u/Objective_Singer_404

So a bit about my background. Basically, I started martial arts when I was 18 at the Lion's Den affiliate gym.

I don't know if it's still around, but it was connected to Ken Shamrock, and it was largely based on his philosophy. It was part of the MMA Mecca that Ken Shamrock was trying to create in Susanville, California.

Basically, hard sparring was the norm. Nobody knew anything about soft sparring. They thought the harder you go, the better you were.

A couple of people managed to get better, but my personal observation was that most people got worse.

You would walk out of the gym every day punch-drunk. You didn't learn how to beat people who are better than you; you just learned how to beat up people that were worse than you.

This was a huge, massive setback for me. I ended up with deep trauma from getting my ass kicked hundreds of times over, and my skill set actually got worse. My techniques got worse, and my instincts got worse.

It was also a huge gym with elite coaches, but unfortunately, it was like a hundred students per coach, and so there weren't even enough coaches to train you effectively unless you were already a fighter.

At the age of 19, I started training kickboxing, but once again, elite coach, too many students, too much hard sparring.

I knew I wasn't getting any better, and it wasn't until I was 24 that I met a man who was a black belt in judo who was trying to cross over to mixed martial arts.

He had three black belts, one in judo and two in Japanese jiu-jitsu, and he was also a champion high school wrestler.

For three years, we trained about 15 hours a week. He taught me escapes from grappling, but he did not teach me how to grapple because I wasn't interested at the time. We were mostly sparring partners.

What he did teach me was sensitivity and learning how to train.

He taught me how to spar playfully, and I got much, much better at the school I was training at. I became one of the better fighters, and it gave me a framework for training that I use to this day.

As many know, Cuban boxing gyms train the best fighters in the world, but they have some of the lightest sparring on the planet.

When you're having fun, it is now scientifically confirmed that your nervous system relaxes, and you end up having much better response times and neurological adaptation, which means that you adapt quicker to patterns so you can adjust and learn more styles.

(Firas Zahabi, Georges St-Pierre's longtime coach, specifically describes using a huge amount of very light live sparring to repeatedly go through sequences and develop seamless movement.)

https://fight.fudgie.org/search/show/jr/episode/20100728\_Wed\_xDsoWp743gM

(Another account of Zahabi's training at TriStar describes his advanced fighters doing very controlled, technical sparring followed by technique instruction and drilling.)

https://www.foxsports.com/stories/ufc/georges-st-pierres-training-secret-firas-zahabi-and-the-tristar-gym

If you've ever seen capoeira practitioners, you've probably seen them moving extraordinarily fast, throwing extraordinarily fast kicks at each other's faces, and yet very few injuries ever happen. How is this? It's because they're relaxed. They go into an alpha state that allows them to have enhanced reflexes.

Modern sports psychologists have identified that when your brain goes into an alpha state, you have enhanced reflexes because time neurologically slows down.

The ways to get here are flow sparring and light sparring.

These teach you neurological adaptation that will help you learn patterns, so when you get into a real fight, if you see a pattern, you adapt quicker.

So a lot of people then will ask, "How do you get better?"

Here's the thing: if you look at Matt Thornton from SBG MMA, he explains it. You have to use aliveness.

What is aliveness? Some people think that means hard. It doesn't. It means adaptability.

Here's the thing: a fight is basically a circle. You're moving through stages of adaptation. The first person who fails to adapt loses. If the striker fails to deal with the clinch, they lose. If the grappler fails to deal with the strikes, they lose.

If a kick comes at you at a weird angle you've never seen before, you're probably going to get your ass kicked. What does this mean? Well, Bruce Lee identified it quite well: it means you have to have adaptability.

That's why Bruce Lee trained in as many fighting arts as he could, with as many people as he could.

Here's the thing: even if you think a fighting art is silly, somebody might throw that technique at you, and if you've never seen it before, it's probably going to work on you. Usually, the things we haven't seen are the things that get us.

That's why even Conor McGregor trained in capoeira. He knew he was fighting some people from Brazil, and he knew they probably were going to throw a capoeira kick. If he hadn't had the neurological stimulus of that kick before, it was probably going to get him.

By having the adaptation already built into him, when he saw it in his next fight, his adaptability would be higher.

The way this generally works is the first time somebody does something on you that you've never seen, it works 100%. The next time, it works 80%, then it works 50%, then 30%, and so on, because in the periods between that technique working on you, you are subconsciously adapting. You're subconsciously figuring out the angles of evasion and so forth.

This is why soft sparring is so important. It teaches you adaptation without the risk of injury.

You don't get brownie points for getting injured, but you do get points for adaptation.

Aliveness training, which is the secret to getting better, merely means adapting to more and more neurological stimuli. That requires you to go out there and see as many styles as you can.

Believe it or not, the best fighters are generally the ones who have been around the most and seen the most things, because it's the hardest to get something on them.

It's not the toughest guy. It's not the most buff guy. It's the person who has been able to adapt the most with the least amount of injuries.

So this is a good reason to get some experience in Wing Chun, Shaolin, capoeira, or whatever else. You don't do these because you necessarily want those whole styles. You do them so if you ever go against somebody who does any of those techniques on you, the chances that they will work are less and less.

And vice versa. Anybody who does those styles should be doing the same.

We all come in with a base, but the process of scientific refinement is what makes you a true martial artist, because you have to adapt again and again.

This is the secret of getting better.

Train in not just one school of boxing, but as many as you can. But always train safe. This is your body. Protect it. This is your brain. Protect it.

People will often be critical and say, "Well, if you get hit in real life and you've never been hit, it will all crumble."

They are somewhat correct.

But you don't want neurological damage, so the way you do this is how some of the best gyms in the world do, which is somebody throws a hard punch, but they tell you exactly what technique they're going to do and exactly where they're going to land it. And what you basically do is you learn to roll, you learn to slip, and you learn to block or counter that technique.

In the case of kicks, you learn how to either reinforce your structure, check it, evade, or catch.

The attacker needs to be well trained so if they see that the person made a mistake, they don't follow through the punch, and they pull it at the last moment so as not to cause neurological damage. Believe it or not, there are no brownie points for getting neurological damage. You just end up retarded and slurring your speech.

(This concept of controlled, technical sparring is also used by boxing coaches who progressively introduce athletes to light, controlled sparring before moving toward harder contact.)

https://www.coachalfranco.com/mens-boxing-skills

There are no brownie points, and in fact, the more neurological injuries you have, the slower your reflexes get, which is why every coach will tell you that getting hurt sparring right before a fight usually means you're going in with an injury, and you're likely to be hit by the exact same punch.

Another reason is if you've been knocked out by a particular angle, when you see that angle again, because you have not readjusted your neurology with soft sparring, what ends up happening is your brain freezes out of trauma, and so guess what? You get knocked out by the exact same punch.

Soft sparring readjusts your neurology. It relaxes you, that way you can have neuroplasticity and start recovering and start adapting to the attacks that defeated you in the past.

This is the best framework for training fighters. We have to always adapt. We have to always get better.

Remember, the person who wins the fight is not the toughest; it's just the most adaptable person.

Have fun. Live life. Remember, we fight to live; we don't live to fight!

Literally the credo of the Highlander.

So a bit about my background. Basically, I started martial arts when I was 18 at the Lion's Den affiliate gym.

I don't know if it's still around, but it was connected to Ken Shamrock, and it was largely based on his philosophy. It was part of the MMA Mecca that Ken Shamrock was trying to create in Susanville, California.

Basically, hard sparring was the norm. Nobody knew anything about soft sparring. They thought the harder you go, the better you were.

A couple of people managed to get better, but my personal observation was that most people got worse.

You would walk out of the gym every day punch-drunk. You didn't learn how to beat people who are better than you; you just learned how to beat up people that were worse than you.

This was a huge, massive setback for me. I ended up with deep trauma from getting my ass kicked hundreds of times over, and my skill set actually got worse. My techniques got worse, and my instincts got worse.

It was also a huge gym with elite coaches, but unfortunately, it was like a hundred students per coach, and so there weren't even enough coaches to train you effectively unless you were already a fighter.

At the age of 19, I started training kickboxing, but once again, elite coach, too many students, too much hard sparring.

I knew I wasn't getting any better, and it wasn't until I was 24 that I met a man who was a black belt in judo who was trying to cross over to mixed martial arts.

He had three black belts, one in judo and two in Japanese jiu-jitsu, and he was also a champion high school wrestler.

For three years, we trained about 15 hours a week. He taught me escapes from grappling, but he did not teach me how to grapple because I wasn't interested at the time. We were mostly sparring partners.

What he did teach me was sensitivity and learning how to train.

He taught me how to spar playfully, and I got much, much better at the school I was training at. I became one of the better fighters, and it gave me a framework for training that I use to this day.

As many know, Cuban boxing gyms train the best fighters in the world, but they have some of the lightest sparring on the planet.

When you're having fun, it is now scientifically confirmed that your nervous system relaxes, and you end up having much better response times and neurological adaptation, which means that you adapt quicker to patterns so you can adjust and learn more styles.

(Firas Zahabi, Georges St-Pierre's longtime coach, specifically describes using a huge amount of very light live sparring to repeatedly go through sequences and develop seamless movement.)

https://fight.fudgie.org/search/show/jr/episode/20100728\_Wed\_xDsoWp743gM

(Another account of Zahabi's training at TriStar describes his advanced fighters doing very controlled, technical sparring followed by technique instruction and drilling.)

https://www.foxsports.com/stories/ufc/georges-st-pierres-training-secret-firas-zahabi-and-the-tristar-gym

If you've ever seen capoeira practitioners, you've probably seen them moving extraordinarily fast, throwing extraordinarily fast kicks at each other's faces, and yet very few injuries ever happen. How is this? It's because they're relaxed. They go into an alpha state that allows them to have enhanced reflexes.

Modern sports psychologists have identified that when your brain goes into an alpha state, you have enhanced reflexes because time neurologically slows down.

The ways to get here are flow sparring and light sparring.

These teach you neurological adaptation that will help you learn patterns, so when you get into a real fight, if you see a pattern, you adapt quicker.

So a lot of people then will ask, "How do you get better?"

Here's the thing: if you look at Matt Thornton from SBG MMA, he explains it. You have to use aliveness.

What is aliveness? Some people think that means hard. It doesn't. It means adaptability.

Here's the thing: a fight is basically a circle. You're moving through stages of adaptation. The first person who fails to adapt loses. If the striker fails to deal with the clinch, they lose. If the grappler fails to deal with the strikes, they lose.

If a kick comes at you at a weird angle you've never seen before, you're probably going to get your ass kicked. What does this mean? Well, Bruce Lee identified it quite well: it means you have to have adaptability.

That's why Bruce Lee trained in as many fighting arts as he could, with as many people as he could.

Here's the thing: even if you think a fighting art is silly, somebody might throw that technique at you, and if you've never seen it before, it's probably going to work on you. Usually, the things we haven't seen are the things that get us.

That's why even Conor McGregor trained in capoeira. He knew he was fighting some people from Brazil, and he knew they probably were going to throw a capoeira kick. If he hadn't had the neurological stimulus of that kick before, it was probably going to get him.

By having the adaptation already built into him, when he saw it in his next fight, his adaptability would be higher.

The way this generally works is the first time somebody does something on you that you've never seen, it works 100%. The next time, it works 80%, then it works 50%, then 30%, and so on, because in the periods between that technique working on you, you are subconsciously adapting. You're subconsciously figuring out the angles of evasion and so forth.

This is why soft sparring is so important. It teaches you adaptation without the risk of injury.

You don't get brownie points for getting injured, but you do get points for adaptation.

Aliveness training, which is the secret to getting better, merely means adapting to more and more neurological stimuli. That requires you to go out there and see as many styles as you can.

Believe it or not, the best fighters are generally the ones who have been around the most and seen the most things, because it's the hardest to get something on them.

It's not the toughest guy. It's not the most buff guy. It's the person who has been able to adapt the most with the least amount of injuries.

So this is a good reason to get some experience in Wing Chun, Shaolin, capoeira, or whatever else. You don't do these because you necessarily want those whole styles. You do them so if you ever go against somebody who does any of those techniques on you, the chances that they will work are less and less.

And vice versa. Anybody who does those styles should be doing the same.

We all come in with a base, but the process of scientific refinement is what makes you a true martial artist, because you have to adapt again and again.

This is the secret of getting better.

Train in not just one school of boxing, but as many as you can. But always train safe. This is your body. Protect it. This is your brain. Protect it.

People will often be critical and say, "Well, if you get hit in real life and you've never been hit, it will all crumble."

They are somewhat correct.

But you don't want neurological damage, so the way you do this is how some of the best gyms in the world do, which is somebody throws a hard punch, but they tell you exactly what technique they're going to do and exactly where they're going to land it. And what you basically do is you learn to roll, you learn to slip, and you learn to block or counter that technique.

In the case of kicks, you learn how to either reinforce your structure, check it, evade, or catch.

The attacker needs to be well trained so if they see that the person made a mistake, they don't follow through the punch, and they pull it at the last moment so as not to cause neurological damage. Believe it or not, there are no brownie points for getting neurological damage. You just end up retarded and slurring your speech.

(This concept of controlled, technical sparring is also used by boxing coaches who progressively introduce athletes to light, controlled sparring before moving toward harder contact.)

https://www.coachalfranco.com/mens-boxing-skills

There are no brownie points, and in fact, the more neurological injuries you have, the slower your reflexes get, which is why every coach will tell you that getting hurt sparring right before a fight usually means you're going in with an injury, and you're likely to be hit by the exact same punch.

Another reason is if you've been knocked out by a particular angle, when you see that angle again, because you have not readjusted your neurology with soft sparring, what ends up happening is your brain freezes out of trauma, and so guess what? You get knocked out by the exact same punch.

Soft sparring readjusts your neurology. It relaxes you, that way you can have neuroplasticity and start recovering and start adapting to the attacks that defeated you in the past.

This is the best framework for training fighters. We have to always adapt. We have to always get better.

Remember, the person who wins the fight is not the toughest; it's just the most adaptable person.

Have fun. Live life. Remember, we fight to live; we don't live to fight!

Literally the credo of the Highlander.

As we have this conversation let's set up some ground rules.

Be respectful. Be kind. Treat people like family

I consider myself a survivor of El Niño 2023.

El Niño 2023 was one of the wildest events and instances I have ever seen in my entire life. At the end of 2022, a really, really intense El Niño hit, literally during the last week of 2022.

It ripped through the West Coast, causing massive trees to collapse and flooding whole cities.

I had never seen anything like it. It looked biblical.

In fact, when it hit, I was initially very surprised by the amount of snow it brought, and I think I underestimated it after I decided to go venture into the mountains.

To the mountains, it brought snow, but to the cities, it brought rain.

And boy, did it rain. It knocked out huge amounts of power. I remember driving through cities and just seeing trees everywhere, power lines everywhere. New Year's parties had to happen without power throughout Sacramento, California.

I remember going to a party that was using a power generator because the power was turning on and off all night.

I've never seen anything like that.

As I drove down the West Coast, it got worse, not better. I saw whole fields flooded. I saw seas everywhere, literally oceans of water covering farmland.

Once I hit San Diego, it got even worse. Huge amounts of water were running down the roads, and as the water started coming up over my wheels, I made a desperate run to drive to Tijuana when the rain briefly stopped so I could find a cheap hotel and get repairs done by a cheap mechanic, after tree branches that had fallen into the road had literally torn my brake lines off and ripped my catalytic converter off.

It was literally like driving my van through a flood.

For those who weren't here for it, you can't imagine it. It was like something from a cosmic horror.

For those who are living in their vans, it was absolutely terrifying.

Every report seems to indicate that this is going to be worse. I am not a doomsayer, but I am also not willing to act like the past didn't happen.

I'm not here to talk about climate change, and I'm not here to describe to people how these instances are getting more and more frequent, despite the fact that they are. I don't want to start a political conversation because I know that's going to distract from the points I am trying to make.

My proposal

What I'm suggesting is that the van dwelling community forms networks. Texting networks, maybe even encouraging van dwellers to get shortwave radios or Meshtastic networks going.

I think we need to start a huge conversation about how to prepare. We have approximately two months to prepare. We can do this.

But the van dwelling community has to start taking this seriously. We've experienced this three years ago.

Having an emergency network set up in our community means that if an elderly couple is stranded and isn't able to handle it themselves, we can send people out to them to help rescue them.

The van dwelling community needs to start networking and needs to start taking care of each other because so many of us are elderly and incapable of helping ourselves. We should not abandon each other ever.

We also need to screen members of this network to ensure that they aren't predators or thieves.

The one thing I don't want is to send out alerts that could identify people who are vulnerable to those who might prey on people in need.

What I've also been proposing is that we start a network of donation based or emergency assistance mechanical help.

Let's be honest. Most of us don't know how to work on our vehicles. Having an emergency network with people who are screened for mechanical knowledge means that if a tire blows or some basic issue happens, at the very least, we can try to get you back on the road.

I don't know what's possible and what's not, but I know there's a lot of us. Some kind of network where we screen each other, and maybe even do criminal background checks as we establish the network, could be a very good thing. We could have screened leaders and moderators to help manage it.

I don't know what this looks like, and I'm not trying to lead the effort. I'm just putting it out there.

It's time we build something like this, something strong.

The only reason I suggest shortwave radio is that cell networks can go out, and we should always have backups. Shortwave or Meshtastic is a great way to go, anyway.

I look forward to hearing some ideas.

By the way, the best preparation is acting beforehand.

A lot of people are saying Quartzsite is the safest place to go. Some people are saying to go up north, where it is likely to have less intense hurricane and monsoon like conditions, such as Seattle.

I'm willing to hear your perspectives. I am not knowledgeable enough or confident enough to throw out anything myself.

So basically I just found out last night that measure of a man had a re-release that was an hour long which is supposedly substantially better I had not become aware that there were extended versions of the episodes turns out that there were tons of deleted scenes because the TV format that required the episodes to be 45 minutes with 15 minutes of commercials meaning that there are approximately 15 minutes to half an hour of deleted scenes that are on the reels for almost every episode.

Apparently Paramount decided to revamp measure of a Man which got an excellent review in its re-release but I have not been able to find a place to stream or let's be honest torrent.

Does anybody know where I can find the re-released version I really want to see the hour-long version that is supposed to be very good.

Apparently it gets much deeper into rikers struggle with his legal role.

What really interests me is the fact that we could potentially have like almost hour long versions of each episode and we could probably recut Best of both worlds into a 2 hour or maybe even longer movie with a remaster.

Apparently it was extremely expensive to rebuild measure of a Man and Paramount canceled all other reassemblies.

But technology is much more sophisticated than when they were first doing this in 2014 I believe and I really think there's a case to be made for doing this to the whole Star Trek franchise.

Can you imagine going through every episode going through all the deleted scenes that are in Paramount vault and actually rebuilding every episode as almost a standalone movie.

It's a real shame this hasn't been done. I will readily admit I think this is a poorly handled franchise they are sitting on a gold mine and every fan would go crazy for this.

Update update update I found it online! Thank you everybody for helping me! You can watch it it's 57 minutes long almost an extra 13 minutes:

https://dn710204.ca.archive.org/0/items/star-trek-tng-the-measure-of-a-man-extended/Star%20Trek%20TNG%20-%202x09%20The%20Measure%20of%20a%20Man%20%28Extended%29/Star%20Trek%20TNG%20-%202x09%20-%20The%20Measure%20of%20a%20Man%20%28Extended%29.mp4

This is a low definition version if anyone can help us find a high definition version we would greatly appreciate that

So I love the show from the early 2000s I would agree it didn't have enough action but I love the humor of what the life of the superheroes was like outside of being a superhero. I thought it was an awesome show and I really loved it I was upset only had one season as for the most recent tick show I loved it as well I loved their version of Superman and I'm really sorry we didn't get to see what happened to him he wasn't as evil as homelander just a little misguided it's real sad that the tick didn't end with a conclusion.

Getting an animated series with the conclusion would be amazing so basically like we should have animated versions of both the shows to have a final season

So many of us just complain and complain but the reality is is it's time for a revolution! Are you willing to fight for it?

I'm writing a thousand page book to teach people how to fight back how to create encampments that are actually functional I'm writing a book for revolution! Are you interested

This is going to be a long and heavy post. If you don't feel comfortable with it, please just be respectful.

I have been homeless on and off for about 20 years. I have also been involved in homeless advocacy. I have spoken to congressmen, senators, police officers, and city council members, and I have worked with anarchist and mutual aid groups to try to create change. I was also in foster care as a teenager alongside homeless youth, so I have been through the system, thick and thin. I have a lot to say about it.

I'm going to give you my complete analysis of what I've been through, what I think the solutions are, or at the very least, how we can stop hurting people.

I hope you can take something from this and that it benefits your experience. I also hope it helps guide you away from danger and helps you advocate for better solutions.

Around 2015, I was in Eugene, Oregon. I was living out of my car and traveling the West Coast when I decided to go to a homeless shelter in an attempt to load up on food and water because I was running low on money.

Before I went there, I stopped at a food bank.

They gave me some food, and I asked them about the shelters. I asked if I could go there to take a shower and whether I could go there for assistance.

I was a young man with no criminal record and no history of drug addiction. I looked young and naive.

Despite what I had been through, I had never been to a city this big or attempted to get help in a city like this.

They looked at me and asked, "Have you ever been to prison?"

I said no.

They asked, "Do you have a history of surviving on the street?"

I said, "Well, I try to stay away from the criminal elements, but I've been around."

They looked at me and said, "Look, we're not going to lie to you. A lot of men get sexually assaulted in the shelters."

And by the way, for those of you who are going to say this just happens in Democratic cities, it doesn't. It happens everywhere. Men's shelters are treated like prisons in many places. In fact, homeless shelters are often treated like prisons. We treat shelters like places to punish the poor.

They told me there simply wasn't enough security staff and that they could not protect me. The shelters were unable to adequately protect the men. They did not advise me to take a shower there because they said that was where sexual assaults tended to happen.

They said there was simply no way they could supervise all of these people. The reality was that the men's shelters were essentially halfway houses for people who had gotten out of jail or needed to go back to rehab. They described them as violent and dangerous places and did not advise me to stay there.

I said I understood and left.

Later on, CalMatters did a report on homeless shelters in California. They found that men were significantly more likely to be sexually assaulted in a homeless shelter than in prison.

Throughout the Deep South, there are horrible stories of shelters that are even worse, including places where, if you leave, the police automatically arrest you and send you back. They become jails without trials, essentially punishing people simply for being poor.

Throughout the United States, shelters have become desolate places.

The staff proceeded to tell me that the family shelters were the only places where they actually verified that you weren't a sex offender. But in order to go there, you had to have a child.

That's the interesting thing about poverty. If you've ever been around it, you know that many programs require you to have a child before they will even accept you. The saddest thing is that bringing another person into this world of poverty can sometimes become one of the only ways to qualify for more assistance, which is incredibly sad.

I can't tell you the number of times I've been told, "If you just had a kid, you would qualify for more programs."

It's absolutely horrible to have a kid on the street. I've seen it. It's bad.

About a year later, I was contemplating becoming an attorney. I decided to start meeting attorneys who were working on civil rights cases. There was one attorney I met who told me that he was looking for expert witnesses and that I might be useful to him. He described how he was working on a lawsuit against the county for failure to provide protection for their staff.

Apparently, a security guard at the homeless shelter was living there in exchange for doing security work.

What had apparently happened was that the shelter had been taken over by a white supremacist gang and that they had made death threats against the security guard. When the security guard complained and said that he needed more staff and more protection, they fired him instead of making the necessary changes.

My experience in that town was that it was very common for homeless people with a history of incarceration to create what were essentially prison-style social structures. They would fight over territory and sometimes over access to shelters. They would claim particular shelters for their own group and threaten other people in the area to stay away.

They would also look at newcomers, particularly naive young people, and identify them for predatory operations such as prostitution, exploitation, or theft.

It has been my experience that, unfortunately, many homeless people have a history of criminality. If you're homeless and you don't want to be forced into that world, you essentially have to stay away from people who are involved in it.

I have seen some elderly Black men who despised the homeless lifestyle and would deliberately dress in old-fashioned suits. You could tell that they had probably been wearing the same suit for years, but they tried to present themselves as gentlemen. They tried to carry themselves as respectful people.

That's because they understood that the clothes you wear and the way you carry yourself can communicate what social group you belong to among the homeless population. They wanted to differentiate themselves both in the eyes of the police and in the eyes of other homeless people. They were making a strong statement:

"I do not belong to your tribe."

Many people who become homeless come from poverty, and there is often a process that happens before homelessness. People may already have been pressured into crime, or they may have a history of addiction or other destructive environments. When they become homeless, they can end up even deeper in those circumstances.

It's very unfortunate.

The truth is that when you're homeless, one of the most important things you can do is stay away from people who are deeply involved in addiction, violence, exploitation, or criminality. These things can spread socially and can take over people's lives.

You need to understand that if you're homeless, these environments can be incredibly dangerous. Do yourself a favor and stay away from them whenever possible. Do everything you can to differentiate yourself from those environments.

That might mean keeping a nice pair of clothes in a sealed bag, keeping a bottle of water and a washcloth, and, when you wake up under a bridge, washing yourself off. Wait until you're dry, put on your clean clothes, and go about your day trying to make connections and find work opportunities.

What you must understand is that the way you dress and the way you carry yourself affects how people react to you. People don't necessarily know you're homeless just by looking at you unless you look like you are. Unfortunately, a lot about getting out of a situation is about presenting yourself as someone who does not belong in that situation.

Unfortunately, our society often works like a triangle. At the top are the oligarchs. In the middle are the working class. At the bottom are people living in poverty, and below that are the invisible class, the homeless.

The only way to move into the working class is to be accepted into those ranks, and unfortunately, one part of that is looking like you belong there.

Many homeless people are never given work opportunities. I was actually working with a woman who is one of the top career coaches in the United States. After many years, she said that her organization, which did pro bono work for counties, had found that only a very small percentage of homeless people ever landed a job. She said the phrase, "They want workers, they just don't want us," was common among homeless people.

Nobody wants to hire the homeless. That's the problem.

Until the government does something to require and enforce fair hiring practices that prevent discrimination based on social class or someone's living situation, this is going to keep happening.

So, unfortunately, one way you can improve your chances is to look like you're already part of the working world. Cut your hair. Wear decent clothes. Look the part. Try to look like you don't belong in your situation, because as long as you look like you belong to groups that other people associate with crime, addiction, or danger, you are more likely to be treated as though you belong there.

You see, there are two ways people respond to homelessness.

One is to unify, work together, protect each other, and protect their inner light.

The other is to become predators and rule the night, preying on vulnerable people and exploiting them. You have probably seen people involved in prostitution, drug dealing, trafficking, and other forms of exploitation.

This is the segment of homelessness that has fully embraced some of its darkest aspects.

Unfortunately, because these people can be the most visible, they often become the image that society associates with homelessness as a whole.

That's why you don't want to look the part. You want to look like somebody who cares for themselves. You want to look like somebody who doesn't belong to the most dangerous parts of the street environment.

So, if you want to get a job, you have to look like you're supposed to have a job.

Otherwise, nobody may give you a chance.

I hate to say this, but I've had situations where I applied for jobs and the hiring manager eventually saw that I lived in my van because they followed me out. I never got a phone call.

And that's somebody who lives in a van.

If you're completely unsheltered, it's going to be even harder. You have to find ways to make yourself appear as though you are not homeless.

I know it's hard, but the best thing you can do for yourself and others is to stay away from predatory environments and establish yourself as somebody who is still protecting themselves, their dignity, their virtue, and their inner light.

You can demand respect without violence. Sometimes that comes through nothing more than pure presence.

Some years back, in 2011, I joined a group of anarchists to create an eco-village for homeless people. This is when I really came to understand that you can't simply create one solution for everybody.

The group was called Occupy Santa Cruz. You can look it up. There is a documentary about it.

We built a 150-person tent with a steel dome and a kitchen running off solar panels.

It was a beautiful village, but it had problems. We did not keep out the criminal elements, and what ended up happening was that we were taken over by drug dealers, pimps, and rapists. Our encampment became unsafe, and we were not able to protect the people to whom we had promised safety.

There was a situation where a homeless man we gave shelter to supposedly drugged several teenage girls who were homeless.

There were multiple nights when elderly people were beaten by younger people.

We failed to protect people, and that was because we failed to understand something very important:

You can't put everybody in the same place.

You see, mental illness, addiction, violence, and criminal behavior can interact in destructive ways. While I feel a tremendous amount of empathy for people dealing with these issues, when you're trying to help people, one of the most important things to do initially is distinguish who is suffering from what and what environment will actually keep them safe.

People who are new to homelessness, or who have not fallen into addiction or criminal activity, need to be protected from environments where they are likely to be exploited or victimized.

I've seen teenage girls become homeless because their parents were struggling with severe addiction, and then end up in prostitution. In my experience, one reason this happens is that social workers sometimes fail to recognize that putting vulnerable young people into the same environments as people already involved in exploitation can create opportunities for further victimization.

It's sad, and it's sick, but it happens.

You have to create different shelters for different populations.

For mentally ill people, unfortunately, if someone is not sleeping at night, screaming, or experiencing severe psychiatric symptoms, it can disturb everyone else in the facility. Sometimes that person may then be attacked at night because other residents become frustrated or frightened.

That's why I believe you have to have different shelters for different people.

I remember that I eventually received housing assistance and lived in a beautiful apartment complex. I had my own apartment.

Unfortunately, the county also placed many other people there who were involved in organized crime and prostitution.

Before long, the apartment next to me became a brothel, and they were selling fentanyl. People were coming in the middle of the night for sex and drugs.

Then those people started victimizing other residents in the apartment complex.

Several drug dealers beat up an elderly woman who was there on Social Security, and they took over her apartment to sell drugs out of it. The county eventually had to send in a SWAT team to remove them.

It was a real shame.

It became so bad that I eventually chose to sleep in a car rather than accept housing assistance because the housing complex had become too dangerous.

After that, I started writing to senators and congressmen, demanding that we use social workers and therapists to separate people into different housing environments so that people who had managed to stay out of crime would not become victims of crime or, even worse, become associated with organized crime.

They said they understood, but they said that doing so would look like segregation. They simply could not do that.

I said, "Well, in that case, you destroy the lives of innocent people who are just trying to live normal lives, because you can't live a normal life when your neighbors are operating a brothel or a drug house."

I've spoken to police officers who said they understood, but once again, they said that it looked like segregation.

This is one of the biggest problems: the people making these policies have often never lived through this themselves.

They don't understand the realities of this life. They don't understand the realities that people are faced with.

They create one solution for everybody, and that solution can end up hurting everyone.

It hurts people struggling with addiction and criminal behavior by placing them into systems that may fail to help them break destructive cycles.

And it hurts innocent people by pushing them into association with people who may victimize them, which can sometimes result in them getting arrested, ending up with criminal records, and being pushed even further into that lifestyle.

This is a really, really hard post to write.

Recently, I've written a series of posts on Reddit about the realities of the life I have seen over the last 20 years, the things I've witnessed, and what I believe the solutions really are.

After having multiple friends die while homeless, I've decided it's time to go on the offensive, start educating people, and start pushing for real solutions.

I do believe that part of the solution is the creation of eco-villages and intentional communities.

I remember in Occupy Santa Cruz there was a homeless veteran who was deeply mentally ill after serving in Afghanistan and Iraq. He was eating out of trash cans and behaving like a wild animal.

We started giving him opportunities and responsibilities.

I think it was extremely distressing for him to be around the crime and gunshots that were happening in the encampment. I think that environment was horrible for his PTSD.

But I will say that as we treated him with dignity and gave him real responsibilities and chores, he started transforming and healing from within.

He started talking to people. He started acting more normally. He started taking care of himself, cutting his hair, bathing, and operating with dignity.

I believe that when you treat people with dignity, it can help heal them. When you treat people as though they are animals, you can reinforce the very behaviors you are trying to prevent.

The last time I saw him, he had a girlfriend and was living a normal life.

I really believe that without us, he might be dead.

For all the failures and mistakes of Occupy Santa Cruz, we helped a lot of people.

The Occupy movement was a great experiment for homeless people in the sense that people built eco-villages within city limits and provided housing to people immediately.

Unfortunately, because we allowed essentially everyone in, criminal elements tended to take over.

But I do believe that building communities is extremely important. I believe the use of common spaces as community housing is important. I just believe that you have to have different places for different types of people, and you have to have security to ensure the safety of the people living there.

You have to protect the social and psychological health of the community.

That means protecting the community from people who are actively exploiting or harming others while continuing to build the psychological well-being and resilience of everyone living there.

There is a theory in social psychology that communities can develop a certain kind of psychological ecosystem. A healthy community can sometimes support a few people who are struggling, especially when there are enough healthy people and enough resources to provide support.

But if you overload a community with people in crisis without providing adequate resources, structure, boundaries, and support, the psychological burden can become too great and the entire community can deteriorate.

This is the foundational concept you have to understand if you're going to build a community.

You have to have enough fortitude and resources to care for people who need help.

It's okay to introduce one or two people who need additional support into a well-grounded community when there is consent and adequate support.

But if you simply keep loading people into a community to fulfill government contracts, hit numerical targets, or satisfy bureaucratic requirements, you can destroy the entire community.

Communities must be protected.

People have a right to help, and I want to help every drug addict and every person who has been involved in criminal operations.

But it has to be done in a way that doesn't destroy other people's lives.

You have to make sure that the people you're bringing into communities have a genuine desire and a meaningful pathway to live their lives to the fullest. At the same time, people who have not yet made that decision need a place to go where they can receive help without being exposed unnecessarily to people who may harm them.

Everyone has a right to have a place to go.

But nobody should be allowed to harm others in the process.

This is the foundational framework I believe we have to understand if we want to start building solutions that actually work.

I would genuinely love to hear your thoughts on this.

Thank you for reading.

This is going to be a long and heavy post. If you don't feel comfortable with it, please just be respectful.

I have been homeless on and off for about 20 years. I have also been involved in homeless advocacy. I have spoken to congressmen, senators, police officers, and city council members, and I have worked with anarchist and mutual aid groups to try to create change. I was also in foster care as a teenager alongside homeless youth, so I have been through the system, thick and thin. I have a lot to say about it.

I'm going to give you my complete analysis of what I've been through, what I think the solutions are, or at the very least, how we can stop hurting people.

I hope you can take something from this and that it benefits your experience. I also hope it helps guide you away from danger and helps you advocate for better solutions.

Around 2015, I was in Eugene, Oregon. I was living out of my car and traveling the West Coast when I decided to go to a homeless shelter in an attempt to load up on food and water because I was low on resources.

Before I went there, I stopped at a food bank.

They gave me some food, and I asked them about the shelters. I asked if I could go there to take a shower and whether I could go there for assistance.

I was a young man with no criminal record and no history of drug addiction. I looked young and naive.

Despite what I had been through, I had never been to a city this big or attempted to get help in a city like this.

They looked at me and asked, "Have you ever been to prison?"

I said no.

They asked, "Do you have a history of surviving on the street?"

I said, "Well, I try to stay away from the criminal elements, but I've been around."

They looked at me and said, "Look, we're not going to lie to you. A lot of men get sexually assaulted in the shelters."

And by the way, for those of you who are going to say this just happens in Democratic cities, it doesn't. It happens everywhere. Men's shelters are treated like prisons in many places. In fact, homeless shelters are often treated like prisons. We treat shelters like places to punish the poor.

They told me there simply wasn't enough security staff and that they could not protect me. The shelters were unable to adequately protect the men. They did not advise me to take a shower there because they said that was where sexual assaults tended to happen.

They said there was simply no way they could supervise all of these people. The reality was that the men's shelters were essentially halfway houses for people who had gotten out of jail or needed to go back to rehab. They described them as violent and dangerous places and did not advise me to stay there.

I said I understood and left.

Later on, CalMatters did a report on homeless shelters in California. They found that men were significantly more likely to be sexually assaulted in a homeless shelter than in prison.

Throughout the Deep South, there are horrible stories of shelters that are even worse, including places where, if you leave, the police automatically arrest you and send you back. They become jails without trials, essentially punishing people simply for being poor.

Throughout the United States, shelters have become desolate places.

The staff proceeded to tell me that the family shelters were the only places where they actually verified that you weren't a sex offender. But in order to go there, you had to have a child.

That's the interesting thing about poverty. If you've ever been around it, you know that many programs require you to have a child before they will even accept you. The saddest thing is that bringing another person into this world of poverty can sometimes become one of the only ways to qualify for more assistance, which is incredibly sad.

I can't tell you the number of times I've been told, "If you just had a kid, you would qualify for more programs."

It's absolutely horrible to have a kid on the street. I've seen it. It's bad.

About a year later, I was contemplating becoming an attorney. I decided to start meeting attorneys who were working on civil rights cases. There was one attorney I met who told me that he was looking for expert witnesses and that I might be useful to him. He described how he was working on a lawsuit against the county for failure to provide protection for their staff.

Apparently, a security guard at the homeless shelter was living there in exchange for doing security work.

What had apparently happened was that the shelter had been taken over by a white supremacist gang and that they had made death threats against the security guard. When the security guard complained and said that he needed more staff and more protection, they fired him instead of making the necessary changes.

My experience in that town was that it was very common for homeless people with a history of incarceration to create what were essentially prison-style social structures. They would fight over territory and sometimes over access to shelters. They would claim particular shelters for their own group and threaten other people in the area to stay away.

They would also look at newcomers, particularly naive young people, and identify them for predatory operations such as prostitution, exploitation, or theft.

It has been my experience that, unfortunately, many homeless people have a history of criminality. If you're homeless and you don't want to be forced into that world, you essentially have to stay away from people who are involved in it.

I have seen some elderly Black men who despised the homeless lifestyle and would deliberately dress in old-fashioned suits. You could tell that they had probably been wearing the same suit for years, but they tried to present themselves as gentlemen. They tried to carry themselves as respectful people.

That's because they understood that the clothes you wear and the way you carry yourself can communicate what social group you belong to among the homeless population. They wanted to differentiate themselves both in the eyes of the police and in the eyes of other homeless people. They were making a strong statement:

"I do not belong to your tribe."

Many people who become homeless come from poverty, and there is often a process that happens before homelessness. People may already have been pressured into crime, or they may have a history of addiction or other destructive environments. When they become homeless, they can end up even deeper in those circumstances.

It's very unfortunate.

The truth is that when you're homeless, one of the most important things you can do is stay away from people who are deeply involved in addiction, violence, exploitation, or criminality. These things can spread socially and can take over people's lives.

You need to understand that if you're homeless, these environments can be incredibly dangerous. Do yourself a favor and stay away from them whenever possible. Do everything you can to differentiate yourself from those environments.

That might mean keeping a nice pair of clothes in a sealed bag, keeping a bottle of water and a washcloth, and, when you wake up under a bridge, washing yourself off. Wait until you're dry, put on your clean clothes, and go about your day trying to make connections and find work opportunities.

What you must understand is that the way you dress and the way you carry yourself affects how people react to you. People don't necessarily know you're homeless just by looking at you unless you look like you are. Unfortunately, a lot about getting out of a situation is about presenting yourself as someone who does not belong in that situation.

Unfortunately, our society often works like a triangle. At the top are the oligarchs. In the middle are the working class. At the bottom are people living in poverty, and below that are the invisible class, the homeless.

The only way to move into the working class is to be accepted into those ranks, and unfortunately, one part of that is looking like you belong there.

Many homeless people are never given work opportunities. I was actually working with a woman who is one of the top career coaches in the United States. After many years, she said that her organization, which did pro bono work for counties, had found that only a very small percentage of homeless people ever landed a job. She said the phrase, "They want workers, they just don't want us," was common among homeless people.

Nobody wants to hire the homeless. That's the problem.

Until the government does something to require and enforce fair hiring practices that prevent discrimination based on social class or someone's living situation, this is going to keep happening.

So, unfortunately, one way you can improve your chances is to look like you're already part of the working world. Cut your hair. Wear decent clothes. Look the part. Try to look like you don't belong in your situation, because as long as you look like you belong to groups that other people associate with crime, addiction, or danger, you are more likely to be treated as though you belong there.

You see, there are two ways people respond to homelessness.

One is to unify, work together, protect each other, and protect their inner light.

The other is to become predators and rule the night, preying on vulnerable people and exploiting them. You have probably seen people involved in prostitution, drug dealing, trafficking, and other forms of exploitation.

This is the segment of homelessness that has fully embraced some of its darkest aspects.

Unfortunately, because these people can be the most visible, they often become the image that society associates with homelessness as a whole.

That's why you don't want to look the part. You want to look like somebody who cares for themselves. You want to look like somebody who doesn't belong to the most dangerous parts of the street environment.

So, if you want to get a job, you have to look like you're supposed to have a job.

Otherwise, nobody may give you a chance.

I hate to say this, but I've had situations where I applied for jobs and the hiring manager eventually saw that I lived in my van because they followed me out. I never got a phone call.

And that's somebody who lives in a van.

If you're completely unsheltered, it's going to be even harder. You have to find ways to make yourself appear as though you are not homeless.

I know it's hard, but the best thing you can do for yourself and others is to stay away from predatory environments and establish yourself as somebody who is still protecting themselves, their dignity, their virtue, and their inner light.

You can demand respect without violence. Sometimes that comes through nothing more than pure presence.

Some years back, in 2011, I joined a group of anarchists to create an eco-village for homeless people. This is when I really came to understand that you can't simply create one solution for everybody.

The group was called Occupy Santa Cruz. You can look it up. There is a documentary about it.

We built a 150-person tent with a steel dome and a kitchen running off solar panels.

It was a beautiful village, but it had problems. We did not keep out the criminal elements, and what ended up happening was that we were taken over by drug dealers, pimps, and rapists. Our encampment became unsafe, and we were not able to protect the people to whom we had promised safety.

There was a situation where a homeless man we gave shelter to supposedly drugged several teenage girls who were homeless.

There were multiple nights when elderly people were beaten by younger people.

We failed to protect people, and that was because we failed to understand something very important:

You can't put everybody in the same place.

You see, mental illness, addiction, violence, and criminal behavior can interact in destructive ways. While I feel a tremendous amount of empathy for people dealing with these issues, when you're trying to help people, one of the most important things to do initially is distinguish who is suffering from what and what environment will actually keep them safe.

People who are new to homelessness, or who have not fallen into addiction or criminal activity, need to be protected from environments where they are likely to be exploited or victimized.

I've seen teenage girls become homeless because their parents were struggling with severe addiction, and then end up in prostitution. In my experience, one reason this happens is that social workers sometimes fail to recognize that putting vulnerable young people into the same environments as people already involved in exploitation can create opportunities for further victimization.

It's sad, and it's sick, but it happens.

You have to create different shelters for different populations.

For mentally ill people, unfortunately, if someone is not sleeping at night, screaming, or experiencing severe psychiatric symptoms, it can disturb everyone else in the facility. Sometimes that person may then be attacked at night because other residents become frustrated or frightened.

That's why I believe you have to have different shelters for different people.

I remember that I eventually received housing assistance and lived in a beautiful apartment complex. I had my own apartment.

Unfortunately, the county also placed many other people there who were involved in organized crime and prostitution.

Before long, the apartment next to me became a brothel, and they were selling fentanyl. People were coming in the middle of the night for sex and drugs.

Then those people started victimizing other residents in the apartment complex.

Several drug dealers beat up an elderly woman who was there on Social Security, and they took over her apartment to sell drugs out of it. The county eventually had to send in a SWAT team to remove them.

It was a real shame.

It became so bad that I eventually chose to sleep in a car rather than accept housing assistance because the housing complex had become too dangerous.

After that, I started writing to senators and congressmen, demanding that we use social workers and therapists to separate people into different housing environments so that people who had managed to stay out of crime would not become victims of crime or, even worse, become associated with organized crime.

They said they understood, but they said that doing so would look like segregation. They simply could not do that.

I said, "Well, in that case, you destroy the lives of innocent people who are just trying to live normal lives, because you can't live a normal life when your neighbors are operating a brothel or a drug house."

I've spoken to police officers who said they understood, but once again, they said that it looked like segregation.

This is one of the biggest problems: the people making these policies have often never lived through this themselves.

They don't understand the realities of this life. They don't understand the realities that people are faced with.

They create one solution for everybody, and that solution can end up hurting everyone.

It hurts people struggling with addiction and criminal behavior by placing them into systems that may fail to help them break destructive cycles.

And it hurts innocent people by pushing them into association with people who may victimize them, which can sometimes result in them getting arrested, ending up with criminal records, and being pushed even further into that lifestyle.

This is a really, really hard post to write.

Recently, I've written a series of posts on Reddit about the realities of the life I have seen over the last 20 years, the things I've witnessed, and what I believe the solutions really are.

After having multiple friends die while homeless, I've decided it's time to go on the offensive, start educating people, and start pushing for real solutions.

I do believe that part of the solution is the creation of eco-villages and intentional communities.

I remember in Occupy Santa Cruz there was a homeless veteran who was deeply mentally ill after serving in Afghanistan and Iraq. He was eating out of trash cans and behaving like a wild animal.

We started giving him opportunities and responsibilities.

I think it was extremely distressing for him to be around the crime and gunshots that were happening in the encampment. I think that environment was horrible for his PTSD.

But I will say that as we treated him with dignity and gave him real responsibilities and chores, he started transforming and healing from within.

He started talking to people. He started acting more normally. He started taking care of himself, cutting his hair, bathing, and operating with dignity.

I believe that when you treat people with dignity, it can help heal them. When you treat people as though they are animals, you can reinforce the very behaviors you are trying to prevent.

The last time I saw him, he had a girlfriend and was living a normal life.

I really believe that without us, he might be dead.

For all the failures and mistakes of Occupy Santa Cruz, we helped a lot of people.

The Occupy movement was a great experiment for homeless people in the sense that people built eco-villages within city limits and provided housing to people immediately.

Unfortunately, because we allowed essentially everyone in, criminal elements tended to take over.

But I do believe that building communities is extremely important. I believe the use of common spaces as community housing is important. I just believe that you have to have different places for different types of people, and you have to have security to ensure the safety of the people living there.

You have to protect the social and psychological health of the community.

That means protecting the community from people who are actively exploiting or harming others while continuing to build the psychological well-being and resilience of everyone living there.

There is a theory in social psychology that communities can develop a certain kind of psychological ecosystem. A healthy community can sometimes support a few people who are struggling, especially when there are enough healthy people and enough resources to provide support.

But if you overload a community with people in crisis without providing adequate resources, structure, boundaries, and support, the psychological burden can become too great and the entire community can deteriorate.

This is the foundational concept you have to understand if you're going to build a community.

You have to have enough fortitude and resources to care for people who need help.

It's okay to introduce one or two people who need additional support into a well-grounded community when there is consent and adequate support.

But if you simply keep loading people into a community to fulfill government contracts, hit numerical targets, or satisfy bureaucratic requirements, you can destroy the entire community.

Communities must be protected.

People have a right to help, and I want to help every drug addict and every person who has been involved in criminal operations.

But it has to be done in a way that doesn't destroy other people's lives.

You have to make sure that the people you're bringing into communities have a genuine desire and a meaningful pathway to live their lives to the fullest. At the same time, people who have not yet made that decision need a place to go where they can receive help without being exposed unnecessarily to people who may harm them.

Everyone has a right to have a place to go.

But nobody should be allowed to harm others in the process.

This is the foundational framework I believe we have to understand if we want to start building solutions that actually work.

I would genuinely love to hear your thoughts on this.

Thank you for reading.

First I want to say that I was a survivor of the Sunny Hills Children's Garden facility in San Anselmo, California.

Disclaimer:

This is basically my experience of the facility I was in. It's a long read. I guess I'm just getting it out there because I felt triggered by the Reckless Ben video, and I'd like to share what I went through.

Well, it had many issues. It was not anything like Provo Canyon. I do think the facility was problematic, but from what I was told, it was vastly better than other facilities. That doesn't mean that I think it should have continued to exist, and I am somewhat happy that it has closed down. It closed down in 2008.

I am going to talk about my experiences and then talk about the stories I heard from Level 14 facilities.

First and foremost, Sunny Hills Children's Garden was a facility that I was sent to after I was refusing to go to high school because I was getting heavily bullied, and I also had a mother that was totally insane. So essentially, I wasn't going home, and I wasn't going to school. I ended up getting on probation after some issues at home, and with the constant truancy, eventually I was sent to Sunny Hills.

Now, I want to be clear about something. I was never into drugs. I was never the bad kid that they said I was. When I wasn't at school or at home, I was in a bookstore or the library. I was never doing drugs, and I was never the dangerous kid that they said I was.

I was a 14-year-old kid that was playing Final Fantasy 7 and reading comic books.

I just had some issues. One of them is that they put me in the class with all the gangsters and druggies at high school. At one point, I was getting my butt kicked by the Mexicans because I was part Mexican, and I was also getting my ass kicked by the skinheads because I was mixed race.

It sucked.

So obviously I was going to avoid that Sh-t.

Anyways, prior to going to Sunny Hills, I got to look at several group homes. One of them was a former dog kennel where they hadn't even cleaned up the fecal matter from the dogs, and they were just putting teenagers in it. There was a cage around it. It was like something from The Last of Us.

It was really, really bad. I remember going there on a tour and seeing all this artwork that these kids had done with pictures of them killing people, and I looked at this and I was like, "Oh hell no, these people are psycho."

I made it very clear I was not going there. The judge was pissed, but they eventually prescribed Sunny Hills. It was a thousand times better than that facility, thank God.

Sunny Hills was four cabins and an on-campus school, and the teachers were quite good and quite professional and cared a lot about us.

The teachers were the best part.

The staff on the residential facilities were, for the most part, underpaid graduate students. They came in many varieties. For the most part, they were decent people, just very, very sleep-deprived and very, very frustrated. I saw a couple of them blow up and tell kids to go and die and stuff like that, but I have to admit we definitely did everything we could to push those people over the edge. I'm surprised none of them ever killed us.

The facility had many children who had grown up as sex workers or drug dealers.

It was coed.

It was next to a cemetery, and it wasn't uncommon for the kids to run away and have sex on the graves, go into town, and try to buy drugs.

To their credit, they did feed us. They did shelter us. When I first got there, it was going through a huge change. Apparently, some time before I got there, there was an event where a bunch of Hispanic kids that were part of gangs apparently took over the facility, lit the place on fire, and surrounded the staff in a circle and told them they were going to kill them. Fortunately, the sheriff's arrived and saved the staff members, but after that they had a no-gang policy. So all the kids that were there were solo actors, or they weren't part of any large gang operations.

They were, for the most part, frankly, the kind of kids that were being taken advantage of by gangs, or they were running their own little operations. So yes, there were a lot of drug dealers, and there were a lot of girls that, you know, had been prostituting themselves to survive on the streets, okay.

They also made sure the place was heavily diverse. Apparently, this was because they realized if you had any one tribe of people, they would organize and take over the facility, so making sure that we fought each other instead of fighting the staff was one of the strategies to keep the place running well, I guess.

When I first got there, of course, you have all these kids that, you know, were smuggling drugs, and, you know, they all looked like they were 30 years old despite the fact they were 16. You know, it was pretty crazy. And all these girls, you know, were cutters, and they were just straight up from that movie Girl, Interrupted.

But they kicked out most of those people, and they decided they didn't want to have psychopaths running the facility. So the second year I was there, it was a lot calmer. They decided they wanted to start transitioning to kids, so there was kind of this in-between phase where you had psycho teenagers alongside of 12-year-olds.

It was pretty screwy, probably not a good thing.

Apparently, the facility was transitioning into younger kids, and it did so until it closed in 2008. But I think having these younger kids around these psycho teenagers was a really bad call. They should have just waited until the contracts ended instead of doing that because I remember some of these kids getting the Sh-t beat out of them by these teenagers, and, you know, I imagine a lot of those kids were deeply traumatized by the Sh-t they were around.

I remember this one girl branded her breast "F the world" with a glue gun, and she would flash us randomly....

I remember the fact that we didn't have any glass in the facility because people would try to cut themselves. Some people tried to commit suicide. It was pretty common to have suicide attempts, you know, but they tried to make the facility difficult to kill yourself in. So I remember this one time this dude tried to hang himself, but as he attached the rope to an air vent and jumped off his bed, it took the whole roof down on him....

I mean, it's pretty crazy S-th, you know.

Honestly, it was pretty ridiculous at some points.

God, you know, when I first got there, you got all these girls that had been on the streets. Some of them had hepatitis, and it was just pretty crazy. But it was a Level 12 facility, and so it wasn't that bad. Yes, there were restraints, but you had to do a lot to get physically restrained. Probably the worst thing I saw was some of the psychological punishments that were wrong, the way they would take everything you owned away from you, your clothes, your shoes, only leaving you underwear and one bed sheet.

If you continuously misbehaved, they had this punishment system where they thought they could punish people into good behavior, but the truth is that doesn't really work because when you have somebody who's really depressed and suicidal, just stripping them of everything they have until they're completely humiliated because all they have is a bed sheet and their underwear is just psychologically f*ed up.

That kind of stuff is not okay, and I remember that kind of stuff and remember being like, "You guys are just going to push that person into suicide." And in fact, the person they did that to tried to kill themselves. It was at that point that their grandmother drove up to the facility because I guess she had to be alerted, and then grabbed her grandson and drove off. Apparently, the staff was furious because they were going to lose that contract, and there was a lot of yelling that happened. But, you know, she took the kid back to the trailer park. I hope he's okay.

Another f*ed up thing was, you know, that it was part of the way we treat people in America. We think punishment is somehow going to scare you straight, but it just doesn't.

It only traumatizes you.

They used to read us these letters from clients that would go to prison right after they graduated. You have to understand that there's this whole thing called the pipeline system. For the most part, if you've grown up, and some of these kids, you know, had spent many years in these facilities, and then you just go into the normal world, it's terrifying. Like, it's absolutely terrifying to go into the normal world after being in a facility like this for years.

So, for instance, there's this one kid, and like a couple months after he left him, a bunch of people stalked a gay man from a gay bar in San Francisco and I think beat him to death or something like that. And, you know, so of course he goes to prison, and they would just read us these letters. And it was obvious that a lot of kids, when they got out, they just ended up hanging out with the wrong kind of people, you know.

That's the hardest part, is getting out and hanging out with the right kind of people. If you hang out with the wrong kind of people, you're going to end up in trouble, you know?

A lot of kids that get out, and the first thing they do is they go join organized crime, or they would, you know, get in these really bad situations, and of course that sets them up for bad things. If the only way you know how to survive is by selling your body on the street, you're going to go back into prostitution after, and not everybody qualified for Job Corps.

This is the problem with the punishment system. If you don't actually retrain people, you can't scare them straight because they don't know how to live any other way. You have to retrain them. You have to teach them how to live other ways. You have to teach them how to be human again. You can't, you can't scare them straight because they don't know how to emulate different behaviors.

They haven't had the role models.

You know, like when you're in a facility like this, you're just around other criminals, so you just learn how to be a better criminal. And you can tell that person all you want, "Don't be a criminal," but the thing is, if you just spent years of your life around criminals, one of the kids there was the son of, like, an Italian mafia boss, and I think he was in protective custody or something like that.

You know, it's like you can't scare somebody like that straight because they don't know. They don't know how to be any other way. It's like you have to teach them that. And that's the issue of these facilities: they're so based on punitive psychology, they don't understand how to teach people to be better people.

They're not focused on that.

They're just focused on punishing. They're just focused on trying to terrify you. That's like, okay, what ends up happening is you traumatize these kids, and they basically believe they're going to go to prison because you keep on reading them letters from kids who get out and go to prison. It's like you haven't taught them how to operate any other way.

Now, I will say for the best-behaved kids, we did have a couple of programs, and that would be that they got to go to a normal school off the facility, which was the normal high school, or they got to have a job. But it was only like two kids or three kids that got to do that, and so it's, you know, a very small amount of kids that have those opportunities. And those are positions, so other people have to graduate out of those positions or lose them before other people can take over.

Now, I will say around the time I left, the state of California was implementing new rules, and one of those rules was that everybody had a right to leave the facility for, it's like, 10 minutes a day or something like that, which literally was like walking down the hill.

I don't blame San Anselmo for not liking this, and I think this is one of the reasons why the facility got shut down.

Basically, the state of California understood there were work problems, and I actually applaud the state for being one of the most progressive in holding the centers to accountability for all the issues. I have the state of California. I will say, unlike Utah or other states, where we heard absolutely horrible stories from kids who had been in facilities there, California was constantly sending people to oversee these places.

That's a good thing.

That being said, San Anselmo was a very wealthy area. The group home Sunny Hills had been there for over a hundred years, but of course the facility was a place that was very despised because you have all these rich people with, you know, their rich daughters, and you have all these, like, drug dealers and former prostitutes, and the last thing Santa wanted was those kids walking around. I remember someone's kids would run away, and the thing is, the police knew exactly who you were. They would look at you and go, "Yeah, you're not from here," and they'd just pick you up and bring you right back.

There was one girl that ran away. We had a separate facility called Threshold. We actually had several other facilities in the area that would have, like, specialty people, and they would attend our on-campus school. And so Threshold, apparently, was for older girls that had a lot of street experience, I'll say that.

They would sometimes come on to a lot of teenage guys. They were pretty wild girls, and I remember one of them escaped and got all the way to the Mexican border before she got caught. So she made it all the way from the San Francisco Bay Area to Mexico. I mean, some of these kids had just been born and raised on the street.

You can't expect them to change their ways unless you teach them differently. And we had some programs for that, but it wasn't enough, you know. And the biggest problem is a lot of these kids are just going to go back to their old families. And so it's like, I don't believe in family separation.

One of the biggest issues I had was that we only got to call our parents once a week for, you know, 10 minutes, and we only got to see our parents or family, I believe, twice a month, and only if certain conditions were met, like we weren't on lockdown, which happened all the time if there was a suicide attempt. So all family visits during the weekends would get shut down if there was a suicide attempt. So sometimes parents would drive all the way up and then suddenly be told they couldn't see their kids and come back in two weeks. And for some of these families, that price of gas to drive, you know, in some cases 60 miles to see their kid, drive the kid all the way back home for one week, and then back was horrible. And it's like, if they get there and suddenly they're told, "Hey, you can't see your kid," that's devastating.

There was a lot of family separation. It didn't help that some of these kids didn't even qualify for family visitations because their parents were drug addicts. And so, you know, considering that two years would pass and they wouldn't even see their mothers, and suddenly they're going to get out when they're 18 and probably go back to their mothers without the family dynamic changing is pretty terrifying.

I believe the state of California did a big study, and they found that actually group homes were problematic because the family separation would change the issue. Some of the kids got out, they were better criminals, plus they go back to their broken families and continue the same patterns. Turns out, apparently, actually just having these families go to court-prescribed therapy produced better results, and family separation creates deep trauma, particularly for people from poverty backgrounds, that leads to more jail time and more issues down the road. And healing the family unit with resources produces vastly better results.

Now to talk about the Level 14s.

I was never in a Level 14 facility, but we had a lot of kids that were, and the stories they told were horrible, if true. So, for instance, we had these, like, survivors of Level 14 facilities that described their facilities as being deep in the wilderness, and they would say that, you know, everyone was drugged.

You were told, you know, where to go and where not to go. You had to stay in your room. It was basically like a psych ward. And if you tried to escape, there was nowhere to go. In fact, they would say sometimes kids would escape and they would just never find the bodies. You know, some of these places were up in mountainous regions where it would snow, you know, half of the year, and if you tried to run away, who knows what would happen to you.

It sounded like some of the people in the Level 14 facilities were just normal kids who had been put in there because the facilities wanted government contracts, and then other kids should have been in the psych ward. I remember one of the kids would talk about, you know, people that weren't even verbal. Like one of my friends who came from a Level 14 facility would say that apparently in his facility there was this guy, and he was just nonverbal, and he would literally just look at the floor all day, and he was a really big guy. And they would say that if he ever made eye contact with anybody, the staff immediately would restrain him because he would literally jump over the table and try to kill you. Like, why is that guy in there with other people? And that's the problem with some of these places. It's like a buffet of cases. Instead of people going to where they should go, these facilities are so hungry for contracts they let in people that should not be in there, and that makes it dangerous for everybody.

My facility definitely had that, but not to the extent of the stories I heard from the Level 14 facilities.

I remember some of the most hardcore drug-dealing kids who had come from Level 14 facilities, and they would get sent back if they got kicked out of our facility. And I remember just seeing them crying like the most hardcore drug-dealing kids, which would start crying like babies. They would say, "I'm going to kill myself. I'm going to kill myself." You know, they were just so traumatized.

The idea that they would go back to a Level 14 was, to them, an end-of-the-world event.

Apparently, some of the Level 14 facilities were also in city limits. And so, for instance, apparently there was one in Oakland, California, and some of our kids had graduated from there and actually got shut down, apparently, by the state of California. I forgot about that, but anyways, some of our kids had come from that facility would say that bullets would fly through the facility, and they would have to literally get on the ground because bullets were flying through. It's like, that's not okay, and I'm happy that place got shut the F down.

That sounded like a straight-up prison, you know. I heard some really bad stories of people just getting brutally beaten there.

The Level 14, from what I was told, and by the way, this is from the 2000s, just seems like nightmare situations, you know. I mean, they sounded like prisons, but because somebody's kids hadn't necessarily committed crimes, they weren't going to prison, so the state had to find ways to put them in prison. It sounded like throwaway places. I mean, how do you live a normal life after you're living in one of those places for several years?

I do know there were also a lot of these weird wilderness programs. I remember this one girl. Sometimes we'd have these rich kids that we'd get sent to our facility because their parents had money to pay for it. As to why you would send a rich kid to one of our facilities, I can't tell you. I remember there's this white kid who brought all these designer clothes. People hated the s* out of him. I can't imagine how he didn't get beaten up more. He didn't, which is strange because everybody hated this f*. People treated him horribly.

It's like, why are you sending your white rich kid, who apparently his parents were literally just like, "One day, I don't want a kid anymore, so here, take him." And the whole time he would just talk about, "My parents are coming back for me." He was like, he was like 13 or something, and he was literally just talking all day about how he just thinks his parents are coming back for him. And we, like all these black kids and all these, like, kids from tripods, were just looking at him like he's a dumbass. I think they felt bad for him more than anything. They're like, "Bro, don't you understand? Your parents f-ing abandoned you to this facility. They don't give a F about you. I mean, how can you love anybody who would send you to a place like this? You literally left Lafayette, which is like the richest place in North Bay, to come and live with a bunch of, like, teenage prostitutes and drug dealers. I mean, how can you possibly still love your parents?" I think people just felt bad for him....

I think that's why they didn't beat him up, because they just felt bad for him. Like, what a sucker.

We definitely had some children of cops. Like this one kid, his father was a detective, and he would talk about how his dad would bring home the teeth of black people and of people he had beaten up. I mean, that's psycho as s*. He would talk about how his father was just beating people up all day. His father apparently was a boxer before he became a cop, and his father would just beat the living hell out of people. It's like, that's f-ed up, man. People hated that kid, but that kid learned how to box from like the age of eight, so he could lay hands down, which is the only way he was able to survive there.

I'll admit, though, for the most part, the men, the guys, were pretty tame COMPARED to the woman. It was the girls that were totally psycho, man(a lifetime of sexual abuse and surviving with your body on the street will do that to you). Before I got there, apparently this one chick punched through the window, back when we had glass windows, took out the glass shards, and chased around the staff. That's why when I got there we could only have plastic windows, plastic everything. Everything had to be accounted for. If we ever shaved our faces, the razor blades had to be accounted for. We got plastic deodorants and everything, you know. A lot of these kids were f**ing psycho, by the way. I mean, I will readily admit, actually, a lot of these kids were psycho. Not everybody. Definitely had some kids that shouldn't have been there, but a lot of these kids were psychos.

The reason why the facility got shut down, apparently, was lack of funding. But I remember one of the big issues was it was coed. Right? You take a bunch of teenagers and put them together, you're going to have some issues there. There was a rape that apparently happened. I'm surprised there was only one, you know. I mean, that was a big deal.

There was a girl who got raped, and things changed very quickly after that.

There were a couple instances I heard of of staff having sex with teenage girls, but I never saw it. I understand the police had to get brought in for that. Some of the staff did get arrested.

I believe there were one or two instances of that.

Yeah, it's been a long time since I thought about this. I just, after I saw the Reckless Ben video, I just had to share this. I was never able to live a normal life after my experience. I am an anarchist. Even though I went to college, I went to a university, I've never been able to live a normal life.

I have a deep despise for the system because of this experience. I think group homes are largely a byproduct of capitalism, of this need to treat everything like a number and everything like it has some type of financial value. That's why the group homes failed to really provide the level of help they were supposed to. They were always nickel-and-diming everything, systemizing everything, instead of treating people as individuals, trying to treat the individual teen because that is what the contract is for instead of healing the whole family unit.

And frankly, if we really cared, we would heal whole communities instead of just having police separate families and put them through a pipeline system.

There you go. Have fun reading.

So, I've been doing martial arts on and off for 20 years probably have about 5 years of Muay Thai experience.

One of my early trainers was a really high level MMA instructor who is connected with Ken shamrock and I remember one night after a Muay Thai instructor was teaching us how to kick in the gym I asked him his honest thoughts about Muay Thai kicks for westerners.

He told me that he thought going shin to shin was a losing experience for us.

As I got older I heard many different viewpoints from many different instructors and then of course Anderson Silva broke his shin and multiple people broke their shin in the UFC and now we don't really see a whole lot of Muay Thai round houses for multiple reasons including people not wanting to get taken down.

Long story short I decided to do some of my own investigation and I seem to have ran across a medical paper that reviewed The shins of thais versus westerners.

Long story short, basically muay thai fighters in Thailand traditionally start at a very young age so The shins developed like trees each layer of bone become stronger than the last because it's being put under a lot of duress and they're consuming bone marrow and a lot of supplementation in their diet to help build their shins.

Many westerners who try to get in Muay Thai have spent a pretty sedentary life and then want to go straight into it they're able to get in the cardio fitness but the thing is is that the muscles develop much quicker than the bones in the tendons bones frankly if they weren't developed at a young age you're never going to be able to develop The shins of a thai and so the likelihood of a fracture is much higher.

Yes there are components of technique but at the end of the day people in Thailand teach you to fight like a thai and if you go on to try to trade kicks the likelihood of a fracture is much higher because you simply do not have the shins for it.

I recall reading this paper after Anderson Silva broke his shin it was written by a sports Doctor who was very respected in the combat industry.

By the way the United States military also did their own study which also concluded that many Americans had very weak bones and heavily reduced density compared to previous generations due to the sedentary lifestyles of modern Americans and that there were far more fractures in basic training than there had been in previous generations. So even military reports seem to have to suggest that inactivity in young years seems to lead to heavily reduced bone density which causes more injuries, so consider that thais already had a major advantage and then when you consider the disadvantages of many westerners it's no wonder there are so many injuries.

It seems to go with the evidence I've noticed that when you look at what have been the hundreds of videos on YouTube many of which have been taken down of broken legs in kickboxing I've only found one video of a thai breaking their leg, and it seemed to be somebody in Thailand who had no real formal kickboxing experience.

In viewing the videos I've noticed even when Americans or westerners check we can still have our shins broken when fighting somebody native in Thailand.

As for why some other Asians are able to compete, people in China who start doing sanda at a very young age are still doing a lot of bone conditioning and so some people from other fighting sports who started at a young age seem to be able to cross over but I think that if you haven't spent a lifetime developing your shins you have to fight differently.

I noticed when watching Benny the jet he does something he calls a catch where he basically has the shin at a 45° angle so as the opponent kicks you the shin runs down your shin instead of straight into it yes some of the components that are important are making sure that you were strongest part of your shin is trying to destroy the weakest part of their shin but obviously a component of this is frankly bone density and you can't fake that if you don't have it you have to fight different despite what your instructor will tell you there is no way to acquire this level of bone conditioning later on in life if you weren't grown up in it you have to fight different.

What are your thoughts?

Basically I don't really have any friends and friends I do have don't seem to think very highly of me and some kind of over them but I'm having trouble making new friends because well I live in a f****** minivan and it's hard I'm 41 I have a college education but never landed a decent job I'm pretty broke and it sucks and I don't know what to do like I can't do Uber in my van because it destroys vehicles my last vehicle I did Uber in and it destroyed that vehicle puts too much mileage on a car.

But I need to start making some money I mean real money and I really don't know how.

I tried a lot of things I've tried to start my own business I've tried to find clients but I get ghosted.

I'm broke and homeless and pissed.

I have no criminal record I spent my twenties having fun and partying didn't do any drugs or drink but went to a lot of raves and had a lot of fun lot of sex too...

Went to college in my early 30s I don't know why but I expected to get a good job and when I didn't I just kind of was shocked now I'm just like broke pissed and lonely and it sucks and I kind of just don't want to be in this country anymore and I don't really know what to do

So there is a whole foods that was putting out some amazing stuff and some of the employees were actually separating the good stuff from the bad stuff to help us out and turns out whole foods crackdown on it and hired a security guard to make sure nobody can dumpster dive anymore totally sucks how common is this?

So I'm writing this post after talking to several of my former professors. They are very aware of the situation most college graduates face after graduating, but they have told me that they don't really want to lecture you about life or tell you what's coming. You're just going to have to find out for yourself.

I say, EFF💀💀 that.

First and foremost, nobody cares about what school you went to as much as you probably think they do.

It is true that people from lower socioeconomic backgrounds often have higher expectations for people who graduate from mid-level schools like UC Davis. You're going to graduate expecting that your degree, your GPA, and all the work you put in are going to translate into a decent career.

It's going to be a hard realization when you discover that you are graduating into an economy where many of the jobs you expected to compete for have disappeared. It's a horrible economy out there right now, and in many ways, it's only getting worse.

There is a reason people join the top fraternities. There is a reason why girls and their families are willing to push their daughters toward sororities despite the risks of sexual assault and abuse.

It's because fraternities and sororities can get you jobs.

The unfortunate truth is that getting ahead in life is often less about being the smartest or hardest-working person and more about being part of the right social network. You either have to become extremely good at getting attention, do something really stupid or crazy to stand out, become an influencer, or be born rich.

For most of you, the reality is going to be much harsher. You will graduate with a great resume, a good GPA, and plenty of intelligence, and despite all of that, you may not be able to get a job.

Every year, there seem to be fewer opportunities in many fields than there were before. Regardless of what you think about AI, it is going to transform white-collar work, and some jobs are almost certainly going to disappear.

That's not a question. It's an unfortunate reality.

And as the number of desirable jobs decreases, access to those jobs becomes more and more gatekept.

This isn't completely by accident. If you read some of Elon Musk's comments about labor, automation, and the working class, he has argued that technology and overseas labor can weaken the bargaining power of workers. Whether you agree with his reasoning or not, the basic economic reality is that companies have strong incentives to replace expensive human labor with cheaper alternatives whenever they can.

So when you graduate, you're going to graduate into a f 💀💀ed-up economy.

If you're part of the in crowd and you have friends with connections, you might get a job. If you're extremely charismatic, attractive, or socially connected, you might get a job. If you're part of a fraternity or sorority with a powerful alumni network, you might get a job.

But if you're not part of that world and you don't have those connections, you're going to have a much harder time.

By the way, I hate fraternities and I hate sororities. I'm not telling you to join one. I'm telling you what I wish someone had told me before I graduated.

It wasn't until after I graduated and spent some time in the working world that I began to understand how things actually work.

I've met some incredibly stupid people who were extremely popular and somehow ended up with great jobs. I've also met incredibly intelligent people who never seem to find work.

I'm not kidding.

I live in San Diego right now, and I've met plenty of people from major universities who seem to have landed jobs through their social connections rather than because they were necessarily the most qualified candidates. At the same time, I've met extremely intelligent people who don't have the social skills, connections, or desire to play that game.

They don't drink. They don't party. They don't have huge social circles. They aren't constantly networking at bars or parties. They don't spend their lives trying to impress people.

And somehow, they can't get a job.

So anybody who tells you that simply working harder automatically leads to better outcomes is lying to you.

The truth is that you are probably better off going to the bar where people from your industry hang out after work and actually talking to them than sitting alone in your apartment sending out another hundred applications.

If you're extremely charismatic, attractive, or socially skilled, you can sometimes get opportunities simply because people like you and remember you.

Because the uncomfortable truth is that getting hired is often about more than qualifications.

A lot of people are going to tell you that the way to get a job is to study hard, cram for tests, get good grades, build a great resume, and kick a$$.

And yes, those things matter.

But they aren't the whole game.

I know an absurd number of people who did everything right. They're brilliant. They have high IQs. They have excellent grades. They studied constantly. They built impressive resumes.

And they still can't land a job.

Then I've met plenty of people who are not particularly intelligent, who are massive stoners, who have crazy lives, and who somehow have fantastic jobs.

Why?

Because they know how to play the popularity game.

The unfortunate truth is that being able to socialize may be more important than your skill set in certain parts of the job market. The people who like you can recommend you. They can introduce you to someone. They can tell a hiring manager that you're worth talking to.

And if people don't like you, they may not care how smart you are.

This is the unfortunate truth that nobody wants to tell you.

It suxs. It's not fair. It is absolutely possible that the wild person who parties constantly and makes hundreds of social connections will be more likely to get a job than the person who spends all night studying and gets perfect grades.

That's not fair at all.

But isolating yourself because you believe being the smartest person in the room will automatically lead to a career is not a good strategy.

The one thing you should probably be doing right now is making friends.

And I hate saying that because I don't particularly like this system either.

If you're trying to get a job, you need to network. If you're trying to get into graduate school, you need to earn the respect of your professors. If you're trying to build a career, you need people who know you, trust you, and are willing to vouch for you.

In other words, it's always partially a popularity game.

There is, however, another way around this.

And I seriously suggest that you research it because it's something I'm looking into myself.

It's the anarchist path.

You can say F it to the popularity game.

Find a bunch of people. Find an empty building or a piece of land. Build your own little eco-anarchist community and make your own rules.

Seriously.

I've met people who dropped out of computer science and started doing exactly this in Oakland. They created hacker spaces and collaborative communities out of warehouses and other neglected spaces.

You can do this if you're an artist.

You can do this if you're a biologist.

You can create biomaker spaces.

You can build your own community around whatever you're interested in.

For most of you, hoping that somebody else will eventually present you with an opportunity probably isn't going to work. Networking is still necessary, but if you can't win the respect of the people who control money, opportunities, and hiring, you're going to have to make your own path.

Don't listen to your parents when they tell you, "Just apply to more jobs. Don't worry. You'll eventually get one."

I'm telling you, they don't know.

They are giving you advice based on a world that may no longer exist.

If people don't like you, don't kill yourself over it and don't do anything stupid. But you should seriously consider making your own path as soon as possible.

If you don't like playing the popularity game, find your own tribe.

If you don't have enough money to start a company, find people who share your interests and build something together.

Find your own space.

Create your own community.

Learn how to make yourself useful outside of the traditional system.

Because I hate fraternities and sororities, but I'm going to tell you something anyway:

Capitalism is, in many ways, a popularity contest.

And if you don't like playing that game, you better find your own path.

I'm just putting this out there because nobody told me this when I was younger, and I really wish someone had.

So I was listening to some good electronica from the 2000s.

It just made me realize how much I absolutely Miss the 2000s. It was really such an incredible time we had enough technology to connect with other people from all over the world but not to the point of toxicity.

Because we didn't have this modern social media of toxicity all things recorded all the time there was a freedom that seems so lost.

I think we need Lo-Fi places places that technology is not present to the degree it is now.

We need our freedoms again.

We need the wanderlust of the 2000s because this decade sucks. It's just anger and hate and climate change that's getting way out of hand.

Listen to the song I'll fly with you, listen to The amazing electronica from the 2000s. The late 90s and the 2000s was where the vibe really was but the 2000s was filled with Yahoo messenger and Napster and just like this amazing technology that allowed people to connect but not to the point where it was killing people inside their hearts.

There was a wanderlust to the technology there was a wanderlust to the world.

I remember the romances of the 2000s were just so sweet people used to kiss each other in public but they don't anymore because everything's being recorded I mean have you noticed people don't touch each other in public anymore? Like what the hell.

People don't communicate like they used to they don't go up to people like they used to like we need to bring back some of that energy.

Please bring back the 2000s

First I see some people who are claiming that experiences with entities are always just expressions of your own consciousness. This is not necessarily true that's like saying if you walk down the street in a dump truck is heading your way that that dump truck is an expression of your own consciousness maybe on some ultimate level that's true but you better get the hell out of the way so you don't get ran over. Just because something's energetic does not make any less or more real though it is true the mind can create energetic constructs easier than physical.

Anyways regarding entities:

My current experience has been that wave one focused 10 can allow a person to communicate with entities and sometimes it can give entities the impression that they can communicate with you and so they may come over to you.

While doing wave one I have had multiple spirits come up to my bed while on laying down with the headphones and an eye mask the experience I usually experience in wave one is becoming hyper aware of my physical space and energetic space because the headphones are on it's not the noise that I'm hearing it's the energetics space that I'm experiencing it's literally like experiencing the world around you like a holodeck.

This means that things that are hidden become revealed.

The point of the gateway tapes is to teach you the difference between being a projector and a receiver for those who are interested in remote viewing this is extremely important learning to differentiate between these two is very important.

When your receiver you're able to experience things in your space without a filter so you may even begin to hear the entities so far for the most part all they say is hello one of them thought that my room was their apartment I simply said no you do not live here go away and I believe they went away.

Some entities will come over to you while you're doing the gateway tapes because they want to communicate this can be very annoying.

The world is filled with trillions of different types of beings.

Personally I believe it's important to be grounded in this reality and so I do think there are things that should have been added to the gateway tape such as practices to do after doing the gateway tapes. Anchoring yourself in this reality is important. This is your focal point in this world. The other worlds are not your focal point you can experience them but it's important to be grounded in the reality that you were born in.

The gateway tapes are about enhancing awareness but you should be cautious it's okay to stop if you're feeling uncomfortable.

Another experience I've encountered is where I am in a room and I think this is a deeper focus I think this is focus 12, anyways I'm in a room and there's usually a desk in the center and there's a door and on the other side of the door there are entities that are trying to get in that want access to this room.

So I believe focused 10 is where you become hyper aware of the energetic space around your body it's like a real state of awareness almost like seeing energies is a sixth sense.

It is the foundational focus.

I do think it's okay to respond entities often I will tell them no you don't belong here.

It's important not to attach your mythology or your own belief system onto them as well, that does not mean that you ignore the energy that they carry and it's okay to acknowledge if you don't feel safe.

The talk to entities YouTube channel does give you tools to respond.

I think stating boundaries is healthy and entities need boundaries. As do we.

My Background

I have a degree in Communications with a minor in Computer Science from the University of California, Davis.

I also have certificates in social media marketing and data analytics from Google.

I used to drive Uber, but over the last couple of years, it has not been profitable. It destroyed my last vehicle, and I've had to stop doing it because the pay isn't enough to cover the repairs.

I also do user testing, and I've been doing that for about 10 years. I've made about a thousand bucks.

I've been trying to get into freelance consulting for user experience, and I've put myself out there quite a bit. I've almost landed several contracts that would have paid about $150,000 a year, and I've almost had several businesses hire me to help consult them with their websites, but then they just end up ghosting me.

We've been pretty close to signing a contract, and then around the time they tell me they're going to send over the contract, they just disappear. Or around the time I send over the contract to them, they never reply, often after months or weeks of working together and building a business plan for them.

It's hard to start a business online. The reality is most clients will fall through when it comes down to signing a contract that would guarantee payment. Most people don't really want to pay for help. What they want is low-cost help, which they can get from India for $5 an hour. The reality is that's the biggest obstacle to making it in the United States. That, and artificial intelligence.

About four years ago, I had a sit-down with a CEO. I got to meet a CEO of a software engineering company who I was hoping would hire me. We went out to lunch, and I was really excited. He described to me his business and how it works, and at the end of the conversation, I asked him for a job.

He laughed and said he couldn't pay me enough money for it to be legal. I looked at him in confusion, and he said he paid his software engineers less than people make at McDonald's in the United States. I was surprised, and he said he hires the best people in India for $20,000 a year.

I've realized this is a huge obstacle. I realize that that's the major obstacle to people making it in this country: cheap overseas labor.

The second one is AI. Simply put, AI is becoming a replacement for freelance labor that's killing a lot of freelance jobs. You can upload pictures of your website, and you can upload pictures of your app, and it will give you real feedback based on its understanding of user experience. It will often give you a plan on how to change it to optimize it. It will even write new lines of code if you upload your repositories.

And it will do that for almost nothing, and it will do it faster than a person can. That's a reality.

It's a horrible reality. Most people don't understand how many jobs are being lost right now, but I'm not here to whine and complain about AI. I am here to say that I need to figure something out.

I've been thinking about going to graduate school for biomechanical engineering,

The University of Washington has an online pharmaceutical engineering program that might be useful in getting involved in healthcare. I'm considering an online engineering degree but I know I'd have to take some classes at community college first. I don't have a background biology except my general education

but that would take a lot of schooling, and I'm 41. Frankly, I'm pretty tired at this age. I need to figure out a plan to really take off and become successful because this sucks.

Please Prepare for El Niño 🌧️🚐

El Niño is coming, and it could be extremely challenging for van lifers on the West Coast.

I don't want to alarm anybody, but we do need to talk about it. I remember in 2023, during the huge storm that hit the West Coast and caused massive flooding, my van flooded. At one point, it felt more like I was sailing through the streets of California than driving through them.

I still can't believe I allowed myself to drive through that. I remember seeing flooded fields, flooded parking lots, and water everywhere. It was insane.

There is a chance this could be much worse. Look, we need water, and I'm 100% for the rain, but we also have to prepare for it as van lifers.

So, what's your plan?

First and foremost, get your windows fixed if you have any cracks. Take some silicone sealant and go over any areas of your van that could allow water to get through the frame. Make sure any ports, fittings, or areas where your solar panels allow water to enter are properly sealed.

I would recommend preparing now. I don't think this is going to be a very cold winter, which is great. Cold winters are always the worst. But I do think it could be a very wet winter, and in many ways, that can be extremely dangerous.

I remember waking up in the middle of the night and seeing the water coming up over my tires. I realized I had to get the hell out of there.

It's important to prepare for this. You don't want your van to be destroyed. You need to develop good habits, like parking your van on higher ground and turning your tires toward the curb so your van is less likely to get washed away.

You also need to have a good eye for places that won't get washed away but also won't become submerged. You don't want to end up sliding down a hill and into another vehicle.

So, what are some of the ways you're preparing?

There's nothing scary about this. Just be smart. Especially if you're elderly or physically unable to push your van out of a ditch, you need to prepare now.

I suggest networking with local van lifers and creating mutual aid networks that can help your van life community respond to emergencies.

And there's no shame in going to a shelter. Some areas will have flood shelters, and there's absolutely nothing wrong with using them if that's what you need to do to stay safe.

Preparation and relocation are always the smartest options. Work with mutual aid networks, and keep building your own network of people who can help each other.

I understand that for people who have jobs or are expecting stability, this could be extremely challenging. That's why I don't think you should wait until the weather gets bad to prepare.

Do your research. Find places that are likely to be safe, know where you can relocate, and always watch the weather.

We can't control the weather, but we can control how prepared we are.

Let's look out for each other, stay connected, and make sure we're ready for whatever this winter brings. 🚐❤️🌧️

What are you doing to prepare for El Niño?

STDS AND S3X WORK AT THE BURN, A CONVERSATION THAT MUST HAPPEN TO SAVE LIVES

This is a story about vaccines, Stds and S3x Work that I hope everybody can read. The most impactful experience with vaccines I have ever had happened when I was 27, and I was deeply entrenched in the Burning Man community across Nevada City, Santa Cruz, and San Francisco.

One of my friends, a college professor in Santa Cruz, was financially very well off and always had beautiful girlfriends around him.

I noticed during a gathering that one of them started looking a little pale. They came over to visit my house, and I remember asking her if she was okay.

She told me she was anemic, but that she would be fine.

About a week later, she collapsed in his bathroom. He rushed her to the hospital. It was revealed that she had Hepatitis B, that she was not vaccinated, and that she was a sex worker.

I did not know it at the time, but he paid women who were escorts to live with him. I have no judgment about this.

This woman was widely known in the Burning Man community as an escort and was highly regarded as a role model. I was extremely surprised, and I remember talking to my friend and hearing his voice shake.

It turned out that she had known she was Hepatitis B positive for about seven years and chose not to reveal it to any of her clients.

It also turned out that other women knew about her diagnosis and had encouraged her not to reveal her status. They urged her to use herbs as a treatment instead of modern medicine, which could have saved her life and prevented transmission to others.

The Hepatitis B had completely destroyed her organs to the point where she could not receive organ donations. She died at the hospital within a month.

I remember that people in the Burning Man community who were involved in sex work heavily suppressed this information. They threatened people who wanted to speak out about her status because they wanted the work to continue. It was how a lot of women made their living, and they did not want anyone to know there was a risk of an outbreak, fearing clients would panic and stop hiring sex workers.

I believed there needed to be a major community discussion about this, but others made it very clear that was not going to happen.

Here is the truth: herbs and energy work cannot stop you from getting Hepatitis or prevent you from transmitting it to others. There is no evidence that this is possible. Even some very advanced spiritual teachers have passed HIV to their students.

I understand why people might be skeptical of newer vaccines, and I am not here to debate that, but many of these vaccines have been available for over twenty years and we know they are safe. We also know that if you are a sex worker and you are vaccinated, you are far more likely to protect your clients and live to old age rather than die in a hospital bed while your body wears away.

I am horrified to see so many sex workers who are opposed to vaccines. I am pro sex work. I believe it should be completely legalized and certified. I believe s3x workers should be required to get tested regularly for STIs, and I believe they should be required to be vaccinated against preventable diseases, namely Hepatitis and HPV.

There is literally no reason not to receive these vaccinations. They prevent death and help ensure you do not pass these infections to people who might be married or intimate with others. They protect you, your clients, and the community.

If you do not want to get vaccinated because it is your body, I understand that perspective. However, when you are selling your body, it is no longer just about you because you are putting other people at risk. Condoms break. Vaccinations are the most surefire way to protect your health and the health of others.

I assure you that the vaccine is far less dangerous than the diseases you can contract. Please stop spreading ignorance.

I have been thinking a lot about the harmful effects of modern technology and how much it has changed the way we relate to one another. It feels like we need something different. We need Lo-Fi Zones, low-tech places where people can just be people. No smartphones. Just people walking around, talking, and meeting strangers until 2:00 a.m.

I feel like we desperately need spaces like this.

I want some of that older energy back, whether it is the 1980s vibe, old-school tech, or even the early 2000s with MP3 players and more face-to-face interaction. I want places where people are actually present with one another instead of being absorbed in their screens.

When I look at the modern world, I see people getting more disconnected even while they are more connected than ever online. I think we need a way to break out of that.

I know technology may also be the best way to build this kind of project at first, so I want to find people through Facebook groups, Reddit communities, and other social spaces who would be willing to help build and advocate for Lo-Fi Zones. These would be places where people can reconnect in real life and feel human again.

I imagine spaces that feel alive and social. Maybe arcades, jukeboxes, music, books, games, and places to hang out. But no smartphones, no constant surveillance, and no cameras everywhere. When you enter, you leave the digital noise behind and just be present.

That is the kind of movement I want to help create.

If somebody wants to create a Facebook group or reddit group for Lo-Fi zones across the United States we can begin a movement! We need to start creating a network of Lo-Fi AI free smart technology free movements.

I'm not anti-technology and I'm not pushing anti-technology but there needs to be places where we get brakes and that's what I'm trying to propose!

So I wonder does the Monroe institute deal with trauma recovery or is it already interwoven within the gateway tapes or is it part of another series that they did?

Have any of you done the human Plus series?

What about the positive mindset series?