John Devaney is a bond trader, retail and real estate expert, and founder of United Capital Markets, a company that buys and sells structured finance bonds, backed by residential mortgages, commercial loans, and other asset-backed securities. He s been in the business for almost 20 years, and is a regular contributor to the New York Times and Wall Street Journal. In this episode, John talks about how he got started in the bond market, how he built a company from the ground up, and why he thinks the financial crisis was a blessing in disguise. He also talks about the new movie, City of Dreams, which is being dropped from theaters because of human trafficking, and how it s similar to the movie Sound of Freedom, which has been accused of being sold for $1.5 billion by a human trafficker in order to get into a movie theater. Get ready for Las Vegas-style action at BetMGM, the king of online casinos. Enjoy casino games at your fingertips with the same Vegas Strip excitement MGM is famous for when you play classics like MGM Grand, Blackjack, Baccarat, and Roulette with your favorite casino games like Blackjack and Blackjack. BetmGM and GameSense remind you to play responsibly. If you have questions or concerns about your gambling or someone close to you, please contact Connects Ontario at 1-866-531-2600 to speak to an advisor free of charge. to speak with an advisor FREE of charge, call 1-800-333-262600. BetM MGM is the King of Online Casinos, the leading casino company in the gaming industry and the leading the gaming and entertainment industry in the U.S., and the number one destination for all things casino-related in the world! and the only place you can get the best deals on everything casino and everything else you need to know about gaming and everything casino related in the gambling and everything that s going on in gaming and more. You can get all sorts of gambling and more in-depth in the best in the casino game, including betting and everything you ve ever heard about gambling and much more! BetemGM Casino, the ultimate Vegas-related. . Bet MGM is your host of the world of gaming and betting on everything you could ever dream of. ...and more! betmGM Casino is a high-end sports betting and more to wager your best bet on the best casino
00:04:21.880We built our company back, and I'm still doing it right now.
00:04:26.380And I've always believed in giving back, okay, throughout my, the culture of my company is to connect with my community and try to give back.
00:04:38.140So we have a community reinvestment leg of my company, you know, participated in helping over 100 different philanthropies over time.
00:04:45.860And so when this movie was shown to me by a great friend of mine named Sean Wolfington, he was one of the producers of Sound of Freedom.
00:04:54.880This man, 20 years ago, made an incredible story called Bella, okay, and he had funded it and backed it and helped to market it about a young girl who chose to keep her baby.
00:05:05.680And it wasn't really, you know, pro-life.
00:05:08.320It was just a beautiful, beautiful story.
00:05:10.120And since then, he's been involved in seven or eight films.
00:05:46.020And he fought for his freedom, and he fought to free these other children.
00:05:51.860And I wept at the end of the story, like you all will, and like the hundred celebrities that all signed on with us to help to raise awareness on this.
00:06:02.780And I talked to him until 2 in the morning.
00:06:04.840And the next day at 9 o'clock, I immediately called him.
00:06:08.720I got to my office, and I said, you know what?
00:06:10.940I'll give you the money, and, you know, now we've brought the film to 775 screens.
00:06:17.120It was going to get out in 75 screens, like many independent films do.
00:06:25.820I've become very, very smart, kind of an advocate to protect children now throughout this journey over the last six months that I've been involved.
00:06:34.580But so anyway, so I embraced supporting this film and have now started a film company called Manor House Films.
00:06:45.740I would like to bring, you know, we're saying that we're going to make films that matter.
00:06:49.520And I think that it's so important right now with all this stuff that's going on to try to back films like this that have important purpose and meaning.
00:07:09.800I mean, so I mentioned this early in the intro that there's videos from Kevin Posobiec where he goes to the – like you go buy movie tickets and you pick by the ticket and that shows you all the seats and you pick your seats.
00:07:22.400And we heard similar things in Sound of Freedom.
00:07:25.000It seemed like they're trying to block this film, which is weird.
00:07:28.700But now we're hearing that you're saying it was dropped from like 500 theaters?
00:07:32.700Yeah, I mean, just to be fair to everybody in the movie theaters and everything, you know, I saw the same report as well.
00:07:41.600And so I'm not saying anything like that had happened where they're, you know, trying not to sell the tickets.
00:07:48.700But there's some kind of funny stuff going on right now.
00:07:51.660The one thing that I know is that our distributor, Roadside Attractions, these two wonderful men, Howard and Eric, run that company and they support independent films.
00:08:02.160They've made 200 films now and they're our distributor.
00:08:04.640Unfortunately, a couple days ago, they notified me that the theaters, Regal, AMC, Cinemark, they decided to reduce our theater count from 775 to 225 for this weekend.
00:09:14.720Even though the movie is not explicitly political, the things it talks about get political when people talk about those things, depending on who's in office and all that stuff.
00:09:23.000Do you think that has something to do with it there?
00:09:24.620Yeah, I think that Hollywood overall and the media right now has an issue with child trafficking and some of these issues like pedophilia for some reason.
00:09:38.020I just don't know why that some of these issues that are out there aren't spoken about more broadly.
00:09:55.020There's one link that goes to over 20 articles that she's written.
00:09:59.580She's done an incredible job reporting on the problem at the border.
00:10:03.400I do believe that part of the pushback, I think, from media and maybe from Hollywood overall is that the flawed policies at the border that this movie is highlighting, that potentially it's giving a big boost to President Trump.
00:10:23.140Because President Trump was very vocal a number of years ago in talking about how the flawed border policy could impact and hurt children, among other problems with the large migration at the border.
00:10:37.760If you listen to the whistleblower who is from the Health and Human Services from about a year ago.
00:10:54.380Just to kind of back up, I could kind of explain it in an easy way that a lot of people might be able to understand just from, you know, trying to just be a simple man.
00:11:04.400What I think has happened, okay, and I could talk about two legs of child exploitation and trafficking.
00:11:13.780And I'm going to first talk about the leg of many of these children that came across the border.
00:11:18.300And then I'm going to talk about child labor overall and how we all have a responsibility as consumers to buy products that aren't made, okay, from child labor from our U.S. corporations.
00:11:30.860And I believe that there needs to be new legislation and laws that focus on making sure that the products that we use every day aren't made by slave labor anywhere in the world, okay?
00:11:42.140Because this is a very important issue, not just in the United States, but across the world.
00:11:46.140So let me first go back and talk about how I see what happened with hundreds of thousands of children that are being exploited in the United States right now as a result of flawed border policies.
00:11:57.260A number of years ago, some of the policies were loosened somewhat and that some of the unaccompanied migrant children were welcomed into the U.S., okay?
00:12:09.600It used to be that you could go to an uncle or an aunt or a parent, and then the rules were changed, and now you could go to a sponsor.
00:12:17.260So these traffickers in Central and South America had sort of gamed the system and realized that they could just dump kids at the border and they would be welcomed in.
00:12:28.660They were trafficking the children just like they traffic drugs, and they pitched families, very poor families in places like Guatemala, that these children might have a better life in the U.S.
00:12:39.980And these parents, I mean, as a parent, I couldn't even think about having an 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13-year-old kid and giving them away.
00:12:49.420But these countries have such poverty, and it's so difficult for them that I think these parents just believed that maybe they were giving a better opportunity for their child.
00:13:00.760And so many of these traffickers would load up 12 kids.
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00:14:28.600Desjardins in a suburban and take them to the border and dump them off.
00:14:33.980Can I say something really quick before you continue?
00:14:35.320Is there's even in Guatemala, they play radio ads and they have Facebook ads targeting young underage children saying, come to America.
00:14:44.000And it's the traffickers doing that to bring them to the border.
00:14:47.300Yeah, they're making three to five thousand bucks.
00:14:49.680I saw the same thing and it's just unbelievable.
00:14:52.460Like there's a whole business saying we can, I mean, or the kids are joining these marches and they're given to another adult they don't know.
00:15:02.220And the kids just walk away and march for days and days and make it to the border.
00:15:05.880Anyway, so the kids get to the border.
00:15:09.060If you go back and look at all the news reports, there were tent cities across the border with hundreds and hundreds of children.
00:15:17.040Okay, so the children made it to the border.
00:15:18.600The real big issue that Hannah had reported on, and honestly, I just cannot believe that the news wasn't reporting on this back then in 21, 22, 23.
00:15:29.840She really did this expose in 2023 and she's still reporting on it in 24.
00:15:34.920She found that some of the sponsors on this side of the border, okay, had 20 kids.
00:15:42.660And that the traffickers, in fact, which are bad guys, recommended the sponsor name of somebody in Minnesota.
00:15:54.000So the bad guys were giving the sponsor name to bad guys over here.
00:15:57.180And then she had found through her investigative reporting that some of these houses had 15 and 20 kids sleeping like sardines in two bedrooms.
00:16:05.100And that 15 passenger vans were picking these kids up and working from like 8 p.m. till 3 in the morning for kids that are 12, 13, 14 years old.
00:17:27.440Everybody in America needs to protect and save our children.
00:17:33.080Everybody in America needs to talk about this issue right now.
00:17:37.180And that's one of the things that this movie is highlighting.
00:17:40.340This is why this director, Mohit, made the whole story.
00:17:44.120His intent was to raise awareness on this topic.
00:17:47.460And it's just – honestly, that it's one of the most important things going on in our country right now.
00:17:54.360It's funny because the media cared a lot about kids in cages, you know, all those years ago.
00:17:59.360You think they'd put that same emotion into this, but it's political, and they won't.
00:18:04.380So they ignore it, and they sweep it under the rug, and that's a real shame because it shouldn't be political at all.
00:18:11.520But I don't think a lot of people on the left and the media care about protecting children.
00:18:15.840But the scary thing is that right now people are more interested in winning for the party than they are for solving the problems this country is facing or that these child victims are facing.
00:19:27.980And they're like, well, you know, we could stop it, but it would be bad for our team.
00:19:31.420So instead, we're going to shut your movie down and not do anything about the problem.
00:19:35.020If that's the direction this world or this country is going, then the dystopian future is outside the realm of anything that these authors thought Orwell or Bradbury.
00:19:43.600The very nature of the conversation is political now.
00:19:45.860You can't just say human trafficking is bad because that immediately signals to whatever political side you're on that this is a political thing now.
00:19:58.240The other thing that like I've been I've been my life is is better.
00:20:04.820And this project to me is a blessing for my own heart.
00:20:09.620And like when you have your kids, you know, my kids, I've got two in college and one just graduated, you know, and when one of my kids looked at me, my oldest daughter, and she's helping with this right now, Corinne.
00:20:23.780And she looked at me and she said, Dad, you're doing the right thing, you know, and she's fucking right.
00:20:34.100I'm telling you that there are business leaders out there just like me, okay, that people that are in business and that have the resources, they should join together with me and speak up.
00:21:49.720I wonder if it's that people hear these stories and they just have to tap out mentally because they can't take how evil it is and how widespread evil is.
00:22:31.460And you can see all the messages that they were sending to their clients, you know, bringing the child to behind apartment buildings, doing stuff in the woods, violence to sell the videos to people in other countries.
00:22:43.920And that was right here in Virginia and Maryland happening.
00:22:47.520And that's just one, that's a fraction of how much that's going on.
00:22:51.420I want to give a quick shout out in the chat to Jack Frost who says, I'm pretty sure this isn't live.
00:22:59.020Have you felt any pushback from, like, you've got celebrities and you've got politicians on both sides that are trying to stop this, but have you felt pushback from politicians or other prominent interests?
00:23:09.860Have there been powerful business interests being like, hey, stop talking about this?
00:23:14.320Aside from pulling your movie from theaters?
00:23:15.740Yeah, I mean, it's funny that you say that right now, that we've discovered that Meta, we've recently written them a letter, but that we've made now, go to our website, cityofdreamsmovie.com.
00:23:34.380We've got testimonials that have been made now by over 100 celebrities, influencers.
00:23:39.860I've met a number of influencers that have, like, three, four, five million followers on YouTube that all said, you know what, we want to join your movement and join your cause.
00:23:50.120That we have over 100 testimonials where people looked at the camera and said, join our movement.
00:23:59.500And do you know what we just discovered?
00:24:00.880We discovered that all of these celebrities, including like Mike Tyson and Sylvester Stallone that spoke up, they're only getting five to 20% of the normal views that they get on Instagram, five to 20%.
00:24:18.620Everything they post gets tons of views, a half a million views or whatever.
00:24:25.460That we wrote a letter to Meta and we're trying to get a hold of them and that it could be, okay, and it might not be on purpose.
00:24:35.040I just can't think that it is, but it might be that the keywords of child trafficking, that they have to prevent the traffickers from using Facebook to network.
00:24:51.140Apparently, Facebook was one of the biggest tools that lured predators to the children.
00:24:59.460And so it's true that there needs to be quite a bit of reform online to prevent some of these other bad things from happening.
00:25:06.440And so it could be that Meta inadvertently has now suppressed and shadow banned all these celebrities that are trying to speak up, but it's only a trickle of the views.
00:25:49.640It's been reported right now that there's like 300,000 of these unaccompanied minor children that came across the border and the government now admitted they have lost contact.
00:26:02.120That means they have disappeared into the United States and we don't know where they are.
00:26:07.380We don't know what adult they're with.
00:26:11.200It's first of all, it's totally cuckoo that a 10 year old kid could get to the border and they're not with a parent or guardian and that you could let a kid cross the border.
00:26:21.060The first of all, that's kind of crazy.
00:26:22.980Like that shouldn't be happening and that now they've given them to sponsors with absolutely no vetting.
00:26:31.260In the foster system, they've learned that the foster families can exploit children.
00:26:37.720A foster family needs to text back and forth and show a photo.
00:27:09.860Yeah, good thing for her speaking up for the children.
00:27:12.880That is a liberal newspaper and she had the guts to report this and to report about these whistleblowers that walked out of there and they warned them that this system of giving these kids without vetting to these sponsors could harm the children.
00:27:27.680However, that very senior people that were involved in caring for the kids in these tent encampments were being very, very, were given clear directive that it looked very bad on TV that all these kids were there and they said, you've got to push them out.
00:28:17.340It's been going on for quite some time and no one seems to care.
00:28:21.200And it's been I mean, I don't know how they're going to fix it.
00:28:23.880Are you familiar with the story where it was Dr.
00:28:26.800Phil speaking on I think it was on The View, right, where he said that he went down and interviewed Border Patrol and they said children will come up with numbers on their arms that they know are sex trafficking rings and they just send them right to these people.
00:28:40.560Yeah. When I was in Yuma at the border, there's lettuce farms along the wall on our side and they'll tell the farmers will be like children just walk up young, eight years old with numbers on them for the like what Tim's saying.
00:28:52.140Yeah. And then and then and then Hannah even reported, you know, she's talked to a lot of these children that that some of the children are responsible for paying back the three to five thousand bucks and that it's like a loan on their head.
00:29:04.560So now you've got like little kid indentured servants.
00:31:35.720Because the second you're in that room, now you're guilty by association, even though it's for a really good cause to help protect children.
00:34:40.000What is this detachment that the media, these media personalities who are not well-off wealthy people, for the most part, some of them are, but how is it they all collectively say the movie is bad?
00:34:52.020I think a lot of them are protecting themselves because a lot of them do these bad things.
00:34:55.360There was one of the biggest BBC reporters was just arrested for child, you know, imagery.
00:42:25.320It's crazy that we live in this world.
00:42:27.280But, you know, outside of all this stuff, too, I don't know if you want to move on to talk about the real estate market and what we're seeing with these cities.
00:42:34.340But you were also mentioning that you work in real estate and that you said there's a potential debt default that we're seeing these big cities turning to ghost towns.
00:42:45.540Do you want to explain what you're talking about with that?
00:43:51.720And I said to chat GPT, I said, tell me the top 20 cities in the United States where the migrants that came across the border were flown and bussed.
00:44:04.980And I looked at it and I was like, holy moly.
00:44:09.400I was like, 15 of the cities out of the 20 cities where all these migrants were bussed have the most distressed commercial real estate in the country.
00:44:22.780These are the cities that are in decline.
00:44:27.000There is a there is such trouble right now in in these Democrat run cities in commercial real estate.
00:44:37.640There are defaults happening right now on large Class A and Class B office building mortgages that are as bad as during the financial crisis.
00:44:51.880I'm talking about tens of billions of defaults that are happening right now.
00:45:44.660OK, that the commercial real estate in San Francisco is so distressed that just four or five years ago, the occupancy in San Francisco was 90 percent.
00:45:55.000OK, right now, there are so many buildings with occupancy went to 60 percent, 50 percent, 40 percent.
00:46:02.520Do you know what happens when you go under about 70 in an office building?
00:46:06.540OK, you don't have enough income to pay the mortgage debt anymore.
00:46:10.240OK, you cannot go below 75 or 70 percent.
00:46:18.940So basically, a number of flawed policies.
00:46:24.180OK, and I didn't really intend to talk about policies in some of these cities.
00:46:30.040You know, I'm really here to talk about this movie and about protecting and saving children.
00:46:34.560But some of these things are connected.
00:46:37.620And so in San Francisco, they made some really big mistakes, in my opinion.
00:46:42.740Number one, that they decriminalized theft and that you don't even get a ticket if you steal stuff under a thousand bucks.
00:46:51.740Like, first of all, I can't even believe that.
00:46:54.180Like, I think that if a kid is 13, 14, 15 years old and they shoplift some gum and some other shit, I think they should call the cops and and make a huge stink out of it.
00:47:06.980Like, that's the way our culture like, I don't know, maybe I'm an old schooler, but I think that stealing is wrong.
00:47:12.380And you should make a huge deal out of it.
00:47:16.800That there are pharmacies and CVS like that in San Francisco, all of the retail in the downtown business district right now, because they because of some of these flawed decisions that the city government and the state made.
00:48:44.280Nobody's renewing in San Francisco that these companies are not going to subject their employees to going in that downtown area.
00:48:51.400That is so bad because they're putting their employees at risk.
00:48:55.820So some of these cities already had flawed policies, OK, that were putting their cities in decline.
00:49:03.420They doubled down for some reason and welcomed hundreds of thousands of these migrants into these cities and now are having to support them.
00:49:12.960And then unfortunately, as the news is clearly reported, many of the migrants are exacerbating the issues with crime because there's really no plan to educate them and train them and give them jobs.
00:49:27.100Like they're you can't bring migrants in and just give them free housing, OK, because they're going to go out and hustle.
00:49:33.800And unfortunately, some of them wind up stealing.
00:49:36.020So everything I just said about San Francisco, like like a third of all a half to a third of all the mortgages on office buildings in San Francisco are underwater.
00:49:47.660That means that they're worth less than the mortgage debt and they're defaulting left and right.
00:49:51.620So there are some really, really big consequences going on right now with policies in some of these Democrat cities.
00:49:59.040Everything I just said about San Francisco, let's go to Philadelphia.
00:50:02.960I mean, Philadelphia has incredible history going all the way.
00:51:18.400So when when these offices go into decline, OK, when society is unraveling, OK, all of these policies are so bad.
00:51:26.860It's making real estate like this worthless because unless you have a tenant that's willing to sign up and to go to work in Philadelphia, which you'd have to be out of your mind to go in there.
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00:53:41.480Then a couple bombs were planted on 25th Street and in Jersey City.
00:53:45.700Some makeshift explosives were planted and blew up.
00:53:48.640And I thought, things are getting crazy in this country.
00:53:51.780So I moved to, I immediately then moved to the southern portion of still the New York metro, but this is in Bayonne.
00:54:00.020And once I, like, with the canoeing escalation of cost and the constant social unrest and what I saw as an inability to, I did not, I saw, I saw escalation.
00:54:41.480We started immediately looking for property, which was in western Maryland or West Virginia.
00:54:46.260And then when the lockdowns happened, we were out.
00:54:48.860The property is substantially cheaper.
00:54:50.620And now we're in the middle of nowhere because I don't want to be anywhere near what's going on.
00:54:53.700And since then, I'm fortunate to say that the, I don't know if you call it my skittishness or my ability to just see the patterns as they're unfolding.
00:55:10.660But I felt like the paths that were laid out before me in these locations only went to bad places.
00:55:17.320And I'm like, even in the best case scenario, I'm not going to be happy with the prices as they're jumping and jumping and jumping.
00:55:22.620Now, my apartment that I lived in when I was in New York, which was $1,950 a month for a two-bedroom, is something, I think it's like $4,000.
01:08:38.400I mean, you know, these types of trends when they start, they run for quite some time.
01:08:43.420So I don't really think that there'd be a lot of things that could change.
01:08:47.800Look at, I mean, Elon, you know, certainly one of the smartest men on earth.
01:08:51.860He's so innovative in the different companies that Elon built that, I mean, Elon picked up and said, I've had enough for lots of reasons with California.
01:09:50.400They were reducing the theaters like what's happening to us right now.
01:09:53.540Elon saw that, and Elon Musk made a tweet, okay?
01:09:58.880And he said, I've built a movie streaming platform that could stream Sound of Freedom just like Amazon for video on demand.
01:10:07.540And I won't charge a penny, and I could stream this.
01:10:11.560And at that time, the producers, including my very good friend Sean Wolvington, who was one of the producers on Sound of Freedom, for whatever the reasons were, they decided not to do it.
01:10:42.320I think he's brought one or two documentaries now.
01:10:45.460And so we would love to work with him and have the video on demand and bring it through X, a champion of free speech.
01:10:56.040Because I do think that right now we're dealing with censorship.
01:11:00.320We're dealing with the media that doesn't like this.
01:11:02.600A lot of these things you guys are talking about, which is just nonsense.
01:11:05.360I mean, our movie is about protecting and saving kids, which really, like, this topic, like, what is more important than this right now?
01:11:14.800And honestly, like, I, you know, we might have gotten off track a little bit just talking about migration and the city politics and cities that are going down.
01:11:23.380But unfortunately, some of the issue with these children, it is unfortunately all connected to the flawed policy of migration and letting too many migrants into our country without the proper amount of controls.
01:12:13.620So the children that, that they're abused and they're beaten and it's a very dark, uh, almost dungeon, uh, like a place that they're being held in a basement with orange dimly lit lights.
01:12:28.840And they're all packed into a room and sleeping together at night.
01:12:34.720And so that Jesus, the hero in the story, he always dreamed of being a soccer player.
01:12:41.540He thought, as you'll see in the movie, that he was going to America to go to soccer camp.
01:12:47.800And the trafficker showed him a pamphlet and said, Hey, we're going to bring you to this soccer camp.
01:12:52.000And so part of the story showed him dreaming of getting to go to a soccer camp.
01:12:56.240And what happened, it turned into a nightmare and the film is so creative that our director Mohit, okay, that there's dream sequences that were Jesus, because in order to deal with what he had to deal with there, he kind of comes out of his body and he starts dreaming of being a soccer superstar.
01:13:17.980And so these dream sequences have him like in London with a hundred thousand fans and he's dribbling, uh, um, uh, and playing soccer on a professional level.
01:13:29.260And, uh, and the whole crowd is cheering for him.
01:13:32.140And instead of all these dark colors, the whole screen in the theater, it lights up and there's hope.
01:29:03.260So what we're seeing now is with COVID, there was a wave of retirements.
01:29:09.640A lot of people who are at retirement age or who are nearing it and maybe want to take an early retirement decided, look, I got two years to retirement.
01:29:24.360I know so many parents in this area who are having trouble finding a pediatrician because every pediatrician is either closed or not taking anymore.
01:29:35.160The other component of this too is what I refer to as our managerial crisis.
01:29:38.560A lot of people on the right refer to this as DEI.
01:29:42.320The problem that we're facing, they say it's a diversity, equity, inclusion is what's like these planes and the wheels falling off or whatever and the failed mechanics.
01:29:54.240I think DEI is an effort to alleviate the managerial crisis.
01:29:58.140Older individuals, boomers, people who are in their 60s, once COVID hit said, I'm done.
01:30:05.640And we're talking about a chief mechanic perhaps.
01:30:08.420The younger guys don't know how to operate and run this stuff and they don't have enough staff to replenish when all these people left with expertise.
01:30:14.540So now what they're saying is, well, we need to bring on new people, diversity.
01:30:22.960And don't get me wrong, there's a difference between like certainly if there is someone who's capable to do the job and you don't hire them and said go for the diversity individual, you are contributing to it as well.
01:30:31.860I think the real issue is that older people are leaving in larger numbers, they're taking their skills with them, and there aren't enough younger people to fill these jobs.
01:30:42.540I think the system doesn't want to admit it.
01:30:44.920I think the government doesn't want to admit we do not have enough children.
01:30:51.160Let's ask the question, if there is no mass migration, unchecked open borders is what we're looking at, and children are getting trafficked because of it.
01:33:03.080If you have questions or concerns about your gambling or someone close to you, please contact Connects Ontario at 1-866-531-2600 to speak to an advisor.
01:33:45.980That we'd have to really study all that data to see what the fall off is that you're talking about.
01:33:54.680I mean, the you know, the the wave of the migrants that came in, you know, 13 million or whatever the number is of both the legal and the illegal that that's caused some of the problem with harming the children.
01:34:09.420And, you know, for sure, because that the yeah, because a lot of people that have come in, they don't have jobs.
01:34:15.640You know, some of them are they're minors, like we've said, but but they're causing social unrest across a lot of the cities.
01:34:22.840They're also they're also creating a burden on many of the cities.
01:34:27.880I mean, there's so many programs right now that are doling out 20,000 bucks, you know, per family or per person for free rent, free.
01:34:39.780That's like that right now, because I trade the hotel debt right now in New York City, 20 percent of every single hotel room in New York City is the city is paying for migrants to stay at 20 percent.
01:34:52.400I mean, there's like billions and billions of dollars. They're feeding the migrants and they're putting them up.
01:34:57.380A lot of family who are. I was on I was on CNBC and Brian Sullivan, who I've known for 20 years.
01:35:03.300I've been on his show at different networks that he's he's been on over my career.
01:35:09.440And he mentioned on the show, he was like, I can't believe it, John, that more recently, just in this last year.
01:35:17.520Now there's kids that are eight, nine, 10, 11, 12 years old, like young kids with no parent around.
01:35:24.120And they're selling fruit and water in the subway system.
01:35:43.560Eighteen hundreds, you know, that's like old that some of these some of these changes are right in front of us right now.
01:35:49.200And it's it's impacting society for us.
01:35:52.720And then underneath some of this is the fact that what our movie is highlighting, that a lot of the children, unfortunately, are wind wind up being exploited.
01:36:03.400Another thing that's interesting that I heard, too, that's shocking to me.
01:36:07.980And it talks about prostitution, which is another issue, you know, that that's sort of in the category of the exploitation of women, which I'm against.
01:36:17.140OK. And so prostitution is another issue.
01:36:20.160That's a serious issue here in our country.
01:36:21.940And one of the things that I read said that 60 percent of women that become prostitutes come out of the foster program.
01:36:31.660So these are like children that are already in broken homes.
01:36:34.240And that's a program that has monitoring of the kids.
01:36:38.960What in the world is going to happen to these three to five hundred thousand kids that came across the border undocumented and there's no way to check up on them?
01:36:46.620How many of those are going to wind up becoming prostitutes when they have no guardian?
01:36:51.760I'm fairly certain the thing I talked about earlier about the MS-13 in Virginia, that victim, I believe, was a runaway from a foster home.
01:37:19.300I'm talking about her experiences and it's just awful.
01:37:24.140She was trafficked at eight years old and she was doing like 20 tricks a day and eight and nine and ten years old.
01:37:32.280So she told me her whole story and that the people that trafficked her had hundreds of Polaroid pictures of all the children that they were in contact with from other bad guys.
01:37:45.600And so there was this underground network that was here in the U.S.
01:37:51.120She was trafficked from Central America and and that was going on, you know, 15 years ago.
01:38:01.380OK, I think that it did explode more recently.
01:38:07.020But it's something that's always, you know, been lurking behind the scenes and something that collectively as a society.
01:38:13.760OK, that we should all be addressing together.
01:38:16.620And then the big companies that are out there that make our goods, they need to be addressing this to make sure that they are not employing child labor.
01:38:25.820All of the big tech companies, like we mentioned before, like Facebook and Zuckerberg, they should be doing everything they can to protect our children.
01:38:35.780And I know that they're working on it right now.
01:38:37.580We've heard the stories about the bridges at the border and the parents leaving pictures of their daughters all over the bridges and they've all been taken.
01:38:45.100I remember some congressman maybe five or six years ago telling about how there was a skyscraper in New York City of a young woman telling her story.
01:38:53.080She was in that, you know, skyscraper is like a hostage and Johns would come in all day long, you know, underage.
01:38:59.640And she spent her years like that stuck in this place.
01:39:03.280It's it's unbelievable how widespread it is.
01:39:07.260And happening in all the places you wouldn't think it is.
01:39:13.680I don't see, you know, when you have a conversation like this, how the current administration, the only real action one could take is to support candidates who are calling for border security.
01:39:32.080It's like they oversee it and want it to happen.
01:39:34.140But this is the big challenge politically with with most things we talk about.
01:39:37.480We want to believe and we hope that there can be a bipartisan solution and that we can reach out to anyone, be it a Democrat, libertarian or Republican, and say we got to deal with these problems.
01:39:48.320But the moment you entertain the solutions to this and you look at the current administration failing to do anything about it.
01:39:57.460But the end result is the Democrats don't seem to be motivated to solve this problem.
01:40:03.100You then run into diehard Democratic voters who are just going to default to, you know, you're a Trump supporter, you're crazy, you're a fascist, whatever.
01:40:11.040And then this is the bind we end up in with most of the problems I think we see today.
01:40:16.140Certainly with what we're looking at in terms of these these buildings and a potential default is not a good thing.
01:40:20.740Why isn't there an effort to solve the problem?
01:40:23.020I don't think it's a lack of awareness.
01:40:24.320I think they know full well exactly what's going on.
01:40:27.200There's no guarantee, I suppose, that voting Republican changes it.
01:40:29.900But at least one party is saying, hey, let's stop bad thing.
01:40:32.380The other party is ignoring it or at least pretending like they're doing something and doing nothing.
01:40:35.860Yeah, I used to think we could all agree on protecting children until the last maybe five or six years when the way everyone defines protecting children became different.
01:40:44.540There's people on the left who say protecting children is giving them puberty blockers now.
01:40:47.900And people on the right saying that's that's bad, you know, but I want to protect the child.
01:40:51.700So even when it comes down to that, our definition of protecting innocence has has changed and it spreads out from there to the border and all these things.
01:40:59.980So I don't that's why I don't know how you fix this politically.
01:41:03.860I believe the border should be shut down right now and we could handle that way better.
01:41:10.060But I think that that it's like to fix you've got to get tough on folks that exploit the children.
01:41:20.480For example, I read something that said that in California they were against increasing sentencing for for the Johns that hire prostitutes as long as the girls were over 15, 15, 16, 17, 18.
01:41:40.180And that was supposedly right now, I think I mean, I could be wrong here, but I believe I read something like this.
01:41:46.680Maybe you guys could search that, but that there was some legislation that was being shot down or something about being tough on the men that are hiring these women.
01:41:58.120And right now it's only a misdemeanor. I think that one of the things is that you need to be really tough.
01:42:05.320It's supply and demand. So I think we need to get really tough on the demand side of the equation.
01:42:10.820And that's going to be on a federal level. So that's like politician. That's your congressman, your senators, the president.
01:42:17.380They've got to get tough and talk tough and take action because we've got to squash the demand.
01:42:24.120So that and then the cities and the counties, they could they could definitely deal with the demand.
01:42:29.220And so it's a it's going to be a big effort, I think.
01:42:34.120Like, how do you how do you help protect these kids and put an end to a lot of this stuff?
01:42:39.120I think it's a joint effort. It's going to take corporations.
01:42:43.180It's going to take philanthropies. It's going to take filmmakers like what we're doing right now.
01:42:49.040It's going to take influencers and celebrities. They could all talk about the issue.
01:42:54.240Awareness and acceptance. But a lot of these places make money off of it.
01:42:58.620This business, people are making money off of it all over the place.
01:43:02.820I don't think a lot of these evil people are willing to give up that money.
01:43:05.060Yeah. Child trafficking, I read, is like something like a hundred billion dollar industry worldwide.
01:43:12.720A hundred to one hundred and fifty billion dollar industry by child labor and sex trafficking.
01:43:19.380That's like a staggeringly big number of money that's being made.
01:43:23.420Shocking. Yeah. I think the more you talk about it, hopefully people accept the reality.
01:43:27.180You know, I mentioned earlier the thing I wrote about in Ohio with with Alex Rosen.
01:43:31.860Those are unorganized people who have this appetite for evil.
01:43:35.640Right. Do going after children using Facebook and other platforms, Roblox and whatever games are using to talk to kids and lure them out of their houses.
01:43:43.680So there's that you got to deal with the stuff you're talking about.
01:43:47.100You're dealing with like the government helping gangs, helping you talk about the border and it's very organized and they're using these online tools.
01:43:56.200That's got to be completely stopped somehow.
01:44:00.340But it doesn't seem as of like I said, as of this year, it doesn't seem like they're doing much to stop it.
01:44:04.800They're doing much to stop people who are saying things politically they don't like.
01:44:07.660But when it comes to the kids, what or movies or movies, bringing up the issue and building awareness has been blocked, has been banned.
01:44:13.600Sound of Freedom and your film show that there is an interest to stopping this narrative.
01:45:17.380The thing about those videos is there's so many different people who are doing those things and they go and they publicly shame these people.
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01:46:43.920When you really care about someone, you shout it from the mountaintops.
01:46:48.340So on behalf of Desjardins Insurance, I'm standing 20,000 feet above sea level to tell our clients that we really care about you.
01:47:19.180And I think some of that came out of the stuff that you were involved with, with some of the protests for, like, the Black Lives Matter protests.
01:47:29.000So there was some of the defunding of the police that came out of some of that.
01:50:10.200And many of them aren't going to have families.
01:50:12.340I don't see how we, the system can survive without, honestly, with the rate of mass illegal immigration, which they have welcomed, probably in desperation, I suppose.
01:50:25.360And the problems we're seeing now with defaults or the threat of defaults on these office buildings.
01:51:14.380We should all sue Apple because Apple created the iPhone and it changed humanity forever.
01:51:20.720Because everyone now is so addicted to staring at your phone all day that I think that there's a correlation between everybody staring at their phone for two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight hours and then bonding and connecting with others.
01:51:34.780So, like, how could you have such a bond with the iPhone and then, like, you should have bonds with other humans and procreate.
01:54:33.500Maybe you'll live in a homestead out in the middle of nowhere, which the machine state will be fine for you to do because you'll have no influence.
01:54:39.360And then you'll eventually just cease to exist.
01:54:42.520The digital age is moving so rapidly right now.
01:54:47.580And the way that information is communicated and transferred.
01:54:52.340I mean, I've learned quite a bit about the digital marketing recently only because, you know, I'm involved in this film.
01:54:58.800I wasn't really, you know, I'm not real big on social media.
01:55:01.720And but but I've met many of these influencers recently that attended some of our red carpet.
01:55:09.580And it's really amazing how many people can earn like 50 or 100,000 bucks a month.
02:01:19.560Do they just put their money in yachts and buildings and then forget about it and have someone manage it?
02:01:23.700And then just buy a summer house in the Hamptons or something?
02:01:28.120Yeah, it really depends who the people are.
02:01:30.660You know, it seems like my wife and I are surrounded by other people that are like-minded like us.
02:01:36.740And so we're in a network of people that are really wealthy, like us, and very blessed.
02:01:44.060And then we also hang out with a lot of people that we went to high school with and elementary school.
02:01:50.500And so we really are hanging around with people of all shapes and sizes.
02:01:56.400And, you know, we have friends that are Democrats and Republicans.
02:01:59.040I mean, just to your point, like, okay, so you have other successful business leaders or people that made money, and are they giving back?
02:02:07.460I mean, I was mentored by a lot of wonderful people when I was younger, both in business.
02:02:14.600Okay, when I was in my lower 30s and late 20s, they had really mentored me and made a really serious impact on me to think about being generous to other people.
02:02:25.260And a lot of them are all throughout South Florida.
02:02:29.020There's a wonderful man named Rick Case.
02:03:24.320And we actually had a really nice reception for him on my property at the Manor House for his family and for Rita and all the membership that was there.
02:03:32.860But there are people like that that I bumped into when I was like 29, 30, 31.
02:03:37.600Right as I was starting to make a bunch of money.
02:03:39.920And I saw them and the way they conducted themselves in business and what a big heart they had.
02:03:46.980And I was lucky that I was mentored and inspired by that family and many others throughout South Florida.
02:03:55.300And I can't say it enough that, like, we don't need socialism or anything like that and, you know, Robin Hood and take from the rich and give to the poor or whatever.
02:04:08.080But that all of us out there have an obligation as humans to think about caring for others.
02:04:14.500And it doesn't have to be with your money.