872: Paul Hutchinson | Beyond the Politics of “Sound of Freedom”

872: Paul Hutchinson | Beyond the Politics of "Sound of Freedom"

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[00:00:18] Coming up next on The Jordan Harbinger Show.

[00:00:21] Paul Hutchinson: Trafficking, human trafficking, is the fastest-growing criminal enterprise in the world. And now the second most profitable. It surpassed the illegal arms trade. It's soon going to surpass the drug trade. And you'll see this on the movie. We had Jim Caviezel say this line, "You can sell a bag of cocaine once. You can sell a child five or ten times a day for the next five or ten years."

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[00:02:02] Today, on the show, we're talking about the movie The Sound of Freedom. Now, I originally was not going to cover this movie at all, despite a lot of requests to do so, because I got the feeling that the lead actor, Jim Caviezel, was actually a QAnon kook, which turns out is definitely the case. And I also know there's a ton of disinformation out there about child trafficking that does more harm than good, all the dramatized stuff which does more harm than good. I did not want to be a part of that, and almost none of the anti-trafficking, door-kicker types wanted to discuss the reality on the ground. That is until I met Paul Hutchinson.

[00:02:40] Paul funds child rescues and has done over 70 undercover missions himself, 7-0. He also raises funds to rescue trafficked children and individuals, and perhaps most importantly, is willing to talk openly and not unnecessarily politicize the issue or turn it into some kooky conspiracy theory. Basically, the situation is bad enough. And The Sound of Freedom, the movie, if you haven't heard of it, or if you haven't seen it, this movie tracks Tim Ballard, who was actually on this show a long time ago, and this is, you know, sort of based on a true story, but really is highly dramatized, in finding trafficked children who are being sold, usually for sex, in other countries, and rescuing them. So this is a movie that is controversial, but not seemingly for a ton of good reasons.

[00:03:26] A lot of people just having the same reaction that I did, which is that the lead actor and Tim Ballard, now who was on the show, once again, are really out there sort of saying this is very political and that furniture companies are selling them and the children's blood is being drunk, just you know stupid QAnon BS nonsense, and I just didn't want to contribute to that. So I am really glad we get to cover it here with somebody who is not going to embarrass themselves or the show, and is actually going to deliver what I hope is real, vetted, on-the-ground information.

[00:03:58] Now, there are some spoilers for the movie Sound of Freedom discussed in the episode. If you've seen it, great. If not, no problem. Don't get mad at me here. I'm not necessarily recommending you go see it before listening to the episode, either. But this, again, is not overly graphic, but it is about child trafficking, so maybe no super young kids in the car for this one if you are not comfortable with them hearing about this.

[00:04:19] So, here we go with Paul Hutchinson.

[00:04:24] The Sound of Freedom, it's been a box office smash to say the least, right? The budget was what, 15 million and it's at 130, something like that.

[00:04:31] Paul Hutchinson: Almost 130 million. Yeah. We made a $14 million on our first day and our budget was only 14.5 and we beat out guys that have $300-million budgets with Indiana Jones and others. So phenomenal success the first three weeks.

[00:04:45] Jordan Harbinger: So does that mean that Sound of Freedom is really good or that Indiana Jones is really bad? What does that mean?

[00:04:52] Paul Hutchinson: Well, for a long time, Jordan, I thought The Sound of Freedom must have sucked because we had this done five years ago and nobody would take our distribution. I'm like, you know, what am I the only guy that thinks this is amazing movie? Just because I'm the investor in it, and I thought maybe this will end up being a CD on my table as a coaster for my drinks. I didn't think it was going to go anywhere, but now with the success of the movie, I really believe people are seeing it as I did, and as our team did, and it's beautifully made. And it has a super awesome message to it that we need to all get behind and say — how can we fix the world?

[00:05:27] Jordan Harbinger: It is a really harrowing story about these young kids who are sold, trafficked often for sex, which is really gross. And I have questions, of course, as to how true to life, how accurate all this is. But first, of course, I want to back up the truck. You're selling yourself short a little bit, right? You're not just an investor in the movie. This is something that's been near and dear to your heart for a while before this.

[00:05:46] Paul Hutchinson: Very much. My character in the movie is played by Eduardo Verástegui, by the producer. Halfway through, when the Homeland Security agent is frustrated, he wants to leave his job and go help rescue these kids, and he needs somebody who can not only help to fund it, but to fly down and physically be there in front of the traffickers, that was me. In the movie, it's Pablo, because when we filmed the show, I was still undercover, thought that I'd be undercover for the next 10, 20 years. And so we didn't have him play Paul Hutchinson. We had him play Pablo Delgado, the billion-dollar fund manager who quits his job to go help rescue children. So that's my personal experience. And that was the first of now 70 undercover rescue missions in 15 countries. It has changed my entire life and transformed everything for me.

[00:06:32] Jordan Harbinger: 70 undercover missions, you thought you would do it for 20 years. I would imagine you get quite tired of being undercover because how long are these operations when you say 70, it's not just 70 afternoons, right? There's a lot going on here.

[00:06:46] Paul Hutchinson: Yeah. Now, when I say 70, I will say this. Every single sting operation requires multiple times going in as a specific operation to identify more traffickers. We don't want to take down a trafficking ring and end up having three or four more in the city that fills in. So I'll usually go in on five or six or seven-plus, sometimes eight or 10 different times into a region to connect with all of the trafficking rings that are there for a single sting operations. I count those as individual undercover operations to set up for one sting.

[00:07:20] Jordan Harbinger: That, of course, makes sense. How do you explain to one set of traffickers while you're talking to their competition in the same city or same region? I would imagine they find out, right? Because it's organized crime, they have eyes everywhere.

[00:07:31] Paul Hutchinson: Absolutely. Multiple times, we've had traffickers. Kill other traffickers on the mission or after we left, or they've got in fights. I've got videos of some of them getting fights over turf wars type of thing. And so the answer is this, I go in and for the first year I went in as the buyer. I was in not as Paul Hutchinson. I went in as Paul Stone and I had a fake Facebook and profile and all of this stuff, web page for Paul Stone Capital, all this crap. And I have pictures of me with Lamborghinis and Ferraris and all this stuff that doesn't matter, but to the traffickers matter.

[00:08:03] Jordan Harbinger: You're like an Instagram influencer, basically.

[00:08:05] Paul Hutchinson: Exactly. Exactly. So these guys would go to in the morning, downtown Port-au-Prince, Haiti or whatever, and they would connect with these traffickers and they would then show them this profile of this playboy and saying, "Hey, this is the guy that funds these parties and stuff and he's coming down." And so then when they see me in real life, they're like, "Oh sh*t, this guy's real. I saw these pictures online." And we had taken everything of the real me down. So there was nothing there. But after a year and a half, I was asked to start going deep cover. This would be dangerous if I was a wealthy playboy. And so instead, I'm working for a guy. And it would go in and say, "Listen, my boss is looking for a big party. He wants to pull in a bunch of his rich buddies and come here to Dominican Republic and have a big party over Superbowl Sunday, whatever it is. And he wants a bunch of models that are there. So you have your inventory, you have others," and we'll connect with all of the traffickers who currently have inventory in that area. And that was just the sting, like what we did in Colombia, the party, we had different types of operations as well, depending on what kind of traffickers were there.

[00:09:04] I had multiple times where they got mad. I was in a border city in Mexico. There was traffickers that were trafficking children across the border in Mexicali, Tijuana. And I was asked by the head of the federal police to come and check out what was going on. And so I did. I went in with a team connected with a couple of traffickers. One of them got mad that we were working with the other one and called his buddy, who was the pretty high up in the police department there, who ended up arresting us and asking for a bribe money and the whole thing all fell apart that was there.

[00:09:33] So it gets challenging when you have multiple traffickers that both want to control. And especially if we're coming in with the desire to bring all of their current inventory to one place, then yeah, they start fighting with each other.

[00:09:47] Jordan Harbinger: That makes sense. And I know you say inventory, but so people are really clear. We're talking about child sex trafficking, which is just gross to keep saying. So we'll say it a few times and then we'll use euphemisms because it is repulsive. I remember talking about this on the show before episode 369 with Tim Ballard, who the movie is loosely based on. We'll talk more about that in a second, but one of the things that I asked him was, I know you're undercover, right? That's part of the job. But how do you fraternize with these guys? Pretend that you like screwing small kids? Talking about it is gross and revolting, so how do you stay in that identity for, what, weeks at a time? Days at a time? Over and over again? Do you just become desensitized to that somehow?

[00:10:25] Paul Hutchinson: The deep cover, the ones that are finding the kids, it's important that the identity that I took when we were in that place was not one of a consumer, okay? I'm working for a boss. And they're like, "Why don't you try out this 12-year-old?" "Oh, you know what? My boss will kill me and my whole family if I taste the candy before the party. It's really his. He pays me really well for it." That way, we keep ourselves out of a situation where we have to prove ourselves or whatever we say, "No, this isn't for us. We're setting this up. He pays us well for doing so and whatnot." So that helps a bunch.

[00:10:56] I was talking to a motorcycle gang guy. He's in this dark alley and he pulls his shirt up and there's a gun that's just sitting there tucked in his pants. And I pull out a bill and I give it to him and he says, "What's that for?" I said, "That's for you. You keep it." I said, "I have another one for you. You can get me in touch with somebody. I have a boss coming in a couple of weeks looking for a party. He likes 10-year-olds." And he said to me right there, "Your boss is effed up." I said, "I know he is. He'll pay you well if you can get me in touch with somebody who can provide what he is looking for." And so boom, he got me in touch with a female trafficker who was running a strip club who was selling children on the side for her primary income. Strip club is more of a front.

[00:11:32] So it happens all the time. These guys are grossed out by it as well. In fact, one of our contacts in one of the undercover missions was a drug lord in the area. And he said, "Listen, you may not agree with how I do business, but I've got children of my own. And those guys are evil and I'm going to kill them. And if I do, you got 20, 30 kids and you don't know where they are. Or I tell you everything I know, you go in there, you get those kids back to their families. You make sure he goes to jail and I'll take care of it from there." It's interesting, even the thugs on the street, the guys selling cocaine and stuff, they're not into this either, but they know who is. And if you're able to get into a place where you're with those super dangerous people, you can connect with the ones who are selling the kids.

[00:12:14] Jordan Harbinger: That makes sense, right? So now you're merely posing as a disgusting amoral psychopath, as opposed to an actual pedophile. It's like those drug dealers. I've spoken to undercover cops and DEA agents and stuff on the show, and sometimes they have to pose as people who consume drugs. But I think, occasionally, depending on the cover, they can get away with, "Hey, I don't do this, I'm a recovering addict." And some of the dealers are like, "Hey, respect. The stuff is addictive. That's why we have businesses that are worth millions of dollars because people can't get off the meth, or the cocaine, or whatever." This is one where probably everybody would understand if you don't consume the product that you're selling because it's very specific and 99.9 percent of people find it completely disgusting.

[00:12:52] Paul Hutchinson: Yup. 100 percent. But it allows us to find the guys who are supplying them and then either geotag their location, which the majority of the rescues didn't take place, like on The Sound of Freedom movie, right? The reason for that was to get a lot of footage to have the stories and to somewhat sensationalize it. There was a number of other ones that I did in those early days where the purpose was we went in, we found the kids and we had to bring them all together for a big party thing. Why? Because there'd be undercover cameras there and they could tell the story. We agreed early on, on that very first Colombia mission, we meaning me and Dave and a bunch of the undercover operators, we agreed, we will do the work. We will find the kids. We will bring them to a place. You guys bring the cameras, you tell the story, and that story can't involve us, because we don't want the world to know who we are.

[00:13:45] And so that happened for a number of years, but after that, we found it was a lot more effective and a lot safer to not have those parties like that. Instead, we did what we were doing. We got in touch with the traffickers, said, same kind of a story. We've got a boss coming into town, et cetera. And we say, "Listen, my boss will kill me if I taste the candy, but I have to verify you have the candy. So if you're willing to take me to wherever they are, I'll give you $100 for each one, just so that I can see them and verify that you have them. So my boss will come down." So either, if they don't trust us enough, they'll bring the kids to a central place, to a restaurant or something, the undercover agents that are tailing us at the time will tag their vehicles and find out where they're taking the kids. Or in most cases, we're able to work our way up to what I call A level three trafficker, the ones that are physically holding the children in captivity, geotag that location. And then once we're out of country, then the federal agents of that country do their job, arrest them. And we don't have anything to do with it.

[00:14:43] There's no cameras and there's no sensationalism around it. But we're taking down pedophiles, we're taking down trafficking rings, and we're saving the kids. We say, "Listen, we'll do all the work and we'll pay for everything. All we ask is that the bad guys stay in jail for good, they don't get around your system. Number two, we have full access to the children and getting them rehabilitated and back to their families." So that's the rest of the backstory.

[00:15:04] Jordan Harbinger: How do you ensure that governments in places like Honduras, Mexico, are actually going to follow rule of law and not just the guy who was in this had a million dollars in cryptocurrency? So he's out and all of us got new cars. How do you make sure that happens?

[00:15:20] Paul Hutchinson: Well, sadly, you can't make sure on anything. We will work with only vetted people that are vetted by some of the US intelligence agencies that some of our guys have worked with just to make sure that we're not going to get shot while we're undercover by somebody that the local cops never even know that we're there. They have no idea that we're in country. The only people that really know is usually the head of the federal police. The president knows we're there. We have authorization to work under their laws and we say, "Listen, we will do the work. We'll work under your laws and you tell us what we can and can't do and we'll present it to you. You'll look like heroes to your people." I will say though that there were a number of operations that unfortunately fell apart either during the operation or afterwards because of that kind of corruption.

[00:16:04] There's a documentary called Operation Toussaint. Toussaint is the name of the airport in Port-au-Prince, Haiti. Now, that was while I was still deep cover. The only time that you see me, my face is blurred and I'm laughing with the traffickers. And you would hate my guts if you didn't know who I really was. Now, I led the entire undercover operation to find those 34 children that were highlighted in that film. And that film also goes into what happened afterwards. We got to the head of the dragon, some really bad traffickers. And these traffickers ended up paying $80,000 to be let out of prison. Now, to put that in perspective, the average income in Haiti is like $500 a year. $80,000, like millions. And these poor corrupt judges got paid off. And so we're like, crap, these kids were now being re-trafficked. It was crazy. And so we flew the first lady, the attorney general, the top for the federal police, we flew them to the US.

[00:17:00] And here's the crazy thing about that. During the operation, there was one thing that kind of went squirrelly on it as I was getting arrested. Usually my passport, we send all of our luggage to the airport beforehand. And when we get arrested, I get arrested with the traffickers. I get hauled off and they think I'm going to jail. I ended up going straight to the airport, but I keep my passport on me. The agent who was searching me down, didn't know I was a good guy. He ends up taking my passport, putting it up on the evidence pile with the other traffickers' stuff, and I'm laying there, I'm like, this is my real passport. I can't say anything. They pick us up. Locals are throwing rocks and everything else. So fast forward, when those corrupt judges let those guys out, they had to say why their reason why is they're like, the real bad guy got away and the real bad guy, it wasn't Paul Stone. It wasn't Paul Steel. It wasn't Paul Black. It was Paul Hutchinson. I didn't realize that it was already entered in before we got it back.

[00:17:54] There's a lot of situations like that where things ended up going bad because of bribery, because of money. But the fortunate thing is they went back in, re-arrested those guys, took out those judges, and made sure the kids were in a safe.

[00:18:07] Jordan Harbinger: This is where? Haiti?

[00:18:08] Paul Hutchinson: That was in Haiti. Yeah, Port-au-Prince, Haiti.

[00:18:10] Jordan Harbinger: I assume that you have to be careful. Between then and the re-arrest and squaring this away, you couldn't go back to Haiti because they would be like, "Hey, you're on a wanted list for human trafficking."

[00:18:20] Paul Hutchinson: Oh, yeah. I was for a while. It was funny. In fact, after they cleared it all up, the head of the federal police guy, he wasn't even a head. His name, Jim Patote, he ended up getting killed, good man. But he called me up and he said, "Paul, we need you back here in Haiti. You were the closest to some of these rings that we need to continue to take down." This was after we rescued the 34 kids. And I said, "Jim, I was on Haiti's most wanted list for a little while." He said, "Yeah. Now, you're Haiti's most protected." I said, "That doesn't make me feel good," you know?

[00:18:50] Jordan Harbinger: A flip of a switch. Don't worry because if you can get protected that quick, you could probably get unprotected that quick. You mentioned that he was killed. Was that in relation to what we're talking about now?

[00:18:59] Paul Hutchinson: I believe so. On record, he died of a heart attack at the same two-week span that three other political leaders died of the same heart attack. We and the family believe he was poisoned. We were getting some pretty high-level stuff. He was just mad. He was mad as hell that these four corrupt judges were let out. A lot of the burning of the tires in the streets and all that unrest that was happening a number of years ago, that was at that time. He stood up when we were in the US after everything had come down. The first lady was here. He stood up and he said, "I don't care if I lose my life. I don't care if I lose my job. I'm going to fix the corruption in this country." And so, unfortunately, I believe he was in a precarious position because he was identifying really who was at the top of it.

[00:19:42] Jordan Harbinger: And by the way, the movie Operation Toussaint, we can link in the show notes because it's freely available and watchable on YouTube. So that's T-O-U-S-S-A-I-N-T, we're saying it in the French way.

[00:19:52] Paul Hutchinson: Operation Toussaint.

[00:19:54] Jordan Harbinger: So we'll link it in the show notes. How did you get trained to do this kind of thing? Because you're not a cop. Even in the movie, they're like, "Oh, here's this hedge fund guy who likes to play cop." Which is funny that you let them say that about you. Why not? It's true.

[00:20:07] Paul Hutchinson: I'm good with it. Yeah.

[00:20:09] Jordan Harbinger: Were you just like, "Hey, real estate portfolio is great and all that, but what I would love to do is something slightly more boots on the ground"?

[00:20:16] Paul Hutchinson: For decades and decades, I've had a passion for hand-to-hand combat training, gun training. I'm really good with a firearm and got hundreds of them myself, but to undercover, you don't take firearms. But the majority of the skill set isn't the fact you know how to fight. In 70 undercover rescue missions, we've seen the traffickers fight, we've been in some very dangerous positions, very dangerous. In times where I thought we were going to have to use it, I've trained for a long time in something called Krav Maga.

[00:20:47] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah, the Israeli self-defense.

[00:20:49] Paul Hutchinson: For the listeners that aren't familiar, so regular martial arts, karate and others, bow to your sensei, three points when you kick him in the leg. Krav is brick to their head and go home to your family. It's Israeli special forces hand-to-hand combat. It's the most lethal I know of on earth. Every move, a lot of them are illegal in the ring. You know where to hit them, where to punch them, that it's lights out. They don't walk, they don't breathe, they don't talk anymore. And I can take away a gun faster than they can pull the trigger every time. I've trained thousands and thousands of iterations of being able to handle other people's weapons when presented. So that kind of thing, a lot of our undercover operators, the guys who were just trained with night vision goggles and their Navy SEAL stuff, they weren't as good. The guys who knew how to handle themselves in any situation with their bare hands. We're super valuable. So, from a security standpoint, that was important from the other part of the equation, though.

[00:21:39] I'm going to back you up about a year before the Colombia rescue mission. I actually called Sean Reyes. He's the attorney general. And he and I became friends years before I was serving on the board of directors for the FBI Citizens Academy. I'd gone through a bunch of training with them and crap. And so I called him up. I said, "Rey, I got front-row tickets to the Miss America pageant. Do you want to go?" In his exact words, he said, "Hutch, unlike you, I have a reputation to uphold." He said, "I can't be seen front row of Miss America. It just doesn't work." I said, "No, it's not like that." I said, "I'm sponsoring a bunch of the children who lost their fathers in military battle. And we're paying for the dresses and hair and transportation of these little girls and their moms to come. And we're having them crowned a Miss America on stage." And he goes, "Oh, that's pretty dope. I'll come to that."

[00:22:26] So we fly out to this Miss America thing. Because it was a fallen soldier charity, the Pentagon had sent a representative down. His name was John. John worked for the CIA for about 25 years as a top recruiter. After three days, John says to me, we're sitting at a table, me and Sean and a couple of former Miss Americas and John says, he said, "Mr. Hutchinson, I've been watching you for the last three days and I think your country can use your talents." And I said, "What talents are those?" He said, "You're about one in every 12 million has what I see in you, we call it a chameleon." He said, "Your ability to immediately break down the barrier of communication and become best friends with a billionaire, a bum on the street, or a runway model is something we don't see very often at all." He said, "Imagine this, we fly you to Dubai. We line you up with some dirty money guys. You get the information we need. You'll have the perfect backstop. You run a multi-billion-dollar fund." And I ended up turning them down when they called a few months later because I didn't want to put my life in danger for some white-collar crime guys in Dubai.

[00:23:31] Fast forward a year later, Sean's in a meeting with Tim and some others, and they're like, "Hey, we need somebody who can help fund this and who can play this role." And that's when Sean said, "Well, have you ever met Paul Hutchinson." Romney's son was there and I wasn't there in the meeting, but I heard and Josh said, "Oh, Paul would be perfect." And I told them both, I said, "You know what? I don't think that's a compliment. You guys both think that I'd be a good undercover pedophile."

[00:23:54] Jordan Harbinger: Who looks like a pedo and is really convincing? Paul Hutchinson. It's a funny compliment, indeed.

[00:24:03] You're listening to The Jordan Harbinger Show with our guest, Paul Hutchinson. We'll be right back.

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[00:27:24] Now, back to Paul Hutchinson.

[00:27:28] How do you even begin to get in touch with the right people, the traffickers, right? I would imagine you can't just walk down the streets of Cartagena and be like, "Hey, I'm looking for some underage kids."

[00:27:38] Paul Hutchinson: No.

[00:27:38] Jordan Harbinger: Where does it begin?

[00:27:39] Paul Hutchinson: It begins, number one, coming into country, meeting with the head of the federal police. And the guys that you can trust and say, "Okay, where is the most dangerous area of the city at the most dangerous time?" Those are the guys that you want to connect with. Those are what I call level-one guys. They're the guys selling you cocaine at two in the morning in the super dangerous areas. You've got to be able to handle yourself in those spaces. And so you're a white guy in a third-world country in the most dangerous area at midnight, there's something up, right?

[00:28:13] Jordan Harbinger: Mm-hmm.

[00:28:13] Paul Hutchinson: These guys are like, "Okay, this guy is effed up," and you're acting like you're on something. You're not normal to be in that area. So you're acting like you're somewhat drunk or high or whatever else. And you're like, "What up? What are you doing?" "Hey, what do you want? Some drugs?" I said, "No, no, we're out of that. But hey, I'm looking for something. Maybe you can connect me with who has what I'm looking for." And then you get to a level two. The level two are usually pimps. The level two's own women and have access to children. For example, in a recent one, this pimp, she was a madam and she had about eight girls working for her, but she was also selling children to the Chinese and she had access from some other places from where these children were coming from.

[00:28:53] Jordan Harbinger: Wait, what do you mean selling children to the Chinese? You're going to have to expand that.

[00:28:56] Paul Hutchinson: Yeah, I say selling, renting them out. So the Chinese in the area were flying in and she was renting out children to the Chinese. She was at what we call level two. And every situation, every single city that we go into, we get to those really dark level twos, usually from the guys in the super dangerous areas. Those level two guys, they have access to the kids, but we've got to find where they're getting them from. We've got to get to that level three. And so the level three will be the one who is physically holding the children.

[00:29:27] And so in Haiti, for example, a couple of drug dealer guys at a super dangerous area, the guy on the motorcycle with the gun, and he makes a phone call, gets us in, he got us to this level two, her name was Dee. She was running the strip club, she was renting out kids, but she had too busy of a life, she wasn't holding the kids. So we had to get from her to wherever she was getting the kids. So a level three physically holds them, we have to get there so we can geotag the location of wherever they're holding the kids or get them to bring them to something so that we can do the same because that's the whole goal.

[00:29:59] You've got to arrest the pedophiles. You've got to take down the trafficking networks and you've got to rescue the children. You've got to pull them out of hell. But that was what we did for 10 years. Now, my biggest focus is fixing the demand side because just doing all of that's not going to fix the problem. It's not going to fix it.

[00:30:16] Jordan Harbinger: Right. It's like burning a cocaine field. Okay, fine. There's plenty of other places we can get the same type of product, cocaine or children. You have to fix the demand side, which seems impossible. I was going to say it was probably easier to fix demand side for pedophiles than cocaine because demand is lower, but I don't even know if that's true.

[00:30:32] Paul Hutchinson: Trafficking, human trafficking is the fastest growing criminal enterprise in the world, and now the second most profitable. It surpassed illegal arms trade. It's soon going to surpass the drug trade. And you see this on the movie. We had Jim Caviezel say this line, "You can sell a bag of cocaine once. You can sell a child five or ten times a day for the next five or ten years." And the demand is there. That's what's sick. There was more money made last year in human trafficking than all of the airlines of the planet combined. It's billions and billions. They figure in human trafficking as a whole is about a hundred billion—

[00:31:10] Jordan Harbinger: $150 billion per year business.

[00:31:12] Paul Hutchinson: 150 billion.

[00:31:13] Jordan Harbinger: But that includes all trafficking. This is where people who are either misinformed or disingenuous. And by the way, I'm not accusing you of this, I'm just saying it's all over the internet. They'll say, "It's a $150 billion per year business selling kids for sex." No, that's all human trafficking. So adult labor trafficking, people smuggling others across borders for economic reasons. It's not selling kids for sex, that's actually a relatively small part of it. The problem is, what if it's only a billion-dollar per year business? That's still way too big of a business for way too disgusting of a crime.

[00:31:45] Paul Hutchinson: Absolutely. When people ask me questions about, "Oh, tell me about adrenochrome and is that true?" I said, "Listen, I'm not going down any roads of anything that I haven't seen myself. But what I have seen is bad enough, an 11-year-old being sold to me as a virgin by itself is bad enough. That's something that we can fix." So yeah, even if it's a billion-dollar-a-year industry, that's bad enough. But the thing that nobody's talking about, because we're all thinking, "Oh, this is a thing we need to send Rambos down to Colombia to fix the problem." Guess what? The problem is likely in your own home or in your neighbor's home or whatever. The problem with child sexual abuse is rampant. It's everywhere. And so people ask me, what do we do about this? Hug your kids. Why? Because the highest likelihood of a child that gets trafficked is one that's a runaway, a broken family, things like that. So having that healthy relationship and even more than that having a relationship with your kids where you can communicate with them, where they feel comfortable coming in and saying, "Hey, you know what, dad, I don't like hugging Uncle Harry." Having that relationship with them, where they can be attuned with their feelings and be okay with sharing when they're uncomfortable with something. That's way more important than sending money for some Navy SEALs to go into Colombia.

[00:32:58] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah, I agree. I'm glad to hear you say that because what I was shocked to learn when I started researching this more is that a large amount of trafficking, of course, happened to the United States and a large portion of those kids are what are called throwaway kids who are trading sex for a place to stay food because they were kicked out of their house, because they came out as gay to their parents, or they ran away because they're in an abusive situation. And most kids were actually trafficked by family or somebody that they knew or somebody who was pretending to be someone they could trust, like a boyfriend or other sort of family member. And a lot of the kids who are trafficked in the United States, they actually go to school, which I found really surprising because what you think is it's, oh, it's a kid from Central America who's been illegally smuggled in. Not really.

[00:33:42] There was a woman who gave a TED Talk on trafficking. She went to my high school, which was in like an affluent area of Michigan. She had good parents, but some boyfriend she had got her drunk, took dirty pictures of her when she was in high school and was like, "I'm going to get your dad fired from his job if you don't do what I say." So she snuck out every night and was turning tricks and giving this guy the money, basically. That's what most trafficking looks like. And this was while she was in high school. So most trafficking looks like that.

[00:34:08] I guess that's where some of the criticism comes in for Sound of Freedom, which I would love to discuss with you, I know we talked about it pre-show, which is a lot of experts, they're challenging Sound of Freedom. They're saying, "Hey, this paints an inaccurate, sensationalized picture of child trafficking. It's not kids stolen from a modeling shoot from Honduras and smuggled to Colombia or some other place. It's the stuff happening at home or near home." What do you think about that?

[00:34:33] Paul Hutchinson: Absolutely. Now, I will say this. The things that we showed on the movie happened. No, Tim didn't kill that guy. In fact, that's a whole other story. It's a whole other country, whole other child and a whole other team that went in there for them. However, those things do happen, but they're not the norm. Everybody that was there were really bad guys. The stories of the children really happened on different rescue missions that we did of how those children were taken and brought in. But the majority of children that are being trafficked today, the majority of them actually sleep in their own bed at night. That's something that people are like, "What? They're sleeping? No." Yeah, they do. They sleep in their own bed at night. They're being trafficked by their mom. They're being groomed by their uncle. Their babysitter is telling them, "Hey, you're going to lose your virginity anyway. If you lose it through these guys, you can make some money."

[00:35:20] That's what's really going on. And that's what we have to be aware of. And yes, I'm happy that The Sound of Freedom is doing so well, primarily because I'm part of it and an executive producer and investor, but more importantly, so that it can at least start the conversations so that people can say, "Okay, now I'm motivated. What do I do?" The worst thing that you can do is go try to be a Rambo in Latin America and go find kids. That was the absolute worst thing you could do. Second worst thing you can do is decide you're going to just randomly fund whatever organization says that they're being Rambos and going on rescuing kids because half of them, that money is going to pay for somebody's ego and somebody's logo and not necessarily directly to where the problem is.

[00:35:59] But the best thing you can do is take a look at what's going on in your own neighborhood, with your own kids. Maybe your kid's friends who suddenly have a change of energy and they're super low self-esteem and everything changed about their outgoing nature and you're wondering what's really going on there. Maybe talking to their parents and maybe their parents have the challenger, it's an uncle, whatever. That's the most common thing. And that's what we need to be aware of as parents.

[00:36:24] Jordan Harbinger: I think there's something to that. Also, I looked at some of these organizations. A lot of them are not nonprofits, which is already sketchy. And some of the ones that are nonprofits, you can look on Charity Navigator and find what the executive compensation is. And it's a little gross. A lot of times people will say, like my parents the other day were like, "Oh, I can't believe the CEO of the Red Cross makes $698,000." And I had to explain that that person could work at a Fortune 500 company and you'd be adding a zero or maybe more than one zero to that figure for their compensation. Because the International Red Cross is a massive organization. There's a lot of moving parts, that person has a lot of specialized knowledge, they're probably coming off a 20 or 30-year career running companies, and they took a massive pay cut, like 90-plus percent, to run something like the International Red Cross. But a lot of these organizations that do this, that rescue kids, are really small. And then the compensation is still $600,000. And you go, wait a minute. This is like a large double-digit percentage of the operating budget goes to the salary of one or two people. That to me is very grifty. So you have to be very careful where you put your money if you're donating to these causes.

[00:37:32] Paul Hutchinson: 100 percent. In fact, for the last five years. My foundation, the Child Liberation Foundation, didn't have overhead. Now, granted, I wasn't bringing in outside money either. It was a 501c3 that I would put my own money and whenever I wanted to donate, and then it would go there and it would donate money from it as a fund, a fund type of a thing to other foundations that were vetted and specifically to operations. I hate writing checks for just putting it into their foundation because I don't know where it goes. I don't have the see through. And so instead, I have them present to me, okay, this is what the plan is. We're going to build this healing retreat or this safe house for the kids. Or we're going to do this operation. This is our intel on it. And it's going to take this many guys to go in and take down this pedophile ring or whatever it is. Those things, I'll say, okay, I'll fund that. I'll give you 20,000 for that. I'll give you 50,000 for that because I know that it's going directly to the cause. It's not going to pad somebody's pocket.

[00:38:26] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah, I think that's important, but not everybody has the ability to do that, right? They just Google child rescuer. They see somebody on a podcast like this and they're like, "Oh, let me donate to this guy." And I also got duped by this kind of thing in the past where I'll have somebody on and they'll say, "Oh, we're doing all this stuff." And then you find out they're making 600 grand a year. Their wife and kids are also on the board of the organization getting paid and they travel by private jet. And you're like, "Wait a minute. I thought you're supposed to be kicking down doors," and then you realize — this is part of the criticism of the movie, right? As they say, "Hey, this is a sensationalized version of this problem. It covers less than one percent of the issue." And I don't necessarily agree with that criticism. Yes, it's probably a small part of it, but it's hard to do a movie where the trafficking is really boring and milquetoast and mundane, yet really damaging because nobody wants to go and see that. So I understand. I get it.

[00:39:13] Paul Hutchinson: Well, and understand this. The movie was actually toned down from some of the things that really happened. When you're going in and you're meeting with people who are selling children, these are not nice people. Now, yeah, they did a good job with the jungle scene, but these guys, there's been multiple cases where we have met with some super bad people. There was guys that had eyes on us, that had guns on us, and one wrong move.

[00:39:38] I had one situation. I'm telling you what, Jordan, this was the closest I came to dying. I was with this trafficker. He was super high-level trafficker. And everybody is referring us to one guy who then worked for him. He says, "This is my boss's boss. This guy was smart." And he says to me, after we told him what we're looking for, and he already had a bunch of these kids, he said, "Give me your business card." And so I handed my business card and him looking at my business card, he said, "Tell me your phone number." Now, if I didn't have my undercover phone number memorized like my own, I would have been shot for sure right there. And it had my phone number, a fake phone number, a web page and everything else. And then he said, "Take out your phone." And I took out my phone. I show it to him. And I'm showing him my phone, and he dials my undercover phone number on my card. Fortunately, I was smart enough to have everything tied in, where boom, his phone number rings on my phone, and he smiles, he goes, "I like you. He says, "Now let me show you," and he took us to where the kids were, et cetera. The federal agents in that country, when I typed up the report that night, the next morning, I had missed nine phone calls. They're like, "Get out." I'm like, "What? We've been trying to get with this guy for three years and you got his phone number within 24 hours in the country."

[00:40:48] These are the kinds of things that happen when you're going up against these guys who are really, truly selling trafficked and kidnapped children. The reality is the majority of the problem that we need to fix as a society is not just liberating a 10-year-old from the trafficker's hands in Honduras. It's liberating the 10-year-old inside of every 20, 30, 40-year-old man or woman who's dealing with childhood trauma and dealing with the fact that most of our children at some point in their childhood are in a precarious position with somebody who potentially could be a pedophile or could be harming them physically or verbally.

[00:41:25] Jordan Harbinger: I did see quite a bit of criticism before I went to go see the movie and a lot of it hinges on, hey, the film portrays children being snatched and kidnapped by strangers. And of course, that happens, but it's, like you said, a myth that most traffickers target victims that they don't know. And I verify this, the US National Human Trafficking Hotline actually said most victims are trafficked by somebody that they do know. So it's not where somebody gets nabbed in a Target parking lot. I think the criticism is well intentioned though, right? It's the idea that if human trafficking or child trafficking involves forceful kidnapping and imprisonment, it makes it harder for people to grasp more complex trafficking cases, just from a legal perspective. If you've got a case of, let's say, coercion, or psychological manipulation, which is usually what gets people trafficked, children especially, and the jury is expecting a Liam Neeson movie, you're not going to get a conviction. And it makes it harder for survivors.

[00:42:22] Wait, so this person just said they were going to do bad things to you, but you were related to them, and then you did all this stuff? I don't know, that doesn't sound like that doesn't sound like what I have in my head. We have the same problem with DNA evidence in trials, right? Everybody's seen so much damn CSI that when somebody has a bunch of evidence, the prosecutor has a bunch of evidence, they'll go, "Where's the DNA evidence?" "What DNA evidence? We don't need DNA evidence. We have a body, we have a weapon, we have a motive. The alibi doesn't hold up." And they're like, "If there's no DNA evidence, then you should be able to get that really easily because I watched CSI Miami and they always have DNA evidence. They found a hair in the parking lot," and it's like that's the criticism that people are leaning into.

[00:42:59] But I get it, Paul. I get it because we want to believe that the people who are selling children and trafficking children for sex are the people in the movie, right? Scorpion tattoo on the face. It makes people really uncomfortable to think, and myself included, it makes me uncomfortable to think that some of these things happen In your own neighborhood by the person that you think is probably just a normal guy in a normal house with normal kids or somebody run into it at Starbucks.

[00:43:27] Paul Hutchinson: Yeah, it is. And a lot of times it's family members, you have to be super careful. And I have family members that were raped by their father, by their grandfather, that nobody even knew about until they were adults. In fact, the average age of somebody who comes out and says and admits or tells other people that they were sexually abused as children. The average age is 52-years-old. That's my age. I've got grandkids. If you've held on to that kind of trauma your whole life, how does it come out? Was it coming out in verbal abuse and in anger issues and sometimes physical abuse? Literally, two out of every three people, God bless them, if they were abused as children, two out of every three are able to grow up and never pass that on. In fact, most of them use it as a motivation to make sure. That children are protected in their life. However, one-third of people who are abused in any way as children become contact offenders themselves, pass that abuse on.

[00:44:24] And so people ask me a lot, Jordan, "Paul, how can you go face to face with somebody selling you a child and not have them see your anger and your hatred?" And my answer surprises them and it pisses them off sometimes. And this is what it is. There's a part of me that feels some compassion. "You have compassion. They're selling you a child." No, I will do everything in my power to ensure they never hurt another child again. But what I wish more than anything is that I had a time machine could go back 10 years or 15 years or 20 before they ever hurt a child or touched a child. What if we could go back to that point and say, "Okay, what is that we need to work through? What do we need to fix in your life that's leading you down this dark road?" Now, that's not an excuse for anybody who's ever passed it on. There's no excuse there.

[00:45:11] However, there's no such thing as a time machine, but there are hundreds of millions of people today who have not yet passed on their trauma in any way. That if we could have a compassionate heart and come forward and say, okay, these kids in elementary school and junior high school and high school that had some challenges were abused as children. Can we help them? Can we put together programs for them? so that they can truly let go of that trauma and not bring it into their adulthood where they could ever pass it on. Those are the ones that we should have compassion for and help. Then the next generation won't have this massive amount of generational trauma being passed down again.

[00:45:56] Jordan Harbinger: This is The Jordan Harbinger Show with our guest Paul Hutchinson. We'll be right back.

[00:46:01] This episode is sponsored in part by BetterHelp. Ever find yourself with one foot in the maybe "I should switch jobs" lane and the other in the "should I stay in my relationship street?" Utterly clueless which way to go. Life doesn't come with a GPS. Therapy can sure make you feel like you have one. It's kind of like having a friendly co-pilot helping you navigate your future. Instilling you with the confidence to boldly take the wheel and steer your life in the direction you desire. I have used therapy at many big junctures in my life when I was figuring out how to deal with Issues with my former business partners and also before Jen and I decided to move in together. People hire personal trainers to help them get more fit. I'm one of those people. Having a therapist is good for your mind. I'm one of those people too. If you're considering therapy, definitely check out BetterHelp. This completely online platform offers convenience, flexibility, works around your schedule. Simply answer a short questionnaire to pair up with a licensed therapist, and if you're not clicking with them, you can switch at no extra cost.

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[00:50:21] Now for the rest of my conversation with Paul Hutchinson.

[00:50:26] Before I went to see the movie, a lot of people were like, "Oh, this is QAnon adjacent." And I was like, "Oh gosh, I'm not going to go see that." And then I went to go see it because I needed to sort of hear it for myself. I actually didn't get that messaging at all. As people know from the show, I am not interested in QAnon's conspiracy theories. We debunk that disinformation all the time. I'm very vocal that those people are batsh*t crazy believing in a lot of this stuff. I researched when this movie was produced and filmed. It was actually produced before QAnon was really a thing. If it is QAnon adjacent, it's purely coincidental because the whole movement started after the movie was produced.

[00:51:04] Paul Hutchinson: There's no tie within the movie itself or the original producers. There's nothing. The only ties that people are getting is the fact that Jim Caviezel, who plays the Homeland Security agent in the movie, Jim has spoken at some of those conferences and Jim believes a lot of those things. And I'm not dishing him for his beliefs there. But when people ask me, "Do you believe that stuff?" I say, "Listen, I'm sorry, but I'm going to tell you exactly what I have seen. And that's bad enough." So all of this other crap about people drinking blood and adrenochrome or even the QAnon stuff where, now understand this, I voted right pretty much my whole adult life, but this is not a political issue. It's not. And anybody that would make this a political issue is going down the wrong path. It shouldn't divide us. This subject should unite us. All of us can come together and say, "Okay, this motivated me and woke me up about, hey, there's probably problems out there. Let me get some more information about really what's going on and how can we come together in a spirit of unity to truly help to liberate humanity as a whole from whatever this dark plague is that's affecting our children. That's not political. So yeah, the only reason why people are tying it is because some of the people involved in the movie have spoken at some of those conferences or are involved with that.

[00:52:28] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah, that's a very diplomatic way of putting it. And good job, because this is definitely where the audience was going to decide if you're insane or not. But it's also a tough one because on the one hand, and I'm not, again, I'm totally not accusing you of this, it helps sales when tons of conspiracy theorists buy tickets for your movie. So do I want to discourage that? But on the other hand, it does damage the cause that you're passionate about when people say there's trafficking, but then they follow it up with an insane theory about how Hillary Clinton is drinking kids' blood in the basement of a pizza parlor in order to stay young or whatever.

[00:52:58] And people will throw the baby out with the bathwater. I was almost one of these people. They'll say, well, crazy Uncle Frank is the one who told me about the trafficking problem. But then she thinks there's microchips in every vaccine and that chemtrails are changing our DNA. So we can write off anything. That crazy Uncle Frank says it's a logical fallacy to do this, but that's how people operate. It's the genetic fallacy. But at the same time, if somebody says crazy sh*t all the time and they get one thing, you don't go, "Oh, let me investigate that." You just go, "I don't even want to hear it anymore, Frank. Have a good day."

[00:53:30] Paul Hutchinson: And that's the worst thing that can happen with this division is for people to, as you say, throw out the baby with the bathwater. We can't allow the crap that's out there that's trying to divide us on this principle. The kids are something that we can all come together. I tell people, I don't care if you're white or black or rich or poor or fat or skinny, or it doesn't matter. We are all one people. We are all one. In fact, the very thing that is at the root of trafficking and of sexual exploitation of children. The thing at the root, it starts with when we look at each other as anything other than that divine light of God that is in each one of us. I see everybody as an equal. It doesn't matter if they're a woman, if they're a different color than me, if they're a different country, it doesn't matter. And this is why pornography is challenging for people, is because when you take a woman from a divine feminine to an object, and you start objectifying that, and you dehumanize that intimacy and that connection, that's what takes people down this road of now dehumanizing more. And so when we're looking at each other and seeing each other as anything other than the divine light that's in us, then we start going down that road. And this division is not going to help this problem. It's going to exacerbate.

[00:54:51] Jordan Harbinger: You said exacerbate, but I feel like we should leave that in because that is a funny, that is a funny flub in the context.

[00:54:57] Paul Hutchinson: That's right.

[00:54:59] Jordan Harbinger: How much, how much does it cost to do these rescue operations, changing the subject? Because I'm going to start giggling.

[00:55:06] Paul Hutchinson: In fact, I'll answer that with this question. This is a beautiful story. I just got married two months ago, and I met my wife about five years ago. We were in Haiti. I had done the undercover work for the 34 kids that were there.

[00:55:17] Jordan Harbinger: Did you meet your wife in Haiti?

[00:55:18] Paul Hutchinson: We met in Haiti. Yep.

[00:55:20] Jordan Harbinger: Wow. You don't hear that every day.

[00:55:21] Paul Hutchinson: Well, and here's the thing, meeting a beautiful Colombian actress is cool, but when she's donating her time at an orphanage in Haiti, that's badass. And I've been to Haiti a lot and girls like that aren't there. The girls have beautiful hearts there, but you don't find it actress level, just gorgeous. But she had a heart, like a huge heart. And it was like, wow, okay. An example of that in terms of how much it costs for the kids is. A few months later, we were going to a gala. It was one where I needed my tuxedo. She didn't have a gala dress. So I took her shopping and we found this beautiful dress. It was a huge expense. It was about $2,000. And she looks at the tag and she said, "Paul, what's the average cost of rescuing one of these trafficked children?" I said, "Average, it costs us average about $2,000 a child is what it costs." She said, "I'm not wearing a child." She said, "You can buy me a $200 dress instead. And we can donate the rest of the money to the foundation." I'm like, "Oh, that's my girl right there."

[00:56:16] Jordan Harbinger: Mm-hmm.

[00:56:16] Paul Hutchinson: Because my past relationships all were all about Louis Vuitton shoes and all this crap. And she's like, "No, I'm not wearing a child." That's the average cost. In fact, one of my undercover operators, one of the best ones, he came into my office years ago and he said, "Paul, I want to fund a mission. What does it cost?' I said, "The average cost is about $25,000 per mission, and we're average is 10 to 15 kids that we're able to get on a mission." He writes a check right there. He said, "Here's $25,000. I want to fund the mission." And he hands it to me. And he said, "Now, I want to go with you on the mission." I gave him the check back. I said, "Bro, you can't buy your way on a mission. This is real." I said, "I've been training for decades. This is super dangerous. You can't just show up, here I am." And he said, "Listen, you tell me what I have to do. I don't care if it takes me 10 years to get to the point where I'm ready." And so I gave him the phone number of my Krav Maga trainer. And this guy, my trainer, he's one of the best. He's like one of only 10 that's qualified to go back to Israel and train the trainers every year. And so his name is Joseph. And Joseph calls me like. Five, six months later, he said, "Andy has been in every single day. He's been training two to three hours a day. He hits like a freight train." He said, "He's probably safer undercover than most of your Navy SEALs."

[00:57:25] So that's that two stories to answer the question of what it costs to rescue a child. But that's just in our undercover stuff in third-world countries. It's about $2,000.

[00:57:34] Jordan Harbinger: Who trains the undercover work because Krav Maga and hitting like a freight train is great. But the idea is not to get caught and have to use Krav Maga to get out of a sticky situation, right? Like that would be the most important skill set followed very distant second by the ability to not get killed doing it.

[00:57:49] Paul Hutchinson: Yeah, absolutely. In fact, your goal is to not ever get in a place where you have to use self-defense to deal with it. And so years ago, we had about 350 guys try out that were all people that wanted to do undercover. Most of these guys were former special forces. These are Green Berets, Navy SEALs, just badasses. And they all came out to Utah and we had like a two-week training type of a thing. There was only three of them out of the 300 that ended up going undercover with us because most people can't do that. We had one of our former CIA guys who had been doing training with them. Okay. Now I want you to have a conversation with me about, and it's a dark conversation, one too dark for the radio, right? For us to be talking about here. He said, "I want you to say this and this without throwing up." And most of them can't, those are dark conversation.

[00:58:37] The very first time I went undercover. And this trafficker leans forward halfway through this meeting, and he says, "Pablo, I have a gift for you." I said, "Really, what's your gift?" And he hands me his phone and there's a picture of an 11-year-old girl on the phone. Now, in the movie, that was depicted as Tim giving me the photo of the little girl and that convinced me. In reality, I was already there. I was already in that first meeting with the traffickers, but that galvanized my commitment. When he shows me this phone and there's an 11-year-old girl and he says, "She's still a virgin. We call her princess." And he starts going down this road. Of things I could do to this little girl. And I was like, and the Navy SEAL that was behind me, he had to excuse himself. He's like, "I'm going to go check out the perimeter, make sure that we're good." He said later, he said, "I almost unholstered my weapon and shot him right there. That girl looked like my daughter at home, but I knew if I did, would never get to the rest of the kids."

[00:59:30] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah. You need acting chops and you need to be able to think on your feet. We've done many an episode with an undercover agent here. And by the time your weapon is out, the cover's blown. And you're probably seconds from dying, depending on how far your team is away from you slash wherever you are. And that makes a lot of sense.

[00:59:46] So the movie's just massive. I know you're down in Honduras right now in Central America, trying to spread the word about the movie itself. How's that going?

[00:59:54] Paul Hutchinson: Yeah, it's good. Well, everybody here has already heard of it. The movie's been out three weeks. Every TV station has already heard about it. All the people, the restaurants, this guy that's hosting me, he's running for president down here. He introduced everybody's already heard of the movie down here and they're so excited to see it. So excited.

[01:00:12] So what's next for me? First of all, continuing to tour around and doing these screenings with the film, that's priority. Number one is to make sure that the momentum that we saw in the US continues everywhere so that we can start having the conversations that couldn't be had before. I was with a gal last night and she said, "The thing that I like best about what you're doing here is the fact that this is opening up the ability for us to have conversations. Nobody wanted to talk about trafficking before in any way." Now, she was one that understands really what's going on in terms of the grooming and the house and the 90-plus percent of people who are trafficked or by a familiar member, et cetera. So she understands that she said, "But I could never talk about it because it was too dark for polite conversation." Now, this movie is making it so that the conversation is somewhat palatable. So by continuing with this process, going around the world with this.

[01:01:02] Now realize this — I had zero social media for 10 years, zero. I couldn't, I was doing all the undercover work. And so I shut down Facebook, Instagram, all of this stuff. And it was about six months ago where I decided I had just finished some rescue missions in Ecuador. And I looked at the numbers and I realized there was more children being sold today than there was 10 years ago. So if my goal was to eradicate child trafficking, if that's the commitment that I made when I'm sitting in front of that little girl that was crying in Colombia, if that's the commitment that I made, I wasn't doing a very good job because there's still children and it's growing faster than what we're doing. And so I thought about it and I thought, you know what? First of all, I'm now in a relationship that I really enjoy and I don't want to get shot. And number two, everybody was pressuring me. They're saying, "Paul, you need to go out there and be the voice. And I said, "Listen, I don't want to be. I would be super happy with a cabin on a river, with a garden and a gun, not having to deal with people. I don't want to do that. But can it just be about the message and not the messenger? Can I not be the messenger?" That puts my family in danger with me going public. And everybody, including my family, is like, "No, Paul, you have been there. You've been in the pit of hell. You have seen the depravity of what happens when people continue down this dark road. And you've got the credibility with the business world with the fund that you've built and the credibility in the philanthropic world here. You need to be the voice." And I told them, I'm not interested in people coming to paulhutchinsonofficial.com. I'm not. That's not me. Okay, we're going to focus on liberating humanity.

[01:02:41] So that's the answer to your question. Where to from here is liberating humanity, whatever that looks like. I'm pulling together anybody who has programs they've already created to help people overcome childhood trauma, to help them overcome sexual addictions, pornography, addictions, et cetera. If I can pull together all of these tools in place and put them on a platform of liberating humanity, then I can give people the ability to break free from this low vibration that is creating all of these challenges right now. So that's what my goal is. I'm going to start speaking. I haven't really spoke a lot, but I'm going to start speaking on podcasts. I actually had my personal podcast just opened today, very first day. We'll see how it works. I'm just here just saying, God, lead me whatever I need to do.

[01:03:28] Jordan Harbinger: It's an admirable mission. You said you're dating a Colombian actress, though. You may still be in danger, Paul. You may still be in danger.

[01:03:35] Paul Hutchinson: Okay. So here's my favorite story. You ready, Jordan? My claim to fame is not building a big company or even all that charity work. Here's my claim to fame. So Henry Cavill plays Superman, right? He's the actor who plays Superman, all the girls will swoon over his name, whatever. So my wife's name is Hada Vanessa, H-A-D-A is her first name, last name, Vanessa. And she was working in New York and he came in, she was like, bartending or whatever else after, because she had been an actress before. He came into her work every single day for a couple of months. They started to date and then she met me. I stole Superman's girlfriend, not really girlfriend, but there's my claim to fame.

[01:04:11] Jordan Harbinger: That's quite a flex, man. That's quite a flex. And I appreciate that you left us here with something a little bit lighter than child trafficking because I was going to ask you to do that. Yeah, decent flex, man. I really appreciate you coming on all the way from Honduras. I'm glad we were able to clinch this one right in the middle of the PR fury over Sound of Freedom. And I really appreciate your time.

[01:04:31] Paul Hutchinson: Thank you, Jordan.

[01:04:32] Jordan Harbinger: You're about to hear a preview of The Jordan Harbinger Show with former professional skateboarder and entrepreneur Rob Dyrdek.

[01:04:40] Rob Dyrdek: I made my mom come in and meet with the counselor and the principal and just basically sold them on this idea that I'm going to be a pro skateboarder now.

[01:04:50] Jordan, I live in kill mode. Kill mode is like my lifestyle. You know what I mean? Like, I am so optimized and operate at such a high level, that alone gives me energy. I track every hour of every single day and have it tagged and it all pumps into a living dashboard of how perfectly balanced my time is. So I've gamified living at this deeply, highly optimized existence. That's also a hundred percent balanced by design. I live as light as a feather.

[01:05:24] When that system is out of balance It's impossible to grow into your full potential, right? And then if you haven't defined what your full potential is in what the life that you want to live and what all aspects of that look like then you're never going to find it. It's looking at everything you want to achieve and breaking it down to the very first task that you know you can do.

[01:05:47] The most extraordinary way is to begin to turn the idea of deciding what you want, defining, you know, four or five milestones and then doing one after another till you get to it. And doing that in all aspects of life over and over again, you begin to feel as if you control reality because you put something that didn't exist as the mile marker and then you built a plan to do it and you did it.

[01:06:14] Jordan Harbinger: To learn more about how Rob Dyrdek dropped out of high school at age 16 and how he now optimizes his life to the fullest potential, check out episode 498 on The Jordan Harbinger Show.

[01:06:26] At the end of the day, I'm glad I covered this. I'm glad I talked to Paul. Interesting story. By way of numbers, the US State Department has reported that 600,000 to 800,000 people are trafficked across international borders per year with about half of those cases being children. Now, that does not mean sold for sex. That means labor trafficking, people smuggling, and other types of traveling. It is a staggering number. But it doesn't mean that all of these people are tiny kids in sexual slavery. Again, we're looking at three to 400,000 children, mostly sold for, which is still gross, labor trafficking and other forms of trafficking. 67 percent of children trafficked are between the ages of 15 and 17. While there are, of course, cases where child trafficking victims are much younger than that, they overwhelmingly and heartbreakingly tend to involve the parents of those children with substance abuse issues selling their own children for drugs. So, it's gross, but it's usually the family, and it's usually older children. Not that that makes it any better, but just, your kid's not going to get snatched out of a Target parking lot, statistically speaking here.

[01:07:34] My point is, you don't have to manufacture conspiracy theories about child sexual abuse. It doesn't help anyone. It does more harm than good. It distracts from the real problem. It scares people for no reason. It makes organizations that want to do the real work have a harder time doing it. There are plenty of facts at hand that don't involve spreading rumors about a furniture company or a pizza parlor. So let's not do that. And let's not support other people who are doing that because they are either insane or they want clicks or donations. So that's where I stand on that.

[01:08:08] If you want to hear our earlier episode with Tim Ballard, that was episode 369. He's no longer with his rescue organization, OUR. I don't know the circumstances under which he left, so there's that. There's more background on it. Take it with a grain of some salt, just given the numbers I gave you. I'm not saying Tim Ballard wasn't telling the truth. I am saying the problem of needing to rescue children who are sold into slavery for these particular reasons while totally disgusting is a tiny percentage of the problem. And I want to highlight that to un-scare you and so that good organizations can do their work.

[01:08:40] All right, I've beaten that horse quite to death, haven't I? All things Paul Hutchinson will be in the show notes at jordanharbinger.com, or ask the AI chatbot. Transcripts in the show notes. Advertisers, deals, discount codes, and ways to support the show are all at jordanharbinger.com/deals. Please consider supporting those who support the show.

[01:08:58] And yes, the newsletter highlights and takeaways from the most popular episodes of the show. Going all the way back to the start, jordanharbinger.com/news is where you can find it. Would love to know what you think of the newsletter. Six-Minute Networking, don't forget it, jordanharbinger.com/course. I'm at @JordanHarbinger on Twitter — I'm not calling it X, folks — and Instagram, or connect with me right there on LinkedIn.

[01:09:19] This show is created in association with PodcastOne. My team is Jen Harbinger, Jase Sanderson, Robert Fogarty, Milie Ocampo, Ian Baird, and Gabriel Mizrahi. Remember, we rise by lifting others. The fee for this show is you share it with friends when you find something useful or interesting. The greatest compliment you can give us is to share the show with those you care about. If you know somebody who is interested in this movie, is interested in this problem, definitely share this episode with them. In the meantime, I hope you apply what you hear on the show, so you can live what you learn, and we'll see you next time.

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