The Michael Knowles Show - PornHub EXPOSED | Undercover Reporter Arden Young

Episode Date: December 14, 2023

Step into a world of shocking revelations with Michael Knowles in this eye-opening interview with under cover reporter Aren Young. In this must-watch episode, Michael sits down with the courageous undercover reporter to discuss her groundbreaking investigation into one of the internet's most controversial websites, PornHub.   Arden's daring undercover work has led to astonishing admissions from some of PornHub's top figures, shedding light on the darker aspects of the adult entertainment industry. This interview delves into the ethical, legal, and societal implications of her findings, offering viewers a rare glimpse into a topic often shrouded in secrecy and controversy.   🔔 This is an interview you can't afford to miss. Subscribe now for more in-depth discussions and investigative journalism. Share your thoughts and reactions in the comments below. How do Arden's revelations change your perspective on websites like PornHub and the adult entertainment industry as a whole?   #MichaelKnowles #PornHubExposed #UndercoverReporting #ArdenYoung #InvestigativeJournalism #AdultEntertainmentIndustry #EthicalImplications #LegalControversy #SocietalImpact #ControversialTopics #ShockingAdmissions #IndustryInsights #OnlineSafety #ExploitationDiscussion Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Let's say you're 12 years old, you try to like push the envelope as much as you can be like, okay, can I hint it like buy content here? The thing about trans angels, which is a site, they sell that to straight men. Can I like talk more about like what if we brought a trans talent onto the site? Porn in all of its forms are so normalized to them and they're so callous to something as serious as a child being able to view pornography. This is a breaking news story. pleased that we were able to get this story and we did not do the investigation. This investigation was undertaken by a wonderful news group. This would be sound investigations. I am joined here by one of

the journalists, Arden Young. Arden, thank you for coming on the show. Thank you so much for having me, Michael. So Arden, before we get into how you conducted this investigation, what it all means, I want to just show people some clips of what you've uncovered. Because some of us have suspected that Pornhub and its parent company formerly called Mind Geek, now it's called A-Lo, they have to keep changing the name because they're an evil company, and they don't want to have to face the music. Some of us have suspected that they've been up to these kinds of activities for a while. Here it is in their own words.

Let's say you're 12 years old. You're still figuring out your sexuality, maybe even your gender. Wouldn't it be helpful to see? Not a celebration, but just like maybe a normalization of something that you think is what you want, you know? Probably helps a lot. Let's say I was 12 and I saw like trans angels, I saw all these different sites, it would help me figure out what I do like and what I don't like. They need to try to push stuff that's more, less accepted. Like putting a trans male or a trans female in a scene, you wouldn't get that on a normal mainstream site.

So test it out. See if you get a bigger audience with it. See if you can convert somebody, right? Like maybe somebody who's never looked for anything like that might find an interest. They can click on it. Same thing for buy stuff. Same thing for gay. That's another senior script writer at Mind Geek, now called Alo, but we all know it as porn hub. That's just the biggest pornographers on the planet. Two major discoveries here. One, they know that kids are looking at their content. They're totally fine with it. It obviously helps their business model. knew that. It's crazy to hear it in their own words. We all knew that. The second discovery,

to me, is the most shocking. Senior scriptwriter here at the biggest porn company on Earth saying, yeah, we're trying to convert straight guys into looking at gay porn or trans porn. We're always trying to push the boundaries. We're not even just serving the market that already exists for porn. We're trying to create new markets by creating new desires in people that they do not previously have that are certainly out of the mainstream that are considered more deviant. And we're going to slip that content into the porn to expand the palate, I suppose, of the customer. I can't believe they're admitting this. I know. I mean, I was sitting across from him. that was probably one of the last things I was expecting him to say.

My instincts were to just ask him about the kinds of things they were marketing to people because I knew he does primarily work on gay and trans pornography sites. That's mainly what he writes. And he was very, very open. He was very matter of fact. And in fact, he, like you saw, he even viewed kids viewing. porn as a positive thing. So you, you're conducting this interview. This guy obviously has no idea what's going on. But you'd think if you were working for so degenerate a company and you were engaged in such,

even today, frowned upon kinds of behaviors, you might play it a little closer to the vest, right? He didn't, though. Did it take much prodding or was he just open about this? He was extremely open about this. And this, we're talking about. about Dylan in particular, the senior script writer for ALO. He was extremely open, extremely obliging, did not think my questions were strange or out of place at all. And it goes to show you kind of the mindset these employees of this company are in. Porn in all of its forms are so normalized to them and they're so callous to something as serious as a child being able to view pornography. But of course we all know, and in fact in one of your interviews, you mentioned that the median age of exposure to pornography now for kids is something like 11.

Frankly, I'm surprised it's that high. I would even suspect it might be lower. Maybe today it is lower. We all know that kids are accessing porn, and that's how the porn companies cultivate and groom their future crop of customers, because kids' brains are very, very malleable if they get addicted to this stuff when they're 10 or 11 years old, they're going to stick with it for a very long time, most likely. Again, it's horrifying. They should be prosecuted for it.

It's just evil. It's great to hear them admit it. The thing that is so shocking to me, I guess, is that we have been told for my entire life, by the left, by the pro-pornography people, by the sexual revolutionaries, that sexual desire is innate and immutable. it's an orientation. Nobody becomes gay, bisexual, trans. It's not you're just, you're born that way. And how dare you suggest? We'll probably be kicked off of social media for even,

for even repeating what this top porn employee who writes the stuff, who knows what he's talking about, what he is admitting on camera, we'll probably be kicked off even for repeating it. But what he is saying is, yeah, no, that's all bunk. Actually, yeah, you can convert people. That's how our business model works. You got to slip in this weirder stuff.

So you take a guy who's been straight his whole life, who's never entertained any other kind of thought. And then you try to get him. Well, actually, you went even in greater depth with him. Let's play that clip. The thing is, it's like when you write for like Sean Cody, which is like primarily gay targeted, when you write for trans-agel,

it's trans female presenting targeted. You also try to see how much you can take of that. and bring it to mainstream vanilla content, right? Because like browsers and reality kings is predominantly for straight men, but you try to like push the envelope as much as you can be like, okay, can I hint it like buy content here? Can I like talk more about like, what if we brought a trans talent onto the site?

And you kind of like take those risks to try and broaden it a little bit more, even though you know that you have a site dedicated to that, right? Like you're always trying to push it a little further. Because the thing is, the thing about trans angels, which is a site, it's female presenting trans women. And like, they sell that to straight men. Like, that's the demographic. There it is. They are trying to trans the straight guys.

I mean, that's not my words. Don't, hey, social media companies, don't take me off for saying that. That's with the senior writer at Mind Geek, the guy who writes all of this porn. He is saying, we are trying to take. straight guys, our target demo is converting straight guys into trans guys. Yeah, and, you know, I think he meant convert in the marketing sense, which doesn't really make it any better. It's the same sense. Yes, there's a whole conversation we had about the business model and capitalism. But when we're talking about a product that involves at a very deep level your own

desires and your own identity, then when you convert people to the product, you're converting them in their desire and their identity. Exactly. And I think they're completely motivated by profits. They just want to make a wider variety of content, more palatable and more profitable to the single viewer. And, you know, going back to children accessing pornography, we're seeing more and more ID laws passed in the U.S. So now in many states, it's required to verify your age before entering a pornographic site. Alo, the parent company of PornHub, is actively suing some of these U.S. states trying to stop this from happening because they openly admit that requiring their ID before accessing porn actually drives down their traffic by 80%. So for them, protecting

children is not a concern. Maximizing profits is 100% their concern, and they don't seem to care who they harm in the process. Of course not. I thought it told the whole story when Utah first passed, I think it was Utah, passed that ID law. And instantly, Hornhub said, okay, we're not doing business in the state of Utah anymore. He said, well, there you go. There you have it. Arden, tell me a little bit about the investigation itself, whatever you can without compromising your methods. Of course. Well, we were in aspire to investigate Pornhub in the first place because of a 2020 New York Times article called The Children of Pornhub. It really detailed struggles of often underage people to get

their abuse videos taken off of Pornhub, which were being advertised and monetized. So Pornhub was benefiting monetarily from these videos as well as the abusers uploading the videos. and through months and months of requests and begging Pornhub to take these videos down, the videos were not taken down. Only after legal action was taken, this article came out, did Pornhub start really getting scared and taking these things seriously. But our premise for the whole investigation was maybe their concern was just lip service and maybe these things are really still going on. So that's what we sought out to prove, and we did. We have multiple previous undercover videos we've published that detail, just the lack of age and consent verification for pornographic uploads and

pornographic ads going on the site, advertising porn to appeal to pedophiles and young teens. We just have a plethora of undercover footage that we've been putting out. You would think, well, this is a ridiculous premise, I guess. But if you were an executive at Pornhub and you had any modicum of a moral conscience and you found out that you've got child pornography on the site, that there are ads being targeted to pedophiles, and that the moment that you say no more kids get to look at Pornhub, your users drop by 80%, that that would cause you to reflect and say, well, this is really bad. But they don't. Instead, they say, if you make us in any way try to keep kids off the site, we're going to boycott your whole state. Exactly. And in those states, now the only way to access Porn Hub is through a VPN, which they also own VPN Hub. And up until not too long ago, it was actually rated for ages 4 and up in the App Store.

Yeah. So VPN Hub is that, that's obviously not just a porn thing if it's ages 4 plus. It's just a VPN that anyone can use to mask their. Right. It's just a VPN owned by Pornhub. Wow. Have they explained why they keep changing the name? You know, they went through new ownership at the beginning of 2023.

It was actually bought a firm called Ethical Capital Partners. And so they went through this entire rebrand and renamed it ALO because of all the bad press they'd gotten under Mind geek. So I think they're really, they, they tout themselves as the leader in compliance, the leader in ethics of the adult industry. But if they truly are the leader in ethics of the adult industry, we have a huge problem. People have written into me. And whenever I've covered, I interviewed a former porn performer and had a long interview with him. And people would write in about their terrible relationship to porn. Young men write into my show. all the time. They say I'm addicted to porn. I've been looking at it since I was 10 years old.

And I have read accounts of men who say, I was just a straight guy. I was just a normal straight guy. I was married. And then I fell into this kind of weird trans porn and now I think I'm a chick. Or you'd hear, I interviewed a trans widow, a woman whose husband left her to go pretend to be a woman. And I spoke to another expert on this subject. And she said that pornography use, even like mainstream stuff, the biggest porn company in the world, porn hub, porn use is an extraordinary predictor of people falling into this transgender identity. This is something, again, I don't think I'm allowed to say it on social media. This part will probably just have to be behind the Daily Wire Paywall or on X.

But I don't ever want to hear a social media company say that that's disinformation. They've got to take me off the air for saying that again. You're hearing it straight from the horse's mouth. Absolutely. And you know, we've gotten a comment from ALO before on our past releases where different employees admit to different things. And in one of them, they actually allege that the employee is too high ranking to know what he's talking about in the video. He's too powerful. How could he possibly know what his underlings are doing? You've got to be kidding. Yeah. Yeah. So their responses to us have just gotten increasingly ridiculous. you know, they've actually bragged about the fact that they report fewer incidences of child exploitation to the National Center child exploitation or like missing and exploited children, which is a requirement for U.S.-based companies.

So they're bragging that they've reported fewer incidences to the NCMEC than other major tech platforms. But the logic says, actually, you should be reporting. as much as you can, because we know these things are happening on a platform literally dedicated to pornography where random users are uploading pornographic videos. And by the way, if a user's face is not in a video, if it's filmed from the neck down, say, which is very, very common, it is impossible for these content moderators to verify that a face on an ID matches a body. And we have one of the employees saying it that he was very concerned about that loophole, as he calls it at one point. But when he brought it up to leadership, he was told to F off and shut up.

So there's this loophole gaping wide open for children to be uploaded, for, you know, young teens to be uploaded or, you know, date rapes, different rapes to be uploaded. And no one would know. There's so much more to say about this. I know you're very busy. Thank you for giving me so much of your time. The takeaway is here for me. If you are a private individual, call your congressman. If you use the political order, this is as clear-cut a case for proper political action as I've ever seen.

Stop looking at porn. If for no other reason then, the senior writers here are saying they want to make you gay and trans. They want to screw up your head and twist your desires and wrench your very identity. for no other reason, at least instead of self-preservation. Don't do that. Arden, incredible, incredible work. Thank you so much for coming on. Can't wait to hear more,

and I can't wait to hear the excuses from these psychos. Thank you so much, Michael. It's a pleasure.