The Mormon Stories Podcast: LDS Discussions Edition

Kolby Reddish [00:00:00] Hello everyone and thank you for joining me on today's episode of Mormon Stories podcast, LDS Discussions Edition. Today is episode number 80 and we are going to be covering the securities and Exchange Commission scandal involving the LDS Church. The LDS discussion series, as a reminder, is best consumed sequentially because these episodes tend to build on each other. I'll get to more on that in a moment. The series as a whole is an attempt to discuss Mormon Church truth claims and in as objective and fair way as possible. This series started with the work of a man named Mike and his website, ldsdiscussions.com he has since retired and I am his pale imitation. We have dozens of previous episodes that, as I said, build on each other. And I know John de Lynn feels that the LDS discussion series is one of the most important things that Mormon Stories podcast has ever done. I feel the same way. And with that we will go ahead and introduce my other panelists for today, the little team here. First we've got Julia Sanders. Julia, introduce folks to you and your other platform.

The SEC Scandal

Julia [00:01:09] Yes, I'm Julia. I run analyzing Mormonism on all the platforms and I discuss mostly the history of the church or things that I find interesting.

Kolby Reddish [00:01:20] Great. And we are also joined, slightly more British, by Nemo the Mormon.

Nemo [00:01:26] Yes, slightly more British. How are we all folks?

Kolby Reddish [00:01:30] Doing? Great. I probably should introduce myself. I'm Kolby Reddish and I will be walking us through the slides today, which Julia has done the primary work on. So thank you Julia. As a reminder for LDS discussions, if this content is important to you, please donate to keep this series alive and and send any feedback you have about today's episode or other episodes to mormonstoriesmail.com so Julia, in my mind, this episode on the securities and Exchange Commission really originated building on one of our last episodes where we talked about the methodology and how believing in the Church seems to lend to people believing in frauds very easily. So we walked through a whole history of fraud in the church, the fact that Utah is the affinity fraud capital of the United States, and we talked about basically what being basically using a believing epistemology leads you to in other areas of your life. And I think building on that, one of the biggest examples is the securities and Exchange Commission order.

Julia [00:02:36] Yeah, and I know that this happened a while ago and one of the other reasons I wanted to do this episode is to bring this to people's attention now in 2026, because it's been a few years people don't remember, or people who have just recently left the church or recently exploring more of the church's history. Like, I want them to have this as, like, a reminder or recap of what's. Of what has happened.

Kolby Reddish [00:02:56] So you're saying you don't want people to consider this matter closed? If I understand you, yes.

Julia [00:03:03] Yes.

Kolby Reddish [00:03:05] Perfect. Yeah. This order originated in 2023. In February of 2023 is when these events basically came to light. And for me, it's really interesting as a lawyer to think about an alternative world where I didn't leave the church in 2022 and what this would have done to my faith in 2023, because I feel like not only working as a lawyer, but working as a regulatory lawyer specifically. I have no idea how my faith would have survived. Like, recognizing what is in this order that we're going to be talking about today.

Julia [00:03:40] Well, and I'll even say, like, I left the church in 21 and I learned about this, obviously, in 2023, and that still shook me. I was like, oh, like, it really surprised me. Even though I had learned about polygamy and I learned about other different things about the church, it still surprised me, even as somebody who wasn't in the church anymore. So. But yeah, that's an interesting.

Nemo [00:03:58] I was having discussions with my state president about this at the time that it became a hot topic issue, or a hot button topic, whatever you call it. And he was also a lawyer. And in three hours, I managed to finally get him to the position that the church hadn't been honest.

Julia [00:04:17] Dang.

Nemo [00:04:17] Yeah. Three hours. That took.

Julia [00:04:20] Yeah.

Nemo [00:04:22] So some people, Kolby, to your point, how would your faith have survived it? Some people are able to talk their way around it.

Julia [00:04:29] Well, and we've talked about that. A lot of Mormon stories of how resilient people's faith is. So, yeah, okay, great. Yeah. So this is the working thumbnail. This is the Security and Exchange Commission or the SEC scandal is how I've framed it. What I want to talk about first is the. And maybe Kolby, you can speak more of this too, but what the entity, the church's entity, the Ensign Peak Advisors. This is their main website. And then one thing I just wanted to point out really fast is this little line that's on their main page. It says financial principles, and on the second paragraph, it says, in managing these assets, Ensign Peak follows established investment guidelines consistent with church policy and strives to maintain flexibility, discipline, and perspective through market cycles. And so I just thought that was just like a quick. That's consistent with church policies.

John on Ensign Peak and the Tithing Law

Nemo [00:05:23] Before we even jump in there, we need to explain what Enzyme Peak is more broadly the reason we're talking about Enzyme Peak at all is they are the investment arm of the church. So they are an investment fund fund that the church owns, and that is where the church puts their spare tithing money.

Kolby Reddish [00:05:39] Right. So starting in the late. Yeah. Starting in the late 1990s. And this actually hooks into other legal trouble that the Church has been in in the Huntsman tithing lawsuit, which I know I covered with John on Mormon stories. So for people who want to understand that the arguments that were made, what that case actually turned on when the Ninth Circuit affirmed the dismissal of John Huntsman's claim against the church for basically, you know, misstating how it was going to use certain tithing receipts. Ensign Peak is the creation of. That is basically the church recognized in the late 1990s that it was receiving more tithing than it knew what to do with, than it needed to meet the church's operational expenses. And so President Hinckley, with the create. With the consent of the other leaders of the church, and this will. We'll go into more detail in the order here in just a minute. They created Ensign Peak as an investment arm, as Nemo said, to take that excess tithing, reserve funds and to invest it into the market to continue to build up wealth that the Church could then use for its other projects.

Julia [00:06:44] And I think specifically it was 97. I think we'll talk about that, too. But I think it was 97 the

Nemo [00:06:49] year I was born. So was Enzyme Peak. And the other thing I would like to point out is I certainly, for one, have no issue with the Church doing that as a principle. As a principle of bringing in more money than they can reasonably spend. I don't think the church should just be frivolous and spend money for the sake of it. If they have more money, sure, they could spend. Building a reserve is a perfectly reasonable thing to do in and of itself. As an idea.

Kolby Reddish [00:07:15] In the. Yes. In the abstract. It's in. When we get to the specifics of how the reserve is reasonable.

Nemo [00:07:22] Yes.

Kolby Reddish [00:07:22] The details of how they get the transparency. Yes, I agree with you. It's just sound investment strategy to have an investment arm. Yeah, right.

Julia [00:07:31] Yeah. Yeah. So how I've set this up, if we. If we're okay with that, because I feel like that was a good introduction. And then. And then, like I pointed out a second ago with this, it's consistent with church policy and guidelines. I just think that's interesting and we can talk about that later, because it doesn't really say it's consistent with with the law, I guess, is what I was thinking.

Nemo [00:07:54] Well, the Church only ever talks about its finances in terms of how consistently the finances are managed in accordance with church policy. Did it ever really give any sort of reassurances when it comes to the legal status of the Church's financial decisions? Which we will get to later. Yeah, but take us back, Julia, take us back to December 2019.

The Mormon Church's Statement on Investment Fund Claims

Julia [00:08:16] Yes, so we're going to talk about this timeline really fast because this is important because this seems all kind of start to unfold in 2019. And so here we have, we're showing a Washington Post. It's called the Mormon Church has misled members on $100 billion tax exempt investment fund whistleblower alleges. And this was December 17th of 2019, which is important to know. And the Church that same day, it seems, released a statement and it says First Presidency Statement on Church Finances. Nemo, do you want to read that last paragraph of this section?

Nemo [00:08:52] Claims being currently circulated are based on a narrow perspective and limited information. The Church complies with all applicable law governing our donations, investments, taxes and reserves. We continue to welcome the opportunity to work with officials to address questions they may have. Now just to point out this idea that the claims are based on limited information. Could that be possibly because the Church is not financially transparent and so therefore limited information is available?

Julia [00:09:18] Just.

Nemo [00:09:19] Yeah, per chance.

Kolby Reddish [00:09:21] And then we also know this second statement is just absolutely not true.

Julia [00:09:26] I was just thinking that too.

Nemo [00:09:27] At this point in time specifically, it is still not true. It won't become true until February of the following year.

Julia [00:09:36] Yeah, so that line is again, the Church complies with all applicable law governing our donations, investments, taxes and reserves. So here they like their statement on their website. It says they're consistent with church policy. Here they're saying they're consistent with applicable law. And Kolby, I have questions about that too. But that'll come later about this applicable law, like, because I have people pushing back on me about certain things. But we can get that. We'll talk about that in a second.

Roger Clark on The Mormon Church's $1 Billion Wealth

Kolby Reddish [00:10:00] Okay.

Julia [00:10:01] So then there's another one. Excuse me, another article here from the Wall Street Journal. And this one was 2020, February 8th. And part of it, he, they quote, I can't remember how I even got this clip. But so the person doing this interview, he records Roger Clark, who we should say is one of the.

Nemo [00:10:22] Oh, I can't remember his exact President of Enzyme Peak.

Kolby Reddish [00:10:24] He is the head of Enzyme Peak.

Julia [00:10:26] He's the head of Enzyme Peak. And so they recorded him speaking. And so and then they quote him in the article. So I don't. Again, I don't remember how I got this, but I got this several years ago when this was all coming down. So this is the voice of Roger Clark discussing this, the tithing aspect, and not wanting people to know the amount. But we can play that paying tithing

Kolby Reddish [00:10:49] is more a sense of commitment than it is that you're needing the money. And so they never wanted to be in a position where people felt like, you know, they shouldn't make the contribution because the church didn't need it.

Speaker D [00:11:11] Yeah.

Kolby Reddish [00:11:11] Huh. So I think that may have played some part in it. Okay, so my memory, my memory of where that audio comes from, Julia, is that they had done an interview with Mr. Clark. They had then, like, stepped out into the hallway.

Julia [00:11:28] That's what I thought.

Kolby Reddish [00:11:30] I'm, I, I would sense that the interview didn't go as well as he's thinking, because what he is sharing then with the report, as they're, like, making their way out, seems to be like, I'm explaining further because I can tell I didn't do a very good job explaining the first time. That's the way it comes across. Tone wise. Right. He's trying to, like, mollify. And so that's my understanding of where that recording comes from.

Julia [00:11:54] That's what I thought because I thought it was out in the hallway. But it's interesting that the journalist kept recording, even stepping out, because I think maybe he sensed or this correction was coming or whatever. But so going back to just to read it so that people can hear it better, he says this is from the same Wall Street Journal. Paying tithing is more a sense of commitment than it is the church needing the money. Mr. Clark said so they never wanted to be in a position where people felt like, you know, they shouldn't make a contribution. So, like, the church has so much money, and we're worried that. To me, this is what seems like what he's saying is that if people knew, then they wouldn't want to contribute and give their tithing money.

Nemo [00:12:33] So, yeah, the church never wants to put itself in a position where people felt like they shouldn't make a contribution. What might make people feel like they shouldn't make a contribution? Oh, the church is fabulously wealthy. They don't need my money.

Julia [00:12:43] But also, the church has made statements. Church prophets and apostles have made statements that will talk about. About how they don't. They will someday stop asking for tithing.

Nemo [00:12:51] Yes.

Julia [00:12:52] So that's another thing.

Nemo [00:12:54] But that Wall Street Journal article is important because it's where we get a lot of information about the Church, about Enzyme Peak, and about the, the figures to do with Enzyme Peak, the amount of money they bring in each year, what returns they expect, whether it's been dipped into or not. That sort of stuff all comes from this Wall Street Journal article.

Julia [00:13:14] And the article, I'll just say, because I forgot to say the title. It says, the Mormon Church amassed $1 billion. It was the best kept secret in the investment world is the title of that.

Nemo [00:13:23] So already that should tell us that some way down the line, something is going to be uncovered as to how the Church kept this quiet. Because if the church or if Enzyme Peak was filing as it ought to have done, then it shouldn't have really been a secret. It should have been very clear that they had $100 billion on their books. That should have been quite visible. So this, even, this here is alluding to or sort of foreshadowing what we're then going to have to get into later with the sec.

Julia [00:13:53] Yeah, that's true. Okay, so this is a, this is a different one. Right, Right. Nima, this other Wall Street Journal.

Nemo [00:14:00] Yeah. Real Estate empire is the title on this one.

Julia [00:14:03] Yeah. Okay, so this, this is a different Wall Street Journal article. This is from 2023. So three years later in June, it says, inside the Mormon Church's globe spanning real estate empire. And then. Will you explain this?

The Mormon Church's $100 Billion Wealth

Nemo [00:14:16] I will explain this quite happily, yes. So this is, I believe this is before the SEC stuff comes out. But the fact that the Church is this wealthy is just good news. Right? That's a really easy thing to write news about. And when you discover that the Church doesn't seem to be behaving with this money, then that's also really good to write about. So the Wall Street Journal writes here that the Church has also misstated its assets on federal tax returns. So now people are starting to get a little bit questioning of how honest is the Church being in its returns. If, as I just said, this $100 billion is the best kept secret in the financial world, how are they keeping that secret here? They're showing that on the 2007 return, Enzyme Peak put down $1 million for its total assets. The real number was about 38 billion. An Enzyme Peak document shows in later years, Enzyme peak wrote over 1 million on its returns. The Church followed the same practices on its own IRS returns where it reports business income unrelated to its tax exempt mission. So even in places where they're not tax exempt and they ought to be paying taxes. They're still being vague about the amount of money they have. Church officials said that they believe, and for Mormons, remember, it is very important. What they believe is paramount. This is why in meetings at town councils, they will get up and testify into what they believe because they believe that has real efficacy. Church officials said they believe that as a religious organization, the church doesn't have to disclose its assets. Todd Budge, another member of the presiding bishopric, said anyone familiar with the church would know its assets exceed $1 million. And this is my favorite quote. It wasn't an accurate answer. It wasn't meant to be an accurate answer, said Budge, a 63 year old former banking and private equity executive. It was simply meant to communicate that we do not feel that we are obliged to fill in that box.

Julia [00:16:13] So he's saying. So hang on, let me recap. He's saying the saying over $1 million wasn't meant to be an accurate number.

Kolby Reddish [00:16:22] And also, hang on, he's literally saying, he's saying we lied, but anyone should have known we were lying. That's basically in effect what he's saying.

Nemo [00:16:30] And we lied because we didn't feel like we owed you the truth.

Kolby Reddish [00:16:34] He said anyone familiar with the church would know its access exceeded $1 million. He's literally saying we lied and anyone should have known we were lying and it's your fault that you didn't know we were lying.

Julia [00:16:44] My gosh. So that, but that first sentence right there. Church officials said they believe that as a religious organization the church doesn't have to disclose its assets. So is there a law that says that they should disclose their assets? Like, isn't that what the sec.

Kolby Reddish [00:17:01] So that's what the SEC found. So we'll get into the details on that. But the basics are, and this actually relates to the question of what does the securities and Exchange Commission exist to do so? Congress created the SEC securities and Exchange Commission after the Great Depression. So the Great Depression was caused in part because people withdrew their money from the stock market, from banks and it caused a gigantic financial collapse. So the Congress created the sec, which has certain disclosure requirements because the idea is if you are a large enough market mover that you withdrawing your money from the market or speculating on the market in a certain way can affect everybody's money. That's the reality of having a modern economy that's integrated together the way that ours is. So there is a filing requirement. I think your question to me directly based on that story was is there a law that says that the church has to disclose certain assets. And the answer to that is yes. The requirement is what's known as a 13F filing requirement. And the idea is, if you have assets that are invested that are in excess of $100 million, that is a large enough sum that if you were to do things with that $100 million, the presumption, basically in the law, in securities and Exchange Commission regulation, is that because you can affect the market so severely because of how large your assets are, the public have a right to know. So one of the great ironies to me of certain apologetic responses to the SEC scandal basically coming out is that the SEC exists to protect you, to protect the public, to protect our overall financial. The overall solvency of our entire financial system. And so when there were certain apologists who just basically pointed the finger at the SEC or talked about how unfair they were being against the church, it's important to recognize that these disclosure requirements that the church did not follow. And again, we'll get to the details in just a moment. Exist to protect you.

Julia [00:19:06] So I want to go back and look at that line again, because I still think this is interesting. Church officials said they believe that as a religious organization, the church doesn't have to disclose its assets. So we believe we don't. Is this kind of what they're saying? We believe that we don't have to report to the sec. Is that kind of.

Kolby Reddish [00:19:25] That's what they're saying, basically, that they're exempt from the requirements, which spoiler alert. That they were not.

Nemo [00:19:32] And religious institutions more broadly in America, if I understand correctly, Kolby, don't really have to disclose their finances if they're certainly below a certain amount. Right. The thing is, the church with this amount of money has then triggered filing requirements that are applicable irrespective of whether you're a religious institution or not.

Kolby Reddish [00:19:52] Correct. So, like, the Internal Revenue Service answers questions of tax. Right. So they're the regulatory body that handles income taxes for the entire country. And religious organizations are exempt from certain filing requirements with the IRS to disclose their assets. Again, the securities and Exchange Commission is about public markets. It's about protecting public markets. So the only reason that the church had to comply with these disclosure requirements is because the money is invested in public markets. If it wouldn't have been, no one would get to know the size of the church's asset portfolio. It's because it's invested in publicly tradable stocks that people have a right to know. Because when you're invested in publicly tradable stocks, you affect everybody's. Money. And if you have enough of it that you can affect everybody's money, which, you know, spoiler. $100 billion is a magnitude greater than $100 million. Right. Which is the disclosure requirement, 13F filing requirement that can affect a huge segment of the market. If the church were to just pull all of their $100 billion out of the market, it would have these gigantic effects literally on the global economy. That's the reason these filing requirements exist in the first place. It's not about tracking the church's assets or policing the church's assets or asking questions about how they're spending the money. It's literally just so that the public knows to eliminate asymmetry between investors, the investing public, and the people who have such a gigantic amount of assets that the law has basically said, you have enough money in the market that the public has a right to know.

Julia [00:21:30] That's a. Thank you. That was a really good explanation. I just can't get over there. Like, there's a law in place to protect the public, and the church says, we believe we don't have to obey that law, so we're just not going to do that right now.

The Church Lied About Not Completing the 13F

Kolby Reddish [00:21:41] But it's even worse than that, Julia, if you pull that story back up real quick, that slide, if they just didn't believe that they were subject to the disclosure requirements, there's a different way to indicate that. Like, you should just say that instead of say, we have a million dollars in assets and we expected that anyone familiar with the church would know that our assets exceeded $1 million. Instead, they lied and then blamed people for not understanding that they were lying. This is absurd, because this is a.

Nemo [00:22:10] Because this isn't a 13F we're looking at here. This is a 990T, which is a tax return document.

Kolby Reddish [00:22:14] A tax form. Correct.

Nemo [00:22:15] I don't know whether the church is required to fill in that box or not necessarily in terms of. I don't know whether they are required necessarily to disclose the amount of their assets to the irs. What I do have a problem with, as Kolby's pointed out, is that rather than say that they lied and they deliberately made an inaccurate statement and, like you said, blamed everyone else for.

Julia [00:22:38] Makes me think of, like, other things that church leaders have said. Specifically, there's a clip with Ballard where he's like, oh, we haven't been hiding. People think we're hiding the first vision, but it was published by. By Cheeseman or Chessman or whatever, and I can't remember what year he published it, but they're like, we've been hiding that for a long time.

Nemo [00:22:54] That. We've been hiding that for a long time.

Julia [00:22:56] Yeah. 71.

Nemo [00:22:59] It was an ensign article in 1972.

Julia [00:23:01] Oh, 72. Okay. So. And then he's like, we're. We're as transparent as we know how to be. Like, I don't know. This just reminds me of that, where they're like, you guys should have known. Like, this was published in some obscure paper about the first vision. You guys should know we weren't hiding it. Like. Like, you guys should know that we're being dishonest about how much money. It just kind of makes me think of that.

Kolby Reddish [00:23:21] Right. Take his last sentence right here at the bottom of the slide. It was simply meant. And by it, he means the 100 or the 1 million dollar indication. It was simply meant to communicate we do not feel we're obligated to fill in that box. What would be, I don't know, 10 better ways you could indicate that you don't feel obligated to fill in that box? Leave it blank, Write exempt. There's so many other things. Right?

Julia [00:23:47] Yeah.

Nemo [00:23:48] Not applicable. Right. That's. If you want to simply communicate that there are simpler ways, then here's a number that you're now going to have to work out if that's honest or not.

Julia [00:23:58] Yeah. Like, we will lie because we don't feel like we need to. We're not obligated to. Yeah, that's wild to me. But. Okay, so one thing before we go into this. I wanted to just give people a chance to look at other Mormon Stories episodes that are on this topic. I've created this little playlist here because I think it's a really interesting topic. It really affected my view of the Mormon Church, even though I was already out by then. So if you go to Mormon Stories and you type in SEC Scandal, these. These different episodes will come up, and I just think they're really good and worth watching. And then, of course, you guys. Nemo, do you want to talk about this one?

SEC Scandal

Speaker D [00:24:32] Yeah.

Nemo [00:24:32] I had Kolby on. This may have been one of our first collaborations, but it was a good one. We got on and we talked about this. Fine. And we went through the filing in detail because I've spent a lot of time with this filing, and Kolby has got a lot of professional experience with this and has also spent a lot of time with this filing. So I think it was a really good episode going through this whole incident.

Julia [00:24:54] Yeah. And it's called understanding the 5 million Mormon sec fine. With Kolby Reddish, for those who just listen.

Kolby Reddish [00:25:00] And you can find it on Nima the Mormon, which is not an official publication of the Mormon Church.

Nemo [00:25:06] Absolutely correct. I am just. Just for clarity, I am not an official publication of the Mormon Church. In some of the places online, I am listed as unofficially Mormon. And I think that is a good

Julia [00:25:17] designation for those just listening. He. That's his YouTube banner. Not an official publication of the Mormon

Nemo [00:25:23] Church, which is great in ess, in a suspicious shade of blue and in a suspicious font, but we'll gloss over that.

Julia [00:25:30] At least you're not using copyrighted images. But anyway. Okay, so the next thing that I want to talk about is the setting up the church tithing and the church funds. And so this one. One thing I just find really interesting, and we're going to talk about this on LDS discussions next time, I think is the history of tithing. But there has been several changes about tithing specifically. And then one thing I just think is interesting is these little tithing slips. So the church have to donate 10%. They stick it in. You can either pay online or you stick it in the little envelope, but you have to fill out this little white page, and then you keep the yellow page behind it, the canary page or whatever. But there's different sections. There's tithing fast offering general missionary, ward, missionary, humanitarian aid. And then there's other that you can specify. But at the bottom, it has this disclosure and it says. Which has changed over time. It says, through reasonable effects, though, reasonable efforts will be made to use donations as designated. All donations become the church's property and will be used at the church's sole discretion to further the church's overall mission. So what I get from that is, like, for me, I felt so good as a member when I would donate to the missionary fund, because, like, that's something I don't. I'm not obligated to do that. Nobody asked me if I've done it. And I just felt really good to donate to help these missionaries. But the church, what they're saying here is that it doesn't really matter, Julie, if you mark it down for missionary or humanitarian aid, we can just put it, plug it in wherever we want. And I just find that a little bit disheartening. Like, I don't know. But that was just my thoughts.

Tithing and the Church Funds

Nemo [00:26:58] It used to say that it was. Reasonable efforts were made to use the missionary fund.

Julia [00:27:04] Yes.

Nemo [00:27:05] Yeah, there you go.

Julia [00:27:06] Yeah, yeah. So this is now on the screen. There's another tithing slip. Nima, do you remember exactly when this year was because this is the tiny slip now.

Nemo [00:27:14] I think it was sometime around 2011, 2012. I want to say that this change my memory too.

Kolby Reddish [00:27:20] I think it's. I think it changed in 12.

Julia [00:27:23] Okay. So in 2011 or previous to 2012, it says all donations to the church's missionary fund. This is the very bottom disclosure. All donations to the church's missionary fund become the property of the church to be used at the church's sole discretion in its missionary program. So they're saying the missionary program becomes the, the churches, they can move that around.

Nemo [00:27:42] They're saying basically we can't guarantee that missionary funds are going to go to the missionary fund.

Julia [00:27:46] Right. But then, but then they. Then that changed to be like kind of everything. We can just move it anywhere. Do you know why do you guys have speculation on why this change was made in 2012? I don't know if it had to do with the Huntsman case or other cases. Like, I don't. I just was curious about that.

Kolby Reddish [00:28:01] They weren't in existence at that time. So I, I don't remember. I know I've heard speculation on why it changed, but I do not remember a specific instance. I can tell you it wasn't related to because Enzyme Peak wasn't disclosed until 2019, late 2019. And the Huntsman tithing lawsuits and all the other tithing lawsuits that we've talked about Gaddy 2020. Remember the name of the other one? Yeah, they're after the Enzyme Peak disclosure because they basically rely on it.

Julia [00:28:28] So I will say because like 2012 was when I started serving my mission and that's when the age change happened in October. It was announced 10-20-12 and then I served in December of 2012. So I wonder if it could be the jump in missionary program and people were. They were getting more. I don't maybe that.

Nemo [00:28:44] Maybe that's a good. This is a good opportunity for people to opine in the comments. Let us know in the comments what you think. Yeah, and as we. As we're going to go through the history of tithing anyway in a subsequent episode so we can find that out for you.

Kolby Reddish [00:28:59] So we'll revisit.

Julia [00:29:00] Well, yeah, for sure. I just. It's just curiosity thing for right now.

Small World: Coby and Julia

Kolby Reddish [00:29:04] But there's another part that I remarking. Oh, I'm so sorry. Also you were marking Julia, where you were at as a missionary in December of 2012. That means I was teaching at the MTC while you were a missionary at the MTC. Small world.

Nemo [00:29:18] You don't know what I was doing in 2012. I was watching the Olympics.

Julia [00:29:28] Coby, what did you teach in the mtc?

Kolby Reddish [00:29:31] I served English speaking, so I just taught English. Yeah.

Julia [00:29:34] Okay.

Kolby Reddish [00:29:34] My wife and I both.

Julia [00:29:36] That's so cool. Anyway. That's so cool. I was in the mission. I was in the NCC for like six weeks because I had to do extra training because I was a visitor center sister. Anyway, so I trained on.

Kolby Reddish [00:29:48] I've had probably five of my past missionaries reach out to me since, so. That's interesting.

Julia [00:29:54] That's so cool. Anyway. Okay. Anyway. Sorry. Cool. Okay. So there's another part that I find really interesting about tithing. And again, we'll talk about this later as well. Kolby, do you actually want to read this slide?

The History of Tithing

Kolby Reddish [00:30:05] I do. So, Joseph F. Smith in the April 1907 General Conference, stated, I want to say to you, we may not be able to reach it right away, but we expect to see the day when we will not have to ask you for $1 of donation for any purpose except that which you volunteer to give of your own accord, because we will have tithes sufficient in the storehouse of the Lord to pay everything that is needful for the advancement of the kingdom of God. I want to live to see that day, if the Lord will spare my life. Well, I feel like truly there is a prophet of the Lord God in Israel because this prophecy has been fulfilled, I would say.

Julia [00:30:42] Yeah, I mean. I mean, they're still asking for donations, so that's not totally.

Nemo [00:30:47] No, but the fact that they will have tithes sufficient in the storehouse of the Lord to pay everything that is needable for the advancement of the kingdom of God, that. That we have reached that blessed day. Hallelujah, brother.

Kolby Reddish [00:30:58] And I'm excited to read it. You have to read it very carefully, Julia. It says, we expect to see the day when we will not have to ask you. It doesn't say they will stop asking you.

Julia [00:31:07] That's true. I'm very excited for this next episode about the history of tithing. And I want to. I'm going to say this to remind myself, but the church was in debt for a while, and then it took them a while to get out of it. And one of the things that I find interesting is that they were investing. They were. How do I say that there were whorehouses that the church was profiting off of. So they weren't the churches. They were the church's buildings. They weren't there specifically their businesses. So they were profiting off of this even. Well, after the Church was out of debt. And so. And it was under several different prophets. And so we'll talk about that too, because the church was in debt and they were trying to get out, but the church. So like. But they were out of debt. Yeah. So like, anyway, so we'll expect to see the day where we won't have to ask you guys for money.

Nemo [00:31:50] So let's not forget Henry D. Moyle putting the church into real financial dire straits towards the late 50s, early 60s. They had to steady the ship after that. His meeting house building program essentially bankrupted the church. He had to build it and they will come attitude that made field of Dreams look like a joke. He just went out and just built so many meeting houses and then we'll find tithe payers to fill them with. The tithe payers didn't turn up because the people that his baseball baptism program were bringing in were young kids who didn't have any money. So numbers were growing, meeting houses were growing. There was no tithing coming in. And they stopped. And they stopped to the point where they stopped putting out public finances. The church has never recovered its financial transparency since the 50s.

Julia [00:32:35] Dang.

Nemo [00:32:35] Thanks, Henry.

Kolby Reddish [00:32:37] I feel like over the next couple decades we're going to find out what happens if you took that same attitude and instead of using it to build media houses, used to build temples. Because yes, I think I've already seen calls on Reddit, like people sharing emails of people saying we don't have enough workers to staff temples. And we're talking like temples in Utah. So there's part of me that's like, so they're calling ward members to serve as like, you know, ad hoc temple workers. And I'm sitting there going, oh my goodness. All over the world they've built these temples with this attitude of. And I've even used that exact phrase, phrase of Nelson's attitude towards building temples. Nemo, if we build it, they will come. And in one sense, I'm sympathetic to that because I think it shows the sincerity of their belief and the sincerity of their faith that like, yeah, we're really going to do this. We're going to expend this capital and believe that God's going to fill these temples. But I guess we'll. We'll see whether their faith is rewarded or whether the church has to figure out what it's going to do with all these temples.

Nemo [00:33:36] It doesn't take much faith to spend that little of your capital. Right?

Kolby Reddish [00:33:40] True.

Nemo [00:33:41] When you consider the size of their reserves. Right. It's not a great gamble anymore in the way that it once was.

Does the Church Care If the Temples Sit Empty?

Julia [00:33:47] Well, this might be a little off topic, but in the newest episode we just had with you and Megan Nemo, one of the questions does the church care if the temples stand empty? I think that was one of the questions. I don't think the church really does care if the church is stand empty. Like I think it's a temple that

Nemo [00:34:04] sits outside Yellowstone national park in Cody, Wyoming is always going to sit there and it's always going to block people's view and it's always going to remind people of the Mormon church as they drive by. It's like it's a billboard.

Julia [00:34:16] But it also makes the helps the faith of the members just that it's there.

Kolby Reddish [00:34:20] But what we except I would say the one area I'd push back is when you start seeing calls like the email I just referenced of we can't staff this temple. We need people to do it. What that will continue to contribute to and this is something I've picked up from your friend Peter Bleakley. Nemo it will continue to contribute to people's burnout with the church. Like if you're expected to hold multiple callings and then do additional duties as an ad hoc temple worker or to go clean the church or go clean the temple. I mean could cause people to say wait, I thought the church was growing at this point, you know, intense rate. I've heard about this in general conference. Why, why, why the mismatch? So I agree with you. They don't necessarily care that the temples sit empty, but what they will care about is if members start to go wait a second, this doesn't match the narrative of the church growing at the rate that I've heard what's going on here.

Julia [00:35:15] But and then again I'll, I can add to that too is John has spoken a lot on Mormon stories about how people when they're given a lot of responsibility in their type of religion or whatever, they tend to stay and they've the strictness and the, the jobs and things like that. And so maybe, maybe it could create stronger believers. But I, I think for sure they would notice that the narrative is not the same. That we're member, we have more members than ever before. But yet these that yet they can't find temple workers and things like that. But yeah. Okay, so this next, this next one is a clip from Elder Packer reiterating the quote that we just read from Joseph F. Smith. This is from April of 1990 and it's called the talk is Teach them correct principles.

Elder Packer Reminiscing the Prophecy Regarding Tithing

Nemo [00:36:02] President Joseph F. Smith, as early as 1907 said, we may not be able to reach it right away, but expect to see the day when we will not have to ask for $1 of donation for any purpose except that which you volunteer to give of your own accord. Because we will have tithes sufficient in the storehouse of the Lord to pay everything that is needful for the advancement of the kingdom of God.

Julia [00:36:33] And then, ironically, seven years later, they create Ensign Peak. Well, I just find that really interesting. This was not that long ago that he's giving this. He's reiterating this old prophecy or whatever from Joseph F. Smith. I just think that's really interesting. I don't know if you guys have thoughts on that.

Kolby Reddish [00:36:52] The only thought I have. Oh, I'm sorry, go ahead. The only thought I have is there's actually a really funny story and I'd have to dig it out. Maybe we can share it in that History of Tithing episode as kind of a follow up. There's actually a really funny story of Elder Packer going over to the Ensign Peak offices when he was the acting President of the Quorum of the twelve. And even he was not allowed access to, like, the Ensign Peak offices and the assets. So I guess what I'm saying is it's ironic in the sense that it's so close in time, like you said, Julia, to the creation of Enzyme Peak. But the reality is, Elder Packer may not have known

Nemo [00:37:30] the amount of money the church was bringing in.

Julia [00:37:32] Okay, so hang on. He was in this story. He's one of the 12? Or he's. What was his position at the time?

Kolby Reddish [00:37:37] Well, it was when the Enzyme Peak disclosure, or like when the disclosure happened with the whistleblower in 2019. 2020 time frame, if I remember correctly.

Julia [00:37:46] Okay, so maybe we can. Because we can.

Kolby Reddish [00:37:48] He would have been dead, right?

Nemo [00:37:49] He would have been dead.

Kolby Reddish [00:37:49] When did he die?

Nemo [00:37:50] Yeah.

Kolby Reddish [00:37:50] Yeah. So it was before everybody else knew about it.

Julia [00:37:53] Okay, because we can talk about that.

Kolby Reddish [00:37:54] I'll do a follow up.

Julia [00:37:55] Who's in charge? Okay, because like, we. There's a part of our discussion where we talk about who's in charge of Ensign Peak. And because I. Because I have a question of. Is it. Is it the 12? Is it the whole 15? Or is it just the top three? So we can talk about that as well.

Nemo [00:38:07] He died in 2015. It only took 11 years for him to reappear in the form of Clark G. Gilbert. And so now he's back. The ghost of Boyd K. Packer. Is in the 12 in the guise of Clark G. Gilbert. Again, it would seem they have a very similar vibe in some ways. My only thought here is I don't think members are going to bat an eye at him repeating that in 1990. I don't think. I think members could be easily convinced that that's not really a prophecy, because that's done often. Members are often convinced that something isn't actually a prophecy that very clearly seems to be a prophecy. This is when we get into the weeds of when is a prophet speaking as a prophet. When are they just speaking their own opinion. The phrase we expect to see the day. You can hear the apologist jumping on it now to say, that's not a prophecy. That's just him declaring what he expects to see. That's just him saying he expects that we should see that in both of

Julia [00:39:07] these talks from Joseph S. Smith. And then we're in general conference. So I just want to say, like, how, if this would be the time.

Nemo [00:39:15] Yeah. If they say it in their official capacity as a prophet, seer and revelator to the general membership of the church. I can't see how that isn't them speaking authoritatively, prophetically. Have you on the Right. The other thing is, I was just

Kolby Reddish [00:39:31] going to say to close the loop. Well, you finish the second thought and then I'll close the loop on my Elder Packer story, because I did find a source for it.

Nemo [00:39:38] Oh, perfect. So the second thought is that the prophecy, in a sense, has come true in that they don't need to ask us for anything except that which we give of our own free will. The free will point is arguable. And we could have a whole discussion about the coercive tactics involved in tithing and the emotional manipulation and et cetera, et cetera, but technically, there's nothing that hasn't happened from that 1907 prophecy. There's no declaration there that we will just stop asking you. There's nothing there to say that once we have that, we will change the way tithing operates. All it's saying is like, we just won't have to ask you for it. You can just give it.

Julia [00:40:17] The implication is that we will stop the implication.

Nemo [00:40:20] But there's another way to read it.

Kolby Reddish [00:40:23] Yeah, yeah, that's kind of the quip that I had when we were looking at that quote, is it does only technically say that they won't have to ask it. Say they will stop asking. Yes, Julia, you're right. Any reasonable person is going to infer that that's what he's actually saying, but he doesn't actually say that. And as we've learned, and we'll see as we go throughout the press releases involved in this matter, you have to watch very carefully on what the church is actually saying versus what any reasonable person would think they're saying. Oh, I'm sorry.

Julia [00:40:55] Oh, I just want to say, I guess one reading is because tithing people say is an internal principle. But we expect to see the day when we won't have to ask you for tithing. But of course, we're going to continue asking because you need to pay tithing because you need to be saved or something like that. But anyway. But you're right, it doesn't really say that anyway. So keep going with the Elder Packer.

Elder Packer Denied the Full Value of Ensign Peak

Kolby Reddish [00:41:14] Well, yeah, I was just going to close. I did find a source on that Elder Packer story. So it was around the time that there were other articles as the ones that we've looked at, talking about Enzyme Peak, talking about the sizes of the church's portfolio. And there's a quote from a very similar article, and I'll just read it. It's three really quick paragraphs, says Boyd K. Packer when he was next in line to succeed then president. Then church President Thomas S. Monson came to EPA's President Roger Clark, wanting to know how much Ensign Peak had amassed and the details of its structure. Mr. Clark told Mr. Packard that he could not share such details. Mr. Packer said, I think I should know. I'm the most senior apostle and the President of the Quorum of the twelve Apostles, and I am one breath away from being the next prophet. I think I should be prepared. Mr. Clark reaffirmed that he had been instructed not to reveal that information to Mr. Packer, who went away perturbed and unsatisfied, as related to the whistleblower by Richard B. Wiles, the head of fixed income at Ensign Peak at the time. Mr. Packer died before he could join the first presidency and know the full value of Ensign.

Julia [00:42:18] Oh, my gosh. Okay, so what year was that again? What year would that have been? When he has this discussion?

Kolby Reddish [00:42:23] I don't think it gave us a year.

Julia [00:42:25] Okay, so the senior apostle, next in line for the prophet, went and said, hey, how much money does Ensign Peak have? And they're like, we can't disclose that.

Kolby Reddish [00:42:33] President, President Monson, when did he pass? That could give us an indication.

Nemo [00:42:41] And 7. January 2018, it was, I think, the 2nd of January 2018.

Kolby Reddish [00:42:46] So it would have been from 2000 around 2008 to 2017. Sometime in that time frame. That's when he was Prophet.

Nemo [00:42:53] Yeah, 2nd of January, 2018. I don't know why I know that exact date, but that is the date on which he died.

Julia [00:43:01] That's a wild story. If you'll share that link with me, I can put that in the show notes. Okay, so there's another little aspect of tithing that I want to talk about. So in 2012, there's. The church published the manual, Teachings of the Presidents of the Church. This is for Lorenzo Snow. In this manual, they share a quote from Lorenz, from President Snow concerning tithing. And this is. This is a direct screenshot from this manual.

Another Controversial Comment on Tithing

Kolby Reddish [00:43:25] Can I read this one?

Julia [00:43:26] Yes.

Kolby Reddish [00:43:27] I plead with you. This is the quote. I plead with you in the name of the Lord, and I pray that every man, woman and child, dot, dot, dot, shall pay one tenth of their income. As timing.

Julia [00:43:39] Yes. As you'll notice, the ellipses. This. This is a. This is a talk taken from October 1899. And this is the reporting for the. This is the full talk. This is in the conference report here. Kolby, will you read this part?

Kolby Reddish [00:43:56] Yes. So here is the full quote. I plead with you in the name of the Lord, and I pray that every man, woman and child who has means shall pay one tenth of their income as a tithing.

Julia [00:44:06] So what was taken out? Will you remind me what was taken out?

Nemo [00:44:08] A lovely conditional clause was taken out. Say it again.

Kolby Reddish [00:44:12] Yeah, it's who has means? And I'll point out that that who has means statement is actually very consistent with the Book of Mormon. The Book of Mormon has passages that literally talk about if you don't have sufficient income or sufficient finances to donate, that it's sufficient as long as you wish that you could give, as long as you wish that you had access to be able to donate.

Julia [00:44:35] Yes, and we'll talk about this in the history of tithing, because this is just such a fascinating topic to me. But yeah, the who has means is. It has. Even in the tithing revelation, it talks about this as well. But so, but the church. Why do you think the church took that out?

Kolby Reddish [00:44:50] Because they don't. I mean, for the same reason that Roger Clark said they hid how many assets were in Ensign Peak. They don't want people to think, should I really be giving? They want it to be the default assumption that you should be.

Nemo [00:45:03] Yeah, even the default position is pay tithing. There shouldn't be.

Julia [00:45:06] Even if you are hungry, even if you have no anything.

Nemo [00:45:09] Pay your choice between eating and paying. Paying your tithing. You should pay your tithing. The bishop will help you with your food. That's Lynn g. Robbins in 2005, I think.

Julia [00:45:19] Yeah.

Kolby Reddish [00:45:20] His talk is called Tithing a Commandment Even for the Destitute. That's literally the title of the talk,

Julia [00:45:27] which is the complete opposite of this talk.

Kolby Reddish [00:45:31] And what the.

Nemo [00:45:32] Have we even. We even heard it in. In this last general conference, we had a. A 70 get up and talk about the time he sold his car to pay his tithing.

Julia [00:45:44] Yeah.

Nemo [00:45:45] And then he said, you will. He said. He ended his talk by essentially saying, you will not get out of poverty until you start paying your tithing. Now is the season to be obedient to that law. Words to that effect.

Kolby Reddish [00:45:57] Yeah.

Julia [00:45:58] Yeah, I.

Nemo [00:45:59] So the church is pushing tithing hard still now, even in light of their vast wealth, even though they would be a middling country by GDP at this point, you know, they still are pushing people and pushing the narrative that you should sell your car so you can pay tithing and that you won't get out of poverty until you pay tithing.

Kolby Reddish [00:46:20] There would probably be a lot of people who would hear us talking about this reality. And I know we'll do a deeper dive on this when we get to the history of tithing, but I actually do not believe that the church is doing this because it wants people's money. I think it's a much more complicated explanation. In other words, I think the comments we've made, just because I know the purpose of the LDS discussion series is to look at things as objectively as possible. I wouldn't want people to think, as we're sharing this, that we think that the church is in the business of trying to take the members money because it legitimately like, wants to scoop up poor people's money. I think the actual explanation is much more complicated than that. And I think we'll get into that when we look at the entire history of tithing. In other words, I think they can entirely believe what they say when Roger Clark says, we really believe that this is a commandment that will bless people's lives and we don't want to withhold those blessings from people. That does not make it okay the way that they have withheld information from the members, from the public.

Nemo [00:47:21] That's why I've advocated the past. I started a petition. It was something I did really early on in my career, advocating that people should pay their tithing to charity instead. And the church should make that their formal position. Because I agree that if you want to keep the idea that paying a tenth of your income is a way to remember how lucky you are comparatively. Those who have means to give 10% of their income to the poor, there are ways to give that money effectively to charity and do things unto the least of your brethren, which means it's the same as doing it unto Christ. There are theological positions you can take that show that you could change the way that tithing is defined. So you would allow people to continue to make the spiritual commitment and continue to engage in that spiritual process without just needlessly. Because I do think it's needless at this point, without needlessly enriching the church.

Julia [00:48:12] There have been, and there have been people on Mormon stories who have gone to their bishops, if I remember correctly, and said, we don't feel comfortable donating 10% to the church. Can we donate to X, Y or Z, whatever charitable organization, and can that be our tithing? And I've heard that the bishops sometimes have accepted that where they count them as a full title.

Nemo [00:48:31] I was personally told that wasn't acceptable.

Julia [00:48:33] But for you, for you, it is Bishop Roulette. So it's not going to happen all the time. But yeah, but I have heard stories like that, which I, I think that bishops who do that, I think that's really admirable for them to accept that. But yeah. Okay, so moving on. This is an NBC News article, and I don't remember the date. I think it says it in a second. It's from 2012. So it says, Mormon Church earns 7 billion a year. From tithing analysis. From tithing analysis indicates. And so this is part of the article. It was published by Peter Henderson, and part of it reads, relying heavily on church records in countries that require far more disclosure than the United States. Sociologist Ryan Cragan, who's been on Mormon stories before, and I guess the other person's name is Reuters, estimate that the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints brings in some 7 billion annually in tithing and other donations.

Mormon Church: How Much Money Does the Church Earn?

Nemo [00:49:31] Reuters is a news outlet.

Julia [00:49:33] Reuters. Okay. Okay, Perfect. So, yeah, 7 billion. 7 billion with a B every year. Which is. That's wild to me, that.

Nemo [00:49:41] And I was pumping the air when he talked about countries that require more disclosure than the United States because one of the big ones is the United Kingdom. The church has to disclose its assets to the. The church, to the Charities Commission, as they're known in the UK because in order for the church to get its tax exempt status, they have to be a registered charity, which means they have to Give a reporting of what charitable good they do every year. And they have to give a breakdown of exactly how much money they bring in, where it goes, what it's spent on. And so that's why we knew they bought this over 100 million pound office block in the center of London, because they had to report that they'd received this money in from Salt Lake in order to make that purchase.

Julia [00:50:22] Wow.

Kolby Reddish [00:50:23] Seems pretty reasonable to me to not just rely on, trust me, bro, when it comes to charitable giving.

Nemo [00:50:30] But this is where it's different in the US because churches are not charities in the like. So. So churches in the UK are charities in order to be tax exempt. They're tax exempt in the us If I understand correctly, just by dint of being a church, you can say we are a religious institution, therefore we don't pay tax. That's about the sum of it, correct?

Kolby Reddish [00:50:50] Yeah, they're exempt as a religious organization, not necessarily as a charitable organization. It could be, but it could also be different. There are different qualifications, there's categories.

Nemo [00:51:01] Yeah. There's no necessity for them to engage in charitable work.

Kolby Reddish [00:51:05] Correct.

Nemo [00:51:06] The assumption being you would expect a religious organization to have charitable work as a core part of its mission and therefore it will be acting in the public good in that way. But they don't have to. So no one can turn around to the Mormon Church and say, you aren't doing enough charity work in the US and if you don't do enough charity work, we can take away your tax exempt status. They can do that in the uk. They can look at the church and go, you are not sufficiently doing enough charitable work, you are going to lose that tax exempt status. They did it with the temples. Just as a real quick aside, they did it with Preston Temple and London Temple in the uk and the church chased this all the way to the European Court of human rights in 2014 and they ruled that they did not get a full tax exemption on the Preston Temple because it was not open to the public and it therefore was not a place of public religious worship and therefore it was not in the public benefit. They still get 80% relief from business rates from tax on that property site. But the church was so desperate to get that extra 20% in order to be fully tax exempt, I believe possibly from a slight feeling of American entitlement, because the church still views things through an American lens and well, we're a religion, we shouldn't have to pay any tax. Well, actually in the UK it's a bit more complicated. And so they fought Desperately to get that 20% off and they didn't get it. And I think they're going to have the same fight with the Birmingham Temple. Someone's going to try and register it as a tax exempt religious building and then someone's going to have to point it out and then the case law will come up and they'll have to pay the 20%.

Julia [00:52:34] That's so fascinating. I also want to sit for a second with the 7 billion because the church, I don't know if Braggs is the right word, but the church claims 17 to 18 million. I can't remember if they're up to 18 so far, but the church claims a large amount of people and I think studies have shown that like 30 to 40% are active and then you have to say that. And then even less of those are temple recommend holding members. And in order to be a temple recommend holding member you have to pay your tithing. So like, so that's a smaller percentage. I don't even know what number that would be. But you have, you know, 17 billion. You take 40% and then you take this smaller number that are temple goers. That's just, that's a small number and that's a lot of money coming in. So like if, if all 17 billion were full tithe payers, I mean I guess some of these are children but like that would, the church would be bringing in a lot more money. But I think, I still think 7 billion is a lot of money every year.

7 billion in tithing

Nemo [00:53:32] Do you think the Marriott family pay and tithing as an example? Right. I think part of what skews this is Mormons have a habit of going on to be incredibly wealthy.

Julia [00:53:45] Well then you have James Huntsman who, who discloses I think his amount that he is paid to the church and like that's a lot of money for these individuals.

Nemo [00:53:53] Yeah, there's some very wealthy members of the church out there paying tithing and getting tax kickbacks for it because it does count as a tax deductible contribution, doesn't it? Correct. Yeah. So you know, there's people writing off, you know, using it for tax write off, something like that. So you know, it doesn't surprise me that that number is so large and it's coming from a, you know, how much of the Ottomans paying in tithing for goodness sake. Right.

Kolby Reddish [00:54:21] Well, I actually would say that number is actually very small. That's the way I would look at it. Like that's crazy to say $7 billion is a small amount. But what I mean is if we used reasonable estimates, like Julia said, of the $17 million. So if we estimate like 5 to 6 million active tide payers. This is just the rough back of the napkin math I'm looking at. And we estimate like an average annual income of like 30 to $40,000 a year, that would come out to $24 billion a year in tithing. So I think the point is there probably are a lot less active tithe paying members than most people are going to assume based on the numbers of the churches shared.

Nemo [00:55:07] Yeah, yeah, that's 3,000. Yeah. Okay, so 3,000 times 5 million, roughly.

Julia [00:55:13] Yeah, yeah. I mean it's not, I mean it is a lot. It's not as much as it could be, of course, if everybody was active.

Nemo [00:55:20] But so I think the. Yeah, the dearth of active tithe payers is made up for by the wealth of certain high profile members. And, and that's how that levels out in my mind. That's a good point, Kolby, is that actually it could be more.

Kolby Reddish [00:55:35] Right. If we used the same estimates and again, some of the 17 million members are obviously no longer active or children, but if we were just assuming 17 million people with the same reasonable kind of overall annual income estimate, that would be $70 billion. So to put it in perspective, that's like a tithe in and of itself. Weirdly, 70 to 7 billion. There we go.

Julia [00:55:58] Yeah, yeah. Anyway, I just thought that was receiving

Nemo [00:56:01] a tithe of what it could.

Kolby Reddish [00:56:03] That's right. It's tithe all the way down.

How Much Does the Church Spend on Tithing?

Julia [00:56:06] I'm also curious to know how much the church spends. Like how much does it cost the church to run itself? And maybe they discuss that.

Nemo [00:56:14] They've disclosed this to the Wall Street Journal, to the Washington Post, one of those two. They essentially said that they spend 6 billion a year running the church and then they put a billion away. And when, and when the tithing income goes down, they trim the budget. That's what they did in 2008 when people paid less tithing. They just trimmed the budget and they admitted to that as well. So yeah, they, they always, they let the tail wag the dog in that sense. I guess you could maybe say they essentially let the amount of money they receive dictate how much money they're going to spend. Rather than having a fixed cost each year and then going into savings to make up the shortfall, they will just let the amount of money they receive dictate the amount of money they spend in a given year.

Julia [00:56:58] So tithing, they make seven and then they tuck one away and Then they spend the six. But then Enzyme Peak, is it called. What is it? The money that Enzyme Peak makes. What's the word?

Kolby Reddish [00:57:09] I'm from investment income.

Julia [00:57:11] Investment income. That's also a similar number. So that all sits there, but I guess nothing comes out of that.

Nemo [00:57:17] Well, so this was my argument when it was $100 billion and Roger Clark was admitting that they make about 7% a year return. My argument was that 7% of 100 billion is 7 billion, which is the amount they bring in in tithing. So what they could do is they could do exactly with those returns. They could spend six of them, keep one. So their fund is still growing by a billion dollars every year. They're not touching the initial capital, if you want to look at it like that. It's essentially an endowment fund that they can just withdraw from the top of the. And keep the church running in perpetuity while it still grows by a billion dollars every year anyway, just naturally, by them continuing to operate in the same way they have operated. What I was arguing that would then do is free up $7 billion a year into the charitable sector worldwide. See, imagine if that $7 billion was given to local and international charities. Imagine the good that that could do.

Julia [00:58:11] Yeah, the church could do a lot of good with their. With that money.

Nemo [00:58:14] Yeah, like that's a positive statement. I'm not, like, trying to bash the church with that. I'm pointing out a way in which the church could be a massive force for good in the world. And who wouldn't want that?

Kolby Reddish [00:58:23] Right?

Julia [00:58:24] Yeah. Okay, so then we need to talk about who is in charge of Ensign Peak. And so I've just made this little image here. So you have Roger Clark, and it says Chief Executive Officer. And then you have Christopher Waddell, who's the presiding bishop, who. He oversees church finances. And then you have the First Presidency. And so right now, this isn't consistent with the time period of when all this stuff was happening with Ensign Peak, but you have Oakes, you have Christofferson, and then you have Eyring, and so that's who's in charge now. But then back then, it would have been. I guess they go through several different presidents.

Who is in charge of Ensign Peak?

Nemo [00:58:58] Ochdorf would have been involved. Eyring was always involved.

Julia [00:59:01] Monson Hinckley. Yeah, so that, of course, would have changed. But right now, I think this is correct.

Nemo [00:59:08] So in terms of those who are still alive and therefore could be implicated, you've got Eyring. And Uchtdorf knew what was going on at the time.

Julia [00:59:19] Yeah. Okay. So now and Waddell. Yeah, because he's been. And this is a little bio on.

Nemo [00:59:26] Cause they actually a member of the. Because it wasn't just the Presiding Bishop that knew. It was the entire presiding.

Julia [00:59:32] Oh, yes. And we'll talk about cause later.

Nemo [00:59:35] But he was at the time involved. I think he was the Presiding Bishop at the time.

Kolby Reddish [00:59:40] Right.

Nemo [00:59:40] I want to say that the news broke, so.

Julia [00:59:42] Yeah, yeah. And maybe I should have, like I could have done. Who was all involved over the years. But.

Kolby Reddish [00:59:47] All right.

The Life of Presiding Bishop Christopher Waddell

Julia [00:59:48] Okay. So this is a, this is a little bio on Waddell just so that we know a little bit more about him because we're going to be seeing some clips from him from the 60 Minutes. So he. So Bishop W. Christopher Waddell was sustained as Presiding Bishop of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter day Saints on November 14, 2025. So he is now the Presiding Bishop. Prior to this assignment, Bishop Waddell served as both first and second counselor in the Presiding Bishopric, which means that he was beginning and beginning his service in 2015. So he was part of this. This. Who's in charge of nsignp. Because it's the, the, Is it the bishopric? Is it the Presiding Bishopric or the Presiding Bishop? Who is.

Kolby Reddish [01:00:24] It's the Presiding Bishopric.

Julia [01:00:26] Yeah, bishopric.

Speaker D [01:00:26] So the three.

Kolby Reddish [01:00:27] When we get to the order, it's very. When we get to the order, it's very clear about who the decision makers were.

Julia [01:00:33] Perfect. So to be more accurate, I should have had Waddell with his little bishopric. So it would have been three people there too. But okay, so before his service in the Presiding Bishop, he served as a general authority. 70. Bishop Waddell has served in numerous church callings, including a full time missionary in Spain, Bishop High counselor. Counselor. And in a mission presidency, Stake president, President of Spring Spain Barcelona Mission and Area 70. After he graduated the Bachelor's degree, I think in history, Waddell served as the first vice president of investments in Merrill Lynch. And so he's. He's been involved in investments before.

Nemo [01:01:10] Yeah.

SEC Cease and Desist Order vs The Church of Jesus Christ

Julia [01:01:10] So, okay, so this. Kolby, will you explain what we're looking at here?

Kolby Reddish [01:01:15] Yep. So this is the COVID page of the order against the Enzyme Peak Advisors as well as the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints. It's important they got the name right. This is the order instituting the cease and desist proceedings pursuant to the securities and Exchange Commission rules as well as the statute. And so this is an agreement that the church and the securities and Exchange Commission reached. And then the order basically finalizes how things are going to Go as a result of the, you know, the conduct that they talk about in the order. So it's important to know.

Nemo [01:01:51] Making findings and imposing a cease and desist order.

Kolby Reddish [01:01:55] Correct. And it's important to know that this order was reached as a negotiated, like settlement, as like an informal resolution to the case. So it wasn't prosecuted in court. Instead, it was something that the church and Ensign Peak and the securities and Exchange Commission would have negotiated before reaching this order. This would have. Having been a regulatory attorney, as I said, most of my career, this would have been something that the church and the SEC worked on. Probably negotiated certain lines that were going to be in there, how things were going to be worded. And so that background, I think is really important. It's dated February 21, 2023, which is just a day before my birthday. And this was such a wonderful birthday gift to dig into.

Julia [01:02:40] And did this hit the news on that day? Because I thought it was after it hit on February 21st.

Nemo [01:02:46] I've got somewhere a copy of the Financial Times, which is the biggest financial newspaper in the UK with this on its front cover.

Julia [01:02:54] Wow. Okay. Big news even in the uk.

Nemo [01:02:56] Big news in the uk. Yeah. Because this is a big deal. Like, apologists will try and minimize this. This is a big deal world news, what I'm hearing.

Julia [01:03:06] So February. February 21st, 2023. Okay. And then so there's these three people. You have the. The. The SEC, enzyme peak and the church who are involved in this in this order. Okay. So the first part I want to talk about is the respondents. Nemo, do you want to read this slide about the response?

Nemo [01:03:23] So this is just laying out who the SEC is essentially saying was responding to their treatment. Essentially. This is who's involved. The Church of Jesus Christ. Last Day Saints is a Utah corporation, Soul, headquartered in Salt Lake City, Utah. And to be. I think we should clear that up. It being a corporation, soul, as far as I understand, means that essentially the only member of the corporation is the president of the church.

Julia [01:03:49] Oh, soul. Yeah. Because the corporation of the president. And why is it the church? Kolby, I don't know if you can answer that. Sorry to interrupt. But like, it's the church is the title of the church is the corporation of the president of the Church of Jesus Christ. Letter to Saints.

Nemo [01:04:02] There was two, and then they merged.

Kolby Reddish [01:04:04] Yeah, that's the legal entity, basically. That is the church. Yeah.

Julia [01:04:09] Okay. So that's. So it's the same thing. Like legally, what is the church called? Is it called the Church of Jesus Christ? Letter to Saints I don't know if that makes sense.

Kolby Reddish [01:04:17] Well, I think the religious organization, which doesn't necessarily have to be like the same paper entity is the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints. I think the corporation then is the corporation of the president of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, if I remember correctly.

Julia [01:04:36] So sorry if I don't quite understand. So, like, the SEC is the respondent, is the church, not the corporation of the president? I'm just wondering. Well, I don't know. I don't really understand the difference between those two. But it is saying it's a corporate.

Kolby Reddish [01:04:47] I think it's because the difference between those two is basically a on paper difference, if there is any difference.

Julia [01:04:53] Okay.

Kolby Reddish [01:04:54] So the only thing I can. So I know I have spoken about this before on Mormon stories. There was an episode that John and I did with Gerardo. And I think looking at the Huntsman tithing lawsuits or one of the other tithing lawsuits where we actually look at the church's corporate structure. But again, off the top of my head, I just don't remember exactly how it's structured in the relationship between them.

Julia [01:05:17] Okay, perfect. I was just curious.

Nemo [01:05:18] To the best of my knowledge, from what I remember, and I'm happy to be correct on this in the comments, there were two corporations. There was the corporation of the president and there was the corporation of the presiding bishopric. The corporations of the presiding bishopric dealt with financial matters. And the corporation, the president was kind of more ecclesiastical. And then what? They merged and now it is just the corporation of the president, essentially doing business as the Church of Jesus Christ of Last Day Saints. Okay, that's sound. That's how it works.

Julia [01:05:49] So sorry to interrupt you, Nima. So you said corporation soul means that

The Secret Life of Russell Oakes

Nemo [01:05:53] Oakes is the only member of the corporation. He's the only person that's actually, like, legally attached to it, which is so interesting to me, which I would argue makes him one of the wealthiest men in the world. Other people argue on a technicality that's not technically true because he doesn't own the assets. He's just the only member of the corporation which owns the assets. But essentially he. He's the boss man. And there are no other boss men when it comes to the church's money and its assets. And that's. I think, one of the reasons why the. The transition of finding a new church president happens often so quickly is because, again, he's like the. The president of the church is the one that's. That's the only member of the corporation. So they can't leave it without someone in it.

Julia [01:06:39] This feels like such a legal thing because, like, as soon as Oakes dies, it has to legally go to. Well, I guess would be eyeing next. Like that's just super interesting to me.

Nemo [01:06:48] Even if he's not sustained as the president of the church, etc, I would imagine he becomes the sole member of that corporation.

Julia [01:06:55] Yeah.

Nemo [01:06:56] If Memphis the right word, I'm not quite sure that'd be your neck of the woods, Kolby. But.

Julia [01:07:01] Okay, so sorry to interrupt you. So let's. We can carry on.

Nemo [01:07:04] So. Yeah. So the. The church was organized and operated to carry out the purposes of the faith known as the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints. The church has over 16 million members in more than 30,000 congregations across 160 countries. So they say, as referenced in this order, senior leadership of the church consists of the church's first Presidency and presiding Bishopric. So it was the First Presidency and Presiding Bishopric that knew what was going on.

The doctrine of senior leadership of the church

Julia [01:07:30] So. So not. Not the President of the 12, the quorum of the 12, and not the quorum of the 12. Correct, just.

Kolby Reddish [01:07:36] And this.

Julia [01:07:37] Just the top three this term.

Kolby Reddish [01:07:39] Senior leadership of the church is going to become very important as we go throughout the subsequent paragraphs that we look at in the order. So it's important to recognize the senior leadership of the church. Phrase means the first presidency. So if we were using today, that would be Dallin Oaks, Henry Eyring and D. Todd Christofferson. And then the Presiding Bishop, which bishopric, which again would be that group of three men, that's Christopher Waddell as the Presiding Bishop and then his two counselors

Nemo [01:08:07] at the time, I believe it was Corsay, Waddell and Davis, I think was the third member at the time that

Kolby Reddish [01:08:16] it was leaked in 2019.

Nemo [01:08:19] Yeah, yeah. The other thing I'll say to your point, Kolby, to build on that as to why it's so important that we remember this and we define terms, and this is why legal documents do define terms like this is because senior leadership of the church in day to day language could mean anyone from a 70 up. And it would be very easy if you're an apologist or someone trying to minimize this issue, to then try and blame the middle management class of the church, to try and blame the 70s to try to say they're the senior leadership that did this. No, it's very clearly defined that the first Presidency and the Presiding Bishopric are what is meant here by senior leadership of the church.

Julia [01:08:53] So those six men from. From that senior leadership of the church Is. Yeah.

Kolby Reddish [01:08:58] Yep. And it is because. It is because of the involvement of the senior leadership of the church. I know we'll get to the resolution of the order at the end, but it is because of that that the church itself was fined $1 million of the total $5 million fine. It wasn Peak that was fined. It was the church that was fined because the senior leadership of the church was directly responsible for and approving all of the decisions that were made that violated federal securities law for two decades.

Julia [01:09:30] And we can talk about that, too, because I have questions about why. Why a specific amount to one and the other and not what. Yeah, I just have questions about that.

Enzyme Peak Advisors: A charitable organization with one client

Nemo [01:09:37] But let's define who Enzyme Peak Advisors are here.

Julia [01:09:40] Perfect.

Nemo [01:09:41] Enzyme Peak Advisors Incorporated is a Utah nonprofit corporation headquartered in Salt Lake City, Utah. Enzyme Peak is responsible for investing and managing the reserves of the church. Ensign Peak is governed by a board of trustees consisting of members of the church's presiding bishopric and the managing director of Ensign Peak. So their board of trustees is the presiding bishopric and the managing director, which is Clark.

Julia [01:10:05] Right. And then Waddell with his counselors. Is that okay?

Kolby Reddish [01:10:09] Correct.

Nemo [01:10:10] Enzyme Peak's managing director is appointed by the church's first presidency and reports to the senior leadership of the church. So he reports to the first presidency and the presiding bishopric. Enzyme Peak is exempt from registration as an investment advisor with the Commission under Section 203 of the Investment Advisors act of 1940, which exempts investment advisors that are charitable organizations that also solely advise other charitable organizations.

Julia [01:10:37] Wait, can you. Kolby, can you explain that last sentence?

Kolby Reddish [01:10:41] Yeah. So the idea here is, because it may surprise people, like, why is Enzyme Peak a nonprofit corporation if it's making money in the market? Because normally when people think about nonprofits, there's a lot of confusion over what a nonprofit is. What it's saying is that they're exempt from being treated as a normal investment advisor under securities and Exchange Commission law and rules, because the only client basically, that they have that they advise is also another tax exemption charitable organization. So that's the reason is because their only client is the church, basically, or their largest, because they only advise other organizations that are exempt from these requirements to pay to pay tax, like we've talked about, they also basically are fall within the scope of that.

Julia [01:11:28] So they are exempt from registration as an investment advisor because it's just the one client, an exempt investment.

Nemo [01:11:35] They don't need to be on a register of available or investment advisors because they only deal within their own little.

Julia [01:11:43] Okay, that makes sense.

Nemo [01:11:44] Yeah.

Julia [01:11:45] Okay.

Nemo [01:11:45] Okay. Next Slide.

Julia [01:11:46] Okay, so this is the second part. Oh, I just wanted to point out that again the appointed. So that advisor, Roger Clark, I guess, and then the first presidency, they're appointed by church first presidency and reports to the senior leadership of the church. And you already discussed that, but I just wanted to really make that clear. Okay. So one thing that I want to talk about with Enzyme Peak is the charity is if they give to charity. And David Nielsen. So he was on this 60 minute episode and so I'll give a little background about him. He was a former Wall street money manager and he was a devout member of the Church of Jesus Christ Latter Day Saints who made headlines in 2019 by filing an IRS whistleblower complaint against the church. He publicly detailed his allegations in 2023 on CBS News, shedding light on a massive investment portfolio. He worked as a senior portfolio manager at NSIG Peak Advisors. He served from September 2010 to September 2019. And then he. In the.

David Nielsen: He Deserves Credit for His Whistleblower

Nemo [01:12:48] He is the reason we know about any of this. And I think he deserves credit there for that. And I know that he's. I can't remember the details of it because it's not the sort of thing I like to try and remember, but I know that one ways that people have tried to attack him and his whistleblowing have been to just go after him personally in ad hominem ways. And he's received a lot of, a lot of flack for doing this. So yeah, he deserves credit.

Julia [01:13:14] Yeah.

Kolby Reddish [01:13:15] Yeah. It's also worth noting while we're talking about that, that his IRS whistle Corp. Blower complaint that was against the church that went to the irs basically saying, here's what I know from actually working for Enzyme Peak. I want you to take a look at this. He is not the one that released that publicly. And that's part of kind of like David's story to tell. But that was. So I guess it just gives me a lot more compassion and sympathy for David and a lot more recognition of the fact that he became basically a public figure, a huge public figure overnight against his consent. Like he's not the one that sent his IRS whistleblower complaint to the media. It was a family member of his that did that.

Nemo [01:13:54] He took it to the IRS because he wanted it dealt with, but he didn't want to make a public song and dance out of it.

Kolby Reddish [01:14:00] Right.

Julia [01:14:01] Okay. So also, I don't know if this is important to say, but I don't know a lot about this stuff. So can you explain like this, it's an IRS Whistleblower complaint and the sec, Like, I don't, like, I, I don't even know what question.

Kolby Reddish [01:14:14] So those, this goes back to what I was talking about there. Those are two different regulatory bodies. So the IRS regulates taxes and tax exempt status. The SEC deals with market participation and market investment. So different questions, but they're related because when we're talking about the one, we're kind of also talking about the other.

Julia [01:14:33] Okay.

Kolby Reddish [01:14:34] Or they relate to each other, but not directly.

Julia [01:14:37] Okay.

Nemo [01:14:37] So, so IRS Nielsen's complaint was that, that this is a charitable organization saving money that is not being spent in any charitable way. Instead, it's being spent in ways that seem like they're for profit ventures, I. E. Bailing out Beneficial Life and building City Creek Mall. So his complaint is that this money that's meant to be doing charitable good or is meant to be saved to one side to eventually do charitable good has only ever been used to do things which seem like they are for profit ventures. And that's against the, you know, that's against the status of this organization as a nonprofit. So that's a problem to him. So that's why he's going to the irs. Is that correct, Corby?

Kolby Reddish [01:15:19] Yes.

Julia [01:15:20] Okay. Okay. So I have some clips from the 60 minutes, and what we're going to do is, because I don't know if YouTube or Spotify will allow us to show these clips because they belong to 60 minutes. So what we're going to do is we're going to play the clip in hopes that things work out and if they need to get cut, we're going to read them right after that. So that's, that's why we're kind of covering it twice. But this clip is about, about this charity aspect of Ensign Peak. Okay. So he's saying here from the 60 Minutes, he says, I thought I was going to work for a charity and the funds were never used for that. Once the money went in, it didn't go out. And he, I don't think I have clips for this one. But he, he explains that there was twice where the word money did go out. And one was to, like you said, Nima, I think you just said this. It goes out to bail out Beneficial Life and to fund City Creek Mall. And those are the only things. And then they're getting money back from those, those entities.

Nemo [01:16:16] Yeah. So. And Beneficial Life was a church owned in insurance provider.

Julia [01:16:22] Right? Right. Yeah.

Nemo [01:16:23] That kind of went down during 2008.

Julia [01:16:26] Yeah. So the, so let me just kind of lay this out for A second. So tithing 7 billion. One of them gets tucked away, the other six gets spent on temple, you know, whatever the church needs to function. And then the Ensign peak advisors makes 7 billion a year.

Nemo [01:16:44] They will have made different amounts over the years.

Julia [01:16:45] Oh, that's. Yeah, you're right. Because it would have gone now would be.

Speaker D [01:16:49] Right.

Kolby Reddish [01:16:49] And it continues, to David's point here, it continues to compound. So that's one of the difficulties, right, is because money never goes out and you're going to be making money on that original investment principle. The fact that it just keeps adding to the principle basically means that the greater they're just going to. It's like the consequence of almost exponential interest. We're talking about a dragon's hoard of money that continues to generate so much money, it would almost be impossible for the Church to even spend this amount of money.

Nemo [01:17:24] It's compound interest. There's a great website that I always love to plug. It's called Mormon Billions. And if you go there, it's $1 million is one pixel and it shows you how big $100 million is on the screen. And then you swipe and it's like, here's how big a hundred billion dollars is. And you swipe and you swipe and you swipe. And occasionally there's like a block that's like Utah's public education fund for the year. And it's like a little block just inside this continuous swipe and swipe and swipe. People should go check it out. It's a really good way of visualizing just how large this sum of money is.

Does the Church Already Be Worth a Trillion Dollars?

Julia [01:17:55] Okay, so John has said on Mormon stories before is that within a 50 or so years, I don't know if he's given a time, but like the church will eventually become a trillion dollar church. I don't know if you guys can speak to that or like. Because if these are compounding.

Kolby Reddish [01:18:08] Well, it depends on how we're. It depends on how we're categorizing things. Because if we're looking at the Church's entire real estate portfolio, it's important to remember the money we're talking about here. The hundred of billions of dollars is literally the extra money that they're parking in the stock market to make more money. That's not even considering the entirety of the Church's real estate portfolio. All the temples, all of its other investments. Like you talked about when it bailed out beneficial life and when it put money into City Creek Mall, those were investments to continue to make money on those Projects. So

Nemo [01:18:42] Creek.

Kolby Reddish [01:18:43] Yeah. It's entirely possible that the church is already worth a trillion dollars, depending on how we look at.

Julia [01:18:50] So you're saying, like. So hang on, let me. I don't think I've even processed this because, like, the church has Ensign Peak Advisors, which is making a lot of money back. It has Beneficial Life, which is making money. If I'm not mistaken. It has the City Creek Mall. It's making money. The church is the number one land

Nemo [01:19:03] owner in that ranch in Florida is making money.

Julia [01:19:07] Yes.

Nemo [01:19:07] So, like you have all of these Washington making money. The condos they own in Miami making money. The office block they own in London making money. The Amazon warehouse they own in Wembley making money. Yeah.

Julia [01:19:19] So you're saying that if you add all that together, Kolby, is what you're saying, the church could already have that. Have.

Kolby Reddish [01:19:26] I'm saying it's possible. No one knows. The reality is. No one knows because unlike the uk, which has functional, you know, requirements that someone actually report their assets if they're going to be engaged in charities and that they're going to have a tax exemption status, we don't do that here. The First Amendment, for whatever reason, has been interpreted, and I don't even want to say the First Amendment has been interpreted. First Amendment principles have been interpreted, that we don't ask those questions about religious organizations here in the United States. So the reality is, I'm not saying we know that it's worth over a trillion. The reality is we have no idea how much it's worth, because we don't. We would have to add up all of its real estate assets, which I know there have been attempts to do that. I know that that was one of the last projects that the team that worked at Mormon Leaks was looking at is like trying to put together all of the Church's real estate assets. But the reality is we just don't know. When we're talking about Enzyme Peak. Here's the real important thing. We're talking about hundreds of billions of dollars that are literally just money that exists to make more money. This is like if you had. If you had, like if we're talking about your personal finances, right. You have an extra thousand dollars for the year and you decide to put it in like a certificate of deposit or you decide to buy some stocks with it. It's that extra money that you're using to invest. This is purely investment money. And it's like Nemo said, basically the GDP of a small country.

Nemo [01:20:49] Yeah. So this is the one vaguely monitorable part of the Church's wealth. And to John's point, that through the nature of compounding interest, to sound like a financial advisor for the moment, you can't guarantee returns on the stock market. You know, returns can go down as well as up, but it is on a fund of that size that is well diversified, it is expected that you'll make in the region of 6 to 7% a year. The Church has been seeing those kinds of returns. And so by the nature of compounding interest, that percentage is every year of a slightly bigger pot. Plus they're putting a billion dollars away into it each year. So yeah, it will just numbers on the screen will continue to grow and we could go down a massive rabbit hole of what money actually is and isn't. Because at this point it's so complex, its tangibility is just so far removed from people's day to day life sometimes that these are just numbers on a screen. But the Church's wealth in these terms is going to grow exponentially.

Kolby Reddish [01:21:51] It's also worth noting, you said this is one of the vaguely monarch ways that we can look at the Church's wealth. It's worth noting. Vaguely monitorable against their best efforts. That's the entire point of this order. And the way we started with the quotes from Roger Clark is against their best efforts because we're going to read

Nemo [01:22:12] quotes of them distinctly saying, let's take better efforts to hide this from the street and the investing public. The street meaning Wall Street?

Julia [01:22:22] Yeah. Okay, so there's an article released or a press release from the SEC Commission, the securities and Exchange Commission. And this was released the same day? Yeah, the same day, February 21, 2023. It says SEC charges the church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints and its investment management company for disclosure failure and misstated filings. And so this is a section just from this article. Nemo, do you want to read through this one?

SEC Charges The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints and Its

Nemo [01:22:51] The SEC's order finds that from 1997 through 2019, Enzyme Peak failed to file Forms 13F, the forms on which investment managers are required to disclose the value of certain securities they manage. According to the order, the Church was concerned that disclosure of its portfolio, which by 2018 grew to approximately 32 billion, would lead to negative consequences to obscure the amount of the Church's portfolio. And with the Church's knowledge and approval, Ensign Peak created 13 Shell LLCs, ostensibly with locations throughout the US and filed Forms 13F in the names of these LLCs rather than in Enzyme Peak's name. The order finds that Enzyme Peak maintained investment discretion over all relevant securities, that it controlled the shell companies and that it directed nominee business managers in inverted commas, most of whom were employed by the church, to sign the commission filings. The Shell LLC's forms, 13F misstated, among other things, that the LLC had sole investment and voting discretion over the securities. In reality, the SEC's order finds enzyme Peak retain control over all investment and voting decisions. So can I just do a brief sum up there and then Kolby, jump in with extra detail?

Julia [01:24:10] Yes.

Nemo [01:24:11] My understanding of this situation is that it is perfectly leg for the church to say, right, we're going to create some limited liability companies, we're going to give them some of our money and they can have discretion over how it is used and they can file their own 13 Fs because it will be an amount over 100 million.

Julia [01:24:27] Is that still, is that still? Hang on. Can you help me define, can you define a shell company?

Nemo [01:24:32] Well, this is what I'm going to get to. Okay, so that isn't a shell company. That's just another company that's just dispersing your funds out into smaller companies for whatever reason. You may wish to do that, you may wish to set giving people control, but you give them control over that money and they have to file the forms. What Enzyme Peak was doing was retaining that money in practice, because on paper it was with these companies, but in practice they retained discretion over how the securities were invested and those sorts of decision making responsibilities. These companies only exist on paper, therefore they are a shell company. In practice, they are not operating as they are said to be, as they are representing themselves too.

Julia [01:25:17] So that's when you get into the not legal.

Nemo [01:25:19] That's why you get in trouble because you are representing to the world that you have these companies that have management over this money. They don't actually have management of this money. So to go back to what Kolby was saying, the reason 13Fs exist is so that people know who is in control of these large sums of money. And if you are misrepresenting who actually has control over that money, then you're not filing them properly and that's bad. Kolby, please, please plug in any holes I've missed there.

Kolby Reddish [01:25:46] No, that's all basically exactly the way I would have put it. The thing we need to keep in mind is the purpose. Again, like Nemo said, the purpose of these requirements is public disclosure. It's that we need the investing public to have information about people have this amount of assets. And so to your question, Julia, about like, where did it become illegal with regard to the shell companies, creating the shell companies themselves is not illegal. What is illegal is creating the shell companies. The shell companies are nothing but paper companies because they are controlled entirely by the Church. So the important part here, or I'm sorry, controlled by the Church and by Enzyme Peak, the important part here is the order finds that Enzyme Peak maintained investment discretion over all relevant securities, that it controlled the shell companies, and that it directed the nominee business managers to sign the commission filings. The reason that matters is again, that $100 million disclosure requirement. What the Church was trying to do was carve up its assets that it's using to invest to get underneath that threshold and say, these, these people are like, here's our report. When in reality, it was just. It was just a game. It was just a paper game. All of the money was being controlled by the same entity. And the reason that that matters is, again, because that's a large enough market participant that the public had a right to know that all of these 13 Fs, so they were still disclosing according to what they needed to in the 13F, except for, as it says, there were also misstatements in there. The problem is that it wasn't accurately reflecting reality and that the Church, through Enzyme Peak, was controlling all of the decisions. And the public needs to know that one market participant has that much control rather than that 13 independent market participants have that same level of control over the entire market. Does that make sense? Julia?

Julia [01:27:41] So, kind of so, so a shell company is not inherently illegal. But when you are claiming things that are not true, these people don't have. They, they. Some of these people, they're. I guess the church is some ways forging their signatures. They're not. These, these people who are in charge of these LLCs have no idea what's going on. Like, they have no control over any real thing. It's just on paper. So, like, that's where. That's when you're misrepresenting things. That's the illegal part. But the shell company itself, those aren't necessarily.

Nemo [01:28:09] Yeah, if you use the phrase the shell company itself, the thing that makes it a shell company is the fact that it isn't a legitimate company that actually has control. It's a shell company. It's a shell of a company. So these LLCs are not in and of themselves illegal. Them acting in the way that they are is the illegal part.

Kolby Reddish [01:28:29] Think about it like this. When you create an LLC or any other type of entity, there are certain forms that you need to respect. To create that entity and then to get certain benefits. If you don't comply with those forms, you don't get the benefit of the entity that you've actually formed. You don't get the protection if you don't follow the rules. That's the way to think about it. The Church here didn't follow. They created the companies, but they didn't follow the rules for those companies. And so you don't get the protection of creating those companies if you don't follow the rules that tie to the creation of those companies.

The SEC order on Ensign Peak

Julia [01:29:03] Okay.

Nemo [01:29:04] And the thing we'll get through here is how this benefits the Church and we'll get to kind of how this is all discovered. But this was done so that these companies with their ungoogleable business manager names and all this sort of stuff, these companies aren't easily connected back to the Church. So the Church does not then look like it has its money split out amongst 13 companies. It looks like a small entity in Utah, and then there's 13 other random entities that people don't know are also the Church's money that are out there. And so it makes the Church look smaller and keeps it below the threshold where it has to file by putting its money in other places that other people don't know where it is. But it never actually put the money there in practice.

Julia [01:29:49] Right, yeah.

Kolby Reddish [01:29:49] I'll just correct the one thing which you got from me just a second ago, Nemo, is they were actually reporting it. The issue is. So it wasn't necessarily about the reporting threshold. I misstated that earlier. It's about reflecting who's the actual decision maker. There's a huge difference in market information with 13 different independent companies having all of the church's money versus one in reality company having that much money. That gives you a lot more ability to affect the market. And so them carving it up the way they did was about hiding who's the real decision maker. Which is precisely what 13F disclosures and the SEC exist to protect in the first place.

Nemo [01:30:30] But what it also does because people couldn't link those companies to the Church is it makes the Church look much smaller. It doesn't make it look like a dispersed entity. It makes it look like a single very small entity. Because it wasn't until people looked at the IP addresses of where these websites were registered and people started getting investigative about these companies that they all seem to link back to a URL, sorry, that was connected to the church that they started to connect that these 13 companies were actually all kind of connected back to Enzyme Peak.

Julia [01:31:02] I also want to point out that it says the SEC order finds that from 1997, which is when it was created, through 2019, Ensign Peak failed to file Forms 13F. So from the very beginning. So it must have exceeded. Because in order to file a 13F, you have to make that mistake.

Nemo [01:31:19] We've got more of this. Right. So if we go through some of the next slides, I think some of this will become clear.

Julia [01:31:24] Yeah. Okay. So this is another part of the order. Kolby, do you want to read through this one?

The Order to Prevent Disclosure of the Securities portfolio managed by Enzyme

Kolby Reddish [01:31:31] Yep. This is from paragraph 8 of the Order to prevent disclosure. Or. I'm sorry, do you want me to start at seven?

Julia [01:31:37] Yeah, actually, go ahead, because it's.

Kolby Reddish [01:31:39] I'm going to start at 7. By at least 1998, senior management at Enzyme Peak was aware of Enzyme Peak's requirement to file Forms 13F and communicated this requirement to senior leadership of the church. This is very important. Enzyme Peak as an entity. The senior managers there say we are required to file Forms 13F. And they bring this to the senior leadership of the church, which, again, is the first Presidency and the Presiding Bishopric. So we have those six senior leaders of the church that were aware. Enzyme Peak itself goes to them and says we need to file these forms. That's our requirement under the Law, paragraph 8. To prevent disclosure of the securities portfolio managed by Enzyme Peak. The church approved Enzyme Peak's plan. And again, remember, who makes the decision for Enzyme Peak? It was the Presiding Bishopric and the manager of Enzyme Peak, all of which were appointed by or were themselves senior leadership of the church. So you can see we're really talking about the same six or seven decision makers. The manager of Enzyme Peak, who was always at the times that it was created. And then until this disclosure or until this order, was Roger Clark and those six senior leaders of the church. Okay. To prevent disclosure of the securities portfolio managed by Enzyme Peak, the church approved Enzyme Peak's plan of using other entities instead of Enzyme Peak to file Forms 13F. So again, this is that disbursement that it was talking about in the press release that you were asking about. Julia. Instead of Enzyme Peak filing the forms itself, it goes to create these 13 shell companies that we'll talk about more detail as we go throughout this. This line is very important. The church was concerned that disclosure of the assets in the name of Enzyme Peak, a known church affiliate, would lead to negative consequences in light of the size of the church's portfolio. Ensign Peak did not have authority to implement this approach without the approval of the church's first presidency.

The Mormon Church's Attempt to Hide Money

Julia [01:33:37] I have a question because, like, I didn't. I don't think I even really knew what Ensign Peak was until this was all happening. If Enzyme Peak had just simply, you know, filed all that, all the forms, and just owned that they had that much money, would that have led to negative consequences? Would people even have been aware? I guess some people would have looked. Could have looked into it. I don't think I would have been aware or I don't think I would have cared. Because of course, the church needs a lot of money because they need it for the rainy day or, you know, they need it for the last days or whatever they need it for. I don't know that it would have led me to negative consequences and not wanting to pay tithing. I just was curious.

Nemo [01:34:15] I think the story would have been smaller. I think someone would have spotted at some point that they're at 32 billion or 38 billion or more, and they would have gone home. Hold up a second. The Mormon church is getting very wealthy. What's going on here? But I don't think that it would have been as big a story as this.

Julia [01:34:32] I often think the church is the church trying to hide things makes things worse in the long run than if they had just almost like, that's what

Nemo [01:34:40] we teach children, that when you try to hide what you do wrong, ultimately it comes out worse. Sorry.

Julia [01:34:49] Well, like, so much for me, like, learning about church history, the rock in the hat, like, just things like that where I'm like, why didn't you just tell me that? Yeah, yeah, like the first vision or just like, I don't know. I just want. I question the. The churches. Oh, this will lead to negative consequences. When I feel like this is, to me, this feels worse.

Kolby Reddish [01:35:09] I completely agree. Like, Roger Clark told us the same exact thing. Right. This is why they're able to recognize and make such clear statements in this order about the church's intention in doing this is because several years before that, Roger Clark had done the SEC a huge favor with basically saying this exact same thing, just in less legalistic language. I agree with you, Julia. If the church had just been open and transparent about this, number one, they wouldn't have violated the law. And number two, I really don't think any members would have thought a thing about it. Like, maybe a few people here and there would have written stories about it. But if you're just open and transparent about what you're doing, which is, by the way, the ethics and morals the church inculcated in me for the time I was a little kid. I don't think it would have been an issue at all. People would have looked at it and we've actually seen people do this. After the disclosure of enzyme peak in 2019, talk about how the sign of the. I'm sorry, it's a sign of the church's success and its beneficence, its blessed state by God that it grows its financial portfolio in such a way. It could have been a faith affirming message if they had just been honest. But instead they wanted to hide the size of their asset portfolio.

Nemo [01:36:22] It would still be talked about. It just. I don't think it would have had

Julia [01:36:25] like wow, that church has a lot of money. Rather than wow, the church has hidden.

Kolby Reddish [01:36:29] It's a lot of money.

Julia [01:36:31] Yeah, yeah. Okay. So moving forward, this is, this is. Do you call them paragraphs or sections 11.

Kolby Reddish [01:36:38] Yeah, I'll read this one too.

Julia [01:36:39] Okay, perfect.

Kolby Reddish [01:36:40] On March 15, 2005, the church became aware of that the public might link this first LLC to the church because the person signing the Forms 13F was listed in a public directory as a church employee. To address this issue, on March 21, 2025, the senior leadership of the church approved a new reporting entity to be created with quote, better care being taken to ensure that neither the street nor the media could connect the new entity to Enzyme Peak.

Nemo [01:37:09] Now that was said by one of six men that quote was said by either a member of the first presidency or a member of the Presiding Bishopric. We don't know who, but they said the words better care being taken to ensure that neither the street nor the media could connect the new entity to Ensign Peak.

Julia [01:37:27] Like hold up. People could look at this and see that it's connected to the church. So a week later they change it.

Nemo [01:37:35] That this is another one that then is better able to be new reporting entity.

Julia [01:37:41] Yeah, that. That's so specifically trying to keep this a secret. Like. Anyway, I don't know if you have more to say on that.

Kolby Reddish [01:37:50] Nope, that's exactly the point. That's how they are able to make such strong statements about the reason the church did this, because they put all of this in writing. That quote obviously comes from some document that the SEC investigated or found in the course of their investigation. I mean, and so just knowing what's that?

Nemo [01:38:12] Probably some email or internal memo.

Kolby Reddish [01:38:14] Yeah, a memo or an email or something. I think my point is I can't even, not even tell you two how much I would love to see what's in that investigative file. Because I'm sure there's other things that ended up not making it into this order that would have been so interesting to dig into. And when they say, because remember this order is the result of negotiation, this was an agreed to settlement with the church and the sec. Right. When they say at the back end, we consider this matter closed, it's because they had agreed to this order and the wording of this order. So the church had to agree to this because it's right there in writing that their intent was to hide things.

Nemo [01:38:54] The point, the point that's really important there is whenever anyone tries to push back against this order and say that, well, this is just the SEC's opinion. No, this is what the church is admitting to. They're not admitting legal liability for it because it's a settlement, but they are admitting that these are the facts of what happened.

Kolby Reddish [01:39:14] Right, exactly.

Julia [01:39:15] That's very good point. Okay, so here, hang on, just question. When it says street, my. My brain first was like, oh, like the, like the public.

Kolby Reddish [01:39:22] But.

Julia [01:39:22] But it's the Wall Street.

Kolby Reddish [01:39:24] It's Wall Street.

Julia [01:39:24] Wall Street. Okay, okay, okay. So moving forward. Nima, do you want to read this section?

Enzyme Peak LLC: Cloning the Second LLC

Nemo [01:39:29] Several Years later, in 2011, Enzyme Peak became concerned that its portfolio had become so large that the Form 13F filings it made using the name of the second LLC might attract unwanted attention. And so, and so the man elected Roger Clark, elected by senior leadership of the church, sought the church's approval to sought approval from the Presiding bishopric in the First Presidency to form additional LLCs to file Forms 13F. On May 19, 2011, the church's senior leadership approved Enzyme Peak's recommendation to clone the second LLC to create new form 13F filers. After obtaining church approval, Enzyme Peak formed new clone LLCs for the purpose of filing Form 13F. Five new entities were formed and given Delaware addresses, although none of conducted business in Delaware. Okay, so they're up to seven clone LLCs now.

Julia [01:40:24] So the first LLC was created 2005. Yeah, it exceeds. It exceeds the.

Nemo [01:40:30] Sorry, the first one's created in 1998, then they create a second one in 2005 because they were aware that the public might link the first one from 1998 because the guy they've got signing the forms is listed as a church employee publicly.

Speaker D [01:40:42] Right.

Julia [01:40:42] Okay. Okay, so first one in 98. Yeah, which is. Which is also interesting because that means that by. Because it was created in 97. So that means really quickly they exceeded that.

Kolby Reddish [01:40:51] The amount reporting year, basically.

Julia [01:40:55] Yeah, yeah.

Nemo [01:40:56] By at least 98. They'd got to this point.

Julia [01:40:59] Okay, so 98, 2005, 2011 and then immediately. It doesn't really list timeline, but it says five new entities were formed. So were they just aware this is just going to keep happening? So let's just go ahead and make five more shell companies. So there's now seven of these in Delaware.

Nemo [01:41:17] Seven of these. There's five in Delaware. So here's. Okay, so here is some of. This is the full amount of them that eventually ended up being created.

Julia [01:41:25] Yes. So I actually, I'm interested. I'm just going to read them all out. These are. These are all. So there's 13 that were listed. Kolby, can you explain that? So there. So I thought is it 13 that are creator 12? I don't. Sometimes I hear different numbers.

Kolby Reddish [01:41:39] There's 13. They probably. It's because they say they're 12 clone LLCs, meaning like they created the first

Julia [01:41:46] one and then they original used copy, paste, copy, whatever.

Kolby Reddish [01:41:49] Yeah. So then they use that model to duplicate it. I think it's also fun that there's one for each of the tribes of Israel. Can we just acknowledge how fun that is? Do you want me to read this list?

Julia [01:41:59] Yes. Also, can you explain what does it mean to clone something like that?

Kolby Reddish [01:42:03] Like, does it just that they match the same like, like, so they're all

Julia [01:42:07] in Delaware or like. But they have different owners.

Nemo [01:42:09] Copy the structure of the. The business. So you details.

Kolby Reddish [01:42:14] It means what it says right there. Go back a paragraph or a page

Julia [01:42:20] 5. New engine.

Kolby Reddish [01:42:20] On May 19, 2011, the Church of Senior Leadership approved Ensign Peaks recommendation to clone the second LLC to create new Form 13F filers. It just means we're going to use the same basic structure that we used for the last one to clone this new one. That's all I need.

Julia [01:42:35] Okay, so you have the. Because it says clone the second one. So this one or I don't know what order these are in exactly, but. Okay, so yeah, if you. If you'll read these out.

Kolby Reddish [01:42:43] Yep. So Ashmore Wealth Management, llc, Argyll Research llc, Clifton Park Capital Management, llc, Cortland Advisors, llc, Elk for Elk Fork Partners, llc, Flinton Capital Management, llc Glen Harbor Capital Management, llc, Green Valley Investors, llc, Meadow Creek Investment Management, llc Newberg Advisors, llc, Riverhead Capital Management, llc, Tiverton Asset Management, LLC and Tires Asset Management llc.

Nemo [01:43:16] Yeah, and I would love to know how they came up with the names for those. What sort of inside jokes or whatever they relate to amongst whoever was making

Julia [01:43:26] or names that were involved.

Speaker D [01:43:29] Yeah.

Julia [01:43:29] Okay, so this next section, hunting place

Nemo [01:43:31] is Elk Fork or something?

Julia [01:43:33] Yeah, yeah, yeah. Newburgh. Yeah. Anyway, yeah, Argyle. Okay, so this is paragraph 22. It says Ensign Peak was responsible for designating the Clone LLC's business managers, many of whom were church employees. That's. Many of whom. That's were some of them not. That's interesting. Oh, I guess employees. But they could be members anyway, so I don't know. Anyway, business managers were selected because they had common names and a limited presence on social media and were therefore less likely to be publicly connected to Ensign Peak or the church. Ensign Peak provided the business managers very limited information about the clone LLCs or why they were created.

Church Business Managers in the Ensign Peak Scheme

Kolby Reddish [01:44:14] So which is crazy. Like, think about what that means. These people are controlling an overall portfolio together of over 100 million, or I'm sorry, $100 billion. Because as business managers they are. When they're filing those 13 Fs they are representing that we are the ones who actually have the, the final authority to decide how to invest these funds that we're reporting to you. Sec, we recognize that that was a lie, that they did not have final investment authority, which is what the violation is. Because if you have, if you have a bunch of LLC like this that are shell companies, that's not necessarily a problem if you report the 13F at the actual decision maker level. So the issue is that Enzyme Peak as the ultimate decision maker should have been the one reporting the 13F recognizing that they had actual decision making authority over all of these clone LLCs. Instead, they're reporting all in the clone LLC's name. And these business managers basically violated federal securities law because they're just doing what the church has asked them, as the church is their actual full time employer. So I guarantee all of these people were church members. Julia. But it says church employees. Yeah, when it says church employees it means like full time church employees probably working in completely other departments since it tells us they're looking for people who had common names and limited presences on social media that could not be publicly connected to Ensign Peak or the church. The really sad thing for me to think about, and again, I'm going to just speculate here, these are probably like lower level staff members who work at the church because if they're people who can't be associated publicly or connected publicly to working with Ensign Peak or the church, we're not talking about high level employees at the church, we're talking about low level employees at the church.

Julia [01:46:08] So there are. Hang on, let me see if I understand. So there's thinking about it in that way you have people who. Lower level employees who are putting their names to this, knowing that they don't. Knowing that this is a lie or that they don't have control.

Kolby Reddish [01:46:20] Says that they're providing limited information. They were taken advantage of by the church.

Nemo [01:46:27] Julia, if you. I think if you get to the next slide.

Julia [01:46:29] Okay. Oh, this is. What is this one you're talking about?

Nemo [01:46:33] Because this is just through that for a second.

Julia [01:46:35] Jump through this?

Nemo [01:46:36] Yeah. Oh, no. Okay, so go back. We won't get to it just yet, but we will come to a slide where we talk about the reactions that some of these people had when they found out what was actually.

Kolby Reddish [01:46:43] Okay.

Julia [01:46:44] Yes, yes. This is just wild to me. So, like, hang on, so the church is taking advantage of these employees or. But also what struck me is that, like, the church is pulling in just random members of the church or certain. Maybe not random, but like, not employees.

Kolby Reddish [01:46:58] Remember that there's two different entities involved. There's Ensign Peak and there's the church. So it's possible that the non church employee business managers worked for Ensign Peak or had a relationship.

Julia [01:47:09] In my head, I think Ensign Peak as being the church, but you're right, I guess. And church employees. And then these other ones could be Ensign Peak employees.

Kolby Reddish [01:47:16] So just to come to. To bring this discussion to a close, maybe think about it this way. You're like a secretary that works at the church office building, and you're approached one day and given no information about exactly why or very limited information. Information, I guess, if we want to be technical and use the term. You're asked to just sign some forms. You find out down the road that those forms you were signing made it so that you're violating federal securities law. Like, the result of this is these church employees. Because the church wanted to hide the size of its asset portfolio from the investing public. Hide it from. You decided to put these employees in this crazy position of saying that they were making investment decisions to the tune of $100 billion that they weren't making at all. All of it was a lie.

Julia [01:48:06] That would make me feel horrible if I found out that I was taken advantage of in that way. Like, that's. So this is a big. The sec. I just feel like that's a big deal to keep.

Nemo [01:48:19] And like, Cole, if you move on to the next slide, as we say this. Kolby's used to dealing with the law, right. I've become a bit more hard hearted with these sorts of things. If you're not used to these things, imagine finding out that the SEC probably An entity you're probably not familiar with and probably quite scared of the idea of sort of crossing and getting stuff wrong with. Because you're not a multi billion dollar corporation that can just pay lawyers to fight your battles. Like you as an individual, if you hear that you've violated federal securities law and you become worried that the SEC is going to come down on you, how terrifying that would be.

Julia [01:48:51] Yeah.

Nemo [01:48:52] For an ordinary person who doesn't deal with this sort of stuff and who doesn't have Curtin McConkey to just fight

Kolby Reddish [01:48:57] their battles and whose legitimate feeling is just like, I was just handed some forms and I signed some forms.

Nemo [01:49:04] I did what my boss asked me.

Kolby Reddish [01:49:05] I trusted my church and my employer and what they asked me to do.

Nemo [01:49:09] Yeah. I work for my church. They wouldn't possibly ask me to do something that violates federal securities law. That was not even crossing your mind. Yeah.

Kolby Reddish [01:49:18] This is just a small, like a side plug. But a couple of years ago I did an episode with Rebecca, Rebecca Biblioteca on Mormonish called, I think it was called Liability for the Lord. But we're so used to these types of situations in the church, like even a calling as a bishop transporting other people's children. People very often don't think about like what liability they're taking on in being involved in the church or doing callings in the church because we're just raised to do it and we don't think about it from the perspective of like, wait, if I'm transporting kids in my car and we get in an accident and I get sued, is the church really going to have my back? In a lot of circumstances, people have found out the answer is no. You will be completely on your own.

Julia [01:50:03] Yeah.

Nemo [01:50:04] What we found in getting the safeguarding changes done in the UK was that one of the things that really got the conversation going was informing bishops that they were legally responsible. If someone who was known to have committed offenses towards children in the past was allowed to work with children again, they would be the ones that were responsible because the church was putting them in the position of the. The individual responsible for safeguarding at that level.

13 Individuals Found Involved in the Church Leaks

Julia [01:50:28] I wish I was reflected everywhere. That's.

Nemo [01:50:31] So that's one of the reasons why they went. Well, hang on then. Can we not start background checking people, please, so we don't get in this situation?

Julia [01:50:36] Yeah, yeah. Anyway, so it's interesting, I just wanted to ask because it's interesting because I feel like this sort of feels like a conspiracy. I'm. This isn't what it is exactly. But you have these 13 individuals who, who have put their names to these. These entities. And, like, nobody has come out to talk about that, to, like, hey, the church had me sign these things. I. I'm assuming these people are all still members of the church, that they're all still faithful. I think it would be interesting to know if that's because you have David Nielsen, who didn't feel this, didn't sit right with him. Like, like, for example, here, this is a. This is an example of one of these LLCs. This is Ashmore Wealth Management, and it's giving you the address, the phone number, things like that, and it says the owner, I guess the person who's reporting on this map is Nathan Brown. And it has a phone number listed. And I know that the phone number, we'll talk about that, too, but, like, is Nathan Brown. I'm just curious about these individuals who are. Who are part of this. I just. That's just.

Kolby Reddish [01:51:37] Well, if any of those individuals feel burned by their interaction with the church over this, I would love to talk to one of them.

Julia [01:51:44] Yes.

Kolby Reddish [01:51:45] So please reach out.

Julia [01:51:46] Yeah, that's kind of what I'm getting at to, you know, where to find us, their stories. Yeah.

Nemo [01:51:50] Come and. Come and chat.

Kolby Reddish [01:51:52] Put up the rando signal and I will show.

David Nielsen on the Church's Tax Exemption Status

Julia [01:51:56] Okay, so this is another segment from 60 Minutes. This is talking about the. This is Nielsen talking about the tax exempt status. Okay, so I'll read this. So from the 60 Minutes, David. Nielsen says these entities were to hide the assets from the members. The chief investment officer said that if they were to change and start reporting these securities in our own name. So under the name of Ensign Peak, it would bring undue attention to the firm, and that the attention would be potentially damaging. After this emergency meeting, David confronted the chief Investment officer. So I think this is Roger Clark. And they said, david, we are going to lose our tax exempt status. And so what? Because I was thinking the negative consequence would be that the members of the church wouldn't pay tithing. So can you explain more on this tax exempt status, Kolby?

Kolby Reddish [01:52:46] Well, I'm not going to say David's wrong, that he was told that, but that isn't what was actually at issue. As we know from Roger Clark's later statements, when David's whistleblower complaint was leaked, it really was about hiding the assets of the church so that people would continue to pay tithing.

Nemo [01:53:04] Okay, so it's not the case. It's not the case that were. Well, because right now the church hasn't. I guess my point is the church right now hasn't lost their tax exempt status and the public now know exactly how much money they have because they've started filing properly. So this is just an excuse that's being fed to David to try and quiet him down, tell him, oh, it could be damaging, as in, we're going to lose our tax exempt status and hope that makes him go, oh, well, we don't want that, so I guess let's keep it secret.

Kolby Reddish [01:53:32] Yeah. And they're, they're. I mean, to give credit there, there are some rough guidelines on when you can cross over and lose your tax exempt status as a religious or charitable organization if you're not doing enough. But I don't know, those have been enforced really strictly. And I definitely. I mean, when you think about all the connections that Mormonism has politically with both sides of the political aisle, the reality that the IRS is going to yank the church's tax exempt status in the United States, I think is essentially zero.

Nemo [01:54:05] Yeah.

Julia [01:54:06] Okay, so that's not. That wasn't really the concern. It was, it was tithing. Okay, so this, this is section 27 of the order. Kolby, do you want to read this? Read through this?

Clone LLCs Have Sole Investment discretion

Kolby Reddish [01:54:16] I DO. Each Form 13F filed in the name of a clone LLC misstated that the slc, or I'm sorry, that the LLC had sole investment discretion for the securities listed and there were no other managers for these securities, and that the clone LLC had sole voting discretion over these securities. So I'm going to pause there and explain why that's important. It's because, again, yeah, this is what we said before. It's about who has the ultimate discretion on how these funds are being spent. Because if the same person has the investment discretion over all of the money, it needs to be reported on that single 13F form, that should have been reported at the Enzyme Peak level, not at these clone LLC levels. That's the problem. Even though the IMAs, which I think is the Investment Management Agreements, stated that Enzyme Peak had delegated investment discretion, Enzyme Peak continued to manage the entire portfolio and at all times maintained investment and voting discretion over all the securities listed in the forms 13F. Which basically is another way of saying what I just said. The problem is that Ensign Peak had the ultimate final decision making authority while representing to the SEC and to the public. Actually, these 13 different companies have all the decision making.

Julia [01:55:33] Right.

Nemo [01:55:35] It's almost as simple as saying, I have banks, I have accounts with several different banks. It would be like me trying to say that those bank accounts will belong to different People when actually I have control over all of them. And they're all actually my money. Right? Yeah, they're in different places, but yeah, it's essentially that.

Ensign Peak Signatures on 13F

Julia [01:55:55] Okay, so this one, I find this one's probably the most interesting to me. This is the next section. This is 28NEMO. Will you read this one?

Nemo [01:56:04] Each form 13F was signed by the designated business manager. The signature page stated, quote, the institutional investment manager filing this report and the person by whom it is signed hereby represent that all information contained herein is true, correct and complete. Close quote.

Kolby Reddish [01:56:22] Do you know the word Nemo for when someone signs a legally operative document that's a lie like this?

Nemo [01:56:30] Is that perjury?

Kolby Reddish [01:56:32] It would be.

Nemo [01:56:33] Would be. Okay, cool. So. So. Cheeky bit of perjury. So, however, Ensign Peak provided the business managers with insufficient information about the clone LLCs or the securities assigned to them that would enable the business managers to make this representation. So they. They were insufficiently informed to be able to say that. That the. The person by whom is assigned that all information contained here and is true, correct and complete. They don't know that all the information is true, correct, and complete because they don't have that information.

Kolby Reddish [01:57:08] Right. So this comes back to when we were talking about the church employees that are selected as these business managers. When I say the church took advantage of these people, it's in part based upon this statement right here. They literally did not even give these people the information to correctly represent what they were representing to the federal government when they were signing these forms.

Nemo [01:57:30] In doing so, yeah, it would be the functional equivalent of giving them the last page of the document, telling them to sign it, and it hasn't earned the proceeding information.

Julia [01:57:38] But I think it's worse than that when you keep going.

Nemo [01:57:41] When Ensign Peak obtained the business manager signatures for the forms 13F, Ensyme Peak gave the business managers only the signature pages of the forms 13F and not the complete documents. So it is exactly what I just said. They only gave them that. In addition, the forms 13F were often filed with electronic signatures before Enzyme Peak actually obtained the business manager's handwritten signatures.

Julia [01:58:04] Isn't that worse? I feel like that just got worse. Like electronic.

Kolby Reddish [01:58:08] Well, I'll just tell you as a lawyer that if I. So you can. You can use an electronic signature if you have someone's authorization to do so. So that is actually not significant to me personally.

Julia [01:58:19] And. But they're giving them the authorization, I guess, to use their electronic signatures.

Nemo [01:58:24] I would imagine the bit of this that really sticks out to me is they're just giving them the signature page and go just sign that.

Julia [01:58:30] Yeah.

Nemo [01:58:31] And they don't have any of the rest of the document that it pertains to. So when they're signing to state that all information contained herein is true, correct and complete, none of that information is before them. None of that information is present. It's not there. They just have a signature page to sign.

Julia [01:58:50] I guess my thought was like the church for the missionaries, each mission call is signed by the prophet, but it's not really. I think that it's just like a stamp or like a pre saved. I don't really know how it works. Yeah, it's a machine. But I guess my thought was like if they have the signature saved, are they just plugging that in and not even telling the business managers? Because without

Nemo [01:59:15] it's saying they're giving the signature pages of the forms to the managers file.

Julia [01:59:21] And you said it's not unusual. Right. To for electronic signatures before you get the handwritten one.

Kolby Reddish [01:59:26] Yeah. The real issue with signatures, I'm going to assume when these people were asked to be business managers and I think it's a reasonable assumption when these people were asked to be the business managers. Again, we've already been told that they weren't explained the things they needed to actually make a knowing decision on this, but that they understood that their signatures would be used. The real issue with signature use is like if you're using someone's signature and you don't have the authorization to do so, that's when it's a real problem.

Julia [01:59:52] Okay, so you're saying they probably had an authorization. It's just like you said, Nemo is that they're just giving them that page like it says in here.

Kolby Reddish [02:00:00] They're not giving them the information to actually correctly represent that all the information contained in this report that I'm signing on the back page is true and correct. That is a huge, huge red flag.

Julia [02:00:11] Right? Yeah. Okay.

Nemo [02:00:13] But when is the church ever cared about informed consent? I guess that it's, it's institutionally, it's not a pattern.

Julia [02:00:19] Yeah.

Nemo [02:00:19] You want to take it to a broader institutional pattern. You get children to commit to a lifetime of engagement with the church and paying tithing based on limited information. Right.

Julia [02:00:26] You don't give to an 8 year old.

Nemo [02:00:28] You know, I can, I can hear what milk before meat being said about this. Like oh, these people don't need to know this information. Right. There is a, there is a sort of an institutional precedent for this concept of only Giving people information that they need to know. And they don't really need to know any of this stuff. They just need to sign the form.

Julia [02:00:50] That just feels.

Nemo [02:00:51] You can hear that excuse. Right?

Julia [02:00:53] It feels so trusting of these individuals to just believe the church and believe that this is okay. I just feel really bad for these individuals.

Nemo [02:01:02] They will believe that all the information is true and correct and complete, and they just need to sign it. They don't need to see that information. Because why would the church try and file information that isn't true, correct, complete? We're an honest organization. This is the Lord's true church. This is. I work for the only true and living church on the face of the earth. The church that is honest. That is all these things. Right. This is. So of course they're going to trust it.

The Ensign Peak Affidavit

Julia [02:01:28] Yeah.

Nemo [02:01:29] And they were taken about the job.

Julia [02:01:31] Yeah.

Kolby Reddish [02:01:32] I'll read these next two paragraphs. So paragraph 31. Throughout its history, at least once a year, Ensign Peaks, managing Director, who was Roger Clark, met with the senior leadership of the church, again, Presiding Bishopric and First Presidency, to discuss Ensign Peak's activities, including at times, this LLC structure. Unanimous approval from the senior leadership of the church was required before Ensign Peak could deviate from the LLC structure and file Forms 13F in Ensign Peak's own name.

Julia [02:02:02] And that's once a year.

Kolby Reddish [02:02:04] Once a year. Meaning that the senior leadership of the church. If you want to ask who is responsible for this whole scandal, it is Roger Clark and the senior leadership of the church being the entire First Presidency and the Presiding Bishopric. Paragraph 32. The Church and Ensign Peak continued to take the same approach to filing forms 13F through the clone LLCs. This is mind blowing to me. Despite two church audit department internal audits of Ensign peak, one in 2014 and one in 2017, that reviewed the LL structure in discussions with Ensign Peak senior management. Although the Church Auditing Department did not recommend specific changes to the LLC structure, the Church Auditing Department highlighted the risk that the SEC might disagree with the approach. What that means is there were two separate times that the Church Auditing Department says to Ensign Peak and the senior leaders of the church. Once in 2014, once in 2017. The SEC isn't going to buy this and it was not heeded. It also means that when the church auditor gets up every general conference and says, we're going to tell you that there's nothing wrong with the way we're doing the church's finances, we've reviewed everything and it complies that they lied. That they lied. I don't know another way to state it.

Nemo [02:03:27] Well, we have Mr. Jurgensen. I asked for this to be put in. This is him. And I asked for this specific year because this is his account of one of the years in which they had raised concerns. So this is for 2014, when they had gone to those seven people and said, the SEC isn't going to buy this. We are concerned. Here's what they got up and then told the membership of the church.

Kolby Reddish [02:03:55] To the First Presidency of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, Dear brethren, as directed by revelation in section 120 of the Doctrine and Covenants, the Council on the Disposition of the Tithes, composed of the First Presidency, the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles and the Presiding Bishopric, authorizes the expenditure of church funds. The church entities disperse funds in accordance with approved budgets, policies and procedures. The Church Auditing Department, which consists of credentialed professionals and is independent of all other church departments, has responsibility to perform audits for the purpose of providing reasonable assurance regarding contributions received, expenditures made, and safeguarding of church assets based upon audits performed. The Church Auditing Department is of the opinion that in all material respects, contributions received, expenditures made and assets of the Church for the year 2014 have been recorded and administered in accordance with approved church budgets, policies and accounting practices. The Church follows the practices taught to its members of living within a budget, avoiding debt and saving against the time of need. Respectfully submitted, Church Auditing Department. Kevin R. Jurgensen, Managing Director.

Nemo [02:05:15] Now, you say they lied. Kolby and I, I would agree they're being incredibly dishonest. They should have brought that forward. But all they say is that, yeah, we are. We are handling our assets in accordance with approved policies, church policies, budgets and accounting practices. We're doing these things exactly the way that we say we ought to do them. Don't worry, people. We're playing by the rules that we have set for ourselves and we're doing it very well. Do not worry. But I think he had a moral obligation to get up there and say, we have concerns about the way the Church is handling some of its savings. I think so.

Julia [02:05:55] Well, yeah.

Nemo [02:05:55] In order for that to be a mean. In order to provide reasonable reassurance. I don't feel reassured if he's not actually mentioning the problems.

Julia [02:06:04] Yeah.

Kolby Reddish [02:06:05] At bare minimum. So I can accept that they're not going to get up there and talk about difficulties in General Conference, but at bare minimum, there should have been some disclosure to the members after this SEC order was issued. I don't understand how you can feel good about yourself as a licensed professional, because that's what a auditor would be. If you like. I'm gonna be a little strong here. Where are these men's ethics? Like, where are their ethics? Like, they have professional ethics. Roger Clark had professional ethics. He literally taught ethics. If I believe so he. Like, he taught investing, which would have incorporated investing ethics. Where are they? Because I don't see them reflected with doing. No, as you said, Nemo, reasonable assurance of the members. Like, I truly believe this SEC order. Like, I could give people that Joseph Smith was a prophet, that the Book of Mormon is true scripture, that the church was actually restored by Joseph Smith. And this scandal alone is disqualifying to me of belief in the church.

Mixed Morality in the Church

Julia [02:07:15] Well, one of my thoughts was the. The Happiness Letter where he says some things that are wrong in one circumstance could be right in another. Or like Nephi killing Laban even though that's wrong to murder. And he's killing him for a book, by the way, which I think is ridiculous. But, like, is that how they're viewing this? Like, what's. I don't know. I don't.

Nemo [02:07:33] Killing him for a record. That could have been revealed to create the Book of Mormon just by revelation anyway. So it wasn't needed physically. We often talk about how. Wasn't it crazy that Mormon and Moroni lugged around the gold plates just for Joseph's. No. Not to use them. A man was killed for the, you know, the books of Moses, etc. As written on brass plates that are anachronistic. But we've done an episode on that. I think you've got a good point here. Corby's. Where are their ethics? I think to Julia's point, we see that someone like particularly D. Tod Christopherson will decry moral relativism. He will talk about it as a real big problem. And that moral relativism is not the way that we should approach life. And there are certain irrevocable laws. The church is incredibly relativistic with its morals in terms of what they will teach members and then how they will act themselves.

Julia [02:08:23] Yeah.

Kolby Reddish [02:08:24] That moral model that you're talking about, that's built into Nephi slaying Laban. And the Happiness Letter is what's known as divine command theory. Morality whatsoever, as it's put in the Happiness Letter. Right. Whatsoever God commands is right regardless of what it is. And it's dependent on circumstance. It's weird that there's actually mixed moral. There's mixed authority inside Mormonism itself. Like Nemo, you just talked about laws are irrevocably decreed in heaven. That's actual objective morality. If God himself is subject to those laws, which also the Book of Mormon recognizes. So the hilarious thing is those are two mutually exclusive models, and Mormon scripture requires you to believe in both of them, depending on the scripture that we're talking about. Regardless, I flag this to just say this. These acts that were taken were so dishonest by the entire institution, including the Church auditing department. Am I expecting them to flag this for the entire membership? Honestly, no. But I am expecting them to do their job and resolve the situation, not just look the other way. When they flagged this twice and said, we don't think the SEC is going to agree with this, they should have done more. And I think they would agree with me.

Nemo [02:09:33] With the benefit of hindsight today, that is fair. Maybe that's right. We couldn't expect them to get up and say something. But I. I just can't then take seriously what they say every time they get up there and try and say that it's all fine when I know that it wasn't fine. And they just got up there and said that anyway.

Kolby Reddish [02:09:55] And. And I would add, while I'm not necessarily expecting them to flag it in 2014 and 2017 while they're still having these ongoing internal communications, they absolutely should have said something. In the April 2023 conference, as a result of this SEC order, they paid $5 million. That's ultimately how the order is going to resolve and didn't say a thing about it to the membership of the church.

Nemo [02:10:20] Yeah, I remember sitting there waiting to see if we would hear anything from church auditing. And. And knowing that it was probably going to be exactly business as usual. And sure enough, it was. All right. Yeah.

Julia [02:10:30] Yeah.

The role of the LOC structure

Nemo [02:10:30] So the next slide. Julia.

Julia [02:10:32] Okay, so this is. I think this might be going back because I can't remember what the other numbers were. I think there were 38 in the late 30s. But anyway, this is the LOC structure that was made public. Nima, do you want to read 33?

Nemo [02:10:43] Yeah. Yeah. I think these are really important.

The Secret Life of the LDS Church

Julia [02:10:45] Okay.

Nemo [02:10:45] So in May 2018, a public website reported that various entities that appeared to have ties to the church had filed Forms 13F, revealing holdings of approximately 32 billion. The website referenced evidence indicating that these entities domain names were all registered to an entity tasked with overseeing and protecting the intellectual property of the church, and that each of the LLCs identified, identified, listed a business manager whose name matched that of a church employee. So essentially, someone went out and found out that, hey, there's these. There's these companies here filing 13 Fs that all have domain names that are registered to essentially, Intellectual Reserve Inc. Or someone like that, and that each of those LFDs also happens to have a business manager whose name matches a church employee. So we think maybe the church is doing something here. After the website reported this information, the. The filing goes on to say, or the order goes on to say, two business managers resigned their roles.

Kolby Reddish [02:11:44] Can I pause you for a second and say I'm almost positive this public website is Mormon leaks. That Mormon.

Julia [02:11:49] I was going to ask.

Kolby Reddish [02:11:50] Leak this information. Okay, okay. So with that context, go ahead. Sorry.

Julia [02:11:54] Yeah.

Nemo [02:11:54] So after the website reported this information, two business managers resigned their roles, voicing concerns about what they had been asked to do. Fair enough, right? Rather than changing the LLC structure in the face of this, two new business managers were assigned to replace the two who resigned. The church paid no attention.

Julia [02:12:17] If these two business managers who resigned. I would love to hear your story if you're out there and you're listening,

Nemo [02:12:22] but, like, I Wonder if there's NDAs involved and things like that.

Julia [02:12:27] And so that's maybe why that could be true. Only two, though. That's another thing that surprised me. Of the 13, two of them were like, I don't really like. I don't really like this.

Nemo [02:12:38] That relates the assumption that all 13 realized that this had been uncovered and realize, therefore, that they've been doing something wrong. The church was keeping this so hidden from these people that some people today, it's unlikely, but some people today could still not realize that anything's gone wrong. They may be sufficiently sheltered from some of this information from the SEC order. There could be church employees right now, one of those 13 who just. They just don't know that they were. All of a sudden, they've just been stopped. It's just stopped coming across their desk to file these forms once a year. And they're like, okay, cool, right? Something's changed, but whatever.

Kolby Reddish [02:13:12] When you asked about the two business managers wanting to hear their story, acknowledging, yes, Nemo, you're right, that there are almost certainly NDAs involved. I would just say there was a certain institution that taught me to do what is right and let the consequences follow. So I would love to hear those stories.

Nemo [02:13:29] I would love to hear them, definitely. But does that sit. Does that track to you, Kolby and Julia, the idea that there could be people file that file these 13F who just still don't know?

Kolby Reddish [02:13:40] Well, I would say no, because they were almost certainly Pulled into the SEC investigation. Anyone who's acting as a business manager.

Julia [02:13:46] Wait, so I have a question on the timeline. So this was. This is 2018. I don't know if this 34 follows in the timeline. Is this still. Do these business managers resign in 2018? It doesn't really say.

Nemo [02:13:56] Well, they resign after the website reports the information. So it's sometime after 20.

Julia [02:14:00] Okay.

Nemo [02:14:00] So they stopped doing this in late 2019, early 2020.

Julia [02:14:07] So it's. So somebody has discovered that we're tied to these. They're. We're not really the business managers or whatever. Whatever things are coming out. So these two business managers feel uncomfortable, it seems like. So they resign. Then the Church just picks two new ones, like.

Speaker D [02:14:22] Right.

Julia [02:14:22] Is that so? Like, and this is 2018, I would assume. Right. Because after the website.

Kolby Reddish [02:14:28] Yeah, 2018, 2019, probably.

Julia [02:14:30] And then the Church is still doing this in 2019.

Nemo [02:14:34] They're doing this up until February 2020. As we're going to point out, Enzyme Peak continued to file Forms 13F through the clone LLCs until February 14, 2020, when Enzyme Peak filed a consolidated Form 13F for the quarter ending December 31, 2019.

Kolby Reddish [02:14:50] Remember the timeline. What happens in late 2019? Enzyme Peak is revealed to the press, to the world. Yes.

Julia [02:14:58] Right.

Nemo [02:14:59] And their Form 13F consolidated securities previously listed on the various Forms 13F filed in the names of the clone LLCs. Enzyme Peak's first Form 13F disclosed its management of 1,659 Section 13F securities valued at approximately $37.8 billion.

Kolby Reddish [02:15:17] And that last sentence just relates to different classes or different categories of securities, some of which need to be reported, some of which don't. So when we've been. Because sometimes people get confused about the numbers. They're like, wait, I thought it was over 100 billion. Why are we talking about 38 billion? It's because the 38 billion that we're talking about here is what was needed to be recorded reported under section 13F.

The Church's Contradiction with the SEC

Julia [02:15:41] Okay. And so everything comes out in December of 2019. Wait, I had another question. I can't remember what it was, though.

Nemo [02:15:50] That was back when the Church was saying that they comply with all applicable laws.

Julia [02:15:54] Yes.

Nemo [02:15:55] When actually they haven't started to file consolidated form 13F yet. So technically they aren't. They aren't complying with all the political laws. They're still doing this nonsense until February.

Julia [02:16:07] Yeah, okay.

Nemo [02:16:08] Right. It's a technicality, but it's worth pointing out.

Julia [02:16:10] Right, okay. So that happened.

Nemo [02:16:13] I mean. Yeah, we've got it on the Next slide.

Julia [02:16:15] So, yeah, December 14th and then December 31st, and then the church releases. And so, Kolby, I wanted to say too, because the church releases the statement. So while it. While it's not a church auditing person saying these things in conference, like they ought to, I think could have done, or in 2023 or whatever, they come up with these statements. Is that good enough? I don't know. Like. Anyway, so maybe as we read it. So this is December 17, 2019.

Kolby Reddish [02:16:41] To me, those are different questions because I'm talking about the personal ethics and morals of the church auditors and of the church's auditing managing director. Church audits managing director. This. This press release to me is a completely separate question.

Julia [02:16:56] Okay, okay, okay.

Nemo [02:17:00] So the relevant bit is the end where it says, the church complies with all applicable law governing our donations, investments, taxes and reserves. They said that on the 17th of December, they had not yet filed a consolidated 13F form, and the order says that they continued until February 2020 to use clone LLCs.

Julia [02:17:18] So, yeah, so that. Yeah, 2020. So there the church is not being honest in that sentence.

Kolby Reddish [02:17:25] I wonder if when the SEC knocked on the church's door, they still continued to welcome the opportunity. Oh, wait.

Julia [02:17:32] Oh, sorry. That last line. Sorry.

Kolby Reddish [02:17:34] If they still continued to welcome the opportunity to work with officials to address any questions they may have, because it turns out that was very prophetic. The SEC did have some questions to work through with the church.

Julia [02:17:46] Yeah. So, yeah, the church auditing department got that right. They're like, this is not going to fly. And it didn't. Yeah. Okay, so this is number 24. This is. This is jumping around a little bit, but. But I think these are all important. So it says each clone LLC was also assigned a local phone number that would go directly to voicemail. An enzyme peak senior manager instructed a business manager of one of the clone LLCs to notify him of all voicemails. Voicemails from regulatory agencies to any of the clone LLCs, but to delete all others. So if it's from the sec, let us know anything else, delete it. Is that what I'm getting?

Kolby Reddish [02:18:20] It's also important to recognize when it says they were assigned local phone numbers. Remember how I was talking about I don't know where all the LLCs were created? That's right. Some of them were created in Delaware. So again, one of the reasons I feel like this is disqualifying for the senior leadership of the church, like, I would not believe in the church just based on this scandal alone. Is this took serious effort to lie and to obfuscate and to hide. They didn't just. This wasn't just, as some apologists said, misfiled forms relying on bad legal advice. This was a complicated scheme to hide all of this, not only from the public, not only from the members of the church, but from the people whose signatures they were relying on to do this entire scheme.

Julia [02:19:12] Your name is too well known. We need to pick a different person. Oh, you're resigning? We need to pick two different people. These phone numbers have to be local. They have to look like they're from Delaware.

Nemo [02:19:19] It's got to be a 302 number and they're just going to go straight to voicemail.

Julia [02:19:23] It is not just a simple mistake of filing. This is. This is a super deliberately all approved

Nemo [02:19:30] by the First Presidency and Presiding Bishopric. None of this could have been done or deviated from without their approval. The order makes that very clear. Which means the Church admits to that fact. Yes, the Church agrees to the fact of the matter being that they could not have changed this and they could not have done it in the first place without the men who claim to be mouthpieces for God allowing this to happen.

Julia [02:19:54] Every year they were. They revisited this, which is astonishing. So one of the episodes on Mormon stories where they cover, where we cover the ICC scandal is with the. The daughters of this episode here with, with Josie and Riley Porter. This is part three specifically, but it's called Daughters of Ensign Peak Executive. And she. They're discussing how their dad was working for Enzyme Peak and how they felt about it and how their dad framed, how they understood all these things. So this is a really fun one to go and watch this whole thing because I really like this episode. She quotes some parts of the order that just kind of. She kind of fumbles it a little bit. So we're going to talk about that afterwards. But I really like their, their raw reaction to the, to this whole situation.

Daughters of Enzyme Peak on the ICC Scandal

Speaker D [02:20:40] Just an important part of my timeline because it did follow the leaks and then the story. The next big conversation that I had to have directly with my father was the SEC filing because that was like public knowledge. And again, you know, after the Washington Post story, at least in my experience, there was like a little discrediting of David, both like, as like an individual, but also what he says isn't part of like the whole picture isn't, you know, doesn't give like a full experience of what Enzyme Peak does. But I couldn't. My dad didn't feel like he could talk as Openly to me, about everything that they were involved with. Just that remember the assurance that it's legal. So to me, this was an important distinction because when the SEC charges came out and I was able to read, like, verbatim, you know, that Ensign Peak, and at this point, I know what it is, I know how much money it was or whatever. Enzyme Peak developed its approach to filing, you know, these forms in the name of shell companies of 13 different shell companies with the knowledge and approval of the church, which sought to avoid disclosure of the amount and nature of their assets. Through their institutionalized use of this approach for almost 20 years, Ensign Peak was basically able to. Its significant role in the securities market as an institutional investment manager was not disclosed to the Commission, the market and the investing public as required by the section 13F of the exchange act and Rule. And to me, like, that was like a clear distinction where I was like, dad, within the opening part of this argument, is the Exchange act and rule not a law? Is it not a law?

Kolby Reddish [02:22:48] Because he kept telling you, everything they're doing is legal.

Speaker D [02:22:51] It's legal, Riley.

Julia [02:22:52] It's legal.

Speaker D [02:22:53] It's legal. So that's why, like, the SEC distinction for me, was a way to say, was this not a law? And I think. And when you read the charge itself, you can tell that there's. I mean, they were in discussions for years before this came out. Right. And again, when you have a lot of money to pay those litigation fees and get things to swing your way and settle outside of court, because they definitely were not going to go into court and lose any more credit in the public opinion and in the court of public opinion and things that you can't anticipate are going to come out during a court process. So of course they were never going to go to court. Of course they were going to settle. And I feel like they took extreme measures to avoid saying the terms we broke the law. And so for me, when it says that they directly, you know, were basically avoiding disclosure to a law that was legally required in the financial sector was a regulation and a law and a requirement, you're telling me that they broke the law?

Julia [02:24:09] Okay, did you guys have thoughts on that? I just. I just like hearing from her saying

Kolby Reddish [02:24:13] that, yeah, I mean, it's unquestionable they did break the law, else the order wouldn't exist. They admitted to breaking the law by agreeing to the terms of the order.

Nemo [02:24:23] And we have here what was quoted by. I think it's Riley or whichever one of them it was. It was Riley. So it's just worth reading again. Enzyme Peak developed its approach to filing Forms 13F in the names of these LLCs with the knowledge and approval of the Church, which sought to avoid disclosure of the amount and nature of its assets through their institutionalized use of this approach for almost 20 years, Enzyme Peak's significant role in the securities markets as an institutional investment manager was not disclosed to the Commission, the markets, and the investing public as required by section 13F of the Exchange act and rule 13F I thereunder or one thereunder. So, yeah, they have admitted it. They did not disclose what they needed to by law, disclose.

Julia [02:25:10] Well, I I admitting it. The Church doesn't say, we broke the law. We lied. The Church doesn't say that. They, they are saying that, but they're not saying that like they're admitting to

Nemo [02:25:21] the facts of this. And the facts of this are that they broke the law.

Julia [02:25:26] Right.

Nemo [02:25:27] They will never come out and say, we broke the law. Like Riley said, they won't come out and say, yeah, we broke the law. In fact, as we'll get to later, they will ask themselves that question, and they won't be able to answer it.

Julia [02:25:37] Right. Yeah.

Nemo [02:25:39] But let's hear from Waddell first, shall we?

In the Elevator With Waddell

Julia [02:25:41] Okay, so this is a clip from Waddell Again, the 60 Minutes, and then we're going to read it afterwards. He's talking about the value of Ensign Peak.

Nemo [02:25:48] The look on that man's face left the room. But we will read this.

Julia [02:25:56] Do you want me to be the reporter?

Nemo [02:25:58] Yeah, I can be the reporter. I can be Waddell. I can plaster that kind of sort of grin on my face.

Julia [02:26:03] Oh, should we look at your face? Okay, so what is the value right now of Ensign Peak?

Jonah on Ensign Peak

Nemo [02:26:08] Yeah, that's just something I can't share with you right now. I know there's been reports and approximates and that kind of thing, but it's just as far as we can go right now.

Julia [02:26:16] It's been estimated at $150 billion. Does that sound correct?

Nemo [02:26:21] That's an estimate that some have made.

Julia [02:26:23] Are we in the ballpark or.

Nemo [02:26:24] No, we have significant resources. It's just, oh, it's so unbearable to see the way he knows. It's just so smug. I'm not trying to be mean to him individually. This is not ad hominem. I'm just trying to replicate the smugness that he was putting across.

Julia [02:26:42] I feel like you did a good job.

Nemo [02:26:43] I think he didn't need to answer that question.

Julia [02:26:46] Yeah, I don't think he, he can't disclose that right? I don't.

Nemo [02:26:50] So it was. So I know something you don't like. It was just.

Julia [02:26:54] Well, is it that attitude or is it I legally can't tell you?

Nemo [02:26:57] No, it's not that.

Kolby Reddish [02:26:58] There's nothing that legally says.

Julia [02:27:00] Oh, so there's not. There's no.

Nemo [02:27:03] Yeah. No, he can say whatever he wants of the six people who knows this. He can.

Julia [02:27:08] Yeah, but don't you think the church would be like, don't tell people.

Kolby Reddish [02:27:12] I don't know, Legal? That's not illegal.

Julia [02:27:14] Not legal. I guess you're right. I just.

Nemo [02:27:16] He's just turning the party line. And that look on his face is one of the. I am taking great joy in not having to tell you these things that you clearly really want to know.

Kolby Reddish [02:27:27] There's one other part of it I want to comment on, which is very misleading. I would call it, again, a lie. Can you pull that back up, Julia? Yeah. That's something I can't share with you right now. I know there have been reports on approximate, and that's the kind of thing. And that's as far as we can go right now. He knows full well they will never, ever disclose this. Over their dead bodies would they disclose this? So saying I can't disclose this to you right now is a lie. It's a softening lie.

Nemo [02:27:55] Yeah.

Kolby Reddish [02:27:56] Period. Again, I'm not trying to ad hominem the guy, but he. He's a liar.

Julia [02:27:59] He.

Kolby Reddish [02:28:00] He is lying. I.

Nemo [02:28:02] Because he's implying that there will be a future disclosure that there just will never be.

Kolby Reddish [02:28:06] Exactly. To make it seem more reasonable. Oh, I can't share that with you right now. He has no intention to share it ever. So just come out and say that. This again, comes back to our question about would it have actually damaged the membership of the church if they had just been honest from the beginning? Just come out and say the truth, which is, we don't share that or do what President Hinckley said and say we think that belongs to the members and then never tell the members. Like,

Nemo [02:28:30] that was the German tv. And two, wasn't it?

Speaker D [02:28:32] Yeah.

Julia [02:28:33] Yeah. I'll link that in the. In the show notes. Okay, so there's this other one. This is probably the best clip of the 60 minutes, I think, where it's Waddell and he's discussing secrecy versus confidentiality.

Waddell on Secrecy and Confidentiality

Nemo [02:28:45] Okay, so go on.

Julia [02:28:47] What about, you know, the idea that secrecy builds mistrust?

Nemo [02:28:50] Well, we don't feel it's being secret. We feel it's being confidential.

Julia [02:28:54] What's the difference?

Nemo [02:28:56] The difference Is. I guess it's a point of view. It's confidential. In order to maintain the focus on what our purpose is and what the mission of the church is, rather than the church has X amount of money.

Julia [02:29:08] That was perfect.

Nemo [02:29:10] Yeah, I've listened to that clip a lot.

Julia [02:29:12] But also him saying. Him saying, oh, people will tell us how to spend the money. I don't think that should matter.

Nemo [02:29:18] You're free to ignore them, Christopher. Yeah, you're free to put on your big boy trousers and ignore them.

Julia [02:29:25] Yeah. Like what? That seems kind of what you can't

Nemo [02:29:29] deal with people advocating towards you. Like, is. Is the position of church leadership so fragile that it can't cope with people saying, we think you ought to do X and them going, no, thank you. We have a different plan.

Kolby Reddish [02:29:40] I know that question was rhetorical, but the answer is, yes, they can. They do not have, it would seem.

Nemo [02:29:47] Yeah.

Christopher Wardell on Enzyme Peak Controversy

Julia [02:29:48] Okay, Nemo, you share this next clip with me. Will you give us a little background on this clip?

Nemo [02:29:53] I love this clip. Because at the time at which

Julia [02:30:00] he

Nemo [02:30:00] knew full well that there was a problem going on, he had been warned by church auditing twice that there was a problem with their approach.

Julia [02:30:08] 2017.

Nemo [02:30:09] Yeah. This is in 2019. You know, not far before the lid's about to be blown off on just how much money the church has and investigations are about to start. Christopher Wardell comes out and says this,

Julia [02:30:23] and this is a BYU speech. So

Nemo [02:30:27] the results of our efforts to bring forth that fruit may be visible and demonstrated in our behavior, but the seeds of that fruit are typically planted in private, in the quiet moments of decision. More than what is seen in public, it is what we do in private, when no one but us and the Lord are aware of our thoughts, the thoughts we entertain and the decisions we make that will set us apart from the world.

Kolby Reddish [02:30:52] If there is not a better fulfillment of Jesus's word, why did sepulcher? I have no idea what it would be like to sit there as a complete hypocrite. Like, again, I don't know this man. I don't know his integrity beyond what I can say based on this interaction. But no, thank you to the ethics and morality of someone who will sit there as such a blatant hypocrite. I also would observe the title of his talk was called are you ready? Well, were they? Because the SEC came knocking shortly after this.

Nemo [02:31:24] Yeah.

Julia [02:31:24] Oh, my gosh.

Nemo [02:31:25] He stands there and talks about how important the decisions are that we make in private and how important it is to have integrity in those decisions. In private. Those are, those are the seeds of the fruit that we bring forth. So the seeds that he planted in private brought forth the fruit of an SEC investigation or the, the seeds he nurtured, if you want to look at it. Because he came in part way through, right? But he didn't stop this from happening. He didn't come in when he came into the presiding Bishopric and say, well, hold on guys, this doesn't seem right. The we talk about these six men. They weren't always the same six men. There was three prophets involved because Nelson came in towards the tail end of this. But there was Hinckley Monson and Nelson. There was eye ring throughout, but there was also Uchtdorf. Everyone's favorite apostle was aware of this almost until the end. From Monson's presidency through, he knew that this was going on. He did nothing. Faust was involved. There were several people who stepped into this situation and would have been brought up to speed with what was going on with Enzyme Peak and that any one of them could have gone, hold on, this doesn't seem right. Any one of them could have come in when church auditing department then came in and gone, oh, hold on. This situation I've inherited that I didn't realize was that bad. Now our auditing department are telling us about that it's bad. Well, maybe we should. Maybe we should do something about it. No, none of them did.

Kolby Reddish [02:32:50] This is also the danger of an attitude. I've heard recently that ideological diversity in the church is a cancer. This is the danger of. It is when you create an echo chamber and no one wants to tell the emperor that he's wearing no clothes. This is the result is everybody was aligned with a plan that violated the law that resulted in a huge black eye for the church in the eyes of the public, in the eyes of. It should have resulted in a huge back eye in the eyes of the members. Apparently it didn't, which boggles my mind. I know there have been some people who left over this, but the fact that there were no resignations, that there was no call for resignation, is its own commentary about how the members need to reclaim their church.

Nemo [02:33:33] I was calling for church discipline against anyone involved. I put that to my state president and said, if this had been a ward clerk who had been found to cause problems sufficient to have the federal government come in and issue the church a fine, he would have received church discipline. So why does the same not apply to the leaders of the church? They should be brought before a disciplinary council and they should be reprimanded that's what should have happened. Nothing happened.

Kolby Reddish [02:34:03] If principles only apply to a select group of people, that's not principles. That's privilege. And I think that's exactly what we're saying.

Julia [02:34:11] Yeah, that's very well said. Okay, so next in this. Yeah. So this is the church's statement on February 21st of 2023. It says, Church issues statement on SEC settlement. And there's just a part that I. A couple of parts I wanted to point out. So, Nemo, do you want to read this question?

Church Statement on SEC Settlement

Nemo [02:34:32] Did the church know about the practices at Enzyme Peak described in the order? Now, just real quick, the church. Right. What is the church? I think they're using a deliberately vague term here to then be able to try and define who was involved and who wasn't involved and try and kind of slippery slope. Be slippery in their approach. The church's senior leadership, which hopefully they're using the same definition as the order. I would hope so. They received and relied upon legal counsel when it approved the use of the external companies to make the filings. Okay. Enzyme Peak handled the mechanics of the filing process. The church senior leadership never prepared or filed the specific reports at issue. I love that they have this idea that members will be complicated by the idea that they didn't file the 13 Fs. They didn't. They didn't go to the copier, pick them up, put them in an envelope, and send them to the federal government. And because they didn't do that, therefore it's all someone else's fault.

Kolby Reddish [02:35:35] That is the implication. And it's hilarious that they think anyone would be that absolutely gullible.

Nemo [02:35:42] Well, they didn't lick the stamp, so it's not their fault.

Julia [02:35:45] I guess we didn't prepare the reports.

Nemo [02:35:49] Like, it's like.

Julia [02:35:50] Well, no.

Kolby Reddish [02:35:50] Yeah. And when they say. And even when they say Enzyme Peak, highlight the. Handled the mechanics of the filing process. As we read from the order, who signed off? Well, who was in control of Enzyme Peak? The Presiding Bishopric and the guy who was appointed by the First Presidency. So that's. That's like, I'm not the one who did it. It was just the guy that lives in my house. Oh, wait, they're the same person.

Nemo [02:36:12] Like the assassin I hired handled the mechanics of the murder.

Julia [02:36:19] Cool.

Kolby Reddish [02:36:20] Yeah.

Nemo [02:36:21] He should also go to prison, but you're responsible, too.

Julia [02:36:26] Oh, my gosh. Sorry.

Nemo [02:36:28] We. Yeah.

Julia [02:36:30] Okay.

Nemo [02:36:30] So, yes, I point out that according to Gerard Cor, they. Who's now an apostle, but was at the time the presiding bishop, they received and relied upon the spirit of revelation when making these decisions, not just legal counsel. We've got a video that proves that.

Kolby Reddish [02:36:46] Did they try the handshake test? Because I think maybe it was the wrong spirit.

Julia [02:36:51] Oh, my God. Okay, so this one, I just wanted to. I put this little YouTube bar down here so you could see that it was published. This video was published December 20th of 2019. So that's right, Right.

Kolby Reddish [02:37:01] In response to the wind whistleblower report. Yes.

Nemo [02:37:05] Right.

Julia [02:37:06] Okay.

Kolby Reddish [02:37:07] It's about building a reserve of the church. And ultimately all of those funds will be used for church purposes. So this is about preparing for the future. This is not expenditures. These are investment. There is a difference between investment and expenditures. Investment is not putting the money, not burying the money in the ground like in the parable of the talents, but making sure that it's not idle, that the. The church will enjoy an increase value of these reserves so they can be used for the sake of the purpose of the church. Sacred funds are managed with great care and responsibility and seriousness by the leaders of the Church. We believe in inspiration and revelation. The presiding councils of the Church are all in there. Of course, we use professional people and staff, and they have great talents and abilities and expertise. But at the end of the day, the decisions, the main decisions are made by presiding councils according to a spirit of Revelation. The real wealth of the church is not.

Nemo [02:38:20] And you can stop there because he says the wealth of the church is not in its money. It's in the faith of the members. He says, while sat behind a vase that's probably priceless or very expensive in a very opulently decorated room in a very nice suit. But this idea that at the end of the day, which is often a colloquial phrase to mean that ultimately these decisions are made with the spirit of prayer and revelation by the presiding council of the Church. So that's what they're saying. They're trying to say in this press release something different. They're trying to blame the lawyers. They're trying to say, we received and relied upon legal counsel when we did this. But he's just admitted that ultimately the decision was theirs under the spirit of Revelation. And that should bother members of the Church. Why did the spirit of Revelation lead them to engage in a. In a system of filing that broke the law? Why would the spirit of Revelation lead them to break the law?

What Would the Spirit of Revelation Lead Them To Do?

Kolby Reddish [02:39:15] Yeah. Why is the Spirit of Revelation worse than the Church auditing department? Twice.

Nemo [02:39:20] The church auditing department. Yeah, twice. Notice what the Spirit of Revelation didn't?

Julia [02:39:26] Yeah, yeah.

Enzyme Peak Earnings: SEC Cease and Desist Order

Nemo [02:39:29] Have we got any more from that Q and A? Because I think we're about to go into my favorite question.

Julia [02:39:33] Do you want to. Do you want to just read this?

Nemo [02:39:34] Oh, no, this is not. Kolby, you take this one.

Julia [02:39:36] Okay.

Kolby Reddish [02:39:37] As the reporting practice that prompted the SEC cease and desist order now stopped. Yes. In June 2019, the SEC first expressed concern about Enzyme Peak's reporting approach. Enzyme Peak adjusted its approach and began filing a single aggregated report. Since that time, 13 quarterly reports have been filed in full accordance with the SEC requirements. Which means that when they issued that statement In December of 2019, I know we've already hit this point, but that it was a lie, that it was wrong when it said they comply with all laws regarding their investments.

Nemo [02:40:11] Yeah, because they knew the SEC had concerns, and they knew and they didn't then begin filing single aggregator reports.

Kolby Reddish [02:40:19] This next question is just the next question.

Nemo [02:40:21] And this is. Yeah, that next slide just points out what Kolby just pointed out.

Julia [02:40:26] Okay.

Nemo [02:40:27] Yeah, you can just go. So next one. This is my favorite question. It's my favorite question because the church prepared this Q and A, right? The church asked this question of themselves. They're like, right, we're going to put together a Q and A, and we're going to ask questions that we think people are going to ask of us. So we're going to then provide answers in anticipation of people asking these questions. And rightly, they understood that people are going to ask the very simple question, did Enzyme Peak fail to comply with SEC regulations? Now, that is softer than what most people would ask. Most people would say, did Enzyme Peak break the law? Did the church break the law? Is probably what most people are actually going to ask. But fine, they've softballed it. Did Enzyme Peak fail to comply with SEC regulations? Makes it sound technocratic and not that bad. It doesn't have the same moral weight. Their answer to their own question is, we reached resolution with the sec. We affirm our commitment to comply with the law, regret mistakes made, and now consider this matter closed. Kolby, did you fail to comply with some regulations?

Did Enzyme Peak Fail to Comply with SEC Regulations?

Kolby Reddish [02:41:33] You know, I know that's a yes or no question, but I'm not going to answer it. It's pretty funny the way you put it. Like to draft your own softball question. And when even the softball hits you too hard because you violated federal securities law for three decades, that's kind of its own commentary, isn't it? Like, sometimes the jokes write themselves, guys. They do.

Nemo [02:41:54] Yeah.

Kolby Reddish [02:41:55] Draft your own yes or no question and provide neither a yes nor no. Amazing.

Julia [02:42:01] Imagine Imagine we regret mistakes made even though we knew about it in 2014.

Kolby Reddish [02:42:06] I'm gonna. You know, the church has professional public relations people, but I'm gonna chalk this answer up to the spirit of revelation, I think.

Julia [02:42:15] Oh, my gosh. Okay. Okay. So, yeah, in conclusion, Kolby, you pointed out these. This. The Deseret. I guess the. An article released from the Desiree News is. I think this is Instagram. They released. Let me see what date that. I can't remember what date this was. It was fairly recently.

Kolby Reddish [02:42:35] It was on the 4th.

Julia [02:42:37] On the 4th. Oh, yeah.

Kolby Reddish [02:42:38] Or around the 4th. Yeah. So, yeah, they released this editorial, the First Freedom, written by Dallin H. Oaks. I'm sure he wrote it all himself and didn't have any help where he writes about the First Amendment and what the First Amendment means. Fair disclosure. I haven't read the article. I just saw this snippet where he says, religion strengthens our nation in matters of. On. In the matter of honesty and integrity. Remember that this is a guy who was involved in this entire scheme during the time that they violated federal securities law for three decades. I do not need your opinion, sir, on matters of honesty and integrity, because I haven't been violating the federal securities law for three decades for the express purpose of hiding my size of assets. So I just think it's hilarious. We often hear from theists that, you know, without religion, entire society will collapse. That. Where do you get your morals from? Well, I don't get them from here. And frankly, I'm kind of glad because I don't need guidance on matters of honesty and integrity from this man nor any of the men involved in this entire scheme. And I think it's insane that members of the church have not demanded. I know you tried to, Nemo, but I think it's insane that members of the church have not demanded accountability for this behavior, that these men just continue to do whatever else they're doing that the membership will find out about down the road.

Nemo [02:44:03] But then, a couple of points here. He says religion strengthens our nation in the matter of honesty and integrity. His religion deliberately tried to weaken the nation in terms of the publicly traded stocks. It was on a national. It would have a national effect. The way that the church behaved in terms of SEC fraud, in terms of being dishonest with the sec, it didn't strengthen the nation. It weakened the nation, arguably, in a very material way, because it undermined public trust in the stock market. It undermined the public's ability to trust who was in control of what assets at what Time. So in those matters of honesty and integrity, they so utterly failed that I would argue they weakened things.

Kolby Reddish [02:44:47] Yeah, right. It's ironic if you look at the very beginning of it. Right. It says, Dallin H. Oaks, the president of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, discusses the First Amendment, moral absolutes and why the Constitution was made for religious people. What morality is this that you can opine hypocritically about honesty and integrity while knowing full well your track record with those things?

Nemo [02:45:11] And. But then to your point about why members are not demanding justice to this. And you can probably throw us up on screen here, Julia. I think that if we exist in a church where the second counselor in the first presidency, he knew his brother had committed crimes against children. He was in the building when the annotation was taken off his brother's record that allowed him to continue to have access to children and commit more crimes than the ones he was originally, you know, sanctioned for by the church. He's not going to see any blowback from that. There's going to be no calls for Detot Christofferson to resign. There's going to be no calls for him because of what he knew about what his brother's doing. This. There's just no accountability there. And that's something that's deeply emotive to people, the abuse of children. So something as technocratic, something as. As difficult and detailed, something that's taken us nearly three hours to go through and try and explain properly, it doesn't have that emotional weight. It doesn't have that emotional punch. And members of the church are so finely attuned to their feelings that I just think, or they've been so conditioned to have their feelings dictate to them what's true and what's not true, that this just doesn't have that emotional weight to cause them to want to ask for any change. That would be my. My theory as to why it's only nerds like us that, that see this what it is and. And think something should happen about it. Because it takes time to work out through all the difficult language, through all the reading of the filings and whatnot, to uncover just how seriously the Church violated these federal laws and just how seriously they were dishonest and lacked integrity.

The Mormon Church's secrecy culture

Julia [02:47:02] Yeah. In 2023, I made a Facebook post about this topic and how I felt about it and how I felt it was. Was wrong of the church to do that. And my former bishop, who. I was the nanny for his kids for four years, he fought me. He got really upset at what I was saying, but I was like, it's. The evidence is here that the church was not being honest. And he ended up blocking me because he. I just don't know that the. I don't know. The members, you know, faith is resilient. They don't want to think bad things about the church. I. I'm also just shocked that the church just wouldn't just tell the truth. Like, let the consequences follow. Like, just disclose how much you have. Because you. They ended up having to do that anyway. Like, I don't know. The church seems to do. That's just a pattern with them, is like, let's just try to cover up this. Like, let's tear out a page from this journal. Because I don't really like how this first vision looks. And then we'll deal with it later. Like, why not? I don't know. Just the. Be honest now so that. Don't have to worry about it later. I. I just. This just feels like a pattern from the church. And this is a big deal.

Nemo [02:48:07] Started with Joseph hiding polygamy.

Julia [02:48:10] Yeah.

Nemo [02:48:11] This pattern of trying to hide things from the public started there.

Julia [02:48:15] Yeah.

Nemo [02:48:16] And it's been ongoing in one form or another ever since.

Julia [02:48:20] Yeah, that's true.

Nemo [02:48:22] Because it's a. It's a church that seems to be founded on the idea that they have a right. Right to keep some things away from the public. I mean, the temple endowment kind of instills that in. In members who go through it. Right. There are things that, you know, that you're not to tell others about. Secrecy. We take. We say it's not secret, it's sacred, but it is secret because it's things you're not meant to tell people outside the fold. So secrecy is kind of, I suppose, embedded within Mormonism. It is part of the church. Sorry.

Kolby Reddish [02:48:51] As is. As is misleading. I'm of the opinion. Yeah. I'm of the opinion that doctrine and covenants 19, which is a revelation that's written by Joseph Smith to Martin Harris at the time he's pressuring Martin Harris to finance the publication of the Book of Mormon, literally says it has this supposed deep, you know, deep mystery of godliness that's revealed to Joseph Smith and Martin Harris, where the question is, what is eternal punishment? And eternal punishment is not punishment that lasts for eternity. God supposedly says through the mouth of Joseph Smith, it's called eternal punishment because it is written more express than other scriptures that it may work upon the hearts of the children of men for God's glory, leading people to repent. Think about, in reality, if we take that outside of KJV language, think about what that means. That's threatening my kid with a more severe penalty that I know I'm not going to follow through on. So that they do what I want. That's lying to people for their own good. That is Joseph Smith's God. That is Joseph Smith's theology from before even the Book of Mormon was printed. And I think recognizing that, recognizing how that then interfaces with divine command theory, morality. One of the things that I have learned through looking at many different case files of the church and child sex abuse cases is that I believe fundamentally the church truly believes that it is above the law, that it is accountable to no one aside from the leaders. And the problem is what happens when the leaders are wrong? Well, then it's up to the members to reclaim their church. Why they don't do that is beyond me.

Julia [02:50:28] Well, reminds me of the beginning of the episode where he's like, we don't.

Kolby Reddish [02:50:31] I.

Julia [02:50:31] We don't believe we have to disclose this, so we're just going to lie on this form. Sorry, Nima, what were you.

Nemo [02:50:37] A petulant, inaccurate answer. I think to that, Kolby's point about why that members don't reclaim their church. I was excommunicated for trying. I was excommunicated for showing that. Okay, Right. If you actually oppose these guys and say that, do that. They are not behaving in the way that they ought to. They are mismanaging money. They are lying. They are hiding things. This needs to stop. We can oppose them. You get excommunicated eventually.

Kolby Reddish [02:51:05] Right. So not exactly the model of the body of Christ that's reflected in the New Testament. Right, Right. The church isn't. It's much more along the lines of all members are equal, but some are more equal than others.

Nemo [02:51:18] Yeah. And I've definitely written that in videos before because it is a very good way to use that Orwell quote. Definitely. Okay, Julia or Kolby.

The LDS Discussion Series

Kolby Reddish [02:51:31] I think that will conclude episode 80 of LDS discussion series. As we talked about at the beginning of today's show, this series builds upon itself sequentially. I would say this one links the most with our episode about fraud and fraud in the church and what the epistemology of the church can leave you vulnerable to. The LDS discussion series is as best we can do. I know we've been very strong in today's episode, but I think it's very warranted based upon the facts as we evaluated them. But the LDS discussion series is an attempt to Take an objective look at Mormon Church truth claims, history and other issues like we've done today. John feels that it's one of the most important projects that Mormon Stories Podcast has ever done, and I completely agree with him. This series started with the work of a man named Mike who has since gone on to retirement. But we are very grateful for you in joining us on today's episode. Please like and share this episode because this is an issue that I feel like has, as Julia said at the beginning of today's show, has kind of fallen off people's radar. But I think it is a very important data point to understanding how the church engages with both the members, with its own members, with the public, and where it feels it fits within the hierarchy of, you know, public institutions or institutions that reflect towards the public. Before we get out of here, Julia and Nemo, do you want to point folks to where they can find your additional work?

Mormon Stories: Let's Disagree

Julia [02:52:59] Yeah, I'm analyzing Mormonism on all the platforms. TikTok, YouTube, Patreon, Instagram.

Nemo [02:53:06] Yeah, as always, I'm Nemo the Mormon on all the platforms, apart from MySpace. That won't get old.

Kolby Reddish [02:53:17] Unlike MySpace, I would say. And I'm Kolby Reddish. I was your host today or one of the three hosts today. I'm not sure exactly which role is which, but you can find me on my YouTube channel. Let's disagree. Another interesting conversations with Kolby Reddish and I've actually got a fun idea that I'll talk to Nemo about as a follow up episode to this episode offline that we may see on let's Disagree. If you are a fan of Mormon history, post Mormon history. Sunstone is a conference that is happening next weekend. I have no idea if we're actually going to air this before Sunstone. And now I'm wondering if I should even talk about this. But if you're at Sunstone, you'll be able to find Julia and myself there. Julia, you're presenting on a panel. Do you want to share what that is?

Julia [02:54:03] Yeah, it's a panel of other ex Mormon content creators. I don't know if ex Mormon is how they would define themselves, but yeah, other content creators. But I'm also interviewing Tim Koznoff, who has been on Mormon stories a lot of times talking about the child abuse in the church. So that'll be a really fun experience to meet him and talk to him about that. So. And then, Kelby, you're presenting.

Kolby Reddish [02:54:22] I am presenting. I'm presenting a refreshed version of an episode we did on LDS discussions. Actually that I had first done with Radio Free Mormon called Could Joseph Smith Write or Dictate a well Worded Letter? Where we look at Joseph Smith's 1830 letters that are contemporary to the publication of the Book of Mormon to dispel the myth that Joseph Smith could neither write nor dictate a well worded letter. In fact, he was very capable of remixing scriptural language together. So if that interests you, I'll probably will share the recording down the road or check out that episode on LDS Discussions.

Julia [02:54:56] Also. Yeah, I understand that they don't live stream these. They will let they will make the audio available afterwards if I understand that correctly. I don't know if you understand something different Kolby, but I think the audio can be available later so we can link those too.

Kolby Reddish [02:55:09] Cool.

Nemo [02:55:11] I will not be at Sunstone someday.

Kolby Reddish [02:55:13] I assumed someday we'll get him over here. Thank you again folks for joining us on today's episode of Mormon Stories podcast, LDS Discussions. This series LDS Discussion Edition. Please be good to each other, be good to each other, be kind to each other and we will see you on the next episode of Mormon Stories, LDS Discussions Edition.

Nemo [02:55:37] Bye.