The Joe Rogan Experience - #2181 - Alan Graham

Episode Date: July 26, 2024

Alan is the founder and CEO of Mobile Loaves & Fishes, a Christian social outreach ministry that provides food and clothing, cultivates community and promotes dignity to homeless men and women in need. He's also the host of the "Gospel Con Carne" podcast and author of "Welcome Homeless: One Man’s Journey of Discovering the Meaning of Home." www.mlf.org Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

The Joe Rogan Experience. Trained by day, Joe Rogan podcast by night, all day. Hello Alan. What's happening? Well I'm here on the Joe Rogan Experience, man. That's what's happening for Alan. Push this thing up, get it pretty close to your face. Yeah, great.

Thanks for doing this man I'm I was very curious to meet you and I heard so much about you from John Paul de Giorgio and You know what you're doing and we've always wondered like there's always been these questions like how do you put a dent in the homeless situation like what can be done and What I see from you is probably the best example, the best possible example I've ever seen. And going to your place, going to see this community that you've established

and how you give these people hope and a purpose, it's really pretty amazing stuff. Well, I appreciate that much, yeah. How did you get started on this journey and when? How long have you been doing it? Well Joe, the organization is 26 years old, so founded it in 1998. It was just a simple idea to start going out on the streets and feeding people out with a catering truck, what many of our friends would call a roach coach. And I got this idea built on a conversation that my wife and I had with a girlfriend of

ours who was telling us about a ministry in Corpus Christi, Texas, where on cold winter nights, multiple churches would come together and pool their resources to take out to the men and women that were on the streets in the winter in Corpus. And at that moment, the image of this catering truck came out of my subconscious mind into my conscious brain as a distribution mechanism from those of us that have abundance to those that lack. And that was pretty pretty simple. And as a serial real estate entrepreneur, I thought that that idea was a brilliant idea. Of course every idea that you come up with is a

brilliant idea. When you're a serial entrepreneur and it just blew up in a positive way. But it really began a couple of years prior to that on a spiritual retreat that I went to at my church, that I was invited to. And had I known that a bunch of guys were going to get together and hold hands and kind of do that bromance hugging it out. I'd have never gone, but I end up in this retreat for 30 hours of

hand-holding and bromance hugging it out and had a pretty powerful experience that really just led me to go and, God, what do you want me to do? I mean, I wasn't asking for anything big. It's just, you know, what are the little things that I can go out there and do? And it was through that and a series of things that led to the founding and then ultimately the founding of the community. So it was essentially this one retreat, you get this vision of just wanting to do something.

And this is why why did you concentrate on homeless people? Like, what was it about that? You know, out of the retreat, the idea was fundamentally to, what can I do at church? You know, I can become a lector, my wife can go do the nursery, you know, we get our kids involved in the thing. The intellectual relationship that I had with Jesus, because there was an intellectual side to this, during that retreat just kind of dropped a floor into the depths of the cave of my heart.

And so there was a different relationship that I was experiencing with Christ. Trevor Burrus What do you mean by that? Like you had an intellectual relationship and then you had a different relationship? David Sperling Well, look, there are elements of the Christian that would first begin with the, that the angel of the Lord came to a poor Jewish 14 year old little girl and impregnated her with the power of the Holy Spirit. That's a weird thought that you gotta buy into.

From that, the son of God is going to be born, a virgin birth. He's going to be on this earth for a period of time, and then he's going to end up being executed. And he's going to rise from the dead, descend into hell, then ascend into heaven, but prior to that he hangs out for another 40 days with his brothers. These are incredulous things to believe. And so at some point in time you have to end up in this intellectual space where you're just kind of going, okay, I'm going to believe that my faith is going to drive me there. So when my wife, prior to 1996, started taking our children back to Mass on Sunday, and I

wasn't part of that, I began to look at that as the train was leaving the station. And my father had left us when I was young and divorced my mentally ill mother and left me and my three brothers, you know, almost stuck with a mentally ill, beautiful mom, but struggling mom. And I begin to look at Tricia, who we will celebrate 40 years this year, kind of gets me emotional thinking about it, as taking our children and leaving the house, the train leaving the station, and I'm sitting back fixing to get ready to go into the

office to do some work on a Sunday, because, you know, we're both kind of serial workaholic types. And I decided to jump back on that train and begin to really explore my Catholic faith. And through that process, I just got enamored with the Church. And when I talk about the Church, I'm talking about the whole thing. The Roman Catholic Church, the Eastern Church, the Protestant Church, the schisms, the heresy, the wars, the reformations. And I got enamored with maybe one of the greatest novels ever written in mankind. What a train wreck this whole deal is. Yet, at the center of that deal remains this Jesus of Nazareth. And so that was very

intellectual for me. And I was buying into it. My faith was buying into it. I was believing in it. I wanted to believe into it, but I had no factual things to take me there. This retreat took that intellectual stuff and dropped it afloor right into the depths of my heart. And that's where the change really began to occur. It became more of a heart relationship with Christ as opposed to an intellectual thing. So when you talk about these specific concepts that are hard for people to wrap their heads around like the resurrection and like the virgin birth, all these things. What do you do with that in your mind when you say you have an intellectual relationship with it?

When you come across something that seems impossible, how do you manage that in your mind? How do you approach it? Well, look, I think there are just some things in the world that you just have to be willing to accept. The immensity of the unknown, basically. And you and I live in a universe of the unknown. We would all agree, and I think science would agree, that there are things that we know, but it's probably extraordinarily limited.

Obviously, much more than we knew five or six hundred years ago. But today, we're not even... You know, I was talking to somebody today about transistors, you know, and if you go back to the Apollo days and your little radio that you could dial in, you could open it up and you could see the little transistors that are in there. Well now we're putting a million of them on the very edge of the size of a fingernail, you know, and you and I can't comprehend that, but I believe it, but I can't see it.

And I know people do see that. So you and I live in a world basically where we're having to accept things for the most part that we can't. Well, sort of. The transistor thing, like first of all, we have schematics. We understand how they work. You can look at them with microscopes. You understand the process of putting them on these chips.

It's like, it's very scalable. And it's also, there's a real paper trail of when they were, do you know the whole story of how transistors first appeared? It's very fascinating. It's one of the most you want to talk about mysterious things One of the more interesting things about the UFO folklore is that they believe that we have back engineered some of our Advances from crashed crafts and the transistor is one of them that sort of comes out of nowhere

Another one is fiber optics. They all sort of seem to come out sometime around 1947 after the Roswell crash. Yeah, well, you know. Just for a little kooky piece of trivia. Yeah, but I haven't ever seen a UFO. So you know, and I'm gonna believe I'm gonna, you know, yeah, maybe, you know, maybe that's that's. Do you believe in that? Do you believe that like like, God has created other

life forms in other places? Dr. Craig Slauson I believe it's completely possible. And, you know, I'm cut out of the doubting Thomas, if you're familiar with the apostle Thomas, I'm cut out of that cloth. There's a great image, and it's an image in our sanctuary in the village of Caravaggio called the Incredulity of Thomas, and it's got Thomas sticking his finger into the wound of Jesus with what I believe are the Apostle Peter and Paul looking over the top. There it is, yeah. And I speak in that. I have a talk that I give called

the gospel concarnate, which is the gospel with meat, but that woundedness, that, I mean Thomas, you know, when the boys came to him after the resurrection and said Jesus is alive, he basically said, bullshit. I'm not going to believe it until I see the nail marks in his feet and stick my finger in his side. And this is the phenomenal depiction of that by Caravaggio. And Thomas, if you really look at it, look at his face, bro. Look at the grimace, the forehead, his eyeballs. You can't see it very well on this screen, but his eyeballs can't even look at him putting his finger in that deal. And then he's got the torn garments, like he's homeless. And then you

look at Christ, and you know, Christ's face is, I mean, I don't know how you can paint that kind of compassion. And then his arm, hand over the forearm of Thomas guiding that finger in, in the most gentlest way, and the boys looking over the top of that deal. And look, these are all fishermen, people, and I have no doubt in my mind that they're looking at that and going WTF. Yeah, for sure. I mean, because they were they were just guys. Right.

Yeah, and, but at that moment, he uttered, you know, that he believes, you know, my Lord, my God is what he said. And so, you know, there's always the doubt in the, you know, whether there's aliens or not, I don't know. But I would be an idiot to say, I absolutely don't know. I mean, I absolutely know there's not. Do you approach religion with that same line of thinking? I approach religion from a faith level. I was raised, my mom, when she went into a mental hospital when I was four years old, spent spent a year there, subjected to the most powerful psychotropic drugs known to man, electric shock therapy, the whole deal. My dad files for a divorce during that period of time,

attempts to strip my mother of her maternal rights of her four boys. My mom wins all that because she had great parents. She gets out and at some point in time she converts to Roman Catholicism and drags me and my brothers to church and the whole deal. I was four or five so I don't have much memory of that, but I have a lot of memory of the love that my mother had for Christ and Mary. And when you're in love with somebody that has profound behavioral health issues like my mom had, and you see that Christ and his mother, Mary, brought tremendous relief to my mom, that

has an impact on you. So I go into this with faith, complete faith. And I'm just released of trying to figure out, is it right or is it wrong? And I'm released of having to prove to people. You know, I don't get into apologetic arguments with people. This is just who I am and how I express who I am. That is one of the more fascinating things about people that are very religious, is that whether or not you think they're correct or not, it obviously has a profound effect on them. And then this relief of release, like

you're discussing, is obviously hugely beneficial to people and to communities, and it motivates people to do beautiful things like what you've done. Yeah. No, that's, you know, look, if God is the creator, He's created all this. So when I tell people all the time, you know, that want to get into a different argument about this or that or the other, I just go, look, man, you know, God created all this, He's going to have to sort all the bullshit out. I'm not the sorter or outer. But this is how I'm going to live my life to the best that I possibly can, which is

simple. Love God and love your neighbor as yourself. So that's what we're going to do. Yeah, and it's a beautiful way to live. It really is. And it's interesting that some people would dismiss it and even dismiss the beauty of it because they're opposed to the idea of it being attached to religion. Well, if you look at what we humans have done in the name of religion, or even non-religion,

over the course of our entire history here on earth, we've screwed the pooch. Yeah. We've also made a lot of great advances. Tremendous advances. We have Penicillin now. Thank God. So we have Penicillin now. You know what I'm saying? Like, yeah, we have ruined a lot of things, but you would not want to be alive 5,000 years ago.

It would have been fucking barbaric. Well, look, I just got back. I mean, last year I walked the Camino de Santiago. I'm going back in September. What is that? That's a pilgrimage. Today, in a funny way, is in almost providential, is the feast of St. James the Apostle. And it is believed that the bones of St. James the Apostle are buried in Santiago de Compostela, Spain. For over a thousand years, there

have been these pilgrimages, and a half a million people will do that pilgrimage this year, walking along a 500-mile journey, which I did last year and I'm going back in September to do another 300 miles, along one of the most medieval journeys on the planet, going from one little small medieval Spanish town, another until you get to Santiago, where the bones of the apostle another until you get to Santiago where the bones of the apostle are buried. And so it's a pilgrimage. It's one of the three great pilgrimages. Pilgrimage to Rome, pilgrimage to Mecca. How long does it take?

Well if you try to do the whole 500, six weeks. It can be done faster if you're in Joe Rogan shape. Yeah, if you're in Alan Graham shape, we're gonna take a little time. But you really want to saunter through the deal as opposed to, you know, power. Right. Power through it. And just take in the experience. Yeah, and you know, although people from all walks of life walk this deal, it's a very Roman Catholic deal because all the churches in all these small towns are Roman Catholic churches and it goes back in the medieval time when the crusades were going down and there was the battle between

the Christians and the Sacerans and all that. It's a magnificent experience. And when you do these things what do you get out of that like what does it do for you? Well last year the purpose was to celebrate the 25th anniversary of mobile ocean fishes and congratulations on that. Yeah thank you man I appreciate it. Very very impressive. Thank you, man. I appreciate it. Very, very impressive. For me, I'm going back in September and I have two of my kids going with me, so it's going to be this great spiritual opportunity to journey. And then along the way, God brings into your life people from all walks of life. And you don't know the impact of people coming into

your life. Like, you know, look, I believe I'm sitting in this chair right now because of how God has architected us over a few years coming together and now we're here. And so life is a camino, which means the way, and you know, you and I are on this journey and lots of things come into our world that just kind of come out of the ether and appear. So why not create as many opportunities in our lives? Many people want to architect how things are going to go in their life, and they've got to have it precise and planned and this is a very

unplanned, I don't know where we'll be sleeping on any given night, I don't know who we're going to encounter at any given night, I don't know what restaurant we're going to be in on any given night or where we're going to eat a meal or you know who we're going to meet. And so there's just a there's a lot of providence that's that's in this journey and in this pilgrimage. It's cool. It's something that would blow a Joe Rogan away. I'm sure. It is always interesting to me when those moments do have when you know someone enters your life you meet someone and you just go I want to know more about the way you think. I want to know more about what you're doing. And the way I was introduced to you, we went, my wife and I went to a fundraiser and you

had this incredible demonstration of what you're doing and what your organization is all about. And then maybe more importantly you came out and talked and the way you talked was with no ego and with kindness and with sincerity and immediately I thought I want to talk to that guy. I want to find out what's going on with him. You know there's people that you meet that are like extraordinarily peaceful and extraordinarily content and that's how that's how you seem to me and

When you were on that stage talking I was saying to my wife. We've got to get his information I want to get him on the podcast. I want to talk to him. I just want to find out what's going on with him because you I think you're a very unusual person. Because there's a lot of people out there that profess to be Christians, they profess to be whatever their denomination is, whatever their religion is, but they don't necessarily live it. Like you abandoned your beautiful house and moved into one of these tiny homes in this homeless community and then when we went and toured the community and got to see how you interact with everybody it's it's beautiful it's really very extraordinary and I don't think there's very many people that would

do that what you've done you live with them, you feed them, they have all these activities, different things to do, different ways to make a living. There's all these people that are extraordinary artists. It's really amazing, impressive art that some of these unfortunate souls, you know, they have all this creative ability, but they just have nowhere to put it, nothing to do, and no hope, and no understanding of how to get out of this. And no one around them is getting out of it either, and they're sort of trapped. And then you come along and you find great value in these people, you know, and they

find incredible value in this community that you've created. And the community is constantly expanding. We were there, you were showing us about this new area that you guys are developing, where you're going to expand it. It's really amazing stuff, because it's an example of someone who's actually doing it. You're actually living that life. You're actually contributing in an incredibly positive way

to all those different human beings. The hundreds of different human beings that you encounter with this and how much you've shaped and changed their lives. It's very beautiful. It really is. Well the the interesting thing is that they've how they have shaped my life. And that's where the miracle sits. When you drive around Austin or you drive around LA, you know, where you came from or any city in the United States, and you see this catastrophe that's unfolded on our streets of all of our urban cities. It appears to be hopeless. It's just a mess. And what we want to do is be able to bring people into our village and let them see that there is hope,

unbelievable hope, if we do this right. if we get our act together as a civil society and begin to do things for people. When we begin to learn, you know, and how I like to describe this is I say to people, you know, and people will, you know, they've got this stereotype of the men and women out there. They're dope addicts, they're alcoholics, they're mentally ill, they've chosen this, they're lazy. And I said, look, imagine being a 12-year-old little boy or girl. You're laying in bed at night, and you're in between, you're in that twilight area between being asleep and awake. You're looking out the window at the starry, starry night. You're dreaming about what you're going to be when you grow up.

I can tell you that my dreams at 12 were three things. One, I wanted to be a rock star. Did you really? Sure. Played guitar, had a Fender Mustang, was in a band. Remember playing the song Bad by Cream, I think. Eric Clapton, Jack Bruce, Deal. Football, I played football, was a moderately decent football player at one time. Thought I could play in the NFL. You've seen my DNA, you realize that that was never possible, but it was still a dream. And then I wanted to be a jet fighter pilot. You know what's amazing is I'm 68 years old today, and if I'm driving and I've got

ACDC cranking in the car, guess who is on stage playing that guitar and singing that song? It's not Angus Young or Bon Scott or Brian Johnson, it's Alan Graham doing that. Or if I'm watching a great football game, you know, and I see somebody throw a great pass or do a great block or a hit or something like that, I go back in time. Or if I see a F-22 screaming across the sky, I still dream today. And I tell people one of my favorite smells on the face of the planet is burning jet fuel. I love being on airports. I became a private pilot. I don't fly now, but many years ago. So the embers of that those little boy and girl dreams are still inside of us. You had them. I don't know what they were at that

time. And then somebody came in and poured fuel on top of those little boy Joe Rogan dreams that now have you... because you couldn't be laying in bed at night going, hey man, I'm dreaming of doing the Joe Rogan experience thing. It wasn't on the plate. This thing was never on the plate. Yeah. What happened? No, that's exactly exactly but somebody was fueling whatever your dreams were along the way until you got to the dream that the world needed you to be in. And for these men and women who lost their family completely and nobody there to pour fuel on those embers that were burning. That's really what we're doing.

So when you come into our art house like you did and you see the artwork that's being produced, the Van Goghs that are being produced by men and women that are on the street, we as a society are missing out. And yeah, look, we got the crack addicts and the glue sniffers and the prostitutes and the convicted felons, all that comes with the package. Yeah. How do you do that to make it safe for the other people there? Like if you do have the other people there? Like if you do have the, you know, the bank robbers and all the people that live a dangerous life and they find themselves homeless, and how do you do you screen those people out? Like what do you do?

We do very little screening. We want to know who you are. But it's a very low barrier entry to get into our deal. We demand civil obedience. I will tell you that over the course of my life, I have personally known thousands of dope addicts and alcoholics. Most of them are just good people. Isn't that crazy? Yeah. I think that's the case with all people.

I think most people are good people. But we are so – we gravitate so much to elevated threat levels that we concentrate on the bad people all the time. It's like the news, right? The news doesn't show you all the news. It shows you what's scary. There's a lot of beautiful things that are happening all the time that the news never highlights.

The news just gets you freaked out about global warming, nuclear war, economic collapse. Is that really Biden or is that a guy in a Biden suit? Whatever it is, it's just more crazy things that get you freaked out. But the majority of your interactions with other people, the majority of your experiences with people are pretty positive for the most part, even considering all this stress that everybody's under all the time. Bills that can't be paid, relationships that suck,

jobs that you got fired from, all these different things. Hopes and dreams that are crushed, flat tire, bad transmission, fuck. Most people are good, most people. That's why you can go on the highway and everybody for the most part is doing what they're supposed to do. Working together, man. Yeah, when someone doesn't it's like, what is on the highway and everybody, for the most part, is doing what they're supposed to do.

Working together, man. Yeah, when someone doesn't, it's like, what is it? Look at this asshole, driving like an asshole. But for the most part, the vast majority of people are letting you into the lane. They're all pretty much adhering close to the speed limit. Well, here are the numbers. 400 formerly chronically homeless men and women living in our community. Average time on the streets is nine years. At any given time, 15 to 20

are given us a run for the money. 380 to 85 are just fine. When you say give it as a run for the money, what's the worst case scenario? Well, they're bringing, most everything that happens negatively out there is going to be related to dope and alcohol. So you may have the on-site dope dealer that we got to manage and figure out how to either tone that down or get them out of there, that kind of thing. The really aggressive meth or crack cocaine addicts are going to be stealing somebody's

bicycle or debit card to go buy, you know, something. Or sometimes we have the confluence of profound mental health issue and drugs coming at the same time and they'll get destructive on their property. Those kind of things. It's the reality of the whole world that we live in, in a microcosm there at the Community First Village. It's probably similar numbers. Well, that's right. Look, we go everywhere, every day, all the time, and we're safe. We live a great life. Yeah, for the most part.

It's just these threat things that people concentrate on. We are engineered to try to stay alive. That's what our DNA is all about. If you want to procreate, if you want to carry on your genetics, you want to keep your loved ones alive, you gotta stay alive. So there's this fear, this constant fear, and it's crippling. Because it's projected, it's projected both by the mainstream media and it's projected

by social media algorithms. The things that you interact with the most, the things that freak you out the most or anger you the most are oftentimes the ones you see the most because you interact with those and it's designed to keep you hooked. And unfortunately, what that's doing is it's making us anxiety-ridden freaks. And we're losing our understanding of humanity. And it's also extremely polarizing. We had a conversation about this at your place.

You know, the news today, it's so polarizing. It's us versus them inside our country for the first time in my life. I've when I was a kid when I was in high school, my parents were very liberal and They never talked disparagingly about Conservative people or Republicans. They just thought they were wrong. That's all it was like they had conservative friends They would sit at the dinner table and have conversations about stuff Maybe they'd argue but it was always fine. It was just two human beings disagreeing on things now It's like everybody's a Nazi or everybody's a communist. It's like

It's just one side is absolutely sure that they're right and the other side is absolutely sure that they're right and it's just Accentuated by everything we see. So when you can see someone like yourself in a microcosm, put this together and make a real community of some of the most disparaged members of our society. The people that know you look when they're trying to get money at the stoplight, you look away, you drive past them and they're tense, Jesus Christ, what's that guy doing in there? You don't even think about them. The same type of person that might see someone with a flat tire and pull over, like, hey buddy, you alright? Can I help you? Because you're me, I'm you. We're at the same sort of stratus in society, we're acceptable members

of society with cars and homes and normal people with jobs, you know, so I'll help you. But that guy over there, like... Well, this is what we have to... You know, when you look at the purpose of Mobile Loaves and Fishes, our vision statement, the thing that drives our organization is that we empower communities into a lifestyle of service with the homeless, not to and for, with the homeless. This metaphorically is the same thing as pulling over and helping the guy change the flat tire. There's a guy on your street corner and up underneath that bridge that you pass every day. Can we

pull over and help them change that flat tire? That's what this is all about, because the government... we have to quit yelling at the mayor and the city council to go and fix this problem. This is what we do, okay? We need government to come alongside of us to do this, but look, this is a human issue and the government is not coming into your bedroom tonight to tuck you in. You know, we need a human-to-human, heart-to-heart connection between people who are broken and battered and come from a trauma background that you and I, I mean a

battlefield background that you and I can't even begin to understand. Yeah, that's the main thing, right? People always want to use that term, pull yourself up by your bootstraps. You can't even comprehend the starting block that most of these folks have. Well, and nobody has, Joe, that nobody in history has ever pulled themselves up by their bootstraps. It's nonsense. It's nonsense. I mean, there are things that you should do in your life. You should have discipline. You should have work ethic.

You should strive to your goals. You should be a good person, try to keep your body healthy. You should do all those things. But all this pretending that everybody's starting from the same spot, and the reason why you're successful and they're not, is that you work harder. That's just foolish. That is ego and nonsense and a complete lack of perspective. One of the things that I've always said is that I find it fascinating when you see a city like Los Angeles is a

great example of this because in Los Angeles no one walks, everyone's in their car and you go from your car to your home, right? So you're constantly isolated until you choose not to be. And then when you do go out and you find these people that are in these tents, that's like, they just, they're not in the community. They avoid them. They get away from them. We didn't, if you go back and you study the history of tribal human beings, we didn't ever live like that, right?

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

Reflection of how sick the culture is and how sick the community is in Los Angeles, which is one of the most morally deprived twisted ideologically imprisoned Places I've ever been to has the biggest most insane homeless population Did you see where Gavin Newsom issued an executive order today to clear all the camps in California? What does that mean? Well, we don't know, but it comes out of that. Well, it's because he wants to be president, right? Well, you know, it's a political move for sure, but it's related to that Supreme Court

ruling, the Grant-Pass versus Johnson ruling that the Supreme Court just did. And so it's an interesting byproduct now of what we're going to witness. Well, it's a byproduct of people's absolute frustration and fury over this. You know, what was interesting is I had a woman that worked for us a few years ago, and she was a PhD English classic, very, very smart, learned person. And I asked one time, where did the word homeless come from? And she went and researched it. And the first time that she could find it

appeared back in like the 700s in a limerick from Ireland or something, an Irish limerick. And then it didn't reappear again until about the 15th, 16th, 17th century type of thing, and it was not even hardly present. But when you get to the 1970s and 80s, the word became ubiquitous. And through a Google search, you can see that this word appears in every publication, on every news media staff, a million times every single day. It just becomes... And why in this window of time, basically the 70s, you know, on, is that word so prevalent? Because we didn't have this. When I moved from Austin, Texas, I mean from Houston, Texas, the Houston area in 1976, there weren't people standing on our street corners begging. You had the, you know,

the Otis's from the, you know, Andy and Mayberry downtown chronic inebriate drunk downtown, but it wasn't ubiquitous on every single street corner. What the hell happened in the past 46, 7 years? What do you think happened since you're in it? Well, profound loss of family, culture of death within our community. Culture of death? Culture of death, just people not caring about other human beings. Our individual rights superseding the rights of the community. Those kinds of

things are constitutional individual rights and I believe in our Constitution. This isn't an anti-constitutional thing, but you know recently you know on my Facebook which is my only social media deal, I'm a member of my high school thing. And one of our assistant principals recently passed away, Coach Yark. And there were five, six hundred comments on Coach Yark and 90% of them were from men who got into his office and ended up being paddled, you know, during that period of time and talking about how awesome Coach Yark was. And I couldn't tell you how many licks I got from Coach

Yark during that period of time because I was a little turd ball when I was in middle school. And that's what they used to do to kids. They used to paddle you. Yeah, they used to paddle you. I got paddled when I lived in Florida. Yeah, well you can't be paddled anymore. There's no discipline, you know?

Right. I don't know if that's a good thing though to tell people that the way to discipline someone is to hit them. I don't think that's correct. I think that's a lazy approach. I think there's other ways to instill discipline. We have to learn how to discipline. Yeah, you have to learn how to discipline. The problem is they're just dealing with large numbers of people and that's the fallback is to scare them and give them pain. The problem is

you're encouraging people to hit other people and then you encourage it as a form of punishment. It's just not the way to go. Yeah, I'm not disagreeing with that. I'm just, you know, saying that there was a different time. People were disciplined out of fear. Yeah. But I think there's other ways to discipline people. You know, I think there's different programs that you could especially get rambunctious

young boys involved in and it would temper most of that. Well, it's like the outdoors, you know. Young guys don't get to go outdoors now. They don't get to shoot guns and bows and arrows. And I grew up hunting and fishing and, you know, raised my family outdoors, hunting and fishing. And a lot of energy got exerted in that process. A lot of testosterone was released out there in the wilds.

It's also a more natural activity than sitting in a classroom. Sitting in a classroom is the most confusing thing to a child. They do not want to do it. They don't understand why someone is telling them to sit still. Well, I hated it, so it didn't work out. And you should. It's not good for anybody. I mean, I'm not telling kids listening to this, drop out of school, but I am telling you that it's designed for one thing. School is designed to get you accustomed to doing things you don't want to do so that you become part of the workforce. And that's what it is. It's not necessarily your friend. I mean education is a wonderful thing enlightening your mind filling your mind up with new and exciting information and

Exploring the world is fantastic heavy emphasis on exploring. Yes experiential yes all that is Fantastic, but what they're doing to kids is not yeah, they're making kids sit down all day. They don't want to they're making them pay attention to some shit That's boring from some unenthusiastic uninspired teacher who's underpaid and it's a mess. Well, I'm a dropout So there you go Didn't work for me. I didn't drop out but I did have nightmares after I graduated high school that I was gonna have to go back Yeah, I had these terrible nightmares. Yeah. Like it was something fucked up but I didn't get all my credits I gotta go back and do high school over again. Yeah.

Yeah the the reality of the way we educate people is that it's just not well thought out and it doesn't it's not aligned with human nature. It's not in aligned with the requirements that a young healthy body has for activity. Yeah well we used to have you know PE we don't do that. Right. Yeah it's also the things that they're learning they're not even necessarily absorbing correctly because they're not enthusiastic about it. When you show someone something that's really interesting they absorb it. They get into it. It resonates with them. They want to they want to be involved in it

Which is why I'm sure you could think back like I had a great science teacher when I was in eighth grade I think about that guy all the time. He was great He put in my mind the the concept of infinity You know he put in my mind he would tell the whole class, like just one night, go outside and look up and realize that there's no end. Because you really want to make your brain hurt, try to figure out what that means. Like there's no end to that. Try to figure, try to think about how far that goes back and don't let that thought go. I thought about that almost every day in my life from a guy that I met

when I was 13 years old. Yeah, still do. Yeah. Yeah. Every now and then you get a really good teacher. Yeah. You know, time being the same. He was also a guy who fought in Vietnam. And I think that, you know, he had this perspective that he was trying to relay to us. Like, this is not a long time. You don't have a long time here.

Like, you got to figure out what you like and get after it. This is not what you think it is. And you're going to lose people along the way. Yeah, there's a great kind of a poem out there called, The Prophets of a Future Not Our Own, about how insignificant we actually are. kind of a poem out there called the profits of a future not our own about how insignificant we actually are. We're just a puff of smoke in this infinite space-time, particularly time, space. We're only here. You and I are

sitting on this history of human time. Right. It's not even measurable. We can't even see it. We'd have to have a microscope in order to be able to really look at it. Yeah. And we are so trapped in our own life in what we're trying to achieve and what we're trying to do in our social circle and all the nonsense that we have going on in our life that we

lose our perspective. And that's really unfortunate because even our perspective, just to think about how small we are in this life and how quick this life goes by, that in the universe this planet is nothing. Like nothing that you can see in the night sky is anything. It's just too much. It's so big. I think that's one of the reasons why in a similar way, people who live by the ocean are very chilled out.

You know, I think there's something about being by that ocean that makes you go, oh, what is this? What the fuck is this? This is all bullshit. Look how much water there is. Or the same thing about mountains. People that live in the mountains, they have a... And food.

And food? Oh, because there's plenty of food there. Right. That's true, too. That's where all the food is. Right, right. But there's something about the humbling of the environment. Like mountains are another example of that.

There's a humbling of the person by their environment. And I think one of the main problems that we have in civilized society is light pollution. And because of light pollution, we're not humbled by the night sky like our ancestors were. Our ancestors, every night, they got to view the most spectacular thing a human being ever gets to witness, the vastness of the cosmos right above their head every night and Now we don't even see it. We we sacrifice that so we could take our Toyota to 7-eleven at 10 p.m. Yeah. Yeah, well we can travel and look at those look we got little spots

Right. Yeah, but not much get like a little dose. You're supposed to get vitamin D every day, you know I think you're supposed to get vitamin space every day too. Yeah, yeah. No. I think you are. I think the sun gives you vitamin D and it makes you healthier, and I think space makes you mentally healthier. Well, I like vitamin space. Vitamin space is legit, man. I'm going to adopt that, yeah. I went to the observatory on the Big Island, the Keck Observatory. I've gone a few times

since then, but one time I caught it perfect. One time, me and my family, we went up there and it was no moon at all. The moon was hidden. So the sky was just everywhere you looked, there was just billions of stars. And you could see the full Milky Way with the naked eye and it felt like we were What we actually are it felt like we were on an organic spaceship That's hurling through the vastness of the universe and the satellites screaming across I didn't see any of those you didn't see no I didn't see any of those. I mean, maybe there was less of them back then we're talking about like 2009 I guess 2008 when it's probably 2008 when

when this really rocked me I just remember thinking watching it like you know you know what I know for a fact it's 2007 I remember thinking this is such a travesty that we don't have this view every night and I think it would change the way people think it would change the way people think. It would change the way people feel about just the mystery of life itself, just to be confronted by the stars, just confronted by this inescapable greatness that's just mesmerizing. Pete Slauson Now, we're living in the Truman Show? Pete Slauson Yeah, a little bit. I think it's spiritual, too. I really do. I think it's spiritual too, I really do.

I think there's a spiritual aspect of looking out into the universe that's undeniable, and I think it imparts something into people. I think it imparts this sense of humility and wonder that we're missing. I think it's another one of the other reasons why we're so sick. I mean, you really mean it's stripping us of that wonder because we don't get to look out and dream the way that we used to dream as we looked out there into the unknown. You know, on the Camino, you end up in this place beyond Santiago called Mujaya in Finisterre called Muheyan Finasteri that was believed to be the end of the world. And it was just a coastline in Spain out overlooking the Atlantic Ocean.

So they thought that was it? That was it. And I've stood in this place where for centuries people stood and knew beyond any shadow of a doubt that they were at the end of the world. And the dreams that got us beyond that, somebody thinking to themselves that no, there's got to be more because they're looking up and they're seeing all of that vastness had to be looking across and being able to see a similar vastness that didn't end.

It's just amazing who had the courage to take that first boat trip and hope they don't fall off the edge. Well, they did. Some of them believed that you would hit a wall and you't fall off the edge? Because they did! Some of them believed that you would hit a wall and you would go off the edge. Wasn't there like ancient depictions of what the earth looked like? That would show a boat going over the edge? No, absolutely. That's what they believed. It wouldn't go out there. And you know, it's amazing because, you know, we vilify Christopher Columbus now, you know, because we've, you know. Found out he wasn't such a good guy.

Well, he had his issues. Like, you know, look, we all have to admit that we are a perverted species. Have you ever read the accounts of the priest that traveled with Columbus? Some of it, yeah. Yeah, that's rough stuff. No, it's rough. Scary. Yeah. Yeah, that's rough stuff. No, it's rough. It's scary. Yeah. Yeah, they were monsters

Yeah, but in Spain, he's a hero because he connected the European continent to the American continent Right. So it's a whole different during September when you're there It's his, you know Holiday and feast and all that stuff. They go nuts. Do they still have Columbus Day here? Or is it your colonizer? No, I think they have Columbus Day, but I think he's gotten so beat up. Didn't they change it to like Indigenous Peoples Day? Maybe they did. Did they? Jamie, find that out. They changed Columbus Day to Indigenous Peoples Day? I think they might have, which is interesting because if

they knew the history of indigenous people, a lot of bad stuff going on there too. A lot of bad stuff. A lot of bad stuff going on right here. No, humans... Yes. Yeah. That's the reality.

There's never been one group of humans that lived in this perfect society, this utopian world where they were kind to all of each other. No, no. No, humans have always been barbarians and conquerors. Yeah. Yeah. It's just, what does it say here? It depends where you live. Some places like Portland, and Texas is still Columbus Day. Where state workers have the

second Monday of October off. Oh, but that's just when they so the other places they don't have that off. So it's just holidays, state holidays honoring Native Americans. Do they still call it Columbus Day on your phone? It's I couldn't get a great answer. What day is it? What day is Columbus Day? Second Monday in October. Let's see if it says it on my phone still. Of these colonizers. The second Monday in October, is that what you said? Yep. Nope. Yeah. Oh, it does. It's both online. Yeah, the 14th. Yeah, Columbus Day and Indigenous People's Day. There we go. Yeah.

But my point was when we started this whole journey that the health of a community is often measured by how they treat the downtrodden. And I think it's a great, look again, I think Los Angeles is a great example of a place that's really fucked up. And the evidence is these people in tents everywhere you look. And the fact that people could just pass them by and they live there for years and it just expands.

I mean, it was bad. It was bad in certain parts of downtown LA when I was filming Fear Factor there in 2003. We were filming. We'd filmed downtown because there was a lot of these warehouses that were abandoned. And we used them for stunts and different things that people had to do.

And I took a wrong turn once. And I was down Skid Row and I was like, yo, this is crazy. Like I couldn't believe the numbers of people that were just wandering around the street, cracked out cardboard box houses. And that was the beginning of it. And that the crazy thing about that is Skid Row is essentially an engineered environment. They took all the mentally ill people that they arrested from all other parts of Los Angeles and they brought them to Skid Row and they kept them there. They just put in, you know, food kitchens and some kind of a shelter and they're like,

you fuckers stay here. We're keeping you out of Beverly Hills. We're keeping you out of Bel Air. Just stay right here. And it just stayed like that and grew. And there was a, was it the Cecil Hotel was the documentary on? Watch the documentary on the Cecil Hotel, and which is in the middle of all that. It was this beautiful old hotel and now that whole area is just chaos. And then now it's expanded like considerably. So the fact that they have never done anything about that, it's only grown and in fact more people are hired to work on it and those people are making hundreds of thousands of dollars a year and not putting a dent in it, just shows you how

sick the culture is. It's an example. And I think what you're doing is an example of what can be accomplished with a healthy culture. You know, I know you have a lot of really important, powerful people that are like, that have got your back and really love what you're doing. And because of that, you've managed to put together this enormous community. And now you have more land and you're expanding and building more of it. And if this can be done more, like, this might be the solution. I mean, what I saw from your place is the best example of a possible solution to this

ever. Because you could see those people when they were walking down the streets and waving to you and talking to you. People seemed happy. They seemed relieved. They seemed like they've got some hope. We're looking at it here. We're looking at it here on the video.

Look at that mugshot, man. That's you, buddy. Yeah. We're a piece of the puzzle, Joe. Yes, but it's a very good piece. I'm not a big fan of the word solution. you know, where people want to solve things, and I appreciate that. Humanity is very difficult to solve. We've been dealing with these issues, issues of poverty and issues of abandonment and issues

of trauma since the advent of man. Hell, the Bible basically begins with, you know, the Cain and Abel, you know, experience. So what we're witnessing today is really nothing extraordinarily new, but because of the urban environment that we live in, it's very congregated and we're so separated as a culture today that it's manifesting into this chaos. What we need to do is we need to open the door very wide to innovation. And I will tell you, from 1975 to 1995, 20 years, one simple generation, we eliminated in the United States of

America one million, that's one with six zeros after it, single-room occupancy units in the United States. Okay, tonight there'll be about six hundred thousand people living on the streets. In LA it's fifty, sixty, whatever that number is. What were those single occupancy units? Just simple single occupancy units? Just simple places with a bed and, you know, metaphorically a microwave inside, maybe a shared bathroom down the hallway. And where were these places? In all of our cities. What were they called? SROs, hotels and stuff like that. And it was just for homeless people? No, for people that lived in poverty, and then over that

period of time, since the 1970s up till now, there's been this creeping affluence dictated by the government as to what housing quality standards should be for people, as opposed to, I'm going to help you get up off the streets, Here's a sustenance to get you off the streets. You choose where you're going to live with that sustenance. So, the only reason why these single-occupancy places were eliminated was because they'd raise the standards? Raise the standards, but these places were also in neighborhoods where people didn't want those people in their neighborhoods. So it's kind of a confluence of not my backyard, plus this

elevation of these housing quality standards, that makes a place like Community First Village, which you have seen firsthand, not approved by the United States government, housing and urban development. Yeah, we have to change this. We have to open the door to vast innovation to get people out of this into places that they can afford. And there was also, during the Reagan administration, they changed the standards for mental health institutes, and I believe they let a lot of people out on the street. Well, let's, we gotta look at the facts. What I would do, there's a great podcast that came out recently through NPR called Lost Patients, P-A-T-I-E-N-T-S, that goes through the historical background of that

entire debacle, and it really begins with JFK. And the effort, and the exclamation point was put on during the Reagan administration – people want to blame Ronald Reagan, but it wasn't Reagan, it was lots of people, all of us, we the people, frankly, that were trying to get people out of the state mental hospitals that didn't need to be there, and the vast majority of them didn't need to be there, and reacclimate them back into the community. What we're seeing out on the streets right now are the small percentage of people who probably need to be institutionalized or managed in a phenomenally different way than how we're managing them now.

So they had a problem with people that were just using the mental health institutions to stay there, or was it just a matter of like they had diagnosed people with you know manageable illnesses but wanted to keep them there like how did what was the issue? Well you know it's it's it's complicated so I'm gonna just kind of do a superficial In 1887, there's a map of the city of Austin. It's an oblique map that goes from the Colorado River north through North Austin. It's kind of a topographical map. You can buy these maps today. And on that map are three prominent features. This is 1887. There's the Capitol, there's the University of Texas Tower, and there's the Insane Asylum. If you can zoom in on that.

That's the Insane Asylum? That's the Insane Asylum. That's a pretty big asylum when you see how few people are there. Well, that building is still there. Really? Right now. What is it now? It's at 45th and Guadalupe.

But what is it now? It's the insane, it's the Austin State Hospital. And so we, the people of the state of Texas and the state of everywhere knew that we had to have a place for our neighbors that lived in our communities that had profound mental health issues. The problem is that we did a lot of human experimentation during that period of time. By the time the 50s and 60s came around, we had invented these unbelievable drugs, Haldol, Thorazine, all these drugs that we could give people, electric shock therapy, which had been around for many decades prior to that, lobotomies. The whole deal about Kennedy had to do with his sister having

a lobotomy, and that there's got to be a better way that we can bring people back into the community as opposed to being in these institutions. And so I ask you and all of our listeners here, how many people do you know that are on psychotropic, they're battling depression, bipolar disorder? It's all around us. And they don't need to be institutionalized, but there are a few people in this world that need a different level of care than we're currently giving them. We have half a dozen of them that live in the village that we can't manage, and we need a different level of care.

By the time Ronald Reagan came around, we were completing what was really an honorable experiment that has gone partially awry. Right, so who else besides yourself has, do you know of other places like your place that they've done it in other cities around the country where they've done something similar? Yeah, there's replicators going on around the country. Oh, like I say, replicators. We call them replicators. We have a replication operation at Mobile Loads and Fishes, so three times a year people fly in from all over the country, sometimes from around the world, to come and learn for two and a half days in an immersive two and a half day symposium

of what we're doing. Oh, interesting. So you're teaching people how to do it other places. That's correct. How many of them exist in the country right now? I'm just going to kind of pull a number. There's a couple of dozen happening around the US and more coming. Is there a cohesive website where people can find these? No. No? No, but we'll probably have one someday. We argue, we debate,

wouldn't call it argue internally, you know, what is a replicator of the community first model? There could be, let's just hypothetically say that there are pillars associated with what we do, you know. And so how many pillars do you have to follow in order to actually be a real replicator? It's like a McDonald's deal. We're not going to be a McDonald's because I can't get, we're not going to be able to manage people to do exactly, precisely what we do. And plus, how we do it in Austin, Texas is not necessarily how you're going to do it in Minneapolis, Minnesota. But there are some characteristics of what we do that we think are extremely important. Mm. And so these people that come to you, how

did they hear about you? How did they hear that you were doing this? And like, have you had experiences with these people that explained their calling? Like why they were brought to you to try to replicate this thing in their town? Well, there's, I mean, there are people all over the US that are working in the homeless space, that have been in this space, that are dealing with these people, looking for ways to compassionately move the needle on this deal and witnessing that we're not doing a very good job in our country of moving the needle. And then we've been all over the news that this show is going to have a giant impact. We're going to get slammed, frankly,

in a positive way by people interested in what we're doing. But we've also, the Today Show, 60 Minutes, has just been so much New York Times that we've gotten to experience. They just hear about us. I mean, we're pretty well-known. Still controversial, but well-known. Well, it's a beautiful thing you're doing, man. It really is. And when you go there and you experience it, you go, wow, I'm so happy there's someone

like Alan out here doing this. And so happy that all those people Allen out here doing this, and so happy that all those people that work with you are also equally moved to do it, because it just feels like you're doing something really good. And sometimes you don't see a lot of that in life. You know, you don't see a lot of like real selfless sacrifice and done under the spirit of just trying to do good? I think, you know, through these symposiums and through the work, there are a number of people out there in the U.S., you know, trying to figure things out. It's the confluence of where I came from out of the business community, you know, maybe kind of rare people leaving, you know, one thing in order to jump in to

another thing, but have had the experience of running operations the way that I ran those. And that's what we're trying to do. We're trying to really demonstrate to people that no matter what your leadership qualities are, no matter how well-spoken you might be able to articulate what's going on, there's a place for you to lead, to make a difference in your community.

Because people will say, I'm no Alan Graham. Well, thank God, number one, you're not. It doesn't take an Alan Graham to do this. But let me show you the pieces that it does take in order to make this happen and where you fit into that puzzle. That's what we try to do with our symposiums. And what's interesting also, too, about the place that you have is you give these people an opportunity to learn things and to express themselves.

And then these people wind up selling these things. Like the artwork was truly extraordinary. Like the person that's making those chess pieces, like those are really intricate. Like you look at something like that, like that's very valuable. And a lot of the art is really incredible. And just think of like how many people get affected and get moved by these pieces of art that would never experience it

if these people didn't have an opportunity to express themselves? Several years ago, my wife and I got really into Vincent van Gogh. And we've traveled around the world trying to see every publicly available van Gogh that we could possibly see. The van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam is

incredible to learn that he started painting when he was 27 years old, committed suicide at 37. During his lifetime of artwork, he sold one painting. He was an abject failure. And it's forensically believed that he was maybe schizoaffective, bipolar schizoaffective. It's also rumored that he was possibly a drug addict. I forget the drug. He spent two years in an insane asylum in a little town in Arles, France, where he probably painted the most expensive art on the

planet while he was in an insane asylum. And then it was post his death and because of his sister-in-law, his brother who died six months after Van Gogh, who really exposed him and he's considered one of the greatest artists of all time history. That's what I believe that we potentially have out there on the streets are these Van Goghs. You met Uta Dittmar, a German woman who is gifted beyond all giftedness and sold that chess set for 10,000 bucks. Wow. It's worth it. Yeah, it was worth it. Handmade, one of a kind.

There'll never be another one like it. Hand carved, hand glazed, absolutely stunningly beautiful. And I think it's up, and that's because we poured, we collectively, we the people, us not just Mobile Oats and Fishes, decided that we're going to pour fuel on those childhood embers of her dreams. And that's what she gets to do every single day is come in there and paint. Do you have classes for these people there? No, they're the

teachers. There's some level of that. It's a lot smaller than people think. You know, I don't know how you were when you were little, but I was the stick figure guy and I could only color outside the lines. It never worked for me. And so, but then there are those people that you knew and they were growing up and they could draw all the faces and stuff like that. There's a natural talent that, something in the brain, man, that they're able to get this creativity out onto a canvas

that is beyond our comprehension. I don't know how they do it. My art is the village. That's my canvas. That village is a different kind of art. But I'd love to be able to draw and paint something. I've tried. It looks like shit.

It just takes more time. When I was a kid, I wanted to be a to draw and paint something. I've tried, it looks like shit. It just takes more time. When I was a kid, I wanted to be a comic book illustrator, so I drew a lot. Yeah, so you may have that gift. Well, I think it's just an interest, and then with focus and time and dedication, you get better at it.

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

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

and it somehow or another gets into you and you're like, oh, I know how to do that. I know how to do that. That's in me. That's in me I think there's a little of that too. Well the Malcolm Gladwell 10,000 hour thing right is It's pretty legit. It's 100% legit. Yeah. Yeah time spent learning something is 100% legit the more focus the more dedication the more you're like all in on something the better you're gonna get at that and That's the difference between someone who's truly great at something And someone who's just kind of mediocre It's how much time you spend on it how much time you how much focus how much energy do you have to apply to it? Yeah, and this thing about your village is that there's a lot of these people that do have this energy and do have these

They just didn't have a path for it and it just was banging around inside of their head. Well, think about what we've, how old are you now? 56. 56. So I'm 68. And I grew up in the Houston area, born in Houston, moved out of there in middle school to Alvin, Texas. When I moved from Alvin to Austin in 1976, there were no panhandlers on our street corners anywhere

in any city. You might have had the chronic inebriate downtown LA or Houston, you know, or Austin, but you had men and women selling bottles of water, newspapers, flowers, Cal Sculls, Cal Skins, and I'm sure your favorite, Velvet Elvis Art. Everybody's favorite. Everybody's favorite. We need Jamie Elvis Art on the screen somehow. And we've outlawed all that, that entrepreneurial spirit of people, that quest of people to go out and be purposeful. And instead, the only remaining bastion of entrepreneurialism remaining in the United

States for poor people is the First Amendment free speech right to stand on a street corner and beg. And you can't go to any country in the world, Joe, and not be accosted by somebody that is selling you something. You could be sitting in the middle of Rome and there it is, baby. Come on, Mo, it's Elvis crying. That's serious Elvis. That's fat Elvis, too. Velvet Elvis. That's Vegas Elvis. Yeah. And you'd be in the plaza in Rome somewhere drinking your, you know, $10 cappuccino, and a rainstorm like today comes on, and there's a hundred people out there with umbrellas

and ponchos selling them. And you're buying them. The rainstorm goes away, and the bottles of water and the artwork and the whirly gig things come back out. What happened to that piece of who we are? One of my great friends, a guy he's dead now, John Brabbel, used to sell stuff like the skulls and the longhorns and stuffed animals and stuff and rugs and cow skins and cow skulls from a van on a street corner and built a multi-million dollar a year business, you know, that was here in Austin where you could go buy all kinds of stuff like

that because he could do it on a street corner. When did they make that illegal? It's either illegal or the occupational licensing requirements to do it have become so onerous and expensive that people that live in extreme poverty can't navigate that deal. That's the problem. Like, I think that if you're going to sell a prepackaged food item, like a bottle of water or a bag of chips or a Milky Way or something like that, you ought to be able

to go buy a box of those from Sam's Club and go stand on the street corner and sell those things or walk up and down Congress Avenue and Milky Way's two bucks. Bottles of water. You know how much a bottle of water is when you buy the case? About 20 cents. And how much do you pay for a bottle of water during South by Southwest? Well, five bucks. bottle of water during South by Southwest? Well, five bucks. You'll pay two dollars all day for a bottle of water. You would buy a bottle of water faster from a guy that's trying to sell it that bought it for 20 cents than you would just to give him the 20 cents without earning it. And they would rather earn the money. So I've wrote a

little blog post many years ago called The Pan Handler, the greatest yet most ineffective entrepreneur I've ever met. They're great. They're willing to stand out there on a street corner in absolutely abysmal shitty conditions, being rejected over and over and over and over again, spit on, reviled, all four are nickels and dimes and dollars. 40, 50, 100 bucks a day. Crazy. Yeah. We should we should empower that, but our nanny state will have them, oh we can't have them on the street corners, they're gonna get hit by a car someday. I think the fear is that you would encourage them to do that and then you would also get in everybody else's way. Well that's the

fear but I'd rather walk down 6th Street and see a guy with a guitar on the corner playing with a hat out in front and throw money in that deal, thanking them for that deal, or selling me a Whirly gig while I'm walking with my family to the restaurant that my kids looking at and going, hey daddy, I want one of those, get me please. Yeah. And you pull out a five dollar bill. It's dignity man. And then we never know where that might Lead somebody there's that big homeless shelter. That's off a seventh Street. Yeah, Seventh and Nature's Yeah, but how do they do it there? Because that seems like a crazy place to put a homeless shelter right next door to everybody partying

Because you go one block over you're on 6th Street, it's madness. It's chaos, drunks wandering down the streets. Yeah. It's fun. Well that place came about in the 1990s when downtown Austin was just kind of a shithole. Nothing going on. We were barely at the beginning of the revitalization of downtown Austin. So the obvious place to have put that shelter was there on the eastern fringe of downtown. And then there was an explosion of people wanting to revitalize, moved downtown, and then suddenly this thing became kind of the source and summit of the center of the town, reviled by everybody moving down there. So it kind of came about naturally. It actually happened during my buddy's Kirk Watson's first term as a mayor, and he regrets it. He looks at that as a mistake, but what do you do now?

Right. Do they even have the money to move it? Where would they move it and why would they move it? Well, what you have to say is that, you know, what neighborhood are you going to move it into? And that becomes the issue. And I think we'd be better off, you know, building more options like the community first and pumping more money into that. Yeah, no question. No question. What would it take? How many people are being taken care of at that place on 7th Street? I'm gonna guess a hundred and hundred hundred and fifty people not many. It's not the there's a new organization I can't remember the name right now forgive

me for that but that took it over about a year year and a half ago or so and they've done a marvelous job of you drive by it today you can't even tell it's a shelter. Hmm. So it's actually being run extraordinarily well. You said that's about a year and a half ago? Yeah. That makes sense. Urban Alchemy. Urban Alchemy is a organization out of California somewhere that came in and took that over. That makes sense, because I have noticed a difference, because when we used to do the Vulcan, which is down on 6th Street, it was like caddy corner to that place, and it was just madness over there.

Yeah, well you should... That was a couple of years ago. Yeah, but if I walk down 6th Street today, it's still full of people hanging out down there, because it's... there's a large crowd crowd there's all the things great pan handling opportunities and so until they really revitalize that area of sixth street that will probably not change right well there's some work being done doing that so we'll see yeah but are you a fan of that revitalization well Well, I own a place down there. I know you do. So.

So I'm definitely a fan. Yeah. I mean, I want it to be safer. Yeah. But it's also, I like the wildness of it. I like the fun. Yeah. Like that street's fun.

Yeah. It's got a lot of energy to it. You're hearing live music from all over the place. There's people walking back and forth and great food trucks right there. It's fun. Yeah, yeah. It's got a. Oh, that's people walking back and forth, and great food trucks right there. It's fun. Yeah, yeah. It's got a...

Oh, that's what attracts. Yeah. And so, how do we make that a part of the character of the deal without the extreme negative side effects that people experience sometimes? The extreme negative side effects of having the shelter there, you mean? Well, homelessness in general. They've made it better. Whatever they've done over the last year and a half, it has had a positive impact.

You see less of it, less real problems. You're definitely going to see, unfortunately, some people that are still under the throes of drug addiction. There's a corner over by where Buffalo Billiards used to be. You know that? Yeah, kind of Red River ish Yeah And you know drove by it the other day and there's like 15 people just slumped over

Some of them laying on the ground some of them like barely able to stand up just Rocking back and forth with whatever drug they're on. It's like cool Whoa, it's such a heartbreak. That's someone's kid, you know? That's what it is. When you have children of your own too, you look at people like that and you go, hey, that was someone's baby boy.

And now here they are, like half naked, scabs all over their body, slumped over, rocking back and forth in the breeze. Yeah, yeah, devastating. And no one's doing anything. Yeah. They're on their own, you know, and it's my feeling that in a healthy society, those people would be treated and cared for. They'd try to figure out a way to try to help those folks. But when they get out for everybody, when they get out of that misery and come into a place

like Community First Village, our statistical data that we've done over the past seven or eight years shows an 80% drop in drug use from the streets to the village and about a 40 to 50% drop in alcohol use. That's amazing. It is amazing. It's a harm reduction model. Because how are you going to live in the misery of being on the streets other than anesthetizing yourself to the max? So it's hard to blame people. I mean, we're anesthetizing all of us, right? I mean, they're so, I mean, one of the greatest drug-dealing places is all of our pharmacies

where, you know, we're all going to buy our pharmaceuticals. You know, and look, there's some interesting things going on in the world that I want to see explored, especially around addiction, and that's like the use of psychedelics in mitigating as a treatment mechanism for people. And I just would like for the world to come around and, you know, make things easier to bring relief to people, because when we bring relief to individuals, because when we bring bring relief to individuals, we're gonna bring relief to the community as a whole. And we ought to explore a number of different things. And you know, I take

the legalization of marijuana as an example. You know, look, I live in the middle of a village where it's all there. Everything is there, from fentanyl to crack cocaine to meth, marijuana, and I will tell you our potheads are happy, hungry, and sleepy. And the folks that are, you know, smoking or shooting, you know, meth and crack, many of them have pretty profound problems as a result of that. And I'd love to see some studies going on around the psychedelic nature to see if we can further help people through their addiction issues. Yeah, I'd like to see that as well. There's some powerful tools out there that we're not utilizing. Yeah, yeah, we're just afraid of them. So how does a person get involved in your,

how do they get accepted? Like what if someone is on the street and they find out about your village? What is the process? Well, first of all, they have to be chronically homeless. So there's a definition that we use that basically comes out of HUD. It's an unaccompanied male or female with a disabling

condition having lived on the streets at least a continuous year. For us, they have to be in the Austin area because we're not going to take you from Dallas or Houston or Minneapolis, or episodically homeless, adding up to a year over a four-year period of time. Why did you choose that particular time period? I don't. That's kind of a definition that comes out of the federal government. And we have a homeless management information system that's managed here in town that allows us to go in. I can go in and, you know, hypothetically look up Joe Rogan. I could see how many touch points you've had into the homeless service deal and over what period of time. But a year has got to be a minimum, knowing that the average number of years in our community

today is under 10 years, a little over 9 years. Of homelessness. Of homelessness. So, is it just that there's so many people that are chronically homeless that you should concentrate on them first? Well, fundamentally, that was my gospel call. I wanted the the roughest, toughest, hardest, most despised, outcast, lost and forgotten population. I wanted the ones that nobody believed had value. So that

fundamentally was a spiritual decision of mine as the founder of of Mobile Oaths and Fishes. And then, you know, it's easier to go after the women and children and the little families that are living in the van in the Walmart parking lot or the veterans or the this that or the other. But I wanted the lowest on the on our radar our totem poles to go after. And then so once they're chronically homeless for a year, how do you find them? Do you seek them? Do they seek you? How does what is the process? In the early days of mobile loads and fishes, we had these catering trucks, still do. There's a dozen of them in Austin.

They go out every night, serve about 1,200 meals every night. And so we're deeply connected into that environment. In 2003, I started something called a street retreat. In May of 2003, I took 15 people from my church out for a 72-hour sleepover, basically, a retreat. One-on-one retreat between you and God and the retreat center were primarily the Wallace streets of downtown Austin. We've done dozens of those. I've personally done 50. I've probably spent 250 nights on the streets myself. And you begin to build relationships with people through that process.

So many of the early people that came into the village were coming through that network. Today we're engaged. We have an organization in town called Echo. They are our Continuum of Care lead in Austin, Texas, and a number of agencies are engaged with Echo who refer people through Echo and the HMIS system into the village. And they have a coordinated assessment. They call it something else, I think now, but there's a coordinated assessment tool that people can take that attempts to assess individuals' vulnerability. So the goal from the continuum of care folks is to get the highest vulnerable people up off the streets because allegedly they cost us,

the taxpayer, the most money, although there's some questions around that now, legitimate questions. We try to get a balance because we can't become a full blown assisted living type of a deal. We need people that can live independently So there's a structure that brings people in it takes a while Are we have a waiting list of about 150 people Wow and

So you have these 3d printed houses too. Yeah, and how did that come about? Did you design those specifically for your needs were these prefabbedbed? Is this something that was already made? No, I mean we had the second ever in the history of the world 3D printed house, you know, on the property. Where's the first? The second one. Where's the first? In East Austin in the backyard of a piece of property that the icon guys own. And it was the one that they built, that they launched out south by six, seven, eight years ago. I can't remember the exact years.

They're great little places. They're phenomenal. That's one of the things that I was thinking when I got in there, like when I was a young man when I was single, it's like, oh, I could live here. This is a sweet little spot. You got a nice little kitchen area, you got a little bedroom area, you got a table, you can put television there. Not bad at all. They're great entrepreneurs. I know them well. It's an Austin-based company. We're considered a pretty awesome entrepreneurial nonprofit, Austin-based, Austin-founded, Austin homegrown.

And as they were starting to come up on the radar screen, we ended up coming together and it just made sense that they could come out there and experiment and beta-test their printers and build for us. And then these guys also have a phenomenal heart because normally new technology is reserved for people that can afford that new technology. But here's a powerful new technology that's actually benefiting people who could have never afford that technology because that technology today is not not cheap. Right. They're beating it down but it's it's not cheap. So we've built 17 of them on the two phases that we have right now.

We're under construction right now on 50 more across the street on that new phase and there'll be another 50 over on Burleson Road by the airport where we're under construction there. And so you live in one community. Yes. Are you going to have people like you that are living in these other communities, or are you just going to, like, how will you manage them? Well, there is a population of people that live in our communities, about 10% of our

population that we call missionals, just like a missionary would leave the United States and go overseas somewhere to be a missionary. There are people that have chosen and called by the gospel to live in community at Community First Village. So there's about 50-60 people that include 40 adults plus about 15 children that live in more are coming our way. So that's one of the secret sauces of our community is mixing people in there throughout the community that have never experienced homelessness but are called to serve alongside and with the formerly chronically homeless. I think another thing to bring up is that you had some resistance from the outside community,

the people that were neighboring it, they were worried that you were going to affect property values and things weren't going to be dangerous. But in fact, the opposite happened. And then you haven't had any problems, and on top of that, the communities near you are now worth more money than ever. Yeah. It's pretty funny because initially what we tried to do was partner with the city of Austin. So we're actually just outside the City of Austin. So we're actually just outside the City of

Austin. We share a property line with the City of Austin. But for several years, from 2006 roughly, 2005 roughly to 2010, I tried to collaborate with the City of Austin. Provide us with attractive land anywhere and we'll raise the money to build. In 2008, April of 2008, the city, unanimously, city council granted us a long-term ground lease on 17 acres of land in East Austin. In July of 2008, we went to a neighborhood meeting myself the sponsoring council members some of our team members system city manager my wife Tricia that just turned into Armageddon police had to be called to escort us out of there and what happened oh we were assaulted and spit on.

And the news media was there, and it was an unbelievably horrible experience. The next morning, the city council member, the sponsoring city council member, by the way, who is still a friend of mine, a hugging friend of mine, called a press conference to suspend finalizing that lease for 12 months, which put a bullet in the head of that deal. We regrouped and we began to look at other property and one of the other properties that was going to be granted to us was the tract of land that the soccer stadium now sits on on McCalla Lane and then we got the not my backyard deal from a large group of people in that

neighborhood and and finally in 2010 complete frustration, I went to the then mayor of Austin, Lee Lovingwell, good friend, great guy, and I said, look, I'm thinking about going outside the city of Austin where there's no zoning, getting attractive land there, but I need the city to help us with transportation and utilities. He looked at me and said, Alan, you may be the smartest person I've ever met in my life, which was a funny thing to say, just a drop out. I mean, I'm not that dumb, but I'm not Stephen Hawking either. And that's what we did.

We went and bought that site where I live today and then bought the site next door to it and then the one across the street with some great support, some of our big donors and really stripped the adjoining neighborhood because there's no zoning. We had the legal right to develop that property. There was no zoning and no body that could approve what we would build on that property. And so the big fear is crime and lower property values. Well, when I contracted for that property in 2010, I could buy any house next door for, call it plus or minus $150,000.

Today it's plus or minus $450. Okay. The other argument is crime. There hasn't been one reported crime that I'm aware of by anybody from our neighborhood in the neighborhood next door, and there have been 13 crimes by that neighborhood into our community. Mostly juveniles stealing stealing our golf carts, our polarises, shoplifting out of our market, stealing bicycles, you know, random juvenile the kind of stuff that I would have been doing if I was 14 or 15 years old. Yeah, and I love those guys. And we work with them, you know, to help them. But if you're gonna put a barbed wire fence, it needs

to be on their side of the deal, not our side. Now, look, we got plenty of bullshit inside of our neighborhood. This is not Nirvana. I don't want anybody walking away. We have plenty of stuff going on, but it's not the gunfight at the OK Corral. Right. Well, Alan, thank you very much for being here and thank you for doing what you've done, what you've accomplished. It's very inspirational. I think,

as I said in the beginning, like you're a guy who really lives that life and I think it's a beautiful thing to witness and I think your story is going to move a lot of people. So tell people if they're interested how they can get involved, where they can find out more. Well, you could go to our website at mlf.org, like Mobile Loaves and Fishes, mikelemafrank.org. You could, you know, our hashtag is pound mobile loaves. I published a book, we published a book, Harper Collins, back in 2017 called Welcome Homeless. You could go and get that book.

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

I'm grateful for you to be here. Thank you. I really appreciate you. Thank you very much for everything. Yeah, thank you. All right, bye everybody. Bye!