Ethical Wealth and AI Strategies with Matt Friedman

0:00 Amelia wanted to host a webinar, but the tool couldn't deliver. Zooming out, she turned to Webinar Key, an expert solution for webinars. With seamless setup and intuitive design, she delivered the perfect webinar. Webinar Key host webinars like a boss. Now, you might ask, does the counter trafficking world not care? Are they lazy?

0:19 What would justify that? Profits generated from modern slavery, $236 billion. The amount of money available to address this is about 400 million, or at least it was up until about four months ago. And now with the US government cutting its funding, it's down to about 220. So you have a huge amount of profit and you have this much available to fight it. And think about what we're talking about here. We're talking about girls that are forced to have sex with 20 a day times 6.3 million or 23 million people in modern slavery, forced labour.

0:51 How is it that this can exist in this day and age? I can't answer that question. You know, it's such a horrible thing that we're dealing with here, but it's just not being addressed. Looking for expert legal support you can trust? At Grayfield Solicitors, we simplify complex legal issues for both businesses and private clients across Essex and beyond. From pensions and insolvency law to construction, conveyancing and commercial litigation, our experienced team is here to help.

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1:49 Visit kingdomspodcast.com. Fuel your mind. Your next breakthrough starts here. With your live ladies and gentlemen, you're once again welcome to the King James broadcast. And today I've got with me fighting heart of Hong Kong, the CEO of the Mechunk Club, Mick Walker, Matt Friedman. How are you, Matt? I'm doing well.

2:12 Thank you. Very happy to be here today. Wow, I am really, really happy to have you on here today. It's been a long time coming, but finally, where there is a will, there is a way. And of course, we've found a way to make it happen. And of course, you know, for our audience, we have a very special person today.

2:35 He is the CEO of the Meccan Club, author of Awakening the Advocate, a global anti trafficking leader, and of course, this episode is themed The Global Anti Trafficking Leader ended Modern slavery, Leadership, Business ethics and Awakening the Advocate within. And of course, we are all about milestones. We're grateful to you, the listeners for helping us achieve the certification on Leasing Notes as a global Top 3% podcast.

3:09 Thank you very much, guys. And of course, please make welcome Matt Friedman to the show. How are you again, Matt? I'm good, I'm good. How are you doing? Very well, thank you. In London. And how, how's it like in Hong Kong? What's the weather like? It's hot here, it's about 35°, very sunny, very little rain.

3:31 You know, the thing about the summers here is usually it's a it's a easy time. We don't have a lot of work, but for whatever reason, the last two summers I blink and it's halfway through the summer and I'm going to blink again and it's going to be over. And so I got to find a way of kind of getting outside and actually having some summertime.

3:49 Whoa. Tixi is a clock. Definitely definitely. You blink and it's all gone. Wow, this he stitching time saves 9 And of course Tixi is a clock. What you have to do do quick. You know, you have spent the last, or would I say nearly 40 years conference in the darkest edges of modern society. How you take us back to the moment when you first pulled, you know, or when you first got into this pathway of fighting against human trafficking. OK, so you know about actually about 37 years ago, I was living and working in Nepal.

4:33 I was a public health officer and my job was to translate resources into healthier people. At that time, we were finding girls 1213 years old who were HIV positive. We couldn't understand what was going on. This is a very conservative culture. So I started to go to the shelters where the girls were to interview them, and I heard pretty much the same story over and over again. And it went something like this.

4:55 A human trafficker would go into a village. He'd flash a bunch of money around to make it look like he's rich. And he'd say, I'm looking for a wife. I don't want an urban wife, I want a village wife. You'd find a girl 1213 years old, befriend her, and then go to the family and say, I'd like to marry your daughter. They're thinking, wow, he's rich, he's handsome. He's going to take care of our daughter. He's going to take care of us.

5:15 In that part of the world, it's not uncommon for girls to get married at that age. After that, the wedding takes place. And then he goes to the family and says, well, I'm going to take your daughter to Kathmandu, but don't worry, I'll be back in three months. But that isn't what's going to happen.

5:31 Instead, he takes her to Mumbai, India, to the red light district where the brothels are. When he gets there, he puts his wife into a room and says, honey, stay here, I'll be back in a few minutes. I just need to do something. As she was coming in, she saw these men milling around, these women dressed funny. She said no, no, no, no, don't leave me. I'm scared.

5:49 He says it's OK, I'll be right back. He then goes to the Madam who runs the brothel to get the $500.00 for having sold her to the brothel. He has the gold from the wedding and he hands the wedding pictures over. He then leaves to go back to Nepal to do this again and again, maybe 40-50 times in the year. The Madam then goes into the room where the girl is and says guess what?

6:08 Your husband just sold you to me and you're going to be with 20 guys a day, every day because I say so. You can imagine this girl shocked. No, no, no, no, my husband loves me. No, that's what happened. When many of these girls internalise what's happening, they say I will kill myself before I do those shameful things.

6:25 I'm a good Hindu girl. The Madam then brings out the photograph of the family and says if you hurt yourself, we're going to hurt your mom, your dad, your brother. So she's trapped in this situation where she can't get out in order to make her into a prostitute. It's very simple. You shame her. So they bring in about four or five guys and then they use her over and over again for, you know, maybe 30 times in a 2 day period until she just lays back and accepts what happens to her after that, She's put on the line.

6:53 She'll be with 20 guys a day every day until after a couple of years she gets what's called black eye, where she's so depleted physically and emotionally, nobody wants her. So they throw her out onto the street. Now many of the girls languished in India, died of AIDS, some of them made it back to Nepal. And those were the people I was talking to. So I was hearing these stories over and over again, but I didn't understand the evil of it till I actually went to those brothels.

7:18 I was invited by the Indian government to do public health cheques at a police officer with me, went into one of the brothels and there was an 11 year old trafficking victim. This girl saw this Caucasian guy, saw an opportunity, literally ran up, 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. I turned to the police officer and said we need to get this girl out of here.

7:43 He said we can't do that. So what are you talking about? You're a cop, why can't we do that? 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 that story because I wasn't one of those 15 year old high school kids that it said when I grow up, I want to be an activist.

8:04 In fact, I did everything I could not to be 1. But every once in a while in life, we are tested. That was my big test. After that, I failed miserably. I couldn't eat, I couldn't sleep. All I could do is see that girl's kind of visual seared into my mind. And so I did. A lot of activists too, surrendered to the fact that now that I know about this, this is what I'm going to do with my life. And 37 years later, here I am talking to you. That must be a really, really traumatic moment. And that what I say was like a lightning brought moment for you in your life and you took that Clarion call. And today the world is, would I say, a better place, right, because of the nature of the work that you do. But being an American living in

8:55 Hong Kong with deep roots in Southeast Asia, how's your international land shape your understanding of the systemic exploitation that happens there? Well, I mean, much of what happened from that point on was a journey of exploration. When I first heard about human trafficking, it didn't have a name yet, and so people weren't paying much attention to it.

9:19 And we thought maybe this was unique to Nepal and India, but then we started shining a light all over the world and came to realise that in few places in the world, you know, a 15 year old girl wakes up and says when I grow up I want to be a prostitute. Many of them are tricked and deceived into scenarios where you know, they, they have no choice. Now there are some that do it willingly, but I'm talking about the ones who are controlled by the pimps, by the madams. They have no choice and they're forced to do this type of activity.

9:48 But it's not just, you know, forced prostitution. There's also forced labour. There are 50 million people in modern slavery around the world. In fact, there are more slaves today than any other time in history according to the United Nations. Out of that, about 23 million of them would be enforced marriages.

10:05 Where it's not a kind of traditional loving marriage, the person is married into the family to do work for the family. And then 27 million in forced labour. 6.3 million of that is forced prostitution. That translates to about 9.2 million people entering modern slavery per year, or 25,200 per day.

10:26 So in every 4 seconds there is a new slave somewhere in the world. We count to 41234. It could be Hong Kong, it could be America, it could be Europe, it could be Africa. And the drum beats on and on and on and on. So much of my exploration has been like many of the activists who focus on this, trying to make sense of this. How do you address the criminals? How do you address, you know, saving these people out of these horrible conditions?

10:54 How do you go after them legally? How do you then put them in shelters and help them after? And through that process, we have gained a certain amount of knowledge, but it's a collective knowledge because there's a community of about 40,000 people like me. We try to work with each other to be able to address this, but we're not making much impact at all.

11:13 There's a there's a lot to unpack here, but two things. Speaking of exploration, as a the younger me in high school or secondary school, I don't know what you call it in that part of the world. I love geography so much. And if you love geography, you would love exploring as a person. And I did well in terms of research. I did study economics.

11:43 I was a social scientist, right? But one thing that caught my attention in the course of my research work was the modern day slavery in West Africa and the cocoa famine, the cocoa plantations, right? So I'd like for you to shed some light on the hotspots across the world that are notorious for human trafficking and modern day slavery.

12:10 OK, so let's start with West Africa. You have cocoa plantations. You have very little government oversight. You have people who engage young children, sometimes teenagers, on the cocoa farms. Many of them have been tricked and deceived into the situation. They're forced to stay there, they're working against their will. And you can imagine the chocolate industry isn't very happy with this because every once in a while BBC or one of those organisations will do an expose on this. And all of a sudden if you have modern slavery and chocolate and you combine those together, it's not good for the brands. And so often times the brands will come in and try to fix these things and maybe they open

12:52 some schools and get the kids out, but then two or three years later they forget it and they move on. So that's one particular area. Another one would be fishing industry. You often see Thailand, 15 year old boy is tricked and deceived onto a boat. The boat goes out for what he thinks is going to be 3 months, but stays out there for four years.

13:11 This poor kid will end up working 1718 hours a day, every day. If he doesn't, he gets beaten, tortured. The only food he gets the entire time he's there is rice and fish. Nothing nutritious. They often give stimulants to get this person to work if he gets injured. If he gets sick, they just throw him off the side of the boat.

13:30 At the end of the four years the boat comes in, he gets nothing. So you see, almost every type of kind of agriculture and fishing and even manufacturing has situations where people can be tricked and deceived into it. In Asia, 55% of these cases are in this part of the world, partly because there's a lot of people here. You know, you have 1.4 billion people in China, 1.4 billion people in India.

13:56 Then you have Japan and all these other locations. But at the same time, the feudal systems that have allowed for this type of trafficking to take place have never been completely dismantled. And so it continues. And then you can say the same for Africa, Latin America, even North America. So out of the 50 million people last year with the United Nations, the NGOs and the governments combined, the world only helped 133,000 which is 0.2% not even 1%. Now you might ask this the counter trafficking world not care?

14:30 Are they lazy? What would a justify that? Profits generated from modern slavery $236 billion. The amount of money available to address this is about 400 million, or at least it was up until about four months ago. And now with the US government cutting its funding, it's down to about 220. So you have a huge amount of profit and you have this much available to fight it.

14:54 And think about what we're talking about here. We're talking about girls that are forced to have sex with 20 guys a day times 6.3 million or 23 million people in modern slavery, forced labour. How is it that this can exist in this day and age? I can't answer that question. You know, it's such a horrible thing that we're dealing with here, but it's just not being addressed.

15:16 Speaking of being addressed, you know, I did have a brief stint around 2017 with the NGO sector. I did work with the international NGO called CRS, that's Catholic Relief Services. They, they did, you know, manage some, some grants from the USAID, right. And of course, I, I was on the Global Fund grant for malaria and it's really interesting to see the great work, the great humanitarian work that these NGOs do. A lot of people do not have the privilege to understand or to appreciate the intensity of the work that, you know, you guys do in the NGO sector.

16:01 And actually made me, or would I say made my heart bleed when I heard about the USAID being cut off, right? Because this is a massive, how would I say halt in the humanitarian tribe globally, there's a lot of lives that have been impacted positively by way of the grant. But yeah, we know that they did have issues with alleged corruption, but to to think about it from a philosophical view, right, It's still for the greater good, right.

16:38 If we audit the whole USAID activities, there's in more lives that have been impacted positively than any alleged cases of corruption, right? How is the industry surviving right now? Are there new grants that are coming up to take care of those activities that were previously, you know, sponsored by way of the USAID grants?

17:05 Well, it's only been about 3 or 4 months since this happened. And what we're now beginning to see are the implications of this. So you have all the NGO's that were supported by USAID, they have to shut down, especially if they were 100% dependent on U.S. government money and many of them were. You have ministries of health, ministries of education, ministries of women's affairs, Ministry of Health that had subsidies that were basically providing support to all kinds of people, whether it's HIV, AIDS or girls education or reproductive health or malaria control and so forth. That's just no longer there.

17:42 And so as a result of $40 billion being taken out of the system because it was the largest donor in the world, you can imagine the impact that this is going to have. You're seeing that food isn't getting to places, medicine isn't getting to places. People no longer can go to school. You know, drugs that were available for HIV AIDS treatment are no longer available.

18:04 You can anticipate that literally hundreds of thousands, if not millions of people are going to be disenfranchised, some of them killed or they they die as a result of this. Some of them just can't get on with their life and they can't move forward. To me, it's a it's an unbelievable situation. As an American, I cannot understand how it is that our government moved in the direction of doing this. But it's a catastrophic, devastating scenario that we're dealing with right now.

18:31 Then we're going to see it unfold over the next couple of months and years. In terms of the filling the gaps, you see that there's a lot of distractions going on. There's Ukraine, there's Gaza, there's, you know, various other things that are happening. What used to be a possible pool of money to perhaps fill the gap is less so these days.

18:50 And so I just feel like there's going to be a lot of pain and suffering for people who no longer get services because of this, this change that has happened as a result of the United States government saying they don't want to do this anymore. And it, and it makes my heart bleed too. I mean, I, I wake up in the middle of night sometimes just thinking about how can this happen? And I can't explain it.

19:12 You know this kind of situation happening, right? I come from Nigeria and it is a developing economy. This kind of situation happening is sort of a big lesson, right? Yes, history has a way of teaching us, you know, from experiences of the past in order to perform actions in the present, to change the landscape of the future.

19:41 But what would we say? The pulling of the grand plot, right? Developing and underdeveloped nations, you know, from an economic development perspective, right? You cannot solely rely on handouts, as harsh as that may sound. It's not a wise thing and has never been a wise thing to do. What are internally Internally Generated Revenue, would I say avenues that the governments of these countries can explore in order to fill the voids, the lacunas that have been created by the withdrawal of the USAID funds?

20:26 I mean, I think it's a good question. I think there there's let's give a couple of scenarios. There's going to be some governments that are going to say, OK, well we should have had this responsibility from the beginning. Let's divert some of the funding that we have, let's put it into these programmes and let's see what we can do. And then perhaps it becomes more long lasting and sustainable. On the other end of the spectrum, our countries are just not equipped in order to have this abrupt change take place. Maybe if it had been over a couple of years and the phased out then they would have been OK. But to have a completely eliminated immediately without preparing for having the revenues available to be able to do that services would just

21:06 stop. They won't exist at all and. Then there's a fair number of governments and perhaps will be somewhere in between these things. So, you know, whenever something like this happens, it seems catastrophic, but you know, it's it's a disruption that might result in something better or something worse.

21:23 At present, it's something worse. But, you know, if they had decided that they really wanted to address this, they just should have done it over a couple of years and then that would have been less disruptive. At least the governments in the in the countries would have been prepared to be able to like, transition it to something else.

21:40 To me, the problem is the abruptness that that happened all of a sudden just turning off the tap completely. And there's just a lot of people that don't have jobs now, and there's a lot of people who don't have medicines now and services and and that disruption is really hard to make up. You know, it's quite a big lesson for, for the global landscape, especially on the side of the recipients, let's put it that way. But and when we look at your own organisation, the the grant forms 25% of your inflow of your revenue. How are you guys dealing with taking 25% off? Well, let me talk a little bit about what we do and how we do it.

22:30 And so that'll that'll help to explain our our model. I work for an organisation called the Macon Club. We work with the private sector in a positive, supportive, non naming and shaming way to help big companies to identify the relationship between their business and the possibility of modern slavery. So for example, banks, if $236 billion is generated from modern slavery, that's considered to be illegal money. If that money gets into a legitimate bank and the regulators find out about it, they can be fined and penalised. There was one bank in Australia that was fined 1.3 billion Australian dollars because they allowed that money to get into the bank and and that had a devastating impact. Then you have manufacturers and

23:13 retailers, these are companies that make things or have supply chains in there. There could be sweatshops and so we work with them to look at their supply chain to find out where those places might be. And then we work with them to to see that those those locations are no longer exploiting workers in the hospitality sector. You have sex trafficking.

23:34 A lot of victims are used in hotels and helping hotels to understand the vulnerability of having those types of crimes take place in their hotel. So the interesting thing about the the private sector is because of the potential for reputational risk, if they find any issue related to human trafficking, they'll address it very quickly.

23:56 And so we have an association and much of our revenue comes from the private sector itself because we have an annual subscription among these organisations. But when it comes to tool development and training development and consultation development and so forth, we had funding that came from the US government.

24:15 And as a result of that not being there, we can continue to do our programmes, but we can't evolve because we don't have the extra capital. And So what I'm doing is I'm pivoting. I'm trying to go and find high net worth people who are willing to provide donations. We're going to governments and helping them to see that we have something that's unique to offer, that's having an impact.

24:38 We're basically changing over to look at, you know, the impact of tariffs on human trafficking. And so that we will do white papers and talks related to those activities. So, you know, I have to raise a certain amount of money to make up what's been lost. But I'm the lucky 1 because at least we have this private sector money come in.

24:57 You have a lot of Ng OS that are, that didn't survive COVID and now another group of Ng OS that won't survive this. So, you know, once they're gone, they're gone. You know, it's, it's not easy to start from scratch to set these organisations up. So it's, it's a, it's a major crisis for the counter trafficking world.

25:16 Amelia wanted to host a webinar, but the tool couldn't deliver. Zooming out, she turned to Webinar Key, an expert solution for webinars. With seamless setup and intuitive design, she delivered the perfect webinar. Webinar Key host webinars like a boss. Major, major crisis, but you know, let's say adversity sometimes can be a blessing in these guys.

25:42 So this major crisis, I want to believe in my optimistic mindset that it will result in when I say innovative methods, especially with, you know, organisations like yourself, and also be a springboard for new organisations that will be proactive instead of being reactive going forward into the future. And of course, aggressively tackle the, the, the issues that we have at hand, especially in the world of trafficking. It's very, very distasteful.

26:17 It's unacceptable. It's not something that you want to see in any way, shape or form, but it's, I think the world should be more grateful to, to persons like yourself. I, I think you, you require more, a greater level of appreciation. You know, your organisation for, for the kind of work that you do.

26:38 But unfortunately, I don't know why the world tends to, you know, play down on song heroes like yourself because it's it's not easy what you guys do. Actually, part of the problem is the fact that what we're talking about is so extreme that it, you know, people don't want to hear about it. So like if you hear of a 1213 year old girl who's forced to have sex with 20 guys and you're a parent and you have a daughter, you're like, well, I don't want to hear about that.

27:06 That's just too sad, too depressing. Or somebody who's basically in a brick kiln farm somewhere where they're forced to work 17 hours a day and you know, they don't get any breaks and you know, many of them, you know, get injured and hurt and, you know, they can't work. And when you hear these kind of stories, it's like, oh, I don't want to hear that. So part of the problem is the counter trafficking world years ago had this assumption if we told these stories in great detail that it would so motivate people to want to do something that they would like step up and get involved. But to a certain extent it backfired. It had the opposite effect when you mentioned. Human Psychology.

27:46 No, I don't want to. I don't want to hear about that. It hurts. I'm having a good day today. I don't, I don't want to, I don't want to be exposed to that discussion. So we have to lessen the amount of content, but end up with some kind of a statement about hope and the fact that we as human beings can step up and get involved. Because if the world is only helping 0.2% of the victims, well, I'll, I'll tell you a story that that happened to me that that'll put this into perspective. So years ago when I was living in Nepal, I desperately wanted to do something to address the issue of human trafficking. So I decided I was going to write a book. As part of that book process, I went from shelter to shelter and I interviewed all these girls

28:28 and I went into one shelter and there was a girl named Geeta. And every time I approach her, I said, no, no, no, no, I don't want to give my story. But she sat and listened to all of the other interviews that were taking place. When I finished and I was leaving, Geeta comes running up and says, I changed my mind. You can have my story.

28:44 So she sat at one side of the table, the rest of us were on the other side of the table, and over a three hour period, she just told the worst story I'd ever heard of rape and torture and disease and betrayal and murder. I honestly didn't know what to say to this girl. I was shocked. I, you know, shocked into silence. Finally I turned her and I said, wow, Geeta, you must be so angry at the traffickers for the horrible things they did to you. She paused and paused.

29:11 Then she said no, I'm angry at you and you and you. She pointed at us. She said where were you? Said that every single day she woke up praying for somebody to come and help. Nobody came. Said she went to school till she was 12. She knew that everything out in front of the brothel was right out in the open, knowing nobody was doing anything.

29:29 She said she wasn't angry at the traffickers. She said they're just bad people doing what bad people do bad things. She said she was angry at the good people at society for a allowing a 15 year old girl to be commercially raped 7000 times only to eventually get AIDS and she was dying. So she called us all out.

29:49 She was basically saying that we as a world basically need to address this. The 40,000 people like me globally that are doing this aren't cutting it. We can't. We don't have enough resources. We don't have enough people. There's a half million criminals out there. There's $236 billion. We have to, as people understand this issue, which is why I do these podcasts, trying to get in front of populations to almost shake them, to say wake up to the fact that this exists, it's horrible. People are being disenfranchised. It's happening in the UK and Hong Kong and Africa, Latin America, North America, every country in the world. We have this problem.

30:28 Let's wake up to the fact that this is unacceptable and this has to stop. Oh, it's, it's a lot to take in. You did mention my neck of the woods to the UK. What are the popular, would I say, methods in which human trafficking and human slavery are being perpetrated in the UK? Yeah, I think it's about 120,000 estimated who are in the UK in modern slavery. It would be marijuana farms, it would be domestic helpers, it would be forced prostitution, it would be manufacturing. It would be, you know, some agriculture cases, you know, sweatshops that make things the same type of thing you see in countries all over Europe.

31:13 It's not just the UK that has this. Every country has their their their number of people. In fact, according to the United Nations, the United States has about a million people in modern slavery. Same types of situations where people are exploited by other people in these circumstances. Now, you know, if you stop and look at the statistics, the number of people that are convicted in let's say the UK, it's probably a couple of 100, even though the number of criminals is probably in the thousands. And it's partly because this is a very difficult crime to identify.

31:45 It's hidden, people don't want you to see it and it requires a lot of resources in order to go after the criminals who are in these situations. That's a lot, but you know, you have been able to help the private sector to recognise their role in ending expectation globally. Or what's the most compelling business case for businesses to act now, you know, with immediate effect?

32:13 Well, actually there was an there was a company, Boohoo, I don't know if you know them in the UK, they were. Identified. As having modern slavery. It wasn't even modern slavery, but they were, they were accused actually they were. They were underpaying some of their people who were in the UK. Now that scandal and that designation of modern slavery reduced their market share by about 2 billion sterling pounds. It had a devastating impact on that particular company. So no company wants to be in a situation where the social media or the traditional media is saying you're supporting human trafficking.

32:51 And I go back to chocolate again. You want chocolate to be associated with Valentine's Day and with Easter and with birthdays. And if you have that designation of something like that chocolate with modern slavery, it leaves a very bad taste in the mouth of the people. They don't want to necessarily want to go out and buy it and so forth.

33:10 And so businesses have a sense of urgency in addressing this. And as a result of that, I would say that the business world probably does more to address helping to stop modern slavery than many of the NGOs do simply because they want to protect their business. But by protecting their business, they also make the world a better place and.

33:33 It's a win, win. Yeah, it's a win, win. Yeah. So I mean, who cares what the motivation is as long as they get it done? And so, you know that big businesses will do anything and everything they can not to be associated with exploitation. My job is to work with them to ensure that if that happens that it's done in a responsible way. It's, it's, it's quite crazy the reputational risk that's is associated with modern day slavery and looking at the valuation of the business just go down the drain because of being associated with modern day slavery. But you know, when you talk about the chocolate one, it hits a home run for me because Nigeria is one of the world's largest population of producers

34:19 rather of, of cocoa. I think in the 90s we were like top of the food chain alongside Ghana and Brazil for production of cocoa. And looking at what happens in West Africa in terms of the cocoa production. It's sad, It's sad. But when we talk about the practical frameworks or the tools that ethical companies can use to audit and fix heating trafficking risks in their supply chains, are you able to enlighten the audience on on those tools? Well, I mean it, it, it goes beyond audit. So we do a baseline of companies to identify what they're doing and not doing it.

34:57 And the things that we measure would be things like, does your C-Suite and your board know about the issue? Do you have policy statements that say that you have 0 tolerance or you know those policy statements cascading down into your supply chain? You have a point person or team that focuses on addressing this issue.

35:17 Do you have a risk assessment approach? Do you train your staff? Do you raise awareness of your staff? And when you do auditing, do you really get down to the level of helping people at the lowest level of your supply chain? Not at Tier 1 where you know there's a lot of auditing taking place, but Tier 2 and 3.

35:34 So what that means is for let's say manufacturing, Tier 1 is where you assemble the running shoe. Tier 2 is where the rivets and the shoelaces and the textiles and so forth come from, separate companies that lead into that. And then Tier 3 is the raw material you need to make sure that you're going all the way down to that level.

35:52 Do you have remediation approaches in place to address issues if you find them? Do you have grievance mechanisms to allow people within your supply chain? So we measure all of those things and if they don't have it, we work with these companies to put those things in place. And once they put it in place, then let's say that you have a company that has 300 and 350,000 people within their main company. And within the supply chain, all those systems and procedures protect 350,000 people.

36:22 So if you have like 100 companies that have half million, you know, employees associated with it and you fix those companies, you're able to immunise and reduce the vulnerability significantly across many, many sectors. And that's the reason why I left the more traditional NGO world to focus on the private sector, because I feel like a lot more potential can be done as a result of that.

36:46 You know, we have what I say certification organisations like B Corp. So what other certifications should our audience be leaking out for in terms of supporting and patronising organisations that are doing their homework in terms of anti trafficking and anti modern day slavery? Well, fair trade often as a concept covers a lot of the things that I'm talking about. But you know, there was an organisation that wanted to certify companies to say that they are slavery free and they thought this was a good idea and they even went to the United Nations and talked to them.

37:32 But no company is going to sign that or accept that because they don't know if they have slavery or not. You know, that's The thing is that the the big problem is that most companies don't have oversight of their entire business because they have so many suppliers and sub suppliers associated with it. So at present, there's no certification that's specifically related to modern slavery. I wish there was.

37:56 It just doesn't exist at this particular time. So in terms of those the, the existent would I say certifications, what are the items they look out for? What are the form of audits that they perform? Because I know the likes of the B Corp, right? They perform audits over the operations and supply chain of the organisations that they certified.

38:20 They don't just hand out those certifications. Well, what's the process like in terms of yeah. Well, I mean, BSCI is, is one of the classification. SETEX is another one. Verte puts out various audits and so forth. And again, what they're looking for is the 11 indicators of modern slavery. This would be, you know, whether or not a person has access to their papers, if they're working in a particular location, whether they paid for their job, whether they're forced to do overtime, whether there's violin or harassment or change of, you know, what they expected to get versus what they actually get, etcetera, etcetera. So auditors go in and we'll look for these 11 indicators of modern slavery.

39:01 And then based on that, if an audit comes back and says there's a vulnerability, this is when the brand is informed. And then the brands will work with organisations like us to figure out how to stop that from happening. So in the old days, they would cut and run, terminate a contract and leave. Now what we suggest is the company works with that factory to figure out if they can fix it so that these things don't exist.

39:26 Because if you cut and run, then you have all these people who are working for that factory who are disenfranchised even more. And so, you know, the, the interesting thing about modern slavery is that when you hear terminology like slavery, you think of extreme things, you think about people in chains and then, you know, fields and everything else.

39:45 Context of modern slavery and forced labour. It could be that a person simply doesn't have their passport because the company's holding on to it. That's an indicator of modern slavery. They paid a fee for their job, which they're not supposed to. That's an indicator of modern slavery. They have excessive overtime that they can't say no to.

40:05 That's an indicator of modern slavery. So a lot of these things can be fixed. And our job is to work with these companies to see that that happens. You know, this leads me to think about something that I leverage on very, very much in my own organisation. And of course, it shares my initials, which is AI, artificial intelligence.

40:27 So with artificial intelligence, blockchain technology, big data, new data systems, how is technology changing the landscape and reshaping the way in which we detect and prevent forced to label well? I'm going to first start with how it's used by the bad guys and then I'll talk about how we can use it. Is a new phenomena that's happening in this part of the world in Asia is human trafficking of educated professionals into places like Cambodia and Myanmar and Lao. And when they get there, they're forced to basically scam for 1415 hours a day, every day.

41:09 So it's estimated about 220,000 young professionals initially from Southeast Asia, but now they're getting these people from South Asia in Africa and they're ending up in these scam centres. And so those scam centres use a lot of technology in order to develop scripts, in order to scam people, you know, to develop websites that look like they're real, but they're not to use cryptocurrency and so forth.

41:35 And as a result of that, the organised crime is very organised and they're very much adapting AI to go after kind of money all over the world, the victims in the United States and Africa, Europe, Asia and so forth. So, you know, the same technology can be used in order to fight that. Like you could have a command centre somewhere in the West where you basically have hackers for good whose job is to break into these these scam centres in order to shut them down. It hasn't happened up until now, but that's really the, that's really what needs to happen.

42:12 You know, and sometimes even like the, the Wi-Fi for these centres comes from Skylink from Musk's organisation. If you could turn those things off, you would be able to shut these things down. So technology can be used for good, but it also can be used for the criminals as well. The one thing I want to say about this particular new phenomena of human trafficking into scam centres is I've never seen violence like this before. If you don't meet your target as a victim in one of these centres, they take these are you, they beat you. Sometimes they beat you to death, and then they videotape the killing and then they sell the videotapes. It's called Harm Core, and it's a new phenomena that we're seeing take place that never

42:57 thought we would see. But these videos are extreme because there's a certain number of people who get a rush off of seeing violence like that, and they're willing to pay a lot of money in order to see it. So these are just some of the offshoots of, you know, technology being used in a way to to basically hurt people. That's just so much to take in.

43:23 It's extreme. You mentioned Africa right there in the mix. Like what? What areas in Africa do they peak? From Ghana, from Kenya, from Zambia, from Zimbabwe, from you know where else, Egypt, Tunisia. So what's happening is these scam centres are looking for people who are educated but desperate for some work. And so they, they'll put something on social media, It looks like it's a real job advertisement. And the person from those countries will say, I, I want the job because it looks like it's good money, 5000 U.S. dollars per month and so forth.

44:01 So they have a legitimate interview. And it really seems like it's a regular interview. And then like they'll actually be have the ticket sent to them. And then when they get there, they're picked up in a van and taken to a place that's pretty much like a like a prison. So there's literally thousands of people in there whose sole purpose is to scam people. And the scam that they're using is called a pig butchering scam. So the idea is the victim of the scam is being fattened like a pig before the slaughter.

44:30 And the way it works is, and you may have received these yourself, you get a WhatsApp message that says, hi, Michael, how are you doing? And then you go back and you say, well, I'm not Michael. And then the person says, oh, well, I'm so sorry. I thought you were Michael. I'm a 27 year old Thai woman. I'm in a new city and I'm very lonely. And you're so nice.

44:49 And so they developed this text messaging love affair and it goes on for five or six weeks without mentioning anything at all. They just developed this relationship and they're talking about how they love each other and every once in a while maybe one of these victims will pretend to be the the girlfriend and she'll get on Zoom and so forth. Then she basically says, oh, I made 5000 U.S. dollars on crypto.

45:12 So the guy says, wow, how did you do it? She says, well let me show you. So she gets 5000, puts it, it becomes 10,000. So she convinces him to put 5000 in. He puts it in, it gets 10,000 and she gets him to take it physically out. He has to have it physically in his hand. Then she says put it in again, 10,000, it'll double to 20,000.

45:34 He's got it in his hands. She waits a week and then she says there's this coin coming out. If you put $1,000,000 into it, you're going to double it. Then we can be together. Life is going to be good. You saw that I'm your I'm your did and you saw that you could take the money in. So she convinces him to put all of his life savings into into this crypto thing that is fraudulent. And once it's all in there, they turn the switch off and they lose everything.

46:00 So about $65 billion just out of the United States was lost as a result of these pig butchering scams. Anyways, I know I've gotten some of those messages before and my my responses are not always very nice, but it's always something along the lines of go go get a live, go get a job. You can't do that to me. And it's crazy.

46:20 Yeah, because we keep getting those messages very, very frequently. Very frequently, yeah. It's crazy. Some of them even send you certain links and you know, by the time you actually go into the link, they would have efficient access into into your device. So guys out there, be very careful. Trust anyone you don't know at all. And even if you think you know the person, it's best like what? In the United States, they have AI that is able to take a person's voice.

46:53 And So what they'll do is they'll come up with a script and they'll call the mother with the daughter's voice that was, you know, gotten from Facebook and so forth. And it says, mom, I'm in trouble. You need to send money to this. I can't talk right now. Here's the address. Send $5000 immediately.

47:10 So the mom obviously thinks, well, my daughter's in trouble. She gets the message and, you know, she, she doesn't think to call the daughter. She just basically, you know, does what she's told because the daughter says, I can't talk on the phone now. And so money is very quickly. There's another case here in Hong Kong where there was a Zoom call and they used AI to develop an avatar of the chairman of the board. And so there's these young, you know, accountants there and the chairman says to them on Zoom, I need you to send $25 million to this immediately.

47:45 I don't want you to hesitate. Do it. So they're seeing their chairperson basically say this to them. And so they transferred the money and it was just AI generated avatar. It wasn't even a real person. So I mean, no, we, we've gotten to a point where because you can pretty much replicate anything, you just really don't know what's true anymore and what's real and what's not real. You know, the pendulum has gone so far to the, to the left that eventually there has to be something that truths what it is that we see.

48:16 And and I, I hope that exists, because otherwise you know what's real and what's not real. It's crazy, yeah. Anyways, you know, being a finance person, I know that there are there are controls in place by these financial institutions, especially when it comes to organisational finance, their levels of approvals, those levels of approvals are not in place, especially for setting threshold of transactions.

48:43 They won't allow those transactions to go through. So yeah, they're trying in in their own way to ensure that these things are being tackled even in terms of personal finance right now. You know, digital banks like shout out to the likes of Monzo, for example, and why's they have this delay in executing transactions and sometimes ask you certain questions to ensure that the transactions are, are legitimate. So yeah, they're, they're doing their own things. But you know, you, you've been able to consult across sectors. How do you foster cross sector collaboration between NGOs, corporations and governments without losing that momentum? Well, I mean, the difficulty is that the private sector doesn't trust the NGO sector and the NGO

49:30 sector doesn't try trust the private sector. So and it's partly because the NGOs feel like it's the, it's the private sector that's doing the problem and the private sector feels like the NGOs, all they do is wag a finger and talk about how terrible you are. So that relationship, you have to find NGOs that understand that in fact within private companies are NGO like people who focus on compliance and sustainability and ESG in order to prevent the company from getting into trouble. Now, governments and NGOs get along pretty well, but governments in the private sector, again, don't know how to talk to each other.

50:08 And so they, they have a different language, they have a different pace. And the government is always afraid that if you work with the government sector, it's just going to result in more rules and regulations and, you know, legal restrictions and everything else. And so they try to kind of avoid that type of relationship.

50:26 And so part of the problem is that you almost need all of these groups to work together, and it's hard to get them in the same room to focus on the same topic. Wow. You know, I'm pretty much smiling because from my own working experience, I've had my fair share of, you know, the three, the three sectors.

50:46 I started to be working with the NGO sector, moved to the private sector and you know, I was an auditor with, you know, the big four accounting fans, PWCKPMT. And I had the privilege of auditing some government sector entities, you know, and of course, you know, you see you're able to compete that triangle and you have that understanding. But sometimes you have individuals who are able to go across and complete those triangles. So you understand the dynamics in terms of the relationships and the communications across the different entities. But like you rightly said, trust is key, you know. But.

51:26 There's another factor as well, and that is OK. So as human beings, we don't pick the causes that we support. The cause picks us. So I didn't one day wake up and say there's poverty or there's girls education or there's communicable diseases and human, I think I'll use human trafficking. It kept coming to me.

51:45 There's something in my DNA that's drawn to that. You're. Born to be a fighter. Well, everybody has it. They just don't. They don't, they don't activate it, they don't look into it. Everyone has a 'cause my sister, it's animals, my brother, it's climate change. I'm human beings and human trafficking. But within the governments, within the private sector and within the NGOs, if you can find those people who really do care about this and are willing to collaborate, and you bring those people together, then 1 + 1 + 1 = 111, not 3, because the synergistic effect of that relationship really makes a difference.

52:23 So it's not about governments, it's about people within governments, people within the private sector, people within the NGO sector who are by their very nature collaborative. And you have to mine those people, You have to find those people. And if you can do that, then you can make this triangle work. If you can't just randomly get people from different divisions so they don't care about it, then nothing's gonna happen, and that's generally the way it works. Apparently you need to find people that are genuinely passionate about these courses, right? And yeah, we'll definitely make some traction in the course of the work, but like, as someone with reach, wealth of experience, right?

53:06 So what's 1 story from your work that stays with you like a moment? I reminded you why this fight is personal. Well, I mean, there's so many of them. There is a young woman that I met early in my career who was a sex trafficking victim and she was in the brothel and she was pregnant three times and two times they gave her an abortion. The third time they said okay, you can have the kid. So the kid was born and she was still working in the brothel and the kid was there for two or three or four years. And then one of the patrons made a pass at the kids. So the woman went to to the Madam and said, can I put my kid in school?

53:48 I'll work harder. I'll do whatever it is that I can. So the kid was put into a boarding school. And so the mother didn't have any contact with her, but once or twice a year she'd go to the school and she just look at the her son, you know, like as he was playing sports or, you know, doing whatever he's doing from afar. And she felt so proud that this is my son, but she didn't know who the son was.

54:11 The school kind of adopted the kid and so forth. And so she eventually got AIDS and she was dying. And she should have probably died like a year earlier, but she wanted to be there for her son's graduation. So she was, the graduation took place. Here's this woman, she's emaciated. She has, you know, she's probably around 90 lbs or something or less dying of AIDS. And all she wanted to do was to see her son graduated. She managed to get up to him and she touched his robe. That's as far as she got, but she just wanted to have some contact with him.

54:44 And, and that was it. And, and that story stuck with me simply because, you know, here's a woman who had nothing in her life. Everything was stolen away from her, her health, her freedom and everything else. But she had this son and her whole purpose was to make sure that her son eventually kind of was able to move forward and so forth. And, and, and when I listened to her say that, I mean, I, I teared up, I, I, I couldn't stop myself. There was there was another girl in Nepal. She came back, she was HIV positive. She was dying.

55:13 And she said, I'm going to stop other people from doing this. I'm gonna go into the villages in the hills by myself and I'm just gonna sit there and tell everybody about this. And so we said, you know, you're very sick, you can't do that. And she said, I don't care. I'm sick. What difference does it make? So we sent a social worker with her, and she went from village to village, and she'd just go there and she'd sit down and start talking.

55:36 Maybe two people, 10 people, 20 people, eventually 100 people listening to her story. At the end, everyone's crying, saying, oh, my gosh, what do we need to do? We didn't know anything about this. And then the social worker would say, well, I'm glad you asked that. Down the road, we'd set up a registration for schools. Another one, we're doing a prevention project and on site, they basically set something up.

55:59 And so these types of heroes, you know, I'm, I'm not a hero. I don't do anything related to this. I didn't have the experience. They are the heroes. They're the ones that have experienced this. They're the ones that come back. They're the ones that are basically doing everything they can with the remaining part of their life in order to address this, this particular issue.

56:17 Those are the people who inspire me. You know, somebody that has LED both the grassroot initiatives and global collaborations. What kind of leadership mindset is needed to navigate the complexity of modern day slavery? I, I think it really comes down to understanding psychology of people, a psychology of organisations. Like for example, if I want to find people who share my interest in addressing human trafficking, I'll do a talk. I do about 150 talks a year.

56:53 I'll get in front of an audience of 100 people, could be bankers, could be auditors, it could be, you know, any number of types of. And I do a talk and at the end three or four people will come up and say to me, I don't know what it is about this topic, but I feel like I need to do something. Can I do something in my organisation? Can you give me some information, some tools? And so I mine those people.

57:16 And once I find them, I say, well, OK, what organisation you work for? Oh, I work for EY. OK, well, where do you work in EY? OK, let me give you some information. And then within that company, we get those individuals to kind of infect them with a sense of good and a sense of responsibility. So understanding that when you meet people or institutions that are seeking to get involved, you have to 1st understand what their value system, what are they willing to put into this?

57:43 How are they going to address this? There's no cookie cutter approach this. You have to adjust your pitch in your recommendations to every single scenario with the hope and expectation that that eventually translates into some action. So again, if I could, if you could get like a million people to do one thing related to human trafficking, that would that would make a big difference. One thing people can do is to learn about this issue and just tell other people about it, or to put articles on LinkedIn or, or to teach your kids about it.

58:15 You can be a responsible consumer. Before you buy branded items, go online to see whether or not that company has a policy related to human trafficking. They do congratulate them. If they don't, in a very polite way, you can say I like your products. I'd feel better if you had that. Companies respond to that.

58:32 You can volunteer. You know, I have about 150 volunteers that work with me. In fact, my youngest volunteer was nine years old. This girl saw me in a documentary. She approached me and said, Mr Friedman, human trafficking is awful. I want to help. I said you're nine years old. She said So what? I said you're nine years old.

58:52 She said 9 year olds are the new 16 year olds. Give me a chance. So I said what can? You do. I love that. Yeah, she said. Well, you know, I mean, I can find anything on the Internet. That's my God-given gift. And so I had a couple of second year Ivy League law students couldn't find stuff on the Internet.

59:09 I gave it to her. Two days later, she came back with everything I needed. Because each one of us has a particular gift that we have. It could be public speaking, it could be writing, it could be networking, it could be podcasting, it could be selling T-shirts. It doesn't matter. If you apply that to volunteerism, then you're making the world a better place.

59:28 And at the same time, you're contributing your gift to the world as well, or just donating and fundraising. I mean, there's a lot of hurt out there are organisations that don't have the funding because of the USAID cut and other cuts and so forth. Skip a couple of meals, take that money, identify a local organisation, donate it to them.

59:47 Any amount is is welcome and is a blessing to these organisations. So these are the things that we can do. And again, if you could get a million people to do that, that would add up to something quite big. And that's really what's needed because the 40,000 people are not enough to have even 1% of these people helped. We need everyone to take a stand. And get involved and and and help with this process. You know, Speaking of mining people, you were able to mine an ex PwC and KPMG auditor, right?

1:00:19 Who now runs a global top 3% podcast to join this mission. And of course, I've spread the word about what is happening in the world today. And you have been privileged to leave 35 plus years in Asia, but also raise your own sons in the US. So how do you reconcile the global and personal dimensions of your mission?

1:00:51 Well, my kids grew up in Nepal, Bangladesh and Thailand. So when they went to college, they went to the United States. And so, you know, my, my ex-wife was Indian. So my kids don't look anything like me. They're, you know, they, they're just, they don't look like their dad. And so even when I was in Thailand, I'd be walking down the beach with these two young kind of, you know, the darker children.

1:01:15 And people would come up to me and say, what are you doing with those kids? Because they didn't think that they were associated with me. But when my kids went to the United States, you know, The thing is, you may know this from your own experience when you lived in another location. People don't understand what that experience is like.

1:01:30 They don't. So my kids would say, I grew up in Thailand, they'd say where you tie, you know, and it confused people. So they just didn't talk about it. They just integrated into society. They went on. My one of my sons is an emergency room doctor. The other's a veterinarian. You know, for whatever reason, they just, you know, succeeded and far beyond where I ever did academically. And they did quite well.

1:01:54 But, you know, some people who have the experience of being in an expatriate situation do well and some don't. In my case, my kids did well. They thrived in that situation. They understand the world as not being a terribly scary place. They know how to navigate going to places. My son was recently in Tanzania. He's going back to I think it's Ghana or something and so forth. He's following the footsteps of his dad and so forth. But you know, the experience worked quite well for them. Yeah, it's, it's quite interesting. I was telling somebody yesterday, you know, I come from Nigeria and even in Nigeria, I, my parents are from different tribes, right?

1:02:38 There's something about having that ethnical dynamism in a home. It trains you to be neutrally minded as a person, and it trains you to respect multiple cultures as opposed to coming from just one ethnical background. And I learned that very early in life. Respect, you know, those that come before you, respect those people from your father's side, from your mother's side, and learn to be a hybrid that becomes the best of both worlds and navigates the world to learn more. And, you know, paid forward.

1:03:15 I told you earlier, I loved geography as a, as a, as a, as a young child, right? So it's one of those things that really inspired me. I love geography so much, but I love to learn the ways of life of people across the world. You know, geography helps you to be able to explore and also learn. I think that's one of those things that probably, you know, your your sons had in them, you know, learning to become becoming the best of both worlds. And of course, you know, if your parents actually instil, that's discipline and self-confidence and you, you will be, would I say, a high level hybrid that can succeed anywhere you go to. Well, I have 5 brothers and sisters and none of them have travelled anywhere.

1:04:02 So they look at me as kind of the black sheep of the family. You know what happened to him? You know, he's visited 70 countries and you know, he's always working in this country or that country and meeting they, they can't, they can't fathom my life. And so even a place like Hong Kong, it's a highly sophisticated culture.

1:04:23 Highly sophisticated. They would think that it's houses on stilts. Then my family has a yeah, they have a Tarzan mentality of Kenya. They would think that it, there's no high rises there. There's no, you know, it's just this crazy assumption that like, I mean, you go to Africa, it's highly sophisticated, highly educated people. You know, some of the, some of the most brilliant people I've met have been in some of these countries and the world just doesn't understand it.

1:04:47 People have no idea what China's like. I visited their head office is there for years and, and it's a very sophisticated culture, you know, and it's partly simply because we have this niampic kind of way of looking at, at the world and, and it's, it's so limited and part of the reason why you can't sustain a conversation.

1:05:08 I I live in Asia, when I go back, my brothers and sisters can't sustain a 15 minute conversation with me about my experience because they have no context. It wasn't until my mom went to Bangladesh and she spent three weeks with with us. Then when when I when I go home. Now she can talk for 10 hours on that topic 'cause she opened up her mind to, to the world. And, and part of the reason why we have all of these biases and these misconceptions is people just don't understand that the world is a, is a wonderful, beautiful, amazing place. And we should get out there and see it and experience it. Experience the people and the animals and the climates and the, and the geography and everything else. And I find travelling is the

1:05:49 best way to to basically educate yourself about. This travel is the best form of education. Absolutely. You have to go out there to experience it. And every continent has its different vibe, right? Yeah. When you when you go on the land, you know, you feel it. But yes, people should travel more.

1:06:08 Actually, that's just what I was saying. Your new book, Awakening the Advocates just launched. So why did you choose the short story format to share your decades of insight? Well, part of it, it was I, I've done 600 LinkedIn articles and LinkedIn has 520 words. And so I compiled, you know, 110 of them that tried to made sense of it. So during COVID, I committed myself to doing an article a day on LinkedIn.

1:06:37 That's 520 words a day for 365 days. And so I did it on, on testimonials. I did it on, you know, situations that people experience. And part of what I did is I tried to explore my own journey from when I was a kid to identify how is it this shy, introverted kid from New England ended up doing this work globally on human trafficking.

1:07:00 So I had a mentor that said you only really remember about 150 or 200 events that happened in your life in a very milestone related way. I mean, what did you have for lunch yesterday or breakfast the day before? People don't remember those kind of things. Most days are just days, but they're, you know, there are certain specific events and activities that take place that you remember. And so I wanted to make sense of like when I was five years old and I had this experience.

1:07:30 How did that impact the experience was my parents took us to the beach and then when they were leaving, they forgot me or they thought I was with them. And then for like 10 minutes I was by myself on the beach crying and hysterical thinking that, you know, my parents left me. They just didn't account for the, you know, the 6th kid they have, you know, the, the balloons and all the other things that they are doing.

1:07:52 But that was an abandonment moment for me. And it was and it had an impact that lasted, you know, throughout my life. So those kinds of experiences, if you if you study them and you and you relate them and you think about them, you meditate on that and you and you try to make sense of what, what created that justice sense in me?

1:08:11 Having been bullied, you know, created a situation where I felt like there was a sense of justice. Having seen other people who were, you know, in injustice and so forth, was a catalyst for that type of thing. And so the book basically tries to make sense of what makes a person a service individual who wants to address justice.

1:08:32 What were these benchmarks that happened over time? That's why it's kind of called a memoir. Well, I, I'm going to take a quick look at my LinkedIn profile, but I think I have something on my profile relating to create an impact. OK, I wanted to be accurate storytelling for impact and influence.

1:08:55 That's the very last line on my LinkedIn bio, right? You have written 5th and of course you have been named one of the most influential LinkedIn voices in Hong Kong. So what has storytelling taught you about building public empathy? Well, I mean, I actually, I used to have a fear of public speaking.

1:09:17 And this goes all the way back to the third grade. There was an assignment that our teacher told us to write about Abraham Lincoln. And I woke up in the morning and I forgot to do it. So I went to the encyclopaedia and I copied it directly out of the encyclopaedia. Now I'm a third grader. I can't read from the encyclopaedia. So I handed my paper and thinking that like the teacher's going to give me an A because it's so sophisticated. But she gave me an F.

1:09:40 And so she came up in front of the class and said, Matt, stand up and read your your paragraph to the class. Did you write that with your own words? And I said, yes, I lied. Did you write that with your own words? Yes. She said, oh, go ahead and read it. And obviously I couldn't read it, you know, And so she embarrassed me. And so after that, for years and years, I had this phobia in the sphere of public speaking.

1:10:03 But with the work that I do, I have to do public speaking. And so finally, one day I just said, OK, I just need to get over this. So every time there was an opportunity for public speaking in one hand would go up, the other one's trying to pull it down. And I just did it over and over and over again.

1:10:18 But what I came to realise is that I went to so many conferences and I was so bored by the traditional presentations where you have 30 slides and there's a heading and seven bullets and 30, you know, another heading and another 10 or 15 bullets and so forth. That if you encapsulate three of those slides into one story, then people are going to remember that. So I started experimenting and trying and so forth. And so I eventually even wrote a book on it, a storytelling, the Art of inspirational Public speaking, because I felt like that's the direction that most of us should be going in now. You know, in this particular podcast, I told a number of stories.

1:10:56 And when I do a presentation, it's a continuous set of stories to convey something because it conveys it in a way that we as human beings can absorb it better. Because when you go home and you tell your partner like, you know, what did you do today? You're telling a story and they're listening to a story and they're talking back and forth.

1:11:16 And so that's how we as human beings communicate. Not a not a heading and seven bullets with just factual information being prevented presented. So we have to adjust the way that we both present and absorb information, and storytelling is the way to do it. Absolutely. And of course, you know, I, I very much align with your philosophy and that is why my LinkedIn by actually documents that it's it's it's just right here, you know, storytelling for word, for impact and influence.

1:11:47 If you want to impact people, if you want to influence people in life, I strongly believe storytelling is the the best way to do it, and I hope you agree with me as well. Absolutely, absolutely don't agree with you more. You know, what advice or what piece of advice would you give to somebody listening to us right now who wants to do something you know but doesn't know where to start from?

1:12:11 Well, I'm going to do it in a more fundamental way. So I look at life as being focusing on reaching our full impact. So when you're born, you have no impact at all. But the potential impact for each person is way up here. Most people through life, they get to a certain point, but then they stop and they don't get close to reaching their full impact.

1:12:32 They get distracted by, you know, family or school or education or jobs or whatever. And so they don't continue to grow. My recommendation to people is to be open to changing, experimenting, trying, failing, trying again in in seeing what life has to offer because so many people limit their life to this is what I think I like and this is what I want as opposed to trying other things.

1:12:58 That's why, you know, travelling is so relevant and important because the by virtue of being in a completely different city, you are experimenting different with different things. You're forced to relate your personality to the world that you're in and the circumstances you're in. So I mean, I just urge people to, you know, don't get to a point where you reflect back on your life and realise that you lived your life all wrong because you didn't do all the things that you wanted to do. If you have a dream of writing a book, write a book. If you have a dream of travelling, then go travel. If your dream of getting a particular job, get the job. But there's so many people are saying, well, I'll do it next week or next year, whatever.

1:13:35 By the time they blink, all of a sudden they're looking back and realising that they allowed so much of their life to go by. So live your life, you know, with vigour and with enthusiasm and with a sense of passion and a sense of desire and experiment and don't be afraid of like failing and, and, you know, messing up because that's where a lot of the learning takes place for all of us. Yeah, I love that.

1:14:01 I'm never afraid to feel, you know, if you feel it's just you learn in another way in which things do not work and feel and feel fast, successfully. People are people who have failed multiple times and absolutely found the way things work. Something I always say that anytime a person shares their time with you, they're sharing their life with you because the SI unit for measuring life is time. And of course, gratitude is good attitude from me to you, Matt Friedman today.

1:14:33 I'm really, really grateful to have you on the podcast to share your life and of course, your wealth of insights with us today. I strongly believe that this has been a highly, highly impactful podcast, but I am not going to let you go without putting you through the quick fire round. So I'll ask you 5 quick questions.

1:14:58 And of course, Ellis, it's quick answers as well. So number one is name 1 country that surprised you in its fight against human trafficking. China. Wow, I'm surprised as well. Number 2 is a personal Moto or mantra that keeps you going. Just do it. Just do it, Nike 3 The biggest threats to end in modern slavery in the next 10 years. Apathy and a lack of awareness.

1:15:29 Wow number 41 daily habitat helps you stay grounded as a leader. Motivation to succeed. And of course #5 the last but not the least, the legacy you hope the Mekong club will leave behind. Impact Helping people to get out of situations in a way that's measurable and tangible and real. Wow, thank you very much. So the final call to action for the audience is this slavery did not end, it only evolved.

1:16:02 So learn more and get involved at cww.themechunkclub.org. That's going to be in the description. So grab Matt Friedman's new book, Awakening the Advocate via Penguin Random House and of course, connect with Matt on LinkedIn or watch his talks on YouTube. The link is actually going to be shared as well.

1:16:24 So from me to you, Matt, it is love and respect to you. Do you have any final words for the audience? Do you want to leave a shout out to any one? And of course for me, to your sons, a shout out to them, shout out to you guys. Well, I'm going. To shout out to you, great job, great questions, great conversation. You know, you, you obviously understand how to communicate and you did a great job and I really appreciate the opportunity to be on your podcast. I'm very grateful.

1:16:55 I'm very grateful. Now, now you're making this my best ever. Thank you very much. Thank you very much. And of course, to our audience, please do the needful live share, subscribe, please share this. You know, it's very, very important that we get the word out there and always believe in yourselves. Always go for something, always try to achieve something. And of course, you know, conceive, believe and strive to thrive and achieve.

1:17:22 Guys, keep achieving. God bless you till I come your way next, keep striving.