Transcript of E559 Laila Mickelwait

Today's guest is the co founder and CEO of the Justice Defense Fund. She also founded the Trafficking Hub movement. She's been fighting against human trafficking for almost 20 years, and she just wrote a new book called, Take Down Inside the fight to Shut Down Porn Hub. We want to let you know as well that this episode can be somewhat sexually explicit at times, so I want to give you that warning in advance. I'm very grateful for her time and her advocacy and her information. Today's guest is Laila McElwate.

I'm on the So take down, Inside the fight to Shut Down Pornhub for child abuse, rape, and sex trafficking.

This is your book, and I'm sitting here with Laila McElwate.

Nice to be here. Is that the way to say it? You almost got it, Laila McElwate.

Okay, so I didn't get it. Laila McElwate. How did your war against Pornhub start?

Sure. I will tell you that story. Okay. In the context of years in the fight against sex trafficking, so I had been fighting sex trafficking when this began. This began at the start of 2020. This was February 2020 when the fight to hold Pornhub accountable for rape, sex trafficking, child abuse began. That was in the context of over a decade in the fight against trafficking at that point. And I had been paying attention to the headlines, obviously, when sexual abuse stories, trafficking stories came up. I was paying attention. And one of the stories that came up at late 2019 that really arrested my attention. It was a story of a 15-year-old girl, and she was from Broward County, Florida, and she was missing for an entire year, and she was finally found when her distraught mother was tipped off by a pornhub user that he recognized her daughter on the site. And she was found in 58 videos being abused for profit. These are monetized videos. Police were dispatched, and they actually rescued her out of his apartment. She had been impregnated. They got her out of that situation. But that was a story that had made some headlines, and it was a horrifying story.

At the same time, there was an investigation that was was released by the Sunday Times, the London Sunday Times, and they had found dozens of illegal videos on Pornhub within minutes, even children as young as three. So these two particular stories were standing out. There was one other that was really horrifying at the time. It was about an adult, a woman named Nicole Adamando, and she was from New York. She was being abused by her partner. She was being raped and tortured. He was filming it, and he was uploading it to Pornhub, and then she ended up killing him in self-defense, but she was sentenced to life in prison, separated from her two young children. Thankfully, she had an amazing legal team, and they fought that, and they got it reduced to seven years, and she's finally out today. But it was just a heartbreaking story. And so at the time, I was really actually discouraged in my fight against trafficking. I had been doing it for a long time. I felt like we weren't making very much progress, but it's not something that I can quit because I'm dedicated to this. But I was up late one night in early 2020.

I think it was, let's see, January 31st, 2020. And I was consoling my own crying baby at that time because he was born, he had a birth complication. He was a very mad baby.

What do you mean? Oh, crying baby?

Yeah, crying baby. Okay. Yeah. I was up at all hours of the night.

I thought you said, crime baby. I was like, what is a crime baby?

No, crying baby. Okay. Yeah. And so I was up late, consoling him and thinking about that story of the 15-year-old girl. And suddenly an idea came to mind. I just said, you know what? How are they vetting these videos? How is this abuse ending up on Pornhub? And an idea just flashed into mind. I said, I'm going to test the upload system for myself, and I'm going to see what does it take to upload content to Pornhub. So put the baby down, got out of my phone, took a video of the computer screen and in the rug in the dark room, and I uploaded it to Pornhub, and I found out what millions of people already knew. Because at that time, millions of videos were being uploaded every year. In fact, the amount of content that was being uploaded to Pornhub, if you put those videos back to back, just the amount of content they would upload in one year. It would take 169 years to watch if you put those videos back to back. That's how much content was being uploaded.

Uploaded or had been uploaded total, you mean? No, per year.

Wow. Yes. That's I'm not even counting the images. Unbelievable. So I tested it. I found out, like I said, what millions of people already knew, and that was that all it took to upload was an email address. So in under 10 minutes, anybody with an iPhone, anywhere in the world can upload a video, and they were not checking age, they were not checking ID to make sure that these are not children in the videos. They're not verifying consent to make sure that these are not rape or trafficking victims. And because of that, I quickly understood that PornHub was not a porn site. It was a crime scene. It was infested with videos of real sexual crime.

And so then the people would upload them and then make money off of advertising on them somehow? Yes.

So the ones that were making money off of this content because this is free porn, right? Free porn is not free. It is heavily monetized with ads. They were selling 4. 6 billion ad impressions on PornHub every single day. A day. So they were heavily monetizing this content. Now, the people who were uploading were doing it mostly for free. Eighty % of people who were uploading were just doing it for social currency, like likes and clicks and comments and shares and all of that, the reason why people upload to social media. Right. Some of them were doing pay to download content where they could actually do profit sharing with PornHub. That was happening as well. But most of the money made from free porn is actually made by the corporation running site. Just to give you a little bit of context for how big PornHub and its parent company are who are making all of this money. Pornhub at the time, by December of 2020, they had capitalized on coronavirus. So they had done crazy stunts, like free premium to the whole entire world.

Oh, I remember something like that.

Do you remember that? Yeah. They had done some crazy PR campaigns at the time.

Because they So the earlier people are stuck at home, they'll watch porn? Yeah.

Well, it was that. Plus, they were getting tons of bad press because Trafficking Hub Movement had gone viral starting at the beginning of the year.

And Trafficking Hub Movement was what?

Okay, so I'll go back to the story. Well, really quick, I want to tell you just so you know what we're dealing with, how big-Okay, yeah.

How big PornHub is.

Pornhub is. Okay. By the end of December 2020, so they had grown to be the fifth most visited website in the entire world. Un Unbelievable. So not just pornsite, website. They had 170 million visits per day, 62 billion visits per year. Like I said, enough content uploaded every year would take 169 years to watch. They had 56 million pieces of content on the site by the end of 2020. And this was the year that trafficking hub movement began. So go back to the story. So I made this discovery. Oh, my God.

That's massive.

I said, Oh, I literally said, Oh, my God, this site is infested with videos of rape, trafficking, non-consensual content. We used to call it revenge porn, but we call it image-based sexual abuse. And I have to sound the alarm on this. I have to tell people what's going on. The only thing that I could do at the time was I took to my Twitter, right? At the time, Twitter. And I started to share this information, share Share the stories, share what I discovered about the upload process. And in a burst of inspiration, I shared the #traffickinghub. And the reason why I did that is because per definition, so by definition, any sex act that is commercialized and it's involving a child or any sex act that's induced by force, fraud, or coercion, and it's commercialized, so it's for profit. It's something of value is exchanged for that sex act, it is per definition an act of trafficking. So every child being abused on Pornhub, every adult who was non-consenting, who was raped in traffic, those are instances of trafficking. I don't think people quite understand that, but that is per international definition and domestic definition.

And so that's why I launched the trafficking hub hashtag, and it slowly started to catch on. I had a few thousand followers on Twitter at the time, but people were horrified find this out.

Oh, yeah. Well, I think when you hear trafficking, you think like... I mean, I picture literally like a train, like people commandeered from other countries or, I guess, younger people that have commandeered and kidnapped in a train car going across the country in the night or something. I think of it as more like people being smuggled across the border. I don't think of it as... I guess the average person doesn't think of it in such a common I don't know if it's common as the word. I guess, yeah, the average person probably doesn't think of that it's that expansive. Right.

Yeah. Well, that's the way it's portrayed in Hollywood movies, and that's the way that it happens often, sometimes. But the amount of trafficking going on, if you think about non-consensual commercialized sex acts, this is massive. Wow. I can't. That's unbelievable. Yeah. I mean, and so sound the alarm, Launched Traffic & Hashtag. That started to catch on. People started to message me. Somebody said, Hey, if you don't start a petition... Oh, then I wrote an op-ed. So I said, Okay, well, what else can I do besides just share this on social media? This has to get out to more people. So I wrote an op-ed about what I had discovered.

An op-ed means opinion-It's like an essay. Right. I just want our listeners to know. Most of our listeners are just like me. They don't know. So op-ed means an opinion editorial. So Something like something that your opinion, you'd write it in a publication that be published in a newspaper or something like that? Yeah. Okay, great. Just want our listeners to always know what that is.

That's exactly what it is. And so I wrote that with the findings, highlighting some of these stories that had just been in the news, making the connections. And that really caught on. People were sharing it, and somebody who read it messaged me and they said, Hey, you need to start a petition to shut down Pornhub and hold its executives accountable. And if you don't do it, I will. I said, Okay, well, I'll do that. So I just went on change. Org. I started a petition, and instantly started going viral.

So on change. Org, you started a petition?

I started it there. Now it's at traffickinghubpetition. Com. And today we have 2. 3 million people who have signed the petition from every country in the world. Let's go. We're going to get more.

We got to get more. It's traffickinghubpetition. Com. Hubpetition.

Com. Yeah. And this has been powerful to have this because as this was going viral, victims were seeing it, and then they were starting to reach out to me. Sometimes on a daily basis, victims that I was exploited on Pornhub as a child, as a teen. I was raped. I was unconscious, and I was raped on Pornhub, and I begged to get those videos down, and I couldn't... All these stories started to come forward. Not only that, but whistleblowers from inside the company started to reach out to me and started to expose the inner workings of the company. Even the former owner of Pornhub actually reached out to me to say he wanted to help with all this. He had his own motives.

Probably trying to cover his own tracks.

Well, yeah. I We discovered that he had some financial motivations for wanting to do that, but he did. One of the things that was so important at this outset was we felt like this company... Trafficking is a transactional crime. All of this is being done for money. That's the only thing that these companies care about. In order to make a difference here, we have to hit them where it hurts. We have to go after the money. And so we said, We have to go after the credit cards to cut ties with Pornhub. And when the owner reached out, he confirmed that. He said, Listen, the only thing they care about is money. If you go after the credit cards, that's the Achilles heel of Pornhub.

So you're saying if Visa and MasterCard, if they will say, We will not allow our credit cards to be used. To be used.

That would be the worst thing that could ever happen to Pornhub. Yes, because they need those in order to sell ads, premium memberships, all of that. So reached out, credit card executives, did letters letters organizations were signing on. All of this was building momentum. The petition was gaining steam, and that's why lots of media articles started to be written about this.

What were some of the crimes that you saw happening? What were some specific instances that you were like, Oh, my God, this is just...

Yeah. I mean, okay.

Is it okay to share those or no?

Yeah, of course. I think it's important to share because I think a lot of times people want to just dismiss it and say, What you saw was just consensual. You just didn't really understand that it was... No, these were obvious.

It's vague until you make it specific, I feel like a lot of times.

For example, I can tell you some victim stories I can tell you some of the things that I saw myself on the site. I mean, one of the worst things that I saw on the site was an instance where it was a young Asian woman, and she was drugged so completely that she was her body was completely limp, she was unconscious, and there was a masked assailant who actually to prove to the camera that she was unconscious, he was lifting her eyelids and touching her eyeballs to prove that she wasn't responsive And then tickling her feet and doing things like that. And then the title was in Chinese. And so what I did was I took the title and I put it into Google Translate, and the title was Dead Pig Unconscious After Being Drugged. And it included Eyes Half Open After Being Drugged. That was the actual title of the video. And then, of course, because there's the algorithm, right? They They've set up the algorithm to make sure if you see one video like that, they're going to assume that you like that content. So then they're going to take you on a crazy rabbit hole.

I call it just a hell hole of That's what it was. And then you go and they'll show you more and more of the same thing. In my book, I do describe these videos. I don't really hold back because I want people to know what actually was making place, what these victims were going through on the site. And one of the things that victims have shared that I think is also really important to know is that when those videos are uploaded, they had a download button so that anybody in the world could actually download and possess that child abuse, the rape, all of that on their devices, and then reupload it again and again and again and again. And so victims actually call this the immortalization of their trauma. So they say it's one thing to be raped, but then it's filmed and then it's uploaded and then it's monetized for profit and pleasure. And people are actually getting pleasure out of the worst moment of my life. And it'll never go away because once it's on the internet, it's out of control. It's just this Whac-a-mole game where they're constantly just trying to find it and then beg for it to come down.

Then even if they can, it just gets uploaded again. One victim said, My abuser put me in a mental prison, but Pornhub gave me a life sentence. Wow. That was really powerful.

Were all these foreign? Were they domestic? It was everywhere.

It was everywhere. Okay. Here's one story I'll share with you. Serena Flitis. Serena Flitis, she's from Bakersfield, California. She was an innocent 13-year-old girl, and she had a crush on a boy a year older than her. At the time, she had never kissed a boy before. She was a straight-A student, and he convinced her to send him some nude images and videos of herself, which she did because she wanted to impress him. This is very common today, sexting, all that. Then he shared it with classmates. Then the classmates uploaded to Pornhub, where it began to get millions and millions of views. She would then reach out to Pornhub and beg for them to take the videos down, and they would often ignore and she's an adolescent. Yes, she's a child. She's a young teen. Then if they did answer, they would hassle her. Prove that you're a victim. Prove that you're underage in these videos. Now, remember, nobody had to prove age consent to upload. But if you want to get it down, she's testifying. She's testified this before Canadian Parliament. She's suing Pornhub right now. That she would be hasled to prove that she's victim.

Then if she did get it down, then it would just get reuploaded again. And so this sent her on a spiral of trauma and despair. She ended up dropping out of school because she was being bullied. She got addicted to drugs to try to numb the pain. She tried to kill herself multiple times, and then she wound up homeless, living out of a car. And that was her story, right? And that could happen to any young teen.

Yeah. I could imagine that a lot of people in that instance, you almost end up wanting to take your life or consider suicide because your life isn't even yours anymore.

Yeah, because it's like that immortalization of the trauma. It's like, I'll never escape this because even if I can find healing, I can do whatever, I can go trauma therapy, but then it's almost like a wound, and then it scab just gets peeled off again and peel off again as those videos keep getting loaded along.

It's like hell. It's like something you would hear about happening in hell.

Yeah. Actually, to your point, the stats on ideations of suicide for victims of this abuse, it's 50% who have suicidal ideations after going through this. Not just child sexual abuse. I mean, that includes when videos are consensually recorded, but then non-consensually uploaded. And the shame and all of that that comes along with that. I mean, this is the stats for victims of this abuse.

And so-So obviously, once you start hearing these stories, the fuel has to really ignite you. I would imagine that at that point, you were just like, this has become a life purpose almost. Were you letting go of a day job? Were you like, did you- No, I mean, this was my...

I've been in anti-trafficking just for years and years. So you're already in that world. This is what I do. Yeah. It is my world. But then it became that I realized, okay, we're going to go after a mega predator here. And to that point, how big are they? So it's not just PornHub, right? Pornhub is owned by a parent company that all of this I learned over the last five years, so called MindGeek. Now, MindGeek has a monopoly on the global big porn industry. So we call it big porn because there's big porn, just like there's big tobacco, there's big pharma, there's big porn, and it's dominated by one company. That company was called MindGeek. They rebranded to Ilo to try to escape their reputation as peddlers of crime. So with a $362 million loan from a hedge fund called Colbert Capital and 125 secret investors who were outed as including J. P. Morgan Chase and Cornell University, they had basically rolled up the entire global porn industry under one company. So they owned it, MindGeek?

Yes.

So they were managing Playboy, Digital Playground, Wicked Pictures, Browsers, Reality Kings, Pace sites, subscription sites, and then the tube sites. So they, so PornHub and its sister site. So PornHub, YouPorn, RedTube, Too Bate, GayTube, X-Tube. I could go on and on. They own the most popular tube site.

Vegantube. Is that one? No time for jokes. And who owns MindGeek?

So MindGeek was owned by a secret majority shareholder. So nobody knew who the owner of MindGeek was when all of this began- And were they in America? No. We found out. So we found them. Through the course of this, there was an investigation called Hunt for the Porn King.

So they're not an American company. So you start on the Hunt for the Porn King.

Right. So we discovered who was the secret majority shareholder of the company, and his name was Bernberg Mair, and he was in Austria, and he lived part-time in Hong Kong.

Bernberg Mair? Let's bring a picture of him up. Yeah, you can.

I just want people to know who he is.

Bernberg Mair. Let's look at his Wikipedia. I just want to get a little... He grew up as a son of farmers in Annsfelden, attended grammar school in Linz, transferred to... He studied at University of Linz, wherever that is. He worked at Goldman Sachs in New York. He became the owner of pornsight RedTube in 2013. He sold of the site, Manwen, now known as Alio. He was a former majority owner of Pornhub and MindGeek. Okay. Yeah. I just wanted to make sure we see him.

Yeah, he was the majority. And then Feroz Antune and David DeCillo were the CEO and the COO, and they were the minority shareholders, and they had hidden themselves from the public as well for a really long time.

Okay. And are these guys all from Austria? Are they all from a specific place?

No. So Canadian. So the company is an international Corporation. They are headquartered in Canada. Canada. They have most of their employees in Canada, but now they have an office in Texas. They had LA, Cyprus, Romania, London.

Mindgeek has offices everywhere?

Everywhere. Wow. Yeah. So they are a multinational corporation Corporation, huge corporation, hundreds of millions of dollars a year, multi-billion dollar corporation with a monopoly on the global big porn industry.

How much money was it bringing in a year?

Yeah, they're estimated about half a billion per year. The value of the company is multiple billions of dollars. And Pornhub was a flagship site. This was the cash cow of the company. This is how not only are they making money on 4. 6 billion ad impressions every day and all the traffic they're getting, but they're advertising their pay sites on the free sites, right? So they have this ecosystem where they advertise browsers on Pornhub and drive traffic to all the other websites that they own.

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So this is the company. This is who we're coming up against, right? All of this started to take off and go viral, and victims are coming forward, whistleblowers. I told you about the former owner who came forward. His name is Fabian Tillman, and he was called the Zuckerberg of Porn. He's the one- Okay, let's bring him up.

I just want to get a look. I want to put a face to these guys. Fabian Tillman. He looks Danish, huh?

It's T-H-Y. Yeah, there you go. Yes.

Fabian Thielmann.

He's the one that put Pornhub on the map. He had this vision for- The German entrepreneur who once built the biggest adult entertainment company in the world.

Let's see him. That's him. Fabian. Okay, so he's one of the guys schlepping it.

Yeah, so he's the one who actually revealed to me who the secret majority shareholder was that he sold the company to. So that's how we found out who he was.

Okay, so the movement is getting bigger, right? So you have the traffic hub.

Yeah, trafficking hub. It's taking off. So we're even out protesting on the streets outside of my geek headquarters in Montreal, in London, in LA, sharing tons of viral victim stories are happening. Then one of the things we're going up through, having all these meetings with the credit card companies executives, trying to present evidence and evidence and more evidence to them and saying, Listen, And you have to stop monetizing this content because actually it's even illegal to knowingly benefit from trafficking in the United States.

Right. So at that point, if you put the knowledge on them that they're benefiting from it, then that becomes a crime against them.

Then they're knowingly benefiting from trafficking and trying to bring this to them and saying, listen, you have to stop. But they were resisting, right?

Why? Because it's so much money, you think?

I think there's multiple reasons. I think it's because they feel like this is a slippery slope. If we do this here, we might have to do it there. And they just don't want to take action unless they're forced to take action. So they're like, we're really concerned. This is so concerning. Thank you for bringing this to us. Give us more information, more information. I give more information. They want for information. Anyway, they're resisting, right? Then, so I reach out and get the attention of nick Christoff from the New York Times. So nick Christoff has a history of really compassionate reporting reporting for victims of human trafficking and sex trafficking, specifically. So I was thinking, if there's anybody in the world that could cover this story in a really meaningful way, it will be nick Christoff. And so he got engaged, and he started a six-month investigation. Of course, he found out exactly what we were saying was happening on the site. I was connecting him with victims as they were coming forward so he could be speaking to victims and whistleblowers. He ended up releasing this groundbreaking called The Children of Pornhub, and it was featuring Serena's Story, the girl I just told you about.

Fleitas.

Fleitas? Yeah, Serena Fleitas, and many other victims like her who were children abused on the site.

Had you been meeting... Were more people coming forward at this point?

Yeah, all the time. So many victims. I personally engaged with so many victims of Pornhub. Thankfully, attorneys were also coming forward saying, We want to help really Really amazing, hard-hitting, top-notch attorneys. One of the ones I speak about in my book, he had done the biggest hedge fund insider trading case in history against SAC Capital and Stevie Cohen. His name is Mike Bowie from Brown-Rutnik, and he cared about trafficking. And he came forward. He became Serena's attorney, and he started representing... Now he represents, I think 200 victims.

Let's bring that hero up.

Bring a picture of him up. Mike Bowie. There he is.

Mike Bowie. Yep. Thank you, Mike.

Son of a firefighter. Wanted to be a firefighter. Ended up being a...

He's fighting huge fires now. Yeah, right. I mean, that's one of the biggest fires in the world. It sounds like human trafficking, taking advantage of people's sexuality.

Yeah. Back to the story. So nick Christoff does this investigate. He releases the Children of Pornhub. And one of the things he does in his article is he calls out the credit card companies. And when this is released, I mean, I couldn't believe the impact that it had. It started to... Like thousands of follow-on articles, the pressure was on. Justin Trudeau in Canada was responding to the article saying how horrific what was going on. Canadian Parliament was up in arms, demanding an investigation, and the pressure was on the credit card companies. And within days of that article being released, Visa, MasterCard, and Discover joined PayPal in cutting all ties with Pornhub, leaving them only with cryptocurrency as a payment option.

Incredible.

This was the worst thing that could happen PornHub. They must have lost it. In a panic, in an absolute panic. This is the worst thing that could happen to them. So they did basically the unthinkable for their business model, which relies on massive amounts of content because content is king for the PornTube sites. You have to understand this, that it's about getting unrestricted, massive amounts of content so that they could get picked up in Google search results so that they can drive massive amounts of traffic so they can sell all those ad impressions and make hundreds of millions of dollars a year on free porn. Worst thing they could do is take content down from this site. But they started to delete millions of videos. They deleted 10 million videos and over 30 million images, basically in 24 hours, and what Financial Times called probably the biggest takedown of content in Internet history. They deleted all of their unverified videos because they had no idea who was a child and who was who was 16 and who was 18, what was rough sex and what was rape. They had no idea what was consensually recorded and non-consensually uploaded.

And so they took down that much content.

Because they're worried about the money.

Yeah. They wanted to woo the credit card companies back. They said, Okay, we have to do this. They basically deleted their site. Well, 80% of it at the time. Sadly, I found out So then there's global headlines, right? Hundreds of headlines all over the world. Visa, MasterCard, the big takedown. I found out an insider came to me months later and said, You don't know this. But two weeks after the credit card companies disengaged with Pornhub, they quietly snuck back to the advertising arm of Pornhub called Traffic Junkie because they have their own ad arm, right? And that's how they make most of their money. So business is going on as usual. And I said, Oh, my God. It's like the worst thing I could have ever. I can't believe that this is what happened. I said, What are we going to do now?

How wouldn't a CEO of Visa or one of these companies be like, Yeah, we're just not going to do this anymore? Why wouldn't they just say, We would stop this This isn't good. At that point, is it because they're also worried about free speech and stuff like that, do you think?

This is not about free speech. I think it has to do with money as well, because one thing you have to know is these are high-risk transactions. Transactions. They charge more per transaction for high-risk transactions, which are porn transactions. I see.

So there's big money.

So there's money, right? Big money. They went back. And so it was another two-year battle to try to get them to finally disengage, which happened because Serena sued PornHub. Not only PornHub, she sued its individual owners and its executives, and she sued Visa for monetizing her abuse. And she sued the hedge funds for funding the whole enterprise.

Did she win?

And so what happened was Visa lost their motion to dismiss the case because they had filed a motion to dismiss. They lost it. And at the same time, we were able to put the pressure on publicly. So Bill Ackman was one of the heroes in this story. I mean, he knew the CEO of MasterCard, and so he was making phone calls.

That's Bill Ackman right there?

So he got him and I on CNBC Cee Squackbox, and we called out Al Kelly, who was the CEO of Visa, for 17 minutes on the show. And this was right when Visa lost their motion to dismiss. So the pressure was on from multiple angles.

And a motion to dismiss is what? So they say- Oh, they want to say, Dismiss the case.

Dismiss the case. We're not involved. Nothing we could do about this. We're not part of this problem.

And the court says, Hold my gavel, brother.

In a damning decision. And it wasn't just a decision. The judge actually said that And the visa gave Pornhub the very tool through which to complete the crime of benefiting from child trafficking. Those were his words in his decision. And so the pressure was on. And then Al Kelly said he did an unprecedented thing. Who is Al Kelly? He's the CEO of Visa.

Okay, so the CEO of Visa, Al Kelly, then- Then he says, Okay, fine.

We're going to cut them off once and for all. And he made a personal statement. He said, I'm a father, and I don't approve, blah, blah, And so we're cutting off Pornhub. And then, of course, MasterCard quickly followed, Discover. Now, they've lost it, totally. And today, so we found out, they kept deleting content, right? So today, they have actually deleted 91 % of the entire site. So they went from 56 million pieces of content in 2020 when this started to 5. 2 million pieces of content today. And we're not done because they still have unverified content on the site. Right. Yeah, if it's not over yet.

Congratulations. That's fascinating. I mean, congratulations.

Thank you. I have to pass that on, that congratulations to any victims who might be watching this because it's through their courageous testimony and then stepping forward amidst backlash, and everybody who's been involved. We had 600 organizations that were involved in this, and the lawyers, and the journalists, and the whistleblowers, and so many people came together to make this happen.

What was the CEO? What was that transaction that occurred where he reached out the previous CEO?

No, he was the owner. He was a previous owner. Fabian Thillman, the Zuckerberg of Porn. Fabian Thillman. Yeah. He reached out in summer 2020 to say he wanted to help. One of the things that he did was he exposed the secret majority shareholders' name, and he said, go after the credit card companies. As the former owner, he said, if you want to make a difference here, you go after the credit card companies to cut ties. And so that was... Now, what I didn't realize at the time, I was suspicious, why is he wanting to help? And I later found out that he had intention to try to buy back the company. So he wanted to make a killing again. So I think he wanted to help take it down, buy it.

And then find a way to do it back, probably with crypto or something on a different chain.

I don't know what he was thinking, but he wanted to buy it back, which I found out later on. But the CEO and the CEO were forced to resign as well. And today, they're being sued by nearly 300 victims in 25 lawsuits, including multiple class actions on behalf of tens of thousands of child victims. And they're doing amazing in the courts. So much more evidence has been uncovered in legal discovery. So Discovery is this amazing tool. When you engage in a civil lawsuit, the court gives you permission to get behind your opponents. So you can get their text messages, you can get their emails, you can get... And so much has come out of the complicity. You just couldn't believe the things that we found out just through legal discovery process.

What are some of the things just involved?

Okay, so here's an example. We found out that they only had one person. So they had 1,800 employees. They hired one person five days a week to be reviewing videos flagged by users as terms of service violations, including rape and trafficking and child abuse. One person. They had a policy where they wouldn't even review a video unless it was flagged 15 times. Now, think about this. You're a victim. Say there's a child victim like Serena. She would She would have to flag her video over 15 times because it had to be over 15 for it to be reviewed in order for that to even be put in queue for review. And they had a backlog of 706,000 videos That were just waiting for this one person to review them? Yes. We've discovered now in a recent filing in December of 2024, we found out specific instances of prepubescent child victims who had their videos on there for years, and they would have 14 flags, 13 flags. And they just like, that was the policy. Then the CEO and the executive- All of this on Pornhub? Yes, on On PornHub. Yes. And so I'm just so...

I'm just grateful that we're having this conversation because I bet most of the people who are listening to your show had no idea that this was happening, that it's ever happened, that this is an issue on user-generated free porn sites.

And they keep it up because it's content, right? Like you're saying the more content- Yes.

Content is king. They don't want to remove content because that's how they have inventory. So here's another egregious example of how they did this. So there's one case that I talk about in my book where there was a case of a clearly prepubescent child who is being anally raped in a video, and she is being tortured. The tags on the video, the titles and tags were describing her abuse, that she was young, that she was being tortured, all of this. We reported the video. We tried to get it down. Weeks go by. It's not coming down. Video view counts going up, up, up. We reach out to the FBI. They demand that it comes down. So they connect with the National Center on Missing and Exploited Children, who confirms this is a So they demanded the video come down, okay? And then what they did was they took the video down, but they left that black box up that said, removed at the request of the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, and they left the URL live, the tags, the titles, the views, all of that. And they did that with so many videos.

Why would they take the video down but leave all of that up? And it's because it's inventory. It's the URL.

It still shows an ad company that they're going to sell to. It still says, well, we have this many videos.

So you could search that, right? We have the most videos. The tags, the titles, they'll still come up in Google search. Then you'll get to the site. You won't find that particular video, but the algorithm will then direct you to others that are similar, and it will advertise to you. You'll get those ad views.

So that's why. Do you have any victims that show up to thank you in person? You've had experiences like that?

Yeah. Oh, yeah. I mean, I'm still in touch with victims on a regular basis. They don't feel, though, that justice has fully been served yet. I'm sure. So Pornhub was criminally charged by the US federal government in December 2023 for intentionally profiting from sex trafficking.

And they're still allowed to stay open?

But they were offered a deferred prosecution agreement, which is just unbelievable to me that that happened, where Basically, they said, You pay $1. 8 million in a settlement, and you have a monitor over your company for three years, and you can get out of going to trial. So that happened. But that was related to a case, a specific case of a 100 trafficking victims from California. So they were part of the Girls Do Porn trafficking operation. The guy that was exploiting them, his name is Michael Pratt. He was on the FBI's Most Wanted List, 10 Most Wanted List.

Michael Pratt. Let's get a look at that. I just want to faces to these people so that they're not just names that pass by. You said Pratt, right?

Yeah, Michael Pratt. Actually, on my Twitter, I just posted about him. This is him. Yeah, he was FBI's 10 Most Wanted, and he was running a trafficking operation, and over 100 victims were exploited by him.

And let's look at Wiki. Where's he from, this guy? Who is this guy? I don't think they have a Wiki for this guy. Okay. Frat is charged in a 19-count indictment of sex trafficking, production of child pornography. Unbelievable.

Girls Do Porn was one of the most popular partner channels on Pornhub. They had over 760,000 subscribers, and they had over 600 million views on the videos of these women's trafficking.

Most of them were trafficked, you think?

Yeah. It's not, I think. I mean, they've been convicted. His accomplices are in prison.

This was in Spain, it says it was happening. Why?

The law is different there? He ran away. He was a fugitive. He was doing this in San Diego. This is where it all happened, was in San Diego. 62 of those women have recently filed lawsuits. 50 of them filed lawsuits and settled those lawsuits. This channel was one of the most popular in Pornhub, and that was what this criminal prosecution was related to. It was about these specific over 100 victims of this particular crime ring. But there's so many others out there.

But he's not in jail, this guy.

Well, they captured him. It's in process. They're working on his prosecution right now. Okay. Yeah. But his accomplices, the others that were involved with him, are already prosecuted. It was just that they have more recently found him, and so he's going through the process of being convicted.

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Victims are so grateful for all that's happened so far, and they've been a big part of it. I remember when the big takedown happened, and the most meaningful thing that happened was that victims were calling and they were crying tears of joy because for the first time, their rape and trafficking was finally off of Pornhub after fighting for so long. But they just feel like justice hasn't been fully served yet because they're still waiting for restitution. The site is still online. It's been purchased now. They're trying to do a whole rebrand. So it was sold as a distressed asset to a company that they created themselves to buy Pornhub. And they are called Ethical Capital Partners.

Wow, what a name. Ethical Capital Partners. And who are the main bigwigs in that company? Do we know?

Yes, we do. They have themselves online. The guy that's out there trying to do this whole rebrand of Pornhub, we're ethical capital partners. His name is Solomon Friedmann, and he is a criminal defense attorney.

Is he really? A Jewish guy from where? Where's he from?

Canada. Maybe a Jewish. He's from Canada. Yeah.

So he wants to rebrand and just make it more ethical?

Well, I mean, that's what they're saying, right? They're saying they call themselves ethical capital, yet at the same time, the videos that are on Pornhub right now are still unverified, mostly unverified. So that 5. 2 million left, they had verified the uploaders, right? But not the individuals in the video. So that doesn't work because often the abuser is the uploader. And I'll give you an example. So there's a man named Rocky Shay Franklin out of Alabama, and he drugged and he overpowered and he raped a 12-year-old boy, and he filmed those assault, and he uploaded 23 of those videos to Pornhub with titles that indicated this was abuse. Like young, it said like uncle secret. I mean, I won't say the worst things, but it was clear. He was put in prison for 40 years for what he did. Police reached out multiple times to Pornhub to try to get those videos down. They were ignored for seven months. Those videos stayed online, getting hundreds of thousands of views. That boy is suing Pornhub today. He's one of those many victims suing Pornhub. But Rocky was a verified uploader. He had shown his ID, and he-They know who he is.

They know who he is, but they didn't verify clearly who's in the video. So even today, as of 2024, Pornhub had to produce a report. They sent it into the European... There's a European law called the Digital Services Act. And in 2024, in four and a half months, they had to take down 3,770 child sexual abuse videos from the site and over 8,000 non-consensual and rape videos from the site.

But they're having to be legally asked to do this.

Right? Yeah. Well, to disclose what they're doing. So that's all under Ethical Capital Partners, right? Okay.

So Ethical Capital Partners, there's still stuff out there that's not supposed to be there.

Yes. They still haven't actually implemented the preventative policy is necessary. So what's ethical about it? It's just a farce. And that's why I think it's so important to sound the alarm on this, Rebrand, because from a victim's perspective, this is also a miscarriage of justice for to go out there and try to resuscitate Pornhub's brand to say, Oh, we're ethical capital. Listen, the same men who made all those decisions that the one person that was verifying videos, they had 30 moderators, 30 moderators moderating the millions of videos on Pornhub. Now, compare that with Facebook's 15,000 moderators, and they still don't have enough. These moderators, they were viewing between 800 and 2000 videos per shift, clicking through I'm in those videos with the sound off, just clicking through them, guessing. I call it the underage guessing game. This is a game of Russian roulette with people's lives. They're trying to guess who's 15 and who's 18, who's 16 and who's 19. Nobody can do that. Even a pediatrician can't do that.

Yeah. And what happens to your brain at a certain point after seeing so much traumatic stuff that you were even... That should be a crime and putting an employee through that.

Well, and I've spoken to those, and some of those employees I call friends today because they- Really?

They said that they've seen some... It's been really intense.

Their conscience was pricked. Oh, I'm sure. And they came forward. I've spent hours and hours in person and online and on the phone speaking to them, trying to understand how all of this worked. One of them is especially dear to me. He told me that it was so hard on him to do this job, but he needed the money. He was abused as a child. He was sexually abused as a child. It was especially hard for him to do this.

But I think that's why he- You almost wonder why he went and did it. It's like you could find something else to do, probably. Not calling him out, but it's like maybe there's some weird thing that's created there, too.

I don't know. But I appreciate what he did in coming forward. But to say the executive, so back to ethical capital, it's like the men who made that decision to have 30 moderators just guessing what's rough sex and rape, guessing. And they guess wrong all the time. They were skipping through thousands of videos per shift. And they're They're still running Pornhub today. So they're still on the sixth floor, Aquamarine, Montreal Tower of that Corporation running Pornhub today. Yes, the CEO and the COO were forced to resign, but they have the same CFO, they have the same CLO, Who's the CFO?

Let's see.

Eddie DeSanto.

Eddie DeSanto. Bring him up.

I don't know if you'll find him. They try to- They try to hide his face? They try to, but some of them, you could find Ryan Hogan, Matt Calici. You can look up Kareem Almarazi. He is the CPO, and he's running it today.

Kareem Almarazi.

There he is. And so he's there today, right?

Yeah. About him from Canada as an integral part of the mobile broadband team. Telecommunication engineering, went to University of Montreal. So they're still running. They're just trying to rebuild this company and still make money off of it.

What I'm saying is like ethical capital, right? If they were coming in and saying, we're going to rebrand, we're going to do this new thing, why would you still have the same men responsible for the decisions that destroy the lives of countless victims just running the site today? That's why it's just a farce. It's not real. And even if it was real, it doesn't mean that they escape justice being fully served. Because what's important is victims receive the justice they need for healing and to be a deterrent to future abusers. One of the Those most important things in the fight against trafficking is not just to rescue victims, and to rehabilitate them. That's important, but to prevent it from happening in the future. And how do you prevent it? You have to increase risk and eliminate profitability. You have to make the risk of continued exploitation greater than the benefit that these executives get by maintaining the status quo. Then when you do that and you end impunity for these abusers, you become a deterrent to future abusers.

Okay, explain that little part to me again.

So you want to hold these companies fully accountable to the full extent of the law. To me, that means Pornhub gets shut down. We go from 91 % to 100 %. They do not exist anymore because they have been destroying the lives of countless victims since 2007 when they came online. When that happens, other websites owned by other executives will say, We don't want to end up in that position, so let's just clean ourselves up, because we can make a lot of money on legal content. Right. We don't have to monetize illegal content. We can do this in a way where we're not distributing sexual crime, and they'll do that because they want to avoid losing the credit card companies. They want to avoid litigation. They want to avoid criminal prostitution.

It's just greed at a certain point is some type Obviously, sick.

It's risk benefit, right?

But a sickness, too, to think that you would be able to know that that's happening, right? Right. And keep going. It's like, what type of sickness exists? It's almost like a No, you're like a slave trader of people's solitude and peace. But I don't know. I can't even I can't imagine that. I can't fathom that someone would be like, Yeah, this is okay. That's not going to be the first thing I'm going to worry about with my company, right? Yeah. I'm just fine-tuned to my view here. A lot of your combativeness is not against pornography. It's against the sex trafficking, the people illegally filming people, filming drug people, no verification of age, all of these crimes.

Cribs, basically. Yeah, sexual crime being distributed online. In fact, some of the most helpful allies in this fight have been those in the porn industry. At one point, I had those who were producing their own porn on Pornhub Hub, and they were doing this in a professional sense. They were reaching out to me because they said, Listen, we need to take this company down because I'm sick and tired of spending two hours a day scouring PornHub in its sister tube sites, trying to get my own stolen illegal content off of a site because they were not only rap and trafficking, this is copyright infringement content.

There's no protection for that either.

No, they're just uploading and uploading all of this content. Those in the porn industry hated MindGeek already because the free porn tube sites were exploiting the legally-produced content of those in the industry.

Yeah, because even with YouTube, there's metadata and stuff that if they want to, they can make sure that someone can't do it without it being claimed or known.

Right. And so they could do these DMCA takedowns, so that's what they would do. She was spending hours a day, multiple of them doing that. But as she was doing that, she was coming across child abuse, rape, trafficking, and then And they were sending the links. And that was one of the things that was crazy that was happening is that as this was all going viral, and there's all these stories, people around the world who were on Pornhub who would find an illegal video would be sending it to me. And so I I was in. It was just a really intense situation.

Because then you're looking at it, seeing what's going on. You're like, what am I supposed to do here?

Then I have the responsibility to report it, to take care of witnessing what's happening and then trying to help the justice of the victims.

That must have been insane, huh? Yeah. This is all real, vile, real stuff that was happening and being uploaded? Yeah.

Wow. Real, real sexual crime.

What do you think What solution is at scale when you think about that, Laila?

Well, so yes, it's one thing to hold one particular company accountable, and that's important. But the question then becomes, because Pornhub is not alone, right? I want everybody to understand that it's not like you go, Okay, well, X videos must be fine. They're a free user-generated porn site that was operating in a similar way of not verifying agent consent. And there's, nick Christoff did an investigation and found, reported on the victims who were on X videos. And there's X hamster, and there's all of these X and X-X, right? And there's others that operate in a similar way. And so the question is, well, how do we stop this across all of these sites, right? And that goes back to the source of the problem is not verifying agent consent. We have to demand third-party agent consent verification for every single person in every single video that is uploaded to a user-generated porn site. And when that happens, we're going to make a huge difference in stopping that illegal content from being uploaded. But that's a huge task, right? So it's not just governments who have to do this because this is an international problem. These sites operate internationally.

So if the US does that, well, they're in Canada, and they're in every country in the world. So the solution at scale becomes the credit card companies implementing that policy because we know they're highly motivated by money. And if Visa says, We don't do business with user-generated porn sites that don't verify the agent consent of every person, every video, well, all of these companies are going to comply, and they're going to do it quickly. So that's the solution.

Because you would think at this point, they would just go on ahead and say that because it's like, It's obviously the next right thing to do in a moral sense, it would feel like.

Well, a lot of companies don't operate from-Right.

Business doesn't have emotions.

Well, yeah. It comes from pressure, right? And so that's where I see the litigation being important, where these dozens of survivors have sued the credit card companies, right?

So now they're facing some of it, right?

So they're feeling that pressure. And at some point they go, Listen, it's better business to We just implement this policy. Just like we have anti-money laundering policy, we're going to have anti-online sexual exploitation policy, and we just don't do business with user-generated porn sites that don't verify agent consent because it's too risky for us, right?

Yeah, it That's their wallet. Exactly.

It's like big pharma. It's like litigation made a huge difference in reform in the pharmaceutical industry. We saw it in hedge fund insider trading cases when they had big litigation and criminal prosecution, and it force those changes to happen. I think that could be- That's where we're hoping to get to next. I think that's where we're headed. Yeah, that's where we need to go.

Who legally supports you guys is the legal costs?

Yeah. Well, that's where these firms, a lot of them are working on a contingency basis where they're working with victims. Some do pro bono. They have different kinds of arrangements. Then we support victims as well at the Justice Defense Fund to help them get connected to lawyers, to support along that journey. It's a hard thing to do, to take on an abuser. It's a hard thing to go into litigation, and they need therapy, advocacy, all the ways that they need to be supported. That's our mission, is to support survivors, to pursue justice in court, to get that healing, and to implement those preventative policies to make sure it doesn't happen again. Now, MasterCard has come a little ways. They implemented a policy where they You have to verify uploaders, but that's not far enough. You have to verify those in the videos.

Yeah. And do you think there's backroom dealings between these companies and the credit card companies where they're sending them extra cash or they just know each other, the owners know each other, and it's like, We'll let you stay open, that type of thing. I haven't seen that.

I haven't seen that happen. You don't get that feeling. I don't get that sense. I think that this is just one of many interesting industries that they can make money on, and they will maintain that position until the situation comes.

Yeah, it's one of those lobbying by the actual owners of the companies towards the credit card companies or the banks.

Possible.

That's pretty lastable. You start to figure that that's where a lot of things really happen. Yeah. And then it bubbles up to the surface of what we can-Follow the money. What we can see. Yeah. Because I've noticed, I've watched pornography before. I've had issues with pornography addiction. I use it as an escape, especially in my 20s. I found pornography when I was at an age where I was probably maybe 13 or 14. And so then I would use it to make me feel good. It was one of the only ways I felt when I was young that I could feel good. I had really low self-worth. And so once I realized pornography and porno and everything, I was like, Oh, dang, I have a control, basically on my body as to when I can feel okay. It was magazines, and then I guess, then it became video online, stuff like that over time. But it certainly has been something where it's like, I don't feel good about myself. I feel down about myself. What's the one way I know to feel good? It would be to watch pornography or use it to masturbate, things like that to make myself...

You get a hit of dopamine, crazily. Then you Part of you feels good for a while. That was my story with it, except it got to... I would notice, instead of going and meeting girls, they're trying to... Well, part of my spirit started to suffer because I was taking out an important part of my soul and my physiology by ejaculating or just abusing that part of me. Then I didn't have... I think that part of you is supposed build up inside of you and help you have some... It pushes you to talk to women and to want to go on dates and things like that. For me, I think it started to weaken some of that over time. It was like, Well, why go meet a girl or ask a girl out when I could just masturbate? That was what happened, I guess, in my head at some times. I've been in recovery groups to talk about that. I'm in recovery groups where there's multiple things that people have dealt with. A lot of it for me has just been intimacy stuff, because if you're looking at pornography, it skews the way you look at intimacy because you start to think of sexual activity just in frames in certain...

You don't really think of connection because you don't see a lot of connection in porn. It's not like you watch a 45-minute porn and it's two people getting to know each other at a park or something, or splitting a diet soda or something. So it's like that part is all... Things get super... I think things get convoluted in your psyche sometimes.

Well, yeah, and it's driven by an algorithm now. It's people's sexual preferences and their sexuality in today this Internet, poor and saturated world that's driven by an algorithm. The algorithm is driven by executives who want to get as many views and clicks and add impressions as possible. And then that's shaping the content that's being seen on the sites. And what's especially alarming to me, and it's what you experience, right? Because when you were 13 years old, when you were first exposed to porn, is that children are just en masse being exposed to not Playboy, not the centerfold that used to be, but the free porn tube sites because it's free. They have access.

It's Do you guys know that children are accessing those? Is there statistics behind it?

Oh, yeah. I think one study from 2022 was saying that 75% of 13 to 17-year-olds have viewed internet porn. I think it would probably be more than that. Every kid has a device. There's five-year-olds that could click through. The internet filters are not doing a good job. Parents who may not even know how to implement internet filters for their kids, and even if they do, they can't control all the time. So they can't be at school and other places when they go to their friend's house or whatever. It's just everywhere.

What filters are they using? Are they the ones that you suggest that people use?

I don't have any particular brands that I would suggest, but there's so many different apps that people can install. You can get routers that could actually block the content at the router level.

That's awesome.

I didn't know that. Yeah. And so there's stuff like that out there.

I know states are stopping people from... A lot of states are pro... You have to upload an ID now.

Well, there's this whole movement in the United States right now that is saying, Look, we understand that kids are accessing this content, and we want to protect kids from viewing, and I call it a form of second-hand sexual abuse for kids to be witnessing this content. From my perspective, I know how much of this content isn't just hard core. It's actually criminal, where they could be watching a real rape as their sex education as an eight-year-old child. They call it the creation of a sexual template. It becomes like, what is your sexuality about and what is arousing to you? If they grow up on this content, it could do so much damage to an entire generation.

Well, especially, I think a lot of that's already happened. I think you've seen a lot the effects of pornography on marriages. People get addicted to porn, and then they're no longer expressing attraction to their spouse because it's being hijacked, basically, by this algorithm, by the insights by this addiction, and then marriages fall apart, and then families fall apart.

Yeah. And another implication of this is actually children who are acting out on other children. So I was just reading the Amikas, I should called Amica's Briefs. So these are briefs that were submitted to the Supreme Court. So as these states across America are implementing age verification to protect kids from viewing porn online, the porn sites are not happy about this. So PornHub and its partners are suing those states. So for example, they sued the state of Texas to not have to abide by this age verification law. And it's gone now. They've appealed it. They lost They appealed. Now it's at the Supreme Court. On January 15, the justice has actually heard oral arguments for whether or not we can have states enacting age verification to keep kids off porn sites. They're going to have a decision by June, but some of the briefs submitted are so compelling. One of them was this nurse, Heidi Olson, and she's a sexual assault. She's a pediatric sexual assault nurse. She was talking about her experience with over 1,500 cases of sexual assault that she had to document and assess. She saw that 50% of those cases were children who were assaulting other children.

The number one, the perpetrators in that group were 14-year-old males who were then assaulting-Females? Other females.

Yeah, children. You're saying that a lot.

And they're citing pornography as the reason why they're acting out, right? Because That's human nature, especially with kids.

Oh, yeah. You see something, you mimic it or you find it. Yeah.

My son, he's like, watch Spider-Man or something, and he's jumping off the walls and pretending that he's Spider-Man. They're acting out what they see, right? And so if they're watching porn and they're potentially actually watching sexual crime on these free- How do they know? Sites, and they're acting out what they see. And so it's not surprising that that's happening, right?

It's sick. It's literally being in a spiral of sickness. I mean, it's almost like what you would feel like people would describe as some a hell. One of the wildest things that happens on porn sites is how they... I don't know if this is targeted or what the goal is, but you talk about it ruining families. Some of the videos are like stepson, mom, dad, son's, girlfriend. Like, shit that's like you're putting things into people's... Just even to put that seed Even as somebody's psyche. People don't realize or we don't realize that when we're watching something, we're a sponge, right? We might say, Oh, I'm not really... I'm watching this, but it's just I'm watching it for a brief second. I'm using it, right? But whatever it is, it's also using you. Everything is a back and forth relationship. Yeah.

And teen was one of the most popular categories on Pornhub was teen. And teen, like teen could be 18 and 19, but it also is 13 and 14 and 15 and 16. And so many of those videos are where they could be someone who's of age, but they're intentionally made to look under age, with the pigtails and the flat chest and the braces and the no makeup and all of that. And you mixed in with videos of real teenagers who are being abused. And then this is being pushed, right? Pornhub was tracking down to the dollar how much they would make monthly on those teen categories on their site. And it was one of the most popular that they had. And so whatever is making the most money, you push that forward, right? And so maybe Maybe it's they're getting more clicks because people are horrified by it. Or maybe, I don't know exactly what is happening there, but whatever it is that gets the most clicks and views, they will push the algorithm, right? Of course. Will push that forward.

But it's I wonder how that even starts if they say mom, son, you know what I'm saying? Where does something like that idea even start?

Well, I think it's... I've spoken to some porn producers who've talked to me about this and the way that there's been a trajectory from playboy into more and more extreme forms of porn in different situations. And they're saying they're just told to create the most extreme extreme thing you can think of because you need more shock value. There's this idea of desensitization for people where they want to... In order to get the same dopamine hit with porn, it's not necessarily that you need more, it's that you need different, and you need something more extreme to get that same dopamine hit.

What does porn do to our brains? Do you have anything on that? I'm trying to see just the psychological effects. New research sheds light on the global impact of problematic pornography use. Okay, I'll look at this a little bit, but after this, I want something more about the actual effects on our brain. A comprehensive international study involving tens of thousands of participants from dozens of countries suggests the problematic pornography use might have a prevalence rate as high as 16. 6%. That's saying that 16. 6% of people, per this study, have problematic pornography use. Problematic pornography use refers to a condition where individuals in experience an uncontrollable urge to consume pornography, leading to significant distress or impairment in their daily functioning. First, most people use pornography, but only a small group of them develop problems with it. We wanted to see how many people may experience such problems worldwide and whether there are any country, gender, or sexual orientation-based differences, as most previous studies focused on really specific populations, i. E. Men from the United States. I think one of the most important takeaway messages from our study is that problematic pornography use seems to be as common as other mental health issues, i.

E. Depression. We need to better understand this problem and provide appropriate care for people experiencing this issue. Probably the And the surprising finding of the study is that only 4-10% of individuals with problematic pornography sought help for this issue with an additional 20-40% wanting to, but did not do so for various help reasons.

Well, part of that is shame, right? For sure. That's why I am so grateful. I'm sure so many of your listeners are grateful that you talk about it.

I'll say this exactly and specifically. A friend of mine started a program called Valor Recovery, and it's for porn addiction. I met this guy in different recovery meetings, and he's a friend of mine. I'll go to the meetings, and I'm excited to go to the meetings, and I'm helping We're helping work to try and make this thing bigger, to make it bigger. One of the things I noticed when I took... When I had the most time I ever had off of pornography, the shame I had disappeared. There was still some shame at certain moments, but I was able to finally notice it because before I'd just been in this circle of shame because I would masturbate, I would feel ashamed of myself, I would start to feel a little bit better, but I would be I had some... But then when I needed to feel okay, if I started to feel a little shaken or needed to feel okay again, I would be right back to the pornography and then the shame of it.

Like a cycle.

Yeah, like a cycle. I didn't even realize. I was stuck in it probably for a decade. I was still going on dates and be in relationship stuff, but it ruined a lot of those.

Are you free today from that?

I wouldn't say I'm free, but I'm definitely on parole. You know what I'm saying? It's a different I have tools and stuff now in place to battle against it.

What helped you the most?

Going to meetings, recovery, 12-step recovery. Community. Community, yeah. Getting in groups, and you'll start to see in groups, I've been in groups where men at first were scared to even talk in the groups. And then three months later, you see that their wife has moved back in. They're spending time with their kids. They're not watching pornography. They're not acting out in these certain ways with escortorts and prostitutes and all of that. But the biggest thing I noticed for myself was shame. I just noticed that it started to disappear because I'd always had this heavy shame. I'd never really noticed that it could have had to do with really the master, but just the part of, if I need to make If I can myself feel good, then I'll use masturbation.

Do you think that there could be two sides to shame, right? Shame could be really destructive and unhealthy because it causes you not to seek help or get community or be able to talk about it. And so then you push the problem down, and then it becomes worse, right? Because then you're trying to alleviate that pain.

Okay, say it one more time for me.

Start right there. Could the shame have two sides to it, where there's a healthy shame where it's pricking your conscience and saying, This is not who I am. I can do better than this. And it inspires you to overcome. But then there's the other side of shame, which keeps people hiding it, pushing it down, not being able community, not being able to talk about it, which then could cause the problem to be worse, right?

For me, yeah, I agree. Both of those things can happen. I think some of them happen at certain moments for me. But I think overall, it was just, I didn't want to be doing it anymore, and I kept doing it. And so for them, it was this constant... I don't have any willpower. And so that made me ashamed of myself. Sometimes the act itself would definitely... I would watch I could feel on the computers or something, and I would immediately close it.

Did you ever feel like you were encountering potentially non-consentual content?

I never felt like I saw anything like that. But I do think that... I've long thought this. I believe, because sometimes you see a lot of people get compromised. It seems like a lot of times in our society that freedom seekers or people that want to change the status quo, that want to rise up and do something different. At some point, it feels like maybe they get compromised their... I don't know if money hits them or there's some opportunity that's presented to them. This is a lot of conspiracy. Tempel has stuff. And then they change their tune. Are their tune weekends or their goal or agenda curbs a little bit. And you think, Oh, somebody got to them. I think that a lot of these sites somehow, secretly these days, can record the user watching porn. And so then that they are able to use that against users, because I think everybody's probably watched some type of pornography, maybe. I don't know. Everybody that I know has watched it. But I would guess anyway. If you had to tickle them and be like, Tell me if you watch it, they would admit it. But that's what I've always thought.

I'm like, Man, I bet some people, it's like they use that. That's something like... Because you always wonder, what's that tool that once people get some power or something, what's the tool that they use to keep them down? And it would either be like, well, we're going to assassinate you, or we have this video of you masturbating them. That would be like, oh, it's too much shame for me to handle.

And even if it doesn't actually happen, the fear of that, right? Yeah.

That'd be a risky card to say, you know what? I'm not going to call your bluff. That'd be crazy.

Well, there is where some of the opposition to user age verification is coming from, probably from users who are afraid that they are going to have to identify themselves when they're going to those sites. But I would assure people that is actually not a real fear in this situation because we have ways now with technology and there's third-party companies. So I would never want anybody to actually have to give their ID to Pornhub because I would never trust them in a million years with that content because they exploit data. They're being sued right now in a class action for data exploitation. They gather so much information already.

And then they sell it to people?

They sell it to advertisers. When you go to a pornhub, you think that it's all private, right? But they're gathering the IP address. They can find out your zip code. From your zip code, they can probably find your income level. They're looking at your sexual preferences. They're determining if you're a male or a female, what language you speak, what browser you use. They're gathering so much information about everybody. If you use a per bar or not. There's that. But there's third-party companies that can verify age safely, effectively with respecting privacy. In fact, they don't even have to actually take your image. It's biometric scanning. There's a company called Yoti where they actually will in one second, they can determine your age over 99% accuracy with a facial scan using AI that's trained on thousands or millions of images. They just look at pixels and numbers. They don't actually even store the actual image of your face. And then they erase that. So that's how they can verify. So anybody who wants to oppose age verification for the reason of privacy concerns, which is what porn Ateb is shutting itself down in states across the United States right now.

Why? They're shutting themselves down in opposition to age verification.

Right. Okay. So they're saying instead of having people verify their age to watch, we would rather shut ourselves down?

Yes, because it costs them money. And we have their senior- Because they have to hire a third-party company to verify.

Exactly. They're not allowed to age verify.

Well, I mean, it's not that they're not allowed to. I don't think that they can. And I don't think anybody would ever want to hand their ID over to Pornhub. So there's this third-party sites that have that technology that can at scale verify. So they're used by Meta, TikTok, other companies who do this.

But they're saying, Oh, it's too much. It's It's cost effective anymore.

They're saying... Pornhub is out there in the media saying, We're shutting ourselves down because we care about user privacy, because we don't want people handing over their personally identifying information.

But that's a lie. If they care about user privacy, then they would care about protecting people who are on-Non-consenting, right? Non-consenting, yeah. That's the most privacy.

But not only that, it's like the same company also runs pay sites that are collecting credit card information, with your name, when you put your billing address, your credit card details.

So it's all a façade.

It's all just a façade. And so that's why it's important for people to know the truth about what is the opposition to age verification, what's really going on behind the scenes here, and it's really about money. We even have their senior community manager who publicly admitted in a Reddit thread, she was having a conversation, and she says age verification would basically devastate their traffic, and it costs us money to verify, and that's why it would be a disaster for them is because it costs them money. That's really what this is about. It's about money.

When people say that, how do you respond to that argument that people say, Oh, you're limiting freedom of speech, right?

Yeah. Well, I mean, I would just...

Well, from the- Or responsibility of the person, right? So both of those things, maybe.

Well, there's two sides. We're talking about those who are in the videos, and then we're talking about who's viewing the videos. And I would just, over and over, and this has been, judges have said this, too. It's like, child sexual abuse is not an expression. It's not an idea. Agree, wholeheartedly. Rape is not an idea. These are actual crimes, this contraband being distributed.

So anybody that's saying that, fuck them, really. Basically, yeah. To be honest, because it's just a messed up. It's like, what are you saying here? So you're saying that because if you know that these sites are doing that now, then you can't really argue freedom of speech for them because they're not- It's not speech. Right. It's not speech. In fact, it's the fact that somebody can't speak up for themselves. And even when people do, they have to be... Videos have to be flagged so many times, or they don't have proper people in place to help those people who are trying to speak up for themselves.

Right. Yeah. So there's that on that side. But then on the other side, they're trying to argue this is limiting free speech for us to implement age verification. And again, it's like, no, this is not limiting anybody's ability to access this content or anybody's ability to express themselves on these sites. It's simply a one second an age verification biometric scan using the safest privacy protection that you can. It's no different than if you go into a physical store and they're selling alcohol, all right? And then the bartender would look at you and determine, do I think that they're of age or not? Let me see your ID. Take a moment, make sure you're an adult and on your way. That doesn't restrict somebody's ability to get what they want. They still can go in the bar and they can get the alcohol. Anybody can still go to a porn site and access porn if they want to. They just have to take these few steps in between.

And it helps keep it out of the hands of children. If a kid gets on there also, too, a lot of times the fear of something, you get on something, like 18 or older, you have to verify yourself. As a kid, I remember, if you even would have clicked something like that, and then it opens to another page, you get so scared. Sometimes you close it down. You'd be like, Oh, my God, they're going to know. My dad's going to... There was a lot of that fear.

When Now, there's just the are you 18 click-through button. They didn't even have that in 2020. Finally, now, if you're on a mobile device, they'll be like, Are you 18? And then you could just click yes.

But some of them now have a thing where you have to have identification. What state level government are doing the best to help support the battle against, I guess, porn or dirty...

Like illegal content. Illegal content. Like the illegal...

And then, porn in general. Because at some point it becomes also it can be a moral or ethical. I don't know if ethical. It could be a moral choice for a population at a certain point. Do we want to continue to consume this?

Yeah. I mean, from my perspective, I think that we could come into agreement about children. I think that that could be pretty easy.

Yeah, I think that's easily done. I think that's true. It's just obviously some people don't care.

So, yeah, the states that are doing the best to protect kids from access, I would probably say... I mean, the one that is taking up the fight is Texas. They're in the ring, right? They're at the Supreme Court trying to battle this out with the big porn companies and to implement age verification. But there's multiple other sites. And I would just say this is bipartisan. So there's people from both parties that are in agreement that kids should not be accessing online porn. That's true. Then on the other side of the screen, we've had several bills that been introduced in the United States since 2020 that would require age and consent verification, but they didn't pass. There's efforts in the UK, there's efforts in Canada, because this isn't just a US issue, right? Right.

But why aren't they passing? More than a dozen states have passed new laws that led to restrictions on pornography. Now the Supreme Court will weigh in, right? Yeah. You mentioned that, right?

But we need the other side, too. We need our government not just to implement age verification for users, but also for those who were in the videos. But here's the thing- But has that bill gone to them before and they didn't pass it? It just didn't. It was- It was attached to other stuff. It was at the end of a session, and then it died, and then you have to reintroduce it. But here's the thing. We don't really have to enact that law in order to rein in these big porn companies, because we have laws that govern studio-produced porn, like the brick and mortar, porn Valley, has always been highly regulated, and they've abided by those regulations. One of them is called USC 2257, and that's been in place since 1988.

It's a law?

It's a law in the US. It's a crime to distribute or to produce porn if you don't verify the age and consent of those who are in the videos. That has been in place for decades, and it has been complied with. The only problem is in the internet age, when it became user-generated content, then these sites say, well, we get a pass because guess what? We're not the ones that are producing the product.

We're just hosting it.

We're just hosting it. But in the case of Pornhub, they've tried to make that argument. It doesn't really hold because not only is it about producing, it's also about distributing. It's transferring. And they had that download button on every video where from their servers. They were transferring this content to the devices of millions of people around the world.

And that's illegal. I mean, isn't it true if somebody, if they find child pornography on someone that they can go to jail?

Oh, just to possess it. I mean, victims couldn't even possess their own videos of abuse. I had to be meticulously careful.

But then these sites can transfer so much.

Possess Dessing it on their servers is actually legal. We now in these recent litigation, there's employees who are going back and forth in their messages going, I just had to download one of the worst child abuse videos that I've ever witnessed. I need to see a therapist for what I just witnessed. Uh-oh, I forgot to delete it. I could go away for a long time for this. These are the conversations that are turning up from Pornhub employees in discovery that they are doing this.

If you're concerned, right. If they're concerned at that level- Yeah.

There's laws. We already have laws that can be implemented to... You can't distribute child pornography, USD 2257. They have to be modernized and applied today over the modern way that we distribute porn on the Internet.

It's funny. Sometimes it seems like our government is the... Once something has come through and made all of its money and ruined so many lives, then they'll help with it. That's why I'm always like, how complicit is our own government sometimes in a lot of these things? Because that's what it feels like. It's like, oh, after this wave has ruined the lives of a million people and made half a billion dollars, then we'll shut it down.

Not if everybody's had their grift or their hand in it. Yeah. That's why I'm really hopeful about the route of strategic civil litigation, empowering survivors in that way to hold the financial institutions accountable, because I think that could go way faster.

Which credit companies are still accepting payments for pornography websites?

None. Oh, pornography websites. Well, all of them except American Express.

Okay, so American Express is the only- They've never been involved in online or like, pornography at all. So American Express is the only credit A credit card company that will not allow its information to be used on pornography websites.

Yeah, period. I'm not suggesting that that has to be the position of the other credit card companies.

No, but if they're not going to say that we're not going to verify things.

Yeah. Well, that's the easy route here is for them to just say, like we have anti-money laundering policy, we have this anti-exploitation policy, and you have to verify the age and consent if you want to do business with Visa. That's it. That will take place instantly and globally. It'll apply everywhere.

What could we say then to the companies? If we were to put out a clip, it's like, Hey, this is what right now credit card companies are allowing transactions on pornography websites- That are not verifying the age and consent. That are not verifying the age and consent of- Every individual in every single video. Every individual in every video.

And they need to stop that.

And they need to stop that right now. The only one who doesn't do it is American Express.

Because they just have this blanket policy against all of it.

Because they have a blanket policy. But the other ones... So hypothetically, someone could be watching a pornography video on a website that the user is being coerced or trafficked under the influence.

A child, minor.

Or a child or a minor. And the websites are not verifying that that isn't the case. There's no verification.

At the point of upload. What they try to say is, Okay, let anybody upload, right? Then later on, if somebody complains, we'll try to take it down quickly. They didn't use to even take it down quickly, right? Or our moderators will view it. But no, before... This is like prevention because there's that immortalization of trauma. One hour is too long on a site that's getting 170 million views per day. And even if they can't download, you can screen record. Got it. You can... Any minute is too long. We have to stop it before it gets uploaded. And the only way to do that is to agent consent verify before it's uploaded. And because of the technology that we have, they can do that at scale. They can do that on a massive-Right, they could do it.

But they don't because-but they don't because money, because-Costs money.

Friction. Because when you to use friction to uploading, you get less uploading. You get less people who will do it. That goes against the whole big porn, free porn business model because they need massive amounts of content. Anything that you would do that would diminish the amount of content on these sites, they don't want to do. Got it. They have to be forced to do it. Actually, as of September of 2024, Pornhub, after being criminally charged and have this monitor over their site, they're finally saying that we're going to start verifying the agent consent of those who are in the videos as of September of 2024. However, they still have millions of videos that were uploaded prior to that time. That they don't know.

That they don't know. Yeah. And Visa and MasterCard, those companies are still accepting payments on those sites?

Well, no, not on Pornhub. Oh, not on Pornhub? Not on Pornhub or any of the MindGeek ILO-owned tube sites. They will not.

So on those, they're not?

They are done. Yeah.

And that's for the consent of the people in the videos, too?

Yes. They need to verify age and consent of those.

But what I'm saying is, is Pornhub currently accepting Visa and MasterCard payments at all? No.

They can't. They would. They would like to, but they can't. They can't? No. They've been cut off from that.

But Pornhub is still not... As of September 2024, they said they were going to start verifying the age of consent of those individuals. Uploaded from then on, but not prior. We don't know yet.

No, for sure they're not. For sure they haven't. They deleted the content that was uploaded prior to that, where it's only the uploader that was verified, right? It's not just Rocky Shay Franklin. I mean, there's multiple other victims who are currently suing Pornhub because they had verified uploaders uploading their trafficking, their rape and abuse. Got it. That's the way of the land. That's the solution going forward. It's a matter of public pressure. I believe this conversation is so valuable to this fight Why? Because we're introducing not only the problem to so many people who probably never heard that this was an issue before, but also the solution so that we can pressure those in positions of power to implement the solutions to make the Internet a safer place.

Right. So who do we pressure, though? Who do I... When if I have them in here, who do I ask and what do I ask them? Okay.

So if you have the CEO of Visa or MasterCard or the VPs there, why do you not have this policy in place, and what will it take to get you there?

Because- The policy of?

Age and consent verification for every single person in every single video on a user-generated porn site. It's not going to stop it 100%, but it's going to stop it a lot. It's going to really just help make, like I said, the Internet an actual safer place.

Oh, I wish that 15 years ago I would open it up and I'm like, Fuck, I can't even get in this thing. I can't even do it. Fuck it. I'm going to go outside. I'm going to I'm going to take a walk or I'm going to go do something. I'm going to respond to one of my buddy's text messages that was asking me to go do something more positive for myself. I did a lot of positive things. I'm not saying, woe is me or anything like that. But when it came to a lot of relationships and intimacy type shit, I was more like, it was just uncomfortable. And so using pornography was easier. But then that started to fray the part of me, I think, that even I'm scared about building a relationship because I didn't nurture that part of me at all. Some of the times, it didn't even grow. How would it grow if I'm not sitting there nurturing it or paying attention to it? The only part of this is that dopamine freaking My dopamine thing was just leaking or whatever because I'm just sitting there just watching all this slurp Lord stuff on there.

It's just trash. But anyway, whatever. Dude, God, I need some help.

Well, one of the things that's also happening is not just intimacy and relational issues because that happens, right? Oh, yeah, dude. But it's also young men are having an epidemic of what they call, Porn-induced erectile dysfunction.

Oh, yeah.

P-i-e-d. Yeah, P-I-E-D, There was a study in Canada, and it was a Journal of Sexual Medicine, and they had found a third of young men between 16 and 21 had issues with porn-induced erectile dysfunction. Oh, yeah, buddy. And they're young.

Yeah. Well, it's heartbreaking. And then here's that creates a ton of shame. And a lot of that's just nervous energy. And then here's the thing. If you get used to watching porn, then you finally are in an instance with a woman or there's some sexual activity or whatever. It's so foreign to whatever. The part of your brain that watches a screen and the part of your brain that engages with someone are two. I don't know this for a fact, but to me, it feels like two totally different parts. One of them is very active and feels very visceral and real, and one of them feels very passive and transactional, almost, in a way. I'm going to give this my attention, and I'm going to get some reward out of it, but that's all this is. Whereas over here, this is a field of communication and connection. Right. So I wanted to watch this right here. Watching pornography, this is from Neuroscience News, watching pornography rewires the brain to a more juvenile state. That's interesting. Pornography has existed throughout recorded history. I'd love to get someone to come in and talk about just the whole history of it.

Hundreds of- At the bottom here, we have the impact. Okay. In the long term, pornography seems to create sexual dysfunctions, especially the inability to achieve erection or orgasm with a real-life partner. Marital quality and commitment to one's romantic partner also appear to be compromised. To try to explain these effects Some scientists have drawn parallels between porn consumption and substance abuse. Through evolutionary design, the brain is wired to respond to sexual stimulation with surges of dopamine. So if you get sexually simulated, your brain gives dopamine. And that makes sense because we're creatures that are supposed to reproduce, right? And have a traction. This neurotransmitter, most often associated with reward anticipation, also acts to program memories and information into the brain. This adaption means that when the body requires something like food or sex, the brain remembers where to return to experience the same pleasure. Instead of turning to a romantic partner for sexual gratification or fulfillment, habituated porn users instinctively reach for their phones and laptops when desire comes calling. Furthermore, unnaturally strong explosions of reward and pleasure evoke unnaturally strong degrees of habituation in the brain. Dang. That's wild. I could definitely see that. Yeah.

And then it's like, And then you feel ashamed. What parent wants to go and talk to their son and wish him good night if he's been master? I'm sure that's a weird thing. You know what I'm saying? I don't know what that's like, but I'm sure that there's some shame there.

It's like- Well, that's where I think that one of the important things that we can do is create actually shame-free zones where kids- Like the kitchen or whatever? I don't know. I mean, your household, right? Oh, I see what you're saying. Oh, okay. Where you can feel like you're in a relationship that is safe to talk about the things that you would feel ashamed talking about. Because then you don't just stuff it down.

Well, that's what recovery meetings. That's one thing I think 12-step meetings are great because it's like... If people are wondering, how do I get in a meeting? There's slaa. Org, I think it's called, if you want to look at that up, nick, and see. But you can also look up SLAa online, and that's just you can find meetings. And then once you get into a meeting, you can talk to people. Now you're not a weirdo. Now you get in a program, you get some things organized. You create basically a set of principles for yourself, and then you have a new design for living.

I wonder, though, in all of this, in the recovery, in all the ways that you can help yourself and people who are struggling with this, does hearing this truth about the victims who are on the other side of the screen, I've had numerous people and men and women who have struggled with compulsive the porn addiction that they didn't want, but they couldn't kick it. They just really struggled with it. When they heard about the victims who could be behind that screen on these sites, which is the primary way that porn is distributed today, they felt like it finally gave them the fortitude or the motivation to just be like, I don't want to participate in somebody else's trauma. I don't want to participate in their suffering. I don't want to give money. I don't want to give clicks and views to a big porn corporation who's making a living off of the devastation of real victims' lives. And that is actually what gave them the I guess, the ammunition to just finally be like, no, I'm not going to do that.

Well, I certainly think you're right, though. It's like, I have some friends that work in porn and that thing, and it's not like... I don't think what they're doing is bad. I don't I think that for me, porn isn't good, right? It hasn't been a tool that I use properly or whatever, and I don't think it's good for me. It may be good for some people. It might be good for them. But I'm not damning the people that work in it or anything like that. No, neither am I.

It's a big business. No, neither am I. I mean, to each his own.

For sure. But the kids should be able to access it. I don't think it's good. No.

Kids is where you draw the line because they can't choose. I think it's really alarming. Because they can't choose. They need to be able get to adulthood before they decide, where they can make that decision. Also, it's that prefrontal cortex of the brain, where it's like that decision making center of the brain. It's not even developed, so they can't reason. Oh, yeah. Perverted. Is this going to be good for me? Or do I want to do this? Or what are the consequences of me? And they just don't have that yet. And so they definitely need to be protected. But once you're an adult, you can make decisions. You should have the freedom to make whatever decision you And I take the position of it's consending adult, that's their business, right?

Yeah, I agree. But we also have this... Imagine if you opened your door and there was a bunch of porno. That's really what it's like. The internet is just our front porch now. It's like, so you open your door and everything is there. Everything is there. So if you, as a parent or as a country, can't decide maybe what should and shouldn't be there, and at a certain point, you see enough proof, well, 90% of this much percentage of people maybe get addicted to this. It ruins this many marriages, hypothetic. At a certain point, you might think this isn't for our society. This just doesn't help society that much overall. I'm not saying that. I don't know if that's true.

But- At least we can all... I mean, everybody can agree that step one, let's just keep kids away from accessing it. Because they will get that compulsive porn use when they are young. Oh, yeah, no doubt about that.

I get it. Yeah. Yeah, Lala. I think there's no doubt about it. It would be hard to hear, listen to anyone's argument against that.

Well, they're not arguing that kids shouldn't watch porn, but they're arguing against the ways that we can prevent them from doing it.

Which is the same thing, isn't it?

I mean, it's just a different... Yeah, I guess it's a different way to say it.

But yeah. And who are the people that are arguing against it?

The people who profit from it, right? Which is the big porn industry. That's crazy. If you had a politician sitting in front of you, I think probably you could just ask them, Look, we need to introduce preventative laws to help keep victims from being abused on these sites across the Internet, and that is, again, agent consent verification for every individual. I don't think there would be resistance to that. I don't even think that the the porn industry itself has a real legitimate way to resist that, or they would, because they They have been complying with USA 2257 for so long, since 1988. That standard has been like brick and mortar studio porn.

They've been doing it. So the Internet just hasn't.

Yeah. It's just evolving with the Internet.

The government is always behind the times.

Yeah. So they just need to get up with the times.

It's the gap in between when the government is behind the times and when-When people get hurt.

Right.

Oh, yeah. Just like this. It's this recurring market that continues to happen. Just the gravity is different. The source of the gravity is different. We certainly appreciate your work and appreciate you coming through here to share about this journey and what it's like to take on something like Hub.

Well, thank you for shining a light on this. Thank you for caring about it. Thank you for talking about it. Thank you for being vulnerable about your own journey.

Oh, yeah. All I am is just a fucking mule for my own bullshit at this or mule for my own problems.

I think it's so valuable because I think that it helps normalize that conversation so that people can actually feel like they can talk about it and get help if they want to get help.

I think-Well, I've been in a relationship. One time, I was just like, I'd watch photography instead of hook up with my girlfriend or have some intimacy with my girlfriend. And man, I feel horrible about that years later. I just didn't know how to do it. I just was I don't know. I think I didn't want to talk to her about stuff, and so it was easier to do that than engage with her. But it just all comes at a cost. At the time, I didn't think that it was I don't know what I thought. I don't think I was thinking. I was like, Oh, this is the easy way. And I wasn't brave enough to take the tougher route of let's lay here and talk and see what's going on and then maybe build up some intimacy.

But even to just recognize that is so awesome.

I was outsourcing a lot of my intimacy just to this screen that didn't care about me, really. And then to potentially the people on the other side of the screen, you're saying they don't even know. It's really pretty twisted, both sides Because say if there's somebody who's masturbating to a video of something that the person didn't want to be in it, right? They're being exploited. This person is doing it just because out of addiction or shame or addiction, they're stuck in this cycle that this is how they do to make themselves feel okay. Then you basically We have this-Exploitation cycle.

Yeah.

Neither one of them wants to be doing anything that they're doing. It's just this magnet.

Lack of freedom here and lack of freedom here because they're doing what they don't want to do, and they're being forced to... They're being exploited here. Their freedom is being taken in a way. I'm just like, we need freedom. Freedom on both sides, right?

Yeah. Being alive, it's a journey. But, yeah, thanks for coming and sharing some of that information with us. Thank you. Yeah. And also, if you like pornography and you can use it in a way that's okay for you, then that's your world, too. I don't want everything to be a Debbie Downer, that everything is horrible and this and that. We're not looking at that. If you can casually jerk off or whatever, touch your body or whatever, then that's good for you. But I think this is when it maybe gets out of control. At certain ages, people look at pornography differently, too, I think. I think when you're 17 or something, you're like, just You're just freaking rabbit and around the town. You're not even thinking about a bigger picture of things.

Literally not thinking because they don't have that reasoning center developed until you're like mid 20s.

Oh, you're just freaking serving jerk chicken all around town anyway. But what can people do to help support?

Well, so easy thing they could do is sign the petition, which is traffickinghumpetition. Com. They can read the book, take down 100% of all author proceeds from that are donated to the Justice Defense Fund to support victims in their pursuit of justice and healing. Amen. The book, it's written in first-person present tense, where you go on a journey of discovery with me, where you go from that night I described in early 2020 all the way through this fight. You meet the victims, you meet the whistleblowers, you go through this day-to-day with me. And so at the end of it, you really would feel like you are immersed in it, you understand it really deeply at a heart level. That was my goal for writing that book, was that it wouldn't just be information that people get, but they would go on this journey and they would come out of it feeling inspired and activated to take action. On that note, they could join Team Takedown. We've created Team Takedown. You can go to takedownbook. Com and you can join there and all of that. We're going to just keep at it until justice fully prevails.

Yeah.

It's like, once you start to put the light on something, it grows. And that's just a nice gift that you gave us here. The truth is like a lion. Let it loose. It will defend itself. St. Augustine. That's really cool. Take Down, Inside the Fight to Shut Down Pornhub. Thank you so much for your time today. I really appreciate it.

Thank you so much for having me. It was really an honor. You bet.

I'm just floating on the breeze, and I feel I'm falling like these leaves I must be cornerstone.

Oh, but when I reach that ground, I'll share this peace of mind I found I can feel it in my bones. But it's going to take...