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EJ is 18. He told me he has been homeless for 11 years.

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An 18-year-old on Hollywood Boulevard tells a stranger with a camera that he’s been homeless for 11 years — since he was seven.

In 2013, Mark Horvath walked Hollywood Boulevard with a camera, the same stretch of sidewalk he once slept on himself in the mid-1990s before he built a career in television and later founded the nonprofit Invisible People. That day he found EJ, 18, and asked him to tell his story. The resulting four-minute-37-second clip, titled “EJ is 18. He told me he has been homeless for 11 years,” has since drawn more than 14 million views, making it one of the most-watched videos Invisible People has ever put online.

• EJ tells Horvath he has been homeless since roughly age seven, after fleeing severe abuse at home and cycling through foster care for 11 years.
• Asked for three wishes, EJ can only manage one, explaining that on the street “you just wait for things to happen” rather than wish for them.
• The interview has passed 14 million views on YouTube, making it one of Invisible People’s most-viewed videos since Horvath founded the organization in 2008.

Eleven Years on the Street, Starting at Age Seven

EJ’s account to Horvath begins with a number that’s hard to sit with: 11 years without a fixed address, starting when he was seven years old. He tells Horvath he left home to escape abuse, stayed briefly with relatives, and was eventually pushed back onto the street when that arrangement fell apart. What follows is a childhood spent moving through the foster care system and Hollywood Boulevard itself, rather than a classroom or a bedroom.

It’s the kind of biography that doesn’t fit the usual image people have of “homeless” — an adult who lost a job, or fell into addiction. EJ was a child before he was anything else, and the streets became the only stable variable in an otherwise chaotic upbringing.

The Three Wishes That Became One

Horvath’s interviews with people living on the street often end with the same prompt: what are your three wishes? It’s a device he’s used across dozens of Invisible People videos, and it tends to reveal more than any direct question about circumstances could. With EJ, the prompt breaks down almost immediately — he can offer one wish, then stalls trying to find a second or third.

“On the streets, you don’t wish for things. You just wait for them to happen. Because you cannot control really anything.”

That single line is the reason the video traveled as far as it did. It’s not a complaint about hunger or weather — it’s a description of what 11 years without agency does to a person’s ability to even imagine a future. Horvath has said the goal of Invisible People, the nonprofit he built out of his own experience being homeless on this same street, is to put a name and a face on statistics people scroll past.

Family Breakdown as the Root Cause

Horvath frames EJ’s story as evidence for a blunter argument than most homelessness coverage makes: that street homelessness, especially among youth, traces back to what happens inside a house before anyone ever sleeps outside one. “We will never end homelessness until we can fix families,” is how he puts it, and EJ’s timeline — abuse at home, a failed relative placement, foster care, then Hollywood Boulevard — is the case study.

It’s a theme that runs through other street-level reporting on youth homelessness, including pieces on kids who end up homeless before they’re even old enough for high school, and it’s the same throughline in stories like The Homeless Boy Who Invented Louis Vuitton, where hardship in early life becomes the hidden backstory behind a very different outcome.

Factors Driving Viral Clip Success

Invisible People’s format is deliberately unpolished — no narration, no music cues, just a handheld camera and a subject talking directly into it. That rawness is part of why EJ’s interview crossed over well beyond Horvath’s usual audience, racking up its 14 million views largely through shares rather than any single platform push. It sits alongside other street-level documentary work in the same vein as the street-life stories that circulate for the same reason: real people, unscripted, saying something a script never would.

Horvath has kept making these videos since founding Invisible People in 2008, but EJ’s interview remains the one people keep sending each other years later — not because of any resolution to his story, but because of nine seconds of him trying, and failing, to come up with a second wish.