• 48:23
SUMMARY KEYWORDS
Giraffe Heroes Project, John Graham, ordinary people, extraordinary change, Tacoma, freighter trip, adventure, US Foreign Service, Vietnam, nuclear planning, cruise ship incident, life of service, storytelling, TikTok videos, badass granddad.
SPEAKERS
John Graham, Damon Pistulka
Damon Pistulka 00:07
All right, everyone, welcome once again, the face of the business. I am your host, Damon Pistulka, and I am incredibly excited for our guest today, because we’ve got none other than John Graham here today from the giraffe heroes Project, John, thanks for being here today.
John Graham 00:27
Well, I’m really glad to be here, especially talking to a guy like you who has really cares about bringing some heart into the business world. It
Damon Pistulka 00:38
is awesome. And you know, today we’re going to be talking about ordinary people creating extraordinary change. John, I think you’re one of those people, and I think you highlight a lot of those people. So let’s get started and tell us a little bit about your childhood and growing up in the northwest. I mean, you’re we didn’t even realize this, but we live very close in the northwest, here of the United States. So let’s hear about that. Start with
John Graham 01:08
I tell people often that you could the whole bumper sticker of my life is, I’m lucky to be alive. I grew up in Tacoma, as you say, it’s very close to where you live, Tacoma, being a small city in the Pacific Northwest where nothing happens and nothing happened in my family, we were not a family of adventurers. We were just a nice middle class family. I had loving parents, and I was headed for that kind of a life. Then a weird thing happened. Most of the halfway three quarters away through high school, I won an essay contest sponsored by a shipping company, and the prize was a trip as a passenger a freighter. Now in those days, freighters were freighters. There was no container ships. There was with about 50 or 60 really tough guys in it, and they swung the cargo in and out with big booms and stuff. And that’s what it was. And anyway, each freighter took about a dozen passengers, because some people really like that way of travel, cruise ships. So anyway, the shipping company calls my me up in about two months before we were to say on I said, we’re really sorry, but we have, we’ve, we’ve miscounted. We don’t have any space for you as a passenger, but you’re a young man, we’ll make you a member of the crew, and we’ll give you, like, a really easy job, but we’ll get you all the papers you need from the Coast Guard, and you can sail from us as a member of the crew of this freighter. Oh, wow, of course, yeah, fantastic. Here I am in this middle of white bread community. Nothing ever happens, and I’m going to the far east on a freighter. Yeah, it wasn’t quite that easy, because my mother, who was a stunt Croatian Catholic, was a little bit afraid of letting all I was still 16, if I was Yeah, go on something like that. So she goes to her parish priest and says, Well, what should I do? And the parish priest says, well, Madeleine, you know, it’s he’ll be alone with 50 or 60 really tough guys who I don’t really think are much into religion. And I think what the Catholics call the near occasions of sin will be a little too near. So my mother takes that into account. So she’s fighting with that against the other side of the equation, which is she really is a Croatian immigrant, and her brothers are all big, tough Croatian guys. And in Croatia, you become a real man. You know, it’s a real chest thumping, male dominated society, and every young man needs to grow up. So she knew that this was an occasion for me, to quote, grow up, versus near occasions of sin. Finally, finally, she makes a decision to let me go. And I, of course, needless to say, I Well, I swear I will go, nowhere near the near occasions of sin. I had every intention of growing near them, because I really wanted to grow up and I wanted to do all those things. Yeah, when I got on board the ship, these 50 or 60 guys were determined to teach me life lessons that they knew I would never learn in school. You can imagine what those life Yeah, and so off we went. And it was an incredible and incredible journey. And they the the seamen didn’t, didn’t, didn’t fail. They taught me all those life lessons and and I saw the real color of the world, and I saw what it was, what I thought to be, a real man. Now, my father, I loved him, but he was a real gentle guy. He got pushed around a lot, shoved around, never got to the top of his profession in the newspaper because he was just too soft. And I was really the. Discouraged by that, because I was getting pushed around by bullies, and I needed a role model. And these seamen were a role model. I didn’t take it from anybody. Yeah, I mean, we got into a bar room Brawl the very first port of call the southern Philippines, and it was a bar room brawl in a bar and a brothel in the southern Philippines, and I woke up the next morning, and what the hell happened? And Roy, who was my big protector, big black guy, weighed about 250 pounds. He said, Hell, John. He says, You got completely drunk. We got you completely drunk. And then the fight started before the stevedores, the dock workers, could kill you. We hauled you back to the ship. And if you’re that, if you’re feeling bad now, it’s called a hangover. It’s your first hangover. Oh my anyway. So then there was Hong Kong and all kinds of stuff. And I came back from that trip completely changed. I wanted nothing more my life and more adventures. And from that moment on, I sought those adventures, and I found them. I mean, the very a year after, I was hitchhiking in in Europe, and I what, I realized that there was a war going on in Algeria, we’re fighting the French. It was a colonial war, and I saw about it in the in the youth hostel in Zermatt, where I gone to climb the Matterhorn, which was the beginning of my mountain climbing experience. And so I said, What the hell is a war going on only 300 miles away? I never been in a war before. Let’s go there. So I hitchhiked down Morocco, Algeria, I cross into the border, still a war going on, and I put a an American twin and shot. And sure enough, the rebels are friendly toward me. They even point guns at drivers and tell me, tell the driver to take me wherever I wanted to go. So I’m hitchhiking to the middle of a revolution, wow, and it’s a really exciting unless, I mean, there I am, and I had a terrific time, and I came back from that, and then it was just a never ending pursuit of wild ass adventures I graduated from, Oh yeah, I forgot to say you mentioned this in the I graduated from high school, went to college, and midway through my college career, I was climbing mountains with a Harvard mountaineering club, and we decided we would climb one of the last remaining North Face, big North faces on The planet, on what was then called Mount McKinley. Now it’s called Denali, and it had never been climbed because it’s so freaking dangerous. Avalanche was swept it once or twice a day, and if you’re caught in avalanche, you were dead. And it was a long climb to the Wickersham wall. It was called the north wall. Wickersham wall was the second highest mountain wall in the world, higher than anything on Mount Everest. Wow. It was like a huge achievement. And we did it. We claimed we were the first people to make this ascent of the north wall. And we have, I have a whole lot of stories of cheating death, three or four times, cress falls, avalanches, rock falls, drownings, you name it. We walked away from all of it. So now I’m pretty well sure that I’m indestructible, and not just what every teenager feels indestructible. Yeah, I’m 17. I’m 20, whatever. I sort of got it that an article of faith, that that I was never going to die, none of my physical adventures would ever do me in. So I took, I just kept taking right out of college, I I signed on with the Boston Globe and and reported a series of wars all the way across the Middle East and Asia. I mean, I was in the middle of the war in Laos and the war in Vietnam, which is starting, I hitchhiked across Iran. I was spent some time in an Iranian jail, and it was a wild ass adventure. And yet I walked away from all of it, yeah, ended up in Australia, but at that point, you know, I had a degree in geology, and my idea was to become a geologist, and if not a geologist, then I was going to join the US Foreign Service. Because I was thinking, Wait a minute. Most important thing in my life was adventure. Most important thing in my life is this rush of adrenaline. So how can I do that and make a living? I’m not independently wealthy, so I will geologist, yeah, but not really. But if I was a Foreign Service officer, a diplomat, I mean, hell. I mean, they actually did interesting things, and some of them do really risky things, so I’ll do that. I passed the exams the year before, so they gave me a job, and I joined the US Foreign Service, and it did my. Adventures didn’t stop. Within two years, I was in the middle of the revolution in Libya, and I just loved it. I mean, other people at the Embassy in Tripoli were freaking out because cars were burning in the streets and angry, throwing rocks and stuff. I loved it. I just loved it. I just loved it. And I found out that I was really good at being under pressure. And the State Department noticed that kept promoting me. Sent me to Vietnam, really dangerous job up there near the DMZ, the divided the north and then North and South Vietnam. And I it was a really dangerous assignment. I mean, I came back with a heavy dose of what we now call PTSD, because I never knew whether I would survive the night or not. That was a pleasure to the bear. Way. More stories there. We can get into it later, but, you know, you got an hour. But anyway, so, you know, that was the that, I guess, brings me up to your question. That’s what? As a, basically, as a, as a young man, that’s who I was. Yeah, I didn’t give a shit about anything except wild ass adventures. Yeah, the more dangerous the better. Yeah.
Damon Pistulka 11:08
Well, I mean, did you, you glossed right over it. You went to Harvard and you got a degree in geology too along the way, and, and then you also went to, was that you went to a graduate studies at Stanford and got a master’s degree in systems, systems analysis. I mean, so you’re, you are just out traveling the world. You, you are getting a great education and starting out, and then the world travel, it seemed like really helped to give you, give you more of what you needed to do. Because, my goodness, before you were 25 you had been to more places, in more dangerous situations and done more things than 10 normal people do. Oh,
John Graham 11:52
maybe 150 maybe 100 Yeah,
Damon Pistulka 11:55
10 adventurous people. But I mean, you were in the US Foreign Service. You’re a US Foreign Service officer for 15 years, like you said, you were in Libya when they did the revolution. You were in Vietnam and then, and you were part of the in the mid 70s, you were part of the NATO top secret new nuclear planning group as well. I mean, dude, this is is so cool to get to talk to you because you’ve had life experience like so many. Don’t
John Graham 12:30
I did I do and it never stopped. And thank God because I I still love adventure. I’ve since. I hope you’ll soon talk about I managed to to turn my life around so that I was cognizant and aware and responsible for more than just adrenaline rushes. Yes, yeah, no, I. And one of the exciting things you say was, I was a member of NATO’s nuclear planning group, and my job, and that of some other people, was to turn Leningrad and Moscow into glass by targeting nuclear weapons that the NATO and the US would throw at the then Soviet Union if they dared invade Western Europe. And so that was pretty exciting, a pretty, pretty stupid too. I mean that we really thought that you could win a nuclear war, if you reflect on it, no, no one’s a winner war. No one’s going to be left.
Damon Pistulka 13:27
Yes, yes, and that’s the thing. But you know, getting up to it, you know, and and again, in in your fashion, and thinking of your life went up until that in 1980 you, you were aboard a burning cruise ship in a typhoon in the North Pacific that that gave you a turning point in your life. Let’s hear about that. And then we’re going to talk about the the giraffe heroes project. Because, man, you’ve been you. It. It only gets better. Yeah, yeah,
John Graham 14:01
okay. Well, we skipped over a few important things, and that is, I told you, there was a turnaround on my life, and it took a long time, and the first part of it wasn’t that cruise ship, okay, it was a battle in Vietnam, a really vicious battle, where I was responsible for people dying. And all of a sudden it got to me. I hated the war. I knew the war was lost. I thought the war was incredibly stupid, and yet I kept following my orders, doing all the stuff I was told to do, and now I was in the middle of this big battle. People were dying. I lived 8000 miles away. I didn’t give a shit about about anything about myself. How could my life have become that shallow? That’s the question I asked myself with this battle. How could my life have become that shallow where, I mean, because I’d spent so much time in the so called Third World, I’d seen huge amounts of poverty and suffering and hunger, and I hadn’t cared about it, man, I hadn’t cared about it. All I cared about was myself, and that’s why I felt so. Yallow. So I began to climb out of that hole. And when I went to Stanford, I didn’t really give a damn about the degree I was getting. I went there just to try to climb out of this self centered hole. And the degree kept me in Stanford because the State Department was trying to reward me for not getting killed in Vietnam. And I climbed in Yosemite, and, you know, did a lot of fun stuff, all trying to climb out of this hole. And I gradually began to, I gradually, it was kind of like in the first part of my life, all those adventures, because I thought that I had to be a John Wayne type figure in order to be a real man. I had, like, nailed a piece of heavy plywood over my heart, and I had forgotten I had a heart. And then comes this battle in Vietnam, and I begin to say, Wait a minute. Wait a minute. I go to California. I got involved with what were then called encounter groups. There were discussion groups where you got together and spilled your guts as best you could. But it was really helpful to me terms of psychotherapy, I guess because they had a whole lot of other people saying, No, you’re not who you say you are. You’re not John Lee what you are. You’re a really compassionate guy with a real heart, but you’re afraid to show it. Oh, that was a revelation when I finally absorbed that truth. So I began to turn my life around first of all, by being a better father and my own kids and and then beginning to establish real relationships with other people, and I gradually began to realize that I was really I was really strong and tough and smart, but I’ve been using all that to make The world a worse place. Why didn’t I use all those things to make the world a better place? So except for some backslidings, like the nuclear planning group, I gradually began to move up that out of that hole, and I ended up at the United Nations, which was the high point of my diplomatic career, because I really had a chance. I really had a chance, and I took it to start solving some problems that would bring more peace and justice, especially to the poor countries in the third world. And I say with a lot of pride that, for example, this is only one example. I helped end apartheid. I really did the system originally in South Africa. So, you know, I, by that time, I had really turned things around. I I was an engine for good, at least that’s the way I saw it, anyway. And my life, my life, had totally changed. Then comes, then comes the ship. Okay? What she meant? Yeah, I leave the Foreign Service, because there’s no way that I’m going to be able to continue to be a force for good in the US Foreign Service, especially not under the new president, Ronald Reagan, who who really didn’t care at all about the rest of the world. And so I left the Foreign Service, but then I panicked over money. I had a handful of ideals. I wanted to make the world a better place, but didn’t have any money. So some friend of mine says you can make a lot of money because you you always had a good gift of gab. You can lecture, give lectures on cruise ships. They pay absurdly well, and you get to travel. Hey, why not? So I signed on as a lecturer on a cruise ship, took my then 13 year old daughter with me. I’m on this cruise ship at least from Vancouver, heading for a nice summer’s trip, going around, going around Southeast Asia and Japan, and three days off from Vancouver, we’re about 150 miles off the coast of Alaska, heading out into the Pacific, and that ship catches fire and would eventually sink. And there’s a real story there. But again, we only got an hour. But let me just tell you that it was an incredible it’s the Coast Guard still calls it the most, the biggest and most successful air sea rescue ever five, 550 people. And not only that, the ship was sinking, the ship was on fire, and it was in the middle of a typhoon. Typhoon Vernon hit us just as the ship was sinking, and so we were all put into lifeboats, and we were being bounced around on cockle shells of a lifeboat as a storm was coming on, and they rescued as many people as they could, because helicopters, helicopters were flying from the shore bases, yeah, 50 miles. And then they would take five or six people up on the one at a time at the end of a cable, and take them over to a big oil tanker that had answered the SOS and was standing by, it worked as fast as they could. I see Mallory. I see Mallory taken off. Thank God my daughter is safe. But then there’s only eight of us left. Out of all those people, were eight of us left. The helicopter pilot signals that he can’t come back because it’s suicide to fly in a typhoon, and so our only. Hope is that a Coast Guard Cutter, which is a small ship, yep, a Coast Guard Cutter, would find us. And it’s, it’s a really dicey thing, because in the middle of a storm, the visibility now is like a couple 100 yards. And not only that, it’s getting dark and we can. We have no lights, we have no flare, we have no radio, we have barely have any worm clothes. Some of several people don’t even have life vests because they didn’t tell us the ship was on fire. So some people were naively disarmed by that lie. So here we are. We’re all dying out there. I’ve been in mountains enough to know what hypothermia looks like. We’re all hypothermia. We’re going to die of hypothermia in five or six hours. But the thing is, in one hour, it will be dark, hard enough to find us in the daylight. But once it’s dark, with no lights, no flares, no radio, we’re dead. They’ll either find our corpses in the boat, if we’re not thrown out, or the little boat will sink, or whatever. So we really have not five hours, but we have one hour, yes. So I’m beginning to realize, Oh man, this time out of all my near misses, it looks like this time. This is a lot. This is it. I mean, I may finally, it’s catching up to me. After all these wild adventures, it’s catching up to me. I’m going to die out here. And I got angry, saying, wait, wait a minute. Why? Why should I die out here? I’ve turned my life around. I helped end apartheid. I’m doing a lot of good, saving a lot of lives of disease and poverty at the United Nations, and I’m being wiped out. I don’t get it. I was talking to quote, God Yes, yes, religious person. I was talking to the, let’s call it the all that is, yes, the entity. And I was I my prayer turned into an angry like, What the hell are you doing here? I’m about to spend the rest of my life doing quote your
Damon Pistulka 21:54
work, right? Yeah, good stuff, yeah. And
John Graham 21:57
you’re wiping me, yeah? That makes no sense whatsoever. So anyway, I’m sitting there, and I hear this voice. The other seven guys didn’t hear anything, of course, but I did. It surrounded me like I was surrounded by loudspeakers, and in so many words, the voice says, Stop bullshitting me, because you’re you have all these ideals. Yes, you help end apartheid, but you get out of this one, you’ll lecture on another cruise ship, because it’s a really nice life, and you don’t have to worry about money anymore. And so you’ll just, you’re not coming back to that life. You’re going to be, you’re going to you’re going to lecture and make money and be just nothing. He says, Look, if you, if that’s choice you make out here, and you might as well die, because the rest of your life won’t be worth living. You’ll have all these ideals, but you’re not exercising them so finial, you might as well die. On the other hand, if you make the opposite decision, if you decide to really commit yourself to a life of service, a life where you’re really spending every ounce you have, every skill you have trying to make the world a better place. Well, perhaps we can arrange a different outcome. Yes. So I’m looking into the store listening to this voice, and I just say, Okay, I gave up. I was totally beaten. My famous ego was just beaten. Yeah. And I leaned into the storm. And I just said, yes, okay, I I’ll do it. And that instant, this Coast Guard Cutter, the boat, well, comes crashing through this wild storm. It would have cut us. It would have cut us some too. Had to look out, not seeing this. I mean, he was like, oh, man, out of people listen to that story, and they think, Oh, John, that’s a well, that’s a stupid story. I don’t believe that that is the truth. That’s exactly what happened that Coast Guard Cutter came seconds after I had said, yes, yeah, yeah. I kept my promise. I never looked back. I kept my promise. Yeah,
Damon Pistulka 23:56
that’s amazing. It’s amazing how, you had the experience of the the worldwide experience, seeing so many good, bad, horrible, whatever you want to say, situations all the way around and and then that, leading up to that, started to think, I’m going to do this. I’m going to, you know, become live a life of service, and then this, this final push to to think about, I mean, just your life alone up to that point, right? Yeah, is a big deal. And getting to that realization where you said, I’ve got, I’ve got to get up, I’ve got to get out of the US Foreign Service. I’ve got to start helping people. I can’t do it here. But then you’re, then you’re out on the the cruise ship, lecturing, and that happens to push it over the edge. You’re like, I’m all in. So is that What? What? So that was like 1980 so in 1983 you. Started the giraffe heroes project. That’s correct.
John Graham 25:03
No, not, not correct. I joined the project, but it was started, and I must correct you by a woman who was now my wife, Ann Medlock, and I’ll tell you a lot more about that when we get into the giraffe let’s do
Damon Pistulka 25:16
that, because we’re right there. And this is, this is awesome, because the giraffe heroes project is where you highlight these ordinary people sticking their necks out to do good things. Let’s hear about that.
John Graham 25:28
Well, I come back to New York, and like I say, I always had a good gift of gab. So I thought, Okay, I’ll do my part by giving wonderful speeches about world peace. And I was so naive. I thought if I just gave these fabulous speeches, people would say, Oh, John Graham, he’s a saint. He’s wonderful. I’m going to stop what I’m doing and work for world. That didn’t happen. I learned very quickly that you can’t change people’s behavior just by preaching at them. It took something else, and then I noticed I met rather a woman, a single mother, living in New York City, working as a writer and editor. Her name was Anne medallock, and she independently, had gotten concerned about the fact that the world news, whether it New York Times or whatever, was all focused on bad news, rapes, pillages, fires, wars, whatever. But she knew there were good people out there. She had her eyes open, and no one was telling their stories. No one was telling the inspiring stories of the good people moving the world in better directions. And so she was going to start her own news service. So she this single woman, was going to challenge NBC, CBS, yeah, awesome by starting the giraffe heroes project, and she did, and she started by getting stories, and they weren’t hard to find of people who were sticking their necks out. That’s where the name giraffe comes from. Stick your neck out. Yeah, the metaphor was perfect. She found people sticking their necks out. She called them giraffe heroes. And she she began to get their stories told at first, beginning of the technology of 1980s she told them on violent records she would, she would take a tape recorder, or get a recording from the giraffe hero of what their thoughts were, why they were doing, what they were doing, what they were doing. And then she would go and get a star of stage or screen, which wasn’t hard to do, because, after all, New York City stage doors, all that kind of stuff. Yeah, she would get people like John Denver and other people who were stars at the time to do the voiceovers. And she would combine the voiceovers, mix them, I guess they call it with the the voice of the giraffe hero, and create little three or four minute segments. And she would put those on vinyl discs. And I suspect that half your audience, Damon, doesn’t even know what a violent disc is. It’s a flat piece of plastic. It goes round and around on a turntable. You put a needle down, sound comes out right? Yeah, yeah. Anyway, so she would put these on vinyl discs and ship them out to radio stations. In the beginning, only small stations would play them, but they caught on, and soon she had a booming organization going. And by, I think about 85 she even got a nice feature on what she was doing in the New York Times, because people begin to realize that storytelling was was important at first, I must say, to my great shame, that I thought storytelling, what she was doing, was lightweight. And then if you really wanted people to do good in the world, you had to preach Adam to do good in the world. I was so wrong. I looked at what Anne was doing, and she was getting and the giraffe heroes project was getting more and more popular because she was doing what people had done for 1000s of years, Neanderthals jumping around the campfire, or the troubadours the Middle Ages. You want to change people’s behavior, you tell them stories. You don’t preach at them. You tell them stories. Tell them the stories you want a hero. Tell them a story of a hero. And Anne instinctively understood that, so that’s what she was doing. And I began to see the benefit of that, because I could see the results at the same time, I fell in love with her. We fell in love and got married and and we’ve been together as husband and wife and business partners with the giraffe heroes project ever since. But no, Anne’s. Anne started the giraffe heroes project, God bless her, and it’s been going now 42 years. That’s
Damon Pistulka 29:36
amazing, 42 years of it. And you know, so what are some of the some of the more recent heroes that you can share that to just give us a flavor of these people that you find that are helping, helping others, or sticking their necks out, as you said,
John Graham 29:54
Yeah, funny. You should ask that I actually dialed up a couple of them. These are just. These are just pretty columns, snippets, snippets, yes, here’s one that’s a South African guy in Cape Town, South Africa, Colin Orense champions the powerless, the elderly, the homeless and the poor. He’s fought their evictions from affordable homes, and he’s fighting the destruction of neighborhoods by a planned highway. Exposing corruption in the police force has brought him threats from both the police and the criminals paying them off. There’s another one. Colette Pichon battle he did left a career as a corporate attorney after Hurricane Katrina devastated her childhood home, her home ground in rural Louisiana. Her new work is helping people without wealth deal with the threat of the climate crisis. Her nonprofit taproot Earth trains endangered communities and lobbies for the policies and funding that are needed for survival. I’ll give you one more here. Where is it? Oh yeah, Lisa and Freddie Macmillan own Drexel and honeybees, a lunch place in Brewton, Alabama that has a menu with no prices on it, because nobody needs to pay the mcmillans run the place on his military pension and grants that she secures when she’s not lobbying at the state capitol and in Washington DC, insisting that legislatures remember the poor. The mcmillans never forgot them, starting their work day at 6am making over 100 meals a day, etc, etc. Anyway, there’s 1500 stories like that. Yeah, I urge your listeners and viewers to go on to giraffe.org, giraffe spelled like the animal.org, and at the top of nav bar, you’ll see a way to navigate to our library of 1500 stories. And they’re incredible. Each is more inspiring than the one before. So we got stories out there. We get them out on our own website, we get them out on social media. We’re now making a major pitch to get them to younger people through Tiktok and Instagram.
Damon Pistulka 32:18
Yeah, yeah. Well, I’m gonna just share I’m going to share your website here real quick, because I do, I do want people to see it. I want them to know when they get on it, they’re at the right place. And you know, the draft heroes project is, is really something that you know it. There are just so many stories you’ve been at this that you said, for 40 plus years, trying finding these people that are sticking their necks out there doing good things in the world, and it’s just we do not hear enough about this. And if people are listening today, they want to learn more about it. Go to giraffe.org and check it out, because this is the real deal, just like you live the real life up to this point and continue living it, helping people and being of service. You’re sharing the stories of the people that are doing like you said, the people in Alabama with no prices on the restaurant, and so many others that are standing up to what they see as wrong or unfortunate for people and really helping to make a difference. Yeah,
John Graham 33:21
yeah, yeah, no, I urge you. I couldn’t I repeat what you’ve just said. We want more people to come, and we want you to tell us who you know might be a hero, and we’re a nonprofit too, so please sign in and join the giraffe project and maybe give us a few bucks when we send you a letter. But, yeah, but that’s not my main purpose. Really, I want you to see that website that that Damon just showed you.
Damon Pistulka 33:48
The thing is, John, is you said it a while ago and and your wife, Anne, saw this back in the 80s. We see the news all day long, telling us all the crap that we don’t want to hear is happening in the world, and there are so many good things happening, and we need to see more of this. We need to hear more of this, because there’s great little things happening right down the street from you, in the house next to yours, in the apartment next year’s and and across the world from you. And we gotta look at that, because
John Graham 34:17
it’s not all that. I want to emphasize that the there are human criteria to become a giraffe hero, and the first is that you stick your neck out, and the second is that you be doing something for the common good, and that’s about it. So there’s a lot of things you can do to take a risk. You can you can take a financial risk, for example, you can take a corporate risk by by calling out an unethical practice in your company or, or an unethical hiring practice in your company, or or your company going down the wrong path in terms of issues like sustainability. And then you can, you can make a fuss. You can, you can try and change that even. You may risk a promotion, I mean, or you can be we also we risk some of our giraffe heroes, or our kids, I mean, like 1012, years old, and for a kid, I mean, the risks are a little bit different, because they’re not adults standing up to bullies, for example, and insisting that your school start a student court or something like that to deal with a bullying problem, or maybe, maybe cleaning up a polluted lake in your town and getting the adults around you to help do it, all that kind of stuff. And then also, at the other end of it, there are some really hard ass giraffes that are doing stuff that you you wonder, there’s still a lie? Oh, this one story impresses me. This happened not two or three months, but it still impresses me, a woman in in Western Uganda. Now, I don’t know how many people listening to this are aware, but the situation of women in a lot of African countries is really bad. They have very few rights in some of these countries, some of them are subject to the worst kind of persecution, including including physical mutilation, and it’s really awful, and it’s all it’s all pushed by a tremendously patriarchal tribal society which has been in place for like millennia. So anyway, this woman in Western Uganda is going to villages and telling women about the rights they have, because they don’t know. The women don’t know they’re just subject to all this shit, excuse me, all this stuff and and they don’t know. And she’s telling them that they have rights and to fight back, and if the tribal chief moves in a direction to squash any kind of rights, well then fighting back, fight back so, and then she spends a third of her time or so in the capital Kampala, lobbying the the government for new rules in the Constitution. And she’s been successful. There’s some new rules and and new rules in Uganda that help protect women’s rights. So now her job is to get women to vote and to run for office and to to take women’s power seriously, and to get the men to take women’s power seriously. Obviously, the tribal chiefs hate her for this, and her life is totally at risk. But she keeps going back into these tribal villages, talking to women, urging them to vote, urging them just to to to push back against the relentless tribal oppressions. So anyway, I love that story, just because, yes, oh, man, oh. How can you be doing that? Jesus, yes. But a lot of people like that, yeah,
Damon Pistulka 37:41
yeah. And you can it’s a normal person doing extraordinary things, you said, sticking their neck out, continuing to do it, even though it’s a it’s a risky endeavor, but they know it’s right.
John Graham 37:52
You know it’s interesting because I take a leaf from giraffe’s book and all my speeches and interviews and stuff, and because I asked these giraffes, why do you do it? And I ask myself, why do I do what I do? Why? Why did I risk my job to end the project in South Africa? Why? Why do I and the answer comes back very clearly, and it’s this, every single one of us, every single human being, there’s one thing we all want, and that’s to live a life with meaning. We want to look at what looks back at us from the mirror in the morning and know that we’re on the planet for a reason, not our lives count. That that, and that’s really important. And I keep saying that and saying that, and everybody agree, no one disagrees with that. The question is, how do you find that meaning? Now, I found that meaning for first third of my life out of adventure. I have plenty of contacts, some of my friends, who are finding that meeting now through, through making a whole lot of money and gaining positions of power. Well, bless them, that’s fine. I’m a capitalist myself, but I keep telling them, like, look, as long as you think that meaning comes from maximizing third quarter earnings, you’re gonna you’re in for a real disappointment. Because yes, and last for right along, you gotta find something that makes your life meaningful, so that when you do look at that face looking back from you in the mirror, you know that you’re here for a purpose that makes sense with your deepest values. Yes, around. Look at assess your skills. Look around, look around at your context. You don’t have to leave corporate life. I keep telling the business audiences I work with, which are many, I said, Please, please. I’m not suggesting that you become Mother Teresa sackcloth and ashes, leave your government career and start, you know, and handling on the streets and giving the money to the poor. No, no, no, you can be a giraffe hero and be a corporate Titan. As far as I’m concerned, it’s just that. It’s just why you do things if, for example, you’re in a company, in a leadership position, you. Yes, and you realize that in that company, using your skills and using your resources and your context, that you can get that company to do a better job on making a better product, selling it at a fairer price, and using sound environmental standards, then that’s a service. That’s meaning, or if you’re, if you’re, if your company is, is not a good neighbor in your community, maybe it pollutes the local stream or something, or whatever. Then, then get your company to be a corporate Good Neighbor. Get your company to care about, for example, using some of its resources to start, you know, non carbon emitting busses on the city streets or something. Your company can make a difference. Yeah. I mean, you you may take a bit of a loss, which you probably won’t, because people see what you’re doing and they’re more likely to buy your products. Or it’s not like you’re definitely going to take a corporate hit by being a good guy. That’s not the way it works. So I’m constantly talking to business people and getting them to join me to tell other business people that, yeah, it’s true that that third quarter earnings are important. Our company has to survive for God’s sake, or I’m an entrepreneur, and I gotta spend every bit I got and every bit of attention to getting this thing off the ground. I understand that, of course, I understand that. I’m just saying that as soon as you can reorient what you’re doing in the business, so that at least part of that energy and part of that resources goes into making your community, your your planet, the world a better place. And that’s my message. That’s my message. And and some people shrug their shoulders and say, Boy, Are you naive. A whole lot more people say, hmm, I’m going to think about that. And a lot of them do. I can’t tell you how many business people sometimes two or three years later, it’s really funny. This is just one story. Other many, I gave a talk in which I expressed these thoughts to a bunch of high priced lawyers in Seattle, big time law firm. And, you know, I got polite applause at the end of it, you know, and then through about three years later, I get this email from someone who had been there at that talk. I haven’t talked to you in three years, but I was there that lunch when you gave that speech, and I ended up leaving the law firm, and I’m now. I started a firm to Save the Redwoods in Northern California, and now my whole life is deported, is dependent, is up devoted, devoted to the environmental concerns in the Redwood areas of Northern California. And I’ve never been happier. And I just wanted to thank you. There we are.
Damon Pistulka 42:49
Yeah, and you know, you can see that I agree 100% and I was the same way years ago. Thought that, you know that corporate, you know, driving profits and doing those kind of things, but it is something that personally left me empty. And when you can start to really care about people, care about your community, and do the right thing, it doesn’t cost any more money to do the right thing. It doesn’t cost any more money in the long run, it usually actually makes you more money by doing the right thing, because people see and understand that you’re doing the right thing, and they want to be around people that do that and and it’s, yeah, I love what you’re doing, John, you guys at the draft project is draft heroes project is so cool. And I just want to say one more time, because we are getting close to time. We have to wrap up, if anyone is listening and you want to learn more about the giraffe heroes project, where they’re highlighting ordinary people sticking their neck out and doing extraordinary things for the common good. Just go to giraffe.org like the animal giraffe.org you can see over 1500 stories and and John have been at this for 40 plus years, highlighting great people helping this cause. So get out there to draft.org and and take a look at it. If you can hit that donate button and help help them highlight more people, John, what we’re going to wrap up in a few minutes, but I want you to tell us a little bit about your tick tock videos, because you got bad ass. Granddad, tick tock videos. Talk about that for a minute. I thought
John Graham 44:34
you’re never going to so much I’m having so much fun doing this. I realized that so much of what I was doing was oriented toward adults, and that I was missing out on reaching people that really needed to be reached, which is people in their 20s. So I started a whole series of three minute videos, and I put them up on Tiktok and on Instagram. Each video goes for about two minutes in which I tell I start by. Telling a story or one of my adventures, including some of the ones I’ve told you about today. Then about the two minute mark, I segue into some life lessons from that adventure. The life lesson might be about courage or leadership or decision making or whatever, but it’s a life lesson related to the video and after, after being on the edge of their seat with the adventure story, the kids are hanging in there for the rest of the last minute and the last 15 seconds is a call to action, and I’m having great fun doing it. I’m getting an enormously positive response to the producers of the show, which, as you say, is called badass granddad. Two D’s, bad ass, Granddad. Look for tick tock in primary, primarily, but it’s also on Instagram. And I’ve done the C I’ve done 15 of them so far. My aim is to do at least 100 assuming that tick tock isn’t disappeared by Nick and so, yeah, oh. And also, well, I while I’m in the in the promotional stage, take a look also at my memoir, which is full of these stories. It’s called Quest, Q, U, E, S, T, risk, adventure and the search for meaning. Get it from your local bookstore or Amazon. Yeah. Finally, my own website is my name, John Graham dot orgy, and which my whole checkered past is laid out there anyway. I guess I done enough self promotion, but yeah, the Tiktok thing is so much fun, and the producers say it’s doing fabulous. I mean, it’s been going now for three months, and I’ve gotten somewhere on the order of 65,000 viewers so far. Oh, my goodness, I guess that’s pretty good. But mostly what I like are the comments. And some of them are simple, like, Boy, I wish I had a granddad like you. But so many of them are like, is a great story. Really made me think that’s the kind of comment I really like. Really made me think that’s
Damon Pistulka 47:00
awesome, dude,
John Graham 47:01
that’s awesome.
Damon Pistulka 47:04
Well, John, I just want to say this is an honor to have you here today and talk with you and to learn more about the giraffe heroes project, how you’re helping people, your enthusiasm for highlighting these people sticking their necks out and really helping others. And I’ll one more time I want to say if you, if you haven’t heard already, go to giraffe.org just like the animal. Check it out and and look at some of those stories that they’re sharing, of these people that are just helping other people for the common good. Thanks so much for being here
John Graham 47:38
today, John. Oh, it’s my pleasure. And thank you for inviting me. Yes, yes. Well, I want to, just want
Damon Pistulka 47:43
to say, real quick, uzman, thanks for stopping by today. Great to see you again. And I want to thank everyone who didn’t drop a comment. I can see we’ve got a lot of listeners out there on the board here. Thank you so much on all the different platforms are out here today. If you came in late, go back and get started. You will not freaking believe John’s story. You will not believe the stuff he started out his life doing, and how long and how many people he’s been able to highlight and help throughout his life. So get back and check it out. Start at the beginning and listen to it again, John, hang out just for a second. We’re going to finish up offline. You.
