Factually! with Adam Conover - Homeless and Employed in America with Brian Goldstone

Episode Date: May 14, 2025

Having a full-time job doesn’t guarantee a roof over your head. While many Americans still equate homelessness with unemployment, the reality is that 40 to 60 percent of unhoused people in this country are working. This week, Adam sits down with anthropologist Brian Goldstone—author of There Is No Place for Us: Working and Homeless in America—to examine the harsh truths behind America’s narrow understanding of homelessness. Find Brian's book at factuallypod.com/books--SUPPORT THE SHOW ON PATREON: https://www.patreon.com/adamconoverSEE ADAM ON TOUR: https://www.adamconover.net/tourdates/SUBSCRIBE to and RATE Factually! on:» Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/factually-with-adam-conover/id1463460577» Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/0fK8WJw4ffMc2NWydBlDyJAbout Headgum: Headgum is an LA & NY-based podcast network creating premium podcasts with the funniest, most engaging voices in comedy to achieve one goal: Making our audience and ourselves laugh. Listen to our shows at https://www.headgum.com.» SUBSCRIBE to Headgum: https://www.youtube.com/c/HeadGum?sub_confirmation=1» FOLLOW us on Twitter: http://twitter.com/headgum» FOLLOW us on Instagram: https://instagram.com/headgum/» FOLLOW us on TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@headgum» Advertise on Factually! via Gumball.fmSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

This is a HeadGum Podcast. Hey there. Welcome to Factually. I'm Adam Conover. Thank you so much for joining me on the show again. You know, homelessness is one of the most pressing problems in America today. But even though a lot of us see it on the street every single day, the truth about it isn't always what we expect. You know, I've told this story before on the show, but it bears repeating.

A couple of years ago, I was volunteering at my local homelessness coalition, a wonderful organization called SEALA. And we had a drop-in center where folks could come and pick up clothes. And one day, this fellow comes in, he's looking at the shirts, he picks out a crisp white shirt, and he loudly says, Oh, hell yeah, I can wear this shirt to work. And I went up and talked to him, I asked him what was going on. It turned out he had a full-time office job,

and he still could not afford a place to sleep that night. In fact, 40 to 60% of homeless people have jobs, but since wages have not kept pace with rent for decades, it is really easy to be gainfully employed, even full-time, and still be homeless in this country. The truth about homelessness does not match what a lot of us think or what a lot of us see on the street. For instance, our vision of homelessness is dominated by people who live on the streets,

but that is not the only form of homelessness in this country. Many homeless people live on and off in motels, or they sleep in a car parked in their friend's driveway, or they permanently couch surf. Their plight is totally hidden from us. It's invisible, even though our society is constructed to make it more difficult for them to live

than most of us can ever imagine. Now on the show today, we have a journalist and an anthropologist who has just written an incredibly well-reported and infuriating book on the truth about homelessness in this country and what it is like to be unhoused and employed in America. Before we get to that interview, I wanna remind you that if you wanna support this show

and all the conversations we bring you every single week, head to patreon.com slash Adam Conover. Five bucks a month gets you every episode of this show ad free. And if you wanna come see me on the road in Oklahoma, Washington State, Brea, California, we're adding new dates all the time, head to adamconover.net for all those tickets and tour dates. And now please welcome Brian Goldstone,

the author of the new book, There Is No Place For Us, Working and Homeless in America. Brian, thank you so much for being on the show, man. Thank you, Adam. It's great to be with you. So what do people most often misunderstand about homelessness? I think that a huge misconception is that people who are experiencing homelessness need to just go get a job. That work is an exit from this really severe form of deprivation. There's a whole range of other myths and stereotypes and misconceptions mixed in with that, that

homelessness is caused by addiction or mental illness or laziness. I think that the idea that that work could actually accompany homelessness and not be an exit from it is really shocking to a lot of people, which is why this book focused on kind of the rise of the working homeless, I think is so scandalous to many. How did you come across this idea? I actually first got the idea for a magazine story on the subject when my wife,

who is a nurse practitioner here in Atlanta, she was working at a place called Mercy Care, a community health center. This is around 2018. She began to notice one patient after another. She would be talking to them and they would tell her that they were working at McDonald's or Walmart or packing boxes for Amazon or driving for Uber and Lyft. And when they finished their shifts, they weren't going to an apartment. They were going to a shelter or crashing in overcrowded apartments with others, or even sleeping on the street or going to these squalid extended stay hotels,

or even sleeping in the very cars. They had just done those Uber and Lyft runs into the airport or wherever. She was stunned by that when she told me about this trend she was noticing. I had been reporting on various things for magazines different parts of the world and I had read a good deal about homelessness just as a somewhat educated person, somewhat progressive person. I thought I was kind of educated on the issue. I had never seen this work in homelessness sort of like thematized. I had never seen it

discussed in any explicit way. I was really surprised when I plugged the phrase working homeless into an academic search engine expecting this plethora of articles to appear. There was pretty much nothing on this phenomenon. And so that was the initial kernel that kind of sparked the idea. And then I ended up writing a story for the new Republic magazine following one family

here in Atlanta. And that grew into the book eventually. Yeah, it's funny how narrow our conception of homelessness is, right? Because the most visible form here in Los Angeles, you know, it's tent encampments. Totally. And it's people, you know,

who are in some amount of distress sort of wandering the streets, right? There's the very visible version of it. But so much of the true story of homelessness is like really invisible from us. A lot of the people that you mentioned who are driving Uber and then sleeping in their cars, well, that's not actually something

that I would see walking down the street, right? And so it's not captured in our concept. Is it not captured in the data either? So, you know, I was, to your point, I was absolutely astonished to discover that what we see on the street is really just the tip of the iceberg, the tents are just the tip of the iceberg, that there's this entire universe of homelessness out of sight that we're not seeing.

And yes, that is, that is reflected in the data itself, because every year when what is called the point in time count, the federal homeless census, every year that that's conducted, only those who are visible on the streets or living in homeless shelters are counted. Everyone else literally does not count. All the families I write about in this book, the five families who I followed over several years and the tens of thousands of families like them here in Atlanta, none of them are counted in that annual census. So, it's not just that there's this whole world of homelessness that we're not seeing. They've been written out of the story that we as a country have told ourselves about homelessness. That has had fateful consequences, not just for our sense of the true severity and scale of this disaster. By cobbling together different data sources in the book, I argue

that a true estimate of the number of people who are homeless right now in America is roughly six times that of the official count. Wow. And that is crazy because the last two years, the point in time count has been the highest level on record. Like two years ago, it was the highest level on record. And then this last year, it broke that record.

So we're looking at truly historic figures in terms of skyrocketing homelessness and the true number is around six times that amount. I point out in the book that if we gather just here in Georgia, all of the families and individuals who are excluded from the federal census of just those homeless in Georgia, you could fill the stadium where the Braves play three times over just with those who are left out. So we're talking about a mammoth population of people who are not just invisible, but maybe we could get back to that, but like rendered invisible.

This is an active production of invisibility that serves very particular purposes. Well, I mean, this sounds like, honestly, one of the headlines of your book is this figure. And look, I've done those point in time censuses myself. There's a homeless count here in Los Angeles. It relies on volunteer labor. Folks from across homelessness services will show up on one day and canvas the city.

And I did it as part of a volunteer organization I've worked with called CELA, which is a neighborhood homelessness coalition here in my neighborhood. And you go out with a clipboard, you cover your little tracks, a couple of acres, whatever it is, a square mile. And then you count the number of people

that you see on the street. And you're counting individuals, you're counting tents, and then you're also counting vehicles, but then the question is how do you know whether someone's living in a vehicle or not, right? If you can tell when you see an RV that has somebody living out of it 24-7, it's pretty clear most of the time,

but if someone's sleeping in the backseat of a car or they're sleeping in, you know, a van parked in someone's driveway, right? You're not gonna see that's gonna look like a normal vehicle. And then that doesn't even count the number of people who are sleeping on couches. And that doesn't count the number of people who, well, guess what?

They're doing that half the time, the other half of the time, they're paying for the worst motel you've ever seen. Totally. Totally. Um, I think a lot of people might've had the opportunity of accidentally staying in a motel that is actually used by mostly housing insecure people. Yeah.

I've had that happen to me before. I'm like, oh wait, this is not a hotel for tourists. Yeah. This is a hotel for people who are checking in for a night or two to get off the street, right? That's their, that's their clientele. I'm getting that vibe. I'm, I'm staying there, but there, but I'm seeing that. Right.

Absolutely. Yeah, yes. So is this is that population really not being? I mean, of course, not being captured by the government, it's not being captured by the census that I took. But are there researchers out there who are like doing the math on how many of these folks exist or do you really feel like you're trotting, you know, new ground here? I mean, so there is new research that has shown using census data,

using a community survey data, showing the number of families who are like doubled up with others in, you know, overcrowded apartments and where they are in those circumstances because of economic reasons. Not because their house is being renovated and they have to stay with friends for a couple of weeks, but because they have lost their housing, they can't afford housing of their

own. They are in effect homeless, but they're staying with others. Research has begun to count that population. And really the only data we have nationally on people living in these motels, extended stay hotels and motels, actually comes from the Department of Education. While HUD, you know, HUD is the federal agency that is in charge of counting homelessness nationwide. HUD is the agency that is responsible for allocating resources for homeless assistance. But the Department of Education, they do count through schools, the number of school-aged

children living doubled up with others and living in these hotels and motels, as well as, you know, cars, RVs, and so forth. And, you know, we know that the data the Department of Education has, as important as it is, it's widely acknowledged that this is a vast undercount just because of the challenges of counting these children. It's almost entirely dependent on families kind of self-reporting their situations. Often, when a parent needs help getting their kid to school because there's no school bus that comes to

this motel, they have to talk to the school social worker and then that family is counted. But the Department of Education does use a definition of homelessness that is crucially more expansive than HUD's definition. And the reason it's more expansive is because teachers and school social workers and principals, they saw over the last couple of decades, they saw the effect that living in these situations had on students, that these kids were just as much homeless, just as vulnerable to trauma, just as vulnerable to what public health researchers call toxic stress as kids living on the street or in tents or in shelters. The Department of Education was like, we need to count these kids, we need to get them resources, at least get them the few resources available to us like bus cards or, or grocery cards, gas cards,

and so forth. And it's, you know, just as a side note, that's why it's just utterly devastating that the Department of Education is now being dismantled. I was about to say. Yeah, I mean, we're about to lose just the minimal data that we have on this, this vast population of children. But to get back to your original question, no, I mean, this really is kind of uncharted territory as far as our conception of the scale of homelessness

in America is concerned. We do have more local research like here in Atlanta, the Southern Poverty Law Center a couple of years ago did a pretty rigorous estimate of the number of families living just at the bottom, you know, bottom sort of spectrum of these motels, like the worst kinds of hotels, not the residents in or Homewood Studios, but places like you described where just squalid living conditions, really slum conditions, mold, rodents, you name it. They're extremely expensive at the same time. It's not that they're cheaper. But the Southern Poverty Law Center estimated between 30 and 45,000 families and individuals

living in these places just in metro Atlanta alone. So it's a huge phenomenon, it's a huge population and we're missing it. And if I could just say one more thing about these hotels since we're on the subject, you know, what blew my mind was not just the fact that these hotels that I, you know, as a resident of Atlanta drive by every day, not realizing that these are basically

for-profit homeless shelters. These are places where families and individuals are pushed into, once they have been kind of forced out of the formal housing market because of low credit scores, because of an eviction on their record, they become trapped in what one family in the book calls this expensive prison of these motels and hotels. And it wasn't just shocking to discover these are basically for-profit homeless shelters

because when you don't have a family homeless shelter as we don't here in DeKalb County, one of the most populous counties in the South, there isn't a single family shelter. So when a family becomes homeless, they either are in their car, they're on the street, or they're in one of these shitty hotels. And, and so that it's not just that part that was shocking.

What was truly shocking to me is that, you know, here in Georgia and really across the country, private equity firms and wall street investors have been buying up vast swaths of America's rental housing, you know, of the single family rental homes of homes here in Georgia and beyond. And it's not just that they are making the housing people already have more insecure through, you know, these automated eviction systems and jacking up rents and evicting people to get in wealthier tenants and so forth.

But like Blackstone and Starwood Capital, these two private equity giants, they actually saw during the pandemic how profitable these extended stay hotels are. And they spent $6 billion buying extended stay America during the pandemic because they saw that amid a housing crisis, this is hot territory. If you can corner the market, not just on the housing people already have, but on the, on the places they're forced to go once they become homeless, like you can make a lot

of money off that. So that, that totally blew my mind. That is mind blowing. I, I do want to say you don't need, private equity is not necessary to like, you know, make America's rental housing horrible, right? Like, I just want, a lot of people love to blame those private equity companies,

but also quote unquote mom and pop landlords, which is what you heard a lot about during the pandemic, especially here in Los Angeles. Oh, we have to protect our mom and pop landlords. Are also folks who evict people and gouge rent and are profiting unnecessary. You know, oftentimes a mom and pop landlord is just, uh, you know, a local asshole who owns five buildings, you know? And, uh, uh, so while,

you know, those private equity companies deserve a lot of criticism, like we have an overall problem in America's rental market. And I think the point that you're making is fascinating because one might ask, hold on a second, if these extremely shitty hotels, these basically for-profit shelters are very expensive, I'm going to assume on a monthly basis they're more expensive than an actual shitty rental unit would be. Well, why aren't these folks able to afford a shitty rental unit? It's because you have to prove a lot in under our system in order to rent a place. Having money is not enough.

You also need to prove credit worthiness. You need to prove, you gotta show people bank statements. I mean, anyone who's tried to rent an apartment in a major city will be familiar with this. So once you are not able to access that system, where do you go? You have to go to the system that is actually designed to extract even more money from you.

And then that becomes a funnel to the street because, well, it takes all your money and now you don't have any. And now you're sleeping rough. If I could just tell you really quickly the story of one family in the book, Maurice and Natalia, because I think their situation totally illustrates what you're describing. And as I was following their journey, it occurred to me, you know, we are familiar with the James Baldwin line about how extremely expensive it is to be poor in this country. I think that their experience and the experience of so many people I'm writing about this book

show how extremely profitable all this precarity has become. So like Maurice and Natalia, they're a two-parent household, so they already defy a lot of the stereotypes we have about this crisis, that it's just single moms and so forth. Maurice and Natalia, they are a black family, a couple from DC. They grew up in DC. They wanted to raise their kids in DC, but they got priced out of their neighborhood. They got priced out of their rapidly gentrifying neighborhood and they became part of this phenomenon of the new great migration. Their great-grandparents had moved to DC from the Jim Crow South seeking economic opportunity and now they're being forced to move.

So they go to the Black Mecca. They go to Atlanta, where they think they can finally achieve their aspirations. They actually do for a while. They find an apartment here in one of the suburbs, Sandy Springs, and for about four or five years, they are stably housed. They and their three children are, they're able to buy a car eventually. Natalia works at the call center for State Farm. Maurice works for Enterprise Rental Car.

They have relatively good jobs. And what happens is they are informed by their very nice landlord, their very well-intentioned landlord, that she is going to be prematurely terminating their lease because it's the perfect time to sell this property, this home. They thought it was their home. It was actually just an investment vehicle for their landlord.

They're like, okay, that's fine. What they realize is now the ground has shifted under their feet. Just in the years they've been renting this place, rents have gone up like 65 percent in Atlanta. The city has lost 200000 affordable housing units just in the time they've been renting this place. So the ground has shifted under their feet. And they when they go to apply for a place, they realize that their credit score, this three-digit

number that has come to determine whether millions of people in America have access to something as fundamental as a place to live, their credit score has actually gone down over the years because Natalia has student loan debt. And so they are forced to go to this company called Liberty Rent, which is a co-signing company and all these business models have sprung up to capitalize on this housing crisis. And this is one of them. So they go with this co-signing company. They end up in this apartment complex where they're paying way, way more than they were

previously and they're hanging on by a thread. Long story short, they have moved into a property unbeknownst to them that is owned by a company called Covenant Capital based in Nashville. When they, because of some, I won't get into all the details, but because of some personal circumstances, they end up being late on their rent one month and there's no number to call. When they call the number for the leasing office, they get a recorded message. And instead, what happens is an eviction is filed against them. This automated eviction system, where if you're just like a day late on your rent, there's no human to talk to. It just

automatically files an eviction. And then finally, they lose their home. That's the first domino that falls. By the time I've met them, they've been homeless for several months. They move into a studio-sized unit at Extended Stay America. Within eight months of staying in this awful hotel room where I spent countless hours, I mean, just an awful, awful place with no amenities, no nothing. They have spent $17,000 in the course of eight months. That's more than double what they were paying for a two bedroom unit down the street. But again, like you said, because of this credit score, because of now the eviction on the record, they have fallen into what is called the hotel trap and it's virtually impossible to get out of it.

And you know, part of why it's so hard to get out is because going back to that discussion about counting and definitions, when they go to try to get assistance, they're told, sorry, you don't fit the definition for what's called literal homelessness. So there's nothing for you. And it's like, in that sense, the only thing worse than being homeless in America is like not even, you know, getting the designation homeless in this country.

Like not even having your circumstances fit that definition. And you're just stuck in this permanent state of limbo. It's really, really bad. Are they working at this time? They are. I mean, because everyone in these places, every one of these rooms that you walk by in these hotels are filled with people who are part of the labor force. Because obviously, by definition, you have to be working because you're not paying your rent at this hotel, which, again, is like double what you were paying at an apartment. Which again is like double what you were paying at an apartment. You're not paying this every month. You're paying it every week. And if you're one day late, you will be locked out of your room. There's no court process to go through. You can't get a lawyer to keep you from, you know, getting pushed out of this room. You're just locked out. So everyone is working at these places or at least has some sort of, you know, disability income.

But everyone is has income and that income is just being swallowed up by these establishments. So during the day, they're going to do, what kind of work do people, just like give me an example occupation that someone might have in one of these places. Maurice and Natalia are the exception. They, you know, they're working, like I said,

at State Farm in the call center. They're working, Maurice is at Enterprise Rental Card. Most people who are part of this population of the working homeless, they are working in low-wage jobs that aren't just paying not nearly enough to afford rent or certainly these hotel rooms or where these hotel rooms are swallowing up 90%, 100% of your income. It's not just a matter of low wages in these jobs, food service jobs, caregiving jobs like home health aides, medical assistants. One of the characters in the book mops the floor at the Atlanta airport, but she's an

employee not of the Atlanta airport, the pride and joy of Atlanta's economy, the busiest airport in the world. She's actually an employee of a contractor, and that contractor gives her only 29 hours a week of work because at 30, she would be eligible for benefits. Wow. So these are the kinds of jobs that people are working. And I think it's really important to note that in our discussion of the housing crisis, you know, we often there's this formula of like low wages, not being enough to afford skyrocketing rents. And there's a lot of truth to that. But it's not just the wages. It's

that the nature of work itself has changed over the last few decades. Work itself in a growing number of industries has become just exponentially more volatile, insecure. You don't know how many hours you're getting from one week to the next. One of the characters in the book, Celeste, she is diagnosed with ovarian and breast cancer. She's living in a place called Efficiency Lodge, one of these extended stay hotels. She has to decide whether she's going to keep showing up for her warehouse job or whether she's going to go to her chemo treatment. Because if she goes to get chemo, she doesn't get paid at her warehouse job. She has no sick leave. And if she doesn't get paid, she can't pay her hotel bill. And then she and her kids are on the street. So it's, yeah,

it's not just wages. It's work itself. Work itself has become more precarious. Folks, if you listen to Factually, it's probably because you actually care about what's going on in the world. But, you know, keeping up with politics can still be overwhelming, right? It moves so fast and changes so drastically, it can feel nearly impossible to keep up. And that is exactly why the NPR Politics Podcast

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That is joindeleteme.com slash Adam, promo code Adam. Tell them Adam sent you. The thing that really leaps out at me is the people you're describing are people who work in customer service jobs or visible jobs, right? If I go to State Farm, I go to the enterprise rental place, I am walking down the, I go through the Atlanta airport, right? I'm walking through the person mopping the floor, right?

That's homelessness. Like I am seeing people who are unhoused, they are living, or at the very least, housing insecure is another term that we use. But, I mean, the folks that you have described, this is homelessness. They're paying day to day that could be on the street any day.

They do not have a home. They're staying in a place that is designed to be transient housing, and they are not able to level up, and yet they're doing a job that is anyone would consider like gainful employment, right? They're wearing a fucking red polo shirt and they're not able to afford a place to live.

I mean, and that's why, even going back to your original question about like the myths and misconceptions about homelessness. One idea I think we have even among liberals and people who consider themselves more sympathetic or compassionate when it comes to homelessness is we tend to think of people experiencing homelessness as kind of on the fringes of society. You know, and even spatially, homelessness in our minds tends to be confined to skid row areas. So, we tend to think of homelessness as springing up in areas of extreme poverty and also as

people who are on the outside. Those are images that have proliferated since the 1980s when mass homelessness first exploded in the US. But I think what is like really shocking about the people who we're talking about is these are not people in the fringes of society. These are people whose labor, whose work, whose bodies are actually powering the very growth, the very booming economies that perversely are forcing them

not just out of the neighborhoods where they grew up, these formerly black working class neighborhoods here in Atlanta, but they're increasingly forcing them out of housing altogether. So like they are working the essential jobs. They're working the jobs that a city like Atlanta or Nashville or Charlotte or Austin or Phoenix or LA or any number of other kind of revitalized you know cities where these this much celebrated urban Renaissance has taken

place. These people are making that Renaissance possible and yet like their work and work you know working and working and working some more. It's not enough to just like secure this most basic need. Yeah. And they're doing jobs that we interact with, you know, they're driving, they're driving Uber, you know, the, the amount of time. One of the things that I think is shocking about Uber is the degree to which you encounter like precarity in our economy when you're riding in an Uber. Like a lot of times I can do an Uber

and I'm like, this person's having a rough time, you know? But we just sort of put the headphones in, tune out, right? But like that's, it's almost a job that is designed for folks who live in precarity. Another one that I think about a lot is, there's unhoused folks in my neighborhood. I know some of them by name. One of them is one of the most industrious recycled object collector, right?

This guy, every single trash day, right, goes and collects the redeemable cans from everybody's blue bins on the street. Does it professionally? Does it quickly? Does it safely? I separate out my aluminum cans, the ones that I know are valuable,

to just like save them a little time. You don't have to go digging in my bin, right? Yeah, yeah. And then he takes them to the scrap place. That's a half a mile away. That's in, you know, it's in the parking lot of a supermarket. And when I go by that scrap place,

there is a line of folks who are there dropping off scrap, aluminum and other metals. Right? Yeah, yeah. Look at those folks. Every single one of them is not living rough, but they're definitely in the population that you're talking about. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

This is work that is, our economy is offering to people, right? Someone said, hey, it's worth it to me to pay people money to bring aluminum cans and other recycled goods. But who's bringing them? Not folks like me. It's not like part-time work that,

hey, anybody is gonna pick up or some high school teen is gonna do. It's like specifically structured by our economy to be something that is only, it's at the bottom end of the economic food chain, right? It's somebody thought it was valuable to do, but the people who are doing it are, you know, folks who are unhoused.

And it's like our economy has created this role of precarity and keeps people in it purposefully. I mean, how else are you supposed to look at it other than that's the case? We have housing that is only available in such a situation as you described. We have work that is, doesn't provide you any benefits and provides you only enough to barely scrape by. The system has created this tier of our economy and we refuse

to even count it statistically. Is there another way to look at it or am I right? No, I think you're absolutely right. I mean, the kind of labor that you're describing is it's important to remember that work can take many forms. It's not just like wage labor that is work. I mean, taking care of kids, taking care of your own kids is what like many moms were doing for three years who were receiving welfare. But they were told, no, you have to go like join the formal labor force in order to, to, you know, sort of be able to, I don't know, like, enjoy the inherent dignity of work. Like, I mean, there are stories of women who were taking care of a disabled, you know, parent or their kid, and they weren't considered part of the labor force.

And so, you know, welfare reform, what it did is it forced all these people to go out and get a job. And so it's like, it's not a job if you're taking care of your kid or disabled elder, it's only a job if it's someone else's kid or someone else's elderly parent. And, you know, we have all these arbitrary ways

of defining what work is and what isn't work. And it's also a reason why I push back against, you know, a kind of lazy reading of even this book, which is that like, oh, you're talking about the working homeless, that's like a segment of the unhoused population that I can like feel sorry for, I can, I can have sympathy for them, right, they're the deserving poor, the undeserving poor. And that's a distinction that has a long, long history in America going back to the colonial period. But the undeserving poor are those who aren't part of that formal labor force. But no, I mean, just to survive on the street, you have to engage in all sorts

of work. It's incredibly hard work, whether you're getting a paycheck every week or not, but it is a spectrum of labor, a spectrum of work. And I think what really is astonishing is just how much of even the formal labor market is now comprised of people who don't have housing or who are right on the verge of being pushed into homelessness. It's just, it's something that should be a scandal in this country, you know, that like somehow, as you put it, you know, are a strong economy can emerge not despite this skyrocketing homelessness,

but in some ways, like alongside of it, and maybe even because of it. Like there's something perhaps intrinsic to our idea of a strong economy and the metrics we use, like a growing GDP, low unemployment, you know, how the stock market is doing that actually like has this kind of extreme precarity baked into it. Yeah, I mean, let's expand that a little bit like our own lifestyles as affluent

people sitting here in buildings that we're able to pay for. I mean, I'm in a I'm in a podcast studio, but this is part of my work, right? It's paid for partially by the show that we're on right now. It looks very fancy, by the way. It's semi, it's fine. It's semi-fancy. I like, you know, headgun, they're nice people. They're a nice, they'll let me use the studio, but you know, the economy is working for us, right?

But our lives are, to some extent, upheld by the people on the bottom, right? Because they are sweeping the airport that we go through, right? They are collecting the cans that are recycled into new cans that I then purchase and put on the street, right? And then they're picked up again and recycled once again. Like, we see these folks as being, you know, a sort of refuse of the system

or an unfortunate byproduct, when in fact they're as intricately woven into it as the rest of us are. They're doing work, they are, capitalism is profiting off of them. I mean, yeah, one way to put it is that like, capitalism profits off of my labor, it also profits off of me as a customer, et cetera.

Capitalism is also profiting off of these people, right? It's sucking money out of out of their pockets. They are a profit source that then is distributed through the economy. And, you know, sometimes it ends up in my pocket. Just as all economic activity does. Right. We're all part of the system that has produced this. That's why I don't think it's enough in our discussions about housing and homelessness, this idea that we just need to build more units. We just need to let the market do its thing and

cut all the red tape and just let private development flourish. Because what that doesn't reckon with is precisely what you're describing, are the ways that capitalism itself, or at least American-style capitalism, which is even more kind of, let's just say it's a very particular kind of capitalism, depends on the insecurity. It produces it actively. And, you know, even going back to the extended stay hotels, there is, you know, just huge profit to be made from all of this insecurity. Homelessness has become big business, not just for, you know, the co-signing companies, but for some like really powerful Wall Street, you know Street firms. I just think that to suggest that all of this could be solved by just

allowing the market to operate in a more efficient way, misses not just the really acute power asymmetry that exists in this country between landlords of all kinds, as you mentioned, not just private equity firms, but landlords of all kinds and tenants, property owners and those who are deprived of the opportunity to own property in this country, but misses out on just how lucrative this has become and how much of our economy now depends on sucking every ounce of money, every ounce of money,

every ounce of profit from all of these laboring bodies. Well, both things can be true, right? I mean, I think about this a lot. And the fact that housing is such a scarce resource, I'll just say in Los Angeles, where I live, it's not a scarce resource everywhere, certainly is here, right? That is part of the problem. Like part of the problem is that the owners of the resource Let's say in Los Angeles, where I live, it's not a scarce resource everywhere, certainly is here, right?

That is part of the problem. Like part of the problem is that the owners of the resource use it to extract money from the poorest, right? The eviction as a source of revenue. I first became aware of this reading Matthew Desmond's wonderful book, Evicted. You're writing about basically the same subject. You're doing a very important work making this visible,

right? But the reason that those like bad actors have so much power over the poor is that the resource is so scarce. If there was massive amounts of housing available, they would have less power. We have two problems working together. And so that's why I've always felt, you know, we sort of, you know, pose these two arguments against each other.

We need more housing and we need less rapacious landlords. We need fucking both. We need both things, right? We need more public housing. We need more social housing. We also need more market rate housing. Uh, we, you know, we've got like a multi-fucked problem in America that we need to solve through every resource. And some of those, sometimes capitalism is good at some things.

I'm not a fan of the effects of the system overall. I think we can, I think we can, we need to build more capacity and reduce the power of bad actors and shift our economy in a direction that's more equitable to people and do all these things at once. And I object to anybody who says that

we should just do one of them. Totally, I absolutely agree. And I think that like we don't have the luxury right now of having this sort of Manichean, you know, either or scenario. I think we need a both and approach to addressing this catastrophe. But I do think that we have to be clear-eyed about the reality of why this problem exists to begin with. In a state like Georgia or in a city like Atlanta, we don't have all of the red tape to building a new apartment complex.

We have tons of new units going up. They are just not meant for the people who I'm writing about in this book. They are not meant for that person who is cleaning the floor at the Atlanta airport. Will that affordability eventually trickle down once we – and the filtering process and once we have enough units at Skid – sure. How many years is that going to take? I think you're right. We don't have to choose one or the other. I do think though that we need just – and this might be jumping the gun a bit to solutions, but I think we need a pretty fundamental paradigm shift around housing itself.

We see it first and foremost as a means of accumulating wealth. The few who are lucky enough to own property or to be a landlord, we have this idea that they will just invariably profit to some extent off the many, many, many, many more who just need a place to live. I remember thinking during the pandemic, there were these two brothers in Tennessee who were vilified for, I don't know if you remember, but they rented a U-Haul and they were going around to Dollar Generals buying a hand sanitizer and masks. Then they were selling it on eBay and Amazon for like 90 bucks a pop. I remember thinking, they were on the front page of newspapers and there were calls for

them to be prosecuted. I remember thinking, that's what we've done with housing in this country. We've allowed this incredibly precious resource to just be hoarded up. And yes, it has to do with scarcity, in some ways an engineered scarcity, but it has to do with supply not meeting demand. But once we are in that situation of supply not

meeting demand, we've allowed this precious resource to just be hoarded up by a relatively few number of actors and then just auctioned off to the highest bidder. And so the idea that if we just incentivize those, so to speak, those two brothers to be a little bit more equitable in how much they're selling that hand sanitizer for, that seems kind of absurd to me. We need to address it at its source, which is treating this resource as something that can be hoardable, that can be profitable in this way. I just think that until we acknowledge that and begin to be, I'm an anthropologist.

One of the most basic moves that we as anthropologists do in Anthro 101 is to say, our job is to make the familiar strange. And nowhere is that more pressing, I think, than when it comes to housing. We need to become anthropologists and drop in on our society and just be like, how the hell did we come to treat housing in this way?

Like, is it something that everyone needs? Like the most, like we don't, you know, treat clean water that way. We don't even treat education that way. We say that if you're a kid and like you're entitled to K through 12 education, regardless of whether you can afford it. We don't say if you're lucky enough

to afford a private school, you can get educated. We say, no, it's even compulsory that you will go to school. And yet we've allowed housing to just become what a case manager in the book, we've allowed the housing hunger games to sort of become the norm where it's like every person for themselves. And if you need assistance, like you enter a lottery, a fucking lottery to determine whether you will have access to a housing voucher.

Where only one in four people in this country who qualify can receive it. It's just like, that is where the homelessness and housing crisis flows out of. And I feel like we just have to sit with that. Yeah. You know, the grocery store and I feel like we just have to sit with that. Yeah. You know, the grocery store and I don't exactly have the best relationship all the time. The second I see something remotely tasty, it is in my cart.

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Hungryroot.com slash factually, promo code factually. It's interesting in this country because we, there are public goods that we make sure that everyone has access to, right? Clean water is one of them. Clean water is, you know, in most communities in America, most communities in America, safe and extremely cheap and widely available, right?

Food is actually, you know, it's not free, but, or extremely cheap and widely available, right? Food is actually, you know, it's not free, but or extremely cheap, but like food as a percentage of average person's income has gone way down. There's huge amounts of subsidies to make sure we produce a lot of it, because it's a human need, right? We actually do subsidize quite a lot of housing,

but what we subsidize is home ownership, right? The government has created the 30 year mortgage as a way to make sure that people were able to buy homes. And you know what? Extremely successful way to build a middle class, right? A lot of people have that. That's what we did. We turned it into an asset where people, they don't just have a place to live, but they

have a way to build wealth. And that's benefited a lot of people. I know a lot of folks who are my age, their parents are getting older, and I was just having a conversation with a friend the other day. They were like, my parents don't have any retirement savings,

but they do own their house. So then eventually they'll sell their house and they'll move into a nursing home, right? And great, fine, it's taken care of. You know what I mean? It has served that purpose. What we have not subsidized at all is rental housing. We do not provide any kind of like guarantee

or even assistance with people for rental housing on a wide scale. And we are really shooting ourselves in the foot as a society, because first, you could look at education and say, okay, we provide free education, K through 12, to everybody in America. Because education is important, we think it's a public good. Sure, maybe that's why we do it.

You could also make the more cynical argument that we do it because the labor force needs a place to keep their kids while they're at work. Right? Everyone needs to go work in the factories. The kids need some supervision. So we go send them to a school. Certainly a lot of school districts in America,

that's mostly what they're doing. It's just a cheap public subsidized daycare. Sure. Okay, sure. Why isn't the same thing true of housing? Hey, don't all the people in the factory need a place to live, right? That isn't causing them to eventually have to move into a tent on the street.

Like, shouldn't we be able to make the same argument for, hey, there should just be a lot of, we used to have housing like this. We used to have like SROs and, you know, a certain low level of housing that was a little bit more available in this country that seems to have, it disappeared. Like we are, we are harming America by not having this basic resource for people.

Yeah, and I think we have to ask, like why is it that having so many housing insecure people in this country, specifically workers in this country, hasn't been seen as more threatening to the businesses that employ them, right? Because you're referencing the possibility of something like a company town, right? I was just rewatching the other night the movie Harlan County USA. I don't know if you ever saw that great documentary about a coal miner strike in Kentucky. And yeah, all these people live in the town and it's basically owned by the coal mine and

they use script to shop at the company store and all that. But they all have housing until they organize and go on strike and then they're forced out of their housing. But yeah, why isn't that more threatening to have all these workers who are on the verge of homelessness and who might have to even quit their jobs or leave their jobs in order to attend to just the needs of being homeless? I think part of the answer is that the labor force is, at least in these industries, there's

a sense, just like with these extended stay hotels, it's sort of like the work analog of this for-profit shelter system where if you complain about the conditions, if you say like, I'm not going to deal with this black mold anymore. I'm not going to deal with this faulty plumbing in this hotel room. I'm not going to deal on the work side of it with know, hours with the lack of benefits, the response you get is, well, you're welcome to go somewhere else, right? And the reason they hear that response is because there's a sense on the part of either the management of the hotels or on the other side of bosses and management that like someone else is going to fill that role pretty quickly there. And so People are seen as expendable, they're seen as disposable.

I think that's why, unlike a coal miner or maybe a so-called skilled position or more specialized work where maybe there is more of a need to take care of your workers and make sure they have these at least a modicum of stability. I just think that there's this increasing sense that people are expendable and replaceable. So yeah, I don't know. I think that, or they're all just going to wake up one day and realize that they've created a system that is completely untenable and that it's in the process of upending itself. Well, the companies, the businesses might not figure that out, right?

Like for instance, we've moved to a gig economy where workers are asked to bring their own resources. Hey, you don't drive a cab anymore. Now you show up, you bring your own car, your own insurance, right? You provide it all yourself. And we decide how much you're paid almost randomly based on the surge.

You clock in, you clock out, right? We have no responsibility for you. We have no connection to you. You're just a person using an app, right? That'll work fine for Uber. I'm not sure Uber is ever gonna wake up and go, oh, we've created a horrible economic system, right? They have, I mean, their product is bad.

It's horrible being in Uber's, again, partially because you are confronted with, holy shit, this person's having a rough time and here I am in the back of their car. Like, I think that that's bad. I think it would be better if we had a system that was less, had the precarity right in our faces like that.

I think we'd all feel better when we go to a business where the employees seem happy and well-fed and like that they got good rest rather than when they're harried and in fear and have not slept. But I'm not sure that the businesses that are making the narrow choices to create a precaritized workforce

are the ones who are gonna figure that out. I think it's gotta be us as a society to look around and go, what the hell happened to our economy, you know? And we've done that at times in the past. I mean, I'm pretty sure that, you know, look at the fucking grapes of wrath. Right?

It's like, that's America looking around going, oh my God, what the hell happened? We've got destitute people roaming the country in search of work. This is bad. And then, you know, we, in the succeeding decades, we built an economy that worked a little bit better for people in the middle part of the last century.

And now we seem to be sliding back to a system where we're okay with the working poor sleeping on the street and doing the labor that all of us rely on. And I mean, hopefully that you'll wake up and make a change. Yeah, I mean, I think we've tended to think of homelessness especially as like, like we've, we've been given two options in America, like one on one side, it's like judgment or

pathologizing people, you know, experiencing homelessness or on the other hand, like charity, compassion. And I think like, you know, getting back to something you mentioned earlier about just how often we are in close proximity to the working home. Every time we're in an airport, every time we're in an Uber or Lyft, we could be in the presence of someone who's in exactly this kind of situation. It's like when you go buy a sandwich at Subway,

you think that the person you're buying the sandwich from has a place to live, you know what I mean? You think that that person is living, the sandwich costs $5. Like you think that this is, this has happened to you every day. You're handing money to someone who doesn't have a place to live

and you don't realize it. Yeah, and you know, and in a city like Atlanta, again, like all the stuff that, that, that we, and I use we, you know, broadly here that we enjoy about the city, you know, all the new amenities, the green space, the, the new breweries and whatever, you know, the cafes, like all of that is, is being sort of one at the expense of these people. And it's like, so there's this Toni Morrison line that I think about a lot.

She gave it during a commencement speech at Sarah Lawrence College in the 80s, but she's like, imagine and vision if our fun, our enjoyment didn't come as a result of the deprivation of another. That is very much the dynamic I think we're looking at with a book like this or a phenomenon like this where it's no longer a question of do we feel compassion for this Uber driver, this subway guy making my sale. It's a question not of charity. It's a question of justice and injustice because something is profoundly broken. There's some benefit being

gained. This is something Matthew Desmond also argues in his more recent book, Poverty by America, where it's like, why does this kind of poverty persist? Because we benefit from it, right? Yeah. is this kind of poverty persist? Because we benefit from it, right? Like, because we profit from it, both as individuals and as a society. And I think like, that's where the conversation has to go is like, it's not a question of like, do I feel sorry for people anymore? It's just, it's, it's wild that so much of even the debate around homelessness in a city like LA has come to be hijacked by this question of like, like, sympathy or, you know, or, or compassion or do we, you know, do they deserve to be rounded up and criminalized or put into camps? It's like,

we were so far from the truth, the heart of the matter, which is that, like, the reason these people don't have homes is because, not just because they can't afford them, because they don't have access to homes they can afford, but because there's this larger system that is somehow thriving as a result of that insecurity. Yeah, like when you talk about private equity buying up apartment buildings, right?

I genuinely do feel that sometimes we overstate how important that is causally. That even if people weren't doing that, even if those large companies weren't doing that, we would have plenty of problems just with smaller local landlords. For sure, yeah. But what is remarkable about Blackstone

and companies like that, or BlackRock, excuse me, buying the- Blackstone and BlackRock, yeah, yeah. Oh, okay. Yeah, yeah. I always get confused because when I was a kid, there was a famous magician named Harry Blackstone. And then, so when I say Blackstone, I'm always like, that must be wrong,

because that was a magician who used to be on PBS when I was a kid. Basically, it has black in it, like, you know, black soul, black heart, black existence. It's a private equity firm. Well, so what is actually remarkable Yeah, Black Soul, Black Heart, Black Existence. It's a private equity firm. Well, so what is actually remarkable about these companies buying these buildings?

That's your 401k, right? That's your, if you have money in the stock market, or you have any investment, or if your money's in the bank, right? Then that large company owning those buildings is part of what is earning you an interest rate, right? On your investments. then that large company owning those buildings is part of what is earning you an interest rate, right? On your investments.

And that connects you to the experience of the person who is being preyed upon by these businesses. Exactly. And it's a really direct connection between you and me. I'm talking about myself specifically. That's what I'm reflecting on in this moment. I can't even tell you like the number of conferences or events I've gone to,

even like in the world of homeless services, where because so much of the kind of advocacy or resources given to homeless services comes from philanthropy. It's like some of the biggest philanthropy groups in this country accumulated much of their wealth as a result of either directly or indirectly through what you're describing. But that's true for individuals too. My parents read my book and they were like, what do I do about this? How can we change this?

A lot of their finances are wrapped up in stocks with BlackRock and Blackstone and so many retirement funds, pension funds, like you mentioned, are wrapped up in this. I think it goes to something. Another point, you talked about home ownership being this like, home ownership being this, this means of like, even just being able to retire in America. And I think we have to grapple with that when, you know, those of us who talk about like decommodifying housing or removing housing from sort of speculation and, and wealth accumulation, like, we have to grapple with the fact that in this country, people need a home. They need to own a home, those who are lucky enough to be homeowners, because that's in many ways the only

way they are going to have a future and retire or put their kids through college. In countries like Austria, where Vienna, for instance, has been able to have just incredible success with what's called social housing, you know, kind of public housing done right, public housing without all the stigma attached to it, and without poverty being concentrated in these housing units and for people across the income scale. But, you know, social housing is able to be what it is in a city like Vienna or in a country like Finland because all of the other interlocking systems that have made our housing crisis possible and this homelessness crisis possible aren't there.

They're not dependent on owning a home in order to put their kids through college or in order to imagine retiring. Like there's, there's a larger safety net in place. Like there's, there's guaranteed health insurance and, and so forth. So it's like, it's hard to just pick out the home ownership piece or just pick out the housing piece and not address all of the other ways that these uniquely American kind of maladies are also conspiring to contribute to this disaster. Yeah, I mean, I don't think the point here is to say that, if you own a home that's bad and you're complicit,

if you have a 401k, you're bad and that's complicit, it's to say, this is how devilish this problem is, that we constructed a system over the last 100 years that all of our individual personal prosperity are now tied up in other people's precarity and deprivation, right? Unfortunately, that is the world that we live in. And that's gonna be a really hard thing

to extricate ourselves from. The first thing to do is to understand that it's happening. Yeah. The second thing to do, I think would be to propose some policies. So what are your antidotes, or what's the first few steps that you might have that can help us get our way around this issue,

even on a personal level? I mean, in some ways, and this is gonna sound like a cop out, like I feel like my kind of modest contribution to all of this is simply to document the sheer scale and nature of the problem, to widen the lens, to, and really to historicize in some ways, to explain how it is that our field of vision

has become so narrow. Going back to the Reagan administration in the 80s, how it is that the narrative around homelessness and who is counted and the magnitude and severity of the problem was allowed to become so narrowly defined. Because when you narrowly define it, it's easier to claim that you're tackling the problem. And it's also easier to sort of mistake symptoms for causes, to say that people are homeless

because they're in the throes of mental illness or because they seem to be in the grip of substance use and so forth. No, that's not what caused, for instance, children under the age of six to be the fastest growing segment of the homeless population even in the 80s. I do feel like my contribution is to first say, let's widen the lens. Let's see just who we're talking about here and how many people we're talking

about that. It's not just 770,000, which again is the highest number on record of unhoused people in this country. It's actually closer to 4 million. To say that is not just to catastrophize. It's to say that, again, to quote James Waldo, not everything that's faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it's faced. Like we have to confront both the true scale and severity and crucially the nature of this problem, like the root causes of this problem.

And once we do that, I think we'll see that our kind of like technocratic fixes and nibbling around the edges, a few tiny homes over here, a couple of like supportive housing units or like 80% AMI over here. Like again, like we need a both and approach. We need every single thing on the table. We don't have the luxury of like saying,

nope, don't need those tiny homes. But let's not kid ourselves. Once we look at the true scale of this crisis But let's not kid ourselves. Once we look at the true scale of this crisis, let's not kid ourselves that that's anything close to what's needed. And, and to answer your question, like what is needed? Like there are all sorts of like immediate policy steps we could take to ease people suffering. Like it's astonishing how rarely in the homeless service space there's discussion of like preventing homelessness from happening to begin with. Like keeping people in the homes

they already occupy through strengthening tenant rights and tenant protections and through eviction defense, through like right to counsel. Like the fact that you could go through an entire conference on homelessness and not hear about eviction defense or right to counsel says something about our understanding of homelessness in America. So we have to keep people in the homes they have. We have to like ban retaliatory evictions where if someone reports unsafe conditions to the authorities, like the landlord can evict them, which happens all the time. So we have to ban those sorts of things. And just doing that alone will stop this relentless churn

where in a city like LA or San Francisco, for every one person who gets into housing, another four people become unhoused. And that's why you can throw billions of dollars at getting people off the street and homelessness continues to spiral because, because you're not stopping that relentless churn. So like prevention has to be a key part of this. But of course, so does like just building more affordable housing, building more housing for people like the families

I write about in this book and making it easier for the families who are languishing in these hotels and motels or in their cars or in shelters to get into housing through like banning like extortionate application fees and all the ways that people are trapped through the use of credit scores and the way like medical debt debt tanking your credit score, that's something that the FTC under the Biden administration had just passed a rule, removing

medical debt from credit reports, and Doge has now basically erased that progress. There are all sorts of low-hanging fruit policy solutions that can be enacted immediately to ease people suffering. Um, at the end of the day, like the North star, I believe this is, this is, I guess, just my opinion. The North star has to be just a massive, a truly massive public reinvestment in, in kind of public housing done right. I just don't think that the private market on its own will ever be reinvestment in kind of public housing done right.

I just don't think that the private market on its own will ever be incentivized to provide for the housing needs of those who are at the bottom end of the income scale. And that's a huge number of people in this country. So in the absence of being able to incentivize the private market, in the absence of landlords. In cities like Atlanta, landlords are not incentivized anymore to even accept a housing voucher because in hot rental markets, you have five people competing for one unit. So why am I going to take the person with the voucher when I can't jack up their rents arbitrarily and where I have

to abide by certain safety standards? So like incentivizing the private market, yes, we can continue to expand the voucher system. We can continue to expand LIHTC, which is low-income housing tax credits. We can do those things, but we really need just a massive public reinvestment in millions of low- income housing units. And the only way we're going to do that is through a paradigm shift around. What housing is and who it's for. And, you know, and, and basically grappling with what we've allowed our country to become.

Well, the first step is informing us about it, which is, uh, so we, we all fucking know it's happening and it's not so invisible right in front of us. And so I really thank you for writing this book and for coming on the show to tell us about it. The book is called There Is No Place For Us. You can get a copy, of course, at our special bookshop, factuallypod.com slash books. And of course, every purchase there supports the show

and your local bookstore. Brian, where else can people find you on the internet? Look, I mean, I am trying not to be on X because that is X, but I'm on Blue Sky, I'm on Instagram. You can look me up at bryangoldstone.net to see the events that are coming up. But yeah, I'm around.

Thank you so much for being here, Brian. Thank you, Adam. It's great to talk to you. My God, thank you once again to Brian for coming on the show. If you want to support the show and all the conversations we bring you every single week, head to Patreon.com Adam Conover. Five bucks a month every episode of the show ad free for 15 bucks a month. I will read your name in the credits this week.

I want to thank Joseph Mode, Rodney, Pattenham, Greg, oh six nine two, Riccarthius, Marcella Johnson, Matthew Bertelsen, aka the bunkmeister, Kelly, no, act Anthony and Jenna Barclay, David Sears, VG tank guy, Damien, Frank, Matthew, Robert Miller, Griffin Myers and oh, no, not again. If you'd like me to read your name or funny username on the show, once again, head to patreon.com slash Adam Conover. If you'd like to come read your name or funny username on the show, once again, head to patreon.com slash Adam Conover. If you'd like to come see me do standup comedy on the road, head to adamconover.net.

I would love to see you out there. Thank you to Tony Wilson and Sam Rowden, my producers, everybody here at HeadGum for making the show possible. Thank you so much for listening and we'll see you next time on Factually. I'm out of here. I'm out of here. That was a hate gun podcast. Hey, I'm Tony Hale.

I'm Matt Oberg. And I'm Kristin Schall. And we're going to be hosting the new podcast, The Extraordinarians, where we are going to be interviewing extraordinary people, doing extraordinary things, things that we have never and probably will never do. We talked to people who have broken records on slacklines suspended by hot air balloons. We're talking to people who have done multiple flips on trampolines. You'll have to tune in to find out how many flips they did.

Subscribe to Extraordinarians on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Pocket Casts, or wherever you get your podcasts, and watch me. Watch it on the YouTube. There's new episodes that we release every Wednesday. We do. I've never seen you cry before. I know. I don't know how I feel about it.

This is upsetting for all of us. They don't let us pray for lunch. They do. The podcast is so competitive, they make you just talk it down. Guys, we're watching a spin out. Please subscribe. Oh man.

Extraordinarians. Hey, I'm Jake Johnson and I host the Head Gum Podcast, We're Here to Help with my partner, Gareth Reynolds. We're Here to Help is a call-in advice show. Think car talk from back in the day. We're determined to help fix life's dumbest problems. We also have guest helpers join us from the entire cast of New Girl to Michael Cera,

Andy Samberg, Jimmy Kimmel, just to name a few. So do me a favor and come check out an episode and then bounce around our catalog. We're over 150 episodes so far, so there's plenty of stories for you to discover. Subscribe to We're Here to Help on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Pocket Casts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

New episodes drop every Monday, and bonus episodes drop on Wednesdays. Hi, I'm Jessi Klein. And I'm Liz Feldman, and we're the hosts of a new Headgum podcast called Here to Make Friends. Liz and I met in the writer's room on a little hit TV show called Dead to Me, which is a

show about murder. But more importantly, it's also about two women becoming very good friends in their 40s. Which can really happen, and it has happened to us! It's true! Because life has imitated ours. And then it imitated life. Time is a flat circle.

And now. We're making a podcast that's about making friends. And we're inviting an incredible guest like Vanessa Barrett. Wow, I have so much to say. Lisa Kudrow. Feelings, they're a nuisance. Nick Kroll. I just wanted to say hi.

Matt Rogers. I'm like on the verge of tears. So good. So good to join us and hopefully become our friends in real life. Take it out of the podcast studio and into real life. Along the way, we are also going to talk about dating. Yep.

Spousing. True. Parenting. Career-ing. Yeah. And why we love film. And Louise and It's the Greatest Movie of All Time. Shouldn't need to be said.

No, we said it. It's just a true thing. So please subscribe to Here to Make Friends on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Pocket Casts, or wherever you get your podcasts. And watch video episodes on YouTube. New episodes every Friday.