1143: Laila Mickelwait | Exposing Pornhub's Dark Trafficking Empire

Summary

Summary of Episode 1143: Laila Mickelwait | Exposing Pornhub's Dark Trafficking Empire

Podcast Information:

• Title: The Jordan Harbinger Show
• Host: Jordan Harbinger
• Guest: Layla Mickelwait
• Release Date: April 22, 2025
• Episode Title: 1143: Laila Mickelwait | Exposing Pornhub's Dark Trafficking Empire

---

Introduction

In Episode 1143 of The Jordan Harbinger Show, host Jordan Harbinger engages in a profound and unsettling conversation with Layla Mickelwait, a dedicated activist and attorney who has played a pivotal role in exposing the dark underbelly of Pornhub—a platform implicated in extensive sex trafficking and child exploitation. This episode delves deep into the systemic issues within the adult content industry, the complicity of major corporations, and the relentless pursuit of justice by activists like Mickelwait.

Background: The Intersection of Pornography and Trafficking

Layla Mickelwait begins by outlining her long-term commitment to combating sex trafficking, highlighting a disturbing trend where such exploitation intersects with the online porn industry. She recounts a pivotal moment in 2019 involving a 15-year-old girl from Broward County, Florida, whose videos depicting her rape were monetized on Pornhub, leading to her rescue (03:04). This case served as a catalyst for Mickelwait's intensified efforts against online sexual exploitation.

Layla Mickelwait [03:04]: "At the end of 2019, I started to notice some really concerning headlines... she was found in 58 videos being raped on Pornhub."

Systemic Failures of Pornhub

Mickelwait exposes the alarming extent of non-consensual and illegal content on Pornhub. She cites internal audits where Pornhub admitted that 1% of their content was child sexual abuse material, a figure Mickelwait suggests is a significant underrepresentation of the true scale of exploitation (06:23).

Layla Mickelwait [06:23]: "They said we think that 1% of our content is child sexual abuse material... but that's when they investigated themselves."

The conversation highlights Pornhub's business model, which heavily relies on user-generated content without stringent consent verification. This lack of oversight facilitates the proliferation of exploitative and illegal videos, making the platform a hotspot for trafficking operations.

Complicity of Major Corporations: Google and Financial Institutions

A critical segment of the discussion revolves around the role of major corporations like Google and financial institutions (e.g., Visa, MasterCard) in enabling Pornhub's illicit activities. Mickelwait argues that Google's indexing services allow Pornhub's harmful content to be easily discoverable, while financial institutions profit from processing transactions related to the site’s operations.

Layla Mickelwait [12:23]: "These companies are enablers who allow them to continue the exploitation for profit and who benefit themselves from the exploitation knowing that it's happening."

Mickelwait underscores the necessity of holding these corporations accountable, suggesting that they possess the power to enforce stricter content moderation and financial oversight to curb illicit activities on platforms like Pornhub.

Legal Battles and Judicial Outcomes

The episode delves into the legal strategies employed to combat Pornhub's exploitation. Mickelwait discusses the civil litigation approach, where victims are suing not only Pornhub but also its financial backers and advertisers. She highlights the challenges of jurisdictional discovery due to Pornhub's complex ownership structure spread across multiple countries.

Layla Mickelwait [75:03]: "The legal team was able to rope in the hedge funds to the lawsuits the victims are suing. They’re not only suing pornhub and its individual owners, they're suing the hedge funds, they're suing Visa and trying to hold everybody accountable for all of this."

One significant case mentioned involves a 12-year-old boy from Alabama who was drugged and filmed for abuse. Mickelwait details how persistent legal efforts led to Romeo Shay Franklin's arrest and sentencing, though victims continue to seek justice.

Impact of Takedowns and Ongoing Struggles

Mickelwait shares the progress made through sustained activism, including the major takedown of Pornhub's unverified content following pressure from credit card companies influenced by high-profile investigative journalism, notably Nick Kristof's article "Children of Pornhub." This led to the removal of over 90% of the platform's illicit content (86:31).

Layla Mickelwait [86:31]: "They have gone from 56 million pieces of content to 5.2 million today. And so they're 91%."

Despite these advancements, the conversation acknowledges that Pornhub remains partially operational, with ongoing efforts required to eliminate the remaining non-consensual and illegal content. Mickelwait emphasizes the need for mandatory third-party age and consent verification to prevent future exploitation.

Challenges Faced by Activists

The episode does not shy away from discussing the personal toll on activists like Mickelwait. She recounts threats, harassment, and immense pressure faced while battling entrenched corporate interests. Her resilience is portrayed as driven by a deep-seated commitment to justice and safeguarding vulnerable individuals.

Layla Mickelwait [84:24]: "There has been part of the whole process... death threats, rape threats, family doxing, hacking, being falsely reported for possession of child pornography."

Call to Action and Future Directions

Mickelwait calls for systemic changes, urging both governmental bodies and private corporations to implement robust verification systems and hold platforms accountable for user-generated content. She envisions a safer online environment where exploitative content is systematically eradicated through combined efforts of legal action, public awareness, and corporate responsibility.

Layla Mickelwait [89:10]: "There are reliable privacy respecting third party companies that can agent consent verify. And that has to be done and it has to be done at scale."

Conclusion

Episode 1143 serves as a stark revelation of the dark practices within the online pornography industry, with Pornhub at the epicenter of systemic abuse and exploitation. Through Layla Mickelwait's experiences and insights, listeners gain a comprehensive understanding of the intricate web of corruption, the role of major corporations in enabling illicit activities, and the ongoing fight for justice. The conversation underscores the urgent need for collective action to dismantle exploitative systems and protect vulnerable populations from further harm.

---

Notable Quotes:

• Jordan Harbinger [02:51]: "My guest today is just fearless Layla Mickelwait who helped expose... the flagrant out of control sex trafficking on Pornhub."

• Layla Mickelwait [06:55]: "The London Sunday Times... found dozens of illegal videos on Pornhub within minutes. Even children as young as three."

• Jordan Harbinger [12:17]: "What are the common signs that video on a site like Pornhub might involve exploitation or trafficking?"

• Layla Mickelwait [14:45]: "As a punishment, they were being held accountable for the exploitation and profiting from it."

• Layla Mickelwait [71:03]: "That's the key to this, is holding the bad actors and their enablers."

---

This episode is a compelling and necessary exposé on the intersection of technology, corporate responsibility, and human rights, providing listeners with actionable insights and a call to action to support the eradication of online exploitation.

Transcript

[Jordan Harbinger]

With new McValue at McDonald's you get more than you expect. So after a long day, buy a double cheeseburger and add a McChicken for a dollar because saving with deals is always on the menu. With new MCvalue, prices and participation may vary. Valid for item of equal or lesser value.

[Ryan Reynolds]

Ryan Reynolds here from Mint Mobile.

[Jordan Harbinger]

I don't know if you knew this, but anyone can get the same Premium.

[Ryan Reynolds]

Wireless for $15 a month plan that I've been enjoying.

[Jordan Harbinger]

It's not just for celebrities.

[Ryan Reynolds]

So do like I did and have.

[Jordan Harbinger]

One of your assistant's assistants switch you.

[Ryan Reynolds]

To Mint Mobile today. I'm super easy to [e-mail] Switch upfront.

[Layla Micklewait]

Payment of $45 for 3 month plan equivalent to $15 per month required intro rate first 3 months only, then full price plan options available, taxes and fees, extra fee full [e-mail] Jordan here this.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Episode contains adult themes. No kids in the car for this one.

[Ryan Reynolds]

Coming up next on the Jordan Harbinger.

[Layla Micklewait]

Show, people are uncomfortable. They're afraid to talk about it. It's one of those things that it's affecting everybody in some way. We're all in contact with this free user generated porn industry, but nobody wants to talk about it.

[Ryan Reynolds]

Welcome to the show. I'm Jordan Harbinger. On the Jordan Harbinger show, we decode the stories, secrets and skills of the world's most fascinating people and turn their wisdom into practical advice that you can use to impact your own life and those around you. Our mission is to help you become a better informed, more critical thinker through long form conversations with a variety of amazing folks from spies to CEOs, athletes, authors, thinkers, performers, even the occasional arms dealer, drug trafficker, rocket scientist, or Russian chess grandmaster. If you're new to the show or you're looking for a handy way to tell your friends about the show, and I appreciate it when you do that, I suggest our episode starter packs. These are collections of our favorite episodes on topics like persuasion and negotiation, psychology, geopolitics, disinformation, China, North Korea, crime and cults, and more that'll help new listeners get a taste of all the things that we do here on this show. Just visit jordanharbinger.com start or search for us in your Spotify app to get started. My guest today is just fearless Layla Micklewait helped expose, if you'll pardon the pun, the flagrant out of control sex trafficking on pornhub. I didn't really ever think about this before, but a lot of the People there are not up there consensually and.

[Jordan Harbinger]

They'Re not getting paid, unfortunately. A lot of the time, I mean, it's just, it's, it's, it's worse than not getting paid. I don't even know how to summarize this. You'll get it here on the show.

[Ryan Reynolds]

She also helped hold some of the owners and controlling managers of the site and the company to account. The story is wild. It is very satisfying. At points, we really clicked. I'm a big fan of her and.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Her cause, and I think you'll really gain some insight from this episode, insight.

[Ryan Reynolds]

That might make some of us, myself included, quite uncomfortable. This is an important episode with a really great guest. Here we go with Layla Micklewait.

[Jordan Harbinger]

By the way, I read the book. I enjoyed it.

[Ryan Reynolds]

That's a weird thing to say, but.

[Jordan Harbinger]

I did enjoy it. It was well written and good. The payoffs are satisfying.

[Layla Micklewait]

Thank you.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Yeah. Let's start from the beginning. So you're on a mission to take down pornhub. That's a heavy lift. What sparked this?

[Layla Micklewait]

Yeah, I mean, it wasn't something that 10 years ago I thought, in 2025, this is what I'm going to be doing. But at the same time had been preparing for it my whole life. So in the context of over 15 years in the fight against sex trafficking, I was paying attention to the headlines and I was noticing that there was a trend that it wasn't just happening offline, it was being filmed, it was being monetized online. And so there was this intersection, what I call the big porn industry, and we can talk about that, and child sexual abuse and trafficking. And at the end of 2019, I started to notice some really concerning headlines. One story that I kind of credit to the launch of the trafficking Hub movement was a story about a 15 year old girl from Broward County, Florida. And she had been missing for an entire year. And she was finally found when her distraught mother was tipped off by a pornhub user that he recognized her daughter on the site.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Oh, gosh.

[Layla Micklewait]

And she was found in 58 videos being raped on Pornhub. And police actually were able to locate her and they recognized the guy's face from the assaults in the video. And she was rescued from his apartment. She had been impregnated. It was like this horror story.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Kidnapped and then put in videos.

[Layla Micklewait]

No, she had been missing. So I think she might have ran away. Nobody could find her for a year. And this is how she was found, that her mom was notified that her Daughter was on pornhub and she was actually in videos that were being paid to download. So it was a profit sharing relationship with pornhub and they were splitting the profit from the sale of her rape videos. So that was really concerning. I had read that story a few days after my second child was born.

[Jordan Harbinger]

When you're a parent, it all hits so different, right? I was telling friends of mine about the book and some of the guys were like, oh yeah, that's gross. And I was like, no, man. But then I was like, I have a daughter and a son. So it's.

[Ryan Reynolds]

There's just that layer of what if.

[Jordan Harbinger]

It were my kid? But guys especially who don't have kids are like, yeah, that's really gross. And it's just like another horrible thing they've heard that week.

[Layla Micklewait]

Yeah, I cared about this for so many years. But then when I have my own children, emotionally, it hits you in a different way. There's a door open in my heart.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Didn't exist when I was a dude thinking about the gym and my next pizza.

[Layla Micklewait]

You just can't. It's just this whole other level of emotional connection, empathy. And all of you can imagine yourself in the position of that mother, all of that.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Yeah, that's true. Based on your research, what percentage of videos on mainstream platforms or on platforms like this might feature exploited minors?

[Layla Micklewait]

I would say so. On Pornhub, we have a percentage of them that we know 20% of the content was from people who considered themselves in the kind of professional model category, although we know that there was criminals infested in there as well. And 80% of that site was user generated, not verifying agent Consent. So I would say on these sites, the possibility that this could be illegal if there's a site that's not verifying Agent Consent is probably over 80%. Not to say that that is the percentage. The possibility is that now we actually have some concrete numbers to show that at one point pornhub was admitting in the height of all of this happening, they said 1%. They did like an audit of themselves and they said, we think that 1% of our content is child sexual abuse material. And that would be confirmed, known, hashed, previously uploaded child sexual abuse material. That means that it was one in a hundred videos, child sexual abuse.

[Jordan Harbinger]

But that was when they investigated themselves, themselves. Imagine. Imagine how much worse it actually was.

[Layla Micklewait]

Right? Jeez, think about that. People are browsing a lot of videos per session on those sites and yeah.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Geez, that's really something we know.

[Layla Micklewait]

Like the stats of like Child sexual abuse material online, but specific to the adult sites. We don't really have those numbers. NCMEC has had over 100 million reports of child sexual abuse in one year. The national center for Missing and Exploited Children.

[Jordan Harbinger]

And you think, oh, some of them are false. There's even more unreported, I would imagine, than there are false reports. That's how it always goes.

[Layla Micklewait]

Yeah. So the London Sunday Times, which is a very credible investigative newspaper in London, they had done an investigation at that time and they had found dozens of illegal videos on pornhub within minutes. Even children as young as three.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Gross and creepy.

[Layla Micklewait]

It was shocking to read that. And they were calling out particular advertisers in this investigation. London Sunday Times, they called them out for that immediately. They were shamed. They apologized, they pulled the ads. But it was a big deal, at least in the anti trafficking space. We were paying attention to what was happening. And there was a woman named Nicole Adamondo from New York. She had been abused by her partner. He had filmed the abuse and he was uploading the videos to pornhub. And she killed him.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Oh, my God.

[Layla Micklewait]

She ended up getting sentenced to life in prison. At the time, she had a legal team and they were able to reduce her sentence seven years.

[Jordan Harbinger]

I can relate a little. I mean, I get it.

[Layla Micklewait]

It was a very dramatic case. And the pictures of her, she had two young children, her being taken off to prison, it was just a horrific story. And then there was about 100 victims in California and San Diego that were part of this trafficking operation called Girls Do Porn. It was run by a guy named Michael Pratt who ended up on the FBI's 10 Most Wanted.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Where is that guy now, I wonder.

[Layla Micklewait]

So he was found two Christmas Eves ago in Spain. He had become a fugitive.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Yeah.

[Layla Micklewait]

Because he was wanted.

[Jordan Harbinger]

What a terrible life that has to be. Although, Spain. Yeah. Nice place.

[Layla Micklewait]

Yeah. He was finally found and all his co conspirators are in prison already. And now he's in the process of finally being held accountable. But he was running a partner channel on pornhub. That was one of their most popular partner channels on the site.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Not while he was a fugitive though.

[Layla Micklewait]

No. Okay, so the victim sued him, the FBI, the Criminal Accountability for Girls Do Porn. But the way that they had distributed their content and made it very popular was through pornhub. So they had one of the most popular partner channels. I think it was over 600 million views and 800,000 subscribers.

[Jordan Harbinger]

And they're each paying like five bucks a month, but whatever.

[Layla Micklewait]

Well, so you subscribe to the channel and then they give you clips and they advertise and then they drive you to pay for more content.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Oh, I see. But even still, multimillion dollar business.

[Layla Micklewait]

Yes. And they were splitting again, this is a profit sharing relationship with pornhub. And they were splitting the profits. And pornhub was aware because victims were reaching out and begging them to take these videos down because it was destroying their life.

[Jordan Harbinger]

So they were tricked into doing the porn.

[Layla Micklewait]

Oh, they were trafficked. And so there's no question, and that's part of the definition, of course, of trafficking is force, fraud, coercion. If you're under the age of 18 and you're used in a commercial sex act. So if you're making money on that sex act that was induced by force or fraud or coercion, or if anybody's under the age of 18, you don't even need to prove any of that. It's just automatically trafficking. So anyway, they were held accountable. But this was in the news at the time as well. And so all of this began to raise the question, how in the world was this happening on pornhub? Because at the time, pornhub was a cultural icon. It was all over the place.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Look at the Christmas sweaters and stuff. And you're like, these are whimsical and fun. And now I'm like, oh, I'm not.

[Layla Micklewait]

Getting one of those walking New York Fashion Week. People are wearing their apparel jokes on Saturday Night Live. Like faux commercials on Saturday Night. All of that mainstream brand. Not to mention that at the time. So by the end of 2020, they had capitalized on coronavirus and they had actually become the fifth most visited website across the entire Internet.

[Jordan Harbinger]

All those people working at home were just like, let me take a quick break. That I couldn't do.

[Layla Micklewait]

They made traffic sore. They had also done some crazy PR stunts. Like they offered pornhub premium for free to the entire world. So that instead of paying 9.99 for ad free Pornhub, so, you know, you could watch porn or you could watch real rape or child abuse ad free on pornhub, like, they were just giving it for free. So their traffic was better than ever. They were making more money than ever. They had more visits than Netflix and Amazon. They had 170 million visits a day, 62 billion visits a year that year. And by the end of 2020, they had 56 million pieces of content on the site. So every year they were having enough content uploaded, it would take 169 years to watch if you put those videos.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Back to back, oh my God, the scale is crazy. In your opinion, how much responsibility do executives at companies like pornhub bear for the child abuse happening on their platforms? Because I assume their argument is we didn't know about this.

[Layla Micklewait]

Oh, in the case of pornhub, we know they knew, we know, we have evidence, we have conversations, we have email exchanges, we have documents, we have policies. We have so much evidence that this was something they knew about. They hid from authorities because of profit, because they wanted to maximize profit. They allowed to continue for years, since 2007. And so 100% responsibility because they have the ability to stop it. They had the ability in 2007 to age, verify, to make sure that somebody had to show an id, to show their face, to consent verify before they could upload, and they chose not to.

[Jordan Harbinger]

What are the common signs that video on a site like pornhub might involve exploitation or trafficking? Is it just the tags?

[Layla Micklewait]

There are some where it's obvious, right, that this is non consensual. This could be prepubescent and you could see that, right? Or there's violence or tags, titles indicating young or pain, things like that. However, sometimes these are videos that were consensually recorded and then non consensually uploaded. So then in that case you have no idea whether they consented to having that video on pornhub. And victims of this kind of, they call it image based sexual abuse. That's all the way from child abuse to what we used to call revenge porn. And they face serious amounts of trauma as well. The suicide ideation rate for these victims is about 50%. And so the harm is from the revenge porn side all the way to the child sexual, it's all serious. And when you're on a site that doesn't verify agent consent not only of the uploader, but every single video and every single person, every single video. You have to be suspect of everything that you're watching.

[Ryan Reynolds]

Wow.

[Jordan Harbinger]

It's interesting because I first got this book and I was like, okay, she's going to be some like super religious person who's against porn. And then we had our phone call and I was like, okay, that wasn't what I expected at all. Like a normal person who has a vendetta, rightfully so, against this horrific website. And then I read the book and I was like, wow, this is an organized crime operation. This is not a sort of sex workers put their stuff up here. You watch a dumb ad and you're done with your business. It's organized crime, period. An international crime ring that just happens to be something that everybody knows about and a lot of people use. Once you read the book, it's like there's no difference between this and the Albanian mafia shipping cocaine or something across. At least there's fewer victims with people who are shipping drugs across the border, which is crazy to think about.

[Layla Micklewait]

And hiding in plain sight.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Hiding in plain sight. That's the phrase I was looking for. Yes.

[Layla Micklewait]

Just under everybody's noses, millions of people a day. A phrase my dad always used to say. He was just a very wise man. And he also used to say assumption is the mother of all screw ups. And thinking about that, the idea that we're all assuming that this is legal, vetted, consensual material, because that was their tagline, that was what they presented to the world. And they spent millions of dollars on their PR campaigns to save the oceans. And they had this whole arm of pornhub called pornhub Cares.

[Jordan Harbinger]

That's so weird.

[Layla Micklewait]

Yeah, save the bees and all this stuff. And so I said, well, let me just test the upload system. I put the baby down after he went back to sleep, got camera out, took the video of the keyboard and the reg, and then uploaded and found out what millions to the point of hidden in plain sight. Millions of people already knew because they were uploading to Pornhub every day, that there was no requirement for ID or consent form. Anybody anonymously with a VPN in under 10 minutes using an email address, just a random email address, could upload a sex video to pornhub. And there you go. That's how the site became infested with videos of real sexual crime.

[Jordan Harbinger]

I'm probably not alone. It makes you feel guilty for ever watching porn in your whole life because you're like, oh my gosh, have I contributed to the bottom line of this company? The answer is almost certainly yes in some small way. Or have I consumed abuse material and just not known? Because the element of fraud in the crime of sex trafficking, that's, that's important and interesting to me on a nerd level, just as an attorney, because what that means is essentially you could say to somebody, hey, I'm going to pay you to appear in a video. And then they leave and I just say, I'm not paying you. Or I trick you in some way saying, hey, I've got a job for you. You're going to have to strip. And then it turns into a sex video. And that is illegal. That is sex trafficking.

[Ryan Reynolds]

It's a Little bit of a shade there.

[Jordan Harbinger]

It's not like you don't have to grab somebody off the street and then force them. It's not taken with Liam Neeson. It's not some crazy thing like that.

[Ryan Reynolds]

You can have somebody who thinks they're.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Getting a job at a restaurant in another state or another country and they're sex trafficked because they don't have any money and they don't have a way to leave and you're telling them you'll.

[Ryan Reynolds]

Let them go if they do this.

[Jordan Harbinger]

And you're telling them it's not going to be uploaded anywhere, but then it is. That is trafficking.

[Ryan Reynolds]

So you could even have somebody who you say you're going to have sex.

[Jordan Harbinger]

On camera for money and they say, okay, fine, but you don't tell them it's going to be uploaded. That's still sex trafficking. That's the important point here.

[Layla Micklewait]

I think they didn't even necessarily need to know that there was going to be money or not. They could have deceived, defrauded, coerced. And we're talking about adults because when they're under 18, it just doesn't matter what happened if they have a video on the site. Now the monetization piece I think is really important when we're talking about the definition of trafficking because a lot of people don't realize that what constitutes trafficking is that commercialization when something of value is exchanged for the coerced sex act or the underage sex. Now with regard to the websites, we call it tech facilitated trafficking because this might be free porn. 80% of the content on Pornhub was free, but it was heavily monetized. So the ones that were benefiting from it are the executives of Pornhub who are selling 4.6 billion ad impressions on Pornhub every single day.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Wait, per day? I thought you were going to say per year. My God, that's a lot of ads.

[Layla Micklewait]

Exactly. That was how they were making most of their money on free porn. So free porn is not free. Yes, it's heavily monetized. It has a high human cost, clearly. But 20% of that would be pay to download content where you could enter into this profit sharing relationship with pornhub, where you could put the content behind a paywall. You have to pay to download that content. And in one horrific case, there was a 12 year old boy from Alabama and he was drugged and he was overpowered and he was raped by a man named Rocky Shay Franklin, who had one of those profit sharing pay to download relationships with Pornhub. And he filmed the assaults. And he uploaded 23 of those videos to Pornhub with titles indicating that they were abused. And this is important when we talk about complicity, because pornhub, in its defense, made a huge mistake.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Content moderation.

[Layla Micklewait]

They had 10 people working per eight hour shift. But they do say we had somebody viewing manually proving every single video before it went live on the site. That's not true. But if it was true, that means that they were approving videos with a 12 year old drugged boy with titles such as Uncle Secret, Young Ass is best, things that would clearly say this is a child. And then once it was discovered, he was a verified uploader in this pay to download relationship. And then police found out. They reached out multiple times to pornhub demanding the videos come down. They were ignored multiple times. It stayed up for seven months, getting hundreds of thousands of views, which all.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Were all monetized, I assume.

[Layla Micklewait]

All monetized. So he was arrested and now he's sentenced to 40 years in prison and the boy is suing Pornhub.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Good for him.

[Layla Micklewait]

Good for him.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Was he 20 now? It's been so. I mean, they'd never.

[Layla Micklewait]

He recently turned 18.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Oh, but this poor kid.

[Layla Micklewait]

And then he. Well, originally he sued with his mom, and then he became old enough to just do it.

[Jordan Harbinger]

I was exaggerating to try and keep it light, but it really took six years and counting. And this stuff was up for months and months when he was a child. This is terrible.

[Layla Micklewait]

When they say we viewed and approved, that means that complicity was even deeper. If they're trying to say that, why would they say that we know it wasn't true? Because moderators through the course of this came forward to me and to investigators and to the attorneys and all of that, and produced documents and schedules showing that they had 10 or under moderators per shift, working not only on Pornhub, because Pornhub was owned by parent company Mindgeek, Mindgeek, who had earned virtually a monopoly on the mainstream, most popular global porn sites and industry.

[Jordan Harbinger]

They just buy everything.

[Layla Micklewait]

So with a $362 million loan from Colbeck Capital, the previous owner of Pornhub, rolled up the industry, buying most of the most popular porn sites and brands and pay sites and tube sites. Pornhub was the flagship site, so it had pornhub in its sister site. So it'd be Uporn Tube, a gaytube extreme, tomb on and on. And these moderators were not just moderating the millions of videos on pornhub. They were in charge of all the porn tube stuff.

[Jordan Harbinger]

So there's 10 people who have eight hours to go through 400,000 uploads a week or whatever it is.

[Layla Micklewait]

Exactly. They were reprimanded if they were watching less than 700 per 8 hour shift videos. Videos just skipping through them. They were incentivized to be just. They put it this way. Our job was to allow as much content to go through as possible. Because the free user generated business model of porn relies on massive amounts of content to be picked up in the Google search results to drive massive amounts of traffic to the site to sell those 4.6 billion ad impressions. They were incentivized to just get as much through. Some of them were watching. The more experienced ones were watching even up to 2,000 videos per eight hour shift.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Just clicking through this is like psychological trauma.

[Layla Micklewait]

It was, it really was. And one of the moderators, and he gave me permission to share this was especially hard for him because he was sexually abused as a child himself.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Geez.

[Layla Micklewait]

And so it was especially traumatizing for him. And I think that was one of the reasons why, you know, when he heard the stories about what was happening on pornhub, wanted to come forward and reveal what he knew.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Oh my gosh. So the content moderation thing is just a joke. It's one of those, like, we have to technically have this department because just say we have it. Yeah, yeah.

[Layla Micklewait]

It was ridiculous because when I discovered all this, I started the hashtag trafficking hub just to reiterate what we just said about trafficking. The reason why I did that was because any underage victim and anyone force, fraud, incursion on the site is a victim of trafficking per our statutes. Because these are heavily monetized videos. So they're using the trafficking statutes now to sue. They can be held criminally responsible for all of that. Some people might say, well, how is that trafficking? It's because it was monetized.

[Jordan Harbinger]

It's monetized?

[Layla Micklewait]

Yes.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Look, I'm a guy who went to college with Internet, so like I've seen my fair share of porn, especially in the early days. You see videos with drunk women who can barely move. And that's the point of the video.

[Ryan Reynolds]

And it's really gross.

[Jordan Harbinger]

And that is, I would imagine, also no one can consent when they don't know where they are and they can't keep their eyes open. This is everywhere. You don't have to look very hard, I would imagine, on a site like pornhub to find something bad. My question is Google's indexing all this. So if you're indexing something and it's 12 year old boy gets raped, your search engine is indexing this, which means it found this and you're just going to go, yeah, okay, well we're just going to surface that as the first result because it matches the best.

[Ryan Reynolds]

How is there not a flag in.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Google that goes, we found a lot of these rape videos that are on a website. Should we block that entire website or call the FBI or something?

[Ryan Reynolds]

No, just put it on the list.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Like the other search results. That's an unreasonable course of action.

[Layla Micklewait]

I agree with you 1000%. And one of the senior employees said Google is where pornhub lives or dies.

[Ryan Reynolds]

Of course if they didn't index all.

[Jordan Harbinger]

These titles they wouldn't need to create all these different videos.

[Layla Micklewait]

Exactly. And Google has the power to suppress so they are just not innocent bystanders. And all this because Nick Kristof, when he did his article Children of pornhub. Yeah he's the two time Pulitzer Prize winning journalist from the New York Times that took this, he heard about this just to give people a recap of what happened. So Trafficking Hub campaign went viral. I started a petition, I wrote an op ed about this, an essay, got a lot of traction. The petition went viral, 2.3 million signatures today from every country in the world. Lots of media articles were written about this. And then Nick Kristoff did this huge investigation. One of the things that he pointed out was Google's power over all of this. And I look at this and I see there are enablers, there is the bad actors and then they're enablers who allow them to do this, who help them, who in fact benefit from their business and doing so knowingly. So that would include the credit card companies, the financial institutions and Google. And so I think Google, they don't let you surface results for how do you kill yourself?

[Ryan Reynolds]

Oh, they don't.

[Layla Micklewait]

They took that ability away from people to search that.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Okay.

[Layla Micklewait]

And find a result that would teach them that this is what he wrote in his article. I haven't actually tried it for myself.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Yeah, I've never thought to Google that.

[Layla Micklewait]

But he said likewise they could suppress user generated porn sites known to be infested in trafficking and not allow that traffic to go. And I have dozens of examples of Google search results that are confirmed. If that link was clicked on Google it would go to a confirmed case of child abuse on pornhub. And I've shown those to Google.

[Jordan Harbinger]

That's a very interesting case. Again From a legal perspective, because Google is also monetizing things via ads and sponsored links. And it's okay. How much do the search results that you're indexing result in monetization for your company? Arguably, there's a nexus there. So you're also, in a way, of course, they got that section 230 where they're like, hey, we're not responsible for the things people put on the Internet. Okay, but you're creating another product by creating the index.

[Layla Micklewait]

And the search results is exactly right. And right now, pornhub and Mindgeek, they're losing their motions to dismiss based on Section 230 because they helped curate. They helped tag title, surface. They created thumbnails.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Yeah. The image search, it's all there. Google creates that on their own servers. The lawyers are making the argument that I would also make. There's a nexus there because of that.

[Layla Micklewait]

Yeah. And then knowingly benefiting. Sure. So in the US not only is it illegal to engage directly in trafficking, but knowingly benefiting from a trafficking venture where you knew or you should have known that this was happening, you can be held liable for that. So I think there should be a lawsuit against Google.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Yeah, I would agree. And it's amazing how much power they have to stop something like this. They just aren't doing it because there's not enough noise. Well, you're working on that.

[Layla Micklewait]

Let's work on that next.

[Jordan Harbinger]

The thing that I didn't understand necessarily was if the uploaders are making money from uploading the videos, you have to know who they are, because you have to know who to pay. How are they getting paid, the uploaders?

[Layla Micklewait]

Yeah, so that was that 20%. So the 20% of content on Pornhub, where it was the pay to download content, they would identify themselves.

[Jordan Harbinger]

They have.

[Layla Micklewait]

So Rocky Shay Franklin was one of those uploaders. Now, the problem was they were identifying the uploader. They weren't identifying the individuals in the videos. So we have numerous cases of victims who are currently suing pornhub who were part of those pay to download. They called it the model Hub program, where they were, quote, unquote, pornhub models that had these verified accounts where they would show an id, they would show where to get paid, but they wouldn't be verifying the individuals in the videos. Yeah, but 80% of the content on Pornhub or more was just the free content. It was anonymous.

[Jordan Harbinger]

I see that maybe points to another website where somebody can go, I'm trying to figure out why somebody would Upload free.

[Layla Micklewait]

Okay? They upload free stuff. The same reason why they upload it to Facebook clout. It's clicks, it's views, shares, comments.

[Jordan Harbinger]

But you're going to prison for 40 years.

[Layla Micklewait]

They're not because they're not going to prison because they could use a VPN to upload and use an anonymous email address.

[Jordan Harbinger]

I see.

[Layla Micklewait]

So nobody could ever know.

[Jordan Harbinger]

So this was nil, basically.

[Layla Micklewait]

There was no risk whatsoever.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Jeez, imagine abusing somebody like you're not even also getting paid for. It's like the height of sociopathy, right? It's like you're not even just a heartless bastard who will do anything for money. You're a heartless bastard who is just wasting your time on this just to get comments. And you're ruining someone's life. I can't wrap my mind around it as a normal person who doesn't have massive psychological damage. I don't get it.

[Layla Micklewait]

The scary thing is that because of the scale of these sites and because they're not the dark web, right? These are the mainstream sites and these are people that we're interacting with every day. I mean, because of the scale, it has to be. Pornhub had intentionally put a download button on every single video. Meaning, and this is important when you think about liability, because if there's a child sexual abuse video that is illegal to distribute and possess, but they were allowing people from their servers to actually possess those videos on their devices all over the world and re upload them again and again, a rape that might be uploaded. So yes, that initial upload happened from that perpetrator, but then millions of people a day would have the opportunity to then download it. And then they are the re uploader. So they then redistribute it again and again.

[Jordan Harbinger]

I wonder why they allowed downloading and re uploading. They must have wanted people to re upload it with different titles.

[Layla Micklewait]

So they indexed that question. Exactly right. They wanted. Because to them it didn't really matter what was in the video, as long as it was inventory.

[Jordan Harbinger]

You have a thousand of the same video on pornhub with a different title and they don't care.

[Layla Micklewait]

Just as. As long as it has different tags, as long as it has a different title, it's more content. And so it was incentivizing people. They wanted people to do compilations. They wanted people to download and upload.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Edit stuff or whatever.

[Layla Micklewait]

Exactly. That is exactly why they had a download button. But at the same time understanding that they had a site that was infested with Videos of real sexual crime.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Somewhere a bunch of guys made a decision that said, hey, if we do this, we're potentially liable for distributing child and illegal pornography, child sexual abuse material, rape videos, etc.

[Ryan Reynolds]

But if we do allow it, we get more inventory.

[Jordan Harbinger]

And they were like, we're never going to get caught for the illegal thing, so just do the other thing that makes us.

[Layla Micklewait]

I think that they had an arrogance.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Yeah. Or there's just no lawyers anywhere near this place, which I don't believe if you're making.

[Layla Micklewait]

No, they had a. I mean they have a chief legal officer who was there from 10 years ago, who's still there today.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Wow, that's a dirty attorney right there. And I mean that in the figurative sense. I'm not accusing this person of any crimes. I am accusing him of being a disgusting scumbag.

[Layla Micklewait]

Though there was an arrogance to all that was going on. I think that they thought they were just too popular. Maybe too big too. That's a question that I sometimes wonder. What were you thinking? You would never get caught.

[Ryan Reynolds]

I want to talk to the lawyer and go, what was your plan for when this eventually came crashing down?

[Layla Micklewait]

This was the plan. It was, how can we make as much money as we can as fast as we can? This was the business model that they set up to the point where in the discovery process, with the litigation now we've even discovered more than what's in my book. So we recently found out things like the executives had emails and documents that they were sharing with each other. They would be recommended. We need to suppress on our red words list words like childhood, minor, young. And they wouldn't. And that they were tracking to the dollar how much money they were making every month on categories and titles that contained child sexual abuse material like the teen categories. Because those were some of the most popular categories on the site.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Right. So if we block this tag, we can do it, but it's gonna lose us $10 million a month. They knew and they were like, let's not do that.

[Layla Micklewait]

Then they knew to the dollar. They were tracking how much money they were getting on these various categories. Now obviously all of the videos in those categories would not be illegal.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Right.

[Layla Micklewait]

In a teen or a very young or young, old, young, small tits, Things like this. It's not all gonna be illegal. A lot of it is. 18 year olds who look underage.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Sure. Dress you up weird or whatever.

[Layla Micklewait]

A lot of it was actual teens that were in these videos and tweens.

[Jordan Harbinger]

How desensitized are you to stuff like this? Cause you just said a bunch of stuff where I was not really necessarily expecting you to say it. There's a part of your brain that's just so deep in this, but then you like a normal person with a child. Also. It's gotta be kind of strange as lawyers do this too, right? You're in a defense attorney and you're looking at gory murder, crime scene stuff and then you have to go get a latte and maybe not think about that for 10 minutes.

[Layla Micklewait]

Yeah, I think that I have just been so immersed in all of this that it just doesn't really. I don't want to say it's like that I'm detached or that it's like a climbing.

[Jordan Harbinger]

It doesn't come across that way, but I just didn't expect you to say, well, there's the small tits category. I was like, geez.

[Layla Micklewait]

But see, this is the thing is that maybe at first it was uncomfortable for me to talk about it, but I forced myself because the thing is that I think people have to hear it. I don't want to talk in vague terms too much. And I was really trying to balance because I under shared. You may feel like this is so graphic and disturbing.

[Ryan Reynolds]

No, you could tell the publisher was.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Probably like, do we need this page?

[Layla Micklewait]

Oh, they were, yeah, like can we.

[Ryan Reynolds]

Remove the chapter on the thing? Because that's really like.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Yeah, we want to sell this in other areas, other countries. When this comes out in another country, you're going to find out what censorship is really like. You know, the Russian edition comes out.

[Ryan Reynolds]

We need all of the stuff that.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Refers to sex removed from this book.

[Layla Micklewait]

Yeah, I just got a Ukrainian translation offer so we'll see how that goes. But I thought that it was important not to be vague, to be specific because I think that a lot of people want to just disregard this as you're just oversensitive about. This is really consensual content. You just don't understand, you don't know consensual content when you read the book.

[Jordan Harbinger]

It is clearly not that it's very clear. What would you say to somebody who believes that the trafficking or the exploitation on these platforms. Oh, it's rare. She's exaggerating. I'm sure you've heard this before.

[Layla Micklewait]

Yeah, I would just say that, you know, one instance like the 15 year old girl from Florida who was missing for a year and found in 58 videos on the site, that would be too much. But we know that the site was actually infested with videos of real sexual crime. That would be the spectrum of abuse. And this is not exaggerated. Like, most of the content on the site was legal and consensual, but too much of it was illegal and that they were profiting from all of it and it was knowing. And so I guess that's just what about ISM too, Because a lot of people say, what about this site and what about that site? And say, okay, well, let's hold them accountable too. I'm focusing on this one predator. We don't do that with individuals. Like when we see Harvey Weinstein, Jeffrey Epstein, we don't say, we're not gonna hold Jeffrey Epstein accountable because Harvey Weinstein was doing it too, or Bill Cosby was also raping.

[Jordan Harbinger]

No, somebody getting murdered in New Jersey doesn't go, look, people get murdered in New York too.

[Layla Micklewait]

It's like, we hold them all accountable.

[Ryan Reynolds]

You all go to prison.

[Layla Micklewait]

That's the way the law works. That's the way it is in this case.

[Ryan Reynolds]

It was interesting in the book that.

[Jordan Harbinger]

You mentioned that adult film stars, like the ones who work in legitimate vetted industrial, whatever porn, they are the ones who often report the videos because they're looking for their pirated, stolen content. But then they come across something where they go, oh my God, this is a child. So they find it all the time. And it's funny because you see somebody like Jenna Jameson being like, this is a cesspool that needs to be taken down. And you go, what an unlikely ally.

[Ryan Reynolds]

Because people will say, and I'm sure that your critics say this, you're just a prude.

[Jordan Harbinger]

That's against porn. That's your problem.

[Layla Micklewait]

I get that. So you're making this up. Well, that was their kind of ammunition to try to quiet this, to try to deplatform or discredit.

[Ryan Reynolds]

Of course, the most important thing, this.

[Layla Micklewait]

Is a religious, moral crusade, right wing, to shut down all sex on the Internet. And at the same time, you have porn performers who are some of my greatest allies in the fight. And sometimes they had to be quiet about it because of the mindgeek monopoly. And they would get blacklisted if they would speak publicly. Because although they hated pornhub because the free porn tube sites, to your point, what you just said was they destroyed the legal studio produced porn industry by allowing, obviously they allowed the rape and the child abuse and all that, but they were just allowing pirated, copyrighted content all the time. So we had porn performers who were complaining just saying, shut this down. Because I'm spending two hours a day scouring my geeks Porn tube sites, trying to get my own stolen content off the site. So they hated it.

[Ryan Reynolds]

Now feast your perverted ears on the pornographically good deals on the fine products and services that support this show. We'll be right back. This episode is sponsored in part by Wayfair. There's nothing more satisfying than finally checking.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Off those home projects you've been putting off. Jen's always updating things here and there. We always utilize Wayfair.

[Ryan Reynolds]

It's kind of amazing how much we've.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Gotten from their rugs, kitchen stools, the kids outdoor playset, even these sleek backlit bathroom mirrors that feel like they belong in a fancy boutique hotel. We even bought a super neat black toto toilet from Wayfair. I know we have a black bathroom. Kind of. Well, whatever.

[Ryan Reynolds]

Whether you're going all in on renovation or just swapping out some fixtures, Wayfair's got you covered.

[Jordan Harbinger]

It's basically your one stop shop for stylish, high quality home upgrades at every place.

[Ryan Reynolds]

One thing I love about shopping Wayfair, their search tools.

[Jordan Harbinger]

You can get super specific. If you're looking for a faucet, you can narrow down 30,000 options by price, style, finish, even brand. It makes the whole process a lot less overwhelming. And the delivery is free and fast, even on big ticket items. They'll even help you set it up, which trust me, is really important if you've ever tried to install a freakin spot chandelier solo.

[Ryan Reynolds]

So if you're looking around your space.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Thinking, yeah, it's time to fix that.

[Ryan Reynolds]

Up, Wayfair is the place to check from.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Lighting, furniture, outdoor storage, hardware, they've got it all. Whether you're working on a tight budget or you're going high end, congratulations.

[Ryan Reynolds]

If you are, smell you. It's all in one place and you.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Don'T even have to leave your couch.

[D]

Shop the best selection of home improvement online. Get renovating with wayfair. Head to wayfair.com right now. That's W A Y F A I R.com Wayfair Every style, every home.

[Jordan Harbinger]

This episode is sponsored in part by Airbnb.

[Ryan Reynolds]

I gotta give a shout out to Brian McDonald who listened to the show.

[Jordan Harbinger]

And absolutely hooked me up in Vietnam. Recently, Brian runs a Taste of Hanoi and I had this layover in Hanoi and he's like, I got you. Sets me up with one of his guides for a motorbike tour in Saigon. Now if you've never been in the back of a motorbike in Vietnam, it's.

[Ryan Reynolds]

Something, man, you're weaving through Scooters in.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Traffic, like a video game where you can actually die. And then all of a sudden, we're inside someone's house. Literally inside. We rode the motorbike. I'll tell you here. The guide pulls into what looks like an alley, okay.

[Ryan Reynolds]

But it turns into a hallway. And then he turns around, grins, and.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Goes, okay, put your hands on my shoulders, duck your head down, pull your knees all the way in. The next thing I know, we're riding through someone's living room, not even kidding. Like actually someone's living room, to get to this little courtyard kitchen where this auntie is making pho that'll just ruin your life.

[Ryan Reynolds]

No pho will ever taste as good.

[Jordan Harbinger]

And Vietnamese egg coffee upstairs on the balcony. I don't even know how to describe it. It's like tiramisu and espresso. Had a beautiful caffeinated baby.

[Ryan Reynolds]

Short trip, chaotic. Absolutely incredible.

[Jordan Harbinger]

And I can't wait to go back and bring Jen next time because I know she's going to love it.

[Ryan Reynolds]

And next time we'll put our place on Airbnb to help fund the adventure. You can too. Airbnb makes it super practical.

[Jordan Harbinger]

It doesn't take a lot of effort. You set it up before you leave and then, boom.

[Ryan Reynolds]

Your house is earning money while you're on vacation and making memories. Your home might be worth more than you think. Find out how [e-mail] host if you're wondering how I managed to book all of these great authors, thinkers, creators, activists every single week, it is because of my network. The people I know, like and trust. And I'm teaching you how to build the same thing for free [e-mail] I.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Know you're probably not booking for a podcast. It doesn't matter.

[Ryan Reynolds]

You might not even use this for work. It might just be a great set of personal or work related skills. Honestly, this course is about improving your relationship building skills in every area. The course does all of that in a super easy, very non cringy, down to earth way. It's not awkward, it's not cheesy. It's just very practical. It's very simple. It's gonna take very little time.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Six minutes a day is really all it takes.

[Ryan Reynolds]

And many of the guests on the.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Show already subscribe and contribute to the course.

[Ryan Reynolds]

So come on and join us. You'll be in smart company where you belong. You can find the [e-mail]. now back to my conversation with Layla Micklewaite.

[Jordan Harbinger]

When I was in my early 20s, a friend invited us to a porn shoot in of course the Valley. And we thought, oh, this would be funny to go and see.

[Ryan Reynolds]

And it was gross, right?

[Jordan Harbinger]

The girls were not in good condition. They were like probably partially intoxicated. But what was interesting was the guys who were shooting it, they were like, you gotta leave, you're not in a condition to work. And I remember thinking like, oh, this is a professional operation. They sent home the girls that were intoxicated or high. That was not expecting that. And it made me realize there's these different tiers, right? There's the horrific, illegal, gross stuff that we're talking about now. There's professional adult film shoots that happen where there's like catering and lighting people and stuff. And it's not necessarily my thing, but it's a thing that it's an industry. And then there's also like the Playboy.

[Ryan Reynolds]

Mansion, which is like adjacent to that.

[Jordan Harbinger]

And it's not appropriate to mix all this into one snowball. There's just these different layers and they get really seedy and gross as you go down.

[Layla Micklewait]

It is true. And there is this distinct difference between the Porn Valley. It almost feels historical now because everything has migrated to mostly the free user generated porn sites, but it still exists. Like the studio produced content where they have to abide by this is really important. USC 2257, this is a law that we've had since 1988 in the United States that requires age and consent verification. It came about when there was an underage victim, Tracy Lords, who was underage and she was being used in these porn.

[Jordan Harbinger]

She's super famous, correct? I feel like I've heard that.

[Layla Micklewait]

Yeah. Like you would have heard her name. Any thinking person understands that if you don't verify for age of consent in porn, you're going to have illegal content proliferating in the industry. And this has been something that they accept in the studio produced professional porn industry. And they abide by that for the most part. And if you don't abide by that, it's a criminal offense. The DOJ has the right to inspect those records at any time. And if you don't have them, you can go to prison.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Yeah.

[Layla Micklewait]

So they take it seriously. However, the problem is it just didn't translate into the Internet age.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Sure.

[Layla Micklewait]

And that is one of the things that we're fighting hard for is to create those standards. Those standards where you have a, you know, an intro and an outro in a lot of those videos where you say, hi, my name is Da Da. Da, I'm here, I consent to this. They do a post shoot interview as well. Like they can have those standards now. You're not going to get as much traffic, you're not going to get as much content uploaded. But that's the price to pay to have a legal operating industry.

[Jordan Harbinger]

There was a point at which you're applying enough pressure where you can see them swapping out and deleting videos. And so essentially proof they knew that the problem was there the whole time because they had no problem finding all these videos they needed to delete once you applied enough pressure. What's interesting to me was in the comments under the videos you mentioned this in the book, they censor words like rape and underaged. So if that's flagged and censored automatically.

[Ryan Reynolds]

Theoretically, if you see that pop up.

[Jordan Harbinger]

15 times in the comments of one video, you could block that video and then have a manual review of that thinking, oh, maybe there's underage rape, whatever in this video. Cuz people keep saying that there is. They just didn't do that.

[Ryan Reynolds]

They just went, oh, let's just block the words out. It's really so clear as you look.

[Jordan Harbinger]

At the way they handled this problem. And I put that in radio air quotes. Handled.

[Ryan Reynolds]

This is not just they were lazy.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Or they were incompetent. This is clearly deliberate. At a certain point, yes, the devil's.

[Layla Micklewait]

In the details of all of this. Exactly the fact that, yeah, so they would have this is rape would be the comment and they would censor rape and this would happen and it was confirmed by the moderators. It's exactly what they were doing. I saw this enough times to say what is going on here? Yeah, they are censoring those words. And when they got in trouble for the stuff like the unconscious, the drugged. So then they started to take out the word drugged from a title, but leave the video up. And so you could see the title, it would be like, you could tell that it would have said that, but just that one word would be taken out, the video is still there. Or they would swap it out, things like that. Instead of actually acknowledging the inherent, deeply flawed business model that they set up, they had to do stuff like this. And it even goes down to things that we discovered like the fact that they intentionally hired one person out of 1800 employees, one person to work five days a week to review videos flagged by users as terms of service violations, including rape and trafficking. And what they did was they had a policy and their emails actually uncovered in discovery where the CEO is discussing with his VPs these policies and talking about them. And he calls it good and reasonable. They had a policy where a video had to be flagged 15 times in order for it to be put in queue for review. So a victim could have their video on Pornhub and then flag it 14 times. They could even flag it 15 times because it had to be over 15 times. And they had a backlog of 706,000 videos. And we have evidence now of specific cases of prepubescent children who had videos on the site for years with 13 flags, 14 flags. And here you have the CEOs and the VPs discussing this policy, saying it was fine.

[Jordan Harbinger]

It's terrible. And pornhub staff out there, if you send me a takedown request for this, I'm really backed up. I've got 800,000 requests for taking down this podcast. It's gonna be a few years, but I'll get to it, I promise. We're on it.

[Layla Micklewait]

I mean, this is publicly available information that is in court documents, of course. And we can see that.

[Jordan Harbinger]

You can imagine somebody going, you need to take this down. You're defaming my corporation. We're on it.

[Ryan Reynolds]

I got somebody who works three hours a week, and they are just slammed.

[Jordan Harbinger]

It's a busy operation we got over here. So the private sharing on pornhub, which I didn't know existed, I guess this is like unlisted videos. Tons of pedophiles are using this because it's basically like YouTube, but you can put up sex videos and you can put up private stuff that is essentially not even going to be found by anybody because you need a specific link. So they're hosting this content, too, which is, again, obviously illegal to even possess, distribute, monetized or not, because it's child sexual abuse material. There's points at which this book is upsetting. If you're a normal human who's even moderately well adjusted, there's gross depictions of rape and abuse. You did a good job of toeing the line of this, where it's not gratuitous, but you did a good job of explaining just how bad it is without making it traumatizing, I think. And I just wanted to give you props for that because it's not an easy topic to cover.

[Layla Micklewait]

I appreciate you saying that.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Yeah, you're welcome.

[Layla Micklewait]

I kind of labored over.

[Ryan Reynolds]

I'm sure you did.

[Jordan Harbinger]

And your editor was probably tearing her hair out, just, oh, what can we leave in?

[Layla Micklewait]

They did want me to tone it down, and I did. I did but also, I just said, look, at the same time, it has to bring true. I didn't want to traumatize people. So I'm so glad that you said that. I did want people to experience it the way that I experienced it. They could feel how I felt when I.

[Jordan Harbinger]

You do get that pit in your stomach feeling without being like, I need to vomit out of my car window right now. I was listening to it while driving and it was just like. There's points where I was just like, this is.

[Ryan Reynolds]

Pause, take a couple breaths, roll the.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Window down, get some air. But I think people will enjoy this book because again, the payoffs are there and we're getting to those in a bit.

[Ryan Reynolds]

The ownership of pornhub.

[Jordan Harbinger]

My producer actually said, hey, aren't they just in Montreal? Can't the RCMP just go in there and be like, hey, you guys are hosting child porn, child sexual abuse material. Get this out of here.

[Ryan Reynolds]

They're in Montreal.

[Jordan Harbinger]

What's going on?

[Ryan Reynolds]

Isn't this Canadian owned? But not really.

[Jordan Harbinger]

So tell us how the ownership is structured.

[Layla Micklewait]

It's a very complicated ownership structure that we still don't fully understand even today. But they were based in Luxembourg for tax purposes. They had offices, their moderation offices in Cyprus. They had offices in Romania, in London, British Virgin Islands. They had their headquarters in Canada. So that's where they had most of their employees and they were operating. So that was their headquarters. They had offices in la. Today they have offices in Texas as well. They were all over the world. And so in that way, they did that on purpose, in a way to avoid responsibility in any one place.

[Jordan Harbinger]

I used to do real estate finance, and you have these investors from, like, Saudi Arabia, and you go, oh, that person's not investing in our U.S. entity. They're investing in our Cyprus entity, which whenever I hear Cyprus and British Virgin Islands, especially if you hear them all in one cluster now, you also hear, like, Dubai or uae, of course. So you hear these. There's certain places where you go, where's Guernsey again? Oh, it's an island off the Isle of Man.

[Ryan Reynolds]

It's like, these are all places where.

[Jordan Harbinger]

You can basically hide money. Vladimir Putin's friend has an account there. That's the company you're in.

[Layla Micklewait]

They were hiding, and not only hiding money, they were hiding themselves. They were hiding their own identities from the public for years.

[Jordan Harbinger]

So this is like shell company owned, I'm guessing, or different shell companies.

[Layla Micklewait]

They had. I mean, over. It was like 200 sister companies, related sides, PO Box accounts, companies that would appear and Then disappear and appear and disappear and interrelated, and it's just very complicated. That was probably the part of all of this that I understood the least. That was the most difficult for me to wrap my head around.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Yeah, you basically need a lawyer to decipher this nonsense.

[Layla Micklewait]

Forensic accountants.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Forensic accountants.

[Layla Micklewait]

Lawyers who. And they did that. And the lawyers that are suing pornhub today, they took two years of jurisdictional discovery. They went in and they've tried to understand all this. And in doing that, they actually were able to now rope in the hedge funds to the lawsuits the victims are suing. And they're not only suing pornhub and it's individual owners, they're suing the hedge funds, they're suing Visa and trying to hold everybody accountable for all of this.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Oh, Visa. Oh, they're not going to like that, are they? The payment processors. I assume pornhub takes credit cards for selling. What is it, premium stuff?

[Layla Micklewait]

No, it was for. Even the ads for buying. Ads buying the ads for selling the premium memberships, for the pay to download content. All of that was being monetized by the credit card companies and PayPal. PayPal actually disengaged with them. When that London Sunday Times story came out I told you about PayPal was like, we're out.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Things are grim when PayPal is the upstanding citizen in this particular story, because you think of credit card companies like, oh, yeah, they're behind me, that somebody charged me for something. They didn't charge me. You know, I called them right away. They did not immediately respond to your query and were horrified and unplugged the.

[Layla Micklewait]

Well, they said they were. They said they were so concerned and. And we were against this kind of content, but it was a lot of talk. It was really hard to get.

[Ryan Reynolds]

They were so concerned until they saw.

[Jordan Harbinger]

How much money they were making from porn.

[Layla Micklewait]

And they were charging a lot, you know, because these are high risk transactions. So they get to charge more per transaction on porn transactions than normal transactions.

[Jordan Harbinger]

I didn't even think about that. So instead of 1%, they're like, hey, look, we gotta charge 3.8% or more.

[Layla Micklewait]

Yeah, I heard certain cards or different financial transactions that are even more than that, so significantly more. And what was interesting about all this, you know, at first we said, okay, looking at this, how do we move them? How do we go after this? And yes, of course, it was like public shaming. But one of the things that was early on we understood was it was the credit card companies. And we knew this because there was a site called backpage.com a number of years ago. It was kind of like Craigslist, where they were selling kids. And one of the things that was really effective was going after the credit card company. So we had that. But then the former owner of Pornhub came forward, Fabian Tillman, the guy that had that $362 million loan to roll up the porn industry. And he's the one who put pornhub on the map. And he had sold the company, I think, six or seven years before all this started. And he came forward to me in the summer of 2020 to say he wanted to help. And one of the things that he said was go after the credit card companies. The only thing they care about is the credit card company. That was a confirmation. Yeah.

[Jordan Harbinger]

But hitting them in the wallet, that's always a good. Generally a good idea.

[Layla Micklewait]

Yeah. Especially if that's their motivating factor. That's all they care about. That's the reason why we saw the payoffs that we did later on in the book with them taking down content.

[Jordan Harbinger]

And so tell me about this Faras guy. First things first. He sounds like a dangerous psychopath. This is not a nice person. He's gross by every metric that you can find. He just strikes me as a disgusting human.

[Layla Micklewait]

So I learned a lot about Feroz through dozens of hours of conversations with company insiders, who from the company experiencing him as an employee, but also people who were close to the family. But I learned a lot about his personality, and it was interesting. I tried to be as detailed and honest as I could about him to describe his character, who he was. He was actually very dedicated to his family at the same time.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Isn't that weird?

[Layla Micklewait]

Willing to completely exploit other children, other people.

[Jordan Harbinger]

And it's also very mafia, the whole thing, the banking and shell companies just reeks of organized crime. And then, yeah, you got the heads of this thing. I'm a family man. I have breakfast with my mom every day. But also I have child sexual abuse material on my website.

[Ryan Reynolds]

And if I don't do it, someone.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Else is going to do it. These sort of justifications that mobsters have.

[Layla Micklewait]

Yeah. I hope that people really do get to know as much as you can, because they did hide themselves. So one of the things I really wanted to do as much as humanly possible was let the world know, who are these people? What are they like? And truly expose them. Because at the same time that they were exposing for profit the bodies of unwilling victims since 2007 and profiting from that. They were hiding themselves. So they were using fake names like VP of pornhub. Corey Ehrman was using pseudonyms all the time in the hundreds of media articles. And the former majority shareholder of the company was completely unknown to the world, and he had hidden his identity for so many years. And actually, Fabian, the former owner, is the one who told me his name for the first time.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Interesting.

[Layla Micklewait]

And we were able to expose him. Burned Burg Mayer, and he was the majority shareholder leaving part time in Hong Kong and London, and he was from Austria. But these men tried to hide themselves. So one of the things was, let's actually show the world who they are and hold them accountable.

[Jordan Harbinger]

It's interesting, right? Because if you're in Silicon Valley and you invested in Uber, you cannot shut up about your good investment in Uber. And if you've invested in Duolingo, you can't stop talking about it. You invest in Pornhub, you got 13 shell companies, a fake name, another fake name, a fake house, a P.O. box, a fake car.

[Ryan Reynolds]

Maybe you're doing something that you are.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Not proud of at this point, right?

[Layla Micklewait]

Yeah, exactly.

[Jordan Harbinger]

It's very obvious. This is not a hedge fund that says, I've got thousands of investments. I don't look at every single one. Mindgeek, what is that? No, you knew damn well that there was something wrong because you hid your identity from that investment, and yet you're on Squawkbox talking about all your other investments. Make it make sense, pal.

[Ryan Reynolds]

Have you been threatened because you're dealing.

[Jordan Harbinger]

With mafia like business and shady characters with zero scruples?

[Layla Micklewait]

Yeah, definitely. That has been part of the whole process. Yeah, I've experienced a lot. Death threats, rape threats, family doxing, hacking, being falsely reported for possession of child pornography, which never happened, of course.

[Jordan Harbinger]

And that's kind of almost predictable, right? We're gonna accuse you of doing the thing that we're doing because it's so ambiguous now. It's an old play.

[Layla Micklewait]

Yeah, that's happened. And yeah, there's been kind of a lot stress on my family through all of this as well, but it doesn't even compare to some of the stuff that the victims themselves have been attacked and had happened to them. And what they've had to go through in identifying themselves and speaking out has been so much worse.

[Jordan Harbinger]

There was that strange, possibly not a coincidence that happened where a couple of the victims came out speaking about this, and then weren't they attacked somehow?

[Layla Micklewait]

Yeah, it was at the same time, within days of each other in different parts of the world. There were separate victims who had come forward publicly. A lot of the victims were coming forward anonymously and being connected to attorneys. I mean, at the time, I had victims coming forward. As the petition was going viral and all the news stories and everything, almost on a daily basis, victims were coming forward. But some of them said, I'm going to put my name out there. I'm going to speak publicly about this. And it was three of them, and they were in different parts of the world within days of each other. Each one of them was physically attacked, and they were just roughed up. It was an intimidation thing. One of them sent pictures of notes that she was getting on her windshield after work that were talking about her sexual abuse and things like that. And it was frightening to just be a coincidence.

[Jordan Harbinger]

It's not like somebody got mugged in Spain and another person had a threat happen in Baltimore. It's, like, very specific.

[Layla Micklewait]

Yeah. And that's the thing. It's that you think that how could this happen? How could this be a coincidence? But at the same time, you can't prove that it wasn't a coincidence. So you feel like, in the sense I felt like I was going crazy, what is happening here is, how could this be real? But it was like this was actually happening.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Dealing with organized crime, though, that's the thing. I'm comfortable saying that because it's a company that engages in criminal activity, knowingly or otherwise, depending on who you ask. By the way, you've been a bit of a vigilante in the past as well. Yeah. There's the plumber who scammed your sister's car transmission. Tell me a little bit about that. Because this is in your DNA, right?

[Ryan Reynolds]

This is something you do.

[Layla Micklewait]

Yeah, I. You know, reflecting back on that, there are some stories people say, like, why did you do this? And how did you stick with it? And some of that I think back on my history, and sometimes I think certain personality traits are just genetic. Like, just in you. Yeah. I've had experiences over the years where a crooked plumber takes advantage of my husband. So he's a builder, and he takes all the money for a job. He never does find out that he had actually done that to many other people looking on the Internet, they're complaining about the same guy, texting him, saying, hey, listen, you give that money back or you're going to regret it. He didn't listen. And I ended up connecting with the victims throughout the county who all shared the same story, connected with the police, actually connected with an ex girlfriend of His I found on social media.

[Jordan Harbinger]

That's always the key, isn't it?

[Layla Micklewait]

And she told me a lot of interesting details and found out that he was going to try to take off to Hawaii with all this money that he'd taken from all these victims and actually found out the airline, the flight. And I told the police, and he was arrested and he was sentenced, and now he's paid everybody back with interest.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Oh, my gosh.

[Layla Micklewait]

Amazing.

[Jordan Harbinger]

I'm just imagining this son of a bitch sitting at an airport sipping champagne, like, I've gotten away with it. This is amazing. And the police are like, there he is.

[Layla Micklewait]

Yeah.

[Jordan Harbinger]

And then $430,000 plus interest later, this guy's just sitting around lamenting.

[Layla Micklewait]

I just couldn't let it go. I just. It started with somebody that I care deeply for, and then this was so wrong, and I just had to go after it. And then a used car salesman had sold my sister a lemon of a junkyard engine and failing transmission, and she drove it off the lot. The check engine light goes on. She begs him to take it back. He won't. I go over there, listen, this is wrong. You sold her a lemon. Give it back. He wouldn't. I just stood out there protesting. I got a permit. Stood outside of his little car dealership for days in the rain, protesting, telling every single person that they sold a lemon, and he lost all his business. And anyway, he.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Yeah, because the news covers it once, and it's like, the owner.

[Layla Micklewait]

The news didn't cover it.

[Ryan Reynolds]

Oh, they didn't?

[Layla Micklewait]

No.

[Jordan Harbinger]

I thought they were going to be.

[Layla Micklewait]

Like, oh, no, the news didn't cover that. There was no news. It was just me with a sign saying, turn around. He sold us a lemon, failing engine. And day after day, he came out, gun threats, yelling his partner quit. I just said, I'm not leaving until you give it back. And I was serious. And then he finally did.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Wow. Yeah. He did the math.

[Layla Micklewait]

Finally hit him where it hurts, Right? Like he was losing his revenue. Nobody would buy a car from him.

[Ryan Reynolds]

You'd have to be crazy to buy.

[Jordan Harbinger]

A car from a dealership with a protester standing out front saying he sells lemons. Geez, I love being on your team. I also am a person who has trouble letting things like that go. Sometimes you have to, of course. But if you don't, if you're just wrong by somebody. I've got this personal policy where if a company screws me over, I want to do at least 10, ideally 100x the financial damage. So if I lose 50 bucks. Yes, I should let it go. But really, I want to do 500 in damage. And often I overshoot because I've got a big platform. So if I say this online company screwed me over, don't buy from them.

[Ryan Reynolds]

Companies pay me a lot to advertise.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Positive things on this show. So a negative impression. Is it worth at least that much?

[Layla Micklewait]

Yeah.

[Ryan Reynolds]

So all I have to do is.

[Jordan Harbinger]

A minute and a half of monologue about why this company sucks. And usually after a while, you don't have to do that because you go to the live chat, they go, our policy is we're not going to refund this. And I go, here's what happened to the last company that I did this. You just explain it and you go.

[Ryan Reynolds]

I'll save you the Google.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Here's a link. Here are the stats. I'm going to say what happened. And I've got this chat logged. It's not going to look good. And then it's, give me 24 hours. And you get an email from a manager that says, we're refunding the entire year. Sorry for the billing mistake.

[Layla Micklewait]

Good for you.

[Jordan Harbinger]

I can't let it go because they're.

[Ryan Reynolds]

Doing it on purpose.

[Jordan Harbinger]

It is an item in their revenue.

[Ryan Reynolds]

The amount we've been able to bill.

[Jordan Harbinger]

From people where they just don't check their statement for this particular charge. Yes. And they go, we'll refund 90 days because that's what you can dispute on your credit card. No.

[Ryan Reynolds]

You added this without my permission.

[Jordan Harbinger]

I am not paying you for whatever. International phone service for a year.

[Ryan Reynolds]

I would rather swap my cell phone.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Over and cost you $25,000 in lost business. That's what I'd rather do.

[Layla Micklewait]

Well, good for you. I mean, you have the heart for justice. Being an attorney also in your past and knowing that they're doing that to.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Other people, that's what really pisses me off.

[Ryan Reynolds]

I can afford to lose 50 bucks. I can afford to lose 500 bucks. You know who can't? Somebody.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Who. That was their rent. And now they're screwed. That really pisses me off. Yeah. So we have the same.

[Layla Micklewait]

We share that.

[Jordan Harbinger]

We got that thing. Yeah. The threats you were getting were scary. They created escort ads with your name, which is creative a little bit.

[Ryan Reynolds]

What do they do? They expect people to then call you.

[Jordan Harbinger]

And then the people are trying to set.

[Layla Micklewait]

It was like intimidation tactics. Just harass, Right? Yeah. I currently have a situation right now, and it's not as nefarious as this, but just an AI thing saying that I'm a porn star using an interview and describing this particular scene that I was in and whatnot. But yeah, all of these things that were happening, they were intimidation, harassment. Some of them I can tie directly back to the company. Some of them are just people who are financially incentivized, who supported the company, who don't want to see revenue disturbed, are angry that this is happening, partners, whatever. Yeah, random people doing this kind of thing. Yeah, but that was certainly happening. But I always had this feeling of this may be uncomfortable, this may be painful, but when you're going through it, it's like when there's purpose to it, it's so much easier to go through. And when you're seeing progress, fine, go for it. We're making progress.

[Jordan Harbinger]

You eventually got the credit card companies. How did you eventually convince these companies to drop what had to be a multimillion dollar line of business?

[Layla Micklewait]

That was hard. We argued and I brought the evidence to the VPs of Visa and MasterCard. It wasn't until Nick Kristof released his groundbreaking article called the Children of Pornhub. He ends that article with these words. Pornhub is Jeffrey Epstein times a thousand. And he specifically called out the credit card companies in his article. Why are you still doing business with a company that distributes rape videos to the world? And at that point there was thousands of follow on articles to that and the pressure was on. There was journalists calling Visa and Master, why are you still doing it? Bill Ackman, who is a billionaire hedge fund manager, and he read the Children of Pornhub. He was incensed. He has daughters of his own. And he reached out and I got connected with him and he learned the story. And not only did he just go on Twitter to express his dismay and call out Visa, MasterCard. He knew the CEO of MasterCard from the tennis circuit. And he made a phone call, he sent some texts. He said, this is trafficking going on. Are you going to do the right thing? And Ajay Bonga, who was the CEO of MasterCard at the time, said, I'm on it. And he was on it. And he actually at that point cut off the credit card companies. And then Visa followed, Discover followed. However, this was the time when they then in a panic because this was the worst thing that could happen to Pornhub. They took down 80% of the entire website overnight. It was gone. Over 10 million videos, over 30 million images in what Financial Times called probably the biggest takedown of content in Internet history. And that was 24 hours. All their unverified content was Gone. Because they wanted to try to woo back the credit card companies.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Look, we solved the problem that we swore was technically impossible.

[Ryan Reynolds]

And we did it overnight.

[Layla Micklewait]

Right. Although they actually didn't, but. However. So this all happened and made huge headlines. But I found out that two weeks later, the credit card companies quietly snuck back to the advertising arm of pornhub. So it was kind of behind the scenes because people don't see those transactions.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Look, it's a different entity called Traffic Junkie.

[Layla Micklewait]

And not owned by pornhub, owned by Mindgeek. And then it was round two. It was two more years of fighting. And it was only until Bill Ackman got involved again. We went on Squawkbox, calling out CEO Al Kelly of Visa after Visa was not let out of their motion to dismiss. In the case where Serena was a young teen. She was exploited on the site. Her videos were uploaded again and again, millions of views. She would beg for the videos to come down. She'd be hassled. They would say, prove that you're underage in the video. Prove that you're a victim. She didn't have to prove that when it was being uploaded. And it sent her on a spiral of despair. She dropped out of school. She was a straight A student before all this happened. Never kissed a boy before. She dropped out of school from bullying. She got addicted to drugs to try to numb the pain. She tried to kill herself multiple times. So terrible, she wound up homeless, living out of a car. But she sued pornhub. And not only did she sue pornhub, she sued its individual owners, the hedge funds and Visa. And Visa lost their motion to dismiss her case. And that is when everything imploded.

[Jordan Harbinger]

I assume they settled, right?

[Layla Micklewait]

It's still ongoing.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Oh, it is.

[Layla Micklewait]

Yeah.

[Jordan Harbinger]

The discovery involved in this is a nightmare for them.

[Layla Micklewait]

But they lost the motion, and that was when the pressure was on. So then we publicly were calling out Al Kelly. Her lawyer was on Squawkbox as well. And finally he made a personal statement and he said, I'm a father and we're finally, you know, cutting off pornhub once and for all.

[Ryan Reynolds]

I'm taking hell for this.

[Jordan Harbinger]

At the country club. That was the final straw for me now that I've personally being embarrassed. Yeah, Bill Ackman.

[Layla Micklewait]

Then it happened and got demonetized by the credit card companies. Lost all mainstream advertisers. All of that happened.

[Ryan Reynolds]

Okay, time to unzip and lube up for the barely legal deals and discounts on the fine products and services that support this show.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Yeah, I'm getting canceled, or at least.

[Ryan Reynolds]

Going to hell for that one. We'll be right back. This episode is sponsored in part by Audible. People always ask me how I managed to get through so much content, especially.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Since I prep for every interview. I'm talking two to three books a.

[Ryan Reynolds]

Week, and it's all thanks to Audible. I've got Audible in my ears.

[Jordan Harbinger]

While I'm getting my 10,000 steps in running errands, even doing stuff around the house, I don't mess with physical books anymore at all. Audible is just way more efficient. I listen on 2 or even 3x speed, which lets me cover a lot of ground without sacrificing quality. Right now I'm listening to Good Inside by Dr. Becky Kennedy.

[Ryan Reynolds]

She's got this really down to earth.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Way of talking about parenting that is not preachy.

[Ryan Reynolds]

And here's what a lot of people don't realize. Audible is not just audiobooks anymore. You get access to thousands of titles.

[Jordan Harbinger]

With your membership, podcasts, Audible originals, and.

[Ryan Reynolds]

Cool stuff like their Words in Music.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Series where artists tell their stories in their own words.

[Ryan Reynolds]

The variety makes the membership way more.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Valuable, so you never run out of great stuff to check out. One day I'm deep in a parenting guide, the next it's a podcast or a spy thriller.

[Ryan Reynolds]

So whether you're into suspense, self development.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Or you just want to make traffic.

[Ryan Reynolds]

Suck less, Audible's got you covered.

[D]

Start listening and discover what's beyond the edge of your seat. New members can try Audible now free for 30 days, and dive into a world of new thrills. Visit audible.com jhs or text jhs to 500500 that's audible.com jhs or text JHS.

[Ryan Reynolds]

To 500500 I've got Homes.com is a.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Sponsor for this episode.

[Ryan Reynolds]

Homes.com knows when it comes to home.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Shopping, it's never just about the house or the condo. It's about the homes.

[Ryan Reynolds]

And what makes a home is more than just the house or property. It's the location.

[Jordan Harbinger]

It's the neighborhood. If you got kids, it's also schools, nearby, parks, transportation options.

[Ryan Reynolds]

That's why homes.com goes above and beyond to bring home shoppers the in depth.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Information they need to find the right home. It's so hard not to say home every single time. And when I say in depth information, I'm talking deep. Each listing features comprehensive information about the.

[Ryan Reynolds]

Neighborhood, complete with a video guide. They also have details about local schools.

[Jordan Harbinger]

With test scores, state rankings, student teacher ratio. They even have an agent directory with the sales history of each agent.

[Ryan Reynolds]

So when it comes to finding a home, not just a house, this is everything you need to know all in1place.homes.com We've done your homework.

[D]

This episode is also sponsored in part by AG1. Spring's here and the days are getting longer and it's the perfect time to refresh your routine. One of the easiest upgrades to make is AG1. While Jordan is super disciplined, I wish I could say the same for myself. So I often keep his advice in mind. To build a habit, keep the friction low, make it easy on yourself, and AG1 is a routine that makes it easy to stick to. It's just one scoop once a day and I can feel the difference. Better energy digestion, even fewer cravings. It covers all the bases without the clutter of 10 different pills. What makes AG1 stand out is that it's NSF certified for sport. It's also tested for over 500 herbicides and pesticides and it's packed with high quality ingredients, no artificial junk. Also, it's backed by science, so it's not just hype. So when it comes to my health, I want something I can trust. And that's why I choose AG1. With science backed ingredients and real benefits, I can feel AG1 makes it easy to support overall wellness every day. And that's why we've been partnering with AG1 for so long. AG1 is offering new subscribers a free $76 gift. When you sign up, you'll get a welcome kit, a bottle of D3K2 and five free travel packs in your first box. So make sure to check out drinkag1.com Jordan to get this offer. That's drinkag1.com Jordan to start your new year on a healthier note.

[Ryan Reynolds]

If you liked this episode of the show, I invite you to do what other smart and considerate listeners do, which is take a moment and support our amazing sponsors, those who make the show possible. All of the deals, discount codes and ways to support the show are searchable and Clickable over at jordanharbinger.com deals. If you can't remember the name of a code sponsor, you can't find it. Email us jordanordanharbinger.com we are happy to surface codes for you. It is that important that you support those who support the show. Now for the rest of my conversation with Layla Micklewait.

[Jordan Harbinger]

The credit card companies eventually bailed, but how did they get paid now? Bank wire.

[Layla Micklewait]

Yeah, today they have bank wires that they can pay in. Crypto is the way that they are monetizing the sites. But enablers is the key word. There are the bad actors and then they're the enablers, those who allow them to continue the exploitation for profit and who benefit themselves from the exploitation knowing that it's happening. And so as much as it's important to hold what I call corporate traffickers, mega pimps, accountable for the exploitation, criminal exploitation happening, you have to hold accountable their enablers. Judge Cormac Carney in California in a case that is suing Visa and pornhub for monetizing child sexual abuse, what he said Visa gave pornhub the very tool through which to complete the crime of knowingly benefiting from child trafficking. I think he said it very well.

[Jordan Harbinger]

When he rejected their motion to dismiss.

[Layla Micklewait]

Yes, exactly.

[Ryan Reynolds]

The lawyers must have got that and.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Their, you know what puckered up real tight.

[Ryan Reynolds]

Because when it's just, no, I want.

[Jordan Harbinger]

To hear what the other side says, that's bad enough.

[Ryan Reynolds]

But when it's no, I think you.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Enabled this completely and you were crucial in that.

[Layla Micklewait]

He called them like what it was is co conspiracy.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Yeah.

[Layla Micklewait]

That's the key to this, is holding the bad actors and their enablers. And the enablers have the power to stop this.

[Jordan Harbinger]

They just have to make a tough call. We're going to lose $25 million a year in fees.

[Layla Micklewait]

That's the price to pay.

[Ryan Reynolds]

Yeah, but on the other hand, you're.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Profiting from a criminal enterprise. It was good while it lasted. Turn off the faucet. It's the right thing to do. You mentioned that they buy user generated content in bulk from developing countries that don't verify or moderate. So they might buy a million videos, I don't know, from a Vietnamese website or something. And you just have no way of knowing if any of that is legal in the United States or not. There's a near certainty that at least some of it is not. To the categories you describe in the book. We won't do it on the show. They're so barfy. Examples are like runaways or like raped homeless teens. The one that stuck with me was people being sealed into vacuum bags or tortured in ice and waterboarding.

[Ryan Reynolds]

It makes you go, what sort of.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Unhinged psychopaths are watching this? I get the drive to watch people bang. Like, I get that, the torture part, that's where you go, wow, this is really feeding some unhealthy stuff.

[Layla Micklewait]

Yeah. And they had hundreds of thousands, if not millions of views and had been on the site for years. These videos, one of the things that happens Is this dark kind of spiral where I hear this a lot from people who come forward and say, hey, I was addicted to this since I was 8 years old and 10 and 11. But obviously there's the psychopaths and the people who are just instantly drawn to that kind of content. But sometimes people go down a road, they don't even realize they're going down.

[Jordan Harbinger]

The rabbit hole thing.

[Layla Micklewait]

So with porn, the dopamine hit, you don't necessarily need more porn, but you need different porn to get that same hit. And so what happens is you go more extreme and more extreme. Some people don't, but then it can lead to where you're watching things that you would never would have imagined that you would have started with in the beginning.

[Jordan Harbinger]

I would imagine there's also morbid curiosity that leads to. I don't know if they have an algorithm. Maybe they do.

[Layla Micklewait]

Oh, they do. So that's how I ended up seeing so much of this illegal content. Because people all over the world, when they would come. Come in contact with an illegal video on pornhub, they would search around the Internet and then they would send it to me. So I would get the link. And if I clicked on the link, then the algorithm springs into action. So if you see one horrific rape video of an unconscious woman, then it thinks, okay, I'm gonna push more of that. Then you get more and more. And so you go down that. I call it the hellhole of rape on pornhub.

[Jordan Harbinger]

I wonder if Google and other companies are retargeting you. Do you get weird ads that pop up where you're like, oh, this has to be because of the pornhub click?

[Layla Micklewait]

Oh, that has definitely happened to me. But to the point of ads, one of the things that was horrific to me to realize, but not surprising was I actually got to investigate Traffic Junkie, which was their ad arm, and the way that they would target advertisements so they would sell ads. First of all, they gather so much data about people. So people think they're going to a free tube site anonymously if you don't use a vpn, IP address and income and all this stuff. But anyway, they would sell ads to advertisers targeting specific content. So they would suggest things like you could find rape in Chinese or not 18 or very young teen or screaming teen, all of these different things. And then they could advertise on a particular video to people who they understood would be interested in their product. So on a child sexual abuse video, I would see an ad that would say, delete your History after clicking here. And it was targeted to pedophiles so that they. Oh, okay, let me click on that ad.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Clever copy.

[Layla Micklewait]

Exactly.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Oh, my gosh. Disturbing. That's what I'm saying about like the rabbit hole, like the hellhole of your algorithm. Man, it really does show you how this can corrupt your mind. I'm not religious at all, but there's no way. This kind of stuff is not horrible for you just psychologically to consume. You hear about it all the time with people who've been through things. There's no way. There's not like some sort of porn PTSD that you get from looking at this crap on the web over a certain period of time. Especially the horrible stuff.

[Layla Micklewait]

The scary thing too, is that kids have free access to sight.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Yeah.

[Layla Micklewait]

The worst things I would never wish on my worst enemy to see that I have personally been traumatized by witnessing on Pornhub.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Any child, a 10 year old's now seeing that.

[Layla Micklewait]

Somebody messaged me two days ago that said I got addicted to the free porn tube sites when I was six and it took me on a dark path. And knowing that they're not only seeing the hardcore content and the porn content, but actually they could be witnessing real sexual crime as their sex education, creating their sexual template, creating their sexual desires and what they understand about sex from such a young age.

[Jordan Harbinger]

It's horrible. Six years old. My son is five and a half and I have to help him build Lego sets, for God's sake. It's just way too young. That's really disturbing. How do law enforcement and regulatory agencies fall short when it comes to addressing these crimes?

[Layla Micklewait]

So pornhub was criminally charged by the US Government for knowingly profiting from the trafficking of over a hundred women in a particular sex trafficking operation in San Diego. And instead of full prosecution, they were offered a deferred prosecution agreement. They were told to pay $1.8 million, which is nothing, to a company like this, and have a government monitor over their site for three years. And I think the way that they're failing in a situation like that is a slap on the wrist or nothing at all. Or we don't see them putting the resources, the time and the attention necessary to actually create a big enough risk for these kinds of abusers to face serious consequences.

[Ryan Reynolds]

Sure.

[Jordan Harbinger]

So this is just cost of doing business at this point.

[Layla Micklewait]

It becomes a million dollars. Exactly.

[Jordan Harbinger]

All right, whatever.

[Layla Micklewait]

That is the cost of doing business. And that is not serious enough for them to actually stop engaging in that kind of conduct.

[Jordan Harbinger]

It has to Be a sort of catastrophic amount of money. That's why, like the hot coffee case from McDonald's, right? If they just had to pay her $600 or $6000 medical expenses, they would have been like, we're not changing the temperature of the coffee. Once they had to pay whatever $12 million, they're like, Dang, we need to change the temperature of this coffee. You gotta do something like that against these websites. So they're not gonna listen.

[Layla Micklewait]

And that's why I'm really hopeful with regard to the civil litigation side of things, because it doesn't rely on anybody with the will of the victims and their amazing attorneys. And today, since 2020, we've had almost 300 victims sue in 25 lawsuits, including class actions on behalf of tens of thousands of child victims. And they're doing well. Those class actions are certified. They lost their motions for summary judgment. They're going to trial like they are doing well. And so I see. I actually have more hope in the civil justice system to hit these companies where it hurts than even the criminal justice system to actually hold them accountable.

[Jordan Harbinger]

That's actually often how it goes. The standard of proof is a little bit lower. Standards can be a little bit lower. It's just slow.

[Layla Micklewait]

Yeah, it is. The wheels of justice turn slowly. That is absolutely true.

[Jordan Harbinger]

It is, yes.

[Layla Micklewait]

But they turn.

[Jordan Harbinger]

I would love to talk about the impact and the payoffs from your investigations and your takedown because the insurance and the lenders dropped the CEO and the executives. Tell us what happened here. This is the part where I was just like, oh, I need to go.

[Ryan Reynolds]

Get a coffee and turn the volume.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Up right when I'm in my car.

[Layla Micklewait]

Yeah, that was pretty incredible. What happened? So they deleted all of that content, but immediately they started getting phone calls. They were getting dropped on a personal level from their insurances for their many rental properties that they had luxury rental properties all over Quebec. And. And suddenly their lenders were dropping them their insurances. Suddenly they couldn't drive their Lamborghinis and their Maseratis and all the kind of luxury cars they had. Cause they were being dropped from their car insurances. They were blacklisted in Canada as a moral risk.

[Jordan Harbinger]

A moral risk. So it's strange, right? Because let's say I drive a Lamborghini and then I suddenly get caught doing blow at a club with Leonardo DiCaprio. Now my car insurance can say, hey, man, you're immoral. The drug use society, we don't like what you do. So I love that these guys got.

[Ryan Reynolds]

Dropped but it is a little scary.

[Jordan Harbinger]

That an insurance company can just.

[Layla Micklewait]

I didn't know that that was even possible behavior.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Yeah, it seems like, wait a minute, what am I missing?

[Layla Micklewait]

Yeah, but in their case, I was glad that they were getting payback. Faras, it was just sick. He's a CEO and minority shareholder. Because they had been exposed and they were getting held accountable and taking Uber everywhere. This is your fault. I mean, that was happening. They were losing mainstream business partners. All the mainstream advertisers were canceling, and the CEO and the COO were finally forced to resign, and the company was sold as a distressed asset.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Micah, tell me you didn't immediately crack open a bottle of wine and just feast on the deliciousness of that revenge. That must have been so nice to see his personal life imploding, like, couldn't happen to a better guy.

[Layla Micklewait]

One of the things that was just reward in that moment of the big takedown that happened was the fact that I was getting calls from so many victims who were just crying with joy and relief that for the first time in years, their rape videos were finally off of pornhub. And it was like they could finally breathe because they had been fighting for so long for these to come down. And finally they were gone. And that was probably the most meaningful thing in all of this when that happened. But at the same time, we're still fighting. We still feel like justice hasn't been fully served, but we're glad for the things that have happened.

[Jordan Harbinger]

It was so satisfying, and this is in the book as well. It's so satisfying to hear the Canadian Parliament tear apart the CEOs and the executives of Pornhub over at Mindgeek.

[Ryan Reynolds]

They're not prepared for the questions.

[Jordan Harbinger]

And you could just see the guy just sweating on TV and being like, oh, my God, my life is over. Why did I agree to Somebody help me? And no one's coming to his aid. It makes me want to download the video of that and the hearing and upload it to pornhub with the title CEO brutally on camera by Canadian Parliament. Gangbang. I know you have that on your computer for rainy days where you're just like, no, I'm having a bad one. I'm going to watch Faras get bent over by.

[Layla Micklewait]

There's been some good, like, compilations. Everything that they say, the way they answer. And it's, yeah, very rewarding to finally see them being grilled and failing.

[Ryan Reynolds]

You thought you were above the law. Here's you not being above the law.

[Jordan Harbinger]

And being embarrassed on TV International. Yes, of course, later evidence shows they hid evidence from law enforcement. Shocking.

[Layla Micklewait]

13 years.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Yeah.

[Layla Micklewait]

Hiding all of the child sexual abuse. So in that parliamentary hearing, the heads of the leading child protection agencies in the US and Canada that they would have to report those videos, child sexual abuse to them. It was mandatory reporting in Canada and they testified that they had not gotten a single report of child sexual abuse for 13 years. And the serious consequences, that is, I think how many children could have been rescued from situations of abuse if they had been reporting and not hiding it from authorities?

[Jordan Harbinger]

Yeah. Oh man, that's disturbing to think about.

[Ryan Reynolds]

What about the employees?

[Jordan Harbinger]

1800 employees.

[Ryan Reynolds]

Don't these people wake up and go.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Oh yeah, that New York Times article. Wow, I had a feeling we were up to no good. And surely people started, oh, they were just jumping shit.

[Ryan Reynolds]

Like imagine hundreds of LinkedIn employees. You work there. Isn't that the thing for New York Times where you abuse kids and you're.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Like, look, I'm just an accountant, leave me alone.

[Layla Micklewait]

They will take it off LinkedIn. They don't want to have Mindgeek on there at all.

[Jordan Harbinger]

That's a hell of a resume gap if you've been to Mindgeek for 10 years.

[Layla Micklewait]

After the New York Times piece, so many employees were jumping ship, just quitting. Entire departments were gone. Like the HR department was gone.

[Jordan Harbinger]

My God. One little petty bit of satisfaction as well for us. It's new mansion that's being constructed. It mysteriously burns down. This is where people go, oh my God, that's terrible. But didn't it turn out to be his neighbors or do we not know?

[Layla Micklewait]

We don't know who did it. Unfortunately, they were trying to kind of turn the fingers, you know, at me and the trafficking hub movement for motivating X, Y and Z. But clearly it was a professional job. It was done by somebody who knew exactly what they were doing. They raised that entire multi tens of millions of dollars of mansions to the ground without even touching the neighbors. And it was in hours. It was a huge fire. It was insane. That happened. Thankfully, they actually weren't in the house because they were building the house. They were at the last stage of construction. So as much as I hate anybody and want to see people face justice, I don't want to see them. Yeah, but that did happen and we don't know even to this day, was it somebody within industry? Was it an angry majority shareholder who was angry? They lived in this place called Mafia Row in Montreal.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Yeah.

[Layla Micklewait]

And there's hints that it could have been their neighbors because their neighbors Were so mad.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Yeah.

[Layla Micklewait]

That they had reporters knocking on the doors of the neighbors, houses, the cameras in the neighborhood all of the time. And then they found out that he had done all of this. They had been hurting children. And before that, they already hated him because he had cleared, like, hundreds of trees to build his monstrosity of a mansion without a permit and all of this. And they. They were ang angry at him anyway.

[Jordan Harbinger]

So that was the last straw. Tony Soprano, the neighbors.

[Layla Micklewait]

Yeah, yeah.

[Jordan Harbinger]

You were on the wrong side. When the Mafia. You're just too immoral. I can't live near you. These guys who made their living embezzling and, I don't know, extorting small business owners or whatever.

[Layla Micklewait]

Good point.

[Jordan Harbinger]

I draw the line at this.

[Ryan Reynolds]

Did you ever think about quitting? I mean, people are threatening your family.

[Jordan Harbinger]

They'Re threatening your kids, they're accusing you. You're getting calls from the sheriff that say you're being accused of having child sexual abuse material or whatever. I mean, there's gotta be days where you woke up and went, like, I can't do this anymore.

[Layla Micklewait]

Oh, yes, that definitely happened. And I wrote a chapter called before youe Break. And it was because so much was piling on at once. And my uncle, who I consider my brother, was dying of cancer and I was seeing him through the stages of death at the same time. All of this was so intense. And I was so conflicted too, because I have two young kids and I'm spending so much time on this. And it was just hard. And there were times when I just. I don't want to do this anymore. But I felt like it is an honor and a privilege of a lifetime to have the opportunity to be able to lead something like this. And sorry I'm getting emotional about it.

[Jordan Harbinger]

But that's great too.

[Layla Micklewait]

Yeah. I just couldn't. As much as I really wanted to, I really didn't want to because I wanted to see this through to the end and I wanted to see justice fully served. And I still do.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Yeah, pornhub is still online, though, man. Like, what's next for you? Because it's not gone.

[Ryan Reynolds]

Do you want to get rid of the whole thing?

[Jordan Harbinger]

What's the goal here? There's still work to do.

[Layla Micklewait]

My dad taught me a lesson. He was a man of integrity. And growing up, if he said something, he meant it. You knew that he was going to, at least as much as he possibly could, try to do what he said he was going to do. And I feel that way. It wasn't a light thing. When we started this to say the petition is called shut down pornhub and hold its executives accountable. And I still feel that justice fully served in this case. Looks like Pornhub does get shut down. We're 91% of the way there. So they have had to take down 91% of the entire website.

[Jordan Harbinger]

91%, yeah.

[Layla Micklewait]

So since the book was written, more has come down. And we found out that they have gone from 56 million pieces of content to 5.2 million today.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Wow.

[Layla Micklewait]

Yes. And so they're 91%. And the rest of the content that's on there, most of that was only verified uploaders. And we know the problem with that. The individuals in the videos were not verified.

[Jordan Harbinger]

People who are in the chat.

[Layla Micklewait]

Yeah. So they need to take down the rest of that content. It's not important just to see justice serve, to get vengeance for victims. And that's important. That's important for their healing because they can say, yes, the wrong was recognized, right, and paid for what happened. And that's an important journey on their healing process. However, it's also important to be a deterrent to future abusers.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Yes.

[Layla Micklewait]

Because this is a risk benefit calculation. And until we make the risk greater than the benefits that these companies get by maintaining the status quo, they will continue. And so we have to make an example out of pornhub to say, and we're seeing this already like the other porn. Two types are already trying to clean themselves up to get rid of illegal content, to change their upload. They don't want to end up like pornhub.

[Jordan Harbinger]

You made an example.

[Layla Micklewait]

Exactly. And that's why when we're fighting trafficking, we have to increase risk and we have to eliminate profitability. But we also want to see policy put in place to make sure this doesn't happen again. So really the solution at scale for this is to mandatory third party age and consent verification for every single person.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Third party's important. Otherwise just trust me, bro, I would.

[Layla Micklewait]

Never want anybody to give their ID to pornhub. Not a million years.

[Jordan Harbinger]

I can't imagine they have. This is all stored encrypted and we're not going to misuse this at all.

[Layla Micklewait]

They're facing a class action right now for data exploitation as well. Yes, user data exploitation. So they were without consent, gathering user data and help monetizing it and whatnot with advertisers and Google and all of that. So they're facing that. So I would never want that. But there are reliable privacy respecting third party companies that can agent consent Verify. And that has to be done and it has to be done at scale. And so what I think is really key here is yes, governments have to do this, but the credit card companies have to do this. Because when Visa says we do not do business with user generated porn sites that don't verify agent consent immediately, quickly, internationally, all of these porn companies that are highly motivated by profit will quickly fall in line.

[Jordan Harbinger]

They will figure out a solution.

[Layla Micklewait]

They will immediately figure it out because.

[Jordan Harbinger]

It creates an immediate market for that third party verification. And that overnight becomes a hundred million dollar plus or whatever business, the financial.

[Layla Micklewait]

Transactions, they will comply for sure.

[Jordan Harbinger]

I mean, even if you charged at scale 25, 20 cents per verification or 5 cents, the scale is enormous. Pornhub has more traffic than Netflix. Those millions of videos. Let's say it costs 25 cents to validate the models in each one. This just adds up so stinking fast. Yeah, it's crazy.

[Layla Micklewait]

And that's why they want to resist it. Right. Because they don't want to pay.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Right. It's their money.

[Layla Micklewait]

They don't want to pay. But that's why these things have to come by force. They have to come through continued public pressure coupled with strategic civil litigation that puts enough pressure on the right pressure points, financial and the public perception, to force those changes to get Visa to do this, MasterCard, governments, and then I think we're going to have a safer Internet for our kids for generations to come.

[Jordan Harbinger]

In part thanks to you.

[Layla Micklewait]

Well, thanks to all the people. I have to pass that on. Yeah. I had the honor of a lifetime leading this movement, but I'm an activist and I was able to help activate people. And it was this amazing team from journalists and lawyers and law enforcement and victims, most importantly, who came together.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Those people are very brave. The victims are very brave. Because if I had a video of me being drugged and raped as a kid, I don't know if I'd be like, I'm gonna shout from the rooftops about how wrong this is. I might just be like, I just wanna go on with my life. Man, this is humiliating.

[Layla Micklewait]

Yeah. Some victims, like 100%, they feel justified. They feel like that. Then there's others. And maybe it's that DNA thing, right? Maybe it's like it's in them. They have this fire, like they want to sound the alarm. And they're really motivated too, by. I don't want anyone else to have to go through what I went through.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Yeah, very admirable. Why do you think the public remains largely unaware of this particular issue?

[Layla Micklewait]

It is shocking to me that after five years of this viral campaign, of all the thousands of media articles that have been written, the lawsuits, everything that's happened, most of the time, most people say, I had no idea that it's happening. That's a problem. And I think it's just because we just haven't reached saturation point where we've talked about it enough for it to be common knowledge. And so that's why I'm so grateful for conversations like this. And I think it's because people are uncomfortable. They're afraid to talk about it. It's one of those things that it's affecting everybody in some way. We're all in contact with this free, user generated porn industry, but nobody wants to talk about it.

[Jordan Harbinger]

That's true. Even my friends and my producer wife were like, oh, this is kind of an icky topic. Not. Not like we shouldn't cover it.

[Layla Micklewait]

That is a thing. It's even with the release of the book. And there's whatever shows you can go on as an author when you release a book. And a lot of them that reach a huge audience are like, it's too heavy, it's too dark. We want to.

[Jordan Harbinger]

America might be like, we want to.

[Layla Micklewait]

You know, and so people want to. A lot of times kind of shy away from these uncomfortable and dark topics.

[Jordan Harbinger]

You know what, though? Podcasts that will cover this. We sell way more books than those morning shows, as fun as they are.

[Layla Micklewait]

Yeah.

[Jordan Harbinger]

The five minute segment on Morning Joe is just not gonna move as many copies of something like this.

[Layla Micklewait]

Anyway, I appreciate the fact that this obviously is not the first time you've been covering this issue of sex trafficking. I know. I've heard other episodes that you've had on this and you definitely don't shy away from the hard topics.

[Jordan Harbinger]

No. If you're not gonna talk about things that matter, you might as well have a morning TV show on network tv. No, thanks.

[Layla Micklewait]

Yeah.

[Ryan Reynolds]

If you could speak directly to the.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Executives at pornhub or the financial institutions, what would you say to them?

[Layla Micklewait]

I would just say you are knowingly benefiting from the exploitation of countless victims and you actually have the power to stop it now. Because the porn sites are highly motivated by the credit card companies and they absolutely had the power to stop it. And we did say that, but they didn't want to until they were forced to.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Until they were forced to.

[Ryan Reynolds]

Yeah.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Holding their feet to the fire. You're a badass, man. Maybe I'm just a former half ass lawyer with a strong sense of justice. But it is so, so satisfying to see these people's feet held to the fire. The banks, the credit card companies, the abusers, the traffickers. I just. I gotta hand it to you. I'm on Team Takedown for sure, and I'm waiting for them to come after me for. Oh, she was slandering us. It's. I don't shy away from a good fight. Scientology tried that too. And I was like, let's go to.

[Ryan Reynolds]

Discovery where we dig in all of your records.

[Jordan Harbinger]

And then.

[Layla Micklewait]

Good for you.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Go ahead. And then they just suddenly don't care anymore because they were never actually gonna do it.

[Ryan Reynolds]

They love to intimidate. And then when it comes down to.

[Jordan Harbinger]

No, I want you to pay your lawyer $30,000 retain that.

[Layla Micklewait]

I can dig into your records too.

[Jordan Harbinger]

They're just like, suddenly, well, actually, you're a small fry. We don't really care. Now you need to decide whether or not this fight is worth it for you.

[Layla Micklewait]

Good for you. And I really like you.

[Ryan Reynolds]

Likewise.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Right back at you. Layla, thank you very much for coming on the show.

[Layla Micklewait]

Thank you for having me.

[Ryan Reynolds]

You're about to hear a preview of.

[Jordan Harbinger]

The Jordan Harbinger show with Amanda Katarzy.

[Ryan Reynolds]

Who was raised in a culture and later sex and labor trafficked.

[E]

The women were trained to be insanely submissive, like, you could never say no to any man. And then the men were trained in a very military way. These people are well armed and well trained, and it's a whole group that thinks that the world is evil and they need to repopulate the world with their people to bring the kingdom of God. When you turn 30, in that culture, you're an adult. So to be 13 years old being courted by men twice my age, three times my age, to see if I would make a good wife, it was just kind of outrageous. So I moved to California to go to school and I start training mma. And my trafficker was there. He was actually one of my boxing coaches. Then he's like, you know, I like you. And so now we're dating. So this is my first adult relationship. He's twice my age at this point. And then he would always take me up to his cabin on the mountain, which was really far away from everybody else. No phone service, isolation. And it was on a Native American reservation. So whatever they wanted to do to me, they could. Oops, you accidentally got gang raped. That was very common of going. Going to go train. And then all of a sudden, now that you've fought 12 rounds, now you're gonna be raped a girl, ran a red light in, T boned my truck. So I pull out my phone and I text my trafficker and I say, hey, I almost just died in a car accident. He said, is your face up? And I'm like, no. He says, well, you're still then. Something isn't right here. This isn't who I want to be. This isn't what I want. And it was like I was coming out of water. I had this moment of clarity and I knew something wasn't right and I knew this wasn't what I wanted. And I knew I needed to act fast in order to get out of that situation because I knew I'd get sucked back in.

[Ryan Reynolds]

To hear how she escaped her dire.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Situation, check out episode 631 of the Jordan Harbinger Show.

[Ryan Reynolds]

Fantastic conversation, man.

[Jordan Harbinger]

I really love this one.

[Ryan Reynolds]

The gross irony here is that this video is almost certain to be demonetized.

[Jordan Harbinger]

On YouTube audio version we have much more leeway.

[Ryan Reynolds]

But on YouTube they're gonna demonetize this almost certainly because of the subject matter that we are discussing. But if we were, I don't know, say, raping underage kids and filming it, we could easily monetize that video with no problem whatsoever on sites like pornhub. And that is just insane to me.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Horrifying, by the way, how satisfying was it when the dude had his unoccupied house and probably uninsured house burned to the ground by his neighbor? His cars are uninsurable.

[Ryan Reynolds]

Like they say on the classier parts of the Internet that I frequent. The dildo of consequences rarely comes lubed, which is very apt for this episode.

[Jordan Harbinger]

And something I would normally never say, especially in public.

[Ryan Reynolds]

But while we're here, am I right folks? All things Layla Micklewait will be in the show [e-mail], advertisers, deals, discount codes and ways to support the show [e-mail] deals Please consider supporting those who make this show possible. Also, our newsletter wee bit wiser, very concrete, specific, practical. Something that'll have an immediate impact on your decisions, your psychology, your relationships in under two minutes. We send it pretty much every Wednesday every in quotes. And if you haven't signed up yet, I invite you to come check it out. It is a great companion to the show. Jordanharbinger.com news is where you can find it. Don't forget about six minute networking [e-mail] I'm JordanHarbinger on Twitter and Instagram. You can also connect with me on LinkedIn this show. It's created in association with podcast one. My team is Jen Harbinger, Jace Sanderson, Robert Fogarty, Ian Baird, Gabriel Mizrahi. Remember, we rise by lifting others. The fee for this show is you share it with friends. When you find something useful or interesting, the greatest compliment you can give us is to share the show with those you care about. If you know somebody who would be interested in this particular conversation, I'm going.

[Jordan Harbinger]

To leave it at that.

[Ryan Reynolds]

Share this episode with them. In the meantime, I really hope you apply what you hear on the show so you can live what you learn and we'll see you next time.