#2181 - Alan Graham

Alright, hello, Alan. Hey, what's happening? Well, I'm here on the Joe Rogan Experience, man. That's what's happening for Alan.

Like, what can be done? And what I see from you is probably the best example, the best possible example I've ever seen. And going to your place, going to see this community that you've established and how you give these people hope and a purpose, it's really pretty amazing stuff.

And as a serial real estate entrepreneur, I thought that that idea was a brilliant idea. Of course, every idea that you come up with is a brilliant idea when you're a serial entrepreneur. And it just blew up in a positive way. But it really began a couple of years prior to that, on a spiritual retreat that I went to at my church that I was invited to. And had I known that, a bunch of guys were going to get together and hold hands and kind of do that, bromance, hugging it out, I'd have never gone.

But I end up in this retreat for 30 hours of hand holding and bromance, hugging it out and had a pretty powerful experience that really just led me to going, God, what do you want me to do? I mean, I wasn't asking for anything big. It's just, you know, what are the little things that I can go out there and do? And it was through that and a series of things that led to the founding and then ultimately the founding of the community.

What can I do at church? You know, I can become a lector. My wife can go do the nursery. You know, we get our kids involved in the thing. The intellectual relationship that I had with Jesus, because there was an intellectual side to this during that retreat, just kind of dropped a floor into the depths of the cave of my heart.

And so there was a different relationship that I was experiencing with.

You know that the angel of the Lord came to a poor Jewish, 14 year old little girl and impregnated her with the power of the Holy Spirit. That's a weird thought that you got to buy into. From that, the son of God is going to be born, a virgin birth. It's going to be on this earth for a period of time. And then he's going to end up being executed and he's going to rise from the dead, descend into hell, then ascend into heaven.

But prior to that, he hangs out for another 40 days with his brother. These are incredulous things to believe. And so at some point in time, you have to end up in this intellectual space where you're just kind of going, OK, I'm going to believe that my faith is going to drive me there. So when my wife, prior to 1996,, started taking our children back to mass on Sunday and I wasn't part of that, I began to look at that as the train was leaving the station. And my father had left us when I was young and divorced my mentally ill mother and left me and my three brothers, you know, almost stuck with a mentally ill, beautiful mom, but struggling mom.

And I begin to look at Tricia, who we will celebrate 40 years this year, kind of gets me emotional. thinking about it, as taking our children and leaving the house, the train leaving the station. I'm sitting back fixing to get ready to go into the office to do some work on a Sunday because, you know, we're both kind of serial workaholic types. And I decided to jump back on that train and begin to really explore my Catholic faith. And through that process, I just got enamored with the church.

And when I talk about the church, I'm talking about the whole thing, the Roman Catholic Church, the Eastern Church, the Protestant Church, the schisms, the heresy, the wars, the reformations. And I got enamored with maybe one of the greatest novels ever written in mankind. What a train wreck this whole deal is. Yet at the center of that deal remains this Jesus of Nazareth. And so that was very intellectual for me.

And I was buying into it. My faith was buying into it. I was believing in it. I wanted to believe into it, but I had no factual things to take me there. This retreat took that intellectual stuff and dropped it afloat right into the depths of my heart.

And that's where the change really began to occur. It became more of a heart relationship with Christ as opposed to an intellectual thing.

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

And I know people do see that. So you and I live in a world, basically where we're having to accept things for the most part, that we, that we can't sort of the transistor thing.

And it's also. there's a real paper trail of when they were. Do you know the whole story of how transistors first appeared? Very fascinating. It's one of the most you want to talk about mysterious things.

One of the more interesting things about the UFO folklore is that they believe that we have back engineered some of our advances from crashed crafts. And the transistor is one of them. that sort of comes out of nowhere. Another one is fiber optics. They all sort of seem to come out sometime around 1947 after the Roswell crash.

Yeah, well, you know, and just for a little kooky piece of trivia.

Yeah. And I speak in that. I have a, I have a talk that I give called the Gospel Concarne, which is the gospel with meat. But that woundedness that I mean, Thomas, you know, when the, when the boys came to him after the resurrection and said Jesus is alive, he basically said bullshit. I'm not going to believe it until I see the nail marks in his feet and stick my finger in his side.

And this is the phenomenal depiction of that by Caravaggio.

And Thomas, if you really look at it, look at his face, bro. Look at the grimace, the forehead, his eyeballs. You can't see it very well on this screen, but his eyeballs can't even look at him putting his finger in that deal. And then he's got the torn garments, like he's a homeless. And then you look at Christ, and, you know, Christ faced.

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

Yeah, for sure. I mean, because they were, they were just guys. Right. Yeah. And but at that moment, he uttered, you know, that he believes, you know, my Lord, my God is what he said.

And and so, you know, there's, there's always the doubt in that, you know, whether there's aliens or not, I don't know. But I would be an idiot to say I absolutely don't know. I mean, I absolutely know, there's not.

during that period of time, attempts to strip my mother of her maternal rights of her four boys.

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

So I go into this with faith, complete faith. And I'm just released of trying to figure out, is it right or is it wrong? And I'm released of having to prove to people. I don't get into apologetic arguments with people. This is just who I am and how I express who I am.

But this is how I'm going to live my life to the best that I possibly can, which is simple. Love God and love your neighbor as yourself. So that's what we're going to do.

But you would not want to be alive 5,000 years ago. It would have been fucking barbaric.

James, the Apostle, are buried in Santiago de Compostela, Spain. For over 1,000 years, there have been these pilgrimages, and a half a million people will do that pilgrimage this year.

Walking along a 500-mile journey, which I did last year, and I'm going back in September to do another 300 miles,

along one of the most medieval journeys on the planet, going from one little small medieval Spanish town, another, until you get to Santiago, where the bones of the apostle are buried. And so it's a pilgrimage. It's one of the three great pilgrimages. Pilgrimage to Rome. Pilgrimage to Mecca.

If you're in Alan Graham's shape, we're going to take a little time. But you really want to saunter through the deal as opposed to power through it.

And so life is a camino, which means the way. And, you know, you and I are on this journey. And lots of things come into our world that just kind of come out of, you know, the ether and appear. So why not create as many opportunities in our lives? Many people want to architect how things are going to go in their life, and they got to have it precise and planned.

and this. And this is a very unplanned. I don't know where we'll be sleeping on any given night. I don't know who we're going to encounter at any given night. I don't know what restaurant we're going to be in on any given night or where we're going to eat a meal.

or, you know, who we're going to meet. And so there's just a lot of providence that's in this journey and in this pilgrimage. It's cool. It's something that would blow a Joe Rogan away.

And then, maybe more importantly, you came out and talked, and the way you talked was with no ego and with kindness and with sincerity.

And immediately I thought, I want to talk to that guy. I want to find out what's going on with him. You know, there's people that you meet that are like extraordinarily peaceful and extraordinarily content. And that's how, that's how you seem to me. And when you were on that stage talking, I was saying to my wife, we've got to get his information.

I want to get him on the podcast. I want to talk to him. I just want to find out what's going on with him. Because, yeah, I think you're a very unusual person, because there's a lot of people out there that profess to be Christians. They profess to be whatever their denomination is, whatever their religion is, but they don't necessarily live it.

Like you, you abandoned your beautiful house and moved into one of these tiny homes in this homeless community. And then, when we went and toured the community and got to see how you interact with everybody, it's beautiful. It's really very extraordinary. And I don't think there's very many people that would do that, what you've done. You live with them.

You feed them. They have all these activities, different things to do, different ways to make a living. There's all these people that are extraordinary artists. It's really amazing, impressive art that some of these unfortunate souls, you know, they have all this creative ability, but they just have nowhere to put it. Nothing to do and no hope and no understanding of how to get out of this.

And no one around them is getting out of it either. And they're sort of trapped. And then you come along and you find great value in these people, you know, and they find incredible value in this community that you've created. And the community is constantly expanding. While we were there, you were showing us about this new area that you guys are developing, where you're going to expand it.

It's really amazing stuff, because it's an example of someone who's actually doing it. You know, you're actually living that life. You're actually contributing in an incredibly positive way to all those different human beings. The hundreds of different human beings that you encounter with this and how much you've shaped and changed their lives. It's very beautiful.

It really is.

When we begin to learn, you know, and how I like to describe this is, I say to people, you know, and people will, you know, they've got this stereotype of the men and women out there. They're dope addicts. They're alcoholics. They're mentally ill. They've chosen this.

They're lazy.

And I said, look, imagine being a 12-year-old little boy or girl. You're laying in bed at night. And you're in between. You're in that twilight area between being asleep and awake. You're looking out the window at the starry, starry night.

You're dreaming about what you're going to be when you grow up. I can tell you that my dreams at 12 were three things. One, I wanted to be a rock star.

You know, I remember playing the song Bad by Cream, I think, you know, Eric Clapton, Jack Bruce deal.

Football, I played. football, was a moderately decent football player. At one time, thought I could play in the NFL. You've seen my DNA. You realize that that was never possible, but it was still a dream.

And then I wanted to be a jet fighter pilot. Wow. You know? And you know. what's amazing is I'm 68 years old today.

And if I'm driving and I've got ACDC cranking in the car, guess who is on stage playing that guitar and singing that song? It's not Angus Young or Bon Scott or Brian Johnson. It's Alan Graham doing that. Or if I'm watching a great football game, you know, and I see somebody throw a great pass or do a great block or a hit or something like that. I go back in time.

Or if I see a F-22 screaming across the sky, I still dream today. And I tell people one of my favorite smells on the face of the planet is burning jet fuel. I love being on airports. I became a private pilot. I don't fly now, but many years ago.

So the embers of those little boy and girl dreams are still inside of us. You had them. I don't know what they were at that time. And then somebody came in and poured fuel on top of those little boy. Joe Rogan dreams that now have you.

But because you couldn't be laying in bed at night, going, hey, man, I'm dreaming of doing the Joe Rogan experience thing. It wasn't on the plate.

We as a society are missing out. And, yeah, look, we got the crack addicts and the glue sniffers and the prostitutes and the convicted felons. All that comes with the package.

and how do you do you screen those people out? Like, what do you do?

Most of them are just good people.

Right. The news doesn't show you all the news. It shows you what's scary. There's a lot of beautiful things that are happening all the time. The news never highlights.

The news just gets you freaked out about global warming, nuclear war, economic collapse. Is that really Biden, or is that a guy in a Biden suit? Whatever it is, it's just more crazy things that get you freaked out. But the majority of your inner, your interactions with other people, the majority of your experiences, the people, are pretty positive for the most part. Even considering all this stress that everybody's under all the time.

Bills that can't be paid. Relationships, that suck. Jobs, that you got fired from. All these different things. Hopes and dreams that are crushed.

Flat tire. Bad transmission. Fuck. Most people are good. Most people.

That's why you can go on the highway and everybody, for the most part, is doing what they're supposed to do.

400 formerly chronically homeless men and women living in our community. Average time on the streets is nine years. At any given time, 15 to 20 are giving us a run for the money.

380 to 85 are just fine.

you know, most everything that happens negatively out there is going to be related to dope and alcohol.

So you may have the on-site dope dealer that we got to manage and figure out how to either tone that down or get them out of there, that kind of thing. The really aggressive meth or crack cocaine addicts are going to be stealing somebody's bicycle or debit card to go buy, you know, something. Or sometimes we have the confluence of profound mental health issue and drugs coming at the same time, and they'll get destructive on their property, those kind of things. It's just the reality of the whole world that we live in, in a microcosm there at the community first building.

That's what our DNA is all about. If you want to procreate, if you want to carry on your genetics, you want to keep your loved ones alive, you got to stay alive. And so there's this fear, this constant fear, and it's crippling. And because it's projected, it's projected both by the mainstream media and it's projected by social media algorithms, the things that you interact with the most, the things that freak you out the most or anger you the most, are oftentimes the ones you see the most, because you interact with those, and it's designed to keep you hooked. And unfortunately, what that's doing is it's making us anxiety-ridden freaks.

Yeah. And we're losing our understanding of humanity. And it's also extremely polarizing. We had a conversation about this at your place.

The news today, it's so polarizing. It's us versus them inside our country. for the first time in my life. When I was a kid, when I was in high school, my parents were very liberal. And they never talked disparagingly about conservative people or Republicans.

They just thought they were wrong. That's all. it was. Like they had conservative friends. They would sit at the dinner table and have conversations about stuff.

Maybe they'd argue, but it was always fine. It was just two human beings disagreeing on things. Now it's like everybody's a Nazi or everybody's a communist. It's just one side is absolutely sure that they're right, and the other side is absolutely sure that they're right. And it's just accentuated by everything we see.

So when you can see someone like yourself in a microcosm, put this together and make a real community of some of the most disparaged members of our society. The people that you look when they're trying to get money at the stoplight. You look away. You drive past them in their tents. Jesus Christ, what's that guy doing in there?

You don't even think about them. The same type of person that might see someone with a flat tire and pull over. Like, hey, buddy, you all right? Can I help you? Because you're me.

I'm you. We're at the same sort of stratus in society. We're acceptable members of society with cars and homes and normal people with jobs. You know, so I'll help you. But that guy over there, like...

There's a guy on your street corner and up underneath that bridge that you pass every day. Can we pull over and help them change that flat tire? That's what this is all about. Because the government... We have to quit, yelling at the mayor and the city council to go and fix this problem.

This is what we do. Okay? We need government to come alongside of us to do this. But look, this is a human issue, and the government is not coming into your bedroom tonight to tuck you in. You know, we need a human-to-human, heart-to-heart connection between people who are broken and battered and come from a trauma background that you and I...

I mean, a battlefield background that you and I can't even begin to understand.

You should do all those things. But all this pretending that everybody's starting from the same spot and the reason why you're successful and they're not is that you work harder. That's just foolish.

They avoid them. They get away from them. We didn't. If you go back and you study the history of tribal human beings, we didn't ever live like that. Right.

We were all communal. Everyone lived together. We had tents and then we shared fire. We shared food and everybody had a role in the community and everybody had a purpose. When we isolated in, we developed agriculture and then developed cities and then developed walls and then developed ways to block everybody out and ways to hide from the rest of the world.

And you're in this. And then and now that we have cars, you get in that box and you drive past all those people. We've lost so much connection with human beings and the proportion and size of the homeless, drug addicts that are on the street in tents is a direct reflection of how sick the culture is and how sick the community is. And Los Angeles, which is one of the most morally deprived, twisted, ideologically imprisoned places I've ever been to, has the biggest, most insane homeless population.

And it was not even hardly present. But when you get to the 1970s and 80s, the word became ubiquitous. And through a Google search, you can see that this word appears in every publication, on every news media staff, a million times every single day. And why, in this window of time, basically the 70s on, is that word so prevalent? Because we didn't have this.

When I moved from Austin, Texas, I mean from Houston, Texas, the Houston area in 1976, there weren't people standing on our street corners begging. You had the, you know, the odysseys from the, you know, Andy of Mayberry, downtown, chronic, inebriate, drunk downtown. But it wasn't ubiquitous on every single street corner. What the hell happened in the past 46, seven years?

And I believe in our constitution. This isn't an anti-constitutional thing. But, you know, recently, you know, on my Facebook, which is my only social media deal, I'm a member of my high school thing. And one of our assistant principals recently passed away, Coach York. And there were five, 600 comments on Coach York.

And 90% of them were from men who got into his office and ended up being paddled, you know, during that period of time and talking about how awesome Coach York was. And I couldn't tell you how many licks I got from Coach York during that period of time because I was a little turd ball when I was in middle school.

They're making them pay attention to some shit that's boring from some unenthusiastic, uninspired teacher who's underpaid, and it's a mess.

Yeah. The reality of the way we educate people is that it's just not well thought out, and it's not aligned with human nature. It's not aligned with the requirements that a young, healthy body has for activity.

I had a great science teacher when I was in eighth grade. I think about that guy all the time. He was great. He put in my mind the concept of infinity. He put it in my mind.

He would tell the whole class, just one night, go outside and look up and realize that there's no end, because you really want to make your brain hurt. Try to figure out what that means. There's no end to that. Try to think about how far that goes back, and don't let that thought go. I thought about that almost every day of my life from a guy that I met when I was 13 years old.

This is not what you think it is, and you're going to lose people along the way.

Right. It's not even measurable. We can't even see it. We'd have to have a microscope in order to be able to really look at it.

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

I think there's something about being by that ocean that makes you go, oh, what is this? What the fuck is this? This is all bullshit. Look how much water there is. Or the same thing about mountains.

People that live in the mountains, they have a-.

And because of light pollution, we're not humbled by the night sky. like our ancestors were. Our ancestors, every night, they got to view the most spectacular thing a human being ever gets to witness, the vastness of the cosmos. Right above their head, every night. And now we don't even see it.

We sacrificed that so we could take our Toyota to 7-Eleven at 10 p.m.

And you could see the full Milky Way with the naked eye. And it felt like we were what we actually are. It felt like we were on an organic spaceship that's hurling through the vastness of the universe.

Probably 2008,, when this really rocked me. I just remember thinking, watching it, like, you know what, I know, for a fact, it's 2007.. I remember thinking, this is such a travesty that we don't have this view every night. And I think it would change the way people think. It would change the way people feel about just the mystery of life itself.

Just to be confronted by the stars. Just confronted by this inescapable greatness that's just mesmerizing.

And I think it imparts something into people. I think it imparts this sense of humility and wonder that we're missing. And I think it's another, one of the other reasons why we're still here.

No. A lot of bad stuff going on right here.

Yeah. Yeah. It's just – what does it say here? Depends where you live. Some places, like Portland.

And Texas, is still Columbus Day. Where state workers have the second Monday of October off. Oh. But that's just when they – so the other places they don't have that off. So it's just holidays.

State holidays honoring Native Americans.

Do they still call it Columbus Day on your phone? I couldn't get a great answer. What day is it? Depending on what state you live. What day is Columbus Day?

Second Monday in October. Let's see if it says it on my phone. still. We have these colonizers.

The second Monday in October? Is that what you said? Yep. Nope. Yeah.

Oh, it does. It's both on mine. Yeah. The 14th. Yeah, Columbus Day and Indigenous Peoples Day.

I mean it was bad. It was bad in certain parts of downtown L.A. when I was filming Fear Factor there in 2003.. We were filming. We filmed downtown because there was a lot of these warehouses that were abandoned.

And we used them for stunts and different things that people had to do. And I took a wrong turn once and I was down in Skid Row and I was like, yo, this is crazy. I couldn't believe the numbers of people that were just wandering around the street, cracked out, cardboard box houses. And that was the beginning of it. And the crazy thing about that is Skid Row is essentially an engineered environment.

They took all the mentally ill people that they arrested from all other parts of Los Angeles and they brought them to Skid Row and they kept them there. They just put in food kitchens and some kind of a shelter and they were like, you fuckers, stay here. We're keeping you out of Beverly Hills. We're keeping you out of Bel Air. Just stay right here.

And it just stayed like that and grew. And there was, was it? the Cecil Hotel? it was a documentary on? I watched a documentary on the Cecil Hotel, which is in the middle of all that.

It was this beautiful old hotel, and now that whole area is just chaos. And then now it's expanded like considerably. So the fact that they have never done anything about that, it's only grown and in fact more people are hired to work on it. And those people are making hundreds of thousands of dollars a year and not putting a dent in it. Just shows you how sick the culture is.

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

And if this can be done more, like this might be the solution. I mean what I saw from your place is the best example of a possible solution to this ever. Because you could see those people when they were walking down the streets and waving to you and talking to you. People seemed happy. They seemed relieved.

They seemed like they've got some hope. We're looking at it here.

We're looking at it here. on the video.

We're a piece of the puzzle, Joe.

So what we're witnessing today is really nothing extraordinarily new. But because of the urban environment that we live in, it's very congregated and we're so separated as a culture today that it's manifesting into this chaos. What we need to do is we need to open the door very wide to innovation. And I will tell you, from 1975 to 1995, 20 years, one simple generation, we eliminated in the United States of America one million. That's one with six zeros after it, single-room occupancy units in the United States.

Tonight, there'll be about 600,000 people living on the streets. In L.A., it's 50, 60, whatever that number is.

not approved by the United States government, housing and urban development. Yeah, we have to change this. We have to open the door to vast innovation to get people out of this into places that they can afford.

It was lots of people, all of us, we, the people, frankly.

That we're trying to get people out of the state mental hospitals that didn't need to be there. And the vast majority of them didn't need to be there and reacclimate them back into the community. What we're seeing out on the streets right now are the small percentage of people who probably need to be institutionalized or managed in a phenomenally different way than how we're managing them now.

You can buy these maps today. And on that map are three prominent features. This is 1887.. There's the Capitol. There's the University of Texas Tower.

And there's the insane asylum. If you can zoom in on that.

By the time the 50s and 60s came around, we had invented these unbelievable drugs. Haldol, Thorazine, all these drugs that we could give people. Electric shock therapy, which had been around for many decades. prior to that. Lobotomies.

The whole deal about Kennedy had to do with his sister having a lobotomy. Right. And that there's got to be a better way that we can bring people back into the community as opposed to being in these institutions. And so I ask you and all of our listeners here, how many people do you know that are battling depression, bipolar disorder? It's all around us.

And they don't need to be institutionalized, but there are a few people in this world that need a different level of care than we're currently giving them. We have half a dozen of them that live in the village that we can't manage, and we need a different level of care. By the time Ronald Reagan came around, we were completing what was really an honorable experiment that has gone partially awry.

You know, we're not going to be a McDonald's because I can't get, we're not going to be able to manage people to do exactly, precisely what we do. And plus, how we do it in Austin, Texas is not necessarily how you're going to do it in Minneapolis, Minnesota. But there are some characteristics of what we do that we think are extremely important.

They just hear about us. And we're pretty, I mean, we're pretty well-known, still controversial, but well-known.

You know, you don't see a lot of, like, real selfless sacrifice done under the spirit of just trying to do good.

You know, maybe kind of rare people leaving, you know, one thing in order to jump in to another thing. But I've had the experience of running operations the way that I ran those. And that's what we're trying to do. We're trying to really demonstrate to people that, no matter what your leadership qualities are, no matter how well-spoken you might be able to articulate what's going on, there's a place for you to lead to make a difference in your community. Because people will say, I'm no, Alan Graham.

Well, thank God, number one, you're not. It doesn't take an Alan Graham to do this. But let me show you the pieces that it does take in order to make this happen and where you fit into that puzzle. That's what we try to do with our symposiums.

Like you. look at something like that, like that's very valuable. And a lot of the art is really incredible. And just think, like, how many people get affected and get moved by these pieces of art that would never experience it if these people didn't have an opportunity to express themselves?

He was an abject failure.

And it's forensically believed that he was maybe schizoaffective, bipolar schizoaffective. It's also rumored that he was possibly a drug addict. I forget the drug. He spent two years in an insane asylum in a little town in Arles, France, where he probably painted the most expensive art on the planet while he was in an insane asylum.

And then it was post his death and because of his sister-in-law, his brother, who died six months after Van, Gogh, who really exposed him. And he's considered one of the greatest artists of all time history. That's what I believe that we potentially have. out there on the streets are these Van. Goghs.

And you met Ute Dittmar, a German woman who is gifted beyond all giftedness, and sold that chess set for 10,000 bucks.

And I think it's up. And that's because we poured, we collectively, we, the people, us, not just mobilos and fishes, decided that we're going to pour fuel on those childhood embers of her dreams. And that's what she gets to do. every single day is come in there and paint.

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

I don't know how they do it. My art is the village. That's my canvas. That village, it's a different kind of art. But I'd love to be able to draw and paint something.

I've tried. It looks like shit.

It has a different feeling when you look at it. But I think that really comes from whatever that person is. The skill of learning how to do it is, that's a learned skill that you could learn.

She's incredible. I think maybe some of that comes from genetics. I don't know. I don't know how that works. I'm not sure.

You know, there's some people that are children of great singers and they have incredible voices. And you wonder, like, is that the genetic makeup? Is that just like you have this capacity for sound that I don't have? Like you can make beautiful songs that I can't do? Or is it a learned thing in your genes from some person?

You know, your parent, one of your parents, that has this thing inside of them and it somehow or another gets into you. And you're like, oh, I know how to do that. I know how to do that. That's in me. That's in me.

I think there's a little of that too.

It's how much time you spend on it, how much time, how much focus, how much energy do you have to apply to it?

or Houston, you know, or Austin. But you had men and women selling bottles of water, newspapers, flowers, cow skulls, cow skins, and, I'm sure, your favorite, velvet Elvis art.

And you can't go to any country in the world, Joe. And not be accosted by somebody that is selling you something.

we are? One of my great friends, a guy who's dead now, John Bromwell, used to sell, you know, stuff like the skulls and the longhorns and stuffed animals, and stuff and rugs and cow skins and cow skulls from a van on a street corner and built a multimillion dollar a year business. You know, that was here in Austin, where you could go buy all kinds of stuff like that, because he could do it on a street corner.

About 20 cents.

They're willing to stand out there on a street corner in absolutely abysmal, shitty conditions, being rejected over and over and over and over again. Spit on, reviled. All four are nickels and dimes and dollars, 40,, 50, 100 bucks a day. Crazy. We should empower that.

But our nanny state will have them. Oh, we can't have them on the street corners. They're going to get hit by a car someday.

It's dignity, man. And then we never know where that might lead somebody.

Drunks wandering down the streets.

And then suddenly this thing became kind of the source and summit of the center of the town, reviled by everybody moving down there. So it kind of came about. naturally. It actually happened during my buddy's, Kirk Watson's, first term as a mayor. And he regrets it.

He looks at that as a mistake. But what do you do now?

I can't remember the name right now. Forgive me for that. But that took it over about a year, year and a half ago or so. And they've done a marvelous job. If you drive by it today, you can't even tell it's a shelter.

So it's actually being run extraordinarily well today.

So until they really revitalize that area of 6th Street, that will probably not change.

I like the fun. Yeah.

You know that spot there?

it's such a heartbreak. That's someone's kid. That's what it is. When you have children of your own, too, you look at people like that and you go, hey, that was someone's baby boy. Yeah.

And now here they are, half naked, scabs all over their body, slumped over, rocking back and forth in the breeze.

our statistical data that we've done over the past seven or eight years shows an 80 percent drop in drug use from the streets to the village and about a 40 to 50 percent drop in alcohol use.

And because how are you going to live in the misery of being on the streets other than anesthetizing yourself to the back? So it's hard to blame people. I mean, we're anesthetizing all of us. Right. I mean, one of the greatest drug dealing places is all of our pharmacies, where, you know, we're all going to buy our pharmaceuticals.

You know, and look, there's some interesting things going on in the world that I want to see explored, especially around addiction. And that's like the use of psychedelics and mitigating as a treatment mechanism for people. And I just would like for the world to come around and, you know, make things easier to bring relief to people. Because when we bring relief to individuals, we're going to bring relief to the community as a whole. Yes.

And we ought to explore a number of different things. And, you know, I take the legalization of marijuana as an example. You know, look, I live in the middle of a village where it's all there. Everything is there, from fentanyl to crack, cocaine to meth, marijuana. And I will tell you, our potheads are happy, hungry and sleepy.

And the folks that are, you know, smoking or shooting, you know, meth and crack, many of them have pretty profound problems as a result of that. And I'd love to see some studies going on around the psychedelic nature to see if we can further help people through their addiction issues.

Or episodically homeless, adding up to a year over a four year period of time.

I can see how many touch points you've had into the homeless service deal and over what period of time. But a year has got to be a minimum, knowing that the average number of years in our community today is under 10 years, a little over nine years. Of homelessness? Of homelessness.

But I wanted the lowest on our radar, our totem poles, to go after.

In May of 2003,, I took 15 people from my church out for a 72-hour sleepover, basically, a retreat, one-on-one retreat between you and God in the retreat center, where they're primarily the Wallace streets of downtown Austin. We've done dozens of those. I've personally done 50.. I've probably spent 250 nights on the streets myself. And you begin to build relationships with people through that process.

So many of the early people that came into the village were coming through that network. Today, we're engaged. We have an organization in town called ECHO. They are our continuum of care lead in Austin, Texas. And a number of agencies are engaged with ECHO who refer people through ECHO and the HMIS system into the village.

And they have a coordinated assessment. They call it something else, I think, now. But there's a coordinated assessment tool that people can take that attempts to assess individuals' vulnerability. So the goal from the continuum of care folks is to get the highest vulnerable people up off the streets because, allegedly, they cost us, the taxpayer, the most money, although there's some questions around that now, legitimate questions. We try to get a balance, because we can't become a full-blown assisted living type of a deal.

We need people that can live independently. So there's a structure that brings people in. It takes a while. We have a waiting list of about 150 people.

Is this something that was already made?

You can put a television there. Not bad at all.

And it just made sense that they could come out there and experiment and beta test their printers and build for us. And then these guys also have a phenomenal heart, because normally new technology is reserved for people that can afford that new technology. But here's a powerful new technology that's actually benefiting people who could have never afford that technology. because that technology today is not cheap. Right.

They're beating it down, but it's not cheap. So we've built 17 of them on the two phases that we have right now. We're under construction right now on 50 more across the street on that new phase. And there'll be another 50 over on Burleson Road by the airport where we're under construction there.

Provide us with attractive land anywhere and we'll raise the money to build.

In 2008,, April of 08,, the city, unanimously, city council granted us a long-term ground lease on 17 acres of land in East Austin. In July of 08, we went on to a neighborhood meeting. Myself, the sponsoring council member, some of our team members, system city manager, my wife, Tricia, that just turned into Armageddon. Police had to be called to escort us out of there.

News media was there and it was an unbelievably horrible experience. The next morning, the city council member, the sponsoring city council member, by the way, who is still a friend of mine, a hugging friend of mine, called a press conference to suspend finalizing that lease for 12 months, which put a bullet in the head of that deal.

We regrouped and we began to look at other property.

And one of the other properties that was going to be granted to us was the attractive land that the soccer stadium now sits on, on McCullough Lane. And then we got the Not My Backyard deal from a large group of people in that neighborhood.

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

And that's what we did. We went and bought that site where I live today and then bought the site next door to it. And then the one across the street was some great support of, you know, some of our big donors and really stripped the adjoining neighborhood because there's no zoning. You can't...we had the legal right to develop that property. There was no zoning and no body that could approve what we would build on that property.

And so the big fear is crime and lower property values. Well, when I contracted for that property in 2010,, I could buy any house next door for, call it, plus or minus $150,000.. Today, it's plus or minus $450,000, okay? The other argument is crime. There hasn't been one reported crime that I'm aware of by anybody from our neighborhood in the neighborhood next door.

And there have been 13 crimes by that neighborhood into our community, mostly juveniles, stealing our golf carts, our Polarises, shoplifting out of our market, stealing bicycles, you know, the random juvenile, the kind of stuff that I would have been doing if I was 14 or 15 years old. Yeah. And I love those guys. And look, we work with them, you know, to help them. But if you're gonna put a barbed wire fence, it needs to be on their side of the deal, not our side.

Now, look, we got plenty of bullshit inside of our neighborhood. This is not Nirvana. I don't want anybody walking away. We have plenty of stuff going on, but it's not the gunfight at the OK Corral. Right.

And I think your story is gonna move a lot of people. And so tell people, if they're interested, how they can get involved, where they can find out more.

I published a book. We published a book, HarperCollins, back in 2017 called Welcome Homeless. You could go and get that book. It's a series of stories about encounters that I've had with about 11 or 12 different people over the course of my time working on the streets. I think it's a fun book that people would really enjoy, kind of an emotional deal.

So go check that out. If you really want to know more, get on an airplane, fly to Austin, Texas, and come see what we're doing. We'd love to share this with you. If you're interested in coming to one of our symposiums, we'd love to have you there. So we're very grateful for this opportunity, Joe.

Thank you.