Podcast Info
Podcast Description
David Ulrich is a photographer, author and teacher who’s spent the last 40 years studying the creative process. David’s teaching of creativity is guided by the search for authenticity through each of our own artistic practice. His perspectives have been influenced by decades studying Buddhism and other wisdom traditions.
Ulrich’s photographs have been exhibited internationally in over seventy-five one-person and group exhibitions in museums, galleries, and universities. Ulrich is the author of one of Sean’s favorite books on the creative process, The Widening Stream: the Seven Stages of Creativity. He is a consulting editor for Parabola magazine.
Transcript
Get exclusive access to Masterworks by clicking HERE
Subscribe to my Momentum Monday Newsletter
Connect with us! Whatgotyouthere
Sponsors
NuSkool Snacks Collagen Protein Bars https://nuskoolsnacks.com/
TRANSCRIPT
David Ulrich
[00:04:27] Sean: David, welcome to What Got You There. How are you doing today?
[00:04:30] David: Very good. And thank you so much for having me, Sean. I enjoy and appreciate being here.
Phil Jackson
[00:04:35] Sean: I appreciate your work. I know I’m going to enjoy this conversation a lot. It’s probably going to go down a few interesting rabbit holes, but the ones we’re going to have a lot of fun with. I want to start a little bit of a different place than most people might think we might be starting at. It’s not going to be around creativity. It’s not going to be around cameras. I actually would love to start around the legendary basketball coach, Phil Jackson, who is infamous for coaching the Chicago Bulls during the Jordan era, and then also the Los Angeles Lakers during Kobe Bryant and Shaquille O’Neal era. I would love to know what you’ve learned from Phil Jackson.
[00:05:07] David: Well, he also wrote a wonderful book. I think it’s called Spiritual Lessons from a Hardwood Warrior or something like that. And I actually feature him in my writing because I think his Zen approach to the game is very powerful. I’d like to read something to you. This is from a new book of mine that’s just been released. It’s titled The Mindful Photographer Awake in the World with a Camera. It’s a series of 55 short essays on photography and mindfulness. And one of the essays is titled Fitting into the Flow of Time.
At the end of the essay, I have five or six one-line lessons from Phil Jackson that I would like to read because I think these are very instructive for creative people. They certainly have touched me. So without further ado, the advice that Phil Jackson gives his team members is;
- Seek personal mastery
- Do not hold the ball for longer than two counts
- Awareness is everything
- Great possibility comes with great danger
- Practice the art of acceptance
- Embody compassion
- Have a love of the game yet practiced non-attachment
- Strive to understand the soul of teamwork.
Aren’t those wonderful?
[00:07:01] Sean: Those are fantastic. It’s great. What I love about those is you mentioned he uses them with his basketball teams, but the underlying themes there are just so applicable to so many. So I just appreciate those. Is there one that just really speaks to you that when you hear it just deeply identifies with yourself?
[00:07:20] David: Well, I think all of them speak to me. The two that I would put at the top are awareness is everything, and seek personal mastery. I think the other ones flow from there. The other one that’s interesting to me is great possibility comes with great danger because remember Phil Jackson is dealing with team members with massive egos, and he’s trying to corral these massive egos into a paradigm of teamwork and compassion.
And I find that very related to seek personal mastery because seeking personal mastery isn’t of course, just about ourselves. I tell my students, moments of intuition, moments of insight are not for ourselves alone. When we have a moment of insight or a moment of inspiration, it becomes a kind of responsibility to somehow transmit that out into the world.
An Artist as a Conduit to Influence Society & Culture
[00:08:25] Sean: I’m thinking in terms of your individual photography, even when you’re taking individual photos, you’re beyond yourself there, right? You’re thinking about how this photo is going to incite something in someone else. Am I reading that correctly?
[00:08:40] David: What’s very interesting in the creative process, because you are deeply connected to yourself. There have been many times where my intuition has said move over here or walk to this location, and suddenly there’s a powerful image there. I think that one’s own inner connection is important, but ultimately you’re speaking to an audience. One of the dangers of any art form is your ego. You’re in the moment and you’re thinking, oh, what a great picture. Oh, people are going to love it. I’m going to get all kinds of likes, but that’s not really where it’s at.
I think that a well-functioning artist, something is coming through them from a deeper level, in a way we become a kind of a conduit. I don’t like the word channel because channeling has too many weird connotations, but artists become a kind of conduit for something that needs to be brought into the world. I was reminded of, I haven’t seen it yet, but this new three-part documentary on the Beatles. The Beatles were young boys. They were 20 years old, 21 years old, and something came through them that literally changed the course of the culture.
And one would argue that they were simply a conduit for powerful energies and forces to be shaped through their work, to influence the society and the culture at large. And I think that’s what artists do. Our own very private experiences get universalized in a way that can speak to and touch and move others.
[00:10:35] Sean: I was talking to a few people before this call, just trying to get some other insights around this, and a few of the people actually mentioned, well, this is really interesting, but I don’t identify as a creative. I’m not an artist. And I’m just wondering what, what you have to say about that.
[00:10:52] David: Excuse my language, Sean, but hell I don’t buy that at all. Are you a mother? Are you a father? Do you have a job? Do you have hobbies? I think that being an artist of life is an aim worthy of our humanity and anything we do can be approached creatively. I have observed parents that are very attentive and creative with their children. I’ve observed business people. Steve Jobs, for example, founder of Apple computer. I think he approached his work as a creative task, so I don’t buy it. I don’t think that artists have a corner on creativity. I think creativity is available to everyone. In fact, I would argue as human beings, I think it’s one of the most distinctive things that makes us human. And I think the creative process is available to everyone.
Defining Creativity
[00:11:57] Sean: Yeah, I’m right there with you, David. I view what we do, that creativity comes out of us. And one of the phrases you use there that I love is an artist of life. The long-term listeners know I’m a huge fan of Bruce Lee and that’s something he sought out. He viewed himself as a martial artist, philosopher, actor, but most of all, he viewed himself as an artist of life. And, I just loved that framework going forward. I am intrigued, how do you define creativity?
[00:12:22] David: Well, I don’t know if my attempt is going to mean anything because many more intelligent people than I have attempted to define creativity. I think what’s beautiful about creativity is there are certain aspects of it that you can define. Ultimately, I think it’s a mystery. Ultimately I think it’s one of our greatest capabilities. I think we only stand on the threshold of it. Creativity is bringing something into being. It is an act of transformation.
We transform materials from one state to something more refined. For example, when you’re making a pot, you start with clay, you start with earth, and through the process of shaping and glazing, you refine those materials. You transform those materials into something evocative and something meaningful. I think creativity is innovation. It’s bringing something into being, and above all, it’s a process of transformation. But it’s ultimately undefinable. It’s a mystery and that’s what makes it so compelling and so beautiful.
The Unconscious
[00:13:43] Sean: That’s what I love. You mentioned bringing something into being, let’s take what you do, your photos, your photography, is your development and growth in your own photos. Is that a parallel journey with your own personal development?
[00:14:01] David: Absolutely. When I’m working with students, I want to see the work they do. It’s one of the first things I want to do because the work they do is a reflection of who they are. The work we do is a very deep reflection of who we are. And it often reveals things that are unknown to the artists. I can see things in people’s work that perhaps at the moment they can’t yet see themselves. I think it’s an act of revealment. If you agree with contemporary science, that 85 to 95% of our mind is unconscious. Think about that 90% of our mind is unconscious.
And what art and creativity can do is it can reach into the well of the unconscious. It can reveal some of the material that is there and it is deeply self-revealing, but I would also argue that material in the unconscious is touched and affected by events and by culture. And some of what is present in our unconscious, what Jung calls, the collective unconscious is perhaps more related to the collective than it is me as an individual. Does that make sense?
[00:15:35] Sean: That makes absolute sense. I‘m obsessed with the unconscious. I know there are certain studies around our unconscious essentially is processing every second, around 11 million bits of information. That’s through all of our senses and we’re consciously aware of about 60 of them. I almost say like the 90%, it’s more like 99.99% that we’re just completely unaware of. And, that’s what I love, these unknowns. I know there’s something there around all of these things that I don’t appear to be consciously aware of but I’m picking up on them.
Authenticity
It’s funny, you were even mentioning a minute ago, you look at your students’ art, and pretty early on, it kind of reveals more about them, things that are unknown. It’s the same thing for me in this podcast, in my interviews I’ve had people who are close to me come up to me and say, oh, I listened to a few of the past interviews. I know what problem you’re working on right now. Like, I know the struggle you’re going through in your own life, based on how your interviews are different from six months ago.
And it’s so true. These things that are unknown to us come through in our art form. I would love to just know what that’s like when you start working with the new student. What are some of those other things that you’re observing and looking at just to help you get a deeper understanding?
[00:16:52] David: Well, a little bit of background when I’m teaching a photography class, I can tell by the second or third class, what images belong to what person? People have a unique and distinctive way of seeing, many people are not aware of that. I laugh with my students and say, how is it that we’ve come to adulthood with not understanding how we see, but it’s true. We don’t know how we see. The word authenticity is really important to me in teaching and in the arts. I believe that each person has a unique gift.
One could call it their point of genius even, where they have something very unique, very individual, very special that they can bring into the world. Most of the time, they don’t know what it is. The process of creativity is in part uncovering elements of the question, who am I. And what’s remarkable about being an artist is being an artist, both stimulates your growth and reflects it back to you. I can trace my own personal development through my images.
I can see clearly my outward and inner conflicts when I was young. I can see clearly may be just the beginning of wisdom that I have as I get older. And I can see that process reflected in the images I make even if the images also talk about things in the outer world. The beauty of photography is that it’s both inward and outward-looking. We’re always dealing with an interaction with the world, and we’re always dealing with interaction with ourselves.
Inexhaustible Wells
[00:18:57] Sean: Are you aware of that development in the moment? Can you look at a photo you just took and realize your own growth, or does it take hindsight to be able to look back on those photos and realize that progression you were on?
[00:19:10] David: Well, Sean, it’s a little bit of both because as we talked about even perhaps 99% of our brain is unconscious. So yes, I can identify some elements in an image immediately, but unquestionably over time, more elements reveal themselves to me because many of them were driven by the unconscious and it takes time, exploration, and a process of revealment to learn more and more about their meaning.
I have a picture on my wall, it’s a photograph by Edward Weston. It’s a green pepper is called Pepper, No. 30 in 1930. I bought it as a print in New York City in 1971. And what is it now? It’s 2021, and I can still look at it and receive more from it. It’s remarkable. It’s like an inexhaustible well. And I think a powerful work of art is like that. It’s an inexhaustible well that we learn more about over time. And for me, that’s true of other people’s artwork, as well as my own.
[00:20:31] Sean: I’m thinking about some of those inexhaustible wells. Is there a piece of art that has just had the greatest impact on you over your life?
[00:20:41] David: Well, there’s maybe too many to list, but I can tell you a couple of experiences. I would say about 10 years ago, I was in the Tate Gallery in London, and I walked into the Mark Rothko Room. I’ve never been to the Rothko Chapel in Texas, but I walked into that room, there must have been eight or 10 wall-size Rothko paintings. And I was stunned into silence, stunned into a kind of state of presence. And I just sat there and looked at the paintings. It was a very similar experience to being in a Gothic Cathedral. That’s one experience.
The other was a museum called The Contemporary Museum and there’s a French artist named Christian Boltanski and they were hosting an installation of his work. I walked into this room, and the installation consisted of maybe 30 to 50 scanned photographs from a yearbook with lights around it as if each picture was a little shrine. And I looked at the work and I felt strangely moved. And then I read the wall description. These were scanned pictures from a yearbook of a graduating high school class in Vienna, Austria in 1938. It was a Jewish school.
I thought, oh my God, did these children survive the Holocaust? And I was moved to tears. The installation moved me to tears. I’ve never been moved to tears from a work of art before. One of the purposes of art is to expand our consciousness. Of course, I read about the Holocaust. Of course, I learned about it in school, but to be confronted with those 30 to 50 faces, young people full of hope and possibility, and then the recognition is they probably did not survive the terror of the Holocaust.
Expansion of Consciousness
[00:23:15] Sean: I would love to know when you say art should expand our consciousness, what do you mean by that?
[00:23:25] David: Can I tell you a story that the title of your podcast is What Got You There, correct?
[00:23:30] Sean: Correct.
[00:23:33] David I was a young man, the Vietnam war was in progress. Many of my friends that I graduated from high school with went to Vietnam. Some did not come back. Some came back, all shot up and forever altered. I was a photojournalism student at Kent State University in Ohio, and there was a protest against the Vietnam war in early May. President Nixon had just sent troops into Cambodia and the students were protesting that. And as a photojournalist, my class and I were charged with photographing the event, the first few days of the event were what you would call a standard protest march.
It was even festive with people’s children and peace signs and marijuana wafting through the air. And then things started to get a little crazier. On May 2nd, the ROTC building on campus got torched, got burned down, and radical groups descended on the campus. May 3rd, the protest was getting more serious. There were many more students, and the Governor called in the National Guard. There were National Guard troops everywhere. The morning of May 4th, 1970, a very beautiful spring day, the National Guard retreated to a hillside.
They raised their rifles and they fired directly into the crowd of college students. Think about that, 30 national guardsmen fired armor-piercing bullets directly into a crowd of college students who were standing half a football field away from the guardsmen. These were the shootings at Kent State. Four students were killed, seven or eight students were wounded and I was absolutely shocked. I did not see the killing. It was a very large demonstration and I was in a different part of the campus, but when I recognized what happened, I was stunned. I was shocked.
How could young men from the same cities and towns of the college students turn around and fire their rifles into the crowd unprovoked? Now, you know that no captain of the National Guard is going to give the order or have the authority to order the guardsmen to fire at college students, that order had to come from very high up. People believe it was the Governor, or perhaps even President Nixon. In any case, at that moment, I recognized the absolute ineffectiveness of violence. I was very young, so this was not a thought, this was more an intuition. I felt two things at that moment.
I felt that first violence could never be an effective way of solving problems. What was needed was an expansion of consciousness. We needed to see more. We needed to be more present, be more compassionate. And that a revolution of consciousness was the only thing that could change the world. And the second intuition I had at that moment is that art and creativity can help in that process. So from that moment on, I put photojournalism aside and I committed to becoming an artist. So that really is one of the stories that made me realize that what we need as a people to solve our problems is an expansion of consciousness. A revolution, if you will, of consciousness.
[00:27:56] Sean: I’m wondering after a moment like that, we can call that an inflection point for your life, what does that look like moving forward? I understand you realize that art is going to be your thing moving forward there, but what else changes about you from before that?
[00:28:19] David: I was 20 years old. I had never had contact with violence or death before Vietnam, before Kent State. It was horrible. I was in a state of anger and depression. I found it hard to function. My girlfriend broke up with me because I was so depressed. It took months for me to integrate that event. And in the integration of that event, my life changed. I suddenly dropped out of school. I spent a year with a menial job delivering flowers and finding photography teachers that could help me on the path of becoming an artist.
I met two teachers that were very important to me. One was a man named Nicholas Hlobeczy in Cleveland, and his teacher was a man named Minor White. White was a well-known photographer. One of the most influential in the medium, in the mid 20th century. His whole thing was learning to see, a camera is an instrument that helps you learn to see without a camera basically. And I spent six years as a student of Minor White. So what Kent State did is it change the trajectory of my life. After the initial trauma, it brought me in touch with teachers and it brought me in touch with a new trajectory if you will.
Can Self-mastery be Achieved Without a Teacher?
[00:30:06] Sean: David, I think that’s really helpful that you’ve mentioned, let’s just call it some of the stumbling that you needed to go through in your own process and your own growth. I am wondering, you mentioned some of the teachers, how vital is a teacher on someone’s own self progression? Can people achieve a level of self-mastery without a teacher or is that a necessary component of it?
[00:30:29] David: It’s a really good question, and I don’t know the answer to it, but I do feel that having a teacher is a seminal experience. You need to have a guide navigating the inner world, navigating the world of creativity is subtle, and for me, it would have been impossible to do without guidance, without a mentor, without a teacher. I received so much from my teachers and I can’t imagine doing it alone. I’m sure that if you were in a remote location, you didn’t have access to a teacher, growth would be possible, but I think that more growth is possible with a teacher.
Externalizing the Unconscious
[00:31:26] Sean: I’m thinking about that growth and David, you know, I’m a fan of Joseph Campbell and one of my favorite lines of all time of his is, “the cave we fear to enter, holds the treasure that we seek”. I would love for you just to expand on that. How you view that, how you think about going after the thing that we fear most.
[00:31:44] David: What is it that we fear most? Usually what we fear most is lodged in our unconscious. It’s usually a part of ourselves. Now I’m saying that living in a civilized society, there are people that live in war-torn regions of the world, where they fear getting up in the morning because they might not go to bed that night. But I’m speaking specifically to people in the civilized world. We do not have external threats. We have internal threats. Many of the complexes, many of the fears that we hold are lodged in the unconscious. They need to be uncovered and they need to be seen. First of all, we need to see them.
[00:32:41] Sean: How do you even become aware of what needs to come out? I feel like you’re someone who’s very attuned. We even mentioned awareness and just understanding those things deep within you. How do those people who are first even getting introduced to this type of conversation, what should be going through their head?
[00:33:04] David: I would say that when you’re young and you’re beginning to explore the inner world, your angels and your demons both have equal force. As a young photographer, when I would go out in the world and make photographs, certain things would excite me greatly. I felt a sense of resonance as if what I was photographing was a part of me, but what was weird at the time, I didn’t, and I couldn’t make any distinction between my angels and my demons. The reflection of both was powerful and compelling. But once these things are externalized for me, it was with photography.
One of the ways that people can externalize their unconscious is through artwork, through photography, or through journaling, sitting down, and just writing whatever comes to mind. You need to find a way to externalize what is within and over time you can begin to untangle the relationship between our angels and our demons. Over time, you can begin to see what is within. Seeing is the first step. I don’t want to say self-change. I don’t want to say self-transformation. I want to say seeing simply becoming aware. If I see that I’m angry or depressed, or something, does that have a source?
Can we find a way to externalize that? I think journaling is a really, really good tool for a lot of people that are not artists, sitting down and doing freewriting, writing whatever comes to mind. We need to find a way to unlock what Natalie Goldberg calls, the wild mind. And artwork can do that. Drawing, painting photography, but soaking journaling, soaking writing. The danger is when we project those negative elements in our unconscious onto other people. Look what’s happening today. Look at the animal of race, how many people are deeply prejudiced, deeply intolerant, deeply offended by people of other races.
That’s crazy, but that’s because they are projecting their own fears, their own demons onto other people. And that’s when it becomes dangerous. If we don’t have an outlet, then we tend to project our fears and our demons on our friends, our associates, or even the world at large.
[00:36:24] Sean: I think conversations like this are so helpful because I hope that more people start exploring that becoming aware and actually seeing to hopefully avoid some of this violence that we’re seeing. One of the things that you do bring up there was journaling, that’s something that I’ve found a lot of success in. What I would do early in the morning is I know this has been called Morning Pages where literally the first thing, just for 15 minutes nonstop, my hand does not stop moving. And you can all of a sudden start to uncover some of those things that are deep down. So for anyone who’s looking to explore a bit further, that is something you might want to try.
Uncovering the Creative Process
David, something you’ve done so well, and I appreciate the heck out of it is how you’ve uncovered and really distilled down the creative process. And we’re going to get more into the seven stages of creativity that you’ve tapped into, but I would just love to know, what was that process of actually uncovering your creative process.
[00:37:19] David: When I was, I don’t know, 19, 20 years old, I read a book, it’s called The Creative Process: Reflections on Invention in the Arts and Sciences. It’s a series of 75 essays by artists, scientists, mathematicians, writers, people like DH Lawrence, Albert Einstein, Vincent van Gogh, Gertrude Stein, Henry Miller, William Butler Yeats, et cetera. I read this book of essays, 75 essays on creativity, and I realized, oh my God, they’re all saying the same thing. They’re all saying that there are identifiable stages of the creative process.
I was 20 years old, so I said, huh, that’s interesting. I couldn’t do anything with it yet. I was too young, but over time I began to observe these stages in my own work. I began to see them in the work of my students, in the work of my teachers, in the work of my peers. And I began to realize that creativity was not an act, it was an event that unfolded over time with identifiable stages. Now we have to be very careful here because the formulaic mind, the part of my mind that can identify these stages is still just the threshold of an understanding.
I had to walk a very fine line between maintaining the mystery of the process and trying to define it. There’s a vital tension point there. We need to try to understand things, but at the same time, we cannot take something very large and truncate it down and make it small enough for our rational mind to understand. So our rational mind has to understand, but yet we also have to recognize the mystery. So that’s the fine line that I feel I walk in talking about and writing about creativity.
[00:40:00] Sean: Can you actually go even a little bit further there between left brain and right brain, you know, logic and then really stretching out because I feel like you really do such a good job in that center section, that tension point. And I would love just to hear you expand upon it.
[00:40:14] David: Well, I really try. When I’m writing I depend upon what I’m going to call inspiration or the muses. Oftentimes I sit down and write and it’s okay. Maybe it’s even good, but it’s flat. I’m just kind of writing out of my own mind maybe after an hour or so, something begins to click. It becomes more fluid, juicier, and suddenly, I feel like I’m in touch with a deeper part of my mind. And suddenly I feel like the words are coming through me. I make an analogy to athletics. I’m a swimmer. I was a competitive swimmer in my youth, and I still swim about three-quarters of a mile every day.
When I get in the water in the morning, it’s cold, my muscles are stiff, I don’t want to be there, but my discipline gets me there. I get in the water and I start to swim, and after about eight or 10 laps, something changes. The endorphins get released and suddenly it becomes more fluid and alive. It’s the same with the creative process. When it’s coming from me, when I first sit down to write or go take pictures, it’s flat. I don’t want to be there. And then over time, if I stay with it, we enter the flow, the endorphins get released.
It becomes more fluid, and suddenly through inner quiet, I have access to what I’m calling the deeper parts of my own mind. However, we have to raise the question. What is inspiration? There are different beliefs on what inspiration is. Psychologists believe inspiration comes from the unconscious, from the deeper parts of the mind, religious people or spiritual seekers believe that inspiration comes from higher energies that surround us. Native Americans, Native Hawaiians, indigenous people believe that inspiration comes from the voices of our ancestors.
And highly social people believe that inspiration comes from the energies that pass between us as human beings. I actually believe that some measures of all of the above are true. I don’t think it’s just my unconscious or your unconscious, I think we can tap into something deeper. Again, it’s the mystery of something energies that surround us at every moment. But most of the time we’re not attentive to them. Does that make sense?
[00:43:25] Sean: It does make sense. I mean all of this, there’s not black and white and it’s funny, in a society that we’re always grasping for that black and white. One of the things I see a lot in some of the other things I do, I’m involved with a lot of logical people like investors, high-end business people, and they have a tough time getting out of their own logic. You must have worked with plenty of people and I’m just wondering, what advice do you have for them that can kind of just peel back slightly on that. And maybe just become more aware of some of these other things.
[00:44:00] David: I found a phrase last night when I was teaching, that I said to my students, the phrase just kind of came about, and the question is when can you give an ambiguous yes? Do you know how the iPhone was created? What’s interesting about the iPhone is Steve Jobs said, oh, we want to create a phone. And people said, well, why? And Steve Jobs said we want a phone that can access the internet and be a telephone and, send instant messages. And people said, well, we already had that. It’s called a Blackberry. And Steve Jobs said, no, that’s not elegant. We needed an elegant solution.
So he put together a team to develop the iPhone and they struggled for the better part of a year, trying to figure out how an Apple product could be better than a Blackberry because Blackberry did everything Steve Jobs wanted it to do. And one of the members of the team had an idea, an inspiration that grew out of their brainstorming, and that inspiration was a software keyboard. A software keyboard, and bam, that was unambiguous yes. That moment of inspiration created these little shamanistic devices that we carry around. A software keyboard, simple, but yet it took them many months to get to that insight.
The Seven Stages of Creativity
[00:45:50] Sean: I love the incubation period on so much of this and I realize now that we actually didn’t even uncover your seven stages of creativity. So I think this would be helpful if you could just map out those seven stages, then we can dive into some of these further.
[00:46:05] David: Well, the first stage of creativity is obvious. What is the medium? What is the theme? What is it that I need to speak about, that you need to speak about? So the first stage I’m calling discovery and encounter, we discover a medium and a theme that is suitable to our body type that is suitable and amenable to who we are. And then we begin, we bring a process of attention and concentration to the task. That’s stage one. Stage two is great fun, I call it passion and commitment. It’s where we really get passionate about the subject.
Obsession is considered a negative thing in life. I would consider an obsession a positive thing with artists. We become obsessed with our theme. We’ve become passionate about it. It becomes very powerful, very juicy, and many discoveries are made in the moment. Many discoveries are made in a serendipitous way at this stage. And we also make a commitment to seeing it through. Stage three is this stage we all know so well, it’s called the crisis and creative frustration. We hit the wall. We can’t go any further on our conscious initiative.
Our initial impulse has been expended, has been spent and suddenly we’re faced with obstacles. What do we do? How do we approach that? There are three ways to approach it. The first is the macho approach. I’m going to try to blast my way through it. Does that work? No. The second is the passive or the poor me approach. I’m going to wait for somebody to come to rescue me. Does that work? No. The third option is to seek a new perspective. So that brings us to the fourth phase, retreat, and withdrawal. We stepped back from the work. We allow it to just stay in the unconscious.
Have you ever been in an argument with another person? You know, you’re like this and suddenly one person steps back and you come to a new perspective and you can come back and have some dialogue. So retreat and withdrawal, we stepped back from the work. We put our initiative on hold. We do research, we do exploration. We allow the idea to just stay in the unconscious. Stage five epiphany and insight. Do you know how Einstein discovered the Theory of Relativity? He was struggling with this question for a long time, working hard with a conscious endeavor to understand the relationship between space and time.
One day he got very frustrated. He said, screw it. I can’t do this anymore. And he went to bed that night and before he went to sleep, the E = mc2 just appeared in his mind as an image. It just came to him, epiphany and insight. After we retreat from the work, after we allow the unconscious to just stay and incubate, something can come to us. Inspiration, the Greeks called it the muses, I call it the epiphany and insight, often the guiding vision of the work we need to do. Then stage six is called discipline and completion. Once we have the guiding vision, we need to develop our craft and do the work.
And that takes a certain amount of self-discipline. I know many artists who are very gifted with insight but don’t have the wherewithal to finish something. Finishing something is not easy. It’s often difficult. And then stage seven responsibility and release. Our children need to be released into the world. We need to get our project out the door. Number one, to communicate with others. And number two, to clear the slate for future projects. Otherwise, we have massive indigestion and constipation. We need to get it out the door in order to clear the way for the new.
[00:51:07] Sean: One of those stages I would love to hit on is the retreat and withdrawal period. All of these things are extremely nuanced or they can be, and so I’m wondering how long that period can last. And then what does it look like during that? Are you fully disengaging from whatever project you’re currently working on? Or are you doing things that kind of touch on the project, but just not fully immersing yourself?
[00:51:34] David: It’s a very good question. You know, in the case of Einstein, that retreat and withdrawal phase was overnight. However, for many of us ordinary mortals that retreat and withdrawal phase lasts much longer. For me, it’s often months, if not years. What I like to say in the retreat and withdrawal phase is anything, any word that begins with R E is what we should be doing.
Retreat, research, revision, renewal, revisit. So it’s a time of revisiting. It’s a time of revising. It’s a time of rethinking. It’s a time of research. So no, we’re not idle during that period. Often when I read a book, for example, the retreat and withdrawal phase is when I go in and start doing revision and editing. I don’t think it’s an idle phase, but I do think we need to leave a certain amount of time available just to be. Natalie Goldberg, the writer says, “just lie on the couch. It’s a good place to begin.”
David’s Writing Process
[00:52:59] Sean: I’m just intrigued now. What is your actual writing process like?
[00:53:05] David: Usually when I read a book, well, how do I say this without sounding weird and new age, most of the books I’ve written have been inspired in the sense that I wake up one morning and suddenly there’s a book title and the chapters just appear in my mind. When I first wrote my book on creativity, I was exhausted. It took me a fall to write the book. And by the holidays I was exhausted and I wanted some time off.
And I was driving to the post office in early January. And suddenly out of the blue, a new book appeared in my mind, just appeared out of nowhere. And the chapter headings came along with the title. And I don’t know what kind of language I can use here, but I’m going to use obscene language. My first thought was, oh, wow. My second thought was, oh shit. Now I got to do this. I was like in between this, oh wow, and oh shit.
[00:54:24] Sean: So you have these ideas, these concepts in your head, are you just like unleashing your writing? Like hours each day? What does that actually look like when it comes to fruition?
[00:54:38] David: Well, don’t forget the things I write about have been gestating in my mind for decades. I first read that book on the creative process when I was 20 years old, by the time I was 24 years old, I knew someday I wanted to write a book on creativity. When I was 24, I thought someday I’d read a book on creativity. I didn’t start writing that book for 20 years until I was in my mid-forties. It took 20 years of gestation for this moment of insight to appear.
When I sit down to write, it’s an urgent process, largely because the material has been gestating in my mind for decades. And when I sit down to write, it’s time, it’s ready. The material is at the forefront of my consciousness and it just comes pouring out. I write very quickly. I write the first draft of a book, usually in two or three months. And then of course it takes a much longer time to go back and edit and revise.
Action Vs Surrender
[00:55:52] Sean: I’m thinking about this because I feel like this somewhat ties in, I know you’ve studied a lot of Taoism and one of the concepts I love is the way in essentially like trying not to try. And, I’m wondering how we need to think about active intent and surrender. Like, surrender to the scenario. And I would just love to hear your thoughts on this because I feel like so often today, all we try to do is force, force, force. Go harder, push harder. And I’ve discovered that so many of these amazing breakthroughs happen when we surrender to the scenario. And I’m just wondering your thoughts and what you’ve uncovered in all your time studying this and then also living this.
[00:56:31] David: It’s a question of being sensitive to the process. We cannot always be doing. We need to be sensitive about when we need to step back. For example, think about a river, a river is flowing along and it hits big boulders or rocks, and slowly the river fills up. We’re living, we’re living the river fills up and it goes over the boulders. So for me, that’s what creativity is like when the material is ripe, it comes out.
When the river comes up and spills over it’s time to come out. However, if I try to manifest something too early, it’s not ripe. Have you ever tried to eat an unripe piece of fruit? That’s what it’s like. So when it’s ripe, it will naturally emerge, but we need to have a sensitivity. We cannot always be pushing forward. We need to understand when the time is right to push forward.
[00:57:50] Sean: Within that process of knowing the right time, I feel like there’s a lot of times there’s that tension between the confidence, that self-belief that I can push forward with this, but then also discovering how little you know. I’m just wondering in your own creative and artistic journey, what that process has been like, both in understanding your own confidence and how that even gives you the belief to go on to try and attempt further things versus being able to discover new things.
[00:58:20] David: Well, you touched on something important. Inner confidence is a really important trait to cultivate. I think what holds a lot of people back is fear of inadequacy. For whatever reason, self-esteem has become an enormously difficult issue in our culture. So we need to have a sense of inner confidence that there’s something in me that I can give to the world. But for me, my biggest obstacle is impatience. It’s an obstacle that I face on a daily basis. I want to bring things to completion, but they’re not ready.
I am constantly in every mode in my life needing to find that balance between action and retreat, between assertion and surrender. And I’ve learned that patience is a trait that needs to be cultivated because very often, the most meaningful things we do take place over time. I had an argument with my students the other day, we were arguing about whether or not they should be allowed to use cell phones in the classroom. And they said, oh, we can multitask. And I said, well, isn’t patience a virtue you want to cultivate?
They said, no, in today’s world, we don’t need patience. Everything is immediately available. There’s a real danger in that attitude. I believe that the quality of our attention is one of the most important gifts we can give to ourselves and to the world. And in that attention, there are dynamics that become visible. Yes, I need to move quickly now. No, I need to stand back now. So Phil Jackson said it, well, awareness is everything, don’t hold the ball for longer than two seconds. When do I need to hold it? And when do I need to pass it to a teammate?
[01:00:50] Sean: It’s funny because one of the things I have such an issue with is looking for these black and white answers. But at the same time here I am, I’m sitting over here and it’s I want that black and white answer because I view this as it’s like two hands holding a rubber band. The tension of who we currently are and then where we’re trying to get to it’s this constant tension, I’m always feeling.
I’m wondering for you, how do you understand internally when it’s time to put the foot on the gas and go harder and you’re not actually doing the work that’s required versus, you know what, I’ve pushed too far. Just because I know my own personality, I tend to try to push, push. I need to get more insight into pulling back. And I’m just wondering how you think about that.
[01:01:35] David: You know, Sean, it’s a huge problem for me. My impatience is a huge obstacle. It’s probably the thing I need to resist daily, but let’s look at that. What takes place when we can resist our obstacles? If I can resist my impatience, it can help me be more sensitive to the moment, like what is needed in this moment. I can often see what is needed in the moment, but my impatience will push forward anyway. So for me, what’s required is resistance. I need to resist my obstacle. I need to resist the obstacle of my impatience and in doing so I can come more cleanly into the attentive part of me that can see what is required in the moment. I don’t want to talk about this as something I’ve mastered, this is not easy. It’s a constant struggle for me as I think it is for many people today.
[01:02:52] Sean: Oh, absolutely. This journey never ends. Even when, you achieve the highest levels. I’m trying to remember it, it’s one of the legendary Japanese directors and he receives a Lifetime Achievement Award. This is like the 1992 Oscars. And he receives this lifetime achievement award and he basically gets up there to accept the award. And he says, I’m not deserving of this. I am such a beginner still.
Here’s this guy who’s been doing his craft for 60 plus years, and he’s literally received the Oscar for a Lifetime Achievement Award. And he’s like, no, I’m just still a beginner. It’s beautiful. Wow, I just wish so many more of us could not only have that at a younger age but have that into his age as well. I thought that was beautiful.
[01:03:33] David: I was listening to a Buddhist teacher talk to a group of students and one of the students said, “when I sit and meditate, my mind is clear. I am at peace. It’s such a beautiful experience.” Another student said, “when I sit to meditate, my mind is so noisy. I am constantly having to try to observe my noisy mind. I’m constantly needing to distance myself from the noisy mind. My body is wanting to move. I see twitches. I feel impatience. I want to get up from the cushion, and move onward.”
And the teacher said that’s meditation. That’s the most important kind of meditation where we struggle against our tendencies. When I say against our tendencies, I don’t mean against our real tendencies. I mean, we struggle against our tendencies, the noisy mind, the impatient body, we need to resist these things. There needs to be an active resistance. And in that struggle, moments of insight and moments of peace arise.
[01:05:01] Sean: Is life a struggle, for you?
[01:05:08] David: Well, life has many things and that’s one of them. Life is a struggle. Life is pain. Life is joy. Life is insight. Life is frustration. For me, it’s all of those things. I am not an evil Master.
David’s Hero’s Journey
[01:05:30] Sean: But you have a lot of wisdom. You have a lot of insight. I think this is a great place to bring up the loss of your right eye. I would love to read a quote because I think this is extremely insightful. And then I hope we can explore this. The quote is from you and it’s;
“Fearing the loss of my capacity to see and photograph, and with all hope to the contrary, this blow helped to awaken my own awareness, losing an eye and facing the resulting need to learn to see again this time as an adult assisted with the growth and development of my perceptual capacities and help me better understand the function and process sight. Above all, I learned to not take vision for granted. It was a profound learning experience. One that continues to this day, the experience was traumatic and painful. Like nothing else I have ever experienced and a great privilege.”
I have to assume a lot of people hear that quote, and can’t even fathom, first of all, the fact of losing an eye, but then to be able to then say it’s a great privilege. So I‘d be honored if you just unpack that for us. I think this could provide some real insight for everyone.
[01:06:31] David: Going back to the title of your show, What Got You There, there was a moment, there was an inflection point. There was a moment of change. I lost my eye when I was chopping wood. I was dropping logs onto a pile and a stick flew up, went right up under my eye. And my first two thoughts were, oh shit, I won’t be able to swim today. And my second thought was, oh, damn, I’m going to have to have stitches on my face. That’s all I thought. My girlfriend drove me to the emergency room. And the emergency room doctor said, “oh my God, we have to call an eye doctor immediately.”
That’s when I started to freak out, the eye doctor came and said, “you must calm down. Your tension is causing a loss of vitreous fluid.” I thought, oh my God. I said, doctor, you’ve got to save my eye, I am a photographer. He said, “you’ll be as good a photographer with one eye as you were with two.” I went into surgery for eight hours. They tried to repair my massively damaged retina. They had to rebuild the side of my face with cosmetic surgery because I lost a lot of tissue. And then I spent a week having tests done to determine if any useful vision could be returned to the eye. And the answer was no, that was the darkest moment of my life.
And they said it should be removed. So 10 days after the accident my mother and my girlfriend drove me to the hospital and I checked in and I said, hi, I’m David Ulrich. I’m here to have my eye removed. It was the most surreal thing. And I went into the hospital room, it was about 10:00 AM, and the surgery was at noon. And the nurse said, do you want to valium? I said, no, I need to experience this moment as fully as possible. And my mother and girlfriend were very freaked out and were being very solicitous, so I needed to take a walk.
I took a walk to the hospital chapel, I sat down and I just felt despondent, like my life was over. And then I had a moment of realization, a moment of insight. If I can’t let go of something as small as a small part of my body, how will I let go of my entire body when I die? That moment changed everything. From that moment on losing an eye became a creative journey. And I really believe what I experienced is true. I was given the opportunity to learn to see again as an adult and as a photographer, that’s an enormous gift.
[01:09:50] Sean: I’m wondering after the surgery and after that insight, what was the most challenging element moving forward?
[01:09:56] David: Well, of course, depth perception was a challenging element. I would reach over to pour something into a glass and I would pour it on the table and not knowing what I could do. Well, I didn’t know, could I drive again? Would I live a normal life? What I looked disfigured, I didn’t know the answer to any of these things. So I was in the hospital after they removed the eye, I was the department chair of an art department at that time, and the very next day after my surgery was student orientation of the students in my department.
I woke up after the surgery and I thought, oh my God, I need to go to work. If I just sit in this hospital room, I’m going to get horribly depressed. I said to my mom and my girlfriend, I’m going to drive to Boston and go to work. They said, “oh, David, you can’t do that. You’re crazy.” But I needed to see, I needed to challenge myself. I needed to see if I could drive again. So I got in the car, my girlfriend came with me just in case and I drove 20 miles to Boston.
I walked into the room, half of my face was bandaged but I needed to experiment right away with what I could do and what I couldn’t do. And driving I realized is something I could still do. And it turns out there are very few things I can’t do. I’ll never be a great tennis star because I don’t have the subtlety of depth perception, but there’s nothing I did before that I can’t do now.
[01:12:03] Sean: After that experience, how do you feel all of this relates to your own personal mastery?
[01:12:12] David: Well, losing an eye became a journey of integration. I really needed to face my mortality. And I think that recognition that someday I’m going to have to let go of my body, became a gift and became a powerful transforming force. I am not my body and what losing an eye serves to do, you’ve heard the story of the Zen master who comes up and whacks the student with a stick on the side of the head and suddenly their ego is broken free, that’s what happened to me.
I felt like my injury broke through a certain amount of egotism, a certain amount of pettiness, things that I cared about before losing an eye were things I didn’t care about post-injury. It did help to incinerate my ego. It gave me more compassion. It gave me more awareness and it really did become an engine, if you will, of personal integration.
[01:13:43] Sean: Do you view that this for you was your hero’s journey to talk about?
[01:13:49] David: Oh God. Yes, it was. It was the Zen Master’s stick. It was Joseph Campbell’s hero’s journey. Yes, absolutely.
[01:13:57] Sean: Is that going to the depths of despair there a necessary evil in order to get to your higher self? Do you have to go through hell to get there?
[01:14:10] David: I don’t know if you need to go through hell, but I do know you need to confront your personal demons, and for some people that may be more difficult than others. For me, for whatever reason, I needed a massive injury to let go of my ego. Other people seem to be able to manage that with less stress, but there needs to be a process of purification. There needs to be a process of seeing and accepting what is within me, both my angels and my demons.
Obstacles to Authenticity
[01:14:57] Sean: Mentioning what you felt that you needed in order to get to that place, and thinking back to earlier in our conversation, you were mentioning authenticity. I’m just wondering your take on authenticity and what’s holding the majority of people back from allowing their authentic self to come through.
[01:15:17] David: I think today it’s two things. I think it’s cultural conditions. We are taught we need to be a certain way. Most people aren’t that way, and for a lot of young people, it causes a real lack of self-esteem, a lack of inner conflict. I think, secondly, our culture does not have the attitude that everybody has an equal gift. We still function on the “great man model.” There are certain people that are geniuses and the rest of us are ordinary mortals. I think we need to have the confidence that there’s something in us that demands to be expressed in the world. Hawaiian culture has a beautiful word, it’s called “kuleana”.
In Western thinking, our privilege, our duty, our honor, and our responsibility are diametrically opposed to what we love and what we do are often at odds with each other. The word “kuleana” in Hawaiian culture means my privilege, my honor, my duty, my responsibility all rolled into one. And I think each person on this earth has their “kuleana”, a place of genius. Romans called it the genus, a place where we can both give and receive to and from life in a way that is distinctly our own. But we need to get beyond the cultural conditioning that says, oh, we need to be this way or that way we need to look like this. We need to act like this. It’s a horrible obstacle, especially for young people.
Breaking Free from Cultural Constraints
[01:17:25] Sean: I know you work with a lot of younger students, have you found anything, that has allowed them to break free from some of those cultural constraints?
[01:17:37] David: You have to inculcate in students that they have a voice, they have a vision, they have something to offer, and even if they don’t know yet what it is, they have the freedom to explore it. Most people don’t feel that freedom. They feel perhaps because of societal constraints, perhaps because of what is considered on Instagram and social media, they don’t feel that what their gift is is valuable. And I don’t know how to instill that inner confidence, but I do know how to give them the freedom and the safe space, if you will, to explore their vision or their voice.
Resonance
[01:18:36] Sean: I’m even wondering about people, understanding what their creative medium even is. How do people unleash that? I feel like so many people are bouncing around. They don’t have a clue in terms of what that is.
[01:18:54] David: The keyword is resonance. What do you resonate with? What are you attracted to from deep within? And don’t be afraid to follow that. There’s a young Hawaiian artist that I know who’s making weapons. One of the Native Hawaiian arts of ancient times was weapon making. And at first, she said, “oh, I can’t do that. Who would accept a weapon as a work of art in today’s world?” Look at all the gun violence, but yet it was hers to do.
We have to be willing to just say yes to seek what we resonate with from deep within, to follow it, and to have a certain amount of faith in regard to where that might lead. We have to be willing to explore. Remember that the key to success is failure. We have to experiment and explore a number of things that don’t work out before we explore that which does work out.
Great Influential Thinkers
[01:20:20] Sean: I completely agree with that. I think that’s just a beautiful insight that I think certain people are starting to come around to. I just wish more would. I’m wondering though, one of the things I appreciate when reading your books is the number of amazing quotes you’ve pulled from and interesting insights and resources. It’s a vast amount of knowledge that you have in, and you pinpoint in your writing. For you, which thinkers have greatly impacted you over the years. And they could be across different domains. I’m just wondering who, when you look back, you’re like, you know what, these people foundationally changed how I looked at things.
[01:20:56] David: I’m going to answer that question, but first I want to tell you a story. When I was in second grade, I loved quotations. I loved them. I would seek them out. The local newspaper, the Akron Beacon Journal, Akron, Ohio actually published 10 of my favorite quotes in the newspapers. I’m telling that story because I think as children, if we look back to our childhood, we can find those things that genuinely interest us. I love words. I love quotes and yes, I’m a master at uncovering the right quote. But when I looked back to my childhood, that was there from a very early age.
So what is it in you that just doesn’t go away? That’s part of discovering who you are. In terms of thinkers and people who I love, I love people that write about creativity, inner work. If I look at my bookcase, I’m going to mention a few people whose work I love Rainier Maria Rilke, the poet. The book of creativity I am jealous of is his book called Letters to a Young Poet which I think is an extraordinary book. I read Walden by Thoreau in high school. I think Thoreau is a magnificent thinker and writer and Thoreau’s book, Walden is a memoir.
It’s a memoir about learning to see, learning to observe the world, and I learned a tremendous amount from Thoreau after losing an eye. I also loved Carlos Casteneda and the fictional Don Juan. When I was a young man, Carl Jung, and one of my favorite philosophers is G.I. Gurdjieff. I’ve read a lot of his work and P.D. Ouspensky, one of his students, wrote a book called In Search of the Miraculous. As I look at my bookshelf, I see a lot of books on the Gurdjieff. I see a lot of books on consciousness. I read a fair amount of Buddhist material. I liked Shogun from the Clavell book quite a lot. Does that answer your question?
Modern Day Sages
[01:23:29] Sean: It’s beautiful. I’m a huge reader, I know a lot of the listeners are as well, so we always appreciate book recommendations. You mentioned studying a lot of Buddhism, I feel like you have a great insight into what a well-lived life looks like, and I’m wondering, are there any modern sages that are out there now. I feel like that’s one of the things anytime I’m doing some of this research, it always seems they are people in the past, and I’m wondering who’s a modern-day sage that you look to for insight.
[01:24:03] David: That’s a very good question because I laugh and say many of the books I read are at least 50 years old.
[01:24:09] Sean: So David, this is like one of the best things. I mentioned like the first time I came across your book, it was like, holy shit, this is incredible. Then lucky enough, it was like, oh no, not only are you alive but you’re still writing. I was like, this is amazing. Because honestly, I would have thought it was something written in the past because of how much wisdom was in it. So please continue. I just want to let you know, you’re one of the people that I actually think is one of those modern days, let’s call them sages.
[01:24:35] David: Well, I deeply appreciate that. I think there are people alive and writing today that I respect greatly. I have tremendous respect for His Holiness, the Dalai Lama. I think his teaching, his writing is profound. I have tremendous respect for contemporary writers. Do you know the philosopher and writer, Jacob Needleman?
[01:25:02] Sean: I haven’t read any of his work. I’m familiar with Needleman, I just have not delved into anything that he’s done.
[01:25:08] David: I feel that he’s a very powerful writer and teacher. I read a lot of books on creativity for my own research. I can’t think of any that touched me deeply written by people today. People that I have learned from, let me put it on that level, I liked Natalie Goldberg, the writer, she wrote the book, Writing Down the Bones. I’ve learned a lot from her. I like Annie Dillard, the writer I’ve learned a lot from her. She wrote a book called The Writing Life. I read a number of books by Matthieu Ricard, who’s a friend of the Dalai Lama. He’s considered the happiest man alive. He’s the one they attached electrodes to his brain and they studied his brainwaves on meditation. I think Matthieu Ricard is an incredible teacher and writer. So I think there are people today.
Long-Form Conversation with Anyone Dead or Alive
[01:26:31] Sean: It’s great. There are definitely a few more people now to look into. I am wondering though if you could do this just long-form conversation, interview anyone dead or alive, just not a family member or friend, who would you love just spending the evening, having a long conversation with?
[01:26:45] David: Can it be a panel discussion?
[01:26:48] Sean: Yeah, let’s do it.
[01:26:50] David: Okay. In the New York Times, they say in the book review section, they have interviews in each issue and one of the questions for their interviews is what writers living or dead would you invite for a dinner party? Okay. I would definitely invite Thoreau. I would definitely invite George Gurdjieff, the spiritual teacher. And I would definitely invite Pema Chodron, the Buddhist teacher. And I’d love to see what those three people could uncover in their conversation.
[01:27:29] Sean: David, I’ll give you one question, you can ask the three of them, what are you going with?
[01:27:35] David: What is the one question I’m going to ask them? The question that I cannot answer. In your mind, what is the meaning of life? What is the meaning of life, and in what way do we become what we need to be?
[01:27:58] Sean: That’s beautiful. David, you’ve been way too kind here with sharing your insights and wisdom, I want to make sure we have a lot of your work, your books linked up. Obviously, everything will be in the transcript and the show notes here, but where can the listeners stay connected with you? And I know you’ve recently released a book, I know we talked a lot about the book, The Widening Stream, your book on creativity, so all of this is going to be linked up, but just want to open up the platform up to you to make the listeners aware of anything you want them to know.
[01:28:30] David: People can go to my website. It’s https://creativeguide.com/. I have three published books currently. The most recent is called The Mindful Photographer Awake in the World with a Camera. That book was recently released online, and the print version is going to be released in early 2022. I have another book that came out a couple of years ago called Zen Camera: Creative Awakening with a Daily Practice in Photography.
And then my book on creativity is called The Widening Stream: The Seven Stages of Creativity. All of those can be found on my website or on Amazon. And I have a book of photographs coming out next May, Titled Oceano: An Elegy for the Earth. It’s photographs of the Oceano Dunes on the Central California coast.
[01:29:35] Sean: That’s fantastic. And one of the things that I love too, David is on your website you have a lot of sample chapters. So for anyone who wants to dive into this a little bit to see if it strikes a chord, I’d highly recommend doing that. You also have some great articles and even some of the other interviews you’ve done throughout the years which I really want to enjoy. And I do want everyone to understand what I love so much is your creative medium.
One of them is what you do with the camera, but your ability to articulate creativity and artistry for anyone, think it’s so important. So even if you have no photography experience, anything like that, you will learn a tremendous amount from David’s book. So I just want to make sure everyone is aware of that as well, but David, this has been an honor. I’ve learned so much from you. So I just want to thank you so much for joining us here on this.
[01:30:24] David: Well, thank you, Sean. You’re a great interviewer. I loved your questions. I think that we uncovered a lot of very interesting material, so thank you very much. I appreciate it.
[01:30:36] Sean: You guys made it to the end of another episode of What Got You There. I hope you guys enjoyed it. I really do appreciate you taking the time to listen all the way through. If you found value in this, the best way you can support the show is by giving us a review, rating it, sharing it with your friends, and also sharing on social. I can’t tell you how much I appreciate it. Looking forward to you guys, listening to another episode.
