February 23, 2024 • 32 mins
In this episode, Tudor welcomes Maureen Flatley, an expert in government reform and oversight involving children, who discusses the importance of protecting children online. She emphasizes the need for law enforcement to address child exploitation and the failure of current legislation to adequately implement necessary measures. Maureen highlights the role of tech companies in reporting child sexual abuse material and the need for increased resources for processing cyber tips. She advocates for holding perpetrators accountable and pursuing justice, rather than solely blaming tech companies. Maureen also emphasizes the importance of education for parents and children and the need for personal responsibility in technology use. The Tudor Dixon Podcast is part of the Clay Travis & Buck Sexton Podcast Network - new episodes debut every Monday, Wednesday, & Friday. For more information visit TudorDixonPodcast.com
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Welcome to the Tutor Dixon Podcast. So often we hear
politicians on both the left and the right say they
are best equipped to protect our kids, and they introduce
legislation they claim will do just that. While they're well
meeting and genuine in their efforts, many of these government
reforms are not actually getting to the root of the problem,
(00:21):
or worse, they end up unknowingly making the problem worse.
But the last few weeks there's been a rare coming
together in Washington on an issue we should all want
to solve. I've talked about it several times on this podcast,
and that is protecting our children online. Today, I'm bringing
in someone who's been at the center of much of
this work for decades. Maureen Flatley is an expert in
(00:43):
government reform and oversight involving children. Her advocacy on Capitol
Hill has resulted in the passage of a wide range
of reforms of child welfare, adoption, and child abuse and
exploitation laws, like Masha's Law, a bill that tripled the
civil penalty for downloading child sexual abuse material. Marien, thanks
(01:04):
for joining me today.
Speaker 2 (01:05):
Well, thanks for having me. It's an important topic and
I'm so glad you're interested to explore it.
Speaker 1 (01:11):
I definitely am. At Most of the people listening know
that I have four children myself, for girls, but we've
had parents on here who've had issues where their kids
have been exploited online ultimately ended up committing suicide, all
kinds of I mean, there's just so much that goes
on with this that people don't realize. And I think
(01:31):
that most of us are uneducated on how to protect
our kids. And even if we think we're educated, there's
always new ways people can get to our kids. So
if you can explain a little bit about what you've
been working on and how you think we can kind
of make this safer for our kids.
Speaker 2 (01:49):
Well, I'm a mom and a grandmother of a whole
flock of kids, mostly girls myself, and so this is
both personal and professional for me. I often start the
conversations by pointing out that I'm the daughter of an
FBI agent, and my dad spent most of his career
detailed to Capitol Hill, where he worked for the Senate
Racketeering Committee developing testimony against organized crime figures, and that
(02:14):
experience growing up literally as a child watching it every
day has really informed my approach to this problem. I
often say that while people try to frame this sometimes
as a tech problem, underneath all of it it's a
crime problem. And when you look at the statistics about
I'm used, for example, the cybertips, so they're thirty two
(02:36):
million cybertips, almost virtually all of those reports come actually
from the tech companies directly, but they can't arrest and
prosecute any of the perpetrators who are involved in those
various allegations and reports, and the conviction rates are very
very low. So while on one level I understand and
(03:00):
the concern the tech companies do more, and I think
most are actually trying to keep up, at the end
of the day, we really have to invest in law
enforcement here because even you know, something like sextortion, which
I know has been a tremendous concern for a lot
of parents like us, it seems innocuous. It seems like,
(03:20):
well it, you know, just might be a kid bullying
my kid, but with a terrible result. But there are rings, international,
rings of sextortionists who have over many years covered twenty
and thirty countries with very deliberate efforts to exploit kids.
(03:41):
So we're never going to get ahead of this problem
if we don't invest in the law enforcement side of this.
And unfortunately, the Protect Act, which was passed in two
thousand and eight, was a virtually perfect response to the problem.
DOJ has almost completely failed, in my view, to implement
meant the law adequately. So we've lost fifteen years of
(04:02):
building an infrastructure to interdict these criminals. So I hope
that everybody can understand that while there are a lot
of things that we talk about doing, this is really
the most important thing that we have to attack. First.
Speaker 1 (04:16):
Well, let's dig into that a little bit, because in Michigan,
I know, we really have one main crime lab in
the entire state. So any type of sexual assault or
any rape kit, anything like that goes through one crime
lab in the entire state. And this was because this community.
It wasn't a statewide decision. It was the community that
(04:38):
decided to put all of their money into this crime lab.
So why when we look at these massive budgets, I
mean the state of Michigan. I'll pick on our state
because I know that we are in the top five
for rapes per capita in the entire country. We obviously
have a sex crime problem outside of being an online problem.
But when I talked to the sheriff in this part
(05:00):
ticular community, He's like, look, I can find a sex
a sexual crime. I got a person who's committing some
sort of a sexual crime every single day in this state.
I can locate them, and I can arrest them, and
I can put them behind bars. But I don't have
the resources to run everything through the labs. So what
(05:21):
is that when you talk about that, is that what
you're talking about one hundred percent?
Speaker 2 (05:25):
One hundred percent. So when you think about the thirty
two million cyber tips, that doesn't necessarily mean thirty two
million crimes. It just means thirty two million reports. I
analogize that Tutor two mandated reporting and child welfare. So
you know, in a state like Michigan, which is one
of the largest populations of kids in foster care, you
(05:45):
could have I'm ball parking a million child abust complaints
a year. But you know, some of them could just
be you know, neighbors are having a dispute and they
make a gratuitous complain about their neighbor and their kids.
It's nothing really serious. Meanwhile, while social workers wigdhe through
those what I would consider to be kind of bogus complaints.
(06:08):
They're not getting to the serious and life threatening stories
that need to be addressed quickly. So one of the.
Speaker 1 (06:14):
Most So, how does that when you talk about the
Protect Act Act? Explain that a little bit. What would
that have had it been implemented the right way? What
would that mean?
Speaker 2 (06:25):
Well, you know, the Project Act actually has had money
appropriated for it that hasn't even been spent, and so
you know, I look at the Internet crimes against Children's
task forces. Michigan has a great one, and that the
linkage between municipal, state, and federal law enforcement in this
(06:45):
is pretty critical because one, internet crimes tend to be
interstate activity, but also because we want to aggregate and
look at patterns and look at perpetrators that are operating
across state lines. So the simple answer to your question
about the Protect Act is that had it been fully implemented,
we would have been infusing those state Internet crimes against
(07:08):
Children's task forces with more money so that they would
have more just to begin with, more analysts to look
at the reports to see if there actually are crimes,
more investigators at the local and state level to investigate
those crimes. Because the tech companies, the best of the
tech companies can't arrest and prosecute anybody. It has to
(07:31):
be a law of law enforcement function. So by failing
to implement that over a long period of time, and
I blame Congress for this because it's their responsibility to
engage in oversight, we would have had a lot more
people on the ground doing the work. The good news
is that BEST passed almost sixteen years ago. I'm sorry,
(07:52):
Protect passed almost sixteen years ago. There's a new bill
in Congress called the Investing Child Safety Act that would
what I call right size this spending on law enforcement
in this sector. It's not just handing out blank checks
to police departments. In the FBI, it's very focused on
child exploitation, and that would bring dramatic increases in the
(08:16):
number of analysts, the number of investigators, the number of prosecutors,
and the number of judges that would look at these cases.
And from where I sit as a mom and as
an expert in chop protection, we can't even begin to
address this issue until we attack the criminal side of it.
Because I use the analogy blaming the tech companies for
(08:38):
all of this is like blaming a bank for being robbed.
You know you have these cases. I don't know if
you guys read about this, but the Chanel store was
targeted and you know, twenty five shoplifters went in and
stole everything in the entire store. Well, nobody blamed the store.
They called the police. And so when you start to
talk about the level of organized crime in this issue,
we have to get that out of the mix before
(09:00):
we're going to see any significant improvements.
Speaker 1 (09:03):
So I think for people who don't understand exactly what
we're talking about, let's just go through. In twenty twenty three,
there were more than one hundred and five million online images, videos,
materials related to child sexual abuse, and those were flagged
by the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children. So
when we talk about this, I think that sometimes people hear, oh,
(09:27):
sometimes there's pictures on Twitter or x now, I guess,
but formerly Twitter or Facebook or you know, any of
these social media sites, people say, well, this is out there.
Why aren't these sites doing something? They like you said,
they can report them, they can't go and arrest these people.
They can take them off. But then if you take
them off their site, do these people reoccur as someone else?
Speaker 2 (09:48):
Where?
Speaker 1 (09:49):
Is this where is this imagery coming from Are they
getting this, are they getting this from the children themselves?
How exactly is this working? And what do we need
as parents to be on the lookout for with our
own kids.
Speaker 2 (10:02):
Yeah, well, I mean, let's talk about what happens with
cyber tips. So, just like doctors and school nurses and
teachers and pastors, the tech companies are federally mandated reporters.
That means that they if they believe that there is
an instance of child exploitation or child sexual abuse, they
have to report it, and they do. They're the only
(10:24):
real source of reports across the board. So once those
reports are made and they go in the pool of
cyber tips, then nickmck does what we call geolocate the pictures. So,
in other words, they determine to the extent possible where
the pictures come from. So one of the important facts
is that ninety four percent of cyber tips involve foreign governments,
(10:48):
and so when they geolocate the pictures, they refer them
out to these other governments who have no real mandate
or responsibility to do anything with them. Of course, many
of them involve extremely poor countries that really don't have
any law enforcement the remaining six percent are US based,
(11:09):
and so that's where we start to think about, Okay,
what can we do in this country. We can start
by evaluating what those pictures are, but right now, because
of limited resources, I think the number is something like
three thousand out of one hundred thousand reports are actually examined.
So problem number one, if my father was still alive,
(11:31):
he would be the perfect person to organize this. Problem
number one is we actually don't know enough about where
those images are coming from. So how much of it
is organized criminal activity? And I can tell you from
working on Musha's Law that that child who was adopted
from Russia by a pedophile to be content in his
child pornography empire was actually one of the most prolific
(11:55):
images on the Internet at the time, literally probably now
millions of pictures. She was rescued in the early two
thousands and her pictures are still all over the internet.
So we need to understand. We can't fix the problem
we don't understand. So we need to begin by differentiating
where do those pictures come from? So is it seventy
(12:17):
five percent organized criminal activity? Because that's a hard target
that we can start to go after and disrupt how
much of it is kids producing their own content, you know, foolishly,
innocently or whatever. That's a problem that we can definitely
begin to address with education. I think a lot of
what's going on is addressed by enforcing existing law, by
(12:41):
bolstering our existing investment in law enforcement, and then tutor
to me as a mother, one of the number one
things is education, education, education. If we don't let our
kids get behind the wheel of a car without driver's
ad we really need to have a digital education approach
(13:02):
to this, both for parents and for kids. Florida passed
a marvelous bill that we're going to push hard as
a model for other states to use. Very simple, because
you know, there have been a lot of ideas promoted
here that involve having the government decide when your child
can go on the internet, what your child can do
(13:24):
on the internet. And I'm here to tell you, with
somebody who has spent many, many years watching the in
real life child welfare system destroy families, we really don't
want to create a digital CPS here because we know,
I mean, I got into this issue as an oversight
matter on working on prontal rights cases, and so this
(13:45):
is something that parents can do more to control and manage,
but you know, oftentimes parents themselves need to have a
better understanding of exactly what's involved here. So I think
a little bit less government involvement in a way is
probably better. But we have to have the law enforcement
(14:06):
piece a bit at the front end, because you know,
it's sort of like some of the proposals that have
been made involve, you know, way down the road after
the fact, after the damage has been done, tinkering with
various tech rules with you know, victims access to civil
justice and victims can sue their perpetrators now. But if
(14:30):
we don't get to the heart of this, it's just
going to be perpetuated. We'll have countless more victims.
Speaker 1 (14:36):
Let's take a quick commercial break. We'll continue next on
the Tutor Dixon podcast. So let me ask you when
you talk about ninety four percent of this being coming
from other countries, so does that mean that the actual
images are coming from other countries or that it is
the offenders are in other countries and they are somehow
(14:58):
coming into our country and getting our kids and getting
pictures of them or assaulting them. Explain what that means.
Speaker 2 (15:06):
Well, it largely means that it isn't US activity. So
whether it's the perpetrator is in another country or the
child is in another country, it's not a US legal matter.
It's something that falls into the jurisdiction of you know,
literally Bangladesh, Algeria, Germany, and so it really isn't something
(15:28):
And this is something that people often don't understand as
they kind of go after the tech companies. We don't
have jurisdictionally the ability to prosecute a lot of these cases.
But at the end of the day, we're not prosecuting
enough of the cases that we do have the ability
to attack. And I sometimes to use the example of
(15:51):
Mothers against drunk Driving, which is really one of my
very favorite examples of grassroots advocacy. So, you know, tragically Candy,
like his daughter was killed by a drunk driver. She
very quickly realized that this was a guy that had
been arrested for DUI many times, had never gone to jail,
and so she started paying attention to the sentences the
(16:12):
judges were handing out, and very quickly, within a period
of four or five years, we went from it was
basically legal to drive drunk and kill somebody with your
car to having really stiff sentences, and we've seen the
number of fatalities due to drunk driving go way way down,
and I think that we need to structure sort of
(16:35):
the same kind of deterrence, if you will. As long
as the focus is on the tech companies who aren't
the ones perpetrating against the kids, you know, they may
be a platform that the crime happens to appear on.
But unless we start to really attack the people who
are directly harming the kids, we're not going to stop
(16:59):
this victim is And in fact, I've seen I mean
I said this, and I was at the hearing in
Congress a couple weeks ago, and I said to someone, look,
we've lost sixteen years because Congress didn't bother to enforce
a bill that is now a law that was literally
at the time, one of the perfect responses to this
problem from a law enforcement perspective. And so now we
(17:24):
have to start now, because if you look at the
explosion of the activity in those fifteen years, I just
think I get up every morning and one of the
first things I think of is how many of those
kids could have been protected if we had done our
job at the front end. And so we can come
up with a lot of and you said it at
the beginning. I think virtually everyone who's waited on this
(17:47):
is well intended. But the question is how much do
they understand how this process, this problem plays out, and
what really constitutes well And.
Speaker 1 (18:01):
I think we've become a society that wants to have
a person or an entity to hold accountable. And that's
where we see these hearings. They get a lot of
play because there's always these statements that come out and
then they travel on the social media platforms and we're like, yes,
that's the person we want to have pay for this.
But we had an interesting story here in Michigan in
(18:22):
the Upper Peninsula. A young man I think he was sixteen,
sixteen or seventeen years old and he went and this
was a young man who was on the football team,
had everything going for him, ended up having somebody this
sextortion happened to him at night where these guys I
think it was from Nigeria, they went after him. They
(18:43):
opposed as a girl. The parents were actually able to
extradite them and they have never stopped fighting. And I
think that's kind of what you're talking about with moms
against drunk driving is like you really have to say
we're going to take this to the next level and say, no,
I'm not okay with the fact that they're going to
get five months and get off. I'm going to keep
(19:04):
fighting until the next person doesn't ever have a chance
to do this again. And I think we've kind of
gotten away from that tenacity with crime, but we have
to get back there a.
Speaker 2 (19:16):
One hundred percent. Now I know about that case, and
in fact, I'm fairly certain that the gang that was
involved in that case is one of the gangs that's
on my radar. It's a Nigerian sextortion gang called the
Yahoo Boys, and it's sort of loosely organized, but it's
well organized enough to operate multinationally and to perpetrate crimes
(19:36):
all over the world literally. And so I work with
a group called Stop Child Predators, started by the wonderful
Stacey Rouman app who is kind of the candy lightener
of this issue. Wasn't a personal victim, but she recognized
a long time ago that this law enforcement piece was
really crucial. And so you just gave me the perfect
(19:58):
example one of the targets that we're going to take
on and it's the Yagu Boys who have been responsible
for some gruesome sextortion cases, I mean including having kids
commit suicide. They were so distraught by what happened. But
you know, this is all about personal responsibility too, and
(20:19):
I think we can shift the blame to the easy
targets to the deep pockets. I think some of what
has driven the criticism of the tech companies has been
quite frankly opportunism, because who has deeper pockets than they do?
But it doesn't take the criminals off the street. And
so when you start to talk about a gang like
(20:40):
the Aagu Boys, and I reference my own father's work
because you know, he developed Joblacci's testimony against the mob
and that ended up being a global undertaking. But that's
how we start to develop a solution. And I love
that story, and actually I might want to get in
touch with that family because that's how you do it. Yes,
(21:02):
sold the actual perpetrators accountable, and pretty soon two things happened. One,
you take the criminals off the street and you start
to disrupt and discourage the activity. But also the process
of doing it is educational for the public, and so
(21:23):
people can see that this is a lot more complicated
than they would like to think. So I know members
of Congress who just want to wave a magic wand
and you know they think suing the tech companies. I mean,
I'll give you. I mean, somebody asked me about what
I thought about the hearings a couple of weeks ago,
and I said, you know, if I had been Mark Zuckerberg,
and you know, I'm not here to defund the tech companies,
(21:45):
but if I had been Mark Zuckerberg, this is what
I would have said. I would have said. You know,
Congress has had sixteen years to build a world class
child exploitation and addiction system, and they haven't really lifted
a finger. The GOO just came out with a skating
report about DOJ's fails to work this issue. And the
tech companies are the only reporters of this activity, only
(22:08):
meaningful reporters in the mandated reporting system. But they're not
the police, and so they hand the cyber tips over
but a tiny percentage of those cases they're prosecuted, and
so and this is so this is a public safety problem.
So at the end of the day, I think one
(22:28):
of the things I love about these stories where families,
you know, do pursue justice in a especially in criminal court,
is that it shows the public exactly what's going on,
that this isn't some wave of magic wand scenario. This
is you know, boots on the ground, giving law enforcement
the tools they need and connecting those dots because honestly,
(22:52):
it's these gangs that are you know, this isn't some
you know, kind of innocuous little act activity. If somebody's
sitting in his bedroom in Milwaukee, you know, it's these
people know what they're doing.
Speaker 1 (23:07):
Yeah, this is organized crime, and it's just a different
form than we're used to hearing about exactly. Let's take
a quick commercial break. We'll continue next on a Tutor
Dixon podcast. Before I let you go, I just want
to get into when you talk about education and you say, well,
you know, children and parents need to be educated. And
(23:28):
I believe this because I'm in the situation where this
was not a thing when I was a kid. I
have no idea what they're facing online, but I don't
feel like there are great resources out there for me
to find out how I protect them. Is there something
that I'm missing? Is there a way for us to
point parents in a direction where it's like Okay, here's
the facts, and this is what you need to teach
(23:50):
your kids or is this something our schools should also
have a course on. I mean, I'm really looking for
those answers.
Speaker 2 (23:58):
Well, certainly working with Stop Child Predators and our partner organizations,
the number one thing that we feel we can do
is to develop those educational materials. And so do I
think it should be a course in school? You betcha?
I think, as I said, there was a bill in
Florida that was passed on a bipartisan basis that we
(24:19):
are absolutely distributing to other states to talk to them
about this is a very simple, basic, useful tool for
kids in school. But then also we're looking to partner
with national parents organizations, foster parents for instance. I'm a
Junior League member, to make sure that we can distribute
(24:45):
just some basic educational material to parents. I mean, I'm
probably old enough to at least be your mother, if
not your nana. And I think when I look at
how the Internet has played out as a thing in
my lifetime but also during the span of my work
in this area, the thing that I also try to
(25:06):
remind people of is that technology has done a lot
of really good things for kids. So it's helping us
locate kids abducted from Ukraine by the Russians, it's helping
us find adoptive families for kids in foster care. I
can go on all day long about how great technology is,
but you know, it's a little bit of common sense.
You wouldn't let your twelve year old drive to them
all by themselves and just wander around. And you know,
(25:30):
my twelve year old granddaughter doesn't go on her iPad
without you know, some real boundaries from my daughter. So
I think we have to help everybody get a better
grasp of what this is really about and how you know,
sort of one thing to have your granddaughter this is
I'm speaking from personal experience, sit on your boat watching
(25:52):
cocoa lemon while she takes a nap or melon, and
it's another thing to just let kids have unfettered access.
So I feel like we are moving in the right direction.
But I think we need to focus on two really
important things, the criminals that are doing this, and then
(26:12):
helping families understand how much control they have over this,
how they can protect their own kids. As I said earlier,
I just think that the government makes a terrible parent.
There are thousands of foster children who can speak to
that on any given day, and so I really feel
like the solutions need to come from families.
Speaker 1 (26:33):
I think there's a different level too that we didn't
talk about, and it's not a safety thing. But when
you talk about this, it just reminded me. I have
a daughter in high school and they obviously the kids
text back and forth, but then if they get mad
at one another for any reason, I mean the most
sensitive reason whatsoever, or break up with a girlfriend or
(26:53):
a boyfriend, they immediately block that person. And I took
my girls aside the other day and I said, look,
don't do that. I don't care how angry you are
with someone. You don't know what you do to them
in that moment. If you cut them off completely, they
have no access to you. They can't have a conversation.
I know that you guys have this different technology and
(27:15):
that wasn't my story as a kid, but these are
just like there are etiquette tips that we didn't have
to think about when we were young, and now life
has changed.
Speaker 2 (27:26):
You know. I'm so glad you said that, and maybe
we should do a whole other show about this because
I think that part of what has fueled a lot
of First of all, the whole issue of mental health
and kids, Technology is not the problem. The rest of
life in a lot of kids' lives is the problem.
But you know the way that social meda I'm sure
(27:48):
we've both done this, but social media has a way
of amplifying and sharpening communication, oftentimes not in a good way.
I know I've been guilty of doing this myself. So
I mean, part of this is is how we communicate
with each other and how we treat each other. And
I think it's actually a really big teachable moment for kids.
(28:10):
You know, people ask me about bullying all the time,
and I'm like, look, you know, technology is not going
to stop bullying, and bullying will move wherever. Kids. I'm
seventy five years old, I'm sure there was bullying. All
the nuns in my school probably wouldn't stand for it.
But you know, there was bullying going on in the
fifties and sixties, and when my kids were growing up
(28:30):
in the seventies and eighties, and the grandchildren. Now, it's
a human thing. It's not a technology thing, right, And
I think that technology, though, gives us an opportunity to
maybe use technology more constructively and more compassionately. And to
your point, you know, when I hear these heart wrenching
stories about kids committing suicide because they felt rejected, Wow,
(28:52):
you just I mean, sometimes the answers are really simple,
and you just raised I think an extremely important.
Speaker 1 (29:01):
But honestly, it's one of those things where if you're
not having that conversation with your kids. I mean, my
daughter was like, I can't believe this happened. You know,
we had this conversation. Then she blocked me and I
haven't spoken to her since, and I was like, how
often does that happen? Oh, this is how the kids
do it all the time. Now, than my seventh grader
chimes in and I said, you know what that can
(29:23):
feel like. It's a forever thing in that moment, and
you guys need to understand how that makes someone else feel.
Don't ever do that. But I would never have known
had we not had that conversation. So it is it's
kind of one of those things. We could talk about this,
and we should because we should talk about all of
those factors and that should go into that material of
how to talk to your kids about technology.
Speaker 2 (29:46):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, and being a good person. I have
a dear friend who has a big foster care program
and his tagline is be a good person. And you know,
I think sometimes we lose sight of that. And technology
has a way of sort of ample find things sometimes,
and you know, I think we probably have both because
I think we're both into a lot of stuff. Policy wise.
(30:08):
It just keeps throwing stuff at you and it can
be overwhelming, even for an adult, and sometimes you do
want to just turn that thing off, whatever it is,
but that isn't necessarily the best way to work through
conflict in a moment.
Speaker 1 (30:22):
So I mean, I keep finding that no matter what
the subject is, it seems like better to handle it
in society than try to make government create some.
Speaker 2 (30:32):
Rule or law around Amen's sister. Because the biggest concern
that I have right now is that we have the
government weighing in with a lot of knee jerk ideas.
And I'm sure that a lot of them are well intended,
but you know, as I think we all know, the
(30:53):
government is not the answer to everything, and sometimes the
government creates a lot of unintended consequences. I'll just leave
you with one thought, because I think Michigan's involved with it.
You know, a lot of the state attorneys general are
suing Meta right now for all kinds of perceived you know,
harm to children. But what I found, I mean, I
literally laughed out loud when I heard about the lawsuit,
(31:15):
because almost every single one of those states has been
sued for their own horrid child welfare outcomes, and so
kids dying in foster care, kids being lost in foster care,
you know, infant mortality rates off the charts. So let's
not get ourselves. This really isn't a technology problem. This
is kind of a human problem. Yeah, And I think
(31:37):
it's up to us to attack it, and preferably together,
because I think that we're all learning a lot from
each other, and I think that that's the way you
get things done.
Speaker 1 (31:47):
Well, this has been great. I mean, I've learned a
lot today. I appreciate you taking the time to talk
to me about it, and if there's anything that you
can point us to, let me know. I mean, we'd
love to share that with our audience. And if you
have those heals, let's get them out there.
Speaker 2 (32:02):
I will be delighted to stay in touch. I really
enjoyed this.
Speaker 1 (32:05):
Me too, well, Maureen, it was wonderful having you.
Speaker 2 (32:08):
Thank you anytime, and.
Speaker 1 (32:10):
Thank you all for joining us on the Tutor Dixon Podcast.
For this episode and others, go to Tutor dixonpodcast dot com.
You can subscribe right there, or head over to the
iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts
and join us next time on the Tutor Dixon Podcast.
Have a blast day.
Welcome to the Tutor Dixon Podcast. So often we hear
politicians on both the left and the right say they
are best equipped to protect our kids, and they introduce
legislation they claim will do just that. While they're well
meeting and genuine in their efforts, many of these government
reforms are not actually getting to the root of the problem,
(00:21):
or worse, they end up unknowingly making the problem worse.
But the last few weeks there's been a rare coming
together in Washington on an issue we should all want
to solve. I've talked about it several times on this podcast,
and that is protecting our children online. Today, I'm bringing
in someone who's been at the center of much of
this work for decades. Maureen Flatley is an expert in
(00:43):
government reform and oversight involving children. Her advocacy on Capitol
Hill has resulted in the passage of a wide range
of reforms of child welfare, adoption, and child abuse and
exploitation laws, like Masha's Law, a bill that tripled the
civil penalty for downloading child sexual abuse material. Marien, thanks
(01:04):
for joining me today.
Speaker 2 (01:05):
Well, thanks for having me. It's an important topic and
I'm so glad you're interested to explore it.
Speaker 1 (01:11):
I definitely am. At Most of the people listening know
that I have four children myself, for girls, but we've
had parents on here who've had issues where their kids
have been exploited online ultimately ended up committing suicide, all
kinds of I mean, there's just so much that goes
on with this that people don't realize. And I think
(01:31):
that most of us are uneducated on how to protect
our kids. And even if we think we're educated, there's
always new ways people can get to our kids. So
if you can explain a little bit about what you've
been working on and how you think we can kind
of make this safer for our kids.
Speaker 2 (01:49):
Well, I'm a mom and a grandmother of a whole
flock of kids, mostly girls myself, and so this is
both personal and professional for me. I often start the
conversations by pointing out that I'm the daughter of an
FBI agent, and my dad spent most of his career
detailed to Capitol Hill, where he worked for the Senate
Racketeering Committee developing testimony against organized crime figures, and that
(02:14):
experience growing up literally as a child watching it every
day has really informed my approach to this problem. I
often say that while people try to frame this sometimes
as a tech problem, underneath all of it it's a
crime problem. And when you look at the statistics about
I'm used, for example, the cybertips, so they're thirty two
(02:36):
million cybertips, almost virtually all of those reports come actually
from the tech companies directly, but they can't arrest and
prosecute any of the perpetrators who are involved in those
various allegations and reports, and the conviction rates are very
very low. So while on one level I understand and
(03:00):
the concern the tech companies do more, and I think
most are actually trying to keep up, at the end
of the day, we really have to invest in law
enforcement here because even you know, something like sextortion, which
I know has been a tremendous concern for a lot
of parents like us, it seems innocuous. It seems like,
(03:20):
well it, you know, just might be a kid bullying
my kid, but with a terrible result. But there are rings, international,
rings of sextortionists who have over many years covered twenty
and thirty countries with very deliberate efforts to exploit kids.
(03:41):
So we're never going to get ahead of this problem
if we don't invest in the law enforcement side of this.
And unfortunately, the Protect Act, which was passed in two
thousand and eight, was a virtually perfect response to the problem.
DOJ has almost completely failed, in my view, to implement
meant the law adequately. So we've lost fifteen years of
(04:02):
building an infrastructure to interdict these criminals. So I hope
that everybody can understand that while there are a lot
of things that we talk about doing, this is really
the most important thing that we have to attack. First.
Speaker 1 (04:16):
Well, let's dig into that a little bit, because in Michigan,
I know, we really have one main crime lab in
the entire state. So any type of sexual assault or
any rape kit, anything like that goes through one crime
lab in the entire state. And this was because this community.
It wasn't a statewide decision. It was the community that
(04:38):
decided to put all of their money into this crime lab.
So why when we look at these massive budgets, I
mean the state of Michigan. I'll pick on our state
because I know that we are in the top five
for rapes per capita in the entire country. We obviously
have a sex crime problem outside of being an online problem.
But when I talked to the sheriff in this part
(05:00):
ticular community, He's like, look, I can find a sex
a sexual crime. I got a person who's committing some
sort of a sexual crime every single day in this state.
I can locate them, and I can arrest them, and
I can put them behind bars. But I don't have
the resources to run everything through the labs. So what
(05:21):
is that when you talk about that, is that what
you're talking about one hundred percent?
Speaker 2 (05:25):
One hundred percent. So when you think about the thirty
two million cyber tips, that doesn't necessarily mean thirty two
million crimes. It just means thirty two million reports. I
analogize that Tutor two mandated reporting and child welfare. So
you know, in a state like Michigan, which is one
of the largest populations of kids in foster care, you
(05:45):
could have I'm ball parking a million child abust complaints
a year. But you know, some of them could just
be you know, neighbors are having a dispute and they
make a gratuitous complain about their neighbor and their kids.
It's nothing really serious. Meanwhile, while social workers wigdhe through
those what I would consider to be kind of bogus complaints.
(06:08):
They're not getting to the serious and life threatening stories
that need to be addressed quickly. So one of the.
Speaker 1 (06:14):
Most So, how does that when you talk about the
Protect Act Act? Explain that a little bit. What would
that have had it been implemented the right way? What
would that mean?
Speaker 2 (06:25):
Well, you know, the Project Act actually has had money
appropriated for it that hasn't even been spent, and so
you know, I look at the Internet crimes against Children's
task forces. Michigan has a great one, and that the
linkage between municipal, state, and federal law enforcement in this
(06:45):
is pretty critical because one, internet crimes tend to be
interstate activity, but also because we want to aggregate and
look at patterns and look at perpetrators that are operating
across state lines. So the simple answer to your question
about the Protect Act is that had it been fully implemented,
we would have been infusing those state Internet crimes against
(07:08):
Children's task forces with more money so that they would
have more just to begin with, more analysts to look
at the reports to see if there actually are crimes,
more investigators at the local and state level to investigate
those crimes. Because the tech companies, the best of the
tech companies can't arrest and prosecute anybody. It has to
(07:31):
be a law of law enforcement function. So by failing
to implement that over a long period of time, and
I blame Congress for this because it's their responsibility to
engage in oversight, we would have had a lot more
people on the ground doing the work. The good news
is that BEST passed almost sixteen years ago. I'm sorry,
(07:52):
Protect passed almost sixteen years ago. There's a new bill
in Congress called the Investing Child Safety Act that would
what I call right size this spending on law enforcement
in this sector. It's not just handing out blank checks
to police departments. In the FBI, it's very focused on
child exploitation, and that would bring dramatic increases in the
(08:16):
number of analysts, the number of investigators, the number of prosecutors,
and the number of judges that would look at these cases.
And from where I sit as a mom and as
an expert in chop protection, we can't even begin to
address this issue until we attack the criminal side of it.
Because I use the analogy blaming the tech companies for
(08:38):
all of this is like blaming a bank for being robbed.
You know you have these cases. I don't know if
you guys read about this, but the Chanel store was
targeted and you know, twenty five shoplifters went in and
stole everything in the entire store. Well, nobody blamed the store.
They called the police. And so when you start to
talk about the level of organized crime in this issue,
we have to get that out of the mix before
(09:00):
we're going to see any significant improvements.
Speaker 1 (09:03):
So I think for people who don't understand exactly what
we're talking about, let's just go through. In twenty twenty three,
there were more than one hundred and five million online images, videos,
materials related to child sexual abuse, and those were flagged
by the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children. So
when we talk about this, I think that sometimes people hear, oh,
(09:27):
sometimes there's pictures on Twitter or x now, I guess,
but formerly Twitter or Facebook or you know, any of
these social media sites, people say, well, this is out there.
Why aren't these sites doing something? They like you said,
they can report them, they can't go and arrest these people.
They can take them off. But then if you take
them off their site, do these people reoccur as someone else?
Speaker 2 (09:48):
Where?
Speaker 1 (09:49):
Is this where is this imagery coming from Are they
getting this, are they getting this from the children themselves?
How exactly is this working? And what do we need
as parents to be on the lookout for with our
own kids.
Speaker 2 (10:02):
Yeah, well, I mean, let's talk about what happens with
cyber tips. So, just like doctors and school nurses and
teachers and pastors, the tech companies are federally mandated reporters.
That means that they if they believe that there is
an instance of child exploitation or child sexual abuse, they
have to report it, and they do. They're the only
(10:24):
real source of reports across the board. So once those
reports are made and they go in the pool of
cyber tips, then nickmck does what we call geolocate the pictures. So,
in other words, they determine to the extent possible where
the pictures come from. So one of the important facts
is that ninety four percent of cyber tips involve foreign governments,
(10:48):
and so when they geolocate the pictures, they refer them
out to these other governments who have no real mandate
or responsibility to do anything with them. Of course, many
of them involve extremely poor countries that really don't have
any law enforcement the remaining six percent are US based,
(11:09):
and so that's where we start to think about, Okay,
what can we do in this country. We can start
by evaluating what those pictures are, but right now, because
of limited resources, I think the number is something like
three thousand out of one hundred thousand reports are actually examined.
So problem number one, if my father was still alive,
(11:31):
he would be the perfect person to organize this. Problem
number one is we actually don't know enough about where
those images are coming from. So how much of it
is organized criminal activity? And I can tell you from
working on Musha's Law that that child who was adopted
from Russia by a pedophile to be content in his
child pornography empire was actually one of the most prolific
(11:55):
images on the Internet at the time, literally probably now
millions of pictures. She was rescued in the early two
thousands and her pictures are still all over the internet.
So we need to understand. We can't fix the problem
we don't understand. So we need to begin by differentiating
where do those pictures come from? So is it seventy
(12:17):
five percent organized criminal activity? Because that's a hard target
that we can start to go after and disrupt how
much of it is kids producing their own content, you know, foolishly,
innocently or whatever. That's a problem that we can definitely
begin to address with education. I think a lot of
what's going on is addressed by enforcing existing law, by
(12:41):
bolstering our existing investment in law enforcement, and then tutor
to me as a mother, one of the number one
things is education, education, education. If we don't let our
kids get behind the wheel of a car without driver's
ad we really need to have a digital education approach
(13:02):
to this, both for parents and for kids. Florida passed
a marvelous bill that we're going to push hard as
a model for other states to use. Very simple, because
you know, there have been a lot of ideas promoted
here that involve having the government decide when your child
can go on the internet, what your child can do
(13:24):
on the internet. And I'm here to tell you, with
somebody who has spent many, many years watching the in
real life child welfare system destroy families, we really don't
want to create a digital CPS here because we know,
I mean, I got into this issue as an oversight
matter on working on prontal rights cases, and so this
(13:45):
is something that parents can do more to control and manage,
but you know, oftentimes parents themselves need to have a
better understanding of exactly what's involved here. So I think
a little bit less government involvement in a way is
probably better. But we have to have the law enforcement
(14:06):
piece a bit at the front end, because you know,
it's sort of like some of the proposals that have
been made involve, you know, way down the road after
the fact, after the damage has been done, tinkering with
various tech rules with you know, victims access to civil
justice and victims can sue their perpetrators now. But if
(14:30):
we don't get to the heart of this, it's just
going to be perpetuated. We'll have countless more victims.
Speaker 1 (14:36):
Let's take a quick commercial break. We'll continue next on
the Tutor Dixon podcast. So let me ask you when
you talk about ninety four percent of this being coming
from other countries, so does that mean that the actual
images are coming from other countries or that it is
the offenders are in other countries and they are somehow
(14:58):
coming into our country and getting our kids and getting
pictures of them or assaulting them. Explain what that means.
Speaker 2 (15:06):
Well, it largely means that it isn't US activity. So
whether it's the perpetrator is in another country or the
child is in another country, it's not a US legal matter.
It's something that falls into the jurisdiction of you know,
literally Bangladesh, Algeria, Germany, and so it really isn't something
(15:28):
And this is something that people often don't understand as
they kind of go after the tech companies. We don't
have jurisdictionally the ability to prosecute a lot of these cases.
But at the end of the day, we're not prosecuting
enough of the cases that we do have the ability
to attack. And I sometimes to use the example of
(15:51):
Mothers against drunk Driving, which is really one of my
very favorite examples of grassroots advocacy. So, you know, tragically Candy,
like his daughter was killed by a drunk driver. She
very quickly realized that this was a guy that had
been arrested for DUI many times, had never gone to jail,
and so she started paying attention to the sentences the
(16:12):
judges were handing out, and very quickly, within a period
of four or five years, we went from it was
basically legal to drive drunk and kill somebody with your
car to having really stiff sentences, and we've seen the
number of fatalities due to drunk driving go way way down,
and I think that we need to structure sort of
(16:35):
the same kind of deterrence, if you will. As long
as the focus is on the tech companies who aren't
the ones perpetrating against the kids, you know, they may
be a platform that the crime happens to appear on.
But unless we start to really attack the people who
are directly harming the kids, we're not going to stop
(16:59):
this victim is And in fact, I've seen I mean
I said this, and I was at the hearing in
Congress a couple weeks ago, and I said to someone, look,
we've lost sixteen years because Congress didn't bother to enforce
a bill that is now a law that was literally
at the time, one of the perfect responses to this
problem from a law enforcement perspective. And so now we
(17:24):
have to start now, because if you look at the
explosion of the activity in those fifteen years, I just
think I get up every morning and one of the
first things I think of is how many of those
kids could have been protected if we had done our
job at the front end. And so we can come
up with a lot of and you said it at
the beginning. I think virtually everyone who's waited on this
(17:47):
is well intended. But the question is how much do
they understand how this process, this problem plays out, and
what really constitutes well And.
Speaker 1 (18:01):
I think we've become a society that wants to have
a person or an entity to hold accountable. And that's
where we see these hearings. They get a lot of
play because there's always these statements that come out and
then they travel on the social media platforms and we're like, yes,
that's the person we want to have pay for this.
But we had an interesting story here in Michigan in
(18:22):
the Upper Peninsula. A young man I think he was sixteen,
sixteen or seventeen years old and he went and this
was a young man who was on the football team,
had everything going for him, ended up having somebody this
sextortion happened to him at night where these guys I
think it was from Nigeria, they went after him. They
(18:43):
opposed as a girl. The parents were actually able to
extradite them and they have never stopped fighting. And I
think that's kind of what you're talking about with moms
against drunk driving is like you really have to say
we're going to take this to the next level and say, no,
I'm not okay with the fact that they're going to
get five months and get off. I'm going to keep
(19:04):
fighting until the next person doesn't ever have a chance
to do this again. And I think we've kind of
gotten away from that tenacity with crime, but we have
to get back there a.
Speaker 2 (19:16):
One hundred percent. Now I know about that case, and
in fact, I'm fairly certain that the gang that was
involved in that case is one of the gangs that's
on my radar. It's a Nigerian sextortion gang called the
Yahoo Boys, and it's sort of loosely organized, but it's
well organized enough to operate multinationally and to perpetrate crimes
(19:36):
all over the world literally. And so I work with
a group called Stop Child Predators, started by the wonderful
Stacey Rouman app who is kind of the candy lightener
of this issue. Wasn't a personal victim, but she recognized
a long time ago that this law enforcement piece was
really crucial. And so you just gave me the perfect
(19:58):
example one of the targets that we're going to take
on and it's the Yagu Boys who have been responsible
for some gruesome sextortion cases, I mean including having kids
commit suicide. They were so distraught by what happened. But
you know, this is all about personal responsibility too, and
(20:19):
I think we can shift the blame to the easy
targets to the deep pockets. I think some of what
has driven the criticism of the tech companies has been
quite frankly opportunism, because who has deeper pockets than they do?
But it doesn't take the criminals off the street. And
so when you start to talk about a gang like
(20:40):
the Aagu Boys, and I reference my own father's work
because you know, he developed Joblacci's testimony against the mob
and that ended up being a global undertaking. But that's
how we start to develop a solution. And I love
that story, and actually I might want to get in
touch with that family because that's how you do it. Yes,
(21:02):
sold the actual perpetrators accountable, and pretty soon two things happened. One,
you take the criminals off the street and you start
to disrupt and discourage the activity. But also the process
of doing it is educational for the public, and so
(21:23):
people can see that this is a lot more complicated
than they would like to think. So I know members
of Congress who just want to wave a magic wand
and you know they think suing the tech companies. I mean,
I'll give you. I mean, somebody asked me about what
I thought about the hearings a couple of weeks ago,
and I said, you know, if I had been Mark Zuckerberg,
and you know, I'm not here to defund the tech companies,
(21:45):
but if I had been Mark Zuckerberg, this is what
I would have said. I would have said. You know,
Congress has had sixteen years to build a world class
child exploitation and addiction system, and they haven't really lifted
a finger. The GOO just came out with a skating
report about DOJ's fails to work this issue. And the
tech companies are the only reporters of this activity, only
(22:08):
meaningful reporters in the mandated reporting system. But they're not
the police, and so they hand the cyber tips over
but a tiny percentage of those cases they're prosecuted, and
so and this is so this is a public safety problem.
So at the end of the day, I think one
(22:28):
of the things I love about these stories where families,
you know, do pursue justice in a especially in criminal court,
is that it shows the public exactly what's going on,
that this isn't some wave of magic wand scenario. This
is you know, boots on the ground, giving law enforcement
the tools they need and connecting those dots because honestly,
(22:52):
it's these gangs that are you know, this isn't some
you know, kind of innocuous little act activity. If somebody's
sitting in his bedroom in Milwaukee, you know, it's these
people know what they're doing.
Speaker 1 (23:07):
Yeah, this is organized crime, and it's just a different
form than we're used to hearing about exactly. Let's take
a quick commercial break. We'll continue next on a Tutor
Dixon podcast. Before I let you go, I just want
to get into when you talk about education and you say, well,
you know, children and parents need to be educated. And
(23:28):
I believe this because I'm in the situation where this
was not a thing when I was a kid. I
have no idea what they're facing online, but I don't
feel like there are great resources out there for me
to find out how I protect them. Is there something
that I'm missing? Is there a way for us to
point parents in a direction where it's like Okay, here's
the facts, and this is what you need to teach
(23:50):
your kids or is this something our schools should also
have a course on. I mean, I'm really looking for
those answers.
Speaker 2 (23:58):
Well, certainly working with Stop Child Predators and our partner organizations,
the number one thing that we feel we can do
is to develop those educational materials. And so do I
think it should be a course in school? You betcha?
I think, as I said, there was a bill in
Florida that was passed on a bipartisan basis that we
(24:19):
are absolutely distributing to other states to talk to them
about this is a very simple, basic, useful tool for
kids in school. But then also we're looking to partner
with national parents organizations, foster parents for instance. I'm a
Junior League member, to make sure that we can distribute
(24:45):
just some basic educational material to parents. I mean, I'm
probably old enough to at least be your mother, if
not your nana. And I think when I look at
how the Internet has played out as a thing in
my lifetime but also during the span of my work
in this area, the thing that I also try to
(25:06):
remind people of is that technology has done a lot
of really good things for kids. So it's helping us
locate kids abducted from Ukraine by the Russians, it's helping
us find adoptive families for kids in foster care. I
can go on all day long about how great technology is,
but you know, it's a little bit of common sense.
You wouldn't let your twelve year old drive to them
all by themselves and just wander around. And you know,
(25:30):
my twelve year old granddaughter doesn't go on her iPad
without you know, some real boundaries from my daughter. So
I think we have to help everybody get a better
grasp of what this is really about and how you know,
sort of one thing to have your granddaughter this is
I'm speaking from personal experience, sit on your boat watching
(25:52):
cocoa lemon while she takes a nap or melon, and
it's another thing to just let kids have unfettered access.
So I feel like we are moving in the right direction.
But I think we need to focus on two really
important things, the criminals that are doing this, and then
(26:12):
helping families understand how much control they have over this,
how they can protect their own kids. As I said earlier,
I just think that the government makes a terrible parent.
There are thousands of foster children who can speak to
that on any given day, and so I really feel
like the solutions need to come from families.
Speaker 1 (26:33):
I think there's a different level too that we didn't
talk about, and it's not a safety thing. But when
you talk about this, it just reminded me. I have
a daughter in high school and they obviously the kids
text back and forth, but then if they get mad
at one another for any reason, I mean the most
sensitive reason whatsoever, or break up with a girlfriend or
(26:53):
a boyfriend, they immediately block that person. And I took
my girls aside the other day and I said, look,
don't do that. I don't care how angry you are
with someone. You don't know what you do to them
in that moment. If you cut them off completely, they
have no access to you. They can't have a conversation.
I know that you guys have this different technology and
(27:15):
that wasn't my story as a kid, but these are
just like there are etiquette tips that we didn't have
to think about when we were young, and now life
has changed.
Speaker 2 (27:26):
You know. I'm so glad you said that, and maybe
we should do a whole other show about this because
I think that part of what has fueled a lot
of First of all, the whole issue of mental health
and kids, Technology is not the problem. The rest of
life in a lot of kids' lives is the problem.
But you know the way that social meda I'm sure
(27:48):
we've both done this, but social media has a way
of amplifying and sharpening communication, oftentimes not in a good way.
I know I've been guilty of doing this myself. So
I mean, part of this is is how we communicate
with each other and how we treat each other. And
I think it's actually a really big teachable moment for kids.
(28:10):
You know, people ask me about bullying all the time,
and I'm like, look, you know, technology is not going
to stop bullying, and bullying will move wherever. Kids. I'm
seventy five years old, I'm sure there was bullying. All
the nuns in my school probably wouldn't stand for it.
But you know, there was bullying going on in the
fifties and sixties, and when my kids were growing up
(28:30):
in the seventies and eighties, and the grandchildren. Now, it's
a human thing. It's not a technology thing, right, And
I think that technology, though, gives us an opportunity to
maybe use technology more constructively and more compassionately. And to
your point, you know, when I hear these heart wrenching
stories about kids committing suicide because they felt rejected, Wow,
(28:52):
you just I mean, sometimes the answers are really simple,
and you just raised I think an extremely important.
Speaker 1 (29:01):
But honestly, it's one of those things where if you're
not having that conversation with your kids. I mean, my
daughter was like, I can't believe this happened. You know,
we had this conversation. Then she blocked me and I
haven't spoken to her since, and I was like, how
often does that happen? Oh, this is how the kids
do it all the time. Now, than my seventh grader
chimes in and I said, you know what that can
(29:23):
feel like. It's a forever thing in that moment, and
you guys need to understand how that makes someone else feel.
Don't ever do that. But I would never have known
had we not had that conversation. So it is it's
kind of one of those things. We could talk about this,
and we should because we should talk about all of
those factors and that should go into that material of
how to talk to your kids about technology.
Speaker 2 (29:46):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, and being a good person. I have
a dear friend who has a big foster care program
and his tagline is be a good person. And you know,
I think sometimes we lose sight of that. And technology
has a way of sort of ample find things sometimes,
and you know, I think we probably have both because
I think we're both into a lot of stuff. Policy wise.
(30:08):
It just keeps throwing stuff at you and it can
be overwhelming, even for an adult, and sometimes you do
want to just turn that thing off, whatever it is,
but that isn't necessarily the best way to work through
conflict in a moment.
Speaker 1 (30:22):
So I mean, I keep finding that no matter what
the subject is, it seems like better to handle it
in society than try to make government create some.
Speaker 2 (30:32):
Rule or law around Amen's sister. Because the biggest concern
that I have right now is that we have the
government weighing in with a lot of knee jerk ideas.
And I'm sure that a lot of them are well intended,
but you know, as I think we all know, the
(30:53):
government is not the answer to everything, and sometimes the
government creates a lot of unintended consequences. I'll just leave
you with one thought, because I think Michigan's involved with it.
You know, a lot of the state attorneys general are
suing Meta right now for all kinds of perceived you know,
harm to children. But what I found, I mean, I
literally laughed out loud when I heard about the lawsuit,
(31:15):
because almost every single one of those states has been
sued for their own horrid child welfare outcomes, and so
kids dying in foster care, kids being lost in foster care,
you know, infant mortality rates off the charts. So let's
not get ourselves. This really isn't a technology problem. This
is kind of a human problem. Yeah, And I think
(31:37):
it's up to us to attack it, and preferably together,
because I think that we're all learning a lot from
each other, and I think that that's the way you
get things done.
Speaker 1 (31:47):
Well, this has been great. I mean, I've learned a
lot today. I appreciate you taking the time to talk
to me about it, and if there's anything that you
can point us to, let me know. I mean, we'd
love to share that with our audience. And if you
have those heals, let's get them out there.
Speaker 2 (32:02):
I will be delighted to stay in touch. I really
enjoyed this.
Speaker 1 (32:05):
Me too, well, Maureen, it was wonderful having you.
Speaker 2 (32:08):
Thank you anytime, and.
Speaker 1 (32:10):
Thank you all for joining us on the Tutor Dixon Podcast.
For this episode and others, go to Tutor dixonpodcast dot com.
You can subscribe right there, or head over to the
iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts
and join us next time on the Tutor Dixon Podcast.
Have a blast day.
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