The Politics of Beauty with John de Graaf – Transcript

The Politics of Beauty with John de Graaf – transcript

Eric: [00:00:00] Welcome to, let’s Hear It. Let’s Hear. It is a podcast for and about the field of foundation and nonprofit communications produced by its two co-hosts, Eric Brown and Kirk Brown. No relation,

Kirk: Said Eric. And I’m Kirk. And

Eric: I’m Eric. The podcast is sponsored by the College Futures Foundation. Which envisions a California where post-secondary education advances equity and unlocks upward mobility now and for generations to come to learn more, visit college futures.org.

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Eric: Let’s get onto the show.

Kirk: That’s a cool mic you’ve got going on over there, Eric

Eric: It’s designed to make me sound not like

Kirk: a chipmunk. If you don’t sound like a, I don’t know, like a radio host after this mic change, [00:01:00] I can be really devastated. But it looks very cool. It looks all pro, all radio all the time.

Eric: Hey, Kirk.

Kirk: Yeah,

Eric: welcome in. See?

Kirk: There you go. We retired it

We’re just cutting straight in. We’re just cutting straight in, having a conversation. Welcome in. It’s freeze. It’s freezing cold here, by the way. And I’m not even kidding.

Eric: Oh, we, I don’t think that we have any right below

Kirk: 32 degrees. It’s freezing. I do

Eric: not think we have any right to complain.

Kirk: That’s a statement of fact.

That’s a statement of fact . It makes me think about beauty and where I want to go. Far away to be in places that are beautiful. It makes me think about the conversation that we’re about to have with this terrific guest. So please set this up because, I heard the phrase politics of beauty in this conversation, and I can’t unhear that.

I can never unhear that . It’s awesome.

Eric: Yes. Last time what we had was the surveillance economy, , and now we have the politics of beauty. That’s what this show is designed to do. We’re designed to go to and fro . I spoke with a dear old friend, a guy named John [00:02:00] DeGraff. Who was the co-author with David Won and Thomas Naer of Affluenza, how Over Consumption is Killing Us and how to Fight back.

But more important, he was the director of the film that played on PBS at at Scott. Simon was the host and . I think for folks who remember that far back or people of a certain age, affluenza was a thing. We realized that this notion of over consumption was not making us any happier.

Eric (2): . And

Eric: John directed that film. And he wrote that book. He’s also the editor of this great anthology of essays called Take Back Your Time. He’s got two films in the works right now, which we’ll talk about in the show. But John is one of those people, and I’ve said this a million times and it’ll probably be in the intro.

This, anyone’s listening to this already knows John DeGraff works his butt off so that we don’t have to

Kirk: This is an incredible conversation. John is so generous to come join us on the podcast. You can find him. He’s online [00:03:00] in his web website, john degraf.com. That’s G-O-H-N-D-E-G-R-A-A f.com. John degraf.com. But let’s listen to John and Eric talk and then we’ll come back. There’s gonna be a lot to talk about afterwards.

So this is John Degra on Let’s hear it.

Eric: Welcome to, let’s Hear It. My guest today is the writer, speaker, filmmaker, and activist John DeGraff. Now John is one of those people who just never stop, so I’m gonna give you a brief rundown of how I can say that he is the co-author. Of the book Affluenza, how Over Consumption is Killing Us and How to Fight Back.

And he produced and directed the documentary of the same name for PBS. He is the co-author of What’s the Economy for Anyway, why It’s time to stop chasing Growth and start pursuing Happiness. He has produced Gore of documentary films about a variety of environmental and social causes, and he has won over a hundred awards and three Emmys, and I’m not done.[00:04:00]

He’s the editor of the anthology of essays called Take Back Your Time, fighting Overwork and Time Poverty in America, and he’s the founder of Take Back Your Time Day. So basically, I’ve said this many times, John DeGraff works his butt off so you don’t have to now It was exhausting just reading that John.

Thank you so much for coming on. Let’s hear it.

John: Thank you, Eric . That’s funny.

Eric: This is it’s great for us to sit down and talk. I think I’ve known you for 25 years.

John: Yeah, since 95, so it’s almost 30 now.

Eric: Good Lord. And so we were ubic then Young and Mish, and now we’re just. Sha Rubik,

John: you were the communications director for the Center for a New American Dream.

Eric: That’s right. Motto. More fun, less stuff. Yeah. And we’re still doing our darnedest to have more fun with less stuff. So John, you’ve been at this for a quite some time. How did you get started in. All of this.

John: And it was right after the Battle of the Alamo . [00:05:00] No, I started in film making first. Back in the 1977, I made a film about, I was in doing radio myself public radio in Northern Minnesota, Duluth, Minnesota.

Met an old character that I thought was a fascinating guy and ended up making a film about him for public television. And that started my film career. It’s now 45 some films later. And strangely enough, that first film I ever made is gonna be shown in Hibbing, Minnesota in June, and they’re bringing me back there for it.

No kidding. I haven’t seen it, but it’s a fun thing. And then I went from that, basically, most of my films ended up in the ozone layer after they were on public television. Nobody saw them after that. And then then came Zo and that was my 15 minutes of fame. Andy Warhol, 15 minutes. And that film was huge.

It really was a big success on PBS and led folks to ask me to write a book about the subject, [00:06:00] which then did become an international bestseller. I did more writing and that I got into figuring, wanting to be an activist. What can I do about this problem, like the Center for American New American Dream was doing and came on, several of us came up with this idea about take back your time.

That we were working way too hard to, for the, all this stuff and we were suffering in many ways. So we started that campaign wrote the . The book that was actually the anthology at that time, made a film called Running Out of Time. And, went from there into various other films, environmental subjects and so forth.

And in 2017 after Trump’s election and after the country became obviously horribly polarized, I felt that we needed some kind of issue that would bring people together across these partisan minds. And I felt that the place to do that I’d heard a number of people Doug Tompkins, who was the founder of Espree and north [00:07:00] Face and so forth, had once said that if he had to bet on something, he would bet that the one thing that would save the world was beauty.

And I thought maybe that’s a bet worth taking and check it out. And I have really come to conclusion that, that beauty, na natural beauty, preserving natural beauty trying to create beautiful surroundings for people to live in is an issue that does bring. People together across polarizing political lines and helps us then begin to talk about other things as well.

Eric: I would say one of the themes throughout your work, more or less, has been the environment. So this notion of beauty in the in your surroundings has been so important. When did you get started? What? Was there something that triggered that environmental consciousness? And then you seemed to take that and find the bridge to our kind of social lives, our, what it does, what the environment can do for us and what we’re doing to either improve or not improve that environment.

What, where did that environmental activism get started and how do you connect it with social issues

John: [00:08:00] or? It started back in San Francisco where you are, which is where I grew up and when I was a young kid my dad used to take me backpack into the Sierra. And by the time I was 14, my friends and I had the permission of our parents to go and spend part of the summer in the mountains without any parents.

Whoa. And we did that. We did that for several summers in a row, and I became very attached to nature and the environment and all of those kind of things. And so I was in the Sierra Club early on. I was part of the first Earth Day. At that time at the University of Wisconsin. And we always had that environmental concern and have felt that, our

Our obsession with stuff is not already not good for us. It’s clearly not good for the environment as well. So I felt that we needed a new goal and that then I began working on this issue of happiness which kind of came between time and beauty. I was it was part of an international movement.

I was invited [00:09:00] at one point to the Little Republic of Bhutan to be consulted to their government on their program called Rose National Happiness, that they do even invited. I was invited to two most different places I’ve ever been in the world. Bhutan, one of the poorest, but . Really a neat place. And then the other place, Bhutan has a happiness minister.

The other place in the world that has a happiness minister is Dubai, the United Arab Emirates. No kidding. More unlike Bhutan. It’s this. So I was invited twice to Dubai. To even speak to the staff of the Prime Minister about Affluenza, if you could believe that. I cannot,

Eric: but I believe you. ’cause you’re trustworthy.

It’s been a strange ride, I should say. Now, they being an advisor to the Kingdom of Bhutan sounds like an extremely nice gig. Did they just call you up and say, Hey, I know that you’re into happiness. Will you come and talk to us?

John: No I gave a talk at a happiness conference in Brazil. This was in 2012 or 2000.[00:10:00]

2012 and there was a guy from Bhutan there and he was the kind of guru of happiness in Bhutan, this guy named Karma ura. And he said he heard the talk, which I gave about time balance being one of the elements of happiness. And he said, we have to bring you to Bhutan. And to be part of this team that’s working on a project for the United Nations about the elements of happiness and time balance is one of those in our view.

And so that’s what they did. They brought me to Bhutan. I didn’t see much of Bhutan. I spent virtually the entire time in the Parliament building. Working like crazy about not working so much, but that again, . Life is full of ironies,

Eric: so I’m told, yeah. I, this happiness conference it just conjures up all sorts of comedic opportunities.

’cause, if the. Plane is late or the food’s not so good, or your room’s not ready. Are you supposed to do a complain ?

John: Yeah. You know the funny thing about the Happiness conference, [00:11:00] the first one I was spoke at in, I spoke at two of them in Brazil and the one in Brazil, they last very long. And some of the speakers in Brazil, especially on the first one, I think they got it right the second time, but the first time some of these speakers would simply drone on forever.

Literally. They would let ’em go. There wouldn’t be any setting the time, so by midnight. You still wouldn’t be done and somebody would be droning on and no one was happy. . Everyone was . When I got my time to speak I cut it short and I said, I don’t want to take any questions. I want you folks just to sit, find three other people and talk about what you heard and how it relates to you.

And it changed the whole. Dynamic because that’s what people wanna do. They don’t want to sit, listen to somebody like me. Yeah, a few minutes fine. I think , that, that worked okay, but they don’t want to hear me for an hour. They want to be able to talk to each other.

Eric: So one, one of the things that you’ve done, obviously it, it’s not just that you’re a, an activist, [00:12:00] you’re also a real communicator.

You’ve used the medium of film for the last 45 years to engage people to try and. Offer ideas, solutions and to reach across differences in ways that people can relate to. Can you talk a little bit about, how documentary film or , the filmmaking that you’ve done over the years has worked or not and how it has changed?

’cause I. Clearly anybody with a phone now is a filmmaker.

John: Yeah. And that is , an issue. And , actually I think that real filmmaking , is getting better. But there’s so many things out there now that people don’t know. What it’s hard to separate because everybody, like you said, it’s a filmmaker.

Everybody is a storyteller. And I’m really sick of the cliche storytelling. ’cause a lot of storytelling isn’t storytelling, it’s preaching. It’s taking your narrative and telling people why they ought to believe it. It’s not really, , , about, about storytelling, which I am a fan of course. , I think the shows [00:13:00] have an impact.

I hear from people about them. The last two have really been focused on the topic you’re talking about. So I made a film about Stewart Udall. Who was the Secretary of the Interior under Kennedy and Johnson. And a really, a great person for bringing people together across the political lines to create the most important and significant environmental laws in our country’s history.

Clean Air Act, clean Water Act, wilderness Act, all of these kinds of things. And, , the beautification campaign of, , of, , labor Johnson. Of this. And Stuart, was a model I think for the kind of behavior and his was the politics of beauty, that’s how I saw it. How beauty could bring us together.

And I’m currently working on a story of Catherine Lee Bates who wrote the Hymn America The Beautiful. , which is I think also a story that can bring people together. ’cause that was not a rip roaring, patriotic, I’m saying, rah America, anything. But while it celebrated the beauty of America, it [00:14:00] said, we got some big flaws.

And our institutions in the way we treat each other don’t match. The of the country. And until they do, and until we have brotherhood and inclusion for everybody, we’ll never live up to our ideals. And so I think it’s a fascinating story to tell and that’s what I’m currently working on.

Eric: Okay. Let’s go back to affluency for a minute because again, this was a, you were swimming definitely the salmon swimming upstream a little bit.

This is what, 19 mid nineties were. At the, in a, in one of the many commercialism booms,

John: yeah. Clinton boom. Yeah. Clinton

Eric: boom. And then you come out with this person bites dog story about how overconsumption is killing us and how to fight back. And as you said, it did. It touched a nerve , and it got a lot of it.

It got a lot of interest and obviously you had a great host and it was a fun, it was a fun and engaging way of presenting it. How did you come to pick that issue to [00:15:00] push up against this dominant culture and what was that like? What kind of . What kind of response did you get? I know that the long-term response was great, but it must have been a lot of people scratching their heads at you.

I don’t know. I think it, it

John: hit, , a nerve right away because we were in such a time , of there where everything was booming and everybody was buying like crazy and both liberals and conservatives. Responded to the message of Affluenza. In fact, at one point between 19 90, 97 when the film came out and 2001, I was told that no student during that period went to Brigham Young University without seeing a film.

really and young uncertainty, one of the most conservative universities in the country, but also the liberal places were showing it, , as well. And, , I think it just, it hit, we had some, , religious right figures in the film, talking about how they saw the same thing as a problem. So we were using it to cut, cut across.

These lines. It came about because I had made this film about time, the running out of time film. ’cause I [00:16:00] was actually interested in time issue even before Affluenza and Vicki Robbin, who was the kind of one of the gurus of symbol living, , your money or your life, , came to the premier of this running out of time film.

And she came up to me afterwards and literally put her hands on my shoulders and said, John, you’ve gotta make a movie about over consumption. And I can help you find the money sold. Vicki, you just said the magic words, , , come down to the station and let’s talk about this. And she pointed me to Susan ler, who was then the head of the, , the chief funding person for the Pew Charitable Trust.

And Susan was working on also what later became the Center for New American Dream and all of these kinds of things. And so Susan gave me the money to make. , affluent, sizable, but more money I think that I got for any other production that I’ve done in my career. But it, it took off and people really responded.

PBS showed it four times at nine o’clock time slots in, in in ultra prime time. And, , so [00:17:00] the timing, so much of this is timing also the term. The titles I learned from it. The titles make a huge difference because here’s this term, affluence, people, it’s this joke. Affluence and influenza, the disease of affluence, but people get it right away.

They haven’t heard it, so they chuckle. They know if they’ve seen it. Or they think maybe I should see it ’cause I heard about it. , it starts with an A, which put it right at the top of the PBS list of programs on the pb hilarious website. , it just had, and it allowed us, allowed me to think about how to make the film in a funny way.

To look at this as this disease that would have all these symptoms, , shopping, fever and all the, these kind of symptoms like of the flu. And then would have a, an epidemiology or a little history where you could go look at the history of this dread disease. How did it come about? And then, , treatment or cure, and all of this would, could be funny.

And it just worked [00:18:00] because , that term made possible so many other things and it really became part of the lexicon, the term. I didn’t make it up, but if you look at Google, I. Ngram, which has this whole thing about words and in history. You’ll see that in 1997, the term affluenza, which has been around floating up and down a little bit since 1815.

No kidding. Oh, I this in 1997 or just boom. And yeah, so we, I didn’t make it up, but I think I helped put it on the map.

Eric: You certainly did. We’re gonna take a very quick break. We’ll be right back with John DeGraff. You are listening to Let’s Hear It, a podcast about foundation and nonprofit communications hosted by Eric Brown and Kirk Brown.

If you’re enjoying this episode, you may just be a rule breaker. Tune into Break Fake Rules, a new limited series podcast with Glen Gall. CEO of the Stubs Ski Foundation. Hear from leaders in philanthropy, nonprofits, government media, and more to learn about challenges they’ve overcome by breaking [00:19:00] fake rules and which rules we should commit to breaking together.

Check them out wherever you get your podcasts. And we are back with John Degra, the writer, speak, speaker, filmmaker, activist. And, , we’re talking about your filmmaking the other, the work that you’ve been doing on taking back your time. I particularly . To it because I don’t guess everybody is, and I just, I thought about you a lot during the pandemic as people were re.

I don’t know, assessing their own relationship with time, working from home, not having to commute, things like that. Has that work gotten a boost in the last several years? Some people, I don’t think there’s been

John: a stampede, but yeah, some people have contacted me and I think we have started to ask them those questions.

We are looking at 30 hour work weeks and 32 hour four day work weeks and things, and their experiments are being tried about these all over the world. Generally successfully. , and so yeah, I think the pandemic did give [00:20:00] us a chance to think about that and to think about, our, , the way we worked, it’s not necessarily, , efficient and it’s certainly not particularly good for our health.

When

Eric: you wrote what’s the economy for anyway, why it’s time to stop chasing growth and start pursuing happiness. That’s the question is what’s the economy for? Why do we do work so hard? Why are we . Doing what we’re doing in exchange for what, and I think that probably, I assume, it’s like your body of work is a conversation and almost an argument about a new economy and a new way of thinking about how human beings interact with each other and with the natural world around them.

Again, this is one of these things that we are constantly taught that gross domestic product. Is the measure of success or a society and then you’re seeing Bhutan who has the Chief Happiness Officer or the gross hap gross national happiness. That hasn’t caught on yet here, but I feel, I feel like there’s something deep inside me that people really relate to it somehow, even as they’re dealing with their own dissonance of trying to get a better job [00:21:00] and make more money and get a bigger house.

John: I think that it is just an issue that’s getting talked about more, but the political parties haven’t discovered it yet. That’s for sure. If there’s one thing both Republicans and Democrats agree on, it’s that the grocer, our gross national product gets. Better, the better we are.

, despite all the evidence of the contrary, but in Europe that’s far less true. So many political parties and groups and things in, in, in Europe are talking about alternatives to the GDP and how we should measure success in different ways. I’ve spoken, twice in Luxembourg and once recently in Paris about that, at conferences, about that very subject.

And, , in one case, I was in Luxembourg two years ago at a conference about alternatives to GDP. Luxembourg, you have to understand, is one of the world’s richest countries. It the banking capital, all the money goes in there and , it’s really a bourgeois place. , there’s no question. Luxembourg, [00:22:00] which has the highest GDP per capita in the world is the country most critical of GDP, maybe except , but is the country most critical of GDP as a real measure of success.

And so the government of Luxembourg is actually spending a lot of money to try to find alternatives. And they brought me there a couple times and they paid for me to go to Paris and, , so I was speaking. , I was on a keynote at this conference in Luxembourg and I spoke first and the speaker after me and on that panel was, , the Minister of Economics of Luxembourg.

Now, this guy’s a banker, right? He’s and I’m thinking like maybe they put this guy up to say that I’m all wet and I don’t understand. Economics and so forth. So I don’t know what he is gonna say, because I’m just thrown in there and he starts out by saying I wanna begin by saying that I agree with virtually everything that our first speaker has said.

And in fact, in some cases I would go a little further. That’s where it went. And he and I I said afterwards, I said to him, Hey, you got some [00:23:00] time, I’d love to talk to you. And he said, yeah, I’ve got about 30 minutes. You wanna have a glass of wine? So I said, sure. So we went and did that and we had a great conversation and he gets.

A lot of these people really get that we’re not measuring the right things and we have to slow down in a way, in many ways. Number one, for the climate, which is obviously getting more and more outta control and you in California really understand that. , and then secondly, , just the resources itself.

The resources that are, even the resources we need to do everything electric. That doesn’t come free. It’s important that we make that transition, but there’s lots of minerals and all kinds of things that are involved. We also have to find a way to live better with less, less stuff.

And instead with more, more fun less stuff, it, the Center for New American Dream had it right on the button when you were their communications director.

Eric: I didn’t make, I didn’t coin the phrase somebody my predecessor did, but I have to [00:24:00] tell you that more fun, less stuff. Feels like a pretty good mo where there’re words to live by.

Anything that starts with more fun. I think I’m all for and and that. I think you’re right. All the work that you’ve done over the, these years , is pointing the, to those to. To those things. Now the question is, I don’t know what’s next. For one thing, you’ve been telling these, you’re a historian as much as you are an activist.

I think you’ve done these beautiful films. You did one about David Brower. The piece on Student u Stuart Udall is really quite lovely and in it reminds us that this notion of environmental politics, that the idea of . That thinking and understanding about the changing climate, , isn’t something that just happened in, 1990 or whatever.

Like it’s been around and Stewart was one of the early proponents of real conservation and an understanding about the changing nature of the planet. And now that you’re writing about America the beautiful, that , we have to better understand where these. Things that we seem , to rally around where they came from and what they mean to us.

[00:25:00] Can you actually talk about your American, the beautiful film? Because I think , it’s a lovely. It’s a lovely film era. I, I saw the trailer and, , it just reminded me that we, , should look deeper into these things that we look to as organizing factors in our culture.

John: And we often mistake them and we mistake them on both sides of the political fence. We either see them as, this rah, patriotic thing, which that song certainly is not. And both. Both groups tend to see that the people on the left think of it, oh, that’s just another one of those Rah America songs, and the people on the right think that’s cool. That’s this rah there. But really, this is a song that’s asking us to live up to the ideals of America. Same. It was written in 1893, the year before 1892. The Pledge of Allegiance to the Flag was written. It was written, believe it or not, by a Christian socialist.

Minister named Francis Bellamy in Boston, where also, , the author of [00:26:00] America that Beautiful lived, and it didn’t have the term under God in that, that was put in during the McCarthy area in 1854. So it was simply,

Eric: 1950. 1954,

John: yeah. 1954. Okay, great.

Eric: Yeah.

John: Yeah, in 1954, so it was, indivisible.

What was that about? That was about saying that all these immigrants coming to the country are part of us, and we have to pledge that we are one country indivisible, that brings these people in and accepts them. So it was designed to get people to care about these American ideals. It was not this thing about the flag, wave the flag and scream, I’m a patriot While you trample on all the values of the country, which we’re seeing a lot of today, clearly

Eric: I didn’t know that, John, you’re just a font of information.

John: His history is fun and I love history and a lot of, I always try to put a lot of history into things.

Santana, the, , philosopher said that those who don’t remember history are doomed to repeat it. That’s a thing that we. [00:27:00] We hear a lot, but the other side to that is those who don’t remember history or don’t learn history are do not to be able to repeat the things we ought to be repeating.

The good stuff to understand that there’s a lot of good stuff in our history. There’s a lot of things to be proud of. What we have now is a country that’s polarized by people like Rhonda Santis, who basically said that am says that America has never had any flaws. And we shouldn’t even talk about slavery because everything we’ve done has been essentially perfect.

And on the other hand, now the far left, which is saying America has never done anything right. It’s just been a constant linny of oppressed and oppressor. Everything has bad. I. Neither one of those views are even remotely correct. And secondly, the view on the progressive side makes it very difficult to inspire people to acts of heroism or to belief that we can change.

We have, we still have flaws, but we have changed a lot of those flaws because people [00:28:00] from Martin Luther King to whoever have gotten out there and said, this has to change. That’s what the Song America the Beautiful is about. It says America, God, men, vine, every flaw. America may God by gold refine these.

These are the, , till selfish gain no longer stains. The banner of the free, these are calls to a different thing. . The America that beautiful was revised in 1904 to reflect what the author thought of as the imperialism of the Spanish American War and the takeover of the Philippines.

So she added the verse. America. America, God meant thine every flaw confirmed thy soul in self-control. This was about stay in our borders and that also included our treatment of Native Americans. So this was a woman who got it, and she was a reformer and a suffragist and a poet and, , a professor for many years at Wellesley.

Ley College, but she wrote that song. She was [00:29:00] very patriotic. She believed in me. I, it wasn’t anti-American. Nothing. Nothing like that at all. It was very pro-American, but it said to be pro-American, you gotta work for the values that America is supposed to represent.

Eric: Wow. Some of those lyrics didn’t make it into the Chevy commercial, did they?

John: No. We only sing the first verse, which is genuine. It’s a, , the amber waves of grain, the purple. She wrote it on top of Pike’s Peak when she was looking at the mountains and on the prairies, and she had just come on this wonderful trip across America and she believed that America was a really beautiful place.

And she said it would be great if, , and we have great ideals, but it would be great if our institutions and how we treat each other lived up to that and matched the beauty of the country. And that’s a politics of beauty, I think.

Eric: John, you’ve been running hard and working incredibly hard.

I’ve never known you to even slow down for a second. What’s next for you?

John: Heart attack[00:30:00]

Hopefully not. Thats, I don’t know. This film is a big one. , and it’s gonna take, , at least a year to get it done. And we’re making two versions. One will be the schools, the shorter version because we really think that kids need to learn this story and they need to become real patriots, American Patriots who care enough about their country to wanna

Make it the best country that it can be, and then we’ll have a version for public television. So it’s gonna take a while. Our fundraising is going great, which is a good thing. We just had a Kickstarter crowdfunding campaign. And we’re just about, seven or $8,000 over our goal. So it’s great. It ends today.

So we’re very, , I’m happy today because, , we succeeded in that. Congratulations. We’re gonna be filming this summer in Colorado and Massachusetts, New York, and so forth, but hopefully edit this thing in the fall. We have some, . , Anyways, I think that, , I’m excited about [00:31:00] it. What comes after that?

I don’t know. Maybe a nap , so as not to have the heart attack. Yes. Yeah. No.

Eric: Take your Lipitor, take a break. I hope you take a vacation.

John: We always say, practice, do what I say, not as I do. And , when it comes to Affluenza, I’m pretty good. I live quite simply and so forth. So I’m not a big consumer.

But when it comes to take back your time, I thought of that I should start an another national organization called Aha. The American Hypocrites Association, that don’t work so hard, but they’re working too hard. But I’m, I’ll never recover from that one. I’m sure.

Eric: Yes, what I used to say, John Degra works his butt off so that you don’t have to, or it could be John works his butt off so you can sit on yours.

, but either way your work has been always a great inspiration. It’s a joy to have you on the show. Congratulations on this film. And, , we’ll put a link to. The film to your website and to the Kickstarter. People can always top up the Kickstarter, right? It’s not like you, , [00:32:00] can’t ever.

John: No.

Not after today. No, they can’t.

Eric: Oh, really? Okay.

John: Congratulations if, but they, but I’ll send you something else. If they wanna help, they’re even better. And I’ll send you that. And that also includes the trailer that we can watch. The three minute s

Eric: We’ll we will link to that. Thank John Degra. Thank you so much.

John: Thank you Eric. It was a pleasure.

Kirk: Okay, and we’re back. Mr. Brown I love these. I’m gonna call these are the way back conversations, . So how long have you known John? And I want you to go all the way back to the Center for a New American Dream because, I’ve had the benefit of, being under the adoring gaze and scrutiny of this podcast.

You have not. Really in terms of your life story? Wait, what? What do you mean?

Eric: Oh, you oh, that I interviewed you. Yeah. Come on. That was a great interview. And now that you’re, now you’re famous.

Kirk: I’m pretty famous. Yeah. That’s all of my 15 minutes are completely cashed now by, let’s hear. But but did you get the key to Iowa

Not yet. Nobody’s called, [00:33:00] they didn’t give you the key to Iowa. Nobody’s called. Not yet. No. They’re they don’t feel like they’ve been discovered quite yet by me, but, but, , so take us back to these first interactions between you and John and really spend some time in the Center for New York, new American Dream concept because, , it skirted around the edges of your conversation, but I don’t think you guys ever really, I.

Got into the depth of it, and I think that’s a really interesting starting point for how you came to know about John.

Eric: I was communications director at this organization called The Center for a New American Dream. Sounds a little interesting. . It’s one of these things that, anyway, people just paint their hopes, dreams, and fears on it.

And so it was appealed to lots of people across the spectrum because they decided what the American dream was. . And how to make it new. What the new one was gonna be. And it’s so funny because it, if you think about it, it is the antithesis of Make America great again.

Kirk: Interesting. Tell me more about that.

Eric: We are building a new American dream, so we have this understanding, a concept of what the American dream.

Is, and I [00:34:00] think for many people that dream was work hard, play by the rules. . Get rich, leave a legacy for your children, buy things. And in the last 10 or 11 years of your life, you downshift, maybe you can retire and, yeah.

And finally, enjoy yourself. And what the Center for a New American Dream was saying is that American dream is driving us to overwork, have stress, not be healthy, not nurture the environment, and not live the lives that we are capable of living. And I think that arguably most people would love to be able to live.

And. The motto for this organization was more fun, less stuff . So by reducing our consuming and by not being part of the we didn’t have it quite the same kind of surveillance economy, right? That Anusha Ali Con and I talked about last time. But now of course, that whole notion of what we consume.

There’s a crazy record of it. . That will tell you who you are and what you’re gonna have for breakfast tomorrow based on your pa, your [00:35:00] patterns. This is the antithesis of that, which is connect with nature, connect with your neighbors, don’t worry about all the material stuff, and find the things that truly matter in life.

And that’s what we worked on. So it was an environmental organization, it was a social organization. It was very hard to pin down. We talked about materialism in the holidays, we talked about, all that kind of stuff. And in as part of that, or this almost rallying thing was John’s film Affluenza.

And it captured people’s imaginations as he talked about. And John was one of the friends and family of the center for a new American dream. He was

Kirk: understandably.

Eric: We just, I talked to him a lot. We became friends and he is, and the other thing about John, you know that it is true, he is the hardest working person who advocates for working less than you will ever know.

He is. Why did he say something about the hypocrisy society?

Kirk: Yeah, exactly. [00:36:00] The contradiction in there,

Eric: the chair of the board of the hypocrisy society.

Kirk: What I love about the Center for New American Dream is a jumping off point for this conversation and what you got into with John in this interview.

This notion about trying to dislodge this idea that GDP is the indicator that helps us understand where we’re at relative to progress. Sure. That, that, that gross domestic progress that, that’s inadequate. In fact, it might be harmful. Sure. It’s been a struggle to come up with other measures. Maybe you may, different people have come up with different strategies and different approaches, but, and in some respects, we’re sitting here in the shadow of some of the stuff that’s coming out in the national political conversation that’s just so upsetting and so concerning.

But you feel that undercurrent of that, that heartbeat too, of when we have this singular focus on just this one idea, it’s gonna be GDP, how do we improve GDP? It’s all about GDP. We start becoming . Like where does our humanity, where does our identity as people [00:37:00] live? We just become agents of the effort to make GDP better.

We’re actually not the beneficiaries of whatever that’s supposed to be. We’re actually, we become the, almost the resource that feeds that outcome. As

Eric: John says, what’s an economy for ? GDP? So that what?

Eric (2): Yeah,

Eric: so that,

Eric (2): yeah.

Eric: Honestly, what, so that, what happens? Do we take and here’s what happened,

We’re gonna get off. Sorry, people just skip ahead. I’m gonna say things that are gonna be boring and stupid. Just skip ahead. Come on.

Kirk: You don’t need to disparage yourself. Come on. This is great. This is the blah, blah, blah. People love it. Let’s go. I’m gonna go

Eric: down a rabbit hole and it’s gonna make me and everyone else uncomfortable.

So it’s just skip ahead. I’ll see you in five minutes people, ’cause I’m gonna do a five minute rant.

Kirk: Let’s find the hole. Let’s find the hole.

Kirk: but the, we’re here. The idea is that, we’re here.

Eric: We work and . We all of this productivity that. Technology was supposed to create for us.

Email is gonna make our lives so much easier, and AI is gonna make our lives so much [00:38:00] easier, and it’s going to give us leisure time. We’ll use that time. Instead. What has happened is that the benefits, and I don’t wanna sound like one of those people with the tinfoil in their heads. But the benefits of all of that productivity have gone into the pockets of a relatively few people.

Eric (2): . Yeah. So instead

Eric: of taking that value in quality of life, I. More leisure time, better health, more time with family. You name it. The benefits of all that productivity have been highly concentrated and they haven’t gone to the greatest number of people. That’s just my read of this. Someone may say something different and maybe have a better idea, but that’s the way I see it.

We are not getting the benefit of all this fabulous productivity that technology was supposed to create for us.

Kirk: In the, see, I like this rabbit hole. I’m gonna pull up a couch. Let’s hang out, crack a beer, because here, I think what’s so important about what you’re talking about so anybody who’s got nerd time on their hands, I commend to you any podcast that takes you through the entire arc of [00:39:00] the history of Rome or the entire arc of the history of any major civilization.

Because this fundamental challenge the balance between wealth and how it gets distributed between progress and whether or not creates benefits and value for many or for you. It’s just so much part of the fabric of all of human history. So I don’t think that observation you’re making, Eric, is actually tenfold.

I think you’re actually describing something that’s been a challenge for us through all of human history, and we’ve talked a lot in this podcast about the scarcity thinking that drives a lot of that sensibility. If I, if you have something, I don’t have it. Again, it shows up in our politics like, oh, you’re taking something from me.

I have to take it back from you and . And this whole, so this whole thing around scarcity and then how we, it’s funny is like, is GDP managing abundance or is it managing scarcity? Are we actually filling the abundance of the, all of this labor and effort that we’re putting in?

Are we actually filling the scarcity of. Progressively less, less. And what that all wraps up to in terms of policy, politics, et cetera. So here’s John entering this fray and saying, I’ve got an idea that [00:40:00] can cut through all of that. Let’s talk about the politics of beauty. And I do think that is such an important concept.

And again, can you mobilize around it? And here we are. I just can’t, we’re not gonna talk about it. We’re not gonna do the run sit scenarios, but I think we can say that we’re gonna be living now moving forward. The shadow of I, the best that I can come forward is come with it is like the politics and language of hate and the vision, right?

The politics and language of hate and the vision, like separating people and watching people gather, find their meeting places where they can be aligned together. But also this, having this notion of beauty sitting at the center of the table and where we find that beauty, the fact that John is on that search, it just feels like such a noble, such a worthwhile, and I can see why he works so hard because that’s, that feels like a little bit of a

A hard thing to find. Hard thing to articulate.

Eric: Yes. And this notion, okay, time, happiness, beauty, folks out there, if you’re listening, if you hear the sound of our voice, are you getting enough of any of those three things? Yeah, and certainly not all three in combination. [00:41:00] I do believe that a life in which you feel like you have sufficient time to do the things that matter, they produce the kind of happiness that every human being wants and deserves.

And. They are surrounded by the kind of beauty that nurtures our souls and our minds and everything else. We have lived a life well lived, and I don’t think that we’re doing that. I don’t think that’s how we are oriented as a society and it is the sort of thing Exactly that. Produces the antithesis of that is the zero sum game that Heather McGee was talking about.

Eric (2): . Yeah.

Eric: So that’s my sense is that if the other thing about time happiness and beauty is, it’s very hard to feel like if I have more of that, than you will get less of that. .

Kirk: Is

Eric: a much harder enterprise to be divisive about,

Kirk: but to actually lay claim to that, and I think this is the piece where I think our whole community struggles.

I certainly struggle with it in our work. This notion that each one of us are carrying around with them. This interior life, this invisible interior life, that’s [00:42:00] like the most intimate, most important, most meaningful thing that any of us have is our interior life. But where and how does that interior life get nurtured and I think that our community struggles to talk about that in a meaningful way so that people can feel like they can be part of that, and so all of the belonging work, all that you’ve done, all the bridging work that you’ve done. And I feel like this work that . John’s doing is right in tandem with that. How do we create a concept around shared beauty, shared understanding that actually brings us together because we all have a place in that.

That’s such important work, seemingly, and I’ve certainly seen it in some of the work that we’ve done over the years especially as this expresses itself and things related to wilderness, public lands protection, conservation, preservation that people of all stripes care about. These public places care about places where you can go and

Just be in the, be in places of beauty, and so it is a place to bring people together, but finding the vocabulary around that, we see how powerful, hateful, divisive rhetoric is. Finding a place for that concept around shared beauty, shared concern, shared mission and purpose. [00:43:00] It’s really cool to see him talking about Stewart Udall, right?

Because he is Hey, here’s a luminary figure, created all this great legislation, pulled all this stuff together.

Eric: Yeah I totally agree. And if you look at John’s body of work, it’s around happiness. It’s around time, and it’s around beauty. He talks about, he’s, he goes to Bhutan to talk about happiness.

He did take back your time, which is this a, a really wonderful movement. And they’re starting to implement in places. They’re doing 32 hour week, four day weeks. And they realize that, oh, you can be just as productive. You can get as much done in four days that you did five and you can get the three days off and you’re restored and you feel better about everything.

You’ll stay in your job longer. All that kind of stuff. And now this notion of beauty that, this steward, you’d all work Yeah. Is really interesting. And if you think about it, there’s another concept of beauty. It’s not how we tend to think about it, but it is the beauty of our own . Our own country that.

He, John’s doing this film about America’s beautiful and it is a another way of looking at our [00:44:00] experience as Americans, and it is about our imperfections, but our acknowledging of the riches around us. And this understanding that we wanna be more perfect, that we wanna improve ourselves, that we wanna continue to take advantage of that.

To love it, to enjoy it, but to acknowledge that we’ve got work to do. And I think Ed is What a cool, let 45 movies.

Kirk: Oh my goodness. Yeah.

Eric: A million books. He goes and does, he has to speak everywhere. Yeah. He’s what a cool body of work.

Kirk: I Medlock from the Giraffe Project says, John Degra is one of the good guys in our world.

Right there with the next important life affirming idea. John, what a legacy. The books, the films, the articles, all the work, all the effort all these years. Thank you for talking to Eric Brown for all these decades and, eric, my goodness. That was awesome. John De Graaf, thank you so much for coming on. Let’s hear it.

Okay everybody, that’s it for this episode. Please let us know if you have any thoughts about what you heard today or people we should have on this show, and that definitely includes yourself. And we’d like to thank [00:45:00] John Alee, the tuneful and inspiring composer of our theme music.

Eric: Our sponsor,

Kirk: the Lumina Foundation, and please check out Lumina’s terrific podcast, today’s students tomorrow’s talent, and you can find that@luminafoundation.org.

Eric: certainly thank today’s guest, and of course, all of you,

Kirk: and most importantly, thank you, Mr. Brown.

Eric: Oh no. Thank you, Mr. Brown.

Kirk: Okay, everybody, till next time.