#2181 - Alan Graham

Alan Graham (0:09)

All day! Hey.

Joe Rogan (0:13)

What's happening?

Alan Graham (0:14)

Well, I'm here on the Joe Rogan Experience, man. That's what's happening for Alan.

Joe Rogan (0:20)

Push this thing up, get it pretty close to your face.

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

Alan Graham (1:01)

Well, I appreciate that much.

Joe Rogan (1:04)

How did you get started on this journey?

When? How long have you been doing it?

Alan Graham (1:10)

Well, Joe, the organization is 26 years old, so founded it in 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 I got this idea 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 Corpus. And at that moment, the image of this catering truck came out of my subconscious mind into my conscious brain as a distribution mechanism from those of us that have abundance to those that lack. And that was pretty simple. And as a serial real estate entrepreneur, I thought that that idea was a brilliant idea. Of course, every idea that you come up with is a brilliant idea when you're a serial entrepreneur.

It just blew up in a positive way. But it really began a couple of years prior to that on a spiritual retreat that I went to at my church, that I was invited to. And had I known that a bunch of guys were going to get together and hold hands and kind of do that bromance hugging it out, I'd have never gone, but I ended up in this retreat for 30 hours of hand-holding and bromance hugging it out. And had a pretty powerful experience that really just led me to go and 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 led to the founding and then ultimately the founding of the community.

Joe Rogan (3:15)

So, it was essentially this one retreat, you get this vision of just wanting to do something.

And this is why, why did you concentrate on homeless people? Like, what was it about that?

Alan Graham (3:31)

You know, out of the retreat, the idea was fundamentally to what can I do at church? You know, I can become a lector, my wife can go do the nursery.

You know, we get our kids involved in the thing. The intellectual relationship that I had with Jesus, because there was an intellectual side to this, during that retreat, just kind of dropped a floor into the depths of the cave of my heart. And so there was a different relationship that I was experiencing with Christ.

Joe Rogan (4:09)

What do you mean by that? Like you had an intellectual relationship and then you had a different relationship?

Alan Graham (4:14)

Well, look, there are elements of the Christian faith that would first begin with the, you know, that the angel of the Lord came to a poor Jewish 14-year-old little girl and impregnated her with the power of the Holy Spirit. That's a weird thought that you got to buy into. From that, the Son of God is going to be born, a virgin birth.

He's going to be on this earth for a period of time, and then he's going to end up being executed.

And he's going to rise from the dead, descend into hell, then ascend into heaven.

But prior to that, he hangs out for another 40 days with his brothers. These are incredulous things to believe. So at some point in time, you have to end up in this intellectual space where you're just kind of going, okay, I'm going to believe that my faith is going to drive me there. So when my wife, prior to 1996, started taking our children back to mass on Sunday, and I wasn't part of that, I began to look at that as the train was leaving the station. And my father had left us when I was young and divorced my mentally ill mother and left me and my three brothers, you know, almost stuck with a mentally ill, beautiful mom, but struggling mom. And I began to look at Tricia, who we will celebrate 40 years this year, kind of gets me emotional thinking about it, as taking our children and leaving the house, the train leaving the station, and I'm sitting back fixing to get ready to go into the office to do some work on a Sunday because, you know, we're both kind of serial workaholic types. And I decided to jump back on that train and begin to really explore my Catholic faith. And through that process, I just got enamored with the church. And when I talk about the church, I'm talking about the whole thing, the Roman Catholic Church, the Eastern Church, the Protestant Church, the schisms, the heresy, the wars, the reformations. And I got enamored with maybe one of the greatest novels ever written in mankind. What a train wreck this whole deal is. Yet at the center of that deal remains this Jesus of Nazareth.