Leigh Dundas | Human Trafficking, Brothel Busting, & Sadness In Southeast Asia

00:08 The planet's puppet masters almost surely have it There clearly may be something there beyond the realm of man And until you've thoroughly tested every last closed chested piece Unless you really We'd be without THC, we know they're lying to us Just don't order THC, the higher side chats show Grad Carl wouldn't come for me Brace yourselves, Hireside Chatters. From the Sunshine State I'm Greg Carlwood and it is very clear that we are not without some major problems a backwards education system corrupt law enforcement preservative-filled foods corporate controlled everything and regulatory agencies that have been thoroughly gutted across the board Not to mention a world economic forum agenda that seeks to surveil and control every aspect of our lives in what looks like it will be the defining fight of the next decade

01:11 And while words like collapse and apocalypse are bandied about and debated, for many outside of the comforts of the typical Western life it's abundantly clear that it couldn't get much worse. As it's estimated that human trafficking is a $150 billion-a year industry with 40 million people on the planet currently enslaved, many of them experiencing horrors on any given day of the week in situations we can barely imagine and many of them children experiencing routine sexual exploitation forced manual labor violence and extreme poverty from cradle to grave with no end in sight.

01:47 Well, today's guest Lee Dundas knows these things all too well and has released a new book entitled Just Stand Up My Fight for Freedom From the Brothels of Asia to the Streets of America where she talks about her dedication to fighting injustice wherever she is founded on this island earth. For the unfamiliar, Lee is a human rights attorney and abolitionist dedicated to preserving basic freedoms while also combating global injustices like child slavery and the peddling of medical tyranny disguised as progress. Lee's career spanned three decades, commencing with her representation of Fortune 500 companies in high-dollar courtroom battles in the early 90s. Which focus changed to humanitarian work a decade ago when she joined an anti-slavery NGO as their general counsel. While there Lee liaisoned with foreign governments to allow undercover surveillance of child brothels by former U.S law enforcement assets

02:43 and also worked closely with NGOs on a plan to have on-ground investigators amass evidence of money laundering by human traffickers, and then securely relay that data to world's banks so they could flag accounts suspected of criminal activity. In recognition of her extensive knowledge on slavery matters, Lee was appointed 10 years ago to the Congressional Advisory Committee on Human Trafficking where she further assisted in identification of these problems and helped formulate U.S response to them Lee has also dedicated significant time to a modern-day Saddam and Gomorrah region comprised of 140 child brothels along the Thai Malaysian border, traveling in excess of 100 miles an hour to avoid roadside bombers in order to provide assistance to the children trapped there. And embed a film crew to document the horrors of the child sex trade until Thailand's Kudetat forced a retreat

03:38 In 2020, Lee took the lessons she learned fighting Asian criminal syndicates that were hell bent on destroying children to the streets of America to fight the medical tyranny of the COVID era. She's certainly done a lot and it's a pleasure to have her here at The Brave Brothel Buster Slavery System Exposer and Fearless Freedom Fighter Extraordinaire Lee Dundas welcome to The Higher Side. Thank you so much for having me this morning It's really a pleasure to be here And that was an awesome intro Thanks, I mean I try. This is going to be a tough one on people that already know but as i said in the intro im aware we have some major problems in our own lives but sometimes its also important to get some perspective on what life really like for other people sharing the same planet right now and after reading your book In some areas it's about as bad as a person could imagine

04:33 Yeah, that is definitely true. You don't realize how good you have at living in a first world country or I should say what used to be a first world country here until you go to third world countries and see how almost the rest of the globe is living it really puts things into perspective Absolutely. So I got from the book that you made this huge decision to get into fighting human trafficking in the early 2000s when you read an article about some sex-trafficking survivors and their stories, which led you to finding two organizations you worked with Rob Morris's Love 146 and The A21 Campaign And this nonprofit Love 146 actually has a really sad story as

05:16 how it got its name. Can you tell people a little bit about that? Yeah, and I didn't do a lot of work with Love 146. I liaised with one of their folks on the ground there in Phnom Penh Cambodia but I did work with two anti-job paying organizations it was 821 Campaign and then Liberty Asia later named Liberty Global for awhile but in terms of the Love 146 story its absolutely heartbreaking Their founder young guy probably about your age at time if I had to guess traveling in Southeast Asia and went out one night with some folks who were working to fight the shop brothel industry. And they ended up in one of what is very patho-mnemonic, as they say for brothels there. I mean just a very good example of a child brothel in Southeast Asia and they walked in and they had a bunch of girls young girl's that were in a fishbowl

06:12 And the fish bowl was basically, you've got plexiglass or a glass pane between the pedophile, the sex buyers, the Johns and all of these girls. They were really young girls, elementary school age and they had numbers. They were wearing little party dresses that had numbers pinned to their dresses. All of the girls one for one were looking down at the ground. They weren't making eye contact with any of them And the founder of the organization, this was his first entree into the world of sex trafficking and bravo work noticed that only one of the girls was really willing to make eye contact. And it was number 146 and she was sort of courageously slash defiantly just absolutely gazing into their eyes. He didn't know if it was because it was her first night and she wasn't broken and apathetic yet or

07:07 It was her 100th night, but for whatever reason she was just wired differently. But she was still actively communicating with our eyes and they sort of bonded as they looked at each other through the glass and his heart was broken. And he said you know are we going back? Like what are we doing here yada yada? The organization that he was doing a ride along with time because he didn't have his own organization. He didn't have Love 146 at this point was like, yeah we're going to go back this is what we do. And they did as I understand it go back a few nights later to bust the brothel but by the time they got back number 146 wasn't there

07:49 So that was just really a pivotal sort of watershed moment in this guy's life. And he thought, I can't just now that I know I can't let it go right? I can't not do something about this problem which honestly is a refrain that you hear over and over again from people who jump into this work they're like wow I didn't know about it wow I didn't know how bad it was but now that I know I can't unring that bell I cannot help now that I know and so if he founded the organization that he still to this day I believe runs, and he named it Love 146 in honor of the memory of the girl that he was not able to save. And as a salient reminder every day when they spoke the words of what they were there to do and why they were doing this work, they go in to help the one,

08:37 that can't get out without the help of somebody like us going to Southeast Asia. And that was also the mission of VA 21 campaign when I worked for them for the better part of a decade between 2013 and recent time, Christine Kane is her and her husband Nick King they're pastors. They had started this organization because their heart was broken when they learned about trafficking when they were traveling in Greece. They saw pictures of girls lining the airport hallways and finally she looks at some local and is like, how does it think you can have thousands of teenage girls missing? How many girls can you possibly lose in a country like what the hell. And the answer that came back was well they're not just missing they've been kidnapped or sold into the sex trafficking trade. Much like Rob much like

09:27 Duncan Jepson, who was the founder of another organization I worked with in Hong Kong called Liberty Asia. One for one when you talk to the founders of these groups and you say why do you do this? They say because I can't not help once I know. That makes a lot of sense. And, uh, that story was really impactful on me and the book and it's kind of typical as to what people experience and what these setups are really like. But you worked on the ground all across Southeast Asia talked with us about some of the conditions of the people living in these places you toured in brothels but also just orphanages and in general

10:06 Yeah, it's a really great question and I'll try to paint a picture with my words if it's possible. One of the most defining moments of the trips that just sort of give context...my husband had a business at that point we were both working in it because we were young parents like you are right now And it was easier for me to help my husband and make my own hours than that be practicing law 3,000 hours a year and never see my child. So we'd have this business in 2013 sold out. My daughter was eight years old at that point and we yanked her out of third grade and we started traveling. We began in Australia and New Zealand but we ended up in Southeast Asia and one day

10:45 We were in Cambodia and we had signed up for a tour of a lake. There's a lake in the middle of Cambodia called Thonle Sap Lake, and it's the largest freshwater lake in the region although defined fresh water because during their dry season its 10 to 12 feet deep and brown working muddy water. It's like a giant mud pond And our guide put us in the canoe and we paddled out to these houseboats. But I say houseboat, and your listeners are probably thinking Lake Mojave, Lake Powell Houseboat. This was more like Mark Twain lashed together pieces of rotting wood with a little ramshackle kind of wood hut perched on top of it

11:25 And when the typhoons come or any natural disaster comes, it wipes out families in the region. They get flooding and whatnot but sometimes a kid or two will escape so then they're orphans and there's this orphanage that sits on this floating wooden platform where all these kids who no longer have parents due to some natural disaster live all day long 24-7 in the middle of Tommy South Lake with their teachers also on board. And we get out in this canoe with our guide to visit the orphanage and we step out, and we walk into very impoverished surroundings there's PVC plastic barrels in the corner and we go what's that? And they're like oh that's the water we drink. I'm like where does it come from? They're like out of the lake. Let me tell you if you saw the color of the lake you'd be like oh my gosh right

12:16 And I'm like, okay wow. Do you boil it or like what? They're like well yeah we try to let it sit out and then you know try to boil it and just to give you some idea because your from America the kids drink the water out of lake they go to bathroom in the lake they wash their clothes in the lake and eat fish on a plate. Oh wow alright got it! Then you know we walk into this classroom and there's kids that are my daughter age and looks like there is calculus on white board Very interesting. So they're doing way higher math than any American class I've seen in elementary school and my daughter eventually makes a little friend despite the fact that she doesn't speak a word of Cambodian and the Cambodian girl doesn't speak any English, they're palling around

13:00 apparently a prior tourist the week before had given the little girl a packet of hair dye. So she had her little pink streak in her hair and she wanted to see it, so I took a picture with my cell phone and I turned it around and I don't think that little girl have ever seen any picture of herself or mirror anything like this was our first time seeing an image of here and there's she and my daughter on and there is a picture I think of them in the book. I included about 20 color photos in my books actually start to see not just here but see what the world is like outside their bubble and their zone. And you know they're fast friends, and they're palling around at the end I look at tour guide and I said look she was really entranced with her picture why don't i shoot your copy? You know do they have cell phones? He said no! And so I can send a copy of your cell phone he goes I dont have a cell phone right

13:51 And I'm like, oh well. I guess I could go back to the hotel and maybe print out a color copy and mail it to you. He goes we don't have just the basic things that even when you're not trying really hard to not be biased and prejudiced and have your first world perceptions in place, the rug is just ripped out from underneath you so we're getting ready to get back in the canoe that we paddled out to this floating barge on And I'm helping my daughter from the bigger platform, stepping down into a little canoe and my husband pulls up the clothing on my elbow and he's like turn around. She's going to say it again."

14:28 And I'm like, what? And I was kind of pissed off at my husband because I don't want to get the fall into the breach between you know the orphanage and the floating kid. She's like Kate, I'm trying to get her safely from one to another. So I turned very brusquely back to him and I'm like, what? Like just leaving it alone! I'm trying to get our daughter in basically. He goes stop! You need to look at what I am saying. she's going to say it again. And he points in the direction of a tinier canoe that's barely afloat and holding water, that has sidled up alongside our canoe which I had not seen. And in this threadbare canoe is a woman who looks twice my age but upon further inspection is probably exactly my age but she'd been living in the hot Cambodian sun with no shelter for her entire life so she looks like she's 60 and not 38 or whatever

15:17 And in front of her is a toddler, like maybe a year and a half-year old baby girl who's got really no clothing on at all. And the baby is standing at the end of the canoe sucking on a bottle of dirty lake water. And this woman looks at me — I mean looks at me like looks into my freaking soul — and then she yanks her gaze away from me, looks up my daughter who was dressed for the record head to toe in pink and white which were her favorite colors and they're great of course And we're not rich, I mean we're comfortable middle class at the time and maybe not so comfortable. You know like depending on whether our business was doing good or not good that month but we're certainly not storks right? And she looks back in me after looking at my daughter with a very appraising stare and she points up her baby at the end of the boat or the end of her canoe and she goes $1,000 you take? My daughter gasps as she leans over to me and she goes mama did she just offer to sell her baby to you

16:19 And the woman repeats it. She looks at my daughter in back of hers and she goes, $1,000? You think? And I just got to say, thank God I didn't have a thousand dollars that day or I would've bought a child and categorically hands down that is not the answer to the poverty or slavery problem in third world countries especially when you get back to LAX with an extra kid they don't have a passport for but We were just heartbroken. We cried, my whole family, my husband me and my daughter took turns crying on and off the entire rest of the day. And you realize very easily at that point that there but for the grace of God go you and your child I was born in California That was a luck-of-the-draw thing. I could have just as easily been born in the middle of Cambodia and had this woman's life. Before we demonize

17:09 parents that we really don't understand. And I say that now having worked for 10 years in third ward, one entries before we go demonizing these parents who are asking to sell their baby to a tourist or when they fail the sell their baby to me then they turn around and sell their baby to a brothel you have to realize the reason they're freaking doing that The reason they're selling their child is because if they don't, that kid will starve. And so will all of their other eight children starved to death this year because guess what? They don't have birth control So, you know it's very very easy to walk into these countries and think oh how dare these sex traffickers sell these children. How dare these mama sons sit and babysit these girls waiting for pedophiles to come in and rape the girls? And how dare these parents sell their children to the brothels but you don't know what it's like until you've lived there life and even I working side by side in this circumstances now

18:03 Still don't truly understand what that is like. That mama's son, that mama's son that I used to think was part of the problem? I got an E for your viewers She's a girl who didn't die She's a girl whose mother was so poor that she couldn't sell that eight-year old or that two year old to a brothel. So, she sold that baby to a brothel and instead of dying by the pimp or the trafficker or dying by a violent john or pedophile who strangled her to death during the sex act or dying from AIDS or syphilis that went into her brain, she just kept living She kept living and now she's 24, I know pedophile wants her. And she can't go home because once you've been sold to a brothel even though your family is the one who sold you are considered to be damaged goods and you can't go back

18:49 Hut in the small town if you can even call it that in Laos or Cambodia where you hail from and so there she is With no skills, No way out. In a brothel as she becomes the babysitter for the girls that the pedophiles do want and so You go to these places and you come home to your middle class suburban lifestyle after six months, we were there almost a half year in these regions. And you walk in your back door and I keep it fairly clean house. My surfaces are clean, I'm not chock-a-block full of tchotchkes in every corner." And my husband and I walked into our living room looked around our house in Orange County

19:29 Are you feeling it?" And he's like, yeah. I'm like we need to take truckloads of this stuff out of our house because we don't need anything and the actual reality is the only thing you need is water a little bit of food probably about 1 30th of the food you and I eat in America. If you're living in a tropical environment like what I just described you don't even need clothing and shelter That's it. And you come home and you intrinsically understand, my daughter understood she would say things like 10 months later like hey mom I backpack is full of holes and I need a new backpack. I'd look at her and go do you mean it or do you want it? She smiled and she goes no that's a lot I don't need it. She walked off. No amount of lecturing your kids about how privileged they are to have three square meals

20:14 does the lesson, the way standing in a canoe watching her mother sell her baby or trying to sell our baby your parents does. My child has a very level head on her and it's because she's been to The Killing Fields at Cambly at age eight. She knows where communism goes. She knows you'll be a skull washing up 50 years later in a place called The Killing Fields if you let a communist overthrow Jacob and your government and no she is not now aging teen one of the 51% of youth who are serving college who think it would be cool to live in a communist socialist country My child, my child knows exactly where that leads. And I would urge you viewers and this was a very long answer so I'm going to shut up now...I would urge your viewers to knock off the Disneyland trip this Thanksgiving or December vacay

20:57 or your Grand Canyon trip next summer and buy a one-way plane ticket to Cambodia, and take your children where I accidentally took my child and worried that was going to need to buy her 10 years of therapy. And in fact, I needed to buy her no therapy what it did was make her a very grateful well adjusted child who gets it." We need to actually show ourselves and our family and even our children how the rest of the world lives because you can't fix a problem you don't know about and you can't be grateful for life if you've never stepped outside of for a sec. Well said and of course child brothels and sex trafficking is probably the darkest application of human trafficking in slavery

21:41 But I've heard you talk in other interviews about the wider scope of forced labor camps, of young boys being worked to death on fishing and shrimping boats, lithium mining. What more can you say about just the wider scope of human trafficking, human enslavement and what regions and industries are most to blame? Human trafficking is a huge problem. To just set the stage for the answer, it's 150 billion with a B, billion dollar year industry 40 million with an M people are currently enslaved to give your viewers some idea of the scope of that I live in California we've got almost 40 million people in my state so it's like waving a magic wand or evil wand if you will overnight and having every single person in California chained to a bed being raped 10 times a night by pedophiles for profit

22:31 We're stuck in a mine in Africa mining the minerals that go into your cell phone and your Tesla battery, right? And it is a huge, huge problem. And we need to stay away from comparing our pain to other people's pain or conditions to other conditions. I mean, I personally think That if you had to ask me which human trafficking context I would least like to be in, it would be a three-year old being raped by grown men night after night 10 times a night in nonpen camp. Like to me and you just don't get much worse than that but It's no walk in the park to be a 17 year old man who is not recognized because you're one of the hill tribe

23:14 You're not a member of the Thailand community. You're not a member of the Laotian community, you're not considered a citizen in that country or your part of the caste system in India right? And your persona non grata, you may as well be chattel and you ended up on a shrimping boat in the ocean off of Thailand and you literally worked to death by that I mean you were working 19 hours a day sleeping a few hours at night doing back-breaking brutal work until you die They just work them until they die. And my daughter actually asked me, we were on a flight from Cambodia to Thailand

23:51 And I just found out about human trafficking. I was just starting to volunteer my time for some of these organizations and apparently she had heard me talking about it, and we're on Laotian air, okay? Which is full of people who are not white and the chairs are like this big so you're like in Amazon as a white person who's a 5'8 female sitting in these teeny tiny chairs that are built for 90 pound five foot nothing Laotian woman And you're clearly the odd man out, right? And my daughter again dressed head to toe in pink this day pipes up into a quiet time on the plane which just never happens on an airplane. It's always got background noise and the sound of the motor but it sounds like a church or library all of a sudden. Of course this is always when your kids nailing you with something right? She goes mama! In this crystal clear voice that just resonates throughout the entirety. Mama

24:44 What is sex, slavery and sex trafficking or something like that? And I look over at my husband with these big eyes like the help me face. Right. And he just looks at me and you know, he's been waiting for decades for his moment in the sun. This is a type B physician who has been married to a Type A hard ass litigator for years now, right? And he looks at me and he's like babe it's all you. You got this! No, no, you got us into this mess. You're going to answer our darling's question right?" I don't know what to say. I mean i barely had the birds of a bee's conversation. I don't want to give her nightmares for 20 years by giving her too much data but I don't want to punch totally because she asked the legit question so my mind is searching and searching and finally I'm like

25:30 I'm going to give her the labor trafficking definition, the human trafficking definition and just sort of sidestep the sex part. So I say well honey in countries like the ones we're visiting And a lot of places in India and places like that, Africa, India they take little kids and they make them work in mines. And factories and cocoa fields for chocolate and T-shirt factories to make your Nike shoes or T-shirts or whatever. And they work him and work him and work him and work him and work him in the hot sun are these brutal sweatshop factories until they die. Before that, they never get to go to school and they never get a day off, not even for Christmas. She's asking questions not even for Christmas? No! They don't get to go to school? No! Do they ever see their parents? No! Are they allowed breaks? No! Do they get fed maybe half cup of rice today and little bit water that's it there basically start

26:21 So I paint the picture for her and I feel like, phew! I kind of dodged a bullet with the sex part of the question. And you can see her kind of ruminating on my answer and mulling it over in our mind's eye. And I'm just about to breathe a pent-up exhalation like, whew! Dodge the bullet as she looks back at me and she goes, mama? so how does this sex part factor into that? And now my husband has just doubled over, he's halfway laying down in the aisle laughing quietly. And every Cambodian and Laotian and Thai person on the plane is now also tuned into our English conversation because they may not speak a lot of English but they know the word sex right? And I'm sitting there again trying to figure out how the heck am gonna describe these conditions. And before I can come up with a good answer that won't give her nightmares she looks at me and she says is it like a forced date

27:16 And I said, yes it is. You know what babe? You just answered your own question just enough data to let her know it's not a cool thing and something you'd want but not enough to need to put her in therapy and that is the definition I would suggest you run with when you're talking to your children who are young about this because they get the boy subcuties or girl subcuties when they're in grade school and wouldn't wanna have to be forced to be on a date with them but it doesn't like I said require gears of their Right, right. Delicate stuff for sure and so you mentioned in the bio and obviously in the book liaisoning with foreign governments to allow undercover surveillance of child brothels by former US law enforcement assets. You also talk in the book about how the local cops are basically like a mob they charge the brothels a fee to not get busted and then also partake in their services

28:11 And the government largely has to be pretty complicit. They definitely turn a blind eye, they don't seem to care in the region of the red light districts at the Thailand Malaysia border saying there's 140 child brothels there I mean clearly they don't do much about it and you mentioned some of the workers that are used in all sorts of industries fishing shrimping Tesla batteries like how How do you stop this? I mean, people hear this and it sounds as awful as could be. But what can you practically do to try to unravel this mess? You also hear people researchers talking about the CIA being involved, the FBI being involved

28:55 Some of these NGOs, they say they're working to stop human trafficking and then some people get busted moving kids around and it looks a little unsavory. There was a comment just on one of your previous interviews where someone said they were working... They volunteered to try to help this issue a small aid project in Kathmandu, Nepal and then found out once they were there that UNICEF seems to be a big player in child trafficking helping work with the local police and military to keep the problem going. So you find people who are like yeah I'm all-in I'm willing to dedicate myself to helping with this problem and then they get on the ground

29:38 the whole thing is organized to pretend like they're helping and people take bribes. It's just a big mess, so I guess what could you say about what you might have saw when it comes to institutional involvement in this stuff and any possible real world solution to unravel even a small piece of the puzzle? Excellent questions all! I have three answers...I took notes because i didn't want to forget one of my pieces of the answer but to set the stage again A lot of these foreign third world countries, the corruptions we think it's bad here in America and it's clearly taken a huge turn over the last three years or even prior. But we don't have a perfect system but it's a damn sight better than in these third world countries. So one of the first days I was doing work in this brothel town that has 140 child brothels on the Thailand Malaysia border We were actually having to turn my camera

30:31 I don't know if you can see the picture there of me and that girl whose face is sort of buzzed out. So it was the night I met her, and I'm sitting on a bench outside The Brothel initially with her and the pastor I was doing the work with, and it's twilight, getting to be dark, and two cops get out of an SUV and they're in uniform, and they walk by two white people being the cop or being the pastor rather which is unusual in that town. It's very local flavor usually. And they say, oh sawadee ka, sawadee krup which was the Thai greeting and we greet them back in Thai. Oh good night to be out? Yes good night to be out. And they go past our little bench and they make a right turn into the brothel and there are in there for about 30 minutes

31:18 And they come out half hour later and they have a little back by their thigh, which I had not really noticed on the way in but i notice now because it's not a flat sac. It's slightly thicker and they go five feet down the dirt alley, and they make another right into the next alley. These dirt alleys are just lined with brothels, and they have industrial roll-up gates like the kind you see in auto body areas of industrial districts. And so they rolled up at night, and then you see big glass pane windows and tiny little brothels and bars or whatever. So there's this making their way down the alley, and we go in five minutes out, in five minutes out, and their bag is getting bigger and bigger between each stop, and every hour or so

31:57 They spent 30 minutes at a brothel instead of five. And so the pastor looks at me, and he goes do you want to explain? I said yeah idea or any goes think 1940s mafia protection things there on the tape And I go, oh so that's money in their little sack? And he goes yeah they're collecting money from the brothels in exchange for turning a blind eye and not busting them. Just like 1940s New York City and I said oh I get it. When they're spending 30 minutes every hour at the brothel instead of five that's because they let their refractory period pass and they're going back in for more sexual favors. They're raping the girls who are supposed to be rescuing and he goes exactly. And I said oh I get you now okay

32:37 So the Thailand police routinely on a scale of one to five with five being the most corrupt are ranked A4 or 5. And the DAs and prosecutors and cops, they're working in many cases lot of times the cops clock out at their day job nine to five and they go down the street and they clock into a brothel all the brothels along the big ones in Bangkok and the bigger areas have muscle you know? They have bouncers of course. And who are those bouncer's well there often police So to walk in to a third world country like I did, all Pollyanna at the beginning. You know we're not in Kansas anymore and like

33:14 Yeah, these first world tools cops lawyers lawsuits criminal justice system that we have at our disposal in America. I ain't gonna fly here. That cop that DA never going to arrest the brothel owner because he's moonlighting for the brothel owner and making extra money so he's not gonna arrest the guy signing his secondary paycheck so that he can bank that money and send his kid to school in New Zealand and not have to sell his own childhood brothels to avoid you know watching them starve like I mean, it's just the hot mess. So the answer to your question is you need to solve poverty problem because that is the drive. It's not that 80% of people in these civil countries are bad. I believe firmly that 80% of people regardless of region or world over are actually good hearted and when they do bad things they're trying to solve a problem and they're doing the best they can to solve it

34:02 And it may look like an ugly answer to you and me because we're not facing the situation of do I sell my child's brothel so I save all the other ones or do I not, so that we all die this year? We don't really see what their smorgasbord of options is that led them to the option they exercised, but that is the drive of poverty. And so then you need to ask the question how the hell did they get so poor that those are their two options? To work for the brothel after they get done with their day job as a policeman or as a parent just so they're good do a brothel instead of starve him out watching him starve and he answered that question as communism All the countries I work in over there are communist or may as well be. Cambodia had a communist overthrow in the 1970s when I was a child, Pol Pot came to town and recruited the Khmer Rouge subset of that population young men put them in black pajama pants and they went around executing people when they didn't starve to death it was a full on communist overthrow genocide one quarter of the Cambodian population was exterminated we're talking Holocaust

35:01 magnitudes of order here, right? So that is a huge issue. Lao... 90% of the girls we pull out of the Thailand brothels come from Laos if you want to pronounce it as but the locals say it Lao and that's how I say it and again currently communist country Vietnam communist right all these countries are communists or may as well be communists And so when Khrushchev said in the 1950s, I will take America without firing a single shot. I will destroy her from within and 1963 we had a congressman read into the open congressional record in our country the 45 communist goals that they had set out which included officially recognizing red China as a real country for many trade between countries regardless of communist affiliation taking over capturing was the word capturing one or both political parties in the US

35:48 capturing the schools to use them as a quote unquote transmission belt for the purveying of communist and socialist propaganda, taking over the teachers union infiltrating the press infiltrating the student press. Getting rid of the nuclear family by way normalizing divorce making it easier to access divorce, normalizing sexual perversion you think drag queen story hour was just something that happened three years ago? No they've been planning this SHIT for 70 years and this is just the tip of the iceberg that finally broke through the surface right They have well achieved more than half their goal. So if you don't want to be selling your kids to a brothel instead of watching them starve, if you don't want your child's eight-year old skull

36:28 to wash the top of a shallow grave. 50 damn years from now, because somebody forced your child into a FEMA camp and when they said no to the job they decided to just point a gun at their head and exterminate them face down in shallow graves like these skulls see my daughter here? There's my daughter age eight we ended up with the killing fields of Cambodia that is the monument at the end of the killing fields which I did not for the record know existed when i took my anal there I thought it was just empty field But when those skulls wash up during the rainy season, they put them in a monument and they attach a sign that says never forget what happened here. So that is why we need to be fighting the war we are in here or this second Holocaust if you will with everything we have. To get back to your main question though, you can demonize Hitler all you want and you can demonize sex traffickers all you want and even demonized parents that sell their babies to brothels all you want

37:23 But I am here to tell you the problem with the Holocaust, it was Hitler to some degree. But in the main? The problem was the good Germans who went along with the plan because if they just stood up and said hell no Hitler we're not baking our friends in ovens who happen to be Jewish. Hitler would have just been one more schizophrenic crazy guy with a meth habit that nobody listened to. It was the obedience of the population listening to a bad man and executing his plans on his behalf that allowed the Holocaust to go where it went. And in this same manner necessarily the poverty and bad people who are the real problem behind human trafficking. It is the demand."

37:59 Because I am here to tell you, if no pedophiles were lining up in India and America and Southeast Asia and Australia and Switzerland to buy five year old kids or 15 year olds girls for sex all of those mafias and cartels would be selling illegal weapons and heroin and cocaine again because there would be no market for the girls. You want to fix the sex trafficking problem? Yeah, you've got to fix communism and poverty in these third world countries but but you need to start by teaching your boys when they are little kids, and I say boys because it's largely boys and men that are buyers. You don't buy people. You don't ever sell a person and you never buy a person for any reason whether they're making a lithium battery for you in a mine in Africa as cheap labor or whether they're being bought for sexual purposes at a brothel or a travel lodge in Chicago or a brothel in Asia. And when you kill the demand

38:48 you actually start to handle the problem. And there are very effective ways to kill the man. St. Petersburg, Florida when I started doing this work was having a huge problem with men buying girls for sex and they were doing these things you see on 20-20 and 60 Minutes where they bust them in and it wasn't really having much of an effect. Then they decided, not only are we gonna do these undercover stams, we're gonna take the men that we arrest and put their name and their face in a high color glossy photo on a billboard that says Joe Blow was arrested for these crimes. And is gonna stand trial on this incision here's his name and here's all of this data." And then they went one step further and they sent a dear Mrs John you know, we call the buyers Johns in the industry. Dear Mrs John bring us a Smith letter to the wife. This was brilliant. They said

39:36 Dear Mrs. Smith, you probably don't know this but your husband was arrested on a bad side of town on Friday night for propositioning and soliciting an underage sex worker, a minor for prostitution so he's been busted and he's gonna go to trial and he's gonna have an arrest and the felony when we get done with him hopefully but we're guessing you don't know this about him? And by the way this wasn't his first time, this is his second or third best... So you might want to route yourself to the nearest STD clinic to get checked for syphilis and gonorrhea, and chlamydia and AIDS to make sure you're not about to die. Sincerely your local health officer." And I am gonna tell you that Name & Shame program dropped the incidence of sex trafficking in St Pete's Florida by 24 1⁄2% over a freaking night! If you know anything about statistics, to even move the needle 5%, in response to one good idea is huge. To drop it by one quarter by 25% was phenomenal

40:29 So what I am telling you as a mom and a pop to go do a name and shame program on the bad guy pushing the bad plan in your neighborhood, whether it's masking your kid or a Vax mandate at school or just drag queen story hour. You find the plan, you find the person pushing their plan, you do oppo research opposition research on them. And you want to know anything they've done that makes you go eat whether it's cheating on your spouse, cheating on your taxes, 100 Biden laptops up whatever it is. And then you put it on blasts and good people will do the rest. Really? Are local officials doing what?! Our health officer was selling methadone in a methadone clinic to heroin addicts who are trying to get off heroin and she's giving them Suboxo, right. And it's not illegal for an MD to do that!

41:11 But when I told the 3.2 million people in Orange County that the only clinical qualifications of our new health officer is that she was handing out opiates to guys who were trying to get off their favorite opiate, and then we went and protested in front of her house at Irvine, she resigned! I didn't need to spend a few hundred grand getting a lawsuit over loss. I just named-and-shamed her. Name-and-shame programs work so these are some of the ways that we as average citizens, even if you don't have a law degree or medical degree can fight injustice whether it's the stuff we're seeing with the freedom fight recently in America over last few years for human trafficking in St. Pete Florida these are the things that actually work

41:48 fair points and I'm totally with you that i'd rather live in a capitalist system than a communist one but it isn't like we don't also have problems with financial incentives and slavery and sex trafficking. I think you mentioned in a previous interview that a Mexican woman in Southern California was snatched right off the street, then chained to a building into a sewing machine and forced to sew And these sorts of things happen. And in capitalism, there is also an incentive first off biology that's going to be an incentive for a lot of men who can't get what they want and other ways. And money is an incentive for the slave labor aspects of things in any system it seems so that seems pretty difficult to unravel. And I'm curious what you think about

42:43 legal prostitution because the problem is underage, of course and slavery. These pimps that are chaining girls up and these people who have no morals going in and using that system obviously that's terrible but what do you think about the fact that if a adult woman wants to make money through sex she should maybe be allowed to do that. And wouldn't that kind of shine a light on the industry? Wouldn't it regulate the industry to a degree, it would separate the dark stuff from the stuff that is maybe just transactional and everyone is a willing participant?" It's a tough call because I am very you-do-you, I-do-me and the government can get the hell out of our lives so to large degree on all sorts of stuff

43:36 I don't like the nanny government, the intrusive government model for anything. You should care that they're trying to mandate a vaccine because you don't want the government in the middle of your doctor-patient relationship. This is a slippery slope that no one knows how it's going to end up. you've got diabetes and they're like, you have to take this drug or you can't take this other drug where you can't get this chemo. Or you have to do chemo and you can't do all holistic stuff like... You don't want a government to be in charge of your body period full stop on medical care ideally right? So I'm definitely of a mind on that

44:12 What I now know, having worked in the sex trafficking industry fighting it for 10 years now is you would think and I thought this going in that if you just allow legal prostitution with legal consenting adults to do a financial transaction for sex as they do in Nevada. The ranches in Nevada that will decrease the incidence of illicit dangerous sex where men are raping young girls What we've actually done is the opposite. When you legalize prostitution, it increases not just all types of sexual activity illicit and consenting overage adults underage solicitation and prostitution and sex trafficking. It just raises the incidence of all of that across the board and drug use I mean all sorts of associated crimes that aren't even sex-based so

45:06 It's not like, hey let's turn the faucet on over here and we can't let the men get what they want or what they need. Or whatever your argument is right? And then they won't do it over here. What we find is you say well we're gonna give you this dedicated lane in hopes that we get rid of other lanes on the freeway and instead we give them one lane and they take a mile and now you've got thoroughfare of all sorts of sexual nefarious practices on gradient degrees going on And the converse is also true. So Sweden had at the time a 51% female majority led legislature No coincidence there with what I'm about to say. Sweden some years ago decided they were going to handle the incidents of sex trafficking in their country by making the buying of sex, any sex even 40 year old man, 40 year old woman for a fee though, the buying of all sex equivalent at a US felony you're gonna go do hard time like seven years in Harvard prison

46:05 And fascinatingly enough, it decreased the incidence of sex trafficking of youth. The stuff we're worried about to zero basically over freaking night because all the pimps and traffickers were like yo dude not worth it to go to Sweden and the buyers were like screw that I don't need to go to Stockholm I'll go to Amsterdam right? So now you've got right the problems you see in Eastern Europe and in Amsterdam with sex but Sweden is cleaned house as it were It's a deterrent. They criminalized the activity entirely and it acted as a deterrent, so if your interest is in actually getting to the root of the underage buying by adult men of underage youth

46:50 What the actual real life studies show is you should criminalize both the buying and the selling of all sex that involves commercial transactions. And when you do that, you're good to go. And what I will say is even to the women who loudly proclaim in the street, I'm a grown ass adult and I should have a right to sell my body if I want it's my right. Go talk to them. Go sit down and actually talk to them. And I am willing to bet that high 90% if not 100% of those women as adults were sexually abused or raped, or otherwise similarly exploited before the age of 18. One in three women generally in the general population in America are sexually assaulted before the age of 18

47:38 One in five men, one in three women. Okay? So do the math like Sunday on church or at the PTA meet start counting every third head every fifth that is the incidence of sexual exploitation and harm in our society at large but you see women self-selecting into these professions if you want to call it that because they don't have a choice No seven-year old girl in her right mind is like, I want to be a hooker when I grow up. This happy hooker Julia Roberts Richard Gere you know pretty woman that doesn't exist 100% of these women are being exploited it is rare that you meet a woman who's working for herself very very very rare and even that woman we start interviewing or you go yeah how was your childhood oh well yeah I was sexually abused by my uncle my scout leader my pastor priest whatever

48:27 These women are doing it because it's a learned mechanism. They're doing it because they've learned they can make money doing, they've learned to do it because their self-esteem the only time anybody gave them any sort of positive praise or acknowledgement was when they did something sexual for the guy and so now they're running old recipes in their head whether they're cognizant of it or not And in that case, do I think government should step in and say we're going to project you from yourself by saying we're not just gonna allow these transactions? Yeah. But less so from the production of women and moreso because men should just not be paying for sex period full stop like it leads to bad things. It just leads to bad things. Fair. I don't disagree with you on what you're saying

49:14 Well, what about the women you have been able to help? First I would ask through your actions. How many women do you think you actually are women or children? Do you think you actually got out of this system and what would be some of their stories for people who are just totally this stuff is so foreign to them Yeah, good question. Hard to keep total track and it's a bit of an interesting number because you can count the number of girls who dragged out of brothels or who made a cry for help to your human trafficking hotline in Greece that our organization ran and that's a number but you know you can also say okay well we walked in

49:59 100 talks over the last three years in junior high and high schools here in America. And we educated the girls on how human trafficking happens here to even the rich white girls who are 4.3 GPA and honors AP classes, because to give you a story from that sector or little more relevant probably a lot of our viewers today, you may think that you're sitting pretty because you're sitting on the good side of the tracks in whatever town or city you live in America it can happen to you or your child too. And I'll give you an example, we all think criticizing Hollywood of gorilla pimping oh it's the ticket and it's the Liam Neeson movie like your daughter is somewhere in some bad man in a panel van comes and kidnaps her out on the street or whatever and she's forced into sex slavery. And that does happen, yeah really does happen with defunding of police were seeing snatch-and-grab, in your face robberies in places like South Orange County and malls

50:55 So violent crime of all types is on the rise and certainly kidnapping your kid out of a lull can and does happen. But it's rare when we work with American sex trafficked teenage girls that we've rescued, more often than not it's the Romeo pimping What do I mean by Romeo could be? Some young guy, think Johnny Depp back in the day who's 25 right or Ralph Macchio when he showed up with Karate Kid. He was 25 but playing a 15 year old right not a lot of facial hair you know very fine bone structure. He can pass as a 15 year old that guy goes and enrolls himself in the sophomore grade at your daughter's high school for the junior year at your daughter's high school even though he is actually 10 years older than that

51:39 and he falls in love with your daughter. And he's very, very polished and very normal looking and he courts your daughter for three months! He brings flowers to her, he shakes your hand, oh nice to meet you Mr Jones yes I'm gonna take your daughter to dinner at the little pizza place that just opened in town I'll make sure to have her back by 10pm curfew and oh boy does he show up at 958 with your daughter super happy seems like a nice guy well-spoken good looking What more could you ask for, for your daughter's first boyfriend? And this goes on for months. Right two or three months we're not talking a day talking months and you're comfortable with them and you think she's won the lottery she thinks she's won the lottery your daughter does. And then one day Johnny comes to your girl and he says hey babe remember when my friend loaned me money because my dad was out of a job and couldn't make his mortgage payment that two months ago I told you about

52:32 Well, the money is now due and he needs it back but I don't have the money yet to pay him back because my family's still on hard times here. But he did say if you just got with him and I know you're not going to want to do this but if you just got with him that he'd just forgive the debt." And your daughter was like what? I'm not gonna get with him, I love you baby. Like no like we're a girlfriend and we're like gonna get engaged after high school and go off into the sunset and get married." And he's like, I know but it was just this one time and please baby like I just don't have the money in this is the only way that... So she works on her work son or work son. Finally your daughter in a fit of self-doubt and being persuaded says okay just this one time although there's just this one time and then you'll be back to basic and will begin to go

53:16 And she gets with it. And unbeknownst to her, during the time your daughter is doing a favor for her boyfriend to erase the debt they are recording it on one of these devices. They are recording her in compromising half naked fully naked positions and two days passes and the boyfriend comes back Johnny comes back to your daughter and goes hey we're gonna go to a party tonight and you're gonna get with half the Spike Pikes fraternity. And your daughters like what the hell do you say? What are you talking about? He's like yeah I'm gonna do that not Mr. Nice Guy." And she's like, no I'm not! I have a good Christian girl my dad is a pastor and mom is lawyer what are you talking about? No!

53:55 And he's like, yeah you are because if you don't remember when you got my friend the other day? Yeah we took pics and some rolling video. I'm gonna send that to your church pastor and all the think footloose small town Texas everybody in town in this Christian Town and your mom who is the Girl Scout leader for your daughter's troop all their parents and your parents and all your extended relatives. I'll make sure I'll send it to everybody in high school with you and it's called sextortion. It's extortion using sex, sextortion is actually a thing you could Google FBI has whole pages dedicated to sextortion or the rise of sextortion and so at that point your daughter goes okay and she goes out on a date with Johnny tonight and he brings her back in 958 oh nice to see you Mr Jones yeah I'll be back this weekend we can go to the volleyball game that your daughter is you know on the playoffs for and he waits for you to go

54:45 And then he shows back up at midnight and your daughter climbs out her bedroom window and goes and gets in his car. He takes her to the front of your chicks or do the bad side of January, takes her to a high net worth traveling businessman who answered his Craigslist ad at the Marriott down the street. Your daughter is being sex trafficked from midnight to four. You're none the wiser except three months later she's down 90 pounds. Her grades are on the toilet. She won't talk to anybody. She's cutting all our friends since she's doing drugs. She's not doing drugs. She's being sex trafficked despite the fact that she was bursting each year squad on track to go to Harvard after she graduated with a 4.3 GPA, that's how it happens in America so no do not sit there smugly thinking oh it can't happen to me or somebody I know, it can and it does and those are some of the stories we hear when we rescue girls So how many girls have we saved from that end? Through going through their junior highs and high schools doing awareness campaigns and online training incalculable

55:38 but probably a whole lot. Hundreds if not thousands at this point, the A21 campaign has been around for well over a decade now I'm guessing they're into the thousands of girls that we rescue old school and by that i mean going into the brothel answering your cry for help on our sex trafficking hotline and sending guys out to actually do the rescue put her in a recovery house like the one we run in Greece in E21 get her therapy get her spiritual emotional psychological physical help that she needs and the skill set. So when you're rescuing them in Europe, they're 16 years old and you can do that and you can go vocationally rehab them and you can send them out to be a waitress or a maid or whatever, a teacher work with the pastor in their local town but let me tell you when you pull a kid out of a brothel in Thailand when there's seven well youngest girl in the Laotian sex trafficking recovery center when I first started doing this work in 2013 was 7

56:32 She had already been in the light, already been out of the child's brothel and been rescued and now was seven and in the recovery house. You're not going to vocationally rehab that girl. You need a foster family for her, to raise her until she's 17 and can get some job skills and go out." So very different scene when you go into the harder parts of Africa in Asia than it is in Europe or America where the age of the girls... It's much older. Average-age girls are turned out in America as 12. Average age in Southeast Asia, India, Africa, you could take a decade off that probably be close to the mark Wow. Obviously very dark and in the example you gave

57:10 That would be horrible. I have a daughter and I would think about such things, you try to do everything right in a bad person enters their life. It can't happen. I know people who had good families and got into drugs because the kid down the street was into drugs. Everything else was equal to my life except that didn't have that neighbor so bad people are everywhere. Psychopaths are everywhere. You do have to beware but when it comes to like institutionalized, structured sanctioned child sex brothels. How do you stop such a thing? I understand the poverty aspect it gets me thinking okay well there's no opportunity there that's the communism aspects well so what do you do if i had a t-shirt company should I actually put the factory over there and pay them 20% more than anywhere else in the neighborhood pays they at least have some job and can eat

58:07 It's like, then you get the bad PR from having that kind of slave labor operation over there. Then you're the Nike. Right! And so I don't know...I just don't know but it's like Once you have the awareness of this problem, and people have been aware before our conversation today. But you start really thinking about it deeply and it's like how would you stop such a thing? It's a frustrating aspect of the current situation where we spend so much money in Ukraine or throwing billions of dollars over there or throwing billions at Israel. Can we put the money where maybe it could be helpful

58:45 Then you have other people talking about the back end of this, where the CIA's coups and their international operations keep these areas in chaos and squalor so that these sorts of activities can go on. Why are there people coming up through Central America trying to get across the US border? Well, the CIA is doing some actions down there that cause extreme situations that make people do anything they can for a better life So we're not going to fix the whole world today, unfortunately. But I just wonder how do you stop like a place where this red light district that that girl you mentioned in that photo? I remember her story from the book. I believe her story was that she was forced to go get a nose job because they're getting these kids to get nose jobs and breast implants. They want them to look like children but with big tits so they go and they make him do this kind of shit

59:42 And I think her story was she had just had a nose job. The gauze were still in her nose and she was going to have to go to work, quote unquote. We're paying money to the bar, we're keeping the money flowing. Can't you just stay down here and drink with us and not have to go fuck 10 guys upstairs? And that's how that picture was taken because she was so thrilled to have one night off so her nose job could heal. I mean This is so different than some psychopath taking your daughter from a middle-class Valley High School situation and pimping her out. These are structures that are standing there at all times, 140 brothels with children in them I'm sure most of the customers or Westerners I'm sure a lot of the customers are rich people but man it's just like

1:00:37 How do you solve that problem? What does the local government even say when they're approached about these kind of problems, because you did a little of that. Well we try to work with the non-corrupt cops in these places we go and the Royal Thai Police has a crime suppression division which is the equivalent a good triple letter agency in our country. It's the non-corrupt guys who actually give a darn, actually wanna make a difference and you try to liaise with them because that way when you loop in the government that you're gonna go bust a brothel, the bad guys on the force aren't telling the brothels so they are gone by the time we get there right? Like it's a very dicey scene but you also need sort of permission to operate in these countries and do need to loop in the locals but you wanna be working with the good eggs not the bad eggs and it's a dicey situation

1:01:26 The answer to the question, it was really funny. Some of the girls that I was meeting in this town in the fall of 2013 10 years ago because they have some downtime between customers and they have downtime in the late afternoon after they first wake up and get ready or makeup on before the traffic picks up for them later in the night. They were sitting on a bench out and they were weaving together strips of material and What are you making? And they're like, oh we're making a purse. And it was beautiful! I mean it looked like one of those seatbelt purses that was popular at the time and I'm like wow where'd she get the material?! They were basically recycling trash floating down the river that divides Thailand from Malaysia

1:02:11 And they were bored, so they were doing handcrafts which they knew how to do from growing up in Laos in a village somewhere. I was like this is amazing! What are you going to do when you're done with it? Where do you sell it and they laughed and they're like there's no market for this here because the town of Bravos and the only people in the town are men. They're here to rape us basically not to buy persons for their wives. This is insanity. And I went back to my gym a week later in Bangkok and I googled what it costs at the time to feed a family of 10 in Laos, because that's why the girl was sold from Lao to the brothel for like a year or months. I forget what the exact parameters were but it was like $30 whatever the answer was $30 and you buy them a whole bunch of not starving with their family for like X bags of rice and

1:03:09 This is incredible. Why are we not taking the handcrafts that they're making, that they're just tossing aside when they're done with because they're doing it not to sell it because of bored and getting them systematically sold to Target and Macy's and Walmart? And oh my gosh one sale up one person I would have bought these persons like they were nice and I'm not even bad in your ability so things by friends with a body roll materialistic I'm like One sale a month would feed the family in Laos for the better part of the year. Why are we not doing this? And that is one of the answers, microfinance opportunities so I don't know what you think about Richard Branson and I'm not sure what to think about him but he's got an amazing book that I read 10 years ago. I'm looking at it right now Screw Business as Usual and in there he quoted the fact

1:04:01 They do microfinance opportunities. They give tiny loans to women in these villages to buy a sewing machine, I mean just nothing right? You know 30 bucks right like we're not talking $10,000 you're talking price of a nice jitter right and they teach the women to sew on the sewing machine if they don't know how to use it already and their rate of repayment on these loans is astronomical its almost 100%. When you give money to the wife When you give the money to the dad of the family, he goes down the street and smokes some opium and it's gone. But when you give the money to their wife who is maternally connected to the children because we carried them around in our body for nine months etc., they use it for good

1:04:44 and they end up making money for their family, and you end up not having your daughter in a brothel. There was another article I read when I first got into this it was an article in Redbook and its...I talked about the book but I don't think I talked about the other profile they did. And it was a feminist who'd gone to Africa to see what the sex trafficking problem was and try to help, and when they interviewed the villagers, so like why are you selling your oldest daughter to a brothel? They were like oh well that's simple because we don't have enough food every other year. They're like well okay, they kept pulling the chain, pulling the chain, why don't you have enough food every second or third year

1:05:22 Because a roving band of elephants will come through the village and trample our little fences and trample our crops. And then we don't have corn or maize or whatever they're growing, and we're starving when you have to sell it here." The end in this article was hysterical because the lady gums right? White Jupiter feminist lady she's like if you had asked me I forget who it was, Gloria Steinem or one other thing. He would ask me before I went to Africa what I thought the answer was to the sex slavery problem in Africa never ever ever ever in a million years would have thought it would have been paying for electric fences to keep the elephants at bay and away from their crops

1:06:00 But in fact, that was the answer to fixing the problem of families having to sell their child because they couldn't afford to feed them. So you've gotta go into these regions and listen to what the locals say because they will tell you what their own drivers for poverty are but sometimes it's as simple as a fence. Sometimes it's as simple as a sewing machine and the larger issue if I may... You know when the cops or the warriors in these areas are not gonna do their job you still need to get the job done. This is $150 billion a year industry, fastest growing crime in the earth soon it'll be the number one crime above even drugs and that is a lot of human trafficking so my co-founder in Liberty Asia and I devised a plan where we thought all right if the cops aren't going to do the job of taking out bad guys let's get the banks to do it

1:06:48 In 2012, there was an article that came out in the New York Times front page news and it said the Department of Justice fined HSBC a bank. Almost $2 billion with a B for quote knowingly allowing Mexican drug cartels and Iranian arms dealers to run dirty money through their American branches because that's money laundering So for those of you who aren't aware, when you make money from an illegal crime whether selling cocaine to an addict or selling a seven-year old to a sex buyer that isn't money like it is from your dry cleaner shop or your auto body business. That is dirty money the profit of a crime and then when you take that dirty money and deposit in your bank account a week later that's also a crime its called money laundering

1:07:30 And not only are you not supposed to do the crime of money laundering, but the banks are not supposed to knowingly allow you to launder dirty money through their branches. If they do so and they turn a blind eye to it and they ignore it so that can make interest off your dirty money, The Department Of Justice can't and won't find them a lot of money to push them back into doing the right thing." So this co-founder of mine and I were like, hey if it worked on the Iranian arms dealers for the DOJ to find the cartels and the Iranian armed dealers why don't we do this in a trafficking realm? We'll start aggregating the names of all the bad guys that all the Navy SEAL type dudes are running into on the ground who are pushing and selling to girls for sex. We're going to make a laundry list of all the bad men, essentially we're going to take that laundry list of bad man names. We're going to give it to an intelligence profiler." And we ended up giving it to Thomson Reuters World Check which for those of you who don't know is the largest

1:08:22 intelligence profiler in the world. When you go down to B of A or Chase or your credit union and you're trying to open a new account, and your kid is whining like mommy why is this taking half hour? I'm hungry can't we leave yet? And you're like yeah gosh why is it taking half hours that's because you are being by federal law and regulation required to run your name they have to do an intel analysis on you, to make sure that you're just Mr. Gregg so-and-so living in whatever city you are with two soccer kids and that you're not a drug dealer or a member of the cartel. And once they verify that you're a soccer mom or a soccer dad, bingo! You have an account. If they run your name against their intelligence profile that Thompson Reuters provides them with and it comes up hot like hey he might be a sex trafficker, he might be a cartel dealer right? Cocaine dealer... They are required to do further due diligence and either not open you that bank account if it turns out that you are in fact the bad guy and not an innocent guy with the same room as the bad guy but is the actual bad guy

1:09:19 They either need to not open you that account or if you have an existing account, they are supposed to freeze the assets. So we were like bingo! We get the names of the bad guys to Thompson Reuters and make an Intel profile. They blasted out to 8000 banks worldwide which got done on an automated basis eventually. And now we've got the bank backed into a corner either they do their thing they're supposed to do and freeze that effing account Or they don't and they're risking a DOJ multi-billion dollar sanction for not having done the right thing. And that, my friends is how you sidestep a completely apathetic, impotent criminal justice system or non-existent criminal justice system in these third world countries. Corrupt criminal justice system and force the banks to do the right thing and by the way that is a macro level solution which we need in addition to the micro level solutions of dragging one girl at a time out of the brothel or educating one junior high schooler at a time in America on how they're not all preyed as sex trafficking those are micro levels solutions and they're needed but there never gonna make it done

1:10:20 in sex trafficking, okay? You need a macro level solution and when you hamstring the money line of the cartels and the biggest mafias in the world I don't care who you are legitimate business or illegal business nobody but nobody runs their business without access to their cash. That is how you bring it down from the inside so those are some of the creative solutions that we've been involved in creating and furthering and trying to get a handle on this problem during the time we hire our way Mm-hmm. You are right that it's really difficult if your goal, if your motivation is to get the kids out of the brothels there's a lot of things that come up that people don't think about these kids don't have a lot of opportunity so are you going to adopt them? Are you going to raise the kids yourself because where are they going to go

1:11:08 It is a nightmare situation to actually try to solve it and you can try to donate money but if your not going to actually go into a dangerous place and extract children then you can maybe fund an organization that is gonna do that I guess, if they're there. It's just, you can maybe take one out and then two more pop up. But it's just a really crazy situation and maybe it gives people a little perspective into not that we don't have big problems and tyranny coming down the pike but... You know? Just think about the rest of the world and be thankful for what we do have

1:11:51 Because we're thankful, we should want to preserve it and extend it. And now is the time to do that as you're saying so. That's the lesson. As bad as it's been in the last three years here in America, We have a pretty damn good and our founding fathers left us with an incredible infrastructure First Amendment Second Amendment those are world-defining differences between the governments that went before ours and those that have come after. And we need to hang on to those rights, We need to use those rights—the freedom to speak, gather, protest peacefully—to hang on to our country and resecure the freedoms that so many who went before us died and gave their lives for."

1:12:29 man their fortunes for and the time is now, we can make a difference but we need to just stand up. And that is really why I named my book Just Stand Up My Fight For Freedom From The Brothels of Asia To The Streets Of America because so many of the novel initiatives that we have found successful in these third world countries where everybody's against you They work now in our country. Why? Because the structures that are supposed to save us, you know the courts and the legislators are broken in the blue states but if we play it like we played in third world countries with some of these name-and-shame programs and creative endeavors, you get a lot more traction than you do just relying on broken institutions so I talk about it in my book and lecture a lot on it speak a lot on it and I encourage you to try out your neighborhood

1:13:12 You could go spend a few hundred grand on a lawsuit and it probably won't work. And I'm the lawyer, 30-year litigator telling you that or you could spend zero dollars doing your name in shame program on your local evil politician and you may well put him in check and get rid of this bad program." I had done it numerous times now with many other people I know as well so I really encourage to learn what's working in these third world countries, because it's working here now. And then to use the first amendment rights we still have to help preserve our country because you just don't know how good you got it even when on a bad day until you go to a place like I've been and I encourage you to go there because it will just renew your passion for life for the good things in life your gratitude and really re-inspire you to do the right thing by future generations and that's really what it's about so

1:13:57 Thanks again for having me. I was loving talking to your viewers and go to leadendist.com if you would, and buy my book. I haven't had a paycheck in four years now, and I promise I'll put the little tiny bit of profit there back into the freedom fight for our children and children around the world. I love it while you're clearly dedicated, and I hope people are inspired to get a little more involved themselves but Thank you for your time and keep fighting the good fight. We'll do take care of my friend until we see each other again. All right, bye. Wow. Dark stuff today guys. We get into so many different things around here that I usually do try to ask myself. So what was the point with this one? What did we learn? What could a person listening take away from it

1:14:47 And why I might book something and then what the takeaway might be after the interview is over, that can change because conversations are organic like that. But i guess i really did just want to see some of us recalibrate as far as how bad we have it and how bad it is in other places around the world I don't want to see people twisting that statement around into some sort of political statement or interpret it as anything deeper than simply, in the big scheme of things right now take a deep breath and realize that we sometimes get pretty hyped up and pretty stressed out in the conspiracy culture. And really... We do have it pretty good! We could have it better and we should strive for better

1:15:36 I'm not denying that. And we will always have to be vigilant against those who seek to erode our way of life, but the world has some really dark corners that most of us really don't even have to think about very often. I know we talk about child trafficking at an elite level, at a blackmail network level oftentimes because it's provocative and we know corruption and depravity run deep at the top But real human trafficking, slave labor forced underage sex work a lot of the time it's low level typical scumbags running shit like this. And some people seem to find that less exciting than if it's child trafficking for the sake of elite families drinking adrenochrome or wannabe Victoria Secret models getting side gigs on Epstein Island

1:16:39 I guess this just felt like a reminder to not normalize human trafficking and don't let the bite get taken out of the term because here's what it really is. And again, I don't know exactly what a person listening is supposed to do except be grateful for the good things they have and focus a bit more on the general positives at least for the rest of the day right? I hadn't thought about this in awhile but As I was reading her book and Pol Pot and Cambodia was coming up, I was reminded that when I was still working at Sunglass Hut the original job that allowed me to move from Missouri to San Diego. A guy started working there whose name I'll never forget probably shouldn't say his name here but once we got talking about our lives it turns out that he was born into a pretty well-to-do family with servants in Cambodia

1:17:38 And his father was good friends with the Cambodian Royal family. And then Pol Pot rolled through and he was just a kid like five or 10, and he told me some wild stuff about having to hide in the woods seeing people make decisions to kill crying babies, to keep the group safe all that kind of thing learning how to bow hunt and skinning and eating squirrels and whatever they could find out there then making it to America and starting over more or less. And he was the most positive guy, and on his lunch breaks he would go over to the grocery store and get a third pound of deli sliced ham or turkey and eat only that which always stuck out to me. He would say well it's better than what I had in the past this stuff is great! No no I guess its just a story that speaks to the same general point I guess

1:18:36 Given that I was so miserable in retail, his stories made me feel a bit more perspective. But it seems clear that nobody who could do anything about this really wants to and remember that the next time they engineer the public's outrage to justify whatever it is they already wanted to do because these kind of places we talked about today are out there and there's very little anyone in power is doing about it period Hot off the heels of the John Potash show, it was pretty fresh in my mind that banks don't care. It's not because they're unaware so I tried to make that point when that came up in The Plus Show and I respect the hell out of Lee for getting her hands dirty like she has actually going to dangerous places to really see things for herself these stories should be told for sure but it's still hard to see change really happening

1:19:39 Ugh, but I guess again get some perspective and some motivation. Think about these realities the next time you want to just waste a day and instead try to get the most out of every moment you have. I guess that's sort of cheesy takeaway here because otherwise it just feels hopeless and depressing I probably disagree with Lee about legalizing prostitution. I see a parallel with drugs where you don't really know what you're getting, the black market might lace things with fentanyl or bleach or whatever they want but if you bring vices and human nature really to the surface and put some guardrails on it...to me that's the only thing that might halfway work but what do i know?

1:20:28 Either way, much respect. I hope some people are inspired to act where they can keep the forgotten and the ones still suffering in this very moment in your hearts and minds there are plenty of innocent people caught in plenty of various crosshairs right now huh but that pretty much does it for me today if you want to hear the full two-hour interview be a plus member you know the deal TheHigherSideChats.com or sign up right there in your show notes, or via the Patreon where you can get the entire Plus archive through Spotify if that's where you usually get your podcasts both plus feeds work with most podcast apps Apple Android Podcast Addict whatever it is it's not hard and you don't have to change how you listen to the show I appreciate the support from you and you can have twice as much show from me

1:21:26 It's a win-win. And as always now, if you want to see video clips from both the free and plus hour I do use the YouTube channel and social media for that maybe this one won't be on YouTube now that i think about it but clips will go on Twitter Instagram and Telegram But before we go let's look at the meetup calendar as well On deck October 14th. That's that big day many events we have Edgewater, Colorado Rappingers Falls New York Lansing Michigan Huntington Indiana and that's it then October 18th the PlayStation Party Chat and October 20th We have one in Cincinnati Ohio And we'll leave it at that but good stuff

1:22:18 Anyone can make an event in your hometown and find more people based on a mutual enjoyment of THC. And why not? You might as well, but I am getting out of here big thanks again to Lee what a wild ride check her out and let her know you appreciate her dedication if you do now see you next time your move pimps traffickers and profiteers of human exploitation Your fucking moves They built a little out of some crazy garbage Called the blood of the exploited working class We've overcome their shyness Now we're calling your highness And the world screams, save me THC

1:23:20 They destroyed the bonds of friendship and respect between the only people left who'd even look them in the eye and make a fortune off the same one that they tortured. And a world made me THC. Look for Jesus, we'll say Mr. Jesus Stone.

1:24:09 can tell me if it's true. Our chance to be built a lil' some crazy garbage called the blood of the exploited working class overcome their shinin', now we're calling our highness and the world scream save me, THC Save Me, T H C