Welcome and Guest Introductions

John Dehlin [00:00:00] Hello, everyone, and welcome to another edition of Mormon Stories podcast. I'm your host, John Dehlin. It is March 30, 2023, and today we are here for part two of our series on the Widows Mite Report. The Widow's Mite Report provides research and analysis on the state of wealth in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints. It can be found that widows might report.WordPress.com and we did our initial episode on the wealth of the Mormon Church and how wealthy it is. And today we are going to be talking about the Mormon Church's assets. We're going to be talking about Ensign Peak, its investment arm, real estate and temples. Joining us today first is one of my partners in truth and righteousness, Gerardo Simano. Hey, Gerardo. Welcome back.

Rebecca Biblioteca [00:00:50] Hi.

Gerardo Sumano [00:00:51] Thanks.

John Dehlin [00:00:51] Thanks for staying late tonight.

Gerardo Sumano [00:00:53] Yeah, I'm excited to be in this series in one of the episodes.

John Dehlin [00:00:57] Yeah, people are excited about the last one and we're glad to be doing the series. We're going to be doing at least three parts, so this will be part two of a three part series. Also joining us is the Rebecca Biblioteca from the Good Book Club. Hey, Rebecca.

Rebecca Biblioteca [00:01:11] Hey, John. How are you tonight?

John Dehlin [00:01:13] Thanks for joining us.

Rebecca Biblioteca [00:01:15] You are so welcome.

John Dehlin [00:01:16] I think you just got off a podcast, didn't you?

Rebecca Biblioteca [00:01:18] I was doing an interview for my podcast, Mormonish, so that's going to air over Easter, so excellent.

John Dehlin [00:01:25] Well, we love all the work you do, so thanks for joining us.

Rebecca Biblioteca [00:01:28] Oh, you're so welcome.

John Dehlin [00:01:29] And our special guest for tonight, all the way from the University of Illinois at Champaign Urbana is Spencer. Hey, Spencer, do you want to introduce yourself again, reintroduce yourself to our audience?

Spencer Anderson [00:01:40] Yeah. So my name is Spencer Anderson. I'm a professor of accounting at the University of Illinois. Super excited to be here to talk a little bit about accounting and more in depth. What I usually do for my job is I do research around financial reporting issues. So I look at how investors might react to the way that a company might disclose something or how they might measure something. And so this is kind of right at my wheelhouse. So it's been a fun project to kind of be on. And the kids are all asleep, so I'm excited to not have to worry about that right now.

John Dehlin [00:02:15] Fantastic. All right. Well, we're so grateful. Thank you. Now we want to tell everyone to go back and listen to part one on Mormon Stories. Radio Free Mormon was able to join us. He was not able to join us tonight, but he promises he may be back for part three. Shout out to Radio Free Mormon who helped produce this episode. But Spencer, if you had, for those who are just joining us now, if you had to give people kind of a one minute summary of kind of what the Widows Might report is and how it came together. I know we talked about it more in detail last time, but let's just start with that quick overview.

Overview of the Widow's Mite Report Project

Spencer Anderson [00:02:47] Yeah. So the Widow's Might project is a five year effort so far to provide better information surrounding the Church's finances and its wealth. So what it does is it aggregates public information and leverages expertise from various sources. So the main person that's involved that started Widow's Mite is involved in the finance industry. But then there's also people in law, history, philosophy, accounting. I might be forgetting some, but a lot of different areas where they try and triangulate around how much the Church is worth, how much the Church brings in each year. And really it's kind of a great compilation of materials that has been based on the efforts that have been done before as well as the information that's available nowadays, which I think were at an unprecedented level of information that could be provided. One thing that's interesting about this is sometimes people say, well, the Church isn't transparent, so how are they coming up with these numbers? If the numbers are out there, then that means the Church is transparent. Well, no, it's taken them five years to put this all together. And so this has been an incredible effort by them to try and recreate kind of what the financial statement should look like if the church were to provide them from, you know, their own hands. So that's, that's the widow's my project, my role in that. I'm independent of that project. But I have been dealing with people on the, on the Widow's my project for the last several months, especially the main person that's involved. And it's been an incredible journey to see exactly how all of they do all of this. So we've kind of gone back and forth on some of the estimates and whether they're accurate, whether they're reliable. And honestly, like the report to me seems like it should be the gold standard going forward in terms of how people should interpret the wealth of the church at this point. One of the things I love about it too is that it's, it's an, it's a living document. So if you have new information, they've, they've updated their information. Just last week they had new welfare reports that they found that the Church used to disclose back in the 2000s, they had no idea that those things existed. Somebody sent them out to them, and now they were able to kind of leverage that for some of their estimate work that they were doing. And so if you have any information, if you have any public data that's available that maybe they might not know about, please send it to them. And it's pretty easy to send it to them. You just go to their website and you can send them an email.

John Dehlin [00:05:27] Perfect. Okay. And I know that we, you know, we covered a lot last time. I'm going to just jump to, you know, this is, this is where the widows might report began. I'll be showing some visuals, one of the major slides. Tell me if I'm wrong, Spencer. We disclosed, you know, the estimate of the Mormon Church's overall wealth, and it was 236 billion. Is that right, Spencer?

Estimating the Church's Total Wealth

Spencer Anderson [00:05:51] Yeah. As of the end of 2022, the estimate for the whole church was 240 billion. Two thirds of that is the investments that the Church has. And only one third of that 240 billion represents what we would traditionally think of as church assets. So, you know, chapels, temples, byu, things like that. And so really, the fastest growing part of the church in the last 20 years and the largest portion of what the church owns has been the investment part of the church, not the church itself, not the spiritual part of the church.

John Dehlin [00:06:28] Okay. All right. And I guess if I was going to show any other slides that were kind of really crucial, I think just to summarize this one, how big is that in comparison to others? Remind us, Spencer.

Ensign Peak: Size and Scope of Reserves

Spencer Anderson [00:06:44] Yeah, so we looked at like, you know, how much is Enzyme Peak have within it? Enzyme Peak being the auxiliary arm that holds all of the Church's reserve investments is comparable to sort of saying that, like, what if you could combine all of the endowment funds of Harvard, Yale, Stanford, Princeton and mit, the five largest endowments of any endowments in any universities across the world, and it would probably be similar to compiling all five of those together. In addition, you could compare it. I think another good comparison is to compare it to Berkshire Hathaway. Enzyme Peak is probably about half of the value of assets as Berkshire Hathaway. No small thing.

John Dehlin [00:07:33] That's Warren Buffett's enterprise, right?

Spencer Anderson [00:07:36] Correct. That's Warren Buffett's firm.

John Dehlin [00:07:39] And more cash and investments, net cash and investments than Google, Apple and Microsoft. Right?

Spencer Anderson [00:07:46] Correct.

John Dehlin [00:07:46] Okay. And then we showed kind of projections for when. When the Church will likely hit a trillion dollars. Right. And what do we come up with?

Spencer Anderson [00:07:57] Yeah, that one's kind of cool. So I think, you know, if the church continues on its current path, using conservative estimates, the church would reach half a trillion. So doubling in size in roughly 10 years and the church would become a trillion dollar church by roughly 2045. And so that's kind of the path that it's on right now. Unless something kind of drastic changes in terms of the church's use of this fund, it's going to just keep growing and growing exponentially. It wouldn't take that much longer for it to turn it from a trillion dollar church into a $2 trillion church from there. So.

John Dehlin [00:08:36] Yeah, and then maybe, maybe one really important summary was that the church doesn't need your money. I mean, is that a fair summary?

Spencer Anderson [00:08:47] That was, that was, I think the biggest, it might be the biggest takeaway of all. You could use the money that runs off of you being the church. The church could use the money that runs off of Ensign Peak and fully run the church's operations. So there's no tithing at this point necessary whatsoever. The church is fully self sustaining. Its investments are more than sufficient to operate the church without asking members for $1 of donations ever. And they would still have enough left to not just operate the way that they normally are, but to also give an additional 1 billion in charitable aid each year that it currently doesn't. And so it has more than enough to operate going forward without once asking for another time of tithing, which is, it's impressive. It also can be a little disheartening. I think that a lot of times we hear this news and it can be cause emotions.

John Dehlin [00:09:42] Yeah, yeah. And, and we even shared, you know, that quote from, I think it was President Joseph Fielding Smith that someday the church won't need your money. And I think that's a surprising quote for people to hear because there's even a prophet saying someday we'll be good and we won't need your tithing anymore. And I think it's a decent argument to say we're, we're, maybe we're kind of there. Okay, so tell us what, what we're going to be. Well, do you want to talk about what the reaction was to last episode? Are you even prepared to talk about like, did it, did a lot of people check it out? Was the, was the committee. Oh, I was going to make a joke and say, does the Widow's Mite committee constitute a secret combination? What, what would be your answer to that? Are they a secret combination or not?

Spencer Anderson [00:10:29] I have no idea. I'm not, I'm not a scriptorian but, but I do think that their heart's in the right place. Like they're not out for gain. They're using this as a public service rather than like have it attached to their name. They're worried that it would like just reduce the whole. All the data that they're providing to ad hominem. So I think what they're trying to do is get all the criticism to come to me. Now, I don't think that's what they're doing, but I think that what they're thinking of is by having nobody behind the numbers to attack directly, people can address the data for what the data are. And so I think that that's the goal. But the reaction has been interesting. So I had a couple of. I will say that there were a couple of byu, not byu, BYU affiliated professors who I've known or LDS who have reached out and said that they watched the episode. This is accounting professor. So. And I did not think that they would be the type to watch Mormon stories. And so you have a much broader following than I ever thought. There was also somebody who's like never Mormon, who lives in Champaign, Illinois, who reached out to me to say hi and they just love your podcast and just a small world there. And then on LinkedIn. Every now and then on LinkedIn it will show you, it'll tell you that so many people have viewed your profile and sometimes they'll give you sneak peeks. I don't have LinkedIn Pro, but there was one person, there were at least a couple of people from that are employees at Enzyme Peak.

Gerardo Sumano [00:12:09] Wow.

Spencer Anderson [00:12:09] Who have viewed my profile in the last two weeks. And so I thought that was interesting. So you have followers. John work for Enzyme Peak. So if you're listening, you know, like if I'm off on anything, then go ahead and give me the data to correct me. Enzyme Peak employees and we can, we can work on that.

John Dehlin [00:12:31] So I, I should also say that between I think last episode and this one, I, I had a tipper reach out to me and I'm not going to disclose who and asked me to go to Ensign Peak because apparently they're supposed to file what are they called, 990Ts these forms.

Rebecca Biblioteca [00:12:48] Yes.

John Dehlin [00:12:49] That where they have to disclose something about their investments or their finances. And apparently Inside Peak had not submitted some 990s or at least they weren't available publicly. And so this person asked me to go down to Ensign Peak and request the 990Ts personally. And they have to give them to you the same Day you request them.

Gerardo Sumano [00:13:12] Oh wow.

John Dehlin [00:13:12] So imagine me, John De lin, like at 2 or 3pm I drive down to Ensign Peak and like five minutes away from there I call them, the receptionist at Ensign Peak. And I say, hi, I'm coming to collect all the 990s that you have that you have not yet published. And they're like, who is this again? I'm like, john. John who? John Dehlin. And I like, I like parked, I parked in the skyscraper on the curb and waited like 15 minutes. And then like two dudes, like I think the chief counsel for Ensign Peak and maybe their top reporting guy, I don't know, they came out and they handed me a, a thumb drive with all the 99Ts that I was requesting and they made me sign a little waiver that I, that I received them. So they, they gave me the. And one of the dudes is like, hey, one of my neighbors loves your podcast. Or you know, so like, so it was fun. He seemed excited to see me. I don't know, I don't want to get the guy fired, but that was a fun little story. And Spencer, I don't know if you want to say if there was anything interesting on those 990Ts or if we want to save that for another show.

Spencer Anderson [00:14:25] I think maybe we'll save it for part three because it's a tax related issue and we could, I think we're planning on delving into the tax controversies. But yeah, that's such a funny story because I mean widows might didn't have to do anything. They should have just sent you down to Enzyme Peak. Can you give me all of your financials? And then we could have been done with all of this.

Deep Dive Into Ensign Peak Funds

John Dehlin [00:14:44] All right. Okay. So Spencer, do you want to give an intro to what we're doing today or do we just want to jump in? Because I think I, you know, I did at least listen what's on our title. So where do you want to go next?

Spencer Anderson [00:14:56] Yeah, I mean, I think we could intro what the goal is, I guess. Yeah.

John Dehlin [00:15:00] What are we doing today?

Spencer Anderson [00:15:01] Yeah, I think we're going to start off tonight doing a deep dive into Enzyme Peak itself. So it's investments, it's strategies, it's performance, how much is in the fund, what stocks it invests in, things like that. And then we're going to do a deeper dive into the Enzyme Peaks assets and the church's assets in general, real estate. And then we'll look into their temples and how much it would cost to build a temple. Whether Enzyme Peak Funds are required or needed to, if, if the church wanted to build a thousand temples, like, how much that would cost them? Like, reasonably, like what's the, would we need to use Enzyme Peak to do that? And so, yeah, so I think that last episode was a little bit more about a broad overview of the church's finances. And now we're going to start to delve into a lot deeper, more, you know, detailed information and some of the more detailed analysis that widows might has done. And then the third part of, for the next time that we do meet, we'll do deep dives on taxes and on the charitable arm of the church. So how much is spending on charity and things like that?

John Dehlin [00:16:12] All right, really quickly, I'm going to ask all our viewers and listeners, if you haven't subscribed to us on YouTube or Facebook, to please subscribe, please, like this episode. And we always welcome and appreciate your super chat donations, at least through YouTube, if you value this content and want to see it continue. Okay, let's go ahead and jump in. Spencer, let's go to the first slide.

Spencer Anderson [00:16:36] Yeah, so I mean, just a little bit of background about what Enzyme Peak is. I think most people, most of your viewers probably know, but Enzyme Peak is the primary investment arm of the church. It was created in 1997. And the original purpose for Ensign Peak was to create a reserve or to, I guess put the reserve of all of the investments that the church had into this one umbrella and save it for rainy days, essentially. And so what the church does is it sets aside a portion of its tithing it brings in each year to Ensign Peak. And as an auxiliary of the church, Ensign Peak does not pay taxes on any capital gains from its investments. And so in other words, let's say that they sell some of their stock and they paid $100 for this stock and they sold it for $200. That's what a capital gain would be, that 100 extra dollars that they sold it for. So with that $100 in capital gains, I'm not positive on the, on the, on the, on this precise number here, but I believe the capital gains rate for corporations right now is 21%. So a corporation, a normal corporation, would have to pay $21 on that $100 of gains, and the church doesn't have to pay that. So that helps the fund grow. And, and that's part of their strategy, I think. And so as we talked about before, Enzyme Peak has worked pretty hard to conceal its assets from the public. And we went over the reasons that Church leaders have offered for this approach to things, but the main reason that seems obvious now, based on the SEC's ruling that has come out, is that they want to hide the size of the fund because they were worried about members that they might stop donating. So they've gone through a lot of efforts to conceal the fund. And I think that these efforts have been pretty extreme, I think, actually. So if we go to that first slide, all that it's showing is sort of saying, who has access to Enzyme Peak? You have apostles that don't have access to Ensign Peak, or at least that's been the case for a while. Maybe it's recently changed. But all the information that we have available suggests that only the Presiding Bishopric and the First Presidency have access to Ensign Peak and know how much is in it. So just like there's a strengthening the Church Members Committee, there's an IPC or Investment Policy Committee of the church. And my understanding is that at least once a year the committee visits Enzyme Peak and visits the entire team. And I presume that the Ensign Peak team presents things to. To the IPC and that the IPC talks and refers back to the. And reports back to the. To Enzyme Peak team as well. And so it's just interesting to me that it's not even just the regular members that don't have access to all of this information. Even apostles in 70s, you know, for Relief Society Presidency, the General Relief Society Presidency doesn't have any access to this. It's just those six. And it seems as though, you know, the SEC confirmed this as well. And so that that was kind of where we left off last time. I don't know if there was. You know, we kind of talked last time about, about this issue, about the secrecy around it, but we could go to the next slide if you want. It has a ton of information about what's in Enzyme Peak. If you want, let's do it. So this slide, like I said, has a ton of information for those of you. And I'm going to try and do a better job than I did last time about describing the slides. I didn't think that. I didn't realize that, you know, a lot of you are just listening. I guess I should have realized that that's how podcasts work. So I'll try and do a better job this time of describing the slides for the people that are just listening in. But this slide has a bunch of bubbles of different sizes, and what it's trying to show is the relative size of different types of assets that are under management at Enzyme Peak. And so for the lay audience, I think a lot of you probably know what equity investments are, debt investments. But I'm going to go through, if that's okay, John, and just describe to anybody who's listening who maybe isn't aware kind of what stocks are.

John Dehlin [00:21:01] Definitely.

Spencer Anderson [00:21:02] Is that okay?

John Dehlin [00:21:03] Absolutely.

Spencer Anderson [00:21:04] Okay. So you know about, I would say 28% of what the Church puts into Enzyme Peak is, is this, these U.S. stocks. Okay. And that's, that's the 13F filing information that we were, that the SEC has been all about. Right. So all of this SEC scandal that refers to 28% of the assets that Enzyme Peak has. I think I did my math right. I think it's something like 28%. And what, what, what an equity stock is. This is where you own part of a company that has. And so you have, you could own like broad ownership within the market or you could be, you know, I could be a part owner when I buy stock. You could be a part owner when you buy stock. And the way that you get money off of owning equity stocks is the money the company is presumably going to take your money that you've given to the company and they're going to use it for purposes like selling a product or whatever. So when you invest in Apple, they're going to take your money and they're going to take it and turn it into a larger return. And so then you're going to get a return on your investment by getting dividends. So like a bonus, some more money comes back to you. Or you could also earn money by selling your shares of ownership at a higher price than what you bought it for. So those are equity stocks and that's what the church owns. Something like 40 something billion in stocks, total bonds. In this case, that's just like Coca

John Dehlin [00:22:38] Cola or Apple or Microsoft or.

Spencer Anderson [00:22:40] Yep. They're usually public companies. Yeah, anybody could be an owner as long as you got the money for it.

John Dehlin [00:22:46] Okay.

Spencer Anderson [00:22:47] Bonds, in this case, you want to think of being of bonds as like you are the bank and you are lending a company some money. Okay. So the company is borrowing money from you and they're paying you interest. Kind of like if you were to pay your mortgage every month, they're going to pay you interest every six months usually. And then at the end of some predetermined period, like at 10 years or so, they're going to give you the money back and pay off their loan to you. That's the way bonds work. So you're essentially an debt investor, and you are the one that's funding the company's mortgage. Let's call it their mortgage. Okay. So that's kind of how a bond would work. Okay. Hybrid securities. There's, you know, there's a smaller bubble that represents hybrid securities, and they're a little bit more unique, but let's just say that they have some characteristics of equity and some characteristics of debt. So they might have a fixed income component and a variable income component, or they might have some conversion option that turns it from a bond into a stock or things like that. But just for purposes of this, just think of it like the reason why it's called hybrid securities is that it's a mixture of both. Okay. So they're a little bit more complicated. Private equity funds, those are usually limited partnerships, and usually with these, you're buying a large portion of a private company, you're restructuring it, and oftentimes you're selling it off after that and selling it off at a profit.

John Dehlin [00:24:18] Is that like hedge funds and stuff?

Spencer Anderson [00:24:20] Hedge funds would be more like stocks. Okay. So private equity funds would be like. Think about, like, venture capitalism, things that. Like Mitt Romney.

John Dehlin [00:24:32] Like Bain Capital.

Gerardo Sumano [00:24:34] Sure.

Spencer Anderson [00:24:34] Yep.

John Dehlin [00:24:35] Okay.

Spencer Anderson [00:24:35] Yep.

John Dehlin [00:24:35] Okay.

Spencer Anderson [00:24:37] It's essentially your owning part of a company, but it's private instead of public. And so you're not owning stock, you're a larger investor of a private company.

Gerardo Sumano [00:24:46] Like Shark Tank.

Spencer Anderson [00:24:48] Yeah, yeah, like Shark Tank. That's a great example. Although I doubt that people are presenting their products to Ensign Peaks.

John Dehlin [00:24:55] Right, right.

Spencer Anderson [00:24:58] And then real estate, you know, I think that one's the one that everybody kind of knows about. Real estate would include land. It would include buildings, things like City Creek. It would include that hotel in Hawaii, the church purchased apartment complex in Philadelphia. It would include all their ranches and their farms. And for the private equity funds and for the real estate, they are paying income taxes on these, but they're likely not paying capital gains taxes or property taxes on at least most of these.

Rebecca Biblioteca [00:25:30] Can I just make one comment that's

Spencer Anderson [00:25:31] kind of the gist of all of these? Yeah.

Rebecca Biblioteca [00:25:33] Sorry to cut you off, Spencer. I was just thinking, when you're going over all these, the securities and the bonds and the real estate, I don't know if you guys are aware of this, really, but when my parents, you know, the 60s or so, the idea was that you don't necessarily invest in the stock market. It was seen sort of as gambling. And even land development was seen among faithful members as sort of gambling. And it's just so ironic to Me that all the tithing they paid their entire lives and the tithing that's being paid now is literally gambling, quote, to use their word, in the stock market. I just find it really funny. Had you guys heard that before that there was that thought that perhaps investing in the stock market was gambling?

John Dehlin [00:26:14] Interesting.

Rebecca Biblioteca [00:26:15] Yeah. Isn't that strange?

Spencer Anderson [00:26:17] Yeah, I think that if you're, especially if you're not an informed investor like they are, it kind of is.

Rebecca Biblioteca [00:26:23] It kind of is. That's true.

Church Debt, Liquidity, and SEC Filings

John Dehlin [00:26:26] Hey, really quickly, really quickly, Spencer, There's a question from the audience. You may be planning to talk about this, but Alyssa asks, does the Mormon Church currently have any debt? Do you want to answer that? I mean, I'm sure the answer is we don't know. But, but you know, we probably do know.

Spencer Anderson [00:26:44] Yeah. Widows might, might be able to clarify, but my, my understanding is not, is that it does not.

Rebecca Biblioteca [00:26:50] Yeah.

Spencer Anderson [00:26:50] Except for, you know, if it does, then it's something that they can immediately pay off. The mentality of especially Gordon B. Hinckley, was if we're going to build a new building at byu, not only do we have to pay for it with cash, but we have to be able to pay for all of its future renovations and we have to be able to have all the money on hand to pay for all of its utilities going forward. And so it's a very conservative approach to. And so, you know, the, it seems as though, at least at a very high level, the church practices what it preaches in terms of staying out of debt. And they've been burned in the past on this. Right. And so they, they know what it's like as, you know, as a church, as an institution, their times haven't always been great for the church. And so I think that maybe they are maybe a little over overly conservative if you ask me. But as far as I know, they don't have any debt.

John Dehlin [00:27:50] I worked for the church for a year as a contractor. I remember it being sort of broadly known that the church was self insured, meaning it was so rich it didn't generally tend to hold insurance policies. Have you heard anything like that, Spencer? And does that even make sense to you?

Spencer Anderson [00:28:09] Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And not only that, but like, I guess, I guess their mentality, the way that they would construct a balance sheet would be that they would think of things like their BYU buildings or their temples as a form of obligations, as a form of debt. So when they have these reserve funds, they're thinking, okay, I've got all of these funds that I could use And I could liquidate them, turn them into cash, and I could use them for my other purposes. Well, they have other buildings that they're never going to sell off. They're never going to sell off their temples. They're never going to sell off their land in Temple Square or downtown Salt Lake City or in Provo. And so those are seen as sort of the debt, Right, that they have to fund. They have to sort of pay into that, but it's all internal. So it's not the same as the traditional form of debt. But they, I think, have that mentality where they think of it like an obligation that they have to hold on to this cash in order to, in order to, you know, for example, buildings, you know, you know that they're going to depreciate over time. And you've got to, you've got to be ready. You've got to have the cash on hand in order to keep those buildings going, replace them, right? Yes. Yeah.

Rebecca Biblioteca [00:29:25] And imagine if you were to make them all earthquake proof. Right. Like what they're doing to the Salt Lake Temple. That's going to take a lot of money if they decide to do that to other temples. So.

John Dehlin [00:29:33] Yeah, good point, Rebecca.

Spencer Anderson [00:29:36] Yeah.

John Dehlin [00:29:36] Okay, so anything else we want to say about this slide?

Spencer Anderson [00:29:42] Well, yeah, the only other thing is on the graphic, it talks about liquidity on the graphic. And so if you go from left to right, you can see, I guess for the people that aren't watching, that there's a broad spectrum in terms of what is liquid and what is not liquid. And what it means to be liquid is whether you can sell it for cash quickly. So by design, it heavily skews toward having liquid investments. Enzyme peak does 80, 75 to 85% of enzyme peak could be turned into cash within three months. And some of you might think that that's a really long time to turn things into cash. Three months. But given the size of the portfolio,

John Dehlin [00:30:27] what do you think, Spencer? Is that a long time or not so long?

Spencer Anderson [00:30:31] Well, it's not that long given the size of the portfolio. But it also makes me wonder, this argument about this being a rainy day fund. If it's a real rainy day and it comes quickly and catches them off guard, they're not going to be able to liquidate in time to capture all of the value that's within the firm and then use that cash for whatever the rainy day is. And so let's say that the rainy day is a pandemic, but this time it's. It's a pandemic and millions are dying and they really need to pull out the cash, like right away. Three months is a long time in those sort of scenarios. And so the whole rainy day idea is kind of upended when you think about that part of it.

Rebecca Biblioteca [00:31:25] Could I make a comment about liquidating everything? I feel that that is the absolute reason that the SEC needs to know who has that money. I mean, that's a, that's a portion of the stock market that can literally be taken out of play within three months. That could cause, I would think, some kind of global panic havoc. And when you have shell companies and it's very nebulous as far as who knows it, that's a problem too. I think that's what reporting is all about is they want to know who owns this large portion of it that could be liquidated in, depending on how you look at it, long or short. Three months is not that long if you're taking that all out of the stock market. So do you have any thoughts on that, Spencer?

Spencer Anderson [00:32:05] Yeah, you're absolutely right, Rebecca. So the reason that 13 Fs even exist, and one of the reasons is to. Is because these are market movers, right? They own enough. There's a reason why it's over 10 million in assets. If you own more than 10 million in direct US stock holdings, you have to file these 13F filings. And part of the reason for that is that you are a market mover and so you have to sort of divulge what it is that you're doing and so that people can kind of see, see otherwise you could kind of, you could create a run on the market sort of scenario where people panic. They see the stock go down. And it's one thing if the stock goes down because one individual or one firm is pulling out. It's another thing if everybody's pulling out. And so sometimes there's a reason for stock price going down and it has nothing to do with the value of the company. And that's what the third, you know, that's what, you know, to protect the interests of investors. We would want to know what, which scenario we're in. If, if the stock price is going down just because Enzyme Peak is selling off. That's a very different issue than all of, you know, a million different people selling off.

Rebecca Biblioteca [00:33:16] And don't you think that might be a point of concern if they realize that all those assets are literally under the control of one person instead of, you know, a board, a corporation, it's one person, the president of the corporation of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints. They can just say liquidate, press that button. So it's an interesting scenario that you don't find in other companies, I think.

Spencer Anderson [00:33:37] Yeah, not only that, but like before they used to think it was 12 companies, 12 different companies. And so now they know that it was one company.

Rebecca Biblioteca [00:33:46] Yeah, one man with his finger on the button. I'm telling you, it gives you something to think about.

Gerardo Sumano [00:33:51] Yeah, that's a good point.

John Dehlin [00:33:54] All right, well, let's go. Should we go to the next slide, Spencer?

Spencer Anderson [00:33:58] Yeah, I mean, like, I guess 1. Can I do one more thing? Sorry on that one. We're going so long in this slide. I didn't see there was a lot of information.

John Dehlin [00:34:05] Don't apologize. Let's do. Let's do this. Well, go ahead.

Spencer Anderson [00:34:09] Okay. So, you know, they're also trying to diversify their risk exposure across these different types of investments, which is essentially the volatility or the performance of the. On the investment. You could lose it all, or you could double or triple or more. Out of U.S. stocks. Right. Out of equity stocks. But with bonds, your upside is limited and your downside is limited to some extent. And so what they're trying to do is kind of, you know, diversify. They're diversifying their risk. This is a sound strategy from an investments perspective. And then an important clarifier here that I wanted to highlight. This blue bubble for those of you who can see the U.S. the direct U.S. stock holdings that are under Enzyme Peak control, that's the only piece that we have public information for. That's the 13F filings. So sometimes we get these news reports that say things like, yeah, 30 something. They say that the church lost $8 billion in the last quarter or something like that. That amount is only related to that blue bubble. It's only related to that small piece of, you know, a third of. Of Enzyme Peak's total investments. And I think that people get confused by this because they say something like, oh, well, the market hasn't done very well. And so the church is actually, Enzyme Peak is only worth like 30 billion. And that's not true. That's when. When, you know, Wall Street Journal comes out with an article about Enzyme Peak's performance in the last quarter based on their 13F filings. It's only talking about the direct US stock holdings where they own more than a certain amount in assets. Right. So it doesn't include international stocks. It doesn't include any of their debt investments. It doesn't include hybrid securities or or private ventures or. Or their. Or their land ownership. And so there. It's very limited. And so I, I want to make that clear because I keep seeing this on Facebook comments, and it bothers me. You know, I just want to correct everybody, but I don't. I don't have the time to do it. So hopefully everybody else can go do that.

Rebecca Biblioteca [00:36:18] Basically, we could tell people that that's really only just the tip of the iceberg. And do you see any avenues that eventually there would be transporting or reporting or transparency on any of these other holdings or investments? Or is that just always going to be under the radar?

Spencer Anderson [00:36:33] It's always going to be under the radar until the church decides to do otherwise. But I guess there is like the 990T that you talked about, John. If they sell off some of their private venture ownership, that gain ends up getting potentially taxed. And so that amount is going to show up in the 990T, but it's not. It doesn't tell you how much they own total. Right. It just is going to say like, oh, they decided to sell off on this amount or they decide to sell off on their. Their ownership in this private equity venture. So there are. There is some kind of inkling of some information, but it's. You can't tie it all together with the 990T. So that's maybe a little more detailed than you wanted to know, but.

John Dehlin [00:37:23] Oh, that's great. Okay, what's next?

Spencer Anderson [00:37:29] Yeah, so the next slide's good.

John Dehlin [00:37:31] Okay, let's go to the next slide.

Spencer Anderson [00:37:33] So some have. Some people have asked. They think that, you know, the church has other enzyme peaks out there that they just are like have all these, what are called dark assets that nobody knows about that aren't under enzyme peak. Like maybe there's a separate enzyme peak that the SEC doesn't even know about.

John Dehlin [00:37:52] Spencer, you. You've. You froze for a second and I. You're going to come back in just a second.

Spencer Anderson [00:37:56] One.

John Dehlin [00:37:57] One thing I texted you off screen if, if there's a way for you to text and just see if there's family members on streaming stuff.

Gerardo Sumano [00:38:05] Your.

John Dehlin [00:38:06] Your video sometimes coming through a little bit choppy, so I don't know if that's possible for you to do, but you're. You're back now, so let's go ahead. Well, let me just. While you're doing that, let's see. We've got some comments here. Oh, okay. So Doctor. Doctor who. Doctor without dogma says he's only freezing on our end. So really Quickly. Just checking with the audience. Are other people hearing him freeze or is that just us? Sounds like that may just be us. And if that's the case, yeah, it is, but. Okay.

Gerardo Sumano [00:38:45] Okay.

John Dehlin [00:38:45] Go ahead and go back, Spencer. We'll stop interrupting. Sorry about that. Keep going.

Spencer Anderson [00:38:50] Well, I'm glad nobody else is watching Netflix or anything, so that's good. So. Yeah, so I guess what we were talking about is this. Is there some other Enzyme Peak? Are there like, dark assets out there that the Church owns like hundreds of billions of assets and, you know, they're operating like the Illuminati or something behind the scenes. And I don't mean to denigrate this view because we distrust the Church sometimes on these things for good reason. I think that, you know, it's like, well, how do we know what we know? And. Right. And so in this case, though, I think it's pretty clear. And now I'm frozen a little bit, but I think it's pretty clear that there isn't an extra Enzyme Peak behind the scenes. And the real nail in the coffin on this was the SEC order. When the SEC engaged in its investigation, it was, it was commandeering all of their emails the Enzyme Peak had and the Church had related to investments it was taking over, you know, phone calls and phone transcripts. The SEC would have found some extra investment advisor that, you know, that we didn't know about. In addition to that, like, we already know that the Church has like, these other large organizations, like, for example, Intellect, Intellectual Property, what's it called, the property reserve. They have, they have a lot of assets. And those like auxiliaries, those are all under the umbrella of Enzyme Peak. So it doesn't make sense if they're going to, like, you know, separate things out into multiple organizations. Why all of the known organizations are under Enzyme Peaks umbrella. And so if you add all of this up, you look at the paper trail that we do have, we look at the fact that if you look at past estimates of Church wealth, it all leads to a pretty clear estimate of what we have under Enzyme Peak. When you look at the fact that about a billion dollars is going in every year in excess tithing, and that corroborates what David Nielsen's allegations were about the additional reserves that were going into to Enzyme Peak, all of that tells a story that this is the big. This is the biggest driver of, of reserves for the church. And the SEC order specifically says that Enzyme Peak was created as a manager for all the reserve funds. So that's, to me, you know, I think that that's one rumor that kind of goes out around. And I don't think that, you know, there's any evidence that widows might. Has been able to find, or anybody for that matter, has been able to find any other, you know, dark assets. At least not in like. At least not like in the billions, you know, of dollars. I don't know if there's anything else that stood out to you there, but.

John Dehlin [00:41:48] No, I mean, I would hope that that'd be true. I guess we don't know for sure until the Church becomes financially transparent.

Spencer Anderson [00:41:56] But, yeah, I think we've learned too. A lot of people that have left the Church at least have learned to try and not believe things unless there's evidence to support it. And in this case, we have zero evidence to support it. And I believe that the proper. The proper approach to this is to withhold belief that there are any dark assets out there that makes sense.

Gerardo Sumano [00:42:18] And I think what you're trying to say also is that the evidence also points out to the fact that most, if not all of the assets are inside in Time peak. And there's. Most of the evidence points out that that's where the Church is holding most of its wealth.

Spencer Anderson [00:42:40] That's correct. Okay, that's right. Perfect. So I guess we can go to the next slide that was a lot faster than the prior one. That's good. We'll actually get done tonight.

The 13F Filings and Hidden LLC Structures

John Dehlin [00:42:54] We're not in a marathon. We're not in a sprint. We're in a marathon.

Spencer Anderson [00:42:57] Okay, so this is a really neat slide that kind of just shows the path that the Church took with Enzyme Peak in terms of disclosing the stuff that we do know. So these are the US Direct stockholders, direct US Stock holdings, the ones that they knew that they had to file 13 Fs for originally. They started off with one fund, one LLC in or, and they reported, you know, under that one fund, Ensign Peak believes that this was Whitney Asset Management. After that, they split off into two. And we. I think we know kind of the story that happened from the SEC order about all of this. But from there they realized that, you know, the size of the fund is actually so large that we want to hide even further how many, you know, how much wealth we have here. And so they divided into six, I believe, and then from there, 12. And around 2018, Mormon leaks discovered sort of this. This approach that the Church was taking to divide.

Gerardo Sumano [00:44:09] It was.

John Dehlin [00:44:09] It was actually a leaker who I've been in contact with through email. He disclosed two Mormon Leaks. What he discovered. I just, I don't. I don't want to shortchange the original leaker before even David Nielsen. Sorry.

Spencer Anderson [00:44:24] Yeah. And I hope that the leaker was an accounting professor. That's what I like to think. It wasn't me. But this is, this approach actually to find. This is something that's done in accounting research. So I would love it if that was the case. So in 2020, or, sorry, in 2019, the SEC approached the church. The church didn't immediately respond in terms of its 13F filings, but by its December 31 filing, and it was filed in February 2020, they started to then file all of their assets that they had to for the 13 Fs under one umbrella, which was Ensign Peak, which is what they should have been doing all along. And there's absolutely zero question that that's what they should have been doing all along. You know, you can quibble about, like, whether legally they could have gotten away with it if there was regulatory risk versus not the, the. The whole purpose of the 13F filings, like we talked about, was to. To allow us to see these big market movers and what they're investing in so that we aren't caught off guard. And if the church thought that this was okay, like legally okay, then what you're arguing for is that maybe Warren Buffett's firm, Berkshire Hathaway, could have created 10,000 LLCs, right. And they could have operated under. With no suspicion whatsoever. And in fact, they could have made it so that they created enough LLCs that they went under the threshold of 10 million assets in assets, and then they wouldn't have had to file 13Fs at all. And the church seems to be arguing or seem to have been operating under this assumption that all of that would have been fine. And it's very clear that that's not okay. The SEC never would have thought that that's okay. I find it very odd that they. They think that they just got bad legal advice wherein, like, this is a very clear violation of what the whole purpose of a 13F is.

Rebecca Biblioteca [00:46:31] Could I make a comment? Oh, go ahead, John. Sorry.

John Dehlin [00:46:33] Oh, just really quickly, I, I think in. In our conversation with Mark Pugsley, I.

Spencer Anderson [00:46:38] We're.

John Dehlin [00:46:39] It's pretty clear that the lawyers and the accountants actually recommended that the church not do this, and the church wanted to do it anyway. So it. They wanted, in their. It seemed like they wanted in their public statement to make it sound like they were following the advice of their attorneys and the, you know, Ensign Peak and The truth is, I think they overrode the council of their attorneys and of Ensign Peak. Does that sound right, Spencer?

Spencer Anderson [00:47:06] I mean, I'm not a lawyer, so you'd have to ask RFM how shady lawyers can be. But as an accountant, as a financial reporting expert, I, I, I think that they would have, I would ask any accountant that offers this type of advice to give up your CPA license. It's, it would be awful, awful advice.

John Dehlin [00:47:25] Rebecca? Yeah. Did you want to add something, Rebecca?

Rebecca Biblioteca [00:47:28] Yeah, I was going to say, I actually did ask RFM that question, and he said no. The, the cart is driven by the client. The lawyer will, you know, do what the client wants, give them different options. But the idea, the impetus, definitely comes from the client being the church, the person who wants, you know, something to happen, to take action. But what I was going to comment before, before was that I think it's interesting if you read church statements and you read news articles about putting everything back under one umbrella, like Spencer was mentioning before, it just makes it sound like sort of on their own, they arrived at that, like, yeah, we should have been doing this. And that, of course, is not the case at all. They basically had their hand in the cookie jar and they quickly had to scramble to put everything in order. So it's interesting how it's kind of spun if you look at statements and articles.

Spencer Anderson [00:48:13] Yeah.

John Dehlin [00:48:14] Oh, go ahead, Spencer.

Spencer Anderson [00:48:16] Sorry, I didn't mean to interrupt, but.

John Dehlin [00:48:17] No, please.

Spencer Anderson [00:48:19] Yeah, it's like Rebecca's kind of saying, it's like the church acted like, whoopsie. Like that was all it was. You know, oops, we filed the wrong forms. I don't know how we did that, but it's a very deliberate action that was taken. And let me be clear, in terms of misinformation, correction here, having shell companies isn't against the law. So I think that sometimes people are like, well, the church had shell companies. Like, how could you be. So, you know, it's obvious, like, just how bad the church was being. But having shell companies isn't against the law. You can actually use shell companies in a legal way. For example, when you're in, it can be like a transaction vehicle. So if you have one company that's purchasing another company in order to separate out the assets that are being purchased, sometimes you'll create a shell company and you'll just hold those assets into that shell company for purposes of the contract. So that's sometimes why you would create a shell company. So simply having shell companies isn't the issue. It's why they created them. That is shady.

Gerardo Sumano [00:49:21] Well, and how too. Right. Because it's my understanding that they were claiming that the assets were owned and in possession of those shell companies, when in reality those shell companies never owned any money. And the managers that were claiming to be the managers and the decision makers of the money were never the decision makers of the money. It was always one person. And that person was a prophet of the church. So it was. I would say it's also a little bit more than just, you know, the why it was created, but also the way it was handled, you know?

Spencer Anderson [00:50:01] Yeah, yeah, absolutely. So, yeah, they should have reported because all of the investment decisions were under the management of their investment manager of Enzyme Peak. So they're. They're their general manager and that's the person who signs the forms of 13F. Right. So that. But they were having. This is what makes things really difficult is the church was essentially, in order to engage in this behavior, was forcing employees to lie and lie to the sec.

Gerardo Sumano [00:50:32] Right.

Rebecca Biblioteca [00:50:32] Yeah.

Spencer Anderson [00:50:33] That's a very difficult thing to. I mean, when you have. When you're forcing your employees to do that. And we know that a couple of employees quit once they realized what they were being asked to do. I think that it's not fair to those employees to ask them to engage in what could be something like perjury because you're signing these forms that you're lying about. You aren't really signing what you say that you're signing for.

John Dehlin [00:50:59] Absolutely. Really, really quickly. I'm going to give a quick shout out. I just have to thank Andrew Tibbets. He gave us a super chat donation and those things help. Help keep us going. So thank you, Andrew. And also Mark. And yeah, so Mark's giving us some IT instructions as well. So that's. That's good to know. All right, so thank you so much for everyone who is supporting us today. All right, back to you, Spencer.

Gerardo Sumano [00:51:30] I wanted you.

John Dehlin [00:51:31] Oh, Gerardo. Yeah.

Gerardo Sumano [00:51:32] To mention that.

John Dehlin [00:51:32] Yeah.

Gerardo Sumano [00:51:33] Our famous just made a comment and said no attorney told President Nelson it was okay to file fraudulent forms with the sec.

John Dehlin [00:51:41] Yeah, yeah, exactly. Yeah. Like when you. Spencer, you tell me if I'm wrong, but when. When you're a professional advising a corporation, you know, you're. You're probably most likely concerned about the ethics and doing what's going to allow you to keep your license and not be blown up like Arthur Anderson and Enron. Is that. Is that fair to say?

Spencer Anderson [00:52:04] Yeah, absolutely. I mean, sometimes a company, when you engage in tax aggressive behaviors or something like that there are tax strategies that could end up, like, biting you in the butt as a corporation. And so sometimes you'll get, like, tax advice, for example, where you won't cross the line to, like, tax evasion. But what you try and do is you try. It's a gray area in terms of the law. And so what you try and do is you try and minimize your tax burden and you create a corporation in Ireland or something like that, or Delaware, and in that way you've sort of formed a tax shelter. This type. Type of stuff, where it's a gray area totally makes sense to me for this one, for the enzyme, for the 13F filings. It doesn't really seem like a gray area to me. When you read the purpose of the 13 Fs, when you read that in order to file a 13 F, you have to have these investment managers, which they knew because they had to create different investment managers for each of these LLCs. It was clear that they were. They were trying to operate outside of. Of the law. And that's what they did. Right. They broke the law. And so it seems pretty clear to me, so either they didn't have an accountant that they asked, or, you know, they. They had somebody that was misinformed giving advice, or else they just disregarded the advice that they got.

Rebecca Biblioteca [00:53:34] Well, and if I could just comment. I know I've heard from a lot of people, they didn't understand the advice or they weren't in a position to know. Does anybody know who Eyring was and is? I mean, he literally spent his career teaching people about shell companies and how to do this kind of thing. So, yes, they absolutely did have knowledge at the upper levels of the church what this entails and what this meant. And what they were doing, I believe

John Dehlin [00:53:58] isn't hiring like a Harvard MBA, Stanford PhD kind of thing.

Rebecca Biblioteca [00:54:03] Yep.

Spencer Anderson [00:54:04] Yeah, I think he got his.

Rebecca Biblioteca [00:54:05] No, he knows how to do this. He taught people how to do this.

John Dehlin [00:54:08] Yeah.

Rebecca Biblioteca [00:54:09] Okay.

John Dehlin [00:54:11] All right, well, should we get anything else on this slide before we go to the next one, Spencer?

How the Church Concealed Stock Holdings

Spencer Anderson [00:54:17] No, it's kind of. I mean, what it shows is kind of how there's this cascading effect. And I think people see this in normal life, when you tell one lie, it kind of spins out of control. This happens a lot in accounting. Like, at what point was like, let's say that you're a new member of the first presidency in 2012, and you're trying to come clean. At what point can you come clean? There's just. No, this was just Going to spin out of control until. Until somebody caught them and stopped them. And so I wonder if, you know, like if I was President Uchtdorf, for example, who didn't. Wasn't involved in the start of this thing, I would be relieved that it's all over, you know, because you can't really stop the train once it gets rolling. And I'm using these really bad metaphors, but I hope that people understand what I'm talking about here. There was no point up until the SEC came in and stopped them that they could have really stopped it themselves. Right. It would have been difficult for them to do so because you just get caught in the lie and the lie gets bigger and the lie gets bigger.

John Dehlin [00:55:24] Got it. All right. When you tell one lie, it leads to another. Then you tell two lies, cover another. Anyway, sorry, that's the Mormon in me coming out. Okay, next slide. Should we go to the next slide?

Spencer Anderson [00:55:42] Sure. Okay, this is just kind of an overview of what happened with the sec, so we can maybe gloss over this one. But the LLC is holding Enzyme Peak. Stocks were kept hidden. Right. Their shell companies were discovered by accident. The idea here that you were talking about this person who discovered them and then told Mormon Leaks and told your. Told you as well, basically the way that the church created these LLCs, they didn't do a very good job out of it because they didn't, you know, I guess they didn't cover all of their tracks because they created all of these LLCs from the same server as church websites. And so people could look at the IP address they didn't use, which these were created and from which these were filed, and they could track it back to the. To the Church. And that made it so that they left a trail, you know, a trail in terms of being able to track them down and, and identify. And they were all created, I think, on the same day as well. So they didn't do. I mean, it seems as though that would be a really bad thing to do if you really were trying to cover your tracks. There has been other accounting research that. I really like this.

John Dehlin [00:56:59] I've been in touch email wise, with. With the original leaker. And he wishes. I think he wishes he could. He could speak up, but I don't think he's in a position to do that right now.

Spencer Anderson [00:57:10] All right, well, if you're an accounting professor, I think there's been some really cool accounting research that's done this where they basically look at the IP addresses of who is accessing forms on the SEC or the IRS website to try and see if, you know, if it's investors that are looking at it, if it's the SEC that's looking at your company. Because if it's coming from the SEC's IP address, then that's maybe a bad thing. It means that they're investigating you. So there's all this kind of cool research that looks at IP addresses. And I think once that kind of got out, people started saying, wow, I've got to like, I've got to send it from somewhere else so I can hide my tracks if that's what I'm trying to do. But the gist of this, you know, the SEC issue at the end of it, you know, the church provided this response where the church said, the matter is closed. And I take some issue with that because first of all, from an investor standpoint, there's something called cockroach theory. I don't know if you heard of that, John or Rebecca or Gerardo.

John Dehlin [00:58:16] No, I can guess. But tell us.

Spencer Anderson [00:58:19] So the saying goes kind of like, what do you do when you find a cockroach in the kitchen and you get rid of it? How do you respond if you found one cockroach in your kitchen? And I don't know. This isn't a rhetorical question. I don't know if any of you have an answer.

John Dehlin [00:58:35] You step on it. That's what I do. I step on cockroaches.

Rebecca Biblioteca [00:58:38] Yeah.

Spencer Anderson [00:58:39] So you get rid of it, though. How do you feel after you've gotten rid of the one cockroach in your kitchen?

Rebecca Biblioteca [00:58:43] You assume there are more. Many more.

Spencer Anderson [00:58:47] Yeah. So the cockroach theory is basically coined by Warren Buffett, who has said there's never only one cockroach in the kitchen. And I mean, this is a non scientific theory, obviously, but savvy investors understand that problems like this don't appear in a vacuum. The conditions were ripe for misreporting to occur with the sec. And that means that they're ripe for other improprieties by the ensign peak and the Church may have done. And we see this all over the place. Right. So like we've seen that they are, they tend to obfuscate. The Church tends to obfuscate its, its church history. It's, it obfuscates the financial history of its or the financial wealth that it owns. And I think it would be safe to presume that there are more cockroaches out there in the church. And that's kind of what a savvy investor would do. They wouldn't just Say, oh, well, the church cleaned up this cockroach. The matter is closed. No need for an exterminator. And I think even the church internally has probably responded pretty strongly to this in terms of creating better internal controls, removing regulatory risk and things like that. And so my guess is that the church knows that there could be other cockroaches out there, and they're trying to address them internally. The other thing I would mention, too, is they were worried about the size of the fund in 1997. So the fund is large now. The fund is huge now. They were worried about the size of the fund back when it was only $7 billion. And so that tells you just how much money we're dealing with. They were worried what members would think when. If they were to find out that they had $7 billion in the fund. And granted, that was in 1997, so you adjust for inflation, but it's really grown since then. And so you can tell just like. I mean, they must have just been terrified at this point about how. How large the fund is.

John Dehlin [01:00:50] All right, so I think the next slide. Should we go to the next slide?

Spencer Anderson [01:00:54] Sure.

John Dehlin [01:00:55] All right.

Spencer Anderson [01:00:56] So are we okay? Is this a. Is this dynamic working for the audience? John? I don't know if this is good.

John Dehlin [01:01:01] This is fantastic. Yeah, let's keep going. Yeah, Great job. This is really important stuff.

What the Church Invests In and Its Strategy

Spencer Anderson [01:01:07] So we're going to talk a little bit about what the church invests in in terms of the stock market. So what we do know from the 13F filings, and I think that, you know, first of all, it's important to realize that the church is engaging in what's called an active investment strategy. And there are probably two reasons that the church would engage in an active investment strategy. When I say an active investment, I mean strategies where they are picking individual stocks instead of just investing in mutual funds and letting those mutual funds do their thing. So that would be a passive investment strategy. The church is doing active investment, where they are trading a lot each quarter on each stock, and they are reevaluating their positions frequently. And so the reason that they would do this first is to earn returns on those stocks through dividends or through selling your stocks at a higher price at a higher level than what you would get if you were engaging in a passive strategy. So they think active through active investment, that they can earn a higher return. And we call that alpha or abnormal returns or excess returns on investment in the industry. The second reason to engage in this type of active management strategy would be to engage in a values Based strategy. And this makes sense for a church, I think, you know, maybe they want to avoid investing in certain strategies that don't align with the church's values. So sin stocks and things like that. And the church appears to be trying to do both of these things. Okay, so they're engaging in active management, active investment in order to earn a higher return and in order to avoid certain stocks and certain companies.

John Dehlin [01:02:53] Give us some example of some sin stocks.

Spencer Anderson [01:02:55] Yeah, so the obvious sin stocks that everybody would agree with that aren't LDS would. Would include things like tobacco, adult entertainment stocks. Some would include war stocks. So Lockheed Martin that provides or creates weapons for the army, that would be potentially included. Gambling stocks, alcohol stocks, Those would all be included in sin stocks. The church might include additional sin stocks because there are more things that they think are sins. So things like coffee or, or maybe Coca Cola, maybe soft pornography. So things like Tommy Hilfiger or something like that might be something that they wouldn't want to support. So. And we'll talk a little bit more about which ones they do support and which ones they don't. But I think this, this slide here kind of just shows what the S. And if they were to invest in The S&P 500, this is the weights that they would put on their portfolio balances. So, for example, Apple, if they were to invest in the S&P 500, roughly 6.5% of their investment would be in Apple. What the Church has done and what they operate under is what's called an investment weighting strategy. And what they do is they'll take the S&P 500 as sort of a baseline, and then they'll adjust and they'll either underweight or overweight the stock compared to the S&P 500 as a baseline. And this is important to realize what they're doing, because if. If an investor tried to mimic the church's investment strategy, they might look at the church and they might say, wow, the church owns millions and millions in Apple. Billions in Apple, potentially. I don't know what the number is exactly, but they own a lot of money in Apple, therefore, they must really, really like Apple. But if you actually look at what their strategy is, they actually are underweighting Apple compared to the S&P 500. So they. They actually own less in Apple than what they would have invested if they. If they invested in the S P. So S&P 500 is basically the largest 500 companies in the United States. We'll just consider it that way for, for purposes of this discussion one that's

Gerardo Sumano [01:05:22] kind of interesting to me is the MasterCard one. And if you pull up the slide, it seems like the Church invests more on MasterCard, is that true? Than as the S&P 500.

Spencer Anderson [01:05:36] That's right. And I find that weird, too. They invest a lot in MasterCard and none in Visa. I don't know how to interpret that, but you can see that there. That is Visa on there. Yeah, Visa's on there. You know, if they were to invest in the S&P 500, about 1% of their investment would be in Visa. Instead, they don't invest at all in Visa.

John Dehlin [01:05:59] That I just want to know, like, hey, viewers and listeners, somebody tell us why the Church has a beef with Visa. Like, did Governor Boggs own does, Like a descendant of Governor Boggs own lease Visa? Like, what is it?

Gerardo Sumano [01:06:14] Like, it's Revelation, John.

Spencer Anderson [01:06:17] Yeah, I mean, it could be. It could be something silly like, you know, like Costco doesn't allow Visa. I don't know. But, but it could be that there could be a fundamentals reason that maybe they are not investing in Visa. Maybe they're taking a position that says, you know, Visa is not well balanced. Or they, or they don't like the. Maybe they're. They really believe in MasterCard in terms of its economic performance in the future. So it could be something like that or it could be something that you're saying where it's like maybe they've. One of the, one of the First Presidency has a beef with Visa or something. Right. And we just don't know.

Rebecca Biblioteca [01:06:50] Or what if one of the first presidency has family members high up in MasterCard? Maybe you look at it the other way around. Why are they investing in MasterCard?

John Dehlin [01:06:58] Yeah, yeah, I, I'm just looking at this. The only other purely black line that has no blue is Coca Cola.

Spencer Anderson [01:07:07] Right. Coca Cola and PepsiCo are both ones that they avoid. Those ones seem to be for moral purposes. Right. Or at least avoiding the appearance of evil.

John Dehlin [01:07:18] Yeah. Okay, so that's Coca lime. And that's weird because, you know, a couple years ago, the Church allowed Coca Cola to be sold at byu, Right? So isn't that a little bit weird that they wouldn't just start buying it again?

Gerardo Sumano [01:07:29] I mean, it could be that the investors didn't get the memo yet and they still are on the assumption that caffeine is bad. Because this is another thing I wanted to point out that something that was really interesting to me from the last episode was that Spencer mentioned that even though the Church is doing this, you know, not really following the S and P 500 to the T, but just kind of doing adjusting based on, you know, because probably they believe they can do better than the S&P 500. It seems like they haven't done much better than if they were just investing in the S&P 500. Is that right, Spencer?

Spencer Anderson [01:08:09] Yeah. We have a slide that kind of talks a little bit about this in the future, but they aren't. Yeah.

Gerardo Sumano [01:08:16] So my point is like you would think that a church with a prophet, theater and revelate 15 of them would be able to see a little bit of the future and have a little bit more advantage than the S&P 500.

Spencer Anderson [01:08:32] Yeah. And this is maybe where they are worried about disclosing the fund because members might say, well, why aren't you investing in Coca Cola? Because I thought Coca Cola was fine with the word of wisdom. And other people might use it as fodder to say, see, I told you that Coca Cola is against the word of wisdom. And other people might say, well, the profit clearly isn't a profit because they lost money on the stock market in the last year. And I guess I can kind of see these criticisms. They just want to avoid it. Right. And so I can kind of see maybe the rationale for wanting to keep it secret on this dimension.

John Dehlin [01:09:13] They just can't win no matter what they do.

Spencer Anderson [01:09:15] It's true.

Rebecca Biblioteca [01:09:15] It's just that they can't see around financial corners. They can see around other kinds of corners, but just not financial.

John Dehlin [01:09:21] I think that's all Rebecca's spicy.

Spencer Anderson [01:09:24] Well, Rebecca, also viral corners. Right. So like any pandemics or anything like that.

Rebecca Biblioteca [01:09:29] Yep, yep. The corners are limited. Let's just say that.

Gerardo Sumano [01:09:32] Well, we did have home church.

Rebecca Biblioteca [01:09:35] Oh dear.

John Dehlin [01:09:38] All right, really quickly, Ryan makes the comment. Design bank use MasterCard or Visa for their debit cards. So he's. He's thinking that their investment strategy might favor assets that they either control or have affection for.

Spencer Anderson [01:09:54] Yeah, it would be affection because I don't think the church owns Zion bank anymore. But I don't know. It's all speculation.

John Dehlin [01:10:01] But they. But they may have tithing payers that work for. I don't.

Gerardo Sumano [01:10:05] You know, they use these. I just googled it.

John Dehlin [01:10:07] Okay, all right. We're speculating, but I think that's part of Spencer's point, is that that's why they wanted to hide this from us to begin with. Right.

Spencer Anderson [01:10:16] Potentially.

John Dehlin [01:10:17] Yeah.

Rebecca Biblioteca [01:10:17] Can I ask a question, Spencer? Do they have any investments that are designed to gain when the market goes down? Which would be a way to kind of conceal gains. Do they have anything like that?

Spencer Anderson [01:10:28] Yeah. And it wouldn't necessarily be to conceal, but to hedge. So.

Rebecca Biblioteca [01:10:33] Right.

Spencer Anderson [01:10:33] They don't want to GameStop.

Rebecca Biblioteca [01:10:36] Right. Is that what.

Spencer Anderson [01:10:38] Yeah, they did invest in GameStop during that period in which the frenzy. I'm gonna try. I'm gonna try and use kind words for the Redditors pretending to be investors. But the. But yeah, GameStop was a thing for a while there and people were investing in. In GameStop hoping to. You know, I feel bad. These are. These are individual investors who are investing their life savings. In some cases, they lost everything investing in GameStop. And that's the gambling that I don't want individual investors to get involved in. Invest in the S&P 500. Don't get involved in GameStop. And you know who was left holding the bill? The people who lost everything were these individuals and the people who left with all the money or people like Enzyme Peak. And so I strongly recommend, if you're an individual investor, if you don't know what you're doing and you don't have all day to work on it, to day trade, just diversify, just invest in the S P, just invest in an index fund and. And you're good to go. And chances are it's going to be just as good as if the. If you're doing what the church is doing. So.

John Dehlin [01:11:52] Yeah. Or better, really quick. I just want to thank Jeff Edmondson for his super chat. We really appreciate your support, Jeff, and everyone who sends the super chats. All right, let's go. Should we go to the next slide?

Gerardo Sumano [01:12:05] Sure.

Spencer Anderson [01:12:06] Yeah. This is, this is kind of another way of looking at its strategy, which is this weighting strategy. And as you can see here. So I'll just highlight for people who aren't able to see it, what this looks at is entire industries and how much it's being. The enzyme Peak is weighing its investment in these different stocks or industries compared to the s and P500. So as of like quarter four of 2022, the church was very overweight. That means that they were, you know, they invested more than if they were investing in the S and P directly. They were overweight on financial stocks, so bank stocks, things like that, healthcare stocks and energy stocks. And they were very underweight on tech stocks. So they were underweight on Apple, Microsoft, Alphabet, Amazon, Berkshire Hathaway. They were, they were under on a lot of those stocks, but they were over on stocks such as, you know, UnitedHealth, Johnson Johnson. Some of these other like health based stocks. And so it just gives you an idea of kind of where their strategy is right now and where their weights are and what they've decided to, to focus on.

John Dehlin [01:13:24] I, I, the Johnson and Johnson one is interesting. I, I've heard that they make up products that are tied to abortions. So I don't know if. Is that even considered a sin stock, Spencer, that as far as you know,

Spencer Anderson [01:13:42] it's not by the broad audience, investor audience, but the church could create its own fund where it could define what it considers a sin stock and it could include stocks like that. Right?

John Dehlin [01:13:56] Yeah.

Spencer Anderson [01:13:57] It's really tough to know where they should, or, or where they have drawn the line. Obviously they haven't drawn the line on Johnson and Johnson, but.

Gerardo Sumano [01:14:04] Right. How about Starbucks? Didn't they invest? It had investments in, on, in Starbucks.

Spencer Anderson [01:14:12] No investment in Starbucks. Yeah, they've excluded Starbucks.

Gerardo Sumano [01:14:16] Okay.

John Dehlin [01:14:17] All right.

Spencer Anderson [01:14:20] Yeah.

John Dehlin [01:14:20] Okay. Anything else on the slide?

Spencer Anderson [01:14:23] No, we can move on. I think it's just another way of looking at it. And you can always go back to widow's might report and you can look at a lot of this in detail.

Gerardo Sumano [01:14:32] I did have one question. Have you guys made an analysis on how their investment decisions varied between the period where they were hiding the investments on the shell companies and now that it's public? And is there any significant difference?

Spencer Anderson [01:14:51] Yeah, that's an excellent question. We'll get there in two slides. Three slides.

Gerardo Sumano [01:14:55] Okay.

Spencer Anderson [01:14:56] And there's a little bit of a, People are going to think that this is a bombshell.

Rebecca Biblioteca [01:15:00] Spoiler.

John Dehlin [01:15:02] Gerardo. Okay, I'm kidding.

Spencer Anderson [01:15:05] You got, you're asking the right questions. This is great.

John Dehlin [01:15:07] All right. Gerardo's just, he's a prophet. Gerardo's our real prophet. Okay, next slide.

Spencer Anderson [01:15:15] Yeah, so I mean, a little bit of a caveat here because this is looking from the, the time at which they started to compile or consolidate their 13Fs under one umbrella. And during that time, the market's been a little bit volatile. Right. So we're talking about during the pandemic and post pandemic and speculation about recession and things like that. And so the time period that we're looking at is a little bit, you know, special, I guess I would call it. But what this graph looks at is how is Enzyme Peak, as far as we know, in terms of its direct stockholder, direct US stock holdings doing relative to the S P 500 in terms of total return? And as you can see, in 2020 it was doing worse. As of 2021, it really rebounded and it was up to about 30, doing about 3% better during this entire period cumulatively versus the, versus the S&P 500. And then it went back down in 2022. And so now it's just barely around, you know, 0.1 2.2% I think is what it was of alpha. And that just means return above and beyond what they would get if they were just investing in the S and P. So they're really not doing a great job. It makes me wonder why is the church not just investing in the S and P? Because right now they're going through a lot of effort. You think about all the employees that they have to hire. You think about all of the strategy that's involved with this. It just isn't clear to me. And also let's say that they want to create a fund that's the S and P, but they also want to exclude some stocks because they definitely don't want Coca Cola or whatever these other firms are or the, they don't want to include like Philip Morris, like a tobacco stock. So if they, they could create their own fund and they could through technology easily just keep investing in this fund that they've created, they could call it a values based fund and they could create it just for them. And they don't need people to passively invest in this S&P 500 adjusted fund, but they instead they're engaging in this active strategy that really isn't doing them any good in at least in this window that we can see. And it's. It would be really, really hard for Enzyme Peak to earn a pot an abnormal return given its strategy. Because this waiting strategy is a little bit outdated. It's not something that like people can really earn. It's really difficult to earn an alpha nowadays anyway. But they also don't have an informational advantage, these Enzyme Peak analysts. Most of the time when you talk about people that are in investment firms nowadays, they are working their butts off all weekend long. They're going on road shows. They're going on the road and rubbing shoulders with company management, engaging in private meetings with management. They're going on site visits to companies that they're following to check out their warehouses or whatever. None of the Enzyme Peak employees are really engaging in that. They're doing nine to five jobs. They're not buying sell side research as far as we're aware. And they're trying, while they're doing this, they're trying to be algorithmic trading that is kind of predominant nowadays. That is just a lot quicker than they are. So I guess I just don't understand. Their approach is outdated to investment. They don't seem to be serious enough to force their employees to leave their families and go out on the road all the time. And so I just don't see how the church would. Would gain a real. A really, you know, strong advantage over the market. It just doesn't make sense to me why they're even doing this.

Rebecca Biblioteca [01:19:11] Would you. Would you say, Spencer, that they're in but not of the snp? Is that kind of a strategy?

Spencer Anderson [01:19:18] Yes. That's good.

John Dehlin [01:19:22] I love it. All right, let's go to the next slide.

Stocks Avoided and Internal Financial Controls

Spencer Anderson [01:19:27] Okay, so this kind of gets closer to what you were saying, Gerardo. We're still looking in this period of like 2019 to 2020. 20, 2022. And these are the stocks that the church has decided not to invest in. And so some of these, for those that are just listening, they don't invest in cores. They don't invest in J.M. smucker, Starbucks, Keurig, Dr. Pepper, Coca Cola, Monster, PepsiCo, Philip Morris. That's a tobacco. That's the predominant tobacco stock. They also don't engage in or invest in gambling stocks. So Caesars, Las Vegas Sands, mgm, Wynn, Vici Properties, Take Two Interactive. They also don't invest in Netflix Anymore. I say anymore. They used to. And then they also don't invest in Bath and Body Works. I'm not really sure why, but these are like, these are the top five. These are the S&P 500 stocks that they avoid. So these are big firms, big companies that they avoid. And then there are also some smaller companies that they avoid. And there's a list here of some of, like, the more interesting ones. So like Abercrombie and Fitch stands out to me. Casey's General Stores. That one, they sell a lot of tobacco and. And that would be considered probably a sin stock. Boston Beer, Party City. They don't invest in parties. I guess too much loud laughter. Mastercraft Boat. Joanne. The one that kind of stands out to me is Franklin Covey. They've decided not to invest in that one, I think maybe to avoid the appearance of. Of not being independent from the church. So I don't know.

John Dehlin [01:21:15] Or maybe one of the leaders of Franklin Covey made someone mad at some point.

Spencer Anderson [01:21:20] Yeah, maybe. I know the Urban Outfitters has a lot of hemp themed products. That was something that widows might point it out to me because that one was confusing to me. But there's a lot of companies that they've clearly some of these could be because they truly like, they look at the financial statements of the company and they say, we do not want to invest in this company. They're too laden with debt. They're going to go bankrupt or something like that. But then there are other companies where it seems as though it's a moral reason that there's some list of these are the companies we're going to boycott in our investment strategy. And so, so yeah, so this is, this is as of, you know, 2020 to 2022. So this is during the period when we can see what they're investing in and the public knows. So maybe this one doesn't have as many surprises. But Gerardo, on the next slide, this is where we get to an interesting surprise because I think it's the next slide.

Gerardo Sumano [01:22:25] This is it.

Spencer Anderson [01:22:26] Yeah, this is it. So if we look back at the 13F filings of the shell companies, we can track back what the church was investing in. And I want you to look maybe like 2008, for one year, for four quarters, the company had, the church had something like $8 million invested in Philip Morris Company, which is a tobacco stock. Right. So we've heard all these rumors about the church investing in Coca Cola. Coca Cola wasn't in there, at least from 2007 on. But they were investing in, I mean, millions of dollars in is invested in a tobacco company. And I mean, this is one of

John Dehlin [01:23:08] those things where it's like a company in there. Right?

Spencer Anderson [01:23:11] You are sorry.

John Dehlin [01:23:12] It looks like there's a few tobacco companies there.

Spencer Anderson [01:23:15] Yeah. So that's what's kind of weird about it. So how this came about, how widows might found this was we were looking back and forth a couple of months ago. The widow's my leader and I on email and talking a little bit about like, okay, what are some of the funds that they invested in? Let's look at exactly when they invested in these. Let's see if they dropped off when there were times where they found where Mormon leaks happened and things like that. And then we found this and it was like, it's a really odd thing because also Philip Morris, the church didn't with most of its investments, it's trading every quarter a lot. So say that it's investing in Netflix. It would be like trading and buying and selling Netflix throughout the quarter, throughout the year. And in this case, it was like they bought it once and they held onto it for a year and then they immediately dropped all of them, almost like it was an accident. Okay. And I Think that that's probably what happened. It was either an accident or, or some prankster that it works for Enzyme Peak thought that it would be funny to invest in this area.

Gerardo Sumano [01:24:30] Isn't there? Go ahead, Rebecca.

Rebecca Biblioteca [01:24:33] Oh, I was going to say. Did you say that was 2008? Because I'm curious. It was such a volatile time. Right. Everything was going to hell. The stock market was going to hell. Well, was it one of the few funds that was performing? I mean, would it have simply been based on that?

Spencer Anderson [01:24:45] I think it was. Man. I want to say that it was Q4, 2008.

Rebecca Biblioteca [01:24:50] I mean, think about the world in 2008.

Spencer Anderson [01:24:53] Yes, exactly.

Rebecca Biblioteca [01:24:54] So everyone was just smoking to survive. Right? That was.

Spencer Anderson [01:24:57] Yeah, yeah, that's true. So.

Rebecca Biblioteca [01:24:59] So maybe you're too young to remember 2008. I don't know.

Spencer Anderson [01:25:04] Yes. So one of the members of Enzyme Peak kind of speculated something like this. Like they, it's the end of the Great Recession sort of coming out of it. And so maybe they are buying a sector like consumer Discretionary and they just, through an oversight, they forgot to take out this portion of the sector that they were investing in. And that's possible. Right. But what's really kind of suspicious about this is that first of all, no other stocks traded like this held exactly. For a year and then liquidated without trading afterwards. And so it just kind of operated under the radar, it looks like. And then it was just kind of quietly sold. And I think that this supports David Nielsen's argument in his Senate and Finance Committee letter that internal controls at Ensign Peak are very, very weak. Right. David Nielsen was talking about how sometimes cash would just disappear out of the fund. Well, he doesn't know why and he doesn't know where. And like how they didn't pick up on this for a year really kind of tells you that like they didn't have the controls in place to make sure that these types of things, that clearly the church didn't really want to invest in a tobacco stock. They, you know, they didn't have the internal controls to stop this from happening. And so that's one thing that kind of really stands out to me is that the internal controls, I think that that supports David Nielsen's argument. You have a values driven firm that managed to own somehow three very clear sin stocks in their portfolio for a whole year without being sold. And if I was an active or. Yeah, if I was a believing member, I should say if I was a believing member, I would be a little bit mad about this because I would want you don't want your leaders to, you know, that they're, they're, they can engage in faulty behavior, you know, that they can make mistakes. And if I was an active member, I would want some mechanism to be in place to help my leaders not sin, not engage in behavior that was going to make Jesus upset. And because there's no transparency and because there are no strong internal controls, this was allowed to go on. And I would assume that God wouldn't be happy with that and that whoever did that would be. Feel bad. I would feel bad if I did that on, you know, with the Church's sacred funds. Right. And so this is really an argument for transparency. Like how long would have it gone on if the church was already telling everyone where it invested? A member would have picked up on this and it would have, I feel like within a quarter it would have been fixed, the issue would have been fixed. And maybe I'm wrong about that. I don't know how you feel about that, but it's great. It seems to be an argument for transparency from a faithful lens. Right. So from a faithful perspective, I wouldn't want my leaders to be put in the position where they, where they accidentally make mistakes that ruin that, that make the Church do something with the sacred funds that God has entrusted them with in some bad way. And this isn't something, these aren't sin stocks for just the Church. These are sin stocks for everyone. So.

Gerardo Sumano [01:28:31] Right.

Spencer Anderson [01:28:32] The other thing about this slide that's kind of cool is if you look at the Mormon leak report in quarter two of 2018, the church was investing in a lot of these companies that are somewhat, I think that they're gray area in terms of sin stocks. And they sanitized essentially the portfolio once that Mormon leaks document came out.

John Dehlin [01:28:59] Yeah.

Spencer Anderson [01:28:59] Like the next quarter they were all gone.

Gerardo Sumano [01:29:02] Yeah.

John Dehlin [01:29:02] I mean that's, that's so shady.

Spencer Anderson [01:29:05] It is, it looks very, I mean it's almost as if, like, it's like, okay, now everyone's looking, looking, and optical sensitivity is high now that everybody can see. But it's really weird because it's not like it's driven by like morals that shouldn't change based on when people are looking and not looking. Right. That's what integrity is all about. There should be a clear policy, clear morals, guiding their investment policy. And you'd think that they'd have that, but they didn't because nobody was looking. And so they didn't seem to, they seem to have let things slide. And so there's just an utter lack of Compliance controls up until 2019. And, and you know, meanwhile, people are, employees are committing perjury during this time. Right. And so you just, can I just kind of wonder like, what's the environment working there?

John Dehlin [01:29:58] Well, that's a good point. It's weird and shady. I remember my, my gym teacher when, when I was in fifth grade, there's this big, wide basketball auditorium and everyone was doing push ups or sit ups, but he couldn't see everybody at once. He could only see, you know, certain groups as he spanned his eyes. And once he said to us, you know how I know who's actually doing the push ups? They're not looking at me. But if, but if I'm spanning my eyes and they're looking at me, it means that when I'm not looking at them, they're not doing the push ups. And that's kind of the way the church was, was working. They were doing the shady stuff when they thought no one was looking. And then when they knew someone was looking, they, they swapped it up.

Rebecca Biblioteca [01:30:41] So.

Spencer Anderson [01:30:41] Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And this is an anecdote, but on LinkedIn, I saw that somebody got hired recently as a compliance officer for Enzyme Peak. This was, this was like two weeks after the SEC thing.

Gerardo Sumano [01:30:53] Wow.

Spencer Anderson [01:30:54] And so it's like, you know, it doesn't mean that they didn't have a compliance officer before they got fired or that they're. But it just, you know, once you do, you have to respond, right. To, to these sorts of threats. But like I think Mark Huxley said

Gerardo Sumano [01:31:08] that they didn't have a compliance office.

John Dehlin [01:31:10] Either they didn't have one or they were understaffed. In the.

Spencer Anderson [01:31:13] Understaffed.

John Dehlin [01:31:13] Yeah, something like that. Yeah.

Spencer Anderson [01:31:15] There should be some compliance department that should be, clearly needs some more resources and support at Enzyme Peak, I would think. And maybe, you know, now they're clearing things up and that's great for them. I just, it's just clear that that's been needed for a while at this point from, from this information that we have now.

Rebecca Biblioteca [01:31:34] Well, and to me that just illustrates that change usually comes from the outside in almost every area of the church. It's not something on the inside where they realize we can do this better, we need to change it. It's something on the outside, Right. That acts on them and then elicits change from that point of view. It's kind of a pattern, I think.

Spencer Anderson [01:31:51] Yeah, yeah, that's absolutely right. I mean, the evidence suggests that this isn't driven by revelation, it's driven by regulation. The sec. Right. So it's interesting.

John Dehlin [01:32:04] And bad. And bad press.

Spencer Anderson [01:32:06] Bad press. Somebody's mentioning in the comments, John, that they dropped Netflix when Murder among the Mormons went into production late 2018. It's possible that that's, I mean, it's speculative to say that, but it is possible that that's what was happening. We tried to look at what was happening. There was also around that time was like when Disney plus was really pushing. And so there were competitors entering the market. And so they might have said, you know, we're going to divest a lot of our fund, our holdings in Netflix. That, that explanation doesn't make as much sense to me because they basically got rid of all of their Netflix. Right. And it would be one thing to kind of just reduce their investment, but they, they got rid of all of it, which suggests that there was some moral.

Gerardo Sumano [01:32:50] Yeah, I think it's fair to say also that Netflix is very progressive as far as the shows that they put out, movies that they create. Most of them that are Netflix original have a gay couple or gay people in it, transgender people. It just, especially in recent years, can't have that.

John Dehlin [01:33:09] No, that's not good.

Spencer Anderson [01:33:10] Right.

Rebecca Biblioteca [01:33:10] Well, and then they're going to have to drop Hulu for Under the Banner of Heaven. They're going to have to drop Peacock for Friend of the Family. I mean, literally, there have been so many programs that have come out recently, they're just going to have to divest themselves of everything.

John Dehlin [01:33:22] Yeah, for them, for them all media stocks are sin stocks. Right.

Gerardo Sumano [01:33:25] Actually, Disney owns Under the Banner of Heaven in, in Mexico.

John Dehlin [01:33:29] Oh, interesting. Really quickly, just some breaking news, sort of for today, it's John. John writes. Hey, John. A little off topic, but if you didn't already know, Southern Utah University sent out an email today saying that they're keeping Elder Jeffrey R. Holland for the commencement speech. So much for listening to the students. Thanks, John, for the super chat and also for the breaking news. And then also Mortimer Duke writes, one year also is when gains become subject to lower long term rates. Is that right? Spencer, do you know what, can you translate what Mortimer is saying for us?

Spencer Anderson [01:34:08] Well, it doesn't apply here. For an individual, that could be true, but the. For they don't pay any capital gains taxes, so it doesn't matter.

John Dehlin [01:34:17] Okay.

Spencer Anderson [01:34:18] In this case.

John Dehlin [01:34:20] All right, let's go to the next slide.

Spencer Anderson [01:34:23] So this is an interesting, I mean, I, I think that it's really interesting. The church, even though it engages in this active strategy, it also engages in some passive strategy. So it invests in a lot of these ETFs, which are essentially, you know, index funds of a group of companies. And what's really weird to me about this is, like, if you're gonna go. If you're gonna engage in a strategy, I feel like you should go all in. But, for example, and just for people who can't see, it's just listing all of the different ETFs that the enzyme Peak holds things in.

John Dehlin [01:34:58] Give some examples.

Spencer Anderson [01:35:00] So, for example, iShares Core S&P 500 ETF, that represents a pretty large chunk of maybe about 1% of all of its U.S. stock holdings, maybe a little less. And basically what that is is it's basically investing in all of the S&P 500. So it's just that it's not throwing all of its money there. It's just that some of its diversified portfolio is in these mutual funds, essentially. And what's weird to me about this is that if you invest in the iShares Core S&P 500 ETF, you're investing in Coca Cola. You have some of your funds. Some of those investments are going to places like Coca Cola and Budweiser and things like that. And so I just don't understand what the policy is of this. I just don't understand. Doesn't it seems as though, if they were to take a moral stance, that they would say, well, we can't invest in these mutual funds because they include Coca Cola. They include these other ones that we've already said are off of our list. They're on our. On our boycott list. Right. And. And so they are to some extent. I mean, it's a small amount, It's a small proportion, but they are investing in beer stocks and in Vegas gambling. Gambling stocks and sin stocks. It's just an odd. It's an odd thing. I would love to know. And I think maybe part of the problem is that Enzyme Peaks employees, they only answer to six people. And those six people might not know what questions to ask. Does that make sense? I'm. I'm just picturing if I could give a presentation and I was trying to make Enzyme Peak look really good, I would know what to withhold from. From President Nelson's eyes. I would know what to say. I would know what benchmarks to provide to make it so that we were doing. Looks like we were doing a great job.

John Dehlin [01:37:03] Right.

Spencer Anderson [01:37:04] And so because you don't have a large set of eyes on it, I don't think that Enzyme Peak has a lot of pressure to either perform well. Like, and you Know, if I was an employee at Enzyme Peak, I wouldn't have. I wouldn't feel this incentive to, like, stay up late at night and work on my job. It just. There's a lot. I just don't think that there's a lot on the line for them. And, you know, you've got like, these 90 year olds in front of you and they're like, all right, well, tell us how things are going. And then you give them a presentation and they say, say, okay, thanks. You know, I just don't see them, like, pushing. I don't see them pushing on them and saying like, well, hang on a second. If you invest in the s and P500, you're investing in Coca Cola, aren't you? They aren't going to ask that question.

Rebecca Biblioteca [01:37:52] Well, doesn't that remind you. Oh, sorry, go ahead. Well, doesn't that remind you of what was leaked on Mormon Leaks that one time about how they get their news? Somebody synthesizes all the news, comes in just like you described, Spencer, and gives a report of the highlights of what's going on. You know, it's a very controlled stream of information that they're getting. So I think you're absolutely right that they're not seeing the big picture at all.

Spencer Anderson [01:38:16] Yeah. It reminds me of one of the meetings where they talked about, who was it? The. The person in the army who ended up being transgender or something. And there was this long discussion about the political ramifications and things like that. And the question that Boyd K. Packer said, I think was just like, okay, so is. Is. Are. Are this. Is this person gay?

John Dehlin [01:38:39] Yeah.

Rebecca Biblioteca [01:38:41] And then they brought up Mark Zuckerberg, trying to describe him in the news, and they asked the same question, is he gay? That seemed to be all they were concerned about.

Spencer Anderson [01:38:48] Yes. Yeah.

John Dehlin [01:38:49] Wow.

Gerardo Sumano [01:38:51] And what I was going to say is that we've covered on Mormon stories several times of stories of employees who have worked at church headquarters and have explained the process of presenting information to the. To the Brethren and how, you know, that's just like you explained, Spencer. Usually they want to present, you know, bring good news to. To the Brethren. No one really wants to present bad news or say we're in a bad position. So I can totally see what you're saying. As, you know, be the Ensign Peak people that report to them are not really giving all the information.

John Dehlin [01:39:30] It's kind of the empire has no clothes.

Gerardo Sumano [01:39:33] Right.

John Dehlin [01:39:33] The emperor has no clothes effect. You just don't want to deliver the bad news. So you just tell them what you think they want to hear.

Rebecca Biblioteca [01:39:40] Right.

John Dehlin [01:39:41] It's. It's a human tendency, but it's probably.

Rebecca Biblioteca [01:39:44] I think. I think in this case, it is the empire. The emperor and the empire. Right. I think you said it right.

John Dehlin [01:39:51] Nice. Touche. All right. Well, Spencer, should we. It looks like we're kind of brought Ensign Peak to a close. Anything you want to say before we move on to real estate?

Church Real Estate Holdings and Land Ownership

Spencer Anderson [01:40:04] No. Yeah, let's move on to real estate. It's also under the umbrella of Enzyme Peak, but we're kind of moving away from the stock stuff and.

John Dehlin [01:40:10] Oh, okay.

Spencer Anderson [01:40:11] If anybody. I don't know if there were any other questions on that. Stood out from the audience, but it seemed like hopefully we covered most of that.

John Dehlin [01:40:18] No, we're doing great.

Spencer Anderson [01:40:20] Okay, so the next one is talking about all of the different real estate assets that the church owns. And through a collaboration with Mormon Leaks, as well as widow's might, they identified something like. I want to say something close to 1300 variations of LLCs the church had filled out in their forms when they. When they purchase real estate. Okay. And, you know, some of these, it's not. I don't think that they're necessarily being nefarious. It's just odd that they're buying all of these using all sorts of different names. And so they track down 1300 different. You know, let's call it. I don't know if we should call them shell companies, but smaller companies that are within the church under the church's name that were used to buy these assets.

Gerardo Sumano [01:41:15] How many? 1300. Wow.

Spencer Anderson [01:41:19] And this is just in the United States, but you can see, like, some of them.

John Dehlin [01:41:22] Can you read a few of them?

Spencer Anderson [01:41:24] Yeah, some of the names make a little bit of sense. So, like, one of them is Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints. And then there's one that's Corporation of the President of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints. And then there's Corp. Presiding Bishop, lds, and then there's Church of Latter Day Saints and then Church of lds. I mean, ironic, right? I don't. Do I have to point out, is

Gerardo Sumano [01:41:48] there the word Mormon somewhere?

Spencer Anderson [01:41:50] No, there is no more Mormon. But. But, you know, the emphasis on, like, making sure the name of Jesus Christ is included. You know, they probably wouldn't be very happy if, like, the media said Church of Latter Day Saints, but they've got one there. The. You know, but then there are some that are kind of weird. There was like, one like Utah North Area Sports, lds, Church Tax Division, byu, Brigham Young University, Agricultural. So it's just a lot of. There's 1 Spanish Fork 3rd Corp. Church of Jesus Christ of LDS and I think it's almost like they only had so much space to fill in the form and so it got put in that way. And so they. You know how it's really hard to fill in a form. It's really hard to say the whole name of the church. And filling in a line on a form to buy real estate on a contract might be also, you know, difficult to put in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints. Some of it might be because of that. But these are all different unique entity names of that they were able to track down. And this is just, I mean this is a lot of incredible work that they did. And they went through professional real estate databases, Land Vision and Reonomy and just tracked down all of them. And you can find them on the Mormon Leagues website as well as I think it's leaked on the Widow's Mite website as well. So this is just to kind of summarize. Like this is all the work that they did to kind of try and track down the church's real estate assets. So from that and we can go to the next slide, I think. But from that they analyzed the public data, they checked those real estate databases, they reconciled a lot of disconnected sources that were related to church assets and they tried to identify and bucket these into different categories like investment properties, farm and ranch properties and things like that. And they do estimates for each of these buckets. Okay, so we're not going to go into detail on that tonight because you could go into. There are slides for each of these and sources for each of these types of assets. For example, they go into more depth on like how they value their ranches, how they valued commercial real estate, residential real estate, how they did each of those individually. So this is more of a summary, but because it's really difficult to value real estate sometimes, they do have a pretty wide range of estimates for how much the value of the real estate that the church owns is. And so right now the low, the lowest of low estimates for all of their real estate assets would be 44 billion. The high estimate would be 121 billion. Now the current, the estimate that they settled on widows, my as a team was around 102 billion. And that's not right in the middle. And the reason that it's not right in the middle is because that low estimate is completely unreasonable. It would be if it would be like, let's say that the, that all of Their buildings burned down, and all they could sell was the land on the buildings that they owned, including all their chapels, all their temples, all their BYU buildings. If every single one of them, all they could get out of it was just the value of the land. That's what that low estimate is representing. So it's really not a reasonable estimate. The top estimate, the highest estimate, is essentially saying, like, this is how much it would cost today to tear it down and replace and rebuild each of these things. And so obviously, the highest estimate also isn't accurate in terms of what would be a reasonable estimate for the value of these real estate assets. So what they've settled on is around 102 billion in assets, and they identified. I don't know if there's anything that kind of stick, sticks out to you here, but 11. Over 11 million square feet of commercial real estate and then over two and a half million acres of farms and ranches. And this is just in the United States. We know that they own a lot internationally as well.

John Dehlin [01:46:09] Yeah. And you hear, as the economy's kind of struggled and as inflation has kind of gone skyward in the past few years, I guess you hear about billionaires buying real estate and buying up real estate all over the United States. And it's actually a really smart thing to do. Right. Because isn't real estate sort of inflation proof?

Spencer Anderson [01:46:32] I don't know if it's. It's sometimes used as an inflation hedge. Yeah. Okay.

John Dehlin [01:46:36] Sorry, I overstated.

Spencer Anderson [01:46:38] But, yeah, I mean, it's still. Yeah, it's. It can be. It. It op. It offers exposure to different risks than you're going to get if you invest in the stock market. And so it's a great diversification strategy. It's a great strategy because they can shift a lot of their commercial real estate directly over to creating chapels or something like that if they decide to do so. And so it gives them some flexibility and adaptability going forward. And so I think that, you know, this is probably a strong investment strategy that they have. It's just a question of, like, what are you going to do with it all? We've talked about this before. I think Rebecca asked this question in the first part. It's like, what's the purpose of all of this? You have all of this real estate, all of these assets. It's just not really clear why in a lot of cases.

Rebecca Biblioteca [01:47:34] And something I found interesting, I knew they owned quite a bit of Florida. In fact, there's a funny song in the musical the Good Shepherds, the tithing musical where they say, let's buy Florida, because they pretty much have. But I also learned that they own

John Dehlin [01:47:47] much of really like 2 to 4% of the publicly owned land in Florida. Right, Rebecca?

Rebecca Biblioteca [01:47:54] Yeah, it's a lot like that sounds like a small amount, but it's not, it's quite a lot. And so I knew about Florida, I think most of us did. But what I didn't know about was Nebraska. They also own quite a large piece comparatively of Nebraska.

John Dehlin [01:48:12] So.

Rebecca Biblioteca [01:48:12] Yeah, do you know what? You're right. That must be it.

John Dehlin [01:48:16] I, I would, I would like to just call and maybe Spencer, you can talk to the widows, my people. I would love to see kind of 50 states and what percentage of the publicly available land does the church owe? Does the church own per state? Because I think. Wouldn't that be an interesting analysis, Spencer?

Spencer Anderson [01:48:36] Yeah, or, or like the rank order of like what rank they are in terms of private land landowners, because they're the number one private landowner in the, in the state of Florida. And then I, I saw a tweet. I don't know, this is a. Not verifiable, but it was a farmer in Illinois. And I'm being in, me being in Illinois, I found this interesting. Who said that, you know, even though a lot of families are operating these farms, they don't own the land that they're operating the farms on. And that the number one landowner in farmland in Illinois was the LDS Church. Number four was Bill Gates or something was what she said. And I don't know where she got that information. I reached out to her and she didn't respond yet. So I would love to hear some verifiable way of knowing that. But, but it is kind of like all over the place. The church owns a lot of land, a lot of farmland, a lot of ranch land. And you know, it's a good strategy. So I guess I just don't like the question is what, why are you doing with it? Yeah, what are you doing it for? And to be honest, like, there are some of this real estate, it's all lumped together in this analysis. Some of this real estate is not liquid, meaning the church is never going to sell it. So like the real estate, like San Diego Temple, that's not real estate, that it's like, why do you, why do you own this? That piece of real estate has a very clear purpose. Right? But the vast swaths of land of hundreds of thousands of acres of ranches and other properties and hotels and apartment complexes, it just, to me that seems so ancillary. To the purpose of the church that it makes me wonder like what, what's, what's the purpose of this?

John Dehlin [01:50:27] And aren't they, aren't they getting into like luxury apartments, like high rise condominiums and even like subdivision development? I mean, I think I remember reading reports about that over the year. But really before, before you answer though, Coco B. Writes that Mr. Google says that the Mormon Church owns 228000 acres in Nebraska. I think that's interesting. Don Smith writes, I saw someone had researched and found the church is the number four landowner in Montana. So we're kind of getting reports in. Celinda writes, are the Mooney's. Aren't the Mooney's buying up land in different states? I guarantee that they are Scientology. If you watch the documentary going Clear, you'll see that they, they've become just a massive owner of real estate. And you know, they own so much real estate and they really don't have members. They're so rich, they're declining in membership, but just like growing exponentially in wealth and wealth. Yeah, they are the number three owner behind the government and Ted Turner. I, I wonder if that is specifically in Montana. Yeah, so just lots of, lots of reports coming in about that. Spencer, anything you want to add?

Spencer Anderson [01:51:49] I mean I like all those comments. I don't know, there's no data. I mean I haven't seen the data to back it up, so I can't comment on that. But it does seem like the demand is there for widow's might to kind of do something there. So I'm sure that they'll dig in something cool.

Rebecca Biblioteca [01:52:02] I have a, I have a great story actually about this particular topic. So I have a friend, his name is Bill Knowlton, he's the CEO of Ally Parent Apparel. Carol. And he was going to donate a house to the church and it was a big deal to him. He was going to donate and he met with some of the financial advisors where they were going to exchange it. And as they were doing the paperwork and you know, like I said, it was a big deal to him. They seemed very disinterested. They were kind of looking off into space, they were on their phones and they finally just said, you know, hey, do you guys even want this house? And they said, well, to be honest, we just closed on this luxury apartment. I can't remember which one it was. But they literally didn't care about this house, which you know, to most people, people would probably be a big deal. So I think anecdotally It's. He was very shocked, very surprised that they could care less because they had just closed on this mega luxury apartment complex. So, I don't know. It's interesting.

Gerardo Sumano [01:52:53] Yeah.

Scale of Real Estate Wealth and Ranch Properties

John Dehlin [01:52:55] All right, well, just massive, massive wealth. So again, around $102 billion in real estate. Right? Right, Spencer?

Spencer Anderson [01:53:04] Yeah, that's right. And they break down into, like, the top 10, I think, on the next slide.

John Dehlin [01:53:09] Okay, let's look at that.

Spencer Anderson [01:53:10] Go there. I think it's the top 10, the top identified investment properties and their estimated values. So obviously, maybe it's not a surprise, but the top one was City Creek Center. It has something like 700,000 square feet of real retail, 1.7 million square feet of office and 535 living units. The estimated value of that was around 2.5 billion. They have around 300,000 acres of ranch lands in Nebraska, 383,000 of timberlands in Florida, 295,000 acres of ranch timber and farmland in Florida, another 200,000 acres of ranch lands in Utah, 250,000 acres of ranch with farm plots in Brazil. And it just goes on and on. They own 17,000 acres of almond growing operation in California, 120,000 in Texas, 13,000 of walnuts, almonds, prunes, and pecans in California, 110,000 acres of ranch lands in Alberta, and 20,000 acres of potatoes, corn, onions, and wheat in Washington. Some of this, I think, could be justified in the sense that, like, you're trying to create a world in which when there's an apocalypse or something, that you can feed your people. Right. But corporations do that as well. You know, like our. If I was an orange grower in Florida, I'd be a little bit upset that a church. That I was competing with a church on this dimension because it's like, well, yeah, my purpose is also to feed the world. And if I'm a. If I'm a farmer, that's my purpose. Right. So it's not like. I think that the church acts as though it's like, operating in some, like, unique way. It's like, no, farmers are everywhere. They do this. Right. It's not as though, like, without the church, what would we do in. In a situation where. Where there's drought, it's like, well, yeah, the farmers would figure that out too, just like your farmers do. So I guess I don't really see it as, like, a social good for the church to be involved here as much as a good for the church kind of operation.

John Dehlin [01:55:24] Go ahead.

Gerardo Sumano [01:55:25] Do you have any. How. How do you know how much of this information is missing. For example, you know, Mexico, how much land do they own in Mexico? And how, how, how do we know that we have the complete information of that?

Spencer Anderson [01:55:42] We don't, we don't have the complete information of it. And they've never tried to get to the closest number of it because they know there's just no possible way of getting there because you're going to go to countries where they don't have to disclose or they're going to be some company. I'm sure that even in the US they didn't get all of the LLC names, so they were just trying to be as comprehensive as possible. The estimate itself corresponds pretty well with the estimate that David Nielsen provided in terms of, in the, in the whistleblower letter or whatever in 2019 that Lars Nielsen had. So that's one thing that kind of gives them, that they're kind of anchoring on when it comes to estimating the value of it all. And so I think for the purposes of this analysis, the best thing that it does is it identifies a lot of the assets that are out there, but it doesn't, they don't have a comprehensive list of all of the real estate. So that's a good question. I, yeah, I want to make that clarification for sure.

Gerardo Sumano [01:56:43] Okay.

John Dehlin [01:56:44] One thing I, one thing that I also there was a really important Mormon Stories episode with Linda and Savannah Clyde and Linda was a copyright a copywriter for the church, but she talked about learning about, I think the ranches in Florida. The church owned ranches in Florida. And one of the points that she made is that on all these ranches, oftentimes they, they use missionaries, you know, like your mom and dad or your grandma and grandpa that are wealthy and they could be spending time with you and with your grandkids and like enjoying their golden years. When they call them on missions to serve these two year missions or three year missions or multiple missions. These, these elderly, quote, missionaries are going to these ranches and these farms and providing labor, free labor for the church just to maintain these, these ranches and, and farms. Yeah. And so it, some like Stephen Hassan would even go as far to say it's, it's kind of labor trafficking, you know, but that's dumb in a way because it's, it's adults and it's consensual. But, but the church is just such a, I guess you could say a smart business. I don't know. Spencer, Rebecca, do you guys have another euphemism for what the church is?

Rebecca Biblioteca [01:58:05] I would say, and not just one mission, but now two missions. Right. We're hearing that people are suggested that they go on two. So now I had grandparents that went on an agricultural mission back in the eight seventies, late seventies, but they went to Tonga and they spent three and a half, almost four years there, you know, teaching them how to farm, that kind of thing. I can see maybe that's more productive. But yeah, when you, when you, When I think about my parents who are in their 80s, you know, being a farmhand, I just can't quite picture it. So it is, it's sketchy at best. I think the other thing I was

John Dehlin [01:58:39] going to say is that when you talk to a believing Mormon about any of this, it's like, whoa, the church has all this real estate and a believing Mormon's like, yeah, that's awesome. It just means the church is doing well and it's well prepared. Right? And if, and if, and if you say to them, ah, but they're exploiting the labor of these elderly people, it's like, no, it's a great chance to serve and it's a wonderful way to live out your golden years serving the Lord. So none of this is like, none of this even registers, I think, with many orthodox believing Mormons, which is fine. We can all have different views. I guess it just depends on what your point of view is. Spencer, did you want to make a comment just on this point in particular?

Spencer Anderson [01:59:15] Yeah, I mean, I guess it's just to me, a lot of this stuff is like a social issue, it's a political issue. It's outside of Mormonism. It's an issue because if you believe in a world where some people are operating under different rules and that some people have a distinct advantage over other people, then suddenly you're not operating in a fair market. And I think that there could be an argument that's made whether whether people are volunteering to do this or not, that the church, by being tax free, by having a zero cost of raising capital, because they are just bringing in tithing. So it's not like they have to borrow money from the bank and pay interest on it. Right. They're operating under a very different formula in terms of trying to gain profits. And so it would be easy for the church to sort of corner the market in certain areas, which it seems as though they've done in a lot of ways in agriculture because they operate under different rules. They're saying, okay, well, we don't have labor costs like you do. We don't have the tax burden that you do on property. We don't have to raise a bunch of money from borrowing from the bank like a normal family would have to do if they wanted to create their own business. And at some point, and I don't know what that point is, but that's up for politicians and for the populace to decide. It becomes an unfair market, it becomes an unfair advantage. And I think that that's where, you know, you contact your senator and you say this, there's something going on here that is not, it's not the world that I want to operate in. And I think the government should step in. And everybody has different political beliefs. And I'm not trying to make an art. I'm not trying to say that this is the right way to think about things, but it's definitely an argument to be, to have. If you, if you, if you believe in government oversight and you believe that government oversight serves a purpose, it seems as though religion has, like, they've just been so hands off on religion that the church has, like, has gained a huge competitive advantage in a lot of these areas.

John Dehlin [02:01:30] Yeah.

Spencer Anderson [02:01:30] One of them being farms. Right?

John Dehlin [02:01:32] Yeah.

Rebecca Biblioteca [02:01:33] Could I also point out. Sorry, sorry. You can go, John. Okay. That every hour of missionary service is monetized and considered charitably giving. They literally monetize each hour somebody's on a mission and then they will add that all up and that is included in the amount of money that they publicize that they've given charitably. And that's a lot of man hours. And I'm always curious, what, what salary are they paying people? What are they saying? Are they making $20 an hour? Are they making $30 an hour? I don't know. But all those volunteer hours, from cleaning the church to being on a mission is monetized and considered charitable giving.

John Dehlin [02:02:11] And Spencer, is Rebecca stealing thunder or giving us a preview for part three we're going to be covering?

Rebecca Biblioteca [02:02:17] I'm segwaying. It's called a segment.

John Dehlin [02:02:22] Are we covered or will we be covering that more in depth in part three? Is that right?

Spencer Anderson [02:02:25] For sure. Yeah. We'll talk about what's monetary versus non monetary.

John Dehlin [02:02:28] And yeah, really quickly, I just want to share one comment from our viewer. Cat Smith writes, my in laws went on four missions, absentee grandparents. We were told our children would be blessed. And so you know, it, I guess. You know, grandparents and elderly people have the right to decide what they want to do with their time. But I, I have repeatedly heard from frustrated, you know, Mormons saying, we wish, we wish Our grandparents were more involved in our, our lives and our kids lives.

Gerardo Sumano [02:03:01] So I, I have a story like, like that too where right now in Mexico, just like in the US there's being a lot of talk on this, you know, for elderly people or senior missionaries to go out and, and serve missions. My, my uncles, who their daughter in law is dying, literally dying of cancer with three kids are just about to, to go and serve a proselytizing mission. And I just, it's really hard for me to understand, you know, how, how, how they are doing it and you know, she's dying of cancer. Her husband is on the stake presidencies, so he has a job and it's very absent at home because of his calling in the church. And then add that, that they're gonna go serve on a mission as, I don't know, the church does require a lot from people and a lot of their time and money and resources. And it can be a little bit sad when you see, when you, when knowing that, that my family members don't have all the context and all of all the church's power and wealth and possibilities. They don't really need them, you know.

John Dehlin [02:04:27] Yeah. Or just pay them, you know.

Rebecca Biblioteca [02:04:30] Right.

John Dehlin [02:04:30] Pay people. I mean, think of all the jobs that could be created if the church just would pay people for these positions.

Gerardo Sumano [02:04:37] Yeah.

John Dehlin [02:04:38] Maybe help the homeless, help, help the lower SES people. Use some of that money to create jobs. Why not? Right? Why not? All right, so Spencer, let's see. Is it time to go to the construction of temples as the next section or did you want to close out real estate in any other way?

Spencer Anderson [02:04:59] No, that's good. You were talking about paying people and it made me think of a conversation that I had with the widow's my leader about what the solution is with all of this wealth. Because something that I think we keep forgetting is that these people that are involved, these people that are leaders of the church, they have the same limited rationality that we have. So the same thing that we can't picture $150 billion, they can't either. So I don't think that they can wrap their, their hands around this very well. And for them to try and create some charitable, you know, mission with Ensign Peak would be an extremely difficult endeavor. They'd have to basically create an additional church just to operate just the humanitarian part of their mission. And I think, you know, we kind of went back and forth in terms of what the solution would be. And I thought that widows, my leader, I thought their idea was really, really A great. So if you're listening, church, I think that this was a great idea. It would be to still have people pay their tithing, but to pay their tithing to other organizations, charitable organizations, and that that counts as tithing. And then with this fund that you have, you can then operate the church. You have enough. You can operate the church. You still have. By that, by doing that, you've, you've contained and you've, you've maintained the commandment to, to pay your tithing and get the blessings from it. You've essentially gotten rid of the problem of trying to do humanitarian aid as an organization. But you can still claim that you as a people are a giving people. Imagine, you know, so like, let's say that, you know, on average, I think widows might estimated that about 450,000 in tithing receipts come in per ward in the United states. So imagine 450,000 going out to the local charitable organizations every year from the Mormons. I mean, it would just be incredible the type of good that that could do. And what you've done is you've, you've gotten rid of the problem if you're a leader. Because I think that they see this at this point as a problem. They don't know what to do with this money. They, they don't have the resources to do what they need to with this money. And so I think that that's the solution. I honestly do. I think that the solution is stop asking members to pay tithing to the church and just ask them to pay to charitable organizations. And I think it fixes every issue. Maybe I'm wrong about that. Is there something I'm missing there?

Tithing, Charitable Giving, and Missions

John Dehlin [02:07:50] Yeah, I mean, honestly, it takes an investment to invest, you know, donations wisely on a mass scale. And that's why the United Way exists. That's why UNICEF exists, that's why the Red Cross exists, because you need a huge staff and administration to just not throw the money away. And the church has decided it doesn't want to be in the charity business. It wants to be in the church business. And so you, you make a great argument. It just needs to give its money to charities, to legit charities or to, you know, not be the middle person. Just follow Joseph F. Smith's promise, tell the members we don't need your money anymore, and then have the members give 10 of their income to their favorite charities. It's brilliant.

Gerardo Sumano [02:08:42] In some way, though, it releases the control that the church has in on its members. When you're paying money to, directly to an organization, it's more likely that you're going to be way more committed to that organization that you're paying money to and supporting.

John Dehlin [02:08:59] So, but also, but also, we've said this, we said this in the past episode. I think the, the church leaders at the top and even down below literally believe that you don't pay tithe. They believe what they've been taught, which is that you don't pay tithing. You know, you don't pay tithing to help the church. I think Bednar Bedar said this, right? You don't pay tithing to help the church. You pay tithing to be obedient and to get, to show your obedience to the Lord and to get blessings from the Lord. It's not about helping the church. It's about helping you and spiritually more than any other reason.

Gerardo Sumano [02:09:33] I, I think that's what they say. But in their reports, when they're, when the apostles are visiting the bishops and the stake presidents, the metrics that they're seeing to choose future bishops, future stake presidents, to see which words are doing better than others are, who's paying more tithing? So, yeah, it doesn't matter if you're like, it's about obedience. But, but really, tithing, it's a really important metric that the church looks at for sure when making a lot of important decisions.

John Dehlin [02:10:07] Because, let's face it, what's the truest sign of devotion? It's, it's, do you give your money away? Right, right. That's when you know you're someone's really committed. What were you going to say? Oh, and Rebecca.

Rebecca Biblioteca [02:10:16] Sorry. I was going to say, and I wonder, anecdotally, I've heard of people now. I think Jana Reese was one that came out really publicly and said, I am now going to give my tithing to other charitable organizations. Has anyone heard what effect that has on a person? If people are now starting to do that, even anecdotally? Because, I mean, I feel that would be a problem. But people are doing that. I just wonder if any of you have heard of anyone doing that and if there have been repercussions, can you get away with that? It's a very interesting scenario.

John Dehlin [02:10:43] I mean, I think the answer to that is always bishop roulette or ecclesiastical roulette. It just depends on who your bishop and who your stake presidents are. And yeah, I mean, we hear about bishops and stake presidents. It's like, I don't believe in God anymore. I think the church is false. And it's like, can we make you Bishop, you know what I mean? I mean, the church is really, really desperate these days to keep its members and even to promote them keep it. And to promote non believing members or to just make sure people get to the temple no matter what status they're in. And then you'll have the hardcore bishops and stake presidents, you know, that'll keep you out of the temple for, you know, posting something on Facebook that they don't like. You know what I mean? Yeah, yeah. Spencer, should we go to temple building?

Spencer Anderson [02:11:27] Sure, yeah. Sorry for that tangent. You just made me think of that.

John Dehlin [02:11:30] That was brilliant. It was good.

Temple Construction Costs and Expansion Plans

Spencer Anderson [02:11:34] So for the temples, what they were looking at is like, how much does a temple cost? We know that these temples are elaborate buildings. We know that there's a lot of temple building going on. And what this next slide shows is just how it's exponential is the way that it looks. It's an exponential curve in terms of the temple announcements that have occurred in the last few years since President Nelson came in. And so one thing that maybe members might go to is they might say, well, maybe one of the reasons why we have so much money is because we have to build all these temples. Like these temples are expensive, right? And so widows might kind of said, well, let's look at this, right? And really there have been like two points in time where there have been what I would call inflection points wherein in like a period of a few years, suddenly the church like really goes berserk on building temples. And this happened once in 19, in the 1980s. And I think that it was when President Kimball was, was technically the president of the church, but he was in poor health. And essentially, essentially Gordon B. Hinckley was operating the church at this point. So he was behind probably these 20 temples being dedicated in three years between 1982, I think in 1985. And then we all, I think, are pretty familiar with President Hinckley when he promised that by the year 2000 there would be 100 temples. And they expedited temple building. 54 temples dedicated in three years. And so in 1997 there were less than 50 temples. And now we're at a point where there are 300 temples announced under construction or completed. And this latest kind of spree temple building spree is under President Nelson, who is unprecedented in terms of offering these new temples. And so one thing I think it was Kevin Pearson said in a fireside or something like that, he said, it's possible, he said, is it possible that we'll build a thousand temples? Absolutely. In our lifetime, we will build a thousand temples. And it's going to cost a lot of money. And so I think that that begs the question, okay, how much money is this going to take? And so widows might went into this and thought about, okay, well, what if the church wanted to build a thousand temples? Let's think about how much this would cost. And so I don't know if there was anything else on this slide, but we could go to the next slide if you'd like.

Gerardo Sumano [02:14:11] I just want to point out that it's really interesting that Hinckley is the first temple builder, very strong prophet

Rebecca Biblioteca [02:14:21] that

Gerardo Sumano [02:14:21] really goes really strong on temple building. And then there's always been speculation that Nelson has tried to outdo or, you

John Dehlin [02:14:30] know, at a rivalry maybe.

Gerardo Sumano [02:14:32] Right, with Hinckley. Nelson. With Hinckley, Yeah.

John Dehlin [02:14:36] Yeah.

Gerardo Sumano [02:14:37] And it's interesting that he's the second, you know, prophet doing this.

John Dehlin [02:14:41] The only other thing I'll. I'll just add. And I, you know, we've talked about this before, but the church has found that when it builds temples, you know, in the area surrounding the temple, the tithing receipts go up. And. And so, you know, we know that. Yeah, somebody, some. One of our viewers and listeners wrote Stephen Taylor wrote, temples are tithing razors. Chapels, attendance is free. So the more temples you have, the closer to people, the more motivated people are to go into the temple because of social pressure. But you got to pay tithing to get into the temple. So you want to get temples as close to the people as possible. So there is a financial motivation to build temples and kind of a financial reward to build the temples. The only other thing I'll say is that I'm pretty certain that the church has figured out how to buy up the land surrounding a temple such that, you know, they did this in Ogden. They clearly did this in Salt Lake City. I think they did it in Philadelphia, if I'm not mistaken. But what I think what they've discovered is that, is that if they can buy the surrounding land around the temple, then when you announce the temple and you build it, especially in Utah, property values are going to go up all around the temple. Not to mention, if there's patronage going on within the church of construction deals, construction projects, you know, it's. It's a way. It's a. It's an indirect way to funnel tithing to the. The people that you want to reward and support. You can call it cronyism or patronage. Maybe our viewers and listeners are going to say that's not true. That's not what happens, but I'm pretty sure the church is careful who it. Who it hires to construct temples. Right. And I'm sure I'm. I'm quite sure it's. It's probably members. You know what I'm saying?

Gerardo Sumano [02:16:36] Yeah.

John Dehlin [02:16:36] And it's members who pay their tithing, and it's members who are probably connected to the people in charge, either through family or through relationships and power relationships. I mean, it wasn't Zwick. Wasn't Zwick in the presiding bishopric and Zwick, who owns a big construction company. Like, this is all kind of interrelated, and I'm a little bit speculating, but I think I'm probably not totally off. Spencer, do you want to.

Rebecca Biblioteca [02:17:01] Can I say one thing about that?

John Dehlin [02:17:02] Yeah, Rebecca, please.

Rebecca Biblioteca [02:17:03] I was just going to point out that this is a practice that's been going on for almost 200 years in the church. This was how they operated in the early days. They would buy. They would build the temple, buy the land, and then they would sell the land to the immigrants coming in at raised or exorbitant prices. So it's definitely a trend that's been going on for 200 years. And the other thing I would say is that we don't necessarily know where the temples are going to be built or how many. But I think one of the things that we can guess is that there won't be enough people in the area to staff the temple. You hear that all the time. There used to be celebration, and now it's sort of like a, oh, my gosh, how are we going to do this? Because there's already a temple next door. So it's really interesting why they think so many, what they're getting out of it. So I think you're right. John, my vote's for you.

John Dehlin [02:17:45] Oh, thanks. Yeah. You hear about these destination temples now, like Rome, where there's like 12 members in the entire country, and they build a temple there because rich, white Utah and Idaho Mormons like to go there on vacation and, like, visit the temple while they're there. But inside, there's no work going on, and that's. There'll be more and more of that. And as you say, as the membership continues to tank, who's going to be working in these temples? You know what I mean? Yeah. All right, Spencer, so you were going to go to the next slide.

Spencer Anderson [02:18:15] Yeah. So what they looked at is. They said, oh, this is the next slide after this. Sorry.

John Dehlin [02:18:22] Here we go.

Spencer Anderson [02:18:24] Okay. Yeah, there we go. So what they looked at is the renovation cycle and of, you know, how long it takes for a temple to go from being constructed in the first place until it gets renovated for the first time. What they found is that the older temples, it took them a lot longer to get renovated. Some of these newer temples, they're not taking very long. So, for example, it highlights in this analysis the Baton Rouge, Louisiana, Louisiana Temple. It was the 94th operating temple. It's a smaller temple. It's one of those. The tiny temples that were built before 2000 or onto within that temple building spree into around 2000. And it only took them 18 years to get to the point where they had to renovate it. And so the renovation occurred in 2018. And for this temple in particular, like, they. They tore it, basically tore it down. Like, they put new limestone on the outside of the temple. They redid the entire interior, redid all of the landscaping. So it was essentially like a rebuild of the temple. Whereas when you think about some of these more, what do you call them, like, the classic temples of, like, the Salt Lake Temple, the D.C. temple, the San Diego Temple, some of these more temples that are kind of mesa, maybe have a little more character. Yeah, they have taken a lot longer to get to rededication. And the idea here, and I think that widows might, is trying to be very neutral in their language, but they call this cost sensitivity or budget sensitivity in the slide. What they mean is that temples aren't being built like they used to be, that they're. They're going. I don't want to say cheap, but they're. They're not. They're not. It's cheaper to build a new temple nowadays because they're not putting as much into these new temples as they used to be. They're seeing them as more replaceable, as more. Well, we'll rededicate it in 15 years. It's great opportunity for a rededication in an open house. Whatever their reasoning is, they're not being built like the Gothic temples in Europe that will last for 500 years or anything like that. And so that's a. That's an important point because on one hand, it suggests that these costs could rise over time because you got to consider not just building the temple, but renovating the temple as a new cost. That might happen more frequently nowadays than it used to be. But it also means that the cost, the original cost, might not be as much. So thinking about, like, how much it costs to build the San Diego temple versus the, you know, some other comparable temple of similar size, like An Idaho Falls, maybe Idaho Falls, I'm just making up a name, but some other, you know, current temple, Ochre Mountain Temple or something like that, it's not going to be anywhere close to the same cost being put into the temple to create it. And I think that that's. Both of those sides of the issue are really important in terms of trying to estimate what it would cost to build a thousand temples and how much that would cost going forward for 100 years to keep those temples operating if they wanted to. And so one really cool thing that they did, and this is the next slide. I don't know how quickly we want to go through this, but I really like this approach that widows might did. They basically said, okay, well not all temples are the same size. And so let's look, let's estimate from the bottom up, like how much would it cost to build a temple if we wanted to build a temple today? And so what they first did is they said, all right, well how much does it cost? They got estimates for how much it would cost to build a five star hotel. Baseline construction, and it was around $600 a square foot to build a five star hotel. So we're talking like Four Seasons, right? These types of really nice buildings, but also not a temple. I guess they estimated, you know, how much furnishings, art fixtures, equipment would cost inside the temple based on laundry service, based on, you know, really nice furniture and things like that within, like the five star hotel kind of context for the temple as well. And then they added a premium on top of that to say, well, like the temple includes a lot of amazing finishes. You know, bottom up, you know, you have the furnishings, you have the bare bones, five star hotel and then you have the craftsmanship on top of that. You have the spires, you have all of these cosmic, this cosmetic effort that's beyond the norm. The murals, right, the murals, the, the fancy like artwork on the, on the railings, that type of stuff. The estimate was that it would be between a 50% to 100% markup. And so they settled on 75, 75% markup. And so, you know, you could add an extra hundred dollars per square foot. It wouldn't change really the, the implications of this. But what they basically came down to after taking a discount, which we talked about and we, they found evidence that suggests that a lot of these construction companies are affiliated with the church. They are going to be offered a small discount for their services and they're still, you know, have a relationship with the church. They got to a total an estimate of around $1,100 a square foot. And I think that that's a really reasonable estimate in terms of, you know, it's not $2,000 a square foot, which is maybe what the old temples used to be. If they were to try and reconstruct some of these amazing temples, maybe the Salt Lake Temple recon renovation, because it's considered a different type of temple, would be something closer to that. But they couldn't justify like going much higher than eleven hundred dollars a square.

Gerardo Sumano [02:24:19] Yeah, that seems high.

Spencer Anderson [02:24:21] It does seem high. Right.

Gerardo Sumano [02:24:22] Because I, I've had friends who close, close, very close friends who have worked for the temple department on purchasing and my husband himself works on a construction industry and his comp, one of the companies he worked for that or has done work for temples. It doesn't seem like it's like from what I understand, it's not, you know, crazy much crazy higher than, you know, what you said, like as a five star hotel. And it's from what I've heard or know, they're always looking for the best price, good quality, best price. And in fact some of these construction companies that I've heard of don't like to work for the Elliot Church building temples because of the, the amount of work that it requires and the level of quality that they want, but not willing to pay for for the level of quality that they, they want.

John Dehlin [02:25:23] Yeah, yeah.

Spencer Anderson [02:25:25] And land was a big issue with, in terms of trying to do this analysis because a lot of times the land is donated for these temples or they already have them set aside for commercial operations to start out as an investment property and then they decide to repurpose it as a temple. And so land was a separate issue. I think that they did throw land into their, into the estimate anyway. But basically there is some leeway around this estimate. There is some range of reasonableness. But I think that they settled on something that I think that people could on both sides, whether you're faithful or not. I think you would be able to say that this is a pretty objective analysis. And coming in on eleven hundred dollars per square foot, I think a lot of people would argue that maybe they're a little high on the high end of that. So, so what they basically looked at after that is they said, okay, well let's estimate, if we have eleven hundred dollars per square foot, let's try and project out how much it would cost to build a thousand, not build, but to have a thousand temples by the year 2040. And so they did that. So they first Kind of. They said, well, let's look at how

John Dehlin [02:26:33] slide do we do. The expanded temple spending is offset by other costs. We do we do that slide already?

Spencer Anderson [02:26:39] Oh, we haven't done that. Yeah, sorry. Let me go around, let me go back then. Okay, okay. So this one, you know, if the prophet is really like in this case, you know, President Nelson's very millennium minded and he wants to build a ton of temples. What's interesting about this is essentially what you have is around 400,000 more square feet of temples each year being built. And what that comes out to is

John Dehlin [02:27:08] around 400,000 or 400 million. Oh, 400,000 square feet. Okay, got it.

Spencer Anderson [02:27:12] And that comes to around 450 to 500 million per year of extra cost to build these temples. And it's not as, you know it sounds. It is a lot. It's a lot. But when you put it in context of how much money the church owns and how much money the church brings in for tithing and what we talked about last time, it wouldn't require them to dip into Ensign Peak to do this. And so, you know, before, you know, you were talking about 150 million on average that the church was putting into temple construction or renovation. And now we're looking at 500 million. This is kind of a one time cost. And what's really interesting about this is they estimated how much they're saving by switching to the two hour block in church and how much they saved by getting rid of boy Scouts, you know, ending their relationship with boy Scouts. And it comes out to about the same of the, the savings that they got from this adjustment, this strategic adjustment, because you don't need as much chapel space. If you have two hour block, you can put more wards into the buildings and you can sell off chapels if you, if you need to, if you're in an area where you don't need to use them. And on the other hand you have the increased spending they basically offset. And I don't know if that's intentional. I don't know if they said, well, we want to spend an extra 500 million a year on temple construction. How do we cut our cost to offset that? Or if it was like, wow, we're saving $400 million a year by switching to, by switching to two hour block. Sounds like a Geico commercial. By switching to two hour block, you can, you could save $400 million a year. And, and let's see what we could do with that money. You know, it could have been that or it could just be A coincidence. But it is interesting how they didn't really need to even dip into tithing anymore. They're just still operating at a total level of, like, the same operating costs as what they were before.

Rebecca Biblioteca [02:29:14] Well, and if you think about it, what they gave up were things that were creature comforts for the members. I mean, I know Boy Scouts is problematic, but as far as programs for kids, buildings, nice places for people to be. That seems to be an afterthought. You guys will just have to make do and figure it out. We're going to go ahead and build a temple. So it kind of shows where, you know, where their mind is as far as maybe the membership itself isn't as important as actually just getting those temples built, getting people going there. So kind of interesting.

Spencer Anderson [02:29:41] Yeah. Yep.

Gerardo Sumano [02:29:45] I don't know. Like you said, I don't know if they're doing it intentionally, but I do know that my. My dad used pretty much those exact works words. Spencer, at least in Mexico, that the plan going forward of the area presidency that has presented is not building chapels anymore and. But building temples. That those are the exact words that he used.

Spencer Anderson [02:30:08] It's interesting. Yeah. I mean, it makes sense. Like, right. Because you have fewer members attending, probably. You also have. No, no.

Chapel Sales, Membership Trends, and Temple Funding

John Dehlin [02:30:17] There's fire sales all over Utah and Idaho. The church is selling chapels like hotcakes. And it's even worse in California. But, you know, all the members in California are like, oh, the church isn't shrinking. Everyone's just moving to Utah and Idaho. But then they come to Utah and Idaho and they're closing stakes like wildfire in Salt Lake County. So, I mean, maybe there's a little bit of growth in, like, Draper or, you know, Alpine. Alpine or Highland or south of Provo, but we're closing, like, it almost seems like a steak a month in. In Salt Lake county alone. And chapels are closing and shutting down all the times. Steak Steak centers are closing and shutting down. So I think it's important for people in Utah, right? In Utah. Yeah.

Spencer Anderson [02:31:06] Yeah. That's interesting, because I'm not there, so I don't see it. I don't know. I just remember thinking, like, man, there's every. Every corner that you turn in Utah as a chapel. And also for a while there, whenever I go back and visit, it was always like there was a new chapel being built. And I don't know if it doesn't feel that way anymore, if it doesn't look like new chapels are being built all around you, except maybe in areas where there are new neighborhoods. Coming up or something like that. But yeah, that's really interesting. Being feet on the ground kind of like thing because of where I am. It's just one chapel and it's not going to change to be two chapels. It's not going to change to be zero chapels. So it's really hard to tell what's going on.

John Dehlin [02:31:47] So Ted's, Ted's given me a hard time. Ted's saying like wildfire. It's a bit of an exaggeration, John. And yes, I'm, I'm exaggerating sort of. But if you go to my, you know, my Facebook Mormon Stories podcast Facebook page, you'll see that just within the past few months they've collapsed, I think several wards or even two stakes into one. In Park City, in Cottonwood Heights, Boyd K. Packers area, they, they merged two stakes and got rid of a stake in the, in the Highland area, which is like East Bench, Salt Lake City, they, they've merged two stakes and then in South Salt Lake, apparently they've merged two stakes. And then in, then I'm hearing that in Sandy they're going to be merging some stakes soon and this is all in the period of a few months. So yes, it's not like wildfire, literally. But in terms of like stake collapsing in Utah, I don't know that there's ever been a volume of velocity of state closures in Zion.

Gerardo Sumano [02:32:49] Yeah.

John Dehlin [02:32:50] So I mean, yeah, Ted, I'm exaggerating, but am I?

Spencer Anderson [02:32:53] Yeah, it's not, it's not double digit stakes every week Muscle menos? Is that what you're saying?

Rebecca Biblioteca [02:32:59] And then it's reported as a new stake is formed. Right. But they don't mention. Because two sticks came together.

John Dehlin [02:33:06] Yeah, yeah, there's a real problem. Okay. Yeah. So you were, were, you were. Oh, and I was just also going to say, if you think about the threefold mission of the church, right. They're not going to invest in perfecting the saints because members are leaving in droves. They're not gonna, they're not going to invest in the missionary program because the missionary program is a bust other than to convert the missionaries and to commit them to the church. So where are they going to put their money? They're going to put their money in temples because they can just buy them. You can't buy converts. I mean, you can, but they won't stay. They tried that in Latin America or the Philippines. You can't buy members, you can't pay members to stay or they won't pay members to stay. Maybe they could, but they don't. But you can buy a lot of temples, right?

Gerardo Sumano [02:33:51] Yeah.

John Dehlin [02:33:52] And so it's.

Rebecca Biblioteca [02:33:52] And there is, there is a fourfold mission. They added feed and clothe the hungry and poor, I think. And they're not, you know, it's still maybe focus on temple. I don't know. There is that fourth mission.

John Dehlin [02:34:03] Yeah, let's say it. Yeah. All right.

Spencer Anderson [02:34:07] I think there's got to be something to be said about just how sincere people's beliefs are about this though, to be respectful or it's like they see this as a really good way to spend money. And I don't necessarily agree. Like, I would rather that the church Instead of spending 30 million on an, on a 30,000 foot square foot temple to spend, you know, to, to donate that 30 million to a homeless shelter to create something for the people that are alive today. I see that as a more value add. But this is a belief that they sincerely hold. And so is difficult where, you know, they, they believe that they are saving souls and that they're operating under, you know, the direction of God, of the creator of the universe. Right. And so it's, it's very difficult to kind of push back and say that this is, this is all monetary in terms of like trying to generate more tithing revenues or things like that. I don't necessarily think that they think that way or they're operating that way. I think that. Or they're thinking like, okay, well which mission do I want to focus on? I think they really do believe that this is redeeming dead people. And, and so it's difficult to argue in terms of how many temples they should have. So what I want to do, and I think that widows might kind of assumes, like, let's assume that this is a really important issue for the church and we're not going to kind of quibble in terms of like the church wants a thousand temples, the church is going to get a thousand temples and good for them. Now how much is it going to cost them? Do they actually need to sacrifice? Like Rebecca was saying, do they need to sacrifice the fourth mission in order to do that? Do they need to sacrifice members, you know, activity, budget in order to do that? Do they need to actually dip into enzyme peak in order to do that? And the answer for all of those is no. And so that's what's really interesting. So the next slide to me is where it really gets down to like, let's say that they want to create 40 or, sorry, a thousand temples by 2040. And right now they have committed 226 operating and under construction. They've announced. If you add the ones that have been announced, you have 300. If you, if you tried to double that number to 600 in five more years and assume that the temples would be around 10,000 square feet, I think that you would assume that because they're going to be placed in areas that kind of don't make sense to have temples, you're going to want smaller ones. That's roughly 60 new temples a year that they would have to build. But let's assume that they want to do it, and let's assume that they do do it. And then from there they're going to take another seven years to build another 400 temples. So 57 per year. So that gives them a thousand temples by the year 2040. That's a lot of temples. But if they want to do it, it would cost them in total, construction costs around $9 billion, which, which if you spread that out per year for tithing, it only costs around 10% of tithing, annual tithing that they bring in per year. So this is not something that requires Enzyme Peak. This is not, I mean, they could literally build a thousand temples with 9 billion. And in Ensign Peak, they have a hundred and something. You know, they have 150 billion in enzyme peak. So this excuse that like they need the money to build tons and tons of temples is just fallacious. It's, it's absolutely erroneous. It's not even close to what they would need. And so they have plenty and then some to. If they wanted to dip in Enzyme Peak. And not only that, but when, but widows might kind of looked at it, you know, you have to annualize the cost of ownership because you've got to do renovations, you've got operating costs, you know, utilities and things like that. It would still only cost over the next 100 years to have those thousand thousand temples. It would only cost them 500 million a year to maintain those temples and keep them going for, you know, into perpetuity. And that's roughly $32 per square foot per year. So I, I'm, I, I, I push hard on this because I think that a lot of faithful members make this assertion that like, wow, temples are so amazing, they just must be worth like infinity, but they aren't. There's a value that you can assign to these temples and they don't even, they don't even, you know, they don't even scratch the surface of what wealth is within Enzyme Peak. And so Again, what are you doing with all this wealth? If you could build a thousand temples and it. You don't even have to cut 10% of tithing of. You don't even have to cut 10%. It would cut 10% of tithing and annual tithing or less than 10% of enzyme peaks funds. You could pay for it today. Then what's the, what's the purpose of all of that? You know, so that's, that's where. That's where I go with this analysis. I don't know if that's what widows might would say. They would probably be a little more neutral.

Rebecca Biblioteca [02:39:31] Would you agree that most members don't understand that they really think paying the tithing is needed to keep building the temple temples?

Spencer Anderson [02:39:38] Oh, for sure. Because they probably think, oh, each temple is probably a billion dollars and they just throw it out there. And that would, you know, like this, this money won't go that far. And there was a BYU professor. I won't say who it is. And they. They. They tried to say something like, well, if they were to give out tithing as a dividend or all this money in Enzyme Peak as a dividend to all 16 million members, as if that's a thing, then it would only end up being 10,000 per member or something like that. And I thought you're just coming up with these things that the church is never going to do. And you've never actually run the analysis to see is it reasonable. Is it reasonable for the church to have all of this money? Give me one scenario where a rainy day is bad enough of a rainy day that you need $150 billion. I've never. I've never received an answer for that. I don't think that there is a rainy day that would be that bad that you would need the size of Enzyme Peak to. To help with.

John Dehlin [02:40:41] Well, arm. Armageddon is. Is pretty bad. You know, like Gog and Gog and Magog and Armageddon. I think it's going to get pretty bad. Aren't like scorpion like burning scorpions gonna rain down on the heads of the wicked?

Spencer Anderson [02:40:57] Like, I mean, what are you gonna

Gerardo Sumano [02:40:59] do with the land though, when that's going on?

John Dehlin [02:41:02] Like, well, you just have good shingles. You have like really good ceramic Teflon. What is it? What's the armor that like tanks use? Like. Yeah. Why are you laughing, Rebecca?

Rebecca Biblioteca [02:41:15] Because haven't you guys watched the Last of Us? Don't you know what's gonna happen? It's not gonna work out the way they think I don't think so.

John Dehlin [02:41:23] You need, you need, you know, you need a million temples because you're going to have 7 billion people in the millennium doing temple work for a thousand years. So, I mean, listen, if you've got, if you've got. Why are you laughing, Gerardo? If you've got.

Rebecca Biblioteca [02:41:40] Let's just say that math is flawed.

John Dehlin [02:41:42] Wait, how many people can staff a temple? Like, if you've got 7 billion people and maybe only 500 people per temple, like, what's 500 into 7 billion? That's a lot of temples, Spencer.

Spencer Anderson [02:41:55] Right, yeah. You'd be done with everybody within like a couple months too.

Rebecca Biblioteca [02:42:00] Yeah, it is a couple months. I knew somebody, a professor that crunched that math and it, you know, goes around the clock and it literally the millennium is only God. Maybe three months. I don't know. The math is faulty, I'm telling you.

Spencer Anderson [02:42:11] You know that, John. But you're engaging in really bad straw man apologetics. But it's actually, I haven't seen anything much better, to be honest.

John Dehlin [02:42:19] You know, there are a couple comments. Our dear friend Martine. We love Martine. Martine is from Belgium. She writes, the temple in Belgium will be built for at most a thousand members. And we've already. We've in. And then Callie writes, think of the environmental impact of all these buildings and their, the water usage and the grass and the maintenance and all that stuff and the electricity. I, I was just going to say that, you know, in all seriousness, if you think about it, that, you know, the church and the, you know, I think there was an article recently. Ben park wrote an article about the church's history with finances and debt and investments. I'm sure it was a good article. I just skimmed the first part of it, but I, I skimmed it enough to know that like, you know, go back a hundred years and the church is in massive financial ruin. The post polygamy stuff and they're seizing our assets and, and then go into the 50s and 60s, you know, there's deficit spending to try and grow. So the church privatizes its finances and then it's, you know, probably by the six late 60s, early 70s, it's like we got to get serious about like getting our house in order, paying off all our debts and getting right financially. So they hire the best help that they can and start investing stuff carefully. And then it just follows the laws of compound interest or 7% a year. How long does it take to double your investment, Spencer?

Spencer Anderson [02:43:56] I don't know, but I could run the math for You, I think it's

John Dehlin [02:44:00] like seven or 10 years at 7% doubles your money, and you just start doubling your money year after year after year after year. And it gets to the point where these 90, these nonagenarians, they don't know what to do with all the money, and they, they want it there, but they don't want to build a bunch of programs to figure out how to spend the money. They probably don't want the legal liability of, like, what if we buy a bunch of food, but the food's spoiled and then we get sued? What if we have homeless shelters and there's assault going on in the homeless, Homeless shelters, you know. You know, what if we buy medicine in Africa, but then the drug lords take it and, and sell it? You know, it. It's just. I just think the money got out of control. But they don't see it as their job to really, you know, feed, Feed the naked and. Sorry, clothe the naked and feed the hungry. They see their main job as, as, as growing the corporation as, as keeping people in and then helping more people join. I think that's in, in and trying to get as much out of the people who are in the church as possible. And they, they just don't see it as their. And historically, I mean, they're just doing what their predecessors did, and their predecessors weren't doing a lot of charity. So, I mean, it's just this money is, it's, it's like a, it's, it's like a stone cut out of the mountain without hands, that rolls forth and consumes all nations. It's just, it's out of control and they don't know what to do with it. Isn't that fair to say? Spencer?

Spencer Anderson [02:45:38] Yeah, I mean, I, I can't ascribe intent to, like, what it is that they're doing. But I do agree with you that they probably don't know what to do with this problem. This is a new problem. They probably think, wow, God must have something really great in store because we've got a lot of money here and they're just going to wait and see, I guess, what the answer is. But it really seems as though, and I know that, you know, people have different views in terms of, like, whether there would be an answer that would come or if the outside influence would suddenly precipitate some revelation. I, I don't, I don't know. But I do think that they, they probably thought they were operating a church and now they're like, wow, there's this Whole investment fund in the background, and they might not even want to deal with it. I, I think that that's a, that's a, an assumption that could easily, I could easily see that being plausible.

Rebecca Biblioteca [02:46:38] So I have some thoughts on that if I could share just for a second. So just because you're a religion, you don't need to be a charity people. You need to understand that distinction. That is not necessary to be a religion, to be a charity. And when you talk about, John, just sort of how difficult it is to do charitable giving or to create these organizations, it is extremely difficult. It would take a lot of manpower, a lot of work, a lot of planning. But imagine if they could channel all the energy that they have put into concealing money, building the whole infrastructure of Vincent Peak and actually created a charitable organization. It would take a lot, but I think it could be done. And then to your point about they kind of have always operated this way. A lot of people don't realize that. Back on March 10, after the SEC ruling, the church itself put out a topic essay. It's not a gospel topic essay, but it's a topic essay called Church Finance. And you can find that on their website. It is so interesting to go through. On my little podcast, Mormon Ish, we did a little demon debunking of the essay. It's just a regular church essay, but it details, details the history of church finance and organizations that oversee their finance. And it's absolutely fascinating just to see that this, this kind of has been ongoing. And in a way, like you said, John, it kind of has gotten out of control. I mean, at the very beginning, the very early days of the church, there was an organization called the United Firm. I don't know if you guys have heard of that. It operated from, I think, 1832-34. And it was literally an organization. Much like in Ensign Peak, there was a revelation to set it up. It's often confused with the United Order because it's sometimes called that in the dnc, but it was literally an organization. The apostles and leaders of the church were, were the members that ran it. And it was to operate, you know, the financial parts of the church, like the publishing and the stores and things like that. And it's just fascinating. The same kinds of things happened there. They used pseudonyms. You can find those in the DNC prior to 1980. Just crazy names to kind of protect themselves, much like a shell company from lawsuits. And they. You can read this on the church website. Look up United Firm. It talks about how they Sort of changed the language to make it sound like it was something to help the poor. I mean, just kind of step by step, this has sort of been how it's gone. So it's a really fascinating, fascinating thing to dig into, just to see the history. Literally almost 200 years.

John Dehlin [02:49:11] Wow. Fascinating.

Spencer Anderson [02:49:13] Yeah.

John Dehlin [02:49:14] And we'll include in the show notes the link to that Mormon. Mormonish episode because you guys are doing really good work.

Rebecca Biblioteca [02:49:20] Great.

John Dehlin [02:49:21] All right.

Spencer Anderson [02:49:22] Well, I mean, to your point, Rebecca, I guess the. The idea that, like, it requires a ton of logistics to take all of these funds and to do something meaningful with it, which is another reason why this whole rainy day argument doesn't really add up for me. Because if there was a rainy day and they had to somehow use $100 billion to facilitate fixing this rainy day, they would have to start now to create the infrastructure and the logistics necessary to facilitate a $100 billion rainy day prevention fund. Right. Or assessment fund or whatever you want to call that it would take. You would need to have it established right now. The church doesn't have that right now. So it's just a really. To me, the argument falls flat, and I just don't see any logical argument for why the church has what it has. I. I wanted to maybe. Can I end on. Can I talk about one more thing about temples, John?

John Dehlin [02:50:25] Yeah, let's do it.

Spencer Anderson [02:50:27] So one thing that's interesting about the new temple building is that I think that before, the temple used to be seen as like a landmark, as a symbol of the religion, and it was like set up on a hill and things like that. Well, President Nelson recently talked about how they're going to put multiple temples in city centers. And so at this point, it isn't about access. So, for example, if you put like three temples in Mexico City. I served my mission in Mexico City. You can get to the Mexico City temple in Mexico City, right? You do. You don't need to. You don't need three of them to get there. So it isn't about access. And what the widows might leader refer to it as is fortressing. And it's the same thing that, like, maybe dominoes would do. They're like, trying to find. They're trying to keep it top of mind for you and have access as easy as possible. So that, you know, even if, like, attendance of temple going attendance only goes up by like 20% in the area, the church may see that as a big win. So they're shifting their approach to temples. And rather than trying to sort of dot the Earth, as landmarks and as. And this explains why they're being cheaper, right? With the temples, it's more of a utilitarian approach. Like we need to get the temple as close to the people as possible so that they have fewer distractions. And I don't know if you want to call it guilt or if you want to call it just access. The access is as high as possible. And it's an interesting approach, but it also means that, you know, they're going to have. Temples are going to be like, you know, a little more frequently seen and it's just not going to feel, in my opinion, it's not going to feel as special to see temples everywhere. When you go to Mexico City and you say, oh, wow, the Mexico City temple, it's going to be like, yeah, well, we have three of them. It's not. It just doesn't have the same, the same, the same shine that maybe the temple used to have. And I don't know if that's going to backfire in terms of a strategy on them or not, because one of the great things about you learn this in economics. One of the things that really drives value is scarcity. And so if temples are scarce, they're seen as very, very valuable. And that explains why members see temples and they think, wow, these must be like billions of dollars. But when you start to see them everywhere, the temple just doesn't feel as special anymore. And I'm ascribing maybe a psychological phenomenon, but I do think that that could happen in the future.

Rebecca Biblioteca [02:53:06] No, and not just everywhere, but in strange locations like here in Utah. I mean, I'm looking at a temple out my window right now. That's why I built my house here 20 years ago anyway. But now they're literally kind of plopped down beside the freeway. It's very interesting. I don't know if the idea is that you just, you know, exit, get back on the on ramp, but they really are just kind of popping up in surprising, not very, like you said, Spencer, special locations. They're literally right on the side of the freeway. It's. It's kind of strange to see them like that. When growing up in my area, you're used to, like you said, on a hill. They're a very special destination. And now there they are. They're just there next to an Arby's or a Starbucks. In the case of my temple, they're building a Starbucks by it.

Spencer Anderson [02:53:46] So as close to the off ramp as possible, right?

Rebecca Biblioteca [02:53:49] Yeah, exactly. Yeah.

Broader Questions About Church Wealth and Values

John Dehlin [02:53:52] Well, the final, the final point just Stepping outside of temples and just study more broadly is if the church, you know, is named after Jesus Christ, if the church claims that Jesus Christ is the, the central inspiring figure of Mormon doctrine and theology and of the church. It's just so weird that Jesus was poor, walked around in sandals and a robe, said to abandon all your riches and follow him, said that it's, it's easier for, it's, it's, it's, you know, hard for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven, you know, to give up everything and follow him. And he also said, where your treasure is, there will your heart be also. And you know, look, look where the church is now. It's this super mega rich corporate entity literally buying commercial real estate and building residential high rises and commercial shopping malls. And how is it anything other than a mockery of the core teachings of Jesus Christ? And it gives fodder to the Denver snufferites and the fundamentalists who are literally calling the Mormon modern church the great and abominable church. Because how is the Mormon Church in 2023 not become a representative of the great and spacious building, Right, right. Where people dress up in their fine clothing and their makeup and their, their jewel jewelry and their fine costly apparel. You know, sitting in the fancy buildings, pointing at the people down below who are poor or who are struggling. How is that, how is that, how is Lehi's dream not a prediction of the modern Mormon Church? And I don't, I don't say that to be harsh. It just seems objectively factual that that's where the corporate 230 billion dollar Mormon Church is today. And I, I wonder if it could ever reverse course, you know, how could it reverse course at 7% a year? Like you say, it's going to be a 2 trillion dollar church, possibly within our lifetimes. Is that what you're saying, Spencer?

Spencer Anderson [02:55:57] Maybe mine, but you're a little older than me.

Rebecca Biblioteca [02:56:02] Where does that put me?

John Dehlin [02:56:03] Geez, you're out of here, Spencer.

Rebecca Biblioteca [02:56:08] Watch it.

John Dehlin [02:56:08] We're done today anyway. All right, Spencer, well this has been great. Can we just give a huge shout out, a round of applause to the widow's might people that have done this amazing analysis we'll give. Let's get Rebecca in there. Clapping widows. My people, you guys. And Spencer's clapping as well. You widows, my people are amazing. Thumbs up. Let's go ahead and give them one more time a shout out. The website is widowsmightreport.WordPress.com you can check out this presentation and much, much more. You can also email them to give them tips or ideas or suggestions or feedback or praise. They don't want your money. Yeah, people are saying, hit the like button. Please subscribe to our YouTube channel. Hit the like button on this episode. Same with Facebook. Hit the like button and subscribe. And we always appreciate the donations and the super chats. Spencer, any final words from the great people at the widow's Mite? Other than we got a part three

Spencer Anderson [02:57:09] coming up, man, I'm just grateful for all the efforts that they've put into it. I hope that people get the sense of just all the work that it took. And this is from somebody who got to peek on the inside. This person that's, like, primarily involved with this, that got it all started, is working, is. Does stuff every single day on this. And it's just a work of love for this person. And so we all get to be the primary beneficiaries of that. But also, I would just say I really appreciate one of the missions of the Mormon Stories podcast seems to be to create an opportunity for informed consent. And so, to me, it's not as much about whether somebody decides to keep donating tithing to the church or not. Whether they find temple building okay or not. The way that it is, it's all about being able to be informed so that then you can make a decision that's autonomous for you. And I think that that's a fantastic effort that you're going through. I think that this. This whole effort that you're. You're engaging in, John, is. Is well worth it. So thank you for. Thank you, John, for having this podcast.

John Dehlin [02:58:18] Well, thank you, Spencer. Thank you. And thank you, Spencer, for being willing to come on. You're great. We're looking forward to part three. Rebecca, thanks for bringing your wit and wisdom and insight and for what you're doing with the Good Book Club, with the Mormon Stories book club and with Mormonish podcasts. You're just. You're a shooting star, Rebecca.

Rebecca Biblioteca [02:58:39] Well, what a compliment. Thank you so much.

John Dehlin [02:58:41] Yeah, thank you. And. And Gerardo, it's always great to have you. Yeah.

Gerardo Sumano [02:58:46] Thank you.

John Dehlin [02:58:46] Making this happen. And should we thank rfm? Is there any. Is there any.

Rebecca Biblioteca [02:58:50] Yes.

John Dehlin [02:58:51] Is there any place. I mean, the RFM really was. Who helped get all this going in terms of coordinating. So, rfm, you suck for not coming on today.

Rebecca Biblioteca [02:59:01] But he's watching Hallmark movies, I'm pretty sure, in his pajamas. I think that's what it was. Literally, he. Yeah, that's what he's doing.

John Dehlin [02:59:08] Well, we love you, rfm. Check out, check out Radio for Mormon podcast. Check out Mormonism Live Every Wednesdays at 6:20pm shout out to Bill Real as well and just everyone who makes all this possible. So Spencer, what's, what's up for the final part three? Just real quickly.

Preview of Part Three and Closing Remarks

Spencer Anderson [02:59:26] Yeah, the part three is we're going to do a deep dive into a couple of things. One is the charitable arm of the church, like how much it donates to charity, into inside the church and outside. And then the second thing would be sort of a broad overview of all of the tax controversies that are surrounding the church right now. So there's this report from Canada, Australia. There's the David Nielsen allegations about some of the tax forms being misleading. So we'll dive into like the tax issue. And then there's a third, I guess there's a third piece as well where we'll talk a little bit about widows. Might has looked at the there are a few countries where the church has to provide data about the tithing that's coming in and they use that data to infer and to extrapolate from that data how what's the percentage of active membership, active tithe paying membership in those countries? Just kind of cool. So those are the three things.

John Dehlin [03:00:23] All right, well, thanks again, Spencer. Thanks Gerardo. And Rebecca, thanks rfm. Thanks to all of you who joined us today on the live stream. Your comments always make things better. Thanks to everyone who subscribed on on YouTube and on Facebook and hit the like button. Thanks all the super chats and thanks to all the donors that make Mormon Stories and the Open Stories foundation possible. If you want to become, if you want to see more content like this, you want to see us stay alive, hit hit, go to MormonStories.org click on the Donate button, become a monthly donor and please share these episodes with anyone you want or can and shoot us. Email@mormonstoriesmail.com if you got feedback or suggestions. All right, thanks everybody. And someone's saying what is the widow's might site Again? The answer is widowsmightreport WordPress. Com. Just use Google type in widowsmight lds and I'm sure it's going to show up. Anyway, thanks so much for joining us today. Tune in again next time for another episode of Mormon Stories podcast. And most importantly, just be good to each other and be kind to each other.

Transcript © 2026 John P. Dehlin. All rights reserved. Brief quotations are welcome with attribution and a link to mormonstories.org; all other use requires written permission.