Behind the Lens: Leif Bristow's Journey Through Film and the Power of True Stories

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Welcome to the Living the Dream Podcast with Curveball. If you believe, you can achieve. Welcome to the Living the Dream with Curveball Podcast, a show where I interview guests that teach, motivate, and inspire. Today's guest is Leaf Briscoe Bristol and Emmy a winning producer, director, screenwriter, and author, known for bringing to life powerful stories in both film and page. Leaf has over thirty television and film products to his credit, including beloved international productions. And he has built a career around compelling storytelling, historical narratives, and cinematic adaptations. And Leaf is here today to discuss the realities of the entertainment industry. And we're going to be talking to Leaf about everything that he's up to and gonna be up to. So welcome to the show, Leaf.

SPEAKER_01 1:22

Thank you. It's wonderful to be here. I appreciate you having me on, Curtis.

SPEAKER_00 1:25

Why don't you start off by telling everybody a little bit about yourself?

SPEAKER_01 1:30

Um you know, I I started as a child performer. I uh I uh always loved performing. And you know, when I when I finished school, I uh uh I went to the University of Denver for a while. I was I was born in Canada but raised in the U.S., lived in Alaska, Denver, Dallas, Chicago, moved back to Denver and graduated high school, then went to university for a while there, then moved back to Canada, went to Europe and sang, and then moved to LA to ultimately get a degree in theater. So it's it was kind of an eclectic growing up. Um I got to move around a lot, meet a lot of great people from a lot of parts of the of North America, and that that was a great foundation. And then um after I got my degree in theater, I um I performed for a long time. I was very fortunate. I I work all the time, so that's that's a good thing when you're a performer. Um, you can pay the bills. And then in in the mid-90s, um, I had stopped performing for a while and and built a company um that did a lot of investment banking and in merchant banking. And I did it because I wanted to learn how to use capital to meet to achieve my goals in in media. And uh so then in in about 1993, um, I came back into the entertainment world full-time, executive producing, producing, and directing. And I've been doing that ever since.

SPEAKER_00 2:58

First, let's talk about Tia Zhang. Talk about, hopefully I said that last name right, but talk about how you met her and how you felt that her life was compelling enough to become a book and a film.

SPEAKER_01 3:10

Well, you know, Tia, I mean, Tia is really somebody very special. Um we met Tia because our our youngest daughter graduated from Canada's National Ballet School. And during in her last year, one of her teachers was Tia Zhang. And um one of the teachers was telling us about Tia, and um, and Brittany would always come home and talk about what a tough teacher Tia was. She was just she was very disciplined, and she wouldn't let you quit no matter what. If she said do 20 jumps, you were gonna do 20 jumps, and if she felt you didn't do them well enough, you're gonna do 20 more. Um, so she was she she was just very, very, very disciplined. And we one of the teachers was telling us a little bit about her life. And she grew up in China under when Mao was in power, came of age during the Cultural Revolution. Her father was a senior military uh man in in Beijing and was one of the men who was responsible for surrendering Beijing to Mao. I mean, it was somewhat of a peaceful um surrender because by the time Mao got to Beijing, the whole country was behind him. So everybody just kind of had to give in. Then there was a day in which Tia and her family, like all the former Kumintang officers, were permitted to get out of China and they all went to Taiwan and ended up forming the government that still pretty much rules Taiwan today. So they got when they got to the sea to get into a small boat to get onto the ferry, the soldiers started shooting bullets into the air from their machine guns, and a bullet came down and landed on Tia's little brother's leg. So he started bleeding profusely. Well, they all ran back to shore. And so out of that, they ended up being stranded in China. So they returned to their family home, a home that, when they lived in it, was a massive home in Beijing. They had servants, um, beautiful moon gate, pond, all kinds of things. And when they returned to it, it was fully occupied by other people, and they were allowed to live in basically one room or two rooms of their own home. Um, and so it really um it was it was about discovering Tia um in that regard. And and what happened was, um, as we heard about it, and the fact that she had ended up defecting um from China at some point, she'd been sent to a labor camp, her husband was sent to a labor camp. And when Tia was sent to a labor camp, she'd just had her son 56 days earlier. So her son was was she had to leave her son with her her with her mother, and she only saw her son twice in three years. So it was just to understand that level of um um adversity and what it would take to overcome it, and the and just the positive human being she is today, we said, you know, that that's a story worth telling. Um, you know, every family, most most, you know, pretty much every uh pretty much everybody has a story to be told. It's always about discovering the story. And and in Tia's case, you know, it was we said, you know, would you be willing to talk about your life? And she she had never in her life thought that she would tell about her life to somebody who wasn't Chinese, but she agreed to come and talk to Agnes, my wife. And um she after she retired, which was the following year, she would come over and sit on our front porch or in the house and tell Aggie about her life. And she um they they spent a couple of years doing that, and then Tia was traveling a lot and with with her dance, and so it took quite a bit of time to get it all put together and written. And then once the book was written, um as we looked at it, and we said, okay, the reason we made wrote this book was to make a movie of it, because I'm a filmmaker. So then Aggie wrote the screenplay about her life, and uh we filmed it, and it's it's now a motion picture. And it's uh I don't have the exact date yet, um, but it will MGM is releasing it through Amazon Prime in all English speaking territories uh this September.

SPEAKER_00 9:21

Okay, well, congratulations on that. Thank you. So, as an Emmy-winning filmmaker, talk about the challenges that come with adapting a truly emotion, deeply emotional true story from page to screen.

SPEAKER_01 9:39

Well, you know, um I think any any anytime you tell a story based on truth or based on written material, um, you have to protect the integrity of that material. Um you know, this movie was not a movie, and it we had to be cognizant of the fact that we weren't writing a movie that was an opinion one way or another on Mao's regime, what happened during the Cultural Revolution. We were telling Tia's story against that backdrop. So you have to be careful that you don't get fully swayed into the politics of the moment, the politics of the day would just happen to be the backdrop. It was a very brutal time. Um, you know, there was a lot of starvation. Um, there was so much rationing at a certain point, uh, you know, everybody had to give up their walks for cooking and anything metal they had in their homes, and they had to take those to uh melting areas where it could potentially be melted down and tried to turn it into iron ore. Um it was it was not it was not an easy time uh at all. So, you know, we really went through the process of of really understanding Tia and Jason's life and then with her son. Um, and it's um, you know, I think it it's always hard to do justice to a great book. And what Aggie's written is a really, it's a really, really powerful emotional story. Um what I love about it is it's a contemporary glimpse into a culture that most of us in North America don't know a lot about. You know, 11% of the North American population is of Asian ancestry, but how much do most any of us know about our neighbor who is Chinese or or Japanese or you know, South Korean? Um, most of us don't know that much. And it's always been a more private community, I would say, where they hold things a little closer. Um so it's sometimes hard. But um I think this this gives a really wonderful glimpse into a more modern day China. You know, it's not a martial arts movie, it's not a it's not a Jackie Chan comedy, and it's we're not talking about something that happened 2,000 years ago. Um, you know, there's so many people living today in North America and you know, France and certain other places in the world where you know their parents and grandparents all lived through the Cultural Revolution. Um, and you know, even today it has uh an immense impact on how they live their lives. When we were doing this movie, um, you know, China, China as a as a culture and as a nation pretty much works on the basis that the Cultural Revolution was only a good time. So you can't say anything bad about it. And if you depict it as a negative time in history, the Chinese government doesn't like it. Um, I had uh members of my cast were told they shouldn't make the movie. Um I had a young woman who was a very significant lead in the movie, who we were we were, we started filming during COVID and then it was shut down and we came back to film, but she was too afraid to come back and finish filming the movie. So Agnes had to readapt the script around her um so that you would still believe she was in it and she was through the whole movie, but we uh adjusted the scenes that we needed her in where she wasn't gonna return. And it was simply because she had uh her her mother was in um her mother was in Beijing and her grandmother was in Hong Kong. And so she was very much afraid for their safety if she came back to do the movie. So it was um there's a there I think there's there's a lot of things uh when you're anytime you take the written the written word and try to then bring it to life on the screen. Um, because what you have to do is get all the information out, but really make sure that the story is always being propelled forward by what you're showing.

SPEAKER_00 14:12

Well, what do you think audiences can learn from Tia's story of survival, resilience, escape, and rebuilding her life through dance?

SPEAKER_01 14:22

You know, I I think I think Tia's story, while it's Tia's story, it is the story of many, many people. Um, I think we all know in North America, um, many families who immigrated to North America, whether, you know, whether they're there's whether they're uh descendants of people who were in the Holocaust. My my cinematographer, this, uh Rudy Blacek, um, remembers when he was three years old, tanks coming through the city he was living in in Czechoslovakia. Um, you know, so if you if you if you've come from a place where you have lived under any form of brutal regime or or war or persecution for you know race or beliefs um or anything like that, um, I think it's a story that resonates. Um Tia, you know, what's what's remarkable about Tia and her family was that um Tia met her husband posing for a statue. That statue is still standing at Worker's Stadium in in Beijing. Um it on the 10th anniversary of uh Mao's rise to power, they wanted to do statues of the most beautiful faces of the new China. And uh Jason was a hurdler uh with the Chinese uh athletic team and Tia uh ballerina, and she was asked to go and stand beside him to pose. They weren't supposed to speak to each other, and yet they stood next to each other for a number of days and really didn't talk very much at all, but she totally fell in love with him. And when they finished, uh when the sculptor finished the statue, they did a night to commemorate the statue and and they were playing a movie. Um, and Tia was invited, Jason was going to be there, and she asked Mother to come. Mother didn't want to go, but she said, I've I've met him and I really want you to come. Mother was steadfast on the fact that that she was to have a proper arranged Chinese marriage with somebody who had a good education and came from a family of prominence so that she would have a good life. Uh Tia wanted nothing to do with an arranged marriage. So Mother finally agreed. She went to the movie theater, she met Jason, and when when they got home, she forbid Tia to see him because he was too tall. And he was he didn't have the education that she liked. So this one uh at some point he was gone for almost two years. Uh Tia refused to see any of the men that mother wanted. Uh Jason came back and had a card that had been mailed to him from Tia that he'd been holding on to for the longest time and came to see if this is where she lived. And of course it was. And it he came in and and then they went for a walk. And he explained why, you know, he'd been he'd been away with the with the athletic team in the south of China. So he wasn't able to get word to her and wasn't able to see her, but he wanted to know if she would still be willing to see him and if they could possibly go out. So she said yes. Mother seemed to allow them to date, but then when it looked like it was getting serious, and there's a scene in the movie that it was such a powerful day because all of my talent, who were Chinese in the family, they were Chinese and South Korean, all said that they had lived through this exact same dinner scene in their own homes growing up. So at a certain point, mother had had enough. And she told Tia at dinner, okay, you now have to stop seeing Jason. I'm going to arrange a marriage for you. Tia said, No. Mother said, if you don't stop seeing Jason, then you will be dead to me and to this family. With that, Tia stood up and walked out of the house and went back to the ballet school because she lived in the dorm and was teaching. Well, this went on for five months. Um, and the family was upset. Tia was not going to bend, she was as stubborn as her mother, and finally, mother sent her sister uh to the ballet school and asked her to come back to the house and to bring Jason with her. So they went to the house. Mother had decided she was going to take a different tact. She said, I will allow you to see each other on the condition that Jason goes and gets a proper education. And he said, Well, funny you should say that because I've had injuries and I've just enrolled in the school of traditional Chinese medicine at the University of Beijing. So now the the whole family was ecstatic because they were going to have a doctor uh for a son, uh, a son-in-law. And um that's that's what allowed them to finally date. And when they they got married, even though they weren't permitted to, um, just before Jason was sent to the labor camp, and all through it, Tia worked on the basis that she had to do whatever it took to bring her family together. And when she was sent to a labor camp, they would dance in the dirt, even when they're you know, when their feet were raw, um, because they didn't have stuff. And um eventually when when they were both released and and came back, at a certain point Tia was asked uh if she could go to England and dance. And it was right at the time uh Mao was allowing people to travel. So they had to travel to Japan and catch a flight from Japan um to London. Tia went there, and what and it was fascinating and an educational piece for me was that she said, you know, being raised in China at that time, we were all taught that the rest of the world hates China and the Chinese people, and that if you leave the borders, they'll kill you. So they were indoctrinated to a culture of beer and as a reason to stand up against the rest of the world. But she gets to London, and the first place she went to when they, as they were taking her to the Royal Albert Theater, they drove through Chinatown in London. And she said, I saw women in beautiful dresses, not mao suits, and they were sitting at outdoor cafes and walking and laughing, and people were talking, and I realized that everything I'd been taught growing up was a lie, that it wasn't the truth. And she met a woman in um in uh in London who was actually uh she had met her in China actually, and she was the one that asked her to come to London. She worked for the the the British consulate. And actually, our daughter, who is an actress and does the lead in an awful lot of movies, she's been doing this uh since she was very young as well. Uh, she played that character in the movie. Um and uh they they became very good friends. And it was through this woman and a reporter from Toronto, uh, the same man who helped Barishnikov defect from Russia, uh, eventually helped Tia defect. And and I, you know, and I so when you when you see this level of devotion to her family, the the resolve never to give up. Um part of it is, you know, it's like I have a daughter who you know graduated from the National Ballet School. When you do 15,000 hours of rehearsal, um your your your discipline and your precision, you know, it's like being any great athlete, it's it's mind-boggling to watch. And Tia was so focused on protecting her family, on on making sure that her her son would have an opportunity to grow up, not under the same kind of rule that she had to endure, but to give him a truly better life, um, and get him out of out of China. Um it's amazing to watch. And Tia is now early 90s, she's a force to be reckoned with. Um, even when she was in her early 80s, I would watch her dance, and she's regarded as the most knowledgeable person on. Historical Chinese Dance in the World. And she created around the around North America and around the world, people see posters uh or billboards up for Shenyun, um, 5,000 years of Chinese Dance and Culture. Well, Tia is the person that created Shenyun. Um, and it's so it's, you know, just seeing seeing that that inner strength and that dedication uh to her husband, to her family, um, the perseverance, I think that's a great lesson for anyone in life. Um, you know, she was not, she was, she there her her her discipline meant there was no way she was gonna define herself as someone who had to be had had had to succumb to being put down and just um tolerate uh uh a brutal regime that was gonna dictate how her life should be. She said, No, I'm gonna create a better life, and she went out about doing it.

SPEAKER_00 24:27

Well, what can readers expect, readers and viewers expect next with uh Dancing Through the Shadows, uh and also, you know, with the film adaptation.

SPEAKER_01 24:39

Um, well, the wonderful thing is, you know, the book is um the book has started to win a number of of awards this year. It's been winning quite uh quite a few um uh literary uh awards, which is really wonderful. I think um I think what the brilliance of the way Aggie wrote this book in the first person, so that you see, you feel, and you really you experience Tia's life through her voice, um, which is really pretty amazing, um, given that Aggie's not Chinese. Um, but it's it's just it's it's a it's a it's a it's it's a great read. You'll learn about modern China, you'll learn about the culture. Um, you know, people that are uh great readers and and read a lot, both historical and and biographical, just they really love the book because they feel that it just draws them into a world that they hadn't expected. Um, and they learn from it and they're emotionally um captivated by it. The film is um, as I said, the film is going to be released on Amazon Prime in September um uh by MGM. Uh so we're really excited about that. Um, you know, it's played at a couple of film festivals in um uh Dhaka, uh Sedona, Utah. Um, and it's it's really wonderful to watch uh the audience response because, as I say, it's it's dealing with more modern day China in a way it and it's not a comedy. So I mean it's not, you know, it's not a it's just a wonderful romance movie. It's got it's got humor, it's got um it's it's it has it has the power of the of the love story um set against what was not a great backdrop, but you really you really feel and find the love in this family and what what lifts them out of this on a day-to-day basis and their ability to stay strong and not not just cave in. So, you know, so we have that, and then you know, my the wonderful thing is for the last oh since 2012, uh Agnes and I have produced all the movies we make together. So we do um we've done an awful lot of exotic location movies for the Hallmark Network, filming in South Africa and Malta, um Ireland, Germany, France, England, just pretty much uh a lot of places throughout Europe and South Africa. And uh we have a couple more coming up, and then uh we're kind of we're we have another major motion picture that we're working on that's another that's a true story uh based on my cousin. So that's you know, that's kind of a next project that we're that we're hard at. Uh most most of the movies that we make are holiday and romance movies. So we do we do a lot of inspirational uh uplifting movies, and that's really the focus of everything we do. We don't do any movies with gratuitous sex or violence. Our our goal is really to inspire audiences and give them something hopeful um to watch. Um, I am going to do a movie that we're working on now. Um, I have a a cousin that warned uh the government that Timothy McVeigh would blow up Oklahoma. And they said there was no way a Canadian would know before the U.S. would know. And unfortunately, that didn't do that didn't turn out well. Um so I'm doing a movie about his life and about those events. So that's that's the that's the next big project. But for the in the in the meantime, we'll um we'll spend a lot of time in in the early fall putting out a lot of publicity and and material to make sure that people uh know about dancing through the shadow being on on Prime and hoping that you know uh that lots of people pick up the book through through Amazon.

SPEAKER_00 29:07

Well, what the behind the scenes lesson have you learned from decades in film, television, and storytelling?

SPEAKER_01 29:16

You know, um I I think one of the uh one of the great things about it, um one thing I definitely have learned is uh it's it's not easy. It's it's not the easiest job on the planet. But um, you know, I think if if you love something and you approach it on the basis that every time you step out to do it, um you do the best you can, and you know that what you're trying to deliver is some something that will give an audience a moment of reflection, a time to to feel, so you know, whether it's to laugh or cry, um and feel as though they watched something um that added value to their life. Um, I think that that's it's been it's been great for me watching um as the movies and the stories that we've told have had the opportunity to do that. Um, you know, I've learned that no matter where you travel in the world, um, and this I think it's one of the whether I've made because I've done biblical movies, I've done suspense movies, I've done a lot of holiday movies. Um, but I've had the luxury of traveling a lot with our films and when I was a singer. And what I've discovered is that no matter where you go in the world, we're vastly more alike than we are different. Um travel when you can opens the doors to new thoughts, new cultures, new perspectives. And it makes you realize that as you travel around the world, we're so much more closely united than we are divided. Um I think politics and religion is what divides us, but usually it divides us out of ignorance, not out of knowledge. Um it's real easy to stand in front of a camera and say the other guy's bad, but did you ever walk into the other guy's backyard? Maybe he's not so bad. You know, when I when I travel to Malta or to um Egypt or South Africa, I think I think every American high school student should have no choice but to go and do a semester of school somewhere in in South Africa because you would learn more about love and community and how to get along as community than what we what we achieve in North America. Um it's you know, wherever you go in the world, people want to laugh, they want to sing, they want to have a bite of food together, whether that's a lunch or dinner, they want to introduce you to their family. Nobody wants to see their child die before they do, and no one wants their children to die in war. And when you use culture to ex, when you use film, television, uh, dance, music to export culture, then through those, through those uh mediums, we can bring people together. You know, the whole world watched a movie like Slum Dog Millionaire. 90% of North Americans will never leave the continent in their lifetime, yet they could watch a movie like Slum Dog Millionaire and relate to it. That's important. Um, the biggest hurdle, you know, as we watch where the state of the world at the moment, the world's in probably in greater chaos than it's been in the last hundred years. And until we can take the time to talk to each other and um kind of find a way to and embrace our differences and and and maybe look at those as sometimes positive, I think it's gonna be hard, it's very hard for us uh as a society to move forward constructively. Um, you know, people say, oh, you have to tolerate somebody young because they're different. Well, tolerates what you do with somebody you don't really want to have to put up with. If if it shouldn't be about tolerance, it should be, you know, I've had this conversation with so many people of Islamic faith, um, Buddhist, um, Hebrew, Christian, and the three religions in particular were all created in the same moment from the same foundation. There's just there's slight ideologies within those three that divide the course of those religions. But at our at the core, they all teach the same level of commandments and goodness. Um, and so I think when we can look beyond the zealot and things like that, and and look to each other as as enriching our lives by by knowing other cultures and and and people from other other backgrounds, then I think you know that's when we really will succeed as people. And so I think, you know, when you ask, what do I learn? Having having spent so much of my life traveling and getting to experience other cultures, I feel like my life has been very much enriched. And I and it gives me a greater ability to try to convey those stories of people from other cultures and other lands and other places to to audiences everywhere, you know, but especially, you know, the bulk of our stuff playing in North America, I can I can open a window and give people an opportunity to experience life somewhere else, experience other culture through film and television. And so, you know, the the the learning about humanity and and human nature is probably the greatest teaching I've experienced. And hopefully through making movies that try to inspire people and um are much more aspirational. We we always try to find stories, particularly about women rising above adversity and tell those stories. Um, just because I didn't think my daughters had a lot of positive role models to look at in film and television when they were growing up. And I wanted to make sure that that there were. So that's you know, I think that's pretty much it.

SPEAKER_00 36:19

Why do you feel like stories of freedom, oppression, courage, and the human spirit feel especially relevant today?

SPEAKER_01 36:29

Um, you know, and this is one of the reasons I want to tell my my cousin's story. He became, in order to destroy hate crime in Canada, he became the leader, the second he became second in charge of the largest hate crime group in Canada. He was a spy. He went in there to destroy it. Um, he went to Hayden Lake, Idaho, which is where he was with Timothy McVeigh and Lewis Beam, the former head of the Ku Klux Klan. He warned the U.S. He also is responsible by 1993 for having destroyed all organized hate crime groups in Canada at the time. The Prime Minister stood up and said he'd done more to protect visible minorities than any living Canadian in history. When I watch what's happening today, um, and the level of hatred and vitriol um and racist comments, crimes, and actions that are going on, there's I I believe that telling those stories right now is more important. I don't think there's been a more important time since Mississippi Burning was made. Um, I think then this generation needs a new Mississippi burning to wake up. Um you know, when you when you think of the the number of swastikas being painted on buildings and mosques and uh synagogues and and and people being attacked simply because of their color or their perceived religion, um it that's insanity. Um and it in in no way can that ever be right, and one injustice can't solve another injustice, but we have to talk, we have to communicate, we have to sometimes the the way you can create the dialogue is through demonstration, and even a movie like Dancing Through the Shadow does that. Um, there's when you think about the fact that 11% of North America's population is of Asian ancestry, and many of the children here today, their parents, grandparents either lived under Mao, some of them came out of South Korea when when the when after the war between North and South Korea, which was also violent. Um there's there's just so much of it. And you know, when you look at something like the Charleston March or or um Floyd, and and we just we look at these things that are going on and being and and just continuing, and bigger lines in the sand are being drawn, um, but we're not having dialogue. And we're not saying, well, wait a minute, this is how do we how do we get this to stop? I think it takes it it takes um it takes visuals quite often to make people stop and think. And you know, um film can be a very powerful tool just to create dialogue. And if I can do a movie that that um shows people rising above the adversity of cultural clash or um like these war, you know, a war or you know, what Tia faced, um, you know, and then the religious persecution, or if I can do something, you know, that that shows that depicts and shows how ugly things are when we have these forms of race crimes and everything else. If I can if I can create dialogue among just even just the groups of people that see the film, and if we do screenings and you do question and answer and and let people be a voice and talk about what it takes to be heard and be res and in a respectful manner, then I think that's really important. Um more now more than really more than I I can remember going back a long way in my lifetime.

SPEAKER_00 41:08

Well, so people can keep up whatever they're up to, though it's a contact info.

SPEAKER_01 41:13

Um the easy I I'm the easiest person in the world to find practically, because if you type Leaf Bristow into into Google, you'll find me. Um, you know, it's uh on IMDB. Um, you know, I'm I'm there pretty easy. And and then of course we've got the um the website dancingthhrutheshadow.com, and people can buy the book on that. It'll have information about when the film, when we know the exact release date on on Prime, that'll be on Dancing on Dancing Throughthe Shadow.com. Um so, but yeah, I'm I'm I'm not that hard to find.

SPEAKER_00 41:48

All right, we'll close us out with some final thoughts. Maybe if that was something I forgot to talk about that you would like to touch on any final thoughts you have for the listeners.

SPEAKER_01 41:56

No, you know, I I I just hope um people take the time to to read the book. It's a it's a wonderful emotional read that's it that it's powerful. You'll you'll laugh, you'll cry, you'll you'll you'll go on a wonderful journey. And then I hope I hope people take the time to watch the movie when it comes out. That would be wonderful. Um, but more than anything else, I think, you know, if you take the time to watch something, just find a movie that really is about, especially true stories about people rising above adversity. Um it it it always does something to your heart uh when when you can rally for that that underdog. Um it makes you feel better about yourself.

SPEAKER_00 42:41

Absolutely, ladies and gentlemen. Definitely check out that dancing through the shadow movie when it comes out and to keep up with everything that Leaf is up to, dancing through the shadow.com. Please be sure to follow Ray Review, share this episode to as many people as possible. Also, to keep up with all things living the dream, visit www.curveball337.com. And if you haven't already done so, sign up for the newsletter to be updated on everything that the show is up to and gonna be up to, and share the website and the show to everybody you know. Thank you for listening and supporting the show. And Lee, thank you for all that you do to bring these stories to light. And thank you for joining me.

SPEAKER_01 43:25

Thank you.

SPEAKER_00 43:27

For more information on the Living the Dream with Curveball Podcast, visit www.curveball337.com. Until next time, keep living the dream!