Pornhub is the world's largest porn provider, and it's based in Montreal, Canada. What does that have to do with the pro-life movement in Canada? Well, it does a lot. In this episode, we talk to Georges Bouchemi, the President of Campagne Quebec Vie, about how Pornhub came to be.
00:05:46.160So I am an ordinary person, but I want to show a video of my dog doing a new trick.
00:05:52.800So I film my dog doing a trick, and then I upload it to YouTube,
00:05:57.220and then my friends and family and a lot of other people can end up watching it.
00:06:00.820It may go viral, meaning it may get shared to such a large extent that thousands and millions of people watch the video.
00:06:08.140So that's the essence of YouTube, and you put enough of these together, and you get thousands of videos uploaded to the platform with millions of viewers.
00:06:19.120And what happens is that YouTube make their money not off the videos, because those are free.
00:07:04.880Why don't you set up the clip for us to watch?
00:07:06.740So the video was shot on Decary Boulevard.
00:07:11.260It's a boulevard that splits Montreal in two, north-south, and there's a big orange julep.
00:07:19.020It's a big kind of a restaurant, diner, Montreal landmark.
00:07:23.600And across the street from that big orange julep is this shiny glass building.
00:07:28.620It's totally nondescript, 12, 15 floors, and no logos, no writing, nothing.
00:07:38.260And that is the location of what's called MindGeek, which is the parent company for Pornhub, YouPorn, and a lot of other, dozens and dozens of other porn businesses.
00:07:50.000And so at that location is where we were.
00:07:54.080It's a kind of a multicultural neighborhood in Montreal.
00:07:58.520And we asked questions around that building.
00:08:01.960We asked people, do you know this building?
00:08:51.960They want to portray themselves as a run-of-the-mill, bland startup tech company, and that they're just a bunch of geeks, and that they like programming.
00:09:01.600And you're not too sure what they're doing, but you're sure that it's something sophisticated and probably lucrative, but you have no idea what it is.
00:09:09.200And they want to keep it that way, because they don't want anyone to be embarrassed or uncomfortable with the situation, and they just don't want any publicity whatsoever.
00:09:34.360Well, we just happen to be in front of a building that houses the largest porn company in the world, and nobody around here knows about it.
00:09:47.920It all started in 2003, when three Concordia University students, Matt Kieser, Stefan Manos, and Wissam Yusuf, and some friends built porn sites in what is called a TGP, or thumbnail gallery post, style.
00:10:05.100They immediately and easily made a lot of money.
00:10:09.360They soon founded Brazzers, a pay-for-porn site, along with what in marketing is called an affiliate network, a system devised to funnel internet users to a pay site through advertising on free sites.
00:10:24.420With the money windfall that came from these new sites, they then founded more sites catering to diverse sexual fetishes and niches, one of these being Pornhub, a YouTube for porn, which today is the single most visited porn site in the world, with close to 100 million daily visitors.
00:10:45.380Their workload trebling from their business success, they began hiring anyone around them, willing to make a fast buck, starting with friends and family.
00:10:58.000They founded a holding company to handle it all, Mansef.
00:11:05.000From 80 employees in 2007, their workforce nearly doubled every year to 250 in 2009.
00:11:14.320In the meantime, a young German entrepreneur and self-proclaimed geek named Fabian Thillmann, a programmer since he was 17, had begun leveraging his expertise at affiliate tracking and management in the burgeoning internet porn industry.
00:11:33.760In 2006, he cashed out of a company he had co-founded and began acquiring some of the porn companies he had become familiar with.
00:11:45.920He soon learned that one very interesting and very successful company had been looking for a buyout, Mansef.
00:11:53.800And the reason for selling was even more interesting.
00:11:58.180Mansef's young owners, Concordia students, Concordia graduates, didn't want their parents to know about their incredibly lucrative porn business.
00:12:09.500Until then, Mansef's owners had been hiding behind a facade of calculated corporate blandness to fool outsiders into thinking that they ran a run-of-the-mill high-tech startup.
00:12:24.040Thillmann bought Mansef for an estimated $140 million.
00:12:30.040He changed the name of the company to Manwin, which continued its dizzying growth right up until the day when Thillmann, for reasons that remain unclear, felt forced to sell the company to its current owners, Faris Antun and David Marmorstein Tassilo, both high-level employees of Manwin.
00:12:52.740The new owners renamed the company MindGeek, which today employs over 1,000 people, mostly in a shiny glass building across the orange julep on Descari Boulevard, Montreal.
00:13:08.280No one we interviewed in the vicinity of the building could even recognize the name MindGeek or tell us what its 1,000-plus employees were doing.
00:13:19.700Yearly, this company makes $800 million in revenue, an incredible fact that almost nobody knows about.
00:13:27.140So, there we saw all sorts of people having no clue what this place is.
00:13:38.340A very expensive-looking building right in the middle of Montreal, and yet nobody knows what it is.
00:13:45.500Tiny, you know, insignia of MindGeek, whatever that's supposed to mean.
00:17:17.240Our Lady did say more people go to hell because of sins of the flesh than for any other reason.
00:17:21.220And this is an unbelievable influx into the homes and hearts and minds of many people that are being lured into hell,
00:17:31.580into a totally distorted view of sexuality and of women and men, for that matter.
00:17:39.180How can this go on with the police being there?
00:17:43.520Is there no action by police against this?
00:17:46.520Because, I mean, obviously, these videos are illegal.
00:17:49.580What are the police doing there in Montreal?
00:17:53.300I haven't heard of any police action whatsoever taken.
00:17:57.920The reports that I've read, the articles that I've read from local media have not said a thing about what the police think of all this.
00:18:05.400I know that in some articles online, they do, MindGeek,
00:18:12.420they do try to say that they are complying to all the child porn laws and that they're taking proactive actions in order to eliminate all this.
00:18:22.520But their whole business model is kind of depends on other people doing their dirty work for them.
00:18:30.260They can always say, well, it's not us.
00:18:32.720It's the users who are uploading all this stuff.
00:18:35.520And we're taking it down as fast as we can.
00:18:38.380In the same way, the users pirate all sorts of videos and upload them.
00:18:44.880And they try to delete them one at a time.
00:18:57.260They hire people as product formatters to watch dirty videos all day trying to see if the girl might be too young or not.
00:19:06.100And they delete, but it's a drop in the bucket.
00:19:09.260And so the fire hose of dirty pornography, sometimes child pornography, just floods the internet.
00:19:18.460And they try to take it off, so they show their quote-unquote good faith by trying to take these videos down.
00:19:25.740But it can never be fast enough because day after day, a hundred million viewers up, some of whom, many of whom, thousands and millions of whom, upload their own videos, their own things.
00:19:39.440And so how could you possibly stop that unless you just plain shut it down completely?
00:19:46.860Absolutely. Well, let me ask you in closing.
00:19:51.400You know, you're a Canadian. I'm a Canadian.
00:19:55.960What do you say as a Canadian to the fact that this is going on in your country, in your case, right in your backyard?
00:20:07.420They, clearly, the authorities are embarrassed by this.
00:20:11.020Because we have other tech companies that are celebrated, they are championed, they are boasted about, the government keeps talking about them, promoting them so that people come to Montreal to do programming.
00:20:26.180And they say, here is this company, here is that company, come to Montreal.
00:20:30.060And they're proud of, whereas this one, nobody talks about MindGeek.
00:20:35.540You've never heard about MindGeek, but it's a huge company that makes 800 million a year.
00:20:39.540So I have to, I have to think that they're embarrassed.
00:20:44.460And something might, more sinister might be going on.
00:20:47.300You know, every year, for example, there's the Formula One weekend in Montreal.
00:20:53.260And everyone knows that prostitution spikes during that time.
00:20:58.460And MindGeek is very big on throwing big parties during that time.
00:21:02.600And that's been confirmed by local media.
00:21:05.720And so we can imagine that maybe certain persons of prominence are invited to these parties.
00:21:12.700I can't, I can't say for sure, but maybe there's corruption at work.
00:21:18.540Porn companies have known, have been known to have associations with the underworld.
00:21:46.360They profit from it, clearly, because there's a thousand jobs.
00:21:50.540And the founders of what became MindGeek also give money to their alma mater, Concordia.
00:22:00.220So we see how they throw their money around.
00:22:03.160And they may be, by doing that, they may be buying complicity.
00:22:08.460But I think that the authorities should take a second look at MindGeek and its effects on society, because these effects are indeed devastating.
00:22:24.500It's having an international global impact, the negative coming right out of Canada to our great shame.
00:22:32.120You know, speaking of embarrassing, you told me something really quite stunning about the shame involved in this whole thing, even from its founding.
00:22:53.420And they were, at the core, embarrassed by what they were doing.
00:22:56.760Because, in fact, they had never told their parents.
00:23:01.040And that was one of the main reasons why they had to sell the company to Fabian Thileman, who eventually bought it, off of them for $140 million.
00:23:11.540But before they had sold the company, they were trying to kind of just project it as a startup.
00:23:19.640When their parents asked them how they were making all this money, they were saying, well, we're building websites.
00:23:29.980Like, for example, whenever their parents were invited to the workplace where they had their offices, where, at the time, it was called Mansef, before it became MindGeek.
00:23:40.300So, the Mansef office has already had dozens and scores of people working there.
00:23:46.500And it was in a shiny office building.
00:23:48.820And whenever the parents were invited over, they would have a code word.
00:23:54.520So, when friends and family came to the office, they had this code word.
00:23:58.300And everybody on the floor had to switch off their screen or change the program so that whatever was on the screen would be changed for something innocuous.
00:24:08.520So, they were completely embarrassed about what they were doing.
00:24:11.760They didn't want their parents to know.
00:24:13.060And when it became impossible to hide or impossible to handle, when it just got too big, and even their security was threatened because of their copyright piracy, and companies were threatening them.
00:24:25.440Well, at that point, they said, let's just get out of this altogether.
00:24:28.520And they sold to a German investor for $140 million.
00:24:32.680They cashed out, and they disappeared at that point.
00:24:35.900So, it just shows that these people just got into something for the money, but they did not like it.
00:29:38.640I thought he was a better man than that.
00:29:40.520Like, Jason, my dad is lusting after girls who are two years older than I am while my mom's sleeping in the next room.
00:29:47.580And then he erases his Internet history, thinks we don't know, kisses my mom and goes to work the next day.
00:29:52.700It makes me sick how much I resent this guy.
00:29:55.480And so the friction that that creates between father, daughter, one girl told me, she said, I've been looking at porn every day for five years because she said five years ago is when I found my dad's pornography.
00:30:06.480And he doesn't know that I know he looks and he doesn't know that I look.
00:30:09.880But every day since I found his addiction, it has become my own.
00:30:13.820Now, the problem with porn, though, is not that it's addictive.
00:30:16.060I mean, lots of things are moral that could be addicting, a coffee or whatever.
00:30:20.080The problem with pornography is that it degrades the human person, that you're looking at this person simply through the lens of lust as something to be used for your selfish gratification.
00:30:30.700And, you know, I speak about this because, like, hey, this is something I struggle with growing up at home.
00:30:53.760He gave the definition of this is his definition of a feminacy.
00:30:58.680OK, it's not definition of homosexuality or femininity.
00:31:01.960This is his definition of a man who's been effeminate.
00:31:06.000And it's the refusal to let go of what is pleasurable in order to pursue what is arduous or difficult.
00:31:13.580And I think nothing has emasculated men in America and up in Canada anything as much as pornography has.
00:31:22.040We don't know how to sacrifice ourselves for the sake of women.
00:31:25.860We simply conquer women for the sake of ourselves.
00:31:28.240And so it has simply robbed us of the understanding of what it means to be a man, to rightly love a woman, where we simply look at them as things to be used for selfish gratification.
00:31:38.300So this disease, really, of pornography is so pervasive.
00:31:43.300We are allowing these companies to get away with almost murder, things that are actually illegal, that tiny bit of things that are still illegal, the underage bit.
00:31:52.200But what would you say if someone said, as several states have suggested, that pornography should be made illegal?
00:31:59.820Is there actually an argument for that?
00:32:01.860Well, there are already obscenity laws all over the United States and in Canada, but nothing is enforced.
00:32:09.640And so it's not a matter of these laws not existing.
00:32:11.860It's about nobody taking them seriously.
00:32:14.740Thankfully, more states are starting to step up and declaring pornography to be a public health crisis because there are some legislators who don't have their head in the sand and that are seeing the fallout of this.
00:32:25.640In fact, I saw recently an interview with a woman who's a pediatric nurse who helps children who are survivors of sexual abuse.
00:32:34.860The number one perpetrator of sexual abuse that we're seeing is not, you know, some live in boyfriend or some step, you know, you know, some some of the pervert down the street or some uncle.
00:32:47.260The number one perpetrator of sexual abuse against children is 11 to 15 year old boys who've been exposed to pornography because these pre-adolescents, they see the stuff on their phone or their grandparents cell phone when their grandparents are looking and they see the stuff for years.
00:33:04.640And then their little sister has a slumber party with their nine year old cousin and mom and dad are asleep and stuff happens and nothing gets reported.
00:33:12.640But just because nothing's reported doesn't mean there hasn't been a victim in this.
00:33:16.080And this poor girl carries this wound well into adulthood.
00:33:19.900And this is happening all over the place.
00:33:22.020I mean, Pornhub, I remember reading about a year and a half ago, their annual statistics where they talk about how many people are on their site.
00:33:28.200And they said that in one year alone, people spent a total of 4.5 billion hours watching porn on their website.
00:34:29.620Now, there is a whole bunch of psychology out there, studies that show that pornography acts very much like a drug.
00:34:39.400Can you tell us a little bit about that?
00:34:40.700Yeah, I mean, you look at what's going on in the studies.
00:34:44.300They're showing that the parts of the brain that are impacted from pornography use are the same as when someone's taking heroin or cocaine.
00:34:51.520And so it's not simply a spiritual battle or, you know, emotional battle or whatever, temptation, lust.
00:34:57.120It's a physiological thing that we're tapping into here.
00:35:01.080He says, you know, don't you know that every other sin that a person commits is outside their body, but the immoral person sins against their own body.
00:35:09.280And so one of the things that it does, in a sense, is it resets the pleasure thermostat of your brain that you need greater and greater levels of excitement to achieve the same high.
00:35:19.540Because if you think about it, you know, an 18-year-old college kid's dorm of looking at pornography can see more flawless women's bodies than any man in history could have ever seen in hundreds of lifetimes.
00:36:15.280This was one of the reasons why, when Our Lady came to warn us in 1917 with the Children of Fatima, she said that more souls go to hell because of sins of the flesh, sins of impurity, than any other sin.
00:36:57.580Now, some of the spiritual writers on pornography or impurity, talk about dulling the mind.
00:37:06.100Is there any evidence for that as well?
00:37:08.940Pornography and neurological studies have actually shown will actually shrink, physically shrink certain parts of your brain.
00:37:16.200And when you've got people spending a half a million years on one porn website in one year, imagine what those people could do for human civilization if they were spending their lives doing something a little more constructive with their time.
00:37:30.320And if someone wants to look up some of the neurological studies on what porn is doing to the brain, not only inducing sexual dysfunction, but making you, like you said, dull, simply go to the website Fight the New Drug.
00:37:43.240Now, Fight the New Drug is a website that's not religious in nature, but it simply gives the relational, sociological, and neurological evidence that porn, in a sense, is like smoking was in the 1960s.
00:38:44.520A lot of people struggle with this as males and females.
00:38:47.860So we need to make sure that we're saying that the damage that's being caused neurologically, spiritually or relationally is not simply a male problem.
00:38:58.500Now, this disease, this affliction is so pervasive that it's probably affecting many even of our viewers right now.
00:39:08.580And one of the things that you've done so well through your Chastity Project, through all the things that you've done actually with your life, you devoted your life to this in a most incredible way, is helping people out of this hell, which really is a hell.
00:41:35.360Let's transform temptation into intercession.
00:41:38.940Now we're actively praying for her healing, for her conversion, for her vocation.
00:41:42.760And the last part of the cross leaves her and goes to the source of her beauty, which is God.
00:41:48.520So the beauty leads us back to God of adoration.
00:41:51.120And so this little four-step thing, and these are the four parts of prayer in the catechism, can transform that moment of temptation into a moment that lifts not only her, but our hearts back up to God.
00:42:03.300And then the last thing I'd recommend between those other steps is use something like CovenantEyes.com.
00:42:11.220CovenantEyes is a website, an internet filter that you can use to block the pornographic content.
00:42:16.780If you go to the site CovenantEyes, you can use a promo code.
00:42:20.060It's just the word chastity, and that will give you a month to try it for free.
00:42:23.680And what this is is an artificial intelligence screen accountability program.
00:42:28.360It just won't catch the porn websites.
00:42:30.100But if something impure comes into your 15-year-old's phone through a text message, it'll catch that.
00:42:35.460If they're seeing it through Instagram, Finsta, Snapchat, Hoop, whatever, it's going to come into your report every single night.
00:42:42.160Block the content, send you the report.
00:42:44.340When you put this on your family's devices, you don't tell the kids, I'm going to know what you're looking at.
00:42:49.820You tell them, we're going to put this on everybody's computer and the whole family so your little sister can know what dad's looking at.
00:42:55.560Dad can know what your brother's looking at.
00:42:57.200Your brother can know what mom's looking at.
00:42:58.980We're going to hold each other accountable as a family to the principles of the gospel.