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Episode: 503. One Woman’s War on P*rnhub | Laila Mickelwait

Author: Dr. Jordan B. Peterson
Duration: 01:12:55

Episode Shownotes

Dr. Jordan B. Peterson sits down with CEO of the Justice Defense Fund, Laila Mickelwait. They discuss her ongoing efforts against the largest adult content platform in the world, their shady dealings with credit card companies, top-down refusal of proper moderation, potential safeguards which would benefit performers, and how anonymity

fuels psychopathy on the internet. Laila Mickelwait is the founder and CEO of the Justice Defense Fund and the founder of the global #Traffickinghub movement supported by millions around the world. She has been combating the crime of sex trafficking since 2006 and is a leading expert in the field. The Traffickinghub movement that Laila continues to lead is a decentralized global effort to hold Pornhub accountable for enabling and profiting from child abuse, sex trafficking, rape, and the criminal exploitation of countless victims. Traffickinghub has earned hundreds of millions of views on social media, and the petition to shut down Pornhub has been signed by over 2.3 million people from every country in the world. 600 organizations have participated in the effort and the impact of the movement has been covered globally in thousands of media pieces. This episode was recorded on August 20th, 2024 | Links | For Laila Mickewait: Purchase Laila’s book “Takedown: Inside The Fight to Shut Down Pornhub for Child Abuse, Rape and Trafficking” at Takedownbook.com 100% of author proceeds are donated to the Justice Defense Fund to support the cause https://Takedownbook.com Learn more about Laila’s organization the Justice Defense Fund at Justicedefensefund.org Sign the Traffickinghub petition at Traffickinghubpetition.com On X https://x.com/lailamickelwait On Instagram https://www.instagram.com/lailamickelwait/?hl=en

Summary

In this episode of The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast, Laila Mickelwait discusses her extensive efforts against Pornhub and the adult industry, highlighting its involvement in child exploitation and sex trafficking. Through her #Traffickinghub movement, she has garnered over 2.3 million signatures for a petition demanding accountability. The conversation covers alarming statistics of non-consensual content, insufficient moderation on Pornhub, and the psychological impact on victims. Their dialogue emphasizes the need for legal enforcement, user verification, and addressing the anonymity that enables exploitation online.

Go to PodExtra AI's episode page (503. One Woman’s War on P*rnhub | Laila Mickelwait) to play and view complete AI-processed content: summary, mindmap, topics, takeaways, transcript, keywords and highlights.

Full Transcript

00:00:16 Speaker_02
So I had the great privilege today of doing a live discussion with Laila Mikkowit, who is one of the most compelling and the bravest people I have ever met. And I don't say that lightly. Laila has been waging a one-woman war

00:00:35 Speaker_02
I would say, although she has plenty of allies now, against the Machiavellian, narcissistic, psychopathic, and sadistic purveyors of online porn, particularly at the site known as the Pornhub Community.

00:00:54 Speaker_02
I'm not a big fan of pornography in general, and certainly not a fan of Pornhub, and I've been sharing Lila's tweets in particular for for about as long as she's been making them, I believe, about four years.

00:01:08 Speaker_02
Anyways, she's mounted a very effective campaign. And so, we took a little voyage to the heart of darkness today, partly sociologically. and technologically investigating the rampant spread of the pornography that's perhaps destroying our culture.

00:01:28 Speaker_02
That might be the case. Certainly, the facilitation of the behavior of the psychopathic criminals who generate and distribute that content is a civilization threatening occurrence and enterprise.

00:01:44 Speaker_02
We also talked a lot personally, because I was very curious about why Lila became interested in this and why she decided to devote herself to it so effectively. And that part of the conversation was also extremely interesting.

00:02:00 Speaker_02
She was tangled up and attracted by the Hollywood fame machine and came to understand its essential soul-devouring shallowness, that pursuit of narcissistic self-gratification.

00:02:15 Speaker_02
And we talked about how her personal experiences tied into her sociological and political pursuits. It was a very interesting live conversation up here in Fairview, Alberta, my hometown. So, join us for a voyage to the heart of darkness.

00:02:36 Speaker_02
Laila, nice to meet you. I've been following your work online for quite a while. My wife has been following you as well, and I believe my daughter, and we understand what you're up to, at least to some degree.

00:02:49 Speaker_02
You've taken on the biggest porn network in the world, the so-called Pornhub community. It's all sweetness and light on the Pornhub community. There's people sharing their hobbies and interests, I suppose.

00:03:02 Speaker_02
And so why don't you explain to everybody just exactly what you're doing, I guess, how long you've been doing it, why you're doing it, and what exactly is transpiring?

00:03:13 Speaker_00
Sure, absolutely. Well, I've been combating the injustice of sex trafficking now for the last 18 years, and about

00:03:21 Speaker_00
10, let's see, a little over 10 years ago, I began investigating the intersection between the big porn industry and sex trafficking and other forms of criminal sexual abuse, like child sexual exploitation.

00:03:33 Speaker_00
And there is a big porn industry, just like there's big tobacco, there's big pharma, there's big porn, and it's dominated by one company, primarily. It's a Canadian company, isn't it? Well, their headquarters is in Canada, in Montreal, actually.

00:03:47 Speaker_00
And this company is called, or was called until last year, MindGeek. And now they renamed themselves iLO in an attempt to rebrand. But they own a virtual monopoly on the global porn industry. Their most popular porn site is PornHub.

00:04:05 Speaker_00
And most people would have heard that name before because

00:04:09 Speaker_00
In 2020, when this movement to hold Pornhub accountable for globally distributing and monetizing countless videos of child sexual abuse, rape, sex trafficking, and other forms of non-consensual criminal, image-based sexual abuse.

00:04:28 Speaker_00
When this began in 2020, Pornhub was the largest and most popular porn site in the world. They had, at the height of 2020 in December, this was kind of the height of this website, they had 170 million visits per day.

00:04:42 Speaker_00
They had 62 billion visits to that site. that year, and they had enough videos being uploaded, 6.8 million videos uploaded to the site. That would take 169 years to watch if you put those videos back to back.

00:05:01 Speaker_00
So, you know, researchers in 2020 named Pornhub the third most influential tech company on global society, just behind Facebook and Google. And it was the fifth most, according to the CEO of Pornhub,

00:05:16 Speaker_00
In December of 2020, it was the fifth most trafficked website in the world. Not just porn site, website.

00:05:23 Speaker_02
Trafficked?

00:05:24 Speaker_00
Yes, meaning visits.

00:05:26 Speaker_02
Okay, yes, sorry, of course.

00:05:27 Speaker_00
And so this is a massive website, but it's one of many websites. So MindGeek owns, they estimate, about 80% of the world's most popular porn sites and brands, including most of the world's most popular tube sites.

00:05:42 Speaker_00
And to understand the tube sites, so these are the YouTubes of porn. So Pornhub is the YouTube of porn, meaning this is user-generated content where anybody can become a pornographer.

00:05:55 Speaker_00
If you have an iPhone, if you have a camera in the back of a car, in a hotel room, in a park, wherever, you can film a sex act and you can upload it to the porn tube sites, Pornhub being the most popular.

00:06:09 Speaker_00
So what happened was, you know, I had been investigating this, you know, my antennas were up, I was paying attention to this intersection between the pornography industry, sex trafficking, and child sexual abuse. At the end of 2019,

00:06:25 Speaker_00
I began to hear some stories in the media that were very concerning that really arrested my attention. There was also at the same time an investigation done by the London Sunday Times that really caught my attention.

00:06:38 Speaker_00
And they found dozens of videos, illegal videos, dozens of illegal videos on the site within minutes, even children as young as three years old.

00:06:48 Speaker_00
they had noted that they had found that there was over 100 instances that were cited in this particular investigation of category A level child sexual abuse.

00:06:58 Speaker_00
So category A level is not just children playing in a bathtub as bad as that would be on a porn site, but these are sadistic acts of harm to children meant to induce terror and pain. And I was just thinking about these cases.

00:07:16 Speaker_00
And I was up late one night, taking care of my very fussy, crying baby, and I was thinking about the question that was haunting me at the time. My dad was really wise, and he said, assumption is the mother of all screw-ups.

00:07:32 Speaker_00
We're assuming that this is all vetted content. But I had that question haunting me, and so I had an idea.

00:07:39 Speaker_02
Well, who can vet 169 years of content? Exactly.

00:07:46 Speaker_00
I said I'm going to test the upload system and see what it takes for myself to upload content to this site. And when I did that, I put my baby to bed, took out my laptop and my phone, and tested the upload system.

00:07:58 Speaker_00
And I found out what millions of people already knew in under 10 minutes. That video was live on the site. It was a video of the rug and the keyboard. And at that moment, everything made sense.

00:08:10 Speaker_00
And I realized that the site was infested with videos of real sexual crime and that Pornhub was not a porn site. It was actually a crime scene. And that's kind of how- Is there a difference? There is legal material.

00:08:24 Speaker_00
I mean, legal pornography is legal under the laws of the United States of Canada. But when it's a child or when it's, you know, a non-consenting adult or when it's even filmed consensually and uploaded non-consensually, there's a spectrum of abuse.

00:08:41 Speaker_00
This was the business model. They were selling 4.6 billion ad impressions on Pornhub every day. And that was how they were generating their traffic.

00:08:48 Speaker_02
Any idea how much money is being generated by this site?

00:08:51 Speaker_00
Yeah, I mean hundreds of millions of dollars a year is generated for MindGeek, ILO, off of... How do you spell ILO? A-Y-L-O.

00:09:03 Speaker_02
ILO. And that's the rebrand?

00:09:05 Speaker_00
That's the rebrand. Right. And so intentional decision.

00:09:08 Speaker_00
And I mean, over the course of the last four years, you know, as this kind of started to go viral on social media, a petition that I started in early 2020 to shut down Pornhub and hold its executives accountable. Today, we have 2.3 million

00:09:25 Speaker_00
signatures from every country in the world. And as this was spreading, victims were coming forward, and whistleblowers and insiders from the company were coming forward.

00:09:34 Speaker_00
And they taught me not just how this content was getting uploaded, but why it was getting uploaded. And again, it's the business model of free user-generated porn.

00:09:48 Speaker_02
Why do you think they're not more careful in drawing a line between what's legal and acceptable, at least legally, and what's illegal and sadistic and criminal?

00:10:00 Speaker_02
All right, is there something about... Okay, so here's part of the reason I'm asking this question. So, I spent a lot of time studying the perceptions and actions of very, very pathological people.

00:10:12 Speaker_02
And one of the things that is interesting about serial sexual killers, for example, is that their behavior tends to accelerate across time. And there's a very specific reason for this.

00:10:26 Speaker_02
Sex has an intrinsically rewarding nature, but that the nature of anything that's rewarding can be heightened by novelty. So because novelty itself, if it's in the right dose, also gives you a dopaminergic kick. Sexual anticipation and sexual pleasure

00:10:48 Speaker_02
produce a dopaminergic kick, but novelty heightens that. Okay, so what that tends to mean, especially if you're overdoing it, let's say, is that you want to stay on the novelty edge, right?

00:11:01 Speaker_02
So what you see with serial killers, for example, who have a sexually sadistic twist is that the sadistic element in their crime accelerates across time as they search for that edge to stay where things are maximally gratifying.

00:11:17 Speaker_02
There's reasonable evidence that the same thing applies to pornography use online, is that maybe it starts out with relatively vanilla displays, but then it progresses to more and more graphic displays, and then past graphic there's kinky, and past kinky there's violent, and past violent there's violent and kinky, and that's not as far as it goes.

00:11:42 Speaker_02
And so you can also see this culturally.

00:11:45 Speaker_02
You know, Theodore Dalrymple, who's a very interesting British essayist, made a lot of this when he was talking about how porn invaded our culture, that the borders were, what would you say, moved bit by bit really starting in the 1920s.

00:12:01 Speaker_02
He identified a famous case. Who was the novelist? Lady Chatterley's Lover was banned as a pornographic novel in Great Britain, and it was quite sexually graphic, especially for the time, and that ban was overthrown.

00:12:14 Speaker_02
And he thought of that as a, although Dale Rimple is a free speech advocate, he thought of that the victory of, I can't remember who the author was, actually quite a renowned author, the victory

00:12:30 Speaker_02
for his novel as the entry point of the pornographication of the culture, okay, but Over the course of my life, I've seen in our culture the same thing that happens to people who become increasingly sexually perverse as they chase the novelty edge.

00:12:46 Speaker_02
Because when I was very young, very young, let's say, the most... It was Playboy that broke the barrier fundamentally, right? That was Hugh Hefner. Playboy was a relatively sophisticated magazine for a porn magazine.

00:13:04 Speaker_02
Most of the images of women were nudes, but not sexually explicit nudes, merely nudes. And there was a lot of journalism in Playboy and some very good writing. And Hefner kind of marketed that as

00:13:23 Speaker_02
bohemian 1950s freedom and equality between men and women, the cool single person who was willing to explore their sexuality in a creative manner. And that was Playboy. And of course, that empire lasted for quite a long time.

00:13:41 Speaker_02
But then after Playboy came Penthouse, and Penthouse was much more sexually graphic. a lot more explicit. And after Penthouse came Hustler, and Hustler started to move into the, well, you might call it into the domain of severely bad taste.

00:13:59 Speaker_02
And that was certainly the case. And then, well, by the time Then Hustler metamorphosed into, you know, dozens and dozens of magazines that concentrated on every fetish you could possibly imagine.

00:14:12 Speaker_02
And then the internet came along, and it was the case that the internet, expansion of the internet, was actually facilitated in a major way by the desire of isolated and socially incompetent men to share sexually graphic images.

00:14:28 Speaker_02
I mean, the whole internet was driven. We know what a third to 40% of the traffic on the internet is pornographic still. And so it was an incredible

00:14:39 Speaker_02
The sexual element was an incredible motivating factor for the development of the worldwide net, and there's a lot of criminal activity on the net, maybe 50% of it, right? And it's very hard to hold people accountable.

00:14:51 Speaker_02
So what we're seeing is our whole culture chasing that novelty edge, and that's all driven by in the worst cases, narcissistic, psychopathic, Machiavellian, sadistic criminals. And we can't hold them accountable. It's really bad. It's really bad.

00:15:08 Speaker_00
OK, so now... But we can hold those who are distributing it accountable.

00:15:12 Speaker_02
Well, OK.

00:15:13 Speaker_00
Can we? Can we? Yes, we absolutely can. Who are these people? Well, first I want to kind of just, you know, basically acknowledge what you just said is absolutely true, is that today, on these free porn tube sites,

00:15:26 Speaker_00
Again, free, you just, like, there wasn't even an RU18 click-through button at the beginning of 2020 where any seven-year-old could just click right through. End up on the homepage of Pornhub or Xvideos for free.

00:15:41 Speaker_00
And what they're seeing on the homepage is not your father's Playboy, right? It's not the images that you were describing.

00:15:49 Speaker_00
It is, you know, there was a study done that was published in the British Journal of Criminology, and they analyzed the homepages of these sites.

00:15:58 Speaker_00
And when you get onto Pornhub, there's about 50 videos that you will see that they, if you scroll over, they autoplay. And these are these homemade user-generated videos. And they found that one in eight of those videos was displaying sexual violence.

00:16:13 Speaker_00
You know, videos that would include non-consent, incest. And I think that is just so alarming that that is the reality that we're living in today.

00:16:26 Speaker_02
Well, exposure also desensitizes. Right, so if you're a therapist and you want to reduce the anxiety that someone feels, well, I can give you an example. I had a client one time who was a vegetarian, but this person was a vegetarian because they were

00:16:49 Speaker_02
really terrified of life and of death and couldn't go into a grocery store. And so one of the, because of the displays of meat, and one of the things that I did was bring them to a store.

00:17:09 Speaker_02
that was closer and closer to an actual butcher store and have them look, because that's what you do. You have people look at what it is that they're terrified of. And if they do that voluntarily, their anxiety levels decrease.

00:17:23 Speaker_02
Actually, they become braver, but fundamentally, you could say as well that their anxiety levels decrease.

00:17:30 Speaker_02
The revulsion that young people would feel for violent acts is, especially on the sexual side, is going to be reduced as a consequence of that kind of voluntary exposure. And God only knows what that does. I mean, I can't imagine.

00:17:48 Speaker_02
And it's an unbelievably powerful force too. You know, we're in a situation now where a 13-year-old boy, because it's going to be boys mostly, men using these sites because men are much more sensitive to visual stimuli.

00:18:03 Speaker_02
Women seem to prefer literary pornography.

00:18:06 Speaker_00
Although there are many, many, you know, it's increasing in the number of girls.

00:18:11 Speaker_02
Do you know what the proportion is by any chance?

00:18:13 Speaker_00
No, I don't know that exact proportion. I do know it's still boys primarily that are primarily being exposed, but girls as well are consuming this kind of content at very young ages as well.

00:18:26 Speaker_02
Yeah, well, curiosity is going to drive that to some degree. There's a great book by the Google engineers called A Billion Wicked Thoughts. Do you know that book? No, I don't.

00:18:34 Speaker_02
Oh, that's I think the best book I've ever read, investigating the use of the sex difference, for example, and the use of pornography. It's a very smart book. Interesting.

00:18:44 Speaker_02
And so, yeah, and so, you know, we're in a situation right now where the typical 13-year-old boy can see more beautiful nude woman than any man ever saw in history, right? Incredibly powerful, possibly irresistible stimulus package.

00:19:01 Speaker_02
And we also don't know exactly what that's doing to the relationships between young men and young women. sexually and otherwise, right?

00:19:09 Speaker_02
There is increasing evidence, especially in countries like Japan and South Korea, although the curves, the transformation curves, seem to be playing out the same way in the rest of the West, except delayed.

00:19:24 Speaker_02
There's a tremendously high rate of virginity now in Japan. I think it's something like 30% of Japanese young people, 30 and under, have never had any sexual encounter whatsoever. The relationship scene is fragmenting in those countries.

00:19:41 Speaker_02
The birth rate has absolutely plummeted. And we have no idea what the connection is between that and the very straightforward and simple sexual gratification that's available online.

00:19:53 Speaker_02
We also have no idea how it is that young people's sexual preferences are trained as a consequence of their exposure to online pornography. And so, is it cataclysmic? Probably, probably. It's an insanely powerful technology.

00:20:12 Speaker_02
And I've been thinking about this too, you know, is that we misapprehend what's happening because it's easy to think that the women on Pornhub, for example, who are participating, the men as well, are just women, but they're not women in a way.

00:20:33 Speaker_02
They're women-machine hybrids, because no woman can be in a million rooms at the same time.

00:20:38 Speaker_02
And you can think about that also with regard to sites like OnlyFans, is the women have been transformed into images that can be propagated everywhere, and that's an insane technological revolution.

00:20:51 Speaker_02
And it's also very possible for young women to monetize their beauty.

00:20:57 Speaker_02
And tempting for them to do that because, well, a small proportion of them can make a very large amount of money, and in a manner that appears easy, and also that draws a lot of attention.

00:21:08 Speaker_02
And so if you have a narcissistic tilt, or if you've been isolated and are lonely and need attention, then that's a hell of a way to get it. So, it's really a bad scene. Now, you said you think that these people can be held accountable.

00:21:22 Speaker_02
So, why don't you tell me about that, because I'm very curious to see if that's actually the case.

00:21:27 Speaker_00
Sure, absolutely. Well, you know, they're distributing, like I said, criminal content. These are crime scenes. These are not consenting adults that I'm talking about.

00:21:37 Speaker_00
the focus of my work is underage victims, victims of rape, sex trafficking, and non-consensual image-based abuse that are proliferating on these sites. They have made intentional policy decisions. Let's just take MindGeek and PornHub.

00:21:52 Speaker_00
I want to give you some of that factual background so you can understand, first of all, the complicity of this company. But then we can zoom back from PornHub to speak about the industry of user-generated porn as a whole and how

00:22:07 Speaker_00
You know, we can also hold all of these companies accountable and not just Pornhub.

00:22:11 Speaker_00
But, you know, I've gone on a journey of discovery over the last four years, kind of like peeling back the onion layers of this corporation and understanding how it works and what I call the deep complicity of Pornhub. I'll give you an example.

00:22:30 Speaker_00
Pornhub owns most of the world's most popular tube sites. I told you how many videos are uploaded to Pornhub every year. They made a decision to only hire 30 moderators at their office in Cyprus to be reviewing this content.

00:22:45 Speaker_00
10 moderators working at a time. They were viewing, they were reprimanded if they viewed less than 700 videos. per eight-hour shift.

00:22:53 Speaker_00
Some of them were watching up to 2,000 videos per eight-hour shift, just clicking through those videos with the sound off. All the while, they knew they weren't verifying ID or age. And this was a guessing game.

00:23:06 Speaker_00
They were playing Russian roulette with real people's lives, with victims' lives. And that wasn't just for PornHub. So that was all of the porn tube sites. They had 10.

00:23:17 Speaker_00
moderating, you know, compare that to Facebook's 15,000, they still don't have enough moderators, even at Facebook. But make that comparison. That was an intentional decision. And those moderators, I spoke to them for dozens of hours.

00:23:31 Speaker_00
I consider some of them friends at this point, because we've spent so much time together discussing how this worked. And, you know, they said that their job was more to allow as much content to go through as possible. So,

00:23:47 Speaker_00
content is king for the porn tube sites. They have to have massive amounts of content in order to drive those Google searches, in order to drive the traffic and sell the advertising.

00:23:57 Speaker_02
Why do they need more content if there's 169 years? I mean, this is one of the things that I find mysterious about the porn business as a whole. I don't understand how it can be monetized because

00:24:10 Speaker_00
the internet is absolutely flooded with porn and it's free so like where's what's the advertising so mostly you know they're making money off of premium subscriptions so that you could buy you know so you can pay $9.99 or $19.99 a month and you can watch porn or you can watch the

00:24:27 Speaker_00
for real rape ad-free. They were selling pay-to-download content, which was a small portion of the content on Corn Hub. But there's many examples of victims even in that pay-to-download content.

00:24:40 Speaker_00
There was a 12-year-old boy in Alabama, and he was drugged, and he was overpowered, and he was raped in 23 videos by a man named Rocky Shea Franklin.

00:24:50 Speaker_00
And that was pay-to-download content where he entered into a profit-sharing relationship with Pornhub to split that 35%, 65% for Rocky, 35% for Pornhub. They were selling those videos.

00:25:05 Speaker_00
Police reached out multiple times to Pornhub demanding those videos be removed and they were ignored. They stayed on the site for seven months, hundreds of thousands of views.

00:25:13 Speaker_00
They put an intentional download button on every single piece of content on Pornhub. Again, an intentional policy decision to place that, and that's not like a YouTube download where you can just access it when you're off the internet.

00:25:27 Speaker_00
This was a possession of that content. It was a transfer from 1,700 servers that Pornhub has. a transfer of that illegal criminal content onto the devices of potentially 5 million users an hour so that that child's trauma could then be immortalized.

00:25:46 Speaker_00
And these victims, they call it the immortalization of their trauma, where they say, you know, it was one thing when I was raped, but to have that filmed and then uploaded, monetized for profit and pleasure and globally distributed so that it will be downloaded and uploaded for the rest of my life.

00:26:02 Speaker_02
Yeah, well, that's that machine-human hybrid issue popping up because it's far more than... For victims.

00:26:08 Speaker_00
And it's a sadistic game of whack-a-mole for them where they, you know, would beg Pornhub to get these videos down. I mean, the testimony of so many of these victims was they would beg for these videos.

00:26:19 Speaker_00
I saw the emails, the begging emails, and they would be hassled by Pornhub. They would make them prove, this is the testimony of these victims, they would have to prove that they were underage or they would have to prove that they were victims.

00:26:34 Speaker_00
in order to get a video down, if they even had an answer at all. Because we also have uncovered that Pornhub had 1,800 employees, okay? They make hundreds of millions of dollars a year. They employed one person five days a week.

00:26:51 Speaker_00
to be reviewing videos flagged by users for violating terms of service, including child sexual abuse, rape, and trafficking. And they had a policy where you had to flag a video 15 times in order for it to be put in queue for review.

00:27:05 Speaker_00
And they had a backlog of 706,000 flagged videos. And that means a victim could flag their video 15 times. It wouldn't even have been put in line for review. These are those intentional policy decisions that I'm talking about.

00:27:20 Speaker_00
And so these victims, they would beg for them to come down. They would be hassled. But even if they did get it down, it would just get re-uploaded again and again and again and again. And at some point, they just give up. Some of them become suicidal.

00:27:35 Speaker_00
We know now that this is actually a life and death issue for victims. The stakes are so high.

00:27:41 Speaker_00
because surveys are showing that 50% of these victims of this kind of distribution of these non-consensual sexual images, child sexual abuse, they have suicidal ideations. Many of them consider suicide. Some of them actually attempt it.

00:28:00 Speaker_00
Many of them do. And that's what happens to these victims. And so, I mean, it's just Tragic what's allowed to happen and intentionally done and going to holding them accountable. We can hold them accountable.

00:28:17 Speaker_00
We are holding them accountable, thanks to the help of many people. We're not there yet, but Pornhub was forced to take down 91% of their content. From when this began to today, we now have numbers.

00:28:31 Speaker_00
I just kind of got new numbers yesterday that they have been forced to take down 91% of that website. They went from 56%. million pieces of content down to 5.2 million.

00:28:45 Speaker_00
They've lost Visa, MasterCard, and Discover, have cut them off completely after a huge multi-year battle for that to happen.

00:28:52 Speaker_00
So the credit card companies were the ones that were enabling them to monetize this illegal content, including trafficking and child sexual abuse, and they were getting a cut of each.

00:29:00 Speaker_02
Was that your doing?

00:29:02 Speaker_00
Well, it was the doing of many people who've joined together. I mean, we've had 600 organizations participate in what's called trafficking hub movement.

00:29:11 Speaker_00
Lawyers, journalists, most of all survivors who've come forward to courageously tell their stories.

00:29:17 Speaker_02
And how did you get the credit card companies on board?

00:29:20 Speaker_00
Well, it was a huge battle. I mean, some of these conversations, behind-the-scenes conversations with the credit card executives are verbatim recounted in my book, Takedown. And you can kind of go on that journey of having to

00:29:38 Speaker_00
battle with them to show them evidence after evidence after evidence that they were actually, in the words of a federal judge, so Visa is currently being sued by these survivors for their relationship with Pornhub.

00:29:50 Speaker_00
A federal judge in California, Cormac Carmi, he said, Visa gave Pornhub the very tool through which to complete the crime of knowingly benefiting from child trafficking. Finally, the New York Times did an explosive article at the end of 2020

00:30:05 Speaker_00
two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Nicholas Kristof that kind of sent shockwaves around the world. The pressure was on, and they actually ended up announcing they were cutting ties with Pornhub at that point.

00:30:18 Speaker_00
But we found out that they actually snuck back two weeks later to the advertising arm behind the scenes to continue monetizing this content with Pornhub, and it was another two-year battle to finally get them to cut off Pornhub once and for all.

00:30:34 Speaker_00
And that's kind of how it happened, thanks to lawsuits, thanks to public pressure. And Bill Ackman actually was a huge help. I mean, he knew the CEO of MasterCard and he, you know, was moved by that article in the New York Times.

00:30:48 Speaker_00
And he actually contacted Ajay Banga and said, you need to do the right thing here. And he helped, you know, at that point, all the way for the next two years. You know, he actually got him and I onto SquawkBox on CNBC to call out Al Kelly by name.

00:31:04 Speaker_00
and, you know, say, why are you continuing? You have to stop. And actually, it happened.

00:31:09 Speaker_02
What was the rationale from Visa and the credit card companies for participating in this?

00:31:15 Speaker_00
Well, they kind of had this attitude of, we're very, very concerned. You know, we hate trafficking as much as you do. Blah, blah, blah.

00:31:25 Speaker_02
That seems unlikely, given that you've devoted your life to it.

00:31:28 Speaker_00
But, you know, it was just always kind of an excuse. Well, you know, we'll... We'll just keep sending us more information. Keep sending us more information. We're very concerned. Keep sending us more information."

00:31:40 Speaker_00
And Visa actually sent a letter that said they weren't going to do anything because they're not in the business of policing legal and consensual material.

00:31:50 Speaker_00
When they had evidence that this was not legal and consensual material, that so much of it, the site was actually infested

00:31:57 Speaker_00
with videos of real sexual crime, and they were earning a cut of each of those videos, and they're currently being sued by dozens of child victims. in lawsuits in California, and they lost their motion to dismiss.

00:32:11 Speaker_00
They said, we're going to dismiss this case. We are not responsible here. They lost their motion to dismiss. And that was in 2022. That was the moment that really helped tip the scale. So it was a combination of Visa losing their motion to dismiss,

00:32:27 Speaker_00
You know, Bill Ackman coming in and helping us put on the pressure, you know, from a public pressure perspective, calling out the CEO like that, combined with the litigation, I think was the combination that finally forced Visa to announce that they were going to cut off Pornhub once and for all and then Mastercard and Discover.

00:32:46 Speaker_02
So how are they being funded now?

00:32:49 Speaker_00
Cryptocurrency and bank wires is kind of how they're currently monetizing their content. But holding them accountable, that's one way.

00:32:57 Speaker_00
Victims are suing, so courageous victims are suing almost 300 victims in 25 lawsuits across the US, Canada, and the UK. Multiple are class action lawsuits on behalf of tens of thousands of child victims. So they're holding them accountable that way.

00:33:16 Speaker_02
Okay, so let's delve into what accountable means. So, so far you've made the case that the accountability, so far what you've described is something like financial accountability, right? Your organization, your work, and the work of others has

00:33:33 Speaker_02
radically decreased the number of files that they're able to utilize, you said about 90%, and it's made it more difficult for them to monetize their content.

00:33:43 Speaker_02
And I know that there are states in the US that have instituted more rigorous age check rules, and Pornhub vociferously objected to that, but that wasn't helpful.

00:33:55 Speaker_02
And so, but I presume that the money is still pouring in like mad, although perhaps not as much,

00:34:01 Speaker_00
This is all for profit, especially when you consider it at a corporate level. These are just calculations. Risk, benefit. And the only way that we're going to stop this across the internet is to make the risk too high.

00:34:16 Speaker_00
It's to increase the risk sufficiently. and eliminate the profitability.

00:34:21 Speaker_02
So how effective have you and your organization been at publicizing the identities of the people, the executives, for example, who are behind this? And to what degree can you do that? Like, can you name people today?

00:34:34 Speaker_00
Well, yes. Okay, let's name them. Well, first of all, I would just say it's not just my organization. I want to say that again. So the secret shareholder of Pornhub was exposed because the former owner of Pornhub actually came forward to me to help

00:34:51 Speaker_02
Why?

00:34:52 Speaker_00
Well, he had ulterior motives. At first, he approached to say he wanted to help. He was called the Zuckerberg of porn, so he's the one that kind of put Pornhub on the map almost a decade or more ago.

00:35:05 Speaker_00
And he kind of exploded this idea of free porn onto the global scene, and he made Pornhub

00:35:13 Speaker_00
this kind of household brand where, you know, people are joking about it on Saturday Night Live and wearing their apparel proudly in public and there had pop-up shops in New York Fashion Week.

00:35:25 Speaker_00
doing these campaigns around the world, they spent millions of dollars promoting this image of themselves as this mainstream, legit brand.

00:35:33 Speaker_00
They had an arm of the company called Pornhub Cares, where they would do these philanthropic efforts to save the bees and save the oceans and donate to breast cancer research.

00:35:47 Speaker_00
You know, all of these things that they would do and they would make massive PR campaigns. So, you know, he was kind of behind that. But he came forward and he revealed that the man he sold the company to, he said his name is Bernd Bergmaier.

00:36:01 Speaker_00
And he was found. He was an Austrian. He was living in half-time in London, half-time in Hong Kong. And so we found out his name, but then a journalist from the UK went on this hunt for the Porn King, and he found him.

00:36:16 Speaker_00
And now he's being sued personally. So it's not just the company that's being sued.

00:36:20 Speaker_01
Burned?

00:36:21 Speaker_00
Burned Bergmeyer. And he's personally being sued. The CEO and the COO who are also minority shareholders are also personally being sued because they've been unmasked. And that was a part of this journey.

00:36:38 Speaker_02
Anybody being criminally charged in the executive suite?

00:36:43 Speaker_00
Not yet.

00:36:43 Speaker_02
Not yet.

00:36:44 Speaker_00
But they should be. And not just in the U.S. Like here in Canada. Section 631.1 of the Criminal Code in Canada makes it illegal to transmit, possess, advertise child pornography, child sexual abuse material.

00:37:03 Speaker_00
An aggravating factor in that is if it's monetized, if it's for profit. I mean, this carries serious sentences. And there is no question. It's not being enforced. And that's the question, is why? Why? Why can't we enforce this?

00:37:19 Speaker_02
I think maybe it's because maybe it's because people, you know, I'll tell you a little story. So I was ill for a long time.

00:37:27 Speaker_02
The first podcast I did when I sort of came back, I was still in pretty rough shape, was with Abigail Schreier, who wrote a book called Irreversible Damage.

00:37:36 Speaker_02
And Michael Schellenberger, who's a pretty good journalist in the US, and Schellenberger broke the files on X that exposed this group for what they were. And then I interviewed him, and he said something very interesting.

00:37:51 Speaker_02
He said that he had been aware, for example, of the interview I did with Schreier, because that was one of the first interviews, along with her book, that really brought this to, say, public attention. And he said he just couldn't believe it.

00:38:04 Speaker_02
He couldn't believe this was happening. If you look into the details of that kind of surgery, it's so absolutely barbaric and brutal that you can't imagine it.

00:38:12 Speaker_02
The only thing I can compare it to is the accounts that I've read of what happened in Unit 731 in

00:38:20 Speaker_02
China, which I would not recommend investigating unless you want to be traumatized for the rest of your life, and the sorts of things that were going on in the death camps in Germany. It's brutal beyond comprehension.

00:38:30 Speaker_02
And Schellenberger basically said he simply couldn't believe it. And I think there are just places that people don't want to look.

00:38:37 Speaker_02
And why would we look at our culture and understand that 40% of internet traffic is sadistic, criminal, hedonistic pornography? And what does that say about the culture at large? It's a massive problem.

00:38:48 Speaker_02
And so who the hell wants to poke their nose into that? What do we do? We swallow a camel and strain it a gnat, right? To use the biblical allusion. And we won't look and see what's actually happening. We won't see what's happening to our kids.

00:39:03 Speaker_02
We won't see what's happening to the people who are victimized by this kind of pathology. It's too much. And so people turn a blind eye and focus on comparative trivialities. That's how it looks to me.

00:39:14 Speaker_02
And then, of course, people are morally complicit, too, because pornography use is extremely widespread. And so if you start to make an issue of it, then you have to examine your own behavior, let's say, in all of its aspects.

00:39:27 Speaker_02
And that's also the kind of dark thing that people are very inclined to avoid. And so, It's nod, nod, wink, wink. This is all cool and fun, you know? And it's none of that.

00:39:38 Speaker_00
Well, that's why I think it has to come by force, right? It's not going to come voluntarily.

00:39:42 Speaker_00
And I guess, you know, I guess that's a lesson that we kind of learned over the last four years, battling the credit card companies, you know, even what's happened like with Pornhub and having to take down the content they've had to take down and whatnot.

00:39:57 Speaker_00
It's not going to come.

00:39:58 Speaker_02
Well, we have another problem, too, is that it's really easy for people to be invisible and pathologically anonymous online. And so, you know, it looks to me like this is actually this technological revolution has an element to it that is likely

00:40:17 Speaker_02
Is it civilization destroying? It might be. Because there's always a percentage of people who fall into the psychopathic, sadistic, histrionic category. It's about 5% of people worldwide. You can think about it as an evolutionary niche.

00:40:32 Speaker_02
You know, if you're depressed and anxious and you just stay at home and you never do anything and you're completely useless, then... you know, that's not a very effective reproductive strategy from a biological perspective.

00:40:43 Speaker_02
But if you're an exploitative psychopath, you can actually find your victims and you can propagate yourself with some degree of effectiveness. And that seems to stabilize at about 5% of the population worldwide.

00:40:55 Speaker_02
And so these are people who are classically without conscience. And you could think about them as temperamentally aggressive people who haven't progressed beyond the moral standards of a two-year-old.

00:41:06 Speaker_02
And there's nothing wrong with two-year-olds, but when you're 50 and you're a two-year-old, there's something seriously wrong with you. And it's almost impossible to describe how dangerous these people are.

00:41:16 Speaker_02
And I'm afraid, and I think with good reason, that the anonymity of the net

00:41:23 Speaker_02
and its international nature makes it impossible to hold the psychopathic sadists who are completely 100% not only self-interested, but delight in the unnecessary suffering of others. That's a good definition of sadism.

00:41:40 Speaker_02
We're not holding them to account. In fact, they're being monetized and promoted.

00:41:43 Speaker_00
Well, that's where the solution is. you actually, I think, just nailed it on the head, because how are we going to make sure this doesn't happen again? And it's verification.

00:41:52 Speaker_00
That's exactly where it's removing the anonymity from those who are uploading, and it's also removing that from those who are in the videos.

00:42:03 Speaker_02
OK, so let's delve into that a little bit, because I've thought about that, you know, because so I've fulminated against

00:42:10 Speaker_02
cowardly online anonymity for a long time, because I've read tens of thousands of comments online on X and on YouTube, and I'm very familiar with the machinations of the dark tetrad types. Machiavellian, psychopathic, narcissistic, and sadistic.

00:42:30 Speaker_02
We know what they're like, and they're particularly active as anonymous trolls online. And people have taken me to task for threatening anonymity.

00:42:40 Speaker_02
Because, well, people point out, for example, well, how can you be an anonymous whistleblower if you have to verify your ID? That anonymity is necessary. My response to that is something like, for every one

00:42:55 Speaker_02
whistle-blowing anonymous hero there's 9999 pathological demented sadistic trolls and so that's a pretty bad ratio but let's say that people have to verify their id okay so what do you mean verify exactly do you mean

00:43:12 Speaker_02
to take an image of your driver's license and upload that. Just hang on, let me just finish this because there's an ugly element to this too. And so any kid with Photoshop can do that in 20 seconds. And so that's just not helpful.

00:43:25 Speaker_02
So let's say we have something like a reliable digital ID. Then we have digital ID. Yeah, and that hasn't worked out so well in China, right, at all, because they have a totalitarian state there because of digital ID that's so bloody all-seeing.

00:43:41 Speaker_02
It's like the eye of Sauron, right, because that's actually a symbol of a totalitarian state, an all-seeing totalitarian state.

00:43:49 Speaker_02
You know, I don't see in some way how this problem is tractable, because the solution that you're proposing, and I can understand why, is to insist upon verification, but we actually don't know how to verify.

00:44:02 Speaker_00
For porn, if you're going—I'm not talking about talking on the internet. We're talking about uploading real sex videos. How would you verify?

00:44:10 Speaker_02
That would work.

00:44:11 Speaker_00
We have companies, like one of them is called Yoti, right? We have the technology, Yoti, for example. We have the technology readily available to be able to verify an ID, match it with a face, do a biometric scan. I mean, they're already doing it.

00:44:26 Speaker_00
And then delete that information immediately once they're age verified, right? And so, ID verified, age verified.

00:44:34 Speaker_00
And that also takes care of some of the consent issue because if you're presenting an ID, your ID, and you're going through that process of putting your face on the camera and doing a biometric scan where you're matching your ID,

00:44:48 Speaker_02
So it's not for the people who upload and the people in the videos?

00:44:50 Speaker_00
The people who upload and every single individual. And this is not like a novel idea. So we've had a law called USC 2257 in the United States since 1988.

00:45:03 Speaker_00
And that is because we understood, anybody with common sense, anybody with half a brain understands that if you don't verify the age of those who are in the videos, the industry will be awash with videos of criminal content, of children, of teens, of underage teens.

00:45:19 Speaker_00
And this is also, so we've had this since 1988, USC 2257, and the traditional brick-and-mortar porn industry has complied with this requirement for many, it's a criminal offense enforceable by the Department of Justice not to do this for every single individual in every single studio-produced pornographic video.

00:45:40 Speaker_00
For some reason, with the advent of the internet and this idea of user-generated pornography, it has not translated. So what we need to do is take that law and apply it now to this digital age.

00:45:55 Speaker_02
So you think the technology and the legal solutions are already in place, they're just not being enforced?

00:45:59 Speaker_00
They're not being enforced because the incentive of these companies is to not want to put any restrictions on, they don't want friction in uploading because they're going to get less content. Less content means less Google searches.

00:46:13 Speaker_02
Well, they're also going to have to take a look at their own behavior.

00:46:16 Speaker_00
Well, yes, but they're heavily resistant, and that's why it has to be government legislation that requires that.

00:46:24 Speaker_02
How come you're still alive? I'm serious, because you've taken on some pretty vicious people. So, like, what's that like for you?

00:46:34 Speaker_00
I mean, it's been challenging for sure. Yeah, I bet it's been challenging. Yeah, it's been difficult for myself and my family. So why do you do it? It's pain that has a purpose.

00:46:46 Speaker_00
It's pain and discomfort and all of those things in the midst of seeing progress that makes it totally worth it.

00:46:58 Speaker_02
Okay, so tell me how you started getting involved in this. You said that 18 years ago you started working on the problem specifically of child trafficking?

00:47:07 Speaker_00
Sex trafficking as a whole.

00:47:09 Speaker_02
Okay, so tell us the story. Tell us the story. Sure.

00:47:11 Speaker_00
Yeah, so yeah, it was Let's see, in 2006, I was influenced by my father.

00:47:19 Speaker_02
So you're 26 at that point. About 25, 26. Is that right?

00:47:22 Speaker_00
I have to do the math. I'm 41. Yeah.

00:47:24 Speaker_02
And that's 15, 18 years ago.

00:47:25 Speaker_00
So I was at a time when I was kind of searching for my vocation. My dad was a huge influence on me just from a very young age. I mean, he was a man that, um, He was just so attuned to suffering. He cared about... What did your dad do?

00:47:45 Speaker_00
He was a vascular and general surgeon, so he grew up in Jordan and Amman. came to the United States, he went to England, India, and then here, and he became a surgeon. But he was not the kind of man that would watch entertainment.

00:48:01 Speaker_00
You just don't see that with my father, he was watching the History Channel, he was watching the news, he was very focused on human rights issues, and that's how we bonded most when I was young, is to discuss these things.

00:48:15 Speaker_00
So he instilled that in me and my sisters from a young age, and I went off, in search of, you know, many different things. I kind of went off, I guess you'd say went off, went off track in my life for a while, but came back around to this.

00:48:33 Speaker_02
Went off track in what way?

00:48:35 Speaker_00
Well, you know, I thought that I wanted to pursue kind of very selfish ambitions. I kind of got involved in the Hollywood scene for a while.

00:48:47 Speaker_02
Why did that work out?

00:48:49 Speaker_00
I kind of got to a real low point. I thought I wanted to be an entertainment contract attorney, drive a BMW from Malibu to Hollywood every day and live this glamorous, star-studded life. this dream I had for a few years.

00:49:08 Speaker_00
And I got involved in that scene and I ended up finding it very hollow.

00:49:13 Speaker_00
I, you know, was partying and I mean, I even found myself at the Playboy Mansion, I mean, with Bill Maher and Andy Dick and Hugh Hefner's birthday party and different, you know, parties in Hollywood.

00:49:26 Speaker_02
Yeah, what was that like for you to be there?

00:49:30 Speaker_00
I mean, at the time it was, honestly, at the time I thought it was cool. Like, I thought it was, interesting, and I didn't think much of it. How old were you? Gosh, I think I was, what is it, 19, maybe 20, 21? Oh yeah, so pretty young. Yeah.

00:49:45 Speaker_02
Right, so you would think that.

00:49:47 Speaker_00
Yeah.

00:49:47 Speaker_02
And so why did you stop thinking that?

00:49:49 Speaker_00
So I kind of hit a real low point in my life. Why? Kind of a crash and burn.

00:49:52 Speaker_02
Why?

00:49:53 Speaker_00
Well.

00:49:54 Speaker_02
Sorry, but it's important because it's, I'm curious, it's necessary to know why you're doing this.

00:50:00 Speaker_00
Yeah. Well, I kind of came to The end of myself, I was partying and, you know, I was even, you know, doing drugs. I ended up being groped and found myself, you know, on the floor of a room, a dirty carpet that smelled like vomit.

00:50:22 Speaker_00
Not really knowing even what happened the night before. And it was just like, I hit a real low point in my life.

00:50:31 Speaker_02
The shadow side of cool hedonism

00:50:34 Speaker_00
Yeah, right. At the same time, you know, I suffered a devastating romantic heartbreak. I got in a bad car accident. It was kind of like all of these things were happening at once. And I just, you know, kind of hit that low breaking point in my life.

00:50:46 Speaker_00
And at that time, I was searching, I was very depressed.

00:50:53 Speaker_02
How old were you when this happened?

00:50:55 Speaker_00
I mean, it was kind of around the same time in my life. Still pretty young. Yeah, these early 20s, right? Yeah, okay. And you were in L.A.? I grew up in Southern California, so I was about an hour and a half from L.A., so I would drive to L.A.

00:51:09 Speaker_00
and come back. And I hit, yeah, a rock bottom, right? And it was at that point that I was crying one night, I had drawn a picture of how I felt. I would have to take, I'll describe it to you.

00:51:29 Speaker_00
But I was at a point where I had to either take sleeping pills or narcotics to numb the pain and I just felt very depressed and I was totally lost and not knowing where or what I was gonna do with my life. And I drew a picture that night.

00:51:46 Speaker_00
It was a flower in a deep pit and there was rain that was pouring down, and there was water that was filling up the pit, and it was going to threaten to drown the flower.

00:51:58 Speaker_00
And at that moment, I felt inspired to grab my childhood Bible from the dresser there that was next to my bed. I opened it up, and the first thing I read was a description of my picture.

00:52:12 Speaker_00
And it was a psalm, and I can't remember the exact words of the psalm right now, but it was describing, it was like, do not let the floodwaters overwhelm me, or the deep waters of the pit swallow me up.

00:52:23 Speaker_00
And it was an actual description of the picture that I just drew.

00:52:29 Speaker_02
Yeah, well, a flower is a symbol of the soul, because it sort of expands. You've seen slow-motion pictures of flowers blooming. That's like a lotus in the Buddhist tradition, right?

00:52:40 Speaker_02
Because the lotus comes up from the darkness, and then it blooms, and then the Buddha sits in the middle. There are rose images, for example, in stained glass, and the rose is a symbol of the Holy Ghost.

00:52:51 Speaker_02
And so, flowers are a very common symbol of the unfolding of the soul, right? And you said that The flower you drew is in a pit. Well, that's a pit, a bottomless pit. That's hell, right? And then the water, that's the return. That's like Noah's flood.

00:53:07 Speaker_02
That's the return of pre-cosmogonic chaos in the history of religious ideas. And so, that's what happens when there's so much uncertainty around.

00:53:17 Speaker_02
and, what would you say, lack of any stability and hope, any upward orientation, that produces an unbearable state of chaos, which is partly anxiety and partly hopelessness, and that can be deadly.

00:53:30 Speaker_02
And so, that image, you said it was a hole with a flower in it and water pouring down.

00:53:36 Speaker_00
Threatening to drown the flower, yeah.

00:53:38 Speaker_02
Right, right. Well, you see, in the story of Noah's flood, what happens, of course, is that

00:53:44 Speaker_02
It's the descendants of Cain who are the sinners who bring about the flood because of their terrible behavior, and that's profligate, hedonistic, self-centered, immature, exploitative, authoritarian, power-based behavior, right?

00:53:59 Speaker_02
Resentful, envious, vicious. And the consequence of that, when it propagates, is that chaos returns, right? And chaos is very frequently symbolized as water, right? Because water is a place of possibility, but also a place where you can drown.

00:54:14 Speaker_02
A little water is good, but too much is pretty hard on you. Okay, so you had that image come to mind. That's like a dream that intrudes in your life.

00:54:22 Speaker_00
And then I read this verse that was a description.

00:54:24 Speaker_02
Why do you think you were inclined to open Bible at that point. Had you had anything to do with that?

00:54:29 Speaker_00
Yeah, I mean, I grew up in my, you know, again, the example of my father, you know, he was a, I grew up in a Christian home where, you know, this was kind of in my background.

00:54:40 Speaker_00
I had, you know, definitely gone away from that for a time, but it was kind of, that was my impulse, was to do that. And when I read that, I felt this, you know, overwhelming sense of, there's someone here, there's, there's

00:54:55 Speaker_00
something bigger than me that's right here in my darkest moment with me that knows what's happening.

00:55:01 Speaker_02
And like that happens in the story of Jonah too. So, Jonah runs away from his conscience, right? That's what happens to him, because he's told by God to preach the redeeming words to the city of his enemy. And he thinks, I'm not doing that.

00:55:17 Speaker_02
There's one of me and 150,000 of them, and I hate them anyways, and there's no bloody way I'm going to the city of the toxic hedonists and saying what needs to be said. So, he runs away.

00:55:28 Speaker_02
And then he ends up in a boat, and the boat encounters a storm, and that threatens the boat to founder, and so he convinces the sailors to throw him overboard, because he's on the outs with God.

00:55:39 Speaker_02
And then a terrible beast from the abyss swallows him up and brings him down into the darkness, where he spends three days and repents.

00:55:48 Speaker_02
And then he's visited by the same thing that visited you, and the fish or the whale spits him out, and he goes to Nineveh and preaches the words that redeem. Right? A very old prophetic story. So you're a prophet. Yeah, too bad for you.

00:56:04 Speaker_02
Maybe, maybe, right? I mean, it's probably better than being face down on a carpet. Yeah, right, is it better? It is so much better.

00:56:15 Speaker_00
It's so much better where I'm at today because, you know, after that moment, I began to read more. I began to, I mean, there was one book that was really influential in my life called Inspiration by Dr. Wayne Dyer.

00:56:27 Speaker_01
Oh, yeah.

00:56:29 Speaker_00
It really opened my eyes. It helped me kind of develop spiritually. I began to understand where true happiness was going to come from. What did you understand? That it was in service.

00:56:47 Speaker_00
It stopped looking inward with your selfish ambitions and all of those things that you want to do.

00:56:55 Speaker_02
You can group words together to see if they're replaceable in their meaning. Right? So, anxious and fearful, for example, they're synonyms. They're quite similar. You could replace them. Miserable and self-consciousness.

00:57:08 Speaker_02
Miserable and self-conscious are replaceable. There's no difference statistically between thinking about yourself, being anxious and hopeless. Those are the same thing. They're so tight that you can't distinguish them.

00:57:21 Speaker_02
You can't distinguish them statistically or conceptually. And so, if you focus on yourself, well, that's what very immature people do, is they focus on themselves, right? That's what two-year-olds do.

00:57:31 Speaker_02
And as people mature, they're taught to, well, focus on their friends, to focus on their family. to focus on the broader community and to focus on the future, right? That's like the definition of maturity.

00:57:43 Speaker_02
And along with that goes a sense of higher purpose and an orientation that isn't chaotic and, what would you say, intimidating to the point of drowning and that also produces hope. So you figured that out.

00:57:55 Speaker_00
I think it's when you're kind of articulating what I haven't articulated about that moment in my life and that kind of season of time. But yeah, I realized that... When did you get married? When I was, let's see, 27? I believe I was 27.

00:58:14 Speaker_02
And how many children do you have?

00:58:15 Speaker_00
I have two. I have a son and a daughter, a four-year-old and a seven-year-old.

00:58:18 Speaker_02
Right. That makes you smile.

00:58:20 Speaker_00
Yes. That's good. Yeah. They are just the best thing I've ever done in my life. I mean,

00:58:29 Speaker_02
Yeah, well, that's the very antithesis of pornography, right? Disposable sexuality and immediate gratification. And, you know, there's some whim-based satisfaction in that, but there's not a lot of meaning.

00:58:42 Speaker_02
Well, all the meaning is nihilistic and pathological, as you discovered when you were very young. Why do you think you had enough sense to quit? You said it was your dad, eh? That's got to be a big part of it.

00:58:53 Speaker_00
He had a huge influence on my life.

00:58:55 Speaker_02
There's a lot of fatherless girls out there, you know. They don't have that. Do you know that girls without a father hit puberty one year earlier? That's how profound the biological effect of not having a father is. Because that helps them attract men.

00:59:08 Speaker_02
And that's quite a high price to pay.

00:59:11 Speaker_00
I was so blessed. I mean, he was just, and he passed suddenly in 2014.

00:59:17 Speaker_00
But, you know, it was him who, you know, it was during this season of time when I was searching and I was realizing that where I was going to find real happiness in life and purpose was to start looking outward and seeking to where I can invest myself.

00:59:36 Speaker_00
And it was at this time when my dad showed me a documentary. He called me into the living room and showed me a documentary that he was watching about child sex trafficking in Calcutta, India. And I was so horrified by what I saw.

00:59:49 Speaker_00
I was so impacted by what I saw that I began to research and I began to investigate this particular crime. It wasn't that many people were talking about it at the time.

01:00:00 Speaker_02
Why do you think that caught your attention, that particular documentary and that particular type of crime? Why do you think that grabbed you? Because this is an important thing, because you're telling a story about how your conscience and your calling

01:00:15 Speaker_02
interacted to lift you out of a pit. Okay, so you had a moment of conscience that you described when you were on the carpet, for example, and then you had a vision and investigated that, but now you found something that really compelled you.

01:00:31 Speaker_02
Why do you think that crime in particular attracted your attention? Do you have any idea?

01:00:38 Speaker_00
It's a really good question. Why did that particularly arrest my attention? I think it was a combination of the innocence, it was about child sex trafficking, and how I felt like it was almost the

01:00:55 Speaker_02
kind of worst thing that you could do.

01:00:57 Speaker_00
Yeah, it's the heart of darkness.

01:00:59 Speaker_02
Of course, the worst thing is—this is the core of sadism—the worst possible thing is to sully the most innocent possible victim, right?

01:01:09 Speaker_00
That's the worst possible crime. I think it was a combination of understanding the innocence and then the... the devastation of that innocence through this particular means of something that I didn't know existed, right?

01:01:21 Speaker_00
Was this modern day slavery, right? We thought this was gone. And it was at a time, most people are familiar with this now, right? And human trafficking, most people know this, but at that time it was not very common to speak about.

01:01:35 Speaker_00
And so it was shocking, but it was the combination of the innocence. And then it was this, you know, It was this combination of horror at what was going on, and I felt drawn to investigate it, to learn. I began reading a book by Kevin Bales.

01:01:52 Speaker_02
Well, there's a rule, eh? There's a rule that This is an alchemical rule that underlies the, what would you say, it's emblematic of the process of psychological transformation.

01:02:02 Speaker_02
It's Latin, inster quillinus invinitur, what you most need will be found where you least want to look. Right, and that's the same as the dragon treasure myth, right?

01:02:13 Speaker_02
The largest possible treasure is to be found where the worst possible serpent lurks, right? That's the whole story of mankind. And so, you stumbled. That makes sense in terms of the progression of your vision.

01:02:25 Speaker_02
You stumbled across a crime that you couldn't conceive of a worse crime.

01:02:30 Speaker_01
Yeah.

01:02:31 Speaker_02
Right. So, why in the world did you have enough? Usually, it's rare for people to actually look once they've seen. Right? And so, why do you think that you were willing and able?

01:02:43 Speaker_02
It must have something to do with your realization of the loss of your own innocence. That would be my guess. Right? The fact that you woke up and realized that. Why did you, why were you attracted by the Hollywood lifestyle, do you think?

01:02:57 Speaker_02
You know, you had your father's influence. In principle, you might have been more sensible than that. I mean, that's not a personal insult. Young people do all sorts of stupid things.

01:03:06 Speaker_00
I mean, I kind of came into it. I was an acrobat when I was, you know, from the time I was eight years old and I was an accomplished acrobat and I had actually was accepted to Cirque du Soleil in Montreal. My dad wouldn't let me join the circus.

01:03:20 Speaker_00
Surprise, surprise. But I had gotten involved with a local acrobatic group, and part of the group was this friend that I made that was a pole dancer, so she was an amazing acrobat.

01:03:34 Speaker_00
She was amazing at the ribbon, and she invited me to jump on the trampoline in Jimmy Kimmel's Man Show. went for a few hundred dollars and I started to jump on the trampoline in a bikini for a few hundred dollars on Jimmy Kimmel's band show.

01:03:58 Speaker_00
And that's kind of where I kind of just started to meet different people and ended up

01:04:04 Speaker_02
Well, the circus is the fringe of the counterculture, right? That's why circuses are very often places of horror, right? Because people go to the amusement park to be casually amused, unaware of the dark forces that lurk behind the scenes, right?

01:04:22 Speaker_02
That's a Stephen King plot. That's the plot of Pinocchio when he ends up on Pleasure Island and all the slavers are working in the back rooms as he pursues his juvenile delinquent pursuit of pleasure.

01:04:33 Speaker_00
Well, I mean, for an acrobat at the time, Cirque du Soleil was kind of like the Olympics. They actually didn't have acrobatics in the Olympics at the time.

01:04:41 Speaker_00
So the best thing you could do as an acrobat was to try out for and get accepted to Cirque du Soleil.

01:04:47 Speaker_02
It's the highest quality possible circus.

01:04:49 Speaker_00
It is. It's beautiful. So anyway, that was the trajectory into Hollywood. And so that's exactly how it happened.

01:05:00 Speaker_02
All right, so I'm going to switch gears a bit because we're tight for time. And so I want to ask you, we're going to do another half an hour on the Daily Wire side for everybody watching and listening. You guys all know that.

01:05:11 Speaker_02
We'll delve deeper into the issues that we're discussing today and try to continue the discussion of the interpenetration of the personal and the social here. Let me – maybe we can wrap our discussion up, although prematurely, unfortunately.

01:05:27 Speaker_02
What do you think – I got two questions for you, I guess. The first is, do you believe that the laws governing what's definable as legal pornography need to be altered? And second, what can people do to facilitate your work?

01:05:46 Speaker_00
Good questions. I don't think the law needs to be altered. I think it's sufficient with regard to child exploitation. We have very clear laws prohibiting that. We need to enforce that law.

01:05:58 Speaker_00
We even have a very powerful underutilized sex trafficking statutes in the United States and Canada that need to be enforced. In the case of Pornhub and MindGeek,

01:06:12 Speaker_00
in Canada, in the United States, it's illegal to knowingly benefit from a sex trafficking venture. This is a sex trafficking venture. They need to be criminally held accountable.

01:06:22 Speaker_02
So at least to begin with, to begin with, we could enforce the laws that we already have.

01:06:28 Speaker_00
Yes. And as far as new laws to address this, I mean, we have issues with non-consensual image-based abuse. So, you know, revenge porn laws, those could be strengthened, I think.

01:06:43 Speaker_00
You know, we now have the emergence of AI now and user, you know, sorry, you know, pornography that is AI generated, that could include children or deepfakes where you're superimposing somebody's face onto a pornographic image.

01:07:00 Speaker_00
But these, I think, in large part, could still be solved by the same solution of mandatory third-party age and consent verification for every single individual and every single user-generated porn

01:07:16 Speaker_00
image or video on every website that per terms of service enables the distribution of user-generated porn. If we did that, we could make a huge dent in solving this problem across the Internet, making the Internet a safer place.

01:07:32 Speaker_00
But it not only has to come from the government, because these are international corporations. So if you have this in Canada, well, they're also in the United States. They're all over the world. So yeah, we need that, but

01:07:45 Speaker_00
Here's the thing, if we get the financial institutions to implement this policy, just like they have anti-money laundering policy, they need to have anti-online sexual exploitation policy, where Visa and MasterCard and PayPal and all of these financial corporations say, we do not do business with websites that distribute per terms of service user-generated porn that don't verify the agent consent.

01:08:10 Speaker_00
of every individual in every single video. And when they do that, it takes place instantly, it takes place globally.

01:08:17 Speaker_00
And these companies are highly motivated to comply because at the end of the day, every decision they make is driven by what will make us the most money. If they thought they were going to lose Visa and MasterCard, they're going to jump through hoops.

01:08:29 Speaker_00
It was because Visa and MasterCard disengaged from Pornhub that they deleted 91%. They weren't going to do that for any other reason, but fearful and terrified that they lost the credit card companies and wanting to do anything.

01:08:45 Speaker_00
I mean, this was the worst thing that they could have done based on their business model, because it's the content that was driving traffic that was enabling them to sell almost 5 billion ad impressions on Pornhub every day.

01:08:58 Speaker_00
The worst thing they could do is delete content. They deleted 91 percent of the site because they were afraid of permanently losing the credit card companies.

01:09:07 Speaker_00
So when the credit card companies, the financial institutions, the payment processors implement that policy, we will see a transformation of this issue across the globe on all websites that distribute this content for profit and monetize it in any way.

01:09:24 Speaker_02
Okay, and what can people do who are watching and listening to aid in this endeavor? Is there anything specifically?

01:09:31 Speaker_00
Well, specifically, I mean, they can follow what's going on. What's your handle on Twitter? Lilamicklewait.

01:09:37 Speaker_02
Spell it.

01:09:38 Speaker_00
L-A-I-L-A-M-I-C-K-E-L-W-A-I-T. And I want to thank you, Dr. Peterson, because you have been an important part of the story, whether you realize it or not.

01:09:50 Speaker_00
that when somebody on social media shares a post, it may feel like a minor thing to do or maybe it feels like an insignificant thing to do, but that is so precious to me and I've seen the impact of that.

01:10:07 Speaker_00
When you have shared my post, some of those posts have gone viral. In one season, we had like 100 million views And it was in large part where I was sharing victim stories. I was doing this truth campaign, and you were sharing them.

01:10:20 Speaker_00
And yes, it was getting more awareness, but also victims were coming forward who were now pursuing litigation. Whistleblowers from the company came forward with such important information that's now enabling us to hold them accountable.

01:10:33 Speaker_00
So there's real tangible impact. As minors, it may seem for people to just like and share something. That's meaningful. You can sign the petition. People can sign the petition. Join 2.3 million other people from every country in the world.

01:10:47 Speaker_02
Tell us about the petition again.

01:10:48 Speaker_00
traffickinghubpetition.com. And this petition has been so powerful, it has generated media, it has generated pressure, and they can join. People are signing and sharing this petition every single day.

01:11:02 Speaker_00
They can follow other amazing organizations like the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children. They can read the book, Takedown. Takedown is the most comprehensive indictment of this company. in existence currently.

01:11:15 Speaker_00
I mean, it is packed full of evidence. When they read that, it's a story.

01:11:19 Speaker_00
You go on a journey with me from that night in 2020, and it's told in first-person present tense, and you go with me on this journey of discovery where you meet victims, you meet the whistleblowers, you uncover the layers of complicity.

01:11:33 Speaker_00
And when you end up at the end of this book, my hope is that you will feel as passionately about this as I do, And so you will be informed, you'll be activated, you'll be inspired.

01:11:43 Speaker_00
100% of all proceeds from the sale of that book go to support the cause, go directly to the Justice Defense Fund. You can join Team Takedown. So if you go to takedownbook.com, you can join Team Takedown.

01:11:56 Speaker_00
And what that means is it's a group of individuals who are committing to Yes, we're going to take down Pornhub once and for all. We're going to hold this company accountable together.

01:12:06 Speaker_00
But we're going to work to take down and prevent illegal content across the internet. And so you can sign up to join Team Takedown there. Those are some actual steps.

01:12:17 Speaker_02
We'll put all those links in the description of the video, definitely. All right, everybody. So for those of you who are watching and listening, we're going to continue this discussion on the Daily Wire side. And so please do join us there.

01:12:29 Speaker_02
Thank you very much. Thank you so much. Yeah, you're quite the creature. All right. That's for sure. So congratulations on cluing in. Thank you. Right. Good luck to you. Yeah. And thank you, everybody, for watching and listening.

01:12:46 Speaker_01
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