So please let's get a warm, immediate welcome to Brad Wyman and Pen's left. You know, Pen just has set the tone to get everybody right into it. Okay.  By the way, of your crowdfunding pitch picture. Sure. Can we run that? And then we'll get into some conversation. Roll the clip. I'm more than half Magic Show in Las Vegas. People love our Magic Show in Vegas. Children love our show. Children, company, and airports. I'm your mom's favorite atheist. I'd be nice to your mom. I wear glasses. I read. I even went from a celebrity apprentice to raise money for people with intellectual disabilities. I'm a big guy. A lot of crazy ideas. But I've tried so hard to be nice. Now I'd like you to contribute money so I can make a movie. I'll need a lot of money by moviemaking standards. But any more than I have myself. The movie I want to make is called Directors Cut. I've already written the script. It's really nutty. And I'm way proud of it. I've teamed up my favorite director of this section, Adam Griffin. There's a lot of great movies. But the one that kills is a movie he did called Look. It's one terrifying, scary, smart, clever. He's directing this little video we're doing right here.  It'll be funny in place. But it's a scary intellectual mystery. We need to cast the perfect woman to play the lead. We're looking. She has to be great. Whatever we cast to play the lead will be the star of our movie and the star of a mystery movie within our mystery movie. You'll understand that as soon as you see it. And if you contribute and help us make this movie, you'll be the first to see it. And Adam and I have a lot of great rewards to get you to help make our movie. It's going to be nutty and scary. The kind of movie I want to see. No, I don't play the hero in Director's Cup. In Director's Cup, I'm not the hero. In this movie, I'm the bad guy.  No one asked me to help us make this movie because I need a job. I have a job. I do a nice magic show in Vegas. And I'm not asking you to help us make this movie because I want to be a movie star.  I'm not going to be a movie star.  I don't want to be the bad guy in this movie.   In Director's Cup, Adam will be director. But my psycho character will be himself in Director's Cup. But this is the character Adam will be in control. If you'd like to help me realize my dream of being the crazy, the bad guy in the movie, contribute to fun anything. The movie's financed. We don't have the money we need, but that has to stop us. No, too much is always better than not enough. Should we pass that? So we're going to do that. Since we've stopped the campaign, we've paid almost $20,000. And where would people find you to do that? We have a site called McPentBad.com. One of the things we've done is, as you know very well, one of the reasons that we haven't enough to fund anything is that the movie I talk about is being really my favorite movie in the past 20 years, the movie called Look. And you have to know Adam Rifkin's look because Look is too common a word to have to search for. But it's on iTunes. It's called Look and it's an incredible movie. It was produced by Brad. So one of the reasons we were involved with that and because Brad was at the time with Fund Anything and we went and did that and we were done with the whole fundraising. We just kind of, there's so much fulfillment to have to do which is kind of a, that's the term they use for all the stuff they give the people. Rewards. Rewards. And there's so much of that to do. And almost 10% of the budget for the movie will be done with the rewards that people have given us. So we just kept it going. Also because it had been fun. I was afraid some of the rewards we're doing are you get to come backstage, you kind of tell her, we give you a magic lesson, you get to come to my house for a movie night, you get to hang out, go to lunch. There's an awful lot of access and I thought it would be creepy and bad to open myself up like that and the real shock so far. I mean the creeps may be a lie but so far it's been an absolute joy. I mean, it's a weird thing to say. I saw Matt King who does a great magic show in town and you get a chance to see it over in Harris, the best comedy magic show ever seen. And Matt King said, you listen to my podcast and you'll be talking about how much I enjoy meeting the people that funded the movie. And he said, so what's the real deal on that? He just assumed that I was lying on the podcast which is a fine assumption to make but in this case I am going to be telling the truth. Well I think being new media and to just kind of segue into that this is not traditional financing. So traditional financing you probably go talk to studio heads and stuff. Well we did. I mean part of the thing that you want to do if you're going to crowdfund is first of all you want to fail the other one. I had this script kicking around for four or five years, the script the director's done. And I've gone and pitched it and the pitch always went very well and we didn't get to the next step with a few studios. But you've only got about seven people that you can talk to in Hollywood. You've got to kiss any of them. You've got to kiss a lot of them. An awful lot. But that's okay. You're going to be working with people and it's okay to... And they're putting up a lot of money. That's what you prefer. The nice thing about this is that although you have to be nice in order to crowdfund to about 5,000 people as opposed to about five people if you did the traditional way the 5,000 people are actually good sane nice people and the five people are dangerous hateful psychotic. It balances off that way.  God bless you. Go to the studio with it. But you love your fans. I do. We also never had a real fear of our fans. If you go to every show in Vegas after the show Teller and I hang out and meet anyone that wants to meet us after the show it's the equivalent of everybody having a backstage pass. And none of the show does that. And we did it not because it was a sparkling idea but because we used to we're carnitrash so we used to work fair and stuff there was just no backstage and when we were off-road away we just kind of continued meeting people after the show and everyone assumed that as soon as we got to Broadway we'd stop doing that and it just kind of didn't. And so it takes us we played London last time we were playing a theater that was like 3,500 seats or maybe a bit more and it was filled up and so the amount of time meeting people out of the show was actually longer than the show itself. We actually crossed that threshold we would do a 90-minute show and then an hour and 45 minutes afterwards talking to people. And we enjoy it.  It is so sad and cynical and heartbreaking the number of people I know in show business that show contempt for the very people that support them and you've seen that too. And it's so sad I mean the sadness is not really for the people that they show contempt for but the people who feel that contempt. What a horrible experience to walk to a show every night for people that you don't respect and care for. It's just so sad so make sure you pen. I don't know. So crowdfunding became this really, really good idea and I talked a lot to a very good friend of Neil Gaiman whose wife Amanda Palmer did the big crowdfunding thing for her record and she said that she gave out 30 rewards of going to people's homes and doing a concert on her ukulele just by herself in people's homes and she said of the 30 shows she did 28 of them weren't creepy at all. So I'm going for that same ratio. So we got a taste but you know tell us a little bit more of the inspiration and then also some of the different cool new media things that even have to do with the site and crowdfunding and being on the set give us a taste a little bit What we talked about when we first started doing this was I have a bunch of Twitter followers and what you ended up doing is my Twitter has always been done by me alone Am I just a tad short of too long because I know you're something I'm honest to Yeah, about 1.9 But I was done by myself and there's a lot of marketing people that take over you know celebrity accounts and stuff but I've always typed it in myself and without really much direction or idea of what to use what I was trying to accomplish it really was kind of what they designed it for I really was just kind of typing things that popped into my head For the king tide to do the crowdfunding I ended up burning a little bit of my Twitter because I was doing so much of contribute now, click here, do this what you just have to do there's no way around you are asking people for money and you need to ask them for money and there's no shame in that but it does mean you give them back the stuff you were doing Exactly, what I'm talking about is put a ton of energy into more value for financial contribution Our goal so far, one of the things we've done is if people gave X amount of money they get to come to the show and come backstage and get a magic lesson and our goal in this is we're hoping that every single person that contributes actually feels like they've gotten much more than they expected and much more value than they wanted and so far we've done that very, very well and we've spent much more time than the people expected and for the magic lesson because I play before the show I play upright bass for about an hour I'm unable to be bad with it before the show so I brought in the best magician in the world Johnny Thompson who is the guy who mentors Teller and I and has for a long time and really writes with us and directs with us and really works on every move we do and coaches us are going to be doing the show I brought him back to teach people magic and we had a guy last week came in from Canada and before the show got a magic lesson with Johnny Thompson and then after the show he met me and Teller and so little bitch fooled us with a trick that Johnny had taught so it's an inventiveness in getting people to cite that I was really thinking more about trying to lead you to the inventiveness of the movie and new media and how like even the villain might appear one of the things that really inspired the idea of director's cut very, very quickly so that I can expand on it is I was fascinated by the idea that we're all familiar with director's commentaries and director's commentaries over movies always have this close, light, personal feel that you really trust the director and you get kind of lulled into this very personal space so I thought that the idea is having a director's commentary that was done by someone who thought he was the director but you found out as the movie went on really wasn't the director the criminal who kidnapped the lead actor that's you so I'm going to do the whole director's commentary and you realize about half way through or third of the way through but I'm not really the director but I'm really the bad guy of the movie and I had that idea and I had it all written and all laid out but one of the problems with the movie one of the logical problems was I had to get my bad guy onto the set like he's delivering pizza delivering food or something it was a pretty weak part of the movie and then we started monkeying with the idea of crowdfunding it I went back and rewrote the whole script because now the logic of the script becomes better because the bad guy me, Herbert the character's name gets on the set by crowdfunding so he is the person in the movie as a reward he gets to be on the set and take pictures and that allows him to go over to the person who has the fdp site and is putting up of all the videos today he just videos the guy typing in the password and that gives him all the outtakes of the movie so he can recut it the way he wants that also gives him access to the police uniform that he steals and that gives him access to the lead woman in the movie who he kidnaps and that forces his knife point at his home to redo the lines the way he wants them to cut them back into and then going with the authenticity yeah well I want to actually prove it in and then we got very near our goal on fund anything we got very very close at the last second we had Herbert Blunt who's the character and then wrote a message on our board that said Adam I can't wait to help you direct this movie I can't wait to be part of funding it I'm so happy I'm going to be there all the time working with this movie you can follow Herbert on twitter and you can also kind of tell what actresses we're talking to because he begins following them oh no that happens one of the things that I love about Blair Witch and everybody loved about the Blair Witch project was the fact that it didn't happen in a movie theater but really was the first movie to happen in social media and I love that I love that there was all that stuff going on so I want to really have director's cut really be that so as the movie progresses and as we make it you will see the bad guy sending in his own videos doing his own vines following people making comments to Adam and showing up on the set so I'm hopeful that this movie will be bigger than just the 90 minutes that happens not bigger in terms of sales but bigger in terms of the sloppiness of it where it really happens I think that's brilliant the inventiveness of using everything that's available to you well one of the things I did and you might like this is one of the rewards you have in the crowdfunding site is you get to have a line in the movie that's one of the big things in every film that crowdfunding does is you get to have a line in the movie well our movie because part of the subject is crowdfunding and because Herbert the bad guy is on the set filming them making the movie and cutting that into his movie while they make this other movie the way we're doing the lines is that Adam Rifkin stands up with a bullhorn with all the other people and says okay who's here from the crowdfunding that has a line in the movie and they raise their hand and lie not and then Adam goes okay let's hear each of your lines which don't appear anywhere else in the movie so I just want to let you know if you want to get meta on my ass I'm there to beat you so we've now talked about new media now it's all working within the picture and all the different ways it's going to be continue to promote and work it where are we when are we going to make this thing? we are right now as in the the accounts we're ready to go we have hired Dory Zuckerman pre-production we're in pre-production and by the way days after he's funded we actually started on paper pre-production before we were completely funded we actually had a Tevin doing budgets and so on and right now one of the things that everybody gets even if they put $10 in the movie is they get a copy of the script as I say on the crowdfunding page spoiler alert it's the fucking script one of the surprises if there is a script it's a right but Adam very much thinks I think he's right on this lead director Adam thinks that we should have our lead actor the woman that's going to star in the movie in place before the script goes out to everybody he just thinks it's respectful to have her have the script first so right now I can't tell you who but right now our top two choices for stars of this movie have the script and the preliminary stuff around them the managers and agents really like it and they're reading it over and if either one of those two says yes then we start as soon as she wants to the nice thing about crowdfunding is our movie is a very low budget movie we have 1.1 million dollars very cheap movie but then again there's all sorts of expenses that you don't have when you're crowdfunding they're sucking off a lot of that money to keep their operation going you don't have completion bonds and any of those none of that there's none of that to pay for so actually a 1.1 million dollar movie should look like a 2 million dollar movie it's personally why I felt a lot of crowdfunding I've made many pictures of that budget the financing comes in immediately no papers no documents it's in your bank as the transactions happen and then you really have a real capital to work with and not all these fictional numbers I was having this argument with Patty just the other day wait a second the budget I signed for was this how can we only have that much to make Patty did monster with me now Penn though just to get off of director I have to say I do want to talk about a little bit more media you have a podcast every Sunday? yeah I do a thing called the Penn Sunday School and I've been doing that for a while it's going to have a Corolla's network however you define nobody knows any of this stuff it's being invented as we go crowdfunding is so new podcasts are fairly new really 10 years and it's a really wonderful way I just love how we're becoming completely unstuck in time people tweet me that they listen to the podcast every week at the exact same time and that's not the time that they do it but I do it it's just part of their schedule works into their routine and doing 90 minutes a week I mean out of Corolla does 90 minutes a day and that's a whole different kind of thing but you don't do anything else you don't write books, have a magic show I'm not sure about the amount of work I'm talking about the intellectual content if you do once a week for 90 minutes you can really kind of dig into a topic oddly doing a show every day morning radio you have to jump around a little more than you do one week you make more personal and I love doing that you know we have an expression that Glenn Allah runs the old pentateller operation show it out to Glenn wherever he is amazing guy we don't, you know he always says about selling a show it's not anything, it's everything and you can't tell whether Twitter sells tickets to pentateller or whether direct is cut it forms Twitter or they go back and forth or Sunday school and they do everything and I just finished I did this movie called Tim's Remire you know a lot of the questions you get you do crowdfunding is people will ask you I think a very reasonable question which is why don't you fund it yourself and the answer is I mean the blunt answer is of course I can't afford it but there's a reason I can't afford it which is the movie The Aristocrats I fund it with all my money and we haven't got the money back Tim's Remire yet well I was an ocean picture producer I can just tell anyone finance your movies don't spend it because also too I think it's a great validation that people want to see this picture it's not about ego, it's not about I want to make it you've had you know literally the community and the crowd finance your movie that's also part of me studios too much their gamekeeping function is a real and valid function if you really can't get money for your movie any place that you probably should make your movie there's a little bit of an argument with that because I believe that movies that are great pitches are almost automatically not great movies I think if you really can get everything good out of your movie in a 10 minute pitch maybe what your movie should be is a 10 minute pitch that having been said I think that you should have a feeling that you can get other people on board before you jump in big so can I ask why I mean is this I mean blogging, tweeting you know features your little magic show I mean is it I mean why Penn in magic and have a great career why are you using on these new medians I mean why I don't think there isn't any sort of overall plan there's no sort of I have I have the success I wanted I mean all I want to do is do a show to tell her and I completely accomplish that and there's no sort of using all this to build up some big big plan as a matter of fact we were a big corporation and we had that big sales meeting where we said here's our plans for 2014 we don't have we'd be like well we'd like to do everybody as we like to do more shit than we want to do thank you we don't have any sort of big goals but all I ever wanted to do you know when I was I grew up in a dead factory town in western Massachusetts and all I ever wanted to do was have ideas and then give them to other people and magic shows are really really good way to do that and if that was all I had I would be thrilled to pieces but with other stuff there I just loved doing it I mean Twitter this funnel that you know in order to say something I thought was funny in the 80s to have people hear it I mean people more than my friends I really had to go through all the gatekeepers of Letterman or Stern or Rolling Stones or People Magazine or all those sure you have to go through all of that and I mean this has been the downfall of many people but I like it is I can get an idea and write it on Twitter instantly and also get feedback I may be the only one that I know has over a million Twitter followers that I believe and I'm always afraid to make promises that aren't true but I believe not necessarily answered but I read every single Twitter that sent back to me what I was doing Celebrity Apprentice and I was sequestered for five weeks I probably missed several hundred but in general I put aside probably two hours a day to read everything I get from people and it's wonderful I like to talk to people who want to talk to me so is it clear to say it's because it's there that you blogs tweet I know some of the people that were involved in starting up Twitter and they gave me it's one of the reasons I don't have real Penn Gillette I just have Penn Gillette because they gave me in the first list of Twitter addresses they just gave me Penn Gillette and for the first year I did not know how to use it I did not understand it at all I just kind of kept toying with it a little bit and then kind of feel for it and enjoy it I had a Vine account since the day they started and just after watching Brian Koppelman do his wonderful screenwriting six second screenwriting lectures which are wonderful I finally got a feel for how Vine seems right for me so just in the past two weeks I started doing vines every other day it took me a while to learn about email you know I had my email I had my email address in 1984 and at that time if you had email the only people you could write to were Steve Jobs and Bill Gates you know hey Milly what do you have for breakfast oh great fruit me too so then because my first address Steve Jobs got it for me and so it was a very small group trying to tell people then what email was why it was better for certain things than talking on the phone was very very difficult and then as each thing comes in you know texting in Twitter and Vine and Instagram and Snapchat and podcasts get popular you have to learn all over again what that kind of communication is talking on the phone is very different than talking in person email is different from that and I just love learning about it when I first nobody in this room has the experience of learning about email you were all born with email around you but that wasn't true for me and I get to learn about it it's not true well I think some people love my age but what I think that's fascinating and it's why I've converged to financing online and I will continue to do so is that I don't believe there's an excuse anymore you know for anything if you want to make music make music put it out if you want to make videos put it on YouTube if you want to promote it start tweeting and doing Facebook you want a podcast film and none of these things cost really anything so if you are expressive if you are creative we now live in a wondrous time where all these tools are available I don't think magician 60 years ago you can now have a chance to do all of the different things that you're getting to do boy it would be cool if magician 60 years ago was tweeting wouldn't it? I don't know do we have any time back there Mike do we have any time left because I can't read it by the way I think it says 17.7 did the pension take some questions anybody want to ask Pat a question I think we can put the house lights up there's a mic there there's absolutely no one there we've answered everything but wasn't it there's so many there's a mic right there in the middle if you want to get up but you know I think there's a cocktail that said that movies wouldn't really be art until the tools were as cheap as a pen pencil and paper we're just coming really close to that we're coming really close to being so good to be able to to do that of course you know that there still is a very very good reason not to do your own films or your own podcasts or your own music and that is if you suck people go out and create your art and everything else no no there's some things you shouldn't be doing go ahead hi there I just want to thank you so much it's been really exciting for you to speak and a couple things first of all my brother-in-law is a dead ringer for you so if you ever need a standing pen I'm sure Tyler would do it yeah you know so many any big fat ugly guy doesn't wear a hat person they look just like me and I always want to say they so much would rather I can't look for life I just want to thank you because I have a son who for some reason got involved in celebrity apprentice he was in high school we watched it we loved what you did he just went to college he's majoring in marketing and I think a lot of it had to do with what you call student celebrity apprentice and I watched how with your crowdfunding use collaboration and I thought about in the apprentice how you bring in your partners I just love that theme and just thank you so much brother-in-law introduce yourself yeah I'm Barbara Vasconi and I write the blog why your PR works God bless you and who are you? Hi I'm Andrea Ball and I am co-author of Facebook marketing all along for dummies I just had a question about how do you know if your art sucks I've just been having this argument with Brian Kaplan with Brian Kaplan Brian Kaplan wrote rounders Ocean's 11, 12, 13 all those things he's a fabulous screenwriter he's been all this inspirational stuff coming people you know go out and do your art let's just suck Charles Kupowski you know the great poet and writer said that the best service you could do to anyone who was going into the arts was to discourage them tell them they had no talent they were awful and they should quit anybody who told that to wouldn't quit because of what you said should not be in the arts so I think there's an argument although I'm not the one who's willing to do it there's an argument that making it difficult is a is an okay thing I mean you really if you have to decide if you want to be a writer you probably shouldn't be a writer if you're not giving up every day writing for two hours just automatically on your own with nobody with no sort of gun to your head and no sort of promises to yourself you probably shouldn't be doing it everybody that I know that writes doesn't really have a choice I mean if I had another job I would still be writing the same amount of writing thank you I have two questions because I'm a pretty jerk the first is specifically for Penn being that in the past on your podcast you talked about being extremely scared of horror movies what made you decide to do a horror movie and then for both of you in terms of crowdfunding how are you going to remain I guess legally accountable for the funds that they were already appropriately and just in terms of background on the accounting on that sort of stuff what do you do to a chore of people that the money's going to go to stuff having to do with the movie directly rather than just paying a production assistant to go get coffee yeah well one of the things you will is you'll pay a production assistant to go get coffee you're not trying to protect against that that's one of the things that happens in making a movie you do need production assistants and they really should be paid I'm making a horror movie because you know I was terrified by any sort of slightly scary movie I realized that so much of the intellectual ideas I was interested in were happening in horror movies that I had to get over that George Romero's own description of Night of the Living Dead does not use the word zombies his description of the movie is it's a movie about what happens to America when a truly radical political system takes over that was his description of Daughter of the Dead George Romero's movie although James Gunn did a wonderful version after Romero's Richard on The Dead which is my favorite movie I like because it deals with the importance of society and interaction with people you don't know personally how important that is and how paradise cannot exist even to material wealth friendship, sex and love you still need society around you and I think that because horror movies and also graphic novels and so on deal with such big subjects, life and death and fear and terror they allow the intellectual to hitchhike along with it and I wasn't willing to not have that and the ideas of Directors Cut are much more important to me than the scares kind of like in our magic show the idea behind the tricks may be more important than the tricks but we still try to do tricks that are really good. In answer to the accountability... I'll finish that and we'll get to the next question this is a direct-to-consumer contract and if you don't act like Penn is Act which is to overcompensate and make your consumer, the person that's bought the reward, think they've gotten more than they bargained for then you won't be crowdfunding again so that's my answer and also in kind of a deeper answer of the accounting there's a lot of stuff on the crowdfunding that nobody knows I mean there's all sorts of questions about it sales tax sales tax and all sorts of taxing interstate stuff that just nobody knows yet that we know you're kind of creating this new thing so what I'm hopeful of is that we can make the 5,000 people who's helping make this movie really, really happy and try to pay all our taxes and do all of that and hope that with a good movie at the end of that that that's a reward and we can do it again I mean all of this stuff we do in our lives once you've gone beyond just creating food you know what you do is you're just playing pinball you do it well and you get to do it again exactly next please introduce yourself hi I'm Charles from Success Freaks and first off Success Freaks first off I wanted to say Poon Intelligence Bullshit was an amazing show Southern Baptist Church home that really changed the way I saw the world a lot we're all about chasing success discovering our gene finding it living in Success Freaks my co-host and partner is in the Renaissance world he's my intelligence if you will we get that a lot because he's short and tall but we know you came from the Renaissance and while you're known for telling sir you're like four foot coming from the Renaissance Festival world was there a moment where you almost gave up on your craft knowing that that's a hard world to be in not knowing where you'd be successful today is there a story where you almost gave up and you're not the Gillette that you are now I'm so sorry that I don't have that story I uh when I was doing terribly I thought I was doing fine Mike and he he worked at one of the most heart-crushing jobs you can have being a jail guard and then came home to his family and got all his joy from his family and never once complained about his work it wasn't until I was an adult that I realized how awesome this job must have been and when I was working as a street juggler I was supporting myself and getting some joy from my job I consider that to be um success and anything beyond that is wonderful but it's incredible that we live in a world and in a century where we can get some joy from our jobs 100 years ago that just plain wasn't true that was really really rare and it's still rarer than it should be but it's a it's a pretty beautiful thing I'm not one to quote Neil Simon but Neil Simon said that the difference between making zero a week doing what you love and making $200 a week doing what you love is enormous and after that you don't just notice the zeroes here as much so I think that my level of what I consider success is probably so much lower than other people's I consider myself a success the instant I was eating and supporting myself even though the first time I was doing that I was living on the streets and actually homeless I was still eating and doing shows and I was still in the pieces one of the problems we had Broadway was that a lot of the interviewers would talk to us about let's talk about the horrible conditions you went in before you made it big on Broadway and tell her not to just always the answer when we were wicked happy we kind of bummed their shit because when we were doing renaissance festivals I was having a fabulous time and when we were climbing trash and playing hundreds of theaters that had 50 people in them were fabulous we were creating stuff and people were applauding for it and in my heart I can't really tell the difference between 200 people applauding and laughing on a street situation a renaissance festival and 200 people applauding and laughing on Letterman I know intellectually there are hundreds of millions but in my heart I can't tell the difference so no there was no time to give it up because I have no other skills if I do show business I just go to jail who's next? I have to thank you for your work on I found it on YouTube on telling people about the truth of vaccinations and how they work and we need to look at the numbers and what happens when you look at groups that are compared against each other what the truth is thank you for that well yeah thank you on the bullshit show the show that I had to push for the hardest was through the vaccine show and it's a complicated thing to say because bullshit the idea was was always we always had a stand over the internet it was the bullshit of the anti-vaccination people and I had to argue this show time forever and insist that we'd be able to make that sexy and funny and that's why we give the real medical information in the middle it's delivered by a top explorer but thank you the vaccination show is my favorite of all whatever it was 90 bullshit shows thank you please introduce yourself hi my name is Alan Martendale I'm a podcaster and a student filmmaker my question is it really can apply to both of you but this particularly for Brad you seem to have really embraced social media and the crowdfunding and what not how do you think the rest of traditional Hollywood are they adapting to what's going on in social media and the different opportunities Hollywood is always the last to get it in fact you know I don't even know if they've still embraced digital technology yet but I think everybody is looking for a new and exciting alternatives for financing and I do believe truly which is why I do what I do that at some point every film will have some aspect of crowdfunding to it for the social engagement for the ability to have direct communication just like when people that had films refused and I was there to put a facebook page up for their film or a twitter account for their film they were against them in Hollywood and now I don't think there's probably a film out there that doesn't have both we can work with the internet association based in Washington DC I have a question for Penn Gillette with technology being integrated in various industries in really unexpected ways and startups coming out with all these awesome new ideas do you have any plans to further integrate new media into your shows like coming out with an app or a digital trick maybe make my text messages disappear we have got it there's a pen and teller app with a really, really good card trick when we put it out we did put a lot of muscle behind it we had other stuff going on we were watching a tv show and stuff so we didn't do a great deal of support for it and it wasn't wildly successful as an app it didn't sell a zillion it wasn't really successful as a trick and it really fooled the show of our people so yes we did do an app like that you don't want to do technology in a magic show live magic used to be on the forefront of science they would always do stuff with it they were the first to do stuff with ether, electromagnets were first done with movies were first done with magicians and showed as part of magic shows people are so tech savvy that we have never been able even for a second to get ahead of the audience there's nothing that we know about that the whole audience doesn't also know so when it comes to doing the magic show live it's better to stand away from technology and go with good old fashioned lying thank you just a couple more here three more questions there and sharing some time with us my name is Chris Curd and my podcast show is called social media unscrambled and I had a question how do you do that? predict the future of social media do you have any ideas or opinions of what the future is going to bring? it's going to get better next question you're not going to get new breakthrough ideas on social media from someone like me I'm up with that stuff and they'll keep doing it and the one thing that bullshit creeps over and over again and I talked about it on my podcast two things are almost all of these truth one is the world keeps getting better and two is people just keep thinking it's getting worse we're getting better on every front and the stuff we're doing now my children are seven and eight and I'm amazed to just think that they won't be dealing with Twitter or Facebook or anything we have now but there'll be all sorts of better things and it all has to do with it comes down to people the fact that we can communicate instantly with people all over the world and the fact that we can share our hearts with people who aren't the same room with us it's beyond any wild utopian fantasy that any writer or creator has ever had it's all good and it's going to get better thank you guys hey Ben, I'm JP Sturmstreet the smart, energized entrepreneur of my podcast I saw your show last time I was in Vegas I told everybody about it recounting all the tricks and stuff I was completely amazed the question I had is my mom always said never talk about religion or politics man I wish she told me that so my question is you're not so much smoother so my question is did you do that from the beginning or did you wait until you had the big stage before you started speaking your voice on this topic I have always felt that the job of a entertainer, performer artist who would want to do it as Alan Ginsberg said about the poet is to stand naked on stage I believe you're supposed to speak from your heart and I think that that's very good advice your mother gave you like the other advice she gave you very good advice for Thanksgiving dinner with the relatives and very good advice for backyard barbecues but I think if you've decided to go into communication your job is to not hold very much back I hold stuff back a little bit on my family I hold back on how the tricks are done because that's part of my job or I hold back on some of the tricks but I believe that religion and politics are really really really important and I believe the best way to find out your role is to say what you believe to as many people as possible a lot of things I've been corrected on I would not have been corrected on if I didn't shoot my mouth off and I think the best way to find out how what you believe holds up is to hold it up for scrutiny there's a great book called John of the Roush which is called Kindly Inquisitors that really talks very much about taking the marketplace of ideas into the 21st century so I think it's very important about the religion of politics because they matter and the answer to the actual question is I always have that isn't a new thing at all one final question I can't believe I'm the first person to say this but I'm so excited to be making a movie with you and I am a super pimp at Wow Is Me and my actually wasn't a question I just wanted to say you have a heavy influence on my son who figured out how to hack the parental controls on my Tito so he could watch your show so thank you for being such a good influence I want to thank Penn Gillette for your touch them all and I am really was excited to just be a small part of helping you with your picture


I'm Kevin Salomon, I'm a professor of agricultural and biological engineering here at Purdue and my lab, we study microbes and develop them for industrial processes. My particular domain is about how do we take resources from the farm, how do we convert those into products that people can use. Unlike other disciplines that might use metals or ceramics or chemicals, the material I work with is biology. And so we have to understand how biological systems work and then using more classical engineering techniques, we can then reprogram that, reorganize it, put that together so we can get new capabilities. I recently received the Department of Energy Early Career Award to study how certain classes of microbes degrade plant biomaterial and to develop new ways to control and enhance that. Animals and humans were able to convert food into energy that allows us to grow due to the actions of the microbes that live in their guts. For example, we have stomach acid that helps break down materials, those nutrients are absorbed and certain microbes can convert them into different vitamins and so on and so forth. The Department of Energy is looking at ways to make energy more effective and more widely available. In this case, we're looking at how these unique microbes that live in the guts of large herbivores can help us break down this abundant resource so that we can then convert them into more valuable fuels and other materials. We feed them things such as orange peel, corn stover, any plant material that we can find. We measure how well they grow in these materials, we look at what they degrade these materials into, at how well they degrade these materials and ultimately we try to figure out what genes are responsible for this degradation. And so we need to reverse engineer their process, we need to understand which enzymes are made when, how much of those enzymes are made and the sequence to more effectively degrade these materials and we want these processes to be applicable anywhere. So we don't want to make a solution just for Indiana, we want something that will work in California, that will work in England, that will work in Tanzania. Different countries, different regions have different materials and different organisms have different feedstocks and so we study the microbes from these different organisms so we get giraffes that might come from Africa, we'll have goats that we have from local farms in Indiana and they all have different microbes in their gut and those different organisms have different capabilities and we're trying to see what are the commonalities, what are the things that are most successful across these organisms. Given the biomass generation capacity of the US, if we were able to effectively leverage all of that material, we could probably replace about a third of the gasoline that we use right now. What I think is really fascinating about our field is that microbial technologies have the potential to sustainably replace many of the products that we take every day for granted. With the tools we have available to us, we can actually modify the types of compounds they can make and so they're actually making medicines such as insulin right now and so the potential is theoretically unlimited. We just need to figure out the most effective strategies to do that.


the estrous cycle of rats can be quickly identified by observing the vaginal smears under a microscope. The smears can be examined at low magnification, 10x, to determine the presence of three cell types, squamous cells, columnar cells, and cuboidal cells. At higher magnifications, 40x, the columnar cells can be further distinguished into two subtypes, tall columnar cells and short columnar cells. These observations allow researchers to identify the estrous cycle stage of the animal. This article was authored by F. K. Markons, F. J. B. I. N. C. H. I. N. A. P. Tano.


All right. Well, we are at six oh six, so I'm going to go ahead and start our introductions. Are you ready for it? All right, welcome everyone to our talk today. Where do we go from here? A conversation about the Bay Area's homeless crisis with Reverend Harry Lewis Williams, the second and Randy Shaw. My name is Taryn Edwards, and I am a librarian for the Mechanics Institute of San Francisco, which is a pioneering library, cultural event center and chess room founded in 1854. Right now we're doing virtual events only, but I encourage you to come and come to the Institute, but take my virtual tour, which I'm hosting on July 8th. You can see all the beautiful spaces of our library, our world-renowned collection, the oldest chess club in the United States, and all the cool spaces of our landmark building. I'm going to put that link in the chat space as we, once I stop talking, once I introduce all our speakers. So this event has been produced in partnership with the San Francisco Writers Conference, which is an entity that I work closely with to provide writing classes and other learning experiences of relevance to the Bay Area. And tonight we have two speakers. We have the Reverend Harry Lewis Williams, the second, who is affectionately known by the nickname of OG Rev.  And he works closely with the homeless, with gang-involved youth, human trafficking victims, and foster children. So basically our most vulnerable populations. He also is serving as the interim minister for interim minister of compassionate care at the Historic Glide Memorial Church in the San Francisco Tenderloin neighborhood. And I met OG Rev at the San Francisco Writers Conference a few years ago. He's a very warm and wonderful person. He's also a prolific writer with nine books under his belt. His latest is entitled, Taking it to the Streets, Lessons from a Life of Urban Ministry. And I'm going to put a link to his book offered by Alexander Book Company in the chat space. So if you're interested, you can buy his book directly from them. They are a wonderful bookstore that we use at Mechanics Institute because they're just across Market Street. And they can also get you books within 24 hours. Puts Amazon to shame. Anyway, we also have Randy Shaw with us tonight, who is director of the Tenderloin Housing Clinic, which he helped found in 1980. And the Tenderloin Housing Clinic is San Francisco's leading provider of permanent housing for homeless adults, single adults in the city. So that's just incredible to me, the work that they are doing. He also is a high volume writer and an expert on San Francisco's Tenderloin history and contemporary issues. He's the editor of Beyond Cron, which is an alternative news source that has a particular focus on housing issues and politics. And his books run along those lines as well, focusing especially on social change. His most recent book is called Generation Priced Out, Who Gets to Live in the New Urban America. And of course, it discusses strategies for increasing affordability in progressive cities like San Francisco. All right, moderating the Q&A will be myself, as well as Lori McLean. She is the director of the San Francisco Writers Conference. Lori has some internet issues going on right now. So in case she cannot, in case she fades out, we also have Barbara Santos with us tonight, who is the marketing director of the conference. Either way, we plan on hopefully handling all of your questions. The way it's going to work tonight is Mr. Shaw will present, and then Reverend Williams will also share his knowledge and I hope impart upon us a feeling of hope. We have a large audience, so I would appreciate if you would put your questions into the chat space, and then Lori and I and or Barbara will try and fold them into a conversation. Anyway, thank you very much and take it away, Randy. Thank you. Thank you Mechanics Institute for having me and for the OG Reverend for joining us. I appreciate this. I wish we could do it in person, but this is the next best thing. So we're actually, I'm going to try to give some hope to, and I'll tell you why. I was here in 1982 when homelessness began not only in San Francisco, but across the United States. And the reason widespread visible homelessness began, the very simple answer, the federal government starting in the mid-70s cut back on federal housing funding. And then as cities were sort of gentrifying and affordable housing money was more needed than ever before, people couldn't afford rent, we kept cutting it. And for the last 40 years, I'm sad to say, the federal government has never stepped up and funded homelessness. And what we have seen though in the last three months is really the federal government's most direct funding of homelessness in putting people in tourist hotels who are in shelters or the unhoused. And it's very interesting because you read a lot about, I read a lot about people saying, oh, you see, now that the fact, now this is all happening in cities that they wanted to could have done it. Well, no, that's not true. Cities didn't have the money. 75 percent, 75 percent of the money of putting people in hotels is from the federal government. Now, if we were a different kind of country, we wouldn't have had a homeless problem. We would have continued to fund people who can't afford the rent. I mean, 75 percent of those eligible for federal housing assistance don't get it. What if 100 percent who are entitled to federal housing assistance got it? We wouldn't have a homeless problem in this country. So there's a lot of chaos and confusion thrown by people to change the fundamental issue that the reason people are homeless is they can't afford rent. And the reason they can't afford rent is because our government, unlike almost every other industrialized country, doesn't fund housing adequately. So what we've had with the pandemic is suddenly the federal government's funding because of the crisis, as a health crisis. And really, the issue that I think I'd like the audience tonight to think about is something that I get asked more than anything else, which is, okay, San Francisco is putting thousands of people into hotels temporarily. At some point, you're not just going to put people back on the street. You can't do that. And so you need strategies to transition people directly from being in the tourist hotel they're in into like one of our hotels or hotels that other nonprofits run. And that can be done. And people are going to say, well, how do we fund it? Well, we don't have all the federal money, but there can be pressure. There's a bill right now that you might have read about the Heroes Act, 100 billion for rent subsidies to prevent the mass evictions, which could be happening if we don't get that done. So the federal government is on the hook in a way it has not really been forced to be sent forever, really. That's one thing. But secondly, in places like San Francisco, where we did pass Prop C, which the Court of Appeal just upheld this week, there is $300 million a year that is coming to house homeless people and for other related homeless services. So you can acquire a number of hotels like the ones we acquire and just take people from where they're staying at the Cova or the Intercontinental or the tourist hotels they're being using on Lombard Street and move them directly into existing hotels where they would never be on the street again. And that really should be our expectation. And we really shouldn't be satisfied with anything less because just think of the psychological trauma of taking people who are in a tent in the tenderloin, moving them into a hotel where they're finally having a roof over their head, they have heat, they have hot water, they take a shower, whatever they want, and then say, sorry, we're putting you back out on the street. That is cruel and we can't allow that to happen. So I think the focus we don't know when, and this is the big mystery, we don't know when the federal government is going to say we're stopping our funding on the temporary tourist housing. Originally, the plan was for them to stop August 15. But that was in a different era. It seems like in the last week, the whole approach to COVID-19 has changed. Just today, Texas's governor now is saying he should wear a mask. So things have radically changed. And there may be the recognition among the federal government, Trump administration, that they can't pull the plug on the federal money in mid-August. But whenever they do pull the plug, it's incumbent on San Francisco, San Jose, Oakland, the cities that we're talking about who have a homeless problem in the Bay Area, that they figure out a strategy for transitioning people into the permanent housing. And I think I don't want to get boring on the details, but it can be done. It's actually a lot less expensive than people realize. There's some state money that can be used that from the Newsom is 500 million and acquiring it. So we need to start thinking about that. Because if we don't, we not only are facing a major eviction crisis soon, adding to the homeless ranks, but we're going to take all these people, thousands of people who've been in housing and then giving them back on the street. And that's a human horror show, which we can allow. So that's the big picture. And I can get back answering other questions about it. But I think that right now, the federal, we are showing firsthand what all of us have been arguing for 40 years. You can't solve homelessness without federal help. The federal government was always the major source of affordable housing. Richard Nixon began to change that. Ronald Reagan killed affordable housing funding, and we've been just scrapping by ever since the Reagan's 81 budget. So I'm optimistic that I think the times are changing. I foresee a new administration in Washington that will be more open to this. So the key thing is getting through the next four or five months. If we can get through that, I think we'll be okay. And I'll turn it over to the Reverend. Well, you know, first of all, I want to say that first, can you hear me? Can everybody hear me? Yes. Okay. First of all, I just want to say what an honor it is to be on this platform, to share this platform with you, Mr. Randy Shaw.  I have friends that work for you, and I have friends who live in THC housing, which you preside over. So I've been hearing your name for years, and you've blessed a lot of my loved ones and saved a lot of lives with some good people that I know.  Thank you very much. And I'm also welcome, all true, all true. And Tara and Edward, so glad to thank you so much for putting this together and for letting me be a guest on this Zoom broadcast. Thank you so much. And then to my literary angel, Laurie McLean, who was my literary agent, I wanted to thank you so much. And with that, I'm just going to get right into what we were asked, today we were asked, we were asked to talk about gentrification and some of the issues that surround the Tenderloin. And so I want to go back and I want to talk about something that I want to talk about how the beginning of my journey here. Let me, I'm going to go back to the beginning of the situation that really changed my opinion. But every Tuesday night, we have Bible study at Glide Memorial Church, and we call it the People's Bible Study. So about four months ago, I was, we walked into, I walked into the church and people were talking about something called the coronavirus. And so we had heard about it, I'd heard some news about it on CNN, but I didn't really think too much about it until we were brought into the sanctuary. And that day something, usually we have Bible study in a small room, but this one evening we were brought into one of the main sanctuaries, the main sanctuary.  That was the first time that I'd heard that expression. We were asked to sit six feet away from each other. Before we took our sheets, there was somebody standing at the door with a hand sanitizer, and we were all given hand sanitizer to have Bible study. And at a certain point, one of the leaders of the foundation of the church came to us and said that this will be the last time they will be having Bible study face to face for a while, because San Francisco is going to be having a skeptical shelter in place. And they said, it was said to us that night that the building is going to be shut down. And so again, I didn't really understand a lot about what coronavirus was, but the building must be I came to church and people were wandering outside of glide, and we had been a hot chocolate for them. And we were told that this disease had come to us, and they were going to have to sheltering in place. Because I'm older and because I have a pre-existing condition, I did not go to the tenderloin for about four months, not four months, about four weeks. But I still serve as the Minister of Compassion and Carey Glide. And so I get phone calls from members who live in the tenderloin all the time. And these phone calls so moved me because they began to talk about the plight of folks who are living in the tenderloin.  I'm not going to go back. I told myself that until one day I was tying up my shoes, and I was heading toward the bus where I live in Oakland, and I was headed to San Francisco, and the next thing you knew I was walking down Jones Street. And I saw something that day that really struck me. It was something that was in the air. It was something that you could taste. It was impalable. No, you couldn't smell it, but there was something that was in the air of this difficult place called the tenderloin that I had never seen before. And that was hopelessness in the air. Now you have to understand that we have folks on this line who have never been to the tenderloin. The tenderloin is a place of extreme poverty, drugs or everywhere, alcoholism. There are a lot of different issues there in the tenderloin, but at the same time there's a lot of laughter. There's a lot of joking. There's a lot of love in the tenderloin. But when I began to walk down Jones Street, I saw something and I felt something that I'd never sensed before. And that was the complete lack of hope. And when I walked down the street, what I saw was there were people who were, nobody had a mask. Nobody had a mask. And I began to tell people, don't you know you need to have a mask? And at that time it's changed now, but at that time no one, masks were not available. You couldn't buy one in the store. There were a few organizations that were handing them out. And so I walked up to YWAM, which is an L Street, which is an incredible organization that feeds people who are unhoused and provide showers and we chatted and talked. And I realized that day that a lot of the service providers had left the tenderloin because people could not, because of health reasons, stay in the state any longer to fight for the poorest people during the pandemic. And so I came up with an idea. And my idea was this. The idea was that I realized that there were a lot of homeless, unhoused people who are hungry because you had tents everywhere. I mean, there were tents everywhere. And these tents, people weren't practicing any type of distance at all. And so what I began to do was I would come there and I would hand out sandwiches. I would have something that I called Subway Day. And on Subway Day, I would come to the tenderloin and I would ask my friends through social media, I would say, hey, I'm going to the tenderloin today.   Hold on. We love you. Hold on. You're going to make it. And you know, that brought some joy to people. But I realized that not only has the homeless crisis, not only has that crisis metastasized, but the drug crisis is metastasized in the wake of hope, in the wake of churches closing, in the wake of organizations used to give hope to people closing. There's heroin everywhere. There's methamphetamine everywhere. People are sitting outside in tents, smoking on a bubble or shooting heroin. In broad daylight, there's just a lack of hope there. The first time I went back, I believe there were tears in my eyes because I'd never seen the community like this. I first came to Glide, not as a minister, but as a case manager. And that was in 2005. You see, back then, if you were somebody who was on the street and they were unhoused, they could get housing. There was something, it was like a tip sheet, it would be like four or five pieces of paper that was stapled together. And it would have all of the, like for Mercy Housing or for TNDC or for THC would list all of the housing that was going to be available and the housing, the percentage housing. And so everybody who was unhoused had a copy of this sheet. And as a case manager at Glide for the health clinic, they would come up to me and they say, hey, would you help me to make this phone call? Would you help me to fill out this application? And Mr. Shaw, a lot of those people in those times got housing through THC. A lot of those people got housing through TNDC and Mercy Housing. But now, because of the influx of folk coming from the tech industry and because of the massive scope of homelessness, I can't go to somebody and say, well, you know, if you follow this list and if you do what you need to do in six months or a year, you get a place. Those avenues have seemed closed. And in preparation for this call, I made a, I talked to a couple of friends of mine who were in San Francisco who were working with people who were unhoused, who were formerly unhoused. And they began to talk about the fact that the city doesn't seem to have the compassion or the care. One friend said there's, he works for one of the city agencies and he says, you know what? The city sends somebody to work with us. They send a new person every two weeks and it doesn't seem like these people really care about us who are the poorest among the poor. Another friend of mine listed up in Bayview Hunters Point and she said to me, Rev, she said about an hour ago, she said, you know, all the places that people who had disability or social security could go to years ago, that's all gone. All the places that were affordable, that's all gone. She said there was some market rate housing that puts aside a few units for us. But low income housing, she said, to be eligible for low income housing, you can make $70,000 a year.  They're just going to live in tents and they're just moving out to Antioch. And you talked about the fact that people are going out to Stockton and having to commute into the city an hour and a half each way. You talked about the stress that causes on the environment. Not to mention the stresses that it causes on families. I was, you know, I thought that was amazing even to talk about the fact that families are separated now because they can afford to live here anymore. And so, you know, we're in a place where we don't know what to do. We're looking at, there was an article that came out by some national, it was in the Mercury News, there was some national organization that did a study and said that San Francisco and Oakland have the largest, have the worst problem with gentrification in the whole country. Now, I've been asked to speak about hope and let me go from what is, because see as a person of faith, we don't, I'm mystical, but I'm not magical. Religion deals with the fact that it is what it is. Our ancestors who pray for deliverance from slavery, they didn't say, no, we're not slaves and no, we're not chained up here in the south somewhere. They understood that, but they also believed in divine intervention.  It's invisible, it's deadly, but unlike the coronavirus, it can't be stopped with a mask or gloves. And when it hits, it's so deadly. About a week ago, about two weeks ago, I went out with Pastor Mustafa Mouyi, we had a caravan of hope through the streets of Oakland, and we pulled up to a homeless encampment. Nobody could practice social distance. People are just squeezed up like this. People didn't have masks. And I took a bullhorn and I preached to the people and I said, there's hope, hold on, you're going to make it. We handed out food that Steph Curry's organization World Cafe provided. We handed out food, but we preached and we handed out, I believe we had masks that day. But my hope comes from this, from this, Mr. Randy Shaw, I'm a hood preacher. I'm a preacher. I don't, you know, I have two degrees, but none of them are economics. None of them are city planning. The only way that gentrification can be stopped is by understanding public policy. And for me, the miracle is me being a hoodcat sitting across from you, who would have the knowledge and the know-how to unravel the different policies that different cities have adopted and tell me about different things that about housing and how we can fight back. That's one of my miracles. And so the other one is that we live in a time of black lives matter. This is a time when people are acutely aware of the injustice and the inequity in our society. And people are willing to fight to see change, not just African American people, not just Latino folk, not just poor people, but the rich. I'm watching young Asian kids with wealth. I'm watching young rich white kids walk through the streets of Oakland carrying signs that say black lives matter, really matter. Somebody's got to care whether we are being pushed out to Antioch, Pittsburgh, Stockton, Modesto, or under a bridge or not. My hope is in the fact that God has sent a new wave through America and that these young people and people like you, Mr. Shaw, will give us the necessary knowledge and know-how to create change in America. That's all I want to say. Thank you both for. I would just, can I just make a quick response? Go right ahead. I think the Reverend makes a really, really, really big point, probably the biggest point people can take away from tonight, which is that the Black Lives Matter movement has inspired hope and made people look differently at a whole bunch of systemic, long-standing problems, not only healthcare, racism, but also the homeless crisis. Because so many people are fatalistic. We've had it all this time. What's going to change? But now I think people are realizing it's not acceptable. We can't keep waiting for the federal government. We need to do it. L.A. has 66,000 homeless people in the city of L.A. Forget the county. We have 8,000 in San Francisco and we're going to be rising. I think the Reverend makes a great point that this movement is inspiring people to think differently and more powerfully about other social injustices. Thank you for bringing that up. Yeah. Both of you said amazing things and my mind's reeling. So why don't we go ahead and start taking some questions from the audience who have been busily posting their thoughts. The first one comes from Laurie. Yeah. Does the Trump administration have a transition plan for post-temporary tourist housing situation? I think Randy touched on that a little bit. I mean, you know, as bad as the Trump administration is in everything that people are probably familiar with, they're equal to or worse in housing and homelessness. I mean, yesterday the president came out for racial segregation. They're discriminating against transgender in shelters. I mean, on a scale of 1 to 100, they're one. That's how bad. So no, that's why I said we have to get through the next five months, assume nothing for the Trump administration. Now, if they have to extend that deadline past August 15th, it's not because they care. It's because the states they need to win, their hope to win in November, Texas, Florida, et cetera, desperately need it. So it'll be, it'll be a political consideration. Is this something that the cities also have to take on? Do they also have to have their own contingency plans in case the federal government or the state government can't follow through? Well, that's what I was saying is San Francisco, San Jose, and Oakland need to plan, start planning right now for the transition of people who've been temporarily housed. We cannot just wait for the, just say, well, we didn't plan. We don't have the might plan now to fund the transition. Okay. So the next question is, homelessness is such a huge problem. And Randy, you know, better than almost anyone, how long you've been working towards solving this complex situation, can you split it into segments to deal with the complexity of it? It just, sometimes when you look at it, it just seems so overwhelming and maybe having different portions of the problem dealt with by different either organizations or churches or, you know, think tanks or whatever would move us in the right direction. What are your thoughts about that? Well, I'll let the reverence start on that one. You want to take that on? Yes, sure. Let me, let me just briefly give another word of hope. I forgot one thing. One of the things that has really blessed my life is the fact that San Francisco, and this is kind of a shaky beginning. I invited Mr. Matt Haney to be with us. I hope he's on this line. Has really fought to get housed, get our friends from who are unhoused into those, into those hotels. And it's had a shaky start. It's got, it's not really worked like the way it should have. But I have one of my members who might also be on this line, who was taken from the MSC South Shelter and put in a hotel and it's transformed his entire life. So just to get this, just to work with the city and push the cities to really make that work, because I've seen the miracle that that can do for people first hand. And then to talk about some of the other issues that, you know, this huge monstrosity of an issue is that people of good will and good, and faith can help so much because there are organizations like Glide in the community. There's YWIM, which stands for youth with a mission on Ellis Street. We're feeding people, providing housing, and hopefully we have an organization called Homies Empowerment. We also call the Freedom Store. And this is people from the community. We say solidarity, not charity. And these are people from the community. We come together and we're able to feed folk and provide for people in the community on a scale that you wouldn't believe. So there's a way that we, at a grassroots level, everybody has to do what they can, and we can do some great things that way. Rev, you were talking about Homies Empowerment, the Freedom Store. Tell people some of the numbers and of people who are getting served and also how long the lines were, and just it speaks to the need in the community. Homies Empowerment is located on MacArthur Boulevard between 76th and 77th. It was headed by Dr. who went to Harvard doctorate degree, then came back to Oakland and started, he's starting a high school, but at the beginning of the COVID-19 crisis, we realized that there were a lot of people in the community who had lost their jobs, who were not able to provide for their families. And so we came together under his leadership and this leadership of Selene Gomez, and we began to talk about what we can do. So none of us have any money, most of us are poor people, but everybody's got to draw a peanut butter in their closet, everybody's got some string beans, everybody's got some corn or something they could provide. So we bought all of that to the Homie Center one day and we invited people to come by. What happened was that more and more people began to donate food and more and more people came, and then the people who donate food are some of the same people who serve, so we're not doing charity, we're doing solidarity. And now if you walk at Homie's after about two or three months, there's a four-block line and people, we open, we start serving food on Tuesday at 10, we serve groceries and we serve hot food, we start serving at 10, but the line starts at 6.45 in the morning because people are hungry, displaced, and people don't have food, but if the people in the community have a mind to work, we can still do wonderful things. And Homie's Empowerment, the Freedom Store, is one of the success stories of community empowerment for our tops. Well, those numbers are incredible. Kimberly has a question, what can we do to promote and achieve PSH units for those in hotels so that they don't get sent back out on the street? What is a PSH unit, first of all? I think she might need permanent supportive housing possibly, but I mean this is the thing, there's two methods. My organization leases hotels because it's a lot more economically efficient. There is money to buy hotels, so and that's why if you look at the economics, for a million dollars you can acquire an 80-room hotel, a million dollars a year, and that's considering how much we're paying for temporary housing and other methods and the cost of hospital care, that's money we need to spend.  Historically, and I talked about this in my book Generation Priced Out and in my book on the Tenderloin, San Francisco has continually historically made mistakes spending vast sums of money on temporary housing, you know temporary hotels in the 80s, the hotline program, and we continued that even with the stabilization program we had until a few years ago. It's very expensive and it doesn't provide any permanent housing, so leasing and leasing is the most cost effective. Groups like Dish and Episcopal Community Services do it along with us and then there's going to be some acquisition, but if when people look at the economics it's cheaper to house someone in permanent housing than in a shelter. That sounds, how can that be because a shelter they're in big with other people? Well the answer is shelters have very high security costs and insurance costs and high staffing costs, so given that it's cheaper to house people in permanent housing, why don't we do that as a priority and not keep saying which we hear too often, hey I'm all for housing first, trust me I'm all for housing first, but we got to get people then it's like, but no we have to actually do housing first and you know we heard a lot of myths in the Tenderloin that oh you know people on the street don't want housing. Every day when the hot team goes out like 40 people 39 will want housing. The 95 percent of the people reached on the street want housing, so this notion of well that's why they're on the street is just an excuse for an action. I'm sorry if I missed it Randy, but how many people do you estimate are homeless in San Francisco right now? Well they say 8,000 based on the point at the point in time survey and that includes people who are who were in shelters and realize that one of the real challenges the city's going to have to figure out is there's has to be a shelter system and how's that going to work with social distancing and how long are we going to have that issue at what point is there a vaccine where people can because the numbers are really going to be a problem for people who are in house in the net particularly the next six to nine months or you could say a year until we figure out how the shelters can reopen with more people. As you mentioned every city that we talk about Oakland had a huge increase in homelessness San Francisco out of 17 percent San Jose and Oakland had over 30 percent increase in homelessness so doing nothing is not solving a problem or I should say even if whatever we're doing we have to do more because doing less isn't an answer. No. So Sherri Wilk says what about Gavin Newsom's Hotel to Living Plans? How does that and will that work? Well I can answer that unless the red one would like to. You know Gavin Newsom's how's a state hotel plan?  Okay well his plan which originally was 750 million and now down to 500 million is to for the city to bought the state to buy like there's two tourist hotels at the Oakland airport that have been used for homeless unhoused the state would then buy those hotels and there's a bunch of motel sixes around the state used for unhoused the state would buy them and that's great it is I mean I know 500 million seems like a lot of money but it's not when you're talking about a state the size of California and the magnitude of our homeless problem so so that's great I don't know if I mean there might there's two in Oakland they might buy I don't know if any San Francisco hotel will qualify and also you have to have people who want to sell and not every tourist tell wants to sell so I think it's going to be more impactful in the Central Valley where they've done a lot of motel sixes and and those kind of tourist hotels and and it's good 500 million though these way everyone listening is to realize when you hear about 500 million or even a billion in California it's a really tiny amount and I did have to mention Los Angeles passed a billion dollar sales tax hike a few years ago and that billion dollars is going to produce 7 000 units and that's in a city with 66 000 homeless people a billion dollars in LA 7 000 units so money a billion sounds like a lot but it's not of the scale that we need you know in in your book price generation price that you talked about land use and in the fact that in cities like San Francisco we can't build because I'm looking at certain areas I'm just like if you can tear down buildings to build a you know a super skyscraper for for industry and for technology why can't we do that for housing and and so what can we do about that what what are your thoughts on that well it's been a struggle because you know as I say in my book we have a lot of homeowners who don't want apartments built in their neighborhood over half of San Francisco you cannot build an apartment building so people say I'm all for a affordable housing well you can't build it in most of San Francisco the whole west side of San Francisco you can't build low-income how you can't house homeless families or homeless single adults because the zoning doesn't let you build it and we need to have a bigger coalition to change that because there's only so many sites in the tender holding left to build or the mission or Bayview and it's really a in all the cities I write about in my book apartments are banned new apartments in a majority of the land and that doesn't make sense right how do you how do you do that yes maybe this question I was going to say that there's another aspect to this and it's great to get homeless in housing if we can but what about retraining people so that they can actually have a job that they can excel at and enjoy and help them get off the street that way I was thinking about you know clearing brush and rural areas to prevent forest fires wildfires or repairing infrastructure projects or doing contact tracing via telephone for either COVID-19 or future viruses these are really huge initiatives but it's something that the government um could get behind you know it had to be a pretty large organization I don't know it just like it moving homeless into shelter is step one but then beyond that there has to be some way to get them to be fulfilled as human beings I don't know I'm a real workaholic so you can see where that question's coming from I I found fulfillment in my work and recommended to other people um but I'm also worried about the future if we continue to automate a lot of these unskilled jobs or low-paying jobs will go away and I just see this snowballing instead of being contained so I thought you two could talk about that if you would okay okay you know I think that's excellent you know that covers a lot of ground because we live in a if you go to come to a place like East Oakland you'll see a lot of young men on the street corners and involved in the underground economy because there's no uh there's no industrial sector to give them jobs the jobs that we had years ago were gone and so people are people are hungry and astray and they're scrambling and think sometimes because there is no uh they're undereducated the schools don't prepare them for the future in a technological society so I I agree with that to a point but when you look at a place like the tenderloin many people there um that that we're talking about have mental health and and substance issues and so there's you know I believe in I believe that you know we have to provide people with work that's uh with work and opportunities to learn and grow and go to school but we also have to take into account a lot of the people that you see on the street are debilitated and we need to provide services that help them with mental um there's there's even a uh someone told me about a van service that goes around the tenderloin now where they're doing some type of counseling that's that's you don't even have to come inside of the office the glide has the um vans that go out and do harm reduction in the community but the there are some deeply entrenched issues that help create the cycle of poverty but what you know so we need to deal with that but the people that have been put in those hotels have been have been offered um that have been offered um recovery help and many of them have taken it and been able to maintain that housing so um so yes I believe in training for jobs and and I believe that's a broader question but when we talk about the tenderloin where there's these master structural problems we need to deal with educate we need to deal with not only education but mental health and you know I'll say that in our we house a we house over 2,000 people and of the two over 2,000 people the average age is 56 so a lot of people goes and and half almost half of our people after they get onto our program end up on social security disability so they're not they're not they're not they're not able to work but the point you started the initiative with which is that if we were a different kind of country we would have federal jobs programs so that when we're facing a wildfire season in california we'd hire a ton of people with federal funds to deal with that crisis but that's not the kind of country we've become we're a country that it says you're on your own and so we're going to have wildfires because we don't want to spend the money just like we have a virus so we don't want to spend the money so whenever we hear what I hear what you say it's like you're right that'd be great for the folks of east oakland but it requires a different kind of country different policies different different elected officials um there's another question here uh harry mentioned um teenagers and youth what what is the solution for unhoused teens or even or even smaller children how how can we tackle that so that the cycle of homelessness doesn't continue well well as mr shaw said mr shaw would you mind if I start this one absolutely go ahead okay as mr shaw said most most of the people that you see in the tenderloin are are older people and so when you but there are a lot of children there are children a lot of children that live in the tenderloin um a great deal and they're exposed to a lot and so there's a lot that they systemic poverty creates situations where where people are exposed to things and they see things they shouldn't see at a young age and and one of the one of the uh human trafficking grows in in poverty situations you know like like more sport like um sports and a petri dish and so um I think that if we're gonna if we're gonna heal the young people we have to improve the school system I as a minister I believe that churches have to be more involved in in nurturing families in helping single moms and helping kids to see another world beyond the streets of the inner city and then we have a problem with the foster care system because there's the because of uh there's so many kids in the foster care system who will last age out at some point and they're not able to there's there's no funds or opportunities for them and they end up in really negative situations you know and and out the gate and so I'm gonna stop right there go ahead well you make a great point in terms of connecting the unhoused families to schools because both my kids are teachers in sams school unified school district and the offline online learning for low income kids doesn't work for the most part they don't have a structure they don't have internet access and it really doesn't work for the unhoused so if you don't get the kids back to school it's a big problem in terms of their future uh right before the pandemic mere breed and supervisor peskin arranged to have a new facility for homeless teens at post and high streets the former fan center so they there's an expansion to that and there's often more funding for that but like you said the uh the family crisis is is really a problem because they can't be in sRO hotels for the most part because it's not the rooms the size and the like and we just haven't built the affordable housing and and that's why the expanding a section 8 program and I can go on and on about federal programs we need and again you know the federal government used to do so much and just does so little now that 75 percent of the people don't get any help who deserve it and that has to change as a country we cannot allow that and it's disproportionately families of color who don't get that aid taren asks oh what do you think about building market rate housing in the bayview district as a solution to supply and demand that is supposed to trickle down to homeless people that's a glorious question well that that's we could spend the whole show on bayview I mean there was a ballot measure around linar building that market rate housing and the voters approved it by like 70 so and they improved it in the neighborhood by 70 so so uh but that's a very complex situation that is kind of separate from the homeless baby who doesn't have enough services for homeless they're in house it's clear and their supervisor uh shamona walton has been very aggressive in trying to get more resources to the unhoused and bayview you know whenever you say the word to trickle down I I think about uh trickle down economics and trickle down means it never trickles down to where we are so I have a I have a hard time believing that I don't know how that would work out and I think gloria for that question gloria is a delegate uh for the democratic part who resides in in the bayview so I'm glad she's on this call with us and then there's a question from tim can you help us understand why do we have exclusionary zoning laws and where does this go at with eliminating those laws well this is one of the things I hope comes out of the black lives man and women I mean we have all these laws I mean the revering was talking about why can't we build big buildings for low-income people is because they have laws that prohibit it and exclusionary zoning laws were passed after the civil rights laws movement because it used to be just bar african-americans from by racial covenants and then when the federal law said you could they said well wait how are you going to keep blacks and latinos out of our neighborhood I know we'll have to we won't let any apartments come in it's been a great strategy you have vast stretches of Oakland Berkeley San Francisco where you just there's no black people living there anymore because the exclusionary zoning and yet the irony is that these are all progressive cities and you have supervisors who are progressive who support this exclusionary zoning it's it's rather mind-boggling and they do it because they get the votes from homeowners who don't want housing built don't want apartments built because they think that their value of their property is higher if it's all homeowners and only wealthy people why is a house in San Francisco the median house price now 1.7 million dollars you can't get a house in Berkeley Berkeley for under a million dollars because artificially restricting supplies when we have housing advocates saying we need more units because we need to get be able to let and this is very important affordable housing shouldn't just be in low-income neighborhoods it should be in high opportunity neighborhoods so those kids can have a great experience go to better schools have better transit more safety and we're saying no no we're going to let affordable housing be built but only in distressed neighborhoods that kind of racism has stopped particularly in places like Oakland San Francisco and uh in Berkeley and you know the revenue you work in Oakland Rockridge I was walking through Rockridge the other day and every third house seemed to have a black lives matter sign but you can't build an apartment building in Rockridge because of exclusionary zoning so the number of African Americans living in Rockridge is very tiny yes right when I first moved here there was there was a lot a larger number and now there's it's that's all changed I mean I was in West Oakland last week and I was just shocked that you know at the the change it's uh and these people are being just forced out into into the to the netherworld to underneath bridges and and out of town where they can't get the services that they need to survive so my hope is that we we develop a new build in America I don't know why bank Carson became the lead got that job Mr. Mr. Shaw do you understand why he was given that job uh I think it's because he was the least qualified person in America so Taryn do you want to do some uh have these guys sum up or since it's seven o'clock I think that would be great why don't you Reverend go right ahead well this has been a really a wonderful experience um you know Francis Bacon the great philosopher once said that knowledge is power and I because I feel more powerful than now that I've sat on this call with Mr. Randy Shaw I've been scribbling furiously and not have information now to take back to the community about where we might go next um and and I I believe for the future I believe change is going to come I believe that this is not the end and I believe that the doors are going to open for a brighter future for our young people and I just believe that we have to raise our fists not only in the streets but in the halls of power and I'm grateful for this opportunity to be with you tonight and I'll just say I agree with the Reverend's optimism I mean we see statues coming down that have somehow survived everything I mean every day a new statue makes the Washington Redskins football name will change I mean we're seeing things that have not happened before Berkeley's moving to get rid of police doing traffic enforcement I mean things that have been talked about so I think people who are who are listening tell your friends they listen to the tape a bit who missed it because we're going to the Reverend and I provide I think a very hopeful plan and future and but it does require everyone on this call and all their friends to get involved and I would say in the immediate short term if you if anyone of your you know anyone living in a state with a with a republican senator get them to support the heroes act because the house passed it again 100 billion dollars in rent relief money to stop mass evictions but Mitch McConnell isn't letting it come to a vote so we got to tell your your relatives friends and other states get on the phone get on the email and let's get that heroes act passed and please vote everyone should tell it to vote and tell your loved ones to vote exactly and it's that kind of grassroots you know phone calls emails postcards knocking on their doors it really does help and I do have to say the knowledge is power quote was a common thing a common watchword for mechanics institutes back in the 19th century so is the raised fist anyway I want to thank you both and I want to thank you Laurie and Barbara for sitting in and thanks to all of our guests tonight you had really wonderful questions and I think that we are maybe all close to tears but um hopeful that that uh we'll be able to change the world thank you man also remember to pick up their books from Alexander books thank you that'd be great to take apart books that'd be great you can buy the books anywhere all right thank you everyone thank you all right thank you and have a wonderful evening you too thank you very thank you very much all right bye bye bye bye


Sweden's dietary guidelines are pioneering in many ways. For example, encouraging people to decrease their climate impact by choosing more plant-based foods, which tend to produce greatly fewer greenhouse gas emissions. But I was surprised by this page on the official Swedish National Food Agency website, which translates to cyanogenic glycocytes and hydrogen cyanide. Encouraging people to stay away from ground flaxseed for fear of cyanide toxicity. As in the ground flaxseeds, I encourage everyone to eat every day. You can see why this was the first question I got when I spoke in Stockholm. Was the Swedish government onto something? Had I just been duped by big flax-funded researchers who claimed you could eat pounds of ground flaxseeds a day without worrying, more than 150 tablespoons a day? Just some background. As many as one in five plants that we eat produce cyanide. In fact, if you look at the major food crops in the world, more than half are cyanogenic, meaning cyanide-producing. See, unlike toxic elements like lead, mercury, arsenic that can't be broken down into anything, cyanide is an organic molecule, one carbon atom attached to one nitrogen atom. In this state it can definitely be toxic, but broken down or complex to something else and it loses its toxicity. And we have an enzyme in our body that does just that, a cyanide detoxifying enzyme, and that's just one of five main ways our body can detoxify cyanide. It does require protein to do it, though, and so that's why you can read about chronic cyanide toxicity among malnourished populations in Africa trying to live off of improperly processed cassava root. But as long as we're getting adequate protein or diet, our body can detoxify the normal amounts of cyanide we eat every day. Now there's a rare congenital genetic condition called Lieber's disease, where you're born without the ability to detoxify cyanide, and indeed, yeah, you could go blind drinking apple cider or something, but otherwise our bodies evolved to be cyanide detoxifying machines.  For example, a case of cyanide poisoning after bitter almond ingestion, not regular almonds, which produce about 40 times less cyanide, but bitter almonds, which you can't even buy. They're used in like flavor manufacturing.  This suggests that eating 2,000 regular almonds at one sitting could also be bad news. You can't buy bitter almonds, but you can buy apricots. And apricot kernels, which are the seeds inside the stone, actually have pretty toxic levels, and have indeed been implicated in cases of severe cyanide poisoning, all linked to the leitreal cult of cyanide, promoting poison for profit that I talked about previously. So I'm totally sympathetic to regulators wanting to take a precautionary approach. But are flax seeds like bitter almonds, where just a few ounces could kill you, or more like regular almonds, where regular dietary intake wouldn't even come close? Although the fact that flax seeds can produce cyanide sounds like it would be a significant health concern, it's not, for several reasons, because flax industry-funded scientists first, the adult human body has the ability to detoxify up to 100 mg of cyanide a day. That's where they come up with their pounds of flax seeds a day are safe number. And if you want to eat more than those totally unrealistic 150 tablespoons a day, you could just eat them in baked goods, since cooking destroys the cyanide, and eating 7 or 8 tablespoons of raw doesn't even bump urinary thionine levels, which is an indicator of cyanide exposure, so it doesn't even look like your body's even exposed to it. Thus, the toxicity of flax seed from cyanogenic glycosides is not, evidently, a realistic health threat. Okay, let's unpack that. The cooking part is mostly true. Yes, baked muffins with even like a quarter-couple ground flax each for 15 to 18 minutes at about 450 degrees Fahrenheit in the cyanide-forming compounds are gone. Looks like the same thing happens with baked bread, but baked ground flax seeds on their own, and even an hour at 350 only wipes out 20%, though baking them whole wipes out 80%. And what, baking in bread or muffins wipes out 100%? How does that make any sense? It's the moisture. It's heat plus water that wipes out the cyanide. Boiling for just five minutes can wipe it out, like when making hot cereal or something. And so, yes, it's true in most cases that cooking eliminates the cyanide compounds, because it typically starts out in a batter. As an egg substitute or baking crackers or the dough starts out moist. And so, yes, in those cases, the cyanide is gone upon cooking. But you can't just spread ground flax seeds on a baking sheet because they dry out so fast that only a minority of the cyanide is lost. But look, why does it matter if your body doesn't even seem to notice seven or eight tablespoons of raw? But that's not true. Urinary cyanide excretion doubled at that level, though that's just to sign your body is actively detoxifying it. And if we can detoxify a kilo worth of flax a day, what's the problem? Well, look, even if the adult human body has the ability to detoxify up to 100 mg of cyanide a day, first of all, look, kids eat flax, too. First of all, a kilo has more than the 100 you said we could detoxify, about 50% more, and I'm not interested in how much we can detoxify up to. For safety, you're interested in the worst-case scenario, not the best-case scenario. Would someone please just give people different doses of flax seeds and just measure how much cyanide ends up in their blood? But that's never been done until now, which we'll cover next.