Episode 315 - SWGP + FDE: Disrupting the Economics of Sexual Brokenness with Eagle Ventures & GameSafe

In a world where darkness lurks behind every screen, can capitalism become an unlikely hero? This eye-opening episode reveals how entrepreneurs and investors are wielding the power of business to combat sexual exploitation and human trafficking. From AI-powered solutions to disruptive economic strategies, discover how faith-driven innovators are turning the tables on predators and reshaping the battlefield in the fight for human dignity. Prepare to have your perspective challenged and your hope rekindled as we explore the cutting edge of redemptive entrepreneurship.

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Transcription is done by an AI software. While technology is an incredible tool to automate this process, there will be misspellings and typos that might accompany it. Please keep that in mind as you work through it.

Richard Cunningham Welcome back, everybody, to another episode of the Faith Driven podcast. And I say faith driven without entrepreneur or investor on the back end, specifically, as Justin Forman, executive director and president of Faith Driven Movements, is in the podcast studio. We're doing something fun today and unique where we zoom in on one of the solving the World's greatest problem themes, and we do it on our FDE and FDI podcast as we're going to bring in marketplace leaders, entrepreneurs, investors alike talking about this particular problem. And we'll introduce our guests here shortly. But Justin, big episode today, a tough topic as the particular problem we're highlighting. It's a heavy one. And I want to give you kind of some time to give context of this episode and then we'll introduce our guests.

Justin Forman Yeah, big episode. And when we talk about solving the world's greatest problems, we don't have to look far to see how dark it is out there and to see how dark some of these things. And certainly this is one of those it's one of the darkest places that you might look in terms of solving the world's greatest problems. But as the world gets darker, I think we get more encouraged when we see light breaking through and we see entrepreneurs and investors doing things and pulling on solutions and levers that haven't been pulled on before. And, you know, I'm I don't know about you, Richard, but often times I feel my heart break. And I think of oftentimes the survivors, the people that are been hurt and they have been wounded. And what encourages me most about this group and so many others in solving the world's greatest problems is the people that are getting upstream and thinking about what is that other lever and what is that other issue upon. And I think with today's friends, as they share about what's happening here, there's an economic lever to some of these solutions. And oftentimes we don't see these. We see our humanity, our brokenness, the morality. But we don't know that there's like really an economic problem to solve that if you can disrupt the economics, if you can disrupt some things for good, that some of the downstream things get that much more turned around. And so I think it's a fun way where we get to see entrepreneurs and investors really stepping in to solve some of these big problems.

Richard Cunningham Today, the adult entertainment industry is a technologically advanced and high strategic engine. It knows how to prey on the most innocent, the most susceptible and the most unsuspecting among us. And their strategy is working. The average age of someone's first exposure to pornography is 12 years old, and that initial dose of unsolicited supply creates an avalanche of demand. Porn sites receive more monthly traffic than Netflix, Amazon and Twitter combined. That's all the movies watched on Netflix, all the shows streamed on Amazon and all the tweets. All of them combined received less traffic and attention than pornography. 28,258 users are watching pornography every second. Over $3,000 is spent on porn every second on the Internet. 35% of all Internet downloads are related to pornography. 40 million Americans regularly visit porn sites. 4.6 billion with a B. Hours are spent watching pornography videos on a single site in just one year. But what does that even mean? These are statistics. You've probably heard versions of them before. And while they're wildly unsettling, it's hard to know just what to do with. The truth is that according to the Journal of Sex Research, 64% of men and 30% of women are viewing pornography. And 100% of those people don't want to listen to a podcast about the damage caused by porn. Let's be honest. If you're in the group that doesn't view pornography, you don't really want to hear about it either. It's a problem that has long existed as part of the underbelly of society. It once lived in the fringes of our psyche like a shadow you'd occasionally see out of the corner of your eye. And while there's a very real temptation to keep treating it like that as something that is someone else's problem or not something that affects me. The reality is that it isn't someone else's problem, and if it doesn't already affect you, it's going to. This is a problem that if Christians don't start taking it seriously, is going to continue to have massive downstream implications. There were only beginning to understand. So if your opinion of pornography is simply that it's a moral wrong and something an Internet filter can solve. Buckle up. The reality of this problem is worse than you think. And then even worse than that. But if you clicked on this podcast, you already know we aren't hoping to solve the easy problems. We're staring the world's toughest challenges straight in the face, and we're talking to the people who are tackling them head on. Amen, indeed. Well, we've got Dr. Lisa Stroman in the podcast studio, clinical psychologist, author, recent author of Digital The Stress Growing Up Online, a specific focus on children and young people in this kind of issue of sexual brokenness. And then West Lyons, an accomplished venture capitalist, a very well-respected investor in this broader faith and investing movement of equal venture fund friends. Welcome on to the podcast. Before I go much further and don't give an intro that nearly warrants how impressive you both are. Lisa, we'll start with you and let's get some kind of background on who you are and a little bit of your stories and then we'll get going.

Dr. Lisa Strohman Sure. Thanks for having me. I am a psychologist, an attorney. I went to a joint program from undergrad to go into policy work and at that time was offered a position to work as an honors intern with the FBI, which was a super cool experience. And I worked in Quantico with the profiling team to classes at BSU and then was invited to become a visiting scholar based on that internship. And they sponsored my dissertation. So I ended up being with the Bureau for 6 or 7 years in total, depending on if you count the AP. And it was an incredible opportunity for me. I learned a ton and I was there when unfortunately Columbine happened. So I was shoved into this world of online safety and what kids were going to do with technology even before social media was launched. So I just remember pivoting and saying, you know, wanting to be a guardian ad litem was kind of my dream in that joint degree. But shifting over and just saying like, somebody needs to really look into and shepherd through the psychology of technology. And so I've spent a career doing that. So 25 years in that space.

Richard Cunningham And that's so powerful.

Wes Lyons Wes Lyons thankful to be here? Thanks for hosting us. I get to work at Eagle Venture Fund, where we get to use venture capital to try to solve some of the world's greatest problems. And one of the ones that we're getting to work on under the banner of the Eagle Freedom Fund is investing in technologies that fight human trafficking. A huge chunk of that is online, a safe Internet for kids. Companies like Lisa's Game Safe, where we're trying to create scalable solutions to the sexual brokenness, to human trafficking. And it's a really dark subject, but it's also incredibly exciting to work with entrepreneurs who have scalable vision for change that bring hope.

Justin Forman Now, guys, I'm very grateful that you guys will both join us here today. It's been a gift to spend time with you guys here recently filming different pieces of this story. And I think it's important as we start this off to recognize this story has many different faces and has many different angles when we talk about brokenness. We can look around the world and it's all encompassing in so many different facets, but specifically this issue. There's exploitation, there's trafficking, there's sexual brokenness, there's different angles to that. And so I think it's important that as we start this conversation, we recognize that there's different angles, but also to recognize one of the reasons why we do this podcast, as Richard and I team up for this, we want to highlight some of the things in the conversation that's happening already in solving the World's Greatest Problems initiative. And so if you're not familiar with the website, if you've been paying attention to Faith Driven Entrepreneur and Faith Driven Investor, it's a new initiative in a site that has been designed to say, how do we start having these conversations? How do we make what feels otherwise overwhelming and complex and make it accessible so that we can begin to process, to have these conversations, to feel how we might be called into this space as entrepreneurs, investors and giving whatever that might look like. So there's a full episode where we work through some of the stories, we work through some of the conversation into that, and there's going to be other pieces that you're going to find there to include an incredible story that we're filming with these guys and just what's happening through Freedom Fund and Eagle Venture. So be sure to check that out. But I wanted to make sure that we start with that framework because a lot of people that are going to enter this conversation are coming from different places and going to think, Man, you're only tackling a piece of the puzzle. And that's right. There's no way we're going to able to round all the bases in this kind of conversation. But what I want to start with is I think oftentimes when we think about evil, we think about evil is this thing that we always slip into, and it's this evil that maybe it's like, man, we have a moment of weakness. There's a moment of brokenness. And while that's true and there's responsibility, we all have to take for that actions. There's a sinister intentionality that I think is on the other side of maybe the screening, the other side of this equation that we need to look at. And we said that was one of the things that struck me when we spent time together. And you just talked about the way that people are being targeted, the CEO, the way that people are trying to get people into this area of brokenness, specifically in this area of pornography from a young age. Can you speak into some of the things of what you guys have found in that journey?

Dr. Lisa Strohman Sure. You know, it's interesting. I think that a lot of times when you look at the rates of exposure. Or to pornography or exposure into these kind of dark worlds. It's happening sub10 at this point in our country. And so what we look at and obviously we're not going to do causative studies in the U.S. because you can't do experimental studies where you're putting children into cohorts where they're going to be have, you know, harms placed upon them. But you can do correlational studies and you can look at what's happening. And so the average in the United States of where children are first being exposed is typically around second grade, where they're given their first research assignment, which means that they're mandated to go into this Internet world and research things that are tethered with ads and things like that that pop up on them innocently. But it's almost like you can't unwind that. And so what I'm seeing is that those children that have unfettered access or even monitored access, the parents think that they're doing the right thing, are fundamentally different kids. And so in my practice, when I see if I go into, say, a speaking engagement in a school or I go to a town hall, I can tell you which of those children have been exposed because they're hypersexualized even at like nine, ten and 11. You can just tell the way they dress, the way they present themselves, versus those children that don't have that exposure, that are more innocent and natural. So we have to think through of like the technology is being a portal to these things that are industry moneymakers. And so when you're going into a very high billion dollar industry where you're you're going in and getting children at such a young age, you're getting ten plus years earlier than you can get them as active consumers legitimately. So that's what we see and that's what we fight against.

Justin Forman Yeah, the intentionality of that evil. In some ways it's surprising. In some ways it's not when you think about so much of like TV and media demographics and you talk about advertisers and they talk about the value of the younger audience, if you can get them engaged, of course, in a business, we understand there's more of that. I hate to say it this way, but the tragic view of like a lifetime value and what you're exploit, what you're talking about bringing to light there is that, yes, they're targeting people from a young age. You know, my wife and I, obviously, we have three kiddos and it was eye opening for us years ago when we would hear that the average age of exposure was above ten. I think it was first told to us like it was 12 and it was, you know, probably the picture that you would have would be the the bus ride home from school. And one of the kids has a cell phone and it's unfiltered and it kind of goes from some of those things. But what you're talking about under ten years old at that young age with that intentionality, it's startling. And it's it's. It's crushing. It's almost kind of crossed a threshold where as parents, we are just it's no longer that you can hide from it. You have to be prepared to kind of teach people how to deal with it. And, you know, one of the other things that I want to kind of bring into is they experience it in the unexpected ways. And, you know, after our time together, I cringed as a parent to think at how young of an age we had our kids in games, specifically things like Roblox and other things that you speak of that I mean, there's just so much happening on these platforms that we don't know about. Can you shed light on the game side of things and just what's missing there?

Dr. Lisa Strohman Sure. I think that in gaming, what we see is parents want their kids to experience just fun. They want them to go out and they want them to connect. And that's what we all should want. We want our kids to have those experiences. But what we're seeing in gaming is that there's no kind of line between adults and children in the gaming worlds. So some of these games like Roblox or Minecraft that you think about farm life like you think of, these are kid games. Well, imagine yourself if you're a predator. And we know from David Erb, he's the whistleblower from Metta that there's tens of millions of predators online on a given day. And imagine if you're looking for a child today and you're going into a neighborhood with a van. It's very unlikely that you're going to see a child. But what they can do is they can go into these kids facing games and go into those very innocently with a totally innocuous avatar or pretend that they're a child and they can have conversations and start to groom those children without that child even knowing, without the parent even knowing. And so the gaming community hasn't figured out a strong stop on that. They don't know what they're doing or what they're not doing. Right. And so they're kind of clumsily trying to come in and fix that. And right now, when you look at kind of roadblocks as an example, they're coming in like if we see anybody that is inappropriate online, we kick them off of our platform. Okay. Well, that's fantastic. Now all they have to do is create a different avatar, a different sign on and come back on and do exactly the same thing. And they're not notifying the parent. They're not notifying anyone that the child may have been exposed to some sort of sexual deviancy or any of those things. So the child now holds that and is shameful and hurt and curious and not sure what to do with that information. And we're not protecting our family unit by giving them the right or the ability to do that. And and that's why I was so excited to join Game Safe. As they're doing that, they're giving contemporaneous reporting to the parent and allowing us to understand and see exactly what our children are being exposed to.

Justin Forman You know, one of the things I love about this podcast is that in the solving world's greatest problems side of things, we get to deep dive on some of the statistics, the issues we tell, some of the stories in that episode. There's incredible parts that we're telling the story from the brokenness side of things, the therapy side of things, the statistics side of things. But one of the stories that our audience is particularly drawn to is that of Layla's story of saying, What does it look like to take down and to bankrupt Pornhub? And we're seeing that some of the solutions are not necessarily just saying how do we prevent how do we take away some of these things, but how do we really go at the very business model side of things? And where one of the things that you said when we spent time together is that this is sometimes more of an economic issue, more than it is anything else. Can you explain what are you guys finding out when you see the economic issue and how we can follow that?

Wes Lyons One of the key questions when you're looking for a really scalable solution to an issue this hard is trying to figure out who has. It's this magic pairing of the pain and ability to pay for a massively scalable solution. And in this case, you actually have to add that the parents feel the pain. And when they realize that their kid is in danger. And that's what Game Save is primarily tapping into in the direct to consumer is parents want to protect their kids. And the ability to hand them the easy button, you can protect your kid. But then what we're seeing here in the last even in the last ten days, as we've seen short sellers on Roblox actually buying big short positions and then publicizing, there's incredibly high numbers of predatory activity happening there. Dr. Allison, just for sharing about. And that's actually destroyed $2 billion of market cap in Roblox in the last ten days, kind of highlighting that there is very real economic consequences for not solving this problem. And it helps validate the thesis that we've been preaching that this is actually a business problem, if that makes sense, and that we can use business to some extent. Business or capitalism got us into the problem because Roblox has not put any brakes on this because they just wanted as many users as possible. If we're very simple about it, and then we've been making the case that there is an economic model to scale really large solutions to this. So on both cases, you have pain in ability to pay. What would you add to that?

Dr. Lisa Strohman Lisa I think that that's perfectly said in that respect because I think that we don't ever take a second to understand the mechanism of what financial is driving the market for the gaming. Kids just want to play. Parents just want to have a safe place to let their kids go. But we don't really think about it because they're kind of free services. You can go on and you don't have to pay anything initially. And so, you know, my work that I do with kids is really to educate them that they are no longer a consumer, but they in fact, are the product in a lot of these situations. And whether it's the porn industry or whether it's the gaming industry, they're the product that is being sold and used to make money.

Justin Forman I want you to push into that one more before Richard. And we push into like the solution and the legal venture side of things in the work that's being done. Lisa One of the things that was both fascinating and scary as you talked about, how the algorithm it's this mysterious thing. It's a mysterious piece of the conversation. We know it's been a part of probably first introduced to us in our Google search and then our social feeds. And we kind of think of this, but it's this mysterious thing. And yet to kids at an early age, it's not actually so mysterious. And sometimes it gets to know them more ways than a parent can. And your analogy of kind of breaking that down of like what this algorithm is to kids at a young age, can you talk about kind of what is it, when do we first encounter it and what are we competing against as parents?

Dr. Lisa Strohman Wow. I mean, that's a big question. You the algorithm start way into the very, very early games where the kids are doing, you know, say, ABC Mouse or some of the educational tools that parents will use. Any time that you're putting a child in an interface that is online, you have to assume that there's an algorithm that is leading them through that process, and it's learning from that to better their product in the end and to better the connection and the drive for the child to return to it. What that does for a child is it's training them. And I've argued this point. I'm very good friends with Dr. Drew Pinsky, who works in addiction. And he and I have talked through the fact that we're really priming children to become addicts in other spaces by doing these very early introductions that are algorithmically keeping them hooked into these games. So, you know, it can be as simple as, like, understanding a child. I'll take ABC Mouse because my children were on it. And the minute I saw that, it wasn't about drawing the letter appropriately, but it was really more about getting the coin so they could buy the sticker to put on to the landscape. And you can see it happen if you're looking for it, if parents are trained to look for it. And when that happens, it shifts. So my work in elementary school, I think, is the most vital work that I do because we have children that are open to learning and we're open and not as exposed as they are by the time you get to middle school or high school. But in that elementary school age of very example, I would say is that many of them by sixth grade, I would say the schools that I've gone into in the last three years, almost 75 to 80% of those kids are truly looking at wanting to be as a career, an influencer or a YouTuber. And so for them to see those words has to have some modicum of understanding that it's about following in. It's about getting the likes and it's about doing things that create that algorithm to give them more attention. And so I think that our consumerism of the children is being overlooked. You know, we're looking at the parents or we're looking at the schools, but the kids themselves, in my opinion, is the biggest solution that we can like dive into and support.

Richard Cunningham Well, I mean, this has been powerful to listen in on. Lisa gave us some kind of phenomenal context on her passion and motivation for this work and where it all started. Wes, you're a venture capitalist and you are looking specifically at Eagle Venture Fund and within your Freedom Fund for solutions to human trafficking and kind of this issue of sexual brokenness. What was some of the original motivation for this investment thesis? And then after that, I want to get into some of those portfolio companies and kind of some of those redemptive stories of solution providers.

Wes Lyons Yeah, the origin story for me started on the battlefield in the Philippines, where I saw ISIS using children in combat. And that just wrecked me. I was actually already in the finance world and was mobilized as a reservist. So I was already thinking with the world of finance, when I encountered the really tough experience of spending the day hunting for kids, trying to save them before the unthinkable happens, and coming home and processing through the grief of what I was doing there. But also through the years of of processing and understanding how big this problem is. When you look at the breadth of a $345 billion industry of buying and selling people. It's breathtaking. But also as faith driven investors meeting more and more and more entrepreneurs, you have these really exciting, scalable solutions has also grown our hope that we can be part of something that the large is doing that's much bigger than ourselves.

Richard Cunningham And maybe a few examples of portfolio companies early on that you guys are extremely passionate about in the ways they're attacking a problem.

Wes Lyons Well, Game Safe is a great example where they're helping parents protect kids online. We've got to be part of tackling this journey where Texas is a phone that doesn't have any exposure to the Internet or kind of any social media at all, or helping people have the best of an online phone experience. But actually none of the addictive elements to it, which is really been inspiring. And then another good example would be Darkwatch. There's about 32,000 brothels operating in the United States run by 200 crime organizations, and they've mapped those cartels and actually coming to businesses and saying, Would you like to know if you're doing business with the cartels? And in many cases, what people don't understand is if you look at this $345 billion industry, that's kind of like the revenue line on that. Overall, the business of human trafficking, the expense line, much of that expense line on the 345 billion is flowing through legitimate businesses. It's flowing through rideshare companies, through hotels, through cryptocurrency exchanges, through banks. And most of the brands that we know and love passionately don't want to do business with the cartels. And so if you can bring them that solution and there's more than 40 hotel brands in court over literally human trafficking allegations right now. So when we see the short sellers losing $2 billion, when we see JPMorgan getting hit for $290 million, when we see these major flairs of what effectively are pain for corporations, that just brings out a treasure trove of opportunities to build scalable solutions that faith driven entrepreneurs who are hunting for ways to express the Kingdom of God are more than excited to step into.

Justin Forman So I want you to hit on that. Like if you weren't paying attention, if you're on a run and you missed those numbers on that scale, how many brothels, how many crime organizations?

Wes Lyons 32,000 brothels trafficking about a million people run by 200 crime organizations.

Justin Forman And $345 billion.

Wes Lyons There's a little bit. So 345 would be a global number. And that 32,000 is a US number. So I don't want to overly mix those.

Justin Forman But when you look at that and then you hear statistics of like there is more consumption than on Netflix and Amazon and X combined, we talking about a serious issue. What I love is the subtlety that you hit on is that the way that you can disrupt this is like where does all of those other operations pass through? And that you can attack kind of some of those things because as you're pointing out to companies are thinking more about that because there's a real price if they don't pay attention to that. There's a real price if they don't have that, because the consumer, us as we're buying and purchasing, we want to know that we're purchasing for something responsible. Can you talk about that? Westlake, where some of the places where companies have taken note said, my goodness, we didn't realize something was happening and maybe you don't need to get specific on a company, but when you talk about an industry, what are some of those places where that whether it's ridesharing or some other thing, where are those places where people are taking note of what's. Happening.

Wes Lyons I think the hospitality industry as a whole has created a number of nonprofits and done a lot of training. So where we're at in the movement, in the hospitality, about 80% of the trafficking in the US, if you just look at calls into the trafficking hotline, are happening in hotels. So they've done a lot of good groundwork where they've rallied into organizations and done training. What we're trying to do is say, Hey, that's amazing, all the ground that we've made. Now let's apply a ton of tools like Deja Vu AI, who's able to take an advertisement for a traffic person and actually do location work on where did that picture come from, or other tools where we can start bringing scalable solutions? Because if you imagine if you work in a hotel and you got training and are waking up and going, Wait, there is human trafficking happening, you can't actually call the police because you felt weird about like that looked a little off. It's just not at all appropriate to call the police to say she looked a little young or she looked a little scared, like, you can't do that. But if you start creating the systems to say, hey, I'm just going to put this into the app, there's something funny or I won't say explicitly the things that you might clean up in a hotel room after 12 customers, but you can imagine what would be cleaned up. Those types of things are not things that you would call the police about. But if you start keeping track of those in a technology solution that's also doing facial recognition. You can imagine we can decimate human trafficking domestically in the next few years.

Justin Forman So you talk about the economic equation, and I think what you talked about is like in sometimes you're trying to raise the expense line item. Like can you talk about like the theory of change here and behind it, like, how do you defeat this? It's not that you can probably eradicate all of it, but you can really attack it from a certain economic angle. Explain what you mean by that.

Wes Lyons Yeah, no, Thomas from Darkwatch really taught me to think about these cartels as entrepreneurs who have a revenue line on one side and an expense line on the other. And if you can drive down demand through a whole litany of making it more scary to go buy sex, any ways that you drive down that revenue line and then pushing up the expense line, there are fewer and fewer hotels where it's safe to operate, fewer and fewer banks where it's safe to operate. If you can get the expense line to cross the revenue line, that business breaks like we decimate trafficking. So it's really it's powerful to change our thinking from, hey, we have to catch everyone or like kind of we tend to think about it in the one off rape type of mechanism. That makes sense. You've got to catch the bad guy. But if you think of how to break a business, you just have to make expenses higher than revenue in the business breaks.

Justin Forman Yeah. Powerful thought. Before we go back, I want you to explain this idea of just why is for profit solutions so needed in this space? A lot of times our heart is a church feature and entrepreneurs, investors listening to this, we break and we think of like the survivor and we think of like, how can we help? But when you think about the other side of things and the for profit, why is for profit solutions needed so much in this equation?

Wes Lyons It's a really good question and we had to wrestle with that too, as we started grappling with the gravity and magnitude of the issue. I would submit it's just the sheer scale of the issue. And in our lifetime, we've watched a billion people come out of dollar a day, poverty primarily through capitalism. And it's just it's what capitalism is good at. Like, for better or for worse, it scales things. When we look at roadblocks as scaled it creative experience a little bit further than it should have. And that makes sense. For better or for worse, capitalism just takes things in. It scales them. And that same mechanism that seen a billion people come out of dollar day poverty. If we can aim those mechanisms redemptive at seeing millions of people come out of slavery, it just seems like one of the most exciting ways to grow capital on the planet.

Richard Cunningham Lisa, let's go back to you for a moment. One of the things that's been top of mind, this entire podcast as we've been just going over this, is I can't stop thinking about social media. I mean Tik-tok, Facebook, Instagram, X, but then also the rise of artificial intelligence and deepfakes. And you've run into some situations there where technology is being used for brokenness. And I think you've got a pretty powerful story around A.I. and deepfakes as well. So what comments and thoughts do you have there?

Dr. Lisa Strohman I think that now that we have AI consumer ready, right? So there's apps that you can go to the App Store or Google Play and you can download these apps that allow now any individual consumer to more for face, more for body like create videos. So when we talk about deepfakes, there's all these different variations of it. But what I'm seeing happening now is that you're starting to see kids experiment like they should, right? They're curious and now they have what on the App Store allows a four year old to download four plus in many of these. Where you're allowed to go in and create deepfakes on video or pictures or those kind of things. And so one of the cases that we've had recently was a school had just come into session. They'd been there for a couple of weeks. I get a call. The principal had been flagged as posting or having a video posted of himself that he was talking to a female student and the female student was asking for grades to be changed to all A's. And the principal said that they would do that with a sexual favor in return. And so none of that was actually true. You know, two students had filmed this talking as a narrative had gone in, taken a picture of this principal and morphed his body into that video. But the consequence of that was now the FBI showing up at a school system. Right now, we have police officers involved for criminal action on the student. The family is now impacted because there's suspensions and an impact there in terms of like schooling, choice of where they're going to be and whether or not the school is going to let them back in. But more so, too, is the victimized principal that is really, truly dedicating his life to support these kids and to be in to talk to them and now trying to figure out how does he manage that? Does he privately press charges? Does he allow the school system to manage that himself? And so you've got this conflict of like just kind of very rape. And that's one system or one example in a system that where I've already had at least two dozen calls on this issue. I think that in the App Store there was an app that I highlighted in a presentation I had recently that you have to be nine in order to notify someone, you know. So you've got, you know, these open source abilities for children to go in and do very, very awful things. And the teachers and the administrators are having to deal with it.

Justin Forman Yeah. And while I don't even know what to do with some of those things of what you're just mentioning, like we often talk about how money can be a tool for good, and business can be a tool for good, but it can be a source of brokenness. And in the same way, we're seeing technology play itself out in that same manner where so much redemptive and great things can come from it. And yet we haven't even like fathom the depths of intentionality of brokenness and how these same tools are being manipulated in the opposite direction. What I'd love to do is we're kind of coming to a close here in this episode and we're just scratching the surface of this, but what are the things that give each of you guys hope? What are the things that you're seeing that you're saying, Man, here's the win. Here's something, here's the progress. Hey, it's a dark world. It can sound like the sky is falling. But what are the things from each of you guys perspective that you're seeing that gives you that hope? Well, let's start with you.

Wes Lyons I mean, it's so dark that you've got to lift your eyes to Jesus fast or else, like, no entrepreneur can give me true hope. But as we're scanning out, we do get to spend most of our day working on solutions, and many of them are incredibly exciting. And getting to see entrepreneurs working together is also really, really powerful. Where entrepreneurs in the UK are working with entrepreneurs in the US and people working on policy start to cross, collaborate with those that are creating companies or even some of the people that are involved in the court cases trying to highlight what's actually been this toward solutions. When we start seeing that cross collaboration happening, the body of Christ is standing up and saying, Let's work together in a way that is deeply exciting.

Dr. Lisa Strohman You know, for me, I'll use a personal example because I have multiple examples over the years. But recently I went to Wyoming and I was in a conference, probably 250 people there. The host of the conference, the prevention specialist, brought her daughter, who was 12 years old and was really fighting with her mom about wanting to have social media and all of the things. And I went up and gave my presentation and I talked about all of the different things that the industry does in order to take advantage of kids. And I talked about some of the things that it impacts their brains, their neurochemistry, their neurobiology, the structural aspects of their brains. And I talked about how it's winnable when we stop and start to educate and we understand and give this power to the kids. And at the end of my speech, the woman came over and she said, My daughter would like to talk to you. And she came up to me and she had tears in her eyes and she gave me a big hug and she said, I just deleted everything on my phone. And she said, And I'd really be honored if I could be your team lead for your mentoring program in my school. And so I gifted it to her on site. And then we prayed and I told her it was going to be okay. And I know that that's the answer, right? Scaling that and getting those kids to be the voice is light. They will do this. They will do the work because when they hear it and they know it, they will do it for us.

Justin Forman Such powerful things. You know, I think oftentimes we talk about solving the world's greatest problems. And sometimes we say that solving the world's greatest problems, we are oftentimes the world's greatest problem. It's us. It's our sin, it's our brokenness. And this is an issue that as parents, as ourselves in different places, we all find the church is certainly not been immune from it. This has been a big issue of our generation. And as you said, it's an individual conversation. I think one of the things that I take away from this conversation with you guys is just a hope that this is also what a beautiful opportunities for the body of Christ to help the hurting to come along. For those that are surviving, they're walking out of some of these brokenness or walking out of some of these painful situations and also to engage the economic side, the business side, and to say, hey, there is an economic equation that if we can disrupt, we're never going to again eradicate sin from this world. That much we know, but we can really see some of this disruption happening for good. And so when I when I hear about why the story of Pornhub, when I hear about some of the different ventures and Evil Freedom Fund, when I hear about this economic model of what we're going at, man, it makes you proud of the home team, makes you proud of the church. It's like, man, we figured out how to take this upstream, how to take this to a different playing field and really kind of evaluate it in that way. And guys are just so grateful for you, grateful for the work of what you guys are doing, grateful for the way the Eagle and the freedom and just thinking about this in a different way. And as you said, bringing resources to bear that are needed for an issue of such skills. They're so, so grateful for you guys. Thanks for joining us. Thrilled to have you guys here on the podcast. For those listening to this and want to push more into the issue in the conversation. Be sure to check out that Solving the World's Greatest Problems website for the Faith Driven Investor is for the Faith driven entrepreneurs. That is a place where we're going to dive into the issue. You're going to hear some of the stories there, but you're also going to hear specific ways that you might build and invest and give differently when you hear issues like this. And so some of the same companies that you heard West talk about some of the same ministries and that you might be able to give to, you can find a best list of those there and not sit on the sidelines, but find ways that you, your family or your business might get in the game here. So great being with you guys. Thank you for joining us.

Wes Lyons Thank you.

Dr. Lisa Strohman Thanks for having us.

Richard Cunningham Thanks for listening to the Faith Driven Entrepreneur podcast. Our ministry exists to equip and resource entrepreneurs just like you. With content and community, we know entrepreneurship can be a lonely journey, but it doesn't have to be. We've got groups that meet in churches, coffee shops, living rooms and boardrooms around the world. Find one in your area or volunteer to lead one and bring this global movement to your own backyard. There's no cost, no catch, just connection. Find out more at Faith Driven Entrepreneur or talk.