Last Podcast On The Left - Episode 382: Mormonism Part IV - I Invented This Scam

Episode Date: September 14, 2019

It's the climax of the Joseph Smith portion of the story of Mormonism as we cover the founding of the city of Nauvoo, just what made Joseph Smith believe in polygamy so hard, and the secret rituals of the Mormons, plus the inevitable death of the American Prophet.

There's no place to escape to. This is the last part. On the left. That's when the cannibalism started. What was that? I'm so excited to begin Mormonism part four. You know, it's kind of, I imagine, the same amount of excitement. What it'd be like sitting completely nude on a marble oxen.

It's cold. Right? You're in the temple. You've never been in there before. So you might be like kind of suppressing a chub. Of course. Because also you're totally nude. Right? So maybe the cold is making your penis a little bit smaller, but also could provide a lot of excitement.

Yeah. And then you sit there waiting for the anointment, and then your daddy comes in. And your daddy then makes sure you're such a good, tight little Mormon, a good boy, a good... Oh my, you're literal daddy. Your actual father comes in. This isn't like a kink.com daddy.

This is your father. This is dad. This is father. This is Mr. Kissel. This is banked Kissel. Well, we don't have to hit it so close to home, do we? He comes in there and he wants to make sure your penis is so clean for God. Oh, right.

It has to be clean for God, because you gotta meet God, who's not even God. God's a dude. Right. God's just a guy. Well, why does he... Why does he care if my penis is clean? Because it's gotta be clean.

Why? Because if not, you don't get to be a king of your own planet, Kissel. So in order for you to be a king of your own planet, your daddy has to wash your penis and balls. And then you gotta turn around and all banked. It's gotta clean your butt hole till it is so pristine. So it's not unlike the alabaster marble of the oxen that you've probably stained with your butt juice.

Oh, right. Well, you know what? Let's just start the show. This is the last podcast on the left. How is everyone doing? I am Ben with Marcus. Ben with Henry. And we are coming to you live from beautiful foggy London.

Yeah, buddy. I am shitting liquid. Good, good. Which I guess is called the breakfast tea here. Absolutely. I had a bit of that. My wife loves it. You got a bit of the warm Guinness runs.

I actually feel like it's more of the Guinness squat walks. Oh, isn't that something? All right. We are on to Mormonism part four. So when we last left Joseph Smith, who's still splitting his time between Kirtland, Ohio and Missouri, building the foundations for a religion whose membership today roughly equals that of the populations of New York City,

Los Angeles and Chicago combined. Remember that as we go into detail of how this religion was founded. And in Kirtland in particular, Joseph Smith was trying to build an honest to God temple. Three stories of stone with two auditoriums and 12 pulpits because a man of God without a house of worship was just a common street preacher. It's like if Steven Tyler didn't have a mic stand,

he could just be a grandmother with a lot of scarves. I understand. Sure. And by 1836, the temple was damn near finished. But Joseph had made a slight miscalculation. Although the temple had helped establish his new religion as legit, he had also attached a ballsy prophecy to the end of its construction. I thought you were going to say he forgot to put in bathrooms,

which that would be what I would call a construction blooper. But they got the big bathtubs. You just shake the bathtub and then you smoosh it all down the drain. You remember, Kessel? Of course. Well, in order to get his people motivated, Joseph had told his congregants that the completion of the temple would coincide with the establishment of the city of Zion.

But the Missouri Mormons were still scattered and nasty rumors were starting to swirl in Kirtland that threatened to ruin Joseph Smith. If you remember from the last episode, they got kicked out of Jackson County and a part of the caveat of that was that you guys can come back. Would you have to buy your land and double the price? What Joseph Smith said basically was that,

I promise you guys, I gay-roan tea. And for the GAY, that I will make that money and we will get the money as soon as this temple is erected. Yes, as soon as the Missouri Mormons take on the Harlem Globetrotters, it'll be a $50 ticket and dare I say, we're going to lose. Well, it wasn't just the temple that was hanging over Joseph's hat as I said, there were a lot of nasty rumors swirling around Kirtland, Ohio. Seeds thought that it was in this place in 1835

that the first seeds of polygamy were planted, all because Joseph Smith was just a little too horny for his own good. I think that's a great analogy. It's a good way to put it, the first seeds of polygamy. Yeah, we're just fucking play so deep by the dirty fingers of Joseph Smith. See, in that year, many think Joseph made 17-year-old Fanny Alger his first plural wife.

I love the term plural wife. Yeah. Because it's so much better than sister-wife. Plural wife sounds like the government made you happy. Right. It sounds like Michael Keaton's character in multiplicity found a female who also had multiplicity and then they had a whole bunch of sex.

That's a good hotel document. Yeah. Well, plural wife, at the very least, is how the affair with Fanny Alger was later justified. See, Fanny was an orphan girl taken in by Joseph Smith's wife, Emma, because you could say whatever you want about the Mormons at the very least, they did actually adhere to many of the teachings of Jesus Christ

that so many of his so-called followers conveniently ignore today. Hold on a second. Are we talking about Joseph Smith or are we just talking about Woody Allen? Yeah. The exact same story of Woody Allen. They are both creative powerhouses that really defined the sex symbol for a generation.

He showed if you just raise a wife, then you're going to make a great husband. Yikes. So it was while Fanny was staying with the Smiths that Joseph seduced her and began a brief affair. But when the whole affair went sour, Fanny was driven out of the church for good. And some of Joseph's longest serving followers

were none too happy about this. Among the most vocal of dissenters was Oliver Cowdery, who had been one of the original translators of the Golden Plates. Oliver was excommunicated for criticizing Joseph for the affair, even though Cowdery said he saw Joseph and Fanny fucking. Joe, I didn't really appreciate the fact that you made me watch. You loved it when we did the, we did the London Bridge. Oh.

It was falling down. We did the Eiffel Tower with that guy I met with Harvey. Do you remember the fence fixer? Then we did the Guinness fountain. Yikes. But although Fanny Alger's role in history was later rewritten to say that she had actually been Joseph's first plural wife, rather than just a teenager he seduced,

Joseph was still spurred to revelation by this incident. Him and Chuck Berry. Yeah. We'd love to hear the star report on this affair. In November of 1835, God supposedly told Joseph that Mormon wives were commanded to essentially let their husbands do whatever they wanted. The revelation read in part.

Hear this y'all. This is straight, legit. Wives, submit yourselves unto your own husbands as unto the Lord, for the husband is the head of the wife. Even as Christ is the head of the church, wives submit yourselves unto your own husbands as it is fit in the Lord. And also, I'd like to add, women be shopping.

Sounds like something Dr. Dieter Laser would say to the three people before he makes them a human centipede. It's just weird that you could just like fuck a 17-year-old that was your daughter. And everyone gets all fucking mad about it. But then you can just tell them I had a one-sided conversation with God and told me it was super cool. Isn't that weird?

And we have to do it. Now, you gotta fucking do it, too. Like, you don't want to fuck all these children around here, buddy. Like, you don't. Right. In other words, Joseph was starting to figure out that it was much easier and much more convenient to change the laws of marriage

than it was to Tomcat around his congregations and, more importantly, his wife's back until the day he died. So this is the power of the male erection. It was easier to change his whole religion than to keep it in his pants. There's a lot of people that do maybe believe that this has something to do with some kind of... some form of cabalic teaching that he understood,

but I'll get into it a little bit more detail later on. Okay. Well, Polygamy was not just created to justify Joseph Smith's shrinking attraction towards his chosen wife, Emma. Aw. Aw, you think that this is just because Emma got all mad all the time? I think Polygamy was really... he just didn't want to fuck Emma anymore.

Aw. But then you just gotta... I love being married. But how many weddings are you gonna have? Planning a wedding is stressful. It's expensive. But Polygamy also served a very real, very cult-specific problem in the Mormon church.

See, sometimes a married person will swallow the narrative from a cult leader whole, but their spouse just don't get it. Are you purposely just putting in all of these sexual puns? I've heard shrinkage, swallow, and seed. This is just you. This is you, because I did not do any of that on purpose. Or maybe it's just a subconscious thing for me.

Maybe we've been alone for two weeks, and I think that we do have some subconscious like I am also very hoardy. You have been a lot of different... I'm gonna say institutions than Marcus and I in the last two weeks. Well, when you've got one spouse that believes in the cult leader and one spouse that doesn't, if that belief in the story is strong enough,

the person who believes sometimes will abandon their spouse in favor of their new chosen leader. Now, this isn't really a problem if you're joining a cult like Scientology that lives entirely outside the Christian belief structure. But if you're Mormon, then you're unfortunately bound by biblical rules. Dude, it's like just even fucking having an afternoon with Jeremy Renner, right? You're hanging out with Jeremy Renner. He's got fucking his boy Keys on the guitar,

which is kind of funny because his name's Keys, right? We've got everybody around him fucking a couple guys beatboxing. Yeah, Shreddy Pete, he's on the steel drums because no Jeremy Renner's thrown on that gay. That's short for Ray gay. Okay. And you're hanging out with him and he's like, what are you gonna do?

It's like, yes, my wife is, you know, like, I love Natalie, but you spent a couple of days with the Renner. Of course. The pure heterosexual magnetism. I'm just being around Hawkeye. He's got to just start driving you wild and even though any bond can be shattered by that. Of course.

And see Joseph Smith. Joseph Smith is fairly handsome too. Like, you saw his death mask. You can see he had a nice, nice shape nose. Right. Nice little kind of doleful eyes. And he's fucking telling you all sorts of stuff about the cabalic fucking celestial marriages

that he's gonna throw down on it. And maybe he also invented eating pussy. There it is. Okay. Compelling guy. Interesting man. Well, as we know, Joseph Smith was clever with interpretation and he knew that the Bible was a sword

that could cut both ways. So he found a road to polygamy that went straight through the Old Testament. Using the examples of Abraham and countless others who took more than one wife, Smith creatively interpreted this line from Exodus. And if a man entices a maid that is not betrothed and lie with her, he shall surely endow her to be his wife.

Interesting. And if you think about Jesus and the Twelve Apostles, flip it. What if they were chicks? Fuck yeah. Cool. From that line, Joseph deduced that adultery was not in the fucking, but in the leaving.

See? Wait, hold on a second. What was that line? And if a man entices a maid that is not betrothed and lie with her, he shall surely endow her to be his wife. He's got to marry her. The bad thing is leaving her after fucking her. Yeah.

That you can have sex with her. That's totally cool. God wants you to do that. Okay. But you're supposed to get married afterwards. Actually, you have to get married before. Oh. You have to have, you can have sex with any woman you wanted

just so long as you married them before you did so. And although the widespread practice of polygamy within Mormonism was still about five years away, Joseph Smith also knew that more wives meant more children, which naturally meant more Mormons. You can do, basically you make your own following. Yeah. And once these people are born in, it's so much easier.

Then you're locked in. Your family is locked in. That's what Scientology understood about getting the whole family. Catholicism did the same shit in Ireland. Right. The idea of just like, no condoms, no problem. Everybody's pumping out as many babies as you can.

Because then that's followers. But it also puts towards the Kabbalic idea of the heavenly father and mother, the male and female, Hakma and Bina, right? God's first emanated forms from the ultimate like back God, the DOS version of God. And the idea is that these gods came from the nothingness or everythingness and they fucked and made whole new worlds.

So now you're starting to see there is a literal, the above and as a below, which is create more fucking children to create more Mormons. And then there's the below, which is a spiritual creation of each time we have a baby, we've made a new Mormon planet. But this really is just an extension of how farmers have kids to take care of the farm. Yeah, labor force.

He's just creating his own labor force. Yeah, but he's just creating a religion. He's creating like an entire community. Because do you honestly think Beck would have become a Scientologist? He was born into it. I mean, he was making crazy sounds. Yeah, that could go either way.

The uniforms are still fun. I'm still on the fence about Scientology being bad now. Honestly. All of this time. It's a fun idea. You get to be on a boat. LRH is playing as ukulele. You got a choir you can join.

It's kind of, you know, back in the day it was fun. I'm not sure. A chubby man playing a ukulele with a choir on a boat. I know, it sounds like the Edinburgh Fringe. It sounds like a show they fucking no one wants to go to. Yes, I mean, for some people the idea of Xenu is laughable. But for other people, I think Beck is like, I'm salt. Yeah.

I love it. Yeah. But even so, Joseph Smith still had to issue a proclamation in 1835 following the Fanny Alger rumors that the Mormons were definitely not polygamists. Oh. And shame on you, sir. I've been shame.

For even thinking such a thing. You pervert. I didn't even know it. Now, this does seem like an oddly specific denial for the time. But in those days, experimenting with sexual relationships and screwing around with the institution of marriage was fairly common among the minor Christian sex. John Humphrey Noyes, of the perfectionists,

centrally wrote in 1836 that quote, the marriage supper of the lamb is a feast at which every dish is free to every guest. I love your analogy. Are you hungry? Can you just... It's your... Again, I'm going to put your mother kiss a little more. No, why are you doing this to my family?

You're just on a platter covered with mint jelly and all the neighborhood is invited to just dine on the sweet rump of your sweet, sweet mother. Oh, don't do that to my mother's a lovely woman. And when this statement was published in a newspaper called the Philadelphia Battle Axe. That is fucking awesome. It's a great newspaper name.

But when that was published, people freaked out. And Joseph Smith was paying attention to all of this. It's weird, though, because he was doing it. It became such an institutionalized part of early Mormonism, but he had the wherewithal to know. This is an inside thing. Like, you just kind of have to be on the inside, which is a part of also his basic understanding

of the secret schools. And that we have secret privilege knowledge. Like, yes, the public can't handle that we're fucking everybody's wives. They can't fucking handle it because it's too groovy. It's too close to the actual reformed word of God. Yes. In the meantime, though, Joseph Smith was just trying

to keep Mormonism alive while he was fucking around in Kirtland trying to get his temple built. The Mormons in Missouri were being shuffled from county to county. No Mormon could set foot in Jackson County anymore without being literally beaten to death. And the people in Clay County who had been sympathetic towards the Mormons after the Jackson County attacks

had gotten their fill as well. Eventually, though, the Mormons founded a city of their own in Missouri called Far West, which would, at its peak, boast 100 buildings and 5,000 Mormons. Wow. And this city was all built without Joseph Smith's guidance in any way whatsoever. No kidding.

It's a part of this, the luck that he's doing this in the frontier times. And there are people that are already organizing and forming their own cities because I, part of me, that's why I keep bringing back to like the hermetic teachings that maybe Joseph Smith had at some point because he tapped into such a vein that people got inspired by.

People were jumping at this Mormonism shit to the point where they're forming, they're building and constructing an entire city without him even there as the center, without him giving prophecies or revelations in front of them, or is it just that they were like, well, we're just kind of, we got Mormon hats on. And that's real it is. It's like, I'm not a member of the Baltimore Ravens.

I just have the jersey on and I just so happen to be building a fucking shanty town. Well, as Bruce Springsteen says, you can't start a fire without a match. Wait, you can't start a blaze without a spark. You can't start a, the Amazon's on fire. That's all I know. I think he said, we can't start the show without a writer.

Well, I think what the Mormons were doing here, it's kind of like when you take a long road trip to a dumb destination, like where you just have somewhere, you have a goal, you have somewhere in mind, and that something that they had was Mormonism. Like Mormonism brought them out there, and it inspired them, and it kept them going. It gave them something to do.

I wouldn't something to believe in, in that extremely difficult time. I would just recommend so you don't have to begin and start and build a cult. Just go to like a hotel shape like a boot. And then when you get there, you'd be like, it kind of sucks as a hotel, not a lot of room here, but it's about the journey.

Yeah. Now, Joseph Smith would eventually end up in far west, but it took a series of massive fuck ups in Ohio to get him there. Really, the beginning of the end for the Mormons in Ohio came when Smith decided to start his own bank. This motherfucker had, I don't even know how he sat down with these balls.

I don't know how he has these ideas, because they're so, again, this is also maybe just the power of America, the power of just being inspired by our own spirit. When you go out there and he was like, we are up to our fucking brain lids in debt. We need money. So he's like, how do we get money?

How do I get money? Make up my own money. Boom. Well, I mean, it's not that dumb of an idea for the time, because see, although the Mormons were growing, the people they were converting were poor. They just did not have money. So Joseph was forced to borrow large sums of money

to build the temple and keep the religion going. And what is money anyway, Marcus? Money is just, it's just paper, it's just paper. And you know, you only agree to spend it on my money when you sign your driver's license. But if you don't sign your driver's license, guys, I am a sovereign citizen. I don't sign anything.

I do everything with an X. I don't even read. Okay, well, student Alex Jones, it's been great having you in our sociology class. What is an A but three lines? What is a B but three lines? Well, you got an F. That is three lines on the paper. See, by 1836, Joseph was $50,000 in debt in 1836 money.

I don't even know how much money that is now. So Joseph Smith founded the Kirtland Safety Society Bank Company and appointed Sidney Rigdon as president while Joseph appointed himself as the lowly teller. I'm just a teller. I wouldn't know that's above my pay grade. I know this money is made out of barley corns. But I just, I just work the drawer.

That's all I do. Very smart though. Very smart. And after the bank was established, the Mormons began printing their own money, which was a common if short lived practice for frontier banks in the 1830s before the whole print your own money scheme came crashing down. Because you gotta, I mean,

there's not a fucking Wells Fargo branch out there. Like, you know, you're out there on the frontier. There's a lot of commerce happening. It's all happening extremely fast. You need banks. But also they show that money is fake, right? Where it's all about the belief you have actually in the bills that you spent.

Back then it did actually mean something. Yeah. Because you would, what you were supposed to be able to do is you would get this banking note from this bank that was saved for $10. And you could go to the bank, you could give them the $10 note

and they would give you $10 in gold or silver or whatever. But the Mormons did not run their bank like that. Oh, what do you mean? They ran it like it was a total fucking scam. Well, the first problem came when Ohio refused to incorporate the bank. So Joseph took the bank notes he'd already printed and stamped the prefix anti

in front of the word bank, making his notes say Kirtland Safety Society Anti-Banking Company. See, for every bank there must exist an anti-bank. That is the only way reality is. I spoke to God and he told me you just get stamps, boy. And I was like,

whenever you want, God, you be crazy. And it was with these notes that Joseph Smith paid off his debts. Now this would have been fine if, like I said, the bank notes had been backed by a safe full of gold and silver. And when you went and looked in the vault, you could see boxes that appeared to be filled with coins.

Nothing but coins. How hard it was even to get these trunks in here who were irresponsible. I mean, five old women do it just for them to understand just how much money we had. Wow. What ex-Mormons later said was that underneath that top layer of coins

was just a bunch of sand. Wow, it's almost like so symbolic my brain hurts. Yeah, that's great. By the time these rumors got out, though, Joseph had already circulated $36,000 in bogus notes. Fuck yeah, dude. Fuck yeah. I feel like I did this guy.

I had a little bit of a run with something I like to call, let's say creative checking that I did in college for a while where you just get a bunch of groceries and then you write a check, because you could do that back in the early 2000s. You could write a check and then just kind of fade into the background and see what happens.

And then they try to find it, but then it's too late. It's all the food and they can't make you think, you know, because then they're like, oh, you got to return all this food and they get really mad if you just bring a bucket of shit. Absolutely. It's like paying your taxes with pennies. And because of this,

because of the $36,000 in bogus notes, Joseph's house of cards fell apart less than a month after the bank first opened its doors. I mean, he literally went against the Bible scripture of not building your house on the sand. He just like took it and was like, well, it's not a house, it's a bank. Thirteen lawsuits were brought against Joseph Smith,

resulting in seven arrests in four months for unpaid debts that now totaled $150,000. And then came a revelation. Just in fucking time. It's unbelievable. God told Joseph that it would have to be his congregants who would pay his personal debts. This God really seems to be looking out for number one.

He really is. Isn't that interesting? He really has a friend in his version of God. Wow. And while a lot of the congregants were poor, men like Parley Pratt, Mitt Romney's grandfather, and Sylvester Smith, they did have money. They had land.

But for them, even this was a bridge too far. They're like, no, I'm not fucking paying your debts. Yeah, but God told you to, right? Yeah, yeah. Are you scared? I am scared now. What if I wash your butthole? I'm going to save that for a couple of years,

and then you'll see how much you'll like when I wash your butthole, Parley Pratt. I'm going to keep it nice and dirty for you. So Joseph did what he always did when things got rough. He left on a mission and waited for things to cool down. But when he returned from his trip to Canada, he found that the church had split in his absence. Many had stayed loyal to Joseph,

but a good number, including David Whitmer, Oliver Cowdery, and poor Martin Harris, the guys who had helped to translate the golden plates, they were now following a young girl who claimed to be able to tell the future by staring into a magical black stone. That's so fucking fast. You've got to be so mad.

These people, you've been working all of a sudden. A new hot comic shows up. They'll show up there. You've been working so hard. You've been, you know, you just get bumped. Next thing you know, you're just sitting there at the bar getting hammered. You've been Margaret Cho for 20 years.

All of a sudden you show up. Aquafina's now here? Aquafina? But you've got to, that's got to be incredible of her just being like, yes, I can see in your future, all of you will be penniless. Oh, nice.

That's pretty accurate, little girl. That's amazing. Are you in boltergeist? Nailed it. The final straw for Joseph in Ohio came when a major warrant for banking fraud finally arrived and an angry mob made up of creditors and ex-mormons burned down the building

where the bank had printed its money. These people were not fucking around. No, no. Old America was serious, dude. Yeah, I actually... They would just show up. I'm like, there's a part of me really misses this idea. Yeah, I'm actually very proud of these creditors,

just be like, yeah, you don't think we're strong. But indeed, we might be nerds, but we'll burn down your house. But that's about when they can get away with it. That's old school just showing up being like, that bank defrauded me. Burn the fuck down.

Well, that night, Joseph Smith was chased out of town by an angry mob who followed him for 200 miles. It's a white person chase. Honestly, running low, running on empty, like him with the huge beard, just running on the highway. But he is, talk about, this is great profit cardio. He has ran and been run out of so many places. His calves must be incredible.

Oh, absolutely. Stronger than forest gums. Yeah, they chased him for 200 miles before they finally gave up and went home. Jeez. Soon after, the 600 remaining Mormons left Kirtland as well, and the town that had once rivaled the great city of Cleveland fell back into obscurity.

Meanwhile, Joseph was, as always, side-stepping and bullshitting. The people of far west believed that God had made the bank fail in order to return his profit to Missouri, and Joseph followed their lead. Yeah, that's exactly what fucking happened. I meant to biff this. You guys, 40 chests. It's all about playing that game that you don't even know we're playing.

You even think we're playing 40 chests, but I'm actually playing 70 sorry. Whoa, isn't that something? Upon arriving in far west for the first time, he proclaimed the land to be the valley where Adam and Eve went after their expulsion from Eden, and the Mormons had chosen the exact spot where Cain had murdered Abel to build their city.

It's kind of like if bush gardens were centered around the Bible. You've got Adam and Eve land, you've got Cain and Abel land, and it was, I really think it was, let me smell, let me taste some of the dirt right here. Adam and Eve shit right here. They did. And although the town was called far west officially, Joseph Smith named it Adam-Ondi-Aman.

Ah, something that, it worked so well on a city sign. Yes. All the city planners were so happy they had to change all the signs from far west to what Steve... Adam-Ondi-Aman. Rolls off the tug. And with this, the Mormons had a settlement that was solely theirs, rather than a place where others had already settled.

But because they were in their own town, didn't mean they weren't still in Missouri. And the Mormons still had a reputation for being abolitionist Yankees in a fiercely pro-slavery state that defended said conviction with deadly violence. Plus, the memory of the Mormons' forcible removal from Jackson County was still fresh in the minds of Joseph's people. So Smith chose a man named Samson Avard

to form a defensive military body. This guy was very serious. He was super, super into it. He loved being named the admiral of a fucking army immediately, which was basically just farmers. But that's the American spirit again. If you got a gun and you got a flag, you are an army. Yeah, you got a chance to be one.

But since it still had to be done under the auspices of their religion, Joseph structured the army as a series of secret fraternal societies. There were the brothers of Gideon, the daughters of Zion, the sons of Dan, and the infamous Danites. Sons of Dan are such a fucking problem, the way they keep setting off fireworks at my grandmother's house. I know. It really is ridiculous. It's not even July 4th.

But as I was reading of this subject, I was reading this subject. It seems like it started informally the secret groups, right? Where they kind of became a understanding. And then they started doing the handshakes. Then they had their own ways of communicating. But it seems to create a precedent for more secret groups to be a part of Mormonism from now on.

And there would always be something like the Danites. The Danites still sort of exist. And we're going to see as we track this further into modern times, this concept keeps popping up and seems to create massive problems for Mormonism, except because of the fact that it is like segmented into a secret group. They can always go, we didn't know about it. See, before all of this, before the Danites,

when the Mormons had taken their fun little excursion down south to Missouri, they'd been badly armed, barely trained, and poorly led. It was more of a lark than anything else. But that all changed with Samson Avard. He was experienced, aggressive, and most of all, violent. Now, Joseph Smith knew that he needed plausible deniability when it came to a secret military. So he pretty much gave free reign to Samson Avard.

What Avard taught would eventually result in a massacre decades later. Can you imagine what Samson could do if he went to one Comic-Con? He could put together a force that would take on the U.S. military. See, the Danites in particular set the Mormons apart from regular folk by claiming that the Mormons were the true House of Israel, which made all the rest of us genteels, meaning that we were lesser than, and therefore, fair game. I believe it's gentiles.

Gentiles? Yes, it's gentiles, because that's what the Jewish people call us. Yeah, we're gentiles. Joseph Smith says that he repudiated any and all talk that may have led to violence, and he very well may have, because Joseph Smith was not an inherently violent man most of the time, unlike Brigham Young, who we'll cover on the next episode. But Joseph Smith certainly enjoyed the profits of violence

and what it did for the Mormons both physically and spiritually. But when you form a secret military society made up of justifiably paranoid people, it's not going to take long before it blows up in your face. And that's exactly what happened with the Mormon War of 1838. All began with a simple fistfight on Election Day. Mormons had traveled to Gallatin, Missouri to vote, but had been stopped from entering the polls by settlers, and the altercation soon became physical.

A settler knocked a Mormon to the ground, and the Mormon used the Danite hand signal for assistance. The middle finger. Fuck you! And when that signal was made, 30 Mormons picked up tree branches and attacked 200 settlers, driving the settlers away. Okay. By the time word got back to far west, though,

the story had grown into a tale that involved the deaths of two Mormons. Even though nobody on either side had even been badly hurt, much less killed. But when Joseph Smith heard the news, the Mormon Gentile divide was officially established in the public speech he made soon after. If the people will let us alone, we will preach the gospel in peace. But if they come on us to molest us, we will establish our religion by the sword.

We will trample down our enemies and make it one gore of blood from the Rocky Mountains to the Atlantic Ocean. I will be to this generation a second Mohammed, whose motto in treating for peace was, the Quran or the sword, so shall it eventually be with us, Joseph Smith or the sword. And then he mentioned the axis of evil,

which was very interesting. Because a lot of this came to this tension because the Mormons were building up a big enough population that they were starting to sway local elections. So there was massive anti and pro Mormon shit going on back and forth that we didn't cover on this because you should just read a book, read No Man Knows My History. It's fantastic. Seriously, read it.

But there is a whole section where basically, Joseph Smith started catering to specific politicians to try to use the Mormon population to swing votes. So people were getting real mad about it. And with that, far west prepared for a siege. Blacksmiths hammered swords and pikes from every available piece of steel and the Mormon army mobilized.

Oh, ho, ho, ho, ho. I'm just here for the music, really. Ho, ho, ho, ho, ho. I'm a choir director. Yes. They arrived in Gallatin ready to fight, but after discovering no one had died, like the rumor said, they instead marched to the Justice of the Peace and demanded the signing of a peace agreement

between the Mormons and the Missourians. But this, just like the story that mobilized the Mormons, morphed into a tale of gross intimidation by the time it reached the establishment. So a circuit court judge named Austin King, whose brother-in-law had been killed in a Jackson County Mormon riot, issued a warrant for Joseph Smith's arrest. This shit's fucking crazy, honestly. He showed up with a fucking army. He actually got all these dipshits together with a bunch of swords and all those bullets

that they handmade. This is, there's a part of it where there's a dry layer to history where you just kind of think about this bullshit. You know, you see this as a factoid, but the more and more I'm rolling around this, like rolling this around in my head, it's just imagining LRH in the ship, but the ship had fucking cannons. Yeah, there was an actual navy. Yeah.

All right, very aggressive. So, after Joseph was arrested, the Danites gathered an army of 350 men, which again was magnified in rumor to actually be 15,000 men. This is the Blackbeard effect. The Missouri militia fled under the rumors, and with the militia out of town, the Mormons plundered the Gentiles of Gallatin, burning cabins and stealing livestock before returning to far west. Mormon's gone crazy.

In response, the militia burned every Mormon cabin outside the far west walls. Beard of a battle at Crooked River reached Missouri governor Will Burn Boggs, and Boggs was told that 50 militia members had been killed by Mormons. Again, it was just a rumor. All of this stuff is predicated in a horseshit. Yeah. Including the religion, it's open self-twisted into a tornado of activity. We don't go to war on false pretence.

It never happens. It never will happen. It's like just a big game of telephone. It goes from one guy to the other, because it's not one messenger riding a horse from Gallatin to independence. It's one guy riding a little bit, telling a guy what happened. He goes and tells another guy, he goes and tells another guy, and by the time you get from one guy to the next, it goes from five Mormons being killed, which was the actual

story to 50 militia members being killed. But the Mormons had actually burned down houses, and when news of both of these incidents reached Lil' Burn Boggs on the same day, he wrote this command, the only one of its kind in United States history. The Mormons must be treated as enemies, and must be exterminated or driven from the state. If necessary for the public good, their outrages are beyond all description. And I heard this one story about a girl who could fit her whole fist up inside her. Isn't that something?

And that was, I thought, beyond description, until I went to Paris, France, and I sold for myself and my God. Even now, I will say, it is beyond description. That's crazy. Governor Boggs, did you want your pants? Do you want to put your pants on today? Nope. Well, think about this, man.

I mean, this is the governor of a state issuing an extermination order on a religious group. Meanwhile, Smith had escaped Frontier Justice once more and had returned to Far West, where siege mentality was in full force. Naturally, people were tense and depressed, so on one Sunday in particular, Joseph Smith challenged his men to an old-fashioned wrestling match. All right. You can. Let's get naked and wrestle.

He put his fucking Indian headdress on. He did default to Tonka. He went around there and be like, bet you can't pin me. You're a slippery old prophet. Oh, I love it. Stone Cold Stunner's getting hit. Mandible claw, the mandible claw. One by one, the men tried taking down Joseph, but Joseph was a great wrestler.

He was like Abraham Lincoln. And not a single Mormon could throw Joseph Smith. So finally, Joseph stepped aside and just let the men wrestle each other. And if you want a greater analogy of the world that we live in now compared to the world that was, Abraham Lincoln is in the NCAA Wrestling Hall of Fame. Donald Trump is in the WWE Hall of Fame. So just let that sink in. It is a perfect analogy for our times.

But think about it. We should try to let Travis wrestle us more often to try to inspire them. The rage in Travis, our eyes would be gouged, our noses would be ripped off. Just, I mean, this is all about inspiring our employees, inspiring the people to wrestle it and having time to play and grab ass and pinning them down and just seeing what happens when he's squirming underneath us. Oh, gotta put my HR cap on, Henry. Shame.

Oh, yes, I experience it. But Sidney Rigdon, Mormonism's eternal wet blanket, came and chastised the men, sword in hand for breaking the Sabbath. Oh, come on. Come on. You gotta have a little fun. Come on. In response, Joseph knocked the sword from Sidney's hand and said, quote, Oh man, you

must go out. I will throw you down. Hey, all right. So he had a little hair. He had a little hair up his ass here. Oh, yeah, man. And when Sidney refused, Joseph knocked off his hat, ripped his coat and tossed him out of the ring.

Now, he did not go over the top rope and by Royal Rumble rules, he's technically still in the match. It's crazy. He's just getting everybody going. They're out there and at some points being like, Mr. Smith, aren't we fighting a war? Yes. But today, we're wrestling. We're wrestling.

From that day forward, Sidney Rigdon followed Joseph Smith unconditionally until of course Joseph tried to fuck his daughter a few years later. But while the boys were all having fun in far West, the Missouri militia was making good on the proclamation of Lil' Burn Box. Although most Bormins had heated the warning Joseph Smith had made to retreat inside the walls of far West, one stubborn settlement called Hans Mill refused to leave what they'd built. Although when the Missouri militia arrived with a force of 200 men, the Mormons were

slaughtered like animals. The militia picked off Mormons from the tree line making no distinction between the adults and the children. And after the Mormons had been mostly subdued, the militia then moved in and finished off the wounded. One old man was hacked to pieces with a corn cutter. One nine year old boy was dragged from his hiding place and shot in the head at point blank range after one militiaman said, Nits will make lice.

All in all, out of the 38 people who called Hans Mill home, 17 had been murdered and 15 had been wounded. And after the militia left, the survivors lowered the dead into an unfinished well and headed towards far West. Now Joseph Smith knew that although his men were loyal and dedicated, they were no match for the savagery the Missouri militia was ready to dole out. So Joseph privately told one of his men to go to the local general and quote, beg like a dog for peace.

Publicly though, Smith sang a different tune. This is what he told his people. If they tried to attack us, we would play hell with our apple carts. Before now men, you fought like devils, but now I want you to fight like angels, for angels can whip devils, and for everyone we lack a number to match the mob, the Lord will send an angel to fight alongside. You won't see them and they're not going to do a lot of the killing, but imagine they're rooting you on with their phantom cries and their transparent swords.

So this whole thing was about apple carts, huh? Is that what's going on here? Apple carts is old timey talk for ball sacks. Oh, I see, okay. But while the bluster kept up morale, the conditions sent back to Joseph Smith were, to say the least, harsh. First, the Mormons were required to surrender, after which their leaders would be tried for treason.

Second, all Mormon property would be confiscated and liquidated. Third, all Mormons not executed for treason must leave the state immediately. And fourth, the Mormons would be required to surrender all their weapons before they left. Okay, here's a, here's a counterpitch. Here's a bit of a counterpitch. What if we just let us go scot-free? And we'll say number three isn't that bad.

You mean to tell me I've got to leave Missouri? Oh man, oh no. And if the Mormons did not meet these demands, each and every Mormon would suffer the same fate as those who had died at Han's mill. They're essentially threatening genocide. And while these terms were deliberated, Joseph Smith, Sidney Rigdon, Parley Pratt, and a few others were held as hostages. Now Lilburn Boggs wanted to execute the men at eight in the morning on the public square

of Far West, but a man named General Donovan, who had gotten friendly with the Mormons, stepped in and saved their lives. He liked them. Yeah, he liked them. Like he had actually, he had gotten very friendly with them, like where he's like, you know what, once you get to know them, they're totally fucking harmless. Listen, the big thing is that you could fuck whoever you want if you marry them. Is that right?

I don't tell this to a lot of people because people really freak out, but you seem like a cool guy. Donovan, Irish, you know what I'm talking about. Because really at this time, yes, the Mormons, the reason why the Missourians hated the Mormons so much was because they, the Mormons were anti-slavery. Well, even, they weren't even anti-slavery. It's that the Missourians thought they were anti-slavery. It was a rumor.

Because Joseph Smith would have been whatever anybody wanted to be. Well, the Mormons... This is a good thing that they were anti-slavery, obviously. He didn't want to be publicly anti-slavery. He was against being publicly anti-slavery because of how much he did brought on them. Again, he had a private set of circumstances, and then he was like, but on the outside we are trying to keep up with the Johnsons. You know what, man?

I'm just going to say, if I only heard two facts, anti-slavery and you get to bang a bunch of chicks, put that magic underwear around my head, buddy. But understand, we're on the way to the Civil War right now. In this period of American history, we're about 20 years away from the Civil War, and that was a long, long time coming. And Missouri was one of those battleground states where you had people that were both pro-slavery and anti-slavery, and if you were anti-slavery, then the pro-slavery people would murder you.

Well, in the meantime, 6,000 militiamen descended on far west. In one week, they shot cattle and hogs, hunted down and murdered elders, and tied down Mormon men and women alike in the schoolhouse and raped them. And at the end of it, the Missourians told the Mormons that the Mormons were the real aggressors. But that's only because that false story was backed up by none other than Samson Avard. Hoping to save his own skin, Samson turned coat immediately and testified that Joseph Smith had set up his own military complete with a secretary of war, which could be seen

as a bit of light treason. Oh, I love a nice light treason. Light treason, yes. The point of the army, Samson said, was for Joseph Smith to establish a personal kingdom within the borders of America, which would no doubt result in a quick hanging for Joseph Smith if it could be proven. It wasn't entirely wrong, though. Not entirely wrong.

However, no one could testify that Joseph Smith had been at any of the battles, nor could they prove that he ordered the attacks, nor could they prove definitively that the Danites even existed outside of Samson Avard's testimony. Luckily for Joseph Smith, nobody had written anything down yet. No, he just, because he kind of had a plan for that, because he talked about the verbal testimony. Yes. And it was to just remember the things I say and spread it via story, speak to each other,

because then you really get the gist of it. Now, you don't want to write it down. Words are just, again, lines on paper. What is an O but an asshole? What is an R but a crooked nose? Yeah, that's true. And it is interesting, because if you do it like that, then everyone can kind of interpret it in their own mind and make it fit whatever they believe, as opposed to having a solidified

belief system that they could argue against. But Joseph Smith kept very intense diaries, which you'll find out decades and decades later that all of this was transcribed, obviously twisted, from an unreliable narrator's point of view where he is the only person who can talk to Jesus Christ and God himself, who is the same person, but who is also a gigantic planet. Yeah. Well, furthermore, the Hans Mell Massacre was now national news, which turned the tide of public opinion towards the Mormons, on and on it went until finally Mormon leaders

bribed a guard with whiskey to facilitate their escape. Very interesting. Are we talking about the Epstein suicide again? What happened? What's going on here? I love it. They were sleepy guards. They were indeed.

Yeah. And that's exactly what happened here. The guard drank himself into a deep sleep, and it was just pretty much, here's your whiskey. He's like, all right, I'm just going to drink all this. I'm going to fall asleep, and then y'all get out of here. They scooby-dood their way out of sleep. While he was asleep, Joseph Smith and the other leaders skittered away and left Missouri

forever. And they, along with 8,000 other Mormons, fled to a settlement in Illinois established by Brigham Young named Nauvoo. Now, remember that number. Think about that shit. We're already at 8,000 Mormons. They have built this, it's going to become a big old city. And Nauvoo, if I've never been there, I'm really, really excited.

I Google street mapped it, and I walk through the streets of Nauvoo, and it is fucking weird. So you mean to tell me Mormonism, the religion that outlaws alcohol would not be around today without whiskey? Yeah. Okay. Now, the first year in Nauvoo was beset by disease and death. But after the Mormons established themselves, they built a city that, at its peak, had 250 buildings, and over 15,000 Mormons.

And Nauvoo comes from a bastardized version of the Hebrew word for, I believe, heaven. Beautiful. Beautiful. And again, he has these weird, like, he has these very strange, like Hebrew lessons that he's been taking. He's been obsessed with religious studies at this point. The again and again, more of this stuff is going to get filtered in, where he's looking at the Kabbalah.

He is doing something with the Kabbalah where he's starting to understand, I was making this shit up as a go. I was just kind of flying off the dome with these rules. But I'm also weirdly channeling thousands of years of religious thought in the background of this and the fucking coding of my teachings. I mean, Joseph Smith, I mean, could very well have been plugged into something that you could call the collective unconscious. Like, this guy, he was plugged into these ancient sort of rituals, these ancient religions,

but he was also specifically plugged in into America and what Americans wanted. And eventually, what the entire world wanted, at least the Western world. So where are they off to now? They are off to Illinois, my friend. Woo! Dub bears. And with this, the Mormons thought that maybe they'd found a permanent settlement. And for a while, they had.

I mean, at one point, like, it was, but as far as like the major city in Illinois, at one point, it was between Nauvoo and Chicago. It was going to be one of the two. I will say, heaven is apparently extremely cold because that is a horrible place to be during the winter. And as a result, the Mormons settled in enough for Joseph Smith to finally expand Mormonism into the fully ritualistic religion that it is today. See while Smith was in prison in Missouri, he'd had time to reflect upon the sorts of

men who would come into his service. Samson Avard had proved to be a cowardly traitor. Sidney Rigdon had lost his mind in the prison cell with Joseph, and three of his closest followers had abandoned him for a teenager with a magic fucking rock. Friends like these. I, everybody loves Militia Joan Hart, and this is where it started. Yeah, maybe. So even though the violence perpetrated against them found the Mormons together, Joseph needed

something to bind his people to Mormonism. So he introduced a highly elaborate set of temple rituals based on existing Masonic rites. You say even just based them on, where it's almost like he completely ripped them off. Stolen, yes. Yes, but there's something about the way these rituals work. I looked a little bit into the history of the Freemason rituals, and there's not a lot of concrete information about when they started.

The first time they were recorded was in the 1600s in Scotland, and so this has been around for a while, but obviously there's the kind of fabled beginnings that happened with the original stone cutters like in fucking Solomon's Day, and that's where these things came about. But it's interesting to see there's something about the actual movements that they will learn that it's about the way the brain works with symbolism and the way the human monkey reacts to, it's about the physicalization of a belief that then bends it deep inside. And also, everybody's doing this super secret, embarrassing thing that also is a secret keeping mechanism that keeps all of us in the same club.

So he based it on the Masonic rituals, very similar to vanilla ice, basing his ice baby hook under pressure. It's based on. It's based on. It's stealing, it's based upon. Now the roots of Mormon ritual had already taken hold years before their arrival in Nauvoo, as the ritualistic washing of the feet and the anointing of believers with oil had been a big part of Mormon services since about 1830.

But in 1842, Joseph Smith discovered Freemasonry through various members of the Mormon church who had entered the faith as established Freemasons and the founding of a Masonic Lodge in Nauvoo that same year sealed the deal. See in Freemasonry, Joseph Smith once again found a ready-made system that he could steal and adapt for his own purposes. He reasoned that what worked for the Masons for centuries would no doubt work for the Mormons. And in this, he was absolutely correct.

It's just so, it's so mysterious. It's in hidden doors. And then again, it's like where LRH conceived of Zeno and all that kind of shit of the idea of being like, now you're going to see behind the veil and you're going to see what's the real real. I love the way you talk mumble to me. Yeah, you're going to love it. I love how my teeth look like a piano keys as a drofter for a click and after it's dropped

off for a cliff in a Looney Tunes cartoon. But it's this power. It's this power. It connects something deep, deep down. And some of my handshakes, people love handshakes. Although the Mormons have a large variety of rituals, the most important one is known as the endowment. Specifically, the endowment is an adult initiation ritual that is supposed to prepare Mormons

for their place among the exalted in the afterlife or to become gods themselves. Because our God was a, our creator God, what started as a dude. And this dude exalted himself using ancient rituals and would shoot past human life into this creator God status in order to work for the big up top God, right? All of this weird hermetic idea of the layers of Godhood. And so his job is he basically creates earth and all this kind of shit. But then he transmuted himself back into human form into Adam and Eve and arrived back on earth and then inspired it again.

God exalted it again, came back, went back to the up top, came back as Jesus again. This is all in this video. If you watch the actual, the ritual, they play a 45 minute long video that explains this shit and it is dry. Yeah, it sounds like you had a busy life. Yeah. Yeah. Well, in this ritual, Joseph Smith combined New Testament rites such as anointing, foot

washing, and bathing with complicated Freemason initiation rituals. Not coincidentally, the first endowment ceremonies began about two months after Smith became a first degree Mason and the entire ceremony as it was done for about 150 years took about two hours and it is far too long and complicated to completely cover from end to end. Now we're going to tickle your foot. We can, however, give some of the broad strokes and juicy bits. Sounds like a London fish restaurant. Broad strokes?

What about that place called Slug and Lettuce? There is a chain restaurant called Slug and Lettuce all over Europe and I just can't eat there. Well, basically, the endowment has two parts, the initiatory segment and the ritual drama segment. Now, the initiatory segment has evolved quite a bit since the time of Joseph Smith. Originally, it began with a fully nude head to toe bathing of the initiate that was supposed to wash them clean of the blood and sins of their generation.

Daddy, is it true that my balls are dirtier than my penis? Yeah. Yeah, there is. It's where the devils are. The devils live somewhere in a mystical land called the Gooch. You will make sure the Gooch is cleansed, my son, no, I'm so proud of you this day. You're a grower, not a shower, just like your father. Oh, my, this is a horrible day to be your son.

For about the first 80 years, this was done totally nude. But starting in 1920, they allowed the initiate to wear a ritual poncho, which they called a shield. So, okay, who do you think did this first? Is it one of the fathers just being like, hey, I don't want to fucking touch my disgusting kids' balls? Daddy, they said that you're going to wash my nuts, I'm going to give it to God, I want to be a god.

I love you, son. Can you just put a fucking poncho on that goddamn kid? I sat in a bunch of dog shit. Put a poncho on him, could you? Then in 2005, they changed it so one began the ceremony with their temple garment. And now they only wash the head. Oh, come on. They just fucking do anything, they don't do anything fun anymore.

I almost respect it more when they went all in, you know? Well, speaking of the temple garment, that brings us to the famed magical underwear. Yes, I've been waiting for the magical underwear, it's finally appeared. Well, originally, the temple garment, as it's called, was a shirt containing no metal that was given to the initiate following the washing. And that shirt was then hidden after the ceremony to hide it from, quote, destroying angels. Pretty CKA like moths. Yes.

Pretty soon, though, the temple garment evolved into a utilitarian suit of long underwear that the initiate was commanded to wear constantly as a protection against evil, which gave the Mormons a way to control their followers' lives on a very basic and constant level. I like the way you put that, because that's really the truth. Because then you have, it physicalizes the secret. It physicalizes the bond and the commitment you've made to the Mormon church, because no matter where you go, I mean, it can't be that comfortable to be wearing this set of long underwear, especially when it's fucking hot, especially when you're on your mission, you're

on a weird new city, and you're doing all this fucking bullshit. In the wintertime, it's fantastic. I used to have like three sets of Mormon magical underwear that got me through like many winters in New York City. But you wear three shirts at a time. Yeah, I'm wearing three shirts right now. Yeah, it's hot in here. No, I'm actually wearing two shirts.

I'm actually fucking sweating my balls off right now. Right, right. Well, I can wash those for you if you want to convert. The only magic underwear that I'll ever believe in is Michael Jordan's jockey underwear. Remember that when he was the spokesman? It was jockey, right? Yeah. I believe so.

He was always wearing that underwear on TV. I thought you were a frid of the loom. It was frid of the loom? I think. Oh, I don't even know. We're going to get a lot of emails about this. I thought you were about to throw it to a me undies ad for us. Oh, yeah.

Well, following the dawning of the underwear of Mormons were then required to take a long series of oaths. The first oath was the law of obedience in which women swore to obey their husbands and men swore to obey God. Convenience. Isn't that something? This was the Mormons' end around way to later guarantee that their wives would go along with whatever polygamous relations might come about because the men were only obeying

the dictates of God when they married and had sex with other women. It's not me, baby. It's God. I want to see someone try to explain this to their wife now when they get back from Las Vegas and he is covered in herpes. Listen, these aren't sores. These are called angels kisses. Is that right?

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I didn't lose money. I tithed it to Vegas. Isn't that something? Remember that when we said, oh, we're in love. We don't have to sign a prenup. Well, you're going to regret that. There's nothing left.

You don't even need a prenup. And interestingly, although establishment Mormons renounced polygamy long ago again saying, God changed his mind, swish, swish, swish, swish, swish. To this day, when a woman gets a divorce in a Mormon church, she is required to undergo a ritual in which she cancels her previous marriage. And I bet you that must be super simple and easy going to go through. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah.

Cancels. All men are required to do no such thing, which means by Mormon belief that a man who marries multiple times due to either divorce or the death of their spouse will have multiple wives waiting in the celestial kingdom when he dies bound by oath to do his bidding for all eternity. It almost seems like Mormon heaven is only heaven for men and kind of hell for women. Interesting, Kessel. Yeah.

That's weird. That's exactly fucking correct, right? Who knows? It's funny how they keep just taking these basic beliefs. Yeah, they can reform, and they do reform. They're trying to modernize, they're trying to keep their religion alive, but every single time they do it, they just take the secret lessons and they bury it a fucking foot deeper. And each time it gets deeper and deeper, and it just gets deeper and deeper and deeper.

But every single time it becomes even more ingrained into the actual kind of like reptile brain of the people living it, because you don't even know that you're still exercising and living the initial wishes of Joseph Smith, even though you're being told we're getting modernized now, all of this, that's all in the past, that's all the goofy shit. You're still doing it, you're still practicing the old ideas, they're just hidden. But perhaps the most infamous of the oaths that were a part of this ritual until 1990 were the penalty oaths taken directly from Masonic ritual. The participant is given a Mormon name of the Aaronic priesthood and is sworn to keep

Mormon secrets under threat of penalty. And that penalty was death. Well that's a little strict sir, could we just have maybe like three slaps on the wrist to start? Yeah. Okay let me check, yeah I can do a thing called half death, no I fucking can't, you die. Oh man. The oath was sealed when the initiate placed their thumb under their left ear and quickly

drew it across their throat then dropped their hand to their side while reciting this. We covenant and promise that we will not reveal any secrets of this the first token of the Aaronic priesthood. Should we do so we agree that our throats be cut from ear to ear and our tongues torn out by their roots. I thought you were going to say they had to say rest in peace, like the undertaker. Well after that they took an oath to obey the law of gospel which bans quote, light-mindedness, loud laughter, evil speaking of the Lord's anointed, the taking of the name of God in

vain and every other unholy and impure practice. They all sound like rules made by someone who is hung over. Now I don't want you to hear you laughing right, I cannot. They all just sound like someone who has very audible sensitivity at this point. But you wouldn't get to this endowment ritual, they went over your records. You have to be the purest of pure Mormon that truly is a believer of this shit. The only reason why I got to see the endowment ritual was because whoever filmed it must have gone so deep under cover because you have to be a good boy for years.

You have to really walk the walk tightly, like it's like being like fuck on a matahari. Yeah Mormon temples, you can't just go into a Mormon temple, like not even Mormons can just go into a Mormon temple. When I walked by the Mormon temple in Utah they actively rejected me, so yes I believe that. Well after that oath they're given the robes of the Aaronic priesthood and are made to take a second penalty oath which says that they are to have their heart ripped from their chest and eaten by birds should they divulge secrets.

And on and on it goes, through the robes of the Melchizedek priesthood, the law of chastity, and two more penalty oaths that say that if a Mormon divulges secrets their body should be cut asunder in the midst and all their bowels gush out. And as they did this they moved from one room to the next in the temple which echoed the Masonic practice of moving up in degrees, except Joseph called it progressing from grace to grace. And the Masonic parallels don't end there. Both initiation rituals feature the initiate being in underwear, both give the initiates

new names, and both feature an oath in which the throat is cut and the tongue is torn out should secrets be divulged. All of which are cult techniques, putting you in a specific thing to wear, put you in a specific mental state, giving you a new name literally takes your old identity and fucking gets rid of it. But also this is a secret name, like this isn't your new public name, this is a name that you're supposed to keep and remember forever. So this isn't on your name tag if you have a job at McDonald's, you're not like C's

or the 8th? I mean you could if your name is like... Glurth. But you can go back and be like, yeah, my Mormon name is Aaron, I'm just gonna keep Aaron. Okay, I see. But this whole ritual you're supposed to do again once you reach the celestial doors of heaven.

When you die, you're going to do this ritual again that it's going to allow you to then move to the next level, which is the you get your planet. Man, that is not my idea of heaven. My idea of heaven is just like a big old Caesar's palace and I win every time I play the slots, every blackjack, every time I play blackjack, it's a blackjack. Sir, I have a Twilight Zone episode you need to watch because that man discovered that that heaven soon became a hell. Yeah, dude.

Yeah, Rod Sterling lied about a lot of stuff. I'm just about to say, you're starting to be becoming Atlantic City Ant-Ben. Well, it wouldn't be unfair to say that the Mormon endowment ritual is damn near the exact same as the Freemason initiate ritual, except for a few changes in wording right down to the five points of fellowship. In this Freemason ritual within a ritual, the candidate and the master touch each other on five points, inside of right foot to inside of right foot, right knee to right knee, breast to breast, left hand to back, and mouth to ear.

What kind of juggalo festival is this? Can we do it, Marcus? I think we can. Yeah. Let me try to stand up and do it. All right. So the boys are standing up now. They're going to attempt to do it.

This is extremely awkward because Marcus is like a stick and Henry is an egg. Okay. They have done it. They are, and that is very uncomfortable. Okay. It has been completed. So I do believe you guys are one step closer to heaven. I do love being a sweat.

You wish that he loves me. Oh, that's very nice. It was our secret, Marcus. Well, now it's my secret. I like to call it a sweaty snake of brotherhood. Yeah. That was very interesting. Not easy to do.

I wonder how they even came up with such a bizarre collaboration. You should see all the handshakes. They're very fun. I've studied the handshakes of many different cultures, and I just stick with the fist bump. You've studied the handshakes of many different cultures. I don't know how to do handshakes on YouTube like cool handshakes because it makes me very uncomfortable. One little part of the ritual though that is important is the veil.

So at the very end, you're supposed to approach this giant curtain where you literally open it up, and it's about the passing through is incredibly important because someone acts like God on one side of the curtain. You do the handshakes through the curtain at God, and again, you're going to repeat this when you die. And then all of a sudden, you do see a large erect penis come through, and you're like, this is a glory hole. Yeah.

Welcome to Utah. Interesting. I fully admitted to stealing from the Freemasons, but he spun it by saying that the Masonic ritual was a corruption of the ancient ritual of Solomon, and then Smith, he was just restoring it to the true Hebraic endowment. But the initiation is only the half of it. The second half was the ritual drama, and this church leaders reenact the creation of earth and the fall of Adam in a fun little play that takes place in a series of rooms

where each scene is depicted. In the early days, Joseph Smith played God, his brother Hiram was Christ, George Miller was the Holy Ghost, and W. W. Phelps crawled around on his stomach, hissing, playing the serpent in the Garden of Eden. Hey, Joe, what if I played the snake in a play? No, W. I don't. I don't want you to do that would be silly. Oh, but I just wanted to be a part of the special endowment ritual.

All right, you do it. I see you do it. I'm a devil. I'm a devil. You're the best damn snake I've ever seen. And once the drama reached the point where Adam and Eve were expelled from the Garden, the actors would don tiny robes that were exact replicas of Masonic aprons, except the robes were painted with little green fig leaves.

Then the initiate would be taught all the necessary secret handshakes, passwords, and hand signals before he was given his secret name, which was inevitably taken from either the New Testament or, more likely, the Book of Mormon. And remember, this was not just some wacky shit that the Mormons did in Nauvoo in the early days. This ceremony was performed exactly as we just described it, along with a whole lot of other ancillary shit, until 1990, Mitt Romney performed this ritual. Hey, man, honestly, it's the coolest thing I've ever heard that he's ever done.

I would like to see him try to pull this stuff off. Maybe Mitt Romney was the snake. I am a snake. A hiss. Hiss. You know what? W used to do it a lot better. Could you just be like, like, make the actual hiss sound?

You don't have to say hiss, Mitt. My only concern is that I am not a snake. No, Mitt. You're acting like a snake, you see. How can someone act and be something that they are not? That is trickery. Why? It's acting.

It's... Wait a second. So I could say something that I don't mean, even though I guess I'm getting into politics. Nailed it, Mitt, nailed it. But in the common Mormon practice of changing with the times, the church removed the penalties in 1990, along with a lot of the Masonic elements after word of their creepy rituals started getting out. Because I think the Mormons started thinking like, we're going to need to get into politics

here pretty soon. We're going to need some people in power. We can't be doing the penalty oaths anymore. We can't be... Because it really... I mean, it's kind of what people thought about Mitt Romney, it was kind of the same shit people thought about John F. Kennedy, was like, is he going to be loyal to the United States or to the Pope?

Yeah. Because JFK was the only Catholic president. He's a member of a fucking cult. Yeah, Mormonism probably cost him the election. Oh, yeah. Yeah, as it should have. Well... And speaking of creepy, the endowment ritual is not even close to the only Mormon ritual

still performed to this day. One that many of you may have heard of is the infamous baptism of the dead. Originally, this right was meant to bring dead family members like parents and grandparents into the faith if they happened to die before they heard the good word of Joseph Smith. Like say you get into Mormonism, you think this is fucking fantastic, but both your parents and grandparents are dead, what's going to happen to them, you know what, we can do the baptism of the dead. Okay.

What this ritual is supposed to do is send a little message to the baptized spirit in the afterlife, send a little note, and wherever that spirit may be, this message gives them the choice as to whether they want to be a post-mortem Mormon or not. So I'm sitting up there in my heaven playing my slot machines, winning every single time, and all of a sudden I get whisked away to Mormon heaven where I just have to sit there and have a horrible, horrible time. It only gives you the choice. The answer's no.

No, you get an invite. A nice young man will show up and be like, Mr. Kessel, you seem to be, you've been taking the Lord's name in vain, quite a bit of that slot machine. Yeah, because they celebrate by saying, God damn it, another win. Sir, you're drinking a lot of coffee and I seem to notice there is about seven Bud Light Limes in front of you. Yeah. Would you want to, you know what, I'm just going to skip it, I'm going to leave.

I want you to get the hell out of here. But more recently, the Mormons expanded this ritual from ancestors to include celebrities and historical figures. You can't, you can't do that. Hey dude, you can, they did. But you can't. You can and they did. Oh God.

In 2017, a researcher discovered that the Mormons baptized Humphrey Bogart and Marilyn Monroe, as well as the ancestors of Kim Kardashian, Trump, Pence, Biden, Hillary Clinton and Steven Spielberg. Oh. You can't. No. No, you don't get them. Those are ours.

Although you can have a couple of those. But we'll take Spielberg. I think that Stephen King has about four books that are about early short stories that are about how the afterlife is filled with classic rock guys. And I think at some point they got so jealous of heaven, our heaven, being heaven like Prince and Jeffrey Epstein, that they really wanted to make sure, I don't think Jeffrey Epstein, I don't know what you're talking about. I know.

He could have threw a Hail Mary right there, but they, they got so jealous of fun heaven, they wanted to get some people over on their heaven, because think about how cool just fucking Humphrey Bogart's planet would be, just all grumpy, him sucking on scotch and talking about it's bad. You can't smack actresses on the butt anymore. Yeah, exactly. I'm sure he has some interesting racial ideas as well. As a matter of fact, he might agree with the Mormons on that, so who knows, he might enjoy

it up there. Well, there have also been attempts to Mormonize both Charles Manson and Stephen Paddock. But as of 2017, both of those people were roundly rejected by church leaders because their spirits were deemed, quote, not ready. Really? But what really pissed people off was when the Mormons posthumously baptized hundreds of thousands of Holocaust victims in the 90s. Oh my god, in the 90s they did this?

However, the church defended the move, saying the ritual only gave spirits the choice to be Mormons, conveniently forgetting the long history the Jews have of being forced through violence and torture to convert to Christianity. Oh god. Okay. This is what I'm going to call an unforced error. Yeah. Like why do this?

Yeah. Don't know why they wanted to do it. I guess they just wanted as many Mormons as possible. It's something fun to do. But it's also, it's a fun ritual for the kids. Because it binds... Wait, hold on. What?

No, seriously. It binds the kids to the religion because they, I think they baptized something like 150,000 Holocaust victims. They definitely baptized Anne Frank. But for every single one of those people they baptized, you have to have kids. You have to have stand-ins. You have to have proxies. So this is a ritual for them to do.

It's like a church activity. It's like today we're going to baptize 10 Holocaust victims. Man, you can do a lot with macaroni too. You can make macaroni crosses. We just did hand turkeys in the Macarena. That was all we did in the confirmation camp. But these kids get shipped out. They go to the temples.

And I think that you're right. I guess it also partially, because the temple is a place where you go and you are truly because of the grandeur of the architecture. You're supposed to feel like you are actually in God's house. And so you're getting them. It's normalizing. It's like you're getting used to the temple. Well, also you get to go to the temple again.

You get to do the endowment ceremony again. Because for a lot of Mormons, the endowment ceremony is the most beautiful, most spiritual experience of their lives. It's fantastic. And when you do the baptism of the dead, you get to do it again. After Joseph Smith established these rituals, he started getting a little more selfish and a little more worldly with his revelations. In January of 1841, Joseph told his people that God had commanded the Mormons to build

a hotel. He's right, man. You're not going to flip that property. He technically was probably listening to, I think, was it, is it Suzanne Powder? Yeah, perhaps Suzanne Powder, yes. And strangely enough, God got pretty detailed with the business side of things as far as how much Joseph Smith should receive profit-wise. This is his actual revelation.

And they shall not receive less than $50 for a share of stock in that house. And they shall be permitted to receive $15,000 from any one man for stock in that house. But they shall not be permitted to receive over $15,000 from any one man. And if they do appropriate any portion of that stock anywhere else, only in that house, without the consent of the stockholder, and do not repay fourfold for the stock for which they appropriated anywhere else, only in that house, they shall be accursed and shall be moved out of their place. Sayeth the Lord God, for I, the Lord, am God, and cannot be mocked in any of these things.

And there shall be a water slide. Oh, I love that, an lotion in every room, I hope. There better be, there better be, I know, it's not happening as much as it used to. I got a wife correction, Natalie listened to the last side stories, and she has to push back, she says she has used the lotion in the bathrooms for actual purposes, not just us masturbating, but it has a purpose. Yes, yes, people do actually, that is not, do you think that's actually what it is? That is our theory.

It's not a theory, it's a fact. It's not there for men to masturbate. That's all I've ever seen anybody use it for. I've never actually seen anyone bathe themselves in lotion. They don't bathe themselves, people use lotion to moisturize their skin. I understand what the theoretical point is. Yes. But I mean.

Lotion is not specifically, they don't have entire owls just for masturbation aids. Yeah. Well see. Yeah, let's push back a little bit on that. And of course that revelation also made sure that Joseph had a suite of rooms all to himself, forever and always. This isn't that fun. The prophet needs a fucking space.

He needs a sit. He needs a think. He needs against the revelations. He needs that fucking, you know how many rooms it takes to put seven wives in there? So he gave himself the penthouse suite. Yes he did. But Joseph was not just busying himself with mundane creature comforts. He was also sending missionaries not west to the frontier, but east to Europe.

There the Mormons found thousands of willing converts right here in England. And if you're wondering how, just know that the urban living situation and what is now the UK was not exactly what you'd call optimal. I'm just going to say this and I don't want to be rude to any of the European people. But I'm assuming they got over here and the European is just like, you mean to tell me you can wash my balls because my balls have not been washed in 35 years. If I do this and you wash my pecker and my balls, all right. It's weird you didn't even do an English accent.

I don't know how to do an English accent. How would an English accent sound like? Do it. I'll have a coffee. Okay. That's actually better. Hello, Kissel. Hello, Benjamin Kissel.

Hello, Benjamin Kissel. I'll have a coffee. Yeah, actually, you're getting there. No, my only impression it will always be. Why not, Dirk? Well, what about call me now? Call me now. All right, I got you.

Well, since it was such a festering hellhole over here, at least in all the urban centers, which we definitely found out in our tour of Edinburgh, we found out just how fucking awful it was to live in the cities of the UK at the time, the idea that you could go to America and live in a nice town by the river in Illinois, that was just about the best fucking deal you were going to get all day. Marcus and Henry inform me of their tour in Edinburgh, and I just have to say, do some research on that. Seems like living hell, and I really was surprised to hear about it.

So, English converts started coming over the Atlantic by the thousands. Interestingly, though, the only place in England that the Mormons couldn't gain traction was right here in London. From the way the Mormon missionaries wrote, not a single person was converted in this city, while the rest of the country provided the Mormons with 8,000 new converts by 1844. It was about two or three years. OK. It's almost like they're from a huge city, and they could smell bullshit for miles away

and things were going pretty damn good in Nauvoo as well, while all this was happening. In fact, this could be described as the good times for the Mormon religion during Joseph Smith's lifetime. See, Illinois was nowhere near as harsh as Missouri, so Nauvoo was granted a town charter. Meanwhile, Joseph Smith was becoming a national character. The Hans Milmasker had kind of propelled him into the spotlight, and the day-to-day wacky goings-on of the Mormon cult became a favorite subject in papers like the New York Taddler and the Boston Bee.

I love it. Why don't we have those names? I need the Taddler, the Bee, what was the other one, the Militia Axe? The Philadelphia Battle Axe. That's so cool, man. And there was another one that was just called The Wasp, and their biggest rider was just named Vortex. That's awesome!

Dude, it's fucking metal, man. It just sounds like a leather club. I think it sounds like a hacker's zine. Yeah. And most people looked at the Mormons with good humor, especially, like I said, after what happened in Missouri. The editor for the New York Herald, who followed the Mormons as closely as we used to follow Lord Rael, wrote this.

There's some good in every sect of religion, and we give fair support to all. From Pope of Rome to Joe Smith. All we ask in return for our reports is a good cool seat, bench or location when the end of the world comes and the everlasting bonfire begins. I love them. Yeah, just a nice little fun wink and a nod. They were just fun characters, and there was plenty of goofiness for these papers to cover. Once Smith got more attention, people started pulling pranks.

Three men cut six copper plates, and their buddies filled those plates with fanciful writing, like all kinds of hieroglyphics in Hebrew and Greek and all kinds of shit, and then they used acid to corrode the metal to make it look old. Then, they buried the sheets near a Native American burial ground and spread the word around Nauvoo that one of the men had dreamed of buried treasure three nights in a row, and that he'd appreciate help from such seasoned treasure hunters as the Mormons. This is what people did before they were addicted to young Sheldon. You have to go and make your own fun.

Yeah. No, at first the Mormons were skeptical, because this was about the fourth or fifth major prank that had been pulled at their expense. But their suspicion vanished the moment they saw the seemingly authentic plates for themselves, and they begged for permission to take the plates to Joseph Smith. Oh my God, you can just imagine him looking at this shit, just being like, you don't think I don't know this fucking scam, you don't think I invented this scam, just like, all right, bring me the plates, I'll look at it.

It's funny how you can even look at these plates, the plates I had made your brain explode. It could be that Joseph Smith knew that this was a hoax, or it could be that word was reaching Joseph that the Rosetta Stone had finally been deciphered, meaning the days of Reformed Egyptian were getting pretty fucking short. Either way, Joseph went no further than just placating his people, because he couldn't say like, I mean, you fucking moron, what are you doing bringing me this shit for? What do you think I'm doing? This is old school, right?

I am channeling the hermetic old teacup. All right, let me look at this, all right, I'll look at a paragraph of it. This is just a TV guide. Joseph said he translated just a portion and said that the plates were merely the history of the person buried in that mound. He was a descendant of Ham, which he's like, this is interesting, but it is not a discovery on par with the mummies that inspired the book of Abraham. But still, even though people liked Joseph Smith, negative press tended to stick.

One person who no doubt had heard Samson Avaard's testimony accused Joseph of sanctioning theft against his neighbors in a practice that Joseph supposedly called milking the Gentiles. I heard that, but it seemed like Joseph preferred to read the positive stories, which is all well and good. But after a while, Joseph started to believe the hype. Emboldened by the positivity, Joseph Smith and the Mormons dove into polygamy, now polygamy began in earnest with Mitt Romney's grandfather, Parley Pratt in 1840, but only in a spiritual sense.

Parley Pratt's first wife had died, and Pratt had since remarried. But he was worried about what would happen when he went to heaven, and both wives were there waiting. Like what if one time on an anniversary, I told them to meet me at the same restaurant for a date, but I told one at seven and the other seven thirty and then I'd have to wear a mustache with one date and then run into the bathroom and change and come to the other date in a sort of Mrs. Doubt file set of farcical circumstances. So he was worried about his wives being catty in heaven?

Just what was going to happen? What's going to happen? How can I be loyal to both wives while in heaven? What's going to happen there? How is God going to look upon this, essentially? That was more what it was about. How is God going to look upon me having two wives in heaven? How does that work on the planet, Joseph?

How does that work? Well, Joseph assured Parley that God allowed for multiple marriages, as per his reading of Exodus, and that they would all live happily ever after for all eternity on their own planet near Colob. But this seemingly innocent proclamation designed to comfort his friend must have seemed like a fucking lightning bolt of an idea to the horny Joseph Smith. Joseph never dared preach polygamy out in the open, because he knew that if the Mormons were officially polygamous, the fledgling religion would never survive.

So Joseph took a sideways street towards supporting the practice by publishing a pamphlet by a non-Mormon named Udney H. Jacob, who defended polygamy as a solution to marital incompatibility. That's basically what it said. This whole document is all about how, you got a fat wife? Get a new one. You got a dumpy husband? Sorry. That's how it goes.

There are some people that say that Udney H. Jacob might be Joseph Smith under a suit in him. Maybe. But which you don't know. I feel like, I mean, I wouldn't put it past him because he really loved playing mind games and he was very, very good at it, but we don't know for sure. Well, on the back of the pamphlet, it said, publisher J. Smith. Oh.

And the gist of the pamphlet was that for a Christian, divorce wasn't an option, because nobody in the Bible ever got divorced. But Udney wrote, some men were nonetheless cursed with unpleasant wives whom they no longer loved. And since sex without love is a sin, Udney argued that having sex with a spouse you didn't love was a sin as well. And he even had a name for it. He called it, fornicating in the wife.

My goodness, do not search that on Pornhub. With a solution to fornicating in the wife, Udney wrote, was to just stop fucking the wife you hated and marry again, while still forcing everybody to live in the same home. And that's how you exalt the Lord and find happiness. Isn't that just what broke up the marriage between Maria Shriver and Arnold Schwarzenegger? No. I'm pretty certain that was it. No.

That was called fornicating in the mate. Ah, not good. Now, the Udney pamphlet was published in 1842, but Joseph Smith had already begun what he called plural marriage almost a year before, when the 36-year-old Joseph Smith married 26-year-old Louisa Beeman. By the time the pamphlet was published, though, Smith had already married Lucinda Harris, Prasindia Bewell, Zena Huntington Jacobs, Mary Rollins Lightner, Patty Sessions, Clarissa Hancock, Sally Gully, Nancy Hyde, and a woman only known as Mrs. Durfee.

Which was Robin Williams in a dress. Oh my, so he got a bevy right away. Many, many women. Oh my goodness. The oldest of Joseph's wives was 59, the youngest, 15. He also married five pairs of sisters, and in one case, married both a mother and a daughter. But what really got him in trouble was when he married other men's wives without the husbands knowing that Joseph was doing it.

Oh, they didn't like that, huh? Well, it was very scary. Your pastor, the prophet, you'd come on, there's one story of a one dude who came home to find his wife and Joseph Smith having dinner, where he's just like, yeah, let me tell you about this new arrangement I've invented. It's called sitting on a tripod. Oh my God. Now some Mormons claim to this day that all of Joseph's marriages were entirely spiritual,

with consummation left to the eternal state as they put it. Oh yeah. Definitely. Oh yeah. I'm a betting man and that's what I would put my money on. But quite a few sworn statements from Joseph's wives prove that Smith did not wait for death to fuck. What?

I can't believe it. But the thing was, a lot of Mormons didn't like the idea of plural marriage. Most early Mormons thought this was fucking weird and a really bad idea. In fact, Joseph Smith's own brother, Don Carlos, was quoted as saying, any man who will preach and practice spiritual wife rape will go to hell, no matter if it is my brother Joseph. In fact, even Brigham Young, who eventually had well over 50 wives, had to be cajoled into participating.

He seems going, come on, Brigham Young, do you want to marry more wives? No, I don't think I do. I don't know. All right. All right. What took years for Joseph to convince Brigham Young that this was a good idea and Brigham finally agreed, or at least the story goes, that Brigham finally agreed, while he and Joseph were watching a funeral procession.

And Brigham told Joseph that he would rather be in that fucking coffin than be a polygamist, but he would do it if God and Joseph commanded. Ah, interesting. At least that's what the story is. But once Brigham said yes, he went all in. Yeah, you think somebody who was hesitant would maybe have like one extra wife or two extra wives. Some reservations, a couple of reservations, perhaps.

56 or 57, I'm not sure which one, it's 56 or 57 wives that Brigham Young eventually had. He went all in. Now, surprisingly, quite a few Mormon women took to plural marriage as well, because plural marriage did not bind a woman specifically to one man. That meant that while one man was off on missionary work, the church widow, as they were called, could still have a warm bed with her other husband. And this was under the church clause fuck party, which is very fun.

I wonder how sexual these relationships were. I think that obviously they were having sex for procreation, but it did seem like they do kind of mention, they hint that this was also about sex for pleasure, that this was about keeping people satisfied and keeping them within the religion. Yeah, it was also, sex was exalting God, because it was believed that God was a man. And if God was a man, then that meant that God had all of the same urges as a man, therefore, it must be true that God likes to fuck, because men like to fuck. Hey man, look at the rock band poison.

Like imagine if Jeff Goldblum was God, and he just happened to know that he needed to marry as many PAs as he was around, as humanly possible, and handpick his several wives from his jazz show that he does in Los Angeles. Trick question, Jeff Goldblum is God. What this also meant, that any woman who left her husband to join Mormonism could remarry without a divorce, without worrying about the spiritual implications of such an action. But one woman who never took to polygamy was Emma Smith. Yeah man, it's hard to share.

It's hard to share the profit. That's your fucking husband, that's fucking, that's the number one guy, that was supposed to be your king. You're his quen, and you're supposed to be there, one for each other, I already backed you up through all of this fucking horseshit, we've already fought a war, now you're having sex with a 15 year old? Yeah, and you remember Emma Smith was, she's about the only one there who knew Joseph Smith before the Golden Plates, and at this point she is the only one who knew Joseph Smith

before, even like the founding of Mormonism, because everyone else who had translated the Golden Plates had all either been excommunicated for talking shit about Joseph, or had just left on their own. So Emma has a completely different idea of who Joseph Smith is than anybody else in this cult. Despite the fact that now he is being a Netflix television producer, one of the very cute things about the relationship between Barack and Michelle Obama is that Michelle would look at Barack sometimes like, I know you're that nerdy kid I met in college, and like everyone's

like going crazy for you now, but like she kept him down and I thought that was very cute. Yeah. Not cheating to keep him down, she kept him grounded. Grounded, exactly. Well Emma absolutely loathed the idea of polygamy, and in fact Joseph Smith kept many of his plural marriages a secret from his wife before he properly convinced her that this had been God's will all along.

It wasn't until 1843 that Emma finally accepted polygamy, and even then she said that she would only sign off on a new marriage if she herself chose the women, which became a kind of Mormon tradition afterwards. No I saw, this is the preamble to one of those Mormon girls videos I saw. The wife just picks, it seems to be always like it's a girl who's in pigtails and seems to be lost or looking for a babysitting job. It is interesting how like your research and Marcus's research like, there's sometimes where it goes into different directions.

Marcus does historical fact, I do cultural implications. But when Emma did finally choose two women for Joseph, turned out Joseph had already married them. Jesus Christ. She knew him better than he knew himself. That is when you look at your wife and you laugh together and you say you are the one. You'll get me. You get me.

But to quote save family trouble, everyone just went through the motions and had another ceremony without telling Emma that they'd already done the ceremony two months earlier. He really is running an improv school. He is, I understand everybody's just rolling with the herald every single time you're like the old surprised eyes, Emma looking at the girl, a girl looking at Joseph and they'll be like, and let's just get married instead. How many times did Joseph have the sentence go through his head? How the fuck am I going to get out of this?

Every day. Every day. I imagine if there are times, the problem is that now he's really starting to believe in himself. Yeah. Before, even through the Mormon wars, I think that he woke up every day like, oh fuck, oh fuck, they're going to kill me. They're going to kill me now.

But now, I think he's been on the money so many times that he is starting to really believe I have tapped into something I might need to profit. Well, he's a celebrity now. He is a national celebrity at this point. He is definitely starting to believe his own bullshit, otherwise he would not have had the courage to go as far with Mormonism as he actually did. You see how one late night set change some of our friends back in the day? I know.

Now, Emma must have discovered what had happened with the wives that she chose eventually because those wives were run out of Nauvoo by Emma herself just a few months after the second ceremony. Uh-oh. And it seems like Emma's reticence was a bit of a strain on Joseph Smith. Yeah, it's a fucking bummer. Wow. So, to help with the load, Joseph's brother Hiram told Joseph that he could convince Emma

that polygamy was good and right. You see, Joseph did have a revelation about polygamy, but he'd never written it down because written evidence removed plausible deniability. See Joseph had told associates that an angel had appeared to him three times between 1834 and 1842 before Joseph finally agreed to become a polygamist. But Hiram was convinced that all Joseph had to do to convince Emma was to write down what the angels had said clearly and then Emma would be convinced because this Hiram told him like, you're not braaming it right.

You gotta frame it right. You gotta really spell it out and then of course, Emma's gonna see, she's gonna realize that it makes sense and she's gonna get it and not only she's gonna get it, she's gonna be super into it, bro. Hiram, sure you do sound like you have the name of someone who wets himself every day at noon. Can you convince your wife to do a threesome? Yes.

No, bro. Every woman wants to do it, man. No, I know you're married and I'm single and I'm not dating anybody like I'm fucking all alone forever, but you, dude, you got a wife. You could flip this, dude. Flip it. You just fucking show her how every chick likes boobies, man. Well, when Hiram tried to convince Joseph that, yeah, everything's gonna be cool, everything's

gonna be fine. What he gotta do is write out the revelation and she'll be down for it. Joseph smiled and said, quote, you do not know Emma as well as I do. But still, Hiram pushed and eventually Joseph wrote down the whole kitten caboodle, perhaps going a little too far and including a personal commandment for Emma because it had worked before. According to the revelation, Emma must quote, receive all those that have been given a turn to my servant, Joseph, and to cleave unto my servant, Joseph, and to no one else.

And if she will not abide this commandment, she shall be destroyed, saith the Lord. And also, Joseph deserves a pool table in his own personal man cave with a Kegorator. And so Hiram, who had taken a polygamy like a fucking duck to water, I fucking loved Emma, dude. There's so much fucking, there's catering, which I fucking dig, I learned what a charger plate is, that's super cool, three plates are no fucking reason to it. He said, fuck yeah, Joseph, you fucking nailed it, bro, I'm taking this over to Emma right now, she's gonna turn that frown upside down.

You really think so? Bro, this could be more of a fucking lock. I didn't get a padlock from a hardware store, my friend. But when Hiram returned hours later, he told Joseph that he had never been so abused by a woman, to which Joseph said, quote, I told you, you don't know Emma as well as I do. Because bro, it's like, she was super mad, like I played out all this shit, and she was like, fucking confused about what the Lord told you to do. But even so, sadly, Emma soon relented with all the resignation of a cult leader's wife.

She told a friend that the revelation said she must submit or be destroyed, so she guessed she'd have to submit. That's exactly what she said, she said, I guess I'll have to submit, like just totally resigned to this whole day, like, I'm in this, I married him, I've got a family with, I've got, I think at this point yet, they had three kids together, like, yeah, this is my life, he's not going to change, so I guess I fucking have to. Well they had four dead babies, right, and they ended up adopting more. At that point.

They were trying to have babies, and it was very difficult. I think that she saw the writing on the wall that knew that Joseph Smith, if he was going so far as to put in his bullshit revelation that she would be destroyed, is it like, okay, so he has decided that this is a must do, like he has decided that this is now a part of it, and it does weirdly reflect on the hermetics, because in the 14th and 15th hundreds, alchemists often had plural marriages, that was like a thing that they've always talked about, about how it was a part of going into heaven, that it was the idea of bringing a harem of women with you into the afterlife, but she also knew weirdly, Joseph Smith had a habit of

being correct about saying people would get destroyed. There was one story that after the words of wisdom passed, he told this guy who had been working for two years, he said, I give you permission, you ought to go out and get drunk tonight. You are going to go get drunk and party all night, and come back, because if not, you will die. You want me to party, like, all night long? Not you, Kissell.

No. Kissell, you just keep going. Are you sure you can't be me? You can't be me? Just, oh, Kissell, you're a funny guy. Go party, Kissell. You're a good guy. You won't die, though.

But the other guy legitimately went and he didn't do it. He's like, no, I won't. I will not. I will not do that. And he fucking died two weeks later, so these kinds of things kind of seem to manifest around Joseph Smith. Right. Well, since absolute power corrupts absolutely, it is without a doubt that some of these plural

marriages were coerced, as is evidenced by the testimony of a feisty 18-year-old English girl named Martha Brotherton. She said that Brigham Young cornered her in a room above Joseph's store and told her that Smith had a revelation from God that it is right for a man to have two wives. And if she married Brigham, he'd take her to the celestial kingdom. And if she was game, Joseph would come upstairs and marry them that night. Then they would consummate their marriage. She could go home to her parents afterwards, and her parents wouldn't have to know a single

thing about it. I've also heard we do not have to get married if we just do it up the button. Martha emphatically said no, so Brigham called Joseph upstairs for the hard sell. Joseph said with a smile that she should just do it. Just do it. And if you don't like it in a month or two, I'll make you free, adding quote. If he turns you off, I will take you on. Finally, they let her go home, unmolested, and the first thing she did when she got there

was to write down the whole episode. When she showed it to her parents, they got on the first steamer to St. Louis and published the whole story in a local paper. But again, Joseph got ahead of the story by talking to his people first, calling Martha a liar and an adulterer, making sure to publicly add that polygamy was evil, and the Mormons would never even think of practicing it. Wouldn't even think about it. Shame on you.

I wouldn't even fucking think about that. I would definitely not have like 17 specific wives. No, what do you think about that? And that was all well and good for most Mormons because the Brothertons were new converts. They weren't nobody new who the fuck the Brothertons were. They'd just come over from England. But that wasn't the case when Joseph Smith started pursuing Sidney Rigdon's 19-year-old daughter, Nancy.

Joseph went full court press on his advisor's young daughter, writing a long love letter punctuated with defenses of polygamy. But when Nancy showed her father the letter, Joseph claimed he was just testing Nancy's virtue. Yeah, I just wanted to see if she'd do it. Oh, then I would spank her nude. I would bathe her immediately if I saw that she dared sleep with me. That's my daughter you're talking about.

I'd bathe and I'd make sure all the devils were out of her vagina and out of her buttocks and I would do it thoroughly. I'm gonna punch you in the fucking nose. Warranted. You got me. But what really put Mormon polygamy into the forefront nationwide was the excommunication of John Bennett. See, Bennett had made fast friends with Joseph Smith and had risen to the rank of number

one guy after only a year and a half. But there had to be a sacrificial lamb for the Sidney Rigdon fiasco, so Bennett was excommunicated for allegedly spreading lies about the prophet because Joseph said Bennett was the one who had spread the word about the saucy letter. And so Bennett figured fuck this guy and started telling everything he knew about Mormons to the press and made sure to make up a whole bunch of extra shit to make the story even better. Bennett claimed that Joseph Smith had set up a system of religious prostitution in which

the women were divided up into three categories, the Cyprian saints, the chambered sisters of charity, and the cloistered saints. Wild. Yeah, I mean, that's fun, those are three fun groups. Oh yeah. Basically, Bennett said that the sole purpose of these women was to be incentives for the men of the church hierarchy to climb higher in the church because the higher you climbed, the better the quality of woman, although Joseph always got first pick.

Now, it's highly unlikely that this system ever existed. It is possible that Joseph Smith may be bandied about the idea because him and Bennett talked about absolutely everything, but there's no evidence whatsoever outside of Bennett's claims that any of this ever happened. I truly would not put it past him though. I truly, it's weird because not the specific sex part of it, I think the idea of creating another category for women might have been in there where he's trying to figure out because they have the Aaronic priesthood and they have the Melchizedek priesthood and he wonders

like maybe we could also do this other subdivision that we could do on this side and then I can even do more weird stats to keep people fucking in game with more spiritual sky miles. I think he talked about it. I think he definitely played around with the idea, but with as many ex-Mormons as there were around this time, if anyone would have been a part of this, they would have told. There would have been multiple people that would have been able to confirm this, but as it was, it was only Bennett saying that all this shit was true. But nevertheless, the damage was done.

Joseph Smith and the Mormons were now inextricably linked to polygamy forever and always. And Joseph Smith's star as a kooky religious frontier curiosity began to fall. And all of these problems may be why Joseph Smith started thinking of a way to come back with something big for his own people. You gotta get a get. It's very possible that Joseph used this as an opportunity to wag the dog. And we don't know for sure if Joseph Smith gave this order, but around the time that the polygamy story broke, Joseph Smith's personal bodyguard, Porter Rockwell, shot

the hated Missouri governor, Lil Burn Boggs, three times in the head. Whoa! Now to the Mormons, this was both heartwarming revenge and the fulfillment of a prophecy. Because after Lil Burn Boggs had terrorized the Mormons with an extinction order, Smith had prophesized that Boggs would die within a year. It didn't seem to matter that it was most likely that Joseph Smith had fulfilled that prophecy himself by ordering the assassination of a government official out of either delayed revenge or hopeful distraction.

Although we don't know for sure if, to be 100% fair, we don't know for sure that Joseph Smith ordered this or if Porter Rockwell was just acting on his own. So Porter Rockwell, he ended up escaping from jail, and he would go on forever and saying bragging about how he shot Lil Burn Boggs on the word of Joseph Smith. I don't know if it's true or not. Joseph Smith said, Equivocally, no, I would never do this, I would never, never, never. But I do think it makes a lot of sense. It's a little bit kind of like cousin Eddie in Christmas Vacation, or Temmie Chase.

I certainly wish that someone would go and shoot that governor three times in the head. Oh, I'll do it, I'll do it. Yeah, sure you'll do it, Porter, sure you'll do it. Either way, whether Joseph ordered it or not, it seemed like once again, his prophecy had come true. But even though Boggs was shot three times in the head, he survived. It's a big head. Yeah.

And he soon swore an affidavit charging Joseph Smith with being an accessory before the fact on the attempted murder. And it is very coincidental that it would be Porter Rockwell. Yeah. So that's the funny thing about history, it's kind of like when you talk about any sort of conspiracy theory, is that when these things kind of show up, like the little tethers, the little strings that could possibly show that Joseph Smith ordered a hit of a governor, it's hard to not say like, it fits, the shoe fits.

The shoe does fit, but we don't have proof that he wore the shoe. Marcus, which is in the nebulous area, is actually more even more powerful than evidence because then it can always be used. Yes. Marcus, what is this? What is this term? I really want you to say this term. What is this term?

What in this situation? Who benefits? Quibono! Quibono! I believed quibono is a foot. So to escape extradition, Joseph went into exile and briefly considered pulling up stakes on the whole operation for a fifth time and moving the Mormons to Wisconsin. You're welcome.

I hope you like cheese. They did a lot of work on Navu. Yeah. Like this was, so this kind of pullout would be very, very intense. I don't know if you would have flipped it a fifth time. I think that this, like it was very, and you saw the writing on the wall, especially because if he's making these kind of money moves, if he really is trying to put it, this is true and he's trying to put a head on the governor, Joseph Smith is starting to understand

we need to stand the test of time. Like we are going to do this and being like, it is my way or the fucking highway. I am God. I can choose who live or die. You're not going to fucking chase me out of my home. Well, after another of Emma's children died during childbirth, number five by my count, Joseph turned himself in and threw himself on the mercy of the court. Luckily for him though, the judge was pro-Mormon and a fierce proponent of state's rights.

So the extradition order to Missouri from Illinois was denied and Joseph went free. And not too long after all that, after a probable assassination attempt on a government official, Joseph Smith ran for president. How do you do? He lost a poke. James K. Polk. Okay. Yeah.

See, Smith saw that politicians regularly courted the Mormons for the large block of votes that they could deliver. That's part of how they were able to settle in Nauvoo because they had just been, because back then it was Whigs and Democrats and that Lil Burn Boggs was a Whig. So when all of the Mormons moved to Illinois, the local Whig courted them and say like, hey, not all Whigs are like that. Not all Whigs are bad. Please keep voting Whig.

You're a Whig. Come on. We love Whigs. So they would often, you know, Joseph Smith became a bit of a power broker. So they went on the apology tour like Domino's did. And now Domino's is fairly tasty. Yeah. But he had to go and that's why he fucking was pumping the numbers because not only did

they need bodies to build Nauvoo, to do all of the kind of the infrastructural things, to farm the lands, to make the goods that they can sell in order to get money, but this also gave him like, you become too big to fail because you become this group where it's like, now they do what I tell them to do and they vote for who I tell them to vote for. So what I can do is I can sway these local elections. But what I need to do is get myself at the national fucking dick. I can need to get myself at the national floor. Yeah.

He just wanted to be on the national stage. He ran for president for the publicity. See Joseph had always thought that the best form of government was a theocracy and he figured who better to be president in the United States than the originator of the American religion, at least in theory, because Joseph knew that he didn't have a chance in hell to win, but he'd already been looking into the possibility of Mormon sovereignty and if he ran for president, that eventuality would not seem so strange when the time came. It sends a chill of my spine because this shit has always been this way.

People who run for president on just trying to get the fucking the likes, just trying to get the notice, trying to get all the fame points, because he wants to build his name and because it's like what if he did win, what if he did go all the way? We'd be fucked. It would have been a different country. So in early 1844, Smith organized a secret council of 50 quote unquote princes whose first act was to crown Joseph as the king of the kingdom of God. After that he sent the first expedition of men west beyond the borders of America to

find a place where that king might rule. Yeah, this shit's gotten fucking real. Once he starts this talk, this is really, this is where my estimation is that he's becoming a very dangerous person. Possibly. Quite possibly. He might be becoming a very dangerous person, but I think more than likely he was going to eventually move across the border.

I don't think he was going to risk a fight with the United States government because he knew that he couldn't even handle a Missouri militia. Those people wiped them out. You think he's honestly going to be able to go against the fucking union? The numbers are bigger than ever. At this point. But that's not that many people. But it starts at 15,000.

You remember, he's young. He doesn't know what's going to happen is going to happen to him. So this shit, he could triple that. I think in this, in this action of sending people out west because he was sending people to California and the Pacific Northwest, because all that was still Mexico at this time. He's going to further isolation. Yes, he's already making plans for further isolation.

But he needs that clout. He needs that clout for when the time comes when America swallows up the rest of the continent. He needs to have the clout to be able to say, hey, I've already got this thing going here. Don't fuck with me. I am a known figure in America as having sovereignty. So don't fuck with me. Oh, we just have to give rid of the pesky people already living there or convert them. But even though Joseph was only running for president for publicity, there were many Americans

who saw a potential theocratic president as a very real threat to the separation of church and state and therefore these United States. What was more, the masons had heard that Smith was using their most secret and sacred rituals in his new religion and was currently telling any Mormon who came through the temple all about their secret under penalty of death rituals. But worst of all, a lot of Mormons within Nauvoo were starting to get sick of Joseph Smith's shit. See when Joseph got in trouble for fucking, he employed the age old tactic of what about

ism and started naming trusted friends as debauchers. You think I'm bad. You should see what Sidney Rigdon gets up to. He looks buttholes. Yes, that's not good. Even worse, men who were opposed to polygamy were being forced to marry their daughters to Joseph specifically or risk excommunication. And Joseph kept asking for more free land from his land owning Mormons to settle the

now 15,000 Mormons that lived in Nauvoo because so many people were coming over from England and Joseph Smith kept saying like, okay, we got another 40 coming today, we got another 50, we got to put these people somewhere. You're going to give me your land. And that's just what's going to happen now. There's also a part of me that think he kind of becomes, this is the line where he's kind of becoming like God Emperor of Dune where he's, when you have more and more of these wives, right?

Because you're bringing with them, you're bringing them to the afterlife. And he is keep saying that this is going to help in your exaltation arriving with these many celestial marriages. Each offspring, I have spiritual offspring with each one of these spiritual wives I'll have after this creates a new planet, a new place that increases the Mormonism throughout the multiverse. And so there's a thing inside of him, right, you do believe, he saw, he started believing his own shit and he saw a highway to becoming Elohim where he's like, I am going to not

just be the prophet, I'm going to be the new arm of God, I'm going to use all of this new physical clout and when it goes to fucking heaven, it becomes spiritual clout and I'm going to fucking cash it out and be president of the universe. All I know is my mom has a star and if that motherfucker tries to invade her star planet, then we're going to have a real fight because you don't mess with the Kessels. Well there were a lot of men in Nauvoo that just couldn't take it. Problem was though, they didn't leave Nauvoo, meaning there were now fierce ex Mormons living amongst the Mormons and some of those ex Mormons started a newspaper.

This is kind of like how you live with your ex for six months and that was only six months. Nauvoo, I just lived in my room and pissed in Gatorade bottles. Cool. That's a whole other story. Did you start a newspaper? Did you start your own zine, like an anti ex girlfriend zine that you would put out from underneath the door for anyone who would read? And then he would just have to take it back in himself and read it.

I'm the publisher and the reader. Well that newspaper was called the Nauvoo Expositor and in May of 1844, it published its only issue, which is a full expose on what went on in Joseph Smith's pantaloons. The story detailed seductions, it completely exposed the polygamy revelation and it confirmed the rumors of Joseph's many wives because at this point, even a lot of Mormons didn't know about polygamy. Even the people within the religion did not know that polygamy was a big part of it, that Joseph Smith and Brigham Young and Parley Pratt and all these people up top were practicing

it. So this is a huge revelation. And when shit like this came from the outside, Joseph, he was always able to get ahead of the story and he could squash it from the pulpit. But these accusations were coming from neighbors. These were coming from people who were respected and trusted members of the community. Now Smith knew that he'd fucked up with polygamy. He told a friend that polygamy would be the Mormon's destruction, that he had been deceived

by the devil, that polygamy was a curse, and that they would have to leave the country if the story wasn't put to bed. This is why I said this to myself and I should have listened to my own advice. It's always important to jerk off before a revelation so that you can clear your mind because now I mean like, I am empty. I couldn't come with a rocket up my ass and five women sucking on my feet. So I have made a boo-boo. But in trying to crush the story, Joseph Smith made his last mistake.

He gathered a legion of men, marched to the offices of the exposer, burned every issue, and destroyed the printing press. Afterwards, the apostates who had printed the story fled town and reported the crimes to the nearby Warsaw signal. This is the funny thing about the Joseph Smith story. He could take multiple wives, he could manipulate people into giving them their land and savings, he could seduce underage girls, he could even attempt to assassinate a government official. But fucking with the free press, that's going too far.

America! America! Got your head in his grease on me! So after the Warsaw signal published the accusations, mobs from Missouri and Iowa crossed the Mississippi River with the express purpose of stringing up Joseph Smith once and for all. Knowing that he'd fucked up for the last time, Joseph sent his family away with a group of bodyguards and fled to Carthage with his brother Hiram, where they were both arrested on riot charges for the destruction of the exposer.

I'll tell you what, fucking Joe, there's nobody I'd rather fucking be in a fucking jail cell with than you, my fucking brother. This is fucking cool, right? Shut up! When Joseph resigned to his fate, knowing that he probably wasn't going to get out of this one, requested a big ol' bottle of wine and had one more drink with his brother before the mob came for him one last time. Now it's believed that the governor of the state, Governor Ford, gave the state militia

tacit permission to do what they did in order to prevent another Mormon war. But either way, 100 Carthage grays appeared outside the doors of the jail house where Joseph and Hiram were being held. They burst into the jail and ran up the stairs to Joseph's cell, shooting anyone who got in their way. But somehow, the other Mormons held with Joseph and Hiram had smuggled in guns. So Joseph was given a six-shooter while Hiram got a single-shot pistol, but it wasn't anywhere near enough.

You mean the dookie guns weren't enough? The militia kicked in the door to the cell and killed Hiram first, hitting him four times in the torso, shin, thigh, and face. Joseph, though, was unhurt, so he emptied his six-shooter into the hallway and made towards a window. But as he got one leg over the window cell and raised his arms in the Masonic signal for distress, which is exactly what you think it is, it literally is just your hands and right ankles going, ah!

He was hit by a hail of musket balls to the hip, chest, and shoulder, and as Joseph fell from the window, his last words were, Oh Lord, my God! And he hit the ground hard on his left side and momentarily managed to sit up against the curb, but his wounds were far too much to bear and the American Prophet expired right there in the gutter. Following Smith's death, a new ritual was added to the endowment. From 1845 until 1930, Mormons swore an oath of vengeance called the Blood Atonement, in

which each and every Mormon swore to avenge the assassination of Joseph Smith. This oath applied to apostates, anti-Mormons, adulterers, and thieves, and the oath clearly stated the only way to save those who were lost was to end their lives on earth and give them a chance at redemption. It's giving them a chance! And nobody was a bigger believer in the oath of vengeance than Brigham Young, Mormonism's dirtiest, weirdest, most violent, shit-obsessed leader whom we'll cover in depth on part five of Mormonism.

All right, there it is, Mormonism, part four, unbelievable. And there is a little quote I want to read from Joseph Smith that comes from his King Folid Discourse, which is one of the last recorded sermons he gave about two months before he died, which is an examination of basically his Kabbalistic teachings, if you read into it. But what he said, if we start right, it is easy to go right all the time. But if we start wrong, we may go wrong, and it will be a hard matter to get right, which is literally what we're going to see how the fucking oath of vengeance and all of the different

little mechanisms that are inside just the very beginnings of Mormonism are what's going to allow it to blossom into later true crime stories after we cover what Brigham Young this fucking character. Jesus Christ. I mean, because what Joseph Smith, the difference between Joseph Smith and Brigham Young is that Joseph Smith was still living in America. Like Joseph Smith thought that he was a king. He thought it was like a wonderful, theocratic society.

It was still very much, it was still very magical, still very idealistic and right hand path-y. Brigham Young was a fucking dictator. Well we will get to Brigham Young on the next episode. Cannot wait. The next episode about Mormonism, that is, we do, do we want to make this little announcement because we are on the road right now in Europe, and also we want to thank everyone who's come out to our live shows, in Dublin, in Edinburgh, Birmingham was amazing, we shared the stage

with Black Sabbath, they weren't there at the time, but you can see it like literally we got to perform on the same stage that Ozzy Osbourne performed at in Birmingham which was like an unreal dream come true. So cool. Bristol was great. Thanks to everyone who came out in Bristol. This has been a fantastic fucking run. But because of the fact that we're still on tour, next week's episode, we are going to

do a relaxed fit episode because if we wouldn't do that, you just wouldn't get the same sound quality and it just would not be up to snuff for us, and this Mormonism series is. It's not even sound quality, it is the quality of research that it takes to go, it's how much research has to go into these episodes. We cannot put the amount of research that we need to put into it while we're going from London to Stockholm to Berlin. Marcus and I have put a lot of, I mean like, not that Kissel hasn't. I do my own kind of research.

No, you're doing good, you're doing good, but we have really been busting our ass on this series. It's been a wonderful series. We're already at four different source materials, and we have been kind of scouring the internet and doing as much as we can speaking with ex-Mormons, and so this is a, we are really trying to lay this series out as thick as humanly possible, and this next episode and the next two are very, very important for us to land correctly. Yes, absolutely.

So what we want to do is that for next week for the Relax Fit, we've had some people reach out and say they wanted us to do like a Q&A type show. Right. And what we want to say is like, you send in questions and you've been dying to ask, and I mean this. It's like, I really want to do like an almost an AMA where you guys send things that you've been really curious about, about the show, about various topics, things that you want to yell at us about, things that you want to like, all of that kind of, and we're going

to address as many of them as possible in a Q&A Relax Fit. Absolutely. So email side stories, L-P-O-T-L at gmail.com, put in the subject Relax Fit Q&A, and we will look at as many as we can, and I think it'll be wonderful. We haven't done that in a very long time. On side stories, occasionally we read emails, but rarely are they in the form of a question. So yes, if you have some thoughts on your mind that you wanted to ask us, it can be about podcasting, it can be about a subject that we've covered in the past, it can be

about our friendship, it really, we're open. So we are excited to speak with you in that direction on next week's episode, and this is all to ensure that the Mormonism series, as it will live forever, will live as great as possible. And I also want to give extreme extra special thanks to research assistants Rachel Shue and Joel McKean who have been going above and beyond on these last four parts with helping us out, and for all the work that they've already done on the episodes to come. They've been absolutely fantastic on this episode.

Thank you all so much for your help on this one. And our goal is because we're inserting Relax Fit next week, we're not going to insert another Relax Fit after Mormonism is complete. We will move on to the next topic, we already have it lined up, which is we have a very fun UFO story, and we have a serial killer that we've been asked to cover many, many times that is also in the pipeline immediately following, so don't worry, more content is coming. And the content never ends.

Thank you all so much for supporting the entire last podcast network. We absolutely, without you, we don't exist, we're DIY as always. So we shall see you in Berlin. We will see you in Stockholm, and we have one more show in London as well. So we cannot wait to see you in those wonderful places. Never forget folks, no matter what you're going through. Hail yourselves. Hail Satan.

Hail again. Magus Dalatians. Hail me. I mean, Joseph Smith was not wrong in many ways in terms of, I mean, like, he's a go-getter. He's a go-getter. I think he was wrong in many ways, though. He's a dead go-getter. Yeah.

Isn't it weird, though? I like the underwear better now, because I used to joke about it. I didn't realize it was the full body undies. No, it's great. I seriously, I had like... Yeah, I do too, minor camo. No, I had the actual real Mormon underwear that I found like an old thrift store, and I wore them like every single day in the winter for like, I don't know, my first ten

winners in New York City. And honestly, when you think about it, they were in Illinois. It's just out of necessity. It's fucking freezing. Y'all going to hell. This show is made possible by listeners like you. Thanks to our ad sponsors, you can support our shows by supporting them. For more shows like the one you just listened to, go to lastpodcastnetwork.com.