Hi everybody this is Scott Sad. Earlier today my family and I went to our usual

rotisserie chicken place, it's a Peruvian place, a little dive with fantastic

chicken. I've sometimes posted photos from that place and just standing outside

the place was this homeless man who looked as though he had some mental health issues and he was sort of

you know laying at the entrance of the place some of you may have seen a few weeks ago I

posted a photo of a cat that just stands outside the place looking for morsels.

Well, in any case today it was this older gentleman, a homeless man who was engaging my wife as she was waiting in line to to order our food.

And so I came over just to see what's up, to see that everything is okay, and I started chatting with him and he, you know, asked what I did for a living and we started, you know, chatting. He told me about, you me about a time when he had built an igloo with his daughters and so on and so forth. He's originally from Hungary.

I guess the first point is you know treat people with kindness

treat people with respect even though he clearly looked very very

dishevelled you know not totally there he's worthy of empathy is worthy of your respect and just

speaking to him maybe helped him through that day.

And so that right away got me thinking about an incredible story

that happened to me.

It was probably maybe 2002.

It was at a time when I was a visiting professor at University of California, Irvine. I spent there a couple of years and so this was between 2001 and 2003, but I can't remember which year it happened.

I was sitting at a cafe, you know, with my laptop open and a whole bunch of books laid out, books that I was potentially using for, you know, as

references for whatever I was working on, and a gentleman comes up to me and strikes up a conversation, oh, you know, I like this book, I've read

this book and I like this one, oh, tell me more about this one.

And as often happens with me, I just start chatting with people, you know, always open to life.

And he tells me, oh, I'm doing a PhD on homelessness.

And as a matter of fact, you know, I've become homeless

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