Billion Dollar Investor to Rescuing Children from Trafficking!

Introduction

Paul Hutchinson [00:00:10]

I’m the founder of over 20 plus companies. The largest one is a 43 billion dollar real estate investment fund. We’re the number one performing real estate investment fund of our kind. For the first 10 years that I was running it, we’re the top emerging managers worldwide. So these principles that I’m teaching you now, although they were starting out small, I use these same principles when we built huge companies later. 

Matt Haycox [00:00:37]

The importance of learning how to sell. The importance of learning how to handle rejection and the importance of always consuming knowledge which it obviously is I guess the translation of what you meant by saying that let’s hope your car radio doesn’t work. I guess listening to audiobooks, consuming knowledge on the move, if you listen no further to this podcast and just take those three things away with you is the guaranteed route to success.

Paul Hutchinson [00:01:02]

It’ll change your life right there.

Matt Haycox [00:01:09]

Welcome to another episode of the Matt Haycock show and I’ve got a guest and a theme today that I’m very interested in and I know you guys are going to be as well because it’s actually something that we’ve never covered on here before. I mean I’ve had many many business owners. Probably most of my podcasts have been with business owners and talk about something entrepreneurial, which is what we’re also going to do with this guest but Paul Hutchison is also involved in child trafficking. Well not involved in child trafficking. Involved in rescue missions, rescuing children from child trafficking and he’s actually we’ve just been talking a little bit before we started recording this and he’s been undercover for the last 10 years. It’s only recent in the last few weeks that he’s actually even started talking publicly about this. So I’m super excited to hear the story, super excited to dig deep but we’re going to talk about that. we’re going to talk about his entrepreneurial background, we’re going to talk about how he mentors people, how he talks to royalty, billionaires, to audiences all around the world. I’m sure there’s plenty I’m going to learn and there’s plenty that you guys are definitely going to learn too. So Paul thanks a lot for being here.

Paul Hutchinson [00:02:06]

Awesome! Well thank you for having me on your show. Super grateful man. 

Matt Haycox [00:02:11]

I feel like I’ve already got to apologize for the introduction because it’s the first time I’ve introduced anyone as a child trafficker but obviously not what I meant but we’re going to go deep on that soon. And I know that probably comes later in your story but let’s just talk about how it all began. What’s the beginning of the journey for Paul? How does your entrepreneurial background start?

Paul Hutchinson [00:02:32]

Absolutely. Well I always wanted to be a business owner but my dad always told me I wasn’t qualified for it because I wasn’t very good at kissing butt. He and his company had to start at the bottom and work his way all the way up. And so I was encouraged to go into something else. And so I wanted to go into medicine. I wanted to be a doctor and I wanted to be a Pediatric Cardiologist, not a regular doctor but a surgeon, not a regular surgeon but a heart surgeon, not a regular heart surgeon but a one that operates on children and helps children and I got a lot of my college done. In college I  was about two months away from taking the MCAT and I got in a major car accident and I severed the tendons in my hand and they didn’t know if I’d have the ability the dexterity to be a surgeon and so they told me Paul, “You can you can be a regular doctor” and I said, I don’t want to be a regular, anything. If I’m going to be a garbage man, I’m going to own the dump. That’s just how I think. I got one life to live, I’m gonna live it and so I had a friend of the family who was pretty successful in business as an entrepreneur and gave me some tips. He said, Paul, you have a unique gift with people. He said, Why do you want to be a doctor anyway? ” I said, honestly though, I’ll go to school for 12 years so I can drive a Ferrari someday and he said, “you know, you got to sit down with the doctor and ask him about his lifestyle, a surgeon who’s where you want to be.” And I did. I actually took the surgeon that did the work on my hand. I took him to lunch and I asked him, “tell me about your lifestyle. And he said, Wow, he said, “I got a beautiful home, got nice cars, got a motorhome, part ownership and a plane. He said, I’ve got two teenage kids and I don’t even know what. He said. I work 100 hours a week to maintain the livestock for my wife and kids and I can’t retire because I’m tied to my people. And I realized. Wow! Even though he’s at that level, if you’re trading time for money for things, you do it forever. And so I went back to this Mentor guy and I said Matt, tell me his name was Matt too. Ironically Matt and I said, “tell me what are you thinking here and he said, Paul said, “If you do what I teach you to do, you’ll be a millionaire by the time you’re 30 and you’ll have the time to enjoy and for me the combination of time and money both was way more intriguing than just having a ferrari. Right? Having the ability to enjoy your life was super valuable and so I said, “okay, what do I do?” and he said, Paul, every good business owner knows how to handle rejection and knows how to sell it. He said, I suggest that you find the hardest rejection job you can possibly find and I’ll Mentor you from there. So I did. I found a job at a call center. Cold calling selling children’s videos, but I didn’t want to ever sell anything I didn’t believe in and I was already dedicated my life wanting to help children and in being a heart surgeon so this one they were selling videos that helped kids with stranger danger and honesty and some fun little videos that have helped parents teach kids these principles. So long story short, I’m not going to go into the details on this. we want to do that but. Well, actually I will be an entrepreneur and your program I think is super important. He told me a few things. He said Paul, when you’re there, you need to work to learn. Don’t work to earn. He said, if you’re there for a paycheck you’re wasting your time. If your goal is to be an entrepreneur and run your own company then while you’re here trading time for money you need to be educating yourself and learning. So he had me find the best guys that were there. There was an average guy making 20 sales a week. there’s two guys making 70. And he had me take them out to lunch on my diet and learn from them everything they’re doing and pretty soon I was making over 70 sales a week within weeks. He also said, Paul, “Your car should be a university on wheels, from now on, the rest of your life. I don’t even want you to know if your car radio works. now for your for your listeners just so you kind of know because I don’t know if we handled this in that but I’m the founder of over 20 plus companies, the largest one is a 43 billion dollar real estate investment fund and we’re the number one performing real estate investment fund of our kind for the first 10 years that I was running it. We’re the top emerging managers worldwide. So these principles that I’m teaching you now although they were starting out small, I use these same principles when we built huge companies later, if that makes sense.

Matt Haycox [00:07:13]

100 percent. And I’ll tell you. I mean, we’ve only been talking five minutes but you know if anyone switches off or gets cut off at this point. I think you know those three things. We just talked about the importance of learning, how to sell, the importance of learning how to handle rejection and the importance of always consuming knowledge, which it obviously is I guess the translation of what you meant by saying that, you know let’s hope your car radio doesn’t work. I guess listening to audiobooks, consuming knowledge on the move if you listen no further to this podcast and just taking those three things away with you. It is the guaranteed route to success.

Paul Hutchinson [00:07:48]

It’ll change your life right there. It was just funny, years later my kids told me they said, “Dad the only reason why you like 80s music is that’s the last you ever heard because I just consumed audio programs on business and leadership and success and all of these things that I could learn from other people. You know what’s interesting? I had a guide the other day and he told me he said oh Paul, I would love to meet like Tony Robbins. I’d love to have a one-on-one meeting with him and have a chat with him like you do. And I asked him this, “what do you think that he would teach you one-on-one that you’re not already learning in his books and his tapes and everything else?” A lot of these great mentor leaders you don’t have to know them personally for them to be a great mentor for you because they’re putting their great stuff that they can send out to the world in their books and takes and things like that. So that’s what I did. I consumed all that stuff. In fact years later, I ended up buying Lebron James’s Range Rover and this thing had like sixty thousand dollar subwoofers in the back of it and my kids are like, “Dad, what are you gonna do?  listen to all of your self-help audio programs on those sixty thousand dollars subwoofers? I said, the reason I could afford that car is because I was listening to that stuff and so they started soaking it in themselves as well. So yes, that transformed my life and those habits actually started when I was a teenager. I’m gonna back up just a little bit because these things I think are vitally important to the whole story, especially as an entrepreneur. When I was like 14-15 years old. I wasn’t that popular in school. I bucked teeth when I was younger and then I had braces and just having a hard time and so I went into my dad. and I said Dad, how can I make friends? How can I be successful? What is the key to success? and he gave me two gifts that completely changed my life, one of them was a book that he had since he was a teenager called “How to Win Friends and Influence People” by Dale Carnegie, classic. It was all tattered and stuff and old black book but I realized at that point in reading, that every person that I talk to is a thousand times more interested in them, than they are me and if I can use a drop of honey instead of a gallon or an understanding that interpersonal relationship skills and really talking and understanding people changed my life and then the second thing which was so powerful, was an audio program by Brian Tracy called “The psychology of achievement” and this was one of his first ones, the classic one, way back, what was this 40 years ago? 35 years ago and I listened to that program map so many times that I actually broke. I had those old audio cassette tapes I listened to it so many times and it broke and I had to take it back together and screw it up with a pencil to give it back in but that taught me that literally everything in my life, I could create through my actions through my words and even my thoughts were bringing about these things in into my life step by step that I  didn’t just have to pound it and pound it and do the work but the most important part was changing my mindset where I needed to look in the mirror and shave a millionaire before I became a millionaire. I needed to see myself as a man of integrity to bring that into my life. I needed to see myself as fit and healthy and that visualization started bringing those truths into my life and especially when it came to business success it would attract the right people, attract the right circumstances and to visualize this world of abundance. Somebody asked me earlier today, he is in another conversation. He said “Paulie, when you arrived, when you were able to buy this massive mansion, when you were able to buy these cars, how did it feel? What was that like? Totally out of I said you know what? It actually felt exactly like I imagined it would because your imagination sets the stage for your future, so those were all things that kind of formatted things in the beginning and I  built this company. My very first successful company was the Midwest Center for Stress and Anxiety. We had an audio program that helped people overcome anxiety and stress disorders. It was completely in line with my mission that I’m going to make a powerful positive impact in the lives of others at the same time that I’m creating value in the way of money coming back to us. So being able to put together a program where I could truly help people change the negative pattern of thought just like I did when I was 14, change those negative habit patterns of thought that we’re creating anxiety and depression in the first place. I sold that company for over 20 million dollars when I was 29 years old and that’s where we entered into being able to start building the fund so that’s it. 

Matt Hay [00:12:55]

Well let’s talk about that fund then because the numbers are obviously astronomical. I think  my notes had 40 billion but I think we spoke early. You said 40-43 billion assets under management under there. I think you like something like 2 000 employees. I mean, what was the concept? What was the genesis of the fund when it started? And how did you go about scaling a business to that size? 

Paul Hutchinson [00:13:14]

I started out with one park, me and a man named John Pennington in the beginning. We started a fund called Bridge Loan Capital. We were doing short-term hard money lending, asset-based lending and where it came about is that the company that bought my marketing company when I was 29, they had some they had some products that they were buying out of Asia and they were selling to Best Buy and other things like that and they needed some float. They needed a 30-day purchase order financing type of thing. So we started out doing hard money loans or purchase order financing for companies,  for example if you had a widget that you’ve invented and you were having it manufactured in Asia and you have to pay to manufacture a half a million dollars for the order but you have a fulfillment order from Best Buy that’s going to pay you a million dollars as soon as it arrives at Best Buy but you somehow need to float that 30 days and getting it over here. So that’s what we would do. John had done nine million dollars a year in import export and he knew how to make sure we didn’t lose a container full of widgets coming in from China and make sure we got paid for it. So that’s where we started and then we transitioned over into real estate about a year later. So in the beginning, we were doing bridge loans. So that’s where the bridge name came of the company. When we first started John and I were in this little teeny office and we built it up to 10 million dollars under management in this office that was so small. We would hit elbows when we turned around or if we stood up together on our chairs. That’s how small it was and we were paying like 300 a month for this little office.

Matt Haycox [00:15:05]

Where were you raising the capital from?

Paul Hutchinson [00:15:06]

High net worth investors and I was clueless at the time. I had come from a marketing background and I told John, well let’s  just put a billboard out and whatever and he said, “No, this is a private offering memorandum and we can only bring in high net worth investors” and I remember writing on a piece of paper, where do I find high net worth investors? and I started writing things on there. Okay, whether they hang out at the high end really expensive gym. Are they front row seats at the NBA teams, where are they? And one of the things I wrote on there was charity work and I realized that a lot of these ultra wealthy guys and their family were now involved in trying to really make a difference. So I served on a bunch of different boards of directors of different charities for two purposes, number one, I believe that choosing to give back even when you don’t have the money will energetically create more coming in. In fact my mentor back in my early 20s he said, “Paul if you make a decision today that you’re going to give 20 of your money and 20 of your time to making a significant impact in the lives of others, he said the rewards coming back will not only be happiness rewards, they’ll be financial rewards as well. You can call it the universe, you can call it God, you can call it karma, you can call it whatever you want to. I believe there’s a higher power very interested in us doing good and making a difference in the world and because of that I’ve seen massive success come in my businesses, by being involved in charity and I met a lot of the high net worth guys in that charity world as well. So back to me and John, we’re in this little teeny office and John tells the story all the time. They say, “John, how did you guys get so big from where you were?” And he’ll say Paul had the vision right from the beginning. We’d be sitting in this little office and I’d be making phone calls trying to raise like we needed 25 000 more for a project that we were trying to fund by Friday and John would say, “you know Paul? be in there making calls making calls making calls and about halfway through the calls I, Paul would hang up the phone and he’d turn around and it put his little pinky right here on his lip and he’d say John we’re gonna be a billion dollar funds to make and John said, I just said Paul we need 25 000 by Friday right he couldn’t see that but then we would sit down and talk and he would say Paul listen, you know that neither you or I have the education or the pedigree to run a multi-billion dollar investment fund and I said yes John but if we build it right from the beginning and if we build it with integrity and this is what I loved about John is that he built everything with Integrity. He crossed every key dotted every eye and I said we build it with integrity and we have the vision of what we want to create. We will attract the right people that will allow us to build this company and that’s exactly what happened. is that as we built this company with the right foundation we didn’t cut any corners or anything. We spent a lot of our own money making sure all the paperwork was right, with the Securities Exchange Commission and everything else. So that it was done right from the beginning and sure enough we were able to attract rock stars like unbelievably decorated pedigree type people that came on as our partners because they saw what me and John were putting together in the vision of where it was going 

Matt Heycox [00:18:38]

And tell me, as the fund developed  up to the billion plus, to the 40 billion it is now, Has the mandate of the fund changed? I mean, is it still bridge lending? 

Paul Hutchinson [00:18:50]

No, I mean, here’s what happened, back in 2006 John and I,  we had gotten it to the point where we had loans out on about a hundred million dollars worth of property and we hired a guy named Don Hartman. Don’s resume was the most impressive piece of paper that I’d ever seen. He had run the financial institutions division for Citigroup in Asia. He raised 14 billion dollars to bail out the Asian debt prices in the late 90s. This guy was qualified. He joked and said yeah, Paul found me walking around Salt Lake City with an unemployed sign “I’ll work for Equity”. I mean this guy was overqualified for everything in Utah and we brought him on to help us have the look and feel necessary to go after the bigger institutional investors because I didn’t know how to get there. I knew that with the audited financials of the returns that we had, I knew we could go to Morgan Stanley and have him write a 300 million dollar check but I didn’t know how to get there and so we brought Don on to help us not only have the pedigree with him there but to help us have the look and feel as a company to get to that point and then Don comes into my office we’re still doing these bridge loans. He comes to my office, it’s December of 2006 and this was a year and a half before  the 2008 crash and he came into my office and he said Paul, we’re in trouble, I said, like we? like the fund? the company? He goes, no we, like the whole country. He said, probably the whole world and he had all these third order polynomial equations that were way over my head and he said I’ve been looking at the numbers. He said, “I think we’re looking at a multi-trillion dollar problem and if you don’t change, you’re going to be upside down with everybody in this space. He said, but if we position ourselves right, we’ll be able to take advantage of the greatest buying opportunity in real estate that we’re going to see in our lifetime. And he said, here’s what’s important Paul, you’re really good at talking to people, you’re really good at raising money. He said you’re really good, you and John have put together something you’re really good at running a fund and doing all the paperwork. He said, you don’t know crap about real estate. He said, because all you’re doing is just the lending and evaluation in a crash, like this lenders will be owners. So I suggest we augment the team and bring on some people who are true real estate adults, who understand how to manage it and then in real estate, he said, there’s a lot of different asset classes and some of them do great in the good times and horrible in the bad times, other ones do pretty good in the good times and still pretty good in the bad times. And I said, “okay, what are we talking about here? And he said, I suggest we start with b-class multi-family apartment complexes that are a dollar a square foot per month type of a thing, things that the average worker is going to be able to afford and not the high-end stuff. He says, because when the crash happens, the crash will hit that really hard, not land and things farmer type stuff that’ll take a while to develop that Etc. He said, but everybody needs a place to live and b-class multi-family will do really really well. And so we started looking around to find some team members that we were Bridge Loan Capital. We found a group called Bridge Property Management. They had a 20-year track record in managing apartment complexes with a 20 per year return and so we brought them on as partners.  We combined together and created Bridge Loan Capital Bridge Property Management. We created Bridge Investment Group, they had never run a fund before but they knew how to manage property really well. Because Don saw the writing on the wall before the crash happened, we got in the right position at the right time, we got rid of any of our lending, any assets that we’re going to really cause us problems and we’ve gotten a strong cash position and we became one of the first funds in the country to be qualified on a top level purchasing platform with all the gse’s Freddie Fanny, HUD, FDIC so when a bank was ready to fail we would get a call and we were able to go in and buy these things at Pennies on the dollar and we created a win-win-win even for the bank because at this point the bank president’s willing to negotiate He realizes 30 days from now the FDIC takes him over he’s out of a job and his shareholders have a big fat zero or we go in and we can buy a 100 million dollar portfolio for 30 million dollars and he gets the liquidity he needs we’re able to take this apartment complex that wasn’t being managed well by the bank and create added value and create a win not only for the bank but now for the tenants as well because we know how to manage those apartments and create that extra value and sell them. We ended up with a 40 plus percent irr return in 2019 2010-2011 where the rest of the market was crashing and lost 30 and 50 percent. So listening to somebody like Don, bringing on the right team, being in the right place at the right time allowed us to create a powerfully strong foundation to catapult us to where they are today.

Matt Haycox [0023:51]

And what do you do with those properties over the long term? Do you keep them for the long term? Hold the long-term yields? Or once the price is right, you flip them?

Paul Hutchinson[0023:59]

Yeah, we’re a fix and flip on a big scale. So we would find properties that needed some love in some way. They needed to have what I call a story either they had a messed up management team or messed up marketing strategy or they have value-add improvements on the property themselves and so we would buy these ones that were mismatched and we would put in our management skills and then we would do things like we would make sure that what we were doing was not only right for our investors but it was right for the tenants as well. For example a lot of our apartment complexes were in areas that were heavily Latin American Hispanics that were coming in these areas and a lot of these apartment complexes were the b-class ones that were built, 20 plus years. Before they have tennis courts and stuff but they have four foot weeds growing in the tennis courts and our tenants didn’t play tennis right? Hispanic people are there, they like soccer, right? So we took down the Nets and we put little soccer fields in we create little soccer leagues, we bring in English as a second language and the bookmobile and a tutoring program and taco Tuesday and all these beautiful things that blended with the culture of our primary people that were living there created a good safe place to live. We didn’t put gold towel rods in a b-class neighborhood, right? But we’re going to make sure that we have a workstation place there for people to bring their kids to with tutoring and things like that. So bringing that kind of value as well as making sure that the pools were taken care of and they have the soccer leagues in place that kind of value allowed is to take the properties up to a 97 success rate or 90 occupancy rate and hold it that long enough where then we could sell it off to a read or something that could just go ahead and clip the coupon and and make a return for them but we’re getting a massive return. We averaged at 23.2 net per year return for our investors over a 15-year period. That’s fantastic. So this is all because of listening and finding the right people not being intimidated to bring on power players on our team and listening to them when they saw the writing on the wall and then we could take. They say that you make money when there’s blood in the streets , that’s true but I don’t like to make money from the blood on the streets. I like to make money from creating first aid kits to help people that are having a challenge when that happens.

Matt Haycox [00:@6:32]

No, of course and tell me,  I mean obviously running billion dollar businesses is something that 99% of the world only ever gets to read about. What would you say are any of the material differences that you’ve noticed in running something of that scale or is it  just when you go from a million to ten, ten to 100, 100 to a billion, billion to 40 billion. Are there massive shifts in  methods of operation or is it just doing the same thing at scale but being more organized?

Paul Hutchinson [00:26:58]

Yes, the key is you’ve got to have systems for everything. Systems for everything. So that you can duplicate it on a mass scale. So we created those systems when we were small to make sure that they would work perfectly when they’re bigger. In fact a lot of us as founders, you know, John and I, we kind of did everything in the beginning. In fact, a funny story, Right before I retired. I retired in 2017 and just to focus full-time on charity work but right before I retired and now I’m still a founder. I’m still an owner I’m the GP of the funds Etc. but I got way smarter people than me that are running the show but right before I retired, We had actually 4 000 employees back then, we’ve scaled down the employees and outsourced some of the things since that time but so the time I retired we had about 4 000 employees, we had 70 plus employees that were in accounting alone. One of them was Andrew. He was new there and didn’t know the history of the company and he comes in his job that day was to have the partner sign up on our expense reports and so he comes in and on my expense report, I’ve got trips to Dubai and I’ve got front row seats at NBA games and nice restaurants with wealthy people and he asked me,  I’m signing off on it and he said, Paul he said Nancy Paul he said Mr. Hutchinson he said do you mind me asking how did you get your job and I realized he didn’t know the history of the company and I said well what do you mean he goes well you you have you have the best job in the whole company all you do is fly around and go to lunch with rich people because I was you know I was Capital markets at the time and so I decided to mess with him a little bit and I said well Andrew I used to do what you do. He goes, ”really you were an accounting? I said,  yeah I had that which I was and when it was just me and John right I said yeah I had it I had a spreadsheet, the Excel spreadsheet that I was keeping track of the net asset valuations of all of the investors and the fund and all of this stuff and it was like 70 megabyte spreadsheet. And  Adam worked for our accounting for their auditor now. Adam is now his boss. So Adam came in and did all of our audits and he said, “Paul, he said all of your numbers are right but there’s a hell of a lot easier ways of doing it than what you’re doing.” So I got replaced by Adam. So basically, I hired Adam to take my place. And then I said,  “I did what Jonathan does.” he goes, “really you were underwriting assets? “Yeah, I have this huge stack of papers which I was going through all of these assets and trying to figure out what the values were Etc. and every night I went home with a headache and so I got replaced by Jonathan and so I said, the only thing I was any good at was going to Rich with going to lunch with rich people so that’s where they put me and so then he’s like well holy crap he said, so how many people were here when you started? I said just me and John so the principle I’m teaching there is as an entrepreneur learn every part of your business but don’t be afraid of hiring somebody who’s way better than you at each one of those areas as you grow.

Matt Haycox [00:30:04]

Perfect. Well listen I want to go on to talk about work, charity work, child trafficking and your involvement in that but just before we just want to kind of wrap up the entrepreneurial side with it with a question that someone asked in Facebook here actually. which says, I’ll read it out, it says you can only get a loan if you have equity. So what’s your advice for me on my business because I have no equity but my business venture is six years of knowledge. I’ve produced nine journals but I’ve written 52. What’s your advice on how I can develop all 52. I mean, I guess the summary of the question is how do you go and find equity investors? How do you raise capital for a small business?

Paul Hutchinson: [00:30:44]

Absolutely! And here’s the answer, there’s different types of equity. There’s physical value equity which we did when we were doing the bridge loans and stuff. We had to say okay, if you’ve got a property that’s worth five million dollars, I’ll loan you three million dollars on it so I have a good loan value type of the thing but somebody like this gentleman he’s got equity in his assets his knowledge, his experience Etc. So those cut types of lenders are not going to be your traditional letters, they’re not going to be the banks, they’re going to be more private lenders or guys who are willing to come in with some sort of inequity stake. So you know, if he’s got some great ideas, if he’s got a track record that is equity, there’s value in his experience, there’s value in what he’s created so far and so somebody who understands that value, somebody who’s maybe has some money that has been in the same industry as him would be a great person to go to.  who could say, “hey I believe in you, I’m going to lend you money on this.” or “I’ll take a piece of your company as we’re building it Etc.” So yeah, those are less traditional but there’s equity there for somebody who understands the value of your company. 

Matt Haycox [00:32:08]

No, I’m loving this chat. I’ve got to say, obviously you and I never got a chance to speak too much before we started but there’s so many similarities in us, in our story, in our business. My core business is what you guys in America call hard money lending, you know. So I mean, I spend my days having lunch with rich people to raise capital so that I can deploy it on the unsecured debt in the UK. So many of your principles or either other things that I operate or believe in or try to operate and believe in myself. So I’m certainly getting some good value here and I know the guys who get to watch and listen to this will be also soaping great having you here so far. Listen, let’s take a dramatic Swift then from building billion dollar funds and talking about your work in rescue missions for child trafficking and I mean, how did that came about? and I mean how do you even get involved in that space?

Paul Hutchinson [00:

Yeah, this is  super unique. It’s not something that the average person  would even want to be involved with but as we touched on earlier I made a commitment in my early 20s that I would donate a significant amount of my money and my time to making a difference in the lives of others into charity and so  I served on a number of different charity boards. I was on the  Make-A-Wish board of directors for seven years. I was the incoming chairman for Make-A-Wish here in Utah. When I got a call from a friend of mine who’s now the Attorney General in Utah his name is Sean. Sean introduced me to a man who was part of homeland security working in child trafficking and we had a guy’s movie night and he showed up there and I was like, “oh, we got this movie and I don’t want to be listening to this guy and him trying to raise money for his his charity whatever” but we gave him the chance to speak and it changed my life Matt. This guy started talking about the fastest growing criminal enterprise in the world, which I mean this is a dark subject and I’m not going to go deep into the start subject but I am going to say this, there’s more today and I’m not talking about just children being abused at home I’m talking about sold human beings. There’s more today than all 300 years of the transatlantic slave trade put together. So he talks about how he found some children in Cartagena Colombia and was putting together this Rescue Mission. He thought there was 20 of them down there. He then calls me a couple weeks later and he said Paul, he said and we had helped to raise some money to help rescue these 20 children and these children are being sold for horrible things. They were kidnapped and abducted children and whatnot.

Matt Haycox [00:34:37]

I mean, I was just going to ask, I know it’s probably a naive question but it’s not really my area of specialism. I mean, what happens to these kids when they’re trafficked, I mean, are they being trafficked for the sex trade or to be made into illegal workers or to something else?

Paul Hutchinson[ 0034:53]

Yeah, all the ones that we’re doing are being sold for organ harvesting and sex trafficking. The 8 million children that are being sold for those type of things is what we focus on. There is eight million now. There’s a way bigger number if you’re talking about labor children. They are underage, there were labor trafficking Etc. but I’m talking about sold human beings that are being sold specifically for sex trafficking and organ harvesting. So this is why nobody talks about it, it’s a dark subject. So I get this call and he said, “Paul I’m here in Cartagena Colombia there’s not just 20 children here, there’s more than 50 that are part of this ring. He said and there’s more than a hundred children in the surrounding in other cities down here that we believe are tied to the same trafficking organizations. he said we have a plan that we could Rescue all 100 plus children at the same time on the same day and get them back to their families he said this will be the largest child rescue operation in one day in history. Now the story that I’m telling you right here is coming out in a movie later this year. We’ve already filmed it. The name of the movie is called “The sound of freedom” and the actor who plays the homeland security agent is Jim Caviezel. Jim played Jesus and Passion of the Christ and Count of Monte Cristo. The actor who plays me is named Eduardo Verrasti. Eduardo is one of the more famous actors in Mexico and because we filmed it while I was still doing a lot of undercover work, he doesn’t play Paul Hutchinson. He plays Pablo Delgado, the billion dollar fund manager who quits his job to go rescue kids. 

Matt Haycox [00:36:34]

The Hispanic Paul Hutchison. 

Paul Hutchinson [00:36:36]

Exactly and so the story I’m telling you is the storyline of that. It starts out with Tim the homeland security agent who’s starting out in anti-trafficking work that ends up coming into starting a foundation and that’s the one who called me while I was in the U.S and he was in Colombia and he said, “We have a plan that we could rescue all 100 children at the same time but I need your help in a big way.” And I’m like, “What do you need? Do you need any money? Should I write you a check? He said, “No bigger than that, if you can be in Colombia in two days, you can be part of this massive operation.” And I said, “well, why me? What do you need from me? He said, “Well, he said, “The head trafficker down here has a piece of property that he wants to develop into a child brothel sex resort, just like Jeffrey Epstein has. It’s actually an island that he wants to develop. He believes he can make tens of millions of dollars a year bringing horrible people down here to do horrible things but he needs eight million dollars to develop. He said, ” I can’t teach my Navy Seals how to negotiate this deal with him.” He said, “If you can be here in two days and play that role then I believe that.” I said, “Well, what do you want me to do? He said, “Well, you let him know that you’re willing to fund his eight million dollar project under one condition, in two weeks we’re gonna have a party and you’re going to bring down a bunch of your buddies and if he calls all of his friends all of his connections that are traffickers and have him bring all their children to the same place, on the same day, we’ll perform the sting at that time and we’ll rescue all those children.” He said, tell him that the only way you’re going to fund his project is if he performs and shows you that he can provide that many kids. So he knew more about my background than most people. I have a special set of skills from previous training Etc. but more importantly he needed my ability to negotiate a real estate deal. So two days later I’m in Colombia. I’m face to face with the most evil people I’ve ever encountered, selling 8- 10 year old children. There’s four people sitting across this table from us, there’s three guys, one female, she was Miss Cartagena. She had this fake modeling agency, she was going to towns in South America and telling the parents, “oh your daughter’s too pretty to be working in the field, she should be a model.” and the parents would bring them to their photo shoots and boom. they would disappear. So all of this is in the movie and it follows the story of some of these children that were brought in. So I’m sitting there at this table we negotiate this deal and they were so excited that we were willing to take a look at it, that over the next two weeks he called all these other traffickers and sure enough he was able to get them to bring all of they abducted and kidnapped children that they had to the same place. We did three separate scenes on the same day, one in Cartagena in which they brought 54 children, almost every one of them was under the age of 16 years old. More than half of them were kidnapped, many from other countries and the other ones were in Medellin and Armenia, Colombia, all simultaneous things we call it operation triple tape. These guys show up with all of these children and we put the children in a separate part of the house because they were already traumatized enough, we didn’t want them seeing the guns and the money changing hands Etc. And we’re sitting down at this table and Fuego, one of the traffickers. He stands up and he goes, “Pablo, he said, I want to show you the gifts that I brought you and Matt, this changed my whole life. There he went in the house, he was in there for about 10 minutes and you could hear two of the children crying, they were so scared of coming out and meeting us. In fact there’s a CBS article that goes through this and you can see my face is blurred out and whatever, they were so scared of meeting us. And 10 minutes later he comes out and he has four virgins scared to death, three little girls, one little boy, this little boy was 11 years old. They gave him cocaine that morning because he was so scared. What kind of effed up monster thinks that that’s attractive?” Every cell in my body wanted to just hug these kids so you’re gonna be fine, you’re and see your parents again. I couldn’t say that I’m standing in front of this little girl. She’s 11 years old, standing up. She wasn’t much taller than I was sitting down and there were tear stains on her makeup face. And every cell in my body say you’re gonna be fine, you’re gonna see your parents again. And she was standing there and I took her little hands and I asked her, I said, What’s your name? and she didn’t know her name, I’m sure that’s because her real name wasn’t princess. That’s what the traffic is calling her, she was so scared and I just said, Esta bien.  It’s okay. She went back in the house and the most beautiful moment of my life, after that point, was after the agents came and stormed the party and arrested everybody. 30 Child Protective Services people came in with the children and they started laughing and singing with the children just to calm them down and that laughing and singing that Sound of Freedom was the most beautiful sound that I ever heard. I started crying that’s why we named the movie The Sound of freedom and they weren’t supposed to tell the kids that we were the good guys but somebody must have said something because that little girl that was standing in front of me with the tear stains in her makeup face, she was standing there by the window. Her hand was on the window. She was crying again but she was smiling and waving at us and she said in broken English she said thank you Americans. I just broke down and I turned it to Sean who’s now the AG and I said, That changed my whole life. I said, I spent my whole life making rich people richer. I want to make a difference. You tell me what I need to do, I’ll write a big check,  I was going to buy a Lamborghini, I was gonna buy an aventador that year and I said “you know what? I’m gonna write the check, I wanna figure out how to make a difference.” and he said, “Paul, here’s how you can make a difference, ” he said, “Unfortunately the majority of demand for this horrible act in second and third world countries comes from wealthy men in first world countries who look and dress and talk like you.” He said, “I can’t teach my Navy Seals how to wear a four thousand dollar suit in a fifty thousand dollar watch and negotiate a multi-million dollar deal. He said, “I don’t know of any ultra successful business owners who’ve had the training that you’ve had.” He said, “If you’re willing to be the bait, it’ll change your whole life.” So that was 10 years ago and I’ve Led or been involved with over 70 undercover rescue missions in the last 10 years. 

Matt Haycox [00:43:04]

These missions always in third world countries? Or if you actually had done them in first world countries?

Paul Hutchinson [00:43:11]

We’ve done them all over. I’ve led rescue missions in 15 countries but the majority of the problems are in places like Southeast Asia, Latin America but we’ve done rescues in Africa and India and a lot of other places. 

Matt Haycox [00:43:28]

The kids always get back to their parents at the end as well? As in like, I mean, Do you even know who their parents are? Do they know?

Paul Hutchinson [00:43:37]

If their parents reported them abducted then it’s easy to find them and it’s easy to get them back. If they didn’t, sometimes the parents were involved. You know, in Southeast Asia more than half the children that we rescued in places like Thailand, more than half of those children were sold by their own families and if that happens, we don’t want to get them back to the same family and have them be sold again. So we find them healthy homes, we’ve got thousands of families, there’s families all over the world that are willing to sacrifice the next 10 to 50 years of their life with a challenged child. They maybe don’t have the money to be able to make it happen so we help raise money. We’ve had some other foundations that we have funded that specifically focus on the legal work to get those children into healthy homes. 

Matt Haycox [00:44:30]

Well, tell me about the Child Liberation Foundation and  is that something you founded recently or was that with that at the beginning of this journey two years ago?

Paul Hutchison [00:44:38]

Yeah. so we were with some other foundations in the beginning. About five years ago we wanted to make sure that we knew where every penny was going that we knew that every penny was going to the rescue rehabilitation or reuniting of children with their families a lot of foundations out there are well-meaning but a lot of them have have high overhead and they’re using the money to promote their own logo or different people’s ego Etc. and so we funded a lot of different groups and I have a lot of love for the organization that brought me on in the beginning but the Child Liberation Foundation, we started about five years ago, its mission is eradicating child trafficking and we have funded lots of other organizations and given them money to help go undercover and rescue for kids and we’ve done a whole bunch of that as well but the transition that’s happened recently and this is the reason why we’re even talking publicly. I’ve come to a realization that just going undercover and rescuing 20 children at a time is never going to fix the problem. This problem 10 years ago when I started is worse today than when we started and I’ve led 70 missions and the other foundations have led hundreds and hundreds of missions and there’s still a challenge out there and it’s still growing and the reason behind it, you cannot fix a problem by just pulling the kids out, you have to fix the demand.

Matt Haycox [0046:13]

But I mean, I was going to say, how do you do that? because I mean, we talk in general about when you just go and do something for someone you know if you haven’t educated them you know then it’s just going to repeat Etc. But, how do you remove the demand for something like that because you’re not talking about a lack of education, you’re talking about absolute psychopaths and horrendous people? 

Paul Hutchinson [00:46:39]

Absolutely. Here’s the challenge Matt. I believed for a long time that the people who were going down and doing these horrible things, I thought that it was tied to pornography addiction, where when you go from taking a woman from a divine feminine to an object you start going down a dark road and for a lot of them that dark road they start wanting, they’re addicted and they want something harder to have that same fix and for some of them harder is a little bit younger, and pretty, soon they’re fantasizing about something they wouldn’t have even thought was attractive five years ago and then they’re acting out on these horrific fantasies. That’s where I thought all the demand was coming from but  I’ve come to an understanding recently as I’ve really looked at some numbers and looked at the people that are involved, I’ve come to an understanding that yes eight million children is an unfathomable number but it’s small compared to what the real problem is and here’s the real problem, one out of every five men here in the U.S and likely even more overseas, one out of ever five-twenty percent of all men have experienced sexual violence against them. Sometime in their life and one-fourth of them experienced it under the age of 10 years old. That is 200 million men who’ve experienced that type of violence before the age of 10 years old and they’re growing up with this trauma that is deep buried inside of them. And some of them, they grow up with big egos and big money and they’re thinking deep inside, “I was raped as an eight-year-old. It’s not going to hurt if I raped somebody else, right? It’s this really F*uck up version of what sexuality is. Now, that number is double when it comes to women. 40 percent of all women have experienced sexual violence and one-fourth of all women a billion women on this planet, it happened as a child. So we’ve got generational trauma and if we can figure out how to help people heal, not just I mean, everybody can get all excited. yeah let’s go in and rescue these kids. I’ll tell you this right now, Matt, if you put me in a room and you said Paul, you’ve got a hundred pedophiles and you’ve got a hundred traffickers and you’ve got one hour and you can either have a gun with no retribution for an hour or you can have a microphone, I would take the microphone and that would be the most transformational 60 minutes of their life. I would take them into the pit of hell. I would show them the depravity of the direction that they’re going and what they have done. I would pull them out and I would at least point them in the direction and teach them how they can let go of all that and get to a point where they can live a healthy life. Now, I’m still going to lock them up because they need to spend some time to make sure they can never hurt another child again period. But I believe that there’s a pathway to healing. And on that note I can do the same thing. You put 2 000 men just average off the streets, me realizing that 20 percent of them in that room have experienced that type of trauma and the other ones third party have experienced it in some way in dealing with maybe a parent or a grandpa or an uncle or whatever else and there’s this trauma everywhere and teaching people how to heal and how to tie into this beautiful light that is inside of each one of us and learn to listen in a way that it can guide us in our life so that we’re not going down these dark roads. That’s the answer. I’ve come to an understanding that my role is not just rescuing a 10 year old from the clutches of a trafficker in Ecuador. My role is helping to rescue the 10 year old inside of every man and woman who has dealt with some degree of trauma in their life and help heal that trauma before they become contact offenders. If you understand where I’m going with that, I believe that a huge number of the people who are doing these atrocities have trauma themselves. So if I can help them heal that trauma before they cause that trauma on others, we’re going to save millions of children, not just 20 at a time.

Mat Haycox [00:51:07]

We just had a comment on here says, I’ve raised 17K for charities when I was working three jobs and building my business. The reason is because I was fostered five times moved homes 32 times abused for seven years and I’m open about this but I see a lot of solutions to a lot of abuse situations because I was in it. It’s one reason that I’m building the business the way I am. My abuser was a sadistic barbaric pedo. He was abused by his uncle and brought that to my life and that’s where one tuff peach came from.

Paul Hutchinson [00:51:42]

Exactly. So his trauma, I’m so grateful that there are people like this, instead of doing what was done to him which was a pass on of trauma. So what came to him was a chain reaction. Somebody else had trauma and what’s exciting about that guy is that generational trauma is stopping with him . Instead of allowing it to destroy him and putting him into a place where he could destroy others lives he instead decided to take that trauma and build a successful company raise money for charities. That’s the type of people who are going to change the world. Is the guys who stop that trauma and one generation. I love it.

Matt Haycox [00:52:26]

So tell me because, I mean, undoubtedly people who are listening to this or watch this, you know,  when we produce it off the live version over the next few weeks, they’re going to be both have their minds opened and want to get involved because I guess we’ve all heard of child trafficking, of human trafficking but probably I certainly never had any concept of the scale of it. And like you say there’s the published scale and there’s a true scale. How can people get involved? What can they do? Whether that’s something to do with your foundation or just in general. How can people make a difference in this? 

Paul Hutchinson [00:53:02]

Well, here’s what’s exciting. The guy that just texted in, that’s what everybody can do, you know, you don’t have to get involved with my foundation. If you want to you can go to liberateachild.org or liberatechildren.org or just look for Child Liberation Foundation and you’ll find us. There’s some great resources and stuff there or do what he’s doing,  you know, help out with foster homes and because he’s been through something or raised money for different types of charities that are in your area that are making a difference. They can get some more information on what I’m doing moving forward. I’m writing some books that will be out later this year that I really believe are going to make a powerful impact in the lives of everybody that is fighting this and you can follow me on on PaulHutchinsonOfficial.com, you can go to Instagram or Facebook or LinkedIn to just look up Paul Hutchinson official. I’m gonna get something shorter because Paul Hutchinson’s initials are kind of long. I’m thinking of something like, I don’t know, Soul Healer 007 and something like that. I don’t know. I would love to and if anybody has connections with great people like you Matt that have podcasts that have platforms. I’m willing to do podcasts every day and share from my heart and help people see the light in and understand what’s going on in the world and get involved with whatever charity. I’ll tell you this, it doesn’t have to be this charity, find something that you’re passionate about. I don’t care if it’s saving the trees or saving the whales or saving the kids, whatever it is. Find something that you’re passionate about that you can make a difference in. And not just write a check but get physically involved in making a powerful positive impact in the world and the blessings that will come to you as you build your business will be tenfold and I have so many examples of making that decision, to write the big checks, to help out people who really needed help and boom, these beautiful things would happen. I found that if I worked really hard at my financial goals I had decent results because I worked my ass off but if I worked really hard and tried to have a powerful positive impact on the lives of others I had enormous results in my business goals and they very seldom that those results come from my own efforts. They always came from you know, call it karma, call it what you want to, beautiful things will happen in your journey to success as you prioritize your time and your money to make a difference in the lives of other people.

Matt Haycox [00:55:41]

Paul it’s been an absolute pleasure talking to you buddy and you know, it’s certainly been an eye-opener for me. An interesting warm-up talking about business and  a very eye-opening and I guess a saddening but inspiring at the same time, conversation about the people trafficking. So like you say, I will do what I can to introduce you to some other people where you can share your story and share your message because it’s been absolutely fascinating and you know, I’m sure there’s so much that people can do as you said. I mean, people can get you on the official page, was it Paul Hutchinson Official?

Paul Hutchinson [00:56:13]

PaulHutchinsonOfficial.com or on Facebook or LinkedIn. I’d be sharing a lot of different links to podcasts and things that we’re doing or get involved with liberateachild.org or liberatechildren.org and you can see us there.

Matt Haycox [0056:31]

And we’ll put in all the show notes on this as well, I know some of you guys are watching this not live now. Listening to it live for everyone who hears the after version, all the information will be in the show notes and we’ll put some good links through to Paul and his organizations and backstory and everything as well. So thanks a lot. Thanks a lot for listening if you’ve been listening or watching live thank you very very much. We don’t get to do these lives too much anymore but thanks Paul for braving the chance to make any mistakes in public. And  when you guys get to hear this over the next couple of weeks I’m sure  you’ll love it too. So thanks a lot as always I’ve been the Matt Haycocks that’s t-h-e m-a-t-t h-a-y-c-o-x on all things social. You can watch this on YouTube. You can hear it on the audio versions on iTunes, on Spotify where listen to your podcast and if you’ve been listening to the audio versions jump on over to YouTube and you can see my pretty face too. Until the next time. Thank you very much for watching.