Episode 008 — Rusty

0:10 Welcome to tonight's episode of Unspun, where we continue our Jehovah's Witnesses series. Tonight, we're sitting down with someone who's born into the

0:19 Jehovah's Witness community, a world they didn't choose, but were shaped by from the very beginning. We talk about what it was like growing up inside the

0:27 faith, the beliefs, the rules, the expectations, and how those early messages seep into your sense of self.

0:35 We explore what it takes to untangle from a world that wants defined everything, your identity, your future, or even your safety. And we speak

0:44 honestly about the long road of rebuilding, healing, and learning to stand on solid ground beyond it. On the pod today, we are interviewing Justin

0:53 White aka Rusty. Rusty is a highly regarded New Zealand comedian based in Christ Church. Known for his award-winning standup and energetic live

1:02 performances, he has been a staple of the South Island comedy scene and has been described as a cult classic comedian. Rusty is known for his

1:10 fast-paced, often chaotic and hilarious storytelling with reviews calling his work a finely polish finally polished

1:20 masterwork. His material often focuses on absurd observations and personal stories. Rusty grew up as a Jehovah's Witness and walked away as a teenager.

1:28 And now he turns that world into comedy gold. His humor is dark, a little irreverent, and deeply personal, pulling

1:34 from the strange, intense, and sometimes surreal moments of life inside a high control religion. We met him at the

1:43 Doomsday Comedy event, loved his set, and invited him on the pod to unpack the story behind the jokes.

1:44 Welcome.

1:53 How we doing? Good. Good. So, to start off, tell us uh a little about who you are

1:59 today and what like what life looks for you now.

2:03 Yikes. Big questions. Um who I am today.

2:11 Um I fix guitars during the day. I play music and perform at night. I'm in lots

2:16 of projects. Keep myself real busy. And that's pretty much the sum total of it.

2:22 There's not really a lot else in my life apart from work and performing.

2:29 And so you but you also um are a musician as well, aren't you? Yeah. Yeah.

2:36 And you and you told you told me before we started that you were in you were in four different projects. Yeah.

2:41 Yeah. That's incredible. That's that's a huge amount of output. You like to keep yourself busy.

2:46 Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I have a brain that is not built for downtime.

2:54 Um yeah. Yeah. I I I don't know what to do with free time, so I'd like to be busy and doing [ __ ] all the time.

3:05 That's cool. That's cool. So, um tell us about what your world was like inside inside the Jehovah's Witness community and how how did it shape you?

3:14 Oh, so so many ways. So I was uh raised in a divided household. Uh my mom was

3:22 very devout uh Jehovah's Witness. Um very much seeking to make Jehovah proud.

3:30 Dad was an angry atheist drinker. Um two incredibly different worldviews. Um

3:38 they didn't really so much struggle over our spiritual upbringing. Uh my father thought the church was a wonderful way

3:45 of getting children out of the house um and away from him. Uh so he just kind of

3:53 sat in the background which I know isn't the case with all you know um divided households. Sometimes there's a real battleground between the parents for the

4:02 souls of the children. Um dad didn't give a [ __ ] about our souls. It was fine. um

4:10 mom because she had pardon me because she had married an unbeliever. She she

4:20 converted uh when she was 18 uh to Jehovah's Witnesses um who you know found her at a very vulnerable state.

4:27 Her upbringing was not cool. Um and yeah, they love a person in a vulnerable state. They'll get on in

4:36 there. She met my dad when she was like 22. Uh married an unbeliever, so was dysfellowshipped and then spent years

4:45 bowing and scraping to get her way back in. But because of that, no matter what congregation there she was in, there was a stigma that traveled with her from

4:47 elder group to elder group, right?

4:55 You know, someone who will make terrible decisions. I don't know if you've ever been 20 before, but

4:59 you probably made some terrible decisions. I know I did. Yeah.

5:07 Um and that ship will follow you around the rest of your life in the organization. So she was desperate for

5:17 approval from an organization that kind of victimized her. Um and we were pawns in that game. Like uh you bring up good

5:25 devout, you know, children that always have something cool to say and the answers and clearly do that then that helps your standing in the congregation.

5:32 So, um, there's a lot of direct and insistent encouragement and that that

5:40 underlying kind of gee, mom's already got such a [ __ ] deal in life. I don't want to be the person that disappoints

5:48 her further. You know, mother's disappointment was always the the worst thing. Dad would just beat

5:49 you, you know, right?

6:00 And well, once it's over, it's over. And you learn that physical pain there's a high degree of forbearance that you can train yourself into.

6:07 But you know, mom but being disappointed in you hurt a lot more than anything dad could do. Right. Right.

6:15 Um I grew up I've got a bunch of older brothers and sisters, but I really only grew up with one of them um who's three

6:23 years older than me. Uh yeah, he was caught up in the same thing. Um,

6:35 you're made to feel strange and other from everybody else in the world. Um, it's a lot harder going through school.

6:42 Um, making friends, doing all the normal things normal kids do. Um,

6:49 you are very twisted in your ideas about other people, you know, but Jehovah's Witness

6:59 is a very zero sum game. You're in the cult or you are an evil Satan worshipping bag of crap uh with no moral

7:09 fiber or you know. Um, so I think the thing for me because I left

7:13 relatively early in life, you know, I was 15, 15 and a half.

7:20 Um, I found it relatively easy to walk away from the beliefs. They seem just stupid,

7:28 just really dumb. Like if the omnipotent creator of the universe

7:35 really did have a detailed plan, I suspect it would be at least better written, you know, like

7:42 I I imagine that the you know, the creator of the universe might be an effective communicator. Um, and you

7:50 know, the beliefs are obviously idiotic, relatively easy to beat, especially if you get out early enough.

7:59 But the conditioning is a whole other thing. and something I myself did not realize was even at play until decades

8:08 after I'd left when I was uh trying to sort my brain out a bit and saw a therapist and sort of the first

8:16 consultation I briefly outlined you know my problems why I was there and he said were you brought up religious by any

8:25 chance and I went yeah I was he says were you brought up as a Jehovah's witness by any chance I was like, "Yeah,

8:34 how'd you figure that?" And he said, "You [ __ ] should have a syndrome named after you." He said, "Let me just say

8:40 some things and see if they try with you." And he rattled off three or four things. And I was like, "Yeah, bingo.

8:46 All of them." And he's like, "Yeah." And he explained to me that the conditioning was a lot more professional than the

8:56 beliefs, you know, and because I've been born into it, that conditioning had been applied to me the instant I was aware.

9:00 And that's the stuff that messes you up belong to. Yeah.

9:07 You know, yeah, I had a lifelong battle with just an unexplained self-loathing that nothing I

9:14 achieved, nothing I did was ever good enough or worthy. I wasn't worthy of love or having anything good happen to

9:20 me because I'm a worthless clay slave built built to disappoint God. Yeah.

9:27 Now, you don't say that out loud to yourself, but if it's ingrained in subcutaneously,

9:34 you know, your whole life, you will carry that [ __ ] around with you like finely made luggage the rest of your life. Yeah.

9:36 Until you realize that that's what it is. Yeah.

9:44 And when you say, "Who am I now? I'm a whole bunch happier than I was just a few years ago. Right?

9:50 Because the first step to breaking your conditioning is recognizing you've been conditioned.

10:00 So, so let's talk about that. Let's what what was, you know, what was the catalyst moment that led to you leaving?

It was kind of a storm uh of various things. I was resisting getting

10:14 baptized. Uh I'd been kind of pumo from I don't know about the age of 11. You

10:23 know, I was one of them bright kids and I saw the inconsistencies, the outright

10:30 lies, the fact that if you were too curious and answered difficult questions, you

10:38 weren't a keen student that wanted to know about Jehovah. you were a troublemaking little [ __ ] you know, and

10:46 that just seemed really inongruous. But I tried to stay in for as long as I could for my mother's sake, you know.

10:55 Um, but eventually you do the math and you go, I can't actually pretend to be

11:04 someone else for the rest of my life to make my parents happy or one parent, you know. Um, and if you can and you think

11:11 that that's worth the investment, well, good luck to you, but I don't think it'll work out. You can't live your life for other people. You You got to do it

11:18 for you. Um, so I was resisting getting baptized. I made a few worldly friends

11:24 because most of the people in my congregation I just did not gel with whatsoever.

11:30 Um, I got into trouble, you know. I got I got drunk once.

11:37 Oh. Yeah. Yeah. And from then on just instant alcoholic and you know started started beating people up and stealing

11:45 cars of course. But no, no. I And what really the thing that was the last fiber

11:54 to snap and set me a drift was the fact that um when I got in trouble, they took my stuff.

12:00 Like they took my stereo away and my bicycle, you know, like.

12:09 And that made me think, a what a bunch of petty little [ __ ] and B, wow, this is conditional, you know.

12:09 Yeah.

12:16 All this love, all this faith, all this togetherness, righteousness, and solidarity is really, really

12:23 conditional. It's not absolute. It is um, you know,

12:31 it you can't bang on that stuff unless you follow all the rules. And I think that was the thing that made me go, I'm

12:39 not only not going to meetings anymore, I'm getting the [ __ ] out of here and I'm running as far as I can. Yeah.

12:48 Um, and I was not ready to leave home and things were real real difficult as a 15year-old with with, you know, uh, no

12:54 support network or resources or anything. And I ended up in pretty dicey situation there for a while. You know, I

13:03 was a homeless street kid. Uh but you know at least I hadn't built an

13:11 entire life and got married and had a family while paring nonsense I didn't believe and I absolutely know why people

13:18 would make that choice. It is real real difficult to break away that early when you've got you know nothing

13:27 but it would have been even harder to shatter a whole bunch of other people's lives by leaving. Um, and that gives them even longer to work the

13:34 conditioning into you, which makes it harder to stand on your own and and get it get get out.

13:41 Yeah, I appreciate that. Um, do did you have any outside support when you left?

13:44 Um, or was it just a completely solitary journey?

13:52 I'm kind of don't know how much I can actually say. Um, I'm very conscious. I only want to tell

14:00 my story. Um there there was another witness kid who was kind of going through the same thing. And while we

14:08 weren't in a position to support each other materially at all, it we did hang out. We played in a band together for a

14:15 while and it was um that that I felt some solidarity with that. My main

14:24 support network was was the band I was playing with and the professional gentleman who supplied me

14:29 with marijuana in order to sell at school. Right. How I made ends meet for a while.

14:35 Um because I kept going to school while living in a tent on the beach, living in the back of a church, in the streets, whatever.

14:44 Wow. Um, weirdly enough, those hard to describe me anything other than a crime family, but they showed me a lot

14:51 more support and unconditional uh fellow feeling than anybody from the church ever did. And they thought my

14:58 situation was kind of tragic. And they were like, well, you know, you can uh keep yourself in in in service station

15:05 pies and uh um sell a bit of weed for us at at your high school. and and they really looked after me to a certain

15:12 extent, you know, they helped me get my first place and uh and that sort of thing. And it feels

15:21 awfully strange to say, you know, the the community Christ loving network dedicated to spreading peace and

15:29 goodwill among earth stole my bicycle while a crime family helped a homeless urchin get on their feet.

15:33 Yeah. The the irony is thick.

15:40 and and those bad guys when I left town there was no oh no you owe us it was all

15:48 like good on you man get out of here get your life started that's awesome you know which is crazy right yeah that is crazy

15:55 so the so I want to talk a bit about the social architecture of the ex jobs and

16:03 you know specifically shunning in family um you know there's they have this policy of dysfellowshipping

16:13 um it's a central pillar of the JW structure. How have you managed to build a chosen family in your life now outside of the organization?

16:20 One of the reasons I didn't want to get baptized is I didn't want to get this fellowship. Um by the time I figured out that eventually I was going to leave, I

16:28 thought, well, if I get baptized and I get this fellowship, um I'll never be able to to speak to my mom ever again, right?

16:32 Well, it turns out if people feel like shunning you, they're going to. Yeah.

16:38 Um, and the other thing was I I ran. I didn't want anything from anybody

16:45 connected to that world. I wanted to either fail horrendously on my own,

16:54 succeed gloriously on my own, or muddle my way through a life of mediocrity on my own. But I just didn't want anything

17:02 from from them. Um, but yeah, certainly other members of the congregation treated me like I might as well as being dysfellowship. No one

17:10 would, you know, acknowledge me or anything like that. But to be fair, I wasn't trying

17:18 to to be acknowledged. I just wanted to get out, make a clean break, and uh get away as far from those manipulative people as possible.

17:26 And you already had sort of a connection with the outside world with your music and your band. So yeah, which was very controversial with the elders. They didn't want me

17:34 of course playing rockus music. Um I mean, you know, it's deeply weird for a teenage boy to want to play an electric guitar.

17:36 I know. That's strange.

17:42 Yeah. If I see teenagers playing a guitar, I slap it out of their hands and say, "No, no, think about your choices.

17:53 Think about your life, son." Yeah. Um but but honestly, music is is always been, you know, if I need a savior, that's what it is.

18:03 You get together with people and you put all your skills together to make something that's way more than any of you are on your own.

18:07 I guess that's what a lot of people want want a church to be like. Yeah.

18:15 You know, so for anybody out there who's looking for that real good feeling and a communal uh enterprise you can get into and actually get something spiritual,

18:22 ethereal, and real out of it, join a band. Yeah. Learn an instrument, you know.

18:28 And and music is something that has always required all of my concentration.

18:36 And same with standup. Like when I'm performing standup, there is no part of my brain that is anxious, depressed, worried, frightened, whatever. There's

18:44 no room for anything else. And I I love that about, you know, creation and performance is the way that it just

18:51 consumes everything you got. There's no bandwidth to feel like [ __ ] A lot a lot of people refer to that as the as the

18:59 flow state. Yeah. Do you do you chime with that? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That's really cool.

19:06 So So for many um leaving leaving at the the organization means losing their

19:14 entire social and familial network overnight. And um you've mentioned a few times how how close you were with your

19:23 mom, how much you loved her. Um, how did you navigate that initial void of connection?

19:32 Well, it's a a whole big complicated bag of worms. There's a there's a bunch of extenduating factors that are probably

19:42 outside of the scope of the conversation we're having that um, yeah, I I I got the [ __ ] out. I ran away, right?

19:50 You know, I At that stage, I felt like

19:56 the church were a a brain parasite that my mother suffered from.

20:07 Um, I mean, reading the publications today, like it's noticeable how dumbed down everything is and how a obviously aiming for idiots they are, right?

20:12 Because that's an easy convert and and an easy person to keep under the thumb.

20:19 My mom was far from an idiot. She was very smart woman. She just had had her

20:26 brain vandalized by by experts. Um, and

20:33 so I didn't I still don't and and never really have I've never really held anything against my parents, you know.

20:41 Uh, both of them did [ __ ] up things, but not because they were [ __ ] up people, because they had [ __ ] up information.

20:43 Yeah.

Most [ __ ] don't know they're being [ __ ] right? They just believe in correct stuff and they're acting on the information that they have for what they

20:51 believe is the best purpose. But if the information is garbage, then the purpose is garbage and the deeds will be garbage.

20:58 But, you know, I’ve never railed against them as people that just, you know, that’s just the mill they had.

21:09 And in particular, my mom, like I said, her upbringing was real hard out.

21:13 And she was never going to turn out 100% normal or well adjusted after that.

21:20 And this is one of the things I get angry at the JDubs about is they do look for people in that state. They look for

21:28 people in a moment of weakness, in a moment of high amount of stress, people who have weaknesses of various sorts. That’s catnet to a cult.

21:38 You know, that is their way in. They promise you, “Oh yeah, you feel like [__] because your life’s real hard.” Well, guess what? In any minute now,

21:46 Jesus is going to come and make it all better. That’s a compelling message to somebody whose reality is inescapably

21:56 [__]

21:57 Yeah. Yeah. Um anytime my brother is in Islam and he has

22:05 been for 35 years and he’s quite fundamentalist and anytime I sort of complain about my

22:12 life, like I’m just having a yarn, just having a moan, he immediately pounces on that and

22:20 goes, “Well, you should become a Muslim because it will solve all of your problems.” And this is true. And this is absolutely

22:29 true because history shows that not one single Muslim has had a bad day in the last 700 years. It’s all made better by the promise of Allah.

22:39 That’s right. That’s a great way to put it. That’s really good.

22:43 So, once you were out, what was an everyday task that was just hard to adjust to?

22:59 everyday task. And the initial

23:07 biggest shock was discovering that worldly people aren’t all thieving

23:14 rapist murderers. You’re taught that nobody outside the religion has a shred of moral fibre.

23:21 encountering people like the gents I mentioned before, people that fall into

23:30 a definition of absolute and sheer horror in the Jehovah’s Witnesses that acted with a greater

23:39 amount of ethicality and moral clarity than a lot of these people that had been

23:47 teaching us all that we’re vile broken slaves. Yeah.

23:52 That was difficult realizing that the outside world had rules too. Yeah.

23:58 boundaries and that they were different ones.

24:05 I don’t know if I really struggled with any kind of everyday task

24:13 because immediately after getting out my life was real hectic, topsy-turvy, desperate scrabble for a while

24:19 there. Got my feet, moved to Christchurch with the band I was playing in in Timaru

24:28 at the time. They helped me out heaps.

24:34 They told me for as long as they’d known me, you got to get out of this weird church you guys go to. They could see that I was at war with

24:42 myself, that at heart I’m kind of a laid-back live-and-let-live empiricist.

24:51 I like measurements. I’m kind of mechanistic. I want things to make sense.

24:59 I don’t really have a spiritual bone in my body.

25:08 I’m kind of mechanistic like that. I want things to make sense. I like it when people’s ideas are

25:16 amenable to change. If you get better information, you should have better ideas.

25:24 You shouldn’t go, “This information might be real good but doesn’t jive with my preconceptions.”

25:29 So you had a level of critical thinking.

25:34 I think quite a lot of people didn’t. It seems like you figured a lot of this out before you’d even left.

25:43 Remember when the evolution book came out… I was reading this going this is so

25:58 flawed on so many levels. They quote scientists but the quotes are stitched together and out of context.

26:07 My superpower was that witnesses are supposed to closely watch what their children consume.

26:15 I figured out if the book looked boring enough on the outside I could read whatever I liked.

26:23 No one checked the title. My peers couldn’t recognise authors.

26:30 So I read everything I could get my hands on.

26:41 That helped me see outside the narrow spectrum of acceptable information.

26:57 You’ve talked about your comedy career and stand-up. You mentioned wanting to be

27:15 busy all the time because anxieties creep in. How do you handle

27:22 triggers or moments when old cult thinking creeps in?

27:34 I use an approach that is at odds with most psychological advice. Don’t use my method.

27:49 Psychotherapists talk about acceptance and allowance.

28:02 I don’t accept and I don’t allow. I will bully myself. It works for me.

28:15 My best defence is a short sharp “come on dude”.

28:30 Didn’t walk all this way to turn back now.

28:33 It’s a win-loss thing. If I lose control of my mind, the old system wins.

28:54 I’ve put too much work into allowing that to happen.

29:00 That’s how I get through things like social phobia.

29:18 I got a job in retail. Forces you to talk to people.

29:22 You handle things head on with brute force.

29:37 There isn’t just one way of recovery. Everyone is different.

29:57 JWs are taught the world is under Satan’s control. When did you realise it wasn’t as dark as you were told?

30:16 I don’t know. I can’t pinpoint the moment.

30:24 I always suspected it wasn’t that bad.

30:33 I was into history. You realise no one is really in charge.

30:50 If anyone is, they need management training.

31:06 If Satan has been running things for thousands of years, you’d expect better results.

31:23 It doesn’t seem to be improving.

31:26 Um and yet despite all the various vectors and ways in which your life can

31:33 go to hell in modern society, people still keep on being good. And you know,

31:41 it’s funny that the one thing that the worldly media and the Watchtower Bible and Tract

31:48 Society kind of both go on about at the same time and myths that need busting.

31:54 They’re both full of [__]. There are more good people than bad people in the world. And there are more smart people than dumb people in the world, right?

32:04 And I think if all of us said that to ourselves at least once a day, it’d be easier because we’re constantly getting

32:12 told that you’re the only clever one and everybody else is a dun.

32:16 You’re the only good one and everybody else is evil. Well, no. [__] that, man.

32:20 When we had the earthquakes in Christchurch, that really pulled the skin off what people really are. Yeah.

32:27 When your city’s falling over and [__] gets real, people are cooperative. Yeah.

32:35 People are not exploitative. They’re collaborative. People look out for other people. And the harder the situation gets, the more good people act.

32:47 Yeah. Right. Yeah.

32:48 Um which, you know, we constantly get told, I mean like even this Lord of the Flies. I remember reading this book as a kid and going, oh gosh, blah blah blah.

32:56 Underneath the skin of every human is nature red in tooth and claw. Well, a bunch of kids did get stranded on a marine island many years ago, right?

33:10 A bunch of Pacifica boys, north of the Strait somewhere around there. And they’re stranded there for a year, right.

33:17 When they finally got picked up, those kids had formed the tightest bonds of anyone ever. They fully cooperated the whole time, had a garden running.

33:25 People actually, the harder you screw people, the more good comes out, which runs counter to the

33:33 narrative told by the Jehovah’s Witnesses, you know.

33:37 And if anything, the guys I was talking about who hooked me up with Weedle, they didn’t look like nice people.

33:45 They just acted like nice people when they had the opportunity.

33:59 And I was thinking, if criminals can be like this, why can’t religious people be like this? It just made me realise the whole thing is upside down.

34:15 And the Jehovah’s Witnesses could have done a better job of pretending they’re an organisation that loves light.

34:25 A bunch of stuff went down in the congregations I grew up in that anyone with eyes and ears open could see.

34:33 There was a whole bunch of evil in that organisation and people in positions of trust misused that power.

34:43 On the regular.

34:54 If you want to convince me everyone outside is evil, you better first convince me everyone inside is good.

35:02 And they’ve failed on both counts.

35:08 The math is pretty simple, isn’t it?

35:15 I want to ask about breaking the mental loop. How did you transition from believing Armageddon is around the corner

35:23 to actually planning a life and a future?

35:37 That was the hardest thing. When I first left it was a coin flip, it might all be true.

35:45 If it is, then living in the time of the end has a certain ride to it.

36:01 The conditioning that everything can stop at any moment really messes with your ability to conceive of the future.

36:19 I went through a huge chunk of my life not thinking there was a long term, making short-term decisions and also long-term ones at the same time.

36:35 I only in recent years got a handle on the idea that the future is real and it’s going to happen to me.

36:57 I’ve got ruined teeth I never dealt with because I didn’t think I’d be around long enough for it to matter.

37:15 I could fix my teeth or buy another guitar. I bought guitars. Now I’ve got 11 guitars and a bad smile.

37:36 That’s one of the biggest things that messed with my life without me even realising it.

37:54 What helped change your thinking about Armageddon? Did music, reading or stand-up play a role?

38:11 Growing up through the nuclear threat era, then 9/11 and global paranoia…

38:30 Jehovah doesn’t have a monopoly on ending the world. We can do it ourselves.

38:50 You can actually see world events unfolding. If there’s an Armageddon, we’ll probably cause it ourselves.

39:14 We’ve overtaken any divine force in destructive power.

39:22 Those religious narratives about divine destruction don’t really hold up anymore.

39:37 That “angel killing 185,000 people” story? That’s modern warfare numbers now.

39:52 Being raised in that mindset gives you a weird inoculation against fear of the end of the world.

40:07 Other people panic about World War 3. I’ve lived with that expectation my whole life.

40:16 There were even soldiers complaining about being told wars are for God.

40:52 Christian Zionism and nationalism are deeply tied to end-times thinking.

41:12 Those beliefs shape political actions in real ways.

41:38 There’s little incentive to fix systems if you believe collapse is the goal.

42:10 Jehovah’s Witnesses messed me up, but on the scale of cults they’re relatively small.

42:25 They don’t have the same level of political power as larger ideological systems.

42:43 That helps put things in perspective.

43:09 Christian nationalism and Zionism operate on a much larger scale.

43:23 They use similar systems of control, just with far greater reach and power.

43:27 And they genuinely believe they are doing God’s work.

43:34 Yeah. Yeah. Exactly.

43:36 I just want to see the look on their faces when their plan works, right? Israel gets destroyed. The blood of the Jews flows into the sea. Blah blah blah.

43:44 Jesus comes down and says, “Hi, I’m Jesus. You might remember me. This is my dad, Jehovah.”

43:50 A lot of people are going to be disappointed when they find out God’s real name.

43:59 There’s been like, “Oh, that stupid little cult got one thing right.” That is the dude’s name.

44:07 One of the things cults often use are thought-stopping phrases to discourage critical thinking. Was there anything you had to unlearn, and what did you replace it with?

44:28 I guess in some ways, my karma ran over my dogma.

44:34 I wasn’t keen to replace one set of arbitrary rules with another.

44:43 I wanted to live life on a scientific basis—try things, measure results, adjust if needed.

44:51 If something works, it’s good. If it doesn’t, rethink it.

44:58 I didn’t want to install a different operating system.

45:06 I briefly looked at other religions and realised an imaginary friend is an imaginary friend.

45:13 Some are more controlling than others, but it’s still the same idea.

45:20 This might offend people, but to me it’s intellectual cowardice.

45:28 Handing over your thinking because it’s easier than deciding what’s right and wrong.

45:35 Learning ethics is hard, but worth it.

45:43 I remember being told as a kid, “The new system will be here by then.”

45:53 I was told that about school, university, everything.

46:08 “You won’t need high school. The new system will be here.”

46:21 Then I went to high school anyway.

46:27 Same for university—always deferred to Armageddon.

46:42 It becomes a way of not making life decisions at all.

46:57 I’m nearly 50 now—I’d have spent my life waiting for something that never comes.

47:13 If we build a better system, it’ll be humans who do it.

47:28 You were physically in but mentally out for a long time.

47:36 Music and reading helped develop your thinking, but it was already there.

47:45 Just a busy brain. Curious.

47:53 Curiosity is my favourite quality in people.

48:00 Everyone deserves a second chance, but uncurious people frustrate me.

48:08 People who don’t want to know things aren’t engaging in being human.

48:17 We’re supposed to be curious, restless, figuring things out.

48:23 That drive was always there in me.

48:33 If I’d been in a more complex religion, I might have stayed longer.

48:42 But Jehovah’s Witness doctrine is shallow—there’s no depth to explore.

48:50 No rich intellectual or spiritual depth to dig into.

49:04 So there was nowhere for me to go with it intellectually.

49:22 We’re getting to the end now—three questions we ask every guest.

49:34 If you could speak to yourself the day you left, what would you say?

49:45 You got this.

49:51 What supported you the most?

50:01 Art. All forms of it—painting, writing, comedy, music.

50:15 Creation is something you can lose yourself in completely.

50:26 You make something, and people respond to it immediately.

50:45 That feeling is real.

50:52 It got me through a lot.

50:58 Instead of waiting for God to fix everything, you create something yourself.

51:09 That’s a terrible way to live—waiting like that.

51:13 Creation is the opposite of that mindset.

51:19 What would you say to someone encountering a cult survivor?

51:35 It’s about empathy. Everyone deserves a way back.

51:55 Whether it’s crime or conditioning, people can return.

52:04 Remember they may be inexperienced in the wider world.

52:14 But also recognise their strength—they left something deeply controlling.

52:56 They need both empathy and respect.

53:14 Thank you for your honesty, humour, and insight.

53:29 These stories go deeper than just a stage performance.

53:41 If something resonated, slow down and reflect.

53:52 Unspinning is messy, not neat.

54:06 Until next time—keep questioning.