Adventure Can Hook People But Purpose Keeps Them Listening

He’s been shot at, caught in revolutions, climbed mountains most people would not touch, and survived a ship fire in the Gulf of Alaska. But John Graham’s most important journey is the one that comes after the adrenaline, when he turns risk into a search for meaning and a life of service. 

We sit down with John, a former U.S. Foreign Service officer and a longtime leader of the Giraffe Heroes Project, to unpack how powerful storytelling works in modern communication strategy. John explains why he opens with adventure stories to earn attention, especially from tough business audiences, and how he uses that attention to pivot toward purpose, courage, and community impact. Along the way, he shares the moments that changed his trajectory, including Vietnam and the night he thought he might die at sea, and what those experiences taught him about values that actually last. 

We also dig into what “giving back” can look like in real life. John makes a case that service is not reserved for saints or retirees, and that ethical leadership, honest work, and even hard choices like whistleblowing can be acts of service. He also talks about reaching a new generation through podcasts and short-form video on TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube, plus what he’s learned from replying to thousands of comments from people trying to find courage in their own lives. 

If you get something from this conversation, subscribe, share it with a friend, and leave a review so more people can find it. What’s one small way you could stick your neck out this week?

Transcript

Welcome And Guest Setup

Carl 0:04

Welcome to Communications Connected Community. The Podcasters Podcast. This podcast takes a deep dive into modern-day communication strategy. It's going to be one of the days. Let's dive into today's episode. Everyone has a story in the challenge, though, in the podcasting space. Sometimes we don't know what stories we want to tell. And it's true for speakers too. There are a lot of speakers out there who have figured this out, but there are some who are still, maybe at the starting point in their speaking career, still trying to figure out what is that magical story. Maybe there's more than one. But I'll tell you a lot of the stories that our guest today is going to share come from his adventures. And man, what a list of adventures he has to share. But it's not just about the adventures, it's about how those adventures have led him to give back to his community in many different ways. John Graham's life has been one of risk-taking and adventure from climbing big dangerous mountains or risking his life in wars and revolutions around the globe. Much of that as a U.S. Foreign Service officer. For the last four decades, though, he's helped lead the Giraffe Heroes Project. It's a global movement that inspires people to stick their necks out to solve tough public problems and gives them tools to succeed. Giraffe.org. We're going to make sure that link is in the show notes later on. But he has a memoir as well. His memoir is Quest, Risk, Adventure, and the Search for Meaning. He's also a thought-after podcast guest. He shares his messages all over the world. He's spoken on stages all over the world, and we're so glad he's here today, not only sharing his stories, but talking about how you can give back, even in the smallest way, to your community. And again, there's many different ways that you can do that. I'm excited to dive into this conversation with John Graham. John, welcome to the podcast.

SPEAKER_01 2:10

I'm glad to be here. Thanks for inviting me.

Carl 2:13

John, I'm so glad you're here. Now, we share a little bit of passion. You're a past member, I guess you could say, technically the Global Speakers Federation, but uh the NSA down in the States, the National Speakers Association, and I'm part of CAPS, which is the Canadian Speakers Association up here in Canada. What was it that led you to sharing your messages on stages? What led you down that path?

SPEAKER_01 2:33

I started uh doing uh public speaking back when I had in the Foreign Service. They I was doing it as a Foreign Service officer, mostly running around the country telling people what the Foreign Service did, policy issues, the like. But I've always had a gift of Gab, and I realized fairly soon that because of my life, and uh my bumper sticker is I'm lucky to be alive. I have an innumerable number of stories of adventures, some of them violent, and that people always seem to want to listen to them. So I thought, what the heck? I realized that in the public speaking I was doing that the best drawing card, the best way to get people to lean forward in their seats listening to me was to start with some of these adventure stories, because people put down their pens and pencils or or in those days, or turned off their phones or whatever, and listened. And then I realized also at that stage in my life that I wasn't just an entertainer. That wasn't enough. What I really wanted to do was to get people to to help people find more meaning in their life through giving back, through being of service, through helping me solve tough public problems, as you said. And so that became my life's goal. And the path to there was a lot more than we can cover in 30 minutes. But basically it stemmed from early life of nothing but wild ass adventures. I I mean I wasn't an adrenaline junkie. There was a real turnaround. It was occasioned by a battle in Vietnam, but it took a long time for me to understand that physical violence, physical adventures, great fun, and made for great stories. It was shallow, and my life had become shallow. And then I was in my thirties and I was looking for one adventure after the other, and looking also as a Foreign Service officer at all kinds of poverty and corruption and violence and stuff. I ended up at the United Nations, where in fact I did a lot of good in helping solve peace and justice issues. My life has been a rush to amass as much adrenaline as I possibly could for the first 30 years or so of my life, and then a realization that that wasn't enough. When the turnaround happened at the United Nations, I was so enthused about doing good in the world, so enthused about the effect I was having. I mean, I helped end apartheid. I mean, that was something. And and I realized uh the the good I could do. I wanted more of it in the State Department, the Foreign Service, uh, was going way too slow for me, and not only that, but in some cases it was going in the wrong direction. I didn't really give a damn about the poverty and disease and violence in the third world that I was seeing. So I quit and then I set out to devote the rest of my life. I was in 40 to doing that. And luckily for me, I happened to uh almost well within a year or two, I met remarkable woman named Ann Medlock, who started something called the Giraffe Heroes Project. Tell you more about that later, but basically it's a global organization that moves people to stick their necks out, hence the metaphor. Whatever public problems are bugging them in their community, in the world, wherever. It speeded things up when I fell madly in love with Anne. We've been married now and working together on the giraffe project for damn near forty-five years. And we're doing the same thing that Anna started doing, finding people sticking their necks out, telling their stories. We're storytellers. And we're doing what the Troubadours did in the Middle Ages, you might say. Everybody knows that if you want a culture to become more heroic, more courageous, whatever, you don't preach at them, you tell them stories, you inspire them, and that's what we do. Tell the stories of inspiring heroes, and that way motivate other people to say, what the heck, that guy or that woman is sticking his or her neck out, and I'm just sitting here grousing about the problems. I should do something too. And they do. I mean, we have remarkable feedback.

Carl 6:10

It's amazing how those stories actually do move people to action. And when they see other people doing things, it's almost like the what do you call that? It's something about the herd. It's like, okay, well, they're doing it, I should be doing it. Do you find that the stories are really not just their stories, but your stories are also helping to add the impact?

SPEAKER_01 6:28

Like I said earlier, I mean, I start everything with uh some stories of of my own life because I recognize, not in a self-aggrandizing way, but just practically speaking, and how to impact people, I realized that my adventure stories really are a tremendous way to draw people in, especially cynical audiences. I spoke before COVID, I was a platform speaker all over the world. COVID kind of shut that down for a while. And now at 83, I don't want to get back on planes much anymore. I've learned how to do it all through social media. I've learned that telling these stories is the way for me to start. And if I'm in front of a tough audience, like a tough business audience, where they're more concerned about third quarter earnings than about helping anybody, I'll get them leaning into their seats by telling some of my stories. And then when they understand that I've done more stuff, more interesting stuff, and the whole room full of them put together, they'll listen. I've got 'em. I've I've grabbed the audience, which as you know, is a as a public speaker, is the aim. You want to get people listening to you. Got the audience, and I've got like ten minutes to go in a platform speech or a few minutes to go in a podcast or whatever. I will then segue into what I really want to talk about, which is the transition in my own life from uh physical adventure to adventures of a spirit, where you use whatever I have, whatever skills I have, and follow my own sense of purpose, which is helping people and giving back and getting other people to see that perhaps that's something, that's a path that they should try as well.

When Adventure Starts Feeling Shallow

Carl 7:54

Is there a specific story, John, that is your go-to that you know will resonate with the audience that you know you have to pull out every time? Like I know there's some speakers, for example, they'll have a story about climbing Mount Everest. They'll have a story about I met the Pope. You know, they'll have some kind of a go-to story that you know is always going to land.

Vietnam And The Sinking Ship Moment

SPEAKER_01 8:13

As you well know, the best teaching stories often are stories of Pratfalls, not successes. It's true. Depending on much time I've got, I will tell stories of my early life. I won't tell them all here, but I went to sea on a freighter when I was just 16 years old, and there were no container ships. And I hitchhiked through the revolution in Algeria, and then I was in the middle of the revolution in Libya, then I went to Vietnam, where I was in one of the most difficult and dangerous spots in South Vietnam during the war. I climbed uh the north wall of Mount McKinley, a climb that's so friggin' dangerous that no one's ever done it since. And lots of other climb as well. Avalanches, dangers, rockfalls, crevasses, whatever. I suppose I've almost died a violent death. I mean come close to a violent death at least twelve, fifteen times in my lifetime, but I kept walking away from it all, and which led to more stories and more stories and more adventures. I tell these stories, I'm careful to use all my time doing that. I'm careful to r understand and remind myself that I'm not there just to entertain. These stories are a way of getting people's attention. And I do that, and then I'm able to, when I have the audience and I can feel it, as you well know, as a professional speaker, you can sense when you've got the audience and they're leaning forward wanting to hear more. I'll say, Well, you know, here what I found out is that the most important thing in my life was the purpose of it, the meaning of it, and that if living a life without any purpose, without any meaning, to me would be like being a fancy Swiss watch with no hands. That doesn't make any difference. Or the other another metaphor I use a lot is you look at the mirror in the morning and who looks back at you. You want to know you're on the planet for a reason, you know, just marking time. And I don't criticize people if they think that third quarter earnings are the purpose of their life. I think they're gonna find out differently. I think that chasing money and power is no better. I was chasing adventures. At a certain point, most people, if they're alive, if they're aware at all, will begin to realize that some kind of service is brings them a sense of satisfaction and a sense of fulfillment that they never felt before in anything else. But I keep telling these stories. The adventure stories, I like I say, I there are lots of adventure stories, but the ones that resonate most probably are the story of a battle in Vietnam, where I suddenly, all of a sudden, in the middle of this battle, understood that my home, I was living 7,000 miles away. I didn't give a damn about the war. I went over there basically as a mercenary. I was employed by the State Department, but I just went over there for the adventure of it. I didn't believe in the war. I thought it was wrong and stupid, but I wouldn't anyway because I'd never been in a place where people were trying to kill me like that. I decided that's a terrific adventure, and I'm gonna do that. Well, I did that all right, I walked away from it, but in the middle of these this battle, like I said earlier, I realized how shallow my life had become. The second turning point is when I left the foreign service. I rushed into this life of service, this life of being a of doing good in the world without any thought to anything else, including making money. I had two kids at the time. Two kids I had two kids, I still have them. And uh so I I panicked over money and got a job lecturing on a cruise ship. You probably know they pay a lot of money for going and and talking to a bunch of of retired people on a cruise ship. And this was a night, this is a long time ago, 1980. So we're not talking cruise ships of today. We're talking small ships of five or six hundred people, not five thousand. The very first cruise ship I got a job on was heading for the Far East for a nice summer for 500 retired people, and it caught fire and began to sink in the Gulf of Alaska. The Coast Guard regards it as the uh the most important air sea rescue it's ever been involved in over 300 years. It was incredible. We were 150 miles off the coast of Alaska, heading uh out into the North Pacific. The ship was uh burning, we were all put on lifeboats. I had my daughter with me, so I had that extra concern. The problem was that we were so far from shore that it took a long time for helicopters from the shore shore braces to get there. And the second problem was that there was a typhoon coming on. And uh while we were in calmer season, those lifeboats, when the sun came up, the typhoon hit us, and those little cockle shells of lifeboats were bouncing around, and we were all dying of hypothermia. At a certain point, the helicopters couldn't fly anymore because it was too dangerous. But they'd rescued almost everybody, including my daughter. Eight of us left in lifeboat number two, and it was getting dark. And I realized, and everybody in that lifeboat realized that once it got dark, we were dead. Because we had no flares, no lights, no radio, no motor, no nothing. Like I say, we were dying of hypothermia. I figured from my mountain experience we had five or six hours to live, and that was a real close turning point. And I just turned up, I wasn't a religious person, still, but I turned up and uh looked at the all that is or whatever you want to call it, call it God, whatever, and I says, damn it, it wasn't much of a I was angry. I said, Hey, at the United Nations, I was doing lots of good in the world. I helped into partite for God's sake. Now you're doing me in. Now you're killing me? That doesn't make any sense. And I got madder and madder that I changed, I'd spent all this trouble and pain changing my life, and I was now being wiped out, made no sense at all. So I was screaming my anger at God. And I heard this voice that said, Hey, stop kidding yourself. You're panicked over money. Now you're lecturing on a cruise ship. You get out of this, you'll lecture on another cruise ship. Yeah, fine, you helped end apartheid. Your life seems to be reorienting, but you haven't got the guts to stick it out, do you? You have a choice. You can either commit yourself to a life of service, to a life of doing, of making the world a better place, or you can die out here, which is gonna happen in a few hours.

Carl 13:48

It sounds like something out of a movie. Clearly it's not, because you lived it, right? But so that was a huge turning point for you then.

SPEAKER_01 13:55

I have to also add that this my memoir is being shopped in Hollywood as we speak. I've got an Asian who read the book and said, This has got to be a movie. What you said may happen. Anyway, I look up at the sky, this typhoon, the visibility is down less than a hundred meters, and it's getting dark, and we're gonna die. And I have this conversation with God, and he gives me this challenge, and I just look up and say, Okay, I give up. I agree, I won't turn back. In that instant, this Coast Guard cutter, small ship, rescue ship, comes crashing through this storm. We would have cut us in two had to look out and not seen us. And I tell the story, I don't know. There's one person in a hundred that believes this story when they tell it initially. Oh, come on. But I swear, that's exactly what happened. It's almost at the moment when I made that deal with God that this Coast Guard cutter comes crashing through this storm, and I and the other seven guys are rescued. And I never look back. I kept my promise. I went back to New York. That's about when I met Anne Madlock on the Giraffe Heroes Project, and the rest of my life since then has been about helping other people find the meaning of their lives and find it not through third quarter maximizing third quarter earnings, but by helping, by looking around and seeing that there's a problem in their community. Maybe it's bussing, maybe it's homelessness, or there's a problem in the world. Medical supplies aren't getting through to those poor people in jazz or whatever. It's something that they care about. And they would do well to think about what they can do with their skills and resources. I'm very careful to say, Carl, that I don't ever tell people, business people in particular, that they should leave their businesses and put on sackcloth and ashes and become another Teresa. No, no, no. I would never get anywhere doing that. I say, look, you can be of service in so many different ways. If you're in business, if you make a good product, offer a fair price, good labor conditions, good environmental conditions, you're a good neighbor in the communities where your factories operate, that is a service. If you're a barber, for example, and uh, as barbers tend to do, get into conversations as a troubled person, and the ten minutes you're cutting his hair, uh you talk about something meaningful to that person. Well, that's a service. If you have a great gift of music, well, making people enjoy the beauty of your voice or your instrument, that's a service. If you're a neurosurgeon, obviously you're a service saving lives, whatever. You find what it is, and you do it because it's a service, because it's giving back. Not because you're being paid a shitload of money to do it. You do it because it's what makes your life sing, it's what makes you passionate. I don't know how long I'm gonna live, but I swear from both me and Anne Medlock, who's older than I am, that living a life this way is gonna is already adding a lot of years to our lives.

Carl 16:37

It's funny how fruitful your life becomes. I hear this from business owners that have been at it forever, and they're the money in business becomes less important than the bigger why. The greater why are you really doing this? Yeah, okay. It might be about income in the beginning, it might even be about status in the beginning, but at some point there is that giving back. And for some, it's building a school, for others, it's helping out at their local food bank or soup kitchen or whatever. But there seems to be in some areas folks who don't necessarily feel they need to do that because they're already doing enough, but find that we should just be doing it more.

Finding Meaning Through Everyday Service

SPEAKER_01 17:14

No, I think it's important that people look at why they're doing it, not the volume of it, but the why of it. If you're doing it because your wife wants you to do it, or your husband wants you to do it, or because your preacher or your rabbi says, hey, you should get more involved in the community. Well, okay. But the real reason, the motivation that really counts is coming from deep in your own heart, your own soul. And it's about the meaning of your life. I swear, from time immemorial, from like Neanderthals, that there's been no bigger passion, no bigger search for any human being than the search for meaning. We all want our life to be meaningful. You look at yourself in that mirror in the morning and you want to know that you count for something. And then you want to find out what it is, and then you question what it is. It may very well be you stay exactly where you are, and you do you use your job or your position, but you your motivations are different. Your motivations now are motivations of service, and they're tied intimately to what makes your own life passionate. And that's a huge difference. You could be doing the same thing, but just do it better. Or in companies, for example, a lot of the people we honor with the Giraffe Heroes Project are so-called whistleblowers. They're in a company and the company is something's wrong with the company. They're doing something that's not good, it's corrupt or it's inefficient or whatever, and you have a question like, oh God, I think I better just hide under the desk. Or wait a minute. If I blow the whistle, if I try to write this wrong, not only will we make a better product, not only will more people uh like what we do, but the people here in the company will take my example and do something like it. There's all kinds of good that can come of this. Yes, there's a risk. I could get fired, but damn it, it's worth taking that risk. And these are the people we honor as giraffe heroes, for example, whistleblowers like that, people who are taking risks in order to be of service.

Carl 19:02

That was a good transition, actually, John, into talking more about the giraffe heroes project because you've been doing so much great work with this, uh, you and your spouse for how many years? Refresh the audience's memory, how many years? It's getting close to 45 years in the summer. 44 years. 44 years. And how did it start? And were did you start it together or did she start it first?

SPEAKER_01 19:23

She started it first. I'm not smart. But Anne was this single mother living in New York City, right? And uh I happened to be in New York because I was working at the United Nations. But Anne was just looking around, and she couldn't help but notice that the media of the day, those ways in those days it was like print media, we're talking 1982, was all about gloom and doom. Everybody was reading about what went wrong today. Fires, rapes, pillage, wars, whatever. And Anne knew that there were plenty of people in New York and around the world who were doing good things, who were helping solve problems and no one ever told their stories. And so she was determined to do that. She was determined to tell the stories of these special people, these giraffe heroes, she called them. She called them giraffe heroes because they were all taking risks, they were all sticking their necks out, hence the metaphor of giraffe, the long-necked animal. She started as a kind of a challenge to NPC and CBS from her own living room. She went around with a handheld tape recorder looking for people, and they weren't hard to find, who were sticking their necks out to make life better, or she'd read about them, or people would tell her about them. And then she would go to and get a star of a stage or screen, and that wasn't hard because after all it was New York City. And she would get the movie star, the stage star to do a voiceover and create these little three, four, five minute segments. And she would either put them on paper and stuff them in envelopes, like like PR releases, or she'd put them on fax machines, or mostly she'd put them on vinyl records. I bet a lot of the people listening to this don't even know what a vinyl record is. It's a flat piece of plastic goes round and round.

Carl 20:57

I know what it is because I have thousands of them in my basement because I'm a collector, but you're right in my basement. Yeah, different generation for sure.

SPEAKER_01 21:05

She would get radio stations to play them, and it really caught on. Within a few years, she had a nice story in what she was doing in the New York Times. At about that time, uh, she'd been in it for a year or two, fell in love with her, and everything she was doing became really important. But more to the point, I got out of my self-centered thing about, oh, I'm a terrific speaker. Audiences love to hear me and all that kind of ego stuff. And I began to realize that the key to influencing people wasn't giving a great speech, he was telling stories. He was inspiring people through uh the examples of others, including your own example. That was the purpose of it. But just to do it to entertain or to earn money, fair enough. I'm not making that wrong, but uh it wasn't enough. What's really important is your gift at being able to inspire people. And you must have found you must find that out true when you're doing a podcast. I mean, why are you doing this except to move the ball ahead a little bit, right?

Carl 21:58

Absolutely. And now you're doing This is on podcasts as well. The pandemic, I think, did a few things for us in shifting how we get our messages out. And how are you finding telling these same stories and getting on virtual stages versus the physical stage?

How Giraffe Heroes Project Began

SPEAKER_01 22:12

I'm finding it fine. First of all, I'm reaching a lot more people. I'll tell you that. I don't know what your stats are, but I reach millions of people on podcasts. And I do these short form videos. I just did it as a lark because I have a granddad, a grandson who's a journalist in New York State, and he did a story about, talked about me, about his grandfather and my adventures, and the last paragraph of the story. In doing this story, I realized what an incredible badass my granddad is. That's the meme. That's what I'm looking for. Because at that point I was saying, hmm, what can I do better? I'm not reaching the demographic uh Gen Z that people in their twenties and thirties, they're not gonna listen to someone who's 83. I gotta figure out a way to do that. And so that means short form videos, and I began to experiment doing three-minute videos. Each video has about the first two minutes of an adventure story, and I've learned how to tell any story in two minutes. It's not easy, but you can do it. The last minute or so, I segue into some kind of life lesson that I is related to that adventure. And the life lesson might be about courage or perseverance or building trust or something like that, but it's related to story. But by then I've captured the 23-year-old or the 34-year-old or whatever, and they listen to it. I've only been doing it for a year and a quarter, and as of yesterday, 120,000 followers and two and a half million views. That's pretty darn good. I get pursued now by by producers who want to put ads on what I do and pay me a lot of money. Of course I say no, but that's what's happening because they call me, I forget what the word is, but I'm a senior influencer or a major influencer. Something like that. And I just laughed. Because as far as I knew, a year and a half ago, influencers were young ladies that showed you how to put your nail polish on correctly, and they were influencers. So I'm enjoying it. But what I'm enjoying most, Carla, and I'm sure you understand this, is not the figures, not the stats. What I enjoy is the comments, because I'm getting a lot of comments. And I thought in the beginning, well, I'm talking to people half my age or younger, and so there's gonna be a lot of snark. Who is this old fool telling us this and that? No, it's not that at all. Almost none of that. I get a huge number of positive responses, and half of them are like, hey, that's terrific, keep it up. But the other half, honest questions and comments, mostly from younger people who are picked up on something I've said, and they said, I don't know how you found the courage to do that, but I need some courage because there's something going on in my marriage that it's falling apart, and I don't have the or there's something going on in my company, or there's something going on in my community. There's a bunch of folks here that want to ban books, and I don't think I have the courage to go to the school board meeting and face them down because they're gonna shout me at me and call me names. But listening to this story, damn it, I am gonna do that. Or I did it. I spent four or five hours a week on my fan mail just because I owe it to these people. I mean, I've grabbed their attention, I've moved them. It would be a crime for me not to follow up their comments and questions with the best advice and the best responses that I can. So, like I say, I spend hours every week with the people that respond to me.

Carl 25:17

I think it's a testament to just the work that you've been doing and now transitioned it to being available to not just on physical stages, but also to, as you say, it's it's like a new generation of people that wouldn't necessarily have found you, have discovered you, and they're not poo-pooing or saying anything crass. They're legitimately interested and want to garner your support or garner your advice or just give you a high five.

Reaching Millions With Short Videos

SPEAKER_01 25:42

I is one thing I didn't say it has come as a real surprise. The demographic I was reaching would be people in their 20s, and it is my biggest demographic is uh 35 to 45. So it isn't just uh people have just graduated from college and and whatever, are looking for their first job, you know, marriage or whatever. A lot of people edging in the middle ages that are middle edging toward middle age that are looking at this stuff as well, uh, which teaches me something that the search for meaning isn't just young people saying, Oh, what the hell am I gonna do with my life? It's all of us. And it's true. I find that mid-40s crisis, whatever, where us men are supposed to say, Oh my god, my life's falling apart. What am I gonna do? I find that they it's more likely people older than that, people who are 55 and who are now a senior vice president or provost of a university or something like that, heading for the top job. Uh, they're the ones that are having doubts. They're the ones that are looking like, man, I'm 55, I'm 60, and uh we're halfway in this life. Am I doing enough? Am I doing the right thing? Those kinds of questions. So I'm reaching a lot of those people too. People who are having uh second thoughts about what they're doing and looking for an affirmation as to their life path. And uh, some of the stuff I do, especially since I've lived through it at 83, believe me, I have lived through it, especially since they listen to me and say, well, this guy doesn't seem to be any brighter than I am, and if he can do it, maybe I can too.

Carl 27:05

Very powerful message right there unto itself, John. Best way for people to get a hold of you. I know you mentioned uh the giraffe heroes project. Is that where you want to drive people? I think so.

SPEAKER_01 27:15

I think looking at giraffe is the URL is simple. It's giraffe.org. And by the way, giraffe has two F's. It's amazing these days with AI, how many people can't spell, but giraffe has two F's in it. The other thing is I urge you, and it's not just because I want to sell a book, but my memoir is pretty damn good and makes these points pretty well. And it's called Quest, Q-U-E-S-T, dash risk adventure and the search for meaning. Order it from your bookstore. It's also an audio book, so you can listen to it in a car, etc. etc. And then there's uh badass grandad series. Just go to the search boxes, either TikTok, Instagram, or YouTube. I've done 73 episodes now, so you can take a rainy day and listen to a few of them. I did try to do a couple a week, but that's enough. People can reach me that way.

Carl 28:03

We'll certainly make sure that we'll put those links for folks in the show notes to check out. I would ask what you're planning on doing when you retire, but I don't think you've figured that out yet. And I say that jokingly because a testament that you enjoy so much of the work that you do, you've had many different adventures in your life. What's there to retire from, right?

SPEAKER_01 28:22

That's it. Hey, Carl, you should be ashamed of yourself asking me that question. Anyway, what do I retire from? I'm having too much fun. I mean, if people haven't got from this 30 minutes we've spent together, that I'm having a lot of fun doing this, as well as I hope doing some good, then they're missing the whole point.

Carl 28:38

I think that's the big piece, is that clearly I was joking about that because but there's so many people though, and you must have you know spoken to them uh events you've been to as a speaker, or even maybe even some of the folks you've met or heard comments from on the podcast that, like you say, a lot of guys, especially they get to that point in their life where they say, Well, okay, I don't know what's next, but can't wait for my rocking chair money, you know, like it. But there's so much more to life that and you ask a retired person for somebody who has quit working, has quit their J-O B, what are they doing with their time? A lot of them are spending more time doing the type of work that you're doing because they love what they're doing.

SPEAKER_01 29:12

Absolutely. I even put it in my will that when the time comes, I get some terminal disease, and some doctor says you got X to live uh months to live. I live close to Mount Rainier. I've climbed it a bunch of times. And I'm just gonna go up in a light jacket and I'm gonna start walking in that light jacket toward the summit. I won't make it, of course, but close to the top, I'll find a crevasse and I'll fall in, and that'll be the end of me. And that seemed like a good way to go.

Carl 29:36

John, what a life of adventure. Thank you so much for sharing it with all of our folks here today. And again, link to some of the resources that John has mentioned his memoir, the Diraff Heroes Project, and also the badass grandad. That all sounds very amazing. And eventually, maybe the movie will come to fruition.

SPEAKER_01 29:54

It's tough to get a movie funded, but anyway.

Carl 29:57

You never know. John, it's been a great conversation. But before I turn you loose, I'll give you the final thought.

Where To Connect And Final Charge

SPEAKER_01 30:03

Giving it a couple times over. I think there's nothing more important than the search for meaning in our lives. And I urge all of your viewers not to quit that search until they find it. And I swear, if they look hard enough, they're gonna find it in some kind of giving back.

Carl 30:16

I love it. That's a great place to leave it. John Graham, thank you so much for being my guest today. It's a pleasure, a real pleasure.

SPEAKER_01 30:23

Thank you for doing this.

Carl 30:24

And hey, thank you for being a part of the show today. So glad you could join us. Believe it or not, I can't work this magic by myself. So, thanks to my amazing team, our audio engineer Don Corrillo, our Sodocratic genius Kenton Doborowski, and the person who works the arms. All of our arms actually, our project manager and my trusty assistant, Gillibel Tiango, known to us here simply as July. If you like what you heard today, let us know. You can leave us a comment or review or even send us a voice note. And if you really liked it, we hope you'll share it with your friends and your colleagues. If you don't like what you heard today, well, please feel free to share with your enemies. And if you know of someone who would make a great guest on the show, let us know about it. You can get in touch with us by going to our show notes where all of our connection points are there, including the links to our website, LinkedIn, and Facebook as well. And if you're ready to be a guest on podcasting, or even start your own show, let's have a conversation. We'll show you the simplest way to get into the podcasting space and rock it. Because after all, we're podcast solutions made simple. Catch a game next time.