Episode 2: The Darth Vader of Porn

Hot Money: Agent of Chaos

Pushkin Industries & Financial Times

Technology, Health & Fitness, Sexuality, Business, Society & Culture

4.6 • 619 Ratings

🗓️ 7 June 2022

⏱️ 33 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

A decade ago, a computer programmer named Fabian Thylmann began to build one of the biggest porn empires in the world.

How did Fabian do it? He was good with money in a business that was starved of finance. He convinced Wall Street to bankroll his vision to take control of the industry.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Pushkin.
0:08.8	This is an I-Heart podcast.
0:15.6	So, warning time.
0:18.2	We're two journalists from the Financial Times,
0:20.1	and for six months, we were set
0:21.2	free to pursue one question, who controls the porn industry? There's some content that
0:27.1	really won't be suitable for kids, and only when strictly necessary, we've used recordings
0:33.9	of investment bankers in the wild.
0:47.3	I want to take you back in time to 2012, to winter evening in Las Vegas.
0:51.3	The porn industry had convened for one of its flagship conferences.
0:55.1	It's like Davos, but for porn.
0:58.7	Models, computer geeks, moguls.
1:03.1	They were all there, gathered together in a flashy music arena where Motley Crew had its presidency that year.
1:06.5	It was the most pact I'd ever seen one of those keynote speeches.
1:10.0	Everybody was sitting there talking, like, I don't know, I'm always going to say.
1:12.4	Car crash, like, type of thing.
1:15.0	Like, we have to see this to see what happens.
1:18.2	Sarah Jane Anderson sat in the hall, not waiting for a rock band, but for a speech.
1:23.6	Sarah Jane had been working in the online adult world since the 90s.
1:27.6	She was on the business and marketing side of things.
1:30.7	It was a close-knit community.
1:32.6	Sarah Jane talks about it like an eccentric family.
	...

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