 From Palo Alto, California, it's The Cube, covering the conference board's sixth annual Innovation Masterclass. Hey, welcome back, everybody. Jeff Frick here with The Cube. We're at the Innovation Masterclass. It's put on by the conference board. We're here at Xerox PARC, one of the original kind of innovation centers here in Silicon Valley. Tremendous history. If you don't know the history of Xerox PARC, go get a book and do some reading. And we're excited to have our next guest because there's a lot to talk about tech, but really not enough talk about people and where the people play in this whole thing. And as we're seeing more and more, especially in downtown San Francisco, kind of an assumption of responsibility by tech companies to use some of the monies that they're making to invest back in the community. And one of the big problems in San Francisco, if you've been there lately, is homelessness. I mean, there's people all over the streets, there's tent cities, and it's a problem. And it's great to have our next guest who's actually doing something about it, small discrete steps that are really changing people's lives. I'm excited to have him. He's Kevin Adler, the founder and CEO of Miracle Messages. Kevin, great to meet you. Yeah, great to meet you too, Jeff. Yeah, so before we did this, doing a little background review, I obviously stumbled across your TED talk. It was a really compelling story. So I wonder, A, for the people, what is Miracle Messages all about? And then how did it start? How did you start this journey? Yeah, so Miracle Messages, we help people experiencing homelessness, reconnect to their loved ones, and in the process, help us as their neighbors reconnect with them. And we're really tackling what we've come to call the relational poverty on the streets. That a lot of people that we walk by every day, sure they don't have housing, but their level of disconnection and isolation is mind-boggling when you actually find out about it. So I started it four years ago. I had an uncle who was homeless for about 30 years, Uncle Mark. And I never saw him as a homeless man. He was just a beloved uncle, remembered every birthday, guest of honor, Thanksgiving, Christmas. And he was in the neighborhood. He just didn't have a home. He was in Santa Cruz. He suffered from schizophrenia. And when he was on his meds, he was good. And then he'd do some disruptive and get kicked out of a halfway house. And we wouldn't hear from him for six months or a year. So after he passed away, I was with my dad and not far from here visiting his grave site in Santa Cruz. And I was having a conversation with my dad of the significance of having a commemorative plot for Uncle Mark. Said, you know, he meant something to us, like this is his legacy. Said, that's nice, but I'm gonna go back in the car, pull out my smartphone, and see status updates from every friend, acquaintance I've ever met. And I'm gonna learn more about their stories on Facebook with a quick scroll than I will about at the grave site of my Uncle Mark. So I'm actually a Christian, I have a faith background. And I asked this question, well, how would Jesus use a smartphone? How would Jesus use a GoPro camera? Cause I didn't think it was gonna be like surfing pigs on, you know, surfboards. And I started a side project where homeless volunteers like my Uncle Mark wore GoPro cameras around their chests. And I invited them to narrate those experiences. And I was shocked, shocked by what I saw. And I won't regale you with stories right now, but I heard over and over again, people say, I never realized I was homeless when I lost my housing, only when I lost my family and friends. Right, right. And so that led me to say, you know, if that's true, I can just walk down the street and go up to every person I see and say, do you have any family or friends you'd like to reconnect with? And I did that in Market Street in San Francisco four years ago, met a man named Jeffrey. He hadn't seen his family in 22 years, recorded a video on the spot to his niece and nephew, go home that night, posted the video in a Facebook group connected to his hometown. And within one hour, the video was shared hundreds of times, makes the local news that night. Classmates start commenting, hey, I went to high school with this guy, I work in construction, does he need a job? I work at the mayor's office, does he need healthcare? His sister gets tagged, we talk the next day, it turns out that Jeffrey had been a missing person for 12 years. And that's when I quit my job and started doing this work full time. Right, phenomenal. I mean, there's so many great aspects to this story. One of the ones that you talked about in your TED talk that I found interesting was, there was really just the psychology of people's reaction to homeless people in the streets and the fact that once they become homeless in our minds, that we really see through them, which I guess is a defense mechanism to some point because when there's just so many and you brought up that it's not the condition that they don't have a place to sleep at night, but it's really that they become disassociated with everything. Yeah, so I mean, your introduction to me, if you had said, hey, there's this guy, there's no TED talk, there's nothing else. He's a housed person. Let's hear what he has to say. Like, what would I talk? I would, you know, but you, that's what we do every single day with people experiencing homelessness. So we define them by their lack of one physical need. And sure, they need it, but it presumes that's all there is to being human, not the higher order needs of belonging, love, self-actualization. And some of the research has found that the part of the brain that activates when we see a person compared to an inanimate object does not respond when we see a person who's experiencing homelessness. And in one experiment in New York, they had members of a person's very own family, like mom and dad, dress up to look homeless on the streets. Not a single person recognized their own member of their own family as they walk by. Yeah, it's crazy. It's such a big problem. And there's so many kind of little steps that people are trying to do. You know, there's people that walk around with peanut butter and jelly sandwiches that we see on social media. There's a couple guys that walk around with scissors and a comb and just give haircuts. These little tiny bits of humanization is probably the best way to describe it. It makes such a difference to these people. And I was amazed at your website. 80% of the people that get reconnected with their family, it's a positive reconnection. That is phenomenal, because I would have imagined it's much less than that. Every time we reconnect someone, we're blown away at the lived examples of forgiveness, reconciliation, you know, in every reunion, every message we record from a person experiencing homelessness, we have four or five messages from families reaching out to us saying, hey, I haven't seen my relative in 15 years, 20 years. The average time disconnected of our clients is 20 years. So what I've been doing now is, once you see it like this, you walk down the street, you see someone on the streets, you're like, that's someone's son or daughter. That's someone's brother or sister. It's not to say that families sometimes aren't the problem. You know, half of the youth in San Francisco that are homeless, LGBTQ, right? But it's to say that everyone, someone, somebody that we shouldn't be this disconnected as people and this age of hyperconnectivity and let's have these courageous conversations to try to bring people back into the fold. Right, so I'm just curious. It's a great talk by Jeff Bezos at Amazon talking about some of the homeless situations in Seattle. And he talks about, you know, there's a lot of- He's a wealthy guy, right? He's got a few bucks. He's got a few bucks. Yeah, just a few bucks. But he talks about, you know, there's different kind of classes of homelessness. We tend to think of them all as the same, but, you know, he talks about, you know, young families that aren't necessarily the same as people that have, you know, some serious psychological problems and you talked about the youth. So there's all kind of these sub-segments inside the homeless situation as well. Where do you find in what you offer, you have the most success. What is kind of the homeless sub-population that you find, you know, reconnecting them with their history, their family, their loved ones, their friends has the most benefit, the most impact? That's a great question. You know, we've, our sweet spot right now, we've done 175 reunions. And how many films have you put out? Films in terms of recording the messages. Yeah, to get to 175. 175, yeah, 175 reunions. We have recorded just north of about 600 messages. And not all of them are video messages. So we have a hotline, 1-800-MISS-U, calls that number, they can, we gather the information over the phone, we have paper form. So 600 messages recorded about 300, 350 delivered and then half of them lead to a reunion. You know, a sweet spot I'd say it's we, the average time disconnected of our clients is 20 years and the average age is 50 and they tend to be individuals isolated by their homelessness. So these are folks, you know, for decades who have had the shame, the embarrassment, might not have the highest level of digital literacy, you know, maybe outside of any other service provider, you know, not going to the shelter every night, not working with a case worker, social worker. And we say, hey, you know, we're not trying to push anything on you, but do you have any family or friends you'd like to reconnect with? That opens up a sense of possibility that was kind of dormant otherwise. But then we also go at the other end of the spectrum where we have folks who are maybe in an SRO, a single room occupancy, getting on their feed through a drug rehab program. And now's the point, you know, that they're saying, hey, I'm stably housed. I feel good. I don't need anything from anyone. Now's the time to rebuild that community and that trust from the loved ones, yeah. Well, Kevin, it's such a great story. You're speaking here later today. I think so. I believe so. I'm saying for good, which is good because there's so much, you know, there's a lot of negative tech press these days. So great for you. So how do people get involved if they want to, they want to contribute time or money, resources, you know, definitely get a plug in there. So we, yeah, should we have, oh, now or later? Right now. Yeah, let them know. No time like the present. So we have 1,200 volunteer digital detectives. These are people who use social media for social good, search for the loved ones online, find them, deliver the messages. So people can join that. They can join us for a street walk or a dinner where they go around offering miracle messages. And if they're interested, they can go to our website miraclemessages.org and then sign up to get involved. And we just released these t-shirts. Pretty cool. It says everyone is someone, somebody. I'm not a stylish man, but I wear that shirt and people are like, that's a great shirt. I'm like, wow. And this is like a volunteer shirt. Okay, cool. I'm in business. I'm putting it on before your thing. You know, I have maybe an image of it. I should have. I should have. All right, Kevin Wall, again, congratulations to you and doing good work. Thanks brother. Super fulfilling every single time you match somebody. No, it's great. Yeah, check out our videos. Yep. All right, he's Kevin. I'm Jeff. We're going to get teary if we don't get off the air soon. So I'm going to let it go from here. We're at the Palo Alto Xerox Park. Really the head, the beginning of the innovation in a lot of ways in the computer industry. The conference board, thanks for hosting us here at the innovation masterclass. Thanks for watching. We'll see you next time.