The Jordan Harbinger Show - 976: Bruce Ladebu | Stories of Hope in the Fight Against Slavery

Episode Date: April 11, 2024

Children's Rescue Initiative founder Bruce Ladebu joins us to discuss the 20 years he's spent liberating hundreds of people from slavery and trafficking! What We Discuss with Bruce Ladebu: Human trafficking and slavery affect around 40 million globally, generating $150 billion per year. Exploitation includes forced labor, domestic servitude, and sex trafficking of all ages. Heartless and often sadistic traffickers prey on the most vulnerable and desperate populations, including disaster-stricken children and marginalized minorities. Corruption and apathy among local authorities and law enforcement allow this atrocity of an industry to thrive. Rescuing trafficking victims is perilous work, but Bruce Ladebu's team has saved hundreds over the past 20 years. Extensive physical and mental rehabilitation in the aftermath is often necessary for these survivors to cope with the trauma they've endured. Children's Rescue Initiative is Bruce's organization that provides funding for a variety of programs that help to rescue children from trafficking and slavery, provide them with shelter and care, and help them reintegrate into society. Donating cash is just one way to help — people can also volunteer their time to organizations like Children's Rescue Initiative that are working to combat human trafficking and slavery. There are a number of ways to volunteer, such as working in a shelter, providing legal assistance, or advocating for policy changes. And much more... Full show notes and resources can be found here: jordanharbinger.com/976 This Episode Is Brought To You By Our Fine Sponsors: jordanharbinger.com/deals Sign up for Six-Minute Networking — our free networking and relationship development mini course — at jordanharbinger.com/course! Like this show? Please leave us a review here — even one sentence helps! Consider including your Twitter handle so we can thank you personally!See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

This episode is sponsored in part by Conspiruality Podcast. You know how I'm always talking about critical thinking and spotting manipulation? Well, there's a podcast that's all about dismantling new age cults, wellness grifters, and conspiracy med yogis, basically the wild overlap of spirituality and misinformation. It's called the Conspiruality Podcast. The hosts, a journalist, cult researcher, and a philosophical skeptic, dive deep into how this stuff spreads, from Project 2025 and the Heritage Foundation's dystopian vision of the future to how former leftists get pulled into far-right conspiracies.

An interesting episode to check out is called Speaking Truth to Goop, where Jen Gunter breaks down the pseudoscience behind the wellness industry in a way that is super entertaining and eye-opening. It's sharp, funny, and makes you a lot harder to fool, which, if you listen to this show, you know I'm all about that. From exploring cults to analyzing our cultural and political landscape, the Conspiratuality Podcast will help you stay informed against misinformation and resist fear tactics.

Find Conspirality on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and wherever you get your podcasts. Coming up next on the Jordan Harbinger show. We had checked into a hotel. After we're there for about two hours, they came in and said, we have to move you to another place in the hotel because they're going to replace a carpet here.

They were preparing the rooms. They were bugging the rooms. So I just told everybody, you know, don't say anything. You know, usually I have something to sweep the rooms. I can check for bugs. I didn't have it that time. So we just had to be really careful what we said. Welcome to the show. I'm Jordan Harbinger. On the Jordan Harbinger show, we decode the stories,

secrets and skills of the world's most fascinating people and turn their wisdom into practical advice that you can use to impact your own life and those around you. Our mission is to help you become a better informed to more critical thinker through long-form conversations with a variety of amazing folks from spies to CEOs, athletes, authors, thinkers, performers, even the occasional extreme athlete, astronaut, hacker, Russian spy or arms dealer. And if you're new to the show or you want to tell your friends about the show, I suggest our episode starter packs. These are collections of our favorite episodes on persuasion and negotiation, psychology, geopolitics, disinformation, cyber warfare, crime and cults, and more.

It'll help new listeners get a taste of everything we do here on the show. Just visit jordanharbinger.com slash start or search for us in your Spotify app to get started. Today, we're talking about human trafficking and literal slavery. This is not one of those weird Q&on conspiracy theories. This is really happening in places like Pakistan, for example. and today's guest, Bruce Latibu, is on a mission to free these folks. And he's taken a direct approach, bringing trained hired guns, so to speak, into factories and farms run by slaves,

taking them out of these conditions and bringing them into new lives. I was initially hesitant to cover this topic again. I got introduced to Bruce and I was impressed, but, you know, I've, let's just say there's a lot of misinformation about this problem. A lot of grifters and clout chasers in the space. But Bruce stuck out and struck me immediately as different. In fact, he didn't even have a book until I told him he needed to, to write one a few years back. Well, he did, and that is what we're basing our conversation on today.

And I think you'll find this stuff as horrific as it is interesting as we take an inside look at something I really hope most of us will never have to experience. Here we go with Bruce Latibu. Well, Bruce, thanks for joining me, man. This topic, I have to say, is pretty horrifying. When I heard about this initially from somebody who knew you, I was a little skeptical because I've covered this before, the child trafficking thing. But unfortunately, and I think you'll know where I'm going with this. A lot of the people that I talk to about this, they're a little, they don't end up being what they seemed at first,

and there's some sketchy stuff going on. And so I was grateful to meet you and be introduced to you. Oh, and thanks for writing an audiobook slash book, just so that you could be on the show. I appreciate that. You're welcome. Someone told me, to clarify, you didn't have a book, and then I was like, oh, call me when you have a book,

and then you're like, I wrote a book, and that was that. That was pretty cool. Never had that before. By the way, people can buy any book that we talk about on the show at Jordan Harbinger.com slash books. It helps support the show if you use our links. So, Bruce, tell me a little bit about what it is. First of all, how did you even find out this problem existed?

Because, well, when you first started doing this, it must have seemed like fiction. I first encountered human trafficking back in the 90s when I was traveling through the former Soviet countries. We had heard a little bit about XKGB became the new mafia over there. and it was just very dangerous. And we heard about it. We started to investigate some. It took a while to figure out how to do that. And then in 2003, we went underground in Kiev, and we just saw horrific things.

We talked to local people, and they talked about the girls that disappeared, the boys that are on the street that are used, then put back on the streets. And I still didn't really know how to do anything. It's a pretty major undertaking. Yeah. And so over the years, I did some research. I couldn't find anybody back then that was doing anything. I'm sure there was a few, but I couldn't find anybody that could teach me how to do this. And so I had to start coming up with my own strategies, had to come up with people that would go into crazy areas with me. And then in 2009, I was actually in Pakistan doing some leaders' workshops over there for a Christian community that asked me to come. And they took me out and showed me the

slave fields and I was horrified. I mean, I'm looking at hundreds of slaves in these fields and had got into a dialogue with my host in the book he's called Emmanuel. And he said, oh, you can't do that here. It's impossible. They'll kill you. And I said, we have to. These people are suffering. They're being beaten. A lot of them are dying. So before I left, we had rescued six children, some boys and girls. The locals were horrified because they said it was so dangerous. Nobody had ever done that there before. Ended up going back for seven years back and forth, rescuing hundreds and hundreds of people out of really bad circumstances.

And in that meantime, I decided, well, if I'm going to raise money, I'm going to have to be more official so we developed the Children's Rescue Initiative. Well, we'll get into a little bit of the detail on that in a bit here. But I'm curious, going back to the, you mentioned the Soviet Union or former Soviet Union, and then he mentioned Ukraine and what was it, 2003. So I was in Ukraine in 2002 in Odessa, which is a smaller city. I never really thought about the homeless people there, the younger people. And in fact, I'm not even sure how many of them I've noticed at all.

So how is it that there are so many homeless children or are they homeless or are they being sold by their parents? What's the deal with the street kids or the kids that were being trafficked in those countries? Well, I think it depends on the country. there are countries where parents do sell their children. They'll sell one to save, you know, seven. In Odessa, which I've been to, and Mariupil, which is now a controlled city by Russia, we just found so many kids. You'd go under buildings and there'd be children sleeping on sewer pipes. We would go into areas with local people, sometimes pastors, sometimes business people, and they'd show us where these children were. You didn't see them during the day very often, but if you went underground, you would see them. If you were out at night, you would. would see them. A lot of them were orphaned. We found out. A lot of them were runaways because of abusive families. I'm sure there's a lot of different scenarios behind, you know, what these children are, why they're out there, but there was a lot of them. I think at that time, we read that

there was over 100,000 street children in just Odessa and Kiev. That is a crazy, huge number. I used to live in a town that had, I think, 100,000 people in it. The population, of Iceland has roughly, what, 100,000? So if you have 100,000 street kids in just a couple of cities, that's an enormous number of homeless people. Are you sure about that number? Because now that I think about it, that's such a huge number. It's unbelievable. Well, that was a statistic. I think that's even in my book. And I have the source. I don't remember what that source is right now. But maybe that was just part of the country. Maybe it was the whole country, but I know it was an enormous number of children. Everywhere we went, we found these children. We started working with a guy.

I named Ganadi, who's become a kind of a hero over there. And he took us out and showed us where we would find kids. And every place we went underground, into tunnels, into sewers, there was children in there. And so it was pretty horrifying. He would take these kids and put them in these makeshift hospitals. A lot of them had, you know, flesh eating diseases from homemade methamphetamines. We got to visit all those places. It was pretty horrifying. Is that what crocodile is? You ever see that drug? That's like a very sort of famous Ukraine-Soviet, or sorry, Russian drug.

And they call it that because it makes your skin scaly and they use gasoline in there or something and they inject it. It's so gross. Is that what you're talking about? I believe it's similar. Yeah, these kids, the skin was just falling off. You know, their arms and legs and there wasn't a whole lot they could do. They didn't have the money for medicine. Right.

they tried to just be with these children, why they either recovered or they passed away. Oh, my God. It's so awful. So slavery is estimated at approximately $150 billion a year globally. You got to wonder how they quantify that, right? Because it's such an underground hidden thing. Who's keeping the stats? I mean, that's got to be a tough number to calculate. But either way, $150 billion a year is absolutely enormous. It's one of the oldest industries in the world, as you might imagine. I mean, you can read about slaves in the Bible. So do we have any idea how many slaves there are in the world right now? I know I'm throwing you a lot of weird questions with numbers that are specific.

No, that's good. Numbers in front of you, but if you can. The estimates, according to most organizations, that was about 40 million worldwide. Wow. They're in either sex trafficking or labor slavery. And that's adults and children? That's adults and children. Okay.

It's still a humongous number. And where is this mostly? Because, you know, if you read crackpot media, you'd hear that it's right in your own backyard. And I'm sure that trafficking happens right in our own backyard. But the slavery, the labor slavery especially, where is that focused? You mentioned Pakistan earlier. I'm sure it's not limited just to that place, though. No, it's throughout Asia.

There's the Global Slavery Index estimates that there is no country that does not have slaves now. of some amount. But India is estimated to have 17 million just itself in bonded labor or in outright slavery. Bonded labor is when they owe money. It would be debt bondage. They create a system where they can never pay a back. So we've rescued slaves that they're a third generation slave. You know, their grandfather borrowed $20 for a medical procedure and they were put in and they can't pay their way out.

Wow. Asia is probably the biggest area and the Middle East, Middle East Asia. That's wild that you can, so you can, it's almost like North Korea. You can be born into a labor camp there and you're guilty because your parents did, you know, folded a picture of the great leader or sat on it because they couldn't see because they don't have adequate nutrition in their eyes failed. Right. So you can end up guilty in some way like that.

And it almost seems like the same thing. You're just born into slavery and instead of being like, well, you have a free kid. That's not a slave. The slave owner is just like, oh, good, a baby slave. That's so insane to me. It is. Every time we go out, we document everything video and picture-wise. And we have come across three- and four-year-olds that are turning bricks over because that's part of their family. Their family's enslaved. Their youngest girl we ever rescued out of a brothel was three years old. The average age was eight, nine, and ten. So this is pervasive through the middle. Middle East and Asia, but it also is happening here in ever-increasing ways in the U.S.

We've been doing a lot of investigations. You know, the Super Bowl's coming up. It's the biggest human trafficking event, followed by the Arnold Classic. The Bodybuilding Competition? That is correct. It's the second biggest trafficking event. Really? I've heard the Super Bowl thing, and that makes sense, right?

Because you get a ton of people coming for a football game from all over the world. So all the hotels are full, and people are partying or whatever. So I guess when you say human trafficking, you're talking about like prostitution and things like that with adults, hopefully mostly adults. But what Arnold Classic, this is sounding naive, I'm sure. But is that really that popular of an event that it attracts this level of vice? I guess it is. Well, I've not been there, but we've read different articles. I've talked to different people who've done investigations during that time.

Like there's a group that has just gone down to Las Vegas to do searches for missing children down there. There's tunnels. There's one of my main team members has done a lot of investigation there. Some of these people have done investigations at the Arnold Classic, and that's where these statistics come from. I have not been to the Arnold Classic. I've not been to a Super Bowl, but some of our team members have. You mentioned tunnels in Las Vegas. I don't want people to get the wrong idea.

These are not like Hamas tunnels, right? These are drainage tunnels that people live in, right? I've seen that before, I think. Yeah. One of my team members has gone into those on a regular basis, created relationships, looking for missing girls or boys. Yeah, there's a lot of underground stuff that happens, unfortunately, in a lot of these cities. It would be so creepy to live in a drainage tunnel under a city.

I know that's kind of an aside in like the least of these people's problems, but that is pure nightmare fuel. Because if it rains at all, which I know it's Las Vegas, whatever, or if they release some water from a reservoir, you're going to die in there horribly, right? It's going to be terrible. And also, what goes on in there?

Right? The people who are living in those things are the bottom rung of whatever sort of hell, personal hell they're already in, and you're just stuck in there with them and you're a kid. That's horrifying. That's terrible.

It is. There's a whole underground world, even in this country. I was just watching some videos this morning of to catch a predator, that TV show. Oh, yeah. They advertise a 13-year-old girl.

She gets online. They create a profile. And they have just men lined up. You know, every hour, some new guys coming to have sex with a teenage prepubescent sometimes. Yeah. Girl, there's a dark side to our country. Yeah. I think it's important to highlight that because it's really easy to be like, oh, Pakistan,

they're so terrible over there. Then it's like, well, actually, there's a whole TV show. about this and they have a jillion seasons and they're not running out of pedophiles anytime soon, right? So this is not supposed to be an episode where the pot calls the kettle black is just sort of to highlight the whole problem. So I think that's a good idea that we highlight our own issues here too. You mentioned the children in labor, slavery, in Asia especially, and I remember a buddy

of mine in college. He grew up in India and he's like, yeah, my parents still live there. And I was like, what's it like growing up in India? you know, he was kind of a wealthy dude. And he's like, yeah, I mean, it was fun because we had houseboys, but like it gets old after a while. And that word never really landed right with me, right? Because it's, I'm like, that's got to be a euphemism. What is a houseboy? Like, where are their parents, do they work for you? Or do you just, like, feed them? I don't understand what this is. And it sort of sounds like he had slaves or something approximating slaves. Well, it could have been.

A lot of those places I've been over there, we've done investigations. It was pretty common to have a child in their house doing labor. We rescued three girls one time that the mother sold them to a man for labor cleaning the house. He impregnated the 13-year-old, and when she had the baby, he kept it and sold the three girls to a brothel, and they were there for two years before we learned about them and we got them out. Wow. But we found it that was pretty common to have a child or a teenager in the house to do all the work in some of those countries. I'm assuming it's not legal to sell your children over there, but is it just so widespread that nobody enforces anything with this? I mean, it's just, look, if you're living in Campbell,

California, and your neighbor suddenly ends up with three kids that are not his own, and he's an older guy and he ends up with three little girls, that's weird, man. And everyone knows that, that that's weird and everyone knows that they're there. So is this just so widespread over there that people are like, well, that's how it goes? And like, because you can't keep it a secret. If you have three random girls that are not yours living in your house and one of them gets pregnant and has a baby,

I'm calling the police on you if you're my neighbor. Of course I'm doing that. That's so bizarre. And that doesn't happen over there? Well, it does. We've had some people arrested before for various things. but a lot of times the police will just turn a blind eye to it. Sometimes the police are corrupt. In areas where there's good police, like we have a border operation going on where we've been

arresting traffickers, you get a lot done. But in these other places, everybody knows what's going on, but nobody does anything about it. It's just kind of accepted to be part of the societal norm. You know, a lot of cafes I've walked into, my teams have walked into, you know, we have everything from Navy SEALs to ordinary people working with us. We've gone into these places. There's two or three little girls in a cafe, and there's eight or nine men that are sitting in the cafe, and they're either waiting their turn or they've already done their thing, and we extract these girls out and make reports and stuff. But everybody in the neighborhood knows this goes on, but nobody seems to do anything about it. Jeez. Cafe, obviously being a euphemism for some sort of weird,

illegal brothel with underage girls in it. That's so weird to me. No, really. It's really just a cafe that they're serving food or they're serving tea and biscuits. And then in the back room, they have these little girls or boys. Same with hotels, same with bars. And we've documented all this. We have it all in video, pictures, testimonies from people. It's becoming the world's biggest illegal business because it's a renewable resource for them. Drugs they can sell once. and it's done. A woman or a girl, they can sell multiple times. It's so pretty horrific.

Horrific, exactly. And what's also weird is I just wouldn't have thought the market for selling things to pedophiles would be that big. I know this, again, this sounds so naive, but it's like, if you're opening up a neighborhood peto cafe, you're expecting a lot of business for that? Like, I just didn't realize that there were so many of those kinds of people. Yeah, it was pretty surprising to all of us. too, that you can go into some of these areas and you could walk down the street, step into

almost any place, cafe, a business, a restaurant, a hotel, and you'll find children scrubbing floors, doing dishes. And then when you look into it in a deeper and broader way, you'll find out that these children are being used at night or even during the day, you know, for sexual purposes. Okay, well, that's really, yeah, horrific is really the only, I mean, you can't really overstayed how gross this all is. It's evil. It's evil, yeah. And I, usually I don't, I try to avoid hyperbole on the show, but you can't really use hyperbole

when you're talking about enslaving children for stuff like that. I think there's no, yeah, there's no such thing as hyperbole in that case, right? It's just so weird. It's so disheartening and so bizarre. And I've interviewed experts on pedophilia and things like that on this show. And in part, a lot of the people who assault children don't actually feel any. sort of, it was gross to talk about. They don't feel any sort of sexual attraction

to the child. They just like to hurt people. So it's almost like a psychopathy thing. They like to victimize people as opposed to them actually even caring about, like they're not necessarily attracted to those people. And a lot of pedophiles who are attracted to children actually never offend.

So it's this weird Venn diagram of like pedophiles over here and then a sliver of them assault children because they have opportunity. And then there's people that like don't care about who they are hurting at all. It just happens to be that kids are easy to victimize, and those are the people that do, and it's hard to get stats on this, but probably slash possibly the majority of the offending. So that's very bizarre. You really expect that to be one circle, right? Like the only people who would sexually assault a child are attracted to children. And it's just not like that. It's just like

people who have the opportunity to do that, do it in many ways. So that's what's most disturbing because what that shows you is these aren't people who have like this insatiable need to assault a child or have sex with a child, these are people that just know they're not going to get caught, know they can walk down the street to the neighborhood cafe and find it, and have absolutely no repercussions and be among other people who are essentially accepting of this, like the business owner and the other clientele in the cafe. So if you were able to clamp down on that kind of thing, those people would have less opportunity and this would just have.

It's not like this would all immediately go underground but still happen just as much. It could be cut way down. Sure, it would still exist, but it could be cut way, way down because the, those guys would go like, ah, well, okay, now I'm going to victimize, I don't know, animals or mug people on the street instead because that's easier than finding a child to assault. It's like if the government would do like anything against this, you could cut the instances way down, but they're not. Right. Some of the countries we operate in right now, the governments do do some, but they don't enforce the laws. The years I worked in Pakistan, it was against a lot. I have, you know, a child under 14 doing labor.

it was against the law to have slaves. Sure. But I can't tell you how many slave owners would say to me, if the government doesn't care, why should I? Yeah, man. Just the evil that, you know, we've seen out there and, yeah, horrific things that I didn't put it in my book. Well, I don't talk about. But when you get into the world of slavery, it's just beyond evil, really. Well, I can only imagine what those things are.

Because when I was listening to the book, there's plenty in there that you will lose sleepover. it's not horribly graphic or anything, so I'm guessing the stuff that you left out is stuff that just, you know, is compartmentalized in your brain in a place that you don't really want to access very often if you can avoid it. What industries, aside from, let's say,

the brothel stuff, you mentioned turning over bricks, what sort of industries are these slaves, adults and children working in? Because I can imagine that if you're allowed to, well, tacitly allowed to enslave children, you're probably also not overly concerned with workplace safety requirements either.

I don't know if there is a limit to how slaves are used. We've found children in textile factories, in rope factories, brick kilns, working in kitchens to clean dishes, rock quarries, agriculture. You know, they use these children in the fields in a lot of these countries, rice patties, the list is endless really of where you're going to find enslaved people, children. A lot of times we've rescued entire families out of these things. And just to encourage people on a good note, you know, when we get these children into our survivor care program, when we go back, you know, four or five, six months later, we see

happy kids in school uniforms going to school. They've never been to school before. They've had medical care, dental care, all these things. So we're seeing some really amazing success with the healing process. There's a difference between if a child is kidnapped and put into sex trafficking or labor slavery versus one that was born into it, there's a different healing process there. The ones that are born into it seem to recover quicker. That's all they've ever known.

And all of a sudden they're presented with a brand new life where the emotional trauma of being taken. or as you read in my book, the little girl whose family was killed in a flood and she's wandering the roads and she gets picked up and ends up in sex trafficking. That emotional trauma takes a lot longer. Yeah. But we are seeing great success. I got to tell you, man, that some of those stories were really horrifying, especially, and I'd never thought of this, but after natural disasters, these slave traffickers, they often look for children whose parents and family was wiped out by that disaster. Or just people that have lost everything. are like, I can no longer feed these kids.

And it's like, oh, I'm going to give them a job at my clothing factory, and it's going to be fun, and they're going to be with other kids. And it's like, just kidding, we're selling them to sex trafficking organization, or we're going to chop them up and take their organs or something. That's really sort of the peak sociopathic victimization of the most vulnerable segment of the world's population. It's truly disgusting to think that you would go. I mean, imagine what kind of a bastard you have to be to hear that there's an earthquake or a flood

in a certain section of the country, and you're like, all right, lads, load up the vans, we're going to go kidnap some kids whose parents just got murdered and then sell them. You have ceased to be human at that point. In the last six months, we've arrested, I think, 35 traffickers and liberated over 45 girls that were being transported. And so these traffickers, they'll go up into areas in these poor areas or even wealthier areas, and they'll offer free scholarships, they'll offer jobs, they'll, they'll, they'll, work through the system for arranged marriages and stuff, and then they'll transport these children

to other areas or to across borders. Then these children will never be seen again. We have evidence right now that in one country in Africa, it was a employment center that was, it's in my book, that little girl that went to try to find a job, they'll go into these employment centers and they'll ship them to other countries, you know, never to be seen again. We helped get one girl out of the Middle East out of Dubai. She was an African girl, and it took a while, but we were able to, we couldn't go physically do it, but we were able to give some resources to some people to go get this girl back to her family in Africa. She had gone there for a job. They took away her passport. They took away all her papers, wouldn't let her go. She was forced into labor, no pay,

and then now she's back with her family in Africa. You're listening to the Jordan Harbinger Show with our guest, Bruce Latibu. We'll be right back. If you're wondering how I managed to book all these amazing folks for the show, these authors, thinkers, and creators every single week, it is because of my network, the circle of people I know like and trust. They make interest to all these folks for me. And I'm teaching you how to build your own network for free over at six minute networking.com.

Yeah, you probably don't have a podcast. You're not trying to book guests. It doesn't matter. This is a course about improving your relationship building skills, inspiring other people to want to develop a relationship with you. And the course does all of that in a super easy, non-cringy, very down-to-earth way. There's no awkward strategy, there's no cheesy tactics, nothing that's going to make you look bad or feel bad. Just practical exercises that'll make you a better connector, a better colleague, a better friend, and a better peer in just a few minutes a day.

And many of the guests on the show, subscribe and contribute to the course. So come on and join us. You'll be in smart company where you belong. You can find the course at six minute networking.com. Now, back to Bruce Latibu. That's scary. I actually haven't talked about this on the show, but I had somebody reach out to me through one of my secure messaging channels. and he was essentially like, hey, help me, I'm stuck in a villa working for a crime boss.

I came here for a job and then it turned out to be a cryptocurrency scam. And I was like, well, I don't really believe you. Sent me tons of evidence, photographs, all the data on the bosses, the employees, how the scam works, screenshots of everything from the inside. So it turned out to be real. I worked with the FBI a little bit on that to try and figure that out. But what this inside guy was telling me was pretty alarming. You know, like, they'll tell you that you, yeah, like you said, they have a job for you and you're going to be like an administrative assistant to somebody at some business.

And then you show up and they're like, here's the place that you can't leave. And there's security guards that are like, you know, Nigerian dudes or something like that that will beat you with tasers and clubs if you try to leave or worse. And they make examples out of people. You can imagine what that looks like. And you have to scam people or do whatever it is that you do there. and even if they do pay you, it's not going to be what they told you in the ad, right? It's going to be like, here's just enough so that you can rationalize being here. And then when you try to leave, that's when the gloves come off.

And it's really scary. How did you find somebody in Dubai? That's a place that's opaque very much deliberately. And I don't know how you would track anybody there. And the authorities are not like, yeah, come in and solve this problem that might embarrass the kingdom. I mean, they're not cool with that at all. I don't know all the details on that because we just gave some financial resources to help the people on that one. But she was able to get enough information out to her husband.

They were able to track her down. And I just got a call about four months ago from people overseas saying that two of their family members were in a call center in Thailand. Yeah. And they were unable to leave. They were being forced to do the work there. They were threatened. Their papers were taken away. And so I didn't have any resources there, so I got a hold of some friends that do have.

I don't know whatever happened with that, but that's the kind of stuff that's happening out there. Cyber slavery is kind of what that's termed. We did an episode on that 833 with two journalists who cover that in Thailand, Cambodia, that area. The short version is there's casinos that are sort of run by Chinese gangsters or different types of gangsters in these borderlands that are, maybe in Burma that are out of the government control or that are kind of like special economic zones where local authorities don't really have any say. And in order to go in there, you basically have to like bribe a general who will go and knock on the door with his unit and be like, we want this one person because somebody in China actually cares about them and gave me 30 grand. And they're like,

fine. But they won't go in there and they're loaded to the brim with people, yeah, who answer a job ad and then get kind of like bagged and sent in to this area to maybe never be seen again. And sometimes they get a hold of a cell phone or something like that and they can tell their parents that they're stuck. But they're not forbidden necessarily from communicating because I think part of the racket is, hey, if you want to leave, just tell your family to buy you out for $12,000, which is like the life savings of somebody in rural China, right, more than that. So they make money if you want to leave by telling your family. And so they'll send videos like, yeah, we're going to beat you up. send a video to your family so that maybe that motivates them to pay us to get rid of you.

So it's just like through and through pretty horrible. And again, that's episode 833 where we really covered that in depth. A lot of the text messages that you get that are like, hi, Sharon, want to meet for coffee tomorrow and it turns out to be a cryptocurrency scam. A lot of it is those people being forced to do that, which is awful. There was an interesting angle to a lot of the book, which was that many countries deliberately keep elements or segments of their own population in slavery so that they have a labor pool to draw from. Going back to what you said about, if the government doesn't care, why should I?

If the parents are too poor to support kids, they have to sell some of the kids. Uyghurs and China was one of the groups, I think, that you mentioned. And I'd never thought about them necessarily being kept in slave conditions per se. I almost just thought it was a lack of opportunity plus exploitive business practice. But you kind of hinted that this a deliberate strategy. And in Pakistan, I think you were really much more clear on they're keeping Christians enslaved. What's that all about? Because I'd never heard of that. Yeah, that's my personal observation. Somewhat subjective, quite objective, though. When we were going around to different places, not just Pakistan, but parts of the Middle East and Asia,

we would find these populations of very, very poor people, Christians and Hindus. And the slave owners or the business owners would go in there and they would purchase people out of there. We observed that maybe a half a dozen times personally when we would go into the slums and you'd look over and there's people, you start asking questions and you find out that, oh, those business people just bought that little boy that's on the back of the motorcycle. That's my personal opinion what I saw is they're either keeping these populations in poverty. They're exploiting them for sure, 100% for slavery. We talked to one mom who just kept selling her children. These guys would come in, she'd sell them for however much, you know, maybe the equivalent of 500 U.S. dollars, I don't know, which is an enormous amount of money and take these kids.

We tried to follow the one. It's in my book. We tried to keep up with them. We were in a car. They were on a motorbike to try to stop them to find out what was going on exactly, but we couldn't on the bumpy roads. But that was an observation that I've made in a lot of different places. Okay, why are these people so poor? I mean, there's poor populations everywhere. But then you see and here and our, you know, the local authorities, I met with dignitaries in Pakistan and ask them a lot. lot of questions. And they said, yeah, these places where the Christians are so poor is where the slave owners go to buy kids. So I don't have definitive proof of that. That was, you know, observations, somewhat subjective, but there was a lot of, a lot of observation there. Why is it that they, I feel like I keep repeating this, but this is also a naive question, I think. So this is essentially a Muslim country, right, in Pakistan. So they have a Christian population. is it not against their religion to hold slaves, or do they just not care? Well, that's getting into some pretty serious dialogue, and I'm not sure I want to go quite there.

I've had enough death threats on my life. Oh, really? You can read, there's some different books. One I have here in my library. I have about 10 books right beside me here. One is called Unvailing Islam, which I think is an eye-opening book. I sat with a member of parliament one time, and I interviewed them. and I asked why this is allowed, and he just said it was part of his culture and part of his

religious beliefs. So he didn't get into it, didn't give me any verse of anything, but he was a pretty high-level official in Pakistan. And I've had slave owners look at me and said, it's our right. It's our right to hold slave. It's our right to hold these Christians. They're not equal with us. I have that documented and recorded by some very powerful slave owners.

the way, I looked at that book. It does look interesting because it's written by two guys who were born as Sunni Muslims. So it's not just like some random kook who doesn't like Muslims. Yeah, okay, that's kind of important. A lot of this stuff does get dicey. I know why you don't want to talk about it. I can understand, but yeah, I guess I'm just trying to clarify because it would be like if you, I mean, you can find hypocrites in any religion, I suppose, but it seems like it's very widespread in this area. So I wondered if there was a religious justification like, oh, no, it says in this hadith or whatever that we can enslave anybody who's not Muslim because whatever, because often there's a BS scriptural rationalization for terrible behavior, right?

I mean, that's kind of, you could find that in any religion, but if we're talking about Pakistan, I wondered what that rationalization was on the side of Islam. But yeah, we don't have to dive into that if you don't want any more death threats. I, too, collect them in my menagerie of email. Yeah, I can understand not wanting to make that problem worse. Okay. Yeah, that's, when I, when I mentioned religious-based slavery, there are different belief systems. You know, you go into India has 17 million people in some form of dead bondage, outright slavery, sex trafficking.

And that's an enormous population within a Hindu country. When you go into Pakistan, you have millions of people enslaved there, and you can find the same in many of the other countries over there. You can find that in Thailand. You can find it in China has an enormous amount of people enslaved, and they're a communist country. So, you know, and then you can go into other countries that it's not religious-based. It's cartel-based or it's whatever, you know, $150 billion a year. There's a motivation there.

Yeah. It's money. Yeah, you can rationalize anything if that much money is on the line. That's for sure. I'm guessing a huge problem you must face is that this whole issue was so publicized by both sides of the political aisle here in the United States. That's got to make your job harder.

I mean, you see these like, kooky, Qaeda Qaeda, Qaeda, type of people being like, it's the Jews or the, you know, whatever, trafficking kids. And then you see the other side push back and they're like, oh, the whole thing is fake. And it's like, well, no, it's not fake, but it's also not, you know, space lasers

are not involved or whatever it is. But then the real slavery and abuse victims get wrapped up in all these, like, conspiracy theory things and it makes it harder, it makes it harder for people to get believed and solve the problem. Do you run into that at all? All the time. Yeah. I mean, I've had people talk about, you know, there's 100,000 kids in tunnels under the United States and in Washington, D.C. And I've never seen proof. And I'm out there all the time. And we have people that work here in the U.S. and they're doing investigations. We've never come across that. But I do believe that there's

some pretty high-level pedophile networks. I'm sure that, you know, like the Jeffrey Epstein. He was just the tip of the iceberg. Yeah. Not just here, but in, you know, countries all over the world. You're going to have these type things. You get into people drinking blood for the, all that stuff of children. I don't know.

I've never seen evidence. Right. No one has. We've seen a lot of evidence of organ trafficking, you know. Yes. I have pictures of slaves that have scars in their back where their kidneys were forcefully removed. And, you know, ISIS was, they were taking all the organs out of people. There's a lot of that that is going on because it's becoming a lucrative business also,

harvesting of organs. But I have no idea how big that is. I don't know how widespread it is, because my experience for that is limited. We have come across it. We've heard stories, but I haven't seen widespread evidence. Like, I can prove as far as slavery, you know. Yeah, Oregon trafficking, I've done an episode on as well, mostly with respect to China, episode 497, but it's not just China doing it. I mean, it's all over the place. More recently, a guy you might know, Remy Adeliki, episode 868, he's an ex-Navy seal. He was also like Nigerian royalty, which is pretty interesting. And he fights organ harvesting and trafficking. And he's got some really disturbing stories of that happening. Same story as you sort of just said

before somebody answers a job ad, ends up getting a bag, and then they wake up on a table, and then some doctor is in a tent, and they're like, we're taking out one of your kidneys, or one of your, I don't even know what else you can lose and still survive. But yeah, they'll do stuff like that, and it's just really scary. And there's one that's kind of seeming like an urban legend, but I'm not sure, where people go down to, like, the Dominican Republic for cheap plastic surgery, and they wake up, and then they have a bunch of problems eight months in, and their doctor's like, oh, it's a complication from your kid. kidney removal and they're like, what are you talking about? I went down there for a butt lift,

you know, what the hell are you talking about? Kidney removal. I don't know if that's apocryphal or if that's real, but it's horrifying nonetheless. It's so horrifying that it makes me think it's not true, but then again, look what we're talking about right now. It's even way worse, right? And it's true. I haven't heard of that, but we were part of an investigation. We got contacted by a federal agency and they wanted us to do some work down in the Dominican Republic where they were getting information about these party boats taking girls out and they would end up in Miami or they'd end up in the ocean after they were used. And then one of my board members is a founding member of Homeland Security. Part of what he was doing was doing investigation into these things. And he said it's one of the

biggest growing things here in the U.S. is family trafficking where people are selling their children for sex to get drugs. He said, that's growing quite a bit. And I know that that does happen because we interviewed people that where that's taken place in their lives. You take a lot of video, which I think is important. One, so people can't deny that this is a real thing. But also, these guys are armed, right? They're using dangerous, I would imagine they got their own dangerous people working with them, right?

So a video camera seems like a really good weapon. Actually, it might even be better than just coming with your own armed guys, although that probably doesn't hurt either. What is that? The sunlight is the best disinfectant kind of thing. Like, people are on their best behavior when you're sitting there with a camera, and they're on it, even if they think they're going to get their hands on that tape later on. Well, we've been armed in different places when we can work directly with the pleas, which we do.

They're the ones that are armed and we are able to teach them how to do this. Sometimes we empower them to do it, which means helping financially, or we are there to be the door kicker frontman and then they follow us in. Other places we can't have any weapons at all, so we train well as. I've gotten older, it's good that I have some of these young badass guys and women around me. But yeah, we all still train. We've had encounters where we've had to put someone in place. But we have, you know, resisted every temptation to eliminate people because that would be bad for the people there.

Yeah. Like one guy said, please don't hurt anybody because they will come after us, which he meant Christians. Right. And in other places, we're doing this where, like, we rescued some girls out of a brothel that was attached to a police station. That's insane. So we had to quietly slip in, get these kids out of there and disappear. So there's a lot of different dynamics. We'll carry non-lethal AIDS with us.

Wow. I always tell people that we walk in love but carry a big stick. Yeah. Ooh, man. Attached to a police station, that just shows you the level. I mean, it's not even that they're unaware of it or can't do anything about it, is that they are complicit at that point. It's located there for a reason. Half the clientele might come from the police station for all we know.

That's terrible. Yeah. Part of our fear going into there was what if there's a police officer? What if the chief of police is in there and we have to do something? But we were able to extract all the girls. I think there was three or four in that one. I don't remember for sure. I think three.

And get them out. nobody ever knew where there. Well, surely somebody's protesting you leaving with all of their, I don't want to say employees because they're slaves, I guess. Yeah, with all their slaves. Yeah, well, usually there's usually a madam in there, but she was willing to not say anything for a while, so she was given some direct words by somebody. So she sat there quietly for a while. At least we think she did because nobody ever pursued us. Right. Persuasive words can go a long way. I love that you tell them it's going to air on the

BBC, and I'm guessing they don't know that BBC is short for Bruce's broadcasting company. That's right. Yeah. Yeah, we've done that quite a bit. You know, told them we're journalists, and they look at the cameras, and they're looking at us, and all of a sudden, they get very compliant. Jeez. They're screaming and yelling, and then we say, well, we can air this. We can broadcast it. We are doing actual video. So they're actually being videotaped, and we just want to have evidence for everything we do. Yeah. You know, so we're covering our butts.

I think that's wise because it's only, it would be really, I mean, the best way to get rid of you guys would be to frame you guys for doing something horribly illegal and then it put you in prison or have you an outright banned from the country somehow, which I kind of assume is only a matter of time. I'm actually quite surprised that you're able to just keep on, I'm surprised you can get visas for yourself and your people to go in. Have you run into any problems with that? I have not. Wow. I'm sure I'm the only one that's really out there and known. We keep the identities of all of our rescue team operators fairly quiet. There's a few that are that are doing some PR for us and they're doing some videos. So they're kind of known, but most of them can get it out anywhere and there's no media attention on them or there's no focus on them like there is on me. But I get in and out of places all the time because we are working with government officials.

and police in quite a few locations. You don't have a super common name either. Like, I've never met anybody else with the last name, Latibu. Like, you're the only one I know. So if they're on the lookout for you, it's not, okay, we got to get this guy's name's John Smith, be on the lookout. It's like, no, you're the only guy with that last name going in it out of Pakistan five times a year or whatever.

Yeah, I don't go there anymore to that nation. We have other stuff going on there, but I still go quite a few places. In Africa, we're working directly with the police where we're, rescuing children out of the fishing industry. And these kids, there's a high mortality rate. Sometimes I was just told the other day by one of my team members, he had never told me this before. We just had a training down in Orange Beach, Alabama. Towns kind of adopted us down there, wonderful people. We did a big gala fundraiser there, which was very successful. But he was telling me, because we were rooming together, a couple other people. And he said, you know, I never told you

this, but over where we're rescuing these kids in the fishing industry, if these kids are on a boat and they see the police coming for them, they drowned these children. Wow. And I said, you're serious? He said, yes, they get rid of these kids because they don't want to be arrested. So that just gave me new resolve to do a lot more work in that particular nation, which I can't really mention right now, but that was just horrific. A lot of these boys will drown when they're trying untangle nets. There's a high mortality rate as far as disease. And they went into one area where they found a whole big, massive group of kids enslaved in the agricultural industry over there, which we didn't even know about. That was just this last trip over. Which country was this,

or which continent was this, if you don't want to say the country? Africa. Africa. Okay. Yeah, Africa. There's a lot of slavery in Africa. Yeah. We've done a lot of work on both coasts there. And we're focusing on a couple areas right now trying to get as many kids out of just really, really bad circumstances. You know, these kids get beaten. I was in one place in Pakistan where we just got there and I saw my host throw a guy up against the wall. He was a slave owner and he was, I thought he was going to kill him and he found out he had beaten two little girls to death that morning in a rage. Wow. We've documented many, many cases of that of children being killed, of parents being killed, of one parent being killed to punish the other. That's a pretty hard

thing to deal with. Yeah. You know, poof. Yeah. I would imagine you do attract unwanted attention. You mentioned in the book there was a hotel where you were clearly being watched. Tell us about that because this gives it an insight to how dangerous this job is, just sort of on the day to day during an operation. Well, there's been a bunch of different times, but I think that case in the book was where we had checked into a hotel and we were at our rooms. We had a team of four. I had a guy that was a two-time world champion karate guy with me and a couple older gentlemen. And after we're there for about two hours, they came in and said, we have to move you

to another place in the hotel because they're going to replace the carpet here. I'm like, okay, that doesn't even make sense. They would know that they were going to replace the carpet. They wouldn't have his check in here. Well, they were preparing the rooms. They were bugging the rooms. So I just told everybody, you know, don't say anything, just talk in very basic stuff. You know, usually I have something to sweep the rooms.

I can check for bugs. I didn't have it that time. So we just had to be really careful what we said. The government actually made us stay in that hotel. Oh, I was going to say to switch hotels, but I guess you couldn't. They said this is where you have to stay. There's alerts in the country. There's violence going on.

And we found cars bugged. I think it was a borrowed car. Yeah. A lot of different things like that take place. Do the police follow you around when you're there to intimidate you or just to see what you're doing at all? All the time. Yeah. We've had secret police follow us.

We've had the regular police. We've had police assigned to us that had to travel with us. You know, you know, they're giving reports all day long and we really weren't allowed to go anywhere without this one police officer with us. And we're still doing rescues. And I'm like, how are they allowing us to do this? You know, it was just kind of weird. but I think it was because it would have been huge political ramifications if we would, had they not let us. They were trying to say, hey, we'll allow you to get these children out.

But then, because I had an attempt on my life, I couldn't go back to that country. Wait, what happened there? You got to tell that story. I found out I had a contract on my life. This was in Pakistan. I had a contract on my life of Fatwa. My picture had been passed around. In one case, we had gone into some brick fields.

The slave owner wasn't there, so we loaded up 80 slaves and took off and got them into our underground railroad type of scenario where they'd go town to town and they'd just all disappear. Those slave owners were part of a bigger association, and so they put the contract on me with some Taliban that were part of that. And the last day we were there, we went to a hotel, had five levels of security. I wasn't too worried about anything, but my picture was being passed around. And so somebody recognized me and slipped some poison in my food. And my wife was with me on that trip and five other team members. As we were at the airport, I started to feel kind of weird. And we got on the plane.

I don't remember this, but she said I started hallucinating. I tried to get up and get in my luggage saying I needed medicine. And so we got back here. I went right to the doctor. And they put me through a bunch of tests, couldn't figure what it was. I ended up in Cleveland Clinic where the doctor up there said, yeah, this is, looks like you've been poisoned. And that's what I was suspecting because of, in the hotel, the waiter kept watching only me, wasn't watching the other people sitting at our table. He kept just kind of

staring at me and peeking around the corner and just put two and two together. But that was the second time over there. We were poisoned. The first time, our host, Emmanuel, he was sick, almost died. He was in the hospital and we were throwing up and I ended up with some kind of thing in my intestines. It felt like I had acid in my system. It was just burning terrible and laying home. But I got over that one. That was in 2013. In 2015 was when I got poison. It took me about a year and a half to recover. Wow. What was going on? Like you just couldn't digest. Was that also just like? It was a neuropathy. It was like my skin was on fire and I lost my ability to sweat for a few months and finally decided that I had to do something about it because if I did

anything where I'd heat up and start to sweat, I felt like a thousand fire ants biting me. Oh my God. So I told my wife, I said, I'm going to go out and I'm going to run until I hit my knees a couple times in such pain and I kept running. I finally started to sweat. And that was pretty much the end of that. But then I went to a natural path and he put me on a bunch of vitamin regimen and some mushroom stuff and to help regenerate nerves.

I came out of it and got right back into doing rescues. This is the Jordan Harbinger Show with our guest, Bruce Ladabue. We'll be right back. If you like this episode of the show, I invite you to do what other smart and considerate listeners do, which is take a moment and support our sponsors. All the deals, discount codes, and ways to support the show are searchable and clickable over at Jordan Harbinger.com slash deals. And if you can't remember the name of a sponsor or a code, shoot me an email.

Jordan at Jordan Harbinger.com. I am very more than happy to surface that code for you. It is that important that you support those who support the show. Now for the rest of my conversation with Bruce Latibu. Holy moly, that sounds awful. But I guess at that point, you're pissing off mafia criminals. You're pissing off maybe actual government officials in the countries where you're operating. So did you have any idea what you guys were worth?

You said there was a contract on your life. Any idea how much it cost to try to kill you? I have no idea. I'd be so curious. Were you curious at all? Like, how much was it worth? I hope it was at least a couple million, you know? I hope for your sake that that's true, but let's be honest.

Life is cheaper over there. I think y'all probably got sold for a few hundred bucks if I had to guess, unfortunately. That may be probably very true. So sad. Maybe 50 bucks, who knows? Yeah, who knows? Maybe somebody did a pro bono because they didn't like you already. So take me through briefly in an operation.

Obviously, you can't tell me like who's involved, how, what, who, where, when exactly. but I'm curious kind of how this works. How long are you on location? Is it like a quick in and out or what? How does this sort of go down? I've developed an intelligence network in a lot of countries. What I mean by that is I have people there that are looking for these victims and they're doing a lot of the advance work for us.

Once we determine, like, let's just say we have a hotel and there's three girls, little girls in there, you know, eight, nine, ten years old that are being sex trafficked, and they've identified that. They'll go back two or three times to make sure that this is the actual case. And then when our team goes in, we have that location. We have sometimes photographs of the girls. And then we have about a seven-step process for rescue. And we'll go in.

Like the last time I was overseas, I had a guy that just retired as a Navy SEAL. I had a guy who was a mission aviator, a guy who's our top operator here in the United States, It's probably one of the best in the United States, my board member, Homeland Security guy, and a couple others. And so when we go into a place to do a rescue, we've done all the advance work. We know the ingress, the egress, we know how we're going to get in and out. We do all that. And then we roll in. The door opens up.

We go in, get these kids, get all the information we can so the police can make an arrest, which happens sometimes. Sometimes it doesn't. and then we get them into our survivor care program, which is we get them to a safe location. And then that's the journey, you know, to our motto is rescue, restore, and raise up. We want to rescue them. We want to raise them up or get them restored and then raise them up. Like, we have a girl that we rescued out of a brothel. She was 13 years old when we rescued her.

She had been there for a year or two. It was three girls. That was in 2017. We went back last year to interview a bunch of children. We do forensic interviews, which is a type of special interview with children. She is now trying to get into law school because she wants to become an advocate for trafficking victims. Wow. Another girl was a worship leader in her church that we had rescued out of sex trafficking.

And she's just up there with the biggest smile, just worshipping God. And we have just a list of all these kids that are doing so well. So we get them into the survivor care program, which we send over quite a bit of money overseas every month to make sure these kids are really well taken care of. Sure. So that kind of, I can't give you anything real definitive, but one time we rolled into a place out in the country, this is in Asia. And we knew that there was girls in there being trafficked. And the guy opens the gate, he thinks we're customers. They're all excited a bunch of foreigners are coming in, walks me down the hall.

I'm the first guy in, opens the door, and there's five little girls sitting there. The youngest was three years old. The oldest was about 10 or 12. And he offers them to me. We get the girls out. We're not real nice sometimes to those people. We get them all into a safe place, and they're all doing really well. We interviewed them last year, and they're just doing so well.

I, speaking of not being real nice to these people, it must be quite difficult to somebody who feels as passionately about this as you do to listen to some just piece of crap trash human tell you that a six-year-old child needs to work off his debt because his dad died on the job from exhaustion so he's selling him to random dudes in a cafe. I just feel like these guys are just begging to have a blade slipped into their rib cage.

And I realize that's a bad idea, especially in Pakistan, but it's got to be quite difficult to suppress your feelings in situations like the ones you're describing because I'm not a violent guy. I don't solve problems with violence, but I'm like, oh, the world would objectively be a better place if this guy was not alive in it.

That's how I would feel about these kinds of guys. I 100% agree with you. And I wish I had the license and liberty to do that. We've come very close, very, very close. I had a team one time that I had a guy that had 11 combat missions under his belt, another guy who is an executive protection specialist. It was a very, very solid team, very, very well trained. I had another guy that just came off a mission where he was tracking down pirates and eliminating

them. So it was a good team, but we knew we couldn't cross a line. And that was really hard because I could see it in everybody's eyes. They just wanted to just do what they're good at. And we got back to this one place. We're dropping these kids off that we had just rescued. And there was a little girl there that had been beaten so severely she was now. mentally challenged. She had been in labor slavery. And everybody had to take a walk. And when

everybody came back, there was no dry eyes there. There was a lot of tears that flowed that day. And these are the tough guys. These are the best of the best. The best we can do right now is to get these guys arrested. And we've done that with our border operations where we're searching cars or getting these guys arrested. I can't remember the exact number right now because I just got some new stats in. But it's around 35 traffickers, 40-some girls that have been rescued over these last months. I have all their pictures on a wall here, the traffickers. So they're waiting for trial.

Hopefully they're going to be convicted and they're going to go away for a long time. Yeah, hopefully. It's hard to imagine, though, that the, you know, I guess it just depends. Is it the local police in these rural areas that are just tolerant of this stuff and the actual other, some more centralized justice apparatus is not going to be lenient on it? Like, you just kind of wonder, does the corruption go all the way to the top? Like, are the judges on the take, or are they going to be like, wow, this is really gross? I don't care that you're bribing some local po-dunk police chief. You're going to prison. Yeah. I mean, that's obviously we hope for the

latter. It depends on the area. There's some high-level officials that have been arrested for human trafficking in some of these countries, and there's a lot of police that are corrupt. There's a lot of police that are good. We have to figure out who's who. Who's who, yeah. It just takes a long time. It takes a lot of advanced work and interviews and finding out, you know, from local people who are the good cops and who are the bad cops and creating those relationships. I'm actually leaving a couple weeks for a mission and we're opening up a second border operation and then we're going to go out into some areas and rescue some kids out of labor slavery. I don't know how many we can do this time, but we're creating some really good relationships in a lot of places.

And then in other places, the corruption is so big and so bad that you don't even know where to start. Yeah, you can't permeate it. It's like you're looking for the clean drop of water right in this bucket of slop. It's got to be just near impossible. The more the corruption permeates everything else, it's like, what can you even do? All you can really do is sort of like kidnap kids and bring them somewhere else out of slavery at that point. Do you just kind of, when you go to get the kids out, do you just sort of, or the adults, too,

do you just roll in and meet with the owners and tell them like, hey, man, so here's what's going to happen. I'm here with a bunch of tough guys and we're taking these people out of here and you're going to sit there and not do anything. Is that kind of the discussion that takes place? There's no negotiation. Right. I talk about this in my book where when I first started this, I had no one to learn from. So we were paying off people's debts, but then we found out that slave owners were going and buying kids without money. You know, other kids out of these slums. We eliminated that.

Took a little while to figure that out. But now we don't, there's no negotiation. There's no dialogue. We don't make agreements or bargain with them. We go in and take these children and adults. We've had a lot of bad people trying to track them down. They're trying to find where these kids are. And they're trying to find out who we are.

You know, we don't use our real names. We all have call signs. So when we're out there, we use the call signs, nobody hears our name. We don't have identification. If we get wrapped up by somebody, they're going to be able to identify us. We don't want to, you know, have them backtrack to where they can, you know, harm family members. Yeah.

I mean, my name is out there and getting pretty well known in some of these countries. Yeah. But I'm not too real concerned about it. I'm not sure how many slavers listen to this podcast. I guess we'll find out after we air it. We'll get the mail. Right. It's kind of, there's a little element of.

of comedy knowing that somewhere in rural Pakistan, they're like, who is the white man who goes by Golden Eagle, who took all of my slaves? Right? When the white men, they call Golden Eagle shows up, just run. He's going to take all your slaves. I think in my case, it's Bald Eagle? Yeah. I mean, you might not want to choose such a transparent code name, but yeah, that's solid.

Solid joke. I think it's good that you rehabilitate them, because one of my questions was, okay, if you take somebody who's born into slavery or been in slavery for a long time, you can't just go and be like, hey, man, want to ride out of here? Because now you've got a homeless, uneducated person who can't even count or read or write, and what are you going to do? Be like, go get a job at an accounting firm, and that's not going to happen, right? So the aftercare program seems like it's going to be probably one of the most important parts of this. And I mean, the upside is, and I'm not trying to make a joke here, but the people are used to hard work. So any job that isn't literal slavery,

in a brick kiln is going to feel much more relaxed in comparison to their previous circumstances. Oh, 100%. Yeah. Yeah, that's really important to us is we want to make sure that these children and adults have a chance. So we don't just rescue them and put them on the streets. We make sure they have homes, jobs. We get them in school. We've got some really good children's homes in a couple countries that are doing incredible work with these kids. We're working with one guy in a country that was actually he was a slave himself. And now he's running a school. So he understands the dynamics of that. And he's doing an incredible job. We've got another children's home where the girl that wants to be the lawyer, she actually was there for a couple years. And they did an

incredible job with her. That's really, really super important to all of us, make sure these kids are really well taken care of it. We support them until they're 18. They get married or they get a job. So we're in for the long haul. And that's sometimes a little stressful to make sure that through COVID, you know, when our finances plunged down, you know, we went off payroll. And I was the only one on payroll. I went off for almost a year. Oh, man. To make sure that these kids are more important than my paycheck. And so we make sure that they're taken care of and we get reports. And when I'm over there in a couple weeks, I'm going to get to see some of these kids again, which it just, it helps us to keep going when we see the success. Yeah, I bet. I mean, not a dry eye in the house. It's amazing that

little girl wants to become a lawyer. I don't know how that works in Pakistan. I know it's very possible because didn't they have a prime minister who was, I think, a female lawyer? I mean, I know she was assassinated, but that's besides a point. So good for her, though. I mean, imagine, I don't know if they elect people like prosecutors and stuff over there, but imagine that campaign. I'm passionate about our labor slavery issues. Oh, why? Well, actually, I was a slave and now I'm a lawyer. I mean, that's a hell of a platform to run on.

That little girl was actually in a different country. Oh, I see. Even though there is a lot of persecution against Christians, she's rising up through those ranks and getting education. A lot of these kids will get a hold to us later. They want higher education. We don't necessarily have the finances to do that, but we have helped some.

Yeah. We've helped some go on to higher education. Wow. That's just incredible. In the book, you often say that radicals are watching you or radicals are approaching you, intimidating you. Who are these people? They're not cops. They're not local random people. Is this like a militia, like Islamist fundamentalist stuff? Is it Taliban kind of stuff? A lot of that was Taliban. Okay. Some of it would have been other radical groups in those countries. Like if you go to any of those countries over there, you're going to find radical groups, militia groups, cartels. I just kind of lumped it all into just saying radicals. Sure. So the reason I wrote the book, Jordan, was that I felt like this information had to get out there. I struggled with it for a long time.

I thought I don't want to be in the crosshairs again. But the need to have people read about what's really going on there, it kind of overwhelmed any dread that I had of being crosshairs again. So it's being read by people all across the nation, and I get a lot of, I'm getting a lot of feedback on it. A lot of very positive. It's gotten all five-star reviews on Amazon. I love that. And you've got so many stories in there. There's one, the image in my mind of this 100, I think she was 100 years old, smiling ear to ear after being free for the first time in her life and like promising herself she wasn't going to die a slave. That's just, I mean, these people were not allowed to bathe.

They were not allowed to use the toilet or eat using utensils or even eat real nutritious clean food. I mean, they're just treated like dogs until the day you liberate them. And you just must be in tears every time you see somebody putting in there the first day as a free man or a free woman, especially if it's a kid or an old lady. It's just got to be so rewarding. Yeah, we've rescued quite a few older people out of slavery. A guy named James, who's a, his father was a slave. He was a slave. And we rescued him and his kids and his granddaughter.

her. And another time, there was an older lady. I don't know what her name was. I don't think I ever learned her name, but she was in her 90s, and she said, I have been praying my whole life to be free. I just want to go back to my ancestral village to die. We freed her. We got her back to her village, and it was a few weeks later she passed away as a free woman. And she kept touching my face and hugging me, and we've got pictures. There's videos on our website where people can see a lot of these videos and a lot of these pictures. Yeah, what an amazing thing to know that somebody who's been a whole slave their entire life, you know, just stepped into freedom like in a millisecond. Yeah. One minute they're a slave, one minute they're free and there's a whole new life ahead of

them. Oh, man. She'd probably never seen a white person before. Oh, most of these people, no. Yeah. So not only are you rescuing them, but you're white and you're bald. So it must be like, what is going on? This is the weirdest day of my life. Yeah, one of our rescue team operas. operators just shared, we just did a winter training down here in Alabama. One of the team members was sharing about how we'd go into places to interview kids and they didn't know my name. None of them know my name. But they knew the white bald guy. Yeah. They had rescued them. They recognized the bald head. It's bald eagle. He's back. Yeah. It's just, man, this is probably a dumb question. When did the people realize they're not going to be slaves anymore? Is it like when

you show up, when they're in the car, when they get out of the car. Like, there must be a moment of realization where they're like, wow, this is real. Like, we're getting fed. I don't have to go to work. Like, is it the next day? What's that moment? And what is that like? I think it's different for every one of them. You know, we have somebody that's speaking their language, no matter what country it is. And they're immediately saying, we're taking you to freedom. You're not going to have to do this anymore, whether it's from a brothel, a little girl that a woman's talking to her, or an 80-year-old slave or a five-year-old, we're communicating immediately about what's happening.

I don't think it kicks in for a while until we get back to maybe a place where we get them hot meals, and they're sitting there eating a hot meal, and our translator is saying, you never have to touch a brick again, or you don't ever, a man is not going to hurt you like they have been.

And so there's a process there. There is one time we had a slave that panicked and wanted to go back because that's all he ever knew. Sure. We had to sit with him and say, okay, we're going to get you a job where you can actually make money. And he was in a total panic, wanted to go back because he just never knew anything different. Never really had left that brickfield.

And all of a sudden he's in a car being transported into a big city or through a city. So there's a lot of shock that we try to mitigate, but it's still going to happen. That makes sense, right? You go back to what you know. But there is some sort of dark humor here. and that he leaves literal hell, right, in this brick field where he's being tortured and he goes into a Karachi and he's like,

you know what, no, take me back to the brickfield. This place is terrible. Because Karachi's chaotic and weird and gross in its own way from what I've heard. In many areas, I'm sure there's lovely areas as well. Sure. Yeah, it's just kind of the dark humor takes over in episodes like this.

I know we're running out of time here, but I'm curious and I think a lot of people are probably thinking about this. If you free the slaves, but the bad guys are still buying kids off the street and enslaving them and making them work in the brick kiln and assaulting them, how do you know if you're making a real dent in the problem?

Or does that not necessarily matter right now? You have to have the whole process working. You have to arrest the bad guys, which we are successful in some places and not as successful in some others. We actually have a place that we are working that the police will not go into. We go in, we rescue kids,

but they won't go in to make arrests. So we're working on a plan right now with the police how to do that. Are they scared of the guy that's there because he's powerful? Or is it just like they don't want to get shot at or whatever? They're afraid. There's a lot of guns, you know, I think they're afraid of how to do it. But we're doing training and teaching and I think we're going to be real successful. Other places, they're wanting to go right there and, man, they take down those criminals very quickly. We're pretty good at, in some areas and other areas, we're trying to figure out how we're going to make the process better. We can get the kids out,

but if you don't eliminate the bad guy, then, you know, and you have to work up the chain because, you know, you got low level and you got the high level people and the high level people just keep getting more people to be their traffickers, you know? So there's nothing easy. I tell people there's never been an easy day in the 15 years that I've been doing this full time. I can only imagine that that's the case. I think it goes without saying you're doing God's work here, man. Good on you for that. Stuff like this always makes me want to go hug my kids. Are you that groups like yours can actually end this practice? I know it's going to take a while. Maybe, you know, it won't happen in our lifetime, which is kind of sad to think about. But it seems like you're quite optimistic about this. I use the starfish story where, you know, the boys walk in the beach and he finds all these stranded starfish and he starts throwing them back in. And some guy walks up and says, what are you doing? He said, I'm throwing starfish back in. He goes, what does it matter? There's too many. And he picks up one starfish. And he said, it matters to this one and throws it. back in the water. I have to live by that. It matters to the one. We have t-shirts that say that.

It matters to the one. And so I'm optimistic that we can we can eliminate slavery for some people. I don't know if it's possible to eliminate slavery overall. I see people advertising, we're going to eliminate slavery and we're going to stop slavery in our lifetime. You'd have to bring down cartels. We've never eliminated drugs. We're not going to probably eliminate this, but we can make a difference in the lives of certain people. There's a lot of groups that have risen up. There are some really good ones and there's some really bad ones out there. But there's now where I started that I couldn't find any back years and years ago.

Now there's thousands and thousands of organizations around the world. So that's very encouraging that you have that many doing various types, whether it's education and legislation, you know, trying to change laws or, you know, being frontline guys like us, I think we will make a difference, everybody working together. Bruce Latabu, thank you for doing the show, man. I really appreciate this. It's so interesting, and you're obviously doing super important work, and I just want to thank you for your time. Well, I appreciate Jordan very much giving me an opportunity to talk about this. Really thankful that I was on your show. You're about to hear a preview of the Jordan Harbinger Show with Amanda Katarzi,

who was raised in a cult and later, sex and labor trafficked. The women were trained to be insanely submissive. Like, you could never say no to any man. And then the men were trained in a very military way. These people are well-armed and well-trained. And it's a whole group that thinks that the world is evil, and they need to repopulate the world with their people

to bring the kingdom of God. When you turn 13 in that culture, you're an adult. So to be 13 years old being courted by men twice my age, three times my age, to see if I would make a good wife. It was just kind of outrageous. So I moved to California to go to school, and I start training MMA. And my trafficker was there. He was actually one of my boxing coaches.

Then he's like, you know, I like you. And so now we're dating. So this is my first adult relationship. He's twice my age at this point. And then he would always take me up to his cabin. on the mountain, which was really far away from everybody else. No phone service, isolation, and it was on a Native American reservation. So whatever they wanted to do to me, they could.

Oops, you accidentally got getting raped. That was very common of going to go train, and then all of a sudden, now that you fought 12 rounds, now you're going to be raped. A girl ran a red light and teabone my truck. So I pull out my phone and I text my trafficker and I say, hey I almost just died a car accident and he said is your face fucked up and I'm like no

he said well you're still fuckable then something isn't right here this isn't who I want to be this isn't what I want and it was like I was coming out of water I had this moment of clarity and I knew something wasn't right and I knew this wasn't what I wanted

and I knew I needed to act fast in order to get out of that situation because I knew it'd get sucked back to hear how she escaped her dire situation, check out episode 631 of the Jordan Harbinger Show. A lot of these kids, man, they're just in conditions that are unnecessarily horrific. It seems like a country that tolerates this is essentially asking for evil people like this to set up shop. That's the problem I have with it. This is systemic.

The slave owners, obviously these are sociopathic sadists from the sound of it, right? This isn't just cheap labor. They're actually torturing these kids with iron bars, sexual assault, and that, that's in addition to the hellish conditions in which they live in work. It sounds like there's also loan sharking, indentured servitude, shadiness going on as well, like the kid who had to work off his father's funeral debt, but ended up never even getting close to paying off the interest. That was in the book. I can't remember if we actually talked about it here on the show. Even transporting the slaves out of this mess is dangerous. Of course, you got armed men chasing

you, you got government officials that don't like it. There's ambushes. There's IEDs. We didn't even get to that stuff. And it seems like with Bruce, a lot of the slave owners give him some version of, well, hey, if the government doesn't care, why should we care? It really does sound like this problem cannot be solved until the government gets behind doing something about this in the first place. And the problem with that is this is obviously a big business, like he said on the show. Nobody wants to mess with the economics of the situation, especially in order to save what, a bunch of kids that even their own parents don't seem to care about or are too poor to take care of. And that is a damn shame. I'm curious, I know we have Pakistani listeners that either

live abroad here in the West or possibly even in Pakistan that are just listening to this podcast. I am curious, have you all seen this? Have you all heard this? How widespread is this? How much is it common knowledge that this is happening in Pakistan itself? Like, do people in Karachi know that poor kids work in brick factories outside the city, or are they kind of blissfully ignorant of that? And there's nothing wrong with that. I don't know the crazy crap that's going on around the United States either. I'm just curious. I can see this being an issue that is out of sight, out of mind. So if you're in Pakistan or you lived in Pakistan or you currently living in Pakistan, definitely shoot me a note, Jordan at Jordan Harbinger.com. I'm very curious what you think

of this episode. Creative stories, by the way, written in the book from the perspective of the rescuers and also from the perspective of the kids being rescued. So I found that to be quite interesting and unique as well. All things Bruce Latibu will be in the show notes at Jordan Harbinger.com. You can also ask the AI chatbot on the website that is new and improved these days. Transcripts are in the show notes as well. Advertis, deals, discount codes, ways to support the show all at Jordan Harbinger.com slash deals. Please consider supporting those who support the show. Also, our newsletter where every week the team and I dig into an older episode of the show and dissect the lessons from it. If you're a fan of the show, you want to recap of highlights and takeaways,

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