#1799 - Yannis Pappas

Yannis Pappas (0:04)

The Joe Rogan Experience.

Joe Rogan (0:15)

When are you moving to Texas?

Yannis Pappas (0:16)

As soon as I can.

Joe Rogan (0:17)

Are you thinking about it?

Yannis Pappas (0:18)

Absolutely. I'm coming down, yeah, I'll be here. That club's opening, I love Texas, I love Terry's Barbecue.

Joe Rogan (0:24)

How fun was last night?

Yannis Pappas (0:26)

Last night was a lot of fun at the Vulcan.

Joe Rogan (0:28)

Those shows are fucking great.

We're doing those shows every week. It's just an amazing place where you can fuck around and work out and write new shit and practice in front of live audiences.

Yannis Pappas (0:39)

Yeah, they were an incredible audience, incredible show, it was nice. Green room's nice, private bathroom, push a code in, that's nice.

Joe Rogan (0:48)

It's fun.

Yannis Pappas (0:48)

It's a win-win-win.

Joe Rogan (0:49)

Yeah, it's fun, man. Yeah. It's a unique situation to be at a comedy scene. There was always a comedy scene here, but now it's like, because of COVID, it got this new boost.

And so many guys moved here, and now it's flourishing, and now it's like, it's different. It's got a different feel to it.

Yannis Pappas (1:09)

Yeah, and it's not just comics, it's people. I mean, this place is growing and growing and growing. Every time I come here, it's like watching somebody who started working out, and you haven't seen them in a while, and you're like, wow, man, you're looking good. You're looking good, you shed a few pounds. And by that I mean shed a few homeless people on the street. Like they're less and less.

Joe Rogan (1:29)

That's the big move. We actually talked about that yesterday with Michael Schellenberger, a guy who's running for governor of California.

And the mayor, Stephen Adler of Austin, he had a plan and he fucking pulled it off.

He was like, if I can fix this homeless problem, if I can't fix this homeless problem by the time I leave office, he goes, it'll be a big failure. He goes, but I think I can do it. It goes, it's only a couple thousand people. We think we can provide them housing. We think we can get them help, give them shelter. You're always gonna have some people that just wanna live in the woods in a tent. You're gonna have some schizophrenics who think the government's got a chip in their brain. It's always crazy people. But he managed to get all those tents off of Cesar Chavez, off of those main streets, off of downtown, and it's way better now, way better.

Yannis Pappas (2:15)

I used to work at a formerly homeless SRO. That's really like other states should adopt that. New York City, they have this thing. It's called an SRO, where it's like section eight housing, so the government pays most of it, tries to employ them. There's case workers there. That's what I did.

And that's great. It houses the homeless. They usually take like old hotels, or sometimes I think they build buildings specifically for that. And then they live like they have their own room, a shared bathroom, and case workers on there. And you know, it was fun.

Joe Rogan (2:45)

Did you do that fresh out of college?

Yannis Pappas (2:46)

I did that.

I did 9-11 disaster relief fresh out of college from 2002 to 2005 So that was like an ad hoc agency, Lutheran Social Services. So that was like a, that was my first foray in the social work. And then I worked at an SRO for two years.

Joe Rogan (3:05)

So when you say disaster relief, like what does that entail?

Yannis Pappas (3:08)

It was helping people who lost their livelihood, lost family members at 9-11.

You know, they were affected by it in some way. They were in the blast zone, the disaster zone. They had to be relocated. They lost their jobs.

So we would petition to FEMA to get them, it was called the Mortgage Rental Assistance Program. So we'd take their cases there. There was this combined charity called the Unmet Needs Table, where you would take a client and present the case, they lost this income or they lost a family member, so they lost this, for assistance. So we were like their representative, and you would take their case, their case would be approved for the Unmet Needs Table, and it was a bunch of charities that came together and they would sit, it would be like Catholic Charities, Lutheran Social Service, and a bunch of charities, and they would dole out money and assistance to people who were affected.

Joe Rogan (4:04)