Mormon Missionary Reads the CES Letter - Kolby Sorensen - 1561

hello everyone and welcome to another edition of mormon stories podcast i'm your host uh john dolin it is march 11 2022 and we are very very excited for today's mormon stories uh episode uh every once in a while i would say at least every few months probably once a month at this point um an actively serving mormon missionary either reaches out to me or you know someone close to me or sometimes inexplicably kind of shows up on either the mormon stories podcast facebook group or one of the pages and of or on reddit the ex-mormon read it and kind of just lets the ex-mormon post-mormon world know that there's uh that there's at least one or several mormon missionaries out there that no longer believe that are following the post-mormon uh social media pages and uh and sometimes they even feel trapped or they're like how do i get out of here or most commonly there's kind of this just dilemma that they present of like i'm on my mission i no longer believe i'm following ex-mormon social media but do i come home or not how do i deal with my mission president what will my parents think um so that's that's a dynamic that's been happening for many many years but uh rarely have we've been able to have on mormon stories either an actively serving uh mormon missionary who no longer believes and we still haven't had that yet but uh what we've wanted to have for some time especially recently is uh someone on mormon stories who's recently returned from his or her mormon mission who lost their faith while on their mission and if possible either listen to mormon stories as a missionary or read the ces letter as a mormon missionary uh that that sort of thing and can talk about what it's like to uh yeah lose your faith as a missionary so today we are really excited to have with us in studio colby sorensen hey colby welcome hey i guess i should check off all those boxes for you because i did all of those things while a missionary yeah yeah and you've only been home how many months uh i think around six months six or seven at this point so we're in 2022 we're in march of 2022 and you got home from your mormon mission august or september 2021 yeah yeah and so and you were in her and i should mention that it's gerardo that was kind of the producer for this episode so we're lucky to have gerardo sitting in cair's chair hey gerardo hey john how's it going going good welcome thanks for uh making this happen yeah and you you you thought this was really interesting what what wasn't colby like wasn't colby like riding on one of the boards like as he's on a train to the mt to his mission home or something like that what was it yeah so uh he made a post on the mormon stories uh community facebook group um just telling us briefly his story that he had lost his faith on the mission uh sorry on the church and and that he was coming back uh from his mission and so i saw the post and were you want to train to the mission home is that yeah i was on the the fracture rule so it's like the fastest train in italy and i was on my way back to the mission home and when to end your mission to end my mission yeah no i was it was see you later i'm heading home at that point and the video was like how to tell and talk about your family that you've lost your faith and yeah that's the kind of stuff i needed so i tuned in yeah left a comment yeah yeah i saw it and i messaged him privately and i said hey would you like to be on mormon stories and he said yes uh he wrote an outline and but for scheduling issues and then colby got a job that didn't allow him to have a lot of free time but well we finally got him on the podcast which i'm really excited for yeah and i i'm partly to blame for the delays but no that's my fault as well i had a job that i switched to that became really difficult to get days off so i'm just happy to be here now though uh the long wait yeah yeah and uh and colby still lives with his believing mormon parents right right colby yep still living in their house saving up for college yeah yeah so this is really cool this is your chance and we're live streaming this as well on facebook and on youtube we we are open to having people call in during the live stream if they want at the end towards the end if they want to share kind of their experiences losing their faith on their mormon mission or if they had children who lost their faith on their mormon mission or if they have questions for colby at the end uh we're open to entertaining that but this is your chance to ask colby questions like um you know what's it like what was it like to serve during covid uh you know kind of the zoom mtc kind of experience what was it what's it like to lose your faith what's it like to have social media access how are freaking missionaries listening to podcasts or getting on reddit you know what's it like to proselyte through facebook so these these are all the types of things we can cover today right colby oh yeah yeah can't wait okay anything else you want to say colby before we any disclaimers or anything else you want to say before we dive in um so i guess if my family if anyone ends up watching this just know i i love you guys a ton like your love and support means everything to me i know a lot of ways this is how many of you expected things going but um i hope you guys are doing okay i know that i love you and like completely i think my views of you have changed and if you had to tell believing members and believing family why you're why you're not doing this episode what your intentions are not and then what your intentions are what would you say so that people don't get the wrong idea my intentions definitely aren't to to paint the mission experience in a bad way i just plan to i want to give an honest take on the mission experience because i think a lot of return missionaries always tell a very fluff piece on it and i'm not here to try to spread and make people want to leave the church i think that the truth is really important and i know one of the things that helped me a lot was being able to watch other people who went on missions and talk about that section of their life and that was a lot of comfort for me having knowing that it wasn't i wasn't alone in that kind of uh part experience and those kind of emotions that i wasn't the only one and i think that's something that's important for all of us where we just need that as people i love it i love it all right well uh what do you want to say about your mormon story before your mission um there's nothing super unique growing up it was kind of just the the typical lds family um we lived in utah um lived in price for a bit and mostly west valley uh is where i grew up um i we went to church every sunday scripture reading with the family we tried to do that every night you know family home evening doing that i loved reading the scriptures with my family i loved being involved in the different activities or reading the scriptures i loved raising my hands like oh i want to read the next verse or i'll read it and i honestly loved learning i loved going to church i wasn't one of the kids that didn't like going i was one of the ones that liked being there and singing jesus wants me to be a sunbeam or jesus wants me for a sunbeam and just having that enthusiasm to to be there and to learn it was it was a part of my life it was uh yeah just a big thing so so how many siblings maybe you already said this how many siblings and and how devout was your family how orthodox was your favorite um three younger brothers i'd say fairly orthodox it was that very yeah that's straightforward this is what they said at general conference this is what the prophets are saying and so that's exactly what it means that's what we're doing i remember before i can't remember who it was eventually one of them like lightened up on caffeine but for the longest time like caffeine soda was not allowed for us to drink at all and then i mean that changed as we got older it was never like a yeah i don't know how to explain like it wasn't like a huge deal switching it was just like uh we encourage you not to when we don't think you should but then once i think one of the prophets or apostles were like more open to it we started having soda more often out of nowhere that was a landmark moment in your family a big landmark moment not coffee and tea though not no no definitely not coffee and tea can't can't do that those are way too bad for you so they'll lead you astray but what were you what did you start drinking uh just like root beer mountain dew beer right barks root beer yeah that's what things get really you know that's edgy mormon edgy is a drink for beer when you get the um i don't know what they're like the ciders that look like wine bottles you know like martinelli's yeah martin out yeah they don't have caffeine they're no they don't have caffeine but i remember those who would all just pop those out as like oh like the avoidance of people yeah yeah okay the this caffeine thing is kind of interesting um my my husband had a really similar experience where like for for a while like his family was not not caffeine not coke at all and on his family and then at some point it just switched like i don't know except he doesn't know exactly what happened in my family because we were in mexico i guess things are harder to get there like my parents still don't drink coke oh um because it has caffeine yeah looks too much like coffee i guess i don't know yeah and on their missions they were not allowed to drink coke yeah um so it's one of those kind of the unwritten order of things yes everyone is living a little bit different everyone kind of lives their personal life a little bit in different places along the private orthodoxy spectrum yeah yeah um so yeah you were the oldest of four three brothers three younger brothers yeah i'm the oldest of four yeah four of us okay and uh so you would have been like let's say middle school high school years what years would that have been oh that's a hard question um what year did you graduate from high school i graduated in 2020 uh from high school from high school 2020 yeah okay yeah so you would have been you would have started high school in in in 2016 yeah yeah 2016 2017. okay all right okay so uh just anything noteworthy about your mormon childhood or adolescence in terms of faith stuff beliefs stuff social media stuff uh law of chastity word of wisdom stuff we always try and cover shame because that's we've discovered that to be central to the mormon faith model slash business model is making sure people so anything you want to share about your upbringing yeah for sure um a lot like that middle school high school is still very like uh i guess like straight edge orthodox as well where it was um maybe i swore a bit during like middle school and high school and that was about it though mostly trying to follow the commandments and shame i definitely realize like looking back that plays a huge part especially when it comes to yeah the the law chastity and the exploring your own uh sexuality like side of things all that it's very much a looking back you can totally see how much it's a controlling and a shame factor yeah so did you what were the were there any teachings that were really shame inducing for you and is there anything you want to talk and you don't have to talk about anything you don't want to talk about no yeah it's i guess for me personally there are never any that i think stuck out as shame inducing i of course i had like the typical um having sex before marriage is like eating chewed gum off the ground you know like the you don't want a dollar bill that's been torn up and ripped to shreds like that kind of thing but for me personally it was just never that part never played in more of the the masturbation shame uh and that side of things was what affected me for sure and just yeah was that what was that uh something that really um [Music] made you feel really bad about yourself no definitely um i remember yeah i mean you're a young teenager you start to explore that i remember of course like not fully understanding like oh this is what masturbation is because it's not really talked about or explained that you're always kind of in church it's like don't masturbate what's that oh we don't really want to talk about it and so once i figured out like oh this is what i'm doing and it's this big wrong thing i went into my bishop and then started around what age um probably like 15 or 16 okay somewhere in that range like it was maybe 14 because i think it was in middle school but um i guess just seeing how looking back at like the shame of it definitely i think plays into the making it almost more desirable because it's a bigger deal in your brain because it's oh it's something i'm not supposed to do it's something i'm not supposed to do because of that it's just i guess like a bigger deal in your brain and on your mind more and can lead to doing it more but also just not yeah feeling shameful for doing something that's just a natural part of your body how does a bishop how does a mormon how did your mormon bishop kind of uh cancel you uh basically accounts will be like hey look try to avoid these things you know don't don't be alone with the phone and make sure if you're having those thoughts sing to him um i remember like once i was able to take like the sacrament for like a couple weeks and really seeing how bats used is a big thing of shame because it's supposed to be he told you not to take the sacrament yeah yeah as like a punishment yeah it's of course never worded like that so you can fully do the repentance process but i mean i definitely think it's a punishment and because not taking the sacrament is something that everybody notices or it was during the time when i could pass a sacrament and can you explain half of our audience has never been mormon right so can you in your own memory and words explain kind of like how the sacrament works for a 14 or 16 year old or 12 year old kid and then how how what the surrounding context is and then how it would feel for a mormon youth to be told not to take the sacrament and and what that would be like right so the sacrament it's um it's part of the service that you do every week it's supposed to be like renewing your covenants with god these the promises that you make with him like baptism and so you take every week to sort of renew those and for and it's bread bread and water bread and water because you can't have wine is against the word of wisdom it's bad for you um so you would as a camera it's 12 when you start passing it you start passing it at that age and it's kind of a big deal because you're in front of everyone you're supposed to be like like christ you're you're i don't know if in the similarity of him is right but you're you're doing part of what he would do in spreading that sacrament and that part of the gospel or not part of the gospel part of those like um ordinances and so it's something where like everyone sees you you're walking around with that tray everyone's eyes are on you even if they're looking for like you you notice who's up there and who's not and so it's kind of a big deal if you're told not to because you've committed some sort of sin because whether or not people do notice or not you always no matter what you're going to have that fear of oh people are going to notice that i am not up there when i normally would be passing it and that oh someone's going to of course notice that you didn't take it because there's people passing it to you oh okay so normally you would either be passing or pro as a as a 12-yard youth you'd be up there passing it around to members of the congregation as a 14 year old youth you'd be preparing it with your friends and then as a 16 year old youth you'd be up there blessing it and so when your bishop was trying to help you repent he would have told you not to participate in the preparing or the passing of the sacrament and then you would have been sitting with your family while all your friends i actually got right yeah i actually because i was like so scared of people noticing that i wouldn't take the sacrament i hid in the bathroom when the sacrament as soon as i knew that was about to start i left went to the bathroom waited it for it to be done and then came back because i was just that nervous if someone's gonna notice i didn't take her that i'm not up there passing and so i was like i'm just gonna go and hide in the bathroom for a bit how'd that feel um [Music] i think shane's probably the perfect word just kind of that that feel of a need to hide that you've done something wrong that you have to keep it buried and secret even though it's something that because it's the sacrament it's out there and kind of open for every and anyone to see i i it's not my mission but i'm pretty sure before i was taught pretty explicitly that the reason why uh one of the reasons why members are not allowed to take the sacrament when they commit like sin usually it's sexual sins and so so they can because part of the repentance process is feeling shame for what you did and that that like everyone seeing that you don't take the sacrament helps you get that shame that you need in order to to fully repent and so feeling shame while everyone notices that you're not that you're unworthy as part of the repentance process were you taught that john interesting yeah i never had i never i had just there's i was told once as a teen that i couldn't take the sacrament for two weeks because with my girlfriend we went just a tiny bit farther than we should have um i don't i think it was i i had a pretty cool bishop and for me it was more just like hey this is the way you can get right with the lord again yeah yeah so i wasn't told shame no yeah yeah i was told that it was it was part of of the process of repentance to feel the shame when everyone notices that you can't sacrament i definitely hadn't heard that the way it was explained to me was just like that you have to take a break from those that way you can like realize how much you do need them and like to be able to fully repent and heal from it that you have to have a break from something that's supposed to renew your covenant of baptism which is what wiped you clean from sin kind of weird i don't know but there's no way to do it privately because everybody says your peers will know your deacon teachers or priests will know your young men's young women's leaders will know your parents will know your siblings will be looking at you why aren't you taking you know the sacrament will come to you it'll be passed to you you know everyone's around you and then you like have to just pass it on and not take it or you're the lucky one that you're on the edge of the seat so they're about to hand it to you and so you're going to grab it and hand it over while looking at them in the eyes and then just knowing exactly why um yeah that's crazy and it was something always to me as weird because i remembered in like dnc i can't remember what section where uh joseph smith i think was saying basically like let private sins be counseled in private i'm like okay if it's something that's supposed to be in private why is it that you're stopped from partaking in this very open thing that didn't i didn't see it as anything as a big deal but i just always thought like that's kind of weird yeah yeah sometimes when i'm thinking about trying to be charitable with my mormon upbringing sometimes i feel like oh this is some of these things are horrible other times i feel like well you learn discipline you learn hard you know you learn to self-control you learn to do hard things for you was it traumatic or was it like hey i learned self-discipline or somewhere in the middle well if you had to say yeah somewhere in the middle because it was like yeah it's about learning self-discipline and control and not acting on being able to be the master of your own ship kind of thing it's you're not controlled by your urges you control your urges your urges don't control you but there definitely was that factor of yeah i guess maybe not traumatized but definitely shame like it was a big part and definitely affected me during those times when i didn't i felt really anxious about it i would be scared about going to church and like ah i was scared enough that i hid in the bathroom because i was just nervous about people knowing or thinking that i did something wrong because that's just kind of part of the i'd say the mormon culture is kind of putting on a pretty face and like oh look see how great of a family we are look how perfect we're doing yeah the one thing for sure is the church ends up i think many of us are concerned are concerned with informed consent but also undue influence and undue influence shame becomes a really important part of making you feel like you need the church you can't be happy or healthy without the church and it's shame that's kind of the axle that that church devotion can often circle around and in that sense i have a problem with the shame because it it makes people feel like they're dependent no definitely yeah psychologically okay uh uh i assume you did release time seminary in your local high school do you want to explain what that is and because it's so bizarre i still can't believe the state of utah a sovereign u.s state allows the intermingling of religion and public education yeah it works yeah um release time basically you get a period off where you go to an lds seminar you're in high school right in high school yeah this is in high school so you're doing your schedule at the beginning of each year yeah it's like it's like do i want biology or chemistry or english or math and you have the option or release time which is really somewhat release time seminary yeah it's yeah release time of seminary and it's going to that that class is a separate building like a little off the school property usually across the street yeah and there's a mormon seminary building that all the mormon kids are shuffling every class period to and from right yeah and you just go and it's kind of um sunday school plus you just get a little more it's just an extra day of the week well not actually it's an extra class period where you continue those studies and talk a ton about the church and go through different scriptures um they no longer did the was it doctrinal mastery it was or scripture master you started doing doctrinal mastering said worlds like before it was scriptural mastery i was never part mastery where you memorize scriptures and then do scripture chase to try and see who could find the scripture the fastest i never did that's what i did yeah i never did the doctrinal master which is like do you understand these doctrines but we still did scripture chases which i thought were super fun because i liked everyone likes a little bit of competition like oh yeah i found it the fastest look at me flip through my quad right here yeah um did you like i mean we recently had brad wilcox week on mormon stories he's an example of kind of a ces instructor did you like your seminary teachers oh i loved all of them they were what were they like um i had really kind ones like a lot of them were really um i say like good emotional like really sympathetic and empathetic towards students they really you could tell like they cared about the people in the classroom and they liked their job they they liked being there they loved the church and being able to talk about it and yeah i like i like the classes i remember my favorite year was my junior year i had an amazing teacher and two of my best friends in the class and we would be the ones always like shooting our hands up to try to answer the questions and getting excited about whatever the topic was if you had to uh describe the techniques or the tactics that were used to make kids excited about religion and about the church would you have any ways you would describe it uh candy once in a while i think that's a big factor i think just trying to the teachers were good at trying to make it more relatable yeah using more like parable type lessons to make it fit for a younger very different audience doesn't don't uh seminary teachers tend to be a little more charismatic than what you would see on a regular um sunday school you know someone that it's not their job but it's just like in in sunday school like it's a voluntary position where like seminary people are selected and like filtered through and like you know like it's hard to get a job as a seminary teacher um they tend to be a little more charismatic am i am i right was that your experience yeah i'd say that's that's a way to describe it they they're usually charismatic they're good at i guess kind of entertaining a crowd a bit you know they knew how to talk and present in a fun way in front of a classroom they felt like kind of like ted talk speakers they know what they're doing while they're up there so they can be funny they can be emotional they can be heartfelt they can be they can tell a good story we're talking john by the way hank smith yeah very much like that yeah john by the way-esque kind of thing with uh either yeah making a lot of jokes to make it more fun or having like a lot of emotional stories that they would share to to kind of bring you one more yeah yeah as far as like the history of the church that you were taught um or you know like doctrines that you were taught in seminary um i mean i'm not asking you to compare them to what you later found out but what what would be the things that you understood or started learning about the history of the church and all that unsigned um i'd say very similar to what i would have learned growing up they started to talk touch on of course a little more polygamy and like yep the church did polygamy but it was usually a lot of the we don't really know why but it was a thing we did yeah and just to just to back up kind of piggyback on your question gerardo yeah so if if the gospel if the gospel topics essays were released around 2014 13 2014 they would have started coming out uh and then and then the church and of course several high-profile excommunications would have happened between 2013 and 2016. and so you would have been in high school right as the gospel topics essays were starting to become more aware which is was the mormon church's attempt to respond to the internet and be more honest about its history but they also would have started to be incorporating a bit more of a factual history into their curriculum so yeah like in what ways were you not well prepared versus prepared for what would come later which was the ces letter right um the one i'd say the most prepared for would be the book of abraham that's the only one i recall like going into more depth but i don't think they used the gospel topic as i think they avoided going to that still but we talked about that more in depth what would they have said to you um the kind went over like okay we know that some people they wouldn't ever be specific about like what people's concerns or complaints but it's like some people have concerns about the book of abraham but what matters is that it's it's doctrine and it's important scripture to us and it brings that spiritual understanding and that there's other ways that it could been brought and they kind of lead you to answering the questions of giving it to you like well what are other ways joseph could have known this and it's like i think eventually like one of them was supposed to lead to like the idea of like the catalyst theory that was just an inspiration i remember it kind of being set up that you're supposed to be led to saying that answer for yourself not just the teacher yeah outright saying it so instead of focusing on how it's not really a translation and like the egyptian characters didn't have anything to do with abraham they focus on like oh how could joseph smith know all this stuff about egypt and look at how great the book of abraham is doctrinally and it's so spiritual it was that kind of like the message that you were getting yeah no that would definitely summarize the message really well as just kind of focus on the the spiritual part of it so prior to let's just say you had a book of abraham lesson in seminary prior to the lesson would you have known anything about the book of abraham or was your seminary experience the first introduction you had to the the hieroglyphics the papyrus i i heard about it growing up yeah i definitely heard about them growing up but like really understanding more about it would have come through seminary like i liked i remember i looked at the facsimiles a lot because i thought they looked cool i remember doing that a ton growing up just like these look really neat yeah not really so what they have said we're going to teach you the story of the book of abraham and then they would have talked to you about the scrolls and the mummies so they would have introduced that whole story to you yeah in seminary it was like yeah we went over the whole story and like that was kind of it was prefaced with like it doesn't really matter how we got here it's that it's important scripture that's kind of the small point they touch on and of course going deeper into like here's why it's important to our doctrine and our understanding of how the world works so what's super significant about this why i'm loving this interview one of the many reasons i'm excited about this interview you know we we gerardo and i and others refer to that as inoculation in other words they're they're putting a little bit of the germ or the bug in the minds of youth and just to back up a tiny bit when marlon jensen you know the swedish rescue happened with hans matson back in the 2010s [Music] right uh they would have marlin jensen would have been going all around the world talking to mormon adults about their faith crisis and marlon jensen would have concluded that adults are lost once once the adults feel betrayed you're never really getting them back and so it would have they would have made a decision we're going to just realize that we're going to lose a bunch of adults but we need to inoculate the youth so that they don't feel betrayed so when they decided to incorporate book of abraham into your curriculum it would have been intentionally with the intent of inoculating you against learning about the book of abraham later yeah and so uh you i'm sure you would have had no concept of this while you were learning about the book of abraham right no not at all and it was really crazy like eventually i did listen to your guys's episode on inoculation just realizing oh that's what they did to me this is me i recognize this stuff this is what happened and just seeing how subtle it is but how much it did make an impact still i mean i'm conflicted because i and it's hard to ask you this because i don't want to get ahead of ourselves in the story but um it you know it obviously maybe didn't work as well for you but there's also probably a lot of other youth for whom it may have worked and so um you know so what what role did that serve at the time anyway the inoculation if you had to describe it at the time honestly i wouldn't even notice it i was i was just like fully into the church like i had no even conceptualization of the thought that maybe the church could be false that was just not a possibility in my brain so learning about that i was like oh yeah well duh of course the book of abraham is true of course joseph translated it in some way by the power of god duh yeah that's that's powerful because because they would have introduced a very problematic topic to you in a way to where you're just like oh there's no problem here this is awesome in church i think csun that could be problematic it was just a this is here if they can contextualize it in the right way yeah you learn it without recognizing there's any problem you want to say something hurt yeah he mentioned that he they planted a seed they said well there's people that criticize the book of abraham you know but we we we got to focus on on this amazing stuff but they don't realize how amazing the book of abraham is you know like so they say they would say stuff like this um and then another thing that i i mean i experienced this when i was in an institute class at uh byu idaho is they started using the michael chandler papyra all that story to get people excited but never focus on the fact you know like the real issues with the fact that i mean it's not a translation so they would talk about the whole story like i remember on my institute class they would make us memorize like the year the rosetta stone was found and you know all this stuff like why does it matter when the rosetta stone was found and the cypher if if it doesn't have anything to do if the book of abraham doesn't have anything to do with papaya but they try to like you know put the focus elsewhere um which i think it's it's kind of interesting i think the idea is if they make you think like you know all you need to know about the issue yeah and that it's not only not a problem but that it's like faith promoting then then they've kind of like in stamped that in your brain so that then when it comes later what it doesn't phase you as much that was definitely the goal and it worked for a time so i mean it's like a good i don't want to say good job i guess it kind of works so you you're on to something maybe well we talked about this in our sandra tanner polygamy episode there's just so much that they don't tell you intentionally that is that again informed consent we're not here to take people out of the church but we just believe people deserve to know the truth and i i don't know i i feel like it's a dishonest act fundamentally to do that inoculation without letting you know the problems you're an impressionable youth you're literally your brain is forming they're trying to get you on a mission and so it's kind of manipulative to not give you all the full facts to not help you understand why there's a problem but to kind of like it knock you late how do you feel 100 especially where like i mean who is it that the quote it's like not telling the whole truth is the same as lying like what the church does is against what their own prophets and apostles would say it's it's such a weird contradiction to see and it's very much they're trying to just give you this very you focus on a piece of wood saying yep this is wood without looking at the whole forest i can't remember exactly how that saying goes but it's like something long that you know what i mean the forced force in the trees yeah the force in the trees it's like if you spend your whole time saying yeah this is a tree you'll miss the whole forest you can there's a lot more to be so they focus on an issue at a time you know and spaced out with a lot of doctrine with a lot of spirituality with a lot of stories and to make you look at each problem individually and in a very surface level and that doesn't let you go back yeah by focusing on the trees yeah you're not seeing the forest yeah yeah and that's that's not informed consent and and oh i really love the point you just made so what would the church have taught you real honesty was real honesty is telling the the full truth of what you know and not trying to hide or obscure any of it and i was taught partial truth partial lies right partial truth is bad partial truth is still a lie because you're not telling the whole truth yeah take your own advice come on yeah okay okay cool so book of abraham you were inoculated back to gerardo's question like do you remember any other discussions of kind of controversial topics like what what false things would have you still been taught like what false representations would you have been given and i can go through the list so like let's just do it so first vision what would you have not even mentioning that there are other accounts there's just there's the one account you read from and that's that's it okay so you okay how about stone in the hat treasure chest i only think i was ever mentioned i learned that like later on my mission ring through other stuff i thought it was just uh the erm and thumbin so the translation yeah there were plates yep when so joseph translates the book of mormon you you would have been taught what uh that he did it by the gift empowered god using the urman thummin to like read through the physical copy of the plates while they're in front of him they're in the room not underneath anything and he's saying it to his scribe no stone in the hat no stone in the hat at all okay and no mention of treasure digging is a not at all a career before i haven't sort of a no mention of the real reason why like joseph was arrested and why people had an issue with him it was always framed it's just they didn't like that he had this new religion going on okay what about any mention of fanny alger no no like the most they would go into polygamy was like yeah it's a thing the church did and that that would be about is they they practice polygamy joseph smith did it it was doctrine oh you didn't do that so they did later on in seminary during my youth i would have heard that joseph only taught polygamy but did not practice it himself he was only faithful to emma okay but that's a big deal so while you're in utah mormon seminary they introduced to you the idea that joseph well the fact that joseph smith practiced please that's a big deal i did not have that i didn't learn that to my 30s yeah it was i think it's definitely something they would rather not talk about but definitely we're forced to because it's just something that's pretty out there for anyone to know and so it's a lot better for them from their perspective if we if we introduce it it's going to be a lot easier than them hearing from someone else how did you how how would they tell you did you have any idea how many wives what kind of wives no how'd they introduce it like the introduction was just that joseph practiced polygamy because he also taught it and that he followed like they weren't explicitly saying but basically not setting up that there were any issues with it or that he didn't uh tell emma like that would have all been left out completely so much just joseph practiced polygamy the same way he had other members and that oh that he didn't like it that it was always a great trouble to him it was so hard for him it's such a trying time many sleepless nights that that's probably true yeah there were some sleepless nights oh sorry i went too far um so okay so no mention of underage girls 14 year olds like any detail like that that would be troubling at all was definitely left out like i cannot recall anything like that ever being mentioned no mention of which is interesting because we because that's how we talk about brigham young's polygamy even among young mormons we don't really know much about burgundy young's polygamy i mean we know he had many wives but we don't really know their names much you know so my guess is that's how you view joseph smith believe me like oh he breaks believe me like bring him young that's it yeah no that that would have been it he practiced plugged me like brigham young and like the rest of the church members whatever yeah no mention of polyandry or joseph marrying other men's wives okay so you would have known that word no i yeah i would have known that word i think like from like a social studies class but not at all anywhere from the church i could be from a separate history class just talking about what that means but without any context of joseph smith involved any addressing of book of mormon historicity in your seminary experience so you know anachronisms horses steel wheels anyway did not any attempts to inoculate you around that none that i can recall i just remember usually like oh look see we have these old mayan ruins this is proof that the neophytes and laminites were here their cultures are so similar that's why i was taught yeah or that like i remember one it's like look at um i can't remember what it was there's the one yeah where it's like oh look see it talks about a white man returning it must be jesus there can't be any other reason they know of a white guy and jesus was definitely very white as well uh what about joseph's death anything how was that framed his martyrdom exactly as that was a martyrdom it's such a tragedy he was just an innocent lamb going to the slaughter they only persecuted him because of he was trying to preach the truth and religion and they did not like that so he was taken to jail and he willingly went to i think they talked about like that he willingly went to try to like subside the mobs or something like that but then that it was just mobs that came in so courageous like well yeah no it was very much it's an act of heroism yeah there's this rhetoric too that he knew he was gonna die oh yeah that made him a prophet right like definitely like he was getting stuff prepared but somehow no one knew who was gonna be his successor but he knew he was gonna die good road map planned out yeah yeah um how about racing the priesthood like i don't remember that really being talked about at all in 1978 i think maybe that was talked about but then within context of just the quote of brigham young being like eventually the african americans shall have all the rights to the priesthood and that's the whole that's the whole quote don't check that for yourselves anybody so no no no mention of brigham young's racism only a mention that brigham was this awesome prophet who foresaw people of color receiving the priesthood that's awesome he loved african americans he he called what's his name i can't remember his name i feel so bad yeah elijah abel he's like look at one of our best members like that would be the only part told it would be painted as they were very against racism oh yeah i remember growing up being told like yeah joseph he was very against racism and so is the whole church or slavery not racism and that during the civil rights movement that we were with like on that side and yeah in general conference there was a 70s that said i am so glad to be part of a church who has always been against racism i very much remember that like i can't remember when it was probably when i was a little kid because i have no memory of exactly like the time but very much believing that and thinking yeah that's so awesome that you know we were there and helping with the civil rights movement and that we were so supportive of that this almost feels like like kgb kind of misinformation like orwellian yeah like rewriting history and indoctrinating yeah a little bit yeah i remember there's just i mean tons of scattered weird doctrinal things that i would have been told that now of course are like oh it's just teachers saying weird stuff but something i noticed on the seminary manuals is a lot of emphasis especially on when you study the old testament but also doctrine covenants a lot of emphasis on inoculating the youth uh regarding lgbt issues yeah and and the marriage between a man and a woman oh yeah talk about that no that was yeah drilled into me that i'm a person in the family all that yeah i remember very much during the time when like the uh the lgbtq movement was going on them trying to be able to you know just be able to legally get married oh you would have been you oh keep going but you would have been there when the when the 2015 thing came down okay keep going yeah and very much then being like yeah we oppose this because it's against god and growing up definitely having those like as a little younger once i was in high school i had a friend who was uh lgbtq and because of that i definitely had like a lot of my view change but before then it was very much i had that very straightforward church view of like yeah homosexuality absolute sin um that shouldn't be legal or allowed like i didn't see i don't know i don't want to say the church tries to dehumanize them but that's definitely how it feels sometimes or they're not they're second class people you know they don't get to just show love for who they love or have these basic rights that anyone else would but just because they're different they see that as evil and want that taken away and that was something that definitely was i guess hard for me in a way because like i said i had a friend who's lgbtq and in high school in high school yeah she came out and that was a big moment because it made me start to actually think about that more because i never had critically thought about that and so her coming out made me had to realize just i just made me had to reevaluate a lot with my thought process towards that and the church was trying to reword everything they said about it during time as well man so what's it like for a mormon girl in utah in salt lake area suburb suburban salt lake to come out as lesbian at her high school in the late 2010s what was that like hers was for her um from when i don't want to share too much um she might be watching this um i don't wanna say any names but hi if you are watching it uh i hope you're doing well um she was very much hiding it like her parents didn't know until way later because she didn't wanna tell him she was scared she'd get kicked out and that they would no longer love her kicked out of her home yeah she was scared of being kicked out from home there were only very few people that she told like it was like a very only the close friends knew and she even lost so she didn't come out to the whole school no very much not it was a it was yeah it was a very undercover kind of thing and she even had a friend that she lost because of it and it was you were seeing how much she was struggling because of who she was and then and then that would make you think you and then the fact that she was your friend and you knew her and you were able to see her as like a human being just as a normal person that kind of start started you thinking right is that what you're saying yeah it made me actually critically think about it and realize like oh like duh like it's like a no duh statement but it's like these are people too who [Music] this is just part of who they are it's not a choice this was something she talked when she talked about she said like i said she's like she's like looking back it's like oh duh she realizes like i was of course always a lesbian but that i very much like before that believe the oh it's just a choice and they can choose to to give it up and all of that and just actually have to have critical thinking about it and having all my views about that change which i think was obviously for the better being able to have a lot more sympathy in that way so how so you're in high school how did you balance believing the church but loving your friend was it a conflict for you no it wasn't it was uh i don't know i guess i didn't even think about it much because it was just like this is my friend they're awesome they're a great person of course i like i love and appreciate them they're they're human they're i didn't see them as a sinner at all i just saw i saw them as a good person and was like worried about them when they were worried about their i was worried with them about like their parents finding out and all that kind of stuff like i i guess in my mind i kind of separated those two things looking back i think that's what i had to have done because the i was very supportive of her like she for a while i was in a relationship i was like yeah that's that's good for you where like the mormon teaching of that of course would be to only either abstain or to just date the opposite gender to try to pray the gateway kind of thing and i guess i separated both of those things in my mind and didn't worry about it much because i just met yeah but it's fair to say that was maybe a something you put like a crack or something you put on your shelf yeah definitely i don't think it was something i ever consciously realized until like later when i lost my faith in the church but it definitely i think was a big factor and helped to be able to it was one of the things that definitely would have helped plant the seeds to be able to get me to where i am now yeah yeah going back to uh the issue of race uh jen just highlighted a uh a quote from quentin cook in october 2021 where quentin cook writes one of the reasons for the violent opposition to mormons in the early age of the church was most of them were opposed to slavery so this is kind of like rewriting history that mormons experienced persecution not because joseph was sleeping with a bunch of women breaking the law and marching his militia around neighboring towns but because mormons were just so anti-slavery yeah they just could not stand that we're getting a little bit cynical yeah anyway thanks for sharing dear dear viewer thank you for sharing i guess that was uh catherine class thank you for sharing that quote it's a nice illustration okay any other any other important points we didn't cover women women in the priesthood was that covered in high school at all yeah no it was cause i remember that i remember that movement happening and kind of just all the ordained women yeah they were doing i remember that happening and remember hearing about it because i think there's a i was seeing it on the news even at one point i think it was maybe after a conference or something i don't know the specifics anyways i remember seeing that of course immediately like i can't remember who it was someone i knew and i've been my family or might have been like at church or seminary later but like oh well we don't have to worry about that it's like women will i remember one person like women will probably get the priesthood in god's own time another saying like women don't need the priests because they get the the gift of child bearing because of that like i never i've heard of others who had like the woman uh don't need it because look they're already like kind of like one-upped on men i never had like that heard of that kind of teaching but definitely the they're blessed with being able to for the child and so that's why or like this or that okay all right i have a question about so so if if the essays are coming out in 2014 you know there are excommunications between 2013 and 2016 high profile ex communications and then the ces letter comes out let's just say 2015 2016 kind of around that time uh and by the way podcasts have been you know 10 years into their mormon theme podcasts have been around for at least 10 years by the time you're in high school and there's uh reddit and there's um you know facebook mormon themed progressive or post mormon themed facebook groups i'm wondering i would just think i could imagine a bunch of mormon kids in high school someone stumbles on ces letter passes it around all the kids and it's like this epidemic that sweeps through or or one one mormon kid starts listening to a mormon-themed podcast that's controversial and then all of a sudden they start sharing with their friends or even youtube stuff like brother jake's stuff would have been out by this time and so i'm wondering how that didn't happen with you and your peers in the late 2000 teens living as a mormon kid in utah can you talk about the bubble or no yeah it was just yeah i was i was definitely within that bubble where just none of that stuff existed i was completely unaware i probably knew one person i remember it was in a debate class and he had mentioned that he left the church he's like oh yeah it's because they there's just questions that as soon as you ask them they will answer them and me being the in the bubble mormon kid i was like of course they'd answer them they'd answer any question like not at all understanding that there are these much more serious topics going around so i was completely out of the loop that anything like that existed how would they have kept you from just googling and being curious well that's a pretty simple way is that ever since i was a kid i could even remember always just uh in general conference even just very much painting that not that the internet is evil but that the internet just cannot be trusted once it comes to topics about the gospel because it's only through like scripture that you can really know the truth and that the internet is not a good source for any of that so along with stay away from porn growing up in masturbation you would have been taught from a very young age to distrust information about the church available on the internet like distrust and it's all just anti-mormon lies and scientists just have their own agenda with things how about evolution because you would be learning about evolution at in school and then how would you reconcile that with the story of adam and eve mine was very much the oh well evolutions is just a theory it's not like there's much oh wow credence behind because i just i was just completely in the church uh like looking back i'm like wow that's pretty dumb of me there's plenty of evidence but i just i was like oh there's not really much evidence for that and i mean come on wow the church is true so there's no way that could be right right yes because my husband grew up in idaho and i mean we're older we're 27. but he was telling me that he he learned about evolution in school and as of pretty much a fact like he was taught this is how evolution is it's not like it's pretty much indisputable and and then his dad he's that as a scientist so he was able to reconcile you know adam and eve with with evolution but still believing in evolution and believing in adam but you're saying in school you would be taught like oh this is just a theory you don't have to accept it that was very much how my teacher presented it was just that it was like just a thing you're a science teacher yeah i was grade yeah ninth grade biology your ninth grade science teacher is teaching the bio uh that evolution is just kind of a theory that you don't have to accept i don't think she would have worn it like that but very much of like using the softest wording she could to make it seem like it's not like the fact that it is just kind of using very strong words like making sure to emphasize theory and stuff like that and kind of dancing around having to dive into that anymore and i mean my parents um from what i know or at least then i i can't speak for them but from what i understand they very much don't believe in evolution there's just adam and eve we're uh parents of all humanity and that's what i grew up believing of course and i've even heard some of the crazy maybe dinosaurs are just god's sense of humor kind of thing so you would have howl like by the time you graduate from high school how old was the earth do you think what was your views on my view of it was that it would be um uh like millions of years old and i think my way of reconciling that was like billions built yeah okay i couldn't think of the exact like well we don't know how long adam and eve were actually in the garden of eden and like maybe a day the whole maybe a day isn't actually a day god's time could be different than man's time right kind of was the way it justified itself in my head were you given the those like little printouts of the timeline of the old testament where it says adam and eve lived seven thousand years ago you were not given that no i wasn't ever i if i was i don't remember them that much yeah as from one from my memory now would you have believed that adam and eve were the first humans yeah they're the first humans and would you believe that there was a literal global flood where yep noah put all the two of all animals in an ark and the whole earth got flooded oh it got two of every animals from every continent onto that boat and the tower of babel was a very historical event all that was that the book of mormon everything about it was these are historical events and facts these are what happened okay okay um all right well i think we get a decent sense of your education up through high school is there anything else you want to share about your personal life family life uh from from high school um there's only one more thing that stands out and it's just i guess something i'd like to talk about because i know it's something i've seen affect a lot of families and it's the kind of the perfection culture that exists within the mormon church like my parents suffered with that a lot of kind of beating themselves up as parents because oh look all these parents they're perfect and they're doing such a good job with all their kids and we're over here not being able to do that and just seeing how that was a a toll on their mental health was was kind of hard because i could see that it affected like my mom and my dad my mom especially and seeing how that would play in to their views of themselves as parents which was hard to see because i think my parents are amazing like they're good parents but kind of bought into that oh look at these parents they're doing such a better job than me kind of thinking like the whole comparison thing and they've grown past that luckily which is really good i'm super happy to see them it's i mean it's great to see how much happier my mom is but i guess that's just something i want to talk about because i think that's something if you're in the church or out of the church no matter what stage you're at please don't buy into that and don't do that because it's not something good for you every family has their mistakes and flaws you're you're trying your best you know your great parents love your mom and dad but you saw that sometimes as being harmful to try and put off in a public image of perfection when things were not so good or not always perfect yeah like that's i my parents they they've grown past that now which is super great to see and great to see my mom be able to see herself as a good parent without having to compare herself to others and seeing that like we're humans we all make mistakes we're not going to be perfect parents what matters is that we're doing our best and i love my parents they did an amazing job so yeah yeah that's awesome yeah well that's the thing like it it only the perception that the gospel works only works if everybody thinks that everybody's happy and living it if everybody's vulnerable in their ward experience saying all the problems and all the ways they're not living up to it or all the ways they're not happy then people are like well they got it's not the plan of happiness if people aren't living it and they're not happy so it forces this this facade of happiness and perfection not that mormons are always miserable but no not at all yeah but it's definitely like something that plays into and like the i mean perfection like that perfection kind of culture definitely like played into my mind a lot too where i was like i needed to just always worry about being better trying to be more perfect because like that's what we're told we're supposed to do and seeing like looking back i guess just seeing how that affected me and others in a way is interesting yeah we have a comment from a listener bae florey writes omg he's so cute with his heart and shout out for mom and dad um how old are you right now somebody asked that 20 years old i almost said 19 i that was bad 20 years 20 i'm 20. wow i'd still just for everyone who if you don't know i would still be on my mission right now if i stayed out for the full time wow yeah that's weird to think about um on your outline you mentioned that you you always had an urge to uh call call out authority figures yeah that's such a weird way of wording i wish i knew how to word it right like that's normal teen stuff maybe yeah for me like what it was there was this but it conflicts with the idea of not criticizing criticizing leaders of the church no definitely like but but it's harmonious with uh a contempt for for uh hypocrisy yeah which is also christian to not jesus called out hypocrites so i mean there's a there's a there's a believing in a non-believing way to call out the leaders yeah in my way it wasn't like calling out for dumb stuff i'd say it was like there's this time this specific example i remember we were downtown for some sort of like it was a steak activity and we're there on the train i was probably like 12 to 14 at the time so pretty young and i was with the other young men and young woman and the bishop's wife was there and there was this girl who just got on the train who like clearly was suffering from some sort of mental disability and the bishop's wife kind of made fun of her with the kids and was poking fun at that and that immediately pissed me off and i was like hey like what the heck that's not okay what are you doing and then she backpedaled and it's just been stuff like that where it's i don't know i didn't like that hypocrisy from leaders sometimes where it's like yeah we got to be kind to everyone but then seeing them do the exact opposite or seeing like yeah just stuff like that it easily got on my nerves and i don't have a problem pointing it out when there is stuff like that especially with people who thought think that they don't deserve and shouldn't have any of that criticism i think yeah everyone how would that translate to how you would see um you would have seen apostles and prophets like at the time yeah um they were perfect they they're there they're guided by god they everything they've said in conference and everything they've done is inspired and so they're like my god theirs they've always been perfectly guided like that would have definitely been my view at the time so there was a difference between local leaders and apostles and prophets yeah and i guess if i would have like i don't know it's hard yeah i guess that would probably be my mindset at the time it's hard to guess and say for sure but that's probably the closest yeah no it was really similar to mine yeah um it's inter because i grew up you know my dad being in the leadership for for so many years so i was able to see the humanity in leaders but then for some reason that didn't make me go to oh maybe apostles and prophets are the same uh for some reason we always put apostles and prophets in in a different level yeah than local leaders including sometimes mission precedence or oh yeah i think it's they want it i'd have to say they want it structured like that where they are these next level kind of beings who have literally seen jesus and are perfectly guided by him and hear from him on a daily basis kind of thing okay so you would have come of age to be a missionary after the church lowered the age for men to serve missions from 1918 i saw that super exciting and for women from 21 to 19. so you that was while monson was still profit yeah so when you're of mission age was monson still alive or i guess nelson would have taken no it was now somebody's time i was of mission age but i remember yeah definitely growing up with monson uh it's like my profit okay did you have any idea he had dementia as you know i didn't even know that until recently like it was just a couple episodes ago when you guys talked about that or maybe it was a couple episodes i just barely recently listened to an episode that i talked about i was like wait what he had dementia for years the church kept it from the members i think it was the avengers episode i watched that and you guys mentioned i was like wait wait what yeah just completely unaware to stuff like that yeah okay so do you remember loving monsoon beloved prophet yeah no i saw like this kind of funny guy he would do like the wiggle his ears wiggle the ears and as a little kid like that's super funny and awesome you know it's amazing how something like that could really promote the brand of the prophet so to speak yeah and who's he had like the very much like his his persona he put on was very much that kind of like that soft loving speaker a holland has a very different style just like each apostle i think has their different persona they kind of put on that was uh that was monson's was the very like gentle like grandpa kind of i i'd say that's like the description i'd see it as like the gentle grandpa you know yeah and then when nelson when nelson becomes prophet what'd you think do you remember any thoughts i remember i was like i remember being said like oh that's sad that um that monson died and then i of course like i was like wait how was like the next prophet chosen because my mind i'm thinking back to any story i know from the bible yeah is that god himself or jesus himself makes a personal appearance to do this kind of stuff but then i don't know i definitely now i think i'd see it as a letdown but then i was just like oh oh it's just actually chosen by like the succession order i was like that's not as fun but i remember liking nelson too um i think everyone just kind of thought i was like we were like hype because he immediately came in started being like a change here change their little change everywhere and getting people excited about that i even saw that as exciting like oh what is he going to do next general conference and then he hasn't done anything too crazy since but that's okay there's a comment from one of our viewers jason lewis says wait what in which episode do they talk about president monson having dementia i'm not sure we ever did a fully dedicated episode to it i was still active in the church when monson was prophet and it would have been viewed bad form even amongst progressive mormon circles to like call out monson as having dementia but the reason why i was plugged into that is because i'm cousins with desert chat benson and when essential benson was prophet in the final years of vegeta benson's administration he had dementia and the church would like wheel him out like a weekend at bernie's kind of thing where they would prop him up and stick a shovel in his hand and put a helmet on and make it look like he was still leading the church because they didn't want members to know that for several years their prophet revelator literally had dementia and then one of his sons or grandsons came out i think it was steve benson and made a big public stink and said i'm an apostate and my dad or grandpa has not been able to like leave the church himself for like years or three together a coherent sentence and it was a huge pr nightmare for the church so that i would have experienced that then i would have read about it after my mission and so then when monson started getting dementia but no we never actually had an episode about it we may have made passing references to it yeah but if you google i mean maybe jen can do it if you google monson and dementia i bet you'll find articles or references to it because it's a fact and it was a multi-year thing i remember like just viewing that he was getting older it's like i remember my family thing is like oh shoot he's like i mean his last journal conference you could tell that he was he didn't have much strength left i remember we saw them we're all kind of sad but not knowing at all that there was way more going on behind the scenes yeah some people believe that i mean because of that dementia that's how russell nelson and oaks were able to pass the november 15 policy they kind of rushed it didn't go through the whole like the entire quorum of the 12 because it was kind of messy how the prophet was you know like yeah not really leading the church nelson was able to ram through the november 15 policy because monson had dementia and wasn't really controlling the ship that's what allowed that disaster to happen in the first place right yep so really quickly um i hope our believing mormons are patient with our never more i'm sorry i hope our mormons and ex-mormon listeners are patient with our never mormon viewers and listeners because over half of our youtube viewers have never been mormon but kp asks is it a lifetime appointment and that's interesting because on the one hand the mormon church teaches that their prophets are called by god and it's this big deal when a like a pope kind of when a mormon prophet dies it's a big deal who the successor is and for over a hundred years it's literally just been whoever has served in the quorum of the twelve the longest immediately without any inspiration without it's legal legally who's who's ever served in the quorum of the 12 apostles longest automatically becomes the next president or prophet of the church and yes it's a lifetime appointment there's no making a mormon apostle or prophet emeritus so that this is interesting the the quorum of the 12 and the first presidency decided that that emeritus status or retirement was okay for the general authorities in the first and second quorums of the 70s so retirement emeritus status was okay for them but they decided that for um for mormon prophets and apostles no retirement even if even if they get dementia yeah even if they become completely feeble and incapable of leading a hundreds of billions of dollars corporation it's a lifetime appointment we've derailed your story successfully no it's all good i think it's good to talk about this stuff because not a lot of people know it or like even the thing you just mentioned the hundreds of billions of dollars i didn't know about that until way later in my life as well thinking that tithing money just always got fully used it was a really weird thing to learn yeah the well and and i just wanted to mention like that had like i think brigham young changed it a couple times he used to be the oldest apostle not the one that had been on the on the on the quorum of the 12 the longest and then i mean throughout the history of the church it has changed um and also who has more power and like at some point the apostles you know had a lot less power than than they have now and anyway it's all it's very messy we have one more comment that's worth uh i love these live comments but raisa lane writes i'm i'm so i'm an infant member my flex is colby was literally at my coveted baptism now uh now that he's woke so do you know who ray racing yeah i remember writing lane hi how you doing um i hope you're doing well sorry i haven't said anything in a while i just have avoided so how do you know here uh i was there at her her baptism were you a missionary yes when i was a missionary i didn't teach her at all i literally came in like the day before her baptism and she's watching your mortgage yeah [Laughter] how did she know you were being interviewed did you tell her no oh my gosh so she just happens to be a listener viewer yeah and i'll talk to you after ray so sorry about she asked um after seeing the video like hey was that you are you actually going home and i at the time didn't want to talk to anyone about it so i said no sorry i lied i just was under like a lot of emotional stress and like talking about it with anyone we'll come back we'll come back to that yeah for sure okay so nelson's the prophet when you're of missionary age you turn you graduate from high school it used to be that um you would always go to a year of college at byu if you were a man you would go to a year of college usually at byu then while you're at byu you would turn in your mission papers you would get called on a mission during your second semester at byu and then you would usually you know go off that summer after your first year the church was starting to hemorrhage its young people its missionary force and it was starting to lose way too many of its men and women between the ages of high school graduation and those first few years after and so they and they were losing missionaries in general so they lowered the age to 18. so you wouldn't have had that year of college no before you were it was time for you to go on a mission right now a lot of missionaries still take that and do they yeah i know some like uh one of my one of my trainers he did a year of college first before going on his mission i would say some do i would say something i want to say yeah someone say a live some that's definitely a better wording some do honestly i recommend it because one it gives you more time to learn about stuff but also like any missionary i knew who waited at least a year was a lot more mature than any of the other ones out there well we covered in a recent episode number one that like across the wasatch front something is as stark as like two-thirds of young men now are choosing not to serve missions two-thirds of mormon men but also that a third of of the missionaries being sent out from utah are coming home early yeah i don't know if you knew any of that no i i could have i saw that in my own ward even i remember before you left before i left yeah like me out of like my age group only three of us uh went on missions one is just about to leave the other one left at the same time or a little earlier than me and then i left and all the others just went right how many would there be the others uh yeah i think there's probably about six or like just for my specific age group about seven to eight and so only three that's three out of eight so so less than fifty percent of the priests baby it was so crazy to me too less of less than fifty percent of the priests you would have attended church with ended up serving missions is that what you're saying yeah like not a lot went in utah that's crazy yeah it's if you want to see how much stuff is declining just look at stuff like that yeah it's apparent it it it is worth mentioning probably that that uh monsters i don't know whose idea was to lower the rate the age but it actually worked for a time like there was a boom of missionaries going sisters right yeah it had changed when i it just when i went on my mission and and they have to start opening and bigger mtc's making the provo mtc larger because yeah there was a boom of missionaries going i think a lot of it had to do with it was seen as a revelation and like like and then prophecy becoming true when a lot of missionaries were going and like oh look this is a time you know when when you should go and look at the prophet he is foreseeing the times and look how inspired he is but but it sounds like that has that is b has been wearing down and yeah and not not having as much impact as it had initially yeah i just want to say we're we're up to 800 live stream viewers on youtube and facebook that's a really big audience especially we didn't announce this ahead of time just like we just like started live streaming that's a really big audience so welcome to all our youtube and facebook viewers uh we're really glad to have you yeah and if there's anyone in there that knows me at any point like feel free to reach out and talk so sorry another question i love these questions we're just taking our time because truth matters they fury writes john where can you find these mission stats very interesting the mission pressure on boys especially was a major reason i raised my son outside the church so bae sad news uh there are no stats because the mormon church won't provide any stats but if you go back a few episodes and maybe jen or gerardo can can put a link in the comments but i did a recent episode with a member of a state hike councilman in uh in sort of salt lake utah county who's on a stake high council and he shared with me the stats from his stake which is a mainstream kind of utah salt lake county faithful mormon stake and it was in the and he said these statistics that only a third of the missionaries are now young men that two-thirds of the missionaries are young women and that two-thirds of the men are staying home and not choosing not to serve missions and that a third of all missionaries are returning home early all that comes from this inside source yeah that now he colby you're helping to yep to validate it's something i've seen myself and yeah it's crazy stuff yeah all right so now we're now we're to the point where you decide that you whether or not to serve a mission so what made what went into you and your decision whether or not to serve a mission when you had peers that were deciding not to what what was the differentiator for me it was that it was never like ever since like i said i was huge into the church as a little kid it was never a matter of if i'm going on a mission it was a win it was something very much that like no matter what any point in my life it was this is in the program this is part of the plan it's a two year mission then i'll come back and do college and so it was it wasn't even something i thought about it was just like something i did because it was like duh this is the next step like what other options are there and it was it was yes senior year is starting to end it's like okay time to do all the stuff and put in my papers and that that was that like it wasn't like a if it was just a win how did you process peers choosing not to serve a mission um i don't know i just kind of thought i was like oh they like i already knew them kind like i i mean i wasn't young men's with them so i of course kind of knew them i already knew they weren't coming to young men's as often and like with a couple of them i knew specifically that they didn't really believe in the church much anymore and so i just thought i was like oh yep some people will fall away but some will stay faithful and we have to stay faithful and help bring them back the weeds from dears yeah exactly so so do you do you have a sense now that any of those young men who who didn't choose to serve missions why or was it just churches i'll give you a couple options church is boring and irrelevant church is not fun or stumbled on ces letter podcasts etc and decided it wasn't true any anything i wish i knew the answer to that i wasn't super close with any of them so i don't know for sure i'd say for one of them i think it was mostly bordermen for the other i have a suspicion that it was um doctrinal stuff but the other one i'm pretty sure was boredom but i don't know for sure okay but for you there's just you had been raised taught and or indoctrinated wasn't even a question yeah it wasn't it was just that i am in fact going to and that i'm leaving once i'm 18. like that that was it there was no thought process no pondering the only thing i prayed about it was just something like yeah i know i'm going to do this it wasn't asking god hey should i i was uh i'm going to especially because like it was in my patriarchal blessing like hey you're going on a mission bud and how would you have characterized your testimony at the time of graduating from high school very strong um did you prayed about it did you receive a witness did you go to efy like i never went to efy okay um or trek i got out of that wow i went to europe and said but um no it was very strong like i had prayed about it plenty of times like multiple times but it was never like hey help me know if the church is true just like help me it was like a thank you for helping me know that the church is true i i don't know where do what i want to say was it ever like a heavenly father i need to know is it true or not no i never had that tell much later on my mission was losing my faith before then it was just like thank you for helping me know that this is true and help think thank you for giving me uh this blessing of a testimony how did they convince you that you knew it was true before ever really asking yourself the question i don't know because they think it was i set up in a way it set up in a way that's like oh well kind of that you already know and so like of course i was told to pray about it but like i i guess in my mindset was that yeah i already knew it was true and so i probably did pray about it at one point but i very quickly said yep it's true like before i even prayed i would have been probably telling myself that cause i just it was i think it was on eczema lexus where she talked about it was being a mormon it wasn't just like a thing you do it was part of your worldview it is your world view and for me that's very that was very much true that was my perception of the world so it's like the fish swimming in water the fish isn't aware of the water because it's all the fish knows yeah you were a mormon kid growing up in utah the mormon church being true is the only reality you even no yeah it was reality there's this story and i think the church even made a video out of it i think it was on general conference where pretty sure his elder todd christopherson he tells the story and when he when he received his testimony about the church being true and he he says that he goes to palmyra i'm pretty sure where joseph smith uh received the first vision he goes kneels and asks god for a testimony you know to know if the church was true and then nothing happened and then later he just figured oh it's because i already knew i realized i i already knew it was true so i didn't need to receive any confirmation yeah wow and that you relate to that yeah i'm pretty sure i was told that story before it sounds yeah of course it sounds familiar now but even like then i'm pretty sure i definitely heard something or something similar to that before it's kind of masterful you you raise people to adulthood just just with that assumption without them even have having to ask themselves the question they just they know it before they've even considered it yeah which is so because like i don't know i like to see myself as someone who likes to look into and research stuff a lot but for some reason yeah the church sets up in a great way where it's something that i never even need to have critical thinking about like it's like a duh of course this is true don't worry or think about it too much because it is like there's no need to yeah we had that we had somebody say they put more thought or effort into deciding what mattress cover to buy than they ever did like whether whether or not the church is true and yeah this is something that we're going to give 10 of their income and their whole lives to okay so you knew it was true so we won't talk about the um applying to become a missionary process or anything about that nothing really noteworthy there like it was just a long process of gotta go get these vaccines gotta do the physical put it in and then you it's the waiting period before you get your calling and like the every every good mormon boy and girl who goes on a mission is that excitement of where am i gonna go and all the family members guessing and me thinking like where is it that i want to go and where would i want to be i always i wanted to go foreign speaking it's like i want to learn another language because i thought that would be cool yeah it's just that it was just seen as like a time of great excitement now to be clear you would have applied what two two and a half years ago like yeah it would have been yeah january to march sometimes no i i got my calling i think in march so i think it was like january when i applied so literally two years ago yeah you were applying for a mission okay so you put in your papers and you got called where'd you get caught and and by the way head coveted happened by the time you put your papers in for your mission i don't think it happened when i put them in but it happened in between the time of me putting it in and me getting my calling it was i think it was somewhere in between that period where like the the lockdowns and school getting cancelled started to happen i think like the school getting cancelled and me opening my calling were i remember those being pretty close together like timeline so were you worried it would ruin your mission i don't think so i think we saw as like yeah this might make it so i'm somewhere else for a bit but of course god's going to provide a way that i can get there because i think kind of the the viewing consensus of it yeah and then of course before i i think before i got mine we already had heard like some people were getting reassignments so it's kind of just something we expected me to get the calling and then of course a reassignment let's see where your reassignment if it was foreign was it weird for you like receiving a calling knowing that it would you had been assigned by then by an apostle and then and then realizing that you were going to be reassigned it's like couldn't the apostle know that covet was going to happen and because mormons are taught that like the prophet the prophet himself signs every every missionary receives a letter telling them where they're going to be sent and it's always signed by the prophet of the church i think i saw as it was the paul i think i was australia is the prophet or one the apostles or one of the apostles but they're all they're all known within mormonism as special witnesses of christ so it makes every missionary feel like jesus jesus himself is deciding yeah through through his apostles where you're gonna get sent is that what you're saying gerardo yeah yeah yeah it's very divine and like kind of like you're divine and mythical almost getting this calling it's like getting literal instructions from god kind of thing as to where you should go i'd say the general view from people because yeah yeah and some people have more literal views than others because gerardo i think what you're getting at is if jesus is is calling you to italy wouldn't he have known kovid was coming and would you have felt weird that that you got you didn't end up going there first you know i can't even think of how i rationalized that at the time i think i just saw that as well yeah god always has his ways and this is all just part of his plan kind of thought is probably the best way i could sum it up or guess what my thought process was because i didn't really question much even during that time it wasn't until later that i started thinking that's interesting okay so you get your call and then tell us what you want to tell us about going becoming a missionary yeah i was called to serve in the milan italy mission i was assigned to the at-home mtc which was just my loft that was that was a very strange experience doing that at home mtc especially because like i don't know you always hear i think from other people hyping up the mtc and like oh yeah it's gonna be so great when you go and my mindset was very much like i just couldn't wait to get out there like i i was excited about it i could not wait until i was thrust into the field and got to get right to serving the lord and so like i think i was bummed out about like that kind of feeling like it took a little longer because i was at home longer not that i didn't want to be my around my family more but just i was like i was just ready to go and hit the ground running kind of thing and normally you would have spent two months in the mtc probably in the provo missionary training center six six weeks in the provo missionary training center in the shadow of byu oh yeah but because kovid was happening yeah it was at home how was that so you're zooming you have a mission district and you're zooming with your district and learn they're i guess language instructors that were returned missionaries that would have been teaching you the language over zoom honestly even i think my view at the time was that it was a little disappointing because it just felt like school it felt like going back to school and suddenly having this very similar program and routine of wake up at this time you got to get ready and then you go to your one class and then there's a break where you study for a bit and then you go to your next class and then the rest of the day i mean there's not much you can do because you're set apart you're set apart as a missionary by this time and so your options as to what you can are allowed to do or kind of up to your stake president but it's very slim as to what you can do for your free time um it was honestly kind of just the home mtc was very long for me though the only ups from that was um like being able to make friends with the other missionaries there and kind of getting to talk and like we could do like a virtual kind of hangout that way which was fun yeah and and yeah the mcc was really fun because you're there with all these missionaries and there's the buzz and there's the cafeteria food and the activities you i guess mormon missionaries would have lost out on a lot of fun and excitement oh yeah so you always hear all these crazy stories about the mtc and then that just got completely axed out yeah but you also probably didn't know totally what you were missing no not really it's like yeah i heard more about the mtc i think once i got on the phil and other missionaries talk about oh yeah i loved my time in the mtc i remember doing this or that crazy thing and this crazy thing that happened and being like ah i wish i got to do that i just stayed in the loft uh played an instrument and sat around how part of the mtc experience is uh there's at least one time when you're you get a talk with either the branch president or the the mtc president that really tried they tried to shame you if you have any past sins that you didn't you didn't um confessed or you haven't totally repented for um and then you and then right after that like big conference that they have where they just pretty much make you feel like awful if you did anything that you didn't confess and then you have a one-on-one meeting with your branch uh your branch president um and then they ask you specifically like have you had sex uh did you have anything that you didn't repent before coming um do you and then they send a bunch of missionaries home yeah if they admit that they lied yeah about sexual transgression before you know to to be able to get on their mission yeah so it's a big pressure cooker yeah yeah was that how did they figure out a way to do that in in online mtc or was that not part of your experience at all from what i remember i think they did do that i think they had like a lot more passive approach as well i don't remember being so much of a grilling but being amorous like look you're about to serve the lord so if you have anything you need to talk about or repent of go to i think it was like a go to your bishop or stake president was what it was because i mean there's oh i've been a pain to make the branch presidents do one-on-one interviews over zoom all day i don't think anyone wants to do that so i think it was just like if you have any of the stuff that you haven't resolved yet then go to your yeah your bishop your or steak present i don't remember which one they said it was a lot softer than what my experience would have been um we have a question from kp on youtube are you given companions in zoom mtc yes and how does that work if you don't live together um basically what it was is that part of our one of the things we had to do as part of our schedule was companion study comp study and so that we were supposed to do a call with just us at some point during the day for i think it's just like 30 minutes is what calm study was but to do a call with them at some point and to study with them like that and then like you kind of buddy with them for different like activities they would do over zoom like they do breakout rooms where they just put you in separate rooms and a lot of times you'd be with your companion or with sometimes with other people but it was kind of like they were your your kind of study buddy okay cool all right so overall was it hard to learn the language was it fun was it boring did you hate it was it six weeks six weeks i saw it was kind of fun um but also like it didn't really feel like learning the language it kind of felt like re-learning but a lot of it was kind of focused on relearning stuff like the basics of what you already knew about the gospel and then like you'd sprinkle in like how the language works with that and i kind of just at that point realize like oh i'm not really learning the language i'm learning the [Music] excuse me the discussions yeah the discus you're learning the the manuals the discussions and like you're learning gospel language you're learning church language not the actual language i still thought it was fun like i liked learning how different stuff worked even when i struggled i thought i liked challenges was it preached my gospel was that still the manual yeah i preached my gospel i think it still is now as well as yeah preach my gospel yeah it would have been edited by that by then it would have included the references to the different first vision accounts and a couple other stuff that they include a few a couple links to the gospel topic essays right and either one i didn't know about that until later as well because in the mtc i had a older oh um the older version the older version and all the from what i know all the ones that aren't in english are still basically the older version and don't have that updated stuff in it from what i know like i know the the italian one at least is still more like the the the original one not the the revised edition that's come out did you find out about the first vision accounts when you were reading preach my gospel at some point in the mtc or again i think it was like something that was just like it was mentioned but just kind of yeah very much just get glossed over right like you read it it just says the quote is instead of saying like this is what joseph smith said about his experience it says this is one of the accounts on just what joseph said about his experience so it just adds like a little reference yeah it's said in a way so it's like oh there are others but if you don't know that there are others you just read that as like well yeah of course like he told it multiple times but you wouldn't think there's oh that they're contradictory slight variations yeah you wouldn't think there's different contradicting accounts so uh ryan never mormon ryan king asks how well is the language learned enough to really connect with people once you arrive in in the country not at all it's you're learning to teach you're not like once you're out in the field a lot will get more passionate about it and have encouraged to to like really be able to learn to connect with them but in the mtc it's very much teaching you like hi this is my name i'm a missionary where's the bathroom and then how to like pray and different like uh like just like how to teach the lessons basically how to pray in the language how to say words like heavenly father and jesus and joseph smith and and how to teach yeah how to just describe joseph's first vision how to say things like alcohol bad tobacco bad premarital sex bad love chastity tithing learn the word tithing right yeah i don't know what the word for tithing is now but gizmo in spanish spanish it's probably something i think it's something pretty similar they're all related i learned that word really important for you to remember that one temples temple marriage you know that that all right on your outline you mentioned about trying to become the best missionary you could and trying to find out about what the anti-mormons yeah said was that mcc yeah this was in the mtc i very much always i like i think i mentioned earlier i'm the oldest of three brothers and so i have three younger brothers and the oldest and i always i guess older sibling complex where it's like you got to be the example you have to be prepared for stuff and that was always something like that i put as a burden on myself and so when it came to this i was like okay i want to well of course like i loved being a missionary i already loved being a missionary in the mtc and i wanted to be able to serve god as well as i could and i wanted to be as prepared to answer any questions as i could and so i was like well the only obviously the only way to know like what the opposing questions are is to to find out what they are they're not just going to suddenly appear in my head i'm going to have to actually look into that and of course i can learn the answers to it because like there's obviously got to be answers perfectly worded by the church and so yeah that led me to a little bit of googling and you guys let me just in the mtc in the mtc okay so you can do it with a home so at home oh oh before that i was going to say what's it like being like the rules of a missionary really strict you can't watch tv you can't go to the movies you can't read the newspaper you can't um date you can't even hang out with your friends you can't be alone how did they enforce those rules while you're home living at home that's way different that was a very much like it was up to your stick president what your rules were so i know some missionaries who like their stake president was like yeah you can go with your friends long as one of them is also like a priest like 18 years or older i think or if there's another potential missionary there or like i could go out in public if i'm with my parents um certain stake presidents would allow me like yeah go ahead if you're like watching disney movies with your family you can one missionary even got permission to swim at his pool because he lived in arizona wow uh it was like a very much like the rules about the discretion of your stake president because it was the case like look your stake president's your leader he's like your de facto mission president yeah for now so look to him for the severity of these rules so if you went if you went to out to eat with your family for dinner would you dress as a missionary you still needed to be dressed as a missionary with your tag on okay wow that was a very like strict thing you got to make sure wearing your tag at all times okay interesting and so your family's kind of looking over you to make sure you're living the rules kind of policing they're your assistance to the president okay all right yeah so you you start so you're cracks in your mormon testimony or faith or at least questions get introduced while you're at home mtc as a missionary yeah you could take us through that yeah because i didn't even see it as like oh i'm searching questions or even i had doubts it was very much just like i want to be able to know how to resolve other people's doubts because like that's something i assumed i'd come across and we always hear people talk about like oh yeah we ran to these mean anti-mormons but then we spit straight doctrinal facts onto them and so it's like okay well i gotta be prepared and know the answers to stuff like that and so i started with the only thing i really knew could even be a concern to start with which was the book of abraham that was the only thing i ever had even heard there were concerns with so i did a i don't even remember what i searched but something about the book of abraham and lo and behold it came to pass that i found the ces letter and it would be very dishonest for me to say i read it i didn't even skim it i think i just read very very very lightly the book of abraham section and of course as i'm reading i'm like oh well you're wrong because uh it was just a cattle it could have just been a catalyst for the translation and like stuff like that and i think i was kind of like a little bit like okay there is something kind of weird but i watched dan peterson's uh video i think it's the remember what was the one where he talks about the cs letter and i watched the portion where he addresses the book of abraham and for me at the time it was like yeah that's all right good enough that's it and i didn't like i kind of looked at one or two other things like i think it was like the temple and freemasonry but then my mom found out i was googling stuff like that i was like look you got to stop uh the i was given like the doubt your doubt before you doubt your faith quote which at the time of course i thought oh yeah that's amazing and so for me it very much was a i put all that on the shelf i didn't even see it as a concern i just kind of doubled down my testimony like it wasn't at the time i didn't see it as any fracture at all but looking back i'd have to say that i was kidding myself like i was trying to convince myself that it wasn't a worry it's still i mean it's still quite an experience when you're do i i mean it was for me because it was pretty similar for me being on my mission and then i googled something about the book of abraham like i remember my heart was pounding i was super nervous i was reading it and i was feeling like my world was like completely being destroyed and it was just it was pretty awful but at the same time like you're saying you try to convince yourself like no i have a strong enough testimony this is not affecting me um but it's it's just so interesting how it's almost like if you were for me it was almost like if i was watching porn on my mission you know like that same feeling of like i felt so guilty of looking at something that might make me question my faith yeah i remember like you mentioned like the heart pounding i very much i can i can put myself in those shoes of even that first time just feeling nervous because it was a it's like a taboo thing to do it's something you're trained i think trains the right word trained to not do and so doing it it was like really nervous like heart pounding kind of thing and then afterwards i remember that was like the first time i i think i prayed and said god please help me remember that the church is true it was like my wording not it wasn't even if it was just to remember that the church is true and like cast these doubts aside and then that's what i did yeah for now which is interesting because when like today if i google anything about you know like just anything i want to know i wouldn't get that feeling of you know like heart-pounding and anxious and stressed well no there was an instagram thing that happened this week where a believing mormon dm'd me on instagram and like i i tried watching a mormon stories and i got a dark feeling and then i i found you john john i found you to be a dark unhappy miserable creature and people just don't people don't understand confirmation but yeah that's what you're trained to think as well because i remember in my youtube section because i had googled just because i googled um dan peterson's response and like uh to the cs letter some of your videos came up and my mom saw that i was like don't watch it there's just a bunch of bitter dark people and like i even like watch a clip of one before that to him like yeah you're right he looked so mad and angry there's just like the very much that just immediately believing that view of it and not thinking that there's anything more to their stories and like i feel so bad immediately just like not seeing any value because like this counts like very much the it's just people who had bad experiences and now trying to spread that online and that doesn't make the church not true and realizing that there's so much more to that and just that those all those experiences like deserve validation and shouldn't be cast aside at all it's probably worth calling out just the bite model we talk about it a lot but they can you know high demand religions or colts control your behavior they control the information that you can take in so that you won't have the thoughts about whether or not the church is true and then emotion they they make sure to condition you such that you feel heart palpitations and panic and sweats when you just like start reading a pdf file yeah or want to stumble on a little tick tock video you start feeling like comparable to like a lion is about to jump out of the bush and attack you yeah you start saying it's about to jump up and grab you and it's like it's hard because like looking back it's like it's so obvious to me the the blatant truth that like it's just it's about power and control that's what it's about and it makes me so mad that people don't know that that they try to hide it still and that i'm i don't know i beat myself up so i'm like how did i not realize that stuff i have to of course tell myself it's like there's no way i could have i was conditioned to i was conditioned and taught to not see the world or see my perception of the world that way at all it was i had no tools to be able to see anything differently yeah cry cry crocodile tears for the kid that figured it out at 18 or 19. we're all those of us who figured it out at 30 or 40 or 15. we're having a hard time feeling super sympathetic for you no no or actually you deserve a lot of respect but we'll get there we're getting ahead all right so so you you have some initial questions you actually stumble on the ces letter while you're in the zoom mtc right but you you turn it off yeah it was just your doubts yeah it was kind of just it was uh yep doubt your doubts push it out of your mind and just i double down like i said like i was very much just like hey we're getting right back into this full and believing i think i like started studying double that amount and started praying like double that amount as well because like oh that might have been mine maybe i wasn't studying or praying enough and that's why these temptations started to enter my mind so just that typical mindset yeah all right so how did your mission proceed uh went on for a bit eventually of course i learned that i was getting reassigned i was reassigned to washington tacoma uh which i was okay with like um a lot of people like like oh how you're not disappointed you're not going to italy just going to washington like and washington's cool i think it'd be a fun place to go so i was still excited i was like look it doesn't matter like i'm i'm serving the lord that's what matters it's not the it's not the where it's the fact that you're doing it and so i remember just the excitement of the last couple days of packing up my bags double triple checking to make sure i have everything so i was terrified of forgetting something that i would need and then you still did the six weeks italian six weeks of time can you go not italian speaking tacoma english speaking english speaking but you're encouraged to like still study your language every day which i loved like um i think it was like good like our mission presence like yep give yourself an hour to study every day still okay it was like encouraging for the time as like where you're like because some people had stories of like where their mission president was trying to get them to forget at all that they were reassigned anywhere and make that feel like not valid at all be like look that's no longer your mission not something you should think about at all just focus on here and that was not like the mice in my mission president i was like look you're given this calling you're still eventually going to get there somehow use it so still study which i thought that was good because it just made that feel more valid like yeah it was i think made it a lot healthier but um i remember i i remember being really upset that during covid a global pandemic the mormon church was sending missionaries out to proselyte putting them potentially in harm's way versus and that i'm not trying to interject that other than to say what was it like for you to be sent out into the world in the in the beginnings of what became a really severe pandemic this is pre masks right yeah no no masks uh this is mask's mask uh by the time i was going out masks masks were required and so i was going into washington which was already like a very like locked not very it was a little more open by that but i was still pretty locked out i got there like august and so it was if you're going out in public have to wear masks we couldn't knock at all we could only go to people's like when i got there they just barely could start going to people's houses if they were invited kind of thing and it was still and you still to wear your masks inside i think unless they told you you don't have to i don't remember exactly but i remember yeah being on the plane i was super pumped to go and to get there uh my view of that i guess it was just like no one hauled hand can stop the work from progressing so like why would a pandemic stop the missionary work nothing can did you feel like god would keep would protect you from getting sick yeah no it was like i didn't see i was like oh cool i would be invincible but i knew that my mindset was yeah he of course he's gonna protect and watch out for me you know long as i'm being faithful [Music] yeah and that the church had your best interests oh you know i always get his temple experience oh oh yeah that would yeah let's actually definitely talk about that i almost forgot um yeah so mormon missionaries before you go into the mtc when you after you get your mission call you go through the endowment ceremony in the temple was the very last week uh before i left to washington because temple's just barely opened back up i was like went in the day before oh wait so it was after you were almost done with your zoom mtc like last week of zoom mtc saturday before i left before i went through okay and for me i'd say that was this jordan jordan river temple no i that one wasn't even open yet it was um mount timpanogos okay i think it was a different one that was like farther away because like tons weren't open we almost went to cedar city because that was one that was open and all the other ones were full but um for me the experience i'd have to say was underwhelming actually because like anyone i talked to especially was in the mtc it was like they were hyping it up like oh you just wait till you go through the temple and how much you'll learn it's and even this um this nice older light she's awesome but it was like you don't have to try to take everything in at once because it's a lot but it's all very important knowledge that god will bless you with and i know you'll try to learn it all at once but just take your time so i was like very much my mindset was like i'm going to learn some crazy stuff going on in here like my the truth of heaven shall be revealed i was pumped and then i go through and i'm like i already knew this yeah adam and eve are the father of all of uh father mother of all of us uh he was the first prophet and then you learn a couple funky handshakes and like i thought i don't think i thought it was weird i'm like oh okay this is like neat i guess but i was just like it was hard for me to find it weird because i was just expecting so much more that i'd have to say like i was disappointed and like wanting to learn more yeah you were expecting it to be way more interesting or yeah different the way it was portrayed to me was that you'd be learning something new and like the lord's university is the temple yeah yeah and it it wasn't it's like warmed over old testament bible stuff creation mm-hmm adam and eve garde of eden myth yeah basically a really quick i have to ask you this and some some won't know this history but for for decades there were these well much much-viewed movies that were shown in the temple and then the church decides they want to remake a super modern version in the mid-2000 teens so they hire an academy award-winning director named sterling van wagonen who also was the co-founder of sun's sundance film festival to produce new movies for the temple unfortunately they uh you know he had a history of being a child molester and they knew that but they hired him anyway and then they released these new and improved exciting temple videos and they would have been around 2013 yeah 2014 so it would have been before you went through but then uh sean uh uh escobar comes out of the new york times and tells the world that he was sexually molested by this sterling von wagner guy uh who was the you know who the church had tapped and they knew he had done it so the church had to get rid of those brand new movies and go to like i heard it was like powerpoint slides like what was the visual that you would have experienced yeah they had to scrap the they couldn't keep temple videos that were created by a child molester a known child molester that they knew they had disfellowshipped him so they had known he was a child molester but they tried to keep it under wraps because he was world famous and a good i guess a really good movie director anyway they had to scrap those once the new york times article came out they had to scrap those movies wow and then they had to come up with just some quick alternative because you can't cast and direct an entire new i mean they could have that on the old ones yeah but but i guess there were changes like there were the changes about like the veil and yeah part the woman hearkening and yeah by that point they had made progressive changes to some of the feminism stuff and other things so they couldn't go back so they had to create something so what were the visuals when you went through it was a powerpoint slideshow for reference i got the satan with hair not the bald one um well there were power points they were basically a powerpoint like it was like a slideshow like it was just like it would flash and it'd be like satan stuck with this pose and he would give his whole monologue oh my god it would flash to eve of course you you hints that she's naked but you get to see shoulders like they're crazy they get to see shoulders in the temple honestly yeah um but uh just against her and then she's monologuing and it'll be like a flash of something else and it monologues and they'll go up and like okay here's one of the signs you do with your hands and the handshake and all that it means and then it'll go back to the slideshow that would make it a little extra underwhelming awkward honestly like yeah it just felt really weird and i still don't know if they've if they've got movies now or if they're still slideshows like right now i don't i they don't let me in so i don't know if they've got movies now or if there's still slide shows if one of our listeners knows they can i'm sure that's on the comments i'm sure someone's gonna tell us in like 10 seconds yeah okay so you were underwhelmed were you disturbed at all no because i think it was just like i didn't have any mental space to be disturbed because it was just i was just solely focused on how underwhelmed i was and just being like oh i kind of wanted more where i just didn't even think about hey these are kind of kind of really weird and wait i might be in a cult like i never had that thought okay but i know a lot of people have and i totally get it because now like thinking about it yeah it's it's weird jess writes it's still slide shows so i i'm i'm pretty sure they're working on new movies that aren't directed by a child molester but they're not at all so yeah wow yeah okay so anything else about anything else about the temple no not really okay like not the peak spiritual no it wasn't like it was hyped up to be this crazy spiritual experiment experience and for me it just kind of wasn't because it was it was overhyped for me so it was just kind of a dud okay yeah all right so then you go to tacoma tacoma um yeah i touched down and got assigned to my at two trainers two dads as they would call them um both super awesome guys i like them a lot even to this day like they were really cool but i remember getting there and honestly the hardest thing for me was that i didn't feel like i fit in anywhere because like even before i stopped believing i still floyd bleed at the time but i very much just saw the mission as like as a click it was it was the high school popular kid sitting at a table talking and that's not at all who i ever was and so i was i felt kind of like a black sheep and an outcast in that way where i just didn't feel like i i fit in as much with the other missionaries i felt kind of like on the outskirts especially being a reassigned missionary even though my trainer was reassigned one of my trains was reassigned but i just kind of felt like out on the outskirts i didn't feel like i was like as popular as cool or funny as them and then i also like was totally beating myself up because i was like i don't know how to teach with crap i don't know what i'm doing like i was beating myself up over every little thing because you learned to do the discussions in italian yeah and now you're all of a sudden i have to teach you in english yeah and teaching like i just didn't understand how to learn how to teach and my one of my trainers and the other missionary we were dealing with honestly weren't great at helping with that because they were just really hyper critical and so i got even more stressed about doing it to like i'd freak out about seeing even one little thing wrong and it was like kind of awful i felt like i was never going to be able to properly teach or help anyone i didn't feel like i fit in with the other missionaries or i had like one other missionary who like considered a friend and that was about it which was really rough what were the traits of the popular missionaries how would you characterize them were they wealthy were they handsome were they from wealthy rich mormon families like what what did you have to do to be on the inner click i think just like it's the same as high school like any clique with high school it's like they're kind of the charismatic they're they're athletic like i'm not not athletic but i don't love athletics either and it was like i'm not i don't consider myself very like charismatic or like talking in front of a crowd like that i never liked being a part of like a popular kid kind of group and so for me i just didn't even want to start to associate with especially when it came to leadership because leadership was like the click within the click like they're the the extra cool kids because they're chosen by the president to be over you so they got to be extra righteous as well this this is very interesting because um when john when you went on your mission the church would have this model of learned by memory lessons right no no i'm not that old yeah it was a it was a maybe a decade before me you memorized these gospels i i was i was the predecessor to preach my gospel but but definitely you had flip charts and you learned six discussions but you definitely learned to say it in your own words okay okay and but preach my gospel became a lot more a lot more open where like you can teach whatever you want you can start with lesson one two three or four five there's there's not a set standard on how to approach people i mean there's some suggestions so it's definitely i can tell i can definitely see how the more charismatic missionaries are the ones that are the most successful because it's it's the way you talk the way you present the information and the way you teach people that gives you the success is not so much like it used to be before where like the the church would give you more like a like a script that you were supposed to give in a certain order and how to approach people it was that's more for like the super old people like radio free mormon who just joined us and and said gerardo he just said hey gerardo in the comments yeah i'm not i'm old but i'm not super old like radio free mormon he's freaking dinosaur you're you're the same age as my mom and my mom was was learned by heart i'm 52. yeah you're the same monster well okay well all right anyway love you alright um okay so you didn't feel great in tacoma no i felt yeah i guess like a like oh real quick uh the yeah preach my gospel is very much like a free flow free form kind of set up for how to teach and i just felt like i wasn't learning at all still like any of the different points of the lessons because you still had to hit those i feel like i just felt inadequate and every way imaginable like that i wasn't going to be able to do good enough and of course i got my mind like how am i ever going to serve the lord if i can't even figure out how to teach the first lesson which is stuff that i know but i just i'm suck and i'm horrible at doing it and i mm-hmm yeah i might honestly look looking back i mostly blame it on one of the other missionaries because he was just like a he was very hypocritical of a lot of people i think some of it was that he just wasn't having a good time on his mission which he's open about and i think he took that out on other people but yeah how long are we in tacoma i was in tacoma from august to like june ish it's like about so 10 10 months 10 months that sounds about right no i hit my yeah i hit my year mark in tacoma or like where would be my year mark based off of when i started the mtc okay so you almost did a full year you know i did i did i did like i was there until june or july actually sorry i have a hard time remembering all this stuff the mission time blends together because you're not supposed to think about time at all you're just there serving the lord yeah so forgive me if i have a hard time remembering it's a blur you're just trying to last trying to survive no yeah that i eventually got to that mindset very much if it was just a survival mode how would you find people to teach um at the very beginning it was through good old facebook um the when i first got there the way that they said to do it was to find groups um in your local area or things that you're interested in and go into those and just try to message people and bring up the uh the gospel to them and that was the first method and eventually it developed more into okay try to message them first and become more of their friend and then transition into the gospel and then it got did he work sometimes i i'd say it's about as effective as knocking though where it's one every few dozen yeah they actually gave us it was crazy i wish i remembered or could find my notes on it but they gave us the stats of how often someone would answer the door it's like one in every or not how many of them they answer but how many people like if you knock like a hundred doors one person will accept you in for a lesson and they like actually telling us those numbers is really interesting i'd say it's about the same with facebook whereas it's like a 1 in 100 would actually agree to do like even the first one of the first lessons with you and how did you approach someone on facebook how would that even work it depended like it evolved over time they were very much like when i got there it was so let's do part one because because this church is trying to figure this out uh um sorry i have this question so who was giving the instructions on how you was it the mission president was it was there like like special offices at the church headquarters who were coming up with this stuff from what i know and understand it came from like the area president i think they did have like some special social media coordinators along with the area president who would pass it to the mission president who would then disperse it to his own leaders dispersed to district leaders and disperse to everyone okay so it was like a top-down method for sure i think one time they mentioned that like apparently that the prophets and apostles were uh helping somewhat with this process and with the ideas of it i believe i heard that once yeah that's yeah okay so so phase one was like friend go to groups on facebook where you can find you know like if you're interested about cars go uh join a car group and friend a lot of people just message them oh just it was just like write out the gate message i'm like hey would you like a message about christ and sometimes facebook filters those messages if you don't have a relationship or some connection they stick it in a filter where the person never says and they learned that and eventually that's why they developed in that you're trying to friend them but at first it was very much you join the group because a lot of times if you're in the group it'll still let it go through which is why i think they okay they had the group method phase two was so you would just dm people yeah and you'd say less than one out of a hundred would wanna be would you say hey i just wanna teach you about jesus yeah and you'd get maybe like one response you'd get okay you get like three responses one person would have a sassy comeback one person would say no thank you and one person would say like maybe but then they'd learned that oh you're actually lds means yeah lds means mormon and never mind there's so many people who like okay this is really important because is this time this is a time when the church is encouraging missionaries to create groups i don't know if you were part of this but they they were starting to create groups i know my sister it was very confusing because my sister was on the mission at this time and it started to be be like okay as a companionship on my area let's create a group a facebook group and we and usually they would be called or they're still called like benira christopher coming to christ oh yeah in in in magna utah come on to christ in washington whatever yeah and and then and then people from the war you're supposed to tell them to join the those groups you know and that's kind of where you post things and you direct people that you friend to right yeah yeah no that's yeah that's definitely secret and then it was there's definitely this this um explicit or implicit instruction of living leaving out any reference to the book of morm like a lot of like don't mention the book of mormon too much don't mention the word mormon definitely don't do that yeah um was left out a lot and and it gave it gives like if you go and look at these pages they look like a normal christian church page they moved towards that later when i first got there it wasn't as much about that like a lot of our videos would be about just explicitly like joseph smith or the book of mormon but i think from what i have heard they've moved towards trying to make it look more like a just like a normal christian page and in certain areas they're even trying to move it so the missionaries aren't the ones running the page but actually the awards and having the members involved there because it's very much it's about getting the it's another way of trying to do member work as we call it where you get the members to get their friends to join this group to meet with the missionaries to take the discussions to get baptized okay that makes sense so then sorry so we talked phase one message them directly phase two is friend them how did that work yeah phase two was more of like phase one was like join a group and start messaging people in mass phase two was more like a [Music] still like join the group but try to start like a normal conversation with them first and like make it normal we called it normal natural is what we talked about like try to make it so you're at first just talking about your common interest like if you're in a group about cars be like oh hey i really like this car what's your favorite car i don't i'm not a car guy so i can't get much there but like it would be that kind of idea where you would talk about just something that you have in common and then eventually try to befriend them and then work in a gospel topic it was so close can you imagine like you're getting business like you're getting this uh trainings from you know like from the top like no but this is like this is not a new lesson for mormons i remember i remember like in the 90s you know as jeff benson was like well flood the earth with the book of mormon so every time you'd go to church it'd be like how many books of mormon did we distribute this week who gave a book of mormon to a neighbor and what we all learned was that like it's super goofy and weird to like you know your neighbor's mowing his line and you walk up and you go hi neighbor i have a book to give you about jesus and you know that you know and and for a long time they would collect stats on how many times did you challenge a non-member to like have the missionaries over and there would be all this pressure right no but i'm just saying in the 90s there was this moment i just remember this because i was kind of half in half out by this point and there was like they held this meeting they held this meeting like they they made this announcement like either in soccer meeting or an elder's core i mean it's like we have some new we have some new council from salt lake city the council is don't just walk up to people and ask them if they want to talk to missionaries we have this new approach that's been carefully curated where you actually talk to them like they're people and just strike up a normal conversation and then after you get to know them a little bit and just make them feel like you're normal then you bring up yeah yeah it was just like and everyone was just like whoa you mean you just like you treat them normally and then like become friends first and everybody's like yeah yeah let's try that you know what i mean that's just i'm just like that was in the 90s yeah and it was like they never learned no really because it felt like a phenomenal new idea with facebook like whoa let's be normal it's approaches like actual people do not like a programmed robot not like we're an ad to be fair people are not going around on groups messaging others like oh hey how are you how's your day going what kind of car do you like no that doesn't happen either i don't know because i've never i've literally i've never done anything on facebook that wasn't mormon related like never once in my life so i'm more i'm just this bad i wouldn't know how to deal with the never mormon on facebook i would have no idea yeah none of us knew either let's be honest um that kind of you mentioned where it's like a random stranger messaging you kind of moved into the third phase of it which was that you you join a group instead of going right to friending or talking to people you you interact with the post leave a like leave a comment saying wow that's super cool and they're like take your time with it and don't like just spring right into it take your time first like like a post and comment on and then eventually message about them like about a different post later and it it like looking back at it it's so calculated it feels like a just like this yeah very calculated almost maniacal process of like yes i'll slowly gain your trust and infiltrate your enemy conditions fighting my time patiently like pretending to be your real friend you know yeah that's the biggest problem it's like at the time i don't actually i even saw that as the time but didn't get too concerned about but now it's like you're pretending to be their friend just to try to get something out of them and we're encouraging the members to do that we're telling the members to go out and do that every time we meet with them and how is this not like a messed up process how was that not twisted in some way how does that not come off as weird yeah what's what's a tiny bit ironic to me is that the earlier super awkward socially ignorant versions are actually the most honest because you're just like hey from the start i want you to be a mormon yeah you need to read this book your church your lifestyle is inferior so here's the book read it do you want missionaries that's the most honest and authentic yeah and what the church is doing is they're slowly saying hide who you are hide what your motives are fake fake a friendship in relationship draw it out and do more of a long con right you're supposed to make your facebook look of course like missionary and wholesome but don't make it like obvious that you're a missionary yeah hide the fact that you're a missionary how does this not seem culty like all of this should scream no run away and like even at the time for me i didn't like it at all without even thinking like much of it i just didn't like it so i still did very much the gist i'd messaged be like hey do you want an uplifting message about chrysler oh hey god loves you like that would be about all i did because i felt really weird and i realized now like i felt wrong trying to do this very deceptive process of gaining their trust and infiltrating their inner circle kind of thing so that felt wrong to you it felt wrong it didn't it like just didn't ever sit right with me because it felt i don't know what the word i would use at the time is but now it just yeah it feels twisted it feels did you have that rule that you because each of your you and your companion would have like a tablet right phones okay did you have this rule where you had to show your companion what what you were gonna say before you sent it yes and then he had to review the message yeah every time talk about social media rules where you have like smartphones and access to social media and how they blocked certain software yeah now they didn't block other things did you have an ipad that's really good to talk about because that plays into like my story learning more about go into that as much detail as you can the first thing they do is remember when el tom perry was like we're gonna have ipads and his missionaries you know he was so proud yeah you remember that yeah it was like such a big deal they'll do with your phone this is so that's your actual this is the one i used on my mission android or iphone and it has to be android because the software they use will not work on iphone okay so you have to buy your own yeah phone i already sent the samsung right i bought this one because it's cheap if like if there are any people who are potentially thinking about a mission and are saying like oh you're just a horrible anti-christ who left the church at least listen to me on this like buy a new phone when you go on a mission don't bring the one you previously had at home buy like a cheap android phone and know that the software you put on your phone is completely restricted you download an app called moss 360 that will what does it stand for um i don't even remember what it was just an app i only know if it stands for setting it's not like a church specific app it's like used by other businesses as well but they can get into your phone and control the stuff yeah it's very much a controlling and monitoring of settings and this is why i tell you like if you're a missionary think about going on a mission or if you have a mission who is thinking about tell them to get a new phone because part of downloading it now requires rebooting your phone and i just don't want you guys to lose stuff that you care about on it because a lot of missionaries were blindsided by that and lost like emotionally valuable pictures to them and stuff like photos from their childhood and stuff yeah no so like me luckily for me i this was a phone i bought just for my mission uh it's beaten up clearly i've dropped a few times but um you download an app called moss 360 and it's a missionary operating system i wonder if that's what it is no it's because it's not it's not like a church thing it's a like other business is using it's kind of like time view on computers where like they can go and control another desktop oh like they've tried to develop their own but they just have not been successful and there's there's still loopholes to moss even which again plays into learning more later but you would download that it controls what apps you can download what sites you can even access and go to um and i don't know if it's true not some missionaries believe that the president could even watch what you're doing on your phone i don't know if that missionaries are a little um paranoid yeah and like conspiracy-esque yeah so whether or not that's true i have no idea but they can lock down your phone they do have a method to be able to like brick it essentially and um isn't that kind of weird i mean very just don't think about it all the time it is like you were supposed to not everyone was great at it i'll never pretend that i was amazing at but you were supposed to like if i was on a phone if you were my companion if we were doing facebook finding we would both have to be able to see each other's screens and approve each other's messages how does that work so like we would say you'd have to sit side by side like this so use your phone to use your phone i don't like you should always both be able to see each other's screens so like you can't just be in bed at night looking at your phone no not at all i will say most missionaries hey elder let's look at our phones now okay let's sit down next you have to make it like you didn't have like stay like long as like you were like you would have like have it basically so they can see it couldn't look like you're like like if i was just like looking at my phone like this that would be a big no-no unless i had it like that so someone else could see kind of thing whoa i didn't know and then you'd have to pre-approve it most missionaries don't follow it i'll be honest and just say that i didn't follow it i think it depends on the mission depends on also companion there's you get your strict companions you get your bad companions you get your apostate companions they so some missionaries or missions the the missionaries wouldn't observe each other's phone it's kind of use waking up at 6 00 a.m like there's some missions that are a little bit more disobedient because the mission president is a little bit more laid back i there's other missions where the mission person is a lot more strict and like everyone wakes up as mission presence yeah um you were yeah you had to pre-approve any message or thing that you did there and on your phone you're supposed to download an app called screen time and every night they're supposed to do a phone audit where they check through your phone see what you use how you used it and also occasionally check through your um apple app yeah your companions see and what apps were you accessing how long were you on the apps their photos to look through their social media stuff to see what they've been using some missionaries oh so you're supposed to do that to your companion yeah you would give i would like if we were complaining i'd give you my phone you could give me your phone and like through that with each other and like someone wouldn't even take it as far as like checking personal messages to like family who'd you text what emails did you send yeah there was a that's weird no yeah and it i didn't have any companions whoever did that most of us never even did phone nuts because we were like look we're by each other all the time we're seeing what we're doing anyways and we didn't care yeah because throughout the day you're supposed to show him whenever you're gonna even to your family right no so with your family you just have to have that they're in the room and you can see your screen but you don't have to like pre-approve any messages with your family or things you're saying to your friends so i think maybe some missions do that but mine very much wasn't which is good but it's like yeah yeah it's just you start to realize just how controlling it is and i think it's such a bad thing because i think it cripples the missionaries for when they come back into the real world and learn that this is not normal stuff and i think they lose you kind of start to lose that ability to know how to function normally yeah and constantly it was like a very much like a constant paranoia even if you're a obedient mission you just had this constant like yep uh anxiety guilty about anxiety and guilt about using your phone yeah and having that phone audit which is why a lot of missionaries just don't do it so uh you may have already answered this forgive me but like was youtube on your could you have could you install apps was there a thing that would block you from installing apps yeah you could only install apps you could do it through the app store but moss is basically able to stick its little tentacles into it and control what apps you can even see to try to download and youtube was immediately uninstalled um chrome even google chrome which is on there is like controlled what you can search you can go to like lds.org i think i'm like that's it it's extremely oh so the limiting how would you get to a url you don't so safari you say no yeah you you you would only be able to use like you'd have like your chrome or like i think it's just only the chrome app but you could go into it and you could search like you could search but if you try to search something that's not approved it would give you like uh sorry your administrator has not approved you searching this screen basically and so the only thing you could go to was like i think it was like lds.org and like church approved sites okay and i i think i i i know i've corresponded with some missionaries who learned tricks and tips on how to break or crack open yeah and install what they wanted or do what they wanted there are a lot of ways depending on the mission because some have like in italy the controls on it were more like than others i don't want to talk about the methods too much because i'm worried of a mission presence i'm not finding out and taking away that because i think it's something very important for the missionaries to have but there are ways i in washington where it's more locked down there was still a method to get to a full access of the internet of like uh just being able to like browse the internet and pull up youtube and it was even easier to do in italy both have their loophole around it though so missions have and do you learn these from other missionaries yeah oh you learn these from other missionaries that's why you know that's blackboard oh that's not the black market is google drive google drive is the missionary black market because that's a way to share documents with each other that's how i we're jumping ahead and story that's how i got asked like google drives is the missionary black market okay okay but but like so within a given mission in a given year there's a pool of disobedient missionaries that know how to break into the phones or the ipads and then they teach if you if you find a safe missionary you'll teach them how to break into their phones right yeah is that right yeah and like the trick missionaries i was like you take it with caution like it's very much like a a guessing game to see how disobedient your companion is he likes it's like this weird awkward dance you do slowly like you poke a little here and it's like oh okay you didn't freak out about me playing something that wasn't motab as music okay what about if i do this what if i mention this way of getting around it what do you respond to that like it was a very like missionaries slowly figure out like each other's apostasy levels apostasy levels to know what they can do and get away with some missionaries watch movies some don't it's crazy i mean that's all fun and and cool that missionaries are able to figure that out and i think it's great i think it's good because um there's also this but there's also jen's back there laughing i'm here but there's also this side of i remember my my sister several times called us um you know on their weekly on her weekly calls and she would cry because of how stressed and and anxious she felt about not because the church is trying to figure out social media rules so it was hard for her to re to figure out what the rules were and feeling guilty all the time that she was not doing everything correct or she was not doing everything 100 or being 100 obedient yeah no that's um so while there's missionaries who will find loopholes it causes really real pain in missionaries who are really trying to be 100 obedient and like to almost like too much temptation too much them not temptation but like it's like like like you're saying like i don't know like i accidentally opened something i was not supposed to or i spent too much time on with this person and i was not supposed to and just those things like really create create a sense i don't know of guilt and pain in any time you break the set rules and control you immediately have this anxiety of like oh no they're going to find out and until the mission president the mission president is going to get mad at me and yeah it's very much it's i hate to say it i feel like it's set up in a model that's supposed to make you feel constantly like there's the horror movie villain just behind your back waiting to get you so you're constantly looking over your shoulder and yeah fear and anxiety like that's how it felt for me and then there's also the the fact that you're being watched so much like if you had a companion that you that was being abusive emotionally or physically because the companion is always looking at everything you're saying it has to be in the room every time you're talking to your family i remember with again with my sister and i know it happened with my husband's sister who was on the mission at the same time like they were having issues with their companions and they weren't they weren't able to tell us uh you know they wanted to tell us but they couldn't tell us because the missionary was there listening all the time 100 of the time in the room yeah uh that happened to a missionary i knew him he just did not like his companion they just weren't getting along and he emailed his family about it and that missionary went through his emails and saw and like got super mad and he was like dude that's none of your business like that's my personal interactions with my family what are you doing and like it wasn't encouraged at all to look through personal emails there are just some that take obedience a step farther than it needs to be yeah because you have to be exactly obedient to have the spirit so i mean that's probably a factor is why yeah wow what a weird tech missionary culture well it is and they're still figuring it out to this day like how the best approach to facebook is especially instagram now they're trying to get to instagram and figuring out how to do it there there were some missionaries who started to do it like a very like tick-tock dance style and the church immediately was like no that is not how we want to be represented oh that wasn't church approved because i remember when dancing missionaries were all over instagram it was very like i think maybe a couple encouraged it but from both the missions i was in it was very discouraged like this is not how we want the church represented we because that's what reach like i'll be honest that reached tons more like it was way more effective effective i thought i thought the church was leading that and i thought the church liked it because it was hip and cool from what i know no it might depend on each mission that could be but from what i know about the in washington it was very much like a we want to stop doing this we do not like this and it was very immense like it used to be like facebook was like a fun and goofy thing one of my companions made a rap battle between alma and cora [ __ ] yeah and it was hilarious but then they very much want to move away from that like we want very serious spiritually uplifted content i was like sounds fun though come on yeah yeah what's not awesome about white mormon missionaries from utah um co-opting or you know uh culture culturally what what's it called cultural appropriating uh urban rap music to the two you know to the lyrics of book of mormon stories the new fights are going to light some though so it's accurate according to them but no yeah and just like even like just like it was very just like i feel like creativity was discouraged and i think that was good i feel like missionary mental health was like a big thing that played into every missionary and in every mission and just the view on physical and like like getting sick it changed from like i've heard other stories where i was very much like if you're sick you keep knocking through it but i'm glad to say and report at least that's changed some and that was because of cobid where it became more normal for it's like if you're sick yeah you know actually stay in bed if you're feeling depressed or like you have anxiety we actually have like a mission therapist you can meet with it started getting taken a lot more seriously that's good yeah i guess oh my gosh yeah i'm just i'm just remembering because my i mean yeah my mind was on her mission too like there was times when she would get sick and she wouldn't want to go to the doctor because she would fee she she felt like it was gonna be perceived as like she was not being righteous enough that's why she was getting sick and she didn't want the mission president to look down on her for getting sick and not have like being able to do the work yeah and it's it's gotten better in some ways and has stayed the same in others like the leadership now like mission president as in leadership is very much more like yeah if you're sick you know like going to a doctor but the mission culture still very much is that of like yep you knock if you're sick you knock if you're tired you knock when you're sore you knock when it's raining you knock if you're feeling depressed like it's very much and seeing as like if you're feeling anxiety some still very much see that as like that's a bad thing that's because of you not being faithful enough and i think i don't know it was good at least though because like commissioner mental health got like a much better light brought to it which is good because there's not a lot of coping mechanisms you can use as a missionary my biggest way i usually cope with stuff is music and if you're following the mission rules the only thing you're allowed is like lds hymns and efy music and efy music just annoys me and lds they are nice but like when i'm going through a hard time like none of those let out the emotions that i need to let out and you don't you can't have any hobbies you can have an instrument in which they started allowing a lot more but that's about it and it's just mental health definitely needs to still be taken more seriously within the mission field and there needs to be more coping mechanisms available and coping methods available for missionaries because it's very much just um you get one day a week and not even like a full day where you can do like a you can act normal and talk to your family well that you're allowed to talk to your family and it's the rest of that is just this 24 7 work work work and i don't think that's something that's healthy at all so um okay so i'm still back on like missionaries finding a way to get around installing apps and so there were missionaries that would break rules uh find ways to hack their phone yeah and then be able to watch youtube videos and maybe listen to podcasts and and that sort of thing yeah but but i guess talk about that as as you take us through when your faith started to crack and when you started having doubts and questions right all right so we'll go i guess we're going to go back now to the end of my my training period with the i had the same trainers for my whole transfer then after that was put with a new companion who was really good for me because that companion did a great job at making me feel like i was valuable like i didn't know what i was doing and like he was a friend to me and like i was able to talk about like my anxiety and the pressure i was feeling with him which was super good companions i think are the biggest highlight of the mission for some people i know some get stuck with companions who are horrible or just mediocre i was lucky i had a lot of all of my companions were amazing but for for me it was good because he was definitely someone i saw as a friend and i was able to start to be happy and felt like i had someone i could talk to again we we that we started being able to knock during that time and every mission convinces themselves that they love knocking but they don't like knocking they just like the conversations they can have while knocking because we would just be talking and goofing around and acting and talking like teenagers would and it was really nice to finally do that and to have that break for the first time in a long while and oh do you have any questions no no keep going yeah during that time um like late end of that transfer was when so i was reading through i love reading i was reading the book of mormon old testament new testament and pearl of great price all at the same time and i was kind of getting bored of it like there's interesting stuff still but like i wanted more i wanted more knowledge because basically like it's repeating the same thing you always have known and already knew so i started looking into other stuff within gospel library and started poking around and i found the gospel topic section and the church history section and i started reading through that because once again like the the desire in my mind to know how to answer questions and to know the answer to these concerns i mean was still there and it came back so i started reading through those a lot more during my personal study instead how much had you read the gospel gospel topics essays prior to that time uh not at all so when they came out and in the seminary you weren't encouraged i think we maybe referenced the gospel topic essay when we talked about the book of abraham in like seminary but it wasn't like a read-through i think we just referenced it um that was really my first time reading through them and even finding them it wasn't like through a recommendation of anyone i just was like looking through different stuff on there and it was a section i found in the church history section i started reading through at one point i had read through like the whole entire catalog they have there because i was just bored and needed something new to read okay so let me be clear this is something so in the mtc it wasn't like okay you're gonna have a phone and there's gonna be a gospel library app and in the gospel library app there are these gospel topics essays make sure and familiarize yourself with the gospel topics essays so that when you're asked questions about different controversial things you'll be able to know the church's line none of that none of that like i if they did i definitely don't remember it because it was probably if they did it it was brought up probably in a very nonchalant way because for me finding the gospel topic essays was like entering a whole new world and having a whole new section exists so up until this point of your mission you really the gospel topics essays their existence and what they talked about just kind of do it you were oblivious to it yeah i in 2020 yeah it's not something they really like i always i believe this is probably exaggerated like i i won't say i knew they existed but like i probably had like seen them before but it wasn't something i was like really made aware of and i think it's still like is not the goal to be made aware of those i don't i think they're meant to be there as like oh look we did this but you don't they don't want to funnel members to it too much because i think they know that they not just more problems than they solve no but what you're saying is that in 2021 a mormon missionary is out serving a mission not even knowing that the gospel topics essays exist yeah i was the one to discover them for myself it wasn't anyone at all it was unbelievable that they could keep those from a you you you're you are making the decision to give two years of your life to a church and pay for it and pay for it and somehow you do that without a knowledge that the church itself had put out essays talking a little bit more honestly about its history and the and the essays are living on your phone but somehow you still are oblivious to them yeah well i mean it's because the goal is to not know about that so it's very much that you don't need to worry about that stuff because that's not what you're teaching to people your concern is the small and simple parts of the gospel and building their faith there so you're very much supposed to focus on just reading preach my gospel and then the standard works and that's really it you're supposed to just stay stuck in those because it's the yeah this small some small but simple truths kind of thing but the primary answers you're very much supposed to stay within that category so they don't encourage trying to learn more about that or deep doctrine or that other stuff out there that could be troubling kind of stuff the church is successful keeping its own members from reading its own content that it releases that's how successful it is at creating a bubble yeah for sure that's yeah that's like george orwell stuff again it's 1984. yeah yeah because then but i mean that is a real feat we're going to put out essays put it on our website put it on everyone's apps and no one's going to know about it but then we're going to be able to say we're transparent in our history they were already they were always there they were always there it's not our fault they were there the whole time we just not mentioned them but they were there that is really a remarkable achievement i have not my sister was told on her mission that she was not even supposed to read like the pearl of gray price or think too much about it like she was supposed to stick to the book of mormon maybe a little bit bible especially in the new testament and preach my gospel that's yeah really the main things you're supposed to read our new testament and book of mormon like pearl great prizes there's like you can read it but you're because i'll get more into that but you're you very much avoid pearl great pricing even doctrine covenants yeah with people you're teaching and then old testament she was told like the mission president like you're not like you don't you you're not to study this even on your personal study meaning doctrine and covenants pearl of great price focus on book of mormon and new testament so now the church is creating a bubble that excludes large sections of its own canonized scripture that was the make her mission president i don't know how it's another that's what that's what colby said yeah it's very much stay in the the standard works focus on the book of mormon and maybe a bit of the new testament avoid the old testament because some of the stuff is kind of that's all weird and outrageous and some of the stuff and i mean we know that of course some of that was translated incorrectly because joseph said so we don't have to worry too much there wow yeah but the old testament way i found the old testament way more fun but yeah yeah that's because i started to realize i mean eventually later on i realized it's like it's very much more like mythologies and that's why i started to find it i think more interesting it had a very musical setup to me the new testament was always way more interesting and and powerful than even the book of mormon i love teaching with the new testament but on my mission it was seen as you were an unrighteous missionary if you were using the bible to teach you were supposed to use just the book of mormon yeah ours wasn't that far at least but it was like it was very much an emphasis on the book of mormon and then like the new testament is yeah support that what the book of mormon is saying is true yeah and the book of mormon supports that the new testament is true because they're trying to break away from that mold of the perception that people have where it's like oh you just have your book of mormon bible and you don't believe in the actual bible yeah i'm kind of thinking that makes sense but um yeah okay so you're so you discover the gospel topics essays and this is how many months into your mission um four or five at this point okay almost that's like four to five coming up at six and that and six around six i think is when i started reading into it i have two questions for you had you heard of any missionaries mentioning them i'd have to say it was like kind of like a in passing whispers kind of thing was my perception of it more so yeah i'd say it's kind of a they exist in passing yeah i think and then my other question is did did and did you find any people when you were teaching or contacting people um talking to them did you did they ever challenge your beliefs something that made you kind of like think oh maybe i should go research that a little bit more yes but after i had already read the gospel topic essays okay all right all right so you find the gospel topics essays yeah i [Music] definitely had like i just thirst for more knowledge i wanted to try to figure out more and learn more so i was reading through the gospel topic essays the church history topics and it's all the things within that that category and i wouldn't say i was too disturbed yet i was just kind of like oh okay so there's some weird stuff but we can keep going on with it the one that i think first stuck out and bothered me the most probably was learning the truth of why joseph smith was like a kind of a wanted man i think that one stuck out but even then it was like a sorry very minimal kind of impact like it was kind of this it was a very slow and gradual process for me as a over the time kind of for for never mormons these gospel topics essays are groundbreaking because the church hid and lied about its history for almost two centuries but because of the internet they released these gospel topics essays around 2014 and they cover let's just say eight to ten of the major issues that cause people to leave the church they're written by committee there's no one there's no date on them they change a lot uh there's no signature on them but they're written a lot of important stuffs left off and then they're the narrative is woven in a way to where you would it would never occur to you that any of these things you're reading about are actually problems they're written as if everything's awesome and and the church is always taught this stuff openly and honestly and you know sort of like these are not the droids you're looking for yeah there is no embossing say what's that oh i was just making up avatar recordings there is no war embossing say it's ballista all is fine but um but so they're deceptive in that way but they're also a slight move towards more transparency yeah and what may mean that too like later on was learning how deceptive their footnotes are and some of their quotes are like the footnotes are very ineffective at finding what source they're talking about they kind of they feel like they're designed to be as difficult as possible to find the source that the footnotes even for and on top of that like a lot of times like there's quotes that are only halfway done but we can get more into that later so they'll excerpt the quotes in ways yeah maybe even you lose the context or even change the meaning yeah like you said the it's a very um oh shoot i forgot the word it's like a very woven um like a contextualized narrative yeah the narrative it's a very uh they control it's very much about controlling the narrative yeah yeah so you start digging in you say and what happens yeah um i was thinking i was going like nothing too crazy was happening and then around during my next transfer i was made dl and moved to the bonney lake area uh love my companion there he's awesome but there's when i started to have some more questions and concerns with things because i saw in a it was just like a weird i remember what it was at this point i think it may have been like joseph saying there's people on the moon like that kind of quote on facebook from like a group that got tagged with like an lbs thing and so there i was like wait what i started trying to re-look through those again and couldn't find anything which is eventually kind of what helps lead me into the uh jim bennett's response to the ces letter and the cs letter itself okay so what yeah so why so yeah we've had jim bennett on mormon stories it's one of our epic series where jim bennett responds to concerns he has with the ces letter but um so what would make you think that you started to and well talk about the importance of that for missionaries in the modern day of jim bennett's response to the ces letter and what was it that led you to become interested in it um and was it forbidden on the mission no it just got something that wasn't like it's not i was explicitly forbidden most constantly it's like you don't need to worry yourself about it my goal was even to find the ces letter jim bennett's response i had asked in a missionary facebook group for a google drive with more deep doctrine because i was like okay i'll just study through some deep doc i was kind of bored the joseph smith uh people on the moon thing didn't bother me too much i was like i'll just focus on something else kind of thing and i got i asked for yeah like a google drive with a uh just like deep doctrine and i got this is missionary contraband at this point missionary contraband at this point yeah but my way justify i was like well i just want a deep doctor i'm not there for anything else but it's righteous contraband it's not like missionaries are sharing doubts it's for the extra faithful hardcore missionaries no yeah i i thought it was like a very this top secret sacred yeah i'm just trying to kind of be smarter trying to try to learn more about what's going on learn the deep doctrine because that's fun and i got a lot more than what i asked for i got one full of uh a google drive now would your would your mos app or whatever allow google drive access yes google drive is allowed and i don't we're ruining their system no because there's no way i think they could take it away because it's so essential for any of the facebook work they do okay because they need it to be able to make and share the videos that's awesome that i don't think they'd be able to function without having it and i think missionaries would still find a way okay it's so widespread at this point but um on that drive were i'm not also like mission presence were very aware of one of these particular google drives because it was like a it's called the fibo or the white bible and it was like are you sure it across missions or was it yeah this is across missions and many mission presidents knew about this and we're trying to find ways to shut it down but oh well they shut one down successfully at one point do they know who who created it no it was called what um there were two different ones there was the order of the white lotus and the white bible and the order of the white lotus is another avatar last airbender reference um but that's what the google drive was called it had what on it that one was all tv shows and such uh the white bible was deep doctrine eventually those two got combined to create what they called the thy bull for summary i don't even know where that name came from uh if the missionary who made that is watching this please tell me how you came up with that name i'm just curious i want to have on mormon stories the original creators of these google drives yes because they're just contraband and mormon mystery among like kind of disobedient missionaries they're seen as legends because they are known to like not be caught because like new episodes were still getting added on like the tv series so they were definitely still getting away with stuff through their missionary email and put out like document updates basically saying yeah i'm still on my this is like the guy that's crazy big bitcoin like no yeah this is a legend or what is the what is the guy with the with the mask that hacks into people's computers anonymous anonymous this is that kind of lawyer yeah no yeah this is like a whole other level of missionary contraband like you're once you're a part of this and know about it you're like part of a secret group and you probe to see what other missionaries know about it i've never heard of this before no it's wild and i'm not too worried to talk about because i don't think mission presence will be able to shut it down because our mission president very much knew about it and still couldn't stop it i want the links i want the links to these i can do that okay in the show notes in the show notes we're going to include the links yeah i still have the link to it okay so one of them was a was like popular media last airbender like last airbender what else any movie you could find on there i what you the sauce series was on there um the joker was on there the whole marvel universe was on there you could watch psych rick and morty you name it because it's probably going to be taken down because of copyright violation so don't give a letter don't give up but these are these are mp4s find me if you want to uh yeah they're videos they're just video links and they're not they're not youtube not youtube links it was like a downloaded form on it and with google drive if you have a shared file it doesn't download to yours it's just safe downloaded on theirs and what this missionary probably did was down by like the expand uh expanded storage for his drive so he's a saint among these disobedient missionaries but um and then the other one okay the other one is the white and that's the one which i was more interested in is the white bible and that's like yeah right [Laughter] why are you laughing deep doctrine and stuff like that and like mormon doctrine mormon deep doctrine old conference talks that you can't find within the journal discourses discourse uh the miracle forgive no dreams of salvation doctrine and salvation america for the forgiveness of 10 don't recommend um and also like just like other random links to deep docker and stuff and the section that caught my eye when i got this at the time i was very much still a very obedient missionary so i was like i don't care about this movie stuff i just like didn't look at all so i'm just not going to touch but i found there was a section it's like anti-mormon stuff and so i looked at i'm like okay this is kind of what i'm interested in i have questions here and the first one that caught up was one that i mean the first one that caught my eye was something i'd seen before which is ces letter and responses and so that's what i ended up clicking on and within it were two pdf files there was the ces letter by uh jeremy reynolds and the response to the cs letter by jim bennett um yoda versus count dooku and luke versus uh darth vader the the classic good and evil um and i was like okay i was immediately interested in it because i already had that like that seed from earlier i guess planted and so i started with i was like well since one's a response i'm gonna obviously i'm gonna start with the original text so i started because you were you still had questions right you read the questions you read the gospel topic essays and you were like this these or not really it's all kind of weird especially the book of abraham one specifically because it felt like reading through it like the first time i was fine but like a second time reading through i was like these are very much what's how do i word it it's a very much just a non-answer it's a a dodging the question yeah okay so for the first time you're reading the true history of the book of abraham the problems with joseph smith's alleged translation of the egyptian into english and then you're reading jim bennett's responses to jeremy reynolds critique i read the cs letter first then jim bennett's yeah response but it was very much like a thousand k these like the history that i've been told isn't completely right but maybe there's nothing wrong there but like i'll do obviously the original then the response first so i again i'd say i had to say skimmed because like reading through the cs letter like it was that same kind of heart pounding thing where it's like if my mission companion maybe sees this he might get the wrong idea and just being super worried so i was always very short and brief in my readings and tried to make it pretty quick so i won't pretend like it was like the best read-through read-through ever but okay really quick i'm trying to imagine this scenario where you're like so your companion doesn't know you've got this google drive so i'm imagining some other missionary must have told you about it it's like a p-day and you're like elder come here there's a google drive so how it happened was i found out this missionary this is a whole nother story now this other missionary came in who had oh wait no just kidding there's one eventually i got another google doc from that guy but the main one i had which was the one with the deep doctor and stuff i'm just imagining i didn't mention it to my companion no it's very no but i'm imagining how you found out about these secret contraband google drives uh facebook i was in a facebook group i asked for like a just it was i asked for just deep doctrine and i got way more than i asked for but not from other missionaries from other missionaries it was like a worldwide missionary deep doctrine group i was like hey can anyone give me a google drive link to like a folder with a ton of deep doctrine and they gave a link and it had like i said way more than what i bargained for i got rid of when i first got i got rid of like the uh the order of the white lotus section just had the white bible section because i was always as interested so missionaries outside of their mission are able to communicate on facebook highly discouraged um i lost this on p day by like mission presence like this discouraged from doing but are you going to stop it let's be honest though sometimes those groups got [ __ ] that group eventually got like shut down because the church apparently was trying to get rid of them because they didn't want them around and so mission presence were told to find the missionaries who started them and to shut down those what was the group called again um i think it was oh there's a couple different ones there was like mission lds missionary deep doctrine and there was like uh the after hour missionary i think or something it was like something like that that's awesome there's tons there's lots of weird missionary groups that's a whole nother just just look up lds missionary groups and you'll find tons of weird stuff on facebook have fun with it everybody but um no so i was very much reading in secret i was reading it during personal study because i was like i'm i didn't see it as like wrong i was like nervous about someone getting the wrong idea but i saw i was like i'm just trying to find answers and figure all this out right so like it's not a big deal i'll use some my personal study for it but even then it was like i'd only use like 10 20 minutes of reading through it so it took a while but after i skimmed read through it i was like okay well that's kind of a lot to think about and in my mind i was like debunking some stuff that's what you can call it like mentally working around some of the issues but then i was like okay i still had like somewhere i'm like i felt a little disturbed by it i felt do you remember which ones they were the book of abraham but like what things about the book because just the fact that let me just so if you read if you go to the gospel topic essay what most people are going to get out of it out of reading it is the church admits that the papyri as the papyri has nothing to do or doesn't mention the the name abraham and that all lds and non-lds egyptologists agree that the translation the translation would be pretty much incorrect but then for some reason they they well at the end they have this like several bullets where they go through like different reasons why the book of abraham is historical so it gives you like it's kind of like this question like okay you're telling me it's not a translation and lds but then it's historical it's still ancient somehow right so so it's kind of like when you're in red in my i started underlining doubts i had in red and that's one of the very first things i underlined was the conclusion to the book of abraham gospel topic essay yeah so so you were you were probably were like okay which is it is it is it is it it's not it's not a translation but it's it's ancient but just like how is it a trans how is it doctrine and how can we say this is for sure scripture if we're admitting that it's not like what's there how are we how are we making that jump i wasn't at that point i was very much not throwing it out as like a complete impossibility but do you remember what jim bennett's response would have been jim bennett's response was reread i tried rereading it before i came and honestly that was hard because a lot of it just feels like him mocking and joking around which i think is one of its strengths and weaknesses but um his response was kind of just making fun of who he set his source was for the facsimiles and then he presents i remember four options for how it came to be which is one that like the scholars are wrong i think number two is that it's inspired and number three is who cares it's scripture anyways and he well like as he does agree like he says like i think this third one is a dumb point because i don't like it as an answer which i respect that a lot that he's willing to say that but the second one i think is what he kind of more leans to green's leaned into for sure but then the most of it is just making fun of the sources that uh the cs letter uses and then even once robert rittner is mentioned it's like oh well here's his he won't respond on these different issues here because the way he word is like he um they're challenging for him and so he avoids them he only chooses fights that he knows he can win it's like the the set up for it robert reigner doesn't reply because he's gonna lose his fight yeah yeah let's trust jim bennett on egyptology yeah no and that's one thing that maybe matt like looking back at it's like wait you're making fun of the sources here but he at least missed like i'm not an egyptologist but also it's very much something like look take my word for it kind of thing it was just like this hard double standard and then with the cs letter the other thing that really caught my attention was the prophets section and also learning that it wasn't a big deal for me but like learning that the book of mormon was translated using a stone and a hat first i didn't get the big deal with that but then like it was a bigger deal later but the biggest the second biggest one for me was definitely prophets and then race in the priesthood why prophets because growing up i remember singing uh like um follow the prophet follow the prophet and just stuff like that and always that like we can completely trust the profits but how can because jim bennett gives this version of mormonism and his response like it's a very profits are so so fallible that they can come up with the 2015 policy but somehow still be profit yeah his response was not satisfying for me at all that was the when i first read through it i like found a lot of satisfying without and for me never was because it was like how can we trust these as reliable men who we should always follow or even saying we should sometimes follow how can we trust to follow them when they've been wrong so horribly wrong and endorsed horrible things on so many occasions how do we know that they're not doing that right now how is that even if the church is true do i even want to take that gamble of following a prophet who might be wrong 20 years later does it even make sense to even if i believe in the church to follow that if it's someone who's could be wrong as you're and on like very important topics that was hard for me and then raising the priesthood was just realizing that like the narrative i had been taught about uh how the church was for the civil rights movement just learning that it was very different than what i had learned because i was tall like i think i i don't remember i mentioned it earlier or not but that like the church has always been really pro-civil rights and was really supportive and uh it was not in so many ways and it was just that was definitely a big issue for me because i'm like again coming back to it's like why is god not getting at you guys for this how is he not appearing and interceding and being like hey slow down a bit so don't say any of that don't say that blacks are lesser don't say that you shouldn't intermarry don't say that they were less valiant in the pre-existence how is like that not on god's top list of concerns yeah to come down and stop and those are kind of my big concerns going in that i was trying to resolve with jim bennett's unfortunately ron meldrum cleared all those up last week [Laughter] that's not the word i would use sorry that was that was painful i'm sorry yeah i don't even have words about that um so let me check my notes here um with the cs i guess uh where do you want me to go next just like my reading through of the ces response or yeah just tell us more about like what were you thinking how long what was what was the process of you reading jim bennett's response was it over several weeks were you telling your companions about it yeah you said you were you're reading this but you you're somehow you're trying to keep it from your companions yeah who didn't care about seeing the screens all the time which made it possible and i was very secretive because my mindset was like these are my concerns my issues i know if i ask other people one i might just get looked down on you might tell the mission present but also like at a level i knew that i was just going to get a biased answer a very biased just believe the church's true answer and that's not at all what i'd wanted and so i was very much in the mindset of i'm going to have to dive into all of this alone yeah and it was very painful that way but i think it was i understand why i did that and i don't blame myself for doing it and i think that was the best way to do it was to do it just it was something for me and it was something i think it was best done i guess by myself because it was something i needed to just i needed to know for me were you sad a lot of times yeah there was even after reading jim bennett's responses and having something satisfied it was a very long period of back and forth i would have days and this is all oh i was a district leader during this whole time as well um and that added pressure of like oh shoot sometimes like i need to be a better missionary and stop doing this i'm i'm supposed to like kind of be a bit of an example and help out the other missionaries in my district in other periods where i was much more like crap i really don't think this is true and it was a very long like back and forth process between so i was rereading like parts of jim bennett's response and the cs letter back and forth and eventually i was able to use a little loophole to be able to see the debunking section on the ces letter yeah website which is amazing check it out if you haven't we'll include links to all this in the show notes um go ahead you were you were going out and proselytizing and teaching people right like at the at the same time you're going through all this so how would how are you able to tell people share your testimony and say i know the church is true brother sister whatever pray about this book would you like to be baptized how were you how were you dealing with all that some of it depended on the day like on a day where i believed tomorrow it was easy because i was like okay yeah well i do believe this one days where i didn't especially once i just didn't believe it was i learned to put on a mask i i wasn't me i put on i knew exactly what role to play i knew the role of the missionary i knew how to act what to say how to seem like i was all in and believed but it was a facade like i knew it and i knew i was lying to myself and that was really uh strenuous and painful on my mental health just knowing that i was especially later on once i stopped believing just knowing i was uh i felt like an imposter i knew i was a liar and i what's it like um thanks for being candid and talking about something really hard what's it like so you know some would say well you're a missionary then you start reading troubling things and then you say oh it's not true and then you go home but that's not how it works so what what's it actually like when you're a missionary and you start to question even once i knew i didn't believe going home was not it was something i thought of but it was more of like a passing thought like i could do this but i didn't see it as an option because i was so worried about it's a very much a if i go home i will be a social outcast i may lose everyone i know and love i will lose friends i will lose family i will lose the respect of them i will lose my wards like not all that was true so this was just over worrying but it happened and that was the pressure yeah and it's very uh dishonorable to go home early especially if you're going home early for doubts and for somebody i didn't connect that like obviously looking back it's like oh well i didn't believe so how is it dishonorable but i was still kind of in that mindset that even though i didn't believe it'd be dishonorable to go home so my plan was to fake it for the next year year and a half yeah it was about a year at that point or a little over a year to fake it until i got home and until i was in college and maybe talk about it later as i make a slow transition out i very much had like a it's so dumb i had like a planned phase of how i would slowly introduce this to my parents and slowly make my exit because that's what i saw as the best and safest option but you had a year to go on your mission uh yeah by the time around the time were i was like i do not believe i was like i had like 13 or 14 months left just shy of a year holy moly i was coming up onto it and that well you were 10 months in yeah i was that's that's missions are hard when you're a full believer yeah the back and forth was like a four six month process of going back and forth between believing and not believing and it was painful because yeah there were days such a back and forth and my emotions were everywhere i started i did start seeing the the mission therapist but of course i didn't talk about the the real concerns behind uh what i was going through because i knew if i did it'd probably be reported to the mission president and so i was trying to get help and develop coping mechanisms that i needed which was good like that it did help for sure and the dude was an awesome guy wait so let me just get this straight so any therapist you know the code of ethics for a therapist begins with the rule of confidentiality i mean every single the first thing you do when you meet with a client is you say everything we say here is confidential and i will not be sharing it with anyone outside of the session that without your consent so how do they address uh therapist client confidentiality in in mormon missions so my mindset going into it was i didn't know for sure if he would tell him tell my mission president but i kind of just assumed and had a suspicion i guess that if i mentioned it there's a good chance he does mention it to my mission president so i chose not to and then i was reading somewhere later and if i'm correct i believe that like if you're doing therapy through like uh the lds family services is that they do have basically some legal wording so they can tell leaders so in my case it would be a mission president i don't know if it would have been exactly true for this situation but i'm going to looking back i'm going to assume it yeah outside the mission like an a regular word there is a form if the word is going to pay for the therapy on family services there is a form that you're encouraged and most most people feel pressured to sign where the therapist is able to talk to the bishop about your therapy sessions or what you're going through and i'm sure on missions is probably explicit so did did your therapist start the session by saying everything we discuss here will be held in confidence i don't recall that ever i wouldn't think they would i don't think so i know we started with a prayer each time which has made me doing therapy now awkward because i sometimes will start to fold my arms i'll be like wait that's not how we now normal people start therapy that's unethical that's unethical to start a therapy session with a prayer yeah i that's outrageous i've never heard of that before yeah i mean i guess it in my mind it made sense in the context it's like oh i'm a missionary this person's a member it's very much like a lds therapist and therapy but that's not therapy no if you're questioning the existence of god and your therapist starts out with a prayer you already know you can't bring that up at all yeah that's off-limits or if you're struggling with the ramifications of a faith crisis or if you've committed some big sin and you know your therapist is like on jesus's side yeah just going to mean yeah so about that the whole thing we just started with um i don't know if god is real or not and i'm losing my mind thinking about it like that's not a normal thing you can talk about or transition into yeah it's it's yeah oh that's i actually believe it or not i didn't know it was that bad i thought these were just licensed therapists that followed their codes of ethics and this could just be my experience i won't speak for all but that's for my memory from what i understand the therapists that treat missionaries are vetted a lot more than the regular lds service therapists and regulations are a little a bit different um yeah okay so you so but and and so you don't remember him guaranteeing you confidentiality and then you regardless you remember feeling like i can't be fully honest with this oh yeah i already i had like made a contract with myself to not take it tell anyone and even when i started therapy i definitely i'll do that because i'm like i'm not taking any risks i need to find this out for myself because if i find out it's not true i have to fake the next part of my life until i can go home and if i find out it is true well then it's no big deal to bring up anyways it was like a law of how i i rationalized it in my mind even though it was something that was weighing heavily upon my soul and mind and yeah the source of a lot of this is my pain outrageous and awful i did not know this it's terrible because this is this is intense pressure a mormon youth is feeling about is there a god is the church true should i stay or should i go what will happen if i go will i be ostracized by my family that's that's like a vice grip of stress and pressure yeah and gerard i'm sure you experience similar types of things on your mission especially but it can really grind your it can it can ramp up the anxiety and ramp up the depression in very serious ways and it's not safe and won't sure won't some their mission therapists will assign you scriptures or give you therapy with kind of like the gospel i intermingled with the therapy was that your experience at all i think we did a little but like mostly he did focus on because like i told like my main concern was finding like new coping mechanisms and that is what he mostly focused on okay and finding them like helping learn something new like i like meditation and learning some new kind of just like figuring out some ways to better meditate and call my thoughts so it wasn't totally worthless there was something there was still a lot of good that came from that there's a lot of ways that he helped me for sure like that was definitely something that helped keep me less uh anxious and less depressed and helped keep some yeah worse thoughts at bay for sure i have a question how how did you go from i have questions about the book of abraham and the reliability of prophets to to maybe god or jesus or not do not exist so i think it's just the way i mean the church is set up you're very much told like this is the most true church of all churches if we're not true then what are these other trash and it's like well so it's like it's part of like the logical conclusion to conclusion to come to but i was also just realizing that every other religion had these missionaries love putting out these problems within religions but once you realize that your own religion has this problem you remember they all have these similar issues as well so what's to make them any more true than this what's to make any of this true and i started to view as more yeah i started to have a very different view on god and religion because of that yeah once i lost my faith when i still had it was still like maybe god's real maybe he's kind of real it was kind of like i think the farthest i would have taken it at that time one more question i have is how uh how are lgbt issues talked about among missionaries and on um and like nowadays in the most disgusting way and possible like it's maybe talked about in decent ways but the attitude is gross i can't think of another word other than like it makes you want to vomit um say it i there was a a missionary who talked about his time when he was in salt lake before he got transferred to his other mission or assigned to his next mission and he talked about at one point one of it was a it was a quad so there's four missionaries in an apartment and he talked about one point that one of the missionaries admitted that like he like the way that he worded even was like he was struggling with gay thoughts like not that he was gay but in the very same time very mormon version of it same sex that he was struggling with same sex attraction and their everyone's reaction to that was to not want to be around him anymore and feel like oh i don't want to be around that might be awkward or he might hit on me or just like stuff like that and it pissed me off a lot it was that was in your mission yeah there wasn't that didn't happen in the mission i was in but it was from it was in italy a missionary there talked about how that's a experience he had with his companions before he was reassigned and he was in salt lake so was there ever an openly gay missionary on your mission that you were aware of none that i ever knew of no and that would be very much a thing i would imagine i'd honestly say i'd probably be discouraged because like having doubts was discouraged having worries was discouraged even being open about mental health or physical problems you're having was discouraged so i have no doubt in my mind that being open about that you struggle with same-sex attraction as they would word it would i imagine that would be very much shut down as well i i it's probably good to mention that there's at least two missionaries right now on the mission fields i know one of them in person because i because he went to byu idaho and i saw him there i mean he's not my friend or anything but he's serving a mission right now and they they're on different missions but they are both very openly gay and very open about their sexuality and i i found their journeys pretty interesting um been they both made facebook posts about their sexual orientation and about being gay very very openly one of them at least one of them has made a video talking about it um and i know that from church headquarters at least for one of them they have tried to shut it down and tell him like you should delete this post and you shouldn't talk about it yeah imagine imagine some mormon kid raised in magna or toilet or freaking you know uh mount pleasant utah who's homophobic and then all of a sudden he finds out the companion he's getting is gay like that's not gonna work no and it's yeah that could be unsafe yeah no 100 and what makes me more i just remembered this now the church my worry with that would immediately be that they tried to make it marketable because i remember there was a sister who had lost her brother to suicide and the first like once different leaders found out about it the goal was to have her do a video and she was open to doing it but to me it immediately didn't sit right because i felt like you're just making her suffering marketable and you're making it i didn't sit right with me especially where i've had friends and family who have struggled with stuff like that i'm like it just didn't sit right that they felt like they were making it uh like something like oh look because then to us we can solve this problem like oh elder raspbern video um because he was not about her telling her story genuinely or it was about using her story and spinning it in a way that it would promote church that's how i felt like for her i definitely feel like she like it was very emotional like and it still was very touching hearing her talk about it but just the way it's very it felt like they're trying to use it as something like a marketing tool the same way with um one of the things i forgot to mention it earlier but that made me it was the first time i ever was openly mad at a church leader was elder rasband's youth devotional where he um there was a question like i have i was like anonymous question from the crap i was like i have doubts about the church and it's truth claims how can i resolve them and he was like oh let us show you this video and it cuts to a video about a teen who is suffering with depression oh you have suicidal thoughts and that yeah immediately [ __ ] pissed me off i was visibly upset and my companions knew it because it just immediately registered to me as wrong because it wasn't even answering the question it was saying the point of the video was to say if you are struggling with depression or suicide it's one it's leaking linking it to you having doubts and it's also saying we can resolve those and make it go away because afterwards he's like he's like stan he had him stand up like look he's now about to be happily married and look like basically how much better he is now because he has the church and it it ralls me upstairs it's it feels so much like it's just exploiting uh mental illness and suicide and depression something that shouldn't be used as a like a marketing tool to say come to our church it's something that should just be talked about genuinely and about trying to get these people help especially where they're trying to link having doubts to being depressed basically making that that connection there and it for me mental health stuff suicide and depression are very like sensitive topics for me i've had people i know almost lose their lives to stuff like that and so yeah seeing it used in a way like that i just find disgusting and evil and i'm sure once you started losing your faith it was a lot easier to see those to see those things and recognize when things were being done wrong right yeah for sure um what and then are we at the point in this story when you're already in italy no so i so where we're at would be i'm starting to go back and forth between my faith and eventually it's hard to pinpoint what exactly made me lose it because it's kind of just an all at once thing right where it was like hey if this is off and this is off and this is off sorry one sec i just gotta catch my breath a bit if this is if all these things are off and not lining up how can this church be true and so i resorted to the classic go-to of moroni's promise was i i was already praying a lot during the time but i gave honestly the most like sincere and emotional prayer i had ever given and up to this time i had in my mind to help give contact i'd set up like i had a space in my mind with god smiling at the middle because i very much saw i see god as a kind god that's how i saw him and so it was like on one side it was a scale for uh in favor of the church and on the other side was in favor against the church and for me i was starting to lean towards every time i kept thinking about it going back to it started to lean more and more in the side of the church not being true and so one night i just kind of went into that place in my head and prayed and said just please please if you're real tell me say something anything at all i don't care if it's a mosquito doing something weird on my wall just let me know this is true let me know that last 19 18 years of my life i haven't committed it to a lie tell me that i haven't been out here lying because i wanted it to be true i needed it to be true because it was my it was my world view it was my world it was everything in so many ways and so i was praying and begging for an answer and then silence nothing and i remember it was i was definitely angry in that moment i was like so i guess that's it then and i just imagined the statue of god just crumbling down and falling to pieces and at that point that was that was the moment the moment when i lost my faith and officially realized i don't believe because for a long time i think in a lot of ways i had stopped believing i was trying to push it off it was the subconscious knew it but the conscious didn't but at that point it was it was acceptance that i did not find the church to be true that the church yeah function as what i knew couldn't add up and be true [Music] and at that point that's when i made the plan there was only one person i had told that i had doubts and i very nervously told them but they said that they had doubts too and there's someone i was able to talk to and kind of express that with a bit eventually i was able to talk to and reach out to more people once i was in italy and had instagram but were they missionaries no okay there are people at home yeah um okay um certainly you you would have been teaching people and telling them to follow more nice promise too right uh up until that point mm-hmm did any of your investigators ever had like an experience when they followed mourinho's promise where they received a definite answer that the church was true after the point where i said no i don't believe the church is true no i never had an experience like that but before i did but so seriously saying you you had investigators who actually received answers to that yeah okay but i'd also heard of stories where people had prayed and said that they got led to revelations whatever where it's like if any book be not the bible or as right from it they truly yeah like that so they prince yeah so god told them that he was not true pretty much yeah missionaries rationalization of that was always funny because it was just like oh well i guess they were misled but there's nothing more they could say about it and the reason i just started to speak to me of the inconsistency and the lack of right reliability that the spirit has yeah what do you mean by that just that if people can get led away like we're saying that to read that scripture in revelations but that also you you can get an answer that the church is true by the spirit it's like how do you know which one is actually the spirit and which one's not because for her it was a prompting to go there so you obviously can't say oh well satan leading her there in the scriptures like that's such a weird it's almost saying the bible is evil so missionaries couldn't and wouldn't say that but also just like if everyone in every church has the same kind of testimony that someone else does i kind of just was like how there's no quantifiable way to really say any of these testimonies are more valid than the others they're all they're all equal yeah because they're all based from the same kind of emotional experience and that uh heightened was a um emotion yeah exactly um so the fl flow or elevation emotion all of it yeah elevated emotion yeah which all humans experience yeah it's very because mormons call it the holy ghost yeah they brand it as something only they have which also started to annoy me too because it was like why do we get to trademark happiness why do we get to trademark the spirits like stuff like that made me so upset why do we get a trademark truth like who are we to say that if you leave the church you couldn't be any happier or that the only way to be truly happy is in the church or that you what you felt was not really the spirit it's only kind of the spirit you have to join our church and pay 10 to get that deluxe edition the dlc [Music] yeah wow that's just so like i i had hard stuff happen on my mission but that just sounds incredibly difficult yeah it was it was hard especially just knowing that i was once i got to the point where i knew i was putting on a mask because it was what does that do to what does that do like so for people who've never been in a high demand religion maybe they don't understand what it's like to live a lie month after month after month teaching things that you know aren't true pretending your companion that you believe things you don't faking it to your mission president hiding things from your therapist what does that do to you month after month after month it slowly eats away at you and you once looking back especially are almost a little disgusted with yourself because of your lack of moral integrity and that was very much how i felt i was gross that i felt just disgusted towards myself for believing that and it's something putting on that mask every day was so painful because it was a very conscious action it was no longer something i was unconsciously doing it's something i was purposefully doing every single day and it ate at me knowing that i was doing it and then i wasn't truly being me so that's that's actually a surprise to me i would think that in that position you would say i'm part of a high demand religion or cult this isn't fair i was manipulated and pressured into this mission and i can't leave because everybody else who's still in is a part of it so like you wouldn't beat yourself up for lying you would literally say i'm doing this for survival yeah and it's a heroic act and i'm just gonna suck it up for my own survival but you wouldn't beat yourself up for deceiving people that's that's what i would think yeah that's my mindset more now is what you described where i am a lot more kind towards myself about it and like able to not blame myself and realize that it was what i was conditioned and set up for and but at the time it was something i was beating myself up for a lot which wasn't good for my mental health because it was i was just putting myself through the ringer about it knowing going out and being like you're lying about this i was even harder like running into bashers or bashers because it'd be like i know what you're saying is true but i have to pretend now oh my gosh it could be like hurt and offended and sometimes like i was and i realized because it's like i wanted to scream and just let out yeah i know it's weird right but i had to put on this act of like oh they don't know what they're talking about when it comes to dna and the nephites that was that's the one distinct one i'm ever being about yeah so have you heard about like problems with the church's truth claims you would support the church knowing that the that the truth claims challenges were legitimate yeah oh man that would be and just like hearing him say that i'm going to be able to scream out with him like dude i know it doesn't make sense but i have to pretend like oh yeah there's totally answers to that in the gospel topic essay and it's totally coherent it makes perfect sense yeah it's it's weird that would be super hard and you're freaking 18. yeah i was 19 at least at this point you're not drinking age you're not even drinking age yet i'm still like yeah your brain still isn't fully formed it is i'm still i'm still just a kid okay yeah all these people are commenting this kid's brilliant but your brain won't be fully formed for another six years not at all yeah no like which i i love i made a vow also when i like i was done with the church i'm like i'm not going to stop learning because that's what i felt like they were trying to get me to do was to have a cease and progression to be damned as they would put it a stop of progression and i was like well i don't want that i'm going to always try to push myself to learn and find out more and to learn something new every day and to have my world view grow so i think that's a lot healthier to do just a little side note when i was growing up damned man going to hell but that stopped my progression thing is modern is modern spin interpretation to make the mormon church seem less its doctrine seem less barbaric and hateful yeah and it was so hard like talking we had a girl we were teaching who was i still i was like at a midway point when we taught her but she was um i think she was bi or lesbian but she eventually asked the like so you guys believe i'm going to hell then right because i'm lesbian and realizing that even our nuance like well not really you'll still be in one of the other kingdoms and it'll be happy with such a bs approach because it's like but we believe you'll no longer be gay and that you'll have that cure because it's something i'm i'm i'm not saying this is what i believe i'm saying this is the church's belief is that you're being cured of what's wrong with you and you're being made whole and just giving that response because like my companion he wasn't trying to because he had nothing no idea what was going on but like we had like a trade-off system it was like my turn to kind of like answer something i was like giving this in the back of my head i'm like i'm so sorry that i am saying this to you because it's this it's just wrong i said wow hurtful message no matter what and the messenger told the show is very deceitful the missionary discussions i would say are still very deceitful like i said we were kind of told to avoid bringing up dnc and the book of abraham i mean i think it's very clear why now it's because they bring in a lot of the issues like the book of mormon on its own is already going to have people with issues even if they don't see like historical issues just the idea of having another bible they already like might give you some some grief about that so bringing in two other ones that actually have some legitimate concerns and problems in them definitely starts to you see why they want to avoid it yeah yeah like i always want to give the church leaders the benefit of the doubt that they're sincere believers and that they know i definitely think they are too yeah yeah and that they're good-hearted and they just want to spread the goodness but when you think about the missionary program and even these things we were talking about with social media there is intentional conscious deception going on both of the missionaries and and of the investigators they're intentionally withholding information they know would make them not want to join the church so they're both teaching missionaries not to share certain things keeping things from the missionaries and then teaching missionaries explicitly not to share certain things because it'd be like knowing that your transmission's broken but you you tell the sales person don't let the buyer know that the transmission's broken yeah or they won't buy the car it's that you know the car is broken you shouldn't be selling the car in the first place it is that level of deception even if they are sincere believers yeah am i wrong no no definitely right on the nail on the head yeah i think i think i also wanted to mention that something so i was uh an assistant to the president while i was on my mission something i learned my mission president taught us was that the number one goal of a mission precedent um is to is not to convert many people but is to convert the missions missionaries yeah and that missionary precedent success even by um church headquarters is measured on how many of those missionaries that they had under their uh supervision remain in the church and follow the covenant paths once they come back yeah and based on those numbers is how then they later promote mission precedence to maybe other higher positions they had that that similar setup for me as well where it's like the the scripture if you can bring but one soul unto christ and how great shall your your joy be and basically staying up it's like if that that one soul can be you even if you just bring that on to christ which i think is good because the mission is a field in which it's very competitive and it's very number based and it still is but they're trying to kind of fix that by saying look don't stress the numbers too much they say it but by practice you still are definitely stressing baptismal numbers and constantly setting unachievable goals that you'll say we're going to try to get 15 baptisms as a zone and you're going to get two by the end of the transfer and everyone knows it but you feel bad if you set a local because then you're not faithful enough yeah it's it's very high pressure emotion i'd say if the church if the lds mormon church isn't occult the mission is a hundred percent occult on a whole nother level it's control and the seat brought to just a whole new extreme that's like a meme we need to make that meme if the mormon church isn't a cult the mormon mission is yeah that's meme worthy really quick rider you're about to say something before you do i have to read a comment from the lila tuller not only one of my favorite humans but one of the most important mormon stories podcast episodes ever and since we're talking about the sincerity of mormon general authorities she is one to be able to speak because she is the daughter of hartman rector junior who was a prominent outspoken mormon general authority hi laila she writes i'm not so sure that the leaders are all sincere believers i think they know too much and i think they are too invested themselves uh to do anything about it so they keep the lies going to support themselves in their own self deception that's lyla throwing it down dropping the mic yeah i think it's very possible i like to try to give people the benefit of the doubt that their intentions are good even if they're the fruit sown from their actions isn't but it very well could be that they are more aware i think they're more aware than they'd let on but i do think they think they're doing a good thing i think yep i think they definitely have that i know i don't think anyone ever looks like i'm can't wait to do this horrible thing and hurt all these people like that's just not how we are as people i think they think they're helping but yeah and it's honestly not just the high up leadership like honestly just thinking about how i was as a missionary i um i believed in the church i believed it was true but i knew there was a lot of problems that i didn't have answers to and whenever i would debate with bashers or jehovah witnesses or other religion people um i would always avoid to say the things that i knew would that i didn't have answers to things that would be problematic yeah i would uh hide evidence that i knew existed that invalidated my point and used this uh used the seat to you know promote the church because i really believed it was true and it was worthwhile so um i mean human um psychology is really is it's not black and white it's not it's very for sure we're very complicated yes for sure yeah and so you reach this really dark moment before you get transferred to italy is that right no i was in washington is when i started therapy it was during my last transfer in washington i didn't know that at the time but that's when i or no it was the one just before that when i had started therapy and it was the same around the same time like during that time is when i officially said i don't believe the church is true but i was like of course still going to go to this therapist because like i knew i needed therapy i knew a lot of my thoughts were not healthy and i knew that trying to say i can manage that on my own would not be smart or safe and so i i was aware of that enough to it was the best remedy i knew i had for the time and i plan to of course continue therapy when i'm home which i'm doing now and it's wonderful so really quick uh in your experience can you envision missionaries mormon missionaries in the same situation as yours experiencing suicidal ideation completely and there were times where i did they were never i don't know if i ever dwelled on them much but there are definitely moments where it was this would just be better if this was all over and that's not a place you should ever be and if any one of you are or know someone who is please reach out and give them the love and support let them know that people care about them help them get the help they need like no one's alone and having someone there definitely makes a big difference like that's something that's extremely important and if some apologist is just saying you're just being dramatic it's not that bad it is that bad i knew many missionaries who were faithful and struggling with mental health i knew many missionaries who weren't faithful struggling with mental health it's a huge problem within the mission field everyone i'd say almost every missionary i met at some level had some form of anxiety because even uh there's this missionary the sister who was like full all in believed in the church was super like chatty and bubbly but even like if you could get her talking you'd see that she had like tons of worries about not being good enough and the mission field is a field that sets you up to always think i'm supposed to be being better and i'm not being good enough yep it's so the scrupulosity can really a mission can really stoke religious ocd or scrupulosity yeah yeah um when i was talking to this stake high council source i have about a third of all mormon missionaries returning early now you hear also i heard there and also here on reddit that many of these missionaries that are returning home early have lost their faith but like you they can't they either can't tell their mission president or their companions or anyone else or they do tell them but they don't want the word to get around in the stake or in their families that they lost their faith and so a lot of faith crises are being masked as anxiety or depression can you talk about that at all um one of the things i noticed a funny comparison is once i realized i lost my faith i could start picking out other missionaries who i thought had as well it was like if you've ever read the scarlet letter the main character talks about when she's branded with the a that she starts to notice other people who she believes are like her and were an adulterer and i very much felt the same way as soon as i branded myself as an apostate i started to look around and realize hey this you seem a lot like me i'm not going to directly ask you but i'm starting to have a feeling that there's some other things things that you say and patterns you follow that remind me of me and so there's a lot of missionaries i remember interacting with and meeting that i'm like yeah i don't think you're all in you're not you're halfway there and being able to kind of start to notice that it's more prevalent but it's very much a hush-hush topic it's not talked about at all and sometimes it doesn't have to do once you're sent home for it yeah sometimes it doesn't have to do with obedience right because there could be a very disobedient missionary who really believes the church is true oh yeah i um one of my favorite missionaries was like that he was he as disability as can be he went to the movies he would do other stuff and what he should be doing throughout the week but i'd say he was one of the most christ-like ones i knew because he loved actually serving people and not doing it to try to teach them he was there just to actually help them and he genuinely cared about and loved the church he was one of the most genuine believers i met and he was extremely disobedient like obedience is not a factor within as much as the church wants to paint it that way it's not a factor about whether or not you believe yeah yeah this may this was i was gonna ask about this this may be a rare personality type or scenario but i'm imagining there are mormon kids growing up who read the ces letter in high school who lose their faith but they're just playing along to avoid disappointing mom and dad or they're told they'll get a car or when they get off their mission or they'll pay for college some or they want to be able to date a mormon girl and they don't want to be rejected so they can you know so so i can imagine and i know this exists kids raised mormon that go on missions as full non-believers but just play the role and they don't even they're people have different people are along a spectrum in terms of conscientiousness or guilt and there are kids that are in teens who are like oh i can lie if it's if it's an unjust commandment or rule or if an unjust system i'll lie all day long and not even feel guilty about it yeah so i can imagine there are in every mormon mission some missionaries that are just lying the whole time that don't feel tormented about it like you did and who are just playing along to to wait off their time until they get home and get the girl and get the car and don't disappoint the parents and and they just lie all the way yeah again i i don't know for sure but there's another missionary who i think that was kind of the boat he was in because he uh was a self-proclaimed disobedient full-on missionary uh he broke as many rules as possible almost some of which i'm shocked he even got away with but um i don't they gamify it in other words they don't get all kind of it's like if you're within the the group of disobedient missionaries you find your way into that it's kind of like it becomes like a flex like oh yeah you you did this i unplugged tiwi and went on a trip to seattle washington outside of our mission area you did that i went in a plane like stuff like that is that a gps tracker oh do you guys not know what tiwi is i have no idea so tiwi is a fun little box that you can find any drive around in salt lake you can find a missionary vehicle by seeing if there's a weird little box in the bottom left or bottom right and it monitors back on the back under the bumper in the front like it's on the front window on the inside okay it's like above the dash and it monitors your speed and location at all times and reports back there are also ways around that that they can't get rid of because there are ways to unplug it and then you can go wherever you want and missionaries have done that before i knew missionaries in the tacoma mission could drove and not drove up to seattle and i know some who went all the way down to portland for a party it becomes it's very much like a game like how much can i get away with without getting caught it becomes like a thrill adrenaline knew about this yeah i mean on my mission we didn't have cars but it was it was common for for missionaries to go out of the mission and my mission president was something that he he would go cr he didn't care too much about movies and stuff but he would go crazy if he found out missionaries would go out of the mission limits yeah they happen often it's a good way to get sent home for a lot of missions like submission presidents if that's what you do you're you're gone just like that yeah wow it's called tiwi tea ti wi tiwi yeah yeah i served pre-kiwi yep for sure it sucks because you can't go you can only go five miles above the speed limit and so like it's so painful sometimes because wait there's a beep or like turtle yell check your speed and it reports back to the mission office and if you get too many they'll take away your card to be able to activate and drive it sucks because you'll be in situations where it's like i need to be going faster than this like if you're on the highway it's like you need to go the speed of traffic and everyone's going 70 and you're stuck going 60 just chugging along it's like this is ridiculous or if you need to speed up to avoid someone trying to hit you or if you need to break heavily to yeah just stuff like it's a weird it's weird it's all about control i mean the the the driving thing i kind of understand yeah no no there's something about safety but there definitely is a safety factor for i think that's good because there's some missionaries who are absolute idiot drivers and they need tiwi for the life of them otherwise they would have been in five car accidents yeah or like back over people yeah no no for sure like even like that you have to back as a missionary and like i kind of get that because you know there's some people who just really don't know how to back up and i'm glad they have a backer backing them up because if not i think they would hit someone so really quickly i've i've mentioned this before in other episodes but it's kind of weird to think about the disobedient missionaries on your mission when you're our super righteous faithful missionary you look on them as like the dumb disobedient unrighteous ones yeah i know they're doing that and wasting the lord's time how dare they right yeah is lower is lesser than now looking back for sure some of them saw through it at a young age knew it wasn't true and were just forced to play along and they were actually the smart ones a hundred percent and at the end once i decided i once i realized i didn't believe i obviously became one of those just to be a missionaries i was like look if joseph smith can get away with breaking his rules i'm gonna break the mission rules why does it matter this isn't true anyways but um what rules did you break i watched a couple movies uh oh yeah well he had a the drive for sure no i never did i never the google drive uh oh the google drive yeah no i had access i got access to that again i watched all rick and morty on my mission i cannot imagine watching ricky morty on your mission they say f-bombs no it's weird but it was like one thing i realized like my mindset was like i started to realize i was feeling happier and healthier doing these normal person things and i started to realize the missionaries who are in a better mental health state are the disobedient ones because they're not taking this too seriously they're not taking themselves too seriously they're not concerned about exact obedience 24 7. so they're they're in a healthier mindset because that's true they're just doing normal people things that's true that's mind-blowing yeah all right so so you um so you're trying to decide so tell us about italy if you want yeah so i stopped believing i was in next transfer and then eventually i get the call like hey you're going to italy i was like cool let's go because you know italy it's italy how can you not be excited for that yeah yeah so no matter what you're going to be a little pumped but um yeah i i got an airplane packed up and went i had a pretty cool companion my first interaction made me pretty upset because it was with a the ap there who very much immediately said like what you've learned in your last like this this is not his exact wording but the basic message was like what you've learned in your last mission the way you did it was all wrong you have to do it the way we do it here which was i found out later was the opposite of what the mission president even wanted he's saying no we need to learn from these missionaries who just got here because they have a better unders like they have valuable things that we can learn from as well but i had a pretty distasteful mis uh experience with the the ap but then after that i mean i went to uh trieste uh it's like all the way out in the corner uh uh at on italy it's like past venice to the east more and just kind of a nice small town really beautiful there uh so i can imagine saying and this is just in my mind i actually could never have done this but like oh man free vacation in italy for a year no that was just like chill out and bear my testimony about you know heavenly father loves you and jesus be kind to people not emphasize all the truth claims i didn't believe and just like work as little as possible whatever companions i could convince work as little as possible and just enjoy as much of a awesome sweet country as i could that was the plan what happened um i had a friend reach out to me uh well actually i reached out to him and started talking to him eventually i told him like i knew before i left even that he was kind of losing faith in the church and so i asked him about he's like yeah i don't believe i told him all right i don't either surprise surprise and i started talking about it and he said something that was really impactful to me it was it came off as harsh at the time but it was kind of like the kick in the butt i needed is like dude how can you like live with yourself knowing that you're lying to all these people how can you how can you do that and that was when like the i guess the morality of it for me really set in of i wasn't comfortable doing that and i started to realize how uncomfortable it made me in lessons and eventually got to the point where i was like okay coming home needs to be considered as a genuine option and i started considering it and eventually i was like okay this is what i need to do i made a draft for my parents um of what i was going to say and then on a p day i sent it were you telling them that you lost your faith yeah i was i was honest i was like look i i don't have much of a faith anymore my mental health is not in a good place i am going to tell my mission president that i want to go home is it an email uh no we were allowed to use facebook messenger to message ourselves messenger okay yeah and at that point i was messaging friends as well which you weren't supposed to do but i was like again did your did your companion care no italy was like way more chill rule-wise like a lot of people would message friends throughout the week even though you're not supposed to and yeah stuff like that which again i think is good to do because like you need those social interactions with people that you're close with yeah but um yeah i messaged them and anxiously waited for a response yeah how long did you have to wait only like five minutes like i just got off the phone i was debating telling her or not while i was calling and i couldn't get myself to do it and say it and then i was like okay maybe i won't and it just kind of hit me like no this is this is what i need to do like this is what's going to be healthiest and best for me so i just sense it as a text instead and waited for a response watch the little three dots pop up on messenger which are like oh i shouldn't have watched those keep popping up and disappearing knowing that she was typing and editing and retyping it just took it felt like eternity before i got a response and her basic um like what she wanted me to do was like give it one last chance kind of thing because we had bednar coming to the mission on that upcoming saturday and she's like just try to make it out till then really pray and study about it again and fully commit yourself and then see if you think it's true and i was like because he could say the magic thing yeah exactly and i was like you know what maybe he can like i'm not willing to throw away any possibility so i will i i stopped doing any apostate apostate things and i started studying more my scriptures again and not zelf on the shelf videos on youtube [Laughter] yeah i was your guy i liked trying to listen to your guys's videos but they were just long and hard to sneak and listens to so the shelf was good like this one exactly my bad everyone um was good because it was very much more quick and consumable information it was like 40 minutes which was like 30 40 minutes which was well i had time for i had time to sneak that in while like i wanted so badly at the time i was on my mission to listen to the robert rittner uh um uh episodes but i was like i don't have time there's no way there's no way i can sneak this in yeah i'll just wait till i'm home to do this yeah but it was one like the first episode she was home anyways um i committed again i stopped watching zelf on the shelf apostate videos i started only reading from the book of mormon i started studying italian more again even and then i prayed earnestly like again because i had been like very much the only father we thank you for this food we thank thee for the blah blah blah and they just crazy men kind of prayers because i was like yeah i didn't believe so right i did like i had another like okay look if this church is true please let there be something anything at all to help me know that and if it is true i will stay and i'll be the most committed missionary i can be for you i'll be the perfect tool in your hands to convert people and then we went and elder bednar gave a talk did you blow your spiritual socks off no it was the same stuff as always i even got my he did like a i liked how he did it he did very much like uh he he interacted with the audience he let us ask questions and talk to him and he responded did he give his talk about inspired question versus yeah yeah that's what he started with and even oh he did yeah that's what he started with was like uh and even before we went in he gave like these lists of things that he wanted us to read through and he said don't take notes take inspired notes i was like okay that's what i'm gonna do then like that's kind of gaslighty yeah it was like my exact plan though i was like i'm going to take just inspired notes instead of notes on what you say because that's what you're saying to do i'll read through these talks you sent and want us what are inspired notes basically just writing down promptings instead of just what they're saying like don't write what it really is is it's him rebranding writing down good notes and what sticks out to you as something spiritual that's how my perception of it was but then if you if you also know what elder oaks has said in other times to me it's kind of like this message of don't record us when we are in this private meetings and don't you recorded yeah the audio quality is so bad but because you're a missionary recording apostles yeah i think i even like i said something to him he cracked a joke because i was talking about how i take already like a weird way of taking notes he's like oh you have your own form of hieroglyphs like joseph smith or something like that and got a good chuckle i was like [Laughter] this is so funny you if you have any discernment you should know that i'm apostate come on man but i chuckled with it was kind of a funny joke and i sat back down i was like okay that's that he didn't spiritually sniff you out nope not at all i tried to give him chances too as well like i was like i'm gonna make this a fair game if you have the gift of discernment i'm setting you up for this okay like i'm giving you a easy easy soft pitch come on make a home run and nothing like i mean not surprisingly but yeah um so that that was kind of like i was like okay that's that and on the way home it took a while i took a bit of the train ride but eventually i told my companion like hey i'm planning to go home man um he was super chill about it too he was like do you want to talk about why i was like no it's just personal stuff i don't really know where i'm at with my beliefs and i don't really believe in the church though and so right now for me i think what's best is to go home he's like okay yeah he's like yeah if that's what's best for you then that's like what you need to do he was super super cool and supportive about that which i really appreciate he's i was lucky enough to have all amazing companions i'd say uh all of them were are people that i still try to reach out to and talk to because they're awesome but um did he not ask you what your concerns he asked what they were and uh i said i'm not really wanting to talk about them he said okay that's okay like he wasn't pushy about it at all once i said i wasn't interested in talking about it it was like that was that for the conversation and wow that was nice of you not really wanting to share um no because i was like i even said i was like look i don't want to push it on you if these are things that would be difficult for you and it was like something i want to work through myself and that's still my mindset now because i have friends on missions who know i've gone home i'm like if they ask me i'm going to be honest but i'm not going to by any means try to force any of this down their throat or try to like slyly tell them about it because i do more harm than good if it's not something they're interested in there's no point in trying to do it because it's just gonna cause tension in our friendship and relationship and it's not gonna they're just gonna take it in a bad way so if it's something they want it needs to be their choice i think they deserve to know the truth about it but they have to choose it i don't think it's my place or my right at all to like force send it to them yeah that's classy um i will say it speaks volumes it really needs to be called out and noted that this man is called to be your leader on the mission he's your mission president and you had a couple and you never felt like you could be open and honest with him about your situation and that's a real problem because for both i knew it would either be chastisement or i just sent home and after at first like at the time in like washington i loved the leader there he was like a really kind loving man but it was very much like i knew the reaction would happen i'd probably get decisions sent home and i was just like i want the hassle of that like you said be open about that because these are your they're total our our mission nurse in italy was the assistant to the mission pres though it was the assist was the mission president's wife and she what made me obsessive saying that jen upsets me still she had no background in nursing your medicine and so like there's a missionary who got injured one time and she was like nope don't you can't go to a doctor like you guys just gotta say focus on working and eventually he just did anyways and she got mad and then his dad called and she tried to get mad at him and he simmered her down the mission president was more on the side of the dad he he was a lot more i think rational and chill in that aspect but just having that's something that's upset me now to looking back at stuff is like having leaders in positions and dealing with stuff they're not qualified to deal with like bishops talking to kids about sexual stuff uh and being their their counselor about stuff like this or having someone as your mission nurse who has no expertise within that field that's not who should be in charge of that you should have someone who is a professional and has studied that you know you need an expert in that feels for that kind of stuff like yeah just kind of makes sense yeah well and they're the ones that decide if you can go to the doctor or not that's just disgusting gracie i [ __ ] miss that word a lot but it's just not right like if you think you need to go to a doctor you're the person who should choose okay i'm going to a doctor yeah like that's that should very much be uh in your hands kind of thing so you let your parents know they said wait bednar didn't give didn't fix the problem and then you knew and he told you i told my companion ms and my parents i'm like hey i'm lying my mission president now and i started cooking up a response and i got some help on good old reddit okay so by this point you're on the ex-mormon reddit yep ex-mormon reddit i made a post um i labeled myself as the apostate missionary i believe or something like that um and i was like hey i'm about to go home advice on like how to make sure like it's cleared my mission present like that's what i want to do any tips because i was like i can't ask my parents because they're not going to have advice or advices to stay there the only non-member relative i have never went on a mission so i don't i kind of talked to her about some stuff but not much um but they gave me some advice and did ex-women read it give good advice oh yeah it did they gave me a copy of the mission president's handbook and there's a specific section that's like a digital copy that's important to read because you learn their tactics of what they're going to try to do if you try to go home it's also on that other google drive i talked about as well the handbook i found out later but because of that i'm like okay i know what he's going to try to say so i made it clear in my outlet like i outlined the text and wrote it out i was like can you talk about what are the the tactics that mission presidents are supposed to use i should have read through that before i came here so i knew them very exact but i remember one of them is like having you talk to the mission president's wife instead and her giving you counsel talking to him about your issues and him giving you counsel uh getting an easier kind of like assignment kind of thing like you can become an office or like a tech elder or another of an office elder i was already a tech elder uh but having a more laid back assignment where this under a section that it said um missionaries who questioned the church or missionaries who wanted missionaries this is missionaries who just wanted to go home and okay okay and then like some of the ones were like the talking to them about their issues was specific to them having questions okay wait so there's a guide for mission presidents on how to handle missionaries on how to handle missionaries that want to go home or lose their faith i want to see this i've never seen it i'll pull it up after but it's very we'll include this in the show notes jen yeah it's a very much at every turn there's no such thing as letting them easily go home it's a very much try to fight them at every corner kind of thing which my mission president didn't do which i was extremely thankful for but i also think it was probably because of my because you were prepared kind of very um bold and brazen approach to it i was very blunt and straightforward but um you could get an easier assignment you could even be told to take like a not like a week off but like basically like take it easy don't worry as much like just kind of chill around more and enjoy the culture more don't worry about teaching as much try to stay in your proselytizing clothes as much as you can but don't be afraid to relax like wait that's what your mission that's what the mission and the mission present handbook one of the rules but one of the suggestions suggestions for is to let the missionary chill out yeah and not be so stressed yeah you know like have actually like a healthy work-life balance maybe but i mean that's almost compassionate because yeah no i can't be devastating to go home early yeah so to have them encourage your missionary to kind of chill out and not yeah not leave but just kind of try and relax and enjoy things and that was one that's actually i like that it's probably pretty new right yeah it's pretty i think it's pretty new it's also specifically also in context like missionaries who are struggling with some mental health stuff and we'll go home because it's basically saying like yeah let them take ease which i think is good because the mission is is definitely its own form of hell of high pressure high demands high high expectations just everything cranked up to the max and so being able to have that i think is something i should utilize more but in my outline i was basically like look i plan to go home because i have questions about the church and because i am struggling with my mental health because of it i am not interested in trying to stay any longer to sort it out i'm not interested in having a final interview i'm not interested in talking to the your wife about my issues i'm not interested in becoming having an easier assignment for a bit so he knew that you had read no yeah and he did i was like you were armed to the team he was like have you read any like he's like have you talked to any anti-mormons i was like i'm not going to worry like that plus it was like i read it from your own document i was like no i was i told like yeah i read it in the missionary and you're in like the mission president's handbook it's like how did you get that i was like oh it's from other missionaries which was partially true i got one copy of it from other missionaries but i knew saying anti-mormon probably at that point i was very much in the mindset like i'm getting home whatever the quickest route is i'm gonna do because i need to get out of here so i was like if you say jump i'll say how high long as it means i get to leave this place so i was like wow i was very straightforward i'm like i want to go home i want the quickest plane out of here you can and it was actually really quick i was shocked because i've heard of so many horses where they they hold hostage their passport and they try to put out the plane as far as possible i got a plane for that week which from what i know is i think that's record time they want you out of there yeah yeah but they've i made it very clear i wanted out um even during when he he gave me a phone call and wanted to talk about he's like are you willing to talk about your concerns i was like no not at all wow i was like are you willing to meet because i mentioned mental health he's like are you willing to meet with a mission therapist and talk to them before i go i was like they've been there i was like but i was like ben i'm like no plus i kind of saw that as okay this is just a tactic to get me the same i'm like nope but i plan to do therapy once i'm home and he offered me lds services i'm like no i think i'll find my own therapist and as he started asking questions it very much felt like he was trying to lead me into saying my reasons more so are mental health than doubts and i i'm getting the benefit of the doubt and saying that he did that because that was the quickest way to get me home i'm guessing if i would have not said mental health at all i'm probably i bet there's probably a lot more hoops he would have had to jump through yeah and so i i'm getting the bit he was a really kind man and he he's a smart dude he used to be a lawyer so i think he knew that i think he knew that the quickest way for me out getting out which is what i wanted was to take more of a mental health approach which was true it was just still kind of leaving out more of the doubt portion even though that was yeah there but i i give him the benefit that i think my guess is he did that just a bill to help me leave quicker because i've heard of so many horror stories where they hold hostage to the passport some were like yeah if they try to do that just buy your own plane ticket you're an adult but yeah i've thought about i i've talked about this early uh another in another episode where yeah it's kind of it's it's it's a it's a long it can be a long process because it's not the mission president he's not the one that decides or makes the final decision whether a missionary goes home or not he has to go through the area presidency and area presidency has to go through seoul lake it's a very political process they have to talk to your stake president back home and they kind of like all have to be on agreement to let you go back home yeah i was like i gotta speed around that process it was pretty awesome and i did that i chose like the worst time to try to i mean it worked out so i did it during the week of transfers is when i it was the same day i left was when they got new missionaries coming in you were prepared man i was is is the reddit post that you made or post still up it is so we'll we'll have jen include links to that yeah so that people can go back and read all the stuff there's one of the i don't remember who it was i think she's like consider me your apostate grandma and she was just like the super kind lady who was like hey i love you stay happy and i was like that's what i needed yeah shout out to x mormon reddit that really comes shout out ex-mormon reddit wholesome people great advice yeah that's awesome that's great well cool so you're so you your mr person got you out of there yeah and i told him i told him like uh on the phone calls like i'm gonna start packing i was very clear that i was just ready to go so i started packing already and then like i think the same day or the next day's like yeah i got you a plane ticket for wednesday you'll come you'll leave to the mission office on tuesday on the fretcherosa which is like the fastest train in italy it's super fun to go on um and that's what you're where you're posting to the mormon stories podcast yes on the way back i uh i factory reset my i saved everything to the cloud uh like all my pictures and stuff and i factor reset my phone because i'm like i don't have any for moss anymore and so on the way back i'm connected to wi-fi so i just pop onto youtube i was gonna i think i was gonna finally watch a mormon stories full video and i see that there's a live stream going on and it happens to be really topical to what i was about to go through which was how do you talk to and like tell your uh family family about you wanting to leave the church i was like hey this oh that was me and margie yeah that was when you guys did that video and it was um yeah i remember that i joined and started listening and i commented on the video and then i didn't even finish watching i didn't get to the part where you actually responded to my comment because my companion started talking to someone else i was like okay i should like at least pretend to be involved to make this less awkward and i got a message from you i was in like a weird paranoid mindset where i was i didn't know how you knew me yeah or that i was going home so my because i didn't know anyone had seen that comment on the video so my mindset was this is a member trying to out me i was so paranoid i thought that's what was going on until i was like wait this name sounds familiar and i clicked onto your profile and then saw somewhere on it like associated with mormon stories and that's when i actually responded to you or even i was like oh wait colby chill out and i started talking and yeah said that you guys wanted me here uh i saw the clip where uh the comment you actually responded to it and i was like oh wow that was really like it was just like really sweet just seeing someone like excited and actually wanting to hear my story because i was at its time in a space where i was like it didn't feel like anyone would want to hear about that especially my family because it's like you just kind of don't want to know because it's it'll kind of hurt some you know no matter what like i get their perspective where like hearing my story definitely i mean like would be painful for them and so hearing that someone was actually like wanted to hear my side and not just this not just characterize me as this or that was really cool that's awesome and how did the release worked out um i got released mostly to humor my parents um honorably released honorably released yeah i was shocked it was an honorable release um on the plane ride home though it was great i watched mortal kombat in the matrix uh i as soon as i was in the airport past like the terminal i went to a bathroom i had my like pajamas and normal clothes with i changed them to them because i was like i'm not wearing a suit and you too what about the garments uh i think that was like the only underwear i had so i had the ball yeah i think i might have the top on still because i don't want to be distracted i can't remember but i was like i'm like i'm going home i'm being comfortable i put on sweats because i love sweats they're super awesome and i chilled i was like what movies do i want to watch i was like the matrix is on here i've never watched the matrix and that was like a cool movie and helped put even like some stuff that was going through into perspective yeah it's kind of like a fake crisis metaphor right no yeah it's so cool looking at media and content now because there's so many things i know from like oh like i never would have seen it that way before now i see it as like a narrative on my like i don't know if i was going up i see it like a narrative on my own faith crisis and like the things i went through it was super cool but then i get back i change back into my clothes put the tag back on walk out get honorably released my mission my stake president tries to ask about my concerns i said no i think i'll figure them out on my own and then i went home and i've been just figuring stuff out since there's so much still that i'm figuring out i still don't know how to talk about tons of stuff like my doubts with my family or like we're still figuring some of that dynamic out just the dynamic with my parents because i mean a lot changes when you leave the religion they they brought you up in and one that they very much believe and cling on to we we used to try to talk about it and every time we tried to talk about stuff that ended in an argument so we both we all kind of agreed like look none of us are in the position to talk about this it's healthier for us to not do this right now and we've gone to the point where we can kind of talk about some things which is great and like it's just been like interesting figuring that dynamic out and it's been hard with some stuff because like it hurts because i feel like they no longer see me as intelligent uh i guess because like there's just comments like oh well you don't really know how to check what a good source is and stuff like that or oh well you just gave up your faith and it's like hey i gave up my faith but it's because of things in the way and for you a good source is anything that agrees with you anything that disagrees with you as a bad source and just like somebody's been having critical thinking skills yeah i was just having to brush that stuff off but it's still hard because it hurts like knowing that that's kind of how my family sees me some and like feeling like some of that respect that used to be there was lost but it's just a method it's just a process of figuring it out like i don't know what the correct way is i don't know what the path is but i'm here for the journey and i'm gonna try to do what i can do to keep having a healthy relationship with my amazing wonderful loving parents so um somebody hira on youtube writes omg the irony quote you don't know how to check a good source oh that's what i think but i've gotten good at bite i'm i've i've learned to be good at biting my tongue because i've learned like i brought up even like one time yeah me and my dad were going about it going at it a little bit and brought up like the book of abraham and i was like yeah like it doesn't match what joe smith says like that's not true because we don't have any copies of the papyri and or anything i'm like at that point i was like okay there's no point in having a conversation yeah because you clearly don't even know what the gospel topic essays are and what they say there and so it's like it's just gonna it's gonna escalate like i clearly wasn't handling it well in a good healthy emotional way and so it wasn't a good idea to talk about stuff like that it's just it's just learning to be okay with that and learning to be okay with maybe they talk about it later maybe it's never as long as we can still have some mutual respect for each other and something else boundaries healthy boundaries yeah something i've realized with my parents is something that i i found very interesting and i don't know how how to deal with it and i i don't even know if it's something i have to deal with but some when they when we talk about the church because sometimes i feel like the only way to talk about the church with them is like in their own terms and i totally respect that but they talk to me like if i was still believing yeah before i had the time where my mom was like i said something she's like see you still believe a bit i was like let me stop you there no i don't i just know what that mindset is yeah like don't try to hold off hope of that like i'm not gonna fall i don't want to lead you on in that you know was kind of my mindset with it it's like i just know how to talk about it in that way yeah and i i i heard about this uh concept brent metcalfe mentioned that when he was talking to um richard buschmann and he met with him and he met him at an event really and then richard bushman was talking to him about joseph they were just talking about joseph smith and just you know different things about book of mormon history city or translation and brent says that richard buschmann would talk to him like if brent was still believing like and and it was and i i just felt very uh i just related a lot to that because that's how my parents talk to me when we talk about the church like they talk to me like if i was still believing even though they know i'm in a same-sex marriage definitely yeah exactly but i don't know it's just an interesting dynamic you're basically ex-mormon draco malfoy [Laughter] [Music] so when you think about your biggest fears about coming home early and how it's actually been it sounds like it hasn't been as the it hasn't met the worst fears no because my brain goes very worst case scenario like apocalypse mode and it very much wasn't there's still like some things that are hard i still like i'm still figuring out the relationship and the dynamic with my parents still i've lost contact with a friend who's on their mission because they don't want anything to do with me right now i hope they want to talk later in the future but if not like i know that's their choice and that's okay i have a friend who i've hung out with a couple times she's still active and believes and every time we meet up she seems to forget that i don't believe anymore and has to double ask and reconfirm oh so you really aren't going to church anymore that's okay it's like they i don't know they'll ask about why and i don't like talking about it because i don't want to feel like i'm forcing it on them yeah i'm like if you genuinely wanted to know not just to try to resolve my concerns i would talk about it but your goal of talking about is just to try to resolve my concerns and it's more likely to just lead into an argument so i don't want anything to do with that and i don't even really interact with my ward anymore there's a couple members who i do um because they're they're they're cool people i liked them before i left i still like them now and so we've just kind of had like a bit of a friendship and talking and it's been good um worst fears definitely didn't come true at all and i think the the heavens and everything in the universe for that yeah for sure it was good well i'm glad it wasn't worst case scenario oh yeah and i'm i'm sure that for those who feel like they need to leave their missions early maybe it'll give them hope that they shouldn't necessarily believe their worst case scenario based fear yeah don't like hope for the best like some things might go wrong yeah and it's going to be hard i'm not going to lie and tell you it's going to be easy like that's what i want to talk about my mission experience because i feel like all the rms who come home always tell you about how great and wonderful it is and i just want to try to give a more honest approach to what it really is but um yeah just do what's best for you like maybe my way isn't your way there's i started saying uh psychology more and there's this carl uh carl young quote i love where he's like there is no what is it yeah read it read it i love you my path is not your path therefore i cannot teach you the way is within us but not in gods nor in teachings nor in laws within us is the way the truth and the life they're i'm not here to tell you what the best choice is maybe for you staying on your mission is what's right for you to do maybe coming home is what's right i don't know that because i'm not you you need to set your own path your own course uh frank sinatra you gotta do it your way and be proud of it and go forth boldly do what's best for you it's awesome so many comments i mean first of all we're four and a half hours in i didn't think about four and a half hours i haven't even gotten up from this chair uh neither of you no um gerardo you got up yeah but uh yeah i have so many comments saying you're just brilliant they can't believe you're freaking 19 20 20 20 yeah yeah but so inspiring i always tread lightly when a missionary reaches out to me because i don't want to blow up their lives you know part of me part of me has like a bucket list of interviewing a mormon missionary while he's on he or she or on their mission i think that would be really awesome to get like a companionship to be able to come on and just have like a cool conversation about that i think that'd make an amazing episode and even if they've lost their faith but i just know that it could blow up their lives and i don't want to do that yeah no it'd be i'd put them at risk because even if you do it like anonymously and hide their identities they could say something that lets it get tracked down and then they'd get in trouble and there's no point in dragging them into that especially with all the apps the church is installing on their on their devices yeah for sure we get that we get gerardo and i both get by students a lot that want to do interviews and we're just like we don't want to risk wait till you're out of the system to do this where it's where it's safe for you to do so yeah yeah so we we i didn't want to rush even even after you got home honestly i didn't want to rush your interview it was you because i didn't want to you know you live in a home i didn't want to compromise your safety either yeah sometimes it's literal safety and sometimes it's just like psychological safety that's one of the things i appreciate a lot you said like it was if you feel safe and ready to do that and at the time i did and i was like looking back i'm glad it got delayed because my emotions now are way different than they were even just a couple months ago when i got home because i've i'm still going through very much a healing process i at that time was much more in the anger part of the grieving process and this would have been a way different interview i probably would have been a lot more upset and riled up about a lot of things and had than i would now i think it's interesting i've like thought about how would i answer things about this interview but then and versus now and i think this one would have been the better one for sure because i think i'm in a healthier spot to talk about this stuff and i have a much more hopeful and healing mindset than i did then so i'm glad it got delayed i think that's for the that was for the best it gave me the time i needed to work on myself some see gerardo he's glad that i delayed it yeah yeah it wasn't just your fault that was my fault too i i got caught up with work stuff and crazy work schedules so wrote it was like john do you ever answer your texts ever it's okay you do to me most of the time 90 of the time man if i only answered 90 of your text what about the rest of the world yeah anyway um well i'm glad well and and it's still a courageous thing that you're doing because you freaking live at home yeah no it was awkward your parents were still i told them that i was going to go and that was like an awkward conversation have they heard of mama's stories yeah but probably in i didn't say what podcast it was i just said a podcast because i knew their perception of it was that they're just angry people ranting and they they can leave the church but they can't leave it alone kind of mindset but it was like i definitely had like a bit of stress going in just because of some stuff that they said but like i understand their place i'm not going to judge them for it and i understand their mindset so i like i don't know i was just kind of saying i'd like it made me way more nervous like the couple the week leading up to this i was not nervous until then i started getting like way anxious about this and then once i got in here all that went away and it's yeah no i felt this yeah the spirit touched me that was a gen being nice when you walked in what was it i think it was just walking in and realizing i was in an atmosphere where i could just be honest um i only have one friend who i've really talked two friends who i've talked honestly about the stuff with and also knowing that like i'm gonna i feel like i'm in a safe place these are really awesome people who whose stories i love even um gerardo that's how you say right yours was one of the first podcasts i listened to and that was so moving for me i think just knowing going in with that knowing that no matter what phase i was at with my process knowing that this was a safe place to talk about it that there would be acceptance for it knowing that you know some people are at different stages of healing and that no matter what that part of that story needs to get shared and just knowing that my side of the story is appreciated uh is super cool what about our fallen countenances though my fallen countenance is oh it's it's so uh dark and worrisome i can feel upon myself even maybe that or it's just that i need some more water it's hard for a potty break or a potty it's hard to confuse those things it's easy to confuse those things with the spirit because the spirit's very vague either john's evil or i need to go to the bathroom [Laughter] we'll figure it out later all right oh goodness well cole the one of my one of my favorite listeners followers she goes by this blind chick talks on youtube she says this has been an absolutely incredible interview ah and i think i've had like hundreds of people have written that in the comments that this is just a a game-changing interview what do you think about that i don't know if i'd call it that i'm just i'm just here to tell my story um and my mindset going in was like if that's gonna help people then that's what matters i just know that there's so many episodes that have helped me and like tons of the ones i've watched have been on your channel have been missionary-based ones so knowing that i can add to that to our audience that could be closer to my age i that's the reason i came here i debated coming for a while and kind of just decided like i felt like i had something that could be contributed and i felt the obligation to do so because i think there's a lot of people who are struggling to navigate and i knew that without people like zelf on the shelf without mormon stories without jeremy reynolds that i would be having such a harder time processing and going through this stuff and so if i can be part of what helps with that i will gladly do so every day of the week well there are 40 and 50 year old multi-millionaires that live along the wasatch front who are afraid to do what you just did in all their privilege yeah they're for you know grown grown-ass humans i'll say who are afraid to do what you did as a 20-year-old kid so that's some courage in my book that's some stones what's another way to say that that's some courage yeah yeah i think yeah challenge fear do what you're scared to do timothy larson writes team colby oh i don't know how to react to that um let's say team team telling the truth team team team truth team putting it out there yeah we it's not us versus them so we just got to figure out the ways that we can all work together and like i'm going through that personal journey with my parents right now and yeah i can't wait for the point where the church and its ex-mormon community can find a way to healthily interact and have a dialogue i as hard as some of like the episodes with believing members are to watch like some of the recent ones i still appreciate it because it's the other side um not the other side that's a horrible way of putting it the people on the believing part going to come on here i think is really important because i think all sides of the story need to be shared so i challenge any believing members to come on here as well i challenge anyone to come on here if you've got a story you think needs to be told good news we got rod meldrum coming back next week so your your wish is being granted by the way one of my favorite comments of the whole show colby reddish who did a really important interview about sexual abuse and mormonism oh my gosh yeah i was watching that he stole my name i was so mad about it no he just commented um this is a good colby yeah let's go colby gang he says he says this man is a good colby so that's that's a good colby as well i liked listening to this story and that was something that disturbed me as the way the church covers that kind of stuff up like it's it's the same kind of thing they would condemn about other organizations but they're doing the exact same thing yeah come on like the we've got to get rid of the double standard it does no one any good yeah well gerardo you set this up you you get at least a final word anything else you want to add no probably just the last question um how do you find meaning and purpose after listing your faith are you still still doing it um i think i love the the quote it's on here a lot is do more good um i like trying to find a way to do more good and to be a positive impact on the world that's why what i'm going into for my career choice is what i'm doing it's why i'm here that's why i can i i think one thing that like annoyed me was the idea that once you leave the church if you leave christianity or religion in general they don't have morals but that was one of my favorite things was redefining my morals and realizing that morality was for once my thing to decide not to be told what it is and it was a beautiful process for me and i guess that was part of me finding purpose was this is what i think is moral and this is why i think is immoral and so i'm going to act based upon that and do what i can to help those in need so uh you you know you've accomplished something that so many of us i mean even gerardo wasn't how old were you and you i mean gerardo was kind of an early bird but between five 25 i can't even imagine yeah i mean i was so i was 31 before i lost my faith yeah and i was i was 45 when i left or was kicked out so i mean i have my temple recommend for now we'll see how how still for now yeah we'll see what happens after this but um i can't imagine i i feel way luckier about my situation i'm at a much younger age before everything kind of gets set in i can't imagine doing it and getting out at such an older age especially there's just so many other factors that i can't imagine going into and how much more pressure that could have could be and how much harder it would be with some of that stuff like i feel very lucky to have found out early in my life before making tons of like big decisions oriented around this religion like i'm glad that most my next big steps in life get to be free of that instead of choosing it based around that because i imagine it'd be just so much harder to leave later on so yeah so many of our viewers don't figure it out until their 20s or 30s or 40s or 50s or 60s or 70s some 70s you figured it out when you were 20. yeah yeah i it's super lucky so your whole life is ahead of you yeah no that's that's one thing that i love is like i have so much to look forward to and it's i feel like it's much more about what i get to define and i also feel like i'm not living for an afterlife anymore i think i'm living for a very tangible future but i'm also living for myself in the now and i think i i like that a lot more than living for some for an afterlife and always worrying about that because i did since i was like eight years old wonder like crap this is going to be scary on judgment day but being now where it's like hey what am i going to do to be better tomorrow without this idea of having this grand judgment from a higher being just having more power to self-reflect i guess do you know what you want to pursue career-wise or anything or uh the medical field is the goal right now but i've had like maybe be medical doctor medical yeah like a doctor probably like a physician is kind of what i thought of doing i've had ideas for i have no idea how i would do any of it but i've had ideas for like movies and stuff maybe i'll try to pursue some of that are we making movie making just like hand directing because i've i just think it'd be fun to embrace that creative side and be able to do something in that field but right now i'm leaning more towards like the medical field because that's something i feel like it's much more like a a set thing you can have control over there's a lot more risk with going into something and anything in the arts has like a ton of like just like a luck and risk involved well with for me the medical field feels like something much more it's like this is what i put in it's not a whether or not i get the right connections it's about what how well i study and how well i can do so it's kind of plan a with directing and anything in there kind of it's like a hobby plan b we'll see what do you think audience you think colby could could uh is smart enough to become a doctor you guys comment right now and let us let us know what you think is he is he sharp enough to become a doctor or is that is that beyond it brady free mormon's been in the chats by the way i love the interview with radio free mormon so much of that uh i felt super relatable just talking about wanting to learn more and realizing how like bland the church was with that it feels very like stagnant the learning in the church uh that was cool being able to hear about that from someone else it wasn't just me who felt like it was like a you hit like a curve and then you just kind of you plateau so right now look into the camera and deliver a personal message to rfm because he's watching you he's listening ah rfm you're amazing and incredible i loved your interview i loved getting to hear even your insight just about like the different religious stories and being able to see someone that i kind of i related to in that way of wanting to pursue more knowledge and feeling like the church was a dead end when it came to that and also like yeah i don't know i felt like i related to where you said like it wasn't like a all at once thing with you for the church for i felt kind of the same where i was like it felt like a very gradual process that culminated in an event okay pop quiz are you ready let's do it five questions are you ready let's go okay who's smarter me or rfm oh what just pick stream of i won't be mad who's smarter i don't know rfm all right the answer is okay second who's more handsome me or rfm oh that one's tough that one's really tough that's that's a toy cost okay okay the next one coin toss the one that the one that will be most offensive to rfm if you don't answer correctly who's most funny me or rfm rfm yeah that's okay that's okay that's good okay who's made a bigger difference in your rfm [Laughter] i'd say equal i'm not gonna i think that depends like on an honest answer i think it depends on the person each person has what would influence them more i have to say rfm has answered rfm [Laughter] we love rfm rfm's goal in life is for all things to be about rfm and that's great and we respect that we we validate that i mean that's legitimate right rfm rfm what do you want to say at rfm look at the camera what do you want to say to rfm i don't know i talk to him on the phone sometimes so i don't know um does he call you at 1a like like at 6am like he does me not me but i mean i love rfm listen to everything he puts out so yeah all right rfm you've successfully uh made this entire episode about you how does it feel all right anyway well colby you're amazing you're an inspiration everyone loves you you're the new celebrity and uh we are we we hope you'll stay in touch yeah and we hope that when you are rich and famous you'll come back on warmer stories and let us all know i'd love to come back at any time to be able to just reflect more on how i guess things have changed for me i think that'd be fun to do all right all right well thanks so much for coming on we wish you all the best and gerardo it's great you know we always miss having cara but it's always great to have you also co-host and man thanks for setting this up this this wouldn't have happened without you because it would have gotten drowned and lost in the ten thousand yeah uh offers i've made for people that come home with stories that i lose track of can we get some applause like in the chat for her yeah shout outs for gerardo thank you for making this happen yeah no problem john thank you and jen thanks for uh being back there doing some uh some moderation late on friday show notes and time codes thanks jen and uh thanks to kara and brooklyn and jennifer and everyone who makes the open stories fun now nemo yeah and simon sotherton yeah and margie and all the all the cool people that are john larson and we've got john larson coming this week oh i'm excited john larson's coming and we've got sandra tanner coming back and rodney meldrum it's going to be a week of fireworks i'm excited and we just announced that we like shattered we had like eight or nine million downloads and views in 2020 and we just announced like 17 million downloads and views not counting freaking tick tock yeah so we grew by like 96 downloads and views between 2020 and 2021 and and 2022 has been better in 2021 so far so like things are blowing up yeah it's good and gerardo you're an important part of that and cara you've been an important part of that and jen you're becoming an important part of that and uh brooklyn you've been important and jennifer and things are good in mormon stories land you wouldn't think a couple of weeks ago i'd be saying that but look at that we're still standing gerardo how does it feel i feel great [Laughter] all right thanks again colby you're awesome and listeners and viewers we couldn't do without you thanks to everyone who made awesome chats especially rfm in the comments uh we love our our live stream viewers thank you uh thanks to everyone who shares uh mormon stories uh thanks to everyone who donates and makes it possible um we we rely on your contributions to keep this going so if you want to continue to see amazing programming and join the list of about two thousand either two or three thousand donors we had last year we would love you to become a supporter and i can just promise any additional donations above what we already get it's just going to go to hiring more cool people like gerardo and kara and simon and and paying sandra and uh and john larson and margie and just we're just going to expand the cool things we do and nemo with your additional support so if you just want to take it from 17 million downloads and views to 20 and 25 and 30 million and take us from like 55 000 or 60 000 um youtube followers to 100. by the way our tick tock is banned again so my personal tick tock has been banned um wow and mormon stories podcast tick tock channel that had 120 000 followers that has been making a huge difference and is literally one of the main reasons for our growth in 2021 it has been suspended again by people um who report us and we're heartbroken about that so what we're doing is i'm asking kara for now to try and get it unsuspended and to amp up our efforts on um instagram reels and on facebook shorts and on youtube shorts so we've we've actually gotten into the youtube shorts game and we've been able to have a few youtube shorts one the one that's had over a million views another one that's had three or four hundred thousand so we're ramping up our youtube in response to the attacks on tick tock we're ramping up our youtube shorts game yeah that's awesome yeah the one hauled hand will stop the work from progressing persecutions may raise armies of fame i'm rusty but the truth of mormon stories i'll go forth boldly nobly and independent until it has penetrated every continent i don't know swept every nation i was close [Laughter] until the great gerardo shall say the work is finished amen amen all right thanks everyone thanks for your support become a monthly donor at mormon stories gmail.com we need your support and we'll keep doing amazing things and uh be kind to each other and uh share this high and wide if you know someone who's considering a mission if you know someone who's on a mission and you um think you can help them share this episode of colby with them and i have a goal i want to know why more mormon stories episodes aren't on these contraband google drives so that's my goal whoever's in charge of this contraband google drive get mormon stories episodes on the google drive anyone who knows a missionary out there whether they're struggling with their faith or not just be amazing to them because they're going through probably i'm going to be honest by the hardest two years some of the hardest stuff in their life um just just yeah reach out to them and be supportive no matter what it is they need if they just need you to be supportive in them believing be supportive in that if they need someone to talk to about their doubts be that just be there for them because they need it and feed the missionaries in your area you don't have to take a lesson from them give them some food and uh if uh if there's a mormon missionary actively serving mormon missionary out there who needs someone to talk to how could they get is there a way they can get a hold of you that's not that's not uh compromising or doxing you or compromising your communication channels i guess we'll i'll make a new account for that and i'll put it in the uh we can get that in the show notes i'll make a new account just for that we'll call it the apostate missionaries probably it's going to be something like that someone's going to steal it immediately jokes on you that's bluff i have a different idea that was a decoy all right colby you're awesome thanks so much yeah no problem all right thanks ferento yeah thanks jen all right thanks everybody we'll see you guys all again soon on another episode of mormon series podcast bye rfm take care everybody thanks

Channel: Mormon Stories Podcast

Views: 206,986

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Id: tlwvj7mEzII

Length: 284min 52sec (17092 seconds)

Published: Sat Mar 12 2022