503. One Woman’s War on P*rnhub | Laila Mickelwait
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Hey, everybody. So I had the great privilege today of doing a live discussion with Lila Micklewaite, who is one of the most compelling and the bravest people I've ever met.

And I don't say that lightly. Lila has been waging one-woman war, 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. 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 years.

For about as long as she's been making them, I believe. About four years. 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. 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 phenomenon.

occurrence and enterprise. 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. 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. 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.

Lila, 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. 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. 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? Sure, absolutely. Well, I've been combating the injustice of sex trafficking now for the last 18 years. And about

I'll say 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. 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. Well, a handful- It's a Canadian company, isn't it? Well, they're headquarters

Quarters is in Canada, in Montreal, actually. And this company is called, or was called until last year, MindGeek.

And now we named 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. And most people would have heard that name before because, you know, when 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. When this began in 2020, Pornhub was the largest and most popular porn site in the world. They had, at the height of 2020 and December, this was kind of the height of this website, they had 170 million visits per day. They had 62 billion visits to that site every

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. So 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,

In December of 2020, it was the fifth most trafficked website in the world. Not just porn site, website. Trafficked? Yes, meaning visits. Okay, yes, sorry, of course. 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.

And to understand this- - Tube sites. - 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. 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.

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, 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.

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.

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. 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. 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." We're assuming that this is all vetted content, but I had that question haunting me and so I had an idea. Well, who can vet 169 years of content? Exactly.

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. 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. 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. 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 a non-consenting adult or when it's even filmed consensually and uploaded non-consensually, there's a spectrum of abuse. Absolutely.

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 is generated for MindGeek, ILO, off of... How do you spell ILO? A-Y-L-O. ILO. 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, 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 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 how this content was getting uploaded, but why it was getting uploaded. And again, it's the business model of free user-generated porn. 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?

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 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 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?

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 reasonable evidence that the same thing applies to pornography use online, is that maybe it starts out with relatively vanilla content.

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. And so you can also see this culturally. 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. 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. And he thought of that as a, although Dale Ripple 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 of

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. 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. 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 journalism in Playboy and some very good writing. And Hefner kind of marketed that as porn.

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 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 and socially incompetent men to share sexually graphic images. I mean, the whole Internet was driven. We know what a third to 40 percent of the traffic on the Internet is pornographic still. And so it was an incredible thing.

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, Machiavellian, sadistic criminals. And we can't hold them accountable. It's really bad. It's really bad.

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Okay, so now... But we can hold those who are distributing it accountable. Well, okay. Can we? Yes, we absolutely can. 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,

Again, free. 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. And what they're seeing on the homepage is not your father's Playboy, right? It's not the images that you were describing. Right.

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. 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, 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. 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 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 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 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 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 in 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 only.

primarily that are primarily being exposed, but girls as well are consuming this kind of content at very young ages as well. 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. 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.

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 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. There's a tremendously high rate of virginity now in Japan. I think it's something like 30% of Japanese women

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 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. And so it's, is it cataclysmic? Probably, probably. It's an insanely powerful technology. 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. They're women machine hybrids because no woman can be in a million rooms at the same time. 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. And it's also...

very possible for young women to monetize their beauty.

right? 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. 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. So why don't you tell me about that? Because I

I'm very curious to see if that's actually the case. 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. That's not, you know, 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 that

Let's just take MindGeek and Pornhub. 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 we can also hold all of these companies accountable and not just Pornhub. But 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. 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. 10 moderators working at a time. They were viewing, they were reprimanded if they viewed less than 700 videos per eight hour shift.

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. 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 PornTube sites. They had 10 sites.

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. You know, 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,

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 why do they need more content if there's 169 years like i mean this is one of the things that's that i find mysterious about the porn business as a whole i i don't understand how it can be monetized because

The internet is absolutely flooded with porn and it's free. So like, where's, what's the business? Well, it'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

real rape ad-free. They were selling pay-to-download content, which was a small portion of the content on Pornhub. But there's many examples of victims even in that pay-to-download content. 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.

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. 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. 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 of the internet. 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. And these victims, they call it the immortalization of their trauma. Right, right, right. 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. Yeah, well, that's that machine-human hybrid issue popping up because it's far more than... For victims. Yeah, for victims, exactly. 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. 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 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

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, 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

These are those intentional policy decisions that I'm talking about. And so these victims, you know, 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. You know, we know now that this is actually a life and death issue for victims. The stakes are so high because, you know, surveys are showing that victims

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. 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. 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. 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. They've lost Visa, MasterCard, and Discover, have cut them off completely after a huge multi-year battle for that to happen. 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 transaction. Was that your doing? 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.

Lawyers, journalists, most of all survivors who've come forward to courageously tell their stories. And how did you get the credit card companies on board? 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 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. 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, 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. 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.

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 was moved by that article in The New York Times. And he actually contacted Ajay Banga and said, you need to do the right thing here. And he helped at that point all the way for the next two years.

You know, he actually got him and I onto Squawk Box on CNBC to call out Al Kelly by name and, you know, say, why are you continuing to have to stop? And actually, what was your rationale?

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Well, from Visa and the credit card companies for participating in this. Well, they kind of had this attitude of we're very, very concerned. Yeah. You know, we're we hate trafficking as much as you do. Blah, blah, blah. That seems unlikely, given that you've devoted your life to it. 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. 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. When they had evidence that this was not legal and consensual material, that so much of it, the site was actually infested 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. 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 and

Bill Ackman coming in and helping us put on the pressure 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. So how are they being funded now?

Cryptocurrency and bank wires is how they're currently monetizing their content, but holding them accountable. That's one way. Courageous victims are suing almost 300 victims in 25 lawsuits across the US, Canada, and the UK.

multiple or class action lawsuits on behalf of tens of thousands of child victims. So they're holding them accountable that way. 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 been

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. And I know that there are states in the U.S. that have

instituted more rigorous age check rules and Pornhub vociferously objected to that, but that wasn't helpful. And so, but I presume that the money is still pouring in like mad, although perhaps not as much. - 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. It's to increase the risk sufficiently and eliminate the profitability. 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? 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. Why? Well, he had ulterior motives. Yeah.

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. And he kind of exploded this idea of free porn onto the global scene. And he made Pornhub 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 and doing these campaigns around the world. They spent

They spent millions of dollars promoting this image of themselves as this mainstream legit brand. 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 and

All of these things that they would do and they would make massive PR campaigns. So he was kind of behind that, but he came forward and he revealed the man he sold the company to. He said his name is Bernd Bergmayer.

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. And now he's being sued personally. So it's not just the company that's being sued. Burned? Burned Bergmer. 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. Anybody being criminally charged in the executive suite? Not yet. Not yet. But they should be. And not just in the U.S. Like here in Canada. Section, what's it, 631.1 of the criminal code in Canada makes it illegal to transcribe

transmit, possess, advertise child pornography, child sexual abuse material. 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. Yeah, but it's not being enforced. It's not being enforced. And that's the question, is why? Why? Why can't we enforce this? I think maybe it's because people...

You know, I'll tell you a little story. So I was ill for a long time. The first podcast I did when I sort of came back, I was still in pretty rough shape, was with Abigail Schreier, who wrote a book called Irreversible Damage. And Michael Schellenberger, who's a pretty good journalist in the U.S., 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.

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. 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. The only thing I can compare it to is the accounts that I've read of what happened in Unit 731 in Chicago.

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

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. And so who the hell wants to poke their nose into that? And so...

What do we do? We swallow a camel and strain it a gnat, right, to use the biblical illusion. And we won't look and see what's actually happening. We won't see what's happening to our kids. 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. 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. 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. That's why I think it has to come by force, right? It's not going to come voluntarily. 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. It's not...

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, 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. And I'm afraid, and I think with good reason, that the anonymity of the net 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. We're not holding them to account. In fact, they're being monetized and promoted. 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. That's exactly where it's

It's removing the anonymity from those who are uploading, and it's also removing that from those who are in the videos. Okay, so let's delve into that a little bit, because I've thought about that. So I've fulminated against...

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. 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, because while 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 whistle-blowing anonymous hero, there's 9,999 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 to take an image of your driver's license and upload that? 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. So let's say we have something like a reliable digital ID.

But 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. It's like the eye of Sauron, right, because that's actually a symbol of a totalitarian state, an all-seeing totalitarian state. And so, you know, I don't see...

in some way how this problem is tractable because the solution, 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. For porn, for porn, if you're going, I'm not talking about talking on the internet. Yeah. We're talking about uploading real sex videos. Yeah. How would you verify? How would you verify? So they have, 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. And then delete that information immediately once they're age verified, right? And so ID verified, age verified. And that also takes care of some of the consent issue because if you're presenting an ID, right?

of 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. So is that for the people who upload and the people in the videos? The people who upload and every single individual and every, and this is not like a novel idea. So we've had a law called USC 2257 in the United States since 1988. Okay.

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. 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 concept.

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. 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. - So you think the technology and the legal solutions are already in place, they're just not being enforced? - 100%, they're not being enforced because the incentive of these companies is to not want to put any restrictions

They don't want friction in uploading because they're going to get less content. Less content means less Google searches. - Well, they're also going to have to take a look at their own behavior. - Well, yes, but they're heavily resistant and that's why it has to be government legislation that requires that. - How come they're still alive?

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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. It's pain and discomfort and all of those things in the midst of seeing progress that makes it totally normal.

Worth it. 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? Sex trafficking as a whole. Okay, so tell us the story. Tell us the story. Sure. Yeah, so, yeah, it was...

Let's see, in 2006, I was influenced by my father. So you're 26 at that point, about 25, 26. Is that right? I have to do the math. I'm 41. Yeah, and that's 15, 18 years ago. 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 he was just so—

attuned to suffering. He cared about... What did your dad do? He was a vascular and general surgeon. So he grew up in Jordan and Amman, and he came to the United States. He went to England, India, and then here, and he became a surgeon. But, you know, he was not the kind of man that would watch entertainment. Like, you just don't see that with my father. He was watching the History Channel. He was watching the news. He was...

you know, very focused on human rights issues. And that's how we bonded most when I was young is to kind of discuss these things. And so he kind of instilled that in me and my sisters from a young age. And I kind of went off

In search of, you know, many different things, I kind of went off, I guess you'd say, went off track in my life for a while, but came back around to this. Went off track in what way? 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. Why did that work out?

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, you know, live this glamorous, star-studded life was kind of this dream I had for a few years. And I got involved in that scene and I ended up finding it very hollow. I, you know, was...

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 parties in Hollywood. What was that like for you to be there? 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...

Was it 19, maybe 20, 21? Oh, yeah, so pretty young. Yeah. Right, so you would think that. Yeah. And so why did you stop thinking that? So I kind of hit a real low point in my life. Why? Kind of a crash and burn. Why? Well... Sorry, but it's important because it's necessary to know why you're doing this. Yeah. Well, I kind of came to the end of myself. I was...

partying and you know, I was even you know doing drugs. Yeah, and I ended up being groped and uh-huh Found myself, you know on the floor of a room a dirty carpet that smelled like vomit right? Not really knowing even what happened the night before. Oh, yeah, and it was just like I hit a real low point in my life right the shadow side of cool hedonism

Yeah. 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. And at that time,

I was searching. I was very depressed. How old were you when this happened? 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. 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. What was the picture like? I'll describe it to you. Yeah.

But, you know, 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 going to do with my life. And I drew a picture that night. 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. 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. Oh yeah. 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 piss swallow me up. And it was an actual description of the picture that I just drew.

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? Because the lotus comes up from the darkness, and then it blooms, and then the Buddha sits in the middle. And there are rose images, for example, in stained glass, and the rose is a symbol of the Holy Ghost. And so flowers are a very common symbol of the unfolding of the soul, right? And you said that

The flower you drew was 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. 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 humanity.

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. And so that image, you said it was a hole with a flower in it and water pouring down. Threatening to drown the flower, yeah. Right, right. Well, you see, in the story of Noah's flood, what happens, of course, is that

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? 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?

right? Because water is a place of possibility, but also a place where you can drown. 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. Yeah, and then I read this verse that was a description. Why do you think you were inclined to open the Bible at that point? Had you had anything to do with that? Yeah, I mean, I grew up in my, you know, again, the example of my father, you know, he's a

I grew up in a Christian home where, you know, this was kind of in my background. I had 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 overwhelming sense of there's someone here. There's someone.

something bigger than me that's right here in my darkest moment with me that knows what's happening. And 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. 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, 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 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 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 and

Yeah, too bad for you. 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. Why? 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. Oh, yeah. It really opened my eyes. It

It helped me kind of develop spiritually. I began to understand where true happiness was going to come from. Yeah. Where true purpose— What did you understand? That it was in service. It stopped looking inward with your selfish ambitions and all of those things that you want to do. So, you know, technically, you can group words together to see if they're replaceable in their meaning. Yeah.

Right? So anxious and fearful, for example, they're synonyms. They're quite similar. You could replace them. Miserable and self-consciousness. 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. You can't distinguish them statistically.

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. 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. And along with that goes a sense of higher purpose and an orientation that isn't chaotic and, and

And what would you say, intimidating to the point of drowning and that also produces hope. So you figured that out. I think it's when you're kind of articulating what I haven't articulated about that moment in my life and that moment.

kind of season of time. But yeah, I realized that... When did you get married? Kind of oriented... When I was, let's see, 27, I believe I was 27. And how many children do you have? I have two. I have a son and a daughter, a four-year-old and a seven-year-old. Right. That makes you smile. Yes. That's good. Yeah. They are just the best thing I've ever done in my life. I mean...

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. 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. He had a huge influence on my life. Yeah, 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? No, I had no idea. That's how profound the biological effect of not having a father is, because that helps them attract men, and that's quite a high price to pay.

I was so blessed. I mean, he was just, and he passed suddenly in 2014. 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, right?

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. 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. Why do you think that caught your attention, that particular documentary and that particular type of crime?

Why did they think that grabbed you? Because this is an important thing, because, you know, you're telling a story about how your conscience and your calling 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. Why do you think that crime in particular attracted your attention?

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That's a, it's a really good question. Why did that particularly arrest my attention? Yeah, yeah, yeah. I think it was a combination of kind of the innocence. It was about child sex trafficking. Yeah. And how I felt like it was almost the kind of worst. Yeah, it's the heart of darkness. Thing that you could do. 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? 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? 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. 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. 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. It's a Latin, insterquillinus inventur, 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? Is that 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. You stumbled across a crime that you couldn't conceive of a worse crime. Yeah. 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—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 you you know, you had your father's influence in principle? You you might have been more sensible than that. I mean, that's not a personal insult. Young people do all sorts of stupid things. But why do you think I kind of came into it? I was an acrobat when I was a teenager.

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. 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. She was amazing at the ribbon. And she...

invited me to jump on the trampoline in Jimmy Kimmel's Man Show. So I 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 Man Show. And that's kind of where I kind of just started to meet different people and ended up

Getting involved in that scene, that's kind of what happens.

of the dark forces that lurk behind the scenes, right? 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. Well, I mean, for an acrobat at the time, Cirque du Soleil was kind of like the Olympians.

Oh yeah, definitely. I mean, they actually didn't have acrobatics in the Olympics at the time. So, like, the best thing you could do as an acrobat was to try out for and get accepted to Cirque du Soleil. Yeah, right. It's the highest quality possible circus. It is. It's beautiful. Yeah, yeah, definitely. And I, you know, so anyway, that was the trajectory into Hollywood. Right, right. Yeah, and so that's exactly how it happened.

But...

Let me, maybe we can wrap our discussion up, although prematurely, unfortunately. 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?

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. So you think it's an enforcement? 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, you know, 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. So at least to begin with, we could enforce the laws that we already have. Yes. And as far as new laws to address this, I mean, we have issues with non-consensual image-based abuse, so revenge porn laws, those could be strengthened, I think. 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 deep fakes where you're superimposing somebody's face onto a pornographic image. 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 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. 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

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 policy.

of every individual and every single video. And when they do that, it takes place instantly. It takes place globally. 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. 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. 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.

The worst thing they could do was delete content. They deleted 91 percent of the site because they were afraid of permanently losing the credit card companies. 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.

Okay, and what can people do who are watching and listening to aid in this endeavor? Is there anything specifically? Well, specifically, I mean, they can follow what's going on. What's your handle on Twitter? Lila McElwain. Spell it. 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.

That, you know, when somebody on social media shares a post, when they, you know, it may be, it feels like a minor thing to do, or maybe it feel like an insignificant thing to do.

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But it is, that is so precious to me. And I've seen the impact of that. When you have shared my posts, 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. And yes, it was getting more awareness, but also victims were coming forward who are now pursuing litigation. Whistleblowers from the company came forward with

such important information that's now enabling us to hold them accountable. So there's real tangible impact. So as minors, it may seem for people to just like and share something, like 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. Tell us about the petition again. TraffickingHubPetition.com. 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. 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. I mean, it is packed full of evidence. When they read that, it's a story. 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. 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. 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. 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, 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 and

Those are some actual steps. 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. 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.

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