Latest / Imagine If with Doone Roisin | Health, Wealth & Wisdom for Women (formerly Female Startup Club Podcast) / “No One Screws More Prostitutes Than The Government!” w/ Cindy Gallop, Founder of MakeLoveNotPorn

Transcript

“No One Screws More Prostitutes Than The Government!” w/ Cindy Gallop, Founder of MakeLoveNotPorn · Imagine If with Doone Roisin | Health, Wealth & Wisdom for Women (formerly Female Startup Club Podcast)

• 0:00
  Let's take this show on the road. Imagine a world where gender equality is the norm and women have equal access to the same financial opportunities regardless of our personal circumstances. Hi, I'm Dune, founder of Female Startup Club and your personal hype girl. This is the pod for you. If you're starting a side hustle,
• 0:20
  scaling your biz or looking for inspo. We cover venture capital, personal finance, selling your biz and keeping your mental health in check from entrepreneurs like Refinery29's co-founder Piera Gelati and Ju Ru, who sold Hero Cosmetics for $650 million. Slide into my DMs if there's a question you want answered and let's get into today's episode.
• 1:02
  Welcome back to the podcast. It's Dune here, your host and hype girl. I am so chuffed to be speaking with Cindy Gallop today. She is the visionary founder of Make Love Not Porn and a fierce advocate for sex positivity and gender equality that I have become such a hype girl of online.
• 1:24
  Cindy is out there challenging societal norms and very loudly sharing her views on the state of the world, especially when it comes to women. And she is currently in the middle of a fundraise for Make Love Not Porn. And we will be getting into that a little bit deeper into the episode. I invested in the business. I'm so excited. It's alongside amazing, brilliant women like American activist Jamila Jamil.
• 1:54
  Yeah, we're going to circle back to that, but Cindy, hi, welcome to the show. Dune, thrilled to be here. Me too. I am actually thrilled to be here. How's your day been? Oh, good. It's been pretty busy, but it's been good. And by the way, the weather has been blissful in New York. That's been really nice as well. It's unbelievably warm here at the moment.
• 2:15
  Oh, like what are we talking? 78 degrees, which is a shocker for like late October. Well, I love that for you. Yeah, I feel like it's usually getting pretty chilly around this time. Yeah, well, we're reversed, obviously, in terms of where we are. So, yeah. Yeah, we're reversed. I'm having like the most beautiful summer starting days that are just, you know, blue skies and beautiful ocean swims. Fabulous.
• 2:41
  Okay, well, where do you like to start your story? I kind of want to go back to pre-Make Love Not Porn. I want to go back to Cindy Gallop as a girl. What was she up to? What was she doing in the world? What was making Cindy kind of get to this point? Sure. I want to go rewind. Sure. Well, so I am half English, half Malaysian Chinese. My father was English. He passed away a few years ago. My mother is Malaysian Chinese.
• 3:10
  And I was born in the UK. When I was six, we moved to Brunei in Borneo. And so I grew up in Asia because my father got a job there and traveled around Asia and then went back to the UK for boarding school and then university. I read English literature at Oxford University at Somerville College. But that was actually where I fell madly in love with theater because Oxford has a very thriving student drama scene
• 3:38
  And, you know, I just flung myself into it, did everything, wrote, directed, stage managed and decided, as you do when you're in your late teens, this is all I want to do for the rest of my life. But I knew I wasn't good enough to be an actress or director, as a lot of my friends in the theatre scene wanted to.
• 3:57
  But I used to draw a lot when I was younger. And so I got sucked into designing theater posters, my friends' shows. And from there, I got sucked into selling their shows and promoting them for them. And I really enjoyed doing that. So I became a theater marketing and publicity officer at various theaters in the UK. I did that for several years until I eventually got completely fed up with working 24-7 and earning chicken feed, which is what theater is.
• 4:26
  And at the time, I was the marketing officer for the Everyman Theatre in Liverpool. And part of my job was giving talks about the theatre. So I gave a talk to a group of women in Liverpool. And afterwards, one of them came up to me and she said, young lady, you could sell a fridge to an Eskimo.
• 4:45
  And I thought, that is the universe telling me something. Time to sell out, go into advertising. And so I did. And so I made the switch to advertising. This was in London in the late eighties and worked at a number of different agencies. And then in 1989, I fetched up at an agency called Bartle Bogle Hegarty, BBH. And soon after I arrived, I went, this place is pretty special. I think I'll stay here for a while. I had no idea what to end up being 16 years.
• 5:14
  And so I worked for BBH in London around big global pieces of business, Coca-Cola, Raybaud, Polaroid. I moved to Singapore in 96 to help start up and run BBH Asia Pacific. And I'm here in New York because in 1998, I moved to New York to start up BBH US, which began as me in a room with a phone.
• 5:34
  on my own, starting an advertising agency in the world's toughest advertising marketplace, but it ended up going pretty well. And so I ran the agency for a number of years until I left the corporate world and struck out working for myself.
• 5:50
  Okay, well, I have so many questions just in this part of the advertising chapter. I saw one of the campaigns or the posters that you worked on on your Instagram a couple days ago, which I absolutely loved. And it said, no one screws prostitutes more than the government.
• 6:06
  And I was like, I love a bold statement like this. Can you talk about that campaign and those kinds of campaigns that you were working on and, you know, the impact of something like that? Sure. And in fact, I was delighted. I must admit, you know, the campaign you're talking about is 31 years ago. And I'd completely forgotten about it until somebody tagged me on Twitter because she was talking about an exhibition that the Welcome Collective in London was holding
• 6:33
  which was to do with labor generally, which included sex workers. And she included a photo of this campaign. And then she obviously looked it up and then she said, why am I not surprised that Cindy Gallow was the account manager on that back in my life? So actually, that campaign was the idea of a wonderful, you know, young woman I worked with back in the day when we were all young, Rachel Carroll. She was a creator of BBH and she...
• 7:00
  brought the idea of decriminalising prostitution, lobbying for the initial collective prostitutes to the agency. And so we did this as a pro bono campaign, as agencies do. You give your time free to good causes. And we all thought, I mean, John Hegarty, my ex-boss, that this was a really, really important cause. And so we created a campaign which was posters of,
• 7:24
  Deliberately designed to look like our agency was based in Soho in London, which was very much, you know, back in the day, the red light district. And so the posters were deliberately designed in garish colours to look like, again, this is very back in the day, but, you know, all those stickers with sex workers numbers, um,
• 7:45
  you know, on the phone booths, et cetera. And it was just something that, A, we felt passionate, but B, it was an interesting demonstration of, you know, this is a bit of a bugbear of mine, because the creativity of the advertising world is so deployable in many other contexts. And I say that, June, because in my industry, we don't get enough credit for what we have to be good at to be good at what we do.
• 8:14
  Because advertising is, you know, like number two after, you know, car salesmen in the public's esteem. I think there's some stat about that. But to be good at your job in advertising, you have to be a master of human psychology. You have to have real depths of consumer insight. You have to be enormously creative.
• 8:35
  And actually, I do say that I have the best possible background for what I do now, because I explain that, you know, when I say I've spent 39 years working advertising, I've spent 39 years working in the business of getting people to do things that they actually had no intention of doing. And that's a very useful skill in any capacity.
• 8:56
  Yes, absolutely. You make people stop in their tracks through language, through colour. Yeah, and it's rallying people. It's creating a movement. What was the impact of that campaign? And what did that campaign inspire you to kind of go from there after working on things like that? Well, you know, unfortunately, and again, bear in mind, this is 31 years ago.
• 9:23
  So we didn't have, as you do today, all of the lobbying possibilities of social media. You know, if we had done that campaign, you know, in this time, it would be very different. So it did not have the impact on the government we were hoping. You know, I mean, it got a lot of press coverage, but that's about the most you could communicate the message. But honestly, you know, what my advertising career absolutely made me believe in was that the future is all about doing good and making money simultaneously. Right.
• 9:54
  You know, I decided coming out the other end of my corporate advertising days that I want to live in a world where the way it works is the more good you do, the more money you make, the more money you make, the more good you do. And I very much designed my startups around that philosophy, which I continue to talk about right to the present moment, because that is what I would like the future of all business to be.
• 10:21
  Oh, yeah. Cindy, you're speaking my language. For everyone listening, we were talking just off the camera here before we started or before we hit record around, you know, building businesses for good and the intersection of capitalism and activism meetings so people can create a better world and be pursuing these big, juicy problems that need to be solved and that light us up and do cool stuff, but get...
• 10:50
  the monetary reward that you need to put passion and energy into something pre-burnout? And there are a couple of reasons why I really focus in on this, Dune. The first is, you know, over the years, I've talked to a number of entrepreneurs, especially, unfortunately in this context, female founders.
• 11:12
  OK, so the sat-minded and they've gone, so Cindy, I have this vision to change the world. And so I'm going to start a nonprofit. And I go, no, don't do that. And I explain that nonprofits get marginalized. If you really want to change the world, the way you do it is proving that by changing the world, you can make an absolute goddamn fucking shit ton of money. Because that's what gets you taken seriously. And that is what makes other people look at you and go, fuck me, got to do it like that.
• 11:42
  And the second reason is I've been saying precisely that for years to women. I go, I want you to unashamedly and unembarrassedly set out to make an absolute goddamn fucking shit ton of money. And I explain that I'm deliberately articulated by that because that is how much money I want us all to make. And the reason for that is not just for you yourself. Obviously, I'd love that. But because when we make that kind of money, we can use that money to fund other women.
• 12:13
  to support other women, to help other women, to donate to other women. We need to build our own financial ecosystem because the white male one isn't working for us. I am here with you. I am absolutely of the same train of thought. I believe that if we
• 12:32
  are going to change women's economic power, we need to build and create new systems because the systems are not working, as we see time and time again when we look at the...
• 12:46
  below par stats of, you know, funding women or whatever the gaps are. There are all the gaps across bloody everywhere these days. Well, not even these days, all days. And, yeah, it's so interesting and complex to break it down. But at the end of the day, we need our own financial independence, economic power separate from anyone else to be able to create new systems. And that is obviously a big long-term issue.
• 13:13
  change that needs to happen in the world. But I agree. We do that with profitable, epic businesses that make money
• 13:22
  and make us all wealthy so we can continue to change the world, i.e. Melinda Gates. Love what she's doing. Melinda French Gates, sorry. Okay, I got off track there. Where do I want to come back to? I want to come back to you kind of going through your advertising career, doing some amazing campaigns, realizing that you need to go out on your own and build wealth, help change the
• 13:47
  What was the design or the thinking of make love, not porn? What was that moment of transition for you? So first of all, I didn't leave the advertising world to do that. I had no idea what I was going to do when I left. And the key thing is that everything in my life and career has always happened by accident. I have never consciously, intentionally planned anything. My ex-boss at BBH, John Hegarty, has this wonderful mantra
• 14:17
  do interesting things and interesting things will happen to you. And I'm a great believer in that philosophy. So make love at porn itself was a complete and total accident because I did not set out to do what I very bizarrely find myself doing now. It came about because I date younger men. They tend to be in their 20s. And 16, 17 years ago, long before anybody else was talking about this,
• 14:43
  I began realizing through my direct personal experience of dating young men that when we don't talk openly and honestly about sex, porn becomes sex education by default in not a good way. Now, I'm a naturally action-oriented person. So when I realized this, I went, wow, you know, if I'm experiencing this, other people must be as well. I didn't know that because, as I say, all those years ago, no one talked about this. No one wrote about it. So I just went, right, I'm going to do something about this.
• 15:13
  So 15 years ago, pure side venture, I put up on No Money a tiny clunky website at makelovenotporn.com that in its original iteration was kind of a public service announcement. Porn world versus real world. Here's what happens in the porn world. Here's what really happens in the real world. I launched Make Love Not Porn at the TED conference in 2009. I became the only TED speaker to say the words, come on my face on the TED stage.
• 15:42
  The talk went viral as a result, and it drove this extraordinary global response to my tiny website that I had never anticipated. Thousands of people wrote to me from all around the world, young and old, male and female, straight and gay.
• 15:59
  pouring their hearts out, telling me things about their sex lives and their porn watching habits they'd never told anyone before. And I realized I'd uncovered a huge global social issue. And so that was the point at which I went, oh my God, I now have a personal responsibility. I have to take Make Love Not Porn forwards in a way that will make it much more far-reaching, helpful, and effective. And so that was when I turned into a business,
• 16:29
  And so today we are the world's first and only user-generated and importantly 100% human-curated social sex video sharing platform. So we're kind of what Facebook would be if it allowed you to openly, healthily, sexually self-express, which it clearly does not. The way to think about us is if porn is the Hollywood blockbuster movie, Make Love Not Porn is the badly needed documentary.
• 16:57
  We are a unique window onto the funny, messy, loving, wonderful sex we all have in the real world. And what we're doing is we are socializing, normalizing and destigmatizing sex, bringing it out of the shadows into the sunlight to promote consent, communication, good sexual values and behavior. We are literally sex education through real world demonstrations.
• 17:21
  Thank God for you. Okay, I have many questions. How do you market? How do you bring people in that are men? I feel like to me it sounds like...
• 17:34
  women are just probably more likely to be like, yes, amazing. No, not at all. More men. Wow. So here's what's really interesting, Dune. So I designed MakeLoveNotPorn to be fully diverse and inclusive, and we are. Our members and our contributors, who we call out MakeLoveNotPorn stars, are all ages 18 to 18, literally, all racist ethnicities over a global platform,
• 18:00
  Male, female, trans, non-binary, straight, LGBTQ, asexual. But in the 11 years we've operated as a business, we've discovered that make love not porn is especially a revelation to men who are, in fact, the majority of our members. I mean, not by much, but it skews more male than female.
• 18:20
  And that is because we are something utterly unique that men will find nowhere else on the internet, which is a safe space where men can be and watch other men being open, emotional and vulnerable around sex. You would not believe the number of men who write to us regularly and say, I just watched my first video of Make Love Not Porn and afterwards I cried.
• 18:45
  I've said for years, I wish society understood the opposite of what it thinks is true. Women enjoy sex just as much as men, and men are just as romantic as women.
• 18:58
  Yet neither gender is allowed to openly celebrate either of those facts. We would all be better off if they were. I put up a wonderful Twitter exchange a while back between two men. The first man had tweeted, as a joke, obviously, hey guys, got this really weird fetish. I've got this kink where I want to watch porn where people are honest, loving, loyal, decent, and really like each other. Hit me up with your hoddle slinks, please.
• 19:23
  And another man replied and said, there's this website called Make Love Not Porn where you can watch real couples making love. He said, I watched a video where the woman said to her man, I love you, while they're making love. He said sincerely, I cried when I heard that. We are one of the solutions to toxic masculinity.
• 19:44
  Oh my gosh, that is so amazing. I also think I was talking to a friend of mine. Well, actually, she's one of the Techstars cohort founders. You might have heard of her, Jenny Rudd. She manages something called the Investment Gap in New Zealand and collects all the data from the VC funds to kind of, she's the only person doing the kind of data and reporting in New Zealand on the Investment Gap. But we were talking about
• 20:11
  for the world to change, we need to, like, as a society, allow and encourage men to be emotionally vulnerable, to not tell men to hide their emotions, which seems so just, of course that would be the way, but...
• 20:27
  It's not. And having more vulnerability showing through and for men to be able to say these kinds of things that they also want and need and want to share and express. And, you know, society is pushing them down. Yep. And also what is great about our impact, June, because as a unique business, Make Love Not Porn has this unique capability to change people's sexual attitudes and behavior for the better.
• 20:56
  Because ultimately, our mission at Make Love Not Porn is to help end rape culture globally. And that may sound like a very big mission, but we have 11 years of proof of concept at the micro level. We help end rape culture by doing something very simple that nevertheless nobody else anywhere on the Internet is doing. We end rape culture by showing you how wonderful people.
• 21:19
  Great consensual communicative sexism in the real world. Our social sex videos role model good sexual values and good sexual behavior. And here's the key point. We make all of that aspirational versus what you see in porn and popular culture. One man left a comment saying, this video makes me want to be a better man in the bedroom and in life.
• 21:42
  We can do that. Oh, I love that. So how do you market? Because obviously, you know, platforms like Meta are a challenge. Yep. What's the funnel?
• 21:53
  So the answer is with extreme difficulty. And I will just for our audience's benefit, make them aware that the one thing I didn't realize when we embarked on this venture was that I and my tiny team would fight a battle every single day, not even to grow Make Love Not Porn, just to keep it alive. Basically, because every piece of business infrastructure, any other startup gets to take for granted, we can't. The small print always says no adult content.
• 22:19
  And that's all pervasive across every area of the business. I can't get funded. I couldn't get banked. I can't use PayPal. I can't use Stripe. We're banned from advertising. So first of all, our growth over the past seven years has been organic. It's been driven by media coverage and by organic search. And by the way, you know, the infuriating thing about not being allowed to advertise, I mean, for example, we're banned from doing paid search ads on Google.
• 22:46
  is that every day all around the world, people search for Make Love Not Porn without knowing that we exist. And what I mean by that is top organic search systems that send traffic to us are Make Love Not Porn, Real Sex Not Porn, Video Sex Zone Now Porno, Make Love Not Porn, where they don't know there's a company called that. One young man told me that he found us when he Googled porn that is not porn.
• 23:11
  He was so fed up with everything out there. One is something different. No idea what to search for. Unfortunately, when you search porn that is not porn, you find Make Love Not Porn. That is how much the world wants what we are, the documentary to porn's horror movie and knows it needs us. It's crazy because actually, yeah, what you're saying is there's so much demand. There is the solution, but these are not easily connected. And it's like...
• 23:37
  We should be lobbying the government to change the rules. Well, also, so I'm a great believer, Dune, that when you have a truly world-changing startup, you have to change the world to fit it, not the other way around. And so when the ecosystem that is meant to enable you to scale and thrive refuses to allow you in, build your own ecosystem. And so that's what I'm doing right now.
• 24:04
  So I have a product roadmap, MakeLoveNotPorn, that is focused on building solutions for my own problems, building the infrastructure I need, but using it to everybody else as well. Because every business obstacle I encounter is a huge disruptive business opportunity itself. So the core business is MakeLoveNotPorn, which is sex tech. And around that, I have a roadmap in sequence with an ed tech, a fintech,
• 24:32
  an ad tech and an AI product. So first of all, and this does actually answer your question about how we promote ourselves. So we, earlier this year, launched our first ever equity crowdfunding campaign. And it's our first ever because historically, like every other piece of infrastructure, crowdfunding platforms would not touch us with a large problem.
• 24:56
  The only reason we were able to is because the wonderful actress, Jamila Jamil, who is a big fan of Make Love Not Porn, interviewed me on her podcast, proposed that she lead an equity crowdfunding campaign as our lead investor and brought us to WeFunder. So we're targeting a million dollars. We're a third of the way there. But the funding we've raised so far has enabled us to start designing and building the EdTech product that I've had in the pipeline for 10 years because parents and teachers began begging me for this from day one of Make Love Not Porn.
• 25:26
  MakeLoveNotPorn.academy, the zero to 18 and beyond sex education expansion. And this is what I characterize as the Khan Academy of sex education, because Khan Academy, the online tutoring platform, tutors on every other topic under the sun except this one. Educational technology, edtech, it's exploding as a category all around the world, not in this area.
• 25:50
  So we are basically building the academy on the same principles of Make Love Not Porn, user-generated, crowdsourced, curated, revenue share, because I'm not about reinventing the wheel. This is an aggregation play. We are building the go-to global hub for the best of the world's sex education content. So we're in the process of building an MVP that we'll launch and then build in public.
• 26:16
  But we are inviting educators, and I use the term very broadly, sex educators, therapists, sexual health and wellness experts, podcasters, health professionals, to share with us their own content, you know, coursework materials, books, videos, comic strips, whatever it may be. Now, at the heart of everything we do lies human curation. As with Makeupon porn, human eyes will vet every single piece of content to make sure it's safe, we endorse it. And we will then publish all of this segmented by age appropriateness
• 26:45
  So if you're a parent freaking out going, oh, my God, my six-year-old just does this. What do I say? You know, we will give you age-appropriate tools and content to be able to have that conversation with a six-year-old. If you're a teacher of a class of 14-year-olds, age-appropriate teacher materials,
• 26:59
  If you're an adult, access all areas. All of these educators can sell their products off our platform. You know, we'll take a 10% commission. Because in 15 years of MakeLoveNotPorn, I've built up a huge network of educator friends all around the world who face all the same problems I do on Facebook, Instagram, TikTok. Their accounts get suspended. You know, they're banned for advertising.
• 27:22
  They can't even make a living doing this. And I want to change that because it's enormously valuable work. But I also designed the academy to be a growth engine for the core business. Because when you're 18 and over, you can graduate to sex education through real world demonstration. We can send the parents, teachers, adults straight there. So it's absolutely designed to power Make Love Not Porn in the absence of being able to advertise. And because this is educational, we will be able to advertise in many more places.
• 27:51
  But also, Dune, I'm out to prove concept. And what I mean by that is, I'm a great believer in communication through demonstration. Don't say it, be it and do it. So for years, people have said to me, you know, oh, Cindy, you know, you should go to schools. Makeup one should be on the curriculum. And I've always said, no, I shouldn't. Because anyone trying to bring sex ed into schools comes up against parent-teacher association, moral panic. But here's the thing.
• 28:20
  The people keeping sex ed out of schools don't know what it'd be like if they allowed it in. They just don't know really bad. In their heads, they have this abstract call. Solomon, Gamora, and Sue. When I can show you what doesn't exist anywhere in the world at the moment, the best of the world sex education content all in one place, you can see for yourself at a glance how brilliant, informative, educational, healthy, and non-threatening it is.
• 28:47
  And you can pick and choose according to age appropriateness, cultural sensibility, because we will have Christian sex ed, Jewish sex ed, Muslim sex ed. And importantly, you can pick and choose according to your own comfort level. You know, what's right for your family, your classroom, your school. That is when I believe I can get sex ed into schools. I'm building it outside the system to get it into the system. Oh, Cindy.
• 29:13
  I fucking love this. However, I can help you. If I can connect any dots, I feel like I've just written a few notes down of people that you need to meet that you probably already know or whatever. But I'm like, oh, my God, amazing. And I'm also just like, man, I would have loved this as a kid. I feel like I went to, you know what's funny? I went to actually some of all.
• 29:32
  Somerville House in Australia. Oh, great. So you went to Somerville College. And I was like, oh, that's funny. I'd gone to like public state schools most of my life and then I went for final, you know, grade 11 and 12, I went to boarding school. And it was such a shock because it was, you know, very rules focused and very strict and very...
• 29:54
  just not realistic, I think, of the real world. And sex education back then, different time. I'm like, man, I would want that now. Like I'm probably still not where I should be as a person because we don't have formative proper conversations as young children around sex ed. I mean, I'm sure it's different now, but yeah.
• 30:19
  Yeah, I'm like, yep, give it all to me. I want it. I want to see it. Excellent. You touched on something that I kind of wanted to shift gears into. And that's around the role of AI when we're thinking about kind of good versus bad, ethical versus unethical. We know that there's obviously ongoing and rising issues with deep fakes and cyber bullying and scamming and fraud and all the other things.
• 30:47
  How do we counter the kind of unethical of AI? And then how do we think about AI for good? I kind of want to go both sides to see what you're thinking. Sure. So there's a very simple answer to all of that, which is fund female founders. And I'm going to give you the results of why I say that.
• 31:06
  So we operate completely uniquely at MakeLoveNotPorn. And I want to contextualize that in the broader tech landscape as a whole, because the young white male founders of the giant tech platforms that dominate all our lives today, they are not the primary targets online or offline of harassment, abuse, sexual assault, violence, racism, intimate image abuse, rape.
• 31:30
  Therefore, they did not and they do not proactively design for the prevention of any of those things on their platforms. And we see the results of that around us every single day. Those of us who are most at risk every single day, women, black people, people of color, LGBTQ, people with disabilities, we design safe spaces and safe experiences, but we don't get funded. Only 1.7% of all venture capital last year went to female founders.
• 31:58
  And that is why we have still not seen what the future of the Internet and technology can be when it's designed and built for the female lens at scale. And I say that because I designed Make Love Not Porn through the female lens to be the safest place on the Internet. I designed around what everybody else should have. Nobody else did. Human curation. There's no self-publishing of anything.
• 32:18
  Our curators watch every video from beginning to end before we approve or reject and we publish it. We review every post and every member profile, every comment, every video before we approve or reject and we publish it. No one else does that, by the way. We can vouch for every piece of content on our platform. And the key point about that, Dune, is that we are tiny bootstrapping, have no money. And we've human curated everything for 11 years. Imagine what Facebook, TikTok, Snapchat could do with their billions if they chose to.
• 32:47
  Safe learning is not a matter of viability. It's a matter of will. OK, so first of all, when you fund female founders, you fund safe technology that makes us all happy and more secure. Secondly, on the AI front, you know, even less female AI founders are being funded compared to female founders generally. And.
• 33:09
  The huge problem with that is, so I have a Make Love It Porn AI product that I've had in the pipeline for five years. I had this idea five years ago in a conversation with a friend whose background is AI and machine learning who told me that this could be done. And you haven't seen it yet because I need funding. And with AI, I need quite a lot of funding. But I want to share it with you and our listeners because this is the female lens on AI. So as you know, OpenAI, Chat, and TPT are built on LLens, large language model.
• 33:37
  As you've just heard, I have something very unique at MakeLoveNotPorn. I have an LVM. I have a large video model that is the world's only pool of 100% human-curated, fully consensual real-world sex video content. I want to use AI to turn that into an algorithm for consent. With a number of use cases across industries, because this is an enterprise application I'm talking about, I'll give you a couple of examples.
• 34:06
  The first is Hollywood. Because right now, all around us in popular culture, we are surrounded by sex scenes that purport to be consensual, but are actually modeling non-consensual behavior. Whether it is Game of Thrones, where pretty much the only way anyone ever has sex is rape. I can't watch it. No, likewise. Or it's rom-coms, where even in a love story, when we get to the sex scene, there is zero foreplay, instant penetration,
• 34:36
  You know, no communication, instant simultaneous orgasm. Imagine being able to run your script or your film through an algorithm that will tell you whether what you are modeling is or isn't consensual behavior. The second use case is a very obvious one, criminal court. Because as I think we all know, something like 1% of all rape cases ever make their way into the judicial system. Something like 0.00 whatever percent ever result in convictions.
• 35:03
  rape is the only crime where the onus is entirely on the victim to prove it happened. Imagine being able to bypass the he said, she said of the courtroom, the entrenched bias in the mindset of old white male judges, with an algorithm that will carry the nuances of
• 35:21
  or whether what happened was or wasn't consensual. And I'm sharing this with you and our listeners because that is the female lens on AI that does not get funded, while all around us, literally, as we speak, the lives of millions of girls and women are being destroyed by the massive explosion of nudify apps and intimate image abuse.
• 35:43
  I mean, my thinking is like, and maybe it's because I'm so cynical these days, but I'm like, but the justice system is built by men and Hollywood is also built by men. So what would make those types of structures and organizations be on board for things that
• 36:04
  yes, it actually serves everyone, but for some reason, because it's the same argument as like, but why don't people just fund female founders? It's better for the economy. It's better for the world. It's better for women. Like it's better for everything. But if it's built by, like these built for, built by systems, they don't take this change. So a couple of responses to that from my side. The first is, as I said earlier, I'm all about communication through demonstration. Don't say it, be it and do it.
• 36:33
  When I can build makelovenotporn.ai, the algorithm consent, when I can run your scenes through it and show you what results, okay? But the other thing is, you know, I am very rigorously focused on the key nodes where what I uniquely bring to the table will make most difference, okay? Nobody else has had a vision like mine for makelovenotporn, you know? Okay, nobody else is building that. I mean, the one good thing when I talk investors is,
• 37:03
  I operate in a very high barrier to entry sector. I don't have to worry about competition for a long time. But that's me doing what I'm doing in an environment that is a swelling chorus of women all around the world who've had enough of this shit. And by the way, this is why for years I've exhorted women to get very, very angry. And I've done that because we're not encouraged to. You know, my skills don't do that.
• 37:29
  But when we get angry, we make shit happen. And we have so much to be angry about. And so the good news is that there are women all around the world who are also in their own individual ways making shit change.
• 37:46
  You know, the amazing woman who led the protests after Sarah Everard was raped and murdered in the UK, who is now driving change in the laws and the Metropolitan Police Force. You know, I always say that you can't have too many of us coming at all of this from completely different angles. And I say that because if you remember years ago when Russia invaded Crimea, do you remember the women who protested topless outside the Crimean parliament?
• 38:17
  And I looked at those photos and I went, I would never do that in a million years, but I'm so glad there are women who will. You know, there are many, many of us all tackling all of this in our own ways where we know our own strengths lie. And that's why you bloody bet change is coming.
• 38:38
  Bloody better be. Talking about something that's going to make all of us angry. Well, it makes me so angry. But have you seen this book? I saw it on Facebook Marketplace. It's called How to Be a Husband. It looks very old. It's very old. It's from maybe the 60s. I mean, not that old, but 60s maybe. Anyway, I can't find anything about it online. And it's so infuriating. I can imagine that.
• 39:01
  I'm like, surely this has to be satire, but it's just absolutely not funny. Or it actually is a genuine reflection of, I mean, anyway, it's just so infuriating, the kinds of things that are said in this book. And it drives me insane. And I'm just like...
• 39:16
  These things rattle me to no end because I'm like, but what is this book? And how is this like a thing? And I wanted to ask you, you know, when I think about all these different things and when I am watching what's happening with the Giselle case in France, I'm so angry and I get so overwhelmed. I get so overwhelmed in so many different directions because we kind of get reminded of this evidence.
• 39:42
  that women are not seen as equal and we're getting reminded that, that sometimes it feels like there's not change happening. So I wanted to ask you, how do you deal with the overwhelm and how do you deal with your like mental health and wellness when you're trying to be someone who is trying to make change, but is also sad with the state of the world? Yep. No, I totally hear you on that. First of all, um,
• 40:12
  You know, in terms of my mental health and wellness, I was interviewed some time back for another podcast, which was focusing on, you know, entrepreneurship stress. And and so the host said to me very earnestly, Cindy, do you have a daily self-care practice to, you know, destruct? I went, oh, yeah, no, I totally have a daily self-care practice. My daily self-care practice is I have no husband. I have no children.
• 40:37
  Okay, so I am in perfect mental health. And by the way, I'm not kidding when I say that. That is absolutely, you know, I don't have to worry about any of that shit. And that really helps. But a couple of responses to your question, Doom. So I was speaking at a conference called Black Week last week, which is an advertising industry event started by two wonderful black co-founders
• 41:03
  to counter racism in the advertising industry. This is the first year it's happened. It's amazing. And so I gave a talk on why the future of advertising is black women, which was very well received. And afterwards, a black man in the audience actually said to me, Cindy, you know, there's been this huge backlash here in the U.S. against DEI. He said, we are all exhausted fighting every day.
• 41:28
  you know, what can you say to us to motivate us to keep going? Because honestly, we're just banging our heads against the wall. And so I said to him, you know, I'm going to draw an analogy. It's absolutely not, you know, as serious. But I said, you know, I fight a battle every day to build Make Love Not Porn. And, you know, another podcast I was on.
• 41:51
  was about getting in mindsets of entrepreneurs. And one of the questions I was asked was, Cindy, have you ever let your ego get in the way of the right thing to do? And I just burst out laughing and I said, what ego? I said, I am humiliated on a daily basis with your mate, love, not for.
• 42:08
  I'm treated as a pariah by every business institution. People are disgusted with me. They're revolted. I left my ego behind a long time ago. And so I shared some of this and I said, and there are two things that keep me going through all of this. And I said to the audience, and I'm hoping they'll be helpful to you. The first is that when I'm asked how I make it through everything I'm at every day,
• 42:33
  Fortunately, the single thing that most motivates me is a dynamic that I call, I'm going to fucking well show you. You tell me it can't be done, I'm going to fucking well show you. You put a barrier on my path, I'm going to fucking well show you. I take all of that daily demoralization and discouragement and depression, and I turn it into motivation and inspiration. The second thing is, and I said this to the gentleman in the audience, you know,
• 43:02
  I also am doing what I'm doing. I keep doing it because I have such a clear vision that I can see of the world when we no longer feel guilt, shame and embarrassment around sex. That's the world I'm building with Make Love Not Porn. I have a vision of what the world could be like without rape culture, which, by the way, is the single biggest dynamic holding back gender equality.
• 43:32
  I have a clear vision of a world that we lead and we design and manage where men are much happy as a result. You know, I said to him, I gave this talk today because I have such a clear vision of our industry when it's led by black women. I can see what all of that could be.
• 43:49
  And so I encourage everyone to think of, you know, the vision of the world as you want it, because that is absolutely what will enable you to power through. My favorite quote of all time is Alan Kay, who said, in order to predict the future, you have to invent it. And I'm all about inventing the future. Too many people think the future is something that happens without us. Rules are in its wake. And I go decide what you want the future to be. Make it happen.
• 44:13
  Oh, I love that. We are inventing the future. That's so cool. Yeah, I'm going to write that on a little post-it sticky and stick it beside my computer for when I'm feeling low. I want to...
• 44:26
  finalize the we funder campaign you're tracking towards a million dollars you're a quarter of the way there how do people get involved talk to me about the logistics so that anyone listening who's like fuck yeah this sounds cool i want to be part of this movement i want to be part of this world and i want to be part of this change and successful business that i'm an investor in
• 44:49
  Tell me how people can get involved. Exactly. So listeners, please go to wefundr.com slash makelovenotporn. The minimum investment is just 100 US dollars. So it's very affordable. And the important thing about this is that this is not a general crowdfunding campaign. This is an investment. I'm going to do my damnedest to add at least one zero, if not more, to every single figure that anybody puts in.
• 45:14
  And so we're talking a million dollars. We are a third of the way there. We've raised 300 and just under 370,000 so far. And so tell your friends, spread the word, create mini investment syndicates, groups of you going on. And by the way, we have a number of investor puts, you know, so...
• 45:34
  You know, when you invest like $250, you get five free video credits that make love not porn. Invest 500, you get a T-shirt. Going up to if you invest $10,000, you get cocktails and dinner with me at my home in New York, the Sky Apartment.
• 45:51
  And actually, I've already held two dinners like that. One was somebody who was flying into New York anyway. Another one was somebody who lives in New York. And if you can't make it to New York, then it's cocktails and dinner with me at the restaurant of your choice in the city that you live in when I'm next passing through.
• 46:09
  But if we can raise that $1 million, then the academy happens. And I have to just say also that, you know, I think there's a very interesting opportunity for edtech investors to get in on that. Because right now, nobody in edtech believes you can educate about sex safely and securely. Once we prove we can, there's a very clear path to exit where large edtech companies...
• 46:38
  could well acquire the Academy. And again, I'm saying that because this is an investment. We're talking to you as investors. And that's the kind of big return we want you to get on your investment. So yeah, please go to wefund.com slash make love not porn and invest. Yay, love that. Everyone get to it. We're going to generate some great returns here. Some big returns.
• 47:05
  Hey, it's June here. Thanks for listening to this amazing episode of the Female Startup Club podcast. If you're a fan of the show and want even more of the good stuff, I'd recommend checking out femalestartupclub.com where you can subscribe to our free newsletter. We send it out weekly covering female founder business news, insights and learnings in D2C, and interesting business resources.
• 47:29
  And if you're a founder building an e-commerce brand, you can join our private network of entrepreneurs called Hype Club at femalestartupclub.com forward slash Hype Club. We have guests from the show joining us for intimate Ask Me Anythings, expert workshops, and a group of totally amazing, like-minded women building the future of D2C brands.
• 47:52
  As always, please do subscribe, rate and review the show and post your favorite episodes to Instagram stories. I am beyond grateful when you do that.