The John-Henry Westen Show - March 03, 2020


Ripping the mask off porn and the Canadian company that's fueling the industry

Topics
MindGeek pornhub algorithmics MindGeek and its founders' embarrassment protest against porn CovenantEyes.com Internet safety
Hosted by
John-Henry Westen
Mentioned
Jason Everett Mansef Fabian Thillmann MindGeek Georges Bouchemi George Buscemi Stefan Manos Matt Kieser Wissam Youssef Covenant Eyes Manwin David Marmorstein Tassilo Feras Antun Descari Boulevard Dakary Boulevard Thomas Aquinas Québec Vie Glass Door St. Paul McGill and 2 more
Christian teen bullied by rapper for refusing to say ‘F＊＊＊ Trump!’ at concert breaks silence Young woman calls on UK Bishops to fulfill 'duty' to fight for unborn

Episode Stats


Length

44 minutes

Words per minute

161.14

Word count

7,200

Sentence count

539

Harmful content

Misogyny

14

sentences flagged

Toxicity

13

sentences flagged

Hate speech

3

sentences flagged


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

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.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
Toxicity classifications generated with s-nlp/roberta_toxicity_classifier .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
Topics generated with Qwen2.5-3B-Instruct.
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00.280 Welcome to this episode of the John Henry Weston Show. I'm your host, John Henry Weston.
00:00:03.900 This week we are going to be talking about something that is really a shame to Canada.
00:00:07.620 We have found out that the number one porn provider on the internet,
00:00:13.140 the most disgusting thing, happens not in the United States, like money would like to think,
00:00:18.580 but right here in Canada. We're going to be talking about it. Stay tuned.
00:00:30.000 Let's begin, as we always do, with the sign of the cross.
00:00:42.020 In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.
00:00:46.560 I'm here, first of all, with Georges Bouchemi.
00:00:49.660 Georges Bouchemi is the president of Campagne Québec Vie, which is the pro-life movement in Quebec, Canada.
00:00:55.840 And he's got some very interesting things to tell us about.
00:01:00.000 In fact, he discovered that this company is actually in Montreal, Quebec, where he's from.
00:01:07.180 And, Georges, why don't you tell us about it?
00:01:09.920 Well, it all began when we were fighting the sex ed course in Quebec.
00:01:15.440 So recently the government of Quebec was trying to put forth this sex ed course,
00:01:20.700 and the students, the Montreal parents were trying to fight this sex ed course.
00:01:27.360 So in the midst of researching about sex ed, somebody came to me and they said,
00:01:33.600 well, did you know that there is a company in Montreal,
00:01:38.520 and they're the biggest porn providers, they're the ones that are responsible for Pornhub,
00:01:43.080 and they're right here in Montreal.
00:01:44.580 And I said, what? Really? Incredible.
00:01:47.400 Nobody has ever heard of this.
00:01:48.940 And so I dug a little bit, and then recently I found documentaries and other articles talking about this company called MindGeek.
00:01:57.920 And it turns out that this is the single largest porn company in the world,
00:02:03.200 and it's right here in Montreal, Quebec, of all places.
00:02:06.700 Unbelievable.
00:02:07.860 You know, Canada always thinks of itself as so wonderful and good,
00:02:12.620 not, you know, into the always profit gearing at the expense of people like they are in the United States, everybody says.
00:02:20.920 But here it is, the most exploitive, disgusting thing going on on the Internet.
00:02:26.740 Where is it?
00:02:27.620 It's in Canada, right in Quebec, in the heart of Canada.
00:02:31.280 So let's, tell us about what you found.
00:02:33.680 Well, so basically, the reason it's in Montreal is that Montreal is a programmer and geek hub.
00:02:42.420 It's a place where all the programmers go,
00:02:45.240 because there's lots of software companies like Ubisoft for video games,
00:02:49.240 and there are very high-level universities like Concordia University, McGill, Université de Montréal, and even UCAM.
00:02:55.740 They all have very highly qualified programmers that come out of these schools.
00:03:01.220 And so there were students going to Concordia University around 2003.
00:03:07.980 So they are Stefan Manos, Wissam Youssef, and Matt Kieser.
00:03:12.840 So those were university students at Concordia.
00:03:16.020 They were programmers, they were coders,
00:03:18.820 and they decided that they wanted to make a little money on the side,
00:03:21.920 so they started building websites.
00:03:23.420 And they started building what are called TGP, or thumbnail gallery websites.
00:03:30.380 And they started making a lot of money just by doing that.
00:03:34.260 And then what their specialty was, is they were good at coding what are called affiliate networks.
00:03:42.100 So basically, porn sites work like funnels.
00:03:45.200 Like all sales, you have the product that you want to sell,
00:03:49.040 but you also want to funnel potential buyers into your website where they finally make the purchase.
00:03:55.820 And porn sites do this by having a lot of free porn sites.
00:03:59.580 So people start with the free stuff, and then eventually they get led on to buying porn.
00:04:04.940 And the free sites want to get a commission from those sales.
00:04:08.880 And the algorithms involved in doing all that are actually quite complex.
00:04:13.580 And the means for funneling people are actually quite complex and require high-level programming.
00:04:19.220 And these young students had that high-level programming.
00:04:22.520 So they were able to take an industry that was kind of behind the times technologically,
00:04:27.880 and they brought it to the next level with these algorithms for affiliate networking,
00:04:33.520 and for also website construction.
00:04:36.320 So before, we had static sites with thumbnails, and then they brought it finally into the age of YouTube.
00:04:43.980 So after 2005, when YouTube really hit the mainstream, they started Pornhub.
00:04:51.480 And that allowed them to create the same kind of dynamic we saw with YouTube, but with porn.
00:04:57.860 And that really mainstreamed it to such an extent that their company had 80 employees one year,
00:05:05.060 then doubled the next year, and it just went crazy from there on in.
00:05:08.560 Okay, so God willing, most of our viewers have absolutely no idea what this is.
00:05:13.840 So tell us a little bit about Pornhub.
00:05:16.400 What exactly is it?
00:05:18.220 We've heard rumors from the United States that there's all sorts of filth.
00:05:23.140 There's actually underage pedophile videos going up on Pornhub. 0.87
00:05:28.400 What in the world is Pornhub? 0.67
00:05:30.800 Okay, so the easiest way to understand it is that Pornhub is the YouTube of porn.
00:05:36.520 So everything that we see on YouTube is basically, for the most part, uploaded by the users themselves.
00:05:45.980 Okay.
00:05:46.160 So I am an ordinary person, but I want to show a video of my dog doing a new trick.
00:05:52.800 So I film my dog doing a trick, and then I upload it to YouTube,
00:05:57.220 and then my friends and family and a lot of other people can end up watching it.
00:06:00.820 It may go viral, meaning it may get shared to such a large extent that thousands and millions of people watch the video.
00:06:08.140 So 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.
00:06:19.120 And what happens is that YouTube make their money not off the videos, because those are free.
00:06:24.240 They make it off of advertising.
00:06:26.220 So because they've succeeded in getting all these people to come to their site to watch the videos,
00:06:31.480 well, then they feed these people advertising, and that's their business model.
00:06:38.140 So in the same way, Pornhub works exactly the same way, except with porn.
00:06:42.880 Okay.
00:06:43.800 Okay.
00:06:44.580 So the people in this business have obviously tried to hide themselves.
00:06:53.220 I'd like for us to watch this video you did.
00:06:55.860 You went out to the place in Montreal where Pornhub is situated, or where this new company is situated.
00:07:03.140 They don't actually call themselves Pornhub.
00:07:04.880 Why don't you set up the clip for us to watch?
00:07:06.740 So the video was shot on Decary Boulevard.
00:07:11.260 It's a boulevard that splits Montreal in two, north-south, and there's a big orange julep.
00:07:19.020 It's a big kind of a restaurant, diner, Montreal landmark.
00:07:23.600 And across the street from that big orange julep is this shiny glass building.
00:07:28.620 It's totally nondescript, 12, 15 floors, and no logos, no writing, nothing.
00:07:38.260 And 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.
00:07:50.000 And so at that location is where we were.
00:07:54.080 It's a kind of a multicultural neighborhood in Montreal.
00:07:58.520 And we asked questions around that building.
00:08:01.960 We asked people, do you know this building?
00:08:03.740 Know people who they are?
00:08:05.400 Do you know MindGeek?
00:08:06.500 And nobody had a clue who we were talking about.
00:08:10.200 Yeah, amazing.
00:08:11.240 All local to there.
00:08:13.160 We're going to take a look at that clip in just a second.
00:08:15.520 But also, they're concealing themselves online.
00:08:18.440 If you look up MindGeek, what do you find in the internet?
00:08:21.860 Well, you find just vague statistics on what they achieve, but you see nothing as to what they're actually doing, which is pornography.
00:08:32.880 You see nothing about that.
00:08:34.620 All you see is, oh, we are the future of content delivery.
00:08:41.760 We have this kind of performance.
00:08:44.020 We have these many views, but you have no idea what they're doing.
00:08:47.740 They look just like a tech company, nothing else.
00:08:50.420 Yes, that's exactly it.
00:08:51.960 They 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.
00:09:01.600 And 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.
00:09:09.200 And 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.
00:09:19.940 Absolutely.
00:09:20.420 Well, let's have a look at that clip.
00:09:21.680 Hello, everyone.
00:09:24.100 This is George Buscemi from Campagne-Québec-V.
00:09:27.020 We're in Montreal today on this February cold day, and we're on Dakary Boulevard.
00:09:33.240 Now, what are we doing here?
00:09:34.360 Well, 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.
00:09:45.500 This company is called MindGeek.
00:09:47.920 It 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.
00:10:05.100 They immediately and easily made a lot of money.
00:10:09.360 They 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.
00:10:24.420 With 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.
00:10:45.380 Their workload trebling from their business success, they began hiring anyone around them, willing to make a fast buck, starting with friends and family.
00:10:58.000 They founded a holding company to handle it all, Mansef.
00:11:05.000 From 80 employees in 2007, their workforce nearly doubled every year to 250 in 2009.
00:11:14.320 In 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.
00:11:33.760 In 2006, he cashed out of a company he had co-founded and began acquiring some of the porn companies he had become familiar with.
00:11:45.920 He soon learned that one very interesting and very successful company had been looking for a buyout, Mansef.
00:11:53.800 And the reason for selling was even more interesting.
00:11:58.180 Mansef's young owners, Concordia students, Concordia graduates, didn't want their parents to know about their incredibly lucrative porn business.
00:12:09.500 Until 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.
00:12:24.040 Thillmann bought Mansef for an estimated $140 million.
00:12:30.040 He 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.
00:12:52.740 The 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.
00:13:08.280 No 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.
00:13:19.700 Yearly, this company makes $800 million in revenue, an incredible fact that almost nobody knows about.
00:13:27.140 So, there we saw all sorts of people having no clue what this place is.
00:13:38.340 A very expensive-looking building right in the middle of Montreal, and yet nobody knows what it is.
00:13:45.500 Tiny, you know, insignia of MindGeek, whatever that's supposed to mean.
00:13:50.760 Just concealing themselves.
00:13:52.220 Now, you were telling me that they also conceal themselves elsewhere.
00:13:55.780 We looked at their headquarters in Montreal, also at their website.
00:13:58.760 Where else are they, and how else are they concealing themselves?
00:14:03.280 Well, as far as I can tell, they have offices around the world.
00:14:08.600 They have some servers in Dublin.
00:14:11.060 They have other locations elsewhere in Europe.
00:14:18.620 But according to the documentaries I've watched, and I've seen a documentary done by a local journalist at La Presse,
00:14:27.360 and when they go and knock on the doors of these different places, just nobody's there.
00:14:32.700 They might have four employees.
00:14:34.900 They just kind of keep the lights on.
00:14:37.060 These are all kind of, they look phony.
00:14:39.540 They don't look like real places.
00:14:41.560 All the action seems to be happening at the Montreal location on Descari Boulevard.
00:14:46.420 There's about, it's estimated that there are about a thousand workers at that location.
00:14:52.280 Wow.
00:14:52.760 And what are they all doing, these thousand people?
00:14:56.540 Now, according to the job advertising, so if you go to the website, for example, Glass Door,
00:15:03.640 and they advertise for all these sorts of jobs,
00:15:06.420 and people who have worked at that location also leave reviews.
00:15:10.940 And for example, there's a format, content formatter job.
00:15:16.780 And it's kind of humorous in a sad way that the person says, well, now to tell you the truth,
00:15:24.720 what this job is, content formatter, and because when you apply for a job, it doesn't say anywhere that it's for porn.
00:15:32.880 So that person is saying, well, the content formatting job actually is you watching underage porn all day
00:15:42.240 and deleting the ones that are against the law, and that's basically your job.
00:15:48.220 So there's that kind of job.
00:15:50.760 There's other, but mostly it's programming.
00:15:53.460 It's programming the websites for cell phone usage, for tablet usage, for desktop usage.
00:16:01.740 It's getting the servers to be able to take care, support the load of all those videos being uploaded by different people
00:16:11.500 who are uploading either porn of themselves doing sex acts or pirating things and uploading porn from other companies,
00:16:21.560 which is a big problem for these other porn companies that are being pirated.
00:16:28.000 So their films are being stolen and then uploaded to this, and people can watch them for free.
00:16:32.980 And so it causes a problem for other porn companies.
00:16:36.280 That's another side issue.
00:16:38.640 But so these jobs are mostly programming, and then there's content formatting, and then there's what you call A-B testing.
00:16:48.160 So some thumbnail clips, you know, are they more alluring than others to get people to click on the video while these tests are done?
00:16:57.560 So lots of optimization and making the experience the most addicting possible, basically, getting people to come back.
00:17:06.680 And so that's why 100 million people, 100 million visits, day after day, come to these sites.
00:17:15.580 Unbelievable. Unbelievable.
00:17:17.240 Our Lady did say more people go to hell because of sins of the flesh than for any other reason. 0.95
00:17:21.220 And this is an unbelievable influx into the homes and hearts and minds of many people that are being lured into hell,
00:17:31.580 into a totally distorted view of sexuality and of women and men, for that matter.
00:17:39.180 How can this go on with the police being there?
00:17:43.520 Is there no action by police against this?
00:17:46.520 Because, I mean, obviously, these videos are illegal.
00:17:49.580 What are the police doing there in Montreal?
00:17:53.300 I haven't heard of any police action whatsoever taken.
00:17:57.920 The 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.
00:18:05.400 I know that in some articles online, they do, MindGeek,
00:18:12.420 they 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.
00:18:22.520 But their whole business model is kind of depends on other people doing their dirty work for them.
00:18:30.260 They can always say, well, it's not us.
00:18:32.720 It's the users who are uploading all this stuff.
00:18:35.520 And we're taking it down as fast as we can.
00:18:38.380 In the same way, the users pirate all sorts of videos and upload them.
00:18:44.880 And they try to delete them one at a time.
00:18:46.940 And they do these things very slowly.
00:18:49.780 Well, in the same way, the videos are coming in like a fire hose.
00:18:53.520 And they'll delete one, they'll delete another.
00:18:57.260 They hire people as product formatters to watch dirty videos all day trying to see if the girl might be too young or not. 1.00
00:19:06.100 And they delete, but it's a drop in the bucket.
00:19:09.260 And so the fire hose of dirty pornography, sometimes child pornography, just floods the internet.
00:19:18.460 And they try to take it off, so they show their quote-unquote good faith by trying to take these videos down.
00:19:25.740 But 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.
00:19:39.440 And so how could you possibly stop that unless you just plain shut it down completely?
00:19:46.860 Absolutely. Well, let me ask you in closing.
00:19:51.400 You know, you're a Canadian. I'm a Canadian.
00:19:55.960 What do you say as a Canadian to the fact that this is going on in your country, in your case, right in your backyard?
00:20:04.480 I just think that it's a betrayal.
00:20:07.420 They, clearly, the authorities are embarrassed by this.
00:20:11.020 Because 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.
00:20:26.180 And they say, here is this company, here is that company, come to Montreal.
00:20:30.060 And they're proud of, whereas this one, nobody talks about MindGeek.
00:20:35.540 You've never heard about MindGeek, but it's a huge company that makes 800 million a year.
00:20:39.540 So I have to, I have to think that they're embarrassed.
00:20:44.460 And something might, more sinister might be going on.
00:20:47.300 You know, every year, for example, there's the Formula One weekend in Montreal.
00:20:53.260 And everyone knows that prostitution spikes during that time.
00:20:58.460 And MindGeek is very big on throwing big parties during that time.
00:21:02.600 And that's been confirmed by local media.
00:21:05.720 And so we can imagine that maybe certain persons of prominence are invited to these parties.
00:21:12.700 I can't, I can't say for sure, but maybe there's corruption at work.
00:21:18.540 Porn companies have known, have been known to have associations with the underworld.
00:21:24.520 And so this is not to be excluded.
00:21:28.300 I have no certainty because we just can't learn very much about companies like this that operate in such an opaque fashion.
00:21:38.280 So I feel that betrayed by the authorities.
00:21:41.020 The authorities just want to sweep this under the carpet.
00:21:44.600 They're embarrassed by it.
00:21:46.360 They profit from it, clearly, because there's a thousand jobs.
00:21:50.540 And the founders of what became MindGeek also give money to their alma mater, Concordia.
00:22:00.220 So we see how they throw their money around.
00:22:03.160 And they may be, by doing that, they may be buying complicity.
00:22:08.460 But I think that the authorities should take a second look at MindGeek and its effects on society, because these effects are indeed devastating.
00:22:18.080 Absolutely.
00:22:19.080 Devastating for men, women, children, for families all over the world.
00:22:22.820 And it's true. 0.56
00:22:24.500 It's having an international global impact, the negative coming right out of Canada to our great shame.
00:22:32.120 You know, speaking of embarrassing, you told me something really quite stunning about the shame involved in this whole thing, even from its founding.
00:22:41.280 Tell us about that.
00:22:41.880 Well, basically, the three founders, Stefan Manos, Wissam Youssef, and Matt Kieser, they were conservative kids, Raph.
00:22:51.800 You know, they had values.
00:22:53.420 And they were, at the core, embarrassed by what they were doing.
00:22:56.760 Because, in fact, they had never told their parents.
00:23:01.040 And 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.
00:23:11.540 But before they had sold the company, they were trying to kind of just project it as a startup.
00:23:19.640 When their parents asked them how they were making all this money, they were saying, well, we're building websites.
00:23:24.740 And they wouldn't explain what.
00:23:27.080 And they would just hide it.
00:23:29.980 Like, 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.
00:23:40.300 So, the Mansef office has already had dozens and scores of people working there.
00:23:46.500 And it was in a shiny office building.
00:23:48.820 And whenever the parents were invited over, they would have a code word.
00:23:54.520 So, when friends and family came to the office, they had this code word.
00:23:58.300 And 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.
00:24:08.520 So, they were completely embarrassed about what they were doing.
00:24:11.760 They didn't want their parents to know.
00:24:13.060 And 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.
00:24:25.440 Well, at that point, they said, let's just get out of this altogether.
00:24:28.520 And they sold to a German investor for $140 million.
00:24:32.680 They cashed out, and they disappeared at that point.
00:24:35.900 So, it just shows that these people just got into something for the money, but they did not like it.
00:24:43.000 They're embarrassed by it.
00:24:43.920 And to this day, they just don't want to be associated with it at all.
00:24:47.540 When you read on their personal or other ventures, they have gone on to other ventures.
00:24:53.500 They don't mention what they did and how they got their money.
00:24:57.400 It's a big mystery, and they want to keep it that way for obvious reasons.
00:25:01.500 Well, let's pray that some of that same shame rubs off on the current owners.
00:25:06.180 Who are the current owners right now?
00:25:08.100 Well, there are two people.
00:25:09.880 It's Ferris Untoon and David Marmerstein Tassilo.
00:25:13.340 And they're currently the owners now.
00:25:16.100 They used to be high-level officers in the company before it became MindGeek.
00:25:24.080 So, when it was ManSaf, it became ManWin when the German Fabian Thalman bought it.
00:25:29.900 And they were high-level employees under Fabian Thalman.
00:25:34.100 Okay.
00:25:35.080 Let's hope some of that same shame rubs off.
00:25:37.560 Canada can pressure the government to end this horror coming out of Canada, infecting
00:25:44.620 and spreading this real virus and plague throughout the world.
00:25:49.180 Yeah.
00:25:49.420 So, one of the ways we can do that also is to protest them.
00:25:52.940 Because one of the things that they do not want, MindGeek, you said that they had a logo
00:25:59.200 on the outside of the building.
00:26:00.500 They have taken down that logo.
00:26:02.380 Oh, wow.
00:26:02.820 It's no longer there.
00:26:03.720 There's no logo anymore.
00:26:04.860 So, you can't even tell what the building is about.
00:26:06.780 They used to have a little yellow light bulb.
00:26:08.600 You thought it might be some kind of electrical company or some kind of high-tech firm.
00:26:12.380 They've taken that down.
00:26:13.920 So, you can no longer find any kind of indication of what that building is.
00:26:18.200 And so, they don't want any attention whatsoever, any association to porn whatsoever.
00:26:25.820 The workers there are not wanting to be associated with porn.
00:26:30.720 And so, any attention that they get will be something that they will feel heavily.
00:26:35.620 When we were out there filming the building and so on, a security person came out immediately,
00:26:44.460 almost immediately, asking us what we were doing, if we had a, who sent us, and so on
00:26:48.700 and so forth.
00:26:49.380 They're very uncomfortable with any kind of attention.
00:26:52.340 And so, we're planning on doing a protest.
00:26:55.220 And it's going to be coming up very soon, on March 8th, International Day of the Woman.
00:27:04.920 So, we want to just protest against the fact that these people are exploiting women for
00:27:10.820 the money and for the power that they get from it.
00:27:15.460 $800 million a year on the backs of exploited women. 0.97
00:27:20.260 This has to stop.
00:27:22.200 And we're glad that we're spearheading this campaign to stop this kind of spiritual and
00:27:29.600 moral pollution, starting right from Montreal.
00:27:32.860 Absolutely.
00:27:33.520 And we're going to be releasing, as of today, a petition to the government on this very issue 0.97
00:27:40.480 to stop this filth, this disgusting, manipulative virus, this plague of porn going out from Canada, 0.95
00:27:48.640 infecting the rest of the world. 0.98
00:27:50.340 So, please join us there.
00:27:52.180 And I thank you, George, for joining us in this episode of the John Henry Weston Show.
00:27:56.280 Thank you, John Henry.
00:27:57.400 God bless.
00:27:58.440 Okay.
00:27:59.740 So, George, now we're going to go to a very well-known speaker on this subject, the whole
00:28:05.840 subject of chastity, actually.
00:28:07.560 He's written very many books on the subject, the subjects of impurity.
00:28:11.580 He's probably one of the world's best speakers on this.
00:28:15.420 And many of you will know him, too.
00:28:17.820 I'm talking about none other than Jason Everett.
00:28:20.760 He is author of many, many books, also one on pornography.
00:28:25.120 Jason Everett, welcome to the John Henry Weston Show.
00:28:28.760 Thanks for having me on.
00:28:30.060 That's great.
00:28:30.700 Now, we've been talking on this program about the group in Canada called MindGeek.
00:28:36.220 It's actually the company which puts out Pornhub, the largest pornography website on the internet.
00:28:43.280 Absolutely horrific stuff there.
00:28:45.020 Illegal stuff with minors. 0.92
00:28:46.640 All sorts of nonsense.
00:28:47.700 But it comes not as many Canadians might think or many around the world might think, 0.93
00:28:53.640 oh, everything bad comes from America like that. 0.96
00:28:55.800 No, no, no.
00:28:56.380 It comes right here from Canada. 0.76
00:28:58.560 So, let's talk about pornography.
00:29:01.560 What is it all about?
00:29:03.220 And what is really the harm that porn causes?
00:29:05.840 Man, I mean, where to begin here?
00:29:09.240 People say, well, you know, it's a victimless crime.
00:29:11.520 I mean, nobody's getting hurt.
00:29:12.840 These women are, you know, consensual and they're agreeing to do this and they're allowed to express themselves if they want to. 1.00
00:29:19.520 Well, let's break down the carnage that's happening here.
00:29:22.580 I mean, first you have the men or women who are viewing this pornography.
00:29:26.900 Let's say you're a husband and a father.
00:29:28.840 I mean, what becomes of you?
00:29:30.260 I've had high school girls tell me, you know, Jason, you know, I found out my dad looks at pornography and I used to look up to him.
00:29:36.840 Now I can't even look at him.
00:29:38.640 I thought he was a better man than that.
00:29:40.520 Like, Jason, my dad is lusting after girls who are two years older than I am while my mom's sleeping in the next room. 0.99
00:29:47.580 And then he erases his Internet history, thinks we don't know, kisses my mom and goes to work the next day.
00:29:52.700 It makes me sick how much I resent this guy.
00:29:55.480 And 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.
00:30:06.480 And he doesn't know that I know he looks and he doesn't know that I look.
00:30:09.880 But every day since I found his addiction, it has become my own.
00:30:13.820 Now, the problem with porn, though, is not that it's addictive.
00:30:16.060 I mean, lots of things are moral that could be addicting, a coffee or whatever.
00:30:20.080 The 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.
00:30:30.700 And, you know, I speak about this because, like, hey, this is something I struggle with growing up at home.
00:30:35.060 I found it in grade school.
00:30:36.520 It was part of my life for years.
00:30:38.720 And I just gradually grew these kind of porn goggles.
00:30:42.580 Like, you don't even know how to look at a woman except through the lens of lust. 0.83
00:30:46.240 And the day comes to love a woman and you have no idea.
00:30:49.820 Like, all you know how to do is take your own pleasure.
00:30:52.000 I think it was Thomas Aquinas.
00:30:53.760 He gave the definition of this is his definition of a feminacy.
00:30:58.680 OK, it's not definition of homosexuality or femininity. 0.68
00:31:01.960 This is his definition of a man who's been effeminate.
00:31:06.000 And it's the refusal to let go of what is pleasurable in order to pursue what is arduous or difficult.
00:31:13.580 And I think nothing has emasculated men in America and up in Canada anything as much as pornography has.
00:31:22.040 We don't know how to sacrifice ourselves for the sake of women.
00:31:25.860 We simply conquer women for the sake of ourselves. 1.00
00:31:28.240 And 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.
00:31:38.300 So this disease, really, of pornography is so pervasive.
00:31:43.300 We 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.
00:31:52.200 But what would you say if someone said, as several states have suggested, that pornography should be made illegal?
00:31:59.820 Is there actually an argument for that?
00:32:01.860 Well, there are already obscenity laws all over the United States and in Canada, but nothing is enforced.
00:32:09.640 And so it's not a matter of these laws not existing.
00:32:11.860 It's about nobody taking them seriously.
00:32:14.740 Thankfully, 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.
00:32:25.640 In fact, I saw recently an interview with a woman who's a pediatric nurse who helps children who are survivors of sexual abuse.
00:32:33.820 And she said, you know what?
00:32:34.860 The 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.
00:32:47.260 The 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.
00:33:04.640 And 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.
00:33:12.640 But just because nothing's reported doesn't mean there hasn't been a victim in this.
00:33:16.080 And this poor girl carries this wound well into adulthood.
00:33:19.900 And this is happening all over the place.
00:33:22.020 I 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.
00:33:28.200 And they said that in one year alone, people spent a total of 4.5 billion hours watching porn on their website.
00:33:37.440 I mean, do the math.
00:33:38.060 That's 500,000 years of human life wasted on one porn site in one single year.
00:33:46.020 And I'm meeting these kids.
00:33:47.380 I mean, I met one high school boy says, you know what, Jason?
00:33:49.780 I go home from school on the weekend and I watch 12 hours of porn on Saturday and I'll go to bed.
00:33:55.580 They don't wake up, watch 12 hours of porn on Sunday and go back to school. 0.96
00:33:59.780 He says, I hate it. 0.80
00:34:01.140 It disgusts me, but I don't know how to live without it.
00:34:04.100 Now, imagine the 16 year old boy starts dating your 15 year old daughter.
00:34:08.460 I mean, what damage do you think could happen from this?
00:34:11.520 And so the idea that we're just letting this fly and say, oh, it's a consensual adult entertainment.
00:34:17.080 I mean, adults don't do this.
00:34:18.720 This is not gentlemanly activity.
00:34:20.420 And so gentlemen need to rise up and help to shut down this industry that's preying upon women and children, especially.
00:34:28.080 Absolutely.
00:34:28.940 Absolutely.
00:34:29.620 Now, there is a whole bunch of psychology out there, studies that show that pornography acts very much like a drug.
00:34:39.400 Can you tell us a little bit about that?
00:34:40.700 Yeah, I mean, you look at what's going on in the studies.
00:34:44.300 They'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.
00:34:51.520 And so it's not simply a spiritual battle or, you know, emotional battle or whatever, temptation, lust.
00:34:57.120 It's a physiological thing that we're tapping into here.
00:35:00.240 I remember St. Paul.
00:35:01.080 He 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.
00:35:09.280 And 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.
00:35:19.540 Because 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.
00:35:34.360 And he gets that in one afternoon.
00:35:35.940 Well, he's back the next day, back the next week.
00:35:38.140 You do that for a couple of years, and then you jump into marriage thinking you're going to be captivated by one until death do you part.
00:35:44.900 It does not happen.
00:35:45.880 You have trained your brain to be addicted to mental polygamy. 0.86
00:35:50.480 And it's not a matter of, well, your wife can't compete with these women. 1.00
00:35:53.620 No, these women can't even compete with these women because it's not like a man is faithful to one pornographic image and no others.
00:36:00.100 After 30 seconds, he's bored and on to the next one.
00:36:03.220 He has trained himself to be bored with the most flawless supermodels in the world.
00:36:09.180 Needless to say, this is not going to fare well for him or for any future partners.
00:36:14.840 Absolutely.
00:36:15.280 This 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.
00:36:30.680 Yeah.
00:36:31.480 It was St. Alphonsus Liguori who said that when the raven finds a dead body, the first injury that it inflicts is to pluck out its eyes.
00:36:41.420 And then he said the first injury that impurity inflicts upon the soul is to take away the light of the things of God.
00:36:48.400 Meaning if you're blessed and pure in heart, you can see God.
00:36:51.580 If we're not pure in heart, not only will we not see him in this life, we're not going to see him in the life to come.
00:36:57.140 Absolutely.
00:36:57.580 Now, some of the spiritual writers on pornography or impurity, talk about dulling the mind.
00:37:06.100 Is there any evidence for that as well?
00:37:08.940 Pornography and neurological studies have actually shown will actually shrink, physically shrink certain parts of your brain.
00:37:16.200 And 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.
00:37:30.320 And 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.
00:37:43.240 Now, 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.
00:37:57.160 Oh, it's cool.
00:37:57.960 It's harmless.
00:37:58.640 It's hip.
00:37:59.500 And then the studies came out in the 1980s and 90s of, like, it does what to your lungs?
00:38:03.720 It does what to your body?
00:38:05.400 Oh, that's gross.
00:38:06.280 That's not cool.
00:38:07.400 Thankfully, porn is going to get to that point where the studies are going to come out and up saying this is not harmless.
00:38:13.240 It's adult entertainment.
00:38:14.580 This is emasculating an entire culture of human beings.
00:38:18.980 And it's not just the men, too.
00:38:20.920 I mean, a lot of girls are struggling with this. 1.00
00:38:22.720 They start looking at it out of curiosity.
00:38:24.720 You know, what do I need to look like and how do I need to act and who do I need to be?
00:38:28.540 But the women were never created to be porn. 1.00
00:38:31.500 They're created to be loved.
00:38:32.560 But when they get sucked into this culture and they get addicted, they start thinking, oh, my gosh, something's wrong with me.
00:38:38.540 This is a guy problem.
00:38:39.720 But the fact is that lust isn't like a guy problem.
00:38:43.140 It's a human problem.
00:38:44.520 A lot of people struggle with this as males and females.
00:38:47.860 So 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.
00:38:57.940 Absolutely.
00:38:58.500 Now, this disease, this affliction is so pervasive that it's probably affecting many even of our viewers right now.
00:39:08.580 And 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.
00:39:20.760 How do you do that?
00:39:50.740 Well, she was actually molested by her stepbrother.
00:39:52.980 What about when she was 12?
00:39:54.460 Yeah, it was her uncle.
00:39:55.660 And then when she was 12, there was that sexual abuse that took part on that date.
00:39:59.600 She entered the porn industry at 18.
00:40:01.400 And now she's 24 years old.
00:40:03.240 She's strung out on heroin. 1.00
00:40:04.940 She's had three abortions so far. 0.99
00:40:07.060 And that porn video that you watched last week, she was actually conceiving a child that would be aborted six weeks later.
00:40:14.820 Now, imagine that much of the woman was revealed.
00:40:17.860 What type of man could get aroused to the least degree by seeing that much of the woman and her life?
00:40:28.640 And so to realize the porn industry can't show that much of the woman, all it can bear to show is just the flesh.
00:40:34.400 Because if we go deeper than that, the whole thing crumbles when you see the whole person.
00:40:38.920 And so that's what lust is, is the reduction of the person to their sexual value.
00:40:44.520 We have to reorder.
00:40:45.680 Yes, there is a sexual value, but the personal value is greater.
00:40:49.480 So let's zoom out a little bit and see these people as human beings.
00:40:54.260 So that's step number one.
00:40:55.500 Step number two, I would say, is when the temptation comes, you know, you've got to have a strategy.
00:41:00.180 I mean, let's say you're at church and you get a pornographic flashback in your imagination.
00:41:04.120 What do you do with that?
00:41:05.440 I'm not going to think about it.
00:41:06.840 It doesn't work.
00:41:07.620 I'd recommend a real quick thing.
00:41:09.280 Make a little sign of the cross on your forehead.
00:41:11.360 The first part of the cross is up.
00:41:13.080 Gratitude.
00:41:13.660 Thank you, God, for making that person beautiful.
00:41:15.880 The second part of the cross goes down.
00:41:17.940 Contrition.
00:41:18.300 God, I'm sorry for the times I've failed to look rightly at your daughter.
00:41:22.800 Create in me a clean heart.
00:41:24.640 Then the cross comes up and off to the side.
00:41:26.760 Think of that as you're going over to her now.
00:41:28.360 You're thinking about her.
00:41:29.800 Where is she at right now?
00:41:31.280 Where does she live? 0.97
00:41:31.900 What's going on in her life?
00:41:33.220 Does she need prayers? 0.71
00:41:33.980 Let's pray for her right now.
00:41:35.360 Let's transform temptation into intercession.
00:41:38.940 Now we're actively praying for her healing, for her conversion, for her vocation.
00:41:42.760 And the last part of the cross leaves her and goes to the source of her beauty, which is God.
00:41:48.520 So the beauty leads us back to God of adoration.
00:41:51.120 And 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.
00:42:03.300 And then the last thing I'd recommend between those other steps is use something like CovenantEyes.com.
00:42:11.220 CovenantEyes is a website, an internet filter that you can use to block the pornographic content.
00:42:16.780 If you go to the site CovenantEyes, you can use a promo code.
00:42:20.060 It's just the word chastity, and that will give you a month to try it for free.
00:42:23.680 And what this is is an artificial intelligence screen accountability program.
00:42:28.360 It just won't catch the porn websites.
00:42:30.100 But if something impure comes into your 15-year-old's phone through a text message, it'll catch that.
00:42:35.460 If they're seeing it through Instagram, Finsta, Snapchat, Hoop, whatever, it's going to come into your report every single night.
00:42:42.160 Block the content, send you the report.
00:42:44.340 When you put this on your family's devices, you don't tell the kids, I'm going to know what you're looking at.
00:42:49.820 You 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.
00:42:55.560 Dad can know what your brother's looking at.
00:42:57.200 Your brother can know what mom's looking at.
00:42:58.980 We're going to hold each other accountable as a family to the principles of the gospel.
00:43:03.560 It's not us spying on you.
00:43:05.940 It's our whole family is being assaulted by this stuff culturally, and we need to hold each other accountable.
00:43:11.940 And one way that also helps is there's a text that you can send that Covenant Eyes came up with.
00:43:17.000 And my wife and I have done.
00:43:17.860 It's been real helpful.
00:43:18.900 It's just texting the word SAFE, S-A-F-E, to the following phone number.
00:43:23.820 It's just 66866.
00:43:26.300 So if you text SAFE to 66866, Covenant Eyes will send you for seven days, one video a day.
00:43:34.940 They're just like three or four minutes, and it'll teach you how to lock down all the devices in your family.
00:43:40.600 Okay.
00:43:40.960 Get on your kid's cell phone.
00:43:42.460 Go to their YouTube.
00:43:43.120 Click the notification to privacy settings because, look, we're busy parents.
00:43:47.240 We don't have time to figure out all this stuff.
00:43:49.360 So Covenant Eyes will walk through you in seven days and set the whole house up for Internet safety.
00:43:54.980 It's free.
00:43:55.880 You're not going to get 10 years of spam from them.
00:43:58.140 It's a fantastic, simple way because, look, a lot of parents need to get computer literate.
00:44:03.560 I mean your kid is like hacking into the Pentagon's website for fun, and you don't know how to open an email attachment.
00:44:08.980 We've got to catch up.
00:44:09.860 And so things like Covenant Eyes will help us to get there.
00:44:13.500 Amazing.
00:44:14.540 Amazing.
00:44:15.380 Jason, I've got to have you on again.
00:44:17.140 Thank you so very much for being with us on this episode of The John Henry Weston Show.
00:44:20.960 God bless you.
00:44:21.660 We'll talk to you soon.
00:44:23.060 Thank you.
00:44:23.580 God bless.
00:44:25.860 Hello.
00:44:27.140 This is John Henry Weston.
00:44:28.440 I'd like to invite you to subscribe to The John Henry Weston Show YouTube channel if you haven't already done so.
00:44:34.660 There you will find all the past episodes and much more.
00:44:37.500 Thanks again for watching, and may God bless you.