How to PROTECT our Children from HUMAN TRAFFICKING | Tim Ballard

All the money that people generously raised donated to us. If all we did with all of that, because everything else had failed and we just got this one kid out, would you say that was worth it? And instantly everybody said, of course it's worth it.

I caught this interesting clip of you talking about Lincoln and how much Lincoln has kind of played a role into kind of everything you're doing. And then you made this comment about, look, if you understood the truth about Lincoln, we could probably end everything that the world is facing suffering wise as it relates to trafficking. What was it about Lincoln that. That set the stage for you?

So, yeah, you know, Abraham Lincoln, the reason I love the guy is.

Because he, he had a conversion in 1862. So 1865 is the Spielberg movie and the 13th amendment, that's all awesome, but that was all a fruit of what happened in 1862, right? Where he.

He is like just humbled into the dirt. He is losing every battle that he should be winning in as much as he had, you know, about two times the resources and manpower and everything else that the south had. But he couldn't, they couldn't seem to win a battle. And then on top of that, In February of 1862, people betraying him left and right, he's the most hated president of all time, right. Because half the country wanted him dead and would have killed him if they could. And then even in the north, there were people turning on him and wondering what he was doing and why we were losing. And. And then, and then his son dies, Willie. Right. And. And now he's a humble man now, just a crushed man. And he said, I had nowhere else to turn at that point. So I fell to my knees and he started to seek heaven's guidance. And this is not kind of, this is not history out of context or anything. I mean, he couldn't have been clearer about what he was doing. And he said that it was during that time that he went through something, what he called the process of crystallization. Historians have called it a Damascus Road experience. Once will, he died, a nurse was sent from the hospital, the military hospital, to take care of his other son, Tad.

And his wife Mary was completely out of commission mentally at that point and never really recovered from the death of their son Willie. And so this nurse is helping. He's watching her. And this woman's been through hell. Yeah, you know, she's. He knows this about her, that she's lost her husband. Two of her three children are dead. Her last son is fighting in the war. And he's, he says to her one day, what is, what is it with you? Like, how do you have happiness? You should be miserable. I'm miserable and I don't have even, you know, half of what you have. And he says, she says to him, well, I met God. You know, there's a higher. Basically introducing him to the concept that there's a higher purpose and you got to find out what it is, Mr. President. And he did. And he said that he did. And he goes to his cabinet and says things like, literally one time he said, I am talking to God. God is talking to me. And he's telling us that we're all wrong. And he starts writing these crazy things that out of context, seem nuts. You know, in September of that same year, he writes that he thinks God wills this contest and wills that it should continue. God wants the war, he wants the suffering. And Lincoln says yes. And then he starts getting bolder in 1863 and four, he starts just saying it, you know, that this is. And then his, his inaugural address, most famous address. And he gave March 4, 1865, this is a punishment to north and south for allowing evil to exist. And so he found what I call the God check, like there is a higher power. And, and, and once you know that, get aligned with that will and do what he says. Lincoln in the beginning of the war said, I'm not touching slavery where it exists. I don't like it. I'm not going to let it grow into other territories, but I'm not touching it where it exists. Well, that's a problem. Someone's, Someone eventually had to have the balls to go and end this. It wasn't going to end on its own. And Lincoln said, I'm not the one. And then by 1862, the next year, he had to go back on his words because he said, in fact, Mary approached him and says, you're not going to actually issue the Emancipation Proclamation, right? Yeah. And he says, he looks at her, looks to heaven, looks back to her, and he says, I'm a man under orders. I have to do it. And that's what changed everything. I mean, he changed the purpose of the war. It was first just about reuniting the country. Now it was about ending slavery and attacking slavery everywhere. And he was so passionate about it and wore his life out in that passion. And that's what ended the legalized form of slavery. So imagine if to your question, you know, imagine if people felt that way about modern day slavery, that, you know, they were willing to be led by a higher power and do things that seemed crazy and wear themselves out. You can see right behind me, I have this. I keep singing in the.

Yeah.

This is Lincoln, right? This is crazy. Yeah, this is. Look at him. That's him in 1860 when he ran for president.

Yeah.

This is just four years, man. Look.

Oh, my gosh. Yeah.

Four years later, he looks like that. Yeah.

Wow.

It's like he's aged 20 years, right? Yeah. Um. Because he was that passionate about a cause that he felt was being mandated from heaven, and he wore himself out, and then.

Yeah.

And then the end. Took a bullet for it. So if I just. He's a great example to all of us.

Yeah. Well, the interesting thing with me was, you know, as I was watching the film that you and our mutual friend Nick Natten did together, and one of the things that stuck out to me was you originally thought the problem was too big and didn't want to engage with it, you know, early on. And it seems to me that you had almost a Damascus Road experience with you and your wife where you guys got behind it. Talk to me a little bit about that, because I feel like a lot of times we are called to bigger things on God's behalf, or we're called to bigger things, you know, whether it be a business or whatever. And we. And we try to turn away from it. Like, talk to us a little bit about that.

Yeah.

Yeah. So I. You know, my wife and I had had several experiences.

Very spiritual experiences, you know, that told us that we needed to quit a job that I loved and go into something that was so scary for me. And. And it was. I was being selfish in it because I was just thinking about myself and my kids. How am I going to provide for them? I'm going from the most secure job to the most risky endeavor, which is starting a nonprofit. I mean, I did the research and saw that. I think it was like, 5% of nonprofits make it through the first year, and then even less make it through the second year and even less.

Ten years and five years, and then.

10 years, it's down to, like, 1% that have. It's a. You know, it's a tough space to be in. And this was a model that no one had really proven. How do you privatize the kind of rescue that I was doing in the government? How do you privatize that?

Yeah.

Will it even work? Will governments accept this new approach? Yeah. And. But I. We'd had so many spiritual experiences, confirmations, and it came down to December of 2013, when I was going to turn in my badge and gun and, and I was a total coward. And I actually went to my wife and I said, I'm not doing it. She's like, wait, what?

Yeah.

And she did something with me that was. She. It was like, I don't know, she got some download from heaven to be this perfect therapist in that moment. And she said, well, what do you see? You see two paths? Well, I see this one path, that's the government. In a few years I get my pension and then I'm retired at 50, you know, I mean, that's only a couple of years from now.

Right.

So see where I could have been. And then, you know, I had my brother in law who's a financial advisor, came to me and said, let me show you your pension. How many millions of dollars this pension is actually worth if you live to be 80, you know, so I'm looking at all this stuff and it's like, you're going to walk away from all this. And so I see this road over on this side that looks beautiful and it's perfect and it's, it's planned out. Yeah. And then I look over here, this. Oh, you are road. And it's scary. And there's cobwebs. That's what she was asking me. What do you see? That's what I see.

Yeah.

And then she did this to me, okay. She. She put me through the process of crystallization. She put me through, knowingly or not, through the Lincoln test. And she said, okay, now you've. You got to meet your maker, right. Because we're all going to die.

Yeah.

Life is short, right? No matter what, we're all going to be dead soon. All of us. Right? And you're going to meet your maker. And he's going to ask you two questions. This is Katherine talking. Two questions. The first questions he's going to ask you, he's going to ask you is, did you know that I told you to start this foundation? And I had. I have to say yes. There's no denying. I could tell you story after story after story. There's no denying that piece.

Yeah.

And then the second question, did you do it? And how will you feel to say, no, sir, I didn't do it. And then I'm like, oh my gosh. Okay, now go back to that fork in the road. Now what do you see?

Yeah.

And I said, well, I still see. I see retirement at 50 and all the. But that was scary as hell. All of a sudden that road Was like, but what will I miss? What blessings might not come? What videotape will I maybe see in heaven about the people that would have been helped? Could there be thousands? And I'm responsible because I was a coward. And then the other road again, the. Our path. I still couldn't see anything except it literally. I saw light and I felt warmth. And I remember in my head, my mind's eye. Cause she invoked this in me. I saw maybe two steps to two kind of stone steps and I couldn't see the third one, but it was light and it was warm. And I would have given anything in that moment to go there.

And then she ended that little discussion with these words. And by the way, if you don't do it, you know, I'm not going to let you not do it. Because she said, I. I will not let you jeopardize my salvation by not doing it.

So, so a little bit of a.

Lincoln kind of test, you know, and, and ultimately we, you know, that was it, the end of discussion. You know, when your wife says that to you, you kind of.

Yeah, I mean, it's the whole head of the household thing. Right.

So it kind of.

Here's the trump card. Right.

It kind of ends the debate. And then, and then from that point, I don't think we've had a worse, you know, month than the month before. In other words, it's just been a blessing. Blessing, blessing, blessing. And we're now 100 plus employees and we've, we've been able to work in 30 countries, including the US and doing more than ever. So. Yeah, so that's the story. And I owe.

It all to my wife and God, really, because I was Jonah, you know.

Yeah.

I was running from what I felt called to do.

Yeah. Well, you know what I think so beautiful about everything, you know, so there's no denying that what you and your organization do is you guys, from my perspective, face extreme darkness. Right. Extreme depravity, extreme hurt. Not just the victims, but also the people that are in the, in the process. Like, it's just, I, I was trying to watch the documentary and I was trying to put myself in, in your shoes, in your family shoes, you know, and a couple of the, obviously the operations that you personally went on, you, you see things and you have to come back to your family and look in your kids eyes and stuff like that. And my heart just broke. Like it broke all the way around. But at the same time it, from what I can see, there's been extreme beauty that's Coming out of this extreme sacrifice, you know, there's, there's, there are people that you guys are bringing out and, and putting in environments where you guys can rehabilitate them. So we'll rehabilitate, retrain, really show them their worth. Right. Because they've been, they've been taught that they're not worth anything kind of thing. I just, I didn't. From me to you and your organization, I'm thankful that you did answer the call. I'm thankful that you went the 5 Talon man story versus the 1 Talon man story because I don't know that the world would be the same without it. Right. There is an awful lot of hurt and frustration and things happening in the world. And to have people that are salt to that is a big deal, at least in my perspective. One of the things that I thought was interesting, I was listening to something you and Dennis did. And I've always, I've always thought of human trafficking as really more in the sexual area, but there's actually different areas outside of sexual. Right. Would you mind breaking those down a little bit? Because I don't know that the average American actually understands what that is.

Yeah. The estimates from the U.N. u.S. State Department and so forth, it's. They put it somewhere around 37 to 40 million people altogether that are enslaved. The, the vast majority of those are slave labor.

The best estimates that I've seen reported on is about 10 million of those are sex slaves. And then of those 10, there's 2 million that are children.

Yeah.

And, you know, but it's. To me, it's hard because we work, we work in all areas. We've conducted operations, sex labor and organ harvesting, which is the smallest, but still just heinous. Right. And I mean, it's all heinous, but if you, if you own somebody. So I think the sex trafficking numbers are probably higher because once you, once you own a person, you own their body, it's just a matter of time before you're going to use them for sex as well. And we see that repeated over and over again. So. And again we learn from history, you know, the transatlantic slave trade. I think historians through the years have done a great disservice to, to the history of what happened there because, you know, they just picture this, the labor part, which was horrifying enough, don't get me wrong. But that's what people think of transatlantic slave trade. They think of, you know, the whips and the forced labor and that, and that's real. But it was way worse. It was Sex slavery. They were, they were all being raped. I can't say all, but those women are being raped, right? I mean, that's documented. The masters would rape them and sell them and for labor and sex. But that's the part, the sex part was one that was kind of hidden, I think, by a lot of historians. It was too much maybe to. Yeah, you know, whatever. And we need to talk about it because we need to learn what we can from that time period and apply the lessons to today.

Yeah. Now, correct me if I'm wrong, but the United States is still, unfortunately, one of the largest consumers of traffic.

Generally, the United States is.

The number one or two consumer of child exploitation material.

Last year, the State Department registered the United States as in the top three for destination countries for human trafficking, which only makes sense because if the demand is here, then of course, instead of these American sex tourists having to go to foreign countries, if they could just get it at home, you know, then that would be easier and it's more money for the trafficker. So that that trend would, would make sense. But, but yeah, we are the demand. And I get frustrated and people in, in the United States sit back and say, ah, this human trafficking, that's not my, that has nothing to do with me. That's, that's far, far from me. Like, no, no, no, no. If we're the number one consumers of this stuff, that means that it's all around you and your children are, are under threat. Yeah.

Yeah. Just because, you know, a lot of the people being trafficked, the vast majority of people being trafficked will probably fall outside the United States.

It's largely the demand. The demand is coming from this country. You know, and, you know, when we, when we go overseas, we are always looking for our own countrymen. If we can find those people from America who are brutalizing children, we're going to put a special effort to identify them and help stop that curiosity.

I don't know if you guys have done research on this, but I'm curious to know if there's been any insight into what creates the demand in the first place. Were these officially assaulted children themselves that have now become adults that haven't learned to, I guess, adjust or be healed? Is there any insight into what's creating the demand to begin with?

Sure, yeah, there is. It's, it's, you know, the question is, why do you want to have sex with children?

Yeah, it's weird.

I like, what is wrong with your brain? And having done this for 18 plus years, I've had a Lot of anecdotal experience, you know, because I've interviewed so many of these people and investigated them and I, they mostly fall in two categories. One, which is so tragic, oftentimes people who were sexually abused as children, their brain, then that neural pathway was formed that said sex is adult, child. And so when they become adults, that's where they go towards. Yeah, they still need to be dealt with and, you know, pulled out of society where they can't hurt children. And it's, it's tragic when that happens. And then the other category is people who are massively addicted to sex.

Often that's driven by pornography addictions.

Yeah.

And studies have been done, very conclusive studies have been done by brain doctors. Right. Neurologists and so forth, that consuming pornography creates very similar, if not almost parallel reactions as taking drugs. Yeah. It's not the naked pictures or the white powder that is, but what it is is the, it's those things create a chemical reaction in the brain. The dopamine hit, right. That's what they want. And so eventually it's not even again, the naked pictures. It's, it's, I get a dopamine hit and it feels so good, I'm addicted to it.

Yeah.

Dopamine is a powerful drug and you can actually get it prescribed to you, right. From a pharmacy. It's a real, it's a real drug that your brain produces for good reason. Right. It's, yeah, it's in a healthy marriage or a healthy relationship. I mean, it's, it's a godly thing, right?

Yeah.

But this is, this is the dark sides, you know, counterfeit to it. And so just like, you know, you start doing marijuana, eventually that chemical reaction isn't going to have the effect that you want. You, you get immune to it almost. Right. You deplete that, so you move on to something harder, stronger, cocaine, crack, whatever, heroin. And, and the same can be said for pornography. You start with the adult stuff that's legal and pretty soon it wears off. And this is from years of experience of me again interviewing people that tell me this.

Yeah.

And eventually they, it stopped. They stopped having the hit, they stopped having the dopamine hit. And so they had to go to something to charge it, anything to get it. So they go to like bestiality or weird fetishes and a lot of them end up on children. What if I watch a. Children, what if I watch a 10 year old being raped? Will that create chemical reaction? And then they find out that, oh, it did, it worked. And then next Thing you know, they're traveling to some high trafficking area to look for a child to rape. So there's your demand. Right. So it makes sense that it's going to be in the, in the country that has the most people with most access to pornography.

Yeah.

Most access to the Internet, in other words. So it would make sense. That's, that's why the United States generally is, is the highest demand. Because. Because that, that the demand is created within their own. Their own souls and their own bodies through, through sex addiction, through porn addiction.

The people that become, unfortunately become predators, we'll call them in bucket number one or really bucket number two in many respects. Do they, do they tend to always be affluent in nature or having a certain level of affluence to be able to even to travel and to do these things, or is it really kind of all walks of life and it's just, it comes down to what access they have.

Yeah, it's all walks of life. And it's hard because everybody wants to picture the creeper in a guy, you know, Chester the Molester, as you know, it has a certain look. Oh, yeah, look at that guy with the greasy hair and whatever. No, that's not what, that's not what it is. It's, it's, it's anyone, it's everyone. We've, I've seen and been and participated in the arrest of pedophiles who are doctors, lawyers, educators, fathers of multiple children, really, you know, clerical people of all faiths.

Yeah.

You know, and that's what's scary about it is it's, that's, it's, it's such a closet crime and closet sin that.

You know, people trust. They're going to trust this guy. He's the baseball coach. You know, he's. He's got three kids and a beautiful wife.

Yeah.

There's no way.

There's no way it could be him.

There's no way it could be him. I've seen. The vast majority of people I've seen arrested and participated in are that, that, that kind of person, man.

I mean, like I said, it's a heartbreaking subject, but I'm glad you guys are doing the work big time. You know, it's.

It'S, it's, it's. I actually think it needs to be discussed more consistently so it can be addressed more consistently. I feel like, you know, over the last, you know, three decades or whatever, obviously the work that you guys have done have been, you know, megaphoning that, hey, this is, this exists. We need Help. These are the efforts we're doing to help these people break free and all this kind of stuff. But it seemed like up to that. It was like a hush hush, like, shh, don't tell anybody. Don't. Like we don't talk about this, you know? Do you find that that's still kind of the same case or is it becoming a little more freer to talk about nowadays?

Yeah, man. When I was in the government in the early 2000s, you could Google trafficking and you'd probably get like the Department of Transportation traffic patterns or something. Like no one was talking about it. I remember having conversations with friends who were like, even like doubting what I was doing. Like, what do you mean? Child sex. Like, I remember I had a conversation with a really good friend of mine who was just like.

In fact, I had arrested one of his friends.

Oh gosh.

For. This guy had so much child exploitation rape material. You know, five year olds, six year olds, seven year olds.

Yeah.

And I remember him like getting. He found out that he was arrested and then he found that I was one that arrested him and he confronted me. He's like, you know, how do. It's just not. It's unjust, you know, how could he have known between a. If she was 17, looking at a 17 year old or a 21 or an 18 year old or a 20 year old, like, I mean, that just seems like unfair, you know, I was like, wait, what? What? I was like, what do you think child sex material is? Yeah. Because his mind couldn't grasp.

Yeah.

Someone would.

7 or 8 year old or 10 year old. Yeah, yeah.

And when I said that to him, I said we didn't charge him for anything other than the prepubescent stuff like 7 year olds, 6 year olds. He had, he had hundreds of thousands of videos and images of that age. And I remember my friend just turned around and walked. Like he turned red and walked away. Like walked away and just stopped. He was like melting down. I'm sure his decent mind couldn't comprehend it. So that's the problem that we faced in the beginning. Especially as. No, no way, no way. It can't be that bad. It can't be that. And we had a problem even in the judicial system. Like judges in the beginning were like sentencing people to like no time at all because they weren't comprehending what it was.

Wow.

You know, because again, it's. Decent minds can't comprehend it until you see it. Even when you see it, you don't believe it.

Yeah.

I'm still shocked by, by it.

And so, but we've, we have done a lot, all the many organizations and government entities and so forth, like Homeland Security's Blue Campaign. And they've made you, you start seeing it now in the airports. You hear it, you hear it over like the speakers in airports, like, beware of, you know, human trafficking and this and that. And so we're now, I think, at least sensitized to it, to where people are accepting this is real. Too many say this hurts too much. I'm not going to look.

And one thing I like to say to people, that they don't like it when I say this, but, you know, they, they, they read history books and say, I would have been an abolitionist back in the day of Abraham Lincoln. I would have supported the Underground Railroad. I would have done this. Or if I was in the civil rights movement, I would have been fighting there. You know, and.

It'S, it's interesting because, you know, the truth is if, if, if you want to know if you would have been doing those things.

Yeah.

You know, because either you are or aren't doing them now.

Yeah. So true.

The parallels are very similar. You know, if you really understand history and understand the people in the north during, during the transatlantic slave trade, they didn't see slavery.

Yeah.

Or even people of African descent at all.

Yeah.

They didn't travel to people in New York, didn't travel to South Carolina any more than most Americans travel to high trafficking areas. Yeah, right.

Yeah. For sure.

So they had just heard about it, just like we have heard about it. And so we like to point a finger at the northerners. How did you let this last for so long? Oh, they'll point right back at you. What are you doing? Because you're in the same situation. Right. Right now. You know, it's easier to turn a blind eye and just say, yeah, I've heard of that, but I can't handle it. And you got to shed a little innocence. You know, you've got to, you've got to dip your, your feet into it a little bit to at least understand what it is in order to fight it in whatever way you choose. And so we're just grateful for people like you, Steven, willing to have me on and talk about something so dark it hurts to talk about it. And so we love when media is willing to, to, to engage, but so many still are not.

Yeah. No, and it, look, it's, the reality is, is it's, it is a dark subject. But if we don't bring the darkness to light. It can never be dealt with. Right. You know, this, the trafficking in some way, shape or form. I feel like I can find evidence going back thousands of years, you know. You know, you start looking, the. You look, you look at the slavery that was happening, you know, to the. To the Jewish people through Moses. If you're. To your point earlier, if you're being. If you're being trafficked one way or being owned one way, it could happen. You know, you look back to. I was thinking about all the milk cartons that I grew up as a kid. Like, you know, they used to have people's faces on the milk carton that these people, these kids would just disappear. Right. So I just, it just, I feel like it's. It's something that I believe that God has brought to the surface so we can not get desensitized to it, but get sensitized to it so we can deal with it on his behalf, if that makes any sense. I really believe that. I am curious. How are the traffickers or the. Yeah. How are the traffickers actually getting these victims to begin with? Especially if you have Americans going overseas to partake in this stuff.

Yeah. It's a really good question and one that needs to be understood. Unfortunately, there was this horrible piece that came out in the Atlantic about a month ago called the Great Fake Child Sex Epidemic. And my foundation and me personally were one of the main targets of the attack.

That's because you're doing, like work. You're doing God's work.

Shame on that person. Shame there. Whoever doesn't get rescued because they believed what she wrote, that's on her forever. And what she did was decided not to answer the question that you just asked me. How are traffickers getting these kids? So she's trying to make a point in pushing an agenda. Probably because I was a Trump appointee, in my opinion. Got to hate him because I have a picture with him and Trump. So I can say whatever I want now. Yeah. But it was the most ridiculous. Ignoring all the research. Right. And decided to define what trafficking is to like a case, like an Elizabeth Smart type case, which is horrifying, but doesn't happen as often. Right?

Yeah.

Of someone going into your house and kidnapping you and ripping you out of your house. And that's, you know. So she decided to limit trafficking to something like that.

Yeah.

And now she could pretend the numbers are much smaller. Never mind what the UN and the US State Department and all these very credible sources who have invested lots of time and resources into figuring out what the number is. Yeah. Right. I heard, I heard on a radio podcast, whatever, talking about, well, you know, the hotline. It's estimated by most groups that there's 100 to 200,000 children in the commercial secretary in America. And she said, well, you know, there was only 17,000 reports to the hotline last year or whatever. 2019, not 100,000. I mean, that's like saying. That's like saying I go out fishing for two days or three days in the, in the ocean and I only caught 30 fish.

Yeah.

So. But maybe there's 40 or 50 fish in the ocean because I only got 30.

Yeah.

I mean, how, how ignorant.

Yeah.

And it's dangerous ignorance because if you convince people.

Yeah. I was gonna say the crazy part about it is, you know, if it's one is too many.

Exactly.

To that. To that one person too much. You know what I'm saying?

Exactly.

That's, that's the danger.

And I'll say this before I answer. Get to your, your question. I'll say this. It doesn't matter where we go. We find women and children who are being held against their will for sex. I don't give a. I don't give. I don't care what the number is. Be honest with you. I, I'm not a researcher.

Yeah.

I think the UN And I think the State Department are credible.

Yeah.

I'm going to, I will continue to repeat those numbers. Yeah. I don't. They say 40 million slaves. I don't care if there's 20 million. I don't care if there'S 1 million. I don't care if there's half a million.

Yeah.

It's not going to change what I'm going to be doing, because everywhere I go, I can't get enough out.

Yeah.

There's. Everywhere we go, we're going to find it. So, so it doesn't like these numbers are just, you know, but, but let's, let's make a big deal about these numbers and stop the passion for saving these people. Oh, man. I'm telling you what. That's, that's, that's, that's not, that's not going to be a good meeting.

Yeah.

I mean, the reality is, try to, try to delegitimize.

Yeah.

All the many people sitting right now in a cell or in a. We just did a rescue a bit ago. They're keeping them in a, in a jail cell or keeping them in a hen house, pulling him out to be raped. They're there right now. Right. And to picture Them reading that article.

Yeah.

And they don't. They're not counted.

Yeah.

Because they were lured out or their parents were part of it. And that's the vast majority of how traffickers are. They're businessmen. Okay. You see the movie Taken.

Yeah.

And people say, is that real? I said it's pretty realistic about how they're treated, but not realistic about how the trafficker got them a cold. A cold kidnapping like that is bad business.

Yeah.

Because, you know, you stir up a Liam Neeson to come after you.

For sure. Figuratively or almost or even literally, that's.

What'S going to happen if you're after my daughter. I'm coming, I'm coming.

Right. I mean, look how many people were looking for Elizabeth Smart because that happened to her. Right?

Yeah.

But that's not. So that's bad business. So what are you going to do? You're going to go up into the highlands of Central America and find an impoverished family and lure that child out of the. Hey, can your 12 year old be a babysitter? A nanny for my kids And I'll pay you guys $100 right now and you can talk to her every weekend. Oh, yeah, that'd be wonderful. Oh, my gosh, what an opportunity. They take them out, move them across another country. There's no recourse, no one, they're gone. That's how the vast majority of trafficking happens. It's a lure situation or it's the Romeo situation where someone pretends to be your, I'm going to. I love you, I'm going to be your boyfriend and, and sweep them off their feet. Oh, let's go visit my family in Honduras. And then. Gone. They're gone. Sold. Right? Yeah. So that's how they work as businessmen. None of those would fit into the very limited category that the Atlantic decided to paint it as. Right. But that's how it's done. These are businessmen and they're not going to do the cold takes and the hard kidnappings. Usually they do happen occasionally. Right. But, but, but it's generally not that way. Yeah. And so we need, yeah, we need to know. We didn't know what it is. And, and shame on anyone. Right. For, for putting their own agenda or career.

Above people who are literally in slavery, being raped on the daily.

Yeah.

What a sick world we live in. Yeah.

And, you know, but that's, that's why we're doing what we do. Right. That's, you know, I get on the air every time I can and try to offer some hope. You're putting boots on the ground, getting hope. We're, we're doing all we can. I think the interesting thing for me is, you know, when I started, it really got real for me when I realized how young many of the children are. You know, they're not the teenagers necessarily. I mean, it's not saying there's not teenagers, but that there's a lot of youth. A lot of what? I mean, what's the youngest child you've rescued so far?

Geez. I mean.

The youngest that I've heard. I'll just say that the youngest rescue child. I'm not going to give myself credit. There's so many people, but like six months old.

Like, yeah. I mean the grossest stories I won't even tell you. But yeah, that's. It starts, it starts that young. There's that many creeps. The average age of someone who gets thrown into trafficking is between 12, 13 ish from what I've seen, numbers wise. And that's also what I've seen personally is about that age is average. But it really runs the, it runs the whole gamut. And also we shouldn't forget that women are four times more likely to be trafficked than kids.

Yeah.

And there. And that's always the lure. Hey, come, I'll give you a great job, you know, and come, come here. And they get there and they steal their passports. I mean, we've literally dealt with thousands of cases of women being trafficked from Africa into the Middle east or from Venezuela to the Caribbean. You know, promised jobs and passports taken. They don't speak the language. They move them over here and boom, they're sex slaves. And, and that's, and that's just as tragic as any other case. So yeah, the oldest we did, we actually rescued, she's in her 90s.

Are you kidding me?

Yeah. This was just last year. It was a case of a woman who was, she was actually a very educated, she worked at a university, I think she was a professor actually. But she had no children and her husband passed away and she had no one. And these people approached her in Venezuela and said, hey, you know, because she was going deaf. Hey, you know, up in a certain Middle Eastern country, you can go there and, and, and here's a ticket. You just fly there and they'll pick you up and they're going to put in, you know, ear, ear whatever.

Yeah.

Hearing hearing aids.

Yeah.

And then you come right back and hey, just take these two suitcases of clothes because they need these clothes. This, you know, she, she goes It's. It's got I don't know how many kilos of cocaine. Right.

Yeah.

She's arrested, thrown in jail for five years in this Middle Eastern country. We found her, found out about her.

You know, got legally made our case, got her out and escorted her back to Venezuela where she's. Now we will. We will take care of her. She's in a very nice aftercare or retirement home. We're funding her until. Until, you know, she passes. So. Yeah, we've seen everything from. From old to young and how people take advantage and abuse people. This way.

She's man. Well, again, I thank God for you guys, the entire team. Right. Not just Tim, but the entire team.

Did. Did Covid slow this down at all? I mean, with. Not with having lockdowns and not being able to travel and stuff that it was. Did it make a dent in.

Did it did a little bit, but not as much as we feared. Luckily, a lot of our countries, a lot of our operators live in country so they could work around it. Yeah, they struggled sometimes when things got locked down and they couldn't move, but then they just. Instead they started focusing on the digital side and they actually found cases they probably may not have found otherwise because they were so focused on, you know, on crawling through the dark net and looking for kids being abused there. And then we just. We started focusing on countries that didn't have travel restrictions. Several Caribbean and Latin American countries didn't. And so we were able to get in and out pretty throughout the whole thing.

You know, in some ways, it didn't make us look more into the digital realm. We just hired a new digital forensic person and. Or growing that area. Because Covid, what it did, tragically, it was one of the. One of the horrific external, you know, the. Or the unintentional consequences.

Was what the shutdowns did to kids.

Yeah.

You know, shutting down an entire economy like we decided to do. Um, we didn't. We didn't think very good, very well.

Right.

About what that would do.

You.

You understand there's lots of millions of kids in the world who rely on social safety nets like schools after school programs sporting, you know, being on a team that keeps kids safe, that keeps kids away from danger. Instead, everything's shut down. You're told, sit on this table with your laptop or your wife phone while me and mom try to go figure out how to get food and toilet paper or whatever, salvage our jobs. And the pedophiles are also home on their laptops. And so in. In 2020 when it first began, the numbers were over 2 million in excess of the year before in terms of reports to the national center for Missing and Exploited Children for Sex for potential sex crimes originating online. So we don't even know how many of those predators got to the kids and physically hurt them. We don't know yet.

We will soon see. But when you consider that millions in excess in just two months, that's not even taking into account, you know, what's happened since those two, those first two months, you know, and then, and then the science starts coming out about, you know, survivability and you realize that kids.

Kids have a, you know, 99, 9 9% chance of surviving now. I've lost close friends.

Yeah.

I've lost two close friends who died of this horrific virus. I'm not belittling it. Okay. But we have to make. We have to make decisions based on facts. Right.

And, yeah, there's a lot of guessing going on for a couple of years for sure.

Yeah. And it feels like even when this, when the facts came in so many jurisdictions were still saying, no, we're going to keep doing it the old way. Like, wait, so you have kids if you're under 60, which most teachers and coaches are, and definitely kids are. So that group of people that keep kids safe, you know, that don't create a 2 million in excess reporting of child sex crimes potentially happening. Right? Yeah, you exchanged that. You exchanged a 99.9% survivability for 2 million plus. It's. I'm being very conservative. Yeah, it's multiple millions more reports which.

For sure, you know, that a huge amount of those are going to end in child sex abuse. You know, it's. And it's just like, what's more dangerous to you? Yeah, clearly the sex abuse is more dangerous than the 99.9% survivability. And it's like, why can't you see this? And that's just one of many negative externalities that occurred because of the shutdowns and suicide rates through the roof and all sorts of other problems. Right. So that's what shifted, I think, helped shift our focus to the digital side because the shutdowns created an environment where we're going to see a lot more abuse originating from that venue.

Well, God willing, the work that you guys have been doing is going to take a huge root and continue making dents in it. You know, I think for the average American, like before I, I took the time to really kind of just pay attention. Right. You were talking about that like Very beginning we first jumped on airs. Like nobody, not everybody's like kind of realizes this is really going on before I started paying attention. I would say that, I would say that the, the problem seems like it's too big, like it can't. So if it's that big, why, why jump in and try? The work that our has been doing has obviously made a huge dent into that. And I know there's a lot of work to get done, but if someone like myself, like for example, I mentioned to you before, I fully plan on partnering with you guys moving forward to do whatever I can with you guys specifically. If someone wants to jump in but they feel like it's maybe too big of a problem for them, what can they do to take it to start to work in this area?

Well, first, you know, it is such a huge problem and people sometimes ask us like, you're just, you're just making a dent. Yeah, well, in the statistics. Yes. Right. We've participated in literally thousands of rescue operations.

And that's a dent compared to millions.

Sure.

Except this is why after every operation, like I just, 48 hours ago, I was in a foreign country.

And we worked with that law enforcement to rescue a kid.

Yeah.

Who had been trafficked since he was 11. Very dangerous scenario. Our guys went in with the police, undercover into cartel run dwellings and got this kid out. Right. And, and I had direct contact with this kid. Sweet, innocent. After your team was right there, he was crying, don't leave me, don't leave me. We're never going to leave you. You know, and I mean, that was literally 48 hours ago.

Yeah.

And I always, when we do that rescue like that, I ask my team, was it worth it if we've been around for eight years, if all we ever did, with all the blood, sweat and tears that we put into this, all the money that people generously raised, donated to us, if all we did with all of that because everything else had failed and we just got this one kid out, would you say that was worth it and instantly everybody. Yeah, of course it's worth it.

Yeah.

What wouldn't you do for your child if your child was being exploited that way? You know, And I think any decent person would. Would agree. Yeah. For sure. Is worth it. And so you make it about the one. Always. Yeah. You know, and it's like, doesn't matter.

Yeah. We'll never stop. We want to end this, but always for the one. We'll always move heaven and earth if there's just one that we're going to go in and get.

Yeah, well, it's a compounding effect too, obviously, if, you know, if one of the perpetrators used to be a victim themselves and you're able to step in and, you know, pull a victim out of the circumstances, they stand a much better chance of not repeating that same behavior. So that, to me, it's like compound interest, right? There's a compounding effect to saving the one. And, you know, as people of faith, one of the things that I, you know, God came after me like he thought I was. He thought I was worthy enough, right, to come, to come after. So I've tried to look at all of his children the same way, right? Not knowing their heart, not knowing what's going on. What is a safe place for people to find out information about this? You know, because we, you know, there are sources that are, you know, you mentioned a couple earlier that may not have the whole truth or may not share the whole truth. What are safe places for people to go and learn about the trafficking situation, about how they can get involved, etc.

Well, people go to our website, our rescue.org, and learn all about the many different ways that we attack the problem.

There's a place they can go called Join the Fight, which gives a lot of different ideas about how they can get involved in different ways. But most people will know before I do or any of us know what it is you can do. Once you understand what it is, people will be creative and say, this is what I could do, right? Whether it's raising money or doing awareness or, you know, getting involved in the political side on what laws need to pass. What do I need to tell my Congress person what to do? You know, there's so many things people can do to get involved, but first they need to have a conversion to the cause, right? They need to allow themselves, like we said earlier, to dip their foot in the pool and shed a little innocence and look at it and it hurts. And so I'm grateful for people even willing to look at it. And then once they look at it, they will be inspired. And I say people turn. Turn to God or whatever is your higher source and get a download what you're supposed to do about it. And it will come. I believe it will come. And then if millions and millions of people around the world are doing that, we can end this.

Yeah. I love it, man. Well, dude, I appreciate you hanging out with me today. You've opened my eyes a ton. I still realize there's a ton of work to still get done, but I Want to get in the fight and help as much as I can. I was actually thinking, I noticed that you guys have a tour that you guys are doing, this kind of getting started here in the near future. I saw a couple of dates in Miami and Los Angeles and Utah. If you want to come to North Carolina in the Raleigh area, you can have full use of my live event center. All the technology, all the lights. We can stream it wherever you want. If you want to come here and bring your team here and do that, consider it a free like event like you. You can. As long as you can come here with your team and do what you guys do best. My. My casa is you casa.

All right, well, I will pass it on to the. To. To. To the organizers of that tour, and let's see what we can do.

All right.

Thank you so much.

Yeah, absolutely. I'm serious, too, now. I'm not playing around. All right, so.

Okay, I'll pass it on.

Rock on. Well, dude, Tim, thank you so much for hanging out with me, man. This is. This has blessed me more than you know, and I hope we're able to bless you back and return in the near future.

Thank you, Stephen. It's been a pleasure being here with you for. Appreciate it.

All right, my friend. Take care. Peace.

Okay, see you.

Bye. If you love that interview, go ahead and check out this next one right here. When you take the time to slow down and, let's say, meditate or pray or write in a journal or read something beautiful or walk in nature, you.

Get into a place where you connect.

To your heroic self, not your egoic self.