John Papola Of ‘Dad Saves America’ On The Four Things You Need To Be The Greatest Dad You Can Be

I had the distinct pleasure of talking to John Papola. John is a father, filmmaker, serial entrepreneur, and the CEO and founder of Emergent Order Foundation, a non-profit studio dedicated to heroic storytelling that promotes a culture of American freedom. Through EO, John hosts the inspiring series Dad Saves America, which celebrates and empowers dads, could-be dads and father figures of all stripes. The show is distributed on YouTube and all major podcast platforms with recent guests including Academy Award-winning Deaf actor Troy Kotsur, Whole Foods Market CEO John Mackey, Dr. Drew Pinsky and more.

An economics autodidact, John’s work has explored free enterprise through film and video for millions of viewers through his original content, including the webseries Love Gov now in its third season, The Kronies, EconPop, and his Keynes vs. Hayek and Mises vs. Marx rap videos, which have collectively garnered over 100 million global viewers to date and growing. John’s feature documentary At The Fork, debuted to critical acclaim, an international premiere at the prestigious Berlin Film Festival and global distribution by Samuel Goldwyn Films and Amazon Prime. His second film The Pursuit which premiered on Netflix, featured NY Times best-seller Arthur Brooks, and explored the search for happiness and global prosperity in our age of populism.

Prior to co-founding EO, Papola was a creative exec at multiple Paramount brands incl. MTV, Nickelodeon, and Spike TV, where he spearheaded the network’s True Dads initiative.

John, thank you so much for joining us. Our readers would love to get to know you a little bit. Can you share with us your backstory and origin story?

I was born in Philly. I’m proud of that because I think of Philadelphia as the birthplace of the country. It’s home to the Liberty Bell and Ben Franklin. The Franklin Institute was my favorite place to go as a kid. That’s always played a significant role in my life in different ways.

I’m also 100% Italian which if you know anything about South Philadelphia, shouldn’t come as a surprise. All of my great-great grandparents immigrated to America from Southern Italy, so that culture and heritage is a big part of my life and identity, complete with the love of food, warm hospitality, and occasional screaming at the top of your lungs for no real reason (we’re not mad, we’re just passionate!).

The left and right side of my brain have always been locked in a duel. I love all things, logic, math, engineering on one hand, and creativity, storytelling and art on the other hand. As a kid (and today, honestly) loved building lego robots, but then also loved drawing Disney characters and comic strips. I loved math and science and didn’t care for English or history in school. So I ultimately started in engineering in college before switching to film. I got a job in New York City at MTV, and spent 13 years at Viacom (now Paramount), working my way up through television. I worked in series development at MTV animation. I worked on several of the core brand teams for Nickelodeon. Then I was part of the early team that developed Spike TV, the first network for men. I was there for seven years.

While I was there, that’s really when I came into my own as a creative director. Then a couple of things happened that were incredibly informative moments that shaped the next decade: One, the 2008 financial crisis, and two, becoming a dad and having a family.

When my son was born, it was a transformative experience for me because I never really had any ambition other than to become the next Steven Spielberg. That was all. When my son was born, that ambition became less important. It was strangely liberating because it was like, “oh, I can take bigger swings on the career side. After all, it doesn’t matter as much as what’s happening with my life and my family. What do I have to lose?”

And then, the financial crisis happened and I had a lot more skin in the game of the global political economy because I was a dad, had a mortgage, and was commuting into the city from Jersey every day.

So, I took my first step into being a creative advocate for ideas I believe in. I reached out to this economist Russ Roberts, whose podcast I started devouring during my daily commuter to understand what was going on in the economy. And we created this rap video called Fear the Boom and Bust. And it pitted John Maynard Keynes, the left-of-center economist and inventor of “fiscal stimulus” as an alleged depression cure, against Friedrich Hayek, one of the leading lights of free-market capitalism. We wrote these lyrics together, and then I produced a song and music video that was, I think, better than most people would have expected given the subject. And it just took off in a way that is still somewhat bizarre to this day. I mean, it was on the top of the homepage of CNN.com. This would be virtually impossible today for something like this. In 2010, when it was released, it was more novel and the times were different. And that was it. I was hooked from that point forward on trying to combine my storytelling skills with my interest in big ideas and intellectual matters to try and make the world a better place.

So we started a company in 2011 called Emergent Order. For a decade, we produced mission-driven projects, including several feature documentaries, one about the morality of our food system and another about the morality of capitalism with Arthur Brooks from the American Enterprise Institute. Two years ago, I started a new organization, Emergent Order Foundation, as a nonprofit because I thought there was an opportunity to start building media brands. I like to call it a privately-funded PBS that absolutely loves America. It’s a bit of a ding on PBS’s, and I’ll admit a slightly unfair ding. I love NOVA and grew up with Mr. Rogers (I wept through the entire documentary about him! Blubbery Italian!). But let’s just say, I’m trying to put forward a fresh perspective.

I do love the country, and especially the founding principles. We’re the first nation built on ideas of individual liberty, rather than on blood-and-soil conquest. I think there’s way too much nihilism and catastrophizing out there today on all sides. Too much fearmongering. I’m trying to push back on that with some rational optimism.

Our first big project goes back to my formative time at Spike. It’s called Dad Saves America. It’s about how we, as fathers, make our country better by embracing the heroic nature of our role. It’s about how we think about that. What is our role, and where do we make an impact in our kids’ lives, our community, and therefore for the country’s future. That’s about education choices, instilling good values, and also filling gaps. And there are a lot of gaps that our kids experience. There are gaps in economic, civic, and media literacy that they just don’t get. If you don’t intervene, I don’t think they end up in a good place. So I’m trying to fill those gaps with Dad Saves America.

You probably have had a lot of fascinating experiences throughout your career. Can you share with us the most interesting or the most humorous story that has happened to you in your career?

I’ll give you two. Back to the Future is my favorite movie. When I was at Spike, I was in charge of promoting the Scream Awards, our fantasy, horror, and sci-fi awards show. This was 2010, and we were going to honor the 25th anniversary of the release of Back to the Future with Michael J Fox and Christopher Lloyd. And it was just going to be this incredible thing. That was my peak Spike moment because I had the chance to shoot the promo for this event, touting the 25th anniversary of Back to the Future. And so, we did a frame-by-frame recreation in high definition of the original theatrical trailer for Back to the Future. We dug this thing up. It’s not something most people have seen, even if you’re a super fan of the movie because of how it was. It was a teaser. It wasn’t all the movie moments; it was just a series of close-ups on the DeLorean and then this little reveal of Michael J Fox at the end. I was insistent that it needed to be frame-for-frame accuracte, which nobody thought mattered. But I was insistent as a geek. I said, “trust me, people will make side-by-side comparisons on YouTube. I even got to film with Michael J Fox, which is like, peak “holy shit, I can’t believe this is happening.” There are very few celebrities for whom I would have any feelings like that. But he was one, and we got to do this. I filmed with him in the hotel room on a green screen. We made it look like he was sitting in the car. Sure enough, when we released it, it just went crazy viral.

The tragedy is that it would probably have hundreds of millions of views right now. But because Viacom was suing YouTube at the time, the original video quickly got pulled down after a couple of days. It got five million views in 48 hours. It was featured on Entertainment tonight. It was all over the place, and then it got pulled down. But it kept getting reposted. If you google “back to the future trailer or recreation,” you’ll find all kinds of reposts. I reposted it recently on my own channel for posterity. So that’s one interesting story,

And my little add-on is, as exciting as that was, it wasn’t as exciting as getting the call back from Russ Roberts, the podcasting economist that I cold-called about trying to do something about the financial crisis. I left a message at a George Mason University public number from his website saying “I’m not a crazy person. I’m a creative director at Spike. Here’s my website. You can see, I’m not some lunatic; I want to do something creative about what’s happening with the economy”. I put his number in my phone and had his face on my contacts. He called me back. When that call came in, it was more exciting than the Michael J Fox moment. I’m a geek.

It’s been said that our mistakes can sometimes be our most outstanding teachers. Do you have a story about a mistake you made when you first started and the lesson you learned from it?

I would say that the mistake that I’ve learned from the most pretty early on in the start of our company is failing to hire people based on vision and values alignment. When you’re trying to build a team, if you don’t have vision and values alignment, it doesn’t matter how excellent your hire is; you should not go through with the hire. It is not going to work. That doesn’t need to be narrowly construed as politics or other things that might be controversial or not necessarily part of the business. But values, as in what is the mission of our enterprise? If you’re not aligned on those things, you’re going to come to conflict over those visions or values. They’re not going to be happy in this. If you’re leading with your values and your mission, and they’re not aligned with them, they’re going to be butting up against it and you.

Abraham Lincoln had this team of rivals. But they were rivals only up to a point. They all wanted Lincoln to succeed as a president, so there wasn’t rivalry around whether Lincoln should succeed. They all believed in his vision for the country.

I’m kind of a fatherly figure in terms of how I to try to lead our team. I want to invest in them. I want to see them succeed. I put a lot of emotional investment into my people, so when everybody’s rowing in the same direction, that pays enormous dividends, and people appreciate it. But when they aren’t, you’re throwing good energy after bad.

Okay, so let’s talk about Dad Save America. First, tell us about the program’s format and how many shows you have created.

First and foremost, it’s a Youtube channel. I just turned 45, so I’m technically “middle-aged”, but I’m a daily YouTube consumer. I think it’s excellent, and in many ways, I’ve been on Youtube for a long time. That first video for the Boom and Bust was a youtube video. So I’ve always been a big believer in the platform.

At the core are these conversations with people I think have important things for dads to hear. My documentary work has made me love talking to people and trying to draw out of them an authentic conversation that is not just presentational. It’s not just like, let’s have you pitch your book. It’s like I want to try to get at some of the more uncomfortable stuff and use my East Coast Philly slash Jersey nonsense to see if I can crack it open a little bit. I don’t take myself all that seriously, even with serious subjects. So that is one of our core products, these conversations with people.

We just released a great episode with Troy Kotsur, who won this year’s Oscar for the best-supporting actor, about what it was like for him to grow up Deaf. He celebrated his dad in his Oscar speech, his relationship with him, and how his dad ultimately had a tragic accident that left him unable to move from the neck down. And so he went from learning sign language and communicating with his son with his hands to not being able to use his hands. I think that’s a perfect example of the conversations I’m trying to have. The core message is how you overcome things. It’s the hero’s journey. The hero doesn’t embrace being a victim. The hero has to overcome obstacles on the journey. We all do. And our kids need that message now more than ever. So that’s a big part of what we’re trying to do at the core.

And then we split them out into all kinds of little videos and clips and shareable stuff.

We’ve got another episode out with Dr. Drew about mental health and dealing with addiction, especially as parents, and what to do about it. What happens when there might be nothing you can do about it, and how do you know when that is? That’s tough stuff to talk about!

I want to do more playful things like rap videos and satires. I’m just a Spike TV guy, and I love doing that. I have a new comedy series called “Love Gov” focused on what’s happening in our kids' schools and on their screens that just launched in partnership with another non-profit. It is tons of fun even as it leaves nobody unscathed from critique.

We’ve got many things in the works planned for celebrating fatherhood and putting forward a healthy vision of masculinity. I think that the social conversation around masculinity is pretty one-dimensional. There needs to be more voices exploring this with an eye on what it means to be healthy and have a healthy, positive sense of masculinity. I want to contribute to that part of the conversation. Not just be reactionary or hyperbolic (which, I will admit, I can be guilty of as well). I think there’s a middle ground there that’s worth talking about, especially as a dad with a teenage son.

From what you’ve produced, can you share with our readers three of your best words of advice about how to be the best father possible?

The first thing to be a great dad is to simply be a dad and be present in your kids’ lives from the beginning and throughout. You just have to be there. I think that is about prioritization. Sometimes it’s much more difficult than that, right? Sometimes there’s divorce or all kinds of things that make it so that your presence is challenged. But your presence matters, especially for those who have some control over themselves.

We moved to Austin, Texas, in 2011, when we started our business. But we didn’t do that for any reason other than to eliminate my four hours of daily commuting from Jersey into Manhattan because I went five years without having dinner with my family. I’d leave at six o’clock. I’d miss the 6:35 express bus and sit in the frigging port authority. Then I’d get the 6:55, and now I’m walking home at eight o’clock, and I left the office at six. Bridge and tunnel life sucks.

So I’ve rearranged my entire life and my location. I never thought I’d leave the Northeast, but it was like, well, I don’t see a world where I can have the time with my son and wife I want to have. I think that’s number one, how do you arrange your life to be present with your kids and with your spouse?

Number two is that alignment I was talking about with your business and with your employees. I think it’s even more important with your spouse. So my wife and I had two straightforward rules that are kind of one rule, which was we present a united front with discipline. The second rule is that we don’t make empty threats. So if you say, “if you misbehave, here’s what’s going to happen,” be on the same page about it. Because kids are smart. They quickly realize they can drive a wedge between you and your spouse about discipline or what they want. Then you’ll fight with each other over the fact that you said yes, but they said no, and I thought we agreed to no. So that’s number two, to be aligned with your spouse, present a united front to your kids so that they know the rules of the game in the house.

Number three is back off. That can seem like it’s contradictory with number one, right? I’m saying be present. But when I say back off, I mean you have to let your kids fail. Let them experience the world for themselves as early as possible. I’m 45, so Gen X. My generation and older had “latchkey kids”. Remember that? I was walking to school in third grade by myself in Upper Darby, Pennsylvania (Pica’s Pizza is the best of all time, btw). That has become a thing that is taboo and even might be illegal in your neighborhood. You might have people call child protective services if they see you’re eight-year-old walking two blocks to the neighborhood elementary school. This happens. I have friends who have had people call the cops on them because they were there with their daughter, and there was a man there, the father, and people were like, who is this creepy guy with the kid? At a fundamental level, we are experiencing a crisis of overprotective parenting, especially among middle and upper-middle-class families that have the time to be there and to overprotect. A lot of it gets motivated by stuff that I think is misplaced, like how do I make sure I get my kid into a name-brand ivy league school by the time they graduate high school. Parents get scared, and think they should make sure that I snowplow every roadblock in their way. It’s a huge contributor to the mental health crisis with gen Z, our kids. Basically, when you do everything for your kid, what you’re telling them is you don’t believe they can do it themselves. It’s incredibly disempowering!

This is a leadership lesson, not just for parents but for business leaders as well. We have to empower people with authority, roles and responsibilities, and decision rights and let that play out. This is hard for me. I’m a details guy. A doer. If something looks like it’s going off the rails. My first impulse is, let me get in there and do it myself.

It’s the same thing with parenting. If you ask your kid to take out the trash, and he’s doing it like a slob, you have to let him do it anyway.

And so those are my three, be present, present a united front and back off. Let your kids experience the world.

Let’s talk about social media, technology, and smartphones for kids. At what age do you let a child have a smartphone? And how can we keep our kids safe and healthy with new technologies?

This is a challenging area, and it’s difficult for me. Guys tend to be more obsessed with gadgets. I have been building PCs since I was a kid. I’m a gamer. I have a PS5 and an Oculus Quest. I just built my son a new gaming PC, even though he didn’t even ask for it. I got nine screens right here, including my phone and watch. So it’s tough to walk. It’s like we’re on screens all the time. So then when you go and tell your kid to get off the screens, he’s like, “dad, I see what you do all day! You just sit in front of screens”. And he’s right!

When we moved to Austin, it was a chance to reevaluate a bunch of stuff. So when we came here, we went cold turkey and put our son in a Waldorf school. There were two reasons for putting him in a Waldorf school. One was I think hyper-rigorous academics at an early age is a fundamental mistake. It misunderstands childhood development. Waldorf is much more gradual and then ramps up on the academics. It prioritizes kids using their bodies and engaging with the physical world more between K-third grade. I like that. I think that’s right, especially for boys.

Secondly, as parents at a Waldorf school, you sign a contract saying, “I will not expose my kid to media.” In terms of the spectrum of parents and strictness to a no media policy, we were on the stricter side. What we saw as a result of that was he engaged in much more physical play. Every day, he came home with scrapes and scabs, a mark of pride; toys like blocks stayed in the rotation much longer. He was engaged in imaginative free play for a much more extended period than he otherwise would have been. The screens are so addictive and exciting. They’re so stimulative it’s like crack. Doing a little is pretty hard. Now he’s 17, so we don’t impose too much restriction on him. Still, I do feel like the early investment pays the highest dividends. My son, thankfully, is pretty well-adjusted. He doesn’t have anxiety issues. I think it’s mainly because we let him get out and get scraped up. He’s gone to all kinds of crazy camps where he comes back, and he’s like, “oh, I had to clean millipedes out of my tent every night”. I’m like, “ was it horrible?” He’s like, “no, I want to go back next year”. I’m like, “that’s my boy.”

So limiting screen time is one of those 21st Century challenges. I don’t think we fully appreciate just what a seismic paradigm shift perpetual screens have created for humanity.

So, John, because of your position and the platform you’ve created, you’re a person of enormous influence. If you could inspire a movement that would bring the most amount of good to the most amount of people, what would that be?

I think it’s what I’m trying to do with Dad Saves America. I want to inspire the next generation of men to embrace their role as dads and see it as heroic and essential, not just to their families but for their communities and the future of the country. America has a lot going for it. I think it is unique. But it’s also unique in a way today that is unfortunate, which is we lead the world in fatherlessness by a large margin. The American fatherlessness rate is three times that of the global average. 3X. Globally, about 7 to 9% of kids are being raised without their dad in their life. But in the United States, it’s over 35%. That’s an aggregate. It’s across the board, in every community. I think that that’s a profound cultural, structural challenge that our country faces, and it’s expressing itself in many ways. But I hope I can inspire young people who should be dads to see that role as exciting and empowering and the most significant thing they’re ever going to do in their life.

Do you think the conversation about the importance of fatherhood relates to the importance of having a two-parent home and successful marriages and long-term relationships?

100%. It’s a well-established, social scientific fact that both boys and girls, for different reasons, do better when mom and dad are present. I’m Catholic, and you’re Jewish. We have deep traditions about marriage and the centrality of marriage and of having kids within marriage. If you want to set your kids up for success? Well, get a job, get married, and have kids, in that order. You’re off to a good start. Your chances of being in poverty if you do those things in that order are essentially nonexistent. You could call that “traditional” if you want. But the facts are the facts and this inconvenient fact has been studied by academics whose biases certainly tilt hard towards overthrowing traditions like marriage.

What can Dad Saves America do to encourage more people to get married and stay happy in marriage?

That’s a great question; I can’t claim to know the answer. I think there are many complicated reasons why. To my understanding, divorce rates really went through a significant change in the seventies, partly because of the sexual revolution and partly because of the birth control pill because of economic opportunities for women. So you no longer need to be trapped in a horrible marriage. You can get out there and make a life for yourself. And I think all of that is good, and it is true liberation. But we shouldn’t throw the baby out with the bathwater.

I think more recently, divorce rates have actually flatlined. So I don’t think things are getting worse on the divorce front.

But we don’t have the same understanding in our culture of what it means to enter into a commitment and that it’s not all about fun all the time, your gratification, your pleasure, and your happiness. Marriage is something that, at different times, will be very difficult. To be Catholic for a minute, we bear a cross in our life in different ways, and I think that’s true in every human relationship we have. And we haven’t come to terms with that in our culture; I think of the push for freedom in the possible broadest definition. That is mainly good. I consider myself a libertarian, so freedom is important to me, but marriage is a constraint on your freedom. But it’s one I think is a net gain. You can’t be like, well, it’s all about me and my freedom. No, it’s about this other person too, and you become one, and how do you do that?

The role I hope I can play with what we’re doing with Dad Saves America is to model what it means, as a man, to be worthy of that relationship. I think we are suffering from a supply constraint of worthy men. I think that’s one of the things that is increasing in awareness. Warren Farrell, one of our guests on our show and a contributor, wrote the book the Boy Crisis. Some more things are starting to come out. It’s a factual matter that men in the West, in particular, but broadly speaking, including in places like Japan, are in decline across every measurable metric. Women outnumber men 60–40 in college and college graduations. Women outnumber men in the workforce. Across basically every dimension, health, health outcomes, criminality, all of it, women are doing better than men. Not just relative to each other but relative to each other’s past. So men are in decline, and that’s not good for marriage either. So I think we’ve got a lot of work to do on ourselves. We want to be worthy of being good husbands and good fathers. To me, that’s what it really means to “man up”. Be an adult. Be worth of love and partnership. Find purpose in the responsibilities you can own. As it turns out, all of that is pretty attractive. Playing of Call of Duty ’til 4am on a Tuesday because you’re jobless on the other hand? Not so much. That’s a big part of the message I want to get out there too.

Is there a person you would like to meet and talk with that could help you in this effort because we could tag them, or maybe we could connect you to that person in the world that was alive? Maybe we want to be inspired by them and engage in your vision.

Oh my gosh, that’s a fascinating question. Let me think about this for a minute. You know what, Barack Obama. I didn’t vote for President Obama because, as a classical liberal/libertarian, I disagree with a lot of his policies. Especially the “stimulus” and corporate bailouts. Still, I think we’ve had some really gross presidents and people who have modeled pretty terrible behavior both then and now. Everybody loves JFK, but the guy was a scoundrel. The Bill Clinton and Trump type of person; they’re not new. LBJ was pulling his “you know what” out in the oval office and showing it to people. We’ve got a lot of scumbags. But President Obama was and seems to be, by all accounts, a great father, and he’s been an advocate for fatherhood. He’d be somebody I’d love to talk to about this.

How can our readers best follow your work online?

Well, the simplest thing to do is to head to dadsavesamerica.com, where we embed the videos. You can also see that we’re a nonprofit organization, so if you love what we’re doing, it’s possible to make a donation and become a member.

The other place, of course, is to go to our youtube channel, which is https://www.youtube.com/c/DadSavesAmerica/featured, and start subscribing, sharing the message, sharing the content, giving us feedback, helping us, helping us improve what we’re doing, and making sure that we’re bringing the most useful material out into the world for people to improve their lives and make themselves better dads and and and overcome the challenges that we’re all facing together.

Thank you, John, so much for this fantastic conversation and these amazing stories and insights. This is among the best conversations I’ve ever had.

Well, it’s nice of you to say, oh my gosh. I appreciate it, and God bless you. Thanks for the opportunity to have this conversation.