Finding Happy: From Hollywood to Homelessness Solutions with Peter Samuelson

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Welcome to the TeacherCast Educational Network, coming to you from the TeacherCast studios since 2011. Join us each week as we bring you the latest educational news, ed tech updates and hottest interviews with today's most influential leaders in education. And now for your host, Jeff Bradbury.

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Hello everybody and welcome to the Jeff Bradbury Show, a podcast that's helping you amplify your impact on this world. On today's episode, we're gonna be talking to somebody who has certainly been creating an amazing presence, not only in the work that he's doing in the film industry, but also in his charities to support people who are homeless and also students who are looking to get an advantage going into their college years. He's also the author of a brand new book called Finding Happy,

a user's guide to your life with lessons from mine. Stick around. We have a fantastic program for you guys. And I want to say one more time, thank you guys for joining us today. This is the first time you're listening to the episode. You can find out all of our shows over on teachercast.net slash podcast. And of course we're available on Apple podcast, Spotify. And our video is going to be found over on our YouTube channel at teachercast.net slash YouTube. Our program today is sponsored by my new book, Impact Standards. If you are out

there in an education field looking to make an impact in your classroom. Check out our new book at teachercast.net slash standards today. My guest today has had an amazing career and an amazing life. He's the founder of seven nonprofits. He has executive produced over 25 motion pictures, including Arlington road, revenge of the nerds, the libertine and stormbreaker. And he is the author of an amazing book called finding happy a user's guide.

to your life with lessons from mine. It is an honor and a privilege to bring on today. Mr. Peter Samuelson. Peter, welcome to the show. Thank you so much for joining us today. I am excited to have you on. You have been an inspiration to so many people worldwide, not only through your work in the film industry, through the work in your philanthropies, but your work really in education. You have been an educator.

So happy to be here.

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of educators. And I'm excited to share today a little bit about the book, share your story. And before we get into all of that stuff, talk to us a little bit about who Peter Samuelson is when you introduce yourself. How do you describe who you are?

I usually use a anecdote, which is the first pivot really in my life, which was that in 10th grade, I had an English teacher called Mr. Lund. I'm sure he had a first name, or maybe his first name was Mr. Certainly we were only allowed to call him Mr. And he said, see me after school, Samuelson. And I did.

which is never a good thing. And he said, now, I remember he poked me like this. And he said, now listen, if you work about twice as hard, and if I help you and I'll tutor you, you can get into a really good university. And I said, I'm absolutely certain I can't. And I kind of laughed. And he said, why, why do you laugh? And I said, well,

because no one in my entire family has ever been to university or college. And in fact, my dad left school at 14. So how's that going to work? And he said, it'll be even better then because you'll be the first one. And the interesting thing kind of pedagogically is that I was the first one. I got a full ride scholarship into Emmanuel College, Cambridge, back in the UK. And

Since then, even though I was first in the family to ever go to uni, I believe every single subsequent 18-year-old has gone on to college. So what one sees there is that if you pivot one person, it's kind of like ripples on a pond. you know, the rest of my life has been greatly influenced by that, the power of a mentor.

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the power of a really fine teacher. And I revere his memory. I try and say his name in every podcast.

You know, we recently did a show all about mentorship and the relationships that you can have with those who are coming up behind you. And that has been definitely a pillar in your career. Talk to us a little bit about what that moment was like, what was your life like before you met your mentor and making that decision for yourself that you are going to go out and you are going to hit college and you are going to try to

Do something with yourself in this world.

Well, let's do macro and then swoop down into the book. So I believe to be 17 or 18 years old or 15 years old or 25 years old or 30 years old right now is a terribly perplexing, confusing, challenging thing. And one of my charities, charity number three,

First Star, you can see it on the web, firststar.org. So what we do is we house, educate and encourage high school aged foster kids. So by definition, kids who've been abused or neglected, and we partner with great big universities. And for a four year period, we have them there at the university and we give them a curriculum that's about one third academics, because you're not gonna go to college if you don't.

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you know, have your SAT or your ACT. Second, third, equally important, life skills, know, financial literacy and sex ed and all this kind of stuff where foster kids get left behind. And then the last third is look to your left, look to your right. These are your new brothers and sisters. And by the end of the four year period, they are so closely bonded. It is a family.

and then through our alumni program, they stay completely connected. So I realized a couple of years ago that I've mentored literally hundreds of teenagers, some a little bit older as well, but mostly teenagers. And I realized I kind of have pattern recognition on the two dozen, three dozen things that bother them.

that they're challenged by. And there may be a different blend, but it's off the same list. So I thought, well, maybe those are my chapter headings. And I could actually, you know, create more ripples on the pond by doing the mentoring, not just one-on-one, but arguably one on many. what it became is this handy dandy thing, which is, you know, it's a paperback.

ebook, it's an audio book and so on and so forth. And what you see there, those words, I analyzed after I wrote it, the prevalence of topics. And the more prevalent they were, the bigger I made the font for the cover. But I also have the smaller words, which are, you know, things that are, they may be less prevalent.

but they are still very, very, very important to young adults. We nearly called it what I know now that I wish I knew when I was 18. And what happened while I was writing it is I realized as a film producer, I've had so many adventures. I've had so many occasions where something completely bonkers, mad, crazy has happened to me.

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or hysterically funny or scary as all heck. And I realized I can use those anecdotes to effectively illustrate the book. So there's a chapter that's called, what is a good risk? What is a bad risk? How can you tell the difference? This is incredibly important, especially for boys and young men in their upper teens and early twenties.

because they have many opportunities, as did I, to kill themselves by accident, but they don't have the front part of the brain, the prefrontal lobe, fully developed yet, which is the chess game of life. So they have to process risk on the back of the brain, the amygdala, which is just pure A or B, fight or flight. So there's a whole chapter about that, but I used...

examples where I look back on them now and I think I'm just so lucky, pure happenstance that I didn't die trying to rescue that kitten down a pipe duct. I could well have died. No one knew I was there. It was three o'clock in the morning. I was five floors down from the little hatchway in the bathroom of this big hotel in Marrakesh, Morocco. And when I realized

that the kitten had escaped and I was now at the bottom of the pipe duct and I didn't have the upper body strength to climb back up. I thought, well, I may die here actually. So, I mean, that's just as one of dozens and hundreds of examples. So that's what the book is. I'm so delighted and honored that so many teachers and ministers and imams and rabbis and

you know, social studies, counselors, and so forth, and other mentors have sort of reckoned on the book as something that they can incorporate into their work and that it will be an uplift. Every chapter ends with points for reflection, and I haven't called them homework, but sort of things you can do now, which will further explicate this and bring it into your life.

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you, the reader. And it's really designed also to be read out of order. You go to the table of contents, you find the thing, I'm being bullied. What do I do? Well, there's a whole chapter on that. There's a whole chapter, how to be arrested without being killed. Should I go to college? Where is the best place to find love and someone to love me?

How do I get a mentor? You know, it's not an endless list. It's like two dozen topics, but they all seem to sit on the brains of our young adults and we better help them because post-COVID, COVID was a terrible kick in the head because it de-socialized. It took away peer support and mentor support to a great degree from our young adults.

And we've been building back ever since, but it's not back to 100%. And I think on top of that, regardless of where you are on the political spectrum, every young adult is aware this is a horrible time when no matter what you believe, half the country doesn't agree with you. So what is that? know, what is our country when it's so polarized and what is democracy and how is this all going to work out? And what about climate change?

you know, dare I ever have children of my own and all that kind of thing. It's not a time of despair because young people gratifyingly tend to be very optimistic, but it's a time where we cannot allow them to only have peer support. Of course they need peer support, but you don't want on some of these more sophisticated challenges, you don't want the blind leading the blind. You actually, you're much better off if someone who knows what they're talking about.

steams in. So I've built it really with a teaching environment in mind and that's what it is. It's so gratifying on Bulk Books is a online site where schools and universities buy, you know, churches and mosques and synagogues and all the rest of it, temples. It's where they buy books in quantities of more than 25 with free shipping and no sales tax mostly.

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We're number one for the month of June. So I think teachers who are going to use it as part of curriculum are beginning to stock up for the fall semester or term. And I'm dying to get even more feedback. I'm already getting individual feedback. The publisher

Simon and Schuster Regalo thought I was mad to put my email address in the back of the book. And I compromised by kind of hiding it. You actually have to read the book in order to find the email. But I'm starting to get dozens and dozens and dozens, it must be hundreds now, of individual emails saying, you helped me, but what about this? And I very much cherish that feedback loop. We're gonna go to a second printing and I'm gonna even do some revisions.

based on some of the feedback, but I think, essentially, I think it works. It's also kind of the closest I'll ever get to an autobiography because it really is stuff that has happened to me. The life of a film producer is a very energized, high-achieving, incredibly threatened, constantly insecure, you know, you're only as good as your last credit. Will I ever make another film? And so forth.

A lot of it is just a kind of amplified version of what every young adult faces. And I started in film very, very young and I was very fortunate, but it didn't all go my way. And as they say in Silicon Valley, you know, when a venture capitalist interviews a would-be entrepreneur who wants an investment, they tend not to ask, tell me about your...

great successes in the past. They want to know where did you fail and what did you learn from it? And I think one of my functions in the book is to help young people to address failure as part of the interstate freeway towards success. And I say in the book, you can sit cross-legged in the dark in your life. Imagine it, it's like an envelope.

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and you're sitting there holding a pencil and it's dark and you don't know where the edges of the envelope are, you can either just sit there and make nothing out of yourself or you can poke away in one direction or another with the pencil and absolutely every so often the pencil point will go through the edge and you will say, whoops, I guess I will never be a concert pianist. But you have the great privilege in your young years

of pulling back the pencil and exploring other directions. And I never, know, because I'm a filmmaker, I meet a lot of young adults who say to me, I want to be a famous actor, I want to be a famous director, so on and so forth. I never say, you realize the odds are just absurdly long, multiple against you. The chances are slim, not none, but slim.

What I say is that's fantastic, but if you want to be a famous actor, you must have a plan B. And there's a whole chapter on how do you find your plan B, which I would define as you can definitely achieve it and you will earn enough money to feed yourself, feed your family and have a roof over your head and get your kids educated. I think there are many ways just using acting as the example. Amateur theatrical in the town hall.

on a Saturday afternoon is proper acting. You can play Lady Macbeth if you want or whatever else is going on there. It is proper acting. You can definitely do it. It has value. And sure, you may strike it lucky and end up being cast in some mega Netflix mini series. That'd be brilliant, but you must have a plan B.

book is amazing. And it is broken down into 52 different chapters. And of course, we're going to make sure that we have the links to everything. It's called finding happy a user's guide to your life with lessons from mine. And I'm curious, Peter, when you were finished reading it, when you were finished writing it, I should say, did you learn any additional lessons once you went back through your life? Once you went back through all of your readings, when you had a chance to reflect through it? Was there anything that you learned from your own writing?

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It was mostly reaffirming of what had been lodged in the back of my mind over many decades. The biggest revelation for me was I remembered one thing, which led me to remember another thing. And one of the functions of the book is that, yes, I had forgotten that when I worked on the Return of the Pink Panther, one of the parts of my job was to go around the set.

And if anyone was wearing the color green at 6.30 in the morning, part of my job was to say, Harry, can you go to wardrobe and change your socks or your shirt? Because you know Peter Sellers, our star, will not work if anyone is wearing the color green. So I had forgotten that, but I remembered it because I was thinking about other crazy stuff that happened on that film. And that led me to remember, oh, yeah, that was that thing with the green issue with Peter.

What was it like making your first movie? How did the producer hat come about?

Well, I didn't obviously produce at the beginning of my career. I started weirdly and by great luck, age 17 and a half. When you get yourself into Cambridge University, they do a really excellent thing, which is they won't let you go the following fall. Well, actually it is the following fall, but it's 10 months away. It's almost a full year away because you get the telegram in January.

but you can't go till October, which means that you have to ask yourself, how am I gonna productively use 10 months of my life? I was introduced to an American producer, the partner of Steve McQueen, the actor, who was coming to Le Mans, France to make a motor racing film with Steve. And he said, tell me about you.

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And one of the things I said is I'm bilingual English-French. I spent a lot of my life in France. I can speak French. He said, well, that's fantastic because I need a French-English interpreter. You're hired. And I found myself sort of almost overnight in my little pop-up car in Le Mans, France. And I was there 10 months. And it was a baptism by fire. I didn't know it at the time.

but it was a hugely dysfunctional film in the sense that there was never really a script because Steve McQueen didn't care about the script. He only cared about the motor racing footage. And the result is a film that is in a class by itself because we didn't, there were no computers. So we did all this amazing 200 miles an hour, car A to car B to car C stuff live.

with cameras strapped onto the cars in Le Mans and they were the big cameras with 35 millimeter Eastman color film going through them. So I learned an enormous amount because people kept getting fired and then I would get promoted. It was in some sense deeply scary. One of the things that happened about halfway through is that there was a terrible crash and

actually couldn't get out of the car and it took the fire engine too long through poor planning to get to him and he lost his legs in the crash. And so what did they do? They said, all right, well, so they fired the track safety guy and they said, well, who have we got that speaks both languages? Because a lot of this has to do with communicating on walkie talkie and all the rest of it.

megaphones and so they said, Oh, Peter, let's let's make him head of track safety. I remember when my father came down to visit and realized that I age at 18 at that point was responsible for track safety with cars driving at 200 miles an hour and all of that. He went and shouted at the producer and said, he's a child. Someone's going to die. What are you doing? And the producer said, no, no.

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He's the most sensible we could possibly have. And so I kind of learned by being thrown in the deep end, not necessarily a good thing, but you as a film producer, you're doing something that is maximally entrepreneurial. Every film is different, but it's kind of the same toolkit. And then over on the nonprofit side, I realized all those years ago, my toolkit of being a film producer.

You know, what is the story? How do I pitch this? Where's the money going to come from? How do I crew this? It's the same toolkit to start a charity. And so I started a little bit kind of Don Quixote, but, you know, seven of them have worked out and a couple didn't. Can I dare to try to attack this huge social challenge?

which apparently has not been cracked before, you know, and who am I? Well, I'm someone who won't give up and who goes for the, you know, the most powerful possible partners and puts together the A-Team and raises the money and all of that. So the Starlight Children's Foundation, where we've raised now all these years later and spent through all of our Starlights, Starlight is in Australia, Canada, the...

United States and the United Kingdom. We're up to about $1.2 billion to date and hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of thousands of seriously ill children. Really simple. Seriously ill children are sad. What can we do to make them happy? Seriously ill children are often in pain. What can we do to distract them from their pain? Not instead of, but to greatly reduce the amount of analgesia, pain medicine.

by distracting them with happy things. How can we heal their family, their siblings and their mom and dad by a joint activity that will allow them to re-bomb the way families should be? In a time of stress when your kid is dying in a hospital bed, you don't pay a lot of attention to the rest of your family or to your spouse. This is very helpful. So...

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You know, I did that and it worked and it made a huge demonstrable, measurable, measured difference. And then I was introduced to Steven Spielberg and he said to me, you know, there's this new thing called the internet and we could link together seriously ill kids in hospital beds at great distances and they could see each other and they could interact and play games and.

you know, be in a three-dimensional space and have an avatar and so on and so forth. And we did that and that was Star Bright. So you get the sense of the children's rhyme, starlight, starbright, first star I see tonight. The third one, first star, I realized foster kids don't go to college. But that's crazy because if anybody would need and benefit going to college, it would be a kid with no functional family.

living with strangers who feels that nobody loves them. And furthermore, age 18 generally, they're kicked out. You know, here's your stuff in the trash bag. Have a nice life. Let us know how it goes. I don't know any 18 year old, including me, who was fully an adult at 18. I think you're lucky if a kid is fully functional and can take care of themselves and find success and safety and.

sustainability in their mid to late 20s. So the book is about my charities. There's all the other ones as well. EDA, Everyone Deserves a Roof, E-D-A-R, edar.org, a single user homeless shelter on four wheels that is massively more affordable than a nice fluffy bed in an apartment.

But we will never, given the economics of it, ever have taxpayer will to house the nation's million and a half unhoused people. And surely on a 10 scale, if an old lady, as I met, living in a large cardboard box on a rainy night, if that's a zero and if, you know, the nice fluffy bed in an apartment, if that's a 10, well, EADAR is

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a five, but it's also a hell of a lot less expensive than the nice fluffy bed. And we've got them all over the place, hundreds and hundreds of them all over Skid Row here in LA and so forth. So, I mean, I just keep plonking away at it. And then I realized if your life is made, if your legacy is measurable, not just by who you helped, but I realize now because some of the people I helped ages ago are now helping other people.

It's kind of a knock on, it's like ripples on a pond. And I realized that the book, I can do yet more of it. All I've got to do is somehow get this down in print and do the audio book. And I did. And it seems to work. And I would say our biggest buyership seems to be teachers, imams, rabbis, priests, ministers.

university lecturers, social studies teachers, social workers, lawyers helping foster kids, anyone who is trying to mentor or who thinks that a kid needs a mentor, I tried to pack it in this book. And also parents and grandparents and Uncle Phil and Auntie Sheila sometimes

teenagers, the last person that they want advice from is someone who's in a power position over them, older than them. And so I'm the bypass, the alternate route to probably the same advice. But I did also put a ton of research into it. Like there's a chapter, how to be arrested without being killed. And I took advice from the ACLU.

I took advice from various young adult black and brown friends who have been arrested and you know how not to lose your temper and all that kind of thing because he's got a gun and you don't and you'll have your day. It'll be in court. You'll have a lawyer who will know the ropes and if you're wrongfully arrested you'll get your revenge but do not run, do not shout, do not fight.

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Do not argue with the officer because in his belt, he has the gun and all you do is go limp, do what he wants and eventually you will get your revenge if you have been wrongfully accused. But don't do it there yourself. So some of this stuff is very important. It's hopefully life saving. And some of it is just how to be bigger, better, bolder. Should everyone go to college? No.

Can everyone go to college? No, but most people can. I'll tell you the first star stat. In the United States, foster kids, 9 % ordinarily go to colleges or universities. Our most recent stat, June, last month, 89 % got into college and university. About half for a four-year bachelor's course, half for a two-year associate's course, and of course some of them.

transfer over to a four-year college for their junior and senior year so they get their bachelor's in the end as well. Why should you want a bachelor's? Well, first of all, over your lifetime, you will average an extra million dollars in lifetime salary uplift because you have your bachelor's as opposed to only graduating high school. But foster kids get messed around because their education is so poor. Less than half of them do graduate from high school.

This most recent crop, several hundred kids across the country, because we have 12 American academies and then three in the United Kingdom, half of them managed to complete 12th grade, you know, and walked and got their cap and gown and everyone cheered and all the rest of it. So my stuff works and it's the work of thousands of people.

and I tried to use the most hilarious or scary or vivid adventures in the book to make it very readable in any order. What I hope young people do and what I hope their mentors tell them to do or advise them to do is just look at the table of contents and something will jump out and you'll think, yeah, I wonder what he has to say about that and then go in there.

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and then do the reflection points on the end of that chapter and do the action points. Some of it is about how to be organized. Don't do your homework on the bus on the way to school on the last possible day. That's the recipe for stress. Do your homework the day it's given to you and then you'll be the one off playing soccer when everyone else is worrying that they haven't done their homework yet.

you know, how to do a spider graph to map out. If there's a huge challenge in front of you, break it down into bite-sized challenges, map them out, work out an order, work out who are the people who might be able to help you for each of those vectors, and then do them and write that in in a concentric circle and move your way around your spider graph and you'll see, you will dramatically lift up your life.

by dealing with this stuff and not letting it fester.

There's so many amazing things, Peter, that you've had the opportunity to do and, you know, support students, support families. If somebody is looking to reach out to you or one of your organizations, what's the best way to do that?

Well, go on. It's also the best way to find where you can buy the book. If you go to my website, which is www.samuelson.la, samuelson.la, see a big picture of the book and right under that is all the places it's for sale. And elsewhere on the site, there is how to send me an email.

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that website is an amazing video. It's talking about all the change that you're making. And if I could ask you to jump back into a quick story, the idea of helping not just foster students get through high school and into college, but also helping so many people who are looking for homes. Could you share the story of how that came to be? I read something about this of you.

meeting with the people at UCLA and trying to figure out how do you get this funded? How did you go about creating a world where people who needed a place to stay now had some type of shelter where they could support themselves?

You're talking about foster kids or you're talking about unhoused homeless people. Okay, so I came out of a restaurant years ago now and a smelly, poorly dressed guy in rags came up to me and shoved his hand palm up into my chest and I was startled because I was

Homeless.

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My head was still in the business breakfast and I dug in my pocket, I took out some dollars and I put them in his hand and I retreated to my car in the parking lot and I sat there kind of shaking and I thought, this is not right. This is not right. How can I be intimidated by a guy who has absolutely nothing? I have everything. And seriously, I'm intimidated by him. What's wrong with this picture?

So one of the lessons that's in the book is if something scares you, unless it's going to kill you, lean into it, get past that, do it enough that you inoculate yourself from being scared by it. So on my bicycle on many weekends, I interviewed well over a hundred homeless people and I would simply go up to them on my bicycle and say, Hi, my name's Peter. Can I ask you a couple of questions? Sure you can.

The questions I asked them were, where do you live and how do you get money? And eventually I met an old lady. We don't think homeless people are women. We don't think that they're children, but there are both. 40 % are women and about 15 % are under the age of 18. A lot of runaways and sex traffic, kids who escaped and that kind of thing. And they end up unhoused. She said, I'll show you where I live.

and she took me by the sleeve onto the wasteland run by Caltrans right next to the interstate freeway. And behind the bushes, there was a ginormous cardboard box, huge, and it smelled bad and it had been raining and it had a piece of blue plastic over the top. And it was just disgusting. And she said, this is where I sleep at night. And on the side,

of the box it said in big letters, foot-high letters, sub-zero. And I thought, I have the refrigerator.

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This old deer has got to sleep. It's her home, the cardboard box. So my initial thought was I will build a hundred bed shelter. And I got an architect, know, film producers know how to hire people. I got an architect. I got a space planner. I got a budget, architectural budget and so forth. And it worked out that to put up, to get the land and put up a building and kit it out, not to run it.

that would be extra, but just to get it to exist was for 100 people was $5 million, which is $50,000 ahead. And I said, all right, well, how many, what does the census say in LA County on the number of unhoused people? out it's 100,000 people. So you do the math, 100,000 times 50,000, that is $5 billion.

I have no idea how to raise $5 billion. I thought, okay, well, film producers simply don't give up. If the door's locked, you try the window around the back. If somebody turns you down, you ask again and so forth. You go elsewhere. So I thought, all right, what is the best we could do?

not with $50,000 ahead, but with less than $1,000. So it ended up being that I went to Pasadena Art Center College of Design, I met with the Dean, and I said, if I put up a little prize, could we have a competition of all your design students to design this thing in the daytime you push it around, it's like a ginormous shopping cart, not even that big.

but at night you park it, you put the two brakes on, you let the front down, you let the back down, and now you have a seven foot long cot raised off the ground, because that's what a doctor told me is the principal cause of death of unhoused people is they lie on the ground and they get pneumonia and then they die, because they get something in their throat and they don't have medical care and so forth.

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and it's enclosed and has a door and two windows. And the whole thing has ended up costing less than $800 per increment. So that became EDA. And we, you know, had all sorts of adventures. I actually slept in an EDA on Skid Row with the then mayor of Los Angeles. And in a third EDA,

We had a guy called Sugar Bear, who was the literally biggest human being I could find to be a kind of bodyguard. Because I said to the mayor, what is not going to happen is that you wake up dead. And then all the newspapers say and television and social media say that Samuelson killed the mayor. So we're not having that. And we did. We slept there on St. Julian Street.

All night about we counted about 150 people, men and women and children lay down on unfolded cardboard boxes on the sidewalk. It was like a Fellini scene. Just cars racing past at you know 80 miles an hour. People throwing things and shouting and screaming and I mean it was vivid for sure. As result of it, the mayor.

following week sent over a check for $50,000 to buy EDARs, which was very kind, not from the city, but from his own personal foundation. I mean, the most bizarre thing that happened is he and I was there looking at the street from 10 feet away, sitting on the stoops of our EDARs. And the mayor says to me, look,

and there is a rat the size of a cat walking at right angles from our left to our right along the gutter. And it gets level with us and looks at us and dies right there. So we've now for the rest of the night, we have a dead rat 10 feet away lying in the gutter. So we carry on talking and

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you know, we're making the best of it. And the mayor says to me, look at our rat, look at the rat. Someone has crawled up and as a practical joke, they've put a marijuana joint in its mouth. So for the rest of the night, there is a dead rat with a joint right in front of us, mad, mad, but true.

and it was all over the news and so on and so forth. I hoped it would cause people to say, we have to do better than EDA. It didn't, it raised a ton of money for EDA, but I hope that there would be more shelter beds and apartments and this and that. The math just doesn't work. know, one and a half to two million unhoused people in the country do the math on that at $50,000 per bed generated. And that's conservative.

But we can do better than a cardboard box or lying down on the sidewalk.

That's an amazing story. Just hearing you talk about all that stuff and seeing the impact that you're having on the world is absolutely amazing. The book again is called Finding Happy, a user's guide to your life with lessons from mine. We're going to make sure that we have links to every single thing in here. And Peter, thank you so much for your time today. I know you've got a lot of stuff going on. I wonder if you could tell us one last story and that is

what advice do you have for the next generation? Somebody who might be listening to this, somebody who might be in one of your programs that's looking to, I don't want to say be the next Peter Samuelson, but looking to make a dent in this world. What advice do you have when you're mentoring those humans?

Speaker 1 (44:11.82)

Well, in a way, the book is a user manual to someone who might want to do a bit of emulating. It's not one piece of advice. It's have a vision, learn how to compellingly tell a story, because everything you want to achieve in your life, you have to be able to tell the narrative. It is recruit the best people to help you.

It is prepare, prepare, prepare. It is research. Who else is doing a piece of this or not doing a piece of this? It is budget. It is business plan. is always have a plan B. Aim high, tap with the pencil, but if you fail, you go in for an audition for some film and you don't get it. Well, okay. You said to yourself six months ago,

I may have to go to 100 auditions before I get a really good role. So you might. So it's a process. Have options. Try and go to college because it'll give you, first of all, an extra four years of a roof over your head. So you can't be homeless if you come from a poor family or if you're all on your own.

go to college, well, you will make friends there and it's a structure and it's a roof and they have a wonderful swimming pool and there's a basketball team. So there are advantages in going to college as well as learn, you know, engineering or something that you can or IT that you can then use afterwards. The book is full of these things and also how to stay alive, what to do when you feel your self-esteem is failing.

what to do if you feel that you are in despair, where to get help, how to reach out. One of the big pillars is get a mentor. The book is not a substitute for having a mentor or a teacher or a life coach or a lecturer or an assistant professor, someone to help you, whether you're in high school or you are in college.

Speaker 1 (46:31.662)

or you're in the workplace, you need someone to help you. And the amazing thing is most people, because of the golden rule, if you ask nicely, say thank you effusively, and generally listen to them and give them place and face, they will be your mentor. You might have to go to 10 to get one.

You might not like the first one you get, in which case you'll make a change. But having a mentor, I think, is essential. It might be your grandpa or Auntie Sheila or a parent, or it might be a teacher. For me, it was a teacher. But if not, well, there are places you can find one. The mentor project, tmp.org, is a sort of sorting house to introduce

vetted qualified mentors to mentees. I'm proud to be a member of it, but there are other organizations as well. But you have to have a mentor. Map your life. Do a spider graph so that you can see your challenges and your opportunities and come up with a coherent action plan where it's in baby steps, which you can certainly do most of them.

and you'll break down the ones that feel a bit daunting, you'll break them down into several sub-steps that are not so challenging.

you know, one of the themes that's been going on here, and this is just happenstance for the people who happen to come on to the show is that notion of mentoring, you know, the in our previous episode, we had Stephen Minix on who is very heavily involved with mentor California youth.org. And he's been working through that program. And, you know, even in my own career, we just had 14 years of doing teacher cast and the podcasting and supporting things and

Speaker 2 (48:34.296)

talking to people like yourselves and I go, what's the next step? What's that next challenge? And the answer usually is turn around and see what you can do. And you know, before we started the recording here, I mentioned that, you know, the kids are 11 years old and the triplets are doing a great job here. And it is all about, okay, what can you do to help bring up that next generation? And how is that happening? And my goodness, Peter, you are certainly doing that and have done that at such a high level and helped out so many people.

Tell us one more time. How can we get in touch with you and your organizations? And where do we go to get a copy of your amazing book?

The easy place to go is www.samuelson.la and as you scroll down you'll see the book, you'll see where to buy the book, which is everywhere, Barnes and Noble and Target and...

Amazon obviously and so on and so forth. And it's also available internationally. Simon and Schuster have got it all over the place now. It's kind of a bit global English language. And then if you keep scrolling down and if you look at the tabs at the top, you'll see whatever you want to know about me, including there's a tab called Contact. Use that.

We'll certainly hope everybody out there listening takes a moment to check out the book. We're going to make sure that we have all of the links to not only the book, but all of the amazing organizations that Peter is involved in over here on our show notes. You can find more information over at teachercast.net forward slash podcast. And if you have a question for Peter, yeah, read the book. It is an amazing, amazing story. It's 52 chapters. As he mentioned, you don't have to read them all in a line. I started to pick out one or two chapters at a time. Read it here or there. It is

Speaker 2 (50:25.742)

an amazing book that I highly recommend anybody check out. Peter, thank you so much for your time today. I hope you come back on the show and we can continue this conversation because the work that you're doing is so valuable and so important to education and to the world. Thank you so much for your time today.

I'm going off on the book tour in the United Kingdom next week, but I'll be back from that and I'd be honored to come back on. And let me also tip my hat to the teachers because what they do is nurture our next generation, not just in knowledge, but also in self-esteem and ambition. And without that,

We have no country, we have no civilization, we have no future. So I tip my hat. It's not a very well paid job, which is mind-boggling. I've never understood that, seriously. We underpay the people who teach our kids. However, it's probably the most rewarding profession that anybody could possibly have. So I do tip my hat and I hope the book helps.

in those social studies courses and in the mentoring and so forth and bulk books you get 50 % off if you order more than 25.

This podcast is all about finding amazing people in the world and helping them amplify the impact that they're having. And I think this has been one of those shows where you can definitely see the impact that Peter and his teams are having not only on the youth of our of our world, but also in just all the great work that he's doing. And we want to say thank you so much for Peter for taking the time to be on the show today. If you have something that you'd like to share and you'd like to have your voice amplified, please feel free to reach out. You can head on over to teachercast.net slash contact.

Speaker 2 (52:20.58)

Let us know about your story. We would love to have you featured and share your passions on our next episode of the Jeff Bradbury show. And that wraps up this podcast on behalf of Peter and everybody here on TeacherCast. My name is Jeff Bradbury, reminding you guys to keep up the great work in your classrooms and continue sharing your passions with your students.

You've been listening to the TeacherCast Educational Network hosted by Jeff Bradbury. Please reach out to the show with all of your questions on Twitter at TeacherCast or online at www.teachercast.net. Be sure to subscribe to our podcast so you don't miss any future episodes. And please take a moment to write a review in the App Store.