#57 - Daniel Epstein: Developing Faith Through Portraits, Stories and Sacred Listening

In this episode, Sam Bell speaks with Daniel Epstein about Portraits in Faith, developing faith through listening, sacred stories, photography, Uncle Bob and Aunty Barbara Randall, Mutitjulu, behaviour change, gratitude, love and becoming more whole.

Daniel Epstein is an author, photographer, founder of Portraits in Faith Foundation, and founder and principal of Daniel Epstein & Associates. He spent 21 years at Procter & Gamble, including as a marketing director, before building a consulting practice focused on behaviour change, marketing and innovation. He travelled the world for business and for faith. Along the way, he began adding personal days to photograph and interview people about faith, spirituality and their direct experience of a higher power. 

What began as Daniel’s own spiritual exercise became Portraits in Faith: 500 people in 30 countries, with black and white portraits, video interviews, a website, YouTube channel, coffee table book, museum exhibition and Sacred Listening workshops.

Thank you to Barbara Schacht Randall for introducing us.

Content note:

This conversation includes references to the Stolen Generations, colonisation, mission schools and sexual violence. Some listeners may find parts of this conversation distressing.

What you’ll hear:

• How Daniel began Portraits in Faith from his own search for faith
• Why his first portrait was with a church janitor, not clergy
• Meeting Uncle Bob and Aunty Barbara Randall through the Parliament of the World’s Religions
• Staying in Mutitjulu and the shift from humanity’s journey to all creation’s journey
• Faith, doubt, gratitude and love across religions and beyond formal religion
• Sacred Listening workshops and the healing possibility of receiving another person’s story
• How this work changed Daniel’s marketing, behaviour change and client work

Guest links:

• Daniel Epstein: https://www.linkedin.com/in/danielkepstein/
• Portraits in Faith: https://portraitsinfaith.org/
• Portraits in Faith Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/portraitsinfaith/
• Background Story: https://portraitsinfaith.org/about/
• Exhibition: https://portraitsinfaith.org/exhibit/
• Sacred Listening workshops: https://portraitsinfaith.org/news/sacred-listening-workshop-with-the-breaking-chains-group/

Conversation mentions:

• Uncle Bob and Aunty Barbara Randall’s Portraits in Faith: https://portraitsinfaith.org/bob-randall/
• Barbara Schacht Randall’s Natural Genius: https://youtu.be/ww08BIyQEGg
• Mutitjulu and Uluru: https://www.google.com/maps/place/Mutitjulu+NT+0872
• Ken Burns, The National Parks: America’s Best Idea: https://www.pbs.org/kenburns/the-national-parks
• Rose B. Simpson: https://www.rosebsimpson.com/
• SpiritualSingles.com: https://www.spiritualsingles.com/

Chapters:

00:02 Introduction to Daniel and Portraits in Faith
02:06 Meeting Uncle Bob and Aunty Barbara Randall at Mutitjulu
04:59 Marketing, behaviour change and global travel
06:34 Feeling like “the other” and beginning Portraits in Faith
08:00 The faith questions that never changed
10:11 Website, book, exhibition and Ken Burns’ advice
12:36 Gratitude, love and developing faith
15:20 Stories from Portraits in Faith
20:55 Atheism, buffalo spirit and unexpected theology
23:03 Becoming more whole through listening
25:09 Sacred Listening and receiving someone’s story
29:40 Workshops, healing and sharing sacred stories
32:05 Indigenous elders and one-to-one connection

Explore further:

Discover Natural Genius: https://naturalgenius.com.au
Learn more about Sam: https://samanthabell.com.au
Other platforms: https://www.buzzsprout.com/2568387
Subscribe to hear future episodes.

Credits:

Hosted by Samantha (Sam) Bell in Kiama and Cincinnati, Ohio, 5 June, 2026.
Produced at the Kiama and Prahran offices, 5 - 30 June, 2026.

Natural Genius Podcast https://naturalgenius.com.au

Transcript

SPEAKER_09 0:02

Welcome to the Natural Genius Podcast. We're here to help you tap into your natural genius. Let's go. I'm about to meet the remarkable Daniel Epstein, thankfully introduced to me through Barbara Schacht Randall. I'm on his website having a look at these incredible photos in his Portraits in Faith project. He says, for 18 years, while I was a marketing director at one of the world's largest corporations, I traveled the world for business and for faith. Born and raised a Jew, my challenges with relationships, work and life forced me at age 36 to drop to my knees and pray to a God I did not know. A higher power, not specific either to my own Judaism or any religion, and ask for help. I created a spiritual exercise by interviewing people I met around the world during personal days added on my business travels. I asked each person about the role of faith and spiritual experiences in their lives. As a photographer, I captured a moment with each person, a black and white portrait meant to evoke their true spirit, especially as seen through their eyes. What transpired from this practice is that my sense of hopelessness and lack of faith faded. I was lifted and transformed by other stories of faith in a higher power and a great intelligence and an unconditional love of the universe. And I became more whole. What an exceptional human being. Corporate and spirituality, empathy, art. There's just so many aspects. Also, it might be of interest to have a look at this one on YouTube as Daniel might be sharing his screen and incredible photos. Enjoy hearing from Daniel. Welcome to the Natural Genius Podcast.

SPEAKER_17 1:50

Thank you so much.

SPEAKER_09 1:51

I was just saying how much I enjoyed seeing your website and your story behind how you got into portraits in faith. Tell me a little bit more about the seeds and what you've enjoyed about the project and as it still keeps going, what you're enjoying now.

SPEAKER_17 2:06

Sure. To start with how we met, I met Auntie Barb, as you say. Um when I went to the Parliament of the World's Religions in Melbourne, Australia in 2009. And my producer reached out to Uncle Bob Randall to see if we could interview him. And not only did he say yes, but he invited us out to Mutijulu for three days. And so I stayed in the Aboriginal community of Mutijulu for three days with Barbara with another house guest. We celebrated Hanukkah all together out there. Um I slept under the amazing stars uh outside with the dingos barking or whatever it is dingos do. And uh it was a wonderful experience. As coincidence would have it, there's a Cincinnati connection that Barbara has. And Uncle Bob and Barbara came to Cincinnati to my home, and I held an evening where I gathered people to hear his stories and his music. So deeply grateful to Barbara, and she and I remain in touch since Uncle Bob passed.

SPEAKER_09 3:16

It's so lovely how friendships form. And tell me about being on the land out there, and you would have been to so many different beautiful places in the world. Tell me about being out at Modajulu.

SPEAKER_17 3:28

First of all, it was hot and there were a lot of flies. Um but uh and I walked around around um one day. Uh started very early in the morning because of the heat since it was December. And I had a really profound experience uh just imagining all the rituals and uh all the generations that have lived there. Uh and then Uncle Bob's own history as a member of the stolen generation. Just being in the Aboriginal community of Mutijulu was profound. Trying to look beyond the poverty and trying to see the beauty of the community was impactful. Seeing the art that they and others are famous for, it was really impactful. And actually, a big thing happened for me with my Portraits in Faith project by spending so much time with Uncle Bob and Barbara that one of the purposes of my project was to show that all of humanity was on a journey together. But as Uncle Bob talked to me about the rock that was the grandfather and the tree that was the uncle and the person he knew that was related to the weather. Now I just say all of creation is on a journey together.

SPEAKER_09 4:42

Increased scope.

SPEAKER_17 4:44

Yeah, exactly. Um let me tell you about portraits in faith. Uh please do.

SPEAKER_09 4:50

And would you mind if you also include? I wonder if you're a behavioral psychologist. I wonder if that comes into your curiosity around people.

SPEAKER_17 4:59

My professional background is um I'm not a behavioral psychologist, but I'm a marketer who specializes in the science of behavior change. So I have business partners who are behavioral psychologists, social psychologists. My career was at the large multinational company called Procter Gamble. I was a marketing director there. Towards the end of my career, I became more like an internal marketing professor studying the future of marketing. And it was when I was studying the future of marketing that I got exposed to behavioral science, cognitive science. And so that's my professional specialty. But it was because of my travels for Proctor and Gamble and in my consulting since then that I've been able to travel to all these countries, add on extra days to interview people about their spiritual journeys. They're connected, but not the same. It's uh two different hats. I've been blessed to be able to travel the world many times over for many years there. And it was because of that that I could pursue this project. I was also single. There, you know, there wasn't a family that I had to rush home to. There was a cat, but uh their ways of dealing, getting people to take care of the cat.

SPEAKER_09 6:16

I'm glad that the cat made an entrance into our conversation.

SPEAKER_17 6:21

Well, the real background, although I guess Carl Sagan says if you want to make an apple pie from scratch, you need to start with the universe. But we won't go back that far.

SPEAKER_09 6:30

Um Carl and the cat so far.

SPEAKER_17 6:34

I grew up Jewish in Atlanta, Georgia in the South in the 70s. And so I felt very much like the other. But over time, as I grew, particularly into my teens and 20s, I also felt called to bring people together. So this dichotomy of feeling like the other, feeling called to bring people together is kind of my history. So when I got into photography, it wasn't a big surprise. I was at a photography workshop in 2001, and you had one of these workshops where you had to come up with an idea and start shooting. And so this idea of portraits and faith came to me. I would go, I thought I would go around to all the different houses of worship and make uh a portrait, uh, because that's what we were studying, uh black mite portrait of uh the clergy. But the first church I went to was a congregational church, and I could only find the janitor. The minister wasn't there, and I was pleading with the guy, well, when will the minister be back? You see, um Daniel Epstein, I'm at the main photographic workshops, I'm working on this project. And then I realized God put the janitor in front of me, not the minister. And so my first portrait in this project outside of my class was with the janitor of a church, which I just love. Uh, you know, service, service looks like many different things. Well, soon after that workshop where this idea of portraits in faith came to me, not of clergy, I had to go to Brazil on business. And so I was talking to my instructor from that workshop, and he said, Oh, I have a former student, Tom, in Brazil. Why don't you get him to find you some people and why don't you keep shooting? So I met Tom, he flew to São Paulo from his city, and he found about 20 people for me to make portraits of. And at that time, I I would talk to people about what their faith journey was, but it would be more like a little side conversation. It wasn't till about a year and a half later when I went to Japan that my producer, as I then started to call them, the Tom of each country, videoed. And at first he was videoing the discussion just to make uh the making of portraits in faith, but then of course the video became essential. Uh soon after that trip to Brazil. I asked Tom if he would answer some questions for me in writing. And the amazing thing is those questions came out and have never changed. And those those questions are what is your concept of God or a higher power? What does it mean to you to have faith? And what's your earliest memory of having faith? What was the first time in your life you feel like you had to or chose to rely upon God or a higher power as you understand God or a higher power? Tell me about a time you doubted your faith. Then I then I ask a few more general questions. What are you most grateful for? What's your greatest wish? Do you have a message? And what would you like people to know about you when they see your portrait? So I've now done this with 500 people in 30 countries over the last 25 years. I was just going around showing people my portfolio book. Oh, I met this, I I met Uncle Bob and Barbara and Muti Julu, and and people said you really need to be sharing this more broadly. So I was very blessed because of work connections. We have a, I don't know if you would know him in Australia, but we have a we we have we think he's world famous, a documentary filmmaker here in the US named Ken Burns.

SPEAKER_09 10:08

Oh, I love his national parks documentary.

SPEAKER_17 10:11

Well, he's pre-eminent, and I'm lucky that he's been an advisor to me now for 15 years. And and his main advice to me was have the courage to say this isn't a film. Everybody wants to make a public television special, but not everything is meant to be that. And so because I just have what in the industry we would call talking head, like what you and I have right now is talking head. Um, I don't have B-roll, you know, I don't have, okay, I'm going to this person's house and this is their community, and these are the things on the shelves of their house. I don't have that kind of footage. I decided that um let's just go with a digital offering, let's just make a website and let's add one more person's story to the website every few weeks. So of the 500 people, we're up to about just under 200 have been published. I have a virtual team. The graphic designer is in Maui and is Hungarian. The the video producer is in Toronto and is Colombian. Um, the editor is in Phoenix, the the website developer was in New Zealand. So it's a virtual ragtag team that I have. We turn reference and faith into a nonprofit uh charity, and we say that our purpose is to show that all of creation is on a spiritual journey together and that there is no other. So we have the website and the YouTube channel. We published a coffee table book a couple of years ago, and then my new wife, as of two months ago, Gina, thank you. When we met, gotta give a plug to spiritualsingles.com. When she saw my project, she got the idea to turn it into an exhibition because she's an artist and a curator. So the project became a museum exhibition, and we've been into galleries, museums, and we actually call the exhibition portraits in faith colon seeing the other, because our point, of course, is that there is no other. So that's that's what I've been doing for these 25 years as a side hustle, is interviewing people about their spiritual journeys and whatever it is faith uh means to them.

SPEAKER_09 12:29

Wow. A question that just keeps on coming up is what does love mean to you? And I guess faith is part of that.

SPEAKER_17 12:36

Well, I'll add a third word, which is gratitude. I was not a very grateful person. In fact, I tell the story that a psychiatrist evaluating me once in Boston, where I lived for a little while, described me to his colleague to whom he was referring me as a young man who wasn't happy about much. Not who you are now. No, but sadly it was true at the time. So the first thing I learned from this project before learning love and the profundity of love was gratitude. You might say that I drafted off of other people's stories of gratitude and faith until I could feel grateful and put together a sense of faith for myself, one that worked for me, a theology that worked for me. I recently interviewed somebody and I titled My Reflection About Him is God is Love and Love is All. I believe that everything's either an expression of love or fear. And I try to yank myself into the love side of the equation as much as I can. Uh, it's hard to remember sometimes. It's easy to get fearful. This project has definitely changed my sense of spiritual love, which has given me the capacity to be a good partner in romantic love.

SPEAKER_09 13:50

And the circle continues, I assume. Having her by your side possibly strengthens and increases the joy.

SPEAKER_17 13:57

Well, absolutely, because we're partners in this project together now as we seek new places to um take the exhibition. Gina and I presented at the Vatican in October. We were invited to have a press conference at the Vatican dedicated to portraits and faith and sharing our content. As a Jewish kid from Atlanta, Georgia, it was pretty heady to be at the Vatican and to have what they call prefects of dicasteries, the cardinal in charge of interreligious dialogue with us, and the imam of the great mosque in Rome and the Israeli ambassador to the Holy See. So it was a lovely experience to be sharing this content. It's kind of mind-boggling that the Pope and the Vatican are all of a sudden the great harbingers of hope in the world, you know, in this crazy time. But it was an honor to be there. Didn't get to meet the Pope. Maybe one day, inshallah. I have a six-minute video that I think would be helpful for people watching to see if it's if it's being listened to as a podcast, you'll at least hear different video clips of what people have shared with me around the world. Is there a common unifying thread? What if God's out there?

SPEAKER_07 15:20

I don't know what I want. What I want is I wanna know what I want.

SPEAKER_15 15:24

If nothing is lots in the world, is just like you know there would be inhale. Until I said yes, I will take that journey. I will not turn my back on anything, I will just expand myself. And let you let you form me and mold me.

SPEAKER_16 15:47

What am I doing here? Am I doing things for God or for myself?

SPEAKER_11 15:55

Maybe God is also ashamed of who I was. Maybe God didn't like me. Because I didn't like myself.

SPEAKER_00 16:03

Non ho bisogno di essere in gruppo per adorare Dio. Posso adorare ovunque nel mio paese d'origine, qui in Italia, se vado nelle Stati uh uh Uniti d'America, uh ovunque.

SPEAKER_05 16:24

I don't feel the need to pray. And for me, faith is not believing that this is the most important thing. I wanna have things. I just don't want things to have me.

SPEAKER_14 16:40

I had this image of Jesus and his arms outstretched and and then the lines from his arms that started to make the ick uncle out of my faith, but the oneness that always is I gone to like do battle and the church had transformed into my sanctuary.

SPEAKER_02 17:14

Hopefully. And um I found the spiritual dimension.

SPEAKER_08 17:22

Which came in the form of an animal, came in the form of a black bird. And in in in the language of the crop of the raven, did a little circle circle at its wings and I kind of interpreted his little dance as asking me, well if you would have lived, what is it that you would want to live for?

SPEAKER_04 17:51

And I thought he had a little bit of talk to colour.

SPEAKER_10 18:12

I was on the second floor of the month looking at the cabin down and I was praying and I got this strong feeling of you know really, you know, it's it's all got done. And two weeks later I met my husband.

SPEAKER_03 18:48

God, if you dare, you know, give me something, you know. Give me something. And I closed my eyes and just flipped the pages and put my finger on the text. And there I read, know that God you cannot comprehend God, but God comprehended all. I got the message, so that's how I became a listener.

SPEAKER_13 19:08

And I started talking to God like as if he was a person. And I said, Hey, you don't want you listen to me right now. I have done every damn thing for this child. Do you want me to do the right thing for this child? Then you did a bit of jumping. Because I can't do anything more.

SPEAKER_07 19:40

Couldn't find that little five.

SPEAKER_06 19:51

Couldn't you bad it pray? Couldn't you bad it pray down the bottom body pray?

SPEAKER_01 20:13

And I've always said it felt like chains flew in all directions. And this was a God I could rely upon to love me, to accept me, to embrace me, to give to me, even if I was not perfect, even if I fell. Uh and that's been much of my message to this day. That you come to God by doing it wrong. That's breathing underwater, not by doing it right.

SPEAKER_09 20:53

What what do you think that people get out of saying?

SPEAKER_17 20:55

I love sharing that video because I'm really trying to make the point that we can each hold on to a certain set of beliefs, but we're really on this bigger journey together. These are all different faces of the same great sacredness, as I call it. I just think that when we hear so many people sharing these profound moments, but of different religions and no religion, atheists and agnostics. I believe there's just a sense of oneness that I believe is possible. A lot of people are surprised to hear that my favorite interview in the whole project is with an atheist. And actually with the guy, my first producer, Tom, from Brazil. And I I asked him, you know, do you have a concept of a higher power? And he said, Well, no. I said he said, I think we created God. I don't think God created us. He said, but don't worry, it's just a concept. He says, What matters is that we don't think that all this stuff we have is what matters. He says, Don't get me wrong, I like having things. I just don't want things to have me. I said, Well, if you did have a concept of God, what would it be? He said, Well, you know, caveman, cavewoman, they believed that if they ate the buffalo, they would gain the strength of the buffalo. But before they would eat the buffalo, they would think the buffalo spirit. He said, I like that. He said, I like buffalo spirit. But today we have Macintosh, but no buffalo spirit. I'm like, well, how much how much more profound could it get than all that? I mean, how much more theology do we need?

SPEAKER_09 22:32

I love that. You reminded me about the telepathy tapes, which has become popular as a podcast recently, and how filmmakers on that project were atheists, and they were saying telepathy baffles them and broadens their view of the world. Daniel, on your site, I was struck by how you say that you have become more whole through the process. That's a really profound statement. It's aspirational for many. Tell me more.

SPEAKER_17 23:03

Well, actually, to be really blunt, I think for many years I felt like a mistake. I know that that's not possible today. I also know a lot of people have a feeling like that. I know I was a surprise, but I don't think I was a mistake uh today. One of the teachings that helped me uh from a shaman friend of mine, he said it takes the decision of seven ancestors for a child to be born. I was like, well, then there's no possibility of anyone being a mistake. I have I have a good friend who's the result of a rape. The pregnancy was the result of a rape, and he's not a mistake. It may have been a crime, but he's not a mistake. And he's a great blessing, a very gifted filmmaker and director. Many people have a feeling of being less than, and I had my own version of it. And these 500 interviews, well, a couple of things. One, I had to just sit there and be quiet. I had to stop talking. These are pretty much one-sided interviews. They're not conversational. They're I'm asking those questions, and I try to limit myself to only saying, tell me more about that and say more, which does come from some market research design thinking background. I think as I received these stories, these sacred stories, people sharing themselves with me, I felt, well, as you said, more whole. You know what's interesting has become a big part of my life, as you might expect. But I don't think it in and of itself is my only life purpose. I think my life purpose is to love, to love the people in my life and to be a loving force in the universe. This just happens to be an artifact I plan to leave behind and that I'm trying to share with the world. But I think the real goal is to be a loving force in the universe, try to be in that space. And by doing that, I feel more whole.

SPEAKER_09 25:03

That force of love is so beautiful. Tell me about how the project has evolved and what your focus is.

SPEAKER_17 25:09

Well, I continue to interview people. People come up into my consciousness, or I hear about someone and I reach out and I ask if I can interview them. If I do an international trip, I will, and it's a place I've never been before. I will try to set up a proper shoot for a week. So I did that in Barcelona and interviewed 15 or so people. I can I plan on continuing to interview people till I drop. Like I said, we have the website and the YouTube channel is the main way that people access these stories and these portraits. We have over 600,000 views on YouTube. We have the coffee table book, we have the museum exhibition. The other thing that I'm doing is I conduct workshops that I call sacred listening workshops. It it is what it sounds like. We will gather people, maybe a church and a synagogue will come together on a Sunday, and we will pair people up in the room. And I will take them through these four of the big questions that I shared with you and share video clips of how some people around the world answered those questions and then let them have a private moment, not to be shared with the room, but to ask that question of each other, listen for three to five minutes. At the end of that exercise, I've started having people make a picture of each other with their phones, not because it's going to be beautiful photography, although sometimes it is what comes on a phone. I'll ask them to take a picture of each other that reflects the other person's true spirit, as revealed in the interview. And then I'll ask them what most inspired you about this person. And I've I've paired up people that would not normally be in a room together, the the lesbian centers for spiritual living minister with the born-again Christian. And they write beautiful things about each other's faith journey as shared. So and and I did a sacred listening workshop this past year at a church. So people were all the same religion, they were all Christian, but it was between men who were previously incarcerated and men who had never been in prison. And I think a lot of these young men who had these young uh whippersnappers, deep in their faith, were a little blown away at the faith of these men who had been in prison five, 10, 30 years, what inner resources they had to develop to survive. So I I love doing these sacred listening workshops. I'm about to do one for the city of Cincinnati in our Festival of Faiths. And I'm trying to do these around the world. And in fact, uh these sacred listening workshops, when they produce these portraits and commitments and learnings, become part of our exhibition.

SPEAKER_09 28:13

That's extraordinary. I love that uh it brings together people of all different backgrounds and that feeling of wholeness that you might have been missing, that you're providing spaces for that for people to feel more whole, to be able to see yourself through another's eyes with love can be so profound.

SPEAKER_17 28:33

That's my hope. I kind of feel like I need to do this, and I'm hoping it's helping some other people.

SPEAKER_09 28:40

How has the project influenced your marketing work?

SPEAKER_17 28:43

Well, I would say in two ways. One, it has made me a better listener, investigator, if you will, of what is the human behavior at play here, and not to assume that everything is obvious. But really, I have to say that the bigger impact is not on the work itself, it's in how I relate to the people I work with. You know, I have clients all around the world. Um I'm going to Los Angeles next week. I was in Switzerland last month. Um, I find that when people find out about my project, they relate to me differently. I'm not just some guy with marketing expertise from Procter and Gamble who's on that professional path. People see me differently and allow me in to their lives when they understand what it is that I'm doing with this project.

SPEAKER_09 29:39

I can understand that.

SPEAKER_17 29:40

I would love to bring the exhibition and the workshops anywhere that people would get meaning out of it. There are certain hotspots around the world that there's a beautiful project in Berlin where they're building a synagogue, church, and a mosque together in one building called the House of One. Uh, and I've gone to visit them. That kind of environment would be ripe for people sharing each other's sacred stories. Universities, uh I did not know this till this year, but many universities don't just have an office of student religious life, but they've renamed them student religious, secular, and spiritual life to be fully inclusive of what those journeys might be. So I ran some workshops at the University of Michigan this year with that department. And we've reached out to similar departments at other universities. It can it can be anywhere people are. It really takes a leader who sees value in their community sharing their stories and receiving other people's stories. For a long time, I thought this project was about, oh, everybody in the world should get to share their story. And then a friend of mine sent me a book uh called Listening is an act of love. And I realized, oh my gosh, my project's not about telling your story, it's about listening, it's about receiving somebody's story. And so I think any any community or sets of communities that are looking for healing, I think great progress can be made by receiving each other's stories. And like I like I said with the prison ministry, that was within a church, people were all the same religion identified as Christian. So I did want to say to them at the end of the evening, now imagine if the person across from you was Muslim. Could you have received somebody of a different religion's faith journey and be equally inspired? I'll go anywhere. You know, I'm trying to work on this content and share it with the world. We're sharing two stories a week now online. So I share reflections and personal anecdotes uh connected to each interview. Our goal is to have a profound healing impact on the world.

SPEAKER_09 31:57

Through teaching, listening, and love. If you've done this in 30 countries, yeah, is there any bucket list countries or locations?

SPEAKER_17 32:05

Well, my graphic designer, producer, project manager is in Hawaii. Really, because of the way you and I met, because of indigenous elders, I've become so fascinated with indigenous peoples. And so my desire to go to Hawaii is to interview indigenous Hawaiians and to understand that connection to ancient culture. I've been fortunate to interview Native Americans, or as they call them in Canada, First Nations peoples. Sadly, their stories are quite a bit the same as Uncle Bob Randall's uh taking land, sexual abuse, mission schools, uh stolen generation type activities. So that makes me sad. But I really love being with indigenous people anywhere in the world. I certainly interviewed a lot of indigenous elders besides Uncle Bob Randall in Australia, would love to go to New Zealand to be with the Maori people. That's my biggest objective. Not necessarily a country to go to, but um, for me it's about uh who I'm with, and if I'm able to connect with people one-on-one, that to me is what's most sacred.

SPEAKER_09 33:18

As you're talking about different indigenous peoples and referring to Uncle Bob, I loved hearing about his very early years, the love that he described between his mother and aunties and the community. It it buys my heart to think of that level of sweetness with younger ones.

SPEAKER_17 33:40

Yeah, and there's so much to be learned.

SPEAKER_09 33:42

Is there anything else that you would like to share?

SPEAKER_17 33:44

No, just thanks for interviewing me and helping people see portraits in faith.

SPEAKER_09 33:50

Thanks for listening to the Natural Genius Podcast. Please share this with anyone who came to mind and visit us at naturalgenus.com.au. Thanks so much.