• Never to attempt to convince any person
• Encourage advisers to engage with clients about tenets central to their identity, and to do so without bias or unintentional persuasion
• Hopefully, we can learn from my story

• The heaviest-drinking 10% of Americans account for roughly 60% of all alcohol sold
• Underage drinkers account for 8.6% of all alcohol sold
• 42.6% of people with bipolar disorder meet lifetime criteria for alcohol use disorder, vs. 16.7% in the general population
• Among people already diagnosed with alcohol dependence, 54% have had a lifetime anxiety disorder and 34% a lifetime personality disorder

• ~178,000 deaths/year — nearly 500 Americans a day — more than double all opioid overdose deaths combined, including fentanyl
• $249B in economic costs (2010 data — most recent full national CDC estimate available)
• $17.5B in alcohol industry revenue from underage drinkers (2016)
• Root cause of 20.3% of all deaths, ages 20-49

• Federal alcohol excise tax revenue: $11.1B (FY2023 — distilled spirits $6.77B, beer $3.28B, wine $1.07B)
• $249B in CDC-estimated economic cost dwarfs that entire tax take, by design of the comparison

• 11% of men and 3% of women nationally showed "some agreement" with self-identifying as "addicted to pornography" (3% and 1% respectively "strongly agreed")
• Escalation is a measured, documented pattern in large-sample research — both quantitative (more time viewing) and qualitative (progressively more "extreme" content) tolerance show up as central, connected mechanisms of problematic use
• A 2026 study of young men found that those who kept escalating toward unusual or niche content were also more likely to encounter or search for material involving minors — a real, measurable link
• That study relied on self-reported search history for illegal content — a category people are well-documented to under-report, given the obvious legal and social risk of admitting to it

• 23% of porn-using men under 35 reported some sexual dysfunction with a "highly significant relationship" between porn-viewing time and worsening sexual dysfunction
• It's not just the women in the videos — women report feeling pressured by partners to act like porn performers in real life.
• Nearly 1 in 3 women in relationships say they worry their partner is more interested in porn than them
• Women describe these encounters as physically and emotionally uncomfortable — something they dread, not something they want

The Pornhub Story

• ~300 women and girls have filed suit against Pornhub/MindGeek since 2020, across 25 separate lawsuits
• Two federal class actions (N.D. Alabama, C.D. California) have been certified on behalf of everyone under 18 who appeared in Pornhub-hosted content since Feb 12, 2011 — Bloomberg Law describes the potential class as reaching "potentially thousands" of victims
• Broader advocacy estimates put the true number in the tens of thousands — a claim repeated widely but one this author could not trace to a verifiable primary court document; treat as an upper-bound estimate, not a confirmed count

• 706,000 videos flagged by users for depicting rape or sexual abuse of children, as of May 2020 — per internal company records, unsealed by a court filing error
• A flagged video could be reported 15-16 times without triggering a single moderator review
• Site-wide searches for "girls under18" or "14yo" each returned 100,000+ videos; "13yo" returned 155,000
• ~80 moderators worldwide covered every MindGeek site — Facebook employed 15,000
• External watchdog reporting (Internet Watch Foundation) had logged only 118 instances over nearly three years — a fraction of the internal 706,000 count
• After the investigation: total videos on the site dropped from 13.5 million to under 3 million, a ~78% purge of unverified-user uploads

• December 4, 2020: Nicholas Kristof's New York Times investigation, "The Children of Pornhub," exposes the site hosting rape and child sexual abuse videos — triggering public outrage and a wave of advertiser and payment-processor scrutiny
• Bill Ackman — CEO, Pershing Square Capital Management ($9.05B in net assets, year-end 2020) — personally texted the CEOs of Visa and Mastercard after reading Kristof's column, leading to the initial cutoff days later
• He then tracked that Visa/Mastercard had quietly reactivated B2B payments for ad purchases and "premium" subscriptions on MindGeek sites — by his own account, ~90% of MindGeek's revenue kept flowing through despite the public "ban"
• August 2022: Ackman posted on Twitter specifically calling out Visa's continued facilitation via MindGeek/Pornhub — directly preceding Visa suspending TrafficJunky, the ad affiliate network, days later, alongside the court ruling

• Why did Visa/Mastercard keep processing payments, even after the first PR hit in Dec 2020? For them, this was essentially an accounting error — a rounding error in a system that processes billions of dollars a day.
• The digital merchant processing reality: a high-risk merchant processor processes the transaction → the cardholder's issuing bank approves it → Visa/Mastercard executes the network transaction. A cut of every dollar spent is split among all three.

Conventional thinking says go after the issuing banks. That's not what Ackman did.

• How would you define a return on your investments?
• Tell me what you would include in your definition of a successful investment strategy beyond monetary returns, if anything.
• Is there anything about you, or anything for which you are passionate, that I need to make certain I honor in your investment strategy? What I'm talking about here could be rooted in your religious identity, social activism, environmental concerns, or even a personal commitment to full scope sobriety like me.
• Are any of such concerns so important that you'd be OK with a lesser return on your investments knowing that we are not acting contrary to your beliefs?
• My goal is to make certain that my money is always best positioned to make a positive impact looking forward, while never creating regret about the footprints I've left behind.