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0:00 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. I mean, legal pornography is legal under the laws, you know, of the United States of Canada. Um, 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. 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. Any idea how much money is being generated by this site? Yeah. I mean, hundreds of millions of dollars a year are gen is generated for MindGeek,
0:47 ISO, um, off of How do you spell ISO? A Y L O ISO and that's the rebrand. That's the rebrand, right? And so intentional decision and I mean over the course of the last four years, you know, as this kind of started to go viral on social media, uh you know, a petition that I started in early 2020 to shut down Pornhub and hold its executives accountable. You know, today we have 2.3 million 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 and they they taught me not just, you know, how this content was getting uploaded, but why it was getting uploaded. And again,
1:33 it's the business model of free userenerated porn. Yeah. 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? Are 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. 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. So sex has an intrinsically rewarding nature, but that
2:18 the nature of anything that's rewarding can be heightened by novelty. So because novelty itself if it's in the right dose is also gives you a dopamineergic kick. Sexual uh anticipation and sexual pleasure produce a dopamineergic 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? 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. And so there's
3:06 reasonable evidence that the same thing applies to pornography use online. Is that maybe it starts out with relatively vanilla uh uh 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 and that's not as far as it goes. And so you can also see this culturally. You know, Theodore Del Rimple, 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, he identified a famous case uh who who was
3:52 the novelist? Lady Chatterly'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 and he thought of that as a although Dale Rimple is a free speech uh advocate he thought of that the victory of I can't remember who the author was actually a quite a renowned author the victory for his novel as the entry point of the pornographic 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. Because when I was very young, very young, let's say,
4:39 the most it was Playboy that broke the barrier fundamentally, right? That was Hugh Hefner. And Playboy was a relatively sophisticated magazine for a porn magazine. Most of the images of women were nudes, but not sexually explicit nudes, merely nudes. And there was a lot of uh journalism in Playboy and some very good writing. And Hefner kind of model marketed that as well bohemian 1950s freedom and equality between men and women. the cool single person who had was willing to explore their sexuality in a creative manner and and that was Playboy. And of
5:26 course that empire lasted for quite a long time. But then after Playboy came Penthouse and Penthouse was much more sexually graphic um 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. 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. 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
6:11 and socially incompetent men to share sexually graphic images. I mean the whole internet was driven at we know what a third to 40% of the traffic on the internet is pornograph pornographic still and so it was an incredible um 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 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, machavelian, sadistic criminals and we can't hold them accountable. It's really bad. It's really bad. Okay. So now, but we can
6:57 hold those who are distributing it accountable. Well, okay. Can we absolutely can? Who are these people? Well, 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 again, free, you just like there wasn't even an RU18 clickthrough button at the beginning of 2020 where any seven-year-old could just click right through, end up on the homepage of Pornhub or X videos for free. And what they're seeing on the homepage is not your father's playboy, right? It's not the images that you were describing. It is, you know, there was a a study done that was published in the British Journal of Criminology, and they
7:43 analyzed the homepages of these sites. And when you get on to Pornhub, there's about 50 videos that you will see that they if you scroll over, they autoplay. And these are these homemade userenerated videos. And they found that one in eight of those videos was displaying sexual violence. Um, you know, videos that would include non-consent, um, incest. And I think that is just so alarming that that is the reality that we're living in today. Well, exposure also desensitizes, right? So, if you're a therapist and you want to reduce the anxiety that someone feels, um, well, I can give you an example. I had a client one time who, uh, was a vegetarian and,
8:32 uh, but this person was a vegetarian because they were really terrified of life and of death and couldn't go into a grocery store. And so one of the because of the of the displays of meat and uh one of the things that I did was bring them to a store 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. Actually, they become braver. But fundamentally, you could say as well that their anxiety levels decrease. And so the revulsion that young people would
9:20 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. And it's 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. Women seem to prefer literary pornography. Although there are many, many, you know, it's increasing the number of girls. Do you know what the proportion is by any chance? No, I don't know that exact proportion. I do know it's still boys primarily that are uh
10:06 primarily being exposed, but girls as well are consuming uh this kind of content at very young ages as well. Yeah. Well, curiosity is going to drive that to some degree, right? There's a great book by the Google engineers called A Billion Wicked Thoughts. Do you know that book? No, I don't. Oh, that's 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. Um, 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. And we also don't know exactly what that's
10:51 doing to the relationships between young men and young women sexually and otherwise. Right? 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 um 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. The birth rate has absolutely plummeted and we have no idea what the connection is between that and the very
11:36 straightforward and simple sexual gratification that's available online. 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. [Music]
