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…
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Human trafficking and slavery cast a vast, ominous shadow over the modern world, with roughly 40 million people suffering as slaves worldwide and an inconceivable $150 billion changing hands annually as a result. This exploitation takes on many guises: forced labor in factories, fields, mines, and households, as well as the unspeakable horrors of sex trafficking — ensnaring both adults and children in an industry built on greed and senseless cruelty.
On this episode, we’re joined by Bruce Ladebu, Children’s Rescue Initiative founder and author of Out of the Slave Fields: Liberating Children from Brick Kilns and Brothels to discuss the 20 years he’s spent rescuing hundreds of people from slavery and trafficking around the world in places like Ukraine, Pakistan, Africa, Russia, and even the United States. Here, he shares the challenges of safely liberating victims from their sadistic “owners” and the importance of providing physical and psychological rehabilitation to help them recover from trauma. He emphasizes the need for continued efforts to combat human trafficking and highlights the impact his organization has made in empowering children enslaved in brick kilns and other forms of forced labor. Overall, we try to focus on the stories of hope that prevail through such unfathomable evil and encourage those who have money or time to offer to get involved in the fight for freedom Bruce and his team face every day. Listen, learn, and enjoy!
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Amanda Catarzi survived a cult-dominated childhood and abuse at the hands of sex and labor traffickers. Since then, she’s helped save countless victims. Listen to her story on episode 631: Amanda Catarzi | Overcoming Cult Life and Sex Trafficking here!
Thanks, Bruce Ladebu!
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Resources from This Episode:
- Out of the Slave Fields: Liberating Children from Brick Kilns and Brothels by Bruce Ladebu | Amazon
- Actively Fighting the Human Trafficking Epidemic | Children’s Rescue Initiative
- Children’s Rescue Initiative | Instagram
- Children’s Rescue Initiative | Facebook
- Children’s Rescue Initiative | Twitter
- Bruce Ladebu | LinkedIn
- Bonded Labor in Pakistan | DW
- Modern Slavery: Pakistan’s Latest Climate Change Curse | Al Jazeera
- How Millions Are Trapped In Modern-Day Slavery At Brick Kilns In Pakistan | Insider News
- Why Escaping Modern Day Slavery In Pakistan Is So Risky | Insider News
- Findings on the Worst Forms of Child Labor: Ukraine | US Department of Labor
- Krokodil: How ‘Flesh-Eating Zombie Drug’ Is Causing a Global Crisis | The Conversation
- Walk Free | Global Slavery Index
- The Children Trapped in Bangladesh’s Brothel Village | The Guardian
- The Super Bowl: Gridiron Dreams, Human Trafficking Nightmares | Thomson Reuters
- Organization Works to Prevent Sex Trafficking before Arnold Sports Festival | WBNS
- A Year of Las Vegas Sex Trafficking: ‘What the Study Shows Is Just Appalling’ | 3 News
- Vegas Tunnels | Channel 5 with Andrew C
- The Terrifying Truth Behind NBC’s ‘To Catch A Predator’ | Collider
- “This Crooked System”: Police Abuse and Reform in Pakistan | HRW
- Dubai: The Megacity Secretly Built by Slaves | Vice
- Nathan Paul Southern and Lindsey Kennedy | Sourcing Cyber-Slavery | Jordan Harbinger
- Nury Turkel | A Witness to China’s Uyghur Genocide | Jordan Harbinger
- Pakistan: Saving Christian Slaves | ARTE.tv Documentary
- Unveiling Islam: An Insider’s Look at Muslim Life and Beliefs by Ergun Caner and Emir Fethi Caner | Amazon
- ISIS Religiously Sanctions Organ Harvesting, in Keeping with Its Tradition of Deplorability on Every Conceivable Axis. | The New Republic
- David Kilgour | The Heartless Art of Forced Organ Harvesting | Jordan Harbinger
- Remi Adeleke | The Ex-Royal/Ex-SEAL Who Fights Organ Harvesting | Jordan Harbinger
- “No One Can Hurt You Like Family”: What We Know About Familial Trafficking Identification and Response | The Community Policing Dispatc
- Miki Mistrati | The Dark Side of the Chocolate Industry | Jordan Harbinger
- Child Labour behind Smart Phone and Electric Car Batteries | Amnesty International
- Siddharth Kara | How the Blood of the Congo Powers Our Lives | Jordan Harbinger
- The Tale of the Starfish | The Starfish Foundation
976: Bruce Ladebu | Stories of Hope in the Fight Against Slavery
This transcript is yet untouched by human hands. Please proceed with caution as we sort through what the robots have given us. We appreciate your patience!
[00:00:00] Jordan Harbinger: Coming up next on the Jordan Harbinger show.
[00:00:03] Bruce Ladebu: We had checked into a hotel after we were there for about two hours. They came in and said, we have to move you to another place in the hotel because you're gonna replace the 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.
[00:00:31] Jordan Harbinger: 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, 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.
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Just visit Jordan harbinger.com/starch 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 Anon conspiracy theories. This is really happening in places like Pakistan, for example, and today's guest, Bruce Laue, is on a mission to free these folks, and he is taken a direct approach, bringing trained, hired guns, so to speak, into factories and farms run by slaves, taking them outta 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 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 Labu.
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 talked 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.
So I was grateful to meet you and be introduced to you. Oh, and thanks for writing an audio book slash book just so that you could, uh, be on the show. I appreciate that. Oh, you're, 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/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've seemed like fiction.
[00:03:19] Bruce Ladebu: I first encountered human trafficking back in the nineties when I was traveling through the former Soviet countries. Mm-Hmm. We had heard a little bit about XKGB became the, the new mafia over there, and, 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, uh, in Kiev, and we just saw horrific things. We talked to local people and they talked about the girls that disappear, 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. Uh, 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.
I had to come up with people that would go into crazy areas with me. Mm-Hmm. And then, uh, in 2009, I was actually in Pakistan doing some, uh, 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, I'm looking at hundreds of slaves in these fields and had got into a dialogue with, uh, my host in the book, he's called Emmanuel.
He said, oh, you can't do that here. It's impossible. They'll kill you. And I said, I, we have to, these people are suffering, they're being beaten. A lot of 'em are dying. So before I left, we had rescued, uh, 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, uh, hundreds and hundreds of people out of really bad circumstances. And in that meantime, I decided, well, if I'm gonna raise money, I'm gonna have to be a more official. So we developed a children's rescue initiative.
[00:05:19] Jordan Harbinger: 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, then you 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. 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?
[00:05:53] Bruce Ladebu: 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 Mariupol, which is now, um, 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, uh, areas with local people, sometimes pastors, sometimes business people, and they'd show us where these children were.
You didn't see 'em during the day very often, but if you went underground, you would see them. If you were out at night, you would see them. A lot of them were orphaned. We found out a lot of 'em 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 'em. I think at that time we read that there was over a hundred thousand street children in, uh, just, uh, Odessa and Kiev. That is
[00:06:49] Jordan Harbinger: a crazy huge number. I used to live in a town that had, I think a hundred thousand people in it. The population of Iceland has roughly what, a hundred thousand.
So if you have a hundred thousand street kids in just a couple of cities, that's an enormous number of homeless. That's Are you sure about that number? 'cause now that I think about it, that's such a huge number. It's unbelievable.
[00:07:07] Bruce Ladebu: Well, that was a statistic I think that's even in my book. Wow. And I have the source, I don't remember what that source is right now, but maybe that was just part of the country.
Mm-Hmm. Maybe it was the whole country, but I know it was a enormous number of children. Yeah. Everywhere we went, we found these children. We started working with a guy named ti, who's become a, 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 under underground, into tunnels, into sewers, there was children in there.
So it was pretty horrifying. He would take these kids and put 'em in these makeshift hospitals, aut 'em, had, uh, you know, flesh eating diseases from homemade methamphetamines. We got to visit all those places. It was pretty horrifying.
[00:07:53] Jordan Harbinger: Is the homemade meth? 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 the I they call it that because it makes your skin scaly and, and they use gasoline in there or something and they inject it.
It's so gross. Is that what you're talking about?
[00:08:09] Bruce Ladebu: I believe it's similar, yeah. These kids, the skin was just falling off. Oh, you know, their arms and legs and, and there wasn't a whole lot they could do. They didn't have the money for medicine, so they tried to just be with these children while they, uh, either recovered or they passed away.
Oh my God, it's so
[00:08:28] Jordan Harbinger: awful. So. Slavery is estimated at approximately $150 billion a year globally. You gotta wonder how they quantify that, right? Because it's such an underground, hidden thing. Who's keeping the stats? I mean, that's gotta be a tough number to calculate, but either way, $150 billion a year is absolutely enormous.
Uh, 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,
[00:09:03] Bruce Ladebu: the estimates, according to most organizations now was about 40 million worldwide. Wow. They're in either sex trafficking or labor slavery. That's adults and children. That's adults and children.
[00:09:16] Jordan Harbinger: Okay. Still a humongous number. So, 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.
[00:09:36] Bruce Ladebu: No, it's, uh, uh, throughout Asia there's the Global Slavery Index estimates that there is no country that, uh, does not have slaves now.
Mm-Hmm. Of some amount. But India's estimate to have 17 million just itself in bonded labor or in, in outright slavery. Bonded labor is when they owe money, it would be debt bondage. They create a system where they can never pay it back. So we've, uh, rescued slaves that they're third generation slave. Their grandfather borrowed $20 for a medical procedure and they were put in and they can't pay their way out.
Wow. Asia's probably the biggest area in the Middle East. Middle East Asia.
[00:10:21] Jordan Harbinger: That's wild that you could, so you, it's almost like North Korea. You can be born into a labor camp there in your 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 al, 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.
[00:10:53] Bruce Ladebu: 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. Yeah. The average age was eight, nine, and 10. So this is pervasive through the Middle East and Asia, but it also is happening here in ever increasing ways.
In the US 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 Arnold cla, the bodybuilding competition. That is correct. It's the second biggest uh,
[00:11:36] Jordan Harbinger: trafficking event. Really. I've heard the Super Bowl thing and that makes sense, right?
'cause you get a ton of people coming for a football game from all over the world. So all the hotels are full. So PE 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. Most, 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.
[00:12:04] Bruce Ladebu: Well, I have not been there, but we've read different articles. I've talked to different people who've done, uh, investigations during that time. Like there's a group that has, has just gone down to Las Vegas to do, uh, searches for missing children down there. Mm-Hmm. 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
[00:12:38] Jordan Harbinger: mentioned tunnels in Las Vegas?
I don't, 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,
[00:12:46] Bruce Ladebu: yeah. One of my team members has gone into those on a regular basis, created, uh, relationships looking for missing girls or boys.
Yeah. There's a lot of underground stuff that happens, uh, unfortunately in a lot of these cities. It would
[00:13:01] Jordan Harbinger: 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 released some water from a reservoir, you're gonna die in there horribly.
Right. It's gonna 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 'em and you're a kid. That's right. Horrifying. That's
[00:13:31] Bruce Ladebu: terrible.
[00:13:32] Jordan Harbinger: Mm-Hmm.
[00:13:33] Bruce Ladebu: Ugh. It is.
There's a whole underground world, uh, even in this country. Mm-Hmm. I was just watching some videos this morning of, uh, 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? Mm-Hmm. Every hour. Some new guys coming to have sex with a teenage prepubescent sometimes.
Yeah. Girl. There's a dark side to, to our country.
[00:14:00] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah.
[00:14:00] Bruce Ladebu: I
[00:14:00] Jordan Harbinger: think it's important to, to highlight that because it's real 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 outta pedophiles anytime soon.
Right. So, right. I, this is, it is not supposed to be an episode where the pot calls the kettle black. It's just sort of to highlight the whole problem. So I, I think that's a good idea that we highlight our own Yeah. Issues here too. You mentioned the, the children in labor slavery in, in Asia especially, and I, I remember a buddy of mine in college, he grew up in India.
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 is like, yeah. I mean it was fun 'cause we had house boys, but like, it gets old after a while and I, that word never really landed right with me. Right. Because it's, I'm like, that's gotta be a euphemism.
What is a house boy? Like where are their parents? 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.
[00:15:00] Bruce Ladebu: 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, doing labor.
We rescued three girls one time that the mother sold them to a man for labor cleaning the house. He impregnated the, 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, the work in some of those countries. I'm assuming it's not
[00:15:40] Jordan Harbinger: 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 sons ends up with three little girls, that's weird man.
And everyone knows 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.
[00:16:25] Bruce Ladebu: Well, it does. We've had some people arrested, uh, before for. Various things, but a lot of times the police will just turn the 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. Mm-Hmm. It's just kind of accepted to be part of the the societal norm. Geez. 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 and 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 I. Make reports and stuff, but everybody in the neighborhood knows this goes on, but nobody seems to do anything about it.
Geez.
[00:17:24] Jordan Harbinger: Cafe, obviously being a euphemism for some sort of weird illegal brothel with underage girls in it. That's so weird to me.
[00:17:31] Bruce Ladebu: No, really, 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 or boys. Same with hotels, same with bars.
And we've documented all this. We have it all on 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 yeah, it's done. A woman or a girl, they can sell multiple times. It's so pretty. Horrific.
Horrific.
[00:18:04] Jordan Harbinger: 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 Petto 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.
[00:18:24] Bruce Ladebu: 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.
[00:18:52] Jordan Harbinger: Okay. Well, that's really, yeah. Horrific is really the only, I mean, you can't really overstate how gross, uh, this all is. It's evil. It's evil. Yeah. And I, yeah, usually I don't, I would, I've tried to avoid hyperbole on the show, but you can't really use hyperbole when you're talking about enslaving children.
Mm-hmm. For stuff like that, there's no, yeah, there's no such thing as a 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, this is 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's 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 such, possibly the majority of the offending.
So it'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 gonna 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've less opportunity and this would just ha, it's not like this would all immediately go underground, but still happen just as much.
It could be cut way down. Sure, there would, it would still exist, but it could be cut way, way down. Because those guys would go like, ah, well okay, now I'm gonna 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 the, if the government would do like anything against this, you could cut the instances way down, but they're not
[00:21:12] Bruce Ladebu: 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 the law to have, you know, a child under 14 doing labor. It was against the law to have slaves.
[00:21:28] Jordan Harbinger: Sure.
[00:21:29] Bruce Ladebu: 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 in my book. Well, I don't talk about, but when you get into the world of slavery, it's just beyond evil really.
[00:21:48] Jordan Harbinger: 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, 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, 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.
[00:22:27] Bruce Ladebu: I don't know if there is a, uh, a limit to how slaves are used. You know, we've found children in textile factories, in rope factories, brick kilns, working in, uh, kitchens to clean dishes, rock quarry's, uh, agriculture.
They use these children, uh, in the, in the fields in a lot of these countries, rice patties, the list is endless, really, of where you're gonna find enslaved, uh, 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. Mm-Hmm. There's a, a different healing process there.
The ones that are born into it seem to recover quicker. That's all they've ever known. Right. And all of a sudden they're presented with a brand new life where the. 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, the roads and they, she gets picked up and ends up in sex trafficking.
That emotional trauma takes a lot longer. Yeah. But we are seeing great success.
[00:24:03] Jordan Harbinger: I gotta tell you, man, that some of those stories were, 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 and are like, I can no longer feed these kids. And it's like, oh, I'm gonna give them a job at my clothing factory and it's gonna be fun and they're gonna be with other kids. And it's like, just kidding. We're selling 'em to sex trafficking organization, or we're gonna chop 'em 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 do 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, alright lads, load up the vans.
We're gonna go kidnap some kids whose parents just got murdered and then sell them. You have deceased to be human at that point.
[00:25:00] Bruce Ladebu: 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 and these poor areas or even wealthier areas.
Mm-Hmm. And they'll offer free scholarships. They'll offer jobs, 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 there was a, um, employment center.
[00:25:37] Jordan Harbinger: Mm-Hmm.
[00:25:37] Bruce Ladebu: 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 'em to other countries, you know, never to be seen again. We helped get one girl out of the middle East, out of, uh, Dubai. She was an African girl and it took a while, but we were able to, uh, we couldn't go physically do it, but we were able to give, uh, 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, uh, now she's back with her family in Africa.
[00:26:17] Jordan Harbinger: You are listening to the Jordan Harbinger Show with our guest Bruce Labu. We'll be right back. This episode is sponsored in part by AG G one. It's important to me that the only supplements that I take are of the highest quality. For over 10 years, I've been drinking ag one. My friends started the company, and I'm afraid to put bad stuff in my body.
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[00:28:57] Jordan Harbinger: 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@sixminutenetworking.com. Yeah, you probably don't have a podcast. You're not trying to book guests. Doesn't matter. This is a course about improving your relationship, building skills, inspiring other people to wanna develop a relationship with you.
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So come on and join us. You'll be in smart company where you belong. You can find the course@sixminutenetworking.com. Now back to Bruce Laue. 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. 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. He sent me tons of evidence, photographs, all the data on the bosses, the employees, the how the scam works, screenshots of everything from the inside.
So it turned out to be real. I worked with the FBIA 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, they, yeah, like you said that they have a job for you and you're gonna 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'll beat you with, uh, 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 gonna be what they told you in the ad. Right. It's gonna 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, the kingdom. I mean, they're not cool with that at all.
[00:31:19] Bruce Ladebu: 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, uh, her husband. Mm-Hmm. They were able to, to track her down. And I just got a call about four months ago from uh, 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. So I didn't have any, uh, resources there. So I got ahold of, uh, 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.
[00:32:00] Jordan Harbinger: Cyber slavery is kind of what that's termed that We did an episode on that 8 33 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, you know, 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. 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 Right. Sent in to this area to maybe never be seen again. And sometimes they get ahold 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 wanna 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 wanna leave by telling your fam. And so they'll send videos like, yeah, we're gonna beat you up.
Send a video of the 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 8 33 where we really covered that in depth. A lot of the text messages that you get that are like, hi Sharon, wanna 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. Mm-Hmm. 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, hey, 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 in 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 it's you, you kind of hinted that this is a deliberate strategy and in Pakistan I think you were really much more clear on they're keeping Christians enslaved. What? What's that all about? Because I'd never heard of that.
[00:34:24] Bruce Ladebu: 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. Mm-Hmm. 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.
A hundred percent for slavery. Like we talked to one mom who just kept selling her children. These guys would come in, she'd sell 'em for however much, you know, maybe equivalent of 500 US dollars, I don't know, which is a enormous amount of money. Uh, 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 fight out what was going on Exactly. But we couldn't on the, on the bumpy roads. But that was an observation that I, I've made in a lot of different places. Okay, why are these people so poor? I mean, there's always, there's poor populations everywhere.
But then you see and hear in, in our, you know, the, uh, local authorities. I've met with dignitaries in Pakistan and ask 'em a 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, uh, you know, observations, somewhat subjective, but there was a lot of, uh, a lot of observation there.
[00:36:18] Jordan Harbinger: 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?
[00:36:34] Bruce Ladebu: Well, that's getting into, uh, some pretty serious dialogue and I'm not sure I want to go quite there.
I've had enough death threats on my, 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 Unveiling Islam, which I think is a, an eye-opening book. I sat with a, a member of parliament one time and I interviewed them and I asked why this is a 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, you know, verse of anything, but he was a pretty high level official in Pakistan and I, I've had slave owners look at me and say, it's our right. It's our right to hold slave. It's our right to, uh, hold these Christians. They're not equal with us.
[00:37:22] Jordan Harbinger: Mm.
[00:37:23] Bruce Ladebu: I have that documented and recorded by some very powerful slave owners.
[00:37:28] Jordan Harbinger: By the way I looked at that book, it does look interesting 'cause 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. 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, 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.
'cause 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.
Mm-Hmm. Yeah, I can understand not wanting to make that problem worse. Okay.
[00:38:28] Bruce Ladebu: So yeah, that's when I, when I mentioned, uh, religious based slavery, there are different belief systems. You know, you go into, India has 17 million people in some form of dead bodies outright slavery, sex trafficking, and that's an enormous population within a, a Hindu country.
Yeah. When you go into Pakistan, you have millions of people in slave there. And you can find the same in many of the other countries over there. And you can find that in Thailand, you can find it in China, has a enormous amount of people enslaved and, 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, it's cartel based or it's whatever, you know. $150 billion a year. There's a motivation there. Yeah. It's, uh, mo money.
[00:39:20] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah. You could rationalize anything if that much money's 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 gotta make your job harder. I mean, you see these like q kooky Q Anon 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, ah, 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's, but then the, the real slavery and abuse victims get wrapped up in all these like, conspiracy theory things. And it makes harder, it makes it harder for people to get believed and solve the problem. Do you run into that
[00:40:00] Bruce Ladebu: at all? All the time. Yeah. I mean, I've had people talk about, you know, there's. A hundred thousand kids in tunnels under the United States and Right in Washington DC and I've never seen proof and I'm out there all the time.
Mm-Hmm. And we have people that work here in the US and they're doing investigations. We've never come across that, but I do believe that there's some pretty high level pedophile networks. Oh, for sure. I'm sure they're, you know,
[00:40:25] Jordan Harbinger: like, look at the Epstein thing. The Jeffrey Epstein. Epstein. Yeah.
[00:40:27] Bruce Ladebu: He was just the tip of the iceberg.
Yeah. Not just here, but in, in, you know, countries all over the world, you're gonna have these type of things and you get into people drinking blood for the, all that stuff of children. I, 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 on 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. I have no idea how big that is.
I don't know how widespread that is because my experience with that is limited. We have come across it, we've heard stories, but I haven't seen widespread evidence like I can prove as, as far as slavery, you know?
[00:41:19] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah. Organ trafficking, I've done an episode on as well, mostly with respect to China, episode 4 97, but it's not just China doing it.
I mean it's, it's all over the place. More recently, a guy you might know, Remy Aliki, episode 8 68, he is an ex Navy Seal. He was also like Nigerian royalty, which is pretty interesting, and he fights organ harvesting and trafficking. He's got some really disturbing stories of that happening. Same story as you sort of just said before.
If 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 ear. Kidneys or one ear. 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 kidney removal.
And they're like, whatcha 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. So
[00:42:36] Bruce Ladebu: I haven't heard of that. But I, we were part of an investigation. We got contacted by a federal agency and they wanted us to do some work down, uh, in the Dominican Republic where. They were, um, 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.
Ugh. And then one of my board members is a, 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 US 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've interviewed people that, where that's taken place in their lives where you take a
[00:43:23] Jordan Harbinger: 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've 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 gonna get their hands on that tape later on.
[00:43:52] Bruce Ladebu: Well, we have been armed in different places when we can work directly with the police, 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, uh, are there to be the door kicker, front man, 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 to that. I have some of these, uh, young badass guys. Mm-Hmm. 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.
[00:44:39] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah.
[00:44:39] Bruce Ladebu: Like one guy said, please don't hurt anybody because they will come after us. Which he meant Christians. Right. And, uh, in other places we're doing this where, uh, like we rescued some girls out of a brothel that was attached to a police station.
That's insane. So we had to quietly, quietly slip in, get these kids outta there and disappear. So there's a lot of, a lot of different dynamics. We'll carry non-lethal. Mm-Hmm. AIDS with us. Wow. I always tell people that we, what we walk and love, but carry a big stick.
[00:45:11] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah. Whew, 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, it's 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.
[00:45:27] Bruce Ladebu: 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 yeah, we have to do something and. 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, uh, get them out. Nobody ever knew we were there, so. Well, surely
[00:45:47] Jordan Harbinger: somebody's protesting you le leaving with all of their, I don't wanna say employees 'cause they're slaves, I guess.
Yeah. With all their slaves.
[00:45:53] Bruce Ladebu: Yeah. Well, usually a, 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. Mm-Hmm. At least we think she did because nobody ever pursued us. Right. Persuasive
[00:46:10] Jordan Harbinger: words can go a long way.
I love that you tell them it's gonna air on the BBC and I'm guessing they don't know that BBC is short for Bruce's broadcasting company.
[00:46:19] Bruce Ladebu: That's right. Yeah. Yeah. We've done, we've done that quite a bit, you know, told 'em we're journalists and uh, they look at the cameras and they're looking at us and. All of a sudden they get very, uh, compliant.
Geez. They're screaming and yelling and then we say, well, we can air this, we can broadcast that 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.
[00:46:46] Jordan Harbinger: I think that's wise. 'cause it's only, it, 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 just have you outright banned from the country somehow, which I kind of assume is only a matter of time.
I'm, 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?
[00:47:12] Bruce Ladebu: I, you know, 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, and so they're, they're kind of known, but most of 'em can get in and out anywhere, and there's no media attention on 'em or there's no focus on them like there is on me. But I get in and outta places all the time because, you know, we are working with, uh, government officials and police in quite a few locations.
[00:47:45] Jordan Harbinger: You don't have a super common name either. Like, I've never met anybody else with the last name Labu. Like, you're the only one I know. So if they're on the lookout for you, it's not okay, we gotta 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 and out of Pakistan.
Five times a year or whatever.
[00:48:02] Bruce Ladebu: Yeah. I don't go there anymore. Mm-Hmm. 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, we just had a training down in Orange Beach, Alabama town's kind of adopted us down there. Wonderful people. We did a big gala fundraiser there, which was very successful. But he was telling me, 'cause 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 drown 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. 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 drowned when they're trying to 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 wanna say
[00:49:25] Jordan Harbinger: the country.
Africa. Africa, okay.
[00:49:27] Bruce Ladebu: Yeah. Africa. There's a, there's a lot of slavery in Africa. Yeah. We've done a lot of work on both coasts there and, uh, 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. They, I was in one place in uh, Pakistan where we just got there and I saw my host throw a guy up against the wall.
He was a slave owner. He was, I thought he was gonna kill him, and he found out he had beaten two little girls to death that morning in a rage.
[00:49:59] Jordan Harbinger: Wow.
[00:50:00] Bruce Ladebu: 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.
[00:50:10] Jordan Harbinger: You
[00:50:10] Bruce Ladebu: know?
[00:50:12] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah. I would imagine you do attract unwanted attention. You mentioned in the book there's a, there was a hotel where that 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.
[00:50:26] Bruce Ladebu: 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 in 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 uh, after we were there for about two hours, they came in and said, we have to move you to another place in the hotel because they're gonna replace the carpet here.
I'm like, okay, that doesn't even make sense. Mm-Hmm. They would know. Mm-Hmm. They were gonna replace the carpet, they wouldn't had his check in here. Well, they were preparing the rooms, they were bugging the rooms. Mm-hmm. 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 gonna say just 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, uh, cars bugged.
I think it was a borrowed car. Yeah. A lot of different things like that take place. Did the police follow you around when you're
[00:51:31] Jordan Harbinger: there to intimidate you or just to see what you're doing at all,
[00:51:35] Bruce Ladebu: 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, to travel with us.
You know, you know, they're given reports all day long and we were really, weren't allowed to go anywhere without this one police officer with us. And we're still doing rescues. I'm like, how are they allowing us to do this? You know? It was just, uh, yeah, kinda weird. But I think it was because it would've been huge political ramifications if we would, had they not let us, you know, they were trying to say, Hey, we'll, 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. So, wait, what happened there? You gotta tell that story. I found out we had, I had a contract on my life. This was in Pakistan. I had a contract on my life, a fowa. My picture had been passed around. In one case we had gone into, uh, some brick fields.
The slave owner wasn't there, so we loaded up 80 slaves and took off and got 'em into the, you know, our underground railroad type of scenario where they'd go town to town and they would 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 they, 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'm 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 in my luggage saying I needed medicine. And so we got back here. I, I went right to the doctor and, uh, 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, uh, 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. And, 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 on the plane home. And, but I got over that one. That was in 2013. And 2015 was when I, I got poisoned.
It took me about a year and a half to recover. Wow. What was going on? Like you just couldn't digest. Uh, was that also just like It was, uh, neuropathy. It was like my skin was on fire and ooh, I lost my ability to sweat for a few months and finally decided that I had to do something about it. 'cause if I did anything where I'd heat up and started sweat, it was, I felt like a thousand fire ants biting me.
Oh my God. So I told my wife, I said, I'm gonna go out and I'm gonna 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, of that. But then I went to a natural path and he put me on a bunch of vitamin re, uh, regimen and some mushroom stuff and to help regenerate nerves and.
I came out of it and got right back into doing rescues. So
[00:54:54] Jordan Harbinger: this is the Jordan Harbinger show with our guest Bruce Labu. We'll be right back. This episode is sponsored in part by Better Help. Have you checked your social feel gauge lately? Are you running on empty or is your tank brimming with social zeal?
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You're pissing off mafia criminals. You're pissing off maybe actual government officials in the countries where you're operating. So the, did you have any idea what you guys were worth? You said there was a contract on your life. You had any idea how much it cost to try to kill you? I have no idea. I'd be so curious.
Are, were you curious at all? Like how much was it worth?
[00:58:04] Bruce Ladebu: I hope it was at least a couple million. You know,
[00:58:08] Jordan Harbinger: I, I hope for your sake that that's true, but let's be honest. Yeah. Life is cheaper over there. I think y'all probably got sold for a few hundred bucks if I had to guess. Unfortunately,
[00:58:17] Bruce Ladebu: that may be, that may be, uh, probably very true.
So sad. Maybe 50 bucks. Who knows? Yeah,
[00:58:22] Jordan Harbinger: who knows? Maybe somebody did a pro bono because they didn't like you already. Um, so. Take me through briefly an, 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, or what and how does this sort of go down?
[00:58:43] Bruce Ladebu: I've developed an intelligence network in a lot of countries.
[00:58:47] Jordan Harbinger: Mm-Hmm.
[00:58:47] Bruce Ladebu: 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, uh, little girls in there, you know, 8, 9, 10 years old that are being sex trafficked.
Mm-Hmm. 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. 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, 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 roll. We've done all the advance work. Mm-Hmm. We know the ingress, the egress.
We know how we're gonna 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, uh, we get them into our survivor care program, which is we get 'em to a safe location.
And then that's the journey, you know, to, uh, our motto is Rescue, restore and raise up.
[01:00:11] Jordan Harbinger: Mm-Hmm.
[01:00:12] Bruce Ladebu: We wanna rescue them, we wanna 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, we do, um, 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 the 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 worshiping God.
And we have just a list of all these kids that are doing so well. So we get 'em into the Survivor Care program, which we send over, you know, quite a bit of money overseas every, every month to make sure these kids are really well taken care of.
[01:01:05] Jordan Harbinger: Sure.
[01:01:06] Bruce Ladebu: So that kind of, I can't give you anything real definitive, but one time we rolled into a, 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, you know, 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, and they're all doing really well. We interviewed them, uh, last year and they're just doing so well.
[01:01:45] Jordan Harbinger: I, speaking of not being real nice to these people, it must be quite difficult as somebody who feels as passionately about this as you do to listen to some just piece their crap.
Trash human tell you that a 6-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, 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, it's gotta 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
[01:02:29] Bruce Ladebu: kinds of guys. I 100% agree with you and, uh, I wish I had the, the license and liberty to, 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 a 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 Wow.
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. Everybody's eyes, they just wanted to just, mm-hmm. 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. There was a little girl there that had been beaten so severely.
She was now mentally challenged. She had been in a, 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. We're 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. Mm-Hmm. Hopefully they're gonna be convicted and they're gonna go away for a long time.
[01:04:06] Jordan Harbinger: 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 more centralized justice apparatus is not gonna be lenient on it?
Like, you just kinda wonder does the corruption go all the way to the top? Like are the judges on the take or are they gonna be like, wow, this is really gross. I don't care that you were bribing some local podunk police chief. You're going to prison. Yeah, I mean that's obviously, we
[01:04:32] Bruce Ladebu: hope for the latter. It depends on the area.
Mm-Hmm. There's some high level officials that have been arrested for human trafficking in some of these countries and there 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 Mm-Hmm.
Finding out, you know, from local people who are the good cops and who are the bad cops, and creating those relationships. I'm, I'm actually leaving a couple weeks for a mission and we're opening up a second border operation and then we're gonna go out into, uh, some areas and rescue some kids outta 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.
[01:05:19] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah. You can't permeate it. It's like you're looking for the clean drop of water right in, in this bucket of slop.
It's gotta 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 gonna happen.
I'm here with a bunch of tough guys and we're taking these people outta here and you're gonna sit there and not do anything like I Is that kind of the
[01:05:52] Bruce Ladebu: 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 with that money.
Other kids outta these slums. We eliminated. That took a little while to figure that out, but Mm-Hmm. Now we don't, there's no negotiation. There's no dialogue. We don't make agreements or, 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, you know, by somebody, they're gonna be able to identify us.
We don't want to Mm-hmm. 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, so, yeah. But I'm, I'm not too real concerned about it. I'm
[01:06:56] Jordan Harbinger: not sure how many slavers listen to this podcast. I guess we'll find out after we, we air it, we'll get the mail right.
It's kind of, there's a a little element 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? There's when the white man, they call a golden eagle shows up, just run. He's gonna take all your slaves. Well, I think
[01:07:17] Bruce Ladebu: in my, I think in my case, it's bald eagle
[01:07:20] Jordan Harbinger: bald.
Yeah. I mean, you might not want to choose such a transparent code name, but yeah, that's solid. Yeah. Solid joke. I think it's good that you rehabilitate them. 'cause 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, wanna ride outta here?
'cause now you got a homeless, uneducated person who can't even count or read or write, and what are you gonna do? Be like, go get a job at an accounting firm and that's not gonna happen. Right. So the aftercare program seems like it's gonna be probably the, 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 gonna feel much more relaxed in comparison to their previous circumstances.
[01:08:08] Bruce Ladebu: Oh, a hundred percent. Yeah. Yeah. That's really important to us, is we wanna make sure that these children and adults have a chance. So we don't just rescue them and put 'em on the streets, we make sure they have homes, jobs, we get 'em 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 a, actually, he was a slave himself and now he's, uh, running a school. So he understands the dynamics of that and he's doing an incredible job.
We've got a, a, another, uh, children's home where the girl that wants to be the lawyer, she actually, uh, was there for a couple years. Uh, 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 and we support them until they're 18.
They get married or they get a job. So we're in it for the long haul. And that's sometimes a little stressful to make sure that, yeah, no kidding. Through covid, you know, when our finance is 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, than my paycheck.
And so we make sure that they're, uh, taken care of and we get reports, and when I'm over there in a couple weeks, I'm gonna get to see some of these kids again. Which it just, it helps us to keep going when we see the success.
[01:09:32] Jordan Harbinger: 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 the 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, uh, 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.
[01:10:03] Bruce Ladebu: That little girl, uh, was actually in a different country. Oh, I see. Even though there is a lot of, um, persecution against Christians, she's rising up through those ranks.
Mm-hmm. And getting education. A lot of these kids will. Get a hold of us later. They want higher education. We don't necessarily have the finances to do that, but we, we have helped some. Yeah. We've helped some go on to higher education.
[01:10:25] Jordan Harbinger: Wow. In incre. That's just incredible. In the book, you often say that radicals are watching you or radicals are approaching, 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?
[01:10:42] Bruce Ladebu: Well, a lot of that was Taliban.
[01:10:44] Jordan Harbinger: Okay.
[01:10:44] Bruce Ladebu: Some of it would've been other radical groups. Uh, in those countries. Like if you go to any of those countries over there, you're gonna 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 cross hairs again. And I. But the need to have people read about what's really going on there, it kind of overwhelmed any dread that I had of Mm-Hmm.
You know, being cross hairs again. So it's being read by people all across the nation and I, I get a lot of, uh, I'm getting a lot of feedback on it, A lot of very positive. It's gotten all five star reviews on Amazon.
[01:11:29] Jordan Harbinger: I love that. And, and you've got so many stories in there. There's one, the image in my mind of this 100, I think she was a hundred years old, smiling ear to ear after being free for the first time in her life and like promising herself she wasn't gonna die a slave.
Uh, 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 their, the first day as a free man or a free woman, especially if it's a kid or an old lady.
It's just gotta be so rewarding.
[01:12:09] Bruce Ladebu: We've rescued quite a few older people outta 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. 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 nineties and she said, I had 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. Wow. 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, a lot of these pictures.
Yeah. What an amazing thing to know that somebody who's been a whole, uh, slave their entire life. 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
[01:13:05] Jordan Harbinger: man. She 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 must be like, what is going on? This is the weirdest day of my life.
[01:13:16] Bruce Ladebu: Yeah. One of our rescue team operators just shared, uh, 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.
Mm-Hmm. None of them know my name, but they knew the white bald guy. Yeah. That had rescued them. They recognized the, the bald head, you know, uh, it's
[01:13:35] Jordan Harbinger: bald eagle. He's back. Yeah. It's just, ah, man. This is probably a dumb question. When did the people realize they're not gonna be slaves anymore? Is it like when you show up when they're in the car?
When they get out of the car? Like what? There must be a moment of realization where they're like, wow, this is real. Like, we're getting fed. I, I don't have to go to work, to like, is it the next day? What's that moment and what is
[01:13:58] Bruce Ladebu: 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 gonna have to do this anymore. Whether it's from a brothel, a little girl that's a woman's talking to her, or a 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.
Mm-Hmm. And they're sitting there eating a hot meal and our translator is saying, I. You never have to touch a brick again or you don't ever, A man is not gonna 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 'cause that's all he ever knew.
Sure. We had to sit with him and say, okay, we're gonna get you a job where you can actually make money. And he was in a total panic, wanted to go back 'cause he just never knew anything different. Never really had left that brick field. 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, it's still gonna happen.
[01:15:11] Jordan Harbinger: That makes sense, right? You go back to what you know, but it, there is some sort of dark humor here in that he leaves literal hell, right in this brick field where he's being tortured and he goes into a right Karachi and he is like, you know what?
Nope. Take me back to the brick field. This place is terrible. Because Karachi's chaotic and weird. And gross in its own way from what I've heard in, in many areas. I'm sure there's lovely areas as well, but Sure. Yeah. It's just kind of the dark humor takes over in episodes like this. I know we're running outta 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 'em work in the brick kiln and 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
[01:15:52] Bruce Ladebu: You have to have the whole process working. You have to, you know, 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.
[01:16:16] Jordan Harbinger: Are they scared of the, the guy that's there 'cause he is powerful or is it just like they don't wanna get shot at or whatever?
[01:16:21] Bruce Ladebu: 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 gonna be real successful other places They're willing to go right there and man, they just, they take down those criminals very quickly.
[01:16:36] Jordan Harbinger: Hmm.
[01:16:37] Bruce Ladebu: We're pretty good at, uh, in some areas and other areas, we're trying to figure out how we're gonna 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
[01:17:06] Jordan Harbinger: 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 wanna go hug my kids. How hopeful are you that groups like yours can actually end this practice? I know it's gonna 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.
[01:17:25] Bruce Ladebu: I used the Starfish story where, you know the, the boys walk on the beach and he finds all these stranded starfish and he starts throwing 'em 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. I. To eliminate slavery overall. I see people advertising, we're gonna eliminate slavery and we're gonna stop slavery in our lifetime.
You'd have to bring down cartels. We've never eliminated drugs. We're not gonna 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.
You know, 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, 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.
[01:18:47] Jordan Harbinger: Bruce Labu, thank you for doing the show, man. I really appreciate this. So interesting and you're obviously doing super important work and I just want to thank you for your time.
[01:18:56] Bruce Ladebu: Well, I appreciate Jordan very much, uh, giving me an opportunity to talk about this. Really thankful that I was on your show.
[01:19:05] Jordan Harbinger: You're about to hear a preview of the Jordan Harbinger show with Amanda Cat Tarzi, who was raised in a cult and later sex and labor trafficked.
[01:19:13] Amanda Catarzi: 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 gang raped. That was very common of going to go train. And then all of a sudden, now that you've fought 12 rounds, mm-hmm, now you're going to be raped. A girl ran a red light and T-boned my truck.
So I pull out my phone and I text my trafficker and I say, Hey, I almost just died in a car accident. And he said, is your face fucked up? And I'm like, no. And 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 outta 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. 'cause I knew it'd get sucked back in
[01:21:11] Jordan Harbinger: to hear how she escaped her dire situation. Check out episode 6 31 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's in addition to the hellish conditions in which they live and 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 outta 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 y'all seen this? Have y'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 outta sight outta mind.
So if you're in Pakistan or you lived in Pakistan, or you currently living in Pakistan, definitely shoot me a note, jordan@jordanharbinger.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 Labu will be in the show notes@jordanharbinger.com. You can also ask the AI chat bot on the website that is new and improved these days. Transcripts are in the show notes as well. Advertisers deals, discount codes, ways to support the show, all at Jordan harbinger.com/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 wanna recap of highlights and takeaways you wanna know what to listen to next. The newsletter is a great place to do that.
Jordan harbinger.com/news is where you can find it. Don't forget about six Minute Networking over@sixminutenetworking.com as well. I'm at Jordan Harbinger on Twitter and Instagram. You can also connect with me on LinkedIn in this show. It's created an association with Podcast one. My team is Jen Harbinger Jace Sanderson, Robert Fogarty, Mio Campo, Ian Baird and Gabriel Mizrahi.
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You know what I mean? Share this episode with 'em. In the meantime, I hope you apply what you hear on the show so you can live what you learn, and we'll see you next time.
[01:24:40] Adam Carolla and Dr. Drew: Hey buddy. Hey buddy. What's going on, man? Hi guy. Yeah, yeah. The team Loveline man. You guys remember us from back in the day when we're doing a pod and we're doing it every day and we've been doing it for a while.
And if you, if I hear one more time, people say, God, I loved you and Adam together on Loveline. And I'm like, yeah, yeah. We're doing a podcast. Will you please just join us at the Adam and Dr. Drew Show please at adam, dr drew show.com. What's a great show? Come on now. Only on podcast, Juan. That's us, Adam and Dr. Drew Show. Just like the old days doctors orders. Oh, oh man, you're funny. Yep. Alright, let's go save some babies. Let's do it.
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