Why Fixing Homelessness is Bad Business (Full)

Episode Transcript
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Alex (00:00):
Solving America’s Problems.
Jerremy and Dave just laid outthe truth everyone ignores.
They’re with choice psychologistDavid Jacob and nutrition expert

Leslie Bobb when the number hits: America spends EIGHTY BILLION (00:09):
undefined
dollars a year on homelessness— and the crisis keeps growing.
Eighty.
Billion.
That’s more than $100,000 perhomeless person — every year
— funneled into a system with zeroreason to ever solve the problem.
Because fixing homelessnessis terrible business.

(00:30):
Shelters, nonprofits, grant machines— they all stay in business only if
the tents stay on the sidewalk.

Jerremy doesn’t blink (00:37):
Finland ended it.
Houston crushed it.
We know exactly how — wejust refuse to do it.
And the gut-punch stat?
... 771,000 Americans are homeless tonight…while the industry built to “help”
them quietly cashes the checks…

Jerremy Newsome (00:54):
Dave, the requests keep flooding in from all over the
world, but most specifically the US ofA, and they need to know what we are
solving and addressing in this episode.

Dave Conley (01:09):
In this week's episode of solving America's Problems,
we're tackling homelessness head on.
It's not just about housing, mental healthor hard times, but what if it's fixable
and we're just missing the real issues.
Joining us today, David Jacob, achoice psychologist expert who's
transformed lives by rethinkingdecisions, sees homelessness as a
societal choice, not a personal choice,and we need to choose differently.

(01:31):
And Leslie Bob, an integrativenutrition expert who seen nutrition,
lift people up from despair to hope.
Together, they challenge how we seethis crisis and how we can change lives.
And that's this week on SolvingAmerica's Problems from apathy to
Action with David, Jacob and Leslie Bob.

We feel very few people are appropriately talking about this.
We know how to end homelessnessslash it by over 50%.
Finland totally wiped itout, but here's the thing.
Every solution starts with achoice America again, we're

(02:10):
kind of choosing a failing path.
I'm Jerremy Alexander Newsom alongsidemy co-host Dave Conley, and this
is solving America's problems.
Today we are sitting downwith two incredible voices.
David Jacob is a choice psychologyexpert who believes homelessness
isn't just about housing, aboutthe choices we make as a society.

(02:35):
Baum is an extraordinary nutrition coachwho's worked with people in transition.
She knows that something assimple as proper nutrition.
Can lift people up.
Both David and Leslie have joined meat the abundance summit, at the aerial
BVI, and they have worked consciouslyand continuously on just becoming the

(02:55):
best versions of themselves as possible.
And they truly do feel that they canwork on creating a solution, even if
it's just one, two, and homelessness.
So David Leslie, welcome to the show.

@DavidJacob_1 (03:09):
Thanks for having us.

Leslie Bobb (03:10):
Thanks Jerremy.

Absolutely.
Both David, myself, and our thousandsof listeners would love to know.
And David, I'll have you go.
Nope.
Leslie, I'll have you go first.
Ladies first.
was a moment in your life?
Perhaps it was a personal encounteror a story that you heard that made
homelessness feel real and human to you.

The more I think about that, the further back I go.
Uh, my, I think my mom's just alwayshad a real open heart and open door.
Uh, as a teenager I was living in LosAngeles County and I was, uh, part
of the bad crowd, so can't see myair quotes there, but I had a lot of
friends that were crouch surfing orgetting kicked out or running away, and

(03:55):
my mom just always welcomed them in.
And it was a really nice feeling to beable to provide some safety in a, in
the storm of adolescence for these kids.
And I remember traveling with mymom and stepdad one year for the
holidays, and we went to a Denny'sor something on Thanksgiving.
There were a few homeless guys outside.
And my stepdad, instead of givingthem a couple bucks, invited them in

(04:18):
to join us for our meal at the table.
So we sat there and, and talked withthem and learned about their lives and
how normal they were and that they hadmay or may not have had family, some of
them had family they were estranged from.
And it was just a really pivotal momentfor me to see someone bravely welcoming

(04:40):
in some people that are normally sortof avoided or, um, feared by society.

Yep.

And, uh, it just really helped my heart expand, seeing my
parents have such big open hearts.
So I think that must haveprobably locked me in there.

Yeah, I love that.
I love that.
And again, it kind of sounds like Davidwill talk about in a second, most likely
is your parents made a conscious choice.
And I love how you said, as asociety, almost as a collective
choice, a lot of people just ah, theypretend homelessness isn't there.
It's almost like this terrifying,scary group of people that has

(05:16):
leprosy that no one wants to talkto or touch or interact with.
parents, again, made that choiceto kind of bring them in you the
humanity, which I really admire that.
And your parents, David, didyou have a similar situation, or
how did it become real to you?

So when I was at college, I worked at a. Like a craft beer bar, uh,
in the center of Manchester in the uk.
there was a guy who used tosit just off to the right of
where the bar front door was.
and he was there like every timeI used to finish, finish work.

(05:51):
And eventually we as bartenders, we'd gettips pretty, pretty frequently, much less
than in the us but we still got tips.
And I was already getting paid a fairlyreasonable hourly wage, so the tips were
kind of neither here nor there for me.
So I used to give him the tips.
And after a few times I ended up, like,sat down with him and we were chatting
and kind of, I got to know his story andI made a point of every time I went to

(06:12):
work and every time I finished, I used tosit down and I, I'd give him my tips and
we'd kind of talk about his life and howhe ended up there and all the rest of it.
And after probably it would've been end ofthe summer, so three or four months of me
sat down with him one day he disappeared.
I was like, oh, you know, maybe youknow the situation got the better of him
and that was the end of it or whatever.

(06:34):
I see him probably a year laterand he's completely different.
He's dressed in kind of quoteunquote regular people clothes.
He's cleaned up.
He's completely an otherwisenormal looking human being.
And this guy runs up to me whileI'm walking down the street
with a couple of my friends andhe goes, David, David, David.
And I was like, I didn'teven recognize who he was.

(06:56):
it was this same homeless guy that Iused to sit down and talk to after work.
And he said, honestly.
The conversations that we had, andyou just sitting down and talking
to me for all of those times, evenif it was for 10, 20 minutes, made
me feel like I could actually goout and, you know, reclaim my life.
and that was the first time that I kindof really saw homelessness for what it

(07:18):
was, which is people just don't care.
And as a result, it continues.
And that's a hard thing toswallow because there are so
many, organizations that do care.
But the average person reallystruggles with that empathy idea.
And then, you know, abunch of other stories.
When I was again at college, afriend of mine did an open mic night.

(07:38):
There was a homeless guy who performed,he was probably, I don't know, 17, 16,
17 at the and he said, you know, I'mraising money so I can sleep at a shelter.
And without really thinking about whatthat meant, I was like, oh, it's fine.
Like, we've got a couch, justcome and sleep on our couch and.
I wake up the next morning and myhousemates are furious because all

(07:59):
of like the, you know, you're astudent, you've got laptops, you've
got, PlayStations, TVs, whatever.
It's all in the living roomwhere this kid was sleeping.
And I didn't consider that.
I just was like, well, I mean, I'dmuch rather you on my couch than
in like a homeless shelter witha bunch of much older dudes who
probably have substance abuse issues,potentially mental health issues.

(08:19):
And you are just a kid who doesn't havea house like sleep on my couch, dude.
Like, it's okay.
So I kind of saw it when I was at collegeand then even now homelessness I think is
a blight on the modern society as a whole.

David, do you think that that's how most people see homelessness
through this, this lens of apathy?

I think apathy is a, is a tough word.
I think and this is, I guess how I've,I've learned to conceptualize it.
I. It's more as a resultof the normalcy bias.
So the normalcy bias is the ideathat if see something frequently
enough, and that is the basis pointor the idea by which we understand

(09:01):
the world, it just becomes normal.
It is normal that, for example, youknow when you turn the tap on in
your kitchen, right when you turnthe faucet on, water comes out.
If one day water didn't comeout, you wouldn't start to, you
know, think the world was ending.
You'd be like, oh, maybe there'sa problem with my plumbing.
I. But the way that we viewhomelessness is that, you know, now,

(09:22):
I mean that just happens, right?
Some people get down on their luck,some people are behind on bills.
So it just, the way the world works andI think that the average person doesn't
really conceptualize it as a problem.
They just see it as normal.
It is just simply a thing that people endup sleeping in the streets or homeless

(09:43):
or whatever, and you know, that boilsdown to another cognitive faculty and the
whole thing just compound and compound.

So like the would, would you say that most people think
that way given like that person issuccessful and that's just how it is?
Like the converse.

Yeah, a hundred percent.
Right.
So that's the, the second cognitivebias is the idea of a just world, right?
We believe you look at every differentculture across the planet and there's
this idea of like karmic balance, right?
Or something that is similar that welive in a just world where bad people,
you know, get their just desserts andgood stuff happens to good people.

(10:20):
So when you take that as the basis, well,if someone is homeless, then they must
have deserved it in some way, right?
It is their own choices or theirown faults, or the problems that
they have that led them there.
And the idea of a justworld is a fallacy, right?
Like, as I'm sure you guys know, andas many of the listeners will know.
Bad stuff happens to good people, right?

(10:42):
There's kids that are born with cancer,like it's a, there is no justice in terms
of like dumb luck and randomness and chaostheory and all the rest of it, right?
Some people just have really toughstuff happen to 'em and if we work under
the idea that, there is a just worldwhere, you know, whatever you've done
leads to some consequence, that meansthat if you are in insert situation

(11:04):
here, you deserve it by some mechanism,then yeah, it's really easy to look at
that as a system and go makes sense.
There has to be something they'vedone that has led them to this point.

Yeah, but
Point is there, there are.
There is a lot thoughthat do end up homeless
I don't know the exact percentage, butour last episode we probably settled
on somewhere around 70% of homelessnessis due to addiction and mental health.
I think Leslie kind oftouched on that quickly.

(11:34):
Yeah.
Leslie, what's, what's your take onthat percentage and just on a general
basis, do you think most people alsorationalize or view most homelessness
is probably because of addictionof some kind, or is it laziness
and I'm just getting it all wrong?

I, that was a couple of different questions there, but I
hesitate to speak to, too much aboutthe logic fallacies because we have
a like real psychologist on the line.
So I don't, I don't want 'em to belike, well, actually you're wrong.
I, I think the, the just world fallacy, Iwonder how much that still applies because
all I see is the like millionaire villainfallacy and that doesn't really apply

(12:18):
to good things happening to good people.
But I would say as far as your questionJerremy about the statistics of how
much is men, I don't know the statisticseither, but I think there is definitely
a large portion of substance abuseissues and men untreated mental health
issues in the homeless population.
And I think that contributes topeople's aversion to interact with

(12:41):
the homeless because there is asafety element and we are innately.
Averse to dangerous situations.
And when someone isn't behaving in whatwe would consider a normal way talking
to themselves or yelling at light polesor, you know, whatever the case may be,
our instinct is to protect ourselves orour children and stay away from them.
There's obviously somethingillogical or irrational about them,

(13:05):
and you can't expect normal agreedupon safe behavior from them.
And I, I think just trying to be alittle bit more fair to society, um,
that's a pretty legitimate aversionto people experiencing homelessness,
even if it isn't necessarily.
I think that I have heard somewherethat most of them do have mental health

(13:25):
problems, but they are not dangerous.
But we don't know that.
And if there's one of them that isdangerous, that could cost us everything
dear to us and we can't really risk it.
So I think that also contributesto our tendency to wanna look away
and maybe there is a, a, a, an.
In kind of inner knowledgethat it could happen to us.

(13:45):
And we don't wanna look at not, notmany people wanna go look at cancer
patients in the hospital either becauseit could happen to us and we're afraid
of our vulnerabilities in that way.
So I think, uh, I think we're all inagreement on this, uh, this group, that
this is an issue that we are really,really poorly dealing with and, and it's

(14:07):
something that should be eradicated.
But I'm just trying to kindof balance a little bit.
I think some of our versionsare just natural and fair.
I think I steered way away fromyour question though, so you
could redirect me if you want to.

No, this, it is great.
It's a great open conversation,but that's really the goal is
just to have, know, a non-scripteddialogue about how do we solve this
relatively egregious problem, right?
In the United States of America,there's over 700,000 homeless, and we
brought David in because one of hisdiscussions about, Hey, if you have

(14:39):
all the money in the world, what'sthe problem that you're gonna solve?
Right?
He stood in front of a bunchof entrepreneurs and said, I'd
love to solve homelessness.
again, the reason that I brought him onthe show and this podcast, but ultimately,
you guys can all tell from Zach thathe lives in London, and guess what?
England has homelessness too.
And so you can you go countryto country to country.
Go, wait a minute, thisis like very global.

(15:02):
So it's not just us.
Yeah.
We get it wrong for sure.
But any general idea, David, on how muchyour country spends on homelessness?
And then Dave Conley is gonna throwa really surprising statistic,
it's you on how much we poorlyspend on our homeless problem.

I wouldn't even be able to hazard a guess, but I
would assume it would be billions.

Yeah.
Well, I mean, so the UK mostlikely, but in the United
States it's 80 billion annually.
Right down the

Good.

Right down the garbage disposal because
they're doing something with it.
And I just, I just don't know whatlike are they getting, a hundred
thousand oranges and just throwing 'emat the homeless hoping they eat them?
I'm not sure what they'redoing with the money.
I don't see I. How manycities have homeless shelters?
Like the big ones, but very,very, they're not well marked.

(15:56):
They don't have a lot of signs.
They don't have like a lotof open invitation on, Hey,
who would like to help us?
Who would like to spend time?
I just feel like it's a very underrated,underserved issue, especially with all
of that money flooding to an annual.

So we actually have an advocate here in our city that works
with the homeless, and she's beenbattling our city council for years on
this, particularly during COVID whenwe as a city, were receiving millions
of dollars in grants for homeless.
And she couldn't find it anywhere.
The shelters are never open.
Uh, the, the call sent the callhotline numbers never answer.

(16:30):
There's an organization that's sponsoredby the city that's supposed to tie all
the resources together and does annualhomeless counts, and she can't ever get
them to account for the money becausethey say some of their funding is private.
So they don't have to have like,freedom of Information Act.
Rules applied to it so they don'thave to tell her where the money goes.
So it, it really is a problem andwe're just one, fairly small city.

(16:53):
So I imagine the bigger cities,it's just, it's just an open bucket.
There's just no one willbe able to find that money.

But I think the really interesting part of that,
and I think this is where a lot ofmy frustration comes from, is that
solving homelessness is bad business.
There are entire industries builtaround treating homelessness.
The symptom not dealing withthe cause of homelessness.
Right.
And even the ones that are tryingto address the cause require the

(17:26):
problem itself to continue inorder to then keep being funded.
Like it's the same reason when you hirea personal trainer, their goal is not
to get you fit in the shortest amount oftime possible because then you're not a
client anymore when you've got, emergencyshelters or I dunno, transitional housing
programs or drug rehab contracts, or, Idunno, even Leslie, to your point, like

(17:51):
grant writers and people that are inthe process of being able to pull that
money from, you know, communal coffers.
all of those people have jobs.
of those people work forsomeone that has a business.
Those businesses.
If they solved the problem,now cease to exist, and now
all of that money goes away.
It's the whole idea of, I I, I'll relateit to something probably very, very, very

(18:14):
far away, but when I worked in consulting,we would have massive, billion dollar
corporations who would come to us in thefinal three weeks of a quarter saying,
Hey, we have budget that we need to spend,otherwise it goes away next, next quarter.
And we don't need todo this work right now.
But I know that if we don't spendthis money, then we're not gonna
get it next quarter, and we mightactually need it next quarter.

(18:36):
It's the same problem, right?
If you don't spend themoney, the money goes away.
Well then it has to be spent with someone.
And those people don't wantthe problem to go away either.
'cause otherwise the money dries up.
Right.
So it's, it's you, this is thedefinition of an economy built
around a problem never being solved.
So why would you ever then solve it?
It's a fallacy because if yousolved it, the money dries up.

(18:57):
If the money dries up, thenthose people don't have jobs.
And those businesses done.
Yeah.

That's the perverse incentive, right?
Like we, we've talked to somebody who hadbeen homeless and, uh, Cara, Kara candid,
and with the amount of, we have more andmore homeless people every single year.
You know, last year alone it was771,000 people that were homeless.

(19:22):
We're spending 20 billion,that's $26,000 per person, it
keeps on getting worse, right?
So we already know that that money isnot being spent to reduce homelessness.
There are some exceptions, right?
Like Houston and Finland, like westarted this with, but in talking
with Kara, that was exactly the case.
The resources that she needed,which was different than somebody

(19:45):
who was in addiction, which wasdifferent than somebody who was had
mental illness, which was different.
I mean, she was just down on herluck and she was with a small child
and she was really struggling tojust get through nursing school.
She needed different things.
And yet there was this one size fitsall, most of it went to, supporting

(20:07):
businesses you know, like NGOsand organizations that didn't have
an incentive to get people off.
They had an incentive to keep people on.
That's the tragedy I think welearned last week, don't you?
Don't you think Jerremy

Yeah.
Yeah.
Like it's essentially thepeople who do need it.
To David's point, if something happensto them just, or unjust, they need help,
they need assistance, they can go applyfor these grants or these loans or these
applications, these things to help.
And it just doesn't truly like, itjust kind of falls through the cracks.
Right.
She was a veteran

Right?

United States there's 32,000 veterans.
Veterans who are homeless, whichagain, seems like that should,
that number should just be

It should be zero.
Yeah.

or 10.
It should be 10 people.
Like it shouldn't be that high.
32,000 is like a city.
so that's very, very tragic.
But yeah, there, there's definitely alot of things falling through the cracks.
And this is a joint question for anyonewho would like to ask it 'cause it
also came up in our last conversation.
would you feel, or what do youfeel is the difference between

(21:11):
homelessness houselessness?
What are the two differencesor two distinctions there?
I'll start with David.

What is the difference between homelessness and houselessness?
I guess homelessness is, is thephysical sorry, houselessness
is the physical element, right?
Like you literally do nothave a roof over your head.
That is, the bottom ofMaslow's hierarchy of needs.
You literally need somewhere to restyour head so you don't feel like
you're gonna die when you go to sleep.

(21:41):
Go all the way back toevolutionary psychology.
That was the one thing that allowedus to, you know, thrive as a species.
How homelessness is, waymore psychological than that.
I guess it's the idea of you don't feellike you belong, you don't feel safe.
You don't have like a community.
There's no identity based in, yourability to survive in and of yourself.

(22:01):
And I think that's, you know, away harder problem to deal with.

What do you think, Leslie?

Based on the, the way I've seen the terms.
I would agree.
Houselessness is the unhoused.
It means sleeping on the streets.
No roof over your head.
Look, if you look at thestatistics, it presents homeless
versus unsheltered individuals.
So not all homeless are unsheltered,but I think on a, on a. Simpler level

(22:31):
than David went with homelessness.
I would just call homelessness,just not having stable housing.
So you might be couch surfing, um,maybe even living in your car or
shelters, temporary housing hotelvouchers, living with relatives or
moving around from place to place,but not having a stable home versus

Yeah,

unhoused is just literally shelterless.

exactly.
Yep.
'cause I think, uh, in the USright, there's some hundred 71,000.
Total homeless.
But the shelter, to your point, likeusing that term, is half a million.
So 522,000 approximately.
And then she unsheltered million, 250,000people are unsheltered Finland solved
the issue essentially by saying, I thinkthere's two solutions in Finland, like

(23:21):
if you're houseless too long, you die.
'cause it's really cold in Finland.
And so they're like, listen,you've gotta get a house.
And so they went outand just built houses.
And essentially, I don't believe theymade it illegal, but it was essentially
like, listen, single person in thiscountry is required to live somewhere.

(23:42):
they built a bunch of small homesthat didn't have any requirement
other than someone had to live inthem per the capital, like per person.
And that helped decrease homelessnessbecause again, they had a place
to stay that didn't have any.
Requirements.
There wasn't any minimums ormaximums that need be met.
I go, Hey, everyone has a house.

Like it's a,

something will, oh, go ahead, Dave.

like it's a,

yeah,

I mean, it makes, it makes some

you're a

sense, like,

whoa, you're a human.
Let's, but let's put you in shelter.

Yeah.

So you give you and your family protection
from the freezing fenland cold.

Yeah.

But it's like that in a lot of places in the us
like North Dakota, South Dakota,Michigan gets cold in the winter.
So ultimately the cities and the stateswith the largest homeless population are
gonna be the warmer clients climates.
California, Florida.
But a lot of people in the USthey're wondering, is that a

(24:40):
choice that they're making?
Or I guess how many of theseunsheltered just can't find shelters?
A quarter million people in the USwho just can't find shelters, are they
choosing not to find shelters or doyou think they just can't, Leslie, is
it like a choice that they're making?
Like, I just wanna not a house, I don'twanna pay taxes, I just wanna go live on

(25:01):
the beach and just like have a tent forthe rest of my life and be kind of Ivy.

I have met quite a few individuals who did choose, they have
some QAC lifestyle in their head,and they did choose to be nomadic.
The majority of the chronically homelessthat, that I've seen, though it's not
necessarily a choice, but they aren'talways, shelters fill up really quickly.
They're not always open.

(25:26):
They're difficult to find, like wediscussed before, but a lot of people
are not comfortable in shelters.
You have to split up fromyour friends or your partners.
They're not safe, they'recrowded, they're nasty.
And a lot of these people,they, they do have an issue.
Functioning in society, so the rules beingstuck inside, all of that sort of stuff.

(25:46):
They they can't do it.
They have, they do have some of thesemental health issues that prevent them
from functioning in an institutionalizedsetting or in normal societal settings.
And that's why they're homeless.
They can't hold a job, so stayingin a shelter, just, it just
psychologically doesn't work for them.
And they would rather beoutside than in a shelter.
They would not rather beoutside than in a home.

(26:08):
Although we have seen some of those too.
They, they get housing and theycan't, they just can't stay inside.
They have to come back out.
But I think that's treatablepsychological trauma.
And it's not necessarily like just whothey are, the choice they're making.

Yeah.
Well I really like your focus thereon that comment about the shelter.
'cause I don't think we really, trulyhave do dove into that too much in the
sense of, okay, if you were to solvehomelessness by placing people in a.
Location, giving them shelter, right?
How safe is it?
And having the homeless shelterspresently reorganized, restructured,

(26:50):
audited, cleaned, made it like a primaryfocus on our government to go listen.
Okay?
More people probably would takeadvantage of this resource if it
wasn't overcrowded, if it wasn'tgross, if it was sanitary, if it was
a nice, kind, safe, welcoming place.
Uh, David, any opinions or thoughts on thehomeless shelters any neck of the woods?

Yeah, the, from any conversation I've ever had with anyone
that's homeless in the uk, the, theconsensus is that shelters are exactly
to Leslie's point, unsafe, overcrowded,particularly enjoyable environments to be
in, but they were never, at least from myunderstanding, they were never designed
to be long-term housing solutions.
They were short term housing solutions.

(27:36):
when you turn what was meant tobe one very temporary solution
into a much longer, again, goingback to the same idea, like that's
just kind of how it is, right?
Like this.
Idea of determinism that, oh, wellthat's just how the world works.
Some people get theshort end of the stick.

(27:56):
Oh well, when you use a solutionthat was designed to basically lift
people out of that initial slump andget them back on their feet and you
turn it into a longer term solution,that is a problem in and of itself.
Right.
And I'm, I would be almost certainthat if you looked at the data, the
higher the capacity IE, the higherthe amount of people who are in a

(28:18):
shelter, the slower those people endup actually solving for their homeless.

I would bet on that.

Yeah,

Wild.

I think shelters might have been a good solution decades ago,

hundred

know?
But it, it's the, the problemcontinued to grow and the
solution never evolved with it.
Yeah.

Fascinating.
And that's a really,really cool perspective.
So Leslie, using that word, yousaid the word solution, what's
a way, in your opinion, right?
Communities could use healthsupport better nutrition to help
people experiencing homelessness.

I love that you asked about communities, because I was
thinking a minute ago I really likeplay, I go down some rabbit holes in
my head with devil's advocate stuff,and I tend to be on the, i I fight all
the time about, well, we don't just.
Make people comfortable that are choosing,you know, laziness or distraction or

(29:19):
whatever, that doesn't solve anything.
But also it's kind of proven people needa house before they can fix anything else.
So I go in back and forthand I was thinking, you know,
as far is housing a right?
A long time ago, throughout history,we would've created our own shelter,
but we also would've been allowed todo so, and we're not really allowed
to just go find a plot of landand build a shelter on it anymore.

(29:42):
So we're preventing that naturalorder that we used to have.
So when people talk aboutpersonal responsibility.
We're not really allowed, insome cases, to be responsible
in the same way we used to be.
But we would've had communitiesthat would've helped the widows or
the children, the orphans, whoevercouldn't, the disabled that couldn't
build their own shelter, theircommunity might have helped them.

(30:05):
Uh, and we don't have that anymoreeither, especially in la New York,
these massive city, London, youknow, these are massive cities.
You can't, community doesn'toperate on such a large scale.
But to your question, as far as nutritionsupport, there are definite, and I
like that David brought up Maslow'shierarchy because, uh, when I was
talking to Dave, I also mentionedthat there, I mean, you legitimately

(30:26):
have to feel safe before you can doanything else, like physically safe.
So I, I'm not saying if you eat right,it's gonna fix all your problems,
but there are some nutritionaldeficiencies that can cause.
Mental health problems thatcan mimic substance abuse, that
can mimic psycho psychopathy.
Like if you have B12 deficiencies,if you're severely dehydrated or have

(30:47):
protein deficiencies, your brain willnot function and you can expect someone
whose brain is not functioning to be ableto handle the same types of steps that
you or I might take if we were down onour luck and needed to rebuild our lives.
So, yeah, it's a simple thing.
Go down to the Social SecurityOffice, apply for benefits you know,
go do this, go get a job, whatever.

(31:08):
But if, if your brain is notfunctioning, if you are actually
intellectually disabled now, you'renot gonna be able to follow those
steps the way someone else might.
So I would say communities can helpfill those nutrition gaps, and not by
giving them, bless Panera's heart forgiving all of their old pastries to
the homeless, but not by giving themsugar filled pastries, but by giving

(31:32):
them actual nutrition, not just.
Cast off leftover junk food.

Yeah.

I don't think, I mean, it's calories, it's keeping them
alive and it may be providing alittle bit of joy and a dismal life,
but it's not helping them heal or,or, um, you know, return to society.
It's not helping them function.
So if we have an actual interest infeeding the homeless, we need to be
feeding them nutrition and not justlike Disneyland, adding it like,

(32:02):
oh, we're the best group 'cause wego on Sundays and give you donuts.
Like that's not helping anything.

But like bouncing off that idea of like the health
implications of homelessness,like the one that immediately pops
into my head is lack of sleep.

Yeah,

on the street, you are not sleeping

absolutely.

Sleep rep. Sleep deprivation is probably one of the
most dangerous like forces thatwe have very little control over.
Right?
Like, I don't know the exact statistics,so don't quote me on it, but I think
it's 24 hours without sleep is theequivalent of being like actually
drunk, like over the legal limit.

like that.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.

So you expect people to rack up sleep debts of probably
24 plus hours in the course ofrealistically what, like a week them to
be able to make reasonable decisions?
They're probably gonnabe emotionally volatile.
I'm annoyed when I have six hours ofsleep, let alone six hours of sleep
on one night, let alone three and ahalf hours of sleep across months.

David.
That's weird.

Like you the impact of sleep on something like this.

That's really

You're absolutely right.
Yeah.

And, and the other factor, right?
So let's say that, we take the shelterstuff that we were talking about
before and you apply the same logic.
Running a shelter, it's probably notgonna be conducive to great sleep.
You've got, however many people areinside the shelter, it's probably gonna
be fairly well lit 'cause they wanna beable to like, see what's going on there
and not gonna be, you know, pitch black,which is the ideal conditions for sleep.

(33:30):
They're constantly terrifiedthat they're either gonna be,
assaulted or robbed or otherwise.
You've got people with, you know,mental health problems who are probably
not exactly the soundest sleeperson the planet, let's be honest.
All of that then, coupled withhistorically poor sleep is probably gonna
lead to a massive decline in people'smental health, and that's without even.

(33:51):
Truly addressing the, the, thequote unquote real problems of
homelessness with it, which isthe tr the threat of violence.
And as Leslie was saying, poor nutritionand everything else, we didn't need
sleep, we would've evolved out of it.
Over the thousands of years ofhuman evolution, we need it.
And this is probably arguably oneof the most impacted elements of it.

And honestly, like you also have people, especially the veterans
who are suffering from hyper alertness.
And I've never even been incombat and I struggle with this.
So you can put me in a perfectlycomfortable, perfectly cool, dark,
safe room, and it's gonna takeme several nights to be able to
actually sleep through the night.

(34:31):
Like any sound I feel like inmy entire neighborhood wakes me
up with like my heart pounding.
So people who are actually indanger, whereas I've never really
been in my life and I still havea hard time, like it's gonna take
them a while to rewire, to safety.
So even if the shelter was nice, theystill might struggle getting that
adequate sleep because their nervoussystems are just so wired to keep,

(34:54):
you know, they're hypervigilant.

So here's a question that popped in my mind as David and Leslie.
You were talking aboutthe sleep perspective.
What would be the benefitsif we did solve homelessness?
What, is there a benefit liketo the society, to communities?
Like what is it if Boom, humsis no longer here tomorrow,

(35:17):
how does society get better?
Exactly.

You wanna start David?

What are the benefits of solving, solving homelessness?
I don't know.
Being able to say that we've,we're not actively failing as
a society would be the big one.
I don't know.
That's, that's probably the biggest one.
I mean, based on Jerremy, thenumbers that you gave about, like
the cost of homelessness, everyyear we'd say billions of dollars or
pounds every single year, just on.
There's a, probably less thanacceptable English way of phrasing

(35:44):
this that I will refrain from.
We like throwing money down thetoilet for want of a better phrase.
If we are just throwing $80 billion ofgovernment spending at homelessness, and
it's, I assume getting worse year on year.
What could you do with $80 billion?
Right?
Jerremy, that's your, yourfavorite question is what are you
gonna do with X amount of money?
I think you'd, you'd, you'd havea pretty decent shot of doing a

(36:06):
lot of stuff with $80 billion.
I guess the other side of it is.
Homelessness, and I think this is where alot of people's gripes with homelessness
come from is it's not nice to look atpeople in your local community or society
and see them struggling with mentalhealth and, houselessness and seeing
them deal with drug addictions and youknow, alcohol problems and all manner of

(36:31):
other things and all of the associatedproblems like crime and whatever.
All of those things will slowlystart to decline across the board.
There's a, this is taking me back to nowmy, like high school sociology classes.
There's a, there's an idea called thebroken windows Theory of Policing, where
if you fix all of the small problems, thebigger problems don't tend to show up as

(36:53):
frequently because people don't want tomess up the environment that they live in.
Well, if you're constantly seeinghomelessness around you, you're
probably gonna assume that thatarea is also quite negative.
You flip that on its head when you fixthe biggest visible, I guess societal
dysfunction, which is homelessness.
It's the thing that we see every day.

(37:13):
Believe that, you know, the governmentis enacting reasonable change.
The government probably can be trusted.
So focus, or at least faith in the peoplethat govern you, probably increases.
At the very least, people are moreinclined to invest in different
neighborhoods because they don't,they aren't fearful of, a homeless
encampment popping up around thecorner randomly because insert A,

(37:34):
B, c, reason, whatever, Vagrant ofnow taken a whatever plot of land.

Sure.

Probably gonna see an increase in entrepreneurship
and businesses because theydon't worry about their shops
getting robbed or whatever it is.
Like there's mass societal benefitsthat just come from fixing something
that is very visible in frontof mind to a lot of communities.
I'm sure if you ask people in LAwhy would solving homelessness be a
problem they're gonna come up with soI don't have to see it all the time.

I would, uh, I would agree with that.
And I, I was thinking additionally.
With a less pragmatic lens.
Earlier when you were talking about,again, the, the biases people have that
keep them from looking at homelessness.
It occurred to me to me, my son wentthrough adolescence really struggling
because he's so intense and anytimehe would see a problem, it just felt

(38:23):
way too big to do anything about it.
So I think solving homelessness wouldprobably do good to restore our faith
in humanity a bit because we're notglaring at this huge failing problem
that we can't do anything about or wefeel so powerless to do something about.
But also back to the money, I don't think,the economic benefits in neighborhoods

(38:45):
I think is a very solid point, but alsoJerremy, I don't think that $80 billion
includes unpaid medical expenses, lostwages, all of the talent that we're
losing out on from those almost amillion people that are not able to like.
Step in their purpose in this life becauseof all the other things in the way.
I mean, those people might be visionaries,they might be brilliant engineers.

(39:10):
They might have the cure for, whatever.
They might be able to colonizeMars before Elon does.
Like, there might be some real gifts,there are some real gifts out there
and people who are buried under life.
So I think just on a human scale withmy girl heart, I'm just gonna say
like the the cost is, or the benefitis immeasurable in restoring that

(39:32):
many humans to their purpose in life.

So both of you are experts in helping people change,
from wherever they are, whetherit's their health and wellness, or
just the choices that they make.
How do we get people excited about this,overcoming this acceptance in society?
What do you think, Dave?

(39:55):
What do you think Leslie?

How do we get housed people excited about
helping or how do we get okay.

You know, like there's, it's, I mean, it's a, it's a partnership, right?
Somebody's gotta want to change.
And based on the conversationswe've already had with people who've
been homeless, they do want that.
So how do we get societyexcited about this?
How do we change society around this?

I, I, I think the, some of the first ingredients to to
getting someone to change is theyhave to believe in a different future.
And I think that's a big one thatwe would battle against nowadays
because people are so distracted andthey're so cynical that just getting
people to look and believe that itcould be different is gonna be hard.

(40:41):
They've been lied to and let down somany times just in our short lives
that we have here, and there's so muchvying for their attention that that
would be the huge, the biggest hurdle.
So believing that there's adifferent future, believing that.
You can have the different future.
So in our case, believing that you canimpact, you can pitch in on this problem,

(41:02):
that it does matter what you do would beanother hurdle once we can actually get
them to believe in a different future.
So I think those are like twohuge, huge like things to overcome,

Yeah.
I think building on that the fundamentalproblem is at least from public
perception that I understand it tobe in, trying my best to continually
understand human behavior and psychology.
I think at its core societyviews homelessness as like
an individual tragedy.

(41:38):
It's really sad that that person ishomeless, but I didn't cause it, and
I've got my own problems, but like,it sucks to suck for them, it, we
need to shift to this idea that it'slike a collective failure stewardship.
Like, that's how I view it, thatas a society, we are failing.
We are failing at the basisform of like societal function,

(42:03):
which is everyone has a home.
That is what a society is.
We grouped we, we collected ingroups so that we would be more
collectively safe than as a whole,or sorry, than as individuals.
Right?
We would be more collectively safeas a whole than as individuals.
But now it's kind of reversed, right?
And you, you now have thetragedy of the commons where it's

(42:24):
always someone else's problem.
And so long as I'm getting mine,that's all that I care about.
So if we work under the premise thatlike our societies are shared resources,
well, we all have to feel collectivelyresponsible for those shared resources.
And if at the point in which we don't,which I think is the point that we've
gotten to now, the individual palmsit off to their local government.

(42:47):
The local government palms itoff to the state government.
The state government palms it offto the federal government, and now
everyone points at everyone else.
And it's like the Spider-Manmeme in real life, right?
Nobody wants to take ownershipof it because it's too big for
them to solve as an individual.
If it's too big for an individual,then it's too big for a small group.
And if it's too big for the smallgroup, then it's bad for the bigger
group and the bigger group and thebigger group and so on and so forth,

(43:09):
like the commons end up rotting becausethe individuals don't care enough.
So like, how do you do it?
Like the, to combat like the almostthe shared paralysis of it all.
The, I write about this in my book, right?
The, a lot of people take on what I callproblem conflation, they group lots of

(43:32):
problems into one big problem and thengo, oh, well it's too difficult, so
I'm not gonna even bother doing that.
And it's, it's the wholeidea of the guardian knot.
Alexander the Great found theGordian Knot, which was, you know,
unsolvable for however many centuries.
And the law was that whoeversolved the Gordian knot would
become the ruler of Asia.
So he pulled out hissword and cut it in half.
And we have to takethe same approach here.

(43:54):
Whatever we're doing nowis categorically failing.
The approaches that we'recurrently taking are broken.
They do not work, and it hasbeen proven year on year.
So instead of trying to sit and untangleone corner of the knot and hope that
that has a collective benefit, we haveto look at this much more holistically
and say, okay, well take the entireframework that we view this in, or

(44:18):
view this through and put it in a bin.
Instead of trying to enact massivesocietal change from the top down
at a highly bureaucratic level whereeverything takes 87 meetings and
a hundred different note takers tofigure out how to do something best.
How can one individualhelp one individual?
How can one person help?
One person?

(44:38):
Because if one person helps one persontimes hundred thousand people, you
eradicate, what did you say Jerremy?
It was seven 50,000 people.
Okay, cool.
We've solved 15% of the problem

Yep.

it took you helping one person.
Okay, cool.
How do you expand that out?

So go down that train of thought a little bit more, David,
because you're, you're touching onthis and what I'm hearing you say,
and kinda what it's making me askis what's a business like approach?
Say rethinking how we fund solutions.
would that make that dent?
I mean, you're very close to it,but what would be that one extra

(45:17):
loop or connection that tie in?

Yeah, so I think the there's a, the life of me, I
can't remember what it's called, butcollec small collective funds, right?
Where let's say you and everyoneon your street puts in 50 bucks.
That 50 bucks buy however many housesare on a street, let's call it 20 for
argument's sake, is a thousand dollars.

(45:40):
That a thousand dollars doesn't go veryfar when you try and tackle homelessness.
if you know that there's one personwho's constantly homeless on your street,
picking up trash or whatever else.
You gave that thousand dollars that persona month, it costs you 50 bucks a month.
That thousand dollars changes thatone person's life very easily.

(46:03):
If every street in the US didthat, I'm assuming there's more
than 750,000 streets in the us.
Congratulations.
It costs $50 a month.
Can everyone contribute that?
Probably not.
Probably not.
there people are.
there people who can contribute a hellof a lot more than 50 bucks a month?
Yeah, but it's small collectivegroups solving small, collective

(46:27):
group problems, right?
It's a whole basis of community.
But the moment that you turn it intoa massive bureaucracy and it turns
into a business, well now the businessneeds to survive and the business
needs to exist for however many yearsto earn back any investment that went
into it, and the whole cycle repeats.
It has to be on a small scale.

Leslie, what part of that caused the physical
smile that's on your face?

Well, I would say the, uh, the American answer would
be, well, I am, it's called taxes.
I already am giving that money,and the government is supposed
to be giving it to that person,

It isn't the

so I.

feel that you don't trust the government
as far as you can throw them,

Well, I, yes, I'm a libertarian, so yes.
And I would rather give that $50to my neighbor than the government.
But the fact is the government takesit from me for this problem, and I
don't have a, a voice in the solution.
So I would say that that would bean insta argument to your ideal.

But

very logical.

But what if you did have a voice in it?
What if it was exactly that?
It was a voluntary, on yourstreet, in your street alone.
There was one homeless guy that livednearby your street, and you and the
collective citizens of your street, inyour street alone decided out of the
goodness of your heart and nothing else.
There was no mandate you were gonnagive 50 bucks a month to, Brian,

(47:49):
who lives at the end of the road.

I mean, I think that would, would be beautiful like most.
Beautiful solutions.
The way it plays out inreal life might not work.
There's been, most of my life, I wouldn'thave been able to afford 50 bucks.
So I might have gone and likecleaned Brian's house for him
instead or whatever, because Ididn't have the 50 bucks to pitch in.
But I think it's a beautiful idea.
But then say we give Brian a thousandbucks every month and he drinks it

(48:14):
away instead of paying his rent.
Which is where you get into thepaternalistic governmental, like,
I'm gonna solve this problemfor you because you're not smart
enough to do it by yourself.
So I think there's a lot of potentialholes to be poked, but then we
get back into the, it's too solve,it's too big to solve problem.
And I do agree with your, you know,let's just take a sword and slice what

(48:37):
we're doing right down the middle.
Start over.
Uh, maybe with an outcome centeredapproach instead of a a, just, or.
Accountability philosophy or whatever,if we just focus on the outcomes that
we're looking for, we can just maybeset aside for just a moment whether
it's fair to give Brian a thousanddollars even though I have to work

(48:59):
for my rent or any of that situation.
But the reality is it's, it's people don'talways do what they're supposed to do.

So the system is broken.
Do we have to break the whole thing?
Sounds like a yes.
One of the situations or determinationsthat we were kind of discussing in
the last episode was taking some ofthe individuals who didn't wanna be
homeless, a consensus, and then placingthem in other parts of the US that need

(49:32):
that need population, that need peopleto come in with fresh perspectives.
Fresh thoughts, fresh ideas.
you think that has any relevancy?
Is that even remotely possible?
Leslie,

I think that would answer a small portion of the
homeless population's problems.
I think if you, uh, justoffered to relocate certain
people to where there was work.
Some of them would takeit, take you up on it.
Many of them would not.
They wouldn't wanna relocate,they wouldn't wanna work, they
wouldn't be capable of it.

(50:04):
As we discussed before, with the mentalillness and substance abuse problems.
I, I think it, Dave mentioned earlier, onesize fits all approach not working here.
And I think that's, I think that'sreally what we have to keep in mind is
people are homeless for unique reasonsand we're not gonna be able to just

(50:27):
make one path to get them out of it.
I don't think so.
I think that would work for some of them,but not probably the majority of them.

But, so this is where I struggle with this idea, right?
So I agree with you, Leslie, that it's,it's not, you know, a one size fits all
isn't gonna work at solving the wholething, will it solve a portion of it?
If the goal is to keep chippingaway, then let's keep chipping away.

(50:56):
Let's not cast out solutions becausethey don't solve it in its entirety.
That's the entire problemof the Gordian Knot.
Is that you have to solve it pieceby piece or do what Alexander
did and cut it down the middle.
Well, if cutting it down the middleis not applicable, then we have to
solve it piece by piece by piece.
And if it is, you know, yeah.
Some people are more than happy torelocate and go to an area with jobs

(51:17):
and they're happy to be, essentiallygovernment mandated shelters until they've
worked for a period of time and thenthey have enough money to get themselves
into housing and their lives restart.
Fantastic.
If we can knock off a hundredthousand people because of that
initiative alone, we've solvedit by plus minus 15% overnight.
obviously it's not overnight,but the point still remains.

Sure.

But like, just because it doesn't solve the whole thing doesn't mean
that it's not a solution in approaching.
And I think that's where like the wholeGordian knot analogy really comes into
play because if we try and solve allof it, we'll try and solve nothing.
How do you eat an elephant?
One bite at a time.

Yeah, for sure.
I, I hope I didn't sound like I was sayingit wasn't a worthwhile approach, but I
do think 5%, 15%, it's worth solving,especially if they're people that just
need an opportunity and they're gonnabe back on their feet, then heck yeah,
let's help 'em find an opportunity.
That's just stupid notto do that, honestly.
Uh, then there's people that have mentalillness that can be treated, and then

(52:14):
there's people that have substanceabuse that may not be ready to be
treated, but we keep working on that.
So yeah, definitely.
Just because there's no one sizefits all doesn't mean none of
the sizes fit anybody for sure.

I can see that you're ready to jump in on this.

No, our guests are making me think.
Right, and I'm just thinkingit through because, you know,
that one size doesn't fit all.
Just a quick back of the napkin math,we're being taxed, $57 per person in
the United States for these, threequarters of a million homeless people.
And to me that's nothing right?

(52:52):
Over the course of a year, you know,like the price of a meal, you know,
like a dinner here, half a dinner herein Miami, you know, that's not enough.
Uh, I, I feel like, you know, like weneed to be spending a lot more and just
saying, look, this is unacceptable.
It is cruel to havepeople treated like this.
Why would, as a society we be doing this?

(53:15):
And it is different fromevery person, right?
For somebody who has, youknow, severe mental illness.
Yeah.
They're gonna be like in one camp forsomebody who is a victim of domestic
violence, which most women arehomeless because of domestic violence.
That's a whole different ball of wax.
You know, getting them safe and in aposition where that they can have a

(53:38):
job and take care of their kids like,uh, like our guests, uh, last week.
I, I don't know.
I, I feel like it's one thing to talkabout, like solutions, what isn't
working, what is working, but I justknow we're not doing enough and that
it, I don't know, it pisses me off.

So Dave or Dave and Jerremy, the guests that you've spoken to before?
I wonder like in certain situations,I know here I can't speak to the whole
country, but I know that there are alot of resources for women escaping
domestic violence and obviouslythey're not matching, they're not
finding the women that need them.
In a lot of cases, if, if that'strue that most of the women that
are homeless are homeless becauseof fleeing domestic violence.

(54:18):
So.
With the $80 billion we are spending,and that probably doesn't count.
That probably doesn't include,maybe it does include charitable
NGOs and things like that, thataren't getting federal funding.
I'm not sure.
But with the 80 billion plus that isgoing into these types of resources,
I really feel like a question to beasked in the solution would be, how are

(54:41):
we better combining these resources,aligning them so they're not all
doing the same thing and not reachinganybody and nobody's doing this thing.
Like, I feel like there's a better way to,to coordinate resources and disseminate
them to the people that need them.
If, if all of these numbers are true.

Again, I love that.
And I keep on coming back to aquestion I asked earlier was, how do
we get society excited about this?
Like what's the how?
Because I, I lived in San Franciscoand I, I think homelessness, you know,
the programs was I think the secondlargest, budget item in San Francisco.

(55:22):
There were so many services, so manyorganizations, and I, you know, and
everybody was like, wring their handsof like, oh, we spend all this money and
yet we keep on getting more homelessness.
Well, it's clearly not working.
But everybody sort of felt better about itbecause they were paying a ton of taxes.
So that disconnect, I want toknow what you really think about

(55:43):
people getting excited about thisand maybe getting pissed off like
me, like, this is unacceptable.
Like we, we've gotta, we've gottastop, stop doing stupid stuff,

do.
Like how angry you're about this and we'vehad so many topics already in the past.
You're f fever energy towardsthis is similar towards
mine with school shootings.
But I think the answer, Dave.
Ready, Leslie Ray.
David, a really good president.
I think that's thesolution to this, right?
Where you have someone who's actuallychampioning this and yelling at it
from the rooftops, where it's like,listen, and again, this is my policy.

(56:15):
My policy is all internal.
I love Gaza, love Israel,love Iran High five.
You guys gotta figurethat stuff out yourself.
Here's what we're gonna do, right?
America's almost, we're gonna stoppolicing the world and we're gonna,
we're gonna come internal for awhile and fix all of the stuff that's
happening here because we as a nationare the watchdog for the entire globe.

(56:37):
Just 'cause we wanna be, and to bereally, really fantastic for someone in
a position of extreme authority on everydebate stage, on every, address to fix
education, is where homelessness starts.
And to fix homelessness and what'scurrently existing and to just let
society know that this is a standardthat's just simply not acceptable.

So

very easy,

there's an identity shift then that we need to,
to encourage instead of.

and identity system shifts.

When I was growing up, right, like there were all of these.
ads on about litter.
I mean, like, so like, if, ifyou're, if you're under, you know,
if you're under 40, you'll, you'llnever even know that this existed.
But there were crying, youknow, crying Native Americans.
There were bears.
Like it was constant.
There were signs everywhere that, youknow, on litter bugs, like we shamed like

(57:33):
the entire country into stop littering.
Now it, I would say, you know, like,this isn't like the number one thing
anymore, but not like all of ourcommunities are like really clean,
but they're way cleaner than what theywere in the seventies and eighties.
Like, it was filthy.
People would just throwstuff out of their car.
That all stopped, youknow, like, I, I want that.

(57:55):
I want this to be likea public shaming, like

It, it worked.
Dave, because I am so angry, likelittering makes me blow my top.
Rednecks still litter.
So they need a little bit longer of thesocial conditioning and the brainwashing
than the normal urban populations do.
Because I live out here in Virginia andthey will throw stuff in the back of

(58:18):
their pickup because when they drive, itblows out and then they didn't mean to.
But I feel like there is somethingto be gained from public shaming
campaigns to change identity shifting.
So,

now I come from 300 years of redneck, so like, I
don't know I'm not much of a re

but you moved to San Francisco, so I feel like.

education back to what Jerremy was talking about.

That's good.
Yeah.
Well, Dave, I mean that's really whatit would take, man, and that, I think
that's what it takes with any changehave to have some type of authoritative
focus and really direct messaging arounda particular topic, whatever it is.
And then you gotta getthe media behind it.
And everyone just focuses on it.
Like right now in the USthe big one is immigration.

(59:04):
I mean, that's high on the list.
So people are like.
Get 'em out of the country versuslet's make sure everyone who's in
the country has a place to live.
It's like if, do you belong here?
No.
Get out.
Like no one cares aboutwho's here presently.
So I think immigration rightnow is a higher priority.
US based value, system based,identity based versus homelessness.

(59:27):
And again, that's just my opinion, but Ithink probably most listeners would agree.
But the shift there would beif you have a president or an
administration who goes, you know what?
Okay, yes, immigration, it's a problem.
However, you know, it also is a problem.
Everyone who goes to fight immigrationor to change immigration, or who is
a veteran, a large percentage of ourveteran population becomes homeless.

(59:52):
Let's fix that instead.
you're probably gonna get is more peoplewho want to actually serve the military
because they know, oh, wait a minute,when I go through the military and
potentially get PTSD and potentially havean addiction problem, and most likely
maybe form some type of mental healthfear, challenge, stress, frustration.
I'm not just gonna getkicked outta the street.

(01:00:13):
I'm actually gonna have a placethat's gonna take care of me.
Oh, that place is safe and it'snot overcrowded, and they're
gonna serve me good food.
So you know what myworst case scenario is?
I'm actually gonna be taken careof by the country that I'm serving.
I

Dave Conley (01:00:28):
I.

Jerremy Newsome (01:00:28):
that whole system with a small little, just a little
flake of rebranding and ReLovecould make some massive changes.

And also policies that don't leave people in that donut
hole that our last guest ran into.
Like, she could either live in absolutepoverty on her veterans benefits fits,
or she would have to give up her veteransbenefits in order to get, you know,
slightly better homeless benefits.

(01:00:57):
But she was like stuck in, stuckin this middle hell of, you know,
bureaucratic policy nightmare.
Hey David just sitting herethinking, you know, what do you
think is different or the same?
I don't know what'sdifferent about the uk.
Like you, you do have healthcare,you know, universal healthcare,
we don't education system.
Like what, what do you see as faras parallels or, you know, things

(01:01:21):
that are different where you live?

@DavidJacob_1 (01:01:23):
It goes back to the same question that you asked at
the start, which was about apathy.
And it speaks to a collectiveconsciousness that is focused on the
idea that if people are homeless, it's'cause they did something to deserve it.
themselves into this situation,they're probably not a great person.
Yeah.
Sometimes.
And now in the UK the one thingthat we don't have as a cause

(01:01:44):
is massive medical bill issues.
Like people aren't necessarily inhomelessness because they have massive
amounts of debt and their house hasbeen repoed and they don't have a
community around them that will allowthem to, get back on their feet.
That's not really a thing here.
It most likely is mental healthdrugs or, you know, yeah.
Tough times for whateverreason, disability, et cetera.

(01:02:07):
But the problem still exists andthe solutions that we are trying
so far, as I'm aware, very similarto yours, shelters, remedies across
the board, across, you know, mentalhealth and and whatever else.

Leslie, and then David, is there anything in
this current environment, currentsituation, even gives you a glimmer
of hope, comma, or even a semicolon?
Is there something that you seeis working or could work that if
implemented soon, would reallyactually make a shift for a dent?

Leslie Bobb (01:02:37):
Great question.
Uh, I, I always have aglimmer of hope, so yes.
I, we see, we do see some thingswork and we do see some things
that are promising, but maybe notapplied in just the right way.
Um, I have seen a lot of theselittle tiny home villages.
I, not a lot, I've seen thempop up these little tiny home

(01:02:58):
villages that pop up in the news.
Our city has been trying to have one,but they just aren't zoned for it.
And so they've been meeting a lot ofbarriers that people that are trying
to start these kinds of things.
But in other areas, I've seenapartment buildings or tiny
homes be used for this housing.
As it sounds like we all kind of agree.
I mean, that was kind of Finland'smain thing was like, let's put a roof

(01:03:20):
over everybody's head first and thenwe can kind of get to the problem.
So I always have a glimmer of hope.
I think that our society, particularly inAmerica, but I would guess as humans we
tend to swing really far on the pendulum.
America may be more than most.
Um, so we swing really far oneway, but then we self-correct and
swing really far the other way.

(01:03:40):
And I think we're close to anupswing on the pendulum and we're
gonna be self-correcting soon.
And I think part of thatis the population size.
So as David was pointing out on asmaller community level, we can,
we can kick this in the arts, wecan like get it out of the way.
So I think if we can start shiftingsolution I identity I guess to

(01:04:04):
community based again, rather than this.
Larger society responsibilityissue, I think that we could
really start solving some problems.
So I am, I'm hopeful there thatwe can look, we can look next door
instead of looking to Washington, um,more immediately and start solving
the problems on smaller scales.

(01:04:25):
And that'll spread.
So that, that gives me hope.
Getting someone in the administrationthat likes to look towards solution, uh,
based ideas is, is also always hopeful.
We get a new president every fourto eight years, so there's always
something different to look forward to.
So I definitely think that is adown the line hope, but I'm really

(01:04:46):
excited about, about community focus.

I guess to, to focus on the, the inverse, right?
So kind of going against everything thatI've said today and, and targeting the big
macro versus the micro, I don't think thatnecessarily we need to look forward to
find something that resembles a solution.
I think we probably actuallyneed to look backwards.
So my dad was born in Singapore in thesixties, and one of the big success

(01:05:16):
stories of complete and societalreprogramming is Singapore, right?
Like in 1960 odd, I don'tknow the actual date.
Qua Yu, who was the, the.
President Prime Minister of ofSingapore completely revitalized
this country from essentially a giantswamp in between, Eastern powers

(01:05:38):
that weren't exactly happy post WorldWar II and turned it into a massive
geopolitical center in the far East.
Right.
And the way that that happened wasbecause there was this collective
ideological shift of, yeah, we're atiny country and we are very divided
racially and we're very divided,politically and socioeconomically, but

(01:06:02):
we are going to become exceptional.
And that was the collective goal.
As a result, he engineered theentire country around that ideal.
And everything changed asthe basis of that, right?
It required a collectiveideological shift.
And then the government actuallyfollowed through, right?
The British had governed Singaporefor God knows how many years.

(01:06:23):
There was ethnic tension,there was poverty.
There were like no resourcesactually in the country.
But you now have the ability for a singleleader to come in and say, no, we're
fixing this and we're gonna rip it downright to the roots and start again.
And society became something thatbecame a system that was built with the
intention of, in the following decades.

(01:06:44):
And in the next, now 60 years later,there's something to show for it.
You look at what happened inSingapore and the goal was that
they were playing the long game.
Yeah, this isn't gonna besolved in the next five years.
It's probably not even gonna be solvedin the next 10 years, but give it 10,
20 years and this is going to go awayand we're gonna solve those problems.
So housing became somethingthat became governmental, right?

(01:07:05):
So the whole idea behindthe, oh, what was it?
Hd something, HDB maybe housing systemwas, we're going to give ownership
of land back to the population.
And if you compare that to, you know, thewestern world, we basically live in cdo.
We are not like actually owning anything.

(01:07:28):
We're renters, right?
We've, we've commoditizedhousing to the nth degree.
the government develops and subsidizeshigh quality housing and then actually
maintains it, which is the problem,the government actually has to follow
through on keeping it up to scratch.
At that point, if you've individuals whoown, quote unquote, that land and it's
highly subsidized by the government,you now have an ability for social

(01:07:50):
cohesion because these people know thatthey're not necessarily going anywhere.
They have a stable base to go back to.
You know Leslie's point from earlier.
if those.
Government subsidized houses that arebuilt solely for this purpose that
actually have affordability baked in.
Now you have the ability toco-create culture with your citizens.

(01:08:11):
And I think from a macroperspective, that's where the
community style of like small townAmericana comes back into the fray.
Because if you can build thatin, well now you're looking at a
fundamentally different idea becausenow all of those people are looking
at the government that basicallypulled them out of abject poverty and
saying, these people actually care.
I exist.

(01:08:32):
And if you look at Singapore now,I would hazard a guess, again,
don't quote me, plus minus 90% ofpeople actually own their own homes.
Their social cohesion.
The company's eco or the country'seconomy has boomed to the nth degree.
And I would have a guess thathomelessness basically doesn't
exist, but you gotta rip, rip itout from the root and start again.
And that has to be a countrywideattempt at social change.

Yeah.
And to kinda get my semi-final thoughts.
I think one very unique subsetof people that we, should or
could target our entrepreneurs,specifically real estate entrepreneurs.
so imagine if file your taxes as areal estate professional, if you did

(01:09:19):
that, a portion of your proceeds or a,a tax or a licensing fee, that did go
directly into a homeless pot, if youwill, because who would build houses
the best for the homeless, if notthose who build houses for everyone.

(01:09:40):
And who make money off of that.
Because when you said the wordgovernment and subsidize those
two words, never work, Really.
So I don't want, I don't actually want thegovernment to build the homeless housing.
fascinating is I think it should fallprobably on the burden of entrepreneurs
who make north of $200,000 a year say, Heyman, if you're gonna make 200,000 a year

(01:10:02):
off of real estate in this country, cool.
Now 5% of everything you makethat is going to go directly into
this homeless community pool thatyou mentioned earlier, David.
Those are the people that we're not gonnarely on everyone to put in 50 bucks.
We're gonna rely on just the people,just the ones that build houses, flip
houses, build apartment complexes,build community centers, build shopping

(01:10:25):
malls, real estate investors who.
Prey on lower taxes, who buydepreciation, who play the game.
They know the game,they've studied the game.
Those are the people thatfund and fuel and are almost
required to have that privilege.
To have that tax decrease, to have thatdepreciation that you're purchasing,

(01:10:48):
you're gonna have to spend a littlebit towards fixing the homeless issue.
I think that'd be a really, reallyfun decision that really wouldn't
impact almost any real estateinvestor in a negligible negative way.

So what if then you incentivize them to
actually upkeep and maintain it?

Yes.

What if?
What if you have your taxes?
If you actually put all of the moneythat you would've ordinarily paid in
taxes, half of it goes to building it andthe other half goes to maintaining it.
Congratulations, youjust wiped your tax bill.
Guest.

That'd be so great.
Again, I think a, a blend of thatwould, would, again, would make a lot
of sense to me, and I think that's.
are the people that I do feel are, likeyou man, like the nearest and dearest,
like you're a really great investor.
Like people who are great investors,great business owners people who, who love
money, they want to circulate money, theywanna give it to other people 'cause they

(01:11:39):
know that it helps, but they also knowthat money expands whatever it touches.
So if you give it to someone with a mentaldisease, mental health challenge, massive
addiction, guess what's gonna expand it?
Those aspects as well.
So they know just directly givingsomeone the money isn't going to be
the direct impact of the solution.
But finding ways to have people that havemoney that started from a very rough like

(01:12:06):
myself, to then put yourself in a positionof, okay, cool, well hey, I got out.
How did I do it?
What did I read?
Who did I surround myself with?
'cause your environment is what's goingto expand all of the consciousness
that you have about homelessness.
And what do most homeless people do?
They have to spend time around guesswhat homeless people all the time who

(01:12:28):
are again, afflicted affected and, and,uh, potentially really strain, strenuous
mental disease, mental disorders,or mental, uh, health challenges.
So it, it's gonna be very hard for thepeople who want to escape homelessness to
escape because they're surrounded by it.

Maybe that's, that's your answer, Dave.
What Jerremy saying?
Like maybe you tap into a way thatpeople can help doing what they love.
Because real estate investors lovereal estate, so having them work on the
housing issue is gonna be a fun challenge.
It's gonna be somethingthey can engage in.
Not everyone loves real estate, butthese people like Jeremy's getting

(01:13:06):
into need other things besides a house.
Two.
So they need, they need financialtraining, they need nutrition education,
they need, uh, job opportunities.
And there are other people who lovegeeking out on that kind of stuff.
And if we get everybody a way tohelp, I actually had started creating
a, a foundation in California whenI was much younger, with that idea.

(01:13:26):
It's just matching, matching passionsto needs, sort of, maybe that's how
you get people excited about it.
Dave, sorry to cut you off.
Jerremy.

No, that's great.
I, I'm working on actually booking.
Mayor of Newark, New Jersey, andthey've done a lot in the homeless
area, but they really focused on theaffordability problems of their houses.
And they changed a lot ofthings in their policies.
And one of the things was ensuringthat that builders had, I wouldn't

(01:13:57):
say incentives, but they had or notguarantees, I don't know what the words
are, but like their bonds and their,their debt financing was protected.
What they had to do for that wasensure that a certain percentage of
their homes were whatever they builtwas affordable and had pathways to
people who couldn't afford, that werehomeless or, you know, just couldn't

(01:14:20):
afford to live there, could live there.
And they've done a lot.
You know, I think that there's,know, there's a lot there.

There is a lot there.
That's the truest statement

Yeah, exactly.
Yes it is.
So as we wrap this one up, let's justdo a fast, little lightning round.
Interesting to see what you all think.
I'll give you all time to think about it.
But what is one word that sums upsociety's view of homelessness?
And it's okay if you've already said thatword, but what would that one word be?

(01:14:52):
Whoever wants to go first.

I feel like maybe disgusting is the one that comes to mind.

Jerremy Newsome: Disgusting by Leslie David. (01:14:58):
undefined

Tolerated.

Disgustingly tolerated.
I would agree.
I really like that blend.
What feeling or truth abouthomelessness do most people overlook?
David.
And then Leslie,

I, is it one word again or am I allowed a sentence?
All right.

you're allowed a whole sentence.

I think there is this idea of discomfort if they really
sat and thought about it for anyextended period of time, they'd get
really, really uncomfortable andthen they'd feel compelled to act.
So it's easier just to kind of covertheir eyes and kind of ostrich them
their head into the ground and assumethat if I can't see the ghost, the

(01:15:44):
ghost can't see me, just blank it out.

I was gonna say empathy, but then I realized,
I don't think that's true.
I think a lot of people have empathy forthe homeless as long as they don't let it
in too big, like David was just saying.
But I think I would say inone word that it's fixable.
I think to David's point earlier, peoplejust, it's normalized, sucks to suck you.
Poor thing.
Here's a dollar.

(01:16:09):
Whatever.
Not that this is something thatis temporary in someone's life
and that they can get out ofit if given the right support.
I don't think anybody really, notanybody obviously, but society
really looks at these people aslike in a temporary situation.
They're homeless people, they're notpeople experiencing homelessness.

(01:16:32):
I mean, even the Bible says thatthere will always be poor people,
there will always be homeless people.
So just be kind to them and help themout, so it's, it's a very like permanent,
pervasive identity in our minds.

Fascinating.
Yeah, and I, again, I agreewith that piece, like that's
always gonna be a choice.
Just like there'll always be richpeople, there are always the people
who don't wanna be rich and they,and consciously, at some point
they have to make that choice.
And I think I'm a really greatrepresentation of that because I have
a lot of individuals in my family whochoose not to listen to this podcast.

(01:17:06):
also choose not to reada lot of the books.
They also make the decision to drinkmore than they should eat, more than they
should and smoke more than they should.
Therefore, their health is gonna beimpacted negatively more overall than not.
And therefore, my exact same genes, theexact same dad, the exact same mom are

(01:17:27):
making different choices that are leadingfinancially a different road than myself.
And so ultimately, like there's alwaysgonna be choices that we can make.
Like if I became homeless andlost all of my money tomorrow.
I would just, I would firstof all call one of E three
and just stay at your place.
But ultimately, like I would makethe choice just to not be in that

(01:17:47):
situation for very long and I wouldremove my ego and start stepping into
things and make some phone calls.
And, if it happened to me at ayounger age, I'd probably still
have to make that decision.
So we all make decisions, we all makechoices, and I think for every listener
here, we simply have to make a choiceto take an action to some level.
with that being stated, I thinkI would just love to propose

(01:18:10):
for all of our listeners justthink about what is an action.
And I'll leave it to you,David, and you to Leslie.
What's one action that we can all taketoday to just start chipping away at
what we would call currently a prevailingproblem of homelessness globally?

Silence a whole group of people that have a
lot of thoughts in their heads.
So that was a good question, Jerremy.

Thanks.
Yeah, thanks.
Well, I'll, I'll, I'll rephrase it.
Make it maybe eveneasier or more poignant.
What's one step every listener couldtake, whether voting helping locally that
could shift how we address homelessness?
How about that?

Well, I would like to say for your listeners real quick,
David, and then I'll let you go.
I would like to say for your listenersthat I am now actively seeking a million
dollar grant for a homelessness thinktank of which you three will first be
invited to, as well as other experts.
But David, you go ahead and thenI'll, I'll come up with a real answer.

I guess the way that when I. First had my first experience with, you
know, dealing with someone who's homeless.
Dealing is probably a bad word,but, just learn their name.
Just treat 'em like people.
It's really easy to see themas homelessness, or sorry as
homeless instead of as a person.

(01:19:31):
And if there's someone that yousee on a really regular basis,
find out who they are now.
You don't have to do what I did andsit and listen to their story every day
for three months, but what's your name?
Remind them that humanity exists.

Come on, bro.
Such a great answer.

That is a great answer.
I like it.
I like it.
'cause if you're unseen as ahuman, how can you even start?
How can you even like think that?
Like how can you even,it's despair, right?
You just, you feel despair, and whenyou feel despair, there's no hope.
And when there's no hope,there's no action to be taken.

(01:20:11):
Sounds a good answer, David.

Yep.
And for you, Leslie, too, again, heyyou're going out and saying, Hey,
I'm trying to track down this grant.
if there's listeners out there thatare grant specialists or they'll
wanna reach out to Leslie or myselfor Dave, no, please let us know.
But ultimately, I lovethat step for you, Leslie.
I love that you're taking that action.
'cause it's like, Hey, let's get acollective group of people together.
Just like David said,that's how you fix problems.
You get a group of individuals whocare, you put 'em into an environment

(01:20:37):
where change can be created.
You motivate that change with thoughts,with actions, with words, with beliefs.
And then you go start making those changesby putting in the time and the energy.
'cause those are the onlythings we can really put in.
And you can spend timeand you can spend energy.
So like we have to spend one of thesethree things in some version of the other
to make sure that it actually happens.
So I love that.
That's awesome, Leslie, that's amazing.

(01:20:59):
David, family, thank you for listening.
And for really everyone out there, Ireally just wanna say our goal here,
as you all can know and feel, see andhopefully understand, is to get every
perspective on either side of thefence, religious or political, whatever
perspectives are truly here to createchange and that change to actually solve.

(01:21:25):
societal problems that are here in theUnited States of America, and to David's
point and other countries as well.
what this podcast is for.
Leslie, David, thank you for being here.
Listeners, thank you for being here.
Please subscribe to this podcastif you haven't done so already.
There's an image of a starall the way to the right.

(01:21:46):
Select that one.
That means you have a five star review.
Do that because apparently ithelps the algorithm somehow let
other people know that solvingAmerica's problems is happening.
It's been happening for over six months.
We have rave reviews, we haverave comment because we truly
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(01:22:06):
They're innovating and evokingemotion, and that's what's gonna
create true solutions to thesemassive problems that are facing an
incredible country that is America.
So ladies and gentlemen,tag us solve you USA pod.
On X or solving America'sProblems Podcast on Instagram.

(01:22:27):
This has been another episode.
Thank you so much foryour time and your energy.
you all.
Great job DC Conley.
Another fun one.
I'm glad to see fired up, man.
It gets me excited.

what did you learn on this one?

I really like Leslie's perspective when she used the word
that I don't think many people haveused in a lot of our problems fixable.
It's like, dude,

Yeah.

has to be this.
This has to be fixable.
You know, like relatively quickly

Yeah.

it seems like to me.
And what inspired me in this episode isI personally feel like we are actually
making legitimate tactical steps.
I can begin to see right as presidentif I reached out and created a.
A real estate investor coalition.
If you are investing at this scalein one of the 50 states, please

(01:23:18):
do this to end homelessness.
Please contribute this, and thiswill reduce your taxes even more.
Create some level of a program or productlike that's still entrepreneur based
and potentially entrepreneur run that'soverseen by a board of directors or a real
estate committee or an agency committee.
I think that that'sactually close-ish for me.

(01:23:40):
That's

Mm-hmm.
Mm-hmm.
Yeah.

sure.
If I make $60,000 from thishouse flip, absolutely.
Please give $4,000 to X, Y, Z location,community, shelter area so that I
know exactly where money's going.
There's no conduit, there's nomiddleman, no one's profiting off
of me, and it's going right tosomeone that can actually help.

Yeah.
Yeah.
I like that.
Fixable.
Yeah.
That's gonna stick with me.
And you're right, I am fired up.
It's not because of homelessnessand it, it isn't almost this topic.
It's because, you know, we've doneincarceration and, and American justice.
We've done health and wellness, we'vedone education, and now this one, and.

(01:24:30):
We've gotta stop doing stupid stuff.
That's what's firing me up.
Like, we spend much money and someoneis getting filthy rich on the misery
of fellow human beings all of thoseright down to school shooting.

(01:24:51):
Somebody is getting filthy richand we're not solving the problem.
We, you said it, weknow how to solve this.
Now I, I'm still not sure in myhead, I know what we're spending
the money on and it's not working.
So we, we've gotta stop that.
And I think I've kind of come to, we'vegotta stop funding this like this.

(01:25:12):
We've gotta cut it off.
And gotta change may, maybewe're funding the wrong thing.
We keep on.
Spending the money onpeople who are homeless.
And I'm thinking thatthis goes back to society.
We have to change the society first.
That was like a theme in this one.
So maybe it is about shaming or changingsociety, or changing people's ideas.

(01:25:35):
We shouldn't have any homelessness.
And it starts with society sayingthat this is not acceptable.
And then all of the programsflow from that, right?
Like we have, we're fundingit the wrong direction.
We're funding all the programsand hoping for the best.
Maybe it's, it's the other direction.
know.

Yeah.
What I learned is, man, thatthere's a lot of smart people
who have been closely impacted,

Yeah.

by this, who really care.
To David's point, he really got me firedup that he, internally, again, he's been
around a lot of my very, very high-endprograms and coaching and consultations
and very frequently he always sayslike, Hey, I'd love to fix homelessness.
And that's because in his mind.

(01:26:19):
He was a huge contributing factor tofixing, helping, and reshifting that
one individual that was homeless, that'snow no longer homeless because he had
a very personal, very kind interaction.
Now, David's mentioned a few times thatwas he the only reason, probably not.
But again, he doesn't, no one needsto be the only reason ever that

(01:26:39):
someone's life becomes better.
They can be a pivot, they can be amoment, they can be a bright light and
a dark space that actually does help.
And for David, he feels like he wasthat flashlight in a dark room for
that individual, for that gentleman.
And that's what really got him fired up.
He's like, holy smokes.
Treat these people like people.
Treat these beings like human beingsand love on them and care about them.

(01:27:00):
Like not some disease, notsome leprosy, but love on them.
And they probably will no longerbe homeless because they feel loved
and they feel accepted by society.
Holy smokes.

Isn't that sort of the summary of, of when we were talking
incarceration like, like punishingpeople doesn't work, but like a
Tony Robbins book kind of does.

Yeah.
Yeah.
Really, really interesting, reallyfascinating, and it's again, just
good to see so many people who docare and are excited and are moved
and motivated by this, for sure.

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