Hey, humans. How's it going? Susan Ruth here.
Thanks for listening to another episode
of Hey, Human podcast.
This is episode
430 4, and my guest is doctor Robert
Marban. You might remember Robert from episode 410
with Billy Baldwin. Robert's a renowned expert on
homelessness and a senior fellow of Discovery Institute
Center on Wealth and Poverty. He's got a
PhD in political behavior and American political institutions,
and his career has been marked by bipartisanship,
having served as house fellow under George
h w Bush, and most recently as executive
director of the US Interagency Council on Homelessness
from 2019 to 2021
under both the Trump and Biden administrations.
Additionally, he served on the board of directors
of the United States Olympic Committee from 1992
to 2004,
and he produced the excellent
documentary Americans with No Address,
and he's an executive producer on the film
no address, which, by the way, also stars
Billy Baldwin.
He's currently been tasked with tackling the fentanyl
crisis,
and he is the executive producer of the
documentary Fentanyl Death Incorporated.
He's a brilliant man and a friend
and
was very gracious to give me his time
because he's probably
one of the busiest people I've ever met.
He's constantly
going all over the place,
trying to make the world better.
It's a in-depth conversation.
He's gonna be on on the show twice,
so this one, we focus on the homelessness
issue,
and I'm gonna have him come on the
show again to talk about his work
regarding fentanyl
and the horrific
toll it has taken on this country.
Alright. Well, other stuff,
check out Hey Human Podcast for links and
to learn more about my guests and the
show.
Hey Human Podcast is on YouTube under official
Susan Ruth. I'm on Patreon at susanruthism.
My TikTok and Instagram is susanruthism.
Check out susanruth.com
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Rate, review, and subscribe to Hey Human Podcast
on iTunes or wherever you get your podcasts,
and thank you for listening. Be well, be
kind, be love.
Here we go.
Hi.
Hello.
Do you want me to put your initial
in between your first and last name, or
is there Yeah. So I I normally go
doctor Robert
g Marbit junior, no commas. We were talking
on the set. They called and said, why
do you not ever let us put a
comma on anything?
I said, do I have to get take
everybody you know, I'm a my day job's
I'm a professor. I said, do I have
to everybody do a little tutorial in Kate
Turabian and use some punctuation marks?
And they're laughing and they go,
okay. We're game. What? What?
And I go, when you do a pun
when you do a comma, it means it's
a parenthetic phrase and it's an add on
it. It, it ultimately can be dropped to
not change the substance at all. So if
you have a senior, junior,
and a third, hypothetically,
the junior matters a lot because it separates
you from 2 other people. And so it's
not a parenthetic phrase, and it's an incorrect
use of the comma. And then they're, like,
looking at me like,
good thing I'm not in your government class.
Well, it's interesting because that's how I've always
seen it written. Yeah. It's incorrect. And if
you go look at your Kate Turabian style
guide, I mean, I should give everyone for
Christmas.
My best friend, Ellen, who does,
very kindly helps me with the the posters
for the post on the show.
She I I put the stuff in and
then she makes it look pretty. I think
she will geek out on the last minute
and a half of that because that seems
like something she would absolutely Show it to
her. Yeah. It's very funny. But but it's
a true thing. You should never ever use
a comma.
And if you're using a comma, that means
it's not necessary. So get so drop junior
PhD, whatever it is, drop all that at
the end. And everybody says, no, no, no,
it's important. I said, then it's not a
cut. It's not a parent that a phrase
is actually a substantive phrase. And so you
shouldn't have a comma. And so, I mean,
I, do you know what I love about
life is that it you learn something new
every
day, which is good. Well, let's get into
it. Doctor
Robert g Marbit
junior, no comma.
Welcome to Hey Human.
Well, thanks very much for having us. Appreciate
it. You're hogging all the letters.
It's the old adage. You want to have
the longest name so everybody can see you
on the voting ballot. So you're the one
that sticks way out.
Yeah. It takes 2 business cards to tell
people who you are. Yeah. Exactly.
Well, welcome to the show. I generally like
to dive in
by asking my guests, you included,
where you grew up, what shaped you and
influenced you within your family
to create the the you you are now.
I grew up a lot in
South Georgia and mid Georgia. I was born
in Savannah, Georgia. And and even when we
moved away,
we moved to,
via Boston and and and Louisiana,
Baton Rouge, out out to Southern California.
And so I my real formative years
were were in Los Angeles and San Diego,
and, like, that's where I just really, you
know,
started realizing things and learning things
and such. But I spent a lot of
times,
I was the only of my sibling. I
guess I was always in so much trouble.
My parents shipped me back to Georgia. I
I remember 1 year I got into so
much trouble. They took me from school straight
to the airport to and I was always
in Georgia for, like, 90 days during the
summer. My my siblings never came. I was
like, what? Found out later what you caused
us so much trouble when it was their
vacation
that they were creating by shipping me to
Georgia.
What kind of trouble were you getting into?
Oh, I got in so much trouble. I
I I got in so much trouble. And,
and and it was interesting. Because of that,
I spent a lot of time with my
4 grandparents,
a lot of time, and and also with
another aunt who, when I first met her,
I think she was already 80 years old.
And my 4 grandparents, all 4 of them
were were so much into public service,
and and 3 of my grandparents in particular
were were that was their whole life. Like,
they they were driven by
whether it was community service
or helping in the academia
world
or,
sort of,
applied faith, you know, and helping people, you
know, race issues were huge at that time.
And in South Georgia,
they were very involved on all those. And
and that probably brushed off on me more
than anything is the call to community service.
Not everybody gets the call for community service.
I get that. I wish everybody did because
the planet would be much better off if
everybody was doing something.
One person can't do everything,
but everybody can do something.
And and and so if everybody starts to
figure out what their something is,
that's why
I was so attracted to the Artist For
Change group. They were
saying, we need to do, we need to
make change and let's use storytelling,
filmmaking, documentaries to, to make that.
And when I had been working in the
white house, I always sort of keep going
back to my grandparents, you know, sort of
what what are you doing? Don't do everything
for money. Don't in fact, you shouldn't ever
do anything for money.
And
and and when I was in the white
house, I was one of the things I
was so frustrated on moving policy.
I realized that if I sit there and
just try to walk out
with 3 or 4 congressional staffer and somebody
from Department of Justice and then somebody over
at the White House, and we'd sort of
walk our way through
4 hours of data charts.
And I get that's important. That's part of
the deliver to process,
but if you can't get the congressional
people to start making change because the public
either doesn't care of in our, my case,
homelessness
or cares incorrectly,
we'll get we'll end up somewhat really bad
policy. And so that's why I got so
attracted to artists for change and the no
address project
was the ability.
We definitely have our wonky times on the
documentary
and all the research that went into that
and all, you know, we did 500 interviews.
I think we ended up with 80
in the documentary, 80, somewhere between 80, 85.
And and so we we do the wonky
stuff,
but I really have learned after being in
the in 3 different presidential administrations.
If you don't really get the country thinking
about something
and thinking about how to think differently
about it, you're not gonna get change. And
and probably the most successful in the last
50 years is Mothers Against Drinking and Driving.
And I know that's one that everybody now,
like, oh, mad, you know, they they they
almost
some people call them past their prime or
whatever. I it it is amazing.
Pre mad, you know, pre,
late seventies, early eighties,
if somebody killed somebody drinking and driving, it
was like, oh, what a horrible accident. I'm
like, somebody died,
and what a horrible accident. And
and mothers against, drunk driving come along
and say, no. We we can't think of
it that way.
And and they they changed both the laws
of the land almost
across the country. Just just I don't wanna
say overnight, but probably one of the fastest
transitions
from
not one way the law treated
to how it was different. One of the
I I I know there, I could probably
maybe come up with 1 or 2 more,
maybe a little faster, but they, they took
storytelling
at the local,
nightly news. Basically
they didn't get a lot of national news
till much later, and they got the laws
of the land change,
but they also changed the culture. They combined
with, some, a lot of research people out
of Sweden, both movements sort of collided.
And they said, we're going to change our
culture that if 3 or 4 people go
to a party instead of everybody drinking or,
or dry, I mean, whatever, you're not promoting
any of this, but it, you know, whatever
you're doing,
that we're going to have a designated driver.
And, and they created a culture in the
mid eighties, not just we're going to change
the law, but we're going to do, we're
going to prevent it in the first place
by having a designated driver. So they not
only changed the laws of the country.
They with this sort of the, the think
tank and group that at a Sweden really
pushed it in, other Scandinavian countries and came
along and said, we're going to change the
culture too.
And
that always was really struck me of how
do you have applied
community service,
but get laws changed, get the culture. And
when I start looking at what we're doing
with the no address and homelessness, we we
I was spending a lot of time in,
you know,
sort of wonky town and not getting anything
done. I mean, you know, we're getting some
things done on the edges, but we're not
changing the culture of the community. We're not
changing you know, what are we doing right?
What are we not doing right? And what
can we be doing that we're not I
wanna get into all of those different projects.
Let's go back a ways to when you
were young again. I think it's important
to hear the stories of what history was
like
during these huge upheavals
in America's,
cultural and civil
discourse?
Do you have anything that really stands
out, affect you on a on a deep
personal level? Or is it more like, oh,
my grandparents are really into this stuff. I
should pay attention.
Because if you're getting into trouble, all that
says to me is you're probably a extra
bright kid who was curious and couldn't satiate
the the brain's need for constant stimuli.
Oh, my mother would love you. She'd say,
oh, you're looking at all the positive side.
Yeah. Well, as a kid, I was also
always getting into stuff. I think I recognize
I have never told this
story ever in the media. I've I think
I've only told this story to
5 or 6 family members. And so you're
you're you're giving the more most interesting question.
You know, I look at my family. I
you know, I'm South Georgia, and,
and I had people on both sides of
the very much both sides in the sort
of civil rights movement. You know, one side
wanting to keep it the way it was,
the local YMCA's
on Dixie before you started the day, that
was on one side. And then over on
the other side
was deep roots in, you know, the the
faith community, in the Methodist Church in particular,
a little bit the Episcopal Church
of, you know, everything from going dating way,
way back, you know, with the underground railroad
and such. And so
I saw
I mean, this came up in our own
families. This came up, and everybody was sort
of on a bellwether spectrum, you know, some
people on one side, some on the other.
So we it was very you're very aware
of what was going on. And so I
happen to fly through the Atlanta airport
regularly. I mean, that's where, you know, everywhere
I got shipped off every possible moment by
my parents to Georgia.
And we've got the you get the Atlanta
airport.
The Atlanta airport was so different than the
Los Angeles airport or the San Diego or
even the Dallas airport. When you went in
the Atlanta airport when I was young, the
bathrooms were still largely segregated.
And even the ones that weren't segregated, like
it, it heartfelt at the international airport there,
they had just recently integrated
bathrooms.
And so something really interesting happened that I
think some court said you got to have
integrated bathrooms bathrooms and such. So when you
went in to the male or female bathroom,
every stall you had to pay, I think
it was a nickel. And
so, and, and then later it was, I
think, a dime. And so you had to
pay money to go into the stall
and the last stall was free. And so
you might have 3 or 4 paid stalls.
And then 1 at the, at the end
was free. And that was in theory, you
know, for, you know, a community of color
might not have the finances or might not
want to waste in their mind, waste the
money to get into their why would I
have to do that?
And it's being discriminatory
against them. It's no different than a voting
poll taxes. If you wanna vote, you pay
a poll tax. It was sort of applied
to the bathrooms after they're integrated.
And so my troublemaking
nature and my influence on my family was,
it was funny because my grandparents would my
grandfather, generally, as my grandfather say, here's a
nickel or dime.
Make sure you use, you know, one of
the stalls. So I would go into a
stall and then I can't I'm only like
5 or 6 at this time. So I'm
like, I would keep it open for a
person of, community of color. I said, sort
of, wait down, you know, come here, and
I'd keep the stall, and then we'd start
a whole chain of people
going through the stall for that my my
grandfather gave me the nickel or dime for.
And so that was my
as a 5 or 6 year old, you
know, protest on the civil rights movement. Cause
I just could not understand why we're making
somebody to pay to go get a little
cleaner
bathroom. And I'm not at all promoting. I
agreed with that. I'm just saying, why would
we have that?
And it to me, it was like voting,
you know, the, you know, the old
when we said everybody now can vote for
free, then we set up a poll tax.
And so that was sort of,
an equivalent. So that was my protest. You
know, this is 65,
66,
64, somewhere around that time frame.
That's making a little a little ripple in
a giant ocean, but that little ripple becomes
a wave.
Civil disobedience
by a 5 year old is something I
can get behind. That was my grandparents
influencing me
on, on it. And, and, you know, you're,
I'm living mostly in Southern California where that's
just not even an issue at that time.
And so you're living, you know, you're flying
in Atlanta, Georgia.
Absolutely. So fascinating. And what a culture shock
for a kid who children are so hyper
aware of their surroundings and not given the
credit.
And to go from a community
where,
as you say, it's not even an issue
to go somewhere where there's really a culture
of holding on to
the past.
What did you study in college? It it's
funny because I got kicked out of public
school when I was at, I think, 6th
grade. I ended up getting to go to
military school.
I sort of was interested in going, but
partly because I wasn't really invited back to
the to go to the the public school,
the middle school there.
And I don't find out that I was
dyslexic
until I got to college. And,
to be honest, I, I got into college
largely because I was a really good athlete
at that time. I was on the Olympic
training squad. I was an all American swimmer,
all American motor pole player, and
and I was also good at math. And
so so I did real well on my
SAT in math. I think, I think I
had a 790 or something like that. Like,
I'd have to go back and look at
it.
But my verbal was awful. I I couldn't
write, couldn't couldn't read.
And I I literally had gotten to college,
and I had only what read one book
in my life, and that was Serpico. And
it it taken me, like, 6 months to
read. And I only read that book because
I loved the book. And so I was
reading about, you know, officer Serpico in New
York, the, the, the, the, the truth, not
the sort of movie version, but the, the
real version. And he's still alive and well.
I know. And, and I heard he's he's
moved back to New York is what I
somebody told me the other day, and he's
no longer he was in Europe for a
long time. And, you know, my goal in
life's always been to try to meet him,
and I don't know anybody knows him. I
do. I'll I'll help set that up for
you. Oh, and I would love that would
be a that'd be like it. What an
honor. You're talking about, you know, protests, you
know, at an individual level, and he he
got repercussions
that were unbelievable
to him. And, you know, there were a
lot of people forget there are a couple
other officers involved that were on his side.
They also you know, and I know how
you do storytelling. You can't sort of tell
3 stories at once, but there were other
people involved.
I basically get invited
to be uninvited to my freshman year of
school. And they basically
said, you gotta deal with this because you
can't you're you're attending a really high end
college, and I sort of got in with
my perfect math score and my my sports
talent, not my quality on writing. And now
here I am at a writing school, research
school, reading school,
and I had 2 college
2 professors come to me. 1 was my
English professor,
and and he came with this other professor,
and he said, we don't get it. You
you come to every class. You're always early.
You stay late. You ask tons of questions.
You come to office hours. You're you're not
a slug. You're not you're you're not you
don't care.
When we call on you individually, you know,
every answer, you know, all the right answers.
But when you go to write, we your
your stuff is a mess. I mean, it's
trap. I mean, it's like, we can't read
it. We don't understand it and such. And
they said, have you ever written anything not
under pressure? And I I like, I don't
write. And they're like, they said, why? Because
I hate writing. And like, but do you
ever write anything,
letters in, but no. No. And they they
kept pushing. I said, I found out I
had a I forgot I'd had a training
log that I had to do for my
coaches to send back to coaches and such.
So it says that this is the only
thing I know of that's not there. And
so I was like, training log.
We want you to go to your dorm
room right now, kid it.
Do you know where it is yet?
Come back. And so 10, 15 minutes later,
I came back, gave it. And it turns
out on my training log, I misspelled
training and log
as a 19 year old. And I hand
wrote across it and I misspelled those two
words and they like looking at each other
and then they're flipping through. And he said,
well, your training log looks as messy as
your papers. And they said, we think you
have a thing called dyslexia and dysgraphia. I'd
never
nobody back then did really know much about
it. There was, you know, there was no
research on it and such,
nationally known.
And they said, we will not flunk you
from school,
because they were gonna my choice was literally
being kicked out after my 1st semester
there. Or we'll give you and I didn't
even know what it was what it meant,
but they said, we'll give you a gentleman's
season. I didn't even know what that was.
And they said, if you go off to
this place in Phoenix, we'll send you over
there for 2 or 3 days, come back
after you figure things out and such. And
I was my whole
I was driven in academia
really to try to make the Olympic team.
And back then, my sport of modern Patathon,
you had to be
with basically a college team or the military.
Those were your 2, 2 choices. And, and
I had really bad vision. So military was
not an option. Even though I tried, I
I couldn't get in. Now you all you
have all these incredible
surgeries. You can do that, but back then,
you couldn't. So I go to this place.
Sure enough, I have really severe dysgraphia,
moderate dyslexia.
By the way, I didn't have any dyscalculia
that cause they're processed in different parts of
your brain. And
most of the research that people understood were
from
military injuries, head injuries,
for, you know, shots to the head. That's
where they had found
most of the early research on this area.
And so I go to this place and
they said, what are you doing for it?
And like pretty much everything I was taught
to do is what you shouldn't do if
you have dyslexia. Like, here's a weird one.
I kept they kept sending me to the
speed reading classes
because I read it like 10 words a
minute. And I said, that's the worst thing.
That's like taking a old vinyl record
and having all these cracks and cuts and
speeding it up, take it from a 33
to 78 and speed up the crackle. He
said, all it does is make the messy
stuff come around more. So you gotta do
the opposite. You gotta read phonetically. You gotta
read differently. You gotta use your fingers. You
gotta use a pad and block out. And
so I learned all these
techniques.
Then I ended up, you know, eventually making
it on the Dean's list and making it
up and, and such. And I always kept
remembering
a 6th grade teacher of mine who I
I had to walk in to give her
a note. I was going to the doctor,
and I was walking to the teacher's lab,
and she didn't see me coming in, and
I knocked on the door, who is it,
walking around, and they had sort of a
a blocked door, so she didn't see me
in her backlist to me. And she happened
to be talking about me in front of
other teachers,
and, and not knowing
some guys walking in, it happened to be
as they said, well, that Robert Marbit kid
is awful. I meant, you know, he's atrocious
in the class. He'll never amount to anything,
never learn anything. I literally
thought about honoring my PhD
dissertation and book.
I, you know, I'd like to honor Mrs.
I won't say her name, but I remember
her name. That's a very long way of
saying,
I once I found out what my challenges
were, I said, I'm gonna really make up
for this. And so I ended up with
a triple undergraduate degree. I did full 3
under degree graduate degrees, political science, economics,
and psychology.
Then I got 2 masters,
then I got a PhD that has 3
parts to it, and then I've done 4
graduate fellowships, so White House Fellow, Quorum Urban
Affairs Fellow,
a fellowship inside Department of Defense, and a
teach fellow over in, Bahrain and Qatar. Thank
God overhearing that teacher didn't set you on
a whole other path because they could've
you could've taken that and fallen victim to
it, and you didn't.
So for about 2 or 3 more years,
I still was, I had been picked up
by you you asked what type of trouble.
Here it goes. I I've been picked up
by 3 different police departments.
And the good news is back then, they
didn't have technology to connect the departments or
I I would have been in big trouble.
And it's so funny because I went on
become, chair of the crime control district in
San Antonio, and I was chair of public
safety when I was on city council there.
Probably the worst thing is I which could
have been really
dangerous and damaging. I threw a green apple.
I had a pretty good arm. I was
a water polo player, and I threw a
solid green apple that we had found on
a tree,
through a a police car window
that was going about 35 miles an hour
on a speed. I I I I guarantee
I was not able to drive that window,
and I did that was not my intent,
but it Yeah. It was a I meant,
I I had a strong-arm,
solid green apple,
hit the side, you know, the the the
side windows back then were not nearly as
sturdy as the front.
You know, the front screen was always much
sturdier,
and so I got in big, big trouble
for that, a couple other incidents,
got in a couple fights at school. I
was suspended for when I was going through
my FBI background check, I I had that.
They said, have you ever done any of
this list? And I they're like, yeah. Yeah.
And I did a couple.
And they, like, went. So I was 12
years old and I threw something in the
principal's office. I,
I don't laugh. It's just like, I was
so close to not being able to come
back from that. If that makes sense. I
mean, I look back in and I go,
if it wasn't for my coaches first, and
a lot of people always talk about teachers
and professors,
coaches
stop more people from going into bed than
I think almost any teacher will. And I'm
not discounting what the role of teachers are
is incredible. I'm a professor,
but
coaches are your
stop a whole lot of people from doing
knuckles that it's tough. And a lot of
my coaches said, if you keep doing that,
you can't be on the team. If you
keep getting suspended and kicked out of school
and such, you can't be on our team.
The combination of getting kicked out and all
those problems and going to military school, and
I went to an incredible school called San
Antonio Academy,
that really just changed me. I mean, it
just just changed my behavior and and outcome
for a variety of reasons. It was amazing,
had incredible teachers there. And then these two
teachers who met with me in college and
said,
we think you can do this, but we
think you got this. Back then, they called
it a disease. It's sort of more of
a mechanical,
structural learning problem.
And when I did that, it it it
just changed. But but there is a period
of time, I'm I'm at the kids I
hung around with, some of the kids I
hang around are not alive anymore. You know,
some of the kids that I that I
got in trouble with ended up spending hard
time doing bad things at different times is
what I heard. I've I've never
seen them, so I I don't know how
accurate the,
you know, the truth is on some of
those stories and and such. But I I
found a
you know, I started hanging around with with
serious coaches who were, you know, trying to
help me make the Olympic team. Then then
I was around a lot of people
who really, for some reason or another, saw
something in me that I didn't see. He
said, you know, we're gonna help you out
and get through this. And I dedicated my
dissertation
to those 2 college
professors who who intervened and
said, you know, professor Payne was just if
if without him, I'd become a totally different
person.
Yeah. Well, I mean, honestly, I think between
sports and military, that has probably kept a
lot of people out of prison. Absolutely.
How did you
start to really hone
what your
personal life's purpose was going to be? Sort
of, I had a year and a half
to go
in undergrad. And and by now, my my
grades are going well.
Our our swim team and water bowl teams
at the Claremont Colleges were amazing. They were
doing well. We then unfortunately boycotted
the 1980 game, so I'd I'd sort of
missed the window,
if I could have even been good enough.
I mean, you never know, you know, what
happened, but we ended up boycotting.
And so I started
really, what am I gonna do? Because back
then, it wasn't like if you were an
Olympic athlete, now you can sort of stay
in till your natural
physical maturity goes.
But back then, you sorta once you got
past college, you were out. And my my
dad was very, very clear. He said, if
you wanna go for the 84 Olympic team,
go for it.
It's not on my dime. And and, you
know, it's so you know, when you're training
in the college environment, that's part of your
job is to be an athlete, and so
it was perfect. But when I was getting
out, I realized that I'm gonna have to
retire as an athlete even though it might
not have been my natural time.
But I knew real quick.
I knew real precisely what I wanted to
have as my first job. And I wanted
to work for, the mayor of San Antonio,
a guy named Henry Cisneros.
And at that time, he had had a
lot of national media about it, but I've
been following him in the local San Antonio
media. And this is he had been considered
for vice president of the United States, running
for 1984
on the democrat side, and I really wanted
to work for him. The more I'd read
about him, the more he was fascinating. He
was much more middle of the road,
he was much more of a problem solving,
he was a mayor
that was really doing amazing things, he really
wanted to learn,
he was a White House fellow,
which I later was fortunate to become, you
know, part of his giving me that inspiration.
He'd gone to Harvard, and he was a,
you know, a Hispanic
kid out of West Side San Antonio, one
of the poorest ZIP codes in America,
and he's off at Harvard. He's in the
Texas A and M military corps. He's done
all this stuff, but it was more about
how he handled mayorship.
And rather than dividing
the community, he tried to get the community
to come together.
And, you talk about somebody who could really
bring sides together. Henry did. He would often
make the say I I was with him
multiple times where he sort of made the
same core speech,
and he would make it in a very
poor, what what we would almost call a
a ghetto community now,
you know, real impoverished, you know, with the
places that we still had some
non asphalt, non cement curbs and some roads
that were basically,
you know, that some of the worst roads
in America.
And he grew up in that neighborhood. This
is a neighborhood that that for a while,
the peace corps trained people here. He told
me stories about the that instead of sending
people down to Latin America to some
country, they would train right in San Antonio
in the Hispanic community, you know, so you
had a lot of Spanish speaking,
and they would actually
use that as a sort of training center.
And this is way before me, but he'd
tell the story about it.
And so I was intrigued because he would
also go into the
Northside Anglo business community,
basically make the same
speech but change words. You know, instead of
talking about jobs, he's talking about economic development,
and he would use he he would customize
the speech, but the theme of the speech
was the exact same thing.
And that's not what you saw a lot
of politicians doing now, and you don't see
now, where now it's division. It's red meat.
You know, we you fight,
and it we talked about why we're different.
He talked about how we're the same. Yeah.
And he talked about how we're similar, not
how we're different. And he brought our community
together, and here was a
perceived
liberal democrat
mayor. And I say perceived because when you
when you really get into it, he was
really middle of the road.
Doctor Henry Kissinger
and vice president George H. W. Bush
came to San Antonio and tried to convince
him to become a republican,
while Henry was on the Kissinger commission about,
what was going on with Central America.
And so
but Henry really focused about how the commonality
of people, not unlike the way on the
Republican side, Jack Kemp did. And and it's
interesting
that they were back to back secretaries
of of HUD, you know, and and Jack
Kemp
on the Republicans. And he's as current was
conservative
as can possibly be,
but he talked about the commonality
and and needing it to work. And if
you look at speeches of Henry and Jack,
it's incredibly, you read the speech and it
goes, all right, who's the Republican, who's the
Democrat. But, but when you know them, you
know, one's on the left, one's on the
right, but, but they talked about commonality. And
I think if I remember correctly, if I
remember correctly, I think they wrote a book
together after they both were secretaries.
I may be wrong about that. I may
have a bad memory on it, but I
think they wrote a book together.
But their styles were so similar. And Henley
is to the left of me, there's no
doubt about it. But there was so much
we had in common that we do. So
that's who I wanted to work for as
my first job.
So I started writing him letters and begging
him to go.
And then, I wrote him a letter finally,
because he wasn't
he was I found once I started working
for him, I found out it's because he
got a bat mailbag of mail every day,
and he would just been on 60 minutes
featured.
And, and it was like 3 mailbags a
day, literally back this is before email and
electronic phones, cell phones, so even get so
much mail, and I didn't know it just
when it came through. And then I wrote
him a note,
and I I was a a finalist to
be a Rhodes Scholar. And, I was going
to Houston, my my senior year
to for a final interview for the Rhodes
Scholar Program. And I wrote him a note,
and I said,
Henry,
I'm going to Houston. I literally wrote I
think it was something like, Henry, I'm going
to Houston to be, you know, for a
Rhodes Scholarship finalist, period, new paragraph.
If you'll hire me, I won't go to
the interview. I won't go to the Rhodes
Scholar interview.
And that guy somehow,
somebody read it and it got bubbled up.
And then,
so, and
and my dad joined us for the the
lunch. He he said, I wanna meet somebody
who wants to say he wants to work
for me or a Rhodes Scholar.
And so so we literally visited,
and,
he said, so tell me about you, what
you're doing. And I happened at that time
to be part of the Choral fellowship, which
is a great learning thing for people just
right out of college,
and I happen to be working in Watts.
And Henry made a comment in in our
thing. He says, so what's it like for
somebody that looks like you working in Watts
and the Watts riots there. And I and
it was this funny thing. I said, Henry,
I gotta stop
you. In the community,
they don't call it Watts riots. They call
it the Watts neighborhood
where riots occurred.
And
and
he goes he said and he goes, when
do you graduate? And, and I like it.
So it is following me. And I said,
I wanna work for you. And he said,
I don't really have a job for you
at all, but I'll hire you, you know,
and you'll you and and I literally started
answering those mailbags for for about 3 months.
I was on mailbag duty, literally,
and he gave me some great advice. He
said, now you go do that Rhodes Scholar
interview, and if you get the Rhodes Scholar,
let's talk about that. That might be a
different path for you. Well, I didn't I
didn't make the I was on the final
list or whatever, but I didn't I didn't
get picked. I later got picked as a
White House fellow, but not a I did
not get picked as a Rhodes Scholar. When
you were at the White House, which administration
did you come into? I I worked for
the h w Bush
administration. Got it. And but you you worked
through 3 administrations
total?
Yeah. I I worked for h w Bush
and was White House fellow, and then I
went on to campaign side and helped on
the campaign side
a lot and helped on a lot of
stuff they were doing in Texas. So that
was with h w, the father,
president Trump, and as the they they call
it the federal homelessness czar
was what Ronald Reagan deemed the job. They
didn't have czars though in the in president
Trump's administration, did they? They had people that
it had jobs that my formal title was
the executive director of the US interagency
council on homelessness.
And then the media people said, well, that's
why they call you a czar. Yeah.
Right.
Ronald Reagan created the first three czars and
the homelessness was one of those 3. And
then I think the peak was
president Obama
and George Bush, the son, both had up
to, like, 26 or 27. I that if
one day, I went to look at what
who what are all the czars that, you
know, they've had a, you know, czar in
Iraq, a czar in Afghanistan,
a czar in this and such. That's never
your formal title, but it's what everybody calls
you. They'll even call you that inside administration.
And then I was one of a handful
of people who carried through,
you know, from the transition to president,
Biden served there very briefly until they he
got his team in and such. And so
those are the 3 I was under payroll,
and and I've worked for
4, I guess, 3 or 4 others on
doing different projects
at times where I've been called in and,
you know, can you help us on something?
You know, pure voluntary
type of projects.
What was it that brought you into
wanting to work with
figuring out answers for the homelessness
issue in America other than the fact that
it's,
there's so many.
In my youth group at church,
we had been very involved
with all the way back in high school,
on homelessness.
And we had had a really tragic,
incident where
a homeless person died at the doorstep
of our church
on a Sunday.
It it had either sort of a combination
of it was below freezing. I think it
was about 22 degrees,
probably his age, bad nutrition,
and he was found at the doorstep. And
our pastor came in
to that sermon day and said, we're not
gonna have this happen again. We are going
to set up our church. You know, he
basically threw out the sermon and said, we're
gonna it was almost on the spot and
said, we're gonna do this. So our whole
church got into this. And I was just
an average, you know, person in youth group
at church,
and we got involved
and I eventually because I traveled a lot
later as an adult, my specialty became
toiletries.
And so I was in charge of gathering
toiletries, and I would go out and make
speeches at, you know, moments for missions at
church. I said, whenever I traveled, you know,
it was before 9:11, you know, back when
you had these, you know, little 3 ounce
things and 4 ounces, I'd go out and
I'd say, hey, for those of you who
travel,
grab all the little toiletry things, bring them,
pile them up. And so I'd gather them.
So that way they didn't pay any money
for soap or laundry or or, you know,
Q tips and feminine hygiene, etcetera. So we
would gather that and donate it. So I
became that, that was sort of my niche.
I did that for 4 or 5 years.
I went away to college, came back, held,
went away to the white house, came back
and help, went away another time.
Sorry. I worked on the hill first as
a intern thing, then later went back as
at the White House.
And so I went away 3 different times
and came back 3 times, and I was
very struck
by
the homeless community
was the same every time I went away.
And I recognize some of the same people,
some of the people I knew names. I
said, George, you're still here. Why why I
thought we were trying to help you on
a job. You know,
and I was just sort of first fascinated
by getting to know people at an individual
level, and then I left. And so it
gave me a much more pronounced sort of
snapshot than a year later or 2 years
or 3 or 4 come back and see
the same people,
see some new people.
And then the only people
I didn't see again, I said, what happened
to Lisa? You know, what happened to Jorge?
They died on the street.
And the only people I saw exiting homelessness
were people who were dying.
And and that would just really struck me.
So that was just a pure observation as
a volunteer on the street, nothing
scientific about it, just
the same people go away, and I come
back, and it was and I'd bring this
up to people, but other people were there
sort of volunteering
every day.
They'd never noticed it. You know, they're much
more like the, you know, the lobsters and
the boiling pot, you know? And so they're
there and not noticing it where I I'd
go away and come back. And it was
so shocking
that the only people who were no longer
in the street had passed on, who died,
passed away.
I started thinking, you know, I come out
of a community of faith. So I was
thinking about it sort of that response, but
I had also was very fortunate to go
to the Claremont Graduate School is now known
as the Peter Trucker,
school,
at the Claremont Colleges where the the famous
management
guru and I and I one day was
literally caught in this conversation with a city
council person.
And I I sort of said, what would
what would,
Peter Drecker do at a systems management level,
and what would Max Lucado do at a
faith level? You know, who's, you know,
New York Times 150,000,000
books sold, and I was like and he's
a pastor in San Antonio. I said, so
what would the Peter Drecker and Max Lucado
do if they sat down together? You know
what? At this point, Max,
or Peter Drucker had passed on, but,
I was like, what would those 2 guys
if you took them to lunch and say,
alright. You got one topic today. What would
you do on homeless
and what they think? And I kept saying,
we don't have any systems on this. We
don't have any measurements. We're not working on
the root causes.
People don't even know what the root causes
of homeless were. And so
what, what I found was we were in
a glorified
bandaid giving practice. We give you a little
food, give you a little toiletries, give you
a little sleeping,
give you a little respite,
and put you on a cot, you know,
the old 3 hots and a cot.
And it and I kept sort of coming
back. What what what would the heart of
of Max Cicato and what would the brain
of Peter Drucker say
on how to handle this?
And it it I I sort of was
walking through knowing both of them and, you
know, reading both of them and and knowing,
you know, both in person or watching in
person, and then started going down. I was
like, it's pretty much, they would do everything
we're not doing, and they wouldn't be doing
anything we would be doing. And so the,
the old management question, what are we doing
right? And we should keep doing,
what are we doing wrong and not then
should discontinue.
And what are we not doing? You know,
those 3, if you ask those 3 questions
in any systems that will get you to
solving stuff.
And that was when I came back that
second time,
or the 3rd time it came back, but
when I came back from the White House,
I said,
this is not the way we should be
doing that. And that becomes the impetus of
forming Haven For Hope.
And it basically is, in very simple terms,
find out what the root causes are,
customize solutions to address the root causes.
Don't do one side fits all that the
federal government's notorious for.
Don't do stuff where you assume what the
root causes are, actually do real research in
your community
so that
Robert, Lisa,
Jorge,
Jesus,
Jonathan,
what's their real need and how do we
fit that need? And that's where, you you
know, with with, Bill Grie is our chair,
and he was chair for 22 years or
so at Haven For Hope. I was the
founding president for First 5.
That was our thing. And and we also
had a theme
that we we call it come as you
are. And, you know, if a person of
faith is come as you are, we god
loves you. We love you as you are.
We accept you no matter what as you
are, but
we love you too much. God loves you
too much to let you stay the way
you are. And we're going to create an
environment
customized to your needs, to do everything possible
to get you out of homelessness.
And that's what our design of Haven for
Hope became, and now has been replicated more
and more and more around the country,
is being adopted more and more.
I've been doing that for about 15 years,
20 years, and then they came across the
no address,
group and and the artist for change, and
that was when I said, oh, we we
we need to, like, bring these efforts together
and and really talk about this. And and
we really
and what we found is the good news
is there are many communities in America,
in spite of what's going on in the
nation, dramatically drop homeless by 85%
street level homeless, and keep it down for
over a decade.
And, and we know how to do this,
but it's not a one size fits all.
We don't focus on housing.
Housing is an important part of it, but
it can't be housing alone, and there's a
reason you lost a house in the first
place, so let's address that before we get
you in a house a second time so
that it sticks.
Street level homeless, and there are 10 different
types of homelessness in America, but there there
are 2 that are street level homeless, sometimes
called street level homeless, unhoused homelessness.
There are a lot of terms, but at
a HUD and 650,000
people in that group, by the way, it's
doubling every 5 years now.
But if you look in that group,
75%
have severe substance use issues
and 75%
have untreated mental illness, And that was determined
by the University of Berkeley and UCLA
of of analyzing
medical,
and report charts and such and self identification
from 64,000
people on the street, not 4,000, not 3,000,
not a 150 or 64,
64,000. And that's where
we've really come. If we don't treat homelessness,
housing doesn't stick. If you don't treat homelessness,
you won't get out of it. Everything I
was doing before has only been exacerbated
with the introduction of methamphetamine
and Fentanyl. And anybody who says, oh, we
can give you a house, that's why the
death rate has doubled in California in just
the last 25 months, because we're giving people
rooms,
hotel rooms mostly,
and they die in there.
Because they weren't they didn't get treatment before
and they overdose, and the death rate has
doubled. And JAMA,
you know, the medical journal did a case
study in the 1st year,
from the moment COVID did in San Francisco,
and the death rate over doubled, and it
was they were using it as a as
a test case for all of California,
over doubled,
And if you read that article,
they say not one person died from COVID.
The increase was a 100%
caused by
overdose.
And now there's that that zombie drug and
then something called blues,
and all of those have
quadrupled
or even more in the past couple years.
And you bring up
as you're talking, I'm thinking this sounds more
like the teach Amanda fish instead of give
Amanda fish
model,
but it's
it's certainly clear that this country has a
a massive mental health crisis
going on and a massive drug crisis going
on. And, of course, those things overlap because
people self medicate.
And when you hear somebody say, oh, well,
I'm not gonna give that guy $5 because
he's just gonna go drink, and, yeah, maybe
he is, but wouldn't you, kinda thing. But
there is a a definite
if if I'm interpreting this correctly,
you're saying
just providing
shelter is like a band aid for a
bullet hole. Yep. Losing the houses
if you look at an average person who
when you go listen to their individual stories,
losing the house is about the 8th or
9th traumatic thing that's happened.
The first thing is something traumatic happens
and they have untreated mental illness, and then
they start to self medicate.
And then suddenly they start missing their job.
They lose their family and friends. They start
couch surfing, burn through all that. Then they
burn through their credit card, blow their credit
card, lose their credit card, lose their housing.
Then they, by the way, they start to
lose their the last thing most people commonly
lose is their car,
except in the Northeast, because the transportation is
different. We could have called this car lessness.
If we don't start getting real serious about
untreated mental illness and substance use,
they can't keep a job. If you don't
have a job, you don't have money, you
can't pay your bills, you can't pay your
rent, you can't pay your gas. And so
then and then the whole cycle goes. I
found a small group. It may be 8,
9, 10 percent of homeless is maybe what
you would call recreational drug user. It
everybody else is
self medicating. Yeah. For sure. And your point
to self medicating is it. And so
in the United States, we gotta start getting
serious about untreated mental illness, And likewise,
the, this harm reduction movement, if you get
down and really dig into it, there's nothing
harmless about the harm reduction movement. It is
making things worse. And I know a lot
of people have different view, but could you
explain what that is? What it, what it
means? Reduction is this idea that basically says,
if you're going to drug, we're going to
still make it where you have the less
harm of you drugging. So we're going to
facilitate your drug use in a harmless
way,
which is nuts to me. Absolutely.
You mean like a, like a methadone clinic
type situation?
No. Much more like we'll give you a
clean needle.
So we're still letting you do, you do,
or, in San Francisco where they have a
safe consumption site and they give you the
foil, the straws, the pipe,
the the lighter,
then they set up Narcon there and doctors
in PA. And I'll put it in the
simplest way.
The American policy now
has made it easy to get high and
hard to get treatment.
And instead
we need to be making it easy to
get treatment and hard to get high. And
until we change that, the drug problem crisis
that
United States
over consumes
in most drug categories,
20 times of what the world average per
person is.
Some drugs are even higher than that. Some
are lower than that. We're about 3 to
4 or 5%, depending on how you, how
you count the population of the world.
And in many drug categories, we're 40%,
50%, 60%
of the user of the drug worldwide.
And that is nuts. We should be putting
everything possible toward treatment
and dealing with the mental illness, because so
much of this is starts as self medication
then becomes an addiction.
And so you need to do those both.
And there, I find some people on the
street that that do have untreated mental illness
and no substance use, and I do find
some people on the street that have some
substance abuse with no mental illness. That's the
exception.
That's not the rule. There's some stats we
need to talk about, because when people talk
about homeless, we gotta know
every time I say which group you know,
I get a question from audience. I,
I always I always ask, which group of
homeless are you talking about? And then they
muddle along. And so let's be real clear.
Housing and Urban Development, Federal Government, they have
5 categories. That's HUD.
1,200,000
people in those 5 categories.
Department of Education,
which is the group that really focuses on
K through 12 youth is 1,500,000.
And by the way,
if you have a family that has 0
to 5 with no kids in school, they're
not tracked by anybody.
So, so the 1.5 and 1.2
is 2.7
together, and we know there are whole groups
of people that are not being found. And
so
those are 10 categories. So the only 2
categories I'm talking about that that when we've
been talking here today is that 650,000,
which are in 2 of the 5 HUD
categories or 2 of the overall 10 federal
categories. And we have 8 other categories
that are, that are, you know, bigger and
we're not even talking about, but most of
the media in America and almost all the
politicians
are talking about the street level homeless. And
why are we talking about that group? 2
reasons. Well, 3. Media talks about it, number
1. Number 2, that group is doubling now
every 4 to 6 years. That's the rate
we're on. And so if you look out
the window and you see 300 people in
your community,
if nothing changes off this nutty approach we're
taking, it will be 600 people in 4
to 5 years. That's the growth rate. And
by the way, that's the official number coming
out of the White House.
I would argue
that if anything is under counting, I know
it undercounts. Most advocates will tell you it
clearly undercounts,
but I think they're putting the best possible
spin on it because the numbers are so
bad.
And so we're doubling every there. And so
one is the, just the growth rate and
how bad it is. The other is the
media,
but it's also
that I did a calculation for a reporter
the other day asked me and said, how
many people see homelessness in a day? It's
been a long time since I got a
question that I had to like, oh, I
don't know that. Let's do some noodling.
And we started noodling and it looks like
based off of where homeless encampments are, that,
that somewhere between 60 75 percent of Americans
on a Monday to Friday,
see at least 1 person experiencing homelessness or
an encampment.
Think about that number.
And I hadn't really ever thought about that
number and that number may be that's
a back of an envelope I did one
afternoon,
looking at population numbers where the homeless are.
So I may Sam off
by 30%,
and it's 45%
America. See a homeless person Monday to Friday,
twice a day. This is what's so frustrating
to me about watching our politicians
on either side of the aisle
arguing about the dumbest
shit
there could be arguing about when real problems
are happening in this country. And it's almost
as if
they are just happily having their martinis at
lunch and arguing with each other for the
cameras in the afternoon
and going home with their happy little $150,000
paycheck
and
not really
giving a shit. You know? That's what it
feels like.
And it the reason why it feels like
that, because that really is happening.
It's not a feel. It it it's what's
really going on.
And
I will tell you, as a person who's
been in the White House multiple times, worked
in the White House, worked on this issue,
and I can't tell you how many,
Hill staffers or Congress people I've talked to.
I mean, any, I'll talk to anybody. I
mean, people,
ask, how do you work for this politician
here or there? And I've even had some
of the politicians that worked for, they go,
how do you work for him or her?
And I laugh. I said, I'll work with
anybody who seriously wants to talk about reducing
homelessness.
Billy Baldwin and I've spent this week working
on things here up on this, the film
shoot.
And he's the, he's as
left as you get. And he thinks I'm
probably to him. He probably thinks I'm as
right as he is. I mean, he's literally
down the hall down here. He's doing another
interview.
And,
and we're driving around this morning, and he
said we were talking about how important this
issue is.
And and if Billy and Robert can agree,
we should be able to get some people
in Washington, DC to start agreeing. And and
it you talked about an issue that is
inner is ripping out our our inner cities.
Look at LA. Look at San Francisco.
Seattle, look at Portland, look at Honolulu.
Just let's just start right there. But it's
not even just the inner cities. That's the
other point that I think needs to be
made is
any one of us
are
perhaps a few steps away
from losing everything.
Dependent on anything from being sick, to falling
into addiction, to falling into mental health issues.
You know, there's
they're they're before the grace,
which is such a terrible saying, really, because
it makes it sound like God picks and
chooses favorites, which I don't believe is true.
But that idea
of
we are all
each other's keeper,
and it isn't political.
It's not political at all. There are people
in red states, blue states.
It doesn't make a damn bit of difference.
This is a human
problem.
In in mental ill you're exactly right. In
mental illness, which is such a a base
for that 658.
Again, I'm not talking about all homeless, but
I'm talking about the group that most of
America's talking about now,
that group
75%,
according to UCLA and Berkeley, that no far
right wing Robert Marmot think tank. I mean,
you know, this is as left as you
get, you know, the policy lab in California.
And and that's what they found in their
charting. And in the self report part of
the report, by the way, is over 50%
of self report. So that you always know
self reports under.
And so
mental illness, I I know red state, purple,
blue. I know Republican, conservative, Democrat. I know
hard right, hard left. We we were in
our final final edits
on, on the documentary we're doing Americans with
no address.
And at the last minute, I go, I
really don't like this first title card. It
had some sort of sappy,
sappy deal. It it went back to this
reporter who was asking me, said, how many
people are seeing homeless a day? And, you
know, I was trying to figure out what
that might be. And and we definitely gotta
go figure that out, but say it's somewhere
between 40 75%.
That's an insane number. But I dug a
little deeper and I go, how many people
in America
have a family member experiencing one of those
10 categories of homeless?
Not just that 650,000,
but the 2,700,000.
How many people in America have a friend
in that group or a family member
experiencing homelessness? And I was shocked at how
many hands were raised. What that they and
I and I went around and I go,
so who do you have? Well, I got
a a real good friend in college, a
real good friend from high school, my mom's
best friend. And you go around. I went
out again, did some quick math, take the
2.7,
went through the average length of time of
experiencing homelessness,
the average family size in America.
I did some research on what's your close
circle of friends. Most people have 7.8 people,
close circle of friends, and they got actually
definitions of the way. So when you actually
run out that number,
1 third in America either has a very
close friend or a personal family member who
experiences homelessness
at least once in a year. Wow. This
is the this is how big this has
gotten, and this number is only gonna get
bigger.
And when you start checking
around, why are you so why are you
helping? Why why do you spend that extra
3 hours? Oh, I got a family member.
I don't wanna really talk about it, but,
they're struggling with this. They're on the street.
I went to a rural area in Pennsylvania,
60 minutes outside of Scranton going west
in a county that only has, I think,
30,000 people in this county in Pennsylvania.
I was there 2 nights ago.
How many people have you here have a
family member or know somebody
closely know not know of a person, but
know a person? You know, their first name,
you know your last name. You may know
their birthday. You may have been to a
birthday party. How many of you know that?
Almost 30 in the room. This is rural
Pennsylvania,
outside of Scranton,
and you're like,
wow, this is really
proliferating. We're
we talk about epidemics and pandemics.
This is one right in front of our
eyes that is just blowing up. If you
say, all right now, who knows somebody who
is experiencing,
mental health,
whether it's crisis or not, mental health issue,
drug issue,
abuse at home situation,
every hand in the Oh, that yeah. The
hands are going.
You don't see a homeless problem. Like like,
I've been I go to Mexico City a
lot with family.
You do not see
a homelessness on the streets like you see
in America. And everybody in America thinks, oh,
Mexico City is full or Guadalajara.
And you you'll see 1 or 2 people,
but you do not see panhandling like you
see in LA, San Francisco, Honolulu,
Seattle, Portland. You don't see that. You go
to Argentina, you go to Costa Rica, you
go to Nicaragua, go to El Salvador.
There there's their commute poverty community is there,
but
believe it or not, a lot of people
don't realize it. Drug use in all those
countries, every country I just mentioned, drug use
is much less than America.
Drug use in America,
we out if we're 3% or 4% of
the population, we should be using 3% or
4% of the illicit drugs in the And
and and I'd say we I'm not saying
we should. Like, I hope I know what
you mean. Yeah. But that number should not
be disproportionately
above 3, 4, or 5%.
We're in the 60%
of this type of drug, 70% of this,
40% of this, 30% of this. It's a
major problem.
And then untreated mental illness,
that seems to be running higher in the
United States, and I I've been trying to
get real good data on it, and I
wish there was somebody
out there
that there's a lot of guessing going on.
There's a lot of comparison, but people use
definitions.
But what I do know for certain is
if you don't treat
untreated mental illness when it's
moderate
and it before it gets to severe,
as it goes up, the longer you go
and treat it,
the more time it takes to treat it
later
and the higher chance of it going from
a moderate
situation
to more severe, to acute, to absolutely
emergency.
When you see stupid
governmental
policy,
not working,
do we have to wait longer than 10
years to make a change? If the federal
government in 2013
before 2013,
when you got a housing voucher,
you got substance use treatment,
mental health treatment, and job training, plus a
whole other plethora, but those were the big
three. And you were given that. In 2013,
partly because of the harm reduction crowd,
and some
said, we don't have enough money for housing
vouchers, so let's take it all out of
treatment. Let's take it out of job training.
Let's take it out of mental illness so
we can create more money for more vouchers.
And so we're gonna stop treating the illness
on the street, and we're gonna and then
we're gonna put it all in the vouchers.
Well, that did not work.
Most homeless in America and almost every category
is either doubled,
or tripled since then.
And to me, it's obvious. If you stop
treating mental illness, if you stop treating substance
abuse, if we stop giving job training
and just give you a free voucher, it's
not gonna work. Imagine if we did Pell
Grants the way we are doing the homelessness.
If we would apply the homelessness principles, the
federal government currently use the Pell Grant, this
would be how your Pell Grant would would
be. Susan,
how much do you need a semester? Alright.
We'll throw in a little extra there because
you asked for that. We're gonna go. So
we're gonna extend you a check for $7,000.
Let's make it 8 or 9,000 every year.
No. Let's make it 8 or 9,000 per
semester. We'll even give you a half the
check during the summer.
Oh, by the way, you don't have to
go to the actual classes. You you do
have to sign up for school. But if
you don't go to school, you don't go
to classes, that's okay.
Oh, it by the way, you don't have
to worry about that GPA,
and you you can get unlimited,
and you have unlimited lifetime.
That's not how we do Pell Grants in
America. In America, we do Pell Grants by
you have to have a 2.0
GPA,
you have to have an 88 and a
half percent in most states' requirement to minimal
attendance to be in school, You have to
show progress
and you have a time limit on it.
Well, in in what we're doing now in
homelessness is we're saying here's unlimited free vouchers.
You don't go to treatment. In fact,
the federal government made it 2013
illegal
for a faith based or nonprofit group to
require treatment. They said it's illegal.
You can't require anybody to have treatment,
even though pre 2013,
treatment was required.
And so in 2013, we disconnected treatment and
recovery from vouchers, and we wonder why we
went south.
Imagine what would happen to Pell Grants if
you dropped GPA requirements, time length requirements, and
attendance requirements. That's what we did in homelessness.
If you go back and look at, you
know, writing about me 15 years ago, Robert's
a crazy lunatic. He's this far right wing
nut.
Well, in the last year and a half
or so, I now have
Newsom
has adopted my policy.
Governor Brown has adopted my policy.
Joe Biden talked about one of my policies
in his town hall
and said, we need to do this. And
within 15 minutes, his staff after the town
hall with Don Lemon on CNN, his staff
said, that's not what he meant to say.
And I'm like, he said it three times.
He repeated it. But this is the thing.
It can't be about politics. This is not
politics. This should be about common sense policy.
And I was made out as this loony,
whatever. And now I'm now the canary in
the coal mine. And you know what? I
haven't changed my view. We shouldn't be making
it easier to get high, easier to live
on the street. We need to make it
easier to get treatment,
easier to get recovery, and harder to get
high, and harder to live on the street,
but we have it all backwards in terms
of policy. And, and some people's, Oh, Robert,
you're just oversimplifying
and said, I really am not. If, if
our philosophy is let's make it easy to
get treatment and hard to get high.
And that became our new policy.
I guarantee you, you'll have a different outcome,
not just what's going on on the streets,
but I think that also affects everything from
school shooting. Look, how many school shootings are
interconnected with mental illness. Now, I mean, there's
one right there. There's all sorts of other
violence street crime.
And
everybody says the inner city San Francisco started
by losing healthcare conventions. Then they started losing
tech conventions.
And now they've their, their hotel rate has
just plummeted
and they've lost almost all their inner marketing,
you know, the CVS's, the Walgreens, their malls
moving out. It's it's you know, these inner
cities are dying out there. They're died out
in Portland. They're on their way. Seattle's not
too far behind what's happened in San Francisco.
Now the new mayor there, by the way,
and even Portland had a little bit of
a a change. They they've stepped up to
it. They're not quite there yet. There's a
former Portland mayor who came down and saw
one of our operations and the media, I'm
paraphrasing, make it real story short, but they
said, well, mister mayor, do you see how
well it works here? Yes.
Do you not acknowledge? And he said, oh,
no, they're really successful.
Yes.
And he said, well, are are we gonna
do that in Portland? And he and he
simply said, that model won't work here.
And I'm like, it can work there. But
that's a politician afraid
that of what it will do to the
to the politics of it. Yes. The talking
heads
will say whatever they say. And, again, you
know, you're like, oh, I'm far right. I'm
far right. I mean, you and I have
had several conversations, and
not one says,
has anything come up for either I mean,
obviously, I'm liberal.
It never once has anything come up where
that
has anything to do with anything we're talking
about. At all. I think this is common
sense. And
the the the great news in terms of
the world of homeless,
you have many communities in America, even though
their whole state may be going nuts,
you have pockets that are doing great. Like,
you got cities in Florida where one city
on one side of the five bridges
is doubled and tripled in homeless. And then
the 2 counties on the other side of
the bridge, same population, same demographics
right across from the bridge
has has had about an 80% reduction
over under baseline
for over 10 years.
It it's not a fluke. You know, anybody
can have a fluke for 18 months, 60
months. But if you've had a sustained reduction
for 10 years relative to the the city
across 5 bridges
and they've doubled and tripled, and and they're
Democrats and Republicans on both sides of the
bridges, this is common sense. Well, that's the
thing. It's like we too we as the
voters
need to stand up to our politicians who
are arguing about bullshit and say, look.
Our society is going to crumble around us
if we don't step up and treat this
as a human problem, not as a Democrat
problem, not as a Republican,
not as this, that, or the other. Stop
with all that nonsense.
And for us as as members of society
to not
turn our nose up because, again,
that person you're walking by on the street,
sure, lots of issues going on there. But
every time you turn your nose up or
ignore it or don't call to action
the politicians,
that's only going to become an exponential problem.
It's not gonna go away just because you
don't wanna look at it, which is why
we have to have these kinds of conversations.
Yeah. And and and you're getting in way
deeper than the than the 12 second sound
bites, 7 second sound bites, so you're able
to get into it. And let's go back
to federally funded,
mental health. If you go back to the
19 fifties,
we had roughly 5 and and these are
gonna be ballpark numbers because you can't get
precise because the what the programs were called
have changed, different types of programs. So these
yeah. So these are ballpark numbers. You had
roughly a half a 1000000 beds paid for
by the federal government for mental health directly
around the country. Right now, that number is,
is approaching 20 to 30,000 beds paid for
by the federal government.
And and if you get into military
mental health, that's it. You know, it it
varied. But but the bottom line is we
used to have a very robust mental health
system. Was it perfect? No. Did it need
reform? Yes.
Yes. For reform,
stopping it? No.
Most of the mental health beds in the
states that, you know,
Virginia and West Virginia, both just went through
closures. Washington state's gone through closures.
Most state funded mental health beds now are
purely limited to what's called forensic
mental health, which means
those are the folks that they were found
innocent by reason of insanity,
or they weren't fully operational at a proper
mental health basis or whatever. So instead of
go to jail,
they go to a forensic mental health bed
and they stay there. Think Kinkley,
is one that a lot of people understood
and how they it took a you know,
he he ironically probably spent more time in
the mental health system than he would if
he was in the criminal justice system. So
you get put put there,
but there's no proactiveness
care on mental health than most of America
because of a thing called IMD
exclusion. If you're under 18
or you're over 65, you can get some
Medicare and Medicaid
money that goes to reimburse. But if you're,
basically 20
over 18, or unless you're in college, sort
of, let's call it 21 ish to 65,
the federal government won't treat you. And by
the way, when they do give you money,
it has to be in a place that
has 15 beds or less.
And you're like, there's no economy to scale
to run a facility at 15 beds or
less. And, well, you can go back to
the fifties
sixties and John Kennedy and some things he
did and back to the 50. But if
you really wanna go to something much more
modern, go go to the early eighties,
81, 82.
On one side,
president Ronald Reagan, when he was governor in
California, he did not think the state of
California should be in the mental health business,
so he started shrinking the mental health budget
and bet. Right. When he became president,
he did the same thing.
You know? And and I liked a lot
of things Ronald Reagan did. I I I
just personally there were a lot of things
he did. I liked them on that side.
But this is an area
where he didn't
I I just think this was maybe have
been shortsighted. They're trying to balance a budget
and Yeah.
It shut down it shut down mental health
facilities across the country. Yeah. It had a
huge ripple effect. Yeah. In the left wing,
it can't escape this at the same time.
It is the famous movie, When A Flew
Over the Cuckoo's Nest came out, and the
Democrats, the far left, they were saw it
as a documentary
and not a fiction,
and they started promoting the deinstitutionalization
of facilities.
And so on this far left harm reduction
group, they thought this was a documentary
and let's, oh, we got to close everybody
and all, and the far right didn't wanna
spend money. So you had this really unusual
alliance, the far right did not wanna spend
money, and the far left didn't wanna
institutionalize
people,
and And the people in the middle suffered.
Yeah. In the in America, the people who
needed to help him suffered. The America suffered.
And and so you're you're going through this
and you're like, if you want to fast
forward this 25 or 30 years and and
have
a double, double, double, double, and double in
25 years. That's the rate we're going. We're
gonna have 5 doubles, not so
whatever it's 6.50 become 1,200,000
will become 2,400,000
will become 4,800,000,
which will become almost 10,000,000 people. That's the
rate we're on in 25 years of street
level homelessness.
Think about that's the rate we're doing. That
is not logarithmic. That's just, that's our current
rate. Not, not worst case scenario rate, that's
our current rate. We'll be at just under
10,000,000 people experiencing street level homeless in 25
years. And you don't and you think you
got a problem in downtown LA, Seattle, Portland,
and and I'm being told in rural areas
in the last 4 years, and I had
never gone to a rural area about homeless
until,
I think, 2018,
ever.
There was one small city. It wasn't quite
rural. It'd be about a 100000
ish in the metro area
that I went in 2011, but that was
it. Now
I'm getting more
calls from people. What do you do? What
it's like? We don't wanna I literally read
a brochure. I I had I got it
in my bag somewhere. I think it's in
my bag over here. It was on the
brochure. It says, we don't wanna become San
Francisco.
I have driven through rural America on several
occasions, and they are,
it's a it's devastating
to see what's happening to America. It's devastating.
It's not just the big cities
At at all.
It's everywhere.
Yep. Robert, I could talk to you for
hours about this, but I do understand that
you have to get back to set. And
I wanna make sure that everybody can hear
how to find you, the different
organizations that you work for and with and
founded for that matter. Can you, let everybody
know best places to to seek you out
or seek this information out or how to
help?
I'm gonna give you some 3 different areas.
So if you're in the wonky world, if
you're in the policy world, if you're a
deputy mayor in Pine Bluff, Arkansas,
go to
fixhomeless.org
or the discovery Institute, you can navigate down
and there's, we have tons, I have 9
other colleagues and we're all writing about different
aspects. We don't always agree to every little
sub thing, but we got 10 of us.
And I don't think there's 10 think tank
type people anywhere in America doing it that
are just talking about this issue from different
forms, the family,
the the person, the public policy. So you'll
see a lot there. If you're interested in
the no address movie documentary
Americans
with no address. And by the way, we
got trailers up and
some, teaser reels. You can go see it.
Or if you're looking at more of a
more philosophical
movie, like, no address, the movie starring Billy
Baldwin, Beverly D'Angelo, Ashanti's and Berkeley, and many
others, you can go to no address movie.
So no address, maybe even just typed in
no address, you can find around. But if
you go to no address movie.com,
you'll see all of what we're doing. We
got 5 different things. We're doing everything soundtrack,
a novel,
and a steady guide to, to help out.
So that's, that's more,
applied, you know, if you're in a church
youth group. And, and we talk about some
of the myths of homelessness. We also talk
about why it's much better to help a
good oak local organization
than handing sandwiches out at a park. And
if you wanna reach me directly, go marbitconsulting.org
or just marbit consulting,
I'll pop up on there too. So those
are three places you can go for more
information. And I'll put links on heyhumanpodcast.com.
And also, everyone,
look for movies that are being put out
by artists for change. They're movies that make
a difference
and are important.
And And if and if you you know,
we were talking earlier. If you've you know,
Maya is a movie already out by Artists
For Change. And if you wanna learn or
or learn a little bit more, see about
human trafficking, how it sort of subtly
I I've met many women on the street
and young ladies yet, and even girls, sadly,
who don't even know they were really trafficked
in the beginning. It's it's it's sort of,
they were they were lobster put in a
dish and put to boil, and they didn't
quite know how they got there. And there's
that the movie Maya's it's based on real
stories. It's not a real story, but it's
based on real stories theatrically done. And it's
it's a real good movie if you wanna
see that, and it also hits domestic violence
on top of that. That's right. Written and
directed by our mutual friend, Julia Verdin. Yes.
That's right. Robert, thank you so much. I
really appreciate your time. Thank you very much
for having us. Really appreciate it.
Absolutely. And thank you for listening, everybody.
Bye.
Great. Review and subscribe to Hey Human Podcast
on iTunes or wherever you get your podcast.
Thanks. Bye.