The True Story Behind ‘The Sound of Freedom’ – Paul Hutchinson’s Undercover Rescue Missions

Trigger Warning. And I don't give these very often. Maybe this is the third time in almost 400 episodes I've given Trigger warning. Look. Today you're going to meet Paul Hutchinson, a serial entrepreneur. He sold his first company for $20 million at the age of 29. Paul is a founder for a bridge investment group. They manage around $50 billion in assets. And he's also a huge philanthropist. And this is where the trigger warning comes in with. Going to talk a lot about his mindset, how he thinks differently, how he's built this incredible empire. However, we're going to talk about the thing he's most passionate about, and that is the prevention and eradication of human trafficking. He has saved hundreds, if not thousands of people's lives from trafficking. He is the executive producer for Sound of Freedom. Some of you may have watched the movie. It's quite harrowing. So, as I say, today, you're in for some incredible insights, but you're also in for some of those harsh realities around trafficking. The reason we've brought Paul on the show is you guys gave us so much feedback about having Gary Shaw on the show and his story inspired you. So we wanted to bring on Paul to continue in that similar theme of the important work that's going on behind the scenes around the world. So enjoy the show. The Lead On Purpose podcast is sponsored by NZ Mortgages. Learn more at nzmortgages.co nz. Paul, a huge welcome to the Lead On Purpose podcast.

Thank you, James. Super excited to spend this time with you.

Oh, I'm very honored. I've came across your work from multiple different angles. I've been in many different countries and the name of your work and what you do has came up and Sound of Freedom. Many people listening may have watched the movie, which I believe you were an executive producer, but you're actually the author of the book Sound of Freedom. We're going to talk in a minute about what that is and how we can get involved, how we can support an incredibly important movement globally. But before we do that, you're such. I'm going to say you're an enigma. What you've done yourself is phenomenal. So to do the impactful work that you're doing now requires freedom in terms of time, geography, but also financial freedom. Not everyone can do that. You've done something unique with your life from a career standpoint. I'd like to just explore that a little bit. So would you mind just sharing a couple of those earlier career moments that have led you to this point where you're sitting in this amazing position.

Absolutely. Well, high level overview. I had my first exit at 29 years old. I had a company that helped people overcome anxiety and depression disorders. And we had over 50,000 people a month calling in off of an infomercial. That was 35 years ago. So, you know, people were still buying stuff on TV ads and whatnot. But, but I sold that company for over $20 million. And at 29 years old and, and I thought, okay, you know, I was, I'm rich now. I don't have to do anything. But my, my wife at the time was not excited about me telling her how to, how to better manage the house. She says, go get a job, do something fall. So technically I retired the first time at 29. And, and I started investing in real estate. And soon I realized if I didn't hire guys smarter than me, I was going to lose all my money in real estate. So I put together a team. In the beginning, I had a partner named John Pennington. We started a company called Bridge Loan Capital. We did short term hard money lending, Bridge loans. And that morphed into what is known as, as Bridge Investment Group. I retired in 2017. We had just under $20 billion in assets under management, over 4,000 employees. The company has continued to grow and went public after I retired. I think they're over $50 billion now. I'm still, still an owner, still a founder that have thousands of people that are running the show so that I can focus full time on philanthropy and making a global impact.

That's incredible. Paul, thank you for sharing that. And I want to unpack some of that. Like, let's go back to your initial company. What was the company? How did you start out and then sell at 29?

I actually wanted to be a, I wanted to be a doctor, not a regular doctor. I want to be a surgeon, not a regular surgeon. I wanted to be a heart surgeon and not a regular heart surgeon. I want to be a heart surgeon that specialized in helping children. I wanted to be a pediatric cardiologist. And I had that dream from the time I was, you know, five years old, five, six years old. I wanted to be a brain surgeon. And then I, I was getting picked on at school. My mom says, why do you want to be a brain surgeon? I says, because I need to change how people think. And I think over time. I realized that in order to fix problems like that, it wasn't about fixing the brain, it was about fixing the heart. So long story short, I, that's why I Wanted to be. I was two months away from taking the mcat.

I had done all my pre med work and I got in a major car accident, severed all the tendons in my hand. Didn't know if I'd have the dexterity to be a surgeon. And, and it changed everything. I literally 10 years worth of work down the drain of all this work and study and whatnot. And, and I had a friend of the family who was super wealthy and he said, paul, why do you want to be a doctor? I said, I'll be honest, want the money, I'll go to school for, for 12 years so I can drive a Ferrari. He laughed. He said, paul, he said, you have a unique gift with people. So much so that I'm willing to be your mentor. He said, if you do what I teach you to do, you'd be a millionaire by the time you're 30 and you'll have the time to enjoy it. I said, okay, well what do I do? I'm just this young 21 year old kid. And he said, he said, first things first, you need to learn how to handle rejection and you need to learn how to sell. He says it's irrelevant what kind of company you go into. If you can't handle those things, you're gonna fail. He said, you're always going to be selling something to your investors, to your employees, to your customers, whatever it is. And so I got a high rejection job and, and cold calling, selling children's videos, you know, and, and the company. And he said, Paulie said, you have to work to learn, don't work to earn. He said, you're young enough right now. You need to be educating yourself every day. He said, and, and this was the most powerful advice he gave me. He said, and he said, the most valuable piece of real estate you will ever own is the six inches between your ears. He said, you spend time developing that, everything else is yours. And so he said, I don't even want you to know if your car radio works. He said, from now on, everywhere you go, you need to be listening to audio programs on business and finance and relationships and leadership and whatever it is. And so I did. My, my kids joked with me. Years later I, I bought Lebron James's Range Rover from it and had, had, had $6,000 rims on each rim. It had like $60,000 subwoofers in the back. And my kids were joking, they said, what are you going to do, listen to all of your inspirational self help things on your $60,000 speakers? I said, you know what I said? Because I listen to those. That's why I bought the freaking car, right?

I love it.

So, so I was at this company, you know, selling and, and they brought on a new client, the, the Lucinda Bassus Attacking Anxiety and Depression program. And I really related to what she was trying to put together. We ended up putting together a personal coaching program and expanding. She was like $6 million a year and in the red. By the time I sold the company, we were $72 million a year and doing very well. But that was a process. But the thing that, that was super important to me is even though I had a few hundred employees, taking the time to physically get there on the phone at least once or twice a week with some of the customers was, was super grounding for me. And especially if I had a room full of guys that had excuses of why they couldn't make sales, I said, guys, you know what? Forget this. I'm freaking the boss. I own the freaking company, right? And I walk in, I put a hundred dollar bill up on the board. I said, you guys already have Warren lead stuff you're working with. I'm getting on the phone right now. Whoever beats me in the next two hours gets that 100 bucks. And many times I was the one that took it, you know, so I was leading by example. And over those years, I spoke with thousands of people who had debilitating anxiety, depression disorders to the point where they couldn't live a normal life. And I being able to make money, big money, while still creating massive good in the lives of other people was, was the most beautiful part of my entire journey. And it was so fulfilling, in fact, you know, so many times. I, you know, and I sold that company, started, you know, investing in real estate, and started the fund. We've all heard the, the, the saying that the best time to make money is when there's blood in the streets. Well, I agree and disagree with that. It was, it was originally quoted by Baron Rothschild years ago talking about how you can make money on the backs of, you know, pain and suffering and things they all fear and whatever else. Yes, that's the time to make money. But I've changed it for me personally to say I make money when there's blood in the streets by creating the first aid kits to help the people, right? If you can foresee some of the challenges, if you can see where the problems are going to be and set things up in a way where you can create a true win, win, win, then, then everybody can profit. And that's exactly how we made billions of dollars in building the investment fund was with that philosophy. And we can go into further depth in that later.

That's amazing. Thank you for sharing that. And it's interesting just to touch on the anxiety and depression part. You obviously help thousands and thousands of humans move forward and find a way forward. What were some of the lessons? What can we learn? How can we. Because I know that anxiety and depression is very prevalent all around the world. What did you learn in your time and what can we actually do to make a difference there?

Everybody deals with some degree of anxiety. Um, you know, it's, it, it's a fear in our minds of, of things that aren't real that we're exacerbating. And there, there's so many different things that we can do to overcome that. Everything from, you know, we, we teach breath work in some of our breath work seminars. We teach deep meditation and turning off that overly active brain. But the, the real key is understanding that anxiety comes from worry and what if thinking and negative expectations and the perceptions we have of ourself or our, our coping skills in dealing with stress. And these are all things that can be changed, all of them. And, and they're simply habit patterns of thought. And traditionally, you know, it took us about 12 weeks to help people really break through on that. We have some programs now that, that have condensed that into four or five days and really helping to break through that we can talk about later. But, but from a tangible standpoint right now, by, if, if you don't actively plant healthy plants in your garden, then the weeds are going to take over. And that's what happens with our minds. You know, naturally we, we have all this crap that comes out and we need to change that perception of ourself and that the, the what if thinking effect. I, I have a little technique that I use. You're going to think this is funny, but I, I call it little wins. And I take myself almost back to a little five, six year old mindset, right? And pat myself on the bed, on the back for stupid stuff. I'm talking putting my socks on the right way, right? So good job, Paul. All right. Tie in my shoes. I'm 53 years old. I know I'd tie my shoes, right? But, but it's that constant positive talk as if I'm like a five year old that tied my shoes the first time. It's that positive affirmations that builds my confidence. And that way when, when Tony Robbins says, hey Paul, take the microphone, talk in front of 15,000 people and calls me out of the blue, boom. I can do it. You know why? Because I tied my shoes that morning, and I spoke positively to myself throughout the day, which, which built my confidence in the small things so that the big things were easy as well.

Such a good tactical tip. I really appreciate that. And I've been to a lot of Tony's events and over in Fiji and whatnot. He's another level in terms of thinking and taking action.

Absolutely. He's, he's a, he's a wonderful, wonderful man. He came and saw one of our, our undercover rescue missions in, in firsthand, and it rocked his world. And, you know, this is when I was working with one of the previous foundations, but I, I had led all of the undercover for about three months in this country, and we had taken down the, the head of the dragon. And since that time, we, we, we've cultivated a beautiful friendship. And I, I honor him for the millions of lives that he has changed through helping people change their perceptions of themselves and changing their energy and their state of mind. Because that's really what it's all about. You know, people, people sit back and think, oh, you know, what's that? What's the how to. How. How do I build this company? How to. How do this? No, you've, you've got to be really tied into the why. I tell people a man who understands why is never at the mercy to somebody who simply understands how. And, you know, this is, this is that process of visualizing and taking yourself, not just mentally. And people are like, oh, I tried visualization. That doesn't work. That's because you didn't emotionally take yourself there. Right. If you can take yourself from a heart space to the point where you can feel it and see it and, and, and everything, then it will literally attract those things into your life. In fact, a little side story, I think this is one. So Tony called me and he said, he said, hey, Paul, I, I, I know you know Glenn Beck. He said, he's a big radio talk show host here in the US and he says, I think it'd be awesome if Glenn came to one of my, my UPW events. So I agree. So I called up Glenn. He said, yeah, I'll bring my son. And so we, we flew and we picked him up. Now there's a part in, where we're sitting there in the front row, you know, roped off air, you know, all this crap, and Tony has a part of that event where he has this, this almost a Two hour section where he helps you identify something in your life, usually in your business life, that's not where you want to be. And he emotionally takes you through where you want to be. And you write down in detail what it looks like, what it feels like, everything. And then emotionally takes you there, and he pulls it away from you, and he takes you there. Well, I was on my second marriage that was headed for a divorce, and it was toxic. And I realized I had used this technique in building multibillion dollar companies. I had used it in identifying children and rescuing kids. I had never used it in my personal life. I thought, you know what? Maybe I'll. Maybe I'll do that. And I. I started writing my relationship with. And I. I wrote my. My ex wife's name. Her. Her name was Rocio. In fact, if you watch the Sound of Freedom, we named the little girl after my wife at the time, right? So. So I wrote there, you know, my relationship with Rocio is. And this is how Rocio shows up for me, and this is how I show up for her. And about halfway through it, I felt this overwhelming sensation saying, paul, don't try to affect the free will of anybody else in your creating this world of your future. Allow other people to make their own choices, too, but decide what it is you want, not necessarily do. So I like, okay, that's a big aha. So I changed it to, my relationship with the woman in my life is. And this is how the woman in my life shows up for me, and this is how I show up for her, and this is how she treats my kids, and this is how she treats me in public. I mean, all of these things. And it was pages and details. That very night, James, very night, I found out some things that.

That I didn't know before that made me text my attorney and said, I need to file for a divorce. I'm done. I had no idea. God. God knew I wasn't happy. But I never identified what it is I wanted. In the second. The second I identified what it is I wanted, he showed me, hey, guess what? It's not her. Like, holy crap. And less than two months later, I was in Haiti. I had done, what, almost 12 undercover rescue missions in Haiti, and I was there at a funeral for one of my operators, and.

I met a girl who was donating her time at an orphanage. She was. She was a Colombian actress. I tell people meeting a beautiful Colombian actress is kind of cool, but when she's donating her time at an orphanage in Haiti, that's amazing. Well, she fit every single thing on the list. Every single thing. We're so happily married today because I, I used that visualization manifestation technique in not only my business career, but what's really important, which is my interpersonal relationships.

That's incredible, Paul, thanks for sharing that intimate detail. And it's interesting, you know, I work with athletes, professional athletes, and often visualization is a tool, but getting them to have an emotional visualization is always more challenging, yet way more rewarding and outcomes reflect that. So I'm really glad to hear that you've done that in your own personal life and seen those results. So super powerful. And I want to talk a little bit about the work that you do in a minute. You've mentioned a few covert operations. I want to go on and understand that a little more in a minute. But let's just focus on the company that you founded. So for the person that's listening going, God, that's mind blowing. Multi billion dollar company. You started it, you've sold it, you're still in there. So what do successful people do that I unsuccessful people don't?

Years ago I was at a seminar, it was a time management type of a thing. And.

The facilitator was up in front, it was a small group and he took out this big jar, big glass jar, big one, and set it on the table. And he pulled out a bucket and he started bringing in fist sized rocks. And he filled them all in, filled up this jar all the way to the very top. And once he just got that last one in, he said, is this full? And most people said, yeah, that's pretty full. And some people saw what he was doing and they said no. And then he pulls out another jar and another bucket and it has some gravel in it. And he pulls the gravel, these smaller rocks, and pours them in. And of course it shakes it around and fills it up. He says, okay, now is it full? Now some people are starting to catch on. They're like, yeah, maybe not, but other people are like, oh, looks pretty full now. And then he pulls out another container that had sand in it. And he started pouring the sand and he shook it and of course now it's completely full of sand. And some people were still saying, yeah, you can fit more and whatever. And finally he takes out a jar of water and fills it all the way up with water. And he says now. And then the question was, he said, what did we learn from this? Now almost all of us said, you can always fit more in, you can always do more. And he shook his hand and he said, nope. He said, the lesson here is that if you don't start with the big rocks, you'll never fit them in. If he had started with the sand and the gravel, those big rocks would have never fit, right? And so that's really the key is identifying what those big rocks are. What are your real priorities? What does that look like? And, and those priorities aren't just, you know, your bottom line in your business. Sometimes it's the, the, the healthy relationships with your, with your employees, the partnerships that you bring your, your, your, even your, your relationship and your family, et cetera. Those are the big rocks. And, and, but by sitting down and taking the time to truly prioritize what's, and putting the time into that, that's, that's super valuable. Now another, another really powerful tool that we use. John Pennington was the co founder with me of the funds. And people ask John, they say, hey, did, did you, did you see it? Did you know you guys are going to be billions? And he tells the story, he goes, you know, I remember he said, I didn't, but Paul did. He said, I remember we're in this little office, it was so small that, that literally if we backed our seats up at the same time, we would hit each other with bump elbows, turning around, right? We're like $300 a month and it came with free Internet and a printer. And we were in there making, you know, we had a company that started out as bridge loan capital and we're doing short term bridge loans. And I was making phone calls, making phone calls and trying to raise. We needed like $25,000 by Friday to make this deal work. It was going to fall apart, right? I'm calling, I hang up the phone and John said, says that he, he remembers the story. He says, Paul turned around after making a call and he put his pinky by the side of his mouth and he said, john, we're going to be a billion dollar fund someday. John's like Paul, we need $25,000 by Friday.

A billion with such a big number. But if you don't put it out there, you'll never get there. And so, and, and that, I remember the end of that day, John said, paul, you know that neither one of us have the pedigree, the background, the experience to run a multi billion dollar fund. I mean, I was a, I was a University of Utah dropout, right? So he had an mba, but it was, wasn't an Ivy League school. I said, yeah. I said, but if we Build it right. If we build it with integrity, if we build the foundation now expecting that it's going to be that in the future we will attract the right people. And indeed that's what happened by, by maintaining that visualization of where we wanted to be and leading from the heart and doing everything with integrity, we attracted our players, power players. In fact, I, and what's crazy as it wasn't putting out a resume, I literally, my, my son's soccer coach said, hey Paul, you need to meet this guy. He just moved into Utah. He's overqualified for everything here. And I meet this guy, he, he was, I mean this guy raised $14 billion to bail out the Asian debt crisis in the late 90s. He had a JD MBA from Ivy League schools. I'm like, holy crap, this guy's. So we bring him on as a partner and another key to our success was not having the ego that we knew everything. So we bring him on and about two months after he brought him on, this was December of 2006, he came into my office, he sat down, he said, Paul, we're in trouble. I said, like we're in trouble. Like we the fund. He goes, no, like we the country, probably the whole world. This was, this was 18 months before the 2008 financial crisis, right? He had all these third order polynomial equations that were way over my head, right over my pay grade. And he, he, he said this is going to be a major catastrophe and if you don't change, you're going to be upside down with everybody in the hard money lending space. And the reason we listen to him, he was arguably one of the top experts in the world at analyzing banking cycles and credit crisis. That's what his job was at Citigroup was to make sure the Citi was in the right asset class at the right time. He studied banking crisis all the way back to Nazi Germany to make sure that he had the right information. So here he was as our employee. We didn't hire him for that job, but it was a one in a billion chance that he was there, saw that crisis early, we positioned ourselves right. And when the rest of the market lost 30 and 50%, just like I was talking about earlier, we don't make money from, from the blood in the streets. We make money from creating the first aid kits for the blood in the streets. So we says, okay, if indeed this is going to happen, this crash is going to come. How can we truly create value, Value for our investors, value for our employees, value for us and value for the banks value for the tenants. We put together a team that could manage those distressed assets during, during a time of, of, of catastrophe in the US Market. And, and, and was the number one performing real estate fund of our size and vintage in the fair country. And then big, big companies like Morgan Stanley were like, hey, you know what? You guys are doing great. Here's 100 million. Here's another 100. Wow.

Things really ramped up from that point onwards then.

It was phenomenal. Well, and what, what was a really big difference too is Don, who used to work with Citi. He said, let's go to, let's go to Hong Kong. Let's go meet with my old boss. His, his name was Bob Morse, right? Bob. Bob was the, the, he was the head of the investment bank with Citi. I mean, he was a big guy. And we're in terms of power player and we're hoping Don would write us a $20 million check. And I remember I flew across the ocean. I'm so freaking tired. I'm sitting there at his desk. I have the private offering memorandum. I have the pitchbook, and I push him forward and he pushes him back across the desk. Doesn't even open them, pushes them back. He said, paul, I don't need to see any of that stuff. He said, I've been watching you guys for the last six months. And then he points at me. He said, I know more about your bio than you do. I'm like, oh, wow.

He said, he said, I'm super impressed with the team that you've been putting together, with your integrity, with, with your strategy. He said, I don't want to write you a $20 million check. He said, I want to bring in a $300 million check and I want to own the GP. Well, I, I started a company so I didn't have to work for somebody, and Don didn't want to work for him again. So we actually turned him down, negotiated over the next number of months and eventually brought him on with that number, but without a majority ownership, but still a big chunk, but not just the money coming in, saying, we want you, we want you to be actively involved. And now when we've got some, some guy like that on our team, now these bigger institutions are like, okay, now you have credibility. So, you know, I, I, I, I credit this to the team. But the biggest credit, and I, I, I will be remiss if I don't point out this, this is the most important thing that created our success. Back in my early 20s, my, one of my mentors said to me, he said, paul, he said, the average person donates around 2% of, of their annual income to charity to making a difference. He said, what's interesting is millionaires and above, that's statistically even a smaller percentage than 2%. He said, I admonish you today to not do 2, not even 5, not even 10. He said, Make a commitment that 15 to 20% of your income will go to making a positive impact in the lives of others will go to charity. And I'm like, holy crap. You know, I'm only earning $2,000 a month at the time. 20% of that, that's, I have to live on 1600. I'd have to work more hours just to pay for things. And I said, what about work, life balance? He goes, oh, in addition to that, probably more important than money, than the money. He said, you should donate 20% of your time. I'm like, holy crap. He goes, yeah, you, you work at 40 hours a week. He says you should consider 10 to 15 hours of charity time. I'm like, that's all you know. He said, some of the wealthiest families in the world make a massive impact by having numbers like that that they give and make a difference. And so I made that decision back then in my early 20s. And I truly believe that that one decision was the catalyst of everything else. How, how does somebody become a partner, let alone a founder of a multi, multi billion dollar company? You're not a University of Utah dropout. The statistical probability of me being where I am is zero. The only way that I can understand it is that I made that decision in my early 20s that I would donate until it hurt. And, and I have so many examples of times where massive miracles happen. In fact, one of them, Glenn Beck, wanted to launch his anti child trafficking campaign from Bangkok, Thailand. It was going to cost a hundred thousand dollars to send him and his whole team there. And he had such a big audience. I knew that would be super valuable in making an impact. But we had a bunch of grandmas that were donating a dollar a month to the foundation. And I, we did. It was kind of sacred money. So I, I made the decision that I was going to fund that together with my partner Don, and we flew to Thailand. We flew back as we landed, back in the US as we landed. This is one of those charity things. I had two voicemail messages pop up on my phone. One of them was from one of the owners of the largest hotel chain in the world. And he said, paul, I've Been looking at your numbers and I want to put another $10 million in your senior housing fund. And the other one was from one of the board members of the investment committee of a company that owns some of the biggest gas station chains in the United States. And their number was even bigger. My income from those two voicemail messages multiples exceeded what I had just donated. You can call it karma, you can call it the universe, I call it God, you can call it whatever you want. There's a higher power very interested in us doing good. And you will receive physical rewards, not just spiritual, whatever, physical rewards for making that decision to make an impact in the lives of others.

That's amazing. As I said at the start, you are an enigma. And you're just underlining and underscoring that 100 times. This is incredible. And I love the idea of the law of reciprocity. When you give and give and give and you don't expect, actually things start showing up. And it's not neediness. You're not doing it with a reason behind it. You're doing it because you want to make a difference. And the sound of freedom. For those that haven't watched it, you need to watch it. For those that haven't read the book, I'm going to put a link in the show notes, you've got to buy this book. I want to talk about that now. And I'm just going to let the listener know that what we will talk about may be confronting.

Challenging to listen to. So we're going to talk about some heavy stuff, but the work you do is incredibly important and we need to shine a light on it. So can I just ask, how did you go from what you were doing professionally to what you're doing now philanthropically with the mission of helping save so many lives?

I received a phone call about 11 years ago from our attorney general in, in Utah. And he, he said, Paul, he said, I know you've donated a lot of money to child related charities. I was on the, the Make a Wish board of directors. I had donated the primary children's hospital. My list went on. And he said, Paul, he said, I need to talk to you about something that's pretty dark. It's the fastest growing criminal enterprise in the world and good people don't even know that it's happening. He said, he started talking about human trafficking. And he said, there's a, there's a Homeland Security agent that's in Colombia that's identified about 20 children in Cartagena. He needs about $50,000 to rescue these kids. And the government wouldn't give him the money because he couldn't prove that there was Americans involved. And I'm like, shouldn't matter what country they're from if they're kids being trafficked, we need to do something right? And so I helped to fund that. And then a couple weeks later, that agent called me. He said, paul, he said, I'm in Cartagena. There's not just 20 children here, there's more than 50. There's more than a hundred children in the surrounding areas that are, that are tied to these trafficking rings that are being sold for the most unimaginable things. He said, we have a plan. We could rescue all 100 plus children on the same day at the same time. But I, I need your help in a big way. And I, I said, well, how much do you need? Thinking he needed a check.

He said, I need you. Can you be in Colombia in two days? Now he knew a little bit more about my background than most people. I have a certain set of skills that makes me somewhat safe in a dangerous place. But more important than that, he needed somebody who could effectively negotiate a multimillion dollar real estate transaction with the cartel, with the traffickers. He said, the head trafficker has a piece of property he wants to develop into a child brothel sex resort. He needs a few million dollars to build it out. He believes he can make tens of millions of dollars a year selling these victims to wealthy foreigners. And he said, we need to convince him to bring all of his children between him and the other ones that he's connected with. He's got over 50 kids in this area and 100 the others.

We believe that he'll make those calls and bring all the children to the same place. If he believes that the only way that you're going to fund his resort is if he can prove to you that he can fill it by having a party with you and your buddies with all of his existing inventory. And.

Hit me hard. I thought, okay, well if, and I asked him, I said, so, what do I need to wear? I mean, I'm, I, at the time I was building my fund, I, I was at a, an opulent hotel. I was raising money from like fourth generation billionaire family conference type thing I was at. And, and I said, I said, well, I don't, I'm in Atlanta. I don't have time to go home to get change clothes if I'm going to fly out tomorrow. And he said, paul, he said, you need to come. As a wealthy playboy And I'm on the phone, I look down and my, my cufflinks were diamond studded cufflinks, right? I've got a suit that costs more than my first car.

Right? And, and I, I'm like, I think I got the outfit. And so I flew down and not knowing what to expect, I walked into this room where they had these traffickers that were there. I was expecting to see guys with tattoos on their, their throats and, you know, earrings in their noses. The first trafficker I met was a businessman. A white polo shirt, you know, clean shaven. The second one I met, it was a beautiful woman, she ran a fake modeling agency. Was luring these children in through it. And I'm sitting there at this table, negotiating with them. Halfway through the meeting, one of them leans forward and he said, pablo, I have a gift for you. I said, really? What's your gift?

He hands me his phone and there's a picture of an 11 year old girl on his phone. He said, this is princess.

She's still a virgin. We just took delivery of some. She's my gift for your party. Started talking about these horrific things so we could do to these children. And I, I thought, if we can get these children out before they're ever hurt the first time, that would be a miracle. And, and in the movie, my character said, no, I don't want to go. I was, I was the rich guy that funded it, that, that Jim Cavie. So, you know, said, if Pablo is, is willing to do this, you know, we can make it work. And, and the only way I was convinced to go is he gave a picture of this little girl to my driver. In real life, I was already there. I was face to face with these guys. But him showing me that picture galvanized my commitment to eradicate this and, and, and fast forward two weeks later, you know, we, we. I told him, listen, I'll fund your deal, but we're going to have a party. You got to bring together. All two weeks later, we met with the US embassy, the Columbia federal agents, they provided 40 agents for us. Like four of them were our maids and our waiters and cooks. You know, they're not very good cooks, but they're armed. 25 were there to storm the party at the right time. And these guys showed up with 54 children. Wow. And we put them in a separate place and so they wouldn't see the guns and the money changing hands and everything. And then halfway through this meeting, one of them stood up and he said, pablo, I have to show you the gifts that I brought you.

And went into the house where the kids were and he came back out. When he was in there, we could hear some of them crying. They were so scared of meeting me. They thought this was the moment that the most horrible thing would happen. And. And he came back out and he had these four children.

It was an 11 year old boy that they gave cocaine. There was a. The little girl that he showed me on the picture. And James, I'm sitting on a chair just like I am right here at this high chair. This little girl standing in front of me was eye level with me, sitting down and I could see into her.

Soul.

And all I could see was fear. And I made a commitment that.

To myself, to God, that child, that I was going to dedicate my life to eradicating that evil from the face of the earth.

The most beautiful moment of my life up to that moment, up to that time was after the agents came and stormed the party and arrested everybody else included. The bad guys think that we got extradited to the US to stand trial. But 30 child protective services people came in with the children.

And they were calming them down and they started laughing, they started singing with the children. And that sound of freedom, that singing compared to the crying that we heard just moments before, that was the most beautiful sound that I ever heard. That's why we named the movie the Sound of Freedom. And they weren't supposed to tell the kids that we were the good guys. But somebody must have said something or maybe she just felt something because that little girl, the same one he showed me in the picture, the same one that we called Rocio in the movie, the same one that, that was standing in front of me with tear stains on her face just moments before. She was standing there by the door, her hand was on the screen of the door. She was crying again, but she was smiling and waving at us. And she said in her broken English, she said, thank you, Americans. And I started crying and I turned to the agent who was with me and I said, you know, I've spent my whole life making money. I mean, a lot of it. I had a basketball court in my basement and 57 cars, helicopters and plane, all this crap, right? I said, I spent my whole life making money making rich people richer. I want to make a difference.

I want to help.

What can you do? How can I help? And he said, paul, he said, unfortunately, there's a huge demand for this that comes from guys like Jeffrey Epstein. They're wealthy, big egos, big arrogance. He said, I can't teach my Navy Seals how to wear a $50,000 watch and negotiate a multimillion dollar deal, he said. And I have never met an ultra successful business owner who's had the training that you've had. He said, if you're willing to be the bait, I'll change your whole life. So I've led 70.

Undercover rescue missions in 15 countries and through that foundation, through our foundation now, which is the Child Liberation foundation, you can go to liberatechildren.org liberatechildren.org and through the child Liberation foundation, other foundations that I have helped to fund and to start. Well over 5,000 transit children are now back to their families. And we knew we couldn't take good people like the listeners on the show. We couldn't take you guys to go undercover and see these kids, but we could help you feel what we had felt. And so I became the primary investor and zf, because executive producer in the movie Sound of Freedom, which became the number one independent film in the world last year, did exactly what we envisioned it to be, would be, is created a global movement and opened up doors everywhere to help change laws and policies with countries around the world to keep the children safe.

Seriously, mind blowing. It's incredible what you're committed to, and we need more humans like you to commit to this because it does take resources. It also takes your acumen, which you say, like, not everyone has the acumen to do what needs to be done, but it takes money and, and it takes awareness. And Sound of Freedom really did that. It's shone the light on a really horrific, ugly industry that most people don't realize is going on or it's going on so far away from where they think, you know, they live that just not in front of them. But can I just ask you, is this happening just in developing countries or is this rife in our New Zealand's and our Americas and the UK and everywhere?

It's everywhere. And here's, here's the real thing we need to focus on. James.

Parents will, will leave the movie Sound of Freedom and they'll say, okay, I want to do something, I want to help. You know, what can I do? And the worst thing you can do is go to Columbia and try to rescue children. You're going to get arrested, you're probably going to get shot. The best thing you can do is go home and hug your children. People are like, well, well, how does, how does that help? Well, the majority of children that are taken and moved to other places and Trafficked in that way. The majority of those children come from runaways, broken families, a broken foster care program, because these are the at risk children. And so focusing on having a healthy nuclear family is vitally important. Now, I'm going to throw this out. This is not a religious pitch, but statistically, one out of every two marriages end in divorce. But marriages that pray together, it doesn't matter what religion it is. It changes from 1 and 2 to 1 in 1152. Wow. 1001, that's, that's less than 0.01% versus 50% of traditional ones. So, so I tell people, go home and hug your kids and pray with your spouse, hold your family together. That's one of the most powerful things that you can do to prevent trafficking in that way. Now, more important than that, even not more equally important to that is you need to have a relationship with your children where they can very comfortably come to you and say, hey dad, hey Mom. I, I don't, I don't like it when you make me hug Uncle Harry because he touches me weird and tells me we should have secrets outside of you. Or I don't like going to this friend's house because her brother's taking pictures of us when we're changing and says sexual things to me and says he's going to use these pictures against me. Or we don't like this babysitter because she's showing us pornography and tells us that we should trust her more than you. These are grooming behaviors. And here's the scary statistics. If you walk out in your front yard in New Zealand, in the us, in the uk, all around the world, even healthy neighborhoods, you walk out in your front yard and you look left and you look right. There's a very high chance that one of those homes is a dangerous place for children. Now let me tell you the statistics. Yes, there's over 10 million children that are considered trafficked, right? Very few of them happen like what you see in the Sound of Freedom movie where it's taken from a healthy home, put into a container and taken to another country. You know, we can talk about how to prevent things like that, but the majority of children that are being sold for these horrific things.

Sleep in their own beds at night and their parents are completely unaware, other than the fact that their 12 year old all of a sudden turns into a recluse from the outward person that she was before. And the parents don't realize that somebody got a sexting picture of her, used it to manipulate her and told her hey, you're going to show up at this house and every Tuesday right after school. Otherwise, this is all going to go public to the world type thing, right? These things happen all the time, all the time, and they're happening all over. So statistically, 40% of all women that you know have been a victim of sexual violence, sexual abuse at some time in their life. One out of every four, one out of every four women who are listening to us right now, it happened as a child. As a child. Now, for men, it's a little bit less. It's 1 in every 5, 20% of all men at some time in their life. However, even them, the majority of them was when they were children, and one fourth of them was under the age of 10 of 10 years old in their own homes. So here's what's happening. After 10 years of doing undercover work, I realized that there were more children being sold today than there were 10 years ago. And I looked in the mirror and I said, paul, if your commitment to that child when you were sitting in front of her 10 years ago, if your commitment was to dedicate your life to eradicating child trafficking, you're not doing a very good job. Because there's more today than ever. Because every time we went in and we rescued these children, if not enough was being done to fix the demand, then 20 more children are being sucked into the deepest recesses of hell. And so here's what all of us can do. Besides having those healthy relationships with your children, besides praying with your spouse, besides holding together your family, the things that we can do is take a personal assessment of how we're showing up to the world and what toxicity we're holding on to that's contributing in some way. So here's the sad numbers.

Gratefully, God bless them. Men, the majority of men, the majority of women, but even the majority of men who have gone through that kind of trauma as children, the majority of us grow up to be protectors. There's no way that a child will ever be hurt on our watch in our world and our family because of the pain we went through. However, one out of every three. I already told you how many people were abused as children. One out of every three. If not given the help, the healing, the love that they need early on in their. Their adolescent years and the early 20s, one out of every three will eventually become a contact offender. Now, don't get me wrong, guys. I'm not a pedophile sympathizer. I'm not saying that anything is justifiable here I have put my life in danger to ensure that they never hurt innocence again. But what I found prancing every single time I did an undercover mission is that I wish that I could have gone back five or 10 years before those children were ever hurt in the first place and sat down with that trafficker, looked him in the eye and say, what is going on in your life that makes you think that in any way it's okay to walk down that road and see if I could give them the help, the left that they need. In addition to that, let's say that there's guys listening here that are like, you know what that happened to me? But I'm one of those ones that I would never pass it on. And that's beautiful and I commend you. However, if it's showing up in, in anger issues, low self esteem, anxiety, depression, if it's showing up in, in any of those ways, even verbal and physical abuse of others, eventually that trickle down is going to affect children. And we all need to take an assessment and say, how do we heal humanity so that something like child trafficking doesn't exist.

Yeah, I'm just 100% with you on that. I've got a friend here in New Zealand. Him and his wife have an incredible movement that they've started it spreading right across the world. Dwayne the Rock Johnson got behind it recently as well, around how do we heal men? How do we help men heal their trauma? Because generally it's men that are driving a lot of these awful statistics. So when you say that, I 100% resonate, Paul, with why you're saying it and where it comes from. It's incredible. So thank you so much for sharing this. And I know we've just literally just started talking about and opening the door, but I want people, I'm going to remind them again, go to the show notes, order the book, order a couple of copies, give one to a friend, go watch the movie. And also for your charity and your foundation, I'll make sure we've got in the show notes a link to it as well where people can go and contribute financially. But I love how you say there's things we can do. We live in a small town of 3,000 people. It's a port town. And about seven months ago there was a little post in our Facebook community and we're all very, we keep an eye on everything. A young girl in this little port town went to the little school in this town and was walking home and a gentleman got out of a van and said, hey, your mom and dad said for me to pick you up. They're not home right now. And she said, oh, okay. What's the password? And as he was starting to fumble, she sprinted and got away and got home. Very concerning for our little community, but it's happening everywhere. So I just thought that that was a beautiful technique, a real good family tactic to have a family password. Anything else in your experience that we can do to help protect our vulnerable kids?

Yeah, I have a lot of these things in the Sound of Freedom book because, you know, we couldn't include all of this in the movie. But, you know, the beginning chapters are about, you know, creating an undercover operator. But I go into depth as to what we learned in. In situational awareness and, and, you know, a lot of things that parents can use in their daily life to keep their kids safe. And, you know, I talk about in there about having a code word and how to set that up. I talk about not putting your kid's name on their backpack. You know, that might seem convenient, but it makes it so that a predator could very easily say, hey, hey, hey, Johnny. Oh, yeah, you know me. That's because your name's on your backpack. You know, and so I have a whole bunch of key tools in there that you can do to keep. Keep your kids safe. And. And then at the end, we talk in detail about healing humanity and what that looks like and how we can all get behind something like that.

Incredible. I can't wait for more people to read this book. In terms of healing humanity, I think we're all on a journey of healing, all on different parts of that spectrum. I mean, if we've got through life without any trauma, man or man, maybe we're very lucky. But I don't think many people have. So there's traditional healing in the Western world, but there's obviously other ways now as well. What have you found to be most powerful in these recent years?

This goes back to, you know, I built the company for 10 years and helping people overcome anxiety, depression and. And PTSD and addictions. And that took us 12 plus weeks. We've identified some tools that literally in four or five days, we're able to get 10 years worth of therapy done. Now, these are somewhat controversial, but I'll, I'll go into them because these are incredibly powerful. Back in the late 60s, President Nixon in the US decided to classify a whole bunch of things as Schedule 1 drugs. So we've been taught our entire life that these things are as dangerous as as cocaine. And what I'm talking about is things like sassafras, white lily, mistletoe, psilocybin, different types of psychedelics. Now don't get me wrong, I am not an advocate whatsoever of somebody going to a rave party and getting high on something, whatever else. That's not what I'm talking about. I'm talking about therapeutic use. In fact, you can, you can google, you can look up the, the John Hopkins University studies on, on using psychedelics, specifically in psilocybin, in overcoming anxiety, depression, PTSD and addictions. And about eight years ago, I had a couple of my undercover operators came to me. Now we were burning through operators. We had navy souls and green berets that had seen the worst thing on the battlefield. So that one undercover mission, seeing 8 year olds being sold ruin them, they're like, you know. And So I had two operators, one that had done 14 missions with me and one that had done 22. And they called me up together on a joint call and they said, paul, do you trust us? I said, I trust you with my life and I'm going to recover. They said, well, you need to come to this event that's a healing event, this, this weekend. And I, I'm like, healing, I don't need to heal. I'm Paul effing Hutchinson, right? You know, I have this big ego. All these cars and, you know, toxic marriage, all this crap. And they said, no, this is, this is something that is super powerful. And it was the single most transformational 24 hours of my life. In fact, in the John Hawkins University studies, 76% of people who go through a guided facilitated plant medicine experience do so and say 76% of the time it was said it was the number one most impactful event of their life as well. And, and something really powerful too. They had, they had another study. Now here's the thing. A lot of us think, oh, they're super dangerous. That's why they're Schedule 1 drugs. No psilocybin is safer than table sugar. There's never been a case of addiction, there's never been a case of overdose. And when used properly, they're doubly effective at shedding childhood trauma, of getting through ego issues, dealing with, you know, anger issues, of, of getting through anxiety, depression, PTSD and addictions, all of these things. And so, you know, we, we host these in, in Latin America. You can go to liberatinghumanity.com and learn some more about the process. But, but taking somebody through that experience is incredibly effective. We, we've taken groups of women who have all had severe childhood sexual trauma. We brought in men's groups who are all stuck in addictions to pornography and other things. We, we brought in different, different like couples groups and whatnot to help them mend some of the difficult issues. But it has been the single most powerful tool that I have seen and I'm now a master facilitator. We've, We've facilitated over 58 guided meditation journey experiences in the last number of years. We do about one a month and work with what I call the tip of the umbrella. You know, the leaders, the royalty and billionaire families that we bring in to help them transform and change.

It's incredible. It's interesting you bring up psilocybin for those that are not familiar that my understanding of psilocybin comes from a mushroom, it's from the earth, it's a plant. And the more people I meet and I'm sitting down with interesting humans like you do who are doing incredible things in the world who are very buttoned up, they're trying psilocybin, they're venturing into ayahuasca, they're trying plant medicine with incredible outputs. I mean incredible transformations. I think it's easy to point at stuff we find weird. It's easy to point to stuff we find different. We can kind of other those things and a bit of othering going on with plant medicine. But I do believe when we embrace it, there's an opportunity to grow. And I'll be honest Paul, I haven't went there yet. And I say yet because it's something I'm learning about and open to and curious about and I feel if I just shut it down and go oh no, no, no, that stuff's weird. There's possibly something I'm leaving on the table in my life that I could heal or that I could improve. So I might see you in Latin America one time.

We'd love to host you. It would be beautiful. One really interesting statistic too, another study by John Hopkins. They had 850.

Around. 850 self proclaimed atheists. I'm not talking agnostic, I don't know if God exists or not. I'm talking full atheists. God does not exist people, 850 of them. And, and after one single, I'm not talking about a grave party, whatever, I'm talking about a guided meditation psilocybin experience with a trained professional. After one single experience, two thirds of that 850 people change their self diagnostic to no, I'm not an atheist anymore. There is a God, you know, and now it's. Again, this isn't a spiritual thing, but when you, when what it does is it opens up that veil. You know, we're so stuck in this world and our five senses and everything here. And we, where we have a hard time connecting with our higher self. We come to this earth, we don't remember what happened before. We don't remember, you know, all that we, Earth, life, God, what. I don't remember any of this stuff. We have to operate on this, this, you know, believe, believe. But in that space, it opens it up and you can feel your connection to all things and it changes your perspective and it gets you out of all this addictive crap. It's super beautiful and super powerful and incredibly transformational.

Well, Paul, I hear that from so many more people now than you can imagine. 10 years ago. It was never talked about, but it's, it's very openly talked about now. So I just want to say a huge thanks. I've got another question for you before we wrap up. I want to be mindful of. I feel like I could have you on the show once a month and we still wouldn't get through everything that we want to get through.

So I want you to imagine for a moment we'll fast forward into the future, many years into the future. You're highly aware that it's your very last day here on Earth. And a very young person that you care about dearly comes into the room and says, paul, how do I go about leading my life on purpose? What would you say to them?

I would say do everything you do from the place of the heart. I would say learn to listen, not to listen with my hand on my ear. Listen with my hand on my heart. Because every one of us are born with that spark, that divine spark. Every one of us have the ability to feel and recognize that spirit of truth, that connection with all things, with each other and be led in ways in our life that will bring about so much happiness and so much good. So I would, I would simply say, learn to listen. Learn to listen from a heart space and learn how to trust what's coming through.

And everything, everything will be so much easier.

Such beautiful, beautiful advice. There's a listener right now that just needed to hear that. I just want to say a huge thank you for the incredible work you do. You are a mission driven messenger. What you're doing is so important in this world and I'm here to support you in any way that I can. So a massive thank you Paul.

Thank you James. So grateful for this time with you and your audience.

Thank you. The Lead on Purpose podcast is sponsored by NZ Mortgages. Learn more at NZMortgages Co NZ.