Matthew Friedman | The Horrific Realities Of Modern Slavery & Human Trafficking

✍︎: https://curiousworldview.beehiiv.com/subscribe

🎙️: https://atlasgeographica.com/matthew-friedman/

Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/ryanfhogg/

#152 - This is a podcast about human trafficking and modern slavery.

The guest is Matthew Friedman, and he is the CEO of the Mekong Club, which is an organisation that mobilises the private sector to take action against human trafficking and modern slavery.

In this conversation, Matthew reveals unsettling story after unsettling story of human trafficking, modern slavery and scams. And in and among it all, he explains how it could be possible that today there are more slaves than has ever been before.

Time Stamps For Matthew Friedman

• 00:00 - Introduction
• 01:32 - Horrific Story From Nepal/India
• 05:25 - UN Versus NGO's Versus Private Sector
• 11:19 - There Is More Slavery Today Than There Ever Has Been
• 15:40 - What Does Matthew Do To Stop Resentment?
• 20:25 - How Are Slavery Statistics Collected?
• 22:30 - How Does Rising Middle Class In Developing Economies Affect These Numbers?
• 28:50 - Pig Butchering & Harmcore
• 38:56 - Coming Face To Face With The Criminals
• 46:50 - The Role Of Offshore Finance & Money Laundering
• 52:40 - The Geography Of All Of This
• 1:00:10 - Red Light District In Amsterdam & 'Taken' & Jeffrey Epstein
• 1:11:30 - Africa
• 1:14:20 - China & Specific Example Of Manufacturers Exploiting Slavery & Greenwashing
• 1:29:30 - Role Of Serendipity In Matthew Friedman's Life & Bullish Country & Conversation Between 2 People

🍻☕: https://www.buymeacoffee.com/ryanhogg

Curious Things Mentioned During The Episode

• Investigative Journalism Starter Pack
• Martin Schibbye - Cards Of Qatar

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:00

This is a podcast about human trafficking and modern slavery. The guest is Matthew Friedman, and he's the CEO of the Mekong Club, which is an organization that mobilizes the private sector to take action against human trafficking and to take action against modern slavery. In this conversation, Matthew reveals unsettling story after unsettling story that involves human trafficking, modern slavery, and all types of different scams. In and amongst it all, he even explains how it could be possible that today there are more slaves than has ever been before. Matthew talks about pig boxing, the rise of online fraudsters, scam artists, the geography of slavery and human trafficking, what it's like coming face to face with a criminal underworld around all of this, his experience advocating on behalf of victims and working in the UN to ultimately becoming disenfranchised to the point where he thought more good could be done in the private sector. And then of course in In Amongst that is much, much more as well. This is a heavy episode, but as well, I actually think it might be one of the best in this podcast's short life. Matthew is such an inspiring communicator, and I'm sure his work will leave as sizable an indent on your worldview as it did on mine. So you all know the drill, leave a five-star review on wherever you listen to this, and tell a friend who you think might be particularly affected by this episode or more generally interested in this podcast. With absolutely no further ado, here is Matthew Friedman. Alright, Matt, so this career started for you over 30 years ago. You were working as a health officer in Nepal. Can you explain your trajectory from there to then uh working with the UN?

SPEAKER_00 1:44

So I began my career uh working in Nepal for USAID. I was a public health officer, and my job was basically to translate resources into healthier people. At that time we were finding girls 12, 13 years old who were HIV positive, couldn't understand what was going on. So we went to go and interview these young women, and we heard pretty much the same story over and over again. How a human trafficker would go into a village, say he's looking for a wife, find a young girl, marry her, and then take her to Mumbai, India, to the brothels. And then he'd basically sell her to the brothels. And we all know the story, uh, she'd be gang raped until she agreed to basically have sex with 10, 20 guys a day every day for a couple of years until she got sick and nobody wanted her anymore, and they threw her out on the street. And so, as a result of this process, um, you know, we were hearing this story over and over again from those who made it back to Nepal. But for me, I didn't really understand the evil of it until I actually went to those brothels. I was invited by the Indian government to do public health checks, had a police officer with me, went into one of their brothels, and there was an 11-year-old trafficking victim. This girl saw this Caucasian guy, saw an opportunity, literally ran up to me, wrapped herself around me, and said, Save me, save me, they're doing terrible things to me. I looked down at this child who was hysterically crying, turned to the police officer and said, We need to get this girl out of here. He said, We can't do that. So, what are you talking about? You're a police officer. He says, if we try to leave, we'll both be killed. To make a long story short, we left, we came back with a lot more police, but of course she was gone. Now I tell this story because I wasn't one of those 15-year-olds that said, you know, when I grow up I want to be an activist. In fact, I did everything I could not to be an activist. But every once in a while in life we're tested. That was my big test. I failed miserably after that. I couldn't eat, I couldn't sleep, um, and eventually did what most activists do, surrendered to the fact that now that I've been exposed to this, this is what I'm going to be doing with my life, and 30 years later, here I am talking to you. So I spent eight years in Nepal. Then I went to Bangladesh. I was there for five years, focused on looking at both sex trafficking and forced labor. There was a lot of forced labor into manufacturing and fishing boats and agriculture and so forth. Then I went to Thailand and ran the U.S. government's kind of regional programs related to human rights and human trafficking. After a while, I decided I needed a change. So I took on one of the largest countertrafficking programs in the world run by the United Nations. Had offices in China, Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, Thailand, and Myanmar, did that for six years, and then felt like uh there wasn't that much progress taking place. It was too slow, it was too bureaucratic, so I decided that I wanted to work with the private sector. And the reason why I made this choice is because private sector has banks, private sector has, you know, supply chains and uh manufacturing and hospitality that all have the potential of a nexus between human trafficking and uh the private sector business that we're focusing on. And so the thing about the business world is if they find an issue or a problem, they'll fix it immediately because it's a reputational risk. There's a vulnerability there. And so we were able to get quick action. So I set up an organization called the Make On Club. The Make On Club basically works with the private sector in a positive, supportive, non-naming and shaming way. And what we do is we raise awareness, we give them the tools, the means, the training, everything they need in order to ensure their business is not uh associated with anything related to uh human trafficking or modern slavery vulnerability. And as a result of that, we are able to protect the world through the private sector response.

SPEAKER_01 5:21

Could you give an example uh up close of the bureaucracy you had to rub up against at the UN?

SPEAKER_00 5:29

Well, I often say that uh when I was working for the United Nations, I spent a lot of time in five-star hotels eating really good food talking about the issue of human trafficking. It was very theoretical. It was very kind of uh looking at it from a standpoint of a philosophy of uh sorts. And a lot of the time was spent writing papers and documents and and it just seemed to take forever. In fact, my particular project got into trouble because we set up a hotline from within the United Nations to collect the information because our mandate was to understand it, and then somebody within the United Nations came and said, Well, you're not supposed to be helping people, you're supposed to be helping the groups that help the people. You have to be one step beyond that. So, I mean, I believe in the United Nations system. I think it does a lot of really excellent work. But for this type of thing, you need to be, you know, boots on the ground in the field, you have to be addressing the issue where the action is, and the United Nations just didn't serve that purpose for me.

SPEAKER_01 6:32

Having seen it from both the public sector, the UN, who's um financed by uh um government aid budgets around the world, to now running your own um private organization which is um addressing the same problems. Do you have any sort of broad reflections over the effectiveness of these public organizations?

SPEAKER_00 6:57

I think that uh uh it's the same with the NGOs. There's a lot of NGOs that are out there trying to address this particular issue. But in some cases, you have organizations that really don't have a direct relationship with forced labor potential scenarios. The private sector does. For example, if you're a more manufacturing company, you use factories, and those factories have subfactories, and with in within that network, there is the possibility that you would find forced uh labor indicators that would indicate modern slavery taking place. So I feel that the private sector has the potential to be much closer to the action and to use the tools and the means they have, you know, whether or not they choose to work with an organization, whether they choose to fund an organization as a means of controlling whether or not that entity that is exploiting people exists or not. So I feel very strongly, having worked with the private sector for 11 years now, that if given the choice between working in the public sector and working with the private sector, I'll work with the private sector because again, that sense of urgency, that they want to make sure that their business is protected. Because, you know, businesses are concerned about profits, prestige, and growth. And if there is uh a newspaper article that basically talks about a particular company being associated with modern slavery, it affects all of those things in a in a very devastating way sometimes.

SPEAKER_01 8:26

It sounds like it's a case where the incentives are just extremely clear. What are the incentives uh that drove your work at the UN? Right? So is it just supporting the private businesses like Mekong Club?

SPEAKER_00 8:40

Actually, the UN did very little with the private sector. It was mostly with community-based organizations and non-government organizations. And so they were doing kind of prevention work, working with migrants and so forth. Um so you know, they they have they have an impact. They they're able to raise awareness and get things done and so forth. But, you know, it happens at just such a snail's pace sometimes. And I and I really feel like that's the advantage of working with the private sector, is they don't have time to kind of develop work plans and schedules. When they realize that there's something that needs to be fixed, they fix it. And that really does uh offer an incentive for somebody like me who really wants to get something done and get it done within a particular time because we're talking about victims. We're talking about people who are in difficult circumstances. We have to be concerned about these individuals.

SPEAKER_01 9:31

I I know it's probably uh not an impossible but an extremely difficult question to answer, but if you could think of this sort of uh capital effectiveness, like what how much more efficient is say um one dollar spent in the private sector going towards actually helping the victims um versus one dollar spent in the via government aid going somewhere to like the UN?

SPEAKER_00 9:55

Well, I mean there's uh kind of a situation where uh an organization maybe gets $10 million and helps about 2,600 people out of modern slavery using a traditional approach. Our organization less than a half million and we do the same number of people that we help. Yeah. And that's because the private sector does the work. So in terms of cost effectiveness, it's it's extremely cost effective because once you kind of instill within a private company the tools and the means to be able to protect themselves, then they go ahead and do it themselves. But it's really important to understand what I'm talking about when I say this. Like there are certain indicators of modern slavery. The International Labor Organization has developed 11 of them. One of them is that in a factory you have a person who doesn't have access to their uh passport or identification documents because the factory's holding it. Now, maybe they're holding it to hold that person in place, or maybe they're holding it because they don't have a locker and they have no place to do it, so they give it to the employer. But it doesn't matter to a journalist. The journalist would look at this and say, well, they don't have access to their um documentation, that's an indicator of modern slavery. And so a lot of times these vulnerabilities exist, but companies don't know about it, and we help them to identify this and fix it so that that vulnerability doesn't become a vulnerability.

SPEAKER_01 11:17

So you started off with this desperately harrowing story of um a girl being uh forced into an arranged marriage in Nepal, smuggled into India, and then just you know as as really as horrible as it gets. And then uh having listened to many of your talks and interviews, you just have a catalogue of all of these harrowing stories again and again and again, which leads to really one of the most disturbing statistics I think I've ever heard, which is that there is more slavery today than there ever has been. How can this be true?

SPEAKER_00 11:55

Well, I think uh as the population increases, so does the percentage of people who are in situations where they lose control of their life. They can't leave a situation, they're not being paid, there's uh threats of violence, there's violence, and so forth, and that's basically the definition of modern slavery. So in this world of ours, you have had this happening from the beginning of time, but because you have kind of more uh people, uh more uh opportunities for people to go from one place to another and get exploited, et cetera, et cetera, you have this scenario where you have a lot of people in modern slavery. Now, the global statistic is about 50 million. About 27 million of that would be forced labor, of which 6.3 million falls into that category of sex trafficking that I was talking about. The women and the girls, sometimes boys and men, but mostly women and girls who are forced into prostitution. Um you're really talking about a huge number of people in this situation. About 20% turnover a year, which translates to about 9.2 million people entering per year. In a day, about 25,200 somewhere in the world, or a new slave every four seconds. So if we count to four, one, two, three, four, somewhere in the world. It could be Japan, it could be Thailand, it could be the United States, and the drum beats on and on and on.

SPEAKER_01 13:19

But everyone has a smartphone. Isn't like this global connectivity and the and the and the uber surveillance supposed to make this type of extreme criminal activity uh like harder to get away with?

SPEAKER_00 13:33

Uh you know, um the thing about the cell phone is that it could be used for good or it could be used for bad. You know, for example, social networking uh contributes to human trafficking. And the reason is that, you know, fraudulent ads uh, you know, that basically bring migrants to a particular location. Once they get away from their community, then they can be exploited. You see young women who are groomed all over the world to into prostitution because the pimps know how to pretend that they're a 17-year-old boy and they find a 15-year-old girl who's misunderstood and doesn't have a lot of friends, and they befriend her and then set up a time for them to meet, and then, you know, uh uh a 17-year-old acts as the avatar for this relationship. Uh she drinks a Coke that's laced with a drug, and then she finds herself naked in a hotel room, and then they extort sex out of her and so forth. So, I mean, there are many examples in which, you know, basically cell phones can be used in a negative way. The positive ways, you're absolutely right. If you were to see something that looks like it's related to human trafficking, you could take a picture, you could get a GPS uh location, but most people don't know what to look for. You know, I do a lot of presentations. Last year, I think I did a about over 200 presentations, and I would say that less than 10% of the people I present to know even 25% of what I'm talking about. If you don't know about an issue, you're not going to care about it. If you don't care, you're not going to do anything. So awareness is one of the big constraints that we face. Because if people had that awareness and then they had their phone and they saw something, because they would be taught what to look for, then we would have a lot more cases being reported. And that's that's part of the solution to addressing modern slavery, is waking people up to this scenario being right out in front of them in some cases.

SPEAKER_01 15:24

How do you because I'm presuming so much of the lack of awareness is simply choosing to look away. I I find it almost inconceivable that you could um live on the internet and be totally ignorant to the idea of human trafficking happening. Um how do you sort of stop resentment at the door and and and maintain drive and and sort of optimism in the face of seemingly everyone turning away from it? Because a theme in a lot of your talks has been we get up to the line and then we do nothing about it. Um That's right. And so, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 16:05

Yeah, I mean, uh I wrote a book called Captive Daughters, and uh, you know, some people want to read it, and they get to around page 47, and they say, Oh, it's it's getting into like the girl's about to be raped, and I don't want to expose myself to this, and you know, I'm having a pretty good day, and that'll just depress me. So here they are, sitting on a couch, they have a cup of coffee, they have the AC on, they have good lighting, they have a good life, and they can't even read words on a on a page because it makes them sad. Imagine if you were in that situation yourself. Imagine if your daughter or your wife or your spouse or somebody else or your girlfriend were were put into that type of situation. I think that the the world is averse to anything negative, and I hate to say it, but poverty and uh, you know, health conditions and a lack of education and human trafficking and human rights are often ugly things. And the reason why we have so many people in these circumstances is we don't allow ourselves to see this and feel it. And I think it's an important part of the process. You know, I I think the shock factor is there. But in the early days, I I learned that I would do a presentation and I would spend 40 minutes talking about the pain and suffering. And at the end of my talk, I'd see a room of zombies. They were so cat, uh they were so affected by the information that it was just too much. So I went from 40 minutes to 30, that was still too much. 15 minutes was too much. I get it down to about eight and a half minutes, and that's enough to open up their mind to it, but then I switch over to something else because I don't want to turn them off. And that these messages turn them off. It's kind of like if you're watching late night TV and then they have one of those ads for the you can sponsor a kid and they're in a poverty situation and you turn the channel because you don't want to watch that, because you want to get back to your show because you don't want to be affected by those visuals. But they're real. We're talking about 50 million people in modern slavery around the world. That's a huge number. We should all be concerned about that.

SPEAKER_01 18:06

But then how do you personally deal with stopping resentment at the door?

SPEAKER_00 18:11

Well, I mean, you know, I what I try to do is to limit the, you know, the serious stories to something manageable, give them statistics, but then give them a sense that if I'm telling you these things, I'm not telling you this because somebody else needs to address this. I'm going to give you some recommendations as a human being that you can do to address this issue. For example, you can learn more about this. You've done something. If you learn something and then go and tell two or three other people you've done something else, something else, something else. You put something on social networking, you've done something. You can volunteer. There's a lot of organizations that will allow you to volunteer from home. My youngest volunteer was nine years old. This girl saw me in a documentary, contacted me, and said, Mr. Friedman, I want to help. I said, You're nine years old. She said, So what? I said, You're nine years old. She said, nine-year-olds are the new 16-year-olds. Give me a chance. So I said to her, like, what is it that you offer? And she says, I can find anything on the internet. That's my gift. So I gave her some things that my second year Yale law students couldn't find. And within two days she found it. Because that was her inherent gift. That was something about where she could just find things and she knew to do it. So what I often say to people is apply what it is that you have as a human being that is unique to you, whether it's public speaking or writing or selling t-shirts, I don't care. But just step up and get over that line that you were talking about. Because a lot of people go through life feeling like, you know, I my life's pretty good, but there's something missing. There's a lack of purpose, there's an emptiness. And that's partly because there's an imbalance. They're taking, taking, taking, but not giving anything back. In the scheme of things, you have to do both. And I don't mean reaching into your pocket and making a donation. I mean like doing something. When you get that balance in line, all of a sudden you feel good. You the endorphins go off in your head. It's it's kind of like doing a good workout. There's something about the the mental physiology of this that uh that helps people to feel good about themselves and about their life, and and it it rights that imbalance that exists.

SPEAKER_01 20:19

Alright, Matt. Well, um you mentioned more than 50 million slaves um globally at the moment. Uh every four seconds a new person is taken into slavery. I'd love to hear how are these statistics collected and how much salt can we put behind them?

SPEAKER_00 20:41

Okay, so uh these are collected by uh the ILO, IOM, um, UNODC as kind of organizations that are within the United States, uh United Nations working with Walkfree, an organization based out of Australia. They do a tremendous amount of data analysis, they do gallup polls within countries, they collect and analyze anything and everything that they can find. I actually feel like the number is uh underreported. And the reason why I say this, just to give you a sense of how easy it is for a person to find themselves being exploited by somebody else, I lived in Bangladesh for five years. And so you have a person who rides a rickshaw and he takes people around in the rickshaw. Maybe he makes uh three or four dollars U.S. a day. And he's never gonna make more than that. All of a sudden his wife gets sick. The only way to save her is to get thirty U.S. dollars worth of medicine. So he doesn't have that money. He lives from day to day. So he borrows the money. 30 immediately becomes 45. He will never be able to pay that debt back. And so he's now indebted to somebody else. How easy was that for a person to find themselves into a debt bondage situation? Because that debt will keep growing and growing and growing, and there's really no way of uh reversing that. So you can see how it easy. Is for people to find themselves in a situation where somebody else kind of owns their time. And if that person doesn't eventually do what it is that individual wants who has that debt, they can be beaten, they can be threatened, you know, terrible things can happen to them. And so that's really kind of what we're talking about here, and how easy it is for people to get into this.

SPEAKER_01 22:21

Some of the countries you've mentioned so far throughout the chat, uh, that at least I can remember. Mexico was a big one, obviously Nepal, you're working from Hong Kong, China, Malaysia, Thailand, you just mentioned Bangladesh, India as well. Uh how much does the rising middle class and economic development of these emerging economies contribute to the number of slavery and slaves that is um happening in the country? The amount of slavery that is happening in the country.

SPEAKER_00 22:51

I mean it when it comes to sex trafficking, there there really isn't a direct relationship. But as consumers, we buy things. And out of the forced labor number, something like 80% of it is associated with the private sector and supply chains. So uh if uh basically a manufacturing company has a supply chain, and somewhere in that supply chain, whether it's tier one, two, or three, you have this issue and you're buying those products, and we as middle class uh people buying these these products are contributing to it. Now, the relevance of me saying this is kind of like with global warming, people didn't pay much attention until there was a direct relationship between that person and them contributing to the carbon footprint. When you made that case, then all of a sudden then the you know the ad uh advocates could say, well, you guys have to be part of the solution. I argue the same thing. If we are buying goods, whether it's bananas or fish or you know electronics, that could be tainted by modern slavery. We as a world have to be responsible for doing our part in order to address this. You know, so as consumers, we can go online before we're gonna buy a branded product to see whether that company has a policy on it. If they do, congratulate them. If they don't, say, listen, I like your products. I'd feel better if you had this. Companies respond to those kind of things.

SPEAKER_01 24:10

Okay, so for um sexual exploitation, the economic development of a country isn't necessarily a variable. But what about this um indentured servitude, the the slavery component of um well the example you just gave with the rickshaw driver in Bangladesh? Or for example, um having deep into your supply chain cotton manufacturers, uh agricultural workers, berry pickers, all this sort of stuff. That ty that um section of the slavery um statistics, how much are they going to be affected positively or negatively by the rising middle class of these developing countries and as well just the overall economic development of the emerging world?

SPEAKER_00 24:55

Well, I think the the uh emerging wealth results in more consumer behavior and more products and more needs for products and so forth.

SPEAKER_01 25:03

So it just keeps tripping down, basically.

SPEAKER_00 25:05

It just keeps Okay. So okay, so most major brands have been uh auditing tier one of their supply chain, the assembly. Let's say it's a running shoe where they actually assemble, but they've never looked at tier two where the rivets and the shoelaces and the zippers come or the raw material because they haven't had to. Now there's legislation around the world that says if you're a big company and you're working in the United States or UK or Australia or Germany, you have to put on your website what you're doing to address modern slavery. And you've got to go all the way down to the lowest level. So let's say you were auditing 2,000 Tier 1 factories, and now all of a sudden you have to put Tier 2 and 3. Now you have 10,000 audits that you have to do. Who's gonna pay for that? Is your running shoe gonna go from $100 US dollars to 150? And so what you're seeing is a change where organizations that are competitors will come together and say, you do the zipper audit, I'll do the shoelace, because we're both using the same companies, somebody else do something else, and you're seeing this rationalization take place related to these particular topics. And, you know, uh just to give you a general sense of what they're looking for, if uh uh a person from Nepal is recruited to go to Malaysia and he pays a fee, that's uh that creates uh uh a potential risk of modern slavery because if he can't pay that fee back, then he's held in place. If he gets to the country and he's forced to sign a contract in another language that cheats him, that's another indicator of modern slavery. If his identification documents are taken, that's an indicator of modern slavery. So in some people's minds, when they think about slavery, they think about chains and being in fields and, you know, with the whips and everything. The indicators are less so, but they are associated with maintaining a person in a situation where they lose their choice. And that's really kind of what we're talking about for a lot of these forced labor cases. They're not overly extreme all the time, but they are indicators of a person losing uh control of their uh ability to make decisions for themselves, and that's why they fall in this category.

SPEAKER_01 27:11

That forced labor example made me think of um Martin Schiber and Kardasev Qatar. Are you familiar with Martin Schiber? No, he's a fantastic Swedish investigative journalist, done a lot of work in Nepal, and he um basically found a hundred families, direct families in Nepal, who um, you know, extremely poor villagers, whose sons and daughters were sent over to Qatar and Saudi Arabia and uh the UAE to build the stadiums for the FIFA Cup, but then as well do a bunch of other work. Um and just story after story of people who, yeah, they paid this fee and then their passport was confiscated once they got into the country and they're fucked. There's just no way to come back. And you know, uh a very consistent.

SPEAKER_00 27:55

A certain number of them come back in body bags. I mean, they don't survive the experience because it's not just I mean, they just don't get enough water, they don't get enough breaks, there's uh absolute stress, they fall off and things and so forth.

SPEAKER_01 28:06

Um really high suicide rates uh that he discovered as well among them. He even found um in Saudi Arabia, he found in very, very rural location a Nepalese man who had been there for 16 years, and he basically said to Martin that um yeah, he he's not allowed to leave. And he just gave up on whatever life or family he had back in Nepal. I mean, just i explicit slavery. There's no discussion around that.

SPEAKER_00 28:40

Yeah. Well, I mean, I I mentioned something to you when I first got on, a new form of slavery that uh falls into what I would describe as that type of s you know, traditional slavery. So a couple of years ago, what we were beginning to hear were cases where educated professional young people were being lured to Cambodia with the promise of a job where they would get $5,000 US dollars a month and so forth. And when they got there, they were taken away to a scam center. Uh this would be a facility that has three, four, five, eight buildings, all ten stories high, uh, a couple of thousand people working in this center to basically scam people out of money all over the world. We all know about the scams, you know, the WhatsApp scams and the crypto scams, and there's innumerable variations on the theme. But if they don't meet their target, they are beaten, they're tortured, you know, uh some of them are killed, some of them are sold back to their family. But it's it's very similar to what you would have seen a couple hundred years ago in, you know, the cotton plantations in in certain locations where if you didn't get the work done, something terrible is going to happen to you. Who would have thought that this would be happening at this day and age? But the the interesting thing is as pressure on Cambodia to close these places uh is put on by different governments, then it it pops up someplace else. In Myanmar and Laos, we're seeing it in Nepal, we're seeing it in Bangladesh, we're seeing it in Dubai, Mexico, all of these locations now have this model because if you can hold a person in place and force them to scam, it's like having an ATM machine. Because, you know, if they can get money out of people and you can just collect that money, it has the potential to really significantly uh incentivize people to want to do this kind of criminal activity. And that's not good for any of us.

SPEAKER_01 30:30

Um can you explain that a little bit more? You said educated young people, um, maybe through an example.

SPEAKER_00 30:38

Well, you need uh it would be like uh college graduates who know how to use computers and know how to use social networking.

SPEAKER_01 30:45

From Malaysia, from Bangalore.

SPEAKER_00 30:46

So usually when you think about mo Yeah, we when you usually think about modern slavery, you think about uh ethnic minorities and migrants from less uh you know uh prolific uh communities and so forth. But in this particular case, they're looking for educated people. And so when they get there, you they they basically are are treated uh like uh like slaves, uh traditional slaves. The horrific videos of what happens to these people, the beatings and the tortures and the tailing tasering will just you know blow your mind that that this is happening in this day and age. But it's it's real. Uh I mean I've seen the videos, and and it's a it's a problem that I think if it doesn't get addressed now is going to proliferate because there's so much money that could be made by you know ripping people off of their entire life savings and using AI to generate websites that look like they're real when they're not, and so you enter into it thinking that you are going to just do your regular banking or whatever, and then everything is taken away. This is uh, you know, I've uh uh I know several people in Hong Kong that have lost everything. Not only did they lose their entire life savings, but they borrowed money because they thought they were going to get even more money. And you know, it the the way it works is you know, a person befriends somebody else uh and then they develop a relationship four or five weeks, they don't talk about anything related to cryptocurrency, and then the person mentions, oh, I just made $5,000 yesterday, and then they don't say anything for a while, and then they get the person to put in $10,000. And then he or she doubles the money, and then that scammer says, take it out. So they demonstrates that you know this is real. And then once they got this trust going, they say, Let's go for a big deal. Put all the money you have in. A million dollars. I only have 750. Well, put that in, borrow the 250, we're gonna get five times that. You're gonna make you saw that it's real. And once they get to a point where uh all their money is in there, they basically terminate the agreement because all everything that they are on is is fraudulent. It's called pig butchering because you you take these the the victim and you you get them really fat and then you you butcher them when they're ready. Um and it's uh it's a terrible, terrible crime that's happening all over the world. Many of us have heard of people who have been scammed, but this is gonna just gonna get worse and worse over time.

SPEAKER_01 33:09

That is shocking. And as well, you can completely sympathize with someone who would fall for that. At least I can. My mum recently uh fell for a scam, you know, even though she's got three boys who are always telling her like the red flags to avoid and so forth, she still sort of fell for one. Thank goodness it wasn't of that scale, but still. Um maybe I mean if you could go a little bit further on this, because again, educated young people, presumably they all have a smartphone. How could it be that they are brought to the point of submission where not only are they presumably breaking all of their ethical um boundaries by ripping people off, but then being tortured if they don't hit the certain um s um um KPIs that they've been measured for, and not escaping, not it not releasing it on their phone, not calling back home and saying, Hey, this you know, this job wasn't what it was cracked up to be, how how could it be that these are scaling to the point where you are identifying them and talking about them so openly?

SPEAKER_00 34:16

Well, for for a long time it was kind of happening and they didn't go contact home because they were basically told if they did, something terrible would happen to them, and it often does. If the family and you know the government of Hong Kong comes and put pressure on Cambodia or or whatever country we're dealing with now, then you know they're looking for a scapegoat. Um there are some social networking um uh sites that actually show the torture of these people. It's called harmcorps. And it's creating a desire for people to actually pay for you know it to go to the point where the actual person gets killed. So here you have an individual, if they can't scam, they sell them to another scam center. If that doesn't work, they try to sell them home. If that doesn't work, sometimes they get killed in one of these videos.

SPEAKER_01 35:07

It goes on harmcore.

SPEAKER_00 35:08

So Jesus. It's just something that in this day and age, you never would have I never would have thought that something like this would happen. And and I've been working on addressing sex trafficking and uh uh forced labor for a long time. This is the first time that I'm really getting concerned because the amount of money that could be generated from this is so obscene that they have the potential to kind of buy people off and bribe people and you know to develop a mechanism of criminality that is so insulated that it could destabilize uh, you know, rule of law and human rights in different locations around the world. And now that we're beginning to see that this is proliferating, then you'll never know what's real or not real. Because, you know, you add AI to the uh to the formula, and then you have this scenario where you just don't know what's real. AI can replicate uh a website exactly the way it looks, but put other links so it goes to the person who's basically asking AI to do that. Once you've gotten into that situation when when it looks like your bank is approaching you and it looks like it's completely legitimate and everything, even the URL looks like it's right, and and it and and you go through this process uh and then they get control of your computer. I mean, wha what do you do in that situation?

SPEAKER_01 36:24

Oh, it's so scary.

SPEAKER_00 36:25

So I mean I think people have to be super careful, not only from you know, don't take a job that sounds too good to be true in a location that you don't know, but don't take advice about uh anything related to investments from somebody you've never really met or you're m seen, and and this grooming process is is quite sophisticated and and they know what to say and how to lure people into this situation.

SPEAKER_01 36:50

It feels like grifting and scamming has never been more scalable or even more profitable.

SPEAKER_00 36:58

Um I think it's becoming a cottage industry. And you know, I mean there are a certain number of people who scam because they just want to scam, they're just bad people doing that. But adding this other component to it, uh and there have been cases in different countries where people have actually been kidnapped and brought to these centers as well. So imagine if uh if that becomes a prevalent type situation. So I'm not one to be an alarmist, but in this particular case, I can't think of any other way of kind of articulating the fact that we really as a world need to really be looking at this now before it gets out of hand. Because it's just another big issue that doesn't have to be a big issue.

SPEAKER_01 37:41

Okay, so I'm I'm a I'm a I'm a Malaysian middle class guy, I'm 20 years old, I've gotten um a degree, so I'm a young, educated person, but I don't have access to any types of money. I see um a really attractive job offer that's going to take me to, I don't know, Cambodia or something. I apply for it, I get accepted, I fly over there, and then I show up at work at the first day, all my stuff's taken from me, and I'm like put on lockdown and told to start doing the scams. Is that the type of life?

SPEAKER_00 38:14

That's exactly what it is. I mean, that's like But that's not much different from a uh uh migrant worker from a village in Nepal who goes over to a factory in another country thinking that they're gonna have a great situation. In many ways, it's just w we're so used to that scenario, but we're not used to uh educated people who come from so-called good families finding them in self-in this situation. And uh and that in some ways, what it's done is it's raised human trafficking within Asian countries to a point where, you know, mainland China and Hong Kong and Taiwan and Vietnam and Thailand are all kind of waking up to the fact that, well, human trafficking is a bad thing because we're getting a lot of people putting pressure on us to ensure that this type of trafficking doesn't take place.

SPEAKER_01 39:02

How how thin do you think the veneer of um sociability and kindness and empathy uh is over humans? Because you're rubbing up against the the the the literal worst of humanity. Um but presumably it's at like a pretty large scale. Do you think most people are can be turned bad if some of these like social pressures vanish? Because you you have to be like scum to the core, I think. Maybe I'm just naive and think that to to to participate in some of this stuff.

SPEAKER_00 39:48

You know, I met a lot of uh criminals in my day, and to me there's a continuum from people who just crossed a little bit over the line and they're doing things that are indicators of modern slavery, but you can get them back over the line. They don't kind of even realize that these indicators, you know, taking the passports and various other things, to the other extreme where you're just inherently evil and you don't care about things. Now, I'll give you two human trafficking stories. Uh one of them was I was in Vietnam and I was working for the United Nations, and this guy contacted me and said, Are you Mr. Friedman working for the United Nations? I said, Yes. He said, Okay, I'd like to meet you. I want to learn about what you do. So I met this guy at a restaurant. He was, you know, highly educated, he was charming, he was uh had a good sense of humor, very highly uh uh learned, and uh and I told him for an hour about what I did as a human trafficking person. So I turned to him and I said, Okay, what's your story? He said, I'm a human trafficker.

unknown 40:46

Wow.

SPEAKER_00 40:46

I said, Excuse me? Yeah, I'm a trafficker. I you know, I uh traffic women and girls, all those things you said, I do those things. You know, thank you so much. I really uh always wanted to have a conversation with somebody like you. I learned a lot, it was really interesting. So I had two choices. I could either like stay there and continue talking or get real huffy and leave. I chose to stay there and and talk to him. And he told me everything about what he was doing. And the reason why he did that is because number one, he was a narcissist, and so he felt like nothing bad could happen to him, but at the same time, he said, here's my card. You know, try to go after me. I'm totally insulated. You know, you'll never be able to get anywhere close to me. And he kept saying to me, you guys are so ridiculous, UN people, NGO people, you have to follow rules and regulations and rule of law and you know, follow all of the human rights things. We don't have to do any of those things. We have a great advantage over you. And, you know, he would to a certain extent he was right. You know, when when anyone gets close to him, they mutate, evolve, kill somebody, do whatever it is they need to do in order to just stay out of trouble. We have to follow rules and regulations. That that makes things slow down and we're we're not able to go after them. Another thing, and just to give you a sense of the evilness of, you know, I I was uh we were interviewing people in the prisons in um in Bangladesh who were traffickers. And initially when you talk to them, they're like, no, no, no, no. Um, you know, I don't uh I'm not shouldn't be here, I'm a victim. But once again, they're narcissists. So if you go and say Muhammad over there is one of the best criminals I've ever met, he's so smart, he's so clever. To Ali, who's standing in front of you, all of a sudden Ali sits up and says, Well, I'm smarter than he is, before you know it, he'll tell you everything. They'll go on and on. And this one guy was talking about how there was this small factory that had huge drums of very toxic liquid, and they had to take it from the big drum into smaller containers. But when you trafficked adults into it, their brain would be fried within three months. And so, but if you get a six-year-old kid, it would last for six months. So we would go and find people who would, you know, uh kidnap six kids, bring them to this factory, they're locked in there until after six months when they're no good, and they throw them out on the street. And he was laughing about it and saying, Oh, this one day I was only looking for five and I got that extra kid. I wonder what their parents thought about that. The kid didn't come home, ha ha ha. You know, I'm a parent, I have two sons, and you know, I mean, when I heard that, it just, you know, it freaked me out. I mean, so when you hear the victim stories, you know, feel compassion and kindness. When you hear the what the criminals think about it, it just gives you a shiver down your spine that they just don't care.

SPEAKER_01 43:23

Those two examples, even the man at the restaurant, sure, he's a narcissist, and he has um there are a couple traits that just make him a terrible person. Um but do you think that there are people like that in, say, where I am, Sweden or Australia or the US, who ha the only reason those instincts or those behaviors are suppressed is because of the rule of law and the sort of uh sociability of everyone around them. They know that it would look really bad. I'm just trying to get a sense for how many people are on how many more how many people are just two or three. Levels of permission away from you know trafficking people, just being the worst of the worst.

SPEAKER_00 44:07

I uh that's kind of a good question. I think what sometimes happens with the traffickers is that they compartmentalize people. There are the good people, and then there are the people that are like dogs or, you know, they're they're if if they get themselves into an exploitative situation, it's on them for being so stupid. You know, so I, you know, I I knew I'm not going to mention which country, a a particular individual who um was a community civic leader, and he gave to his faith-based group and he gave community programs, but he was a he was an extreme trafficker. And in his mind, there were the good people who were from his community and then the people he exploited that you know came from a completely different world. And so, you know, they they deserve being exploited because they're just so ridiculously ignorant about you know the tricks and they should know that. And so if they get themselves in that situation, it's on them. So this bifurcation, you you see it with racism within certain uh countries where you know on the outside, you know, people say the right things and they're politically correct, but on the inside, maybe they have very severe biases towards people. It's kind of the same type of thing where you don't really know what's in a person's mind until they express what's in the person's mind. And you don't know what a person is capable of until they're put into a particular situation. I'm giving you an example of that. When I was a kid, my older sister and I would walk down the street and we would see a puddle of dirty brown water. And I would say to her, um, you know, how much would I have to give you in order to drink that water? Ten dollars, no. $100, no. Thousand dollars, ten thousand, yeah, I'd drink it. You know, there's that point where even people who basically are so-called good people who who you have a moral sense or whatever, the trade-off of the amount of money that they can get and what that can do for their life and their family and their future and their retirement uh allows them to cross over a line that they didn't think that they could cross over. And uh and I think that's kind of how criminals eventually get into this. They try to do a legitimate job and they just can't make enough money, and then all of a sudden they do something that pays five times more. There's some danger involved, and they go a little bit further, a little bit further before you know it, they're deep into it and they're exploiting people. And sometimes they say, I don't even really know how I got here. It was just a gradual process. It's kind of like when you throw the frog into hot water, they jump out, but if you put it in and it's cold and it's heated up slowly over time, then they get to a point where they can't jump out because it's so gradual that they don't even recognize it happening. And that's what happens to a lot of these people. That's what they say.

SPEAKER_01 46:53

Something we were talking about off-air before we started was the role of financial secrecy in all of this. And as you know, that's uh pretty prevalent theme on this podcast. Uh something I hear a lot from these investigative journalists who look into um the criminal world of offshore finance and um the tax loopholes, is that these same incentives that uh uh help rich people and corporations um to avoid paying taxes enable the scale of criminal organizations who might be in drug trafficking um or who might be in uh grifting or these um pig butchering. But I just wonder if you could talk a little bit about the relationship between all of this horrible um slavery, human trafficking, sexual exploitation, and their connection with other types of um criminal networks and the role that financial secrecy plays in all of that.

SPEAKER_00 47:50

Okay, so there's two parts of that question. I'll start off with kind of like if you're a bank and you want to ensure that you don't associate yourself with this. And to put this into perspective, the profits generated from modern slavery are estimated to be 150 billion US dollars a year, second only to drug trafficking, which is about 300 billion. Okay, so if any of that dirty money gets into your bank, it's money laundering, and you get fined. There was a bank in Australia that was fined 1.3 billion Australian dollars because uh online sexual exploitation of children took place. And there's other examples of that as well. So obviously the banks are concerned about this. And so what the banks do is develop typologies, you know, and your community would know this, where you look at the criminal and the victim and the various steps and what are the transactions that take place and which of those transactions could be perceived as perhaps being nefarious or a pattern of human trafficking. As an example, in the United States, there was a nail salon chain run by Vietnamese immigrants. They had hours from nine in the morning till nine o'clock at night. An accountant found that there were transactions taking place at two, three, four o'clock in the morning, all around $200. That shouldn't have happened. The business is closed. So when they looked into it, they came to realize it was a sex trafficking ring in the same business at a different hour. So in this particular case, the typology red flag indicators would be transactions in a particular type of business at around a particular price at a particular time after hours. You package that together and then you put it against big data, you can determine if you find other uh scenarios like that. And so, you know, uh banks do this all the time for drug trafficking and other forms of uh, you know, criminality. But on the other side, um you if you are generating all of this cash, whether it's for human trafficking or for drug trafficking or for scams, you have to launder it somehow. And so that's the big other part of the equation. How do you determine whether or not uh this large amount of money is being transferred from illegal money to clean money? And so there's all kinds of indicators that are out there that uh that can be used for that. You know, the purchase of luxury items, uh, you know, a person who makes a certain amount of money but is rich, who is constantly going to the casinos because he knows that he's going to win a percentage back because he puts a million dollars in and he wins a half million back, but at least he has the slip and all of that. It'll be more and more difficult for them to do money laundering as blockchain technology and deep searches into you know financial transactions continues to grow and expand because that's the direction that we're going in.

SPEAKER_01 50:37

It does feel like though the same incentives are at play in the anti-money laundering um environment as there is in, say, the anti-slavery environment or the anti-grifting environment. Just the financial incentive to commit the crime is multiples larger than the financial incentive to prevent the crime. And therefore it's a question of ethics, but the the raw skills tend to be going towards the criminal side of the equation.

SPEAKER_00 51:08

Well, I mean, th th it used to be that we would go after the bad guys and try to put them in jail. Uh we don't do that that much anymore. And the only reason why I say that is that it takes too much time. Uh there's always the possibility of the case uh being derailed because of threats or bribes or any number of things. And so and you have to spend a lot of money. But the money laundering angle can be used if you can figure out if a person has an account in a place like London or Sydney or New York. So, for example, there was this uh Australian guy who ran girlie bars out of Thailand, and we knew he was trafficking, but he was totally insulated. But we eventually found out that he had money in uh in London and in different locations in Australia, and all you have to do is to go to the regulators and say, well, I think this particular individual is dirty and that's dirty money, and their money gets frozen. So, you know, if you really want to mess around with a trafficker, you go after their money. A lot of them don't care if they go to jail, especially in Southeast Asia. They can they can run their business out of jail, but you go after their stuff and it really makes a difference. So be finding ways of really kind of disincentivizing, you know, these criminals because they're not really getting the the money that they they could get from from this is is the direction that we all have to be going in to figure out how to go about doing that.

SPEAKER_01 52:28

Yeah. There's an incredible journalist and also um a former guest on this podcast, Nathan Lynch, who actually uh suggested to me that I write to you um who explains this entire top-to-bottom um phenomenon that you're speaking about here, the money laundry, the anti-money laundry, and catching them and so forth uh so well. His book is called uh The Lucky Laundry, um, just for the audience to you know. Um Matt, could you explain a little bit more the geography of all of this and also what the sort of uh routes are? So broadly, where are people being taken from and where are they going to?

SPEAKER_00 53:08

Well, I mean it's a that's a tough question to answer, but I'll just give you some patterns. Uh and like for example, if you're a uh manufacturing company in Thailand, you're getting your victims from uh Cambodia, Laos, and Myanmar because Thailand is more prosperous than those countries and has opportunities for jobs, and as a result of that, it becomes a draw. If you're uh kind of uh from South America and Latin America, you're gonna try to get into the United States because you want to eventually get a job there, and so oftentimes you pay smugglers that eventually create some kind of a debt. So if you get across the border, then you're indebted to them, and then you end up in a trafficking situation. Um in the United States, uh, a lot of uh women and girls end up in prostitution who are from the United States. You know, they are 14, 15-year-old girls who are misunderstood, they don't have a lot of friends, and then they get manipulated and tricked into a scenario where they're taken away from their community and then held in place to offer uh prostitution. So there's all kinds of patterns. Uh uh about ten years ago I did uh a project where we had across Southeast Asia all kinds of different routes that uh defined how people were exploited, and it was just like a bunch of spaghetti on a map because there were just so many of these routes. Um and a lot of people think that it's cross-border always. But you have a person goes from Nepal to India, but you also have with India somebody goes from one district to another, or you have within a city, somebody goes from one side of the city to another to be exploited. So there's all kinds of variations that exist around the world related to this this you know how a person ends up in this situation.

SPEAKER_01 55:01

So it sounds like though, especially given that the majority of the slavery statistic comes from uh forced labor rather than sexual exploitation, that it's happening in Asia and Latin America.

SPEAKER_00 55:16

Well, I mean the United States the slavery index number is four hundred thousand. Uh I think uh Japan is something like three hundred thousand. Japan. That's very shocking. Japan. Yeah, well, in in the case of Japan, what you have are um you have sex trafficking, which is an issue, and you also have what are called interns that are brought in from other countries, and a certain percentage of these people who are supposed to get a job in training end up being exploited when they're there. So, I mean, these are not my numbers, these are numbers that come from this uh slavery index. Uh you know, India uh I think it's like 18 million, you know, out of that. And it's just because you have a culture that has feudal systems that have never been completely dismantled that allow for a lot of exploitation to take place. But there's no country in the world that doesn't have modern slavery associated with it. But you know, I want to give you one more bit of information about this. So 50 million people in modern slavery. According to the uh trafficking in persons report that's put out annually by the U.S. government, the recorded number of people that have been helped out of modern slavery last year was 115,000. That's 0.2 percent, not even a half percent. And it's been like that for the last 20 years, you know, not even a percentage point. You know, and so you have all these people in a situation where they're exploited, and very few of them are getting out with support from the United Nations or the governments or the NGOs. Part of it is that, as I said, the profits are $150 billion. The amount of money you know available globally to address this is somewhere between $350 million or $500 million. That's uh something like 0.3% of the profits. So you have huge profits and very little money available to actually address this. Plus uh a lack of people like me, there's about 30,000, 40,000 of us around the world that work on this against a half million greed-incentivized criminals. And uh awareness is really low. When people come to know what human trafficking is, many people you know say, well, while we should do more, we we should get involved. But until we get to the awareness where it's a critical mass of people understanding this and recognizing this and putting pressure on governments and institutions to make these changes, it's going to be at less than a half percent. And you know, this is the frustration that I have as a person who's been working on this for over thirty-five years, that we're not further along.

SPEAKER_01 57:47

Yeah. What can be done to say shame in the Indian government or incentivize the Malaysian government into um, you know, wanting to crack down as much as possible that they can expel as much slavery from their country as possible. Is there an incentive to do that at the government level, or does it just create too much uh income na nationally to do anything about it?

SPEAKER_00 58:14

I I found working in a more positive way with governments is is is easier than if you try to name and shame them into doing it. But let me give you an example in India. Uh I I think it was about eight or nine years ago there was a uh sensational rape case. Uh medical student was on a bus, raped, she she eventually died, and this this went viral. And all of a sudden everybody just got up and they were like, oh my gosh, this has to end. Look at the number of people who get raped. They had protests, they had uh sit-ins, they put pressure on the government, changes were made, law enforcement uh received more training, there was an emphasis, that wasn't enough, so they continued and continued. I'm just waiting for the day when that happens in human trafficking. Okay, I'll give you a scenario. That that 11-year-old girl was probably having sex with 10 or 12 or 15 guys a day every day. Where in the world is it acceptable for an 11-year-old girl to be in that situation times 6.3 million people? You know, and these people aren't consenting to doing this, so it's commercial rape. You know, you know, I'm not saying that there aren't people who enter prostitution in a in a positive, I know, because they want to, but you know, in this particular case, they're forced into it. They have no choice. And as a result of this, we have a scenario whereby we really have to be kind of caring for these individuals. They're somebody's uh wife, they're somebody's uh child, there's somebody's sister, and you know, where's the humanity? We have to be focusing on this.

SPEAKER_01 59:44

So about six point three million people, is that the number out of the fifty million in global slavery? The six point three million are sexual exploitation.

SPEAKER_00 59:55

That's within the fifty million. There's also a certain number of people who are in forced marriages. That's that's a big number. And these are people who get married into a household, not in the the way we think about marriages, where they're husband and wife coming together. They're married into the family in order to basically do all the work for the family or take care of an elderly person or whatever. They don't really it's it's more of a slavery situation than what we would consider to be a marriage situation.

SPEAKER_01 1:00:24

Alright, so I want to see if we can take the conversation away from Asia for a moment. Um and I lived several years in Amsterdam, um, and I remember uh I was working in 3PL logistics, so most of my colleagues were sort of Eastern European, and I particularly had a few Bulgarian colleagues uh who were just absolute legends. Um but we were out at a bar one time and she told a story of how um there was what she thinks a pretty uh sly attempt at getting her to um you know join this other group of Bulgarians who were working in the red light district. Basically went out, she went out to a bar, um a couple of shady blokes sort of sat at a table with her, and her friend had set up this meeting basically. Um and they were just talking about how much money she could make doing it, and anyway. She obviously she's totally switched on and knew to sort of get away from the situation, not talk to this you know friend anymore. Um but uh that conversation that I had with her really opened up my eyes to the narrative that is in Amsterdam, which is that these are all Dutch women who um are there at their own free will. Um and I suspect that's not the case. So I just wanted to see uh if we could bring it away from Asia, more towards Europe, like Western countries. Um i if i yeah, what you can sorry, again, god I can't speak today. What you can say about that.

SPEAKER_00 1:02:01

Um, you know, there there are people who enter into prostitution because they see this as a means of making money, to subsidize their life, to to have more money than they would have and so forth. But you know, um most girls don't wake up when they're 14, 15 years old and say, When I grow up I want to be a woman in prostitution. They just don't. You know, um, you know, the you you find yourself in very dangerous situations, you often, you know, have to be with very seedy characters, and you often find yourself getting trapped in the situation. Maybe initially you thought you were going to be a free agent. Ultimately, over time, somebody is going to kind of play that role as a pimp and get you indebted, and then they you you kind of go from voluntary to something much different, and that happens fairly quickly. So, you know, there's two schools of thought when it comes to you know addressing modern slavery. One school says end prostitution and then human trafficking goes away because you didn't you know have anything that they can get into. But that often, you know, puts prostitution underground, you know, and and so people um and and you can't find it, and so you can even exploit more people. The other says legalize it and then it'll go away because then basically there's no um kind of criminal activity associated with it. But using Amsterdam as an example, while you have those those uh windows where you see the women in in the windows waiting for customers to come by, there's a lot of other places where a person is held in place in a brothel against her will because of debts or threats or something else that is still human trafficking. So neither approach works. You know, you you can't end prostitution and you can't legalize it and assume that you're still not gonna have human trafficking. You know, and so it's a it's a real conundrum to figure out well, what do you do in order to prevent people from you know being in a situation where uh they're they're trafficked into the sex industry. And until the demand for sex goes away, then you know you're you're gonna have people in this situation.

SPEAKER_01 1:04:02

But um w what what else can you say about um sexual exploitation and human trafficking in, say, Western Europe, you know, or in Australia, or in countries where there is significantly higher um law enforcement and penalties to be in court, and it's presumably more difficult.

SPEAKER_00 1:04:22

Well, I mean, you know, you you can look at many European countries that have tomato pickers that are getting paid uh a lot less than the minimum wage or nothing at all. You know, there uh there was a Guardian article that came out that talked about uh the kind of syndicates being associated with tomato picking and you know exploitation of migrants and everything else. And so, you know, even in a fairly sophisticated country that has rule of law and so forth, you can find that that happens. The United States, there are a lot of uh, you know, under-the-table arrangements that allow for the tomatoes and the oranges to be picked at at a particular time. You know, when it comes to sex trafficking, you know, as long as there's that demand, then you're always gonna have people coming in. For Europe, you often have Albanians and Romanians and you know, people from the Eastern Bloc that or the the you know, the old Soviet Union countries that are you know in situations where they want to improve their life and they think that by going to Europe that's gonna happen. Sometimes they know they're going into prostitution, and other times they think they're gonna get something else, and then they get tricked into it. But you know, you any developed country that has prosperity is gonna be a magnet for people to be trafficked into it. So the UK is a good example of that. Uh any kind of uh prospering European country is going to be like that. Um United States and Canada or Australia, Japan. These are locations that people want to improve their lives. They go into it because they believe the stories that have been told to them that all you have to do is pay us money, we'll get you there, you'll make lots of money, you'll send that home, you'll be a hero. Or your family. And that often doesn't happen. No. Those scenarios uh are few and far between. You know, uh there are always people who realize that there is somebody who's gullible enough to accept that offer, doesn't know that they shouldn't be doing this, and then they find themselves trapped in a situation. So you see a lot of that happening in Europe.

SPEAKER_01 1:06:23

Forgive me if this is a ridiculous question. Um, but in the movie Taken, there is a an American woman who is um um kidnapped and then sort of sold into sexual exploitation and eventually sort of like marketed off to you know rich sheikhs. Um how absurd is that in reality, or is it closer to reality than we would like to acknowledge?

SPEAKER_00 1:06:53

Uh you know, I mean there's there's a lot of what I would describe as um theories about large numbers of often kids being sold and transported to countries only to be end up in basements and then they become sex slaves and so forth. Um there's no data really to kind of support that that happens beyond you know the less than a hundred cases of extreme, you know, abuse of pedophiles that takes place. Um the traditional approach, there's a lot of sex trafficking victims, a huge number of them. So, you know, that's true. But they end up basically into a scenario where they're forced into prostitution and then they engage with the general public where clients come on a regular basis and pay. So that idea of kind of selling people that way, I've heard uh stories about that, but I I just I haven't really come across uh actual examples of that. It it just i I I just haven't seen it. And you know, I mean i if if that was a routine part of things, there would be a lot more press about it. But it but I want to go back to the taken film for just a minute. You know, a lot of people think that human trafficking is based on kidnapping, where a person is abducted and taken away. That doesn't happen very often because that that young woman was kicking and screaming and she didn't want to be taken away, and somebody could see that and alert the authorities. And so most trafficking victims are deceived into a situation where they basically think that something good is going to happen at the end of this process, only to find out when they get there that they've been tricked and deceived into an exploitative uh human trafficking situation.

SPEAKER_01 1:08:38

What about like uh Caçapia in Portugal? Um, and you know, all this stuff around Jeffrey Epstein and do you ever in your work come across these types? Not personally, but in the Okay, so you know uh and again I'm reminding you it's being edited. I personally don't know really anything about um Jeffrey Epstein. I watched a documentary in Kasapia, um, but it just seems that yeah, so that's the context.

SPEAKER_00 1:09:19

Okay, so um I was uh working in Bangladesh and there was a technical advisor who was hired by the government there, and you know, he was a brilliant practitioner, and um he knew all about human trafficking, and I and I uh frankly I I learned a lot from him. Um and once he told me about how you know there were people from Russia that were setting up rings in the United States of young girls being made available for uh sale to politicians and you know, high net worth people and so forth, and he talked about all of that, and he said that it's it's quite common, and you will never hear about it because the people who basically are involved in this uh you know uh have enough influence to prevent that from ever getting out. That's kind of what Epstein did, you know, and so the interesting thing about this particular individual is that I found out later that he was a trafficker, hiding from you know, uh uh prosecution in Europe. He eventually went back and he got arrested and he's in jail now. But he knew all about this because he was part of the system himself. So, I mean, are there uh kind of uh high-level VIP type uh sex trafficking venues that allow for you know a particular type of people with wealth to have access to them? I I think there are. I I I I think that they're they're uh um not something that you'll ever hear about or see because they're so well insulated. Um and and I don't think it that you know across the board all VIPs fall into the category of of succumbing to these places, but but certainly there are what I would describe as high-end uh scenarios where victims are uh fairly sophisticated and uh fairly educated and they can't get out of the situation. It it exists.

SPEAKER_01 1:11:15

So to look at the map of what we've gone over so far, you've got um the pig butchering and a lot of the forced labor coming from Southeast Asian countries, mostly, including India, Bangladesh, Pakistan and that there is uh a lot of Latin America that has now part of the 400,000 of uh sort of slavery labor in the US. There's sexual exploitation just happening all over the world. Um what about Africa? Where do they fit into this? Will as they as they uh rise more and more economically over time, are we gonna see the same uh themes play out as have in Southeast Asia when Africa becomes a big manufacturing hub for the rest of the world?

SPEAKER_00 1:12:06

Well, I mean, I think exploitation of workers in Africa is like any place else. I mean, uh South America, Africa, Middle East, Asia, um they Africa just has a lot of other problems. They have communicable diseases, they have AIDS, they have uh poverty, they have a lack of education, they have a whole variety of things that are that are taking place. And so human trafficking as a topic tends not to be on the top of the list. And so it's there and it exists, it's just that nobody's really doing anything to address it. But I don't think it's any more than the percentage that you find in other places around the world. You know, there interestingly, there's a certain percentage of people that uh, and and it probably has been the same, I don't know whether it's between eight and ten or uh four and six, I don't know what the percentage is of people who, for whatever reason, are capable of exploiting other people. There's a lot of good people too. There's a lot of people who would never do anything like this and uh uh you know are appalled when they hear this. But you know, you find that in in every location in the world. I've seen it in every country. I've worked with 42 governments and I've worked and I've seen it everywhere. So, you know, I I I I don't necessarily feel like you know Africa hasn't had this, and then with prosperity it's going to change, and then they'll have it. I think that they they have it now. People are exploited in mines, people are exploited in um sweatshops, people are exploited in um you know transport companies and and all kinds of things, just the way they are all over the world. Now, the reason why you see more in Asia is partly because you have a lot of Asians. You know, China, 1.4 billion people, you know, India, 1.4 billion people, then you have Pakistan and Bangladesh and Japan and Philippines, all of these countries have huge populations. The other thing is the feudal systems that I mentioned earlier have never been completely dismantled. So you can go to a fairly modern city like Beijing, but go, you know, 20 kilometers outside, and the same type of exploitation systems and procedures that existed, you know, a hundred years ago are still in place. And you can say the same for Africa and even the United States. You know, exploitation is handed from generation to generation because the tricks and the procedures and the ability to get away with it have been tried and true. You know, they've been tested, and and so this is kind of passed down from criminal element to criminal element, and that's why they're able to get away with these things.

SPEAKER_01 1:14:34

You're in Hong Kong. Um China hasn't been spoken about too much in this conversation so far. Presumably, statistics from there are as hard to get as they would be anywhere in the world. Uh famously, China is the manufacturer of the world, at least it has been for the last 20 years. Um if all of these same uh indicators that exist in Malaysia, that exist in Thailand, in the UAE, Dubai, etc., it it's like 10x in China, I would imagine. So could you speak about the landscape for um modern slavery and sexual exploitation in China, as far as you can tell?

SPEAKER_00 1:15:15

Yeah, I mean I I I I I'm just gonna give a blanket statement. Like any other country, um, China has the same issues that we all have of forced labor and sex trafficking and so forth. Um, you know, despite what people think, uh, the Chinese government in some ways does more than a lot of other countries when it comes to those things. Now, China has a whole different issue when it comes to the Xinjiang issue uh associated with the Uyghurs and so forth. I'm not going to touch that issue, but when it comes to sex trafficking and you know, uh sweatshops where people can exploit others, uh, you know, they they obviously have that type of scenario in place. Um but if you look at factories, I've seen the first factory I saw in China was in 1990, um, and you look at them now, they're they're pretty well run. And that's because if you're going to do manufacturing for brands around the world, your your uh facility has to meet a particular standard, and it gets audited every year. And if it doesn't, you don't get the orders. They'll go someplace else. So manufacturing has in many ways, not only in China but all over the world, significantly increased the um the lack of vulnerability for tier one factories. Again, let me let me emphasize these are where you assemble the product. And not necessarily the zipper companies and the rivets and the sole of the shoe and the textiles, because people haven't been looking at that until recently. But at a higher level, you you would see that there there is actually things taking place.

SPEAKER_01 1:16:47

Um okay, so let's talk about the private sector um for a moment, since that is what the Mekon Club directly services, and as well, you started off the conversation by highlighting just how more effective you can be in the private sector helping out these giant multinational companies with their supply chain. So give a like archetypal um clothing producer as an example where they might find slavery within their supply chain.

SPEAKER_00 1:17:16

Well, okay, let's say that it's a big brand and they are working across Southeast Asia and in one of the countries and they have multiple manufacturing sites for blouses and jeans and various other things. Um for 35 years, those companies have been auditing Tier 1 factories to ensure that you don't have an issue. They have to do that. And they they've had to do that for a long time, and generally you're not finding too much of an issue at that level because they've they've done the due diligence to ensure that that company doesn't have issues and problems and so forth. But below that you have the buttons, the textiles, the zippers, the various other component parts. As I mentioned, nobody's been really looking at that. And below that, you have the raw material, the metal, the cotton, the rubber, the wool associated with the raw materials. So transparency legislation around the world says if you're a big brand, you have to be looking at all these different levels. And so what we're seeing is that companies are doing what's called traceability, where they're identifying a particular tier one factory, identifying the tier two of supporting component parts to that factory, and then the raw material, and then they're doing random audits to see what they're finding, to see if they're finding something down lower in the supply chain. In many cases they don't, but sometimes they do. And once they do that, then they have to go and make even more audits. And so what this does is it incentivizes manufacturers to really look at their entire supply chain to ensure that it's completely free of any kind of human trafficking or uh forced labor indicators. And and, you know, these companies, despite what people feel, and and I hear this all the time, that they're so greedy that they would use slaves knowingly, the private sector, they would do that. Not the case. You know, this is a real vulnerability. Any kind of a newspaper article that says that there's so they obsess with trying to find anything and everything they can to ensure that their business is protected. And I've found people who have been more benevolent than anyone I've met in the United Nations and in the NGO sector within the private sector doing these jobs. They take their jobs very seriously. They really do want to make sure that workers are protected. And they do that not only to protect their company, but because they believe it's the right thing to do. So, I mean, I would argue that the private sector has been responders in addressing modern slavery for a long time. You will never hear about it because if they see something, they fix it, and they don't go and say, look it, we found something and we fixed it. They just do it because that's what they need to do in order to protect their business. So we know that there are things that are happening that protect workers as a result of their involvement. So I mean I feel like in many ways these larger companies are heroic in that they are really trying to ensure that forced labor doesn't exist within their supply chains.

SPEAKER_01 1:20:10

But I was hoping to hear a specific example, say for instance, um, a pair of genes. If you could break down the components that go into that genes, including all the different labor, all the different transport, and then highlight where in that entire supply chain there might be not just extraordinarily low-paid labor, but people who are being forced to work against their will.

SPEAKER_00 1:20:34

Okay, so I I I mean, let's take a pair of jeans. You start off with the cotton, uh, which is the raw material. You got the the the buttons uh maybe in the zipper made out of metal. So, and then you have maybe some other component parts. That's that's tier three. Nobody's looking at that. Tier two is the they make it into the zipper, they make it into the button, they make it into the uh textile, they they they then send it to tier one and they cut it. Um there's really no what I would describe unique pattern where you can say in a supply chain that looks like this that this and this and this is exploitative. There are some countries, like uh, you know, there was an example of a fast-fashioned brand that was accused of modern slavery in the UK. Um actually I didn't think it was modern slavery, but they got accused of it. Um, and there are places in the most extreme locations of Myanmar that uh this factory is run beautifully with no issues and problems. So you almost have to do the audits and you have to do the due diligence to find out where within that supply chain. Because I can't say that you know buttons are traditionally a problem or zippers or anything else, because in a lot of locations they're not, or they are. You just don't know until you do your due diligence. And that's why this what I call transparency legislation says that if you're a big company and you're working in the UK, you have to put on your website what you're doing to address this issue, and you have to submit an annual report that says what you're doing to protect your business from modern slavery, indicating that you're going all the way down to the lowest level. So because of this legislation that exists in the UK, in the United States, um, Germany, Australia, France, companies are forced to really take a deep dive into their supply chains in order to ensure that they don't find issues and problems. And, you know, uh sometimes they find it, sometimes they don't, oftentimes they don't, but you know, you you don't know until you look. So, you know, I I I understand the question. I wish I could say that there was a particular pattern, but you know what happens with buttons in uh India is different from what happens in Ethiopia. And you know, you you there's there's really no pattern associated with that.

SPEAKER_01 1:22:54

But you said, I mean, I think you said something very compelling in there that nobody's looking at tier three. And presumably, if we just take the law of averages, if no one's looking at tier three, that is surely the most likely area where there would be this type of forced labor because it's the lowest skilled, and it's happening in the most rural locations. For instance, like who's auditing the the uh in unimaginable tonnage of cotton that's being produced? And then who's auditing the entire supply chain of that cotton? The pesticides that comes onto it, the machinery that comes onto it. If you just look at the impossible complexity of the of this, you know, these global supply chains, um surely if we're just yeah, sorry, go on.

SPEAKER_00 1:23:40

Interestingly, cotton is um is more automated than you would think, and more regulated than you think because it's a it's a hot point and it has been for a while. Yugoslavia, for example, was identified as a location where you know people would be kind of mandated to go into the fields in a particular season, and that created a big issue, and then there was a boycott of that and so forth. Um but look at something like sugarcane. Sugarcane in Bangladesh, you know, all these different farms and the farms come together and then it's processed and so forth, there's no way you could possibly kind of audit all those farms because they're they're they're small mom and pop type situations. So uh you can assume that there's exploitation there, but being able to get down to that level and then be able to uh effect some kind of a change uh when we're not even able to get more than 115,000 people out of modern slavery, you can see what we're up against. We just don't have the bandwidth and the resources and the people to be able to do those kind of things.

SPEAKER_01 1:24:41

What what about greenwashing? And I just want to bring it up with this with the context of this anecdote. I had on the podcast um a Danish man called Mikey Mistrati, uh, who's done lots and lots of work in uh slavery within the chocolate supply chain. And he just gave harrowing example after harrowing example of how quickly he would discover someone working against their will who had been um kidnapped from a village two hours up the road to work in this cocoa plantation. Anyway, basically he also discovered that uh the um the fair trade uh approval and the rainforest alliance approval, which are supposed to be these sort of external auditors that ensure that your cocoa is slavery-free, basically they will farm, they will they will collect, say, 200 different microfarms cocoa beans, throw them all together in one, and then that's resold to what a broker who then resells to another broker, who then might finally resell to the giant. Anyway, it just it it's to the point where similar to this tier three problem you've identified in other supply chains, um you're almost certainly consuming some type of uh sh uh child slave labor when you eat a relatively cheap piece of chocolate, yet it has all of these auditor's ticks of approval, which means it's greenwashing to the core. And I and I would say Nestle um a greenwashing to the core. Same incentives are happening in coffee. I can tell you an example that I had in Veracruz. But basically, um I want to use that exam that anecdote from Mikey Mistrati in the coffee uh sorry in the chocolate supply chain to ask you about greenwashing because you're working with private uh organizations, I'm sure you see this very, very close.

SPEAKER_00 1:26:36

Yeah, I mean I'll I'll give you another example, the fishing industry in Thailand. So you have, I don't know, 300,000 boats that are out there, and a certain percentage of them have forced labor on the boat. But you'll never find it because uh these boats stay out for four years. And what happens is there's a collection boat that goes and collects the catch, but also gives them the supplies. And so once that's all consolidated, how do you know which fish are in that same scenario? It's the same kind of example of what you gave for the cocoa industry. The difficulty with uh those kind of scenarios is that you know the chocolate industry clearly doesn't want that to happen because you want chocolate to be associated with Valentine's Day and Easter and you know holidays and so forth. And you don't want somebody to be accusing you of forced labor, but influencing those those communities to change the way they do things when they don't have uh a lot of control over what happens in the real world themselves. The government doesn't, and people get paid off and there's bribes and everything else, it makes it really different difficult to address that. You know, basically you have a situation in the Congo where you have highly exploitative circumstances there that result in people basically getting the uh raw materials for batteries that we need, and uh Uh, you know, it's very little influence could be made from outside. You know, that that particular country is very difficult to influence what happens there. It's a lot of poverty, there's a lot of uh potential for exploitation, but yet we still use our electric cars and our electric phones and our electric computers uh despite the fact that we know that uh you know the lithium and the cobalt that is in our computers comes from that situation. Um, you know, uh the uh I I was in a United Nations meeting once and I said, well, maybe we should boycott some of our products, and then you saw people getting their phones and saying, anything else, but you know, not my cell phone and my computer. So I mean there's a certain amount of fickleness associated with, you know, the point at which we uh have an issue that we're uh maybe I'll stop eating carrots if I recognize that there's a problem associated with other products. No. I'm not gonna give it my chocolate either, you know, that kind of thing.

SPEAKER_01 1:28:58

Um well look, Matt, I'm I um you know I'm so happy that Nathan um put me onto your work. Um like I said, I watch so many of your talks and presentations and think it's just the most incredible work that you're doing. So I really hope that uh one day I'll get the chance to do this in person again with you in Hong Kong and I'll be better informed. Um because yeah, uh obviously there's as we've gone through this entire conversation, there's uh way more people working on the other side of this equation that you're working on, and so hopefully uh yeah, through awareness but also maybe some type of action. But thank you very much. I really appreciate that. I just wanted to finish off with three questions that I try to ask every guest if possible. The first being, what is the role that serendipity has played in your life?

SPEAKER_00 1:29:49

Um, I come to realize that everything is based on a kind of serendipity. I started my life thinking that I had a plan and it just never worked the way it was supposed to work, and I just kind of go with the flow. So serendipity is is a valued partner in my life.

SPEAKER_01 1:30:08

Beautiful answer, and I am so happy how often that is the answer that ends up coming back my way. Second question I like to ask every guest. Uh, what is a country that you're particularly bullish on?

SPEAKER_00 1:30:23

Um I would say Nepal. I spent a lot of time there, and uh I really uh just kind of fell in love with the country. Uh didn't want to go there, but it seemed like you know, the cosmos had me moving in that particular direction when I got there. I realized that in that particular point in my life that's what I needed.

SPEAKER_01 1:30:43

So But why are you bullish on them now?

SPEAKER_00 1:30:47

Uh just just in terms of uh kind of it was a country that I I experienced like real life. You know, in in modern life, everything is kind of uh done for you and everything works and everything. And when you're in Nepal, there's uh, you know, for the most part, um, you know, these people are living hand to mouth and they're uh they're very uh resourceful and they're very clever in the way they address issues and problems and so forth. And I just see that as a culture that'll eventually take off.

SPEAKER_01 1:31:18

Amazing. And finally, Matthew, if you could witness a conversation between any two people of history, dead or alive, with no language barriers. So a podcast, who do you want to talk to? No, not talk to, listen to.

SPEAKER_00 1:31:32

Uh Gandhi and um I would like Gandhi and Obama to have a nice conversation. I think that would be quite an interesting conversation. Um, you know, I'm fans of both of them for different reasons, and uh yeah, so amazing mate.

SPEAKER_01 1:31:48

Well, again, thank you for being generous with your time and your responses.

SPEAKER_00 1:31:52

Well, thank you very much as well.