BYU Black Menace Leaves Mormon Church Over Racism - Sebastian Stewart-Johnson | Ep. 1891

hello everyone and welcome to another edition of Mor Stories podcast I am one of your hosts for today John delin it's April 17th 2024 uh I have as a co-host in studio today returning to Mormon story Studios the one the only Nate bird hey Nate hey John happy to be here good to have you Nate is one of the co-hosts for black menaces podcast is it the black menaces or black menaces a little bit of both black podcast all right and um and uh the the special guest for today the focus for today's interview um is someone I've wanted to have on Mormon stories podcast for a long time relatively uh his name is Sebastian Stewart Johnson hey Sebastian hey how are you thanks for joining us yeah happy to be here um I I joked with them earlier that uh black menace's uh you know three black BYU students stirring up all sorts of trouble I joked with uh Sebastian and Nate that I consider them the the black menaces Trinity and we were going to argue about who the father son and who the Holy Ghost was but uh yes we've had we've had Nate on as one of the founding members of Black menaces we had Rachel Weaver on another founder and then Sebastian rounds it out but we had to wait until when Sebastian till that degree came in a mail honestly because what happens if you come on Mormon stories potentially before you get your diploma in hand probably been done with the school and I wanted to be done but you know I'd rather just get the degree too so so so yeah so one of the founding members of Black menaces And for those of you who don't know what that is Sebastian tell everyone what the black menaces were and are yeah yeah the black mineses it started out as a way for us black students to vent our annoyances irritations you know pains with BYU and it slowly and well quickly honestly developed into being such something much larger where we sought to empower marginalized communities at by you and across the country and it's only grown and grown more um until what it is now which is focused on empowering marginalized communities in every way possible love it yeah it's good yeah and um you know they've gotten international news uh national news what was the biggest National media Outlet you guys probably connected with People magazine maybe news week future news week Business Insider yeah yeah now honestly too now this is like a big social media news that's true and basically all y'all kind of broke into public Consciousness by making these short Tik Tok videos where you interview mostly white boou students and ask them questions right yeah yeah we just go around and we ask them a basic sometimes slightly more complicated question like who are you going to vote for or are you a feminist or should people be feminists um um do you support like marriage equality and um the answers are baffling sometimes uh most times which is why they get a lot of attention yeah yeah some of the millions of views right yeah yeah biggest like 20 million views I think yeah that's a lot you have a a YouTube channel right we'll plug that at the beginning and the end right black mines Please Subscribe like comment be a fan and is it mostly YouTube or is it audio and YouTube or um what do you mean like do you release it as a Audio Only podcast and as a YouTube channel yeah so there is a visual and audio podcast that we release and then there's also like basic YouTube videos that we do too okay yeah all right yeah yeah and there'll be lots of themes for today uh clearly your Mormon story yep there'll probably be some Faith Journey kind of them is right probably talk about race and Mormonism in America yeah any other big themes to let people know what we're going to talk about um sensibility not equality um I don't know I don't not sure honestly we'll wing it but uh Sebastian's brilliant and so is Nate so um it's going to be great Nate anything you want to add nothing yet I'm just here for the ride all right okay so uh uh I often I often like to ask people to start by kind of sharing their intentions yeah yeah sometimes people like you're doing an interview to tear down the church or cuz you hate Mormons or whatever sure so what's that got that one before yeah so why did you want to do tell your story on Mormon stories yeah I I think I don't know I think telling stories are powerful I've had a lot of people reach out to me individually to like tell me the impact they had on their own life and their own life story um just by me talking about what I go through what I've gone through what my thoughts are and so I feel like telling stories are powerful and and I just hope to tell my story one for you know my own release of My Own Story um because I think everybody's entitled to telling their own story but um also you know so other people can hear and maybe like feel a connection feel like that they're not alone I know a lot of times in my own story I felt a lot alone in a lot of times and so I think you know having somebody who relates to you having somebody that they that you can hear say the exact same thing that they went through I think is powerful yeah brilliant yeah brilliant all right so uh where does your Mormon story begin Sebastian are you a of pioneer ancestry I'm dying to know Pioneer ancestry Brigham Young is actually no just kidding um yeah my both of my grandmas converted to the church actually so my dad's mom she a third generation on both sides yeah that's amazing it's actually yeah crazy um so my dad's mom converted when my dad was like 78 years old and my mom's mom where where was that oh yes that was see now we're talking about geography this is where we get lost a little um I think that was in Cleveland okay that's where my dad's from originally okay oh don't quote me on that that's where my don't quote me actually don't quote me on the geography of my dad okay I'm not great I never remember for some reason all right maybe maybe somewhere in the midwest Cleveland Tennessee one of the two okay okay one of the two um um converted into Mormonism so they came and then eventually a few years later they moved to Texas my mom's mom my grandma she converted actually while attending Dallas Baptist University um when she was in college because she met my grandfather who was Mormon and sought to like convert my grandma and my grandma was like you can bring the missionaries here and I'll make them Baptist and uh um she's still Mormon to the day so nice yeah and so yeah that's kind of where I became Mormon was born into it um by both of my parents did you say where they met oh my parents where did they meet they met in high school they met in high school in church or from church which which high school oh oh where what city Texas sorry uh Dallas like Arington so parents met in Dallas yeah so right so both of my grandparents um in my parents all lived and grew up in Texas after they converted and stuff um my mom's family they're deeply enrooted in inra to Texas and then my dad's family is from more like is like the South and then you know the you know a great migration stuff they went more North and came back down to Texas got it okay so uh I'm guessing like you know I I I'm from Texas right I grew up in Dallas and Houston nice uh and I was dying to go to Salt Lake to find someone I could date because I couldn't find a lot of people as a white Mormon in Texas that I wanted to date so the fact that your parents found each other in Texas right I mean it could mean a couple things it could just mean they were super lucky or it was just like oh two people yeah like I don't know do do you have any idea of like do they consider that like they were super lucky or I mean they got divorced like 23 years ago oh okay so it didn't last I don't know if they consider a Lu so that marriage didn't last long wasn't the success story that you would hope for yeah they was not it was not fruitful to say the least they um um they met at like I don't know in the same stake I guess and um had a kid in high school well got pregant in high school and so so very Mormon right um very proud no it's okay it doesn't matter um had had my oldest brother right after high school and then had me six years later um and then got divorced well separated when I was like 3 months old divorc when I was like one oh wow yeah okay yeah yeah but Mormon but Mormon okay so you're you're with a single mom is that right in Dallas right as a one-year-old yeah okay with an older with four other siblings four other siblings yeah okay so how how was that like growing up with a single and is a Mormon kid of color in Dallas it was it was cool it was all right um I did as a child um I grew up so where I grew up in Arlington is like the seventh most diverse City in the nation um and yeah we lived in government housing for like the first eight years of my life which I loved honestly I loved where we lived um super fun um my apartment complex was on one half was black and on the other half was like Middle Eastern and I was friends with like we lived in the middle eastern half for a few years and then went to the black side and I loved those apartments they were it was a time we played football every day played basketball all the time um we were very poor as well um and the church paid for a lot of our stuff which I'm grateful for you know like grateful to eat and survive um yeah you know we they helped pay for rent often times they paid I mean we went to get food from the bishop storehouse often times um which is you know a big blessing for me um because without it we would have probably been on the street so I do Grant Mormonism some things like without you know some of those efforts we would probably have been homeless at different times yeah and I can relate to that as well growing up the the church paid my rent probably most of my life as well well as well as you know paid for a lot of the food that we ate yeah and so yeah definitely provided us with with comfort and um you know resources that we wouldn't have had otherwise in my family too so I can relate to that for sure yeah yeah it's and it's a cool like aspect of Mormonism I always joke that I'll go back if I need my rent paid as a joke of course um but yeah so we were we weren't the we weren't Super Rich we were pretty poor and um I didn't get to know my dad until more later in life or like six seven that's when I started knowing him more seeing him more often there was a lot of um tension between my parents so they weren't you know the best co-parents growing up always and so I didn't see my dad a ton um and yeah I started seeing him about 6 seven um let me think what else how was Mormon growing up and then you know what I always think is interesting is when I was seven I um had zero desire to get baptized which is always strange um and I remember I told like the bishop I told my mom I didn't want to get baptized and they were like no just get baptized and I was like all right whatever and I got baptized okay that's where my day start so your your childhood Soul was not down necessarily no something I don't know what it was something about like you know I was also the type of kid who liked to go against like what other people did like if everybody was getting baptized I wasn't going to get baptized everybody wanted to go do this I wasn't want to do it like like type thing my my dad and all of his family loved Lakers so I hated the Lakers like it was just like weird stuff like that was kind of like my personality and I think it was a mixture of intuition and also like personality of wanting to not do whatever what everybody else was doing um but something about baptism I was just not wasn't for it wasn't for it what was wrong with the Mavericks a lot back then no honestly that's the thing is like everybody loved the Mavericks so I didn't like the Mavericks but your dad didn't your dad was Lakers fan my dad sort of my granny was a big Lakers fan my dad was a mixed Lakers fan okay my uncle was a big Lakers fan it was like my family was all big Cowboys fans though across the board okay that we will never give up okay that one we won't give up okay so um how Mormon well I was just going to say like Christianity and Mormonism at its best best is like doing things like helping pay People's rent and helping them survive financially and I would add giving people community and friendships and and it sounds like that was a really valuable part of your family's upbringing that would did did that make you really grateful for the church in some ways um I was I feel like I was pretty like Lucky in some regards um growing up like um I lived in like a pretty obviously like I said diverse area so the people in my church were also more more dver diverse than other areas and like the like the white people in my church were some of them were cooler um like the people that I were my age like everybody that was my age that I grew up with besides like one person I'm still like relatively friends with um and they like like black menes like in my youth group there was me my brother so two black people two Polynesian people and like I don't know some other white people and some like some Asian people like it was a diverse group of people um and like they some of them have left the church other like other people in that youth group like to the two white brothers that I mentioned they like like black menaces so I feel like I was lucky to be surrounded by who I was surrounded by like they weren't like those like they weren't weird like these like like what you would imagine as a weird Mormon kid like they were like normal people a little weird sometimes but like athletic they played Sports um and so everybody was pretty like where we grew up felt normal in that regard like in our youth group like the older people like we didn't talk to them cuz they were old and like weird you know but like the people that are were our age were normal seemingly like they weren't my best friends I got didn't hang out with them like a ton outside of school but they were like good people like I enjoyed my time when I was with them and like I was like lucky and I felt I still feel grateful for like the things like financially help the financial help that we received from the church cuz like that's something that you know it was either get help from the church or go to get a payday loan for my mom right and like we did both but like you only can get so many payday loans before you syn the whole ship and so there's like stuff like that I'm grateful like I remember on Christmas um I think it was Christmas Eve like they brought a ton of presents and food to our door and stuff like that like Bo members mhm so they they bought our Christmas presents a lot which I'm grateful for right like we didn't get a lot of presents in general and so for them to like help financially for Christmas is like a child's like you know dream and I knew where it was coming from but like that's something I was still you know very grateful for I'm curious uh Julia wanted me to ask if your dad remained active Mormon after the divorce or see that's a good question I forgot I was going to dive into that actually so my dad he left the church for a little while he left the church for like six seven years maybe K don't quote me on the exact time but he left the church for a good amount of time and um he later like joined again and you know got acquainted once more with the church okay yeah and how religious oh I was going to say just to make this final point like I really loved growing up Mormon outside of Utah because I often like to say religion and Mormonism at its best is the salt to the meal but it's not the meal I think the sometimes I feel like the closer you get to Utah like people make religion the meal not the salt to the meal and if you grow up in the what by the way I don't know if you know that like anything outside of Utah is called the mission field have you heard that term before I haven't that's crazy so you and I and Nate we all grew up in the mission field meaning not Utah right and sometimes I think Mormonism Finds Its best balance in that's fair in sort of like non- Utah us Wards right I think I think there's some like validity to it like I feel like something that me and my sister my girlfriend my brother we talk about sometimes is that like Utah is like pure Mormonism like in its most concentrated form which makes sense because they do make it the mill like um Utah Mormonism is so concent concentrated so pure so it's like when you come to Utah and experience Mormonism you feel it in its most foolest form whereas like in Texas it can't be the whole thing like you're first off you have to focus on all the other Christian sexs saying Mormonism is of the devil like that's like number one thing you have to was that a thing were you all considered a cult in Arlington we were considered everything horrible basically like nobody like nobody liked Mormons in Texas like Baptist people can't stand Mormon people which like at this point in my life I understand a little bit more um you know but yeah it was not necessarily the most favorable religion amongst Christianity in Texas so what was that like for you to feel like your religion that meant so much to you and your family was View poorly by everyone around you H it's so funny honestly I didn't care okay so like I um wasn't like very Mormon like I didn't really care about religion and church until I was like 16 years old and so in that time period before then like yeah I was like Mormon but like I did what I wanted I you know acted however I wanted like Mormonism was not a defining factor to me besides saying like oh I go to the Mormon Church um and then once I became more like actively Mormon I definitely became more like apologetic more defensive but it still wasn't that crucial to me because it's like I was who I was and it was so interesting because everybody just knew like Sebastian's Mormon and like like that's cool you know like I was still like the same person that everybody knew um it didn't affect how people like it didn't affect how people liked you and I do want to ask I don't know if this is the right time to ask but um I wanted to ask uh what was it that made you more like actively Mormon so I don't know if this is the right time in the story I want to get there eventually yeah yeah no yeah I can answer um so this is what I used to call my like Joseph Smith moment actually this is what I would talk about in my mission lessons on my mission um yeah I was 16 years old and um it was the the first girl I ever dated that was Mormon I only dated two in my life the first one I ever dated was um was I was 16 and she was Mormon and um this is like let me think hold on am I I'm Miss messing up my story okay I did date her after this experience though yes let me reverse so I was 16 it was the start of my junior year of high school and um I my brother was on his mission and I wrote him a letter one time you know this is like handwritten letter times I guess like you definitely know that John um when I was on my mission I didn't write a single hand letter um but I wrote him a letter basically just asking him a ton of questions cuz to me I thought it was truly Preposterous just insane to leave the world for two years to go do a mission like I thought it was like the like craziest thing on the in the world like there was Zero way that I was going to do it at this point in my life um and I just knew I was like I'm not leaving like my plan was play basketball in college I was like I'm not doing this whole missionary thing for two years like not playing basketball for two years is is not good for you um and not for your career certainly at all and um so I like wrote him a letter he wrote me one back and I can't remember if I read it immediately or not but I just like stored it in like my baptism scriptures because I I didn't open them they sit in the same spot and I wasn't going to lose them cuz like it was a gift from my mom and um I just like put it in there you know and um and I can't remember you know like you know memory is is faint but years later closer to the end of my brother's Mission I opened my Book of Mormon and it just happened to be on like what is it the last book of Moroni the prey scripture one it was like um the beginning of the the chapter so I flipped the page I was like isn't that one scripture I read it and I was like like and I like you know felt like peace I was like oh cool and I was like I think this means like the book of woman is true and um at that point one thing about me as well is like I'm pretty heavy on discipline and like when I want to do something I'm very dedicated to doing it it's just like just part of my personality like I'm when I when I'm for something I'm very for it when I'm not I'm not for it at all and um that's how I have been I was with basketball obviously with Mormonism just like anything I did in my life anyway so I was like let me change my whole life I was like I need to change my actions I need to start reading the scriptures and so I just went like fully into it and I was reading my scriptures every day um was around what age again I was 16 okay yeah 16 fall like September October 2016 and um I was like oh let me get my life together so I was like I should probably date a Mormon girl too right like pretty that makes sense D didn't Mor girl we broke up obviously um anyways right so for the next time period I was focused completely on Mormonism to the point where I was like oh then I also like quit basketball cuz I was like um basically the premise was like if Mormonism is my goal and I want to go my mission basketball will be like a distractor basically and um I quit basketball which was crazy to everybody I played with um one I remember I had to tell my team cuz my coach I texted my coach and he was like you got to tell the team tomorrow I was like whatever told my team they were all like what are you talking about bro cuz I was like God is telling me to do something else I want to preface I don't necessarily think that quitting basketball was the wrong decision were you were you like Varsity level were you good I was good yeah my like our team was good I was good um my one of my teammates now was in the NBA uh from high school oh wow yeah so like I was like I was pretty good I like felt like I was going to get a lot better too um but I was good yeah and um um yeah let me think sorry I lost my train of thought so people are saying oh yeah talking to your team so I was talking to my team and I was like God is telling me to do something else and um I remember very I remember so clearly it's very funny the dude that's now in the NBA was like what do you mean God told you and I don't know something about something about that question was is like very like it has just stuck in my memory the last however many years like something about like what do you mean God told you and I feel like I did I didn't have like a great answer then don't have a great one now but um it was a very interesting time but I will I will like I said I'll preface that like I don't necessarily think quitting basketball was the wrong decision because that's when I got into like debate in student council fell of like politics became an activist and stuff so like positive things came from quitting basketball but I'll also say I don't think quitting basketball was inherently necessary either you know what I mean um like it led to fruitful things but I think all those things could have been achieved without doing something what what is as drastic as a youth in that and it was just like what the church had conditioned you to think was the Holy Ghost you got this feeling that you should quit and you were taught that your feelings can be God communicating to you and so you quit because you you had that thought or feeling yep yeah yeah that's so it's like religiously conditioned yeah yeah wasn't the church was saying quit basketball per se yeah nobody like yeah nobody had told me like oh you should quit basketball per se but it was more just like the overall environment what you get taught and then application of it okay okay before uh just because for so many Mormon's kind of Standards we'll call them standards coming to play prior to your Al of the younger conversion in around 16 were you like living the standards not living the standards I want to say I was living the standards greatly I live some of them um but I didn't live a lot of or some of them as well I was a throw up on the day basically like how much standards I was going to live I feel like I was like I was like a middle of the road standard living person like well basically a normal high school kid I was normal yeah like maybe a little more leaning to like breaking the standards but like I wasn't doing anything crazy in my opinion yeah like crazy but not like crazy but you had this uh conversion moment and he equit basketball were you were you doing Seminary you know four years of Seminary impossible no one thing about me I've hated mornings my whole life I started skipping school in second grade like it's something about like the am the moon still you know being around the area of the sky that gets me to not wake up and um yeah I bar I absent failed my last four semesters of high school so there's no way that I was going to go to Seminary my best attendance record however was 35% in semester so take it or leave it that was my best I attended one time my senior year of high school okay um so it was just it just couldn't it wasn't for me so you missed that indoctrination that's a pretty significant Mormon Milestone you say luckily yeah yeah I saved a lot of years asleep yeah yeah okay was your home pretty religious in terms of like scripture study and or was your mom just trying to survive you know yeah or both both well it was my home was weird so like we were religious and not at the same time like my mom was super busy my mom worked two jobs like 60 hours a week um and when she was home she slept a lot so like but even with that like she I think she did as much as she could with the time that she had and the energy she had um like she worked herself to having like a brain tumor like she was going crazy which obviously kept us out of you know homelessness which is great grateful for her um I love my mom but um yeah we weren't the most we weren't the most religious home though I think we were low middle of the pack in my ward probably um yeah like nothing crazy we you know looking back we me and my siblings some about this other day that we were kind of inactive in a way like I always thought we were we didn't go to church as much with my mom because you know every other weekend we were at my dad's house and my dad he he made it go to church every week but like we could get out of going to church with my mom like sometimes my mom is tired you know she works every day or she' work on Sunday sometimes or I would just be like I'm so tired I can't go to church this week you know just like anything um so at different times we're actually like technically inactive um because church was like a whole thing and church was far too our church was like 20ish 25 minutes away um and so yeah so like we were actually a little inactive we didn't do scripture study or anything crazy together I have one memory of like one or two family home evenings so we weren't like the model Mormon family at all family prayer we did family prayer though every night okay sometimes we like we would do family prayer read one scripture actually every night oh yeah so like take it or leave it did you were you like into personal prayers and journaling and that kind of stuff no okay I didn't journal or nothing okay okay um I have to ask like once you started becoming active yeah W dances steak dances that kind of thing was there a dance scene in your Mormon youth sort of yeah I mean I think I would go even like before I became like you know model Mormon I still went to like the church events cuz like most like sometimes they're fun or like you know like I was still am pretty close to some of them but like I was very close me and my brother were very close with our leaders like our priesthood leaders and so they would always tell us to go to events and so we'd go and like our Wednesday like our you know normal youth activities were fun like we would play like sports and we would just do like fun things um to like teenagers like we' play this anyways we just do fun activities and um the dances I'd go to cuz I was for the women that the girls that would be there like I I was trying to find and meet um and um yeah I would go just for like The Vibes um nothing crazy I wouldn't actually know get to know anybody for real but you know me and my brother we would go show out a little dance a little and go home you talked about surrounding Evangelical Christians in Arlington Dallas whatever yeah being sort of anti- Mormon yeah did anyone ever uh I guess I'm curious were your friends in high school mostly white mostly black mostly just mixed and did any anyone come at you saying why would a black person be Mormon them knowing that the Mormon church had a stigma of of being a racist Church historically that's a good question yeah most of my friends were black um I had like yeah most of my friends were black my whole life uh most of my friends were actually just my basketball teammates most of the time um and then or like you know like other people football players and stuff and then it grew once I quit basketball my friends opened up slightly to like my debate in student council like so my debate team my student council my debate team was like there's a lot of Middle Eastern people um a few black people including myself like three probably five black people and then like a few white people actually white people I think were the smallest racial group in my debate team of people that are actually like good and competed um cuz like my high school was like 50% black and then like 30% white I think and then like some other stuff um yes so my friends were mostly black though and it's so funny cuz up to my memory that we only talked one time about Mormonism being racist and it was my white debate coach and my white debate teammate and they were like why are you part of a religion that supports white supremacy and I was like they don't I was like I would know if it was a racist church I'm a member of it that was like my whole that's all I can say I knew nothing like about Mormon history I knew nothing about racism in the Mormon church I just remember when they said that I was like that's crazy and I asked like I think I asked somebody I looked something up I don't know I did something though to you know obviously Echo chamber valid day and I was like Mormonism is not racist they're just crazy I was like also who are you to tell me what's racist that's also what you know I mean like white people came to me to tell me my church is racist as a black person and I was like first off I'm not listening to you about racism and you're bro both conservative like I have this is not even a conversation that we could have um so yeah so only one time okay um and uh had you ever been taught like at church about the priesthood ban and the church's history you know Brigham Young's racist comments did you get any of that through graduating high school you know I never can remember when I learned about the church's racist history I I don't remember when I learned I just remember it being in my brain like it's really hard to explain like it never was a surprise to me so I I think I knew it for a while I just don't know when I ever I learned it um and maybe my dad talked about maybe my siblings talked about it I I have zero idea truly I feel like some of the first times I heard about it cuz my sister was the first person to leave the church when she was in college and I was in high school and I remember we would talk about her grievances like regarding like the church and queerness and like regarding the church and racism and sexism and we would talk about stuff but like and maybe maybe she was the first person to tell me about it but I always you know when we talked to obviously I took it most times in like uh apologetic way of like you know defending the church like no the church is great the church is all right um but I never remember learning it specifically I just remember knowing it cuz I remember when I had to confront it like all my mission and stuff it was something I knew it like nothing came to as a surprise to me so I have no idea when I learned it honestly and it's weird I don't know but you're you're certainly not remembering a time where you're in seminary or you're you're in Sunday school and somebody says 19 78 was a year where the church gave the priesthood to black people and allowed them to go to the temple but before then black you know that sort of thing there's no way you never that never AB do you mean there's no way what do you mean they would never say that in my church gr like they would never tell basic church history no no there's no like the people I grew up with like they're good people um great people some of them um but there's just no way there must be some kind of unspoken rule within the church where like you just don't discuss race in the priesthood when black people are around because it seems like that doesn't get discussed very often unless you're in you know a setting where it's just people who don't care uh but I feel like a lot of times those things don't get discussed or if they do get discussed they get brushed over cuz like from my experience it's kind of the same thing we're like I remember learning about it but like it was talked about so casually and like so quickly like oh also you know well there was this time where you know God didn't want black people to have the priesthood but you know that's all that's all over now it's good we're F you just move forward yeah exactly so oh okay cool well I have the priesthood now so why worry about it and it didn't sink in until my mission and so um I guess I kind of understand that that feeling too of just like you know it's kind of there but you don't really understand the gravity of it or the seriousness of what that means until you actually like basically until you become an adult and you can actually process your own thoughts and make choices for yourself you know so I think that was uh at least for me a significant thing was on my mission actually being able to process what it meant or what the priest bment yeah I agree I mean I in my brain my Mormon brain and I'll say in my white brain like on the one hand yeah I can get not wanting to have that conversation in front of black people you know avoid it just pretend it ever happened and God forbid the black person to ask a question you got to answer it it's crazy and then also I can imagine not even with the intent to hide or deceive but just like hey look this is this is working for Sebastian this is working for Nate yeah why would we introduce complexity the church is true and why would we want to bring up hard stuff it's working for them it's through so like why would we talk about it yeah right yeah I was you know and I I'm thinking right now as we've been talking I've been trying to think where did I hear about this stuff first and I think honestly it might have been for my oldest two brothers both very active members still and I feel like if I would have heard about it I would have asked them about it and both like did missions everything both are sealed to have kids and um I feel like I would have addressed them about this topic and I feel like they would have gave me reasoning that like spoke to my mind at that time I'm gonna imagine well and if it's okay I'm just musing here um cu the other part of my white Mormon brain is like how has any person of color ever join this church let alone be a member of it right and like how could it be that um yall didn't hear about it yeah and then how could it be that that it wasn't like this Earth shattering moment for you like I even remember learning about being misled about Malcolm X like I was taught in high school Malcolm X was a bad guy and I remember being super mad at the church or or at my high school in my textbook when I found out Malcolm X was a good guy yeah I felt lied and betrayed so if I'm feeling that about Malcolm X how could you not have what [ __ ] Church did what to who when I'm out of here you know that's a very coming from a place of privilege and whatever else I bring right so I don't know if yall have that actually was a question yeah do you have an explanation for any of that or is it just this is just the way it is like well or is it even worth discussing do you want to go first you go first I'm collect to my thoughts I think I think the first thing is to look at the church not as a religion but as a business and when you look at it from that that point of view then I think everything makes sense true um one thing that we talked about that deal right now with a certain mobile carrier I won't say the name you know for for liability purposes but a certain mobile carrier is like oh if you come and uh if you come and switch to our phone plan uh we'll give you a free iPad we'll give you a free iPhone and we'll give you a free Apple watch it's a crazy deal that's a wild deal right I was like let me go look at this so I look at the deal and then there's all these you know in the small print there's all these different activation fees and hidden fees and this and that we own your children for four generations exactly right you know we we reserve the right to send you pictures is a barbecue whenever we want you know just like random stuff um and so you know you you think about that and it's like okay well this is really appealing on the surface but then when you dig down deep into and you kind of start reading the five print then you start finding things that are maybe a little bit less appealing um and every business does that right you know they want you to they want your business they want your support they want your uh your patronage right um and so if you look at the church as a business they want the same thing like they want that support they want that patronage and they want that dedication to the religion because that's how it survives um but you know if you start to look at the fine print once you get underneath that once you get past the free iPhone the free tablet and the free iPad um then you start to see some of those things that are maybe a little bit less appealing but if you never do that digging and you just sign for the phone plan and you just you know sign up for direct deposit then they're just kind of taking that money from you every month who sorry about that that's a good that's a really good metaphor so that would be the way that I describe it but I don't know sebas I don't read find print in my my phone play yeah most people don't they just you know they just add their bank account or they just accept the cookies you know what is cookie right no that's a good question though we should dive into it no but um yeah I would say like for Mormonism and of all its troubling history I think what a Mormonism does well is it separates it all into different like topics like if you look at like for instance they racism it's like oh it was a time and we quote unquote like people say like we messed up or like they separate into this one topic where it's like exclusive from other things or like when you think like I feel like Mormonism does well at giving good statements like our prophets make mistakes but you should listen to every single thing they say like those are like very contradictory but they don't put them together you know what I mean and I think once you put to put everything together that's what like what is happening here but if I like truly if you hold all of these things separate it makes sense it's like our prophets make mistakes that's what people will say also we should listen to our prophets because there are you know connection to God but like it's a little they they they they struggle to work together or like you know we made a few mistakes in the past with racism but look at us now we're equal it's like yeah that's not just that's not how it works and so I feel like when you separate things it makes it a little easier to digest um I also think Mormonism does very well with the idea that like it ingrains this idea that if the church is true nothing really Else Matters like history doesn't matter if the church is true like if you pray and you believe or receive a Testament of the Book of Mormon they always are like that means Joe Smith is a prophet that means this happened that means this this this this this it all mean makes sense that's not true like first off that is a logical fallacy in of itself and second like this random book doesn't validate if even if it was true wouldn't validate all of the problematic stuff afterwards like that's like saying the Crusades were Justified because the Bible's true you know what I mean like like that's not how the indigenous genocide was fair because God wrote the Bible like that's not how it works and so I think it's just when you separate these statements or when you believe the Perfection of the church nothing else actually matters which leads to you know everything else yeah Mormons are also really good and not probably just humans and Christians not just Mormons but like we're also really good at compartmentalization yeah you know yeah I did a lot of that yeah yeah like Julia mentioned you know the church will never lead you astray the the prophets like it's a good contrast like yeah the prophets are perfect but the church will never lead you astray right so you know you don't really realize those things kind of conflict with each other yeah and the church teaches compartmentalization they just rebranded it as you know as it put your doubts on the Shelf yeah that's literally what you doubt your fath or we had grank up we had quotes in the year my mom would like have quiles ear and put in a little in a little frame and I remember I think it was like 2015 2016 doubt two DS before you doubt your faith I I was like that's a bar o used to drop bangers on a regular basis I was like that is a bar doubt your doubts don't doubt your face what I like you did you one and those are called thought stopping I'm you probably studied cult techniques but thought stopping techniques these little blurbs that make you just turn off your rational you know I'm my 1984 right how do you doubt a doubt I let me know I'm already doubting so I doubt a doubt that is crazy that's interesting so yeah that's just anyway it's crazy technique I'm going work on that my anxiety you doubt your anxiety okay turn it off don't know what say in the book of musical turn it off like a light switch you know I've never heard that bamore musical is good oh I've never seen oh I haven't watched that check out the book more musical if you can I need to next time it comes I'll I'll buy you tickets next time you get yeah it's on the recorder all right impossible to break now it's a deal okay um yeah really quickly have y'all heard of Darren Smith Darren Smith I don't think I I know the so it would be cool at some point for yall to to I can help you get in touch with Darren Smith back in like 2004 4 2005 about he was like a black BYU grad student and ultimately a BYU professor who was talking about race and Mormonism back in mid 2000s in a in a very critical way he ended up writing a book on like NCW athletes in the way that they're and maybe even BYU students in the way that like it's not fair what but you know they recruit these students of color and then make them live the honor code and and then punish them unfairly when you know all that stuff he's great when I asked him early on about racism in the church he would make this point you know when I'm like how could any black person be a member he would say if black people could only join you know organizations that weren't racist they wouldn't join any organizations yeah so like you have to just lower your bar that's another that's another justification I've heard for why any black person would ever be Mormon yeah I've heard that too which is fair I think it's valid um I think the there's some differences like um Mormonism isn't just like an organization you join like the Rotary Club Mormonism is something you like give your life to it's a religion like that you put all of your belief and your faith into um it's something that you believe God is directing I don't think God is directing the government like I yeah the government's [ __ ] excuse me the government is messed up but like God isn't the president of the United States right like Mormonism is messed up and apparently God leads it you know what I mean like I don't join organizations thinking God is leading them knowing that they're racist so if I'm going to join God's organization I'm going to hope that it's not racist because it's God's organization to that's so that's my rebuttal that like yes that's true but if you're expecting God to be leading it you shouldn't be expecting to encounter racism the whole time yeah that's kind of a mic drop like it's all it's it's it's a different standard of expectation when the organization claims to be led by God directly right and to be representatives of Jesus it has to be absolutely yeah but at the same time like I'm always I'm always like confused by the fact that the church is paying your rent like the church is probably giving you food from the storehouse yeah and if I'm a parent and I'm looking at either homelessness or a racist church that's paying my rent and giving us food and and treating us I mean it sounds like you're treated well yeah pretty decent yeah like I don't know are I'm going with the racist Church like is that fair or not fair yeah I I think it's a hard decision especially like I think when you're put into a space of like what is going on like this like where it's you know you got food this month I honestly I don't even think you're worried about is this church racist I think you're worried about how am I going to eat tomorrow you know what I mean like like I don't think it was really a thought a conversation worth having like I remember a few years ago when I you know maybe last year when I start you know two years ago it doesn't matter within recent years doing black mines I was talking to my mom and she was like y'all talk so bad about the church what about all the good it did I was like yeah it did do good and also that doesn't matter like that that good doesn't change reality to me you know like it can be great um and so I think like in those spaces though it is like not you don't really consider like racism if it's life or death I don't think you're worried about racism that's like a privileged thought process like in a weird way like if I'm going to die I'm not worried about like whether I'm receiving racism right now like probably but that's life you know like and you just move on because I have to live tomorrow I also will say Mormonism is great at giving you know people stuff also I had a lot of friends that were Christian and received a lot of stuff from their churches too so I don't think we should you know Mormonism is the end all be all to granting you know welfare to people cuz my best friend growing up well one of them was homeless and his church took him out of homeless too or homelessness too and gave them food too you know what I mean so it's like a lot of churches do it Mormonism does on a grander scale cuz they're billionaires you know what I mean got money but well some say they do it less per capita than they should and I would yeah agree but we're not at the point where we're backing on the church sh I do want to come back though oh go ahead sorry I was I have another metaphor if you're okay come on metaphor so with the most everybody's seen The Truman Show if you haven't I don't know to tell you but the spoiler alert right spoiler alert so you know the the premise of the triman show is you're watching this young man um you know from the time he's a little boy it's the time he's an adult he grows up you know he gets a job gets married Goes to School whatever um but then as you're watching the show you seen them he has his great life but then you find out that actually he's trapped inside of an artificial World um where everybody else there is a paid actor and they're broadcasting his life you know to the entire world and this is like the most watched show everywhere you know I've never ever seen anybody watch The Truman Show and be like Oh but he had such a great life why didn't he just want to stay once he found out that there was more to life than what he was experiencing once he found out that there was something different out there he wanted to be a part of that he wanted to experience that he wanted to like have that freedom and so you know it's the same with Mormonism even though um you know it provided us a lot of great things when we were kids you know was Comfort um you know it it prevent you know it gave us the ability to have a roof over our heads it gave us the ability to have food on our table um that was a great thing but then like you know once we're now that we're able to take care of ourselves and once we've realized that there's like more to life than just Mormonism in the ODS Church um it isn't fair if people to expect us to want to stay within that once we've discovered you know that there that there's other things out there that we can explore that we can learn about that we can identify with it's beautiful great metaphor beautiful and that's part of the pickle too because there's there's kind of two different questions one is should I stay in it once I find out it wasn't real or once it was problematic but the second is was it was it good and is it still good for people who are you know not super educated or or you know not great sces or even just the average kid is it a good structure to grow up in in spite of its flaws because it produces sebastians and NES you know what I mean yeah honestly but we don't have to answer that now but you can if you want to if you want to answer I can give you one let's let's save it well go go ahead sure sure sure I was going to say you know I think I think some structurally some things structurally is is beneficial because it you know creates order it creates organization it creates like discipline um I also think it creates a lot of like I think where it lacks it or where it's not as great is where it messes with their mental like I think it does a lot to your mental health and like your emotional health and your like rational health I would say too like you you you receive a lot of harm and pain and then you also look back and look at how much you potentially missed in your life because of Mormonism like there's like my mission was beneficial because I you know learned or whatever but also like that was two years of my life I'll never get back and a lot of trauma I can never remove from myself fully you know what I mean so anyways yeah that's good yeah I would say the same thing too where you know there were a lot of good things that the church did but there was also a lot of pain that it caused you know um being you know n 10 11 years old and thinking you're you're destined for for outer Darkness because because you watched porn or because you looked at a you know a Sports Illustrated or whatever or just feeling the weight of the world on your shoulders like I remember as a missionary wishing um that I would just die as a missionary because you know they told us like oh if you die as a missionary you go right to the Celestial Kingdom and I was like well you know there's no way that I'll ever make it to Celestial Kingdom because I'm not perfect so if I just die as a missionary I'll make it there I'll be with my family you know so when you think about the type of like mentality that that is to have that mentality where you like rather die than live life at at 19 20 years old um you know because you're you're aspiring towards something that that maybe is necessarily achievable in this life which is perfection right so um you know there's a lot of good but there's a lot of negatives too and I think in my case the negatives outweigh the positives after a certain point you know yeah we've had many missionaries on Mormon stories that wanted to die on their missions and you don't think of Mormon missionaries as being people who want to die we've had many yeah it's kind of crazy anyway so um so have your I'm of the younger conversion to 16 yes you get you leave basketball you get really committed to the church did you have to go through what I call the shame parade where you're like confessing sins to the bishop and not taking the sacrament and shamed in front of maybe your parents of the congregation or did you were you able to skip that yeah I I I confess my sins many many times growing up it a weekly it was like you know like or well I lied for a lot of interviews growing up and then once sometimes I'd confess sometimes I wouldn't I luckily never actually had to the when I confessed I had let a lot of time pass like I didn't confess like the next week you know like I confessed like eight months later that's a good strategy and I was you honestly yeah it was cuz my brother well I not to put his business out there but I think he's fine with it it's like one of my brothers couldn't take the sacrament I was like that's crazy like I don't know about that way explain to our never Mormons what that means yeah not taking the sacrament so when you sin basically depending on like your Bishop I or depending on your leader um depends on like it changes I guess like the amount of the different sin you do will change the consequence and one of the consequen is not taking the sacrament and the sacrament is a very public thing in front of every single person that you do and when you don't do it it's very evident and it means like oh my God he's a sinner basically and um I you know when I went to confess um it was a long time later and they're like you're good you can take the sa I was like great you know what I mean um cuz I wasn't going to get sham I wasn't going to get shamed and I was probably going to take the sa even you told me I was probably going to take it anyways um because I was hungry every time you know um did you take two pieces oh I used to eat the bread after the sac too absolutely to be honest and um and Nate when a Mormon 16-year-old Mormon boy doesn't take the sacrament yeah what does everyone in the congregation assume is going on uh some issue with Chastity so they had sex where did something or did something with a girl or or they've watched porn or something like that it's always like a assumption that it's a chastity issue that's a pretty shaming thing for a 16-year-old kid going through puberty or whatever I think luckily also I had a good like I was pretty cool with the Bishops and they liked me and they were I feel like they were pretty like good Bishops maybe yeah um at least in my experience so they never they didn't feel like they ever did stuff too drastically I feel like they were very like graceful um at least for me like I the bishop I had you know when I was finishing up high school was like it was like his sixth seventh year so I think he was like more time and he was also old and he was tired and like I don't think he honestly cared like to be real he was like just go on your mission bro okay so I think whatever was going to be okay so what year did you graduate from high school 2018 2018 I'm a young guy that's wild 2018 wow so that's like I was in the studio by 2018 so you're graduating from high school two years before covid basically yeah yeah yeah okay and you were 17 what 18 when I graduated I graduated like June so pruc in May okay so you stopped doing basketball you got into speech and drama and student government yep and was a mission just you said your older brother had gone were there other siblings and was was a mission just something you were going to do yeah my second oldest brother went first and then a little little while later my oldest brother went and um when I had my like album of the younger conversion I was like oh my gosh I was like I should go on a mission I was like I got to tell people about this um and so from that moment that's when I started preparing before then people like are you going to go to Mission I was like maybe and then in my experience if somebody says maybe it means no um and I was like maybe maybe so who knows no like it was always really like no I just you just can't tell like how do you tell everybody in your church you're not going on a mission just wait and find out and you'll see me not go was more like The Vibes I was going for and um but then I had changed and I became like the like this like people loved me after that especially like I was like that star remember I would go with the missionaries I do everything because people are like oh you're you're this black kid who has like a strong Testament he has conversion story who reads the scriptures and like like I knew what I was talking about more than just like I know it's true i' have always known it's true like I didn't I never you know that wasn't my experience and so um I became super involved because I feel like people you know honestly it was probably like a tactic as someone who's been a missionary and I've been in like the bishop break and stuff like they were definitely targeting me and they did it well yeah so strategy to me I I know I single-handedly carried the entire District my ward because I every time they needed a member pres lesson 15minute notice hey Nate could you come out with this every single day I was to with the missionaries yeah yeah I have a question I don't think I've ever asked before in Mormon stories and it's not really Mormon related how how awakened were you to sort of US History to you know Civil War slavery kind of stuff yeah and the Civil Rights Movement you know they talk a lot I guess in the past five years about like education and education around um civil rights and stuff and what we should and shouldn't teach by the time you're a senior how plugged in are you to Martin Luther King to Malcolm X to Rosa Parks and to all the types of things that really come out in your black menaces interviews with people were you tuned into that totally oblivious to it something in the middle yeah I was um I was pretty T in actually um once I quit basketball at the same time I became more Mormon I actually became like activist in polit like politics polit politically active rather and so like doing debate everything was like you needed history to like argue and we talked a lot like this was during Colin Kaepernick this was during like Donald Trump when I was doing debate and so it was like these like the topic of racism and like xenophobia and everything was so prevalent in like all of our debates and this is like same time as Confederate statues being taken down like so black lives matter when did that really burst onto the public Consciousness 2014 so four years before you gr graduated yeah so like you're a freshman in high school yeah yeah and like somebody from my school that went that graduated my brother was murdered by the police too and so like I like everything was very like visible to me as a child or like growing up and stuff um cuz I remember I remember when he was murdered like there was a video of it and it was like crazy and my whole city was going crazy about it and the cop you know like was like put on like suspended and I don't think he was fired nothing I can't remember honestly but yeah so like it was very like black lives matter was in the heat Colin Kaepernick Confederate statues Donald Trump and we're in Texas that's your high school and my high school was like predominantly black okay and so like it was very things were very active where I was and because of debate I studied history a ton and history was also my favorite subject growing up and so like when my US history class also happened to be everything was aligned my my apus history class was also my junior of high school which is when I became involved in debate and student counsil and I left basketball so everything kind of hit me at the same time um and so yeah I was pretty like active I became I became obviously more knowledgeable as I got older um but yeah and when we think about some of the stereotypical realities that people have C in the United States have to deal with that white people don't like where we're worried about where hoodies or like driving while black and being pulled over for no reason or being followed in a retail store whatever those all those things are was that something that you didn't really have to experience because you grew up in a multicultural area or you did experience or no yeah definitely did um yeah so like there was times where like cops would like hit the craziest of u-turns to pull us over or like when I would like just cuz they'd see you people driving black yeah it was like me and my two brothers and like they would hit like the most insane uturn in pull us over it's like bro like first off you wasted gas getting us um or like one time it was you know one time we were in a gas station me my brother and like a basically a family like friend and um it was like 101 and we were just like at 7-Eleven trying to figure out what we're going to get and we're talking and laughing cuz we're humans and um the dude of the store like kicked us out cuz we were stealing from him like bro we don't want your stuff just like a lot a lot of experiences like that like you know another time we got pulled over as was a car of eight black people and um we were stopped for like an hour because there was eight black people in the car or you know a lot of stuff like that um I will say I feel like one experience that I was grateful for in a weird way like this come back to like some people I'm cool with Mormonism like there's one person I grew up in Mormonism with that was my leader and um we call him me and my brother we call him uncle and um we were at like a youth um camping trip and me and my brother were the only two black people in the car it was me and my brother my uncle who's this white guy in my church and then two white brothers and we went to this gas station me and my we were all four of us right the four kids two white people two black people we were looking around like looking at like the random we're in the country like country or Texas which is obviously don't recommend you if you go there don't recommend that you go there but we're in the Country of Texas looking at every thing like just the store you know like oh they have like little gizmos and gadgets and stuff you know and we're just like looking at stuff picking it up putting it down and we go to the car old white dude comes out follows us hey what were those other two doing you know like basically like those two black kids were stole from my store and my uncle got out and like basically like chastised this dude was like bro they didn't steal from you and you're only like basically was like you're racist and um it was little moments like that like that's one of the reasons I'm grateful for him like he was one of the only Mormon people that was like more conscious like he lacks some things um but more conscious to an extent to defend racism so so yeah it was definitely prevalent but I wanted that little Mormon story in for the Mormon stories that's good yeah that's good okay okay so by the time you're graduating and thinking about a mission yeah you are definitely attuned to civil rights and and that sort of thing in the history of the US and race but not about the history of Mormonism race not fully it was weird like it's like I do it but it's like it didn't to me like I viewed Mormon racist history in the same way I viewed United States racist history and like I knew like I for instance I knew Bruce AR Maki was racist like it was like little things I just knew and I was like whatever it's fine that's why I think my older brothers must have told me about it at some point or my dad or something and like made it made like a defense of some way that I used going into my mission do you remember reading the book of Mormon in high school yeah I read the book of Mormon like three times in high school so the narrative about dark skin being a curse and all that did you think about that and apply it to you at all or I did I read it and doubted my doubts before doubt of my faith I didn't know I was like I have no idea what this means I don't know why it's here and I would ask people about it and they would be like it's not it's not about race it's it's a different time it's this it's that like I don't you know a million things I'm like whatever obviously y'all don't know cuz y' keep telling me different things so I just like waited my timeout until my mission that's when I got more into it okay so were you uh graduating when the mission age had dropped 18 yep okay so it was like do I go on a mission right after graduation yeah so what' you do I went three months after graduation okay yeah so where did you get assigned I went to the Dominican Republic Santiago Mission whoa Dr yeah the Dr wonderful country yeah and did you know Spanish before no okay learned it all and tell me tell me if I'm right would people from the Dr ever assume that you were from the Dr because they're people most times okay yeah once I so you passed as a as a Dominic what a at first like I would they were like oh you must be Dominican they would hear me speak spish like you're definitely not Dominican and then I like worked very crazy hard on my Spanish and my accent and they're like oh you're Dominican and then I just became like Dominican wow yeah you know that's a different that that's a different type of Spanish like you know Puerto Rico and Cuba and Dominican Republic yeah wow so you got so good at Spanish that people thought you were a native yeah yeah yeah luckily I had a native companion that helped my accent a lot too he like he didn't play with my accent at all he every time I was say anything just lightly wrong just repeat it back to me and back to me and we would just go over it drill and yeah so I was gr for having him cuz he like worked with my accent a lot so how was your mission it was medium it was interesting it was not the greatest it was all right uh my mission was it depended on the time period of my mission my mission honestly was probably one of the craziest I have heard about before um yeah I I got to the mission 18 years old and um I mean like a lot of missionaries the first 6 months I was in hell I was depressed and I was anxious and I was hated my life and I was tired like I said I don't wake up in the morning so 6:30 also was very difficult for me and I just was like 6:30 getting me up at 6:30 is probably the most difficult task that you could have me do right now in my life like I hate mornings so 6:30 obviously was also terrible it doesn't help that Dominican Spanish is one of the hardest Spanish is you can learn or like like you know hear and speak and stuff like when I left MTC I was like speaking with Mexicans like that went to my mission too cuz I did my MTC in the Dominican and oh I was going to ask you that cuz BYU like the MTC and Provo is probably like BYU on steroids but you skipped that yeah I went to the Dominican okay there with a lot of other Dominicans some it was like some Dominicans some other like Latin countries a lot of like Utah and Americans and stuff okay so it's kind of like a mixed bag but like I loved the MTC like I had zero complaints about the MTC besides a few things like I almost fought my MTC leader what you say I I had agree something the MTC too I thought the MTC was cushy like it was fun like 6:30 you wake up you know what I mean 10:30 you go to bed like none of the rules like super applied like we would sneak food in and like a lot of stuff like we were just playing around um and it was fun for that reason cuz like it wasn't it didn't feel serious like it was like serious but it's like we're not we're barely missionaries right now that's what it felt to me anyways but I remember after I left MTC like the first night before you go go out into the mission you're in the mission home and there was like some Mexicans and I was like talking them to them like pretty well cuz I like worked really hard in MTC too like I would carry a dictionary I was like that guy was it two months or 3 weeks in six weeks yeah six weeks and I like learned a lot of Spanish and I like worked super hard on it and um I remember when I got to the mission home I was talking to Mexicans pretty well like not perfectly but like you know pretty decent and um then I got to the field and I couldn't understand a sing Le thing somebody said to me and like I was just there like standing like hello you know like I remember the first member I met she said welcome in Spanish and I said yes see you know what I mean so like that gives you a a Vibe of how it was going for me and um my like first area was horrible in the sense that like the person I was my companion had like we weren't teaching anybody like it was just like a whole thing um but like yeah the first six months were were tough and I was miserable and I wanted to go home but I was like you know like power through it you know like try and I would I was trying every single day my best and like I remember I would cry some mornings um like I remember IID just sit there like doing my scripture study doing a prayer and I would be crying because it's like this [ __ ] is terrible and um I would write these little note cards um to put in my pocket right here and there were motivational note cards cuz it's like every day I didn't want to leave the house and so it's like if you don't want to leave the house every single day but you have to leave every day it's like it's I mean that's that's like torture and it and so I would have these little note cards of like you know you can do it or like things like my like my mom sent me notes or my my sister or something sent me notes and uh one time a drunk dude almost stole them and I was like gonna lose my mind anyways he didn't luckily no but yeah so first six months were terrible after about 6 months things kind of rounded out got better I feel like they didn't necessarily get better I think I just got like used to the pain you know what I mean like at that point the mission was strategy and it wasn't like spiritual for me at that point I feel like like I as somebody who is like I like strategy and like optimization of like oh how do I do the best the most efficient you know everything and um that's how it really became is like I figured out a way to teach the lessons in the most in the best way somebody could understand and then receive a testimony of it like the way I would contact people in the street is I would ask them to get baptized like we were like everything I did was for like the most optimal way to get people baptized the fastest possible and the most amount of people and I think it lost some of like the spirituality aspect of it but it's like the best missionaries baptized the most I wanted to be the best like that's part of my perfectionism too is like I'm not here to be average I'm also not here to break the rules so it's like I followed the rules and I baptized like that's the only thing I cared about um because I feel like I would tell myself like even though I know it lacked some spirituality I told myself God would want you to be more efficient because the more people you baptize the the more people bring home like you bring you know home to God and um when I you know grew go like went up in Mission In like like leadership that's what I would tell people like your work is ineffective and like because it's ineffective people aren't you know going to be baptized and it's all really like spiritual manipulation like truly I felt like looking back I manipulated people the same way I was manipulated but like I manipulated other people into faux spiritual experience es that meant the church was true and if the church was true you should be baptized like that was true spiritual manipulation but I feel like that really encapsulates the second six months of my mission like going up to a year but at the same time it was very weird because so at one year I got sent home because I got sick well I'll tell the real story here because we're here for you know opening on this conversation I got something called testicular torsion basically and um it was the worst pain in my life it it means your testicle hits a 360 and it starts like cutting the blood flow TMI for anybody who didn't want to know that but now you know and um luckily It reversed itself stuff and I was fine but I had to get get sent home because they thought I needed surgery prior to that though um I was like the first counsel first counselor in my dis uh what was it called district is it that's not the word right the branch Branch presidency I was like the first oh you were in a branch presidency I was in a branch presidency that's like being in a bishop brick yeah but in a smaller unit smaller unit yeah and um the problem though is like so where I went I was in this super Tiny Town of the Dominican Republic called constanza and um when I got there there was like 20 people 10 people on Sundays and I also played the piano at church too and basically Sayang all the words because they couldn't sing um and um so but when we were working like mean the missionaries we got like the church up to like 80 people and it was like this huge like thing like in my mission was like oh my gosh you changed Coan I was like yeah me and my people we do it good anyways but like doing the first counsel of the branch presidency like dividing half your time doing Mission work and other half like bringing people back to church but having to have like good numbers and like baptize people still it was like it burned me out completely that's a lot of has to wear at 19 what you're basically that's like being a CEO literally the thing is why am I writing Financial plans for people that are 40 years old and I've never had a financial plan in my life like that doesn't make any sense and not only that but like in all of those positions you also are given like the burden of people's salvation so it's like every mistake that you make every sin that you make that affects somebody else's salvation so every time I messed up I was like oh somebody didn't get saved today lit you know so like you have that burden on top of everything else that's exhaust it it does burn you out it breaks you really it's probably something about that six month Mark cuz that's when I changed too it's something about the six month I think you get you just normalize the misery truly I think you I think there's probably something about like psychological breakdowns or something it has to be yeah cuz something about that six-month Mark was cuz that's when I conformed that's yeah that's when you get used to like when you live normally and um yeah so I burned out and I remember and honestly I thought getting sent home was of God like if something on my mission was of God was getting sent home because you about to snap kind of thing yeah and I did actually like I was like messaging my sister like I don't know what to do like I have zero energy my mental health like I I didn't understand mental health at this point in my life like but I was like I you know feel XYZ and I remember seeing at the keyboard crying and this was the first time I cried like on my mission in a while like you know like I got used to misery but like I let all these emotions out the keyboard like this [ __ ] is this is horrible like this is breaking me down to like a level I've never been broken down mentally like just dead like I would go to sleep every night on my knees praying because that's how tired I was I was just like 2:00 a.m. I wake up on my knees like okay let me get back in bed you know what I mean like also this city I have a lot of crazy stories about this city but it like I was just dying um and um a week literally a week later I got sent home from that moment and like it was like sad to get sent home but also like and I was like distraught when I got sent home cuz I was like bro like I don't want to go home theoretically you know what I mean I didn't want to go home because like I didn't want to come back and if I go home I know like the transition adjustment is going to be horrible like difficult but I got s home can I you one quick question about that please so uh you know the idea of hi number of baptisms in Latin America is very personal to me because my mission was kind of corrupt in that way yeah and there's different levels of like what it means in Latin America as a Mormon missionary to get a lot of baptisms yeah like you know there are people that go their whole mission and only have one or two baptisms and then in Latin America you know having three a month or five a month could be a lot yeah but then having 10 can be a lot but then in my mission there were guys who had 40 in a month that's crazy where was it in yours yeah ours was like the top missionaries we would have probably it would probably be around like like four to like seven okay so it wasn't for like the top top top yeah it wasn't insane but like it was like a good amount okay yeah because that's for for a lot of missionaries in the world that's a lot of baptism three or four in a month yeah yeah okay just want to check on and if you want to have any questions interject me cuz I'm just going to just talk whatever no it's good so so you you get at home with the health yep reason and you feel like God was answering your prayers basically yeah cuz it was just difficult like I was in misery like truly like I was depressed and anxious and I got sent home and I was like wow like I can sleep in like that's was the first thing I noticed like I said sleep is important to me I love sleep and I think it's the most valuable thing I do basically every single day and without sleep I don't like it anyway so I slept in I was like oh this is so nice and then I just started getting used to it like I was home for 6 weeks and after like 3 days I was like I don't know about going back to the mission because the mission is tiring it's a lot of work it's mental it's it's all this stuff like now I'm at home sleeping in a comfortable bed not sweating all day like not getting food poisoning not like you know like I'm not getting people aren't breaking into the house I'm not getting you know like there's no demonic episodes like there's nothing crazy happening at in Arlington Texas and um there's women in Arlington Texas and to me that was also good like there's a lot of things I didn't have and um but so I was like well I need a and I remember actually real quick too is like I remember the first week back from my mission I went to church and my Bishop was like because there was another dude that got sent home early like right before me and um he was like you know to like with hold Judgment of people on to me cuz they saw me walk into church and was like why is he here so to withhold judgment he was like yo like he's here he got sick he's here for like medical reasons and like people like withheld those judgments luckily some of them did they anyways it doesn't matter um but then I realized I had to come to the I had to make a decision whether I was going to go back to my mission or whether I wasn't going to go back to my mission and um I remember I was talking to everybody I was like what should I do what should I do what should I do I was praying I was doing everything and nothing was coming to my mind besides like a lot of anxiety and like just like the desire to not go back and I was really praying that I that God would tell me not to go back to my mission at least that like I would hear like but I needed something I need basically needed God to come down and tell me yo Sebastian stay at home like for my level of perfectionist perfectionism that I had at that point like I always felt like I required like a sign like I needed something large cuz like most times a little fing wasn't going to do it for me like I needed if if I'm going to do something crazy I need you to basically come like tap me on the shoulder and be like yo Sebastian get up and go do something and um that didn't happen um but like I was praying whatever nothing happened I was talking to my mission president actually about it and um I was telling him about my thoughts and he was like how are you feeling and I was like I don't know if I want to come back and um he laid a a 10-point reason or 10 reason he laid out 10 reasons a 10o argument yeah 10o argument about why I had to come back in one as Nate mentioned earlier actually was if you don't come back you will be abandoning the Souls that you promis in the premortal life to save it's a pretty tough argument right it's a tough one how do you how do you combat that one and it's like this Mission president like he has like he can receive Revelation for you you know what I mean like to a Mormon kid a missionary speaks for God a mission a mission president speaks for God yes am I wrong no like he was who I sought advice from for a whole year prior so like what he said what his word was like God to me basically like he couldn't he had zero wrongs to me um and anyways I have so many stories and so um I was like that's tough and I was upset about it actually and I called one of my brothers and I was like bro that's crazy to say like is that not manipulation and he was like maybe you're like mad because it's true the guilty taketh the truth to be hard right it cuts them to the very quick and um or maybe you know like bad things hurts you I don't know it's weird you know like a fire burns you it's crazy and um so I went back on my mission yeah and um I I got somewhat Lucky in the sense that my first week and a half back was like a week and a half before transfers and so it was strange but I got put into a companionship with the kid I trained the kid he was training and the person one of the people that my second baptism was on a Mini Mission and we were all forign a companionship which felt very like in the mission this is like dramatic like this is your family in the mission like that's my son that was my grandson and this was like my baptismal son and like all of us in one little house and um I was like the great grandpa the grandpa who knew all things in this house which was kind of fun cuz I was like yeah listen to me I know what I'm doing and um it was cool just like you know whatever be back honestly it was horrible back though actually for real because I was like I was extremely exhausted I got there and I was like how did I do this like I and luckily because it was four people in the district we are in the we all didn't go out at the same time like two people at a time would go out and so sometimes I would just stay at home all day luckily and I'd be able to take naps cuz I couldn't I couldn't manage the schedule that I had lived prior and um anyways I went back and um I developed a stutter so I I think I had a stutter growing up I took it away though like I I work work worked really hard to not stutter as much and um I went back to my mission and I had a stutter it was like I was tripping cuz I was like I didn't perfect my Spanish to now speak with a stutter in Spanish like that's annoying I was really just annoyed like why am I stuttering realized I was stuttering because of like anxiety and depression stuff so then you know left that became like this Zone leader one of my zones and I remember my first day back in that zone the water was flooding up to my knees and I was like I know I didn't come back to to a mission to swim in you know Brown Mucky flood water like it was just like just like another thing on top I was like this is annoying and you know I go and I goone leader da d da more pressure to like be great and um you know things were all right but I was very anxious and depressed I started meeting with the mission therapist and like trying to practice on my mental health and that this time period the first 6 weeks back on my mission was the first time I doubted like Mormonism like for real like I was like is Mormonism is the Book of Mormon real I I truly was didn't know like something about it wasn't sitting right with me anymore and I and I realized like like a few months ago what it was when I came back from a mission in that time period I was on Facebook and I saw like anti- Mormon Doctrine and it was that Joseph Smith translated The Book of Mormon out of a hat and I thought it was the craziest thing and I swiped out of it super quick cuz I was like this can't be true like anti- [ __ ] literature no anti- Mormon Literature Like Joseph Smith couldn't have translated out a hat did some research turns out man was looking in a hat and that started like shattering my like belief system like what is going on you know what I mean like I don't understand how he could translate a book in a hat and also why would they lie like why is there why is it not why didn't you just say that you know what I mean like in all reality mormonism's biggest flaw was lying like you should have just been straight up because it's already a it's already a cult in my opinion and it's already like you already got these people that will believe anything you say so might as well just told the truth at the beginning and half their problems would have been avoided that's just my like personal opinion they might not be worth a quarter of a trillion dollars today if they done that right so maybe Li is good for the business um and so I saw that and then when I went back my mission I didn't really I was struggling with like my faith in that regard like I was like I don't know like something about it isn't adding up and um I remember like praying and I got to one day and I remember I woke up and I was like I don't think the book of war is true and I was like there's no way that I just came back to a mission to figure out the book of woman's fake like that's not happening so I was like God Give Me A Sign like I said I was like I needed a sign to believe and I think honestly that only indicated that I didn't believe the whole time cuz like I needed something wonderful to occur for me right and um I think I just created a lot of faux spiritual moments and I remember one day we were teaching the first lesson and I was like God please the whole time I was like God please give me a sign Give Me A Sign Give Me A Sign Give Me A Sign Give Me A Sign and and as we were teaching the first Vision the sun got bright and I was like this is God I wish it was more than that like that is the experience like the sun came out like from the clouds that happens like every 10 minutes by the way in the Dominic Republic um the sun is always out actually it's like this weird thing about a Caribbean Paradise Island um and um I was like wow God has told me it's true but I think it was the it was what it was the only way I could cope like there was no way that I could serve the rest of my mission thinking the book was fake because if I didn't believe I would have had to go home like I would have told him like you have to send me home because there's no way I can be here and I can't teach these people something I don't think um I eventually kind of work through a lot of my anxiety and depression to to the exent to the extent that I felt peace enough um wow my story is a lot longer than I remember and um yeah I work through it a lot and then just that's a I just have to say That's a classic example of either um confirmation bias or motivated reasoning yeah that you really you're you're experiencing this cognitive dissonance and if I could just do a metaphor you know following you know like if you're if you're in love with the with a woman or a man or whatever and you're feeling all those wonderful feelings and you're experiencing that early phase of Attraction yeah you'll Overlook everything if you're feeling all those good things but if all of a sudden they're stealing from you and they're beating you up and locking you at home then all a sudden you're willing to consider some of the flaws right like it feels like that's what was going on you abely you weren't having a great experience yeah and that would open you up to applying actual critical thinking skills and actually asking is this true because I'm having an awful time yeah but uh you know you you had to reconcile that cognitive dissonance absolutely and so motiv motivated reasoning or or you know or confirmation bias is like oh there's light coming I'm miserable okay it's true go with it right God thank you and like two is like just like that's Survival to it is survival like that's the only way to live it was the only way for me to cuz yeah life was horrible at that point like I If it wasn't for it I had to I had to have it and I think the biggest like the presents such a big moral issue with Mormonism is because it's like you said you didn't know anything else like you thought that was the only way to live was in this state of of of misery and like you know denying you know your mental health denying like your physical health right all of these things because you felt like this is the only way that you can that you can live your life the only way that you can achieve you know Salvation the only way that you can like save other people so that their salvation is not on your head right and like all of that I feel like that's the that's kind of like one of the biggest like moral issues with the church is like they give you all of these burdens to carry without ever giving you the option of whether or not you want to carry those you just expected to that's just the expectation of you from a young age you know um and so you're expected to carry all these heavy burdens when some people are ready for those and then some people are not ready for those at all you know and then sometimes it's not even a matter of being ready it's just a matter of is this even something that you need to carry is it something that's for you at all you know and so yeah we see a lot of different variations of that you know with missionaries where some some people thrive some people conform some people just make it work some people barely make it through some people don't make it through but I feel like um if people were given the choice more than just the expectation you would see a much higher caliber of missionary too yeah and too like I I skipped a few things too I forgot but like I talked a little bit about this on social media already but it was like there was a lot of racism on my mission too like so like my my um trainer my my first companion he was Cho like Mexican ameran and um one of the this was one of our first like first few weeks in the mission maybe I don't know first like 12 weeks of my mission he was like you know when we get to heaven we're we're all going to be white and I just like laughed and I was like I'm going to go to hell then like I'm not changing my race to go live with anybody like I'm black like at the end of the day no matter what I'm black you're Mexican-American he's white like we have to be content in our identities like whatever that looks like but like at the end of the day I'm Black and I'm very satisfied with being black if God needs me to be white then God is not going to be my like Eternal house companion you know what I mean like we're not going to be roommates in the next life and um what made him think that y'all were going to be turning white he had so much internalized racism that's what they talk it was baffling like the amounts of things he would say like he'd always talk about how he wanted to be wide in high school or he was like I talk black what he said ain't and he was like I talk black bro first off please shut up like you're going to make me go crazy and I'm on a mission I can't beat you up as a missionary um no he just said like he just had so much internalized racism it was scary and I don't want to get you off that thread but that's that's the difference between a a quot layite a Latin American and a black person because he would be paying attention to the Book of Mormon narrative because he would have been taught he was a descendant of the lamanites right right and Joseph Smith what you said it like didn't J Smith prophesy that the Lites will Blossom as a rose and what prophets interpreted that to mean was that they turn white yeah so he would have been taught that internal racism right that that if he was righteous his skin would be turned white now you might not have been taught that because you weren't quote a lonite which is a horrible term what were you going to say oh I don't even remember but I was going to agreeing with you there was isn't there a quote from Spencer Kimo like where he leadered like over the pulpit or maybe it's in the enzy something where he's like you can see the the the skin of these the children of these lamanites turning whiter you know as they sit in the the pews you can see that their children are lighter than they are and I just remember prophet of the church jul fact check she says General Conference October 1960 come on come on with the facts wow that's that's impressive 1969 you can't even find that on l .org they 1960 yeah they scrubbed I think everything before 1970 right it sper be Kimble she says she ate on that she did respect for sure respect okay so yeah he was taught that you weren't taught that absolutely not and isn't that interesting that two people of color can be taught totally different things I was truly baffled like I grew up around a lot of like very Pro black people a lot of pro Latin people Pro Muslim people like like Pro white people white National like I grew around Pro everything yeah and like changing your race was never like like that was never something that crossed through my mind at least yeah like I thought that was like one of the craziest things um or like you know another like dude in my district my district leader actually my this white District leader from St George I think he um he one time he was reading uh Mormon Doctrine by Bruce almeri right and this how I knew I had knew previously that Bruce almeri was racist like I had the belief already inside me because he came up to me and told me that like white people and black people should never get married and like have children cuz it was a sin and I was like where did you hear that from and um he was like Mormon Doctrine I was like bro don't you know Bruce alar is racist like don't like I think we I thought we all knew that right like I thought some things were just commonly known and I was very used to people like where I grew up who under like who were culturally aware like the white people that group up around were surrounded by black people we're surrounded by like Latino people and all these other cultures so it's like I wasn't used to hearing such like all the time blatant Ignorance by people I'm like that are my age you know what I mean like most and the people I affiliate affiliated with never would have said that to me at least right like or never or didn't think it um so like adding the religion plus you know whiteness only maximized anyways so racist experiences a lot of homophobia in the mission that I like would combat to um and um anyways homophobia yeah yes so one time there's guy in my mission he had his op pinic burst and we were all at the hospital with him and um it was like 1 2 3 4 six Elders in the apartment in in the hospital and I was in the bathroom and I'm hear them talking about gay people and I was like I hope they wrap this conversation up by the time I get out there because I've never really been the one who is like mute two topics like I I speak my mind like it's just like I don't know part of my personality and I came out the restroom and they're like Elder would you choose to be born gay and I was like no but I wouldn't choose to be born white either and it's like all like white in room and they like got like silent and I was like but neither one is bad and they were just like they like looked at me like I was crazy they were like he just said he would not rather be white and that being white or being gay is not bad and said that they were the same like he they they were like baffled and the conversation ended cuz it was like I don't know what you me to say to you you know like I have been very like ad I I'm just outspoken and um that was I just remember that time just like the I I that's when I started to realize more and more I think that was like month five of my mission maybe I started realizing more and more how much people lacked and like intelligence I guess like common awareness and goodness like I remember Elders like talking about women and I was like are you not a missionary like the way you're talking about this what you call it daughter of God like but you're like degrading her and objectifying her like those things never made sense to me and it was a little weird to like call out people that had like when I had like five months in Mission that like 20 months in the mission it was a little weird too because obviously they're like my Superior in the mission or whatever but I don't know people on the mission said a lot of crazy stuff and it made me realize like how much I don't know maybe just see people for people more like Mormonism wasn't like the people that were Mormon like the people I grew up with that were Mormon were so like holy I was like these are great people like the people that were my age like the two brothers that I've mentioned before two white brothers phenomenal people still to the day like great people like all around like not because they're Mormon but because they're like good people like they're kind and they would never like objectify a woman they wouldn't say anything racist or like you know like they are like we're good people I always felt like and I saw them in a lot of different lights but it's like these people on my mission you're supposed to be like missionaries of God and y'all say the most like some of the most obscene things to me was always baffling um so how did you make it to uh becoming a Mormon a missionary being lgbtq affirming how did you survive Mormonism I guess you did I I guess we talked about it you didn't have the conditioning of early morning Seminary I shouldn't be answering the question yeah like how do you explain reaching the Mormon Mission Age and and not being homophobic yourself that the church is historically homophobic you know I feel like I wouldn't say I wasn't homophobic I had a lot of like internalized homophobia within me um I just really like I I I grew up in a I grew up in a very homophobic space like where everybody I knew was very homophobic me too yeah and like my friends were the people in my school were I was and I I something about like like I think I always knew within me though like like this is not like good like I remember when marriage equality was passed and like people were like oh my God this is so bad and I just was like why you know like what about it is bad like one of my first best friends like in fifth grade was gay or eventually came out to be gay and it's like little things like that like I don't know throughout my life I was just like I feel like being gay is not bad but I had a lot of internalized homophobia still it was like this weird distance I think for myself and the older I grew like up rather I never felt like I never felt super strongly about like being gay was a sin I just knew that the church said being gay was a sin but I never felt like any attachment to it but I also knew like I wasn't okay with like anybody degrading somebody else based on something like their sexuality like I I something within my development like in my teenage years I became very adamant against like bullying so like when I would see bullying like in my high school and stuff I would do my best to like stop it like I think it was just like I went through a lot of life changes and like when I quit basketball I realized a lot of things like that were wrong with like how I was as a person like whether it's like homophobia or whatever it was like I wasn't a bad bully but like sometimes I was mean to people like I could demonstrate bullying attitude sometimes and um like those were things like I realized like this is like horrible like I some people that I was very close to were bullied and like that made me realize like bullying does some horrible things to people's mental health and um so like I just was anti-bullying and so like for somebody to talk about gay people negatively while there's gay missionaries in our mission was like baffling to me or like gay people are walking down the street like what do you want to do like or like when people would be like colorist to like Haitian people like I would have to correct them like it just like I created um when was it I I made a law for myself when I was maybe senior of High School junior of high school or my mission within that same like few years that when I saw something problematic it was my job to speak up it was like um it was like a challenge kind of cuz it was like I was tired of being mute in these circumstances where people were being harmed and like bullied and like nobody was like standing up for them and like to me I was like standing up for somebody else who feels like they have zero Voice or like that they can't like if you're in a room of 30 people and you everybody's coming at just you like You're vulnerable like sometimes standing up is actually put you in a more vulnerable situation so it's like I wanted to challenge myself to stand up for those people and um so anytime I heard anything problematic I didn't care what it was it was my job and it created like you know discomfort amongst like groups sometimes but like I believed like it was better it was the best thing to do like if it's in if it's between standing up and not standing up I thought you should stand up anyways I'm going on like tangent but I think that was kind of it like I still honestly at this point harbored a lot of homophobia less than obviously my counterparts but like I just knew like treating somebody less than for any reason like just wouldn't go with me at all and like no matter what you live a homophobia or whatever it is like it just wasn't going to bide with me very well it's beautiful and I just have to ask was there ever a point in these years pre BYU where you understood the Mormon Church's lgbtq policies and past and ever thought you needed to speak up or out against that um preu that's a good question um in high school I never really thought about Mormonism Mormons like queer policies at all like um I just like did like I barely thought about Mormonism yeah in the most part um and I remember like I would talk about like I would ask questions about like why we considered a sin and stuff like in my church um but I never like talked about it too much I think the first time I talked about it um honestly prear was probably like I moved to Utah in January like 30th of 2020 well we can we can come to so but on your mission you couldn't baptize a gay person or like you're right I did actually yeah I oh I wanted to tell the story thank you for reminding me good yeah on my mission is the same time the church changed its policy about gay people It reversed the November 15 policy um cuz yeah 201 18 or 19 they reversed I think at the same time they made it where like queer sins like gay sins or whatever in straight sins would be held accountable the same amount and because prior what was your understanding prior to that yeah like if you did something that was like sexually immoral as a gay person it was like 10 times worse so you have premarital sex as a straight person and Beed baptized but if you had premarital sex as a gay person you had to wait three months wow yeah so it's like you could have sex the Saturday before and still get baptized but if you were gay it would took it literally was a three for 4mon policy that you had to abstain which is I mean like blatant inequality right yeah and I brought up some Mission president cuz I was like this is crazy like if we're going to have this policy the church said it let's let's live it there's a lot of gay people that probably would be more open maybe I don't know you know what I mean like to like you know missionaries if they knew like it was they were living they had to do the same amount anyways and I brought it up and I was like why do we hold them under two different standards when um the church literally just passed the policy like a month ago at this point and um it was the craziest thing he ever said to me he he was like he gave me a metaphor actually since we've been on metaphors today he said imagine he said imagine a he said it's like it's a how did he phrase it I want to phrase it very well my mission president told me about gay people that if a gay guy walks into a restroom it's like a it's like a wolf walking into a sheep's den and that we have to be careful because we don't want to let wolf eat sheep basically no that's that's I've never heard that one I was without words like truly I didn't know what to say because I was like being gay and being a pedophile is like two separate conversations like very drastic also like a lot of straight men in this world world that are Bishops and like PRI of leaders and da d da how are pedophiles and assault kids and women and whoever else and um I would say that letting a you know an eight-year-old child into a room alone with a grown man that's more like letting a sheep into a lion or Wolf's then absolutely than uh you know a regular person walking into a bathroom a regular gay man regular person right like who doesn't want a boy that's not how it works I hate to break it to you like that's not how it works I don't know why them phobic people love to focus on bathrooms so much but anyway no for real to for another day you have a grown man touching and baptizing a 8-year-old boy you don't feel like that's weird at all but anyways and so yeah so that was like one moment where I brought up to my mission president and after he told me that like I didn't really know how I don't know what I said in response but I remember the conversation was cut pretty short after that cuz it's like I have no I have nothing else to say to you cuz I mean you you demonstrated what you believe um but I mean I he said a lot of problematic stuff looking back so yeah okay so that policy changed and you were happy I thought it was good yeah I thought it was positive like okay I mean I felt like on my mission too is when women could start like um being witnesses to baptisms and stuff too yeah so I feel like there was like positive growth like I mean I saw all this as like equality um and like you know moving towards it um but yeah so like you know moving to back to my like where I was my mission at this point it's like November of 20 uh 2019 and I've been back to the mission for about 12 weeks probably and uh I started to have like these pains in my body it was like weird like one day my whole leg would like hurt and I couldn't walk on the next day my fingers would hurt the next day my shoulder would hurt like it was like weird and I was like what is wrong with me but a lot of the time it was like centered in my lower abdomen it felt like and so my I went to the doctor tell they were like maybe I have a hernia didn't have a hernia like maybe this maybe that and it turned out that I had um like three herniated disc and two bulging disc in my back and um what the from before or on my mission I got him on my mission doing what walking um they the doctor actually never found out my belief is I used to carry a scripture bag right here on my waist and I think that eventually led to my back like scriptures are heavy heavy and I was Adam always carrying all books so I had the Old Testament the New Testament The Book of Mormon I had everything cuz I was like you need it all like I teach I Tau with every book I always had my quad I always have my quad we had a we had iPads but I always my quad with me we had a we had a nine dial phone and um no right and also the Spanish set of scriptures are longer by a considerable amount and so like that adds you know like I think the Spanish book of Mor is 100 Pages longer and um anyways right so whatever D D I figure out my back is like broken practically and I couldn't walk for two weeks and um after those two weeks I got sent home again at 18 months and um wow yeah and also I was very grateful to be sent home again cuz I was like you know this has been cool but going home home is also great and um I got sent home and I was happy to be back and luckily this time I didn't have to go back a third time I was so grateful to not have to go back a third time so were you able to end your mission honorably yeah after 18 months okay and then two months later was Co so oh wow yeah okay started being home anyway and so how was your testimony by the end of your mission great weirdly enough mhm U my testimony was like strong but not strong it was weird it was like it was strong but I also was a little like hesitant on my testimony can I ask do you feel like it was like lasered in on some parts like do you feel like there were parts that you focus on more than others cuz I would say my mission was also like difficult yeah and by the time I got to it I would say that my my testimony was Stronger but I would say that it was also more focused because when I left my mission I basically had the idea that like the church is not perfect there's like a lot of faults in it but the gospel is true and so like I was like as long as the gospel is true book Mormon is true well like when I came home from that's like what I felt was like as long as the gospel is true then like I don't have to really worry about all this other stuff that doesn't make sense so I had kind of like Las her in on a specific point and I just tried to focus on that for as long as I could until I couldn't like focus on that anymore you know was it like that for you or was it good question truly um I I was like an apologist to be honest with you um when people say the is true but the church is not I would show them a scripture that told them that the church was true I was like there's no way you can believe a Mormon it's contradictory in my opinion to be Mormon and say the church is not true because the scriptures say like in DNC it says verbatim like the church is true and like so for me like I was that like apologist like no like everything's true like I hate to break it to you like and I was I was unrelenting in my opin opinions like I had scriptures for everything like if you cussed I would have showed you a scripture in Matthew that tells you not to cuss you know what I mean like that's how I was like I was the weirdest activist you would have ever met because I was like an unrelenting Mormon but I was also like big on equality it was strange um but that season ended pretty quickly um and also I feel like for me like at this point like I was so I think I was so unrelenting because I was holding on so hard you know what I mean like I was gripping harder because I felt it slipping and um and that's terrifying because like you're taught that if you leave the church your entire life is like falls apart I was so scared yeah I was I was so fearful of like what leaving the church look like and um I I knew though like something was it wasn't the same because Mormonism wasn't easy anymore for me like it wasn't easy to like read my scriptures for an hour or read my scriptures every day you know like those were like difficult tasks for me and like like doing everything just was hard like beforehand like doing everything was easy like I enjoyed it I I wanted to do everything but like doing eventually it turned into something more difficult for me um and that's kind of really what encapsulated like that the movement into my more like like after that got it okay well that's fascinating so you come home in 2020 yep which is four years ago yeah honorably y was your mom super thrilled yeah my mom was cool she was always supportive she the first time I came home she was like stay home if you want to stay go back if you want to my mom was never like like crazy about Mormonism she was just like do what you think is right like I'll support you however I think my family was very untraditional in like that sense like it was like do what you think like my even my oldest two brothers who were very strong Mormons were like only God knows bro you're home like go back if you want to come back or you know do what you want like but you know what I mean yeah okay yeah so you get home your testimony you're you're hanging on tight to your testimony TI and you got to decide where to go to college right or was it never a question I had already decided premission yeah I got accepted BYU and um everything when I came home from my mission right no no no no no no my senior year I realized I got like a like a good scholarship to BYU and so I was like oh cool like like let's get this money and I went to I was playing going to BYU and came home January 13th of 2020 moved to Utah January 30th of the same month wow but that wasn't the time to start that semester was it no it wasn't so I was just chilling for like seven months living with my brother okay which was fun experience Provo for the first time I was it was not great no it was all right I didn't I I never understood Utah people like I never had a lot of Mormon friends and I didn't know how to be friends with people from Utah like I didn't know what to say like you have to I didn't know what jokes were funny to them like like I'm from Texas like in around a lot of non-members like everybody else friends with was not Mormon and so we joke about like sexual things and like you know just like things that like people here didn't joke about and so it's like you what do I joke about like also you they you dress different here so Fashion's different like you talk different what would you not want to wear here that you would wear there just an example not we here that I wear there what would you feel weird wearing here rib jeans like just like the type of rip jeans I would have like people like was like weird acid wash jeans at this time or like sneakers like people didn't really wear sneakers for real mhm now women wear holes in their here not men is that not as much right like especially like when I came here like I just feel like what I would how I presented myself to the world was like a black person was just not received it was weird it was like I I remember I had this whole conversation with my brother one time I was like how do you talk to people from here like what do you say like I would get into these moments as somebody who had been like very popular in like talkative his whole life I'd get here and be like what you hi like you know what I mean like confused like I could only talk about Mormonism like it's the only thing I had in common with these like with people from here and I just was confused like I didn't know how to get along and um it I have to ask how white was Utah relative to other places you had lived I had only lived in Arlington Texas my whole life and the and the Dominican so I had lived in a black country and I had lived in a predominantly black high school and the seventh most diverse City in the nation and then I came to the least diverse city in the whole country is it yeah so provo's number one orm's number two well what about like Cay and Idaho or some we they beat them like at least in 2020 when these results like when I I remember up and I think it's not just like racial diversity it's also like religious diversity and like you know diversity in jobs and like all that kind of like there was s diversity yeah and that that blew my mind coming to Utah because because I you know I grew up in Houston basketball team and it was a Melting Pot of like you Asians Latinos blacks Native Americans everyone I would meet people in Utah that never spoke never saw or spoke to a black person until like they were 18 or 20 yeah I was the first person black wa go ahead no no I was just saying I was like to add on I was the first black person to a lot of people wait wait really yeah like I shouldn't be your first black person as a grown person there is no way I should be the first black person you've ever meet like why does like it's like one time like a 5-year-old described me cuz she couldn't I she didn't know how to she I was like the first black person she had ever met too and she described me as Knight somebody call me a chocolate man primary but it's like you should understand race enough to identify black person versus a white person cuz night is that's crazy you don't even look like night right I'm not that like all the like she could have said teddy bear caramel macchiato hersher Hershey chocolate bar anything bro night is crazy um yeah that's so wild like I didn't even know what to make of that yeah yeah I didn't either you had the same experience um just you know like there was a kid who couldn't describe so they just said I why is that man chocolate and so I was like oh I'm not chocolate I'm just African-American lonite cuz I've heard about some black people being asked if they were lonite but like a kid not in my memory I never got I got son of Kane once but that was from a companion who thought he was being funny that's crazy H okay I'm so sorry and does that how does that feel does it feel cute does it feel awful hell no that it was not cute to me at all I thought you I thought they were dumb like to me like where I came from every single person knew what a do-rag was everybody every person knew what a bonnet was like a what like a bonnet or a dag like we were those to school like black culture was evident I wor my Bonnet everywhere I everywhere in school like where I was and so it's like white people knew like I'm not saying they were the like not every was the brightest person but they understood culture like so to me it was not like ignorance was never cute to me I was like you're dumb like simply like simply stated like like like one time this this white girl called me the nword here in Utah and she was like texting me she was like NW please I was like oh my God I was like I don't know what's happening right now she's Mormon yeah and I was like I don't understand this life I'm living and like you know i' I've been called inward in Texas but like this is crazy like it was just like you said it like casually like like we're friends and I was like don't say that ever again in your life and she was like why not I say all the time oh my God oh my God I was just like moving to Utah was was baffling like every day we're not talking 1950 right we're talking 2020 2020 yeah Nate what I was say I think the problem with Utah is that most of the people who grow up here have no like when you talk about people not being the brightest I think the issue is like they're people who are very intelligent extremely smart crazy intelligent how you on your third Tech startup but but you don't know like what a doag is you know what I mean so I feel like the problem with people who grow up here in Utah is that they don't have any inkling of like what an experience is outside of their own experience where I feel like if you live other places you know if you're friends with people who are Muslim or if you're friends with people who are from this country or that country or this experience you kind of have an understanding of other cultures you know um and you might even grow to like love or appreciate some parts of that culture and like maybe incorporate that incorporate that into your own but in Utah because it's there's such a lack of diversity here um and because there's also this idea of like Conformity it just takes away from that ability to experience other people's you know experiences and and and you know shared identities and so in that way they you become very very ignorant and just kind of like stupid about the rest of the world you know and it creates like a weird little bubble and the only tiny push back I'd have there is how many Mormon young men and now young women go on missions to foreign countries so there I mean there's that Wrinkle in an otherwise comprehensively bubble existence I would say though even though even though they do go to these foreign countries the the guys or the role under which they go to those foreign countries is often like the role of a savior um and so a lot of times that affects the way that they experience that because a lot of times people will come back from a mission um not having really like learned to appreciate that experience at all um they might come back with like a fetish for you know the people that they saw in that country they might come back with this idea that oh I can't be racist I serve my mission in Africa or let me wear this dashiki to black student union and maybe all the black students will like me um you know so that's not the case with everyone but I would say that like going on a mission to a foreign country isn't enough it's also about like your willingness to learn and to just experience other people's cultures and and you know learn from them as opposed to coming in with the idea I have you know the right idea I I have the best I think um you know for maybe lack of a better description I think a lot of missionaries will go into foreign missions with like a colonial mindset where they're going into to colonize that area with Mormonism and that's what they're there to do um so if you're go with that that mindset you're not there to you know to share you're there to you know to colonialized right and so um yeah I think it is a wrinkle for yeah yeah it is a wrinkle but I think it also depends on like the mindset that you're going with yeah that's beautiful yeah again we're doing metaphors today like I'm thinking of when I was in Guatemala there were these towns that were built by like the United Fruit Company or Del Monte like 15 foot high walls with Mansions inside and I I thought you know and this is where when people were like colonizing Latin America Americans were moving down there as Executives to run these banana plantations they would live within these walled cities with mansions with servants they didn't experience lot of America right right but then they'll come back and say that they did no it's like going to Resort like a I went to Jamaica no you didn't you went to a beach like yeah yeah yeah going to Cancun Resorts doesn't mean you really experienc Mexico thank you that helps a lot yeah I knew there was a good answer to that but you put it so well so thanks Nate okay so so white Utah yeah blowing your mind blow my mind but you're not it's not making you feel bad about yourself it's making you think Utah are uneducated yeah like I was really cool like yeah I was doing me and um I I was lucky like I think I got like I got lucky in some ways like I had family here like my brother two of my brother when I first moved here three of my brothers lived here I think two of my brothers three of my brothers lived here and my sister maybe so it's like a lot of people lived here so I got lucky cuz it's like if I didn't want to I didn't have to make any friends and a lot of times I didn't go out to make friends like I I like the weekends I hung out with my brother and like people he knew like or I hung out with my brothers you know what I mean like I just like would do what I did growing up which was hanging with my family and because my family were very close-knit it was fine like to me like I'm very I love my family and my brother that I lived with is like we're best friends still to this day and so like if I had to choose somebody to live with I would choose obviously my closest friend who Al my blood brother and so um yeah it was different um but also like I think it just it made me realize more like about like who I was though like yeah it didn't change me it just made me realize who I was and then black lives matter like the 2020 Summer of black lives matter happened and like things got more developed I would say but that's before you started to beu yeah okay talk us do that yeah so obviously remember like the buildup to the summer with like Ahmad Aubrey Bron Taylor and then George Floyd happened and then the world's went on Fire And for those who don't know the history these are tell us who these people are yeah so these are all people that were murdered by um like cops or you know white individuals and um in different like you know things like BR Taylor was murdered on a because police busted her house and she was in her bed that's Louisville right um Kentucky oh I don't know the location yeah so sounds about right um or George Floyd was suffocated to death for 9 minutes you know um and so at knee on his neck with his knee on his neck and um and mod AR was shot while he was jogging right as he was jogging through a neighborhood cuz he had aood on right by a um I don't think he had a hoodie on okay just because he was running yeah he was jogging in the t-shirt and then some some white men saw him and they jumped in their truck and grabbed their guns C arrest them down and shot him are you serious and um so weirdly let's be clear it's not like 2020 was the year these things started happening right at all like there have been many before this was just a Breaking Point in Black lives matter started with like around the time of Trayvon Martin in like 2014 cuz he had his hoodie on and was murdered by George simmerman um because he was a black team with a hoodie on and um but after George Floyd I remember me and my brother the one I lived with we were like bro should we do a protest here like we were like we should do something cuz they were happening all over the country happening everywhere okay okay and I remember we called my mom my mom was like B was like don't do it she was like you're going to like be in the same situation like you'll be in jail you'll be murdered like it's not safe we're like nah it's fine so we did anyways and like we did this like protest in proo it was fine like it had I learned from it it wasn't everything I wanted but it was a learning experience for me as an activist and actually I think it's the most for formidable experience of my life because it wasn't what I wanted and I felt like part of it was a failure it was it was cool though it had like a thousand people um it was the first protest I ever did like major protest like for real and um I started a nonprofit in 2020 before BYU what was it about it's called called unified allies for change basically unified allies trying to change stuff like fighting racism yeah fighting racism in the community and stuff and um and like bring the community together to work about it and so we had this protest and um it was all right like I said it wasn't everything I wanted it to be but I learned a lot from it and I learned the biggest lesson I learned though was that like as an activist you can't play Both Sides like this like at this point I was like very Mor and I was like if we love if we figure out a way to like speak truth but also like bring together it'll be magic that's not how it works like hate to say it but if you're making your words more palatable all the time like you're losing your message you know what I mean like and that's what I really like learned is like to be in my the way I wanted to be one to be the as I wanted to be like you we have to speak power to truth all the time like you can't be less like speak less because people are like certain people around like truth is like in certain ways like I don't really like the phrase truth is truth like I think that has a lot of flaws in it but like certain things like like if we're talking about racism like it's happening like I can either like coddle you around this idea or I can just be honest with you and tell you for real like this is a reality and I didn't do that and then I realized like that was in my opinion flawed and lacked poignancy because if you're not truly honest with people people aren't going to change like if you cudle people in their racism or in their homophobia or in their sexism why would they change if they they're comfortable where they are like if you're like it's okay but work harder it's not okay yeah work harder but it's not okay and um so that's when my like in person on the ground like real activism started and I started to learn and that's when I became um without uh what's the word a filter let me ask you something uh the Mormon part of my brain wants to think that you didn't really have a racist experience that that spring and summer of 2020 that you came here and okay yeah a a R person texted you the nword but like in theory that could happen in Texas 2 but the generally Mormons are open and kind loving nice people and that you would have come here and yes there weren't a lot of people of color but the generally people would have treated you nicely and fairly and maybe even extra nice like overcompensating by August of 2020 how racist were you experiencing Utah to be and Mormons to be yeah I think most okay um there was a few times that like like for one time like um the police like pulled up next to my car on the highway put this like the big bright light in it what yeah I don't he was trying to Blind me I I should have ran him off the road caused accident but I didn't obviously that' be crazy no like um so like we the amount of times I I'd get pulled over um I think most things though were like microaggressions that like you have to understand racism to what the microaggression is like M if I tell you every single time I go to BYU and you assume I go to BYU cuz I'm an athlete that is built on the idea that you think black people are not smart enough to go to BYU but because we have an athletic capability apparently or if like let me think of another thing like um or if everywhere I go like every single person is like staring at me every single time like that's built on a lot of stuff but it's like a lot of it though is like a basis of uncomfortability that makes you stop moving fluidly like I would I'm less likely to go out especially now but like I'm less likely I was less likely to move around freely because of the way that like moving around was uncomfortable and like like or I mean one time like a car drove past us and was cussing at me and my brother and we drove right behind him and confronted him but like like stuff like that like just like a lot of random experiences mostly microaggressions because most things won't be a hate crime every time but like it's funny though like a lot of white individuals Mormons in this case but like a lot of like people will discount experiences because they like play The Devil's a kid or look at like well if you look from their perspective but it's like like excuses can be made for anything you can excuse any behavior and we have if you look at anything in Mor history or United States history like a lot of stuff has been excused and so it's like maybe I wasn't like nothing crazy happened where I was like beat up or something but when something is happening just when little things are happening every single day it is a wear and tear that like eventually tears you completely down man I I was just having the realization I don't know if this makes sense that like having such a white population is its own microaggression or maybe a macroaggression literally like I would just say how how does a place become so white like what had to have led right to any population being this white yeah I don't know I'm just making no yeah I mean like if you think about like what it was deliberate right exactly it wasn't just accidentally all white right it's possible yeah like if you think about like BYU's black graduation rate black people aren't transferring just for fun like that's not how it works like what do you mean what is the graduation so like the black graduation at BYU is like 58% 58% while the white one is like 78 or 80 or something 79 79 this is this is according to the cor report in 2020 right and then for Native Americans I think it's like 48% that's not happening just because oh they're not happy like that no they're they're leaving black people are leaving for a reason and if if it's happening consistently around black and brown people maybe there's some correlation to it like why is 20% like why 20% difference obviously something's happening yeah um one more one more thing really quick uh so I it wasn't until my PhD that I took a diversity and inclusion class where I learned about microaggressions and SU racism yeah yeah that was in my 40s uh can we talk about a better a better understanding of what the term racist means for for white people that think I don't say the NW I'm not racist I don't hate black people so I'm not racist there's a broader definition of the word racism systemic racism that helps people understand the term a little better yeah I think and I apologize I don't want to act like it's your job to teach us happy to teach okay okay um I'm not here if I wouldn't have came if I didn't want to talk there's certain settings and this is one of those set right catch me at Walmart don't ask me you know what I mean but here here I'll talk so I think there like we have to break up in a few things like if we talk about racist right and when I talk about racism I like to talk about like every other ISM like I I like to talk about sexism and homophobia because I think it all like somebody might understand one idea and not the other and they all are similar in a way but like I think if you say the words your not racist you're not sexist you're not homophobic then you probably are like at the basis of it like if you truly think like I'm free from transgression then you have more work to do like I wouldn't say I'm not sexist like we live in a society that perpetuates white supremacy patriarchy and a hetero normative like lifestyle and so we're bred to be homophobic we're bred to be sexist and we're bred to be racist like in like by being born in this country by being born in this world and so to be racist is in my opinion is something subconsciously or consciously we all have within us like it's not an option like you're born in America so sorry racism is within you racism can then be demonstrated through actions whether they're small like microaggressions like like questioning somebody has the education level to attend a school rather than not being an athlete right like a microaggression can be something like can I touch your hair like oh my gosh you look so exotic like these are little things that feel like nothing but are something because you're othering a person because they're not you and because they're not the norm those are still racist though because at the basis of the idea we're making a different thing we're making Blackness to be in other like in the category of other right and so I like in my very backed up in a lot of books opinion like the amount of racism we all have well there's racism in all of us it defers on its level though and so for each of us that's why it takes so much work because we all have to be working intentionally to eradicate the things within us because if we're not it's just going to be present and that's just something that we're and it's going to it's going to like it's going to we're going to show racist attitudes more often if we're not working against them in the same way like if you're not actively like Pro queer and anti-homophobic those things are just going to be sitting in within within you and when they come out they're going to come out like because you're not thinking about it and when you're bred in a society that's racist homophobic and sexist these things naturally come out unless you're working against them and so for me like if somebody say when somebody says I'm not racist sexist or homophobic I'm like you're lying to yourself and you're lying to me like at the end of the day like because if you say I'm not this that means you stopped working on yourself and the moment you stopped working on yourself you stopped you trying to be anti whatever so then you fall into a category of like allowing the ism to live within you that's a bar when we when we sorry that's a bar M I think the key the key to ending racism is not to like eradicate it but to become aware of it right and I continue becoming more and more aware of it over time um because as you do that then you start to kind of eradicate it from within instead of just being like Oh I'm not racist I can never be racist and then you're doing things and you're not aware that you're doing them and you're generating more harm that way yeah and then we get out of transphobic too right absolutely yes yes yes yes excuse me I I should added antism beautiful everything and like that's even a good example like excluding transphobia like that's huge like that's a great example and I I that's the part of it like we all have to be aware we have to be ready also to call ourselves out like it's okay to be like and keep each other accountable like nobody in this room is trans but we need to be including trans people in our conversations um system racism is a whole another thing that wasn't that one of your questions on black menaces you ask was what was the question we as about believe in it like an example of it maybe but rever oh you would ask if Reverse Racism a thing we've asked about that like why is that and I know we're jumping off your story but while we're here yeah it's like okay well white people grew racist but black people grew racist too Reverse Racism yeah why is that not a thing there's a good question so the basis of it is really like on the back of systemic racism um it's this idea that like there are these individual prejudices that we um like that we do towards each other right um the reason people say that like you can't be revers racist in this scenario is that like um black people or people of color have no power to implement racism on another person which would then hold them like captive in some way like the way that white people have in Ed racism within our government or within systems outside our government like when workplaces have oppressed in in and put black people in such a space so that's why people say that and that's why we have said that too yeah so black people can be prejudiced or you know anybody can be prejudiced you can have misconceptions or you know unkind you know feelings towards another group of people not saying that we do but like anybody can have those feelings but that like racism in and of itself is not something that can be perpetuated um by a group that is like under the thumb of racism that's beautiful is it worth mentioning really quickly implicit bias and the and the young black girls and the dolls kind of study that they did if you if you um are you talking about the beautiful one yeah yeah just just implicit bias the fact that we don't even it's important for us to understand it's easy to get defensive um but it's important to understand that we don't even understand what's going on in our own brain yeah even if we think we do yeah and it's the story the the the little black girls as an academic study that were given the choice of white dolls or black dolls yeah um and in that study like they the overwhelming majority chose white dolls as like the more beautiful doll and um what's interesting about this this is what I talked about earlier about this internalized racism is like in this society that we grow up in like we're EMB breeded we're embedded with this racism and like colorism like we are taught at our core what is beautiful and what's not beautiful what's better and what's not like what's good and what's bad and it just most of the time happens to be where black people are on the negative side of that spectrum and and the darker you are the farther you go into the negative side like as a lighter skinned person I will be received more positively than a darker skinned person right like I'll be in the more of the middle like you know negative middle Spectrum you know what I mean and um but with this implicit bias is like that's why if you're not actively working Against Racism within your own self or any bias within your own self it's going to come out 10 times out of 10 and you won't even know what came out and maybe you you'll recognize it but that's the thing is like if you're working on yourself and you're reading books about racism reading books about homophobia and transphobia reading books about sexism then like when those things come out you'll notice it like there's a lot of times where I'll say something or I'll think something and I'm like okay like that I should check myself because that right there is problematic and like those are things that we have to be aware of and if you're not aware then the biases will just roll over and over again and then you won't even you'll be like I'm not racist but you just said something racist today you know what I mean so yeah beautiful well thanks for being willing to help us understand some of better um so before you even enter BYU yeah you're already sort of a activist sort of an anti-racism activist is that right yeah yeah yeah and it was honestly I loved it like I love activism um also grew very I burned out I burned like out pretty quickly too like I had to take a step back just like in how much I was this is when I stopped talking to people for like when people would you know DM me how do you know racism is even real and I would have a conversation with them you know what I mean like I would have these endless conversations about things I should never need to converse about because Google's free and it took all of my energy away um and it was very harmful for me just because I'm wasting my time simply said like I and at this point and this is what I recommend people to is like you can't change everybody like everybody in my opinion everybody has somebody that can change them but you can't be the one that changes everybody and we have to live with that we have to be okay with it and that's why I don't use my time on everybody some people I will never change and I'm okay with that some people My Method doesn't work my method being honest Frank and direct and I'm not really the palatable P palatable person I'm not going to seek like speak soft to you just for fun just because you hurt it saves your feelings like it's not it's not how I go in life and um that's how I entered into BYU my first year I BYU was mostly on Zoom though cuz it was right during Co yeah yeah it was during Co so my first year was mostly on zoom and I was kind of like in the I don't know like in the back of everything like I was like doing me like I just lived my life and it just happened to be in Utah and um were you dating at all during that time I was I was in before my second semester of you of BYU I was in a serious relationship long term and we eventually you know did the whole Mormon thing got married and sealed and stuff divorced too but but I was in a relationship um and I think that also added to the ability to like not be active at BYU as much too for the first year okay yeah because you had a partner yeah and Co was happening you study online yeah so you weren't really immersed in the BYU culture y that's a big bummer like oh I don't know you may have hated it but like that freshman year at BYU yeah is such a time to get acculturated into the overall culture make friends you didn't have that I didn't it was like positive and negative at the same time like it was positive in the sense that I got to skip a lot of like I didn't have to be there negative though like because I yearned for like a college experience like I wanted to be a college person like a normal college kid who had normal experiences but instead like I was on the outskirts and like the people I did meet at school I wasn't friends with like I thought they were just weird or not for me like we didn't go get along you know like at church like people had their own groups but like I wasn't in like any group and I never felt comfortable like I ne I've never been to a single like family hope FHA family hope un I BYU once you never did no I I was uncomfortable I didn't know them like they didn't talk to me I didn't talk to them like I went to church did my thing said my P or home like a family W like the the BYU like student you would go to those yeah and um like I was cool with people but like I wasn't like in involved with people it was like this weird thing like I would I would know them but I also like had a state calling too at this time like when I was in the um when I was in the singles W I was in a state calling so that was also I was um like the state Secretary so I have to be at church from like 6:00 a.m. to like 3:00 p.m. and I shouldn't project but like for me I valued dating at BYU to start BYU married you do miss out on some of that dating and maybe that's for better for worse yeah yeah it was interesting it was interesting to like start out like that because also when I was married I was in the bishop brick too so I was just work to death about what you in the bishop yeah you became a high priest no I wasn't so let me rephrase I was the Secretary of the bishop Bri too yeah yeah so I was just I was just there all day no matter what I did and then right before I got divorced actually my Bishop was like I'm going to make you the the counselor soon I was like crazy might not be here I got ask to be a counselor right before I yeah MH yeah no not for me okay so not in any way a typical BYU experience no not at all okay and so yeah how did things progress were you political science from the start or no It's actually kind of funny so my first major was um finance and then when I got to be was like definitely not so my first real major though was ancient neare Eastern studies with an ancient Greek minor with an ancient Greek emphasis what so I was going to get my PhD in like religion and like learn ancient Greek and Armic and all that stuff okay yeah and then I was like this is not for me either I was really good at aging Greg weirdly enough though I had like a 99 wow I was phenomenal but then I lost interest and I was like I don't care and then I ended with the c it was that quick that was like my I had an a until November November December did not go to class ever again and then you know GP came hard it was weird um and so then I was you know ancient nearon studies and then I switched to psychology and I didn't really care for that either and then I was like bro stop playing with him just become a political science major again and like love politics and stuff and I did that and I didn't like that one other but I just stuck with it yeah okay yeah so is should we talk about how the black menaces emerged then is that the next point in your story it is yeah yeah cuz my sophomore year that's when I like got into like you know actually going to Buu and stuff and that's when I like um I was in the BSU presidency with Nate what is that black Union presidency with Nate actually no but for the audience no yeah I figured you do and what is that and like tell talk a little bit about so black student union is an organization for black students where you just come together like prop each other up basically have a space that's comfortable and safe for black students um where that's like within this larger white space so it's like a black space that you feel safe and you can just be around black people freely and function freely be free and just be happy and do you remember when you first either were seeking for some type of support or Community or when you first learned about the BSU or did you learn about that from your brothers I know about the BSU before I even started BYU because of the protest like activism I like knew like I had met Rachel when I did activism that summer in 2020 um but I didn't like actually do like be I didn't actually go to B BSU for real until my until I joined the presidency because I was like if I'm if I'm going do it I might as well do it for real and like needed somebody I was like why not I'll join so you like showed up were made put in the presidency and you met Nate almost immediately basically yeah yeah I remember you know I was I I had been in the presidency the year before and I had submitted videos or I had had people submit videos um applications cuz you submitted one right yeah so we had people submit applications like submit a video of why you want to be in the presidency and then we'll vote for you I saw Sebastian submitted his video and we're just like who is this guy I've never met Sebastian who is this guy you know who's this platform that he's running on and so yeah you been in the presidency and we had a good time good time it was a good time did y'all become friends yeah we did yeah during that time that's when we became friends cuz we were the presidency members who would show up to meetings so we got a lot done together during that time he was like a besides after the other president that was co-president when Nate left it was um Nate and Sebastian show basically so the yeah the first semester we were all you know doing things together we we ran a pretty pretty smooth yeah it was good pretty tight ship and then the second semester um was When Brad Willcox happened our you know my co-president left y I ended up moving and yeah like a couple other things happen and it was just a so we we talked about the Brad will Co story when you were here let's talk Let's do let's tell the story again from Sebastian standpoint and now both of yall are here yeah and I'll throw in like how black Min started with it cuz it is one kind of take it back wherever you want so January so like a month before Brad real Cox you know popped off in the of 2022 okay so January 2022 um I had the that was when like the idea first started with black mineses and I was talking to people about it and I think the first person I ever told was actually the co-president of Nate T and she was like all and then she transferred she like left BYU like very suddenly mhm very suddenly and the other people I told they were like no no no and then February 8th which is like the day Brad Willcox went viral right so Brad Willcox um basically was like just gave This Racist speech can I pause you people getting mad would I interrupt no no I don't mind actually I want to just do a little bit of background just chronologically yeah so you you know Co is starting to end y you're you're integrated into BYU you're attending their life what can you describe your experiences there that may have built up inside of you question that led to you wanting yeah that had formed your feelings for what later became black medicine yeah honestly it was a lot of like what I talked about before like it was little things every single day like I would go to school and argue with my whole class I was polyi like I said not the one that is a mute person I speak my mind when my mind is speaking to me and I would go to class and I would argue with my professor to argue with the classmates whoever had a bad opinion in my opinion I would argue with what types of topics were most common oh it could be from like things that are like very like solely political like an international strategy to like why the police respond slowly to black neighborhoods or why about racism or like just anything like we we talked a lot about like policies um and like why they were like corrupt like we talked about the Muslim band just like a whole like range of topics um and it really was just like the the day-to-day uncomfortability that like I would feel of like nobody talks to me really but unless like there was a few people I spoke to and that's because they were like good individuals but like nobody talked to me um you know it just like I felt out as as a black BYU student people like white by students wen't super friendly and not really like if I sat next to them like I would only sit I would sit next to same people every class per because like I knew like who they were they was more comfortable but it's like sitting next to him like they weren't like going to like be my friend like that um or just like it was just uncom like I don't know how to describe like being at BYU is so uncomfortable and like as a black person you get very um you get used to people staring at you when you're in wide spaces being at BYU is like the on drugs version to being stared at in like normal society like people are just always staring like I don't know as a black person yeah like just imagine everywhere you go people are always looking at you but like not looking at you like oh he looks good not looking at you like oh I want to be his friend or like his outfit like just staring like like but like it feels like just an uncomfortable stare like the way that people 247 the way people were staring at Ken and Barbie in the Barbie movie that's like how black people stare at black people just like what is like what are they wearing why do they look like that what's wrong with them yeah you know it's weird kind of like a maybe it's like a Natural Curiosity mixed with uncomfortability that just makes people not sure how to interact with with with black people did you feel the same way oh yeah absolutely I uh I my my form of protection was music so I would always had a giant speaker and I would always like blast music whenever I walked on campus and that was the way that I got from class to class without having to like feel uncomfortable you know cuz it was like I can listen to my music I don't have to focus on anything else just keep my head down walk to class and so that's what I did everywhere I went it was like my little protective show yeah and luckily too like at this time period I feel like our like we had a we created something in like the like lunchroom called the black table mhm and the black table was like wison C uhhuh okay it was at least my Saving Grace like I skipped a lot of my glasses and I would just sit at the black table like that was like the happiness for me like it wasn't going to class it wasn't going to religion class it wasn't talking to people at school it was really just like being around people who understood and like we were all be like damn BYU is tough like together like we all like felt the same amount of like mental health struggle the same amount of like toughness like we all collectively as a body would come together and like forget about the world and it would help like that's what allowed us to function truly like that's why black mines was such a passion project like it wasn't like a calculated thing that we did we're like oh we're going to do XY no it was truly a passion project that came from like the inside of our souls MH that allowed us to voice are like emotions that's truly what blackm is started out as but with Brad Wilcox he was just our he happened to also be our first video okay one more question before we jump to that like I'm thinking about again this is my Mormon brain now the average Mormon who's white who's from Idaho or Utah or Arizona if you to sit down with them how do you feel about black people I love them well you know do you are you racist no I like would you have them as a friend absolutely and these are some of the questions that come out in Black later where he'd say do you have a black Print you know what I mean but like I would guess that so many of them would say I'm not racist I don't want to be racist I love black people I'm inclusive I want them around me I want to have them as friends I'm trying to figure out the chasm between what we white people think we are and what we want and how we act all that perception like and I used to think about this in high school like I'm growing up in Katy Texas there's like you want to you group up in Katie Texas yeah K yeah with Katy High School that's crazy my debate coach group in Katie Texas what it yeah my my debate coach in school his name her name Amber the Reynolds oh yeah yeah Katie had really good debate team sorry that was very off topic it just was a man right yeah right um anyway yeah grew up and Katie but like I would notice like okay there's white tables yeah and then the Hispanics are all sit together and then the black people are all sitting together in my high school I hated that yeah like why are we all equally distributed I didn't get it I didn't want it to be that way I hated it but I didn't know how to fix it yeah and same with the BYU like I'm sure there's a ton of BYU students running around thinking I want Sebastian as a friend I want n as a friend I want to have friends of all types and yet it doesn't happen yeah how do we like I know I know I'm asking a question in the middle of your story that's okay but like I don't think the average be student would want there to be segregation or a black table where you all had to sit and commiserate so that you could get through yeah why does it happen honestly I think like a big part of it is um that like especially at BYU and probably across country too is like a lot of like a lot of white people don't know how to interact with black people normally like it like you could tell you could tell the difference between somebody who has black friends and somebody who didn't who doesn't rather like you can feel like like it's just it's it's really I think it's kind of hard to explain but it's like the way somebody interacts with you you can feel like their genuinity in the realness of them like I don't want you to like missionary friend me you know what I mean like and that's how a lot of it is is like oh my gosh so where you from man like like just like stuff that like it's like know me like it's like just get to know me as like a human you know what I mean but without like assuming all of like I don't know like without the conversation being inherently around Blackness like when me and Nate first met like yeah we talked about Blackness and like black things but like we became friends because we're friends because like we understood each other like as normal friends do and so I think like what happen so much and a lot of people who have come up to me like I would love to be your friend like okay so like let's talk like some people you just don't click with I'm not really the person to force friends with anybody um but like I think what happens a lot though is like some people just can't interact with black people and you can tell it's like like you just don't know how to speak to me like you don't know how to like your jokes are racist like I don't know how to tell you like that joke about black people you just made is not funny you know what I mean like you think it's cool to call me brother I'm cool on it you know what I mean like or like a lot of what happens the absolute most when it comes to interacting with black people is people like appropriate Black Culture when talking to black people so it's like they start to speak in like a a and they like are like brother and they know what that is hey African-American vernacular English so like what people say like they're speaking black like that's what African-American vernacular English is formerly known as ebonics ebonics right like it's like a it is a language amongst black people and it has grammar grammatical rules like has everything and like there has actually been studies where like black kids and white kids took a same test and when it was using aav African American vernacular English and black kids scored well and white kids didn't score well at all because it's like it is a language and it has meaning and whatever so like but it's like when people will come they try to make they try it's like a weird thing it's like so hard to explain but like they try to incapsulate themselves as like black individuals too in a weird way like they try to be like cool for black people but it's like just be you like you are you I me Nate's Nate like if we get along we get along because we understand each other not because we're being fake people to each other you know what I mean like we like as a friend you shouldn't have to be different and I think that's what happens a lot of times like just basic interactions like and that I don't know yeah I mean see go ahead mate yeah I was going to say if I could just kind of encapsulate all of that I would say that it kind of comes down to like one thing and that's fear I think um it's kind of interesting because it's it's just kind of like a cycle that repeats itself and it's a cycle that um um was created by the same people that are caught in the cycle now where you know during the the the the Civil Rights Movement um they had to figure out a way to get widespread support behind civil rights because everybody hated Dr King like he was his support was his movement was not supported they had to figure out a way how to get that widespread support and the only way that they could do that was by showing like the atrocities that were happening to black people in the South and so when they broadcast nationally um black children being arrested beaten sprayed with water hoses bitten by German Shepherds like white people saw those things and it became a terrifying thing to be seen as a racist individual because racist people were linked with those images of violence those images of hor they were linked with with slavery with the cluc close Clan with with lynchings like those are the the scenes that come to mind um when we think of racism and stuff like that and I think a lot of people white people especially are terrified to be hit with that um or with that connotation um because of the implications of that right because there's no way that a good person can possibly you know be a member of the clu CL Clan there's no way you can be an upstanding Christian in your community a member of you know your your local city government but then also ride with the KKK at night there's no way that those can be possible those are only bad people right so I think a lot of a lot of white people have this innate fear of being perceived um or interpreted as racist um and so when they speak with black black people a lot of the times that fear comes out and so they're trying to do things to like overcompensate whether it's like talking in aave or um trying to find things to relate on so that they're not perceived as racist so that they're not seen as racist so that they're not stuck with that label um for me personally my favorite white people in the world um are the people that just treat me as a person for me and they're not that that fear is not present there so like John in talking with you you know we've known each other for a little while now and like you know in all of our interactions one of the things that I always tell you know when I'm talking to other ministers or things like that I'm like John is one of the most intentional white people that I know we're like you're always making that effort um to to be aware like even when you when you brought up transphobia or when you recognize like um you know thinking that the debate coach was a man instead of a woman which is like a mistake that you know I I made the same mistake in my head too right so like but being able to like Point those things out that's very intentional right and so I respect you a lot for that and you know it's the same with like the white people that I choose to interact with in my life they're all people that are very intentional um about those types of things and are able to put that fear on the back burner and just see me as a person first and not as someone who could potentially label them and I think that's probably the hangup where a lot of white people run into is because they feel like they have to change who they are or be a different version of themselves in order to try and be seen or perceived as a different way because they're terrified of getting hit with that racist label um but the truth is we just need to recognize that that is inside of all of us and we have to like combat that and actively working on that on a regular basis rather than just pushing it down or pushing it to the side or dismissing it can I throw one more thing in there real quick thank you two is um well said very well said Nate is I was just going to say to add another part of this conversation is that like um I what happens a lot is people bring up like black struggles and like black pain in these conversations especially like first to like third you know in these beginning conversations I just met you and we're talking police brutality you know what I mean like this is not a conversation I want to have with you it's not a conversation I want to have every day and it's definitely not a conversation I want to have over lunch and we just met for the first time you know what I mean like and I think that's happens a lot too is like you know people want to show their some people want to either you know learn or some people want to like show their allyship and I think like you don't have to show allyship by explicitly stating allyship and you don't and it's not also not somebody's burden or you know job to teach all the time like this is upsetting where like it makes sense to like talk about or ask questions that like are deeper and like in tune with stuff but it's like if we're getting lunch on a random T like Tuesday like or if I meet you in the grocery store and I'm like Hey how do you think about PR brutality no like leave me alone like this is a conversation I want to have every once in a while you know and I think that's what happens a lot too is we people jump into conversations that aren't needed to like show who you are like being yourself will show your allyship more than like some statements that will like Pro black like okay cool how about you just be Pro black you know yeah well is I'm just reflecting and I appreciate so much all this insight and it I if you what what I think we all want is just to be treated normal just for Who We Are and if you've never been around a a person of color you don't know what to say you're nervous and you've either got biases that you're trying to beat back or you're like trying to overcompensate because you're it's all awkward and weird when we just all want to be treated normal yeah but if you've never had any of that experience it's almost impossible to arrive at that interaction normal yeah so it's it's I think that's part of why it's so hard I don't know it's dumb I hate it and I don't know other I mean I think that's what busing was trying to do right was it busing just trying to integrate everybody MH so that maybe it would just we'd start really early you know what I mean being more natural with everybody but it's I'm so frustrated that in 2024 it's still so hard I think too is like a lot of that normaly can come from like engaging with like cultures that are not yours online like if I watch watch like say I was like a white person I watched black shows I like you understand culture more if you listen to like black music which most people do or if you read books books about if you if you're engaging with culture in like history about a certain group of people that you don't belong to like part of that normaly will become natural because I'm not going to like if I was a white person I'm not going to meet a black person and be scared I'm going say the wrong thing because I've seen it you know what I mean like I've engaged like maybe all my friends aren't black but I've know how to speak to a black person cuz I've watched black people speak a lot or I've listened to them speak or I've worked intentionally on myself like there's part of that like like your at home training will change how you show up in the place like it's the same way like you don't show up to corporate American learn how to speak professional on day one no but like you prepare you know what I mean like you don't just show up knowing how to speak all these different things like you work at it but the same way is like you have to be working at every aspect of life Society or socially it's just that we don't want to because we're lazy okay okay so going back to BYU are yall aware of a study you know how they do like campuses with the hottest people or like campuses that are like most unsafe for women whatever have there have been like most racist campuses do you know in is by ever I don't but I think BYU is top like one of the top the hottest campuses oh iett Playboy used to say like hottest women BYU like I'm pretty sure probably just because they're all well I won't get into that y'all aren't aware of like ratings of how quote racist boou is I'm not sure you haven't heard I'm not sure no okay okay yeah it's a good question though I'm not sure okay so so now let's get to bread W yeah so the lunch table's thriving so lunch table's thriving it's a BSU it's a black union meeting right to 7:00 8 8:00 at this point meeting's over and I'm like y'all heard what like Brad Wilcox like this was like heavy in our community at this time like we were all feeling it so tell never Mormons who Brad Wilcox is and what he said Brad Wilcox is a religious professor and like high in the Mormon church and basically what he said is like regarding like the like black people couldn't have the prient until 1978 or going to the temple right so basically black people were excluded from salvation in the mor in the mor church and um he basically was basically said like why are we asking why black people couldn't have the da until 1978 we should be asking why did white people not have it until 18 like whatever 29 yeah 29 yeah and it like and he was saying it to a almost fully white audience right and he's and he's taught that multiple times a ton of times yeah and luckily somebody recorded and put on the internet and it like just blew up in Mormon Mormon World Mormon landia went crazy I'm the one who put it on the internet oh come on it hey goed goed hey you are the reason solely for black mines now um that's cool I didn't know that that's funny I like that I I have I know someone in that area who shared it with me that's dope that's a lot I didn't know that look at you I'm not trying to get credit it's just no no you deserve credit absolutely you're you're our first video is Grand Central it happened to that desk right there that's crazy that's D that's cool that's so funny actually and so um well yeah so John put it on the internet we all saw it yeah and um and he said a lot of other super cringey things like a ton of Stu he had all of the isms every single one xenophobia sexism like he got them all so like he said other religions are playing church we actually doing church right like he said so it was baffling how much he said actually yeah and um 5 minutes is just garbage cathon of cringe right and he aced he he was number one a cringe cathon if you Olympic gold medalist and if you look at like the Mormon stories like um like metrics like web metrics or analytics it's like it's like YouTube was doing this and then Brad Wilcox it was like it was monstrous it was crazy it was our first real major going viral YouTube moment and honestly ours too so thank you and um yeah so we it was like heavy in our community at this time like we I didn't realize how much it was like burdening me at least how did you emotionally how did you receive that honestly I thought it was like nothing like I was like same old same old right like something happens every semester at BYU that's racist like this is fine and then I had a class like called the silver at seminar it's a group of 12 black people and there was one like San she's been on the show it was 12 black people in San and whoan from Oakland yeah she's fantastic she is and um so we're all together and we just started talking about like how is this making y'all feel and next thing you know basically the whole room is like in tears and like yo I didn't realize how much this was been affecting me like nobody like because like you don't get you don't get through BYU by feeling everything not at all like you you can't like you can't feel all the emotions like you have to compartmentalize and move on unless you don't want to graduate cuz I feel like the more you feel the more likely you are to leave because there's a lot of stuff to feel and so we had all been compartmental compartmentalizing and um we all like this is like the Friday we're like breaking down and but like so like I didn't honestly not as well as I thought it was I thought it was perfect turns out crazy we got feelings and um but this day at B BSU February 8 2022 oh that come on that's a bar that's nice and um anyways we made a reaction video to it it's like 13 BSU black students I remember yeah and we like did a little thing green screen and none of us know what we were doing it was kind of cringing right like play Brad wilcox's audio and you're all like oh yeah we like oh my gosh what you say Reed to and um it was our overnight had 5,000 views MH and we were like oh my God like we are we are them like bro what like black mines world what we're famous and um we started making more and more videos like that's when we asked like what's your favorite thing about BYU and everybody was like nothing like you know Rachel's Infamous line was like BYU pays me and like just like everybody was like raing their experience it was like z z like it was just like real but we were laughing like this was like the first thing that had brought us joy so like Brad Wilcox thank you a little bit because you like kicked Black mines off thank you John for posting Brad and um this was what started black mines though like for real like it was that's why I say it's such a passion project it was like it was beautiful to us like black mines wasn't it was what we looked forward to like every day I was like oh my God I get to go to school and do black menaces I didn't go to school for real like I didn't go to class but I did Black menaces and that was like joyful to me like CU I did something that mattered you know what I mean I have to ask when a Mormon thinks about speaking up you know and I don't know how much of the history you know but like I was a BYU when they were excommunicating Scholars and professors and firing professors for just talking about mother in heaven or you know just like talking about feminism yeah and that enough to get you excommunicated or you know kicked off campus like you have that moment of like whoa like what wait we want to do this thing it'd be super meaningful and fun to do this thing but like there might be very serious consequences anywhere from getting kicked out of school losing our diploma to being excommunicated yeah or to just being socially ostracized or marginalized or disappointing our parents yeah they had how did what AR they had a meeting a couple weeks after we started black menes about whether or not to expell yeah so like I was just when I saw that video Drop I thought a couple things I was like this is amazing and like this is really bad for BYU in the church if this continues good for these kids but like I wonder if they know what they're doing yeah and I wonder how this is going to end so did y'all have that conversation or thoughts as you were considering whether or not to do it or was it just like uncontrollable I think it was honestly uncontrollable like there was no stopping like like I I was I don't think I would have tooken no for an answer for real like like I remember when I brought it up to Nate and Nate was like let's do it I was like oh my god did he just say yes like that's how I imagine cuz I remember I brought it up to like I remember was we were we were doing it right I asked Nate and Nate was like yes I asked one of our other members Kia and she was like yes I asked other people outside and they're like no I don't know about that one like that like they were like they showed that fear a lot like they were like H that's true cuz a lot of people were not willing to promote us nobody was and then we had 10,000 followers in a week and they all wanted to jump on and they're like okay maybe I was like oh weird and then like obviously at that point it's like you said no like I mean you can help and support but it's like there's only so much you can do and to me like I believe a lot in like people's word and principle and stuff and like if you don't want to help before it's something I don't feel like you should be able to jump on bandwagon bandwagon when something like I don't I feel like that's weird to me you weren't about it when we had zero followers you know what I mean so don't be about it now so the main principles in Black menaces were who um us two so me Nate Rachel Weaver Kenia and somebody named Kylie so there's five five officially but now it's really me Nate and Rachel okay so you start releasing these videos the ex Morman internet goes viral yep uh crazy yeah and everyone's loving it then what happens like within a couple weeks like yeah so honestly ex Mormons are the reason that black mines is something like I will fully say like oh absolutely they were they were our first Community for sure the absolute First Community like every all the comments were ex Mormons yeah long before yeah long before people at other colleges were recognizing us and all that the X Mormons were holding us down they were easily probably our first 50,000 followers oh absolutely yeah so shout out to the X Mor Community Y and I give them props anytime I talk about like building a black mines cuz without the ex Mor Community like black mines wouldn't have grown cuz they were our cuz they donated to BSU when that happened yep heavy and like they truly made black Min like they helped us grow and they gave us like a foundation of like bro they were like cuz I remember it was so many people that were like I used to be Mormon I used to go to BYU like I'm so proud of you yeah and like there's something about like people who've been where you are telling you like I'm proud of you and like this is validating something in me from 20 years ago that really speaks to like your soul I think you know what I mean like when I've met people who have told me like you have validated all of my experiences at BYU like with your videos like to me that meant a lot cuz it's like it's hard to explain why BYU is so tough it's very hard to do it is you have to you have to experience it yeah you have to experience it but something about black mines putting it on video showed the world like BYU is not easy by is weird yeah mhm yeah just gave people the voice yeah so um shout out to ex Mormons mhm okay and let me ask about that so ex Mormons are scary to the world yeah espe especially non-believers yes sorry let me start that over ex Mormons are scary to Believers Y and as far as I know y'all were still Believers at that point um at least you didn't tell us that you would your faith I hadn't I had told no I had left the church at that point though what yeah that was my secret oh I did I'm telling my story right now so I forgot I'm telling my story so before black menaces yeah andad Wix I stopped going to church October of 2021 we got to go back I forgot sorry I always leave this part out when I'm telling black mines cuz I've been conditioned to like not tell people the truth because BYU what can you do yeah I stopped believing in the church honestly probably before then but I stopped like actively going to church October 21 um it all aligned with like my marriage and divorce the moment I got divorced was the moment I stopped going to church cuz I just KN I don't know I just knew like I had told her like if we you know like leave each other like I'm going to not like I was I said I'm scared that I won't be Mormon anymore like verbatim like it was I was scared scared of it and then I realized like I can't do it like it's not it doesn't go with me like we don't fit in the same boxes my brain doesn't formulate the same opinions ideas like I don't believe what you believe like it just I can't and it was liberating mhm so had you intellectually processed your Mormonism at that point in terms of like learning about the history of racism learning about Joseph Smith and the truth claims the Cs letter stuff the Mormon story stuff sort of did you process that prior to leaving or not cuz some people just become a Jack Mormon and fall away but they don't do the intellectual the emotional processes so I left purely on like the doctrinal inconsistencies and like how I just didn't agree with him like I just simply couldn't agree with the fact that they thought being gay was a sin like I just couldn't agree with it like foundationally I was like it's not a sin it doesn't make sense and like you're it's easy to use Ancient scriptures as defense but queer phobia was rampant at that time as well so it's like of course you use old outdated scriptures that aren't even about being gay as you know clarification or I couldn't you know get with the idea of like prophets like prophets have led us astray time and time again like without failure have leted us astray um I couldn't get get with the idea that like you have to give your soul to this organization like I thought that was it just didn't go with me like something about like giving your all to something that doesn't give you its all is like strange to me MH um I felt like I was also like like I like I said like I had all these callings and different times in my life and like I would spend why am I spending 12 hours on a Sunday on the day of rest working for the church for free mind you I a get paid I should have got paid AB but it's like I'm work getting work to death to do something that's like what to organize meetings for some old white people that like don't care about me for real like and like some of those people have come back and deemed me nonsense like in over time like reacting to my activism too so it's like it's like I knew like I never comfortable with you and it makes sense so it's like there were just like things that I just didn't get with and like also to be frank I just knew well I'm actually not going to say that anyways oh man don't filter well unless this one this one I should filter just for BYU's sake okay I'll tell that after um no but it's like there was just things that I just like couldn't that I no longer identified with and eventually I read like half I still haven't finished CES letter to be honest I it didn't didn't matter like it wasn't why I left like I didn't re leave because of like the nonsense of like why the Book of Mormon is fake or whatever I just didn't I just don't agree with I just stopped agreeing with it it's like you propping up inequalities and inconsistencies and manipulation and gaslighting and it also didn't help because of my experiences on my mission that I felt like it increased the amount of manipulation I thought the church had and like I also was trapped I felt trapped at BYU so that didn't helped help rather I felt like I was like manipulated to get married which also didn't help so it's like when you feel all of these different things like I think the marriage though was like the nail in the coffin because it was like I it was it's a really long story but it's like I felt very like forced to get married and which is why didn't end very well and I felt very like I felt like I had no power in the situation and I felt like that was because of the god that Mormonism created in my brain that made me be gassed by other people but Also spiritually and emotionally Gaslight myself which I give 100% credit to well not 100% but like the vast majority of credit to Mormonism because it trained me to Gaslight myself over and over again until I couldn't take it anymore okay yeah and so um and did you dig into the racism stuff the Brigham Young statements the prood ban was that a part of your deconstruction at that point um not not heavily also like I used to honestly the biggest parts of my deconstruction was to learning learning to stop thinking black and white so stopping black and white thinking and I used to always watch on Facebook Muslim versus Christian debates and the Muslim person who always would win in my category of videos that I watch or atheist versus Christian and it just like I feel watching Jubilee the Jubilee these were like off offbrand random things with like like bad quality random people and I would just like listen and like I would if I would try to create arguments against these people sometimes I sometimes I could sometimes I couldn't and eventually I it just deconstructed like my ideas of Christianity and religion and Mormonism overall that I was like I don't know if I believe in any of these stuff any of these things rather and then eventually I did dig more into like history stuff and it was just like validation I was like yeah I knew y'all were crazy like I knew a good amount but it was like the more more I read or would read and stuff like y'all been crazy for real huh so yeah yeah I often C I've studied a bit just why people leave and there's sort of a bucket of Truth claims and history stuff there's a bucket of like abuse or harm which I think was certainly part of it for you yeah for sure but there's also just the bucket of it's not working doesn't feel good yeah that's its own bucket yeah you don't even have to be mad about LGBT rights or Joseph Smith's you know 14-year-old girls whatever it's just like I hate this literally yeah is that kind of were you mostly just I hate this isn't working I feel like it was like the mixture of the latter like there was like a few of the first things like historical things of course but like it was like manipulation like things I I was not comfortable with and then like this it was just sucky like this is not a good life like I don't Eno I didn't enjoy life at that point like 2021 was the worst year of my life really categorically worse than your mission which you almost wanted to die oh I wanted to die in 2021 too so it just it just added up 21 was like without a doubt was the worst year of my life but you didn't when you were telling that story I didn't get that same Vibe I'm not doubting you oh no for sure I'm just saying you you didn't on your mission you were just saying I think my mission had a lot of um had a lot of like reasons that I like will like easily go into 2021 was 2020 was good 2020 was good I didn't really speak a lot about 2021 I kind of glance glazed over it because a lot of it is like that marriage I was in which comes with a lot of like baggage of what was occurring on the dayto day and some things left better UNS said yeah okay yeah so like 2021 yeah categorically was worse than my mission absolutely CU you felt alone cuz you felt like you out of place constantly being watched oh it was like everything like it was it was like all of it put together it was like racism emotional it was just like it was like everything added together multiplied by 10 Okay and like adding like normal life to the spiritual manipulation all work together against each other I'm so sorry it's all right yeah yeah yeah I disassociated most of 2021 too so I don't remember a lot of it I think I've dissociated most of my life actually and I'm not trying to say it's no say I feel nothing I think Mormons can be world class dis associators absolutely yeah world class I'm still trying to heal from that that's absolutely right yeah um just for my own stuff anyway okay so you by the time Brad Wilcox February of 2022 comes around yeah okay now how is that because at BYU you got to sign the honor code which means you have to profess belief and your willingness to behave yeah and then you have to if you're not believing or not behaving you have to worry about renewing your ecclesiastical endorsement getting kicked out someone find out yeah and appearing active out of fear of Bishops cutting you off so like how are you dealing with that yeah tough I did dealt with it toughly um I was I feel like I was lucky in a lot of circumstances I had good Bishops I will say like like people who cared more about me as an individual than they cared about like like their religious beliefs and like the like certain things that like BYU commanded and like I feel like when I spoke I lived in I lived in orm after like um 2020 end of 2021 up to before I moved to Salt Lake and so 20121 the rest of my college career I lived in orm and the Bishops I had were very understanding and they were very like real like they liked black menes like one of my Bishops was an ex religious professor at BYU who hated BYU or like didn't have a good experience at BYU didn't hate it but like had a negative experience at BYU and was like like that makes sense and he liked black menaces and was like he was like you know like just be honest with me and I was honest with him and um it was helpful because I could be more real with the people who had to give me endorsements and they told me that they weren't going to sabotage my education over the belief or lack thereof um which is something that I knew I was more I was favored for I feel like because I know a lot of people who didn't have the opportunity who didn't have like the bishop who cared more about them as an individual than their religion yeah so I was very lucky I'm still I feel very lucky at this point cuz I was able to because I feel like having two years of BYU and not believing in Mormonism was extremely difficult but it was better than it could have been because of like the Bishops that I did have well shout out to those Bishops you know and leaders who were supportive of you cuz cuz I've met people who were kicked out of BYU or they were they finished but they weren't given their diplomas like that's a real thing yeah I was nervous like I remember my first ecclesiastical endorsement after so the summer of 2022 I was super nervous um I just didn't like I was like this could go horrible you know what I mean like I've heard about everybody's experienc and they not going well and um but he set me down it was like just be honest with me he's like I talked to your last bishop and he said all these great things about you and um but like be honest with me like how do you actually feel and I just like was pretty honest with them I'm not going to say I was like I was pretty honest with them I'm going to say and and um that that you know got me through and I I lived the honor code as I needed to and I was good okay yeah and I'll just say one last thing sorry um like so the Trump presidency was 16 to 20 yeah and then Biden takes over in 2021 yeah January 6 happens but I just remember as someone who cares about BYU and he watches Mormon Stu of seeing come out of BYU this sort of like really conservative almost like like surprisingly um problematic political mentalities that led to like Holland having to give that musket talk yeah where clearly Holland was hearing from like super we'll just say Christian nationalist kind of Mormons saying I'm not sure I want to send my kids to BYU because it's becoming too woke yeah and so I remember through tw Twitter and through other blogs or Outlets this sort of really scary almost Christian nationalist form of Mormonism emerging at BYU when I would have thought BYU would have been coming around more Progressive it was almost some parts of it becoming more reactionary yeah towards Christian nationalism do you did you experience that yeah I feel like like with every like the more progress the farther people go back and like there's two separate you know two separate sides that's why Superman's always fighting like a monster from a different earth like he's not fighting you know the normal he's not fighting the mafia you know obviously weird example but same Vibe is like like the more I feel like we and other people at BYU pushed back like to make BYU more Progressive more inclusive more open I feel like the crazier other people got like people were crazy when I got there for sure but people are outspokenly crazy like more now I feel like like like now that talk is required at BYU the buset talk yeah yeah they it's required to read it yeah it's required to read now and it's like people are the church is so worried about progress that they're pushing back in such a radical way that it's pushing more people out in my opinion cuz it's like like you came in fake inclusivity when you use the musket talk as a required spe speech or like like when you I remember when black minist started I if I I swear I I saw the talk that was directed at us I SW and maybe that's crazy I think I know what you but I swear there was a talk that was like felt directed like at black mineses wasn't it Elder Oak you like was talking about social media or something maybe I can't cuz I didn't I didn't watch it or anything but I remember like reading about it and just like being like that has to be about us like that's about something you know like like and maybe that's me you know being in my own little bubble like thinking I'm cooler than I am but like that's also not something the church wouldn't do you know we were popping too that was April that was when we were going crazy and um so yeah um I feel like people increase their opposition you know like the things that we've captured on camera have truly been baffling like it's crazy so the racism got worse at BYU after black medicis is that fair to say or it's hard to know because I when I started black mines the the farther I got into black mines the farther I removed myself from BYU mhm CU did you feel unsafe at that point oh absolutely yeah and like it was like I went to a BYU football game last fall and I went with my brothers and they were all like on edge for me because like one in three people like gave like mean M me at a B football game what is that like like looked at me like disgusting basically like what you use Mean Mug mean evil eye yeah like and so they were like bro like like one of my brothers was like do they stare at you like this all the time and I was like yeah they do and he was like that like this is like a dark skinned black man and was like bro that is crazy so it's like as like a black person who was like newer to Utah and obviously grew up in America same like white PR Society was like shocked of like why are they looking at you like this like but it's like that's what like that's why we didn't go nowhere like that's why I would stay at home in Provo you know like because people genuinely like hated us like without like without using a different word like they didn't they hated us like a lot of people liked us which I was very grateful for we have a lot of support at BYU but we also have a lot of hate Abu so it's obviously a mixed bag but a lot of people they don't play no more with us yeah that's true I was secretly hoping that the BYU student body would like embrace you all and be cheering you on and making you feel super welcome yeah but it sounds like you became more isolated and afraid it's a mixed bag you know like I I never want to say we weren't cheered on I I try to always give like a very objective opinion cuz like we we have been cheered on by certain BYU students like there's a lot of like especially White BYU students who are very grateful for us who love us who I have a lot of love for as well and like they come up to us and tell us when we go to BYU um there just also is a lot of BYU students who despise us because they think we hate BYU because we hate Mormonism we want us to talk bad about them they think that we have some ulterior motive and that's to like in Mormonism in its all or something be honest with you if I wouldn't I don't really care about Mormonism like to be frank like I hope y'all figure y stuff out you know what I mean stop harming people but like all what I care about is like problematic attitudes and actions and ways that people discriminate and just so happens that Mormonism does that and so does be you so you have been a product of like that activism but it's like so a lot of people hate us and a lot of people like us but it's a mixed bag and you never know what you're going to get but it's like the people that love us it's nice to feel but there's a lot more people that hate us and that takes away from like it's hard to move in a space where most people don't like you MH all the time I agree with that I said the the so that was my last semester when we started black mines and for that semester maybe about two weeks after we started black mines is when I stopped going to class and I think there was only one class that I went to um and it was my what class was it was it Psych ology or gender was it capson oh I don't know whatever class it was it was like a class that was like a topic that I was you know kind of passionate about so I went to that class um but I think I was taking I was taking 18 credits I had stopped going to all my classes um because I just didn't want to be in that environment I didn't have like the capacity to be in those spaces anymore and so the only time that I was on campus I would come to campus I would go to the black table I would record black mineses videos with Sebastian Rachel Kylie Kia and then I would go home and or I like go to the library and like go to a corner and do homework by myself on the fifth floor of The Wil there was a back hallway with like a stairwell that was always empty I would just go up there and be up there for hours all day you know doing my classwork virtual stuff but I just couldn't bring myself to like go and be in those classrooms and those spaces cuz I just didn't feel safe there I didn't feel comfortable and like at the time I was just like oh you know it's just whatever I didn't really think about it at the time because I was trying to get through BYU get through that last semester but looking back on it now that was a very dark place to be where you feel like you can't even go to your classes right um you know you feel like you're barely making it through through the semester um one of my classes this is not like obviously it's not something to brag about but one of my classes I barely made it through like by the skin of my teeth I think I graduated with like a 60.1 or something like that there done that yeah but like that was all I could muster you know I had to email the professor I was like Hey I've struggled a lot this semester I'm doing my best there any way I can like make up some of this class work that I missed and you know he was nice enough to let me do that um and you know I was able to get my diploma but yeah I mean I contemplated dropping out multiple times that semester you know and black Min is one of the only things that kept me going that's why I went to campus if I didn't have that I probably would have just you know I might have dropped out my last semester College who knows what would happen so yeah thanks yeah well I can't at all imagine what y'all were feeling what I can say is that in my little way of trying to not only be an activist but be an activist and living amongst the people you're being an act it's I don't think I could ever it would be hard for me to find other people that uh could understand or even understand more the psychological tax it is to speak out against a group and to continue dwelling amongst the people you're speaking out against or the culture you're speaking out against because I don't think evolutionarily we evolved to do this I think go back a thousand or 2,000 years you speak out against your tribe they kill you or they abandon you and you die so I think we're wired to have all sorts of really healthy chemicals coar through our veins if we speak out against the tribe and so to just do that and to just say I'm doing it and I'm going to still look you people in the eye and walk around with you and exist with you unless you do it you really can't understand what that does right to your physiology and your psychology so yeah anyway I I think I know at least a little bit of what y'all were experiencing and I just can't I mean it's something something I'll always respect I I talked to a whistleblower the other day um James Huntsman he's the one who did some whistleblowing on the church's finances and he was talking about another friend of his who he's like yeah he's a whistleblower too and I'll always take his call because once you've been a whistleblower you you understand what it's like and then you just really have so much respect for other people that do it and of course that's how I've always felt about y'all appreciate it you too absolutely okay so the XM Step Up support black menaces you start cranking out those videos let's talk about the administration's response to black menaces cuz that was crazy to watch yeah um you said within a couple weeks right yeah so don't mention any names no specific names U basically a few weeks later this thing happened where another student reported a few of us to well actually it started with with Brad Wilcox matter of fact we and I'm happy thr his name paid him a visit we paid him a visit and I actually was people that tell people about that visit so it happened to fall in the same week as something called perspectives it's our black cultural celebration at BYU it's a we use it as like a dress up week to like you know like celebrate like we just wanted to have fun BYU is lame and so we tried to make it exciting we made a spirit week and so we had a theme for every day yeah and the day we showed up to Black to Brad wox was Black Panther day yeah and so it was like I wasn't there actually I was with my friend but a group of like 10 Nate you were there yeah I was there you tell the story so you just you were there so it's better Mak sense yeah so um we and the thing is when I had so I've been this is my second time being president of black student union I had done this before there was an incident where a student had said the nword in class in front of another black student and so the black student union had gone to that class spoken with the professor and then we had sat down with the class and basically just kind of like done over the Takeover of the class and so this is something that we had done before so we set out to do the same thing you know except this time we were dressed up as Black Panthers and also political climates and whatnot um but we go here and we didn't we went to his uh we went to his class we found out when his class was going to be and we go in um or we we go to the the building so that we could go into the classroom and we're going to sit down in the classroom and then just like have make our presence known and be like hey Brad WL Cox we're the black students on campus like we're the ones that you affected by this we're making our presence known here and like you know if they wanted to have a discussion we have a discussion otherwise we just going to sit there quietly and then go talk with them afterwards but we show up and there's security posted at the door of of um of the classroom somebody snitched can you imagine and I'm pretty sure I know who it was but I Ain going we know exactly who it was we know exactly who it was but um yeah we all had a black C Union group chat and so we've been making these plans to go in and do this sit in and somebody in that group chat had you know decided to go and report it to Administration and so we show up and there's security there and they're like oh Mr Wilcox doesn't feel safe having you in his class and he doesn't want you here specifically told us he didn't feel safe and so we all sat outside of the class and we waited for class to be over and then once class is over um a couple of us went in to speak with Brad and he was literally shaking in his you know in his boots he was trembling um and was you know scrambling like trying and gather his paper so he could leave the classroom because he didn't want to speak with us um and one of his daughters was there and she came up and like put herself in between us I guess she thought she was going to Shield him from our you know from Blackness our dangerous black advances right so um you know she was trying to Shield us from him and so we ended up just saying hey can we have a convers send me an email send me an email and then he runs out of the classroom and so we sent him an email um and we ended up having a sit down class but by this time he had already been coached by you know Church PR Corbett the my and this was after his apology too so he had already been coached and so he gave gave us a big nice apology they asked us not to record which to this day is my biggest regret somebody recorded didn't somebody no I was going to record it oh and then in the room I literally had my phone out and they said we'd like to ask y'all not to record and I was going to record it secretly but they you know they asked the de the vice president of student life asked us not to record it so I was like oh well still being a good Mormon boy let me put my phone away and you know follow what my church leaders say and so we didn't record it but he proceeded to say a lot of vile things in that meeting too you know he told us he oh he told us first of all he gave gave us all sign copies of his book about the atom of Jesus Christ and how we should forgive uhhuh so there's that that don't you you can't be racist and then tell me to forgive you so he gave us he gave us all a hug and a sign copy of his book what else he told the hug was forced he started the conversation by telling us that he was he lived in Ethiopia until he was seven so he knew how we felt he said when I came to Provo I was an outcast I was culture shocked you're a white man that lived in Ethiopia and you came here when you were seven you came here in first grade right like you weren't culture shock you were not an outcast you might have there might have been a culture shock there might have been a culture shock but they they didn't culturally notice no right so that's how he kicked it off in the news he whispered in my ear he said he said he said never stop speaking up become a politician if you don't get your hot breath down my ear don't play with me yeah you get a lot so we're not that fond of bread not my favorite for obvious and he also said I'm going to jump back to our story in a second but he also said um if you ever see me in public say hi you know how many times he's walked past me and ignored us he ignored us all on campus countless times and you I'm stop being a bully okay I'mma stop anyways one last thing one yeah you go I had some jokes I'm G hold him back in addition to that he um in that conversation we said you know it's it's good that you apologize on Twitter it's good that you did that but we told him you need to apologize to the people that you hurt but real apology need to make that apology public because we told him you know the problem with this situation is that there are so many members of the church who don't see a problem with what you said who think that that's okay and you've said this many times before meaning that you didn't see a problem with it until now and you need to do your part in correcting that and literally the exact the response that they told us was we can't do that we have to ask permission and so I said so just to make sure you're telling me that you have to ask permission to repent for a mistake that you made and like well we have to ask for permission he was like the church leaders don't want me to keep talking basic keep saying anything yeah and so he never made that that apology or never made that correction in stating why the things that he said were incorrect or why they were harmful um and he never apologized to the specific populations that he harmed because he said things about a lot of different groups of people you know um I think it was book away too so yeah but that was kind of my my breaking point was hearing that like you need permission to repent from the church leaders you can't just if you make a mistake you can't just own up to that I was like these people don't care at all at all They Don't Care About Us at all they care about their image they care about what looks good what sounds good they don't actually care about the people in this you know at least not the people of color in this church yeah and so you know that was that meeting was like the the breaking point for sure and two is like so prior to that back to like like the story too so that's Brad will so prior to that he um reported to the administration that we intimidated him oh yeah that like we basically bullied and intimidated him and made him fear for his life um so this is the student he said it too oh bread will cook okay I don't remember yeah yeah yeah yeah so they that's kind of why it even got worse so a student said we intim that black mines who had zero effort into what actually happened that black mines intimidated and threatened him for his life black mines did nothing nobody intimidated him more threatened his life but and he said that we did and um and like I said you know we've moved on like it's it's that was two years ago right we grown since then so it's not it's it really doesn't matter but what does matter though is that like five of us were on the chopping block to get expelled from the school and coupling both Brad willox and this individual um they had a meeting about whether they should kick us out or not to set an example and Nate's name was on the list Rachel's name was on the list Rachel's brother's name was on the list and I think two other people that names like nobody would know so it doesn't matter and um these people were like facing real like Nate and Rachel were graduating in two months and they're on the chopping block because people are talking about us and um Brad wox called us a militant group is what he called thish excuse me and so yeah TR on The Chopping Block you know about to get expelled luckily we had somebody who spoke in our behalf a black woman a black woman on our behalf in helped us not get helped half of us not get kicked out of school um and that was three week that was 11 days into black mines um right so it started off started off strong and they never made any public comments either no this was all behind the SC the only reason we knew about it was because that person was there and cuz she had called me and was like she called all of us and was like yo um y'all need to be ready and we was ready and so we almost got kicked out well someone get kicked out and um by one month we had 100,000 followers um it was a crazy time of life truly and by two months we had 400,000 by 3 3 months we had 700,000 it was wild um and I didn't we didn't really know like how to we didn't know what we were doing like truth be told none of us had really done anything on the internet for real before like it just happened and it was just happening and it was cool like we were enjoying it like we were averaging it was crazy cuz we were ing like 30 million views a week on Tik Tok in were you able to monetize you don't have to answer that if you don't want to not at the time no cuz they didn't have like they didn't have a program and um they did biggest robbery we making six figures if we had been a year later yeah we would have made so much money oh my you did the math didn't you I did yeah we would have made like before before you say it let me give them so the amount of money that we made that Tik Tok paid us for all of the views that we got from for the year 2020 or for the year 2022 they sent us the money I think I think I had like sent it out maybe halfway through 2023 so for 18 months we made $1,300 on Tik Tok and that was like 250 million views and then they changed the creative program and now everybody gets paid but yeah if we would have done it it' have been like $20,000 a week MH yeah for like three months straight yeah yeah yeah I've been cool which cool you know wasn't meant to be though you know and it's honestly I'm not mad about it like I'm grateful it's a passion project like we got incredible opportunities and like incredible we got to go to Smith College University of Michigan being able to go back to my home state and speak at a university there like I'm made that's Michigan is basically an ivy league university and being able to go back that was very full circle for me so inred a lot of rewarding experiences absolutely wasn't about the money ever cuz we could have made money we turned down some deals we turned down a lot of deals trying to be trying to be in in integrous is that a word trying to have integrity yeah and um so it just went crazy honestly and we didn't know what we were doing but we just did what we could and um eventually it was just let me think and then um Rachel and Nate graduated we kept going for the next year the next year honest honestly the next year was not too eventful either so we can we'll move though no um I'll just say like I always try to because of all I've you know been through in my own weird world and because I've seen people like Sam young and Bill reel and Kate Kelly and you know so many people become collateral damage not to me mention the September 6 like it takes a lot out of people again like I said before but as I was watching this happen um I was really torn because I'm like man BYU Church Morman Church you kick these people out of school because they'll become they become National celebrities they'll become Heroes and but then that was always checked by like no but these are real people and these are you know that's going to cause a lot of stress and that may affect their education and employability and probably family relationships but I was really on that fence wanting y'all to be safe and just like daring the church to pull that trigger you know what's funny I was on the same P to I remember when we got that call I was like they better I hope they do I was like like har call us now show like for real was ready no it's so funny cuz the whole time I was like if they kick us out like do it like do it bro I we got this platform we'll talk about it like BYU you'll be no more like I don't know you know what I mean like it that's so funny that you thought the same I was like honestly like and that's how I've been like the last like two years when especially when I was at BYU by myself I was like at this point if you kick me out like this is hurting you you want me gone and you want me to leave with my diploma cuz like you don't like us you don't want us to keep talking you're you're honestly scared of us cuz they said it in their Admissions and stuff like they've had meetings about us countless times and so it's like you don't you obviously don't want us to be here and you don't want to be students but you definitely don't want to kick us out because that the backlash would be horrendous horrendous but funny I even had the um the legal counsel for BYU kind of like gently you know and he's a he's a very man we have a good relationship and so no ill feelings but he you know I think so maybe somebody but probably pressured him a little bit too cuz he's like hey you guys should you know review the BYU media policy just look over that and let me know what you think and I was like okay we'll look over it and we and we looked over it we looked over it you know we you know we made it work we you know did our best to to follow the rules while also being respectful of you know what we need to communicate but yeah well I I remember a new wave of drama when the when BYU had some change their Poli y about like recording things on campus yeah wasn't that a thing yeah they changed it where you couldn't record if you monetized and like by ad Revenue which did not fall upon us and we weren't making any money so and it wasn't added revenue and um they are also trying to change the rules again and this is from a little whistleblower my my own and they basically told me that they're the they sent me the whole sheet actually and they're trying to change the policy for this next year the next year they're trying to change it where um what month is it April right so in Fall they're trying to make it where they're going to ban interview style Tik toks at BYU the black men rule like like interview style Tik toks is crazy BYU Banning that like also the amount of Tik tokers at BYU is baffling yeah like if you look BYU Tik Tok there's like six of them like with without us you know what I mean like lots of different and I can name them like I I I watch them like they're interesting I like interview style Tik toks but it's like if BYU bans inter interview style Tik toks first off I want to see all of them like hell accountable no right cuz that's what I always said like you're not going to kick me off you're not going to stop me from doing Tik toks until until you stop everybody from doing Tik to cuz I'm not stopping till they stop and when they stop sure I'll stop but until then here I am yeah okay so they made those changes but it didn't affect you so you were able to keep going okay yeah they didn't and you know that's what led to like last year when everything happened with that student following me and the professor yelling at me and stuff yeah tell I was that was going to be my next question so cuz I was terrified and it seemed like that was really traumatizing so tell us if you don't mind CRA yeah yeah basically I went you know doing my thing went to go interview and when I was interviewing you're on campus interviewing students walking by sorry just giving no for sure for sure to those who don't know and um I there was a student watching me and my interviewer me and my cameraman and I noticed it people watch me a lot though like I'm not too like people stare at me because they hate me some people like like to watch interviews cuz they're fans like you kind of get a mixed bag of like who's watching and why they're watching and nor can pick up on their body language this person didn't look very happy and I was like weird whatever I don't have the energy like I'm not going to focus on you I'm doing my job like I'm going make some Tik toks and I'm going to leave campus and actually had a class after matter of fact so I was going to interview and then go to class and I was interviewing dude was staring I was like that's weird let's see if I can even recall this in a perfect order of events he's still staring I'm mid mid interiew Karen strange I saw her like a month or two ago who that who's that that's the name of the professor the well she realized she she's a faculty member she ain't nobody she don't she has like she's like a like not that secretary is nothing like but she's not like a professor Karen strange though so you had no authority to be no author yeah and she's genuinely like I hate to say it she's nobody on campus and she has zero power she walked up to me yelling you can't interview here are you even a student first off I don't respond to yelling I'm a grown man you're a grown woman it's this weird thing that we call communication and we should learn how to do it you're not going to yell at me and um she's yelling and she was like you can't be here yes I can you're not a student yes I am like I hate to like be so blatant but like everything you're saying is misinformed and ignorant and she's just yelling at me I'mma call the police go ahead Karen like go do you bro I'm going interview is her name actually Karen her name is literally Karen strange Karen her god-given name there's a God there in this moment there is because strange had no better name Karen an she strange um so oh Karen so she leaves goes to get the police dude she tells him she tells the kid the BYU student to follow me until like basically stopped me to be Superman I had to realize that I'm one of the most hated people on this campus at this point that I'm also black and they would kick me out for anything so it's not like I could physically get in altercation because I know my I would suffer more than the other person because one I'm going to win two I'm black three I am hated already like they're going to they wanted any reason to kick me out and he's following me he's interrupting all of my camera he walking in front of the camera walking in front of the camera standing in front of my camera man of this ton of it and he was touching my cameraman just like all this stuff and I was like I had to mentally with like withhold myself because it's like when you I felt trapped like I felt unable to do anything because I had to consider the consequences for myself like I remember people were like why don't you just beat him up and what go to prison like get kicked out ofo doesn't matter I'm going to lose this like I might win the fight but I'm going to lose the F excuse me I'm going to lose the war like BYU hates me the people on the school hate me like I'm not going to win I know I won't and i' would have been the first to fight like I would have hit first you know and anyways so I had to do nothing besides keep going because what I didn't know as somebody who likes to make Tik toks is I'mma make Tik toks with him in it first off I don't need his consent that's not how this camera the camera laws work at the state so I didn't need just cons and if you're going to be in my camera you might as well be in a in a Tik Tok so I just kept making Tik toks about it made Tik toks whatever obviously the whole thing went down I left pretty quickly after cuz I was just like flustered I was like man like F this school like I never liked the school for real like you didn't go to class I didn't go to class I didn't go to class basically for the rest of the semester for real barely graduated but I went back like I was like man like this is crazy like what is like cuz we've had people hate us but it's like why are you harassing me for real though and like why is a professor yelling at me and why am I so stuck knowing that BYU will pin anything on me that I can't do anything you know what I mean um and as the days went on I started to then I realized that so I started to like receive death threats after this so my roommate at the time his cousin was in the is in the military and his cousin was saying that there's there was people in the military like basically digging around to find my address so they obviously could come to my house and somebody emailed us a Manifesto that was weird some email us Manifesto another whoever it was called and like left a voicemail a white Mormon Manifesto what was the manifesto it was one of those like oh so you think you're the Big Man on campus now you think you can do this and just get away with it well fine it was something like that like some you know self-important person who was like oh well you think you can just do this well fine you know like come fight me anytime like that said ruffle feathers something let me is because then I'm pretty sure I think it is cuz then when they called me and left a voicemail they were like you ruffled the wrong feathers first off you're not going to scare me with calling saying I ruffle feathers like like let's be just honest like ruffling feathers is not scary to me but I also know that those words not going to be scary but also like somebody in the military is digging for my address my roommate's cousin was like y'all need to have guns at the house or something to be safe and there was a truck around my house like a lot that was like looking around and stuff a lot and so it was like all of this stuff so I kind of like went in Mya for a few weeks because it's like if there's people out there that want to kill me I think I might just stay in the house because obviously y'all trying to kill me I'm cool over here and um yeah it was after that like I didn't really have a lot of motivation for to go to BYU and finish like I I almost thought about dropping out September I graduated in December I thought about dropping out of September um because I was just like this is not like I thought about dropping out a lot of times and transferring and I was like but it's like is it worth it then I was like I didn't do all this work for no reason you know what I mean like i' been here for three years I CU I graduated in three and a half so I was like I've been here for three years and um dropping out now would be just dumb like like it might be nice for your mental health but it like I did all these like all these like credits D anyways there's so many BYU classes that don't transfer to real leg universities so it could set you back a year or two right financially and TimeWise right and I didn't have time or Finance yeah and so um yeah so I you know finished it out and I barely graduated likely I did graduate and um yeah I went MIA basically for the rest of the semester and it's a lot nicer now living in Salt Lake CU I don't have to you know be down there anymore so yeah find is Salt Lake materially better than Utah County slpro yeah it's nice it's better it's definitely better Utah County Provo is crazy I don't like that place yeah so I'm happy to be anywhere else yeah but also not Dallas not Houston not some other state it's never Texas I love Texas I'm biased there's a lot of bad places at Texas though I will say I have somebody doing interviews at Texas Tech right now and the answers are just as bad as BYU and that's like why I doubled down so many times that it wasn't BYU it wasn't Mormonism it was problematic thinking like I rais I was raised in Texas I know what a lot of radical conservative people believe in and honestly the difference between a big one of the big differences between people in Texas and people here that are like conservative and like racist is people here use God and they try to act nice people in Texas they don't care if you think they're nice or not like if they don't like you they don't like you like just straight up and they don't use God they use you're just not they don't like you like you're black they don't like you like you know what I mean like it's different and in a way you kind of like are grateful for that frankness I to say I prefer that cuz at least I know yeah at least I know I have to worry about if you're going to stab me in the back or if you're like secretly going to call the police on me yeah you know but I think you're my friend at least I know you don't like me exact I prefer that Texas are just wolf you thought there would be wolves and sheep's clothing like my mission president said and so I've wondered what kept y'all here I'm glad y'all are here but I've wondered what's kept both of y'all here when you might want to just flee to State forever you know yeah I am planning on moving actually in a x amount of time unsure exactly when and I'm not going to tell the world when I'm going to move but like I will be moving actually back to Dallas as the plan okay yeah okay my time in Utah is also coming to an end soon God damn it sorry I'm not supposed to SAR got that yall are both freaking leaving yeah I'll come back every once in a while is Rachel leaving too I don't know potentially I don't know we need man anyway no it's I'm not putting that on you I'm sorry no heard you though yeah I would love to stay I just think my time I think I've done what I've needed to do in the time that I've been here maybe I'll come back later maybe I won't but I think I've served the fullness of my purpose and I don't think there's anything else that wait are you saying you fulfilled the measure of your creation is that what you're saying yes fully I've reached Perfection um that's a temple line translated being right here guys and I know I just think I've done what I needed like I've been called to do here and I think like I think my this like I I feel like I have less I just think it's time yeah I think that's a good way to put it okay and what are you doing for work I'm just curious full-time content creator yeah all I do is black mines okay cool cool it's fun and are you Nate are you jealous that he gets to do it fulltime and you got to go work for where you work am I jealous no no no I um I'm super proud of Sebastian because you know we've all like black mines has been something that we've all put into you know at different times and in different ways and um yeah the work that Sebastian has put in lately like gaining all of our followers on YouTube and Instagram and things like that it's been huge for black menaces and so yeah I'm just happy to be able to help out um with the podcast and doing other things where I can and you know if I can interview in a video being able to do that too I love that but um I do wish that like we had known what we were doing at the beginning you know U because if we had done that we would have been able to build this into something even bigger and better than it is now um you would been able to monetize it if oh absolutely yeah if we had known what we were doing or if we' had somebody to just be like hey you know here's some tips because you know now we know but now it's too late you know our initial you know surge of you know you don't just gain 700,000 followers in three or four months on a regular basis that's a once in a lifetime opportunity maybe it can happen again but I still have never had that happen yeah exactly right you know it's such it's such a r happen years and I'm at like 250,000 yeah you know it's it's it brought incredible opportunities but like because we were so un not unprepared I mean we couldn't have really prepared for that but just because like we didn't know what to do and we didn't have anyone to kind of guide us we weren't able to take full advantage of that and maybe not have even an even greater impact so like that's probably like my only wish there not a regret because I we still did amazing things and we got to do a lot you know so that's probably like my only wish is that it could have been something even bigger and better yeah but we got the future for that like things coming okay yeah working do you have plans of what you want to do yeah I can tell you so yeah yeah so um right now we're having um calling them black Menace ambassadors there's like singular individual people that will go on their own campus and interview so had just started with Texas Tech honestly there's a lot of people from across the country I have people that'll be starting at Purdue um at another Texas school to Texas A&M someplace in California in New York work here soon in HBCU actually um Swan um that's probably news to you I didn't tell you that when I don't know that one that's cool um so a lot of different places um that I'm going to have those do and then we're also um I'm going to start doing some like better YouTube stuff so I'm uh just created a good count content calendar for it rather um we'll be uploading 5 days a week and um some days it'll be me just like answering a question and talking sometimes it'll be me like breaking down interviews um other times I'm going to start a new segment where I get like two camping chairs and I sit in one and I people pull people like random people and have them sit down we have like a real functional conversation for longer than an interview like longer than you know a Tik Tok interview and then what I'm really excited for is we're going to be doing like YouTube Productions is what I'm calling because I have nothing better words and basically I'm GNA like kind of similar to like Jubilee and cut and stuff like where people are going to come and like talk to each other about like real issues and find some understanding within each other and I'll have times when I do longer interviews too but yeah beautiful yeah so subscribe to the YouTube cuz why not black menaces yeah black menaces okay yeah same everywhere love it um how would y'all feel if we did a quick lightning round cool all right so what you got I'm going to just bring up some various aspects of Mormonism or Christianity and just have you free associate Comet okay you go you go first Sebastian then Nate you can fill in after is that all right is that right y let's do it okay all right let's start let's start with uh the Bible and and Genesis uh curse of cane yeah you know what do you what do you guys think of that I just think you know racist people create racist ideologies um I don't honestly I don't have too much to say besides like clowns do clown work you know what I mean like it's just n to me it's nonsense and if you believe in it I mean sucks for you I guess yeah I don't have nothing crazy to say about it yeah Nate uh the curse of cane I think it's um it's a it's a cute justification but it definitely it's uh it's not spiritual in nature it didn't start with Mormons right no it definitely start did not start with the Mormons it was a justification for slavery and so and continuing with that I think that the Bible has been used to justify a lot of atrocities over the years and you know it's also been used for a lot of good the Bible um has a lot of good things in there but uh the thing about good things is that you can find them just about anywhere same with bad things um and so you know while there's a lot of good things in the Bible there's also a lot of things that need to be taken with a grain of salt so you can learn from them but taking everything in the Bible or taking everything thing you know every story as 100% truth leave you with some interesting mental conundrums so I also want to say I was I when I said my whole comment was about the curs of cane nothing about the Bible in of itself so when I said clowns do clown work I was referring to the curs of cane not the work of the Bible that'd be crazy to say about somebody's religion that's what I was referring to just wanted to preface again okay okay got it okay good disclaimer yeah because I heard you comment I was like people might think I was talk about the whole Bible and I I don't like I don't like to talk about people's sacred life too negatively what about the Bible either failing to condemn slavery or even condoning slavery yeah um that's why also like I agree with Nate's statement of like there's some things you have to take with a gra of all and I think it also is evident of some of the individuality that is within the Bible that doesn't inherently in my opinion would come from God um cuz like yeah it says like slaves need to mind their masters or something M and T like I think that shows that might be New Testament I think that is New Testament and I I think that is evident of the humanness of the Bible in some places in the same way like in Corinthians how it talks about women or like how it says certain things to me is not God can't be godp speaking if it's the a god that is good it can't be that one speaking so all right white jesus or brown Jesus it's a good question um if if Jesus Brown Jesus probably I would agree white jesus makes no sense G it just is like categoric it's just it just doesn't make sense like it's not logical if you put all the facts together it just there's no other conclusion you but I guess if you're you know the ois church and you want to apparently all the prophets like all the book [ __ ] prophets were white and then everybody else was just you know right native and I remember when I was good times and like The Jeffersons these were shows I watched when I was growing up and I remember the first time I saw Black Jesus like on the wall I'm like that's Scandal what how was that I remember there was a time I had posted a picture it was like somebody had done like some illustrations of biblical characters as black people oh and someone did a an illustration of Jesus and he was like Jesus with like long long locks and I posted that picture and this old woman from my mission was like how dare you impersonate My Savior she thought it was me it looked nothing like me you can still go back my face crazy she deleted the comment but you can still go back in my Facebook and look at the picture and see that it had nothing this is before I had locks at all um and this this man he had locks like down to his you know like down to his knees but she thought that I was impersonating Jesus and that it was disrespectful for you know for there to be a black Jesus and I was just like okay so you you're telling me that Jesus is white and anything other than that is sacrilegious that's kind of crazytivity at all right and then also let's throw a macroaggression in there because you assume that this completely different black man is also me it was it was a bizarre I ended up like talking to her privately on the side and was like Hey so this is what you said and this is why this is wrong you know she was very sweet about it but that situation too reminded me yeah it can only be brown Jesus okay yeah okay uh so Layon night said Nephi in the Book of Mormon dark skinn curse in the Book of Mormon yeah honestly I've seen so I've heard so many justifications for this um it's actually crazy but I think I think I think we should take words with what they are like I think people to be apologetic of the Book of Mormon and Mormonism try to write around what it means and insert their own words and just do what with what do with that phrase as they can but it's just like take words with what it is like it says what it says like at the end of the day in my opinion cuz it doesn't say skin of brownness it doesn't say skin of brownness it doesn't say it doesn't say count countenance of brownness it doesn't say you know it doesn't say tattoos of brownness it doesn't say any of that no it says skin of Blackness you know what I mean like it says skin of Blackness and that d d like also like loads like we made we we cursed them with the skin of Blackness so that they would be loathsome like gross or detestable to the white Nephites right yeah and it's like I feel like we should take that at face value like I it was written like that it meant what it meant and you can't change the meaning of words just because you are like oh man it's not racist anymore yeah but if 100 years ago they said something else like interpretations can only change so many times because even in the 2020 one come follow me of Book of Mormon it said in the come follow me that it was referring to race and like they were cursed with a skin skin of Blackness not countenance or whatever it's not a metaphor it's not a metaphor it's real life that's well it's not real life but that's what they meant it be yeah I would say for me I love I I love the Book of Mormon like the stories in it is just fun they're enjoyable but they don't make any sense when you like add everything up like I remember as a kid I loved reading the Tennis Shoes Among the Knight series if you ever read that chrisinger if you still this I'm if you see this I'm still waiting on book 13 and I will read it even though I don't mess with the church anymore um wow well so there's is a series called Tennis Shoes Among the Nephites and it's was about like time travel back in the Nephi times I used to love that I read that series all the time I was a huge nerd but he's been writing it since like 1997 and he still hasn't come out with the last book I don't know I may never read it but um maybe he lost his testimony maybe so he could have but like I say that to say like I love those stories and I I want them to be true but like in actually doing the research and like going and like compare like looking at all the facts watching those LDS discussions episodes the facts just don't mesh with the stories and it just doesn't make sense and also I've always wondered where it happened none like there's no geographical location like based on the descriptions in the Book of Mormon there's no geographical location in North America that would match so those things make it to where it's like I want to believe in it but until I see facts that that cor corroborate I can't yeah um all right do you remember learning about Elijah Abel and Jane Manning James and the fact that Joseph Smith gave the priesthood to black people before Brigham Young took it away do you remember so thoughts on Elijah Abel I think it's cool um I think people prop up Joseph Smith to be some activist um and like to not forget that abolitionists still didn't think black people were equal Abraham Lincoln didn't think black people were equal he just didn't think they should be enslaves like being an abolitionist is nothing crazy giving a black person the priesthood is also not that crazy to me like you did the bare bare bare minimum and obviously like he couldn't have been too anti-racist because the moment Joseph Smith disappeared the church only got worse you know what I mean like yeah you gave the preset to what one or two black people mhm and then you're F like the person that suceeded you canceled it so it's like obviously you didn't put you didn't make it like very clear to everybody else um that's excellent point and also like who cares you gave one two black people the priesthood congratulations you also saw didn't they like send black people like enslaved to Utah First to prepare land and stuff like like y'all aren't y'all didn't do anything for black people though like oh you're an abolitionist that's why they hated Mormons no they hated y'all because well a lot of other reasons and it wasn't because you loved black people like that's not that wasn't it fact Checker Julia is telling me that Joseph Smith didn't authorize Elijah Abel getting the priesthood oh word but may maybe someone did it without his permission or okay Was Elijah or I think Elijah Elijah abble was ordained after Joseph Smith's death wasn't he he wasn't Ed I thought it was while Joseph Smith was alive so okay I don't know y'all would know better than me I know he served as a missionary but I don't when I had first learned about it it was like a great comfort to me Julie is saying it was while Joseph was alive okay but I think she's saying Joseph didn't approve it but it sounds like he didn't go against itend it is what I'm hearing but anyway good to know I'm not with Julia that's one thing shout out fact Che fact Checker Julia okay and people want to say I guess in his Missouri years or maybe his Illinois years he was an abolitionist sure but the thing that I think people don't also know is that he flip-flopped based on where he was and what he thought would be popular sounds like wherever he was living and the reason he chose it wasn't it because it was part of his presidential campaign like that was part of his platform that he ran on yeah and if you're from the north maybe that's what you do I don't know I we don't we're not you're not giving them a lot of credit no like I don't give abolitionists a ton of credit in the first place like yeah abolitionist abolitionism is was cool was great I'm grateful however like I said like Abraham Lincoln he thought the Sol he never thought racism would be solved he thought black people should be sent back to Africa yeah and he never thought black people should ever be on the same standard or life of white people so you expect me to think that Joseph Smith was better than Abraham Lincoln there's there's no way that you had a more Progressive view than at that time like the most Progressive president of the United States yeah just there's no way yeah 40 years before especially not coming from rural New York rural New York in the 1800s I mean serious maybe not all right BR young that man is rotten in hell if Bri young is yeah he definitely is if I'm going to hell me like there's no way he made any heaven in any religion um I mean he's horrible like why he's a horrible human I think I also think he had shortman syndrome that's also like my theory on him like I think he was angry because like I don't know maybe maybe that's crazy to say but I I've heard of s maner before and I anyways that's not the point I'm going on a tangent that doesn't matter the point is Brigham Young was a horrible human being oh yeah he was just blatantly racist he was blatantly sexist and that's the way he treated people probably transphobic and homophobic too I mean like the things he said and the also like to go and declare black people out excl exclude black people from the priesthood in a random conference because because like of governmental pressure is like baffling like you you had a such a lack you lacked such principles that on a whim as it seemed it could not have been on a whim but on a whim you excluded black people from the only way of Salvation in the Mormon church like to me like you can't be a principled person um also like wasn't it wasn't it during his time that he sealed Jane Manning James or Jane Manning what's what's her last name j James oh okay I was right it sounded weird um to Joseph Smith as well like was that not his time period that was might have been yeah Julius so so I yeah I just think like his racism set a precedent that destroyed in part the Mormon church I mean if you when it comes to briam Young if you take the church's own standard like the standard that they apply to missionaries where oh if you don't go back out on your mission then there's all these Souls that you're impacting or you know you promised these souls in the premortal existence that you would come and find them and teach them the gospel so if you take that standard and you apply that to Brigham Young and you think about all of the souls that he um prevented from receiving salvation over that time period right that in itself would exclude him from the blessings of the Celestial Kingdom right but according to LDS Doctrine BR Ming is going to be up there with Joseph Smith chilling I don't want to be a part of he become a god he's going to become a God right and be able to kind of you know perpetuate this uh existence and with 50 plus wives yeah and that's you know with 50 plus wives and I guess he's going to be the Old Testament type of Gody I don't maybe you only get to be a new testament God once you you've been around for a few billion Millennia I don't know but like I can't imagine bam young being anything except like you know Old Testament God fire and brimstone but I don't want to be a part I say all that to say I don't want to be a part of any uh you know Kingdom of Heaven where Brigham Young is going to receive the same or like greater rewards than I would in that place and I have not had nearly the amount like I have not um caused the amount of harm that he caused to Soul over that time per if you just apply that one metric not even anything else yeah so yeah and for those who don't know briam young literally called black people like filthy and loathsome he taught that like didn't he teach if you have sex with the black person you should be killed on the spot you should be killed on the spot right lot of we compared his quotes in one of our interviews to Robert E Lee there's an every gu Robert E Lee weird enough yeah really hateful disgusting racist some of the worst I've ever heard yeah yeah and yeah and isn't a weird like talk about taking down Confederate statues or whatever like I can understand I I can't I can't say I get or sympathize with both sides of any argument but the fact that his name is still on that on those universities is wild little bit is it wild it's absolutely wild not just him I did a I made a Tik Tok of me like dancing in front of all the buildings with like racist names the quotes that they they say Prett a good you share that with Julia it yeah it's insane like the like Ernest Wilkinson was crazy yeah they all were horrible like there's not there's basically not a single person with a that's a good human that is named after like what's his name um I forgot honestly I don't remember the names that's good it's called healing that is heing cuz they said a lot of stuff um yeah like there was the one I think it was Wilkinson or maybe it was Peterson um Mary Peterson was like we have no problem with the Negro they can have a Cadillac if they want to just you know don't don't mix it with us like that kind of stuff right and the same like all the prophets in like the 50s and 60s were like the Silver Rights Movement are communist like we hate them like okay so you hate equality like just say it do you know just be honest with it yeah yeah yeah okay uh really quickly so Bruce armaki Mormon Doctrine yeah the teaching that black people are black people because in the pre-existence they were fence sitters yeah which was in the book Mormon Doctrine published by the church or at least I mean it's bookcraft but it was promoted by the church for decades and decades and decades thoughts on bris makoni fence sitter Doctrine I hope he's in hell with BR bam young um also I don't hope he's in hell I just think he might be there um I don't hope for anybody go to hell if hell is real thatd be terrible I guess but that's true no but I would imagine he's probably not in heaven with god um yeah I just think like I think he like n was kind of saying to his like Bruce armari is responsible for the indoctrination of evil indoctrinate indoctrination of millions of people and like for Bruce alari to have been leading the church the 50s 60s and people on my mission in 2019 to be reading his book telling me like falsities that he spoke I think that shows how much power like people have especially him and his ideologies had and that's the reason that like those are the reason that people don't like Mormonism like because you have people like Bruce armaki and you don't say anything against him you know like y'all like a lot of Mormon people look away from all of the statements and all these things like oh a sign of the times yeah but like God shouldn't be a sign at the times you know what I mean and if God's leading these people they should not be a sign at the times either I think if your legacy is if your legacy is one of like hate or one of um spreading misinformation and just um saying and doing things that cause people to feel hate or discrimination or Prejudice I think if that's your legacy you're not worth my time and so Bruce AR makoni is not someone who's worth my consideration anymore I me someone that I certainly listen to many of his talks I had a companion Who Loved listening to Bruce armak used to listen to him all the time I've heard all of his best talks and that same companion also called me a fence sitter um you know but you know experiencing all of that having worked through that Bruce armakan is um yeah I don't wish for him to go to hell but I would assume that he is there and that's where he should be what about the general notion of Mormon prophets and apostles as special Witnesses of Christ and mouthpieces of Christ and uh you know having the gift of discernment and prophetic inspiration gift of Prophecy I think their gift of Prophecy is that they're like rich businessmen who like understand business strategy or like they're intelligent men like it it like yeah well sorry not the intelligent but like the the rich businessman part they are intelligent they like you know like Russ Nelson was a doctor he was a surgeon like leading in his field I don't think I think like I think about myself Mission I'm not saying I'm going to POS but I'm saying is I had the spirit of Prophecy too and I just created strategy to like optimize Mission results and like when I like on my mission we were also like um what's it called a pilot mission for something like for like a strategy thing and so like when I was watching that be implemented it didn't feel like oh it's like God like they use God so because it's God's Church anything that promotes God's Church in any way is God speaking to them in the spirit of Prophecy so if you buy a mall and now you have extra few billions to help people even if you don't help people that's for God that's good or if you like get more people baptized for God even if they leave the church immediately like but to me it's like it's not Spirit of Prophecy it's just men in a group trying to figure out how to spread a church like I don't believe that they've seen God they might have seen something but it's not God like I don't know what they're doing up there but I I I think they're probably just all they either are narcissistic human beings who are able to lie to people or they truly believe in what they're doing and they truly believe that God's leading them and they're so enveloped in this this religion that no other possibility can be true and also when all your bills are paid by the church why would anything else be true for me I my my my viewpoint is a little bit different I think that they are regular people with I think misguided Notions of their abilities I think um I think that I I do think that for the most part I think that they're they generally try to be good people I think that there's a few of them who maybe aren't the best you know um like your well I won't name any specific names but um I I do think that they are just regular men um trying to do the best that they can uh but the problem is that a lot of times God is being used to like justify personal beliefs personal opinions personal feelings and they're using those things um you know to kind of push certain agendas over the pulpit like You' talked about um kind of like you know it's not uh confirmed but you've talked about on previous Mormon stories episodes John where you've mentioned um you know kind of like maybe there's a little bit of beef or a little bit of resentment between uh Elder Nelson or president Nelson and uh president Monson or maybe like because let me see was there a clip where you like showed president Monson like shooting down the um the calling members of the church not calling their members of the church Mormons you know what I'm talking about yeah there was like a where he like ridiculed Hy that's what it was was okay calling people more so was Monson made in in general conference or something like that and then once Hinkley died and then once president Monson died and then president Nelson came and then he implements that policy you know 20 30 years later and it's like that was just something that you just wanted to do that was just maybe like a bone that you had to pick yeah and once you got your opportunity to do that you implemented that yeah but you said it was God's idea right because like no you've had that idea for 30 40 years you know so I think that they're just good men trying to do regular things but maybe they have a little bit too much for their own good there's this uh I I referenced the book more musical previously there's this line in the song I Believe In it's like it's like the apex of the third chorus it's like and I believe that in 1978 God changed his mind about black people like um like how how do Mormons and I you know I I know the answer to this and I don't mean any disrespect it Les my mind that after polygamy has come and gone the church fought the Equal Rights Amendment to keep women from just being declared equal the church fought the Civil Rights Movement the church clearly fought the lgbtq movement it's like they've been 30 years behind predictably on pretty much every major civil rights they haven't won at all they've never won they haven't won a single battle and you think God would be on the winning side yeah you think yeah but also just their own Doctrine like like they had to get rid they had to stop printing Bruce maki's book they had to you know they they they've had uh they've had official decorations where they're renouncing polygamy after they taught that it was required for salvation like there's so much conference talks conf or even even the the November policy in 2015 the exclusion policy four years later they were send it isn't it mind-blowing that Mormons still believe that their prophets are by God after they've had to eat crow decade after decade after decade and they've been on the wrong side of every major civil rights thing since the beginning isn't it I mean I I'm this I don't even know it's not a question but yeah no I mean it is crazy I think what's like partially craziest about it too is that um people love to like people that in defense of the church love to be like oh it was a policy where in the time when the policy was stated it was stated as a Doctrine for sure as a revelation and so it's like we people in the church love to 60 years later be like oh that was a policy decision no that was Doctrine actually to them and they stated as Doctrine black people being cursed was Doctrine pgy was Doctrine like these things are Doctrine yeah and just because the church loves to change its mind up and God loves to be like oh left here right there and then switch up like that doesn't mean something's not Doctrine to the church just because you call it a policy now doesn't mean it was actually ever a policy something sure are policies but most of the big changes in the church have never been policies until they made it a policy because they wanted to change mhm I'll would say for me I don't find it mind-blowing or surprising um because I was there I understand why me too you believe the way that you think I understand why this argument that I'm making to you is going right over your head because you're literally not letting it in you know like when you When You Believe in the church so strongly when you believe in in prophets and apostles and in the Book of Mormon like you literally are from an early age you are bred and conditioned with like automatic armor with automatic Shield to where like certain things just kind of bounce off and unless something significant happens to like shift um or make you uncomfortable enough to where you're willing to like let new ideas in those things are just going to continue to bounce off with you but now I'm looking back and I'm like how did I not catch this before or how did I not see this or why did I not see this inconsistency and I think oh I did see that I just ignored it and literally like that compartmentalizing we were talking about putting your doubts on the Shelf like I literally can recall specific times in my life where I had questions that I could not find the answers to and so I just gave up trying to answer that question you know because if you can't find the answer to the question how can you be happy or like how can you you know focus on the truthfulness of the Gospel if you're worried about that doubt so I just doubt that doubt right y um and so it doesn't surprise me that people feel that way or people see that because they're going to have that huge blind spot until some like you know major shift in their lives comes to make to make that change you know people don't generally tend to just you know wake up one morning and want to leave the church it usually is something that happens that causes them to think about something differently or that causes a shift in their thinking or their mindset that eventually creates that change people don't usually just change on their own it's usually you know there's usually a catalyst and so it doesn't surprise me that people still believe that because that's usually all that they've known or all that they've been taught and until you know you have that Catalyst nothing changes it does it makes it makes no sense that it makes all the sense in the world but it also makes no sense it makes no sense if you've never been there before but if you've been there you understand yeah and that it goes for any religion yeah you know all right I'll just skip to maybe one final one and then I just want to hear about your beliefs now just to end um the church so never Mormons the Mormon church is literally shrinking and dying for the most part in North America in Western Europe in developed Asia if it weren't for a slightly larger birth rate the Mormon Church would be in decline in the United States even in Utah it's shrinking in many counties they're closing Wards they're closing Stakes they're selling chapels um and if it weren't for the influx of people moving into Utah from other states potentially Utah would be in Decline Salt Lake's for sure in Decline like the mor church has in declined except in subsaharan Africa or black Africa where it's growing like gang Busters so as it's closing Wards and stakes and missions everywhere else it's offsetting that that shrinkage it's offsetting that decline with just crazy growth in subs subsaharan or black Africa it's like the church is going all in on Africa being its its future of growth and I'm wondering what your thoughts are on that honestly um I don't know I feel like it's not too surprising because the church will jump where people are willing to accept you know um and also like in Africa Christianity is Christianity is huge and Community is huge and like I think people in in Le in the less like less developed countries are also more willing to accept like religion and new religions I feel like um and are more tied to like religion in general like in when I was in the Dominican Republic everybody went to a church at least like there was like you couldn't just not go to church like it was not really a thing like I met one atheist my whole mission and so I feel like it's part like that's one part and I also think obviously there's a lot of like white saviorism there or with that and I think that can only happen so much because there also is a big push in Africa right right now in like some bigger countries that are to push out the United States completely um and they're really working hard to make the United States leave like in every way and they're like they're forcing United States to like close their military bases and everything and so I think that will only last so long until like they're they join together and kick out like all the Western influence um in all facets which I think could fall into this umbrella too okay okay so you're saying it's it might uh it might be a temporary growth potentially and if it is longer then I think the more they realize church history they're going to be like oh y'all just said black people were cool like 40 years ago so I think that only can last so long yeah I would say for me um man let me give you a second to think about it because I want to follow up so keep keep thinking because Sebastian like looping back to the beginning of your story yeah I'm sure your mom and maybe even your dad would say they've been benefited by being Mormon sure and you're you know graduated from a division one University and you know got a great education and like a lot of good things came from be a Mormon I know we T touched on this at the beginning but as you think about all these subaran Africans You could argue there's worse things than them joining the Mormon church and that maybe with Pathways or with the values or the morals or the community or the support from the church I could see both of you saying that's awesome like maybe Mormonism will help lift them and then maybe if it lifts them to a sufficient point they may graduate but maybe good that the church is there and maybe they'll do a lot of good for those subaran Africans are you there or you not there um partially I think it could material do materially do some good things um how however I think like the values of like white supremacy that it would instill and also like the rejection of culture that it would instill would create worse would perpetuate worse problems and the reason that Africa has been burdened up to this point is because like Western organizations and the Western world came to Africa with this idea of like oh but we can help you and we can make you better we can change your life for the better and I don't think that brings value larger than what self-sufficiency would bring as value because like sure say they do BYU Pathways and they then come to America how does that help them like how does that help their country how does it help the continent of Africa how does that like actually change where they're from because now they're in a like not that coming United States is bad but like now they're in the United States and like that's cool but it's like are what do they like if they come United States are not instilled in white Supremacy or like what is happening there so I think like yeah there might be some material benefit that I would never tell somebody that they shouldn't receive um but I also think like the larger grander scale problems that it could cause are more like large scale problems that are within the continent and within the countries that they will be coming from because the country as a whole will still be relying on an outside influence for its betterment rather than it causing its own betterment um and that's like the whole basis of the saviorism as um the saviorism I can give you what you need but you have to do it through me and without me you can't succeed and like in of itself that's problematic so yes but mostly no okay yeah all right Nate now now is your turn yeah I would say for me it it's is tough because um the the opportunities that the church provides to people in those areas um are amazing opportunities ones that they probably wouldn't get otherwise like the opportunity that I had to go to BYU um and get an education from a great school you know opportunity I might not have had otherwise um but the problem is like the motivation behind that um you know and from the church perspective the motivation is you know the salvation of souls right but if you look at it from a secular perspective perspective the reason that they're wanting to grow the church is so that they can have more people who are committed to the standards of the Gospel so that you know and one of the standards of the Gospel being committed to is paying tithing you pay your tithing the church is able to you know continue profiting off of that and they're able to continue expanding you know doing building churches here building temples there making these Productions you know paying for for you know these campaigns and that campaign and doing to this and that um and so because the motives um because the motives for for those things are designed more for like the the convenience and the profiteering of the church as opposed to like the betterment of that individual and the betterment of their Community I think that's where the issue comes in um because they're not trying to like improve the continent of Africa they're not trying to improve any specific country they're trying to improve the church and they're using Africa as a vehicle to do that um and so for that reason it's it's unfortunate because those opportunities I I don't want those opportunities to be taken away from those people I think that those opportunities are necessary but I also think that it it creates some other you know some other problems my experience with people from the continent of Africa or from different countries in Africa has been relatively limited most of the people that I've known have been people who um you know who are members of the church and came to BYU to be students a lot of the experiences that I've had is that a lot of those students tended to have negative viewpoints of myself or other black American students until they lived our experience here in the United States and I think a lot of that was shaped by um by the things that they were taught about black people within the church you know you taught that dark skin is a curse you taught that um you know all these different things and when they look at the status of black people within the church it's very very or black American people within the church excuse me is very very different from the status of African people within the church um when you look at how they're perceived by uh by by Church leadership and things like that nobody's ever talking about um you know some faithful member in in Detroit or Jackson Mississippi but they love to bring up you know when those African villagers threw away all their Idols into the waterfall or when you know those childlike Kenyan you know natives did this or did that you know like there's there's always you this Viewpoint of that so I think um those issues kind of like or those things that you see within like the small details that kind of like illuminates the bigger issue with going in and basically in a bishop RG in the Dominican and oversaw all of the finances of the church there is like they got money money what's crazy is they don't like people barely receive anything in these countries like like these people are impoverished right like I can speak of the Dominican in my personal experience an impoverished country impoverished people when I was there we had I had more money in my missionary bank account than the church chch account for that Ward right and when they went needing something first off you can only receive something from the church if you pay your tithing and you have to pay consistently so first off unless you're feeding the church money you can't receive anything back that's the first thing two is in these under like less developed countries and impoverished countries it's not like the church is sending money from headquarters over there like they're not getting extra money to even get a chapel you have to hit a specific Coda of people or you are in a house or you're in like a little makeshift chapel and so it's like you're not getting any extra resources from the church unless you're hitting a financial quota and if you don't meet that Financial quota there's no help and the only help you can get is from the people that are surrounding you so if the church in your look area doesn't have money maybe they can go to the stake and if the stake doesn't have money then you're out of luck like that is they you you ran your course and maybe you can go ahead of that like but it's not like these local churches are getting money from Utah HQ even though they have billions and billions of dollars it's not like they're just getting money that they can better people's life with but like when you're in America it feels like oh my gosh yeah you can but that's because you have more wealthy people surrounding you and so and it's the same like in our education system I'm not going to get into that but like if you have more wealthy people around you there's more money in the tax Pock and there's more money in the tithing pocket but when nobody has money the tithing pocket is pretty pretty shallow and so like I remember people coming up to us and asking us for money and we couldn't give them that much like we if we have 2,000 pesos we can't give you 2,000 pesos we can give you what 500 but that's not going to materially change your life in the Dominican because that's not even that much in the Dominican either and so it's like that's like so it's like yes like like financially the church is helpful but not if you don't have financially well-off people around you and in those country and in less developed un like impoverished countries you don't have it and so you're still stuck like I watch people prepare for the missions having to like take like two pairs of pants and one white shirt but it's like this church is a multi-billion dollar Corporation and you can't have pants or a t-shirt like that's crazy to me so anyways I don't know that that's why wow great answers there's so much I think about like like first of all you know why did the church not care about Subs Africa in the 70s or 60s or 50s like why are they doing it now there are reasons it's because the church is in Decline everywhere else it's it is a money opportunity because Africa is going to become very wealthy in the future its growth is crazy it's one of the only places in the world world where there's like real significant financial monetary growth so like it is a huge financial opportunity for the church and it's the only way they can offset the shrinkage in statistics so I guarantee you part of their motivation in expanding in Africa at the rate they are is to offset the decline of the church elsewhere which is a problem and then there's not informed consent it's not like they're telling all those Africans hey we weren't good with you 50 years ago we excluded you for 200 years they're not telling them that so they're all joining a church that's at its core racist but they they won't learn that until they're kind of hooked in yeah and then it's good for the church's image yeah because the church has been viewed as racist for so long it's been a laughing stock and so it's a way for us to say look we're look we were growing in Africa we love African people so there's a monetary incentive there's a statistical incentive there's a PR incentive and I'm sure also have love for all and and want to see good happen but it's it's so problematic so it'll be interesting to see how it plays out yeah yeah yeah all right well thanks for doing that lighting round let me just end uh so um so Sebastian to conclude like do you want to share where you are on just belief in God sure yeah I'm in a weird I'm like everywhere at at once um I'm like um it's interesting I I believe in God I don't NE I um it's kind of weird so like I believe that there's like a higher power for sure um I'm I'm a mix between agnosticism and Christianity in a weird mixture um there's a lot of things about Christianity I don't believe um which leads me to a weird mixture of the both I do believe though that there is like a god in general though um and I I assign Christianity to some in some regard to it because of like the symbol of Jesus and I feel some connection to like the symbol of Jesus and like this idea that like like just I mean we're raised in a Christian Society so it makes logical sense to feel like a connection to the symbol of Jesus as he has represented God to many people um and so I'm like in a weird mixture of like yes higher power sometimes that higher power might be Jesus but also a lot of things about the story of Jesus and everything that goes on in the Bible um contradict a lot of my own beliefs and I think are problematic U along with how religion and I don't get along either so um yeah weird mixture of both but yeah so you haven't rejected Christianity I have and then I kind of came back to it a little okay so you've you're kind of like Loosely Christian yeah so like for a while I was a split between like agnosticism and Atheism yeah um and then over time I grew more like well you know I just kind of like I just let myself process in whatever speed whatever way I felt was comfortable and um that's kind of what led me hear to more mixture of agnosticism and Christianity loose Christian okay and have you tried like any Christian churches here in Utah no just because they're religions basically yeah I I've thought I've thought about like I've watched some sermons like online and I thought about going to like some Churches here I just never did it and most of them are in the morning on a Sunday and like I said about me and Sun me and mornings don't really get along um and I just never I never had like the super like like the the super desire to do so and I think I will like probably eventually go to church maybe a little bit but um I don't think I'd ever be like a dieh hard Christian I just don't think I could fully do that and be true to myself um I think I could be loose Christian at most probably okay yeah um are you if where do you come down on like Joseph Smith now that you've had time to really look at him uh yeah I mean oh Joe I think he was a pretty I think I think he got lucky and accidentally created a billion dollar corporation like I think he was probably like I think if somebody in Mormonism was like potentially truly narcissistic and lied to everybody intentionally it was him and I think like I there's no way that Jose unless he was like on some crazy drugs or had like schizophrenia there's no way that like he could actually say all these things and believe them because he had to then experience them and I don't believe he experienced them so I think some way somehow I think he was probably like an intelligent narcissist who created enough structure to like write the Book of Mormon in enough structure to like have the people like around like to do exactly what he need needed to do to create a solid enough Foundation that could grow over the time and I also think he got lucky because of the time period where people were more overall they overall people had less education in like knowledge like um access um so it'd be easier to believe like I saw God sure you did why not like you know what I mean like you're a religion like a lot of religions are like you know big and very popular it's a very it's a time where you needed to belong to a religion and it when you then I think you know passing on to Brigham Young when he moved over to Utah I mean I think that was the greatest Escape for Mormonism so I think that was just though the byproduct of Joseph Smith and he probably was like you need to get out and leave and be surrounded by only yourselves and then populate with yourselves and what that me oh sorry I just said that in the fact he was a martyr right yeah do it mhm and I think he planned to be a martyr on purpose every everybody loves a martyr like people love a martyr and that was probably part of his narcissism of like I'm going to die and it's going to make my Rel you know like I'll be remembered for ages like you know what I mean and here we are 200 years talking about him later 200 years later talking about him yeah so like but I don't think he could have been in his right mind some way or another to do what he did and actually like to what he did cuz I don't think it actually happened what about people who say the Book of Mormon is too amazing it church has to be true because the Book of Mormon is too amazing for someone to come up with it especially an uneducated farm boy what's your answer to that Harry Potter the Lord of the Rings like there's a lot of good books you know Lord of the Rings only happened like 70 years later or something the Lord of the Rings heard it's a crazy book you know what I mean like I never read it but like but I'm saying like people make chapter books people make stories that's what story tellers do and if you're smart enough I think and if you're smart enough read enough other books you can compile something enough also there's things that are just factually incorrect like elephants elephants weren't on this continent like certain things like or whatever like whatever animals it was likees horses like stuff like sheep you're wrong like factually Incorrect and no matter what justification you want to bring they weren't here like that's just facts like they weren't here yet I don't you know what I mean like that's just not how it worked um so I think there are things that are factually incorrect about the Book of Mormon but people are willing to ignore them enough so it doesn't matter what is factually incorrect or true factually incorrect or correct about the book because no matter what it no matter what people say if you believe enough like nothing matters cuz it didn't matter to me m so this may be a tough question let's say there's a black man in Houston or Dallas or Chicago who's like seeing the missionaries liking what he's hearing and he's thinking about joining the Mormon church but then he turns to you and says Sebastian I'm a black man in the United States or a black woman should I join the Mormon church what would your response be no don't do it I think like why would you get involved with what I believe is a religious cult who doesn't appreciate you who doesn't value you never has and like sure like it might feel good like it might be nice like the community might welcome you they might come to your house they might cheer you on they might do all of those things but that doesn't offset the [ __ ] they've perpetuated and it definitely doesn't offset like their true opinions about you either and also doesn't offset the fact that it's simply it's simply problematic and if you support organization like that that I think that only tells something about you inherently um subconscious even if it is and so I don't know why would you don't waste your time in a racist sexist quer phobic religion that is going to ENT trap you and Gaslight you until you can't be gasl anymore and then to a black young Mormon kid thinking about BYU and they say Sebastian should you know it's good school good academics more lots of [ __ ] kids should I go to BYU or not I'm probably I probably know the answer but yeah I would also say try to go somewhere else like you can last at BYU you can make it you can um you might not be mentally intact fully afterwards but you could do it I did it Nate did it Rachel did it um I would just try your there's so many other options though like there's so many countless other better options for you like there's no reason to subject yourself to what you will be subjecting yourself to and like the lack of the lack of ability to have opinions at BYU to change your opinion at BYU like you can never grow at BYU they want you to be stagnant and they want you to be Mormon in like in this bubble and in this little like thing that you are forever um and so there's so many other universities in this country that are just as cheap as BYU and just I don't know I would try to go anywhere else first um I would go to UVU first I would go to the first I would go to any other school before I went to BYU um because BYU it's to me it's just not worth it like it's just not and its reputation isn't natur strong for it to for to endure everything like you could go to a less a a not higher ranked School in like Texas or something and have more benefits for like its reputation rather than wouldn't BYU's unless you want to stay in Utah or like Arizona or whatever forever and overall you felt what at BYU what did I feel that BYU overall um isolated ostracized unhappy depressed anxious um I didn't enjoy basically a single second of it so yeah I'm so sorry that's all right yeah all right Nate any final words before we close out nothing for me just happy to be here Sebastian it's good to hear your story bro yeah bro appreciate you subscribe to Black mines on YouTube yeah yeah so tell everyone how they can support black menaces oh yeah yeah yeah um if you first off go on all of our accounts across social medias black mineses on everything specifically YouTube that' be the best at the moment um so go follow black mines on YouTube I would love you forever and I will never be ungrateful I promise you that um if you want to mon monetarily support um you can go on a website and there's like a residual uh residual donation or you can go like on our on our vimo as well um at black mines it's a business account so you need to like scroll over to the business to actually donate um and um yeah support all I care about was black mines at this moment you can follow me too real Sebastian SJ on everything um I'm around so all right well uh again I just want to let you both know and Rachel and the others how inspired we all have been and continue to be at your courage to speak up and to help bring attention to our problematic culture culture and to help make positive contributions we should have mentioned black menaces was such a positive approach it wasn't attacking I didn't even feel like you were mocking people you worked really hard to just let people share what they think and feel and not to even shame them yeah it was just such a positive beautiful contribution and I'm thrilled to know that it's continuing and may even expand so thank you both yeah yeah thank and the others for all yall did for us yeah thank you I'm sorry you had to go through so much pain and difficulty to help us learn to do and be better that's all right we're happy to do it really sometimes all right well thanks Sebastian great good luck thank you we wish you well thank you and Nate thanks so much man stay in touch of course appreciate you John all right thanks for join us today [ __ ] stories please support black menaces uh and um and thank thanks for your support to Mormon stories and the open stories Foundation as well we couldn't do it without your support So for those who support us thank you if you want to support us support them first after you support them subscribe to the mor Stories podcast YouTube channel we're on Tik Tok Instagram Facebook and um and we always appreciate your financial support you can go to Mormon stories.org click on the Donate button become a monthly donor but at least for today only do that after you've donated to Black bues all right thanksgiv Sebastian thanks Nate be good to each other be kind to each other we'll see you all again soon on another episode of Mormon stories podcast take care

Channel: Mormon Stories Podcast

Views: 48,145

Keywords: Mormon, mormon, the church of jesus christ of latter-day saints, Mormon Stories, Mormon Stories Podcast, LDS Church, Exmormon, LDS, John Dehlin, black menaces, bipoc mormon, black menace, mormon racism, lds racism

Id: dHFMjr6AMM4

Length: 296min 50sec (17810 seconds)

Published: Thu Apr 25 2024