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Ethical Wealth and AI Strategies with Matt Friedman · King Dems Podcast | Growth Mindset, Leadership, AI and Business Insights

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  Now, you might ask, does the counter trafficking world not
• 0:18
  care? Are they lazy?
• 0:19
  What would justify that? Profits generated from modern
• 0:22
  slavery, $236 billion. The amount of money available to
• 0:26
  address this is about 400 million, or at least it was up
• 0:31
  until about four months ago. And now with the US government
• 0:33
  cutting its funding, it's down to about 220.
• 0:36
  So you have a huge amount of profit and you have this much
• 0:39
  available to fight it. And think about what we're
• 0:42
  talking about here. We're talking about girls that
• 0:44
  are forced to have sex with 20 a day times 6.3 million or 23
• 0:49
  million people in modern slavery, forced labour.
• 0:51
  How is it that this can exist in this day and age?
• 0:54
  I can't answer that question. You know, it's such a horrible
• 0:57
  thing that we're dealing with here, but it's just not being
• 0:59
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  Your next breakthrough starts here.
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  With your live ladies and gentlemen, you're once again
• 1:58
  welcome to the King James broadcast.
• 2:00
  And today I've got with me fighting heart of Hong Kong, the
• 2:05
  CEO of the Mechunk Club, Mick Walker, Matt Friedman.
• 2:10
  How are you, Matt? I'm doing well.
• 2:12
  Thank you. Very happy to be here today.
• 2:16
  Wow, I am really, really happy to have you on here today.
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  It's been a long time coming, but finally, where there is a
• 2:23
  will, there is a way. And of course, we've found a way
• 2:26
  to make it happen. And of course, you know, for our
• 2:29
  audience, we have a very special person today.
• 2:35
  He is the CEO of the Meccan Club, author of Awakening the
• 2:38
  Advocate, a global anti trafficking leader, and of
• 2:43
  course, this episode is themed The Global Anti Trafficking
• 2:48
  Leader ended Modern slavery, Leadership, Business ethics and
• 2:53
  Awakening the Advocate within. And of course, we are all about
• 2:57
  milestones. We're grateful to you, the
• 3:00
  listeners for helping us achieve the certification on Leasing
• 3:04
  Notes as a global Top 3% podcast.
• 3:09
  Thank you very much, guys. And of course, please make
• 3:12
  welcome Matt Friedman to the show.
• 3:15
  How are you again, Matt? I'm good, I'm good.
• 3:18
  How are you doing? Very well, thank you.
• 3:21
  In London. And how, how's it like in Hong
• 3:24
  Kong? What's the weather like?
• 3:27
  It's hot here, it's about 35°, very sunny, very little rain.
• 3:31
  You know, the thing about the summers here is usually it's a
• 3:35
  it's a easy time. We don't have a lot of work, but
• 3:38
  for whatever reason, the last two summers I blink and it's
• 3:41
  halfway through the summer and I'm going to blink again and
• 3:43
  it's going to be over. And so I got to find a way of
• 3:46
  kind of getting outside and actually having some summertime.
• 3:49
  Whoa. Tixi is a clock.
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  Definitely definitely. You blink and it's all gone.
• 3:57
  Wow, this he stitching time saves 9 And of course Tixi is a
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  clock. What you have to do do quick.
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  You know, you have spent the last, or would I say nearly 40
• 4:09
  years conference in the darkest edges of modern society.
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  How you take us back to the moment when you first pulled,
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  you know, or when you first got into this pathway of fighting
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  against human trafficking. OK, so you know about actually
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  about 37 years ago, I was living and working in Nepal.
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  I was a public health officer and my job was to translate
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  resources into healthier people. At that time, we were finding
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  girls 1213 years old who were HIV positive.
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  We couldn't understand what was going on.
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  This is a very conservative culture.
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  So I started to go to the shelters where the girls were to
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  interview them, and I heard pretty much the same story over
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  and over again. And it went something like this.
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  A human trafficker would go into a village.
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  He'd flash a bunch of money around to make it look like he's
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  rich. And he'd say, I'm looking for a
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  wife. I don't want an urban wife, I
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  want a village wife. You'd find a girl 1213 years
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  old, befriend her, and then go to the family and say, I'd like
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  to marry your daughter. They're thinking, wow, he's
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  rich, he's handsome. He's going to take care of our
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  daughter. He's going to take care of us.
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  In that part of the world, it's not uncommon for girls to get
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  married at that age. After that, the wedding takes
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  place. And then he goes to the family
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  and says, well, I'm going to take your daughter to Kathmandu,
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  but don't worry, I'll be back in three months.
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  But that isn't what's going to happen.
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  Instead, he takes her to Mumbai, India, to the red light district
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  where the brothels are. When he gets there, he puts his
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  wife into a room and says, honey, stay here, I'll be back
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  in a few minutes. I just need to do something.
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  As she was coming in, she saw these men milling around, these
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  women dressed funny. She said no, no, no, no, don't
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  leave me. I'm scared.
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  He says it's OK, I'll be right back.
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  He then goes to the Madam who runs the brothel to get the
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  $500.00 for having sold her to the brothel.
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  He has the gold from the wedding and he hands the wedding
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  pictures over. He then leaves to go back to
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  Nepal to do this again and again, maybe 40-50 times in the
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  year. The Madam then goes into the
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  room where the girl is and says guess what?
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  Your husband just sold you to me and you're going to be with 20
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  guys a day, every day because I say so.
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  You can imagine this girl shocked.
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  No, no, no, no, my husband loves me.
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  No, that's what happened. When many of these girls
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  internalise what's happening, they say I will kill myself
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  before I do those shameful things.
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  I'm a good Hindu girl. The Madam then brings out the
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  photograph of the family and says if you hurt yourself, we're
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  going to hurt your mom, your dad, your brother.
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  So she's trapped in this situation where she can't get
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  out in order to make her into a prostitute.
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  It's very simple. You shame her.
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  So they bring in about four or five guys and then they use her
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  over and over again for, you know, maybe 30 times in a 2 day
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  period until she just lays back and accepts what happens to her
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  after that, She's put on the line.
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  She'll be with 20 guys a day every day until after a couple
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  of years she gets what's called black eye, where she's so
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  depleted physically and emotionally, nobody wants her.
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  So they throw her out onto the street.
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  Now many of the girls languished in India, died of AIDS, some of
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  them made it back to Nepal. And those were the people I was
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  talking to. So I was hearing these stories
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  over and over again, but I didn't understand the evil of it
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  till I actually went to those brothels.
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  I was invited by the Indian government to do public health
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  cheques at a police officer with me, went into one of the
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  brothels and there was an 11 year old trafficking victim.
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  This girl saw this Caucasian guy, saw an opportunity,
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  literally ran up, wrapped herself around me and said save
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  me, save me. They're doing terrible things to
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  me. I looked down at this child who
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  was hysterically crying. I turned to the police officer
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  and said we need to get this girl out of here.
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  He said we can't do that. So what are you talking about?
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  You're a cop, why can't we do that?
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  Says if we try to leave we'll both be killed.
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  To make a Long story short, we left.
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  We came back with a lot more police, but of course she was
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  gone. Now I tell that story because I
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  wasn't one of those 15 year old high school kids that it said
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  when I grow up, I want to be an activist.
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  In fact, I did everything I could not to be 1.
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  But every once in a while in life, we are tested.
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  That was my big test. After that, I failed miserably.
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  I couldn't eat, I couldn't sleep.
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  All I could do is see that girl's kind of visual seared
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  into my mind. And so I did.
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  A lot of activists too, surrendered to the fact that now
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  that I know about this, this is what I'm going to do with my
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  life. And 37 years later, here I am
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  talking to you. That must be a really, really
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  traumatic moment. And that what I say was like a
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  lightning brought moment for you in your life and you took that
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  Clarion call. And today the world is, would I
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  say, a better place, right, because of the nature of the
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  work that you do. But being an American living in
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  Hong Kong with deep roots in Southeast Asia, how's your
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  international land shape your understanding of the systemic
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  exploitation that happens there? Well, I mean, much of what
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  happened from that point on was a journey of exploration.
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  When I first heard about human trafficking, it didn't have a
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  name yet, and so people weren't paying much attention to it.
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  And we thought maybe this was unique to Nepal and India, but
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  then we started shining a light all over the world and came to
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  realise that in few places in the world, you know, a 15 year
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  old girl wakes up and says when I grow up I want to be a
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  prostitute. Many of them are tricked and
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  deceived into scenarios where you know, they, they have no
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  choice. Now there are some that do it
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  willingly, but I'm talking about the ones who are controlled by
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  the pimps, by the madams. They have no choice and they're
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  forced to do this type of activity.
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  But it's not just, you know, forced prostitution.
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  There's also forced labour. There are 50 million people in
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  modern slavery around the world. In fact, there are more slaves
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  today than any other time in history according to the United
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  Nations. Out of that, about 23 million of
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  them would be enforced marriages.
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  Where it's not a kind of traditional loving marriage, the
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  person is married into the family to do work for the
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  family. And then 27 million in forced
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  labour. 6.3 million of that is forced prostitution.
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  That translates to about 9.2 million people entering modern
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  slavery per year, or 25,200 per day.
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  So in every 4 seconds there is a new slave somewhere in the
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  world. We count to 41234.
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  It could be Hong Kong, it could be America, it could be Europe,
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  it could be Africa. And the drum beats on and on and
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  on and on. So much of my exploration has
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  been like many of the activists who focus on this, trying to
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  make sense of this. How do you address the
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  criminals? How do you address, you know,
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  saving these people out of these horrible conditions?
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  How do you go after them legally?
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  How do you then put them in shelters and help them after?
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  And through that process, we have gained a certain amount of
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  knowledge, but it's a collective knowledge because there's a
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  community of about 40,000 people like me.
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  We try to work with each other to be able to address this, but
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  we're not making much impact at all.
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  There's a there's a lot to unpack here, but two things.
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  Speaking of exploration, as a the younger me in high school or
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  secondary school, I don't know what you call it in that part of
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  the world. I love geography so much.
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  And if you love geography, you would love exploring as a
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  person. And I did well in terms of
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  research. I did study economics.
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  I was a social scientist, right? But one thing that caught my
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  attention in the course of my research work was the modern day
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  slavery in West Africa and the cocoa famine, the cocoa
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  plantations, right? So I'd like for you to shed some
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  light on the hotspots across the world that are notorious for
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  human trafficking and modern day slavery.
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  OK, so let's start with West Africa.
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  You have cocoa plantations. You have very little government
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  oversight. You have people who engage young
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  children, sometimes teenagers, on the cocoa farms.
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  Many of them have been tricked and deceived into the situation.
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  They're forced to stay there, they're working against their
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  will. And you can imagine the
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  chocolate industry isn't very happy with this because every
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  once in a while BBC or one of those organisations will do an
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  expose on this. And all of a sudden if you have
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  modern slavery and chocolate and you combine those together, it's
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  not good for the brands. And so often times the brands
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  will come in and try to fix these things and maybe they open
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  some schools and get the kids out, but then two or three years
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  later they forget it and they move on.
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  So that's one particular area. Another one would be fishing
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  industry. You often see Thailand, 15 year
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  old boy is tricked and deceived onto a boat.
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  The boat goes out for what he thinks is going to be 3 months,
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  but stays out there for four years.
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  This poor kid will end up working 1718 hours a day, every
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  day. If he doesn't, he gets beaten,
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  tortured. The only food he gets the entire
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  time he's there is rice and fish.
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  Nothing nutritious. They often give stimulants to
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  get this person to work if he gets injured.
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  If he gets sick, they just throw him off the side of the boat.
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  At the end of the four years the boat comes in, he gets nothing.
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  So you see, almost every type of kind of agriculture and fishing
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  and even manufacturing has situations where people can be
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  tricked and deceived into it. In Asia, 55% of these cases are
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  in this part of the world, partly because there's a lot of
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  people here. You know, you have 1.4 billion
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  people in China, 1.4 billion people in India.
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  Then you have Japan and all these other locations.
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  But at the same time, the feudal systems that have allowed for
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  this type of trafficking to take place have never been completely
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  dismantled. And so it continues.
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  And then you can say the same for Africa, Latin America, even
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  North America. So out of the 50 million people
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  last year with the United Nations, the NGOs and the
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  governments combined, the world only helped 133,000 which is
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  0.2% not even 1%. Now you might ask this the
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  counter trafficking world not care?
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  Are they lazy? What would a justify that?
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  Profits generated from modern slavery $236 billion.
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  The amount of money available to address this is about 400
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  million, or at least it was up until about four months ago.
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  And now with the US government cutting its funding, it's down
• 14:48
  to about 220. So you have a huge amount of
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  profit and you have this much available to fight it.
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  And think about what we're talking about here.
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  We're talking about girls that are forced to have sex with 20
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  guys a day times 6.3 million or 23 million people in modern
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  slavery, forced labour. How is it that this can exist in
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  this day and age? I can't answer that question.
• 15:10
  You know, it's such a horrible thing that we're dealing with
• 15:12
  here, but it's just not being addressed.
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  Speaking of being addressed, you know, I did have a brief stint
• 15:19
  around 2017 with the NGO sector. I did work with the
• 15:26
  international NGO called CRS, that's Catholic Relief Services.
• 15:31
  They, they did, you know, manage some, some grants from the
• 15:34
  USAID, right. And of course, I, I was on the
• 15:38
  Global Fund grant for malaria and it's really interesting to
• 15:43
  see the great work, the great humanitarian work that these
• 15:47
  NGOs do. A lot of people do not have the
• 15:51
  privilege to understand or to appreciate the intensity of the
• 15:56
  work that, you know, you guys do in the NGO sector.
• 16:01
  And actually made me, or would I say made my heart bleed when I
• 16:06
  heard about the USAID being cut off, right?
• 16:09
  Because this is a massive, how would I say halt in the
• 16:15
  humanitarian tribe globally, there's a lot of lives that have
• 16:18
  been impacted positively by way of the grant.
• 16:23
  But yeah, we know that they did have issues with alleged
• 16:27
  corruption, but to to think about it from a philosophical
• 16:32
  view, right, It's still for the greater good, right.
• 16:38
  If we audit the whole USAID activities, there's in more
• 16:43
  lives that have been impacted positively than any alleged
• 16:48
  cases of corruption, right? How is the industry surviving
• 16:53
  right now? Are there new grants that are
• 16:56
  coming up to take care of those activities that were previously,
• 17:00
  you know, sponsored by way of the USAID grants?
• 17:05
  Well, it's only been about 3 or 4 months since this happened.
• 17:08
  And what we're now beginning to see are the implications of
• 17:10
  this. So you have all the NGO's that
• 17:12
  were supported by USAID, they have to shut down, especially if
• 17:17
  they were 100% dependent on U.S. government money and many of
• 17:20
  them were. You have ministries of health,
• 17:22
  ministries of education, ministries of women's affairs,
• 17:26
  Ministry of Health that had subsidies that were basically
• 17:31
  providing support to all kinds of people, whether it's HIV,
• 17:35
  AIDS or girls education or reproductive health or malaria
• 17:40
  control and so forth. That's just no longer there.
• 17:42
  And so as a result of $40 billion being taken out of the
• 17:46
  system because it was the largest donor in the world, you
• 17:49
  can imagine the impact that this is going to have.
• 17:52
  You're seeing that food isn't getting to places, medicine
• 17:55
  isn't getting to places. People no longer can go to
• 17:58
  school. You know, drugs that were
• 18:01
  available for HIV AIDS treatment are no longer available.
• 18:04
  You can anticipate that literally hundreds of thousands,
• 18:07
  if not millions of people are going to be disenfranchised,
• 18:10
  some of them killed or they they die as a result of this.
• 18:13
  Some of them just can't get on with their life and they can't
• 18:16
  move forward. To me, it's a it's an
• 18:18
  unbelievable situation. As an American, I cannot
• 18:21
  understand how it is that our government moved in the
• 18:24
  direction of doing this. But it's a catastrophic,
• 18:28
  devastating scenario that we're dealing with right now.
• 18:31
  Then we're going to see it unfold over the next couple of
• 18:33
  months and years. In terms of the filling the
• 18:35
  gaps, you see that there's a lot of distractions going on.
• 18:38
  There's Ukraine, there's Gaza, there's, you know, various other
• 18:42
  things that are happening. What used to be a possible pool
• 18:45
  of money to perhaps fill the gap is less so these days.
• 18:50
  And so I just feel like there's going to be a lot of pain and
• 18:52
  suffering for people who no longer get services because of
• 18:56
  this, this change that has happened as a result of the
• 18:59
  United States government saying they don't want to do this
• 19:00
  anymore. And it, and it makes my heart
• 19:03
  bleed too. I mean, I, I wake up in the
• 19:06
  middle of night sometimes just thinking about how can this
• 19:08
  happen? And I can't explain it.
• 19:12
  You know this kind of situation happening, right?
• 19:15
  I come from Nigeria and it is a developing economy.
• 19:21
  This kind of situation happening is sort of a big lesson, right?
• 19:27
  Yes, history has a way of teaching us, you know, from
• 19:33
  experiences of the past in order to perform actions in the
• 19:39
  present, to change the landscape of the future.
• 19:41
  But what would we say? The pulling of the grand plot,
• 19:47
  right? Developing and underdeveloped
• 19:49
  nations, you know, from an economic development
• 19:53
  perspective, right? You cannot solely rely on
• 19:57
  handouts, as harsh as that may sound.
• 20:01
  It's not a wise thing and has never been a wise thing to do.
• 20:07
  What are internally Internally Generated Revenue, would I say
• 20:11
  avenues that the governments of these countries can explore in
• 20:16
  order to fill the voids, the lacunas that have been created
• 20:21
  by the withdrawal of the USAID funds?
• 20:26
  I mean, I think it's a good question.
• 20:27
  I think there there's let's give a couple of scenarios.
• 20:31
  There's going to be some governments that are going to
• 20:33
  say, OK, well we should have had this responsibility from the
• 20:37
  beginning. Let's divert some of the funding
• 20:39
  that we have, let's put it into these programmes and let's see
• 20:42
  what we can do. And then perhaps it becomes more
• 20:44
  long lasting and sustainable. On the other end of the
• 20:47
  spectrum, our countries are just not equipped in order to have
• 20:51
  this abrupt change take place. Maybe if it had been over a
• 20:55
  couple of years and the phased out then they would have been
• 20:57
  OK. But to have a completely
• 20:59
  eliminated immediately without preparing for having the
• 21:03
  revenues available to be able to do that services would just
• 21:06
  stop. They won't exist at all and.
• 21:08
  Then there's a fair number of governments and perhaps will be
• 21:11
  somewhere in between these things.
• 21:13
  So, you know, whenever something like this happens, it seems
• 21:16
  catastrophic, but you know, it's it's a disruption that might
• 21:20
  result in something better or something worse.
• 21:23
  At present, it's something worse.
• 21:26
  But, you know, if they had decided that they really wanted
• 21:29
  to address this, they just should have done it over a
• 21:31
  couple of years and then that would have been less disruptive.
• 21:34
  At least the governments in the in the countries would have been
• 21:37
  prepared to be able to like, transition it to something else.
• 21:40
  To me, the problem is the abruptness that that happened
• 21:43
  all of a sudden just turning off the tap completely.
• 21:46
  And there's just a lot of people that don't have jobs now, and
• 21:50
  there's a lot of people who don't have medicines now and
• 21:52
  services and and that disruption is really hard to make up.
• 21:59
  You know, it's quite a big lesson for, for the global
• 22:03
  landscape, especially on the side of the recipients, let's
• 22:08
  put it that way. But and when we look at your own
• 22:12
  organisation, the the grant forms 25% of your inflow of your
• 22:21
  revenue. How are you guys dealing with
• 22:25
  taking 25% off? Well, let me talk a little bit
• 22:29
  about what we do and how we do it.
• 22:30
  And so that'll that'll help to explain our our model.
• 22:33
  I work for an organisation called the Macon Club.
• 22:36
  We work with the private sector in a positive, supportive, non
• 22:39
  naming and shaming way to help big companies to identify the
• 22:44
  relationship between their business and the possibility of
• 22:47
  modern slavery. So for example, banks, if $236
• 22:51
  billion is generated from modern slavery, that's considered to be
• 22:55
  illegal money. If that money gets into a
• 22:57
  legitimate bank and the regulators find out about it,
• 23:00
  they can be fined and penalised. There was one bank in Australia
• 23:03
  that was fined 1.3 billion Australian dollars because they
• 23:07
  allowed that money to get into the bank and and that had a
• 23:10
  devastating impact. Then you have manufacturers and
• 23:13
  retailers, these are companies that make things or have supply
• 23:16
  chains in there. There could be sweatshops and so
• 23:19
  we work with them to look at their supply chain to find out
• 23:22
  where those places might be. And then we work with them to to
• 23:26
  see that those those locations are no longer exploiting workers
• 23:30
  in the hospitality sector. You have sex trafficking.
• 23:34
  A lot of victims are used in hotels and helping hotels to
• 23:37
  understand the vulnerability of having those types of crimes
• 23:41
  take place in their hotel. So the interesting thing about
• 23:44
  the the private sector is because of the potential for
• 23:49
  reputational risk, if they find any issue related to human
• 23:53
  trafficking, they'll address it very quickly.
• 23:56
  And so we have an association and much of our revenue comes
• 24:00
  from the private sector itself because we have an annual
• 24:03
  subscription among these organisations.
• 24:07
  But when it comes to tool development and training
• 24:09
  development and consultation development and so forth, we had
• 24:13
  funding that came from the US government.
• 24:15
  And as a result of that not being there, we can continue to
• 24:19
  do our programmes, but we can't evolve because we don't have the
• 24:22
  extra capital. And So what I'm doing is I'm
• 24:24
  pivoting. I'm trying to go and find high
• 24:28
  net worth people who are willing to provide donations.
• 24:31
  We're going to governments and helping them to see that we have
• 24:34
  something that's unique to offer, that's having an impact.
• 24:38
  We're basically changing over to look at, you know, the impact of
• 24:42
  tariffs on human trafficking. And so that we will do white
• 24:46
  papers and talks related to those activities.
• 24:49
  So, you know, I have to raise a certain amount of money to make
• 24:51
  up what's been lost. But I'm the lucky 1 because at
• 24:54
  least we have this private sector money come in.
• 24:57
  You have a lot of Ng OS that are, that didn't survive COVID
• 25:01
  and now another group of Ng OS that won't survive this.
• 25:05
  So, you know, once they're gone, they're gone.
• 25:07
  You know, it's, it's not easy to start from scratch to set these
• 25:11
  organisations up. So it's, it's a, it's a major
• 25:14
  crisis for the counter trafficking world.
• 25:16
  Amelia wanted to host a webinar, but the tool couldn't deliver.
• 25:19
  Zooming out, she turned to Webinar Key, an expert solution
• 25:22
  for webinars. With seamless setup and
• 25:25
  intuitive design, she delivered the perfect webinar.
• 25:28
  Webinar Key host webinars like a boss.
• 25:34
  Major, major crisis, but you know, let's say adversity
• 25:40
  sometimes can be a blessing in these guys.
• 25:42
  So this major crisis, I want to believe in my optimistic mindset
• 25:49
  that it will result in when I say innovative methods,
• 25:54
  especially with, you know, organisations like yourself, and
• 25:58
  also be a springboard for new organisations that will be
• 26:02
  proactive instead of being reactive going forward into the
• 26:06
  future. And of course, aggressively
• 26:09
  tackle the, the, the issues that we have at hand, especially in
• 26:14
  the world of trafficking. It's very, very distasteful.
• 26:17
  It's unacceptable. It's not something that you want
• 26:20
  to see in any way, shape or form, but it's, I think the
• 26:25
  world should be more grateful to, to persons like yourself.
• 26:29
  I, I think you, you require more, a greater level of
• 26:33
  appreciation. You know, your organisation for,
• 26:36
  for the kind of work that you do.
• 26:38
  But unfortunately, I don't know why the world tends to, you
• 26:42
  know, play down on song heroes like yourself because it's it's
• 26:46
  not easy what you guys do. Actually, part of the problem is
• 26:50
  the fact that what we're talking about is so extreme that it, you
• 26:55
  know, people don't want to hear about it.
• 26:57
  So like if you hear of a 1213 year old girl who's forced to
• 27:01
  have sex with 20 guys and you're a parent and you have a
• 27:04
  daughter, you're like, well, I don't want to hear about that.
• 27:06
  That's just too sad, too depressing.
• 27:09
  Or somebody who's basically in a brick kiln farm somewhere where
• 27:13
  they're forced to work 17 hours a day and you know, they don't
• 27:17
  get any breaks and you know, many of them, you know, get
• 27:20
  injured and hurt and, you know, they can't work.
• 27:22
  And when you hear these kind of stories, it's like, oh, I don't
• 27:25
  want to hear that. So part of the problem is the
• 27:27
  counter trafficking world years ago had this assumption if we
• 27:31
  told these stories in great detail that it would so motivate
• 27:35
  people to want to do something that they would like step up and
• 27:38
  get involved. But to a certain extent it
• 27:41
  backfired. It had the opposite effect when
• 27:43
  you mentioned. Human Psychology.
• 27:46
  No, I don't want to. I don't want to hear about that.
• 27:48
  It hurts. I'm having a good day today.
• 27:49
  I don't, I don't want to, I don't want to be exposed to that
• 27:52
  discussion. So we have to lessen the amount
• 27:56
  of content, but end up with some kind of a statement about hope
• 28:00
  and the fact that we as human beings can step up and get
• 28:03
  involved. Because if the world is only
• 28:06
  helping 0.2% of the victims, well, I'll, I'll tell you a
• 28:10
  story that that happened to me that that'll put this into
• 28:14
  perspective. So years ago when I was living
• 28:16
  in Nepal, I desperately wanted to do something to address the
• 28:19
  issue of human trafficking. So I decided I was going to
• 28:22
  write a book. As part of that book process, I
• 28:25
  went from shelter to shelter and I interviewed all these girls
• 28:28
  and I went into one shelter and there was a girl named Geeta.
• 28:31
  And every time I approach her, I said, no, no, no, no, I don't
• 28:33
  want to give my story. But she sat and listened to all
• 28:36
  of the other interviews that were taking place.
• 28:39
  When I finished and I was leaving, Geeta comes running up
• 28:41
  and says, I changed my mind. You can have my story.
• 28:44
  So she sat at one side of the table, the rest of us were on
• 28:46
  the other side of the table, and over a three hour period, she
• 28:50
  just told the worst story I'd ever heard of rape and torture
• 28:53
  and disease and betrayal and murder.
• 28:56
  I honestly didn't know what to say to this girl.
• 28:58
  I was shocked. I, you know, shocked into
• 29:00
  silence. Finally I turned her and I said,
• 29:03
  wow, Geeta, you must be so angry at the traffickers for the
• 29:06
  horrible things they did to you. She paused and paused.
• 29:11
  Then she said no, I'm angry at you and you and you.
• 29:14
  She pointed at us. She said where were you?
• 29:17
  Said that every single day she woke up praying for somebody to
• 29:21
  come and help. Nobody came.
• 29:22
  Said she went to school till she was 12.
• 29:24
  She knew that everything out in front of the brothel was right
• 29:26
  out in the open, knowing nobody was doing anything.
• 29:29
  She said she wasn't angry at the traffickers.
• 29:32
  She said they're just bad people doing what bad people do bad
• 29:36
  things. She said she was angry at the
• 29:38
  good people at society for a allowing a 15 year old girl to
• 29:42
  be commercially raped 7000 times only to eventually get AIDS and
• 29:46
  she was dying. So she called us all out.
• 29:49
  She was basically saying that we as a world basically need to
• 29:54
  address this. The 40,000 people like me
• 29:57
  globally that are doing this aren't cutting it.
• 29:59
  We can't. We don't have enough resources.
• 30:02
  We don't have enough people. There's a half million criminals
• 30:05
  out there. There's $236 billion.
• 30:07
  We have to, as people understand this issue, which is why I do
• 30:11
  these podcasts, trying to get in front of populations to almost
• 30:15
  shake them, to say wake up to the fact that this exists, it's
• 30:19
  horrible. People are being
• 30:20
  disenfranchised. It's happening in the UK and
• 30:23
  Hong Kong and Africa, Latin America, North America, every
• 30:26
  country in the world. We have this problem.
• 30:28
  Let's wake up to the fact that this is unacceptable and this
• 30:31
  has to stop. Oh, it's, it's a lot to take in.
• 30:37
  You did mention my neck of the woods to the UK.
• 30:40
  What are the popular, would I say, methods in which human
• 30:47
  trafficking and human slavery are being perpetrated in the UK?
• 30:52
  Yeah, I think it's about 120,000 estimated who are in the UK in
• 30:56
  modern slavery. It would be marijuana farms, it
• 30:59
  would be domestic helpers, it would be forced prostitution, it
• 31:03
  would be manufacturing. It would be, you know, some
• 31:06
  agriculture cases, you know, sweatshops that make things the
• 31:10
  same type of thing you see in countries all over Europe.
• 31:13
  It's not just the UK that has this.
• 31:15
  Every country has their their their number of people.
• 31:17
  In fact, according to the United Nations, the United States has
• 31:21
  about a million people in modern slavery.
• 31:23
  Same types of situations where people are exploited by other
• 31:28
  people in these circumstances. Now, you know, if you stop and
• 31:31
  look at the statistics, the number of people that are
• 31:34
  convicted in let's say the UK, it's probably a couple of 100,
• 31:38
  even though the number of criminals is probably in the
• 31:40
  thousands. And it's partly because this is
• 31:43
  a very difficult crime to identify.
• 31:45
  It's hidden, people don't want you to see it and it requires a
• 31:49
  lot of resources in order to go after the criminals who are in
• 31:52
  these situations. That's a lot, but you know, you
• 31:57
  have been able to help the private sector to recognise
• 32:00
  their role in ending expectation globally.
• 32:04
  Or what's the most compelling business case for businesses to
• 32:09
  act now, you know, with immediate effect?
• 32:13
  Well, actually there was an there was a company, Boohoo, I
• 32:16
  don't know if you know them in the UK, they were.
• 32:19
  Identified. As having modern slavery.
• 32:21
  It wasn't even modern slavery, but they were, they were accused
• 32:25
  actually they were. They were underpaying some of
• 32:27
  their people who were in the UK. Now that scandal and that
• 32:32
  designation of modern slavery reduced their market share by
• 32:36
  about 2 billion sterling pounds. It had a devastating impact on
• 32:41
  that particular company. So no company wants to be in a
• 32:44
  situation where the social media or the traditional media is
• 32:49
  saying you're supporting human trafficking.
• 32:51
  And I go back to chocolate again.
• 32:53
  You want chocolate to be associated with Valentine's Day
• 32:56
  and with Easter and with birthdays.
• 32:59
  And if you have that designation of something like that chocolate
• 33:03
  with modern slavery, it leaves a very bad taste in the mouth of
• 33:07
  the people. They don't want to necessarily
• 33:08
  want to go out and buy it and so forth.
• 33:10
  And so businesses have a sense of urgency in addressing this.
• 33:15
  And as a result of that, I would say that the business world
• 33:18
  probably does more to address helping to stop modern slavery
• 33:22
  than many of the NGOs do simply because they want to protect
• 33:26
  their business. But by protecting their
• 33:28
  business, they also make the world a better place and.
• 33:33
  It's a win, win. Yeah, it's a win, win.
• 33:35
  Yeah. So I mean, who cares what the
• 33:37
  motivation is as long as they get it done?
• 33:40
  And so, you know that big businesses will do anything and
• 33:43
  everything they can not to be associated with exploitation.
• 33:46
  My job is to work with them to ensure that if that happens that
• 33:50
  it's done in a responsible way. It's, it's, it's quite crazy the
• 33:54
  reputational risk that's is associated with modern day
• 33:59
  slavery and looking at the valuation of the business just
• 34:03
  go down the drain because of being associated with modern day
• 34:09
  slavery. But you know, when you talk
• 34:10
  about the chocolate one, it hits a home run for me because
• 34:14
  Nigeria is one of the world's largest population of producers
• 34:19
  rather of, of cocoa. I think in the 90s we were like
• 34:23
  top of the food chain alongside Ghana and Brazil for production
• 34:27
  of cocoa. And looking at what happens in
• 34:30
  West Africa in terms of the cocoa production.
• 34:34
  It's sad, It's sad. But when we talk about the
• 34:37
  practical frameworks or the tools that ethical companies can
• 34:42
  use to audit and fix heating trafficking risks in their
• 34:45
  supply chains, are you able to enlighten the audience on on
• 34:49
  those tools? Well, I mean it, it, it goes
• 34:51
  beyond audit. So we do a baseline of companies
• 34:55
  to identify what they're doing and not doing it.
• 34:57
  And the things that we measure would be things like, does your
• 35:01
  C-Suite and your board know about the issue?
• 35:03
  Do you have policy statements that say that you have 0
• 35:07
  tolerance or you know those policy statements cascading down
• 35:11
  into your supply chain? You have a point person or team
• 35:15
  that focuses on addressing this issue.
• 35:17
  Do you have a risk assessment approach?
• 35:19
  Do you train your staff? Do you raise awareness of your
• 35:22
  staff? And when you do auditing, do you
• 35:24
  really get down to the level of helping people at the lowest
• 35:28
  level of your supply chain? Not at Tier 1 where you know
• 35:31
  there's a lot of auditing taking place, but Tier 2 and 3.
• 35:34
  So what that means is for let's say manufacturing, Tier 1 is
• 35:38
  where you assemble the running shoe.
• 35:40
  Tier 2 is where the rivets and the shoelaces and the textiles
• 35:44
  and so forth come from, separate companies that lead into that.
• 35:47
  And then Tier 3 is the raw material you need to make sure
• 35:50
  that you're going all the way down to that level.
• 35:52
  Do you have remediation approaches in place to address
• 35:56
  issues if you find them? Do you have grievance mechanisms
• 35:59
  to allow people within your supply chain?
• 36:02
  So we measure all of those things and if they don't have
• 36:04
  it, we work with these companies to put those things in place.
• 36:08
  And once they put it in place, then let's say that you have a
• 36:11
  company that has 300 and 350,000 people within their main
• 36:15
  company. And within the supply chain, all
• 36:18
  those systems and procedures protect 350,000 people.
• 36:22
  So if you have like 100 companies that have half
• 36:25
  million, you know, employees associated with it and you fix
• 36:28
  those companies, you're able to immunise and reduce the
• 36:32
  vulnerability significantly across many, many sectors.
• 36:35
  And that's the reason why I left the more traditional NGO world
• 36:40
  to focus on the private sector, because I feel like a lot more
• 36:43
  potential can be done as a result of that.
• 36:46
  You know, we have what I say certification organisations like
• 36:51
  B Corp. So what other certifications
• 36:57
  should our audience be leaking out for in terms of supporting
• 37:03
  and patronising organisations that are doing their homework in
• 37:08
  terms of anti trafficking and anti modern day slavery?
• 37:15
  Well, fair trade often as a concept covers a lot of the
• 37:19
  things that I'm talking about. But you know, there was an
• 37:22
  organisation that wanted to certify companies to say that
• 37:26
  they are slavery free and they thought this was a good idea and
• 37:30
  they even went to the United Nations and talked to them.
• 37:32
  But no company is going to sign that or accept that because they
• 37:37
  don't know if they have slavery or not.
• 37:39
  You know, that's The thing is that the the big problem is that
• 37:42
  most companies don't have oversight of their entire
• 37:45
  business because they have so many suppliers and sub suppliers
• 37:49
  associated with it. So at present, there's no
• 37:52
  certification that's specifically related to modern
• 37:54
  slavery. I wish there was.
• 37:56
  It just doesn't exist at this particular time.
• 37:59
  So in terms of those the, the existent would I say
• 38:04
  certifications, what are the items they look out for?
• 38:08
  What are the form of audits that they perform?
• 38:11
  Because I know the likes of the B Corp, right?
• 38:13
  They perform audits over the operations and supply chain of
• 38:18
  the organisations that they certified.
• 38:20
  They don't just hand out those certifications.
• 38:22
  Well, what's the process like in terms of yeah.
• 38:25
  Well, I mean, BSCI is, is one of the classification.
• 38:29
  SETEX is another one. Verte puts out various audits
• 38:32
  and so forth. And again, what they're looking
• 38:34
  for is the 11 indicators of modern slavery.
• 38:37
  This would be, you know, whether or not a person has access to
• 38:40
  their papers, if they're working in a particular location,
• 38:44
  whether they paid for their job, whether they're forced to do
• 38:47
  overtime, whether there's violin or harassment or change of, you
• 38:52
  know, what they expected to get versus what they actually get,
• 38:55
  etcetera, etcetera. So auditors go in and we'll look
• 38:58
  for these 11 indicators of modern slavery.
• 39:01
  And then based on that, if an audit comes back and says
• 39:04
  there's a vulnerability, this is when the brand is informed.
• 39:08
  And then the brands will work with organisations like us to
• 39:11
  figure out how to stop that from happening.
• 39:14
  So in the old days, they would cut and run, terminate a
• 39:17
  contract and leave. Now what we suggest is the
• 39:20
  company works with that factory to figure out if they can fix it
• 39:25
  so that these things don't exist.
• 39:26
  Because if you cut and run, then you have all these people who
• 39:29
  are working for that factory who are disenfranchised even more.
• 39:33
  And so, you know, the, the interesting thing about modern
• 39:36
  slavery is that when you hear terminology like slavery, you
• 39:39
  think of extreme things, you think about people in chains and
• 39:43
  then, you know, fields and everything else.
• 39:45
  Context of modern slavery and forced labour.
• 39:48
  It could be that a person simply doesn't have their passport
• 39:51
  because the company's holding on to it.
• 39:53
  That's an indicator of modern slavery.
• 39:55
  They paid a fee for their job, which they're not supposed to.
• 39:59
  That's an indicator of modern slavery.
• 40:01
  They have excessive overtime that they can't say no to.
• 40:05
  That's an indicator of modern slavery.
• 40:06
  So a lot of these things can be fixed.
• 40:09
  And our job is to work with these companies to see that that
• 40:11
  happens. You know, this leads me to think
• 40:16
  about something that I leverage on very, very much in my own
• 40:20
  organisation. And of course, it shares my
• 40:23
  initials, which is AI, artificial intelligence.
• 40:27
  So with artificial intelligence, blockchain technology, big data,
• 40:33
  new data systems, how is technology changing the
• 40:37
  landscape and reshaping the way in which we detect and prevent
• 40:42
  forced to label well? I'm going to first start with
• 40:45
  how it's used by the bad guys and then I'll talk about how we
• 40:47
  can use it. Is a new phenomena that's
• 40:51
  happening in this part of the world in Asia is human
• 40:54
  trafficking of educated professionals into places like
• 41:00
  Cambodia and Myanmar and Lao. And when they get there, they're
• 41:04
  forced to basically scam for 1415 hours a day, every day.
• 41:09
  So it's estimated about 220,000 young professionals initially
• 41:13
  from Southeast Asia, but now they're getting these people
• 41:16
  from South Asia in Africa and they're ending up in these scam
• 41:20
  centres. And so those scam centres use a
• 41:24
  lot of technology in order to develop scripts, in order to
• 41:27
  scam people, you know, to develop websites that look like
• 41:31
  they're real, but they're not to use cryptocurrency and so forth.
• 41:35
  And as a result of that, the organised crime is very
• 41:38
  organised and they're very much adapting AI to go after kind of
• 41:44
  money all over the world, the victims in the United States and
• 41:48
  Africa, Europe, Asia and so forth.
• 41:51
  So, you know, the same technology can be used in order
• 41:53
  to fight that. Like you could have a command
• 41:56
  centre somewhere in the West where you basically have hackers
• 42:00
  for good whose job is to break into these these scam centres in
• 42:05
  order to shut them down. It hasn't happened up until now,
• 42:09
  but that's really the, that's really what needs to happen.
• 42:12
  You know, and sometimes even like the, the Wi-Fi for these
• 42:16
  centres comes from Skylink from Musk's organisation.
• 42:20
  If you could turn those things off, you would be able to shut
• 42:23
  these things down. So technology can be used for
• 42:26
  good, but it also can be used for the criminals as well.
• 42:30
  The one thing I want to say about this particular new
• 42:32
  phenomena of human trafficking into scam centres is I've never
• 42:36
  seen violence like this before. If you don't meet your target as
• 42:40
  a victim in one of these centres, they take these are
• 42:43
  you, they beat you. Sometimes they beat you to
• 42:46
  death, and then they videotape the killing and then they sell
• 42:49
  the videotapes. It's called Harm Core, and it's
• 42:52
  a new phenomena that we're seeing take place that never
• 42:57
  thought we would see. But these videos are extreme
• 43:00
  because there's a certain number of people who get a rush off of
• 43:04
  seeing violence like that, and they're willing to pay a lot of
• 43:07
  money in order to see it. So these are just some of the
• 43:10
  offshoots of, you know, technology being used in a way
• 43:14
  to to basically hurt people. That's just so much to take in.
• 43:23
  It's extreme. You mentioned Africa right there
• 43:27
  in the mix. Like what?
• 43:29
  What areas in Africa do they peak?
• 43:31
  From Ghana, from Kenya, from Zambia, from Zimbabwe, from you
• 43:38
  know where else, Egypt, Tunisia. So what's happening is these
• 43:42
  scam centres are looking for people who are educated but
• 43:46
  desperate for some work. And so they, they'll put
• 43:49
  something on social media, It looks like it's a real job
• 43:52
  advertisement. And the person from those
• 43:54
  countries will say, I, I want the job because it looks like
• 43:58
  it's good money, 5000 U.S. dollars per month and so forth.
• 44:01
  So they have a legitimate interview.
• 44:04
  And it really seems like it's a regular interview.
• 44:06
  And then like they'll actually be have the ticket sent to them.
• 44:10
  And then when they get there, they're picked up in a van and
• 44:13
  taken to a place that's pretty much like a like a prison.
• 44:16
  So there's literally thousands of people in there whose sole
• 44:19
  purpose is to scam people. And the scam that they're using
• 44:22
  is called a pig butchering scam. So the idea is the victim of the
• 44:27
  scam is being fattened like a pig before the slaughter.
• 44:30
  And the way it works is, and you may have received these
• 44:33
  yourself, you get a WhatsApp message that says, hi, Michael,
• 44:36
  how are you doing? And then you go back and you
• 44:39
  say, well, I'm not Michael. And then the person says, oh,
• 44:41
  well, I'm so sorry. I thought you were Michael.
• 44:43
  I'm a 27 year old Thai woman. I'm in a new city and I'm very
• 44:48
  lonely. And you're so nice.
• 44:49
  And so they developed this text messaging love affair and it
• 44:53
  goes on for five or six weeks without mentioning anything at
• 44:57
  all. They just developed this
• 44:58
  relationship and they're talking about how they love each other
• 45:01
  and every once in a while maybe one of these victims will
• 45:04
  pretend to be the the girlfriend and she'll get on Zoom and so
• 45:07
  forth. Then she basically says, oh, I
• 45:09
  made 5000 U.S. dollars on crypto.
• 45:12
  So the guy says, wow, how did you do it?
• 45:14
  She says, well let me show you. So she gets 5000, puts it, it
• 45:18
  becomes 10,000. So she convinces him to put 5000
• 45:21
  in. He puts it in, it gets 10,000
• 45:25
  and she gets him to take it physically out.
• 45:27
  He has to have it physically in his hand.
• 45:30
  Then she says put it in again, 10,000, it'll double to 20,000.
• 45:34
  He's got it in his hands. She waits a week and then she
• 45:37
  says there's this coin coming out.
• 45:39
  If you put $1,000,000 into it, you're going to double it.
• 45:42
  Then we can be together. Life is going to be good.
• 45:44
  You saw that I'm your I'm your did and you saw that you could
• 45:47
  take the money in. So she convinces him to put all
• 45:50
  of his life savings into into this crypto thing that is
• 45:55
  fraudulent. And once it's all in there, they
• 45:57
  turn the switch off and they lose everything.
• 46:00
  So about $65 billion just out of the United States was lost as a
• 46:04
  result of these pig butchering scams.
• 46:06
  Anyways, I know I've gotten some of those messages before and my
• 46:10
  my responses are not always very nice, but it's always something
• 46:14
  along the lines of go go get a live, go get a job.
• 46:17
  You can't do that to me. And it's crazy.
• 46:20
  Yeah, because we keep getting those messages very, very
• 46:24
  frequently. Very frequently, yeah.
• 46:27
  It's crazy. Some of them even send you
• 46:29
  certain links and you know, by the time you actually go into
• 46:33
  the link, they would have efficient access into into your
• 46:38
  device. So guys out there, be very
• 46:41
  careful. Trust anyone you don't know at
• 46:44
  all. And even if you think you know
• 46:46
  the person, it's best like what? In the United States, they have
• 46:50
  AI that is able to take a person's voice.
• 46:53
  And So what they'll do is they'll come up with a script
• 46:57
  and they'll call the mother with the daughter's voice that was,
• 47:00
  you know, gotten from Facebook and so forth.
• 47:02
  And it says, mom, I'm in trouble.
• 47:04
  You need to send money to this. I can't talk right now.
• 47:07
  Here's the address. Send $5000 immediately.
• 47:10
  So the mom obviously thinks, well, my daughter's in trouble.
• 47:14
  She gets the message and, you know, she, she doesn't think to
• 47:16
  call the daughter. She just basically, you know,
• 47:20
  does what she's told because the daughter says, I can't talk on
• 47:23
  the phone now. And so money is very quickly.
• 47:27
  There's another case here in Hong Kong where there was a Zoom
• 47:29
  call and they used AI to develop an avatar of the chairman of the
• 47:35
  board. And so there's these young, you
• 47:38
  know, accountants there and the chairman says to them on Zoom, I
• 47:41
  need you to send $25 million to this immediately.
• 47:45
  I don't want you to hesitate. Do it.
• 47:47
  So they're seeing their chairperson basically say this
• 47:49
  to them. And so they transferred the
• 47:51
  money and it was just AI generated avatar.
• 47:54
  It wasn't even a real person. So I mean, no, we, we've gotten
• 47:58
  to a point where because you can pretty much replicate anything,
• 48:03
  you just really don't know what's true anymore and what's
• 48:05
  real and what's not real. You know, the pendulum has gone
• 48:09
  so far to the, to the left that eventually there has to be
• 48:13
  something that truths what it is that we see.
• 48:16
  And and I, I hope that exists, because otherwise you know
• 48:20
  what's real and what's not real. It's crazy, yeah.
• 48:24
  Anyways, you know, being a finance person, I know that
• 48:27
  there are there are controls in place by these financial
• 48:31
  institutions, especially when it comes to organisational finance,
• 48:35
  their levels of approvals, those levels of approvals are not in
• 48:40
  place, especially for setting threshold of transactions.
• 48:43
  They won't allow those transactions to go through.
• 48:46
  So yeah, they're trying in in their own way to ensure that
• 48:50
  these things are being tackled even in terms of personal
• 48:53
  finance right now. You know, digital banks like
• 48:56
  shout out to the likes of Monzo, for example, and why's they have
• 49:01
  this delay in executing transactions and sometimes ask
• 49:05
  you certain questions to ensure that the transactions are, are
• 49:08
  legitimate. So yeah, they're, they're doing
• 49:11
  their own things. But you know, you, you've been
• 49:14
  able to consult across sectors. How do you foster cross sector
• 49:18
  collaboration between NGOs, corporations and governments
• 49:22
  without losing that momentum? Well, I mean, the difficulty is
• 49:27
  that the private sector doesn't trust the NGO sector and the NGO
• 49:30
  sector doesn't try trust the private sector.
• 49:33
  So and it's partly because the NGOs feel like it's the, it's
• 49:36
  the private sector that's doing the problem and the private
• 49:39
  sector feels like the NGOs, all they do is wag a finger and talk
• 49:42
  about how terrible you are. So that relationship, you have
• 49:46
  to find NGOs that understand that in fact within private
• 49:51
  companies are NGO like people who focus on compliance and
• 49:55
  sustainability and ESG in order to prevent the company from
• 49:59
  getting into trouble. Now, governments and NGOs get
• 50:03
  along pretty well, but governments in the private
• 50:05
  sector, again, don't know how to talk to each other.
• 50:08
  And so they, they have a different language, they have a
• 50:10
  different pace. And the government is always
• 50:13
  afraid that if you work with the government sector, it's just
• 50:16
  going to result in more rules and regulations and, you know,
• 50:20
  legal restrictions and everything else.
• 50:22
  And so they try to kind of avoid that type of relationship.
• 50:26
  And so part of the problem is that you almost need all of
• 50:30
  these groups to work together, and it's hard to get them in the
• 50:33
  same room to focus on the same topic.
• 50:37
  Wow. You know, I'm pretty much
• 50:39
  smiling because from my own working experience, I've had my
• 50:43
  fair share of, you know, the three, the three sectors.
• 50:46
  I started to be working with the NGO sector, moved to the private
• 50:50
  sector and you know, I was an auditor with, you know, the big
• 50:54
  four accounting fans, PWCKPMT. And I had the privilege of
• 51:00
  auditing some government sector entities, you know, and of
• 51:04
  course, you know, you see you're able to compete that triangle
• 51:07
  and you have that understanding. But sometimes you have
• 51:10
  individuals who are able to go across and complete those
• 51:13
  triangles. So you understand the dynamics
• 51:16
  in terms of the relationships and the communications across
• 51:20
  the different entities. But like you rightly said, trust
• 51:24
  is key, you know. But.
• 51:26
  There's another factor as well, and that is OK.
• 51:28
  So as human beings, we don't pick the causes that we support.
• 51:33
  The cause picks us. So I didn't one day wake up and
• 51:36
  say there's poverty or there's girls education or there's
• 51:39
  communicable diseases and human, I think I'll use human
• 51:43
  trafficking. It kept coming to me.
• 51:45
  There's something in my DNA that's drawn to that.
• 51:48
  You're. Born to be a fighter.
• 51:50
  Well, everybody has it. They just don't.
• 51:52
  They don't, they don't activate it, they don't look into it.
• 51:55
  Everyone has a 'cause my sister, it's animals, my brother, it's
• 51:58
  climate change. I'm human beings and human
• 52:01
  trafficking. But within the governments,
• 52:03
  within the private sector and within the NGOs, if you can find
• 52:08
  those people who really do care about this and are willing to
• 52:12
  collaborate, and you bring those people together, then 1 + 1 + 1
• 52:17
  = 111, not 3, because the synergistic effect of that
• 52:21
  relationship really makes a difference.
• 52:23
  So it's not about governments, it's about people within
• 52:27
  governments, people within the private sector, people within
• 52:29
  the NGO sector who are by their very nature collaborative.
• 52:34
  And you have to mine those people, You have to find those
• 52:36
  people. And if you can do that, then you
• 52:38
  can make this triangle work. If you can't just randomly get
• 52:42
  people from different divisions so they don't care about it,
• 52:44
  then nothing's gonna happen, and that's generally the way it
• 52:48
  works. Apparently you need to find
• 52:51
  people that are genuinely passionate about these courses,
• 52:54
  right? And yeah, we'll definitely make
• 52:58
  some traction in the course of the work, but like, as someone
• 53:02
  with reach, wealth of experience, right?
• 53:06
  So what's 1 story from your work that stays with you like a
• 53:11
  moment? I reminded you why this fight is
• 53:13
  personal. Well, I mean, there's so many of
• 53:17
  them. There is a young woman that I
• 53:20
  met early in my career who was a sex trafficking victim and she
• 53:26
  was in the brothel and she was pregnant three times and two
• 53:29
  times they gave her an abortion. The third time they said okay,
• 53:32
  you can have the kid. So the kid was born and she was
• 53:35
  still working in the brothel and the kid was there for two or
• 53:38
  three or four years. And then one of the patrons made
• 53:42
  a pass at the kids. So the woman went to to the
• 53:45
  Madam and said, can I put my kid in school?
• 53:48
  I'll work harder. I'll do whatever it is that I
• 53:50
  can. So the kid was put into a
• 53:52
  boarding school. And so the mother didn't have
• 53:55
  any contact with her, but once or twice a year she'd go to the
• 53:58
  school and she just look at the her son, you know, like as he
• 54:03
  was playing sports or, you know, doing whatever he's doing from
• 54:06
  afar. And she felt so proud that this
• 54:09
  is my son, but she didn't know who the son was.
• 54:11
  The school kind of adopted the kid and so forth.
• 54:13
  And so she eventually got AIDS and she was dying.
• 54:17
  And she should have probably died like a year earlier, but
• 54:20
  she wanted to be there for her son's graduation.
• 54:23
  So she was, the graduation took place.
• 54:25
  Here's this woman, she's emaciated.
• 54:27
  She has, you know, she's probably around 90 lbs or
• 54:31
  something or less dying of AIDS. And all she wanted to do was to
• 54:34
  see her son graduated. She managed to get up to him and
• 54:38
  she touched his robe. That's as far as she got, but
• 54:41
  she just wanted to have some contact with him.
• 54:44
  And, and that was it. And, and that story stuck with
• 54:47
  me simply because, you know, here's a woman who had nothing
• 54:51
  in her life. Everything was stolen away from
• 54:53
  her, her health, her freedom and everything else.
• 54:56
  But she had this son and her whole purpose was to make sure
• 54:59
  that her son eventually kind of was able to move forward and so
• 55:02
  forth. And, and, and when I listened to
• 55:05
  her say that, I mean, I, I teared up, I, I, I couldn't stop
• 55:08
  myself. There was there was another girl
• 55:09
  in Nepal. She came back, she was HIV
• 55:11
  positive. She was dying.
• 55:13
  And she said, I'm going to stop other people from doing this.
• 55:18
  I'm gonna go into the villages in the hills by myself and I'm
• 55:21
  just gonna sit there and tell everybody about this.
• 55:24
  And so we said, you know, you're very sick, you can't do that.
• 55:26
  And she said, I don't care. I'm sick.
• 55:28
  What difference does it make? So we sent a social worker with
• 55:31
  her, and she went from village to village, and she'd just go
• 55:34
  there and she'd sit down and start talking.
• 55:36
  Maybe two people, 10 people, 20 people, eventually 100 people
• 55:40
  listening to her story. At the end, everyone's crying,
• 55:43
  saying, oh, my gosh, what do we need to do?
• 55:45
  We didn't know anything about this.
• 55:47
  And then the social worker would say, well, I'm glad you asked
• 55:49
  that. Down the road, we'd set up a
• 55:51
  registration for schools. Another one, we're doing a
• 55:54
  prevention project and on site, they basically set something up.
• 55:59
  And so these types of heroes, you know, I'm, I'm not a hero.
• 56:02
  I don't do anything related to this.
• 56:04
  I didn't have the experience. They are the heroes.
• 56:06
  They're the ones that have experienced this.
• 56:09
  They're the ones that come back. They're the ones that are
• 56:11
  basically doing everything they can with the remaining part of
• 56:14
  their life in order to address this, this particular issue.
• 56:17
  Those are the people who inspire me.
• 56:22
  You know, somebody that has LED both the grassroot initiatives
• 56:26
  and global collaborations. What kind of leadership mindset
• 56:30
  is needed to navigate the complexity of modern day
• 56:35
  slavery? I, I think it really comes down
• 56:38
  to understanding psychology of people, a psychology of
• 56:41
  organisations. Like for example, if I want to
• 56:45
  find people who share my interest in addressing human
• 56:49
  trafficking, I'll do a talk. I do about 150 talks a year.
• 56:53
  I'll get in front of an audience of 100 people, could be bankers,
• 56:56
  could be auditors, it could be, you know, any number of types
• 56:59
  of. And I do a talk and at the end
• 57:02
  three or four people will come up and say to me, I don't know
• 57:05
  what it is about this topic, but I feel like I need to do
• 57:07
  something. Can I do something in my
• 57:09
  organisation? Can you give me some
• 57:11
  information, some tools? And so I mine those people.
• 57:16
  And once I find them, I say, well, OK, what organisation you
• 57:19
  work for? Oh, I work for EY.
• 57:21
  OK, well, where do you work in EY?
• 57:23
  OK, let me give you some information.
• 57:25
  And then within that company, we get those individuals to kind of
• 57:28
  infect them with a sense of good and a sense of responsibility.
• 57:32
  So understanding that when you meet people or institutions that
• 57:37
  are seeking to get involved, you have to 1st understand what
• 57:40
  their value system, what are they willing to put into this?
• 57:43
  How are they going to address this?
• 57:46
  There's no cookie cutter approach this.
• 57:48
  You have to adjust your pitch in your recommendations to every
• 57:52
  single scenario with the hope and expectation that that
• 57:55
  eventually translates into some action.
• 57:58
  So again, if I could, if you could get like a million people
• 58:02
  to do one thing related to human trafficking, that would that
• 58:05
  would make a big difference. One thing people can do is to
• 58:08
  learn about this issue and just tell other people about it, or
• 58:11
  to put articles on LinkedIn or, or to teach your kids about it.
• 58:15
  You can be a responsible consumer.
• 58:17
  Before you buy branded items, go online to see whether or not
• 58:21
  that company has a policy related to human trafficking.
• 58:24
  They do congratulate them. If they don't, in a very polite
• 58:27
  way, you can say I like your products.
• 58:28
  I'd feel better if you had that. Companies respond to that.
• 58:32
  You can volunteer. You know, I have about 150
• 58:34
  volunteers that work with me. In fact, my youngest volunteer
• 58:37
  was nine years old. This girl saw me in a
• 58:40
  documentary. She approached me and said, Mr
• 58:42
  Friedman, human trafficking is awful.
• 58:45
  I want to help. I said you're nine years old.
• 58:48
  She said So what? I said you're nine years old.
• 58:52
  She said 9 year olds are the new 16 year olds.
• 58:54
  Give me a chance. So I said what can?
• 58:56
  You do. I love that.
• 58:58
  Yeah, she said. Well, you know, I mean, I can
• 59:00
  find anything on the Internet. That's my God-given gift.
• 59:03
  And so I had a couple of second year Ivy League law students
• 59:08
  couldn't find stuff on the Internet.
• 59:09
  I gave it to her. Two days later, she came back
• 59:12
  with everything I needed. Because each one of us has a
• 59:15
  particular gift that we have. It could be public speaking, it
• 59:19
  could be writing, it could be networking, it could be
• 59:21
  podcasting, it could be selling T-shirts.
• 59:23
  It doesn't matter. If you apply that to
• 59:25
  volunteerism, then you're making the world a better place.
• 59:28
  And at the same time, you're contributing your gift to the
• 59:31
  world as well, or just donating and fundraising.
• 59:34
  I mean, there's a lot of hurt out there are organisations that
• 59:37
  don't have the funding because of the USAID cut and other cuts
• 59:41
  and so forth. Skip a couple of meals, take
• 59:43
  that money, identify a local organisation, donate it to them.
• 59:47
  Any amount is is welcome and is a blessing to these
• 59:50
  organisations. So these are the things that we
• 59:52
  can do. And again, if you could get a
• 59:53
  million people to do that, that would add up to something quite
• 59:56
  big. And that's really what's needed
• 59:58
  because the 40,000 people are not enough to have even 1% of
• 1:00:03
  these people helped. We need everyone to take a
• 1:00:06
  stand. And get involved and and and
• 1:00:08
  help with this process. You know, Speaking of mining
• 1:00:12
  people, you were able to mine an ex PwC and KPMG auditor, right?
• 1:00:19
  Who now runs a global top 3% podcast to join this mission.
• 1:00:26
  And of course, I've spread the word about what is happening in
• 1:00:31
  the world today. And you have been privileged to
• 1:00:36
  leave 35 plus years in Asia, but also raise your own sons in the
• 1:00:44
  US. So how do you reconcile the
• 1:00:46
  global and personal dimensions of your mission?
• 1:00:51
  Well, my kids grew up in Nepal, Bangladesh and Thailand.
• 1:00:54
  So when they went to college, they went to the United States.
• 1:00:58
  And so, you know, my, my ex-wife was Indian.
• 1:01:02
  So my kids don't look anything like me.
• 1:01:04
  They're, you know, they, they're just, they don't look like their
• 1:01:08
  dad. And so even when I was in
• 1:01:09
  Thailand, I'd be walking down the beach with these two young
• 1:01:12
  kind of, you know, the darker children.
• 1:01:15
  And people would come up to me and say, what are you doing with
• 1:01:16
  those kids? Because they didn't think that
• 1:01:18
  they were associated with me. But when my kids went to the
• 1:01:21
  United States, you know, The thing is, you may know this from
• 1:01:24
  your own experience when you lived in another location.
• 1:01:28
  People don't understand what that experience is like.
• 1:01:30
  They don't. So my kids would say, I grew up
• 1:01:33
  in Thailand, they'd say where you tie, you know, and it
• 1:01:36
  confused people. So they just didn't talk about
• 1:01:38
  it. They just integrated into
• 1:01:41
  society. They went on.
• 1:01:43
  My one of my sons is an emergency room doctor.
• 1:01:45
  The other's a veterinarian. You know, for whatever reason,
• 1:01:49
  they just, you know, succeeded and far beyond where I ever did
• 1:01:52
  academically. And they did quite well.
• 1:01:54
  But, you know, some people who have the experience of being in
• 1:01:57
  an expatriate situation do well and some don't.
• 1:02:01
  In my case, my kids did well. They thrived in that situation.
• 1:02:05
  They understand the world as not being a terribly scary place.
• 1:02:10
  They know how to navigate going to places.
• 1:02:12
  My son was recently in Tanzania. He's going back to I think it's
• 1:02:18
  Ghana or something and so forth. He's following the footsteps of
• 1:02:21
  his dad and so forth. But you know, the experience
• 1:02:24
  worked quite well for them. Yeah, it's, it's quite
• 1:02:28
  interesting. I was telling somebody
• 1:02:30
  yesterday, you know, I come from Nigeria and even in Nigeria, I,
• 1:02:34
  my parents are from different tribes, right?
• 1:02:38
  There's something about having that ethnical dynamism in a
• 1:02:43
  home. It trains you to be neutrally
• 1:02:46
  minded as a person, and it trains you to respect multiple
• 1:02:52
  cultures as opposed to coming from just one ethnical
• 1:02:55
  background. And I learned that very early in
• 1:02:59
  life. Respect, you know, those that
• 1:03:00
  come before you, respect those people from your father's side,
• 1:03:04
  from your mother's side, and learn to be a hybrid that
• 1:03:07
  becomes the best of both worlds and navigates the world to learn
• 1:03:13
  more. And, you know, paid forward.
• 1:03:15
  I told you earlier, I loved geography as a, as a, as a, as a
• 1:03:18
  young child, right? So it's one of those things that
• 1:03:21
  really inspired me. I love geography so much, but I
• 1:03:24
  love to learn the ways of life of people across the world.
• 1:03:29
  You know, geography helps you to be able to explore and also
• 1:03:34
  learn. I think that's one of those
• 1:03:37
  things that probably, you know, your your sons had in them, you
• 1:03:41
  know, learning to become becoming the best of both
• 1:03:44
  worlds. And of course, you know, if your
• 1:03:46
  parents actually instil, that's discipline and self-confidence
• 1:03:50
  and you, you will be, would I say, a high level hybrid that
• 1:03:56
  can succeed anywhere you go to. Well, I have 5 brothers and
• 1:04:00
  sisters and none of them have travelled anywhere.
• 1:04:02
  So they look at me as kind of the black sheep of the family.
• 1:04:05
  You know what happened to him? You know, he's visited 70
• 1:04:09
  countries and you know, he's always working in this country
• 1:04:12
  or that country and meeting they, they can't, they can't
• 1:04:15
  fathom my life. And so even a place like Hong
• 1:04:20
  Kong, it's a highly sophisticated culture.
• 1:04:23
  Highly sophisticated. They would think that it's
• 1:04:25
  houses on stilts. Then my family has a yeah, they
• 1:04:29
  have a Tarzan mentality of Kenya.
• 1:04:31
  They would think that it, there's no high rises there.
• 1:04:33
  There's no, you know, it's just this crazy assumption that like,
• 1:04:36
  I mean, you go to Africa, it's highly sophisticated, highly
• 1:04:39
  educated people. You know, some of the, some of
• 1:04:42
  the most brilliant people I've met have been in some of these
• 1:04:44
  countries and the world just doesn't understand it.
• 1:04:47
  People have no idea what China's like.
• 1:04:50
  I visited their head office is there for years and, and it's a
• 1:04:53
  very sophisticated culture, you know, and it's partly simply
• 1:04:56
  because we have this niampic kind of way of looking at, at
• 1:05:02
  the world and, and it's, it's so limited and part of the reason
• 1:05:06
  why you can't sustain a conversation.
• 1:05:08
  I I live in Asia, when I go back, my brothers and sisters
• 1:05:11
  can't sustain a 15 minute conversation with me about my
• 1:05:14
  experience because they have no context.
• 1:05:17
  It wasn't until my mom went to Bangladesh and she spent three
• 1:05:20
  weeks with with us. Then when when I when I go home.
• 1:05:24
  Now she can talk for 10 hours on that topic 'cause she opened up
• 1:05:27
  her mind to, to the world. And, and part of the reason why
• 1:05:31
  we have all of these biases and these misconceptions is people
• 1:05:35
  just don't understand that the world is a, is a wonderful,
• 1:05:38
  beautiful, amazing place. And we should get out there and
• 1:05:41
  see it and experience it. Experience the people and the
• 1:05:44
  animals and the climates and the, and the geography and
• 1:05:47
  everything else. And I find travelling is the
• 1:05:49
  best way to to basically educate yourself about.
• 1:05:52
  This travel is the best form of education.
• 1:05:55
  Absolutely. You have to go out there to
• 1:05:58
  experience it. And every continent has its
• 1:06:01
  different vibe, right? Yeah.
• 1:06:03
  When you when you go on the land, you know, you feel it.
• 1:06:06
  But yes, people should travel more.
• 1:06:08
  Actually, that's just what I was saying.
• 1:06:10
  Your new book, Awakening the Advocates just launched.
• 1:06:14
  So why did you choose the short story format to share your
• 1:06:17
  decades of insight? Well, part of it, it was I, I've
• 1:06:22
  done 600 LinkedIn articles and LinkedIn has 520 words.
• 1:06:27
  And so I compiled, you know, 110 of them that tried to made sense
• 1:06:32
  of it. So during COVID, I committed
• 1:06:33
  myself to doing an article a day on LinkedIn.
• 1:06:37
  That's 520 words a day for 365 days.
• 1:06:41
  And so I did it on, on testimonials.
• 1:06:43
  I did it on, you know, situations that people
• 1:06:46
  experience. And part of what I did is I
• 1:06:49
  tried to explore my own journey from when I was a kid to
• 1:06:52
  identify how is it this shy, introverted kid from New England
• 1:06:57
  ended up doing this work globally on human trafficking.
• 1:07:00
  So I had a mentor that said you only really remember about 150
• 1:07:04
  or 200 events that happened in your life in a very milestone
• 1:07:09
  related way. I mean, what did you have for
• 1:07:12
  lunch yesterday or breakfast the day before?
• 1:07:15
  People don't remember those kind of things.
• 1:07:17
  Most days are just days, but they're, you know, there are
• 1:07:20
  certain specific events and activities that take place that
• 1:07:24
  you remember. And so I wanted to make sense of
• 1:07:26
  like when I was five years old and I had this experience.
• 1:07:30
  How did that impact the experience was my parents took
• 1:07:33
  us to the beach and then when they were leaving, they forgot
• 1:07:36
  me or they thought I was with them.
• 1:07:38
  And then for like 10 minutes I was by myself on the beach
• 1:07:41
  crying and hysterical thinking that, you know, my parents left
• 1:07:45
  me. They just didn't account for
• 1:07:46
  the, you know, the 6th kid they have, you know, the, the
• 1:07:49
  balloons and all the other things that they are doing.
• 1:07:52
  But that was an abandonment moment for me.
• 1:07:54
  And it was and it had an impact that lasted, you know,
• 1:07:57
  throughout my life. So those kinds of experiences,
• 1:08:00
  if you if you study them and you and you relate them and you
• 1:08:03
  think about them, you meditate on that and you and you try to
• 1:08:07
  make sense of what, what created that justice sense in me?
• 1:08:11
  Having been bullied, you know, created a situation where I felt
• 1:08:15
  like there was a sense of justice.
• 1:08:17
  Having seen other people who were, you know, in injustice and
• 1:08:21
  so forth, was a catalyst for that type of thing.
• 1:08:24
  And so the book basically tries to make sense of what makes a
• 1:08:28
  person a service individual who wants to address justice.
• 1:08:32
  What were these benchmarks that happened over time?
• 1:08:35
  That's why it's kind of called a memoir.
• 1:08:38
  Well, I, I'm going to take a quick look at my LinkedIn
• 1:08:42
  profile, but I think I have something on my profile relating
• 1:08:47
  to create an impact. OK, I wanted to be accurate
• 1:08:51
  storytelling for impact and influence.
• 1:08:55
  That's the very last line on my LinkedIn bio, right?
• 1:08:59
  You have written 5th and of course you have been named one
• 1:09:03
  of the most influential LinkedIn voices in Hong Kong.
• 1:09:07
  So what has storytelling taught you about building public
• 1:09:11
  empathy? Well, I mean, I actually, I used
• 1:09:15
  to have a fear of public speaking.
• 1:09:17
  And this goes all the way back to the third grade.
• 1:09:20
  There was an assignment that our teacher told us to write about
• 1:09:22
  Abraham Lincoln. And I woke up in the morning and
• 1:09:25
  I forgot to do it. So I went to the encyclopaedia
• 1:09:28
  and I copied it directly out of the encyclopaedia.
• 1:09:30
  Now I'm a third grader. I can't read from the
• 1:09:32
  encyclopaedia. So I handed my paper and
• 1:09:35
  thinking that like the teacher's going to give me an A because
• 1:09:37
  it's so sophisticated. But she gave me an F.
• 1:09:40
  And so she came up in front of the class and said, Matt, stand
• 1:09:43
  up and read your your paragraph to the class.
• 1:09:47
  Did you write that with your own words?
• 1:09:49
  And I said, yes, I lied. Did you write that with your own
• 1:09:52
  words? Yes.
• 1:09:53
  She said, oh, go ahead and read it.
• 1:09:55
  And obviously I couldn't read it, you know, And so she
• 1:09:58
  embarrassed me. And so after that, for years and
• 1:10:00
  years, I had this phobia in the sphere of public speaking.
• 1:10:03
  But with the work that I do, I have to do public speaking.
• 1:10:06
  And so finally, one day I just said, OK, I just need to get
• 1:10:09
  over this. So every time there was an
• 1:10:11
  opportunity for public speaking in one hand would go up, the
• 1:10:14
  other one's trying to pull it down.
• 1:10:15
  And I just did it over and over and over again.
• 1:10:18
  But what I came to realise is that I went to so many
• 1:10:21
  conferences and I was so bored by the traditional presentations
• 1:10:25
  where you have 30 slides and there's a heading and seven
• 1:10:28
  bullets and 30, you know, another heading and another 10
• 1:10:31
  or 15 bullets and so forth. That if you encapsulate three of
• 1:10:36
  those slides into one story, then people are going to
• 1:10:38
  remember that. So I started experimenting and
• 1:10:41
  trying and so forth. And so I eventually even wrote a
• 1:10:44
  book on it, a storytelling, the Art of inspirational Public
• 1:10:47
  speaking, because I felt like that's the direction that most
• 1:10:50
  of us should be going in now. You know, in this particular
• 1:10:54
  podcast, I told a number of stories.
• 1:10:56
  And when I do a presentation, it's a continuous set of stories
• 1:11:01
  to convey something because it conveys it in a way that we as
• 1:11:06
  human beings can absorb it better.
• 1:11:08
  Because when you go home and you tell your partner like, you
• 1:11:11
  know, what did you do today? You're telling a story and
• 1:11:14
  they're listening to a story and they're talking back and forth.
• 1:11:16
  And so that's how we as human beings communicate.
• 1:11:19
  Not a not a heading and seven bullets with just factual
• 1:11:22
  information being prevented presented.
• 1:11:25
  So we have to adjust the way that we both present and absorb
• 1:11:28
  information, and storytelling is the way to do it.
• 1:11:32
  Absolutely. And of course, you know, I, I
• 1:11:34
  very much align with your philosophy and that is why my
• 1:11:39
  LinkedIn by actually documents that it's it's it's just right
• 1:11:43
  here, you know, storytelling for word, for impact and influence.
• 1:11:47
  If you want to impact people, if you want to influence people in
• 1:11:50
  life, I strongly believe storytelling is the the best way
• 1:11:54
  to do it, and I hope you agree with me as well.
• 1:11:57
  Absolutely, absolutely don't agree with you more.
• 1:12:00
  You know, what advice or what piece of advice would you give
• 1:12:03
  to somebody listening to us right now who wants to do
• 1:12:07
  something you know but doesn't know where to start from?
• 1:12:11
  Well, I'm going to do it in a more fundamental way.
• 1:12:13
  So I look at life as being focusing on reaching our full
• 1:12:17
  impact. So when you're born, you have no
• 1:12:20
  impact at all. But the potential impact for
• 1:12:23
  each person is way up here. Most people through life, they
• 1:12:27
  get to a certain point, but then they stop and they don't get
• 1:12:30
  close to reaching their full impact.
• 1:12:32
  They get distracted by, you know, family or school or
• 1:12:35
  education or jobs or whatever. And so they don't continue to
• 1:12:39
  grow. My recommendation to people is
• 1:12:41
  to be open to changing, experimenting, trying, failing,
• 1:12:47
  trying again in in seeing what life has to offer because so
• 1:12:52
  many people limit their life to this is what I think I like and
• 1:12:55
  this is what I want as opposed to trying other things.
• 1:12:58
  That's why, you know, travelling is so relevant and important
• 1:13:02
  because the by virtue of being in a completely different city,
• 1:13:05
  you are experimenting different with different things.
• 1:13:08
  You're forced to relate your personality to the world that
• 1:13:11
  you're in and the circumstances you're in.
• 1:13:14
  So I mean, I just urge people to, you know, don't get to a
• 1:13:17
  point where you reflect back on your life and realise that you
• 1:13:20
  lived your life all wrong because you didn't do all the
• 1:13:22
  things that you wanted to do. If you have a dream of writing a
• 1:13:25
  book, write a book. If you have a dream of
• 1:13:27
  travelling, then go travel. If your dream of getting a
• 1:13:29
  particular job, get the job. But there's so many people are
• 1:13:33
  saying, well, I'll do it next week or next year, whatever.
• 1:13:35
  By the time they blink, all of a sudden they're looking back and
• 1:13:39
  realising that they allowed so much of their life to go by.
• 1:13:42
  So live your life, you know, with vigour and with enthusiasm
• 1:13:46
  and with a sense of passion and a sense of desire and experiment
• 1:13:51
  and don't be afraid of like failing and, and, you know,
• 1:13:54
  messing up because that's where a lot of the learning takes
• 1:13:58
  place for all of us. Yeah, I love that.
• 1:14:01
  I'm never afraid to feel, you know, if you feel it's just you
• 1:14:05
  learn in another way in which things do not work and feel and
• 1:14:09
  feel fast, successfully. People are people who have
• 1:14:13
  failed multiple times and absolutely found the way things
• 1:14:16
  work. Something I always say that
• 1:14:21
  anytime a person shares their time with you, they're sharing
• 1:14:24
  their life with you because the SI unit for measuring life is
• 1:14:28
  time. And of course, gratitude is good
• 1:14:30
  attitude from me to you, Matt Friedman today.
• 1:14:33
  I'm really, really grateful to have you on the podcast to share
• 1:14:38
  your life and of course, your wealth of insights with us
• 1:14:42
  today. I strongly believe that this has
• 1:14:45
  been a highly, highly impactful podcast, but I am not going to
• 1:14:50
  let you go without putting you through the quick fire round.
• 1:14:55
  So I'll ask you 5 quick questions.
• 1:14:58
  And of course, Ellis, it's quick answers as well.
• 1:15:01
  So number one is name 1 country that surprised you in its fight
• 1:15:05
  against human trafficking. China.
• 1:15:09
  Wow, I'm surprised as well. Number 2 is a personal Moto or
• 1:15:14
  mantra that keeps you going. Just do it.
• 1:15:19
  Just do it, Nike 3 The biggest threats to end in modern slavery
• 1:15:24
  in the next 10 years. Apathy and a lack of awareness.
• 1:15:29
  Wow number 41 daily habitat helps you stay grounded as a
• 1:15:33
  leader. Motivation to succeed.
• 1:15:38
  And of course #5 the last but not the least, the legacy you
• 1:15:41
  hope the Mekong club will leave behind.
• 1:15:45
  Impact Helping people to get out of situations in a way that's
• 1:15:50
  measurable and tangible and real.
• 1:15:54
  Wow, thank you very much. So the final call to action for
• 1:15:57
  the audience is this slavery did not end, it only evolved.
• 1:16:02
  So learn more and get involved at cww.themechunkclub.org.
• 1:16:08
  That's going to be in the description.
• 1:16:10
  So grab Matt Friedman's new book, Awakening the Advocate via
• 1:16:14
  Penguin Random House and of course, connect with Matt on
• 1:16:18
  LinkedIn or watch his talks on YouTube.
• 1:16:21
  The link is actually going to be shared as well.
• 1:16:24
  So from me to you, Matt, it is love and respect to you.
• 1:16:30
  Do you have any final words for the audience?
• 1:16:33
  Do you want to leave a shout out to any one?
• 1:16:35
  And of course for me, to your sons, a shout out to them, shout
• 1:16:38
  out to you guys. Well, I'm going.
• 1:16:41
  To shout out to you, great job, great questions, great
• 1:16:44
  conversation. You know, you, you obviously
• 1:16:47
  understand how to communicate and you did a great job and I
• 1:16:50
  really appreciate the opportunity to be on your
• 1:16:53
  podcast. I'm very grateful.
• 1:16:55
  I'm very grateful. Now, now you're making this my
• 1:16:58
  best ever. Thank you very much.
• 1:17:00
  Thank you very much. And of course, to our audience,
• 1:17:02
  please do the needful live share, subscribe, please share
• 1:17:07
  this. You know, it's very, very
• 1:17:08
  important that we get the word out there and always believe in
• 1:17:13
  yourselves. Always go for something, always
• 1:17:17
  try to achieve something. And of course, you know,
• 1:17:19
  conceive, believe and strive to thrive and achieve.
• 1:17:22
  Guys, keep achieving. God bless you till I come your
• 1:17:25
  way next, keep striving.