Name: Joe Rogan Experience #2181 - Alan Graham
Uploaded: 2024-07-26T17:00:01.000Z
Description: Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Joe Rogan Experience #2181 - Alan Graham' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2024-07-26. Transcript available.

Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Joe Rogan Experience #2181 - Alan Graham' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2024-07-26. Transcript available.

Joe Rogan Experience #2181 - Alan Graham

Joe Rogan Podcast, check it out.
The Joe Rogan Experience.
Train by day, Joe Rogan Podcast by night, all day.
All right, hello, Alan.
Hey.
What's happening?
Well, I'm here on the Joe Rogan Experience, man.
That's what's happening for Alan.
Push this thing up, get it pretty close to your face.
Yeah, great.
Thanks for doing this, man.
I was very curious to meet you, and I heard so much about you from John Paul DiGiorgio
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 give these people hope 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 organization's 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, 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.
And 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 end up in this retreat for 30 hours of of hand holding and bromance,
hugging it out and had a had a pretty powerful experience that really just led
me 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 in a series of things that led to the founding and then
ultimately the founding of the community.
So 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?
You know, out of the retreat, the idea was fundamentally.
What can I do at church?
You know, I can become a lector.
My wife can go to the nursery.
You know, we get our kids involved in the 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.
What do you what do you mean by that?
Like you had an intellectual relationship and then in a different relationship?
Well, look, there are elements of the Christian faith that would, you know,
first begin with, you know, 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.
Well, 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.
Yeah.
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.
And so at some point in time, you have to end up in this intellectual space
where you're just kind of going, OK, 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.
And so that was very intellectual for me.
And I was buying into it.
My faith was buying into it.
I was believing in it.
I wanted to believe into it.
But I had no factual things to take me there.
This retreat took that intellectual stuff and dropped it afloor right into the
depths of my heart.
And that's where the change really began to occur.
It became more of a heart relationship with Christ as opposed to an
intellectual thing.
So when you talk about these specific concepts that are hard for people to wrap
their heads around, like the resurrection and like the virgin birth, all these
things, like how do you, what do you do with that in your mind when you say you
have an intellectual relationship with it?
When you come across something that seems impossible, how do you manage that in
your mind, like how do you approach it?
Well, you know, look, I think there are just some things in the world that you
just have to be willing to accept.
The immensity of the unknown, basically, and you and I live in a universe of
the unknown.
We would all agree, and I think science would agree, that there are things that
we know, but it's probably extraordinarily limited, obviously much more than we
knew 500 or 600 years ago.
Right.
But today, we're not even, you know, I was talking to somebody today about
transistors, you know, and if you go back to the Apollo days and your little
radio that you could dial in, you could open it up and you could see the little
transistors that are in there.
Well, now we're putting a million of them on the very edge of the size of a
fingernail, you know, and you and I can't comprehend that, but I believe it,
but I can't see it.
And I know people do see that.
So you and I live in a world, basically, where we're having to accept things,
for the most part, that we can't.
Well, sort of. The transistor thing, like, first of all, we have schematics, we
understand how they work, you can look at them with microscopes, you understand
the process of putting them on these chips.
It's like, this is, it's very scalable. And it's also, there's a real paper
trail of when they were, do you know the whole story of how transistors first
appeared?
It's very fascinating. It's one of the most, you want to talk about mysterious
things.
One of the more interesting things about the UFO folklore is that they believe
that we have back-engineered some of our advances from crashed crafts.
And the transistor is one of them that sort of comes out of nowhere.
Another one is fiber optics.
They all sort of seem to come out sometime around 1947 after the Roswell crash.
Yeah, well, you know.
Just for a little kooky piece of trivia.
Yeah, but I haven't ever seen a UFO. So, you know, and I'm gonna believe. I'm
gonna, you know, yeah, maybe. You know, maybe that's...
Do you believe in that? Do you believe that, like, God has created other life
forms in other places?
I believe it's completely possible. And, you know, I'm cut out of the Doubting
Thomas, if you're familiar with the Apostle Thomas. I'm cut out of that cloth.
There's a great image, and it's an image in our sanctuary at the, in the
village of Caravaggio called the "Incredulity of Thomas."
And it's got Thomas sticking his finger into the wound of Jesus with what I
believe are the Apostle Peter and Paul looking over the top.
There it is. Yeah.
And I speak in that. I have a, I have a talk that I give called the "Gospel Concarne,"
which is the gospel with meat.
But that woundedness that, that, I mean, Thomas, you know, when the, when the
boys came to him after the resurrection and said, "Jesus is alive," he
basically said, "bullshit. I'm not gonna believe it until I see the nail marks
in his feet and stick my finger in his side."
And this is the phenomenal depiction of that by Caravaggio. And Thomas, if you
really look at it, look at his face, bro. Look at the grimmest forehead. His
eyeballs, you can't see it very well on this screen, but his eyeballs can't
even look at him putting his finger in that deal. And then he's got the torn
garments like he's homeless.
And then you look at Christ and, you know, Christ's face is, I mean, I don't
know how you can paint that kind of compassion. And then his arm, a hand over
the forearm of Thomas guiding that finger in, in the most gentlest way. And the
boys looking over the top of that deal. And look, these are all fishermen,
people. And I have no doubt in my mind that they're looking at that and going WTF.
Yeah, for sure. I mean, because they were, they were just guys.
Right.
Yeah. And, but at that moment, he uttered, you know, that, that he believes,
you know, my Lord, my God is what he said. And, and so, you know, there's,
there's always the doubt in the, you know, whether there's aliens or not.
I, I don't know, but I would be an idiot to say, I absolutely don't know. I
mean, I absolutely know there's not.
Do you approach religion with that same line of thinking?
I approach religion from a faith level. I was raised, my mom, when she went
into a mental hospital, when I was four years old, spent a year there,
subjected to the most powerful psychotropic drugs known to man, electric shock
therapy, the whole deal.
My doc, my, my, my dad files for a divorce during that period of time, attempts
to strip my mother from maternal rights of her four boys.
My mom wins all that because she had great parents. She gets out. And at some
point in time, she converts to Roman Catholicism and drags me and my brothers
to, to church and the whole deal.
I was, I was four or five, so I don't have much memory of that, but I have a
lot of memory of the love that my mother had for Christ and Mary.
And when, when, when you're in love with somebody that has profound behavioral
health issues like my mom had, and you see that Christ and his mother, Mary
brought tremendous relief to my mom, that has an impact on you.
So I, I, I go into this with faith, complete faith. And I'm, I'm just released
of trying to figure out, um, is it right or is it wrong?
And I'm, I'm released of having to prove to people. I, you know, I don't get
into apologetic arguments with people. This is just who I am and how I express
who I am.
That is one of the more fascinating things about people that are very religious
is that whether or not you think they're correct or not, it obviously has a
profound effect on them.
And then this relief of release, like you're, you're discussing is obviously
hugely benefi