Rich Thompson, the creative force behind the podcast, Finding Ruby, shares how he uses immersive podcasting to inspire change

Sometimes, a story comes along that truly impacts you. For many, that story is Finding Ruby, a six-part immersive podcast created by Rich Thompson, a creative agency owner who took a sabbatical to bring this powerful narrative to life. Finding Ruby follows a 16-year-old girl’s harrowing journey through the hell of online sex trafficking, a growing global crisis with over half a million cases reported in the Philippines alone. Rich chose podcasting to tell this story, aiming to raise awareness and inspire action.
In this episode, Chris Edwards sits down with Rich to discuss the motivation behind Finding Ruby, its impact, and the ambitious goals Rich hopes to achieve through this narrative. If you’re looking for inspiration to take bold action and make a positive difference, this conversation is a must-listen.
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Featured voices
- Chris Edwards, founder of Launchpad and The Honeycombers, and host of the Good Business podcast
- Rich Thompson, creator of Finding Ruby and founder of Cadence Media.
Good Business goes behind the scenes of the leaders of good businesses, who have people, planet and profit at the core of their mission. Follow the show on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Full Transcript
Before we begin, a warning: this podcast discusses adult themes, and little ears should not be listening. Sometimes you come across a story that really impacts you. It’s something that my next guest has done for me and for many. Rich Thompson took a sabbatical from his creative agency for 6 months to tell this story, and it’s the story of Ruby. Ruby is a 16 year old girl who got a message.
The message was simply, hello. Would you like a job? Which starts a very sad journey for Ruby. Finding Ruby is that story, and it’s a 6 part immersive podcast experience that journeys with Ruby through the hell of an online sex trafficking den and out again into the light of justice, healing, and restoration. Now I don’t know about you, but I don’t watch the news.
I don’t like crime stories. I don’t watch horror or sci fi. I’m a total rom com kinda girl, and I just removed myself from the ugly, harsh realities really to protect my mental health. And that’s one of the reasons Rich chose podcasting as a platform to tell this story. This podcast has now won gold at the Shorty Awards in Australia, best new podcast, winner in the human rights category, along with a string of other awards.
And I’m really, really chuffed to sit down with Rich today to talk about Finding Ruby and, really, I suppose, his motivation and the impact of creating this podcast and and what the goals of this podcast really are and what he’s hoping he’ll achieve with it. Alright. Let’s get into it. Hey, Rich. Thanks so much for joining us today.
I’m really excited about this opportunity to talk to you about Finding Ruby. It’s such, I suppose, a big moving podcast on a really enormous topic, which is on online sexual exploitation of children, or OSEQ. Can you just share with us, I suppose, how did this start? How did how did you end up creating a podcast about Ruby’s journey? Yeah.
So it’s it’s one of these things that you’re sad there is an acronym for it. This is one of these things that you wish or that you think shouldn’t exist. And then when you find out there’s an acronym for it, that it’s happening that much, you think, you know, It’s one of those what does our world come to? So I was the creative director at an agency that I started, a creative agency, so like an ad agency. And one of our clients was working in the, space of combating, modern slavery and trafficking, human trafficking.
They gave me a brief back in 2017 on a new type of human trafficking that was evolving in the Philippines. And, they wanted to essentially raise awareness of it, especially in the Philippines because, it was growing so fast. And so it’s OSEQ. It’s the online sexual exploitation of children. And, they were at pains to tell me what it wasn’t, what it’s not.
So they kept saying, look, it’s not what we might think of as something like child pornography, which is a really unhelpful term. So I found out it’s child abuse material, but it is not even just the viewing of it. We’re talking about the live streamed directed abuse of children. So that is a man in a country like mine will order a show, a half an hour show, and then will live stream, ask for various abuse to happen to the children. I mean, it’s just horrific.
And some of the things that are being asked of these children are just incredibly dehumanizing. And, when I found out about this, I thought, oh, man, this is very, very dark. It must be happening somewhere on the dark web. You know, it’s one of these things that you it almost feels like one of those, oh, is this a conspiracy theory sort of thing? But it’s not.
It’s it’s we started doing our research. It’s one of the it’s the fastest growing crime in the world or one of the fastest growing crimes in the world. In 2022, they ran a massive study that talked with 13 different agencies working in the Philippines. And their best guess is that about 500,000 children were subject to this kind of abuse just in 1 year in the Philippines alone. So it’s just enormous amount and it’s growing very, very quickly.
And it is not happening on the dark web at all. It’s happening over platforms like Skype and WhatsApp where there’s end to end encryption. So where your your chats can’t be monitored by anyone. So it is, when I found out about it and then kept looking into it, I I just thought, why aren’t we taking to the streets on this one? Like, this is just abhorrent.
And the fact that it’s growing so much and there’s so many new men pouring into this space. So we did a a whole bunch of different social
media campaigns on it, trying to raise awareness for it. And we’d always see a little spike and, you know, little effect. And then I met this person called Ruby, and she was one of the first people that, this NGO they’re they’re called International Justice Mission that they rescued from this. And she was 16 when they rescued her.
She was quite old comparatively. The average age of, children being rescued these days is 11 years old, but they’re also rescuing toddlers and babies and and things like that increasingly more and more so. They’re getting younger and younger. So she was 16. And by the time I met her and talked with her, she was older.
She was in her early twenties. And, as I heard her story, it was just it was like, I heard the full story of it, and it was a taking story. A story of, like, like, I was on literally on the edge of my seat listening to her talk and hearing her get rescued and then the rehabilitation and the the trial and everything and kinda her, her own triumph over this whole thing. I was like, this is a movie. This is breathtaking and and kind of made me very sad to be creating campaigns that were essentially fundraising campaigns or awareness campaigns and losing all the detail of her story.
And then, so I just had this thought, well, why don’t I create a long form version of her story, a true crime podcast of her story, and really go the complete opposite way? Do this as a passion project. I went, I asked her if she’d be open to this. And then I talked to International Justice Mission about it and they said, yeah, look, if you wanna do that, go for it. And they said, they gave me a essentially a backstage pass.
So got to go in and go into the prisons where they you know, in the Philippines where they have put people who who have been convicted of this. Went to aftercare shelters, met little children who’ve been rescued from this. I retraced Ruby steps. I got to chat with her in person and really try and get to the bottom of this crime. But to do so and to create a podcast in a way that didn’t feel heavy or burdensome or scary to enter into, but something that felt really we were able to look in the face of the darkness but able to say, actually, no, there is hope in this space as well.
So that’s a long winded answer, because there’s no short way to say it. But, yeah, that’s how it came about. Yeah, Rich. I’m very happy for the long winded answer. I mean, it’s it’s an incredible podcast, and you’ve done an amazing job.
And I I I wanna share what I loved about it later on. But you you left your current work, you you’ve left your job to others to do and kind of did a sabbatical to to take on this project, which I think is very admirable. But I’m wondering, like, what was the hardest part of all of this? I imagine there’s a lot of hard bits, but, yeah, I mean, I presume this has changed you forever, but I’d love to know. Yeah.
Tell me about that. Yeah. So it was very difficult. There were some some nights where I couldn’t sleep and things like that. You know,
when you’re especially when we started looking into, well, who are the men?
Who is on the other side of these webcams? Because the temptation is to just say, look, these are monsters, monsters on the other side of the cam camera. And to some degree they are. But the question is, how did they get there? And why are they so why is it growing so rapidly?
So there was we’re talking we’re talking about such massive exponential growth that you then have to start asking those sort of questions. They’re more societal questions. And the, the kind of potential effects on our culture here as well is quite vast. So that was really difficult. I’ve got 3 young daughters myself.
And they would often ask me what I was doing. What are you working on? They’d come in and I’d have to stop as we’re editing things and, you know, asking me, like, looking at photos of my trips and things. And they’re they’re trying to ask what’s what is going on? I was trying to explain this to them in a way that was appropriate, but that’s really difficult.
But I just kept it changes. And I’ve actually heard a lot of people in this space say that about their own children. You start, like, looking at your own children going, it seems so unfair that mine are safe. There’s no chance that they’re going to be subjected to this. And so that that too is it’s quite a hard thing to carry.
And you’ve kind of got to leave it, like, lay that down each day, as you go in. So that’s probably the emotional side of it was probably the hardest. Creatively, it was, a good challenge, which I really liked, and that really lit me up because because I think one of our major problems in our society is that we’re not engaging with topics like this because they’re too dark and because we wanna turn away from them. That’s how natural good people wanna turn away from them. That’s the natural, response.
And so the question of saying, okay, well, that’s not good. We can’t have that. So how do we create something again for, you know, good people to engage in? And, so I really enjoyed that creative part of it. I think that’s what kept me going throughout it.
Yeah. I mean, one thing I thought was really clever was in episode 1, you actually talk about how difficult, of a story it is to listen to. And you actually it was very clever because I did find it difficult to listen to as a podcast, but the way you said in episode 1, you know, through, I suppose, a real life example of why people wanna turn away and why you kinda do need to lean in, Very clever strategically to just help people understand why we need to, you know, I suppose, lean into discomfort in order to be I suppose it’s good citizens of the world. Right? But, yeah, you definitely want to lean out.
But, yeah, I mean, I suppose OSEQ is it’s a complicated and very hidden crime. Right? Like, I’d never heard of it before. And, yeah, it’s I
mean, I can totally see why we need Finding Ruby as a podcast and and the international justice mission and what you’re doing. But, yeah, I suppose I’m interested to know, besides getting people to listen to the podcast and and supporting international justice mission, like, overall, as a society, what do we need to do to to really stop the growth of this?
That’s such a good question. And and I reckon that you’re asking it is probably the number one thing that we need to do right now is ask that question. So just this morning, I was having coffee with someone and they’re they’re quite closely, into like, they they they know the human trafficking space quite well, but they hadn’t heard about OSIC. And so someone who’s like got their kind of finger on the pulse a little bit, even someone like that wasn’t aware of this that’s going, my LinkedIn profile now is full of people that are in this space fighting it, which is awesome to see legislators and people are like pushing against tech. And that’s really what we need.
So there’s there’s things that can happen right now, right today, that are drastically lower the prevalence of this. So one being there’s software right now that if your mobile phone camera, if it was built into the phone, it can detect abuse of children and shut off the camera straight away. And then as soon as you move your camera away from it, it fires back up again. So that kind of if if you imagine that going into every smartphone would immediately make it far, far more difficult for families in countries like the Philippines to to do this, to live stream abuse like this. Because it kinda at the device level as opposed to at the platform level can shut it down straight away.
I think one of the things that, research is showing is that the kind of unfiltered all all you can consume access to pornography that we have, is actually having massive effects, especially when young children get into it and grow up with this. It kind of like has a a deep and profound impact on the mind, which is, if you speak to people in this area, they’ll say it’s contributing a lot to the amount of people that are essentially looking for more shocking material, in order to achieve the dopamine hit. So we’ve gotta be asking that question as uncomfortable as it is in then in in, essentially prison in their own mind? I spoke to one guy. His name is Donald Findlayda.
This is part of the podcast. When we were profiling, who’s the man on the other side of the screen. And he said so he runs essentially an organization that is that that exists to kind of walk with men who are worried about their feelings towards children. Incredible guy, incredible organization. I mean, incredible work.
And he said, look, ever since COVID, their phone lines have just been jammed, and they’ve opened up chat bots now or chat functionality on their website and it’s jammed. They just cannot keep up with the demand in it. This is just through the roof now. And these are men that are reaching out. These are not the ones, you know, happily staying in in in the quiet.
But he said to me, the number of men I have journeyed with recently who have said a couple of years ago, I couldn’t have imagined even
being attracted to children, let alone wanting to commit abuse. And now here I am. I’m kinda stuck as a prisoner. So to me, though, those voices, the Donalds who are on the front lines of this, they need to be listened to, and we need to be saying, hang on. That’s that’s deeply worrying for us.
So what are we doing about that? Yeah. So I think it’s the first thing. It’s the first thing is we’ve gotta not turn away from this, and we’ve gotta be willing to just stare at it for a bit and say, okay. What are we gonna do about it?
Yeah. It’s a it’s a a big complex problem, isn’t it? I thought what was really interesting was episode 3, when you actually you talk about the episode’s called The Trespass, and it was really going deep into who are the the the men, you know, soliciting this kind of activity. And the case study you use in the podcast is actually a family man and a religious man. I find that even more terrifying that actually someone who is religious with grandchildren could be tied up in in something so dark.
And I suppose it just goes to to the state of of mental health and and the crisis of for men at the minute. But, yeah, I thought it was a a really tricky, but well done episode on trying to understand both sides of the story. I don’t think there’s any answers there, but, yeah, was that really enlightening to you? Like, was that really surprising and and challenging to digest? Yeah.
And and I and I should say, like, we we basically went through stack load of news articles to to look for men who have been convicted of this and to research their back stories. That’s how we did this. And so we had a lot to choose from, sadly. One was, actually an Australian politician, a member of the Greens party. And he was also a person that was really, engaged in the community, seemed like a really good guy.
We ended up going we ended up picking this person in the UK because we wanted to show that no man is immune from it. And his story is really interesting in that he went into the space, freaked out about it, like, actually called the police, turned himself in, and then they they said, okay, look, We can see you’re wanting to reform. So here’s all these conditions of bail. And then he finds himself back in this thing. We picked that because it’s such a good example of a good person being twisted down, feeling like they’re trapped, wanting to get out, but just being pulled back into the darkness.
And and like you said, he was a successful businessman, a grandfather, like, really, like, a churchgoing person, really involved in his local community. All the things that you would expect create that healthy dynamic in a life. Even someone like that is, susceptible to this. So we picked that almost as a way to say to listeners, to the male listeners and and in particular, but look, anyone that’s the thing about OhSec is it’s sinister and it’s like a snake and, and we need to be on our guard against it. So what do you hope like, what’s your goal with finding Ruby?
Do you have a number of listeners or, you know, where’s what what’s a good outcome for you from the podcast? Thank you. Good question. Yeah. The more the more listeners, the better.
The main goal that I was hoping to do with this was to create deep impressions in people. So I was hoping to be able to create the same experience that I had in sitting and listening to Ruby for a long time and to have it sink deep into my heart. I realized that when we do short form campaigns with stories like this, often we measure over Instagram or Facebook or whatever in the in the advertising world or in the marketing world. Oh, yeah. This is the number of impressions I’ve had.
But actually, I’m I’m now realizing there’s impressions and then there’s impressions. And if we’re going to actually move the needle on this, people first need to have a a deep experience to be to have that impression done deeply into their heart, and it will be the voice of Ruby’s and other survivors that will do that. So my whole goal here is to essentially try and platform her voice as much as possible to create the deep deep impression in people. I mean, like, Chris, your story is beautiful in that you heard her story and were like, okay. What can I do?
That is to a t exactly why I wanted to create the podcast. Basically to get people like you to say, okay. Let’s go and do something about this. Yeah. I think that’s a very interesting point about impressions versus deep impressions and actually having a real impact.
I think, often, when you’re in the space of creating content, you do think of metrics rather than actually impact, so I think that’s a really good point. I thought the podcast was really well produced. I I don’t listen to true crime, so I was not used to a podcast with background music and sound effects and outtakes from famous movies. It was incredibly emotive and engaging, and all the whilst on such a delicate topic. One thing I thought you did really well was the use of pauses and white space.
How did you learn or teach yourself how to create a podcast around such a sensitive topic with, it was the right balance of, you know, drama without being oversensationalized, if if that makes sense. So real art. Yeah. Well, thank you. That’s a great compliment.
Thank you very much. And I think I was I’ve been fortunate to have my the background in kind of advertising and that whole industry is about how do I try and communicate something relatively complex in a way that’s gonna be quickly absorbed and understood. And the difference, though, in that industry is generally you’re dealing with little, little things. So I I basically tried to take that and extrapolate it right out. And there were some podcasts.
Obviously, I’m I’m an avid listener myself. And so there were some that I’m like, okay. I love how they did that. I love how they and putting long pauses in, it’s a brave move because you’re like, it feels like an eternity
when you’re actually editing it in there. But but if you’re going to say something potentially, that needs digesting, if you’re gonna take some if you’re gonna say something that people have to process, if you don’t allow the space for it, it’ll be gone.
It has to take time to sink into the heart. And it was interesting on the first couple of drafts, I gave it to my team to have a listen to, and that was the feedback they got. They just it was like a wall of story and information, and they just said it was it was too much to process. So I took it right back and was like, okay. Then how do we allow that space for for processing?
So I think in in a case like this, I I really try to put every bit of production skill I possibly had, including, yeah, soundscapes. And how do you how do you like, there’s a bit where, Ruby, attempts to escape. How do you allow us to have the same feeling that Ruby had in that moment where she’s like, this is it. This is my time to get out of here. And then, you know, that am I gonna get caught or am I not?
Those sort of things. How do we allow the listener to to be able to journey with her in that? One of the things that I think was really smart was my cowriter, Nikki Thompson, who’s not my wife. It’s a lot of my wife’s also called Nikki. And so there’s a lot of confusion around this.
But she’s actually my sister-in-law and she’s a brilliant writer. And she said to me at the very beginning, let’s write everything present tense. And so whenever we’re telling her story, we’re in the present tense and we are with her. We’re not we’re not going too far ahead, ever too far ahead of her story. We’re trying to just process the world with her.
And I thought that was a genius move from her. And, and I yeah. I think it allows you to, digest as you kind of consume the podcast. Mhmm. Rich, what what advice would you give to entrepreneurs who want to use their talents or their platforms to really, I suppose, have have a greater impact in the world?
It’s a good question. My and I think everyone approaches these things differently. But I think the big thing is to to say that the world is always made better by people willing to take risks and by people willing to kind of put it out there. I think playing it safe whilst more comfortable is generally, is hard to have impact if you’re gonna play it safe. So I think there’s something about saying, look, we have 80, 90, maybe a 100 years on this planet.
They’re gonna go quickly. So what we do today, like this actual day, really matters if I want to, at the end of my time, look back and say, yeah. I left this world better than when I got here in in some way. So I think there’s a case of just saying, look. If you always consider that as something you’ll do in the future, I don’t know that it will ever happen.
I think you have to be willing to be bold today is kind of one of my one of the things I keep trying to tell myself anyway. Yeah. And then the other thing is I kinda wanna give credit to the people that came alongside this with me. I find it very, very difficult to do any new venture
by myself. And so, like my business partner who essentially allowed me the time, he picked up my work while I was doing this.
His name is Matt. And, to to be surrounded by people that are that are good people, that understand what you’re doing and can kinda, walk with you along the way. To me, that’s a huge thing. Yeah. I think, that that that’s all very good advice.
I really like the be bold today. I think that, you know, that impetus to take action sooner rather than later. Because I think everyone has great intentions, but, you know, there’s always work to be done or kids or you know, there’s always a really good excuse. Right? So I really like that.
And I also like your point around it’s very difficult to do this if you’re not surrounded by people who really believe in you and your mission and share those values. So think that’s a very good call as well. I wanted to ask you about I’ve got a a lot of listeners in Asia, particularly Singapore. What can they do is what’s going on in the ground in Singapore? Because, you know, I suppose Singapore is a a big hub quite close to the Philippines, lots of strong ties to the Philippines.
How can we support, you know, I suppose, support victims and also, yeah, the community that’s affected by this? It’s a great question. So International Justice Mission, IJM, have a presence in, Singapore, so they would be a good one to reach out to. It’s a it’s a predominantly, the Philippines is the major and for all sorts of reasons, economic reasons and language reasons. They’re the they’re bearing the brunt of this, in terms of the actual children being abused.
To me, this is an east meets west issue. So when the east meets the west, it can be really beautiful and really wonderful, but can also be really destructive. And this OSEQ is a case of it being really destructive. To me, Singapore is this, like, incredible, like, unicorn of a place where it sits in the middle. It’s like it understands both worlds so, profoundly and so wonderfully.
It kind of to me, I see a big part of the solution of this probably being birthed out of Singapore. So I’ve spent a fair bit of time there. We’re actually working on a new project, a feature film at the moment to help try and really widen out the net of public awareness on this. So that’s another long story in and of itself, but just try and create a pop movie, a really feel good, uplifting movie. And we’ve spent a lot of time in Singapore chatting with people and doing part of the story development because there is that connection there.
Singapore understands the Philippines and it understands the USA and Australia. It’s just really kind of beautiful area. So in my mind, Singapore actually holds a pretty significant key here. So it’ll be really interesting to, to see the role, it plays going forward. Yeah.
Well, I’m I’m very happy that Singapore can play a big role. That’s, you know, where I’ve spent a lot of my time and a lot of my, yeah, I suppose, adult life. And I know there’s a lot of good people there that,
you know, focused on, like, I suppose these these east meets west challenges. Rich, thank you so much for your time today. I just have absolutely loved getting to know you and the story behind Finding Ruby.
Is there anything besides go listen to the podcast, Anything that, you’d like to leave our listeners with today? Well, I just wanted to say to you, Chris, I’m a massive fan of what you’re doing, and I think you’re also in a unique position where you understand the the the worlds, together as well. So I want to tell your listeners that you’re awesome. That’s what I wanna say. That’s really that’s really sweet.
Well, I I do feel grateful I’m in a position where I can help raise awareness of Finding Ruby, and I do really recommend that everyone give it a listen and and really push through. I think you’ll find that you’ll be sharing it with lots of friends and family as I have. Thank you, Chris. So good to chat with you. Really appreciate takeaways for me.
I think the biggest one for me is to be bold and take action today. I think there’s always a really good reason to put things off or procrastinate, but I think Rich’s whole goal with this is to inspire people to do something about it because it is a really big problem. I mean, one of the fastest growing crimes and over half a 1000000 cases of it every year in the Philippines. The numbers are just scary. So I think that is the big outtake for me is I hope I hope you go and listen to Finding Ruby, and I hope that if you’re thinking about doing something with your business or your life that can really have a positive impact on the world is to be bold and take action.
I hope you found this interview as inspiring as I did. And if you’re an entrepreneur in your journey, please hit me up in the DMs or come and check out Launchpad. It’s www.thelaunchpad. Group. We are a bunch of beautiful humans that are supporting each other and building together businesses that are ethical and conscious, and we’d love to hear from you.
Before I close out today, I just want to acknowledge the traditional owners of the land of which I’m recording this podcast, which is the Arakwal people from the Bunduang Nation. I pay my respects to these elders past, present and future, and I extend my respects to all traditional cultures. My name is Chris Edwards and I hope that you are as inspired as I am to create your own good business.