Adult Site Broker Talk Episode 231 with Mike Stabile of the Free Speech Coalition – Part Two

This is Bruce Friedman of Adult Site Broker and welcome to Adult Site Broker Talk where each week we interview one of the movers and shakers of the adult industry and we give you a tip on buying and selling websites. This week we’ll be speaking with Mike Stabile of the Free Speech Coalition in part two of our interview. We’ve added an event section on our website. There you can find out about all the B2B events in our industry and there are discounts on selected shows. Go to adultsitebroker.com to find out more. Speaking of events, I’ll be at the X-Biz LA show January 13th through the 16th and I’m looking forward to seeing everyone there and talking some business. Contact me on our website to book a meeting at adultsitebroker.com. To register for the show, go to xbizla.com and I’m proud to announce I’ve been nominated for Community Figure of the Year at the X-Biz Executive Awards as part of X-Biz Honors January 15th. It should be an exciting night and I hope to see you there. 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You know, I think that this is sort of like what I was complaining about the press, right? It’s like on one hand, I want to be like, well, you know, this affects you. You should get educated. Well, yeah, it’s First Amendment and Freedom of the Press is part of that. Hello. But you and I know that whether you are a platform owner or an independent creator, that you have endless numbers of things to do in the day, right? It’s not age verification isn’t the only thing that you are focused on, right? If you are dealing with traffic is down or sales are down or this person is quit or, you know, we’re open to new office here or, you know, I lost my camera or I’ve been hacked or all of these things, right? It’s not like we are all retired and people are just being lazy, right? People have businesses to run and this is one part of that issue. And I think that what FSC can do is to be that resource. I think in terms of I am happy to get on the phone call on a phone with anybody and walk them through. Here’s what the issues are. I’m also happy to hear from people constantly telling me how this is affecting their business. I generally on Friday afternoons, I will try to make time to talk to somebody that I’ve never talked to before because I want to understand how their business is changing. I want to understand how this is affecting. I want to understand like that because those become the stories that I can then tell the press, right? Those are the examples. FSC is not involved in production and we’re not involved in distribution. So a lot of what we’re talking about with these laws can be somewhat theoretical. And what is really helpful is to be engaged with our members. And so I understand when members here, I want you to be engaged. They think, well, we want you to give money and that is part of it. Or they think we need you to help us do things. That would be great, right? You know, we always need new website design. We always need campaigns. We always need marketing. We know, need headshots. All of these things. We could certainly ask you for those. But really what I want is for you to say, you know, as a number of the platforms have and a number of creators have and say, hey, listen, can you walk me through this? Help me understand. And that’s the beginning of activism, right? That’s the beginning of getting involved. It’s just somebody feeling more comfortable. I think that in a lot of these conversations, people are fearful of looking stupid or think that they already should know this. And what I say is like, you’ve got enough going on, right? Like we’re the experts in this. And I’m happy to walk you through. I’m happy to give you what you want. If you want to learn, I’m thrilled. And that may be a one on one or that may be a webinar. And that’s what FSC, what we try to do. We try to do Twitter spaces. We try to do town halls. We try to do webinars. We don’t have the resources to do enough of them because we’re busy doing the actual work. But that’s what we’re looking at now is to do is more of this so that more people can feel like, OK, I feel comfortable making that first step. And then maybe I’ll get a little bit more involved. Sure. And what’s important are high profile performers like Sheree DeVille and Melrose Michaels to your cause? Hugely important, right? I think that like one of the things that I talk about and obviously I love both of them, both of them have been incredibly active in terms of the fight. I think that like whether we’ve been dealing with banking description or age verification, right, there are people who have large followings who have used their platform to educate people, right? Because there’s three and Melrose and Cinnamon Love and Alana Evans and there’s a theory doll and Gwen Adora and like, you know, it loads like there’s just there’s so many people who have been so active. And I think that when you do have one of the things I try to impress on performers is that you have such an incredible voice, right? You have people who really and this has changed even more so in the fan era, right? Where people really view you as a person, right? They may view you as a goddess and a dominatrix and all the rest of it as well. But they also understand your issues and you have an ability to influence them. And I think that most politicians would be thrilled to have the audience, you know, the Twitter following that, you know, a Riley Reed, you know, has, right? Like that those people are can be incredibly influential, right? They have media access, whatever they do is that. And so I’m always pleased when when large performers get involved and want to use that platform constantly. I mean, I think that we saw this week, even in this, you know, Sarah Silverman came out and tried to get sex workers to register to vote, right? It is a I think that we have to constantly build. We have to find allies. We have to activate them because our industry has a tremendous audience and it is tremendous media friendly and and we can maximize it. So like, yes, I am performers largest fall. I want people involved. I want people talking about this. I want to talk to them and figure out how to sort of, it doesn’t have to be your full time job. You don’t have to put your fan platforms and and, you know, take up a flag and, you know, sit outside, you know, the Senate building. But I do want you educated. I do want you, you know, amplifying some of these things. Tweet. That’s all you got to do is tweet. That really is just or retweet. Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. Exactly. Well, look, we’re always happy to have people like Shari and Melrose, who have already been on the podcast to come on and advocate for the FSC and help us fight against these laws because they did. They did a great job of articulating that in their interviews. And I look forward to having them both back, but we’d love to have more of them on for sure. You’ve called porn the canary in the coal mine of free speech. I do love that. Two years in, do you get the sense that people outside of our industry are taking this seriously? And if not, how do we get them to fight with us? I think they’re starting to. And I think that the, you know, the best evidence of that past month or so, as people start to look at these Supreme Court cases and the cases, not just ours, but what’s upcoming in 2025. We have a lot of people who are saying this is one of the most consequential and important cases that the court is going to see this year. I have been on calls with big time lawyers, right? I’ve been on calls with large civil liberties organizations, anti censorship organizations that sort of unprompted have brought up, you know, brought up the case. I’ll be on a group call with 30 people and suddenly someone will say, Hey, listen, by the way, I don’t know if people are paying attention, but this free speech coalition versus Paxton, this is a huge deal. Some people need to start paying attention to it. They may not even know I’m on there, you know, like raise my hand. I, you know, like, yes, I am here. I appreciate that. But these are mainstream organizations. That was not the case a year ago, right? I think that we weren’t on as the rate of people did sort of, you know, they might have heard about it. If you were a real free speech, you know, advocate, if you were fire, you know, one of these other big organizations show, you have the age verification, this is bad. But, you know, everybody is swamped with a million and one other bad things that they’re fighting as well. So it wasn’t, you know, top of mind. Now more and more, I see, you know, journalists, I see big organizations, I see advocates like mentioning this case with no relationship to the adult industry. I think that they understand that if the government is allowed to say, Hey, listen, we can limit your access to the internet based on perceived harms in and, you know, to, if a minor access is that it means a whole lot more than this. You know, I was in, I went to a libertarian conference this summer to recruit allies and to talk about the course I went to was Freedom Fest. And you know, RFK Junior was speaking and, you know, I got COVID, not surprised. Right. So, you know, I made this, you know, in a somewhat hostile area, people are yelling me about pronouns and, and, you know, masks and all the rest of it. But you’re able to have these conversations and say, Hey, listen, we have some possible alliances here, right? You don’t want the government telling you what you can access online any more than I do. We may have different political views, but this is it, right? This is a, and we were able through that to bring important people from the right into the battle, right? And then so if you look at things like the Cato Institute, right, they are have filed an amicus brief with us, right? In support of us. And we have that sort of, that sort of way. People understand the issue. And when we have those conversations more often than that, they’re like, Oh man, I’ve been meaning to talk to you. I’ve been interested in your case. And I think that that, again, is 180 degrees from where we were last year. That’s fantastic. As far as RFK Junior goes, there has to be a black sheep of every family. Of course, they had a couple of them didn’t they? Well, I’m one. So, yeah. I know a few politicians are talking to us. How do you get them to come out for the adult industry in this fight for free speech? You’re right to check. Yeah, besides that simple answer. You know, I think that it is education, you know, it is going in what we have been to DC and talk about banking fairness. And we talk about these things in a manner that takes us out of the like, Oh, they’ve got cooties and they’re weird. And they’re probably sex traffickers and what if they’re nude when you sort of say, you sit down and you have these conversations that, Oh, this is sort of similar to the issue that we’re having. You know, we talk about debanking, right? There are people who are like, Oh, well, yeah, gun shops are getting debanked or you talk to somebody else and they say, Oh, yeah, you know, like queer people have a really hard time with banking. They’re much more likely to be debanked or, you know, immigrants get debanked or, you know, people who are Persian get debanked or people who are bar owners get debanked. Right. All of these different things where you start saying like, okay, we’re not some strange alien creature, right? We’re people who live in this community, this world like you, we have the same issues that you do. We have the same desires and we’re facing some of the same struggles. And when you sort of see it in that case, it’s a lot easier. The same with age verification and censorship or as the panoramic in the coal mine of free speech, that’s an important concept to explain to people that like, yes, what you think of is porn when someone says, Oh, we’re going to ban porn or we’re going to restrict porn. Makes sense to you. Yeah, mine shouldn’t access that. Right. Nobody’s going to disagree with you. But what somebody else thinks is porn can be a drag show, right? It can be Toni Morrison. It can be a sex ed book. It can be this, you know, the statue of David, right? As we saw in Florida a couple of years ago, right? There were all of these different things. And so if you don’t want the government doing that, you defend it. The free speech, the first amendment isn’t there to protect speech that everybody likes, right? It’s there to protect the speech that nobody likes because that’s the speech that needs a defense. And so I may not like a Nazi march. I may not like hate speech. I may not like misinformation online, but I defend it because if we don’t defend it, all of our speeches up for, you know, potential labeling and patrolling. You’re absolutely right. A few years ago, porn scene would be fairly uncontroversial and mainstream. At least it was getting that way. Of course, in the past few years, we’ve seen politicians and activists, particularly on the right, make opposition to porn. One of their defining political issues. Of course, I think everyone’s heard about Project 2025 by now. It’s a great example. Some are even calling of it to be banned entirely like that guy and that secret recording. What do you think happened and how likely is it that they’ll succeed? So I think that, you know, I look at this, you know, as a storm. When I say storm, I mean, meaning that we need to protect ourselves. We need to prepare for it. We can, you know, take precautions to make sure that we don’t get wet or that we don’t get destroyed. But there’s going to be, you know, it’s something that we’re going to deal with. It’s also something that passes, right? Again, there can be a lot of damage. But, you know, it’s stuff that this is the moment that we are in. We need to sort of fight back and make sure that it’s not permanent. I think that where we were a few years ago, where we are now, I think are really linked. So I think that if you look at the 2010s, right, sort of like the decade of Pornhub, you know, and the decade of, you know, adult sites being in the headlines, you know, with top lists and, you know, talking to press and, you know, Mary Cherry running for president or for, you know, governor of California and, you know, all of these sorts of big things. And I was part of a lot of that, right? Because I do PR and I do media strategies for adult companies as well as FSC, right? I was, you know, responsible for a number of those headlines. And but I think that there was, I think that that was, there was a sense that like, hey, listen, this is where we are as a culture. We can talk about sex openly. We can talk about like that we’re not all maybe doing the missionary position and that maybe like women do have sex drives and that like people all genders exist, right? There’s all these sorts of stuff that were that porn sort of like led the way in talking about, right? It wasn’t just talking about porn. When you look at like the Pornhub year in review, it was always also like, this is what people are watching. This is what senators are watching. Yes. What senators are watching. And so I think that part of the backlash is because of that, right? That what we’re looking at is a reactionary movement and they’re reacting to the fact that all of the stuff that they found incredibly distasteful and maybe sinful and morally wrong and repugnant, you know, was suddenly being accepted. And I think that we can look at the internal documents, the public statements of some of the groups that are fighting anti-porn now and see how they in the middle of the 2015, they’re looking at this and they’re being like, we can’t get anybody to answer our calls. We can’t, you know, nobody is interested in morality as a reason to sort of censor things. And so what they move into is how can we get around that? And first that is trafficking, you know, claiming that everything is sex trafficking, claiming that everything is sort of criminal. And then more recently, right? Age verification that we have to protect the children. Oh, think of the children. Yeah. But don’t think of putting a filter on your device. Don’t think about like turning on the filter on your Wi-Fi. No, let’s, let’s go out and do it for somebody else because it’s never really about you or what you should do for your house. It’s always about how can we make sure that other people are not accessing this. Well, you know, it’s ironic about it. If you look at the history of the Republican Party, the Republican Party used to mean we’re not going to get into your business kind of like the very libertarian type of approach. Now they’re just the opposite. You can’t watch porn. You can’t be gay. You can’t be trans. We’re burning books again. My God, I didn’t think I’d ever hear about burning books again. And proudly, right? Yeah. These people that candidate that was for Secretary of State in Missouri who had a flamethrower and was like, I’m, you know, posting social videos. I think that it is, I think that a lot of the socially conservative right has been in a panic about the fact that they’ve lost a lot of the culture wars. And I think that what a lot of what you’re seeing both in the legislation and also the ballot box is a way to exert minority control, to exert minority power and to say, hey, listen, we didn’t make the argument. We lost the argument, but we still want to control what you do, right? Like we may not be able to do this in a democratic way, but we could do it an authoritarian way. And I think that that’s that’s sort of why we are where we are right now. I think that it is this understanding that like actually in the free market of ideas, we failed. Nobody wants to hear about this, right? But we still don’t like it. And so the only way to do it is if we sort of seize power. Right. But I mean, how many porn surfers are there out there? Hundreds of millions, right? If those people voted against the people who were bringing these laws up, the paradigm would change. Yeah. And that’s something that we have tried to unlock, right? That’s part of when we talk about like Cherie and Melrose and, you’re right, they have an audience, right? And getting performers to voice that is important in changing those ideas. I think that one thing that you find out is that I think that that honestly, I think that that most porn consumers tend to understand that they may not be single issue porn voters, right? Be sexist or racist or, you know, not want their taxes raised or something like that. But they do have a general sense of that. I think that what is difficult sometimes is that there are a lot of people, a lot of people in the audience who have really conflicted ideas about their sexuality, meaning that they watch porn and then they feel terrible about it. And when you look at the language that happens on the right in particular around this, what they do is they externalize it. They say, "I wouldn’t be feeling this way if it wasn’t for porn. We need to ban porn because it made me watch this trans scene and it turned me on and I hate that." And that is porn being addictive. That is the industry trying to seduce me. That is this woman trying to take my money. That is all of these things. Like I think that it is, people have a tremendously complicated relationship with their sexuality. So you can have people who are spending huge amounts of money on porn and then feeling really guilty about it and really shamed about it. And I think that sometimes those people are probably the best consumers because they are, they’re really invested in it in a way that someone who is just watching porn casually doesn’t feel any particular shame around it, doesn’t think about it all the time. They think about it when they want to get off and they think about it as a natural function they move on. Somebody who is really torn about it, thinks about it constantly and has these weird and humiliation fans, "Oh, I have to do the most degraded thing and I have to go into this." That’s a hard nut to crack. But I think that we’re doing that. I think that we are, and again with the fan content revolution, you have a lot of people talking about, "Hey, I’m a real person. This is what I like. This is what I don’t like." And I think that that opens up doors for a lot of people to sort of accept their own sexuality. Well, you know what these porn attacks remind me of? And I’ll get my site, thewaronporn.com, another plug because we write about all this and Mike certainly figures prominently at times. It kind of reminds me of, and I don’t know your age, but I don’t know if you remember Jerry Falwell and the moral majority in the 1980s. Back then, there were some major attacks on porn, but it’s subsided. Well, it’s subsided. I mean, it partly is subsided. And this gets to your earlier point about the election, right? Because those attacks, we as an industry went through a period in which I think 50% of distributors were brought up on federal charges or raided. It was they were putting people out of business. If you get the federal government going after you on obscenity charges, it’s tremendously expensive. It takes a lot of time. People really fold it and they would settle or whatever else. And that was sort of why the genesis of the free speech coalition was to create an organization that could fight back in a way that an individual organization. But the way in which that ended was because Bill Clinton was elected. Got to love Bill. Yeah. So if you look at Reagan, Reagan elevated the moral majority. He had the Mies Commission that studied all of these things and came up with this sort of like anti-porn dogma. And then they had the Department of Justice go after and prosecute people. And those prosecutions stopped when Bill Clinton came in. The 2257 prosecutions started during the second Bush administration. And then they ended when Obama came in. So it is, with all due respect to people’s individual political beliefs and ideologies, there is a big difference from when these things are. And frequently what we saw happen with Reagan and what we saw happen with Bush is that it’s usually in the second term is when we see it. It’s when the rewards sort of go out to the faith-based anti-porn. It’s always religion-backed when these types of things happen. Always religion-backed. So what’s at stake for adult businesses? You just talked about some of the things that happened in the past and consumers in the 2024 election. How seriously do you see the threat of a second Trump presidency? God tell me no. Well, I mean, obviously, I see it. I watch the polls. I spend a lot of time talking about politics. This will run after the election, by the way, but that’s okay. I answer it anyway. We’ll see how much of a soothsayer you are. Well, I will not make any predictions. I will say that if we are listening to this with the prospect of a second Trump administration, you can batten down the hatches. And not just around porn. Because I think that one of the reasons the Free Speech Coalition case is so important and people recognize it is so important is that it’s not about porn. It is about the ability to go online anonymously. It is about the ability to access content that might be controversial, whether that’s political or sexual or entertainment or information without the government watching you. And I think that the age of application legislation, the campaigns against porn are really about sort of opening that door. People don’t like, I mean, people on both parties don’t like the open internet, right? Because it has all the sort of wild and woolly things. It has great things and horrible things. And it’s very easy for a politician on either side to say, "Oh, we need to control this. We don’t like this because speech is dangerous." That’s why people want to control it. But I think that we do have one party that has been, really comes to sexual speech, really advocating it. This is not, we’ve had a number of bipartisan votes, I think, because this has been hard to vote against. But by and large, this has been an initiative that has come from the right. This is an initiative where they have been very vocal about their expansive view of what is considered pornography, right? And that is going to be sex education. That is going to be, in most of these laws, people don’t realize this. It says, "Depictions or descriptions or depictions," right? That means text. That means drawings, right? That means it could be anything that they think a minor shouldn’t see because it might turn a minor on. It’s sort of working definition. They have more technical definitions, but they think, "If it’s going to turn a minor on or if I think it’s going to turn a minor on, then we’re going to do it." We can censor it. And I think that once you get those restrictions in place, it’s easy to sort of expand that to any number of things. So if you value a free internet, whether you’re a consumer, a producer, if you value your ability to do business unimpeded by these types of, by the government, then I think what is it state? And that is, again, we have to, it sucks that we have to be the one that is fighting this, but I’m also proud that we’re the one that’s fighting this. You should be, man. You definitely should be. And I hope as people hear this, we’ll have our first woman president crowned. And we can at least take a brief sigh of relief before you guys have to go back to work on more age verification laws coming up in 2025. By the way, what are your thoughts about an overall national age verification law that makes sense? There have been bills introduced in that vein. I think that they haven’t always gone terribly far. It doesn’t mean that they couldn’t. You know, Congress has a hard time passing uncontroversial bills. And so I think that that’s part of the reason we’re sort of seeing this in the States. I think that we have certainly been talking with legislators about age verification, even if we were to lose at the Supreme Court, right? Even if this, it was to be determined. We still would probably seek a national bill in some ways because you want companies to have a clear playing field. You don’t want a patchwork of 50 different states. And I think that there are ways, you know, as I’ve said over and over again, right? We don’t want kids access adult content. We think we have better solutions. We think we can work with it. I think that, you know, there are, there’s model legislation that we’ve looked at. There’s bills that have been introduced that we’ve looked at that we support. I think that, you know, no matter where it goes, I think that we want to be involved in it to make it sort of both effective and also not de facto censorship. Tell me about a bill that you support. So, you know, I think that we looked at, I mean, if you look at the California bill, right, that was a bill that I wouldn’t say we supported it. We were neutral on it. But I think that even with the problems that it had, that that was a direction that we could get behind, right? And saying like, hey, listen, this is going to be more effective about blocking stuff. I think that the device level filters, et cetera, send a signal, right? And say, hey, listen, I think most adult sites, I think all adult sites, right? The legal sites, the people who are in energy would say, of course, we’re going to block that. So I think that, you know, as you’ve said, right, everybody in the industry has understood that this is an issue that we need to tackle. And frankly, our industry with the RTA tag was one of the first to tackle it, right? We did say, hey, listen, we don’t want minor traffic. And we create these systems and we all, you know, use these labels. And then you find out that parents aren’t turning on filters. And you think, well, what the hell, it takes two to tango. And so I think that like, those are types of things, right? The specific language of a bill is always tricky. And you need to make sure that, like, it can’t be weaponized against you. But I think that those general concepts are concepts that we’ve all supported and for years have talked about it. So I think that it may be that we get to a point where we see, you know, whether it’s a state bill or a national bill, we say, well, listen, this is going to be more effective this we can do it. It’s not censorship. You know, let’s move forward on it. But that’s, it’s hard to do when you have a lot of people who are bad actors, or we’re doing bills like this in bad faith. If this, if we had had legislators and proponents of these bills who believed that we had a right to adult content as adults, I think that we could have gotten to a yes a lot quicker. But again, most of these people don’t want adults even accessing adult content. And so they don’t want to create a bill that is effective. They want to create a bill that’s censorship. Are you telling me that senators don’t want to watch porn anymore? You know, the thing is, is that the senators and the people passing these bills always think that they’re going to be able to access porn, right? They never fear that they’re going to be doing. And that’s why they know that it’s ineffective. That’s how you know that they know that it’s an effective. Well, I’m always going to be able to get it. I just don’t want to make it hard for those people to get it. Or alternately, I want to push them out of business. And I think that a lot of the, the real effect of these laws is that if you look at like the, you know, if you’re paying a dollar per verification, right? Everybody that comes here says you charge, it pays a cost you a dollar. In Tennessee, the law is every 60 minutes, you have to verify the consumer. They make huge amounts of money, right? And basically what they want, I think, is to bankrupt adult companies. All that content to make, to sort of fuel the growth of pirate sites, right? They want to make it illegal. They know that adult content is never going to go away. They just want to make it dangerous. They want to make it so that when you do access adult content, you’re probably going to a shady part of the internet with stolen content, with criminal activity, and where maybe there’s going to be a malware. They want to make it as dangerous as a back alley abortion, right? That’s what they want to do. They know that they’re not going to get rid of it. They want to make it dangerous in hopes of dissuading good Christians from going there. So that’s sort of where we are. It’s not about, I think they’re always like, well, I’m going to be able to get it because most senators have money, right? Most senators have resources. There’s always going to be the ability to access it. It never is thought of to apply to them. Yeah. They’ll have somebody in their office get rid of the malware. Yeah. Absolutely. That’s it. What can people do who want to get involved? I would say what they can do if they want to get involved is they can call me. I think that the best thing to do at this point is to become educated. That means reading articles as they come out. Subscribing to the FSC newsletter every week, every two weeks when it comes out, we sort of put the significant articles that are in there. We make those arguments. Sign up for webinars. Sign up for town halls. Sign up for these things. Just listen in. We often record these things. Listen to podcasts like this and try to get educated because I think that it helps feel confident and then obviously, yes, if you’re a big platformer, you’ve got a lot of money, support us. Help us get a lobbyist in a state where we wouldn’t normally have a lobbyist so we can defeat a bill. Help us so that we can fly to a state that we wouldn’t be able to afford to fly to so that we can testify and do it. That money that people donate or the membership dues, that really helps us do that work. I will tell you that the difference between early 2024 and early 2023, especially early 2022 when that first bill was introduced in Louisiana, we had no resources to fight in Louisiana. We had no ability that was not capacity. As those bills got introduced to other places, we didn’t have the ability to respond. We were just understaffed and under-resourced and paying for our own meals sometimes going on to these things. I’ll buy you lunch, Mike. When people become members, that is put right into the work that we’re doing. That’s the most important thing. I would say, "Read up. Become a member if you’re not already a member. If you are afraid of becoming a member, you can give a one-time donation." That stuff, that really does make a huge difference. It’s the difference between winning a state or losing it. What percentage of the industry do you think are members? That’s a good question. It’s outside my scope of knowledge. I think that I will say that a large number of ... A good number of the larger platforms are members, but there are plenty of people in this industry who are not members of Free Speech Coalition. There are also a lot of members. There are also a lot of people in our industry who think, "Well, I’m a member of the Free Speech Coalition because I’m a member of the industry. I’m a member of the coalition because I support what it does theoretically." Not realizing, "Oh, you’re not a dues paying member. You do." That’s a different thing. Sign up, get involved. Yeah, and sponsor. Sponsor. Yeah. All of this stuff, I can’t tell you what a difference it makes to have that support. Yes. In a couple of months in January in LA, and I went this last year, and I’ll be going again to the Xpaz LA show, there will be an entire day of FSC activities and seminars. I got to tell you, that was so informative and it was so interesting. Anyone who’s around should stick around for that day. Well, it’s a great show anyway. Xpaz LA has become one of the better shows certainly as far as an industry-only show. There’s a lot of affiliate shows that are also adult like TES, which is outstanding, but missed you not being there by the way. I’ve never been to TES to tell you the truth. Oh, I thought you were going to be. Okay. Okay. But I encourage people both to go to that show and to stick around for the seminars. One thing we didn’t cover this time is the credit union. Talk about that. That is the credit union is moving forward. Allison has been leading that charge. That is a regular process. We’ve submitted our official application. Again, do you think that the regulation of adult sites is formidable? Check out what you have to be a financial institution. That’s a game changer as well. We want to be, and I think one of the things I’m proudest of with FSC today is that we are investing in the future. It is not constantly just reacting to the things that are happening at any given day or being like, "Oh, I wish this didn’t happen," or "How do we deal with this," or "I hate the fact that this is happening." No, it is looking at things that are one or two or five years down the line and saying, "Listen, we need to get this in order. We cannot deal with debanking anymore. It’s no way to run an industry. How can you run a business? Why are we the only industry that can’t get loans? Where people are like, "I can’t pay my staff or I can’t pay my credit." This is a huge change. It means that we’re a lot more solid and I think that that means that we’re a lot more powerful as an industry if we can have that stability. Yeah. As a website broker, I constantly have people looking for loans. They say, "Well, my bank won’t loan it to me," or they ask me, "Will my bank loan it to me?" I go, "No." It’s not going to happen. Yeah. It’s not going to happen. That’s unlike any other business. Right. Well, I look forward to the day that we have that credit union that the FSC starts because it will be a huge accomplishment for our industry. Once again, everyone should be a member. All businesses of any size should be a sponsor. Do everything you can to support the FSC and Mike and Allison and their team because they do a great job. Thanks, Bruce. Thanks, Shayna. No problem. Mike, I’d like to thank you for being our guest again today on Adult Site Broker Talk and I know we’ll have a chance to do it again soon. Yeah. I look forward to seeing you at Expos.ly. Yeah, absolutely. My broker tip today is part five of how to buy a site. Last week, we talked about how to determine the value of a site, how to negotiate the sale, and how to get to the point of drawing up an agreement. So, now you’re talking to your attorney and you’re having them draft an agreement. What should be in it? Well, your attorney should guide you through the legal side, but here are some considerations to keep in mind from a buying standpoint. What’s the date you’d like to close? Make sure you know you’ll have the money to either pay the deposit or the entire amount of the purchase by that date. I’ve had buyers who aren’t ready and that just causes issues. Make sure that all of the assets you’re purchasing are in that agreement, such as every domain included in the sale, processing and payment accounts, relationships with vendors, all records including 2257 data, software to run the sites, and any other assets such as source code for the sites. Of course, it should spell out any payment schedule if there is one. Who’s responsible for closing costs, such as paying for escrow? And there are always terms that are unique to yours in the seller’s situation. This assumes you’re the party responsible for drawing up the agreement. If the seller is drawing up the agreement, then it’s important that you express all of this to your attorney so they can check the seller’s agreement and see if any changes are necessary. We’ll talk about this subject more next week. And next week we’ll be speaking with Leya Tanit of Pineapple Support. And that’s it for this week’s Adult Site Broker Talk. And once again, like to thank my guest, Mike Stabile. Talk to you again next week on Adult Site Broker Talk. I’m Bruce Friedman. (upbeat music) (upbeat music) (upbeat music) (upbeat music) [BLANK_AUDIO]