An Army of Normal Folks - Gabrielle Clowdus: We All Have Homelessness In Us (Pt 2)

Episode Date: December 2, 2025

Dr. Gabrielle Clowdus is the founder of Settled, which helps churches build "Sacred Settlements", tiny home villages on their property where people experiencing homelessness and church members live in community. When she started this work of radical hospitality, she believed it was a homelessness ministry. Today, she believes that it's a ministry to all of us, as we all have some homelessness in us!  Support the show: https://www.normalfolks.us/premiumSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Hey, everybody, it's Bill Courtney with an army of normal folks, and we continue now with part two of our conversation with Dr. Gabriel Cloutis, right after these brief messages from our generous sponsors. I'm Stefan Curry, and this is Gentleman's Cut. I think what makes Gentleman's Cut different is me being a part of developing the profile of This beautiful finished product, with every sip, you get a little something different. Visit gentlemen's cut bourbon.com or your nearest total wines or Bevmo. This message is intended for audiences 21 and older.

Gentleman's Cut Bourbon, Boone County, Kentucky. For more on Gentleman's Cut Bourbon, please visit gentlemen's cut bourbon. Please enjoy responsibly. Welcome, fellow seekers of the dark. I'm Danny Trejo. Won't you join me in Nocturno? Tales from the Shaberg. An anthology of modern-day horror stories inspired by the legends and lore of Latin America.

Take a trip from ghastly encounters with evil spirits to bone-chilling brushes with supernatural creatures. And experience the horrors to have haunted Latin America since the beginning of time. You should probably keep your lights on for Nocturnal, Tales from the Shadows. Listen to Nocturnal Tales from the Shadows as part of my Cultura podcast network, available on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast. Malcolm Gladwell here. This season on Revisionous History, we're going back to the spring of 1988. to a town in northwest Alabama, where a man committed a crime that would spiral out of control.

35 years. That's how long Elizabeth's and its family waited for justice to occur. 35 long years. I want to figure out why this case went on for as long as it did, why it took so many bizarre and unsettling turns along the way, and why, despite our best efforts to resolve suffering, we all too often make sense. suffering worse. He would say to himself, turn to the right, to the victim's family, and apologize, turn to the left, tell my family I love him. So he would have this little practice, to the right, I'm sorry, to the left, I love you. From Revisionous History, this is The Alabama Murders. Listen to Revision's History, the Alabama Murders on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever

you get your podcast. Hey, it's Ed Helms, and welcome back to Snafu, my podcast about history's greatest screw-ups. On our new season, we're bringing you a new snafoo every single episode. 32 lost nuclear weapons. Wait, stop? What? Yeah. Ernie Shackleton sounds like a solid 70s basketball player. Who still wore knee pads. Yes. It's going to be a whole lot of history, a whole lot of funny, and a whole lot of guests. The great Paul Shear made me feel good. I'm like, oh, wow. Angela and Jenna, I am so psyched. You're here. What was that like? What was that for you to soft launch into the show. Sorry, Jenna, I'll be asking the questions today.

I forgot whose podcasts we were doing. Nick Kroll, I hope this story is good enough to get you to toss that sandwich. So let's see how it goes. Listen to Season 4 of Snafu with Ed Helms on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. It's okay not to be okay sometimes and be able to be able to. to build strength and love within each other. Thanksgiving isn't just about food. It's a day for us to show up for one another.

I'm Elliot Connie, host of the podcast Family Therapy, a series where real families come together to heal and find hope. What would be a clue that would be like? I've gotten lots of text messages from him. This one's from a little bit better of a version of him. Because he's feeding himself well. It's always a concern. Like, are you eating well?

He's actually an amazing cook. There was this one time where we had neighbors and I saved their dog. And I ended up and buying them over for food and that was like one of my proudest moments. This is Family Therapy, real families, real stories on a journey to heal together. Listen to season two of Family Therapy every Wednesday on the Black Effect Podcast Network, iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. You get the mind. money, you're in Minnesota, now you got a, your debt's paid off, now you've got this degree

in housing and this master's and undergraduate and all this other stuff. And again, I'm a planner. So I'm asking, was there what's next or did it just happen? You know, what, tell me, you know? Okay, so the plan was still get the Ph.D., move overseas. Right. Oh, okay. That's what I was asking.

So the plan was move overseas, do some more of the stuff you've been doing. Commanditarian architecture. My husband would get the license in architecture. I would get the degree, and we would have sort of a design research think tank. I love that. That's kind of cool. Doesn't that sound like a great life plan? Especially with the whole container thing and everything else and thinking about how to come up with creative ways to satisfy a real need all over the place for.

Cheap, affordable, but livable. Housing. Yeah. Cool. Right. Design builds, research with students. What do you doing? Hanging around here. Exactly. In a state you didn't even know existed. Exactly. Okay. I'm two years into my program.

My principal investigator that I was doing research with goes on emergency medical leave. I now have no funding for my work. Oh, wow. I have to go find a new research job. the only job that's available is looking at chronic homelessness in the Twin Cities with tiny homes as a potential solution. To me, that's God speaking. Okay.

To me, that's... We got there, Alex. You got recognized. But to me, that's it. That, to me, is you stay steadfast. You do what you're supposed to do. You stay faithful to the mission. And when one door shuts another opportunity opens, if you just got sense enough to find it.

Yeah. Okay, it didn't look like an opportunity to me. It looked like my nightmare. No, I get it. Chronic homelessness in the Midwest, looking at tiny homes as the solution. Really? Okay.

This is like 10 years ago. Yeah. So tiny homes were a fad. That's exact word I was going to use. Back then, because there's people doing. I'm uninterested. They were kind of a curiosity. Yeah.

And these people in Sweden, like, build tiny homes in the mountains and go sit in a sauna, and that's kind of cool. So couldn't we put a tiny home somewhere? I mean, that's kind of how the tiny home thing was going. Totally. Yeah. It's basically a sauna. Yeah. I did not want to take on this project. I was very uninterested. I had, I would just be totally honest and have tell you that I had a giant chip on my shoulder around homelessness in America. I was like, I have seen the deserving poor. I have seen what it looks like to live on $2 a day. If you're in America and you are homeless, bummer. That's a real bummer. But we've got government. We've got helping professionals. You see people carve

igloos out of garbage. Right. And they have zero systematic support. And then in the United States, we have all of the support. So really, if you want to sit around with your government paid for cell phone and everything else and maybe even your bike, depending on the state, and talk about, woe was me. I hate it for you. But But on balance, you should see what I've seen. Right. Now, I wasn't so much like putting the blame on the person. I get it.

I'm not trying to do that. I'm just saying it's a whole different experience for an American. Yes. And so you did have a chip on your shoulder. I had a chip on my shoulder. And I really didn't understand homelessness in America. The data, it's such a. Yeah.

Yeah. It's why I wanted to talk about the data at this point. Yeah. But not soon after this point. But go ahead. Okay. So then I sense that God is saying that it's time to look at poverty in my own backyard. Yeah.

So why are we going to go overseas and fix everything when they're all around me? It's right here. It's in your own backyard. It's your own neighbor. That's actually been my attitude. We do business in 42 countries. I see a lot everywhere. And we sell to manufacturing.

So we don't go to London. We go to, you know, Bangalore, India. We go to really poor places in Eastern Europe that still exist all over Eastern Europe. Probably have some of that same issues on Russia. We go to industrial centers in places like Vietnam and Laos and China. So I see, right? I don't live it, and they're working, and I'm not there on a mission. but I do see, and I have felt compelled by some of the things I've seen,

but then I always come back to, every time I go to work, I see lost, hopeless people in my own city. Yeah. Why don't I serve where I am? Yeah. How can I step over the person right in front of me to help someone else? Yeah. So that's what was revealed to you.

Yeah. Okay. Okay. So it's just, now it's packing. an extra granola bar getting on the train between St. Paul and Minneapolis that I rode every day. Turns out 200 of my neighbors also ride that green line every day, but that's just where they sleep. Oh, when you say neighbors, not house neighbors, unhoused neighbors. My unhoused neighbors. And starting to get to know them.

It's interesting. You got to be careful when you say neighbors. People won't understand what you mean. Yeah. Well, my neighbor that's sleeping on the street is my neighbor. I agree with you. I'm just, I'm teeing it up for you. Yeah, it's good. Yeah, I have to see the person in front of me, right there in front of me, and not as someone to step over, walk over, ignore, look away. I think that does something really, really, I think that's deeply wounding to our souls. Your own or the people that you're looking away from? Your own, when you look away. You think, see, here's a squirrel. I'm going to chase up a tree. Okay.

You think that it's impossible as a human being when you see somebody unhoused or on the street or filthy or whatever. You think as a human being, we all notice them. Yeah. You're saying our act of looking away is deeply damaging to our own soul just because we look away.

Yeah. Because... We're literally hiding ourselves from our own flesh. That is my brother, that is my sister. I am connected to that person, and we hide ourselves away. The scriptures say, God says, you want me? Do you know where you'll find me? You'll find me in the poor.

You'll find me outside the city gates. I'm the leper. Outside the city gates that's not in the palace. not ruling the kingdom, I'm in the poor. You want to be with me? You want to serve me? You love me? Come and sit with me outside the city gates.

Come and sit with the leper. Come and sit with the poor. Come and sit with the outcast. Come and sit with the vulnerable. There I am. I do lots of speeches. I've spoken to Nike. I've spoken to the Olympic Committee.

I've spoken to Olympic swim team. I've spoken to Firestone. and I do a lot of public speak and stuff. Sometimes I get to do churches and faith-based groups. The things you're saying right now are actually very challenging because the most segregated day in America is typically Sunday. And I think our faith can be its only. worst enemy oftentimes by its hypocrisy toward the poor.

Yeah. And it feels like what you're saying is very challenging to someone who calls himself a Christian because if they do look away, they're actually looking away from Christ himself. It's what I hear he's saying. I'm not trying to put words in your mouth. That's what I believe. So one of my common things when I'm feeling my oats and want to be challenging is a

story about when Lisa wanted shrimp. And Lisa's gorgeous, she's a tin, she's a drop-dead dime. She'd be walking down the street right now and she'd stop traffic. I mean, she's gorgeous and I mean, you look at this guy, right? So, you know, if I'm going to keep my wife, I mean, you know, just do what she says. Right. Period. Yeah.

Good advice to any husband out there. So she told me I was coming back from a sales trip on the coast. She told me she went shrimp and she said, go down with the dogs, go to Walmart. and get you a little styrofoam cooler and go to 7-11 and get some ice and go down there when the shrimp boats come in and get you some shrimp. Okay. And we live in Memphis and pack it on good ice because I want it fresh and get home. We're going to have a shrimp ball tomorrow.

The kids are going to love it. I'll get the corn of potatoes. You get the shrimp. Like I'm tired of it. She said, did you hear what I said? I said, yeah, I'm going to get shrimp. Right? So I go down there and I don't, have you ever been to like the Gulf of, well, certainly you've been all

over the place. you know what those wharfs and docks smell like. It's fish heads. It's stagnant water. It's probably doesn't smell like the Guatemalan dump, but it's a nice close second. Okay. You've been there, right? Seriously.

They really do have a hot, wretched, thick stench to them. And I'm sitting out there going, my gosh, this place stinks and waiting on this. And here come the shrimp boats. And I found something that stinks worse than the wharf, the fisherman. Oh, gosh. I mean, you know, they've been smoking marble. Reds all day. is more of a suggestion than a requirement to work on a shrimp boat,

and they've been sweating all day, and the surfs been hitting them, and they've been covered in fish guts and bait. And, I mean, they're wretched. Yeah. It's pretty horrific. The whole scene's, again, not Guatemala, but it doesn't matter.

I'm getting my shrimp. So I get my good shrimp. I put it on ice. I'm headed home now, and about halfway between the coast of Memphis, is Jackson, Mississippi. And I was in Jackson, Mississippi kind of recollecting, wondering if my hair and my clothes smelled like the war for the fishermen because it's just disgusting.

And as I pastor Jackson, I'm recollecting all that and thinking about the truck more we're going to have tonight, it dawned on me. Christ surrounded himself a fisherman. Yeah. And if he were to come today, he wouldn't show up in my neighborhood. Yeah. He would show him in theirs. Yeah. And that was a little bit of.

another one of these things of being still in quiet, listening, and being faithful, and just arriving at a conclusion that I kind of had it backwards. And that was about 20 years ago, maybe 50, no, 20 years ago. And I'm just telling that story to you because I hear the same thought process happening when you were taking a granola bar on the train with your, quote, neighbors, that that's the revelation you were having in a different way, it feels like. Totally. Yeah. I'm sitting with Christ himself.

Okay. So what? You give a granola bar away. Good job. What's next? Get to know people. Know them. Know them by name, by face, by story.

Start to walk. So you get to start having chats with the people on the train? Yeah. Start to build real friendship. Build friendships with people. Invite them into our lives, into, you know, games and walks and meals and celebrations and Christmas dinner. Christmas dinner?

How does that work? You just, you know, I mean, once you've built a relationship with someone, where else are they going to be for Christmas dinner? Do you invite them to your home? You invite them to your home. Of course you do. Don't you want Christ at your dinner table? So, yes.

So I guess he would have to talk to me then. So the point is... That's how you would hear from it. That was really good, Bill. That was good. So, all right, I just said it. So you're literally evolving into this person who sees, feels, and is inviting people to their home that are homeless, right?

Okay, keep going. Um, first neighbor that we build like a, a real relationship with, my buddy Anthony, build a trusted friendship. Anthony is having some serious, like, kind of dental pain and convince him to go and see, go and see a dentist, do the research, find a dentist that will take him, you know, it's 30 minutes outside of the city, drive him there, sit with him through the appointment, because he's nervous to be there, nervous about being judged, nervous about what he's going to hear, nervous about, you know, what he looks like, how he smells. And the professionals did a really beautiful job. That's

not always the case that I've experienced when I bring my neighbors to get help. But in this particular the case, it was, um, they did a beautiful job not judging him and just welcoming him. Um, they also put a plan in place for 17 appointments to get his, holy smokes. He had that much trouble. Teeth back in order. And I remember going home and just being like, John David, I don't have it in me to bring Anthony to 17 appointments. Like, it's a lot. It's a lot. I got kids, a family, stuff going on. Uh, you know, and also, we, I have bad days, right? And so I think that was the real moment of realization.

Like, we actually have to help people in community. Like, we really do need one another. And we can't just one family go help someone on the street. It's nice. You're not going to have a macro effect. You will not. We'll be right back. I'm Stefan Curry, and this is Gentleman's Cut.

I think what makes Gentleman's Cut different is me being a part of developing the profile of this beautiful finished product. With every sip, you get a little something different. Visit Gentleman's Cut Bourbon.com or your nearest Total Wines or Bevmo. This message is intended for audiences 21 and older. Gentleman's Cut Bourbon, Boone County, Kentucky. For more on Gentleman's Cut Bourbon, please visit Gentleman's Cut Bourbon. Bourbon.com. Please enjoy responsibly. Welcome, fellow seekers of the dark. I'm Danny Trejo. Won't you join me in Nocturno? Tales from

the Shadows. An anthology of modern-day horror stories inspired by the legends and lore of Latin America. Take a trip from ghastly encounters with evil spirits to bone-chilling brushes with with supernatural creatures and experience the horrors that have haunted Latin America since the beginning of time. You should probably keep your lights on for Nocturnal

Tales from the Shadows. Listen to Nocturnal Tales from the Shadows as part of my Cultura podcast network available on the I-Heart Radio app Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. Malcolm Gladwell here.

This season on Revisionous History, we're going back to the spring of 1988 to a town in northwest Alabama where a man committed a crime that would spiral out of control. 35 years. That's how long Elizabeth's and its family waited for justice to occur.

35 long years. I want to figure out why this case went on for as long as it did, why it took so many bizarre and unsettling turns along the way, and why, despite our best efforts to resolve suffering, we all too often make suffering worse. He would say to himself, turn to the right, to the victim's family, and apologize, turn to the left, tell my family I love him. So he would have this little practice, to the right, I'm sorry, to the left, I love you. From Revisionous History, this is The Alabama Murders.

Listen to Revision's History, The Alabama Murders on the IHeart Radio app. Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. Hey, it's Ed Helms and welcome back to Snafu, my podcast about history's greatest screw-ups. On our new season, we're bringing you a new snafu every single episode. 32 lost nuclear weapons. Wait, stop? What? Ernie Shackleton sounds like a solid 70s basketball player. Who still wore knee pads?

Yes. It's going to be a whole lot of history, a whole lot of funny, and a whole lot of of guests, the great Paul Shear made me feel good. I'm like, oh, wow. Angela and Jenna, I am so psyched. You're here. What was that like for you to soft launch into the show? Sorry, Jenna, I'll be asking the questions today. I forgot whose podcast we were doing. Nick Kroll, I hope this story is good enough to get you to toss that sandwich.

So let's see how it goes. Listen to season four of Snap-Foo with Ed Helms on the I-Hart Radio app. Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. Michael Lewis here. My book The Big Short tells the story of the buildup and burst of the U.S. housing market back in 2008. It follows a few unlikely but lucky people who saw the real estate market for the black hole it would become and eventually made billions of dollars from that perception.

It was like feeding the monster, said Isman. We fed the monster until it blew up. The monster was exploded. Yet on the streets of Manhattan, there was no sign anything important had just happened. Now, 15 years after the Big Short's original release, and a decade after it became an Academy Award-winning movie, I've recorded an audiobook edition for the very first time. The Big Short Story, what it means when people start betting against the market, and who really pays for an unchecked financial system, is as relevant today as it's ever been, offering invaluable

insight into the current economy and also today's politics. Get the big short now at pushkin.fm.fm. slash audiobooks, or wherever audiobooks are sold. Our neighbors that are stuck in homelessness, that are chronically homeless, that have been on the streets for five, ten, twenty years, the amount of trauma and abuse and neglect and, and suffering that has been in their life, that is in their life, it's so much that's more than one healthy household can take on. And you really need a community with a lot more health than unhealth. And so that really started kind of forming this idea of what does it look like

to build a community, a strong community ourselves, where we're actually living intentionally with one another. then we can invite the outcasts, the leper, the vulnerable into the center of our community. And they can find rest, and they can find health, and they can find healing because they're surrounded by a lot of that. And in the process, we become more healthy. We become more whole. But that requires people who are housed and who have not found their way into this horrific lifestyle to meet those folks halfway.

Yeah. That's hard. What's hard about it? It's hard to find people willing to do that. Why do you think that is? I don't know. I guess I'm asking you, but I do think that is. I don't think the vast majority of people I know

who have homes and jobs and are taking kids to soccer and lacrosse and everything would interrupt them their lives to join these people in community. And what I mean in community, I don't mean serve them and try to help them and give their money to it. There's a lot of well-intentioned people, but people willing to literally move into that community or bring folks like that into their community because we're going to have conversations about property values. We're going to have conversations about are we having a rising crime?

We're going to have our children going to be safe. I'm teeing this up for you a little bit. I'm being the doubles advocate, but I'm giving you an opportunity to speak to that because, honestly, I think that's why the vast majority of people would think. Yeah, totally. I cannot speak for every person, but as a person of faith, you know, we're called and compelled to a lifestyle of radical hospitality. That's the word I was looking for, the phrase. Yeah. I read, you've said that.

I've read it a bunch through here, and I loved it. Radical hospitality. Yeah. Which is exactly what a church should be. Yeah. Radically hospitable. Radically hospitable. Crazy.

We'll take everybody, all comers. Of course. Because the church is the best place for people that are suffering. The church is the best place for people that need healing and need to, wholeness and need restoration, Jesus himself said, I didn't come for the healthy. I came for the sick, right? So the church is the place to receive those that are most suffering so that they might find their healing. So you start to envision this idea of a community where not one family's trying to help one person, but a community where it can get more macro. Yeah. And I get to stand on the

shoulders of giants before me. So I, the research project that I took on ended up being funded by the largest health care system in our, in the Twin Cities and the University of Minnesota, kind of jointly kind of came together. The health care system said, hey, we've got the chronically homeless coming into our ER feigning an illness for a bed and a meal because, you know, maybe the shelters are full or they weren't able to get in. And there's a loophole in our system, in our society. Health care is an entitlement. Housing is not. And so can't turn someone away. The CEO of the health care system comes to the University of Minnesota with this problem. I'm the one that gets hired to somehow solve that. You know, and he was particularly interested in

tiny homes as a potential solution. So as part of my research, I was looking at tiny home villages for the homeless kind of across the nation. At the time, you know, we're now talking nine years ago, there was about a dozen across the nation. And there was, you know, a little village of six homes over here, you know, 12 homes over here, and then 250 in Austin, Texas. And of course, it's Texas. Everything's bigger in Texas, right? But they were literally calling their community first exclamation point. Community first village. Community first. Community first. Community first. Community first. So. Yeah. So they, you know, I mean, of us are standing on their shoulders. 25 years ago, a group of six white, affluent men got touched by God to look at homelessness in their city. I think that that probably happens all over the place. What's distinct about their story is that rather than just being like, I know what we'll do and coming up with their own ideas, leaning on their own understanding, is they humbled themselves, went and slept on the streets of Austin, Texas, alongside people that were suffering

and said, what is it? What is it like? What are you experiencing? And they had a profound insight that homelessness, chronic homelessness, is not a result of lack of housing and social services,

but the result of a profound and catastrophic loss of family. Say it again. This is where your whole story starts to all make sense to me. Yeah. It really is. Say that again.

It is so, this is kind of the data. Say it again. It's so important for everybody, this to get this through your head. Yes. As a society, our narrative around homelessness is that it's around, it's about addiction,

it's about mental illness, it's about lack of affordable housing, it's about lack of job opportunities, it's about poverty. If you unpeel layers and layers and layers of each neighbor's life that is stuck in homelessness, what you will find is a profound and catastrophic loss of family, often from childhood. Childhoods of extreme neglect and abuse and violence. And that profound and catastrophic loss of family means that they grow up as adults of feeling unloved, unwanted, and pushed to the furthest fringes of society. And unseen, primarily because.

because when everybody looks at them, they look away. So why wouldn't you feel unseen? So you're also experiencing a profound and catastrophic loss of community. There is nobody in your corner. There's nobody rooting you on. There's nobody looking at you in the eye and saying you're of great value. You can do good things. You are so worthy as a human.

At best, we come to them and say, give them a baloney sandwich and say, God loves you. And then we go back to our own comfort. So you have all of this understanding. You have the data. There are, what'd you say, six to 12 images of this around the country at this point? Tiny home villages. Would you tell us what a tiny home is?

A tiny home? A home of about... Square footage. Two to 400 square feet. The size of a lot of people's den and Eden area. Yes. For people who don't really get square footage, you know, a lot. But, I mean, think of something the size of a den and an eating area or in today's home,

maybe a kitchen and a keeping room area. That's about 400, right? Yeah. Yeah. 20 by 20. Yeah. Although our homes are built in trailers, so they're like 9 by 20. Okay.

Um, but a tiny home, a tiny home is 400 square feet is 200 to 400 square feet. 200 to call it 300 on average. Sure. Does it have, what's it have in it? What's it look like? I mean, you can scale all over the place. Sure. Where we settled is we don't want to build shedgers jacks.

We don't want to meet the crisis of homelessness with another, um, uh, like crisis solution. We, so we aren't trying to just slap up homes together. We feel called and compelled to love our neighbor as our self. So we're building something that we would want to live in. We don't put anything in the homes that we wouldn't put in our own homes. And we also feel like we need to be a blessing to our nation.

We not only have a crisis of homelessness, we have a crisis of affordable housing. So we build homes just like new single family home construction. same materials longevity durability but it's just smaller and we put them on wheels the reason we put them on wheels is to overcome building code building code is highly inflexible and across the nation depending on what city what county what area you're in we define housing in terms of um you know some kind of social constructs we say uh home isn't a home unless it's a thousand square feet with a bedroom, bathroom, and kitchen. We desperately think we need to redefine home.

If someone's been on the streets for 10 years, do we really need to be building a thousand square foot home with a bedroom, bathroom, and kitchen that there aren't any funds actually to do? And so what would be better? To build something that's simple and quality and beautiful, but for a tenth of the cost, or to just say,

oh, we can't build something good enough so we shouldn't build anything. so we build homes that would be something that we ourselves would live in it has a gravity-fed water tank a sink a catch basin below so that you can empty that out into the greenhouse or gardens or into your dehydrating toilet we have the only legal composting toilet that exists because we have a beautiful aerospace engineer that's volunteered with us for five years to develop that essentially we can create and build a home for about $40,000, built by volunteer labor, built by normal people.

We aren't 3D printing homes. We aren't manufacturing homes. We're building stick frame homes. Because guess what? Just about every community has people within them that know how to do that, know how to build a home. We've had youth groups be able to put lemonade stands, raise. the money and build the home. This is possible in the hands of ordinary normal people to build an affordable housing stock for our nation. So you got this idea of community. You got to put

these things somewhere. Yeah. And if I'm hearing you right, you're also not looking to put it on the outskirts of town. You want your neighbors to be part of a community, and I assume the community. Yeah. So how's that go? Yeah. Okay, so I talked. You got to put these things somewhere. You got to put them somewhere. So I talk about how did we overcome building code? Building code's highly inflexible.

It makes for affordable housing to be really expensive. We overcame it by putting our homes on wheels, still look and feel like a single-family home. The next thing we needed to overcome was zoning. Zoning is also really inflexible and exists to keep the poor out of certain areas. I was going to say it exists so that the people from the other side of this track stay there. Stay right there. Don't come in our neighborhood. Not in my backyard.

Right. Not in my backyard. Yeah. Yeah. But God is calling us to look at poverty in our own backyard. I'll toss a turkey over the tracks to you on Thanksgiving. Yeah. Just don't come over asking me for one.

Yes. God forbid. And make sure you say thank you. Yeah. Oh, and if you don't say thank you, you know. I won't be doing this next year. I won't be tossing you a turkey next Thanksgiving. Good luck if you got food in the food pantry if you don't say thank you.

Yeah. Yeah. So we found a very strong federal land use law called the Religious Land Use Act that allows... What? Is that a thing? It's a thing! The Religious Land Use Act. Yeah. All right.

What does that mean? You can burn chickens at the steak if you want to? Um, no comment. I was just wondering. I mean, you got, you got folks down in Louisiana that practice voodoo and stuff, so religious use act. Okay, great. Can we scratch that? I mean, he said something inappropriate.

You didn't. No, but the point is... Actually, this is interesting. It was sponsored by Orrin Hatch and Teddy Kennedy, two people from different political parties. That's interesting, too. Orrin Hatch is Mormon, Teddy Kennedy, I presume, was Catholic. Yeah, no doubt.

I mean, kind of Catholic. He kind of killed the girl. Ted Kennedy's Catholic, but progressive Catholic guy. Killed the girl Catholic, but yeah. Oh, okay. Hey, who's the largest landowner in America? Who? Yeah.

single, I would say the federal government. Okay, after that. Okay, the largest, the largest, now, see, I love questions like this, the largest single landowner in the United States. I would say the federal government, and then after them, maybe the railroad. You're just trying to be a smart ass right now. No, I'm not. No, I'm really guessing.

The answer is churches. That's what she's trying to get you to say. But that might be. The church as a combination. As a combination. The Catholic Church, the Mormon Church. Okay, yeah, sure, sure. When you add it all together, that would make.

I believe, Alex, maybe you can... Ask Chats you meet to you or here. Yeah, absolutely, yeah. I was probably right, those are probably, it might be the third. I think that the Catholic Church is the largest landowner in the world. Is that right? I think so. The point is...

The church owns a lot of land. Yeah, got you. The church might be cash poor, but it is asset rich. The American church has a lot of land, and turns out that land is protected under a very strong federal land use law that says you can use your land in conjunction with your mission. That is a revelation. It is. I honest, that is so interesting and cool. We'll be right back.

and this is Gentleman's Cut. I think what makes Gentleman's Cut different is me being a part of developing the profile of this beautiful finished product with every sip you get a little something different. Visit gentlemen's cut bourbon.com or your nearest Total Wines or Bevmo. This message is intended for audiences 21 and older.

Gentleman's Cut Bourbon, Boone County, Kentucky. For more on Gentleman's Cut Bourbon, please visit gentlemen's cut bourbon.com. Please enjoy responsibly. Welcome, fellow seekers of the dark. I'm Danny Trejo, won't you join me in Nocturno? Tales from the Shadow. An anthology of modern-day horror stories inspired by the legends and lore of Latin America.

Take a trip from ghastly encounters with evil spirits to bone-chilling brushes with supernatural creatures. and experience the horrors to have haunted Latin America since the beginning of time. You should probably keep your lights on for Nocturnal, Tales from the Shadows. Listen to Nocturnal Tales from the Shadows

as part of my Cultura podcast network, available on the I-Heart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast. podcast. Malcolm Gladwell here. This season on Revisionous History, we're going back to the spring of 1988 to a town in northwest Alabama, where a man committed a crime that would spiral out of control. Thirty-five years. That's how long Elizabeth's and its family waited for justice to occur. Thirty-five long years. I want to figure out why this case went on for as long as it did, why it took so many bizarre and unsettling turns along the way,

and why, despite our best efforts to resolve suffering, we all too often make suffering worse. He would say to himself, turn to the right, to the victim's family, and apologize, turn to the left, tell my family I love him. So he would have this little practice, to the right, I'm sorry, to the left, I love you. From Revisionous History, this is The Alabama Murders. Listen to Revisionist History, The Alabama Murders on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Hey, it's Ed Helms, and welcome back to Snafu, my podcast about history's greatest screw-ups. On our new season, we're bringing you a new snafu every single episode. 32 lost nuclear weapons. Wait, stop? What? Ernie Shackleton sounds like a solid 70s basketball player. Who still wore knee pads? Yes. It's going to be a whole lot of history, a whole lot of funny, and a whole whole whole

lot of guests. The great Paul Shear made me feel good. I'm like, oh, wow. Angela and Jenna, I am so psyched. You're here. What was that like for you to soft launch into the show? Sorry, Jenna, I'll be asking the questions today. I forgot whose podcast we were doing. Nick Kroll. I hope this story is good enough to get you to toss that sandwich. So let's see how it goes. Listen to season four of Snafoo with Ed Helms on the IHeart Radio. app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Lama is a spirit. It's not just a city.

I didn't really have an interest of being on air. I kind of was up there to just try and infiltrate the building. It's where Cronk was born in a club in the West End. Four world star, it was five, five, nine. Where a tiny bar birthed a generation of rap stars, where preachers go viral, and students at the HBCU turned heartbreak in the resurrection. How do you get people to believe in something that's dead? Where Dream was brought Hollywood to the south

And hustlers bring their visions to create black wealth Nobody's rushing into relationships with you Where are you from? They want to look in the eye Where the future is nostalgia Talk to the chat, GPZ She's like, you really did first lady To have a gayfrey girl's tape in Atlanta, Georgia

Like that's what separates you from a lot of people And I'm like, oh what, you're right Atlanta doesn't wait for permission It builds its own spotlight Um Big Rue Let us guide you through the stories Behind Atlanta's most iconic moments Listen to Atlanta is on the I Heart Radio app.

Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcast. Who found this out for you? How'd you find this out? I had the best mentor at the University of Minnesota. It was just the coolest guy, Tom Fisher. I would come into his office every week, tell him the research I was doing, and nothing was too crazy or too out there. He would just encourage me to explore every possibility.

And so we, you know, week after week after week, we were just coming up with the craziest ideas of how to overcome zoning. Everything from, I mean, like ice fish houses on the lake to put them on the water. Put them on water. What kind of zoning is happening on the water? Summertime may be a little difficult. That it turns into a houseboat. They're going to have wills and a hole. Okay.

But then you find it. That is so, so you found it in your research. We found it in our research. We actually found a church in St. Paul. St. Paul's a capital of Minnesota for others that didn't know about Minnesota, like me, that was in a lawsuit. They were suing the city of St. Paul for unjust restrictions on the use of their building. They had rented out their basement to a nonprofit that had been around for 20 or 30 years

that was a day respite center for the homeless. Oh, I know what happened. Yeah. The neighbors didn't want those people walking through their neighborhood. So they started raising hell and they used their influence with the politicians. And so the politicians said, okay, we'll stop this. And the church says, you can't stop it because we have, we already have protection under the federal, what's it called? Land use. Religious land use. So churches rank six on the list. We forgot tribal lands is a big one. And then it's interesting with Orrin Hatch, LDS Church owns 1.2.

seven million acres in the U.S. Wow. Yeah. They need some settled properties. Let's go. Yeah, let's go. But the point is, that's what happens. And so the church was suing the city saying, we don't care if these people upset about these

unhoused people or whatever coming to use our basement. Yeah. We're allowed to use this under this federal law. Yeah. Not only we're allowed, but we are called. Well, the argument legally is allowed. Yeah. But their mission is they.

feel called as a church to serve these folks. Yeah. Okay, well, they sound like a pretty nice candidate to talk to you about your holes and will's houses. Absolutely. When I met them, they were a couple years into that fight, and they were weary. But they ended up winning in federal courts. Oh, it went all the way to federal courts.

Wow. Yeah. And so St. Paul. But that actually is pretty good that that happened because that's set precedent for you. Absolutely. We planted our first sacred settlement in St. Paul. Right there, that church. Not at that church.

They didn't have any land, but a church, you know, five minutes down the road. No kidding. All right. So tell me what that first, first of all, we talked about the founder of Settled, and I said at the top of this show, I love the title of the organization, Settled, because metaphorically, it co-joins, but settle your life, settlers. You envision people in wagon trains settling and then folks experiencing homelessness finally able to physically settle but also settle their souls. And we settle our souls because we take ourselves away from the busyness of life and living community.

I was trying to be cheesy, but that's true. It's so good. It's true. I'm just reflecting what you said. It's in the prep. So what is this first? settlement of settled look like. Okay, first settlement. It's a tiny little church about six minutes outside of downtown St. Paul, about one acre of land. That's all. That's teen I'd see. That's tiny. Little building that's, you know, been there forever. A lot of deferred maintenance. The church, they just kind of did like a replant.

It's been around for about eight years when we meet them. And maybe about 20 committed, like, families that show up every Sunday. So very tiny, under-resourced, just outside the heart of St. Paul, not much land. And they say yes to the nation's first sacred settlement. They just, their mission is hospitality. They are on mission to offer radical hospitality, and they just could, they were like, you know what, we don't have much, but we want to use every inch of our land for the kingdom of God.

So if you can do it here, do it here. And so it was just a process of learning with them, planting our first sacred settlement. Again, a sacred settlement is an intentional and permanent tiny home community, owned and operated by the local church. I was wondering that. So the church's land who's on it, they own it. They own it. Did they own the homes?

They own the homes. So you build them, and then the church owns them. The community builds them. The community, well, I say you, the organization, the community, whoever, you spearhead the building. The community does it, but the church owns the asset. Yes. And that people living in them then pay rent? Yes.

To the church. Why isn't that the greatest full circle? For a second, for just a second, let's put aside the social impact. I mean, pragmatically, that's a really cool win-win for everybody. Yes. And it could be a self-sustaining model then, too, if they're paying rent, right? Yeah. You upload the costs up front, but then it gets paid back.

Yeah. Now, we're through, we, see, I didn't get that part reading the prop. I didn't understand that part. That's very cool. Yeah. And they operate it. Yeah. This is the role of the church.

But so the church, and then in operating it, they are in community with the residents of the tiny homes. Yes. And then not only is it neighbors coming out of homelessness living on the church land and using the church. building. But there are also what we call intentional neighbors that make up one third of the homes there. These are people that are coming from relatively healthy, happy backgrounds, feel called and compelled to live in the community alongside the poor to augment that role of family that has been lost. It's almost like your backyard missionary. Yeah, because we got to go back to the thing I made you repeat. Yeah. The data says the vast

majority of the people experiencing homelessness are experiencing it ultimately because of a lack of connectivity to family, to a family. And so this small home community helps recreate what they've never had or they lost very early. Right. Does it reverse the patterns that are above the peals of layers once you get to that? Slowly. We're taking... I'm so happy you said it that way. The answer is yes, but there's work. Yeah. Patient work. What's that look like?

What's that look like? It's really a work on the heart of the church. You know, we come in with so much judgment about people, about how they should live their life, how they should spend their money, what decisions that they're making. And having a sacred settlement right at your church. it just changes everything it's no longer those people it's your neighbor by name by relationship and a lot of the hardness of our heart just starts to to fall away like we start to get plump hearts again we start to learn empathy we had a guest recently that said it's hard to well it's actually a quote from brine brown that people are hard to hate close up move in yeah yeah

And that's a little different from a different perspective. But again, let's change it. It's hard to look away from people that are right in front of you. Yeah. And that kind of community. Yeah. And it's hard to judge my neighbor for how they're spending the little bit of money that they have when I have to go back and look at myself and say, like, well, did I need to get my nails done?

Did I need to spend that $5 on? My water. Thank you, Alex. Are you going to make me feel guilty about my monthly pedicure? Maybe. Don't, please. No, no, no. Alex is the Catholic in the room.

He does the guilt. You and I don't have to. You are so right. He gives me crap about my pedicure all the time. There's worse things I give you crap. I'm not going to call you out on the air. I get the point. I was being playful.

So how slowly and how much change. When did you put in this first, or excuse me, when did you guys, your community form the first settlement? How many years ago? Sacred settlement. Sacred settlement. Apologous. Sacred settlement. October 2022.

So we are just past three years. Three years. What does slow change look like three years later? Well, first I want to tell you who lives there. I love that. It's six homes. Two of those homes are filled with intentional neighbors. One is a 30-something-year-old young professional who plays orchestra.

Another is a... He was homeless? No, no. She's an intentional neighbor. Sorry. Go ahead. Another is a husband and wife. He's an engineer.

She's a nurse. They lived in the community for 30 years. Gave up their three-bedroom, two-bath house to live in a tiny home in the community. Wow. It says it's the best thing that. Most people need a trophy on their little tiny mantle. You think that. You really think that.

But the truth is it enriches their life. It strengthens their relationship with their adult son. It strengthens their marriage. It strengthens their relationship with God. Like, they are better humans three years later living there. And you actually have a really beautiful line about, like, years ago, I would have told you this is a homelessness ministry, but not. I call it. Can you talk about that? Yeah. Yeah, that is true. I think, you know, just all those years ago, God's saying,

it's time to look at poverty in your own backyard. I thought we were building a ministry for the homeless. And, you know, fast forward all these years later, I would say that our ministry is to the church. Like, this is for the sake of the church. This is for the sake of the sanctification of the church. Like, we need this. We need the poor in relationship with us. We don't need charity. We don't need, you know, a monthly soup kitchen or a coat drive or the food bank. All of those things are fine, but those don't change your soul. If you knew how so closely you and I sing off the same sheet of music, you would be shocked.

I won't go into any more me. This is about you, but it's refreshing for me to hear you say the things you're saying, because these are things I've been saying. a different way for years. I could not agree with you anymore. Who are the other four people? Poor homes are filled with people coming out of chronic homelessness. On average, they were on the streets for 10 years. If this church hadn't stepped in and invited them home, they would have died on the streets. There was no other option. They are the most expensive to the public because they cycle in and out of the emergency rooms and detox centers and jails because we make

homelessness illegal, most expensive to the public with the least amount of options available. This is the group of people that we look away from. We step over. We're at the red light. We see them holding a sign saying anything, anything, anything. And we make all of our quick judgments. They must have done something wrong. Or the government is there. to help them. That's their role. They should just go get help. What do you say before we go to who these are and then how this thing

looks and the three-year question? Because I do want to get back to that. I think that's important for people to understand. I can't help but chase the squirrel up a tree a little. I always have at least

a few bucks in my pocket. I'm still I'm old school. I don't do credit cards with much. I'm still cash and carry. And I live in inner city Memphis and I work downtown in inner city Memphis and I coach football in inner city Memphis and my life is inside the loop. The loop is the interstate loop. Outside's the suburbs inside. So in Memphis when you live inside the loop, you're in the city, right? So there's not a single day. I don't come to rest at a stop sign or a stoplight where there's not somebody with a sign or enter some kind of store where there's not

somebody I can't think of a day I had been asked for a dollar yeah um and I really am torn it's not the dollar a dollar or even a five dollar bill really means very little to me um really does mean very little to me um financially but I don't want be part of the problem and i i feel like sometimes if you're giving money to someone begging for money like that that it's not going to get them a shelter overnight or get them something good to drink or a decent thing to eat but more than likely it's going to be just another piece of straw the haystack of the drug epidemic in this country and, you know, the, the continual desperation of the people caught in all of that.

And so I know it, you know, especially to you, it really doesn't come from a point of selfishness for me. It comes from a point of by giving this person money, am I not part of the problem? ultimately. Sure. So what do you do? And so what do you do? What do you do?

Candidly, sometimes it depends on my mood. Sometimes it depends on how I'm approached. And if I'm seeing someone I've seen telling the same story, doing the same thing. over and over again, it's usually a no. If it's someone I haven't seen before or seems legitimately hungry or a need, I typically give it.

I have on occasions, said no, gone inside and bought $10 with the food and gave them a sack. I've also done that and watched people when I drove away, throw it down because they weren't interested in food and water. Well, did you ask them what they wanted to eat or come into the store with you and pick it out? I have a couple times.

And they still were the ones to throw it away? No. After they picked it out? Not them. But I've had people say, man, I'm starving. I'm really hungry. Can you give me $5? And I'm like, no, man, I can't.

But then I'll go in about $10 with food and I hand them a sack. If you're hungry, here's some food. And then I have watched twice. I can remember specifically twice. I even bought one time I was going through the, in Memphis, you can be going through the drive-thru, and they will literally walk up between the restaurant and the drive-thru with your window down before. I mean, there's the person taking your money and handing your food, and they're five, you know,

it's like a second, it's like the homeless window up against the wall, you know, and I have actually bought an extra hamburger or something, and in one time I watched that person take that brand-new hamburger in a sack, never look at it, tossing the bushes. And I thought, you know, what is the right answer here? You know, and I'm just curious what you think the right answer is. Yeah. I don't think that there's a right answer. I think it's being present in the moment and not hardening our hearts toward it.

And saying, like, what does this moment require of me? We'll be right back. I'm Stefan Curry, and this is Gentleman's Cut. I think what makes Gentleman's Cut different is me being a part of developing the profile of this beautiful finished product. With every sip, you get a little something different. Visit gentlemen's cut bourbon.com or your nearest total wines or Bevmo. This message is intended for audiences 21 and older. Gentleman's Cut Bourbon, Boone County, Kentucky.

For more on Gentleman's Cut Bourbon, please visit gentlemen's cuthuburn.com. Please enjoy responsibly. Welcome, fellow seekers of the dark. I'm Danny Trejo. Won't you join me in Nocturno? Tales from the Shadows. An anthology of modern-day horror stories

inspired by the legends and lore of Latin America. Take a trip from ghastly encounters with evil spirits to bone chilling brushes with supernatural creatures and experience the horrors to have haunted Latin America since the beginning of time. You should probably keep your lights on for Nocturnal, Tales from the Shadows. Listen to Nocturnal Tales from the Shadows

as part of my Cultura Podcast Network, available on the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast. Malcolm Gladwell here. This season on Revisionous History, we're going back to the spring of 1988 to a town in northwest Alabama where a man committed a crime

that would spiral out of control. 35 years. That's how long Elizabeth's and its family waited for justice to occur, 35 long years. I want to figure out why this case went on for as long as it did, why it took so many bizarre and unsettling turns along the way, and why, despite our best efforts to resolve suffering, we all too often make suffering worse.

He would say to himself, turn to the right, to the victim's family, and apologize, turn to the left, tell my family I love him. So he had this little practice, to the right, I'm sorry, to the left, I love you. From Revisionous History, this is The Alabama Murders. Listen to Revisionist History, The Alabama Murders on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, it's Ed Helms, and welcome back to Snafu, my podcast about history's greatest screw-ups. On our new season, we're bringing you a new snafu every single episode. 32 lost nuclear weapons.

Wait, stop? What? Yeah. Ernie Shackleton sounds like a soft. solid 70s basketball player. Who still wore knee pads? Yes. It's going to be a whole lot of history, a whole lot of funny, and a whole lot of guests.

The great Paul Shear made me feel good. I'm like, oh, wow. Angela and Jenna, I am so psyched. You're here. What was that like for you to soft launch into the show? Sorry, Jenna, I'll be asking the questions today. I forgot whose podcast we were doing. Nick Kroll.

I hope this story is good enough. to get you to toss that sandwich. So let's see how it goes. Listen to season four of Snap-Foo with Ed Helms on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Michael Lewis here. My book The Big Short tells the story of the buildup and birth of the U.S. housing market back in 2008.

It follows a few unlikely, but lucky people who saw the real estate market for the black hole it would become and eventually made billions of dollars from that perception. It was like feeding the monster, said Eisman. We fed the monster until it blew up. The monster was exploding. Yet on the streets of Manhattan, there was no sign anything important had just happened. Now, 15 years after the Big Short's original release,

and a decade after it became an Academy Award-winning movie, I've recorded an audiobook edition for the very first time. The Big Short story, what it means when people start betting against the market, and who really pays for an unchecked financial system, it is as relevant today as it's ever been, offering invaluable insight into the current economy and also today's politics. Get the big short now at pushkin.fm.

slash audiobooks, or wherever audiobooks are sold. I genuinely empathetically feel for every. single person that's in that state that is somebody's son or daughter that is somebody's brother or sister or uncle or cousin and and that is somebody you know Christ made yeah and I do feel empathy yeah um I haven't hardened my heart but I do and candidly you know when people are coming through my town that I'm really proud of and they stop to get gassed and I get you know hit up for money. I mean, what does that say about our community

and our city, our society? I really do. I struggle with the emotion of, you know, how on a personal level to respond to it all. I really do. I think that struggle is good. I think don't try to get out of the uncomfortability too quickly. that uncomfortability is the Lord stirring something and saying something, even your own soul saying

something to you. And it's like, will I be inconvenienced for another human? Another human that, sure, maybe I don't like the way that they're asking, or I don't know how they're going to use this, or I feel, you know, we can create all sorts of judgments to build a barrier between me and them. But they are human. And will I stop? Will I love? look them in the eye and say, hey, sister, hey, brother, what do you really need right now? Do you need a meal? Then let us go together and go and find that together. Do you need a cigarette? Do you need something to take away the gnawing pain of trauma in your mind right now? How can I help you? I think that empathy is very inconvenient.

and I think we have we try to keep as much inconvenience out of our lives but stopping for someone it's inconvenient it's costly and it's risky and we are called to do those things I think that's the best answer I've ever heard the question honestly I've asked a question probably 10 different times the last three years of guests and I think I think your answer's probably the best tell me about the other four people, the unintentional, well, they're all intentional, but you know what I mean, the other four people in the first house group. Yeah. So it's five people in four homes. Three are individuals and one is a couple. When you are kind of deemed chronically homeless by the federal government, you are most often an individual or a couple. By this time,

you're probably not a family unit anymore. That family unit has split apart. Kids have been taken away. It doesn't mean that we don't want kids to be reunited with their family, but likely they're never going to move back in. Our hope for them was that they would be reunited to still be mom, to still be dad, and to have a healthy place to come and visit and play and have celebrations and birthdays and games. But it's often individuals and couples. So we build homes for one and two person homes and two person homes and then homes for intentional neighbors that can look like individuals, couples, or families. We have all three of those, those, those neighbors that are coming from, you know, resource backgrounds choosing to live in the community

as a good neighbor. We are, we're calling the American Church to look at the chronically homeless. Look at the hardest to house. Look at the most expensive to the public. Look at those with the least options available. Look at those who otherwise will die on the street if we don't step in. because the chronically homeless make up about 20% of the overall homeless population using up about 80% of the public resources because it's very costly for us to look away. We are leaving people on the very margin of survival and we give them just enough to just keep surviving for one more day.

What an awful way to live. Why not pull people as far back, from that cliff edge as possible and into the center of a community that is trying to carry each other's burdens and trying to love each other as God loves us and trying to look more like Jesus in our very lives. What will that look like for their lives? It will change the church. It does change the church. And it changes our neighbors. Three years in, I said that it's slow work. It is slow work. We're rebuilding trust. Years and years and years of trauma don't go away within a week of getting a tiny house

just because you've got a tiny house. I get it. This is not a fix-it model. This isn't, okay, you know, come and be healed in two years and then move on to something else. It's like, move on to what? No, come and find belonging here. Come and be settled here. Come and grow deep roots here. Come and be stable. Rebuild trust with yourself, with God, with others. Hey, if mom began drugging you at the age of of two and pimping you out, you have trust issues. Wow. And that is a real story, but not one of the extreme stories.

That's horrible. That's not an extreme story. All of our neighbors come from such extreme abuse from childhood. Abuse, neglect, violence, a profound and catastrophic loss of family. It will take the rest of their lives to heal from that. Would you say, what percent of them? homeless, what percent of people experiencing homelessness in the United States come from one of those three things you just said?

A hundred percent of people in chronic homelessness. Which represents how many of the homeless? About 20 percent of the homeless population. Okay, what about the other 80? Other 80 are where we hear like, I'm just a paycheck away from being homeless, kind of episodically homeless, homeless for a little bit, but then can get back into something or kind of, you know, just homeless for a moment. Do you just need kind of a leg up, need help with rent or that sort of thing?

But those are not the people we typically see on park benches and stuff. It's the chronically homeless that we're talking about. That's who we're talking about. That's who. And you're saying 100% of them come from a lack of family and typically some pretty dire abuse and trauma that some of us can't even fathom. Yeah. So I wouldn't just say a lack of family because I do,

You know, have a breakdown of a breakdown, a profound loss in some way, right? Just, you know, I don't know your story, but having gone through five divorce, a mom who got married and divorced five times, that sounds like a profound loss of family. Now, fortunately, it wasn't nowhere near as ours, what you're talking about, really. Well, what makes you different from one of our neighbors? Like, what made it, what, like, why, like, why, How did your life go? Who sets of loving grandparents and a mother that had no addiction or any problems and absolutely no abuse in the home? That's it. You had strong resiliency factors.

And my mother worked every day and kept a roof over my head and kept me in school and loved me and everything else. So I didn't have any of that. Yeah. I can see how that can happen. Imagine if mom had been abused. She was just an abused woman and the grandparents weren't in the picture. What would childhood have looked like? No, I get it.

And oh my gosh, I hate the victimization of able-bodied people as an excuse. That's a whole other conversation. but if we're talking about the 20% of people experiencing homelessness that we define as the chronically homeless and if the data says 100% of them had a profound loss of family and were victims of abuse, neglect, trauma, and everything else, the truth is these people will see on the park bench are most likely victimized and the victimization continues day after day after day. Yeah.

You meet a woman that is in chronic homelessness. There, it's, it is almost certain that she's been raped many times on the streets and often came from a childhood of sexual abuse. You just see it all the time. All the time. I met a woman on the streets. She had been homeless. She'd been kicked out of her home. She'd been on the streets for three days.

She'd just been raped and met her right after that. Three days. Yeah. Life on the streets is really brutal. And it's not helpful if we continue narratives that, like, people just choosing this, they just want this. Maybe they know nothing better. And they might, maybe somehow you're hearing that. But nobody chooses a life of suffering in people.

pain and being unloved and unwanted. Every human being wants to be loved and known. So what does three years later look like for the four non-intentionals? I think, am I using the right word? You called the two, two, the intentional neighbors, yeah. Intentionally, the four people who formerly experienced homelessness. I'm trying to say it right. But tell me what three years later looks like for them.

Three years later, for our neighbor. coming out of homelessness, there are five of them. So three individuals and a couple. And their lives look better. They lives look. We don't require people to be sober before they move in. We don't require them to shape up and get their life together in a certain amount of time. We just love people on their healing journey. And turns out that works. You know, for anyone that doesn't believe that, there's incredible research out there. There's a TED talk called Everything You Think You Know About Addiction is wrong. It's 17 minutes, worth every minute to watch and to just see the research around substance use.

So, again, another narrative that's just not helpful. If we just continue to perpetuate that people want this, they're just stuck in their addiction, nothing's going to change, we're just enabling them. Well, have you tried love? That's interesting. So, what's next? We planted our second sacred settlement on the heels of the first in December of 2022, so at a completely different context.

So the first is in an urban area. It's a small, conservative church. At the time we met them, they were under-resourced. Three years later, they are no longer resourced. under-resourced. Then second sacred settlement is at a first-ring suburb. It's at a progressive Lutheran church. It's been around forever, liturgical, affluent, white, very different. If you look at the first two churches that we plant sacred settlements, there's nothing, nothing similar. You should pause on that of why they're not under-resourced anymore.

Yeah. So three years later, both congregations are experiencing an increase in attendance, an increase in engagement, an increase in tithing. As you said, what you found out is you're not really serving just the homeless, you're serving the church itself. Oh, I found your quote. It was so good.

All right, so you said somewhere else was... Tell me what I said. Yeah, it was better than what you said in our interview. Jeez. You said, we're no longer just homelessness. We say that we're on a mission to cultivate home in a homeless world because we believe that actually all of us

have some homelessness in us. Yeah. That's a good quote. Yeah. Yeah. It's pretty cool. Yeah. So the Lutheran Church. Lutheran Church, we're planting a sacred settlement at a mega church in a third ring suburb.

The most unlikely place. People say, oh, like, there's no transportation out there. They wouldn't want to live out there. So far from social services. actually, why did you move out to the suburbs? Yeah, I was going to say, what makes you think they, in quotations, wouldn't want to live in a nice, safe area in the suburbs that's all pretty any differently than you would want to live out there?

Yeah. And what I love about the heart of this megachurch is that they're changing up the script. Mega churches in America are known for being performance centers, destination centers, and they are saying, no longer will we do that. We will inhabit our land. We will inhabit our building. We will do this for the sake of the poor and the sanctification of ourselves. How many houses on that one?

Twelve homes. Twelve. How many intentionals versus former homelessness? There'll be four, is that right? Four intentional neighbors or intentional households. Again, it can be an individual, a couple, or a family. We have all three. And then eight homes for the hardest to house, most expensive to the public with at least

amount of options. We're not cherry picking. We are going after people that otherwise would die on the streets. And we're saying, come here. This is the best place for you to be. The church is the place to wrap around you. Do the people, I'm curious, do the people that were formerly homeless that are in these communities now, do they actually start attending church at that church? Some of them do. Not like a Sunday service. No. None of them, well, actually one of our neighbors, the first year she moved there, she felt compelled to go to both services every Sunday. Like she owed it to them or something. Like she owed it to them.

And they were like, we are not requiring this of you. This is not an expectation. She is not a believer. She identifies with the Native American community. But she would go to both services. The pastor is like, you are the only one in my congregation that comes to both services. I think it's also very, very cool that you said that, and I read that somewhere that nobody's required to go to the church, nobody's, you know, when I read that, I thought, good,

let God do his thing. Let God do his thing. You stay out of the way. Yeah. Same thing with, like, the substance use and mental illness. If we were to tell people, okay, you have to be clean before you can come in here, you have to be on your meds before you can come in here. Okay, well, then we're just going to continue to keep the same people on the streets.

Like, how can they do that without being to feel safe and loved and have something to live for? Like, we need to give them that first, and let those things fall away, which is what we're seeing three years later. Those things start to fall away slowly because they start to feel safe. It feels like replacing the profound loss of family with a profound growth of a loving community. and over time, one by one, you change. Yeah. And then one by one, we change. Our judgments fall away.

Our empathy grows, and we become more of who we've always wanted to be. And when we say, you know, this is your line, right? I wish someone were to do something about that. Yes. Yeah, who's someone? Me. Right. I get to be a part of this.

I don't have to be an intentional neighbor. I don't have to live in the community. I mean, that's a select few, and they are called to do that. But there are hundreds of people that are part of those communities that are just coming for community dinners or just coming to have a faithful presence in the community. Hey, you're already going to work from a coffee shop today? Why not work from the sacred settlement?

Hey, you're already going to make a good dinner tonight for your family? Why not make a little extra and bring it to the sacred settlement and have it there. Hey, you're already going to sit around and knit. Why not do it in the common house of the sacred settlement? We'll be right back. I'm Stefan Curry, and this is Gentleman's Cut. I think what makes Gentleman's Cut different is me being a part of you know, developing the profile of this beautiful finished product. With every sip, you get a little something different. Visit gentlemen's cut bourbon.com or your nearest total wines or Bevmo.

This message is intended for audiences 21 and older. Gentleman's Cut Bourbon, Boone County, Kentucky. For more on Gentleman's Cut Bourbon, please visit gentlemen's cut bourbon.com. Please enjoy responsibly. Welcome, fellow seekers of the dark. I'm Danny Trejo. Won't you join me in Nocturno?

Tales from the Shadows. An anthology of modern-day horror stories inspired by the legends and lore of Latin America. Take a trip from ghastly encounters with evil spirits to bone-chilling brushes with supernatural creatures and experience the horrors that have haunted Latin America since the beginning of time. You should probably keep your lights on for nocturnal. Tales from the Shadows. Listen to

Nocturnal Tales from the Shadows as part of my Cultura podcast network, available on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast. Malcolm Gladwell here. This season on Revision history, we're going back to the spring of 1988 to a town in northwest Alabama, where a man committed a crime that would spiral out of control. Thirty-five years. That's how long Elizabeth and its family waited for justice to occur. 35 long years. I want to figure out why this case went on for as long as it did, why it took so many bizarre and unsettling turns along the way, and why, despite our best efforts to resolve suffering, we all too often make suffering worse.

He would say to himself, turn to the right, to the victim's family, and apologize, turn to the left, tell my family I love him. So he would have this little practice, to the right, I'm sorry, to the left, I love you. From Revisionous History, this is The Alabama Murders. Listen to Revisionist history, The Alabama Murders on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, it's Ed Helms, and welcome back to Snafu, my podcast about history's greatest screw-ups. On our new season, we're bringing you a new snafu every single episode.

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I'm like, oh, wow. Angela and Jenna, I am so psyched. You're here. What was that like for you to soft launch into the show? Sorry, Jenna. I'll be asking the questions today. I forgot whose podcasts we were doing. Nick Kroll. I hope this story is good enough to get you to toss that sandwich. So let's see how it goes. Listen to season four of Snap-Foo with Ed Helms on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Michael Lewis here. My book The Big Short tells the story of the build-up and burst of the U.S. housing market back in 2008. It follows a few unlikely but lucky people who saw the real estate market for the black hole it would become and eventually made billions of dollars from that perception. It was like feeding the monster, said Eisman. We fed the monster until it blew up. The monster was exploding. Yet on the streets of Manhattan, there was no sign anything important.

important had just happened. Now, 15 years after the Big Short's original release, and a decade after it became an Academy award-winning movie, I've recorded an audiobook edition for the very first time. The Big Short Story, what it means when people start betting against the market, and who really pays for an unchecked financial system, is as relevant today as it's ever been, offering invaluable insight into the current economy and also today's politics. the big short now at pushkin.fm slash audiobooks or wherever audiobooks are sold. So it's interesting you said both congregations are actually continuing to grow.

Yeah. Do you think the sacred settlements are the reason? Absolutely. The Lutheran Church was. on a slow decline for 30 years before they planted the sacred settlement. Just like the little Nazarene Church, the first sacred settlement, had truly no business saying yes to a sacred settlement, no resources, not very many people, looked impossible. The Lutheran Church really had no reason to say yes to a sacred settlement either. Slow decline for 30 years. Nobody had come

into the community. They were on a slow hospice living off an endowment. But God revealed himself as the God that is trustworthy. Hey, you can plant this sacred settlement, and there will be people here in the next generation and the generation after that to take care of this. You can trust me. So who is it that's settled, the homelessness or the church? It's all of us.

Yeah, it's interesting. Yeah, we're being. As I listen to you and start thinking about all of it, is there a third? The third is at a megachurch. Tell me about that. So the megachurch is third ring suburb, white, affluent, surrounded by a, you know, a pretty wealthy community. The community had struggled, really struggled, that neighborhood really struggled when they heard about a sacred settlement coming into their community.

I bet they fought it. They fought it. Struggled probably sounds like a sweet word for a whole bunch of people saying, don't bring these people into my high dollar neighborhood. Okay, they fought it. And they, you know, they had the means and the education and the resources to do that. And so actually authored a bill at the state level to dismantle all the work of settled. That's too bad. There's a federal law that says houses of worship can use their land for whatever they want to,

even if it's put chickens on steaks. Preach it. For our friends and the... Actually, you remember just this week we interviewed Lisa Stephen who went through this whole fight. She built a home for teenage moms in Colorado. And she's actually a stand-together catalyst, too. And she had a whole zoning fight, you know, over this issue. And she probably wasn't aware of this law because it was on the church's property.

She needs to know about it. Yeah. Churches get pushed around all the time. They have no idea. They don't know the strength. They don't know the strength of the law. The thing is, though, if they'd have won that, then they could have shut down the other two things you had. So you were looking at an existential crisis of settled.

Yeah, we were. So this happened, so I went on my first sabbatical in 10 years in December, took a month off, come back in January. My first week back, I learned about this major opposition, 200 very angry people. That's what you get for taking a break. That's what I get. Yeah. It's totally what I get.

And on my sabbatical, the Lord was talking to me about growth. We've always imagined that this is a national movement. We want to help churches anywhere and everywhere across the nation plant sacred settlements on their land because we think this is good for them and good for their neighbors. And so I come back into work, major opposition. I'm like, hey, God, you said we were going to grow. And I sensed him saying, my church always grows under persecution. Rejoice.

This is a time to rejoice. So we called our partner churches together for a time of repentance, worship, and rejoicing. Yay, we're getting sued. there's the rejoice yay they're suing us let's rejoice it's hard to do is what i'm saying hard to do yeah can be hard to do but when you know that you're on the side of god you know that you're on the side of justice and and mercy um easy to do okay so so um we also called our community to six to seven weeks of prayer and fasting. Fast every Wednesday together.

Because our legislation meets on Wednesdays. And, you know, 11th hour, the bill doesn't go through. Gets completely killed. And the church moves ahead. There's complete unity in the megachurch. No split, no internal opposition to the sacred settlement, complete peace. watching the leadership of that church walk through this opposition was one of my greatest privileges.

They spoke with such grace and humility and kindness, never spoke against the neighbors, never spoke a single ill word about them, prayed for them, love them, spoke kindly of them, and trusted that God was going to bring the neighbors, the neighborhood into the folds of this work. And so now the greatest opposers of the sacred settlement have now come and are now allies and advocates. of the sacred settlement. How many houses there? 12 homes. So you're up to 30, if my math is right. And then we just had a fourth church vote to plant a sacred settlement on their land. It's a small...

All same area? Same area, but we're also starting to work outside of Minnesota. Well, first, this fourth one. This fourth one is in Minnesota. It's at another neighborhood church, a Wesleyan church. They likely, you know, put half a dozen homes on their land. That's kind of what the land can handle and what the neighbor or what the congregation, the size of the congregation, would be the right scale.

Now we're working for the first time outside of our state, working with churches in Michigan and also Washington. And then there's several cities that have come to us where there's community organizers saying, we want to see sacred settlements in our city. Will you come and talk with our city? And so that we can gather our church leaders together and talk about this with the hope that the first church or the first three churches will rise up and say yes to hosting a sacred settlement on their land. The beautiful thing about a sacred settlement is that, okay, one faithful church says yes to hosting it on their land. And that can look like an acre, eight acres, 50 acres, you know, we have all three.

It can look like in an urban core in a first ring suburb or a third ring suburb. We have all three. It can look at a really, really under-resourced church, a church that lives on an endowment, or really well-resourced church. We have all three. It can be conservative or somewhere in the middle or progressive. We have all three. God is literally showing us, hey, I'm not Baptist, I'm not Presbyterian, I'm not Lutheran. I might be a little Jewish.

But I can do this anywhere where my people say yes to radical hospitality. I can do this anywhere. This is, this is, I've already said yes to this. I already want to see this in the world. You just get to say the amen. Can we live lives of God's amen? Can we say amen to the things that he already wants to see in the world? And then he will do it.

It's phenomenal that we're having this conversation and the first thing opened in 2022. We're not talking about something has been going on forever. No. This is, you're still in the infancy of this thing. Maybe.

But remember, this started with research a lot of years ago. Oh, no, that's what I'm saying. I was just about say, but it really is formed from a 12-year-old who went to Guatemala

all the way from a confused participant and a doctoral problem in Minnesota in the years between. Yeah. I mean, it really is. It took all of that education, knowledge, experience, and faith to even get to what started in 2022. But since 2022, you're already talking about 30 existing home

and another six on the way. Yeah. And cities from all over the place reaching out, Alex often comments, we do, we've highlighted, I don't know, five to ten, ten. different organizations that approach foster care in many different ways. Yeah. All have been effective.

All right. You often butcher it? What? Can I say it? Yeah. And Alex often says, So there's 400,000 kids in foster care. Okay.

115,000 of them could be adopted today. Wow. Their parental rights have been fully terminated. And there's almost 400,000 houses of worship in the country. So just one person and one out of every three of them adopt. in an orphan, there wouldn't be any orphans in America today. So let's use that math. Yeah.

If every church had six houses on their property, we would. Homelessness goes, chronic homelessness is eradicated. Oh, completely. By a long shot. We actually only need every, every two churches to lift one person up off the streets. We have about 150,000 people experiencing chronic homelessness. That's probably under.

like underreported. And then we have about 350,000 churches, not including home churches. And so... And there's nothing to say the synagogues can't do this. Or mosque? Yeah, come on now. You know, we're all called to love our neighbor. Any house of worship. Yeah.

So the point is, if one of three did this, we eradicate chronic homelessness. Even less than that, because they're not just going to have one freestanding tiny home. that's not a community, right? Oh, that's right. I'm doing the math wrong. It's 15% because six times, yeah. It's 15% of the House of Worship in the United States put up a six tiny home community. We've eradicated one of the most wicked problems in our society.

And expensive. If you don't care about it from a pragmatic standpoint, think of what that does for our society. And we've added... 150,000 new units of affordable housing. Okay, well, I'd vote for you for Secretary of Housing and Urban Development. All right. And it's not all on these churches that do it either, right? With your first sacred settlement, the other churches in the community help pay for each of those houses, right?

Yeah. The churches of the sacred settlements themselves, you know, if they have the means to be able to put money into the project, great. If they don't, that's fine, too. at all of our sacred settlements, almost every one of the homes are sponsored, paid for, and built by another church in the community. Because maybe another church says, you know, we don't have the land for this or we don't have the culture for this, but we also, we want to help get in the game of responding to chronic homelessness. So we can lift up one person off the streets through one home. And then because they're on wheels, they can actually build the home on their church property

so that over, you know, nine weeks or 12 weeks, they can start to show their congregation, you know, from trailer all the way to fully built home, how they're adding one new unit of affordable housing and lifting one of the hardest to house most expensive to the public off the streets. And the crazy spin that makes this curveball really break is your unexpected revelation of what it's doing for. for the church itself. Yeah. That's incredible. I mean, we do talk about as Christians declining membership in churches, declining Sunday worship, declining engagement, small groups, and Sunday school class declining engagements and youth programs.

And giving only the average American gives 1.9% of their disposable income to charity are away from typing. Wow. But the churches that are doing this, you're experiencing growth. Yeah. Phenomenal. Are you living in one of these settlements? I do not live in one of these settlements.

We live at the settled homestead. That's what I saw. What does that mean? Yeah, so the settled homestead is a place of gathering and training. So we see ourselves as a national organization. And we also are building an ethos and a culture. It's not just tiny, plop tiny homes on land, and it's not a program. It's a lifestyle.

And it's like in a redemptive model, everyone wins. The land, the animals, the people, the building. So how do we think about the church? How do we think about how this all works together? So the settled homestead is a full expression of what we imagine in the world and how things, you know, an ecosystem of how it all works together. And then we invite church leaders. that are discerning a sacred settlement

to come and stay with us for a three-day intensive. And then we go and take field trips to the different sacred settlements and show them, you know, the various pieces of this. And then on their last day, we do a dreaming session

about their sacred settlement and how they can imagine propagating and bringing this back to their community. Marketing and development. That's what that is. Marketing and development. But at a very faithful manner,

All right, somebody's going to say, I got to find out. What are you, settled.com? What do people go to here? Settled.org. Yeah. Settled. S-E-T-T-L-D. Isn't it a great domain?

Oh, that's awesome. I know. Like eight years ago. I know. I saw the, when I started reading it and I saw the title, I was like, bingo. I mean, you hit that on the nail. And you have really beautiful pictures on there where they look like. I don't know if you had a chance to watch the video, but like the five-minute video that is on your website, but also on

YouTube shows it really well. We'll put that up on our stuff, won't we? Yeah, the video. All right, so settled.org. Yeah. And everybody is happy cheese. Gay, Briel. See, I did it. Somebody wants to reach out to you, can they? Sure. How? Gabriel at settled.org. There you go. Gabriel at settled.org. That's it. And remember you're speaking to a doctor, so mind your manners if you reach out to her. She's a smart woman. That's right. dude you're cool i really really really like your whole thing i wish more people were not just listening but watching um the doc has a very very very bright smile but quite discerning eyes and um i think she's uh summing things up as she goes along pretty much all the time is the

feel i get from you and um wow what it was What an amazing, faithful journey you and John David. What are your children's names? And how old are they? We've got Ophelia, Abigail, Fiona, and Pearl. Hold it. Ophelia is... 11.

Abigail. Eight. Fiona, five. F-O-O-N-A. Fiona is five. And Pearl. Is? Two.

Where these names come from? These are all cool kind of creative names. Look at her bag. Look at those names. Yeah. I mean, what's up with the name? Don't label me. Yeah, I'm going to label you.

No, really, are the names just whim names that you just get you and John David just liked? You know what? When we were pregnant with our fourth, with Pearl, and we're like, we're going to have a fourth daughter. What are we possibly going to name her? We truly, we realized that if you look at kind of the meaning of the first three girls' names, it literally means father, son, and holy spirit. And we had no idea. So we named Pearl, Pearl. But with Fourth, you're out of the Trinity.

So now you're out in the Trinity, so what are we going to do now? So we named here a pearl with a pearl of great price. So just like the kingdom, you know, what else is? Got it. Father, son, Holy Spirit, kingdom, come Holy Spirit. Got it. You're going to get pregnant again? You're going to have to go into something else.

I don't know. What's the pearly gates in Latin? I wonder. I don't know. Hey, for people listening, if you belong to a church, send this episode to people at your church, the pastor. Yeah, that's how this happens. And if you don't go to church, you know people who belong to a church. go to church and send it to them. Right. Yeah. What did we say? Fifteen percent of churches need to say yes to

you're it. Say yes. If you're hearing this and something is longing. It's not only 15 15 percent say yes to this. If 15 percent say yes to this, chronic homelessness is over in these cities and all the money and resource and hand-wringing we do over it. And suffering. And suffering for everybody involved. Here's an answer. Yeah. Fix it. Yeah. Government's not involved. On earth. It is in heaven. They made a really cool law that helped us out.

That's about it. Yeah. Thanks, God. Thanks, dudes. Yeah. The bigger change is actually us, though. There's more of us house people. Yeah.

Right? Yeah. That's right. Dr. Cloudis, you're a cool person. I love your story. Thanks for sharing it with us. Thanks for coming to Memphis and Safe Trip Home. Hey, thanks.

It was really generous of you to, like, invite me on to this show to have me out. And I love the mission of what the vision that you. see of like, hey, what is an army of normal people? What can we do? We can do everything. Yeah, we can do everything. We can fix it all. Yeah, we can. And your proof. Yeah. Thanks for being here. Thanks. And thank you for joining us this week. If Dr. Gabriel Claudus has inspired you in general or better yet to take action by exploring a sacred settlement for your church, sharing this episode or their Settled's website with your church and other churches, donating to Settled,

or something else entirely, please let me know. I really do want to hear about it. If you'll just write me at Bill at normalfokes.us, I will respond. And if you enjoyed this episode, please share it with friends on social, subscribe to the podcast, rate it, review it, join the army at normalfolks. Us, any and all of these things that will help us grow an army of normal folks. I'm Bill Courtney. Until next time, do what you can do. the profile of this beautiful finished product. With every sip, you get a little something different. Visit gentlemen's cut bourbon.com or your nearest total wines or Bevmo.

This message is intended for audiences 21 and older. Gentleman's Cut Bourbon, Boone County, Kentucky. For more on Gentleman's Cut Bourbon, please visit gentlemen's cuthuburn.com. Please enjoy responsibly. Hey, it's Ed Helms host of Snafu, my podcast about history's greatest screw-ups. On our new season, we're bringing you a new snuffer. Knafoo every single episode. 32 lost nuclear weapons.

You're like, wait, stop? What? Yeah, it's going to be a whole lot of history, a whole lot of funny, and a whole lot of fabulous guests. Paul Shearer, Angela and Jenna, Nick Kroll, Jordan, Klepper. Listen to season four of Snapu with Ed Helms on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. When your car is making a strange noise, no matter what it is, you can't just pretend it's not happening. That's an interesting sound. It's like your mental health.

If you're struggling and feeling overwhelmed, it's important to do something about it. It can be as simple as talking to someone or just taking a deep, calming breath to ground yourself. Because once you start to address the problem, you can go so much further. The Huntsman Mental Health Institute and the Ad Council have resources available for you at loveyourmind today.org.

And she said, Johnny, the kids didn't come home last night. Along the central Texas plains, teens are dot. Suicides that don't make sense, strange accidents, and brutal murders. In what seems to be, a plot ripped straight out of Breaking Bad. Drugs, alcohol, trafficking of people. There are people out there that absolutely know what happened. Listen to paper ghosts, the Texas teen murders, on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Thanksgiving isn't just about food.

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