May 7, 2025 • 57 mins
John Graham's life reads like an adventure novel, but with a profound transformation at its core. At just 17, he left behind his sheltered existence in Tacoma, Washington, for a summer job on a freighter bound for the Far East. That voyage would set him on a path of increasingly dangerous adventures spanning decades and continents.
Graham recounts harrowing experiences with remarkable candor – mountain climbing expeditions where avalanches narrowly missed him, hitchhiking through war zones, and navigating political revolutions. His seemingly insatiable hunger for adrenaline led him to the U.S. Foreign Service, where he strategically positioned himself in the divisions handling wars and revolutions, primarily in Africa and Asia.
The turning point came during the Vietnam War. As Graham orchestrated desperate measures during a battle for the city of Hue, he experienced a profound moral awakening: "I didn't give a damn about this war... The only thing that mattered to me was fulfilling my own needs for taking risks." This realization began a transformation that would redirect his considerable skills and courage toward humanitarian work.
His most dramatic moment of reckoning occurred years later during the sinking of the cruise ship Prinsendam in the Gulf of Alaska. Trapped in a lifeboat during a typhoon with rescue chances dwindling, Graham had what he describes as a spiritual confrontation that cemented his commitment to meaningful service. Following his miraculous rescue, he joined forces with his wife Ann Medlock at the Giraffe Heroes Project, where they've spent over 40 years telling stories of people who "stick their necks out" for the common good.
Now in his 80s, Graham offers wisdom that transcends political divisions: "There's no more important quest for anybody than our personal lives being meaningful." His journey from self-serving adventurer to humanitarian reminds us that finding purpose through service creates bridges across even the deepest divides. What will you do to make your life meaningful?
Links - Giraffe Heroes Project
John Graham - https://www.johngraham.org/
Hosted by Brandon Mulnix - Director of Commercial Accounts - Prism Controls
The Poultry Leadership Podcast is only possible because of its sponsor, Prism Controls
Find out more about them at www.prismcontrols.com
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Brandon Mulnix (00:27):
Welcome to the Poultry Leadership podcast.
I'm your host Brandon Mulnix, Iwant to welcome you to today's
episode and I think you're goingto find this one quite
interesting.
It's not every day that you getto talk to an 82 year old
grandfather who's got stories ofan amazing adventure.
(00:47):
Most people that have thestories that he has aren't alive
anymore because they probablydied during one of those stories
, and this guy his name's JohnGraham has lived an amazing life
.
I mean, you can look him up onWikipedia and you can find all
kinds of adventures that thisguy's done, and so I want to
(01:09):
invite John on the show becauseJohn speaks from the heart.
John speaks to us with wisdom,age old wisdom, stuff that needs
to be passed from generation togeneration.
And guess what?
He doesn't know a darn thingabout chickens.
So stay tuned, guys.
John, welcome to the show.
John Graham (01:29):
Thank you, you took my opening line, man.
I was going to say I don't knowa damn thing about chickens.
Brandon Mulnix (01:36):
It's okay, you said it anyways.
Hey, John, tell us a little bitabout yourself.
John Graham (01:40):
Well, I'm lucky to be alive, which you kind of got
to, I mean the time I was 40,I'd almost I counted I guess I'd
almost died a violent death.
I mean almost, I mean reallyclose to a violent death, a
dozen times the time I was 40.
And, like I say, I'm lucky tobe alive.
Washington, living in a totallywhite bread community.
There was no adventuresanywhere.
(02:07):
My parents were, you know, agood, stable Republican family
and nothing exciting everhappened and I was expected to
go to high school and then theUniversity of Washington and
then, I don't know, start workin Tacoma or Seattle someplace,
and that's what everybody did,my sister did that.
But then a weird thing happenedthat utterly changed my life and
(02:30):
I won't give you all thedetails, that'd take too long,
but through some weirdcircumstances I found myself
getting a job on a freightergoing to the Far East and back
when I was barely 17 years old.
Now, in those days a freighterwasn't a container ship, this
was in 1959.
So a freighter was a big boatwith Terry and the Pirates, look
(02:51):
to it.
It was run by 50 or 60 reallytough guys tattoos, muscles, all
the rest of it and I got a jobon a freighter and I set sail
from San Francisco to spend thesummer in the far East.
Now these 50 or 60 tough guystook one look at me, this nerdy
little kid from Tacoma,washington, who was undoubtedly
(03:12):
heading for college and all thatnicey nicey stuff and they were
determined to teach me lifelessons.
They knew I would never get ina classroom and they did, they
did.
You can imagine what thoselessons were going across the
Pacific.
I mean six guns and rock androll.
I mean it was like amazing to a17-year-old.
(03:33):
I remember the first port ofcall was in a place called
Iloilo, as I remember, it was atiny port in the middle of a
jungle in the Philippines andthe ship had stopped there to
pick up coconuts.
Port in the middle of a junglein the Philippines and the ship
had stopped there to pick upcoconuts.
We stopped there and the firstnight there the seaman took me
down to the bars in town, whichwere like fast roof bars and
(03:54):
there was liquor and prostitutes, a whole bit.
I mean it was like a big fightbroke out.
I lost track of what was goingon because I was so drunk broke
out.
I lost track of what was goingon because I was so drunk.
They got me drunk the firsttime in my life that they hauled
me back to the ship and savedmy life and I had a hangover
that lasted for three days.
I suddenly began to realizethat there was a bigger, wider
(04:17):
world than Tacoma Washington.
I mean wow.
And that whole trip was socolorful, it was so violent in a
way, um, in a way that that itwas completely new to me.
I mean, young men, we alwayslook for role models, especially
when you're 16, 17, right,you're looking for role models.
I love my dad, but he was aboutthe gentlest person you'd ever
hope to see.
(04:37):
He never got promotions becausemore aggressive males were
always batting him down and hewasn't the role model I looked
at because I was getting bulliedby kids at school, for example.
So I was looking for somethingmore than a really quiet
intellectual, and my dad wasn'tthat.
But on this ship man, I mean, myprotector on the ship was a guy
(04:57):
named Roy.
It was a 250 pound black guywho was determined to protect me
and keep me from getting killedin barroom brawls or whatever,
and roy was a great example.
I mean, I remember just secondor third day out or up on deck
and, uh, one of the other seamenstarts making, uh, you know,
sexual advances to me and roygrabs that guy around the,
(05:20):
around the neck with his shirt,uh, and slams him up against the
bulkhead and in there proceededwas a string of magnificent
cussing.
Oh, I never heard cussing likethat.
And Roy told that guy that ifhe ever put his such and such
hands on me, he was going totake this guy's such and such
body part and shove it down histhroat.
I just sat there.
Brandon Mulnix (05:41):
Oh, wow.
John Graham (05:42):
And then he shoves the guy down, kicks him a couple
times and the guy slinks off.
I remember that night goingdown to the cabin where I bunked
, practicing to be like Roy,slamming an imaginary guy up
against the mirror and trying togrowl like Roy I'm going to.
Roy was my hero and from thatmoment on, the heroes I look for
(06:05):
in my life are all peoplecapable of physical violence.
But that was the first of it,and I was nowhere near able to
do that because, like I say, Iwas, like you know, a nerdy, 98
pound, weakling, whatever.
I always got beat up and I wasnever good enough to be an
athlete in high school.
So, you know, I had to reallystruggle.
But I soon began to learn andvery soon after that I get to
(06:28):
write a risky after.
Yeah, after my freshman year incollege, I scraped up enough
money to hitchhike in europe.
Uh, and I did that.
I hitchhiked in europe and Iwas looking for all kinds of
adventures, because afterroaring on the and ship which
was called the Golden Bear,after rowing on the Golden Bear,
I wanted nothing but adventure.
(06:49):
I hitchhiked in Europe.
I felt I could do that.
Oh, by the way, also when I gotto university I rode crew.
It took a lot, but I put on 20,30 pounds of muscle in a year.
So I was no longer a 98-poundweakling and I began to get
tougher and tougher.
And my mind was getting tougherand tougher.
So I could hitchhike aroundEurope.
(07:09):
And I remember I was at a youthhostel in Switzerland.
I went there to climb theMatterhorn, that spiky mountain
in Switzerland, which was greatfun.
And then I saw in the newspaperthat there was a war still
going on in Algeria, thecolonial war.
The rebels were fighting theFrench army and the still going
on in Algeria, the colonial war.
The rebels were fighting theFrench army and the French
foreign agent in Algeria.
And I said, oh, wow, that'scool.
(07:30):
And I got to get in the middleof that war because that's a
hell of an adventure for me.
So I hitchhiked down throughMorocco and hitchhiked across
the border into Algeria.
Only there wasn't a borderbecause there was a war going on
.
And I was smart enough to putan American flag over my chest
so that I wouldn't be taken foroffense or else I would have
been shot.
And the rebels were great theywould stop cars going in my
(07:52):
direction at gunpoint and demandthat the driver take me where I
wanted to go.
I just thought that wasterrific.
And here I was, hitchhikingthrough over the middle of a
shooting war, and I was was sonaive that I either didn't care
about the dangers or didn'trealize it, or whatever.
But things got more and moreadventuresome.
The very next summer, forexample, I was with a group of
(08:16):
climbers from the UniversityMountaineering Club and we went
up to Alaska to tackle the northface of then Mount McKinley,
now Denali.
Yeah, I still call it Denali, Idon't care what Mr Trump says
Dammit, it's Denali.
But anyway, we went after theclimb Mount McKinley, on a climb
that nobody climbed beforebecause it was so frigging
dangerous and I mean dangerous.
(08:37):
Avalanches were coming downthat wall, and it was the
biggest mountain wall in theworld, bigger than any of the
mountain walls of Mount Everest,and no one had ever climbed it.
So we were going to climb it.
And we did, and it was onehairy-ass adventure after the
other.
I mean, avalanches would sweepdown and they would miss us and
rocks would fall and they wouldmiss us and we'd take terrific
falls and the rope would catchus.
(08:58):
I almost drowned in theMcKinley River, for example, but
we got to the top and thatclimb, if you look it up, is now
one of the most iconic mountainclimbs, first ascents in North
American mountaineering, calledthe Wickersham Wall, north Wall
of Mount McKinley.
So after that I was reallydetermined, obviously, that I
(09:18):
was never going to get killed bymy adventures.
So with that in mind that I wasindestructible, my adventures
got more and more extreme.
After college I hitchhikedaround the world and I could
prattle for the rest of oursession with the adventures you
can imagine hitchhiking aroundthe world, and I'm talking about
hitchhiking through a desert ofdeath in Afghanistan,
(09:40):
hitchhiking through all placesthat became the headquarters
with the Taliban, and there Iwas and I just walked through it
all without a scratch.
Brandon Mulnix (09:48):
It's funny you say hitchhiking, John, because
in today's generation peoplethink they're going to get
killed if they hitchhike, letalone or killed by a hitchhiker,
let alone hitchhiking aroundthe world.
John Graham (10:00):
I know it kind of saddens me, brandon, because you
know, there I was, the worldwas my oyster, so many
adventures out there and thereweren't that many of us, but you
saw quite a few hitchhikersaround.
And don't forget also that thiswas the mid-60s and so the
world wasn't as dangerous thenin many ways as it is now.
(10:21):
It wasn't a wash in drugs, forexample.
So yeah, a little bit ofhashish in a hitchhiker's pack,
but not the stuff that goes onnow.
And police forces and armyforces looked on hitchhikers as
kind of like irrelevant, crazyWesterners and didn't really
bother us, and so it was a lotless dangerous.
I don't know if you could dowhat I did then, but I literally
(10:43):
except for the oceans, Iliterally hitchhiked around the
world sleeping in haystacks andliving on three, four dollars a
day.
Also at that time I mangled thestringer contact from the Boston
Globe to write stories for theBoston Globe as a correspondent
on every war I came across.
So I got into the war in Cyprus.
That was cool because the restof the professional journalists
(11:08):
in the evening would all hunkerdown in their hotels and I
wouldn't.
I'd put on a piece of lightclothing so I could be seen at
night and I'd go walking on theceasefire line, just walking
down there with guns pointed atme from both sides.
In Cyprus the war then wasbetween Greeks and Turks, so
there would be Turkish guns onone side and guns on the other
and I would walk down the middleof that talking to people if I
(11:30):
could.
And I think nothing of it.
The other correspondents, thereal professionals who were
getting drunk in the hotel bars,thought I was crazy, but it was
great fun.
Then I went to cover the war inlayos, in the Plain of Jars,
and then the beginnings of thewar in Vietnam, where I went out
with the South Vietnamese Armypatrols.
(11:52):
I ended up in Australia for awhile because I had by then a
degree in geology.
So I worked for a short time asa geologist in Australia.
Then I came to the conclusionthat I wasn't a rich person.
Nothing was more important thanmy life of adventure and I had
to do something to keep thatgoing.
How could I do that?
Well, I thought foreign service.
(12:13):
That's cool.
I'll join the foreign service.
And I did.
I passed the exams for the USforeign service and then I got
the State Department.
I conned the State Departmentinto not sending me to fancy
embassies in Europe where I'dhave to wear a coat and tie, but
they put me into this part ofthe Foreign Service that works
with wars and revolutions,mostly in Africa and Asia.
(12:35):
That was terrific.
My second post, for example,was the first revolution in
Libya, and it was exactly what Iwas looking for in the foreign
service.
I mean, here I was in in Libya.
Muammar Gaddafi who was my age,by the way had just taken
control of the country and thecountry was a mess and everybody
else in the embassy wasfreaking out, because you know
(12:57):
there was a revolution.
I loved it.
I mean, the first time I saw acar burning in the streets or a
mob of protesters shaking theirfists, I was in my element.
I just loved it.
I just loved it and I knew,like I said, I would never be
hurt.
I had that weird conviction.
So, after surviving therevolution in Libya, I demanded
(13:18):
to be sent to Vietnam, wherethere was, of course, a shooting
war.
Then I told the StateDepartment to send me to the
most dangerous approach they had.
They did.
I was the advisor to the cityof huawei, which was a small
city just 50 miles south of whatwas then the dmz, dividing the
north from the south in vietnam.
(13:38):
And um, it was uh, it was ashooting war.
I was in that part of theforeign Service that sure didn't
wear coats and ties and I wasarmed and I dealt with a lot of
intelligence issues and did alot of fairly nasty stuff.
That was also part of the wareffort.
But I never wore a uniform.
I was over there as a civilian.
Brandon Mulnix (13:57):
John, I want to talk about something that I
learned about you when we weretalking to set up this podcast.
Wasn't Vietnam?
That was the moment wherethings started to change for you
.
John Graham (14:06):
Yes, so amazing.
It took me that long because bynow I was in my late 20s, but
it did happen.
As you say, it did happen in abattle in Vietnam.
The North Vietnamese had almostsurrounded Hue.
Their tanks and guns were onlyfive or six miles from the city.
By that point the Americanforces had been withdrawn from
Vietnam, the military forces, soI and just three other
(14:30):
civilians were in Hue and therewere tens of thousands of North
Vietnamese troops bearing downon us.
I knew that a rescue helicoptercouldn't get me out, because if
one arrived in Hue, my SouthVietnamese counterparts would be
clamoring to get onto thehelicopter and I'd have to shoot
my counterparts, literallyshoot them off the skids.
(14:51):
So that wasn't going to happen.
So my life really depended uponthe battle for Hue.
It so happened that at theheight of the battle, my job
then was to create a stable basearea, which was really
difficult because the SouthVietnamese Army had basically
broken and only remnants of itremained to fight.
(15:12):
The North Vietnamese and mostof the city leaders had fled
because there was still a pathout of the city.
It wasn't quite surrounded.
They fled to Da Nang.
So basically, I and the otherthree American civilians ended
up running the city trying tocreate martial law, which was
necessary because all the armsand ammunition for whatever that
(15:33):
was left of the SouthVietnamese Army had to go
through the city.
And yet the streets were jammedby deserters.
Deserters from the SouthVietnamese Army divisions were
blocking everything.
Not only that, but they weredrunk and they were raping and
pillaging and creating a realmess, and people were panicked.
And so, all of a sudden, I hadlike a couple hundred thousand
panicked people on my hands, anenemy army five miles away, and
(15:57):
it's like oh, this is a toughsituation.
So I said to the deputy mayor,who was at least brave enough
not to have fled we got to stopthe deserters, because they're
the problem.
If we can stop the deserters,get the arms, ammunition to the
troops fighting on the north, wehave a chance.
He says how are you going to dothat?
I don't know.
Let's set up a firing squad.
(16:17):
And so we did.
We set up a firing squad.
The thing was was that thedeserters, however, were all
farm boys who had been dragoonedoff their paddies maybe a week
or a month before, and they werescared out of their wits and
drunk and whatever.
Yeah, they were doing badthings and they're burning and
raping and looting, butnonetheless they were kids,
(16:40):
right.
And so I set up this firingsquad to start shooting these
kids.
And in the middle of this,imagine the night constant
series of booms and bangs,artillery incoming, outgoing
artillery, panic refugeesstreaming by, people yelling and
screaming.
It was like an incredible scene, but more violent than any
(17:07):
movie I ever saw.
And yet the next morning theskies finally cleared and
American fighter bombers fromcarriers off the coast were
finally able to fly and theyblasted the hell out of the
oncoming North Vietnamese forcesand and my, the city was saved
and my life was saved.
But at the middle of that,before I knew that would happen,
and when I realized that I hadset up this firing squad, I came
to grips with the fact that Ididn't give a about this war.
(17:31):
Not only that, I knew it was alost cause, because I could see
for myself there wasn't anywherenear enough glue to keep a
south vietnam together.
The south vietnamese governmentwas completely corrupt and
inefficient.
America's war effort was aclassic mistake, a huge mistake.
I was only there because of theadventure.
I was there because of theadrenaline and I was fine.
(17:52):
Adrenaline rushes were finewhen I was 22.
But now I had the power of lifeand death over a whole lot of
people and I was still operatingthe same way.
It suddenly became clear howshallow my life had become,
which is the answer to the pointyou just made.
I finally realized that, christ, the war is a losing effort.
(18:13):
I don't believe in this war.
I think the war is evil.
In fact, my home is 8,000 milesaway and I'm here only because
the only thing I care about ismy own adrenaline rush.
I didn't give a damn aboutanybody else.
I didn't give a damn about thesituation.
The only thing that mattered tome was fulfilling my own needs
for taking risks, and that wasfine when I was 21.
(18:34):
But when I was 29 and peoplewere dying because of my
decisions, well, that wasanother thing, and I remember
putting my head down and justweeping, realizing that at 28,
29 years old, my life had becomethat shallow.
So I got rescued because of thefighter bombers and I come back
, go to something calledencounter groups in California,
(18:57):
which which was basically peoplegetting together to talk about
what was going on in their lives.
And I was trying to get throughthis because I had a healthy
case of Pete, what we now callPTSD, and then I had all of this
misgivings.
I had to reshape my life and itwas difficult.
The encounter groups helpedsome, but I began to crawl out
(19:18):
of that hole, man.
I began to crawl out of thehole and try to see what I could
do to reverse my life.
Instead of causing wars andrevolutions, how about ending
them?
How about working for peace andjustice issues in the world
equity?
Because in my life, in myforeign service life, I'd seen a
whole amount of violence andpoverty and disease.
(19:40):
I knew how bad things were outthere.
And now I had a chance to dosomething about it because I was
bright and tough and I was nowin the mid-level, low senior
ranks on the Foreign Service.
So I had some swat and I endedup at the United Nations, which
was like perfect for me, becauseI was put in charge of American
policies toward Africa at atime when the African nations
(20:03):
were being decolonized, theEuropean colonizers were going
home, the new nations werestruggling to make things work
and there was a huge amounts ofpoverty and injustice, and the
European nations and the UnitedStates really didn't give much
of a damn about it either.
We had no friends over there,nobody trusted the United States
(20:24):
.
And here I was thrust into thisand all I could see for the
first time in my life was howcan I make the world a better
place?
A question I'd never asked 10years before.
But how can I make the world abetter place, all this inequity,
all this injustice, all thisviolence and disease?
What can I do about it?
And I found at the UnitedNations there was a lot of
things I could do about it.
(20:45):
So I mean, just hesitate there,because I'll tell you some of
those stories.
But I can see from the wayyou're holding your chin you've
got something to say.
Brandon Mulnix (20:55):
John, I'm just amazed.
I mean, there's so many peopleI know that in their 20s and
their teens they just gravitatedtowards adrenaline, life,
finding identity, findingpurpose, and you literally
survived wars.
You were making decisions thatultimately didn't have a vested
interest in, and again it took amoment in Vietnam to change
(21:18):
everything.
For you, it's empowering toknow that people grow up, people
interact with these youngadrenaline junkies every day and
there's hope for them.
There's hope, there's guidance,and sometimes it takes hitting
rock bottom or making a decisionto finally kind of turn things
around and then to dedicate therest of your life to making a
(21:39):
world a better place.
It just is inspiring to me,John.
I mean I knew a little bit ofyour story going into this, but
I'm just sitting here inspiredbecause this is early in your
journey.
I mean this is in the firstthird of your life that you've
had this adventure and yetyou've spent the rest of your
life making the world a betterplace.
John Graham (21:57):
That's true, but in a curious sort of way the first
part had to happen, I had tohit bottom.
And it's like I think, brandon,that first of all, every young
person not just men, every youngperson, I think has this sense
of adventure and stuff At leastI hope they do and thinks
they're indestructible, all thatkind of stuff.
(22:17):
But for me it was just anextreme case, and when I kept
surviving all these things itbecame a really extreme case and
where it begins to wear off inother people.
For me it only got bigger andbetter.
And Vietnam didn't end it by nomeans.
The rest of my life has beenvery adventurous, so much just
that I managed to transform,transmute whatever the right
(22:37):
word is my adventuring and myskills and my resources into
doing something that wasworthwhile and that really began
at the United Nations, in mywork fighting for peace and
justice issues there.
And also the other thing I wantto say is I don't think I was
ever a quote bad guy.
I think that as a child I was avery compassionate little boy.
(23:02):
I had a doll, for example, and Ikept that doll years longer
than most male children in aCroatian family my mother's
Croatian are allowed to keepdolls and I love that little
doll.
And my mother keeps saying whata kind little boy I was and I
think I've always had acompassionate heart.
But when the bullying started,and especially after I'd met Roy
(23:24):
and the seaman on thatfreighter, I hammered a heavy
piece of plywood over my heartand pretended I didn't have a
heart, because I was so ashamedof my father for constantly
getting bested and beat up, andso ashamed that I was my
father's son that I would growup to be a wimp, just like he
was.
Again, I love the man, but hewas a wimp and I was so afraid
(23:46):
I'd grow up that way that I justput this heart and I figured,
if I put this piece of plywoodover my heart and took my cues
from Roy and the Golden Bear orthe French Foreign Legionnaires
in Algeria or watching movieswith John Wayne or whatever,
that, that's who I would be.
And so by the time I get toVietnam I had this enormous
(24:07):
barrier over my heart so I couldgo through all this.
Then all of a sudden, bam, thatbarrier just got ripped away
and I was left weeping andcompletely screwed up.
Thank God for a year off inCalifornia, where I was able to
start regaining my footing andnot go crazy and then crawl my
way back.
So it's a complicated thing.
(24:29):
I do, as I think I said in anearlier conversation with you.
I spent a lot of timecounseling and mentoring young
men, and you're right, I meanthey all feel bumptious and
whatever, and I think that'sgreat, but they're all looking
for something.
They're all looking for ameeting in their lives.
And I didn't begin to find thatmeeting until after that
session in Vietnam.
(24:49):
But it's possible.
Young men, young people, canfind that meeting earlier than I
did.
I was a test case for beingawfully slow at it.
Brandon Mulnix (25:01):
So, John, did you have this point?
As you're starting to repurposeyour life, you're starting to
give back, you're a delegate.
There's all these things thatyou've done.
What got you to that pointwhere you found your purpose in
that?
When did you feel most alive indoing that?
John Graham (25:18):
First of all, it was the small stuff.
Coming out of California, Ireally was a changed person, at
least in a personal sense.
I began to spend a lot moretime with my kids, for example.
I began to form genuinefriendships instead of
domineering transactionalrelationships.
I began to develop a fullerpersonality, and that was at a
(25:39):
very small personal level andthat was important.
That was the first step.
The first step was just withoutthat piece of plywood nailing
over my heart.
I realized that I could be a guypeople actually liked and I did
form some friendships and myrelationship with my kids
improved and this feels prettygood.
Then, at the United Nations, Irealized that I could use this
(26:00):
transform, this change, johnGraham, to do some good in the
world, because I didn't lose thefact that I was strong and
tough I mean, you didn't want tomess with me and I knew a lot
so I was a real.
I could become a real enginefor doing some good in the world
, and I became that.
One of the first things thathappened that just totally
convinced me that I wanted todevote my life to this stuff was
(26:23):
something that happened in 1979.
I was at the United Nations,right, and that was a time when
we had really bad relationshipswith the Cubans.
I guess it really hasn'timproved much.
They were so bad that I wasn'teven supposed to talk to the
Cubans because they were commiesfrom Cuba.
And after all, this is afterthe Bay of Pigs and all that
(26:43):
kind of stuff, cuban MissileCrisis.
And on the other hand, I formeda lot of friendships with the
Cubans because they were fun andsmart and, as far as I could
tell, honest, most of the otherpeople of the UN were stiff and
unbending and boring.
And so I talked a lot with theCubans.
I couldn't do it openly, but wewould talk in parks and
restaurants in the UN area andmostly it wasn't about politics
(27:07):
at all, but we were all baseballnuts so we talked baseball.
We would spend a lunch talkingabout the collapse of Red Sox,
pitching that year or somethingyou know.
That developed some realfriendships with the Cubans.
Okay, that developed some realfriendships with the Cubans.
Okay, that's part one.
At the same time, the big crisisin America was that 53 people
in our embassy in Tehran in Iranhad just been taken hostage by
(27:29):
the Ayatollah Khomeini, and poorJimmy Carter, the president,
couldn't get them out and it wasa real thorn in his side and in
the nation's side and it was areal big diplomatic issue right.
So back to story one.
The non-aligned nations, thethird world nations, the nations
of Africa and Asia, all met.
Their leaders met once a yearin one of their capitals.
(27:50):
And in 1979, they were no early1980, maybe January 1980, they
all met in Belgrade, the capitalof Yugoslavia, then Yugoslavia.
So I went there too.
As the senior Americanresponsible for our politics
with this class of the world, Iknew more of these people than
anybody else.
I was America's main point mantoward the entire third world.
(28:13):
I was in Belgrade at the sametime.
I couldn't go to the meetings,of course, but I knew everybody,
so I call her them in bars andstuff after the meetings and
they would tell me what theywanted me to know or talk to me
about what was going on in theconference, and I would cable
that back to people who wereinterested back in washington,
and some often I was used toconvey messages.
For example, a foreign ministermight approach me and say I
(28:36):
really want you to get thisprivate message to your
secretary of state about thepeace plan in I don't know what
Lebanon or whatever.
It was Okay.
So it was a relationship thatreally worked for both sides, a
win-win relationship.
So I'm over there in Belgrade,the Cubans are all over there
too.
I have friends in the Cubandelegation and they say after
the first or second night of theconference hey, john, take you
(29:00):
out to dinner, come on, havedinner with us.
So I say sure, and uh, the I gowith the cubans.
And hey, we had to go in a bigblack limousine.
And they hated that becausethese were real communists, you
know, and the idea of driving ina black limousine was
incredibly embarrassing to areal communist.
But they had to do it becauseit would be a great loss of
(29:21):
faith to the Yugoslav governmentif the Cubans didn't take a
deal.
But at least they insisted onnot having dinner in the fancy
part of Belgrade.
They insisted on finding wherethe other side of the tracks was
and going to the poor sectionof town and finding a workers'
restaurant.
We parked the limousine three,four blocks away so that they
wouldn't be seen in a black limo.
(29:42):
We walked the rest of the wayand found a dirty workers
restaurant and whereupon theyordered, uh, rice and beans and
pork and, uh, huge amounts ofred wine, and we had having a
great time.
Somewhere around midnight westart talking politics and the
big issue was the Iranianhostage crisis and these 53
(30:02):
Americans being held hostage inIran.
So one of my Cuban buddies,raul, says hey, what about that,
john?
I said, yeah, it's a realproblem for us.
It's a real problem.
We can't get these people out.
And he thinks about it.
He says you know we might beable to help.
I say, well, really, thesepeople out.
And he thinks about it.
He says you know we might beable to help.
(30:23):
I see, well, really, he saysyeah, because I don't know how
he says, but our guy, ourpresident, fidel castro, happens
to have really goodrelationships with the ayatollah
khomeini, the head of iran.
It's kind of like a fathersomething or something.
But the two men get alongreally well and maybe castro can
be an intermediary and helppresent a peace plan that gets
your guys out.
And I said, well, you're goingto want something in return,
(30:44):
right?
He said, sure, we would askthat you lift all or part of the
economic embargo which is nowstrangling our island.
So that would be the deal You'dlift all or part of the
economic embargo.
Castro gets your people out, orat least makes economic embargo
.
Cash will get your people out,or at least makes a good faith
effort to get your people out.
So we think that's a good idea.
We're all at that point prettydrunk.
(31:05):
We'll end up.
A few weeks later.
We're back in New York andRaoul approaches me, the other
back end of a pillar wherepeople can't see us, and he
whispers hey, john.
He said hey.
The old man says well, do it.
I said what are you talkingabout?
He looks really annoyed with me.
He says Castro says he would bewilling to intercede with the
(31:29):
Ayatollah Khomeini to get yourpeople out in return for the
deal we talked about in therestaurant.
So my eyes widened.
I said really, you mean thatReally?
Oh man.
So I go running across thestreet.
Now I'm in a real picklebecause I'm not even supposed to
be talking to the Cubans, right?
But now I have to spill all thebeans.
I have to say exactly whathappened, what happened in
Belgrade, why it happened.
(31:50):
And my masters in Washingtonand New York are pretty shocked
to know that one of theirdiplomats has been sneaking
around the back end there formonths doing all this stuff and
doing all this private diplomacy.
But on the other hand, I keepsaying, yeah, yeah, yeah, okay,
all right, do whatever you haveto do to me, but this is an
(32:11):
offer.
Well, it took them about twohours to decide that they were
going to reject Castro's offer,because that way we'd have to
give credit to Castro if he gotour people out, and there's no
way we're going to give thiscommie bastard credit for
anything.
So, no, we're not going to takeit.
And, by the way, you're luckyyou didn't get fired.
We're not firing you becauseyou broke every rule in the book
(32:33):
in doing this.
I walked away from that and Ijust felt really good.
I mean, I was lucky I didn'tget fired, but I knew I had done
the right thing.
And had there not been suchassholes on my own government,
small-minded people I could havegot those hostages out a year
(32:54):
before they were finally sprung.
And I came damn close to doingthat and I did it on my own and
I did it by establishing trustwith people who were supposed to
be my enemies and I felt reallygood about that.
And I kept doing stuff likethat.
I mean, the next year I'm notgoing to tell the whole story I
did stuff that helped endapartheid in South Africa,
fighting racism in South Africa.
So you know, I was in themiddle of all these things.
It got to the point where Irealized that I could no longer
(33:16):
work for the State Departmentbecause our State Department, or
any State Department, was ledby small-minded people and
peppered with some totalassholes and they would never
give me the freedom to do what Ineeded to do.
And now I was getting to be asenior officer I was, I think,
the youngest equivalent of afull colonel at that point,
headed for a life ofambassadorships and stuff, and I
(33:39):
had to give all that away,which was another point of pride
, in a way, that I gave it allaway and quit.
I quit because I realized Icould never again work for
anybody, because my ideals werethen so powerful.
It was things that shifted sodramatically from that
battlefield in Vietnam that Icould no longer take orders from
anyone, because nobody elsewould be idealistic enough or
(34:02):
have enough guts or perseveranceto do what I wanted to do.
I was going to change the wholefrigging world, brandon.
I was going to change the wholefrigging world.
Brandon Mulnix (34:09):
John, I believe that, I totally believe that,
and I'm still amazed, becausehow old were you when you left
the US government?
38.
38 years old.
Do you know how many people, bythe time they're 38, have
traveled the world, have doneone, one hundredth of what you
did?
Very few to have lived to that.
(34:30):
And yet you know.
Here you are.
You're 38 years old, you've gotyour kids, your family, you're
married, through all thismarriage breaking up at that
point because I had changedcompletely and the strings were
just too much, and that was theend of it.
So life's still happening, thesame thing as your focus on work
and everything going on.
All that stress affected yourmarriage and you're going into
(34:53):
this next chapter of your life.
What got you into the nextchapter?
What got you through it?
John Graham (34:59):
Oh, man, are you asking all the right questions?
I'll tell you what got me in.
It was almost drowning, almostdrowning, yeah.
Yeah, I left the ForeignService right with a head full
of ideals and I thought I was sonaive.
I always have a good gift togab right.
So I thought if I just startedgiving speeches and writing
books and articles, that I wouldinstantly become famous and I
(35:21):
would charge change in the world.
People would be flocking tohear my lectures and stuff
Didn't happen.
Man Didn't happen.
People don't respond by beingpreached at, and I was going
nowhere and going broke fast andso I'm cutting like desperate
and a friend comes up to me andhe says look, I think you're
running out of money, right, andno one's coming to your
lectures.
(35:42):
Well, look, you can make out alot of money lecturing on cruise
ships.
You're a really good speaker,you have a tremendous amount of
stories.
You go on a cruise ship, yougive a couple lectures, they pay
you an absurd amount of moneyand it's a really sweet life.
I said, okay, I'll try it, andmy first effort was successful.
I got a job as the guestlecturer on a cruise ship called
the Princeton Dam and it washeading from Vancouver to the
(36:05):
Far East.
I got to take my daughter,mallory, with me, who was then
13, and we fly out to Vancouverand board the ship.
It looks like it's going to bejust a wonderful time and we go
up to Alaska and look at thefjords and stuff and then we
head out to sea and I learnedthat I give one of my lectures.
No, I don't, I don't give oneof my lectures.
(36:26):
The next day I'm supposed togive that lecture, but that
night, this particular night,third night out, there's a
captain's ball and I realizedthat I'm hired not just to give
lectures, I'm hired to put on atuxedo and look handsome and
waltz blue haired widows aroundthe dance floor.
This is a cruise ship, right?
So there's a lot of blue-hairedwidows and my job is to waltz
(36:51):
them around the dance floor.
So I'm thinking, not without alot of irony, that okay, all
right, yes, yes, yes.
Just a year or so ago I wasdoing this Cuba thing.
I was helping end apartheid.
My life is devoted to our peaceand justice issues.
I was helping end apartheid.
My life is devoted to our peaceand justice issues.
I'm going to change the world.
Oh yeah, I'm waltzingblue-haired widows around the
dance floor.
(37:12):
I didn't seem very consistent.
Oh well, I got to do this.
I got to earn some money.
And I'll tell you what I'll do.
I said I promised myself I'llspend six months a year
lecturing on cruise ships,making some money, and then the
other six months I'll save theworld.
How's that?
We're like kidding myself.
Anyway, the third night outafter this ball, the intercom
(37:32):
awakes Mallory and me about twoin the morning and I just come
in from the ball, I put the taxior down on a chair and the
loudspeaker says sorry to wakeyou up, but there's been a small
fire in the engine room and noproblem, we're putting it out.
But you really should probablyget up and think about coming up
to the ship's lounge wherewe'll provide free drinks and
(37:54):
we'll use ship's blowers to getthe smoke out of the ship, so
then you can go back to sleep.
Mallory and I ignore this.
About 10 minutes later the samevoice comes on, this time
sounding pretty urgent.
It says we really insist thatyou go up to the ship's lounge.
It doesn't say put on warmclothes.
It doesn't say take your lifevest, nothing like that.
And Mallory and I get outsidethe door and we head toward the
(38:18):
stairwell we had been using, butit's blocked by a fire door
which is slammed shutautomatically.
So Mallory finds another doorand the other way and we clamber
up to the promenade deck wherethe ship's lounge is, and you go
in the ship's lounge but it'sfull of smoke so you couldn't
stay in there and everyone else.
There's 550 people on the ship,so it's.
(38:40):
But today's standard is reallysmall and about 250 crew and 250
passengers and the passengersare all out on deck and, because
we haven't been warned, somepeople are there in their
nightclothes and stuff, you know, and it's cold.
This is October in the Gulf ofAlaska, so it's cold.
People are ripping downcurtains from the windows or
(39:02):
tablecloths or whatever and andtrying to stay warm and getting
a little worried because anyfool could see, looking back,
that the smoke coming at thestairwells where we just come
was blacker and thicker thanever.
So they lied to us.
Whatever was burning down therewas burning more.
The smoke fire couldn't havebeen out.
So people are getting a littleworried.
(39:22):
It's two o'clock now, threeo'clock in the morning.
Captain comes out on the deckand says okay, I'm sorry to say
we have to ask you all to moveto the fantail, the rear of the
ship, and we'll provide morebooze.
We're working on getting thisfire out, so we all collect back
there.
Funny part of it the ship'sorchestra is out there as well,
(39:44):
out on the fantail.
It isn't playing near my God,this isn't quite the Titanic,
but it's playing show tunes fromOklahoma.
Decades later, mallory and I gowatch the movie Titanic and
we're just holding each other'shands because there were some
parallels that were really exact.
Anyway, about four in themorning or so, the smoke is now
(40:05):
not coming up, not just thestairwells, but coming up from
the sides of the ship and thecaptain says I'm afraid we've
lost the battle with the flamesand I'm going to ask you all to
go to your lifeboat stations.
Mallory and I go up thelifeboat too.
On the side of the lifeboat itsays it's made for 45 people.
I asked Mallory to count howmany people are there and it's
(40:28):
like 60 or 70.
But that's okay because we allcrowd into that lifeboat and by
some miracle, none of thelifeboats capsized, even though
this was a brand new ship andnobody had really prepared for
it and the crew was not poorlytrained.
Nonetheless, six or sevenlifeboats all drop into the
ocean without any of themswamping.
I'm on the side of the lifeboatclosest to the ship, and so I
(40:48):
have to use my hands andshoulders to keep pushing away
from the ship so that bangingback and forth doesn't crack the
boards on the lifeboat.
And the ship's hull is hot.
I mean the iron is hot.
I mean there's a hell of ablaze going on down there.
We drift away from the burningship and wait for morning.
At dawn now we're 140 miles offthe coast.
(41:09):
So this is like, seriously, inthe middle of the North Pacific
A big oil tanker has answeredthe SOS and at dawn this big oil
tanker hoves into view but it'sso big it can't maneuver.
It can't maneuver to thelifeboats and it's so big that
you can't get anyone off thelifeboats because these are all
old people and clamoring 50 feetup a swinging rope ladders just
(41:30):
isn't going to cut it withpeople who are in their 80s, so
they have to wait forhelicopters.
By now an SOS has run all overthe Pacific.
I mean it's from.
San Francisco to Alaska.
And so helicopters are arrivingfrom shore bases.
They hover over a lifeboatboatand they lower a chair at the
end of a chain, put one personin it.
(41:52):
The chair gets hoisted into thehelicopter.
They do that seven or eightmore times and then take a load
off to the deck of this oiltanker and drop them, come back
for more.
So the helicopters move as theycan, and they have to move fast
because Typhoon Vernon isheading out.
We knew this because theydistributed Dramamine the night
before and the typhoon is comingon and the sea, which was calm
(42:16):
when we entered into thelifeboats, was now not calm.
At a certain point thehelicopters can't fly anymore.
At that point Mallory has beenrescued.
I see her safely off in thehelicopter and in lifeboat
number two there's just eight ofus left and the helicopter
pilot signals previous time thathe can't come back.
It's just too dangerous for ahelicopter to fly in the middle
(42:39):
of a typhoon and we're nowlooking at a typhoon.
We're looking at 30-foot seas.
That means it's like being in aup and down a six-story
building, in waves and windsthat are gusting to 60 knots.
The eight of us are hangingunder that lifeboat, foundering.
We're getting swamped, we haveto bail, but it's hard to bail,
because then you have to take ahand off the lifeboat and you
(43:01):
can easily get thrown out, butwe're doing the best we can.
The key thing is light.
It's now about four or five inthe afternoon, but it's getting
dark because this is the last goright, and it's getting on
winter.
I know from mountain climbingthat we're all suffering from
hypothermia.
Nobody has warm clothes, and Iknow what hypothermia looks like
.
You get really cold, but thenyou get warm again, and then you
(43:23):
go to sleep and you don't wakeup, and that's how hypothermia
kills you.
So I realized we're in thatfirst stage of hypothermia.
I figure we all have six, sevenhours to live, and the thing is
, though, that it's still a bitof light.
The only path to safety left outthere are Coast Guard cutters,
these small ships that have alsosteamed out from Sitka and come
(43:45):
full bore out to the 140 milesout, and they're frantically
looking for us, and thevisibility is now down to 100
meters or so.
The visibility is really poor,but still there's a chance.
It isn't dark yet, and so CoastGuard guys are really
professional, so they have thissearch pattern and they're
looking for us and they can'tfind us.
But if it gets dark, then we'redead because we have no lights,
(44:08):
no flares, no radio, nothing,no reflector mirrors.
So once it's dark, the chancesof being seen by a coast guard
cutter are zero.
Before dark maybe they're 10,but they're not nothing.
Gonna be dark in half an hour.
So I'm saying, okay, we got alittle bit of a chance, but once
it's dark we're dead.
Now we got thrown out of theboat or they'll find our corpses
(44:28):
in the lifeboat in the dawn orwhatever.
But half an hour is the key,not five or six hours before
hypothermia kills us, but halfan hour, because that's how much
light we got left.
So I'm thinking, hmm, I've beenthrough all these crazy ass
adventures and I walked awayfrom every one of them.
I've always thought that I wasindestructible.
And this time, I don't know, itlooks like the odds are like
(44:50):
one in a million.
This may be when I really buyit.
This may be when my luck reallyfails, that I die.
This could be it.
Then I get to thinking, well,wait a minute, wait a minute,
wait a minute, wait a minute.
That would have been fine whenI was doing all the wrong things
in Vietnam or whatever, but I'mdoing all the right things now.
I mean, I helped end apartheid,I damn near got the hostages
(45:11):
out of Tehran, peace and justiceissues, all that stuff.
I'm doing all that stuff andI've devoted my life to making
the world a better place.
And now, god I wasn't religious,by the way, no, no, no.
But I didn't know what else todo.
What else do you do but praywhen you're in a situation like
that, whether you're religiousor not?
So I look up and I say, allright, god, I don't get it.
I don't get it.
(45:31):
Here I am, I'm on the upside ofmy life.
I'm doing what I thought you,god, wanted me to do, in other
words, helping the.
That makes no sense at all, Ithought.
I thought I mean I went to aJesuit high school.
I believe in order in theuniverse.
You know snowflakes, thestructures of crystals, stuff
like that.
I believe in order in theuniverse.
Well, there's no order in this.
(45:52):
Just as I get my life togetherand I got another 50 years to do
your work, making the world abetter place, you're killing me.
That makes no sense at all.
My prayer turns into this angry,bleak, and I was screaming at
God what the hell are you doing?
And this message comes back.
The other seven guys, of course, don't hear a thing.
And to this day, maybe it wasthe wind, maybe it was, but I
(46:14):
got this message loud and clearand God says or the message says
, or the wind says whatever itwas, stop kidding yourself.
Stop kidding yourself.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, stuff you doat the UN, great, okay.
But now you're lecturing on acruise ship and it's a lot of
fun and it's paying you absurdamounts of money.
So you got off this cruise ship.
You're going to lecture onanother cruise ship.
It's a soft life, man, and yougot to get serious.
(46:46):
Either you are what you said youwere when you left the United
Nations an engine for good, andyou're devoting your life to
that end but you might as welldie out here, because the rest
of your life won't be living.
You'll be a total hypocrite for50 years.
You got a choice to makebasically shut up god didn't use
these words but or get off thepot.
So I hook up and I'm totallybeaten.
I know I'm dying and I, I justsaid, okay, I give up.
Yes, and in that instance, andI I I'm sure every one of your
listeners is saying, oh, come on, but I swear this is the truth
(47:09):
In that instant the Coast Guardcutter Butwell comes crashing
through this wild storm it wasso bang on, it would have cut
the lifeboat in two, had to lookout not seeing us and I got
rescued and I went back to NewYorkork and I never looked back
and I kept that promise.
And that's my long answer toyour question john, my listeners
(47:34):
, they understand, I understand.
Brandon Mulnix (47:37):
I wasn't out in the middle of the ocean.
I was a member of the US CoastGuard.
Oh, and it's amazing howstories collide, how, at one
point, raised my hand and saidI'm willing to die for our
country.
I joined the Coast Guard andserved in the great state of
Michigan, where I'm from.
(47:57):
But what amazes me is you saidit you faced so many things when
you were living for you, thenyou were living for others, but
it all didn't matter until thatnight in the boat when it all
came crashing down.
And then you really changedyour life because you, you
(48:17):
started an organization.
I want to give you anopportunity to talk about
giraffeorg, yeah, because Ithink that's where you continue
to serve today, and so continueon, john yeah well, the first
thing I want to say was I didnot start the giraffe heroes
project.
John Graham (48:32):
My wife Ann Medlock , started it.
She was a writer and editor inNew York City, fed up with all
the bad news and conventionalmedia, and she knew there were
heroes out there and that theywere shaping society.
But no one ever told theirstory not the New York Times,
not nothing.
So she decides to start her ownbroadcast network from a small
apartment in Central Park West.
(48:53):
She would find heroes, peoplewho were sticking their necks
out West.
He would find heroes, peoplewho were sticking their necks
out men, women, even kids andget their stories told.
And this was not 1982 beginning.
So the story of her vehicle wasat first vinyl records,
remember those?
They went round and round theturntable.
She would record their storieswith a handheld microphone and
(49:15):
then she would get a star ofstage and screen, and there are
plenty of those in New York todo the voiceovers and create
three four-minute littlesnippets that she'd send off to
radio stations to play, alltelling the story of the giraffe
hero and then offering somecomment about heroism.
And it was great.
I thought it was lightweightbecause I thought, as I said, I
(49:37):
was a great speaker, so Ithought my lectures were going
to be far more powerful.
I was so wrong.
Anne's Giraffe Heroes Projectbegan to gain adherence.
There was a big article in theNew York Times in a couple of
years, whereas my lectures werefloundering, and about that
early time I met her.
I fell instantly in love withher, you can imagine, and so I
(50:01):
joined the Giraffe Project ayear or two after she'd started
it, and we've been workingtogether on it now for like 42,
43 years doing the same thing.
We're still doing the same thing.
We find heroes all over theplanet and tell their stories
Now not on violent records, ofcourse, or with faxed press
releases, but we do it on socialmedia websites and the like.
(50:21):
And we've created a wholeprogram for kids, the Giraffe
Heroes program helping kidsbuild lives, courage, compassion
.
I run Giraffe HeroesInternational, which has now got
seven eight overseas branches,mostly in Africa and Asia,
helping people start their owngiraffe projects and do their
own honoring of their own heroes.
I'm on, you know I still loveto talk, so I do a lot of blogs
(50:48):
and podcasts and Twitter feedsand whatever, all on the same
themes of courage, courage andservice, and we've been doing
that now for 43 years.
It's been remarkably successful.
Our strategy and strategy wasthe oldest one in the book.
I mean I got since neanderthals, I guess, tens of thousands of
years.
(51:08):
Any society that wanted to getmore of its people to be heroic
told stories of heroes.
That's how they did it.
That has never stopped.
The troubadours in the MiddleAges were doing the same thing
and Anne Medlock, founder of theGiraffe Heroes Project, is
doing it for our age.
And that's what the GiraffeHeroes Project does.
We're storytellers and weinspire other people to stick
(51:30):
their necks out by telling thestories of heroes.
It's been remarkably successful.
That's our base.
And then we've now togetherwritten I don't know five, six
books.
And she's older than I am, she's91 and I'm 82.
And we're not going to stop.
Why would we stop?
Until they pull me out of herein a pine box?
(51:52):
I'm not going to.
Well, no, that's not true.
I tell my grandkids look, don'tput me in a pine box.
If I get a terminal diagnosis,I'm going to put on a light
jacket and start walking towardsthe summit of Mount Rainier,
which is not far away.
And uh, when I get near the top, I'm going to just accidentally
fall on a crevasse and that'llbe the end of me.
That's the way I want to go.
Brandon Mulnix (52:11):
That's neither here nor there, but I just
thought I'd tell you that.
John Graham (52:17):
Anyway.
So the Giraffe Heroes Projecthas been the template and the
master plan for everything thatwe do, whether it's telling the
stories, blogging, podcasting,writing books, whatever and Ann
and I have been totally alignedon that for a long time.
Brandon Mulnix (52:35):
John, you've given a lot of time and I'm sure
our listeners are going toreach out.
Check out the giraffe projectat giraffeorg.
It's a very, very simplewebsite create domain, create
everything.
I have to share somethingbecause John and I don't agree
on a lot of things.
We do on story, we do on a lotof things, but when we first
(52:56):
started talking, we could tellvery quickly that we're not
coming from the same areas.
We do on a lot of things, butwhen we first started talking,
we could tell very quickly thatwe're not coming from the same
areas.
We're not coming from the samethings, and so what I want to
encourage you by this issometimes you have to have
conversations with people thatyou don't necessarily agree on
everything with to get the realstory.
And that's where I reallyappreciated John.
(53:17):
As we got to know each other, wecontinued to dive deeper and
deeper to find the connectionsthat helped connect us, where I
could be confident in sharingJohn's story with you.
Because if we just seeeverybody at a surface level
with what's going on in theworld, there's so many of these
stories, there's so many peoplethat have hero stories, there's
(53:39):
so many people, but we get sotransfixed by the surface levels
.
So I wanted to share thatlisteners, because I know just
how powerful relationships are,stories are.
It's our responsibilities asleaders to get to know the
people that we work with, thepeople that we talk with, the
people that we interact with.
So, john, is there any finalmessage that you have for the
(54:03):
Poultry Leadership Podcastlisteners?
John Graham (54:06):
Well, I want to endorse what you just said,
because I feel exactly the sameway.
Nothing that I've said, I think, so far has a Republican or a
Democrat into it.
I mean, this is just life.
My bumper sticker, if you will,for life is that there's no
more important quest for anybodyRepublican, democrat, whatever
no more important quest than ourpersonal lives being meaningful
(54:27):
.
That's it.
I don't care if you're strungfar right or strung far left.
It's true.
It's true.
You look for things that makeyour life meaningful.
In my view, my experience hasbeen a really good, stable
source of that kind of meaningand some kind of service.
And I'm not talking aboutsackcloth and ashes.
I'm not talking about becomingMother Teresa.
(54:49):
I'm not talking about beingsomeone running around in how
shall I say this?
You know, liberal circles withall their do-gooders in intense.
I'm talking about being ofservice in any way you can.
In the business world, forexample, you can be of service
by making a great product,selling it for a fair price,
with decent environmentalrelationships and relationships
(55:09):
with your employees.
Or you can be of service in theprofessions.
You can be of service,certainly.
You can be a service raisingchickens, for no question about
it, providing a real service anda real source of sustenance and
pleasure for millions of people.
So you look to what can provideservice and then you tie it to
(55:31):
what's meaningful in your life.
Your grandkids are meaningful,for example.
Your kids are meaningful.
You look for that, that, and itdoes not have a red or a blue to
it, and I think that's whatBrendan and I I don't think
either of us discovered it.
We're not naive.
We both knew that it existedout there, but the fact that
we've spent now hours togetherenjoying each other's company is
(55:52):
just a reaffirmation that thereare certain things in life that
just make life better.
And and finding meaning in thatlife is important.
And it also allows you, onceyou begin, to realize that so
many things that bring meaningare the same things that bring
meaning to someone who doesn'tagree with you politically.
It allows you to talk, itallows you to establish a little
trust in a society that, as weall know, has become really
(56:15):
badly polarized there.
All right, I'm going to stop,because I know has become really
badly polarized there.
Brandon Mulnix (56:19):
All right, I'm going to stop because I know
you've got to end this.
Well, poultry listeners, Iabsolutely appreciate your time.
I appreciate John's time.
You can find more informationabout what John Graham and his
amazing wife are doing for theworld still changing the world.
As long as there's breath inhis lungs, he's going to be
serving people and we get toexperience that from afar.
(56:42):
So, poultry listeners, poultrypodcast listeners, please share
this episode.
It's a great, great messagethat means so much to others,
not just in the industry.
So share this with others.
Help others become betterleaders.
And again, thank you, PrismControls, for allowing me the
time to sit with John and sharehis story with future leaders in
(57:04):
the industry.
So thank you.
Welcome to the Poultry Leadership podcast.
I'm your host Brandon Mulnix, Iwant to welcome you to today's
episode and I think you're goingto find this one quite
interesting.
It's not every day that you getto talk to an 82 year old
grandfather who's got stories ofan amazing adventure.
(00:47):
Most people that have thestories that he has aren't alive
anymore because they probablydied during one of those stories
, and this guy his name's JohnGraham has lived an amazing life
.
I mean, you can look him up onWikipedia and you can find all
kinds of adventures that thisguy's done, and so I want to
(01:09):
invite John on the show becauseJohn speaks from the heart.
John speaks to us with wisdom,age old wisdom, stuff that needs
to be passed from generation togeneration.
And guess what?
He doesn't know a darn thingabout chickens.
So stay tuned, guys.
John, welcome to the show.
John Graham (01:29):
Thank you, you took my opening line, man.
I was going to say I don't knowa damn thing about chickens.
Brandon Mulnix (01:36):
It's okay, you said it anyways.
Hey, John, tell us a little bitabout yourself.
John Graham (01:40):
Well, I'm lucky to be alive, which you kind of got
to, I mean the time I was 40,I'd almost I counted I guess I'd
almost died a violent death.
I mean almost, I mean reallyclose to a violent death, a
dozen times the time I was 40.
And, like I say, I'm lucky tobe alive.
Washington, living in a totallywhite bread community.
There was no adventuresanywhere.
(02:07):
My parents were, you know, agood, stable Republican family
and nothing exciting everhappened and I was expected to
go to high school and then theUniversity of Washington and
then, I don't know, start workin Tacoma or Seattle someplace,
and that's what everybody did,my sister did that.
But then a weird thing happenedthat utterly changed my life and
(02:30):
I won't give you all thedetails, that'd take too long,
but through some weirdcircumstances I found myself
getting a job on a freightergoing to the Far East and back
when I was barely 17 years old.
Now, in those days a freighterwasn't a container ship, this
was in 1959.
So a freighter was a big boatwith Terry and the Pirates, look
(02:51):
to it.
It was run by 50 or 60 reallytough guys tattoos, muscles, all
the rest of it and I got a jobon a freighter and I set sail
from San Francisco to spend thesummer in the far East.
Now these 50 or 60 tough guystook one look at me, this nerdy
little kid from Tacoma,washington, who was undoubtedly
(03:12):
heading for college and all thatnicey nicey stuff and they were
determined to teach me lifelessons.
They knew I would never get ina classroom and they did, they
did.
You can imagine what thoselessons were going across the
Pacific.
I mean six guns and rock androll.
I mean it was like amazing to a17-year-old.
(03:33):
I remember the first port ofcall was in a place called
Iloilo, as I remember, it was atiny port in the middle of a
jungle in the Philippines andthe ship had stopped there to
pick up coconuts.
Port in the middle of a junglein the Philippines and the ship
had stopped there to pick upcoconuts.
We stopped there and the firstnight there the seaman took me
down to the bars in town, whichwere like fast roof bars and
(03:54):
there was liquor and prostitutes, a whole bit.
I mean it was like a big fightbroke out.
I lost track of what was goingon because I was so drunk broke
out.
I lost track of what was goingon because I was so drunk.
They got me drunk the firsttime in my life that they hauled
me back to the ship and savedmy life and I had a hangover
that lasted for three days.
I suddenly began to realizethat there was a bigger, wider
(04:17):
world than Tacoma Washington.
I mean wow.
And that whole trip was socolorful, it was so violent in a
way, um, in a way that that itwas completely new to me.
I mean, young men, we alwayslook for role models, especially
when you're 16, 17, right,you're looking for role models.
I love my dad, but he was aboutthe gentlest person you'd ever
hope to see.
(04:37):
He never got promotions becausemore aggressive males were
always batting him down and hewasn't the role model I looked
at because I was getting bulliedby kids at school, for example.
So I was looking for somethingmore than a really quiet
intellectual, and my dad wasn'tthat.
But on this ship man, I mean, myprotector on the ship was a guy
(04:57):
named Roy.
It was a 250 pound black guywho was determined to protect me
and keep me from getting killedin barroom brawls or whatever,
and roy was a great example.
I mean, I remember just secondor third day out or up on deck
and, uh, one of the other seamenstarts making, uh, you know,
sexual advances to me and roygrabs that guy around the,
(05:20):
around the neck with his shirt,uh, and slams him up against the
bulkhead and in there proceededwas a string of magnificent
cussing.
Oh, I never heard cussing likethat.
And Roy told that guy that ifhe ever put his such and such
hands on me, he was going totake this guy's such and such
body part and shove it down histhroat.
I just sat there.
Brandon Mulnix (05:41):
Oh, wow.
John Graham (05:42):
And then he shoves the guy down, kicks him a couple
times and the guy slinks off.
I remember that night goingdown to the cabin where I bunked
, practicing to be like Roy,slamming an imaginary guy up
against the mirror and trying togrowl like Roy I'm going to.
Roy was my hero and from thatmoment on, the heroes I look for
(06:05):
in my life are all peoplecapable of physical violence.
But that was the first of it,and I was nowhere near able to
do that because, like I say, Iwas, like you know, a nerdy, 98
pound, weakling, whatever.
I always got beat up and I wasnever good enough to be an
athlete in high school.
So, you know, I had to reallystruggle.
But I soon began to learn andvery soon after that I get to
(06:28):
write a risky after.
Yeah, after my freshman year incollege, I scraped up enough
money to hitchhike in europe.
Uh, and I did that.
I hitchhiked in europe and Iwas looking for all kinds of
adventures, because afterroaring on the and ship which
was called the Golden Bear,after rowing on the Golden Bear,
I wanted nothing but adventure.
(06:49):
I hitchhiked in Europe.
I felt I could do that.
Oh, by the way, also when I gotto university I rode crew.
It took a lot, but I put on 20,30 pounds of muscle in a year.
So I was no longer a 98-poundweakling and I began to get
tougher and tougher.
And my mind was getting tougherand tougher.
So I could hitchhike aroundEurope.
(07:09):
And I remember I was at a youthhostel in Switzerland.
I went there to climb theMatterhorn, that spiky mountain
in Switzerland, which was greatfun.
And then I saw in the newspaperthat there was a war still
going on in Algeria, thecolonial war.
The rebels were fighting theFrench army and the still going
on in Algeria, the colonial war.
The rebels were fighting theFrench army and the French
foreign agent in Algeria.
And I said, oh, wow, that'scool.
(07:30):
And I got to get in the middleof that war because that's a
hell of an adventure for me.
So I hitchhiked down throughMorocco and hitchhiked across
the border into Algeria.
Only there wasn't a borderbecause there was a war going on
.
And I was smart enough to putan American flag over my chest
so that I wouldn't be taken foroffense or else I would have
been shot.
And the rebels were great theywould stop cars going in my
(07:52):
direction at gunpoint and demandthat the driver take me where I
wanted to go.
I just thought that wasterrific.
And here I was, hitchhikingthrough over the middle of a
shooting war, and I was was sonaive that I either didn't care
about the dangers or didn'trealize it, or whatever.
But things got more and moreadventuresome.
The very next summer, forexample, I was with a group of
(08:16):
climbers from the UniversityMountaineering Club and we went
up to Alaska to tackle the northface of then Mount McKinley,
now Denali.
Yeah, I still call it Denali, Idon't care what Mr Trump says
Dammit, it's Denali.
But anyway, we went after theclimb Mount McKinley, on a climb
that nobody climbed beforebecause it was so frigging
dangerous and I mean dangerous.
(08:37):
Avalanches were coming downthat wall, and it was the
biggest mountain wall in theworld, bigger than any of the
mountain walls of Mount Everest,and no one had ever climbed it.
So we were going to climb it.
And we did, and it was onehairy-ass adventure after the
other.
I mean, avalanches would sweepdown and they would miss us and
rocks would fall and they wouldmiss us and we'd take terrific
falls and the rope would catchus.
(08:58):
I almost drowned in theMcKinley River, for example, but
we got to the top and thatclimb, if you look it up, is now
one of the most iconic mountainclimbs, first ascents in North
American mountaineering, calledthe Wickersham Wall, north Wall
of Mount McKinley.
So after that I was reallydetermined, obviously, that I
(09:18):
was never going to get killed bymy adventures.
So with that in mind that I wasindestructible, my adventures
got more and more extreme.
After college I hitchhikedaround the world and I could
prattle for the rest of oursession with the adventures you
can imagine hitchhiking aroundthe world, and I'm talking about
hitchhiking through a desert ofdeath in Afghanistan,
(09:40):
hitchhiking through all placesthat became the headquarters
with the Taliban, and there Iwas and I just walked through it
all without a scratch.
Brandon Mulnix (09:48):
It's funny you say hitchhiking, John, because
in today's generation peoplethink they're going to get
killed if they hitchhike, letalone or killed by a hitchhiker,
let alone hitchhiking aroundthe world.
John Graham (10:00):
I know it kind of saddens me, brandon, because you
know, there I was, the worldwas my oyster, so many
adventures out there and thereweren't that many of us, but you
saw quite a few hitchhikersaround.
And don't forget also that thiswas the mid-60s and so the
world wasn't as dangerous thenin many ways as it is now.
(10:21):
It wasn't a wash in drugs, forexample.
So yeah, a little bit ofhashish in a hitchhiker's pack,
but not the stuff that goes onnow.
And police forces and armyforces looked on hitchhikers as
kind of like irrelevant, crazyWesterners and didn't really
bother us, and so it was a lotless dangerous.
I don't know if you could dowhat I did then, but I literally
(10:43):
except for the oceans, Iliterally hitchhiked around the
world sleeping in haystacks andliving on three, four dollars a
day.
Also at that time I mangled thestringer contact from the Boston
Globe to write stories for theBoston Globe as a correspondent
on every war I came across.
So I got into the war in Cyprus.
That was cool because the restof the professional journalists
(11:08):
in the evening would all hunkerdown in their hotels and I
wouldn't.
I'd put on a piece of lightclothing so I could be seen at
night and I'd go walking on theceasefire line, just walking
down there with guns pointed atme from both sides.
In Cyprus the war then wasbetween Greeks and Turks, so
there would be Turkish guns onone side and guns on the other
and I would walk down the middleof that talking to people if I
(11:30):
could.
And I think nothing of it.
The other correspondents, thereal professionals who were
getting drunk in the hotel bars,thought I was crazy, but it was
great fun.
Then I went to cover the war inlayos, in the Plain of Jars,
and then the beginnings of thewar in Vietnam, where I went out
with the South Vietnamese Armypatrols.
(11:52):
I ended up in Australia for awhile because I had by then a
degree in geology.
So I worked for a short time asa geologist in Australia.
Then I came to the conclusionthat I wasn't a rich person.
Nothing was more important thanmy life of adventure and I had
to do something to keep thatgoing.
How could I do that?
Well, I thought foreign service.
(12:13):
That's cool.
I'll join the foreign service.
And I did.
I passed the exams for the USforeign service and then I got
the State Department.
I conned the State Departmentinto not sending me to fancy
embassies in Europe where I'dhave to wear a coat and tie, but
they put me into this part ofthe Foreign Service that works
with wars and revolutions,mostly in Africa and Asia.
(12:35):
That was terrific.
My second post, for example,was the first revolution in
Libya, and it was exactly what Iwas looking for in the foreign
service.
I mean, here I was in in Libya.
Muammar Gaddafi who was my age,by the way had just taken
control of the country and thecountry was a mess and everybody
else in the embassy wasfreaking out, because you know
(12:57):
there was a revolution.
I loved it.
I mean, the first time I saw acar burning in the streets or a
mob of protesters shaking theirfists, I was in my element.
I just loved it.
I just loved it and I knew,like I said, I would never be
hurt.
I had that weird conviction.
So, after surviving therevolution in Libya, I demanded
(13:18):
to be sent to Vietnam, wherethere was, of course, a shooting
war.
Then I told the StateDepartment to send me to the
most dangerous approach they had.
They did.
I was the advisor to the cityof huawei, which was a small
city just 50 miles south of whatwas then the dmz, dividing the
north from the south in vietnam.
(13:38):
And um, it was uh, it was ashooting war.
I was in that part of theforeign Service that sure didn't
wear coats and ties and I wasarmed and I dealt with a lot of
intelligence issues and did alot of fairly nasty stuff.
That was also part of the wareffort.
But I never wore a uniform.
I was over there as a civilian.
Brandon Mulnix (13:57):
John, I want to talk about something that I
learned about you when we weretalking to set up this podcast.
Wasn't Vietnam?
That was the moment wherethings started to change for you
.
John Graham (14:06):
Yes, so amazing.
It took me that long because bynow I was in my late 20s, but
it did happen.
As you say, it did happen in abattle in Vietnam.
The North Vietnamese had almostsurrounded Hue.
Their tanks and guns were onlyfive or six miles from the city.
By that point the Americanforces had been withdrawn from
Vietnam, the military forces, soI and just three other
(14:30):
civilians were in Hue and therewere tens of thousands of North
Vietnamese troops bearing downon us.
I knew that a rescue helicoptercouldn't get me out, because if
one arrived in Hue, my SouthVietnamese counterparts would be
clamoring to get onto thehelicopter and I'd have to shoot
my counterparts, literallyshoot them off the skids.
(14:51):
So that wasn't going to happen.
So my life really depended uponthe battle for Hue.
It so happened that at theheight of the battle, my job
then was to create a stable basearea, which was really
difficult because the SouthVietnamese Army had basically
broken and only remnants of itremained to fight.
(15:12):
The North Vietnamese and mostof the city leaders had fled
because there was still a pathout of the city.
It wasn't quite surrounded.
They fled to Da Nang.
So basically, I and the otherthree American civilians ended
up running the city trying tocreate martial law, which was
necessary because all the armsand ammunition for whatever that
(15:33):
was left of the SouthVietnamese Army had to go
through the city.
And yet the streets were jammedby deserters.
Deserters from the SouthVietnamese Army divisions were
blocking everything.
Not only that, but they weredrunk and they were raping and
pillaging and creating a realmess, and people were panicked.
And so, all of a sudden, I hadlike a couple hundred thousand
panicked people on my hands, anenemy army five miles away, and
(15:57):
it's like oh, this is a toughsituation.
So I said to the deputy mayor,who was at least brave enough
not to have fled we got to stopthe deserters, because they're
the problem.
If we can stop the deserters,get the arms, ammunition to the
troops fighting on the north, wehave a chance.
He says how are you going to dothat?
I don't know.
Let's set up a firing squad.
(16:17):
And so we did.
We set up a firing squad.
The thing was was that thedeserters, however, were all
farm boys who had been dragoonedoff their paddies maybe a week
or a month before, and they werescared out of their wits and
drunk and whatever.
Yeah, they were doing badthings and they're burning and
raping and looting, butnonetheless they were kids,
(16:40):
right.
And so I set up this firingsquad to start shooting these
kids.
And in the middle of this,imagine the night constant
series of booms and bangs,artillery incoming, outgoing
artillery, panic refugeesstreaming by, people yelling and
screaming.
It was like an incredible scene, but more violent than any
(17:07):
movie I ever saw.
And yet the next morning theskies finally cleared and
American fighter bombers fromcarriers off the coast were
finally able to fly and theyblasted the hell out of the
oncoming North Vietnamese forcesand and my, the city was saved
and my life was saved.
But at the middle of that,before I knew that would happen,
and when I realized that I hadset up this firing squad, I came
to grips with the fact that Ididn't give a about this war.
(17:31):
Not only that, I knew it was alost cause, because I could see
for myself there wasn't anywherenear enough glue to keep a
south vietnam together.
The south vietnamese governmentwas completely corrupt and
inefficient.
America's war effort was aclassic mistake, a huge mistake.
I was only there because of theadventure.
I was there because of theadrenaline and I was fine.
(17:52):
Adrenaline rushes were finewhen I was 22.
But now I had the power of lifeand death over a whole lot of
people and I was still operatingthe same way.
It suddenly became clear howshallow my life had become,
which is the answer to the pointyou just made.
I finally realized that, christ, the war is a losing effort.
(18:13):
I don't believe in this war.
I think the war is evil.
In fact, my home is 8,000 milesaway and I'm here only because
the only thing I care about ismy own adrenaline rush.
I didn't give a damn aboutanybody else.
I didn't give a damn about thesituation.
The only thing that mattered tome was fulfilling my own needs
for taking risks, and that wasfine when I was 21.
(18:34):
But when I was 29 and peoplewere dying because of my
decisions, well, that wasanother thing, and I remember
putting my head down and justweeping, realizing that at 28,
29 years old, my life had becomethat shallow.
So I got rescued because of thefighter bombers and I come back
, go to something calledencounter groups in California,
(18:57):
which which was basically peoplegetting together to talk about
what was going on in their lives.
And I was trying to get throughthis because I had a healthy
case of Pete, what we now callPTSD, and then I had all of this
misgivings.
I had to reshape my life and itwas difficult.
The encounter groups helpedsome, but I began to crawl out
(19:18):
of that hole, man.
I began to crawl out of thehole and try to see what I could
do to reverse my life.
Instead of causing wars andrevolutions, how about ending
them?
How about working for peace andjustice issues in the world
equity?
Because in my life, in myforeign service life, I'd seen a
whole amount of violence andpoverty and disease.
(19:40):
I knew how bad things were outthere.
And now I had a chance to dosomething about it because I was
bright and tough and I was nowin the mid-level, low senior
ranks on the Foreign Service.
So I had some swat and I endedup at the United Nations, which
was like perfect for me, becauseI was put in charge of American
policies toward Africa at atime when the African nations
(20:03):
were being decolonized, theEuropean colonizers were going
home, the new nations werestruggling to make things work
and there was a huge amounts ofpoverty and injustice, and the
European nations and the UnitedStates really didn't give much
of a damn about it either.
We had no friends over there,nobody trusted the United States
(20:24):
.
And here I was thrust into thisand all I could see for the
first time in my life was howcan I make the world a better
place?
A question I'd never asked 10years before.
But how can I make the world abetter place, all this inequity,
all this injustice, all thisviolence and disease?
What can I do about it?
And I found at the UnitedNations there was a lot of
things I could do about it.
(20:45):
So I mean, just hesitate there,because I'll tell you some of
those stories.
But I can see from the wayyou're holding your chin you've
got something to say.
Brandon Mulnix (20:55):
John, I'm just amazed.
I mean, there's so many peopleI know that in their 20s and
their teens they just gravitatedtowards adrenaline, life,
finding identity, findingpurpose, and you literally
survived wars.
You were making decisions thatultimately didn't have a vested
interest in, and again it took amoment in Vietnam to change
(21:18):
everything.
For you, it's empowering toknow that people grow up, people
interact with these youngadrenaline junkies every day and
there's hope for them.
There's hope, there's guidance,and sometimes it takes hitting
rock bottom or making a decisionto finally kind of turn things
around and then to dedicate therest of your life to making a
(21:39):
world a better place.
It just is inspiring to me,John.
I mean I knew a little bit ofyour story going into this, but
I'm just sitting here inspiredbecause this is early in your
journey.
I mean this is in the firstthird of your life that you've
had this adventure and yetyou've spent the rest of your
life making the world a betterplace.
John Graham (21:57):
That's true, but in a curious sort of way the first
part had to happen, I had tohit bottom.
And it's like I think, brandon,that first of all, every young
person not just men, every youngperson, I think has this sense
of adventure and stuff At leastI hope they do and thinks
they're indestructible, all thatkind of stuff.
(22:17):
But for me it was just anextreme case, and when I kept
surviving all these things itbecame a really extreme case and
where it begins to wear off inother people.
For me it only got bigger andbetter.
And Vietnam didn't end it by nomeans.
The rest of my life has beenvery adventurous, so much just
that I managed to transform,transmute whatever the right
(22:37):
word is my adventuring and myskills and my resources into
doing something that wasworthwhile and that really began
at the United Nations, in mywork fighting for peace and
justice issues there.
And also the other thing I wantto say is I don't think I was
ever a quote bad guy.
I think that as a child I was avery compassionate little boy.
(23:02):
I had a doll, for example, and Ikept that doll years longer
than most male children in aCroatian family my mother's
Croatian are allowed to keepdolls and I love that little
doll.
And my mother keeps saying whata kind little boy I was and I
think I've always had acompassionate heart.
But when the bullying started,and especially after I'd met Roy
(23:24):
and the seaman on thatfreighter, I hammered a heavy
piece of plywood over my heartand pretended I didn't have a
heart, because I was so ashamedof my father for constantly
getting bested and beat up, andso ashamed that I was my
father's son that I would growup to be a wimp, just like he
was.
Again, I love the man, but hewas a wimp and I was so afraid
(23:46):
I'd grow up that way that I justput this heart and I figured,
if I put this piece of plywoodover my heart and took my cues
from Roy and the Golden Bear orthe French Foreign Legionnaires
in Algeria or watching movieswith John Wayne or whatever,
that, that's who I would be.
And so by the time I get toVietnam I had this enormous
(24:07):
barrier over my heart so I couldgo through all this.
Then all of a sudden, bam, thatbarrier just got ripped away
and I was left weeping andcompletely screwed up.
Thank God for a year off inCalifornia, where I was able to
start regaining my footing andnot go crazy and then crawl my
way back.
So it's a complicated thing.
(24:29):
I do, as I think I said in anearlier conversation with you.
I spent a lot of timecounseling and mentoring young
men, and you're right, I meanthey all feel bumptious and
whatever, and I think that'sgreat, but they're all looking
for something.
They're all looking for ameeting in their lives.
And I didn't begin to find thatmeeting until after that
session in Vietnam.
(24:49):
But it's possible.
Young men, young people, canfind that meeting earlier than I
did.
I was a test case for beingawfully slow at it.
Brandon Mulnix (25:01):
So, John, did you have this point?
As you're starting to repurposeyour life, you're starting to
give back, you're a delegate.
There's all these things thatyou've done.
What got you to that pointwhere you found your purpose in
that?
When did you feel most alive indoing that?
John Graham (25:18):
First of all, it was the small stuff.
Coming out of California, Ireally was a changed person, at
least in a personal sense.
I began to spend a lot moretime with my kids, for example.
I began to form genuinefriendships instead of
domineering transactionalrelationships.
I began to develop a fullerpersonality, and that was at a
(25:39):
very small personal level andthat was important.
That was the first step.
The first step was just withoutthat piece of plywood nailing
over my heart.
I realized that I could be a guypeople actually liked and I did
form some friendships and myrelationship with my kids
improved and this feels prettygood.
Then, at the United Nations, Irealized that I could use this
(26:00):
transform, this change, johnGraham, to do some good in the
world, because I didn't lose thefact that I was strong and
tough I mean, you didn't want tomess with me and I knew a lot
so I was a real.
I could become a real enginefor doing some good in the world
, and I became that.
One of the first things thathappened that just totally
convinced me that I wanted todevote my life to this stuff was
(26:23):
something that happened in 1979.
I was at the United Nations,right, and that was a time when
we had really bad relationshipswith the Cubans.
I guess it really hasn'timproved much.
They were so bad that I wasn'teven supposed to talk to the
Cubans because they were commiesfrom Cuba.
And after all, this is afterthe Bay of Pigs and all that
(26:43):
kind of stuff, cuban MissileCrisis.
And on the other hand, I formeda lot of friendships with the
Cubans because they were fun andsmart and, as far as I could
tell, honest, most of the otherpeople of the UN were stiff and
unbending and boring.
And so I talked a lot with theCubans.
I couldn't do it openly, but wewould talk in parks and
restaurants in the UN area andmostly it wasn't about politics
(27:07):
at all, but we were all baseballnuts so we talked baseball.
We would spend a lunch talkingabout the collapse of Red Sox,
pitching that year or somethingyou know.
That developed some realfriendships with the Cubans.
Okay, that developed some realfriendships with the Cubans.
Okay, that's part one.
At the same time, the big crisisin America was that 53 people
in our embassy in Tehran in Iranhad just been taken hostage by
(27:29):
the Ayatollah Khomeini, and poorJimmy Carter, the president,
couldn't get them out and it wasa real thorn in his side and in
the nation's side and it was areal big diplomatic issue right.
So back to story one.
The non-aligned nations, thethird world nations, the nations
of Africa and Asia, all met.
Their leaders met once a yearin one of their capitals.
(27:50):
And in 1979, they were no early1980, maybe January 1980, they
all met in Belgrade, the capitalof Yugoslavia, then Yugoslavia.
So I went there too.
As the senior Americanresponsible for our politics
with this class of the world, Iknew more of these people than
anybody else.
I was America's main point mantoward the entire third world.
(28:13):
I was in Belgrade at the sametime.
I couldn't go to the meetings,of course, but I knew everybody,
so I call her them in bars andstuff after the meetings and
they would tell me what theywanted me to know or talk to me
about what was going on in theconference, and I would cable
that back to people who wereinterested back in washington,
and some often I was used toconvey messages.
For example, a foreign ministermight approach me and say I
(28:36):
really want you to get thisprivate message to your
secretary of state about thepeace plan in I don't know what
Lebanon or whatever.
It was Okay.
So it was a relationship thatreally worked for both sides, a
win-win relationship.
So I'm over there in Belgrade,the Cubans are all over there
too.
I have friends in the Cubandelegation and they say after
the first or second night of theconference hey, john, take you
(29:00):
out to dinner, come on, havedinner with us.
So I say sure, and uh, the I gowith the cubans.
And hey, we had to go in a bigblack limousine.
And they hated that becausethese were real communists, you
know, and the idea of driving ina black limousine was
incredibly embarrassing to areal communist.
But they had to do it becauseit would be a great loss of
(29:21):
faith to the Yugoslav governmentif the Cubans didn't take a
deal.
But at least they insisted onnot having dinner in the fancy
part of Belgrade.
They insisted on finding wherethe other side of the tracks was
and going to the poor sectionof town and finding a workers'
restaurant.
We parked the limousine three,four blocks away so that they
wouldn't be seen in a black limo.
(29:42):
We walked the rest of the wayand found a dirty workers
restaurant and whereupon theyordered, uh, rice and beans and
pork and, uh, huge amounts ofred wine, and we had having a
great time.
Somewhere around midnight westart talking politics and the
big issue was the Iranianhostage crisis and these 53
(30:02):
Americans being held hostage inIran.
So one of my Cuban buddies,raul, says hey, what about that,
john?
I said, yeah, it's a realproblem for us.
It's a real problem.
We can't get these people out.
And he thinks about it.
He says you know we might beable to help.
I say, well, really, thesepeople out.
And he thinks about it.
He says you know we might beable to help.
(30:23):
I see, well, really, he saysyeah, because I don't know how
he says, but our guy, ourpresident, fidel castro, happens
to have really goodrelationships with the ayatollah
khomeini, the head of iran.
It's kind of like a fathersomething or something.
But the two men get alongreally well and maybe castro can
be an intermediary and helppresent a peace plan that gets
your guys out.
And I said, well, you're goingto want something in return,
(30:44):
right?
He said, sure, we would askthat you lift all or part of the
economic embargo which is nowstrangling our island.
So that would be the deal You'dlift all or part of the
economic embargo.
Castro gets your people out, orat least makes economic embargo
.
Cash will get your people out,or at least makes a good faith
effort to get your people out.
So we think that's a good idea.
We're all at that point prettydrunk.
(31:05):
We'll end up.
A few weeks later.
We're back in New York andRaoul approaches me, the other
back end of a pillar wherepeople can't see us, and he
whispers hey, john.
He said hey.
The old man says well, do it.
I said what are you talkingabout?
He looks really annoyed with me.
He says Castro says he would bewilling to intercede with the
(31:29):
Ayatollah Khomeini to get yourpeople out in return for the
deal we talked about in therestaurant.
So my eyes widened.
I said really, you mean thatReally?
Oh man.
So I go running across thestreet.
Now I'm in a real picklebecause I'm not even supposed to
be talking to the Cubans, right?
But now I have to spill all thebeans.
I have to say exactly whathappened, what happened in
Belgrade, why it happened.
(31:50):
And my masters in Washingtonand New York are pretty shocked
to know that one of theirdiplomats has been sneaking
around the back end there formonths doing all this stuff and
doing all this private diplomacy.
But on the other hand, I keepsaying, yeah, yeah, yeah, okay,
all right, do whatever you haveto do to me, but this is an
(32:11):
offer.
Well, it took them about twohours to decide that they were
going to reject Castro's offer,because that way we'd have to
give credit to Castro if he gotour people out, and there's no
way we're going to give thiscommie bastard credit for
anything.
So, no, we're not going to takeit.
And, by the way, you're luckyyou didn't get fired.
We're not firing you becauseyou broke every rule in the book
(32:33):
in doing this.
I walked away from that and Ijust felt really good.
I mean, I was lucky I didn'tget fired, but I knew I had done
the right thing.
And had there not been suchassholes on my own government,
small-minded people I could havegot those hostages out a year
(32:54):
before they were finally sprung.
And I came damn close to doingthat and I did it on my own and
I did it by establishing trustwith people who were supposed to
be my enemies and I felt reallygood about that.
And I kept doing stuff likethat.
I mean, the next year I'm notgoing to tell the whole story I
did stuff that helped endapartheid in South Africa,
fighting racism in South Africa.
So you know, I was in themiddle of all these things.
It got to the point where Irealized that I could no longer
(33:16):
work for the State Departmentbecause our State Department, or
any State Department, was ledby small-minded people and
peppered with some totalassholes and they would never
give me the freedom to do what Ineeded to do.
And now I was getting to be asenior officer I was, I think,
the youngest equivalent of afull colonel at that point,
headed for a life ofambassadorships and stuff, and I
(33:39):
had to give all that away,which was another point of pride
, in a way, that I gave it allaway and quit.
I quit because I realized Icould never again work for
anybody, because my ideals werethen so powerful.
It was things that shifted sodramatically from that
battlefield in Vietnam that Icould no longer take orders from
anyone, because nobody elsewould be idealistic enough or
(34:02):
have enough guts or perseveranceto do what I wanted to do.
I was going to change the wholefrigging world, brandon.
I was going to change the wholefrigging world.
Brandon Mulnix (34:09):
John, I believe that, I totally believe that,
and I'm still amazed, becausehow old were you when you left
the US government?
38.
38 years old.
Do you know how many people, bythe time they're 38, have
traveled the world, have doneone, one hundredth of what you
did?
Very few to have lived to that.
(34:30):
And yet you know.
Here you are.
You're 38 years old, you've gotyour kids, your family, you're
married, through all thismarriage breaking up at that
point because I had changedcompletely and the strings were
just too much, and that was theend of it.
So life's still happening, thesame thing as your focus on work
and everything going on.
All that stress affected yourmarriage and you're going into
(34:53):
this next chapter of your life.
What got you into the nextchapter?
What got you through it?
John Graham (34:59):
Oh, man, are you asking all the right questions?
I'll tell you what got me in.
It was almost drowning, almostdrowning, yeah.
Yeah, I left the ForeignService right with a head full
of ideals and I thought I was sonaive.
I always have a good gift togab right.
So I thought if I just startedgiving speeches and writing
books and articles, that I wouldinstantly become famous and I
(35:21):
would charge change in the world.
People would be flocking tohear my lectures and stuff
Didn't happen.
Man Didn't happen.
People don't respond by beingpreached at, and I was going
nowhere and going broke fast andso I'm cutting like desperate
and a friend comes up to me andhe says look, I think you're
running out of money, right, andno one's coming to your
lectures.
(35:42):
Well, look, you can make out alot of money lecturing on cruise
ships.
You're a really good speaker,you have a tremendous amount of
stories.
You go on a cruise ship, yougive a couple lectures, they pay
you an absurd amount of moneyand it's a really sweet life.
I said, okay, I'll try it, andmy first effort was successful.
I got a job as the guestlecturer on a cruise ship called
the Princeton Dam and it washeading from Vancouver to the
(36:05):
Far East.
I got to take my daughter,mallory, with me, who was then
13, and we fly out to Vancouverand board the ship.
It looks like it's going to bejust a wonderful time and we go
up to Alaska and look at thefjords and stuff and then we
head out to sea and I learnedthat I give one of my lectures.
No, I don't, I don't give oneof my lectures.
(36:26):
The next day I'm supposed togive that lecture, but that
night, this particular night,third night out, there's a
captain's ball and I realizedthat I'm hired not just to give
lectures, I'm hired to put on atuxedo and look handsome and
waltz blue haired widows aroundthe dance floor.
This is a cruise ship, right?
So there's a lot of blue-hairedwidows and my job is to waltz
(36:51):
them around the dance floor.
So I'm thinking, not without alot of irony, that okay, all
right, yes, yes, yes.
Just a year or so ago I wasdoing this Cuba thing.
I was helping end apartheid.
My life is devoted to our peaceand justice issues.
I was helping end apartheid.
My life is devoted to our peaceand justice issues.
I'm going to change the world.
Oh yeah, I'm waltzingblue-haired widows around the
dance floor.
(37:12):
I didn't seem very consistent.
Oh well, I got to do this.
I got to earn some money.
And I'll tell you what I'll do.
I said I promised myself I'llspend six months a year
lecturing on cruise ships,making some money, and then the
other six months I'll save theworld.
How's that?
We're like kidding myself.
Anyway, the third night outafter this ball, the intercom
(37:32):
awakes Mallory and me about twoin the morning and I just come
in from the ball, I put the taxior down on a chair and the
loudspeaker says sorry to wakeyou up, but there's been a small
fire in the engine room and noproblem, we're putting it out.
But you really should probablyget up and think about coming up
to the ship's lounge wherewe'll provide free drinks and
(37:54):
we'll use ship's blowers to getthe smoke out of the ship, so
then you can go back to sleep.
Mallory and I ignore this.
About 10 minutes later the samevoice comes on, this time
sounding pretty urgent.
It says we really insist thatyou go up to the ship's lounge.
It doesn't say put on warmclothes.
It doesn't say take your lifevest, nothing like that.
And Mallory and I get outsidethe door and we head toward the
(38:18):
stairwell we had been using, butit's blocked by a fire door
which is slammed shutautomatically.
So Mallory finds another doorand the other way and we clamber
up to the promenade deck wherethe ship's lounge is, and you go
in the ship's lounge but it'sfull of smoke so you couldn't
stay in there and everyone else.
There's 550 people on the ship,so it's.
(38:40):
But today's standard is reallysmall and about 250 crew and 250
passengers and the passengersare all out on deck and, because
we haven't been warned, somepeople are there in their
nightclothes and stuff, you know, and it's cold.
This is October in the Gulf ofAlaska, so it's cold.
People are ripping downcurtains from the windows or
(39:02):
tablecloths or whatever and andtrying to stay warm and getting
a little worried because anyfool could see, looking back,
that the smoke coming at thestairwells where we just come
was blacker and thicker thanever.
So they lied to us.
Whatever was burning down therewas burning more.
The smoke fire couldn't havebeen out.
So people are getting a littleworried.
(39:22):
It's two o'clock now, threeo'clock in the morning.
Captain comes out on the deckand says okay, I'm sorry to say
we have to ask you all to moveto the fantail, the rear of the
ship, and we'll provide morebooze.
We're working on getting thisfire out, so we all collect back
there.
Funny part of it the ship'sorchestra is out there as well,
(39:44):
out on the fantail.
It isn't playing near my God,this isn't quite the Titanic,
but it's playing show tunes fromOklahoma.
Decades later, mallory and I gowatch the movie Titanic and
we're just holding each other'shands because there were some
parallels that were really exact.
Anyway, about four in themorning or so, the smoke is now
(40:05):
not coming up, not just thestairwells, but coming up from
the sides of the ship and thecaptain says I'm afraid we've
lost the battle with the flamesand I'm going to ask you all to
go to your lifeboat stations.
Mallory and I go up thelifeboat too.
On the side of the lifeboat itsays it's made for 45 people.
I asked Mallory to count howmany people are there and it's
(40:28):
like 60 or 70.
But that's okay because we allcrowd into that lifeboat and by
some miracle, none of thelifeboats capsized, even though
this was a brand new ship andnobody had really prepared for
it and the crew was not poorlytrained.
Nonetheless, six or sevenlifeboats all drop into the
ocean without any of themswamping.
I'm on the side of the lifeboatclosest to the ship, and so I
(40:48):
have to use my hands andshoulders to keep pushing away
from the ship so that bangingback and forth doesn't crack the
boards on the lifeboat.
And the ship's hull is hot.
I mean the iron is hot.
I mean there's a hell of ablaze going on down there.
We drift away from the burningship and wait for morning.
At dawn now we're 140 miles offthe coast.
(41:09):
So this is like, seriously, inthe middle of the North Pacific
A big oil tanker has answeredthe SOS and at dawn this big oil
tanker hoves into view but it'sso big it can't maneuver.
It can't maneuver to thelifeboats and it's so big that
you can't get anyone off thelifeboats because these are all
old people and clamoring 50 feetup a swinging rope ladders just
(41:30):
isn't going to cut it withpeople who are in their 80s, so
they have to wait forhelicopters.
By now an SOS has run all overthe Pacific.
I mean it's from.
San Francisco to Alaska.
And so helicopters are arrivingfrom shore bases.
They hover over a lifeboatboatand they lower a chair at the
end of a chain, put one personin it.
(41:52):
The chair gets hoisted into thehelicopter.
They do that seven or eightmore times and then take a load
off to the deck of this oiltanker and drop them, come back
for more.
So the helicopters move as theycan, and they have to move fast
because Typhoon Vernon isheading out.
We knew this because theydistributed Dramamine the night
before and the typhoon is comingon and the sea, which was calm
(42:16):
when we entered into thelifeboats, was now not calm.
At a certain point thehelicopters can't fly anymore.
At that point Mallory has beenrescued.
I see her safely off in thehelicopter and in lifeboat
number two there's just eight ofus left and the helicopter
pilot signals previous time thathe can't come back.
It's just too dangerous for ahelicopter to fly in the middle
(42:39):
of a typhoon and we're nowlooking at a typhoon.
We're looking at 30-foot seas.
That means it's like being in aup and down a six-story
building, in waves and windsthat are gusting to 60 knots.
The eight of us are hangingunder that lifeboat, foundering.
We're getting swamped, we haveto bail, but it's hard to bail,
because then you have to take ahand off the lifeboat and you
(43:01):
can easily get thrown out, butwe're doing the best we can.
The key thing is light.
It's now about four or five inthe afternoon, but it's getting
dark because this is the last goright, and it's getting on
winter.
I know from mountain climbingthat we're all suffering from
hypothermia.
Nobody has warm clothes, and Iknow what hypothermia looks like
.
You get really cold, but thenyou get warm again, and then you
(43:23):
go to sleep and you don't wakeup, and that's how hypothermia
kills you.
So I realized we're in thatfirst stage of hypothermia.
I figure we all have six, sevenhours to live, and the thing is
, though, that it's still a bitof light.
The only path to safety left outthere are Coast Guard cutters,
these small ships that have alsosteamed out from Sitka and come
(43:45):
full bore out to the 140 milesout, and they're frantically
looking for us, and thevisibility is now down to 100
meters or so.
The visibility is really poor,but still there's a chance.
It isn't dark yet, and so CoastGuard guys are really
professional, so they have thissearch pattern and they're
looking for us and they can'tfind us.
But if it gets dark, then we'redead because we have no lights,
(44:08):
no flares, no radio, nothing,no reflector mirrors.
So once it's dark, the chancesof being seen by a coast guard
cutter are zero.
Before dark maybe they're 10,but they're not nothing.
Gonna be dark in half an hour.
So I'm saying, okay, we got alittle bit of a chance, but once
it's dark we're dead.
Now we got thrown out of theboat or they'll find our corpses
(44:28):
in the lifeboat in the dawn orwhatever.
But half an hour is the key,not five or six hours before
hypothermia kills us, but halfan hour, because that's how much
light we got left.
So I'm thinking, hmm, I've beenthrough all these crazy ass
adventures and I walked awayfrom every one of them.
I've always thought that I wasindestructible.
And this time, I don't know, itlooks like the odds are like
(44:50):
one in a million.
This may be when I really buyit.
This may be when my luck reallyfails, that I die.
This could be it.
Then I get to thinking, well,wait a minute, wait a minute,
wait a minute, wait a minute.
That would have been fine whenI was doing all the wrong things
in Vietnam or whatever, but I'mdoing all the right things now.
I mean, I helped end apartheid,I damn near got the hostages
(45:11):
out of Tehran, peace and justiceissues, all that stuff.
I'm doing all that stuff andI've devoted my life to making
the world a better place.
And now, god I wasn't religious,by the way, no, no, no.
But I didn't know what else todo.
What else do you do but praywhen you're in a situation like
that, whether you're religiousor not?
So I look up and I say, allright, god, I don't get it.
I don't get it.
(45:31):
Here I am, I'm on the upside ofmy life.
I'm doing what I thought you,god, wanted me to do, in other
words, helping the.
That makes no sense at all, Ithought.
I thought I mean I went to aJesuit high school.
I believe in order in theuniverse.
You know snowflakes, thestructures of crystals, stuff
like that.
I believe in order in theuniverse.
Well, there's no order in this.
(45:52):
Just as I get my life togetherand I got another 50 years to do
your work, making the world abetter place, you're killing me.
That makes no sense at all.
My prayer turns into this angry,bleak, and I was screaming at
God what the hell are you doing?
And this message comes back.
The other seven guys, of course, don't hear a thing.
And to this day, maybe it wasthe wind, maybe it was, but I
(46:14):
got this message loud and clearand God says or the message says
, or the wind says whatever itwas, stop kidding yourself.
Stop kidding yourself.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, stuff you doat the UN, great, okay.
But now you're lecturing on acruise ship and it's a lot of
fun and it's paying you absurdamounts of money.
So you got off this cruise ship.
You're going to lecture onanother cruise ship.
It's a soft life, man, and yougot to get serious.
(46:46):
Either you are what you said youwere when you left the United
Nations an engine for good, andyou're devoting your life to
that end but you might as welldie out here, because the rest
of your life won't be living.
You'll be a total hypocrite for50 years.
You got a choice to makebasically shut up god didn't use
these words but or get off thepot.
So I hook up and I'm totallybeaten.
I know I'm dying and I, I justsaid, okay, I give up.
Yes, and in that instance, andI I I'm sure every one of your
listeners is saying, oh, come on, but I swear this is the truth
(47:09):
In that instant the Coast Guardcutter Butwell comes crashing
through this wild storm it wasso bang on, it would have cut
the lifeboat in two, had to lookout not seeing us and I got
rescued and I went back to NewYorkork and I never looked back
and I kept that promise.
And that's my long answer toyour question john, my listeners
(47:34):
, they understand, I understand.
Brandon Mulnix (47:37):
I wasn't out in the middle of the ocean.
I was a member of the US CoastGuard.
Oh, and it's amazing howstories collide, how, at one
point, raised my hand and saidI'm willing to die for our
country.
I joined the Coast Guard andserved in the great state of
Michigan, where I'm from.
(47:57):
But what amazes me is you saidit you faced so many things when
you were living for you, thenyou were living for others, but
it all didn't matter until thatnight in the boat when it all
came crashing down.
And then you really changedyour life because you, you
(48:17):
started an organization.
I want to give you anopportunity to talk about
giraffeorg, yeah, because Ithink that's where you continue
to serve today, and so continueon, john yeah well, the first
thing I want to say was I didnot start the giraffe heroes
project.
John Graham (48:32):
My wife Ann Medlock , started it.
She was a writer and editor inNew York City, fed up with all
the bad news and conventionalmedia, and she knew there were
heroes out there and that theywere shaping society.
But no one ever told theirstory not the New York Times,
not nothing.
So she decides to start her ownbroadcast network from a small
apartment in Central Park West.
(48:53):
She would find heroes, peoplewho were sticking their necks
out West.
He would find heroes, peoplewho were sticking their necks
out men, women, even kids andget their stories told.
And this was not 1982 beginning.
So the story of her vehicle wasat first vinyl records,
remember those?
They went round and round theturntable.
She would record their storieswith a handheld microphone and
(49:15):
then she would get a star ofstage and screen, and there are
plenty of those in New York todo the voiceovers and create
three four-minute littlesnippets that she'd send off to
radio stations to play, alltelling the story of the giraffe
hero and then offering somecomment about heroism.
And it was great.
I thought it was lightweightbecause I thought, as I said, I
(49:37):
was a great speaker, so Ithought my lectures were going
to be far more powerful.
I was so wrong.
Anne's Giraffe Heroes Projectbegan to gain adherence.
There was a big article in theNew York Times in a couple of
years, whereas my lectures werefloundering, and about that
early time I met her.
I fell instantly in love withher, you can imagine, and so I
(50:01):
joined the Giraffe Project ayear or two after she'd started
it, and we've been workingtogether on it now for like 42,
43 years doing the same thing.
We're still doing the same thing.
We find heroes all over theplanet and tell their stories
Now not on violent records, ofcourse, or with faxed press
releases, but we do it on socialmedia websites and the like.
(50:21):
And we've created a wholeprogram for kids, the Giraffe
Heroes program helping kidsbuild lives, courage, compassion
.
I run Giraffe HeroesInternational, which has now got
seven eight overseas branches,mostly in Africa and Asia,
helping people start their owngiraffe projects and do their
own honoring of their own heroes.
I'm on, you know I still loveto talk, so I do a lot of blogs
(50:48):
and podcasts and Twitter feedsand whatever, all on the same
themes of courage, courage andservice, and we've been doing
that now for 43 years.
It's been remarkably successful.
Our strategy and strategy wasthe oldest one in the book.
I mean I got since neanderthals, I guess, tens of thousands of
years.
(51:08):
Any society that wanted to getmore of its people to be heroic
told stories of heroes.
That's how they did it.
That has never stopped.
The troubadours in the MiddleAges were doing the same thing
and Anne Medlock, founder of theGiraffe Heroes Project, is
doing it for our age.
And that's what the GiraffeHeroes Project does.
We're storytellers and weinspire other people to stick
(51:30):
their necks out by telling thestories of heroes.
It's been remarkably successful.
That's our base.
And then we've now togetherwritten I don't know five, six
books.
And she's older than I am, she's91 and I'm 82.
And we're not going to stop.
Why would we stop?
Until they pull me out of herein a pine box?
(51:52):
I'm not going to.
Well, no, that's not true.
I tell my grandkids look, don'tput me in a pine box.
If I get a terminal diagnosis,I'm going to put on a light
jacket and start walking towardsthe summit of Mount Rainier,
which is not far away.
And uh, when I get near the top, I'm going to just accidentally
fall on a crevasse and that'llbe the end of me.
That's the way I want to go.
Brandon Mulnix (52:11):
That's neither here nor there, but I just
thought I'd tell you that.
John Graham (52:17):
Anyway.
So the Giraffe Heroes Projecthas been the template and the
master plan for everything thatwe do, whether it's telling the
stories, blogging, podcasting,writing books, whatever and Ann
and I have been totally alignedon that for a long time.
Brandon Mulnix (52:35):
John, you've given a lot of time and I'm sure
our listeners are going toreach out.
Check out the giraffe projectat giraffeorg.
It's a very, very simplewebsite create domain, create
everything.
I have to share somethingbecause John and I don't agree
on a lot of things.
We do on story, we do on a lotof things, but when we first
(52:56):
started talking, we could tellvery quickly that we're not
coming from the same areas.
We do on a lot of things, butwhen we first started talking,
we could tell very quickly thatwe're not coming from the same
areas.
We're not coming from the samethings, and so what I want to
encourage you by this issometimes you have to have
conversations with people thatyou don't necessarily agree on
everything with to get the realstory.
And that's where I reallyappreciated John.
(53:17):
As we got to know each other, wecontinued to dive deeper and
deeper to find the connectionsthat helped connect us, where I
could be confident in sharingJohn's story with you.
Because if we just seeeverybody at a surface level
with what's going on in theworld, there's so many of these
stories, there's so many peoplethat have hero stories, there's
(53:39):
so many people, but we get sotransfixed by the surface levels
.
So I wanted to share thatlisteners, because I know just
how powerful relationships are,stories are.
It's our responsibilities asleaders to get to know the
people that we work with, thepeople that we talk with, the
people that we interact with.
So, john, is there any finalmessage that you have for the
(54:03):
Poultry Leadership Podcastlisteners?
John Graham (54:06):
Well, I want to endorse what you just said,
because I feel exactly the sameway.
Nothing that I've said, I think, so far has a Republican or a
Democrat into it.
I mean, this is just life.
My bumper sticker, if you will,for life is that there's no
more important quest for anybodyRepublican, democrat, whatever
no more important quest than ourpersonal lives being meaningful
(54:27):
.
That's it.
I don't care if you're strungfar right or strung far left.
It's true.
It's true.
You look for things that makeyour life meaningful.
In my view, my experience hasbeen a really good, stable
source of that kind of meaningand some kind of service.
And I'm not talking aboutsackcloth and ashes.
I'm not talking about becomingMother Teresa.
(54:49):
I'm not talking about beingsomeone running around in how
shall I say this?
You know, liberal circles withall their do-gooders in intense.
I'm talking about being ofservice in any way you can.
In the business world, forexample, you can be of service
by making a great product,selling it for a fair price,
with decent environmentalrelationships and relationships
(55:09):
with your employees.
Or you can be of service in theprofessions.
You can be of service,certainly.
You can be a service raisingchickens, for no question about
it, providing a real service anda real source of sustenance and
pleasure for millions of people.
So you look to what can provideservice and then you tie it to
(55:31):
what's meaningful in your life.
Your grandkids are meaningful,for example.
Your kids are meaningful.
You look for that, that, and itdoes not have a red or a blue to
it, and I think that's whatBrendan and I I don't think
either of us discovered it.
We're not naive.
We both knew that it existedout there, but the fact that
we've spent now hours togetherenjoying each other's company is
(55:52):
just a reaffirmation that thereare certain things in life that
just make life better.
And and finding meaning in thatlife is important.
And it also allows you, onceyou begin, to realize that so
many things that bring meaningare the same things that bring
meaning to someone who doesn'tagree with you politically.
It allows you to talk, itallows you to establish a little
trust in a society that, as weall know, has become really
(56:15):
badly polarized there.
All right, I'm going to stop,because I know has become really
badly polarized there.
Brandon Mulnix (56:19):
All right, I'm going to stop because I know
you've got to end this.
Well, poultry listeners, Iabsolutely appreciate your time.
I appreciate John's time.
You can find more informationabout what John Graham and his
amazing wife are doing for theworld still changing the world.
As long as there's breath inhis lungs, he's going to be
serving people and we get toexperience that from afar.
(56:42):
So, poultry listeners, poultrypodcast listeners, please share
this episode.
It's a great, great messagethat means so much to others,
not just in the industry.
So share this with others.
Help others become betterleaders.
And again, thank you, PrismControls, for allowing me the
time to sit with John and sharehis story with future leaders in
(57:04):
the industry.
So thank you.
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