And Diddy goes “No, no, this is bad.”
I say, “Well, yeah, but you got all these photographers here, you can’t stop! You have to finish it.” And he was gasping really, really hard.
We get back to the house and he goes, “That was not okay. That was not all right.” We may have gone out the night before, so it might have been one of those alcohol shiver sweats, right? Where your skin starts to get numb because the alcohol is coming out—one of those. He was not doing well. And yeah: That’s the year he ran the marathon.
You touched upon it a little bit earlier about what you’re doing with Thorn. I find it interesting you’re kind of approaching the issue as a tech problem, and I know you’re running on behalf of them for the charity. So if you want to give a little bit of a deeper dive into that passion to close out the convo and you know how it started, that would be great.
So about 15 years ago, I saw this Dateline special about these kids that were like five, six, seven years old in Cambodia, that grown-ass men were flying to Cambodia to assault these kids and somebody was profiting off of it. And I thought this was crazy. I can’t believe this exists in the world. I started looking around, trying to find what the organizations were that were proactively going after that issue, and there were some small organizations that were doing some stuff but nothing at any kind of scale. I just started to approach it the same way I look at startups, because at the time I was investing in a lot of startups. I thought the first thing I need to do is figure out what the total addressable market is here, how big is this problem? And I spent about five years researching the problem to try to size it, and at one point somebody said to me, this isn’t a problem just for Cambodia—this is a problem here [in the United States]. This is happening here.
In the research, I found that it’s very vast, and I won’t quote numbers because the numbers are relatively hypothetical, but it’s in the millions of kids that are being sexually abused. So we found out that 70% plus of the transactions for this material were happening online. I thought If we can build companies that are good businesses online, maybe we can make [sexual explotation] a bad business by identifying this content. So taking the same tactics that companies take to identify spam and malware and remove it to identifying and removing a child sexual abuse material from the internet.
So right now we have three core pieces of software that are all identifying children that are being sexually abused. There are two products that we have for law enforcement to help them prioritize their caseload and find these kids and collaborate on cases, and that’s been used around the world by law enforcement and in all 50 states. And then we have a new product that we just finished building a couple of years ago, that’s being used by enterprise companies like any company that has an upload button on their site where you can upload a photo, an image, or a video.
We can help them identify the content and report it and take it down. Today we’ve identified 25,000 kids, and every year that number gets greater. We’ve got a real problem on our hands and we now, thanks to the work of the folks at Thorn we’ve got some real solutions, and it’s just about getting folks to implement those solutions and then staying one step ahead so a lot of the people that are consuming and publishing this content are really technologically sophisticated, so staying one step ahead of them and finding these kids is. That’s what we do.
Amazing. And then: This is the last question that I ask to everybody in an interview, for somebody who’s reading this, is on their health journey or just needs to kick start or even wanna run a marathon. What advice would you give them?
It’s just one step at a time. Running is just a controlled fall. That’s it.
Joe Holder
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