The Mikhaila Peterson Podcast - It’s Way Worse Than You Think： P＊rnhub ｜ Laila Mickelwait EP 225

00:00:00.000 Pornhub is Jeffrey Epstein times a thousand.

00:00:02.960 Could you please give us your name?

00:00:04.260 Jeffrey Epstein.

00:00:05.980 Pornhub had done an amazing job at spending millions of dollars

00:00:10.100 making itself this household, mainstream, brand name for porn

00:00:14.400 where people were wearing their apparel in public,

00:00:17.020 you know, were walking New York Fashion Week,

00:00:18.780 and there was faux commercials on Saturday Night Live.

00:00:21.420 The site makes most of its money by selling 4.6 billion ad impressions

00:00:26.620 on Pornhub every single day.

00:00:28.320 So they call it the underage guessing game, where they're just playing Russian roulette with people's lives.

00:00:33.500 They're trying to guess who's 16 and who's 18. 0.87

00:00:36.480 What's rough sex and what's rape?

00:00:38.480 The solution at scale to this problem is age and consent verification for every single person in every video.

00:00:45.580 Well, duh.

00:00:46.580 Yeah, like, duh, right?

00:00:47.640 Like, how is that not already the standard?

00:00:49.860 And it's not just a free-for-all on the side of uploading.

00:00:52.520 They're not verifying the ages of those who are accessing the free point sites either.

00:00:56.260 Kids are being exploited in front of the screen and they're being exploited in back of the screen.

00:01:05.720 Lila Micklewaite, welcome to my podcast.

00:01:08.060 Thank you for having me. So glad to be here.

00:01:10.260 Yeah, thanks for coming out. This is a horrifying topic, but we should get into it.

00:01:16.380 So I'm going to ask a bunch of questions. First off, can you give a brief background about who you are and how you got into what you do?

00:01:22.860 Of course. Yeah, I am, you know, the founder and CEO of the Justice Defense Fund, founder of the Trafficking Hub Movement, Trafficking Hub Movement to shut down Pornhub and hold its executives responsible for globally distributing and profiting from rape, child sexual abuse, trafficking, all forms of non-consensual content.

00:01:41.780 and I've been in the fight against trafficking now almost 20 years so it's about 18 years now

00:01:47.180 and in the context of that I you know number of years ago started to realize that trafficking

00:01:53.400 wasn't just happening offline you know back alleys and streets and things like that but

00:01:58.260 actually it was being filmed and it was being distributed online we live in a digital age and

00:02:03.060 that's what was happening and so I began to investigate the intersection between what I

00:02:08.280 call the big porn industry just like there's big tobacco and big pharma there's a big porn

00:02:12.520 industry it's dominated primarily by one company the parent company Pornhub but I began to

00:02:19.220 investigate this intersection between child sexual abuse trafficking and the big porn industry and I

00:02:24.820 made a discovery one night early 2020 middle of the night unexpected moment that kind of just

00:02:32.100 changed the course of my life over the last five years. It launched the trafficking hub global

00:02:38.020 movement. And so much has happened since then. Uh, you know, what happened was at the end of 2020

00:02:44.540 or sorry, at the end of 2019, it was a few days after my son was born. It was about nine days

00:02:50.740 after he was born. I read a story. I was paying attention to the headlines and I read a story

00:02:55.680 about a girl, a 15 year old girl from Broward County, Florida, who had been missing for an

00:03:00.900 entire year and she was finally found when her distraught mother was tipped off by a porn hub

00:03:05.760 user that he recognized her daughter on the site and yes and she was found in 58 videos being raped 0.61

00:03:12.780 for for profit and police actually matched with an account named daddy slut and a police had

00:03:19.240 matched the rapist face from the videos to surveillance footage from a 7-eleven and they

00:03:25.680 rescued the girl she had been impregnated and it was just like a horror story and i just couldn't

00:03:30.860 get that story out of my mind and then at the same time the london sunday times released an

00:03:36.060 investigation and they had found dozens of illegal videos on the site within minutes even children as

00:03:41.620 young as three years old and it wasn't just children that were ending up in the headlines

00:03:47.160 around the same time there was a hundred victims adult victims of trafficking that were being

00:03:53.620 trafficked by this operation in san diego and they had a partner channel on porn hub they had

00:03:58.900 it was, I think, over 800,000 subscribers, over 600 million views on these women's trafficking

00:04:06.300 on Pornhub on a channel called Girls Do Porn. And the abuser that was running the operation,

00:04:11.880 he was on the FBI's 10 most wanted list. And, you know, so it wasn't just children who were

00:04:17.780 being abused. It was adults. And one last horrifying story I remember at the same time

00:04:22.920 that was just coming back to me again and again was this woman called nicole automando from new

00:04:29.100 york and she was the mother of two young children and she was being raped and abused by her partner 0.97

00:04:35.700 sexually tortured by her partner who was then filming the videos and uploading them to porn 0.90

00:04:41.080 hub and she killed him in self-defense and then she got sentenced though to life in prison gosh

00:04:47.900 life in prison, separated from her two young kids. Thankfully, she had an amazing legal team 0.89

00:04:53.280 and she got that reduced down to seven years. And that's still insane, but it's still, it was like

00:04:57.480 heartbreaking. And so all of these stories were just haunting me. And I had this question,

00:05:05.380 how in the world did this abuse end up on Pornhub? And I decided to test the upload system

00:05:10.700 one night, middle of the night. And I found out what millions of people already knew because

00:05:16.280 millions of people were uploading to Pornhub every year and that was that all they were requiring to

00:05:21.540 upload was an email address so that anybody anonymously in under 10 minutes anywhere in the

00:05:26.560 world this is the YouTube of porn you know at the time they had 56 million pieces of content on the

00:05:31.960 site they had in 2020 170 million visits to the site per year 62 billion visits to this sorry

00:05:39.920 170 million visits per day 62 billion visits that year and enough content uploaded that year

00:05:48.780 in 12 months that it would take 169 years if you put those videos back to back to watch that

00:05:54.140 content so this was a massive site they had more visits than netflix and amazon wow they were huge

00:06:00.960 and they had this dirty secret hiding in plain sight that they had no verification of id to make

00:06:08.940 sure that these weren't children in the videos being uploaded no consent form to make sure that

00:06:13.300 these weren't rape or trafficking victims and putting those dots together quickly I understood

00:06:17.680 okay this site is actually infested with videos of real sexual crime which it was it was totally

00:06:24.420 infested with sexual crime and that porn hub wasn't a porn site it was actually crime scene

00:06:29.500 and I said I have to sound the alarm on this what's going on on this site and that's how

00:06:34.360 this story began. This is how the trafficking hub movement to take down Pornhub started five years

00:06:41.420 ago. That's insane. If you guys aren't on Peterson Academy, you're missing out. There are over 25

00:06:49.800 eight-hour courses on there from people like Verveke, Michael Malice, Keith Campbell. My dad

00:06:55.600 has three eight-hour courses out now, including Nietzsche, Sermon on the Mount, and Intro to

00:07:01.040 personality, which is excellent. Brian Keating's on there. David Eagleman on brain plasticity just

00:07:06.420 came out, which I love. Go to petersonacademy.com and come in and see what it's like. We have a

00:07:11.380 seven-day money-back guarantee, so you can poke around the website, look at the courses, and get

00:07:15.880 a refund if you want. No strings attached. Any age is welcome. The courses are university level.

00:07:21.580 Thanks, guys. Enjoy the rest of the podcast. I remember as a teenager, like not being on Pornhub

00:07:27.720 or anything, but I remember hearing it thrown around and things, but I never knew that any of

00:07:33.000 that wasn't just like adult porn stars being paid to perform and then uploading. Like that's what I

00:07:40.260 assumed that site was. That's what everybody assumed. I mean, because porn had done an amazing

00:07:45.840 job at spending millions of dollars making itself kind of this household mainstream brand name for

00:07:53.980 porn where people were wearing their apparel in public and they, you know, were walking New York

00:07:58.680 fashion week. And there was faux commercials on Saturday night live about Pornhub and, you know,

00:08:04.740 joke, wink, wink, you know, it was this like kind of cheeky household name brand for porn.

00:08:10.880 And they even had an arm of Pornhub called Pornhub Cares. So it was like their philanthropic arm

00:08:17.460 And they would do these crazy PR stunts that, you know, they would save the whales and save

00:08:24.400 the bees and, um, donate to breast cancer research and save the pandas and all of this

00:08:29.660 stuff that they would do to kind of present this facade to the world that they cared about

00:08:35.100 health and safety, that they were, uh, you know, a safe brand.

00:08:38.760 And, you know, the key word that you just said was assume.

00:08:41.760 And like, that's what I did.

00:08:42.900 That's what everybody did.

00:08:44.020 and my dad was a really wise man and he often said assumption is the mother of all screw-ups

00:08:50.720 and that's exactly what everybody was doing and then like all it took was testing the upload

00:08:56.360 system and I you know I took a video of of my keyboard and the rug in the dark room

00:09:01.380 and I uploaded it and with a VPN people could even anonymously do this so you could just create any

00:09:07.860 random email address and then you could upload the content it would go live on the site and this is

00:09:13.360 literally anybody could become a pornographer with anyone with an iPhone, anyone with a camera,

00:09:18.500 anywhere in the world, like in the back of a car, in a park, in a hotel room, anywhere could upload

00:09:24.580 a video. And so much of it was actual sexual crime, all the way from child rape to non-consensual

00:09:32.480 content. We call it image-based sexual abuse, revenge porn, that kind of content, even stolen 0.54

00:09:37.900 content. So, you know, porn performers themselves hated Pornhub because they would allow stolen,

00:09:44.500 copyrighted, professionally produced porn content to be uploaded as well. So it was all kinds of

00:09:50.520 illegal content all over the site. So what happened a number of years ago, they had to delete

00:09:55.600 a bunch of their videos, right? Can you explain what happened then? Yes. Did that have anything

00:10:00.500 to do with you? Yes. Okay. Let's go. Let's go. Yeah. So what happened was, um, you know,

00:10:07.840 after I made this discovery, uh, I was horrified. I said, what am, what am I going to do about this?

00:10:13.460 I have to sound the alarm on this. I don't know what else to do besides post on social media.

00:10:17.880 I, all I had was a Twitter account. Um, you know, it was an anti-trafficking activist who'd spent

00:10:21.980 you've got a year's trying to raise awareness, only have a few thousand followers on social

00:10:27.500 media, but I started the hashtag trafficking hub, uh, because per definition, anybody that's under

00:10:35.500 the age of 18 or anybody that is used in a non-consensual sex act by force, fraud, or

00:10:42.440 coercion. So if they're an adult and it's by force, fraud, or coercion, or if they're a child

00:10:47.280 and this is a commercialized sex act, so it has to be done for something of value.

00:10:51.880 then that's an act of trafficking per definition so every child on Pornhub every non-consensual

00:10:59.820 video that's on Pornhub is actually an act of trafficking per definition so that's why I said

00:11:07.120 Pornhub is not you know it's not Pornhub it's trafficking hub and I started that hashtag it

00:11:12.020 started to take uh you know people started to share it I wrote an op-ed about that in the

00:11:17.660 Washington Examiner with the findings of these stories and the upload system. And that started

00:11:23.780 to go viral. People called on me to start a petition, which I did. And that started to go

00:11:30.240 viral. So today we have 2.3 million signatures from every country in the world on the petition

00:11:36.300 to shut down Pornhub and hold its executives accountable. And people can still sign that

00:11:41.220 today. It's at traffickinghubpetition.com and people are signing it every single day.

00:11:45.280 hundreds of media articles started to be written about this um and as this was all kind of spreading

00:11:52.320 online victims were seeing it so victims started to come forward to me almost every day oh my gosh

00:11:58.880 that's a lot to handle whistleblowers from the company started to come forward to share the

00:12:04.040 inner workings of the company at one point the former owner of Pornhub came forward to say he

00:12:10.260 wanted to help, um, which was crazy. And all of this culminated in 20, at the end of 2020,

00:12:18.060 Nick Kristof from the New York times, he, uh, you know, took notice of all that was going on

00:12:22.820 and he engaged in a six month investigation. I was connecting him with whistleblowers. I was

00:12:27.100 connecting with victims and he released this kind of groundbreaking article called the children of

00:12:33.100 Pornhub. And it sent shockwaves around the world. He ended with the words, uh, Pornhub

00:12:39.000 is Jeffrey Epstein times a thousand. And we were calling out the credit card companies all year.

00:12:46.180 You know, I had been engaged in conversations with the VPs of Visa, the VPs of MasterCard,

00:12:51.900 because we understood we have to hit them where it hurts if we want to actually stop this and hold

00:12:57.380 them accountable. But they were resisting. And then Nick Kristoff called Visa and MasterCard

00:13:02.620 and discovered out in his article, he said, why are the credit card companies processing

00:13:05.880 and and benefiting from child trafficking and rape on Pornhub and the pressure was on and finally

00:13:14.740 Visa, MasterCard and Discover all cut ties joined PayPal cutting ties with the site leaving them

00:13:21.520 with only cryptocurrency and bank wires as payment options and then in a panic the owners of the site

00:13:28.700 did the unthinkable for a free porn tube site because they depend on massive amounts of content

00:13:33.920 to drive traffic. They took down 80% of the entire website overnight, over 10 million videos,

00:13:39.940 over 30 million images in what Financial Times called probably the biggest takedown of content

00:13:45.480 in internet history. They lost all major advertisers. The CEO and the COO were forced

00:13:51.900 to resign. The secret majority shareholder was found and exposed. He was hiding himself from

00:13:56.500 the public. They were criminally charged by the US government for intentionally profiting from

00:14:01.320 trafficking. And today they're being sued by hundreds of victims in 25 lawsuits, including

00:14:06.820 class actions on behalf of tens of thousands of child victims. And the site was sold as a distressed

00:14:12.440 asset. And today they've actually had to take down 91% of the entire website is gone. So they've had

00:14:20.860 to, and we're not done yet because the call to action at the beginning was shut down Pornhub

00:14:26.160 and hold its executives accountable. And we still have yet to see justice fully served,

00:14:30.620 but we've come a long way. So this is kind of what happened. That's, that's insane.

00:14:37.560 Oh my gosh. That's a lot of information. 91% of it. Yes. They went from 56 million pieces of

00:14:44.060 content in 2020 to 5.2 million pieces of content today. And those millions of pieces that are on

00:14:51.020 the site today are still mostly unverified content, meaning they didn't verify the agent

00:14:57.940 consent of the individuals that are in those videos they only verified the uploader so like

00:15:04.440 they didn't even do that that's not yeah they they didn't even use to verify the uploader but

00:15:09.060 now they say oh well we verified the uploader but that that doesn't actually solve the problem

00:15:13.940 there was a verified uploader named rocky shea franklin in alabama and he drugged and overpowered

00:15:22.120 and raped a 12 year old boy and he uploaded 23 of those rape videos to Pornhub with titles that

00:15:28.940 indicated clearly that this was the abuse of a child and police reached out multiple times 0.79

00:15:35.800 demanding they come down seven months went by they were ignored the child's rape stayed up

00:15:42.080 getting hundreds of thousands of monetized views and he was in a profit sharing relationship with

00:15:46.580 Pornhub. And today he's, he was arrested. I mean, he's arrested. He was sentenced to 40 years in

00:15:51.720 prison, but he was a verified uploader. So clearly that doesn't actually solve the problem just to

00:15:59.780 verify the, the person uploading. How are people making money off of this? Is it through advertising

00:16:04.980 on Pornhub? So most of it is, so the site makes most of its money by selling 4.6 billion ad

00:16:13.600 impressions on Pornhub every single day okay so they monetize free porn so free porn's not free

00:16:20.080 right it is monetized heavily monetized but some of the people so it was about 20 percent of the

00:16:26.180 people that were uploading were doing it in a pay to download situation with Pornhub where

00:16:31.360 they would put the content behind a paywall and you would have to pay to download those videos

00:16:37.500 and that's Rocky Shea Franklin was in that situation a number of the victims like the 15

00:16:41.820 year old girl from florida that i described she was one of those that was paid to download her

00:16:46.800 rape video on porn hub um but most people are uploading and they don't get money for it they

00:16:54.680 it's for views clicks shares kind of like social currency the same reason why people are uploading

00:17:00.060 to facebook or instagram is is why they're uploading this is so awful i guess the people

00:17:07.820 uploading behind a paywall were thinking, well, anyone who's going to download and pay for this

00:17:11.940 content, they're not going to be the ones that get me in trouble. I just had, I, I guess my

00:17:18.400 question is this was all illegal, right? Oh yeah. And people were aware they were doing illegal

00:17:23.880 things, obviously. Yes. Well, most of them could do it anonymously because they could even use a

00:17:31.140 VPN so that you couldn't even detect the IP address. And even in cases where Pornhub knew

00:17:38.560 that, so that they would actually have to take down a video of a child or a victim would reach

00:17:43.180 out, beg them to take down that content. You know, there's stories, um, like Serena, uh,

00:17:48.500 flight test from Bakersfield, California, you know, she's, uh, was the feature of that New

00:17:53.680 York times piece by Nick Kristoff. And today she's suing Pornhub, it's owners. She's suing

00:17:58.620 visa she's suing the hedge funds that funded the parent company of mind geek or porn hub called

00:18:03.540 mind geek but she you know she was a young teen so she uh you know was a straight a student she

00:18:10.280 had never kissed a boy before and her boyfriend or the the boy that she had a crush on coerced her

00:18:16.520 into sending nude images and videos of herself to him which she did and then he shared them with

00:18:20.980 classmates they started to get uploaded again and again to porn hub getting millions of views

00:18:25.900 she would beg for those videos to come down and then she would be hassled if they even answered

00:18:31.020 at all so they would say prove that you're a child in the video prove that you're a victim

00:18:35.840 in the video obviously you shouldn't have to prove anything to have the video uploaded to

00:18:40.320 Pornhub and she testified before Canadian Parliament about all of this um and if she

00:18:46.280 did get it down it would just get re-uploaded again and again and again and victims call it

00:18:51.960 the immortalization of their trauma. So they say it's like one thing to be abused, but then

00:18:56.500 it's uploaded and then it's distributed online in perpetuity. So they know that even after they're

00:19:03.600 dead, like this will go on and on and on. And so this sent her into a spiral of despair. She

00:19:10.200 dropped out of school. She's being bullied. She got addicted to drugs to numb the pain. She tried

00:19:15.120 to kill herself multiple times um because of you know just actually victims of this kind of abuse

00:19:22.520 have a 50 suicidal ideation rate and then she ended up homeless living out of her car oh my

00:19:29.120 gosh yeah that was her trajectory um but she was you know one of so many of these teens that were

00:19:38.080 being abused for profit on Pornhub and Pornhub knew that this was happening but they actually

00:19:43.480 hid that from authorities for 13 years so you know what the the leading heads of the child

00:19:51.180 protection agencies in canada and the united states testified that for 13 years until all

00:19:57.840 of this happened they were actually hiding the child abuse from authorities so they weren't

00:20:02.360 reporting it even though we have mandatory reporting laws so you know for that's so

00:20:06.940 horrifying because imagine how many kids could have actually been rescued and saved if they

00:20:11.980 weren't trying to hide the child abuse from authorities for all these years but they were

00:20:17.120 wasn't one of the owners houses burned down this is a company so mind geek is that a company out

00:20:22.300 of montreal in canada yes they're headquartered there yeah yes it is a canadian i mean everybody

00:20:28.720 thinks of it as a canadian company based in montreal they had 1800 employees in montreal

00:20:34.340 wow they only hired one person out of 1800 employees to be reviewing videos flagged by

00:20:41.120 users as terms of service violations including rape and trafficking one person five days a week

00:20:48.360 if you're going to be evil my will be all like don't spend money on that yeah um out of those

00:20:53.540 1800 employees they only had 30 moderators uh you know 10 per shift reviewing thousands of videos

00:21:02.240 So they would review, if they reviewed less than 700 videos per eight hour shift, they

00:21:06.880 were reprimanded.

00:21:08.320 They normally had to watch 1200 videos.

00:21:11.840 Some of the more experienced moderators were flipping through up to 2000 videos per eight

00:21:17.140 hour shift on Pornhub.

00:21:19.260 And they were just guessing.

00:21:20.800 So they call it the underage guessing game where they're just playing Russian roulette

00:21:25.340 with people's lives.

00:21:26.020 They're trying to guess who's 16 and who's 18.

00:21:29.500 who's what's rough sex and what's rape they they nobody could tell so they were literally just 0.61

00:21:37.460 guessing and they guess wrong all the time oh my gosh yeah but they were Canadian but they're

00:21:44.920 also international so you know they were based in Luxembourg for tax purposes they had offices

00:21:51.160 in Romania and Cyprus and Texas and LA and the UK they're this multinational corporation

00:21:58.740 So why hasn't it, why didn't they get shut down? How much are they worth? How much are they worth

00:22:04.340 now? Well, they were a multi-billion dollar corporation. So in order to understand Pornhub,

00:22:10.580 you really have to understand the parent company. So Pornhub was owned by a parent company called

00:22:16.640 MindGeek. And with a $362 million loan, they had essentially rolled up the porn industry under

00:22:24.180 one company. So they owned, you know, Playboy digital. They owned, you know, what? Yeah. Most

00:22:30.860 of the world's most popular subscription sites, pay sites, brands, tube sites. So it wasn't just

00:22:36.480 Pornhub. It was like Pornhub and its sister site. So Pornhub, YouPorn, TubeBait, ExtremeTube,

00:22:42.060 GayTube, XTube. I mean, I could go on and on. They owned all of that. So they owned,

00:22:48.420 it's estimated about 80% of the world's most popular porn sites and brands were under this

00:22:53.300 one company and so they were worth multiple billions of dollars however it was just sold

00:23:01.040 for 400 million um as a distressed asset still a lot but you know it was not not what they were

00:23:08.020 um for sure because they've lost advertisers credit card companies you know they've definitely

00:23:15.240 faced a reckoning so far but wow yeah well good for you well it wasn't sounds like a stressful job

00:23:22.060 yeah it was a lot a lot of people the lawyers the victims the attorneys it was I mean it was

00:23:28.560 really amazing to see and even today like still see like we had 600 organizations come together

00:23:35.020 you know hundreds of survivors it was really like it was truly a movement it is truly a movement

00:23:42.240 all so many you know 70 members of parliament in Canada came together from eight parties like

00:23:48.500 when do you see people from eight parties come together right on something hopefully on something

00:23:53.480 like this they could align in their views yeah so that you know it was it's a it's been a lot

00:23:59.080 a lot of people coming together and i'm just honored to have a part in leading what's happened

00:24:05.520 that's horrifying ew oh i like i knew i knew about you i knew what you do i know you were

00:24:12.820 on my dad's podcast like I know about this but like hearing about it it's so disturbing what kind

00:24:20.120 of person is like what do you do as a job oh I own these companies who are these people well I tried

00:24:26.420 to profile I mean I had dozens of hours of interviews with family insiders with company

00:24:33.480 insiders who actually knew the owners well and they had hidden themselves from the public for

00:24:39.880 so many years. You know, they used fake names. They used fake profiles. They tried to throw

00:24:47.260 people off by putting, they hired, you know, SEO companies to put fake pictures and fake

00:24:51.720 profiles online. You know, the secret majority shareholder of the company, nobody knew who he

00:24:57.140 was for years. Nobody knew he even existed. He used, like he was completely hidden and now finally

00:25:05.340 exposed and he's personally being sued by dozens of victims uh for what's happened but and he's

00:25:14.240 being sued because he was fully aware of what was going on i mean if he hid himself then he knew

00:25:19.320 well something the way that the victims are suing is under our statutes in the united states that

00:25:25.440 say um you know there's knowingly benefiting from a trafficking venture is the law so you know if

00:25:32.360 a company or even if an enabler like the credit card companies for example like under our

00:25:40.160 trafficking statutes you can't knowingly benefit from a trafficking venture so whether it's the

00:25:46.660 owners the company enablers like they can help be held accountable under our laws both criminally

00:25:52.960 and civilly for knowingly or should have known so it's like you knew oh okay should have known

00:25:58.120 or you should have known yeah that this was happening and then and then victims have the

00:26:03.100 ability to actually try to hold them accountable which they're doing right now and they're making

00:26:08.180 a lot of progress they're making amazing progress in the courts which is really encouraging to see

00:26:13.220 okay good yeah so you you said people had set up like i didn't realize that people were being

00:26:21.060 kidnapped and trafficked just to make money on Pornhub. I didn't realize kidnapping was taking

00:26:27.860 place too. I mean, like rape is already bad enough in like coercive relationships and that kind of

00:26:34.060 thing. That's kind of when I heard about you, I was thinking, okay, so a lot of this is like

00:26:37.740 revenge porn or something like that. But people were also being full on kidnapped children.

00:26:44.700 There was a story just last Friday of a 21-year-old man in North Ireland named Stephen McKilveny.

00:26:54.840 And he tricked, coerced, blackmailed three young boys to come to his house.

00:27:01.400 And he actually overpowered them and physically brutalized them where they had brain bleeding from the attacks. 0.99

00:27:09.500 and he raped these three boys and he uploaded videos of their rapes to Pornhub and he got 0.95

00:27:16.340 sentenced last Friday to 23 years in prison for doing that and I mean horrifying actual 0.86

00:27:26.480 how many people so you talked about the number of videos and everything and the content that

00:27:31.440 was removed how many people were uploading like trafficking what do you call them videos

00:27:38.000 yeah or illegal content non-consensual content i mean we don't have like a precise number

00:27:43.920 but the site when i say the word infested i actually mean infested i mean you could find

00:27:50.520 you know when all this was really going down they've tried now they've gotten in huge trouble

00:27:57.120 right so they've tried to now they have a government monitor over the site and you know

00:28:01.360 they've they've had such huge repercussions that they're trying to clean this stuff up now

00:28:06.480 too late they don't get any credit for that but like you could search drugged drunk coerced you

00:28:13.160 know rape in different kinds of languages uh cp you know all of these things clearly indicating

00:28:20.140 abuse and you would go on what i call uh like the black hole the hell hole of rape on the site where

00:28:27.160 it would be the most obvious from the most obvious to you know just the non-consensually

00:28:35.420 uploaded stuff that you know somebody could actually videotape it with a partner consensually

00:28:40.180 and upload it non-consensually but they even had like unconscious people women on the site where

00:28:45.960 you would have like a masked rapist and he would actually be lifting the eyelids of the victims and

00:28:52.380 touching their eyeballs to prove that they're unconscious in the videos and these would be on

00:28:58.640 this is so bad what yeah for years they would be on Pornhub and that would and then the algorithm

00:29:05.520 will spring into action because they want to serve up if they think somebody watch that

00:29:10.160 they're they're going to serve more and more and more of that same kind of content

00:29:14.680 you know and it wasn't just like adults unconscious rape you know they had so many

00:29:22.940 teens on the site that were being brutally abused homeless teens crying teens like these were some

00:29:29.040 of the tags and titles and they were actually we have legal discovery and court documents now

00:29:35.740 showing they knew down to the dollar how much they were making on these tags titles categories

00:29:44.280 where they understood that there were they were infested with illegal content so like the teens

00:29:49.660 the very young, all of that. And like recently court documents showed that the executives

00:29:55.580 refused to even take words off the site, like childhood, minor, young girl, things like that.

00:30:05.380 So, I mean, the complicity of, when I say like shut down Pornhub, it's not something that I've

00:30:11.860 said like just to be you know extreme about it or just to um you know be inciting people it's it's

00:30:19.800 because the level of complicity that we've seen and the way that this has been done since 2007 to

00:30:26.860 literally destroy the lives of so many victims like the only response is the only justifiable

00:30:34.500 response to that is shut down Pornhub and put its executives in prison and the reason why that's

00:30:40.800 important is because victims need that for healing. They need to, even the people working

00:30:46.660 there going through videos. Yeah. Like honestly though, like how warped do you have to be to be

00:30:53.880 like, yeah, I'm a content moderator going through 2000. Like, yeah, you're not seeing the world

00:30:58.960 clearly if you're like, yeah, that seems okay. I don't know. Oh, like at least just the, at least

00:31:04.760 the executives. Yeah. They were, you know, they were making the decisions. They were saying,

00:31:09.280 listen, you know, the role of the content moderators, like what they said was we understood

00:31:14.440 that our role, our job was not to limit content that was going up on the site, but it was to let

00:31:21.140 as much content go through as possible because the free porn tube sites, like they rely on massive

00:31:27.260 amounts of content to get those Google search results to drive that content. So they didn't

00:31:32.180 really care what was in the videos. They just wanted videos. They just wanted a lot of videos.

00:31:36.640 So they had no incentive to take those videos down.

00:31:40.160 But yeah, I mean, like some of the moderators, they just saw the headlines.

00:31:45.000 Like they, they came forward, they showed schedules, documents.

00:31:49.880 One of the moderators today, I would consider him a friend.

00:31:54.340 I've spent so much time with him understanding how all of this worked.

00:31:58.720 And he really had a hard time with this because he was sexually abused as a child.

00:32:04.000 And he gave permission for me to share that.

00:32:06.640 um but that was one of the reasons why when he saw this he just said I can't I can't keep quiet

00:32:11.800 I have to come forward and help expose what's going on but he was part of the machine right

00:32:17.340 he was part of all of this crazy yeah wow do you think there are other sites I mean Pornhub was the

00:32:26.700 big one that's the one everybody has heard about but are there other sites that have the same kind

00:32:30.660 of issue like does only fans have a similar issue do you have so for sure the free porn tube site so

00:32:37.240 so there's porn habits you know parent company mind geek but then they have biggest competitors

00:32:42.980 and so one of them would be x hamster owned by hammy media they're a free porn tube site they

00:32:49.640 operate the same way where they were not verifying agent consent to upload you have x videos and x and

00:32:54.940 XX owned by WGCZ. And they similarly were not verifying agent consent. So Nick Kristof, a few

00:33:02.500 months after he did the expose on Pornhub, he actually did one on X videos because some of the

00:33:08.220 same victims that were being exploited on Pornhub were also being exploited on X videos. So then

00:33:13.460 the question is, okay, clearly, you know, Pornhub actually paved the way for all of this. They kind

00:33:19.020 of set the standard for the industry to do this but we have a bigger problem than just holding

00:33:26.040 Pornhub accountable and that's why the solution at scale to this problem is age and consent

00:33:32.400 verification for every single person in every video and it has to be third party yeah like

00:33:38.440 duh right like how is that not already the standard yeah that is the crazy part of all of

00:33:44.160 this is that it's been a free-for-all for them to just for years be able to just have crime all over

00:33:51.840 these mainstream sites not the dark web right this is mainstream porn that everybody goes to so

00:33:58.800 solution at scale third party because i would never want anyone to ever give their id to porn

00:34:03.960 hub or any of these sites so third party agent consent verification for every single person in

00:34:10.760 every single video on a user-generated porn site and not just governments that have to implement

00:34:16.880 that because they do but credit card companies they should have to implement that to solve this

00:34:23.260 problem at scale because they're international because these companies are highly motivated by

00:34:29.040 profit so a visa says we won't do business with any user-generated porn site that doesn't verify

00:34:34.180 agent consent then immediately they will all comply so okay i mean that all seems more than

00:34:41.540 reasonable so how come like anyone who's a survivor of this or who is trying to be a whistleblower

00:34:47.740 why isn't it as simple as sending like why why can't they just take content down why can't you

00:34:53.980 just send a cease and desist and say hey here's the video this is me or this is somebody i know

00:34:59.680 and then why doesn't the law get involved and take it down why is it taking so long and it's

00:35:05.020 actually a an act a law that's trying to be passed right now called take it down act

00:35:09.300 yeah that does yeah address this of you know within a certain amount of hours you know 24

00:35:16.260 hours or 48 hours can't remember what it was if a victim reports a video it should be able to be

00:35:20.900 taken down there's various laws being proposed to that end but i guess this is just so new that

00:35:26.320 there were there wasn't a legal infrastructure for well i mean online content i don't get it

00:35:31.000 there is and by the way like there there are laws that we have that are being used currently to

00:35:36.640 address this issue but we can improve them for sure but i mean it's illegal to distribute child

00:35:40.900 sexual abuse material yeah okay i mean it's illegal to distribute it to possess it to all of that like

00:35:46.540 that's already illegal and victims are suing and trying to hold the company accountable for that

00:35:51.620 already, you know, knowingly benefiting from a trafficking venture. But we also have

00:35:55.840 USC 2257, which is a law in the US where, you know, it started with the brick and mortar porn

00:36:02.280 companies in Porn Valley and the studio produced porn where they understood everybody with a brain

00:36:08.040 understands if you don't verify age and consent in porn, it's going to get awash with illegal

00:36:13.600 content. So they adopted this law and it's a crime in the United States not to verify ID for those

00:36:20.340 who are in studio produce porn it applies to Pornhub although they thought that it didn't

00:36:26.200 because they were actually transferring content too so it like they had a download button on

00:36:30.880 every single video so that millions of people had the opportunity not just like YouTube when

00:36:36.580 you can save it for later but actually possess it and then upload it again and again but but that

00:36:42.320 just our laws have to evolve with the internet you know that so that it's understood that's not

00:36:48.400 just for studio brick and mortar porn companies that have to comply but if you're an internet

00:36:53.920 porn company you have to comply as well so we need to see that happen for sure here yeah i can't

00:37:02.220 believe that that hasn't you always assume i feel like as a kid that everything's kind of taken care

00:37:06.400 of in the world i mean depending on your childhood but like things are organized and you grow up and

00:37:10.660 you're like no one has any idea what they're doing and nothing is organized at the layer you needed

00:37:17.140 organized at like you would you would assume oh verification okay easy yep that's or like laws

00:37:24.000 to protect you people are shocked that that's not you know just across the board the case with all

00:37:31.460 online porn but it hasn't hasn't been that way but to the take it down point you'll really

00:37:38.180 one minute is too long on one of these porn sites you know 170 million visits per day on

00:37:44.880 Pornhub, when a video is uploaded, even if they took off the download button, which they had to

00:37:49.700 do, they still could screen record. I mean, there's a million different ways you can save

00:37:54.240 that video. You can also stop screen recording. You can implement that as the company that you

00:37:58.980 can't screen record. You can't screen record on Netflix and all this. Yes, they can implement

00:38:03.380 that. They're not doing that, but they should. They should be forced to. That's a really good

00:38:07.580 point. That should be part of the law to force them not to be able to screen record on these

00:38:12.260 sites because obviously one minute's too long because once it's uploaded and that's the

00:38:18.020 immortalization of the trauma that victims are so you know just traumatized by because they could

00:38:24.660 try to heal they could go to therapy they could try to get beyond that rape but when that video

00:38:31.500 keeps coming up again and again and again across the internet this i call it a sadistic game of

00:38:36.720 whack-a-mole where it's like that that scab that just gets peeled off and peeled off and can never

00:38:41.000 heal and yeah obviously we have to prevent it from ever being uploaded in the first place

00:38:47.420 right and then yes they should take it down after it's been identified but if we could if we could

00:38:53.820 prevent it from ever getting yeah on those sites like that's the biggest win in this situation

00:38:59.660 yeah for that to happen yeah so did you wild it's it's shocking how evil people can be

00:39:06.480 It still shocks me. It's gross. You said you started out before you got into this like 0.68

00:39:13.880 porn hub debacle in trafficking, like researching trafficking, trying to put an end to trafficking.

00:39:20.000 So how did that happen? What's that beginning like? Yeah, well, I credit my dad. My dad passed

00:39:26.520 away in 2014, but he was a huge influence on me from when I was very young. And he was somebody

00:39:34.440 that had a heart for justice issues for human rights issues he grew up in the middle east

00:39:39.080 amid war civil war in amman jordan and then he came to the u.s to to become a surgeon so he was

00:39:46.680 a general surgeon and he dedicated his own life to saving lives like he could have done a lot of

00:39:52.560 different things in his medical profession but he wanted to really make a difference so you know

00:39:57.900 even though he had to be up at all hours of the day and night running to the emergency room he

00:40:02.760 was actually saving people's lives um and he was sacrificing to do that and he wanted to do that

00:40:08.700 and as we were growing up like you know we had moments where we bonded most talking about issues

00:40:16.200 of human rights war and genocide and slavery and watching documentaries together and watching the

00:40:21.520 news and all of that so from a very young age I kind of had that instilled in me from my dad

00:40:27.920 and then one day in 2000 I think it was in 2005 he was watching a documentary and he it was about

00:40:35.000 child sex trafficking in Calcutta India and he called me into the living room to watch that with

00:40:40.120 him and I was I'd never seen anything about trafficking or modern slavery before so it was

00:40:44.820 all very shocking to me to see that and it was that moment that kind of inspired me to research

00:40:52.380 more and then get involved in the fight against sex trafficking specifically and so I'd been doing

00:40:58.320 that for years really focusing on prevention like my heart is for prevention implementing laws

00:41:03.980 raising awareness you know it's important to rescue people or to help them escape or help them

00:41:10.560 support them in their journey um out of those situations of exploitation you know and I'm so

00:41:17.280 grateful for the people that do that in this field, but I always, um, gravitated towards,

00:41:23.580 you know, how can we prevent this from happening in the first place? And so, you know, that was

00:41:28.140 my focus was on laws to prevent trafficking for many years. That was what, what I focused on.

00:41:34.340 That makes sense. Yeah. Sounds like you had a good dad. I had a good dad. You have a good dad.

00:41:40.480 have a good dad I I appreciate just seeing your kind of your public relationship that you have

00:41:48.800 with your dad and the way that you support each other and it's really beautiful I think it's cool

00:41:53.560 to be able to teach kids that they can do something good beyond you know themselves and not like not

00:42:00.220 like activism in a negative way yeah but like you basically I think I got taught from the time I was

00:42:07.220 a child that like you have to do everything right and always make the right decision that's like

00:42:12.780 aiming upward because people can go dark I didn't realize until I got older how evil people can be

00:42:19.380 and like this is on another level of evil but you can raise kids in a way that they're hopefully not

00:42:27.440 naive and able to make the right decisions um talking about prevention do you have tips for

00:42:34.000 parents or friends or anybody who's around people who might be in a situation where they're getting

00:42:40.420 coerced or trafficked and like what to look out for, how to avoid it. So I think one of the fears

00:42:45.920 of having a kid too, and I'm not a very paranoid person, although I'm a little bit more paranoid

00:42:50.440 now, to be honest, but it's like, how do you warn kids to not fall prey to these people?

00:42:57.800 yeah and today it's not even even sending nudes today it's like I've got a seven-year-old she's

00:43:04.260 gonna be a teenager and it's like so like and that's you know that's the kind of stuff that

00:43:09.260 also was ending up on Pornhub is self they call it self-generated CSAM so self-generated child

00:43:14.720 sexual abuse material yeah that they could have sent to a boyfriend right and then it gets out

00:43:18.940 of hand it gets uploaded um other ways that children are being preyed upon today it's called

00:43:24.180 sextortion it's so common and what happens is that young tweens and teens or really anybody that has

00:43:31.780 access to a device and there's predators that are lurking you know trying to connect with children

00:43:37.920 chat rooms or different apps or and they pretend to be another minor so they pretend that let's

00:43:44.260 say it's a girl right it's a like a 15 year old girl and then so he'll pretend to be a 15 year old

00:43:48.840 boy and then they'll start talking and then uh you know there'll be some grooming going on and

00:43:53.900 you know and then finally you know send me a nude image of yourself and then it's so common they do

00:43:59.060 it so thorn actually released a report that said that i think it was one in seven children who was

00:44:08.080 i think it was between nine and 12 had sent a nude image of themselves nine and 12 between nine and

00:44:15.540 12, one in seven. And this was, they had done a survey of, I think it was over a thousand kids.

00:44:20.480 Um, so it's very common today for that to happen. Right. Um, and so then they'll say,

00:44:27.020 send me a video. Then what they do is they say, okay, they, they kind of reveal who they really

00:44:31.960 are. They say, well, we have the name. We know you're, who your parents are. We know your teachers,

00:44:36.740 your classmates. And if you don't do X, Y, and Z, we're going to send these images of you or

00:44:43.040 these videos that you made and the kids are terrified because they're so ashamed and they'll

00:44:48.720 do what this criminal tells them to do whether it's to send more videos or to give them money

00:44:54.700 and then sometimes they're so desperate in that moment that they try to commit suicide so really

00:45:00.720 it's a life and death issue but to your point of like what do parents do I think one of the most

00:45:05.960 important things to do besides just gosh in this day and age it's so hard to protect your kids from

00:45:10.960 the online world it's so hard to be monitoring them all the time do your best right um in that

00:45:16.420 regard but have a trusted relationship let your kid at least have one adult relationship whether

00:45:23.200 it's an auntie or a teacher or you where they it's like this shame-free zone and they know that

00:45:30.600 they could go and share anything and if they were in an emergency situation like that they know

00:45:36.000 there is somebody that they can trust that they can go right to for help without shame and i think

00:45:42.600 that is lifesaver um for kids and in this day and age yeah i think that's really important i had

00:45:49.900 that conversation actually with my daughter recently which was i've done it like a parenting

00:45:54.660 a little bit differently i think than how i was raised not that i'm complaining about how i was

00:45:58.560 raised i was like i remember and i was quite depressed and sick as a teenager but i remember

00:46:04.600 when i started to lie about going out or drinking or things um it was because i it was like hammered

00:46:13.240 into me to tell the truth tell the truth tell the truth but i didn't really understand i guess on a

00:46:17.640 spiritual level why to do that and i knew that if i said bad things i did i'd get grounded or

00:46:24.920 punished and so i was like wow i'm in this weird predicament of like i'm doing some things i

00:46:30.820 shouldn't do, but I don't have anybody to talk to necessarily without getting in trouble. So it was

00:46:34.500 like, you, I agree with raising a kid being like, look, I'm going to instruct you in the right way

00:46:40.820 to go, but I'll never be mad at you for telling me the truth. Like, I'll never be mad at you for

00:46:46.280 telling me the truth. Even if you feel shame and guilt and it's something bad you've done,

00:46:50.800 tell me the truth and I'll help you figure it out. And I won't be mad at you.

00:46:55.500 Yeah. That's kind of a hard balance, right? It's hard because you have to do discipline,

00:46:59.580 Go ahead and do whatever you want. It's okay. And, but then there's the, I, I, I relate to that

00:47:05.960 because my dad was, you know, I understood that he really wanted us to, you know, not do all those

00:47:13.760 things that I ended up doing. Yeah. And I didn't, he didn't know he had no idea. It was going out

00:47:18.880 drinking drugs, you know, all the things that I did. I know. How do you stop that?

00:47:24.220 or it just depends if you have a wild card as a child i don't know i'm sure i'm going the route

00:47:30.800 where i'm like okay i'm not going to be mad at you it's not like i don't discipline yeah her

00:47:36.680 either when she needs it i was like as a teenager what would i do to a teenager that was like yeah

00:47:41.020 i've been you know drinking at my friend's house with people i don't know like ah yeah just

00:47:47.440 definitely don't do that i agree it's better though that if they could share it with at least

00:47:51.500 tell you so you know like they're not going to be punished for sharing the truth and that they can

00:47:58.640 trust you to to guide them out of it i mean i think that's the key i didn't really have that

00:48:04.540 either growing up because i didn't want to share it because i was going to get in trouble i think

00:48:08.520 that's totally normal and you should like it's not like you should be encouraged to do those

00:48:12.500 things and you shouldn't get in trouble at all but i was like maybe if me as a teenager maybe

00:48:17.540 if I felt like I wasn't going to get punished I already there was still part of my underdeveloped

00:48:22.540 brain that was like this is bad for me and I shouldn't be doing it yeah and so I'm thinking

00:48:28.780 I don't even know if it'll work but I was like maybe if I didn't get in trouble then someone

00:48:33.440 could talk to me and be like these are the reasons it's unsafe for you like at least that like this

00:48:38.980 is why it's not safe for you other than the fact it's not good for you this is why it isn't safe

00:48:42.860 yeah and maybe that would have clicked it's just hard with like anybody young because

00:48:47.360 they just don't think about with the pornography exposure and the predators online and all of that

00:48:53.860 for sure having that open line of communication they call it shame-free zone for you to be able

00:49:00.340 to communicate with your kids about that and the because they do feel a lot of shame involved in

00:49:05.580 because kids aren't when they and also like the grooming aspect of being exposed to porn

00:49:12.460 at a very young age these days is having a really detrimental effect on kids oh yeah let's talk

00:49:18.580 about that yeah do you so do you have numbers around that like what age are kids generally

00:49:23.740 because i know you'll go to school and then some kid will show it to you too yeah so what what age

00:49:28.240 are kids usually exposed to porn i guess yeah i think it's now the stats and they have lots of

00:49:34.320 different stats but you know 75 percent of kids by the time they're 15 are being exposed to

00:49:39.260 online porn I get contacted all the time by young men especially who say I was eight I was nine I

00:49:47.420 just got contacted a week ago by somebody who said they were six when they got exposed to the

00:49:52.860 free online porn sites like Pornhub and got you know they call it addicted like compulsive porn

00:50:00.100 use starting when they were children like six eight nine ten years old and that continues and

00:50:05.760 it's not just it's not playboy like this is not you know the centerfold of old like this is

00:50:13.520 hardcore you know this is violent but it's also criminal like what we know is things that I would

00:50:21.500 never wish upon my worst enemy these kids could be witnessing as an eight-year-old child to

00:50:28.940 develop their sexual template to have this as their sex education they could be watching that's

00:50:35.680 brutal, the real rape or coercion, all of these different things that are happening on the free 0.95

00:50:42.460 porn tube sites. And it's, it's, it's not just a free for all on the side of uploading. Like

00:50:47.280 they're not verifying the ages of those who are accessing the free porn sites either. So,

00:50:52.200 oh my gosh, that's another level. Yeah. Yeah. So, so like kids are, so I say kids are being

00:50:58.360 exploited in front of the screen and they're being exploited in, in back of the screen.

00:51:02.900 it is a form of secondhand sexual abuse for children to have um to witness this content

00:51:11.940 um even just you know whatever if you would call it the vanilla pornography like kids should not

00:51:16.860 they're not they're not ready to watch that but but that's not all that this is it's you know

00:51:22.720 there's so much violence there's so much you know incest themes you know teen is one of the most

00:51:26.940 popular categories on these sites incest is so common incest themes and a lot of this is

00:51:34.140 you know people who are consenting adults who are over 18 and they're just pretending to do

00:51:41.160 these things but a lot of this is actually real right we know that for a fact that a lot of this

00:51:45.760 is actually real abuse of of children and others and so there's a movement in the united states

00:51:52.760 right now i'm grateful for it to enact age verification for those who are viewing these

00:52:00.200 free user-generated porn sites so 17 states have adopted these are things that i just assumed

00:52:05.160 kind of existed in this realm they do not so like and there wasn't there wasn't even an are you 18

00:52:11.900 click-through button that any five-year-old could just just like a button like there wasn't even

00:52:16.880 that like now i think on mobile devices they finally have but just like are you 18 and then

00:52:22.040 you just click it. There's no actual verification that that's true. But in these states across the

00:52:29.260 U.S. where they're enacting this law, Pornhub is shutting itself down in protest of verifying

00:52:37.360 that children are not accessing their site. Ew! Because they don't want to pay for it. They don't

00:52:43.440 want to pay the third party to have to verify those users because their business model depends

00:52:50.760 on unlimited amounts of content to be i'm sorry unlimited amounts of traffic to be just to to go

00:52:58.680 to those sites without friction without any friction so they can sell those billions of

00:53:02.620 advertising impressions every day so they don't want to do it like pure evil what people who are

00:53:08.460 anti-capitalist thinks evil corporations are like oh that pure evil capitalist corporation oh 100

00:53:15.520 percent profit over the protection of children every single time and they've gone so far as to

00:53:21.800 sue the state of texas so texas enacted age verification to protect the children of texas

00:53:27.940 from exposure to the porn hub crime scene and the other free user generated porn sites like it

00:53:33.180 and porn hub and its partners sued the state of texas they lost they appealed now it's at the

00:53:39.320 Supreme court and the Supreme court currently is trying to decide whether states have the right

00:53:46.700 to implement age verification for these sites. So we're going to know by June, we're going to know

00:53:53.300 what's going to happen with that. I don't understand what the other side of the argument is.

00:53:59.260 The other side, well, for the porn sites, they don't want to pay for it. It's expensive, right?

00:54:03.420 I mean, so they're doing this all under the facade of free speech under privacy.

00:54:09.320 So they're saying it's so ridiculous that they're saying, they're saying we care about

00:54:15.780 privacy.

00:54:16.420 We do not want our users privacy at the same time.

00:54:19.560 They're, they have a class action lawsuit against them for exploiting user data.

00:54:24.680 They don't, you know, having non-consensual content all over the site.

00:54:28.220 Right.

00:54:28.860 I mean, uh, but yet they have the, uh, you know, they go out and say, this is about privacy.

00:54:36.720 We don't want people to have to hand over their ID, but they don't have to hand over

00:54:40.940 their ID to Pornhub.

00:54:42.920 They, and they don't actually have to hand their ID over to anybody.

00:54:46.280 They have now technology where they can do in one second, a facial scan using pixels

00:54:51.560 and using, um, uh, numbers and pixels, AI that's trained on thousands, if not millions

00:54:58.480 of faces.

00:54:58.920 And in one second they can determine with almost, let's say 99% accuracy, how old that

00:55:04.580 person is that is trying to access the site and they don't store that picture they just verify it

00:55:09.540 and then they can create a token that could be used on multiple different porn sites so it's

00:55:14.660 actually based on a misconception that that that's you know now if you're under 21 it the accuracy

00:55:21.140 goes down right so if you're under 21 you would probably need to couple that with an id

00:55:26.520 for that third party to verify but you know these are seems like a good idea right if you're looking

00:55:33.020 if you're over 21 it takes one second to look at that face and then determine whether you're an

00:55:39.680 adult and then it's easy wow but they want to pretend it's hard they want to scare people to

00:55:45.580 think that they're going to have to hand their id to porn hub yeah okay i was just wondering what

00:55:50.060 their angle was yeah yeah that that yep that makes sense um okay you talked a little bit about

00:55:56.160 or let's get into this aspect the more like psychological repercussions of watching porn

00:56:01.340 do you know what happens to a developing brain or even an adult brain if you get addicted to porn

00:56:08.600 is the porn addiction thing real so there's so much debate around this some people want to

00:56:14.840 kind of split hairs over whether they can call it addiction or whether they have to call it you

00:56:20.140 know compulsive or sexual compulsivity and you know there's people all over the world who are

00:56:28.640 by the thousands young men in forums saying that they can't control their porn use and that they

00:56:35.020 want help. Right. Um, and so whether you call it addiction or sexual compulsion, you know,

00:56:41.640 I think these people do need help if they can't control that and it's having a detrimental effect

00:56:46.640 on their life. Um, I'm not an expert in the brain science of porn addiction. So that's, you know,

00:56:52.580 I focus on, you know, the actual criminal content that's being distributed and all of that, 0.70

00:56:57.460 but there is a really good book called your brain on porn. There's a organization called

00:57:02.260 the reward foundation. Um, there's lots of neuroscientists who are looking at this and,

00:57:07.560 um, trying to understand the implications of it. But, you know, there's people who are saying

00:57:13.080 it's causing depression, anxiety. Um, uh, you know, they, they're also saying that they have

00:57:20.380 an issue where, you know, they may start out with one type of porn and they never imagined that they

00:57:24.960 would kind of go down this rabbit hole. I've heard this, yeah. Where it's called, I think it's called

00:57:28.740 habituation or desensitization, where they don't just need more porn to get that same dopamine hit,

00:57:37.460 where they need different kinds of porn. So they need more novelty. And then they end up going,

00:57:41.860 you know, more violent, maybe younger. And they end up even sometimes as consumers of CSAM,

00:57:48.560 child sexual abuse material when they didn't actually start out as a pedophile like they

00:57:53.760 then went down that road because of you know the teen categories and then kind of going more and

00:58:00.820 more extreme younger more violent things like that which is super detrimental i used to think

00:58:06.840 that sounded crazy not that i was ever an expert in this at all i was like there's no way like a

00:58:12.340 porn addiction is an addiction like a drug addiction like that doesn't make sense but then

00:58:16.800 over the last, I guess it'd be maybe three or four years. Once I found out about Pornhub and,

00:58:22.500 and all this, cause I knew a little bit about it. Um, I've been talking to more and more

00:58:26.900 people my age, but like men in mostly who were like, yeah, I had a hard time dropping it. And

00:58:33.200 yeah, I was desensitized and yeah, I did make relationships harder, all this, which I don't

00:58:39.020 know if it, I don't know enough about the stats. I'll have to have somebody on the podcast to talk

00:58:43.480 about it because I was like, I don't think I've heard from as many women that it does that to 1.00

00:58:47.180 women. Yeah. But I can understand if you're getting this dopamine spike constantly, that 0.99

00:58:51.440 it could be addictive. Yeah. And there are a lot of people who are saying that I'm, I mean,

00:58:56.760 just anecdotally, I get messages all the time from especially young men, but also women who say

00:59:03.860 that they cannot stop. They want to stop and they can't. And sometimes they, they're messaging me

00:59:10.980 because they're saying, well, finally, for the first time, I feel like maybe I have the ammunition

00:59:15.040 knowing that there's a victim on the other side of the screen to stop me from doing what I don't

00:59:19.960 want to do. And thank you for that. Like I needed that ammunition to give me the, you know, the

00:59:26.180 fortitude to actually stop. But they're telling me all the time, like, I can't, I want to, and I

00:59:30.660 can't. And so if you want to do something and you can't, and you feel like it's bad for you,

00:59:34.700 whatever whatever we call it like let them get help and I think one of the horrible things is

00:59:41.560 that there are people out there that are trying to give people help and they're being attacked

00:59:45.440 all the time they're being um you know just there's it's hard it's really hard because there

00:59:51.500 is so much financial interest from the porn industry to make sure that you know this doesn't

00:59:56.280 seem like it could be a problem for people um yeah and that's probably I came from I don't know

01:00:03.420 what your background is but like growing up in toronto super liberal super liberal and so we

01:00:09.100 my view until more recently was like kind of control yourself it's fine let people do whatever

01:00:17.300 they want maybe which like i still kind of i don't even know what i think right now i'm gonna have to

01:00:22.380 sit on that and and think about it um but a vanilla example i suppose would be i stopped

01:00:27.960 watching horror movies i was obsessed with horror movies as a kid then this is like i said a vanilla

01:00:32.260 example, but I got completely desensitized to horror movies. And I was like, I got to a point,

01:00:37.040 I think it was at probably after I had a baby where I was like, I don't really want to see that

01:00:41.860 anymore. Or it was after I stopped taking antidepressants, probably. I was like, I don't

01:00:45.420 want to watch horror movies anymore. And I stopped. And the first time I saw a horror movie, which was

01:00:50.300 like four years after I stopped watching them, I was like, oh my gosh, blood, like gore. This is

01:00:55.540 crazy. And so I think you can probably desensitize yourself as a human to content because when you

01:01:03.060 stop watching certain content, it's shocking. And I can see that easily happening. Well,

01:01:07.820 that's the neuroplasticity because just like, you know, the brain pathways, you know, they can

01:01:13.600 connect in certain ways, right? It's kind of like they call it's like plastic, right? It's bendable,

01:01:18.980 but it goes both ways. So if you make those negative pathways or the desensitization and

01:01:24.240 all of that stuff that happens, habituation. And I'm not a neuroscientist, but I have read enough

01:01:30.000 about this to understand that there are, you know, Donald Hilton, Dr. Donald Hilton, he's a,

01:01:34.760 he's actually a brain surgeon. He's been investigating porn addiction for a long time.

01:01:39.700 And he talks about neuroplasticity, but he says, if you actually stop, right, then you can actually

01:01:45.920 retrain your brain pathways to, you know, undo the damage that has been done. So that's really

01:01:52.380 encouraging I think to a lot of people to know that you know so probably when you stopped watching

01:01:58.280 the horror movies for a long time and then when you saw them again it was shocking to you because

01:02:03.800 you had kind of maybe undone some of that frustration and desensitization in your brain

01:02:09.680 I was surprised because I used to watch them with absolutely no like emotional response really

01:02:13.740 you know I was on antidepressants so it's hard to say like what that was doing as well but I was

01:02:19.560 surprised the first time I saw the beginning of because I didn't watch it I was like nope

01:02:23.840 yeah that's too much for me so I thought I mean I'm sure it's easy to desensitize yourself

01:02:28.880 yeah oh wild yeah and that does happen and I mean I think there was just a research paper out of

01:02:36.700 the University of New South Wales I just read Dr. Michael Salter so he investigates child sexual

01:02:41.460 abuse material he's a professor and he puts out studies and what it was it was summarizing what

01:02:46.420 they had looked at and they saw that there is some connections between um people who have who

01:02:52.200 are daily porn consumers who have a hypersexuality that are viewing these kinds of categories like

01:02:58.940 teen like incest like the very violent content and actual uh you know they're they're showing

01:03:05.040 a correlation between that and people acting out upon actual children and actually consuming also

01:03:11.440 consuming real child sexual abuse material so like there is a concern here um for people who

01:03:19.760 are viewing especially these problematic kinds of pornographic content um definitely yikes yeah

01:03:28.200 not that everybody does it i mean no you know there's people who can watch that content and

01:03:32.340 never act out right but there's also a concern that it can lead certain people down that path

01:03:39.180 yeah yeah act out i mean that makes sense to be careful with your brain it's a very plastic

01:03:44.440 entity like you like you said uh lila where can people find you online obviously they can check

01:03:50.440 out your book yes so takedownbook.com all proceeds author royalty proceeds from the sale of the book

01:03:58.260 go to the justice defense fund to help victims in their pursuit of justice um and to implement

01:04:03.660 these preventive policies. People can sign the petition. So we want more people to sign the

01:04:09.320 petition, traffickinghubpetition.com. And then they can follow me on social media. I'm posting

01:04:14.220 about this all the time. You know, I am not going to stop until we accomplish the goals of this

01:04:20.000 movement to see justice fully served. So they can follow me at Lila McElwaite online. Wow. Okay. I

01:04:27.640 will link all those links below in the description for anybody listening or watching. Good for you.

01:04:32.400 thank you so much for coming out here that is quite a monster to try and take on but

01:04:39.180 good for you that needs to go well thank you for sharing this and using your platform to

01:04:44.960 shine a light on it and i feel like these conversations are so crucial because still

01:04:50.300 so many people have no idea that this ever happened that's a problem so this is all part

01:04:55.860 of it. So thank you for doing this.

The Mikhaila Peterson Podcast - March 28, 2025

It’s Way Worse Than You Think： P＊rnhub ｜ Laila Mickelwait EP 225

Episode Stats

Transcript