 I want to start our conversation talking about the ruling in the Texas case because it really cuts right to the heart of what these laws are all about. It defines the law here quickly as restricting access to pornographic websites by requiring digital age verification methods and warnings about the alleged harms caused by pornography. The warnings aspect of this is kind of interesting and amusing that these are some examples of the warnings that must be posted in 14-point font or larger. Texas Health and Human Services warning, pornography is potentially biologically addictive and proven to harm human brain development. Exposure to this content is associated with low self-esteem and body image. Pornography increases the demand for prostitution, child exploitation, and child pornography. And then here's the kicker, the judge notes that although these warnings carry the label Texas Health and Human Services, it appears that the Texas Health and Human Services Commission has not made these findings or announcements. So we're going to talk more about what we do and don't know about the effects of porn, but one more thing I want to pull in from the judge's ruling. It was a preliminary injunction halting this law on the grounds that compelled verification chills protected speech because first the restriction is constitutionally problematic because it deters adults access to legally explicit material far beyond the interest of protecting minors and it has racist privacy concerns because by requiring you to submit government identification and this information then going into a government database you're essentially giving the state a permanent database of everyone's porn browsing history with no mechanism requiring them to delete it or who has access to it and so forth. So those were among the judge's objections. There were also things like it was overly broad. It did this in a way that was not narrowly tailored in a way to protect free speech but Ayla what is your reaction and response to this law and the way that the porn industry has reacted to it? I mean like grief or something and disappointment. There's a way where a lot of it's kind of conservative coded has said a lot about oh we like freedom. Don't try it on me let's say out of each other's business and there's a way where I kind of hope they meant it in a more principled manner but instead we are saying that this only applies for things that they approve of but as soon as you're stepping on to things that people find like personally offensive which is why I assume what's going on here and suddenly like those principles no longer apply. I'm really glad that it doesn't seem to be there seems to be being successfully challenged in some court so. You know as someone who is a Texas resident who's provided studied and consumed a lot of online sexual material like what are your biggest concerns about how it's going to affect the landscape? Yeah it depends so this is it depends on like how much this affects but like as with most things like for example with escorting like you introduce laws that try to prohibit some things and it just shoves things underground into places where you can't you can't actually like be safe that easily like with the back page thing like they were working with FBI people to turn in like people who are child molesters child predators or traffickers then the whole website went down and then like boom your whole access is gone and so I think of something very similar is happening here like if you do want to track like bad porn to some degree but see it's really funny because like porn has one of the cleanest porn sites on the internet like everybody ships on Pornhub for their content that they have but like as somebody who tries to post porn places it's one of the most difficult and most stringent websites. Wait a little bit about that like what's the what's the landscape I think most people you know are maybe only fair weather fans of porn sites and only do a little bit of you know recreational porn hub browsing but give us a little bit of a sense of like what are some of the characteristics of really bad actors in this landscape and how might this law result in this unintended consequence of boosting those bad actors while punishing porn hub. So like porn hub if you are a porn actor if you're publishing erotic content on the internet for the past 10 to 20 years what happens is you just it's part of the process that some people steal your stuff and publish it online in places you didn't consent to. It's so normal that like we haven't even processed it and this is an issue because like nobody has a shit about us like about like controlling your content in like copyright kind of ways. It's sort of an attitude of like oh well if you're going to be naked outside like why you shouldn't expect any sort of ability to control like the naked images of you if you're doing this you're doing it to yourself and porn hub is like one of the only as far as I know they weren't legally pressured into it at all they started paying you for content that other people posted about you on their platform which to my awareness is the first time that any porn site started doing this and it was like holy shit you're treating us like humans you don't support stolen content here and there's also the problem of fetishes it's just a different topic but porn hub really doesn't allow fetishes that are considered maybe a little bit edgy for some people. Like what are some examples? Like if you want like like struggle fucking to some degree which is a subreddit that was banned in a couple years ago but this is like more of a phenomenon of like the cleansing of fetishes from the entire internet like trans stuff trans fetishes it's like anything that's like might be considered sort of morally offensive to people on the outside uh anything too kinky um but anyway so like porn hub is one of the wonderful ones that like it seems to actually pay performers in a way where they were never forced to and it seems such a shame that like that's the thing being pressured underneath so there's tons of websites that are just people can post stolen content and you can do absolutely nothing about it. Are you disappointed in any sense that porn hub the stance that they're taking here is we support the law just we don't like that it's only we're going to be the only ones complying with it instead of taking a more expansive or strident opposition to the idea that this is a good way to regulate or prevent children from accessing pornography. Is that what these I thought these maybe I misunderstood I thought they were like we pull it up in a second here we disapprove of the way that this is I think I thought they said they approve of like trying to prevent minors from accessing yeah let's say we've started to introduce laws aimed at preventing children from accessing material harmful to minors online this is okay yeah you're right they're saying this they've supported that notion um if not necessarily the the law itself so yeah which seems to be like a very publicly safe thing to say and a lot of people like in good faith I think support this I personally think that we are like way overly stringent about kids sexuality but I understand that porn hub might disagree. And there's a question I just saw that kind of goes to this point uh Jason at Chevaria says why not just have porn sites on a separate domain than parents can actually control access this was an issue that was brought up in the lawsuit is the idea that you could have something like better content filtering so that's what you know me as a parent would want access to is just tools that really enable me to have a bit more control over what my kid can get to on the internet and if there was a law that had more to do with you know saying a browser has to have a certain level of content filtering or something like that like still don't think that's ultimately gonna that there's always going to be workarounds but at least that would be more theoretically defensible to me. Well I just want to raise the VPN objection here I mean most consumers of porn I would imagine are basically like probably teenage boys up to you know actual male adults um pretty much everybody is technologically able to use a VPN and so I'm curious about like does this just slightly raise the costs um of actually accessing porn but like how airtight is this really what do you think Ayla? Yeah I don't people will find porn is like one of the most powerful things and if you're a teenage would you remember being a teenage boy? I remember it well yeah how much do you think these content filters would have stopped you? I yeah you know this guy here Sandman speaks to this point he says learn from the war on drugs you cannot ban anything people will always find ways to get what they want and there will be someone to supply it and I agree with you Ayla that especially in a case where the the drive is so strong people will find a way and the way to do it is fairly easy and it is VPNs like everyone knows most people uh it's not that hard to download a VPN um most people are technically able to do it and certainly a you know 15 year old boy who's motivated enough to get to it is going to figure out that work around and so I think in some sense yeah we're going to just like if this trend continues that you're going to just see it's going to be a boon for the VPN industry and I'm I'm fine with that but uh it's still worth it you know in the interim to you know we want to be if we want a maximally free world then we want to be working we want to have the the exit hatches like the VPNs the workarounds but also you know fighting and supporting fights on on the legal front as well I want to yeah go ahead I was gonna say I feel like a lot of this is coming from a misguided place like to some degree I think we should question the idea that we should be protecting kids from exposure to sexuality at all like like there's this weird phenomenon where we're treating teenagers like they don't have a sex drive and like aren't shouldn't be allowed any access to any sexual content at all um and I'm like that feels so strange to me and and like dehumanizing in a way I feel like ideally we should be giving them sort of like sexual content that they desperately want but with a lot more education about it they're going to be doing it anyway what does that look like like in your ideal view of the world I assume that doesn't mean trusting state departments of education to appropriately administer sex at right I mean school is deeply fucked up as an institution but if we had to use it I would say like maybe have like like in your class about sexuality I'll have a section on pornography be like hey here are the incentives when people are shooting porn the incentives are different from the kinds of incentives you have when you are having sex here are examples of scenes and porn that you should not be extrapolating to real life and I think it's like it's really uncomfortable for us as adults to think about doing this like with people who are underage um but underage people are people also they're legitimate people with full sexualities and it's just like feels insulting and dehumanizing to treat them as anything else and that purpose would have the positive consequence of also teaching people about incentives which we as libertarians can very much get behind because that seems to be ignored in most public schools these days uh but I am curious I mean do you see um a place for the sort of parental rights argument that Zach is making like I think about this you know I have a very young son right now but navigating this in the future I think like well I see my role in his life as like this this steward of you know attempting to sort of suss out as best I can which you know admittedly probably won't be perfect a sense of what type of material is age appropriate and the ways to attempt to provide behind the scenes context so that he can develop healthier ways of thinking about you know sexuality or or violence in the world or processing grief like any sort of hard thing I see the role of the parent as sort of you're this intermediary between the kid and the outside world and you take on ideally less of that intermediary role to some degree as they get older and as you know they are more and more independent but how do you look at that tension between parental rights and also as you said treating a minor like they're a human too I mean like is the question are there some parents that don't treat their kids like humans well I think I think the question of like if we place this firmly in the parental rights camp of like every parent ought to be able to decide for themselves for their minor child under the age of 18 um you know what type of internet content they feel comfortable with them accessing this creates a problem where some parents will probably draw that line into really you know what you would consider to be a bad spot so how do you look at this in terms of like making sexual material more pervasive for underage children even if that means sort of flouting the wishes of their parents well I mean you can do both I don't like you can do a thing where you allow parents to behave as they want with their kids I guess public schools a deeply fucked institution and I guess that's hard because parents sort of have to vote on what their kids are exposed to I'm like a pro homeschooler in my fantasy world it's like we like people like us would go out and do messaging like hey guys treat your kids like people and but we wouldn't I don't agree with the use of force like I think adults should be allowed to I see this was a lot of like discomfort but like I think parents should be allowed to I'm trying to say the words like treat your child as a subhuman but like I don't I really hate it the only problem is I'm saying that's because the alternative is so much worse like it's like either the parents or the government does it hey thanks for watching that clip from our conversation with Ayla about porn laws the sexual revolution and the freedom to browse the internet privately and speak anonymously and watch another clip right here or the full conversation over here