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I had a talk that was kind of written and then I shared it with Steve and I told him I was a little bit worried that it was too angry.

So I rewrote it like two hours ago and then I said the old slides so we can pull up some of the old slides if we need to.

But I titled it what I've learned from 15 slash 30 years of Mormon Transitioning.

You know, as many of you know, I first sort of went through my faith crisis as a seminary teacher working for Microsoft in Seattle.

Right around the time 9-11 happened and I won't go too much into that story but it's been a long journey from then to now 15-16 years.

I wanted to begin though by telling you guys a little secret and the secret is I really hate public speaking.

I really do. There's so much I just like about it.

It's stressful. It's really stressful to try and sit and think how do I be interesting?

These people have listened to possibly hundreds of hours of my voice. I hear some people actually use my podcast to help them go to sleep at night.

That's really intimidating.

How do you be thoughtful? I always forget people's names and so I'm like oh my gosh, I've got to see 120 people and I'm going to forget names and that's going to be embarrassing.

I don't always love the travel. I honestly just in full disclosure, I believe there's a lot of people who are more interesting or intelligent or even worthy of being in front of you than me.

I feel that every single time.

And honestly, I've talked about this before but I really have internalized some of the lessons of Mormonism one being sort of the risks of occult to personality.

And I swear to you I don't take that lightly that a crowd might gather and that people might express interest in wanting to hear what I might say.

And all that's just really uncomfortable for me.

So I guess it's fair to ask why am I here?

The first thing that comes to mind are so many pioneers that have come before us that I kind of just want to honor.

This is primarily a post-mormon gathering and this is just a small list of some of the people who really influence me over the years in terms of being pioneers.

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