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