503. One Woman’s War on P＊rnhub ｜ Laila Mickelwait
Summary
Pornhub is the most trafficked website in the world and one of the most popular porn sites in the entire world. It is home to millions of porn videos of child sexual abuse, rape, sex trafficking and other forms of criminal sexual abuse like child sexual exploitation. Pornhub is owned by a Canadian company and they own a virtual monopoly on the global porn industry.
Transcript
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hey everybody so i had the great privilege today of doing a live discussion with lila
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micklewaite who is one of the most compelling and the bravest people i've ever met and i don't say
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that lightly um lila has been waging uh one woman war i would say although she has plenty of allies
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now against the machiavellian narcissistic psychopathic and sadistic purveyors of online
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porn particularly at the site known as the porn hub community um i'm not a big fan of pornography
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in general and certainly not a fan of porn hub and i've been sharing lila's tweets in particular
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for for about as long as she's been making them i believe about four years anyways she's mounted a
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very effective campaign and so um we took a little voyage to the heart of darkness today partly
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sociologically uh and technologically investigating the rampant spread of the pornography that's
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perhaps destroying our culture that that might be the case certainly the facilitation of the
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behavior of the psychopathic criminals who generate and distribute that content is
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a civilizational a civilization threatening uh occurrence and enterprise uh we also talked
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a lot personally because i was very curious about why lila became interested in this and why she
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decided to devote herself to it so effectively and that part of the conversation was also extremely
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interesting uh she was tangled up and attracted by the hollywood fame machine and came to understand
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its essential soul devouring shallowness that pursuit of narcissistic self-gratification and
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we talked about how her personal experiences tied into her sociological and political pursuits um
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it was very interesting live conversation up here in fairview alberta uh my hometown so
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join us for a voyage to the heart of darkness lila nice to meet you i've been following your work
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online for quite a while my wife has been following you as well and i believe my daughter and
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we understand what you're up to at least to some degree you've taken on the biggest porn network in
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the world the so-called porn hub community uh it's all sweetness and light on the porn hub community
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there's people sharing their hobbies and interests i suppose and so why don't you explain to everybody
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just exactly what you're doing i guess how long you've been doing it why you're doing it and what
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exactly is transpiring sure absolutely uh well i've been combating the injustice of sex trafficking now
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for the last 18 years and about 10 let's say a little over 10 years ago i began investigating the
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intersection between the big porn industry and sex trafficking and other forms of criminal sexual
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abuse like child sexual exploitation and there is a big porn industry just like there's big tobacco
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there's big pharma there's big porn and it's dominated by one company primarily well a handful
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it's a Canadian company isn't it well their headquarters is in canada in montreal actually
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and this company is called or was called until last year mind geek and now they're we named themselves
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ilo in an attempt to rebrand but they own a virtual monopoly on the global porn industry their most
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popular porn site is porn hub and most people would have heard that name before because uh you know when
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in 2020 when this movement to hold porn hub accountable for globally distributing and monetizing
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countless videos of child sexual abuse rape sex trafficking and other forms of
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non-consensual criminal image-based sexual abuse when this began in 2020 porn hub was the largest and
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most popular porn site in the world they had at the height of 2020 and december this was kind of the
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height of this uh website they had 170 million visits per day they had 62 billion visits to that site
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uh that year and they had enough videos being uploaded 6.8 million videos uploaded to the site
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that would take 169 years to watch if you put those videos back to back so uh you know researchers in 2020
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named porn hub the third most influential tech company tech company on global society just behind
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facebook and google and it was the fifth most according to the ceo of porn hub in december of 2020 it was the
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fifth most trafficked website in the world not just porn site website trafficked yes meaning visits okay
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yes sorry of course and so this is a massive website but it's one of many websites so mind geek owns
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they estimate about 80 percent of the world's most popular porn sites and brands including most of the
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world's most popular tube sites and to understand the tube sites tube sites so these are the youtubes of
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porn so porn hub is the youtube of porn meaning this is user generated content where anybody can become a
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pornographer if you have an iphone if you have a camera in the back of a car in a hotel room in a park
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wherever you can film a sex act and you can upload it to the porn tube sites porn hub being the most
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popular so what happened was you know i had been investigating this you know my antennas were up i
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was paying attention to this intersection between the pornography industry sex trafficking and child
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sexual abuse at the end of 2019 i began to hear some stories in the media that were very concerning
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that really arrested my attention there was also at the same time an investigation done by the london
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sunday times that really caught my attention and they found dozens of videos illegal videos dozens of
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illegal videos on the site within minutes even children as young as three years old they had noted
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that they had found you know that there was over a hundred instances that were cited in this particular
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investigation of category a level child sexual abuse so category a level is not just children playing
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in a bathtub as bad as that would be on a porn site but these are you know sadistic acts of uh of of harm
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to children meant to induce terror and pain and i was just thinking about these cases and i was up late
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one night taking care of my very fussy crying baby and i was thinking about the question that was haunting
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me at the time my dad was really wise and he said assumption is the mother of all screw-ups
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we're assuming that this is all vetted content but i had that question haunting me and so i had an idea
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well who can who can vet 169 years of content exactly i said i'm going to test the upload system
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and see what it takes for myself to upload content to this site and when i did that i put my baby to
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bed took out my laptop on my phone and tested the upload system and i found out what millions of people
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already knew in under 10 minutes that video was live on the site you know it was a video of the rug and
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the keyboard and at that moment everything made sense and i realized that the site was infested
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with videos of real sexual crime and that porn hub was not a porn site it was actually a crime scene
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and that's kind of how is there a difference there is legal material i mean legal pornography is legal
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under the laws you know the united states of canada um but when it's a child or when it's you know a
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non-consenting adult or when it's even filmed consensually and uploaded non-consensually there's
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a spectrum of abuse this was the business model they were selling 4.6 billion ad impressions on
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porn hub every day and that was how they were generating their traffic any idea how much money
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is being generated by this site yeah i mean hundreds of millions of dollars a year are gen is generated
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for mind geek ilo um off of how do you spell ilo a y l o ilo and that's the rebrand that's the rebrand
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right and so intentional decision and i mean over the course of the last four years you know as this
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kind of started to go viral on social media uh you know a petition that i started in early 2020
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to shut down porn hub and hold its executives accountable you know today we have 2.3 million
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signatures from every country in the world and as this was spreading victims were coming forward
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and whistleblowers and insiders from the company were coming forward and they they taught me not
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just you know how this content was getting uploaded but why it was getting uploaded and again it's the
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business model of free user generated porn yeah why do you think they're not more careful
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in drawing a line between what's legal and acceptable at least legally and what's illegal
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and sadistic and criminal all right is there something about okay so here's part of the reason
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i'm asking this question so i spent a lot of time studying the perceptions and actions of very very
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pathological people and one of the things that is interesting about serial sexual killers for example
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is that their behavior tends to accelerate across time and there's a very specific reason for this
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so sex has an intrinsically rewarding nature but that the nature of anything that's rewarding can be heightened
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by novelty so because novelty itself if it's in the right dose is also gives you a dopaminergic kick
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sexual uh anticipation and sexual pleasure produce a dopaminergic kick but novelty heightens that
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okay so what that tends to mean especially if you're overdoing it let's say is that you want to stay on the
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novelty edge right so what you see with serial killers for example who have a sexually sadistic twist is that
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the sadistic element in their crime accelerates across time as they search for that edge to stay where
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things are maximally gratifying and so there's reasonable evidence that the same thing applies to
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pornography use online is that maybe it starts out with relatively vanilla uh displays but then it
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progresses to more and more graphic displays and then past graphic there's kinky and past kinky there's
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violent and past violent and and that's not as far as it goes and so you can also see this culturally
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you know theodore delrimple who's a very interesting british essayist made a lot of this when he was talking
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about how porn invaded our culture that the borders were what would you say moved bit by bit really
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starting in the 1920s he identified a famous case uh who was the novelist lady chatterley's lover was
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banned as a pornographic novel in great britain and it was quite sexually graphic especially for the time
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and that ban was overthrown and he thought of that as a although delrimple is a free speech uh advocate
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he thought of that the victory of i can't remember who the author was actually a quite a renowned
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author the victory for his novel as the entry point of the pornogrification of the culture okay but
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over the course of my life i've seen in our culture the same thing that happens to people who become
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increasingly sexually perverse as they chase the novelty edge because when i was very young
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very young let's say the most it was playboy that broke the barrier fundamentally right that was hugh
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hefner and playboy was a relatively sophisticated magazine for a porn magazine most of the images of
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women were nudes but not sexually explicit nudes merely nudes and there was a lot of uh journalism in
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playboy and some very good writing and hefner kind of model marketed that as well bohemian 1950s
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freedom and equality between men and women the cool single person who had was willing to explore their
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sexuality in a creative manner and and that was playboy and of course that empire lasted for quite
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a long time but then after playboy came penthouse and penthouse was much more sexually graphic um
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a lot more explicit and after penthouse came hustler and hustler started to move into the
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well you might call it into the domain of severely bad taste and that was certainly the case and then
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well by the time then hustler metamorphosed into you know dozens and dozens of magazines that
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concentrated on every fetish you could possibly imagine and then the internet came along and it was
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the case that the internet expansion of the internet was actually facilitated in a major way by
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the desire of isolated and socially incompetent men to share sexually graphic images i mean the whole
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internet was driven it we know what a third to 40 percent of the traffic on the internet is
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pornography pornographic still and so it was an incredible um the sexual element was an incredible
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motivating factor for the development of the worldwide net and there's a lot of criminal activity on the
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net maybe 50 of it right and it's very hard to hold people accountable so what we're seeing is our
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whole culture chasing that novelty edge and that's all driven by in the worst cases narcissistic
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psychopathic machiavellian sadistic criminals and we can't hold them accountable it's really bad it's
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okay so now but we can hold those who are distributing it accountable well okay can we yes we absolutely can
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who are these people well well first i want to kind of just you know basically acknowledge what you
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just said is absolutely true is that today on these free porn tube sites again free you just like there
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wasn't even an are you 18 click through button at the beginning of 2020 where any
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seven-year-old could just click right through end up on the home page of porn hub or x videos for free and
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what they're seeing on the home page is not your father's playboy right it's not the images that you were
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describing it is you know there was a study done that was published in the british journal of
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criminology and they analyzed the home pages of these sites and when you get onto porn hub there's about
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50 videos that you will see that they if you scroll over they autoplay and these are these homemade user
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generated videos and they found that one in eight of those videos was displaying sexual violence
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you know videos that would include non-consent um incest and i think that is just so alarming that that is
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the reality that we're living in today well exposure also desensitizes right so if you're a therapist and
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you want to reduce the anxiety that someone feels um well i can give you an example i had a client one
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who uh was a vegetarian and uh but this person was a vegetarian because they were really terrified of
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life and of death and couldn't go into a grocery store and so one of the because of the of the displays
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of meat and uh one of the things that i did was bring them to a store that was closer and closer to an
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actual butcher store and have them look because that's what you do you have people look at what
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it is that they're terrified of and if they do that voluntarily their anxiety levels decrease actually
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they become braver but fundamentally you could say as well that their anxiety levels decrease and so
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the revulsion that young people would feel for violent acts is especially on the sexual side is
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going to be reduced as a consequence of that kind of voluntary exposure and god only knows what that
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does i mean i can't imagine and it's it's an unbelievably powerful force too you know we're in a
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situation now where a 13 year old boy because it's going to be boys mostly men using these sites because
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men are much more sensitive to visual stimuli women seem to prefer literary pornography although
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there are many many you know it's increasing the number of girls do you know what the proportion is
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by any chance no i don't know that exact proportion i do know it's still boys primarily that are
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primarily being exposed but girls as well are consuming uh this kind of content at very young ages as well
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yeah well curiosity is going to drive that to some degree right there's a great book by the google
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engineers called a billion wicked thoughts do you know that book no i don't oh that's that's i think
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the best book i've ever read investigating the use of the sex difference for example and the use of
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pornography it's a very smart book um and so yeah and so you know we're in a situation right now where
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the typical 13 year old boy can see more beautiful nude woman than any man ever saw in history
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right incredibly powerful possibly irresistible stimulus package and we also don't know exactly
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what that's doing to the relationships between young men and young women sexually and otherwise right
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there is increasing evidence especially in countries like japan and south korea although the
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curves the transformation curves seem to be playing out the same way in the rest of the west except
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delayed um there's a tremendously high rate of virginity now in japan i think it's something
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like 30 percent of japanese young people 30 and under have never had any sexual encounter whatsoever
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the relationship scene is fragmenting in those countries the birth rate has absolutely plummeted
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and we have no idea what the connection is between that and the very straightforward and simple
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sexual gratification that's available online we also have no idea how it is that young people's
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sexual preferences are trained as a consequence of their exposure to online pornography and so it's
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it's is it cataclysmic probably probably it's an insanely powerful technology and i've been thinking
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thinking about this too you know it's that we we misapprehend what's happening because it's easy to
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think that the women on porn hub for example the who are participating the men as well um are just women but
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they're not women in a way they're women machine hybrids because no woman can be in a million rooms at the same
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time and you can think about that also with regard to sites like only fans is the women have been
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transformed into images that can be propagated everywhere and that's a insane technological
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revolution and it's also very possible for young women to monetize their beauty
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right and tempting for them to do that because well a small proportion of them can make a very large
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amount of money and in a manner that appears easy and also that draws a lot of attention and so if you
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have a narcissistic tilt or if you've been isolated and are lonely and need attention then that's a hell
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of a way to get it so it's really a bad scene now you said you think that these people can be held
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accountable so why don't you tell me about that because i'm very curious to see if that's actually the
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case sure absolutely well you know they're distributing like i said criminal content these
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are crime scenes these are not consenting adults that i'm talking about that's not you know the
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focus of my work is underage victims victims of rape sex trafficking and non-consensual image
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abuse that are proliferating on these sites they have made intentional policy decisions let's just take
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my geek you know in porn hub i want to kind of give you some of that factual background so you can
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understand first of all the complicity of this company but then we can zoom back uh from porn hub
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to kind of speak about the industry of user generated porn as a whole and how you know we can also hold
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all of these companies accountable and not just porn hub but um you know i've gone on a journey of
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discovery over the last four years kind of like peeling back the onion layers of this corporation and
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understanding how it works and what i call the deep complicity of porn hub i'll give you an example
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porn hub you know owns most of the world's most popular tube sites i told you how many videos are
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uploaded to porn hub every year they made a decision to only hire 30 moderators at their office in cyprus
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to be reviewing this content 10 moderators working at a time they were viewing they were reprimanded if
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they viewed less than 700 videos per eight hour shift some of them were watching up to 2 000 videos
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per eight hour shift just clicking through those videos with the sound off all the while they knew
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they weren't verifying id or age and they were this was a guessing game you know they were playing
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russian roulette with real people's lives with victims lives um and that wasn't just for porn hub so that
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was all of the porn tube sites they had 10 uh moderating you know compare that to facebook's
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15 000 they still don't have enough moderators even at facebook but make that comparison that was an
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intentional decision and those moderators i spoke to them for dozens of hours you know i consider some
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of them friends at this point because we've spent so much time together discussing how this worked um and
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you know they said that their job was more to allow as much content to go through as possible
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so content is king for the porn tube sites they have to have massive amounts of content in order to
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drive those google searches in order to drive the traffic and sell the advertising why do they need
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more content if there's 169 years like i mean this is one of the things that's that i find mysterious
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about the porn business as a whole i i don't understand how it can be monetized because
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the internet is absolutely flooded with porn and it's free so like where's what's the advertising so
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mostly you know they're making money off of premium subscriptions so that you could buy you know so you
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can pay 9.99 or 19.99 a month and you can watch porn or you can watch the real rape ad free they were
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selling pay to download content which was a small portion of the content on porn hub but there's many
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examples of victims even in that pay to download content there was a 12 year old boy in alabama and
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he was drugged and he was overpowered and he was raped in 23 videos by a man named rocky shea franklin
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and they were being paid that was pay to download content where he entered into a profit sharing
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relationship with porn hub to split that 35 65 for rocky 35 for porn hub they were selling those
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videos police reached out multiple times to porn hub demanding those videos be removed and they
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were ignored they stayed on the site for seven months hundreds of thousands of views they put an
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intentional download button on every single piece of content on porn hub again an intentional policy
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decision to place that and that's not like a youtube download where you can just access it when
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you're off of the internet this was a possession of that content it was a transfer from 1700 servers that
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porn hub has a transfer of that illegal criminal content onto the devices of potentially five million users
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an hour so that that child's trauma could then be immortalized and these victims they call it the
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immortalization of their trauma where they say you know it was one thing when i was raped but to have
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that filmed and then uploaded monetized for profit and pleasure and globally distributed so that it
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will be downloaded and uploaded for the rest of my life machine human hybrid issue popping up because
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it's far more than for victims yeah and it's a sadistic game of whack-a-mole for them where they you know
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would beg porn hub to get these videos down i mean the testimony of so many of these victims
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was they would beg for these videos i saw the emails the begging emails and they would be hassled
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by porn hub they would they would make them prove this is the testimony of these victims they would
00:27:22.100
have to prove that they were underage or they would have to prove that they were victims
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in order to get a video down if they even had an answer at all because we also have uncovered that
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porn hub had 1800 employees okay they're making hundreds of millions of dollars a year they employed
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one person five days a week to be reviewing videos flagged by users for violating terms of service
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including child sexual abuse rape and trafficking and they had a policy where you had to flag a video
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15 times in order for it to be put in queue for review and they had a backlog of 706
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thousand flagged videos and that means a victim could flag their video 15 times it wouldn't even
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have been put in line for review these are those intentional policy decisions that i'm talking about
00:28:12.880
and so these victims you know they would beg for them to come down they would be hassled um but even if
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they did get it down it would just get re-uploaded again and again and again and again and at some
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point they just give up some of them become suicidal you know we know now that this is actually a life and
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death issue for victims the stakes are so high because uh you know surveys are showing that 50 percent of
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these victims uh of of this kind of uh distribution of these non-consensual sexual images child sexual abuse
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they have suicidal ideations many of them consider suicide some of them actually attempt it many of
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them do and that's what happens to these victims and so i mean it's just tragic what's allowed to
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happen and intentionally done and going to holding them accountable we can hold them accountable we are
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holding them accountable thanks to the help of many people we're not there yet but porn hub was
00:29:16.540
forced to take down 91 of their content from when this began to today we now have numbers i just
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kind of got new numbers yesterday that they have been forced to take down 91 of that website they went
00:29:31.740
from 56 million pieces of content down to 5.2 million they've lost visa mastercard and discover
00:29:39.480
have cut them off completely after a huge multi-year battle for that to happen so the credit card
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companies were the ones that were enabling them to monetize this illegal content including trafficking
00:29:51.200
and child sexual abuse and they were getting a cut of each was that you're doing well it was the
00:29:55.320
doing of many people yeah who've joined together i mean we've had 600 organizations participate in
00:30:00.340
what's called trafficking hub movement um lawyers journalists most of all survivors who've come
00:30:07.840
forward to courageously tell their stories and how did you get the credit card companies on board
00:30:12.560
well it was a huge battle i mean some of these conversations behind the scenes conversations
00:30:18.680
with the credit card executives are verbatim recounted in my book takedown and you can kind of go on that
00:30:27.980
journey of having to battle with them to show them evidence after evidence after evidence that they
00:30:34.760
were actually in the words of a federal judge so visa is currently being sued by these survivors
00:30:40.620
for their relationship with porn hub a federal judge in california cormac carmy he said visa gave
00:30:46.360
porn hub the very tool through which to complete the crime of knowingly benefiting from child trafficking
00:30:51.800
finally the new york times did an explosive article at the end of 2020 uh two-time pulitzer prize
00:30:58.960
winning journalist nicholas kristoff that kind of sent shockwaves around the world the pressure was on
00:31:03.900
and they actually ended up announcing they were cutting ties with porn hub at that point but we
00:31:11.100
found out that they actually snuck back two weeks later to the advertising arm behind the scenes to
00:31:17.360
continue monetizing this content with porn hub and it was another two-year battle to finally get them to
00:31:23.300
cut off porn hub once and for all and that's kind of how it happened thanks to lawsuits thanks to public
00:31:30.920
pressure and bill ackman actually was a huge help i mean he knew the ceo of mastercard and he
00:31:37.920
you know was moved by that article in the new york times and he actually contacted ajay banga and said
00:31:44.520
you need to do the right thing here and he helped uh you know at that point all the way for the next two
00:31:49.240
years um you know he actually got him and i onto squawk box on cnbc to call out al kelly by name
00:31:55.960
and you know say why are you continue to have to stop and actually what was your rationale
00:32:02.240
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00:33:04.340
companies for participating in this well they kind of had this uh attitude of we're very very concerned
00:33:10.580
yeah you know we're we we hate trafficking as much as you do blah blah that seems unlikely given that
00:33:18.340
you've devoted your life to it but you know it was just always kind of an excuse well you know we'll
00:33:23.380
we'll just keep sending us more information keep sending us more information we're very concerned keep
00:33:30.140
sending us more information um and visa actually sent a letter that said they weren't going to do anything
00:33:36.800
because they're not in the business of policing legal and consensual material when they had
00:33:41.880
evidence that this was not legal and consensual material that so much of it the site was actually
00:33:46.600
infested with videos of real sexual crime and they were earning a cut of each of those videos and
00:33:52.780
they're currently being sued by dozens of child victims in lawsuits in california and they lost their
00:34:00.960
motion to dismiss they said we're going to dismiss this case we are not responsible here
00:34:05.520
they lost their motion to dismiss and that was in 2022 that was the moment that really helped tip
00:34:13.800
the scale so it was a combination of visa losing their motion to dismiss you know bill ackman coming
00:34:19.580
in and helping us uh put on the pressure uh you know from a public pressure perspective uh calling out
00:34:26.640
the ceo like that combined with the litigation i think was the combination that finally forced visa to
00:34:32.800
announce that they were going to cut off pornhub once and for all and then mastercard and discover
00:34:37.540
so how are they being funded now cryptocurrency and bank wires is kind of how they're currently
00:34:43.900
monetizing that content but holding them accountable that's one way you know victims are suing so
00:34:50.020
courageous victims you know are suing almost 300 victims in 25 lawsuits across the u.s canada
00:34:57.420
and the uk multiple are class action lawsuits on behalf of tens of thousands of child victims
00:35:04.160
um so they're holding them accountable that way but okay so so let's delve into what accountable means
00:35:09.680
so so far you've you've made the case that the accountability so far what you've described is
00:35:14.960
something like um financial accountability right you've you your organization your work and the work
00:35:22.000
of others has radically decreased the number of files that they're able to utilize you said about 90
00:35:28.880
percent and it's made it more difficult for them to monetize their content and i know that there are
00:35:36.020
states in the u.s that have instituted more rigorous age check rules and pornhub vociferously
00:35:43.360
objected to that but that wasn't helpful and so but i presume that the money is still pouring in like
00:35:51.020
mad although perhaps not as much this is all for profit especially when you consider it at a
00:35:55.560
corporate level these are just calculations risk benefit yeah right and the only way that we're
00:36:01.900
going to stop this across the internet is to make the risk too high it's to increase the risk sufficiently
00:36:10.300
and eliminate the profitability so how effective have have you and your organization been at
00:36:16.640
publicizing the identities of the people the executives for example who are behind this and
00:36:22.120
to what degree can you do that like can you name people today well yes well first of all yeah i would
00:36:28.680
just say it's not just my organization i want to say that again so the secret shareholder porn hub was
00:36:33.920
exposed because the former owner of porn hub actually came forward to to me to help why well he had
00:36:43.960
ulterior motives um at first he approached to say he wanted to help you know he was called the
00:36:50.000
zuckerberg of porn so he's the one that kind of put porn hub on the map almost a decade uh or more ago
00:36:56.940
um and he kind of exploded this idea of free porn onto the global scene and he made porn hub this kind
00:37:04.940
of household brand where you know people are joking about it on saturday night live and wearing their
00:37:10.680
apparel proudly in public and there had pop-up shops in new york fashion week and you know doing
00:37:16.620
these campaigns around the world they spent they spent millions of dollars promoting this image of
00:37:22.680
themselves as this mainstream legit brand they had an arm of the company called porn hub cares
00:37:27.400
where they would do these like philanthropic efforts to save the bees and save the oceans and
00:37:34.460
donate to breast cancer research and you know all of these things that they would do and they would
00:37:40.040
make massive pr campaigns so you know he was kind of behind that but he came forward and he revealed
00:37:47.060
that oh the man he sold the company to he said his name is burned bird mayor and he was found he was an
00:37:54.040
austrian he was living in half time in london half time in hong kong and so we found out his name but
00:38:01.180
then a journalist from the uk went on this hunt for the porn king and he found him and now he's being sued
00:38:09.020
personally so it's not just the company that's being sued burned burned burg mayor and he's
00:38:16.040
personally being sued the ceo and the coo who are also uh minority shareholders are also personally
00:38:23.420
being sued because you know they've been unmasked and that was a part of this journey anybody
00:38:29.780
being uh criminally charged in the executive brand suite not yet not yet but they should be and not
00:38:37.020
just in the u.s like here in canada section you know was it 631.1 of the criminal code in canada
00:38:45.400
makes it illegal to transmit possess advertise child pornography child sexual abuse material
00:38:54.380
an aggravating factor in that is if it's monetized if it's for profit i mean this carries serious
00:39:00.660
sentences and there is no question being enforced it's not being enforced and that's the question
00:39:06.260
is why why why can't we enforce this i think maybe it's because maybe it's because people
00:39:13.560
you know i'll tell you a little story so i was ill for a long time the first podcast i did when i sort
00:39:20.180
of came back i was still in pretty rough shape was with abigail schreier who wrote a book called
00:39:25.260
irreversible damage and uh michael schellenberger who's a pretty good journalist in the u.s and
00:39:32.560
schellenberger broke the files on x that exposed this group for what they were and then i interviewed
00:39:38.900
him and he said something very interesting he said that he had been aware for example of the interview
00:39:47.260
i did with schreier because that was one of the first interviews along with her book that really
00:39:51.300
brought this to say public attention and he said he just couldn't believe it he couldn't believe this
00:39:56.700
was happening if you look into the details of that kind of surgery it's so absolutely barbaric and brutal
00:40:02.200
that you can't imagine it the only thing i can compare it to is the uh accounts that i've read of
00:40:08.940
what happened in unit 731 in china which i would not recommend investigating unless you want to be
00:40:15.500
traumatized for the rest of your life and the sorts of things that were going on in the death camps in
00:40:19.600
germany it's brutal beyond comprehension and schellenberger basically said he simply couldn't
00:40:24.200
believe it and i think there are just places that people don't want to look and why would we look at
00:40:29.140
our culture and understand that 40 percent of internet traffic is sadistic criminal hedonistic
00:40:35.320
pornography and what does that say about the culture at large it's a massive problem and so who
00:40:40.300
the hell wants to poke their nose into that and so what do we do we swallow a camel and strain it a gnat
00:40:46.240
right to use the biblical illusion and we won't look and see what's actually happening we won't see
00:40:53.080
what's happening to our kids we won't see what's happening to the people who are victimized by this
00:40:57.260
kind of pathology it's too much and so people turn a blind eye and focus on comparative trivialities
00:41:03.780
that's that's how it looks to me and then of course people are morally complicit too because
00:41:09.060
pornography use is extremely widespread and so if you start to make an issue of it then you have to
00:41:14.300
examine your own behavior let's say in all of its aspects and that's also the kind of dark thing
00:41:20.880
that people are very inclined to avoid and so it's nod nod wink wink this is all cool and fun
00:41:27.700
you know and it's it's that's why i think it has to come by force right it's not going to come
00:41:32.420
voluntarily and i i guess you know i guess that's a lesson that we kind of learned over the last four
00:41:38.320
years battling the credit card companies you know even what's happened like with porn hub and having
00:41:44.640
to take down the content they've had to take down and whatnot it's not well we have another problem
00:41:50.740
too is that it's it's really easy for people to be invisible and pathologically anonymous online
00:41:57.580
and so you know it it looks to me like this is actually this technological revolution has an element
00:42:04.300
to it that is likely is it civilization destroying it might be because there's always a percentage of
00:42:13.900
people who fall into the psychopathic sadistic histrionic category it's about five percent of
00:42:19.780
people worldwide you can think about it as an evolutionary niche you know if you're depressed
00:42:24.360
and anxious and you just stay at home and you never do anything and you're completely useless then
00:42:29.200
you know that's not a very effective reproductive strategy from a biological perspective but if
00:42:34.980
you're an exploitative psychopath you can actually find your victims and you can propagate yourself
00:42:40.060
with some degree of effectiveness and that seems to stabilize at about five percent of the population
00:42:45.420
worldwide and so these are people who are classically without conscience and you could think about
00:42:50.640
them as uh temperamentally aggressive people who haven't progressed beyond the moral standards of a
00:42:56.900
two-year-old and there's nothing wrong with two-year-old but when you're 50 and you're a two-year-old
00:43:01.540
there's something seriously wrong with you and it's almost impossible to describe how dangerous these people
00:43:07.120
are and i'm afraid and i think with good reason that the anonymity of the net and its international
00:43:15.560
nature makes it impossible to hold the psychopathic sadists who are completely 100 percent not only
00:43:24.060
self-interested but delight in the uh unnecessary suffering of others that's a good definition of
00:43:30.360
sadism we're not holding them to account in fact they're being monetized and promoted that's where
00:43:35.600
the solution is you actually i think just nailed it on the head because how are we going to make sure
00:43:40.440
this doesn't happen again well and it's verification that's exactly where it's it's removing the
00:43:46.960
anonymity from those who are are uploading and it's also removing that from those who are in the
00:43:53.860
okay okay so let's delve into that a little bit because i've thought about that you know because
00:43:58.080
so i've fulminated against cowardly online anonymity for a long time because i've read tens of thousands
00:44:07.100
of comments online on x and on youtube and um i'm very familiar with the machinations of the dark
00:44:14.780
tetrad types machiavellian psychopathic narcissistic and sadistic we know what they're like and their
00:44:23.420
particularly active as anonymous trolls online and people have taken me to task for threatening
00:44:29.620
anonymity because while people point out for example well how can you be an anonymous whistleblower if you
00:44:36.420
have to verify your id that anonymity is necessary my response to that is something like for every one
00:44:45.720
whistleblowing anonymous hero there's 9999 pathological demented sadistic trolls and so
00:44:54.060
that's a pretty bad ratio but let's say that people have to verify their id okay so what do you mean
00:45:01.160
verify exactly do you mean uh to take an image of your driver's license and upload that just hang on
00:45:06.620
let me just okay well just let me finish finish this because there's an ugly element to this too
00:45:11.120
and so any kid with photoshop can do that in 20 seconds and so that's just not helpful so let's
00:45:17.000
say we have something like a reliable digital id but then we have digital id yeah and that hasn't
00:45:23.320
worked out so well in china right at all because they have a totalitarian state there because of
00:45:28.780
digital id that's so bloody all-seeing it's like the eye of soron right because that's actually a symbol
00:45:35.740
of a totalitarian state and all-seeing totalitarian state and so you know i don't i don't see in some
00:45:43.800
way how this problem is tractable because the solution the solution that you're proposing and
00:45:48.880
i can understand why is to insist upon verification but we actually don't know how to verify for porn
00:45:54.160
if you're going i'm not talking about talking on the internet yeah we're talking about uploading
00:45:58.400
real sex videos yeah how would you verify how would you verify so they have we have companies like
00:46:04.140
one of them is called yoti right we have the technology yoti for example you know we have
00:46:08.900
the technology readily available to be able to verify an id match it with the face do a biometric
00:46:14.780
scan i mean they're already doing like and and then delete that information immediately once their age
00:46:20.700
verified right um and so id verified age verified and that also you know all takes care of some of the
00:46:28.840
consent issue because if you're presenting an id of your id and you're going through that process of
00:46:34.920
putting your face on the camera and doing a biometric scan where you're matching your id
00:46:38.800
so it's not for the people who upload and the people in the videos who upload and every single
00:46:45.580
individual and every and this is not like a novel idea so we've had a law called usc 2257 in the united
00:46:52.620
states since 1988 and that is because we understood anybody with common sense anybody with half a brain
00:46:59.160
understands that if you don't verify the age of those who are in the videos the industry will be
00:47:04.980
awash with videos of criminal content of children of teens of underage teens yeah and this is also so
00:47:12.720
we've had this since 1988 usc 2257 and the traditional brick and mortar porn industry has complied with this
00:47:19.560
requirement for many it's a criminal offense enforceable by the department of justice not
00:47:25.260
to do this for every single individual in every single studio produced pornographic video right for
00:47:32.160
some reason with the advent of the internet and this idea of user generated pornography it has not
00:47:38.880
translated so what we need to do is take that law and apply it now to this technology and the legal
00:47:47.920
solutions are already in place they're just not they're not being enforced because the incentive
00:47:53.420
of these companies is to not want to put any restrictions on they don't want friction yeah
00:47:59.700
and uploading because they're going to get less content yeah less content means less google they're
00:48:04.700
also going to have to take a look at their own behavior yeah well yes but there was they're heavily
00:48:10.860
resistant and that's why it has to be government legislation starting a business can be tough but
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i'm serious because you've taken on some pretty vicious people so like what's that like for you
00:49:33.120
i mean it's been challenging for sure yeah i bet it's been challenging yeah it's been
00:49:38.760
difficult for myself and my family but so why do you do it it's pain that has a purpose it's it's pain
00:49:47.600
and discomfort and all of those things in the midst of seeing progress that makes it totally
00:49:56.040
worth it okay so tell me how you started getting involved in this you said that 18 years ago you
00:50:03.640
started working on the problem specifically of child trafficking sex trafficking sex trafficking okay
00:50:09.320
so tell us the story tell us the story sure yeah so yeah it was let's see in 2006 i was influenced by
00:50:18.000
my father so you're 26 at that point about 25 26 that is that right you do the math in 41 yeah
00:50:24.620
and that's 15 so i was at a time when i was kind of searching for my vocation um my dad was a
00:50:31.160
huge influence on me just from a very young age i mean he was a man that um he was just so
00:50:39.900
attuned to suffering he cared about what did your dad do he was a vascular and general surgeon so he
00:50:48.320
grew up in jordan and amman and he um came to the united states he went to england india and then here
00:50:54.440
and he became a surgeon but you know he was not the kind of man that would watch entertainment like
00:51:01.020
you just don't see that with my father who's watching the history channel he was watching the
00:51:05.400
news he was um you know very focused on human rights issues and that's how we bonded most when
00:51:13.000
i was young is to kind of discuss these things and so he kind of instilled that in me and my sisters
00:51:18.260
from a young age and i kind of went off in search of uh you know many different things i kind of went
00:51:24.820
off uh i guess you say went off went off track in my life for a while but came back around
00:51:30.920
um to this and went off track in what way well you know i thought that i wanted to pursue
00:51:39.960
kind of very selfish ambitions i kind of got involved in the hollywood scene for a while
00:51:45.740
um why did that work out i kind of got to a real low point um i thought i wanted to be an
00:51:54.360
entertainment contract attorney drive a bmw from malibu to hollywood every day and you know live
00:52:02.120
this glamorous star studded life was kind of this this dream i had for a few years and i got involved
00:52:09.620
in the in that scene and um i ended up finding it very hollow i i you know was partying and i mean i
00:52:17.360
was i even found myself at the playboy mansion i mean with bill maher and andy dick and
00:52:21.360
you have nurse birthday party and different you know parties in hollywood what was that like
00:52:27.200
for you to be there i mean at the time it was i honestly at the time i thought it was cool like
00:52:34.240
i thought it was interesting and i didn't think much of it how old were you gosh i think i was
00:52:41.160
i was 19 maybe 20 21 pretty young yeah right so you would think that yeah and so why did you stop
00:52:49.060
thinking so i kind of hit a real low point in my life kind of a crash and burn why well sorry but
00:52:55.560
it's important because it's i'm curious it's necessary to know why you're doing this yeah
00:53:00.460
well i kind of came to the end of myself i was partying and you know i was even you know doing
00:53:11.100
drugs um i ended up being groped and uh-huh found myself you know on the floor of a room
00:53:19.740
a dirty carpet that smelled like vomit right not really knowing even what happened the night before
00:53:24.580
oh yeah and it was just like i hit a real low point in my life right the shadow side of
00:53:32.180
cool hedonism yeah yeah right at the same time you know i suffered a devastating romantic heartbreak
00:53:39.040
i got in a bad car accident it was kind of like all of these things were happening at once and i
00:53:42.820
just you know kind of hit that low breaking point in my life and at that time i was searching i was
00:53:52.200
very depressed i was how old were you when this happened i mean it was kind of around the same
00:53:57.780
same time in my life yeah these early 20s right yeah okay and and you were in la i was i grew up in
00:54:04.980
southern california so i was about an hour and a half from la so i would drive to la and come come
00:54:10.500
back yeah um and i hit yeah a rock bottom right and it was at that point that i was crying one night
00:54:21.380
i had drawn a picture of how i felt you know i would have to take i'll describe it to you um but i you
00:54:29.880
know i was at a point where i had to either take sleeping pills or narcotics to numb the pain and i
00:54:34.900
just felt very depressed and i was totally lost and not knowing where or what i was going to do with
00:54:41.740
my life and i drew a picture that night um it was a flower and in a in a deep pit and there was rain that
00:54:50.620
was pouring down and there was water that was filling up the pit and it was going to threaten to drown
00:54:56.900
the flower and at that moment i felt inspired to grab my childhood bible from the dresser there
00:55:05.920
that was next to my bed i opened it up and the first thing i read was a description of my picture
00:55:11.180
oh yeah and it was a psalm and i don't i can't remember the exact words of the psalm right now but
00:55:16.580
it was describing it was like do not let the flood waters overwhelm me or the the deep waters swallow me
00:55:23.400
up and it was like and it was actual description of the picture that i just drew yeah well a flower
00:55:30.560
is a symbol of the soul because it it it sort of expand you've seen slow motion pictures of flowers
00:55:37.140
blooming that's like a lotus in the buddhist tradition right because the lotus comes up from
00:55:41.620
the darkness and then it blooms and then the buddhist sits in the middle and there there are rose
00:55:46.460
images for example in stained glass and the rose is a symbol of the holy ghost and so flowers are
00:55:52.420
a very common symbol of the unfolding of the soul right and you said that the flower you drew was in
00:55:59.380
a pit well that's a pit a bottomless pit that's hell right and so and then the water that's the
00:56:06.380
return that's like noah's flood that's the return of pre-cosmogonic chaos in the history of religious
00:56:12.640
ideas and so that's what happens when there's so much uncertainty around and what would you say
00:56:19.280
lack of any stability and hope any upward orientation that produces an unbearable state
00:56:25.320
of chaos which is partly anxiety and partly hopelessness and that can be deadly and so
00:56:31.160
that's that image you said it was a hole with a flower in it and water pouring down threatening to
00:56:37.320
drown the flower yeah right right well you see in in the story of noah's flood what happens of course
00:56:42.360
is that the it's the descendants of cain who are the sinners who bring about the flood because of
00:56:48.840
their terrible behavior and that's profligate hedonistic self-centered immature exploitative
00:56:54.840
authoritarian power-based behavior right resentful envious vicious and the consequence of that when it
00:57:03.440
propagates is that chaos returns right and chaos is very frequently symbolized as water right because
00:57:10.740
water is a place of possibility but also a place where you can drown a little water's good but too
00:57:15.480
much is pretty hard on you okay so you had that image come to mind that's like a dream that intrudes
00:57:21.380
in your life and then i read this verse that was why do you think you were inclined to open the bible
00:57:27.240
at that point had you had anything to do with that i mean i grew up in my you know again the example of
00:57:32.720
my father you know he was a i grew up in a christian home where you know this was kind of in my background
00:57:38.980
um i had you know definitely gone away from that for a time but it was kind of that was my impulse was
00:57:46.780
to do that and when i read that i felt this you know overwhelming sense of there's someone here there's
00:57:53.420
there's something bigger than me that's right here in my darkest moment with me that knows what's
00:58:00.100
happening and like you know that happens in the story of jonah too so jonah runs away from his
00:58:08.280
conscience right that's what happens to him because he's told by god to preach the redeeming words to
00:58:14.000
the city of his enemy and he thinks i'm not doing that there's one of me and 150 000 of them and i hate
00:58:20.080
them anyways and there's no bloody way i'm going to the city of the toxic hedonists and saying what
00:58:25.780
needs to be said so he runs away and then he ends up in a boat and the boat encounters a storm and that
00:58:32.640
threatens the boat to founder and so he convinces the sailors to throw him overboard because he's
00:58:38.300
on the outs with god and then a terrible beast from the abyss swallows him up and brings him down into
00:58:44.440
the darkness where he spends three days and repents and then he's visited by the same thing that visited
00:58:51.720
you and the fish or the whale spits him out and he goes to nineveh and preaches the words that redeem
00:58:57.560
right a very old prophetic story so you're a prophet yeah too bad for you maybe maybe right i mean
00:59:07.220
it's probably better than being face down on a carpet yeah right is it better it is so much better
00:59:14.960
it's so much better where i'm at today because you know after that moment i began to read more i
00:59:22.200
began to i mean there was one book that was really influential in my life called inspiration by dr
00:59:27.180
wayne dyer oh yeah um it really opened my eyes it it it helped me kind of develop spiritually i um
00:59:37.180
i began to understand where true happiness was going to come from yeah true purpose what did you
00:59:43.800
understand uh that it was in in service it's it stopped stopped looking inward with your selfish
00:59:51.140
ambitions and all of those things you want to do technically if you can you can group words together
00:59:57.380
to see if they're replaceable in their meaning right so anxious and fearful for example they're
01:00:02.980
synonyms they're quite similar you could replace them miserable and self-consciousness miserable and
01:00:08.920
self-consciousness are replaceable there's no difference statistically between thinking about
01:00:14.580
yourself being anxious and hopeless those are the same thing they're so tight that you can't
01:00:20.120
distinguish them you can't distinguish them statistically or conceptually and so if you
01:00:26.140
focus on yourself well that's what very immature people do is they focus on themselves right that's
01:00:30.420
what two-year-olds do and as people mature they're taught to well focus on their friends to focus on
01:00:36.700
their family to focus on the broader community and to focus on the future right that's like the
01:00:41.280
definition of maturity and along with that goes a sense of higher purpose and an orientation that
01:00:47.520
isn't chaotic and and uh and what would you say intimidating to the point of drowning and that
01:00:53.340
also produces hope so you figured that out yeah i think it's when you're kind of articulating what i
01:00:59.540
what i haven't articulated about that moment in my life and that kind of season of time but yeah i
01:01:06.720
realized that when did you get married kind of oriented uh when i was to see uh 27 i believe i was 27 and how
01:01:14.300
many children do you have i have two i have a son and a daughter a four-year-old and a seven-year-old
01:01:19.020
right that makes you smile yes that's good yeah they are just the best thing i've ever done in my life i
01:01:27.180
mean um yeah well that's the very antithesis of pornography right disposable sexuality and
01:01:34.700
immediate gratification and you know there's some whim based satisfaction in that but there's not a
01:01:41.760
lot of meaning well all the meaning is nihilistic and pathological as you discovered when you were
01:01:46.980
very young why do you think you had enough sense to quit you said it was your dad hey that's got to
01:01:52.380
be a big part of he had a huge influence on my life yeah there's a lot of fatherless girls out
01:01:57.040
there you know they don't have that do you know that girls without a father hit puberty one year
01:02:01.600
earlier no i had no idea that's how profound the biological effect of not having a father is
01:02:06.420
right because that helps them attract men and that's quite a high price to pay i was so blessed i mean he
01:02:12.660
was just and he passed suddenly um in 2014 but you know it was him who you know it was during this
01:02:20.540
season of time when i was searching and i was realizing that where i was going to find real
01:02:24.920
happiness in life and and purpose and uh was to start looking outward and seeking to where i can
01:02:33.740
invest myself um and it was at this time when my dad showed me a documentary he called me into living
01:02:42.060
room and showed me a documentary that he was watching about child sex trafficking in calcutta india
01:02:46.520
and i was so horrified by what i saw i was so impacted by what i saw that i began to research
01:02:55.240
and i began investigate this particular crime it wasn't that many people were talking about it at
01:03:00.120
the time why do you think that caught your attention that that particular documentary and that particular
01:03:04.240
type of crime why did they think that grabbed you because this is an important thing because you know
01:03:09.860
you're telling a story about how your conscience and your calling interacted to lift you out of a pit
01:03:17.960
okay so you had a moment of conscience that you described when you were on the carpet for example and
01:03:24.480
then you had a vision and investigated that but now you found something that really compelled you
01:03:31.380
why do you think that crime in particular attracted your attention do you have any idea
01:03:36.220
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you know that's a it's a really good question why did that particularly arrest my attention um i i think
01:05:02.620
it was a combination of kind of the innocence it was about child sex trafficking yeah and how i felt
01:05:09.500
like it was almost the kind of worst yeah it's the heart of darkness thing that you could do of course
01:05:17.040
the worst thing is this is the core of sadism the worst possible thing is to um sully the most
01:05:25.060
innocent possible victim right that's the worst possible crime i think it was a combination of
01:05:29.880
understanding the innocence and then the the devastation of that innocence through this
01:05:34.740
particular means of something that i didn't know existed right was this so it was a modern day
01:05:40.740
slavery right we didn't we thought this was gone and it was at a time most people are familiar
01:05:45.000
with this now right and human trafficking most people know this but at that time it was not
01:05:50.920
very common to to speak about so it was shocking but it was the combination of the innocence and um
01:05:57.320
and then it was this you know it was this combination of of of horror at what was going on and i felt
01:06:03.840
drawn to investigate it to learn i began reading you know a book by kevin bale there's a rule there's a
01:06:11.040
rule that this is an alchemical rule that underlies the what would you say it's emblematic of the
01:06:17.300
process of psychological transformation it's a latin insterquilinus infinitur what you most need
01:06:23.720
will be found where you least want to look right and that's the same as the dragon treasure myth right
01:06:29.800
is that the largest possible treasure is to be found where the worst possible serpent lurks right
01:06:35.860
that's the whole story of mankind and so you stumbled that's that makes sense in terms of the
01:06:40.900
progression of your vision you stumbled across a crime that you couldn't you couldn't conceive of
01:06:47.120
a worse crime yeah right so why in the world did you have enough usually it's rare for people to
01:06:53.520
actually look once they've seen right and so why do you think that you were willing and able
01:07:01.020
must have something to do with your realization of the loss of your own innocence that would be my
01:07:07.900
guess right the fact that you woke up and realized that why did you why were you attracted by the
01:07:13.780
hollywood lifestyle do you think you you know you had your father's influence in principle you you
01:07:18.880
might have been more sensible than that i mean that's not a personal insult young people do all sorts
01:07:22.940
of stupid things but why do you think i kind of came into it i was an acrobat when i was uh you know
01:07:28.500
from the time i was eight years old and i was an accomplished acrobat and i had actually uh was
01:07:34.340
accepted to cirque du soleil in montreal my dad wouldn't let me join the circus surprise surprise
01:07:38.900
um but i had gotten involved with a local uh acrobatic group and part of the group was this uh friend
01:07:48.440
that i made that was a pole dancer so she was an amazing acrobat she was amazing at the ribbon
01:07:53.620
and she invited me to jump on the trampoline in jimmy kimmel's man show so i went for a few hundred
01:08:05.200
dollars and i started to jump jump on the trampoline in a bikini for a few hundred dollars on jimmy
01:08:11.940
kimmel's band show um and that's kind of where i kind of just started to meet different people and
01:08:19.400
ended up right getting involved in that scene that's kind of what happens is the fringe of
01:08:25.940
the counterculture right that's why circuses are very often places of horror right because people
01:08:32.720
go to the amusement park to be casually amused unaware of the dark forces that lurk behind the
01:08:39.200
scenes right that's a stephen king plot that's that's the plot of pinocchio when he ends up on
01:08:43.840
pleasure island and all the slavers are working in the back rooms as he pursues his juvenile delinquent
01:08:50.460
pursuit of pleasure well i mean for an acrobat at the time cirque du soleil was kind of like the
01:08:54.960
olympics oh yeah i mean they actually didn't have acrobatics in the olympics yeah at the time so like
01:08:59.520
the best thing you could do as an acrobat was to try out for and get accepted to cirque du soleil
01:09:04.140
yeah right it's the highest quality possible it is it's a beautiful yeah and i you know so anyway
01:09:09.800
that was a trajectory trajectory into hollywood right right yeah and so that's that's exactly
01:09:15.360
how it happened but all right so i'm going to switch gears a bit because we're tight for time
01:09:21.540
and so i i want to ask you we're going to do another half an hour on the daily wire side
01:09:25.600
for everybody watching and listening you guys all know that we'll delve deeper into the issues that
01:09:30.880
we're discussing today and try to continue the discussion of the interpenetration of the personal
01:09:35.660
and the social here um let me let maybe we can wrap our discussion up although prematurely
01:09:43.600
unfortunately what do you think i got two questions for you i guess the first is do you believe that
01:09:51.060
the laws governing what's definable as legal pornography need to be altered and second um what can people
01:10:00.540
do to facilitate your work good questions i don't think the law needs to be altered i think it's
01:10:07.560
sufficient with regard to child exploitation we have very clear laws prohibiting that we need to
01:10:14.920
enforce them so you think it's an enforcement we even have a sex you know very powerful underutilized
01:10:20.760
sex trafficking statutes in the united states and canada that need to be enforced in the case of
01:10:27.300
porn hub and mind geek you know in canada in the united states it's illegal to knowingly benefit from
01:10:34.160
a sex trafficking venture this is a sex trafficking venture they need to be criminally held accountable
01:10:40.480
so at least to begin with to begin with we could enforce the laws that we already have yes um and as far
01:10:48.820
as new laws to address this um i mean we have issues with non-consensual image-based abuse so you know
01:10:56.940
revenge porn laws you know those could be strengthened i think um you know we now have
01:11:02.540
the emergence of ai now and user you know sorry you know pornography that is ai generated uh that could
01:11:11.760
include children or deep fakes where you're superimposing somebody's face onto a pornographic image
01:11:16.900
but these i think in large part could still be solved by the same solution of mandatory third-party
01:11:26.140
age and consent verification for every single individual and every single user-generated
01:11:32.360
porn image or video on every website that per terms of service enables the distribution of user-generated
01:11:42.160
porn if we did that we could make a huge dent in solving this problem across the internet making
01:11:49.140
the internet a safer place but it not only has to come from the government because these are
01:11:53.560
international corporations so if you have this in canada well they're also in the united states
01:11:58.880
they're also they're all over the world so yeah we need that but here's the thing if we get
01:12:04.280
the financial institutions to implement this policy just like they have anti-money laundering policy
01:12:09.420
they need to have anti-online sexual exploitation policy where visa and mastercard and paypal and
01:12:16.160
all of these financial corporations say we do not do business with websites that distribute per
01:12:23.480
terms of service user-generated porn that don't verify the agent consent of every individual in every
01:12:29.200
single video and when they do that it takes place instantly it takes place globally and these companies
01:12:35.500
are highly motivated to comply because at the end of the day every decision they make is driven by
01:12:41.320
what will make us the most money if they thought they were going to lose visa and mastercard they're
01:12:46.160
going to jump through hoops it was because visa and mastercard disengaged from porn hub that they
01:12:51.940
deleted 91 of the website they weren't going to do that for any other reason but fearful that you know
01:12:58.960
and terrified that they lost the credit card companies and wanting to do anything i mean this was the worst
01:13:04.460
thing that they could have done based on their business model because it's the content that was
01:13:08.360
driving traffic that was enabling to them to sell almost five billion ad impressions on porn hub every
01:13:15.420
day the worst thing they could do was delete content they deleted 91 of the site because they were afraid
01:13:21.780
of the credit card losing permanently losing the credit card companies so when the credit card companies
01:13:27.460
the financial institutions the payment processors implement that policy we will see a transformation
01:13:34.360
of this issue across the globe on all websites that distribute this content for profit and monetize
01:13:41.400
it in any way okay what can people do who are watching and listening to aid in this endeavor is there
01:13:47.680
anything specifically well specifically i mean they can follow what's going on what's your handle on twitter
01:13:53.420
uh lila micklewaite and i just spell it l-a-i-l-a-m-i-c-k-e-l-w-a-i-t yeah and i i want to thank
01:14:01.880
you dr peterson because you know you have been an important part of the story whether you realize it or not
01:14:07.520
that you know when when somebody on social media shares a post when they you know it maybe it feels
01:14:14.700
like a minor thing to do or maybe it feel like an insignificant thing to do but it it is that is so
01:14:21.920
precious to me and i've seen the impact of that when you have shared my posts some of those posts
01:14:27.920
have gone viral in one season we had like a hundred million views and it was in large part where i was
01:14:33.920
sharing victim stories i was doing this truth campaign and you were sharing them and yes it was getting
01:14:39.440
more awareness but also victims were coming forward who are now pursuing litigation whistleblowers from
01:14:44.920
the company came forward with such important information that's now enabling us to hold them accountable
01:14:50.360
so there's real tangible impact so i mean as minors it may seem for people just to just like
01:14:56.000
and share something like that's meaningful um you can sign the petition people can sign the petition
01:15:00.960
join 2.3 million other people from every country in the world right and tell us about the petition
01:15:05.640
again traffickinghubpetition.com and you know this petition has been so powerful it has generated media
01:15:12.520
it has generated pressure um and they can join and people are signing and sharing this petition every
01:15:19.360
single day they can you know follow other amazing organizations like the national center for missing
01:15:23.540
and exploited children they can read the book takedown takedown is the is the most comprehensive
01:15:28.940
indictment of this company uh in existence currently i mean it is packed full of evidence when they read
01:15:35.440
that it's a story you go on a journey with me from that night in 2020 and it's told in first person
01:15:42.260
present tense and you go with me on this journey of discovery where you meet victims you meet the
01:15:47.940
whistleblowers you uncover the layers of complicity and when you end up at the end of this book my hope
01:15:53.500
is that you will feel as passionately about this as i do and so you will be informed you'll be
01:15:59.080
activated you'll be inspired 100 of all proceeds from the sale of that book go to support the cause
01:16:04.660
go directly to the justice defense fund um you can join team takedown so if you go to takedownbook.com
01:16:11.960
you can join team takedown and what that means is it's a a group of individuals who are committing
01:16:18.040
to yes we're going to take down porn hub once and for all we're going to hold this company accountable
01:16:22.920
together but we're going to work to take down and prevent illegal content across the internet
01:16:28.000
and so you can sign up to join team takedown there um and those are some actual steps we'll put
01:16:35.960
all those links in the description of the video definitely all right everybody so for those of you who are
01:16:41.360
watching and listening we're going to continue this discussion on the daily wire side and so please
01:16:46.140
do join us there thank you very much thank you so much yeah you're quite the creature all right
01:16:51.020
that's for sure so congratulations on uh cluing in thank you right good luck to you yeah and thank you