Podcasts about daniel there

This week on the blog, a podcast interview with the writer of a great new book, “London After Midnight: The Lost Film,” a book about the classic lost Lon Chaney film.LINKS A Free Film Book for You: https://dl.bookfunnel.com/cq23xyyt12Another Free Film Book: https://dl.bookfunnel.com/x3jn3emga6Fast, Cheap Film Website: https://www.fastcheapfilm.com/Daniel's Facebook Page: https://www.facebook.com/p/London-After-Midnight-The-Lost-Film-100075993768254/Buy the Book “London After Midnight: The Lost Film”: https://www.amazon.com/London-After-Midnight-Lost-Film/dp/1399939890Eli Marks Website: https://www.elimarksmysteries.com/Albert's Bridge Books Website: https://www.albertsbridgebooks.com/YouTube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/c/BehindthePageTheEliMarksPodcastTRANSCRIPTJohn: So, Daniel, when did you first become aware of London After Midnight? Daniel: I was about seven years old when I first stumbled into Lon Chaney through my love of all things Universal horror, and just that whole plethora of characters and actors that you just knew by name, but hadn't necessarily seen away from the many still photographs of Frankenstein, Dracula, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. And the Phantom was the one to really spark my interest. But this was prior to eBay. I couldn't see the film of Lon Chaney's Phantom of the Opera for a year. So, I kind of had the ultimate build to books and documentaries, just teasing me, teasing me all the time. And when I eventually did watch a few documentaries, the one thing that they all had in common was the name Lon Chaney. I just thought I need to learn more about this character Lon Chaney, because he just found someone of superhuman proportions just who have done all of these crazy diverse characters. And, that's where London After Midnight eventually peeked out at me and, occupied a separate interest as all the Chaney characterizations do.John: So how did you get into the Universal films? Were you watching them on VHS? Were they on tv? Did the DVDs happen by then?Daniel: I was still in the VHS days. My dad is a real big fan of all this as well. So he first saw Bela Lugosi's Dracula, on TV when he was a kid. And prior to me being born he had amassed a huge VHS collection and a lot of those had Boris Karloff, Bela Lugosi, Henry Hull, Claude Rains, Vincent Price, what have you.And a lot of them were dedicated to Universal horrors. And as a young curious kid, my eyes eventually crossed these beautiful cases and I really wanted to watch them. I think my first one I ever watched was The Mummy's Tomb or Curse of the Mummy. And it's just grown ever since, really.John: You're starting at the lesser end of the Universal monsters. It's like someone's starting the Marx Brothers at The Big Store and going, "oh, these are great. I wonder if there's anything better?" Jim: Well, I kinda like the fact that you have come by this fascination, honestly, as my father would say. You sort of inherited the family business, if you will. The book is great. The book is just great. And I'll be honest, I had no, except for recording the novel that John wrote, I really had no frame of reference for London after Midnight.John: Well, Jim, were you a monster guy? Were you a Universal Monster kid?Jim: Oh yeah. I mean, I had all the models. I love all of that, and certainly knew about Lon Chaney as the Phantom of the Opera, as The Hunchback of Notre Dame. I knew he was the man with a thousand faces. I knew he, when he died, he wrote JR. on his makeup kit and gave it to his kid. So, I knew stuff. But London after Midnight I didn't know at all, except for the sort of iconic makeup and that image, which I was familiar with. What was the inspiration for you in terms of writing this book?Daniel: Like you say, I really had no immediate go-to reference for London after Midnight, away from one or two images in a book. Really clearly they were very impactful images of Chaney, skulking around the old haunted mansion with Edna Tichenor by his side with the lantern, the eyes, the teeth, the cloak, the top hat, the webs, everything. Pretty much everything that embodies a good atmospheric horror movie, but obviously we couldn't see it.So that is all its fangs had deepened itself into my bloodstream at that point, just like, why is it lost? Why can't I see it? And again, the term lost film was an alien concept to me at a young age. I've always been a very curious child. Anything that I don't know or understand that much, even things I do understand that well, I always have to try to find out more, 'cause I just can't accept that it's like a bookend process. It begins and then it ends. And that was the thing with London after Midnight. Everything I found in books or in little interviews, they were just all a bit too brief. And I just thought there has to be a deeper history here, as there are with many of the greatest movies of all time. But same with the movies that are more obscure. There is a full history there somewhere because, 'cause a film takes months to a year to complete.It was definitely a good challenge for me. When we first had our first home computer, it was one of those very few early subjects I was typing in like crazy to try to find out everything that I could. And, that all incubated in my little filing cabinet, which I was able to call upon years later.Some things which were redundant, some things which I had the only links to that I had printed off in advance quite, sensibly so, but then there were certain things that just had lots of question marks to me. Like, what year did the film perish? How did it perish? The people who saw the film originally?And unlike a lot of Chaney films, which have been covered in immense detail, London after Midnight, considering it's the most famous of all lost films, still for me, had major holes in it that I just, really wanted to know the answers to. A lot of those answers, eventually, I found, even people who knew and institutions that knew information to key events like famous MGM Fire, they were hard pressed to connect anything up, in regards to the film. It was like a jigsaw puzzle. I had all these amazing facts. However, none of them kind of made sense with each other.My favorite thing is researching and finding the outcomes to these things. So that's originally what spiraled me into the storm of crafting this, initial dissertation that I set myself, which eventually became so large. I had to do it as a book despite, I'd always wanted to do a book as a kid.When you see people that you idolize for some reason, you just want to write a book on them. Despite, there had been several books on Lon Chaney. But I just always knew from my childhood that I always wanted to contribute a printed volume either on Chaney or a particular film, and London after Midnight seemed to present the opportunity to me.I really just didn't want it to be a rehash of everything that we had seen before or read before in other accounts or in the Famous Monsters of Filmland Magazine, but just with a new cover. So, I thought I would only do a book if I could really contribute a fresh new perspective on the subject, which I hope hopefully did.John: Oh, you absolutely did. And this is an exhaustive book and a little exhausting. There's a ton of stuff in here. You mentioned Famous Monster of the Filmland, which is where I first saw that image. There's at least one cover of the magazine that used that image. And Forrest Ackerman had some good photos and would use them whenever he could and also would compare them to Mark the Vampire, the remake, partially because I think Carol Borland was still alive and he could interview her. And he talked about that remake quite a bit. But that iconic image that he put on the cover and whenever he could in the magazine-- Jim and I were talking before you came on, Daniel, about in my mind when you think of Lon Chaney, there's three images that come to mind: Phantom of the Opera, Quasimoto, and this one. And I think this one, the Man in the Beaver hat probably is the most iconic of his makeups, because, 'cause it is, it's somehow it got adopted into the culture as this is what you go to when it's a creepy guy walking around. And that's the one that everyone remembers. Do you have any idea, specifically what his process was for making that look, because it, it is I think ultimately a fairly simple design. It's just really clever.Daniel: Yes, it probably does fall into the category of his more simplistic makeups. But, again, Chaney did a lot of things simplistic-- today --were never seen back then in say, 1927. Particularly in the Phantom of the Opera's case in 1925, in which a lot of that makeup today would be done through CG, in terms of trying to eliminate the nose or to make your lips move to express dialogue. Chaney was very fortunate to have lived in the pantomime era, where he didn't have to rely on how his voice would sound, trying to talk through those dentures, in which case the makeup would probably have to have been more tamed to allow audio recorded dialogue to properly come through.But with regards to the beaver hat makeup, he had thin wires that fitted around his eyes to give it a more hypnotic stare. The teeth, which he had constructed by a personal dentist, eventually had a wire attached to the very top that held the corners of his mouth, opening to a nice curved, fixated, almost joker like grin.You can imagine with the monocles around his eyes, he was thankful there probably wasn't that much wind on a closed set, because he probably couldn't have closed his eyes that many times. But a lot of these things become spoken about and detailed over time with mythic status. That he had to have his eyes operated on to achieve the constant widening of his eyelids. Or the teeth -- he could only wear the teeth for certain periods of time before accidentally biting his tongue or his lips, et cetera. But Chaney certainly wasn't a sadist, with himself, with his makeups. He was very professional. Although he did go through undoubtedly a lot of discomfort, especially probably the most, explicit case would be for the Hunchback of Notre Dame, in which his whole body is crooked down into a stooped position.But, with London After Midnight, I do highly suspect that the inspiration for that makeup in general came from the Dracula novel. And because MGM had not acquired the rights to the Dracula novel, unlike how Universal acquired the rights of the Hunchback or, more importantly, Phantom of the Opera, by which point Gaston Leroux was still alive.It was just a loose adaptation of Dracula. But nevertheless, when you read the description of Dracula in Bram Stoker's novel, he does bear a similarity to Chaney's vampire, in which it's the long hair, a mouth full of sharp teeth, a ghastly pale palor and just dressed all in black and carries around a lantern.Whereas Bela Lugosi takes extraordinary leaps and turns away from the Stoker novel. But it must have definitely had an impact at the time, enough for MGM to over-market the image of Chaney's vampire, which only appears in the film for probably just under four minutes, compared to his detective disguise, which is the real main character of the film.Although the thing we all wanna see is Cheney moving about as the vampire and what facial expressions he pulled. It's just something that we just want to see because it's Lon Chaney.John: Right. And it makes you wonder if he had lived and had gotten to play Dracula, he kind of boxed himself into a corner, then if he'd already used the look from the book, you wonder what he would've come up with, if Lugosi hadn't done it, and if Chaney had had been our first Dracula.Jim: You know, the other thing that I think of strictly like through my actor filter is here's a guy who -- take Hunchback or Phantom or even this thing -- whatever process he went through to put that makeup on, you know, was hours of work, I'm sure. Hunchback several hours of work to get to that, that he did himself, and then they'd film all day.So, on top of, I mean, I just think that that's like, wow, when you think about today where somebody might go into a makeup chair and have two or three people working on them to get the look they want. Even if it took a few hours, that person is just sitting there getting the makeup done. He's doing all of this, and then turns in a full day, uh, in front of the cameras, which to me is like, wow, that's incredible.Daniel: Definitely, it's like two jobs in one. I imagine for an actor it must be really grueling in adapting to a makeup, especially if it's a heavy makeup where it covers the whole of your head or crushes down your nose, changes your lips, the fumes of chemicals going into your eyes.But then by the end of it, I imagine you are quite exhausted from just your head adapting to that. But then you have to go out and act as well. With Chaney, I suppose he could be more of a perfectionist than take as much time as he wanted within reason. And then once he came to the grueling end of it all, he's actually gotta go out and act countless takes. Probably repair a lot of the makeup as well after, after a couple of takes, certainly with things like the Hunchback or the Phantom of the Opera.John: And, you know, it's not only is he doing the makeup and acting, but in, you know, not so much in London After Midnight, but in Phantom of the Opera, he is quite athletic. When the phantom moves, he really moves. He's not stooped. He's got a lot of energy to him and he's got a makeup on that, unlike the Quasimoto makeup, what he's attempting to do with the phantom is, reductive. He's trying to take things away from his face.Daniel: Mm-hmm.John: And he's using all the tricks he knows and lighting to make that happen, but that means he's gotta hit particular marks for the light to hit it just right. And for you to see that his face is as, you know, skull-like as he made it. When you see him, you know, in London After Midnight as the professor inspector character, he has got a normal full man's face. It's a real face. Much like his son, he had a kind of a full face and what he was able to do with a phantom and take all that away, and be as physical as he was, is just phenomenal. I mean, he was a really, besides the makeup, he was a really good actor.Daniel: Oh, definitely. Jim: I agree with that completely. I kind of in what I watched, I wonder if he was the makeup artist, but not the actor and he did exactly the same makeup on somebody else. And so we had the same image. If those things would've resonated with us the way they do today. I think it had everything to do with who he was and his abilities in addition to the incredible makeup. He was just a tremendous performer.Daniel: Absolutely. He was a true multitasker. In his early days of theater, he was not only an actor, but he was a choreographer. He had a lot of jobs behind the scenes as well. Even when he had become a star in his own time, he would still help actors find the character within them. like Norma Sheera, et cetera. People who were kind of new to the movie making scene and the directors didn't really have that much patience with young actors or actresses. Whereas Chaney, because of his clout in the industry, no one really interfered with Chaney's authority on set. But he would really help actors find the character, find the emotion, 'cause it was just all about how well you translate it over for the audience, as opposed to the actor feeling a certain way that convinces themselves that they're the character. Chaney always tried to get the emotions across to the audience. Patsy Ruth Miller, who played Esemerelda in in the Hunchback, said that Chaney directed the film more than the director actually did.The director was actually even suggested by Chaney. So, Chaney really had his hands everywhere in the making of a film. And Patsy Ruth Miller said the thing that she learned from him was that it's the actress's job to make the audience feel how the character's meant to be feeling, and not necessarily the actor to feel what they should be feeling based on the script and the settings and everything.So I think, that's why Chaney in particular stands out, among all of the actors of his time.John: I think he would've transitioned really well into sound. I think, he had everything necessary to make that transition.Jim: There's one sound picture with him in it, isn't there, doesn't he? Doesn't he play a ventriloquist? John: I believe so.Daniel: Yes, it was a remake of The Unholy Three that he had made in 1925 as Echo the ventriloquist, and the gangster. And yes, by the time MGM had decided to pursue talkies -- also, funny enough, they were one of the last studios to transition to, just because they were the most, one, probably the most dominant studio in all of Hollywood, that they didn't feel the pressure to compete with the burgeoning talkie revolution.So they could afford to take their time, they could release a talkie, but then they could release several silent films and the revenue would still be amazing for the studio. Whereas other studios probably had to conform really quick just because they didn't have the star system, that MGM shamelessly flaunted. And several Chaney films had been transitioned to sound at this point with or without Chaney. But for Chaney himself, because he himself was the special effect, it was guaranteed to be a winner even if it had been an original story that isn't as remembered today strictly because people get to hear the thing that's been denied them for all this time, which is Chaney's voice. And he would've transitioned very easily to talkies is because he had a very rich, deep voice, which, coming from theater, he had to have had, in terms of doing dialogue. He wasn't someone like a lot of younger actors who had started out predominantly in feature films who could only pantomime lines. Chaney actually knew how to deliver dialogue, so it did feel natural and it didn't feel read off the page.And he does about five voices in The Unholy Three. So MGM was truly trying to market, his voice for everything that they could. As Mrs. O'Grady, his natural voice, he imitates a parrot and a girl. And yeah, he really would've flourished in the sound era. Jim: Yeah. John: Any surprises, as it sounds like you were researching this for virtually your whole life, but were there any surprises that you came across, as you really dug in about the film?Daniel: With regards to London after Midnight, the main surprise was undoubtedly the -- probably the star chapter of the whole thing -- which is the nitrate frames from an actual destroyed print of the film itself, which sounds crazy to even being able to say it. But, yeah the nitrate frames themselves presented a quandary of questions that just sent me into a whole nother research mode trying to find out where these impossible images came from, who they belonged to, why they even existed, why they specifically existed.Because, looking for something that, you know, you are told doesn't exist. And then to find it, you kind of think someone is watching over you, planting this stuff as though it's the ultimate tease. To find a foreign movie poster for London After Midnight would be one thing, but to find actual pieces of the lost film itself. It was certainly the most out of body experience I've ever had. Just to find something that I set out to find, but then you find it and you still can't believe that you've actually found it.John: How did you find it?Daniel: I had connections with a few foreign archives who would befriend me and took to my enthusiasm with the silent era, and specifically Chaney and all the stars connected to Chaney films.And, quite early on I was told that there were a few photo albums that had various snippets of silent films from Chaney. They didn't really go into what titles these were, 'cause they were just all a jumble. All I knew is that they came from (garbled) widow. And he had acquired prints of the whole films from various, I suppose, junk stores in Spain.But not being a projectionist, he just purely took them at the face value that he just taken the images and snipping them up and putting them in photo albums, like how you would just do with photographs. And then the rest of the material was sadly discarded by fire. So, all we were left with were these snipped relics, survivors almost to several Chaney lost films. Some of them not lost, but there were films like The Phantom of the Opera in there, the Hunchback of Notre Dame, Mockery, The Unknown. But then there were several lost films such as London After Midnight, the Big City, Thunder. And All the Brothers were Valiant, which are mainly other than Thunder are all totally complete lost films.So, to find this little treasure trove, it was just finding out what the images meant and connecting them up, trying to put them in some sort of chronological scholarly order. Grueling, but it was very fun at the same time. And because I had identified myself with all of these surviving production stills from the film -- a lot of them, which formed the basis of the 2002 reconstruction by Turner Classic Movies -- it didn't take me too long to identify what scenes these surviving nitrate frames were from. But there were several frames which had sets that I recognized and costumes that I recognized, but in the photographic stills, they don't occupy the same space at the same time. So, it's like the two separate elements had crossed over. So that left me with a scholarly, question of what I was looking at. I was able to go back and, sort of rectify certain wrongs that have been accepted throughout the sixties as being the original, say, opening to London after Midnight. So I've, been able to disprove a few things that have made the film, I suppose, a bit more puzzling to audiences. Some audiences didn't really get what the plot was to begin with. So, it was nice to actually put a bit more order to the madness finally.John: At what point did you come across the original treatment and the script?Daniel: The treatment and the script, they came from a private collector who had bought them at auction a number of years ago who I was able to thankfully contact, and they still had the two documents in question. I had learned through Philip J Riley's previous books on London after Midnight that he had the two latter drafts of the script, the second edition and the third draft edition.And, again, the question of why and where. I just always wondered where that first draft of the script was, hoping it would contain new scenes, and open new questions for me and to study. And once I've managed to find those two documents, they did present a lot of new, perspectives and material that added to the fuller plot of the original hypnotist scenario, as opposed to the shortened, time efficient London After Midnight film that was ultimately delivered to audiences. So again, it helped to put a little bit more order to the madness.Jim: You found an actual piece of the film that you were able to, somebody got images from it? And then you found the scripts? But the images are terrific and they're all in your book. They came from what exactly?Daniel: The just below 20 images of the film came from originally a distribution print, a Spanish distribution print, from about 1928. Originally, they were on 35 millimeter indicating that they were from the studio and as is with a lot of silent films that have been found in foreign archives.Normally when a film is done with its distribution, it would have to be returned to the original studio to be destroyed, except for the original negative and a studio print, because there is no reason why a studio would need to keep the thousands of prints when they have the pristine copy in their vault. But, in a lot of smaller theater cases, in order to save money on the postage of the shipping, they would just basically declare that they had destroyed the film on the studio's behalf. There was no record system with this stuff and that's how a lot of these films ended up in the basements of old theaters, which are eventually when they closed, the assets were sold off to collectors or traveling showmen. And eventually these films found their ways into archives or again, private collections. Some of which people know what they have.A lot of times they don't know what they have because they're more obsessed with, naturally, more dedicated to preserving the films of their own culture that was shown at the time, as opposed to a foreign American title, which they probably assume they already have a copy of. But it's how a lot of these films get found.And, with the London After Midnight, example, there were the images that I found spanned the entire seven reels, because they came from different points in the film. It wasn't a single strip of film, of a particular scene. Having thankfully the main source that we have for London After Midnight is the cutting continuity, which is the actual film edited down shot for shot, length for length.And it describes, briefly, although descriptive enough, what is actually in each and every single shot of the film. And comparing the single frame images from the film with this document, I was able to identify at what point these frames came from during the film, which again spanned the entire seven reels, indicating that a complete seven reel version of the film had gotten out under the studio system at one point.As is the case, I'm assuming, 'cause these came from the same collection, I'm assuming it was the same with the other lost Chaney films that again, sadly only survive in snippet form.John: It's like somebody was a collector and his wife said, "well, we don't have room for all this. Just take the frames you like and we'll get rid of the rest of it." So, you mentioned in passing the 2002 reconstruction that Turner Classic Movies did using the existing stills. I don't know if they were working from any of the scripts or not. That was the version I originally saw when I was working on writing, those portions of The Misers Dream that mentioned London After Midnight. Based on what you know now, how close is that reconstruction and where do you think they got it right and where'd they get it wrong?Daniel: The 2002, reconstruction, while a very commendable production, it does stray from the original edited film script. Again, the problem that they clearly faced on that production is that there were not enough photographed scenes to convey all the photographed scenes from the film. So what they eventually fell into the trap of doing was having to reuse the same photograph to sometimes convey two separate scenes, sometimes flipping the image to appear on the opposite side of the camera. And, because of the certain lack of stills in certain scenes cases, they had to rewrite them.And sometimes a visual scene had to have been replaced with an inter-title card, merely describing what had happened or describing a certain period in time, as opposed to showing a photograph of what we're meant to be seeing as opposed to just reading. So, they did the best with what they had.But since then, there have been several more images crop up in private collections or in the archives. So, unless a version of the film gets found, it's certainly an endeavor that could be revisited, I think, and either do a new visual reconstruction of sort, or attempt some sort remake of the film even.Jim: That's an idea. John: They certainly have the materials to do that. I've got an odd question. There's one famous image, a still image from the film, showing Chaney as Professor Burke, and he is reaching out to the man in the beaver hat whose back is to us. Is that a promo photo? Spoiler alert, Burke is playing the vampire in the movie. He admits that that's him. So, he never would've met the character. What is the story behind that photo?Daniel: There are actually three photographs depicting that, those characters that you described. There are the two photographs which show Chaney in the Balfor mansion seemingly directing a cloaked, top hatted figure with long hair, with its back towards us. And then there is another photograph of Chaney in the man in the beaver hat disguise with a seemingly twin right beside him outside of a door.Basically the scenes in the film in which Chaney appear to the Hamlin residents, the people who are being preyed upon by the alleged vampires, the scenes where Chaney and the vampire need to coexist in the same space or either appear to be in the same vicinity to affect other characters while at the same time interrogating others, Chaney's character of Burke employs a series of assistants to either dress up as vampires or at certain times dress up as his version of the vampire to parade around and pretend that they are the man in the beaver hat. Those particular shots, though, the vampire was always, photographed from behind rather than the front.The very famous scene, which was the scene that got first got me interested in London After Midnight, in which the maidm played by Polly Moran is in the chair shrieking at Chaney's winged self, hovering over her. It was unfortunate to me to realize that that was actually a flashback scene told from the maid's perspective.And by the end of the film, the maid is revealed to be an informant of Burke, a secret detective also. So, it's really a strong suspension of disbelief has to be employed because the whole scene of Chaney chasing the maid through the house and appearing under the door, that was clearly just the MGMs marketing at work just to show Chaney off in a bizarre makeup with a fantastic costume.Whereas he is predominantly the detective and the scenes where he's not needed to hypnotize a character in the full vampire makeup, he just employs an assistant who parades around in the house as him, all the times with his back turned so that the audience can't latch on as to who the character actually is, 'cause it must have posed quite a fun confusion that how can Chaney be a detective in this room where the maid has just ran from the Vampire, which is also Chaney?John: Yeah, and it doesn't help that the plot is fairly convoluted anyway, and then you add that layer. So, do you think we'll ever see a copy of it? Do you think it's in a basement somewhere?Daniel: I've always personally believed that the film does exist. Not personally out of just an unfounded fanboy wish, but just based on the evidence and examples of other films that have been found throughout time. Metropolis being probably the most prominent case. But, at one point there was nothing on London After Midnight and now there is just short of 20 frames for the film. So, if that can exist currently now in the year 2023, what makes us think that more footage can't be found by, say, 2030? I think with fans, there's such a high expectation that if it's not found in their own lifetime or in their own convenience space of time, it must not exist. There's still a lot of silent lost treasures that just have not been found at all that do exist though. So, with London After Midnight, from a purely realistic standpoint, I've always theorized myself that the film probably does exist in an archive somewhere, but it would probably be a very abridged, foreign condensed version, as opposed to a pristine 35-millimeter print that someone had ripped to safety stock because they knew in the future the film would become the most coveted of all lost films. So, I do believe it does exist. The whole theory of it existing in a private collection and someone's waiting to claim the newfound copyright on it, I think after December of last year, I think it's finally put that theory to rest. I don't think a collector consciously knows they have a copy of it. So, I think it's lost until found personally, but probably within an archive.Jim: Lost until found. That's a great title for a book. I like that a lot. What do you think of the remake, Mark of the Vampire and in your opinion, what does it tell us about, London After Midnight?Daniel: Well, Mark of the Vampire came about again, part of the Sound Revolution. It was one of those because it was Chaney and Todd Browning's most successful film for the studio. And Browning was currently, being held on a tight leash by MGM because of his shocking disaster film Freaks, I suppose they were a little bit nervous about giving him the reign to do what he wanted again. So, looking through their backlog of smash silent hits, London After Midnight seemed the most logical choice to remake, just simply because it was their most, successful collaboration. Had it have been The Unholy Three, I'm sure? Oh no, we already had The Unholy Three, but had it have been another Browning Chaney collaboration, it might have been The Unknown, otherwise. So, I suppose that's why London After Midnight was selected and eventually turned into Mark of the Vampire. The story does not stray too much from London After Midnight, although they seem to complicate it a little bit more by taking the Burke vampire character and turning it this time into three characters played by three different actors, all of which happened to be in cahoots with one another in trying to solve an old murder mystery.It's very atmospherical. You can definitely tell it's got Todd Browning signature on it. It's more pondering with this one why they just did not opt to make a legit, supernatural film, rather than go in the pseudo vampire arena that they pursued in 1927. Where audiences had by now become accustomed to the supernatural with Dracula and Frankenstein in 1931, which no longer relied on a detective trying to find out a certain mystery and has to disguise themselves as a monster.The monster was actually now a real thing in the movies. So I think if Bela Lugosi had been given the chance to have played a real Count Mora as a real vampire, I think it would've been slightly better received as opposed to a dated approach that was clearly now not the fashionable thing to do.I suppose again, because Browning was treading a very thin line with MGM, I suppose he couldn't really stray too far from the original source material. But I find it a very atmospherical film, although I think the story works better as a silent film than it does as a sound film, because there's a lot of silent scenes in that film, away from owls, hooting and armadillos scurrying about and winds. But I do think, based on things like The Cat and The Canary from 1927 and The Last Warning, I just think that detective sleuth with horror overtones serves better to the silent world than it does the sound world away from the legit, supernatural.John: So, if Chaney hadn't died, do you think he would have played Dracula? Do you think he would've been in Freaks? Would Freaks have been more normalized because it had a big name in it like that?Daniel: It would've been interesting if Chaney had played in Freaks. I think because Todd Browning used the kinds of individuals that he used for Freaks, maybe Chaney would've, for a change, had been the most outta place.John: Mm-hmm.Daniel: I do think he might have played Dracula. I think Universal would've had a hell of a time trying to get him over because he had just signed a new contract with MGM, whereas Todd Browning had transferred over to Universal by 1930 and really wanted to make Dracula for many years and probably discussed it with Chaney as far back as 1920.But certainly MGM would not have permitted Chaney to have gone over to Universal, even for a temporary period, without probably demanding a large piece of the action, in a financial sense, because Universal had acquired the rights to Dracula at this point. And, based on the stage play that had, come out on Broadway, it was probably assured that it was going to be a giant moneymaker, based on the success of the Dracula play.But because of Cheney's, status as a, I suppose retrospectively now, as a horror actor, he was probably the first person to be considered for that role by Carl Laemmle, senior and Junior for that matter. And Chaney gone by 1930, it did pose a puzzle as to who could take over these kinds of roles.Chaney was probably the only one to really successfully do it and make the monster an actual box office ingredient more than any other actor at that time, as he did with. Phantom, Blind Bargain and London After Midnight. So, I think to have pursued Chaney for a legit, supernatural film would've had enormous possibilities for Browning and Chaney himself.You can kind of see a trend, a trilogy forming, with Browning, from London After Midnight, in which he incorporates things he used in Dracula in London After Midnight. So, he kind of had this imagery quite early on. So, to go from – despite it's not in that order -- but to have London After Midnight, Mark of the Vampire, and he also did Dracula, he clearly was obsessed with the story. And I think Chaney was probably the, best actor for someone like Browning who complimented his way of thinking and approach to things like silence. As opposed to needing dialogue all the time, loud commotions. So, I think they dovetailed each other quite well, and that's why their ten year director actor relationship was as groundbreaking as it was.Jim: If the film does surface, if we find the film, what do you think people, how are they gonna react to the movie when they see it? What do you think? What's gonna be the reaction if it does surface?Daniel: Well, the lure of London After Midnight, the power in the film is its lost status rather than its widespread availability. I think it could never live up to the expectation that we've built up in our heads over the past 40 to 60 years. It was truly people, fans like Forrest J Ackerman that introduced and reignited the interest in Chaney's career by the late fifties and 1960s. That's when London After Midnight started to make the rounds in rumor, the rumors of a potential print existing, despite the film had not long been destroyed at that point. So, it was always a big mystery. There were always people who wanted to see the film, but with no access to home video, or et cetera, the only way you could probably see the film would've been at the studio who held everything. And, by the time the TV was coming out, a lot of silent films didn't make it to TV. So again, it has just germinated in people's heads probably in a better form than what they actually remembered. But, the true reality of London After Midnight is one more closer to the ground than it is in it's people are probably expecting to see something very supernatural on par with Dracula, whereas it's more so a Sherlock Holmes story with mild horrorish overtones to it that you can kind of see better examples of later on in Dracula in 1930 and in Mark of the Vampire.It's a film purely, I think for Lon Chaney fans. For myself, having read everything I can on the film, everything I've seen on the film, I personally love silent, detective stories, all with a touch of horror. So, I personally would know what I am going in to see. I'm not going in to see Chaney battling a Van Helsing like figure and turn to dust at the very end or turning to a bat. I'm going to see a detective melodrama that happens to have what looks like a vampire. So, it certainly couldn't live up to the expectations in people's minds and it's probably the only film to have had the greatest cheapest, marketing in history, I would think. It's one of those films, if it was discovered, you really would not have to do much marketing to promote it.It's one of those that in every fanzine, magazine, documentary referenced in pop. It has really marketed itself into becoming what I always call the mascot of the genre. There are other more important lost films that have been lost to us. The main one again, which has been found in its more complete form, was Metropolis, which is a better movie.But unlike Metropolis, London After Midnight has a lot more famous ingredients to it. It has a very famous director. It has a very famous actor whose process was legendary even during then. And it's actually the only film in which he actually has his make-up case make a cameo appearance by the very end. And it goes on the thing that everyone in every culture loves, which is the vampirism, the dark tales and folklore. So, when you say it, it just gets your imagination going. Whereas I think if you are watching it, it's probably you'll be looking over the projector to see if something even better is going to happen.The film had its mixed reactions when it originally came out. People liked it because it gave them that cheap thrill of being a very atmospherical, haunted house with the creepy figures of Chaney walking across those dusty hallways. But then the more important story is a murder mystery.It's not Dracula, but it has its own things going for it. I always kind of harken it back to the search for the Lochness Monster or Bigfoot. It has more power in your mind than it does in an aquarium or in a zoo. Hearing someone say that they think they saw something moving around in Lochness, but there's no photographic evidence, you just have the oral story, that is much more tangible in a way than actually seeing it in an aquarium where you can take it for granted. And it's the same with London After Midnight, and I think that's why a lot of hoaxster and pranksters tend to say that they have seen London After Midnight more than any other lost film.Jim: For a film that I would say the majority of the world does not have any frame of reference, and I'm using myself as the sort of blueprint for that, no frame of reference for this film. That image is iconic in a way that has been, I mean, it at first glance could be Jack the Ripper. I was talking to John before we started the podcast, once I locked in on that image, then I started to think, oh, the ghosts in Disney's Haunted Mansion, there's a couple of ghosts that have elements of that. I mean, it was so perfectly done, even though we don't, I bet you nine out ten people don't know the title London After Midnight, but I bet you seven outta ten people know this image.Daniel: Definitely, it has certainly made its mark on pop culture, again, I think because I think it's such a beautiful, simplistic design. Everything from the simplistically [garbled] to the bulging eyes and the very nice top hat as well, which is in itself today considered a very odd accessory for a grotesque, vampire character.But it's one of those things that has really carried over. It's influenced what the movies and artists. It was one of the influences for the Babadook creation for that particular monster. It was an influence on the Black Phone. It's just a perfect frame of reference for movie makers and sculptors and artists to keep taking from.John: Yep. It's, it'll live long beyond us. Daniel, one last question. I read somewhere or heard somewhere. You're next gonna tackle James Whale, is that correct? Daniel: James Whale is a subject, again, coming from, I happen to come from the exact same town that he was born and raised in, in Dudley, England. So, it's always been a subject close to home for me, which is quite convenient because I love his movies. So, I'm hoping to eventually, hopefully plan a documentary feature on him, based on a lot of family material in the surrounding areas that I was able to hunt down, and forgotten histories about him and just put it together in some form, hopefully in the future.John: That would be fantastic, and we'll have you back at that point.Jim: So, let's pretend for a minute that the audience is me, and they'd have absolutely no idea who James Whale is or what he's done. Just for a minute, let's pretend.John: Pretend that you don't know that?Jim: Yeah.Daniel: James Whale is the most known for his work for directing Frankenstein with Boris Karloff in 1931. But he also directed probably some of the most important horror films that have ever existed in the history of motion pictures. The Old Dark House, which can be cited with its very atmospherical, and black comedy tones, The Invisible Man with Claude Rains and Gloria Stewart in 1933. And, the most important one, which is probably the grand jewel in the whole of the Universal Monsters Empire, which is Bride of Frankenstein in 1935, which is the ultimate, example of everything that he had studied, everything that he'd learned with regards to cinema and comedy, life and death, and just making a very delicious cocktail of a movie in all of its black comedy, horrific, forms that we're still asking questions about today. One of his first films that he did was for Howard Hughes Hell's Angels, in which -- because he'd coming over from theater -- when again, films in America were taken off with the sound revolution. They all of a sudden needed British directors to translate English dialogue better than the actors could convey.So, James Whale was one of many to be taken over to America when he had a hit play called Journeys End, which became the most successful war play at that point. And he did his own film adaptation of Journeys End. He also did a really remarkable film called Showboat, which is another very iconic film.And again, someone with James Whale's horror credentials, you just think, how could someone who directed Frankenstein directed Showboat? But, clearly a very, very talented director who clearly could not be pigeonholed at the time as a strictly horror director, despite it is the horror films in which he is remembered for, understandably so, just because they contain his very individualistic wit and humor and his outlooks on life and politics. And being an openly gay director at the time, he really was a force unto himself. He was a very modern man even then.

A Permanent Solution to Anxiety? | Daniel Packard One of the most common mental health conditions I see as a Therapist in private practice is Anxiety. Whether it is about social situations, relationships, work or school performance, health or family, anxiety often arises in situations that are unpredictable, uncertain or unknown. Which is why so many people experience anxiety in times of chaos, because chaos is by nature unpredictable, random, disorderly, messy. There are a variety of different skills, tools and techniques to cope with anxiety. And most of them work just great if used consistently and properly. But what if there was a permanent solution to anxiety? Well that brings us to our guest today. Daniel Packard is going to talk with us about a more permanent solution to anxiety…without using all the traditional coping skills, tools and techniques. Daniel is a U.C. Berkeley Mechanical Engineer who turned his painful 10 year battle with severe anxiety into a mission to reverse engineer a permanent solution for anxiety. We're going to find out more about Daniel's story, and also his permanent solution to anxiety. IntroDaniel introduces himself and talks about how he reverse-engineered a permanent solution to anxiety, as opposed to just managing it. He offers a way to get past the belief “I am broken” and how to solve anxiety permanently.Tracy's 1-2-3 step method of Managing Anxiety1. Be aware of anxiety and how it feels in your body2. Use coping skills to calm the body's physiology3. Spot errors in your thinking and check the factsDaniel's Background and Research into AnxietyA toxic relationship and missing ALL the flags (from white to purple to red) Developing Complex PTSDTrying “everything” to treat it for 10 years and losing hopeThen: The idea to “reverse engineer” a permanent solution to anxietySolving Anxiety – Permanently?1. Exploring what anxiety looks like mechanically2. Testing it with real participants around the world 3. Approaching the skeptics / mental health professionals who “don't seem to care” and think anxiety is a problem with the mind. But what's missing?4. Engineering a solution that is based in problem-solving5. “The root cause is in the body. The mind is only linked to it…it's not the cause.”“My body is feeling anxious” helps you to understand that anxiety is a problem of the body.“Some well-meaning professionals sent you to the wrong location to deal with the problem of anxiety”Tracy Pushes Back: “Isn't anxiety necessary?”Daniel: There's a difference between the body's stress response (body is on high alert for a short time) and anxiety (body is on high alert for a long period of time)Key points:Your body is creating the anxiety, not your mind. There is a shame / stigma about the idea that anxiety is happening in the mind“There's no stigma in the idea that anxiety happens in the body”Understanding why your nervous system is malfunctioning and that there is a way to repair it and maintain itEvery system needs the basics: The body needs care and maintenance in all sorts of ways. There are 29 basics of care that we weren't taught. You can repair the nervous system and maintain it.The process:1. Repair2. Retrain3. MaintainResourcesa. Website www.danielpackard.comb. Social Media Linksi. Twitter @danielpackardii. Instagram @danielpackardiii. YouTube Channel www.youtube.com/user/danielpackardc. ResourcesA Recent Podcast Daniel was on: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WR04RnxhOu0FREE TRAINING + RESOURCEShttps://www.danielpackard.com/free-resources-download

In this episode of The Tragedy Academy Podcast, host Jay Hicks sits down with Daniel Maigler, a dedicated mental health advocate and therapist. Daniel shares his personal journey into mental health and explores the complexities of depression, the human psyche, and the powerful connection between humans and emotional support animals.

Joël is joined by thoughtbot Software Developer and Dirt Jumper Daniel Nolan. Dirt jumping is BMX-style riding

One may debate who was the greatest man in the Old Testament. Was it Abraham, Moses, David, or Daniel-- There can be no debate as to the most influential person -other than our Lord Jesus, of course- in the New Testament. The Apostle Paul was a man totally given to the Gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ.

From criminal records to background checks, there are numerous places where a candidate’s chances for a job can be squandered. But can second chance hiring be as beneficial to businesses as it will undoubtedly be for those given this opportunity? Daniel Okonkwo — attorney, public policy expert, and market manager for community engagement at JPMorgan Chase thinks so, and he’s working hard to reframe how (and who) the hiring process can benefit.   Key Takeaways: [2:46] The “Ban The Box” movement has been around in the US since the 1990s, advocating for the removal of the “Do You Have a Criminal Record” box. It’s a movement in favor of second chance hiring. While Daniel and JPMC banned the box already, they have also found that they were losing prospective talent due to the background check. Daniel explains how they are working with the FDIC to try and get around these regulations. [4:50] When people are employed, there are ancillary benefits including community building and public safety advances. [5:20] Daniel’s work has always been about helping those in need. He worked as a public defender in Miami that then brought him to be part of the team that founded DC Lawyers for Youth. This led him to JPMorgan Chase to which he lends his experience and passion for helping people get back on their feet and showing them that someone does care and believe in them. [8:07] For every person that walked through the door that got hired, they’ve had many other doors shut in their face. The significant barriers to employment are often built on bias, and Daniel sees firsthand how we miss out on a lot of talent and growth. [10:24] Daniel talks about how he measures success and growth. First, how can we expand the options for people with some criminal record, and second, are there policies that can help certain offenses be stricken from your record. [11:32] Daniel discusses the biggest challenges he faces as a leader including the huge scope of the problem, creating institutional commitment, and continued stigma around those with a criminal record. [14:28] What is Daniel’s call to action for how we can help? More discussion regarding the issue, automatic expungement, and getting involved at a policy level. [16:28] Daniel stays grounded and motivated by seeing the impact he makes on people that otherwise may have had a real issue with getting hired. [21:46] At JP Morgan, Daniel and his team want to provide thought leadership and lead by example. They can help others by sharing the tools and insights they have developed not only for financial well-being but how we think.   Quotes: “When people are employed, there are so many ancillary effects from that. From community building, to health, to public safety advances.” - Daniel “There are communities out there that have been under-invested in and under-resourced that as a result of institutional and systemic racism have been left behind.” - Daniel “We really believe that business has a role in making sure people are employed and can be part of an inclusive economy.” - Daniel “Unmaking implicit bias and hiring and training towards an inclusive workforce is an effort that needs a lot of takers. It’s not just holding back potentially great employees from an opportunity; it’s holding back businesses and communities as well.” - Jo “Working to reform a system plagued with implicit bias is vast and demanding.” - Jo “The future of work is about showing what possibilities are out there.” - Daniel   Continue your journey: https://www.pega.com/   Mentioned: Daniel Okonkwo JPMorgan Chase FDIC Just Mercy

更多英语知识，请关注微信公众号: VOA英语每日一听 Olga: Hey, Daniel, how are you?Daniel: Hey Olga, I'm fine thanks. How are you?Olga: Fine. Actually I have a favor to ask you.Daniel: Yes, sure.Olga: OK. Like my boyfriend and I are planning to go to Chile next month.Daniel: Really?Olga: Yes, so I was trying to ask if you could recommend us some place to go.Daniel: Sure.Olga: All over Chile. Actually we're planning to go to three places because we're planning to go to Chile for around one month so I think we have enough time.Daniel: That's good.Olga: Yes.Daniel: So have you been to South America before?Olga: No, never.Daniel: Never?Olga: No, we've never been outside of Mexico.Daniel: Wow, so this is going to be your first time in South America?Olga: Yes.Daniel: Good. Well it depends what you want to do. You said about a month and also it depends on how much money you're taking.Olga: We have been saving around like one year money so I think we have enough money to, you know, just travel around and don't worry about money.Daniel: OK, good, because I think if you go to the right places you can save a lot of money.Olga: Oh.Daniel: Because if you go, you know, to like big fancy restaurants, you're going to take a lot of money but I can give you a lot of tips so you can save money and also have I think a much better time.Olga: That would be great.Daniel: OK. So I can recommend you about three places.Olga: Yeah.Daniel: The first one would be in the north.Olga: Oh.Daniel: We have a desert.Olga: Yeah.Daniel: So if you are OK with the heat.Olga: Yeah, I'm OK. I'm from Mexico.Daniel: OK, that's good then. It's called Atacama Desert and we have a lot of really, really nice places there.Olga: Yeah.Daniel: There's a place called San Pedro de Atacama. There's another one called The Valley of the Moon and it's supposed to be, it's supposed to look like the moon actually, that's why the name.Olga: It sounds so romantic.Daniel: It is. I've never been with my girlfriend but it should be romantic.Olga: Yeah.Daniel: There's also a lot of mountains and if you go to a couple of places near the Andes you can see a lot of beautiful lakes and you will also have to be careful with the altitude.Olga: Oh, right, yeah, because I come from a really low place.Daniel: Yeah.

更多英语知识，请关注微信公众号: VOA英语每日一听 Olga: Hey, Daniel, how are you?Daniel: Hey Olga, I'm fine thanks. How are you?Olga: Fine. Actually I have a favor to ask you.Daniel: Yes, sure.Olga: OK. Like my boyfriend and I are planning to go to Chile next month.Daniel: Really?Olga: Yes, so I was trying to ask if you could recommend us some place to go.Daniel: Sure.Olga: All over Chile. Actually we're planning to go to three places because we're planning to go to Chile for around one month so I think we have enough time.Daniel: That's good.Olga: Yes.Daniel: So have you been to South America before?Olga: No, never.Daniel: Never?Olga: No, we've never been outside of Mexico.Daniel: Wow, so this is going to be your first time in South America?Olga: Yes.Daniel: Good. Well it depends what you want to do. You said about a month and also it depends on how much money you're taking.Olga: We have been saving around like one year money so I think we have enough money to, you know, just travel around and don't worry about money.Daniel: OK, good, because I think if you go to the right places you can save a lot of money.Olga: Oh.Daniel: Because if you go, you know, to like big fancy restaurants, you're going to take a lot of money but I can give you a lot of tips so you can save money and also have I think a much better time.Olga: That would be great.Daniel: OK. So I can recommend you about three places.Olga: Yeah.Daniel: The first one would be in the north.Olga: Oh.Daniel: We have a desert.Olga: Yeah.Daniel: So if you are OK with the heat.Olga: Yeah, I'm OK. I'm from Mexico.Daniel: OK, that's good then. It's called Atacama Desert and we have a lot of really, really nice places there.Olga: Yeah.Daniel: There's a place called San Pedro de Atacama. There's another one called The Valley of the Moon and it's supposed to be, it's supposed to look like the moon actually, that's why the name.Olga: It sounds so romantic.Daniel: It is. I've never been with my girlfriend but it should be romantic.Olga: Yeah.Daniel: There's also a lot of mountains and if you go to a couple of places near the Andes you can see a lot of beautiful lakes and you will also have to be careful with the altitude.Olga: Oh, right, yeah, because I come from a really low place.Daniel: Yeah.

更多英语知识，请关注微信公众号: VOA英语每日一听 Olga: Hey, Daniel, how are you?Daniel: Hey Olga, I'm fine thanks. How are you?Olga: Fine. Actually I have a favor to ask you.Daniel: Yes, sure.Olga: OK. Like my boyfriend and I are planning to go to Chile next month.Daniel: Really?Olga: Yes, so I was trying to ask if you could recommend us some place to go.Daniel: Sure.Olga: All over Chile. Actually we're planning to go to three places because we're planning to go to Chile for around one month so I think we have enough time.Daniel: That's good.Olga: Yes.Daniel: So have you been to South America before?Olga: No, never.Daniel: Never?Olga: No, we've never been outside of Mexico.Daniel: Wow, so this is going to be your first time in South America?Olga: Yes.Daniel: Good. Well it depends what you want to do. You said about a month and also it depends on how much money you're taking.Olga: We have been saving around like one year money so I think we have enough money to, you know, just travel around and don't worry about money.Daniel: OK, good, because I think if you go to the right places you can save a lot of money.Olga: Oh.Daniel: Because if you go, you know, to like big fancy restaurants, you're going to take a lot of money but I can give you a lot of tips so you can save money and also have I think a much better time.Olga: That would be great.Daniel: OK. So I can recommend you about three places.Olga: Yeah.Daniel: The first one would be in the north.Olga: Oh.Daniel: We have a desert.Olga: Yeah.Daniel: So if you are OK with the heat.Olga: Yeah, I'm OK. I'm from Mexico.Daniel: OK, that's good then. It's called Atacama Desert and we have a lot of really, really nice places there.Olga: Yeah.Daniel: There's a place called San Pedro de Atacama. There's another one called The Valley of the Moon and it's supposed to be, it's supposed to look like the moon actually, that's why the name.Olga: It sounds so romantic.Daniel: It is. I've never been with my girlfriend but it should be romantic.Olga: Yeah.Daniel: There's also a lot of mountains and if you go to a couple of places near the Andes you can see a lot of beautiful lakes and you will also have to be careful with the altitude.Olga: Oh, right, yeah, because I come from a really low place.Daniel: Yeah.

The COVID-19 craziness has caused people to stress out and scramble to work remotely. This crisis is pushing everything forward technologically. Why not hire a virtual assistant (VA) to scale your property management business? Today’s guest is Daniel Ramsey of MyOutDesk. Daniel is a real estate investor/broker who loves doing deals, and property management is a way to connect with others and create communities. But he also wants time to take a vacation with his family! You’ll Learn... [02:52] MyOutDesk: Property managers find talent to inexpensively scale their business. [04:05] MLS Porn: Scrolling through new investment properties on the market. [05:05] Remote Reality: In 2018, 5% of America worked remotely, now it’s 50%. [07:58] Work Culture: Maintain good team, quality interaction, and customer service; and reduce operational/overhead costs. [15:00] Steps to Scale: Assess business, compound leverage, develop plan, craft outcome, start interviewing, launch, and training.  [25:48] Match Values, Not Personalities: Define who you are as a person and company. [33:15] Go Remote Guide: Tips for working remotely with new technology. [35:08] Push vs. Pull Leadership: Communicate, don’t micromanage. [44:15] MyOutDesk Mission: VAs need to be indispensable and irreplaceable. [46:15] Pricing vs. Cash Crunch: Do you need help? Can you afford MyOutDesk? [53:52] Care ROI Concept: Emotion is what creates memories. Tweetables I had a need in my own real estate practice. I hired a virtual assistant. I was like, ‘Wow, this works.’ Leverage is compound interest and entrepreneurs’ biggest swing. When I hire somebody, I'm hiring them to grow my revenue. I'm hiring them to save money. I'm hiring them to own an entire process for my business. The biggest cure for the economy is businesses and entrepreneurs staying productive. Resources MyOutDesk Go Remote Guide (text MOD to 31996) MLS Mark Spain Bluefishing by Steve Sims Upwork OpenPotion DoorGrow on YouTube DoorGrowClub DoorGrowLive DoorGrow Website Score Quiz DoorGrow Cold Leads Calculator Transcript Jason: Welcome DoorGrow Hackers to the DoorGrow Show. If you are a property management entrepreneur that wants to add doors, make a difference, increase revenue, help others, impact lives, and you are interested in growing your business and life and you're open to doing things a bit differently, then you are a DoorGrow Hacker. DoorGrow Hackers love the opportunities, daily variety, unique challenges, and freedom that property management brings. Many in real estate think you're crazy for doing it. You think they're crazy for not because you realize that property management is the ultimate high-trust gateway to real estate deals, relationships, and residual income. At DoorGrow, we are on a mission to transform property management businesses and their owners. We want to transform the industry, eliminate the BS, build awareness, change perception, expand the market, and help the best property management entrepreneurs win. I'm your host, property management growth expert, Jason Hull, the founder and CEO of DoorGrow. Now, let's get into the show. Today, we have a really cool guest. He is Daniel Ramsey, over at MyOutDesk. Daniel, welcome to the show. Daniel: Thanks for having me, Jason. I'm so glad to be here. Jason: Daniel and I were talking a little bit in the green room chatting up a little bit about what's going on. It's a little bit crazy right now, with COVID-19 and Coronavirus, and all this stuff, the real estate market looks scary. We may get into that a little bit in the show, but our topic today is using a virtual assistant to scale your property management business with MyOutDesk. Before we get into that, Daniel, what I want to hear about your background, your entrepreneurial journey and that should lead us right into the inception of MyOutDesk. Daniel: Yes, sure, man. I love the show. I'm really grateful to be here. I agree, I'm a real estate guy. I love doing deals and property management is just such a great way to connect and create community, and also, it's a great place for deal flow if you're a buyer and want long-term wealth. I love being here. I'm a real estate investor, myself, real estate broker, contractor, mortgage guy, developer, broker, this is my world. I love it. In fact, you'll love this story. My wife and I, we've got two little girls who will drive in the neighborhood and I'm like, "baby, baby, open house, I gotta go look at it," and she's like, "fine, just go." I'm a real estate guy, I love what I do. We help property managers basically find talent and inexpensively scale their business. The topic is timely. Our business was started because I had a need in my own real estate practice. I hired a virtual assistant. I was like, wow, this works. My wife and I went on our honeymoon, and as many entrepreneurs, I brought my laptop on my honeymoon. I'm in Guatemala in a rainforest, and I'm at the bar at like 1:00 or 2:00 in the morning and the bartender in Spanish is making fun of me. He's basically saying things like dumb Gringo, his wife's here, beautiful woman just married, why is he still working? At that moment, I knew something had to shift in my world, and that's when we started to scale and really use leverage at a high level. Jason: I would imagine that most of our partners as entrepreneurs go through quite a bit, and they don't always appreciate us doing things like that. Daniel: My wife calls it MLS porn for me, because at night, I'm scrolling through all the new investment properties that came on the market. I'm really lucky to marry her, and she's understanding. But at the same time I wanted to stay married, and I wanted to have a kid, and a family, and I knew I needed leverage in my business. I wanted to be able to take a vacation. Jason: I'm sure you have kids at home right now. Daniel: That's right. Jason: Me too, it's crazy. One of them just came in to hand me an Xbox controller so I could give them access because I control that, crazy. I'm on air, they don't care. They're like, dad, this is important. Daniel: This is the deal. This is what we're in, and it's crazy timing because we have this call like a month ago, and we're in a crazy place. In 2018, 5% of America worked remotely, 5%. Last week, that number went to 50%, in one week. Jason: The rest are probably not even working. Daniel: Yeah. Here's the thing, as a company, one of the things that we've been doing is we've been remote for 13 years, 100%. We're about 1300 people. If you're listening right now, we figured out how to scale a business remotely with 1300 people, and serve clients like property managers, real estate brokers, investors, flippers, that's what we do. In the last couple of weeks, we've helped more companies just understand the tools required, what systems you have to put in place, how to communicate with your people when they're not physically in your office. We put together a whole like go remote guide that we're going to give away in the show, basically, just to help things like what you just said. We were just on a conference call with our largest client and his two and a half year old son just, hey, daddy, I need more Cheerios. This is just how it is now. Jason: Yeah, that is what it is. There's all these funny videos you'll see online where you've got like some guy on the news and his kid walks in, in a diaper, and then the wife's crawling on the floor because she thinks she's not on camera trying to pull it out, these things. The world we live in, we're fathers, we run companies, there are moms that run companies, and I don't think there's anything that needs to be hidden. It's not like there's something shameful that you have kids or that you have a personal life. For those that are watching this or listening, just own that. It's totally okay, everybody likes to see that you're a real person anyway, instead of just a suit and a tie stuck behind a desk all the time. It's a lot more relatable I would imagine. I've got four kids. I'm slightly insane, I think, and it's crazy, and they need to be quieter, hey guys be quieter. Daniel: That's awesome. Jason: I started my company Open Potion the corporation back in 2008 right around the time everything was falling apart then. I've just worked from home. I've been virtual, my team members are in Toronto, New York, wherever. We've got some in the Philippines. A while ago, there's always a stigma connected to those that were remote, especially if they were not in America. I think that we're going to see some crazy shifts that are going to be happening. One, every company that’s like, “We can’t have people working from home, how will we know that they're actually going to do work?” These things, these concerns, now you have to. If you want them to work, they're working from home. Your office is shut down, you're not doing business. Everybody's figuring out in this new environment, and they're scrambling. I'm sure companies like Zoom are just going to go gangbusters, but this is the new world that we live in. I think it's going to push everything forward technologically which is exciting, and it's going to cut out a lot of bullshit. All the fluff that was just bloated in companies is just eating up resources, like people are just going to realize after this why do we need this $20,000 a month office space for this big corporate building? All these things are going to be shifting, and we're going to have this new culture as a result of everybody being forced to stay indoors and work from home. I think that's going to open people up to the idea that, hey, I can have team members and they don't have to be right geographically near me. I can find the best that are anywhere, and find people that are lower costs, and figure this out. People are going to be a lot more open that have been closed to it before. I imagine this will be really good for companies like yours, to be able to help people out and help people see that you can still maintain a really good team, and quality interaction, and customer service, and you can lower your operational costs, or at least make a more healthy cash flowing business by reducing some of these overhead expenses that you have in the company. I was hanging out on a really great course with training over the last few days with a financial coach. One of the phrases, I don't know who said it but he made this joking comment that overhead walks on two legs. Basically saying people are the biggest piece of overhead a lot of times that we might have in a company. I want to point out, that was a really humble intro you gave, but in the written intro I have here you've got 10 years of experience serving more than 5000 clients, including over half of the real trends, top 10 Real Estate teams. Daniel: Right. Jason: Your company has already got a who's who list of clientele as far as real estate businesses go. Daniel: Yup. Jason: You've built real estates' number one staffing company, and it says you've worked with some of the top clients in the industry from sales organizations like the Mark Spain team to tech providers, like the Zillow Group, Keller Williams, and RE/MAX, and so you sound like you're a pretty cool connected guy as well. Daniel: Maybe connected. I don't know about cool, though. What we do, and I love this. We have a property manager who's in Austin, and I really love this guy. Jason: That's where I'm at. Daniel: Okay, cool. You guys are neighbors. He manages half a billion dollars of commercial real estate, and he's like one of these guys that's just freaking brilliant. I'm like, hey, what are you doing? He's like, I'm sitting with my son and looking at deals. He's middle age, and he's really had a lot of success, but he called us because he had four property managers, a bookkeeper, and an office manager. Five people running half a billion of real estate, and he's like, hey, my people are overworked. I'm worried that nobody's taking vacations. Everybody works on Saturdays and Sundays, and our systems aren't tight. Jason: Burnout is coming. Daniel: Exactly. They had a system that didn't have all the information in it. They had basic terms, but every lease is different. Some tenants are paying for maintaining their HVAC, some are not. He had all of these leases that nobody had actually put into the system. Every time somebody called and said my roof is leaking, he'd be like, okay, we'll call you back, and then they have to dig up the lease, and we have the lease and say, who do we call? Is it our responsibility, or is it their responsibility? Five hours later, they're responding to what could be a really big deal like damage everywhere for the tenants. We started working with him about two years ago, and we started helping him with SOPs, Standard Operating Procedures. We started helping them take their leases and get him into the system, which is any basic scale a business grows, a business scenario. We gave him a book like an AP, AR person, so now his really talented bookkeeper who's managed his whole financial world for his entire career has time in her day to think strategically, and save money for the company. What we did is all the property managers got in the system. We basically gave them somebody to run their system so that there was a person who could enter data and just make sure the system was clean. The bookkeeper got an assistant, and now all of a sudden he's poised for what are some phenomenal growth years that he's had in the last couple of years. It didn't change his world. It really didn't, because we're $21,000 a year for a full-time employee. If you think about that, half a billion dollars making all the rents, literally for almost $100,000 now he's not going to lose his team. That's our story. That's what we do for really big companies like Zillow, and all the way down to small investors who own 5 or 10 properties and just need somebody to help the day to day, keep things running. Jason: Let's get into how this process works. Let's take a typical listener of the show, they're probably maybe a property manager, entrepreneur. Maybe they've got about 200 to 400 doors that they're managing, largely single family residential. They might have a property manager by now or two. They've got maybe somebody having maintenance coordination, and everybody on their team is telling them that they're maxed out on time, because that's what always happens. Every team member is maxed out on time, and they feel like I can't afford to hire anybody right now. Every appointment back on time, and then they call you up. Let's go through the process here of what it would look like maybe for one of these clients to start a conversation and work with you. Daniel: Sure, Jason. I don't want this to be a commercial for us. What I want to do is if you're listening right now, like what the steps that I'm going to go through are the steps to determine how to scale your business. Even though these are our steps, you can actually write these things down and go through the step by step process. Whether you hire us or not, this is the process that we know works, because we've done it 5000 times. The first step is just really assess your business. We do a strategy call with all of our clients where we do a one on one video conference, just like you and I are right now on video, and we go through things like who's on your team, what are your systems. When I say systems, like where are you putting all the information? Do you have a voice phone system so that when people call, you can transfer that number around. A lot of property managers do but some actually don't, and you can imagine during this Coronavirus what happens if you're a property manager and you had regular phones tied to an office that you can't go to anymore. What do you do? We're looking at who's on your team. We're looking at what your systems are, what tech do you have right now to operate, and then we're looking at what your processes are. Talk to me about what happens when you have to turn a tenant over, talk to me about what happens when you put a property out to lease, what's the step by step process. Who owns that process, and so we'll go through those three things in our first strategy call and really identify what's your highest value leverage, and we have this process and I liked it. I love thinking like this. Leverage can be just like compound interest. You can have compound leverage, meaning you as the business owner, or your managers, or the people on your staff can offload some of the not very valuable process based day to day repetitive stuff that you just don't need to do, and then you get two or four hours back of your day, and then you can take those hours and help build your business, and then you get a compounding effect with leverage. That's the next step is what do we need to do to start taking advantage of compound leverage? If you or your team gave up some stuff, how would you then drive revenue for your business or increase your value for your customers? What would you do to really scale and grow if you got half your day back? Jason: You do the strategy call. You figure out team systems attack, you're going over their processes. You're identifying the highest value leverage, I think it's a cool idea of compound leverage. And then what would you do next? What would you recommend next? Daniel: It's developing your plan. From that guy that owns half a billion dollars in property to the person who's got 100 homes, every single person has opportunity. It's standard blocking and tackling in business. We're doing a needs analysis for you. We're saying, okay, what do you need to do now, or who do you need to hire on your team now? It's always been developed with the plan moving forward. Any company like ours who says, oh, we'll just hire somebody for you tomorrow, be scared. Just be scared, because as an entrepreneur, leverage is your biggest swing, it's where you can get the most value for your dollars, you really have to be strategic about it. Step two is what's my plan? What systems do I need in order to do this virtual thing like what we're talking about going remote? Who do I need? What do I need? What conversations need to happen for my internal team? What planning do I need to make? Let's create an outcome statement. You could call step three crafting an outcome. Another thing that's unique about our businesses is we don't do job descriptions, areas of responsibility. I don't say anything wrong, there's nothing wrong with that, but what we do is we create outcomes. For instance, when I hire somebody, I'm hiring them to grow my revenue, I'm hiring them to save money, I'm hiring them to own an entire process for my business. We will help you craft and create a plan that really adds value to your business, so that you're getting a 3 or 4 times return on the $21,000 that you're going to pay us. Jason: You're crafting an outcome, you've developed the plan. You've done the strategy call, you develop the plan. You've crafted this outcome, and then what's the next step? Daniel: At that point, we know exactly what you want to accomplish. As a company, what we'll do is we'll take that outcome, we'll craft a series of interviews with somebody who has experience doing that thing. One challenge that we have in the outsourcing virtual assistant world is you can go on Upwork and hire somebody from India for $3 an hour, and that's what most people think about when they think of outcomes, or outsourcing, or virtual assistants. The thing is we're a virtual professional company. We are very strategic, we hire people who've done it before, who've been there before, who have served that outcome in the past. If you need somebody to answer the phones and be a prospector for you, or handle like client calls or tenant calls. We're going to find somebody who they've been 10 years doing that. They may not be property management, but they've been 10 years on the phone handling concerns and being a support mechanism for businesses similar or very like yours. The next step is to get three to five people right in front of you, so you can interview them, and you can choose somebody who is a great cultural fit plus an expertise and experience. Jason: I love the idea because I think cultural fit is the most important piece to look at first. A lot of people, well, they're great for this job. They look great on paper, they know how to do this job, but if it's not a good cultural fit, and I find as an entrepreneur if you don't feel comfortable around them… There's a great book by a really cool guy called Steve Sims called Bluefishing, and he talks about it in it. He calls it The Chug Test. He's like, what I want to go chug a beer with this person, if the answer's no, like then there's a disconnect, there's a problem. He uses the chug test with clients and different things. I think on our team, it's really important that everybody on our team exists to lower our pressure and noise. They exist to help move the business forward towards our outcomes. If there's resistance there, or discomfort there, and you're adding more and more team members like that, you're building a business you don't even feel like being involved in. It's very important, I think, for us as entrepreneurs to be really conscious of how we feel around our team members. Daniel: I can tell you I've hired people before and you have it too. If you're listening right now, it's interesting because I think this is a mistake that we make as entrepreneurs, we either hire people that we really like, or we hire people who know the job, and have expertise or experience doing the job. The reality is you need both. You've got to enjoy them, or at least feel like there's a fit in who you are and what you think, but they also have to be an expert at what they do, or a professional in our world. I can always tell when I'm talking to somebody who understands growing and scaling a business because they say what you just said, Jason. I appreciate it. Jason: I'll add, I think one of the biggest mistakes I've seen entrepreneurs make in trying to grow, or scale their business, or hire in their team is that the biggest mistake we make is that we try to hire somebody like our self a lot of times. We have a natural rapport for people that are like us. In NLP, Neuro-Linguistic Programming, they teach if you mirror or communicate at the same pace of these sorts of things, then you can build artificial rapport, or build real rapport perhaps really quickly. But, the challenge is we also tend to have a blind spot and hire people that are like us. A lot of times, the people that we need to do a certain job, or not the entrepreneurial, visionary, cowboy personality type, or whatever personality type you are as an entrepreneur. You might need a different personality type for that role, and sometimes we're trying to get people like us, which we don't even want to do those things, and we're trying to put them into that role. We need to find people that love and enjoy doing that particular thing that we don't want to do. Somewhat, they need to be different from us, but we need to be able to have a relationship with them that feels comfortable and feels good and that we value. We enjoy being around them or having them on our team. Daniel: Some things I'm going to add because I'm a nerd. I love people, I love growing and scaling. I think there's another possibility which is when values match. If you're very clear about what your values are as a human and a business, then you can be with somebody who maybe doesn't match up with your personality, because you feel like you at least have that commonality and value. Jason: You guys trust them. Daniel: Yeah, exactly. One of our values as a family is we take care of our people. I teach my kids, we don't give up. I naturally gravitate to people who care about people, and who have a bit of grit. Defining who you are as a person and defining who you are as a company, and having those values can help you in selecting somebody who you may not love hanging out with, but there's a value match, and they have an expertise match. Things just jive as a company. Jason: I find that's one of the biggest flaws that I see in property management businesses, probably any business. As entrepreneurs go from the stage of solopreneur to building a team, they build a team around them but they're operating like a solopreneur. They're trying to micromanage them. They're viewing these people as people that are supposed to be extensions of them in some way, and instead of building a team around them, of people that are taking things off of their plate and their jobs to lower their pressure and noise, they're hiring people for jobs, people for roles they think the business needs instead of what they need. In order to hire a team and build a team around you that is what you need as an entrepreneur, there needs to be clear values. Those need to be defined. That's one of the foundational things we coach clients through is getting clear on their business, why we get entrepreneurs personal why, how those connect, creating, figuring out their core values. If they don't have that, they don't have culture. Culture comes from the entrepreneur, and it's the business that is supposed to exist to serve the entrepreneurs needs in some way, and it's also supposed to exist to solve a problem in the marketplace. If they have those things in alignment, it significantly affects their ability to close deals and create trust. That speeds up rapidly. If they don't have that, then not only are they having challenges with that, but they also have a team around them that they have to micromanage, that they always feel like they have to tell what to do, and that are not believers in them or in the business because they've never given them anything you believe in. Having a team of believers feels great. You feel like you're Iron Man. You feel like you've got the super suit, you've got all these people supporting you. We had an issue this morning, there was a client that had a product or something and they were frustrated or upset because they didn't do any of the work and they didn't get the results, obviously. They didn't do some things that needed to be done, didn't show up any calls, that didn't do anything. We want this client to get a result. One of my team members is brilliant at coaching and helping clients just feel the negative energy and transform it. He's just a brilliant coach in that, and he talked to this client for like 60 minutes. The client was like, okay, I'm excited to work with you guys, I'm not going to sue you now. My approach probably would have been a little bit more hardline and hard nosed. I've got another team member, and he deals with the clients directly. He's super diplomatic, and I'd be like just do it this way. But he's like, why don't we say it like this? I'm like, that's better. Our team members protect us. They protect the business, especially if they believe in you. You always feel like you're being supported. God, it is so stressful. It's worse having a team than being a solopreneur if you have a team that isn't there to believe in you, to support you, and lower your pressure and noise, it's worse. Daniel: Agreed. Agreed. Jason: You want to talk about the next step? You've got this outcome crafted. I love that idea because ultimately what matters is results, the outcome is what matters. A lot of people will hire just to fill a wall. They're like, "We need this." They think that's the outcome, we solved it, we got this person. The real outcome is them helping the business achieve a goal, achieve the outcome, that's involved. I like the idea of crafting outcomes. What's next? Daniel: You know what? I have to follow it up with the outcome. I want clarity for your audience around why we do that, it's really important. When you have a person coming into it and you give him a job, they could do a job and not get a result. Jason: Absolutely. Daniel: That's the challenge. When you craft an outcome and there's massive clarity between you and the employee about what the outcome is, how to do the job is well informed. It's like, "Look, we are going to need you to book X, Y, and Z so that the clients have this result." They're like, "Well, I booked it." Yeah, you booked it but the client didn't get this result. This is a challenge. Outcomes just align the interests of the entrepreneur business owner and the employee so that the coaching conversations and the interactions are super, super, clean. There is some responsibility on the entrepreneur because I can't say, "Look, I want to fly to Pluto one day. I'm going to hire you to help me do that." That's just not a possibility right now. We have a lot of clients here who are like, "I don't know how to do that. I need to hire somebody. Daniel, can your virtual professionals help me?" I'm like, "Absolutely not, we can't help you. You don't even know how to do it. How would we know if you don't know?" The military has this great concept, "You can't give one unless you have one." They don't promote from outside. You're not going to get a two star General who used to work at Coca-Cola, they're not just going to make him the general. They have a process of rising through the ranks because that experience is so important. When our clients say, "Hey, I want to try this thing out." We're like, "Hey, we can't help you because we're not a try-it-out company. We're a professional organization that helps entrepreneurs get time freedom in their life and high caliber leverage." We're not going to experiment something with you, we're not going to try to create the shift that's going to go to pluto. We just don't know how to do that. That's some clarity on the outcome. Our next step after an outcome, we start interviewing. Then, it just moves into the launch which is why we have the Go Remote gift for your audience which is really timely because 50% of the world is now working at home. How do you do that? What are some of the technologies? How do I communicate? Jason, you're going to love this one. You and I, we've been working remote for a while. Most people would be on a chat platform, "Hey, I got to go to the bathroom." Nobody wants to see that, but we're all humans. What do you say? In our Go Remote guide we're going to give out, you type ‘bio.be right back.’ It's just a little bit better to see that on a chat platform in your corporate office, maybe 100 people. We've got a lot of tips, tricks, what's the right etiquette, and all that. After you interview, which is about a launch, that's probably where all the magic happens—the first 90 days. Jason: Yeah. I just saw on Facebook, it went viral, that all these people are working from home now. People are doing Zoom meetings and stuff. Some lady in her team of 20 or 30 people on a Zoom call forgot that her camera and her mic was still active while she was going to the bathroom. She said, "I'll just go to the bathroom," and took things with her. How awkward would that be? They need to understand some basic etiquette dealing with this new technology. Daniel: Sure. The fun thing about it, we're all humans. We all have kids, we all go to the bathroom, we all need a lunch break, and the rules are different now working at home. If you find yourself as a manager or an employee, you have to hyper communicate now because nobody can see if you're actually working. If you find yourself as a leader, you have to give people the benefit of the doubt, and really communicate, communicate, communicate. This is a time unprecedented in history. Nobody can plan for needing to take your entire team remote in a matter of seven days. It just can't be planned for. Having a little bit of grace as a leader, and also increasing your communication for your employees as a leader is really super important right now. Jason: Yeah. One of my coaches, Al Sharpton, gave me the idea that the best way was push communication rather than pull in which as a leader, you don't have to go to hold them, stand over their shoulder, and ask them, "Hey, did you do this? Are you doing this? Where's this at?" That's pull communication. You're always trying to get things from them but you set up systems in which the system, they're reporting, submitting things, and providing the information to you so you'll feel comfortable, and you don't feel the need to micromanage them that way. Daniel: That's a great point. Part of our onboarding is helping people understand what a start of the day report looks like and the end of the day report looks like. Each of our folks, 1300-ish, 1200 or 1300 people, are doing a start of day report where they're like, "Hey, these are the seven things I'm going to accomplish today." And an end of the day report, "Hey, those seven things I knocked out five of the seven. I did three others and these two are pushed to the next day." Again, if you've got those communication systems well-oiled, one of the things because we've been virtual for so long, we have a tech platform where all of our virtual professionals enter their time. They start their day and they do their start of the day report in our system. At the end of the day, they report in our system. It keeps tabs and track of our virtual professionals so that we have a system of knowing, "Hey, they took a break." They enter into a system, "I'm taking my lunch break," or, "I'm taking my 15 minute break." We have a system that reports to our clients everything they do throughout the day. Our clients can login to that portal and just see it. We've been doing that because that's normal. Now, everybody's like, "Hey, how do I do that?" That's another example. You just have a start and end of day report so your managers and your people have a clear way of communicating what their day looks like. Jason: Yeah. That same coach I mentioned, I once asked, "How do you know if somebody in your team is a believer?" He just said, "They're getting their work done. You've got the outcomes and the things they're supposed to be doing. They're reporting that they're getting these things done. The performance is there and you're getting the results that you want. You don't have to micromanage them, you don't have to live in fear. They're getting things done.” That's ultimately what you want. You want to pay money, you want them to help you make more of it. You want them to get it done. Strategic call, development plan, crafting an outcome, interviewing, and you said launch. The launch is then setting, you've got these systems in place. For your clients, they can login, they can see what the team members are doing. Clarifying question. There's two types, I've noticed, of assistant companies or outsourcing companies where they're like, "Hey, we'll answer your phones and we've got 50-100 people here in a call center. Some random ones are going to answer the call." Or, you've got Raymond who's assigned to your phone and he's going to do this, he's going to do this job for you. Maybe you could help the listeners understand what MyOutDesk and this relationship looks like. Daniel: Yeah, make sense. The first example is for major corporations. Our business is designed for SMBs—Small and Medium Sized Businesses. We think of us like an extension of your business. You get to interview them, you get to onboard them. They report everyday to you. It's like, "Hey, Jason. I'm here. Daniel's here. I'm ready to login. I'm going to rock it. Do you need anything today? Here's my start of the day report." Every single day, they login. We typically do Monday to Friday. Some of our clients will have multiple schedules depending on coverage needs. LIke over the weekend, late night calls, or emergency phone numbers. Just think of us like an extension of your business. We're giving you leverage. We're a real estate staffing company that is specific to property managers, brokers, busters, mortgage companies. Our whole world is around helping you grow and scale. After the launch, it goes through training. Most entrepreneurs who ever hired somebody realizes that in the beginning, I liked this X. If you've been watching us on video right now, I'm doing an X. In the beginning, it's low value because they're brandnew to your business. They don't know your culture, they don't know your customers, they don't know your value proposition. There's just not a lot of value in the first two weeks. At some point, the value goes up. The amount of time you have to spend with somebody is high in the beginning because you need to tell them everything that's in your brain. That all of this tribal knowledge that you need to impart and give to them. You might already have it documented, you might not. The first 90 days is really teaching them how you want them to serve the business. Communicating, giving around like, "Hey, here's how to use our system. Here's the training platform. Here's all the team members. Here's all the systems you need to learn." The first 90 days, it's just getting them up to speed. After that, typically our clients are recording a 60% or 70% savings with the exact same result they were getting prior. It's pretty awesome. Jason: Now, these team members, is it hourly or are you dedicating a monthly? Fulltime? How does this tend to work? Daniel: There's a couple of things. We're different. Obviously, they're virtual professionals so they're working full time. We're a subscription based business. You pay us, we pay them. We also carry their healthcare, their vacation time, and all their benefits. Most companies, they're making a very razor thin margin. Honestly, 90% of what you guys pay us, what our clients pay us, actually goes to benefits for their virtual professionals—benefits, vacation, health plan, we do conferences. We have an entire support system, team, tech, and all that kind of craziness. The point is they're our people. We're helping you get up to speed so they can help you grow and scale your business. At some point, we all become a team. Meaning, the company is here to support the virtual assistant, support the client, and everybody wins. That's what I love about working here. I'm going to help people find jobs in the Philippines, that's where we operate. I get to help businesses scale and grow. It's like the coolest place to be especially because we’ve helped over 5000 clients. I’ve gotten to see growth plans, org charts, systems. It's just so exciting every day to see so many Small and Medium Sized Businesses really see under the hood—profitability, who's on your team, what are some of your struggles. It's just really awesome for me and my team because every day, we're just serving our community. Jason: Love it. What are some of the frequently asked questions that people have that maybe we haven't covered? That somebody might be asking during the process? Daniel: A lot of people are like, "What does my commitment look like? How long do I have to stay in contract?" I'm a real estate guy and very firmly believed in value. We don't lock our people into any long term contracts. Every two weeks, every single one of my clients is voting with their credit card, honestly. Imagine if your business, 100%, runs on adding value for others. That’s how our business works. One of the missions that we've embraced at a really high level is our virtual assistants or virtual professionals need to be indispensable to your business. That's the guiding light, it has been from the beginning. If they come in and they take things off of your plate, you have all this time freedom, all of these opportunities to crack, and grow your business, then we just created an indispensability, it is irreplaceable. That's our whole mission as a company. We're really excited. Jason: Very cool. Do we talk about pricing? What is it going to cost? Typically, I know that the people listening, that's the big question. They're like, "Can I afford this? Would this make sense for me?" Most of them are thinking, "I can barely afford the team I have now. Is this something I can do to get to that next level? Maybe this will help me bridge that gap." For example, in property management, what I call the first sandtrap is the property manager that's maybe broken about 50 doors, they broke that barrier there. They're between 50-100 doors, they can't break the 100-door barrier. They're operating as a solopreneur, they can't afford to hire their first team member. Their pricing is too low, they've taken on too many crappy properties to manage. They've got a lot of leaks. They're trying to figure out, "How do I get ahead?" They can change some of these other things but one of the things is, "I need another person." Maybe you can touch on that and give people an idea of what they should budget for and make this work. Daniel: Step one, three, or five, is 100% free. If you're listening right now and you're like, "I need support," or, "I need help," I just want you to jump on our website, myoutdesk.com. Just go and schedule a consultation, go through the process. Worst case scenario, we walk away as buds. We high five each other, say, "Congratulations," and we walk away. Best case scenario, we find a way to make it a win-win where you're getting time freedom back into your world and you're able to focus on growing and scaling your business. If you decide to move forward with us, I always like to say, "Look, it's $400 a week. It's $400 and some change." It's not a super expensive value proposition in our world. It's $1747 a month, all in—benefits, vacation time. Like an entire team supporting you. All the systems and processes that we’ve developed over the years will help you. This Go Remote guide we're going to give out is 12 pages and 5000 clients later worth of really good this-is-how-you-run-a-remote-team guide. We're going to give everything away for free because that's what we do. Including our time, energy, and effort. We were just on the news last week. We basically gave out consultations to help business leaders, C-suite people, and entrepreneurs figure out how to go remote. There's this bottleneck in California. Everybody got shelter in place. California went down, people were scrambling. We helped our insurance broker, we helped our attorneys. We were just helping people figure this out and give them some confidence in this. If you're listening right now and you think this might be an avenue, I would just encourage you to reach out because it costs you nothing but your time. You'll walk away with a lot of value. Jason: Another major issue right now is the cash crunch. Every business is feeling a cash crunch. Cash is just shortened, people are laying people off. Companies are furloughing people, their team members can collect their employment insurance. This is a painful time period. They're having to figure out how to cut expenses. Some businesses will not be the same after this. This might be another option if they're having to layoff staff and they're not able to fund or keep cash flow positive. The big challenge then is how do we keep some sort of level of service? How do we still deliver to our clients if we cannot afford that overhead anymore, and we need to lower the overhead. For those listening, that's what you need to do right now, to cash crunch, and solve that problem. If you can be healthy there, then you can get on some higher level problems to deal with like how do we keep the [...] economy or what not. You've got to solve the immediate cash crunch issue. That might be an SBA loan, that might be some of these things coming out. Maybe having a conversation with your team might help facilitate that. Daniel: We have a good friend of mine who owns a recruiting firm. One of her right hand women has a 1 year old and a 3 year old. They're all at home. She needs support now, not tomorrow, because she's contractually obligated to add value to her clients. If she doesn't, they have the opportunity to walk away and cancel. We're seeing a big uptake in people who are like, "Hey, we're having staffing issues right now. I'm not sure. We need support in X, Y, and Z.” We're happy to go through that process with somebody and say, "We can help you here," or, "No, this isn't what we specialize in but these people are your best option." There's a lot of companies like ours. There's lots of resources out there where the SBA thing, that's one of our free gifts in the Go Remote right now. When we give that away, we have a guide to getting the SBA disaster loan there. We have a guide for what's happening with the taxes right now. We have a guide for what you are saying to your clients right now in this weird, uncertain time. You can't say you want to buy or sell, this is an odd time to be a sales person but it's a great time to have conversations, ask questions, and connect people on a human to human basis. We put together a little guide for people in that space. We should give it away. What do you think, Jason? Jason: Let's do it. How do we get it? Daniel: All you have to do is text MOD—MyOutDesk—MOD to 31996. Anybody that wants it can go there. You'll get a link to our Go Remote stuff, all those free guides are down there. Here's the other thing, normally, you understand marketing, we date our content. Normally, we help people register and do a bunch of stuff so that we know who they are. Because of this disaster and because of everything that's happening in the world, when you text MOD to 31996, we're giving that stuff in a Word format. Meaning, you can take the Go Remote guide, put your logo on it, and give it away to your customers and clients. You can put your logo on our disaster recovery plan. We have a CEO mindset conversation. It's time to adapt your value proposition for your customers because we're in a new world right now. All that stuff is given away free because we're all in this together. The biggest cure for the economy right now is businesses and entrepreneurs staying productive. Jason: Right. I'm texting it right now so I can check it out. It's 31996 and I just do MOD. Daniel: That's right. I can't wait to see Jason from across my phone. It's going to be awesome. There we go. Boom! "MyOutDesk is your partner in going remote!" That's exactly it, brother. Right there. Here's the thing, we were on TV. I think it's an important message. I think we can wrap it up with your audience with this one thing. As entrepreneurs, as business leaders, it is our job to stay productive. It's our civic duty right now. Our economy is going to be challenged. The people at the bottom who have the normal middle class jobs, they're going to go through pain. As a leader in my community, my job is to help everybody I can stay as productive as possible. That's what's going to shift, that's what's going to change this world. That's why we put together a guide. That's why we're giving it up free. I hope it's valuable to you guys, your audience, and Jason—even you guys. Jason: Awesome. I just did a training just last week. Property management and property managers are going to be even more critical during this time than ever before. This is an opportunity for property managers to plant seeds for the future. I taught a concept called Care ROI. Right now may not be the time to focus on financial ROI but Care ROI will lead to that in the future as things shift. In turn, people will remember. Because emotions are heightened right now, anything that we do, and it actually takes a communication that we do as an entrepreneur, as a business owner, will be magnified times 10 in the mind of our customers or consumers because emotion is what creates memory. It's the difference between what you were doing the day before 9/11 or the day on 9/11. People's memories are very different because of the emotions attached. Right now, you have the opportunity to get a 10x ROI on positive things that you do out to your customers, to your audience, and your potential clients. That is massive.  Everyone listening, make sure you checkout the training that I did and leverage that Care ROI. I want to thank you for coming on and doing this even though it's crazy right now. I honor you for putting out this awesome guide to help people out. That's awesome. I look forward to having some more conversations with you in the future, Daniel. Daniel: Jason, thanks for your time, man. We really appreciate you today. Jason: I'll say one more thing, Everybody, businesses exist to solve a problem. That's why businesses exist. If the business is not solving a problem, it's taking people's money and not delivering results. There's no higher purpose or cause that entrepreneurs can do right now than to solve people's problems and to also make money. Making money helps you help the economy, it helps everybody. It helps you help your team. Find ways to help people solve their problems and to make money. I don't think there's anything wrong. Some people try to guilt and shame right now. They're the people that are just taking from the system, don't worry about them. The other thing I'll point out is if you're an entrepreneur, you don't like your business, you've been looking for your out. You're an entrepreneur, this is your perfect out. This is the perfect opportunity to choose out of your business and just not do it anymore. You have the perfect excuse. For the rest of us that are driven, that we’re passionate about what we do, if you are a property management entrepreneur, you're still wanting to grow, still wanting to be part of the community, check us out at doorgrowclub.com. Get inside our Facebook group community there. There's lots of helpful things going around, property management trying to solve problems for each other, and figure out what to do with things. Make sure to have a conversation with us at DoorGrow. Our goal right now is to plant those Care seeds, ROI as well, and help you out in any way that we can. Check us out at doorgrow.com. Daniel, thanks again for coming and hanging out. Daniel: It's been my pleasure. Jason: All right. We'll let you go. Everyone check out his website. It is myoutdesk.com. Make sure to do the text message thing. Until next time, everybody. To our mutual growth. Bye, everyone. You just listened to the DoorGrow Show. We are building a community of the savviest property management entrepreneurs on the planet, in the DoorGrow Club. Join your fellow DoorGrow Hackers at doorgrowclub.com. Listen, everyone is doing the same stuff. SEO, PPC, pay-per-lead, content, social, direct mail, and they still struggle to grow. At DoorGrow, we solve your biggest challenge in getting deals and growing your business. Find out more at doorgrow.com. Find any show notes or links from today’s episode on our blog at doorgrow.com. To get notified of future events and news, subscribe to our newsletter at doorgrow.com/subscribe. Until next time, take what you learn and start DoorGrow hacking your business and your life. Always use the JS Compressor to shrink before you publish a website.

0:00:05 Daniel: Welcome to Improving Intimacy, a podcast to help single and married Latter Day Saints strengthen their family connections and marriages. Daniel A. Burgess, is the host of Improving Intimacy. Daniel's a marriage and family therapist, father, husband and author. Here's Daniel on this episode of Improving Intimacy.0:00:29 Daniel: Welcome to another episode of Improving Intimacy. Today we have on the line, Anarie. And she will be sharing with us, her personal experiences around porn addiction in her relationship, and her experiences with addiction recovery treatment. Welcome to the show, Anarie.0:00:49 Anarie: Thanks Daniel.0:00:51 Daniel: Tell us a little bit about yourself. Give us some details, who are you, and tell us a little bit about your experience?0:01:00 Anarie: Hey. I am in my early 30s. I'm an active member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints. I have two kids, ages eight and five. I was married for 11 years. We were married in a temple. And we had our divorce finalized about four months ago, and separated about a year ago. So, that's kinda where I'm at.0:01:24 Daniel: This is pretty recent and fresh. And I appreciate you, even with that, coming on and sharing your experiences here. Give us a little background on the... You shared with me that, was it your husband or you, who is experiencing the issues around pornography? Let's start there.0:01:47 Anarie: It was my husband.0:01:48 Daniel: Your husband. And how long into the marriage or before the marriage did you know that there was a problem?0:01:55 Anarie: So, we dated for about nine months before we got married. A pretty short time. Looking back at the time, it seemed like a long time. But about two months into our dating, kind of the time when we went fairly exclusive, he told me that he had had struggles with pornography before his mission. He was a return missionary at the time we were dating. He told me he'd had some trouble with it before his mission, that he'd resolved it with his Bishop, at that time.0:02:25 Anarie: And that since then, that it had been no issue at all, that he had no struggle with it during his mission. And but since meeting me, felt extra strong and resisting but he wanted me to know that that had been a part of his past. So I took his word for it, that it was in the past and that it was several years since he'd had a struggle with it. At that time, we didn't really talk about it very much other than I basically said, "Hey I don't expect you to be perfect, I'm proud of you for resolving it." And it sort of went to rest at that time.0:03:11 Anarie: Then about nine months after we were married, is when I found out that he was still actively using pornography and masturbating without my knowledge. And I found that out, there were some things off in our marriage, in our sexual relationship right from the beginning. And sort of when I was pressing into some of that, that he admitted that he had viewed some. At that time he told me it was just recent and that he'd never do it again. He felt it wasn't something that he needed to talk to the Bishop about, and I was okay with that. I do feel like I had a trauma response, and I was very anxious to believe that it really was just once or twice and kinda put it away at that time.0:04:11 Daniel: What happened before? So you were at about two months into the relationship, you guys became serious. And from what I'm hearing, it's impressive. Some individuals don't even, if they feel like their porn use or whatever sin it may be, is in the past, sometimes they don't even mention it. But he was mentioning it to you at about two months in. To, I don't know, clear the air, or just keep you informed. Which seemed like a good thing. What was your experience at the time?0:04:45 Daniel: I really value what you said, you said, "You know it's in the past." But emotionally, what were you experiencing? Were you thinking, "Oh boy, this is gonna be a potential issue in the future."? Or did you feel like, "Oh, it's taken care of, this shouldn't be a problem, going forward."? What were you experiencing?0:05:03 Anarie: That's a great question. I was nervous about it. It was a little bit of a concern. And actually, about a month before we got married, my older sister said to me, "Make sure you've talked to him about pornography. Make sure you've asked him about pornography use." And I said. "Oh... "0:05:22 Daniel: She did that just randomly, or did she already know?0:05:25 Anarie: Yes.0:05:25 Daniel: Okay.0:05:26 Anarie: No, she didn't know. And I didn't tell her. I told her, "Yes, we've had the conversation." And she seemed to imply that if there was pornography use that I shouldn't be marrying him. I very much wanted to marry him, so I chose not to tell her that that was something that had been a problem in the past. So I was a little bit nervous about it.0:05:49 Daniel: Did that scare you?0:05:50 Anarie: I knew it could potentially be a problem in the future. Yeah.0:05:53 Daniel: When she said, "If there's any pornography, don't pursue the marriage." I think it sounds pretty clear why you didn't share more, is because he had issues...0:06:05 Anarie: And I think rather than not pursuing the marriage, he was encouraging to take it seriously.0:06:10 Daniel: Oh absolutely, right.0:06:12 Anarie: And to not just dismiss it. Which I probably dismissed it more than I should have.0:06:21 Daniel: You said, before we went back to the dating phase, you were starting to talk about how you're seeing some signs after he'd mentioned he had ongoing issues. Did I hear you correctly?0:06:33 Anarie: Yes, yeah.0:06:34 Daniel: What were those indicators, those red flags, so to speak?0:06:38 Anarie: We did not have a good sexual relationship right from the beginning of our marriage. We didn't have sex very often. There were just a lot of things that were really weird, that seemed like they weren't typical at all for what I'd heard initial marriage was supposed to be like. And...0:07:04 Daniel: For the sake of the listeners and their, for a variety of experiences, are you comfortable with maybe giving some of those specifics? What did you see as...0:07:14 Anarie: Oh, what I was expecting?0:07:15 Daniel: Yeah. What you were expecting, or what seemed off?0:07:18 Anarie: I think I was expecting honeymoon phase, where we have sex multiple times a week, multiple times a day. I felt, before we were married, there was lots of sexual tension and lots of sexual interest, and so in my mind, I thought that once we got married, we were gonna have sex a whole bunch, and it was gonna be really fantastic, and we were gonna want each other whole bunch. And that's not what happened, when we got married there actually was a significant decrease in any sort of sexual tension or sexual interest.0:07:56 Daniel: Even though it sounds like you were wanting more frequent sex at that time, and were you communicating that, or did it just dry up real quick?0:08:08 Anarie: Yes, I was communicating it. Through our whole marriage, we had what would be termed as a sexless marriage, sex fewer than 12 times a year. And I was the one who consistently was saying, "Hey, I want more. This isn't right. What's wrong?" Reading lots of books. I took on a lot of the blame for that, and I think because by taking on the blame myself, it was something that I could fix.0:08:42 Anarie: So I read lots of things about Good Girl Syndrome, about maybe why... 'Cause he would sort of say that I wasn't responding the way that I should, and so he didn't want to, or usually when I tried to talk to him about it, it just sort of... It was almost like we couldn't talk about it, it never went much of anywhere. I expressed a lot of like my things, but then there was never much response from him.0:09:11 Daniel: Traditionally, we think of the husband as the higher sex desire partner. Was that confusing to you to see he had a lower desire than you, and that the sex was infrequent? Was that part of the reason why you're taking on the blame?0:09:27 Anarie: It was very confusing to me, especially because prior to our marriage, I was the boundary keeper, he was always pushing the boundaries sexually, and I was the boundary keeper. So then it was really confusing when we got married, and suddenly it was different. I wasn't feeling that desire from him any more.0:09:51 Daniel: And what was he saying, what was the feedback? And I wanna respect the fact that he's not here, and the listeners are taking this at the value... From your perspective. With that being said, what information was he giving to you? Was he saying that he wasn't attracted to you, or what was the reasoning he was giving?0:10:15 Anarie: Not really any reason at all. After a while, as I read more books and stuff, we did have the high desire-low desire. And so he would say, "I guess I'm just a lower-desire person," or... But no, there was never much explanation. I would say things like, I did believe that he wanted me before marriage and after marriage, he didn't, so that must mean that I was a disappointment, so I was the problem, I think that was part of it too. And so a lot of that, I was the one saying, and he didn't really counter it. I mean, he would say, "No, that's not the case," but then he'd never tell me why or do anything to make me believe anything different, in terms of attractiveness and interest, if that makes sense?0:11:11 Daniel: So the absence of information left you with very little to go off of, and it was like you didn't feel that attraction towards you, and he wasn't refuting it, so what else were you left to believe? Interesting.0:11:24 Anarie: Yeah. And so I filled a lot of that void with my own ideas and my own beliefs, and read books to try to figure it out.0:11:34 Daniel: So from there, that was about, you said, nine months into the marriage. Then when did... You're doing all this research, when did it finally become clear that this was actually being as a result of his porn use or masturbation? How far into that discovery was it?0:11:54 Anarie: Okay, so I'm actually kind of embarrassed that it was so long, but it was years before I really got clear that it was pornography, that it was still an active issue. We went to a couple of therapists, we went to one at LDS Family Services, and this was probably four years into our marriage. And so that was fairly traumatic for me, 'cause it ended up feeling very much like... The therapist that we went to... We only went to one session, so... And it was my first therapy experience, but I felt very much like the male therapist and my male husband were looking at me, confirming that I was the problem and waiting for me to get on board or figure something out. I don't remember any discussion of pornography in that session.0:12:57 Daniel: What were they then saying, or what... How do I ask this? You felt it like you were the problem. What were they identifying as the problem, specifically?0:13:11 Anarie: My lack of trust in him. So that actually... And that's something that my husband would say to me a lot. I would ask him about porn, so during this time, I would ask him about it, and he would tell me, "No, I'm not using it. I haven't for years." And he would say, "You need to trust me." So even though he knew that he was not trustworthy, but that was what he was using. It's something that needed to be resolved, is I needed to forgive and I needed to move on and I needed to trust.0:13:47 Daniel: It was manipulative. He knew he wasn't being trustworthy, yet asking for your trust.0:13:53 Anarie: Right. Yeah, yeah. And I was overriding a lot of my gut instinct. I can see now, looking back, that I didn't feel safe with him, and I didn't trust him, and I wasn't able to connect with him because he wasn't being truthful and he wasn't being safe. But I was so unwilling at that time to look at that reality, to believe that he could be lying to my face, that I was taking it all on myself and trying to fix it that way.0:14:23 Daniel: Unfortunately. An unfortunate event, not only the betrayal from your husband, but coming across the therapist who, is what we call triangulating, siding essentially with one person in the experience. But it sound like you got rid of that person pretty quickly, you only had one session.0:14:44 Anarie: Part of it was because he was male and I specifically wanted a female therapist. I felt like it would, I would feel safer. So the second therapist we went to was female, and we went to her for several months. And that was interesting. The only conversation about pornography that we had there was, I remember she asked him directly once if he had current use of pornography. He said, "No."0:15:10 Anarie: So then, all of the conversations about how I couldn't get over his past pornography use and how that was interfering and during that time, we were assigned to have sex a certain number of times a week or a month and report back. And when it was an assignment, it happened, so he was willing to engage with me when it was an assignment, when we were reporting back to the therapist. And I think I felt hopeful, so maybe we just needed to get jump started. So that when we were no longer going to that therapist, it again, that essentially disappeared.0:15:48 Daniel: Again, I wanna respect the fact that he's not here, but that sounds a little... For the sake of the listener, he wasn't, am I following you right, he wasn't willing to have more sex with you when you were asking for it but when it was an assignment from the therapist, he would meet that assignment? Is that what you're saying?0:16:07 Anarie: Yes, yes, yeah.0:16:08 Daniel: What do you think was the difference? Do you think he was wanting to meet a commitment with the therapist, or impress the therapist, or why the difference there? Why was he willing to comply as an assignment?0:16:22 Anarie: I think it may have been partly that; I also think there's a rejection factor, that because it was assigned by the therapist, it was clearly mutually greed, that he was on board and I was on board, so there was no risk of him initiating something sexually and having me feel unsafe or not want it, or be hesitant. Does that makes sense?0:16:44 Daniel: Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And it seems to make sense, especially in the context of what we're talking about here. And what about your hurt; what about your trauma in this experience? Was the therapist mindful of your experiences?0:17:00 Anarie: No, I don't think she had much knowledge of betrayal trauma at all and I didn't have much vocabulary for that either. I don't know that I even knew what betrayal trauma was as a category or how it might be impacting me. Once I learned about betrayal trauma, then my response to everything made so much sense, my response over the years.0:17:24 Daniel: And you said how long were you seeing this particular therapist?0:17:29 Anarie: I think it was about four months. And it was right after the birth of... I think it was when my oldest was about a year old, so four years after our marriage, and we had a one-year-old baby at home.0:17:42 Daniel: And this, I think you're saying seemed to provide some sort of hope, because you're having more frequent sex, things seemed to be improving, but emotionally they weren't.0:17:54 Anarie: Yes. And I would often say to my husband; I felt like I was begging, "Please give me another chance. Can we try again? Can we do this more often?" And he would say, "Yes."0:18:07 Daniel: Wait, wait, begging for what? Sex, or just stay married?0:18:10 Anarie: For us to have sex, for us to have sex more often.0:18:13 Daniel: Oh, okay.0:18:15 Anarie: I talked to... One other thing that was going on here is I did talk to my OB-GYN about vaginismus, and got some information about a program for that.0:18:27 Daniel: So you were, you're experiencing painful sex also?0:18:29 Anarie: Yes. And I think largely due to no foreplay and no arousal. So I don't know that... The vaginismus program wasn't super helpful for me, because I think...0:18:47 Daniel: The foreplay was absent.0:18:49 Anarie: Yeah, there was no arousal happening at all, so of course it was painful and not awesome for me.0:18:57 Daniel: But even with the painful sex, you were still craving... Maybe craving isn't the right word, desiring more frequent sex from him.0:19:06 Anarie: Yes. I think a lot because I had been taught to believe that it was my responsibility as a wife to meet my husband's sexual needs and to fulfill my husband sexually. And I had been, I'd heard from parents and from church leaders that men who are happy with their wives don't look at porn. Which is a incredibly harmful message, that I had internalized and was accepting as part of truth. So I think part of it too was I knew that pornography had been an issue for him, and so one of my ways of helping him with that was gonna be to have sex with him, and then it wasn't working.0:19:49 Daniel: That's powerful.0:19:50 Anarie: I don't know if that makes sense, but that's...0:19:52 Daniel: It actually... You read... Yeah, well, I was about to ask that question, about how much of this was a preventative measure? You felt it was your responsibility as the wife in this eternal marriage to protect and provide a source for his outlet, to prevent him from pornography?0:20:12 Anarie: Yes.0:20:13 Daniel: You're desiring more sex, but there was also a strong element there of, "Okay, if I'm desirable enough to him he won't venture into this icky place," right?0:20:24 Anarie: Yeah, I felt like it was part of my responsibility as a good wife to have a good sexual relationship. I also think, my parents had also told me that sex is a beautiful thing. And once you're married, it's a beautiful part of life. So I do feel like I had a lot of positive affirmation for sex as well.0:20:42 Daniel: But you're like, "Where's the beauty?" [chuckle]0:20:45 Anarie: Yes, yeah. But I felt like I wanted that. And I wanted to make it happen, and I wasn't just gonna settle for like, "Oh, I guess sex is stupid and painful, and so good riddance." I wasn't content to just write it off as, "Okay, well, I guess we won't do this."0:21:03 Daniel: There are quite a few spouses out there that are in similar positions as you and, I don't have any statistics at all, but at least with my anecdotal experience and things that I've read, it seems like a lot of wives will go to a place of... They will actually stop having sex. But you were trying to make this beautiful. You were trying to achieve this thing that your parents were saying is good.0:21:34 Anarie: Yes.0:21:34 Daniel: And so that was amazing. That's, you weren't giving up on this hope that it could be something wonderful. So when did things, so to speak, hit the fan? When did you... Did he finally come out and say, "You know what, it's not you, it's been the pornography." What happened there, how did that occur?0:21:55 Anarie: Okay, so it was when my... Let's see, my five-year-old was a year old. Yeah, so our second child was a year old, and by that point, I felt like I had read all the books and talked to my doctor. Essentially, I felt like I had done everything to fix myself and to educate myself. I kinda felt like I'd hit a limit on what I could do on my end. And so I...0:22:32 Daniel: This was what, about five, six years in your marriage?0:22:35 Anarie: So this was about four years ago. So yeah, so it's seven years...0:22:40 Daniel: Seven years into the marriage.0:22:41 Anarie: Seven years into our marriage.0:22:42 Daniel: Wow, so this is...0:22:42 Anarie: So, yeah...0:22:43 Daniel: Wow, okay, good.0:22:46 Anarie: So I got to the point where I basically told him, "I am done with our marriage. I'm not willing to live in a marriage like this. It's not okay with me." By then, also, I had seen a lot more, I'd gotten a lot smarter about pornography usage. So I think a lot of my denial, believing that he was not actually engaging, had been broken down, because I actually started believing a lot of the studies, a lot of the information that was saying that pornography is an ongoing problem, that you don't just turn it off, like he was claiming he'd done. So basically I said, "I've done everything I can. Either you start talking and you start doing something, or I'm out of this marriage. I'm done."0:23:42 Anarie: And I really was to the point where I was willing to get divorced over this. That I didn't want to live in a emotionally disconnected sexless marriage. We were great. We've always been great business partners, good at coordinating logistical things. So the other aspects of what I believe should be part of marriage were completely non-existent. So I believe it was at that point when he realized that I was dead serious that... So by continuing to lie and hide his addiction, he was going to lose the marriage that he decided to start disclosing.0:24:18 Daniel: And can I ask you a personal question here? Is...0:24:22 Anarie: Yeah.0:24:23 Daniel: Were you at any time in that seven years trying to find clues, or go through his internet history or browser, and see if... Were you checking it?0:24:37 Anarie: No.0:24:37 Daniel: Wow, I'm impressed.0:24:39 Anarie: No, I didn't, I didn't play detective like that.0:24:42 Daniel: No, and forgive me, I'm not suggesting you should have, or anybody else should have. I'm just curious to what extent you were... You had a gut feeling, things weren't adding up, and you wanted to believe him, but there was something just off and...0:24:58 Anarie: Well, I am sort of amazed that I... Looking back, there was evidence. I did actually see some things that I should have realized were linked to current pornography usage. But I didn't. One other thing here that I wanna mention is that, about when we were going to that female therapist, you know, a few years into our marriage.0:25:21 Daniel: Right.0:25:23 Anarie: One of the things that came up was that he had never gone and talked to the Bishop after that initial disclosure nine months into our marriage. So I expressed that maybe if he went and talked to the Bishop to resolve that old issue with pornography nine months into our marriage, then I would be able to relax about it and trust him. So he went to our Bishop. And, I was not there so I don't know exactly what was said, but basically he disclosed that he'd viewed pornography within the first year of our marriage, and that it had been really devastating to me. So he told the Bishop some story, and about three weeks later, he was called as elders quorum president in our ward. Which I took to be a sign from God that he was clear.0:26:15 Daniel: Oh.0:26:16 Anarie: That the pornography issue was resolved. So I think that that was also part of why I refused to acknowledge that it was still actively happening all the time.0:26:28 Daniel: So you gave him this... Gosh, it almost sounds like an ultimatum. You were saying, "I'm done here. You gotta bring it forward," seven years into the marriage, what was his response?0:26:42 Anarie: He started disclosing some things. It was a staggering disclosure. He started admitting that he had... At first he just said that he had masturbated. So he'd been actively masturbating. And, which was upsetting to me but also relieving, "Oh, so that's where your sexual... You are a sexual person. That's where your sexual energy is going." And he said it at first that it was like old... He was using old mental images from his prior pornography use and stuff. So over the course of two or three weeks, he started disclosing more that, "Okay, there had been pornography use, but not in the last year."0:27:29 Anarie: Now that I know more about addiction or sexual addiction and how these disclosures generally happen, it really did fit the framework a lot, that he would disclose a little bit and see how I reacted, and then disclose a little bit more, or based on how I responded or what his shame was. And it was about three weeks after he initially started disclosing that he went to our current bishop. It was his initiation. He went to our current bishop and talked to his parents. And then, I talked to my parents and got in touch with a Lifestar therapist. And we were able to pretty quickly get into a sexual addiction recovery program.0:28:13 Daniel: So, now that you hear what's going on, you're able to get the right resources in there, at least different resources. So what was your experience? Was that... I asked these questions... I know you mentioned at the beginning you're divorced now, what was that experience like for you? Was it helpful?0:28:30 Anarie: It was very helpful, yes. I think we both felt a lot of relief that we had a problem that was identified, and that we could seek treatment for. So, there was a clear path for us to get on now. Whereas before it was like, "Something's wrong in our marriage, what's wrong? What's wrong? How do we fix this?" At least what was going on on my end. And with the pornography sexual addiction model, that gave, "Oh, there's a clear problem, there's a name for it, there's a name for what I'm experiencing, there's a treatment plan, there are other people that are experiencing this." So I feel like it immediately brought a sense of release and hope and safety that we would be able to figure this out.0:29:23 Daniel: For those who aren't familiar with Lifestar out in Utah, I think they're actually in a couple of different other states now but, for those who aren't familiar with addiction treatment, behavior treatment, what was that like? So you're saying now they're actually focusing on the pornography, and they're providing a treatment plan. Help the audience understand what does that mean? What does that look like?0:29:49 Anarie: Okay. So, the first part of Lifestar is called, Phase One, and it's a six-week education phase that couples attend together. If they want to. Sometimes individuals come 'cause their spouse won't come. But generally it's attended by couples, it's six weeks and basically it's kind of... I said educational 'cause the therapist presents information, and we had workbooks to do learning about addiction, learning about shame, some basic family of origin things. A little bit about drama triangle, attachment principles, and, during those we would sometimes break into smaller groups and share some answers from our workbooks. But for the most part, it was not a group therapy kind of experience.0:30:41 Anarie: Then after that six week, Phase One, then Phase Two starts, and that's when each person goes to their group therapy. So it's divided based on gender. So I had my group, and he had his group, and that was a group therapy, a weekly group therapy session. And we had additional workbooks and assignments that we would each work through in our individual groups; and their groups were led by a therapist. The Lifestar program is administered by different therapists, so it's like a franchise type of thing. And, the program that we did it in, the therapist really believes in not setting strict time parameters.0:31:29 Anarie: So, we were actually... Compared to some others where it's like phase two is six months and then you moved to the next phase. It was much more based on readiness and reaching a certain emotional place. So, compared to some other Lifestar group, I was in Lifestar for a total of three years before I completed it.0:31:50 Daniel: Is that...0:31:51 Anarie: And a lot of people do the Lifestar program in 18 months.0:31:54 Daniel: Yeah, you answered my question.0:31:54 Anarie: So I just wanna throw that out there, that's my experience, it's a little different from other Lifestar experiences. After about a year of... Or maybe 10 months of Phase Two, I graduated to Phase Three. And the reason for the different phases is just because it keeps people in the group that are in a similar stage of recovery, 'cause early recovery and fresh raw trauma looks and feels and sounds different than a little further down the recovery road. So, moving from Phase Two to Phase Three, it was more about...0:32:34 Anarie: There was a little change in focus, much less like raw trauma. And so, that's why there it was divided by phase. And in Phase Three, there were different assignments. One significant thing that's done... And they've changed it a little bit now, but there's a formal disclosure that happens during Phase Two, if both parties are willing, and it's a therapeutic disclosure. So the couple meet with the therapist, and it's a organized disclosure where the addict discloses to their spouse all of their behavior, behaviors in the addiction, and the spouse prepares questions in advance to ask.0:33:20 Anarie: So it's a chance to clear the air, start fresh, to ask questions in a safe environment, with a therapist you can hopefully watch for signs of lying or... And for me it was kind of healing because there had been a lot of unhealthy disclosure, it was helpful to have that formal disclosure where I had support, I knew it was coming, I had a therapist, I had friends. So in a way, that was able to heal some of the more traumatic earlier disclosures. So anyway, that was also...[overlapping conversation]0:33:52 Daniel: What a wonderful resource. So during that three years, you're taking it your own pace, working through your own trauma. So this is wonderful, you finally it sounds like now that you have your own cohort, so to speak, or a group of people that you can trust. You're able to now work through your trauma, your hurt, while he's dealing with his struggles. Did you see during that three-year period the relationship improve, or what was the result of attending these different phases?0:34:29 Anarie: Okay, so I do wanna throw in real quick that we also did individual therapy, we each had individual therapy sessions in the same group.0:34:35 Daniel: There at Lifestar, or somewhere separate?0:34:38 Anarie: We did it with the same therapist. So the therapist that led our lifestyle group was also the therapist we went to for our individual sessions, through most of it.0:34:49 Daniel: Excellent. So they understood what you were doing. And that's great. The reason why I point that out is, I think that's actually wonderful. In fact, studies show that if you only do group treatment, you don't have as high success rate. If you combine individual and group treatment, the success rate goes up. And the fact that your therapist was familiar with the program allowed that, I guess synergy, or you don't have to re-explain everything why you're doing what you're doing, or anything like that.0:35:22 Anarie: It integrated really well in taking place.0:35:24 Daniel: Exactly.0:35:25 Anarie: It was really helpful. We did have some couple sessions often on during that time mostly after disclosure and we did the couple sessions as well with the same therapist. When I was in phase three so in the third year of recovery I did go to an outside therapist for a period of time and that was really, really helpful for me. And looking back, I would say that I wish that we would have done some couples therapy with another therapist as well. I think because all of our treatment was coming from the same therapist there was some more... There were just some issues that came up with that but I think there might have been more safety if we had had some other therapist as well.0:36:08 Daniel: Would you point that out if you feel comfortable in doing that. I think that's actually a really important fact that people don't realize. There's a couple of elements here, and I'll share with you my thoughts, and then tell me what it was for you. I personally I'm very comfortable in doing individual and couples with the same people, there are limitations and there are exceptions there and that's usually discovered in the intake processes, is what we call it, and if I feel like it will be a benefit to both the individual and as a couple.0:36:43 Daniel: But there are cases where it's even if I'm comfortable with it, it's not a wise move or it's not a good way to support the couple because of the dynamics or whatever it is there and so a lot of clients will sometimes seek that from a therapist and there comes the other issues if a therapist is confident to navigate and to be able to separate the individual versus the couple experience there and sometimes bringing them together and so the individual seeking that kind of treatment both the individual and couples therapy, need to be aware of that in the risks and the benefits from that. What was your personal experience with that?0:37:27 Anarie: So, I feel that there were some very real benefit, because that therapist was aware, very aware of where each of us was individually. I think that that aided him in a lot of our sessions to... I don't know, I think he was aware of things that we didn't have to talk about 'cause he already knew but I think the biggest reason that I would say I wish we would have gone to someone else with kind of a safety thing.0:38:00 Anarie: So there were times that I felt like our therapist was on my husband's side, and there were times when my husband felt like the therapist was on my side. Whether or not that was accurate, I do think that... And maybe that would have happened with any therapist, but that came up. My perspective from me right now, and my therapist has acknowledged this, is that there was some manipulation, my husband manipulated the therapist. And that was part of why, when I went to an outside therapist, that was really helpful and empowering for me, because that other therapist had not been manipulated by my husband. So, I don't know.0:38:51 Daniel: That's... Yeah.0:38:54 Anarie: Because the therapists that we shared was so in it for multiple years and so he started giving blind spots and there are some things that he didn't see at the time that happens with any therapist.0:39:09 Daniel: Yeah, I think this is a very valid point, one that's kinda hard to communicate in a brief interview like this. And there's a lot of caveats here, I understand very well what you're talking about. I've even had to be very careful with working with couples that I'd known for a long time, or have been... Or I'm following up with, and knowing when and how to ask the right questions. It's very difficult when you have built that relationship, and you're not necessarily looking for all the signs of manipulation. And I'm gonna be cautious here. I'm tempted to say a good therapist can see those signs, but that means we would have to be perfect too.0:39:51 Anarie: Right. Yeah.0:39:52 Daniel: It's a very difficult experience.0:39:54 Anarie: Yeah. Well, and I think my main message to any of the listeners would be, I know it's really scary to get in with an initial therapist. At least it was for me. For me it was really scary to get into therapy, to build a relationship with a therapist, to be vulnerable about these things. So it was really scary to go find another therapist, another person, especially because I'd had some bad experiences...0:40:18 Daniel: Exactly.0:40:18 Anarie: With therapists before. I had some therapist trauma. But if you're feeling like you want another therapist, you want another perspective, a good therapist is not gonna be threatened by you wanting to go talk to somebody else for a period of time.0:40:31 Daniel: Thank you for saying that. Absolutely.0:40:34 Anarie: And you can get the support that you need to go talk to another therapist, or to go as a couple and try talking to another therapist.0:40:43 Daniel: I think you've brought up...0:40:44 Anarie: That you don't have to be still fiercely loyal to one therapist.0:40:50 Daniel: Absolutely, and I think that's a good way to approach it. First of all, trust your gut. You've had, whether there was actual manipulation going on or not, whether the therapist was siding with you or not, your experience is real and valid in that moment. There's a lot going on there's trauma, there's hurt, there's confusion. Trust your gut. First of all, trust your gut. And it is scary trying to get, especially if you've had bad experiences like you did with therapists, pose that question, "Do you mind if I look for another therapist for this?"0:41:25 Daniel: And their response I think will be a great indicator of maybe their motivation, or whether or not you should go get another therapist. If they get kind of awkward or embarrassed, or question, "Why would you do that?" Or if they even kind of stonewall in a way, "Well, we have all this history. How are you gonna communicate that history, and how will they follow our treatment plan?" That's a good indicator that you probably should go look a good therapist, like you said, will be totally supportive. Absolutely, go for it. This is your experience, do what you feel is important.0:42:07 Anarie: And I think sometimes, going to another therapist, I know this is sort of a tangent, but it could be motivated by wanting to run away from your current therapist. Maybe they're wanting you to look at some things you don't want to. So that could also be a factor but.0:42:22 Daniel: That is true. That's why it's hard. I think it's important to, kind of a tangent, but kind of not. This is all part of that experience in realizing what's happening here, especially when you have a partner who's manipulating you. Especially if there's been manipulation in the relationship, that therapist should be joining with you and building that trust, right?0:42:43 Anarie: Yeah. Yeah.0:42:46 Daniel: Yes there is a potential that you're running away, but you know what, you get to. You're having this experience and you need to have somebody who can trust you in this experience. And I've had people come back and say, "You know what? I was running away, and I realized that." And I'm putting it into my own words, but eventually he came out and says, "Thank you for letting me do that. I wouldn't have learned this if you prevented me or discouraged me from doing that."0:43:19 Anarie: Yeah.0:43:19 Daniel: And so, you're absolutely right. People are gonna run away when they don't like hearing what they're hearing but part of the experience is supporting that person in that experience, 'cause that's really what you're asking your husband to do, is, "This is scary. You should have been upfront with me from the beginning, regardless of my response. It's scary, I get it, this is scary for me, too. I need you to be open with me just like I should be open with you." And so, great, great. I think that was an important tangent. If we wanna call it a tangent. So...0:43:51 Anarie: One other thing I wanna...0:43:52 Daniel: Go for it.0:43:52 Anarie: Real quick, another part of my recovery over the last four years has been a 12 step program. The one that I have found most supportive was at a Lifeline group. So I did go to some of the LDS church's ARP program, and did not find them to be as supportive as I did the 12 step groups that are done through S.A Lifeline. [0:44:23] ____.0:44:24 Daniel: Oh, no, I think that's important. And if you could boil it down to one or two things. Why was it not as supportive...0:44:32 Anarie: Okay, so I wanna say at first ARP was wonderful, right at first, I'm super grateful that there was a place to go immediately, and that there was a place within a gospel context and within a gospel framework. So I did attend ARP continuously for about six months, and I was grateful for it. It met a need at the time. The biggest thing that I felt was not supportive about ARP, was actually the way that it was structured, that it was, it is missionaries that lead the ARP group, and a lot of them are not sufficiently educated on the topic on what they're dealing with.0:45:10 Daniel: Yeah.0:45:10 Anarie: And a lot of them spent a lot of time sharing. The missionaries would spend time sharing and teaching and lecturing things that were not actually helpful, were inadvertently shaming, and created a lack of safety. Another thing that I saw happen in the ARP group, in recovery there's a real need to give permission for emotion, and for letting your experience be what it is, and for having that experience be validated. And within the context of ARP, often it felt like there were certain emotions that were okay to have, and there certain emotions that were not okay.0:45:53 Anarie: Or that... And boundaries are important in any group, but I felt like there was not adequate space in ARP for anger. I felt like there was a real jump to forgiveness and share positive things and share faith things, faith-promoting things. And there's a place for that, but when you're down on the ground in, especially the immediate aftermath of trauma, there's so much anger and there's so much hurt. And there's, it rocks you spiritually.0:46:25 Anarie: I've gone through times where I don't even believe in God. I feel like, I know my betrayal that I experienced, it ran deep, a lot of it impacted my relationship with God. So there were times when I felt like I couldn't believe in God the way that that group was wanting me to believe in God. So for me it kind of increased the shame.0:46:47 Daniel: That is so...0:46:48 Anarie: Some of my shame experience there. Compared to the S.A Lifeline, where it's more general language, you talk about a higher power. And there I felt so much permission in that group to be wherever I was at, without feeling like I needed to show only the nicer part, or to be immediately jumping to the right way of saying things. If that makes sense?0:47:10 Daniel: I really appreciate you sharing that, about ARP. I think it's a great resource that is offered. I also agree that it's not for everyone, and I will say it's not for most people. I'm gonna say that very carefully for the very reason you've just mentioned. Untrained volunteers who are doing their best but not aware of how a lack of safety is created by reverting to forgiveness versus allowing that anger to be present and understanding how that can be healing in a group of people with a common experience.0:47:55 Anarie: Yeah.0:47:56 Daniel: Thank you so much. I don't wanna come across as criticizing ARP, I think it's a resource, but I think it's just that, a resource.0:48:06 Anarie: Yes, and I was incredibly grateful that it was there for me at the time, and by going there and talking to some of the people in the group, that's how I learned about some of these other resources as well. And I think that the experience in an ARP group it can be heavily dependent on who the missionaries are, and who else is there in the group.0:48:27 Daniel: Absolutely. So let's come... Thank you, I think that was very important. Let's come back around to... You have so much good information, I love it, I absolutely love it, but I'm trying to remember if we actually answered the question. In that three years of going to Lifestar, and these other various treatments, did we see progress in the relationship? What was a result of that?0:48:51 Anarie: Okay, so in terms of our relationship, we did not really, we were not very successful at connecting emotionally, through the three years. At different times we did. And I'm not entirely sure why. I felt like I made lots of individual progress, lots of individual healing and growth. And relationships with family, I saw relationships with my family members and with my friends, radically transforming and changing.0:49:38 Anarie: Within my marriage though, and my relationship with my husband, I was not seeing and experiencing much fundamental change. We were not connecting sexually, we were not connecting emotionally, really, through that process. We were supportive of each other in our individual journeys, but sort of in the same old like logistical business partner-y kind of way that it had been before.0:50:15 Daniel: So you don't want... You don't want a eternal business relationship, you want an eternal marriage.0:50:22 Anarie: Right.0:50:22 Daniel: So...0:50:23 Anarie: And I was... He might say The reason we didn't have a sexual relationship was because of my boundaries, and I would say, "Well my boundaries were where they were because there was still no emotional safety." I wasn't feeling... I didn't have trust restored, in like, I believe his disclosure was honest. I think I do.0:50:54 Daniel: You mean the disclosure in Phase One, or Phase Two?0:50:57 Anarie: The formal disclosure.0:51:00 Daniel: Okay.0:51:00 Anarie: Yeah, and I appreciated him sharing that. And immediately after there was some connection. He supposedly was able to achieve sobriety really early in the program. So a lot of times during the process of Lifestar, there's opportunity to work on conversation about experiences of pornography and slips, and disclosing that and working through that. And because he was so immediately sober, we didn't have much of that. So, I don't know.0:51:34 Daniel: So Tell me a little bit more about that. I think that's important for the audience to hear, now quite a few episodes are available with my podcast. What is sobriety when we talk about sobriety? And it may sound like a stupid question, and you may be familiar with the way I've tried to define it, and explain what is pornography. So how did they measure that for the sake of the listener Sometimes the definition around pornography could be anything that could potentially lead to something more severe, for example, maybe looking at in a lingerie or Instagram or something like that. So how was... Did Lifestar create some sort of definition, or was this an agreed-upon sobriety? How did that get decided and navigated?0:52:25 Anarie: So, for us in Lifestar there, I think there was a certain expectation in the group of what sobriety is, which is not actively seeking out pornographic images or sexual stimulation, things that with... Because with the addiction model the addicts are turning to that as a way to medicate their feelings, and so it was a... They weren't sober if they actively went after something that would give them their sexual hits. So if they were searching for pornographic images, or...0:53:07 Daniel: Of any kind?0:53:08 Anarie: Of any kind. Or... I believe a lot of people in my husband's group, and I think in 12 steps as well, sort of had a 10-second fantasy rule, that if they engaged in fantasy for more than 10 seconds then that was considered a slip.0:53:31 Daniel: Okay.0:53:33 Anarie: Or they needed to share that with their stuff.0:53:36 Daniel: That's a pretty short, short window in reality.0:53:40 Anarie: Yeah, yeah, yeah.0:53:40 Daniel: But I actually like that concept because it's actually encouraging self-awareness. You're not penalized or you're not viewed, whether by your group yourself or whomever, as back to zero again because, oh, my goodness, my mind went into an automatic thought process, and now I have to... It seems impossible, but that self-awareness or that time allows you to become more, "Oh, my goodness, that's what's happening. Okay, I still have time to recover." And not have to count that as, "Oh, excellent, great." So he was basing sobriety, supposedly off of that.0:54:22 Anarie: Masturbation as well. No masturbation, no self-stimulation.0:54:26 Daniel: Got it.0:54:28 Anarie: But really, so much of it was about the lying. So no... And with my experience with my friends on the betrayal side of it, so much of it was about the lying and the hiding. So yes, it would hurt if there was a slip, but it in a way, it was almost healing to have those slips shared, 'cause then we were being let into that world, and we were a part of it.0:54:58 Daniel: So this is what's... What's really interesting to me, and not a criticism, 'cause I... Well, at least I like to think I understand the human behavior side of it, but now you've gotten at least, you're past phase one, into phase two, the disclosure has been made, you've had a ton of psychoeducation about what these patterns are like, and now creating this environment of trust where he can disclose to you. And you're actually finding healing from it. It feels, "Oh my goodness. You're open with me." Why would he hold that back? If you've made this success... Again, I know I'm asking you to kinda interpret from his experience.0:55:39 Anarie: Yeah, I'm not sure.0:55:41 Daniel: Okay.0:55:41 Anarie: I have wondered if shame... Just using the sexual addiction model, as like these behaviors are bad, coming from that background of these are bad and shameful, by disclosing, it's, I'm showing you again that I'm shameful.0:56:03 Daniel: For those who keep hearing the phrase, "sex addiction model", just to provide a little bit more clarity here, there are different theoretical approaches to treating sexual behavior. And one of them is what is being referred to here as this sex addiction model, which is places like Lifestar and other organizations, believe in treating this behavior. And you're bringing up an interesting point here, is even though the sex addiction model was very enlightening to you, it helped you as an individual. You made a comment about how it might have been reinforcing the shame. Is that what I heard?0:56:44 Anarie: Yeah. Yeah, I'm not sure if it was ideal scenario for him.0:56:51 Daniel: Can you say more about that?0:56:55 Anarie: Just because I feel like all through the recovery there was too much fear around it. Even if it was trying to be normalized, and other people struggle with this, I still feel like there was not an acknowledgement of how normal pornography use is. And I feel like there was still a lot of fear around it, and a lot of labeling of it as being bad and wrong, and...0:57:37 Daniel: So it...0:57:37 Anarie: It itself was still demonized a lot. Even if there was work done to navigate shame, like education about what role it's serving, and choosing more appropriate ways to meet some of those needs, it was still coming from this premise of, the pornography and the masturbation in and of itself is bad and wrong and... Yeah.0:58:11 Daniel: Yeah, well that makes sense. So, what I think I'm hearing here is, even though you've had this psycho-education, you're having this great support network, you're getting the resources you need for both of you and your relationship, there's a possibility that same treatment method was also reinforcing more fear. And so, even though he knew he could reveal to you, and that could be an opportunity for success and recovery, acknowledging that you slipped up again, you are now taking on all these...0:58:46 Anarie: Yeah, it still made him look like the bad guy.0:58:48 Daniel: Very much so. Again, not minimizing the seriousness of it, or giving him an excuse here, but the reality is, is when we demonize the use we then become and identify with that demon, so to speak. Right?0:59:05 Anarie: Yeah.0:59:05 Daniel: And so being able to acknowledge that even though you know you've done it, wow, that could really feed into, not only his fear, but your fear. What does it mean? You did this again. Who are you? Is that what I'm hearing?0:59:18 Anarie: Yeah, yeah. There in... I quite often heard it like Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. There's the addict self and the true self. And I think there's some truth to that, and I also think it's problematic and was harmful, for both of us, to turn it into a Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde type of scenario. Because I believe it's more integrated.0:59:45 Daniel: This is an experience that I hear so many have, where they finally get the... I thought it was beautiful the way you described it, is they provided resources and information that resonated with you perfectly, things made sense. And your personal journey, you felt like you were getting the right support, the right help, he was being held responsible in the right way to divulge his information and his struggles. While you have this great resource, you're also seeing how it was problematic. What is...1:00:22 Anarie: Yeah, look... Oh sorry, go ahead.1:00:24 Daniel: No, absolutely, go ahead.1:00:26 Anarie: I was just gonna say, looking back there, we're dealing with a sexual issue, pornography, his masturbation, sexual addiction, but there was not much information given in our program about healthy sexuality...1:00:42 Daniel: Bingo.1:00:42 Anarie: About normal sexual development. And I know normal's a relative term, but human sexual development, there was not much information about that. Even with disclosure, hearing about a lot of the forms of acting out that he used, I still, during my time in recovery, there was so much fear that there was never really any normalization of some of those kinds of behaviors. So I would hear that he'd done this type of pornography that, to me, was extra scary and extra bad. And there was never any space to put that in a less terrifying way.1:01:30 Daniel: I think that's huge, and I think that's a thing that's missed in all treatment. Well, not all treatment, but a majority of treatment. Even in those clinics that are, like Lifestar, who are phenomenal at what they do, we focus on what not to do, right? But we don't actually explore and understand from a expert point of view, of what healthy sexual behavior looks like. We have these assumptions, but those assumptions aren't necessarily true, or need further expanding on.1:02:06 Daniel: But I also, what you said there was, the type of pornography, and there's huge misunderstandings around this. Pop-psychology, a lot of the predominant resources out there teach this idea that it's escalative behavior, and that is... There's very, very little support for that, in that somebody who's looking up maybe bondage type of pornography, or something very serious, or is perceived as something more serious than another, then that creates this whole new treatment model or severity around the person. Or there's something more sickening about the person, which is, again, problematic and not supported in treatment or in science. But you started to notice that.1:02:54 Anarie: Yeah. I feel like I needed to have my experience validated, so I was coming at it from a place of a lot of fear.1:03:03 Daniel: Of course.1:03:03 Anarie: In fact, it was really scary for me to listen to his disclosure. I had never watched a rated R movie myself at that time, and so to learn about these sexual behaviors and these kinds of pornography, that was a really scary thing for me, to have to learn about those things. And it was helpful for me to have others validate how scary and how much fear there was in that. At the same time, I feel like there could have been... I could have been validated in my fearful approach to it, and a more balanced view could have also been presented a little bit sooner, so my narrative could have been validated and some reframes could have been offered more.1:03:51 Daniel: So what would you recommend to somebody who's in your position, situation rather, and they're struggling with a similar behavior, their spouse is hiding, and you're seeking treatment? How would you... I guess what I'm asking is, What would you do different?1:04:11 Anarie: Or what would I do the same? What would I...1:04:13 Daniel: Oh yeah, fair, fair.1:04:14 Anarie: Recommend for someone in that place?1:04:16 Daniel: Yes.1:04:17 Anarie: For me, getting support from others and moving out of isolation, is so so scary. So wherever you can start to get that support from. For me, looking back, I have felt some like, "Oh, maybe we should have gone to a different program. Maybe if we would have found a better therapist." Or, "I should have not gone to ARP first, I should have... " It's really easy to get into some of that. But any support, any... Reach out to the people around you, look for the best resources that applaud any steps out of isolation, any effort to express your experience and get support. And permission to experience what you're experiencing, to feel what you're feeling.1:05:09 Anarie: However you're coming at it from, whatever you feel about it, those things are valid, and there's a place for it, and you don't need to feel ashamed for the way that you're experiencing it. So you... I heard a lot of messages about how betrayed spouses need to respond right to disclosure. So, if you freak out, they're not gonna share with you in the future. But... And there's truth to that. At the same time, when you're in fresh trauma it makes sense that you freak out and that you can't hold space for yourself the way that you might be able to further down the road. So, I guess just permission to be where you're at when you're there.1:05:57 Daniel: I really appreciate that insight right there. I will often... If we discover that disclosure has to be made, I can't tell you how valuable it is to, depending on which partner it is, in this case let's say the husband, pulling them aside, meeting with them individually and coaching them through this. "Look, it's gonna be rough. You don't try to manage your wife's feelings and emotions at all. Let her experience it. This is about revealing, building trust, and she gets to have her emotions just like you do. In this experience, allow her to be. In fact, encourage it." But that's, I think... Oh, that's a big one. Thank you for bringing that up.1:06:47 Anarie: And that is something I felt Lifestar did a really good job, of giving space for the betrayed partner to have their experience, for their trauma to be validated. And to expect that the addicted spouse needed to find support elsewhere, and that the betrayed person can't... You want to come together as a couple to address the issue together, but for a time maybe you can't do that. You need outside support, outside people. So...1:07:23 Daniel: Absolutely, so you now are divorced. It's been how long since the separation?1:07:27 Anarie: Four months since it was finalized, a year since we separated.1:07:29 Daniel: Four months. Alright. And do you feel like you're in a better place now?1:07:34 Anarie: I do, yeah.1:07:37 Daniel: Well, Anarie...1:07:39 Anarie: And I'm hopeful that he is as well, and that he will be.1:07:46 Daniel: Well, it sounds like you're making some important decisions to move forward, and that healing is occurring. And I can't tell you how much I personally appreciate you coming on here and sharing your information with everyone else. I can't tell you...1:08:00 Anarie: Well, I hope that it can be helpful. There was so much... Shame thrives in believing that you're the only one. And for so long I believed that I was the only one, or one of only a few. And particularly the sexless nature of my marriage didn't match a lot of what I heard about other...1:08:21 Daniel: No.1:08:22 Anarie: Addicted people. And I think that was part of what was so distressing too, it seemed to not fit. And since recovery I've found, no there are others who are experiencing this dynamic of being married to someone who's acting out sexually while having a sexless marriage and sexless relationship. And so, for a long time I was even nervous to tell other people in my recovery circle about what kind of sexless marriage I'd had because often I was in a minority. So, for that reason I wanna share my story because I know now that I'm not the only person experiencing that kind of dynamic.1:09:03 Daniel: It's so much more common then people realize.1:09:04 Anarie: And when you... When you feel like it's just you, when you feel shame for your shameful experience, it's just so much more painful. So I know now that I'm not the only one experiencing that, so I wanna share that so that others can know as well, that this is part of the experience too.1:09:24 Daniel: I could assure you, the people listening right now are comforted by that comment. You did mention one other thing, before we go. I can't remember if we were personally talking about it offline or if it was at the beginning. You said one of the concerns, or... And maybe you have addressed it in a round about way. But one of the concerns you had about this treatment process, just the whole process I guess, was, yes, you got solutions, you got treatment plans for the porn and sexual behaviors, but some of the underlining issues weren't addressed.1:10:02 Anarie: Yes.1:10:02 Daniel: Do you mind talking about that for a second?1:10:04 Anarie: Yeah. So, in terms of our relationship and what was actually going on in our relationship, I feel like the pornography was a symptom of other things that were going on. So in spending a couple of years honing in specifically on pornography, and the pornography use, and regulating and learning about that, it took a couple of years before we started actually looking at more of our relationship dynamics, that were actually more of our problem. And it's linked, so it's not like... Okay.1:10:50 Anarie: But in a way I feel like the focus on the pornography use was able to feed... We almost... It started to become a part of some of our underlying issues. We almost used it in old unhealthy ways. So, in terms of what the underlying issue was, there was some control and power manipulation, lying, unhealthy shame management, enmeshment, differentiation issues, sexual shame, repressed sexuality. Some of those things... We spent so much time on the regulating sobriety and porn behaviors that by the time we started actually getting to the real meat of stuff, it took a couple of years.1:11:48 Daniel: Which is absolutely a case I see quite frequently here. We may resolve the pornography, the addictive behaviors, but when that's gone what happens is exactly what you described. You're going to this, you're healing, but where's the connection? The absence of porn and undesired sexual behaviors does not create connection.1:12:16 Anarie: Yes, yes, yes. [chuckle]1:12:18 Daniel: Right?1:12:19 Anarie: Yeah. Yep.1:12:19 Daniel: And so, this is an element that is always... Again, I'm using always. Not always the case. Is too often overlooked, because we do, we make the symptom, which is the pornography, the problem. And we think if we get rid of the problem, which is actually just the symptom... There's clearly something else going on here with the constant manipulation. And unfortunately, the way... The addiction model, or pop psychology, whatever we wanna refer to it or blame it on, tells us that manipulation is a result from the escalating behavior. Well, we're finding that it's actually an underlying issue that's unresolved and not treated. And then the pornography, in a sense, becomes yet another form of manipulation to cover that real problem. It's this benign tumor that just is hidden somewhere we can't find it. Right?1:13:17 Anarie: Yes. And pornography addiction recovery can, in a sense, end up being used as a tool of manipulation.1:13:25 Daniel: Yes.1:13:25 Anarie: And, there was something I was gonna say. I can't remember.1:13:33 Daniel: Now, if it comes back to you feel free to jump in.1:13:36 Anarie: Sorry. [chuckle]1:13:36 Daniel: But I think that you hit... I think one of the biggest takeaways from this is not to neglect the... We focus too often on getting rid of something. I phrase it... You went to treatment at the beginning, no one talked about pornography, and then you went to Lifestar where pornography was finally talked about, but yet connection wasn't addressed. If there was some way that we can address both the undesired behavior and the desired behavior... And in my practice, I always say, "Let's focus on the desired outcome. What is the desired outcome? Okay, you're using pornography right now, the desired outcome isn't just to stop that.1:14:20 Daniel: The desired outcome is, "I wanna feel closer to you, I wanna feel connection. Okay, even if you saw some pornography today, I still wanna come home and have a meaningful discussion with you, I wanna have meaningful sex, I wanna feel close to you. If that means getting rid of the pornography, great. If it means we need to understand how to communicate better, let's do that too." And it sounds like that was an element that was missed, at least in your experience.1:14:52 Anarie: Yeah, and it was talked about, and I... Connection, the opposite of addiction is not sobriety, it's connection. That's a phrase that I heard a lot in recovery. So there was a lot of talk about connection.1:15:06 Daniel: Yeah, but we're discovering, it sounds like you did too... And forgive me, I'm not trying to put words in your mouth at all. Is the absence of the addiction doesn't re-result in connection.1:15:18 Anarie: Yes, yeah, yeah.1:15:19 Daniel: So we talk about it a lot, but we don't actually, I think, create a treatment plan around that and try to improve it.1:15:27 Anarie: Yeah. And I do wanna say that I am grateful that pornography... Because pornography was labelled as an issue, as a problematic thing, it gave a doorway into some therapy and some information that was incredibly helpful. So I am grateful that there was this issue and there are these programs that help, that were able to catch me and help me get directed into some real therapeutic help.1:16:00 Daniel: Absolutely. Well, you've given us so, so much to think about here. And I know it may sound redundant, but I'm gonna ask again, any final thoughts or things you wanna leave us with?1:16:13 Anarie: I do wanna share just some of the things beyond betrayal trauma that I needed to learn, and that were an important part of my recovery, and my process of learning how to be a healthy individual in a healthier relationship. Because there were definitely

Daniel 12 What’s the in final word in Daniel? There's a future for all who live faithful. God is real. And God loves to reward. Taught By Jose Zayas

Daniel and Andrew talk about different ways of relating to the ancestors. Especially getting into how to help the ancestors evolve and make our lives better in the process. They also get into their relatinoships to the orisha and ways of thinking about practicing a tradition that you were not born into.  Daniel can be found through his site here. His events are there too.  Daniel's talk on practicing other peopels traditions is here.  Andrew's upcoming Ancestral Magick Course can be found here.  Think about how much you've enjoyed the podcast and how many episodes you listened to, and consider if it is time to support the Patreon You can do so here. If you want more of this in your life you can subscribe by RSS , iTunes, Stitcher, or email. Thanks for joining the conversation. Please share the podcast to help us grow and change the world.  Andrew You can book time with Andrew through his site here.  Transcription ANDREW: Welcome to the Hermit's Lamp podcast. I'm hanging out today with Daniel Foor, and Daniel is a Ifá priest and has done all sorts of wonderful work along the lines of ancestral healing. And Ancestral Medicine is the name of the book that he has out. And he and I have a lot of similarities in practices and the kinds of things we're interested in, so, you know, lots of people have been suggesting I have him on for a while, and, and well, today's the day! So, welcome, Daniel! Thanks for being here!  DANIEL: Thanks so much. It's good to be here.  ANDREW: There are people who might not know who you are. Who are you? What are you about?  DANIEL: Yeah, well, I ... to locate myself a bit, I'm a 40-year-old, white, cis-gendered American living in western North Carolina. From Ohio, originally, but traveled a good amount, but live in the States, and have a PhD in psychology. I'm a licensed therapist, so I have a background in mental health.  But mostly I'm a ritualist, and I've been training with different kinds of teachers and traditions for over 20 years now, and started out with more shamanic pagan background with magical things, and migrated into involvement with Islam, and Sufism, Buddhist practice, and then circled back to involvement with indigenous systems and earth-honoring traditions. And in the last decade have been immersed in west African Ifá practice, lineages in the Americas and also in west Africa, and so I'm an initiate of Ifa, Obatala, and Oshun, and Egungun priesthood, [inaudible], and in the lineage of Oluwo Falolu Adesanya Awoyade, Ode Remo, in Ogun State. So I've been four times to Nigeria, and that's one influence on my practice.  But mostly I teach and guide non-dogmatic, inclusive, animist ancestor-focused ritual practice. The last two years or so I have shifted to training others, which has been really satisfying after years of doing more public-facing ritual, I'm now ... I do some of that but mostly I'm training other people in how to guide the work. And I have developed a specialization in repair work with blood lineage ancestors. But I also operate from a broader animist or earth-honoring framework that isn't limited to just that. So. And I'm a dad, I'm a, you know, married, and love the earth here, and live in the American South, which is kind of strange, but also okay. Yeah.  ANDREW: Mm-hmm. That's awesome.  DANIEL: Yeah. ANDREW: So, I mean, I guess, my first question for you is, when did you start feeling the ancestral stuff calling you?  DANIEL: Well, my own lineages are German, English, Irish, early settler colonialist to North America, and so I didn't inherit any religious or spiritual framework or culture that was of value to me in any conscious way as a young person. And so, my first teachers in shamanic practice, Bekki and Crow with the Church of Earth Healing, in the late 90s, nudged me to get to know my ancestors ritually. And it was really impactful, actually. I was surprised by it. I'd never thought about them really before that. And I ended up assisting with an older ancestral guide or teacher, my father's father who had taken his own life, and just showing up for that work, which was powerful.  And it was a catalyst for me to research, do a lot of depth genealogy research about my own family history, and that dovetailed in with my training as a therapist, so I was in a period of connecting a lot of dots and valuing my own heritage, and, in a grounding way ... Not in like some awkward, go white people way, but in a way that helped me to reclaim what is beautiful about European, you know, northern western European cultures, and ... including earlier pre-Roman, pre-Christian magics and lineages. And so, I ran with that ritually. And have guided 120 maybe, multi-day, ancestor healing intensives since 2005 in that work, so I spent about six or seven years getting grounded with all of it myself. Then started to help other people with it. And it just organically developed as a specialization. And I tend to be a little obsessive about a thing, when I'm into it. I'll do that like crazy, until it's ... yeah.  ANDREW: Yeah, I think ... I mean, I think it's interesting how ... Cause I do a lot of ancestral work as well, you know ... DANIEL: Mm-hmm. ANDREW: I do ancestral divination work and, you know, ancestral sort of healing and lineage healing and so on.  DANIEL: Mm-hmm. ANDREW: You know, I've been teaching it with my friend Carrie, we have this, we developed this system of people working with charm casting as a tool ... DANIEL: Mm-hmm.  ANDREW: To get into that work. And, you know, we've been traveling around and teaching it everywhere. We were in China last year teaching it, and stuff like that, with people ... DANIEL: Mm-hmm.  ANDREW: You know, I think that the thing that sort of stands out in your story, that I think stands out everywhere, is so often, like the last little bit, you know, the last few generations, it's kind of wonky, or like there's not a lot, there's not a lot of connection or living connection. Even, you know, it wasn't until last year that I found out that my grandmother read tea leaves when she was alive ... DANIEL: Mm-hmm. ANDREW: And she's been gone for like 12 years, and it just never came up before. She never talked about it, and my mom just never brought it up. Not for any particular reason but it just, it just was never a thing. Even though that's the same grandmother who bought me a tarot deck when I was like 13, long ago.  DANIEL: Right. Of course she did.  ANDREW: But I would have talked about it, right? But how ... Often when you kind of go back, you know, a few generations or somewhere a bit deeper, you know, there are these sort of more ... evolved isn't the word that I super like, but you know, like, more grounded, more helpful, you know, ancestors with a, with a sort of more capacity to be really guides and assist you in this process, right?  DANIEL: Yeah, often. It ... Where those cut-offs happen varies so widely from one demographic or even one individual to another, and I know in a lot of my own lineages, it's been over 1,000 years since anyone during life had a culturally reinforced and supported framework for honoring the ancestors. And so the older ones, the ones even before that, are quite available. So it's not ... I mean I could ... reinforce some kind of orphan victim culturally-damaged white person narrative, but it's not that sexy or useful, and so at a certain point, you're just like, well, you pick up the pieces where they're at, and get the fire going again.  ANDREW: Mm-hmm. DANIEL: And the older ancestors are happy to do that. And so even if someone comes from a really recently and before that culturally fragmented set of lineages, the ancestors are still available, the older ones, and the main repair orientation or practice that I encourage people to try on at first is to partner with those older ancestors and with them, assist any of the dead who are not yet well, any of the ones between those older ones and the present, who are not yet really well-seated, really vibrant. Help them to become well-seated ancestors. So the dead change. It's very important for us living folks to not fix them in some static condition.  ANDREW: Mm-hmm. DANIEL: Just cause people were a pain in the ass or really, you know, culturally in the weeds during life doesn't mean they're doomed to that condition forever. They can really change and become, not only, like, not ghosty, but they can become dynamic, engaged, useful allies for cultural healing work in the present.  ANDREW: Mm-hmm. DANIEL: So. ANDREW: Yeah, I think it's, you know, it's a misconception that a lot of people have that they automatically change on crossing over. DANIEL: Oh, sure, yeah, that's different. (laughing) ANDREW: And then the other side of that is, you know, they can change, but it might take a bunch of work, even if they did change, right?  DANIEL: Yeah, totally. Yeah, both, both are true. Yeah. The idea that just dying makes you wise and loving and kind is really hazardous actually, as a world view. So. ANDREW: Mm-hmm. DANIEL: Cause it'll lead to a view of ... I've seen it at times in pagan circles as well, where it's “Oh, the ancestors, ancestors are good, let's invoke them all. Okay, here are all the names of my ancestors, and the pictures, and let me light a candle and strongly invoke all of them.” ANDREW: Yeah. DANIEL: Well, I hope your invocation doesn't work. ANDREW: Yeah. DANIEL: Because if it does, you're going to get a mixed bag! Cause your people are, you know, if they're well, awesome, but if they're not yet well, and your invocation works, then what you have is some not yet well ghosty energy in your space.  ANDREW: For sure, right? And some of those spirits can be pretty tumultuous, you know, if they're ... DANIEL: Oh, no doubt. Yeah. ANDREW: [crosstalking 09:53] here. I have one grandfather that I continue to work with who, sort of, work on, let's put it [laughing].  DANIEL: Right.  ANDREW: It's been a long time and they're still not ready to be, you know, front and center in anything, cause they just, so caught up in so much deep, deep trauma in their own life and in their generations before them, and, you know. DANIEL: One of, one of the things that I don't, I won't say it's unique to how I approach it, but it's emphasized in how I approach ancestor work, which isn't across the board, is I take a very lineage-based approach. Like I don't even really encourage, necessarily, relating with individual ancestors that much. ANDREW: Hmm. DANIEL: So in the case of someone, not to speak to your specific case necessarily, but let's say someone's grandmother is really quite entrenched in the unwell ghosty range of wellness. My strategy is to make sure that her mother and her mother and her mother and her mother and the lineage of women before them on back through time to the ancient weird witchy deity-like grandmothers, that that whole lineage is deeply well, and the repair happens from the older ones toward the present. And so, once you have the parent of the one who is quite troubled in a deeply well condition, and the whole lineage before them deeply well, as a group energy, asking them to intervene to address the rowdy ghosty grandparent tends to be ... It can ... Well, it can be more effective, simply because there's a re-anchoring of the rogue individuality in a bigger system, in a collective energy.  ANDREW: Mm-hmm. DANIEL: And there's a respect for seniority or hierarchy, by having that person's elders be the ones to round them up. ANDREW: Mm-hmm. DANIEL: So, so that's. I shared that because in the West, generally, I find that people tend to conceive of ancestor reverence primarily as a relating of one individual to another individual, and, and some of the lineage or group level aspects of it can get lost, or they're not as emphasized. And so I find that's an important nuance to include, and then another is, and we've spoken to it, is just the way in which one's ancestors are not at all just the remembered dead, the ones, the recent ones, but they include ... The vast majority of them are living before remembered names. And that's helpful for people who are like, my family are abusive trolls. I'm like, okay, I believe you, but I think what you mean to say is all the generations you know about, which is probably not more than two or three. ANDREW: Yeah. DANIEL: And so, it's like, you're at the ocean, at a windy, cloudy day, and you're saying, “Oh, the ocean is tumultuous,” well, I believe it is, right there at the beach. But the ocean's a big place, yeah. So expanding our frame for who we mean when we say ancestor is gonna be helpful too. ANDREW: Mm-hmm. For sure. Yeah, and there's lots of times when, you know, we'll make offerings or do work with all of those ancestors, right? With the Egun, right, with everybody? Right? DANIEL: Yeah.  ANDREW: You know? And in those ways and so on, right? Yeah, yeah, I mean it's interesting how ... It'd really be interesting to make sure that you're looking at those things. And some of my, some of my best ancestral allies have been gone, you know, three, four hundred years, right?  DANIEL: For sure. ANDREW: Or longer.  DANIEL: Yeah, totally, yeah. ANDREW: They arrive, and they're just like, “Yes! You're the beacon of light amongst all of these things, and let's radiate that out to everybody afterwards and anchor further and deeper,” right?  DANIEL: Yeah. For sure. ANDREW: Mm-hmm. So, when you're doing work with people, are you mostly focused on ... you know, because a lot of people come to ancestor work because they want to get messages and receive stuff and do ... DANIEL: Right. ANDREW: ...[inaudible at 13:59] kind of stuff, right? I mean, I think that that can be fruitful, too, I enjoy that kind of work as well, but that's not really what we're talking about here either, right? I mean not explicitly, right?  DANIEL: Yeah. If we say like, what's the point? It can ... There are a lot of different motivations that can drive someone to want to engage their ancestors. The most common one is, “I'm suffering, will this help?”  ANDREW: Mm-hmm. DANIEL: That's legit. Sometimes it will help indirectly. Sometimes it will help directly because the source of the suffering is unmetabolized intergenerational trouble that's directly connected to ancestral interference, and so sometimes it, you know, it can help in different ways.  Another motivator for the work is seeking life guidance, cause the ancestors have insight into our unique destiny, and can help us to move into closer alignment with that, you know, our unique instructions or soul level work in the world.  As you know, in Yoruba culture, we sometimes talk about the world as the marketplace and Orun or the spirit world as home, and, and so if you forget your shopping list, working with the ancestors can be like, “Let us show you, you said this, this, this, and this,” and be like, “Oh, yeah, okay, thanks,” and so that's helpful to not waste our lives.  And ancestors can be great for being a resource to parents or supporters in family, like they're especially good with all the family sphere, the domestic sphere, like being a responsible family human. And they're also good allies for cultural healing. A lot of the racism and colonialism and sexism and other kinds of cultural toxicity and garbage and bad capitalism that we're stewed in and trying to get out from underneath and help transform ... Those are ancestor, those are troubles created by the ancestors. Like, they're implicated in the trouble. And so they have, appropriately, a hand in resolving the trouble as well.  And so they're great allies, by whatever form, activism, cultural change, all that. And so I really think that working closely with one's ancestors helps cultural change-makers to up their game, so to speak. So that's another motivation.  And this is, I guess it's related to the one about destiny, but, inspired a bit from the Yoruba frameworks. The collective energy or wisdom of the ancestors is associated strongly with the Earth. Like the onile, the earth is like the calabash that holds the souls of the dead. And because the Earth is associated with accountability and, you know, moral authority, and is the witness through of all interactions, in that way also the ancestors carry that same quality of accountability. ANDREW: Mm-hmm. DANIEL: And I think whether or not people can consciously own it, some part of us craves accountability. Like we want to be seen and checked when needed. ANDREW: Mm-hmm. DANIEL: There's something really like ... our daughter almost made it to the top of the steps. Like, the door was open the other day. She's nine months old. But we caught her. It was good. It was way better than had we not held her in that moment.  ANDREW: Right. DANIEL: And there's a way in which that kind of love and connectivity is like, “Oh, I'm not alone in the universe.”  ANDREW: Mm-hmm. DANIEL: If I crawl to the top of the steps, someone will pick me up. So we want that, and the ancestors bring that, as well, when we live with them.  ANDREW: I think it's a, I think it's a thing that, especially, you know, in my experience, people, in Western culture, struggle with too, right? This sort of willingness to acknowledge an authority or an awareness or a position that's sort of above them in a way that they can allow in to say, “You know what, actually, we do know what's better for you in this moment.”  DANIEL: [laughing] Oh, yeah, it's- ANDREW: You what, my friends, you know, going down that road has nothing to do with your destiny, or what have you, right?  DANIEL: Oh, yeah! [laughing] ANDREW: Here's your fault in this mess that you're trying to put on this other person, right?  DANIEL: Oh, yeah, no, people, look, I'm a teacher, also, and so often it's great and fine, and sometimes people are idealizing in awkward ways, and like, oh, don't do that, don't do that. But, but just whatever, fine, it's fine, it tends to burn out and even out. And also sometimes people are really just not okay with anything resembling a power differential or a student teacher relationship.  ANDREW: Right. DANIEL: And it's ... It's tiring a little, as a teacher. Because there is a difference between telling someone just what to do in an authoritative way, and also saying, like, “Well, do you want to learn a thing? Because I know this skill. Like, what do you ... do you want to tell me how it goes, cause ... ?” So, so yeah, it is ... I think it's a function of power so often being abused, that people understandably have mistrust.  ANDREW: Yup!  DANIEL: Yeah. So I have compassion for it, and also the piece around hierarchy and authority is really, is challenging. In the coming months, some dear friends are going to Nigeria to do initiations and I was talking to them last night, and I was like, in the nicest possible way, “Really, your main job as the initiate is to obey.” ANDREW: Yes. DANIEL: Just to, like, the ritual is done to you, nobody really cares what you think about it. And it's totally fine.  ANDREW: Stand here, stand there, [crosstalking 19:59]. DANIEL: Right! Yeah, totally, sit down, drink it, sit, eat it, say thank you. Like ... ANDREW: Yeah.  DANIEL: Yeah. Like you're the thing being consecrated. Your input is not needed.  ANDREW: Yeah. DANIEL: Nothing personal. Next time you go back, then you can have an opinion.  ANDREW: Yeah. And even then-- DANIEL: And even then, so you get one small vote. [laughing] Yeah.  ANDREW: No, for sure. Yeah, let's see what people who ... I mean come for readings of all kinds, but you know, people who approach, you know, getting dillogun readings and stuff like that, and you know, the Orishas come through, and they're like, “Oh, you know what? Don't drink this year, don't, you know, whatever. Don't get tattooed. Don't, you know, no, no red beans for you.” They're like, “Well, what do you mean? I don't understand.” It's like, “Well...” [crosstalking 20:52] DANIEL: Obey! [laughing] ANDREW: What is the understanding? I mean, in a lot of that situation ... in some of those situations, the understanding is more obvious, right?  DANIEL: Right. ANDREW: I had a conversation with a person who'd say, “Well, it seems like you kind of have this kind of challenge, and this is kind of the thing that might counter that,” and they're like, “Okay, yeah, maybe.” But other times it's just energetic or on other levels that it's just like, you know, it's kind of the ... It's an equivalent of saying “Hey, carry this citrine with you for the next year, it's going to help your energy,” but it's in a different structure that people don't relate to in the same way, right?  DANIEL: For sure, yeah.  ANDREW: And then they're like, “But, but, I don't want to be told what to do!” I'm like, “What else are you gonna do?” DANIEL: You just paid me to do that.  ANDREW: Yeah, you asked, right?  DANIEL: [laughing] ANDREW: You didn't have to, I wouldn't worry about it ... DANIEL: But some part of us does, some part of us really, I think wants to be told what to do. And that could go awry, and I'm not saying it's an entirely healthy impulse, but there's something about accountability and structure and community and limits, that's actually really intimate. ANDREW: Yeah. DANIEL: And if you can't hear and accept “no,” your “yes” is meaningless.  ANDREW: Mm. DANIEL: And so there's something that's precious and sweet about protocol and tradition and about structure.  ANDREW: I also think that a lot of people don't really ... Faith is a really complicated and difficult thing for a lot of people too, you know?  DANIEL: Mm.  ANDREW: And especially when entering a new tradition, you know? And, and I think that part of what we're talking about here is also a matter of faith, right? What is your faith in the ancestors or the Orisha or whatever, and how, how do you sustain that faith through being deeply challenged by all that stuff?  DANIEL: Yeah, and for me, look, I was involved with different Orisha teachers in the States, American, for the most part, and ... it didn't work out that well, for the most part. I mean, complicated. But I ... I felt like there was a lot of restrictive and unhealthy and kind of confused energy around it. And I had an opportunity to go to Nigeria to reset some of the initiation-like things that had happened here, so I took a risk on it, and I'm like, “Well, this is either gonna be like the final straw, or some breakthrough,” like, “let's pray for the latter.” And I saw kind of a non-dogmatic group community like, in my Ifá initiation, there were men aged like 80 to five, holding space. Like, and 20, 30 people there. And people were teasing each other, playing, and having a good time. Like the people were well human beings, they seemed happy. And so that relaxed, teasing heart aware energy. I'm like, “Oh, good, this is what I was looking for.” And it helped ... For me, it helped me to trust, and just not fight the system. I'm like, “Just tell me what to do.” Just okay, “eat the pig dung,” okay, “Leave me a bite,” or whatever. Whatever it is. Just tell me what to do. So.  ANDREW: Yeah.  DANIEL: Yeah, it's great.  ANDREW: I used to, you know, get some people who would bring their, you know, like, elderly, Cuban elders to the store. You know? And pick up stuff. DANIEL: Mm-hmm. ANDREW: You know, they're here in Toronto to do a thing, and they'd bring this person to the store, right? And you know my Spanish is not great [laughing] and their English was not great, and we'd like, know some like, Yoruban words in common or whatever. And you would see how sweet and genuine and nice they were. And then they'd notice that like, you know, I've got plants growing at the front of the store for working with religion, and they'd be like, “oh, alamo,” I'd be like, “yeah, yeah,” and we'd have this like sort of pidgin conversation and a bunch of other things, and mostly what it would be is our hearts being opened, all this sharing of our love of this religion and these spirits ... DANIEL: Mm-hmm. ANDREW: And the continuity of that. And it was such a beautiful and uplifting experience, even though there wasn't a lot of words that were associated with it. There was just so much communication happening at other levels, and you could, you know, I could feel my Shango just being happy about it, you know, be like whoever there, too, just being happy about it, and so on. You know? It's so uplifting in that way, right? But ... DANIEL: That's good. It's one of the things in, you know, we had mentioned in our previous chat about my talk on practicing the traditions of other people's ancestors. And-- ANDREW: Mm-hmm. DANIEL: I respect it a lot about the necessary and important dialogues around cultural appropriation, and especially, not only, but especially around respecting different Native North American or First Nations, as you say, traditions, and being mindful of what the conditions of involvement, if that's open, to non-Native people are, etc., and what's important to understand is those same parameters are not universal, and how cultures are shared and understood from one part of the world to another really vary.  And Yoruba culture, for example, is generally an open system. Yoruba people in my experience, in Yorubaland, have never had anyone feel off about me being there and training in Orisha, except for the Christians, who were like, “Why don't you want Jesu?” I'm like, “We have Jesu where I'm at,” it's like, “It's fine, like, go Jesu!” but it's not why I'm here. And one of the things that is important though, is, it's family, like you're stepping into a family, a spiritual family. It's not like a “Hey bro, thanks for the culture, now I'm gonna go back and set up shop, I got what I need.” There's a ... And so when your teachers hit you up for money, it's family. That's what like, you can't be part of a family and have a bunch of stuff, and then other people don't have something, and you don't share it.  ANDREW: Yeah. DANIEL: And so it's ... It's not like you're getting exploited. I mean, that also happens. But just the ethic of sharing and supporting one another. If people don't want that, then they might not want to get involved. because most indigenous systems that I know of that are open to people not of that blood ancestry hold things in a family-oriented way. There's intimacy with that, but there's also connectivity, reciprocity, accountability. Yeah.  ANDREW: And, you know, so, you know, my immediate family where I was initiated lives in the Detroit area, and my, you know, my elders are in Miami, you know, and like, but like, especially when the Detroit folks are doing work, you know, especially bigger things like making priests, you know, I always show up, like, you know, it's like you, when they're doing the work, and you're like, “Oh, it's so inconvenient for me to take four or five days off and go down there and help out, right?” And it's like, yeah, it's inconvenient, and you know, it's time off work, and it's whatever, but it's what those people did for me, right? And it's what allows all of that to continue, and it's a chance to, you know, to also sustain those connections, and you know, sing together, and sit and joke together, and, you know, complain about handling the ... cleaning up after the animals together, and whatever, it's just part of it, right? Like ... DANIEL: Right. ANDREW: And in the absence of being willing to engage that community element of it, right? It's pretty ... If you don't have the community element in one way or another, especially in the Orisha tradition, you don't really have much of anything, you know?  DANIEL: It's true, with the tradition, it in my experience is very communal, and there are a lot of ritual domains of activity you just can't pull off solo.  ANDREW: Yeah.  DANIEL: And it's just that, you know, it's a lot of hard work, it's heavy lifting. And for people who have worked with psychoactives, there's a certain kind of feeling among the group after a long, successful, like all night acid trip, when the sun's coming up, you're sort of like, “Oh, we've just gone through something together.”  ANDREW: Mm-hmm. DANIEL: And, and, minus the LSD, there can be a sense after a multi-day ritual of a strong sense of magic and beauty and intimacy that's shared through all the effort and all the devotion ...  ANDREW: Mm-hmm. DANIEL: That it takes to keep old lineages of practice alive.  ANDREW: Yeah. DANIEL: Yeah.  ANDREW: For sure. And I think it's, I mean, one of the other points that I think was super important ... It's been a while since I listened to that talk and we'll link to it in the show notes, cause it was a good talk. Folks should go back and listen to it. You know, is also the fact that these are living traditions, right? They have continuity. DANIEL: Yeah. ANDREW: And, you know, but there's a big difference between, hey, we're gonna call up some Greek deities and see what happens, you know, and, like, or you know, see what happens sounds dismissive, I don't mean it in that way. And you know, there's nobody, there's no continuity to ancient Greece, in that particular way, versus there are people who've been practicing these traditions from person to person to person, all the way through until now, and you can actually go and ask those people and they can answer you as to what's done and how it's done and why it's done. DANIEL: Yeah. No, it's true. People don't ... If they don't know something, would be in the habit of divining on it, but I wouldn't want someone to, like, not go to flight school and then divine on how to fly the plane. [crosstalking] Yeah.  ANDREW: Yeah. There's that great proverb, which I'm sure you know, which is “Don't ask what you already know,” right?  DANIEL: Right. ANDREW: And I think that there's a sort of choleric glory to that which is, you know, there are things you just shouldn't ask, cause you should already know them, right?  DANIEL: Right. ANDREW: You don't need to ask if we do this thing because we know we don't. You know? DANIEL: Yeah.  ANDREW: We know that Oshun won't take this as an offering. We know that we don't do this kind of thing. We know that, like, you know, you don't ask if you could rob a bank cause the answer's already no. You know? DANIEL: Right. And there's a beautiful essay [inaudible 31:07] by Ologo Magiev [31:09], a child being asked to divine, and their parents died young and so they didn't get the information. And so they invoke their ancestors, and bring a lot of humility, and wing it, and it turns out fine. And, and I think there's also this kind of an implicit message, “And don't do that again. Don't pull that card too many times.”  ANDREW: Right?  DANIEL: [laughing] Then go train! ANDREW: For sure, right?  DANIEL: So, it's both. The deities have kindness, and benevolence, and also, careful! ANDREW: Yeah. And, you know, I was traveling, and I got a call that a friend of mine was like at death's door in the hospital, basically, right? And, you know, and I was just literally at a rest stop getting, gassing up the car when I checked my phone in the middle of New York State, right?  DANIEL: Mm-hmm. ANDREW: And I was just like, all right. And so I went and, you know, kind of looked around for some stuff, and it's like, there's nothing, like I can't, there's nothing I could really sort of put together here, so I just collected a bunch of white flowers and, you know, it's really hilly, right, so I just took them to a spot that I thought was appropriate for Obatala ... DANIEL: Mm-hmm.  ANDREW: And I was like, Obatala, this is all I have today. I'm here, it's this situation, and I need you to accept these and intercede in the situation. And you can get away with that. But that's not practicing the tradition. And that's not gonna, as you say, it's not gonna fly all the time, right?  DANIEL: Yeah. ANDREW: When you're at home, you can do all sorts of other things, you have your shrines or your ancestors or wherever you're working with, right? They will accept these things, cause they do understand circumstance and they're not tyrannical about it, right? They just say, you don't want that to be your way of practicing forever.  DANIEL: I spent years like, I don't know, not quite 20 years, not involved in a really dedicated way in one set tradition. I was training with different traditions for a period of time, and would definitely learn stuff, and would develop my own ashe [33:20] or whatever, but I wasn't like embracing one fully, as an operating system. ANDREW: Yeah. DANIEL: But I learned that it's possible to do it that way. That was actually really helpful to me. That it's possible to go deep with one's own ancestors, to go deep with the spirits of the land, where you're at. ANDREW: Sure. DANIEL: And to get to know them, and to get clarity about your own destiny and to just constellate in the different powers and forces and spirits that are gonna help you to do that. And I also ... that there's loneliness in going it solo, as well. There's like a freedom and a loneliness, both. And it drove me eventually to ... You know, I spent almost ten years involved in Orisha practice and Yoruba ways before I decided to initiate. And it's like a long slow dating process. It wasn't a lot of charisma. It was like, oh, you're the last one left standing, and ... ANDREW: [laughing] DANIEL: We have a ton of compatibility, why are we not doing this? And I go, okay, I guess we're gonna do this. So we just had the high match on the dating, you know, religious dating profile website. So I'm like, oh, maybe we should try this. And, and I haven't regretted it at all. It's very ... It's been a relief. The sense for me is of being held in a bigger frame. And it's not really ... It's not what I teach publicly, I'm not publicly offering services in that way, even though there are certain ones I could, in integrity.  I'm still in training, I'm still trying to learn Yoruba language, and especially with a west African orientation of practice it's such an aural language-based tradition, especially Ifá practice in particular, so I'm trying to hold a ... I think if you're not ancestrally of a tradition, the standards are even a bit higher for you to get it right, which I think is fair and understandable. Especially with the cultural climate of racism in the west and all that, for European ancestor people to be doing west African Ifa, you need to not look like a fool doing it, and so part of that looks like studying the language and really, you know, taking to heart the training.  ANDREW: Mm-hmm. DANIEL: But, it's possible to go really deep without stepping into a tradition. And there are a lot of ritual advantages to having a system to work from, as well. So I appreciate both sides of that. Yeah.  ANDREW: Yeah, for sure. I think you can get there ... I think you can accomplish the same ends either way, right?  DANIEL: Yeah, yeah. ANDREW: I think that where it gets, where it gets touchy is where you're solely working independently, but within the set of spirits that has a living tradition. If you're only working independently and devoid of traditional teaching, you know, that's where it starts to become a question for me of what ... DANIEL: Well, yeah, no, if the main powers you're working with are the Orisha, it's like, well, you've got to, here's the front door. You can try crawling in the window, but it's going to go badly, so.  ANDREW: Yeah.  DANIEL: Yeah. But if you're just working with the weird old land gods and your own ancestors, you can get away with it. yeah.  ANDREW: For sure.  DANIEL: Yeah, for sure.  ANDREW: Yeah. I also like the weird old land gods. You know? There's this beautiful ravine, you know, about a two-minute walk from the shop, [crosstalking 36:45] in Toronto. It runs through and you know, under there, there's sort of part of a buried river, that was once upon a time up on the surface, and all sorts of stuff, and there's wonderful and magical energies that are there, and really fascinating things have happened in that space over time. You know? Like I was ... I was there making a ... dealing with something and helping somebody, and making an offering essentially to the spirit of that place in the snow, right? And then when I came out of sort of the wood part back onto the path, all of these moths emerged, these white moths. And I'm like, there's snow on the ground, and it's snowing right now, what is going on with these things? And I'm like, all right, I'll take it. Big old yes from the spirits of this place on that thing, you know?  DANIEL: Mm-hmm. ANDREW: So I mean yeah, there's some amazing stuff that can happen in those ways, for sure.  DANIEL: Nice. Yeah.  ANDREW: So, I mean, first thing is, I'm going to ask you now if people should, if they're listening to this, and they want to think about starting a, you know, where they should start? And I know that one of the answers is definitely, they should go read your book, cause your book is great. DANIEL: Sure. ANDREW: But like, for the context of our conversation today, where would you kind of point people? Where, where do you point people [inaudible 38:02]? DANIEL: I'm not a very trusting person, really. So, if I were to listen to this conversation, and I didn't know that I'm a good person, I would go to my website, which is ancestralmedicine.org. Root around there, see what the vibe is, and there are other talks, or whatever, and see if you, you know, get an instinctual, this guy's not crazy vibe from where I'm coming from, and if you're drawn to the ancestral work, there are three main ways to engage.  One is to connect with one of the practitioners in the directory there. And there are 30 some people at this point who are trained in the work. Men, women, all different genders of people [38:43--not sure I've got his exact words here], ancestrally diverse people, lots of different opportunities for low income sessions, sessions in seven languages, so, opportunities to connect with people directly for session work. That's the most efficient way. Another is that I offer an online course that starts in December, that's thorough, and it maps along the heart of the book, chapters 5 through 9, which is lineage repair work, and there's a lot of support throughout that course, so that's an option, and I'll also be offering a course through the Shift network in the fall.  And then, a third way is the in-person trainings. And the last one I'm going to guide probably in North America will be in just over a week in Ottawa, the 24th to the 26th, and there's a talk on August 22, next Wednesday, in Ottawa as well, and all the info on that is on my site, and additionally, to that, there are trainings in maybe ten cities and also coming up in Australia and Mexico and maybe Russia and Canada and Victoria, so. And those are done by students who I trust to guide the work. So in person work, online course, or sessions, are, in addition to the book, the three main ways to plug in. Yeah.  ANDREW: Perfect.  DANIEL: And, and, you know, like just to say it, if you're wary of people, which is warranted, this approach to the work doesn't involve the practitioners or me or anybody saying, “Hey, this is what your grandmother says to you.” It's about stepping the individual through a process of reclaiming and re-energizing their ability to connect directly with their own people. So, it's an empowering approach in that way. It's not somebody getting all up in the mix and channeling messages to your people. There's nothing wrong with that, it's just not this approach, so. And especially if your family's a mess, it's useful to do ancestor work. Cause you get some space from all that, and connect with what's beautiful and trustworthy in your own blood and bone lineages. So that's grounding, it's helpful, also for the cultural healing that's needed.  ANDREW: Yes. Well and I think it can be quite liberating, you know, because we're carrying those patterns, right?  DANIEL: Oh, yeah. So you can relate consciously or unconsciously with your people, but you don't get to opt out of relatedness. Yeah. ANDREW: Exactly, right? And if we can tidy those up and take some of that burden off of us or free ourselves from that, right? Then we get to show up much differently in that way, right?  DANIEL: Yeah. I think the masquerades in Yoruba culture, Egungun, and it's a blessing when they come around, but it's also a lot of people try not to be touched by them. And so there's ... It conveys something about the ancestors, like, they're dangerous to avoid and they're dangerous to have around. ANDREW: Yeah.  DANIEL: But, whatever, it's just like living humans. [laughing] ANDREW: For sure. People are challenged on both sides of the veil, right?  DANIEL: [laughing] Yeah, exactly.  ANDREW: For sure.  DANIEL: So, good.  ANDREW: Well, thank you so much for making time today, Daniel. It's been great to hang out and chat with you.  DANIEL: For sure, thanks, Andrew, thanks for your service, here. Blessings on everything you're up to. ANDREW: Thank you. DANIEL: Yeah. Good.   

Guest Bio: Daniel Bryant is a technology specialist with expertise in the design, development, and deployment of enterprise-grade software applications and platforms.  Daniel also excels in leading teams that build these systems, and regularly shares his knowledge by presenting at international conferences and writing for well-known technology websites.   Episode Description: In this episode, Phil talks with Daniel Bryant about the benefits of working in a variety of areas across IT and business and how it can help you figure out the work you’re best at and will enjoy the most, as well as just taking in a wide range of new experiences. Daniel also stresses the importance of a strong and supportive community of peers, as well as the need to make sure your foundational learning is a priority.     Key Takeaways:   (1.24) Phil opens things up by asking Daniel to tell a little more about himself and what he does. Daniel explains that he actually started his career as an academic but fell in love with consulting while working on his Ph.D., emphasizing that academia was all theoretical and that he wanted to actually build things.   (4.37) Phil asks for Daniel for a career tip and Daniel recommends trying many different things, explaining how he’s worked on everything from coding to racking and stacking servers as well as on hiring teams and in positions of leadership. He says that all these different things helped him learn to empathize with people in all areas of business and IT as well as helping him discover what kind of work he enjoys most and is best at.   (5.31) Dan admits that while there is a comfortable level of stability in doing just one thing, you’re unlikely to find something you are both good at and enjoy on the first try, and that the different jobs someone does, the roles they play, and the people they meet will have a huge impact on shaping them as a person.   (6.47) Phil follows up by asking Daniel about his worst IT experiences, to which Daniel replies that he thinks his biggest mistakes include not doing due diligence in learning more about a company before signing up to work there, as he has found himself at several companies whose values did not line up with his own. In that same vein, he goes on to say that he has a problem with not thinking ahead and rolling into new positions or jobs without fully considering whether or not it’s the best idea.   (9.50) Phil then switches things up by asking Daniel to talk about what successes he has experienced. Daniel describes joining communities of people with shared interests and career paths and getting involved with them, specifically citing the London Java Community as a group that has provided him with friends, mentors, and career opportunities.   (13.16) When Phil asks Daniel what he finds exciting about the future of IT, he responds that it would be easier for him to list what DOESN’T excite him, since almost everything these days involves computers and technology and there are so many ways to be a part of it. In particular, though, he is excited to see developments in AI and augmenting human abilities with machines.   (15.08) Then, Phil enters the rapid-fire question round, with Daniel explaining that he was first attracted to a career in IT because he loved building things and wanted to help people and that the best career advice he ever received was to find mentors and to be a mentor.   (15.26) Daniel goes on to say that if he had to begin his IT career over again now, that he would nearly the same things that he already does, but with more of a focus on AI, and that his current career objective involves learning more business-specific skills so that he can help organizations solve both tech and business problems. Daniel also tells Phil that public speaking and writing have been the most useful non-tech skills he’s ever learned.   (16.12) Finally, Phil asks Daniel for some parting words of advice, which are to learn the fundamentals. Daniel reiterates that variety and learning lots of different things is important and useful, but advises to not skimp on making sure you know the basics and not to get too distracted by exciting new things to learn that you don’t get the fundamentals down.   Best Moments:   (4.08) Phil: “You certainly seem to be quite diverse in the things you do.” Daniel: “One of my sort of founding values, I guess, is I always enjoy learning and I kind of want to know everything.”   (5.31) Daniel: “There is a sort of stability with doing one thing, but what're the chances that we actually find something we like and are good at first off?”   (6.33) Daniel: “The world is genuinely a massive place and there’s so many different things we can do. I think having some of those experiences and conversations will help you find your niche.”   (14.48) Daniel: “Technology impacts politics, it impacts the markets, it impacts social stuff we do. What’s not to love?”   (17.21) Daniel: “Learn many different things, talk to many different people, read many different books, but be conscious of ‘are you learning fundamentals or are you learning the latest hotness?’ and try and mix in a bunch of those things.”   Contact Daniel Bryant Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/danielbryantuk/ Website: https://www.infoq.com/profile/Daniel-Bryant Twitter: https://twitter.com/danielbryantuk Github: https://github.com/danielbryantuk