#995 - Jon Ronson

Joe Rogan (0:03)

Three, two, one. Jon Ronson, welcome back.

Jon Ronson (0:07)

Joe, it's good to be back.

Joe Rogan (0:09)

It's good to see you again.

Jon Ronson (0:09)

Very good to be back.

Joe Rogan (0:11)

What's happening, man? How you been?

Jon Ronson (0:13)

I've been good.

Joe Rogan (0:13)

You've been floating around this neighborhood.

Jon Ronson (0:16)

Yeah, I've spent a year on porn sets.

My wife did say to me once or twice, do you really have to go to another porn set? I've just finished making a series for Audible called The Butterfly Effect, and the flap of the butterfly's wings, which I'm tracing throughout the series, is this young man called Fabian, who's like a tech nerd in Brussels, and he has the idea to get rich from giving the world free porn, so free streaming porn. So the series is about the kind of tech takeover of porn in the valley.

Joe Rogan (0:57)

Doesn't he know that that's already real? Free porn's everywhere.

Jon Ronson (1:01)

Yeah, no, that was back in the day. That was like in the 90s. So Fabian gave the world Pornhub.

Joe Rogan (1:08)

Okay.

Jon Ronson (1:08)

So it's fiction. No, no, this is all true. So, okay, let me go back. So in the 90s, this kid called Fabian would like Fabian Tillman, a young boy in Brussels, like a tech nerd, would like to go on CompuServe and swap porn passwords, so get porn for free, which is how people got porn for free back in the 90s. And then he had like a sort of eureka moment, which is I can give the world YouTube for porn. Right. So he bought up this fledgling company in Montreal called, it was called MAMSEF at the time. It was run by these two brothers up in Montreal, and they had just invented Pornhub. Fabian bought up Pornhub and then kind of overnight, single-handedly took over the valley. It's an extraordinary story. This massive flow of money went from where we are now in the valley, a community of people who were making pretty good money from porn. The money just flowed into Fabian's pocket.

Because what Fabian did was...

Well, look, if you're a porn star, and you go to a bank and say, can I have a checking account?

Joe Rogan (2:27)

Did you say a porn star or a pornster?

Jon Ronson (2:30)

Well, I said a porn star, but actually there aren't really many porn stars anymore. If you're a porn person, and you go to a bank and you say, can I have a checking account? The bank manager will usually say no, because you're in porn, which means you're disreputable. Really? Yes.

People like Stoya have written about this a lot, about how they found it really hard to get mortgages, how they found it hard to get checking accounts.

Joe Rogan (2:55)

But checking accounts? That seems unlikely. I mean, I would believe that maybe mortgages, they would think that your business is fairly unstable. That kind of makes sense as far as an investment concern.

Jon Ronson (3:05)

And also the idea that other people, other customers might not like the idea that their high street bank is being shared with somebody who's in porn.

Joe Rogan (3:15)

Really?

Jon Ronson (3:15)

Yeah, it's called reputational risk.

Joe Rogan (3:17)

Wow, that seems really dumb to me.

Jon Ronson (3:20)

Yeah.

Joe Rogan (3:20)

It doesn't make any sense at all.

Jon Ronson (3:21)

Right, well, sure.

But Fabian was making money from running a site that dealt in piracy. So basically fans would upload porn illegally onto Pornhub.

So Fabian was running a site that was filled with pirated content. Fabian went to a bank to say, I want to expand. But because he wasn't ostensibly a porn person, he was a tech person who was deemed to be respectable, this bank gave him a $362 million loan to expand, to build an empire based in part on the handling of stolen porn. So he went to the Valley who were already kind of paranoid that all their porn was being stolen and put up on to PornHub. And he bought up loads of companies at cut price because the companies were panicking and wanted to sell. And suddenly Fabian just single handedly took over porn. And nobody cares about that. Nobody was thinking about the consequences of that because Fabian was giving the world what they wanted, which was free porn. But I was really curious to know what were the consequences.

Joe Rogan (4:37)

Let me pause there. You said no one cares about it.

But a lot of people did. It was a huge issue. And there was a lot of moral debate.