John vs Jon Larsen

John Dehlin [00:00:00] Hello, everyone, and welcome to another edition of Mormon Stories podcast, John Edition. I am one of your co hosts for today, John Dehlin. I thought of the thumbnail. Today needs to be John versus John, because we have the other Mormon ex Mormon, John podcaster Jon Larsen in the studio. Hey, John Larsen.

John Larsen [00:00:20] The Jonoff.

John Dehlin [00:00:21] Yeah, John off.

John Larsen [00:00:22] I thought Jon Larsen retired. What's this? What's going on?

John Dehlin [00:00:26] John, what are you. I thought you retired. What are you doing here? What the heck?

John Larsen [00:00:30] I was in town to visit some family and I called up John and said, hey, you want. You want to catch up? And I think you asked me what I wanted to talk about. I said, I don't know. Let's just see what comes out.

John Dehlin [00:00:44] Well, I'll just do a really quick intro. John Larsen's one of the most important voices in Mormonism, in my opinion, in the past 20 to 30 years, at least. During a time when I had paused Mormon Stories podcast to begin my PhD in Clinical and Counseling Psychology around 2008, 2009, John. Nature abhors a vacuum. John decided to start another Mormon themed podcast at the exact same time called Mormon Expression. And you guys ran Mormon Expression for how many years?

John Larsen [00:01:20] That was from 2009 to 2014. For five years, yeah.

John Dehlin [00:01:24] And it was definitely kept me on my toes. It was very popular. It was very, very loved. Nobody wanted to see John Larsen retirement, but he did, and he retired for a while, and then we brought him back to do some episodes on Mormon Stories. And those Mormon Stories episodes with John Larsen, for many of my audience, remain some of their favorites to this day. And then he retired again. When are you going to stop retiring, John Larsen?

John Larsen [00:01:53] Well, I don't know. I do. What feels right, I guess. And this feels right, John. This feels right, you and me here today.

John Dehlin [00:02:03] That feels very Mormon. Doing what? That's right. Let the consequence follow. Is that what you're saying?

John Larsen [00:02:07] Sure, why not? I'll take that one.

John Larsen on His Past

John Dehlin [00:02:09] All right, so we're just going to have a John off and just talk. And there's not a lot of structure today, but I'm excited. And I do think, for those of you who don't know anything about John Larsen, because you know that, like, we're forgotten in, like, 12 minutes.

John Larsen [00:02:24] Yeah, we're old. We're old dudes now.

John Dehlin [00:02:26] The people are like, Grant Palmer. Who's that? You know what I mean? It's like if it's on Thrones, no one's ever heard of them anymore. Like, Brother Jake. They're all like, in the boneyard of memory. You know what I mean? So most of my audience has never heard of you before.

John Larsen [00:02:40] Wow.

John Dehlin [00:02:41] Isn't that weird?

John Larsen [00:02:42] I suppose. That's okay. I mean, the world keeps moving. I mean, the church, and everything changes. It's a different world than when we started. In 2009, I started a radio show. It was a podcast, and the cameras came on. And then that's when I decided to get out.

John Dehlin [00:02:57] That's when you peaced out. You had a voice for radio, by the way.

John Larsen [00:03:01] The studio, every time I come here, is upgraded. This place is hot. I told John when I walked in, it felt like a porn studio in here. It's all. It's all decked out. It's nice. Good job.

John Dehlin [00:03:09] Like, porn studio. First of all, how do you know what a porn studio looks?

John Larsen [00:03:13] Come on, everybody's been to Van Nuys. Don't. Don't search for me on the. On the. Online. You know, we all have a past. It just looks great here, John. You guys have done. Done well. And, you know, every so often in my. In my feed, John, you pop up. You're always agitating the church. What's up with that? Trying to call yourself a Mormon? Jeez, John.

John Dehlin [00:03:35] Well, let's get into it. Before we do, though, let's just get a quick update on your life. Yeah, let me see if I got this right. So at some point you decided, first of all, you were a prophet. The Great Salt Lake was going into the crapper.

Living on a commune in Oregon

John Larsen [00:03:52] Easy now. I mean, like, you were the first

John Dehlin [00:03:56] person I know of that called attention to the fact that the Great Salt Lake was drying up and becoming toxic.

John Larsen [00:04:02] Yeah, well, it was. It is. And, yeah, I thought it was important enough to. To bring up, you know, this. This Utah is mostly my home. I spent most of my life here. I left about five years ago. And yeah, it's. It's. It's a tragedy and it's sad and it's. It's. It's something that we're going to have to deal with one way or the other. And so I thought it was worth talking about.

John Dehlin [00:04:30] But that's one of the reasons you moved to Oregon, right?

John Larsen [00:04:33] That was one of the reasons. Yeah. The climate and the air quality here, not just for the. Because of the lake, but the air quality. It's grown. This is an enormous city. Salt Lake City is. And my partner, Kimmy and I, we long. Since we got married about 10 years ago now.

John Dehlin [00:04:55] Congrats.

John Larsen [00:04:56] Yeah, thanks.

John Dehlin [00:04:57] And how long were you and Zipfla married for?

John Larsen [00:04:59] We were married for 16, 17 years.

John Dehlin [00:05:01] Okay.

John Larsen [00:05:01] Yeah. Yeah, you're getting there. Yeah, I have decent stamina, I guess.

John Dehlin [00:05:07] You know, 10 years is an achievement, full stop.

John Larsen [00:05:11] It is, it is. Relationships aren't easy. They're great, they're wonderful. But you know, it's, it's. Now that sounds like I'm, I'm really super happy. And you know, Zilpha and I had a good relationship. We got married really young. We was really in the structure of the church and there came a point and we were fortunate enough to be smart enough to realize you don't want to burn all the goodwill out of a relationship before you break up. But in fact, one of the reasons I'm here in town is she's having a family reunion. So her and the kids were in town. So she called me up and we had a big long conversation about a week ago, talked for an hour and a half and caught up. So she's doing well. She had lots of fans too. She's still out there. But yeah, I'm super happy. So the big city was not speaking to us and we kind of wanted to take a step back in speed. We have a little hobby farm that we run and we love it out there. It's a wonderful place. I live out in Oregon.

John Dehlin [00:06:16] So as I remember, you were trying to create, I don't know if commune is the right word, but just a group of people what to have kind of a self sustaining agricultural community or what.

John Larsen [00:06:28] Yeah, so some of the investigation is the way things are right now in sort of the industrial world is not sustainable. I mean, it's just we have to mine resources, oil, the housing situation, you know, people who have kids or if you're a person under 40, you, if you read the news, if you walk outside, you know what I'm talking about. And it's becoming difficult. The old framework of everybody on a quarter acre in the suburbs is starting to reach its natural end. And so I kind of look back to actually my upbringing in the church and my family and I grew up in, I wouldn't say a poor area, but a very working class area. And people had gardens and they used the gardens and there, there was livestock scattered around and there was still a connection to agriculture and kind of where we get our food and that sort of stuff. And that, that appeals to me more. So, so converging those two things, you know, there's, there's those who are investigating new ways to try to try to, to live that aren't this model and they're not like a commune or anything, but trying to Find something in the middle. But it proves to be a difficult thing. We're still open to it and investigating and. But yeah, it's been a, it's been a fun journey.

John Dehlin [00:07:53] So are you growing stuff this summer?

John Larsen [00:07:56] Yeah, yeah. So we have, we have on my. We have a three acre little farm, farmette, or what you might call it. We have, we have seven sheep. We have seven sheep. We have rabbits that we raise for fertilizer. So we don't use mined fertilizer. We have chickens and we have a couple of gardens and a big orchard that we planted. So yeah, we're trying to do the thing now. I enjoy it. I mean that's building that thing. Building that little farm is sort of what gives me joy and gives me my farmer's tan. But so it's not so much about trying to prepare for the apocalypse or save the world. It gives me immense joy as I get older to be out with my hands in the ground.

Mormon Kibbutz idea

John Dehlin [00:08:47] So my brother in law and sister are serving missions right now for the church as senior missionaries and he used to be a stockbroker and an investment guy and I recently sent him a podcast episode about the stock market potentially being about to take a big dip, like maybe even kind of bear territory. And I asked him what he thought about that and he responded in a way that was kind of interesting. He's really concerned about the population bust, as he calls it. Yes, that. I'm guessing what he means by that is we're not making enough babies to then fund the Social Security systems that are needed to pay the retirement for all the people getting old and who are going to be relying on Social Security and retirement.

John Larsen [00:09:38] That's one take on it. Yes.

John Dehlin [00:09:40] No, no, no, I know, and I'm

John Larsen [00:09:41] not saying this is true, but I think it's right. It's not the sole story, but yeah, go on please.

John Dehlin [00:09:46] So he, so I wrot him about that and he wrote something interesting that I think and he's a very conservative believing orthodox Mormon. But this is what he wrote. He said, I do like the kibbutz idea. So this is an Israel kibbutz. Kibbutz. The solution to everything he said is to create a community structure around a small group of like minded people on a farm where you grew your own food, utilize solar, wind, geothermal, hydro and batteries to keep small extreme efficient homes. I think he said Starlight Internet works. Maybe Starlight having members of the kibits learn to repair, adapt, teach each other. Being butchers, builders, plumbers and electricians have a central Community hall for efficient cooking, sharing, playing, learning. Chickens, cows, big community gardens where harvest is bottled. Together in the community hall, fruit trees, jointly planned and bottled bees and a sewage system that generated gas through biodigestion that you could cook on and heat homes in the winter. Now that's long term planning that would protect generations against this very uncertain future. Now this is my brother in law who's an orthodox believing Mormon senior missionary downtown Salt Lake. Do you want to join the skibitz?

John Larsen [00:11:21] No. Yeah, I love that, I love that. It just kept going, you know, it's like Whoville, right? We're going to hold hands. No, what I think is, To use the Marxist term, we're coming to late stage capitalism. And we can talk about what that means a bit. But everyone sees it. But we have to re engineer a new way of living. And my belief is that my one article of faith is that it can be done, but it's an extremely complicated problem as he's demonstrating with all of his dream space. Right. But so for me it's a multi generational problem. We have to start trying to fix this problem of how humankind can live with one another and live with the planet. Right. But it's beyond any one person to solve. It's an enormous problem, all that stuff that's buried in there. And my ideas have modified some, I think the idea of having people on shared property. So like I said, we have about three acres and we have a home. And we have plans to build two more smaller homes there on the property if it comes to that. But now I'm more looking at the connection between others. For example, I have a woman who helps Julie, she's fantastic. And she's a friend of ours, she just turned 70 and she spent a lot of years working in community gardens. And I'm like, well, just come work here, you can do whatever you want, I'll fund it and whatnot. And so the idea of us all living together and figuring out how to pay taxes together and share the bills. Cause the laws of property and money and stuff are not set up to support this. So you're working against the grain, but there's other ways. Not everybody has to live in one shared space to be able to share output and the gardens and to do those things. So we're investigating some other things like that. It's very important to me. But yeah, like getting down and dirty. I'm surprised after five years of doing this how much time I spend doing plumbing, you know, because we want drip lines for the. You Know, very efficient water usage. And, you know, what does it mean to have solar? What do you need? You know, all these things and start getting in the pragmatics of what that means is a very interesting thing to me. And it's very. I've spent my whole career in tech, so it's very. Not tech, which is the most important thing to me.

John Dehlin [00:13:52] Are you still doing it?

John Larsen [00:13:55] I still do, yeah. I'm in. I'm in IT management. I do really. I'm a program manager and I manage a team of developers and stuff. We do sort of future proofing, so R and D, you know, constantly watching what's coming with AI and what's happening and trying to figure out and engineer the best systems. I work in local government, work for county. So it's compelling, fulfilling work. But I think there's other things that are. When you break from something like the church, not to pivot to that, but it's kind of why we're here. You have an opportunity to question everything. And one of those things is, well, how do I want to move through this planet? What do I want to do with my time here? How can I actually make a difference? What is good? What does it mean to be an ethical person? Those are difficult questions. And I think looking at and saying, well, you know, the food that we're getting at the supermarket is getting worse and it's not good for you. And we're seeing rise of all sorts of things, you know, diabetes and obesity and lots of things that are systemic throughout the population. So something's gone wrong. We're not exactly sure what, but if we can go take a step back. So I think for me it's more like a solarpunk model. There are things that we've done as we've moved along that we've changed really quick. The last 200 years or 300 years, there's been so much change so quickly. And I think Mormonism sits right in the sort of the center of that change. A religion that was born right in the middle of the Industrial Revolution, right or right pre that. And it's so fast. You know, I'm 53. You're what, 87. But, you know, we've seen a lot of change in our life, and some of it for good and some of it, I don't know if it's. If it's that much better. But if we can take a breath and say, well, you know, some of the things they were doing, you know, for example, regenerative agriculture, the Midwest was created by the buffalo. Right. Tens of thousands of years of herbs, of buffalo running across that land, eating the grass, stomping it up, and we had beautiful topsoil. Well, it's all gone. We've used it all up. And the buffalo are gone. We used them all up, too. But our ancestors in India and China and Europe lived on the same land for thousands of years. They knew regenerative agriculture. So sometimes we just have to look back and say, well, how were we doing this 150 years ago? And then bring in the best solar and geothermal and using the Internet and bringing those things together in a reasonable way. Not going to an extreme and saying, I'm a Luddite, we won't use anything invented after 1950, but saying, what's the best of what we left behind and what's the best of what we have in the future? Which is also a good model for people leaving the church. What's the best of what you left behind and what's the best that you can grab out there? I think that's a good way to move through the world really quickly.

Mormons on Leaving the Church

What have been the most successful or rewarding parts of trying to do

John Dehlin [00:17:01] With the farm, what have been the most successful or rewarding parts of trying to do mini communal kind of farm? Like, is it the vegetables? Is it the fruit? Is it the relationship? Has it been fun at all? Rewarding?

John Larsen [00:17:17] It's fun. It's rewarding. It's humbling. I think what I like best about it is you can't cheat. Like, the plant grows, the plant doesn't grow. You know, so much of like. Like in the online world is about rhetoric. Who makes the strongest argument? Like, the truth is lost in it. And that doesn't work on the farm. In fact, if you go to, like, the subreddits in this stuff, you know, you get people who've clearly never set foot in a garden or on a farm who have really strong opinions about how these things should run. And they're used to that. Like, the strongest opinion wins. Right. But that's not how it actually works. Boots on the ground. And I think the reality.

John Dehlin [00:17:54] Do you mean literal boots on the ground?

John Larsen [00:17:55] I mean literal boots in the mud. Yeah. And I just think that slow, humbling process of trying things and having not work and then going at it again. And going at it again. But, you know, probably to answer the question, it's the modification.

Farm Talk: Growing a variety of fruit

John Dehlin [00:18:10] What are you growing? Remind me, what are you growing? Your favorite 3 things to grow on your farm?

John Larsen [00:18:17] Well, that's an interesting question right now, this last year or two, I've been really focused on fruit trees. And fruit production and trying to get it spread out. So in the Pacific Northwest, in Utah, where I kind of grew up, the model is everything comes on in August and September, then you can it all and put it all in a storage place, Then you live off of it. And that's how I approached it in the beginning. But that's not necessarily how you have to do it. If you know that these berries come on in March and then they're replaced by these berries, then they're replaced by these berries. So for example, I have grapes and I have huckleberries and I have persimmon trees and I have black currants and I just planted an elderberry tree bush. And we have apples and apple trees and pear trees and peach trees, and we have cherry trees and we have pawpaw trees. I've never had a pawpaw, but what is a pawpaw? I don't even know. It is a native fruit that was all through the United States, I'm told it's sort of custardy. But it has two problems. The European settlers came over here, they liked the stuff they brought from Europe and they kind of ignored it. And it doesn't ship. It's not been grown for packaging. So most people have never had one, including me. But I've got my two little trees I'm watching. I should be producing fruit in about eight years.

John Dehlin [00:19:38] So you've been making a lot of fruit or planning fruit production for the future.

John Larsen [00:19:43] Yeah, yeah. And I think that's an important principle for me is working on timescales beyond your own. You know, the model is you have a house and you build it up and then you sell it. And saying this place, you know, I tell my kids that the farm is going to inherit the farm when I pass on. Whoever is living here, whoever's working it, that's who it's going to. And because we need to think on timescales greater than our own, I think that's key and important, man.

John Dehlin [00:20:13] I gardened for several years while I was living in North Logan doing Mormon stories, while you were doing Mormon expression. And I just had this experience where I would grow all these crops that again, didn't really, didn't really sprout or fruit or whatever until August or September. Couldn't eat all the tomatoes, but had to wait until freaking September to eat the tomatoes. And I just realized, dang, it's just so much easier to go to the grocery store than to like grow all the stuff that you only eat during a one to two month window. And when it does produce, it's just way more than you could ever eat yourself anyway. So you end up throwing a bunch of stuff away or trying to give it away. And nobody wants a zucchini in North Logan in September because they're more populous than people.

John Larsen [00:20:56] It's a complete. To make it work. And this is a slow burn is a complete lifestyle change. Because what you need to be doing is eating things in season. Now, I would say most Americans have no idea what that means. I mean, they kind of do. But I mean, if you go to the grocery store and look and say, where did those apples come from? Why am I eating apples this time of year? And we have recipe books and we just go to the store and buy the stuff. And there's not a concept that, I shouldn't be eating this right now. And, you know, and I've even heard people say, you know, the apples were so big and gorgeous last week. Now there's these little mealy small things. And what they don't realize is apple production just shifted globally from Argentina to Malaysia. Cause that's what's happening as the world is trying to fill the niches, right? And so that we can have the same things all the time. And the grocery store has changed in my lifetime. There's lots of apples. And if you go buy a peach, they almost have the consistency of an apple. That's cause they're made so they can be picked early and they can ship. The Pacific Northwest is full of blackberries. And I.

John Dehlin [00:21:59] Natural.

John Larsen [00:21:59] Natural, yeah, they're invasive, actually. They're a big problem. But I didn't realize the blackberries weren't tart, because I'd only ever had them because they have to be picked at a time when they. So they always had a sweet and a tartness. But if you pick them ripe off the vine, there's no tartness whatsoever. So that's where I just didn't even understand what the fuck food was supposed to be like. So, you know, and that really means you eat a lot of something for like two weeks, and then you go and eat a lot of something else for two weeks. And you eat a lot of something else for two weeks. And changing that, you know, I realized, like I was saying, okay, well, how many square feet or how many acres of onions do we need to plant? Do all of our onions? Well, the answer is, how do I store them? And I was working on that problem of storage and getting the right temperature, and I'm like, I don't need this problem. I can Grow. I can plant them and grow them year round. I just go dig them out of the ground. And that's a foreign idea in this. In the Utah climate doesn't work that way. So really trying to figure out how to live with the food, and that's the idea of permaculture. But I don't eat very much unprocessed food anymore. And it doesn't taste very good to me. And frankly, it gives me the shits too. So I like to eat the fresh stuff. I'm getting kind of snobby that way. And there's a lot of foods that you don't eat. They're not available in the grocery store. We don't eat the variety of foods that our ancestors ate because it has to fit into that global shipping marketplace. Right.

John Dehlin [00:23:25] We need to have like a John Larsen tourism, where Mormon Stories listeners take trips out to your part of Oregon just to kind of see what you're doing and hang out with you for a weekend.

John Larsen [00:23:37] I've had people come out. Yeah, it can be fun. Yeah. Yeah. I've decided that from now on, if you come out, you're gonna have to shovel shit, though.

John Dehlin [00:23:45] Literally.

John Larsen [00:23:46] Yeah, I want to get. Because I've talked to a lot of people, met a lot of people that have romantic ideas and the problem that we face in the world. And we, and most of your listeners on the global scale are in the upper 3%. We're focused on the 1%, rightfully so, but we're in the upper 3%. And everything you have is built on the same, this big pyramid of labor. So if you go down to Starbucks and get a cup of coffee, you know, you've got the barista there who's not making a good living. But there were pickers and shippers and truckers and boat captains. And if you can get this romantic idea of, I'm going to go live a simple life. A simple life is a lot of work and people. I don't mean to sound like an old curmudgeon, but people really aren't used to doing that sort of work. It's invisible to most of us. And so when you do this thing, you spend a lot of time clearing brush and mucking coops and weeding gardens and doing things that isn't glamorous. So I've had a lot of people come out and when they encounter that that's not what they. Not that they dreamed of. You know, I remember one time I was out there and there's a part of my property we're reforesting. And I just planted some little saplings and there was just light. Miss Misty rain. It was late winter. And the mist. You know, we live right in the foothills of the Pacific Coast Mountains, so it's very. Train Dreams is sort of the place I live. Right.

The Problem of Simple Life

John Dehlin [00:25:22] Oh, what a great movie.

John Larsen [00:25:25] And I was just thinking, this is it, this is the moment. But I had been up and down on my knees planting saplings. I was covered in mud, my back hurt. I was tired. I was thinking about going to work the next day. That's the part they never show. You know, see the picture the person leaning on the pitchfork with the, with the, you know, the wheat coming out of their, their mouth. But they don't. This story never around is what's around that. And that's, that's the, that's the part that is so compelling to me. It's like running a marathon. It sucks to train for it. It sucks while you're doing it. But there's something about it that's compelling, that. That moves you.

John Dehlin [00:25:59] Moves you along when you finish it. Yeah. Beautiful. All right. Well, I love that you would give us a glimpse into how that's going. I wasn't sure if it was like disappearing or failing or fading or succeeding. And it sounds like it's just progressing.

Mormon Expression: Starting and Failing

John Larsen [00:26:20] It's succeeding. I'm 53 right now and my plan is to have the principal construction done when I'm 60. So I've got a six and a half year plan of what needs to be built when. And. And we just keep moving forward, you know, and yeah, it's wonderful. And for those who I didn't think I could ever make it happen, it took me years to figure out how to do it. So I would say, you know, if it sounds like a compelling dream to you, don't lose hope. There may be a way. It's probably not the way you would envision, but there's probably a way.

John Dehlin [00:26:55] You used to have a website where you're tracking all this. Do you still have that website?

John Larsen [00:26:58] You know, when I first got out there, I had a website, website out and I was even going to record the stuff. But I, I realized that first of all, I had a long ways to go. And secondly, I have a job and then I have another job. And for the first two years I was recording with you once a month. Right. So that was a third job and

John Dehlin [00:27:16] we were stressing you out, man.

John Larsen [00:27:18] Well, it was. It's just a lot. There's only so much some somebody can do and you know now with, you know, when I started Mormon Expression, it was a radio show, right? Itunes had a 55 minute limit. You remember, you couldn't go more than. That's why you have a tradition of doing part one, part two, part three, part four. That was from itunes back in the day. So the production was important. But now, I mean, look, all these cameras and lights and equipment and the expectation of what audiences want and there's the noise, the number of people putting material out there. At some point it's like I just don't want to invest the time that it takes to do social media.

John Dehlin [00:27:58] It's a lot.

John Larsen [00:27:59] It's a lot. How are you still here, John? How are you still doing this?

Mormon Stories: A Full Time Job with Benefits

John Dehlin [00:28:03] All right, all right, now we're going to open up the point where either of us can ask either of us any question we want.

John Larsen [00:28:09] Yeah, ask anything you want.

John Dehlin [00:28:10] Yeah. No, why am I still here? I mean, honestly, one reason is we've been able to make a generous income. Like, it's not fun to talk about because people can be so mean about it, but you know, I was making great money at Microsoft and then massive financial sacrifice for 10 to 15 years to build this thing. But thanks to the generosity of our donors, we have a sustainable income. And health insurance. You never really had that with Mormon expression or did you like where it could have been a full time job with benefits kind of thing?

John Larsen [00:28:53] No, no. The most I ever took was $500 a month. In fact, for most of most of Mormon expression, I gave away, I repurposed most of the money that came in. I really wasn't doing it to make money. And then there's kind of these valences, you know, to go from sustaining and paying for, you know, the web servers and stuff. Of course, the more successful you are, the more everything gets expensive. So to actually having it as an income and taking that leap is not something that I ever felt comfortable really pursued doing. So, so, but I, you know, I don't mean to make fun of you. I think what you're doing and the position you sit in is very important. And you know, you're successful to a degree when you're a lightning rod because you're, you're not going to make everybody happy because you're trying to bring sides together that are fundamentally irreconcilable. So, you know, you just need to say, hey, I haven't, these guys haven't complained about me in a while. Maybe I need to veer over into

John Dehlin [00:29:51] their territory, piss them off. No, weirdly, one of the Toughest things about this job was allowing the board to pay me what I felt like I was worth, because I knew I was going to get so much grief, not so much from the believing Mormons or the apologists, but from ex Mormons that felt like it was grift or unethical to make a good living off of this. But it's so hard. It's so hard to do this over a long period of time that if you can't make a decent living at it with benefits, it's just not worth it.

John Larsen [00:30:34] Right? Yeah. It's a very strange mindset. And oftentimes ex Mormons will take their position that they had in Mormonism. They'll reverse it. They'll invert it so they recognize they've been writing all these checks, oftentimes a great sacrifice when they were college students and stuff and they were grifted. And then they get very wary of anybody who seems to be making money in this space. But this space is not that space, and people need to have producers and to have people. They're professionals who deserve to get paid market rates. Mormon Stories is not here to change the fundamentals of the. Of the market of YouTube space. Right. You deserve to get paid what you're doing and what you're worth. And it's a weird hangover from Mormonism, and it's unfortunate, but, no, you deserve to make a living, you know?

John Dehlin [00:31:34] Yeah. Well, thanks. Well, let's. Can we go back a little bit? I want to ask you some questions about your experiences as a podcaster, even though we've covered it before.

Mormon Expression

John Larsen [00:31:44] Sure. Yeah.

John Dehlin [00:31:45] Is that all right? Okay. So remind us why you and Zilpha decided to start Mormon Expression to begin with and what you saw it becoming in your vision when you started it.

John Larsen [00:32:00] Oh, okay. So I went to church the last time in 2005, and so I was 32 at the time. And as I grew up and went on my mission stuff, I kept encountering issues and I, you know, put them on the formal shelf and more. It's like you're having kids, you're getting married, you're working on your career. It takes time and emotional energy to process these things. And I started having more doubts or doubts kept surfacing. And so I started studying, and I'd been told the thing like, ex Mormons, they didn't really talk about ex Mormons, anti Mormons were all full of lies and they were going to deceive you. So I set myself a game in the beginning, which sort of got the whole ball rolling which is I wanted to get to the bottom of some issues like polygamy and things that I wanted to feel better about. I wanted to understand more. And so I said, I'm only going to read source material. And luckily, there is a lot of source material that has been published and is widely available. And it was in the days of the Internet, there was starting to be people who were starting to post a lot of that stuff online. So you did have access to treasure troves of documents, and people like the Tanners had done a lot of work to publish that stuff. Now, I, of course, didn't trust the Tanners, but it's verifiable. You can look and they'll tell you the source, and you can go back and get the source. Which is why, over the course of doing this, I collected over 4,000 volumes of stuff. Because I. I started reading that stuff, and it was bonkers, and it was fascinating, and it just pulled me in to read them, you know, like Joseph Smith and Brigham Young in their own words. And it was one of the first paradoxes I ran onto is I started reading Joseph Smith, you know, what he had written and what had been written by his scribes. And then I was like, wait a minute. We believe that this guy is the single most important mortal. You know, I'm going to discount Jesus being. Being a God, right? So he's the. According to Mormons, he's the most important mortal and the person who was prophesied to usher in the last great dispensation before the return of Christ, right? Here's the single most important. And he wrote all this stuff, and we don't read it. That got me. Then I was like, what's going on here? Why do people revere this man? And then I would even talk to people at church. You know, I was like, hey, look at this. And you could see them a little bit, like, bristle.

John Dehlin [00:34:47] What are you doing?

John Larsen [00:34:47] You shouldn't be reading the writings of Joseph Smith. I bought this book in Deseret Book. This is available, right? This is published by the church. And that got me curious. But Joseph Smith was a frontier dude. He was. He was ornery sometimes and gracious, and he got into fist fights, and he was forgiving, and he was a jerk, and he was a dreamer, and he was just all those things, and he was this. It's suddenly like going from, you know, black and white to, you know, to Technicolor. And these guys came alive, and I just started just consuming that stuff hours every day. You know, I Remember on my lunch breaks, reading for an hour after, you know, just consuming book after book after book after book after book? And Zilpha, at the time, I was more really concerned about polygamy. I was interested in polygamy. That one really rubbed me raw. Zilpha was interested in the book of Abraham. So we were both reading those, and we're like, check this out. This is crazy. Look at this, look at this. For a couple of years, still in the church.

John Dehlin [00:35:55] Okay, wait, let me ask you two questions. First is, did you have a period of being what we would consider now to be one of those kind of farms, like apologists, where you were intellectual about your orthodox Mormonism before you started questioning such that on the mission, you would have been the guy to answer the hard gospel questions, or when quote, Antis would come at the church, you would have learned the fair or the farms kind of line of thinking to be able to provide apologetic answers before you became John Larsen, that we know.

John Larsen [00:36:28] No, I was never apologist. I was always sort of stem. Scientifically minded. And, you know, I took, you know, I, I science and biology and those classes in high school and on. And I, I believe there was some kind of higher reconciliation, but I could see that you couldn't reconcile biological evolution, the established fact of biological evolution, and like the fall and the story of the creation. So I was able to sit with that saying, this is a paradox I haven't solved. But apologetics never appealed to me, even when I was a strong believer, because I could see the logical fallacies they were engaged in. I could see they were playing these tricks. And so there was always a kernel of me wanting to know the truth. Like, well, and I guess probably in all this, you know, I'm not any smarter than anybody else or whatever, but I do have some kind of weird bent wire where I don't join camps because human beings join camps. And once they're in this camp, then they defend that camp. And even though I was a believing Mormon, I didn't feel the necessity to join that camp. Matter of fact, I remember one time I was at BYU and the Undernet at the time. I snuck into a chat room that was for atheists, and I was like a clause. I was, you know, pretending to be like, like, just talk openly about as if I didn't have a belief. And I, I felt so, it felt so right and so wrong, John, at the same time. But no, the Apologetics, I would read their books, and I would, you know, read things like, no, ma', am, that's not history. And I'd be like, this is just drivel. Like, like, this is not scientific. This is not logical. This is bad science. Interesting. So anyway, one last.

Laotian refugees and the Mormon Church

John Dehlin [00:38:15] Did you ever have. I've been thinking about this myself from age 0 to 32, John the Believing Mormon. Did you ever have, like, moments like those Truman show moments where the light crashes down on the street and Truman's looking around going, what the heck was that? Did you ever have some of those moments where you could have really questioned, yes, and then you, you kind of put it back on the shelf or stuffed it back down?

John Larsen [00:38:41] Absolutely.

John Dehlin [00:38:42] So what, what were they? I'm just curious.

John Larsen [00:38:43] So I served my mission in San Diego from 1992 to 1994 with the Laotian refugees. Now they, you know, they were coming over from the end of the Vietnam War, so that's why the years are important. The, you know, the war really ended in 75. You have the, the big refugee push coming in like 78, 79 into the early 80s. So there's a lot of these Hmong and Laotian and Vietnamese and Cambodian refugees that came into the cities. And the church discovered them very, very early and found they were making tons of baptisms. And what would happen over and over again is there'd be a lot of baptisms and then they would put the church. I saw a presentation itself. Then they would get. So English speaking missionaries would start baptizing Laotians like crazy. So they'd be like, we need Laotian speaking missionaries. And they get Laotian speaking missionaries. And the baptisms would tank. And they would do the same thing with the Vietnamese and with the Cambodians and the brethren, who are, you know, business guys. They're all business guys. They're like, what's going on here? You know, the obvious answer is, well, once people can actually communicate and the missionaries kind of know what the people are actually doing. So, you know, these are Theravada Buddhists, which is an old, older form of Buddhism, less engaging, more like the monks in the temple and we go and give alms to the monks sort of thing. And there would be nothing about Theravada Buddhism that prevent you from becoming a Mormon. So from them, you know, like, these guys would come and they called us, loosely translated, they called us the Couch church, because when you joined the church, then welfare services would buy you a couch. You could go to the di and get. So we were colloquially known as the Church of Couch. And that's an absolute true story. So for them, there's these young Americans, nobody's paying attention to these little Southeast Asian refugees in the slums of these big cities around the country. And then these shiny, bright young kids come in and start paying attention to them, eating their food, sitting with them. And that was, you know, that was great. So by the time I came in, that was starting to die. But the church oftentimes is protective and overreactive, as are a lot of organizations. And they would tell these people things like, you can't drink jasmine tea and then why? Well, you can't give a good reason. Or if you come from a country like that, all of your festivals are connected with religious holy days, which are also connected to the calendar. But there would be a stake president would say, you can't go to, you know, Laotian New Year because it's a Buddhist festival. And so they were trying to yank the culture. And what they would do is, you know, the churches, the way Mormon churches are built, they're oftentimes a chapel. And then there's this breezeway in between. It has these doors that accordion doors open into the cultural hall, the basketball court. So, like when you're in conference, you can have multiple people in there. And they would literally sit the refugees, the brown people, in the breezeway. And then they would just open this. So they would. And I saw this even when I was there, they were segregated. So all the white members would be sitting up front and all the brown members. And oftentimes the white members would not even know these people. So by the second half I mentioned,

John Dehlin [00:42:18] in the same ward.

John Larsen [00:42:19] In the same ward, or oftentimes there'd be a ward with a branch attached. You know, so they would have these layers of segregation and then they would call the white members to be the positions of leadership over the brown people. Yeah. So there was definitely a cultural wall that was still occurring. But as I was trying to learn Laotian, I would engage and I'd wander on. And at the end of second operation, I'd go talk to the monks and things like that. And I started to see that what we were saying about them wasn't correct at all. And secondly, I started to see that.

John Dehlin [00:43:06] Wait, like what?

John Larsen [00:43:09] Well, I think there was a big attitude that they just needed to drop everything of their culture and just full on embrace Mormonism, which was really steeped and laced in Americana. They wanted. And you see those same currents, not just in America, all over about immigrants. They want assimilation. I saw there was a Minnesota congressperson just a couple days ago was talking about Somalis and they're not integrating. They're not, you know, and it's true that America does have a sort of a melting pot. If you're a black American who speaks like a white American and moves among white Americans and acts like a white American and dressed like a white American, you'll probably be accepted. I think that's generally true. But that difference is often shunned. And that's a human trait. That's not. I'm not criticizing Americans or any kind of political thing. That just seems to be a human trait. And that thing played out so they would blame all sorts of things. These guys aren't paying a full tithing, or they're not wearing white shirts and ties. I pissed off my branch president because one of the boys came in to pass the sacrament and he had a white shirt on, which was weird

John Dehlin [00:44:23] for

John Larsen [00:44:24] him culturally, but he didn't have time. The branch was like, you can't pass sacrament. And I just took my tie off and gave it to him.

John Dehlin [00:44:28] Him.

John Larsen [00:44:29] Oh, he got mad at me. But to me, what are we trying to do here? Are you trying to punish this kid who might end up in a gang? That we're trying to establish a better life and teach them the gospel? Right? Is that what we're trying to do? Not punish them for not conforming to American culture? So I saw things like that, and then I started saying, because there's not a lot of stuff written in Laotian, and the Mormon translations were for shit. So the stuff that had been translated by the Mormon Church into Laotian were full of all sorts of grammatical, linguistic problems. And that's been. You've probably covered in your podcast in multiple languages, Japanese and stuff. We've had that problem over and over again. So as I read materials, oftentimes the only materials I get my hand on were religious scripts, right? And that's a good way to learn language, right? You learn the foundation, you want to learn, learn, you know, English, read Shakespeare and read the Bible. Right? So the more I started seeing that we didn't understand them, we were telling them things and not actually comprehending. Like, for example. And it's too. It's too big of a topic to go in here. It's kind of complicated. The Mormon or the. Actually the Christian. The Protestant concept of faith and the Buddhist concept of faith are very different from one another. But they would just take the Buddhist word and they would. Which came from Bali, which came from Sanskrit, and they would just drop it into the Mormon scriptures and they would read it and they would come with the definition of faith and so they were bringing Buddhist theology into Mormonism unwittingly, because the Mormons had translated that way. And not just the Mormons, the evangelical who had translated the Bible and stuff before. So I started seeing. As I studied further and I'd read the definition and say, we're not speaking the same language. And I remember one time I said, hey, let's talk about faith. I went to a member of Church for 20 years. They'd been to a temple. And I'm like, does faith mean. And I gave the Buddhist definition. And they're like, elder, you're the first one who gets it. So we weren't doing what we thought we were doing. We weren't communicating the way we thought, and we weren't doing them a service by trying to rip them out of their culture, out of their structure, out of what they had been growing with and their families. But when I got back off my mission, I went to school, I had to work, I had to keep a job or two to pay my way through school. And then I got married and. And, you know, and it just starts. So you put that stuff on the shelf. So, yeah, I think the seeds were there, but I sort of decided to not pursue it, to pursue the good cause. There's a lot of good in the church.

On the Problem of Cultural Imperialism

John Dehlin [00:47:21] So you were concerned about kind of the cultural imperialism slash spiritual colonialism that we were doing with the people who had a lot to teach us.

John Larsen [00:47:34] I think I would frame it that way now, but I don't think that's. At the time I would have framed it at that. I saw it the proto, but I didn't have that kind of words or that. Or that sophisticated model. But. But now. Now I see it as something that. That I. I do actually repent from that I was involved in a cultural imperialism and an American sort of superiority complex. You know, this is the right way to go. And. And, yeah. But luckily I wasn't super successful on my mission, so I didn't have a lot of bad work done to.

John Dehlin [00:48:05] Isn't it great that you learned that on a mission? Like, aren't missions in some ways amazing?

John Larsen [00:48:12] They are. I was living in the most downtrodden neighborhoods in San Diego. Amongst at the time, there were a lot of Somalis. There was just a lot of languages, a lot of people, a lot of. And I was fortunate because I think it introduced me to a pluralism, because you're in this American city, but you see all these cultures kind of interacting and not interacting and having racially motivated gangs and seeing what the Gangs actually do. They don't give a shit about people who aren't. If you're not in their turf, like if you're not selling pot on their street, they don't care. And especially church people, they just left us alone, you know, and, and, and, but it gave, it opened my eyes to, to a world outside of, outside of Utah. And it was, it was, and introduced me to, you know, when I went to school, my degree was in linguistics and I studied a lot of Sanskrit and Bali and, and opened up this world of, of ancient ideas and different ways of thinking and where ideas gener from and how, you know, how, you know, Latin roots and these things, these ideas that stay with us for a long time. And it opened up this idea of multiculturalism that I'm ashamed, I'm actually ashamed of the way things are going in America today. This turning away from pluralism. And there's a reason that cities are more progressive and the country, there's a lot of reasons. It tends to be more, more conservative. And I'm talking not about political, I'm talking about philosophically. And that's cause cities do tend to be pluralistic. So if you're in a city, you'll be dragged by somebody to an Afghani restaurant, you're like, this is interesting food and you'll go to a Greek festival. But if you're living in a 2,000 person town in the middle of Iowa, you're probably not getting exposed to these. So you get to move through the world and say, wow, there's different, different ways of living, there's different ways of being. And that was a beautiful gift. So yes, my mission. They created me. It's their fault.

John Dehlin [00:50:28] That's right. Twain said travel is fatal to prejudice. It sounds like that's what happened. Same thing happened with me in Guatemala. Not the same thing, but similar. Okay, so that was the big thing is just realizing the world was a whole lot bigger than orthodox Utah Mormonism.

John Larsen [00:50:46] Way bigger. Yeah, I mean incomprehensibly bigger. Now, you know, I lament that people don't understand math and science these days. And you know, I was thinking about this a couple nights ago. People don't understand statistics at all. They know they're like 25%, but they don't understand how that number is derived. You know that you have to have a P value, an N value and you have to take samples and you can calculate this stuff out. But there's 8 billion people on the planet. And if you go through a normal life, you do not encounter Enough human beings to be able to make any conclusion about human beings statistically, that's mind blowing. You just don't have a big enough sample set. Whoever you are, whatever you think, you don't have a big enough set. You don't know. You don't know what human beings are like. You don't. And when I first got back to my mission, I wanted to study anthropology. And I took a lot of anthropology classes where I pivoted to architecture to linguistics. And they share a lot of the same curriculum. And when you learn about the way different cultures move through the world, what they're doing in Papua New guinea, what they're doing in the hinterlands of China, what it's really like in northern India, you start seeing that human beings are very diverse and have a lot of different approaches to the same problems. And it saddens me that we're in a stage of retracting from that and just, just ignoring it. That the vast differences and that leads to a nationalism and a bigotry where people think that their race or their culture is the superior one, which is, I think, to cut to the chase, the fundamental problem of Mormonism, it's encapsulated that sort of superiority, that sort of nationalism, that sort of racism into the words of God, which is reason enough to reject it all wholesale.

John Dehlin [00:52:31] It's almost struck me just with this whole blood lineage, chosen Israelite blood, God's people, kind of, that is inherently, objectively, mathematically racist because it's saying we are God's blood chosen people. But we don't ever really even think about the implications of just how, how fundamentally racist. Just that is not talking about dark skin as a curse. It's just us being God's chosen people.

John Larsen [00:53:02] Racist is a fundamentally racist idea. But I think we need to have the caveat that not all people who subscribe to this idea are in fact racist. There's paradox after paradox after paradox. Religion. I've just been staying with my folks and I love my father so much. And he is a believer. He's a very intelligent, intelligent man. And oh my God, he has the patience of, to listen to me. We were arguing this morning even. And so my parents, my mom, especially her mom gave her all this genealogy records and she has them. And my parents are in their 80s and they're starting to do the Swedish death cleaning. And my mom's lamenting, trying to figure out what's going to happen with these records. She's given me a lot of them. And I said to my mom, and my dad, this morning, I said, this is a sincere question. I'm not trying to beat you up. What do you want me to do with this stuff? Because they've given me sheets that have birth and death records. And I was like, I've read them. What do you want me to do with them? And to them, the temple work and the family history is very important. It unites them to their ancestry. It gives them a place in the universe. And, you know, I said to my dad, I said, but, you know, and he's, he's heard all these arguments from me before, but there's people who are dead ends. You know, I have four wonderful children. I have sired nobody. I'm a genetic dead end, and I'm, I'm fine with that. And, and my, my, my wife, she was sealed to another guy and I was sealed to another woman. And we're, we're married. And they're talking about like family search. And I said, from these databases, you're loading all this stuff into, I'm invisible. I disappear. My whole family doesn't. It's just gone in this thing. And so I'm saying to him, and there's all these people who, they were peasants, their names weren't recorded, or the parish church that was burned down 200 years ago. How can it be that the people who have progenitors, who have access to these records have a privileged status? And my dad says they don't. And I'm like, you have a paradox where doing genealogy work and doing family history both matters and doesn't matter. And he says, yes, and that's a sincerely held belief. My dad is not a bigoted man, and he's a very kind man. And he is accepting to everybody. He's accepting to the transgender or LGBT people in the family. They have their strong, sincerely held belief, but they are true Christians. And there's so many in the church who are the same way. And it's hard people in position like me, me and you pointing out your position is a bigoted position. You can't believe the Book of Mormon and not accept the fact that it says in there that dark skinned people are made that way to not be attracted white skinned people. And it's a curse that God put on them. That's there in the book. And there's people who believe that and don't believe it. And, and you know, we were talking some notes before, and you were talking about being an exx Mormon. That's one of them sitting with that paradox is tough. And, and and knowing to love the people, that's. That's the kind of racist thing we always said in the church. You just got to love the people. And that's the instruction for ex Mormons and exx Mormons too. You still got to love them. And that's for the political divide. You still gotta love them. You can't excommunicate the libtards. You can't excommunicate the maga guys. We're more alike than we are different. And there's people who want to make money by dividing us. But fighting that divide is hard. And I've failed at it.

"You Can't Excommunicate The Mormons"

John Dehlin [00:56:46] Me too.

John Larsen [00:56:47] More than I've succeeded. I'm sorry. John Blubber.

John Dehlin [00:56:50] I love it. Yeah, we love big hearted John Larsen. Well, beautiful. Okay, so when you and Zilpha start studying these books.

The Procession of Learning the Scriptures

John Larsen [00:57:01] Yeah. Back to the main narrative. Yeah, yeah.

John Dehlin [00:57:04] So no, no, no. I took you away from it. So I'm remembering my own progression because it started like only the scriptures and then it's like, well, I'm teaching seminaries and then it was like the institute manuals. And then it was like Lowell Benyan and. And faithful scholars like Eugene England. And then it would be like Michael Quinn and then eventually it would be like the Grant Palmers and the Fawn Brodies. What was your and Zilpha's progression in terms of the types of books you read as you went down the polygamy slide, the razor slide, and Zilpha went down the Book of Abraham razor slide?

William Clayton's Descendants

John Larsen [00:57:41] Well, I was really enjoying reading their firsthand accounts. I remember one of the first ones I got was William Clayton, who is Joseph Smith's secretary.

John Dehlin [00:57:50] He's all in the news right now. Have you been following that?

John Larsen [00:57:53] No, I don't. I don't get in Mormon news. I honestly don't.

John Dehlin [00:57:55] Dude, some homie. Some doctor died who was like, I guess. No, some. A physician who is a physician to one of the scholars that transcribed the entire William Clayton journal. Okay. That historian just died and so his physician got a copy of the full William Clayton diaries in like a word doc, and he just shared it. So even though the church is a year away from publishing the William Clayton diaries with Yale, it just dropped as a word doc on the Internet.

John Larsen [00:58:27] So a new updated update edition. Well, and William Clayton, he wasn't a super big fan of Brigham Young and he had a bunch of Joseph Smith paper papers that during the, during the. The Reformation. The First Reformation, 1854, I think. 56. About that time when there was a big revival and. And then up to, like, you know, Brigham Young's death. They were trying to collect all the errant. Because they were trying to solidify kind of a doctrinal line because Joe Smith was all over the place. He. He evolved his doctrine, and. And Clayton didn't like him, so he kept some of these papers away. So he had a journal. He kept papers. And, you know, he. He wrote Joseph Smith stuff, but he was one of the first. He just openly talked about polygamy on the. You know, he went across the plane and he had two sisters, I think one was, like, 17, one was 16, that he'd married, and. And I. I.

John Dehlin [00:59:18] The Moon Sisters.

John Larsen [00:59:19] Yeah. So I'm. I'm starting to forget some of this stuff, but. Yeah, but it was just. It was just raw, and it was real. You could see his emotion. You could see his devotion, devotion to Joseph Smith and his grievance with the more pragmatic Brigham Young. And, you know, he's the one who wrote, what, 244 days to Zion. He kept the journals, and I think he went back and forth across the plains like 12 or 13 times. So I started reading these, and then I read Wilford Woodruff, the version that was by Susan Black. No, it's still. I can't. She.

John Dehlin [00:59:53] Susan Eastman Black.

John Larsen [00:59:54] No, it might have been. She was one of the early Dialogue. She had compiled those journals of Wilford Woodruff and the Dialogue or whoever had published it. And it was called Waiting for World's End. I remember reading that one. And just again, you saw the things that we talk about that are. That, like, if they're set in stone, like, they're just revelation. They weren't. There was doctrinal disruption and stuff like that. And then. Then starting to read more and more of the biographies of Joseph Smith, faithful ones. I remember Donna Hill. I read her, the guy who wrote Rough Stone Rolling Ice Bushman, his first book on Joseph Smith, I thought was much better than Rough Stone Rolling. And. And. And so I started reading all of them, you know, and. And just. It just snowballed. It's just whatever I could get my hands on. You know, the Elders, the Elders Journal, and then Times in Season, and, you know, so I was. I was reading the Source. Read. Read probably the first eight volumes of Journal Discourse. I mean, straight through.

John Dehlin [01:01:01] Dang.

John Larsen [01:01:02] And then I read a lot of conference talks. So I would. I would go the source. I would pick the thing, and I. I want to see the source, because that was my game I was playing. But as soon as it just snowballed and took over. So 2005, we were done. I lost my faith. I lost my faith in God actually first before I kind of lost my faith in the church. And then Zilpah had quit going and I kept trying to go, but then we kind of crashed out. But I really got involved in the communities at the time. In the mid-2000s, they were underground, so people didn't use their names. You were probably one of the first pioneers of people who actually use your own identity. The early things like what was that?

John Dehlin [01:01:50] There was New Utter Mormon, there was zlmb, rfm.

John Larsen [01:01:54] A lot of people recovery from Mormons were under pseudonyms. They'd go on these boards. They were more like Reddit.

John Dehlin [01:02:01] Yeah.

John Larsen [01:02:01] And less like Facebook discussion forums. Yes. With people under pseudo. And you'd go to get togethers in the late 2000s and people would have their monikers on there, on there. I remember like Chris Weber, she went by the name Froggy and she had Froggy written there. And so you'd start, but you'd like, you'd meet and you're here. Oh, you're that guy.

Ex-Mormon on The Calm Community

John Dehlin [01:02:22] You're Mayan Elephant.

John Larsen [01:02:23] Yeah, yeah, exactly. And so I got involved and then I met a couple of cool cats and we started a group called Calm Community. After leaving Mormonism, we started a chapter up in Davis county and we had two. We had one north Davis county, one in south Davis county, and then there's one in Utah County. It was interesting that in that time it took a longer time for Salt Lake county because it was already more like if you left the church in Salt Lake county, you had more of a support structure. If you were in the surrounding suburbs, you were on your own, you were ostracized. So we were heavily involved in that. I started going to Sunstone. This reminds me, this is a great story. So I remember the first time I saw John Dehlin in person. Do you remember the year this would have been before I was broadcasting? This would probably been about sometime 2006,

John Dehlin [01:03:14] 2007, which was around my second or third Sunstone, probably. Yeah.

John Larsen [01:03:19] So. So John is, is a good looking fella. And you're what, six, nine? No, you're like, you're six, six, six, six. So. So John has a commanding up here. Now he's an old man, but you got, you got a rewind it like you know, 20 years. And I remember we were in something and John Dean walked into the room and. And he turned heads the ladies. But he just. You just had this natural charisma and it was, it was Impressive. You, you've always had a smooth, easy style, very friendly, very knowledgeable, great communicator. But I could see, you know, this guy because I think you'd already started doing recording at that time, that this was somebody people could look up to. Cause people were lost. You literally didn't know you were even 20 years ago, the ostracization of leaving the church was much heavier. Now everybody knows somebody's left the church. That was not the case back in the day. People would stay underground and stay in

John Dehlin [01:04:23] the church and just feel desperately alone

John Larsen [01:04:27] and broken and suicidal and, yeah, feeling like there was something wrong with them. And that's what their priesthood leaders and stuff would tell them. There's something wrong with you. You're not praying hard enough. You're not doing it right. So I started, you know, I was heavily involved. You talked the apologetics boards. I was heavily involved in them. Not as apologists, but I started a game where they would ban people at the drop of a hat. So the game was to be as antagonistic towards them as possible. I mean, I never really was antagonist towards people. It was always about ideas for me, but not get banned. So being direct and being somewhat debating, confrontational, but not getting banned. And that was the game I played before I ever did the podcast. So then Zilph and I decided, I finished grad school, I got my mba, and we decided, let's get a fresh start. Let's get out of the state. And we moved to North Carolina. And I sort of missed the. The social aspect of being able to talk about this stuff. I really enjoyed the doctrine and the history. That's what. That's what. And I enjoyed having people to chat with about it. So I started the podcast. I started with four other. Four other people. Wasn't doing it at the very beginning, and it was just meant to be a dialogue. And as a matter of fact, you listen to the very first ones. There were two guys that were pretty kind of antagonistically ex Mormon, and two guys were kind of apologetic. And on the middle, in the beginning, I tried to play the middle and we were supposed to round robin. So if you listen to the early Mormon, Mormon expressions, you'll see me start taking over more and more. That was not because I was trying to take over. They just wouldn't do it. But I was like, we have to publish every week if we're going to be successful. I thought it was just going to be this. This wonky dialogue about Mormon doctrinal issues. And I remember us having a meeting early on we said, we will be successful. You asked what success is, said we'll be successful and get to a thousand subscribers. And we blew through that in, like, five days. And it just started snowballing and it scratched an itch because it wasn't. We weren't just attacking the church. We were going after the doctrines, but we were going after them with gloves. Everything was open to say. So you could be openly antagonistic. You could defend it. And that's sort of the hook that we got early on.

Back in the Studio With Tom Perry

John Dehlin [01:07:01] Who were your first four? Remind me. Oh, do you remember? I'll just name names. So there's like, Tom.

John Larsen [01:07:07] Tom.

John Dehlin [01:07:08] There was Glenn, there was Matt.

John Larsen [01:07:09] Glenn came later.

John Dehlin [01:07:10] I don't know who came with Matt.

John Larsen [01:07:11] Came later.

John Dehlin [01:07:13] Oh, there was Tom. Oh, the guy in Orym.

John Larsen [01:07:16] Is that Tom Tom, yeah, Tom. Tom was one of the early apologetic guys. He had quit going to church.

John Dehlin [01:07:24] Perry, right?

John Larsen [01:07:24] He was a Tom Perry. He was. He was more sympathetic.

John Dehlin [01:07:28] There was the. The believer guy in Vegas, right?

John Larsen [01:07:32] No, yeah, well, Mike Tannehill. Tannehill, yeah, yeah, yeah, Tannehill was. Was, Was, was early. It was early on. And yeah, he was a sport. He, He, He. He's. He's one of the few apologetic believers who really knew or all the bodies were buried. Yeah. So, so, and, and then. And then, as you're talking, we had a rotating cast, and I was always open, you know, in the studio days when. When I had the studio in Salt Lake City, we had, like, I think five microphone positions, and I would let anybody come on, and most of them found that it moved way too fast. It moves a lot faster than they think it does. And, you know, I would tell them, they'd get on their phones, try to look stuff up. I'm like, you can't. It'll be onto the next topic before you. You can find your stuff. But, yeah, I. I was. I was whorish. I'd let anybody on the podcast if

John Dehlin [01:08:22] they wanted to remind people what some of the episodes would be like. Just, you know, this whole archive is on Spotify, it's on Apple itunes. We gotta figure out how to get it on YouTube, honestly. But just tell people the types of topics you covered. Maybe some of your biggest episodes.

John Larsen [01:08:39] Oh, we covered everything. I know from the early days. One of the ones that got a lot of traction was we went through the Nauvoo Expositor. So at the end of Joseph's life, when Mormonism was blowing up in Nauvoo, several of the faithful high people, like Law, the stake president, and the schism was happening and they went and published a, a newspaper. And of course it's always been this is full of anti Mormon lies. But it, it was all insiders. These guys were still in the church when they did it. So we did a four part episode where we went through it line by line by line by line to analyze and say, is this a lie? Is this true? Yes. No. And, and we did it very carefully and it.

John Dehlin [01:09:27] That was groundbreaking. I had never done stuff like that before, so that was real groundbreaking stuff.

John Larsen [01:09:34] Yeah. So we would go to the. You know, and still Today I think YouTube you get a lot of just like arguing back and forth and rhetoric and name calling and stuff. But to me it was always about. I'd already left the church. It was about what does this stuff actually say? What is actually there. So we oftentimes did deep dives into the actual documents. One that I. We did it. We took and compared all of the, all of the accounts of the first vision. Right. And so we found the actual. We found legitimate church published sources for every one of them and went through line by line and discussed, you know, so there was the apologetic response, but it was like, well, let's see what it actually says. And so I think a lot of the important ones. And then we had a. I remember

John Dehlin [01:10:19] you did1ondnc89 on the word of Wisdom.

John Larsen [01:10:22] Yeah. We took a lot of the section of the Doctrine and Covenants, did DNC 132. Blew my mind piece by piece by piece. And you'd look up the historical context and that sort of stuff.

John Dehlin [01:10:32] That was so good. And Abzilon and. It was so good.

John Larsen [01:10:36] Yeah, yeah. And yeah, there's a rotating cast of interesting people. The one that always sticks out in my mind, it wasn't a great one, but it was funny because, you know, it was participatory. So we did one on more Minutis. We, we had a little studio. Studio Fist in your face was in my house in Lehigh. And they came in and then we were sitting there and. And then we all took off our clothes and we did that one in the nude, which was weird for the first 50. And then it just became.

John Dehlin [01:11:06] It's just buddies.

John Larsen [01:11:08] It's just normal, you know, like it. And that's what I think a lot of that stuff is. It's. It's defanging these, these, these things. I do a Halloween party every year and we pull out every. The crystal ball and the tarot cards and everything and there's. People get spooked, but you go look and say, this stuff, none of it works. None of it's real. It's all just. I mean, I can explain to you how it works, but there's no there there. And I think that's always been interesting to me to pull it apart. We analyzed the temple ceremony. That was one we held off on for a long time. We debated a lot about, and I kind of pumped the brakes on that one. I said, this is sacred to people. And, you know, it's one thing to pull, you know, this newspaper and pull it apart, but we finally did it and went through. And then there's the one that is a favorite series where we brought in the fellow who was a really strongly educated Mason who knew masonry, and people liked the series. I remember, I have. It was like two hours each for, like, four. I'll be honest with you. I was having trouble paying attention. It got too wonky, too deep for me. But it was some really good information. So, yeah, there's a lot of great stuff in the archive.

Pulling the Book of Mormon apart

John Dehlin [01:12:23] So the one, you know, every once in a while on Reddit, there's like, what's the best episode you've ever listened to? And, you know, where I'm going.

John Larsen [01:12:29] Yeah.

John Dehlin [01:12:30] Talk about.

John Larsen [01:12:32] There's one that's a clear winner, and there's one that usually comes in second.

John Dehlin [01:12:35] Go for it.

John Larsen [01:12:36] The first one is how to build a transoceanic vessel, which I want to,

John Dehlin [01:12:39] you know, would be fun to get it on YouTube, would be to rebroadcast it and, like, pause for commentary by you. Anyway, yeah, yeah, we got to do that.

John Larsen [01:12:47] We have to bring Megan back. That's the only. That's the only thing I hold the, you know, the backstory on that one is I, I, you know, oftentimes you get a divorce, you take the trip that you always want. And I went to Edinburgh, and then I took the train down to. To London. So I spent a couple weeks in Scotland, then in London, and I was with my good friend Megan, who lived in London, and she was heavily involved in a lot of this stuff. And we went to the British Museum, and they had.

John Dehlin [01:13:16] She's an academic, right?

John Larsen [01:13:17] She is an academic, yes. Her research was on the keys, like Viking burials for both men and women. They always have these ornamental keys, and we're not quite certain as to what that. And that was. Her research is trying to figure out what these keys that they were always buried with meant. And there were dummy keys. They weren't cut in a way to open a lock. So why do the Vikings have keys so if you're interested, talk to Megan about it. So they had this hall where they had excavated a Viking longship. And so it was kind of. There's a walkway around it and it has it down there where they excavated. And then there's a lot of information. And one of the things on the wall is they had this wall that had sheep, and it was showing how many sheep you would have to shear to make the sail for a Viking longship. Now the ship that Joseph Smith would have had to have would have been

John Dehlin [01:14:16] much bigger that Nephi and Lehi would have.

John Larsen [01:14:18] Yeah, that's a Joseph Smith. Yeah, that Nephi and Lehi would have

John Dehlin [01:14:22] to build to come from the Middle east to America.

John Larsen [01:14:24] Right.

John Dehlin [01:14:25] 600 BC.

John Larsen [01:14:26] And so that inspired me saying, you know, to actually build this, what the materials you actually need.

John Dehlin [01:14:30] And wait, how many sheep to build the sail?

John Larsen [01:14:33] I can't remember. It was just walls and walls of them. I mean, they had all the material that it took. That was the presentation. This is. And part of the presentation was it took a lot of civilization sophistication to put together one of these boats. Like, it required centuries of design and plan and expertise, metallurgy and lumber and

John Dehlin [01:14:57] all that stuff, carpentry and milling.

John Larsen [01:15:00] And the way the narrative in the Book of Mormon is written, it basically says that this was not something they found on the shore. It makes clear that they had to molt the iron out of the mountain. So it makes it clear. And it says they had to build the tools. Right. So what we did is we took it apart heart and said, well, what, what would this take? And, and you know, and then, then you started doing this history of, of of shipbuilding, start digging in, you know, and things like, things like, you know, you, you, the ship would need, you know, a rudder and of course that if to do transoceanic, most vessels would follow the coastline, you know, like, like the, the, the Romans and, and, and the, and the. They, they could, did sail out across the sea, but it was dangerous both navigationally and also because the open seas hit boats from side to side in ways that they have to be really strong, they have to be really well built. But, but navigation and sailing. And so, you know, I would typically dump, you know, jump in. I probably did 50, 60, 70 hours of research and, and, and to find it, you know, and people who criticize like, well, he's not an expert on boats. I'm like, I'm not. But I've never seen any of the biggest objection people have is they, they use the Polynesians and to, you know, to say, well there's these guys on these Polynesian crafts that are sailing, but they're not selling with cattle for, for one thing. And we can come back to that in a second also crossing the Atlantic Ocean and going the, the, the, the Asian Pacific arpeggio. I'm saying that word, right? Archipelago, Archipelago architecture. I always say those words wrong. So they're two different things, right?

How to Get to the New World

John Dehlin [01:16:47] Pacific versus Atlantic, you're saying.

John Larsen [01:16:48] Yeah, and if you're crossing the, you've got different currents. And there's a reason why we really didn't get to the new world from the old world till like the 15th century, 1492. Of course, it took a lot of technology to get, get there. Could it have happened? Could the Egyptian have made a boat? Of course, but that's not what the narrative saying. So say what would you have to do? But you know, we point out, you know, for example, that just things that until you think about it one level deep, you know, if you have to, it says you had to go up and mine the iron and smelt it in order to make the tools. It made it clear they didn't have the tools. But how in the world would you mine iron without any tools? Like, like these, these. And to me that's how all scripture is. It only takes one or two questions before it falls apart. And, and you know, just making the number of nails or the strapping or this number of trees, you'd have to fell. And that's what that podcast does. And of course I, I see quoted a lot the first part of the podcast, which I go through a 15 minute thing about miracles because you could just say, well, God can do whatever he wants. Right. But the narrative itself basically in the Book of Mormon pushes away from that and it insists that he made the tools and that he had to have these things to cross. And they had sails, which implies they had rope, but they'd have to make rope. And what were they making rope out of? And that sort of thing.

John Dehlin [01:18:16] And Mormons have never thought for a second about these things.

John Larsen [01:18:18] Well, most of us don't. Most of us go through life and don't say wait a minute every time somebody says something to you.

John Dehlin [01:18:23] Yeah.

John Larsen [01:18:25] And you know, so that, that is, that is by far and away the most widely quoted, most impactful podcast.

John Dehlin [01:18:32] Well, we'll figure out how to share it. What I've been doing is going back to like the Michael Koh episode, you know, or, or the Carolyn Pearson episode, munge it all together Instead of being five 50 minute episodes, Munge it all together and then re release it on YouTube as a single thing. So we gotta figure out.

John Larsen [01:18:51] I think it'd be worth it. You know what. The second most quoted one.

John Dehlin [01:18:54] Yeah.

John Larsen [01:18:54] What's next is one I did with you, which is on the planet Salvation for Dummies where we did the math

John Dehlin [01:19:00] right here in the studio. Right?

John Larsen [01:19:02] Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

John Dehlin [01:19:04] Oh, fun. I'm glad we. Well, people also liked our. The one about the death march.

John Larsen [01:19:11] Oh yeah, the trap handcart company.

John Dehlin [01:19:17] People love rickets. I saw a clip the other day about Ricky Rickets. I said he went with rickets. Anyway, I don't know if you remember that. That's back when Care Barrel was working here.

John Larsen [01:19:26] Yeah, yeah. You know that they're, they're, they're fun to do, to take that stuff apart. You know, people always like, when are you gonna do the submarines?

John Dehlin [01:19:33] And oh, oh, the, the Jaredites. Yeah.

John Larsen [01:19:36] To me that one is so ridiculous. Like, like, like they're supposed to have cattle, like livestock. Do you guys know how much a cat cow drinks and how much they. And how much they. They like, like, like to. To. Or, or just the amount of water? I mean, I think, I think we discussed that in Transoceanic. The, the, the. One of the big problems is you can't drink seawater, so you have to bring a lot of fresh water. But fresh water goes bad, which is why they drink grog, which was that they would take. They would take alcohol, but not enough to get drunk, and they'd pour it in the water. They basically figured out over the centuries how much alcohol. Alcohol to keep the water from going.

John Dehlin [01:20:18] I forgot about that.

John Larsen [01:20:20] So, so, so like it's not, you know, you can argue that you could use this boat that the Polynesians make to cross the island, but where did they drink their water? Because you. And you've got livestock. So, so, so it just.

John Dehlin [01:20:33] And the submarines flip it upside down, right? Oh, whatever way it flips upside down, it's fine. With all the cows and feces.

John Larsen [01:20:41] I think it's. That podcast might be another one where I go. I keep yelling about the slack. Slag is a byproduct of when you smelt iron. And it doesn't go anywhere. Like it doesn't just dissipate. And of course there's no slag in the new world. There was never any smelting of iron going on in the new world. So, you know.

Mormon Stories: Burnout

John Dehlin [01:20:59] Well, that's fun. Let me. So, yes, everyone, please check out the Mormon expression episode and if you leave Mormon stories and never come back because you realize Mormon expression way better. No hard feelings. Enjoy it.

John Larsen [01:21:13] It's getting gone, so you're gonna be jonesing for something, then you come back to the source.

John Dehlin [01:21:16] Then you come back. Okay.

John Larsen [01:21:17] No, I think. I think some of. Some of my best work was done with you. I don't. I think. I think that it's. It's a. It's a. It's a progression. But, you know, it takes a lot of time. It takes a lot of time to do these. Well, and. And, yeah, it does.

John Dehlin [01:21:32] You know, one big difference between you and me. And I thought about this, and you came in between my early years and then later years. You did a lot of heavy lifting I didn't do. In other words, I really did design Mormon stories for sustainability. And what I mean by that is. I mean, at the time when I was doing Mormon stories, I was starting a nonprofit, getting a PhD, raising four kids. You know, like, it was not easy to do all that at the same time. So what's easy? You find experts and you interview them. And then what's easy? You just let them talk and you don't ever edit. You know what I mean? And so, so much of Mormon stories was just out of necessity for, like, if I'm gonna do this for 10 years or 15 years, I gotta make it so I don't get burned out. But you studying 50 hours for a single episode, that's a lot of heavy lifting that is hard to sustain just in terms of the time investment. But then it could also burn you out emotionally and intellectually. Right?

John Larsen [01:22:40] Yeah. I don't think. Bernard, before we talk about burnout, I want to say you're doing yourself a disservice. We had two different approaches. I became the personality and the center of Mormon expression. It was about me, which is okay. I mean, a lot of things are that way. But you, like you said, were about giving a voice to the spectrum. And I'll compare you to Doug Fabrizio. I think you're a much better interviewer than Doug Fabrizio. Doug Fabrizio pisses me off because he'll always go off on a. He'll start asking a question, then he'll give an exposition, then he'll say, talk about that. Like with Doug, you just shot your load on it. I don't know what you want them to say, but you always let these other people and you gave them a place where they were safe to say their opinions. Some wackadoodle nuts you had on the, on the, on the, on the podcast and the wide spectrum and, and that's a particular talent that, that you have. And, and you might think it's easy because you've done it and you've forgotten how much work it was after all these years. But I, I, I don't, I think they're in somewhat apples and oranges the, the two podcasts. And I think, I think that yours has more staying power and is, is more influential. And I don't mean that in any sort of negative, negative way. They're just different things. But because you really honestly are open to people telling their story, I think that's what's given it's staying power and it adapts, it grows, it changes as a church grows. Burnout. I enjoyed doing that research, but not all the episodes were in that depth. So the ones that hit are the ones that had a lot more research behind them. But, but I was raising kids. I was go, I had my regular job and, and, and, and I enjoyed doing it. But you, it's you, you, it's kind of unsustainable. You know, when I had the studio, people would, people would volunteer. But what I needed somebody was to sweep the floor. Nobody would sweep the floor, so I had to sweep the floor. And you know, that's sort of the central problem of volunteers. They want to do this, the sexy stuff. But what, what you need kind of like we were talking about with the farm, you need somebody to muck the sheep, you need somebody to sweep the floors. And eventually you say like, why am I sweeping the floor? I could be doing other things in my life.

John Dehlin [01:24:52] Yeah, let's talk about. So, you know, as you look around this room, we've got a four camera set up with four microphones and lights. And how many people are in this room right now besides you and me?

In the Elevator With Tony Robbins

John Larsen [01:25:07] Well, we have a, we have a

John Dehlin [01:25:08] producer who joined us remotely. Hey, Julia. But I mean, there's no one here

John Larsen [01:25:14] but you and me.

John Dehlin [01:25:15] And, and that's, that's become a choice because like it's, people are so hard. And one of the things I'll never forget is when Mormon expression went through some public, I don't know, mutiny or tension with former panelists. And we don't need to even talk about that specifically or relive it other than I just want to ask you, what was it like to deal with people and to work closely with people, to team with people and then sometimes just have it all blow up and how do you reflect on what it's like to have interpersonal relationships in this space, the good and the bad.

John Larsen [01:26:04] It's a great question I've thought about, first of all, for any of the conflicts, I don't hold any grudges whatsoever. And I'll tell you, there's two reasons. People who are successful in a creative endeavor, and this is a creative endeavor. Musicians, artists, authors. They become successful in large part by staying true to their vision, but they also become successful by collaborating with other people. And there is inherent tension in those. There is nobody who's done anything even remotely successful that hasn't had conflict. It's inevitable because you have a vision and the people come on and they have a different vision. And there's times when you're the creative head that you have to say no, and there's times you let them do it and it fails, but it's on you. So that's part one. Part two is if you're going to. To put your face on the Internet and put a microphone, you have some sort of ego. Like, you know, everybody who does or savior.

John Dehlin [01:27:12] Yeah, Saber complex, whatever it is.

John Larsen [01:27:14] You know, there's some people who are full on, you know, malignant narcissists who just want to dominate. But you have to have some confidence to do Tony, to get up on stage on an open mic with your guitar. Right. There's a certain ego that needs to be involved. I don't mean this in any sort of negative way. It's. It takes that to be successful. So being successful in endeavor is sort of the opposite of humility. So there is going to be conflict. There's going to be a bumping of those divisions. You know, one thing I admire about you is you and I have had. We've had conflicts over the years. Yeah. And I just think it's part of what it is and part of. And it's part of being human. Like I often joke, but not really when. When it was at the height of its popularity. I'm sure you still live this. You're running into people all the time who recognize you, who want to come up, and there's this thing that they're really excited to meet you, and then they start talking to you. And you can watch as they get more and more disappointed because you can't be whatever is in their head. No, they have constructed. It's, it's. It's inevitable. I mean, you see a DJ who you've listened to for 10 years, like, it looks like that, like, because. Because your mind has constructed something. So we're all human beings and, and, and, but when you're recording, when you hold the, the, the, the thing there, you can paint the picture of yourself. Now it's true, you don't edit. You edit very lightly. So, yeah, I've complained about it over the years, haven't I? No, it's, it's abusive, it borders on abuse. I think it's a great question. And, and it does happen, but it's just, it's just, it's part of the journey. It's part of being a human being.

John Dehlin [01:28:56] Okay, I love that analysis. But now talk about what it was like or can be like for you emotionally when people you really cared about, you gave them a shot, you gave them a platform, you trusted them, they trusted you. Maybe you shared special intimate moments together and then all of a sudden they're turning on you, shit talking you, maybe even trying to destroy you or take your audience away or use their proximity to you to try and bring you down. Did you experience that? And if so, was that hard? How did you process that?

John Feith on the Criticism of His Discoverers

John Larsen [01:29:33] Yeah, it's hard. Again, I have a lamb. This little dude, he has figured out a way to get out. I don't know how he gets out. And what he does is he's fairly tame. Is. He gets out and then he runs to the gate. He knows where he's gonna get back to, get back into his mother and stuff. And he runs to the gate and then, but because the grass outside, where there's more green, the grass is literally greener. So he bleats because he wants in, he wants to get to his mom. And then he eats grass. And then he, And I can be mad at the lamb for breaking out of the cage. But, but he's a sheep. Like that's what sheep do, right? Like, so, so, so yes, there's, there's difference in creative vision. And, and, and if, if I say no, you can't do that thing. Or, or sometimes what happens is you, or this is probably more likely in some of these situations is you let them do what they wanted to do.

John Dehlin [01:30:34] Yeah.

John Larsen [01:30:35] And it doesn't pan out the way they thought it would.

John Dehlin [01:30:37] Yeah.

John Larsen [01:30:38] And it's a human, it's a human trait to look for blame. Because when you hear like somebody like me or somebody like you, you know, there's a long history. Like I was on high school debate teams and I did everything extemporaneous and I am well studied in how to project my voice. Like I, So even though it sounds like I'm just like bullshitting about Mormonism, there's A lot of work that went into getting me there, and I think sometimes people would come on and not recognize that.

John Dehlin [01:31:09] That.

John Larsen [01:31:09] And the advice I would give to everybody who would talk to me is, you know, they, they would want to get on and they would see the, the, the being on the camera, and they would see that point. And I would say, you got to do the work, you got to bring something. You have to do the homework. TR Transoceanic was funny, and it was lively and it was live in front of an audience, but there were a lot of hours of me just reading manuals on shipbuilding and history of, you know, and, And I think sometimes that failure that people would run into because what they, they did wasn't, Wasn't funny. I was, I was, I, I'm, I'm. My podcast is, is. Can be pretty humorous. I don't take myself too seriously. And, you know, I was always the wingman, kind of the fat, funny guy. You know, if you want attention from women, you either be handsome or funny, that sort of thing. But people would come on and they'd be mean, they'd be cruel, cruel. And, and even though the stuff, if you listen to Mormon expression, it skirts the line. But it's very, very rare that I attack people. And I think sometimes I'd have people come on, they would, they'd go there and that would go dark, and then they would get kind of angry that it wasn't working. You know, why, why was this not going? You know, and, you know, there were times I set up. I even set up whole podcasts for other people, but, you know, they weren't getting the attention that mine was. And then they, they might say, well, why aren't you, why aren't you giving the attention? Why aren't you giving as much attention of yours? That's a fair criticism, but the answer is, well, I gotta make dinner for the kids. You know, I gotta go to work at 8 in the morning. So. Yeah, it just is, John. That's the nature of what's gonna happen.

John Dehlin [01:32:51] Was it tough to cope with this feeling of betrayal?

John Larsen [01:32:56] There was some of the people who spoke negatively. There are some things that I have, and I will never release them. Meaning I have the proof that what they said wasn't true. And that's good enough. That's good enough for me. There was one guy who crashed out and he said some things that were flat out not true. And I just let it slide. I never rebuked it. Never. And he's gone. Forgotten something.

John Dehlin [01:33:33] That may just be my impression, but I'll just give you my impression. There were entire communities of, let's just say, progressive Mormon feminists or ex Mormon feminists or progressive Mormon scholars and historians or just online communities and various groups, this critical mass of people. And I knew most of the players, and there would be semi predictable contingencies or reactions depending on what was or wasn't said or done in 2026. From my perspective, all of that's almost totally gone. It's really bizarre now. Like, this idea of, like, oh, if you say the wrong thing, there's gonna be this massive backlash. That was absolutely the environment, let's just say 10 or 15 years ago, where we're always on our toes to say the perfectly politically correct or woke or sensitive or enlightened thing. And I think that a lot of those people just became ex Mormons or ex. Ex Mormons and got sick of paying attention. And Margi and I always say, congratulations, you graduated. And I know you've talked about that a lot, but it's weird, that whole critical mass community where we knew almost everybody is kind of moved on.

Ex-Mormons on Social Media

John Larsen [01:35:02] It does. And also, you know, the zeitgeist of the time, you know, like pride parades are under threat. LGBT and the trans community faces real discrimination. And. And I think that there was a time, say 10 or 15 years ago where it seemed like that was victorious. And at least I sound like I'm always criticizing the Right. It was a problem with being woke and language policing and things on campus of what you could and can't say. I mean, that happens on all sides. And I think also Facebook does not have the kind of influence it did. So there were times, times when these communities would form. And I would. I would say, and this is one of the problems with ex Mormonism. You can't form communities form around a central value or a central thing. Like, these are people who knit, or these are people who bowl. Who bowl. Or people who are flat earthers. Right. You have to have an idea. But if you form a Facebook community that's based on a very negative, you know, like the criticism of the patriarchy or that women need to be put in their place and go back to trad. Those are inherently unstable communities. They will always pull apart. I believe you have to have a positive value to center around. And because if you do it around negative value, those communities get torn to pieces. And I saw the rise of some of these communities that became very. In Facebook, this is like 2013, 2014, they got to be very. That you'd have one group brigading and policing another and pulling screenshots and doing things. And there was just people who didn't have any better to do. I know some of these people, you know, some of them, the point was to create strum and drang on Facebook. And it's the nature of social media. It's why social media is such a problem. Which by extension, since I talk about is the problem. The AI is having the LLMs training. There is so much more material on the Internet about the flat earth than there is about the globalists. Because people don't. If you believe that the world's a globe, you don't start a Facebook group dedicated to globalism. Right? But if there's more purchase, there is more money to be made, there is more attention in being that contrary voice. So sometimes if you're the big dog, your Mormon stories, you're the big podcast. There's a certain amount of cachet that can be developed by just attacking Mormon stories. And that comes and goes. But I think the change in the political climate where LGBT and women's rights are on the ropes, again, there's people openly talking about taking the vote away from women. And so I think that's part of the change. Mormonism, ex Mormonism, we're all part of a bigger sea of what's happening, happening in the world. We can't separate ourselves from it.

Being an ally to ex-Mormons

John Dehlin [01:37:58] Something I haven't talked a lot about and I'm kind of just turning back and responding on a topic that we're chewing on. I felt like from the start, from 2005, I was like, let's talk about feminism, let's talk about women's rights, let's educate ourselves about feminism and women's rights. Let's talk about racism, let's bring on people of color, let's bring on gay people and mixed orientation marriage and celibacy and conversion therapy, and let's bring on Native Americans and talk about the Indian placement program and let's. You know, I felt for so long like I was trying to be the good ally for all the possible groups. And to some degree, I mean, I did it cause I felt like it was right. I did it because I really felt like we needed to do better with all the groups, including the marginalized ones. But it just over time it started to feel like you just got pummeled for trying to be supportive and you could never do it right. And you were either white knighting or white savioring things, or you were apathetic. You were either you couldn't win and it just felt like what you got in return for trying to advocate for lots of groups is just eviscerated. And to this day, it's not like I've stopped. I do all those things still. And I didn't do it for accolades or warm fuzzies. But it has just been so bizarre to try to be a positive influence amongst lots of different groups and just to feel like what happens is you just get destroyed and those groups turn on you and, and you feel like they want to eat you alive. And it's probably just a few noisy ones. When there's a lot of people that remain grateful and maybe you don't pay attention when you feel like they're grateful. And again, it's not their job to be grateful or maybe they just aren't as vocal. But that, you know, I feel like we're a little bit past that because so many of these communities, they probably cannibalize themselves honestly and burned out. And it's nice to not have to be constantly living in fear of being canceled by everyone you felt like you were trying to lift up and elevate. But that's probably where some of my earlier questions about friends betraying you was coming from. Because by far, I'm getting sued by the church right now.

John Larsen [01:40:44] Congratulations.

John Dehlin [01:40:45] It's like, thank you. It's like the third or fourth lawsuit I've been in, involved with. There's plenty of apologists who have attacked me over the years. By far, by far the most painful, difficult, worst thing about this job has been dealing with the ex Mormons and the ex Mormon activists in various special interest groups. They're the most savage, vicious, mean spirited, historically, by far.

John Larsen [01:41:11] They're wounded.

John Dehlin [01:41:12] Yeah, yeah.

John Larsen [01:41:15] But I, of course, I don't really make a differentiation between ex Mormons and Mormons anymore. It's what is, what defines you, is what you spend all your time thinking about. So the fact that you're in this camp or this camp, you're still obsessed with Mormonism.

John Dehlin [01:41:30] Yeah, right. Yeah, yeah.

John Larsen [01:41:32] And so the further out I get, the farther away I get from it, the more removed I'm from it, the less there's a distinction between Mormons and ex Mormons.

John Dehlin [01:41:42] Yeah, yeah.

John Larsen [01:41:44] And so it's a space where people are trying to find their core identity and we oftentimes do that by trying things out and failing. That's the second adolescence that comes from ex Mormons. They oftentimes have very weak ethics and morals in the beginning. That's a very short phase. It usually passes through in a Couple

John Dehlin [01:42:15] months, because their morals had been handed to them. They inherited them. They're weak, and they just absorbed them, but didn't necessarily internalize them. Right.

John Larsen [01:42:22] It's like the Matrix. I mean, like, oh, your eyes are weak because you've never used them. And the church is often there telling people. Well, and you hear it in testimony, meeting. If it wasn't for the church, I'd be dead in a ditch, strung out on. On crack, and I'd be raping everybody. Like, really? Is that really your, you know, your take? And of course, that's a lie for that person, too. It's a lie they're telling themselves. And so. But you have to figure that out, and you have to look and say, well, what is it that I want? And sometimes your whole life has been programmed. You find yourself with five kids, but you may not enjoy being a mother. You find yourself married to a person. Person you. You. You've had a decent relationship with, but you got married to him when you were 19. You're like, is this even what I want? Those are really big questions that the rest of the world faces, too. That's. Mormons don't have a. Or ex Mormons don't have a monopoly on midlife crises and things like that, you know, so. So it's. It's. It's. It's a tough space, and we try to give each other grace, but it's kind of like being a zookeeper in a. With the tigers and the bears. You got to respect them. They're going to bite. You know, you got to keep a little bit of distance. I'm sure you've learned that. You know, back in the early days, there'd be open parties. I had a solstice thing at my house today. We had 30 or 40 people there, which a couple were our old friends, ex Mormons who moved out to Oregon with me. And we were saying that. We say, yeah, we used to just open our house. House and post on Facebook. There's a party.

John Dehlin [01:43:54] I remember.

John Larsen [01:43:55] And. And, you know, my friend's like, yeah, we did that, too. And the people were like, what? Like, it's a different time. It's a different place.

John Dehlin [01:44:01] You know, the John Larsen, Zilpha Larsen Mormon expression. Parties. House parties were kind of legendary back in the day.

John Larsen [01:44:08] Yeah, they were. They were fun. They were. They're mostly good. I mean, I got kind of, you know, you. You'd.

In the Elevator With Ex-Mormons

John Dehlin [01:44:12] I was like, people are drinking. Whoa. He has a tattoo. That's bad.

John Larsen [01:44:17] We went streaking at one. I remember that. Yeah. Yeah, they were good, they were youthful. But there's always predators and that's what kind of got me. There were people, both men and women, that would look for vulnerable people usually to sexually exploit. That wasn't the norm, but it was something you had to keep your eye on. And that happens at church. That happens with the Boy Scouts. That happens. So. So I don't want to vilify the ex Mormons. That happens outside Mormon paradigm. But when you have a vulnerable population, it will always attract predators. You know, that's one of the reasons I've got a rabbit infestation and that I kind of get under control. But you got to control the rabbits because otherwise the bobcats will show up. Right, so. So it's, it's the same thing. Yeah, it's. It's an interesting little toxic community by its very nature.

John Dehlin [01:45:13] So, you know, in an era when there's, you know, social media is on the rise and so is depression and anxiety and loneliness and religion generally is on the decline, except for 20 something men right now. You know, obviously I tried to create like the Oasis communities or the Thrive communities you created. You created a community called the living community. Probably before I think I had had the idea to do a secular community, but I hadn't been kicked out of the church in time to beat you being out the gates trying to create a secular community. And you did it here in Salt Lake City. I don't know that you've ever told that story or I don't know that I've ever really heard and it doesn't have to be law, but I would love to just hear a little bit about your experience trying to create a secular community with ex Mormons.

John Larsen [01:46:11] You have to remember. Cause you started in the podcast world and sort of gravitated towards that. I started in the community building world, yeah. And that sort of stuff. And dear deep friends that I have, matter of fact, after this, I'm going to dinner a friend's house who I've known for 15 years, years. And some of these relationships are. There were some very close, one might say trauma bonded, but we didn't process it at the time as trauma. So I think that's unfair. But. So that connection and what really compelled me forward when we talked about the podcast is I started talking about the history, but I discovered this world of pain. You and I have talked about this and, and my experience in church growing up was mostly positive, somewhat mediocre. I didn't start seeing real problems until I got to byu and then I started Meeting yahoos. But like I said, I grew up in a working class neighborhood and the church was a positive, but it wasn't like Provo where they were using it to lord over people. So that sense of being lonely and needing a community was always a big driver for me. And the people who I corresponded with, who would write me, those are the people, people I was compelled to talk to as opposed to doctrinal or the evangelicals wanted me to beat up at the church. Poor evangelicals who think I'm their friend. That always ends poorly for them. So yeah, we set up this little community because a lot of people leaving religion are very versed religion. Zilpha and I started going to the Unitarian Church and I'm a Jack Unitarian

John Dehlin [01:47:53] kind of downtown, right. The one over Fort Union.

John Larsen [01:47:57] It was way before then. We were still going. This was like 2004. We were still going to Mormon Church and we went to the Ogden Fellowship.

John Dehlin [01:48:02] Oh, okay.

John Larsen [01:48:04] So. Because I saw the value of having a community to help raise children, having that structure. And I've been off and on hanging out with the Unitarians and the Unitarians. Basically you have to believe that, you know, like fellowship of human beings and supporting each other. Basically. Unitarians are all the good parts of church without any of the other stuff, but human beings still. So, you know, they, they bring that along. But, but a lot of ex Mormons are even adverse to that. They, they, they don't want anything to do with organized religion. So we, we rented the South Valley Unitarian and we would go and we would have our, our kids. You know, we would, it was really primary, centered around family things. So we would have kid activities, people would lead the kid. Like we did like an egg drop, you know, where you have to make a parachute and, and activities for, for the kids to be engaged and just have, be around other adults and other children and, and give families a place. You know, because you're, you, you have three small children, you leave the church, you're suddenly all alone with these kids. So, so we were trying to set up a community, but we ran into a couple problems. If, if you don't have fear or of heaven or stuff, it's hard to get people to actually donate money. Any kind of even we always had sufficient for our needs. But you know, like we were talking about the money that it takes to really run an organization like that, that. And secondly, people were very commitment adverse. You know, we'd be like, are you going to come? And they're like, well, you tell us what you're doing. And then we'll decide. And what happened is you had. It was always very well attended. I mean, hundreds of people would come. Wait, how many hundreds? Sometimes hundreds, yes.

John Dehlin [01:49:40] Wow, that's good.

John Larsen [01:49:41] But it was like 10 or 20 people who were doing all the work. And eventually this living community never died. We just looked at each other and said, why are we inviting these other assholes? And we just kept doing it. We ran what we call Camp Curiosity until all of our kids grad. We had a summer camp that we ran. It was never advertised. There was probably 20 families that we would run up the canyon up here because we grew up, most of us grew up. And we had Boy Scouts or girls camp, and we saw the value of that. So we ran a secular version of that to all our kids graduated from high school. Then we just, we moved on. But when you open it publicly, then you get the people coming in who are. Who can be parasitical or try to try to move it aside. So the living community never went away. It just went underground.

Living Community in the Mormons

John Dehlin [01:50:28] Interesting. So how did you structure it at its peak, before it went underground? Was there a weekly service? Was there like a TED Talk kind of thing? Was there music? Were there the Sunday school equivalent? How did you structure. Picture it?

John Larsen [01:50:44] We never. We never got that formal. I. I think we did it monthly because Sundays are awesome. Yeah, they used to be more awesome. Like in Utah, like 2005.

John Dehlin [01:50:54] Right.

John Larsen [01:50:55] You could go to Lagoon. There's nobody there.

John Dehlin [01:50:57] Or the golf course or the ski resort.

John Larsen [01:50:59] Yeah. Now Mormons just go do everything. You go to the coffee shop, it's full of Mormons. Aren't you guys supposed to be somewhere else?

John Dehlin [01:51:04] It's our fault. You and I, you know, and others like us ruin Sundays for Utah.

John Larsen [01:51:08] I guess, but. I'm kidding. I'm kidding. So we would have the people who were doing the activity for the kids. I don't think we ever got too formal. We didn't sing, but we might have somebody come play the guitar. But oftentimes the adults just wanted to chit chat. We'd have a topic, we'd sit in a circle, and then we would just talk about whatever that topic was. And sometimes it might be like how to raise secular kids in a very religious community. And so we'd have coffee and talk and then the kids would do their activity and we'd come back together. So it stayed pretty informal because we didn't want the structure to take over. And anybody can do this. It's just the work is going to fall on the few. And so you look at the course of humanity. You either need to pay them or blackmail them. Tell them they're going to go to hell if they don't do this or you need to compensate them because that's the way the world works. And if you're not willing to do those things, it won't.

Living Community: When it went underground

John Dehlin [01:52:07] How long did the living community last before it went underground?

John Larsen [01:52:11] It went about a year, maybe a little bit.

John Dehlin [01:52:13] About a year. Yeah.

John Larsen [01:52:14] We had done some preliminary meetings. We would get together and we had a core set of values that we had these seven values that we created. I think they might still be on my website. If you go to like john larson.org, they might still be up there. And then. So we met and decided the structure. So we basically had a committee, for lack of better words, a kind of a board of directors, but it wasn't that formal where we'd meet and we would decide. So if somebody wanted to be part of that committee, they could come to the committee meeting. And so we tried to keep from having hierarchies, but hierarchies work because they're efficient, you know, and when you have non hierarchical organizations, they move through molasses. They're very slow.

John Dehlin [01:52:55] And once you went underground, how many families about. Do you think, you know, survived into camp? Curiosity.

John Larsen [01:53:02] Yeah, probably. Probably five, six, seven, eight core ones. And maybe 10, 15, you know.

John Dehlin [01:53:11] Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And that's, that's what we found, is that we would do Oasis or we'd do Thrive. People would come over several weeks and then they'd find three or four couples that they really vibed with.

John Larsen [01:53:23] Yeah.

John Dehlin [01:53:23] And they would just start getting together and realized they didn't need to come to all these other things. And at first we would be bummed because it's like we were helping people find relationships so they didn't need us anymore. And then we realized, oh, wait, that's a good thing. But then those relationships would sometimes last and have lasted decades.

John Larsen [01:53:44] Oh, yeah. And sometimes spans of time. People you haven't talked to. I had an old dear friend of mine, like last year, we reconnected. We hadn't spoken in five years and we just picked right back up. Yeah. And if you go through, you know, there was calm, those of us who ran calm, and then there's been others.

John Dehlin [01:54:02] Post Mormon.

John Larsen [01:54:02] Jeff Rich, Post Mormon. And the people who do it, they do it as a service, but then they eventually burn out or. And burnout sounds terrible. They move on. They just move on. So these things are always popping up. I think about Time moved out to Oregon. The Portland group invited me up to go speak up there, drive the Thrive group Thrive. And then I think I went up to one in Bellingham, Washington like a year later. I haven't heard from him since. But I'm not on Facebook, so, you know, they probably don't even know how to contact me. But, but also, you know, and I had, I've hosted barbecues at my house for ex Martin. Had a lot of them show up. But you know, I realized I was, I was happy to have them there, but I just wasn't engaged. I didn't care, you know, to be involved in the discussion, but it was an important discussion. So yeah, there needs to be people, People now are, are lonely and they're isolated and they're socially awkward and you have to have extrovert to be the flag bearers. But those people oftentimes have lots of opportunity. So there has to be that motivation. But it's the nature of the work. You don't want to hang out in the ex Mormon world. And I think one of the reasons you can do it is your PhD in psychology. You kind of know what you're doing, but it can get on you, it can get messy and most people, people rightfully so, move on.

Ex-Mormon on the Church's Future

John Dehlin [01:55:31] Let's see you. I don't know, it sounds like you're not really paying attention to Mormon news these days or kind of Mormon current events. You would have had a lot of theories and feelings and predictions about what would happen to the church and how it would evolve or wouldn't evolve. Are you paying attention at all these days? And if so, do you have any commentary on where the church is in 2026?

John Larsen [01:55:56] It surfaces every so often. I think. I still get email updates from the Tribune, so obviously it's email. So I'm flooded with email. Carry on. So I miss half of them. And then sometimes things will pop up like on Reddit. I'm in the Utah group, but I'm not in any of the Mormon groups. So I'll see sometimes. So if something, you know. But I'm also in the Washington state group and the Oregon state group and so it's, it's part of a, a bunch of threads I, I, I subscribe to. So, so things pop up like I saw when they did your lawsuit, but I, I think the New York Times covered that, didn't it? I don't know if got that. It got national coverage when, when, when, when, when they sued you. I'm using past tense. It's active lawsuit. Yeah.

John Dehlin [01:56:40] Yeah.

John Larsen [01:56:41] So you can refuse to talk about it.

John Dehlin [01:56:45] No, I don't mind talking about that.

John Larsen [01:56:47] The church is what the church is when you select. There's a problem in the United States, actually the globe right now. And it's quite funny. You can see it with organizations like Intermountain healthcare, all the MBAs that are being cranked, and I'm an MBA, I went through business school. They're being trained in sort of this capitalistic market IT philosophy. Right. That's predominant. I don't even know of any business schools that are teaching any other different ways. Well, what's happening, and it's been pointed out by a lot of researchers, is these MBAs, they get hired by nonprofits, they get hired by hospitals, they get hired by churches, but they all just operate everything as if it's a capitalistic, meaning trying to raise capital for the shareholders, even when there aren't shareholders. Intermountain Help Healthcare is sitting on billions of dollars. The Mormon Church is sitting on hundreds of billions dollars because these guys went to school to learn how to gain profits. The Mormon Church selects its leadership almost exclusively these days from the business world. And so the Mormon includes law, right? Law, yeah, you're talking about law, finance, business, you know, economics, you know, these, these, these kind of derivatives, derivative degrees where if you go back 50, 60, 70 years, you'd have people who came up through CES, through church education, science, you would have, you'd have scientists. Yeah. Henry Eyring's father, you know, was, was a legitimate scientist. And, but, but now they're usually, if they're not legacies, I mean, a lot of them are from the, the big families. They're, they're usually schooled in business and, and that's how the church is run. So it's completely predictable. If you say, how would you know executive level for profit MBAs who have been working for companies, working for shareholders for 30 years, if you suddenly put them in charge of a church, how would they run a church? So you can call me a prophet if you want, but it's absolutely predictable. You just have to assume that the church is not a church, it's a business, and then it makes perfect sense. It runs like a business.

John Dehlin [01:58:56] Explains everything.

John Larsen [01:58:57] Explains everything. Yeah. And that's where the church is going. The church has a lot of money. They know how to get money, but they don't know how to spend it. And the church is becoming more and more showy. I drive to these little neighborhoods and there's temples everywhere. Right. But it doesn't always Play. They just opened a temple in Springfield just outside of Eugene. So that's about 45, 50 minutes from, from my house. And it'll be interesting because people know I'm, I'm a Mormon or they know I was former Mormon or they know I was in a cult. That's what I always say. I always say I grew up in a cult and blah, blah, blah, blah. And, but so sometimes they'll ask and it's, it's interesting to see the church through the eyes of people who have never been Mormons. And they're really not hostile towards Mormons. Mormons to everybody else are just like Scientologists, Jehovah Witnesses. They're just, they're just little religious weirdos in the world full of little religious weirdos, Amish people and Mennonites and Mormons and, you know, and they're, they're all around, you know, you know, and then that's just the way the, the world sees them. But, but, you know, it's like if you met Jehovah Witnesses, they're, they're, they're pleasant people, they're nice people. Right? That's the way people see Mormons. But it's interesting what, what it surfaces. But the, the ostentatiousness of their, of their temples and the light lights, they just love to light those things up. Not far from my house is actually an LDS wardhouse now. I actually live in a certified genuine rainforest. We get 60 inches of rain a year at my house. Except in the summer, it really stops raining. It goes dry because it's so green during the winter. And there's grass all over. In the Willamette Valley, the grass goes dormant in the summer. That's what's expected. Grass goes yellow in summer. And the entire town, People do not water their lawns in the summer. That is not something that people do. Except the Mormon Church. It has this green Kentucky bluegrass and because I'm sure that the members who are running that church, it's not their decision that's coming out of Salt Lake and Salt Lake is making that decision. It was pointed out to me years ago that if you go to like a lds, maybe this is still true. An LDS chapel. Chapel, like in Louisiana. There's a shovel in the cloth, like a snow shovel. Yeah, they just. Standard issue, give everybody a snow shovel and that. That's a very Mormon way of doing things. It's, it's, it's standard. It's, it's, it's the way it's done. But they don't Consider how that plays out. That is seen as sort of bad form. You don't water your lawn in the summer. That's wasteful. But for them you have a well manicured green lawn. And that's the same thing with the temple. Why are, why do they have these, these big floodlights on this building at night? Like why don't you turn the lights off? And, and, and, and I think that that kind of sums up the way the world sees Mormons.

"The Mormon Temple Is a Cult"

John Dehlin [02:01:49] Branding, right? And marketing and branding.

John Larsen [02:01:51] That's the way they see it. If you talk to Mormons, they think their architecture is so amazing, it's going to cause people to just see the grandeur of the church. But these people need to get to, to the old world and see the cathedrals and, and see what something really breathtaking is like. You know, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the Mormon Temple, the Salt Lake Temple is, is a cargo cult. And what do you mean so, and okay, so cargo cults. This is something if, if, if you want dear listener, you can pause and go down this, this rabbit hole. During World War II, the, as, as the war was ramping up in the east, you know, and, and, and the Japanese empire had expanded and they had, they had stations all over islands. So we were getting ready when we started island hopping and you know, the, the baton death march from the Philippines and you know, fighting this grueling war to try to take back this territory from the Japanese empire. Well, in, in, I think it was Papua New guinea, they had refueling stations, supply stations. So the, the Americans sort of parachuted in, bulldoze this big area, made these airfields, build air towers, and they started just moving tons of cargo as a, as a staging ground. And you know, the natives who were perfectly evolved to the environment they lived in, right, they saw this thing and there was all this cargo coming in, but they could see, I mean they weren't idiots. They could see these planes, but they didn't understand the plains. So they were there for a short time, for maybe a year or two, and, and then it all went away and this religion formed and it's still there today, the cargo cults. And, and the, the savior of the cargo cults is a guy named John Frum F R U M and there's some, you know, is it John Frum, Louisiana? Where did they get John from? Nobody knows. But they build out of like wood, these towers and they have like coconuts they use as like the, the ear things. Things and they pray for cargo. I'm dead serious. I'm not making this up. This is a real thing, the cargo cults. And what it is is you see something and you think you understand it, and this is happening. There's so much scientific illiteracy today. I believe we've entered the second Dark Ages. And so people see science. And when I watch TV shows like Netflix, whenever there's science, science, science talk, it's all bullshit. It's people who don' Understand science. We're trying to sound scientific. And the Mormon Temple is a cargo cult. They took these cathedrals and they built a version of it. But if you know anything about architecture, it's a monstrosity. But now it's fascinating because it's a monstrosity, right? It's this neo gothic weird thing, you know? But I think Mormons sometimes, because it's theirs, their family, it's their temple, it's, it's meaningful and it's beautiful to them, and it is a beautiful building, don't get me wrong. But it's not what they think it is, and it's just bizarre. And it sits as this weird architectural amalgamation that's not really following a style. And it is looking at the churches and the temples and the cathedrals of Europe and then trying to create a version of them. And I think that that happens a lot, that you kind of act like you understand something, but you fundamentally don't. And by the way, this is not a Mormon. This is a problem for all of us. We're all joining cargo cults all the time where we think we understand something, so we do it, but we fundamentally don't. I know that's a lot of leaps there. Are you following what I'm saying, Mr. Yeah, that's fun.

Cargo Cults: The Problem with Science

John Dehlin [02:05:39] I've never heard of cargo cults before, so thanks for introducing the concept.

John Larsen [02:05:44] I think it also speaks to the bigger problem in Mormonism and the world writ large. The world is very large, very complicated, more so than any of us can understand. And we tend as human beings to retreat into. We like to build little mini worlds. It's easier. When I was full in Mormonism, it was an easier way to view the world because it compartmentalized it that, oh, well, all the church, all the world's not Mormon, but we're supposed to convert them. This is the stone cut out of the mountain that'll roll forth and fill up the world. What about Asia? We're going to get the gospel to them and, well, what do you have to worry about? You don't have to worry about that stuff. Just you don't drink coffee and you don't drink beer and you don't have premarital sex and you do this and you get married in the temple and people retreat into Star Trek or World of Warcraft or Magic the Gathering. And we keep doing that because the world itself is dirty, messy, messy, complicated, heartbreaking. And we have a tendency to want to construct these little worlds, and we're seeing a lot of that today where people, you know, don't want to deal with the realities of climate change, with the realities of politics, with the realities of, of what capitalistic pursuit is doing to the world. We don't want to deal with the reality of disease and, and plague and all that kind of stuff. So we retreat into worlds. It's, it's, it's easier to be progressive antifa sort of person, it's easier to be maga than it is to confront the world as it is. And that's what Mormonism, that. The question you've asked and apply is, where am I in my journey? And the further away I am from the church, the more Mormons and ex Mormons are just not special. The message I have for you all is you're not special. And that makes you very special because that means Mormonism is not this weird anomaly that you have to retreat from. It's the same thing that everybody is doing all around the world. This is just this version. This is 31 flavors. This is one of the flavors. But the battles of Mormons and ex Mormons are the same battles between the orthodox and the progressive Jews. It's the same battle between the orthodox and progressive Muslims. It's the same battle. It's all, it's, it's the same thing writ large. And what I wish humanity would do is embrace that and recognize, whoa, there is a consistency to all of this. We are not actually that much different that, that. You know, what's happening in Gaza mirrors what was happening in, in, in Germany in, in in the 40s. That you, you're, you're, you're, you're talking about genocide and which side is right and which side is wrong. It, it doesn't matter if you're the one getting a bomb dropped on you. You're getting a bomb dropped on you, on you. And I love that the Ten Commandments, which they want to publish and put in buildings, do it because it doesn't say kill your enemies and love you. It just says, thou shalt not kill. It's very straightforward. Don't kill. And then everyone comes in and says, well, you can Kill in these circumstances. That's not what the Ten Commandments say. It says don't kill. Yeah, I'm down.

John Dehlin [02:08:54] They're actually pretty solid.

John Larsen [02:08:56] They're pretty.

John Dehlin [02:08:56] Don't covet, don't lie. Right. Yeah. Don't stick deal.

John Larsen [02:09:00] Don't have graven images like that. It's pretty easy. Like, you don't make statues, you know,

John Dehlin [02:09:07] I love it. Let me, Let me ask you just, just some hot takes because I follow, you know, current events pretty decently. So we're going to stray outside of Mormonism for a second. And none of these questions are asked from a partisan perspective. Yeah, they're just from a human perspective. I'm curious. So I saw this clip the other day that more people have been arrested for the, you know, the Washington Memorial pool, that was supposed to be blue and it's still green. And like, more people have been arrested as suspects for sabotaging that pool than have. For the Epstein files.

White House Correspondent on the Epstein Files

John Larsen [02:09:47] Yeah.

John Dehlin [02:09:48] What are your thoughts on the Epstein files? And like, what has not become of them?

John Larsen [02:09:53] Well, I think that nothing has changed, like, throughout human history. I think that you have always had an elite who control most of the resources of the planet. You know, you look at the sins of Henry VIII or Napoleon or Caesar or Louis xv. Yeah. Countless Chinese emperors. So this is an instance of very powerful people. If you go to a rich person's house, we're talking somebody who's worth eight to nine figures. What you'll see in their house is they'll have jet skis and they'll have snowmobiles and they'll have quad runners and they'll always have a pool table. And sometimes they'll have a bowling alley, but the bowling alley is not. They're not bowlers, they're not pool players. They're trying to own and consume. Because in order to get that kind of wealth, that kind of prestige, that kind of power, we're talking the entirety of human known history. You take, you take, you take, you take. And so the fact that they have harems of children and, and whatever other crimes, this is nothing new. This has always been happening and it always will be happening. You can't cut the head off the hydra. Epstein is just one of many people like this throughout history. It's sad, but true. So, yes, we don't have the mechanisms to go after these guys. They are literally above the law because the law has been constructed by them. We couldn't go after the peerage and, you know, you see the reminiscence of divine right, the peerage, the Aristocracy, you know, they called themselves the peers because the problem with the aristocracy is they're always trying to kill each other. I mean, they're always like killing us peasants. But so, yeah, I mean, the arrests of the monument. One thing you always have to ask yourself that the media never does, is you always have to ask, well, what's the base rate? So you say, okay, well, there's been five people arrested for vandalism. And say, okay, well, how many people does the Park Service normally arrest? That's the first question you ask. You know, what's the anomaly here? Now there's still. It seems like I'm very disappointed in the Justice Department. I'm very ashamed and humiliated by America right now, partly because. Not because of Trump. Trump's just a symptom of a great. But how quickly they were able to subvert, take the Justice Department and turn it into a department that goes after people. But there's still hope. It's not working. The Justice Department. The wheels of justice turn slowly. There were just those guys that arrested in Texas for being antifa and one got a sentence to. But I think he brandished and fired a gun. That's a crime, right? Should go to jail, but I think got sentenced to 100 years. And there are others who were there. They arrested him for carrying, like, medical supplies. 70 years. Those. Those are most likely going to get overturned without evidence that anybody did actually vandalism. But doing vandalism to that thing would be a crime, misdemeanor. I don't think people should go to prison for that. But it's a crime. But this stuff's always happening. It's just the, the media, be it left media or right media, whatever is the Eye of Sauron, you know, it goes here and it goes here and we all follow along and follow along and follow along. You know, it's like you were talking about me bringing up the lake five years ago or whenever it was on your podcast. That was. If you go to the right places, it's never left the news media. It's just the mainstream media to co op that word. They follow each other and they follow the story that gets the most clicks. But underneath the surface, it's all still there. That's the good news. Like, like people are talking about how expensive concerts are. It's true. Like, if you want to go see Taylor Swift, you're going to have to shell out thousand, $10,000. But there's still live local bands that you can go see for $5 in. In almost every town. Right Live music never went anywhere. It's still there. You just got to go find it. There's still beauty in the world world. There's still, there's still love, there's still compassion. You just got to get off of, of. You got to get off Reddit, you got to get off TikTok, you got to go find it.

What's It Been Like to Get Off Social Media

John Dehlin [02:14:26] What's it been like to get off social media for you?

John Larsen [02:14:29] Well, I, I, I largely off, I'm, I'm, I, I don't use Reddit and I, I, as a social media, I don't, I don't talk to anybody on Reddit. But you know, I got off Facebook in 2014 so it's not good for me. I, I, that dopamine hit. I'm sort of ADHD and it's not good for me. I'll keep digging and doesn't make me feel good. And so for my own mental well being, it doesn't bring me joy, it doesn't bring me peace.

John Dehlin [02:15:00] Same with Instagram and TikTok.

John Larsen [02:15:02] I don't have any of them.

John Dehlin [02:15:03] YouTube.

John Larsen [02:15:04] YouTube. I have and I actually subscribe to YouTube, but I play the bass guitar so I use it mostly for music.

John Dehlin [02:15:10] Music.

John Larsen [02:15:11] And I have to be careful not to get, not to get sucked into, into things. Yeah, I have to be cautious.

John Dehlin [02:15:16] Real quick, what do you think about the Strait of Hormuz?

John Larsen [02:15:20] It was completely predictable. It was in all, Everybody knew, everybody knew that's what would happen. I mean that's, that's, what's, that's what's funny about the, the, the funny ha ha that, that they, they said for. Why does it, you know, you hear all this rhetoric about nuclear weapons for, for, for Iran, you know, who's got nuclear weapons? North Korea. Why don't we go to war with North Korea? Well, the answer is obvious.

John Dehlin [02:15:41] Yeah.

John Larsen [02:15:42] Like it wouldn't, it wouldn't end well. But that was the answer for Iran. It's just, it's clear if you just take people inside the administration what they say, that there isn't an up channel of information. So America got into a war that it can't win. We didn't win the Vietnam War, we didn't win the Iraqi war, we didn't win the Afghanistan war, we didn't win the, the, the, the conflict in Korea. Like I was watching when, when, when the, when the Russians first invaded Ukraine and you know, there was worry that, that the tanks were going to hit Kiev, right. And I remember I was watching some pundits on CNN or something and the, the guy was like, he was some military guy and he, he's like, you know, he said there's no, there's no military doctrine for running tanks into a, into a metropolitan area. Nobody's ever done it. And so I'm like, oh my God, that's, that's crazy. And they, they went on and said, you know, there's too many high places. Like, like if you, like, let's imagine you, if you ran a tank down Salt Lake City, how many sniper positions are there? How many, how many places could you throw up a barricade pretty quickly, lock that tank down in and then go, go hit it on the side under underbelly. Like tanks are not good in urban environments. And I do, I went and I did a, I did a dive and it's true, nobody's ever taken a city with tanks.

John Dehlin [02:17:04] Wait, World War II, there weren't German tanks going through Paris streets or whatever.

John Larsen [02:17:08] Well, you're, you're talking about the, the blitzkrieg, which was a little bit. So, so it, it's like Alexander, like he, he, he learned to, he. They were on horses and they just, they just went, went fast. And then the phalanx came along and they'd use these 30 foot poles and they'd drive them into the ground and they'd do them three rows back. So if you're running a cavalry charge, the countermeasure in the history of warfare is always cheaper and easier than the measure. But there's always a gap. So there's conquerors who come in during the gap until you figure out the counter measure. The Vietnamese, they dug tunnels, right? We were leveling. You're just dropping bomb after bomb after bomb on rice field. And the same thing in Iran. Iran had already prepared. They had five levels deep of leadership. They had plans that if your leader gets killed, it's this guy. And if that guy gets killed, it's this guy and this guy. You can't bomb that into submission. So it's American hubris. But Americans aren't special here. I'm not criticizing America. This is always what every empire does. It gets too big, it gets too powerful, it gets too. Extends itself out too far and it collapses. The good news is after empires collapse, life usually gets better for not for the empire, for the citizens. You know, like the empire. Let's take, let's take the Roman Empire. After the collapse, a lot of the rich people left Rome and they went out and bought a property and started villas. So all these villas all around Italy really are in a lot of. Lot of ways a product of the collapse of the Roman Empire because people found a better way to live. Like you couldn't get good food and bread in Rome anymore. It was falling apart, so you just moved out of the city and that shaped modern Italy.

John Dehlin [02:18:56] Are you giving us an optimistic outlook and worldview? It's a pendulum, okay.

John Larsen [02:19:05] The Nazis were only in power for 12 years. Those were a rough 12 years. Right. But Nazis, that sort of nationalistic thing that exists in Mormonism, that we're superior, we're God's chosen people, we're the people who should be leading things, that is always going to be with us. It's like, I hate politics. I've never joined a political party. I think politics is itself a subversion of democracy. But the idea of the progressives versus the conservatives, those are two philosophical positions that will always be with us. This, they can't defeat one another. They're two sides of a coin. The conservative philosophy will never beat the progressive and the progressive, it's just part of human nature. The church needs you.

John de Lynn on the Mormon Lawsuit

John Dehlin [02:19:56] I know that. I'm helping them all the time. That's what I do, is I help improve the church. That's really what my day job is.

John Larsen [02:20:03] Yeah, well, they should read up about the Streisand effect. That's what they, they're getting with you.

John Dehlin [02:20:07] Oh, my gosh. We've had like 12,000 subscribers since they, they sued me. Yeah, I'm exaggerating, but not by much.

John Larsen [02:20:13] You know, I, I never got sued by the Church, but I was lawyered up. I had a Washington D.C. law firm. And, and there, when, whenever there was just even a tiny hint of blood in the water, the lawyers would start calling. There's a lot of high powered lawyers and you don't have to say anything. Who hate the Church. And they are willing. I know there's a lawyer of rich people who hate the Church. There's a lot of rich people with names you would recognize from the church who hate the Church. And the church goes after somebody like you. I'm not saying I, I, I have no idea. I have, no. John and I have not talked about this, but I guarantee you the resources are pulling in. And when I saw that, I'm like, oh, those, those idiots. They're, they're. What, what are they doing? But they're trying to do a slap lawsuit. Strategic lawsuit against public participation. This is, this is a strategy that is used, used all the time. Big money. They just try to throw. Trump does it all the time. They know they don't have A winning case. So they just throw lawyers after lawyers after lawyers. I mean, the fundamental case of do they own the word Mormon? Is patently ridiculous.

John Dehlin [02:21:12] So they're not claiming that. They're claiming that over a three year period, as I understand it, that over a three year period because we decided to rebrand to blue even though we used blue before, because we came back to blue blue and had some light rays and used the word Mormon and used some of the copyrighted images that we feel were under fair use. They're saying that it's that combination of all those things for three years that is the trademark and the copyright violence.

John Larsen [02:21:40] Yeah, well, they're going to have to do some discovery and then your attorneys get to do some discovery and that's usually when they'll back down.

John Dehlin [02:21:45] You think that's what you think is going to happen?

John Larsen [02:21:49] I think they're trying to grind you into the dust. That's what they're trying to, to do. But it doesn't always work.

John Dehlin [02:21:56] Yeah, I'm curious to.

John Larsen [02:21:58] I don't think they care if they win or not. I don't think it's on their radar.

John Dehlin [02:22:04] So like if it ends up being, you know, a judge rules in favor of open stories and John de Lynn, they get to keep the word Mormon and they don't have big fines for trademark or copyright violation. You don't think the church feels like they have egg on that they, you know, that they lost?

Dietrich vs The Church of Jesus Christ

John Larsen [02:22:26] I think one of the problems that you say the church feels, of course it's a corporation, it feels nothing. But it also has a really weird, bizarre management structure that has a fatal flaw in that the people at the top now because of modern medicine are usually senile and very old. So there is always a constant power vacuum. And people work in the church talk about this, that there'll be whole initiatives people will be working on, then a single general authority will come and move. What does the church want? I don't even know what the church. The church has not been consistent about Mormons and the Mormon messaging. You know, it's not even the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints. The Strangites have the copyright on that. It's the Church of Jesus Christ, capital L dash small D. And you know, so you go back historically and the kind of stuff that they claim to have control over, they don't have control over. But, but you know, like what you're, I'm not a lawyer again. But you know, they have to show intent. Like they can't just say we think they Went to blue. Because they're competing with us. They have to show some sort of evidence. Right.

John Dehlin [02:23:31] Yeah.

John Larsen [02:23:32] And, and so that's what. But you know, they'll, they'll want.

John Dehlin [02:23:35] They also have to show harm.

John Larsen [02:23:36] Yeah.

John Dehlin [02:23:37] How are they going to show harm when they make, when they, when their assets are in the hundreds of billions? I mean, I guess they could, but they're going to have to claim. Claim that a two employee nonprofit harmed an organization that probably increased in its net worth by tens of billions of dollars in any given year.

John Larsen [02:23:56] Right, Right. Yeah. It's the same thing with like malpractice. You have to show a duty to act, a failure to act, and harm that came from those. You have to show all three things. In that case, this is kind of analogous to that. They'd have to show that you. Yeah. You had intelligence, intent to do this and that you gained from it. And that's, that's a pretty steep hill. Now I think what one of the things they're hoping is there's a lot of there. There's a lot of there. Traditionally, the courts have been very deferential. The Supreme Court is very differential to religions right now. So I think they're hoping to ride that wave. But this would be a very strange precedent. But who knows? Maybe you're going to be argued before the Supreme Court. Depends on what you guys want to do.

John Dehlin [02:24:36] Yeah, but I don't see, I don't see wanting to settle. And we're now countersuing them. So they can't drop it even if they want to because we're now suing them.

John Larsen [02:24:50] Yeah. Yeah.

John Dehlin [02:24:52] So, you know, it's possible that

John Larsen [02:24:56] my prediction is they'll settle with you at some point.

John Dehlin [02:24:59] Meaning they'll do whatever they can to convince me to stop up.

John Larsen [02:25:04] Well, it'll most likely involve an NDA. So none of us will ever know except you in your heart of hearts. What that, what that.

John Dehlin [02:25:11] Until now, I refuse to sign any NDA, even in mediation because I just

John Larsen [02:25:17] general good advice like that's. It's one of the things bringing our society down. Refuse NDAs.

John Dehlin [02:25:21] Yeah, but.

John Larsen [02:25:22] And a lot of them aren't, aren't legally enforceable anyway.

John Dehlin [02:25:24] Yeah. Well, I'm, I, It'll be curious to see what happens. But do you have a prediction? You, you think they'll try to settle? What if we refuse to settle?

John Larsen [02:25:32] I think they'll try to string it out as long as they can. I think they'll try. My prediction, they'll try to bleed you for as much money and much time. As they can. I mean, they, they are sitting on hundreds of billions of dollars. They've got endless pots of money.

John Dehlin [02:25:45] But the courts don't allow endless abuse of the legal system.

John Larsen [02:25:49] But you, you're, you're in the, you're going to be in the Utah district court, federal, federal court. There's. So it's, it's, it's hard to say. They're, they're, There are some weird things going on legally right now. The Supreme Court is overturning precedent, in my view. They've, you know, the, the whole English common law system relies. The, the reason doesn't fall apart is because you have to fall on precedent so that every judge is not making every decision. And, and we're in new territory on that. You can read in, in legal rags and, and legal scholars and people talking about this that the Supreme Court has gone a different direction now. This isn't the first time. Dred Scott and some of those things post war, you know, there's been times when the courts have gone kind of hog wild. So this is not, that's the optimism. We like to think we're unique. A lot of the stuff that's going on today has happened before. But no, I think ultimately you'll prevail unless you just get, unless they wear you down, you know.

John Dehlin [02:26:44] But you don't think the church will feel embarrassed if they end up losing?

John Larsen [02:26:51] No, I think if they felt embarrassment, they would have felt it a long time ago. Like, you know, I remember, remember the temple in Cody, the temple in Heber where they would just crush the community just to get what they want. They don't. Corporations do not have a. The church does not feel anything. The church does not care. And there's been plenty of cases. You probably covered them on your podcast where people have given, like, senile grandmother gives the entire farm to the church, and the church will go to court tooth and nail. Even though you can demonstrate that mom was under duress and she was doing something that was not beneficial to her family. Church don't care. It wants the money.

Church don't care. It wants the money

John Dehlin [02:27:34] Oh, man.

John Larsen [02:27:35] Because it's a corporation. It's not special.

John Dehlin [02:27:38] You know what's weird is I still think of the church as a parent to me because when my parents got divorced, I kind of feel like the church raised me. It was really just these nice leaders in Katy, Texas, who just showed me love. But I've somehow transferred that to the church in some weird, twisted, sort of traumatic, Oedipal kind of complex thing where I still think of the church as this Beloved parent that maybe somehow still loves me somewhere. You know what I mean?

John Larsen [02:28:07] Yeah. It's one of the things I get quoted on quite a bit. The church takes everything from everybody and then sells it back to you. Right. It's. It takes all the goodness of people and says, this is us. But if you look at what the church actually does, it's all lawyers and accountants. Right. The good that you saw is good, and it's human good, and it's universal. And when I look at. If I go hang out with some witches or some pagans or some Hindus or some Mormons or some ex Mormons, they're all the same. They all basically have the same core values. It's just the problem we have as humans is we divide into us and them and us. We treat with ethics and morality, and then we can do whatever we want to.

John Dehlin [02:28:50] Yeah, that's right. That's right. Wow. Well. So I'll never forget the episode you did when you were kind of retiring Mormon. Expression. I don't know the first time, second time, I'm not sure. But when we did.

On Being An Ex-Mormon

John Larsen [02:29:06] On stage at the.

John Dehlin [02:29:07] Well, we did that. But, you know, when you coined this term, being an exx Mormon.

John Larsen [02:29:11] Yeah.

John Dehlin [02:29:11] How's that going? I know we've kind of talked about.

John Larsen [02:29:15] Doesn't have any purchase in my soul anymore at all.

John Dehlin [02:29:17] Mormonism.

John Larsen [02:29:18] Mormonism. Doesn't it? To me, it's very. I was trying to think of the analogy. I knew we were gonna have this question. It's like college. I can think about my experience in college. I don't process the world through my collegiate experience anymore. I'm sure I did. It was something that happened to me. It was junior high school. It was high school. But I don't, I don't filter through now. When I, When, When I got with Kimmy, she had been divorced for 10 years, and I, you know, I'd been divorced by two years, and I had been out of the church for 10 years, and, and, and she'd been out of church for two years. So it's. It's funny, you know, that I'm ahead of her or she was ahead of. Of me in processing the divorce, and I was way ahead of her in processing. And it's. It's been interesting to watch her as it has less and less and less emotional impact. It has no emotional impact. And, and, and, and to a point, that's where I can engage it. Like, I don't feel any embarrassment or shame that I was a Mormon. I, I don't feel any embarrassment or shame that I was an ex Mormon. It was just part of my journey. But I'm. I don't, I can watch it. I don't identify with it anymore. I don't get any joy from watching the church succeed or fail. It's just something out there. And that's the good news, Will. Time just erases it away. But the more you. There comes a point where the engagement, you cling on, it's unhealthy, that you need to move on. And sometimes it takes friends, sometimes it takes therapists. There's nothing wrong with that. The only thing I wish, my wish for the world. Here's what I want, here's my message. When people leave the church, they engage intellectually and they start using science and logic and reason and they carefully research things like that. I think unfortunately, once people get to the other side, they often shut that down and they just join a new identity. I wish the world would engage everything that way, especially in 2026. Be skeptical of everything. The kind of. Of for ex Mormons, the kind of critical thinking you apply to the church. Please apply to every political movement, every nationalistic movement, every health movement, every vitamin, every workout regime, every diet. Be skeptical. And I think the world would be a better place if we were cautionary. I don't have faith in any, anything. I want to see the evidence and I'll go wherever the evidence goes. I'm not in anybody's camp. I'm not in anybody's thing. And that is a great gift. The gift of leaving the church is you suddenly and we said it on stage. It's the gift of being wrong. And hopefully it installs a little bit of humility. But that humility has to. I have a big mouth. I talk when I should shut up. I keep driving sometimes when I should let things, things go. Sometimes I speak in hyperbole. Sometimes I'm overly emotionally reactive. Sometimes my anger heckles up. And if I don't constantly acknowledge that about myself, I'm going to fall into bad, into bad ruts. You got to recognize that you're a human and maybe forgive yourself or what. I don't even know what forgive means, but acknowledge it. Know that, hey, I joined a culture cult. I have a propensity to join cult. So I gotta be careful.

John Dehlin [02:32:46] So self awareness. Be careful what you join, Ask for data, go with the data, go for the evidence, be skeptical.

John Larsen [02:32:53] And we're all a lot stupider than we think we are. We jump to conclude our minds, our unconscious mind jumps to conclusions all the time. And be careful what, you know, check it all the time. And they check it again. Yeah.

In the Elevator With John McCain

John Dehlin [02:33:06] What about loneliness?

John Larsen [02:33:08] Loneliness is a bitch. Stay away from that.

John Dehlin [02:33:10] How has your loneliness factor been in Oregon?

John Larsen [02:33:15] I make effort to invite people over. We get out there, go find whatever church is closest to your aligned values and go meet people. Go find out whatever you want to do. If you like to play games, go to the game shop. If you like to play softball, go play softball. Softball. You. We human beings don't do well in isolation. And, and the powers that be, isolated people, stressed out, anxious people, make for the best consumers. The, the, the, the, the unminded mind of the, of the corporations, they, they just want to sell you stuff. And they will in it. They will. The algorithms that are getting better and better want you to buy. And if, if you buy more because you're lonely and you're bored and you're disconnected, then they'll drive that. You have to actively fight against it. Go bowling. And if you don't know what your thing is, make your thing finding your thing. Go take classes at the community college, you know, the outreach. Go take a pottery class. Go take, go literally go join a bowling league. Go do all these things until you find your thing. And when you find your thing, you'll find people. And then the second thing, people are fucked up, they're gonna hurt you. That's part of the game. They're going to be flawed, and you just have to say it's people, you

John Dehlin [02:34:35] know, Was it hard to walk away from being a popular loved contributor in public discourse for at least a decade? Right. No.

John Larsen [02:34:53] I mean, the advantage of something like this is you are out there doing something and you can see the impact. But I never liked that part. And you know, I've said before, I hated it. Once the cameras came on, I liked the radio. I thought it was more intimate. I thought people listened better. And I think when the cameras came on, it became more vanity driven. But, but no, I was always less substantive. Less substantive? Yeah. I was always uncomfortable with the fame. I never felt superior or whatever.

John Dehlin [02:35:31] Let's say not fame, but contributing something that means a lot to a lot of people.

John Larsen [02:35:38] It is nice to have creative control that you can flip the microphone on and say what you want. So, yes, there are times, times where I start saying, well, do I really matter? Because you feel like you have to do something to matter. And then I have to remind myself that, no, I don't. We're all 150 years. Most of us are, you know, 150 years at best, away from being completely forgotten. And the people who aren't Socrates. Do you think we know anything about Socrates? Jesus, Thor. Well, whoever else. Sheba? I don't know. Yeah. Do we know anything about these characters? You know, like. No, you're going to be forgotten and you should be forgotten and there's a freedom in that. You don't have to fix the world, but if you can make your own little postage stamp of it better, you can, you can have a fire pit that 20 people show up to. I think, I think that's that, that you, you find there's lonely people. People find them. Be careful. But, but, but. Because it's, it's, it's. They're, they're, they're, they're. It's like a dog, you know, a pound dog. It can nip you, you know, but. Yeah, yeah, no, I think, I think, I think it's a good point, John. Loneliness is, is, is, is, is the scourge of our day.

John Dehlin [02:37:00] But you're, you're not missing being kind of like a public figure, being a creat creator.

John Larsen [02:37:06] I, I miss sometimes the creative out and, and, and the focus. When you have a show, you have to. Every week you, you, you focus. Yeah, right. But. No, no, I don't, I don't. The, the. And that's probably why it was easier for me to step away. I mean, I, I have a certain ego, of course. I mean, listen to me. But, but I, I, it's no, that, that, that part, that part wasn't that hard. But, but, but having that, that and I acknowledge knowledge. The, the beautiful, wonderful gift is to have a microphone, to have a voice. But sometimes the, the thing to do is find a, find a voice for other people, you know?

Jonah Smith on Religion

John Dehlin [02:37:45] Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

John Larsen [02:37:47] This is, this is what I do. I, I love you guys. The Mormons, the, the ex Mormons, the people move beyond. You know, you're all my people and, and, and hang in there. It's tough, it's hard stuff.

John Dehlin [02:37:58] You go shovel with them.

John Larsen [02:38:00] Yeah, yeah. The coop needs to be mucked out really quickly.

John Dehlin [02:38:04] I know I've asked you this before. Just checking in. You have a magic wand. You can wave away all religion immediately or you can wave away the LDS Church. Do you wave religion away in 20, 26 and just take it away because it does more harm than good and, or do you wave away the Church of Jesus Christ of the Latter Day Saints because you believe it does more harm than good? Good.

John Larsen [02:38:32] Well, I would, I would go large because again, I think you Know, Utah and the Mormon thing, it's a small microcosm of humanity in general. And there's, there's a lot of weird religion. I mean, there's, there's weird cults in China that have, you know, 200 million people in them. So I, I, you, you that I'm probably exaggerating, but a lot more than, a lot more than, than the, the impact of the Mormon Church. I'll tell you. Here's my take on religion. Religion is great, great when it's in the minority. When it's in the minority, it helps give people identity. It helps as soon as, really, I don't care what religion, as soon as it takes over and becomes the majority, it starts to impose its will. So I had my magic wand. I'd make it so the religion is still here. People seem to need it, but it would always be a minority player. It would stay in its place of doing what it says, says, doing what Jesus taught. You know, taking care of the sick, taking care of the, you know, judge not least you be judged. Surrender unto Caesar, what is Caesar's, all that stuff. But as soon as it gets into the position of power, then you have the Mike Lees come out and you're like, what is wrong with this guy? You know,

John Dehlin [02:39:46] so religion can stay according to John Larsen, but in the minority.

John Larsen [02:39:50] In the minority. That's where it serves best. Ardent rule.

John Dehlin [02:39:53] It shouldn't rule. Are you worried about AI, artificial intelligence? How are you seeing it play out, especially since you're in tech for humanity?

Are You Worried About AI and The Bubble?

John Larsen [02:40:02] Well, I'm most worried about the bubble. The, the, the LLMs, the, really, the, the analogy is to 3D printers. If you go back about 15 years ago, there was a lot of punditry, there was a lot of investment in 3D print. Not the size and scope of this saying, oh, there were not even going to have stores. You're just going to walk into the thing, you're going to punch it in, it's going to print it out for you. 3D printers have their place, but they're not, you know, people are, we're going to print houses, we're going to print cars. It's going to revolutionize everything. But it's limited technology. What LLMs are, is they're a statistical engine. And so what they do is they feed off of all the output, but they have some problems that they are actually killing the output output. And it's, it's my flat earth problem. There is a lot more information, there's a lot more on the Internet suggesting that the earth is flat than there is suggesting that it's globe. But, but the, the LLMs like singular, like intelligence. You know, I came from linguistics and I was studying grammar, automatic grammar systems and, and artificial intelligence. It, we don't, we don't know what I is yet. So, so the idea that these, these tech bro morons are on the verge of creating an artificial intelligence when we don't even know what it is. We haven't even settled the question if humans have free will. So, so the idea that this system, if we just read every word that's on the Internet and then we have these great big processors that can statistically process through every use of the word can't, suddenly it knows things to me. I find the idea patently ridiculous. And it's playing out. You know, you, you're saying garbage in, garbage out. Garbage in, garbage out.

John Dehlin [02:41:43] Yeah.

John Larsen [02:41:43] And they're actively killing the motivation to put anything on the Internet. I mean the old deal between Google and everybody else was Google would index your site, it would read your site and pull all your content, but then it would click through and send. And so you would go on Google and you'd optimize your search engine so that you get more, more click throughs. And it was a symbiotic relationship. The AIs are trying to kill that. They're trying to stop the traffic. But if they stop the traffic, if nobody actually goes to Wikipedia anymore, then people will stop updating Wikipedia. So the LLM will starve itself of content. And that's one of its key flaws and one of the flaws they're running into already.

John Dehlin [02:42:26] Interesting.

John Larsen [02:42:27] So it's not what they're saying. And the biggest problem is the amount of money invested in it. I think I, I read that every one of us to cover the cost of the current infrastructure would have to be paying $2,000 a month in fees just to cover the current cost. That, that's not going to happen. So, so there is going to be a retraction, is going to be a big bubble pop or is it just going to be a silver traction? I, I, I don't know.

John Dehlin [02:42:51] I, so like stock market imploding kind of thing.

John Larsen [02:42:54] The, the amount of stocks in, in the amount of wealth that has shifted to those companies companies, the amount they control. You know, Elon Musk hit a trillion dollars and four days later hit two trillion dollars.

John Dehlin [02:43:07] What? I didn't hear two trillion.

John Larsen [02:43:08] Yeah, it's doubled. But he doesn't have, there aren't a trillion dollars.

John Dehlin [02:43:13] I just read that he Went under a trillion again.

John Larsen [02:43:15] Well, that's because it's the valuation of these stocks and they just went. SpaceX just went, SpaceX just went IPO. And when that happens, what tends to happen happen is you'll see the stock price inflate and then deflate and then it'll eventually come to a price. But the traditional profit versus expense ratios and things like that, they're way off. The whole market's way off the market shows that it's over inflated. So the likelihood is a correction. That's, that's, that's what happens. But the correction may not be a bad thing because what? Well, the percentage of money that you and I have in the market. Market. And what, what money do we have in the market? We have. If you have a pension, it's in the market. But also your hospitals, your hospital's endowment is in the market, your college's endowment is in the market. It's all these diversifications all point back to the same place. But the market is increasingly controlled by fewer and fewer entities. So your share of the market is becoming smaller and smaller and smaller and smaller. Like if you own a mortgage. Inflation is not necessarily a bad thing because the amount you owe becomes less and less. It's the problem if wages stagnate. And that's what we've had. So why does this matter? Because the church has lots of money. Like if the markets deflate by a quarter or 30% like they did in the Great Depression, these institutions like the church will feel the pinch.

John Dehlin [02:44:41] That's why it's good.

John Larsen [02:44:43] The system we have, we kind of hinted at this before, is on growth. Like you put your money in the stock market and a company needs to grow. It needs to grow at a certain rate. Like just, just paying the bills is not good enough. It has to grow. This is why they want population. Population growth fuels growth. If you sell washing machines and the population grows, you will sell more washing machines year over year. If the population starts to stagnate, you no longer have that guaranteed growth. But the entire global economy is dependent on growth. That's why they're panicking. Panicking because we know there's overuse of resources. So from an Earth perspective, having fewer people is better. But from raw, unadulterated capitalistic growth, we have to have that growth. But you can't have infinite growth. So I don't know if It'll happen in 10 years or 300 years, but the system has to correct it. But I have optimism. We haven't discovered every economic system they talk like there's capitalism and there's socialism and Marxism and they can't even define those terms. But there's an infinite number of models of democracy and economics that we haven't even discovered yet. So we just have to stop labeling everybody who says anything that's contrary to the American propaganda line as a communist. We have to start saying, well, let's go back to the drawing board. That's what the founding fathers did in the American experiment. They went back to the drawing board and said, well, this isn't working. Let's try again. And I think that's. And that's what Joseph Smith did. This isn't working. Let's try again. But there are mystics, and they're priests and they're gurus. The mystics, the Jesus Christs. These are people who. They're always progressives. They're always revolutionaries. They're always interesting. Then the priests come in. In and they codify it and they make rules and they collect money and they ruin it. Every religion is a ruined mystic. The gurus are just people trying to pretend to be mystics for money. So we need the mystics. The mystics have to emerge.

The End of the Mystics

John Dehlin [02:46:49] How do you distinguish between a mystic and a guru?

John Larsen [02:46:53] Mystics usually aren't looking for money, and usually you never hear about a mystic till they're long dead.

John Dehlin [02:46:58] Okay. And you're not worried about.

John Larsen [02:47:01] They don't have man buns either?

John Dehlin [02:47:02] No man buns. You're are. So you're not worried about population collapse and all that stuff?

John Larsen [02:47:08] No.

John Dehlin [02:47:08] Like, Elon. Elon's freaked out about we're not making enough babies.

John Larsen [02:47:11] He wants a.

John Dehlin [02:47:14] Okay. J.D. vance. Like. Oh. Oh, well, there's.

John Larsen [02:47:17] Yeah.

John Dehlin [02:47:17] I mean, no, I'm just saying there's a group of people really concerned that we're not having the babies we should be having.

John Larsen [02:47:22] It. It will impact the global. The global economy. It will impact us. But. But the, The. The retraction of. Is a biological thing happening. It's global. It's everywhere. But you can't. We talk to our kids in their early 20s as they think about having kids, and we already have to say, well, Kimmy and I basically have to be the nannies, which is a model for a longest time. I read recently that childcare in America now costs. Costs more than college. It's unsustainable. You can't. You can't. Most people can't have kids. It's. It's just out of the reach.

John Dehlin [02:47:59] Wow.

John Larsen [02:48:01] So. So the system, although the breaking down of the system is Painful. And I'm not encouraging. I don't want that. That chaotic. But we're already there. We're already in a liminal space. This is not. Humans can't live the way we're living right now in 2026, there's. There the, the young people, the people, they don't have, have hope of a home. They, some don't even have hope of a car. They can't be. You can't have school teachers who even have their own apartment. That's not sustainable. And, and we know that once the populace gets hungry and we're starting to screw it up against that, then bloodshed comes. Always not encouraging it. I don't want war, I don't want violence. I'm just telling you, historically, you keep pushing down the line. We are, and there will be revolution. That's history.

John Dehlin [02:48:47] Are you a grandpa?

John Larsen [02:48:49] No, not yet.

John Dehlin [02:48:50] Okay. Okay. Yeah. You talk about child care so well,

John Larsen [02:48:54] I mean the kids look and say, you know, my kids real dilemmas. Should we go to college? Yeah. And I'm like, I don't, I don't know. I was in the humanities, Kimmy was in the humanities. So I think it's a shame that we're losing critical thinking skills. But the economics of going to university for the working class, for the majority population, the middle class is disappearing. Right. The church could help with this. The church could.

John Dehlin [02:49:23] It is. It's creating cheap university experiences through pathways for the world.

What is Religion and College?

John Larsen [02:49:31] I'll take your word on that.

John Dehlin [02:49:34] Cheap online religious, some college level education.

John Larsen [02:49:39] Okay. I mean I, I think oftentimes when evangelicals or Mormons go into communities, they do. They help clean up water and help. And, and, and, and we have to acknowledge the good that religion does.

John Dehlin [02:49:49] Yeah.

John Larsen [02:49:49] But to me it's important that they be truthful that, that the good you do doesn't dismiss the lies you tell.

John Dehlin [02:49:55] Yeah. Fair. Well, John Larsen, I think I'm hearing mostly optimism, although there is some blood in chaos.

John Larsen: The End of Optimism

John Larsen [02:50:04] I'm a cynic. They say a cynic is a disappointed

John Dehlin [02:50:07] optimist, but I'm still hearing optimism.

John Larsen [02:50:11] The world is stranger. If you and I got together back in 2014, 11 years ago, and tried to predict where we'd be now, we would have never predicted this. The tell is not over, Trump, and Trumpism is not the end of the story. It's hold up, buckle up, climate change is here. Here. I just read that Lake Powell's dropping below the, below the turbines in March. That's providing. So like we are on the cusp of some real significant Change. They say the headwaters of the Colorado river are going dry. The headwaters. Like, like it's going to get crazy.

John Dehlin [02:50:54] But you think global warming is, Is transforming the, the Earth?

John Larsen [02:50:58] I don't think it is. It is.

John Dehlin [02:51:00] It has.

John Larsen [02:51:00] It's not. It's not. Is it going to happen? It already has happened.

John Dehlin [02:51:03] Yeah. Yeah.

John Larsen [02:51:04] Like, like, it's, It's. The transformation has already occurred. And that is, that is the, that is the, the big story. This is all. This is all just a distraction. But, you know, people, there's this narrative in the United States that, like, if society breaks down, people will start killing each other with guns. But when society breaks down, that's not what happens at all. Like most people, I don't know what percentage of people in the United States work as technicians. They put things together. Like if the world collapsed on Thursday, on Friday, everybody just go back to work and put it back together again. But they'll put it back together again. Different. We adapt. Will there be pain? Will people die? Yes, unfortunately. Will there be war? Will there be famine? Will there be disease? Avoidable things? Sadly, yes. But I have faith that humanity, that we'll find a way. And in fact, when the oil is $20 a gallon, then we won't be able to import textiles from China, which means we'll have to open textile plants. And it will be painful, but we don't know how it'll play out. It might play out in ways that are advantageous to us. It's like the church. You lose your faith and you don't know how it's going to play out. You don't know where you're going to end up. That's part of the ride. It's part of life. We're all dead in the long run, so it doesn't matter.

John Dehlin [02:52:29] John Larsen, you're a prophet. I'm so grateful that you would stop in, check in with us all the time. People tell me, bring back John Larsen. Bring back John Larsen. His was the only stuff I ever listened to, you know, But I, I get it. I get it. So thanks for gracing us with your wisdom.

John Larsen [02:52:48] Well, your, the, the work you've done and, and the heavy lifting, you know. Yeah. Does John Delun have a bit of an ego? Yeah, yeah, he does. He does. But. But, you know, I'm, I'm pro. I'm proud of what you've done. I'm proud that I was a part of these people who I may have had conflicts. I'm proud of what we all did together. And, and, and we're getting old. It's time. It's time for the next generation to step up and it's going to look different, you know?

John Dehlin [02:53:17] Yeah, well, we don't want to go down another rabbit hole. But I'm really curious once I step down and what's going to happen to kind of ex Mormonism? Because I've been doing this a long time.

John Larsen [02:53:28] As long as. As long as you have the fire in your belly, I don't think you need to step down. Yeah, I think. I think the next thing emerges. You don't have to clear the Runway.

John Larsen on Podcasters

John Dehlin [02:53:35] No, no, no. I. I'm just. I'm pretty alone here. You know what I mean? And I'm not trying to build community or like, coalitions anymore. I'm just doing my thing and watching what else comes up.

John Larsen [02:53:46] I think if you knew the full story of people who just connect by just talking about what you're doing, I think you're building more community than you're ever aware of or ever hear about. I think that. I think the service that you're doing, and it was something that one of the great podcasters who came before me said. He said, I have to take the arrows so that my kids don't. And you have to be the victim of these lawsuits to pave the way for the future. So thanks, John, for taking one for the team.

John Dehlin [02:54:18] Thanks, John Larsen. All right. Will we come back from time to time?

John Larsen [02:54:21] Sure. Yeah.

John Dehlin [02:54:22] It's been too long.

John Larsen [02:54:23] I come right at least once a year to say hi to mom, you know.

John Dehlin [02:54:26] Okay.

John Larsen [02:54:27] Yeah.

John Dehlin [02:54:27] Well, I'm glad you stopped by and check out our comments. How do people reach you if they want to come do a tour and shovel chicken shit?

John Larsen [02:54:35] My email is John Larsen. J O H N L A r s e n.org john larson.org so they can email you there, they can email

John Dehlin [02:54:44] me there, and they can visit your firm.

John Larsen [02:54:46] Well, we'll see. You got to not be crazy.

John Dehlin [02:54:48] Okay. All right, brother. Hey, brother. Well, it's great to have you. Thanks for all you do. Come back again.

John Larsen [02:54:54] Thanks.

Mormon Stories: John Larsen RIP

John Dehlin [02:54:55] All right. Thanks for joining us today on Mormon Stories, everyone. Thanks to Julia and Brooklyn for all they do, along with our board and our other co hosts. Thanks to the donors that make this possible. MormonStories.org donate is the way to donate. MormonStories.org legal is a way to help support our legal fund. MormonStories.org apply is the way to apply to be on the show. We'd love to have you email us@mormonstoriesmail.com, be good to each other, be kind to each other, and let's enjoy the ride. And I like the optimism that you brought, John. So let's try and carry a little bit of John Larsen with us wherever we go. In the name of Mormon expression. Amen.

John Larsen [02:55:41] Amen.

John Dehlin [02:55:42] All right, take care, everybody.