NH

Noah Harlan

Things Noah Says on Podcasts

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Noah Harlan has been a guest on Oxide and Friends .

Recently: “Working on Wicked Problems” on Oxide and Friends (October 2026).

What They Said

“I could tell if you worked in policy around homelessness or if you worked actually boots on the ground by whether or not you thought people had phones. And the difference was that individuals experiencing homelessness have a pretty high rate of access to phones. What they don't have is post-paid cell phones, like most of us have.” — Noah Harlan, Oxide and Friends

Harlan recalls a hospital-system official who told him homeless people don't have phones. Administrators were going by shelter intake reports that recorded phone numbers, while people were actually using prepaid SIM cards or free public Wi-Fi.

Oxide and Friends · 2026-10-16 Permalink → Listen →
Oxide and Friends Around 58:53 into the episode
Noah Harlan

…some, you know, let's not try and be Accenture or Tyler Technologies or whatever and try and like get the billion-dollar contract. Let's actually work on the ground and try and solve some of these problems from the bottom up with a really specific focus on the user experience of the individual.

Bryan Cantrill

…i think that i mean this is something that that i think it's interesting to me that that this is like the kind of disconnects that exist when you're tackling this problem because you would think that like you want to describe that a little bit because that was yeah the disconnect was surprising to

Noah Harlan

me So the number of times that like I've encountered someone where I've just wanted to like scream in the last five or so years working on this is hard to count. But one of them was we were having a meeting with it was a woman who worked, I think, for New York Health and Hospitals Corporation, which is the city-run hospitals in New York. And she was responsible for a bunch of their housing stuff. And she said, you know, we were talking to her about Keep and how it could be used. And there was a bunch of interest in the org in potentially using it for some case management stuff. And she was like, yeah, but the problem is that like homeless people don't have phones. It's like, right. No, that's not true. It's not true at all. Like actually an astonishing number of them do. And we sort of dug into it to try and figure out why she thought that. And eventually what we realized is that like, if you speak to like this, this became like one of those great like shibboleths where like, you know, you know, the scene in Inglorious Bastards with the three fingers where it's like, oh, I see you. Where like I could tell if you…

Bryan Cantrill

And this is like also one of those aspects of wicked problems. Like there's not going to be a solution to this stuff. I mean, you got to be content with, all right. So this, we're going to have to pick and choose a little bit. We're going to have to have a solution. They're going to be, there are…

Noah Harlan

Yeah. And the inclusivity arguments are infuriating. They're like, hey, yeah, it sounds like a good solution, but actually like 15% of people, this won't work for. So we're not going to do it. And you're like, but you could be helping 85% of the people. And that would make. big difference and then…

Bryan Cantrill

you also in terms of like picking and choosing a little bit too because you also i'm sure you've got folks that are beginning to to teeter where their their problems are beginning to compound and they're going to become not only are they going to have much more hardship but they're going to be much…

Speaker names from our own diarization · position estimated from where the line sits in the episode
“Every year, the U.S. counts its homeless population and we do it on one day… But that is how many homeless people there are in America on that night. The problem is that homelessness isn't a state problem. It's a flow problem. You have new people entering homelessness every day. You've got people exiting homelessness every day. And you've got people oftentimes returning, so cycling.” — Noah Harlan, Oxide and Friends

Harlan, who builds software for social service providers, is explaining why homelessness is a "wicked problem." The official point-in-time count, taken on a single night, captures far fewer people than experience homelessness over a year. Many of them are briefly on friends' couches, not on the street.

Oxide and Friends · 2026-10-16 Permalink → Listen →
Oxide and Friends Around 47:56 into the episode
Noah Harlan

…can happen, which is you think that you've organized a system and you've put it together so well that it couldn't have a problem. And then when a problem emerges, you have no way to handle it because you are no longer applying expertise, which is like what the complicated and complex realms are all

Bryan Cantrill

…observations was that trying to define the problem implies a certain solution to it. And then using canonical examples like poverty and homelessness as wicked problems, because they're so multifaceted. And we have a hard time even agreeing what the problem is, let alone what the solutions are.

Noah Harlan

…of it as a state problem. Like every year, the U.S. counts its homeless population and we do it on one day. It's called the pit or the point in time count. And people go out all around the country and they go out and they go, you know, into parks and under bridges and to shelters and they add it all up and that becomes the official record of like, there are this many homeless people in America. But that is how many homeless people there are in America on that night. The problem is that homelessness isn't a state problem. It's a flow problem. You have new people entering homelessness every day. You've got people exiting homelessness every day. And you've got people oftentimes returning, so cycling. And in a world where it's constant, so the number of people that experience homelessness in a year, and homelessness is also quite broadly defined, but is vastly greater than the pit count because many people experience homelessness for a few months. And homelessness might be, I have no place to stay. I'm going to crash on friends' couches. And, you know, homelessness is not always like, I think…

Bryan Cantrill

right, exactly. And so the, the, what they, in addition to also, I think, uh, uh, being against data centers, I think is the other thing that this like at the moment is transcending all political boundaries. Um, interesting, right? The one, I mean, because it's, I mean, who wants administrative…

Noah Harlan

No, no, no, no, I'm saying the opposite. I'm saying that they both want it,

Bryan Cantrill

they both want administrative burden. I'm serious. They both want it.

Speaker names from our own diarization · position estimated from where the line sits in the episode

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