Adult Site Broker Talk – Episode 197 with Blair Hopkins of SWOP Behind Bars

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 Blair Hopkins of SWOP Behind Bars. Would you like an easy way to make a lot of money? Send sellers or buyers to us at Adult Site Broker through our affiliate program, ASB Cash. When you refer business to us, you’ll receive 20% of our broker commission on all sales that result from that referral for life. You can make $100,000 or more on only one sale for some of our listings. Check out ASB Cash dot com for more details and to sign up. At Adult Site Broker, we’re proud to announce our latest project, thewaronporn.com. You’ll find articles from industry websites as well as mainstream publications from around the world. It’s designed to raise awareness of our industry’s plight in the war on porn and the numerous attacks on our industry and online free speech by hate groups, the religious right and politicians. You’ll find all that and more at thewaronporn.com. We’ve also added an events section to our website at adultsidebroker.com. Now you can get information on B2B events on our site as well as special discounts reserved for our clients. Go to adultsidebroker.com for more details. Now let’s feature our property of the week that’s for sale at Adult Site Broker. We’re proud to introduce a successful and growing only fans agency. They’ve been in business less than a year and a half, but they’ve experienced tremendous growth. The company was founded by two brothers. In the last year, they’ve done over $5 million in gross profit. They have over 130 full-time Filipino employees with affordable salaries. The strategy of the company is to acquire large volumes of creators, put them through their automated onboarding process, and then they decide which creators are worth keeping. Out of over 2,000 in the last year, they’ve pared down to the 300+ creators they have now. They focus on 30-50 high revenue producing creators. The top one is generating $120,000 in monthly revenue. There are many high potential creators who currently do between $5,000 to $75,000 a month. These creators can be scaled through detailed focus and know-how, not to mention additional marketing. The founders have created scalable systems and automations through sustainable processes. The whole company is very well-structured. The founders currently only work about an hour a day due to their systems. There’s a great potential to further develop the revenue from each creator, thus multiplying the revenue and profits of the company. The main marketing is TikTok, with some Instagram sprinkled in, which leaves amazing opportunities using other media and buying ads. Only $13.5 million. Now time for this week’s interview. My guest today on Adult Site Broker Talk is Blair Hopkins of Swap Behind Bars. Blair, thanks for being with us today on Adult Site Broker Talk. Thanks for having me. It’s a pleasure. Swap Behind Bars is a non-profit service organization that’s based on human rights, harm reduction, services provision and prison and jail outreach. They make their services available to all people in the sex trade, both current and former through their sex worker community support line and associated chat feature. They work directly with sex workers and survivors of human trafficking who have also experienced incarceration, as well as people who are seeking peer support, resource referrals and crisis care. They ensure that incarcerated community members know about the support line, enabling them to support, release with reentry and gap services. Their operators on the support line are comprised of the populations they serve, as well as domestic violence and crisis specialists. People find the support line through internet searches, word of mouth, service provider referrals and adult platforms where they advertise the hotline. Now Blair began her adult industry work as a photographer and videographer in the early 2000s. She is the author of All in a Day’s Sex Work, a photographic investigation into the daily lives of the intriguing, off-maligned and dedicated professionals who occupy our fantasies and indulge our deepest erotic urges. Damn, that’s long. Hopkins joined Swap Behind Bars in 2018 and now serves as its executive director. She lives in the city of New Orleans, one of my favorite places. Now Blair, besides what I mentioned, what is Swap Behind Bars? Swap Behind Bars was founded in 2015, 2016. Our founder, Alex Andrews, had a Twitter interaction with a corrections officer and in that interaction she was a little less than impressed with the empathy and the breadth of knowledge for interacting with inmates who had a history of sexual labor exploitation or any kind of work around the sex trade. And she thought, you know, this is a population that is being poorly served by the folks who are charged with their care. She sought different ways to change that. So she thought, you know, I’m going to start talking to women and, you know, people who are incarcerated who identify as sex workers and see how things are going in there, see what they need, see how we can meet people where they’re at, and also just offer the supportive ear of somebody who has been incarcerated for prostitution, as Alex had been, and just take it from there. So she started a newsletter and this newsletter grew really, really quickly and within a year or so she was sending the newsletter out to like 5,500 women institutions across the United States. You know, it became a bit of a juggernaut pretty quickly because as you start to wade into the waters of finding out what people’s needs are, what their stories are, who they are, not only do you tend to find a lot of need that you then want to try to figure out how to meet, but you also find a lot of folks who are interested in being involved in some level of activism or advocacy and don’t have the tools in order to do that. So whether those people are incarcerated or are just community members who are excited about what you’re doing. So from the newsletter, you know, she started trying to help people with getting their needs met as they exited incarceration and that encompassed things like getting your ID documents, figuring out how to pay your fines and fees, what they are, how to re-register to vote, how do I find housing, how do I find work that is not, you know, whether somebody wants to remain in or around the industry or not is not really of our concern, but if they want other options, those can be really limited by criminal convictions. So as time went on, you know, the team grew a little bit, we kind of developed some skills for case management. And what we found is that nobody does a better job of meeting the needs of a demographic than people who are part of that demographic. And that is something that is sorely lacking when it comes to helping sex workers get where they want to go. There’s not a lot of service providers who are both empathetic and experienced. Makes good sense. What exactly do you do for the organization? Oh, God. Well, I’m the executive director. So what don’t you do, right? Well, it’s a mixture, right? What don’t I do? And then also what don’t I delegate? My primary function at this time is to direct the organization based upon its mission. So it’s programming as well as its public facing growth, its team growth, its fund development and the coalitional development that needs to happen in order for us to most effectively meet our mission. Okay. Makes sense. So what does a typical day look like for you? Or is there such a thing as a typical day? Yeah. I mean, you know, right now we’re getting ready to ramp up for conference season, right? So I’ll be at XBiz and at ABM this year. I’ll see you there. Yeah, fabulous. We’ll be at CREED and Change. It’s crazy because as your listeners probably already know, the intersection of people who work in and around the sex trade and every other kind of work and every other industry, the intersectionality is rich and tense. So there was a time last year where I went on the course of three weekends to a libertarian party conference. Then a couple of weeks later went straight to the Woodhole Freedom Foundation conference, which is focused on sexual health and well-being and quite of expression. And then the following weekend I went to a conference that was specifically for people who provide services to incarceration institutions. So it was like me and a bunch of people who like order the bedding for prisons. You know, I mean, it’s crazy, the intersectionality. So that’s a typical month is finding myself in a lot of strange places with a lot of strange bedfellows. And then at a porn conference where I have more familiar and friendlier bedfellows usually. Oh, yeah, absolutely. But on a typical day, I would say I get up. The first thing I’m doing is checking in on our anything having to do with money, right? Where are we at? Where are our donations? Where are our, did our newsletter go out? How are our open numbers on the newsletter? What’s going on with the social media? What grant applications do we have out right now? What are the metrics on those? Have it has anything come back? Are there any action items that need addressing today or this week or imminently? I use Monday.com. I would be lost without it for project management. It’s wonderful. Yeah. Check in with the various department heads on our team. See if there’s anything that they need from me on direct support. Let them know if there’s anything that I need from them on direct support. And then I usually will this time of year be waiting that deep into financial statements. So I’m doing a lot of close work with accounting for end of year. We fiscally sponsor several organizations and I can explain more about that structure if you want. It’s a little dry for some folks. I’m really interesting. So as a 501(c)(3), we have the ability to fiscally sponsor projects in the community. So if you have a grassroots community group that is doing some kind of work on the ground and people want to donate money to that group or somebody wants to give you a grant, you have to be able to process that money in a way that does not leave the group or heaven forbid your directors with tax liability for them. A big mistake that happens a lot with small or newer organizations is they just collect donations on like their founders personal then or whatever. This is a huge mistake. However, getting your own 501(c)(3) can be a pretty onerous, expensive, time consuming process not only to obtain it but then also to make it. So one of the services that we offer and we are making this part of our more expansion expansive mission 2024 is we offer fiscal sponsorship, which means that we can take on certain groups if they meet specific metrics for us and it’s going to be a good feasible relationship but we will manage all of their money. Accepting money for them gets reported on our taxes and is owned by like we take responsibility for it. We take on the liability of it. That can be a little bit complicated, right? That makes the accounting complicated. So I spend a lot of time making sure that those income streams are clarified. Specifically when somebody gets a grant that has restricted funding meaning you can only use that funding for one specific purpose and it has to be reported in a very specific way that can take up a lot of time. I maintain a family of bank accounts where I manage all of the contractors, volunteers, stipends, mutual aid requests and just day-to-day operational expenses of each of the organizations that are in our orbit. Crazy. That’s interesting. I’ve never heard of anything like that. So how does the community support line work? Well, you want to know on a granular and logistical level or on a just generalized community facing? I think generalized will do us. So we have... I’ll always get into the logistics. So there are a lot of hotlines out there with a lot of different purposes, right? And they tend to do wonderful work. Some of them do, in my opinion, better work than others or work that is guided by principles that I agree with more than others. But one thing that they all seem to have in common is that they don’t have a lot of training or knowledge around how to meet the specific needs of sex workers, whether that is a sex worker who calls in and they need safe reproductive healthcare when they can be honest with their doctor about what they do for a living or they need legal assistance resources or referrals that are particular to situations for adult industry workers. For example, custody battles can be really sensitive if you are in the adult industry or if you are in a domestic violence situation where your sexual labor is being exploited. It’s really challenging to call most of the quote unquote anti-trafficking hotlines that are out there because what you will more often than not run into is what they like to call rescue, right? Which is like, we can help you. We can take you from all this and you can go work a target instead. Just what they want. Just what they want, yeah. And then we’ll take you to church. It’ll be great. Yeah. So when you call the sex worker community support line, what you will receive is assistance from or just a listening ear from somebody who has been where you are. From somebody either is currently still doing sex work or is in and around the adult industry or who has been doing this for so long that it’s such a strong and well trained ally that we trust them to guide people and listen to them. So it’s peer to peer resources and referrals. You know, I would say more often than not that we do get a lot of requests for resource referrals. Most of the time people just really want to talk to somebody who’s had a similar experience to them. Get things off their chest, vent and go through. Yeah. And of course, that’s what a support line is all about is support. How does the criminalization of sex work facilitate violence? The criminalization of sex work facilitates violence because anytime you push a demographic into the shadows, they’re going to be more at risk, right? There’s just no getting around the fact that when you stigmatize any adult consensual behavior, it makes that behavior more dangerous. Yeah. No, I get it. Obviously laws like FOSTA/SESTA make it even worse. FOSTA and SESTA have made everyone’s job a lot harder, not least of all, but certainly sex workers, online sex workers in particular, it’s made their lives a lot harder and it has pushed a lot of folks back out onto the street. Exactly. That’s where I was going with that. Yeah. I mean, if they had a somewhat safe haven, it’s never really a safe haven, but if they had a somewhat safe haven with an online presence where they could better vet their customers, as opposed to being out on the street corner in a bad part of town, I mean, where I come from a lot of the sex workers like we’re in Richmond and West Oakland, I mean, it’s really bad areas. That’s a really good way to get killed. And importantly, the chilling effect that SESTA/FOSTA had on free speech on the internet is another major source of potential violence and exploitation for people doing the work because it scared all of these platforms into kicking sex workers off who were not "facilitating prostitution." Reddit, for example, shut down all of the bad clients blacklist. And so that’s a way, a really vital place where people could talk about how to stay safe and it actually impacts harm reduction organizations like ours because if somebody comes to us and they say, "Hey, I have started doing sex work. I want some resources on how I can do it more safely," we can’t tell them. We cannot talk to them about that. Sure. I get it. Help us understand how sex work and sex trafficking are different from your perspective. I’d like to see the marginalization of the term "trafficking" because it is a really overbroad term that is not clearly defined in our culture and that makes it right for misuse and misappropriation. Speaking from a legal perspective, trafficking is the act of taking something from one place to another illicitly. Okay? And it’s not illicit. You can traffic in cell phones. You can traffic in anything. However, when you have trafficking as a catch-all moniker for any kind of sex work or anything that reeks of coercion or anything that comes across as morally reprehensible to the person who’s hearing it, what you end up with is a lot of folks who are stripped of their autonomy to do the kind of work that either they want to do or sometimes that they need to do where the only thing that they’re being exploited by is capital. In my opinion, the bulk of what people think of as trafficking situations are domestic violence situations. At least when we’re talking about here, U.S. domestically. Right? We’re not talking about women from another country who are shipped in and told that they’re going to be a nanny and said they’re doing sex work and they’re doing so against their will. Like that is a completely different scenario. What I’m talking about is the bulk of people whose sexual labor is being exploited more often than not, they’re in a violent situation. And because culturally we do not take domestic violence seriously, we have to assign it, but we do take sex very seriously. Because we have this cognitive dissonance around how we treat women versus how we treat sex. And it is more often than not women. It’s my default to using women. But what you have is a situation where you have to ascribe some bigger, scarier, darker moniker to what’s happening. So it’s trafficking. Yep. They definitely overuse it in the politicians and police spend a lot of time using that as a fear tactic. The best example is every year at the Super Bowl, there’s going to be so much sex trafficking. Sure there’s some sex trafficking at the Super Bowl, but the bottom line on it is it’s where a lot of business gets done by sex workers. There’s a lot of beer trafficking at the Super Bowl. Yeah, that’s true. There’s a lot of liquor trafficking from your flask into the arena. And it’s not, it’s not perspective. It actually doesn’t help anybody to like, it does not help sex workers to increase stings around the Super Bowl because most of the folks who are doing the work in the city where the Super Bowl is are getting the fuck out. Can you say fuck on your show? Okay. Isn’t it a family show? Well, it’s like when I went to Rio for Carnival, all the normal people left. They’re like, I don’t want to be around here. They know there’s more cops. They know that everybody is drunk. They know it’s just an absolute shit show. They’re getting out of town. So the folks that are left who are, you know, maybe patrolling the crowds looking for customers are folks who can’t afford to leave. So they’re folks who can’t afford to be arrested. Yeah, I get it. How do you determine if someone is a sex worker or a sex trafficking victim? We allow people to self-identify. People can exist anywhere on the spectrum when it comes to their journey with their experience and their identity. We’re never going to tell somebody, hey, you’re a victim or hey, you’re a sex worker or hey, you know, any of this kind of stuff. We’re going to allow people to come to us and say, this is the thing that I need. When it comes to incarcerated folks, more often than not, women who are incarcerated, men actually, women, men and them, have had some exposure to trading sex for resources. Whether or not they want to self-identify, that may come in time. They may not ever want to. A lot of folks just call themselves hustlers. That is fine with us. When it comes to trafficking, we generally encourage people to, if they have an experience where they have been exploited, to identify as trafficking survivors because it does open up a lot of doors for them legally and force-wise. Yeah, sure. What kind of resources do you provide overall? So, while people are incarcerated, we maintain communication. We send J-Pay or Securist stamps. We do a pen pal program, a mentor by mail program, which is great for the public. That’s a nice way for folks to get involved and also for folks who are on the inside to have something to look forward to. But it’s also a really good opportunity for us to get the jump on. Let’s say, you know, Jane is getting released in a year. Well, then you, if you have established a rapport with Jane, then you know her release date is supposed to be in a year. You have a lot of time to help her get ready to make that transition. Because when she gets out, she may or may not have any ID. She may or may not have anywhere to go. She may or may not be a sex offender. So, she may have really, really limited housing options. And fun fact, a lot of people who are survivors of trafficking are in prison for trafficking and are sex offenders. We deal with that. They may or may not have kids that they want to try to reconnect with or regain custody of. Like, there’s all kinds of things that people might have as far as their goals and their obstacles for when they have incarceration, whether that has been for a weekend or a month or a year or 20 years. And so, we try to use that time to get to know them and meet them where they’re at. Why are sex workers in prison? In a lot of states, including Florida, where we’re based, your third prostitution arrest is an automatic felony with a year in prison. Oh, Florida. Right. Right. And that’s not uncommon. So, you might get picked up for prostitution once and you think, "Well, somebody getting arrested for prostitution. Like, what’s the big deal? You’re in and out on a weekend." Alex tells this story, our founder, about how she was arrested for prostitution in, like, 1990, she was arrested several times. And 25 years later, she went to buy her condo. She’d been out of the industry for a really long time. She’d been a hairstylist, you know, for the last, like, 15 years or whatever. She went to buy her condo and on the day that they were set to close, the Homeowners Association came to her with her arrest record from the ’90s and tried to stop the closing. So, even if you are not in a situation where you have a long sentence, a prostitution arrest can affect, even a misdemeanor one can affect you for the rest of your life. And going to jail for one hour, one night, one weekend, aside from being potentially really traumatizing, is incredibly destabilizing. You spend the weekend in jail because you got picked up for prostitution. Just watching your kids, where are your kids going to be when you get back? What if you were doing a little sex work on the side because you didn’t make enough money working at Walmart? Well, you’re not going to have that Walmart job when you get out. You may not even have any shoes when you get out. Now you’re in a position where you’ve lost your hotel room or you’ve fallen short of your rent because you’ve lost your primary means of employment. Maybe you’ve been traumatized by the process of being booked. You also now have court dates and fines that you’re going to have to deal with. You’re now at a very, very significant disadvantage for staying out of jail in the future. And you’re on the radar. Your name’s on the radar. Yeah. Isn’t just the whole criminalization of prostitution bizarre in 2023? I mean, how do we get this thing legal? Yeah. Well, and you know, I want to highlight that the issues around sex workers being incarcerated, not just the thing that happens in Florida. It’s not just a thing that happens in Southern or more conservative states because in a lot of more progressive districts where, you know, for example, like Philadelphia, Seattle, Portland, where they have functionally decriminalized sex work, what you have is the competing priority of police budgets and the need to make certain kinds and numbers of arrests. So what you have instead of folks being arrested for prostitution is you have folks being arrested for drug possession or resisting arrest or other kinds of charges, anything that can get tacked on. You’re going to get arrested for prostitution, but it’s going to be a desk appearance ticket. That really incentivizes the police officers to find something else to charge you with. I’m sure they can figure it out. They’re an innovative crew, aren’t they? Oh, man. Are they ever, they can even make it up. Tell us what violence against sex workers looks like. Violence against sex workers looks like, I mean, it is a, at least a tri-vocal situation, right? There’s state violence that we just kind of started to touch on detailing their cultural violence in stigma. You know, we have one of our board members who actually came to us through the support line as a client years ago, and she’s now on our board. She’s about to graduate law school. She had done porn in her early 20s, where her life changed and she moved away from the industry. She became a paramedic and then she decided, I want to go to nursing school. And a vindictive family member outed her to her school as having done porn. And she got kicked out of school. She got kicked out of college. And she sued that school and she most recently was awarded, I believe, $1.1 million. Nice. Yeah. As it should be. As it should be. But of course, it took, you know, seven years and homelessness and a suicide attempt and losing her kids for like a really harrowing and difficult journey because her entire life was destabilized by this small town all at once finding out that they had a hooker in their midst, right? Nice family. Yeah, great. Great family. This all happened in Southern Oregon. When people think of Oregon, they think of some kind of like progressive, blue-stained straw pool. It is not. There are rural parts there too. There are rural parts of every state that are as conservative as Alabama. Exactly. So, cultural violence is a real thing. Stigma can be deadly for people. You know, isolation can be deadly for people as we all learned in the last few years. And then of course, there is just good old fashioned violence. When it is risky for you to see a sex worker, then the people who will go to see sex workers are more inclined to be not risk averse people. Does that make sense? This is a problem with like the Nordic model where they tend to, well, instead of criminalizing sex workers, they will criminalize Johns. Okay. Well, if you criminalize seeing the sex worker, then all the people who are really going to take the risk are people who are not afraid to take risks. With criminals, yeah. Mm-hmm. Yeah, that Nordic model is ridiculous. I mean, it’s ridiculous. It’s just, come on. You know, I don’t understand that they’re doing that in Canada. It’s just dumb. You know, one way or the other, I mean, decriminalizing it for the sex workers is great. Should just be legal. But making it criminal for the customer, huh? It’s vast backwards. So, yeah, I mean, we advocate for decrim because our biggest priority is stopping the arrest, right? And there are arguments to be had on all sides around legalization and the way that capitalism and bureaucracy interact with people’s ability to have autonomy. And you know, that’s where you can all get a little libertarian about it. It’s like, why don’t you just not arrest me and like leave me the fuck alone and I’ll pay my taxes instead of making me go through some kind of like licensing situation or whatever. And there’s, you know, because it isn’t something that’s been tried in a meaningful way in the US, we don’t really know to what extent labor exploitation would continue to be a problem. But just looking at the limited information that we do have, I think that the regulatory oversight would have to be pretty intense to avoid that kind of exploitation. And that might actually render legalization kind of move anyway, because it would be so expensive to run a brothel or to be a sex worker who’s in compliance that there would just be a really robust. Oh yeah, get the government involved. Ask anybody who sells weed in a legal state. It’s Byzantine. Oh Lord. And then look at the whole healthcare system. We could go on for hours about that and how the how the government just makes it almost impossible. What’s the difference between institutional and societal violence? Well, institutional violence, it is like the baked in long term result of societal violence, right? So you have something that’s been happening over and over and over again for a long time and this is just the way that we’ve always done it. Those traditions, those cultural norms and those methods become traditions. Those traditions become institutions. They become laws. They become the way that we do things in a royal week. So when you have a core group of people who’ve been taught since the inception of the country, you know, as Dan Savage says, Australia got the convicts, Canada got the French, and America got the Puritans. So since our since before founding even it’s been baked in that sex is bad and sex is scary and then all of this stuff. This is an idea that we all love. I love Dan Savage. He’s great. He’s hilarious. And so our entire cultural and legal and institutional paradigm is built around the ideas that we had, the biases that we had as a society at our founding, at our inception. I know. How do we get rid of violence against sex workers? Well, when you asked me what a normal day in my life looks like, that question is always there at the beginning of my day, in the middle of my day, and at the end of my day. I think that we have to continue to try to reduce the amount of violence and suffering in the world at large and continue to fight every day for a more just world and society and system. And that is the only way. Right. I mean, it’s when somebody asks me how we can reduce violence or end violence against sex workers, to me it kind of feels like someone’s asking me what the meaning of life is. Right. I just go totally galaxy. I go like galaxy brain immediately. But as again, Maggie McNeil, another great quote of hers is that sex workers are the canaries in the coal mine when it comes to civil rights issues. The folks who are at the quote unquote bottom of the ladder are always going to feel the effects first, but they are always going to affect everybody. And sex work is the perfect intersection of every social justice issue, every whole issue that we have as a society, positive and negative. There is an intersection with sex work because it’s integral to our humanity. Sex is not going anywhere and tragically, need our capitalism, but you know, sex and money, they are interwoven resources, survival, sex, homeostasis, right. It’s not going anywhere. So anytime you wake up and you fight to make a more just world, you are helping to, if you’re trying to end violence against women, if you’re trying to clear the way for LGBTQ people to have a voice and have equal rights in our society, if you’re trying to lift up from poverty, like this is where it starts. Absolutely. Also obviously, by donating behind bars. Well it’s also like, I mean porn, which is interwoven very much so with sex work and porn performers are known as sex workers now, which really kind of brings us all together in it. And I think the whole industry can be considered sex workers. I’m a sex worker. And I think that, let’s face it, the government goes after us because we’re easy pickings and it’s a total free speech issue plus prostitution is the oldest profession and it’s never going away. It’s never going away. Porn’s not going away. They can try with all their stupid laws but porn’s not going away either. No, it’s not. And you know, I believe that the lawsuit in Texas around identity verification was just one and I think Woodhull was involved in that. Yeah, Woodhull’s involved in a lot of things. They’re involved in everything, yeah, but then of course they just had, talking about Larry Walters, they just had their, against us, Sestifasta, Shelg basically. So lived to fight another day on that one. Exactly, exactly. No Larry, very, very well. I should remind everyone that this will be running in the spring. So we talked about the shows and we talked about what’s happening now. That’ll be what happened a couple months ago. Who can get involved with swap behind bars? I wish we had 10 hours just to talk about section 230. Yeah, really. Okay, so if you want to get involved with swap behind bars, there are a number of ways to do so. We do have orderly volunteer training for folks who are interested in becoming a support line operator. We start folks out on the chat for support function because it is a easier pace for people to get used to and it’s a little bit like lower stakes, right? But we have those trainings quarterly. We run our mentor by mail program, which is where you can host a letter writing party or we can assign you some 10 calls from folks that are incarcerated who are interested in connecting with people on the outside. Of course, you can always donate. We definitely encourage that. Money’s good. Money’s always good. Help people about the support line. And also importantly, one of our major projects right now is we’re building a sex worker safe resource directory. So right now it’s internal use. It’s kind of in a prototype. But our operators can access this resource directory where they can type in the state or the type of resource that someone is looking for and they will have a list in front of them of all of the resources that match their search criteria that have been pre-vetted by our staff as being sex worker safe. So if you have a resource, if you’re a lawyer, if you’re a doctor, if you know one, anybody, you’re another nonprofit. They want to learn more about how to better serve this particular demographic. Email us. Get on the support line and chat for support to us. Let our operators know that you’re there and you want to talk about collaborating and offering your services. You know, there’s a million ways to get involved. And how can our listeners get involved? They can go to swapbehindbars.org. And there they will find a list of all of our programming. There’s an automatic pop-up chat bot that they can talk to someone on our support line about their desire to get involved. They can find our donate link. They can find our merch. They can find out information about our teams. That’s what I was getting at was the money. You were just leaving here right there. I’m trying. I’m in the time dilation. When you’re recording, you’re like in time dilation. I’m like, we’re just talking. We’re going to be here all night. It’ll be great. No, he has to grab two, he’s trying to get us to play. Exactly. Well, Blair, I could certainly talk to you all night as well. And I’d like to thank you for being our guest today on Adult Site Broker Talk. And I hope we’ll get a chance to do this again soon. Thanks. Anytime. I appreciate you. My pleasure. 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 Casey Donatello of In Bed With Strangers. And that’s it for this week’s Adult Site Broker Talk. I’d once again like to thank my guest, Blair Hopkins. Talk to you again next week on Adult Site Broker Talk. I’m Bruce Friedman. [MUSIC] [BLANK_AUDIO]