*In the latest episode of the Explaining History Podcast, writer and cultural critic Dennis Broe joins me to discuss his new novel Pornocopia—and what it reveals about the intertwined histories of the gambling and pornography industries in post-war America.*

The Scale of the Industries Today

Let’s start with some numbers. In 2024, global profits from the pornography industry totalled over $76 billion—up from $70 billion the previous year. To put that in perspective, the entire US movie industry generated $8.5 billion in profits in 2023. Porn is now nearly nine times larger than Hollywood.

Gambling tells a similar story. 2025 was a record revenue year, with $64 billion spent, an 8.7% increase over 2024. A recent study shows that sports gambling is now funded not from prior winnings but from day-to-day expenditures, contributing directly to increased bankruptcies, loan defaults, and debt collection fees.

These are not marginal industries. They are central to the contemporary capitalist economy.

1952: The Moment of Transition

Pornocopia is set in 1952, and Dennis argues that this was a crucial transitional moment for both industries. The porn industry, then as now, was dominated by low-level mafiosi—men who were “not above the occasional murder.” But larger financial interests were beginning to take notice. These industries needed to be “rationalised” if they were to achieve their full profit potential. The low-level thugs who had built them would have to be disciplined or pushed aside.

This is the dynamic that detective Harry Palmer uncovers. Two low-level mobsters are running three porn actresses—Perfect, in her early thirties and already past her prime by industry standards; Chansey, a black actress who likes to gamble; and Lulu, just 18 but almost certainly inducted at 15 or 16. The producers, “nod, nod, wink, wink,” welcomed her in.

The parallel with Hollywood is deliberate. In the early studio era, actresses were unnamed—the “Biograph Girl” was the first star, but she had no name because the studio wanted to advertise itself, not her. The porn industry in 1952 was at a similar stage. The mob didn’t want their actresses to have names or celebrity because that would give them negotiating power.

The Histories They Bring

One of the book’s recurring themes—and one of the most troubling—is the life stories of porn actresses. Dennis puts it bluntly:

> “One of the theses of the novel, and one of the things you just keep running into again and again as you get the life stories of porn actresses, is sexual abuse. It’s there, and it’s there as they talk about it. And it’s not only sexual, it’s also familial abuse.”

He quotes a line from another porn actress, since deceased, about how horrible her family was to her. As she’s about to leave, her mother says: “It’s okay if you leave, we can always make another one of you.”

Dennis calls this “the almost sufficient, but not necessary condition for producing actresses in this field.” The industry doesn’t need to create the conditions; society does that for them.

Today, the dynamics have shifted somewhat. For working-class women in the US, many don’t go to college; instead, they go to OnlyFans, earning what looks like a lot of money. But the company takes a large cut, and careers are short. The industry loves to say they aren’t inducing anyone—people come to them. But first, society has to create the conditions for them to feel like there’s nothing else left.

The Trump Connection

Donald Trump sits at the intersection of all these dubious industries. His casinos famously went bust—one of the few people to make that “sure thing” fail. His connections to organised crime have been documented, including a handler who lived in Trump Tower for years, reported on by the Village Voice in the 1990s.

But the family history runs deeper. Dennis points out that the Trump family fortune was amassed in saloons and brothels during the California gold rush. Friedrich Trump arrived too late for the gold, so he decided to “mine the miners”—opening establishments that combined gambling with sex trafficking. The current President’s own conduct, as Dennis delicately puts it, places him squarely within this tradition.

## Hoover’s Blindness

The novel also explores J. Edgar Hoover’s catastrophic neglect of organised crime. As one character notes, Hoover’s main obsession was the supposed communist menace—about 40,000 people, half of whom were probably FBI informants anyway. Meanwhile, the mob was gathering momentum, building Las Vegas as a money-laundering operation for drug profits.

> “The New York Bureau Office assigned 400 agents to thwart communism, but only 10 to fight organised crime. One report concludes that the FBI was in fact a mediocre political police force whose mission, rather than halting crime, was repression of dissent.”

This is the report that Crystal, Harry’s partner, discovers—and it’s what she uses to get her producer client off the hook when he’s called before HUAC. She shows it to Bobby Kennedy, who has shown up in Las Vegas in 1952 (Jack having just won his Senate seat, and “wooing every woman he can find” before assuming office). Bobby is interested in the mob, though at this stage he’s more focused on McCarthy. But the seed is planted.

The Kennedy Connection

Bobby Kennedy would later conduct the most serious investigation of organised crime in US history. The Kefauver hearings of the early 1950s were largely theatre—the first televised congressional hearings, watched by millions, but the mob usually outwitted them. Johnny Roselli gave a performance like Bertolt Brecht before HUAC, presenting himself as a Teflon Don to whom nothing stuck.

The mob didn’t laugh at Kennedy’s hearings, though. They took them seriously. Sam Giancana’s supposed comment after JFK’s assassination—”we got the wrong one”—may be apocryphal, but it reflects a real truth: Bobby Kennedy was an existential threat to organised crime.

## The Casino-isation of Everything

We ended the conversation talking about what these industries do to human relationships. Gambling promises the thrill of prediction—something hard-wired into us from our hunter-gatherer past, when predicting where the game would be meant survival. Pornography promises the most immediate form of intimacy.

Both are lies. As Dennis says:

> “Pornography promises the most immediate direct form of intimacy—sexual intimacy immediately. But of course, that’s part of the delusion, because instead it fetishises both the body and the act. This lure of ultimate intimacy is actually an attack on real intimacy, which is much more difficult. It requires talking, figuring out who people are.”

The same is true of gambling. When Dennis’s Uber driver in Vegas asked for a tip on the Dodgers—not to enjoy the game, but to monetise it—the conversation became purely transactional. What could you give me to help me make money? Not: what do we share? What do we care about?

This is what Dennis means by the “casino-isation” of everyday life. Everything becomes a bet. Everything becomes a transaction. And the space for genuine human connection—for reflection, for relationship, for intimacy—shrinks accordingly.

From Polls to Prediction Markets

Even politics hasn’t escaped. Prediction markets like Kalshi now claim to offer better forecasts than traditional polling. Gallup has reportedly begun surrendering to them, acknowledging that the bettors might be better at pricing the future.

When the head of Kalshi was asked if he was worried about the world turning into a casino, his response was: “Define casino.” Which means, of course, he’s not worried at all. He’s hoping for exactly that.

The Pornification of Culture

Dennis notes a crucial shift from the 1960s, when pornography was sometimes seen as liberating—therapists even prescribed it to help people overcome sexual inhibitions. That’s not what this is. This is a multi-billion dollar global industry approaching one trillion dollars. It’s about inducing people to forget their lives and make this their lives instead.

The “pornification” of popular culture is now complete. What was once marginal, hidden, shameful, has moved to the centre. And as it has, it has transformed how we understand intimacy, relationships, and ourselves.

—

Dennis Broe’s new novel, Pornocopia, is out now. It’s the sixth Harry Palmer novel and the second in the trilogy The Dark Ages, covering 1950-52 at the height of McCarthyite censorship. The next volume, Criminal Consumption, will examine the moment when US consumer goods flooded the market and began dictating what everyone’s home looked like.

If you can, please buy the book from an independent retailer or direct from the publisher. The little guys need your support.

—

# Tidied Up Transcript (Normal Format)

Hi there and welcome again to the Explaining History podcast. I’m delighted to have back on the podcast Dennis Broe, who came to have a chat with us, I think it was last year now, about McCarthyism and Hollywood and communists and the kind of steady degradation of American political life from the 40s and 50s onwards. And now Dennis has come to talk about his new book, Pornocopia, which is focusing on the kind of devices of gambling and pornography in fictitious exploration. Is it focusing on Vegas, have I got that right, Dennis?

Los Angeles and Vegas.

Okay, cool. So firstly, and obviously we are, as we always do on the podcast, here to explore what this tells us about modern American history. Dennis, welcome.

Thanks, thanks, Nick. Yeah, it tells us quite a bit about modern American history, actually, and the kind of corruption that we still have today. And there are direct parallels in the book, by the way, there are some actually direct parallels because in one sense, what’s going on in Iran, this is 1952, takes place in Los Angeles, that’s where the pornography industry is, and in Las Vegas, and that’s where gambling is. By the way, gambling had migrated, it was basically offshore in Los Angeles until it was outlawed, and then it moved to Las Vegas. So when Raymond Chandler writes about gambling, he writes about the ships offshore before they were outlawed, actually. But at any rate, yes.

So gambling and pornography, this is a book not only about sex and betting, it’s also about the gambling and pornography industries. So it’s about the sex industry and the gambling industry. And those industries are really prevalent and have really grown over the time that this book is talking about, though. This book is about sort of the initiation, the moment of these, you know. And I put some statistics in the back. In 1960, there were 20 porn theaters. By 1970, there were 750, which is an increase of 3650%. And 2024 profits from the porn industry globally totalled over $76 billion, up from $70 billion in 2023. So it advanced $6 billion in that one year. It is now much bigger than the US movie industry.

My goodness.

Porn industry profits were $12 to $14 billion in 2023, and the US movie industry profits were $8.5 billion. So bigger than the movie industry. Same thing with gambling. 2025 is a record revenue year for gambling. $64 billion spent, rising 8.7% over the previous year. The other thing in terms of gambling is a study shows that for sports gambling, since it is online and is now as ubiquitous as pornography, is not coming from prior winnings, but rather from day-to-day expenditures and contributing to increased bankruptcies, inability to pay loans, and exorbitant debt collection fees. So these industries, that industry gambling is feeding the others.

And if you look at the kind of structural shift in America predominantly, but you can see this across the rest of the Western world, since probably the 1970s, you’ve gone from a notionally productive capitalism and industrial capitalism—making stuff—to an extractive kind of rentier capitalism. And if you were going to be a rentier capitalist and you said, well, how am I going to make money? You might want to buy a bunch of houses and rent them out to people. You might want to be a health insurer, but that’s peanuts compared to owning a casino, owning a betting shop, owning a gambling app. That’s surely rentier capitalism in its crudest, rawest form.

Yes. As they say, you know, the gift that keeps on giving, that’s sort of another way of describing this in both of these industries. The idea is to lure people. And part of the lure is that they are addictive. People don’t actually sometimes have so much of a choice once they get hooked. And of course, the internet has been the big thing that has propelled pornography, and it’s also a big thing that’s propelled gambling. If you look in the US, sports gambling is very, very big, but that is everywhere. Sports gambling is everywhere, but it’s also now moving into politics and into a bunch of areas. There’s a company, I don’t know if you know it called Kalshi, where you can bet on all kinds of politics, bills that come up, elections, and Kalshi has great predictive power. In fact, some of the polls are sort of surrendering to Kalshi and saying, well, the bettors are telling us better about a better forecast, pricing the future.

And I have a kind of almost a confession to make on that one. Probably this is all unknown in the rest of the world, but there’s been a political earthquake here in Britain in the last few weeks in that the dominant Labour Party have had one of their MPs step down. Then there was a by-election in the seat and it was viewed as either being Labour’s for the winning—they’re generally quite a despised political organisation here at the moment—or the new sort of proto-fascist Reform Party. And neither of them won. The outsider, the Green Party, which has at the time four MPs and is a totally fringe organisation, swept the board with a massive majority. And I knew they were going to win, because I’d seen it on a betting website. I don’t look at betting websites, but it popped up on my Twitter feed. I thought, well, if the people that are staking tens of millions potentially on the outcome, if they think it’s a Green win, it’s a Green win. And it was. And it’s an alarming development. It really is.

You know, the head of Kalshi was asked if he was worried about the world turning into a casino, and his answer was “define casino.” Which means he’s, of course, not worried about it at all. He’s hoping that the world turns into a casino. He claims the company is not like slot machines, but it’s based on being informed. But of course, it is also like slot machines. I don’t know if you know or not, but Gallup has recently announced that they’re giving up polls on politicians’ popularity. They’re surrendering to Kalshi, but also, of course, the other popularity polls that are produced on these politicians are so low as to be extremely embarrassing. So is the Gallup poll that comes out every year on trust in media and trust in the legislature in the US. The only thing people trust less than media is the legislature, the House and Senate.

One thing I was kind of curious about, and sort of all roads at the moment kind of lead back to Donald Trump, but when you’re talking about pornography in casinos, obviously, he’s famously one of the few people who’s ever actually made a casino go bust. His kind of level of fraud and incompetence has even destroyed that kind of surefire win. But he seems to be at the intersection of all of these dubious industries. And if not part of the pornography industry, then sort of a direct beneficiary of it in all sorts of ways. And is his origin story in the heart of all of this somewhere, do we think?

In a way, in a couple of ways. One, there is a mafia element with Trump, which has always been kind of known. A handler who lived in Trump Tower for quite a long time. This was reported on by the Village Voice in the 90s. And I don’t know if you know or not, but his grandfather, that is the Trump family fortune, was amassed in—well, the grandfather went to California, but he was too late for the gold rush. So he decided that the best thing to do was to mine the miners. And so he started opening saloons, which were also brothels. That is, the Trump family fortune is made from gambling and sex trafficking. So there you go.

Now, just to come back a little bit here to the book, Pornocopia, it is set in ’52. And it is about this moment when these industries were both nascent, were borning. But in a key way, the book suggests that this is a crucial moment for their advancement. For the porn industry, it’s the first time the book suggests that there are financial interests besides the mob who are also interested in the industry. Now, of course, what you have with the mob is, and this is what Harry, the detective, finds out, is you have very low mafioso who are running some of these companies and they’re not above the occasional murder, whatever. And so in terms of, as you say, for the rentier economy, they need these industries to be rationalized. And so they can’t abide by this. They have to discipline some of these people. And that’s part of the story of the novel. These two low-level mafiosi are sort of, in the end, find that they’re kind of on the outs. But they’re the ones who are directly exploiting these three actresses who are really kind of the stars of the film, of the novel.

This one actress, Perfect, who’s early 30s and in the porn industry, like Hollywood at that time, early 30s and you’re just about through. Another one who’s a black actress named Chansey, because she likes to gamble, and a third who’s very young, she’s 18, but she probably got into the industry around 15 or 16. And the producers, nod, nod, wink, wink, welcomed her into the industry. And this is something that really was prominent at the time in the studios, and is still particularly prominent in Hollywood, in the modeling industry, where they’re not looking, they don’t look at age, or they say they look beyond age and they kind of nod, nod, wink, wink. “Okay, that’s what age you’re telling me, then that’s what age you are.” So there’s some trafficking also already involved in that.

I will say too, in terms of addiction, and I haven’t brought this up in other places, but it is a feature of the books and it’s a feature of this one, that one of the theses of the novel, and one of the things that you just keep running into again and again, as you get the life stories of porn actresses, is sexual abuse. It’s there, and it’s there as they talk about it. And it’s not only sexual, it’s also familial abuse. There’s a great line, which I did use in the book from another porn actress who subsequently died, and it’s about how horrible her family is to her. Her mother, she’s about to leave, and her mother says, “It’s okay if you leave, we can always make another one of you.” You know, it’s that kind of abuse, plus there’s of course sexual abuse also that’s in their histories. And that is, I would say, the almost sufficient, but not necessary condition for producing actresses in this field.

Whereas today we have a slightly different thing, because today in the US for working class women, many of them don’t go to college, instead they go to OnlyFans, and they get on and start earning what looks like a lot of money. But of course, the company takes a lot of it, and who knows how long you can work—that’s the other thing about the industry, nobody lasts in it very long. But this has become a real—the porn industry loves to say that they aren’t inducing anyone, they’re just there and people come to them. But first you have to have society create the conditions for them to feel like there’s nothing else left for them.

And this is what I think happens. You get people in, and it’s not just America, you can find this in, I think, a great many Western countries, countries that have basically been atomized by neoliberalismSupply Side Economics Full Description:Supply-Side Economics posits that production (supply) is the key to economic prosperity. Proponents argue that by reducing the “burden” of taxes on the wealthy and removing regulatory barriers for corporations, investment will increase, creating jobs and expanding the economy. Key Policies: Tax Cuts: Specifically for high-income earners and corporations, under the premise that this releases capital for investment. Deregulation: Removing environmental, labor, and safety protections to lower the cost of doing business. Critical Perspective:Historical analysis suggests that supply-side policies rarely lead to the promised broad-based prosperity. Instead, they often result in massive budget deficits (starving the state of revenue) and a dramatic concentration of wealth at the top. Critics argue the “trickle-down” effect is a myth used to justify the upward redistribution of wealth.. You get people who exist more and more, there’s a kind of a grey world between the gig economy and essentially the criminal economy.

Yes. And there is an idea. And it’s kind of an elite idea that sort of scams and lies and hustles and murky deeds are somehow almost entrepreneurial. And they have a great model to look up to of this kind of elite Wall Street class that just rips people off on epic scales. And if you’re an ordinary person and you’re to point to what capitalism is, you think it’s a scam. And what you need to find is suckers. And there’s that kind of everyday life infused with an element of exploitativeness and criminality, borderline criminality.

And I agree. There’s the scam of porn and gambling. Gambling grows up in Vegas, porn grows up in LA in the San Fernando Valley, now sometimes called the San Pornando Valley, or also sometimes called Silicon Valley. This is sort of alternate industry and supposedly the dark side, but in fact, the two of them work together. That’s another way these distinctions collapse, plus the idea of the scam. As somebody says in the book, one of the lowlife mafioso says, “If anybody ever discovered that sex isn’t dirty, you got to make it look seedy and dirty. If people ever found out there’s nothing wrong with sex, we’d never survive.” So the industry itself is based on a scam.

And Vegas, the idea, as Harry finds out, the idea in going to Vegas with Chansey, the gambler, the idea was that the more you lost either at the tables or with the girls who surrounded the tables, the less you talked about what really went on, giving the impression that it was all fun and games because no one wanted to admit that they may have come there hoping to win in either love or money, they left not wanting anyone else to know that what went on instead was relentless losing. And I found out when I went to Vegas, that is what’s behind “what happens in Vegas stays in Vegas.” It’s because everyone’s embarrassed to admit that they end up leaving feeling like they’ve been scammed.

So you invent this slogan that makes it sound really attractive.

One thing I’ve been thinking, and this is unlike me, because I’m going to introduce a kind of right wing critique now that we can explore, but the traditional, not necessarily the Trumpian MAGA critique, but your traditional neoconservative critique of things like pornography is this is the fault of the counterculture. If it hadn’t been for the 60s and hippies and free love and all that kind of stuff, people would still be living these very abstemious moral lives. And here in the UK, our best selling and most rabidly insane newspaper, the Daily Mail, says this about once or twice a week: had it not been for the 1960s, this terrible decade, we would all be living in nuclear families and everything would be all right. And I wonder what you think of that.

Well, I think it’s kind of the opposite of that part of the right wing critique. I really think, as I said, the 60s were when people started to discover that sex isn’t dirty and that everyone’s entitled to it. And that’s exactly the opposite of porn. So that doesn’t work along with porn. Plus the other things around the 60s, they discovered that fashion could be made by everyone. It didn’t need to be made by corporate producers of fashion. All of these were sort of lifestyle attacks on the sort of corporate mentality. So, no, I don’t think that that’s responsible at all. I think this is an industry and I think it’s a very deliberate attempt to lead people there. But I think the other part of it is, what else do they have? That is, you’ve gotten to the point, at least in the US where this book is set, you’ve gotten to the point where they don’t have much else going on in their lives. So it’s either start to make positive changes or start to move toward things which could really affect their lives. And then on the other hand, there’s always porn and gambling, which are so omnipresent. And they always suggest that there is no solution. The solution is simply dissolution.

A kind of hedonistic nihilism. That’s right. And if you were looking for, and this goes far into kind of tinfoil hat conspiracy theory territory, but if you were somebody in the mid 60s at the Trilateral Commission or the CIA or something like that and thought, wow, you have black people politically organizing and workers politically organizing and we’re losing in Vietnam and the red tide is going to engulf us. We could give people heroin. We’re going to do that. But what about gambling and pornography? People will stop going to political organizations because they’ll be at home watching sex videos and things like that. I mean, obviously completely unfounded, by the way listeners. And that’s just a flight of my imagination. But also I think it’s probably true as well.

Also, I think the book is pretty interesting. It suggests, since Harry is involved in the industry at both levels, because there’s an actress who’s one of the three big actresses in Hollywood at this time. She has a pseudonym, not her actual name, but actually this actress was involved and did do porn reels when she first came to Hollywood and she gets blackmailed as often happens. And the studio hires Harry to get the reels back, to get the negatives of the reels. There’s a lot of other similarities. Studios change the names at that time, change the names of the actresses just as porn actresses change their names. The actress says in her early encounter with porn, she learned how to seduce the camera, which came in very handy above ground where she’s doing a lot of the same thing. And Hollywood always sort of needs the porn industry so they can point to and say, no matter how lascivious you think we are, we’re not that. And so that’s the way porn works. Also, a lot of the same technicians who are out of work, Hollywood technicians go to work on porn. That’s why the industry grows up right next to Hollywood, because it uses all the Hollywood people.

You know, and of course, there’s always lots of similarities in terms of the history. In the beginning of the studio history, from 1900 to about 1912, women were not allowed to be named. It was all about the studio. So the first character that we have who actually emerges is called the Biograph Girl, but she doesn’t have a name. She’s just the Biograph Girl. That was perfect for them because it advertised the studio, which they were trying to advertise. But slowly, they started to realize that, wait a minute, people aren’t coming to see Biograph films. They’re coming to see the Biograph Girl. We better give her a name. And then that happened. Same thing with the beginnings of the porn industry. This is in ’52. These mafioso don’t want to give these women names. They don’t want them to be known. They don’t want them to have any star or celebrity because then they’ll be able to negotiate better. And there is a whole thing. There’s a great book called Porn as Work that takes this up to date and starts to talk about porn actresses negotiating within the gig economy and what that’s like. And that’s kind of an interesting part of it.

But let me say also that there’s another element to this which returns to the previous book, The Dark Ages, and that is that Harry’s partner, Crystal, there’s a studio producer and the producer is about to get his big break. He’s one of the producers on a big budget, full color Disney film of a Jules Verne novel, which we can guess is 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, which ended up being with James Mason. But the thing is, he’s being called in front of HUAC. And he knows that if he is called, he has two choices: name names, in which he’ll never work again—I’m sorry, name names in which he can go work again in the studio, or don’t name names in which he’ll feel he’s absolutely betrayed everything he ever stood for. So he hires Crystal to get him off and to figure out how to get around this conundrum. And the way that she does it is she starts to investigate the FBI and she has a friend who’s actually an FBI agent. And what she discovers is very interesting about Hoover that finally gets him off.

And it’s that Hoover’s main obsession in the entire country is about communists. This is at a point when the mob is really starting to grow and also at the point where there’s some different levels of the mob. They start out in drugs and it’s Meyer Lansky who’s bringing in drugs from Mexico and they need to launder the money. And that’s where they come up with the idea of Las Vegas. It’s first and foremost a money laundering outfit for the mob from drug money. But at this time, and then the money starts to circulate. First, it starts to circulate out from the casinos into the nearby industries, construction and other industries. Then it starts to circulate into Main Street, then it starts to circulate into Wall Street. In fact, the mob has a bank in Switzerland and they’re very proud because a lot of the skim goes into this bank and the money that they’ve laundered now. And they were very proud that that was a bank that actually was able to loan back money in the US to other bankers. That’s how profitable they were, but how that circled. Anyway, the thing to go back to Hoover.

A critic here suggested that McCarthyism might better be called Hooverism because McCarthyism, if it’s just McCarthy, this is the problem with McCarthyism. If you think it’s just McCarthy, then it’s a very set period. It goes from ’51 to ’54 when McCarthy’s ousted, but it didn’t. It was much larger. It went from ’47 to at least ’62 or ’63 before a lot of people got work. Anyway, Hoover’s main obsession in the entire country is about 40,000 communists. In the books, they ask what menace could they pose. And somebody says, the producer says half of them could be FBI informants. So his pursuit of communists at a time when organized crime was gathering momentum could, as someone said at the time, be viewed as dereliction of duty. The New York Bureau Office, where Hoover assigned 400 agents to thwart communism, but only 10 to fight organized crime. And this one report concludes that the FBI was in fact a mediocre political police force whose mission, rather than halting crime, was repression of dissent. And that figures in the thing because Crystal finds, in terms of getting him off, she finds that report about how she gets it. She actually brings it to Bobby Kennedy. And Bobby Kennedy has shown up in Vegas at this time, in ’52. Jack has just won the seat, his first time big election, and Bobby’s there. Jack is wooing every woman he can find in Vegas prior to assuming his position. But Bobby tells her that he’s actually interested in doing something about the mob eventually. Although at that point, he moves to the McCarthy, he becomes a Democratic advisor on McCarthy hearings, but that’s a stepping stone. And he also doesn’t get him where he wants. So he does decide to investigate the mob. And in US history, Bobby probably did the best investigation of the mob.

Wasn’t it true that apocryphally Sam Giancana after JFK—we should say, we got the wrong one. And not suggesting that that’s how JFK died, absolutely no idea. But certainly, he was, you could even describe him as an existential threat to the mob at some point in his career as Bobby’s attorney, as Jack’s attorney general.

And yes, I mean, the supposed Kefauver hearings really didn’t accomplish very much. They were really an American sort of thing. It was the first time these hearings were on TV. They were on TV in the day, everybody watched them. But the mob usually outwitted them. In fact, Johnny Roselli, although it didn’t work in the end, they did get him. But Johnny Roselli gave a performance, in the book they say is kind of like Bertolt Brecht with the HUAC committee. That is, he presented himself as a Teflon Don. Nothing sticks to him. He has nothing to do with the mob. He doesn’t know what you’re talking about. But they eventually did get him. But a lot of times the mob laughed at the Kefauver hearings, but they did not laugh at Kennedy’s hearings, actually. They thought they were serious.

And it was, I’m guessing probably the 1980s was the decade really when the FBI actually took on the mob and for the most part won by the breaking of the five families and that kind of thing.

In some sense, they win. In another sense, the money moves into more protected areas. The mob financializes like everyone else in the American economy. So they win in that the worst elements are swept under the rug. But at the same time, the mob is moving into really more mainstream businesses. And now they’re thoroughly ensconced in those businesses.

The one thing I’ve been thinking of as we’ve talked about this is, I’m not sure whether you’ve seen it, it goes back about 30 years now, but the Paul Thomas Anderson film Boogie Nights. That’s a great film. One of my all time favorites. But it captures, there’s just an interesting moment in the film when you sort of look beyond the drama and look at the change. It captures that moment when these sort of seedy porn theaters start to be wiped out by VHS. And the interesting character in it all is actually the Burt Reynolds character, the mogul of this porn studio, who actually it turns out is actually a real bit player in the whole industry. And I just wonder, obviously, it’s set in a later period, the mid to late 70s. But I just wonder whether it has any relevance to where you begin in the 1950s.

I think in the idea that the character you talked about, the Burt Reynolds character, is kind of about family. That’s another sort of thesis of the film, that the people who work on film are families and people who work in porn are families also. That figures in the book. The woman Perfect, she has a kind of low down apartment that they dump her in in North Hollywood with Chansey and Lulu, the other two actresses, and she’s trying to get out. But she does consider them to be a family, not the owners of the thing. They’re purely exploiters. So there is that. I know PTA grew up in the valley. So he knows about porn. And his autobiographical film Licorice Pizza also mentions that as well.

I think the final thought here is about this interesting process—or troubling process, I’m not sure how you want to frame it—of how things like gambling and pornography in sort of moments in social and cultural history are kind of outliers. They are things on the periphery of everyday life. We sort of gamble a bit, but particularly pornography, we don’t really talk about. And by the sort of the 90s, by the 2000s, they have become actually quite mainstream. The pornification of popular culture and sexualization of popular culture. They move into the center of life.

Yeah, absolutely. And it has a transformative effect on society and on how we as individuals function within it.

And is that, by and large, do you think a kind of irreversible process?

Well, I don’t know. It’s certainly moving forward at a fairly rapid pace, but it also moves forward at a fairly rapid pace because the society is deteriorating at a fairly rapid pace, and this is what people are left with. I do think that pornography is—we’re well past the point in the 60s when pornography was about sexuality, it was about encouraging sexuality. Remember, there were therapists prescribing pornography to get people loosened up to overcome their sexual inhibitions. This is an industry. It’s a multi-billion dollar global industry. It’s approaching one trillion dollars. We’re beyond that. This is about inducing people into sort of forgetting their life and instead making this their life.

And to push beyond, I mean, I work in my day job as a therapist. I work with both people addicted to pornography and people addicted to gambling. And there’s a whole bunch of stuff to be said about that maybe in a different time. But it’s the ability to induce people to break through the fairly natural impulse controls that most of us have into the kind of cycles of compulsive behavior that is—if you think people do that with sugar, it’s capitalism’s special sauce.

And we must finish that in a moment. Let me just say something about intimacy. Intimacy and pornography. Pornography promises the most immediate direct form of intimacy—sexual intimacy immediately. But of course, that’s part of the delusion because instead it fetishizes both the body and the act. And pornography is broken into what kind of body do you want to look at and what kind of acts do you want to see. So this lure of ultimate intimacy is actually an attack on real intimacy, which is much more difficult. It requires talking, figuring out who people are. And of course, it includes sexual intimacy as well, but not in the way that it’s offered necessarily by pornography, in the way that it’s offered for profit right now.

And gambling, as you said, gambling also, in a way, short circuits polls, predictions, trying to figure out what people actually think in this society, because instead, everything they think can now be monetized.

My thesis on gambling really is that if you go right back to the dawn of the species, our entire world was based on trying to work out what’s going to happen next. Everything that we did, particularly hunting, is highly exciting, highly dangerous. And if you win, you win big, you bring back an animal for the tribe to eat. And if you lose, if you don’t catch anything or you break your ankle, you’re either burnt off calories and you’re hungrier than you started, or you break your ankle, you’re probably going to die. And so thinking about that, trying to predict what’s going to happen next is something we don’t need to do that much of in a society that has supermarkets. However, one of the reasons why we love sports is we’re watching hunting happening. You’re watching a bunch of guys chasing a thing around in the field. It’s what stimulates us and gets us excited. But that kind of “what the hell’s going to happen next” doesn’t get catered to very often unless you’re going to watch a roller coaster or a horror movie. And if you can, particularly on a smartphone now, bombard somebody with that impulse every 20 seconds, you’re going to be rich.

You’re going to be rich. And also for the person who’s being bombarded, it kills reflection. There is no time to reflect. It’s only about—when I was in Vegas, I met a couple of people who are really into sports betting. One of my Uber drivers, all he wanted to know was could I give him a tip that he could bet on in terms of like the Dodgers. So I told him about a pitcher who does better in the second half and he was exuberant because now we can bet that. But the whole conversation really reduces down to how can I monetize it? Conversation between people becomes about what can you give me that will help me make money off of this conversation rather than having a conversation between people that’s based on mutual respect and trying to get people at the level of personal relationships. I think both of these really are harmful.

And it is, the Marxist is about to talk about alienation and all these kinds of things. And I think that the idea that human discourse becomes that transactional—I only want to talk to you if you can tell me which Dodgers pitcher is going to catch a ball or what have you.

We must finish. It’s been an amazing conversation, Dennis. I really, really enjoyed today. And before we finish, let’s talk about the book. When’s it available?

It’s out now. It’s around everywhere. We’ll be in bookstores, I think pretty soon. But it’s definitely up on all the places where you can buy online, Amazon, Apple, all those places. And this is the sixth novel, the sixth Harry Palmer novel called Pornocopia. And this is the second trilogy called The Dark Ages, since ’50 to ’52, which is really the height of the McCarthy censorship. And the next one is called Criminal Consumption. And it’s about the moment when US consumer goods are flooding the market and dictating what everyone’s home looks like.

Brilliant. And I hope that we can hope you’ll give us the heads up when that’s ready and we can talk about that.

Right. Yep.

Brilliant. Take good care. And as we’ve always mentioned, if you can buy the book from an independent retailer or direct from the publisher, please do, because the little guys, as ever, need your help.

Thanks.

Cheers. Take good care, Dennis. All the best. Bye bye.