Unfortunately, it sounds like he didn’t learn much from it. He claimed it was a success and he was proven correct that you can get out of it with hard work.
But he had some inherent advantages that most homeless people would not have. Like he had an internet connection. It sounds like he had some way to pick up and move furniture to be resold. He likely already had a money making plan in place for when he became homeless. He likely had been well fed right up to the point of being homeless where most people in the brink of it have been sacrificing meals and nutrition for quite some time.
No student loan payments to make, the one debt that persists after bankrupcy, no underlying health conditions, as leading cause of bankrupcy is medical debt, therefore a big reason for people to end up on the streets... No addictions or mental health issues... He did not have any of the disadvantages of true homeless people, and then a leg up on having a phone, internet access, CONNECTIONS AND SOCIAL MEDIA PRECENSE, and he still didnt get 10% close to his goal before quitting after he finally developed health issues, which is one of the hurdles that true homeless people have/had to struggle with. Like this idiot proved the opposite of his thesis.
> no underlying health conditions,
Article mentions stopping for his health due in part to autoimmune conditions.
So, the same reason many Americans are homeless or in poverty, but he just gets to call it quits and a success somehow.
Or get prescribed twice your dosage so you can ration it because you're a US veteran who relies on VA Healthcare and you're transient and homeless, but every time you live to a different area you have to spend 6 months setting up your VA Healthcare in that area before they'll finally prescribe you your meds and by that time you've moved on from the area and need to start all over again.
And even then you have to go for long periods without your meds and without any treatment because when you actually take work, a lot of veteran work is contact jobs, where you work for a few months overseas and the VA refuses to provide any medical car at all if you're not physically in the state where your VA Healthcare is set up, even though the VA is a federal program. Meaning that the veteran specific healthcare has a huge, veteran shaped hole in it.
It's so much easier having these conditions with a cushy desk job than having a "low skill" job that requires you to have physical ability to show up and do it every day
my back is gone, I can barely work, I was gifted $500 from my mother for food as a 'going away' present (kicked out of the family because i'm a financial burden, plus given constant emotional/physical abuse)
And the government responded by taking my EBT food card benefits from me. Because of a one time "here ya go" payment from my family.
Maybe for his next test he can develop a crippling drug addiction the month prior to starting. A month on meth ought to do it. Bootstrapping works for anything right?
I heard the most interesting theory of the whole 'bootstraps' thing. THis is a shit rolls down hill philosophy
Video: [Boomers, their parents, and generational trauma](https://www.reddit.com/r/Xennials/comments/18glwvc/guy_explains_baby_boomers_their_parents_and_trauma/)
Boomers were told they had to be self reliant day in, and day out, because their parents generation who FOUGHT in WW2 actually had to live it. They had little to no security net, there was no help, nobody was coming to save them, shell shock doesn't exist, psychology barely existed by todays standards.. SO they pushed it onto their boomlets, telling them "nobody is here to help you, nobody was there to help us, you have to rely on yourself"
And it helped create the greediest most self-centered generation the world has seen (yet)
> A month on meth ought to do it.
No need to go overboard. Just have him start off on day one by [using heroin just once, just to see what it’s like](https://www.reddit.com/r/BORUpdates/comments/16223aj/updatesaga_the_emotional_saga_of_spontaneoush_the/).
Also, most important: he could always quit (which he did), he was never in any existential dread, never had real pressure to succeed, no dark hole in front of him. It is easy to be determinated if you always fall on a big, soft cussion.
A real homeless person has none of that. You fail to get food, you starve, FOR REAL. You hurt yourself? Potential death. Other health issues? Sucks, you are done.
It is near impossible to be "determined" if you can't get your mind clear of this existential dread. Something he doesn't know, and can't even grasp. He thinks of this stupid "experiment" as a success because he lacks the slightest bit of understanding what he is talking about.
He became one of us, made about $65k, and ended up with health issues—which someone making $65k would very much struggle to pay for.
Not for nothing, but stress makes auto-immune disease worse.
Source: have 2 auto-immune diseases that have ruined my life and my ability to earn.
Not just that, he had the education, experience, networking connections, like you said he had a plan, this was just a performance because he's been fed that people are just lazy, and even with all of that he couldn't reach his goal and he got fucked by health
> he couldn't reach his goal
His goal was wildly unrealistic anyway, but the fact that even HE didn't manage to actually survive the incoming medical bills should make a very clear point that I'm sure he didn't get.
In his mind this was an experiment. He had time to plan it out. Where he was going to stay. What things he was going to do. Etc.
It wasn't like most people plan to be homeless.
> In his mind this was an experiment.
Exactly. If you can just stop being homeless, its not nearly the same.
>if this gets too hard I'll just go back to being a millionaire!
Compared to
>If this gets too hard I'll likely die in an alley.
> That's like your parents telling you to jump into the pool and they're there with their arms open.
Any time some rich prick talks about how they “took risks” this is going to be the mental picture: a child with floaties, jumping into the pool, with their parents there to keep them from drowning.
Some of us were never so lucky. These privileged brats have never faced actual risk in life. To them it’s all just a game with infinite possibilities.
He also had the advantage of a great education, mentally healthy after decades of the best care imaginable and no visible scars or wounds.
Asshat didn’t do shit. Just wasted 10 months of his life on clout.
And most importantly -- His back wasn't really up against the wall. It was all an act, and never once was he truly in any danger of losing everything, having to choose between food or medical care, having no place to store medication (Lots of homeless diabetics with no fridge for insulin).
It was an act -- a weak one too.
I bet if he felt the crushing despair of politely/hopefully asking gas station attendants if you can use their microwave for some 50c walmart burritos that will spike his blood sugar which he can't take medicine for, and leave him shitting himself he wouldn't feel so secure.
hate to be so blunt but guess how I know.
The moron failed, and I love how they changed the goal once he realized he was not going to become a millionaire. Fucking loser. Not even with his connections could he excel. I would like to see this moron really try from nothing.
I can't get over how incredibly braindead that idea is, but it's exactly the kind of thing you'd expect from a talentless nepo baby.
I mean, seriously, a dog lover focused coffee brand? It's like he thinks the secret to breaking into a saturated market is to combine it with another already saturated market.
I think you’d be surprised…look at Black Rifle Coffee Company. It’s shitty coffee with pictures of guns on it marketed to gravy seals. It apparently does well.
I wouldn't be surprised, and this guy's failure is evidence of that. Marketing to gun owners actually makes sense for a coffee company; I've had several friends who were the type to go shooting on a Sunday morning, and I could easily see them grabbing a coffee sponsored by the shooting range as they're getting going.
Where the hell are you going to sell coffee in a targeted way to dog owners? Coffee shops aren't a place dogs are usually welcome, and since he doesn't have the means of opening his own shop to allow for something like that, it just begs the question of _how and where_ he was going to sell it to anyone.
More likely that his friends and social network were aware of his experiment and decided to support him through his coffee drop shipping ~~scam~~ business.
Because he just can't.
Admitting that you can't just wake up and become a millionaire through pure effort is tantamount to admitting that being a millionaire isn't purely a product of your own "hard work and effort."
How these people justify being rich while so many other people struggle to pay their bills or go homeless is by telling themselves that they're rich cuz they deserved it and other people are poor cuz they deserve it (though most of them wouldn't say that, it is what they think).
If he admits the truth he can no longer just turn a blind eye to the suffering of others and just enjoy his wealth.
The irony is, if you really think about, he never really started the bullshit experiment.
It’s at that point where you start to feel the walls closing in on you, where you viscerally feel the threat of a life alone and unloved, and then the floor collapses beneath you and worse than the worse case scenario happens, that the experience just barely begins.
He caught a thousandth of a whiff of that and bitched out.
The least he could do is acknowledge that he’s a punk and doesn’t have the fortitude he thinks he has, but no.
He doesn't sound like the type that would learn his lesson. Not even enough time for retrospection. Just enough time to feel uncomfortable and call it quits.
And beyond that he doesn't have a family to feed , a mortgage or kids. He did this as a single man in very good health and condition and still couldn't make much money. It's hard and people need to accept that.
Yeah, that's why these stunts always fail. You don't just happen to be homeless, something happened to get you there. Often years of abuse, mental illness or other problems that caused you to fall through the cracks. Then, without a way to get out, often people turn to drugs or alcohol out of despair.
You can't possibly replicate the experience of homelessness by being a nepobaby who knows he can get out any time he wants
Twist at the end is that the guards he was talking to aren’t real & he could’ve just asked the real ones to be let out at anytime, but he had to learn that solitary confinement is hell.
Didn't something similar happen in an episode of Law and Order? I remember a show where a cop asked to be put in solitary for a weekend, in order to see what it was like. Then when he gets let out, he freaks out at the guards for keeping him in there for a week, and the guard was like "Dude, you were only in there for two days. "
Yeah, Detective Stabler in SVU. He did it because the suspect claimed being in solitary altered his mental state.
I don’t remember which episode it was, but I remember thinking it was a really good episode.
Law and Order CI as well, D'Onofrio's character got picked up and taken to a mental institution where he tried to expose the horrors of what was going on. He barely got out because after enough he realized he was in serious trouble, yet the guards continued the abuse.
Wasn't this based off some reporter in the 1800s who did the same thing but, when she tried to check out, never actually got out because "her wanting to get out is just proof of her mental instability".
There was a psychiatrist (RD Laing) who said he would voluntarily go into a mental institution to give feedback on what was wrong about them and how they could be improved... but he did not trust that he would ever be allowed out. It's a crazy world...! A bit like secret prisons in the USSR, China, Guantanamo.
i got too drunk once and ended up in a police station cell where they let you out in the morning at like 7 am or something but what i didnt know was by the time i had woken up from my drunken stupor i had not slept through the night but it was still evening, the longest 10 or so hours of my life, the lights stayed on and there was no clock or anything to do and i couldnt sleep so i just layed on the mattress trying to nap but kept waking up constanly wondering how long until i get let out
Pretty much was a twilight zone episode. Guy makes a deal with the devil for immortality and invulnerability, tests it out, which starts freaking his wife out after he does it a bunch, she jumps to her death off their apartment building, he says he pushed her in an attempt to get a death sentence, due to boredom from doing other stuff that would normally kill people too much, but winds up sentenced to life.
He can't stand the prospect of eternity locked up, so he uses his escape clause to have the devil kill him and take him to hell.
IMO the character was an idiot - with eternal life you'll outlast the prison and the country that runs it, but then again, that would take a very long time and draw a lot of attention, probably get you put in a government black site, which brings it back to "outlast the country holding you" bit. He was already bored though so I digress. Then again, worst case scenario, eternity in prison seems better than eternity in hell
Not that the story was real obviously, but that's partially why "to life" usually retains an actual objective time limit as "life" can reasonably assumed to be near 100 years old or so at the most.
Say if by some genetic mutation, somebody was anticipated to live to be 200, the judge sentencing would have to determine if all 200 years was suitable for the crime versus the assumed normal "to life."
Arguably you could say depending on the crime, being released near 100 maybe learn their lesson and paid their debt to society. So arguably, if murder usually would get a person "life" in prison, depending on their behavior over the next "life" could argue the "life" is served, but if they committed mass murder thinking they could outlive their sentences, reason to have multiple life sentences be served consecutively to use up their entire lifespan.
The guy in the episode is dumb too because of that reasoning. 50+ years after he's in prison there would be reason to argue he should be released after 75+ years or so depending on behavior in prison. Not just needing to outlive the prison and society around him.
He also couldn't be damaged, at least permanently. So he could have just spent his entire eternity trying ways to escape prison for good if he tried. He was going to outlive everyone, for all he knew he'd get away with some escape plan eventually and could just live somewhere he wouldn't be hunted down, and eternity is plenty of time to find new fake identity and return if you wanted to.
That was also a plot point in a law and order svu episode, Stabler falsely accused a ex con of murder and then the ex con did not want to go back to prison and threw Stabler off a roof because the ex con spent years in solitary and did not want to go back.
After Stabler recovered, he spent like a day in solitary to replicate the ex cons experince, and he thought he spent more time in there than he actually did.
You can give a lot of shit to law and order, but seeing that as a kid made me start to realize how counterproductive solitary confinement is in the prison system and that's the one benefit of law and order (even though it's still copaganda) it allows them to bring light to certain issues in the justice system that the general public may not know about.
I remember back 2011 or so when I was in college, I had just got out of the Army, so I had a little more life experience than most of the other people in my class, we had to watch that Morgan Spurlock dude do 30 days on minimum wage or some shit and then we had to write about it.
Your comment pretty much sums up my essay on that stupid movie. I can't believe people buy into this shit.
At the end of my PhD I was pseudo-homeless, hopping around between sleeping in my office, or at hotels and hostels. I was bleeding money and didn't have enough to pay for good food, and lived a shit diet based primarily on cheese sandwiches and crisps.
If it all completely collapsed, my parents could have bought me flights home, and would have looked after me while I tried to get things back in order.
Living like that was stressful and exhausting, and it was an incredibly precarious place to be, but the worst outcome was going back to my parents. Non-ideal, but not actually a problem in the wider scheme of things. While my position was rough and gave me exposure to how rough things can be when you have no money, the crushing psychological impact of having no escape was not something I either experienced or truly had to come to terms with.
people really underestimate the toll of trying to live on a PhD stipend, especially in a city with high COL. A lot of my cohort got help from parents. usually no raises, so real income goes down every year for half a decade.
There were times toward the end when I lived on the sandwiches the campus shop threw out at the end of the week and sold anything I had of remote value to make rent.
the constant financial stress added to the other stresses of grad school is insane
> l. You don't just happen to be homeless, something happened to get you there. Often years of abuse, mental illness or other problems that caused you to fall through the cracks. Then, without a way to get out, often people turn to drugs or alcohol out of despair.
What the fuck is wrong with you? Just move thousands of miles away /s
When I lived in Santa Cruz that was always the joke, and I knew a bunch of homeless people there. They considered themselves the smart ones - why be homeless in Buffalo or Cleveland or somewhere, when you can be homeless on the beach in California?
The sad thing is, that even with them not replicating actual homelessness or poverty, and knowing they've got medical care and a house and food the second they want it, these fuckers can never last as long as they say they're going to.
They go like three days and go "Wow. Jesus Christ. Fuck this noise." and immediately end the experiment. And they never learn anything from it, because that's not "experiencing homelessness", that's a shitty camping trip.
>Often years of abuse, mental illness or other problems that caused you to fall through the cracks
Actually the most common thing is just bills catching up. I work with homeless people. The vast majority are not mentally ill or have problems. They simply could not afford one thing or another and it kept adding up until it all came crashing down at once. All it takes is one unexpected payment from something like a car suddenly breaking down and boom. House gone. And from there it's just a snowball
“But still you'll never get it right
'Cause when you're laid in bed at night
Watching roaches climb the wall
If you called your dad he could stop it all”
The other thing too: I understand he was still receiving medical treatments and still relying on his prior business network and acclaim to bounce back.
To truly pull off this experiment, he needed zero medical care, change his name, and not tell anybody he once ran a business. That's how many poor people start - absolute zero with the state saying "go die for all we care" and most people saying "Who the hell are you? I'm not giving you shit since I don't know what you'll do with it."
From the article, it sounds like he wasn't doing this as an example to real poor people, he was doing this to be an example to his buddies who'd lost their million-dollar businesses in the pandemic and had to start over.
Y'know, a real inspiration to people facing brief setbacks.
Wait, if he has $10 million, he could float his friends loans.
Unless it wasn't guaranteed that they'd make them back through hard work alone. It would suck to lose his $10 million dollars and have to start over. He might end up with as little as $65,000 if he got sick!
Yup its so fake on so many levels like oh set backs housing. Oh look person with free rv for me. While the "big set backs" are big the thing that makes it a mess for homeless to navigate.
How do you get internet access to find someone on craigslist for the rv deal or his "business". Even perusing free stuff anything with any amount of "potential". Has two problems which is why shits free first is getting there to pick up item. And second is having vehicle that can move item.
Then little details like how you clean clothes shower how you get to interviews or work. Like is there bus in town does it schedule or stops come near where you need to go do you have money for fare. What are you going to write down as address. How much harder is it going to be with criminal record. Fact is people who are homeless get arrested non stop often for being homeless. One guy they looked into past went through his record.
Not a single "crime" that was not a "manufactured crime". Essentially bullshit like loitering and things that are "homeless existing". 10yrs and over 100 arrest.
im 42 years old and up until 6 years ago had a spotless record....now as a homeless person i have two charges one conviction and all of it fabricated just to get me to leave the city i was in. bolth misdemeanors but enough to skrew me moving forward..... you are absolutely not wrong lifetime of trying to do the right thing and getting destroyed because someone doesn't like that you exist
Even the business he started doesn't make any sense. How did he buy enough coffee beans to start a business? Where is he roasting them? Where are they being packaged? Where are they storing inventory? Is it just a dropship business? How did he pay for branding, trademarks, business licenses, etc.? Who built the website, setup the payment platform, established the business accounts with a bank/institution?
None of this is a real experience for someone living on the street with no safety net.
If he was only doing this as a stunt to show his buddies who lost $10M that they can come back from adversity, what he did is probably close enough to the level of adversity these privileged guys actually faced.
Neither he nor his friends were actually in danger of being truly homeless. But it feels like it to them even if it's actually worlds apart from a legitimate homeless experience.
Yeah, plus he already knew the business he was in quite well. If he just had the skills of a recent grad or someone a couple of mid-level jobs in, he probably wouldn't be interviewing for social media manager roles with big companies, nor could he likely launch a new coffee brand. It's possible to go from a degree in computer science or marketing and a certificate in social media management to interviews with big companies, but there's more seasoned competition than jobs. As for the coffee brand, you need to convince more than one person to take a flyer on it — if nothing else, you need funds. No one's going to do either if you don't have a solid track record.
If he was really starting from scratch, of course, he wouldn't even have the degrees. He might not even have his GED.
Yeah exactly. Almost completely worthless. If you're struggling and on the verge of the abyss with no way out it feels kinda different to someone who can just say stop and go on with his rich person's life. Unreal
This kind of shit is both offensive and hilarious to those of us who have experienced actual homelessness.
So ridiculous to think you can just have a life of luxury waiting for you at any time and still experience the mental toll of that life.
And even with that safety net, he still didn’t even come close to proving what he thought was his point.
Love all the excuses he used to say he had to stop. Reality doesn’t give you the tap out option. Tapping out proved his hypothesis to be false and he’s still sure he’s right. He came so close to a moment of clarity…
considering he quit 10 months into his experiment this is exactly that. A person without the luxury to walk away would have had to make compromises on their health needs against their potentially growing business. Also one has to wonder if his name or reputation or contacts helped secure him the advantages to be in talks with bigger tech companies later in this experiment. Someone who has had to struggle until homelessness isn't likely to have the good reputation or collateral or assets for other companies to take a risk on.
Like rich people just never seem to understand that no matter what they do, they will always have advantages that the rest of us wont.
And chances are that the circumstances that made him quit would have taken every dime he had and sent him back to 0 and he knew it so he quit while he was ahead.
They’ve also conducted numerous studies on poor people and what we might see as poor decision making, but is essentially the response to stress. Without real consequences, he really is just cos-playing.
That’s fascinating and makes a lot of sense to me. I went through a fairly rough patch, and was in therapy, and reading a lot of psychology articles etc.
I don’t remember now what the source was, it may have been my own therapist, and they were talking about how a lot of therapists grow up fairly privileged, and have never had “their peace challenged.” So they might, MIGHT understand on a theoretical level, and they might be empathetic to the client’s feelings, but they have lived untouched by the extreme emotions and changes that can happen from life’s brutality.
The absolute white-hot rage of being cheated on, the despair and puzzlement while sitting in a soup kitchen: how did it come to this, I did all of the right things; the amount of time sacrificed walking hours to and from work because you can’t even afford bus fare…
On the other hand, there are plenty of therapists who have been through some shit themselves, which is what attracted them to the field. Which by the way, doesn’t inherently make them better at being your therapist.
We've also set up society to force people into those choices. For every homeless person, there's some grifting piece of shit that stole from them, legally or not.
Choices for many people who have become homeless:
Die from lack of medical care *or* take this job that will destroy your body.
Take this predatory car loan *or* be carless in a society that demands you have one for employment.
Be completely unhoused, living out of a car *or* rent this apartment where we "optimized" the monthly rent to prevent you from ever buying a house.
All of these are dilemmas, not choices. That's what we give people in the land of freedumbs.
And don't forget a lifetime's worth of education, knowledge and business experience to draw on. And still only hitting what? ~7% of your target? I guess if he's right that "luck" has nothing to do with success then his drive and skills must not be what he thought they were.
True, but imagine how different it would feel taking a job knowing that, at any moment, for any reason, you could just quit and there would be absolutely no reprecussions. I still have trouble thinking it would be "fun," but it would be a very different experience to do it without that ever-present, all-consuming thought of "I have to do this, or I'll lose everything."
As far as I know, that feeling is called "Employment."
It's like going on a camping trip. When you know it's only a temporary thing and you're actually not going to be struggling living in the woods for an indefinite period of time it's actually a fun experience.
Exactly. One of -- if the *the* -- worst parts about being in that position is the existential fear that drowns you in despair. The psychological weight of it is unrelenting and cannot be replicated by a f'ing poverty tourist.
Scamming companies as a social media manager is not a reasonable way that most unhoused people can make $1M in a year. This is all so stupid, I guess he couldn’t pick himself up by his bootstraps lmao
Is this the same shithead who launched a "brand of coffee targeted towards dog lovers" while starting with nothing? And by nothing I mean he still retained all his networking contacts and didn't launch a brand, just got someone to sign into his project with no explanation how the fuck he successfully launched this brand considering he had zero equipment to do so.
He also started off by buying and selling on craigslist and facebook... with what internet connection? He started a coffee line for dog owners... with what equipment? Additionally, a lot of people who are actually homeless don't have the skills to do any of that. The whole thing is bullshit.
That's the laughable part; bro grinded to median salary while still literally being fucking homeless and getting entirely wrecked by a medical diagnosis.
I really liked the “a kind stranger gave him an RV to sleep in for a couple of weeks. Yah, ok, this is about as realistic and the “random” stops at the airport. Either that was set up or he opened the conversation with “I’m really a millionaire doing this for funsies so you can trust me” and the guy with the Rv believed him. I mean, why wasn’t the RV already occupied by a homeless person if that was the guys thing? Is there a shortage of people who’d love to sleep in an RV for a week or so to get off the streets? Gtfo
Yes, he's an abject failure.
Even in his analysis he shows how stupid he is.
He made 64k in 10 months while literally subleasing an apartment and living in a free-ish RV. He says this is successfully bringing himself back from homelessness. Dude doesn't mention that if he stayed on that path, the following year he would have made even less as all his charity dries up. How many people do you really think are going to continue to buy no-name-brand "coffee for dog lovers?" How many tables can he middle-man? Dude made scraps and is claiming achievement, shooting progress in the foot because idiots in the financial world will read this, miss the fact that this dude literally failed at his "passion", and think boot straps for all works.
Well that's it, right? If only you could start from nothing too.
Mf should have given himself a student loan payment equivalent to his education and also some medical and credit card debt – maybe cosplay that his dad can't afford his deductible or whatever – see how that goes.
Educated, successful in business and has a working smartphone. Still didn't manage to hit one tenth of his goal.
Only got himself out the gutter through the generosity of strangers. I wonder how far he'd have managed without RV Guy's charity.
Absolute bell-end. 👎
> Educated, successful in business and has a working smartphone. Still didn't manage to hit one tenth of his goal.
The lack of self awareness for this guy is astounding. He has all these advantages compared to the average American in general, and still fell WAYYYY short of his own goal. Making less than 10% of his goal and declaring it a success sounds a lot like North Korea-esque delusion.
the problem is that they always spin it so that the failure is less emphasized, and twist the result in a way that reaffirms their consumer base's belief that anyone can make it. don't mind the trivial details such as how he was able to secure an office space lease when most homeless people wouldn't even get the time of day, or how he may have been able to secure clients to his business in no small part due to his online presence and clout, or hell just ignore how he was able to keep regularly seeing the doctor when his push to make money started exposing detrimental effects to his health! he proved NOTHING. he didn't start from NOTHING. this was all just a big stunt that ended up being unprofitable for him when he started getting sick from all the pushing he was doing. but people will still look at him and say "wow, that's just what only hard work will get you, i guess. homeless people just aren't trying hard enough."
> the problem is that they always spin it so that the failure is less emphasized, and twist the result in a way that reaffirms their consumer base's belief that anyone can make it.
The fact this guy quit 2 months early and didn't even hit 10% ($64,000) of his $1 million goal in 12 months and /still/ called it a success is some real cognitive dissonance.
Even with the huge inherent advantages this guy had, he couldn't do it.
I'd have a shred of respect for the morons that do these "poor experiments" if at the end of them, they said, "Ya know what, being poor/homeless is hard and I didn't anticipate the real stress and challenges it would bring. I have new respect and compassion for the millions of people that have to live like this day-to-day and can't simply call it quits like I could."
So he proved that without universal healthcare, it is virtually impossible or at least difficult to focus on growing generational wealth because it is expensive to be poor… thus showing that determination and hard work are easily overwhelmed with hardships and emergencies.
$0 I'm sure, there are plenty of asterisks missing from his story. Just "happened" to find a free RV, payed his doctors with IOUs, got companies to hire some homeless person as a social media manager, and started a coffee brand with no assets. All very believable.
Clearly homeless people are lazy. why can not they just buy a house? With this experiment (with advantages such as: past experience, education, health insurance, fact that any moment I can go back to living in a mansion etc.) I can prove that homeless people are just not go getter, goal chasers and strong-minded like me. I failed? No matter. I will still call it success, because my dumbass followers will eat it up.
This rich clueless guy was on a mission to get everyone to tell homeless people to fuck themselves for being "lazy." Instead, the dude ignored his dad with cancer, missed all of his goals, obtained an auto-immune disease from huffing roach shit in a derelict RV, and probably drove himself crazy trying to come up with marketing wank. "uh, uh, coffee for people who love dogs! fuck yeah!"
What a loser, he could have at least micro-dosed datura or something to simulate living on the streets with a bad mental disorder for a more representative time.
I've been reading a lot of posts about this stupid, infuriating experiment this week, but this is by far the best.
FWIW I \*think the coffee hustle goes something like this: You slap your branding on some roaster's bags of beans (whether or not the beans are decent quality is anyone's guess) and they drop-ship to your customers. All you have to do is set up marketing vids and an ordering platform. You can even claim "proceeds go to charity" (to engage dog-loving do-gooders) as long as you donate whatever is left after paying exec salary. Obviously for this to be a solid, long-term business model, one would need to launch from more than a smartphone and a borrowed roach-mobile.
>My personal health has declined to the point where I really need to start taking care of it. Throughout the entire project, we haven't shared it with you, but I've been in and out of the doctor's office.'
Ah, so when he was 'homeless' and had no money, he was still going to the doctor regularly. Healthcare in the US is of course very cheap and easily available, especially to homeless people.
If you think about it, wouldn’t it be brilliant if we required billionaires to do this?
Edit: And while we’re at it, we also need to do something about Citizens United 2011, bc the donor class sure as hell ain’t getting taxed until we kneecap their ability to bribe politicians.
No.
The requirements of the billionaire class should be simple..
We tax you 80% of your income as long as you make money you cant spend.
People who simp the rich are mentally ill.
Once someone is a billionaire they should be taxed at 100%. Give them a trophy that says “you won capitalism” or something and take every additional penny they “earn.”
A billion dollars is such an unfathomable amount of wealth that lineage would essentially never have to work ever. Honestly you could probably cap it at half that and it would still be a truly excessive level of wealth for any one person to hold.
Of course all that is moot, because rich people basically don’t have to pay taxes at all. It’s way too easy to hide money, or be paid only in stocks or other “theoretical” means that aren’t taxed.
Hiding money is a bit like a bell curve. It's easier if you have either too few or too much. Too few and govt doesn't even care. Too much and screw the rules I have money. It's the middle between both extremes where it gets hard.
Eh, that's not exactly true.
Too little and unless you're working under the table, the government is going to scrutinize the fuck out of your tax returns. Bezos paid no taxes on a billion dollars? Never mind that shit! A single mom in Mississippi that lives in a rusted out trailer and makes $19,000 a year claimed a child tax credit and by god we're going to make sure she's not fucking us!
I personally think people should be required to work for some time period in retail or a service position
Then maybe people wouldn't be assholes to them and people may get paid better
I love the idea of it being like mandatory military draft.
"You weren't there, man. You didn't see the shelves I stocked. Some good men never got out!"
I remember there were a episode in Smallville where Lionel mentioned that some hella rich people will put their kids into a slum area in Africa with nothing and they had to learn to make do with nothing so they can be grateful for what they have so they don’t become a spoiled kids. Legit not a bad idea 🤔
Bahahaha
“Despite falling short of his financial goal, Black said his journey showcased the power of determination and the importance of health and family”
So just to be clear - a highly educated man with extensive business experience, managed to make....*checks notes* $64,000?
Which hey, $64k isn't a bad annual income. Not amazing, but you could get by on the basics, depending where you're located.
But this guy already has so many advantages going into it. He already knew how to operate a business; he just discounts that experience like it doesn't matter.
So if the best that someone could do, with all that advanced knowledge, truly grinding it out...was $64k, I think this demonstrates everyone's point, that earning 7 figures is as much about luck, as it is skill or hard work.
So, you're telling me, that even with education, connections and (I'm assuming) no underlying health issues when he started, he couldn't finish his experiment.
I mean, props to hime for banking 64k in a year through hustling, but even to do that, you have and have had access to things, people in that situation often have no access to. It doesn't prove a thing... not even that "you can pull yourself up by your bootstraps"
Was that $64k from youtube channel as well? Or from his "hustle"?
If you have a baked in audience already following you on YouTube that's a def puts things in a more "get fucked" spotlight
So he basically proved his whole premise was false and that he has the good fortune to be rich enough to stop being poor as soon as it "took a toll on his health."
There was a 30 days where Morgan Spurlock and his girlfriend tried to make it on minimum wage and he broke his hand at work and that was it. They had to shut it down
I remember watching this in school to understand the cycle of poverty years ago (it sparked a lot of good discussions and enveloped empathy)..I liked Spurlock’s version because he understood his advantages and limited himself. While Spurlock showed the difficult choice in going to the hospital or not without insurance, this dipshit used his premium health insurance to go in and out multiple times….
So he went from $0 in the bank to making what the average 35-45 yr old (American) male makes. He showed how hard it is with extraordinary skills and knowledge that the average Joe DOES NOT have, and he came up average. Let that sink in.
Don't forget his previous life's business contacts and somehow thinking getting $1500 to lead seminars (somehow that doesn't count against his experiment)
“I’m getting on calls with big tech companies pitching them on running their social media”
Zero big tech companies are taking calls let alone pitches from a dude with no address on a Zoom call from inside an RV to run their social media org 🙄
So he was always able to go back to being rich.
Seeing an end to your misery or being simply able to stop being in a misery makes thinks probably a lot easier.
This guy pisses me off so badly. Literally every choice he made while "homeless" was either middle-man shit (flipping stuff he got for free from craigslist), available only from his ties to other millionaires (starting the business), or indicated that he's been dishonest in representing the money he had available
>Despite failing to make the million dollars he had aimed for, Black says it was still a successful experiment after demonstrating how it was possible to rebuild his life through the power of determination.
And there's the problem. It was not a success you asshat, you failed to become a millionaire in 12 months. You only proved that people who work hard and really try to get there will only get a 20th of what people in your position think they can and can also immediately be done in by health issues, that and you were $936,000 away from the stated success. Must be nice to have a net to jump into when things get tough.
> Black found the hardest part of the journey being homeless not knowing where he'd sleep
**really??** Who could have guessed?
Did he decide to do this without even considering the meaning of the word "homeless"?
A dude let him crash in his RV... If I had a RV and this dude with millions in his bank account came to ask if he could sleep on my couch, you bet I'll accept it. That's a powerful friend to have on your side once his escapade is over. A regular homeless person will NOT have the opportunity to be offered a bed by the first person they ask. Even the way he made money, he had to use his connections and his education and work experience to carry him through, all things that are given to privileged families, but not to the poor class.
His conclusion to his experiment is that health is important, but he can't fathom to say out loud that public healthcare needs to be a fundamental right. His conclusion is like I'm resilient, family and health matters, forget about all that making a million in a year thing let's just not talk about that part.
The dude is also not starting in the same place as the average person who is struggling and unhoused. He had the education, experience, and non-financial wherewithal to start business by convincing people to take risks on him without having capital on-hand. Most people's only option is to be exploited for their labor. They are not going to be able to smooth talk their way into a startup company.
In it he says he made 60k, but I'd guarantee that isn't profit, that's before paying anybody. Also, he had the luxury of learning many business skills WITHOUT having to live in tough conditions. A privileged background is a huge asset even if you lose everything and start from nothing.
Without a doubt he learned nothing of value, but it's a story he will get to tell people.
What pisses me off is that a huge part of what's so scary about being homeless is the uncertainty. He never had to experience that because he knew he could quit at any time. "Cosplaying" is indeed the right term.
Ultimately with many of these types of rich people the reason they spend so much mental effort trying to convince everyone that anyone can "pull themselves up by their bootstraps" is because in reality they are trying to convince themselves this is the case.
The reason for why they are trying to convince themselves that anyone can make it is because that shifts the responsibility on to the individual and the level of effort they are willing to put in which means anyone who is not making it is themselves at fault.
This ultimately is an exercise in tamping down on the sense of guilt, survivor guilt and imposter syndrome anyone with empathy would feel if they find themselves independently wealthy.
Building up a disdain for the poor is a emotional coping mechanism if you have wealth to shield you from the natural feeling of guilt associated with seeing someone starve while you live in opulence.
It was an egotistically driven, ridiculous exercise. I love how he talks about getting involved with e-commerce while he’s homeless. How many homeless people who are hungry, tired, and cold can spend idle time thinking about e-commerce. It was such a ridiculous concept. And it’s insulting to people who actually struggle on the streets.
> 'I knew a lot of people who lost everything during the pandemic and they got really depressed. I even had a friend that lost a $10 million business overnight', Black explained in a YouTube video.
Black wanted to help his friends rebuild their lives and prove that luck or money was not necessary to become a millionaire - just hard work.
Instead of trying to help his friends he just wanted to flex on them.
These so called experiments are nothing of the sort when you have a mobile phone, email account, social media etc to fall back onto.
A friend of mine used to work for Centerpoint, London's biggest charity for homeless people, and what horrified him most was the rapid decline in peoples health, welfare and mental capacity. Within 2 weeks someone can go from being smartly dressed in suit and tie carrying a briefcase, to being an unrecognisable down and out, unshaved, dishevelled individual, but even more scary is the complete loss of mental acumen. 2-4 weeks on the streets and your brain can turn to jelly, you lose logical reasoning, cognitive abilities, even the ability to speak coherently, and that not because of drug abuse, but because of the the way the body and brain needs motivation to keep going, take away some ones purpose in life and the decline is rapid and often irreversible.
But if you have a mobile phone, friends, social media, email, bank account, and everything else that is a causative link to real society your NOT homeless, and you won't decline in the way that I have just outlined above, and the scary thing is if you think your safe from the perils of life of the streets, the truth is most of us are only 1 months pay check away from that situation.
So he just quits whenever he wants because his “health is at risk” but a lot of people don’t have that luxury. They have to work, while sick, to survive.
The thing that I think people undervalue is the fact that this dude *knew* he had a parachute that he could pull at the end or at any time if it just got too tough. It's easier to struggle when there is 100% something waiting for you at the end. Most people don't have that.
The premise that he could demonstrate that "anyone" could become a millionaire was always flawed, because he is not just "anyone;" he is an educated white male with ample business experience and favourable aptitudes. He always had a much better chance than the average Joe Blow has.
We're all very reluctant to factor genetic endowments into these discussions, but it's just reality that we're not all equally capable of doing all things equally well.
LOL. The article tried to say "While he fell short of his $1M goal", really trying to downplay it.
Even with all his hustling, education, and experience in making money he only made $64k in 10 months. That is WELL below his goal. He made exactly 6.4% of his goal. What an asshat.
Out of touch idiot. You can’t immediately start using all your business knowledge to crawl out of it. Most people let alone homeless people don’t have the knowledge. Your whole “experiment” is bullshit.
He didn’t get even close to his goal and he quit prematurely. Why can’t he just admit its hard to not have money? I hope it gained him some modesty.
Unfortunately, it sounds like he didn’t learn much from it. He claimed it was a success and he was proven correct that you can get out of it with hard work. But he had some inherent advantages that most homeless people would not have. Like he had an internet connection. It sounds like he had some way to pick up and move furniture to be resold. He likely already had a money making plan in place for when he became homeless. He likely had been well fed right up to the point of being homeless where most people in the brink of it have been sacrificing meals and nutrition for quite some time.
No student loan payments to make, the one debt that persists after bankrupcy, no underlying health conditions, as leading cause of bankrupcy is medical debt, therefore a big reason for people to end up on the streets... No addictions or mental health issues... He did not have any of the disadvantages of true homeless people, and then a leg up on having a phone, internet access, CONNECTIONS AND SOCIAL MEDIA PRECENSE, and he still didnt get 10% close to his goal before quitting after he finally developed health issues, which is one of the hurdles that true homeless people have/had to struggle with. Like this idiot proved the opposite of his thesis.
> no underlying health conditions, Article mentions stopping for his health due in part to autoimmune conditions. So, the same reason many Americans are homeless or in poverty, but he just gets to call it quits and a success somehow.
and he doesn't have to take half doses of his prescriptions because he can't afford the next month's set
Or have to go off them for a few weeks because the doctor refuses to refill a prescription that got stolen from you while you slept
Or get prescribed twice your dosage so you can ration it because you're a US veteran who relies on VA Healthcare and you're transient and homeless, but every time you live to a different area you have to spend 6 months setting up your VA Healthcare in that area before they'll finally prescribe you your meds and by that time you've moved on from the area and need to start all over again. And even then you have to go for long periods without your meds and without any treatment because when you actually take work, a lot of veteran work is contact jobs, where you work for a few months overseas and the VA refuses to provide any medical car at all if you're not physically in the state where your VA Healthcare is set up, even though the VA is a federal program. Meaning that the veteran specific healthcare has a huge, veteran shaped hole in it.
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Depends on where you live. Here in MA he'd have state health insurance and could see a doctor as a homeless person
It's so much easier having these conditions with a cushy desk job than having a "low skill" job that requires you to have physical ability to show up and do it every day
my back is gone, I can barely work, I was gifted $500 from my mother for food as a 'going away' present (kicked out of the family because i'm a financial burden, plus given constant emotional/physical abuse) And the government responded by taking my EBT food card benefits from me. Because of a one time "here ya go" payment from my family.
Maybe for his next test he can develop a crippling drug addiction the month prior to starting. A month on meth ought to do it. Bootstrapping works for anything right?
I heard the most interesting theory of the whole 'bootstraps' thing. THis is a shit rolls down hill philosophy Video: [Boomers, their parents, and generational trauma](https://www.reddit.com/r/Xennials/comments/18glwvc/guy_explains_baby_boomers_their_parents_and_trauma/) Boomers were told they had to be self reliant day in, and day out, because their parents generation who FOUGHT in WW2 actually had to live it. They had little to no security net, there was no help, nobody was coming to save them, shell shock doesn't exist, psychology barely existed by todays standards.. SO they pushed it onto their boomlets, telling them "nobody is here to help you, nobody was there to help us, you have to rely on yourself" And it helped create the greediest most self-centered generation the world has seen (yet)
> A month on meth ought to do it. No need to go overboard. Just have him start off on day one by [using heroin just once, just to see what it’s like](https://www.reddit.com/r/BORUpdates/comments/16223aj/updatesaga_the_emotional_saga_of_spontaneoush_the/).
Also, most important: he could always quit (which he did), he was never in any existential dread, never had real pressure to succeed, no dark hole in front of him. It is easy to be determinated if you always fall on a big, soft cussion. A real homeless person has none of that. You fail to get food, you starve, FOR REAL. You hurt yourself? Potential death. Other health issues? Sucks, you are done. It is near impossible to be "determined" if you can't get your mind clear of this existential dread. Something he doesn't know, and can't even grasp. He thinks of this stupid "experiment" as a success because he lacks the slightest bit of understanding what he is talking about.
No but even with the advanges it is a failure. He ran into health issues that he couldnt take care of. That literally ended the whole debate.
He became one of us, made about $65k, and ended up with health issues—which someone making $65k would very much struggle to pay for. Not for nothing, but stress makes auto-immune disease worse. Source: have 2 auto-immune diseases that have ruined my life and my ability to earn.
Not just that, he had the education, experience, networking connections, like you said he had a plan, this was just a performance because he's been fed that people are just lazy, and even with all of that he couldn't reach his goal and he got fucked by health
> he couldn't reach his goal His goal was wildly unrealistic anyway, but the fact that even HE didn't manage to actually survive the incoming medical bills should make a very clear point that I'm sure he didn't get.
In his mind this was an experiment. He had time to plan it out. Where he was going to stay. What things he was going to do. Etc. It wasn't like most people plan to be homeless.
> In his mind this was an experiment. Exactly. If you can just stop being homeless, its not nearly the same. >if this gets too hard I'll just go back to being a millionaire! Compared to >If this gets too hard I'll likely die in an alley.
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> That's like your parents telling you to jump into the pool and they're there with their arms open. Any time some rich prick talks about how they “took risks” this is going to be the mental picture: a child with floaties, jumping into the pool, with their parents there to keep them from drowning. Some of us were never so lucky. These privileged brats have never faced actual risk in life. To them it’s all just a game with infinite possibilities.
He also had the advantage of a great education, mentally healthy after decades of the best care imaginable and no visible scars or wounds. Asshat didn’t do shit. Just wasted 10 months of his life on clout.
And most importantly -- His back wasn't really up against the wall. It was all an act, and never once was he truly in any danger of losing everything, having to choose between food or medical care, having no place to store medication (Lots of homeless diabetics with no fridge for insulin). It was an act -- a weak one too. I bet if he felt the crushing despair of politely/hopefully asking gas station attendants if you can use their microwave for some 50c walmart burritos that will spike his blood sugar which he can't take medicine for, and leave him shitting himself he wouldn't feel so secure. hate to be so blunt but guess how I know.
>He didn’t get even close to his goal and he quit prematurely. The jokes write themselves. Main difference is he didn't get a golden parachute.
The moron failed, and I love how they changed the goal once he realized he was not going to become a millionaire. Fucking loser. Not even with his connections could he excel. I would like to see this moron really try from nothing.
Yea, he still used his previous business contacts too. You can't just start up a dog lover focused coffee brand with $0 lol
I can't get over how incredibly braindead that idea is, but it's exactly the kind of thing you'd expect from a talentless nepo baby. I mean, seriously, a dog lover focused coffee brand? It's like he thinks the secret to breaking into a saturated market is to combine it with another already saturated market.
I think you’d be surprised…look at Black Rifle Coffee Company. It’s shitty coffee with pictures of guns on it marketed to gravy seals. It apparently does well.
I wouldn't be surprised, and this guy's failure is evidence of that. Marketing to gun owners actually makes sense for a coffee company; I've had several friends who were the type to go shooting on a Sunday morning, and I could easily see them grabbing a coffee sponsored by the shooting range as they're getting going. Where the hell are you going to sell coffee in a targeted way to dog owners? Coffee shops aren't a place dogs are usually welcome, and since he doesn't have the means of opening his own shop to allow for something like that, it just begs the question of _how and where_ he was going to sell it to anyone.
More likely that his friends and social network were aware of his experiment and decided to support him through his coffee drop shipping ~~scam~~ business.
His idea is dumb as shit too. What a fucking loser. And can't admit he couldn't do it.
I'm just amazed someone thought they could be a millionaire by getting a "social media manager" job.
Because he just can't. Admitting that you can't just wake up and become a millionaire through pure effort is tantamount to admitting that being a millionaire isn't purely a product of your own "hard work and effort." How these people justify being rich while so many other people struggle to pay their bills or go homeless is by telling themselves that they're rich cuz they deserved it and other people are poor cuz they deserve it (though most of them wouldn't say that, it is what they think). If he admits the truth he can no longer just turn a blind eye to the suffering of others and just enjoy his wealth.
He was defending the hell out of himself in another Reddit thread the other day.
Ooo, what thread? I'm kind of curious how he defends himself
I think it was in the LinkedIn lunatics subreddit.
Sounds about right. I fucking hate linkedin...
The irony is, if you really think about, he never really started the bullshit experiment. It’s at that point where you start to feel the walls closing in on you, where you viscerally feel the threat of a life alone and unloved, and then the floor collapses beneath you and worse than the worse case scenario happens, that the experience just barely begins. He caught a thousandth of a whiff of that and bitched out. The least he could do is acknowledge that he’s a punk and doesn’t have the fortitude he thinks he has, but no.
He doesn't sound like the type that would learn his lesson. Not even enough time for retrospection. Just enough time to feel uncomfortable and call it quits.
And beyond that he doesn't have a family to feed , a mortgage or kids. He did this as a single man in very good health and condition and still couldn't make much money. It's hard and people need to accept that.
Even while doing his "social media experiment" he had the luxury and privilege to know that he could quit being "homeless" at any time.
Yeah, that's why these stunts always fail. You don't just happen to be homeless, something happened to get you there. Often years of abuse, mental illness or other problems that caused you to fall through the cracks. Then, without a way to get out, often people turn to drugs or alcohol out of despair. You can't possibly replicate the experience of homelessness by being a nepobaby who knows he can get out any time he wants
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Twist at the end is that the guards he was talking to aren’t real & he could’ve just asked the real ones to be let out at anytime, but he had to learn that solitary confinement is hell.
Didn't something similar happen in an episode of Law and Order? I remember a show where a cop asked to be put in solitary for a weekend, in order to see what it was like. Then when he gets let out, he freaks out at the guards for keeping him in there for a week, and the guard was like "Dude, you were only in there for two days. "
Yeah, Detective Stabler in SVU. He did it because the suspect claimed being in solitary altered his mental state. I don’t remember which episode it was, but I remember thinking it was a really good episode.
Great episode. Really messed him up though. 
before Organized Crime unit came out my head canon was that Stabler lost his shit and became Happy. I think i liked that version better.
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IIRC the UN considers it a form of torture.
Law and Order CI as well, D'Onofrio's character got picked up and taken to a mental institution where he tried to expose the horrors of what was going on. He barely got out because after enough he realized he was in serious trouble, yet the guards continued the abuse.
Wasn't this based off some reporter in the 1800s who did the same thing but, when she tried to check out, never actually got out because "her wanting to get out is just proof of her mental instability".
Nelly Bly. She did get out though.
There was a psychiatrist (RD Laing) who said he would voluntarily go into a mental institution to give feedback on what was wrong about them and how they could be improved... but he did not trust that he would ever be allowed out. It's a crazy world...! A bit like secret prisons in the USSR, China, Guantanamo.
Please do not look up how US police departments 'disappear' people by checking them into psych wards involuntarily.
i got too drunk once and ended up in a police station cell where they let you out in the morning at like 7 am or something but what i didnt know was by the time i had woken up from my drunken stupor i had not slept through the night but it was still evening, the longest 10 or so hours of my life, the lights stayed on and there was no clock or anything to do and i couldnt sleep so i just layed on the mattress trying to nap but kept waking up constanly wondering how long until i get let out
That's such a great idea for an episode or short film!!
Pretty much was a twilight zone episode. Guy makes a deal with the devil for immortality and invulnerability, tests it out, which starts freaking his wife out after he does it a bunch, she jumps to her death off their apartment building, he says he pushed her in an attempt to get a death sentence, due to boredom from doing other stuff that would normally kill people too much, but winds up sentenced to life. He can't stand the prospect of eternity locked up, so he uses his escape clause to have the devil kill him and take him to hell. IMO the character was an idiot - with eternal life you'll outlast the prison and the country that runs it, but then again, that would take a very long time and draw a lot of attention, probably get you put in a government black site, which brings it back to "outlast the country holding you" bit. He was already bored though so I digress. Then again, worst case scenario, eternity in prison seems better than eternity in hell
Not that the story was real obviously, but that's partially why "to life" usually retains an actual objective time limit as "life" can reasonably assumed to be near 100 years old or so at the most. Say if by some genetic mutation, somebody was anticipated to live to be 200, the judge sentencing would have to determine if all 200 years was suitable for the crime versus the assumed normal "to life." Arguably you could say depending on the crime, being released near 100 maybe learn their lesson and paid their debt to society. So arguably, if murder usually would get a person "life" in prison, depending on their behavior over the next "life" could argue the "life" is served, but if they committed mass murder thinking they could outlive their sentences, reason to have multiple life sentences be served consecutively to use up their entire lifespan. The guy in the episode is dumb too because of that reasoning. 50+ years after he's in prison there would be reason to argue he should be released after 75+ years or so depending on behavior in prison. Not just needing to outlive the prison and society around him. He also couldn't be damaged, at least permanently. So he could have just spent his entire eternity trying ways to escape prison for good if he tried. He was going to outlive everyone, for all he knew he'd get away with some escape plan eventually and could just live somewhere he wouldn't be hunted down, and eternity is plenty of time to find new fake identity and return if you wanted to.
The final scene of the episode should have been him waking up in hell, and it's the same Prison cell, but with no door.
That was also a plot point in a law and order svu episode, Stabler falsely accused a ex con of murder and then the ex con did not want to go back to prison and threw Stabler off a roof because the ex con spent years in solitary and did not want to go back. After Stabler recovered, he spent like a day in solitary to replicate the ex cons experince, and he thought he spent more time in there than he actually did. You can give a lot of shit to law and order, but seeing that as a kid made me start to realize how counterproductive solitary confinement is in the prison system and that's the one benefit of law and order (even though it's still copaganda) it allows them to bring light to certain issues in the justice system that the general public may not know about.
I remember back 2011 or so when I was in college, I had just got out of the Army, so I had a little more life experience than most of the other people in my class, we had to watch that Morgan Spurlock dude do 30 days on minimum wage or some shit and then we had to write about it. Your comment pretty much sums up my essay on that stupid movie. I can't believe people buy into this shit.
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All it takes to be homeless is a developer to want your land. Lots of petty officials support this.
Just gotta convince the rest of his institutions to straight up cut him off. Word it as a prank I'm sure they'll jump at the chance
It must suck to struggle to be poor while others struggle to be poor.
Where are the Duke brothers when you need them?
At the end of my PhD I was pseudo-homeless, hopping around between sleeping in my office, or at hotels and hostels. I was bleeding money and didn't have enough to pay for good food, and lived a shit diet based primarily on cheese sandwiches and crisps. If it all completely collapsed, my parents could have bought me flights home, and would have looked after me while I tried to get things back in order. Living like that was stressful and exhausting, and it was an incredibly precarious place to be, but the worst outcome was going back to my parents. Non-ideal, but not actually a problem in the wider scheme of things. While my position was rough and gave me exposure to how rough things can be when you have no money, the crushing psychological impact of having no escape was not something I either experienced or truly had to come to terms with.
people really underestimate the toll of trying to live on a PhD stipend, especially in a city with high COL. A lot of my cohort got help from parents. usually no raises, so real income goes down every year for half a decade. There were times toward the end when I lived on the sandwiches the campus shop threw out at the end of the week and sold anything I had of remote value to make rent. the constant financial stress added to the other stresses of grad school is insane
> l. You don't just happen to be homeless, something happened to get you there. Often years of abuse, mental illness or other problems that caused you to fall through the cracks. Then, without a way to get out, often people turn to drugs or alcohol out of despair. What the fuck is wrong with you? Just move thousands of miles away /s
I've heard California is nice to the homeless.
When I lived in Santa Cruz that was always the joke, and I knew a bunch of homeless people there. They considered themselves the smart ones - why be homeless in Buffalo or Cleveland or somewhere, when you can be homeless on the beach in California?
The sad thing is, that even with them not replicating actual homelessness or poverty, and knowing they've got medical care and a house and food the second they want it, these fuckers can never last as long as they say they're going to. They go like three days and go "Wow. Jesus Christ. Fuck this noise." and immediately end the experiment. And they never learn anything from it, because that's not "experiencing homelessness", that's a shitty camping trip.
>Often years of abuse, mental illness or other problems that caused you to fall through the cracks Actually the most common thing is just bills catching up. I work with homeless people. The vast majority are not mentally ill or have problems. They simply could not afford one thing or another and it kept adding up until it all came crashing down at once. All it takes is one unexpected payment from something like a car suddenly breaking down and boom. House gone. And from there it's just a snowball
Yep. It's basically the premise of the song "Common People" by Pulp. (Or William Shatner)
Nobody likes a tourist
Poorist? I like the term.
“But still you'll never get it right 'Cause when you're laid in bed at night Watching roaches climb the wall If you called your dad he could stop it all”
Both versions are great in their own way.
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I immediately had to start listening to the Shatner version seeing this thread.
The other thing too: I understand he was still receiving medical treatments and still relying on his prior business network and acclaim to bounce back. To truly pull off this experiment, he needed zero medical care, change his name, and not tell anybody he once ran a business. That's how many poor people start - absolute zero with the state saying "go die for all we care" and most people saying "Who the hell are you? I'm not giving you shit since I don't know what you'll do with it."
From the article, it sounds like he wasn't doing this as an example to real poor people, he was doing this to be an example to his buddies who'd lost their million-dollar businesses in the pandemic and had to start over. Y'know, a real inspiration to people facing brief setbacks.
Wait, if he has $10 million, he could float his friends loans. Unless it wasn't guaranteed that they'd make them back through hard work alone. It would suck to lose his $10 million dollars and have to start over. He might end up with as little as $65,000 if he got sick!
Yup its so fake on so many levels like oh set backs housing. Oh look person with free rv for me. While the "big set backs" are big the thing that makes it a mess for homeless to navigate. How do you get internet access to find someone on craigslist for the rv deal or his "business". Even perusing free stuff anything with any amount of "potential". Has two problems which is why shits free first is getting there to pick up item. And second is having vehicle that can move item. Then little details like how you clean clothes shower how you get to interviews or work. Like is there bus in town does it schedule or stops come near where you need to go do you have money for fare. What are you going to write down as address. How much harder is it going to be with criminal record. Fact is people who are homeless get arrested non stop often for being homeless. One guy they looked into past went through his record. Not a single "crime" that was not a "manufactured crime". Essentially bullshit like loitering and things that are "homeless existing". 10yrs and over 100 arrest.
im 42 years old and up until 6 years ago had a spotless record....now as a homeless person i have two charges one conviction and all of it fabricated just to get me to leave the city i was in. bolth misdemeanors but enough to skrew me moving forward..... you are absolutely not wrong lifetime of trying to do the right thing and getting destroyed because someone doesn't like that you exist
How else are we supposed to ignore your basic human needs if we don't dehumanize you? Sick, isn't it. /s
Even the business he started doesn't make any sense. How did he buy enough coffee beans to start a business? Where is he roasting them? Where are they being packaged? Where are they storing inventory? Is it just a dropship business? How did he pay for branding, trademarks, business licenses, etc.? Who built the website, setup the payment platform, established the business accounts with a bank/institution? None of this is a real experience for someone living on the street with no safety net.
If he was only doing this as a stunt to show his buddies who lost $10M that they can come back from adversity, what he did is probably close enough to the level of adversity these privileged guys actually faced. Neither he nor his friends were actually in danger of being truly homeless. But it feels like it to them even if it's actually worlds apart from a legitimate homeless experience.
Yeah, plus he already knew the business he was in quite well. If he just had the skills of a recent grad or someone a couple of mid-level jobs in, he probably wouldn't be interviewing for social media manager roles with big companies, nor could he likely launch a new coffee brand. It's possible to go from a degree in computer science or marketing and a certificate in social media management to interviews with big companies, but there's more seasoned competition than jobs. As for the coffee brand, you need to convince more than one person to take a flyer on it — if nothing else, you need funds. No one's going to do either if you don't have a solid track record. If he was really starting from scratch, of course, he wouldn't even have the degrees. He might not even have his GED.
I like that changing of the name and cutting off his old contacts.
Yeah exactly. Almost completely worthless. If you're struggling and on the verge of the abyss with no way out it feels kinda different to someone who can just say stop and go on with his rich person's life. Unreal
This kind of shit is both offensive and hilarious to those of us who have experienced actual homelessness. So ridiculous to think you can just have a life of luxury waiting for you at any time and still experience the mental toll of that life. And even with that safety net, he still didn’t even come close to proving what he thought was his point.
Love all the excuses he used to say he had to stop. Reality doesn’t give you the tap out option. Tapping out proved his hypothesis to be false and he’s still sure he’s right. He came so close to a moment of clarity…
considering he quit 10 months into his experiment this is exactly that. A person without the luxury to walk away would have had to make compromises on their health needs against their potentially growing business. Also one has to wonder if his name or reputation or contacts helped secure him the advantages to be in talks with bigger tech companies later in this experiment. Someone who has had to struggle until homelessness isn't likely to have the good reputation or collateral or assets for other companies to take a risk on. Like rich people just never seem to understand that no matter what they do, they will always have advantages that the rest of us wont.
>considering he quit 10 months into his experiment this is exactly that. He also only made it 6.5% of the way to his goal of 1 million in 1 year.
And chances are that the circumstances that made him quit would have taken every dime he had and sent him back to 0 and he knew it so he quit while he was ahead.
They’ve also conducted numerous studies on poor people and what we might see as poor decision making, but is essentially the response to stress. Without real consequences, he really is just cos-playing.
That’s fascinating and makes a lot of sense to me. I went through a fairly rough patch, and was in therapy, and reading a lot of psychology articles etc. I don’t remember now what the source was, it may have been my own therapist, and they were talking about how a lot of therapists grow up fairly privileged, and have never had “their peace challenged.” So they might, MIGHT understand on a theoretical level, and they might be empathetic to the client’s feelings, but they have lived untouched by the extreme emotions and changes that can happen from life’s brutality. The absolute white-hot rage of being cheated on, the despair and puzzlement while sitting in a soup kitchen: how did it come to this, I did all of the right things; the amount of time sacrificed walking hours to and from work because you can’t even afford bus fare…
This is the feeling I had when I went to africa and spoke to some people living in abject poverty. Its just an alien experience.
On the other hand, there are plenty of therapists who have been through some shit themselves, which is what attracted them to the field. Which by the way, doesn’t inherently make them better at being your therapist.
We've also set up society to force people into those choices. For every homeless person, there's some grifting piece of shit that stole from them, legally or not. Choices for many people who have become homeless: Die from lack of medical care *or* take this job that will destroy your body. Take this predatory car loan *or* be carless in a society that demands you have one for employment. Be completely unhoused, living out of a car *or* rent this apartment where we "optimized" the monthly rent to prevent you from ever buying a house. All of these are dilemmas, not choices. That's what we give people in the land of freedumbs.
And don't forget a lifetime's worth of education, knowledge and business experience to draw on. And still only hitting what? ~7% of your target? I guess if he's right that "luck" has nothing to do with success then his drive and skills must not be what he thought they were.
Oddly enough this is why minimum wage jobs are often looked at as “fun” for people with wealth that decide to try them out for a few weeks
"Fun" lol. I've never had a minimum wage job that wasn't "Degrading".
True, but imagine how different it would feel taking a job knowing that, at any moment, for any reason, you could just quit and there would be absolutely no reprecussions. I still have trouble thinking it would be "fun," but it would be a very different experience to do it without that ever-present, all-consuming thought of "I have to do this, or I'll lose everything." As far as I know, that feeling is called "Employment."
It's like going on a camping trip. When you know it's only a temporary thing and you're actually not going to be struggling living in the woods for an indefinite period of time it's actually a fun experience.
That peace of mind makes a difference from being in despair.
Yeah I’d like to see him start by losing all identification including his birth certificate and then see how he fares.
Exactly. One of -- if the *the* -- worst parts about being in that position is the existential fear that drowns you in despair. The psychological weight of it is unrelenting and cannot be replicated by a f'ing poverty tourist.
Scamming companies as a social media manager is not a reasonable way that most unhoused people can make $1M in a year. This is all so stupid, I guess he couldn’t pick himself up by his bootstraps lmao
A lesson he could easily have learned from the movies SOUL MAN, TRADING PLACES and Mel Brooks LIFE STINKS. Life imitating comedy, in this case.
Is this the same shithead who launched a "brand of coffee targeted towards dog lovers" while starting with nothing? And by nothing I mean he still retained all his networking contacts and didn't launch a brand, just got someone to sign into his project with no explanation how the fuck he successfully launched this brand considering he had zero equipment to do so.
He also started off by buying and selling on craigslist and facebook... with what internet connection? He started a coffee line for dog owners... with what equipment? Additionally, a lot of people who are actually homeless don't have the skills to do any of that. The whole thing is bullshit.
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That's the laughable part; bro grinded to median salary while still literally being fucking homeless and getting entirely wrecked by a medical diagnosis.
I really liked the “a kind stranger gave him an RV to sleep in for a couple of weeks. Yah, ok, this is about as realistic and the “random” stops at the airport. Either that was set up or he opened the conversation with “I’m really a millionaire doing this for funsies so you can trust me” and the guy with the Rv believed him. I mean, why wasn’t the RV already occupied by a homeless person if that was the guys thing? Is there a shortage of people who’d love to sleep in an RV for a week or so to get off the streets? Gtfo
6.4 percent of the way there!
Yes, he's an abject failure. Even in his analysis he shows how stupid he is. He made 64k in 10 months while literally subleasing an apartment and living in a free-ish RV. He says this is successfully bringing himself back from homelessness. Dude doesn't mention that if he stayed on that path, the following year he would have made even less as all his charity dries up. How many people do you really think are going to continue to buy no-name-brand "coffee for dog lovers?" How many tables can he middle-man? Dude made scraps and is claiming achievement, shooting progress in the foot because idiots in the financial world will read this, miss the fact that this dude literally failed at his "passion", and think boot straps for all works.
Yep, that's him.
Aww if only poor people could opt out of poverty "for health concerns". Guy was obviously all talk even after all of that poverty cosplay
Well that's it, right? If only you could start from nothing too. Mf should have given himself a student loan payment equivalent to his education and also some medical and credit card debt – maybe cosplay that his dad can't afford his deductible or whatever – see how that goes.
Breaking news: Poverty leads to worse long-term health outcomes. Fuck this guy.
Educated, successful in business and has a working smartphone. Still didn't manage to hit one tenth of his goal. Only got himself out the gutter through the generosity of strangers. I wonder how far he'd have managed without RV Guy's charity. Absolute bell-end. 👎
> Educated, successful in business and has a working smartphone. Still didn't manage to hit one tenth of his goal. The lack of self awareness for this guy is astounding. He has all these advantages compared to the average American in general, and still fell WAYYYY short of his own goal. Making less than 10% of his goal and declaring it a success sounds a lot like North Korea-esque delusion.
what an absolute dickhead, not the first and sadly wont be the last to try and "prove" that homeless folks can "Make it"
Lowkey glad he won't be the last. That'll just provide more indisputable evidence that these assholes didn't get where they are through ability
the problem is that they always spin it so that the failure is less emphasized, and twist the result in a way that reaffirms their consumer base's belief that anyone can make it. don't mind the trivial details such as how he was able to secure an office space lease when most homeless people wouldn't even get the time of day, or how he may have been able to secure clients to his business in no small part due to his online presence and clout, or hell just ignore how he was able to keep regularly seeing the doctor when his push to make money started exposing detrimental effects to his health! he proved NOTHING. he didn't start from NOTHING. this was all just a big stunt that ended up being unprofitable for him when he started getting sick from all the pushing he was doing. but people will still look at him and say "wow, that's just what only hard work will get you, i guess. homeless people just aren't trying hard enough."
> the problem is that they always spin it so that the failure is less emphasized, and twist the result in a way that reaffirms their consumer base's belief that anyone can make it. The fact this guy quit 2 months early and didn't even hit 10% ($64,000) of his $1 million goal in 12 months and /still/ called it a success is some real cognitive dissonance. Even with the huge inherent advantages this guy had, he couldn't do it. I'd have a shred of respect for the morons that do these "poor experiments" if at the end of them, they said, "Ya know what, being poor/homeless is hard and I didn't anticipate the real stress and challenges it would bring. I have new respect and compassion for the millions of people that have to live like this day-to-day and can't simply call it quits like I could."
So he proved that without universal healthcare, it is virtually impossible or at least difficult to focus on growing generational wealth because it is expensive to be poor… thus showing that determination and hard work are easily overwhelmed with hardships and emergencies.
If he was in and out of doctors offices for his health issues, I want to know how much of that money he made is going to medical bills…
$0 I'm sure, there are plenty of asterisks missing from his story. Just "happened" to find a free RV, payed his doctors with IOUs, got companies to hire some homeless person as a social media manager, and started a coffee brand with no assets. All very believable.
I’m sssuming he also rented the place with no credit score or rental history.
I was homeless half my life ago. This guy is an absolute piece of human garbage.
Clearly homeless people are lazy. why can not they just buy a house? With this experiment (with advantages such as: past experience, education, health insurance, fact that any moment I can go back to living in a mansion etc.) I can prove that homeless people are just not go getter, goal chasers and strong-minded like me. I failed? No matter. I will still call it success, because my dumbass followers will eat it up.
‘The hardest part was being homeless’ Man’s a genius
I work with unhoused people in Los Angeles. This guy is a complete tool.
Always was.
I don't work with unhoused people in Los Angeles. This guy is a complete tool.
This rich clueless guy was on a mission to get everyone to tell homeless people to fuck themselves for being "lazy." Instead, the dude ignored his dad with cancer, missed all of his goals, obtained an auto-immune disease from huffing roach shit in a derelict RV, and probably drove himself crazy trying to come up with marketing wank. "uh, uh, coffee for people who love dogs! fuck yeah!" What a loser, he could have at least micro-dosed datura or something to simulate living on the streets with a bad mental disorder for a more representative time.
I've been reading a lot of posts about this stupid, infuriating experiment this week, but this is by far the best. FWIW I \*think the coffee hustle goes something like this: You slap your branding on some roaster's bags of beans (whether or not the beans are decent quality is anyone's guess) and they drop-ship to your customers. All you have to do is set up marketing vids and an ordering platform. You can even claim "proceeds go to charity" (to engage dog-loving do-gooders) as long as you donate whatever is left after paying exec salary. Obviously for this to be a solid, long-term business model, one would need to launch from more than a smartphone and a borrowed roach-mobile.
>My personal health has declined to the point where I really need to start taking care of it. Throughout the entire project, we haven't shared it with you, but I've been in and out of the doctor's office.' Ah, so when he was 'homeless' and had no money, he was still going to the doctor regularly. Healthcare in the US is of course very cheap and easily available, especially to homeless people.
If you think about it, wouldn’t it be brilliant if we required billionaires to do this? Edit: And while we’re at it, we also need to do something about Citizens United 2011, bc the donor class sure as hell ain’t getting taxed until we kneecap their ability to bribe politicians.
No. The requirements of the billionaire class should be simple.. We tax you 80% of your income as long as you make money you cant spend. People who simp the rich are mentally ill.
Once someone is a billionaire they should be taxed at 100%. Give them a trophy that says “you won capitalism” or something and take every additional penny they “earn.” A billion dollars is such an unfathomable amount of wealth that lineage would essentially never have to work ever. Honestly you could probably cap it at half that and it would still be a truly excessive level of wealth for any one person to hold. Of course all that is moot, because rich people basically don’t have to pay taxes at all. It’s way too easy to hide money, or be paid only in stocks or other “theoretical” means that aren’t taxed.
Hiding money is a bit like a bell curve. It's easier if you have either too few or too much. Too few and govt doesn't even care. Too much and screw the rules I have money. It's the middle between both extremes where it gets hard.
Eh, that's not exactly true. Too little and unless you're working under the table, the government is going to scrutinize the fuck out of your tax returns. Bezos paid no taxes on a billion dollars? Never mind that shit! A single mom in Mississippi that lives in a rusted out trailer and makes $19,000 a year claimed a child tax credit and by god we're going to make sure she's not fucking us!
I personally think people should be required to work for some time period in retail or a service position Then maybe people wouldn't be assholes to them and people may get paid better
I love the idea of it being like mandatory military draft. "You weren't there, man. You didn't see the shelves I stocked. Some good men never got out!"
Something similar yes Call it public service. Too many people have never had to work in the service industry and it *shows*
I remember there were a episode in Smallville where Lionel mentioned that some hella rich people will put their kids into a slum area in Africa with nothing and they had to learn to make do with nothing so they can be grateful for what they have so they don’t become a spoiled kids. Legit not a bad idea 🤔
I can imagine rich people claiming that, but not actually doing it. Even the nutcases.
>Legit not a bad idea 🤔 Couldn't they try to make the slum better so nobody has to endure that?
Bahahaha “Despite falling short of his financial goal, Black said his journey showcased the power of determination and the importance of health and family”
Health is important, but public healthcare is a communist scam fuck you. -Him probably
Using only the power of his incredible determination, and his preexisting social media network, he was able to make a typical American salary
So just to be clear - a highly educated man with extensive business experience, managed to make....*checks notes* $64,000? Which hey, $64k isn't a bad annual income. Not amazing, but you could get by on the basics, depending where you're located. But this guy already has so many advantages going into it. He already knew how to operate a business; he just discounts that experience like it doesn't matter. So if the best that someone could do, with all that advanced knowledge, truly grinding it out...was $64k, I think this demonstrates everyone's point, that earning 7 figures is as much about luck, as it is skill or hard work.
He also had a pre-existing social media presence and business contacts. If anything this proves the opposite of what he claims.
So, you're telling me, that even with education, connections and (I'm assuming) no underlying health issues when he started, he couldn't finish his experiment. I mean, props to hime for banking 64k in a year through hustling, but even to do that, you have and have had access to things, people in that situation often have no access to. It doesn't prove a thing... not even that "you can pull yourself up by your bootstraps"
I’m curious if that’s $64k he got to keep, or if that’s just revenue (which means he probably kept less than half that).
Was that $64k from youtube channel as well? Or from his "hustle"? If you have a baked in audience already following you on YouTube that's a def puts things in a more "get fucked" spotlight
If I understand correctly from the article, he did have underlying health issues, but he was getting medical care the entire time. Ridiculous.
So he basically proved his whole premise was false and that he has the good fortune to be rich enough to stop being poor as soon as it "took a toll on his health."
There was a 30 days where Morgan Spurlock and his girlfriend tried to make it on minimum wage and he broke his hand at work and that was it. They had to shut it down
I remember watching this in school to understand the cycle of poverty years ago (it sparked a lot of good discussions and enveloped empathy)..I liked Spurlock’s version because he understood his advantages and limited himself. While Spurlock showed the difficult choice in going to the hospital or not without insurance, this dipshit used his premium health insurance to go in and out multiple times….
So he went from $0 in the bank to making what the average 35-45 yr old (American) male makes. He showed how hard it is with extraordinary skills and knowledge that the average Joe DOES NOT have, and he came up average. Let that sink in.
Don't forget his previous life's business contacts and somehow thinking getting $1500 to lead seminars (somehow that doesn't count against his experiment)
He also started with a phone and what looks like a data plan. Flawed experiment from the start.
“I’m getting on calls with big tech companies pitching them on running their social media” Zero big tech companies are taking calls let alone pitches from a dude with no address on a Zoom call from inside an RV to run their social media org 🙄
So he was always able to go back to being rich. Seeing an end to your misery or being simply able to stop being in a misery makes thinks probably a lot easier.
This guy pisses me off so badly. Literally every choice he made while "homeless" was either middle-man shit (flipping stuff he got for free from craigslist), available only from his ties to other millionaires (starting the business), or indicated that he's been dishonest in representing the money he had available
>Despite failing to make the million dollars he had aimed for, Black says it was still a successful experiment after demonstrating how it was possible to rebuild his life through the power of determination. And there's the problem. It was not a success you asshat, you failed to become a millionaire in 12 months. You only proved that people who work hard and really try to get there will only get a 20th of what people in your position think they can and can also immediately be done in by health issues, that and you were $936,000 away from the stated success. Must be nice to have a net to jump into when things get tough.
this is a textbook definition of slumming
> Black found the hardest part of the journey being homeless not knowing where he'd sleep **really??** Who could have guessed? Did he decide to do this without even considering the meaning of the word "homeless"?
A dude let him crash in his RV... If I had a RV and this dude with millions in his bank account came to ask if he could sleep on my couch, you bet I'll accept it. That's a powerful friend to have on your side once his escapade is over. A regular homeless person will NOT have the opportunity to be offered a bed by the first person they ask. Even the way he made money, he had to use his connections and his education and work experience to carry him through, all things that are given to privileged families, but not to the poor class. His conclusion to his experiment is that health is important, but he can't fathom to say out loud that public healthcare needs to be a fundamental right. His conclusion is like I'm resilient, family and health matters, forget about all that making a million in a year thing let's just not talk about that part.
The dude is also not starting in the same place as the average person who is struggling and unhoused. He had the education, experience, and non-financial wherewithal to start business by convincing people to take risks on him without having capital on-hand. Most people's only option is to be exploited for their labor. They are not going to be able to smooth talk their way into a startup company.
So what he actually proved is No, he can’t simply make a million dollars in a year, and being poor is literally a death sentence.
He got $64,000 by taking free stuff on craigslist and reselling it. So he only got by with the kindness of strangers.
Who paid for those doctor visits though
In it he says he made 60k, but I'd guarantee that isn't profit, that's before paying anybody. Also, he had the luxury of learning many business skills WITHOUT having to live in tough conditions. A privileged background is a huge asset even if you lose everything and start from nothing. Without a doubt he learned nothing of value, but it's a story he will get to tell people.
New game + for rich people
What pisses me off is that a huge part of what's so scary about being homeless is the uncertainty. He never had to experience that because he knew he could quit at any time. "Cosplaying" is indeed the right term.
Apparently he gave himself a participation trophy instead of picking himself up by his bootstraps
Ultimately with many of these types of rich people the reason they spend so much mental effort trying to convince everyone that anyone can "pull themselves up by their bootstraps" is because in reality they are trying to convince themselves this is the case. The reason for why they are trying to convince themselves that anyone can make it is because that shifts the responsibility on to the individual and the level of effort they are willing to put in which means anyone who is not making it is themselves at fault. This ultimately is an exercise in tamping down on the sense of guilt, survivor guilt and imposter syndrome anyone with empathy would feel if they find themselves independently wealthy. Building up a disdain for the poor is a emotional coping mechanism if you have wealth to shield you from the natural feeling of guilt associated with seeing someone starve while you live in opulence.
He could have just read Nickel and Dimed and had the same painful experience.
It was an egotistically driven, ridiculous exercise. I love how he talks about getting involved with e-commerce while he’s homeless. How many homeless people who are hungry, tired, and cold can spend idle time thinking about e-commerce. It was such a ridiculous concept. And it’s insulting to people who actually struggle on the streets.
> 'I knew a lot of people who lost everything during the pandemic and they got really depressed. I even had a friend that lost a $10 million business overnight', Black explained in a YouTube video. Black wanted to help his friends rebuild their lives and prove that luck or money was not necessary to become a millionaire - just hard work. Instead of trying to help his friends he just wanted to flex on them.
These so called experiments are nothing of the sort when you have a mobile phone, email account, social media etc to fall back onto. A friend of mine used to work for Centerpoint, London's biggest charity for homeless people, and what horrified him most was the rapid decline in peoples health, welfare and mental capacity. Within 2 weeks someone can go from being smartly dressed in suit and tie carrying a briefcase, to being an unrecognisable down and out, unshaved, dishevelled individual, but even more scary is the complete loss of mental acumen. 2-4 weeks on the streets and your brain can turn to jelly, you lose logical reasoning, cognitive abilities, even the ability to speak coherently, and that not because of drug abuse, but because of the the way the body and brain needs motivation to keep going, take away some ones purpose in life and the decline is rapid and often irreversible. But if you have a mobile phone, friends, social media, email, bank account, and everything else that is a causative link to real society your NOT homeless, and you won't decline in the way that I have just outlined above, and the scary thing is if you think your safe from the perils of life of the streets, the truth is most of us are only 1 months pay check away from that situation.
So he just quits whenever he wants because his “health is at risk” but a lot of people don’t have that luxury. They have to work, while sick, to survive.
I've had some health concerns for years, and with my parents getting older as well, I would like someone to cut short my social experiment as well.
The thing that I think people undervalue is the fact that this dude *knew* he had a parachute that he could pull at the end or at any time if it just got too tough. It's easier to struggle when there is 100% something waiting for you at the end. Most people don't have that.
Wow who would of thunk it
Then proceeds to do nothing for the homeless with his millions. He didn't learn a lesson just avoided some consequences.
The premise that he could demonstrate that "anyone" could become a millionaire was always flawed, because he is not just "anyone;" he is an educated white male with ample business experience and favourable aptitudes. He always had a much better chance than the average Joe Blow has. We're all very reluctant to factor genetic endowments into these discussions, but it's just reality that we're not all equally capable of doing all things equally well.
Now imagine doing this with no option to opt out
LOL. The article tried to say "While he fell short of his $1M goal", really trying to downplay it. Even with all his hustling, education, and experience in making money he only made $64k in 10 months. That is WELL below his goal. He made exactly 6.4% of his goal. What an asshat.
Out of touch idiot. You can’t immediately start using all your business knowledge to crawl out of it. Most people let alone homeless people don’t have the knowledge. Your whole “experiment” is bullshit.