On this episode of the Joe Rogan Experience, I sit down with John Paul DiGiorgio to talk about his mission of feeding the homeless. John is a serial entrepreneur, a serial church leader, and a father of three. He is also a husband, father-in-law, husband, and friend to many, including his own son. John is also the co-founder of a non-profit organization that provides food and shelter to the homeless in the winter months in the United States, helping to feed them on cold winter nights in the streets of America's largest city, New York City. We talk about how he got started with his mission, why he started it, and what it takes to run a community that provides hope and purpose to those who find themselves on the streets, especially those who don't have it themselves. I hope you enjoy this episode, and I can't wait to do it again next week! -Joe Rogan and the Podcast -- Check it out! The Joe Rogans Experience is a podcast by day, Joe RogAN Podcast by night, all day, all the time. -All day, All Day, All Night, by Night, all Day, by Day, By Night, All Morning by Night by Night - by Night. -- Joe and I - with Alan podcast by Day by Day by Night by Night All Day by Night By Day by Day All Day All Day By Night by By Night by Day By Day By Night By Night By Day, , All Day all Day - All Day Morning By Day All Night All Night - By Night All By Day , Night, All Night By God's Day by God's Love & Blessings by God, by God by God? God's Grace And Blessings By God and Blessings by Me I Love You, Lord's Word by Me, By You, Oftentimes by Me & Me, By Me & You, God's Blessings And Me, Blessings, Blessings & Me by You, Me, Lord (Amen And You, My Father, And I'm Yours, Lord, And You're Not Here, I'll See You, I'm Sending Me Back By Me, And Love, & I'll Love You Back, & You'll Hear Me Back
00:00:25.000I was very curious to meet you, and I heard so much about you from John Paul DiGiorgio.
00:00:32.000You 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 you give these people hope and a purpose It's really pretty amazing stuff Well,
00:01:10.000Well, Joe, the organization's 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.
00:01:27.000And 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.
00:01:51.000And 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.
00:02:07.000And as a serial real estate entrepreneur, I thought that that idea was a brilliant idea.
00:02:15.000Of 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.
00:02:27.000But 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.
00:02:37.000And 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.
00:02:46.000But I end up in this retreat for 30 hours of...
00:02:50.000Of hand-holding and bromance, hugging it out, and had a pretty powerful experience that really just led me to going, God, what do you want me to do?
00:03:00.000I mean, I wasn't asking for anything big.
00:03:02.000It's just, you know, what are the little things that I can go out there and do?
00:03:06.000And it was through that and a series of things that led to the founding and then ultimately the founding of the community.
00:03:16.000So it was essentially this one retreat.
00:03:19.000You get this vision of just wanting to do something.
00:04:10.000Like you had an intellectual relationship and then you had a different relationship?
00:04:14.000Well, look, there are elements of the Christian faith that would first begin with the You know, 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.
00:04:39.000That's a weird thought that you got to buy into.
00:04:44.000From that, the Son of God is going to be born, a virgin birth.
00:04:50.000He'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.
00:05:05.000But prior to that, he hangs out for another 40 days with his brothers.
00:05:10.000These are incredulous Things to believe.
00:05:15.000And 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.
00:05:26.000So 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.
00:05:44.000And 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,
00:06:04.000And I begin to look at Tricia, who we will celebrate 40 years this year.
00:06:11.000Kind of gets me emotional thinking about it.
00:06:15.000And as taking our children and leaving the house, the train leaving the station, 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.
00:06:29.000And I decided to jump back on that train and begin to really explore my Catholic faith.
00:06:39.000Through that process, I just got enamored with the Church.
00:06:43.000And when I talk about the Church, I'm talking about the whole thing.
00:06:47.000The Roman Catholic Church, the Eastern Church, the Protestant Church, the schisms, the heresy, the wars, the reformations.
00:06:56.000And I got enamored with maybe one of the greatest novels ever written in mankind.
00:07:03.000What a train wreck this whole deal is.
00:07:07.000Yet, at the center of that deal remains this Jesus of Nazareth.
00:07:14.000And so that was very intellectual for me.
00:07:31.000This 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.
00:07:45.000It became more of a heart relationship with Christ as opposed to an intellectual thing.
00:07:51.000So when you talk about these specific concepts that are hard for people to wrap their heads around, like the resurrection and 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?
00:08:10.000When you come across something that seems impossible, how do you manage that in your mind?
00:09:00.000You know, I was talking to somebody today about transistors, you know, and if you go back to the Apollo days, a little radio that you could dial in, you could open it up, and you could see the little transistors that are in there.
00:09:14.000Well, 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.
00:10:01.000It's one of the most, you want to talk about mysterious things.
00:10:05.000One 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.
00:10:15.000And the transistor is one of them that sort of comes out of nowhere.
00:11:00.000There's a great image, and it's an image in our sanctuary in the village of Caravaggio.
00:11:09.000It's 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.
00:11:25.000I have a talk that I give called The Gospel Concarne, which is the gospel with meat.
00:11:31.000But that woundedness, I mean, Thomas You know, when the boys came to him after the resurrection and said, Jesus is alive, he basically said, bullshit.
00:11:44.000I'm not going to believe it until I see the nail marks in his feet and stick my finger in his side.
00:11:49.000And this is the phenomenal depiction of that by Caravaggio.
00:11:57.000And Thomas, if you really look at it, look at his face, bro.
00:12:05.000His 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.
00:12:13.000And then he's got the torn garments like he's homeless.
00:12:19.000And 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.
00:12:28.000And then his arm, hand over the forearm of Thomas, guiding that finger in, in the most gentlest way.
00:12:36.000And 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.
00:13:36.000My mom, when she went into a mental hospital when I was four years old, spent a year there.
00:13:43.000Subjected to the most powerful psychotropic drugs known to man, electric shock therapy, the whole deal.
00:13:49.000My dad files for a divorce during that period of time, attempts to strip my mother of her maternal rights of her four boys.
00:14:02.000My mom wins all that because she had great parents.
00:14:06.000She 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.
00:14:17.000I 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.
00:14:29.000And 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.
00:14:51.000So I go into this with faith, complete faith.
00:14:55.000And I'm just released of trying to figure out, is it right or is it wrong?
00:15:01.000And I'm released of having to prove to I don't get into apologetic arguments with people.
00:15:09.000This is just who I am and how I express who I am.
00:15:13.000Trevor Burrus 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.
00:15:23.000And then this relief of release like you're discussing.
00:15:28.000It's obviously hugely beneficial to people and to communities, and it motivates people to do beautiful things like what you've done.
00:15:38.000No, that's—you know, look, if God is the creator, he's created all this.
00:15:45.000So what 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.
00:15:54.000He's going to have to sort all the bullshit out.
00:16:16.000And 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.
00:16:27.000Well, 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.
00:17:12.000Today, in a funny way, and almost providential, is the feast of St. James the Apostle.
00:17:22.000And it is believed that the bones of St. James the Apostle are buried in Santiago de Compostela, Spain.
00:17:31.000For over a thousand years there have been these pilgrimages, and a half a million people will do that pilgrimage this year.
00:17:39.000I'm 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,
00:17:55.000going from one little small Medieval Spanish town, another until you get to Santiago where the bones of the apostle are buried.
00:18:39.000You 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, you know,
00:18:55.000when the Crusades were going down and there was the battle between the Christians and the Saucerans and, you know, all that.
00:19:02.000It's just, it's a magnificent experience.
00:19:06.000And when you do these things, what do you get out of that?
00:19:30.000For me, I'm going back in September and I have two of my kids going with me.
00:19:38.000So it's going to be this great spiritual opportunity to journey.
00:19:43.000And then along the way, God brings into your life people from all walks of life.
00:19:53.000And you don't know the impact of people coming into your life.
00:19:59.000Like, 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.
00:20:13.000And so Life is a camino, which means the way.
00:20:19.000And, you know, you and I are on this journey, and lots of things come into our world that just kind of come out of, you know, the ether and appear.
00:21:14.000It's 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.
00:21:24.000I want to know more about what you're doing.
00:21:27.000And the way I was introduced to you, my wife and I went to a fundraiser.
00:21:33.000And you had this incredible demonstration of what you're doing and what your organization is all about.
00:21:42.000And then maybe more importantly, you came out and talked.
00:21:46.000And the way you talked was with no ego and with kindness and with sincerity.
00:21:58.000And immediately I thought, I want to talk to that guy.
00:22:01.000I want to find out what's going on with him.
00:22:04.000You know, there's people that you meet that are like extraordinarily peaceful and extraordinarily content.
00:22:27.000There'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.
00:22:38.000You abandoned your beautiful house and moved into one of these tiny homes in this homeless community.
00:22:47.000And then when we went and toured the community and got to see how you interact with everybody, it's beautiful.
00:23:13.000That 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.
00:23:27.000And no one around them is getting out of it either, and they're sort of trapped.
00:23:31.000And then you come along, and you find great value in these people.
00:23:37.000And they find incredible value in this community that you've created.
00:23:41.000And the community is constantly expanding.
00:23:43.000While we were there, you were showing us about this new area that you guys are developing, where you're going to expand it.
00:23:50.000It's really amazing stuff, because It's an example of someone who's actually doing it.
00:23:56.000You know, you're actually living that life.
00:23:59.000You'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.
00:24:14.000Well, the interesting thing is that they've – how they have shaped my life.
00:24:22.000And that's – That's where the miracle sits.
00:24:30.000When 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.
00:24:52.000And 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.
00:25:10.000When we begin to learn, you know, and how I like to describe this is I say to people, You know, they've got this stereotype of the men and women out there.
00:26:02.000Played guitar, had a Fender Mustang, was in a band, you know, I remember playing the song Bad by Cream, I think, you know, Eric Clapton, Jack Bruce Deal.
00:26:20.000Football, I played football, was a, you know, moderately decent football player at one time.
00:26:26.000Thought I could play in the NFL. You've seen my DNA. You realize that that was never possible, but it was still a dream.
00:26:35.000And then I wanted to be a jet fighter pilot.
00:26:38.000You 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?
00:26:55.000It's not Angus Young or Bon Scott or Brian Johnson.
00:27:02.000Or 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.
00:27:15.000Or if I see a F-22 screaming across the sky, I still dream today.
00:27:21.000And I tell people one of my favorite smells on the face of the planet is burning jet fuel.
00:27:39.000I don't know what they were at that time.
00:27:41.000And then somebody came in and poured fuel.
00:27:45.000On 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.
00:28:02.000I don't know what happened with this thing.
00:28:03.000No, that's 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.
00:28:16.000And for these men and women who lost their family completely And nobody there to pour fuel on those embers that we're burning.
00:28:31.000So 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.
00:28:44.000And yeah, look, we got the crack addicts and the glue sniffers and the prostitutes and the convicted felons.
00:28:56.000How do you do that to make it safe for the other people there?
00:29:01.000Like, if you do have the bank robbers and all the people that live a dangerous life and they find themselves homeless, do you screen those people out?
00:30:13.000There's a lot of beautiful things that are happening all the time that the news never highlights.
00:30:18.000The news just gets you freaked out about global warming, nuclear war, economic collapse.
00:30:25.000Is that really Biden or is that a guy in a Biden suit?
00:30:28.000Whatever it is, it's just more crazy things that get you freaked out.
00:30:33.000But the majority of your interactions with other people The majority of your experiences with people are pretty positive, for the most part.
00:30:42.000Even considering all this stress that everybody's under, all the time.
00:30:46.000Bills that can't be paid, relationships that suck, jobs that you got fired from, all these different things.
00:30:52.000Hopes and dreams that are crushed, flat tire, bad transmission, fuck!
00:31:45.000When you say giving us a run for the money, what's the worst case scenario?
00:31:48.000Well, you know, they're bringing, you know, most everything that happens negatively out there is going to be related to dope and alcohol.
00:32:01.000So 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.
00:32:13.000The really aggressive meth or crack cocaine addicts are going to be stealing somebody's bicycle or debit card to go buy something.
00:32:25.000Or sometimes we have the confluence of a profound mental health issue and drugs coming at the same time and they'll get destructive on their property.
00:33:08.000Like, if you want to procreate, if you want to carry on your genetics, you want to keep your loved ones alive, you got to stay alive.
00:33:14.000And so there's this fear, this constant fear, and it's crippling, you know?
00:33:20.000And because it's projected, it's projected both by the mainstream media and it's projected by social media algorithms.
00:33:28.000The 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.
00:33:39.000And unfortunately what that's doing is it's making us anxiety-ridden freaks.
00:33:45.000And we're losing our understanding of humanity.
00:34:27.000It was just two human beings disagreeing on things.
00:34:31.000Now it's like everybody's a Nazi or everybody's a communist.
00:34:35.000It'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.
00:34:43.000And it's just accentuated by everything we see.
00:34:47.000So 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.
00:34:56.000The people that know, you look when they're trying to get money at the stoplight, you look away, you drive past them in their tents, Jesus Christ, what's that guy doing in there?
00:35:25.000Well, 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,
00:35:44.000This, metaphorically, is the same thing as pulling over and helping the guy change the flat tire.
00:35:50.000There's a guy on your street corner and up underneath that bridge that you pass every day.
00:35:56.000Can we pull over and help them change that flat tire?
00:36:00.000That'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.
00:36:13.000We 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.
00:36:24.000You 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.
00:37:11.000But 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.
00:37:21.000That is ego and nonsense and a complete lack of perspective.
00:37:26.000One 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?
00:37:40.000So you're constantly isolated until you choose not to be.
00:37:43.000And then when you do go out and you find these people that are in these tents, that's like, they're not in the community.
00:38:07.000We had tents, and then we shared fire, we shared food, and everybody had a role in the community, and everybody had a purpose.
00:38:16.000When 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 the rest of the world, and you're in this, and now that we have cars, you get in that box, and you drive past all those people.
00:38:33.000We'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.
00:38:49.000In 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.
00:39:03.000Well, did you see where Gavin Newsom issued an executive order today to clear all the camps in California?
00:39:10.000Well, we don't know, but it comes out of that.
00:39:12.000Well, it's because he wants to be president, right?
00:39:14.000Well, you know, it's a political move for sure, but it's related to that Supreme Court ruling, the Grant Pass v.
00:39:21.000Johnson ruling that the Supreme Court just did.
00:39:25.000And so it's an interesting byproduct now of what we're going to witness.
00:39:31.000Well, it's a byproduct of people's absolute frustration and fury over this.
00:39:38.000You know, what was interesting is I had a woman that worked for us a few years ago, and she was a Ph.D., English, classic, you know, very, very smart, learned person.
00:39:53.000I asked one time, where did the word homeless come from?
00:39:58.000And the first time that she could find it appeared back in like the 700s in a limerick from Ireland or something, an Irish limerick.
00:40:11.000And then it didn't reappear again until about the 15th, 16th, 17th century type of thing, and it was not even hardly present.
00:40:22.000When you get to the 1970s and 80s, the word became ubiquitous.
00:40:28.000And 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.
00:40:53.000When 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.
00:41:03.000You 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.
00:41:20.000What the hell happened in the past 46, 7 years?
00:41:24.000What do you think happened since you're in it?
00:41:27.000Well, profound loss of family, culture of death within our community.
00:41:49.000Our constitutional individual rights, and I believe in our Constitution.
00:41:53.000This isn't an anti-constitutional thing, but...
00:41:57.000You know, recently, on my Facebook, which is my only social media deal, I'm a member of my high school thing.
00:42:11.000One 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,
00:42:30.000you know, during that period of time and talking about how awesome Coach York was.
00:42:37.000And I couldn't tell you how many licks I got from Coach York during that period of time because I was a little turd ball when I was in middle school.
00:42:47.000And that's what they used to do to kids.
00:45:05.000They're making them pay attention to some shit that's boring from some unenthusiastic, uninspired teacher who's underpaid, and it's a mess.
00:46:06.000They 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.
00:46:18.000He put in my mind the concept of infinity.
00:46:23.000You 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 of my life from a guy that I met when I was 13 years old.
00:47:51.000And we are so trapped in our own life and 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.
00:48:02.000And 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.
00:48:15.000In the universe, this planet is nothing.
00:48:19.000Nothing that you can see in the night sky is anything.
00:49:03.000And I think one of the main problems that we have in civilized society is light pollution.
00:49:09.000And because of light pollution, we're not humbled by the night sky like our ancestors were.
00:49:14.000Our 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.
00:51:36.000I think it's another one of the other reasons why we're so sick.
00:51:41.000I 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.
00:51:51.000You know, on the Camino, you end up in this place beyond Santiago Called Mujia and Finisterre that was believed to be the end of the world.
00:52:06.000And it was just a coastline in Spain out overlooking the Atlantic Ocean.
00:52:16.000And 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.
00:52:32.000And 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.
00:52:56.000It's just amazing who had the courage to take that first boat trip and hope they don't fall off the edge.
00:56:07.000It 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.
00:56:22.000And I took a wrong turn once and I was down Skid Row and I was like, yo, this is crazy!
00:56:28.000Like, 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.
00:56:39.000And the crazy thing about that is Skid Row is essentially an engineered environment.
00:56:45.000They 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.
00:56:52.000They just put in, you know, food kitchens and some kind of a shelter and they're like, you fuckers, stay here.
00:56:59.000We're keeping you out of Beverly Hills.
00:57:03.000And it just stayed like that and grew.
00:57:05.000And there was, was it the Cecil Hotel was the documentary on?
00:57:09.000Watched a documentary on the Cecil Hotel, which is in the middle of all that.
00:57:14.000It was this beautiful old hotel, and now that whole area is just chaos.
00:57:19.000And then now it's expanded considerably.
00:57:22.000So the fact that they have never done anything about that, it's only grown.
00:57:27.000And 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.
00:57:36.000Just shows you how sick the culture is.
00:58:54.000We've been dealing with these issues, issues of poverty and issues of abandonment and issues of trauma since the advent of man.
00:59:01.000Hell, the Bible basically begins with, you know, the Cain and Abel, you know, experience.
00:59:07.000So 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.
00:59:21.000Today, that it's manifesting into this chaos.
00:59:26.000What we need to do is we need to open the door very wide to innovation.
00:59:32.000And 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.
00:59:51.000Tonight, there'll be about 600,000 people living on the streets.
00:59:54.000In L.A., it's 50, 60, whatever that number is.
00:59:58.000And— What were those single occupancy units?
01:00:01.000Just simple places with a bed and, you know, metaphorically a microwave inside, maybe a shared bathroom down the hallway or— And where were these places?
01:00:21.000No, it's for people that lived in poverty.
01:00:24.000And then over that period of time, since the 1970s up till now, there's been this creeping affluence dictated by the government.
01:00:34.000As to what housing quality standards should be for people, as opposed to, I'm going to help you get up off the streets.
01:00:42.000Here's a sustenance to get you off the streets.
01:00:45.000You choose where you're going to live with that sustenance.
01:00:49.000So the only reason why these single occupancy places were eliminated was because they'd raised the standards?
01:00:58.000Raised the standards, but these places were also In neighborhoods where people didn't want those people in their neighborhoods.
01:01:07.000So it's kind of a confluence of not in my backyard, plus this elevation of these housing quality standards that makes a place like Community First Village, which you have seen firsthand,
01:01:23.000not approved by the United States government, housing and urban development.
01:01:55.000There'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.
01:02:17.000People want to blame Ronald Reagan, but it wasn't Reagan.
01:02:20.000It was lots of people, all of us, we the people, frankly.
01:02:25.000That we're trying to get people out of the state mental hospitals that didn't need to be there, and the vast majority of them didn't need to be there, and re-acclimate them back into the community.
01:02:37.000What 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.
01:02:53.000So they had a problem with people that were just using the mental health institutions to stay there?
01:02:58.000Or was it just a matter of, like, they had diagnosed people with, you know, manageable illnesses but wanted to keep them there?
01:04:15.000And 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.
01:04:31.000The problem is that we did a lot of human experimentation during that period of time.
01:04:37.000By the time the 50s and 60s came around, we had invented these unbelievable drugs Haldol, Thorazine, all these drugs that we could give people.
01:04:49.000Electric shock therapy, which had been around for many decades prior to that.
01:05:18.000And 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.
01:05:31.000We have half a dozen of them that live in the village that we can't manage.
01:05:36.000And we need a different level of care.
01:05:38.000By the time Ronald Reagan came around, we were completing what was really an honorable experiment that has gone partially awry.
01:05:53.000So 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?
01:06:04.000Yeah, there's replicators going on around the country.
01:06:11.000We have a replication operation at Mobile Loaves and Fishes.
01:06:14.000So 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.
01:07:21.000We're not going to be a McDonald's because we're not going to be able to manage people to do exactly, precisely what we do.
01:07:30.000Plus, how we do it in Austin, Texas is not necessarily how you're going to do it in Minneapolis, Minnesota.
01:07:36.000But there are some characteristics of what we do that we think are extremely important.
01:07:43.000And so these people that come to you, how did they hear about you?
01:07:48.000How did they hear that you were doing this?
01:07:50.000Have 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?
01:07:58.000Well, 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.
01:08:24.000And then we've been all over the news that this show is going to have a giant impact.
01:08:30.000We're going to get slammed, frankly, in a positive way by people interested in it.
01:08:58.000And when you go there and you experience it, you go, wow, I'm so happy there's someone like Alan out here doing this.
01:09:04.000And so happy that all those people that work with you are also equally moved to do it.
01:09:09.000Because it just feels like you're doing something really good.
01:09:12.000And sometimes you don't see a lot of that in life.
01:09:16.000You don't see a lot of real selfless sacrifice done under the spirit of just trying to do good.
01:09:24.000I think through these symposiums and through the work, there are a number of people out there in the U.S. trying to figure things out.
01:09:42.000The confluence of where I came from out of the business community, you know, may be kind of rare.
01:09:50.000People 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.
01:10:05.000We'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.
01:10:23.000Because people will say, I'm no Alan Graham.
01:10:25.000Well, thank God, number one, you're not.
01:10:27.000It doesn't take an Alan Graham to do this.
01:10:30.000But let me show you the pieces that it does take in order to make this happen and where you fit into that puzzle.
01:10:37.000That's what we try to do with our symposiums.
01:10:40.000And 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.
01:10:48.000And then these people wind up selling these things.
01:10:51.000Like the artwork was truly extraordinary.
01:10:53.000Like the person that's making those chess pieces, like those are really intricate.
01:10:58.000Like you look at something like that, like that's very valuable.
01:11:01.000And a lot of the art is really incredible.
01:11:04.000And just think, 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?
01:11:15.000Well, several years ago, my wife and I got Really into Vincent van Gogh.
01:11:22.000And we've traveled around the world trying to see every publicly available van Gogh that we could possibly see.
01:11:34.000The van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam is incredible.
01:11:44.000To learn that he started painting when he was 27 years old, committed suicide at 37. During his lifetime of artwork, he sold one painting.
01:13:39.000And that's because we We, collectively, we the people, us, not just Mobile Loaves and Fishes, decided that we're going to pour fuel on those childhood embers of her dreams.
01:13:57.000And that's what she gets to do every single day is come in there and paint.
01:14:02.000Do you have classes for these people there?
01:14:29.000But then there are those people that you knew when they were growing up and they could draw all the faces and stuff like that.
01:14:37.000There's a natural talent, something in the brain, man, that they're able to get this creativity out onto a canvas that It's beyond our comprehension.
01:15:12.000Well, I think it's just an interest, and then with focus and time and dedication, you get better at it.
01:15:20.000If you're truly engaged in it, enthusiastic about it, obsessed with it, you'll get better at it.
01:15:25.000I 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.
01:15:37.000Just something, it just, it sparks, it has a different feeling when you look at it.
01:15:41.000But I think that really comes from whatever that person is.
01:15:44.000I think the skill of learning how to do it is, that's a learned skill that you could learn.
01:15:48.000Now did you, when your kids were Younger, would you draw caricatures or cartoon stuff?
01:16:12.000You know, there's there's some people that are children of great singers and they have incredible voices and you wonder like is that the genetic makeup?
01:16:20.000Is that just like you have this capacity for sound that I don't have like you can you can make beautiful songs that I can't do or is it is it a learned thing in your genes from some person?
01:16:32.000You know your your parent One of your parents that has this thing inside of them, and it somehow or another gets into you.
01:16:39.000And you're like, oh, I know how to do that.
01:17:14.000And 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.
01:17:22.000And it just was banging around inside of their head.
01:17:25.000Well, think about what we've—how old are you now?
01:18:13.000We need Jamie Elvisart on screen somehow.
01:18:19.000And we've outlawed all that, that entrepreneurial spirit of people, that quest of people to go out and be purposeful.
01:18:29.000And 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.
01:18:42.000And you can't go to any country in the world, Joe.
01:18:46.000And not be accosted by somebody that is selling you something.
01:18:52.000You could be sitting in the middle of Rome.
01:19:06.000And 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.
01:19:21.000The rainstorm goes away and the bottles of water and the artwork and the whirly gig things come back out.
01:19:28.000What happened to that piece of who we are?
01:19:33.000One of my great friends, a guy, he's dead now, John Bromble, used to sell, you know, 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 multimillion-dollar-a-year business,
01:20:00.000you 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, you know?
01:20:13.000It'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.
01:20:31.000I 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 Ways,
01:21:03.000You'll pay $2 all day for a bottle of water.
01:21:06.000You 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.
01:21:33.000They'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.
01:21:46.000All four are nickels and dimes and dollars.
01:21:58.000But our nanny state will have them, oh, we can't have them on the street corners.
01:22:04.000They're going to get hit by a car someday.
01:22:06.000I think the fear is that you would encourage them to do that.
01:22:09.000And then you would also get in everybody else's way.
01:22:12.000Well, 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 him for that deal,
01:22:28.000or sell me a whirligig while I'm walking with my family to the restaurant that my kid's looking at and going, hey, Daddy, I want one of those.
01:23:19.000We were barely at the beginning of the revitalization of downtown Austin.
01:23:26.000So the obvious place to have put that shelter was there on the eastern fringe of downtown.
01:23:35.000And then there was an explosion of people wanting to revitalize, move downtown, and then suddenly this thing became kind of the source and summit of the center of the town, reviled by everybody.
01:24:36.000How many people are being taken care of at that place on 7th Street?
01:24:41.000I'm going to guess 100, 150 people, not many.
01:24:48.000It's not, 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.
01:25:04.000If you drive by it today, you can't even tell it's a shelter.
01:25:10.000So it's actually being run extraordinarily well today.
01:25:14.000You said that's about a year and a half ago?
01:25:18.000Urban Alchemy is an organization out of California somewhere that came in and took that over.
01:25:25.000That 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 catty corner to that place and it was just madness over there.
01:25:36.000Yeah, but if I walk down 6th Street today, it's still full of people hanging out down there because there's a large crowd, there's all the things, great panhandling opportunities.
01:25:49.000So, until they really revitalize that area of 6th Street, that will probably not change.
01:27:08.000And, you know, I 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.
01:27:21.000It's like, oh, it's such a heartbreak.
01:27:57.000When 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.
01:28:43.000I mean, one of the greatest drug dealing places is all of our pharmacies where we're all going to buy our pharmaceuticals.
01:28:55.000You 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 and mitigating as a treatment mechanism for people.
01:29:12.000And I just would like for the world to...
01:29:15.000To come around and, you know, make things easier to bring relief to people because when we bring relief to individuals, we're going to bring relief to the community as a whole.
01:29:29.000And we ought to explore a number of different things.
01:29:33.000You know, I take the legalization of marijuana as an example.
01:29:36.000Look, I live in the middle of a village where it's all there.
01:29:39.000Everything is there, from fentanyl to crack cocaine to meth, marijuana.
01:29:47.000And I will tell you, our potheads are happy, hungry, and sleepy.
01:29:53.000And the folks that are, you know, smoking or shooting, you know, meth and crack, you Many of them have pretty profound problems as a result of that.
01:30:06.000And 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.
01:30:35.000Well, first of all, they have to be chronically homeless.
01:30:37.000So there's a definition that we use that basically comes out of HUD. It's an unaccompanied male or female with a disabling condition.
01:30:50.000Having 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.
01:31:08.000Why did you choose that particular time period?
01:31:13.000That's kind of a definition that comes out of the federal government.
01:31:18.000And we have a homeless management information system that's managed here in town that allows us to go in.
01:31:28.000I can go in and, you know, hypothetically look up Joe Rogan.
01:31:32.000I can see how many touch points you've had into the homeless service deal and over what A period of time.
01:31:41.000But 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 nine years of homelessness.
01:31:55.000So is it just that there's so many people that are chronically homeless that you should concentrate on them first?
01:32:00.000Well, fundamentally, that was my gospel call.
01:32:05.000I wanted the roughest, toughest, hardest, most despised, outcast, lost and forgotten population.
01:32:14.000I wanted the ones that nobody believed had value.
01:32:21.000So that fundamental was a spiritual decision of mine as the founder of Mobile Loaves and Fishes.
01:32:30.000And 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.
01:32:43.000But I wanted the lowest on our radar, our totem poles to go after.
01:32:52.000And then, so once they're chronically homeless for a year, how do you find them?
01:34:04.000We 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.
01:34:26.000And they have a coordinated assessment.
01:34:29.000They call it something else, I think, now.
01:34:31.000But there's a coordinated assessment tool that people can take that attempts to assess individuals' vulnerability.
01:34:42.000So 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.
01:34:57.000We try to get a balance because we can't become a full-blown assisted living type of a deal.
01:35:04.000We need people that can live independently.
01:35:05.000So there's a structure that brings people in.
01:35:58.000That'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.
01:36:18.000We're considered a pretty awesome entrepreneurial nonprofit, Austin-based, Austin-founded, Austin-homegrown.
01:36:25.000And 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.
01:36:46.000And then these guys also have a phenomenal heart because normally new technology is reserved for people that can afford that new technology.
01:36:56.000But 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.
01:37:08.000They're beating it down, but it's not cheap.
01:37:13.000So we've built 17 of them on the two phases that we have right now.
01:37:17.000We're under construction right now on 50 more across the street on that new phase.
01:37:21.000And there'll be another 50 over on Burleson Road by the airport where we're under construction there.
01:37:39.000Well, there is a population of people that live in our community.
01:37:45.000It's about 10% of our population that we call missionals.
01:37:50.000Just like a missionary would leave the United States and go overseas somewhere to be a missionary, there are people that have chosen missionals.
01:37:59.000And called by the gospel to live in community at Community First Village.
01:38:04.000So there's about 50, 60 people that include 40 adults plus about 15 children that live and more are coming our way.
01:38:17.000So 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.
01:38:33.000And I think another thing to bring up is that you had some resistance from the outside community, the people that were neighboring it.
01:38:39.000They were worried that you were going to affect property values, that things weren't – it's going to be dangerous.
01:40:02.000Oh, we were assaulted and spit on, and the news media was there, and it was an unbelievably horrible experience.
01:40:13.000And 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,
01:40:30.000which put a bullet in the head of that deal.
01:40:35.000We 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.
01:40:51.000And then we got the Not In My Backyard deal from a large group of people in that neighborhood.
01:41:00.000And finally, in 2010, after complete frustration, I went to the then mayor of Austin, Lee Leffingwell, good friend, great guy.
01:41:12.000And I said, look, I'm thinking about going outside the city of Austin where there's no zoning.
01:41:19.000Getting attractive land there, but I need the city to help us with transportation and utilities.
01:41:29.000And 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 dropout.
01:41:50.000We 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 of some of our big donors.
01:42:08.000And really stripped the adjoining neighborhood because there's no zoning.
01:42:16.000We had the legal right to develop that property.
01:42:19.000There was no zoning and no body that could approve what we would build on that property.
01:42:27.000And so the big fear is crime and lower property values.
01:42:31.000Well, when I contracted for that property in 2010, I could buy any house next door for, call it, plus or minus $150,000.
01:42:47.000There 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.
01:43:02.000Mostly juveniles, stealing our golf carts, our Polarises, shoplifting out of our market, stealing bicycles, you know, the random juvenile, the kind of stuff that I would have been doing if I was 14 or 15 years old.
01:43:52.000I think, as I said at the beginning, 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.
01:44:02.000So tell people, if they're interested, how they can get involved, where they can find out more.
01:44:08.000Well, you could go to our website at MLF.org, like Mobile Loaves and Fishes, MikeLemafrank.org.
01:44:18.000You could, you know, our hashtag is pound mobile loaves.
01:44:35.000It'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.
01:44:46.000I think it's a fun book that people would really enjoy, kind of an emotional experience.