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You know, you know, of course, when I first had you read sort of the beginnings of that essay that I worked with, ultimately with Brian Jodsten to kind of polish off, you know, you kind of smiled and said to me once, you know, you're just like, you're just starting this journey.

You know, you know, no idea what's ahead and you're writing this as someone who's really green, you know, and that was true in probably 1400 different ways.

But one of the things that really caught me off guard, I was so optimistic when I started Stale DS and when I asked you to do Mormon matters and when I started a thoughtful faith with others.

And one of the things that really dragged me down was how many people I would sort of make the pitch to make my very best pitch to use a lot of honestly use a lot of the arguments and the language even that you continue to use today with much more eloquence than I ever had, of course.

And then to just find that so many people that I interacted with weren't able to do it just over time they felt disingenuous or they felt an authentic or they felt like they had to bite their tongue or they just said, no, the church is causing too much harm or they just felt like it wasn't true and that somehow that really mattered.

So that that kind of ended up getting me down because so many of these people and so many close friends of mine just would come to me privately and say, John, I just can't, I just can't do it.

What's what's been your experience sort of making this pitch like let's just let's just say you for a hundred people that have listened to your podcast that have that you've made the pitch to

do you have any sense for what percentage stick around versus go do you ever do you ever feel like there's more who end up leaving than staying do you feel like the people staying or growing that it's actually the majority are able to stay if you catch them what's your sense for that flow.

Yeah, I haven't really tried to ever measure it. You know, as you know, when we do these podcasts, a big big portion that people don't see is how many people write to us right.

You know, and we'll end up in these long email conversations or you know, Facebook instant messaging things that go on paragraphs paragraphs and days and weeks and all that stuff.

And so certainly lots of people have have just found what you know the path that I've taken wasn't for them.

Others do, you know, and it's like this is optimism or something like that.

You know, just again, I've said these words before. So if you look at you know 1989 to 2000 was really my crisis years, you know, kind of kind of came out started coming out of crisis 98 99 2000.

It just took such a long time for me to do it that you know, these people who are saying to you or to me, I just don't know that I can keep doing it. It's not working for me.

I would have said all those things too. If I had, you know, a Facebook friend like me, you know, or you too. Now I did have Randy Paul and those have listened to my podcast enough time.

Randy Paul was my steady Mormon friend, the guy who had been ahead of me on this path. I had Jeanne England to look to I had arm and moss. I had Richard Bushman. I had these guys that somehow are again and it could be all because they're PhDs and stuff too.

But they represented to me people who I know I respected their brain. And I could see they had really neat spiritual lives.

And so they were, they were people in front of me, you know, close, you know, either through my reading or or talking with them.

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