Iamjoyo.eth

Dear LA (again), One out of ten homeless people in the entire country live in our city. Despite whatever statistic our mayor claims to the contrary, things are getting worse around here. The biggest challenge to solving a problem is accepting that you have one, and that starts with admitting that our problem isn’t money, it’s corrupt leadership. Mayor Karen Bass, Councilmember Nithya Raman, and Governor Newsom have built a political web so financially entangled with homelessness NGOs that the dysfunction isn’t a failure, it’s their business model. I’ve spent nearly 20 years studying the chronic homelessness epidemic and no matter how many new gold plated condos Gavin Newsom promises to build on the back of our tax dollars, the root cause has NEVER been lack of housing, and housing itself will never be the primary solution. As my friend Paul Shirley would phrase it, if “housing first” worked, it would have worked. The only reduction in homelessness that housing first deserves credit for is the 30% of overdose deaths in San Francisco that came from their “supportive housing” initiatives. I’m sorry if that is shocking to read, but many of you need to wake-up & smell the fentanyl. The one thing housing first is good for; however, is financial scheming. Recently Karen Bass’s office was complicit in a grift involving the Weingart Center Association, a Los Angeles based homeless non-profit, to take a massive grant of LA taxpayer funds to convert properties into homeless housing as part of California’s Project Homekey. Sounds lovely, right? The mayor’s ingenious plan involved a property which had originally been purchased for $11 million that was then immediately flipped to Weingart on the city’s dime at nearly TRIPLE the price. I’m sure Mayor Bass has lots of clever talking points for why $20 million magically disappeared into thin air, and she’ll need to perform them convincingly as this act of service is now facing a federal probe. We will never know how truly bad the corruption is as Gavin Newsom has blocked the audits of countless related projects that have vanished billions of dollars, all in the name of homelessness. If you can help Gavin come up with a good reason why we shouldn’t audit how tax funds are being used then you’ll probably have a job waiting for you at the LA Times.  Our media needs to do better. They once did… So why do I care about this so much?  In 2006 Del Bigtree (formerly of Dr. Phil & The Doctors, currently host of the High Wire) took me on the misadventure of a lifetime when I agreed to help him document a group of homeless men who had just survived a tough winter in Denver. What we captured, acquired by Merv Griffin Entertainment & later titled “Under the Cardboard,” was ultimately dubbed “too difficult for audiences to watch.” What began as a light-hearted expose seeking the sort of wholesome temporarily down-on-their-luck tale we often naively attach to the homeless, instead crash landed into an honest glimpse of what life is truly like for the humans suffering mental illness & crippling addiction in plain sight. The best thing that came out of our docuseries was that it inspired a man named Kevin Adler to begin his own experiments to record the experience of our brothers and sisters living in the streets, while fruitless as a documentary, the countless conversations that ensued led to his creation of “Miracle Messages,” a charity focused on another underappreciated cause of homelessness: “relational poverty,” and is an inspiring example of the first of what I see as the three primary solutions to ending the homeless epidemic: REUNITING FAMILIES I am forever honored & humbled that Kevin asked me to become his first advisor. Kevin’s breakthrough came in asking people he interviewed on the streets two incredibly important questions. 1). “When did you first feel homeless?” The more conversations he had the more he heard the same answer… Part 2 👇👇👇

Dear LA, The industry is not coming back. In the entertainment capital of the world - “Hollywood” - there are fewer television shows and movies being produced today than when Governor Newsom was arresting people for going to the beach. The downstream carnage is piling up across our city, and we aren’t going to shame or strike or tax our way out of it. Drive down Sunset Blvd and you’ll see countless “Jay Luchs - For Lease” signs draped like flowers at a funeral.   Ask your friends working in retail, restaurants, or real estate just how bad things are, and you’ll be reminded that every business in our city flows downstream of the entertainment industry, the sword that LA lives by, and dies by. Rick Caruso, native Angeleno, creator of the Grove, & former mayoral candidate, has recently begun pleading to “bring Hollywood back,” ironically via TikTok, in order to protect all of the adjacent “below the line” businesses. It is the right end goal but the wrong strategy. But what can Mr Caruso do to bring Hollywood back? Ask the unions to ease up? They run this town, even when they cut off their nose to spite their face. Ask Sacramento to give up their fruitless addiction to over-taxation & regulation? It would be easier to convince Count Dracula to give up blood. Ask consumers to change their tastes and abandon TikTok? He’d certainly have my blessing, but that ship has sailed. We can build our way out of LA’s cost-of-housing problem, as Caruso has rightfully pointed out, but more housing alone won’t be enough to save Los Angeles, any more than it would have been able to save Detroit after their own respective monopoly [automobiles] crumbled. Beyond rebrands & gimmicks & political rhetoric, the time has come for a complete product refresh, starting with a reimagining of how LA entertains the world. My idea is simple: pivot Los Angeles from the capital of production to the global capital of LIVE entertainment, events, & hospitality. Almost everyone needed in production, and every business downstream of production, has a year-round parallel role to offer in the AI-proof world of LIVE events. Actors can continue to delight audiences, but with a greater emphasis on in-person performances. Production services can become event logistics providers. And for everyone else it will be an all-hands-on-deck effort to ideate & create the new California dream. Outside of the highly protected walls of Disneyland, a few gated communities in Brentwood, and the smoothie bar at Erewhon we’ve earned a bad reputation. The tourist consensus is that LA is dirty, dangerous, & disappointing. New travelers come to LA as a bucket list item, most vowing to never return, which never seemed to bother anyone, perhaps because previously we just didn’t need their business. We need to become the city that people want to date, not take out for a one-night-stand. And that starts by no longer acting like the prom-queen who peaked in high school. We need to collectively clean up & reorganize our entire city from LAX-it’s uber-lot-from-hell all the way to the open air drug markets surrounding our hotels. And I’m sorry if this hurts Mayor Bass’ feelings, but our inability to manage our addiction & mental health crisis should not be the burden of our guests. The easiest place to start is Hollywood, my home of 18 years. 10,000,000 people travel annually to the Hollywood Walk of Fame despite its dubious honor as “the worst tourist trap in the world.” Imagine a walk-of-fame permanently closed to car traffic, protected by security, with an open-carry-beverage farmer’s market, minus the pushy hustlers, that takes over the asphalt, leaving the stars for guided experiences.  Why-oh-why do we expect travelers to care about stars from 50 years ago when we refuse to make any effort to give them minimal context? I see an LA that can take the same movie magic that made it the best marketed city on earth, and use it to deliver a travel experience that warrants a 2nd, 3rd & 4th helping. The Olympics & World Cup both present once-in-a-generation opportunities for Los Angeles to reintroduce itself on a global stage. But these tentpole events should be considered the grand re-opening of LA, not the grand finale. Every celebrity on earth should already be living here, assuming they haven’t fled for their family’s own well being after we seemingly abandoned law & order sometime around 2020, so it is easy to imagine around the clock creator driven events led by Gen-Z stars from Mr Beast to Alix Earle, galvanizing their fan bases alongside our own versions of Graceland for names like Cruise, Hepburn, & Kobe. This plan offers a little bit of something for everyone, even our wealth-gap obsessed activist class, as hospitality outcomes are flatter and more egalitarian, something our Hollywood elite at least claim they want. The biggest challenge to making Los Angeles the LIVE entertainment capital of the world will be getting our political leaders to stop sabotaging us with endless red tape, excuses, and kleptocracy.   Rampant political corruption has been enabled by LA’s toothless media who, aside from Elex Michaelson & Bill Melugin - both formerly of FoxLA, have been unable to hold our politicians accountable. Reality TV star turned Influencer turned mayoral candidate (as of yesterday) Spencer Pratt has been effective in keeping the media from completely ignoring the victims of the Palisades fire, but LA still considers my former employers - KTLA & the LA TIMES-  to be the watchdogs of record. Without mainstream media support I fear our new media warriors won’t be enough to prevent leaders like Gavin Newsom & Karen Bass from continuing to pillage California with a trail of failed programs, despite bottomless budgets, that make Minnesota’s recently unearthed $18 billion fraud scheme seem like, forgive my pun, kiddie stakes. Can someone please light the Bat-Signal for Nick Shirley? Gotham *cough cough* I mean LA needs him. Some might remember in the last mayor's race when Karen Bass said that if we elected Rick Caruso “he’d just turn LA into The Grove!” I believe the Grove’ification of LA is exactly what we need to successfully pivot as a city, and it would ultimately mean cheaper housing, better jobs for everyone, and happier repeat travelers. So to echo Elex Michaelson, who aptly quipped back at Bass, “what’s wrong with that?” But why hasn’t Caruso declared himself in the next mayor’s race? Maybe it’s because he has his sights set on a California gubernatorial run or maybe he just doesn’t want to risk another disheartening defeat. Not even his inner circle knows what he’ll do next. But I do know one thing…  Many of the most successful people in the world call California home and we are going to need them if Los Angeles is ever going to make its comeback.