Badass Granddad Speaks His Mind about Risk, Adventure and the Meaning of Life

What began as a book about the Vietnam War evolved into a candid memoir about a self-centered life of thrill-seeking adventure transformed into one focused on service and meaning.

"Quest: Risk, Adventure and the Search for Meaning" by John Graham is available in print, on Kindle and as an audio book. To watch a brief video that promotes the book, go here.

In this episode, you'll hear about John's close brushes with death; one long-ago personal failing that still weighs on him; life-changing mystical experiences; and struggles to shift from an adrenaline-fueled life to service-oriented work that includes his involvement with the Giraffe Heroes Project for nearly 45 years. 

Founded by his wife Ann Medlock, the Giraffe Heroes Project highlights individuals who "stick their necks out" for public good. You can learn more on the project's website. 

The black and white photo in the thumbnail is of a young John during a death-defying climb in Alaska. The picture is one of many in his new book, "Denali Diaries," which is available to access for free on John's site.

John's short-form video series "Badass Granddad," on TikTok, Instagram and YouTube, is his way to reach a younger demographic. The "Badass" episode about the war in Iran, mentioned in this conversation, was published on March 24. Here's a link. One of my favorite "Badass" episodes is the latest as of today. It's Ep. 70 about taking smart risks vs. stupid ones.

Underlying each of John's projects is this message: Pursue meaning through giving back, use your personal skills to serve, and be willing to take risks for the public good. 

"Quest" is a well-told story about John's remarkable life. I recommend it highly.

Also want to mention that the artwork framing the photos in the thumbnail is by my brother-in-law, Bob Jones, a prolific creator in his own right. 

This is Kate Jones. Thank you for listening to Everyday Creation®, available on YouTube and in podcast directories including Apple, Spotify, iHeart and Audible.

Transcript

Hello, I'm Kate Jones here with writer, speaker and coach John Graham, the author of “Quest: Risk, Adventure and the Search for Meaning.” John is also the “Badass Granddad” in a series of three-minute videos that one can find on TikTok, Instagram and YouTube. Each video is a tale of one of his adventures followed by a life lesson linked to that adventure. 

Welcome, John. It is so good to see you.

John: It's great to be here, Kate. And thank you so much for inviting me.

Kate: Oh, I so appreciate you being here. If you don't mind, let's talk first about “Quest,” which I just finished. This memoir is so good. There's great storytelling, fast-paced action, emotional resonance, spiritual awakening, and ultimately, good counsel for leading a meaningful life. And in this memoir, you don't shy away from your own failings either.

It's very, very honest. Why did you write this very personal account?

John: I suppose the initial impulse came from my long departed mother, like 25 years ago. She wanted me to write a book about my experiences in Vietnam. So that's what the book started to be. And then I started writing it, and I realized that I was writing stuff about the war in Vietnam — I was in it — that other people had already written.

I mean, that the war was a disaster, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera, Nixon, Kissinger. And all I was doing was repeating what others had already said. So I kinda lost interest in it, but then I realized that my story about Vietnam wasn't about Vietnam at all. It was about me because Vietnam was the first of a series of dramatic turning points in my life, turning my life completely around from one focused on violent adventure to one focused on service and solving public problems. And that all began to happen in a battle in Vietnam, and that was the story.

So when I realized that, I realized that, no, this is not gonna be a book about Vietnam. This is gonna be a memoir, and it's gonna be an incredibly honest, as you pointed out, memoir in which I would document a descent into a serious, profound hole in my life. A hole defined by selfishness, a hole defined by shallowness, where the only thing that mattered to me was the next rush of adrenaline, and I didn't give a damn about anybody else or anything else. And that all changed.

And the story of how that changed, I thought, would be an interesting story to tell. Not just because I wanted to tell it as a form of catharsis. I often joke that writing that memoir “Quest” was worth a million dollars in psychotherapy. It probably was. So it was not only for myself, for my own spiritual awakening.

But I thought — and I didn't think this was too hubristic — but I thought, you know, there are some lessons here. As far as I know, a lot of stuff that happened to me happens to a lot of people or something like it. And if I tell my story honestly enough and people realize, “Jesus, this guy Graham sank way lower than I'll ever sink. He was out of sight, but he pulled himself back up, and now he's doing some reasonably useful things on the planet. Well, I can do the same thing.” 

And so that became my hope that it would become a teaching tool, a coaching book, if you will, in the form of a memoir. So as you've noted, having just read it, the whole first half of the book is a descent into hell. It's all my adventures, and believe me, I have a lot of, as you know, I have a lot of terrific adventure stories.

Kate: Yes. They're very good adventures. I like your writing about them.

John: Thank you very much. And the second half is, OK, all right, I finally learned that violent adventures were fun while it lasted, but now I'm in my 30s. I've got to develop another life.

And so the second half of the book is my struggle to find a more meaningful life, not based on adventure but based on service. And that book continues to be honest because I went three steps up and two steps back. It took me a long time. The book, it started off as a war memoir, and I realized that was not nearly the story I wanted to tell.

Kate: The story that you tell is very compelling. And what, if anything, did you learn from doing this book?

John: It reconfirmed what I think I know, and I think almost everybody knows at some point, that the most important thing in living a life is finding meaning for that life. Otherwise, it's kinda like being a Swiss watch with no hands on it. When you look in the mirror in the morning, what looks back at you from that mirror? You wanna know that it means something, that you're on the planet for a purpose. I thought in the beginning of my life, adventure was the purpose.

I have some friends now and lots of other people that are convinced at this point of their life that the meaning will come from money and power. And maybe for a time, it will. But at a certain point, you begin to realize that the real meaning doesn't come from any of that, at least not real permanent meaning. Real meaning comes from some kind of giving back. And I've learned that not only in my own life, but in the nonprofit that I've been working with for the last 44 years, the Giraffe Heroes Project.

We don't need to talk so much about that, but it's giraffe.org, and I urge your viewers to take a look at it. It's a global movement all about moving people to stick their necks out, hence the metaphor giraffe. And it's all about people finding meaning by giving back, by helping solve tough public problems and taking risks to do so. So that's what my life became, and teaching people how to do that became my life's mission. So the last 45 years now, that's been the focus.

That's been the umbrella. That's been whatever you wanna call it. That's driven me. My life strategy has been set ever since that moment in Vietnam and climbing out of that hole. My life strategy is service, but what changes almost every day is tactics.

You mentioned, for example, my video series, “Badass Granddad.” By the way, in looking for it, badass is all one word, granddad has two d's in the middle. But in any case, I've been only doing that for a year. That's a tactic.

My strategy is set, and even at 83, I keep discovering new and better ways to implement that strategy. In other words, tactics. And the badass granddad is my latest. So I'm continually doing that and feeling awfully good about it. It really is fulfilling my life.

I'm sure it's making me live longer because I really found what life is about and what life was about for me. And I suspect for a lot of other people, once they come around to the understanding, it's about giving back.

Kate: There were a couple of moments, well, probably more than that in your book, but one in particular where somebody came to you clearly in deep emotional trouble. And it was a very inconvenient time. And just what that did to you afterwards, just how you didn't step up at that moment for this friend.

John: That’s true. I still think about that. It was one of the worst mistakes I ever made in my life and you described it briefly, but it was a guy I worked with. He was always a a hail fellow well met, always the life of the party, but there was always something sad about him. Never could figure it out.

And he comes to my house, on a winter night and it's cold, but my wife and I are having a big- deal dinner party. I'm a diplomat, right, at the United Nations. So it's a big-deal dinner party. And he comes to the door, and I've got guests and, you know, big wigs and stuff. And so I say, Tony, can we talk tomorrow morning?

I'll meet you for breakfast at the UN cafeteria. And he mumbles something and goes away. I turn him away. And I could clearly see he's, like, desperate. He goes to a hotel that night with his girlfriend, blows her brains out, then kills himself.

And I remember going to his funeral and just quietly weeping in the back realizing the mistake that I had made. So yeah, three steps up, two steps back. I was well-embarked on a life of service at that point. I thought I was anyway. I was doing a lot of good stuff at the United Nations and helping solve serious issues of poverty, disease and violence.

But when Tony comes to me, one person, one friend, and I fail him, well, that said that my life transition was far from complete.

Kate: Wow. It's quite a realization, and it takes a lot of clarity to see that too. That was one of the many poignant moments in your book. Chapter 15 was amazing, recognizing your real self through the events of that chapter. It was beautiful. It was absolutely beautiful.

John: Well, yes. It was. And in that chapter, it was by far the hardest chapter to write because it was all about what you might call mystic experiences. I mean, I'm a graduate of both Harvard and Stanford. I move with my head.

I'm very intellectual. And all of a sudden, I was overwhelmed by a lot of impulses coming at me from places I didn't understand. I wasn't a religious person, so I didn't understand it. And I finally began to do some study at what was happening to me. And I was having, for want of a better word, mystic experiences, even out-of-body experiences where I would be in some mystic state very much like some people describe being high on, like, ayahuasca or magic mushrooms or stuff like that.

Only I was doing it without any drugs, and sometimes I would be out of my body exploring realms that I never knew existed for hours at a time, and I learned an enormous amount out of that. It helped shape the moral life as to learning about what my role in the universe was. And, basically, I learned something that mystics have learned, people have learned for, I don't know, a couple hundred thousand years going back to cavemen, I suppose, and then continuing with people like St. John of the Cross, Teresa of Avila, or present-day Hindu mystics or whatever, that basically we're all one. There's a mystic connectedness to everything, and that I was part of it, kinda like a wave is part of an ocean. And that had a huge amount to say about my reactions and relationships to other human beings and to community because I couldn't run away from any of it.

There was no them, that was all me. It was all me being part of a larger whole that I had a hell of a time understanding, but finally did through these mystic experiences. But I had to be very careful in writing it because I didn't want people just to throw the memoir down and say, “Oh, now I understand. The guy’s nuts.” And had I not written it carefully, they might have done that.

But I tried to be extremely honest about my own skepticism, and I was really skeptical. I mean, I was at that time a serving foreign service officer, a diplomat, But I was at one point, for example, flying back and forth to Brussels, NATO headquarters, planning nuclear war for NATO. And then on the weekends, I'd be leading trance sessions at Holiday Inns. I even worked as a paid mystic for a year or so, seances, stuff like that. And I was afraid that if I said that, people would just dismiss me as an idiot, and probably some people still do.

But I tried to make it an Everyman experience that we all experience, things that are out of the ordinary, whether it's hearing the telephone buzz in your pocket and knowing for sure it's Aunt Grace in Buffalo. And you pick up the phone and sure enough, it's Aunt Grace in Buffalo. But how would you know that? Stuff like that. We all have experiences like that.

There's another whole world out there. Like I say, an ocean, and we're rafts in that ocean. And once I learned that, it set straight an awful lot of my questions about existence, and I never forgot it. And those experiences and this business about being a mystic lasted for three years, and it's shaped my life ever since.

Kate: Wow. That's really cool. The other chapter that I just wanna mention is the Pinsendam.

John: Prinsendam.

Kate: Prinsendam. OK. That's an incredible chapter. I mean, you go on a cruise and you almost die.

John: Yeah. I was an employee of the shipping company. I didn't go on a cruise for a vacation. I was invited, hired to be the guest lecturer. Here I was as big-shot diplomat, and all I had to do was give a couple lectures on foreign policy.

Back in those days, talking 1980 now, the cruise ships were tiny, tiny compared to today. There was only 550 people, not 5,000. And it was quite wonderful, very luxurious, and mostly old people, seniors, retired people. And they loved hearing someone like me give fancy lectures on foreign policy. So they were gonna pay me an absurd amount of money, and I got to take my then 13-year-old daughter, Mallory, with me.

We set sail from Vancouver, headed for the Far East for a delightful summer of roaming around the Far East and looking at the sights and all that. Three days out of Vancouver, the ship catches fire in the middle of the Gulf Of Alaska, a 140 miles from shore, and starts to sink. And at the same time, a typhoon is coming on. All of a sudden, things look really desperate. 

And I won't go through the whole chapter. It'll take the whole rest of our time here. But, basically, what happened was that we had to abandon the ship because they couldn't get the fire out. So Mallory, my daughter, and I are in this lifeboat, lifeboat number two. And we're a 140 miles from shore. Helicopters arrive from shore bases, and they move as quickly as they can hauling people out of the lifeboats one by one at the end of a chair and end of a chain, taking them to an oil tanker that had answered the SOS, dropping them off on the deck, coming back for more.

So they gradually began to to rescue people, 550, and they'd almost finished except that the typhoon came on and the helicopters couldn't fly anymore. Too dangerous. So the only hope then, and there are only eight of us left, eight, and it's lifeboat number two. And we were in the middle of a typhoon.

Kate: Darkness was about to fall.

John: You got it. And even in the daytime, you know, our only hope of rescue was not the helicopters. It was from Coast Guard cutters, small ships, frantically searching through this wild storm. And it was a huge storm, 30-foot waves. That's going up and down 60 feet.

We were all dying of the cold. We had no protection. We had no radio, no flares, no nothing, no motor. And I knew from my experience in mountain climbing, we were dying of hypothermia. And I just realized at this time, out of all my adventures, I wasn't gonna make it.

The odds of being rescued even with a bit of daylight left in the storm were really small. But as you pointed out, it was about to get dark. And once it got dark, it was hopeless. The Coast Guard cutter could have never found us in the dark. We had no reflectors, no lights. Like I say, no radio. All they would find if we weren't tossed out of the boat was eight corpses, frozen corpses in the morning.

Kate: But don't tell how you were rescued because it is so good. Let people read it or listen to it. Wow. And we're just talking about two of 22 chapters that are really memorable. So I just wanna thank you for what a great book this is.

John: Oh, thank you very much. It took a long time to write because I swore from the very beginning, the very first page, that I was either gonna make it brutally a 100% honest or nothing. And I kept that promise. And so you read that book and, yes, I hope people have your reaction that it's a good book. I think it is a good book.

But also the reaction that, "Boy, this guy sank really low," like I said. "And he crawled out the other side. So if he can do it, I can do it too."

Kate: There's hope for me too, right? That is excellent. When did that book come out? I didn't even check that.

John: Oh, it came out in some preliminary editions a long time ago, six, seven years ago, and it's been out in this current forum, “Quest,” for two years now.

Kate: The person who does the reading is really good, too.

John: Yes. The audiobook is very new. That was just last year. It's been up as a print book and as an electronic book, Kindle book, for like I say, five, six, seven years. And then I decided that because so many people have access to books these days only when they're driving to work and stuff, that I would make an audiobook. I invested a few bucks in turning it into an audiobook, and it's getting a lot of listeners.

Kate: The entire process of doing this book, how did it change you? How did it affect you? How did you grow from it?

I guess it kept me honest. If ever I felt a lack of faith in myself, if ever I felt that I was gonna chicken out and take the easy way out of a decision, all I had to do was, “Hey, wait a minute. You're the guy that wrote this book, this big, honest book, right? And you're gonna chicken out? No, I don't think so. Buck it up, Graham. You've tried to tell people that you can crawl out of a hole and do some good in the world, so you better keep doing it.”

So if anything, it's been a continual kick in the pants.

Kate: Is there anything else you wanna talk about either your memoir or would you like to go on to "Badass Granddad" right now?

John: Well, it's all one. "Badass Granddad" is the same stories that are in “Quest,” and I did "Badass Granddad" because I wanted to reach that demographic. Last year, I was 82, and I was reaching a lot of people with all my writings and stuff. But I didn't think I was reaching young people. And, of course, famously, young people, Gen X, Gen Z, whatever they are now, have a short attention span. I knew I had to use a short-form video, three minutes max.

I didn't know how to do that because I've been a professional speaker most of my life, and I'm used to being on a stage for 45 minutes. And so the idea of doing something in three minutes, telling a story, was a real struggle, and I had to master it, which I think I did. So I started doing "Badass Granddad," and I started on TikTok. I held my nose because I don't like TikTok, and I still don't like TikTok. And I may get off it because I'm so disgusted with its ownership.

But in any case, I started off on TikTok and then added Instagram and then YouTube, and it turned out to be enormously popular. I was amazed. I was utterly amazed. I have now, as of this morning, a 120,000 followers and 2 and a half million viewers. And I'm told by people that are supposed to know about such things that that's pretty good.

In fact, I've had podcast producers and social media producers constantly contacting me, offering to put ads up on “Badass Granddad” and pay me a lot of money. I mean, a lot of money. Of course, I say no. But there I am. I looked it up.

At these numbers, I am a, what do they call it? A senior influencer, which makes me laugh, Kate, because I always thought an influencer, oh, yes. I know what that is. That's young ladies who teach you how to put nail polish on correctly. That's an influencer.

Kate: So I shouldn't have said writer, speaker, coach when I introduced you. I should have said influencer John Graham.

John: Oh, yes. He'll teach you how to put nail polish on. Right. So, anyway, I'm having great fun doing it, and it's interesting because I thought that pitching this toward a younger demographic, I would get a lot of snarky comments. Like, who is this old fart? What's he know? You know? From people who are 26 or or 29 years old or whatever.

No, that’s not what I get. I get a huge amount of fan mail, but it's almost entirely positive. And half of it is what you might expect. It's “attaboy, great, love it.” But the other half are serious questions and comments from people. And they're all young. My demographic, I find now, is more like 30 to 45 for whatever reasons. But the questions are serious.

And because they're serious, I mean people read a story from “Badass Granddad” and they'll make a comment like, “Wow, that was incredible what you did. I'm facing a real tough challenge here. My company is doing something wrong, corrupt. But if I blow the whistle on it, I'll get fired. What should I do?” Or “I'm in a terrible position now because of something I did in the family, and my wife's gonna leave me.” People with serious problems where a little courage and encouragement and guidance might be useful to them. 

And because these questions are so honest, I feel that I have to answer them with more than thanks a lot. And so I do. I spend four or five hours a week now, Kate, answering my fan mail because these questions and comments deserve it. So I'm having an impact. I thought I would just broadcast these three-minute stories, and that'd be great. Some people would read them. Some wouldn't. Instead I get this massive response. 

And not only that, but because of these four or five hours I spend a week basically coaching, I'm helping a lot of people directly, which is all I've wanted to do for the last 45 years since that turnaround from Vietnam. It's all I've wanted to do is help people live meaningful lives and find that meaningful life and some kind of giving back. And now I found yet another vehicle for doing it. So I kinda fell into it.

And I couldn't be more thrilled with the impact of “Badass Granddad.” I didn't expect it.

Kate: Marvelous extension of your service. It is more service for others, for the common good, because there's a lot of confusion. There's a lot of anxiety. And to be part of calming or guiding or inspiring someone is a very beautiful thing.

John: Also, I can take “Badass Granddad” in lots of different directions now that I have this huge audience. For example, maybe now or within an hour or two, the latest episode will go up and it's all political. It's all about Donald Trump's war in Iran. Like I say, I used to be an American diplomat. Not only that, I was engaged in wars and revolutions, so I know an awful lot about how to fight and how not to fight a war in the Middle East.

And so I've offered a very sharp criticism of the Trump administration's war in Iran, and it'll be up on “Badass Granddad” sometime today. And I expect a call from the White House momentarily. Who is this guy? So I'm using “Badass Granddad” in lots of different ways now that I'm noticing how powerful it is. It's become a megaphone in many ways as well as a coaching vehicle.

Kate: Very good. Love it. And then you're also the director of Giraffe Heroes International?

John: Yes, but I wanna say right away that I had nothing to do with starting it. It was done by my wife, Ann Medlock, who who was a single mother living in New York City. And she was kinda, like, fed up with all the negative emphasis in the news. New York City news, world news, whatever, it was all negative.

And she knew there are a lot of good people doing good things, and nobody was telling their stories, so she would. So she starts this whole broadcast system from her living room and calls it Giraffe Heroes program because giraffes have a long neck, and so that's where the metaphor came from.

Kate: I love that. Sticking your neck out for good.

John: She was looking for people sticking their necks out for good, and there was no lack of them. And she began telling those stories. Well, this was in 1982, so we're not talking social media. Ann was very creative, and she started using everything from paper press releases stuffed into envelopes and sent to media to a vinyl disc. I suspect some of your viewers don't even know what a vinyl disc is.

It's a flat piece of plastic. It goes around and around on a turntable. Sound comes out. And she would send these records to radio stations, each one full of these little three-, four-, five-minute maybe stories. She'd get a movie star or a stage star. After all, it was New York City. It wasn't that hard to do the voice over and send these things out. 

Now I met her soon after she started. Initially, I was so stupid, I thought it was kinda lightweight. I mean, telling stories, really. But then I realized how powerful it was as people began to catch on. And within a few years, there was a nice feature on her in The New York Times, and away she went, and the Giraffe Project's been booming ever since. 

And I joined her soon after, in part because I began to realize the power of storytelling, something people have realized for what? A hundred thousand years? But also because I fell madly in love with her. And the two of us married and have been husband and wife and business partners on Giraffe Heroes Project now for well, it'll be in another month or so, it'll be 45 years.

Kate: Excellent. What a great organization. Anything more you'd like to say about the organization?

John: In 45 years, we have done a lot of stuff, and, again, a lot of is because of Ann's creativity. We've now found 2,000 of these Giraffe Heroes. They are men, they are women. Some of them are young. Some of them not. They're every color in the rainbow, from every walk of life from 60, 70 countries. What unites them is their passion for sticking their necks out and solving a public problem. 

And that public problem can be anything from, for example, for a teenager, it might be stopping bullies in their high school. For adults, it might be demanding that relief supplies be allowed to flow into Gaza or maybe fighting global climate change or whatever.

It's every kind of issue you can think of, people taking risks, and that's the key thing. They have to take a risk. Lots of people do good things, but what the Giraffe Project focuses on is people doing good things and doing them in dangerous environments, sometimes even physically dangerous environments. I mean, more than a few Giraffes have been hurt, even a few of them killed doing what they're doing. So we've been doing that now for, like I say, almost 45 years.

We've also, in that time, created a huge program for schools stretching all the way from pre-K to high school. Ann and I together have written four or five books all about civic engagement, helping people stick their necks out without getting their heads chopped off. A lot of it is basic stuff about how to form teams, how to deal with conflict, how to plan a rally, whatever. But an awful lot of it is back to the central theme of how to find a meaning for your life and finding it through service and getting an extra boost to your energy and your insights by focusing what you're doing on some form of giving back. 

And so the strategy of the Giraffe Project really hasn't changed. Our tactics have have changed a lot because we're constantly bobbing and weaving, finding new ways on social media to tell these stories. And I do urge your viewers, the URL is very simple. It's simply giraffe.org. From there, you can get to these 2,000 stories. The links are pretty clear.

You can nominate your own heroes to be Giraffe Heroes. We have a jury that meets three, four times a year to choose them out of all the recommendations that we get. And we're constantly experimenting with new ways, new forms of social media to get the messages out. And we'll keep doing that. I mean, Ann and I, we're not gonna stop.

People ask me, “Well, when are you two gonna retire, for God's sake?” I say, retire from what? We're having too much fun. We're doing too much good as far as we can tell. So I do urge your viewers to go take a look at giraffe.org and just scroll through, and you'll see in great detail what we're up to.

Kate: OK. And you also have a website, johngraham.org. I didn't know that you had done the “Denali Diary.”

John: Oh, that's the newest thing. A long time ago, in fact, 1963, I was part of a team of climbers that made the first direct descent of the North Wall of Mount McKinley, Denali in Alaska. And this is one of the most difficult and dangerous mountain faces on the planet. Top to bottom, it's higher and tougher than anything at Mount Everest, and it took us 38 days. It was horrendously dangerous, but we managed to do it and come back down in one piece.

About three years or so ago, my daughter, Mallory, the same Mallory that was on that lifeboat with me, she reminded me that I had found a diary. I put it in a drawer somehow, but it was the original diary. I kept notes every night on this climb no matter how hard the weather was, whatever. I kept notes of how the climb was progressing, and it's all written in the enthusiastic, bombastic, stupid way that a 21-year-old writes an adventure. You know? And so it's just great. 

I also found at the same time a whole trove of black and white photographs that I didn't know existed. And I put the two together. Mallory helped me do it, and it took a year or so, but we created basically an illustrated memoir called “Denali Diary.” And at this point in my life, I wasn't interested in selling books anymore. So I put it up as a free download on my website, and you can go to the website, which is my name, John Graham.org, and you'll see at the nav bar, “Denali Diary.” So go there. 

It's a quick read and lots of incredible pictures of this first descent. It's never been repeated because it's so freaking dangerous. The one team that tried, the guy got killed, so no one tries it anymore. It's just too dangerous, but we did it. And the story is pretty riveting. So that's what the “Denali Diary” is.

Kate: And that was one of the times you almost died.

John: Oh, half a dozen times.

Kate: Yes. I know. But that was one of them.

John: Yeah. That was one of them. And either being hit by avalanches or hit by rocks falling down the cliff or falling in crevasses or falling off a steep snow ledge. It it was a miracle that of the seven of us, there was not even a serious injury. It was just a miracle.

Kate: Incredible. I'm listening to this on Audible going, oh my God. Not being a very physical adventurer. But anyway, I wanna ask you one thing about your Moscow chapter. It just sounds like things were so on the upswing there at that time in the late ’80s, early ’90s.

Yeah. And I'm extending that to everyone, including us here in the United States. Things do not seem on the upswing right now. A lot of regressive ideas and just things are tough. And what do you think about what's going on right now?

I mean, to me, the best way is keep our thoughts as high as possible. But it just looks really bleak for our country, for the world. And I just wondered what you think about what’s happening.

John: I'm upset. I'm angry. And you're right. One thing that's really important is keeping a positive mental attitude. For that, it goes back to this key theme we've been talking about for over half an hour. That is finding meaning in your life. You’ve got to find the meaning of your life. And if your meaning is just to bash the opponent, make sure those bastards in the White House do the right thing, you're not gonna get very far because they're smart and tough, and they're gonna come right back at you. What you need to do is create that positive attitude in yourself that will help drive smarter, tougher reactions yourself, and you have to be smart about this. 

I have a lot of wonderful friends who some of them wanna pray their way to a better world.

That's great. I don't do that, but I think it's really important that people do that if that's their thing. And other people just are constantly saying, “Oh, I hope things get better. I hope things get better.” “I myself am gonna try to do my best to calm down the polarization that I see in my hometown,” and that's great too.

At the same time, you have to also be street smart, and that's where a lot of my efforts are oriented. I do a lot of speaking, for example, to corporate audiences. And if I went in front of a corporate audience well, before COVID, there were large ballrooms full of people. Now not so much. But if I go before a corporate audience and I say, oh, I'm gonna tell you how to do good in the world. They'll throw me out of the room. I mean, these are tough-minded people. They haven't got time for a mild idealist to tell them to be good. 

No. I talk from my experience, all these adventures. I tell them about mountain climbs. I tell them about all the times in revolutions. Like, I was in the middle of the revolution in Libya, for example. I was in the war in Vietnam and lots of other stuff. I tell them all these stories until they understand that I've been risky.

And then when I've captured their attention, I segue for the last five minutes or so of a speech or an interview, and I'll say, you know, I shifted from realizing that the meaning of my life does not come from the adrenaline rush. It comes from giving back. And I wanna tell you how this happened to me because I'm a pretty tough-minded guy as you've now understood. And so why would this tough-minded guy do this? And so I explain the story of what happened to me beginning with this turnaround in in Vietnam, beginning with the almost backsliding of that time in the Prinsendam, in the lifeboat, and also beginning with my years in the United Nations where I did a lot of good things. For example, I've helped end apartheid in South Africa. I feel really good about that. 

So I tell them all these stories, and then I end with, you know, is this true for all of us? My story is an Everyman's story, Everywoman's story. Each of us has a chance to do good in the world.

Yes. I understand. You're not gonna be climbing Denali. You're not gonna be risking your life in a revolution. But the risk for you might be standing up at a school board meeting and demanding that your school board stop banning books, or it might be something bigger than that, like, protesting killing those two people in Minneapolis by ICE agents.

It might be all kinds of things that really annoy you. What I'm saying is stick your neck out. Stick your neck out. Get out there and raise your hand. Picket. Write letters to your congressman. Raise hell. Do what you have to do to help make a difference. And as you do that, as you begin to see, and you will see, you will see results, especially if you start small. 

People that wanna do good in the world and are focused entirely on the whole aspect of global climate change, well, that's great. That's important. It's also important to write checks to groups that work in issues like that. But it's even more important to look around and see what's happening right in your hometown, right in your community, and not just your school board trying to ban books, but maybe it's something that the MAGA Republicans in your community are trying to do and you don't agree with. Well, maybe when next time you see that person in the grocery store, instead of coming after them and saying, “How dare you,” you start talking about your grandchildren or something. You start trying to do something that starts building a little trust.

So then you can start talking about community issues, like low-income housing, for example, or transportation, or all the things that are trouble for every American city. You look for ways in which you can work together. But at the same time, as I was saying earlier, you can't be naive about these things. There are some people, and we can name them in the Trump White House and his minions, who are never gonna do the right thing and then you have to outvote them. So that means working hard, for example, to take away congressional power from the MAGA Republicans this November with your vote and certainly to elect a Democrat in 2028 and try to rebuild this country from the mess that you pointed out we're now into after having gone through, at least for those of us who are old enough, a very optimistic period in 1989, 1990 when the Soviet Union collapsed, and it looked like we were looking for a much better world, and it didn't last very long, did it?

Kate: Unfortunately, no. But we keep on. A lot of times, that's the way of things, though. It is the way of things because the end of something isn't necessarily when you think it is, and it comes roaring back because whatever the quote-unquote evil is, it gets stronger before it, we hope, disappears.

John: Well, it's gotta be more than hope, Kate. It's gotta be a hope combined with a lot of street-smart efforts and risk. And that's the key with the Giraffe Project. We recognized from the beginning that hope isn't enough. You gotta take risks. You gotta stick your neck out. And that means by sticking your neck out, it means by definition is a possibility of being hurt. Well, you gotta do it anyway because the opposition now, the people that wanna polarize this country and turn it into a white Christian nationalist nation and tromp on the rights of all the brown and Black people in this country…

Kate: And the women.

John: And the women.

Kate: All women.

John: All women. They have to be dealt with, and they have to crawl back under the rocks where they came from when Donald Trump first was elected president. Those people existed forever in our country. Just go back and look at the stuff that was being said and debated in the 1850s, for example, by slavers in the South. And there were some really nasty people then too, and those people are still here.

But pretty much, they were living under a rock, and then Donald Trump lifted up that rock and all these people, I don't know how many, 10 percent of our population, 20 percent, but far more people than I thought, and this is a discouraging part. Millions of people think that what Donald Trump is doing with his prejudice, with his racism, with his stupidity is a great thing.

Kate: It's ugliness. You know? It's unrelenting ugliness. Not physical, I'm not talking about that. I'm just talking about the behavior. And the words are so, it's so deadening for people's spirits.

John: That’s right, it is. So, you know, it means take a look at how you can move against that. Some of it's gonna be political, but some of it is simply, I don't know, bringing some music and light into that emptiness. Convincing people, other people that people are still basically good, that those people that wanna do good far outnumber those that wanna do us evil.

That right now we're in a position where for various reasons we got outvoted and we're dealing with a bunch of sometimes pretty awful people doing some really awful things, immigration, wars, whatever. And we gotta not only live through this, we have to correct it and then take steps to do a better job of making sure it never happens again. Because let's face it. The Democrats, a lot of progressives, took their eye off the ball beginning with Bill Clinton, in my view. Let a lot of things slip. They forgot, for example, that there was a working class in America and that we needed to have policies that were directed not at Eastern elites, but at the great majority of working people, most of them in the center of the country and in the South.

They got madder and madder and madder. And when Trump came along, they said, yes. A savior at last. Well, we can do better than that.

Kate: We certainly can. Is there anything else, John? I've taken a lot of your time, and it has been so enjoyable for me. So thank you.

John: Well, thank you. Anything else. My bumper sticker is “look for the meaning of your life.” And don't stop with “it’s money” or “it’s power” or “it’s my granddaughter's wedding in September.” No. It's something more than that. It's something more than that.

And don't stop until you've found a meaning in your life that somewhere entails giving back. Doesn't mean you have to become Mother Teresa. Doesn't mean you have to live in sackcloth and ashes. No. Doesn't mean poverty.

You can be of service as a business person, for example, making a good product and selling it at a fair price, good labor conditions, good environmental conditions, good neighbor in your community. You can be of service in all kinds of different ways. Take stock of who you are. If you're good at math, for example, maybe there's some engineering problem, maybe a a new system of busing for your town you can contribute to. If you're a musical person, maybe there's something you can do that creates some beautiful musical event that brings people together, etcetera, etcetera.

Take stock of who you are and then use those skills and resources to make a difference. And, yes, it will mean sticking your neck out, which entails risk. You need to do it.

Kate: All right. Or as you said in that lifeboat, OK!

John: OK. Yes, OK.

Kate: I will leave it at that. OK! 

John, thank you. This has been lovely.

John: It has been lovely. Thank you so much for inviting me on.

Kate: Absolutely. My pleasure. 

This is Kate Jones. Thanks for listening to Everyday Creation.