Joe Rogan Experience #2181 - Alan Graham

(drumming music plays) Joe Rogan podcast. Check it out. The Joe Rogan Experience. Train by day, Joe Rogan podcast by night. All day. (rock music plays)

All right. Hello, Alan.

Hey, uh-

What's happening?

Uh, well, I'm here on the Joe Rogan Experience, man. That's, uh, that's what's happening for Alan, so.

(laughs) Push this thing up, uh, get it, like, pretty close to your face. There we go.

Yeah. Great. Yeah.

Um, thanks for doing this, man. Um, I'm- I was very curious to meet you and I'd, uh, heard so much about you from, uh, John Paul DeJorio and, you know, what you're doing. And we've always wondered, like, there's always been these questions, like, how do you put a dent in the homeless situation? Like, what can be done? And what I see from you is probably the best example, the best possible example I've ever seen. And going to your place, going to see this community that you've established, and how you, you give these people hope and, and a purpose. It's really pretty amazing stuff.

Well, I appreciate that much. Yeah.

How did you get started on this journey? And when? How long have you been doing it?

Well, Joe, the, uh, the organization's 26 years old. So founded it in, uh, 1998. It was just a simple idea to start going out on the streets and feeding people out with a catering truck, what many of our friends would call a roach coach. And, uh, I, I got this idea, uh, built on a conversation that my wife and I had with a girlfriend of ours who was telling us about a ministry in Corpus Christi, Texas where on cold winter nights multiple churches would come together and pool their resources to take out to the men and women that were on the streets in the winter in, uh, in Corpus. And at that moment, the image of this catering truck came out of my psych- subconscious mind into my conscious brain, um, as a distribution mechanism from those of us that have abundance to those that lack. And, uh, uh, that was pretty, pretty simple. And as a serial real estate entrepreneur, um, I thought that that idea was a brilliant idea. Of course, every idea that you come up with is a brilliant idea-

Yeah.

... when you're a serial entrepreneur. And, um, um, it just blew up in a, in a positive way. But it really began a couple of years prior to that on a spiritual retreat, uh, that I went to at my church, uh, that I was invited to. And, um, had I known that a bunch of guys were gonna get together and hold hands and kind of do that bromance, hugging it out, I, I, I'd have never gone.

(laughs)

But I end up in this re- retreat for 30 hours of, uh, of handholding and bromance, hugging it out, and had a, had a pretty powerful experience that, uh, really just led me, uh, to going, "God, what do you want me to do?" I mean, I wasn't asking for anything big. It's just, you know, what are the little things that I can go out there and do? And it was through that and a series of things that, uh, led to the founding, and then, uh, ultimately the founding of the community. So ...