Warning: This article contains content of a sexual nature that is intended for adults only
Flynn Talbot and Lacey Haynes live with their two young children in a quiet Sussex village. It’s where they also have explicit sex for half a million listeners and counting.
Lacey Haynes and Flynn Talbot host the succinctly titled podcast Lacey & Flynn Have Sex, to which half a million people have tuned in to date. As promised, their particular podcast format involves actual fornication, across more than 70 episodes whose topics include “How to give a blow job”, “Sauna sex”, “Sex robots” and “That time we had a threesome with our bestie”.
This morning, before I left home, I listened to Haynes and Talbot simultaneously have sex and commentate upon it, describing in explicit and intimate detail exactly what they are doing, why they are doing it and how they are feeling during it.
Aside from being an impressive example of mutual multitasking, it is X-rated in the extreme, though not intended to be pornographic or titillating. Their aim is “teaching through showing”, sharing their own shenanigans in service of the sex lives of others.
I’m not sure where I expected such boundary-defying broadcasters to live, but it wasn’t a village deep in leafy, suburban Sussex commuter belt. Their modern, detached three-bedroom house is unremarkable, with large windows, a swing in the front garden and a high hedge. This is just as well, since many of their live-action episodes are recorded in the front room. I hope they have the foresight to close the curtains, or at least have an understanding postman.
Talbot, 41, is loitering on the doorstep, all 6ft 7in Australian of him, with long, curly, slightly greying hair. After an awkward hello, during which he seems surprised and flustered by my (scheduled, perfectly on time) arrival, Canadian-born Haynes, 38, opens the door in fluffy slippers and a leopard-print jumpsuit, and leads me to the kitchen, where she’s whisking a pan containing “cacao, cinnamon, butter, coconut oil, ashwagandha and a bit of maple syrup”. This is apparently a drink.
In five days’ time Talbot, Haynes and their two children are moving to Costa Rica, and the family is in the throes of selling or giving away most of their possessions. In the now spartan, half-empty sitting room, Talbot seems even taller, like Gulliver or a character from Alice in Wonderland, as he rearranges the two sofas to face one another.
One is a hot pink two-seater, infamously nicknamed “Love Island” on the podcast, on account of the amount of action it has seen. I sit on the other one.
“You’re meeting us at a really interesting moment,” enthuses Haynes, folding her legs underneath her and sipping her cacao concoction.
“It’s a pivotal time,” nods Talbot.
“Are you feeling excitement right now?” she asks him, intently.
“I don’t know if I’m quite at that point,” he muses. “I’m a little bit traumatised from yesterday.”
Over the previous two days, they’ve been recording the audio version of their forthcoming book, titled — inevitably — Come Together.
Talbot admits he found it hard going. “I just had to bring it, you know?”
“You brought it, baby,” his wife soothingly assures him.
“I feel I did a great job,” he nods, earnestly.
“Part self-help, part manifesto, part guide kind of thing”, according to Haynes, Come Together has the subtitle The Secret to Deep, Meaningful, Elevated Sex and is, like their podcast, frank and explicit.
They advise “scheduling self-pleasure” and there’s a “deep dive” into the performative aspects of sex, with discussions on how to “free your voice” as an “elevated sexual explorer”. They also advocate the practices of “p****-gazing” and “c**k-gazing”, both of which involve mirrors (one handheld, the other full-length), though I take issue with their laying claim to have created these last two. I did the handheld mirror thing almost a decade ago, at a Sex Camp workshop called C***ology, where I also made a model of my own vagina out of Play-Doh.
Both Talbot and Haynes run online coaching businesses — the former with a programme called The Elevated Man, the latter with a course for women called School of Whole — but neither are qualified sex therapists or counsellors or, as they freely admit, trained professionals in the world of sex and relationships.
They do not lack confidence in their own achievements or significance in the field, however, frequently referring to themselves as “visionaries” and “trailblazers”. Though Talbot has the languorous, laid-back demeanour of a surfer (and is actually one too — he’s recently bought a new board, he tells me, for Costa Rica), he also thinks of himself as a “leader”, while Haynes talks of her own “zones of genius”.
They back up each other’s apparent exceptionalism too.
“Lacey’s really good at marketing,” beams Talbot. Haynes is taking the full credit for “manifesturbation”, a concept and term that they have trademarked. “It’s the principle that you can use your connection to your body and sexual energy and pleasure to co-create things that you want,” she says. “It’s principles of manifestation but used through the body. Instead of getting what you want through struggle, you’re learning to do it through enjoyment.”
The “first hurdle”, she says — as if reading my very thoughts — is that, “You have to believe in manifestation. Do you believe that you can co-create your reality by connecting to what it is you want and living as if it’s coming to you and that your success is inevitable?” They do, she says. “That is how we live. So this isn’t such a far jump. This is just saying: your body and how you feel matters in the way that you magnetise things to you. If you feel like a bag of shit and you hate yourself, the world’s going to show you that you’re a bag of shit,” she declares. “Whereas if you’re in a state where you’re like, ‘Oh, the world’s delighting me. People are good,’ then the world shows you that. That feels so basic to me now, because that’s the way I live. It seems so sensical.”
So, are they saying you can really get tangible stuff you want — a new handbag or a holiday or an e-bike — just by getting yourself off?
“Oh, yes. You should see the testimonials,” cries Haynes.
“One woman was like, ‘I want to go on a holiday, I manifesturbated, and two days later I got $2000 back from a tax cheque and now we’re going on holiday,’” says Talbot. Another believer, he says, “really wanted a new sofa, and just manifesturbated”. This manifesturbator then received a call from a friend who was moving house and offered them their sofa, he reports.
Haynes even manifesturbated their book into being, she says. “And then when Adam [their editor] got in touch and asked us if we wanted to do a book, I was like, ‘You’re perfectly on time. Let’s do this.’”
On a related note, they also favour the practice of “problem-solving through sex” — with or without a partner.
Talbot “sometimes names things too”, and he coined the term “mandurance”: ”The ability to have control of your body to prolong your sexual experience long enough so you’re meeting your female partner in the space that they need to open up and really build the trust and connection that both of you are ultimately looking for,” he explains, impressively, all in one breath.
“Sexual stamina,” adds Haynes, somewhat more succinctly.
The book is dedicated to their children, Fox, six and Rocky, three. I don’t mean to get all Mary Whitehouse, but how do they think their kids will feel when they become aware of what their parents do for a living?
“Without their lives this wouldn’t have happened, so it’s more like a recognition that they were the pinnacle, they were the people that facilitated this,” gushes Haynes of the dedication.
“The kids came along at these milestone moments in our relationship,” agrees Talbot. “They were pivotal in creating a lot of the foundational thinking that sent us in this whole new direction.” There’s a lot of this slightly baffling, quasi-spiritual loquaciousness with Haynes and Talbot who, along with cacao and ashwagandha, are big fans of a word salad too.
When their previously priapic dynamic began to dwindle a few years into their marriage — then almost died a total bed death after their daughter was born — Haynes assumed this was the natural order of things; nobody keeps up the erotic athletics for ever, right? Particularly not as parents. “You’re hot and lusty to start with, and then you become besties who hang out and enjoy life together, with very little intimacy,” was the way she saw it. Talbot, however, felt differently. “A slowly fading sex life was not something I could tolerate. It was a non-negotiable. When [our children] came along, it was the catalyst to really go, ‘OK, let’s dig in and fix this.’”
You’ll be relieved to hear that they did indeed fix things, and now have more sex, 13 years and 2 children into their relationship, than they did when they first met. “Definitely,” says Talbot. “Probably not right now at this moment more, as we’re packing our house and crying every day over something, but definitely better sex,” qualifies Haynes.
Few would argue that prolonging the passion in a relationship is a positive. It’s the “how” that Come Together advocates that some might find provocative.
One chapter is called Have sex (even when you don’t feel like it). The “mood”, they argue — that will-o’-the-wisp of carnal desire — is a fallacy, and, “If two consenting adults in a long-term relationship (with careers and kids to boot) wait until both people are in the mood to have sex, they’ll rarely have sex at all.”
I’m not saying they’re wrong, but I do suspect — particularly at a time of extreme sensitivity around ideas of consent and coercion — that some might balk at their advice to “take ‘no’ off the table” when it comes to sex.
The pair are a curious mix of non-conformist and deeply, unexpectedly traditional. They home school their children (“Why would we deliver our children to an institution where the curriculum is defined by the government? We can do better,” asserts Haynes), are unvaccinated against Covid, and believe in freebirthing, eschewing any medical intervention in childbirth at all. (“We were packing up the other day and I said to Lacey, ‘Oh, here’s the stainless steel knife that I cut both the kids’ umbilical cords with,’” says Talbot.)
But they also — bar that threesome with their friend — believe firmly in monogamy.
“I think people expect us to do that [open relationships] because we talk about sex, and we’re actually so traditional. We’re not interested [in non-monogamy] at all,” says Haynes.
“I feel like the open relationship thing can be a smokescreen for many people,” continues Talbot. “I feel like most people that go into the open relationship thing are doing it because they don’t actually want to dig in and do the deep work.”
There’s a section in the book about “lighting your own fire”, “filling your own cup” and “being your own epic flame”, in which they lay out tips for “turning yourself on”.
Women are instructed to “put on a song and dance with yourself”, while men are urged to “throw some logs around, work out, get sweaty”. At this point in the book, my eyes rolled so hard, I thought they might finally fall out of my head.
The pair are unyielding. “It’s biology,” says Haynes. “Men are less manly when they’re not throwing logs around,” says Talbot, who relates the story of a visit to a Tony Robbins event at which the charismatic “life and business strategist” urged all the women in the room to get up and dance. “It was the most powerful moment ever, because they all fed off each other’s femininity and all of the men were just completely awestruck by the power of women,” he recalls. When the women sat down, Robbins put on a Braveheart DVD (yes, really), “and all the men stood up. There were a thousand men with fists in the air yelling, ‘Freedom!’ " Talbot tells me sincerely. “And then all the women were like, ‘Oh, that’s what masculinity is — the essence of man.’”
They believe that boys brought up by single mothers, or even “raised mainly by their mothers”, will not be exposed to this essence. Without being “closely shaped by their fathers”, boys are not “initiated into manhood”, they believe. Equally, says Haynes, “We’ve stripped the world of present mothers because we’ve decided that proving ourselves and working really hard is more important than raising our children.”
Talbot was born in Melbourne, and grew up mostly in Perth, studied lighting product design, and moved to London in the early Noughties, “when I discovered where all the cool people were”. He exhibited his designs at the V&A, and represented Australia at the London Design Biennale. Haynes was raised in Nova Scotia, Canada, where she studied English literature and took women’s studies, then trained as a yoga teacher, taking courses in India.
They met at a Christmas party in 2010, when both were living in Berlin. He was freshly single (“You sent your girlfriend back to Australia on a boat”), while Haynes was in a relationship, one she soon dispensed with. What was it that made her ditch that boyfriend for Talbot (who, at the time, had a proto-hipster moustache and “hair like a porn star”, he says)?
“I think it was just really kindred and he really saw me,” she says, gazing fondly at her husband. “I think we saw each other in our entrepreneurial efforts and our visionary tendencies.” Plus, she adds, “You’re very tall and I really liked that. You know that scene in Bridesmaids? I mean, Bridesmaids wasn’t out yet — but she’s like, ‘I’d climb you like a tree.’ I was like, ‘Yes, I’ll take that.’”
“I just saw a spark in her,” begins Talbot, looking intently at his wife, at which point she begins to cry. They hold hands. “It’s been battered down in the past year by work… But still that spark is there. It comes out every now and then. And I’ll look forward to seeing it a lot more when we get to Costa Rica.”
I feel, for a second, slightly awkward intruding on what has turned into a bit of a moment. Then I remember that I’ve already heard them shagging each other into the middle of next week.
Haynes mentions briefly in the book that she remembers “doing handstands in the hallway when my father left. I heard stories afterwards that his relationship with my mother ended because of a lack of sex and intimacy. I vowed somewhere within me to never be with anyone who cared so much about sex that they’d leave me because of it.
“I think I probably still haven’t integrated the depth to which that was impacting,” she reflects, fiddling with her long auburn plait. “I think I’ve just scratched the surface of it.”
Her husband has a theory though. “It was like you spent your whole life saying, ‘I’m going to find a relationship where sex isn’t important. I’m not ending up like my parents, breaking up because of that.’ But then I was like, ‘No, sex is important. You have to work it out.’”
Their marriage vows included a “commitment to radicalise one another… that we choose growth over comfort, and truth over what’s easy”.
So when things waned, sexually, “We found ourselves for a number of years with a great relationship, save for this huge, gaping hole of intimacy.”
They never talked about breaking up, but there was, they say, resentment and sadness.
Married, with a baby, they were living in Hackney, east London — both by now working in coaching — but didn’t feel settled. “I think it was the first time we maybe stopped wanting to adventure and we wanted to have roots,” says Haynes. A woman she was coaching recommended their village, which, they discovered, attracted a like-minded populace, thanks to boasting the largest Steiner School in the UK, and a “London-class Planet Organic”. An astrology reading confirmed their destiny was “to move between London and Brighton”.
Once settled, with easy access to overpriced organic produce, they decided, says Talbot, “to dive into our sex instead of skirting around it for ever”. They also wanted to share it. “When we feel a deep calling to do something, we do something — and we just felt very inspired,” says Haynes. But she admits that they were nervous of discussing some of the explicit content on Instagram, where they promote their respective coaching work. “We wanted just to go deeper and feel uncensored,” she says. “We don’t want to make Lacey and Flynn porn videos,” says Talbot. “So we’re like, ‘Oh, a podcast.’ "
It took six months or so to gain traction, but once it did, people were “almost flabbergasted, blown away”, reports Haynes. “I think that was one of the biggest reflections — just resounding gratitude for being able to…” “Put language to their experience,” finishes Talbot.
The book, they insist, is “designed to be mainstream — not some tantric book in a spiritual store”, says Talbot, who is indignant when I bring up the question of why men don’t buy self-help books. He thinks the issue is that publishers aren’t publishing any self-help books men want to buy. “Heaps of men do self-development work all the time,” he asserts.
In spite of the success of the podcast, and the launch of their book, they’ve wrapped up the former and don’t have any plans to do more of the latter. “We decided we didn’t want to work together any more,” says Haynes, throwing me somewhat for six. “We were working together on everything — the podcast, the book, our coaching, everything— and it was just too much.”
“Our whole work is about relationships and yet the whole business side of it started impacting on our relationship,” says Talbot. “You’d go to bed at night and say, ‘Oh, did you send that email to that person?’ Every waking moment had some work-related thing and we’d forgotten how to actually just live as people and enjoy life with separate interests and surprising stories or things that happened to tell each other.”
So, in the move to Costa Rica, they’re “transitioning our lifestyle to support us”.
They don’t yet know what shape that will take. They like making music together, so think they’ll probably do some of that. And Haynes is in discussions about making documentaries.
“We’re not going to stop contributing to the world,” she says. “But we’ve poured so much of ourselves into the world, we can hopefully relax a bit now, while the book does the work.”
Talbot, for his part, is looking forward to “going surfing instead of having sex on the internet”.
Come Together by Lacey Haynes and Flynn Talbot is published by Piatkus on June 1.
The rise of the X-rated podcast
Call Her Daddy
Alex Cooper, 28, below, is the host of the Spotify podcast with the most female listeners. It’s renowned for its explicitness, with episodes called Plotting My Summer Threesome and Hornier on Our Periods. Celebrity guests sharing their sexual insights include Gwyneth Paltrow and Miley Cyrus.
Savage Lovecast
Based on his popular sex advice column Savage Love, the American journalist and LGBTQ activist Dan Savage, 58, answers anonymous queries from callers. They range from questions on genitals to guidance with sex toys — with help from doctors and sex therapists.
Brown Girls Do It Too
Best friends Poppy Jay, 36, and Rubina Pabani, 34, navigate sex and relationships as millennial British Asian women. Their taboo-busting anecdotes and life lessons won them Podcast of the Year at the British Podcast Awards in 2020.
Where Should We Begin?
Esther Perel, 65, above, is the psychotherapist who, on her podcast, counsels real couples on their sex life and relationship. She coined the term “erotic intelligence” in her first book, Mating in Captivity, and her second, The State of Affairs: Rethinking Infidelity, was a New York Times bestseller.
Doing It!
Kink-shaming, masturbation and sex work are all on the cards in Hannah Witton’s Doing It! A 31-year-old British YouTuber with ulcerative colitis, Witton has opened up about having sex with a stoma bag. It’s moving, funny and informative.
Girls Gotta Eat
Hosted by Rayna Greenberg, 37, and Ashley Hesseltine, 39, founders of the sex toy company Vibes Only. They chat about whether it’s time to ditch dating apps, why you might be in pain during sex and how to level up your foreplay skills.
Written by: Jane Mulkerrins
© The Times of London