His Greatest Adrenaline Rush? Serving Others: John Graham

Warwick Fairfax:
Welcome to Beyond the Crucible. I’m Warwick Fairfax, the founder of Beyond The Crucible.

John Graham:
This voice comes booming out of the storm, and it says basically, “Here you are. You’re lecturing on a cruise ship. You get out of this one, you lecture on another cruise ship. It’s a pretty copacetic way to earn a living, right? And yeah, yeah, yeah, you helped end apartheid. That’s good. But you seem to have left those ideals behind, John. And so you have to make a decision here. This is the crunch point. You have to make a decision. Either you keep on with what you started at the UN and devote your life to peace and justice issues, making the world a better place, and we’ll see what will happen out here. On the other hand, if you don’t do that, you might as well die out here because the rest of your life won’t be worth living.”

Gary Schneeberger :
That’s our guest this week, John Graham, describing the moment he thought he was going to die during a fire on a cruise ship in the middle of a typhoon. On a lifeboat losing hope that he would be rescued, he says that voice he describes shook him, but not because of what it said to him, but because of what it said about him. A seeker of adventure since age 16, crisscrossing the globe in search of his next jolt of adrenaline, he took the voice’s exhortation to heart, and stopped living for himself and began living to serve others. That’s the life of significance he’s built over more than 40 years now through his work with the Giraffe Heroes Project.

Warwick Fairfax:
Well, welcome, John. It’s so good to have you. I really enjoyed watching the video and just learning a bit about you from stuff on the website and other sources, and you’ve lived a fascinating life, really a life of adventure. It’s hard to believe one individual could have as many experiences as you have, which is just incredible. And I understand you grew up in Washington state, I think I saw somewhere in the Tacoma area.
So I’d love to hear a bit about the backstory of were there clues in your childhood, your upbringing, that led you to being such an adventurous person who done things that most of us have never even thought of doing, but you’ve just had a remarkable journey. So any clues in your childhood as you look back, saying, “Well, I can see how I ended up where I ended up and doing what I’m doing”?

John Graham:
Well, thank you very much. I’m delighted to be here. And clues, you know, it’s interesting because Tacoma, Washington, where I grew up, is a very ordinary little city in America, and I come from a very ordinary middle-class family. Nothing exciting ever happens in Tacoma. Nothing exciting ever happened in my family, and I just grew up with a nice mom who cooked good meals, and my dad worked selling advertising for the local newspaper. And I was miserable because I was constantly being bullied by other kids in school.
So I grew up very smart. One thing I had going for me was that I was really smart, but I hated being kicked around by the bullies. And I grew so fast that I was uncoordinated, so I couldn’t throw a football or kick a soccer ball or whatever. I couldn’t do athletics, and it was a pretty miserable teen for me.
And then everything changed. I won’t get into all the details, but by some series of miracles, I ended up when I was just 17 years old at the crucial point, the really beginning of my life, when I shipped out on a freighter to the Far East, and I don’t know why my mother, a good Catholic Croatian, let me go because she knew perfectly well that a 17-year-old on a ship in those years was going to face some significant, how shall I say it, moral challenges. In those years, this is like 1959 or so, there were no container ships. These were big cargo ships run by 50 or 60 really tough guys. And they were totally different than my father or the people that I knew in Tacoma, Washington. And I soon found myself on this freighter heading for the Far East.
And the very first night, or maybe it was the second night, one of the seamen comes up to me on the deck and begins making sexual advances, 17-year-old boy. And another guy, a big Black guy named Roy, he must’ve weighed 250 pounds, he grabs this other seamen who had accosted me, shoves him up against the bulkhead, and there was a magnificent stream of cussing. I never heard cussing like that in my life. He was magnificent. And Roy beats the guy around the head and tosses him down on the deck.
And that evening, I went back to the cabin and I thought, “Oh my God. Oh my God. There’s a whole new world out there.” And I went up to the mirror and I practiced taking an imaginary person and shoving him up against the bulkhead. And then I practiced cussing like Roy because Roy all of a sudden became the model of manhood I’d never had. My father, I loved my father, of course, he was a nice guy, but a very, very weak man. He was constantly being shoved aside by other more aggressive males everywhere he went, and I was being bullied and so I needed a strong role model, and I didn’t have any until Roy. And here was this right as 250-pound guy, and he was perfect.
The next year I found myself hitchhiking in Europe, and by then, I began to realize that the world was a huge, more colorful place than I’d ever thought because that trip in the Far East was, well, it started after Roy. The first port of call was a small port in the Philippines where the ship was three times as long as the dock. We were picking up coconuts, I think. And it was the first stop. And so Roy says, “Come on with us.” And I went with all the seamen down to the local little village there where they promptly took me to a local dive because they were convinced they were going to give me life lessons they knew I’d never get in school, and I won’t go into detail, but they sure did.
Anyway, I got roaring drunk and a brawl broke out. The next morning, I woke up with a hell of a hangover, and it lasted all the way to Hong Kong. But nevermind, I had seen the world, and the world was not my dad. The world was not Tacoma, Washington. The world was huge and colorful and exciting, barroom brawls and seamen and stuff, tearing into pirates. Whew. And I resolved then that that’s what I wanted my life to be like.
So anyway, the next year, I’m hitchhiking and I see from the youth hostel in Zermatt that there’s a war still going on in Algeria, the colonial war between the French and the rebels. And so I said, “Hey, a war? That’s cool.” And so I hitchhiked down to Morocco. I stepped across the border. There’s no border because it’s a war, right? And I’m smart enough though to put an American flag on my chest so that the rebels don’t take me for a Frenchman and shoot me. On the contrary, the rebels were great. They stopped cars going in my direction at gunpoint and told the driver to take me wherever I wanted to go.
So I’m hitchhiking through Algeria, and the next role models I got were a detachment of French foreign legionnaires who ran the power plant and still did in Olinghamville. And there were three guys, and they were surrounded by the rebels, thousands of rebels, three guys with a couple of shotguns and a rifle, but they had tattoos all over the place, and they were French foreign legionnaires, which as you know, means that they probably escaped from a jail someplace, so they were big tough guys.
And I remember we were having dinner out on their patio and a machine gun opens up not that far away, and I dive under the table. They just laugh. “Ha! Oh, no. They try. They’re just scaring us. We operate the power plant. They shoot us, the power goes out. They can’t do that here.” So we got Roy and we got these French legionnaires. From then on, my life path, I thought, was set. I needed to be like these guys, these tough guys. And so everything I read, every movie I saw, I wanted to be John Wayne, et cetera, et cetera.
At the same time, I needed to make myself that kind of a person. So when I went to college, I finally began to grow up a little bit, and I rowed crew for Harvard, and I put on about 30 pounds of muscle, and all of a sudden I became 6’5″ really tough guy myself so I could start doing all kinds of adventures. And I did.
Second year in college, I’m with a bunch of people, a bunch of guys in the mountaineering club, and we make the first direct descent of the North Wall of Mount McKinley in Alaska, the most dangerous climb in North America. It’s still one of the most epic climbs in North American mountaineering. And we dodged death a half a dozen times, carasses, rock falls, avalanches, rushing rivers, whatever.
And I kept surviving all this stuff, you know? And I became convinced not only did I want to be like Roy and the French foreign legionnaires and John Wayne, I was going to live through it all, that none of these physical adventures was ever going to do me in. So I then began to live a life where nothing mattered but the next adrenaline rush.
So I’m going to stop right now because this is how you… And I’m trying to answer your first question without getting ahead.

Warwick Fairfax:
Yeah, yeah, no. No, it’s-

John Graham:
But that’s how, that was the first shaping moment of my life, and it took a couple years of absolutely wild-ass adventures. I kept walking away from it in one piece, and it was a frigging miracle, but a lot happened after that, but that was the beginning.

Warwick Fairfax:
I love what you said. I think in the ’60s, you were at University of Adelaide. Can you describe your activities there? It’s hard not to fall off your chair laughing with you. I mean, so you write here, “I spent almost all my time in mines and prospecting the Outback, drinking beer and chasing girls. Heck, I was 22. A bar fight in Tennant Creek in the geographic center of Australia was memorable.”
I mean, you were one adventurous guy. It’s just I love your just sense of humor and authenticity, and you were just living your life, just experiencing the world. So that’s just, that’s incredible.

John Graham:
Well, and I kept walking away from it all because when I graduated college, I was then totally hooked on being an adventurer. The only thing I wanted to do was live a life with these kinds of adventures. And so I hitchhiked around the world, took a year off and hitchhiked around the world, ended up in Australia, as you pointed out, chasing girls and drinking beer. But that was only going to be for a year or so. I still needed to find some way of being an adventurer. I wasn’t independently wealthy, so how was I going to do that?
Well, I could have… On the way to Australia, I got a contract with the Boston Globe to write foreign correspondent articles for them, and I did so on every war I went across. So on the way to Australia, I stopped off and walked into the wars in the, let me see if I get this straight, Cyprus, Laos, and Vietnam. Yes. So I wrote stories, and of course I lived through all that stuff, wrote some terrific stories.
So when I got to Australia, I had a choice of becoming a correspondent. The Boston Globe wanted to hire me, but I also got a letter from the US Foreign Service offering me a job, as I passed all the tests, as a US Foreign Service officer. And that seemed like what I wanted to do because after all, foreign service could be adventurous as well. So I ended up joining the Foreign Service as a way of continuing my adventures, and it didn’t disappoint because they didn’t send me to fancy embassies in Europe. My foreign service career was mostly in jungles and deserts in wars and revolutions, which was perfect for me.
So I joined the Foreign Service, and very shortly thereafter, after the second, third year of foreign service, I find myself in Libya during the 1969 revolution. And oh, I loved it. I just loved it. It was perfect for me. It was scaring the bejesus out of everybody else in the American Embassy because the minute they saw cars burning in the streets and mobs throwing rocks, they got scared. But for me, that was what life was about, mobs throwing rocks and burning cars. I knew I was going to live through it because I always did.
So I went through the revolution in Libya, and then I demanded to the State Department that they send me to Vietnam, and not only that, but they send me to the most difficult and dangerous spot they had, and they did that. I became the advisor to the mayor of Hue, a small city in the northern part of what was then South Vietnam, but it was in the far north, just 50 miles south of a then-demilitarized zone that separated north and south. So it was a very dangerous place to be, and I had a dangerous job. Part of it was simple enough, administering an aide program, but the other half was a political officer, intelligence, counterintelligence, bullets whistling by my ear. And I was in the middle of a shooting war in Vietnam for a year and a half.
But it’s toward the end of that time in Vietnam that that first crucible happened. So I’m going to stop here because I’m sure you’ve got some commentary before I tell you what the crucible was.

Warwick Fairfax:
Yeah, I mean, it’s just incredible, John. A lot of people in the State Department, front offices, as they say in the UK, they would want to go to the cushy jobs in Paris, Rome, Vienna, live the good life. For you, it’s like, “Nah, send me to the jungle. Send me to the place where bullets are flying because I want an adventure.” And there’s probably some in the State Department said, “Okay, John, I don’t want to do that. Most people don’t. So therefore, plenty of opportunity to go where it’s dangerous.” Right?
So you always had this love for adventure, so you’ve got to do the perfect thing. You’re with the State Department and they pay you to go all around the world and have adventure. What could be better?

John Graham:
They kept promoting me because I was strong and tough and smart, and I kept doing great work for them, and so they kept promoting me, and I became fairly unusual, moving up into the higher ranks of the Foreign Service at an early age because I kept surviving all these situations. But I just loved it and the Foreign Service was great for that.

Warwick Fairfax:
Something happened in Vietnam that was, you’ve had more crucibles than that, but that was one of the defining moments. That was the beginning of the change in direction of your life. So just talk about what that was and how the impact of the before John Graham person and the after because it seems like you didn’t shift immediately, but it was a huge moment in your life. So talk about what happened and why it affected you so much.

John Graham:
Yeah, it’s still hard to talk about. I wrote a memoir and the section on this, it took me months to write because I kept crying.
I was in Vietnam and I was then no longer a kid. What was happening to my life was way beyond youthful exuberance. I was stuck in, I was totally committed to a life fueled by nothing but adrenaline. And yet, as I learned soon, I had a softer part of me.
I grew up in a household and I was a very gentle kid. I mean, I had a doll named Sammy, and my mother, a Croatian, basically a Croatian peasant-lover, she had a time clock that about age four or five boys stopped playing with dolls and went on to manly things. Well, I didn’t. She took the doll away. I got it back, the hair fell off. I sewed the doll’s hair on myself, and I loved little Sammy until my mother finally took him away for good. But there was a soft side to me, and yet the bullies, the bullies forced me to abandon that.
And so I began to, the way I like to put it is like nailing a large sheet of heavy plywood over my heart. And then when Roy and the ship and the legionnaires, and then the life on the Foreign Service and mountain climbing and all that risk-taking, it just bounced off that piece of plywood and I became tougher and tougher, but I also became totally self-absorbed. My life became extremely selfish. The only thing that mattered to me was the next adventure. And it was great because I knew that I would never be killed because that’s who I had become. So I kept walking into all these things and loving it.
And then at a certain point in Vietnam, when I was like 28, I realized that I really wasn’t a kid anymore and I was there in a fairly senior position where decisions that I was making involved people’s lives. And it all came to a head in the spring of 1971 when the North Vietnamese attacked South Vietnam from the north and tried to take over the country. They didn’t succeed for three more years, but this was the first attempt.
And the North Vietnamese, all of what surrounded Hue, there was only one narrow road south, but the North Vietnamese had almost surrounded the city. I was inside it. The American military had left under the troop withdrawal agreement. So there were only a few of us civilians still left in Hue, and we were almost surrounded by the North Vietnamese. And we knew we couldn’t get out because even if the army managed to send a helicopter, we knew that all our South Vietnamese allies would be clamoring to get on the helicopter and we’d have to shoot them off the skids. So we were trapped, and it mattered that whether or not Hue would fall or not.
The South Vietnamese were really poor troops, and they fell back onto the city until at one point the North Vietnamese tanks were only six miles away from the city walls on the north, and the South Vietnamese troops had broken and ran, or most of them anyway. But my job then was to create martial law in the city. And it was a Kafka-esque situation. I mean, half the population had fled south to Da Nang. The rest were totally terrified. Artillery was booming. The North Vietnamese were advancing, and I couldn’t get out, and my fate depended upon whether or not the South Vietnamese could refit themselves and make a fight of it.
But for that, they needed ammunition and the ammunition had to flow through Hue, and the city officials and most of the city infrastructure had fled and collapsed. So my job was to create a stable base area to get that ammunition to the troops. And I realized that I couldn’t do that because the city was completely overrun with deserters from the South Vietnamese divisions who had broken and ran, and we had to deal with the deserters, at least I saw that that way.
So I remember going to the deputy mayor, who was one of the few officials that hadn’t fled, and I demanded that he set up a firing squad and started shooting these deserters, even though I knew these deserters were all farm boys who had been dragooned off their patties maybe just the week or the month before, and thrown into the front line. They were scared, so they got drunk and behaved badly and were all looting and raping and pillaging and keeping the city from becoming a stable base area. So I figured, “Oh, well, let’s just set up a firing squad and start shooting them.”
So that all happened one night. And like I say, it was a Kafka situation, me and the deputy mayor screaming at each other, and they set up a firing squad. And I realized that night that here I was, my home was 8,000 miles away. I hated the war. I knew it was wrong and evil. I knew the US was losing. I didn’t really give a damn because I was only there for the adrenaline rush. I didn’t really care who won the war. What I cared about was me, me, me and another adventure. But now, now people were dying because of my decisions, and those farm boys were the next batch to die because of my adrenaline rushes.
And I just remember putting my head down and just weeping, like, “Jesus, what on earth have I become? What on earth have I become? How can my life… How could I have let my life become that shallow?” And it suddenly hit me, all the adrenaline rushes and everything, it was all for me, and now I was senior enough so that people were dying because of my rush for adventure. And that was the lowest point in my life. It was the lowest point of my life. That was the first crucible.
Turned out that a few hours later at daybreak, the clouds finally cleared and fighter bombers from US carriers off the coast reached the city and blew apart the North Vietnamese army that had surrounded the city and my life was spared. And so I came back from the war, again in one piece, but I wasn’t in one piece. I guess now you call it PTSD, but it was worse than PTSD because my whole life had been shattered.
I remember going to… The State Department sent me to California as a reward to go to Stanford for not getting killed in Vietnam. And so I was in California, and I went to a lot of what were then called encounter groups, which were groups where you sat down with other people and you sort of spilled your guts and hoped to learn something. And I did. I went to youth encounter groups, and I began to explore who I was. Was I this vicious John Wayne warrior, or was I the kid that sewed the hair back on my little doll Sammy? And who was I?
And I had a lot of people in these encounter groups who were really brave and smart, and they said, “Will you get off the John Wayne thing, John? We think there’s a nice guy in there. We think somewhere in John Graham, there is a useful human being and you’re denying it. You’re denying it.” And I finally began to realize that they were right.
And that was the first time I began to pry this heavy load of plywood off my heart, and I began to be more of a father to the two kids I had, and I began to develop real, genuine friendships and stable work relationships. It took a long time, but I began to crawl out of the self-centered hole because I had no choice. I mean, I was desperate once I realized the hole I’d fallen into and how deep it was.

Warwick Fairfax:
So in that moment, yeah, just to explore that, when you’re at the bottom of that pit, what were you thinking? You wanted a life of adventure, but in your lowest moment, who did you think you’d become? How would you describe your view of yourself at that lowest point?

John Graham:
Well, self-centered monster. I had the lowest opinion of myself. I began to realize that the adventurers were great fun, but they were shallow. And the fact is that to do what I was doing, it was important for me not to give a damn about the rest of the world. So I didn’t. I was in the middle for years in the Foreign Service of all kinds of suffering, poverty, violence. I didn’t give a damn. I didn’t care about other people. All I cared about was myself.

Warwick Fairfax:
What was some of those glimmers of, as you said to yourself, “I don’t want to be this person I was in Vietnam or this adventurer that only cared about myself,” what was the glimmer of a vision of who you wanted John Graham to be? Or maybe the elements that were there that were being suppressed, if you will? What were some of those glimmers of the image that was there that you wanted to let out of the John Graham that you wanted to be back then?

John Graham:
Well, they were more than glimmers. It was interesting because the Foreign Service kept providing me a perfect platform for where my life was headed, only now it wasn’t bloody adventures. After a couple years after Vietnam, I ended up at the United Nations, and by then my life had really turned around. I had a lot of spiritualist experiences, meditation and stuff like that, and I really come to realize of who I really was, that I really wanted to make the world a better place, to use that phrase. I wanted to use my skills and my resources, which were plentiful, to undo what I had done and to start doing things that made the world a better place. And then the American State Department sent me to the United Nations, which was absolutely perfect because the United Nations under Jimmy Carter was trying to do a better job with the world, and they put me in charge of American policies toward all of Africa, and eventually toward all of the so-called Third World.
So I had this whole panoply of a couple billion people suffering in wars and revolutions, and I was in a position to do something about it. So I began working for peace and justice issues at the United Nations with the same vigor and the same smarts and the same courage that I’d used to survive physical adventures. I started finding adventures at the UN, and they were adventures because I was then so much imbued, so much enthused by wanting to do good in the world, I went way past where Jimmy Carter wanted to go, where the American government wanted to go. So I got into all kinds of trouble by pushing policies at the United Nations. And because of a curious relationship, I had a lot of autonomy at the UN, and I pushed for things on my own and, in a sense, almost creating my own little state department up there.
I suppose the biggest thing that happened, and there were a number of incidents, was my work with South Africa when it was still an apartheid state. Apartheid, of course, being a system of brutal racism then in South Africa. And the first thing I did when I got the job at the UN was travel to South Africa and see for myself, and it was just awful. The oppression of Blacks by the white racist regime in South Africa was just awful. And it was sustained by military equipment, guns, and police equipment, and communications gear all supplied by Europe and the United States because there was huge amounts of money to be made in shipping guns and military equipment to the South African whites, which they then used to kill Blacks, keep them in line.
So I came back from South Africa looking for a touch point, something I could do, and I realized that if I could get the UN to shut off the supplies of guns and military equipment to the South African military and police, that would cripple their efforts to enforce apartheid. And that’s what I set out to do. And the first thing I had to do was to earn the trust of the African delegates because America’s relationships then, and probably still, were terrible. We didn’t give a damn about our Black and brown brothers. We only cared then about the Cold War, whether they’d vote on our side or that of the Soviet Union. And so we didn’t care much for them, and they didn’t care much for us, or it took me a while.
But I approached the African delegates on the Security Council quietly and basically said, “Hey, I’m on your side. You probably don’t believe me, but I’m really on your side. I will help you develop a plan to put pressure on my own government to institute an arms embargo on South Africa to cut off the supplies of military equipment. And if the US cuts it off, the Europeans are going to have to follow suit. So, what do you say?” And they said, “Oh, we don’t trust you.” But then gradually, after lunches and walks, they began to trust me. And I even gave them documents for which I could have been fired or even jailed, which showed who in America was responsible for the guns trade, and who in Congress, and there were plenty of racist senators at that time, who in Congress were turning a blind eye to what America was doing to prop up the Afrikaner regime, the apartheid regime in South Africa. I did all of that.
It all came to a head once and I’ll never forget this. I got notice of an angry telegram sent to my boss, the Secretary of State, just vilifying American hypocrisy for saying all the right things in speeches, but then doing nothing to institute an arms embargo to keep guns away from the South African military, and this foreign minister from Africa was furious. But the thing was in the middle of his message, I recognized a couple of sentences that I myself had drafted three weeks before, given to my level contact in New York, he had sent them back to his boss in Africa, and they’d come rocketing back. So I said, “Whoa, that’s terrible. Oh my goodness, what are we going to do?”
And at that point, I finally let loose and went to my own government and says, “Look, we have to do something. We look like utter hypocrites on this issue.” And I convinced my own government finally to face down the racists in Congress and in the administration and to agree to institute a really tough arms embargo on South Africa that really did cut off the supply of arms, and the Europeans weren’t happy, but they had no choice but to follow suit.
And so on April, April, April 19… Where was it? April 1980, I guess it was, ’81. No, ’79, ’80, ’80, 1980, the UN adopts this arms embargo in South Africa. And in time, that arms embargo was, as I knew it would be, decisive in ending apartheid.

Gary Schneeberger :
I’d love to jump in here because we’ve heard two sides of your story up to this point, right? You talked a lot about the adrenaline rush of climbing Denali and being in war and covering wars and doing all those things. And you’ve just described very passionately your work for the government. And I’m wondering if there wasn’t, I don’t know if it was an adrenaline rush in that, but doing good, did being involved in those situations looking for a good outcome, rather than being involved in situations that gave you adrenaline rush just for your own thrills, was there some of that in what you were doing? Did you get an adrenaline rush of a different sort maybe from that?

John Graham:
Oh, Gary, perfect question. Yes, of course. Yeah, these were incredible adventures, but they were adventures not so much of testing my body, but testing my spirit, testing my resolve, testing my emotions, but they were a lot more adventurous than hanging by a rope over a cliff or dodging a bullet. I had found the adventures of my life and the fact that they were saving lives instead of costing them, the fact that I was doing good was perfect.
It was so perfect, for example, that now, I guess I’m an extremist, but I was as hooked on doing good as I had been hooked on daredevil pursuits, and I realized that I couldn’t stay in the Foreign Service because it was too slow. I wanted to change the whole frigging world, and the Foreign Service was too slow. And not only that, but I was now a pretty senior guy, and I made a lot of enemies from people that didn’t want to make these changes, so I was going to get fired anyway. So, I quit. I quit the Foreign Service at really the top of my game because I could see the handwriting on the wall.
So there I was in New York City in 1980, ’81 without a job, but I was looking for new ways to change the world. And because I’d always had a good gift of gab, I thought I could do it by giving speeches. And boy, was I wrong about that. I thought I was changing the world, but I couldn’t figure out how to do that. And then I ran out of money. A friend comes, says, “Hey, you can make some money lecturing on cruise ships.”
So I applied and my very first application was accepted, and so I found myself, and I was able to take my then-13-year-old daughter Mallory, as a guest lecturer on a cruise ship heading from Vancouver to a trip to the Orient. Small by today’s standards, 500-and-some passengers or so. And Mallory and I board the ship and head out to sea, and it goes up through Alaskan waters and it heads across North Pacific.
Well, anyway, even before I gave my first lecture, the ship catches fire, and Mallory and I are awoken in the middle of the night 140 miles off the coast of Alaska. And there’s a voice that says, “I’m very sorry, but there’s been a small fire in the engine room and we’re putting it out, but the ship has got some smoke in it so we ask you all to come up to the ship’s lounge. We’ll be serving free liquor and we’ll put the fire out and it’ll all be fine by morning.”
So Mallory and I are disarmed by this, and we open the door, and sure enough, the ship is full of smoke, so we go up to the lounge with the lounge in the dining room. They’re also full of smoke. And not only that, but any fool can see that the smoke coming up the stairwells that we’ve just come up is getting blacker and thicker. Whatever is going on, the fire’s getting worse, so people are getting worried. All these passengers are out there on the deck because there was too much smoke inside, and it was October in the Gulf of Alaska, and it was cold. So people were tearing down curtains and using tablecloths to stay warm because we hadn’t been warned to take warm clothes or even life vests. We had been lied to over the intercom.
So we’re sitting out there, people are beginning to mumble, then they yell that we’re told to go into the fantail, the rear of the ship, the stern, and everybody collects there. And they bring out the ship’s orchestra. Would you believe that? They do. It’s true. It’s true. That is a true story.

Warwick Fairfax:
It’s like they must have read about that.

John Graham:
The ship orchestra. Yeah, yeah.

Warwick Fairfax:
They must have read about the Titanic, right?

John Graham:
Well, of course, of course, of course. And not only that, but when the movie-

Warwick Fairfax:
You know, like in the ’50s movie or whenever it was, playing. You remember that scene?

John Graham:
Yeah, of course, of course. Only they weren’t playing Nearer, My God, to Thee. They were playing show tunes from Oklahoma. I remember going… Many years later, I went with Mallory to see the movie Titanic, and we just held each other’s hands because of the parallels were so exact.
Anyway, the fire gets worse and worse, and we’re all told to go to the lifeboat stations finally. And Mallory and I go up to lifeboat number two off the port bow, and it says that it’s made for 48. Well, there’s like 60 people there, but it’s okay because it’s so cold. We’re crammed together in that little lifeboat. And by some miracle, the lifeboats, six of them, eight of them, whatever, are lowered from the burning ship and they began to drift away. And it’s still about three, four o’clock in the morning. It’s still dark.
The thing is though, is that a typhoon is bearing down on us, and we knew that because they had distributed seasick pills the night before, a warning that the next day would be choppy because of the typhoon. So where we land in the seas are relatively calm, and at dawn, a huge tanker answering the SOS arrives. That’s good. But the tanker is way too big to maneuver to the tiny lifeboats, and the lifeboats are too small to grab the swaying rope ladders off the… So we’re still stuck.
And then helicopters start arriving from shore bases 140 miles away, Canadian and American helicopters, and they start lifting people out of the lifeboats one at a time on a little metal chair at the end of a chain, and so it’s slow work. 500 people have to be pulled one by one from the lifeboats. And as long as the seas are calm, the helicopters can fly. They get maybe seven or eight people in the helicopter. They fly to the deck of the tanker, drop the seven or eight people, come back for another load. And there’s three or four helicopters going as fast as they can.
The trouble is is that the typhoon is coming on, and by about noon, the typhoon is so fierce that the helicopters can’t fly anymore. It’s just too damn dangerous. Our only hope then is that a Coast Guard cutter, which had been rushing out there to the scene from Sitka, a Coast Guard cutter would find us. But now we’re in a typhoon, and the visibility is getting less by the minute. And not only that, but the seas are rising and it’s getting worse and worse. At a certain point, we’re in seas that are 25, 30 feet high in a little lifeboat. That’s like watching the water go up and down like a five-story building. And the winds are 60 knots or so. And I’ve been in mountain climbing situations enough to know that we’re all dying of hypothermia.
Now, who’s left? Almost everyone’s been rescued by the helicopter. There’s only eight of us left in lifeboat number two, and we’re all dying of hypothermia. And I recognize that we’re going to be dead in seven or eight hours. I could see that. And so if we’re still in the lifeboat and not thrown out from the typhoon and the high waves, we’d be dead anyway. They’d just find our bodies in the lifeboat.
And then so there we are. And up until this point, as you know from my stories, I’ve always walked away from anything that was dangerous, and I thought in the beginning, “Oh, wow, another adventure. Cool. Okay.” So I’m in a lifeboat with eight guys in the middle of a typhoon, 140 miles off the coast. Our only hope is for a Coast Guard cutter trying to find us with visibility down to 100 meters. The chances of that happening are really slim. The key thing though was it was going to be dark in half an hour, and if they couldn’t find us in the daytime, they would never find us at night because we had no lights, no flares, no reflectors, no radio, nothing. So once it was dark, we for sure we were dead. And it was, at that point, maybe a half an hour until dark.
So here comes the crucible. I realized that finally this may be my last adventure and that I may not get out of this one. But on the other hand, damn it, I’ve turned my life around. I’m not the self-centered bastard I was in Vietnam. In fact, I helped end apartheid for God’s sake. And I didn’t understand. And I’m not a religious man, but I remember turning to the allness or whatever you might call it, call it God, call it whatever, and saying, “I don’t get it. I thought the world was a useful, I mean, an orderly place.” I went to a Jesuit with high school. Order in the universe, crystals, salt crystals, all that, order in the universe. “There’s no order here. Here I am. I got 40 years, 50 years left to do your work, God, to do good in the world, and you’re wiping me out. It makes no sense whatsoever. It’s just plain stupid.”
So my prayer becomes this angry bleed, I’m screaming at God, and I get this answer. The other seven guys didn’t hear a thing, but for me, it was real clear. And this voice comes booming out of the storm, and it says basically, “Here you are. You’re lecturing on a cruise ship. You get out of this one, you lecture on another cruise ship. It’s a pretty copacetic way to earn a living, right? And yeah, yeah, yeah, you helped end apartheid. That’s good. But you seem to have left those ideals behind, John. And so you have to make a decision here. This is the crunch point. You have to make a decision. Either you keep on with what you started at the UN and devote your life to peace and justice issues, making the world a better place, and we’ll see what will happen out here. On the other hand, if you don’t do that, you might as well die out here because the rest of your life won’t be worth living. It’s a choice. Make a choice. Shit or get off the pot.” God didn’t say that, but that was the message.
So I look up, and my famous ego is just depleted, and I just look out of the teeth of this storm, and I just say, “Okay, it’s a deal.” And in that instant, and here’s another example that most people just don’t believe it, in that instant, and I swear it was almost to the second, the Coast Guard cutter Boutwell comes crashing through this storm out of nowhere and aiming right at us. It would have cut us in two had the lookout not seen us. And so we get, I get rescued. I go back to New York. I keep my promise. I never look back.

Warwick Fairfax:
So talk about the next part with your wife, Ann Medlock, and the whole concept of the Giraffe Project because that’s really been, I mean, as amazing as the work you did with the State Department, this is really your life’s work.

John Graham:
It has been, yeah. What is it now? 42 years. I came back, I’d known Ann. I’d known Ann a little bit because we were both members of a writer’s group, but I was still married to my first wife at that point, so we were just friends. And then I came back from Prinsendam and started doing these lectures that were going nowhere, but Ann had started the Giraffe Heroes Project. And the concept was very simple, but very ancient. She was looking for heroes, looking for people sticking their necks out, hence the metaphor. And she would tell their stories any way she could because she was convinced that the world needed to hear the stories of heroes because there was too much gloom and doom. And if people were going to be hopeful, they had to have the stories of heroes.
Well, people have felt that way for, I don’t know, since neanderthals. Cultures have tried to create more heroes in their culture by telling the stories of other heroes. I mean, the troubadours in the Middle Ages, same thing. And Ann became the troubadour of our ages when she started the Giraffe Project. And while my lectures were failing, what she was doing became an instant success. I mean, there was an essay on her in the New York Times a year or two after she started, and it was growing fast. And I thought at first it was lightweight. I mean, telling stories, come on. You had to be serious. If you’re going to save the world, you had to be like me. You had to be giving these great weighty speeches and write letters or write articles in Foreign Policy magazine and stuff. Now, storytelling captured people and I began to see that.
And so two things happened. I began to realize the power of what Ann was doing, and I also fell madly in love with her, my first marriage then being over. And it was a crazy time. It was just absolutely wonderful. After one of our sessions in this writer’s group, Ann asked if anyone wanted to go see the new movie, Superman. And I answered, “Yes,” in a voice so loud and aggressive no one else would dare say “yes” as well.
She and I go off to see the movie. We questioned whether her hand moved over mine or mine over hers, whatever. Went to an Irish bar. That was a Tuesday night. On Friday, I moved in for good. So our courtship lasted three days, and we were crazy in love, still are. And I became also a big fan of the Giraffe Project, and the two of us began operating it together. Then now we’re talking 1982, ’83, ’84. And now we’re talking about 2025, so it’s been a lot of years, but we’re doing the same thing that Ann started doing. We’re finding heroes and telling their stories, only now it’s like 1,500 stories that we’ve told. They’re all cataloged on our website, giraffe.org, and we have written a whole school’s curriculum. That took a decade and a million dollars to do it. A whole school’s curriculum, helping kids build lives as courageous and compassionate citizens.

Warwick Fairfax:
Yeah, it’s so well said, John. I feel like where you are now and maybe the last 40 years is the adventure of a lifetime, the ultimate adrenaline rush in that sense because when you do good for others, and maybe somebody says, “Hey, John, thanks. That really made a difference,” or, “thank you for sharing my story. I felt seen and heard,” and again, you’re not doing it for the adrenaline rush. You’re not doing it for the attaboys or “thanks, John,” but it can help you make you think, “well, you know what? Today was a good day. I may have done some dumb stuff in my life, but today, I did something good. I helped somebody.” And again, you don’t do it for the reason, that reason, but there’s a side benefit that it’s like, “Maybe I’m not such a messed-up person after all, or maybe I am, but I still can do some good for people.” We all can feel that way.
And does that make sense? I feel like you’ve lived the adventure of a lifetime that’s at a different level, and it’s sustainable because when you do good for others, that sense of feeling inside, “Boy, this is a legacy that my kids, grandkids, my friends, this is something they can respect. This is something I can leave behind. This is a kind of adventure.” That’s the ultimate adventure, in a sense. Does that make sense?

John Graham:
Oh, it does. I put it also in this way, in that I am more, in all my endeavors now, more than a little bit selfish because there’s so much pleasure, so much meaning in my life, so much satisfaction out of doing this. And of course, I feel good that I’ve helped this person, but I also feel really good that I’ve helped myself because yet another example of being able to use my skills and experience to do good.
And a curious sort of thing too, I just want to add this, is that I don’t regret, if you will, that first half of my life, despite, as you put it, all the backsliding and stuff, because it makes me credible with tough audiences, not this audience. I mean, you guys aren’t a tough audience. You’re pushovers. You’re good guys. But I talk to maybe a C-suite audience in a boardroom or maybe 2,000 people at a corporate gathering, and they’re all skeptical. And the only way to get past their skepticism, if they give me 45 minutes to talk, I’ll spend 35 minutes telling these horrendous stories until everyone’s on the edge of their seat, “What the… How can that guy, how could he possibly have…”
And then when they’re at the edge of their seats and they realize that I’ve done more tough stuff, more dangerous stuff than the whole room full of them put together, they’ll listen, and I’ll make the pivot to, “You know, I learned something more about adventuring. I learned something more about meaning. Here’s what I’ve learned.” They listen to me. And so in the last two minutes, I can say, “You’ll find the same thing. I’m not saying you’re going to die on a cruise ship or from a mountain climbing fall, but I am saying there will be, there are adventures in your life, there are tests, there are challenges, and you need to look at that in terms of how much meaning they will give or subtract from your life. You need to look at that and be serious about it because that’s what saved my life and that’s what made me who I am, and I suspect that’s true for you too.”
And at that point, these tough-minded, cynical business people are listening. And I reach audiences like that because of my backstory. I often say that if you’re going to hire me as a lecturer, what you’re really hiring is my biography because my biography is my way in to a lot of audiences who wouldn’t listen to me otherwise.

Gary Schneeberger :
We, folks, have reached the point of the show where I normally say something and I’m going to check before I say it because our guest, John Graham, has been through a whole bunch of crucibles that you’ve heard about, and I want to make sure none of them have to do with planes. And so far, I’m not seeing it. So I’m going to say that sound you heard, folks, is the captain turning on the fasten seatbelt sign, indicating that it’s time to begin our descent to close this conversation. We’re not there yet, though. I’m going to turn it over to Warwick in a minute to ask some more questions.
I have a thought, John, that when I ask you this question, you’re going to set a record for number of websites you list because I would be remiss if I didn’t give you the chance to let listeners and viewers know how to learn more about all the incredible things they’ve heard about. So what are some good online places they can go to learn more about you and about the Giraffe Heroes Project?

John Graham:
Okay. Well, the first URL is real simple, giraffe.org. That’s the Giraffe Project, 42 years. And you get through there, there’s an easily searchable database of 1,500 inspiring stories of Giraffe Heroes, notices of our books, et cetera, et cetera. So, giraffe.org.
And then my personal website is my name, johngraham.org. It’s pretty much got the stories that we’ve talked about so far, plus the other useful stuff that you might find on a personal website.
I’d love to give a note to my new memoir. It’s called Quest: Risk, Adventure, and the Search for Meaning. You can get it from Amazon or order it from any bookstore.

Gary Schneeberger :
Warwick, John’s life has been interesting. It has been informative. I’ll turn it over to you to ask the last question or two.

Warwick Fairfax:
Well, John, thank you so much for coming on the podcast, and you’ve had an incredible story from an adventure-seeker, somebody who really lived for the adrenaline rush to somebody that maybe still is an adventure-seeker, but you’re doing it in an area that’s so much more lasting, really to help people, to just really uplift people have taken risks to do something good for others, and I love just what you do at the Giraffe Heroes Project.
So there may be people here that maybe they’re going through the dark night of the soul. Maybe they’re just saying, “Look, isn’t life about me, about money and power?” And maybe they’re saying, “Well, if only I get across the next mountain ridge, then I’ll finally be happy.” For somebody that’s going through that dark night of the soul, what’s maybe a different vision for your life, the vision that’s a legacy that you want to lead, or a vision that you can be proud of, an adventure that’s sustainable? What would your advice be to that person that’s going through that dark night of the soul and, “Hey, life’s all about me and the next rush”?

John Graham:
Take some time off. Go for a quiet walk in the woods. Look up with a starry sky because you’ve got to silence the clatter and clamor first before you can begin to seriously think about what makes your life meaningful. And if it’s a dark night of the soul, what may seem to make your life meaningful is getting back at the bastards who are making life miserable for you or something like that, I guarantee you it’s not that.
Find that meaning. And if you start with the meaning is my kids and grandkids, that’s great. That’s a great place to start. But then look at your skills. There’s a reason why you’re smart or not smart. There’s a reason why you’re good at math or not good at math, a reason why you have artistic talent, there’s a reason why you’re able to give a good speech, or there’s a reason why you’re shy. There’s reasons for all of this. It’s like why does an eagle have claws? I mean, they’re there for a reason.
So part of it is just taking stock of who you are, and then from there, looking at things that are meaningful that make use of who you are so you feel comfortable in your own skin. But mostly the key is to look for how you can be of service and how much meaning that can bring to your life. And again, the service can be something absurdly simple, and you start with a service to your own family, your own community. And maybe if you have the proper skills, maybe it is getting involved, running for office or whatever. That’s not true for most of us, but it is for some. But look, be an honest searcher. Yeah, okay. Bumper sticker: be an honest searcher.

Gary Schneeberger :
Folks, I have been in the communications business long enough to know when the final word’s been spoken on a subject. And our guest, John Graham, has just spoken.
Well, Warwick, wow. We just got done interviewing John Graham who, I dare say, talked in depth about more and more incredible crucibles than I think any guests we’ve had before. Not that other guest crucibles, we’re not comparing crucibles. We say that all the time. But John had some really, really, really challenging crucibles, big-ticket items, if you will.
Where do we start? What’s your big takeaway from John’s life and how he’s turned it around?

Warwick Fairfax:
Yeah. John has led an amazing life, a life of adventure, a life of adrenaline rush from his perspective. The first part of his life, he just lived for adventure. He seemed to feel like he led this charmed life where he could take these unbelievable risks and nothing would happen. I mean, at age 16, he hitchhikes on a freighter, and from this kind of pretty ordinary life in Washington state and in Tacoma, he’s on this freighter with these incredible characters, and learning a lot about life that you don’t learn at school.
At 19, he’s there during the revolution in Algeria. I mean, he’s just leading this incredible life. Later, he ends up in Vietnam when he’s with the Foreign Service and incredibly dangerous circumstances in the ’70s. All these things that he’s done, and despite all his adventures, he’s also an incredibly smart guy. I mean, he went to Harvard undergrad. He was magna cum laude. That is the highest honors you can get. We don’t use those words in Australia, so I had to learn that when I came to America, but I know that means a lot. So he did a grad degree at Stanford. He even did a stint in Adelaide.
And looking at his resume, this has got to be the funniest, craziest, amazing resume I’ve ever read. He talks about his time at University of Adelaide in the ’60s, and he said, “Yeah, I spent almost all my time in mines and prospecting the Outback, drinking beer and chasing girls. Heck, I was 22. Had a bar fight in the geographic center of Australia.” I mean, he’s done it all.
And so I think the first half of his life, it was all about the rush, about adventure. And really, he had two crucibles that turned his life around, or at least turned the direction of his life. One was in Vietnam in which he was in a town that was surrounded by the North Vietnamese. He was with the South Vietnamese. And it looked like he wasn’t going to get out of there. He had to make some very difficult decisions to stop people deserting, and listen to the whole podcast for more detail, but he had to do things that maybe he wouldn’t have done normally in less chaotic situations. And he was thinking, “What am I doing here? Why are we here in general?” Which obviously a lot of people have thought subsequently in Vietnam, but he just felt like there was no purpose, there was no meaning. For him, it was all about adventure, about the rush of adrenaline. And it’s like there’s got to be more than just a rush, a sense of adventure.
And so that was the beginning of a change of direction. And then he then went on to spend more time in the State Department. One of the high-water marks of his life was when he was in the UN and he was covering Africa and really helped in the Carter administration in the late ’70s lobby to stop the US supplying arms to the white apartheid regime in South Africa. Not a popular stance at the time because countries are making a lot of money from arms. But he did some amazing things.
But then he got out of the State Department because he was probably making some enemies with some unpopular, pretty courageous decisions. So then he thought, “Well, I can tell colorful stories, and so I’m going to just do the cruise ship routine and tell stories.” And I guess in hindsight, from his perspective, I think he felt like he backslid a little bit. He was doing some good in the State Department, but now I guess he felt like there’s more to life and just giving speeches on ships. Nothing against that, but for him, it felt like he was copping out a bit.
So it only happens to somebody like John Graham, there’s a fire on a board ship. They have to abandon ship, and of course there’s a typhoon bearing down. I say, “Of course” because for John Graham, a fire on board a ship is just not enough. You’ve got to have more adventure, more challenge. Of course, there’s a typhoon and he’s on the last boat, and the Coast Guard off of Alaska, they can’t get them, excuse me, the helicopters can’t get them off in the midst of a typhoon, that kind of storm. And so he reaches this really ultimate crucible moment where he is just sort of yelling at the wind, and he’s not religious, but yelling at God, so to speak, saying, “Come on, what’s the deal?” And he feels like God’s basically saying to him, “You’ve got to,” in colorful language, “stop what you’re doing and change direction. You choose. Do you want to just live your life in this sort of ordinary life doing the cruise ship routine?”
He’d done good before, but somehow I guess he felt like he was just going to go on a path that really didn’t have the same level of merit perhaps. And as soon as he made that decision, “Okay, God or whoever you are, I’m going to change my life. I’m going to really use who I am and my skills for good,” as soon as that happens, the Coast Guard cutter comes, and if it hadn’t come then, he would’ve died. Night would’ve fallen. He would’ve died of hypothermia.
So ever since then, he’s changed his life. He and his wife, Ann Medlock, together worked on this project called the Giraffe Heroes Project, which seeks to find people who stick their necks out and make a difference in the world. And they’ve shared, I don’t know if it’s like thousands, a couple thousand, a lot of stories of ordinary people doing heroic deeds. And so his life is totally different. He’s somebody that lives a life of purpose and meaning and encourages other people to live lives of purpose and meaning.
And the ultimate rush, if you will, which may not even be the right word, but is the ultimate sense of joy and fulfillment is when you’re helping others. And he helps so many people and tells so many stories. He’s now in his early 80s, he has so much fulfillment and satisfaction, he’s doing so much good with Giraffe Heroes Project.

Gary Schneeberger :
Yeah. And one of the things that was really interesting to me is after we were done with the recording proper, he said to you that he had to do this show because he saw, as we see after talking to him, that what Beyond the Crucible stands for and what his life now stands for and what the Giraffe Heroes Project stands for are so much the same, as we found on a number of occasions. Lots of overlap, even in language.
So you guys are both in the same business, got there through different crucibles in different ways, for sure, but what we say all the time, “Crucibles can differ in circumstance, but they can be resonant with each other in emotion,” and I think we found that in John’s story.
Warwick and I have a couple of favors to ask of you. If you’ve enjoyed this show and if you enjoy the show generally, we ask you on your favorite podcast app, if that’s where you’re listening, to subscribe to the show, put a comment, rate the show there. That will help more people find us. And if you’re watching us on YouTube, we ask you to like our YouTube channel and to leave a comment there so that we know what you think about what we’ve talked about here today with John Graham.
And what we’ve talked about here today, folks, is what we know to be true. And John’s stories, and I said, “Stories” on purpose, that wasn’t a slip, John’s stories make crystal clear what we say all the time, that we know your crucibles are difficult. We know that they can knock you for a loop. They can cause some really traumatic things to happen in your life. But we also know this, that your crucible experiences aren’t the end of your story. In fact, if you learn the lessons, as John explained how he did, if you learn those lessons and you apply those lessons as you move forward, where those crucibles can lead you, those lessons that you learn from those crucibles can lead you to a new destination that will be the most rewarding destination of your life, and that destination is a life of significance.
Welcome to a journey of transformation with Beyond the Crucible Assessment. Unlike any other, this tool is designed to guide you from adversity to achievement. As you answer a few insightful questions, you won’t just find a label like The Helper or The Individualist. Instead, you’ll uncover your unique position in the journey of resilience. This assessment reveals where you stand today, the direction you should aim for, and, crucially, the steps to get there. It’s more than an assessment. It’s a roadmap to a life of significance.
Ready? Visit beyondthecrucible.com. Take the free assessment and start charting your course to a life of significance today.