Latest / Solving the World's Greatest Problems / Episode 3 - P*rnhub Wasn't Verifying Age Or Consent! | Laila Mickelwait

Transcript

Episode 3 - P*rnhub Wasn't Verifying Age Or Consent! | Laila Mickelwait · Solving the World's Greatest Problems

• 0:00
  SPEAKER_05: Two-time surprise journalist Nick Christoff, he released this powerful article called The Children of Pornhub, featuring Serena's story, who I just told you about.
• 0:08
  SPEAKER_05: And that just really put this on like the global radar.
• 0:12
  SPEAKER_05: Within days of that article, there were journalists calling up Visa and MasterCard.
• 0:17
  SPEAKER_05: Why are you still doing business with Pornhub?
• 0:19
  SPEAKER_05: And then Visa and MasterCard and Discover ended up cutting ties with Pornhub.
• 0:30
  SPEAKER_00: Solving the world's greatest problems is an audacious proposal.
• 0:34
  SPEAKER_00: And yet, no generation has more talent, capital, or tools than ours.
• 0:39
  SPEAKER_00: The time has come for entrepreneurs, investors, givers, ministry leaders to reclaim the church's ancient calling.
• 0:50
  SPEAKER_00: The scale of brokenness is too big for us to do this in silos.
• 0:57
  SPEAKER_00: Under his power, for his glory, together.
• 1:00
  SPEAKER_00: Welcome to the Solving the World's Greatest Problems Podcast.
• 1:16
  SPEAKER_00: Every year, tens of millions of images and videos of abuse spread across the internet.
• 1:22
  SPEAKER_00: And for the longest time, the corporations profiting from them faced no consequences at all.
• 1:29
  SPEAKER_00: Until now.
• 1:32
  SPEAKER_00: Our guest today is leading the charge to hold them accountable.
• 1:35
  SPEAKER_00: Lila Mickawaite is the co-founder and CEO of the Justice Defense Fund.
• 1:40
  SPEAKER_05: A question came to my mind: how in the world did this abuse end up on Pornhub?
• 1:44
  SPEAKER_00: An organization fighting to prevent sex trafficking and online sexual abuse and to help survivors pursue justice through the legal system.
• 1:53
  SPEAKER_00: She's also the founder of the Trafficking Hub Movement, a global effort signed by over 2.3 million people from every country in the world.
• 2:01
  SPEAKER_00: One that forced Pornhub to remove more than 50 million images and videos.
• 2:07
  SPEAKER_00: Lila's on a mission and she's just getting started.
• 2:10
  SPEAKER_00: Let's talk about the problem of human trafficking and how to solve it.
• 2:16
  SPEAKER_01: You've had the opportunity to be interviewed by such a diverse group of people over the last couple months, if not years.
• 2:23
  SPEAKER_01: Tell us about some of the different conversations you've had and who you've been talking with.
• 2:26
  SPEAKER_05: Yeah, it's been so encouraging to be able to really be reaching people with this message.
• 2:31
  SPEAKER_05: And, you know, that's it's actually one of our big programs at the Justice Defense Fund is public pressure.
• 2:37
  SPEAKER_05: And public pressure means educating the public and really putting the pressure on in the court of public opinion about this issue of child sexual abuse, rape, and trafficking on these big porn sites, specifically Pornhub.
• 2:50
  SPEAKER_05: And so it's been really wonderful to be able to have a platform to share this message, message and to see the impact that that's been able to have with the podcasting, especially.
• 3:01
  SPEAKER_05: I've been very encouraged about that, even more than traditional media.
• 3:05
  SPEAKER_05: We've had an opportunity to do lots of traditional media from, you know, New York Times, London Sunday Times, or CNBC Squawk Box, all those kinds of Fox News, all different kinds of traditional media.
• 3:17
  SPEAKER_05: But going on a big podcast, like, you know, I had the chance to do Theo Vaughn and Jordan Peterson and Dave Rubin and Jordan Harbinger and others, and um just having uh a chance to take a moment in this long form format to reach many, many people with this in a way that they can deeply understand the issue, not just a 10-minute sound bite, but really dig in uh in a way that's really authentic and it's conversational.
• 3:46
  SPEAKER_05: And I just have been so encouraged by the impact.
• 3:49
  SPEAKER_05: I mean, so many people responding, uh, messaging.
• 3:52
  SPEAKER_05: I, you know, one thing that's been amazing is to see how many, mostly men have reached out after hearing about the injustice of sex trafficking, child sexual abuse, and rape, how it's infested the big porn sites like Pornhub and them not realizing there was victims behind the screen and them reaching out and saying, you know, I was exposed when I was six years old, when I was eight, when I was 10, and I've been addicted ever since.
• 4:17
  SPEAKER_05: But after being able to hear this message about victims behind the screen, it's finally given me the ammunition I needed to stop and and to, you know, which is an important part of this equation is demand.
• 4:28
  SPEAKER_05: So it's been really wonderful.
• 4:30
  SPEAKER_01: I think a lot of people that have heard so much about it, thankfully, as you said, in the last couple of months, that there's just this building awareness to it.
• 4:38
  SPEAKER_01: But oftentimes, whether it's an entrepreneurship or ministry, what we miss is there's such a long obedience leading up to that.
• 4:44
  SPEAKER_01: You had been in this space for quite some time.
• 4:46
  SPEAKER_01: Tell everybody about what the journey before maybe 2020 had been like.
• 4:51
  SPEAKER_05: Yeah, you reminded me of one of my favorite quotes from Gary Haugan, right?
• 4:55
  SPEAKER_05: Is you know, victims of injustice don't need our spasms of passion.
• 4:58
  SPEAKER_05: They need our long obedience in the same direction.
• 5:01
  SPEAKER_05: And that has been um a long journey leading up to the, you know, amazing viral impact we've had over the last five years.
• 5:09
  SPEAKER_05: But before that, you know, being in the trenches against sex trafficking for 15 years at the moment in 2020 when the viral trafficking hub campaign really took off, it was 15 years in the trenches, feeling like I was really pushing this boulder up a hill, but just knowing that I was committed to this and I wasn't going to stop, and really knowing that I wanted to be faithful to that calling to fight this injustice.
• 5:35
  SPEAKER_05: And um, you know, I was in a period of deep investigation as well, which really laid the foundation for being able to take this on.
• 5:42
  SPEAKER_05: And that was about a decade deeply researching and investigating the intersection between the big porn industry and sex trafficking and child sexual abuse to understand it um fully.
• 5:55
  SPEAKER_05: And it was in that context of investigation and research, and I was paying attention to the headlines and they stood out to me when I started to hear about child victims who were ending up on Pornhub.
• 6:05
  SPEAKER_05: And that's when the light bulbs went on, and all of this kind of started in early 2020 in the context of all those many years in the fight against trafficking.
• 6:14
  SPEAKER_01: So take us into 2020.
• 6:16
  SPEAKER_01: So for those that are just hearing about some of the story for the first time, you go from this event, you go through this uh idea ideation of just kind of seeing, like, hey, there's something big happening here.
• 6:26
  SPEAKER_01: What's that moment where things change?
• 6:29
  SPEAKER_05: In the context of all those years in the fight against trafficking and and looking at that intersection between pornography and child sexual abuse and trafficking, there was a few headlines at the end of 2019 that really arrested my attention.
• 6:44
  SPEAKER_05: Particularly, I credit the trafficking hub movement's launch to a story of a 15-year-old girl from Broward County, Florida, who was missing for an entire year.
• 6:54
  SPEAKER_05: And she was finally found when her distraught mother was tipped off by a Pornhub user that he recognized her daughter on the site.
• 7:00
  SPEAKER_05: And she was found in 58 videos.
• 7:02
  SPEAKER_05: It was under an account named Daddy Slut, and she was being raped and trafficked on Pornhub.
• 7:08
  SPEAKER_05: And uh police were able to match her uh perpetrator's face from the videos to surveillance footage from a 7-Eleven and actually rescue the girl from the apartment.
• 7:17
  SPEAKER_05: She had been impregnated.
• 7:19
  SPEAKER_05: It was just this horror story.
• 7:20
  SPEAKER_05: And at the same time, the London Sunny Times had released an investigation where they had found dozens of videos on Pornhub that were illegal within minutes, even children as young as three.
• 7:31
  SPEAKER_05: And so it was these two stories.
• 7:34
  SPEAKER_05: There was a few others, but that really stood out to me.
• 7:36
  SPEAKER_05: And I was just thinking you know, I was really haunted by these stories, and I was thinking about them, and an idea just came to mind.
• 7:45
  SPEAKER_05: Uh, you know, how is this being uploaded?
• 7:48
  SPEAKER_05: How is this happening?
• 7:50
  SPEAKER_05: How are these videos of abuse ending up on Pornhub?
• 7:54
  SPEAKER_05: And I had an idea to test the upload system.
• 7:56
  SPEAKER_05: I had never done it before, and I didn't really know why I hadn't done this before.
• 8:00
  SPEAKER_05: Like this seems like the natural place to go to figure out, you know, how this industry is operating.
• 8:06
  SPEAKER_05: But I did it one night.
• 8:08
  SPEAKER_05: I I just um decided to test the upload system.
• 8:11
  SPEAKER_05: I took a video of the keyboard and the rug in my room, uploaded a test video to Pornhub, and found out what millions of people already knew.
• 8:21
  SPEAKER_05: And that was that all it took to upload to Pornhub was an email address.
• 8:25
  SPEAKER_05: So anonymously, even using a VPN, even using just an email, anyone could create at any moment.
• 8:30
  SPEAKER_04: Yeah.
• 8:31
  SPEAKER_05: Anyone in the world, you know, could become a pornography, they could videotape a sex act, they could upload it online.
• 8:37
  SPEAKER_05: They were not checking age, they were not checking ID, they were not checking consent.
• 8:42
  SPEAKER_05: And I quickly understood exactly how those videos of abuse ended up on Pornhub because they weren't checking anything.
• 8:49
  SPEAKER_05: And that the site was actually infested with videos of real sexual crime.
• 8:54
  SPEAKER_05: And it was in that moment that, you know, I always say uh I realized that Pornhub was not a porn site, it was actually a crime scene.
• 9:01
  SPEAKER_05: And I was compelled at that moment to sound the alarm.
• 9:05
  SPEAKER_05: And at the time, you know, just for context to understand, you know, the site for those who may not be familiar with Pornhub, although in today's uh, you know, in our day and age, it's it's very few people who haven't heard about Pornhub or have ended up on that site either purposefully or accidentally.
• 9:23
  SPEAKER_05: But in 2020, when this fight to hold them accountable for these crimes began, they were the fifth most trafficked website in the world.
• 9:32
  SPEAKER_05: So at the beginning of 2020, they were the 10th most trafficked website in the world, but they capitalized on coronavirus.
• 9:38
  SPEAKER_05: And by the end of 2020, they were the fifth most trafficked website in the entire world, not just porn site, but website.
• 9:45
  SPEAKER_05: And they had 170 million visits per day, 62 billion visits per year, and enough content being uploaded every single year that it would take 169 years to watch if you put those videos back to back.
• 9:59
  SPEAKER_05: So this was massive amounts of content, and none of it was being vetted, and so much of it was illegal, and that's what we discovered, and that's how all of this began.
• 10:09
  SPEAKER_01: So there's a point here where you realize the size of what you're up against.
• 10:15
  SPEAKER_01: When did you realize the size in terms of the organization, the scope, the magnitude of it?
• 10:21
  SPEAKER_01: Was it kind of like one step, one faithful step leads to another?
• 10:25
  SPEAKER_01: Or was there a moment of like, no, I realize this is a David and Goliath kind of kind of moment here?
• 10:31
  SPEAKER_05: Well, I understood to go into it.
• 10:33
  SPEAKER_05: I mean, you know, I had been researching this industry for a very long time.
• 10:37
  SPEAKER_05: I knew that Pornhub was the major player in the online porn industry.
• 10:42
  SPEAKER_05: And I knew that it was owned by a parent company.
• 10:44
  SPEAKER_05: And it wasn't just Pornhub, it was owned by a parent company and they were called MindGeek.
• 10:49
  SPEAKER_05: Uh, and but I didn't really understand how big this corporation actually was until I began.
• 10:56
  SPEAKER_05: Like you said, just putting one step in front of the other and learning.
• 11:00
  SPEAKER_05: It was like a journey of discovery.
• 11:03
  SPEAKER_05: It was a journey of learning, and learning not just from information that I was finding out, but learning from all of the people who were coming forward, from victims to whistleblowers from inside the company, moderators, managers, even the former owner of Pornhub reached out to me in the summer of 2020 to say he wanted to help with this fight and revealed really important information along the way.
• 11:28
  SPEAKER_05: But, you know, I learned that this was a multinational, multi-billion dollar corporation.
• 11:33
  SPEAKER_05: They had offices all over the world from LA to Montreal to Cyprus to Romania to um, I mean, London, you name it.
• 11:42
  SPEAKER_05: They were there, over 200 related corporations, very complicated corporate structure, hidden owners.
• 11:48
  SPEAKER_05: Nobody knew who the real owner of Pornhub was at the time, we found out.
• 11:53
  SPEAKER_05: Um, but yeah, it was a learning experience and journey.
• 11:57
  SPEAKER_05: I knew a little bit going into it, but I began to learn more and more and more and realized um how much of a behemot this was.
• 12:05
  SPEAKER_05: One of the things that I learned was that with a$362 million loan from a hedge fund called Colback Capital that had, you know, 125 investors that included Cornell University and JP Morgan Chase, the owners of Pornhub had actually rolled up the global porn industry's most popular porn sites and brands under one umbrella.
• 12:27
  SPEAKER_04: Wow.
• 12:27
  SPEAKER_05: Under MindGeek.
• 12:28
  SPEAKER_05: So they owned everything from Playboy to Pornhub and so much in between.
• 12:34
  SPEAKER_01: So when you're talking about something like this, one of the things that you talked about in the book is that like some people, there's so much user-generated content that was there that something of that scale had victims that some people maybe knew about that, but some people you know, texting an inappropriate image to uh in a dating relationship all of a sudden found its way on there.
• 12:56
  SPEAKER_01: Yes.
• 12:57
  SPEAKER_01: Can you talk about some of those stories and just kind of how long that stuff lasts?
• 13:01
  SPEAKER_05: Yeah.
• 13:02
  SPEAKER_05: Yeah.
• 13:02
  SPEAKER_05: Victims call it the immortalization of their trauma when they have whether it's an incident of rape or trafficking, or whether, like you said, I mean, it's sometimes this is we call it self-generated CSAM, self-generated child sexual abuse material that is rampant today.
• 13:20
  SPEAKER_05: I mean, there was a study done by the organization Thorn, and they had uh surveyed over a thousand children, and they found that one in seven children between the ages of nine and twelve had taken a nude image or video of themselves and sent it to another person.
• 13:37
  SPEAKER_05: And so this is just very common in today's tech saturated world where every child has a device in their hand.
• 13:45
  SPEAKER_05: But a lot of the illegal content that was ending up on Pornhub, you know, wasn't only the blatant rape and trafficking, it was also self-generated content.
• 13:54
  SPEAKER_05: And there's a story that really illustrates this of a survivor, a victim in Bakersfield, California.
• 14:01
  SPEAKER_05: Her name is Serena Fleitus, and she was an innocent 13-year-old girl.
• 14:06
  SPEAKER_05: She had never kissed a boy before, but she had a crush on a boy who was a year older than her.
• 14:12
  SPEAKER_05: And he coerced her and convinced her to send him some nude images and videos of herself.
• 14:18
  SPEAKER_05: And she did, and he shared them with classmates.
• 14:22
  SPEAKER_05: And then they got uploaded to Pornhub where they were getting millions of views, and she was just devastated by this.
• 14:29
  SPEAKER_05: And she would beg for those videos to come down and they would ignore her.
• 14:32
  SPEAKER_05: And if they did respond, um, they would hassle her to prove that she was underage, prove that she was a victim in those videos.
• 14:39
  SPEAKER_05: But if she did get them down, they would just get re-uploaded again.
• 14:42
  SPEAKER_05: It was like the sadistic game of whack-a-mole, I call it, where you know they might get it down, but then it just gets uploaded again and again and again.
• 14:49
  SPEAKER_05: And it sent her on a spiral of despair.
• 14:53
  SPEAKER_05: She dropped out of school because she was being bullied.
• 14:55
  SPEAKER_05: She got addicted to drugs to try to numb the pain.
• 14:58
  SPEAKER_05: She tried to kill herself multiple times.
• 15:00
  SPEAKER_05: And this is very common with these kinds of victims.
• 15:04
  SPEAKER_05: Um, they have a suicidal ideation rate of about 50%.
• 15:08
  SPEAKER_04: Oh my goodness.
• 15:08
  SPEAKER_05: Uh, and then she ended up homeless living out of her car.
• 15:11
  SPEAKER_05: And that was a trajectory for Serena.
• 15:14
  SPEAKER_05: But thankfully, today she's actually, you know, taking her power back.
• 15:17
  SPEAKER_05: She's suing Pornhubs, she's suing the individual owners and the companies that were involved.
• 15:22
  SPEAKER_01: How do you personally carry the weight of these stories?
• 15:26
  SPEAKER_05: Yeah.
• 15:27
  SPEAKER_05: That's a good question.
• 15:28
  SPEAKER_05: Um, I find that these stories, when you're personally connected, when they're things that you've seen, victims that you've interacted with, on one hand, it's a weight that's really difficult to handle.
• 15:40
  SPEAKER_05: It's a blessing and it's a curse.
• 15:42
  SPEAKER_05: And it's a blessing in that it fuels the fight in a way that information could never could never do, where it's personal, where I know that these are not pixels on a screen.
• 15:54
  SPEAKER_05: These are real breathing human beings, they're children whose lives have been shattered by this predatory company, this industry that has chosen profit over people's lives.
• 16:06
  SPEAKER_05: And, you know, when I go out and I speak about this, I'm grateful that I have um the ability to recall faces and names and, you know, even the most devastating things I've ever seen.
• 16:21
  SPEAKER_05: I think it just really makes it real.
• 16:24
  SPEAKER_05: And it helps just um, it helps just continue, right?
• 16:28
  SPEAKER_05: Because we need, we need that fuel and we need to um continually be inspired to even in the hard times to just keep going.
• 16:36
  SPEAKER_05: And it's often just recalling the stories, recalling the relationships with the victims and all of that that helps me just keep going.
• 16:42
  SPEAKER_05: And I even sometimes think of my own children, right?
• 16:45
  SPEAKER_05: In in the place of because it could be any of our children, right?
• 16:49
  SPEAKER_05: Serena could be anybody's child in this day and age, and I think that helps a lot too.
• 16:54
  SPEAKER_01: You know, oftentimes we look at these big, you know, huge problems of the world and we start saying, Man, where do you start?
• 17:01
  SPEAKER_01: And information sometimes can be paralyzing and it can be overwhelming, but then there's this conversation of like, well, you don't you might not be able to start with eradication, but there's this idea of like how do you find that leverage point to really kind of solve it.
• 17:18
  SPEAKER_01: I think it's one of the things I'm fascinated as you told the story, is like there's some understanding of the size and the scope and the magnitude of the organization that's here, but then you're like, okay, what's the what's the chink in the armor?
• 17:30
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, we hear the Al Capone story of like, oh, you got picked up on tax evasion.
• 17:34
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, but there's somewhere along the way in this that you're confronted by it and you say, gosh, where's that leverage point?
• 17:40
  SPEAKER_01: When was it for you?
• 17:41
  SPEAKER_01: And how did you guys come about saying where to where to take the first step?
• 17:44
  SPEAKER_05: Well, I think that's the beauty of community and not doing this alone, and having so many amazing organizations and thought partners and allies, you know, from attorneys to journalists to lawmakers to um other advocates, of course, the survivors who were involved, and even those who were within the company that helped with strategy.
• 18:07
  SPEAKER_05: And, you know, one of the things that we ideated on very early on was that exact question.
• 18:13
  SPEAKER_05: Well, how do we really move the needle on this?
• 18:15
  SPEAKER_05: Because, you know, at the end of the day, we can make all the noise we want.
• 18:19
  SPEAKER_05: We can have millions of people sign the petition, which they have, right?
• 18:22
  SPEAKER_05: We can make a lot of noise in the media, but at the end of the day, what's really going to move them?
• 18:28
  SPEAKER_05: And we understood that it was money.
• 18:30
  SPEAKER_05: And even looking back at some other cases where, you know, the the finances and the economics of the situation were able to be leveraged to produce change.
• 18:40
  SPEAKER_05: And we looked at the fight againstbackpage.com.
• 18:42
  SPEAKER_05: I mean, some people might be familiar with that.
• 18:44
  SPEAKER_01: Not familiar with that.
• 18:45
  SPEAKER_05: So Backpage was a classified website that was selling household items and cars, and it was also selling children.
• 18:53
  SPEAKER_05: And they were using Visa and MasterCard to place ads on this site and, you know, being able to actually blatantly sell children online.
• 19:02
  SPEAKER_04: Wow.
• 19:02
  SPEAKER_05: And one of the most important things that they did in the fight against Backpage was to go after the credit card companies, to go after Visa and MasterCard and Discover to cut ties with the site.
• 19:12
  SPEAKER_05: So, you know, people who were involved in that fight, and that's the beauty of being in this for a long time is that you develop, you know, friends and allies and organizations that have, we've been in fights together, you know, in other areas and we can think about and we can strategize together.
• 19:28
  SPEAKER_05: And we realized, okay, we need to go after the credit card companies.
• 19:32
  SPEAKER_05: Um, this was also something that was very important to the attorneys that were involved, understanding that you got to hit them where it hurts.
• 19:39
  SPEAKER_05: You have to go after their finances.
• 19:41
  SPEAKER_05: This is at the end of the day, this is a transactional crime.
• 19:45
  SPEAKER_05: The companies and the executives that are engaged in this behavior are doing it because it makes them money.
• 19:52
  SPEAKER_05: So, how do we go after the money?
• 19:54
  SPEAKER_05: And we understood that there's not a very profitable online business without credit card companies being involved.
• 20:00
  SPEAKER_05: And so, you know, we we're okay, we're gonna go after the credit card companies.
• 20:03
  SPEAKER_05: And that's what we did.
• 20:04
  SPEAKER_05: We got thousands of people to write letters to the executives of Visa and MasterCard and Discover, and then started to engage in actual dialogue with the VPs at those companies.
• 20:14
  SPEAKER_05: Um, and yeah, it took, it took years and it took a lot of of things happening, but eventually we were able to.
• 20:19
  SPEAKER_01: And so those not familiar with it, and again, I think part of why I want to come back to this is oftentimes we're paralyzed by information and we become casual activists and we're not actively taking those steps.
• 20:31
  SPEAKER_01: You hear about this, you take some steps, you write an op-ed, that starts to get traction.
• 20:36
  SPEAKER_05: Petition gets up to how many people at the So today we have 2.3 million people from every country in the world who've signed the petition to shut down Pornhub, and we're still seeing people sign every day, and we want people to continue to sign because it's been a powerful tool.
• 20:50
  SPEAKER_01: What I love about it, it wasn't like that wasn't the natural thing for you.
• 20:53
  SPEAKER_01: Like, as you talk about community, there was somebody in your life that said, like, hey, if you don't do this, yeah, it was a follower on social media.
• 21:01
  SPEAKER_05: So I had been convinced a few years earlier that I needed to start really being a voice in in this in this movement and to to be sharing specifically on social media.
• 21:13
  SPEAKER_05: And so I made a commitment.
• 21:14
  SPEAKER_05: I said I only had 300 followers at the time when I started, but I'm gonna post every single day on social media about this and the things that I was learning and the things I was discovering.
• 21:24
  SPEAKER_05: And I didn't care who was hearing, I just wanted to be faithful to that commitment that I'm gonna post every single day.
• 21:30
  SPEAKER_05: And I got, you know, a small following, and it was one of the followers who said once all this started to take off in 2020, I started the hashtag trafficking hub.
• 21:41
  SPEAKER_05: I wrote the op ed, but they said, listen, you need to start a petition.
• 21:44
  SPEAKER_05: And if you don't start it, I'll do it.
• 21:46
  SPEAKER_05: But I think you should do it.
• 21:47
  SPEAKER_05: Uh and I said, Wow, that's a great idea.
• 21:50
  SPEAKER_05: I'll do that.
• 21:51
  SPEAKER_05: And so that's exactly what I did.
• 21:55
  SPEAKER_00: Trafficking, structural hunger, a billion people without the Bible in their language.
• 22:00
  SPEAKER_00: These are unsolvable.
• 22:02
  SPEAKER_00: They're just uncoordinated.
• 22:04
  SPEAKER_00: At solving the world's greatest problems, we're a community of givers taking on the root causes of the world's deepest suffering.
• 22:11
  SPEAKER_00: And we're taking them on together.
• 22:12
  SPEAKER_00: We've identified more than 30 of the world's greatest problems.
• 22:15
  SPEAKER_00: And the list keeps growing.
• 22:17
  SPEAKER_00: We work alongside the entrepreneurs, investors, and ministry leaders already in the fight, and we fund the breakthroughs happening right now.
• 22:25
  SPEAKER_00: Here's where it starts.
• 22:26
  SPEAKER_00: Choose your problem and start your journey with one of our foundation courses.
• 22:32
  SPEAKER_00: You won't just hear about the work, you'll see the breakthroughs and give directly towards them.
• 22:36
  SPEAKER_00: Come on your own, bring a few friends, or host a room and set the table.
• 22:40
  SPEAKER_00: Come join the fight and find your people.
• 22:43
  SPEAKER_00: Learn more at solving.org.
• 22:46
  SPEAKER_00: Under his power for his glory.
• 22:48
  SPEAKER_00: Together.
• 22:57
  SPEAKER_01: I love it how those steps of faithfulness, of like, again, it's just the community, it's people around us that are pushing.
• 23:02
  SPEAKER_01: And I love the fact of how you're talking about so many of these ideas, these conversations.
• 23:07
  SPEAKER_01: Community is a huge part of this.
• 23:08
  SPEAKER_01: I think it's often overlooked that we just look at whether it's some giving fun, some collaboration, something, and it can feel very I don't know, it feels very transactional in terms of the ways that we might get involved.
• 23:20
  SPEAKER_01: But I think that that's what's so powerful about this is it's a community that's coming together to really tackle a problem.
• 23:27
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, we get fired up here in Texas about football games, and we talk about them all the time, probably too much.
• 23:35
  SPEAKER_01: And yet these big things, these big issues, we don't spend much time talking about.
• 23:40
  SPEAKER_01: But what you're seeing is this community that's saying, I mean, we're on a mission together.
• 23:44
  SPEAKER_01: We are fighting this fight and really developing some deep relationships as we go about something like it.
• 23:50
  SPEAKER_05: Yeah, and that's the beauty of collective impact.
• 23:53
  SPEAKER_05: I mean, we can't do this alone.
• 23:54
  SPEAKER_05: This is a huge and powerful industry.
• 23:57
  SPEAKER_05: And if we're going to be effective, we can't just be all siloed away from each other.
• 24:03
  SPEAKER_05: We have to come together, we have to work in our power alleys.
• 24:07
  SPEAKER_05: I mean, some people um or are just skilled in media.
• 24:10
  SPEAKER_05: And so we have the attorneys and we have the lawmakers and we have the advocates, we have all these different people who have uh their different skills.
• 24:18
  SPEAKER_05: And it was beautiful to see, it's like a baseball team that came together and everybody is taking their position and playing their part with excellence.
• 24:27
  SPEAKER_05: And the way that we were able to do that in concert and community to produce this collective impact, to be able to take on a behemoth of abuse like Pornhub.
• 24:37
  SPEAKER_05: Because if it was just me on social media making noise, that wouldn't just do anything.
• 24:41
  SPEAKER_05: But I think one of the most important roles of an activist is to activate people and to realize that you can't do it alone.
• 24:49
  SPEAKER_05: You have to activate others to join the fight and to welcome and to embrace and to um and to and go at a problem like this together.
• 24:58
  SPEAKER_01: Amen.
• 24:59
  SPEAKER_01: So let's take it through it.
• 25:00
  SPEAKER_01: You you understand how big the size and the scope of this issue is.
• 25:04
  SPEAKER_01: You start taking some steps with the op-ed, you start getting some of this conversation, and then there's a moment for me where all of a sudden it hits on the radar squawk box of where all of a sudden this becomes, as you said, an issue that people can't turn away from.
• 25:19
  SPEAKER_01: But then there's like the economic piece of that intersection.
• 25:23
  SPEAKER_01: Take us through what happened there.
• 25:24
  SPEAKER_05: Yeah, so here's what happened.
• 25:26
  SPEAKER_05: So it started with again, the op-ed, the petition, that started to go viral, the hashtag on on social media.
• 25:33
  SPEAKER_05: And I would just say, don't ever discount the value of a like and a share on social media, the conversation.
• 25:39
  SPEAKER_04: Yeah.
• 25:40
  SPEAKER_05: People are online today, and that is one of the most effective ways that we can communicate is online.
• 25:45
  SPEAKER_05: And anyway, post after post going viral, thanks to this community of people who are sharing, sharing, sharing, uh, victims coming forward.
• 25:52
  SPEAKER_05: Then attorneys are getting involved.
• 25:54
  SPEAKER_05: And we're able to help mount lawsuits against the company.
• 25:58
  SPEAKER_05: So talk about pulling the kind of powerful economic levers to be able to help hit this corporation where it hurts in the bank account.
• 26:07
  SPEAKER_05: And that was a kind of a long time coming vision with the justice defense fund, was to be able to see this as a risk-benefit calculation for corporate traffickers and understanding at some point there's going to be a moment where there's victims that are coming forward due to public pressure.
• 26:25
  SPEAKER_05: We call it a lighthouse, like being a lighthouse to victims and wanting to empower them to be able to go toe-to-toe with these corporations to really hit them where it hurts and also to obtain justice because we can't always rely on the criminal justice system.
• 26:38
  SPEAKER_05: I mean, it's slow, it's ineffective.
• 26:40
  SPEAKER_05: Often they don't take on the cases that should they should take on.
• 26:43
  SPEAKER_05: They don't prioritize human trafficking and child abuse as they do other crimes.
• 26:48
  SPEAKER_05: And so be able, being able to leverage the power of civil litigation to help survivors.
• 26:53
  SPEAKER_05: And so that was happening at the same time.
• 26:55
  SPEAKER_05: At the same time, we're going after Visa and MasterCard and making a lot of noise in the public, in the media.
• 27:01
  SPEAKER_05: Um, but then two-time surprise journal uh journalist Nick Christophe, uh, you know, we were able to engage with him and educate him about what was going on.
• 27:11
  SPEAKER_05: And then he released this powerful article called The Children of Pornhub, featuring Serena's story, who I just told you about, and many others.
• 27:19
  SPEAKER_05: And that just really kind of put this on the like the global radar in a way that hadn't happened before.
• 27:28
  SPEAKER_05: And within days of that article, there was journalists calling up Visa and MasterCard and just kind of saying, Why are you still doing business with Pornhub?
• 27:37
  SPEAKER_05: And it it put enough pressure on uh billionaire Bill Ackman actually got involved.
• 27:42
  SPEAKER_05: He read the article, and then he was just incensed because he has daughters of his own.
• 27:48
  SPEAKER_05: And then he joined the fight and he happened to know the CEO of MasterCard.
• 27:52
  SPEAKER_05: So he was able to send some messages there and do what he could do to help.
• 27:57
  SPEAKER_05: Um, and then Visa and MasterCard and Discover ended up cutting ties with Pornhub and joining PayPal and doing that.
• 28:04
  SPEAKER_05: And what that did was it sent Pornhub into a complete panic uh because they understood that things were gonna get really bad without the credit card companies.
• 28:14
  SPEAKER_05: And so, in an attempt to woo back the credit card companies, they actually took down 80% of the entire website.
• 28:20
  SPEAKER_04: Wow.
• 28:20
  SPEAKER_05: So they took down over 10 million videos and over 30 million images overnight in what Financial Times called probably the biggest takedown of content in internet history.
• 28:30
  SPEAKER_05: Um, but they actually snuck back.
• 28:33
  SPEAKER_05: A few weeks later, we found out that they snuck back to Pornhub's advertising arm, which is how they were making most of their money.
• 28:40
  SPEAKER_05: They were selling 4.6 billion ad impressions on Pornhub every single day.
• 28:45
  SPEAKER_05: And it was another two-year fight.
• 28:46
  SPEAKER_05: And it was only because of the litigation against Visa, coupled with the public pressure with that, uh, what you just talked about with Squawk Box, being able to go.
• 28:55
  SPEAKER_05: Bill Ackman actually invited me on to Squawk Box with him.
• 28:59
  SPEAKER_05: We had 17 minutes calling out Al Kelly, the CEO of Visa.
• 29:02
  SPEAKER_05: What are you doing?
• 29:03
  SPEAKER_05: And they had at the same time, they had lost their motion to dismiss the case.
• 29:08
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, they had to face it.
• 29:09
  SPEAKER_05: And so it was this combination of public pressure coupled with the litigation that produced the environment to finally get them to cut Pornhub off once and for all.
• 29:18
  SPEAKER_05: And that was just a huge moment in this fight.
• 29:21
  SPEAKER_01: I think there's so many thread lines.
• 29:23
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, we could talk for hours here.
• 29:24
  SPEAKER_01: Like, there's this story and the power of storytelling and media.
• 29:28
  SPEAKER_01: Then there's also this whole lever of just like, you know, you often hear about some of the world's great problems, some of the solutions start on these days text threads and conversations where it's one connection to another before you know it, that you're sitting here talking to the world about this and calling out the CEO of one of the largest companies in the world.
• 29:48
  SPEAKER_01: Like it's amazing how much more interconnected we are than we think, especially in the body of Christ.
• 29:54
  SPEAKER_01: I think we look at this and we've got our dysfunction, we've got our moments like where we're completely disconnected, but we don't realize how uh how many more people could be joining these fights if we stood up, started talking about and invited others to the community.
• 30:08
  SPEAKER_05: Yeah, and then acting and reacting when people's hearts are moved.
• 30:12
  SPEAKER_05: You know, Bill Ackman could have read Nick Kristoff's article about this and made a few tweets, which he did and then stopped there.
• 30:19
  SPEAKER_05: Yeah.
• 30:19
  SPEAKER_05: Or actually he could have just read it and been upset about it and then stopped there.
• 30:22
  SPEAKER_01: Which is where most of us are, right?
• 30:24
  SPEAKER_01: If we're honest, we're we're stuck with like we get angry, but we don't take action.
• 30:29
  SPEAKER_05: And that's the difference, I think.
• 30:31
  SPEAKER_05: What really has made the difference is those that have been and and it doesn't have to be so big as you know, Bill Ackman leveraging his relationships with the CEO of MasterCard and helping in the ways that he did, but even just sharing on social media, right?
• 30:47
  SPEAKER_05: Or helping to write a letter or like take an action versus being a passive bystander, but becoming an active participant in the fight and realizing that it's all the little and the big actions of so many people around the world that have made this possible.
• 31:06
  SPEAKER_05: What you know, we have a long way to go still, but everything that's happened has been a result of people hearing and taking action.
• 31:14
  SPEAKER_05: And I think it's beautiful that it really has been a diverse group of people that have come together.
• 31:20
  SPEAKER_05: I mean, it hasn't, it's been people from the faith community and joining with atheists, people who are pro-porn and anti-porn, and people who are right and left all agreeing.
• 31:32
  SPEAKER_05: I mean, because this is easy to agree on, right?
• 31:34
  SPEAKER_05: That's another part of messaging, is making sure that you have a clear and distinct message.
• 31:39
  SPEAKER_05: And that was important with Trafficking Hub in this fight, is to say, look, this you can think what you want about the industry itself, but listen, nobody should be raped for profit on the world's largest porn site.
• 31:51
  SPEAKER_05: If we can agree on that, we can all work together and we can take down this giant of criminal abuse.
• 31:57
  SPEAKER_01: What has that been like for you to find those points of easy agreement to fight that battle and then see what comes next after that?
• 32:04
  SPEAKER_01: But like, is there something for us to learn in that idea of like find the areas of easy consensus and those wins and these big battles?
• 32:12
  SPEAKER_05: I think that with issues like this specifically, where there are things that, I mean, with human trafficking, with child sexual abuse, I mean, this is easy to agree on.
• 32:23
  SPEAKER_05: Yeah.
• 32:23
  SPEAKER_05: But it's a matter of building bridges and welcoming those that may think differently than you.
• 32:30
  SPEAKER_05: But in order to come together, because in order to move the needle, I mean, it does take um, you know, in in some cases, these broad coalitions.
• 32:40
  SPEAKER_05: When we think about even passing legislation, right, we often need people on the left and the right to agree.
• 32:46
  SPEAKER_05: And so being able to message in a way that welcomes others into the fight, where you find these lanes of agreement and you can work together on these issues that need us to come together.
• 32:59
  SPEAKER_05: They they need us not to be um just kind of you know siloed into um, you know, these exclusive groups that are not, you know, working with others on these issues that need us all.
• 33:12
  SPEAKER_05: And so I think that was one thing that was really important for me was to make this welcoming and um something that people could jump.
• 33:22
  SPEAKER_05: I mean, we even had people in the porn industry who were participating and helping.
• 33:28
  SPEAKER_05: Um, and they played a really important role.
• 33:31
  SPEAKER_05: I mean, some porn performers who were spending hours a day on Pornhub trying to find their own stolen content on the site because they weren't just distributing rape and child abuse.
• 33:41
  SPEAKER_05: They were also distributing copyrighted material.
• 33:43
  SPEAKER_05: And they would find, you know, as they were spending hours a day trying to get their own stolen content off the site, they would find rape videos and they would send them to me so that I can get them reported.
• 33:55
  SPEAKER_05: And it was amazing.
• 33:57
  SPEAKER_05: I mean, like I said, even the former owner of the company, he came forward and he said, Listen, if you want to go after Pornhub in a way that's really gonna uh create impact, go after the credit card companies.
• 34:09
  SPEAKER_05: And, you know, we had already been thinking along those lines, but then here he comes, the former owner of the company from him.
• 34:16
  SPEAKER_05: Go for the credit card companies.
• 34:18
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 34:18
  SPEAKER_05: The other thing he shared was the name of the secret majority shareholder that nobody knew.
• 34:23
  SPEAKER_05: For years, he had completely hidden his his identity from the public.
• 34:27
  SPEAKER_05: And he actually came forward and he told me the name of that secret majority shareholder, which was Burned Bergmare.
• 34:33
  SPEAKER_05: And today, dozens of victims are actually suing him personally for his role in monetizing their abuse.
• 34:42
  SPEAKER_01: What's the emotions that you go through, like in or how do you process through the emotions of a high, high, low, low of oh my goodness, however many millions of videos you just talked about, just leave one day two weeks later.
• 34:57
  SPEAKER_01: It's like, dad gummit, they're back.
• 35:00
  SPEAKER_01: And they snuck in.
• 35:01
  SPEAKER_05: Yeah, I was crushing.
• 35:02
  SPEAKER_05: I mean, that this has truly been a roller coaster, and I appreciate the advice of one of my friends who was has been in this movement for a long time.
• 35:10
  SPEAKER_05: Brad Miles, he's um he founded the Polaris Project, but you know, he's been an amazing partner and thought partner in all of this.
• 35:17
  SPEAKER_05: And you know, one of the things he said at the beginning is this is gonna be a roller coaster.
• 35:21
  SPEAKER_05: There's gonna be highs and there's gonna be lows, and you just have to just sail, you have to just keep going, you know, just expect it and anticipate it.
• 35:30
  SPEAKER_05: And it's been really valuable to just have that perspective.
• 35:34
  SPEAKER_05: And it's not always gonna be a win day, someday it's gonna be a lose day.
• 35:39
  SPEAKER_05: And that was one of those, it was like this big moment of we're celebrating because you know, finally Visa and MasterCard and Discover have cut Pornhub off.
• 35:48
  SPEAKER_05: Then we find out they sneak back, and it was just like devastating because at that point, you know, the petition had already been launched, the the Children of Pornhub article was already out, and it was like, what are we gonna do now?
• 36:01
  SPEAKER_05: But you know, just continuing to keep pressing those levers, litigation, public pressure, litigation, public pressure, and it really ended up culminating in Al Kelly making a personal statement and saying he's gonna cut them off once and for all.
• 36:18
  SPEAKER_05: But yeah, it's definitely you have to expect the highs and the lows for sure.
• 36:22
  SPEAKER_01: So you've written at length about the story and the journey in a powerful book that has captured so much of this.
• 36:28
  SPEAKER_01: Take us a little bit to today.
• 36:30
  SPEAKER_01: Kind of what's the battlefield look like today?
• 36:33
  SPEAKER_01: Where do we find ourselves?
• 36:34
  SPEAKER_05: Well, we're still in the fight, the fight with Pornhub is not over.
• 36:39
  SPEAKER_05: I mean, we have definitely there's been a reckoning.
• 36:41
  SPEAKER_05: They've been the company's been sold as a distressed asset.
• 36:45
  SPEAKER_05: Um, they lost about a billion dollars in um value, but we're still fighting for justice to be fully served.
• 36:53
  SPEAKER_05: So there are victims who are out there in the courts fighting for justice, civil justice.
• 37:01
  SPEAKER_05: We still have yet to see meaningful criminal justice as well, which we uh we like to see um the civil justice produce the necessary information and evidence to then produce the criminal justice.
• 37:13
  SPEAKER_05: And just yesterday, um, or is it two days ago now, uh Nick Kristoff released a follow-up piece.
• 37:20
  SPEAKER_05: And in it, he exposes the thousands of pages of the information that's contained in thousands of pages of discovery documents that were uncovered.
• 37:31
  SPEAKER_05: Yeah, internal communications, messages, where now we have such uh a broad um plethora of evidence, of the knowledge of the complicity of the executives and the managers and the VPs and the employees in distributing child sexual abuse for profit for so many years.
• 37:51
  SPEAKER_05: And so that's the power also of the civil litigation is that it can produce through the discovery process the evidence necessary for criminal prosecution.
• 38:00
  SPEAKER_05: So we're still supporting and we are still um, you know, fighting for to see that civil and criminal justice, but we want to see prevention.
• 38:08
  SPEAKER_05: One of the important things about this fight against Pornhub, it's not just about one company, it's about so many others, its biggest competitors that act in the same way that they do, where they, you know, are all infested with criminal content.
• 38:23
  SPEAKER_05: So, how do we stop this across an entire user-generated porn industry?
• 38:28
  SPEAKER_05: Well, one of the ways that we do that is be by being creating a deterrent effect, right?
• 38:32
  SPEAKER_05: So if we hold the biggest player accountable and we keep the pressure on in the court of law and the court of public opinion, we create the necessary condition to be a deterrent to future abusers.
• 38:43
  SPEAKER_05: Now, we're already seeing some of that happen where we're seeing the biggest competitors like X Hamster and X Videos and others that are proactively changing their upload processes, that are taking down illegal content, that are uh changing the way that they do business because they don't want to end up being the next porn hub.
• 39:02
  SPEAKER_05: But we also need to make sure that the financial institutions understand it's not just a porn hub problem, that this is a user-generated porn industry problem.
• 39:12
  SPEAKER_05: And so we need to continue to fight both again in the court of law and the court of public opinion to expose these bad actors and to hold them civilly, legally accountable, to keep that pressure on and not to let that pressure uh to dissipate at all.
• 39:28
  SPEAKER_05: In fact, we need to now it's time to double down because at the end of the day, we want to see prevention and deterrence.
• 39:35
  SPEAKER_05: And one of the most important things that we can see as a result of this is companies like the credit card companies implementing policy that says we don't do business with user-generated porn sites that don't verify the age and the consent of every single person in every single video.
• 39:52
  SPEAKER_05: And they'll do that when they realize it's a bad business decision not to do that, when they realize the risk of continuing on is too great.
• 40:00
  SPEAKER_05: And so that's where we're headed.
• 40:02
  SPEAKER_01: You know, I think one of the things that's fascinating about the scope of some of these problems is there's so many people that are needed for the fight.
• 40:09
  SPEAKER_01: And when you talk about this, it's it's helping survivors, it's helping them go through a long journey of health and rehabilitation and what that looks like.
• 40:16
  SPEAKER_01: It's fighting for justice, it's uh driving up the fear, the cost, the expense, and those sides of things.
• 40:22
  SPEAKER_01: There's so many things that are needed here.
• 40:24
  SPEAKER_01: And and I appreciate that perspective of like, man, if you can drive up the expense line item of this, make it so risky that you can disincentivize some of the bad behavior that's really happening.
• 40:37
  SPEAKER_01: Talk to us a little bit about the organization and the fund that's come about and just ways that people are getting involved in that fight with you guys with the Justice Defense Fund.
• 40:45
  SPEAKER_05: Yeah.
• 40:46
  SPEAKER_05: So, you know, the Justice Defense Fund has uh you know been a long time in the making.
• 40:52
  SPEAKER_05: Um, me and my co-founder, you know, we have been collectively in this fight, each of us for now 20 years.
• 40:58
  SPEAKER_05: Um, and we have an amazing team of attorneys and therapists, social workers, um, and and and others that are working with us in this fight.
• 41:08
  SPEAKER_05: Sometimes, you know, people will see me out on the podcast and whatnot and think that, you know, this is Lila McIlwaite.
• 41:14
  SPEAKER_05: No, it's it's it's not.
• 41:16
  SPEAKER_05: There's so many amazing people that are working day in and day out at the Justice Defense Fund to make this work uh possible.
• 41:24
  SPEAKER_05: And, you know, it was a vision in that we understood many years ago that this is a risk-benefit calculation for corporate traffickers.
• 41:32
  SPEAKER_05: And I call them corporate traffickers and mega pimps that are engaged in you know, the distribution of sex trafficking.
• 41:40
  SPEAKER_05: And I would just say really quick, so people understand, you're they might be wondering, well, how is sex trafficking and porn and child sexual we think about it differently in the movies?
• 41:51
  SPEAKER_05: How is that like how is that sex trafficking?
• 41:53
  SPEAKER_05: Well, just so you know, sex trafficking exists when there's a commercialization of a sex act involving a minor or somebody who's uh induced into that sex act by force, fraud, or coercion.
• 42:07
  SPEAKER_05: So in the case of the big porn sites, every minor on that site is a victim of trafficking because their abuse has been monetized.
• 42:17
  SPEAKER_05: It has been heavily monetized.
• 42:18
  SPEAKER_05: I mentioned 4.6 billion ad impressions on those videos every day.
• 42:23
  SPEAKER_05: Um, and so every act of non-consensual sex on a porn site is an act of trafficking.
• 42:30
  SPEAKER_05: And so going back to JDF, we understood to tackle the issue of trafficking.
• 42:34
  SPEAKER_05: Um, you know, we needed to increase risk and eliminate profitability.
• 42:39
  SPEAKER_05: And we saw that, you know, we needed to uh create two programs.
• 42:43
  SPEAKER_05: So we have our public pressure side of what we do, and that's coupled with the support of strategic civil litigation, and that means funding litigation.
• 42:50
  SPEAKER_05: We uh enable impact investors to actually invest through charitable dollars into the cases of these victims so that they can access the historically unequal justice system so they can actually take on these mega abusers, these corporations in a way that they wouldn't be able to do otherwise with some of the best attorneys in the country.
• 43:13
  SPEAKER_05: And so we enable investors to to again use their charitable dollars to invest in those cases to help them get liftoff, to help them um fight these battles.
• 43:23
  SPEAKER_01: Uh and so they help them with that.
• 43:25
  SPEAKER_01: Yes.
• 43:26
  SPEAKER_01: And then if a case uh were to break in the favor, they can basically just pay that forward or push that forward.
• 43:33
  SPEAKER_05: Yes, they can grow their charitable uh and it, you know, they would never uh nothing would ever touch what victims um would get from these cases.
• 43:43
  SPEAKER_01: It's important people know that that's a separate category of the conversation.
• 43:47
  SPEAKER_05: And it's all charitable dollars.
• 43:48
  SPEAKER_05: Like these are you know funds that are going to go to charitable purposes when they are recovered.
• 43:55
  SPEAKER_05: Um, but it's a way that we can help mobilize strategic civilization.
• 44:00
  SPEAKER_05: Litigation, impact litigation.
• 44:02
  SPEAKER_05: Um, that's not aimed at just money, right?
• 44:06
  SPEAKER_05: Of course, money is important for survivors.
• 44:08
  SPEAKER_05: They need money, they need, they need that.
• 44:11
  SPEAKER_05: Sometimes these survivors they can't get jobs because they're so traumatized they can hardly even go to the grocery store because they're imagining who has seen my abuse videos that I'm standing with here in the grocery line.
• 44:23
  SPEAKER_05: So, in many cases, they're incapacitated in many ways, and they need and they deserve significant restitution for what happened to them.
• 44:31
  SPEAKER_05: That justice is necessary for them to experience healing as well.
• 44:35
  SPEAKER_05: Um, but also impact to produce change, to transform uh a predatory industry, to force changes upon an industry to make it safer, to make the internet safer for generations to come.
• 44:50
  SPEAKER_05: And we've seen this in other industries, the pharmaceutical industry, the tobacco industry.
• 44:55
  SPEAKER_05: We're able to use public pressure campaigning coupled with strategic civil litigation to produce change in the way that these companies do business to make them safer.
• 45:05
  SPEAKER_05: And that's what we're doing here with this industry as well.
• 45:08
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 45:08
  SPEAKER_01: It's fascinating when we think about um just ways that people can get involved.
• 45:13
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, there's so many ways here, but to think about that you can be really this compounding impact for good of helping kind of lever up and really go to bat with some of these big corporations.
• 45:23
  SPEAKER_01: There's a lot needed for that fight.
• 45:25
  SPEAKER_05: This is not something that's a multi-billion dollar industry, and they have a lot of resources to fight these fights.
• 45:34
  SPEAKER_05: And we need to be able to fund the the pushback.
• 45:40
  SPEAKER_05: We need to fund the fight for justice to hold these predators accountable in a way that victims can go toe-to-toe with these corporations and they can stand their ground and they cannot be kind of drowned out by um the ways that these companies often um engage in litigation just to uh you know try to uh kind of just make it so expensive that they can't continue.
• 46:03
  SPEAKER_05: You know, we don't want that to happen.
• 46:04
  SPEAKER_05: We want to resource and fund these cases in a way where they can go for maximum impact and they could actually um help transform an industry uh in a way that is is really meaningful.
• 46:19
  SPEAKER_01: So I'm listening to this and I'm thinking uh there's many people out here listening to this saying, man, what a heroic kind of journey that this has been, what an incredible journey that's been, what a tough journey that's been in.
• 46:31
  SPEAKER_01: But how would somebody not just be a consumer?
• 46:33
  SPEAKER_01: How would somebody hear this and be activated?
• 46:36
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 46:37
  SPEAKER_01: For me, I I think of your book and what you've written on this where you go in depth into it, but what are some ways that people can join the fight?
• 46:42
  SPEAKER_05: Yeah, they can read the book and 100% of proceeds from that go to our nonprofit, the Justice Defense Fund.
• 46:49
  SPEAKER_05: Um, but also you can join millions of others in signing the petition.
• 46:53
  SPEAKER_05: That's a powerful thing to do.
• 46:54
  SPEAKER_05: And a lot of times people think, well, that that doesn't do much, but it does.
• 46:58
  SPEAKER_05: It's been such a powerful tool.
• 47:00
  SPEAKER_05: Do that.
• 47:00
  SPEAKER_05: That's easy to do.
• 47:02
  SPEAKER_05: You can also join Team Takedown.
• 47:04
  SPEAKER_05: So we have created uh a group of dedicated activists and individuals that are joining together in a commitment to fight this fight, to make the internet safer, to take on and to take down predatory corporations that are engaged in this kind of abuse.
• 47:20
  SPEAKER_05: Um, and so team takedown is a commitment to um, you know, be engaged in this fight will update you when there's collective action, uh, things that we can do together, whether it's it's a letter to Visa or you know, sharing a story or sharing a post on social media.
• 47:37
  SPEAKER_05: And they also make a commitment to become a monthly donor.
• 47:40
  SPEAKER_05: So to give to the Justice Defense Fund to help fuel this fight into the future.
• 47:46
  SPEAKER_01: That's awesome.
• 47:47
  SPEAKER_01: Thank you for fighting this fight.
• 47:48
  SPEAKER_01: Thank you for calling other people to the fight.
• 47:50
  SPEAKER_01: It's a gift uh to hear about just what you've been doing, but it's a gift to think of ways this community of entrepreneurs and investors can really rally behind what you're doing.
• 47:58
  SPEAKER_01: So thanks for spending time.
• 47:59
  SPEAKER_05: Yeah, thanks for having me.
• 48:01
  SPEAKER_00: So, what are your next steps?
• 48:03
  SPEAKER_00: Give together, meet friends, and discover how you can go further.
• 48:07
  SPEAKER_00: Join us on a call, and we'll give you a 30-minute overview of giving funds and how they work.
• 48:12
  SPEAKER_00: Visit solving.org to join the call today.
• 48:15
  SPEAKER_00: Pick a fund and step into the story.
• 48:18
  SPEAKER_00: Breakthroughs are happening right now.
• 48:21
  SPEAKER_00: God is already at work, and you're invited to join him.
• 48:24
  SPEAKER_00: To learn more, visit solving.org.
• 48:28
  SPEAKER_00: That's solving.org.
• 48:30
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• 48:32
  SPEAKER_00: Thanks for listening, and we hope that you join us in solving the world's greatest problems.