ENGLISH SPEECH ASHTON KUTCHER The Pursuit of Happiness English Subtitles
Thank you. It is an honor to be here.
As a young man, raised and – and brought
up in the public school system, I pledged
my allegiance to that flag every single day.
And the honor – maybe one of the greatest
honors of my life today is to be here, and
leverage the work that – that I’ve done
as testimony that may in some way benefit
this nation that I love.
I’d like start by saying thank you to Chairman
Corker for your leadership in this endeavor,
and to Senator Cardin. Your leadership has
been extraordinary. And I’d like to also
say thank you to the rest of the committee
that has supported this effort. This is a
bipartisan effort. And in a country that is
riddled with bipartisan separation on so many
things, slavery seems to come up as one of
these issues that we can all agree upon. And
I applaud you for your agreement, and I believe
in you and your leadership and your ability
to take us out of it.
I’m here today to defend the right to pursue
happiness. It’s a simple notion, the right
to pursue happiness. It’s bestowed upon all
of us by our Constitution. Every citizen of
this country has the right to pursue it and
I believe that it…is incumbent upon us as
citizens of this nation, as Americans, to
bestow that right upon others – upon each
other, and upon the rest of the world.
But the right to pursue happiness for so many
is stripped away. It’s raped. It’s abused.
It’s taken by force, fraud, or coercion.
It is sold for the momentary happiness of
another.
And this is about the time when I start talking
about politics – that the internet trolls
tell me to stick to my day job. So I’d like
to talk about my day job. My day job is as
the chairman and the co-founder of Thorn.
We build software to fight human trafficking
and the sexual exploitation of children. And
that’s our core mission. My other day job
is that of the father of two, a 2-month-old
and a 2-year-old, and as part of that job
that I take very seriously I believe that
it is my effort to defend their right to pursue
happiness and to ensure a society and government
that defends it as well.
As part of my anti-trafficking work, I’ve
met victims in Russia. I’ve met victims
in India. I’ve met victims that have been
trafficked from Mexico, victims in New York,
and New Jersey, and all across our country.
I’ve been on FBI raids where I’ve seen
things that no person should ever see. I’ve
seen video content of a child that’s the same
age as mine being raped by an American man
that was a sex tourist in Cambodia. And this
child was so conditioned by her environment
that she thought she was engaging in play.
I’ve been on the other end of a phone call
from my team asking for my help because we
have received a call from the Department of
Homeland Security telling us that a 7-year-old
girl was being sexually abused and that content
was being spread around the dark web and she
had been being abused and they’ve watched
her for three years and they could not find
the perpetrator, asking us for help. We were
the last line of defense, an actor and his
foundation were the potential last line of
defense.
That’s my day job and I’m sticking to it.
I’d like to tell you a story about a 15-year-old
girl in Oakland. We’ll call her Amy. Amy met
a man online, started talking to him; a short
while later they met in person. Within hours
Amy was abused, raped, and forced into trafficking.
She was sold for sex. And this isn’t an isolated
inciden[t]. There’s not much that’s unusual
about it. The only unusual thing is that Amy
was found and returned to her family within
three days using the software that we created,
a tool called Spotlight.
And in an effort to protect its capacity over
time, I won’t give much detail about what
it does. But it’s a tool that can be used
by law enforcement to prioritize their case
load. It’s a neural net. It gets smarter
over time. It gets better and it gets more
efficient as people use it. And it’s working.
In six months, with 25% of our users reporting,
we’ve identified over 6,000 trafficking victims,
2,000 of which are minors. This tool is in
the hands of 4,000 law enforcement officials
in 900 agencies, and we’re reducing the investigation
time by 60%. This tool is effective. It’s
efficient. It’s nimble. It’s better. It’s
smarter.
Now there’s often a misconception about technology:
that in some way it is the generator of some
evil; that it’s creating job displacements;
and that it enables violence and malice acts.
But as an entrepreneur and as a venture capitalist
in the technology field, I see technology
as simply a tool – a tool without will. The
will is the user of that technology, and I
think it’s an important distinction. An airplane
is a tool. It’s a piece of technology. And
under the right hands it’s used for mass
global transit, and under the wrong hands
it can be flown into buildings. Technology
can be used to enable slavery but it can also
be used to disable slavery, and that’s what
we’re doing.
I alluded [to] a phone call that we got from
the Department of Homeland Security about
this girl that was being trafficked on the
dark web. Now, it’s interesting to note that
the dark web was created in the mid-90s. It
was a tool that was created by the naval research
lab called Tor, a tool with absolute purpose
and positive intention for sharing intelligence
communications anonymously. It’s also been
used to help people who are…being disenfranchised
by their government within political dissent
in oppressive regimes. But on the other side,
it’s used for trafficking – for drug trafficking,
for weapons trafficking, and for human trafficking;
and it’s also the warehouse for some of the
most offensive child abuse images in the world.
Now when the Department of Homeland Security
called us and asked for our help, and asked
if we had a tool, I had to say no. And it
devastated me. It haunted me because for the
next three months I had to go to sleep every
night and think about that little girl that
was still being abused; and the fact that
if I built the right thing, we could save
her.
So that’s what we did. And now if I get that
phone call – and Greg, wherever you’re at
– the answer would be yes. We’ve taken these
investigation times of dark web material from
three years down to what we believe can be
three weeks. The tool’s called Solace. And
once again I won’t go into too much detail
about the tool. But it’s being used by 40
agencies across the world today, in beta,
and we believe that this can yield extraordinary
results. And just like Spotlight, it gets
smarter and more efficient and more cost effective
over time.
So where do we go from here? What do we need?
Obviously we need money. We need financing
in order to build these tools. Technology
is expensive to build but the beauty of technology
is once you build the warehouse, it gets more
efficient and – and more cost effective over
time. I might be able to present to you a
government initiative where next year I come
back and ask for less – and to me that – that’s
is like, it seems extraordinary. The technology
we’re building is efficient. It works. It’s
nimble – because traffickers change their
modus operandi and we can change ours as well
just as efficiently, if not more efficiently,
as they can. It’s enduring and it only gets
smarter with time.
We also are collecting data. We have KPIs
[Key Performance Indicators]. We actually
understand that if we’re delivering value,
we can increase our efforts in that area.
If we’re not delivering value, we shut it
down and it,s a quantifiable solution. One
of my mentors told me, “Don’t go after this
issue if you can’t come up with a quantifiable
solution.” We can quantify it and we can make
the work that we’re doing and the initiatives
that you put forth accountable.
My second recommendation is to continue to
foster these private-public partnerships.
Spotlight was only enabled by the McCain Institution1
and the full support of Cindy McCain; and
a man that I find to be not only a war hero
but a hero to this issue, John McCain. It
wasn’t just created by them. There was extraordinary
support from the private sector. The company
Digital Reasoning of Tennessee stepped up
to the plate. They offered us effort. They
offered us engineers. They offered us support
and pro bono work. We’ve had the support
of companies that often times war with each
other from Google to Microsoft to AWS to Facebook;
and some of our other technology initiatives
include many, many other private companies.
It’s vital to our success. These private-public
partnerships are the key.
The third thing I’d like to highlight is the
pipeline. You know, we sit at the intersection
of discovery of these victims but the pipeline
in and the pipeline out are just as vital,
and just as important, and addressing them
are just as important. I’d like to highlight
one thing in particular, that being the foster
care system. There are 500,000 kids in foster
care today. I was astonished to find out that
70% of the inmates in the prison across this
country have touched the foster care system;
and 80% of the people on death row were at
some point in time exposed to the foster care
system; 50% of these kids will not graduate
high school and 95% of them will not get a
college degree.
But the most staggering statistic that I found
was that foster care children are four times
more likely to be exposed to sexual abuse.
That’s a breeding ground for trafficking.
I promise you that’s a breeding ground for
trafficking. But the reason I looked at foster
care is that it’s a microcosm. It’s – It’s
a sample set that we have pretty extraordinary
data around to date, even though we can’t
seem to fix it. It’s a microcosm for what
happens when displacement happens abroad,
as the unintended consequences of our actions
or inactions in the rest of the world. When
people are left out, when they’re neglected,
when they’re not supported, and when they’re
not given the love that they need to grow,
it becomes an incubator for trafficking. And
this refugee crisis, if… we want us to be
serious about ending slavery, we cannot ignore
it. And we cannot ignore our support for this
issue in that space because otherwise we’re
going to deal with it for years to come.
The outbound pipeline. There’s just not enough
beds. The bottom line is, once…someone is
exposed to this level of abuse, it’s a mental
health issue – and there aren’t enough
beds, there’s not enough support, and we have
to have the resources on the other side. Otherwise,
the recidivism rates are through the roof.
It’s…astonishing because when Maslow’s
Hierarchy of Needs are not being met, people
will resort to survival, and if this is their
means of survival and the only source of love
that they have in their life, that’s what
they go for. So we have to address the pipeline
out and we have to create support systems
on the other end. It’s not an entitlement.
It’s a demand to end slavery.
My fourth and final recommendation is the
bifurcation of sex trafficking and labor trafficking.
They’re both aberrations. They’re both
awful. They’re both slavery. And they’re
both punitive, in fact. But the solution sets
are highly differentiated. When you look at
sex trafficking, a victim is most often present
at the incident of commerce and – and this
– this provides an opportunity for – for
drastic intervention; whereas in labor trafficking,
the victims are being hidden behind the manufacturers
and the merchandisers, and it requires an
entirely different set of legislation, and
proactivity, and enforcement in order to shut
it down.
Now there’s a lot of rhetoric that’s going
on in the world right now about job creation
in the United States. Well, if we want to
create jobs in the United States I would ask
you to consider eliminating slavery from the
pipelines of corporations because a lot of
that slavery is happening abroad. And if we
ask those corporations, under extreme pressure,
that “If you don’t change it, you are going
to be penalized.” “And if you don’t clean
up that pipeline, it’s going to mean trouble.”
And they’re forced into a decision: They can
either clean up the pipeline abroad, or, they
can move the jobs to the United States of
America where they can be regulated and supported.
Bringing jobs to America can be the consequence
of doing the right thing, or it can be the
consequence of doing the wrong thing. But
that choice is up to you.
Now it – it’s not lost on me that all of
this disruption in our marketplaces is going
to have economic backlash, like that is not
lost on me at all. But I ask you, do you believe
that Abraham Lincoln had to consider the economic
backlash of shutting down the cotton fields
in the South when he shut down slavery, because
I’m sure that weighed on his mind.
You know, happiness can be given to no man.
It must be earned. It must be earned through
– through generosity and through purpose.
But the right to pursue it – the right to
pursue it is every man’s right. And I beg
of you that if you give people the right to
pursue it, what you may find in return is
happiness for yourself.
Thank you.