February 4, 2024 • 52 mins
Turtle Island: A Journey of Diversity and Healing in the Apocalypse
In this episode, The Fresh King Benjamin reflects on a recent show and shares his experience of performing while feeling sick. He then delves into the concept of Turtle Island as a way to understand the current state of the apocalypse in America. He discusses the white supremacist origins of Mormonism and how it shaped his worldview. The Fresh King Benjamin also shares his transformative trip to Uganda and the impact it had on his beliefs. He highlights the foundational sins of America, including the genocide of Native Americans and the enslavement of African people. Finally, he introduces the term 'diverse immunity' and emphasizes the value of diversity in communities. The conversation explores the concept of Turtle Island as a place of diversity and resources, where different cultures, ideas, and worldviews come together. It emphasizes the importance of recognizing and embracing this diversity to overcome challenges. The chapter also discusses the upcoming show and invites listeners to join the podcast as guests to share their skills and perspectives.
Takeaways
-Performing with grace and adapting to different circumstances is important in creative endeavors. -Understanding the white supremacist origins of certain ideologies can help in dismantling harmful beliefs. -Personal experiences and interactions with different cultures can challenge and change deeply ingrained beliefs. -Acknowledging and addressing the foundational sins of a nation is crucial for healing and progress. -The term 'Turtle Island' offers a more inclusive and indigenous perspective on the land now known as America. -Embracing diversity and valuing different perspectives can lead to stronger and more resilient communities. Turtle Island is a metaphor for the diverse and resourceful nature of humanity. -Embracing diversity and different ways of being human is crucial in facing apocalyptic challenges. -The podcast host invites listeners to attend the upcoming show and join as guests to share their skills and perspectives.
#TurtleIsland #DiverseImmunity #FreshKingBenjamin #ApocalypseNow #HealingAmerica #MormonismExposed #UgandaTrip #DiversityMatters #FoundationalSins #JoinThePodcast
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
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The following presentation is a productionof Ride the Wave Media.
Hey, Heathens, welcome back to Vibing theApocalypse.
I'm your host, the Fresh King Benjamin.
First off at the top, I just want to thankeverybody who came out to my show last
(01:32):
week on the 26th.
We sold it out.
Oh my God, it was so much fun.
We had a packed audience and we just hadso much fun.
So if you were in the audience and youcame out to support, thank you very much.
It was a great night.
I'd been sick all week and so I'd beenlike nursing myself, taking care of
myself, sucking down some tea, violatingthe word of wisdom.
(01:53):
And so it was a different experiencebecause I've never performed, I haven't
performed before where I felt like Iwasn't quite at the top of my game.
Because I was coming in, I was still alittle bit sick.
I was all masked up right until I went onstage.
And it was a cool experience though,because it was fun to be able, because
(02:13):
I've headlined now, I don't know, to eightor nine or maybe 10 times.
And it was cool to be able to fall back onsome muscle memory.
fall back on the set that I've done somany times and to just trust that it
worked, even though I wasn't at the top ofmy game, even though I was feeling sick.
And there was a moment in the middle ofthe set where I was feeling like I was
(02:36):
panicking a little bit.
Internally, I was feeling like maybe Iwasn't doing as good of a job as I had
before.
And I remembered, I started to think, oh,oh shit, I think I might be bombing right
now.
Maybe I'm bombing.
Am I bombing?
Oh shit, I'm gonna bomb.
And...
At right when my head was doing that, Ihad this memory of something that one of
(02:56):
my comedy coaches, a guy named Mark whoworked with me when I first started
comedy, something that he told me when Ivery first got started.
And he said that it's important toremember that when you are in front of an
audience, that's a new audience, right?
It's an audience that has never heardthose jokes before.
And so sometimes as the comic or as theperformer, we have this idea in our head
(03:18):
of what the joke is supposed to be or whatit's supposed to look like.
And if it doesn't look like that, or ifit's not like that, then we can get in our
heads and we can think, oh my gosh, I'mbombing, this isn't working, I've failed.
But what's important to remember is thatthis is a new audience.
This audience has never seen this materialbefore.
They don't know the way that the jokes aresupposed to go.
(03:39):
And so you just need to be with them anddeliver it the best that you can in the
moment with the audience that you're with.
And remembering that in the moment, itallowed me to breathe and just give myself
some grace and to just say,
Hey, it's okay, you're feeling sick rightnow.
It's okay to be a little lower energy.
It's okay to be presenting these jokes ina slightly different way than you have
(03:59):
done in the past.
It's okay to be in the energy that you arein right now and to be in the energy with
this audience that you're in right now.
And after the show, I just had everyonecome up to me as they were leaving, they
were just congratulating me and thankingme and telling me that it had been moving
and funny.
The way that I do this...
The show is it's hilarious, but there'salso some sad moments in there, because
(04:21):
I'm trying to like, I'm trying to givevoice to a traumatic background and to a
traumatic life that I've lived and thatother people have lived who have a
background similar to mine.
And, and I was able to really come across.
And so it was just a reminder as acreative to just remember that the moment
that you're, that you're in right now isthe most important moment.
(04:42):
And the creation that you're creatingright now is the only creation.
And it can be so easy when we have theseideas of what we should be doing or what
it should look like to be judgingourselves against rather than just being
present with the audience that was rightthere.
So just again, a big thank you to everyonewho came out.
It was very fun, very fun to sell it out.
(05:04):
It sold out right before, like even beforethe doors opened, I showed up to the club
and the owner was like, hey, you sold thisthing out.
It's packed.
And that was a couple of hours before theshow started.
So thanks again to everyone who came out.
If you missed it, or if you came and youwant to just an encore, I will be back at
Wise Guys again this month, February 25th.
(05:24):
So that's Sunday, February 25th.
I imagine that that show will sell outagain.
So if you weren't able to make this oneand you want to come, or if you're just
wanting to come again and bring some, somenew friends, make sure that you get those
tickets at wiseguyscomedy .com.
Get them now because that show is going tosell out.
So, uh, that's, that's that.
Let's get to the meat of this show.
So today,
(05:45):
In my last episode when I was chattingwith Emily, I mentioned just briefly this
idea of Turtle Island.
And I want to dig into that a little bitmore in this episode because it feels like
an important frame to begin to understandthe apocalypse as we're dealing with it
right now in America.
(06:05):
Because Turtle Island to me is the settingwhere the apocalypse for us and our
immediate surroundings is unfolding.
Because Turtle Island is America.
Now let me give you some background.
on this, why do I call it Turtle Island?
Why is that important to me?
Why not just call it America?
And for me, this really goes back to mebreaking out of a white supremacist
background, right?
I grew up, as I said in my first episode,I grew up deep in Mormon polygamy.
(06:30):
And Mormonism at its inception wasessentially a white supremacist ideology.
The Book of Mormon, when it was published,when Joseph Smith translated it, by
looking at a rock and a hat, what heclaimed that it was,
is a narrative account, a historicalaccount of the origins of the Native
(06:50):
Americans, right?
So in the 1820s, 1830s, there was a bigfascination in white America with where
were these natives coming from?
Where did these natives come from?
Who were the people, who were theancestors of the humans that were on this
continent before white people showed up?
And there was a big debate about that,right?
(07:11):
A lot of people, it wasn't just JosephSmith, but a lot of people at the time,
thought that maybe they had come across,maybe they were some of the lost tribes of
Israel.
That was like a big, that was a big, a bigexplanation as to why or to where they
might've come from.
And Joseph Smith decided that he wanted totake a stab at explaining where these
people had come from.
And rather than asking them or going totheir myths or thinking about like that
(07:37):
from their perspective, he did what whitesupremacists have done since I guess the
invention of white supremacy, which is heexplained it for them.
And so he, in the Book of Mormon, hecreated a story about a family of Jews, of
white Jews, called the, they were thefamily of Lehi in Jerusalem that lived 600
(07:57):
years before Jesus in Jerusalem.
So this is before Babylon invades anddisperses the Jews in Israel.
There's this family, the Lehi's family,and Lehi is a prophet.
And Lehi, this is the very first story inthe Book of Mormon.
Lehi gets a revelation from God thatJerusalem is about to be destroyed.
(08:18):
And he gets told, hey, you gotta take yourfamily and you've gotta go and you've
gotta take your family out of Jerusalemand go where I'll tell you to go and I
will bring you to a promised land.
In the Book of Mormon, it calls it a landchoice above all others where you will be
safe and protected.
You'll be able to grow into a greatnation.
And when...
(08:39):
Lehi brings his family out.
Some of his family are on board.
They're like, yeah, we believe that God istalking to you.
We believe that we're supposed to bewandering in this desert.
Some of the family is like, no, we justwant to go home.
We just want to go home.
And there are four brothers in thisfamily.
There are sisters too, but the sistersdon't matter in the Book of Mormon because
it's also misogynistic.
There are only three named women in theentire Book of Mormon, which is even less
(09:02):
than the Bible.
So it's predominantly a story about men,which makes sense when you consider Joseph
Smith's views on women.
So it's, it's, there's four brothers.
There's Laman, Lemuel, Nephi and Sam.
And Nephi is the youngest.
Laman and Lemuel are the oldest.
Sam is in the middle.
Sam incidentally is my temple name.
So I went through the LDS temple and inthe temple you get a very secret special
(09:25):
name that you're not supposed to reveal toanyone because it's what Jesus is going to
use to resurrect you.
So I tell everyone that because I justwant to make sure that I'm resurrected.
So not only Jesus can resurrect me, any ofyou can resurrect me now because my very
secret temple name.
which is Sam.
Also a little bit of a disappointment whenI got that name.
I much prefer the apocalypse prophet,which is the new name that I got at
(09:50):
Burning Man.
Anyway, so there's these four brothers,right?
Nephi and Sam, they're faithful, right?
They are following Lehi.
They are doing what God wants them to do.
And Laman and Lemuel are wicked.
They murmur, they complain, they don'twanna do it.
They're forced to do it.
And there's all of these miracles thathappen in the Book of Mormon where like
(10:10):
angels appear to them and tell them thatthey're supposed to be doing what Lehi
tells them.
And Laman and Lemuel consistently forget.
They're like, oh, we, this sucks.
We don't have any food.
We just want to go back home.
And Laman or Nephi and Sam are all,they're gung -ho.
They're like really into it.
They're like, we're going to do what,what, what Lehi and God command us.
In fact, there's this scripture that allMormons memorize that comes from, from
(10:33):
Nephi and it's Nephi responding to hisdad.
asking him to go back to Jerusalem to getsome brass plates, which have the
scriptures on them.
And he says, I will go and do the thingsthat the Lord has commanded me.
For I know that the Lord give us nocommandment unto this children of men,
save he prepare a way for them toaccomplish the thing which he has
commanded them.
See, it's still in there, right?
(10:53):
I haven't been Mormon.
I haven't been active Mormon for almost 10years and I still have that.
I still have that.
It just rolls right off the tongue.
So Nephi says this and he goes back toJerusalem.
He ends up.
chopping off the head of the person whoowns these golden plates as this person is
passed out drunk in an alleyway because anangel appears to him and says, hey, it's
(11:15):
better for one person to perish, onewicked man to be killed, than for a nation
to dwindle and perish in unbelief.
So chop off this dude's head and steal hisgolden, steal his not golden plates, his
brass plates.
The golden plates come later.
Which is pretty horrific, right?
The very first story in the Book of Mormonis about how
the righteous people, they kill sometimesin the name of God.
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And this was something that I was raisedon as a child, as a little boy, we were
taught this story, we were taught thatNephi was the one that we wanted to
follow, and that sometimes, sometimes Godcommands you to do things that don't feel
good.
God commands you to do things that don'tfeel good.
And this is an important doctrine, this isan important milestone in the formative
(12:02):
beliefs of my youth.
and in the formative beliefs of a lot ofMormons, because it prepares you later on
to believe and to do things that are, thatfeel bad, right?
Because humans, we are intuitively good.
I believe, I think that we knowinstinctually what's right and what's
wrong.
And we know that based on what feels goodand bad in our bodies.
(12:25):
And so when you can be taught that whatfeels bad in your body, like murder, is
actually good,
because God told you to do it, then youcan be twisted into all sorts of gross
beliefs.
And this is one of the beliefs that I gottwisted into because later on in the
story, there's this introduction of thisreally gross white supremacist idea, which
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is that when they get to the promisedland, Laman and Lemuel and all of their
family, they end up splitting off fromNephi and Sam and they become, Nephi and
Sam become the righteous tribe and they'recalled the Nephites for the rest of the
Book of Mormon.
Laman and Lemuel, they become the WickedTribe, and they get called the Lamanites
for the rest of the Book of Mormon.
(13:08):
And then the rest of the Book of Mormon isessentially a story about the conflicts
between the Righteous Tribe, the Nephites,and the Wicked Tribe, the Lamanites.
But right when they split up, God stepsinto the narrative, and he's talking to
Nephi, and he's telling Nephi, hey, I'mgoing to curse your brother, your
brothers, and their families, and theirdescendants.
(13:30):
so that your descendants will be able totell them apart and so that you'll be able
to know that that's who they are, then I'mgoing to curse them because they're
wicked.
And this is the nature of that curse.
So this is coming from the Book of Mormon,second Nephi in the Book of Mormon, which
is one of the books of the Book of Mormon,chapter five, verse, this starts in verse
20.
So this is Nephi talking.
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It says, wherefore the word of the Lordwas fulfilled, which he spake unto me,
saying that inasmuch as they, meaning theLamanites,
will not hearken unto thy words, meaningNephi's words, they shall be cut off from
the presence of the Lord.
And behold, they were cut off from hispresence.
And he caused the cursing to come uponthem, yea, even a sore cursing because of
(14:11):
their iniquity.
For behold, they had hardened their heartsagainst him, that they had become like
unto Flint.
Wherefore, as they were white andexceedingly fair and delightsome, that
they might not be enticing unto my people,the Lord God did cause a skin,
of blackness to come upon them.
And thus saith the Lord God, I will causethat they shall be loathsome unto thy
(14:35):
people, save they shall repent of theiriniquities.
And cursed shall be the seed of him thatmixes with their seed, for they shall be
cursed even with the same cursing.
And the Lord spake it, and it was done.
And because of their cursing which wasupon them, they did become an idle people
full of mischief and subtlety, and didseek the wilderness for the beasts.
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So that is gross, right?
Horrifying.
That's a disgusting thing to believe thatGod, the God of the universe, uses skin
color as a curse.
And specifically, blackness.
Dark skin color.
That's the curse.
But at the time of Joseph Smith, when he'swriting this in the 1800s, right?
(15:18):
This is an explanation as to why there arethese brown people running around.
Why are there these Native Americans whoare dark skinned and we're white skinned?
We're obviously better because we'rewhite.
White is supreme.
That's where white supremacist comes from.
And so white is supreme.
White's great.
Brown is not great.
And there was also this attempt to explainwhy the white race seemed to be rolling
(15:39):
over to justify the genocide that washappening, the removal of natives from
their lands.
This is the same time that Andrew Jacksonis confiscating the land of the Cherokee,
right?
There's the Trail of Tears happening.
Millions upon millions of natives havebeen killed through sickness.
through war, through genocide.
And there's an attempt in white culture inthe United States to explain why that's
(16:03):
okay.
Why is it okay that that's happening?
And for a lot of white Americans, sort ofthe national myth became manifest destiny.
And within Mormonism, there was thisreally concentrated version of that
manifest destiny with this idea thatAmerica is a chosen land.
It's reserved for the righteous.
If a people are losing that land, it'sbecause they're wicked.
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Therefore, the natives must be wicked.
And why are they wicked?
Well, because they're idle and they'remischief.
They have mischief and subtlety and theyhunt animals and stuff.
They don't live this civilized lifestylethat we do.
Which is actually absurd because thenative peoples were incredibly civilized.
If you study the Iroquois or the Cherokeeor any of these, they were really
(16:46):
sophisticated civilizations that hadcultivated the earth over thousands of
years to essentially be a Garden of Eden.
Like...
One of the things that I think is funnyabout Mormonism is that Mormons believe
that the Garden of Eden was in JacksonCounty, Missouri.
And that's not true, right?
That's because number one, there was noGarden of Eden.
And number two, if there was a Garden ofEden, it would have been like in Babylon
(17:10):
or like in the Euphrates over in thatarea, not in Jackson County.
But it is interesting that if you look atthe agriculture and the way that the
natives cultivated the land in...
on this continent before white peopleshowed up, there were these massive
forests that were carefully cultivated byhumans to basically just be food machines,
(17:37):
right?
There were nuts in the overstory, tons ofdifferent varieties.
There was fruit.
There was roots, root vegetables.
Like this entire forest, this entireecosystem was designed to essentially be a
forest of food that humans, you couldliterally just walk around and
pick food up from anywhere and eat.
It was a paradise.
And white people showed up and we werelike, oh my God, look at all this cool
(17:59):
lumber.
Let's burn it all down and build cities.
And so this is the ideology that I'm borninto, right?
I'm taught that this is the origin of thenative peoples on this continent.
I'm taught that the reason why it was okayfor the native peoples to be enslaved or
to be genocided and kicked off their land,
(18:21):
And the reason why it was okay for blackpeople from Africa to be enslaved is
because both of those populations weresuffering under the curse of God.
And how do you know that?
Well, because of their skin color.
Right?
And I'm taught this as a littlepolygamist, Mormon polygamist boy growing
up in Wyoming, where there are basicallyno brown people.
(18:41):
Right?
I don't think I met, I don't think I met ablack person until I was 18 when I was at
college.
And that was one dude that I met inSeattle.
I was on a debate trip.
So I had no contact.
I had no, this was not a part of my worldat all.
And the entire time growing up, I wastaught that because of my skin color,
because I was white, I was better thaneveryone else.
(19:07):
That would meant that I was chosen by God.
And I didn't really realize even that thatwas a white supremacist.
I wouldn't have used that language as aMormon because I didn't have that
language.
It's not like,
White supremacy is something that you get,you learn outside and then you can
retroactively apply it to the worldview.
But I always felt really gross in my bodybelieving this.
(19:29):
I remember going back to this idea thatMormonism teaches you that things that
feel bad in your body are actually good.
This is one example, right?
I was taught, hey, because you're like,this is doctrine, right?
This is the truth.
This is the true thing.
And humans were wired.
to believe in the fictitious worlds thatour elders provide us, right?
(19:52):
We're hardwired to exist in mythical andfictional worlds, and we just accept these
worlds when we're very young and justassume that that's true.
And what that does to a young child, whatthat did to me is it put me in conflict
with myself because my body felt grossbelieving that.
I remember hearing my dad.
(20:13):
talk about those beliefs with other peopleand just feeling so ashamed as like a five
or six year old because I just I had thissense that it was gross that it wasn't a
right that how could how could that be thething that determines if someone's good or
not shouldn't it be actions shouldn't bethe content of your character not the
(20:33):
color of your skin I knew that intuitivelybut I was programmed to believe that that
knowing feeling that was wrong.
Right?
That was me.
That was weakness.
That was me not measuring up to the truth.
And I had to squelch and squish thattenderness down so that I could get in
line with what was, uh, what was true.
(20:56):
And that's how I operated and believeduntil I was 19 years old.
And when I was 19 years old, I was atcollege and I happened to see a little
poster that was advertising like a summerinternship, like a summer trip to Uganda.
teaching teacher development classes tolike high school and elementary school
(21:16):
teachers.
And I'd never, I didn't even know whatUganda was, but I looked at that sign and
I had this little thought pop into my headthat was like, you should go to Uganda.
And I'd been taught to listen topromptings, right?
I'd been taught that God and the Holyghost speaks to you and they'll like,
they'll give you little nudges to push youin the direction that you're supposed to
go.
And so I assumed I was like, okay, well,this seems like a prompting, I guess I
(21:39):
better go to Uganda.
And so I started to raise money for it.
I ended up going at the, over theresistance and the refusal of my parents,
right?
So my parents find out that I'm going todo this.
My dad tells me, Hey, you're not supposedto go, go here.
You're called to preach to the house ofIsrael, meaning white people, which is a
(22:01):
whole nother, a whole nother can of wormsbecause as of Israel was brown, not white,
but.
Mormonism hijacked Israel to be whitepeople and not just Mormonism, like a lot
of evangelicals, a lot of white Christiannationalism has hijacked this idea that
whiteness is Israel.
And so Mormonism is just one iteration ofthat.
(22:22):
But he was like, you're called to preachto the house of Israel to white people,
you're not called to preach to the heathennations.
I forbid you to go.
And that was a really...
pivotal moment in my life because I feltvery deeply at the time that I was
supposed to go to Uganda, right?
I felt that very, and now I wouldattribute that to my higher self, right?
(22:45):
To my soul, knowing that I had to get outinto a bigger world.
And so it was pushing me into that spacewhere I could be confronted with the
limited and hateful nature of my ideologyso that I could change it.
At the time, I didn't know that, right?
I thought that God was calling.
And so I override my dad's objections andI'm like, dad, I'm going to go anyway.
(23:12):
It doesn't matter what you say.
God's told me to go.
And so I'm going to listen to that.
And he came back with, well, what if I getbrother Lemoine to tell you not to go?
And for context, brother Lemoine, he wasthe prophet of the AUB, of the Apostolic
United Brethren, which was the version ofMormonism, the sect of Mormonism.
that I belonged to at the time.
(23:32):
He was the prophet, right?
He spoke to God.
And that was tricky because had theprophet of God, because one of the things
that you're taught in Mormonism is thatit's okay for you to get, there's
individual revelation and then there'sprophetic revelation.
So individual revelation, all humans havethe right to get individual revelation
from God for their own lives.
(23:54):
And so, and you're supposed to listen tothat and to follow that.
But if that individual revelation everconflicts with prophetic revelation, then
you cancel the individual revelation, yougo with prophetic revelation.
This is one of the ways that Mormonism isa cult, right?
Because that's what cults do.
There's no other, if you are in anorganization or an institution or a group,
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or if there's a person that's telling youto override your intuitive, individual
sense of what's right and wrong and whatyou should do, your sort of moral compass
for your life,
and to override that in favor of someoneelse doing that for you, that is one of
the characteristics of a cult, is that yousubordinate yourself to another person.
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And that would have been tricky hadLemoyne called me because at the time I
was still pretty fully indoctrinated intothis cult.
And I don't know if I would have gone hadhe told me not to.
But I don't know if my dad just nevercalled him or if he just didn't have the
kind of pull with the prophet that hethought he did.
(25:00):
But I never got a call from Lemoyne.
And so I ended up going to Uganda.
I spent 92 days in Uganda.
And I was one of like five white people inthe entire town that I stayed in.
We were surrounded by, by all of these,all of these beautiful Ugandans.
And it, it changed me.
It changed me.
(25:21):
And it also just gave me permission to bewho I always was.
Because I fell in love with these people.
And I realized that there was nothing,there was no difference between us, right?
We were all human.
I was human, they were human.
And if anything, like I wasn't better thanthem.
(25:44):
If anything, they were better than mebecause they didn't have this dark, gross
secret that they thought they were betterthan me because of their skin color.
I had that and I felt a lot of...
Felt a lot of internalized shame aroundthat.
And so when I came back from Uganda, thatwas the beginning of the unraveling of my
Mormon indoctrination.
Because I couldn't square the livedexperience that I'd had in Uganda and the
(26:09):
real human connections that I'd had withthe people that I'd met there with this
really hateful worldview that I was toldwas true.
And so that ultimately became...
the spark that pushed me into my slow exitof Mormonism.
From there, I joined the LDS church, theLDS version of Mormonism, which is a
(26:30):
slightly, it still has the whitesupremacist doctrine.
It still believes the Book of Mormon, hasthat skin of blackness thing, but they've
downplayed, they've moved away fromrestricting people of color from being
full members of that church.
In 1978, if you've seen the Book ofMormon, in 1978, God changed his mind
about black people.
(26:51):
What that's referring to is that in 1978,the LDS church before then, the LDS church
did not allow black people to be fullmembers of the church.
They weren't able to hold the priesthood.
They weren't able to go to the temple,which is what you need to do in order to
get like to the tippy top of Mormonheaven.
They weren't able to do any of that.
But in 1978, under the threat of losingtheir tax exempt status and not being
(27:11):
allowed to play or BYU to play in collegesports anymore, they had a revelation and
they, and they changed which, um,
is hilarious that the LDS church stillclaims to be led by a prophet because I
don't think that you get to claimprophetic guidance and be teen years late
to the civil rights movement, right?
(27:32):
Like you don't get to have a racist policymagically change 15 years after the civil
rights act gets passed and claim to be aprophet.
You should be ahead of that shit.
And,
Ultimately, I end up leaving Mormonismentirely after a couple of years in the
LDS faith.
But that experience of being raised andprogrammed as a white supremacist and then
(28:01):
meeting the people that I was told to hateand that I was taught were less than me
and then having to square that in my souland unpack the grossness that was inside
of me and step into...
the love and connection and tendernessthat had always been underneath that was a
really important experience for me.
And it also framed my view of Americanpolitics because I, with that experience,
(28:28):
right, having grown up in the most extremeexample of American white supremacy, it
makes me really cognizant of the ways inwhich America was and still is a white
supremacist nation.
Right, the fact that it blows my mindtoday that there are, like if you look at
(28:50):
America, if you look at the United Statesof America through a moral lens, meaning
that we judge this country based on themoral actions that it has taken over its
history, there are two foundational sinsthat this country committed that it has
still not repented of.
(29:12):
and that is the genocide and stealing ofland from the natives, and then the
kidnapping and enslavement of Africanpeople.
Those are two foundational crimes againsthumanity.
On the scale of the Holocaust, on thescale of other massive human rights
(29:36):
violations throughout history, we didthat.
The United States of America enslaved
entire populations for generations.
Did you know?
I didn't realize this until I startedstudying history outside of the cult and
really learning American history.
But it will, it will, the United States orAmerica, right?
(29:57):
The European North American experiment,whether that's colonial America or the
United States, but our existence as awhite culture on this continent will not
have been a
non -slaveholding culture, as long as itwas a slaveholding culture, until 2158.
(30:19):
Let that sink in for a little bit.
We have been a nation of slaves from 1619,when the first slaves arrived on this
continent, 1619 until 1865, when slaveryis abolished.
And that's generous, right?
(30:40):
Because really, really, it's not until the1960s, and really it's not until the
1980s, and really it's still a problemtoday, right?
But like, if you wanna talk about theabolition of slavery,
1865 to 1619.
That's 246 years that we were a slave-holding nation.
(31:03):
So 1865, 1865 minus 1619, 246, 1865 plus246, oh, 2111.
Sorry, that's the date.
2111.
is when we will have been a non-slaveholding population for as long as we
(31:26):
were a slaveholding population.
That is grievous.
That is the kind of sin that you getIsaiah in the Bible condemning the nation
of Israel to destruction, right?
The kidnapping, enslavement, breeding,
(31:50):
split up of families, oppression of thesepeople for 250 years, and then the
continued oppression after that, right?
We still have not.
America's wealth, America's the wealthiestcountry on earth, America's wealth was
built on the backs of slaves.
(32:10):
It was stolen from those people, and westill haven't given it back.
We still haven't made it right.
One of the things that you learn inMormonism, right?
Cause Mormonism is really focused onrepentance and being righteous, right?
And so when you grow up in Mormonism, youlearn a formula for repentance.
And so there's, there's a couple of steps.
The first step to repent is if you have tonumber one, you have to admit that you did
(32:32):
something wrong.
Then you have to apologize to the personthat you did it, did it to, and then you
have to repair.
You have to make it right.
There's three steps and we have just.
barely gotten comfortable with theadmitting part.
I don't think we've really ever fullyapologized for that.
(32:53):
And we definitely haven't made it right,because we're, you mention reparations in
white America and we're all like, oh mygosh, get over it.
Get over 250 years of generational traumaand abuse and exploitation and murder?
What the fuck are we talking about?
(33:14):
And that's just one of these sins.
Because the other sin is we came to a landthat was inhabited.
We came to a land, we called it the NewWorld, there's nothing new about it.
Humans had been actively living on thiscontinent for thousands of years.
They had cultivated nations andcivilizations and forests and agriculture.
(33:39):
They had entire cultures here.
And we came here.
And we deliberately attacked, murdered,stole from those people.
And then we created disgusting lies likethe Book of Mormon to justify why it was
okay that we did that.
So the wealth of America, right?
(34:01):
America, I'm just gonna Google this realquick, because I'm not exactly sure what
America's wealth is.
What is America's America's GDP.
much is that total GDP?
What's the GDP of the US in 2023?
I've been getting increases.
I want to know total.
(34:22):
It's trillions of dollars.
Because it grew, it increased by 1 .6trillion in 2023, which was 6 .3%.
How is this not just easily Google?
What is the total GDP?
of United States, $23 .32 trillion.
(34:45):
$22, $23 trillion.
And that wealth, that wealth was, camefrom two places.
It was built from the slavery, the laborthat was exploited from slaves because
America was at first a cotton economy.
Cotton was the backbone of our economy.
(35:06):
That's what built the manufacturing.
In the North, even the North as it movedout of slavery, the manufacturing that was
built based on, in the North was based onthe cotton in the South and it was built
on stolen land.
There's this great line, oh, there's thisfabulous line from an Ava Brothers song
that describes America as a place built onstolen land by stolen people.
(35:33):
A place built on stolen land by stolenpeople.
We stole that.
That's where, that's America's wealth isstolen.
And we pretend that it's not.
We pretend that it's not.
And we, anytime anyone mentionsreparations, no, we can't do that.
I don't want to take money from me, whichI think is dumb because let's be real.
Let's be real, you guys.
If we did reparations and we absolutelyshould, because we know we have records,
(35:57):
right?
We know who the people are, who are thedescendants of slaves.
And we know who the people are who are thedescendants of the natives that this land
was stolen from.
So all that we know where all those peopleare.
And we know where all that money is.
It's in corporate America, right?
It's not in the pockets of like theaverage white worker, which is that's one
(36:18):
of the ways that the elite kind of keep usenslaved, right?
As they'll get us fighting each otherlike, oh, we can't give reparations to the
descendants of slaves.
That money will come out of my pocket.
No, it won't, white wage earner.
It'll come out of Amazon and MorganStanley.
and Goldman Sachs, right?
The place where the top, the wealth ofthis country is concentrated in the top
(36:41):
1%.
We know where that money is.
And that money by rights should go back tothe people that it was stolen from.
I say this as the prophet of theapocalypse.
Right?
We have that, that is our foundationalsin.
And we will not, as a country, we will notfully heal and fully be able to rebuild
(37:03):
ourselves into this new,
world that we're we have the opportunityto build ourselves into with this
apocalypse unless we Fix that unless werepair that because that's where we're
broken right you everyone knows us intherapy in medical science you you have to
go where the injury happened to heal anduntil we go to where the injury happened
(37:29):
and Look at the results of that injurythat are still ongoing today
we will continue to be wounded and brokenas a country.
And let's be real, you guys, that kind ofredistribution of wealth, that kind of
investment into the native peoples andinto the people of, into black people in
(37:49):
America would be revolutionary becausethey already make tons of cool stuff.
Like black people invented modern musicand they're poor.
They did that when we stole everythingfrom them.
What the fuck do you think that they coulddo if they had some of the money that we
stole from them?
(38:10):
They could make some pretty cool shit.
So, I think we need to invest in that.
We need to repair that damage.
We need to...
That is one of the, I think, most urgentmoral questions of our age and of this
apocalypse, right?
The most urgent thing for us to do as acountry is to go back and to fix...
(38:32):
That.
That is our original sin.
That is the thing.
That is the thing that we're all ashamedof that we can't really talk about.
That's why do you think there's a thingcalled white guilt?
Why do you think white people are walkingaround feeling guilty all the time?
It's because we know that.
It's because we know this and that's theroot of so many of our problems today.
(38:54):
We gotta fix it.
All of which brings me back to TurtleIsland.
Why do I wanna call this place TurtleIsland?
It's because I hate calling America,America.
Because America is something that whitepeople named it, right?
We didn't, this is what happened whenwhite people discovered a place where
(39:19):
there were already humans living, right?
We showed up and rather than saying, hey,oh my gosh, hi people who live here
already.
Hey, what do you call this place?
Where are we?
Right?
First what happened is Columbus shows upand he's like, I'm in India.
And the natives are like, no, you'rereally not.
And he's like, seriously, I am.
And then he goes to his grave.
(39:39):
He dies, refusing to believe that he wasin India.
He's like, it was just the West Indies.
It was the West of India.
But then after Columbus, another guy comesalong.
His name's Amerigo Vespucci.
And he's an explorer.
And he's credited with the one being theone that figured out that it was a
continent, even though again,
Everyone who lived here knew that.
(40:00):
So literally all you had to do was ask thepeople who were already here and they
would have told you, yeah, this is a, thisis not an island, this is a continent.
But America Vespucci discovered that forEurope.
He wrote a couple of letters back toEurope about describing some of his
adventures.
And then a dude in a map maker in Europebasically made one of the first maps of
(40:20):
the North and South American continents.
And, and he wrote America on them afterAmerica Vespucci.
So it's literally named after some dudewho is not even from here, not named by
the people who've been living here forgenerations, just a guy who showed up and
lied about some of the things that hediscovered, wrote some letters, and then
they just drew, just wrote on a map, thisis mine.
(40:43):
I can't think of a more white thing to do,right, than taking credit for something
that someone has already done.
But I don't like calling where we're at,America, because...
that sort of buys into thiscolonialization, buys into this idea that
(41:04):
this is something that there weren'talready people here, that white people and
white supremacy and white culturediscovered this place.
We didn't.
We were almost the last people who showedup.
So what did the natives call it?
What did the people who lived here callit?
Well, they called it a lot of differentthings, generally depending on where they
lived.
(41:24):
But my favorite thing, this was a questionthat I had a couple years ago.
I was like, I want to know what they callthis place.
I'm trying to figure out what to call thisplace.
Cause I don't want to call it Americaagain anymore.
Cause I don't want to buy into thiscolonial worldview.
So turns out that a bunch of the tribes,especially in the Northeast, most
prominently the Iroquois, which was amassive federation of tribes in the
(41:48):
Northeastern, um, United States, very cooltribe or very cool group of tribes.
with just a rich and vibrant politicalstructure and culture, they called it
Turtle Island.
And it goes back to this myth of how itwas formed, which basically was that there
was a big flood and the gods were tryingto figure out how to help all the animals
(42:11):
survive.
And there was a turtle who volunteered.
It was like, hey, you can, all the animalscan climb up on my back.
So the owl climbed up on his back and theywere floating, surviving the flood.
But then the waters were so high that thegod was like, hey, we gotta, we gotta,
build out this a little bit more on theback of this turtle so that there's more
land so that people can live on here.
And so a couple animals tried to dive downto the bottom of the ocean to get some
(42:33):
dirt.
Only the muskrat is able to make it backup.
He brings a little bit of land and withthat the god kind of creates, puts mud
down on the back of this turtle and thatbecomes Turtle Island.
What's interesting though is that thereason, or if you, what's interesting
about the term Turtle Island is that ifyou look,
(42:54):
North America from above, it looks like aturd.
Let me show you.
So zooming in, here's the head, rightalong the top.
Alaska is one of its feet.
Down here by the Hudson Bay, that'sanother one of its feet.
(43:14):
Here's the shell, the tail, back leg, backleg.
An artistic,
rendering of that that looks a little bit,you can see it a little bit better is from
Reddit.
I love this image.
It's a fucking turtle.
We're on the back of a giant turtle.
(43:35):
And what's interesting about that as itrelates to the apocalypse, as it relates
to oceans rising, is that it looks likewe're on the back of the turtle and the
turtle is diving, right?
You can see that water going up, it's headfirst, it's going back under the water.
where ocean levels are going to rise, theturtle that we're on the backup that we're
riding is gonna go down.
(43:56):
I think this is fascinating.
I love this as a name for this amazingplace that we live because it's not named
after a person.
It's not named after something from theold world.
It's not named after Europe.
It's not named after an ideology.
It's named after the land.
It's named after what it looks like.
(44:17):
It's a fucking turtle.
We're on the back.
of a giant turtle and the turtle isdiving.
And I think that's an important and ahelpful way to look at America, right?
Because it gets beyond borders, it getsbeyond political events, the United
(44:38):
States, Canada, Mexico.
We don't know how crazy this apocalypse isgoing to go.
We don't know what the next hundred yearsare really going to bring, but it's...
There's a very real possibility with thedecline of the North of the United States
Empire that the political institutionsright now, literally Texas is talking
about seceding.
There could be a civil war in the UnitedStates.
(45:00):
So the political institutions of thatcurrently exist on Turtle Island are very
much in flux.
They could be different.
They're not permanent.
And what I like about calling it TurtleIsland is that Turtle Island isn't a
political ideology.
It's not a country, it's not anationalism, it's a place.
(45:21):
And we are responsible as citizens ofTurtle Island for all of the life on
Turtle Island.
All of the people, it doesn't matter whatthe border is.
It doesn't matter what country it is.
What matters is are they people?
Are they alive?
Are they citizens of this Turtle Island?
Are they living on this continent?
(45:41):
Then they're our neighbors.
Then they're our people, then they're ourtribe.
And the tribes of Turtle Island,
are gonna have to come together to survivethis apocalypse.
And actually, when you think about it, weare beautifully prepared on Turtle Island
to survive the apocalypse because inaddition to all of the crappy things that
(46:02):
the United States of America has done,which was a bit of a, that was a bit of a
culture shock for me too, right?
Stepping out of Mormonism has been thisgrowing out of a cult, right?
And I had to come to terms with some ofthe things that Mormonism had done that
were bad.
that were harmful.
And then I had to come to terms, because Istepped out then into America, into the
United States of America, and then I hadto come to terms with some of the harm
(46:24):
that that country had caused.
And so I went, I got to a point for awhile where I was like, I was bummed about
the place where I lived.
I was upset.
I was like pretty negative about theUnited States.
And then I started meeting people who hadimmigrated here, right?
Who had come here from other countries,from Russia, from Latin America, from
(46:44):
China.
from just all over because the UnitedStates, for all of its faults, has also
been gathering, it's been calling a highcaliber of people for hundreds of years.
They've been coming here, often with greatresistance from some of the white
supremacist ideology that exists on TurtleIsland, but they've been coming here
nevertheless.
And as I talk to these people, I rememberI was at a conference in Vegas, there was
(47:09):
an after party, I was talking to this dudewho he'd immigrated from Russia, he'd
started a business here.
And I was sharing with him how I feltabout America at the time I was feeling
negative.
And he looked me, he kind of like grabbedmy shoulder and he looked in my eyes and
he said, he said, I love America.
I love this place.
(47:29):
There's nowhere else that has the kind ofopportunities that I've been able to have
here.
And I thought about that and I took thatin and I thought about it.
And I thought about all of the, all theincredible,
diverse people who have been coming toTurtle Island for the last 400 years.
(47:52):
We have an incredible diverse communityhere.
One of the terms that I've coined that I'mtrying to make a thing, because I think
it's a value.
Like if I were to be prophet of TurtleIsland and to preach the values of Turtle
Island, I think one of the most importantvalues is what I call diverse immunity,
which is when you take the wordsdiversity,
and community and you squish themtogether.
(48:13):
So a diverse community gives you diverseimmunity, which is an immune system,
right?
It's like, diverse immunity means you areimmune, you're able to withstand some of
the challenges, some of the shocks thatare coming with the apocalypse.
As ocean levels rise, as natural disastershappen, as governments fall, as wars
(48:33):
happen, right?
As all of the crazy calamities that I waspromised start to unfold.
Right?
As the climate apocalypse hurdles ustowards potential oblivion, having diverse
immunity in our communities will allow usto respond to that very effectively.
Because the more diverse your communityis, the more different ideas and more
(48:58):
different perspectives and differentworldviews and different ways of being you
have from the different humans that livein your community, the more options you
have, the more ideas you have.
And if that community has learned to getpast some of the tribal, ethnocentric
parts of our species where we shun and areafraid of those people who are different
(49:19):
from us, the white supremacy, right?
That says that one group of people is themost important, is the best.
If we can move past that worldview andstep into a worldview that values
difference, that values diversity, thatrecognizes that having a
bunch of different people with a bunch ofdifferent ideas is not a liability, it's a
(49:44):
fucking asset.
What you begin to realize is that TurtleIsland is actually the most well -prepared
place, the most vibrant, exciting,powerful place on Earth because we have
people, we have ideas, we have cultures,we have myths, we have worldviews, we have
(50:07):
food from all over the world.
It's like the entire, it's like the humanrace has been experimenting with different
ways of being human for tens of thousandsof years, for hundreds of thousands of
years, all over the world.
And then we gathered all of thosedifferent ways of being and we brought
(50:29):
them to Turtle Island.
And now we have access to them.
We have those people as resources.
We have those ideas as resources.
And if we can recognize that for thebeautiful gift that it is, we'll be able
to crush this apocalypse, y 'all.
We will be able to make this apocalypseour bitch because we will have access to
(50:53):
the greatest minds, people, ideas,resources that the world could ever
create.
And it's just because of a shift ofmindset.
So that's why...
I think Turtle Island is an importantframe.
It's an important way to think because wehave to get past this sort of ethnocentric
(51:13):
white supremacist idea of one person, oneway is the best way and recognize that
what we need in these apocalyptic times isa bunch of options, a bunch of ideas, a
bunch of different ways, a bunch ofdifferent ways to respond to the
of challenges that our communities arefacing.
(51:35):
So if that sounds rad to you, then welcometo Turtle Island.
I'm the Prophet.
We're going have a good time vibing theapocalypse on Turtle Island.
Thanks for joining me for this episode.
Once again, if you weren't able to catchme last time at Wise Guys, or if you want
to catch me again, February 25th at WiseGuys, downtown Salt Lake, we're going to
be doing another show.
It's going to sell out.
(51:55):
So get your tickets at wiseguyscomedy .comas quick as you can.
And then if you
If you want to come on the podcast, if youthink that you have something interesting
to share, like a skill or a perspective,if you're one of those diverse members of
Turtle Island, then you think you've gotsomething of value to share with the
citizens of Turtle Island.
Reach out to me.
I would love to have, I'm trying to getmore people on the podcast.
(52:17):
I want to interview them and get a senseof what I missed in the apocalypse or
while I was on the compound.
And also like what skills, what resources,what ideas you have to share with the rest
of this community so that we can.
we can vibe this apocalypse together.
I think that's it.
Thanks guys.
Talk to you next week.
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(01:09):
The following presentation is a productionof Ride the Wave Media.
Hey, Heathens, welcome back to Vibing theApocalypse.
I'm your host, the Fresh King Benjamin.
First off at the top, I just want to thankeverybody who came out to my show last
(01:32):
week on the 26th.
We sold it out.
Oh my God, it was so much fun.
We had a packed audience and we just hadso much fun.
So if you were in the audience and youcame out to support, thank you very much.
It was a great night.
I'd been sick all week and so I'd beenlike nursing myself, taking care of
myself, sucking down some tea, violatingthe word of wisdom.
(01:53):
And so it was a different experiencebecause I've never performed, I haven't
performed before where I felt like Iwasn't quite at the top of my game.
Because I was coming in, I was still alittle bit sick.
I was all masked up right until I went onstage.
And it was a cool experience though,because it was fun to be able, because
(02:13):
I've headlined now, I don't know, to eightor nine or maybe 10 times.
And it was cool to be able to fall back onsome muscle memory.
fall back on the set that I've done somany times and to just trust that it
worked, even though I wasn't at the top ofmy game, even though I was feeling sick.
And there was a moment in the middle ofthe set where I was feeling like I was
(02:36):
panicking a little bit.
Internally, I was feeling like maybe Iwasn't doing as good of a job as I had
before.
And I remembered, I started to think, oh,oh shit, I think I might be bombing right
now.
Maybe I'm bombing.
Am I bombing?
Oh shit, I'm gonna bomb.
And...
At right when my head was doing that, Ihad this memory of something that one of
(02:56):
my comedy coaches, a guy named Mark whoworked with me when I first started
comedy, something that he told me when Ivery first got started.
And he said that it's important toremember that when you are in front of an
audience, that's a new audience, right?
It's an audience that has never heardthose jokes before.
And so sometimes as the comic or as theperformer, we have this idea in our head
(03:18):
of what the joke is supposed to be or whatit's supposed to look like.
And if it doesn't look like that, or ifit's not like that, then we can get in our
heads and we can think, oh my gosh, I'mbombing, this isn't working, I've failed.
But what's important to remember is thatthis is a new audience.
This audience has never seen this materialbefore.
They don't know the way that the jokes aresupposed to go.
(03:39):
And so you just need to be with them anddeliver it the best that you can in the
moment with the audience that you're with.
And remembering that in the moment, itallowed me to breathe and just give myself
some grace and to just say,
Hey, it's okay, you're feeling sick rightnow.
It's okay to be a little lower energy.
It's okay to be presenting these jokes ina slightly different way than you have
(03:59):
done in the past.
It's okay to be in the energy that you arein right now and to be in the energy with
this audience that you're in right now.
And after the show, I just had everyonecome up to me as they were leaving, they
were just congratulating me and thankingme and telling me that it had been moving
and funny.
The way that I do this...
The show is it's hilarious, but there'salso some sad moments in there, because
(04:21):
I'm trying to like, I'm trying to givevoice to a traumatic background and to a
traumatic life that I've lived and thatother people have lived who have a
background similar to mine.
And, and I was able to really come across.
And so it was just a reminder as acreative to just remember that the moment
that you're, that you're in right now isthe most important moment.
(04:42):
And the creation that you're creatingright now is the only creation.
And it can be so easy when we have theseideas of what we should be doing or what
it should look like to be judgingourselves against rather than just being
present with the audience that was rightthere.
So just again, a big thank you to everyonewho came out.
It was very fun, very fun to sell it out.
(05:04):
It sold out right before, like even beforethe doors opened, I showed up to the club
and the owner was like, hey, you sold thisthing out.
It's packed.
And that was a couple of hours before theshow started.
So thanks again to everyone who came out.
If you missed it, or if you came and youwant to just an encore, I will be back at
Wise Guys again this month, February 25th.
(05:24):
So that's Sunday, February 25th.
I imagine that that show will sell outagain.
So if you weren't able to make this oneand you want to come, or if you're just
wanting to come again and bring some, somenew friends, make sure that you get those
tickets at wiseguyscomedy .com.
Get them now because that show is going tosell out.
So, uh, that's, that's that.
Let's get to the meat of this show.
So today,
(05:45):
In my last episode when I was chattingwith Emily, I mentioned just briefly this
idea of Turtle Island.
And I want to dig into that a little bitmore in this episode because it feels like
an important frame to begin to understandthe apocalypse as we're dealing with it
right now in America.
(06:05):
Because Turtle Island to me is the settingwhere the apocalypse for us and our
immediate surroundings is unfolding.
Because Turtle Island is America.
Now let me give you some background.
on this, why do I call it Turtle Island?
Why is that important to me?
Why not just call it America?
And for me, this really goes back to mebreaking out of a white supremacist
background, right?
I grew up, as I said in my first episode,I grew up deep in Mormon polygamy.
(06:30):
And Mormonism at its inception wasessentially a white supremacist ideology.
The Book of Mormon, when it was published,when Joseph Smith translated it, by
looking at a rock and a hat, what heclaimed that it was,
is a narrative account, a historicalaccount of the origins of the Native
(06:50):
Americans, right?
So in the 1820s, 1830s, there was a bigfascination in white America with where
were these natives coming from?
Where did these natives come from?
Who were the people, who were theancestors of the humans that were on this
continent before white people showed up?
And there was a big debate about that,right?
(07:11):
A lot of people, it wasn't just JosephSmith, but a lot of people at the time,
thought that maybe they had come across,maybe they were some of the lost tribes of
Israel.
That was like a big, that was a big, a bigexplanation as to why or to where they
might've come from.
And Joseph Smith decided that he wanted totake a stab at explaining where these
people had come from.
And rather than asking them or going totheir myths or thinking about like that
(07:37):
from their perspective, he did what whitesupremacists have done since I guess the
invention of white supremacy, which is heexplained it for them.
And so he, in the Book of Mormon, hecreated a story about a family of Jews, of
white Jews, called the, they were thefamily of Lehi in Jerusalem that lived 600
(07:57):
years before Jesus in Jerusalem.
So this is before Babylon invades anddisperses the Jews in Israel.
There's this family, the Lehi's family,and Lehi is a prophet.
And Lehi, this is the very first story inthe Book of Mormon.
Lehi gets a revelation from God thatJerusalem is about to be destroyed.
(08:18):
And he gets told, hey, you gotta take yourfamily and you've gotta go and you've
gotta take your family out of Jerusalemand go where I'll tell you to go and I
will bring you to a promised land.
In the Book of Mormon, it calls it a landchoice above all others where you will be
safe and protected.
You'll be able to grow into a greatnation.
And when...
(08:39):
Lehi brings his family out.
Some of his family are on board.
They're like, yeah, we believe that God istalking to you.
We believe that we're supposed to bewandering in this desert.
Some of the family is like, no, we justwant to go home.
We just want to go home.
And there are four brothers in thisfamily.
There are sisters too, but the sistersdon't matter in the Book of Mormon because
it's also misogynistic.
There are only three named women in theentire Book of Mormon, which is even less
(09:02):
than the Bible.
So it's predominantly a story about men,which makes sense when you consider Joseph
Smith's views on women.
So it's, it's, there's four brothers.
There's Laman, Lemuel, Nephi and Sam.
And Nephi is the youngest.
Laman and Lemuel are the oldest.
Sam is in the middle.
Sam incidentally is my temple name.
So I went through the LDS temple and inthe temple you get a very secret special
(09:25):
name that you're not supposed to reveal toanyone because it's what Jesus is going to
use to resurrect you.
So I tell everyone that because I justwant to make sure that I'm resurrected.
So not only Jesus can resurrect me, any ofyou can resurrect me now because my very
secret temple name.
which is Sam.
Also a little bit of a disappointment whenI got that name.
I much prefer the apocalypse prophet,which is the new name that I got at
(09:50):
Burning Man.
Anyway, so there's these four brothers,right?
Nephi and Sam, they're faithful, right?
They are following Lehi.
They are doing what God wants them to do.
And Laman and Lemuel are wicked.
They murmur, they complain, they don'twanna do it.
They're forced to do it.
And there's all of these miracles thathappen in the Book of Mormon where like
(10:10):
angels appear to them and tell them thatthey're supposed to be doing what Lehi
tells them.
And Laman and Lemuel consistently forget.
They're like, oh, we, this sucks.
We don't have any food.
We just want to go back home.
And Laman or Nephi and Sam are all,they're gung -ho.
They're like really into it.
They're like, we're going to do what,what, what Lehi and God command us.
In fact, there's this scripture that allMormons memorize that comes from, from
(10:33):
Nephi and it's Nephi responding to hisdad.
asking him to go back to Jerusalem to getsome brass plates, which have the
scriptures on them.
And he says, I will go and do the thingsthat the Lord has commanded me.
For I know that the Lord give us nocommandment unto this children of men,
save he prepare a way for them toaccomplish the thing which he has
commanded them.
See, it's still in there, right?
(10:53):
I haven't been Mormon.
I haven't been active Mormon for almost 10years and I still have that.
I still have that.
It just rolls right off the tongue.
So Nephi says this and he goes back toJerusalem.
He ends up.
chopping off the head of the person whoowns these golden plates as this person is
passed out drunk in an alleyway because anangel appears to him and says, hey, it's
(11:15):
better for one person to perish, onewicked man to be killed, than for a nation
to dwindle and perish in unbelief.
So chop off this dude's head and steal hisgolden, steal his not golden plates, his
brass plates.
The golden plates come later.
Which is pretty horrific, right?
The very first story in the Book of Mormonis about how
the righteous people, they kill sometimesin the name of God.
(11:39):
And this was something that I was raisedon as a child, as a little boy, we were
taught this story, we were taught thatNephi was the one that we wanted to
follow, and that sometimes, sometimes Godcommands you to do things that don't feel
good.
God commands you to do things that don'tfeel good.
And this is an important doctrine, this isan important milestone in the formative
(12:02):
beliefs of my youth.
and in the formative beliefs of a lot ofMormons, because it prepares you later on
to believe and to do things that are, thatfeel bad, right?
Because humans, we are intuitively good.
I believe, I think that we knowinstinctually what's right and what's
wrong.
And we know that based on what feels goodand bad in our bodies.
(12:25):
And so when you can be taught that whatfeels bad in your body, like murder, is
actually good,
because God told you to do it, then youcan be twisted into all sorts of gross
beliefs.
And this is one of the beliefs that I gottwisted into because later on in the
story, there's this introduction of thisreally gross white supremacist idea, which
(12:47):
is that when they get to the promisedland, Laman and Lemuel and all of their
family, they end up splitting off fromNephi and Sam and they become, Nephi and
Sam become the righteous tribe and they'recalled the Nephites for the rest of the
Book of Mormon.
Laman and Lemuel, they become the WickedTribe, and they get called the Lamanites
for the rest of the Book of Mormon.
(13:08):
And then the rest of the Book of Mormon isessentially a story about the conflicts
between the Righteous Tribe, the Nephites,and the Wicked Tribe, the Lamanites.
But right when they split up, God stepsinto the narrative, and he's talking to
Nephi, and he's telling Nephi, hey, I'mgoing to curse your brother, your
brothers, and their families, and theirdescendants.
(13:30):
so that your descendants will be able totell them apart and so that you'll be able
to know that that's who they are, then I'mgoing to curse them because they're
wicked.
And this is the nature of that curse.
So this is coming from the Book of Mormon,second Nephi in the Book of Mormon, which
is one of the books of the Book of Mormon,chapter five, verse, this starts in verse
20.
So this is Nephi talking.
(13:50):
It says, wherefore the word of the Lordwas fulfilled, which he spake unto me,
saying that inasmuch as they, meaning theLamanites,
will not hearken unto thy words, meaningNephi's words, they shall be cut off from
the presence of the Lord.
And behold, they were cut off from hispresence.
And he caused the cursing to come uponthem, yea, even a sore cursing because of
(14:11):
their iniquity.
For behold, they had hardened their heartsagainst him, that they had become like
unto Flint.
Wherefore, as they were white andexceedingly fair and delightsome, that
they might not be enticing unto my people,the Lord God did cause a skin,
of blackness to come upon them.
And thus saith the Lord God, I will causethat they shall be loathsome unto thy
(14:35):
people, save they shall repent of theiriniquities.
And cursed shall be the seed of him thatmixes with their seed, for they shall be
cursed even with the same cursing.
And the Lord spake it, and it was done.
And because of their cursing which wasupon them, they did become an idle people
full of mischief and subtlety, and didseek the wilderness for the beasts.
(14:57):
So that is gross, right?
Horrifying.
That's a disgusting thing to believe thatGod, the God of the universe, uses skin
color as a curse.
And specifically, blackness.
Dark skin color.
That's the curse.
But at the time of Joseph Smith, when he'swriting this in the 1800s, right?
(15:18):
This is an explanation as to why there arethese brown people running around.
Why are there these Native Americans whoare dark skinned and we're white skinned?
We're obviously better because we'rewhite.
White is supreme.
That's where white supremacist comes from.
And so white is supreme.
White's great.
Brown is not great.
And there was also this attempt to explainwhy the white race seemed to be rolling
(15:39):
over to justify the genocide that washappening, the removal of natives from
their lands.
This is the same time that Andrew Jacksonis confiscating the land of the Cherokee,
right?
There's the Trail of Tears happening.
Millions upon millions of natives havebeen killed through sickness.
through war, through genocide.
And there's an attempt in white culture inthe United States to explain why that's
(16:03):
okay.
Why is it okay that that's happening?
And for a lot of white Americans, sort ofthe national myth became manifest destiny.
And within Mormonism, there was thisreally concentrated version of that
manifest destiny with this idea thatAmerica is a chosen land.
It's reserved for the righteous.
If a people are losing that land, it'sbecause they're wicked.
(16:25):
Therefore, the natives must be wicked.
And why are they wicked?
Well, because they're idle and they'remischief.
They have mischief and subtlety and theyhunt animals and stuff.
They don't live this civilized lifestylethat we do.
Which is actually absurd because thenative peoples were incredibly civilized.
If you study the Iroquois or the Cherokeeor any of these, they were really
(16:46):
sophisticated civilizations that hadcultivated the earth over thousands of
years to essentially be a Garden of Eden.
Like...
One of the things that I think is funnyabout Mormonism is that Mormons believe
that the Garden of Eden was in JacksonCounty, Missouri.
And that's not true, right?
That's because number one, there was noGarden of Eden.
And number two, if there was a Garden ofEden, it would have been like in Babylon
(17:10):
or like in the Euphrates over in thatarea, not in Jackson County.
But it is interesting that if you look atthe agriculture and the way that the
natives cultivated the land in...
on this continent before white peopleshowed up, there were these massive
forests that were carefully cultivated byhumans to basically just be food machines,
(17:37):
right?
There were nuts in the overstory, tons ofdifferent varieties.
There was fruit.
There was roots, root vegetables.
Like this entire forest, this entireecosystem was designed to essentially be a
forest of food that humans, you couldliterally just walk around and
pick food up from anywhere and eat.
It was a paradise.
And white people showed up and we werelike, oh my God, look at all this cool
(17:59):
lumber.
Let's burn it all down and build cities.
And so this is the ideology that I'm borninto, right?
I'm taught that this is the origin of thenative peoples on this continent.
I'm taught that the reason why it was okayfor the native peoples to be enslaved or
to be genocided and kicked off their land,
(18:21):
And the reason why it was okay for blackpeople from Africa to be enslaved is
because both of those populations weresuffering under the curse of God.
And how do you know that?
Well, because of their skin color.
Right?
And I'm taught this as a littlepolygamist, Mormon polygamist boy growing
up in Wyoming, where there are basicallyno brown people.
(18:41):
Right?
I don't think I met, I don't think I met ablack person until I was 18 when I was at
college.
And that was one dude that I met inSeattle.
I was on a debate trip.
So I had no contact.
I had no, this was not a part of my worldat all.
And the entire time growing up, I wastaught that because of my skin color,
because I was white, I was better thaneveryone else.
(19:07):
That would meant that I was chosen by God.
And I didn't really realize even that thatwas a white supremacist.
I wouldn't have used that language as aMormon because I didn't have that
language.
It's not like,
White supremacy is something that you get,you learn outside and then you can
retroactively apply it to the worldview.
But I always felt really gross in my bodybelieving this.
(19:29):
I remember going back to this idea thatMormonism teaches you that things that
feel bad in your body are actually good.
This is one example, right?
I was taught, hey, because you're like,this is doctrine, right?
This is the truth.
This is the true thing.
And humans were wired.
to believe in the fictitious worlds thatour elders provide us, right?
(19:52):
We're hardwired to exist in mythical andfictional worlds, and we just accept these
worlds when we're very young and justassume that that's true.
And what that does to a young child, whatthat did to me is it put me in conflict
with myself because my body felt grossbelieving that.
I remember hearing my dad.
(20:13):
talk about those beliefs with other peopleand just feeling so ashamed as like a five
or six year old because I just I had thissense that it was gross that it wasn't a
right that how could how could that be thething that determines if someone's good or
not shouldn't it be actions shouldn't bethe content of your character not the
(20:33):
color of your skin I knew that intuitivelybut I was programmed to believe that that
knowing feeling that was wrong.
Right?
That was me.
That was weakness.
That was me not measuring up to the truth.
And I had to squelch and squish thattenderness down so that I could get in
line with what was, uh, what was true.
(20:56):
And that's how I operated and believeduntil I was 19 years old.
And when I was 19 years old, I was atcollege and I happened to see a little
poster that was advertising like a summerinternship, like a summer trip to Uganda.
teaching teacher development classes tolike high school and elementary school
(21:16):
teachers.
And I'd never, I didn't even know whatUganda was, but I looked at that sign and
I had this little thought pop into my headthat was like, you should go to Uganda.
And I'd been taught to listen topromptings, right?
I'd been taught that God and the Holyghost speaks to you and they'll like,
they'll give you little nudges to push youin the direction that you're supposed to
go.
And so I assumed I was like, okay, well,this seems like a prompting, I guess I
(21:39):
better go to Uganda.
And so I started to raise money for it.
I ended up going at the, over theresistance and the refusal of my parents,
right?
So my parents find out that I'm going todo this.
My dad tells me, Hey, you're not supposedto go, go here.
You're called to preach to the house ofIsrael, meaning white people, which is a
(22:01):
whole nother, a whole nother can of wormsbecause as of Israel was brown, not white,
but.
Mormonism hijacked Israel to be whitepeople and not just Mormonism, like a lot
of evangelicals, a lot of white Christiannationalism has hijacked this idea that
whiteness is Israel.
And so Mormonism is just one iteration ofthat.
(22:22):
But he was like, you're called to preachto the house of Israel to white people,
you're not called to preach to the heathennations.
I forbid you to go.
And that was a really...
pivotal moment in my life because I feltvery deeply at the time that I was
supposed to go to Uganda, right?
I felt that very, and now I wouldattribute that to my higher self, right?
(22:45):
To my soul, knowing that I had to get outinto a bigger world.
And so it was pushing me into that spacewhere I could be confronted with the
limited and hateful nature of my ideologyso that I could change it.
At the time, I didn't know that, right?
I thought that God was calling.
And so I override my dad's objections andI'm like, dad, I'm going to go anyway.
(23:12):
It doesn't matter what you say.
God's told me to go.
And so I'm going to listen to that.
And he came back with, well, what if I getbrother Lemoine to tell you not to go?
And for context, brother Lemoine, he wasthe prophet of the AUB, of the Apostolic
United Brethren, which was the version ofMormonism, the sect of Mormonism.
that I belonged to at the time.
(23:32):
He was the prophet, right?
He spoke to God.
And that was tricky because had theprophet of God, because one of the things
that you're taught in Mormonism is thatit's okay for you to get, there's
individual revelation and then there'sprophetic revelation.
So individual revelation, all humans havethe right to get individual revelation
from God for their own lives.
(23:54):
And so, and you're supposed to listen tothat and to follow that.
But if that individual revelation everconflicts with prophetic revelation, then
you cancel the individual revelation, yougo with prophetic revelation.
This is one of the ways that Mormonism isa cult, right?
Because that's what cults do.
There's no other, if you are in anorganization or an institution or a group,
(24:15):
or if there's a person that's telling youto override your intuitive, individual
sense of what's right and wrong and whatyou should do, your sort of moral compass
for your life,
and to override that in favor of someoneelse doing that for you, that is one of
the characteristics of a cult, is that yousubordinate yourself to another person.
(24:40):
And that would have been tricky hadLemoyne called me because at the time I
was still pretty fully indoctrinated intothis cult.
And I don't know if I would have gone hadhe told me not to.
But I don't know if my dad just nevercalled him or if he just didn't have the
kind of pull with the prophet that hethought he did.
(25:00):
But I never got a call from Lemoyne.
And so I ended up going to Uganda.
I spent 92 days in Uganda.
And I was one of like five white people inthe entire town that I stayed in.
We were surrounded by, by all of these,all of these beautiful Ugandans.
And it, it changed me.
It changed me.
(25:21):
And it also just gave me permission to bewho I always was.
Because I fell in love with these people.
And I realized that there was nothing,there was no difference between us, right?
We were all human.
I was human, they were human.
And if anything, like I wasn't better thanthem.
(25:44):
If anything, they were better than mebecause they didn't have this dark, gross
secret that they thought they were betterthan me because of their skin color.
I had that and I felt a lot of...
Felt a lot of internalized shame aroundthat.
And so when I came back from Uganda, thatwas the beginning of the unraveling of my
Mormon indoctrination.
Because I couldn't square the livedexperience that I'd had in Uganda and the
(26:09):
real human connections that I'd had withthe people that I'd met there with this
really hateful worldview that I was toldwas true.
And so that ultimately became...
the spark that pushed me into my slow exitof Mormonism.
From there, I joined the LDS church, theLDS version of Mormonism, which is a
(26:30):
slightly, it still has the whitesupremacist doctrine.
It still believes the Book of Mormon, hasthat skin of blackness thing, but they've
downplayed, they've moved away fromrestricting people of color from being
full members of that church.
In 1978, if you've seen the Book ofMormon, in 1978, God changed his mind
about black people.
(26:51):
What that's referring to is that in 1978,the LDS church before then, the LDS church
did not allow black people to be fullmembers of the church.
They weren't able to hold the priesthood.
They weren't able to go to the temple,which is what you need to do in order to
get like to the tippy top of Mormonheaven.
They weren't able to do any of that.
But in 1978, under the threat of losingtheir tax exempt status and not being
(27:11):
allowed to play or BYU to play in collegesports anymore, they had a revelation and
they, and they changed which, um,
is hilarious that the LDS church stillclaims to be led by a prophet because I
don't think that you get to claimprophetic guidance and be teen years late
to the civil rights movement, right?
(27:32):
Like you don't get to have a racist policymagically change 15 years after the civil
rights act gets passed and claim to be aprophet.
You should be ahead of that shit.
And,
Ultimately, I end up leaving Mormonismentirely after a couple of years in the
LDS faith.
But that experience of being raised andprogrammed as a white supremacist and then
(28:01):
meeting the people that I was told to hateand that I was taught were less than me
and then having to square that in my souland unpack the grossness that was inside
of me and step into...
the love and connection and tendernessthat had always been underneath that was a
really important experience for me.
And it also framed my view of Americanpolitics because I, with that experience,
(28:28):
right, having grown up in the most extremeexample of American white supremacy, it
makes me really cognizant of the ways inwhich America was and still is a white
supremacist nation.
Right, the fact that it blows my mindtoday that there are, like if you look at
(28:50):
America, if you look at the United Statesof America through a moral lens, meaning
that we judge this country based on themoral actions that it has taken over its
history, there are two foundational sinsthat this country committed that it has
still not repented of.
(29:12):
and that is the genocide and stealing ofland from the natives, and then the
kidnapping and enslavement of Africanpeople.
Those are two foundational crimes againsthumanity.
On the scale of the Holocaust, on thescale of other massive human rights
(29:36):
violations throughout history, we didthat.
The United States of America enslaved
entire populations for generations.
Did you know?
I didn't realize this until I startedstudying history outside of the cult and
really learning American history.
But it will, it will, the United States orAmerica, right?
(29:57):
The European North American experiment,whether that's colonial America or the
United States, but our existence as awhite culture on this continent will not
have been a
non -slaveholding culture, as long as itwas a slaveholding culture, until 2158.
(30:19):
Let that sink in for a little bit.
We have been a nation of slaves from 1619,when the first slaves arrived on this
continent, 1619 until 1865, when slaveryis abolished.
And that's generous, right?
(30:40):
Because really, really, it's not until the1960s, and really it's not until the
1980s, and really it's still a problemtoday, right?
But like, if you wanna talk about theabolition of slavery,
1865 to 1619.
That's 246 years that we were a slave-holding nation.
(31:03):
So 1865, 1865 minus 1619, 246, 1865 plus246, oh, 2111.
Sorry, that's the date.
2111.
is when we will have been a non-slaveholding population for as long as we
(31:26):
were a slaveholding population.
That is grievous.
That is the kind of sin that you getIsaiah in the Bible condemning the nation
of Israel to destruction, right?
The kidnapping, enslavement, breeding,
(31:50):
split up of families, oppression of thesepeople for 250 years, and then the
continued oppression after that, right?
We still have not.
America's wealth, America's the wealthiestcountry on earth, America's wealth was
built on the backs of slaves.
(32:10):
It was stolen from those people, and westill haven't given it back.
We still haven't made it right.
One of the things that you learn inMormonism, right?
Cause Mormonism is really focused onrepentance and being righteous, right?
And so when you grow up in Mormonism, youlearn a formula for repentance.
And so there's, there's a couple of steps.
The first step to repent is if you have tonumber one, you have to admit that you did
(32:32):
something wrong.
Then you have to apologize to the personthat you did it, did it to, and then you
have to repair.
You have to make it right.
There's three steps and we have just.
barely gotten comfortable with theadmitting part.
I don't think we've really ever fullyapologized for that.
(32:53):
And we definitely haven't made it right,because we're, you mention reparations in
white America and we're all like, oh mygosh, get over it.
Get over 250 years of generational traumaand abuse and exploitation and murder?
What the fuck are we talking about?
(33:14):
And that's just one of these sins.
Because the other sin is we came to a landthat was inhabited.
We came to a land, we called it the NewWorld, there's nothing new about it.
Humans had been actively living on thiscontinent for thousands of years.
They had cultivated nations andcivilizations and forests and agriculture.
(33:39):
They had entire cultures here.
And we came here.
And we deliberately attacked, murdered,stole from those people.
And then we created disgusting lies likethe Book of Mormon to justify why it was
okay that we did that.
So the wealth of America, right?
(34:01):
America, I'm just gonna Google this realquick, because I'm not exactly sure what
America's wealth is.
What is America's America's GDP.
much is that total GDP?
What's the GDP of the US in 2023?
I've been getting increases.
I want to know total.
(34:22):
It's trillions of dollars.
Because it grew, it increased by 1 .6trillion in 2023, which was 6 .3%.
How is this not just easily Google?
What is the total GDP?
of United States, $23 .32 trillion.
(34:45):
$22, $23 trillion.
And that wealth, that wealth was, camefrom two places.
It was built from the slavery, the laborthat was exploited from slaves because
America was at first a cotton economy.
Cotton was the backbone of our economy.
(35:06):
That's what built the manufacturing.
In the North, even the North as it movedout of slavery, the manufacturing that was
built based on, in the North was based onthe cotton in the South and it was built
on stolen land.
There's this great line, oh, there's thisfabulous line from an Ava Brothers song
that describes America as a place built onstolen land by stolen people.
(35:33):
A place built on stolen land by stolenpeople.
We stole that.
That's where, that's America's wealth isstolen.
And we pretend that it's not.
We pretend that it's not.
And we, anytime anyone mentionsreparations, no, we can't do that.
I don't want to take money from me, whichI think is dumb because let's be real.
Let's be real, you guys.
If we did reparations and we absolutelyshould, because we know we have records,
(35:57):
right?
We know who the people are, who are thedescendants of slaves.
And we know who the people are who are thedescendants of the natives that this land
was stolen from.
So all that we know where all those peopleare.
And we know where all that money is.
It's in corporate America, right?
It's not in the pockets of like theaverage white worker, which is that's one
(36:18):
of the ways that the elite kind of keep usenslaved, right?
As they'll get us fighting each otherlike, oh, we can't give reparations to the
descendants of slaves.
That money will come out of my pocket.
No, it won't, white wage earner.
It'll come out of Amazon and MorganStanley.
and Goldman Sachs, right?
The place where the top, the wealth ofthis country is concentrated in the top
(36:41):
1%.
We know where that money is.
And that money by rights should go back tothe people that it was stolen from.
I say this as the prophet of theapocalypse.
Right?
We have that, that is our foundationalsin.
And we will not, as a country, we will notfully heal and fully be able to rebuild
(37:03):
ourselves into this new,
world that we're we have the opportunityto build ourselves into with this
apocalypse unless we Fix that unless werepair that because that's where we're
broken right you everyone knows us intherapy in medical science you you have to
go where the injury happened to heal anduntil we go to where the injury happened
(37:29):
and Look at the results of that injurythat are still ongoing today
we will continue to be wounded and brokenas a country.
And let's be real, you guys, that kind ofredistribution of wealth, that kind of
investment into the native peoples andinto the people of, into black people in
(37:49):
America would be revolutionary becausethey already make tons of cool stuff.
Like black people invented modern musicand they're poor.
They did that when we stole everythingfrom them.
What the fuck do you think that they coulddo if they had some of the money that we
stole from them?
(38:10):
They could make some pretty cool shit.
So, I think we need to invest in that.
We need to repair that damage.
We need to...
That is one of the, I think, most urgentmoral questions of our age and of this
apocalypse, right?
The most urgent thing for us to do as acountry is to go back and to fix...
(38:32):
That.
That is our original sin.
That is the thing.
That is the thing that we're all ashamedof that we can't really talk about.
That's why do you think there's a thingcalled white guilt?
Why do you think white people are walkingaround feeling guilty all the time?
It's because we know that.
It's because we know this and that's theroot of so many of our problems today.
(38:54):
We gotta fix it.
All of which brings me back to TurtleIsland.
Why do I wanna call this place TurtleIsland?
It's because I hate calling America,America.
Because America is something that whitepeople named it, right?
We didn't, this is what happened whenwhite people discovered a place where
(39:19):
there were already humans living, right?
We showed up and rather than saying, hey,oh my gosh, hi people who live here
already.
Hey, what do you call this place?
Where are we?
Right?
First what happened is Columbus shows upand he's like, I'm in India.
And the natives are like, no, you'rereally not.
And he's like, seriously, I am.
And then he goes to his grave.
(39:39):
He dies, refusing to believe that he wasin India.
He's like, it was just the West Indies.
It was the West of India.
But then after Columbus, another guy comesalong.
His name's Amerigo Vespucci.
And he's an explorer.
And he's credited with the one being theone that figured out that it was a
continent, even though again,
Everyone who lived here knew that.
(40:00):
So literally all you had to do was ask thepeople who were already here and they
would have told you, yeah, this is a, thisis not an island, this is a continent.
But America Vespucci discovered that forEurope.
He wrote a couple of letters back toEurope about describing some of his
adventures.
And then a dude in a map maker in Europebasically made one of the first maps of
(40:20):
the North and South American continents.
And, and he wrote America on them afterAmerica Vespucci.
So it's literally named after some dudewho is not even from here, not named by
the people who've been living here forgenerations, just a guy who showed up and
lied about some of the things that hediscovered, wrote some letters, and then
they just drew, just wrote on a map, thisis mine.
(40:43):
I can't think of a more white thing to do,right, than taking credit for something
that someone has already done.
But I don't like calling where we're at,America, because...
that sort of buys into thiscolonialization, buys into this idea that
(41:04):
this is something that there weren'talready people here, that white people and
white supremacy and white culturediscovered this place.
We didn't.
We were almost the last people who showedup.
So what did the natives call it?
What did the people who lived here callit?
Well, they called it a lot of differentthings, generally depending on where they
lived.
(41:24):
But my favorite thing, this was a questionthat I had a couple years ago.
I was like, I want to know what they callthis place.
I'm trying to figure out what to call thisplace.
Cause I don't want to call it Americaagain anymore.
Cause I don't want to buy into thiscolonial worldview.
So turns out that a bunch of the tribes,especially in the Northeast, most
prominently the Iroquois, which was amassive federation of tribes in the
(41:48):
Northeastern, um, United States, very cooltribe or very cool group of tribes.
with just a rich and vibrant politicalstructure and culture, they called it
Turtle Island.
And it goes back to this myth of how itwas formed, which basically was that there
was a big flood and the gods were tryingto figure out how to help all the animals
(42:11):
survive.
And there was a turtle who volunteered.
It was like, hey, you can, all the animalscan climb up on my back.
So the owl climbed up on his back and theywere floating, surviving the flood.
But then the waters were so high that thegod was like, hey, we gotta, we gotta,
build out this a little bit more on theback of this turtle so that there's more
land so that people can live on here.
And so a couple animals tried to dive downto the bottom of the ocean to get some
(42:33):
dirt.
Only the muskrat is able to make it backup.
He brings a little bit of land and withthat the god kind of creates, puts mud
down on the back of this turtle and thatbecomes Turtle Island.
What's interesting though is that thereason, or if you, what's interesting
about the term Turtle Island is that ifyou look,
(42:54):
North America from above, it looks like aturd.
Let me show you.
So zooming in, here's the head, rightalong the top.
Alaska is one of its feet.
Down here by the Hudson Bay, that'sanother one of its feet.
(43:14):
Here's the shell, the tail, back leg, backleg.
An artistic,
rendering of that that looks a little bit,you can see it a little bit better is from
Reddit.
I love this image.
It's a fucking turtle.
We're on the back of a giant turtle.
(43:35):
And what's interesting about that as itrelates to the apocalypse, as it relates
to oceans rising, is that it looks likewe're on the back of the turtle and the
turtle is diving, right?
You can see that water going up, it's headfirst, it's going back under the water.
where ocean levels are going to rise, theturtle that we're on the backup that we're
riding is gonna go down.
(43:56):
I think this is fascinating.
I love this as a name for this amazingplace that we live because it's not named
after a person.
It's not named after something from theold world.
It's not named after Europe.
It's not named after an ideology.
It's named after the land.
It's named after what it looks like.
(44:17):
It's a fucking turtle.
We're on the back.
of a giant turtle and the turtle isdiving.
And I think that's an important and ahelpful way to look at America, right?
Because it gets beyond borders, it getsbeyond political events, the United
(44:38):
States, Canada, Mexico.
We don't know how crazy this apocalypse isgoing to go.
We don't know what the next hundred yearsare really going to bring, but it's...
There's a very real possibility with thedecline of the North of the United States
Empire that the political institutionsright now, literally Texas is talking
about seceding.
There could be a civil war in the UnitedStates.
(45:00):
So the political institutions of thatcurrently exist on Turtle Island are very
much in flux.
They could be different.
They're not permanent.
And what I like about calling it TurtleIsland is that Turtle Island isn't a
political ideology.
It's not a country, it's not anationalism, it's a place.
(45:21):
And we are responsible as citizens ofTurtle Island for all of the life on
Turtle Island.
All of the people, it doesn't matter whatthe border is.
It doesn't matter what country it is.
What matters is are they people?
Are they alive?
Are they citizens of this Turtle Island?
Are they living on this continent?
(45:41):
Then they're our neighbors.
Then they're our people, then they're ourtribe.
And the tribes of Turtle Island,
are gonna have to come together to survivethis apocalypse.
And actually, when you think about it, weare beautifully prepared on Turtle Island
to survive the apocalypse because inaddition to all of the crappy things that
(46:02):
the United States of America has done,which was a bit of a, that was a bit of a
culture shock for me too, right?
Stepping out of Mormonism has been thisgrowing out of a cult, right?
And I had to come to terms with some ofthe things that Mormonism had done that
were bad.
that were harmful.
And then I had to come to terms, because Istepped out then into America, into the
United States of America, and then I hadto come to terms with some of the harm
(46:24):
that that country had caused.
And so I went, I got to a point for awhile where I was like, I was bummed about
the place where I lived.
I was upset.
I was like pretty negative about theUnited States.
And then I started meeting people who hadimmigrated here, right?
Who had come here from other countries,from Russia, from Latin America, from
(46:44):
China.
from just all over because the UnitedStates, for all of its faults, has also
been gathering, it's been calling a highcaliber of people for hundreds of years.
They've been coming here, often with greatresistance from some of the white
supremacist ideology that exists on TurtleIsland, but they've been coming here
nevertheless.
And as I talk to these people, I rememberI was at a conference in Vegas, there was
(47:09):
an after party, I was talking to this dudewho he'd immigrated from Russia, he'd
started a business here.
And I was sharing with him how I feltabout America at the time I was feeling
negative.
And he looked me, he kind of like grabbedmy shoulder and he looked in my eyes and
he said, he said, I love America.
I love this place.
(47:29):
There's nowhere else that has the kind ofopportunities that I've been able to have
here.
And I thought about that and I took thatin and I thought about it.
And I thought about all of the, all theincredible,
diverse people who have been coming toTurtle Island for the last 400 years.
(47:52):
We have an incredible diverse communityhere.
One of the terms that I've coined that I'mtrying to make a thing, because I think
it's a value.
Like if I were to be prophet of TurtleIsland and to preach the values of Turtle
Island, I think one of the most importantvalues is what I call diverse immunity,
which is when you take the wordsdiversity,
and community and you squish themtogether.
(48:13):
So a diverse community gives you diverseimmunity, which is an immune system,
right?
It's like, diverse immunity means you areimmune, you're able to withstand some of
the challenges, some of the shocks thatare coming with the apocalypse.
As ocean levels rise, as natural disastershappen, as governments fall, as wars
(48:33):
happen, right?
As all of the crazy calamities that I waspromised start to unfold.
Right?
As the climate apocalypse hurdles ustowards potential oblivion, having diverse
immunity in our communities will allow usto respond to that very effectively.
Because the more diverse your communityis, the more different ideas and more
(48:58):
different perspectives and differentworldviews and different ways of being you
have from the different humans that livein your community, the more options you
have, the more ideas you have.
And if that community has learned to getpast some of the tribal, ethnocentric
parts of our species where we shun and areafraid of those people who are different
(49:19):
from us, the white supremacy, right?
That says that one group of people is themost important, is the best.
If we can move past that worldview andstep into a worldview that values
difference, that values diversity, thatrecognizes that having a
bunch of different people with a bunch ofdifferent ideas is not a liability, it's a
(49:44):
fucking asset.
What you begin to realize is that TurtleIsland is actually the most well -prepared
place, the most vibrant, exciting,powerful place on Earth because we have
people, we have ideas, we have cultures,we have myths, we have worldviews, we have
(50:07):
food from all over the world.
It's like the entire, it's like the humanrace has been experimenting with different
ways of being human for tens of thousandsof years, for hundreds of thousands of
years, all over the world.
And then we gathered all of thosedifferent ways of being and we brought
(50:29):
them to Turtle Island.
And now we have access to them.
We have those people as resources.
We have those ideas as resources.
And if we can recognize that for thebeautiful gift that it is, we'll be able
to crush this apocalypse, y 'all.
We will be able to make this apocalypseour bitch because we will have access to
(50:53):
the greatest minds, people, ideas,resources that the world could ever
create.
And it's just because of a shift ofmindset.
So that's why...
I think Turtle Island is an importantframe.
It's an important way to think because wehave to get past this sort of ethnocentric
(51:13):
white supremacist idea of one person, oneway is the best way and recognize that
what we need in these apocalyptic times isa bunch of options, a bunch of ideas, a
bunch of different ways, a bunch ofdifferent ways to respond to the
of challenges that our communities arefacing.
(51:35):
So if that sounds rad to you, then welcometo Turtle Island.
I'm the Prophet.
We're going have a good time vibing theapocalypse on Turtle Island.
Thanks for joining me for this episode.
Once again, if you weren't able to catchme last time at Wise Guys, or if you want
to catch me again, February 25th at WiseGuys, downtown Salt Lake, we're going to
be doing another show.
It's going to sell out.
(51:55):
So get your tickets at wiseguyscomedy .comas quick as you can.
And then if you
If you want to come on the podcast, if youthink that you have something interesting
to share, like a skill or a perspective,if you're one of those diverse members of
Turtle Island, then you think you've gotsomething of value to share with the
citizens of Turtle Island.
Reach out to me.
I would love to have, I'm trying to getmore people on the podcast.
(52:17):
I want to interview them and get a senseof what I missed in the apocalypse or
while I was on the compound.
And also like what skills, what resources,what ideas you have to share with the rest
of this community so that we can.
we can vibe this apocalypse together.
I think that's it.
Thanks guys.
Talk to you next week.
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