#2181 - Alan Graham

33:48Like, if you want to procreate, if you want to carry on your genetics, you want to keep your loved ones alive, you got to stay alive. And so there's this fear. this constant fear and it's crippling, you know, and because it's projected, it's projected both by the mainstream media and it's projected by social media algorithms. The things that you interact with the most, the things that freak you out the most or anger you the most or often times the ones you see the most because you interact with those and it's designed to keep you hooked. And unfortunately what that's doing is it's making us anxiety -ridden freaks and we're losing our understanding of humanity.

34:29You know, it's, and it's also extremely polarizing. I don't, we, we had a conversation about this at your place. You know, this, the, the news today is like, it's so, it's so polarizing. It's us versus them inside our country for like the first time in my life. I've, when I was a kid, when I was in high school, my parents were very liberal. And they never talked to spiralingly about conservative people or Republicans. They just thought they were wrong. That's all it was. Like they had conservative friends. They would sit at the dinner table and have conversations about stuff. And maybe they'd argue.

35:06But it was always fine. It was just two human beings disagreeing on things. Now it's like everybody's a Nazi. Or everybody's a communist. It's like, it's just one side. is absolutely sure that they're right and the other side is absolutely sure that they're right. And it's just accentuated by everything we say. So when you can see someone like yourself in a microcosm, put this together and make a real community of some of the most disparaged members of our society. The people that know you look when they're trying to get money at the stoplight, you look away, you drive past them and they're tense, Jesus Christ, what's that guy doing in there.

35:45You don't even think about them. The same type of person that might see someone with a flat tire and pull over, like, hey buddy, you're all right. Can I help you? Because you're me. I'm you. We're at the same sort of stratus in society. We're acceptable members of society with cars and homes and normal people with jobs. You know, so I'll help you. But that guy over there, like, well, this is what we have to, you know, when you look at the purpose of mobile -lose and fishes, our vision statement, the thing that drives our organization is that we empower communities into a lifestyle of service with the homeless, not two and four, with the homeless.

36:24This metaphorically is the same thing as pulling over and helping the guy change the flat tire. There's a guy on your street corner and up underneath that bridge that you pass every day, can we pull over and help them change that flat tire? That's what this is all about because the government, we have to quit yelling at the mayor and the city council to go and fix this problem. This is what we do. Okay? We need government to come alongside of us to do this, but look, this is a human issue and the government is not coming into your bedroom tonight to tuck you in. You know, we made a human to human heart to heart connection between people who are broken and battered and come from a trauma background that you and I, I mean, a battlefield background that you and I can't even begin to understand.

37:21Yeah, that's, that's the main thing, right? People always want to use that term, pull, pull yourself up by your bootstraps. You can't even comprehend the starting block that most of these folks have. Well, and nobody has, Joe. Right. That nobody in history has ever pulled themselves up by their bootstraps. It's nonsense. It's nonsense. It's, I mean, there are things that you should do in your life. You should have discipline. You should have work ethic. You should strive to your goals. You should be a good person, try to keep your body healthy. You should do all those things. But all this pretending that everybody's starting from the same spot and the reason why you're successful and they're not is that you work harder.

37:59That's just foolish. That is ego and nonsense and a complete lack of perspective. One of the things that I've always said is that I find it fascinating when you see a city like Los Angeles as a great example of this because in Los Angeles, no one walks everyone's in their car and you go from your car to your home, right? So you're constantly isolated until you choose not to be. And then when you do go out and you find these people that are in these tents That's like you they just they're not in the community. They avoid them. They get away from them We didn't If you go back and you study the history of tribal human beings We didn't ever live like that right?

38:44We were all communal everyone lived together We had tents and then we shared fire we shared food and everybody had a role in the community and everybody had a purpose. When we isolated, we developed agriculture and then developed cities and then developed walls and then developed ways to block everybody out and ways to hide from everyone, the rest of the world and you're in this and then now that we have cars, you get in that box and you drive past all those people, we've lost so much connection with human beings and the proportion and size of the homeless drug addicts that are on the street intense is a direct reflection of how sick the culture is and how sick the community is.

39:29And Los Angeles, which is one of the most morally deprived, twisted, ideologically imprisoned places I've ever been to, has the biggest, most insane homeless population. What did you see where Gavin Newsom issued an executive order today to clear all the camps in California? What does that mean now? Well, we don't know, but it comes out of this. Because he wants to be president, right? Well, it's a political move for sure, but it's related to that Supreme Court ruling the grant passed versus Johnson ruling that the Supreme Court just did. And so it's an interesting byproduct now of what we're going to witness.

40:11Well, it's a byproduct of people's absolute frustration and fury over this. You know what was interesting is I had a woman that worked for us a few years ago and she was a PhD English, classic, you know, very, very smart, learned person. I asked one time, where did the word homeless come from? She went and researched it. And the first time that she could find it appeared back in like the 700s in a, in a, in a limbic from Ireland or something, an Irish limbic. And then it didn't reappear again until about the 15th, the 16th, 17th century type of thing, and it was not even hardly present. But when you get to the 1970s and 80s, the word became ubiquitous.

41:08And through a Google search, you can see that this word appears in every publication on every news media a staff a million times every single day it just becomes and why in this window of time basically the 70s you know on is that word so prevalent because we didn't we didn't have this when I moved from Austin Texas I mean from Houston Texas the Houston area in 1976 there weren't people people standing on our street corners begging. You had the, you know, the oduses from the, you know, Andy of Mayberry, the downtown, chronic anibirate, drunk downtown, but it wasn't you bick with us on every single street corner.

42:00What, what the hell happened in the past 46, seven years? What do you think happens, it's your in it? Well, profound laws of family, culture of death within the community, culture of death, culture of death, just people not caring about other human beings. Our individual rights superseding the rights of the community, those kinds of things, are constitutional individual rights, and I believe in our Constitution. This is an anti -constitutional thing. But recently on my Facebook, which is my only social media deal, I'm a member of my high school thing. And one of our assistant principals recently passed away, Coach Yark.

42:56And there were five, 600 comments on Coach Yark. and 90 % of them were from men who got into his office and ended up being paddled during that period of time and talking about how awesome Coach Shorke was. And I couldn't tell you how many licks I got from Coach Shorke during that period of time because I was a little turdball when I was in middle school and that's what these do the kids. That's what it was. Yeah, you should have had a paddle when I lived in Florida. Yeah, well, you can't, you can't be paddled anymore. There's no discipline, you know? Right. I don't know if that's a good thing, though, to tell people that the way to discipline someone is to hit them.

43:42I don't think that's correct. I think that's a lazy approach. I think there's other ways to instill discipline. But we have to learn how to discipline. Yeah, you have to learn how to discipline. The problem is they're just dealing with large numbers of people and that's the fallback is to scare them and give them pain. The problem is you're encouraging people to hit other people and then you encourage it as a form of punishment and it's just not the way to go. Yeah, I'm not disagreeing with that. I'm just you know saying that there was a different time and people were disciplined out of fear. But I think there's other ways to discipline people.

44:17You know I think there's different programs that you could especially get rembancious young boys involved in and it would temper most of that. Well it's like the outdoors you know. Yeah guys don't get to go outdoors now they don't get to shoot guns and bows and arrows and I grew up hunting in fishing and you know raise my family outdoors hunting and fishing and a lot of energy got exerted in that process. A lot of testosterone was released out there in the wild. It's also a more natural activity than sitting in a classroom. Sitting in a classroom is the most confusing thing to a child. They do not want to do it.

45:02They don't understand why someone is telling them to sit still. Well, I hated it. So it didn't work. And you should, it's not good for anybody. I mean, I'm not telling kids listening to this drop out of school, but I am telling you that it's designed for one thing. School is designed to get you accustomed doing things you don't want to do so that you become part of the workforce. And that's what it is. It's not necessarily your friend. I mean, you, education is a wonderful thing. In lightning your mind, filling your mind up with new and exciting information and exploring the world is fantastic.

45:33Heavy emphasis on exploring, experience, tools. All that is fantastic. But what they're doing to kids is not. They're making kids sit down all day. They don't want to they're making them pay attention to some shit that's boring from some Uninthusiastic uninspired teacher who's underpaid and it's a mess. Well, I'm gonna drop out So there we go. So yeah, it didn't work for me. I didn't drop out But I did have nightmares after I graduated high school that I was gonna have to go back. Yeah, I had these terrible nightmares I called out I like it was something fucked up, but I didn't get all my credits.

46:08I got to go back and do high school over again Yeah Yeah, the reality of the way we educate people is that it's just not well thought out. It's not aligned with human nature. It's not aligned with the requirements that a young, healthy body has for activity. Yeah, well, we used to have PE. We don't do that. Right. It's also the things that they're learning. They're not even necessarily absorbing correctly because they're not enthusiastic about it. When you show someone something that's really interesting, they absorb it. They get into it. It resonates with them. They want to be involved in it, which is why I'm sure you could think back like, I had a great science teacher when I was in eighth grade.

46:54I think about that guy all the time. He was great. He put in my mind the concept of infinity. You know, he put in my mind. He would tell the whole class, like, just one night, go outside and look up and realize that there's no end. Because you really want to make your brain hurt, try to figure out what that means. Like there's no end to that. Try to figure, try to think about how far that goes back. And don't let that thought go. That thought about that almost every day of my life. From a guy that I met when I was 13 years old. Yeah, still do. Yeah. Every now and then, you get a really good teacher.

47:33Yeah. You know, time being the same. He was also a guy who fought in Vietnam. And I think that, you know, he had this perspective that he was trying to relate to us. Like this is not a long time here. Like you got to figure out what you like and get after it. This is not what you think it is. And you're going to lose people along the way. Yeah, there's a great kind of a point out there called the profits of a future, not our own about how insignificant we actually are. We're just a puff of smoke in this infinite space time, particularly time space. We're only here, you and I are sitting on this history of human time.

48:25It's not even measurable. We can't even see it. We'd have to have a microscope in order to be able to really look at it. Yeah. And we are so trapped in our own life, in what we're trying to achieve, what we're trying to do, in our social circle, in all the nonsense that we have going on in our life, that we lose our perspective. And that's really unfortunate, because even our perspective, just to think about how small we are in this life, and how quick this life goes by, that in the universe, This planet is nothing like nothing that you can see in the night sky is anything There's just too much.

49:05It's so big. I think that's one of the reasons why in a similar way people who live by the ocean are very chilled out You know, I think there's something about being by that ocean that makes you go. Oh, what is this? What the fuck is this is all bullshit? Like how much water there is or the same thing about mountains that live in the mountains they have a and food food and food? Oh, because there's plenty of food there. Right. That's true too. Yeah. And we're all the food is. Right. Right. But there's something about the humbling of the environment. Like mountains are another example of that. There's a humbling of the person by their environment.

49:43And I think one of the main problems that we have in civilized society is light pollution. And because of light pollution, we're not humbled by the night sky like our ancestors were. Our ancestors every night, they got to view the most spectacular thing a human being ever gets to witness, the vastness of the cosmos right above their head, every night. And now we know I even see it. We sacrificed that so we could take our Toyota to 7 -Eleven at 10pm. Yeah, well we can travel and look at those, we got a little spot. Right. Yeah, but not by the way. You get like a little dose. You're supposed to get vitamin D every day.

50:21You know, I think you're supposed to get vitamin space every day too. Yeah, yeah. I think you are. I think the sun gives you vitamin D and it makes you healthier and I think space makes you mentally healthy. Well, I like vitamin space. Vitamin space is legit. I'm gonna adopt that. Yeah. I went to the observatory on the big island and the Keck Observatory. I've gone a few times since then, but one time I caught it perfect. One time, me and my family went up there and it was no moon at all. The moon was hidden. So the sky was just everywhere you looked. There was just billions of stars. And you could see the full Milky Way with the naked eye.

51:03And it felt like we were, what we actually are. It felt like we were on an organic spaceship that's hurling through the vastness of the universe. And the satellites screaming across. I didn't see any of those. You didn't say anything about it. No, I didn't see anything else. I mean, maybe there was less of them back then. We're talking about like 2009, I guess, 2008. Probably 2008. When this really rocked me, I just remember thinking watching it. You know what? I know for a fact, it's 2007. I remember thinking this is such a travesty that we don't have this view every night. And I think it would change the way people think.

51:43It would change the way people feel about just the mystery of life itself, just to be confronted by the stars. Just confronted by this inescapable greatness that's just mesmerizing. And now we're living in the Truman Show. Yeah, a little bit. I think it's spiritual, too. I really do. I think there's a spiritual aspect of looking out into the universe that's undeniable. and I think it imparts something into people. I think it imparts this sense of humility and wonder that we're missing. And I think it's another one of the other reasons. I mean, you really mean it's stripping us of that wonder because we don't get to look out, and dream the way that we used to dream as we looked out there, into the unknown.

52:30And on the commino, you end up in this place, beyond Santiago called Muje and Finisteri that was believed to be the end of the world. And it was just a coastline in Spain out overlooking the Atlantic Ocean. So they thought that was it? That was it. And I've stood in this place where for centuries people stood and knew beyond any shadow of a doubt that they were at the end of the world. Well, you know, and the dreams that got us beyond that, somebody thanking them to themselves that no, there's got to be more because they're looking up and they're seeing all of that vastness had to be looking across and being able to see a similar vastness that didn't end.

53:35It was just amazing who had the courage to take that first boat trip and hope they don't fall off the edge. Well, they did. Yeah. And some of them believed that you would hit a wall and you would go off the edge. Wasn't there like ancient depictions with the Earth like that? No, it was just a boat going over the edge. No, absolutely. That's what they believed. That wouldn't go out there. And you know, it's amazing because, you know, we vilify Christopher Columbus now, you know because we've, you know, fun. I wasn't such a good guy. Well, he had his issues like, you know, look, we are, we all have to admit that we, we are a perverted species.

54:15Have you ever had the accounts of the priest that traveled with Columbus? Some of it. Yeah. Yeah. That's rough stuff. No, it's rough. Scary. Yeah. Yeah, they were monsters. Yeah. But in Spain, he's a hero because he connected the European continent to the American continent. So it's a whole different during September when you're there. It's his holiday and feast and all that stuff. They go nuts. Do they still have Columbus Day here? Or is it your colonizer? No, I think they have Columbus Day, but I think he's gotten so beat up. Didn't they change it to like Indigenous peoples day? Maybe they did.

54:55Did they? Jamie, find that out. They changed Columbus Day to Indigenous peoples day. I think they might have. which is interesting because if they knew the history of indigenous people Well a lot of bad stuff going on there, too. No, a lot of bad stuff. No, a lot of bad stuff going on right here. No humans Yes. Yeah. Yeah. That's the reality. There's never been one group of humans that lived in this perfect society This utopian world where they were kind to all each other and no no No humans have always been barbarians and conquerors. Yeah, and yeah It's just, what does it say here? It depends where you live.

55:32Some places like Portland, and Texas is still Columbus Day. Where state workers have the second Monday of October off? Oh, but that's just when they, so the other places they don't have that off. So it's just holidays, state holidays honoring Native Americans. Oh yeah, just take a call. Do they still call it Columbus Day on your phone? It's, I couldn't get a right answer. What day is it? I think what's the day you live? What day is Glum's Day? Second Monday in October. Let's see if it says it on my phone still. If these colonizers. The second Monday in October, is that what you said? Yep. Nope.

56:12Yeah, oh it does. It's both on Monday. Yeah, the 14th. Yeah, Columbus Day and Indigenous People's Day. There we go. Yeah. But my point was when we started this whole journey, I mean, the health of a community is often measured by how they treat the downtrodden. And I think it's a great, like again, I think Los Angeles is a great example of a place that's really fucked up. And the evidence is these people intense everywhere you look. And the fact that people could just pass them by and they live there for years and it just expands. I mean, it was bad. It was bad in certain parts of downtown LA when I was filming Fear Factor there in 2003.

56:52We were filming, we filmed downtown because there was a lot of these warehouses that were banned and we used them for stunts and different things that people had to do. And I took a wrong turn once and I was down on Skid Row and I was like, yo, this is crazy. Like I couldn't believe the numbers of people that were just wandering around the street, cracked out, cardboard box houses, and that was the beginning of it. And the crazy thing about that is Skid Row was essentially an engineered environment. They took all the mentally ill people that they arrested from all other parts of Los Angeles and they brought them to Skid Row and they kept them there.

57:32They just put in, you know, food kitchens and some kind of a shelter and they say, you fucker stay here. We're keeping you out of Beverly Hills, we're keeping you out of Bel Air, just stay right here. And it just stayed like that and grew. And there was a, was it the Ciso Hotel? What's a documentary on the Cecil Hotel and which is in the middle of all that. It was this beautiful old hotel and now that whole area is just chaos. And now it's expanded like considerably. So the fact that they have never done anything about that, it's only grown and in fact more people are hired to work on it and those people are making hundreds of thousands of dollars a year and not putting a dent in it.

58:16just shows you how sick the culture is. It's an example. And I think what you're doing is an example of what can be accomplished with a healthy culture. You know, I know you have a lot of really important, powerful people that have got your back and really love what you're doing. And because of that, you've managed to put together this enormous community. And now you have more land and you're expanding and building more of it. And if this can be done more, like this might be the solution. I mean, what I saw from your place is the best example of a possible solution to this ever. Because you could see those people when they were walking down the streets and waving to you and talking to you.

58:59People seemed happy. They seemed relieved. They seemed like they've got some hope. We're looking at it here.

59:09We're looking at here on the video. Look at that mug shot, man. That's you, buddy. Yeah. It, we're a piece of the puzzle, Joe. Yes, but it's a very good piece. I'm not a big fan of the word solution. You know, we, people want to solve things. And I appreciate that. Humanity is very difficult to solve. We've been dealing with these issues, issues of poverty and issues of abandonment and issues of trauma since the advent of man hell the Bible basically begins with you know the cane enable You know experience so what we're witnessing today is really nothing extraordinarily new but because of the urban environment that we live in it's very congregated and we're so separated as a culture today that it's manifesting into this chaos.

1:00:07What we need to do is we need to open the door very wide to innovation. And I will tell you from 1975 to 1995, 20 years, one simple generation. We eliminated in the United States of America, one million, that's one with six zeros after it, single room occupancy units in the United States. Okay. Tonight there'll be about 600 ,000 people living on the street. It's an L .A. It's 50, 60, whatever that number is. And what were those single occupancy units? Just simple places with a bed and you know, metaphorically a microwave inside maybe a shared bathroom down the hallway or where were these places?

1:00:53In all of our cities. What were they called? SROs, hotels and stuff like that. And it was just for homeless people or people that lived in poverty and then over that period of time since the 1970s up till now, there's been this creeping affluence dictated by the government as to what housing quality standards should be for people. As opposed to, I'm going to help you get up off the streets. Here's a sustenance to get you off the streets. You choose where you're going to live with that sustenance. So the only reason why these single occupancy places were eliminated was because they'd raise the standards.

1:01:37Raise the standards, but these places were also in neighborhoods where people didn't want those people in their neighborhoods. So it's kind of a confluence of not in my backyard. Right. Plus this elevation of these housing quality standards that makes a place like community first village, which you have seen firsthand, not approved by the United States government, housing and urban development. Yeah, we have to change this. We have to open the door to vast innovation to get people out of this into places that they can afford. And there was also during the Reagan administration, they changed the standards for mental health institutes, and I believe they let a lot of people out on the street.

1:02:31Well, let's, we got to look at the facts. And what I would do, there's a great podcast that came out recently through NPR called Lost Patients PAT IDNTS that goes through the historical background of that entire debacle and it really begins with JFK and And the effort and the exclamation point was put on during the Reagan administration people want to blame Ronald Reagan But it wasn't Reagan. It was lots of people all of us we the people frankly that we're trying to get people out of the state mental hospitals that didn't need to be there, and the vast majority of them didn't need to be there, and reacclimate them back into the community.

1:03:18What we're seeing out on the streets right now are the small percentage of people who probably need to be institutionalized or managed in a phenomenally different way than how we're managing them now. So they had a problem with people that were just using the mental health institutions to stay there or was it just a matter of like they had diagnosed people with manageable illnesses but wanted to keep them there like how did what was the issue well

1:03:54You know it's It's it's complicated, so I'm gonna just kind of do a superficial and 1887 there's a map of the city of Austin. It's an oblique map that goes from the Colorado River north through North Austin. It's kind of a topographical map. You can buy these maps today. And on that map are three prominent features. This is 1887. There's the capital. There's the University of Texas Tower and there's the Insana Silem. If you can zoom in on that. That's the Insana Silem. That's the Insana Silem. That's a pretty bigger asylum when you see how few people are there. Well, that building is still there.

1:04:46Really? Right now. What is it now? It's at 45th in Guadalupe. But what is it now? It's the Insane. It's still the awesome state hospital. Oh. Okay. And so we, the people of the state of Texas and the state of everywhere, knew that we had to have a place for our neighbors that lived in our communities that had profound mental health issues. The problem is, is that we did a lot of human experimentation during that period of time. Right. By the time the 50s and 60s came around, We had invented these unbelievable drugs, Haldal, Thorazine, all these drugs that we could give people. Electric shock therapy, which had been around for many decades prior to that, lobotomies, the whole deal about Kennedy had to do with this sister having the lobotomies.

1:05:41And that there's got to be a better way that we could bring people back into the community as opposed to being in these institutions. And so I ask you and all of our listeners here, how many people do you know that are on psychotrop, they're battling depression, bipolar disorder? It's all around us and they don't need to be institutionalized, but there are a few people in this world that need a different level of care than we're currently giving them. I had, we have half a dozen of them that live in the village, that we can't manage. And we need a different level of care. By the time Ronald Reagan came around, we were completing what was really an honorable experiment that has gone partially awry.

1:06:32Right. So who else besides yourself has, do you know of other places like your place that they've done it in other cities around the country? Would that done something similar? Yeah, there's replicators going on around the country. Oh, okay. Say replicators. We call them replicators. We have a replication operation at Mobile Loads and Fishes. So three times a year, people fly in from all over the country, sometimes from around the world, to come and learn for two and a half days in an immersive two and a half days symposium. Wow. Interesting. So we teach people how to do it other places. That's correct.

1:07:11And how many of them exist in the country right now? Just going to kind of pull a number. There's a couple of dozen happening around the US and more coming. Is there a cohesive website where people can find these? No. No. No. But we'll probably have one someday. We argue, we debate, what is it called it, argue internally, what is a replicator of the community first model. There could be, let's just hypothetically say that there are pillars associated with what we do. And so how many pillars do you have to follow in order to actually be a real replicator? It's like a McDonald's deal. We're not going to be a McDonald's because I can't get, we're not going to be able to manage people to do exactly precisely what we do.

1:08:10Plus, how we do it in Austin, Texas is not necessarily how you're going to do it in Minneapolis, Minnesota. But there are some characteristics of what we do that we think are extremely important. And so these people that come to you, how did they hear about you? How did they hear that you were doing this? If you had experiences with these people that explained their calling, like why they were brought to you to try to replicate this thing in their town? Well, there's, I mean, there are people all over the US that are working in the homeless space, that have been in this space that are dealing with these people looking for ways to compassionately move the needle on this deal and witnessing that we're not doing a very good job in our country of moving the needle.

1:09:05And then we've been all over the news that this show is going to have a giant impact. We're going to get slammed, frankly, in a positive way by people interested in what we're doing. But we've also, the today show, 60 minutes, has just been so much New York times that we've gotten to experience. They just hear about us. We're pretty well known, still controversial, but well known. Well, it's a beautiful thing you're doing, man. It really is. And when you go there and you experience it, you go, wow, I'm so happy. There's someone like Allen out here doing this. And so happy that all those people that work with you are also equally moved to do it.

1:09:49Because it just feels like you're doing something really good. And sometimes you don't see a lot of that in life. You know, you don't see a lot of like real Southless sacrifice and done under the spirit of just trying to do good. I think, you know, through these symposiums and through the work, there are a number of people out there in the US trying to figure things out. It's the confluence of where I came from out of the business community. You know, maybe kind of rare people leaving, you know, one thing in order to jump into another thing, but if they had the experience of running operations the way that I ran those.

1:10:43And that's what we're trying to do. We're trying to really demonstrate to people that no matter what your leadership qualities are, no matter how well spoken you might be able to articulate what's going on, there's a place for you to lead to make a difference in your community. Because people will say, I'm no Allen Graham, well thank God, number one, you're not. It doesn't take an Allen Graham to do this, but let me show you the pieces that it does take in order to make this happen and where you fit into that puzzle. That's what we try to do with our symposiums. What's interesting also to about the place that you have is you give these people an opportunity to learn things and to express themselves.

1:11:29Then these people wind up selling these things. The artwork was truly extraordinary. The person that's making those chess pieces, those are really intricate. You look at something like that. That's very valuable. A lot of the art is really incredible. And just think of like how many people get affected and get moved by these pieces of art that would never Experience it if these people didn't have an opportunity to express themselves several years ago my wife and I got really into Vincent van Gogh and We've Traveled around the world trying to see every publicly available van Gogh that we could possibly See, the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam is incredible to learn that, you know, he started painting when he was 27 years old, committed suicide at 37.

1:12:31Wow. During his lifetime of artwork, he sold one painting. He was an abject failure.

1:12:48And it's forensically believed that he was maybe schizophrenic, bipolar schizophrenic. It's also rumored that he was possibly a drug addict. I forget the drug. He spent two years in an insane asylum in a little town in Arles, France, where he probably painted the most expensive art on the planet while he was in an insane asylum.

1:13:21And then it was post his death. And because of his sister -in -law, his brother who died six months after they can go, who really exposed him, and he's considered one of the greatest artists of all time history. That's what I believe that we potentially have out there on the streets are these van goes and you met Uta Dittmar, a German woman who is gifted beyond all giftedness and sold that chest set for ten thousand bucks. It's worth it. Yeah, it was worth it. Handmade, one of a kind, there'll never be another one like it. hand card, hand glazed, absolutely stunningly beautiful. And I think it's up.

1:14:22And that's because we collectively, we the people, us, not just mobile lows and fishes, decided that we're going to pour fuel on those childhood embers of her dreams. And that's what she gets to do every single day. They have come in there and paint. Do you have classes for these people there? No. They're the teachers. Wow. That's the... There's some level of that. It's a lot smaller than people think. You know, I don't know how you were when you were little, but I was the stick figure guy and I couldn't... I could only color outside the lines. It never worked for me. And so, but then there are those people that you knew and they were growing up and they could draw all the faces and stuff like that.

1:15:17There's a natural talent that something in the brain, man, that they're able to get this creativity out onto a canvas that is beyond our comprehension. I don't know how they do it. My art is the village, that's my canvas, is that village. It's just a different kind of art, but I'd love to be able to draw and paint something. I've tried. It looks like shit. It just takes more time. When I was a kid, I wanted to be a comic book illustrator, so I drew a lot. Yeah. You may have that gift, you know? Well, I think it's just an interest, and then with focus and time and dedication, you get better at it.

1:16:00If you truly engaged in it, enthusiastic about it, obsessed with it, you'll get better at it. I don't think, I mean, I think there's certain people that definitely have a very unique perspective and that whatever that is, that gift allows there to be completely unique and different. Just something, it sparks, it has a different feeling when you look at it. But I think that really comes from whatever that person is. I think the skill of learning how to do it is that's a learned skill that you could learn. Now, did you, when your kids were younger, would you draw caricatures or... Yes, one of my daughters is an incredible artist.

1:16:38She's incredible. She's really, really talented. Like more talented than I was when I was her age. She's incredible. I think maybe some of that comes from genetics. I don't know, I don't know how that works. I'm not sure. You know, there's some people that are children of great singers and they have incredible voices. And you wonder, like, is that the genetic makeup? Is that, do you see like you have this capacity for sound that I don't have, like you can make beautiful songs that I can't do. Or is it a learned thing in your genes from some person, you know, your parent, one of your parents that has this thing inside of them and it's somehow another gets into you.

1:17:19And you're like, oh, I know how to do that. I know how to do that. That's in me. That's in me. I think there's a little of that too. Well, the Malcolm Gladwell 10 ,000 hour thing is pretty legit. It's 100 % legit. Yeah. Yeah, time spent learning something is 100 % legit. The more focus, the more dedication, the more you're like all in on something, the better you're going to get at that. And that's the difference between someone who's truly great at something and someone who's just kind of mediocre. It's how much time you spend on it, how much time you, how much focus, how much energy do you have to apply to it?

1:17:53Yeah. And this thing about your village is that there's a lot of these people that do have this and do have these, they just didn't have a path for it, and it just was banging around inside of their head. Well, think about what we've, how old are you now? 56. 56, so I'm 68. And I grew up in the Houston area, a born in Houston, moved out of there in middle school to Alvin, Texas. When I moved from Alvin to Austin in 1976, there were no panhandlers on our street corners anywhere in any city. You might have had the chronic inebriate downtown LA or Houston or Austin, but you had many women selling bottles of water, newspapers, flowers, calcoles, calcans, and I'm sure you're favorite, Velvet Elvis Art.

1:18:52Everybody's favorite. We need Jamie Velvissart on screen somehow. And we've outlawed all that, that entrepreneurial spirit of people, that quest of people to go out and be purposeful. And instead, the only remaining bastion of entrepreneurialism remaining in the United States for poor people is the first amendment free speech right to stand on a street corner in Begg. And you can't go to any country in the world, Joe. And not be accosted by somebody that is selling you something. You could be sitting in the middle of Rome. Come on, man. There it is. It's Elvis Crian. It's here, yeah. That's Fett Elvis, too.

1:19:41Velvet Elvis. That's Vegas Elvis. Yeah. And you'd be in the plaza in Rome somewhere, drinking your, you know, know, $10 Capuchino and a rainstorm like today comes on and there's a hundred people out there with umbrellas and ponchos selling them. And you're buying them. The rainstorm goes away and the bottles of water and the artwork and the worldly gig things come back out. What happened to that piece of who we are? One of my great friends, a guy he's dead down, John Braumble, used to sell, you know, stuff like the skulls and the long horns and stuffed animals and stuff and rugs and cow skins and cow skulls from a van on a street corner and built a multi -million dollar a year business that was here in Austin where you could go buy all kinds of stuff like that because he could do it on a street corner.

1:20:50when do they make that illegal? It's either illegal or the occupational licensing requirements to do it have become so onerous and expensive that people that live in extreme poverty can't navigate that deal. That's the problem. Like I think that if you're going to sell a pre -packaged food item like a bottle of water or bag of chips or a Milky Way or something like that. Y 'all to be able to go buy box of those from Sam's Club and go stand on the street corner and sell those things or walk up and down Congress Avenue and Milky Way's two bucks. Bottles of water, you know how much a bottle of water is when you buy it by the case, about 20 cents.

1:21:38You know, and how much do you pay for a bottle of water during South by Southwest? Well, five bucks. Right. You'll pay two dollars all day for a bottle of water. You would buy a bottle of water Faster from a guy that's tried to sell it that bought it for 20 cents that you would just to give him the 20 cents Right without right and they would rather earn the money So I've wrote a pot a Little blog post many years ago called the panhandler the greatest yet most ineffective entrepreneur I've ever met They're great. They're willing to stand out their own street corner and absolutely abysmal shitty conditions, being rejected over and over and over and over again, spit on, reviled, all for our nickels and dimes and dollars, $4 ,500 bucks a day.

1:22:33Crazy. We should empower that, but our nanny state will have them, oh we can't have them on the street corners, they're going to get hit by a car someday. I think the fears that you would encourage them to do that, and then you'd also get in everybody else's way. Well, that's the fear, but I'd rather walk down six street and see a guy with a guitar on the corner playing with a hat out in the front and throw money in that deal. Thank you for that deal or sell me a whirligig while I'm walking with my family to the restaurant that my kids looking at and going, Hey daddy, I want one of those. Get me, please.

1:23:18Yeah. You pull out a $5 bill. It's dignity, man. And then we never know where that might lead somebody. There's that big homeless shelter that's off of Seventh Street. Yeah, seventh and eighths. Yeah. But how do they do it there? Because that seems like a crazy place to put a homeless shelter right next door to everybody partying. Because you go one block over, you're on sixth street, and it's madness. It's chaos, drunks wandering down the streets. Yeah. It's fun. Well, that place came about in the 1990s when downtown Austin was just kind of a shithole. Nothing going on. And we were barely at the beginning of the revitalization of downtown Austin.

1:24:07So the obvious place to have put that shelter was there on the eastern fringe of downtown. And then there was an explosion of people wanting to revitalize, move downtown, and then And suddenly this thing became kind of the source and summit of the center of the town reviled by everybody moving down there. So it kind of came about naturally. It actually happened during my buddy's Kirk Watson's first term as a mayor. And he regrets it. He looks at that as a mistake, but what do you do now? Right. You know? Do they even have the money to move it and where would they move it and why would they move it well What you have to say is that You know what neighborhood are you gonna move it into right and that that becomes the issue and I think we'd be better off You know building more options like the community first and pumping more money into that yeah no question no question What would it take how many people are being taken care of at that place on seventh Street?

1:25:21I'm going to guess 150 people, not many. It's not that there's a new organization. I can't remember the name right now. Forgive me for that, but that took it over about a year, a year and a half ago or so, and they've done a marvelous job of you drive by it today. You can't even tell it's a shelter. So it's actually being run extraordinarily well today. You said that's about a year and a half ago? Yeah. That makes sense. Urban Alchemy. Urban Alchemy is an organization out of California somewhere that came in and took that over. That makes sense because I have noticed a difference because when we used to do the Vulcan, which is down on Sixth Street, it was like Cadi Corner to that place and it was just madness over there.

1:26:14Yeah, well you should do it. Yeah, but if I walk down the history today, it's still full of people hanging out down there because it's there's a large crowd There's all the things great pain handling opportunities and So until they really revitalize that area of six -threat that will probably not change right well There's some work being done doing that so we'll see yeah, but you are a fan of that revitalization and by own a place down there. I know you do, so. So I'm definitely a fan. I mean, I want it to be safer. Yeah. But it's also, I like the wildness of it. I like the fun. Yeah. That street's fun.

1:26:56It's got a lot of energy to it. You're hearing live music from all over the place. There's people walking back and forth and great food trucks right there. It's fun. Yeah. It's got a... Well, that's what attracts. Yeah. And so, how do we make that a part of the character of the deal without the extreme negative side effects that people experience sometime. The extreme negative side effects of having the shelter there, you mean? Well, homelessness in general. They've made it better. Whatever they've done over the last year and a half, it has had a positive impact. You see less of it, less real problems.

1:27:35You're definitely going to see, unfortunately, some people that are still under the throes of drug addiction. and there's a corner over by where Buffalo Billiards used to be. You know that, that's a part, that red river issue. Yeah. And you know, I drove by the other day and there's like 15 people just slumped over. Some of them laying on the ground, some of them like barely able to stand up, just rocking back and forth with whatever drug they're on. It's like cool. It's such a heartbreak. And it's someone's kid, you know, that's what it is. When you have children of your own too, you look at people like that and you go, hey, that was someone's baby boy.

1:28:13And now here they are, like half naked, scabs all over their body, slumped over, rocking back and forth in the breeze. Yeah. Yeah. Devastating. And no one's doing anything. Yeah. Those are on their own, you know, and it's my feeling that in a healthy society, those people would be treated and cared for. They'd try to figure out a way to try to help those folks. But when they get out. for everybody. When they get out of that misery and come into a place like Community First Village, our statistical data that we've done over the past seven or eight years shows an 80 % drop in drug use from the streets to the village, and about a 40 to 50 % drop in alcohol use.

1:29:00That's amazing. It is amazing. It's a harm reduction model, and because how are you going to live in the misery of being on the streets other than anesthetizing yourself to the back? So it's hard to blame people. I mean, we're anesthetizing all of us, right? I mean, there's so, I mean, one of the greatest drug dealing places is all of our pharmacies where, you know, we're all going to buy our pharmaceuticals. And, you know, and there's, look, there's some interesting things going on in the world that I want to see explored, especially around addiction, and that's like the use of psychedelics and mitigating, as a treatment mechanism for people.

1:29:52And I just would like for the world to come around and, you know, make things easier to bring relief to people because when we bring relief to individuals, we're going to bring relief to the community as a whole. And we ought to explore a number of different things. And, you know, I take the legalization of marijuana as an example, you know, look, I live in the middle of a village where it's all there. Everything is there from fentanyl to crack cocaine to meth, and I will tell you our pot heads are happy, hungry, and sleepy. And the folks that are smoking or shooting, you know, meth and crack, many of them have pretty profound problems as a result of that.

1:30:46And I'd love to see some studies going on around the psychedelic nature to see if we can further help people through their addiction issues. So I'd like to see that as well. There's some powerful tools out there that we're not utilizing. Yeah, we're just afraid of them. So how does a person get involved in you? How do they get accepted? Like what if someone is on the street and they find out about your village, what is the process? Well first of all, they have to be chronically homeless. So there's a definition that we use that basically comes out of HUD. It's an unaccompanied male or female with a disabling condition.

1:31:30Having lived on the streets at least a continuous year, for us they have to be in the Austin area because we're not going to take you from Dallas or Houston or Minneapolis. or episodically homeless, adding up to a year over a four -year period of time. Why did you choose that particular time period? I don't. That's kind of a definition that comes out of the federal government. We have a homeless management information system that's managed here in town that allows us to go in, I can go in and you know hypothetically look up Joe Rogan. I can see how many touch points you've had into the homeless service deal and over what period of time.

1:32:21But a year is gotta be a minimum knowing that the average number of years in our community today is under 10 years, a little over nine years of homelessness. Of homelessness. So is it just that there's so many people that are chronically homeless that you should concentrate on them first? Well, fundamentally, that was my gospel call. I wanted the roughest, toughest, hardest, most despised, outcasts, lost and forgotten population. I wanted the ones that nobody believed had value. That fundamental was a spiritual decision of mine, as the founder of Mobile Loose and Fishes. And then it's easier to go after the women and children and the little families that are living in the van in the Walmart parking lot or the veterans or the this, that or the other.

1:33:23but I wanted the lowest on our radar, our total polls to go after. And then, so once they're chronically homeless for a year, how do you find them? Do you seek them? Do they seek you? How does, what was the process? And the early days of mobile loads and fishes, we had these catering trucks still do. There's a dozen of them in Austin that go out every night, serve about 1 ,200 meals every night and so we're deeply connected into that environment. In 2003, I started something called a street retreat in May of 03. I took 15 people from my church out for a 72 hour sleepover, basically a retreat. one -on -one retreat between you and God in the retreat center where the primarily the Wall of Streets of downtown Austin.

1:34:21We've done dozens of those. I've personally done 50. I've probably spent 250 nights on the streets myself and you begin to build relationships with people through that process. So many Many of the early people that came into the village were coming through that network. Today we're engaged, we have an organization in town called Echo. They are our continuum of care, lead in Austin, Texas, and a number of agencies are engaged with ECHO who refer people through ECHO and the HMIS system into the village. And they have a coordinated assessment, they call it something else I think now, but there's a coordinated assessment tool that people can take that attempts to assess individuals vulnerability.

1:35:21So the goal from the continue of care folks is to get the highest vulnerable people up off the streets because allegedly they cost us the taxpayer the most money although there's some questions around that now, legitimate questions. We try to get a balance because we can't become a full blown assisted living type of a deal. We need people that can live independently. So there's a structure that brings people in. It takes a while. We have a waiting list of about 150 people. Wow. And so you have these 3D printed houses too. Yeah. And how did that come about? Did you design those specifically for your needs?

1:36:04Were these prefabbed? Is this something that was already made? No. I mean, we had the second ever in the history of the world, 3D printed house on the property. Where's the first? the second one. Where's the first? In East Auction in the backyard of a piece of property that the icon guys own. And it was the one that they built, that they launched at South by six, seven, eight years ago. I can't remember the exact years. They're great little places. They're phenomenal. That's one of the things that I was thinking when I got in there, like when I was a young man, when I was single, I was like, oh, I could live here.

1:36:43Yeah. This is a sweet little spot. You got a nice little kitchen area. You got a little bedroom area, you got a table, you can put television there. They're bad at all. They're great entrepreneurs. I know them well. It's an Austin -based company. We're considered a pretty Austin entrepreneurial, nonprofit, Austin -based, Austin -founded, Austin and Homegrown. As they were starting to come up on the radar screen, we ended up coming together and And it just made sense that they could come out there and experiment and beta test their printers and build for us. And then these guys also have a phenomenal heart because normally new technology is reserved for people that can afford that new technology.

1:37:36But here's a powerful new technology that's actually benefiting people who could never afford that technology because that technology today is not cheap. They're beating it down, but it's not cheap. So we've built 17 of them on the two phases that we have right now. We're under construction right now on 50 more across the street on that new phase and there'll be another 50 over on Burleson Road by the airport where we're under construction there. And so you live in one community? Yes, are you going to have people like you that are living in these other communities or just going like how you manage them?

1:38:19Well, there is There's a population of people that live in our communities about 10 % of our population That we call missionals Just like a missionary would leave the United States and go overseas somewhere to be a missionary There are people that have chosen in called by the gospel to live in community, community first village. So there's about 50, 60 people that include 40 adults plus about 15 children that live in more or coming our way. So that's one of the secret sources of our community is mixing people in there throughout the community that have never experienced homelessness but are called to serve alongside and with the formerly chronically homeless.

1:39:13And I think another thing to bring up is that you had some resistance from the outside community, the people that were neighboring it, they were worried that you were going to affect property values and the things weren't, it's going to be dangerous. But in fact the opposite happened. And then... Yeah, and so... You haven't had any problems and on top of that the communities near you are now worth more than one of them ever. Yeah, it's pretty funny because we initially what we tried to do was partner with the City of Austin. So we're actually just outside the City of Austin. We share a property line with the City of Austin.

1:39:48But for several years, from 2006, roughly, 2005, roughly to 2010, I tried to collaborate with the City of Austin. and provide us with attractive land anywhere and will raise the money to build.

1:40:07In 2008, April of O8, the city unanimously, City Council granted us a long -term ground lease on 17 acres of land in East Austin. In July of O8, we went on to a neighborhood meeting, myself, the sponsoring council member, some of our team members, system city manager, my wife, Trisha, that just turned into Armageddon. Police had to be called to escort us out of there. And what happened? Oh, we were assaulted and spit on. And news media was there and it was a unbelievably horrible experience. The next morning, the City Council member, the sponsoring City Council member, by the way who is still a friend of mine, a hugging friend of mine, called a press conference to suspend finalizing that lease for 12 months, which put a bullet in the head of that deal.

1:41:15We regrouped and we began to look at other property and one of the other properties that was going to be granted to us was the tract of land that the soccer stadium now sits on, on McCullough Lane. And then we got the not my backyard deal from a large group of people in that neighborhood. and finally in 2010 after complete frustration I went to the then mayor of Austin, Lee Levin, well good friend, great guy and I said look I'm thinking about going outside the city of Austin where there's no zoning, getting attractive land there but I need the city to help us with transportation and and utilities.

1:42:09And he looked at me and said, Alan, you may be the smartest person I've ever met in my life, which was a funny thing to say to a drop out. You know, I mean, I'm not that dumb, but I'm not Stephen Hawking either.

1:42:29And that's what we did. We went and bought that site where I live today and then bought the site next door to it and then the one across the street with some great support, you know, some of our big donors and

1:42:47and really stripped the adjoining neighborhood because there's no zoning. I mean, we had the legal right to develop that property. There was no zoning and nobody that could approve what we would build on that property. So the big fears, crime and lower property values. Well, when I contracted for that property in 2010, I could buy any house next door for call it plus or minus $150 ,000. Today it's plus or minus $450 ,000. The other argument is crime. There hasn't been one reported crime that I'm aware of by anybody from our neighborhood in the neighborhood next door and there have been 13 crimes by that neighborhood into our community.

1:43:42Mostly juveniles, stealing our golf carts, our Polaris' shoplifting out of our market, stealing bicycles, you know, the random juvenile, the link, the kind of stuff that I would have been doing if I was 14 or 15 or 12. And I love those guys. And we look, we work with them, you know, to help them. But if you're going to put a bar wire fence, it needs to be on their side of the deal, not our side. Now, look, we got plenty of bullshit inside of our neighborhood. This is not Nirvana. I don't want anybody walking away. We have plenty of stuff going on, but it's not the gun fight at the OK Corral. Right.

1:44:23Well, Alan, thank you very much for being here. And thank you for doing what you've done, what you've accomplished is it's very inspirational. I think, as I said, at the beginning, like your guy really lives that life. And I think it's a beautiful thing to witness. And I think your story is going to move a lot of people. and so tell people if they're interested how they can get involved what they can when they where they can find out more. Well you could go to our website at mlf .org like mobile loaves and fishes Mike Lima Frank dot org you could you know our hashtag is pound mobile loaves I published a book we published a book Harper Collins back in 2017 called Welcome Homeless.

1:45:14You could go and get that book. It's a series of stories about encounters that I've had with about 11 or 12 different people over the course of my time working on the streets. I think it's a fun book that people would really enjoy kind of an emotional deal. So go check that out. If you really want to know more, get it on an airplane. fly to Austin, Texas and come see what we're doing. We'd love to share this with you. If you're interested in coming to one of our symposiums, we'd love to have you there. So we're very grateful for this opportunity, Joe. Thank you. I'm grateful for you to be here.

1:45:55Thank you. I really appreciate you. Thank you very much for everything. Yeah, thank you. All right. Bye everybody.

1:46:13Itukan