Porn and Masculinity: How to Teach Kids about Sex and Relationships (Jordan Stephens)

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0:50Hello, it's Amol here. Welcome to Radical Conversations about the deep global trends changing our world and offering you some radical ideas for the future. Today we're diving into a topic that is, well, it's often treated as taboo, wrapped in controversy and secrecy and certainly plenty of misinformation. But my guest this week is helping to lead a campaign that aims to bring a lot more openness, honesty and accountability to the conversation around porn. Pornography has effectively become the UK's number one sex educator. According to research by the media company Ladbible, 70 % of men say porn was their first exposure to sex.

1:29A pretty striking statistic when you consider how regularly young people are consuming it. And of course, all of this in ways that we've discussed before in this podcast and we'll discuss I'm sure in future is being accelerated and supercharged by AI. So joining me this week is Jordan Stephens, one half of the hip-hop duo Rizzle Kicks, who's become a powerful advocate for healthier, smarter, wiser and maybe more open and honest conversations about issues like masculinity and manhood in today's society.

2:05Hello, Jordan Stephens is here. How are you, man? I'm good. I'm good, yeah. How are you? Excited to talk about porn. Yeah. We're going to talk about porn. Topic of interest to you, is it? It's a topic of tremendous interest to me. But the broader... Let me answer your question. I'm very good. And I'm very conscious of the strange asymmetry of fame. Because I meet a lot of famous people. And one of the things about it is that fame creates this feeling where you feel like you know the person. Right. And they obviously don't know you. We've never met before. Right. And I feel like I've followed you for about 15 years.

2:46I know you get this spiel from everyone, but it's true. Well, I used to say this is a rizzle kick when you're kicking off in 2011. When I was a young star. All of that. And I also read when it came out your seminal piece in The Guardian in 2017 about masculinity. And I would say that I feel like many people probably feel, I have a sense of the journey that you've been on. Right. And I'd say that you're at a very particular place. it brings you here today, which is that after writing your memoir, which we'll talk about, you've kind of worked a few fundamental things out about yourself and about life.

3:20And you're in quite a good place now, right? Yeah, definitely. In comparison to where I was, 100%. No doubt. For people that don't know you, just tell me when you say where I was. Well, I guess I can obviously only use my own metrics. And the reason why I think my voice has become, well, why I find myself talking often about masculinity on men, boys and men, I consider myself now an advocate for boys and men. It's because in my early 20s, I had fame, notoriety, money, access, opportunity, all of those things. Glamour. Glamour. You know, a lot of things that I was told that, you know, that's where the vibes are.

3:58You know, a lot of sex, a lot of drugs. And don't get me wrong, man. Like the hedonistic approach to life is great. and I definitely don't walk around now encouraging people to not experience at least a brief phase of hedonism. But ultimately, as I think most of us learn, the hard way, it's not sustainable and I often found myself feeling quite existentially alone. I'm an only child, I have been for most of my life until recently and I think I wasn't able to maintain any intimate relationships. And the reason I wrote that article, the reason I wrote my my memoir which is really just a snapshot of six months of my life really written in the present tense which was interesting in the present tense so people can follow me through the journey of of my my most profound heartbreak um it's called avoidance drugs heart break and dogs and it's about when you were 27 you were in love yeah and um you um endured a breakup um and you screwed up yeah you screwed up and you went to some pretty dark places yeah I cheated on on my ex-partner and I told I told them about it I told them which you know I guess that's a thing it's a very it's a very up in the air whether or not people think that's a good or a bad thing which I find interesting um and they left um which I'm very grateful for and it ripped open this kind of abandonment wound that I hadn't dealt with um and it propelled me into like trying to make sure that doesn't happen again either for myself and somebody close to me you know the reality is I've I'd hurt partners I'd been with emotionally um through negligence through luck through immaturity and you know none of that helps form the bond bonds that I wanted in life and nowadays when you ask me how I'm doing now I think you know compared to then when I was doing drugs and taking what I could get and being unable to even feel like I can't even explain it like even feel from the neck down now this idea of love that seems so abstract to me and potentially it seemed like a fairy tale if i'm honest i feel on on a deeper level and i feel it so much that if i feel almost a duty to explain that it's possible but it comes with work i love that you use the word bond because bond is my favorite um word there's this feeling that i've got i mean i've been on a very different journey to you but i i've ended up in a similar place to where you are where I sort of realized that true wisdom and true happiness comes from really not suppressing the self, but realizing there's something greater than yourself, whether it's a broader kind of cosmological story or if people have faith.

6:33But I think it's about connection. It's about the connections we have. And I think that in the end, 99, unless they're psychopaths or sociopaths or strange people, 99 % of people, when they're on the deathbed, they measure the success of their life and their happiness by the quality of their relationships. 100%. And your 20s, the relationship you had was mostly with yourself, with drugs. And the public. And the public. And would it be fair to say, some people know that your girlfriend is called Jade, and she's someone who's also experienced fame. She was X Factor when she was 15. Yeah, she won X Factor, yeah.

7:03But she's also been through that kind of 20s madness of suddenly being thrown out there. But broadly speaking, before we get into masculinity and the specific campaign that you and Ladbible and others are working on around pornography, is it true to say that the kind of thing the place you've got to is a feeling that actually connection and our bonds are our making and actually it's when you kind of learn how to connect with other people that you achieve something like what aristotle called it eudaimonia human flourishing really wow that's incredible human flourishing yeah i mean i just i guess what what pop stardom allowed me to do was have a an amount of money which in which meant i was able to actually engage with the pain I was feeling, whether that's through therapy, emotional trauma retreats.

7:49Obviously, when I wrote the article, the feedback was, I couldn't believe what was coming back. So in 2017, you wrote an article for The Guardian which went completely viral, where you said men have got to confront the fact that they exist within the patriarchy and if they want to move to a better world, they've got to talk about not just their own emotions, but the way, the urge to dominate, to use a Nietzschean phrase. Yes, and we have to create that community ourselves, you know, and encourage that ourselves. And yeah, I think when I started to break things apart and go through these retreats, you know, one of the things, for example, I learned was literally how to feel, which again sounds so abstract, but I was taught, I read and I watched and I was guided through a space where I could learn how to process stuff I'd buried, feel emotions that I didn't think I could connect to and I don't think it's a coincidence that after having gone through this process when stepping into a situation with a new partner with with an extra level of maturity having been through that pain and processed you know a good amount of that anger not all of it obviously I'm a work in progress I was able to show up I was yeah right I was able to show up for Jade in a way that I wasn't before and my reward has been like the feeling I have of connection to her is literally I mean it's the longest relationship I've been in it's the deepest relationship I've been in and that's no disrespect to past relationships I just literally myself let alone the other partner also the world around me the animals around me I know it sounds again mad and abstract but I feel it but you mentioned childhood trauma and abandonment do you mean the fact that you didn't live with both your parents because for people that don't know and we'll get to Rizzle Kicks but you I think grew up in London until the age of about 10 a place called Kneesden which I knew because I was going there for a famous temple which is a big part it's a great temple it's a great temple it's a phenomenal temple my parents used to love it And then you moved to Brighton and Brighton is a very particular place.

9:38It's open, it's liberal, it's accepting, not very diverse when you attend. But what was the childhood trauma or that sense of abandonment that you were dealing with later on? Well, look, it's, well, actually, I can't speak on what the reality is because I'm not like an expert in this space. But for example, I definitely follow many of the teachings of Gabor Mate. And, you know, his explanation of... He's a physician who, when he was very young, experienced, I think, fled with his family, the Holocaust. He talks a lot about the effects of childhood trauma. He did. And he's best known nowadays for his work on addiction and ADHD, two things I've struggled with.

10:09And so the way he puts it, and when I read and listened to him, it was this light bulb thing which totally aligned with what I'd heard in therapy, with what I'd experienced in emotional trauma retreats, which is that, look, my mum and dad did their best. I'd like to say most mum and dads are doing their best in the circumstances they're in whether that's like extreme financial circumstances poverty um you know their own traumas they're handling a difficult relationship and an inability to understand how to cultivate a connection between two people and but when you're a when when I'm a child when I was a child I don't care about any of that I don't know or understand why uh my mum and dad are just friends and not partners I don't understand why you know it's mainly just me with my mom and my dad visits me now and again listen my dad was always there but I think I believe anyway that I wanted as most humans would do to have that solid stable space to be in and it's tough when you grow up with no money and your parents are just trying to put food on the table and keep themselves alive they're in survival mode so that my therapist believes and I do think I agree you know that you that as children I think we perhaps internalize that feeling of like, why isn't this person there?

11:23Why aren't they there all the time? Is it about me? Yeah. And sometimes, obviously, in my example, my dad literally wasn't there physically all the time, but he was there sometimes. But I think, to be honest, even people who have sometimes both parents there, they're not emotionally there. So you can still feel that level of abandonment, because you might show up, you know, I know people who would, or children who would cry in front of their parents, and their parents would just completely dismiss them. that's still a form of abandonment. I didn't actually experience that. Well, maybe I did a little bit, but I think it's human to internalise that feeling.

11:56And then unfortunately, sometimes it manifests as things like addiction, ADHD. Did you say you grew up in poverty? You didn't have much? Yeah, yeah, yeah. We were skinned. I mean, I lived in a council flat. Mum was an adult. So how hard was that? Honestly, I don't remember being that hard. I remember we were homeless for a couple of years. We lived at my mum's mate Tina's. I had quite a happy disposition as a kid I don't remember being stressed I don't remember that but I do remember noticing as I got older my mum being stressed and that had quite an effect on me It's amazing the lack of self pity a lot of people who grew up in poverty often have, it's amazing, often we project it on them but when you went from that poverty to being very famous and very rich so Rizzle Kicks was formed in 2008 2011, when was Down With The Trumpets?

12:402011? Yeah, 2011, yeah And suddenly you're what, in your early 20s? No, back in 18 when we blew up. 18? Yeah. So you experienced something that a huge number of people, young people, a lot of young people who follow you, look to you, to whom you're an inspiration, crave. What can you tell them about what was good and what was not so good or incomplete about fame, adulation? It's not real relationships. You're not required to grow up, to earn money and be super famous. You don't have to be mature at all. it's that in fact if anything it it it um infantilizes you if anything you've got people running around doing shit for you all the time and and you're like this is the whole thing about money you know it's what the thing that blows my mind the most is you're not required to to i don't know what that that um beautiful phrase you used the greek philosopher eudaimonia yeah human flourishing you're not required to to have a high level of human flourish to to to um to make it succeed in capitalism in this in this current setup so yeah i would have been propelled into i don't know america what would we have done start touring america and i hadn't even understood how to like wash my clothes cook food for myself i didn't know what i liked what i didn't like didn't know how to have a relationship what would have happened i would have just carried on doing drugs i think into my 30s i didn't understand how my addiction or my anger was manifesting up until that point if anything personal in my life or intimate in my life went awry so that could be anything like I'm angry with my mum, I'm angry with my dad, I'm angry with my partner, I'm angry with my bandmate, any of these things.

14:12If I track back, most of my drug spirals came after me being unable to tell someone no. And reading that Guardian article, as I did, obviously a few times in preparation for this, was that the moment you pivoted towards thinking that we're getting something wrong in a cultural script that we've got around masculinity? Well, yeah, the reason I wrote the article is because it was that Me Too was really big at that time. It was the most, it was the biggest emergence of that um campaign and at that time from what i can remember in 2017 i felt it opened the door to obviously that was the extreme end of it which is weinstein but then on a on an everyday level i felt like there was actually quite nuanced conversations happening and an opportunity for men and women to purge like that they're you know like watered down struggles and for me i was reading these stories and being like damn you know like i think I haven't shown up for people in the way I want to I feel like I have watched and engaged with an idea of how to be in a relationship or to engage with women and bear in mind I was raised mainly by women I'd say my safely say my mum's a feminist I was dating a feminist and still still I was unable to be able to to to be present and and show up as a partner you know so that's why I wanted to write about it and it was still years after that that I even got to the point where I could have a relationship i just felt i was so sad at the time that when i wrote that article i just didn't it was honest because i didn't think i could lose anymore i couldn't go any further so i just felt i'd write exactly how i felt and then you know sod's law it blows up but when i got all the messages asking to do documentaries and books and whatever i was just sobbing in a car park i didn't i i had no i didn't i was in brazil what are the psilocybin retreat i was no i was i was i'd run away to i thought for some reason i felt like running away to brazil was like a really unique thing to do but apparently most creatives with heartbreak they disappear to south america and think it's like some really i've heard that story a few times how do you how did that experience um affect how you think about the chat we hear a lot about now i've got some stats to bring uh to back it up about the idea there's a crisis in masculinity is there a crisis do you think um or is masculinity just evolving i think that yeah that there's a transitionary phase occurring for for boys and men i'd say my belief is that masculinity is an energy that i think any any human can and should balance um so i don't think masculinity as an energy is in crisis i think you know we tend to reward expressions of masculinity in the society quite happily i'd say there's more an issue for men of of engaging with the feminine energy um in a healthy way and not feel as though that takes away from the masculinity that that's my opinion but for men and boys yeah massively transitionary you know feminism has made some headway in the west uh certainly where we're living um women you know can occupy jobs in the city more like they're they're actually doing really well in their 20s obviously it changes when children come into the equation but um the reliance on boys and men for let's say financial security is changing you know and and and also boys are failing globally in school um nothing shifted educationally for for for children not just boys um and you know again mothers are left with it with it with options now you know do you want to go and pursue a career or do you want to be a mom like can you do both can you do both with men are men emasculated for wanting to stay at home these are all questions that are being asked now from the from this from the stage we're in so there's this author called richard reeves wrote a book called Off Boys and Men.

17:50And one of the arguments that he made was that the cultural script that feminism provided was a series of empowering do's to women. So do be this, do do that thing, do have it all, do work, do have a career, do also go for the children, do also try and be your best self. And he said that the problem we've got into is that we've got a cultural script, which even if it's not trying to do this actively, a lot of boys and men are receiving as a series of don'ts. Don't buy that car if you don't want to do that. Don't try and express yourself in this way. don't say that to that person because you might be offended don't try and be strong and be a provider what do you make of that idea that the cultural script men some men are receiving seems to sort of try and attempt to stop them fulfilling their nature it's a series of don'ts yeah uh you know i think much like anything there will be uh aspects of movements and shifts that are not very productive i personally you know i can't speak on what it must feel or have felt like to have been under the thumb, I guess, as a gender, largely speaking for most of recent memory, there's going to be a moment or a pendulum swing where there's a lot of anger.

18:58And I felt that especially around Me Too and afterwards, you know, there's some more radical views, things I don't agree with myself. But am I going to stand up and say that they're wrong to have those views? I think maybe that might be a step too far. Do I think men are trash? No. Do I think that boys and men are inherently flawed? Absolutely not. I love men. I love boys. And I can think of countless examples of brilliant men who I owe a lot to, that a lot of women owe a lot to, and vice versa. You know, I think that I personally don't subscribe to the notion that you should punish people into good behavior.

19:32I don't think that about my dogs, my puppies. Like, I wouldn't recommend that for children i really think that reward based uh um a reward based approach is is actually just just works more and i know people who adopted this idea you know friends of mine female friends of mine who work in the space who have to hear horrendous stories you know often gender-based stories or gender-based violence but they maintain the idea that this isn't a reflection of all of all situations all men all women or whatever and are more than willing to share incredible stories which happen every day, by the way, with boys and men.

20:07But look, people process things in different ways. I think the internet has done a really good job of showing both genders the extremities of the other gender and then using that as a way in which to describe the majority of the gender, which I don't think will work. It gets the most clicks. It gets the most views. But is it an accurate reflection? No. People need to go outside and speak to people. It's not like that. I don't believe. Real people as opposed to avatars you see online. But I do think, you know, I can understand, especially with like maybe boys who are teenagers during this transition who are just basing their view of the world from online.

20:44I can understand how they can conclude that people don't seem to like men or boys or they're confused perhaps of how they can identify with their gender without that being seen as a toxic idea. So, you know, that's why I've begun this by saying I do not think that masculinity is in crisis. I think our understanding of what masculinity is could be questioned. And you said that the online world is kind of exposing people, especially young people, to the extremes of gender or sex. Yes. And this is particularly true, perhaps, of pornography. And just before I give some, one of the things I basically try to do in this podcast is really get inside the zeitgeist.

21:24And basically, I've been obsessed for 20 years with the idea that the real news is not in single events, but in trends. and the trends in pornography, which I'm going to give you some stats for in a minute, are very striking and broadly speaking, I think you'd say very bad. But just before we get to that, why have you decided to put your name to this campaign? It's from Ladbible and its sister organizations, or it's rather kind of a campaign that's got other people. I think Movember are involved, Fumble, Pivotal. And you're going to go to Westminster and you're going to champion the idea that we need a new approach to pornography.

22:00yeah you've got a lot of demands on your time why this one because uh like i said since i wrote my book and put it out i wanted to clue myself up on where men and boys were at because i thought inevitably when promoting it i'd be asked questions this is why i read richard reeve's book and other books you know um so uh certain things became clear from doing that research i thought wow that this is you know if i am to advocate for men and boys what things perhaps are a particular issue for men and boys so i recently did a documentary on sextortion for similar reasons it felt like an issue that was actually overwhelmingly targeting particularly young boys um and and with porn porn addiction um you know lad bible came to me and said we've got an idea we want to you know create like a healthier conversation around porn as someone who had myself have had had a very complicated relationship with sex for, you know, all types of reasons.

22:57I think it would really help boys and men to have a more open discussion about how to engage with porn in a healthy way, not to dismiss it, not to repress, not to shame, but to understand that, you know, a lot of porn isn't real life. And that is in keeping with what I want to do, which is, you know, constantly try and align myself and create spaces for boys and men to reimagine and re-engage with these little secret, you know what I mean, secret convos. Like, everything around sex, especially with men, seems so secretive. Even talking about penises is like, ugh. Talking about masturbation, there's no cultural, no television, no film, no nothing points about sexual maturity, development, like barely anything.

23:38Even in boyhood, I can't remember there being a massive amount about the boy actually confronting his own sexual maturation or penis or masturbation or, I don't know. Don't you feel we've made progress on that? no not in terms of not in terms of like I'm talking about like cultural touch points like maybe theatre actually sorry which is again for some people that seems like out of reach but big series okay I would love you give me one example of a TV show can't I was just thinking yeah there isn't I'm trying to write it by the way what are you trying to write a TV show yeah yeah yeah but that's all I love but my point is is it's you know the reason why I think these boys will operate and engage with something as extreme even some of the porn we see in private is because where's the space that discuss it outside of it it's also that that's both the first thing they come across and it becomes the norm i just want to give our listeners and our viewers some really striking stats so lad bible who are the people behind this campaign did a um a survey it's a big survey it's 5 318 to 29 year olds and some of the stats are really striking so porn is the number one sex educator uh for gen z 45 of gen z say that sharing porn was one of their main sources of information about sex 70 of men report that porn was their first exposure to sex now in a way a generation ago before the internet more than a generation ago whatever it might have been that pornography was your first exposure to sex but it might have been a magazine a lads magazine or something it's not moving video which is a very very different thing but check this out one in two men worry they consume too much porn porn consumption and this is the thing i think which is the most alarming and is also most consistent with some of the other guests that we've had on this podcast, it's the impact that the digital world is having on the real world.

25:17Porn consumption is changing real life sex. So 76 % of Generation Z have wanted to try something they saw in porn and 64%, nearly two-thirds, say influences what turns them on. It's literally having real world consequences. Because what we're talking about there, just to not be prudish, is that you are more likely to get turned on, have an erection, be aroused if the real world matches something you've seen online. But where this gets really dark, and this was recent stats in The Economist, was where people basically have a view of sexual intercourse and they think really abnormal things are normal.

25:56Abnormal things like choking. So there's a bit of research from McGill University in Canada where they found a startling increase in the prevalence of choking, hitting and forced gagging in the most viewed pornography videos. Right. Sharp rise in the amount of violent behavior, choking and choking is not OK. And then what they really find, which is extraordinary, is how in the real world, more than 40 percent of women aged 25 to 29 say they've been choked by their partners. Now, I find that, you know, I'm 42, you know, I'm definitely of a kind of digital first generation. I find that absolutely shocking.

26:32It's just one study. I think this one's from Indiana University. 40 % of women, 40 % of women aged 25 to 21 say they've been choked by their partners. What the hell? If your first thing you see creates a connection, an explicit visual connection between, for instance, sex, copulation, intercourse, whatever you want to call it, and choking, you might think that that's what sex is. That sex involves choking. To me, that's disgusting. And the rise in choking... But there's no one... My point is, we're in a space now where a young boy, right, let's say you watch that, 12 or 11 or whatever it is 13 who who are you going to talk to about that is what i mean i i don't know what families i don't have all the answers for this stuff right i would like to believe that if in the future i have children i would create a space where a question like that can at least be floated it's not like you know i don't think and i understand we would it's going to be we've lived so long i think with this trickle down from religion that we were so used to this complete cutoff from engaging in anything even conversation sexually we just throw someone a condom and hope for the best like now i think it's important to know that i saw this what does this mean because if there's no context do you think that's normal if i used my own example i think one of the first porn videos i ever watched was paris hilton's sex tape right i was sent a video of that part of the sex tape i must have been 12 right something like that it was like early, early video phone.

27:57And I was fascinated from that point. And who knows, maybe, maybe I'll do this on my next book. Maybe that really did, you know. You don't know the impact it had on you. Maybe it conditioned you in some way. Not because I was watching sex. More because I didn't have any opportunity to break down or contextualize what I was seeing. So if there's a world where I, it seems a bit mad, right? Because I can't, what am I going to do? Run around to my mum and go, look at this video of Parasite. Like it's not, that doesn't seem logical, but maybe even a third space bro maybe even a youth club maybe even some situation where you feel an older person an elder a mentor in your life someone in school a teacher i don't know just a sex education facilitator whoever i've seen this video ah i think you should know that this this this this you shouldn't watch that because this woman well actually young girl you know young woman has been had had had this released against her will no one should do that and if anybody does do that they are in my mind they are out of whatever man club they think they're coding towards you're out of it that's my that's my dream that's the part of the movement i want to be in anything without consent on a sexual level i mean in a general level but especially within consent i want to be in i want to live in a world where any boy or man has to contend with if they're even risking the the possibility that there's a lack of consent with it comes complete extradition from this man club.

29:21Yes, bro. They're ostracised. Ostracised, bro. Not like, ha, ha, ha. Nah. Like, that's not it. And it never will be it. And I don't want all men to have to have to learn that through that happening to someone close to them. If you were... So a lot of people at the Corridors of Power listen to this podcast. I've had a lot of conversations with Bridget Phillipson, the Education Secretary. I know that she cares about these issues. If you were Education Secretary for a day, if you could redesign sex education... Yeah. to address the concerns that you're articulating so powerfully, what would you do differently?

29:54Well, I haven't got a full update, but I keep hearing people say that sex education is still, still to this day, insufficient. Might happen a couple of hours, three hours. I think some schools still separate kids based on gender, which I think is nuts. Personally, I'm amazed how little, quite old teenage boys know about menstruation. Yes, and also vice versa, to be honest. I spoke to a female friend of mine recently. She didn't even realise that balls dropped. The one thing I will say, which is a slightly callous, but it's real is unfortunately, when it's about something like sex, I don't want to be taught that by someone in their fifties.

30:24I'm sorry. That's a harsh thing to say, but like, well, within reason, I think a lot of kids are going to listen to younger people talking about sex. Right. I was taught it by a man who didn't want to be there. I'm not dismissing all 50 year olds. I don't want to be ageist. I'm saying that there's a certain level of reality we have to live in. It's a common sense point that you're likely to relate more to people, especially when you're young, to people who are closer to you in age. Right. And people who have things that you think at that time, which again isn't, because you're not an adult, you don't realise in life that it's not important, but they have things that you think are important.

30:55You know, they might be, they might, you know, have a job you think is important. They're of an age that you think is cool. You want to be in your mid-twenties or maybe your early, I don't know what it is, but some identify where they're not going to just take the piss, feel disconnected, and it's going to be uncomfortable, but we just got to demystify this shit. So a radical idea for sex education would be to have a lot more of it. A lot more. More sex education. And also, dude, I literally watched a video called Johnny the Condom when I was a kid. It was a cartoon condom bouncing around the nightclub.

31:22Also, other things like, I remember they were putting condoms on bananas, right? To teach kids. Bananas, bro. As a teenager. I hadn't even hit puberty, boss. My penis must have been a fifth of the size of that banana if I was lucky. Do you know what intimidating it was? So you feel, why does my penis not look like a banana? It's a different shape. It's a different size. I was 13. It's a different colour. Yeah, but I'm going like, boss, can we maybe have some variation of what size a penis has to be? Again, where's the conversation around that? People hitting pubes at different times, people getting pubes at different times, getting balls at different times.

31:54A way in which to discuss this and engage with it, with everybody in the class, in a way where it's not like, ugh, ugh. It's like, yeah, this is it. You're going to have to sit in this discomfort and understand it. Consequence, consent, all of these things. Some of the things you're talking about require cultural corrections, and some of them require political corrections. Politically, you could come up with a policy, we're going to do a lot more sort of sex education but on the cultural thing about the access to ai porn many many more people in the stats i've uh used there a lot more people accessing pornography for a lot more people it being their first exposure to sex and in the rise of things like choking well what can you do solutions like you know what we're trying to understand on this podcast is the trends that are defining the era we live in right yeah and the trend is in a sharp increase in the consumption of pornography which is about to be hyper accelerated by ai yeah and for a lot of people it's their first um exposure to sex what can you actually do about this because i i spent years covering technology right i spent six years covering the tech companies and it's just amazing you hear on all these different issues grooming child abuse mental health addiction people saying the tech companies need to do more yeah i'll tell you the great lesson in the last nine years of my career please people say the tech companies need to do more the tech companies don't do that much more.

33:10They don't do a huge amount more. They would say, well, we've increased age verification. Well, because it doesn't make money. Because there is a fundamental conflict between technology and regulation. These tech companies are the most powerful private corporations or public corporations in the history of our species. And they have created the biggest, these are facts, by the way, these are just facts, not my opinion. They've created the biggest asymmetry of knowledge, wealth, and power in human history. And technology of its nature is global, it's fast, move fast and break things, And it's very well funded.

33:42Regulation, national regulation of its nature is slow. It's messy and it's consensual. If you look at how unbelievably slow this country was for a variety of reasons to come up with something called the Online Safety Act. It was farcical. When I started out as a BBC media editor in 2016, everyone was like, the big thing you're going to be covering is the Online Safety Act. I finished in 2022. It wasn't on the statute book. So technology is fast. Regulation is slow. And so when we think about, I just want to push you a little bit to say, what do we actually do about this? Because the trend line is clear and it's getting steeper and more young people are getting exposed to pornography online.

34:18Disclaimer, as you've said, I definitely don't have the answer to this. I mean, Laura Bates would be in a better position to be able to talk about. She's done a lot of research around legislation from a conversation I had with her recently after Cheltenham Festival. You know, ultimately, there are opportunities, like I said, for AI to be used in the reverse. instead of mobilizing people and satisfying desires. They don't have the language. This is what I need to be clear about. Every human being has a shadow side. We all have dark thoughts. We all have dark feelings. And that's okay, right? It's what you do with them.

34:52Yes. Our job is, you know, I'm very much a follower of kind of Jungian philosophy in this way, where we have to integrate that into our being and make a healthier choice in the knowledge that we have that shadow side. if we are to ignore it or if we're to completely feed it i don't think the the the how it manifests is is good for society right but why are we not using the ai to safeguard people children from the potential terrors of something like porn i don't know and also you can't as a society you can't put your hands up and just say this we're just passive this is just going to happen no can you you've got to say as a society what do we want for our children it's amazing and i've said this a few times on this podcast, but I did an interview with Eric Schmidt, former boss of Google the other day and he, earlier this year or last year, I can't remember what it was, he said on this whole thing of smartphones and what they're doing in Australia around the social media ban and this is a guy who ran Google for like 20 years ago.

35:46He said, we will look back on this era in human history and we will ask ourselves how it is that we ran the biggest experiment in human history on all the world's children. Yeah. And if you chat to these tech bosses, I've spent a lot of time in Silicon Valley, I know a lot of these guys that run these companies, none of them let their kids have access to this stuff. You shout to the boss of Google, he limits the access to YouTube. But this is the thing, it's like because we're so bound to profit, right? Like even with social media, we're so obsessed with the idea of growth. We've actually gone past the point when people even need anything new.