Source: Podcaster Meggan Hayes Joins the Show! Channel: Mormon Discussion Inc. Published: May 20, 2026 | Archived: May 22, 2026

Video: Podcaster Meggan Hayes Joins the Show!
Channel: Mormon Discussion Inc.
Published: May 20, 2026
Duration: 2:11:50
Views: 9,205
Category: Comedy
Video ID: Vilnt7rPkDU

Description

Bill Reel and RFM are joined this week by Meggan Hayes, host of the “Generally Unquotable” podcast, which features a news report on things Mormon every weekday morning! How does Meggan do it? Where does she get her stories? What are the biggest stories she has covered? These are just some of the things we’ll be finding out in this fascinating episode of Mormonism Live!

Transcript — YouTube panel (human-authored)

0:02 Good evening, everybody. This is Radio Free Mormon and Bill Reel coming at you live on Mormonism Live. Good evening, Bill. are you rfm i’m fine thank you are you wearing a sweater tonight i am it’s a little cold in here so uh i could have turned the heat up but then it gets sometimes too hot and i’d rather be too cold than too hot so i’ve got a little sweater on and we’re that time of the year where it’s really cold in the mornings at cedar city it was cold today though but really cold in the mornings and it’s hot in the late afternoons and you can’t ever get the heater air conditioning central air right so here i am in the sweater vest Well, it looks very, very nice on you.

0:39 It’s a bit of a different look, so much so that I noted. Yeah, there it is. Looks like some kind of solid shirt, but it is solid purple over top the dress shirt. Very nice. Probably cashmere. No, I can’t afford cashmere. Okay. I understand. It’s very, very soft. It’s very nice. Well, anyway, everybody, do you have anything you want to say before the show? Because if you’ve seen the thumbnail, everybody who is here watching is probably here for our special guest from generally unquotable.

1:10 Do you have anything you want to say before we bring generally unquotable audible? No, I’ll just tell you, she’s been quite a hit the last few years, putting up quite a bit of stuff here. Maybe the last year and a half, two years, I think she’s been doing this, and it’s been a big deal. Yeah, she’s got a, I actually happen to know, I think I know, that her first podcast was December eleventh, two thousand and twenty-three.

1:33 Looking down there, see if you’re nodding, I think that’s correct. So over two years now, two and a half years. And this is no small thing because she doesn’t do a weekly newscast, which itself has its own issues. But she does one every morning. And I believe it’s every weekday morning. Five days a week, though. And she puts up something every morning. And she’ll cover different stories.

1:56 And her shows are usually like, fifteen to twenty minutes in length. And sometimes she’ll have special episodes where she’ll talk about a certain issue in more depth. And, you know, I’m not going to have her out on the stage yet. Because I just want to tell you, without her being here, that I… I’m continually amazed at how articulate, generally unquotable is. And the thoughts that come out of her mouth and into my mind are enlightening frequently. In a sense, it’s kind of like you.

2:28 Like when I talk with you and we bounce ideas off each other and you’ll see things differently than I do. And I go, oh, I never would have thought of that on my own. Well, that’s what happens when I’m listening to Generally Unquotable. We don’t have to be talking. I just listen to her. And it’s amazing the things she says. Now, I didn’t bring her out on the stage for that because I didn’t want to embarrass her. But now I’m going to bring her out. Here we have Generally Unquotable, folks.

2:51 Don’t worry, RFM. I was embarrassed backstage. So I didn’t miss it. Okay. Here’s the applause. Sorry, I was a little bit late on the applause button there. That’s okay. How are you doing? I’m fantastic. I’m excited to be here. Maybe everybody says that, but it’s true. Well, we’re really glad that you’re here. I am, at least. How do you feel about it, Bill? I’m definitely glad she’s here.

3:19 For a name like Generally Unquotable, and we’ll obviously get to the name at some point tonight, but the name Generally Unquotable, as RFM points out… When people watch your work, I see your work shared often. So I think you’re a hell of a lot of quotables. So I’m excited to get into this conversation tonight. And we’ll definitely get to that issue of why that name. Oh, hell, let’s just do it at the outset. Let’s be a little bit spontaneous. Let’s live a little. Oh, yes. Why generally unquotable?

3:48 Because you do say a lot of things that I think could be quotable. Yeah, so the name, when I was coming up with it, I was thinking about my past and what my story looked like and what would happen if I shared my story. And when I share my story, when anyone shares their story and puts it out into the collective, especially on a public platform, then we all kind of get to hold each other’s stories.

4:12 And in my mind, I thought, if I’m saying something that’s very unique, then people will quote it. But when I’m telling my story and it’s an ex-Mormon story and other people identify with it, it becomes less of a quotable experience and more of a shared experience. So generally unquotable wasn’t meant to be self-deprecating. It was meant to be an experience where we share and we all get to hold and live each other’s experiences.

4:42 So we’re not quoting them as much as just sharing in them. That’s where it came from. That is incredibly deep and profound. And I think you spent a lot more time thinking about the name of your show than I did of mine. It may be. That’s amazing. Absolutely amazing. What a response. And this is the kind of thing I’m talking about, folks, that you can find every weekday on the channel, generally unquotable. So let’s see here.

5:08 You’ve put some slides together to tell us a little bit about yourself and your life. And here’s the first one. Tell us about it. Oh, look, it’s me when I’m a baby. So I am number, I know, look how cute I am. I’m number seven of fourteen kids. Number seven? Yeah, right there in the middle. So when they say middle child, that’s me. Seven of fourteen? Yeah, when I tell people that, they always ask how many girls and boys. So there were eight girls and six boys. I would have asked, is polygamy involved?

5:41 That’s a better question. I’ve actually never gotten that one. I do get the question whether or not we had TV and I did not understand the implications of that until well into my teenage years. I did not know what people would ask that. Yeah. You know, I’m in elementary school and they’re like, well, did you guys have TV? I’m like, why do they always ask me that? Gotta do something for entertainment, huh? Yeah. Yeah.

6:01 There, there are no twins and there’s twenty years between the oldest and the youngest and they’re all from the same parents. Twenty years between the oldest and youngest, no twins, fourteen children. That’s amazing. Yes. Were your parents like Catholic or something? You know, when I was pregnant with my fifth child, I went in for an ultrasound and the woman asked me if it was my first. I said, no, it’s my fifth.

6:26 And she said, are you Catholic or Mormon? And I said, Mormon. And she said, I was hoping you’d say Catholic. Did she say why? No, no, she didn’t explain after that. Then she just did the ultrasound. I guess she’d rather the kid be raised Catholic. But this is an amazing, amazing family. So what is that like? And where were you at this time when you’re growing up with this large family?

6:51 So we, I was born in Colorado, but I mean, I was born in California, but we moved to Colorado when I was just out of that little bassinet there and lived in Colorado till I was ten. So we lived in a small town. We were the minority being Mormon and we were not liked. Mormons were not liked. I got that impression as a kid that my older siblings dealt with teachers who said bad things about Mormon. I don’t know what those were.

7:16 I mean, probably they were just teaching history and maybe mentioned polygamy or something, but Yeah, I didn’t get the feeling. Woodland Park. It’s right at the base of Pikes Peak, about thirty minutes from Colorado Springs. Okay, I was wondering about the Colorado Springs. My understanding is, and I don’t know how long it’s been there, that there’s a big evangelical community in and around Colorado Springs and in Byron’s, and that they kind of don’t like the Mormons generally there.

7:45 So there may be some truth to what they were saying. Yeah, yeah, that definitely could have been the case. My dad was the branch president of the branch in Colorado Springs or in Woodland Park for seven of the ten years that we lived there. And I don’t know. I don’t think it’s because he wanted the position. I don’t know that there were a lot of options. What did that kind of opposition, if I can call it that, or whatever it is in the community, what did that do to you as a family?

8:11 We were very insular and I don’t, I mean, that was partially because of the opposition. Cause when we moved to Utah, it wasn’t quite as much, but I played with my siblings and we went to church and we went to school, you know, I didn’t hang out with a lot of other kids from school. And partially I think that’s because of what I learned at church. I was kind of afraid of the other kids.

8:32 I always had the song in my head, I belong to the church of Jesus Christ. And so if somebody said something, I was ready to just go. You know something? Never before has it occurred to me so strongly as this did at this time into mine when you were singing the lyrics of that song, the word belong. Okay, tell me more. I belong to the church of Jesus Christ. Boy, do you. And you’ll find out just how much when you get to the temple, kids. Yeah. Yeah.

9:00 So I’m counting seven children in this picture. And one is the youngest, obviously, being held in your mom’s arms. Is that you? Yeah, that’s me. Oh. Yeah, the little bonnet. My mom probably made that dress. She sewed quite a bit of our clothing. I’ll bet. So let me just go here to the is okay, to the next slide. Or did you have anything else you wanted to say about that? Just the only other thing in this slide was that’s my baby book there the front and you can see the temple on there.

9:28 So even my the arrow is pointing to the temple on there. Even my baby book was LDS themed. Yes. Um, I think I might have been involved with one or two of those myself. Yeah. So this is how the family grew. Yeah, the denim photo that I think my mom collected denim for about five years before we got that photo. Okay, will you hang on just a second? Because are there no wives or husbands in this picture?

9:58 There’s two brothers-in-law in that picture. The rest is just us. Okay, well, thank goodness for that much at least. So except for two of the guys in the picture, the two brothers-in-law, everybody else is either your parents or their kids? Yes. Wow. That’s very impressive. And it is very blue. I noticed the theme. Yeah. Yeah. I actually won an award once because there was a, during COVID, someone said the picture with the most denim and you get a prize and. Oh my gosh.

10:26 And did this win the prize? It did. Absolutely. It should have. Hey, Bill, expect to get served with a lawsuit by the LDS church for this slide. Okay. All right, I can’t wait. It’s the color blue. Yeah, all the colors that they use, no one else is allowed. So we’re all transparent and translucent. Those are the colors we’re… Do you need to put out a quick disclaimer? Yes. Okay. Oh, right, right, the disclaimer.

10:53 I don’t know if there’s a disclaimer that will solve the problem of blue. But we’ll file a counterclaim against you when that happens. Okay, thank you. A lawyer, nonetheless. I always got that wrong. It’s a cross claim. Yeah, it’s a cross claim, not a counterclaim. So anyway, tell us about the other pictures, please. Okay, so there’s me with my dad when I was baptized. That one’s at the bottom.

11:17 You can see me in my little white jumpsuit. And then the other one says I was so Mormon that I did a wedding dress fashion show at fourteen. That was part of my young women’s class one time. And I was supposed to wear my mom’s wedding dress, but she was a little embarrassed about it because it had yellowed over the years. So that’s actually one of my sister’s wedding dresses, an older sister.

11:39 And so, yeah, I got dressed up and went to young women’s and then we, you know, did the catwalk and talked about, we had to write little letters to our future husbands. Yes. They really prime you, don’t they? Oh, yeah. Yeah. Actually, when people would ask me what I wanted to be when I grew up, starting in kindergarten and first grade, I would just say a mom. And in seventh grade, they forced me to take this test to see what I would be good at.

12:06 And I just put all these weird answers because I was like, I’m just going to be a mom, you guys. I don’t need to do this test. I have to say that, you know, I was baptized when I was eighteen, so I didn’t go all through all this as a youth. But still, I have some familiarity. And the guys, you know, they’re pushed more to the mission. Obviously, there would be a marriage beyond that.

12:26 But I don’t think, hey, Bill, you tell me, of course, you were baptized when you were nineteen, but you were a bishop. You tell me, do the guys get this kind of priming to get married in the temple as much as the girls do when they’re growing up in the church? Yeah, I joined late in my senior year, and so I didn’t really have enough time in young men’s or whatnot to know. It didn’t appear so.

12:52 Again, my time serving as an adult in the church and watching both groups from a little more distance, it always seemed like the women were under much more pressure to follow the standard track than the men were. What do you think, generally unquotable? yeah you know I hear the men get it at the end of their mission or they used to now they might get it at the beginning, because the rules have changed right you’re supposed to start looking for that spouse on your mission, but I think back in the day.

13:18 That the men got it at the end of the mission from the mission President you’ve done your two years now go home and get married. yes i want to comment on this picture on your baptism day yeah because that is my favorite picture of you because i love that look on your face now when i was a kid okay i’m the youngest of three boys when i was a kid my mom used to call me her little imp and you have a look on your face that looks decidedly impish what do you remember what’s going on there The one thing I remember, well, I remember two things really distinctly from my baptism day.

13:53 One, as we were driving to the church, I was like, I’m going to be perfect. I’m going to be perfect, right? Because I knew once I came out of the font, it’d be the only time in my life I’d be perfect. And then the second thing I remember was that my dad had started the water for the font in the morning and then he turned it off when we got there. I guess it took a very long time to fill up, but it was very, very deep. It was higher than they normally put it.

14:15 So when I got in, the water was like just hovering right below my mouth. So I didn’t have to go far to get done. You made it easy on your dad. Right. The dress wasn’t or the, you know, the thing wasn’t floating up. Oh, my gosh. Okay. Great memories of baptism days. Oh, you’re on the covenant path now. Yes. It wasn’t called the covenant path then, but I got married. So I went to Ricks College for two years and graduated without a husband.

14:48 And before I had gone to Ricks, my dad had given me a blessing that I was going to find my eternal companion there. So when I went through the full two years and didn’t have the eternal companion, I actually felt blessed. Like I was all washed up. I was twenty and I just thought I didn’t maybe I wasn’t faithful enough. And so the guy didn’t come. So I was really terrified that I wouldn’t get married ever. See your face.

15:14 Did you ever think that maybe that guy was wasn’t faithful enough so he didn’t come? No, actually, that didn’t occur to me. No, it wouldn’t occur to us as a good Mormon. It’s always our fault. Yes. Yeah, for sure. And so then I moved out to California, and that’s when I met Donnie. And we met, got engaged two weeks later, got married four months after that, and then had our first child eleven months after that.

15:42 A whirlwind romance. Mm-hmm. You know, he was a righteous priesthood holder. He was home from his mission. So what else did I need to know? Well, nothing really. Right. He looks very handsome. You look wonderful. You look like a beautiful couple. What could go wrong? Well, you know, it was rough. It was rough. Yeah. We didn’t know how to be whole people ourselves. And we definitely didn’t know how to be in relationship with someone else who was carrying a ton of shame from Mormonism that we didn’t know we were carrying, which caused problems.

16:17 But then we also had six kids in ten years while we were both finishing our degrees. Wow. You were super righteous. I was. I didn’t have as many as my mom, which when I was a kid I thought I might. But I did have six. Wow. Growing up in a family with that many kids, you moving into adulthood, did you, you wanted to have a family sort of that big? I don’t know if I wanted to. I don’t know that it was something that I ever consciously thought about to that level.

16:54 I thought that if I did those things, I would be more worthy. I tied them to worthiness, and I can’t really connect that to wanting to do them. I thought I needed to do them, even when I was scared or even when I didn’t understand or even when I knew that we couldn’t afford it, because I really had the faith that God would just provide a way that money would fall out of the sky. It didn’t, but I thought it would.

17:28 i expect if anybody had the faith to make it happen it would have been you i really i i one hundred percent believed everything i was told there i didn’t question when i was a kid growing up the rules of the church kept me safe right if i followed all the rules then maybe people wouldn’t get mad at me and it continued as i was older So I believed it all. I, you know, when Dottie and I were first married, when I was pregnant with our oldest child, a member of the bishopric came and extended me the calling to play the piano for Relief Society.

18:03 But I didn’t know how to play the piano. I played the violin as a kid and I had taken very brief piano lessons where I didn’t practice. And, but I just had the faith. So I said, yeah, yeah, of course I’ll play the piano in Relief Society. So I practiced for minimum of an hour every day. And I learned how to play the piano well enough. I’m not great, but well enough to play in Relief Society and play most of the hymns.

18:31 You know, the standard ones that people used to sing. If they had come out with a new hymn book halfway through, I would have been really upset. That’s a great story. I love it. You know, if you ever become the president of the church and they write a manual about you for the members of the church, they’re going to include that story, aren’t they, Bill? They should anyway, but I don’t, you know, those guys are listening a whole lot to what we have to say, but there should be a lot of stories from this side of things that are included, huh?

19:01 I’m thinking of the stories like about Heber J. Grant and practicing throwing, you know, the baseball against the barn. He’s also the same guy who perfected his handwriting. And that was a big deal. That was the inspiring thing about Heber J. Grant. This is a better story, even than those of Heber J. Grant. I can’t believe it. I also have a handwriting story. Tell us. I’m basically, so when I was in sixth grade, my handwriting was abysmal.

19:24 And there was this girl sitting next to me. This was in Utah. And I don’t know if you know this about Utah and the Mormon influence there, but girls especially have a certain handwriting. And it’s all the same. It is. Yes. Yes. The, the girls who do it right. And the girl next to me, she had the, she, I’m not kidding. She had the handwriting. So I watched her incessantly in sixth grade. She was my friend.

19:47 Otherwise she probably just thought I was creepy until I figured out how she did it. And then I changed my handwriting to be like hers. So my handwriting is great. So basically you can forge checks right and left and your friend’s going to get blamed for it. Yeah. See any story I hear, I think, how can I make this work as a criminal? Yeah, yeah, that’s what I was doing in sixth grade. That was actually my goal. That’s amazing.

20:13 And, you know, if you’re a little bit, if you’re twelve, usually if you’re younger than twelve, then you can also do whatever you want criminally because you usually can’t be charged. Well, I wish I would have known that. There’s a vague area between eight and twelve, at least in this state, where maybe you can be charged. But below eight, you can do whatever you want. The law can’t touch you. Just letting you know, kids. Yeah, nobody told me. Oh, this is good.

20:34 No, they never tell you until you get baptized, you know, and then you’re Aiden. Yeah. Then you call your sister a name and the whole baptism is gone. Here’s a question. Yeah. Calling your sister a name. Is that a reference to something that did happen to you? Oh, yeah. That’s how I ruined my baptism. Oh, tell us how you ruined your baptism. Well, you know, I went down in the water and I came out and then there was afterwards, you know, people congratulating me.

21:02 And then we in our family, we didn’t go out to eat. Right. There were too many of us. I’m certain it was way too expensive. But when we got baptized, we got to choose where we went out to eat. And I chose McDonald’s because they had a slide there and some toys. OK. So, yeah. So on the way to McDonald’s. I called my sister a name. I just said she was stupid. I mean, but the whole baptism was gone then.

21:29 So then on the drive to McDonald’s, I’m wearing this dress that’s white on the top and it’s black velvet on the bottom. And I’m just honestly devastated because I was like, I didn’t even last a full day. Well, that perfection, it’s not easy. It’s not for the faint of heart, you know? No, but there was this, there was this, um, lesson when I was in primary and it was called twenty four golden hours that I had at church.

21:55 And it was this kid who wanted to be so good. So they tied a little string on their finger and then for twenty four hours they did everything right. They set the table when their mom told them to and they were nice to their sister. And so I thought if they can do it, I can do it, but then I’ll just redo it every day. So. I’ll put the string. Our teacher gave us a string and I’ll put the string and I’ll be perfect. It’s a great plan.

22:19 Bill read a book when he was a kid too, but it was called Twenty-Four Golden Showers. Yeah, one of my favorites from childhood. It was a big deal for me. Yeah. I don’t know this one, but if you send it to me, I will. Let’s not. Let’s not. Oh my goodness. So you screwed up your perfection. How long? Less than an hour? Yeah. Yeah. And the in the third seat back of the fifteen passenger van, I can picture it like it was yesterday. And you called your sister stupid. Yeah.

22:52 Either that or a butler, because that was one of the words we said to each other because we weren’t allowed to say but, you know, so we so we call each other butlers. And you would get in trouble for that. Oh, absolutely. Even after you’ve gotten all the trouble. This reminds me of a story. I don’t know. I’m just going to tell it because whatever. We had a family meeting one time. I was a little older.

23:15 I was probably, I don’t know, twelve or thirteen. My parents gather us all in the living room and they’re very somber and we’re we’re thinking, oh, no, you know, what’s going on? We didn’t have family meeting. I mean, we had family home evening, but this was a family meeting. It was different. And my mom says, my your dad and I, we really want to talk to you about something very serious that’s happening in the family. And so we’re very quiet.

23:37 And my mom says, there is a word that is creeping into everyone’s vocabulary that we do not like. And, you know, I’m sitting by my brothers. We’re looking at each other who said it, you know, we’re trying to place blame already in our minds. And she says, I’m not kidding you with the straightest face. She says, it’s nards. And my brothers and I, oh, man, we knew if we laughed, we were going to be in a lot of trouble. Oh, yeah. You can’t laugh. Not when your mom says nards. No.

24:18 Oh, my mom. How did she keep a straight face? I don’t know. I think she thought it was probably a bad thing to say. She didn’t want her kids saying it. She didn’t want words like nards creeping into their conversation. We… It was very serious, RFM. I don’t know why you’re… Imagine if you had lived in Oxnard. Oh, right? Or you’d gone to Menards. Isn’t that a hardware store in Idaho or something? I don’t know. I try and stay away from hardware. Have you heard of that story, Bill? Menards.

24:53 M-E-N-A-R-D-S. Yeah, Menards. Like Maynards? Or you can call it Maynards, potato, potato, but the rest of us call it Menards. Do you really? Because I don’t know. I’ve never heard of it before. They don’t have it out here. You can look it up later. It’s just a hardware store. Okay, very good. Maybe they have them in Oxnard. But seriously, folks, here’s what I want to ask you. It’s a serious question, okay? Okay. My question is this.

25:17 I’m getting from you that you are very, very obedient. You do the things you’re supposed to do, plus, plus, plus. You have one hundred percent faith. You’re doing everything you’re supposed to do with the family life and with having the kids expecting the faith to be rewarded with the promised blessings of money from heaven or some kind of help. It doesn’t show up. How do you deal with that? I just keep doing the same things.

25:42 I mean, really, for years and years and years. Actually, that last picture of me there sitting with the Book of Mormon, that’s one of the original copies. It’s at Duke. You can go there and request to look at it. Okay. But I just kept trying because, like we’ve already talked about, I really thought I was the problem. So if something got hard in my marriage, actually early on when things were… I mean, they were hard from the beginning. I memorized…

26:09 the scripture about charity, charity suffers long and is kind, you know, and any time that something would happen where Donnie would get upset, I would quote that in my head and I would then make a list. Like, here’s the thing I did that upset the relationship. And so I’m just not going to do it again. So this is constant list making. I had all of these rules. that I thought would keep me on the straight and narrow path.

26:34 So the other thing I started doing though, that really started to upset things later, but I didn’t realize it was going to was I started studying how to be a good parent. Ah, hang on a second. Cause I think that’s on the next slide. Yeah. So I was on the covenant path, but then, yeah, I started parenting with love and logic is the first parenting book I ever read. And I didn’t know that that eventually would, you know, start to lead me in a different direction other than the church, but I just want to be a good parent. I just wanted to be a good parent. I had six kids. Yes.

27:07 And so you went reading a book about how to be a good parent and it changed something. Yeah. It slowly, because I didn’t, I wasn’t studying other things. I mean, other than the church, I, in the last two years before I stopped going to church, I read the book of Mormon eight times in two years. Um, But previous to that, I was a Relief Society president two times. So I was always not only studying the Book of Mormon, but lessons for Relief Society in case the teacher didn’t show up.

27:34 Can I ask, why are you reading the Book of Mormon so much? Eight times in the last two years? I thought it would make my life easier. I mean, there are all these blessings associated with reading the Book of Mormon, right? Right. Like, I had memorized the scripture on charity, and I’d made all these lists of things I could and couldn’t do, and my life was still really hard. We still had no money.

27:58 I… You know, my marriage was really hard. I was learning how to parent my kids, but still, you know, struggling through that. And the Book of Mormon is supposed to be the end all be all. It’s supposed to be the thing that brings you closer to Christ and brings light and love into your marriage. And yeah, I really believed that if I did that, I would change enough that things would get easier.

28:21 I just always thought that I could change and then it would force other people to change around me. I mean, which kind of it did, but not like that. I mean, the Book of Mormon didn’t make anything magical happen. I just spent a lot of time reading it. Right. As if what you’re doing now, which is like one hundred and fifty percent, isn’t enough to make the blessings happen. You’ve got to go two hundred and fifty percent. Yeah. Yeah.

28:48 I mean, I read the Ensign every month and all the talks and and the general you read the general conference talks. Yeah. Yeah, I started reading those in the Ensign in college. So I would have my parents send me that edition with all, you know, that’s all it was. The November episode and the, what, May episode? Yeah. I say episode, magazine. Issue. Yeah, issue. That’s the word. The older folks got to.

29:17 That printed matter, that kind of thing they used to have. Yes. That program. Yeah. So I, the Book of Mormon was the next thing that was going to save me. Yes. And it doesn’t. And then two years goes by and you read this book and what is it that happens then as a result of this book? Of the Book of Mormon? I meant the, well, I meant the orange one, Parenting with Love and Logic.

29:42 I read that book and then I read success, you know, was reading parenting books after that. Then I started going to therapy. How did you end up going to therapy? Well, I came to a point where I realized that my marriage was either going to end or I was going to try something the church wasn’t giving me. What therapy was starting to be talked about, you know, like when I was a kid, it was hocus pocus and we didn’t talk about it.

30:11 And it was you didn’t have enough faith if you had to go to a therapist. But it was starting to be talked about more. And I was desperate at that point for anything to make my life, everything that it had been promised it would be, you know, I thought marriage, you just got married to the righteous priesthood holder. And then it was Disney after that. So I, uh, Donnie and I started going to therapy.

30:34 We were actually seeing a Mormon therapist cause I could not see anybody who wasn’t Mormon. Of course, no way. And we would go one week together and then we would each take a week to ourselves and then meet together again. And that therapist, actually encouraged me after, you know, hearing about all this stuff, I’ve been telling you all the rules I was making everything. He encouraged me one time to go shopping on a Sunday. I didn’t do it, but just the thought.

31:04 The Mormon therapist encouraged you to go shopping on Sunday. Yeah. He said I needed to do it and realize that lightning wasn’t going to come down and strike me down. Hmm. I just liked the fact that he was encouraging me to do it. I didn’t actually not until way, way, way later. But as you can see in that middle picture, I cut my hair short and I dyed it some unnatural colors. That was a big departure for me.

31:27 And I was the Relief Society president at the time. Really? What did the sisters say? They didn’t say anything. I don’t like, I think they were probably thinking things, but in true Mormon fashion, they thought them and said them not in my presence. I almost asked, what did they say behind your back? But then I thought, how would you know? Yeah, I didn’t know. There were always rumors in my family as well, and some of those I’ve learned about now, but there were definitely rumors about my hair, how I’d cut it so short, and then I looked like a boy, and then I did all the weird colors.

31:59 You’re definitely making a statement here that people are going to see. What is the statement you were trying to make? I just was trying to do something different. Honestly, my hair, is a lot. When it was long, it’s curly in the back and it’s straight in the front and it’s very thick. And so I would spend hours every day trying to tame it when it was longer. And then if there was even an ounce of humidity, which when I had that short haircut, we lived in Southeast Alaska and it was very humid.

32:30 So an ounce of humidity would destroy the whole thing. And eventually I was like, I’m just done with my hair. So whether or not I’m supposed to keep it long to be more holy, I just need to cut it off. I mean, honestly, so I could read my scriptures more. Like, I mean, if we’re being honest, like that took up a big chunk of my time. And so if I could get rid of the hair, I could spend more time with my kids learning about parenting and then doing all the things the church wanted me to do.

32:57 Being the Relief Society president, studying the lessons, doing my visiting teaching and back when it was called visiting teaching. Yeah. was uh was your hair color the female version of the male wearing the blue the blue shirt you know us guys the way we sort of signaled to the folks in the ward that like i’m not exactly going to play by the rules anymore is that we put the colored shirt on and then they make up a story that that means that you’re a prolific uh you know uh self abuser but uh it really is just your way of going like i’m not doing the white shirt and tie thing ladies and gentlemen so how about you because we’re in this twilight zone where it’s not breaking a commandment it’s not shopping on sunday god forbid but i can do something different edgy yeah by wearing a blue shirt if you’re a guy with the tie of course to church Yeah, if you’d gone without the tie, that would have sent people over the edge. Yes.

34:02 So I’m still trying to find out this orange book, Parenting with Love and Logic, and how it was that that precipitated your change at this point. So it started it. So I actually read that book when my oldest was about five and didn’t leave the church until ten plus years later. That was just the beginning because what it did was it started helping me understand that I could be nice to my kids and that I know that sounds weird, but if I can be nice to my kids, shouldn’t I expect the same thing out of Heavenly Father, out of God?

34:46 If I can parent my kids in a way that I don’t, have to say no all the time and punish them. And I certainly don’t have to hit them or, you know, as God would do drown them or curse them. If I can be a good parent and raise healthy kids without all of those things, then why couldn’t God do that? That was where my mind eventually went. And that’s why the parenting with love and logic was the beginning of that.

35:16 Because I was so tied to Mormonism and I think one of the only things that could have gotten me out of it was feeling protective of my kids. What is going on in the picture on the right with the horses? Is that you and your kids? So that’s my kids. I don’t, I can’t remember if I’m in that picture. I might be, but so we moved from Southeast Alaska to Missouri for one year. Wait a second.

35:45 At some point you went to up to Alaska. Did I miss that? Okay. So we, when we got married, we’ve been all over. Yeah. My family moved to Utah when I was ten. Then I got married and we lived in California. And then we went to school in Idaho. I went to Ricks and BYU-Idaho. I have diplomas from both. Really? Yes. Yeah. And then we moved to St. George and lived there for two years.

36:10 And then we moved to Southeast Alaska. Wow. Wow. Yeah. Lived there for six years, then went to Missouri for a year. And that’s where the horse picture comes in. Missouri, God’s country. Yeah, I know. Right. Well, and that’s, so we took, by the time we got to Missouri, my testimony was on the rocks and I was starting to have some big rifts with my, my parents and my siblings because I was starting to get healthy and say healthy things and, maybe suggest that you didn’t have to spank your kids or any of those things.

36:45 And so we decided, Donnie and I decided to take the kids to Nauvoo. And that picture is actually taken in Nauvoo because it wasn’t, you know, it wasn’t a long drive. We took a long weekend and we went to Nauvoo and it was part of this, you know, I was reading the Book of Mormon four times a year and I was going to Nauvoo because I wanted to stay in the church. I was desperately trying to hold on to the church.

37:07 So we took the kids up there and we went to, did all, it was in the off season. So the senior missionaries were just fawning over us because there was nobody else there. I feel like they were really, you know, wanting to talk to someone. And we went to Carthage and we sat in the jail and we saw the hole in the door and, talk to the kids about it and tried to have a very spiritual experience.

37:29 And actually we only lived in Missouri for one year. And after we moved back up to Alaska, after that to Fairbanks, Donnie said, why do you think, you know, the Lord wanted us to move to Missouri? And I told him so that I would stay in the church. So I thought it was, saving my testimony to move there. And the other thing about Missouri is that the ward we were in there was a bunch of people who were just amazing, salt of the earth, quirky as all get out and nonjudgmental.

37:59 The purple hair there was no big deal. And the The people were just living their lives. They were very, very kind. If we had stayed in Missouri, I might have stayed in the church longer just because of that community sense that there was in that specific ward. Okay. You already answered the question I was going to be asking, which was, what was it about that experience of a year in Missouri that you feel pumped your testimony up? It was the people.

38:29 Yes, and that one visit to Nauvoo. You know, sitting with your kids and talking about the… the folklore of Mormonism, that can be a very faith promoting experience. I was taught that it was supposed to be faith promoting. So that, you know, it was sunset and we were talking about the pioneers coming across rivers. Yeah. It was very dramatic. I’m sure it’s a dramatic story. And I’ve never been there.

38:56 Oh, well go in the off season. It’s not hot and you can do everything because nobody else is there, but we didn’t get to see the pageant. because they weren’t doing it that weekend because it was state conference. But other than that, we saw everything. Have you ever been to Nauvoo, Bill? I’ve been to Palmyra, Nauvoo. What is it across the water there, Iowa? Sarah Himmler. No, no, yeah.

39:23 You cross from Nauvoo over the water to the other LDS site. A little Rod Meldrum humor there. Yeah, well, I got it. And all the church history sites. I think, you know, again, grew up near Kirtland and went there a bunch of times as a young adult in the church. And I think being near the church history sites, it is a faith-increasing place to be. Yeah. So can you tell us why it is you’ve got this little thumbnail in the bottom right, just under the horses? Yeah.

39:58 So after we left… Missouri, the church history Mecca, and went to Fairbanks, I purposely got a job so I wouldn’t have to attend church on Sundays. So I got a job and I said, schedule me for Sundays. Because I didn’t want to go, but… What’s that? Did you tell your husband or anybody else this, that this is why you’re getting the job? No. No. Of course not. I mean, we needed the money. Fairbanks is very expensive.

40:29 But… I got to pick my schedule. I didn’t tell them that part. I just scheduled it on Sundays because I didn’t want to go to church, but I couldn’t just not go. And I sort of thought that because we’d lived there probably six months before I got this job, I thought that people would notice I was gone and they would say something to me. I really kind of wanted them to notice me.

40:49 I know that’s not the emotionally healthiest thing, but that is what I was thinking when I got the job. I don’t want to be at church anymore. So I’m going to get the job. So I have an excuse not to be there. And maybe people will notice that I’m gone and they’ll say something and they’ll want to talk to me or something. It’s a cunning plan. But what I want to ask is you’re six months back from Missouri and already you don’t want to go to church. What’s going on? Well, the ward wasn’t the Missouri ward.

41:17 We ended up in a ward with all of the, I hate to say it, but the lawyers and the doctors and the dentists. And we just didn’t fit in. We just didn’t fit in. We were the, we were the charity case with the six kids. And, you know, we were always just barely making enough money to get by. So, yeah, I mean, it just, we just didn’t feel like we fit in. There were people who were nice, but we weren’t making the same friendships.

41:46 I mean, and we were only in Missouri a year. We made friendships there really quickly. So it just wasn’t feeling the same. And that on top of everything else, all of the parenting I’d been studying and I’d had the purple hair and I’d started to learn that I could, you know, say no to a calling maybe. And all of those things were starting to add up. And then to get to the thumbnail in the bottom corner. Yeah.

42:09 I had a friend recommend to me that I should listen to this episode with this guy named Radio Free Mormon. That is no friend. And… And Bill Reel talking about the Book of Abraham. I remember that. Do you remember that, Bill? That’s been a few years now. I thought we did an incredible job. It was either two or three parts. Three, I think. That says part three right there. Well, there it is.

42:33 So I thought this was such a great production that you and I did early on, going through the Book of Abraham, explaining it to the audience, and showing them in one of the episodes, which looks like it was part three, all the… all the confusion being added to the situation by the apologists those landmines from john gee this episode actually won a brody award for busiest thumbnail This was back when none of us, when you’re just kind of winging it, making a thumbnail.

43:01 You didn’t really have any sort of design elements that anybody had shared with you. Oh, that’s amazing. It didn’t really win that, did it? No, I just made that up. Oh, I’m making that award. The thumbnail is fantastic. But the episode I so I was taking my kids to karate and they were they’d be in karate for an hour. It was about a twenty minute drive and then they’d be in there for an hour and then it was twenty minute drive home and they were kind of young.

43:28 So I would so I turned it on in the car and then it got about ten minutes in and I was like, oh, I can’t let them listen to this. They’ll tell somebody. So I turned it off and put the kids at karate. And then I thought, you know what? I’ll go for a walk. So I’m holding my phone in my hand because I haven’t brought headphones and I’m listening to this episode and my brain is breaking because I didn’t know anything about the book of Abraham other than it’s a book and we study it sometimes in church.

44:01 I mean, I didn’t know it was controversial. I had no idea. And I get to the end of this episode and then I need to tell someone, but I don’t have anyone I could talk to about it. So then I decided that I needed to start exercising while my kids were in karate and I could bring headphones and I could see what else Radio Free Mormon had to say. Wow. So what did he have to say? Oh, my word. He had so much to say. A lot. A lot.

44:35 I listened to the Abraham, the book of Abraham episode on one time speed. But after that, I went to one and a half times speed because if I was just alone and I was running, I was just in it. And there was so much. I couldn’t get enough. When I caught up to wherever you were at the time, I don’t remember how many episodes there were. I actually felt a loss in my life. I don’t know if you’ve ever read like a really good book and then you get to the end and you feel like you’ve lost a friend because it’s over. That’s how it was.

45:05 I got through all the Radio Free Mormon episodes, and I’m like, well, who am I going to deconstruct with now? Well, there are others, and you found others. I did. I did. That’s when I went to Mormon Stories, because I was like, I heard of this John Dillon guy back in the day when Ordained Women was big, and I know that he’s lost the light in his eyes, so he’s probably the guy I want to listen to now. Yes.

45:28 Radio Free Mormon first, John Dillon second. Okay, just underscoring that. You can blame my friend. Yes, absolutely. So did you like John Dillon as much as you liked Radio Free Mormon? Okay. If I’m going to be completely honest, the answer is I appreciated the Radio Free Mormon episodes more. And I think she said it. I’m just being honest. I think it was because of the interjections of the humor and the way that your mind works. It just made sense to me.

46:06 Like there was just a connection there in my brain where I could be, I would be running and I started off running five minutes at a time. And by the end of all of this, I was running half marathons. That’s how much ex-Mormon content I was consuming. Wow. But I would be running and I would be, you know, six miles in and be like i don’t know if i want to go more but i’m like oh but there’s another episode and but then i would be crying because i’d be like oh he really gets how i feel about this and but then two minutes later i’d be laughing because you would have said that so-and-so is beating a path to the bishop’s office to tattle on you because that was sister waters Oh, my God, every time you said that, it killed me.

46:50 So I’m running and I’m crying and I’m laughing, but I’m totally engaged. So maybe, yeah, I mean, I just, I really soaked it all up. And there was actually a part where you talked about how when you read the Book of Mormon, you felt like you’re your brain had opened up and you know, things were spinning around or I don’t remember exactly how described it. And I stopped my run and I paused the episode and I was like, wait, is this guy still totally faithful?

47:19 And I was kind of mad. I’m doing the long con coming up on ten years now. I was like, he better not still be faithful because I felt like he was really telling me I’m not crazy for thinking all of these things about the church. I was mad. Like me saying, psych. Yeah. Yeah. But I took a sigh of relief when you continued on and I was like, okay, he can’t really be a member. But when I did finally tell my husband I was listening to you, I brought that up because I was like, well, you know, he still says stuff that’s kind of faithful to the church.

47:56 Yes. It’s like a soft landing to be like, I have listened to many episodes of Radio Free Mormon. How did this conversation go, and how did it come up? Assuming this is the first thing that you broached with your husband. Maybe there’s something before that. Well, he is actually the one who told me to stop going to church. So I was working that job, not going to church. Then I got a better job, and… there were no Sundays to be scheduled.

48:24 So then I had to go to church and I went for about six months and six months. And he’s like year, we came home one day. It was the Christmas, right? Um, the Christmas Sunday at the end of. So it wasn’t on Christmas, but I think it was like the that year. So you just have the one hour sacrament meeting. It’s all about Christ and the birth and everything. And we came home and he said, you have to stop going to church.

48:47 And I was like, you know, I can’t do that. And he’s like, but you’re miserable there. Hmm. and i was like yeah but it’s it’s church we have to go you know and he’s like well i’m not gonna go next week and the kids aren’t gonna go either and if you want to stay home with us you can and so we stopped going to church but we weren’t like leaving leaving the church and we didn’t talk about it we just stopped going to church so then i’m continuing to listen to all these episodes but i’m still not telling him even though we’re not going to church i feel like it’s a taboo area that we haven’t broached yet.

49:23 So I’m trying to remember when I finally told him, but that was one of the first conversations we had where I said something about the church that was, and I brought up the Book of Abraham episode. And he’s like, yeah, I knew that. I was like, what? Wait, you knew that the Book of Abraham was probably just made up by Joseph Smith and you didn’t tell me? He’s like, I learned that on my mission.

49:49 I was, and he never, he didn’t tell, he didn’t tell me. So then I was upset at him. I like my upset for you liking the Book of Mormon was over and I was upset at Donnie because he hadn’t told me. I was blown away that he already knew that, but we didn’t really talk about very many church things. I was pretty much deconstructing on my own every once in a while. I’d mentioned something, but he didn’t want to listen to the podcast and he just, he didn’t want to talk about it too much.

50:19 He just wanted to, you know, church is over. We’re just moving on, but I needed to break it down. And he did too. He just didn’t know it at the time. So, yeah, but you, you were a, you were a little, um, What are those things they call when you put it in the wood to split the wood? A pain in the ass. Oh, man. We had to split wood when I was a kid. No, the pointy thing. It’s a hammer.

50:46 That you put in and then you hit the hammer on it. It’s not a matic. It doesn’t matter. But you know what I’m talking about, right? That’s what it was. Is it a maul? It’s a wedge of sorts. Yeah, it’s a wedge. Maybe wedge is the right name. That’s the word I was coming up with, but I thought it was a weird word. President Monson. He would know. Wedge in the tree. If you read all those, you remember that, right? I am the gardener. Oh, yeah. Oh, that’s Hubie Brown.

51:11 You were the wedge in there that was busting open the conversations about being out of the church and things I was learning about the church. Yes, I’m the fly in the ointment, Hans, the monkey in the wrench. Well, if you’re the fly, then you’re going to need Jesus of Nazareth. Very good. This is one of the things I like about you. You’re quick and you’re sharp. Now I want you to tell us about, Oh no, no, no.

51:38 This other part I think is going to be very embarrassing to me. No, I’m just going to go somewhere. I’ll take a little walk around the block. You go along for about five minutes and I’ll come back. Is that fair? No, just sit there and turn into a beacon. Turn into a what? If you turn red from embarrassment, you just be like a beacon. Oh, I thought you said a vegan. I thought she wanted to be a vegan.

51:57 I don’t know how being a vegan would help my embarrassment, but I was willing to give it a try. Well, I mean, if you want to be vegan. Here, you go ahead. You had introduced the next slide and then I’ll click it. Okay. So in the midst of this deconstructing alone, when I was running a lot, went from five Ks to ten Ks to half marathons, I, there was actually a hundred and fifty day streak where I ran six miles every day for a hundred and fifty days straight. That’s incredible.

52:23 It was just a way for me to try to process everything that was going on because I was getting all this information and I didn’t really have anyone to talk to about it. So I had to do something. And so I thought, you know what, Radio Free Mormon, he’s this famous guy who lives somewhere, but he has to know what I’m thinking and feeling right now, because I feel like he would understand.

52:50 Cause I, at that point I thought of you as a friend, even though you didn’t know who I was. Maybe that’s creepy. I don’t know, but I did. And so I sent an email. I included a portion on the next slide. That wasn’t the whole email that I sent, but it was part of it. And we can, we can read it. What’s that? Is this the racy part or did you cut that out? Well, I just cut out the part in the middle that went into a lot of specifics about my family. Not a lot.

53:16 It was one paragraph in the middle that went into specifics about my family situation, my parents and my siblings. But this one, this was on April twenty fifth, twenty nineteen. So we had stopped going to church at the end of twenty eighteen. So this is, you know, four months later. And it says, dear RFM, I am in a shame shit storm right now because writing a vulnerable email to someone I don’t know always makes me feel very small.

53:38 And, you know, coming this isn’t part of the email, but coming from a family of fourteen, I often just. felt lost in the mix, right? So that’s the kind of feelings I was having. It goes on to say, I’m going to write it anyway, though, because like so many others, I’m sure, I have to say thank you for your podcast. I started listening just a few weeks ago. I listen when I drive to and from work and when I go jogging.

53:59 Today, while I was listening and jogging, I was also sobbing. Running and crying is not for the weak. Because for the first time in months, I felt like maybe I’m not alone on this faith journey slash crisis slash whatever. A few weeks ago when I started listening to your podcast, it felt like a giant I’m not crazy hug. Dissecting the leader’s lies, showing how the church isn’t the magical save-all that I was taught, it’s been immensely comforting to hear you say things that I’ve thought for some time but couldn’t properly voice.

54:28 Today I listened to the discussion with Bill Reel about receiving his summons to a church court. When he described his inability to attend church because of the trauma it was causing him, I finally had words to describe the feelings I experienced the last year I painfully attended. I felt such connection that another human had a similar experience to the one I’m having. It’s been life-changing, for lack of a less cliche phrase, and I am glad you’ve been so brave to put the podcast out there.

54:57 I appreciate all of your hard work and study. Keep it up. You matter to me. I wish you the very best in everything. Let me tell you again. Thank you very much. Yeah. Well, thank you. I, I needed. the validation to know I wasn’t crazy. And I needed to know there were other people, good people who were just trying to understand the same way that I was. And that’s what happened with your podcast. Well, thank you. It’s an amazing thing, though. It’s out there.

55:32 Your experience, my experience, the experience of others feeling crazy. And the strange thing is that what the Mormons do to you or Mormonism does to you is it makes you think that if you don’t believe that an angel came to Joseph Smith with gold plates, which he dictated, buy a rock out of a hat into the Book of Mormon. If you don’t believe that, you’re the one who’s crazy. Yeah. Yeah, absolutely.

56:05 And so then when you get out and you start thinking, ooh, that sounds a little weird. A rock and a hat. Then there’s all of this cognitive dissonance. My, you know, I was almost forty by this time when I’m deconstructing this. And I had forty years of conditioning. I was listening to Book of Mormon stories before I learned how to tie my shoe and write my name. Unraveling that is a big deal.

56:33 It influenced everything that I did. You know, when I would talk to my kids about trying, even when I was studying all this parenting, I was always trying to still tie it back to the church. So when I would talk to them about being good humans, being kind to each other, I would say, we’re not kind to, I don’t want you to be kind to your sibling because I’m telling you to be kind to them.

56:53 I want you to be kind to them because I want you to look at them and see that they’re a child of God. Right? So I was coming at it from that angle. Now, now I can just say, because they’re a human. you know, but the church was in everything that I did. And actually part of therapy that I was always also trying to tie it back to the church because the church has all the answers, right?

57:16 But I wasn’t finding them. But then when I went to therapy, I was, so I was like, well, maybe the church just said these things and I didn’t hear them. So when I heard the scripture for the first time after I’d been in therapy for a while that said, love thy neighbor as thyself, I was like, thyself, I can love myself. They have been saying that all along. I am the problem because I didn’t hear it before.

57:39 So it was this constant mind games of trying to fit all of the things I was learning into, you know, about being healthy emotionally into what the church had previously told me. Mormonism not only gaslights its members, it gets them to gaslight themselves. I was a pro. I was too. I was too. Did you ever gaslight yourself, Bill, do you think? I was just thinking about this earlier.

58:11 I wrote a little thing about years and years ago called the, it was a book called the mighty change, the doctrine of Christ. And I was taking Brad Wilcox and Robert Millett and Steven Robinson stuff and trying to figure out a much more compassionate version of grace that at the time Mormonism wasn’t teaching. Now, fast forward, Brad Wilcox and, uh, ends up leading to Dieter Uchtdorf saying something sort of official in general conference that nudges the LDS church off that direction.

58:43 But I remember thinking like, I’m not going to make it. The whole point of me thinking out all these thoughts was I was beating myself up. The church has this really high checklist. And I spent so much time telling myself stories about me that were negative, that were unnecessary, but the church had taught me to tell myself those stories. And so in my head, I thought I’ll help other people get to the celestial kingdom, but there’s no way I’m going to make it.

59:12 So, you know, I’ll just burn myself out getting to a lesser kingdom, helping others get to the celestial kingdom, which is such a crazy thing to even think. So selfless of you. Well, I guess it, uh, it, you know, I loved Mormonism. I wanted to be in the church. I, I wanted to be a part of it. I wanted nothing more than it to be true. If it, if it was true and I didn’t make it to heaven, that’s my fault. It’s not the system’s fault. That’s the program that God set up. Right.

59:40 So there I am gaslighting myself maybe right now. It’s the rules of the game. Yeah. It is the rules of the game. Cause there’s always more you can do. And you know, this whole second anointing thing, which I think people are talking about way too much, by the way, because I don’t think it should be talked about. But as long as we’re talking about it, I want to say that people are down on that.

1:00:00 People are generally down on the whole second anointing thing because, you know, it gives you the, what is it? The master card to do whatever you want, commit whatever sin, you know, you’re going to heaven. Okay. On the other hand, The flip side of that is what we have in most of Mormonism, those who haven’t entered the executive suite in the temple, is most of the people in Mormonism wander around trying to do everything they’re supposed to do with greater or lesser success, but they’re trying.

1:00:31 And none of them know, no matter how hard they’re trying or how much they believe or how much faith they have, none of them have any idea as to where they’re going to end up once they’re judged, what kingdom and where. And that itself lends itself to kind of this being up in the air, ungrounded. And I don’t know if it’s by design, but I think it’s able to be taken advantage of effectively by leadership.

1:00:56 Yeah, because then they give you these tiny little breadcrumbs, these little glimpses of like, you might be worthy right now in this moment, maybe. And I would just grasp onto those. I don’t know if it was the same for you guys, but I would take, one time I went to this fireside as a teenager and the guy who showed up had a tux on. And he got up there and he said, you know, I was going to wear my suit tonight, but I really felt like the spirit wanted me to wear this tux because this crowd is at a higher level.

1:01:27 And I, and, and he taught us that if we felt the spirit that also meant in that moment, we were forgiven. Right. And I was like, oh, maybe, maybe I have a chance, you know? And then ten minutes later he said something else. And I was like, actually, just kidding. No, I’m the worst. As long as you kill yourself while you’re feeling the spirit, you’re good to go. But you’re right.

1:01:51 This example that you give and you gave earlier, I think highlights it, which is baptism. It’s the only time in Mormonism, it’s the only time you know that you’re sinless. So if you were to die or if the guy who’s baptizing you holds you down a little too long while you’re being baptized, then you’re going to go to the celestial kingdom because you got no sins whatsoever. Yeah.

1:02:16 When I was a kid, the guy across the street from us was a, was not a member and he was a heavy, heavy smoker. And then just a couple of months before he was going to pass from, I’m guessing lung cancer, he got baptized. And I was like, why can’t I just do that? You know, I’m seven. I’m watching them hoist this guy out of his wheelchair into the font and then back up. And he is just, you know, white as a ghost and very thin and I was jealous of him.

1:02:45 I was like, I just want to live my life, and at the very end, I want to get baptized and then just be done. Have we all had that thought at some point or other as Mormons? Immediately to chastise ourselves and understand that, no, because we know it’s true, so therefore we’ve got to do it our whole freaking life. Right? What a blessing to be born into Mormonism. A blessing Bill and I were both spared, and yet, look at us. Yeah. You guys got like teenage years, I guess.

1:03:16 Yes, we did. Trying to fix this light so you can see my face, but it’s either too bright or not bright enough. That’s okay. I’ll just leave it. Okay. Yeah. Lucky you. You got to be a teenager without like, you didn’t do a wedding dress fashion show. I’m guessing. Well, no, I did not, but I was a pretty good kid. All things considered. I mean, it wasn’t like dealing drugs to other kids at school. Was I Bill?

1:03:40 no only one of us did that i didn’t want to deal drugs i just wanted to hang out with kids it’s okay the statute of limitations is run now tell us about this slide oh okay so we had stopped going to church i was very into all the podcasts i had probably finished your podcast at this point and uh this i posted this on facebook And so it’s a montage of these guys who’d been in the news recently, Mormon bishops, leaders, other clergy from the Mormon church who had gotten arrested for abuse of children.

1:04:21 I don’t know if it was specific children, but I posted it on Facebook and In the comments, I was putting snippets of a talk from President Eyring, Elder Eyring, I just call him Henry nowadays, showing how we are supposed to just put the hand up and sustain and our leaders are called of God. And how do we reconcile that? Because I was actually trying to reconcile these guys were a bishop and then they abused a kid.

1:04:56 But Eyring said they’re called of God and that God makes no mistakes. I think one of these quotes, they’re too small, I can’t read them, but I think one of the quotes says something to the effect of there’s not a mistake that’s made. Bill practically has this talk memorized. Is there any one of those you want Bill to read? Well, isn’t there one that says mistakes in it? It’s very small for me. I should have made them bigger maybe.

1:05:22 Well, let’s see here. I was going from the bottom up. Oh, yeah, it’s the first one. It’s at the end, though. That was the problem of the quote on the first one. For instance, it takes faith to believe that the resurrected Lord is watching over the daily details of his kingdom. So if you don’t believe that, you don’t have faith. It’s on you. It takes faith to believe that he calls imperfect people and child molesters into positions of trust.

1:05:57 It takes faith to believe that he knows the people he calls perfectly. Both their capacities and their potential. And so makes no mistakes in his calls. Period. End of quote from Henry Eyring. I think there’s like October, two thousand and seventeen general conference or so. Oh, I should have put the reference on there. But yeah, I mean, you can look it up from that quote. But I had.

1:06:26 who listened to that talk when it was given and I was still a semi-faithful member, but then seeing the guys get arrested for sexually abusing children while they were bishops and then pairing it with that talk, it had a whole new meaning for me. So I posted the first post on Facebook and then in the comments, I was putting portions of that talk while I was bantering back and forth with people because I still had a lot of people on my Facebook list who were people who had gone to church with.

1:06:54 And what happened was about a week later, the bishop texted not me, but Donnie and asked if we could come in to meet with him. He said, I need to meet with you and your wife. And so Donnie’s like, the bishop needs to meet with us. We hadn’t been to church in a while. And so I was like, yeah, sure, I guess. I mean, I don’t know what he wants. So we go in there and he starts talking about this Facebook post. And mind you, he doesn’t have a Facebook.

1:07:29 So I know as soon as he starts talking about it, that somebody… Has ratted me out. Because he’s not a social media guy. And he was actually a pretty nice guy, but pretty quiet, somewhat awkward. And I could tell this whole conversation was very, he didn’t want to be having it. I bet I know who did it. Who? Sister Waters. Yeah. She beat the path right there. Mormons are such stool pigeons. Right to the bishop’s office. Somebody told on me.

1:08:04 And I told him, I said, I was posting conference talks and they had sent him screenshots. So he’d seen exactly what I, yeah, yeah, he had evidence. And he said in that meeting, he said, not only will you, your church membership could be in jeopardy if you keep doing this, but I’m not sure if I’ll still be able to be your friend. Wow. He played the friend card. Yeah. Yeah, he said, I don’t know.

1:08:33 I mean, because Fairbanks isn’t the biggest town. You run into people you know everywhere you go. He’s like, I don’t know if I’ll be able to wave hi to you if we pass each other at Costco. Did he really say the wave hi in the Costco? Yes. He absolutely said that. So basically, I’ll have to shun you. Yeah. If you don’t take this down, is that what the condition was? He said if you keep posting things like this.

1:09:00 So he didn’t specifically tell me to take it down. I mean, I, of course, got the impression that’s what he needed me to do. But what I did do was I went home and I unfriended everyone on my Facebook who was Mormon. Everybody, every single person who had ever there were maybe two who I knew were sort of on the fence that I left. But people who I’d been friends with for a really long time, I was like, I don’t know who tattled on me, but it’s not worth it. What were you feeling there?

1:09:30 I mean, I can imagine sadness or anger being sort of prominent, but what were you feeling there? And maybe articulate for the audience what that feels like to somebody to have people going behind your back and, you know, tattle-telling to the bishop instead of just being a grown-ass adult and saying, like, knocking on your door, making a phone call to you and saying, hey, can we talk for a few minutes? Like…

1:09:51 Here’s what happened. This is how it landed for me. You know what? I felt like I was five. That’s honestly what I felt like. I felt like I was sitting in a room alone with my dad and he was mad at me because I’d eaten some chocolate chips I shouldn’t have eaten or whatever it was, because I was terrified of my dad. So that whole meeting, I was attempting to be nonchalant because in my mind I was thinking, if I don’t believe in this, he doesn’t have any power over me.

1:10:22 But my heart was racing. I was sweating when I get nervous. I can run a half marathon and be barely sweaty, but if I get anxious, the day’s over. I do not have enough deodorant for that. So I was terrified. My body was shaking. And I felt like he held all the cards, even though in my mind I knew he didn’t. But he was a man in a position of power. And in my life, that person had always been the person who I just do what they say. I don’t ask questions.

1:11:00 I don’t turn down callings. I do what they say. So even though he was a fairly gentle guy and we had been friends, our families had done stuff together a handful of times. I was terrified. I felt scared. It sent me way back. I felt like I was a child. And by the way, I just want to say that you can always tell a person’s a true friend when they say they’re not going to be able to wave at you if you keep criticizing the church on your Facebook page.

1:11:28 Yeah. Yeah. That’s the mark of a true friend. The truest. So what happened with this meeting? At Costco, no doubt. At Costco. Yeah. Because that’s where everybody bumps into everybody. It actually, yeah. If you’re in Fairbanks. Yeah. Yeah. So what I didn’t realize at the time, I actually read this years later where if they’re going to excommunicate you, they’re supposed to give you like a warning.

1:11:55 I don’t build. Did you run across a meeting to discuss stuff with them? Their concerns? What is it, Bill? Okay, so I hear the question is, did I get warnings about what I was doing rather than just sort of a direct interjection of discipline of some sort? Is that what you’re? Well, is that the protocol? I remember reading somewhere much later that they’re supposed to talk to you before they send some sort of letter.

1:12:21 I didn’t realize at the time that was what that meeting was. It was years later. Gotcha. Yeah. So there is something somewhere where every stake president I met with referred to this idea that somebody above them had reached down to them, said, hey, you should be aware of these things. Sit down with Brother Real. We basically try to save his soul in some way. But I was lucky that my first stake president in Santa Clara, Utah, just… He saw me as nice.

1:12:54 We had a common friend, the Bloxham family, the common friends, and he really didn’t want to give out discipline. So he was so gentle. And even the next stake president, President Carnevale, who… who was the one who ended up excommunicating me, went so slow on the front end of even wanting to reach out and talk and had several meetings and was very gentle. Yes, their impetus is like Salt Lake’s asking me to try to get this guy to change.

1:13:24 And again, leadership roulette, whether that person is mean or nice, but they were gentle and took the process really slow. Yeah, so after that meeting happened, the meeting that they were supposed to have, that I didn’t know that until later, I unfriended all the Mormons on Facebook. Generally and quotable. In the meeting, though, he’s asking you this, and are you just saying you’ll think about it?

1:13:52 Or is there any kind of discussion between you and your husband and the state president about his demands? So I honestly remember how I felt. I don’t remember a lot of what was said because I was so nervous. But I do remember asking him if anything I said was not true. I do remember saying that. Did I say something that’s not true? And he was trying to say back to me, like, well, no, but…

1:14:19 But it just didn’t look good or it just didn’t sound, it didn’t make the church sound good or things like that. But I remember being nervous and I remember sweating and I remember getting out of there and asking Donnie, what did I say in there? Because I was so nervous. And it’s just you who’s on the hot seat, not Donnie, right? Yeah, but he needs to be there. He was contacted. Yeah. Yeah.

1:14:46 Yeah, I mean, is that what they do, Bill, too? If it’s a woman, you have to have them bring the… I mean, did your wife have to go with you at the time when you were married? No, and I’ve heard so many instances in the church where women are always reached out to through the husband, and the husband never has the wife reached out to first. That’s just not the way patriarchy works. Right, yeah, that part, yep.

1:15:11 So then what happened? You’re leaving the meeting with the stake president. Take it from there. Well, it was the bishop. Yeah, it was just the bishop. Well, they just cut contact. I think we maybe got a letter on the porch for one of my teenage daughters, you know, from the young women’s after that. But people just kind of let us be lost. It didn’t come, I unfriended everyone so they couldn’t tattle on me anymore.

1:15:40 I did go to church one more time after that because one of my kids wanted to go see their friends. So I agreed to go, but we hadn’t gone in a long time. I don’t even remember how long it was. And I sat through sacrament meeting and then after an older gal from the Relief Society came up to me and she said, we’ve missed you. And I just, I knew I was gonna get that comment. So I looked her straight in the face and I said, we didn’t move. You know where I live. You can just come visit me. And then she walked away.

1:16:11 You were ready for that one. She had no words. Yeah. And that was the only other time I’ve gone. Other than not this last Christmas, but the one, was it this last Christmas? No, it was the one before. I went and sat through a sacrament meeting just to sing some Christmas hymns at a random ward here in Texas. It’s not the ward we’re assigned to. we’re not assigned to any ward our records are in no man’s land you know i went from thinking that my deepest friendships were with members of the church and then i pulled away from the church and they pulled away from me and then i i’m kind of alone out there with two exceptions i’ve talked about before but by and large i became radioactive and i realized that the friendships i thought were the deepest were actually the shallowest Yeah, if I couldn’t talk about the church, we didn’t have anything in common.

1:17:05 And talk about the church in the right way. Yeah, I could talk a lot about it. I learned a ton. They didn’t want to hear about that stuff. No, well, and by this point, I had a big rupture in my family with my parents and siblings as well. So when I stopped going to church, it was kind of the straw for a lot of the people in my family, because I had already been getting healthy.

1:17:31 I already had the purple hair. I had gotten one little tattoo at that point, this one here that says loved. And so I was ousted from my family. And then when I left the church, it was even more so where I didn’t have anything in common with them. There was nothing to talk about with them. And then also every one of my friends before that had been members pretty much, except for, you know, maybe a few random people I’d met at work or something.

1:18:01 So yeah, it was lonely. It was lonely. You can see why a podcast that makes me feel like I can stay alive is really important. What happened next? Oh, so man, to get me to my podcast. Oh, okay. So Donnie and I, we’d been in fairbanks for six years and our marriage had come to a point leaving the church helped a little, but it didn’t solve our problems. Donnie still needed to do a lot of the deconstructing I was and a lot of the healing that I was, and he hadn’t been doing it up to that point.

1:18:49 So we actually separated for about eight months and we had a huge house because anyway, it was a super weird house, but it was huge. And so we divided the house into like put up a wall and made it into like two separate living spaces. So we separated that way so we could still have the kids go back and forth, but we had separate spaces. And during that time, Donnie started going to a really good therapist and started really delving into the things that had hurt him being a member of the church.

1:19:23 And then About eight months into that, he really wanted to get out of Fairbanks. And so, well, we both kind of did. So he got a job in Texas where we live now. And we moved to Texas together, even though we were starting to have conversations about maybe we could start dating. And he was starting to show up in ways that I was like, okay. Dating each other again. Yeah, yeah. because we didn’t get to know each other before we got married the first time.

1:19:54 And so when he decided to come to Texas, I was like, I will come, but I wasn’t sure we were going to stay together. I had seen enough from him showing up in healthier ways than he had previously that I was willing to come to Texas, but I didn’t know if we were going to stay together. So when we got here, I was going to get a job, but he’s like, you know what? We’re making enough money now.

1:20:15 We intentionally downsized our house so that we could be more free financially he’s like why don’t you just stay home for a little while and just take time for you you know you’ve all you’ve always been the one fairly solo parenting the kids you’ve always also worked sometimes from home sometimes in an actual you know a full-time job outside the home he’s like just take some time and while i was doing that I one day on a very small TikTok channel that I had at the time, read a little bit of the news that had to do with Mormonism.

1:20:53 I had been getting it in my email every day for years. I just set up a Google alert. And when it said Mormon or Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, the news would come to my Gmail inbox. So on TikTok, I was like, hey, here’s some news that’s going on in Mormonism. And it was very clumsy. That was the one that the screenshot of. that you said before, the December eleventh of twenty twenty three that day. And people seem to like it.

1:21:21 I didn’t have a thought about doing it beforehand, and I didn’t know that it would end up where it is now. But yeah, There’s my first. Everyone should scroll back for, you know, four hours in my TikTok and watch that because, oh, it’s so clumsy. It’s so funny. But I got six hundred and seventy five views, which for me was a lot. I never got over two hundred before that. And I thought, oh, well, maybe people like this.

1:21:52 And I wasn’t working outside the home at the time. I had picked up a few graphic design jobs because that’s what I’ve been doing on the side. But yeah, that is how Generally Unquotable got started. On a whim, one day I sat down and read some news clumsily. On behalf of Geoplanet Jane, I’ve got to ask, do you know Hannah Stevenson? going to need more context than that maybe well it’s geo planet jane’s niece right i hope that helps maybe she’ll maybe she’ll message me and i can get some more context because i’ve lived in so many places maybe if i have a place then i can remember you know tie it together so you were doing a podcast before this about something else no i just had a tick tock channel and sometimes so i was reading um luna lindsey corbden’s book About how Mormonism is a cult.

1:22:41 You know, what’s it? I want to say combating cult mind control, but that’s Steve Hassan’s book. But she lists thirty one things that make Mormonism or they sorry, list thirty one things that make Mormonism a cult. And I sometimes on that channel, I would read a little portion and then just talk about how it had impacted me. Oh, they’re so right about this. Look at this portion. Look what they said.

1:23:04 So I had done that a handful of times, but I hadn’t done any new stuff and I hadn’t. I mean, I just it was just a little TikTok channel. That’s all it was. And so this day I just read the news just because. And you got six hundred and seventy five views and you thought, this is nice. Maybe I’ll make this a regular gig. Well, I just thought somebody benefited from this or they wouldn’t there wouldn’t be they wouldn’t have watched that much of it.

1:23:30 And I was like, OK. And I’m thinking back to when I was a brand new Exmo, you know, a little baby Exmo. And I was listening to Radio Free Mormon and I was feeling like I mattered because And I was like, if six hundred and seventy five people, that’s a lot of people. I mean, it might be a minuscule amount of views on a TikTok or something, but to me, that was a lot of people. And I was like, if even one of those people today thought I’m not crazy. then that was worth it to me.

1:24:06 So the other thing on this slide is some of my own art. So I actually have a degree in art. I did photography for years and graphic design for years, and I actually drew an entire coloring book. And that’s one of the pages from the coloring book that says we belong together to each other. We belong to each other. And so before I had done this news and six hundred seventy five people had watched it, my life, I had been thinking a lot about how we belong to each other.

1:24:38 And so when people seemed to listen, I wanted to be there. I wanted to be there for the other people who were like me. And yeah, the whole coloring book was about how we can support each other. It was mostly focused on women and females, but as an ex-Mormon, we need community. So yeah, I’ve also done art. That was the, that, you know, I have all of these different things that I’ve done.

1:25:08 I’ve worked at Baskin Robbins and I’ve done graphic design and now I do a, I worked manual labor when I was a teenager building gun safes. I’ve done it all. That’s awesome. By the way, I don’t want to pursue this too much further, but geo planet Jane says that this Hannah Stevenson chick that she used to work in the art department at the university of Alaska. Oh, So I didn’t know a ton of people from there, but I’m certain we probably ran into each other.

1:25:42 The University of Alaska Fairbanks, because there is a University of Alaska elsewhere, but you know. Oh, Esther. Yeah, I know where Esther is. They have a wonderful festival out there that I actually designed the logo for one year, and it was very well liked. The logo and the festival, yeah. Esther is a very small town. Matter of fact, there’s probably six hundred people there, so. It’s not one that I’d heard of before. No, it’s very small. Yeah.

1:26:07 So Fairbanks is the Fairbanks North Star borough. It’s like a county. Right. But it includes Fairbanks and North Pole and Esther and all these other places. But the actual city of Fairbanks has thirty thousand people. But the borough is the size of Rhode Island land wise and has one hundred thousand people. So everyone is very spread out. There’s not very many people, a lot of land.

1:26:29 I put up some of your photos on the slide from Alaska. Yeah. So I’ve seen the Northern Lights. The Northern Lights picture there, that was actually, so the pipeline ran through our property when we lived in Fairbanks. So there was an easement on our property. The oil pipeline ran right through it. And so they kept the easement clear and there were no trees there. And so it was a perfect place to view the Northern Lights. And so I’ve seen them. You took that picture yourself? Yeah. Then that’s not a great picture.

1:26:59 Don’t zoom in. Okay, but still, it’s amazing. Oh, the Northern Lights are unreal. If you have it on your bucket list, don’t put it at the bottom. Because I saw them many, many times, and it was unreal every time. There are times when there’s a lot of solar activity and it gets as far south as Washington State. But it’s nothing like that, at least not what I’ve seen. What I’ve seen is like some greenish sort of mildly glowing goo in the sky sort of.

1:27:29 It’s not like this rippling kind of river of light. And it was across the entire top of the sky, and they move. It’s wild. If you want to go to Fairbanks and see the Northern Lights and not freeze your butt off, go the second or third week of September. It’ll be chilly, but it won’t be snowy, and it won’t be forty below. And every year for six years, the second and third week of September, the Northern Lights were phenomenal. That’s amazing.

1:27:55 And over here in this upper right picture, you’ve conquered the giant red spiders. Those are king crabs. So when we lived in Southeast Alaska, we had a boat and we had shrimp pots and crab pots and we’d go halibut fishing and salmon fishing. And we did a lot of subsistence because food was very expensive. So if we, you know, brought that stuff in and filled our deep freeze, we could last through the winter on crab and shrimp and fish and deer.

1:28:24 Yeah. yeah so and then there’s the little iceberg there in the middle that was down in petersburg too we go out on the boat and head towards the glacier and then the other is a drawing of optimistic prime i saw that you drew this i guess i did yeah he’s got his thumb up and he says everything will probably be all right and that’s why he’s optimistic prime yeah so i just wanted to showcase I just have had a very full life.

1:28:55 I mean, Mormonism seemed like it was everything, but there’s so much outside of that. And all of this was happening as I was transitioning out and getting out. And I’m not left with nothing. I’m left with a whole lot. Very good. And I think that’s the end of the slides. You know, I’ve got to ask you a question. I have all these other questions that I’m never going to get to tonight.

1:29:19 And that’s fine because this has been much better. This has been much better. But you’ve talked about how you got to your podcast. And I just wanted to ask you, how is it that you put out a podcast every morning of every weekday? I do have that correct, right? It’s not seven days a week. No, sometimes it is. Every once in a while, I’ll do some extra episodes on the weekends, just depending on what’s going on that week. But standard, five days a week.

1:29:45 And there are some times when I’ll be like, I’m going to be out of town, so I’m going to miss a day. I don’t. I just record one previous. Get it out anyways. How do you do it? I can read very quickly. That’s something that helps a lot. And I read a lot. In ninth grade English, I read four or five books to the class because they’d say, have the fast girl read because then they knew if we had to read out loud, we’d actually get through the material.

1:30:11 So that helps a lot. And I retain information. I can still play songs on the violin that I learned in seventh grade. So I just retain information just for whatever reason. And so I spend, I mean, I’ve spent so many years studying all of this. A lot of it will just come to mind. So if I include a conference talk that has to do with the news story, it’s probably just because I remembered it.

1:30:34 I didn’t have to go to LDS.org and search a word. And I just thought, oh, yeah, that, you know, Benson said that thing and just grab it and bring it in. So that’s helpful. It helps speed things up. and you seem to have quite a grasp of the subject i just want to say because i have seen a number of your episodes and i know what you’re referring to where all of a sudden you’re talking about a talk that doubt i think it was today’s show dylan oaks from talking to byu and this connection that you made between that and the other thing you were talking about Oh, about the teeth with Faust. Yes. Yes.

1:31:09 He’s in the Faust and the dental work and the gold and you dedicate it for the temple because we have to have something for Moroni to coat him with all that gold. So why not your teeth? But did you, Faust has said he bought the gold above market value. Someone’s teeth gold. Well, he bought it above market value to show respect. But, but if he could do that, why didn’t he just let them keep their damn teeth and just give the money to the church?

1:31:33 These are the questions that a good Mormon is not supposed to ask. I didn’t even say that on there, but I was thinking it. But yes, I think of it. But I thought that was a great juxtaposition that you did. And that’s a lot of it is in my mind. Those tensions are happening. So I just put them out there. But I do treat it like a full time job. I work forty plus hours a week. So I record a podcast.

1:31:58 I haven’t ever said this out loud to anyone, but I mean publicly, but I do it a day in advance, right? So tomorrow’s podcast, I schedule today. That way it can go out in the morning because I have a lot of people who religiously listen while they drink their morning coffee. But yeah, I spend the whole day doing the next day’s podcast. And I usually, I start right at eight thirty when my kids leave for school.

1:32:22 And then I’m usually done recording, editing and posting by about two o’clock. And then I start writing for the next the next one. So it’s just a continuous. And I have, you know, screenshots of the stories that I’ve seen and they’re all lined up and I just I see one and then it leads me to something and I kind of let it go where it goes. Sometimes I’ll have things where I think this is going to be so important to talk about. And then I never talk about it.

1:32:51 So, yeah, it just, it’s kind of, it’s, if you listen to my show, you can start to see how my mind works because it is a stream of consciousness for me where I read a news story. It reminds me of a conference talk that reminds me of a book that, and it just, and sometimes all the stories tie together and sometimes they’re all different, but they’re, yeah, it’s just what I wanted to talk about that day.

1:33:12 And it’s part of the joy of just being my own boss because I can talk about whatever I want. It sounds wonderful, but I do have to ask you this question. How do you get to sleep at night? I would think that so many thoughts would always be running through your head. I’m going to be real honest right now. Listen, number one, about eight years ago, I got a weighted blanket. I had not slept through the night.

1:33:39 I don’t know since being a child until I got that weighted blanket. And it wasn’t because my newborns didn’t sleep because my kids, my oldest at three days old slept eight hours. Okay. I was not a typical sleep deprived mom. I just didn’t sleep because my mind was always going right. I got a weighted blanket that helped a ton. The second thing is that I hit early menopause. And when they gave me the therapy, the hormone replacement therapy for that, made it so i could sleep at night even better so those two things the weighted blanket huge for me some people don’t like them but that’s been a huge one and yeah and then the estrogen so i have trouble getting to sleep at night myself so i may try those yeah i don’t know how the estrogen will work for you but definitely try the weighted blanket the other thing too is that i work out every morning so by the time i go to bed at night i’m tired

1:34:34 So on top of all this, you work out every morning. I do. And that’s seven days a week. I don’t still run every day because menopause does stuff to the joints, okay? Every other day? Well, yeah, for being honest. But not every day. It was starting to hurt my hips, okay? I’m forty-five now. Okay. Believe me, I’m in awe. Bill, do you have any questions that you want to ask, generally and quotable, before we bring in people from outside?

1:35:07 We’ve got another guy who’s in line to ask you a question. He’s actually in your home state. Ooh. He’s only about a thousand miles away. Yeah. Everybody’s faith journey is this exhilarating ride of ups and downs. And I’m just curious, you know, the things that generally I would ask somebody is, What issue maybe was the most abrasive to you? What moments, if anything strikes your mind, again, you’re sharing moments of disconnection with ward family, with family members themselves.

1:35:50 You’re talking about your own path of stepping away from it and what that looked like. I guess I’m just interested in roller coaster that that is, what are some of the moments that stand out that something really was abrasive to you or you really got hurt by the fact that somebody didn’t show up making space for you to shift or change? So when we lived in Petersburg and I was the Relief Society president and I had started, I had been going to therapy for, I don’t know, six or eight months.

1:36:25 He was a Mormon therapist. He was very good. You know, the one that told me I could chop on Sundays. And I was talking to him a lot about, so I was the Relief Society president through the pregnancy of my fifth and sixth child. And it was a lot. and i was talking to my therapist about that and he you know what he wouldn’t tell me what to do but he’d say well what what do you want to do and i said i really need to be released from my calling and so i went to the branch president and which was terrifying you know a male in a position of authority plus that was even smaller town and he also held sort of an authority position in the town and i told him i need to be released and he didn’t acknowledge that I could feel that way.

1:37:10 He just said, you know what, I need to go and I need to think about it. Let’s meet again in a week. So we came back in a week and he said to me, I had a conversation with the Lord and he said, you need to keep doing your calling. And it was one of those moments where I finally cared about myself enough that I said, I am I believe you that you had that conversation with the Lord and I need you to know after today, I’m not going to be doing my calling anymore.

1:37:44 And just realizing that I could be a person separate from everyone else and that he didn’t get to tell me what to do. It was terrifying, but it was one of those moments where I just couldn’t sit back and do what I was told anymore. I couldn’t because I knew that it wasn’t serving me. I was trying to serve everybody else and I wasn’t picking myself up in the process. Yeah. We sort of just meet a moment where it’s like, I can’t do what I did yesterday.

1:38:18 And before this moment, I can’t do it that way anymore. A new me is here and I have to honor myself. Yeah. Because I found out about all of the sticky stuff in church history after we had already stopped going to church. That wasn’t that stuff. It was mental health things where I was learning that I could have autonomy, that I could make decisions. And for a woman in the church, that’s really not something they want you to do.

1:38:50 They’ll say they want you to, but they don’t. That branch president didn’t give me the space to say, no, I just had to take it. Thank you. Yeah. Yeah. Well, Megan, that’s a great story. Thanks for being here tonight. We’ve got some other people who want to come on and ask you a question. Here’s the fellow who’s in your home state. It’s DG. You may have heard of him before. You may have seen his photograph on the wall of the local post office. It’s DG. How are you doing? Doing good, RFM.

1:39:25 Thanks for having me on. You have quite a collection of pictures on your wall. I do. I’ve got three questions and I’ll be quick about it. Okay. Actually, fourth, what part of Texas are you in? South of Houston. Okay. So I owe Alex five bucks. Thanks. Question number one, curious, did you ever reconcile with your husband? I mean, did things work out? Y’all are still together? Yes. Yes.

1:39:51 Yes. Yes. Thank you for helping me wrap that up. Absolutely. He is, I, when I see us, I’m the, the me of five years ago is jealous of the us right now because he deconstructed All of the shame that he was holding from Mormonism. And damn, you know what? Underneath there that whole time was a really awesome dude. That’s great. Yeah, he’s amazing. I like the part where you said you got to discover each other after the fact, after you left. And that’s kind of my story, too.

1:40:26 I mean, married very quickly, started having a family and kids, and then realized I really didn’t know my wife that well after twenty five years of marriage. But anyway, question number two, you said that while you were you got a job to avoid having to go to church. And I’m thinking for a woman that has six kids, how did that work out? Did they go to church? Did they keep going or did they not? Did your husband take them to church?

1:40:50 Did someone else take them to church or they didn’t go to church while you were working? So my husband was taking them to church. Really? Yeah, I was letting him. He was allowed. He was allowed to take the kids to because it sounds like your family was the primary in your branch or your ward. Yeah, I mean, that ward in Fairbanks was if we had still been in Petersburg, yes, because there were thirty five people who showed up every week and we were eight of them.

1:41:13 But in Fairbanks, you know, it was a ward. It wasn’t a huge ward. But yeah, I mean, we were a big portion. Okay. And my last question, and this is more of a news kind of item. I’m sorry, I don’t watch your podcast. I think I’ve caught some reels maybe here and there, but so I’m going to try to jingle. I’m curious about this particular news item because I saw it and I think it was Rebecca Bibliotheca that may have posted something about this over a week ago.

1:41:38 But since you’re in the know and you’re the news person, young men’s presidencies are making a comeback. Do you know about this? So, yeah, they there’s I saw the article about it, and it’s one of those ones I have in my queue to read. But I over the past couple of years while I’ve been doing this, so I do have access to a couple of faithful Facebook pages where people talk about these things.

1:42:05 Anyway, I haven’t seen men complain about it so much as the women. So it’s been young women presidencies who have complained that they are picking up the slack because there’s not a young men’s presidency. And I think that information has been getting back to the Brethren in many, many ways. And they are seeing that they maybe made a little snafu in taking away the young men presidencies and putting it all on the bishop.

1:42:35 Uh, one of my, I told my Bishop off, uh, and that was on my way out. I was his first counselor in the ward and there was, it was a number of items, but one of the things was, you know, he kept re I told him when I, when I accepted the calling, I was not the answer to his young men’s problem that the church had raised me my entire life to be a scout master. And I actually had that calling when the church was still involved with scouts, but now that there’s no more scouts, I’m, you know, I’m not the solution to your young men’s problem.

1:43:04 I work. I’ve got my own problems throughout the week, and I can’t meet separately. And he kept hitting me over the head saying, well, you know, your role as first counselor is you need to be heading up the young men. And I just told him off, and I said, you know, Bishop, why would Jesus tell his one true prophet to do away with young men’s presidencies? I don’t understand this.

1:43:22 But what you need to do is you need to call someone to be a young men’s president. You just don’t give them the title young men’s president. And that’s what he did. And that’s what I picked up on on this news thing was that that’s pretty much what almost probably every stake in North America, if not around the world, has done because Nelson royally screwed up the youth programs.

1:43:43 And we were supposed to get this wonderful youth program that was gonna replace scouting and it never materialized. But this one item I was curious about because that was a big deal with me and my bishop and my departing from the faith was, you know, why get rid of young men’s presidencies and dump all that on the bishop? And then I see that story and I’m like, ah, so it wasn’t just me. Okay. I was just curious. Yeah, it was not just you.

1:44:06 People have been complaining about it since it happened. Yeah. It’s interesting that you say it’s the women that are making the loudest noise about it. That is interesting to me. Anyway, thanks. I don’t want to take any more time. Great show. Thanks RFM and Be Real for having her on. Wonderful episode. Love it. Thank you so much, DG. And your absence was noticed last Friday night. I’ll try to be there this week. I promise. I hope it was a hot date. It was hot, but not a date.

1:44:34 Okay. Well, we’ll find out more later. Friday, RFM. Wait for Friday. On Friday, tux night. See you, DG. I’m going to take you out of here. Actually, Bill is, but I keep thinking Bill’s going to. Anyway, Bill and I have this problem is that we both want to give each other too much authority. He keeps trying to let me have a little bit more power, and I keep forgetting to use it or how to use it.

1:45:01 Anyway, so eventually we got DG out of here. That’s the important thing. Thanks for calling in, DG. You pressed the buttons? Yes. The button’s about DG’s gone now. Now DG’s in. Now DG’s gone. Hey, Bill, is there anybody else who’s called in? I haven’t seen anybody else down below. A lot of people just love you to death and lots of positive comments. You covering things on the daily basis, is there a day that you created content where something happened and you found yourself way more…

1:45:37 dysregulated or activated, triggered would be maybe another word, over what it was that was in the news or what it was you were writing a script for and doing a video on? You know, I tend to stay, I have been deconstructing long enough that I don’t get tied up too much. There have been times when I am reading, I’m trying to think, because there was one story where I was pausing so that I wouldn’t cry while I was reporting. As you’re reading.

1:46:10 Yeah, yes, as I’m reading an article. And I, of course, read everything in advance. It’s not a surprise that I’m going to read this article. I’m the one who wrote everything down. But more often than not, the dysregulation would come out in ways that I wouldn’t want to be disrespectful to people who I’m talking about, right? Because I still get angry about things that the church does.

1:46:37 But I don’t want to process that anger on my show in that way. I want to do it with logic because that’s what’s going to hold, you know, like I’ve learned that the anger that I have is the part of me. It’s part of me that loves me because it’s the part of me that tells me something is wrong. So my anger loves me, but it’s not the part that’s going to continue to carry me through.

1:47:02 It’s okay if it comes and I process it and move through it, but I need to find a way to continue on in those thoughts where I can get to the other side. So sometimes, and it’s why I would do a first read through. I don’t know that I would do a live show because I, if I was breaking down a video by someone who was, you know, an apologist who I didn’t care for or something, I would probably say something terrible about them.

1:47:32 But I don’t want to ad hominem people, right? I mean, I understand that that’s just really not helpful. Do I think those things… It’s a lot of fun though. It can be so much fun. I know, I know, I know. It’s therapeutic actually. Absolutely, absolutely. And when I come online, I want to present the part of it that is… There are occasions when I will put something out there that is a little more coarse, but for the most part, I try to stick with the parts that help me process through it so that other people can process with me.

1:48:05 Because it’s not just reading a news story and saying, think what you wanna think about it. I try to put myself back in my Mormon brain and say, when I heard this when I was Mormon, I would have thought it was the bee’s knees, right? I would have been like, thank you, Uchtdorf. Thank you, Oaks. You really laid down the law. And so now when I hear it, that’s what my brain will default to a lot of times. The first thing is the Mormon brain.

1:48:30 And so I have to stop and say, what are they actually saying? Why is this harmful? Even though they’re standing there, this grandpa type man is standing there and saying these things. And on the surface, because I was raised Mormon, they sound so wonderful. Why aren’t they? So let’s pause for a minute and let’s talk about this. Let’s talk about how they’re using manipulation or how this is really benevolent patriarchy or how their attempt, how they’re controlling people, whether they’re attempting to or not through this language.

1:49:02 through the way they’re controlling this new story or whatever it may be. Sorry. Yeah. To answer Bill’s question, there are definitely times when I get dysregulated. Sometimes I get overwhelmed with sadness, but a lot of times I just want to say, you mother, you know, can you just leave them alone? Can you just report the abuse? I do want to say those things sometimes. Yeah. When you talk about, um, figuring out how you would have looked at what was said as a Mormon and then drilling down deeper.

1:49:35 And what does it really mean? That description by you really does describe what I think is, like I said, one of your strong suits. And I see it over and over again. And that is one of the most fruitful areas where you give me thoughts that I hadn’t thought before. And that, I love that because they’re thoughts I probably didn’t have until the moment I was writing it either, because I’ll read two or three sentences and then I’ll pause and write down what I was thinking and, you know, go over a Brené Brown book if I need to, to deconstruct a little bit and pull it apart a little bit more.

1:50:14 I have a whole stack of, you know, Brené Brown books and Luna Lizzie Corbden’s book is right here on my desk at all times. really pulling things apart. And to get back into my Mormon brain, RFM and I were talking about this before the show. I, in the past couple months, listened to three hundred plus episodes of a faithful Mormon podcast. It’s very small. It’s called Words of the Prophets podcast.

1:50:40 And it’s two, three, sometimes four very, very faithful Mormons talking about conference talks because it is helpful for me to hear them talk about it so then that way when i hear apologists who are some of the more well-known ones saying you know you you always should have known this thing about the church i can say you know what the faithful run-of-the-mill average mormons still don’t know this stuff and still aren’t talking about it it just keeps me very grounded in a place where i know what i experienced and there are still people who are experiencing that in mormonism regard you know regardless of what the apologists want us to believe or think. Yeah.

1:51:23 Well, you know, we had Jay Castro down here below, but he since abandoned us or maybe his, I don’t know, his wifi failed. There’s a problem wherever he is. Oh no, I recognize that name. Yeah. He comments on my show regularly. Sometimes they have a problem with the wifi in San Quentin, but we do have Nanya who’s present and accounted for. Nanya, how you doing? I’m all right. How are you folks? Great. Great. What do you think of generally equitable? Is this Nanya’s business? Yes.

1:51:52 Nanya business. Yes. Okay. Okay. Okay. Just, okay. Moving forward. Had to make sure. It’s okay. It’s all right. I have a lot of business, but it is business. That’s right. Anywho, my big question is this, um, Well, it’s kind of a two-parter. First part, how is your relationship with your parents currently? It is strained. So I haven’t talked to them. The last time I saw them in person was twelve years ago in twenty fourteen.

1:52:29 Actually, one of the pictures on the slide is the big family reunion that we had in twenty fourteen. That’s the last time I saw my parents in person. And I think the last time I talked to my parents was in Fairbanks sometimes. So it would have been probably, I don’t know, five, six years ago on the phone. So when I started to get healthy, there was a lot of stuff that happened in our family that started to split it apart.

1:52:50 So my parents went on a mission to New Zealand to kind of get away from all that. And while they were there, I did FaceTime them one time. But my dad used to send out these, well, he still does, these daily thoughts. And they were always, you know, he’s reading the Book of Mormon. He’s sending out a spiritual thought. to his kids by email. And after I’d been out of the church quite some time, I just sent him an email saying, hey, can you please just take me off that list?

1:53:17 Like, it’s really hard for me to read those. And he was upset by that. So then he didn’t talk to me after that. My mom said he was waiting for me to apologize for that. Is he still waiting? He’s still waiting as far as I know. Kind of what I thought would happen. I’m sorry, is this the slide on the upper right, that picture? Is that the family reunion? Yeah, yeah, that’s my parents and their kids and their grandkids.

1:53:42 And there are a few people missing, but it’s a lot of people. Yeah, that was the family reunion in twenty fourteen. The second part, after your parents had realized that you had fallen apostate, was the phrase I taught you the truth uttered and was it, you know, a frequent phrase if it was or? From my parents? Yeah, or maybe even family members or members of the church who may have directly been part of your education.

1:54:14 So I had a brother that left the church before I did. Actually, two brothers. And I heard all that stuff about them, but I don’t know that they heard it, right? So when I left, I’m certain it was being said, but it was not said to me. Interesting. Yeah. Yeah. So we were very much, you tell everyone but the person in my family. I think that’s echoed in Mormonism a lot. But yeah, my family was very much that way. No, my family was very direct with it.

1:54:44 If you were out, you know, our mother was very much, I taught you the truth and you know the truth that I taught you. Yeah, see, I heard that phrase, but I heard it about my siblings. Right. It feels like it’s their get out of jail free card because since parents are responsible for the children and them falling apostate, it’s the way they sit there and try and self-soothe. right well in the family home evening manual back in the eighties or whatever there was a quote in there that said if you hold regular family home evenings your children will be say you know they’ll they won’t leave the church or they’ll come back or something along those lines and my mom is holding tight to that very tightly yeah that was something i didn’t really notice being mentioned if that phraseology happened during your uh during your Mormon Stories episode and earlier during this episode either.

1:55:39 So I figured it’d be a good question to ask because I’m pretty sure quite a few other people out there have heard that phrase or phraseology or some variation of it put at them, especially if they were born in the covenant. Yeah, well, my mom did say, I do remember her saying, I did everything right. She didn’t say I taught you the truth, but she, you know, we never missed a family home.

1:56:01 Literally never missed a family home evening. Never missed scripture study. Had scripture study in the morning and again at dinnertime. Had family prayer no matter what. Went to church at home on vacation. Did not skip. Well, you got to wonder because what’s going on in your mom’s mind? Because if the church is true, her kids are not leaving. Right. Or it’s possible that her and your father, in their minds, did not do enough to ingrate the truth enough into you.

1:56:41 Yeah. That’s why the response can be, I told you, I did nothing wrong. I did nothing wrong and neither did I. When I get to that place with my parents, that’s when I can have compassion. Growing up with the parents I had was really hard, but when I can see them as a parent, just wanting the best for their child, which is, and they think that’s the best, right? Yeah. Then I can get to a place of compassion.

1:57:07 It doesn’t happen all the time, but when it does, I, I just feel a lot of empathy for them. Like I, I wish they didn’t have that pressure for us to be a certain way so that they could just love us. And so we could have a relationship. The church is supposed to bring the families together, but it doesn’t seem to be working out in this. In the church, your children are part of how you present in the church, and what they do reflects directly on the parents.

1:57:34 So it’s part of how strict they are with youth, generally. Because you always knew about the parents who were lax, and you may not be able to go hang out with those kids because… They weren’t strong enough in the faith, their parents, which means their kids are going to fall away. And it might be that the parents will too eventually. Yes. Well, in this case, we can only hope. Yeah. Hey, Nanya.

1:57:58 Nanya, thank you for calling in. Appreciate it. Yeah, thank you. Not a problem. Thank you for having me. And thanks for the question answer. You bet. Talk to you later. Later. Bye-bye. Okay. So now we’ve got Anaheim. One, two, three is calling in. How are you doing? The cat’s got their tongue. Or maybe they don’t. Some sort of like, I can’t hear RFM. Okay. Can you hear me? Okay. I’m just going to ask my question.

1:58:31 I had asked you for advice, and you recommended me a few books. And you told me, we don’t have to do this alone. And that was really like… I think maybe we lost them. We don’t hear you anymore. But I know what they’re referring to. Yeah. Yeah. They sent me a message asking for some book recommendations. I’m going to put her back down below. It’s the only thing I would know to do.

1:59:11 I thought she was pausing because her emotions got the best of her. I know. Me too. I ended up just being technological. The conversation I had with them was wonderful, but I don’t want to say anything they don’t want to say. I’m going to try one more time. Are you there? A-N-H-E- one, two, three. Okay. I’m going to… I didn’t remove them. They somehow disappeared because I think they got disconnected.

1:59:40 So someone had to reach out to you, a listener to your show had reached out to you for some book recommendations. Yeah, they sent me a Facebook message asking about how to talk to their children about their bodies. You know, because in Mormonism, when I started my period, I didn’t know I was going to do that. My mom didn’t tell me. So I thought I had cancer. So it was terrifying.

2:00:06 Anyway, so as a parent, even when I was Mormon, I was like, I am gonna be open with my kids about their bodies. I’m gonna use proper names for body parts. And then when I really started deconstructing, I found a lot of books to help me talk to them because my parents had never modeled how to talk about anything, not even putting deodorant on or wearing a bra. the simplest things were not conversations we had and so i was so awkward about it so i read a lot of books so i recommended them to this person so that they could have some tools to help them talk to their kids just about their bodies and growing up and how they change and dealing with sexual thoughts and what’s appropriate and how to be you know become a human and become an adult and do all the natural things that Mormonism made really uncomfortable or even scary. And it was awesome.

2:01:00 We just had a conversation like, well, I didn’t know if you’d even respond. And because of my lived experience, I could say, look, here are six books I have on my shelf right now that were key in this part of my life. So yeah, and I think my kids would now say I’m probably too open about it. They’re like, mom, nobody needs to know that. Okay. Thank you. Thank you so much for that answer.

2:01:23 I’m noticing that Jay Moon has rejoined us. So I want to grab him before he evaporates again. Jay, how you doing? Hey, pretty good. How are you guys? Hey. Hey. Awesome to see you, Megan. Yeah, it’s nice to see you. I usually just see your words. Yeah. I just wanted to say, like, your channel is really, really amazing. It’s, yeah, it’s, every day it’s never disappointing. It’s always something that’s pretty inspirational.

2:01:50 I think, like, it’s a great way for people to deconstruct. Well, thank you. Thank you. Yeah, you’re always there and you have kind words for me. And I might project this aura of confidence, but, you know, I can get after myself with the best of them. So it’s always nice to hear something positive and uplifting with all the time that I put in and how I overthink things. So I really appreciate it.

2:02:17 Yeah. You already know how I feel about you. I’m your favorite superhero. Yeah. Yes. All right, guys. Just want to stop in there. Keep up the good work. Thank you so much, Jay. It’s always good to see you. Talk to you later. Well, I think that is it for tonight. Generally Unquotable, I haven’t used your name once, except people are using it now in the live chat, and it’s getting put up on the screen. Oh, that’s okay.

2:02:51 I have said Generally Unquotable all night long, religiously, even though before the show started, they got your clearance on it. It was okay to use your name, your real name, but I haven’t done it. And then somebody goes and throws it up there. It’s two Gs. The last comment had it right. The second G is silent, right? Yes. And yeah, the question I get is why the two G’s? And I actually asked my mom that one time and she said, that’s how we thought it was spelled.

2:03:13 So I just tell people the second G is silent because then people want to say Megan or I don’t know. They don’t know what to do. It gets confusing. Yeah. Right. Megan. We thought it had two G’s. Well, now it does. It does. It does. So I’m Megan with two G’s and my husband is Don with two N’s. He has two N’s? The match made in heaven. It’s like Saturday’s warrior. Now we got to sing the song and come together and everything. That’s wonderful. Anybody ever call you Meg gun?

2:03:44 No, that’s the worst. Like Megan. It sounds the same anyway. So it’s not really worth it. Cause if you say it fast than it, no, but I’ve been called Megan. Yeah. Yeah. Or they just say, how do you pronounce your name? Cause they don’t want to mess it up. Yeah, there’s some parents who give their kids names. Oh, I know. Believe me, my mom was one of them. But the whole thing is this is if you want to go through life with a name, that’s unusual. That’s great.

2:04:12 But just remember, you’re consigning your kid to actually having to spell their name out to every person they meet. Yeah, you know, my parents did do the girls a favor in our family, though, because they didn’t give us any middle names. Only the boys only the boys got middle names. Okay. Because the girls are going to get married and they’re going to take their husband’s name and then they just keep their last name as their middle name.

2:04:35 It makes it easier for family history purposes. Well, and that’s the important thing. It’s family history. What, Bill? What’s… I just think that’s funny. It’s the things we do because Mormonism is true. You name your kid. I named my youngest boy. I was smart enough. I sort of knew like, don’t give him a Mormon first name. You never know what could happen. But I gave him a middle name of Lehi.

2:05:03 And I know so many people who have left the church and their name is Alma or whatever it is. And That’s not a good name. Which one did you say? Teancum? Teancum. I do not like that guy, Teancum. He’s a sneaky guy and he sneaks around at night and sticks people with pointy things. No joke, my resident assistant at Rick’s College had a son who was six or seven named Teancum. Really?

2:05:36 Yeah. We’re going to give Anaheim one, two, three, one more chance. Yeah. Right now you are, you’re muted. I can tell that from here. A N H E one, two, three, you’re muted. So if you take yourself off mute, we all have a chance of hearing you. She can’t hear me anyway. So I can’t hear you. If you can hear any of us, you need to unmute yourself. You’re muted. I feel like God talking to president Oaks.

2:06:05 He’s not listening. I put my question in the chat. We can hear you now. We can hear you now. Please go ahead. Sorry. OK. Let me try to resend it. I’m just not really in a place that I can talk. Yeah, she said she put it in the chat. Did you guys see it in there? Yeah, I don’t see anything. In the streamer chat. See, we don’t have to do this alone. Where do you find community? Oh, OK. OK. Yeah, I did.

2:06:36 Yeah, I did tell her that I said we don’t have to do this alone. And that’s a good question, because when I was doing the majority of my well, actually, all of my deconstruction was outside of Utah. Right. Because when we lived in Utah, I wasn’t deconstructing and deconstructing Mormonism outside of Utah can be very, very lonely. So it started with podcasts, so that wasn’t really an in-person connection, but actually in Fairbanks, I eventually found two other women who had also left the church, and we had a dinner, just the three of us, every Thursday night for about, I don’t know, four to six months, where we could just say whatever.

2:07:16 We would eat Thai food and we would just say all the things about the church. I was very newly out. I was very angry and that helped a lot, but it was really, really hard. There was never a time I longed to be in Utah more than when I first left the church because I was like, I know there are ex-Mormon communities that meet for coffee Sunday and trying to tell people about Mormonism who’ve never experienced it is hard because it’s fun because the looks on their faces when they hear what you did when you were Mormon and you thought was normal.

2:07:54 I mean, that’s kind of fun, but it doesn’t foster that sense of like, they know where you’ve been. So I did have a couple of online groups. where we met sort of on Facebook and then started chatting to each other on Marco Polo so we could leave video chats that were really nice. So I know there’s like an ex-Mormon group for women on Facebook. There are ones that are for anybody, but once a group gets over about one hundred and fifty or two hundred people, they tend to sometimes get out of control and then you can’t really feel like you know who’s in there.

2:08:33 So it’s nice to find like a smaller Facebook group where it’s a lot of the same people chatting a lot and then you can find people you identify with and maybe try to set up something. On Marco polo we did voxer which was like a voice memo one I don’t know if people still use that one, but then we graduated to Marco polo so we could see each other. And it’s nice because you can leave a video chat, but then you don’t feel pressure that you have to talk to the person right then. You can answer in your own time.

2:08:57 So I would highly suggest that because if you’re not in a highly populated Mormon area like Utah or Arizona, odds are you’re deconstructing without a lot of other ex-Mormon people. Even here in the Houston area, I know there are other ex-Mormons, but it’s so big. An ex-Mormon who lives in Houston could be an hour drive from me. Yeah. Well, those are a lot of great, great ideas. So thank you for those. Generally unquotable. Yeah. With two Gs. Yes.

2:09:29 Don’t forget the other G. And thank you so much for joining us tonight. It’s been a real treat. Somebody had mentioned your Patreon. So please tell everybody about your Patreon. And tell us, if I haven’t done enough good job lavishing praise on your podcast, please give us one more plug. So I… Primarily start everything now on YouTube. I started on TikTok, but it’s a hard platform. So YouTube and Patreon are my main places.

2:10:00 All my videos go on Patreon at eight a.m. in the morning. So that’s two hours before anywhere else. And if you go on Patreon, you can pay five, just five dollars a month. And you can watch the videos at eight a.m. And you don’t have to watch the ads that are on YouTube or Spotify. But you can… I’m going to admit this right now. Other than listening and liking and commenting, I have not contributed monetarily to any other ex-Mormon podcast because I could never afford it.

2:10:29 But so I understand if you can’t pay five dollars a month, I get it. YouTube. I do put links to the videos on Facebook, but I don’t really post much on Facebook. I do put them on Instagram and Spotify sometimes. So if you just want to listen, which is what I did for a long time, you know, you can go to Spotify. But my main place is Patreon and then YouTube where I focus on making sure I try to answer all the comments and all of that.

2:10:57 The others are just there for people who need those mediums. Great. Yeah. Well, thank you again, Generally Unquotable. The show is Generally Unquotable. You can find it on YouTube anywhere and every day. Bill, thanks for your help with the show as usual. And thank you once again, Megan, with two Gs for coming on the show. It has been wonderful. Everybody, thanks for joining us.

2:11:22 We will see you next week on another episode of Mormonism Live. Good night.