DEF021 - cindy gALLOP Interview
social sex revolution
Interview date: Friday, November 15th 2019
Interview location: New York
Note: the following is a transcription of my interview with Cindy Gallop. I have reviewed the transcription but if you find any mistakes, please feel free to email us. You can listen to the original recording here.
In this interview, we discuss what drove Cindy to start Make Love Not Porn and the challenges of getting investment and banking.
Interview transcription
Peter McCormack: 00:02:08
Good morning, Cindy.
Cindy Gallop: 00:02:10
Good morning, Peter.
Peter McCormack: 00:02:11
Thank you for having me here in your wonderful apartment in New York. It's a beautiful day.
Cindy Gallop: 00:02:15
It is indeed.
Peter McCormack: 00:02:16
And I knew I had to come and see you and talk to you after meeting you in Palm Springs and hearing you talk about the sexual revolution that you are on. So I just want to start out by … Actually, do you know what I'm going to do? This would be a really good start. Excuse me, I'm going to read something I read in prep, the social sex revolution. Imagine a world in which no one feels guilt, shame or embarrassment around sex, where our sexuality isn't something consigned to the shadows but accepted as personality, a fundamental part of who we are, where everyone is able to talk openly, honestly and frankly about sex, whether that's parents educating their children or lovers communicating in bed.
Peter McCormack: 00:02:53
Now, I won't read the whole thing. I'm going to share that out so people can read it. But can you give me the background to this? What is the journey that's taking you to this point where you are working on Make Love Not Porn and leading the sexual revolution?
Cindy Gallop: 00:03:05
Sure. So, essentially Peter, everything in my life and career has happened by complete accident. I've never consciously and intentionally planned anything. And so my startup is also a complete accident.
Cindy Gallop: 00:03:18
Make Love Not Porn came out of the fact that I date younger men, they tend to be in their 20s. And about-
Peter McCormack: 00:03:25
I'm too old then.
Cindy Gallop: 00:03:28
And about 11 or 12 years ago, I began realising through dating younger men that I was encountering an issue that quite honestly would never have occurred to me if I had not encountered it so very intimately and personally. I realised I was experiencing what happens when two things converge, and I stress the dual convergence because most people think it's only one thing. I realised that I was experiencing what happens when today's total freedom of access to hardcore porn online meets our society's equally total reluctance to talk openly and honestly about sex. When those two factors converge, porn becomes sex education by default in not a good way.
Cindy Gallop: 00:04:09
So I found myself encountering a number of sexual behavioural means in bed. I went, whoa, I know where that behaviour's coming from. I thought, gosh, if I'm experiencing this, other people must be as well. I didn't know that because 11, 12 years ago, nobody was talking about this, no one was writing about it and so this was me in isolation as a naturally action-oriented person going, "I'm going to do something about this."
Cindy Gallop: 00:04:33
So 10 years ago, I put up on no money this tiny clunky website at makelovenotporn.com, that in its original iteration was just words. The construct was porn world versus real world. Here's what happens in the porn world, here's what really happens in the real world. Launched at TED in 2009, became the only TED speaker to say the words cum on my face on the TED stage six times in succession. The talk went viral as a result and it drove this extraordinary global response to my tiny website that I had never anticipated. And I realised I'd uncovered a huge global social issue. And so I then felt a personal responsibility to take Make Love Not Porn forwards in a way that would make it much more far reaching, helpful and effective.
Cindy Gallop: 00:05:22
So that was the point which I turned it into a business. I turned it into the world's first and only entirely user-generated, human curated, social sex video sharing platform. So we are what Facebook would be if Facebook allowed you to socially sexually self-express, which it obviously doesn't. We are socialising and normalising sex, making it easier for everyone to talk about in order to promote consent, communication, good sexual values and good sexual behaviour. And that's why we call ourselves the social sex revolution. The revolutionary part is not the sex, it's the social.
Peter McCormack: 00:06:03
Right. So there's a number of things I can touch on on here. I have previously interviewed an adult performer by the name of Ally Eve Knox, and talked about a number of subjects with her. But the things that are coming to mind here for me, so firstly, I'm guessing your experience here was you were dating young men, you were making your way to bed and you were being treated like it was a pornography film rather than you as a human. So that was, I'm guessing, the first thing.
Cindy Gallop: 00:06:28
Right. Let me just clarify that, Peter. And I should say that I've spent the past 10 years of working on Make Love Not Porn trying to get the world to see nuance in all of this. Because we are talking about the single universal area of human experience that we are most fucked up about.
Cindy Gallop: 00:06:51
So, first of all, let me explain exactly what was going on in the scenario you talk about, because that is absolutely the heart of what we're doing at Make Love Not Porn. Because I decided to Make Love Not Porn to make it easier for every single person in the world to talk openly and honestly about sex. And what you're alluding to demonstrates precisely why this is so crucial.
Cindy Gallop: 00:07:13
So, because we do not talk about sex as a society, it is an area of rampant insecurity for every single one of us. We all get vulnerable when we get naked, sexual egos are very fragile, people therefore find it bizarrely difficult to talk about sex with the people they're actually having it with while they're actually having it. Because in that situation you're terrified that if you say anything at all about what is happening, if you comment on the action in any way at all, you will potentially hurt the other person's feelings, put them off you, derail the encounter, potentially derail the entire relationship, but at the same time you want to please your partner, you want to make them happy.
Cindy Gallop: 00:07:58
Everybody wants to be good in bed. No one knows exactly what that means. And so you will seize your cues on how to do that from anywhere you can. And if the only cues you've ever seen are in porn, because your parents didn't talk to you about sex, because your school didn't teach you, because your friends aren't honest, those are the cues you'll take to not very good effect.
Cindy Gallop: 00:08:19
I'm enormously selective about the younger men I date. My fundamental criteria, no matter how casual, is they have to be a very nice person. I have fantastic read on very nice people. I only date utterly lovely younger men in an atmosphere of mutual trust, respect, affection and liking. So when they get into bed with me, they are going, "My God, she's an older woman, got to impress her," and they're breaking out the porn moves. Overly porn-influenced sexual behaviour is usually driven by the best of all possible motives and not the worst, and so I want your listeners to understand that nuance.
Cindy Gallop: 00:08:51
But, yes, essentially … And, again, bear in mind, this is 11, 12 years ago. I was the first person to stand up on the stage and publicly identify this as an issue, which is why thousands of people then wrote to me from every country in the world pouring their hearts out. But essentially, to your point, this is me going, wow, I recognise those moves, I recognise those facial expressions, I recognise that soundtrack, I know what's happening here. And, as I said, thinking if this is what I'm experiencing, many other people must be as well.
Peter McCormack: 00:09:25
Well, it's interesting you say that because I come here with my own slight nerves about the conversation. Where is this conversation going to go? Are we going to get into an area where I'll feel uncomfortable? Because it's not something openly discussed. Will we discuss something that becomes embarrassing where if my listeners hear or my children hear it … I'm here happy to do it but another thing it makes me think about as well, and I wonder if you've thought about this. In a world where we've had Epstein and we've looked at disgust for him for his treatment of 16- and 17-year-old girls, we also at the same time legally accept an 18-year-old can go into a studio and perform in an aggressive film with three, four guys and that's seen as acceptable. Has that crossed your mind as well?
Cindy Gallop: 00:10:08
So, first of all, you're talking about porn, which is a completely different sector to the sector I operate in.
Peter McCormack: 00:10:15
No, but what I mean is I think what you're trying to do is you're trying to teach a different way to consume sexual material, no?
Cindy Gallop: 00:10:21
No, not at all. Not at all. As I said earlier, Peter, and I've been saying this for 10 years, the issue isn't porn. The issue is that we don't talk about sex in the real world. If we did, amongst many other benefits, which I hope I get the chance to come onto, people would then be able to bring a real world mindset to the viewing of what is simply performative produced entertainment. That's why our tagline at Make Love Not Porn is pro-sex, pro-porn, pro-knowing the difference. And that's why the reason for the genesis of makelovenotporn.tv was that in order to execute against this mission of making it easier to talk about sex, I decided to take every dynamic in social media and apply them to the one area no other social network or platform will go in order to socialise sex.
Peter McCormack: 00:11:15
Okay.
Cindy Gallop: 00:11:16
And to make real world sex and talking about it socially acceptable and therefore ultimately just as socially shareable as anything else we share on Facebook, Tumblr, Twitter, Instagram. So that's why what we're pioneering at Make Love Not Porn is we are building a whole new category on the internet that has never previously existed, social sex. Our competition isn't porn, it's Facebook and YouTube. Or, rather, as I said earlier, it would be if they allowed you to socially sexually self-express.
Cindy Gallop: 00:11:43
And so social sex videos on Make Love Not Porn are not about performing for the camera. They're simply about doing what you already do on every other social platform. Capture what goes on in the real world as it happens spontaneously in all its funny, messy, glorious, silly, beautiful, ridiculous, wonderful humanness, and we curate to make sure of that.
Cindy Gallop: 00:12:06
I designed Make Love Not Porn around human curation, what every other tech platform should design itself around from the get go. Our curators watch every single video submitted to us from beginning to end. We do not publish it unless it's real. And, by the way, we have a revenue sharing business model. Our members pay to subscribe, rent and stream social sex videos and then half the income goes to our contributors whom we call our Make Love Not Porn Stars.
Cindy Gallop: 00:12:32
But let me tell you and your listeners what the overarching goal of all of this is. Because when I say to people that our mission is this very simple thing, make it easier to talk about sex, because we don't do that, people don't get how massively profoundly socially beneficial that would be, and here's what I mean. I designed Make Love Not Porn around my own beliefs and philosophies. One of which is everything in life starts with you and your values.
Cindy Gallop: 00:12:59
So I regularly ask people this question, what are your sexual values? And nobody can ever answer me because we're not taught to think like that.
Peter McCormack: 00:13:09
Yeah, I can't.
Cindy Gallop: 00:13:09
No, exactly. Our parents bring us up to have good manners, a work ethic, sense of responsibility, accountability. Nobody ever brings us up to behave well in bed. But they should because in bed values like empathy, sensitivity, generosity, kindness, honesty, respect are as important as those values are in every other area of our lives where we are actively taught to execute them.
Cindy Gallop: 00:13:39
Here's what the world will look like I can ever get Make Love Not Porn funded to achieve this social mission at scale. Parents will bring their children up openly to have good sexual values and good sexual behaviour in the same way they currently bring them up to have good values and good behaviour in every other area of life. We will therefore cease to bring up rapists because the only way that you end rape culture is by inculcating in society an openly talked about, promoted, understood, operated and, very importantly, aspired to gold standard of what constitutes good sexual values and good sexual behaviour.
Cindy Gallop: 00:14:19
When we do that, we also end Me Too. We end sexual harassment, sexual abuse, sexual violence, all areas where the perpetrators currently rely on the fact that we do not talk about sex to ensure their victims will never speak up, never go to authorities, never tell anybody. When we end that we massively empower women and girls worldwide. When we do that we create a far happier world for everybody, including men. And when we do that we are one step closer to world peace. I talk about Make Love Not Porn as my attempt to bring about world peace and I'm not joking.
Peter McCormack: 00:14:52
I've got my phone out because I was attempting to find something I watched on Netflix recently. It was a documentary about a bunch of school college kids and an American football team who had sexually assaulted a young girl-
Cindy Gallop: 00:15:05
That would have been Nancy Schwartzman's amazing documentary Roll Red Roll.
Peter McCormack: 00:15:12
Yes, yes. So I watched that recently and it's shocking. It's absolutely shocking. Is that what you're alluding to, that kind of behaviour?
Cindy Gallop: 00:15:21
That is part of what we call rape culture, absolutely. And the heart of all of this, Peter, is that we do not talk openly and honestly about sex in the real world. So what we're doing at Make Love Not Porn could not be more topical in the era of Me Too and of the horrifying events you're talking about.
Cindy Gallop: 00:15:39
Because right now, quite rightly, everybody is talking about consent. Everybody is writing about consent. There are lots of thoughtful, nuanced, insightful think pieces about consent out there. Here's the problem. Nobody knows what consent actually looks like in bed. Nothing educates people as to what is great consensual communicative sex, good sexual values and good sexual behaviour like watching people actually having that kind of sex. And Make Love Not Porn is the only place on the internet where you can do that. Every one of our videos is an object lesson in consent, communication, good sexual values and good sexual behaviour. We are literally education through demonstration.
Peter McCormack: 00:16:22
Right. So let me ask you a question. So I've got two children, one of them is a 15-year-old boy, so I recently tried to have a conversation with him because he's at that age where I was where pornography was first introduced into our world. But when I was 15, it was a magazine and it was boobs and bums, that's all it was. He is now one click away from the most extreme pornography that you can possibly get. So I had to raise it with him and I just said, "Look, have you been exposed? Have you seen any?"
Peter McCormack: 00:16:48
He said, "Yes, some people have been sharing things at school."
Peter McCormack: 00:16:52
I attempted to try and talk to him about this to say, "Look, this isn't real life. When you eventually have a girlfriend and you eventually" … Even trying to have a conversation with him he closed up and he refused to even have the conversation. What advice can you have in that area? How do you even approach that with your children?
Cindy Gallop: 00:17:08
Sure. So, Peter, this again is exactly why I started Make Love Not Porn, because the average age today at which a child is first exposed to hardcore porn online is eight years old. And by the way, a global study done by Bit Defender five years ago indicated then that age had dropped to six. And by the way, this is absolutely not because six-year-olds and eight-year-olds go looking for porn, they don't. It's a function of what is inevitable in the digital world we live in today they stumble across it. It's what somebody shows your kid on a cellphone in the playground. It's what happens when they go around to the neighbor's house. Because it doesn't matter what controls you have at home, your kids go other places. Or, and this is by far the most common instance, they google something innocuous and this is what comes up. So parents and teachers write to us all the time.
Cindy Gallop: 00:17:53
My advice to parents today is two things. The first is you cannot begin talking to your child about sex too early. And what I mean when I say that is I don't mean literally talk about sex. What I mean is the very first time they ask where babies come from, they touch their genitals, the most important thing actually isn't even what you say as much as how you say it. Never get visibly flustered embarrassed. Never get angry, never shut them up. Instead answer them calmly, straightforward and honestly, and you will open up a channel of communication between you that will be there all through their lives and you want it to be there.
Cindy Gallop: 00:18:29
And then the second thing I say to parents is today, because of what I've just said, when you talk to your child about sex, you must also at the same time talk to your child about porn. And this is a lot easier to do than most parents think. All you have to do is some version of what I'm about to tell you and you dial it up or down depending on the age of the child.
Cindy Gallop: 00:18:49
So what you say is, "So, darling, we've just talked about sex and you know how together we watch movies and videos and cartoons where things happen that aren't real? Well, there are also movies and videos about sex and they're not real either. And because of that, they can be quite confusing and so we'd rather you did not watch them until you're older. But if anyone ever shows you something like that or you come across it, come and talk to us, we can explain it."
Cindy Gallop: 00:19:20
That is literally all you have to say because you have then done two very important things. The first is that you've set up in their minds when they stumble across porn, this isn't real. And secondly, you have encouraged them to come and talk to you about it. And by the way, trust me, you'll want them to come and talk to you about it because what a child stumbles across can be utterly traumatising.
Peter McCormack: 00:19:40
It's funny you should explain it like that, because that's actually a very similar way to how I explain drugs to my son, because he's at that age now where he's going to festivals, and I had a very similar conversation where I was like, "The first time you're exposed to it, you've got to come and talk to me about it. You won't be in trouble, you'll never be in trouble about this, but we need to have to have the conversation." So it was very similar.
Peter McCormack: 00:20:00
Also, with regards to sex, another thing I've learned with my children is actually not to make jokes about it because if you make jokes or it ever feels like a tease they close up.
Cindy Gallop: 00:20:08
Yup, absolutely. And at the heart of all of this, Peter, is it very much amuses me when people talk about watching porn, because nobody's watching porn, they're wanking. Okay, this is not entertainment you watch, it's entertainment you masturbate to. And so you can't talk about it the way we talk about other forms of entertainment because your son is subject quite rightly to all of the hormonal changes and sexual urges that of course we all are as teens, which is when we begin really getting to grips with our sexuality. And he is going to be massively aroused by whatever he is watching however bizarre or extreme it may be, and that's very, very conflicting in your mind to recoil from something and be enormously aroused by it at the same time. So he's going to find it incredibly difficult to talk about because there are so many different dynamics going on including massive sexual arousal.
Cindy Gallop: 00:21:00
And, again, as I said earlier, there are so many nuances to all of this that because we have never as a society talked openly and honestly about sex, we have never embraced the ability to actually explore and discuss and debate and research and look into this universal human use case the way we have with every other area of life.
Peter McCormack: 00:21:21
So, let me ask you, this is a very bold and open way to talk about sex. Have you received negative feed … You must have, I'm sure, but none at all?
Cindy Gallop: 00:21:31
Nope. Here's the enormously ironic thing about what I'm doing. In 10 years of work at Make Love Not Porn, we have had a universally positive reaction from all around the world.
Peter McCormack: 00:21:41
Amazing.
Cindy Gallop: 00:21:42
My only barriers have been financial and business ones. And, by the way, one of the reasons for that I think is I alluded earlier to the extraordinary global response my TED talk received 10 years ago when makelovenotporn.com was just this very clunky little porn world versus real world site. I think the reason for that extraordinary response was that makelovenotporn.com was a manifestation of me. And what I mean by that is it was very simple, straightforward, truthful, honest, down to earth, utterly non-judgmental and it had a sense of humour. We never get to have conversations about sex within those parameters. The moment we do, the floodgates open.
Cindy Gallop: 00:22:22
What people have welcomed everywhere in the world is that I and my team are doing with Make Love Not Porn is we are socialising and normalising all of this. We are the social sex revolution. And I can tell you that everybody is dying to talk about sex and when you normalise it and go, "This is perfectly natural," and, again, I'm all about communication through demonstration. Our approach is social. Everything we do is social.
Cindy Gallop: 00:22:48
People just go, "My God, at last."
Cindy Gallop: 00:22:51
I remember one of the thousand emails I got 10 years ago was from a man in his 30s, and he wrote to me at enormous length, as many people did. And at the end of his email he said, "An indication of how messed up our world is around sex is that I'm writing all of this to a complete stranger, a woman I've never met, just because she's the first person I've ever heard talk openly, honestly and publicly about all of this."
Peter McCormack: 00:23:18
So I looked at the website, took a look. It is very different from anything else you might go if you're looking for sexual performance as entertainment. It's so real. It also makes it less intimidating.
Cindy Gallop: 00:23:36
If porn is the Hollywood blockbuster, we're the documentary.
Peter McCormack: 00:23:38
Okay. Love that.
Cindy Gallop: 00:23:41
By the way, Peter, the reason amateur is the biggest growth sector in porn has nothing to do with porn. It has everything to do with the fact that everybody wants to know what everyone else is really doing in bed and nobody does until now. And for the first time, at Make Love Not Porn, we're showing you.
Cindy Gallop: 00:23:58
So attached to that are many, many benefits. Porn is purely and simply masturbation material. That's its role, very good at it. We are not just that. We are that too, by the way, extremely happy to be that. But we are many more beneficial things on top of that. So, for example, social sex is enormously reassuring because we celebrate real world everything. Real world bodies, real world hair, real world penis size, real world breast size. You can talk body positivity all you like, you can preach self-love, nothing makes you feel great about your own body like watching people who are no one's idea of aspirational body types getting turned on by each other, desiring each other, having a bloody amazing time in bed. Our mantra is everybody is beautiful when they're having real world sex, and they really are.
Cindy Gallop: 00:24:47
And then we're also reassuring because we celebrate the accidents, the awkwardness, the messiness. If you only learn about sex from porn, porn teaches you that sex is a performance, nothing must go wrong. My God, it did, how embarrassing, I can never speak about this to anybody ever. Whereas we go, if you can't laugh at yourselves in bed, when can you? And in our videos ridiculous things happen because this is the real world.
Cindy Gallop: 00:25:10
And then also very importantly, we celebrate real world emotion. Love, intimacy, feelings. Our members write to us and our Make Love Not Porn Stars, one man wrote, he said, "The sex in that video was incidental, I want what you guys have. I saw the way you look at each other. I saw the way your eyes met. I hope one day I can meet someone I'll have that with." We get very, very moving emails.
Cindy Gallop: 00:25:33
By the way, we have a very unique category on Make Love Not Porn, which I wanted to have from launch and my friends helped me. We are the only place on the internet where porn stars share videos of the sex they have off set in the real world. Because porn stars-
Peter McCormack: 00:25:48
Okay, that's fascinating.
Cindy Gallop: 00:25:49
Porn stars have real world sex too. Which is completely different from the sex they perform professionally. And so our gay, straight, lesbian, trans porn star friends share on Make Love Not Porn videos of the sex they have in their real world relationships with their real world partners, and a number of them talk in those videos about how different this is from what they are performing professionally in front of the camera.
Peter McCormack: 00:26:13
I want to ask a lot more about the business, but I want to do one more question before then. We touched on the fact that, say, my son could at the click of a button get to quite extreme pornography. Where do you stand on censorship though? Do you believe that there should be censorship or do you believe that it comes down to the responsibility of the parents and education?
Cindy Gallop: 00:26:32
Right. So, no, because what I've been saying, again for the past 10 years, is the answer to everything that worries people about porn and sex is not to shut down, censor, clamp down, block, repress. It is instead to open up. Open up the dialogue around all of this in the way that I and Make Love Not Porn are working to do. Open up to welcoming, supporting and funding entrepreneurs like me who want to disrupt all of this for the better. And open up to allowing all of us to do business in the same way everybody else does. Because when you do that, you completely transform the landscape of what is deemed adult.
Cindy Gallop: 00:27:06
I like to repurpose in this context Wayne LaPierre of the NRA's infamous gun control quote. The only thing that stops a bad guy with a business is a good guy with a better business. But it's also very important component Peter, which is we all watch porn, we don't talk about it. Porn therefore exists in the parallel universe, in a shadowy otherworld. Porn therefore lacks a number of the tools that we use in every other part of our lives to improve them. So, for example, porn lacks curation and navigation or rather it lacks socially acceptable curation and navigation. Because there are sites that curate porn, but they're porn sites. There is no Yelp of porn. And there's no Yelp of porn because right now it's really okay to come into the office, stand by the water cooler and go, "I'm really bored of the restaurants I've been eating at. Who knows a new restaurant?"
Cindy Gallop: 00:27:55
It is not okay to come in, stand by the water cooler and go, "I'm really bored of the porn I've been watching. Who knows some new porn?" And that's a problem Peter, because the landscape of porn needs curation and navigation, especially for young people.
Cindy Gallop: 00:28:08
Okay, for example, I have many female pornographer friends who are making amazing, innovative, disruptive, creative porn, they're not getting the traffic, the viewers and the income they deserve because nobody can find them. And, by the way, I get very frustrated when people use the word porn like it's all one big homogenous mass. That is like using the word literature like it's all the same thing.
Cindy Gallop: 00:28:31
The landscape of porn is like the landscape of literature, it is as rich and infinitely varied, as full of genres and sub-genres and we would be a lot better off if society and the business and financial world opened up in the way I've just talked about, which meant that your son, when he is looking for porn, could actually find guides that direct him to the other corners of this vast genre of porn, this vast world of porn, beyond Pornhub, YouPorn, Redtube, et cetera, et cetera. Because he would be a lot better off and, quite frankly, as I said, those pornographer friends of mine would be a whole lot better off as well.
Peter McCormack: 00:29:13
So, I believe everything you're saying. I think it's amazing. For me personally it would be a huge step to go from understanding what you're saying, agreeing with everything you're saying to being brave enough to upload a video of myself online. They must struggle with this. What's your experience with that?
Cindy Gallop: 00:29:35
Sure. I'm glad you asked that question. Obviously, before we launched makelovenotporn.tv, we had to seed the platform with content. So I and our curators spent an entire year asking all our network and complete strangers, will you film yourselves having real world sex for us? So every time I talked about Make Love Not Porn to anybody, I would always end the conversation with a question. So, would you be interested in contributing content? And I would always ask this question regardless of whether I personally thought the person I was talking to would or wouldn't. And that's how I found out that 99.9% of the time, the answer is yes. To the extent that I literally had to rearrange my facial features because I wanted to go, "What?"
Cindy Gallop: 00:30:18
The desire to do this lies a lot closer to the surface in many more people you ever have thought and, given a reason, given our social mission, our social values, people jump at the chance. And, by the way, the vast majority of our Make Love Not Porn Stars had never ever filmed themselves doing anything sexual before ever. They're doing it for us, again, because they believe in what we're doing.
Cindy Gallop: 00:30:38
And here's the really interesting thing, Peter, because we're a social experiment. Even I, who had this idea, had no idea of all the benefits it would deliver. So our Make Love Not Porn Stars tell us fascinatingly that socially sharing their real world sex has been as transformative for them and their relationships as socially sharing everything else has been for the world at large.
Cindy Gallop: 00:31:02
So we are all inclusive, LGBTQ, we have many solo videos. We have men and women who film themselves masturbating for the first time ever and they have uploaded a video of this incredibly intimate act to be watched by complete strangers on our platform. They tell us that doing that made them love themselves more. It actually enhanced their sexual sense of self, their sexual self-esteem. Couples tell us that doing this transformed their relationship because when you decide to film yourselves having sex, you have to talk about it. And when you talk about it, it doesn't matter how long you've been together, the conversation goes places its never ever gone before. Couples write to us and say, "We thought we were open. Doing this just took our relationship to a completely new level."
Cindy Gallop: 00:31:46
And incidentally you don't even have to share your videos on our platform to find out how transformative filming yourselves can be because we get a lot of emails from people saying, nervously and timidly, "We're quite interested. I'm quite interested. Can you tell me more?"
Cindy Gallop: 00:32:04
And one of the things we always say is, "Listen, just start video yourselves or yourself. No obligation. We recommend just start videoing yourself, check it out, ee what you think."
Cindy Gallop: 00:32:14
So we know from the emails we receive, and in fact we just published an amazing blog post from a couple who were members for three years, who we have … First of all, they talked about the fact that Make Love Not Porn has transformed their relationship because, and this is exactly how we're designed to work, they said, "Watching your videos normalized our conversations about our sex life because we discovered that talking about them felt just like talking about something we've watched on TV." And then it inspired them to begin filming themselves. And they have not taken that final step to become Make Love Not Porn Stars but just filming themselves has added this whole new dimension to their sex life that they never anticipated.
Cindy Gallop: 00:32:57
I talked to a woman who … She had seen me speak, she went home, she said, "That very night, my husband and I filmed ourselves out of curiosity." And she said to me, "I had not realized how incredibly hot it would be to watch ourselves." Because a lot of people never have. She went, "Wow." She said, "We're not at the stage … We're not going to share it on your platform but this was amazing." So there is zero obligation to become a Make Love Not Porn Star unless you want to. But we are inspiring people to do this and to have it be revelatory in how their own relationship develops.
Cindy Gallop: 00:33:33
Also I should just say that our community emails us every day. And, again, the point I made earlier, I had no idea how transformative we would be. We hear from couples who say, "You saved our marriage." Haven't had sex in years.
Cindy Gallop: 00:33:48
Because we're social sex, it's okay for the husband to say to the wife, the wife to say to the husband, or partners of whatever gender to go, "I came across this thing. Why don't we watch it together?" Then kaboom, best sex since our wedding night.
Cindy Gallop: 00:34:00
People write to us and tell us that we have helped them recover from rape, sexual assault, sexual abuse and, by the way, women and men write to us and tell us this. They say, "You helped me reclaim my sexuality, to rediscover my body again."
Cindy Gallop: 00:34:17
People write to us post-cancer, post-surgery. One couple wrote they had a thriving sex life marriage, the husband then got prostate cancer surgery, erectile dysfunction resulted. Their therapist recommended Make Love Not Porn. They wrote to us and said, "Our sex life is now even better than it was before the surgery." And, by the way, I think that's because we celebrate all the wonderful ways you can have non-penetrative sex, you do not need an erection to be able to thoroughly enjoy yourself on both sides. We even have a Make Love Not Porn baby.
Cindy Gallop: 00:34:50
So a couple wrote to us quite soon after we launched and they said, "We've been trying for a kid for ages. We just came back from the doctor, our scan proved what we suspected. Our child was conceived the night we watched this particular video on Make Love Not Porn." They said, "We're not going to say we couldn't have done it without you, but you really helped." So we are helping people in all sorts of ways, as I say, I never envisaged when I came up with this idea.
Peter McCormack: 00:35:12
Did you lead by example?
Cindy Gallop: 00:35:14
So we're asked this question all the time.
Peter McCormack: 00:35:15
Yes.
Cindy Gallop: 00:35:17
We sat down pre-launch as a team and we had this conversation. We said, "As entrepreneurs, we should be using our own platform, what do we think about that?" So varying views within the team. Some people keener than others. But we all agreed the same thing, which is we fight an enormous battle every day to build this business. Every piece of business infrastructure any other tech start up can just take for granted, we can't. The small print always says no adult content. And this is all pervasive for us in every single area of the business.
Cindy Gallop: 00:35:48
Sadly, right now, for business reasons it would not help us to have any of us on our platform. It's already tough enough trying to work with business and finance having the platform. And so it's a purely business reason. Further down the road, who knows? But right now, no.
Peter McCormack: 00:36:03
So let's get into the business stuff. And it's interesting timing because of the announcement by PayPal yesterday with regards to Pornhub.
Cindy Gallop: 00:36:08
And can I just say, Peter, my immediate response to that news was fuck me, PayPal let Pornhub work with them for all those years when none of us can. That was the revelation.
Peter McCormack: 00:36:23
Right, okay. What is the business model?
Cindy Gallop: 00:36:25
Right. Our core business model is revenue sharing. So our members pay to subscribe, rent and stream social sex videos. 50% of that income goes to our contributors, our Make Love Not Porn Stars. Because, by the way, we would like our Make Love Not Porn Stars one day to be as famous as YouTube stars for the same reasons, authenticity, realness, individuality. And we want them to make just as much money. We want to hit the critical mass where one day your social sex video gets a million rentals at $5 per rental and we give you half that income. We are the answer to the global economy by the way. So that's the corebusiness model.
Cindy Gallop: 00:36:59
But there are other planned revenue streams, which are predicated on our ability to scale. Which, by the way, is massively inhibited by difficulty finding investors. So one of those is data. So I designed Make Love Not Porn to be the Kinsey of today. Real world, real time, real life human sexual behavior captured in a way that nobody else is doing. By the way, I do not mean personal data. This is a female-founded venture designed through a completely different lens to the white male founded big tech platforms that dominate our lives. That is not our business model. Our business model is the ability to extrapolate data about human sexuality in an area that is notoriously research and data and statistics free because for all the reasons that I battle on a daily basis nobody's funding the Comscore of sex. And also in the area of research and data, where there is the widest possible gap between what people say and what people actually do. And we are all about what people do.
Cindy Gallop: 00:38:01
By the way, we have some very interesting things happening on the data front which we finally found a partner who totally gets it. At the moment I can't talk about it but I'm hoping that in the not too distant future we can announce ways in which we can contribute to the world at large using our data that nobody has even envisaged because we are the only platform that is capturing real world sex.
Peter McCormack: 00:38:29
Okay, so let's tackle the two primary issues you raised there separately, the fundraising and actually building the tech platform. Let's start with fundraising. What's your experience been? I guess you have a deck, I guess you've spoken to venture capital. What's the experience been like?
Cindy Gallop: 00:38:44
So a couple of responses to that. First of all, I've been trying to raise funding for Make Love Not Porn for 10 years. I'm exhausted.
Peter McCormack: 00:38:53
Have you raised any?
Cindy Gallop: 00:38:53
I have and I'll respond to that. So my biggest obstacle raising funding is the social dynamic that I call fear of what other people will think. Because it is never about what the person I'm talking to thinks. When you understand what we're doing and why we're doing it, nobody can argue with it. The business case is clear. It is always their fear of what they think other people will think, which operates around sex unlike any other area. I'm really asked, "So, Cindy, what do VCs say when they turn you down?"
Cindy Gallop: 00:39:25
I go, "I wish I could get that far. I can't even get across VCs thresholds." I can't even get the meetings.
Peter McCormack: 00:39:34
And do you know why that is?
Cindy Gallop: 00:39:34
Fear of what other people think.
Peter McCormack: 00:39:35
So you've been told that?
Cindy Gallop: 00:39:37
No, absolutely. A young VC reached out to me, this is several years ago, he saw me speak at Big Omaha, which is a big Midwest tech conference. He wrote to me, he said, "My God, what you're doing is amazing." We met up the next time I was in San Francisco, we talked, he totally gets it. He said, "None of my partners will. Too many stakeholders. All my partners, our LPs, they won't get it.
Cindy Gallop: 00:39:57
A friend of mine, who is a female VC, a very prominent one, she said to me, "Cindy, I think what you're doing could be really big. If I took it to my partners, they'd go, 'What are you on?'"
Cindy Gallop: 00:40:07
By the way, one of the ironies of this, Peter, is I want to say, "Listen, if everybody dropped the pretense simultaneously, everybody's worried about what everyone else will think. If we all dropped that, then we could all embrace all of this."
Cindy Gallop: 00:40:21
So to give you our fundraising history, after my TED talk, 2009, got this amazing response, concepted makelovenotporn.tv, I then pitched it for two years before I found one angel investor who got it. He put up $500,000 in seed funding to help us build a platform, and sadly, by the way, asked to be anonymous. He works in finance, sadly it wouldn't benefit him for people to know that he backed us, which, again, is one of the things I'm trying to break down obviously.
Cindy Gallop: 00:40:50
But here's the interesting thing, any other founder looking for funding can at least do their research and target. They can go, so and so has publicly said they want to invest in my sector, clean tech, whatever it is. So and so has a publicly viewable portfolio to indicate very clearly their interest would line up with what I'm doing. Nobody is putting their hand out and going "bring me sex tech" and sex is the one area where you cannot tell from the outside what anybody thinks on the inside. The people you think would get it don't, the people you thought were complete prudes do.
Cindy Gallop: 00:41:17
And so this angel investor was someone I'd known for a while. I actually wasn't even pitching him. He was in town, we had dinner. Purely as dinner conversation
I told him what I was doing, he got dollar signs in his eyes, he went, "I'll fund that." And I was gobsmacked. I had him marked as a bit of a prude actually in this area. That just demonstrates what I'm talking about. So he's been amazingly supportive and he's put more money in as convertible notes over the years. I put in a ton of my own in savings by the way.
Cindy Gallop: 00:41:45
And then I set out five years ago to raise just $2 million to scale Make Love Not Porn. It was enormously challenging and hopefully we will come on to talk about the sex tech fund I decided to raise as a result. But at the same time, our investor is … He's a professional investor, so he travels around the world, meets high rollers and whenever he finds somebody he thinks might be open-minded, he'll pitch us to them, which is how he found out for himself what I already knew, which is that we are literally the final front of investment.
Cindy Gallop: 00:42:16
So he and I were having dinner at the end of 2017, and he was gobsmacked because he sees our potential and he said to me, "Cindy, the guys I meet," and sadly they're all guys by the way, "will invest in literally anything else. Guns, alcohol, tobacco, gambling, drugs. The minute you bring up sex, whoa." And he was so frustrated he said, "So I'm going to put the money up myself. Have $2 million."
Cindy Gallop: 00:42:39
And I was gobsmacked because I didn't want to go back to him. He'd been so amazing. I wanted to bring other investors to him. But he put that funding up. By the way, this is nothing to be happy about that in 10 years I've only been able to find one investor. But I need to raise more funding because that was terrific by the way, great. I then discovered even with funding two areas of frustration, one old, one new.
Cindy Gallop: 00:43:04
The first area of frustration, I know we're going to talk about this in more detail, was none of the infrastructure challenges have improved. And then we had a whole area of frustration, because we finally had the funding to do what we'd never been able to afford to before, paid for advertising, marketing, promotion, nobody will take our ads. Facebook will not allow any sex-related advertising, none of the social platforms will. Even Reddit a few months back announced they will not take adult-related advertising. Reddit, I ask you. The same is true of traditional media channels. The MTA, who oversee billboards and subway advertising here in New York, they would not allow Make Love Not Porn to advertise. In fact, my fellow female sex tech founders at Dame Products, who are a sex toy company, are currently suing the MTA under the Freedom of Speech Act for not taking their ads. So $2 million does not go far when you're battling all of those problems.
Peter McCormack: 00:43:56
And over 10 years, because as you know most tech companies, you are a tech company, go through a series round, A, B, C … You know that if you're hitting certain benchmarks you'll be able to get to your next round.
Cindy Gallop: 00:44:08
Yup, exactly. So what you would normally do, Peter, is you would take that $2 million, or whatever your round funding is, and you would deploy it rapidly to get the hockey stick. It doesn't work like that for us. I don't know if I'll ever get funded again quite frankly.
Peter McCormack: 00:44:21
What is the size of the opportunity they're missing out on?
Cindy Gallop: 00:44:24
My God. Sorry-
Peter McCormack: 00:44:26
Can you talk about any of your metrics so far?
Cindy Gallop: 00:44:29
Happily. Let me talk about the opportunity and then I'll come on to our metrics. So I've been saying for years that sex tech is the next trillion dollar category in tech. And the reason I say that is, my God, the money there is to be made. But the money to be made in two areas, the second one of which right now nobody even thinks is possible, they don't even think about it.
Cindy Gallop: 00:44:52
The first area is obviously the money to be made out of sex. We all have it. We all enjoy it. Completely recession-proof, market never goes away. The universal human use case. But secondly, Peter, my God, the money to be made out of socially acceptable sex. When you do what we're doing at Make Love Not Porn, socialise sex, you then normalise people feeling really okay about publicly buying your goods, products, services, and then publicly doing what they do with everything else, publicly reviewing, recommending, sharing, advocating and publicly badging themselves as brand ambassadors. That's the trillion dollar financial future we're going after.
Cindy Gallop: 00:45:38
And it's entirely feasible because … So with Make Love Not Porn, I have to contextualize our metrics because, first of all, our growth has been entirely organic.
As I said, historically we've never had funds to be able to do promoted targeted outreach and now we can't anyway. So our growth has been driven by two things, media coverage and search. The one benefit of being a controversial venture is that we get ongoing media coverage all around the world without doing one single bit of PR media outreach, which is great because we can't afford to anyway.
Cindy Gallop: 00:46:11
And the interesting thing, by the way, is that whenever anybody writes about us in any country around the world, that country rockets to number two in traffic after the US no matter how tiny. So several years ago someone wrote about us in Serbia. Serbia is minuscule, number two in traffic after the US. That summer someone wrote about us in Switzerland, also tiny, number two in traffic. When the country is particularly large, India, China, Brazil, they can overtake the US in traffic. Now what that demonstrates is how much people want what we're doing.
Cindy Gallop: 00:46:39
The less good thing about that is that we get a ton of traffic from BRIC markets where our business model is completely out of whack with the economy. They can't afford us. So I'm actively looking for on the ground investors in India, China, Brazil to launch Make Love Not Porn India, Make Love Not Porn China, Make Love Not Porn Brazil, reconfigured and redesigned to be acculturated to local market, local economy.
Cindy Gallop: 00:47:03
So we have had over 500,000 members sign up in our six-and-a-half-year lifetime.
Peter McCormack: 00:47:10
That's not a small number.
Cindy Gallop: 00:47:10
No, exactly. Obviously a much smaller number in terms of paying subscribers. Again, bear in mind, this is organic growth, it's not even driven by us actively trying to grow our members.
Peter McCormack: 00:47:24
But if you watch the … I'm pretty sure in one of the parts of the Facebook film, Social Network, is when they hit a million subscribers and that's an entirely free platform. Half a million is not a small number.
Cindy Gallop: 00:47:37
No, exactly. Also, by the way, again, bear in mind this is without doing any kind of promotional advertising. We've had over 200 Make Love Not Porn Stars submit over … I think it's now 2,000-odd videos. We began taking in income on day one. Our monthly income is obviously very low because of all the payment processing challenges. But the point is, in the world where the received wisdom is nobody pays for porn, people are paying for social sex because they see the uniqueness and the value of what we're doing.
Cindy Gallop: 00:48:08
By the way we had fantastic proof of concept just literally two months ago because CNN featured us in the premier episode of their new series of This is Life with Lisa Ling, the first episode was called Porn Ed. By the way, I want to mention this is mildly galling that the whole point of the episode was, my God, kids are learning about sex from porn, when I identified that 10 years ago. And if I had raised the kind of funding I was looking for 10 years ago, we wouldn't have to have that episode now. Nevertheless, it was great coverage.
Cindy Gallop: 00:48:36
Within a few minutes of us appearing in the episode, our site crashed with this huge traffic spike. By the way, again, because we are massively underfunded, under-resourced, we knew this was coming, we shored up our servers, our tech is so clunky … We got it back up as soon as we could. The following day our daily income was up over 400%. It proves when people find out about us at scale, A, they want us and, B, they will pay for us.
Peter McCormack: 00:49:03
Didn't Killing Kittens have a similar problem raising funds and they actually community raised in the end?
Cindy Gallop: 00:49:08
Killing Kittens, who are, again, our fellow women of sex tech … By the way we are all part of a thriving community. Your listeners should go to womenofsextech.com, you'll find us all there. It started in New York, which is home to the largest community of female sex tech founders globally, but now we're international.
Cindy Gallop: 00:49:25
So here's the interesting thing. Fear of what other people will think rules out crowdfunding for us. And that's because successful crowdfunding requires network effect. It requires a ton of people willing to very publicly rally around something and then very publicly invite their whole networks into it. And incidentally, Peter, even within sex tech there is a hierarchy of acceptability. Sex toys are now a thing. They're a known category and there's familiarity. We have a number of fellow female founders doing wonderful things in the audio porn, audio erotica market. That's, again, more acceptable because you're only listening, you're not seeing. Make Love Not Porn operates right out at the extreme end of sex tech. My God, people having sex on video basically.
Peter McCormack: 00:50:11
Wouldn't you argue though that Killing Kittens is the same? It's out there with you, they're normalizing-
Cindy Gallop: 00:50:17
But they're event-based. They're content-based and so they're doing something different. Depressingly I see the evidence of this in my own social media feed every day because I am very active on social media and I post on a whole range of things, business, tech, advertising, feminism, sex, Make Love Not Porn. My posts about sex and Make Love Not Porn, my tweets, they're read. They are never liked, shared and retweeted at the same level as anything else I put out there. I can tweet about Make Love Not Porn, I will get 25,000 impressions and two retweets.
Cindy Gallop: 00:50:49
And by the way, I know this qualitatively because I've had this conversation with a number of my friends. And bear in mind a number of these friends are people that are actually very prominent in the tech world. You wouldn't think they'd worry about what other people think. And they've said to me, in one-on-one conversations, "Cindy, you're absolutely right. I love what you're doing, I'm a parent, I get it, I read everything you post, I never retweet it to any of my followers." Fear of what other people will think.
Peter McCormack: 00:51:11
Wow. Well, I'll tell you what's quite interesting. So when the Pornhub news broke yesterday, I posted it in two places as an interesting experiment. I put it out on Twitter, it was shared a lot. Because I'm surrounded by bitcoiners who think this is an opportunity, this is great, this is a way they can be paid. I put it up on Facebook, it must have been liked by two or three people despite the fact that probably … You know the stats of the percentage of men who watch porn and women, men it's close to 100%, and women, 80% maybe.
Cindy Gallop: 00:51:39
No, okay, bear in mind there are no reliable stats, as I said earlier. Nobody's funding the Comscore of sex and porn. But the stat you'll see bandied around there is basically 30% of the porn viewing audience is female. Quite frankly, in my view, it's a lot higher than that.
Peter McCormack: 00:51:53
Okay. But amongst my friends, there will be definitely people, men and women, who are watching porn obviously. And actually the removal of payment from PayPal, in my world, firstly, that's censorship, it's financial censorship. But, secondly, it can make their lives more difficult which I think maybe potentially makes it more dangerous. No one wants to talk about-
Cindy Gallop: 00:52:12
You're absolutely right, Peter. You're absolutely bloody right. And this is the infuriating thing, I agree. To be frank, separate to that issue, I get mildly upset every day when I see how few of my many friends on Facebook and LinkedIn and on Twitter like and retweet my posts about my own startup. Only my really, really close friends are brave enough to actually like those posts and retweet those tweets. It's astonishing, it's absolutely astonishing.
Peter McCormack: 00:52:45
The question I like to ask people is do we think the performers in adult films deserve the same treatment and protections of people in Hollywood films? My view is absolutely exactly the same because they're essentially doing the same thing. You consume it differently but they're essentially providing you with onscreen entertainment.
Cindy Gallop: 00:53:00
Peter, you're absolutely right. By the way, part of the social sex revolution, and I've said this publicly many times, is that in normalizing all of this one day sex work should be as straightforward and natural and normal a career choice as doctor, lawyer, accountant. And sex workers should be able to use their own names and not be in fear of any stigma.
Cindy Gallop: 00:53:20
This is the infuriating thing. I go back to my point earlier about we all watch porn, we don't talk about it. Porn therefore lives in this parallel universe. Therefore porn is the one industry where nobody shines a bright light into dark corners. Nobody is acting on behalf of the industry. Nobody has driven any antitrust legislation to break up the biggest monopoly in an industry in the world, which is Mindgeek, which monopolizes porn. And in any other industry that would not be allowed to continue, but in porn it is. I go back again to my point about the answer to all of this is not to shut down, censor, clamp down, lock, repress, it is instead to open up.
Cindy Gallop: 00:54:03
I've been very vocal, again, in interviews. I make the point that every single payment processor that refuses to process payments for a legal adult company, legal adult businesses, every bank that refuses to work with legal adult businesses, every business that will not partner with legal adult businesses, they are directly responsible for all the bad things that happen in the adult industry.
Peter McCormack: 00:54:30
Okay, let's … I'm conscious of time but I do want to ask you about the difficulties you've had specifically with regards to banking services, but also with technology. Because you've had a real struggle, haven't you in this area?
Cindy Gallop: 00:54:41
Yup. So as I said earlier, every single piece of business infrastructure is denied to us because of the clause no adult content, and this is all pervasive across every area of the business in ways that people outside the sphere don't realize. So as I said, I can't get funded. I can't get banked. It took me four years to find one bank here in America that would allow me to open a business bank account for Make Love Not Porn. Our biggest operational challenge is payments. PayPal won't work with us. Stripe can't work with adult content. And, by the way, the founders of Stripe are friends and fans and supporters-
Peter McCormack: 00:55:21
Why can't? Why is it can't?
Cindy Gallop: 00:55:22
Because the banks won't let them.
Peter McCormack: 00:55:24
So the banks are the problem here.
Cindy Gallop: 00:55:29
Then, every single tech service I need to use to operate Make Love Not Porn, hosting, encoding, encrypting, the terms of service always say no adult content. In every single case, I have to go to the people at the top of the company, explain what I'm doing, beg to be allowed to use their service, sometimes they let me, sometimes they don't. This is a very labor intensive process as you can imagine. We had to build our entire video sharing, video streaming platform from scratch ourselves as proprietary technology because existing streaming services, off the shelf components, will not stream adult content. I am so jealous of friends who built video startups on top of Vimeo. Quick, easy, simple, I can't do that.
Cindy Gallop: 00:56:10
Even something as apparently simple as finding an email partner, MailChimp won't work with adult content. We were rejected by six or seven email partners until we found Sendgrid who would. Every single thing is a battle. And that is why, by the way, the thing that overcomes all of this is funding and money. And as long as I don't get it-
Peter McCormack: 00:56:27
Yeah, but there's a bigger issue there. Yes, funding and money, but this is discriminatory behavior for what is a legal industry.
Cindy Gallop: 00:56:33
Yeah, absolutely. We are more legal than legal.
Peter McCormack: 00:56:37
It's like the drug industry. I'm a big supporter of the right to choose which drugs you want to put inside your body, a previous drug addict, I'm now clean for five years. One of the things that helped me is I used to buy my drugs on the Silk Road, and there were forums on there that could help you … Firstly, you could buy clean drugs and, secondly, it could help you if you felt like you were having a problem, and I was having a problem and I went to the forums and it really helped me. Without that I wouldn't have had that support.
Peter McCormack: 00:57:02
I fundamentally believe that the repression or the difficulties that people in the sex industry have with payments ultimately doesn't change anything apart from making people's lives more difficult and more dangerous.
Cindy Gallop: 00:57:14
No, exactly, Peter. When you force an entire industry into the shadows and underground, you make it a lot easier for bad things to happen and you make it much harder for good things to happen. And, by the way, I've been saying for years in an attempt to open up the tech and business worlds' minds the three huge disruption opportunities in tech today are sex, cannabis and the blockchain. And ironically investors and funding are flooding into the other two more than they are the first. Which means that VCs and startups in cannabis and the blockchain can afford to fund lobbyists, regulation change, public education initiatives, foundations. We need all of that in sex tech because we need a new legal definition of adult content.
Peter McCormack: 00:57:58
I'm going to say bitcoin not blockchain, that's going to be my thing I'm going to leave with you, focus on bitcoin and not blockchain because-
Cindy Gallop: 00:58:05
Yeah, so I've been talking to the bitcoin community for years and, by the way, the bitcoin community has been enormously supportive because obviously 10 years ago, when I was concepting Make Love Not Porn and beginning to realize the obstacles that I was running into, and by the way somebody said to me back then, "Cindy, to do what you want to do you're going to have to start your own bank." I was so frustrated and so angry-
Peter McCormack: 00:58:25
Did you look into it?
Cindy Gallop: 00:58:26
I actually looked into starting my own bank. I investigated that and that's how I discovered it's impossible. Regulation makes it to be impossible. But basically, I said to my team, "We're trying to invent the future of sex. I want to talk to anybody inventing the future of money. Let's find the people as frustrated with the old world order finance as we are from a different perspective."
Cindy Gallop: 00:58:43
So we looked at the entire fin tech landscape and I began talking to bitcoin players very early on. Unfortunately I did not buy bitcoin. Wish to God I had obviously.
Peter McCormack: 00:58:54
You wouldn't have a problem now.
Cindy Gallop: 00:58:55
And they were enormously supportive. The issue being that our lack of funding and resources means, and I said this at Crypto Springs, we needed plug and play solutions. And those have not existed for a very long time. We don't have the developers to be able to build and integrate. We have enough trouble just keeping our platform going on a day to day basis. So I'm continuing to explore bitcoin.
Cindy Gallop: 00:59:17
I was thrilled at Crypto Springs, I met with the founder of OpenNode, we're talking to them. But at the same time I will also say, again what I said at Crypto Springs, Make Love Not Porn is a mass market mainstream platform. We need bitcoin to tell its story more effectively. We need bitcoin out in the mainstream very simply and clearly understood. I love the fact at Crypto Springs we were having this discussion. You've got to be able to phone it home to your parents, that's how simple and easily understood the story has to be for more of the mass market to accept this as this is a whole additional form of payment that I can now use.
Peter McCormack: 00:59:58
How much of the problem has Foster caused? That was what I was just looking up, the FOSTA/SESTA regulations-
Cindy Gallop: 01:00:06
Do you know it's interesting? So it's not an issue for us because-
Peter McCormack: 01:00:08
But is that why the banks are behaving the way they are?
Cindy Gallop: 01:00:15
By the way, just to complete that thought for your audience, I designed Make Love Not Porn around human curation. As I said, our curators view every single video submitted from beginning to end. We don't have to worry about being liable for content on our platform because we designed that into it.
Cindy Gallop: 01:00:28
But re banks, the thing that is the biggest concern in the financial world about adult is charge backs. And just for your audience, in case they don't know what I mean by that, charge backs is when the wife says to the husband, "Darling, what's this odd charge on our credit card?"
Cindy Gallop: 01:00:42
The husband goes, "No idea what that is. That's fraud. We're not paying that." Make Love Not Porn has a zero charge back record. We're social sex. Couples watch our videos together. Nobody is hiding anything from anybody else.
Cindy Gallop: 01:00:53
But when I try and explain that we are a low risk venture in what is deemed a high risk category, no one wants to listen because compliance is knee jerk. It's more than my job's worth. Our compliance rules say no adult content, that's it.
Peter McCormack: 01:01:07
So it's entirely the charge back problem.
Cindy Gallop: 01:01:10
Yeah.
Peter McCormack: 01:01:10
Can't charge back with bitcoin.
Cindy Gallop: 01:01:10
No, exactly.
Peter McCormack: 01:01:11
Do you accept bitcoin yet?
Cindy Gallop: 01:01:12
No, as I said just now we're talking to OpenNode
Peter McCormack: 01:01:19
They're out in LA I think. Yeah. Okay, look, this is all very interesting, it's fascinating. I love listening to you speak. Anyone listening to this, what message would you like to leave with them? What would you like them to do? How can people help you?
Cindy Gallop: 01:01:33
Sure. So first of all, I would love everyone listening to this, the way you can most easily help us is, please, go to makelovenotporn.com, join for free, please take out a subscription to help us and incidentally we are working on re-engineering and relaunching our site and so make allowances. It's pretty clunky at the moment-
Peter McCormack: 01:01:52
It's not that bad.
Cindy Gallop: 01:01:54
Well, thank you, Peter. We are about to overhaul and update it. Bear with us. Secondly, if anybody out there is an open-minded investor who wants to invest in the next trillion dollar category in tech, please email cindy@makelovenotporn.com. Thirdly, we would love you to basically join all of us in sex tech and the adult industry in doing everything you can to campaign against the ridiculousness of how much we are shut out of doing business the way everyone else can. So in whatever small way you can, even if it's just sharing and retweeting the things that we write about, how unfair and unjust this is, if you work for a fin tech company or for a tech company where in any capacity you have the ability to change the way they operate to embrace the social sex revolution, we would love you to do anything you can to help all of us.
Cindy Gallop: 01:02:47
Because basically when we open up all of this, what I like to say is Make Love Not Porn operates in the single biggest market of them all. Not porn, not sex, the market of human happiness. We will all be a great deal happier.
Peter McCormack: 01:03:01
I think that's a perfect way to end it then. Okay, look, great to see you again, Cindy. I really appreciate you coming on. I hope this show helps. I wish you all the success and anything I can do for you, just let me know.
Cindy Gallop: 01:03:11
Thank you so much, Peter.