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Welcome to the Tony Robbins podcast.
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Today we re bringing you a special episode that illuminates a cause and an organization that Tony is extremely passionate about.
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So passionate that he is dedicating his 60th birthday event to it as a benefit to raise funds.
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He and his wife Sage have been involved with this organization for a few years, but now they want to raise awareness and turn more people s attention to it.
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Operation Underground Railroad is a nonprofit organization that s committed to eradicating child sex trafficking through coordinated rescue missions and recovery programs.
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Most of the time, when somebody adopts a cause, they have a personal connection to it.
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You might raise money for cancer research if you ve lost a parent to the disease.
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You may work with homeless populations if you ve experienced it yourself or have a family member that has.
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But in Tony s case, his dedication to this cause did not come from a personal connection.
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He learned about Operation Underground Railroad through a woman at his Business Mastery event in 2016, who shared with the audience her goal of contributing significant funds to this organization so that even more children can be rescued.
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Here s Tony speaking about the moment he learned about Operation Underground Railroad.
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I first heard about Operation Underground Railroad, I was doing one of my business mastery seminars for business owners from all over the world.
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And so we have, you know, different buckets of finance, where you put kind of your security bucket, the things that you don t want too much risk with, where you d put your risk money.
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And then there s a dream bucket.
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And in the Dream Bucket, I try to get people to realize that if they earn more, they can do so much more.
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They can have such impact in their life and their families and their friends.
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But I also very strongly encourage them to find some type of project of contribution because I really believe in my soul.
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The secret to living is giving, corny as that may sound, but there s nothing that lights us up like giving.
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I ve done quite a bit of research.
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I wrote a whole book around this.
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And in it, scientists now, they can test the hormonal change in your body, and giving even to a stranger creates a greater biochemical change of happiness in your body than just about anything else you can imagine, other than taking care of your own family.
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So I talked about this, and then people share all their things that they want to make happen, and this woman stood up and she said, I really want to help
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free girls that are in sexual slavery.
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And she said, there s a group called Underground Railroad.
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And she said, they re former CIA, FBI, special forces type of guys.
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And they don t just go in and free them, but they figure out strategies to capture these people.
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And they teach the local police in those countries.
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And I said, well, how much does it cost to take care of a child, a free one child?
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And she said, it s about $2,000, $2,500.
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And I said, well, I ll donate $100,000
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in your name to get you started.
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And it was just spontaneous because I was touched by it.
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When I did that, people got inspired.
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This man stood up and he said, I don t have $100,000, but I have $5,000 and I d like to donate it.
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So I said, I ll match everybody here as much as you ll do.
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And then there was this incredibly beautiful moment.
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We re all in tears because, you know, there s a couple thousand people in that particular program, and there was a line of people coming up.
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I said, well, come on up and just sign a card here, what you ll commit to, and I ll match it.
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And it took us like 15, 20 minutes to process everybody, and we raised about a half a million dollars.
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And so it just got things started.
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And then after that, I reached out to Tim Ballard, one of the co-founders, and got a chance to know him personally.
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And then I also had the chance to actually go on an operation and witness the incredible work of these men.
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And I have to say, it was one of the ugliest experiences of my life, and also one of the most beautiful.
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The ugly part was witnessing human beings, including some of these people that were trafficking their own children,
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You know, little girls 13 and 14 years old.
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It s just, it s an abomination.
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It s beyond what they can imagine.
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So it was kind of like, emotional about it, obviously.
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It was shocking to witness the complete lack of humanity in these people.
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I take advantage of these children.
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And, you know, being close to them, I wanted to beat their face in.
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I know that sounds pretty horrific, but it s just you, you want it.
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They hurt children.
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You know, the part of me is just so wants to protect them.
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But I knew if I did that, I would obviously destroy the entire operation.
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So you got to manage yourself.
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That s the ugly part.
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The beautiful part was seeing these girls when they were freed, when they got on the bus and they began to realize that they were really free.
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It was,
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you know, so much bewilderment, and then joy, and then awe, and then non-belief at first, but just seeing that, those first moments of freedom, and then also going and visiting.
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You know, some of them are able to go home.
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Some of them, unfortunately, were sent, sold by their own families, and so they re going back to a center where they re gonna be reintegrated, and the people there are just so loving and so committed.
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You know, they re as dedicated as any human beings can be, again, 24-7, to take care of these girls and reintegrate them into a normal life.
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I love seeing these kids being healed.
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We were out there playing with them, you know, playing soccer, kicking the ball.
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And it s fun to see Tim, who s got this unbelievable intensity, and yet he also can be a chameleon like some of the other guys here.
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He knows how to enter these guys  worlds and twist their brains and basically pull them in so that you can capture them.
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But then, you know, watching him afterwards,
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He s as soft as I am, the son of a bitch.
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He cries and gets tears pouring down his face.
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You can just see it s his life s mission.
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And seeing those kids, he calls them his kids because he freed them.
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He should call them his kids.
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It was really, really touching.
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I have a deep love for Tim.
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He s a really good soul.
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He s recruited so many good souls around him.
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So now it s not just Tim, it s this army of men and women who are unbelievably dedicated and incredibly effective.
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So I shared the whole experience with my wife.
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I m in tears.
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I m in tears remembering it again now.
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But I was also inspired by it.
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inspired by the intelligence behind this and the heart.
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You ve got an amazing team of people and you see the power of the strategies that the CIA and other agencies have to be implemented in this area and then to be taught.
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It s pretty amazing.
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It s God s work.
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I know, again, I can sound pointy to some people, but I think somebody s got to do it and nobody s doing it like these guys that I m aware of.
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And so that s why I m such a supporter of Underground Railroad.
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What you just heard from Tony about his experience learning about Operation Underground Railroad and going on an undercover rescue mission is an experience that changed his life forever.
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His dedication and attention to this cause is because modern day slavery is an issue that nobody wants to think or talk about.
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It s the worst part of humanity and it s hiding in plain sight.
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All too often, people turn a blind eye to it because it s too unbearable to even think about.
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When you hear about it on the news or see it in a movie, most people turn it off because it s simply too hard to imagine a child of your own, a sibling, a niece or nephew, or godchild in such a situation.
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It s difficult and it s dark, and most people don t want to face the darkness.
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Today, there are over two million children enslaved worldwide in sex trafficking.
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Human trafficking brings in an estimated $150 billion annually, and it s the fastest growing criminal enterprise on the planet.
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To illustrate just how big that is, imagine this.
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With the money made in human trafficking every year, you could buy every Starbucks franchise in the world, every NBA team in the nation, and every Target store across the globe.
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And this isn t just an issue in other countries.
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Human trafficking in America is among the worst in the world.
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In fact, the United States is ranked as one of the top three nations of origin for victims of human trafficking, with children in foster care, homeless youth, undocumented immigrant children, and those with substance abuse problems especially at risk.
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Over 300,000 of America s young population is considered at risk for sexual exploitation, with nearly 200,000 incidents occurring in the U.S.
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every year.
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Sadly, the United States is the number one consumer of child rape videos.
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You heard Tony talk about Tim Ballard, the founder of Operation Underground Railroad.
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Tim is a man that has selflessly dedicated his life to rescuing children from sex slavery.
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He spent over a decade working as a special agent for the Department of Homeland Security, where he worked on the Internet Crimes Against Children Task Force and was deployed as an undercover operative for the U.S.
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child sex tourism job team.
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He s worked every type of case imaginable in the fight to infiltrate and dismantle these absolutely horrific child trafficking rings.
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But Tim left his government career, everything he knew, his pension, and his security in 2013 to start Operation Underground Railroad, also known as OUR, a nonprofit organization of former Navy SEALs and CIA agents that help law enforcement find and capture human traffickers and provide victims with the support they need to integrate back into a normal life.
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When Tony learned of the courageous work that Tim and his team do, he knew he had to take action.
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Here s Tim on why people like Tony, people who aren t afraid to look darkness in the eye, are making all the difference in this fight to end child slavery.
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We should warn you that Tim s experience doing this type of work is extensive and intense.
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And as a result, some of the details in this episode may not be appropriate for some listeners.
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Human trafficking or modern day slavery is the fastest growing criminal
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enterprise in the world and people don t know.
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The reason Tony is one of the greatest fighters against what is today the fastest growing criminal enterprise in the world, that s the buying and selling of people, of children, for sex, for organ harvesting.
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The reason he s so effective in this fight
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is because he learned that principle many, many years ago, that he is not afraid to look darkness in the eye and take it on and engage it and eradicate it.
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That s who he is.
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I wish more people could do that.
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Every time I go on radio stations, I find out later, yeah, people turned us off.
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Many say human trafficking and children being raped for money and they just turn it off.
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And that s the problem.
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That s why it s continuing.
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That s why the legalized form of slavery lasted for hundreds of years in our own country.
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What an embarrassment.
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What a horrific tragedy that we legalized this and allowed it to thrive.
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Why?
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Because the people that could have done something about it, they didn t want to look at it.
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Tony has gone on undercover rescue operations with OUR.
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He s donated money and spoken about the issue at length, publicly, to raise awareness.
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And he s also the executive producer of a film called Sound of Freedom, which will be coming out this fall.
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The movie is inspired by true events that happened to Tim while working for Homeland Security, and the first rescue operation he conducted upon leaving that job.
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It follows the story of Rocio, a girl that was kidnapped by Colombian traffickers.
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In this clip from Sound of Freedom that you re about to hear, Tim, who is portrayed by actor Jim Caviezel, is meeting with a wealthy businessman to try to convince him to finance a rescue mission.
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Did you know there were over 22 million new images of child pornography on the web this past year?
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That s a 5,000% increase over the past five years.
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5,000%.
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The fact is,
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It is the fastest growing international crime network that the world has ever seen.
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I agreed to it because we were working with the U.S.
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government.
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Back out now or this whole thing will blow.
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It has already passed the illegal arms trade, and soon it s going to pass the drug trade, and you want to know why?
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Because you can sell a bag of cocaine one time, but a child, the most precious child, you can sell a five-year-old kid five to ten times a day.
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for 10 years straight.
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And everyday ordinary people don t want to hear it.
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It s too ugly for polite conversation.
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But meanwhile, over 2 million children a year are being sucked into the deepest recesses of hell.
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Trust me, man.
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If we do nothing,
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Their pain is gonna spread and spread.
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Till someday it s gonna reach the likes of you.
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And that will be a nightmare that you re never gonna wake up from.
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After agreeing to help, the businessman financed the rescue mission and posed as a rich man trying to buy children, which helped lure in the traffickers.
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With his help, Tim and his team rescued 54 children, and it was this operation that ultimately started Operation Underground Railroad.
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Since then, OUR has rescued over 3,500 children and victims of sex trafficking and has arrested over 1,500 pedophiles and traffickers.
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Through an arm of OUR, Tim and his team also do a lot of work in the Middle East, using high-tech tools and undercover operators to infiltrate crime networks and rescue women and children that are under the attack of ISIS.
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To date, they have helped extract 10,000 people and move them into safety.
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Naveen is one of those people.
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Here s her story.
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This is the story of a little girl, 13 years old, her name is Naveen, and she was living in Sinjar city in northern Iraq peacefully with her family, a Yazidi family, which is a tribal group, peaceful, beautiful, religious people that mind their own business.
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And ISIS comes in and decides that all the people that are Yazidi people will be slaves.
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They came in and just killed the men and took the women and children and put them immediately into sex slavery.
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And they had these huge slave markets in northern Iraq and in Syria, and they just bought and sold women and children for sex.
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This little girl at 13 got sucked into that.
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Her mom was not taken and she was left childless and a widow and just praying that her family would come back.
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Years had passed and all the news that she had was that her daughter was dead.
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She was not in a safe place so she worked with us to get her out of the country and into Australia that was taking Yazidi refugees.
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It was so sad watching her leave knowing that little Naveen was probably killed at this point.
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And so she goes to Australia.
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The day she gets to Australia, we had the unbelievable surprise and honor to be able to call her and say, literally while you were flying to Australia, we found your daughter and we recovered her.
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And she s in our aftercare facility and she is safe.
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This little girl, she s 16 at this point, and we begin the process of aftercare.
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She lives in one of our basically tent cities.
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We started to expedite the paperwork, and finally this summer, we were able to take her.
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We went to Iraq and picked her up and took her home to her mom, who she hadn t seen in five years.
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It was the most unbelievable scene if you can imagine this.
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She s now 16 years old and she s seeing her mom for the first time, having been through just the worst possible scenario.
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And it s at times like this where you realize everything we do is worth it.
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If all the millions that we have raised only produced that one case, only produced the rescue of this little girl and got this girl back to her mom, it all would have been worth it.
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She today is going to school.
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She s brilliant.
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She s learned English now, and she s preparing to go to law school.
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She said, I want to go to law school so that I can learn the law, and I m going to go back to Iraq, and I m going to defend my people and their rights.
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Those kind of stories, the simple act of us getting her out and getting her home, she will now turn around and probably go rescue thousands.
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It s an amazing story.
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It s a story of the ability for the human spirit to triumph over darkness.
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I can t imagine what she s been through.
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I know what it was, but I can t imagine what it s like.
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The aftercare process is one of the most important elements of a rescue, because it s not often, as in the case of Naveen, that there s a parent to receive them and help them reintegrate back into society.
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Unfortunately, the majority of kids who find themselves in the nightmare of human trafficking in the first place are there because there s no parent around.
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And worse, sometimes the parents are the ones selling the children.
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Before an operation even begins, Tim and his teams vet local care facilities and safe houses to determine if they can provide the level of quality, holistic care that the child needs.
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When we go into a country to set up operations, the first question we ask is, what is your plan with any of the kids we rescue?
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And if they tell us that the state has some kind of program, we say, no, we know how that works.
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We re not going to work with you unless you work with our partners.
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So we spend a lot of time finding partners already existing on the ground.
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We don t reinvent the wheel.
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There s experts on the ground, mostly they re non-government organizations that have set up shop and they have all the tools
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to help in the healing and ultimately in the reintegration.
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We look for programs and partners that provide the hope.
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When we rescue these kids, you can ask them questions like, what s your favorite color?
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And nine times out of 10, they ll tell you, I don t have one.
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I didn t know I was allowed to have one.
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So it s a whole mindset that we can t comprehend if we haven t been through it.
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And so you need to replace that darkness with hope.
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And so it s largely based on what do you want to be?
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Because you can be whatever you want to be.
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You just choose it, and we will support you.
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One little boy we rescued back in 2014, he s just now
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finishing his program, the aftercare program, and he wants to start his own business.
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He wants to learn English.
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And so we stay with the kids.
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Six years ago, now we just gave him a scholarship to an English school and a business school, and he s now starting his own business in Latin America.
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And so that s what we do, is we find these aftercare homes that can take them in, have all the tools they need, can provide the hope, can provide the training, the vision that these kids know they can have a future, and then we stay with them.
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Our aftercare team lives on a plane and they fly from country to country.
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Our director of aftercare, she literally knows the names of every single one of these survivors in 26 countries.
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She s like their sister, their mom, their best friend.
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And that s what she does.
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She lives on an airplane.
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plane and she has a staff and they vet out aftercare programs that we select to use and then she stays with them and make sure they have what they need.
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If they need something they ll come to us and we can raise the money for that and get them whatever thing it is.
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Sometimes survivors have a particular interest that they d like to pursue as a career and OUR provides them with education that they need in order to be successful.
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Sometimes they need computers or three or four of the survivors say, we want to be chefs.
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That happened in Mexico.
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So we went and found the best chef in town and hired him to do classes Tuesdays and Thursdays.
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He d come into the home and teach them to prepare, you know, high-end food.
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Both those girls ended up graduating the program and got jobs as sous chefs at these awesome restaurants in Mexico.
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It s not always about the number of kids you save and impacting a lot of lives.
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Sometimes it s just about one or two.
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Listen as Tim shares the surprising result of one of his missions.
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I went undercover, pretending to be a buyer, and I walked into this false orphanage.
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It was advertised as an orphanage, but it wasn t.
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It was just a place where traffickers kidnapped and held children and sold them for $10,000, $15,000 to pedophiles, to slave owners, to organ harvesters.
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And I remember walking into this place.
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believing that this little boy was here and I was going to find him.
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I had cameras in my body, I had cameras in my sunglasses, and we were working with Haitian law enforcement.
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We went in undercover and I was looking for the little boy that was lost, that had been kidnapped.
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We knew that he had been here.
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And I was told by the police, if they offer children, buy one.
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That s how you do a sting operation, get the evidence, and then we ll liberate everybody.
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So I m at this point where I m in the operation and I m looking for what kid to pick.
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I don t think it matters.
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And just as I m looking, there s this beautiful child.
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He s about one and a half years old, two years old.
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He just turns to me almost like he heard my thoughts.
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He turns to me and puts his arms up and walks up to me and I pick up this little boy and I realize, I don t know, I feel like God was telling me he s the one I m supposed to buy.
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He picked me.
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So I take this little boy and I walk into one of the dark outbuildings on the premises of this horrible place while my colleague was out doing an undercover negotiation with the traffickers.
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I m looking for more kids.
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I have a camera that I m trying to pick up in my backpack.
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I want to pick up all the faces, all the kids.
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And I m holding this little boy in my arms and I walk in and the deeper I get into the building, the darker it gets.
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And the quieter it gets, and only then can I hear what was always right behind me.
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And that was the footsteps of another child.
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And I flip around and there before me is this little girl, probably three years old.
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And she has this big gash over her eye, which I knew was from the abusive situation she was in.
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The thing that startled me was how she looked at me with like this ferociousness in her eyes.
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All these kids are starving, little protruding tummies, grays in their eyes.
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And I give her a candy bar.
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She s probably never seen a candy bar.
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And I said, go outside and eat this.
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You can have this if you go outside.
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Kids are supposed to respond to that.
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At least my kids do.
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And this little girl didn t respond.
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She took the candy bar, still looking at me like she was going to rip my head off, breaks the candy bar in half and puts the other half into the hands of the little boy in my arms.
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And that s when it hit me.
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I m holding her little brother.
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And how many people that look like me walked into this place, picked up a child, and that child was never seen or heard of again.
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And that s why she was doing this.
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And so I immediately recognized my error and I put the little boy down.
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She grabs the little boy and rips him out of my arms and puts him behind her.
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And she s still ready to fight me.
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I knelt down and I broke the cardinal rule of undercover operations.
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The only time I ever did it.
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And I told that little girl who I was.
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She s an old soul, this little girl.
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And she softened and she understood.
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And I said, I m not here to hurt you.
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I m here to help you.
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I want to get you guys out of here, but I need you to help me.
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I need you to do everything I tell you.
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And she agrees, and she does it.
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And so she plays along with this, and I know she knows.
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And we end up buying these two kids in a sting operation.
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We get them out.
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And then afterwards, the little boy we looked for was never there.
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We re still looking for him.
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I called my wife that night, and I told her the story.
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You know, I said, you won t believe this little girl and what she did.
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And my wife just had this moment.
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It was a spiritual moment for her, and she d tell me later.
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But she said something that just shocked me.
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She said, I want to be their mother.
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I said, what?
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So what are you talking about?
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I just left my federal job and we re running a nonprofit.
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Statistically, we ll be out of business in six months.
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This was the very first operation.
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We didn t have any money.
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We can t afford to adopt.
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And she said, I want to be their mother.
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And so those are the two kids we end up adopting.
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And as I ve tracked this little girl, it took us three years to actually get her out, get them out and get them adopted.
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But she had this amazing thing.
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I understood where that power came from when she was protecting her little brother.
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Every time we would bring toys or treats to the orphanage over three years,
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The one constant with this little girl is that she would never keep anything.
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She couldn t.
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She would be the first in line to get the toys, but only so she could pass them out to her friends.
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Even though her friends already had an abundance, she left with nothing and she sat back and she was the happiest when she had nothing and just watched everyone so happy.
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And then I realized something.
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It was Toni that actually brought this principle around to teach me what she had learned on her own, which is something Toni says, the secret to living is giving.
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And it was Toni that taught me that.
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I was at his house, actually, and I was asking him why he is so charitable, because he s way more charitable than every other person that I work with.
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And he said, don t you know the secret to living is giving?
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And I m like, what does that mean?
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And he explained this amazing science behind what happens to the brain.
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He showed me research that when you give, you actually there s a chemical reaction in your brain.
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And all of a sudden you have this ability to be a person of light and you have courage, you have hope.
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And it s this beautiful thing.
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And it s connected to heaven and God and all these things that are amazing miracles that happen.
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And I recognized that s what this little girl understood.
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She didn t read the research.
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She didn t need to talk to Tony.
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She figured it out because she lived in hell.
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And she had to be at two years old, sister and mother to a baby.
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And the only adults in her life were trying to hurt them.
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She learned how to protect herself.
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That s what gave her the courage to look me down and stare me down and will me to turn her brother back over to her.
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It s what allows her to manipulate every other situation to keep them alive in the dark orphanage and even in the other orphanage, which was not a happy place.
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She just gives and gives and gives, and then she s filled with light.
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The greatest blessing was adopting two children who we rescued, because it s just every day in my face in a good way about what can happen.
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Sometimes I just weep when I think of the trajectory that my kids were on.
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Where they would have ended up if there hadn t been an intervention, nothing worse on earth or hell than where they were heading.
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They would have been bought by an organ harvester or a pedophile.
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That s where they would have been.
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Instead, they re the happiest kids.
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When we adopted those kids, we had seven at that point.
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And so they made eight and nine, and they are just completely part of the family.
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They re just loved by everybody.
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They love everybody.
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And sometimes I just sit back when I watch them laugh and play, and I just weep happy and sad tears, you know?
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Happy because I know where they are, and the other 3,500 kids are.
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but then also tears of sadness that are frankly motivating.
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We have to keep going.
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We have to dig harder.
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We have to dig deeper and let this happen for other people too.
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The nature of Tim s work is extremely difficult.
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Being a live witness to the worst part of humanity can certainly take a toll on a person.
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But Tim, despite the darkness he encounters, is able to see the light.
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And that s what keeps him going.
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When I was a government agent, the only part we were exposed to was the dark.
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Going in, extracting the bad guys.
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Our job wasn t to do aftercare, someone else did that, so we have to come out and didn t know ever what happened.
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The funding came in through government sources, so it was just a faceless source from which the money came.
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And so it was kind of this dark cycle, and people don t last more than a couple years, and they tap out of this work.
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When I started OUR, I found something I didn t expect.
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Yes, the darkest part of humanity was still there, still present, still looked and smelled and felt the same way it did my whole career.
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But because we are now a private organization that looks to the public for help, all of a sudden I get to see not only the darkest people, but the lightest people, the most amazing people.
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They come into your life and they become the light that sustains you, honestly.
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people that are willing to shed their innocence and get in the dark with you and bring the light and give you the light so you can take it to the dark corners.
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Roger saves us.
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Me, it saves me.
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I ve met the most amazing people on the planet, like Tony and Sage, and others who were willing to stand up.
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Tony and Sage Robbins have been the largest financial supporters of Operation Underground Railroad to date.
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And for Tony s 60th birthday, they re hosting a benefit concert with 100% of net proceeds going to the organization.
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The goal is to raise enough money to rescue 10,000 children from sex slavery.
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And it s possible with your help.
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Tony has dedicated his life to making an impact on others.
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And the absolute best way to celebrate a man who has given so much is through support of this cause, which he cares so deeply about.
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To purchase your ticket to the benefit concert on February 29th, 2020 in Los Angeles, or to make a donation to OUR, go to www.tonyrobbinsbday.com.
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That s www.tonyrobbinsbday.com.
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The Tony Robbins Podcast is directed by Tony Robbins and produced by the Tony Robbins editorial team with audio editing and sound design by Jeremy Enns.
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Our guest today was Tim Ballard, founder of Operation Underground Railroad.
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To learn more about the incredible work that they do, go to OURRescue.org.
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That s OURRescue.org.