David Batstone’s entrepreneurial journey begins at his favorite restaurant in San Francisco. As he recalls, he loved the tandoori chicken, but he didn’t realize that he was eating in the center of a human trafficking ring that had brought over 500 teenagers from India into the United States for the purpose of forced labor. 

A journalist and venture capitalist, David couldn’t reconcile the fact that human slavery was happening in his own backyard. So, he decided to do something about it. The result is Not for Sale, a book where he breaks down how business can fix the $31 billion human trafficking epidemic.

Today, he’s with us to share that journey of how God opened his eyes to the brokenness in the world and gave him a vision for how to fix it.

Episode Transcript

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David Batstone: Like I thought, look, I was at the end of a river pulling bodies out as they were drowning and flailing, and that's compassion and something is very important. Part of my spiritual journey is to practice compassion, but at the same time is wisdom, and that is to look upstream and say, well, how are these bodies falling in? Like, what are the systems and what are the people, the demand behind it? How do we solve the problem there?

Henry Kaestner: Welcome back to the Faith Driven Entrepreneur podcast. We've got a special guest today, David Batstone is in the House talking about the ministry that he started with regards to human trafficking. And, David, it's great to have you on the program. Thank you very much for being here.

David Batstone: It's a real pleasure to talk to some brothers about my heart.

Henry Kaestner: So there's so much to talk about with what is on your heart. And I want to get into that, provide our listeners a context about the industry and the problem that you're looking to solve and how you as an entrepreneur have gone about solving that problem. But before we do that, love to start our show every time by asking our guests who they are, where they come from, what their faith journey has been, and really bring us up to that moment in your life when all of a sudden this became a big, big deal for us. So what is it like growing up brings up to speed?

David Batstone: Well, you know, I grew up in the Midwest and I grew up in a evangelical background, the Plymouth brother. And maybe some people who are listening are familiar with the Plymouth Brethren. But it's a small community that very much values the scripture and looked for ways to implement it in the life of the church and in the community around. And I went I went to Westmont College, which is a Christian evangelical school. And in Santa Barbara. Really? Really. Yeah. And I went on to get an objective and studied theology and have a Ph.D. in theology. And so, you know, today I'm a venture capitalist and teach business at the University of San Francisco. I don't know if I'm probably the only business professor in entrepreneurship that has a Ph.D. in theology.

Henry Kaestner: Then you may be the only one. The only one I know Rusty.

Rusty Rueff: I don't know any others either. So whether or not that you're the only one, we're going to give it to you today. You got that badge, you know.

David Batstone: Yeah, a dash. My dreams. I had one thing I stand up for.

Henry Kaestner: OK, so tell us I want you to take us back to the restaurant that you used to frequent that you later found out was a center of human trafficking. So this is a restaurant, the United States, correct?

David Batstone: Yeah, it's in the San Francisco Bay Area. And I was a venture capitalist in Silicon Valley at the time, and I was also a professor teaching University of San Francisco. So it wasn't like I was looking for another gig, Henry. I mean, you know, my life was full and it was just a shock to learn that my favorite restaurant I would go to regularly. You know, I love the Italys and Poppadoms and Teriyaki Chicken. Yeah, but I learned that this restaurant had trafficked young girls from the ages of 14 to 19, over 500 young girls. Oh, my goodness. Into the San Francisco Bay Area for the purpose of forced labor. First in this restaurant, they were being forced to work against their will and then they'd be taken out the brothels and fruit and vegetable fields in California. I didn't discover it and that was part of my journey. The trafficker kept these young girls and fifteen to twenty in an apartment and there was a natural gas leak that killed one girl and injured others. And when the police showed up, they said, we need to get you away from the gas and we're more worried about him and pointed to the trafficker. And so front page of my newspaper, I read it and I've been going to this place for years. And I was like, how could I not see this? How could have been blind to it? And it's really funny how, you know, when we often say we pray that God would give us some wisdom or teach us a path or open a door. And I could have changed my philosophy on this because I think God is always putting things in front of us. It's how we respond to those things. That's how it builds our character, the way we respond to things that God puts in front of us. It's not like we need to somehow go out and find it. It's there. And I can't tell you why. That was a defining moment of my life. I had to do something about it because I'm sure many other people went to that restaurant. I said, well, that's a very bizarre experience. But for me, it was a calling. I had to respond to it.

Henry Kaestner: That's incredible, the size and scope, and it's just right there, I think that when we think about human trafficking, we think that, yes, we've heard about girls coming from Nepal or India, but we generally think that they I don't know, they go to Amsterdam or they go to some other places. It's far from us. But that many girls, it's not two or three or 500 through a restaurant in San Francisco. Reasonably civilized city. That's incredible.

David Batstone: I'm shocking. So I should call in other people that, you know, if you heard of this and some friends in L.A. said, well, yeah, we just had a sewing factory in East Los Angeles where 112 girls from Thailand were imprisoned and forced to sew clothes every day. And they would then be locked into rooms in the same facility where they were sewing clothes. And then I called friends in the Texas area, Houston and Dallas, and they would tell me of these bars or cantinas where young girls would be lined up with a numbers printed on their chest and a man would come to get a beer and then point to number 30 for who he wanted to buy for a night or weaker. And it was just, you know, just so shocking to me that this was a part of, you know, my country and my reality that I felt like, OK, I need to really understand this. So I took a leave of absence from my university and my venture capital bank. And I went around the world for a year, follow the money. I went from San Francisco to Bangalore and went from Los Angeles to Thailand. I went from Houston and Dallas to Peru and Guatemala. So, you know, basically follow the money to understand this trade in people.

Henry Kaestner: So I was going to ask you, so you're an entrepreneur, you've been a venture capital. You understand it. Entrepreneurs solve problems. You see that there's clearly a problem. But instead of doing something right away, you say, I want to fully understand the problem, let's follow the money. So what an incredible adventure that must have been. Oh, you know, I wish that there's a documentary filmmaker along with you as you kind of leave San Francisco in this restaurant and then you go to Bangalore and you're in the back alleyways. So you spent a year trying to understand the problem, following the money. And at some point in time, you're like, I got it. There's a big problem. I think I have a sense about how I might address it. What was that?

David Batstone: It's funny how we have an accepted paradigm of how you approach a concern, whether it's social, environmental. And I'm sure everyone listening today has something that they really care about, whether it's malaria or global warming or extreme poverty. So it's very funny, though, that many of us, when we attempt to address these problems, we open our heart and we shut down our brain. At least that's what I did, because here I was a venture capitalist in Silicon Valley. And when I confronted with this problem of trafficking, you know, over 40 million individuals living in some form of forced bondage or slavery, what I did is I started a bad business model called a nonprofit, a charity. And now I do want to clarify, I don't think charities are all bad or wrong or they're foolish, but they are not sustainable and they're not scalable. And if you really want to address a problem of the magnitude we're talking about, you need to develop a business model that has the scalability to it to actually solve the problem. So what I did is I set up a nonprofit and we would go to churches and rotary clubs and schools and, you know, we get donations and then we build a shelter. And I mean, we were good at it. It was fine. It was great. But it was small and it was very difficult to build something that would actually, I believe, solve the problem.

Rusty Rueff: But you did find a way to release the talents that God had given you. And one of the things I find fascinating about your story, and I think it should be enlightening to all entrepreneurs. And I remember, you know, we were much younger than when you wrote Not for Sale, when you and I first met years and years ago in San Francisco. But I was impressed then and I'm still impressed now that you not only had the heart for it, but as you started to allude and get into. You also had some skills, some talents that you'd been given that all you needed to do was sort of look inside of yourself and say, wait a minute, I can do something with this. And you had these journalism skills. That you uncovered, so take us through that and then take us into, you know, what you ended up doing with those writing skills.

David Batstone: I appreciate that, Rusty, because it is I think many people listening. They say, well, how could I do? I like to do something more meaningful. I'd love to be involved and say works that that would bring about a benefit for the world. And oftentimes they don't think about, well, what do I know best and who do I know best and what would be the process I would follow. And I guess I started to look at the fact that in Silicon Valley, if I wanted to build an enterprise, what I do is I'd find the best capital, the best talent and cutting edge technology. And I would build a company based on that that would be profitable and would reach internationally. And in the case I said, well, what if I took those same skills, that same kind of formula, and I applied it to human trafficking? And the first thing to do is bring together the best talent, so I got 50 people who, you know, the smartest people I knew, the most successful, you know, the founder of Twitter was one of them. I got the founder of the largest health care online company. I got a you got a baseball player for the San Francisco Giants, like people who are successful. And I said, look, help me come up with a business model or a business plan for a very specific situation. And this situation is in the Amazon of Peru, my nonprofit not for sale. We build a shelter for young kids coming from native or indigenous communities in the Amazon. They're being trafficked into Lima. Help us come up with a business model. So we had a 24 hour period where we brainstormed and had a competition. The winning idea was to start a company that would source the wonderful assets or ingredients that come out of the Amazon. These super herbs like Mocha Mocha suddenly pay a fair wage, create an economic platform that would provide long term security for the native communities, put into a beverage, sell it in mainstream grocery stores and return profits back to those communities. It's a wonderful, beautiful idea. Unless you're the guy on Monday morning that now has to start this company, that's a beverage. Right. And I knew nothing about beverage. And so, again, I thought, OK, what would I do if I was in Silicon Valley now? What would I do if I was just another charity? Well, I go and find the best beverage maker in the world who could use these herbs and put them into the beverage and make a wonderful product. And that's what I did. I just found the best beverage maker in the world, hired them, paid them what Coca-Cola would have paid him. I didn't pay them a nonprofit salary in equity in the company. And, you know, fast forward six years. We are now the number one health beverage in America. Rebel groups extract Barberi leaves rebel, and we have now returned over a million dollars back to those communities through our profit sharing. We're sourcing ingredients in three countries now and we choose the ingredient based on the most impact, not the cheapest ingredient. But where will we have the most impact on poor communities? So over 30000 families, one hundred twenty thousand people, more or less, are being empowered in poor, rural, exploited communities. So to me, this was like a revelation. It's taking the same principles and mission that I had a nonprofit, but embedding the DNA into a enterprise, a for profit enterprise.

Rusty Rueff: Well, I got to give you a plug, because unless I'm wrong, Serena Williams is on your side, right, with Rebel, right. I see her on television all the time.

David Batstone: We got we're fortunate. We have so many. Rubirosa is a great actress. She's a bit one of our big ambassadors, Michael Franti, who's a musician. So we get a lot of actually actors, musicians, artists who come to us and say, is there any way I could be an ambassador for your brand? And that's the great thing about, you know, doing well by doing good. People want to be a part of it.

Rusty Rueff: Yeah, that's awesome. So it reminds me of and we all know the story of Esther did write in the book of Esther. And Mordechai says to her, you know, is it that you've been called for such a time just as this? Do you feel like God specifically prepared and equipped you to make the headway into this sort of massive, let's call it a massive force of evil in this world? Did you have that Esther moment?

David Batstone: Oh, very much so. You know, coming out of that experience of understanding that in my own backyard was this trafficking of hundreds of young girls from Bangalore. I just could not walk away. It was a calling. And to have walked away would have meant for me a betrayal of a character that I was being called to fill. And, you know, I suppose even today, now, 15 years later, people ask me, well, gosh, know, aren't you just being overwhelmed by this evil or by the enormity of the problem? And I say, you know, for whatever reason, I'm more inspired by what we do achieve and the people we can rescue and save and the empowerment that does happen, that inspires me more than the enormity of what we haven't done. And I think once you're on that calling, then your inspiration comes through your daily walk and not through some kind of expectation of how much of it you're going to solve.

Rusty Rueff: So I'm going to encourage everybody to jump on Amazon and go back and get that book not for sale, because it tells your story and it tells the story of the beginnings of what you tried to conquer. If you were writing an epilog or a new chapter for not for sale, what would it say right now?

David Batstone: I would say I'd say it's the art of being a rebel and of course, is the name of the first company we started. We now have 10 companies, by the way. And I could talk about some of those if you'd like. But the art of being a rebel, meaning that we're so much through social media or through advertising or just through our environment that we live in, that we're so, you know, told to what makes us valuable, what we should consume or what career we should pursue. And to be a rebel, anything in the best sense is to hear a different voice, to follow a different path. And that requires us to have a strong spiritual grounding that we realize that where the world is going and what is named as what is valuable, what will make me a success may not be what's true for my character. And so I think the art of being a rebel is about choosing a path that you're going to follow, regardless of what the rest of the world tells you.

Henry Kaestner: So I'm fascinated by, you know, we've been around the space long enough to know that there's this thing of impact investing, and so there are social entrepreneurs that come out of programs like Praxis and others that really have a desire to really make an impact on communities in many cases, work with them on the business side, which I love, which is there's injustices in this world. Yes, there's an opportunity for philanthropy. But in terms of providing dignity rather than dependency, there's a place for the markets in all of this. You teach about social entrepreneurship in innovative entrepreneurship in San Francisco. I'm wondering what you do as you take a 19, 20 year old student that is starting to understand the enormity of the injustice in this world. They've got a heart for these things. What is it that you do as you train them, as you give them this kind of alternate imagination and you equip them? What do you tell them? How do you get them trained up?

David Batstone: Hmm. What I find my students is they are looking for a bridge to tie together with their heart. And talent is what they're really passionate about and their expectation of creating a life that is, you know, financially responsible and maybe having a family. And and they feel like they have to choose between the two. And probably the most helpful thing that I do in my classroom is to help them understand that their skills are needed all over the world. And there's incredible opportunities for them to deploy investment or accounting or, you know, their entrepreneurial passion in environments that are basically untouched. And so there's so much opportunity in the world today, the way that we're rewriting our energy systems and the way that we're going to be moving into new economies of transport. And this is every area health care is going to transform that. I would say to my students that even though you're getting the message that, wow, it's almost like you're nineteen eighty four, you wish you joined the Beatles, it's over. There's nothing new and there's nothing in the truth of the matter is, is that you're living in the most exciting moments in history and you can use your skills to build livlihood not only for yourself but for those who typically are being left out of the world economic picture today. So I really do encourage them to think bigger than simply can I get a job at Goldman Sachs or Apple?

Henry Kaestner: So I think that you're probably finding this new generation is really, really open to that in a way, not the to options weren't. Do you ever see there's a book that we all know called When Helping Hurts by guy named Brian Fisher, talking about some great intentions? And what are things like that might go wrong? What are the unintended consequences? Are there examples when impact investing or social entrepreneurship might also go wrong, where somebody comes at it with the right intentions, wants to really address an injustice, but there's something that they don't see that ends up maybe even doing more harm than good. And I shouldn't focus on the negative side because there's so much positive that can happen. And yet there are probably some examples where it's done poorly as well.

David Batstone: Absolutely. The best way to talk about poor examples is start with my own life. You know, when I first started working in social entrepreneurship, I was in Latin America and I tried to create economic opportunities for poor communities and teach them agricultural skills or teach in the show or whatever skills training. And you often find this in the nonprofit or ministry world that we train people to do a job. But some of that we never think about is, well, if there's no ecosystem, if there's not a environment where then there's investment opportunity or there is a supply chain or a demand for the products or services, then really you're equipping someone for a very disappointing and frustrating life. And I find this is not only within a training program, but say, in well hearted people who want to teach people in Africa how to grow mangoes better. OK, but how do you think about the system that allows for that success, whatever investment that might be for that community? And so I suppose from the start, you need to think about both the demand and the supply and the ability to use your investment in a way that those communities can actually begin to build out an economy and a platform that will sustain itself over a long period of time. Unfortunately, I find that many social impact enterprise groups. What they do is that they have a very, you know, three to five year investment and then it dries up and it goes away.

Rusty Rueff: So, David, I want to go a little deeper into sort of the faith journey that you took. Right. That at the time when you said, I'm walking away from all of this and I'm going to travel around the world and I'm going to go solve or I'm going to try to solve or try to understand sex trafficking, that's as much of a faith journey is sitting there going, I'm going to solve world hunger. I mean, because it's a big thing, like you were trying to put your arms around so we can. Call that a faith journey, but let's also call it a faith journey, you know, with your faith. Take us through that journey that God put you on and share some of the stories, maybe ups and downs of your own personal faith journey as you embarked on this.

David Batstone: You know, it's really interesting, Rusty, that we like to make heroes out of people when we see the whole narrative. So while it's very heroic, but everyone's journey, whether it's a hero's journey or not, starts with just one step. And that's the hardest step, is to say I'm going to leave my security and my comfort to do something. And it it's scary to take that one step. And I honestly was not thinking of anything beyond, you know, I need to understand how this was happening in my backyard. My one step is I'm going to go to India and Thailand, follow the trail of trafficking from California to Asia and just understand it. It was curiosity. And also, if I made it visible, I was going to go back to my venture capital firm at my university. But what happened is that you made that one step. Then I met this woman who in northern Thailand, she had rescued twenty seven kids who were in karaoke bars being forced to sell their bodies to male clients. And she was living out in an empty field without any resources. And so I went, oh, man, OK, I have a second step. I'll take. I promised I would build her a home. That was OK. Now I'm going to, you know, write this book about my understanding of what we've learned and to build a home. Then I'll go back to my life. And that just keeps cascading. So, you know, the fact that not for sale does what it does today, if you think, oh, my gosh, it's wonderful, what you do is that, you know, that I've just been stumbling my way toward it now. You know, there's been a lot of ups and downs and things that I wish we had done differently. And, you know, one saying I learned and gone I really would love is that we don't mind stumbling because it makes us move forward more quickly. And I think that's probably than my journey is. Like I'd like to say that there was clarity, but probably reluctantly. I took each step and then you look back and say, well, God really blessed that narrative. God bless that journey

Henry Kaestner: or take us forward in a second to some of the other ventures that you're involved with and energy and a number of different projects. I want to go backwards, though, first, which is to go into this kind of atwar about understanding the larger ecosystem. And I'm compelled not only about the stories of where these girls come from, but also through to the demand side. And part of me is just thinking, oh, my goodness, if you can have prostitution where people have numbers on their chest and dozens and dozens of girls being sold in the field, what role does the demand side have in the equation on trafficking?

David Batstone: Well, it really is. The preponderance of the problem is that there is a demand for either the use of someone's labor or their body for someone else's pleasure or someone else's greed. So, you know, after five years of my first five years of not for sale, Henry, what I felt like I thought like I was at the end of a river pulling bodies out as they were drowning and flailing. And that's compassion. And something is very important. Part of my spiritual journey is to practice compassion, but at the same time is wisdom, and that is to look upstream and say, well, how are these bodies falling in? Like, what are the systems and what are the people, the demand behind it? How do we solve the problem there? And I suppose I don't see there's enough of that being done within the anti trafficking movement to actually solve the problem of the area of demand and not only the supply problem, that is people who are the consequences of these actions. So I think it's really important to understand that demand side. And, you know, it's everything from factories to agricultural fields to brothels to fishing industry, fishing boats. I mean, it's embedded in so many systems that one thing that I felt as a business entrepreneur, I'm probably the best thing I could do is rather run after every one and kind of try and stop. All of the negativity was to start creating models of desire in the world that I wanted to live in. I'm sure other people want to live in as well. Start designing companies where there's dignity and goodness at the core of the company in the DNA of the company, thereby inspire other young entrepreneurs to be able to want to live that life and pursue those dreams.

Henry Kaestner: So I want to get into that. But one last thing, the deterrent part, because I'm just thinking right through the demand side. I mean, the demand for lust and all that stuff, I mean, is biblical. We all know it. We all know that it's inside of us. I'm wondering, you know, some number of people have there's a debate about whether the death penalty is a deterrent or not. I wonder how, though deterrence enters into the demand side of the equation with sex trafficking, is somebody listening to this? Can you lobby your legislator to be able to have stricter rules? Does that even work? Do you find that rules are just lax enough and that just authorities kind of look the other way even in America, does deterrence and punishment work or is that just a myth?

David Batstone: Deterrence is effective and I think there's different levels of deterrence. One is simply prosecution and rule of law that actually takes seriously the practice of same sex trafficking. I remember when we first started not for sale. I mean, it was hard to get, you know, local police officials and FBI to believe the extent of the problem in our American cities. And, you know, I'm not trained as a law enforcement officer, but I my team and I, we would have to go undercover with a camera and go into these brothels and massage parlors and the like and then take that footage to law enforcement. And it's changed now. It is a much more of an awareness and a much more of a compliance with that in the United States at least. But so that's one of the other is I think probably the biggest deterrence is the public shaming that comes from being exposed. It's really interesting. I'm in Sweden right now. This interview in Sweden, what they've done is they put in newspapers or on billboards and shaming the johns and the demand side. And, you know, all too often it's the victims is the young women who are kind of shamed or put into the spotlight. And, you know, it's remarkable the level to which that puts another fear of the social community even more than in many cases, just the being arrested.

Henry Kaestner: Yeah. OK, so I want to move forward towards your equipping some of these entrepreneurs to solve more problems, to create these businesses where business is done the right way. You've got just business and not for sale was maybe your first foray into that, but you've not stopped there. You're in Sweden right now on an energy deal. Walk us through some of the different projects you're working on.

David Batstone: Certainly, you know, part of this was it's an ongoing evolution of understanding how could we scale the solution? And that's really the objective here is not for me to be able to come on your show. And I could tell you three stories of young women or boys. And that's a fantastic again, I don't want to undersell that, but is being able to say, look, now we can impact millions because it's the size of this, the scope of that. So, you know, I had a great entrepreneur come to me and I'm always looking for entrepreneurs. And he said, look, I have this idea of being able to assist big companies with mobility. And so if you look at the big tech companies or the big pharmaceutical companies or retail companies, they're hiring people from all over the world. They want talent and they'll move them around the world. So they're in mobility. And so I thought about this, you know, look at all make an investment in your company and I'll get behind you to be able to get the Apple, Facebook, Googles, Nike's, and those are all our customers today for this company. But you have to take one percent of all the revenue. We generate one percent of the gross revenue and dedicate it to those people who are in mobility, refugees, human trafficking victim. But they don't have those services. They don't have someone to help them say when you come to a new city, find a place for your children to go to school or find a dentist. And so basically, we created a concierge service that now is global. This company, we're the only investors in it, and it's called velocity. And now we do have Apple, Facebook, Google, Nike, Twitter, all the companies, Nike, Walmart, Starbucks, they all pay us to take care of their employees. And what we're doing is we're taking some of that revenue directly to those communities that also are in deep need of mobility. Security.

Rusty Rueff: That's very cool. That's actually inspiring, David, that you've extended what you've done into, you know, organizations that we all know that needed to be shook at their core to say this is something important. And, you know, to that point, you know, on this podcast, you have the ears now of thousands of entrepreneurs, Faith driven entrepreneurs. What would you like to tell them about how they can, even in the earliest stages, you know, use their businesses to do more than just create a bottom line profit? And how would you like to see Faith driven entrepreneurs, you know, solving these types of problems?

David Batstone: I've been involved in a lot of faith driven entrepreneurial events. You know, there's great things like businesses, Mission BAM and The Lion's Den. And, you know, I could go on and on with faith driven organizations. And I guess my message continually to them is you're not thinking big enough. You know, it's almost as if it's a ministry that we're stamping a Bible verse on top of or some kind of a mission. But, you know, it's not about transforming the business. And what I want to see is that we transform business, that we actually redeem the business model to bring about goodness for the community. And that requires thinking, you know, with grabble, my goal is to compete with Coca-Cola. Right. With velocity. I want to be the number one mobility company in the world. Doesn't sacrifice my mission. My mission is at the heart of all that I do. But I have to think bigger. And I think entrepreneurs are making. Or God too small, they're making their mission too insignificant and they're not saying that, you know, this is a warrior's test, is a lions task, and it's to start to build the best companies in the world, but with faith and values of the center of the company.

Rusty Rueff: Yeah, we had Tony Evans on the podcast recently, the pastor of Cliff Fellowship Bible Church in Dallas, and he had a great sort of calling out to Faith driven entrepreneurs, to King Demised. Their business kingdom is your business, you know. And as I listened to that and I listened to you, sort of what I read into all of this is, look, the core of what we do, we might be out there running a agricultural business or cleaning business or a technology business. But if we're faith driven entrepreneurs, you know, we are to give back, take our talents and our skills and kingdom is our business, but also to find these areas where we have the skills, talents and maybe resources, maybe financial resources that we need to put to help those that can't be helped. And I'm going to turn this over to Henry to close this out. But I want to continue to encourage you, David, and thank you for the work that you've done in such an important area that's happening all around us that, you know, we don't see. You had to look into the shadows and you had to go into the shadows to find it. And I appreciate the courage and the journey that you took to get there.

David Batstone: Well, thank you. I appreciate it, Rusty. You know, now my being in Sweden today, I think the other thing that spiritual vision gives you is the audacity to think that you can start to kingdom eyes the world we live in. And, you know, right now I'm really compelled not only to the work of my own people and dignity of people, but also the planet. And how do we rethink and redesign the world so that the planet is something that has the same dignity. But God made it with, you know, working with all the big car companies, Tesla, GM, Ford, for the next generation of car. We're recycling all the batteries. We're extracting the minerals that they need for the batteries. But it's done all with a new kind of technology that is going to just really remarkably change the way that transport is done so that companies, American Battery Technology Company, we also have a hydrogen company. So rethink the world, redesign it, put values at the very center of it

Henry Kaestner: by saying, that's awesome. So much more to go to. I think that we could do an episode on each one of those ideas about how you're looking to solve for them, how you're tracing the money and the problem, just like you did with child trafficking and understanding how the supply chain works and things like energy and how it needs to be redeemed and what does it look like right down to the end user. So we're going to come back to that. For now. We want to ask you, as we do all of our guests, what you're hearing from God through his word and doesn't need to be this morning. But it very well could be. But maybe the last week or last couple of weeks now, as one of the things that unites all of our guests together is God is at work. One of our guests has said Auslan is on the move and he's very much at work. And what's your sense with all that?

David Batstone: I've been drawing recently to the Proverbs, I've been reading a lot of the proverbs. And one of the problems over the last week I've been thinking a lot about is Proverbs 17. Twenty two about a cheerful heart is good medicine, but a crushed spirit dries up the bones. And I just think about what do I surround myself with, what is a cheerful heart? You know, the people around me and I guess in a very glib way of saying is that toxic people really do dry your bones, cheerful people, people who have a good heart, people who are positive, they inspire you. And, you know, I just don't think a lot about time is precious, relationships are precious. And to surround yourself with people who are hopeful and encourage you, they want to see you succeed. And, you know, if people are a negative force in your life, get rid of them, walk away because they never get better. I know it sounds harsh, but really it's about building communities of hope and inspiration and faith.

Henry Kaestner: David, thank you very much for being with us. Great joy. Thank you for being one of those people that is a positive force in the midst of all this going on with covid being able to look at some of the challenges that can be solved and getting out there and doing it creatively and then also inspire the next generation through your work in school. That's super cool as well. Thank you.

David Batstone: Thank you very much. Entrain Rusty really been good to connect with you today.