About the Podcast
Join us in this compelling episode of Unshackled as we delve into the extraordinary journey of Paul Hutchison, a beacon of hope in the fight against human trafficking. With unwavering conviction and a heart ablaze with compassion, Paul recounts the founding of the Child Liberation Foundation, a relentless crusade to rescue children from the clutches of modern-day slavery.
Through gripping narratives of rescue missions and tales of triumph over adversity, Paul unveils the harrowing realities of the human trafficking underworld and the resilient spirit of those liberated. From the power of faith and unwavering belief in oneself to the vital role of trauma healing, Paul shares invaluable insights that transcend boundaries of belief and background.
Tune in to Unshackled and embark on a transformative journey of hope, courage, and unwavering determination to save lives, one child at a time.
Transcript
Josh York [00:00:01]
Come to fuel your drive I’m your host, Josh York and guys I got a great guest today. I’m super super excited. This is actually the first guest that I’ve had in a while. I’ve been doing a lot because I’m always listening to you guys what you like and I know you’ve been liking a lot of the one on the one just not the one-on-one interviews but more hearing from me and talking on different topics of Entrepreneurship and success and so on and so forth but today I got a great interview and a great guest and I just want to kind of start off by reading down the list here. Successful entrepreneur in over 20 companies, he’s received just the list goes on of awards and degrees for his work but something that I’m really into you know, we need to stop and I’m really behind is you know ending human trafficking and I’m gonna let him talk about that a little bit but he’s also an executive producer in a movie. The Paul Hutchinson award has been given to 100 doctors in Mexico for their work in helping women and children, he’s LED over 43 undercover missions in 15 countries to take down child trafficking which is unbelievable and I’m getting more excited to have this conversation but serves as a mentor to tons of entrepreneurs and honestly before we even started getting into this conversation we just started talking about entrepreneurship because that’s what I love and he loves it and I believe everything happens for a reason, I believe the universe brings many people together for many reasons throughout life and that’s what’s going to lead us into today’s episode. So guys please give a round of applause and welcome to Paul Hutchinson. Paul, thank you so much for coming on fuel your drive.
Paul Hutchinson [00:00:32]
Thank you Josh, appreciate your time and letting me share with your audience here. Super excited to share with them my path to success in business and my passion for making a difference and how those things are truly intertwined in a way that fuels each other in a beautiful way.
Josh York [00:01:56]
Absolutely! So let’s just get right into it, maybe let’s start this little background on yourself and how you kind of started in business and how you’ve achieved your success and kind of the transition to what you’re doing now.
Paul Hutchinson [00:02:05]
Absolutely! Since I was a little kid my dad was a business owner and I wanted to be a business owner like my dad and he said, “Paul you’re you’re not going to be a good business.” I said, “why?” He said, “because you’re not any good at kissing butt.” And you know in his business he started at the bottom and worked his way up and he knew that I had a little bit of a problem with authorities but what we never talked about was being an entrepreneur back then. So I went to school to be a doctor. I wanted to be a Pediatric Cardiologist, a heart surgeon on children and fast forward today, I believe that’s kind of energetically, my role is helping the children, rescuing, creating platforms to heal the trauma that a 40-50 year old person might have had when they were abused as a child as well and so that healing, the hearts of children even if they’re in a 30 year old man or a woman is something I’m doing today. From an entrepreneurial standpoint, I changed my major to business and finance, about two months before I was taking the MCAT in in my medical career because I had gotten a major car accident and I severed the tendons in my hand, they didn’t know if I’d have the dexterity to be a surgeon and they said, Paul, you can be a regular doctor if you want to be. And I said I don’t want to be a regular or anything and I actually said, if I’m gonna be a garbage man, I’m gonna own the dump. That’s ironic, they actually owned a dump for a while but my mindset was, I’ve got One Life to Live, I’m gonna live it, I’m going to do it the best that I can and I’m going to create, I’m going to build, I’m going to create value for other people in ways that are really going to make a powerful positive impact in the lives of others and so my first company that I built that was fairly successful was called the Midwest Center for Stress and Anxiety. I own the marketing division, marketing company called Midwest Center Marketing and what’s important about this is I made a decision that any company that I built would have a very impactful difference in the lives of other people. It wasn’t just going to be something where I made some money from whatever widget that was wasting their time and wasn’t creating real value. I felt like, if I could really give back, when it came to adding value to people’s lives then the money would just come and that’s really what people need to understand about money is that it’s energetic. If somebody wants to make a million dollars, figure out how to create a million dollars with the value in the lives of others, if you want to make a billion dollars, create billion or even two billion dollars worth of value in the lives of other people and money is just a tool of exchange of value for value but the real catalyst Josh, that I feel made all the difference for me, was a decision that I made in my early 20s, that I would give up to 20 or more of my time and as big of a number 20 plus of my money to charity, to making a difference and I had a mentor that said if you make that decision today, it’ll make all of your financial things will be so much much easier and I was earning like two grand a month at the time you know, 20 of that, that hurts. Yeah, I have to live on sixteen hundred a month. Well making that decision while I was broke, I believe was the catalyst for the success and everything else. In fact, I can point to hundreds of examples of the growth of my businesses that were tied to big sacrifices in charity and I served on a bunch of different boards of directors. I was serving on a lot of different charities. I decided to focus my energy on children just because that’s kind of my passion when I was younger, was helping kids and so I served on the Make-A-Wish Board of Directors for seven years and I donated time for the Ronald McDonald House and one life at a time and a bunch of different charities relating to children and every single time that I did that, I would find beautiful things, you can call it God, you can call it karma, you can call it the universe, call it whatever you want to, there’s an energetic connection that we have with the entire world around us and that a higher power that’s very interested in us doing good and making a positive impact in the world and countless times and we’ll go through a bunch of different stories, countless times where beautiful amazing blessings as you would call them, would come in to my financial world that were tied to decisions I made in making difference. For example, we’re going to get into some of the child rescue work but at one point there’s a big TV radio, right-wing talk show host Glenn Beck and Glenn wanted to launch his anti-child trafficking campaign from Bangkok Thailand and it was going to cost. I mean the child trafficking problem in Thailand is horrific. There’s approximately 800 000 children and the sad thing about that Josh is that almost half the children that we rescue there in Southeast Asia were sold by their own families, which is super sad and they have five kids and so we can’t put them back in a family where they’re going to be sold again. We have to find super healthy places for them to grow and that’s what we can talk about later but back on this thing with Glenn, it was going to cost a hundred thousand dollars to send Glenn and his team and take this all to Thailand to do this filming of the kids and everything, the rescue is theirs and I knew that he had a big huge audience with amazing people that wanted to make a difference but we at the time, I was working with another foundation that we’ll talk about later and they had you know, at the time ten thousand grandmas that were donating it a dollar a month you know, this was sacred money. We didn’t want to use that money and just blow a hundred thousand dollars to get Glenn and his team there and so I decided that I would help make that happen. Myself and my business partner, Don wrote the check and we flew to Thailand and got a whole bunch of footage and rocked their world. While we were there, there was a guy that works with Glenn, Jason, Buddrell I think his last name is. He had done a lot of hardcore undercover journalism in Pakistan and places like that and he was talking to me and Tammy said, “I really want to see this stuff firsthand, I want to see some children being sold not just video on the orphanages and stuff like that and we say, Glenn that’s really dangerous you know, you can’t just go out into two in the morning and talk with traffickers. He goes, “Oh no no not me.” he said, send my guy, send Jason in with you and so we went out that night. I took Jason and I had done some pre-work that day and brought Jason in and these traffickers brought this little nine-year-old girl. She must have been 45-50 pounds if that tiny and they had drugged her. This was horrific Josh, and Jason said later, I’ve seen the atrocities of war. I have seen the worst parts of humanity. So I thought but when I was there and I saw this little girl being offered up he said, I could not believe how dark humanity has gotten, to think that that’s okay in any way and it rocked his world and he wrote this big article and they put it out of the background of the charity thing. We flew back to the U.S and as we landed, I realized I had just written a hundred thousand dollar check between me and Don to make this trip happen. As we landed in the US, I had two voicemail messages pop up on my phone, one of them was from a large investor that said, Hey Paul, I’ve been looking at your senior housing investor fund, I want to put another 10 million dollars with you and the other was from a bigger institution that said with even a bigger number and my income from those two voicemail messages multiples exceeded the six figures that I just put into the charity work and it happens every single time and so that’s I tell people. I said, I’m not that I’m not that charitable, I just need help running my companies and you know there’s a higher power that does a better job than me and so I’ve had this beautiful experience to be able to get directly involved in helping the kids but at the same time seeing amazing progress in the companies.
Josh York [00:11:48]
It’s incredible, it’s incredible you know, hearing some of these stories with the kids. Like it makes my stomach turn. It actually like, really bothers me, gets me sick like, I don’t know, like how are you able to deal with that. like, I don’t like, I don’t, I’m very mentally tough, I don’t know if I’d be able to handle that. like I would probably lose something.
like you know. I don’t even like want to ask these questions because it’s making me sick but it’s like, we need to bring awareness to it. It’s very important but like how does something like that go down and like maybe you could talk a little bit about, like a mission or you know without getting too crazy in detail because I don’t want to really upset people.
Paul Hutchinson [00:12:25]
You bet, you bet. Here’s the thing
Josh York [00:12:31]
You Paul, you have children?
Paul Hutchinson [00:12:34]
Yes I do, I’ve got three boys and I’ve got a daughter. They’re all grown now but yes, I let me give you this one example because I think this is pretty powerful so about seven, six seven years ago and probably seven eight years ago, I was dating a girl at the time and I had gone down undercover and I had identified a bunch of the traffickers that were there and we had the sting coming up. I go deep cover, I go in at two in the morning and identify the worst part of humanity, that’s selling these children and make friends with them and set up a sting. There are all kinds of different ways that we do it and I came back home because the sting was in about two weeks and my girlfriend at the time, she we’re sitting, talking at her kitchen table and she said Paul, she said, I’m really worried about you, I don’t want you to go back down, she said, I really don’t want you to go. I want you to be safe and you know, I’ve got these young kids and you’ve got your kids from previous marriage. She said, I just don’t want you to go and at the time she had two little boys and they were playing with a girl that was in the neighborhood, they were just kind of playing over in the living room and I remember, I think her name was Jessica or something and hold on, I said hey Jessica, I said, come in here for a minute and she came in and I said, “How old are you?” She said, “I’m 10, I’m almost 11.” I said, that’s great. I said, “What do you do for fun?” And she said, “Well, I like to dance, I like to sing and I like to play and ride my bike.” And I said, what do you want to do when you grow up? And she said, “Maybe be a dancer or maybe be a nurse.” And I turned back to my girlfriend at the time I said, okay go ahead and sit you know, she had beautiful dreams for a beautiful little 10-11 year old girl right and I turned back to my girlfriend and I said, the girls that those traffickers showed me yesterday were her age and if I don’t go back they could be sold to somebody and can you imagine the life they’re gonna live, they deserve to have dreams like her, they deserve to want to be a nurse and so I realized if I have a certain set of skills that make me safe, somewhat safe in that kind of a position and they could use those skills in ways to even if I just found one child, just one, it would be worth it. In fact, the very first mission that I ever did where I got a phone call from a guy you and I both know named Tim. He was Homeland Security for a long time and he had found 20 children in Cartagena Colombia and I helped to with some other guys, help to fund about fifty thousand dollars to pull these kids out of hell and he called me and he said, Paul, he said, I’m here in Cartagena and there’s more than those 20 children there’s more like 50 here and there’s more than a hundred children in the surrounding areas that are tied to the same ring. He said, this is my very first mission and he said, I believe we can rescue all of these children on the same day at the same time. And he said, but I need your help and if you’re willing. And I said, “well, how much do you need?” And he said, “I need you, can you be in Colombia in two days?” He knew more about my background than most people but most important he needed somebody who had a strong understanding in real estate, he had a trafficker down there, the head trafficker had this island that he invite, he had inherited from his mom and he wanted to develop it into a child brothel sex resource something like Jeffrey Epstein was doing right, he needed eight million dollars to build it out, he felt like he could make tens of millions of dollars a year from horrible people that were coming down there for these horrible things and Tim’s idea was, Paul if you come down and you tell him that you’re willing to fund his project under one condition, he calls all the other traffickers that are in the area that he’s connected with and get them to bring all their children to the same place at the same time for a part of that you’re going to have with you and your buddies then you’re in two weeks you’re going to come down with a bunch of your friends and have this party with these kids and he said, we believe he’ll make those calls and we’ll be able to make that sting and rescue these kids and I hang up the phone and my business partner, about a half an hour later, he had heard from my other partner that was there he calls me up and he goes, “Paul, I just heard what you’re thinking of doing.” He said, “If you thought through this, he said, this is really dangerous, he said, you’re set, you could sell out today and buy an island and be happy for the rest of your life.” and I said “John, would I really be happy if I bought an island, if I bought a yacht, if I bought a jet, if I had another plane, would I really be happy?” I said, if I was doing something else dangerous tomorrow, if I was climbing Everest you and I would have the same conversation. He goes, “yeah, we would.” and I said, “when I’m 85 years old and I look back in my life and say, I climbed this mountain, I helped build this multi-billion dollar company and it helped rescue many children. Which of them matters?” So he’s like, “Yeah you’re right, he’s gonna go. And so I went down there and the movie The Sound of Freedom that’ll be coming out later this year, Jim Caviezel plays the part of the homeland security agent, he’s yeah and have Tim and the actor who plays me is Eduardo Verasigi. He’s one of the more famous actors in Mexico and at the time we filmed it I didn’t need the world to know who I was, I was still doing undercover work and so he doesn’t play Paul Hutchinson, he plays Pablo Delgado, the billion dollar fund manager that quits his job because we’ll help rescue kids and this story of this rescue and all of that stuff are all put into that movie and it follows the story of some of these children and getting them back to their families and the rehabilitation is such a beautiful light at the end of the tunnel.
Josh York [00:19:53]
Wow man! you know, do you think you’d be able to do what you’re doing if you didn’t achieve all the success you achieved?
Paul Hutchinson [00:20:03]
No. Two reasons, number one, on that very first rescue, it ended up being the largest child rescue in history that I know of up to today.
Josh York [00:20:18]
You rescued all those kids?
Paul Hutchinson [00:20:19]
Yeah. 127 children, 127 children in three separate cities.
Josh York [00:20:24]
Jesus. Well let me, before we even get into the question, I just asked, how did that even go down? Was there any problems with it like, people try to kill people? Like what was that like?
Paul Hutchinson [00:20:37]
No no here’s what happened. I’ll just back up, I’ll tell you the details of it so you can kind of see how it works. So when Tim called me and said “Paul, can you be down here in two days?” I flew down to Cartagena, Colombia. I get picked up at the airport by these two Navy Seals. I mean they’re badass and they’re my real bodyguards and my show bodyguards and these guys that told these traffickers look this big player is coming down and you know, he owns this, he’s a big real estate investor or whatever and he can negotiate whatever he needs and so I come in, I’ve got a four thousand dollar suit on, I’ve got a 50 000 watch and I’m living large on purpose right, I’m going in because this is the kind of death cards that are going down and doing this stuff right, they’re ultra successful guys and so I go in. Tim said, have a big ego just come in with a big ego. I don’t have a problem doing that sometimes right. So I fly in and these guys picked me up and they got us full armored bulletproof car and stuff and these guys are sitting at this restaurant, this overlook over the beach and we pull in this armored car and these guys get out and they look around and stuff and “they’re making a show out of it” right and they open up after they make sure everything the whole coast is clear, they open up my door and I get out and these guys are like, they’re pissing them, they’re like, oh crap, this is the guy right. So then they come in upstairs and we’ve got a Homeland Security agent there, the FBI equivalent in Columbia I think they’re like CSI, I can’t remember what they called but anyway, Matt was undercover for 14 years with I think the FBI or anyway all of these guys were there already with these guys right and they had undercover cameras that were there, they were inside of these backpacks and stuff so they could gather you know whatever Intel they needed and I come in and I sit down with these guys and there’s four traffickers, there’s three males and one female. This female was used to be like I don’t know if she has missed Cartagena, she was a beauty queen and because of that had some credibility but she was going around to towns in South America and telling the parents how your daughter’s too pretty to be working in the field, she should be a model and they would bring these kids to a photo shoot or whatever else and boom they’d be gone and this whole story I’m telling you is actually in the movie, The Sound of Freedom the one coming out. So this whole thing is there we actually took eight different rescue missions and put them all together in that one and some rolls of some different operators, we put them all in there as part of what Jim was doing et cetera. So we’re sitting at this table and some of them don’t speak very good English, so a lot of the stuff that I’m telling you was actually translated because my Spanish sucks. And we’re sitting there and one of the traffickers leans forward and he says Pablo he was so excited I was willing to look at his project. He goes, Pablo, he says, “I have a gift for you.” I said, really? What’s your gift?” And he leans forward and he gives me his phone, it shows me his phone and on it there’s a picture of an 11 year old girl. He says, this is Princess, she’s still a virgin, we just took delivery of some and she’s my gift for your party and start talking about these horrible things I could do to this little girl and I thought come on hell, if we could get these children out before they’re ever hurt the first time, that’s a miracle and something he said made me realize he had more than her I said, “you have more virgins?” “oh yeah I got three or four more.” “You have to bring those to the party too.” He goes, “Oh no.” they’re too expensive.” “Too expensive? I’m already paying 25 000 you know for that party, “according to them” So we’re paying 25 000 for this party and he goes, “Yeah, they’re too expensive.” He says, you already paid 25 000. He says, “you want some more virgins, this can cost you maybe two thousand that and five thousand for that little one more, it’ll cost you like ten thousand more.” “I was so pissed, he’s talking about these children like their commodities right, and I’ve got this nice suit on and I’m like, “you don’t think I can afford an extra ten thousand dollars?” He’s like, “Oh no.” I said, “I want every one of those virgins at my party, they better be virgins.” When they get there and the Navy SEAL that was standing behind me, his name was Dutch, he was standing behind me he had to excuse himself and go walk around the restaurant and stuff because later when we were debriefing he said, “I almost upholstered my gun and shot him right there.” He says, “that little girl looked just like my daughter at home.” and so I would go into the details of what happened next because it’s kind of dark with them talking about these kids but then two weeks later we go back down and the team meets with the Colombian federal agents and the U.S embassy and the Colombian federal agents provided 40 agents, four of them were are maids, four of them are waiters, four of them are cooks you know, they’re not very good cooks, I thought they were going to blow the cover of everybody because they brought out this cheese plate with nothing to cut it with and no cheese on it. I mean, it wasn’t sliced up or anything and so it was sort of like, okay, don’t blow the cover yet. So then, there were actually three separate cities that were being done at the same time because we knew they were all connected. So they actually brought 54 children to Cartagena and the other ones were in Medellin and Armenia. There was kind of an operation triple take is what we called it and so I was there in the Cartagena one and these guys showed up and to make sure that everything was safe. When these guys show up to the boats, we had a bunch of our foremost Special Forces guys or Green Berets, Navy Seals who met them that were there as supposedly my security right and so they’re telling them, listen no guns, no knives, no problem, we’re going to meet a bunch of fun and consists a big party right, so they take all the weapons even check the girls purses, make sure there’s no weapons on them and put them on the boat and then they bring actually multiple boats come out and they land and all these children get off and this guy named Fuego, he was standing there, one of the traffickers, he was standing there and he was saying to one of the other operators, he said, you see that little 10 year old you know, she was talking these horrible things and as this other operator came over to me because he of course knew what was all going down. he I can’t say the word on here but he said, Fuego is aft. You know because we knew what was going to happen in half an hour but these kids were all there and we put the kids in a separate place inside the house because we don’t want them to see the guns and the money changing hands and everything else and they’re in there and we’re sitting out on this table area outside negotiate. So I’m there in the center of the table, these guys are all standing and we’re supposed to get all of the information on camera so the children never have to stay on trial. So this is a dark conversation, where we’re asking them, so what is this one willing to do? Why are they here? What system are you willing to do? We’re capturing it all so that can be turned in as evidence against these guys and a few and like 10-15 minutes into it one of the guys stands up and he goes Pablo, he said, I have to show you the gifts that I brought you and he goes in the house where the children were and he was in there for about 10 minutes and we could hear some of the children crying and he came back out and he has four virgins scared to death, three little girls, one little boy, this little boy was 11 years old, they had taken him from Haiti I believe. This Fuego guy had given him cocaine that morning because he was so scared it was gonna hurt, what kind of effed up monster thinks that that’s attractive. I was so glad it was us there and not some monster and I’m sitting there in this chair and this little girl standing up, wasn’t any taller than I was as I was sitting down and there was tear stains on her makeup face, this was the same little girl he showed me in the picture that he called Princess and every cell in my body wanted to hug her and say you’re gonna be fine, you’re gonna see your parents again just wait just a few minutes. She was looking at me with this fear in her eyes and I thought, “oh that’s not, I’m not that guy and I took a little hand and she was shaking and I said, “¿Cómo se llama? What’s your name?” She didn’t remember her name. I’m sure it’s because her real name wasn’t princess right and I said, “that’s okay.” This was the hardest moment for me to see that and they went back in the house and I told the traffickers sit back in the house, let’s finish negotiating here and then we’re supposed to order tequila when we’re all done with that, we get everything all there, we’re supposed to say okay, let’s start, time for the party, order tequila, that was the sign for our waiters to go in and radio and 25 special operatives are supposed to come and come storm the whole party and arrest us all right, so we ordered tequila and two minutes later was supposed to hit, two minutes passes, five minutes passes, 10 minutes 15-20-25-45 minutes later when they actually showed up. What had happened? We found out later, is that one of the lady, who was the head of the Child Protective Services actually slept through her alarm that morning and missed the boat coming in and so she was so high powered that she said, do not do this thing until I’m there and we didn’t know this at the time and we’re like, five minutes after you ordered tequila, the guys are like okay, it’s time for the party to start, I’ll go get the cocaine, you can get the girls, we’re like go get the girls right now we gotta finish something and so at this point it was a true miracle that I was there as a successful business owner because here’s what happened I said, you know what before you go get if you go get the girls in the cocaine. I’m gonna be effed up for the next few days. I’m gonna be super happy but you know, I’m gonna be effed up. So you’ve already proven to me that you could provide what you said you could provide, so why don’t we do this, somebody get me a piece of paper, get a piece of paper and a pen, I want to draw out a business plan right now, right now let’s do that, let’s negotiate this deal because you proved to me that you could do it. So they bring out this piece of paper and I start writing down asking questions, okay let’s draw this resort that you want to do, what’s it going to look like? Okay and how many children are you gonna bring in? And how many do you have right now? And what other connections? And I’m putting all this together and then it starts getting dark because I asked him how much it costs them to bring in because I needed to create a real business plan. I’m trying to delay delay delay. I’m telling you Josh this business plan pencil, that’s what’s scary, it cash flowed like no business you can imagine because of the amount of money is. I was like, this is the reason for this problem, is the fact that this cash flows so well and you know, they were writing down things like, Okay, how much does it cost for a little girl from Colombia? What does it cost for a little girl from America? You know, what does it cost for a virgin? And I won’t go as dark but this business plan was dark and then I’m like, these guys still haven’t got here yet, what’s going on? I have to delay it some more. So I said okay, let’s now do a business plan for the modeling agency that you guys have, right because that’s going to bring in a lot of fresh ones and so I negotiated that and that’s still nothing, so then I said, guys okay I love it, I love where we’re going here, I never invest in anything unless I’m in control, I’m taking 55 you guys have got 45 to work with and there’s these all these traffickers that are there and you know I pointed at one of them and I said, you’ve done the most work I think you should probably get you know 25 and the rest of these guys can split the other 20, you know what, why don’t you guys work that and look at the strap your start, just arguing with each other it was beautiful, they were arguing and they try to negotiate. no I get this percentage whatever else and we let them argue, until the agent showed up. Boom. They come in, they arrest all of us, throw us out on the ground, I get handcuffed all of us are hand tripped on the ground and then they take the traffickers off on one of the boats before they take us off and then as they’re leading us off before we were leading us up, we were laying there, I’m laying there getting handcuffed and that 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 sound of freedom was the most beautiful sound that I ever heard. I started crying, especially compared to the crime we heard half an hour before. I started crying and I turned to Sean and I said, holy crap! I said, I changed my life. I said, I spent my whole life making rich people richer. I want to make a difference, what can I do? What do you want and he said, Paul, unfortunately, the majority of demand for this horrible act in second and third world countries comes from wealthy business owners and high-powered people in political things Etc in First World countries. He said, I can’t teach the Navy Seals how to wear a four thousand dollar suit, a fifty thousand dollar watch, and negotiate a multi-million dollar deal. He said, “I don’t know of an ultra successful business owner who has the skills that you have. If you’re willing to be the bait, I’ll change your whole life.” So I’ve LED missions in 15 countries and I have been completely code silent for the last 10 years, I haven’t had a social media that talked about it at all. In less than two weeks, just over two weeks ago, I did my first public podcast talking about business success and tying it in with the charity work and sharing these stories because I’m done doing the undercover work. I believe that there are better people than me that can do that work number one. Number two, I come with credibility because of the companies that I’ve built and the missions that I’ve LED and I’ve been in the deepest darkest depravity of human nature and seeing that firsthand. One of my mentors from history is a guy by the name of William Wilberforce. William lived in the 1700s and before his time it was fully legal worldwide to sell another human being and he thought you know, what I need to figure out how to make a difference here and he was a wealthy, well-spoken, connected businessman who had seen children in chains and he said okay, what can I do? I need to show this to the world and so what he did is, he would have dinner, big dinner events on his yacht or his ship whatever, it was in the 1700s and in the middle of that dinner he would have the captain of the ship take it and then park it next to the slave shifts and the sound of the screaming and the smell of the blood and everything it would shake up his dinner party of all these wealthy politicians, wealthy business owners and politicians and ultra connectors and then he would have the ship pull away and he would say, now I have your attention, now let’s talk about what needs to happen to change this. I believe that because of the fact that I’m a wealthy well-spoken businessman who has seen children in that condition that I can then take that and say okay, what do we need to do to help people heal? How to fix this problem? And I realized Josh, that one child being sold is unacceptable, eight million is beyond comprehension but even that is a teeny tiny number compared to the real problem that the source of where the tsunami of demand is coming from for a while I thought that the demand was coming from a pornography addiction, that people just get super hardcore addicted and they go down this dark road and they want something harder and harder and pretty soon they’re looking at something they wouldn’t have even thought was attractive five years ago. I thought that was part of the demand until I really started digging into it and I realized that if you’re in a room here in the U.S and you’ve got five men in that room, one out of every five of them, 20% of all men in the US and probably higher around the world have experienced sexual violence towards themselves sometime in their life and so that’s approximately 800 million men had that kind and one-fourth of them 200 million of them was under the age of 10 years old. Okay so these guys have had this childhood trauma, this isn’t just going down to Colombia, this is childhood trauma that’s growing up with and I thought, if I can create programs and if I can teach people how to let go of that trauma, how to cleanse themselves to the point where they can step forward into a place where they don’t have this screwed up version of sexuality in their mind because what happens is they grow up and here’s the crazy thing, the average age of somebody who comes forth and stand or either remembers or verbally says, yes I was abused as a child, the average age is 52 years old, that’s my age. They’ve lived most of their adult life holding this trauma and that the number of women is double. 40% of all women in the US have experienced that kind of trauma and one-fourth of them were when they were children. So I realized that just going undercover and rescuing 20 children at a time was never going to fix the problem. I’ll find other organizations that are doing that through the child Liberation Foundation but I realized that my purpose is not just to pull a 10 year old out of the clutches of a trafficker in Honduras or Ecuador, my job is to help rescue the 10 year old inside of a 30 or 40 year old man or woman who has dealt with that kind of trauma and helped them heal before they become contact offenders themselves. If we can heal generational trauma, we will save Millions, tens of millions of children from that kind of trauma, not just a thousand a hundred at a time, 20 at a time Etc. So that’s kind of what’s brought me full circle to this point where now for the first time ever I’m going public with these stories so that people can number one see that, yes there’s a problem but also understand that we as a society can fix this problem by helping people heal that generational trauma that’s causing the problem in the first place.
Josh York [00:40:37]
Wow! Well look. you know that was the main reason why I wanted you on the show. I’ve never done a show like this ever before and I obviously raise extreme awareness about it and I just want to thank you. I feel like I owe you something because it’s just really special what you’ve done man you know, I’m not saying this in a negative manner and I’m sure you’ll agree but like remove all the accolades and all the success you had like, that story right there and what you’ve done is the most impressive thing ever, like the amount of, not just the resilient of the resiliency of your mindset and no fear and like you had to be scared right, like you had to be right, where you were. Did you have some anxiety during that whole time?
Paul Hutchinson [00:41:26]
I did. I’ll tell you a story to kind of wrap that in that I think is super important. So I was asked to come to Haiti with Glenn Beck and some others in which he wanted to film some of the children that were rescued in the orphanages that were there and I took my son with me and this was kind of a difficult time in my life, I had just gotten a divorce from his mom, my wife and you know. He at this time was 22 years old, he was trying to figure out if I was still a good guy or not you know and so I took him, we put him on a Gulfstream jet, we fly down to Texas, we pick up Glenn Beck and we go to Haiti and he’s there, as we’re going through all of these orphanages and seeing some of the children and the rehabilitation places that were there Etc. It was about 10 o’clock at night on a Saturday night, we were flying back home at six a.m the next morning and Tim, the homeland security agent who was working with that foundation at the time, comes to me and he said, Paul, I’ve had teams out on the ground for the last five days,they haven’t found any real leads with traffickers, you’re one of the best I’ve worked with, can you go out with them and I knew that it meant I’d get no sleep that night, I had my son stay in the hotel and I went out that night and connected with the top trafficking organizations in the country that ended up later over Super Bowl Sunday with the largest child rescue that had done in Haiti with 34 children but I’ll tell you how I did in a second because this is important on the fear thing. So the next morning we get on the plane and Tim had just gotten briefed by some of the Green Berets, Navy Seals that were out with us and he shakes his head and he says to my son and Glenn, this was kind of my crowning moment at the time. He said, you know, in 14 years working with Homeland Security, CIA, working with FBI agents. He said, one of the best undercover operators I’ve seen is Paul Hutchinson and Glenn turned to me and he said, why is that? You haven’t had any government training. What is it that you do differently? And I told him this, I said, I’ll tell you exactly what happened last night. We were about two in the morning, we hadn’t found any real connections to any traffickers and I told some of the guys that were with me I said, can I take the lead? Are you good with that? He said, yeah yeah we’re good you know, Tim says you’re good at this. I said, okay you need to follow exactly what I say. I said first things first, I need you to understand that I believe in God, some people call him the universe or Allah or whatever I said, there’s a higher power that cares more about these kids than you and I ever could and knows exactly where they are. So I told them a story and this was super powerful. In fact this lines into everything. I said, most people think that faith is going to church and asking God to fix things in their life that they don’t believe are going to be fixed, that’s not faith. Faith is an actual power that all of us have the ability, it’s manifestation, it’s visualization, it’s being able to patrol and harness the powers of the universe to come together and create in your life, it’s not just the Law of Attraction, in reality is the law of creation, it is something where when you really understand that your actions create, your words create and even your thoughts create, then you’ll start to harness them. The problem is that most people have a hard time with unwavering conviction about anything, should I marry this new woman, should I go to this new job, should I move to this new country and it’s because they’re confused as to what their God wants or whatever. It’s easy for me and this is where I was able to get this training, it’s easy for me to have unwavering conviction that I’m gonna find these kids because I don’t care if God’s a man or a woman or a mountain or a sky or whatever, there’s not a higher power anywhere with this okay with a child being raped period. And so it’s easy for me to say, okay I’m gonna have unwavering conviction that we’re gonna find them and then I told him the story about how in my early 20s I met a man whose name was Jerry Prine. He unfortunately died in 2010 but he only read on the third grade level, his dad was an alcoholic, his mom was in a mental institution, all these challenges he was a life of crime as an adult, he read on a third grade level if that yet he was the inventor of over 300 different life-saving medical devices and the original software that voice recognition was that IBM used voice recognition to build off Etc and I went to lunch with him and he said to me something that changed my life. He said, Paul, you could have an IQ of 200 if you wanted and I said, no I’m really not that smart. I worked my butt off for my grades. He goes, no. He said, the difference between me and you is that I listen better than you. And I said, you listen better than me? He said, no I listen better than you and he touched his heart. He said, most people discount their intuitions because they doubt themselves, they don’t know where they came from, they don’t understand that every single one of us are connected to each other Heart to Heart to Heart to the world around us, to the universe around us and when we understand that and we start listening and following it, it will guide you and so you know, I told these Navy Seals this story and they’re like, okay dude whatever. I said okay, just drive, just drive and they’re driving us, okay stop, right there, that motorcycle gang you know, the guy? Yeah right there, well what are we gonna do? Well this is a super dangerous area they said, well we need to survey the area first, we don’t have time for that, so we got out, there’s this guy in this motorcycle and he had his gun, he pulled his shirt up, there was a gun that was sitting there in his pants and I’m just listening and I said, I pulled out a hundred dollar bill and I just handed it to him, he was, what’s that for? I said, that’s for you to keep. I said, I got another one for you if you can help me or something. Now I knew I could feel that he had a connection. I knew it absolutely as sure as I’m sitting here. I knew it and I said, I got a guy coming you know in a few weeks, pretty rich friend interested in some horrible things. I didn’t say horrible things, I said, he’s interested in 10 year olds. And he goes, I know somebody who can get that. I knew he did right. Now here’s the thing: fear and faith cannot exist in the same person at the same time on the same subject, the reason behind it is that in a way they’re the same power. People that believe bad things will happen to them attract that into their life, people that believe good things actually attract that into their life and so because of that, when I’m in that situation, I feel safer there than I do sitting in my own house here at home because I know that there’s a reason behind it and when you have that complete unconditional love and unwavering conviction or faith then miracles happen in your life. Miracles happen in finding these children in protecting the team and in building the companies. Everything is tied to this and you know this isn’t a religious conversation in any way. I think that unfortunately a lot of religions get in the way of people tapping into this beautiful tool that they have inside of them to be able to create and expand in ways that they never dreamed possible. So there’s kind of the rest of the story on why going in those places, we feel and plus we’re super protective. I’ve got freaking Green Berets, Navy Seals some guys that really know their stuff and I have some training myself that makes me safe in those places but most importantly, my goal is to just listen and be guided but fast forward like, we talked about before just going in undercover rescuing these and you mentioned in the intro that there was 43, we actually counted, if you count every single independent time that I went in and before they actually came through for a full Rescue Mission whatever else, each one of those ends up being over 70. Over the last 10 years and in the darkest places of the world but I can go into that Darkness, I can come out and just like William Wilberforce. I can say I have been to the pit of Hell, let’s talk about this, let’s talk about healing, let’s talk about out essential, let’s talk about raising the vibration, let’s talk about what it’s going to take to fix this problem worldwide and that’s what my first book coming out is going to be called “Are you listening?” and it’s going to talk about each one of those Rescue Stories and how using those things was able to help find the kids but how you can use it in your life to help direct you into a happier marriage or a more successful company or whatever it is to help you direct those tools and understand that it’s not just the the receiving end it’s the expanding as well and those tools that we can use to help heal trauma, to help guide us in a place where we live in this world of fake news on the left and fake news on the right, we live in a world where we don’t know, do we trust our doctors? Or do we not? Do we trust our politicians? Do we not? Everybody’s sick, they’re sick and tired of being lied to and they don’t know how to differentiate truth that, I mean even the media can produce a video that is a total fake. So how do we trust our eyes, on our ears, we have to learn how to trust something else.
Josh York [00:52:06]
Powerful man. that’s really powerful. So before we finish up, well you know my question before we got into, we kind of sidetracked and got into this was like, does it affect you? As far as what you’ve seen and what you’ve heard and I’m sure what you’ve probably witnessed like, are you able to block that out? What is that like?
Paul Hutchinson [00:52:25]
It’s heavy and I’m going to touch on something that I haven’t touched on yet but I think it’s important. Trauma healing of the victims, and Trauma healing now of you know, a lot of The Operators I’ve gone with, they’ve got PTSD from being in the service and you know, we’ve seen eight-year-olds in Chains in horrible positions right and how can you wash that and get to a point where you can just clean and this is a problem not only for me having dealt with that and seen that myself. We’re talking about billions of people who have had trauma themselves right, first hand as children, this trauma. So how do we help people release that trauma? How do we help them get into a clean beautiful place where they can move forward? There’s a lot of tools, unfortunately some of the most amazing tools were thrown under the bus in the late 60s. Okay there are certain herbs that can be used to heal the body, there are other holistic tools and herbs that can help heal the mind and help let go of trauma. Now unfortunately in the U.S they were classified as schedule one in the late 60s. Now I’m not talking about cocaine and heroin and all this crap, that’s really bad for you. I’m talking about things like psilocybin and white lily and things that are different types of psychedelics that if you go down to Mexico or you go to Columbia or places like that and you can do a guided meditation, cleansing ceremony. John Hopkins did some studies and found that 78% of people who did a guided meditation plant medicine Journey experience with a facilitator, 78 of them said it was the number one most transformational 24 hours of their life and so you know, I think things are going to be coming out. I’ve sponsored some bills to legalize those tools in Utah and in Nationwide in some other places, they’re super powerful but they need to be used in a place where you’ve got a trained facilitator and people who understand and respect those tools and so we’re helping to form some legislation that allows doctors to be able to use those in a way to help people really get rid of trauma and PTSD so you know those are some of the things that some of my operators have used which have been super super effective for them but you know, I hold on to this light inside of me. I can be in the pit of darkness and for Halloween last year, I actually went as an angel in Devil’s clothing right, I had this black cape around the outside but inside it was all white with light and everything else. I could open it up because that’s what I kept inside but sometimes I have to pretend like I was that Darkness to be able to connect with the traffickers and find the children.
Josh York [00:55:37]
Wow. powerful episode. What can people do to help? First of all, where can people find you? What can people do to help?
Paul Hutchinson [00:55:43]
Absolutely, you can go to Child Liberation Foundation. It’s liberateachild.org or liberatechildren.org we’ll both take you there, they ‘re changing some things on the site. Right now it’s all about fighting trial trafficking, we’re expanding it to helping to heal Etc. Right now all of my Facebook, LinkedIn and everything else is all under Paul Hutchinson Official. I think we’re going to change it to something a little bit shorter. I think I’m going to use Soul healer 007. I don’t know something like that, it’ll be easy but right now they can go to PaulHutchinsonofficial and follow. We’re putting out a lot of new material, some trauma healing things, a lot of different tools they can use and some other videos. So we’re gonna help heal the world one person at a time but thank you for letting me share some of these things on your podcast and you know, we can go on for hours on you know, building companies and using some of these tools that we just touched on visualization, manifestation, real goal setting and how to create a life of abundance in that way you know. So if we ever wanted to have another podcast where we’re specifically on those then we can. I think it’s really beautiful that you’re able to allow me to share some of the stories. I know that it’s dark but at the same time we need to understand that we can’t just stick our head in the sand and expect things to get better. As a world, as a community we need to come together and say, okay how can we heal? How can we stop the demand for this problem? What do we need to do in our families to help people heal? So that they never get to a point where that’s okay,
Josh York [00:57:31]
I agree 100% and that’s why I wanted to do this and that’s why I want to spread more awareness about it and I appreciate you jumping on Paul. It’s been great. Guys please, you follow Paul. You go to those websites. Please help out and support it and as always continue to fuel your drive Legend. [Music]