S3 E30 The Reluctant Apostate: In Conversation with Lloyd Evans

Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
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(00:22):
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for your support and your listenership. Now let's unlock the vault. Hello, Hello,
hello listeners, and welcome back to another episode of the
Cult Vault podcast. I'm your host, Casey, and today I'm

(01:44):
joined by another author, an activist. I'm really excited to
welcome to the show, Lloyd Evans.

Speaker 2 (01:49):
Hi, Lloyd, Hello, Casey, Thank you so much for having me.

Speaker 1 (01:53):
Thank you for coming. It's funny to talk to somebody
in the same time zone as me. Usually I'm like,
you know, what time, how is it where you are?
I'm confused, hang on, the clocks are about to change.
It's ten thirty on the dark perfect.

Speaker 2 (02:07):
Well, it is slightly different because I'm in Europe, so I'm.

Speaker 1 (02:10):
One hour ahead.

Speaker 2 (02:12):
Head of you. But that's compared to like transatlantic conversations.
We are pretty much the same time zoned. Come on,
let's not goibble. We are over six pints.

Speaker 1 (02:23):
Yeah, I've got a friend in Norway, so sometimes she's
an hour ahead, sometimes she's two hours ahead. I think
for a little short window. Yeah, but then I spoke
to a lady in India the other day and she
was ten and a half hours ahead.

Speaker 2 (02:38):
I think, what of you ays need to understand with
the work that you do, is that figuring out time
zones is one of the most stressful things when it
comes to arranging these conversations.

Speaker 1 (02:48):
So you've summarized it perfectly, Loye. You couldn't have said
it any better myself. So would you like to start
by introducing yourself to the listeners.

Speaker 2 (02:57):
My name's Lloyd Evans. I'm a former Jehovah's Witness, writer, activist,
filmmaker YouTube. I spent twenty three years from baptism to
getting out as a believing Jehovah's Witness. It was moving
to Croatia where I am now, which ultimately kind of

(03:19):
got me out of it because of the language barrier.
I was going to meetings and not able to understand
what I was being told, and for the first time
it was like the indoctrination got broken. And so before
I know it, I'm blogging on Jehovah's Witnesses. I'm doing
extensive research into their history. I'm amassing a collection of

(03:40):
their older literature and writings. I'm making YouTube videos, I'm
writing books on Amazon, and I'm even appearing on TV
in America to talk about the group. I was also
involved as a core participant in the Independent Inquiry into

(04:01):
Child Sexual Abuse in England and Wales due to my
specific knowledge of Jehovah's Witnesses in that area and the
way they cover up child abuse. So yes, I've been
quite busy over the last thirteen and a half years
of ex Jehovah's witness activism.

Speaker 1 (04:18):
Yeah, a little bit of everything. You know. I think
you said in your bio you're like a filmmaker, activist, author.
You know, you have your YouTube channel and you have
the is it the JW survey website as well it's.

Speaker 2 (04:33):
Now JW Watch, Yes, jwwatch dot org.

Speaker 1 (04:36):
Well that's smart. Ever I like that and just explain
for the listeners what the website is all about.

Speaker 2 (04:44):
So the website first started out as jw Survey because
I really wanted to provide some kind of it felt
like Jehovah's Witnesses were being overlooked in terms of their
actual opinions. And ironically, even witnesses who because like a
two tier Christianity and Jehovah's Witnesses were a very small

(05:04):
percentage believe they're going to rule as kings and priests
in heaven. But no surprises, it's actually only a handful
of men who actually get to say in what God
wants them to do, and that's the governing body. So
I thought it would be really interesting to provide a
survey where these these overlooked anointed Jehovah's witnesses could actually

(05:26):
tell us what they thought, and ordinary Jehovah's witnesses and
those who's experienced with the group had only been fleeting.
So I started doing this annual survey, and you know,
it was interesting to do for a while, but I
think I kind of reached the limit with how much
I could do with that, and it just became about, well,
let's keep an eye on what's happening with Jehovah's Witnesses

(05:48):
and let's write about what's going on with the various
lawsuits against them and that sort of thing. So that
became jw Watch, and really I have the website, but
really now it's more a case of keeping on top
of it with videos because I think in the twenty
first century people's people consume information more visually I've noticed

(06:09):
nowadays than looking at blog articles, so I tend to
focus on if there's a development, I try to cover
it as succinctly as possible on my YouTube channel under
the banner of jaw Watch.

Speaker 1 (06:21):
Well, it's really impressive website. It's like an archive of
all types of different things, from you know, legal proceedings
to news coming out of different countries. There's different things
categorized here around like the LGBT community, things here about shinning,
and so there's hundreds of articles, all very neatly categorized

(06:43):
on this website. So you've got the video element of it,
which is probably easier for people to consume for entertainment
or education purposes, but formal education you can still go
to this website and you can have all of these
different articles to reference in sight in academic papers as well,
so you've really got all the areas covered like, it's

(07:06):
very impressive, Thank you so much.

Speaker 2 (07:08):
Well, as you know, this sort of work kind of
can be quite draining. I mean, you know, there's a
lot of levity or I like to introduce levity when
it comes to covering cults, because there are so many crazy,
bizarre things to talk about that just lend themselves so
well to comedy. But there's also kind of a dark
and sinister side. And the more you wade into this stuff,

(07:31):
particularly when it comes to you know, children being abused
and that kind of thing, it can eat away at you.
And I'm sure you've experienced this, you know, covering different
cults already, where just by the end of maybe a
conversation with someone like me or at the end of
researching some particular aspect of what it calls is doing,
you feel kind of almost dead inside. How far eaching

(07:55):
an impactful and pervasive cult ideology can be and the
harm it can do people's lives. So it definitely takes
a toll, I think, on our mental health the work
that we do, but there's also a great deal of
satisfaction to be derived from the messages that I receive
and I'm sure you receive where people have really been
able to start thinking for themselves due to consuming this content.

Speaker 1 (08:19):
Yeah. Absolutely, I think you're spot on again there, Lloyd.
It's very sometimes I have to kind of discern whether
it's burnout that I'm feeling, because in creative processes, we
are always going to experience like you know, like the
you can kind of feel it pushing, pushing in a
little bit. But then sometimes it's trying to work out
whether it's burnout or whether it's like, oh, okay, I'm

(08:41):
feeling really down. I need to take a break. And
sometimes you know, it can mean two or three months
of not really doing too much of this stuff burnout
wise or vicarious trauma wise. So you are right. But
on the flip side of that, it is very motivational
to receive messages of people saying this has really helped me,

(09:01):
This has validated the experiences that I had. I had
no idea anybody else felt or experienced these things. And
what I really really love is when somebody messages we
said I almost signed up and I almost sent them money,
but then I found this video and I didn't. You know,
I'm like, yes, don't, let's stop giving them the money.

Speaker 2 (09:21):
Absolutely, I get similar it. Messages like that sometimes from
someone who says, you know, I was studying with Jehovah's
Witnesses and I saw your video pop ups. I just
thought i'd have a look to see what's going on,
and now I've canceled my study. So that sort of
message is really nice. Yeah.

Speaker 1 (09:37):
With your work though, because it's all centered around this organization,
I imagine there's a rabbit hole you can fall down where
you're like, oh, he's talked about this, and he mentioned this,
and he's done another video on that, so I'll go
and watch that. It's almost like, you know, you can
become deeply educated just in the Jehovah's Witnesses by following
your work. So as somebody who's almost like a theologian

(09:59):
specific to Jehovah's Witnesses, I can ask you some questions
on things that I haven't covered for a while around
the kind of emergence of Jehovah's Witnesses, the history of
the Jehovah's Witnesses, the changes that we've seen in modern times,
and then where you fall into that personally in that

(10:22):
timeline of the JW history.

Speaker 2 (10:24):
Absolutely, I'll do my best to sum up one hundred
and forty years as sactosil really good. Yeah, yeah, well, look,
it's all began with a man called Charles tas Russell
who founded a magazine. He started publishing a magazine called
Zion's Watchtower in July of eighteen seventy nine. He was

(10:49):
quite an eccentric character. He was an entrepreneur. His father
was wealthy, and I think he inherited his father's wealth,
and so he was basically businessman. But he was also
quite charismatic and fascinated by the Bible and particularly End
Times chronology, and he was very good at taking different

(11:12):
ideas that were floating around at the time and just
kind of stitching them together into his own kind of
take of what Christianity ought to be. So he kind
of summarized these beliefs in The Watchtower, and he started
publishing a series, which to begin with was called Millennial Dawn,
but they ditched that title because it sounded like it

(11:33):
was some kind of novel and called its Studies in
the Scriptures. Actually, it turns out his wife, who was
actually better educated than he was. Turns out his wife
likely wrote many much of the first few volumes of
Studies in the scriptures, and he just took the credit.
Make of that what you will. But he had all
sorts of strange ideas about the inner passageways of the

(11:57):
pyramid of Geezer, the length of them corresponding with time
spans in Bible prophecy. He also had some frankly racist
ideas that he said, the skin of the Theopian will
turn white in God's kingdom. So and he believed that
Armageddon would come by nineteen fourteen at the latest, which

(12:20):
is something that current Jehovah's witnesses don't know that. They
just assumed that he They don't know that he made
such a specific prediction about armageddon to the point where
I actually I have to show them in the book itself.
So needless to say, Armageddon didn't come nineteen fourteen. And
really his group called the Bible Students, I mean, they're
still around today, but there's only maybe one hundred or

(12:40):
two hundred of them left. They weren't like a huge,
huge following. You wouldn't have known at that time what
they were going to become. But what happened was Charles
d As Russell died actually Halloween October thirty first, nineteen sixteen
on a train, and there was something of a coup,

(13:01):
a leadership coup in the wake of his death, whereby
his lawyer Joseph Rutherford managed to assume control of the
presidency started to basically introduce his own character. Think of
Charles Tayze Russell as like the l Ron Hubbard and
Joseph Rutherford as like the David Mskovich. Joseph Utherford was

(13:23):
an altogether different kind of personality, quite an unpleasant chap
For example, in the build up to World War Two,
he wrote a letter to the German regime, the Nazi regime,
essentially explaining to them that they had all sorts of
things in common with the German regime, including a dislike

(13:46):
of Jewish people, so therefore the German regime shouldn't be
making things difficult for them, closing down their printing presses
and that sort of thing. So this was a sort
of character that Joseph Rutherford was. He was also an
awfulist and a drunkard, an alcoholic, and he he obviously

(14:09):
noticed that the nineteen fourteen prediction of Charles tays Russell
had failed, so he came up with his own prediction
of nineteen twenty five. He believed that by nineteen twenty five,
God's kingdom would already be established on the earth, and
so called ancient worthies, in other words, characters from the
Bible would magically appear in I'm not making any of

(14:33):
this up. They would magically appear in San Diego, which
happened to be where he was living at the time,
and they would all kind of gravitate towards this mansion
that he'd persuaded someone to build for him. And he
actually deeded the mansion, which was called Beth Surrem still
there today. He deeded it to David Solomon Moses. He

(14:53):
put all of their names in the deed because he
was so convinced that they would appear out of nowhere
and start to form this government that would rule over
the earth. And needless to say, that didn't happen. Nineteen
twenty five came and went. But what Rutherford did was
something very interesting. They had this teaching that everybody who

(15:14):
followed the Bible students as they were called initially, would
go to heaven. So they would all form part of
the one hundred and forty four thousand elect that I
mentioned in Revelation. But they obviously had a logistical issue,
which is that if you put a number on it's
of one hundred and forty four thousand, it means that

(15:34):
you're limited in how big your movement can grow. You've
put a cap on yourselves. And Rutherford very ingeniously came
up with this idea that actually there would be two
versions of well. First of all, he rebranded it Jehovah's Witnesses,
and he also around the same time came up with
this idea that the one hundred and forty four thousand

(15:56):
would be ruling in heaven, and they've been pretty much
which chosen already. What they needed to do was find
the millions of people who would be living on earth
underneath the rulership of the one hundred and forty four thousand,
and so that became the focus. So Jehovah's Witnesses basically
started under Joseph Rutherford, to the point where Bible students

(16:19):
get very offended if you call Charles Stays as All
the founder of Jehovah's Witnesses. But even when Rutherford died
in nineteen forty one, I think it was nineteen forty one,
nineteen forty two, it was still quite a small movement.
It was really Nathan nor his successor who really grew

(16:40):
the movement into kind of the household brand that we
know today, because he put a lot of emphasis on
missionary work, on flying out to different countries and making
sure that there was kind of a codified way of preaching,
and he put a lot of a lot of emphasis
on training people to do preaching and get people signed up.

(17:01):
And I'm breezing through it as quickly as i can.
So we fast forward to nineteen seventy five, which incidentally
is a year that the Jehovah's witnesses also prophesied would
be armageddon, or they alluded very heavily to the year
nineteen seventy five as a potential date for armageddon from

(17:21):
being super correct, but it also happened to be in
nineteen seventy five that there was another leadership coup, and
this phrase that had been in circulation for a few
decades of governing body. To begin with, the governing body
had been the president and his board of directors. But
after a few years, this board of directors started to think, well,

(17:43):
if we're a governing body, why aren't we governing? Why
does everything have to go through the president, and by
nineteen seventy five there was this coup whereby the office
of president essanctually became redundant and the governing body took over.
And so you have nowadays, due to that is a
worldwide religion that's actually headed up by rather than one

(18:06):
single individual, as is the case under scientology in certain
other groups, it's headed up by I think eleven currently
governing body members, overwhelmingly white and overwhelmingly aged men. There's
only one black kind of token member on the body,
and they are the channel that God is apparently using

(18:29):
to communicate his will to mankind. So that's I guess
one hundred and forty years of Jehovah's witness history in
a nutshell.

Speaker 1 (19:01):
What was fascinating. I really enjoyed that, Thank you, Lloyd.
I am very impressed as well at how you're able
to talk about certain parts of the JW history without
sounding like, well, I don't know if everyone knows this
phrase outside of like Europe and the UK, but like

(19:21):
taking the.

Speaker 2 (19:22):
Piss right, yeah, yeah, you.

Speaker 1 (19:24):
Know, because there's a number of false prophecies, there's a
number of people saying, you know, actually there should be
more of us in charge. You know nothing about actually
I'm hearing divine I'm hearing divine messages, so I should
be part of the decision making body. Nothing like that.
It's just actually like, why aren't there more people? So
I think it's really interesting to me how much work

(19:48):
you might have had to do to make yourself be
able to talk that way because I can't.

Speaker 2 (19:53):
Do it well. And in all honesty, I think it's
I'm glad that you've noticed that, and I'm glad that
you've said that because it's something that I've I worked
on very very hard over my thirteen and a half
years of doing this, is to just get my tone right,
because I just remember what it was like when I
was first kind of waking up to my indoctrination. And

(20:15):
for me, if there was anything that was overly sneering
or overly mean, or like a derisory mocking tone in
whoever it was that I was listening to or reading,
I would immediately shut down. You know, what I wanted
to see in whoever's content I was consuming was I
wanted to see some sincerity, and I wanted to see

(20:38):
as much objectivity as possible. And I remember when I
was first waking up, I actually went on a website
still there, JW fax Doc. I'm good friends with the owner,
Paul Grundy, And I remember, like when I first went
on that website, feeling just this immense fear of oh no,
like a fireballs on its way towards me right now,

(21:00):
like I am toast because I'm looking up apostate information.
And before I even started going through the pages, I
was and made the bee line for like the about
us section or where Paul had summarized who he was
and why he was doing what he was doing, And
there was a picture of him with his son, and
all I could think about was just what does he

(21:22):
look like? Who is he? And I saw him with
his son, and I just thought, he looks like a
normal guy. You know, I think it's all very superficial,
but I just needed that reassurance that he was someone
that I felt I could relate to. And then in
one of his articles I was reading, he said something
towards the end, something along the lines of, of course,

(21:43):
it could be that you, despite knowing all of this,
you still feel as though Jehovah's witnesses are the one
true religion. And if that's the case, then that's totally fine.
That's your decision. And I thought, great, that's that's what
I need to hear. I don't need someone telling me
that I'm an idiot being in this religion. I just
need someone who's going to give me the facts and

(22:04):
let me reach my own conclusions. And I wish I
could say that every ex Jehovah's Witness activist or ex
COLLT activist gets that tone right, you know, because it's
so tempting to go for the outrage and the kind
of the sneering, kind of condescending voice. But I actively

(22:29):
fight against it whenever I'm making my content because I
know what a huge turn off it is to people
who are taking those first steps.

Speaker 1 (22:38):
You've definitely got it down so well. Just the way
you talk as well, it's like I imagine you released your
books in audio form as well.

Speaker 2 (22:48):
One of them, the well, the eight hundred page one
is a bit problematic to make an audio book for,
but I have a shorter book called How to Escape
from Jehovah's Witnesses and that's available on the audible. Thank
you for the opportunity to plug.

Speaker 1 (23:04):
I mean, that's what are the reasons we're here today.

Speaker 2 (23:06):
Yeah, exactly.

Speaker 1 (23:07):
Yeah, So I don't know, maybe you know more about
the statistical side of current affairs with Jehovah's Witnesses in
terms of the reality of numbers and what the JW
organization claim about their numbers, how many JW's there are worldwide,

(23:30):
and how many are recruited members. From my understanding, it's
more generational, yeah, than you know, people being proselytized too
on the street or witnessed two on the street or
at their homes and then coming into the fold, so
to speak.

Speaker 2 (23:50):
Yeah, it's very, very hard to convince a grown adult
with fully formed critical thinking skills to buy into, you know,
the Jehovah's witness ideology. The best way to do it
is to get them when they're young. Is to get
them when they're a child. That's how I got involved, because,

(24:12):
of course, you know, when your parents tell you something,
why would they be lying to you. You know, they're
telling you to not put your hand in the fire,
to not run into the road. You know they've got
your back in all these other areas. Why would they
be lying to you when they say that all of
your school friends are going to diet and impending arm again,
and that must be true as well. You know, just go,
you just go right along with it, and Jehovah's Witnesses

(24:35):
have actually got it down to a fine art when
it comes to child indoctrination. They have on their website
an entire Pixar style cartoon series Become Jehovah's Friend, where
each episode features two children, Caleb and Sophia. Although the
Becomes Jehovah's Friend universe is slowly expanding to encompass other characters,

(24:57):
but I think it was the second episode Less than
number two has Caleb throwing his toy wizard into a
bin by the end of the episode because he's been
convinced that this toy plastic toy wizard, whose name is Sparlock,
I'll never forget the name, Jehovah hates him. Jehovah hates magic,
and magic is a trick Wizards and the occult, and

(25:19):
magic is a trick by Satan, and so when Caleb's
friend gave him this toy, it was actually part of
a sinister plot to get him to make Jehovah sad.
So his mother sits him down at the table and
explains all this, and obviously Caleb looks very crestfallen to
begin with, and then by the end of the video

(25:40):
he's putting his Sparlock toy in the dumpster, and that
tells you everything you need to know about how messed
up the approaches towards raising children as Jehovah's witnesses and
indoctrinating them. You're not even allowed to have certain types
of toys in case they're magic. I can remember somehow
my parents let me watch Star Wars when I was

(26:01):
growing up, but I actually remember having to cut off
the guns from my Millennium Falcon and from my LUKESX
wing because it wasn't allowed to have anything that could
kill people on it, you know. So they do take
child indoctrination extremely seriously, and when it comes to actually

(26:22):
preaching the preaching work itself. I was a pioneer for
nearly ten years. A pioneer is someone who dedicates and
it used to be seventy hours per month, it's now
fifty hours per month voluntarily without pay, to preaching. And
I spent ten years of doing that, and I never

(26:42):
brought a single person into the organization from knocking on
their door. I did manage to get one person baptized,
but it was someone whose family were already Jehovah's witnesses.
It's very and I wasn't. It's not like I was
completely inepse when it came to conveying information. Hopefully I'm
coming across as someone who's relatively competent as a communicator.

(27:05):
But it just turns out that and you don't realize
this at the time. You just think, why can't people
see it's just all so obvious. We're living in the
last days and here we are with this wonderful solution.
You don't understand why so many people are closing their
doors on you. And also when you go back, when
you do get interest, all of a sudden, that interest

(27:27):
just evaporates. And it's only when you get out that
you realize, Oh, of course they're googling it, you know,
and why wouldn't you. You know, if someone comes at
your comes to your door with an offer that seems
too good to be true, you're going to be maybe
excited about it to begin with. You're maybe going to
take their literature, but then as soon as the door's close,

(27:50):
you're going to say, okay, so what's the other side.
What's going to come up if I google this, and
if you google Jehovah's Witnesses, the whole thing implodes, Which
is why the organization really tries to steer people away
from objective information and just channels them purely towards their

(28:10):
website JW dot org, which is obviously brimming with their propaganda.
It's a very very difficult message to get people to
accept because what it amounts to is who you are
as a person is inadequate. If you are not one
of Jehovah's witnesses, you will be destroyed at Armageddon unless

(28:32):
you put on the new personality. Unless you completely change
who you are as a person and start to be
obedient to all of the things that Jehovah wants you
to do, then you're in with a chance of surviving
and impending armageddon that's been coming for the last one
hundred and forty years. But now we really are in
the last days, unlike when we first started.

Speaker 1 (28:53):
Yeah, reminds me of a joke that for with JW
told me a few years ago. It was like, did
you not know that we're in the end times? At
the end Times? And I was like, that's good.

Speaker 2 (29:03):
They literally call it. I mean, I joke about it
on one of my most recent videos. In the introduction,
there's this famous quote from when they had COVID. That's it.
So when COVID was first breaking, the governing body very
excitedly started doing these updates to let witnesses know how
they should deal with the pandemic. Apparently, there's no way

(29:24):
that you can know how to navigate your way through
a pandemic unless you're in a cult like Jehovah's Witnesses.
That's when that's how you do it. So they kind
of rather condescendingly started putting out all of this information
about what Jehovah's Witnesses should be doing and how they
should be dealing with it. And one of the first
things they said was, we are now in the last
of the Last days. So and that was back in

(29:47):
twenty twenties. Now we're in twenty twenty five, so I
assume we're in the last of the last of the
last of the last days. So. But it's just incredible,
how you know a doomsday group is always going to
leap on the slightest catastrophe as evidence that you know,
these really are the last days? Even though you know,
if you just kind of stand back and look at

(30:08):
things objectively, for as long as there have been humans,
there have been pathogens, and there have been epidemics and
even pandemics, many pandemics. In fact, most of pandemics have
been way more deadly than COVID turned out to be.
But you don't think about this objectively at the time.
You just think, oh, yes, of course this was prophesied
that there would be would be illness, and there would

(30:30):
be plagues and there would be all of these things,
so you just kind of go along with it.

Speaker 1 (30:56):
Yeah. Yeah, Even just thinking about the dates that you
were sharing about Charles Tay's Russell's time and Joseph brother
Third's time around the First and Second World War. So
there's lots of opportunity there for people that have certain
rhetoric to influence people that are feeling perhaps like existential

(31:16):
dread about like the end of the world and where
do we go next? And you know, everybody's fighting at war.
I don't know if my husband's going to come home.
I don't know if my children have a dad anym
or any of this stuff. But the interesting thing that
you mentioned there about the you know, certain toys, certain
children's TV shows, a lot of information control that I

(31:38):
think we're quite familiar with at this point. About the
Jehovah's Witnesses on this show, for anybody that's a regular listener,
it's like telling children that they are well and adults,
I suppose, not allowed to enjoy fantasies and fairy tales
and other realities like you would find in the fantastical

(31:59):
and fittional work of like JK. Rowling's Harry Potter, for example,
but also a lot of the stuff that is shared
in the Jehovah's Witnesses publications themselves are almost aligned with
fantastical and fairy tale and other reality. I don't know
what you think about.

Speaker 2 (32:18):
That, Oh, definitely, it's only I mean Jehovah's witness publications,
if you think about it, a far more problematic from
the point of view of what's age appropriate for children
than many of the kind of literature that you've alluded to,
like Harry Potter and that kind of thing. I mean,
I have on my shelf I'm looking in it now,
a yellow book called My Book of Bible Stories that

(32:41):
I was raised with. You can imagine some of the
Bible accounts that are rendered in there, and the blood
and the gore that's depicted. I mean, even the picture
of Jesus has like blood streaking down his arms, you know. Oh,
and there's a fairly there are fairly graphic portrayals. There's
one very striking image of what was her name, Jezebel,

(33:01):
who was thrown from her window. So you have a
woman literally being thrown from the window. And the story
says that after she'd been thrown from the window that
she was eaten by dogs. So you have in the
background these dogs ready to come and eat her. So
that's somehow acceptable for children to be raised with. But
when it comes to a story about a guy, a

(33:23):
boy who goes to learn how to be a wizard
and flies around on her broomstick playing you know, wizarding sports,
that's somehow inappropriate. So it's very I mean, I will
say this in the interests of objectivity. The current version
of the book that I'm alluding to is way more
tone down. It's like they got the message from this

(33:45):
kind of traumatized generation. You know that I include myself
in that. Maybe they went too far with some of
the artwork. So in the more recent version, the artwork
is far more palatable. Of course, I're only doing that
by actually skipping out certain stories or not portraying certain
stories as they're told in the Bible. And even if

(34:09):
you put all that to one side, with the book
and everything, what they do make Jehovah's Witness children do
at their annual conventions is watch Bible dramas that include
some quite distressing scenes, including violence. As there was one
Bible drama discussing the attempted invasion of Judah by the

(34:30):
Assyrians and how an angel descended and killed it was
it one hundred and eighty thousand Assyrian troops and then
so then and then you see all of the bodies afterwards.
This is something that's required viewing for everybody, no matter
what age. They don't put an age number on it.

(34:52):
And they actually, and this was unprecedented, They actually on
their JW broadcasting monthly show, they started to mention that
they'd been getting complaints through from parents who were saying,
do you not think he perhaps ought to tone down
some of the violence in particularly the convention material that

(35:13):
we're being required to show our children. And their answer
to the parents was more or less we actually know
better than you do, and if it's in the Bible,
we should be showing it, and we should should be
showing it unvarnished.

Speaker 1 (35:26):
Super helpful thought, terminating cliches, you know, sprinkled in with
a little bit of lift. Its kind of sacred science.
We are the only ones that know all of this information.
So be a Jehovah's witness and give your life to
the organization, and then you'll be offered a glimpse into
this sacred science and what we will tell you inside

(35:48):
that sacred science is all about the dispensing of existence
and how all of your school friends are going to
die and you'll get to live. And that's so traumatic,
and that's so horrible. And that leads me right into
my next question on rapture anxiety, and how you've already
mentioned that your journey out of the organization and kind

(36:10):
of trying to unpack everything included some rapture anxiety in
you know, visiting your friend's website and then being worried
about the consequences of that. So if I my son
or daughter there're three and five, if one of them
came home and explained to me that they had a

(36:30):
friend in school, who was a Jehovah's Witness who couldn't
participate in like Christmas card making, Christmas decoration making, Halloween parties,
all of the different things that other JW survivors have
explained experiencing on the podcast before. What would be some
good advice I could give to my children on supporting

(36:54):
that that friend who seems maybe a little bit different,
who may appear to be a little bit odd just
because they have a different upbringing, you know, a different
belief system. What are some of the things I could
teach my children on helping that child to feel accepted
and feel and not feel like an outcast. Because this

(37:16):
is probably not just applicable to potential Jehovah's witnesses that
my children come across, but other children in other belief systems,
with other you know, different life part and parenting and
all different types of differences.

Speaker 2 (37:31):
Yeah. No, it's a good question, honestly, and I'm saying
this as a dad. My children are growing up in
a Catholic country. And though I certainly don't think that
you know, you can really compare Catholicism with Johoah's witnesses,
I do think that there are certain problematic elements of Catholicism,

(37:52):
and it can be quite challenging for my children who
I'm raising to kind of think critically. Are particularly my
oldest to kind of feel like she's the only one
who's not going to church all the time and not
having these very specific ideas. And my message to her
is always just be understanding, you know, don't don't come

(38:15):
across as I know it all. Nobody likes to know
it all. And I think it would be the same
thing in the situation you've described. What children of Jehovah's
Witness parents are expecting from their classmates is derision, is bullying,
is to be singled out and persecuted, And what they

(38:36):
need is the exact opposite. They need compassion and understanding
and acceptance and tolerance. Now, when I say tolerance, that
doesn't mean that that anyone's anyone should feel like they
should be accepting literature from them. I do. Actually, I
would draw the line personally with my children accepting any

(38:57):
kind of religious literature, whether it's Jehovah's Witness or or otherwise,
because when children go to school, they should go to
school to learn, not to be indoctrinated and Interestingly, Jehovah's witnesses,
they have this mantra whereby when they send their children
to school, they tell them, this is your territory. So
when grown ups go into go door knocking, they're doing

(39:20):
their territory in the local community. But they can't get
into the schools. They can't get into the classrooms, but
you can. So this means this is your territory, and
you should preach to your teacher, all of your classmates,
et cetera, et cetera. So be tolerant, you know, to
the point where you're not kind of indulging them in

(39:40):
their efforts to indoctrinate you, but just be understanding and accepting.
It may come to a point at some point where
they just need to very frankly say, you know, listen
to your Miima. It's really cool that you have your convictions.
I have different convictions, and I hope you can respect
that I care about you for who you are, whether

(40:01):
you believe or whether you don't believe, whether you believe
now and end up not believing later, you will always
be important to me and I'll always care about you.
That would be the kind of tone I would encourage
my children.

Speaker 1 (40:11):
Yeah, let's go play football. Let's play footy exactly.

Speaker 2 (40:15):
There's always going to be common ground somewhere.

Speaker 1 (40:17):
Yeah, I think what you mentioned there about not adding
to any persecution is really important for all groups that
will be validated by external persecution. They'll say, you know,
in the outside world, this is how people treat each other.
This is how you'll be treated because you won't be
understood for you know, the true path that you're on,

(40:41):
or however people decide to word it. So if people
do experience persecution, it almost validates the warnings that the
group is giving to its members. So if we can
avoid doing that, I think that that's you know, strength
as well. And it's just really heartbreaking the stories you
hear from from people that felt a add in school
and felt like outcasts, and you know, I always say

(41:05):
that some of the most wholesome things you can find
on Reddit is in the XJW subreddit, where people are
having their first tattoos or they're just having like, you know,
trusts with strangers and trysts with strangers, and I just think,
you know, celebrating their first Christmases and Halloween's. It's just
some of the most adorable content you can find and
it's absolutely wholesome to the core, but it comes on

(41:28):
the back of, you know, experiencing significant trauma, so it's
always kind of like tinged with that sadness.

Speaker 2 (41:35):
I think indeed, so sorry. I was just going to say,
there's a flip side, though, which is that you know,
there's so much repression, sexual repression and particular and there
are so many rules that Jehovah's witnesses spend their entire
lives having to adhere to. I think what can sometimes
happen on the other side once they get out is

(41:57):
that they can go to excess in feeling like everything
that they weren't allowed to do is like a box
that must now be ticked, to the point where it
becomes almost like a self fulfilling prophecy, because they've learned
all their lives that if you are a non Jehovah's witness,
then you are You're going to be a terrible person.

(42:21):
You're going to be thinking only about yourself, You're going
to be consumed by drugs and alcohol, You're going to
be on the streets, you're going to be destitute. All
of these terrible things are going to happen. And sometimes
because people overindulge in some of the things that they
were told not to do, including things that you know

(42:43):
there is reason to be wearying, like with drug use,
for example, Because people kind of over indulge, they end
up becoming the person that the organization predicted that they
would become. So it's a little bit this is one
of the kind of mine fields that you need to
navigate when you do breakout of a cult. Is Okay,
I was told I can't I couldn't do this is

(43:04):
actually a reason why I can do it? And to
what extent can I do it? Or should I do it?
Or is this actually not something that's for me anyway? So, yeah,
that can be a challenge when you get out.

Speaker 1 (43:14):
Yeah, and just to circle back to the idea of
rapture anxiety, I just wonder what your thoughts are on
that particular subject as somebody that grew up in this organization,
in this cult, being subjected to certain imagery, certain stories,

(43:38):
warnings basically on what could happen to you that your friends,
your loved ones, if you don't addhere to the teachings,
or if you don't try and bring others in to
save them. You know, there's a lot of stuff here
that's put on to children. So it's no wonder it
takes a lifetime to really move away from that fear

(44:01):
of you know, the end times, the apocalypse, doomsday, all
of the different ways that you can word it, you know,
right through to adulthood, even if you've been out for decades.
You know, people talk about still being scheduled in thunderstorms
because you know, they've been out for twenty thirty years,
because they're like, I've done something today and now it's happening.
It's here.

Speaker 2 (44:21):
Sure. I mean, I'm going to be completely honest. This
is literally the first time I've heard of the phrase
rapture anxiety, and for me, rapture means something very specific,
which is, you are literally elevated to heaven to assume
your heavenly life. That's what the rapture is. And in
Jehovah's witness context, they kind of don't they do and
they don't believe in the rapture, so that they don't

(44:43):
discuss the under the word rapture, but they do believe
that just before armageddon comes, the governing body in particular
and anyone else who is anointed will kind of be
moved into heaven be to assume their a role as angels,
and they will be involved in the bloodshed that armageddon actively. So,
in other words, the governing body, their message is not

(45:06):
just becoming Jehovah's witness or die, it's become a Jehovah's
witness or we're going to kill you ourselves, because they're
going to be one of the among those riding around.
So I guess rapture just means something slightly different to me.
But I think more broadly what you're describing is kind
of existential dread at the thought of being destroyed or

(45:28):
going to Hell, which Jovah's witnesses don't believe in hell,
but undergoing some kind of traumatic, unthinkable punishment due to
rejecting the group that you've been brought up in. Would
that be kind of what you're describing more specifically, Yeah,
I just.

Speaker 1 (45:44):
Kind of like a brief Like a brief description on
Google says that rapture anxiety refers to the psychological phenomenon
of an overwhelming fear or anxiety concerning the rapture, a
concept in dispensational and pre millennial Christian esquodologies. So that
makes sense there. You know, it kind of makes sense
more in that because.

Speaker 2 (46:04):
There are lots of groups that believe in the rapture,
and they literally believe that, Like they could be driving
along and the rapture is going to come and all
of a sudden, they're not going to be driving the car,
and their loved ones could be in the car, and
suddenly the car is going to be driverless, not because
they've been killed, but because they've been transferred up to Heaven,
which isn't quite how Jehovah's witnesses believe, or maybe they do,

(46:27):
but they just don't discuss it that much. But there's
definitely a lot of existential dread that comes with not
just leaving Jehovah's Witnesses, but even just being Jehovah's witness,
because you're constantly second guessing yourself. Nothing is ever quite
good enough no matter what you are doing as a
Jehovah's witness. You could be pioneering. You could be let's

(46:51):
say you're an elder, could you could be a missionary,
or you could be involved in some kind of building
project to assist the organization. You could be working one
of the Bethel Law Branch facilities. You know, no matter
what you're doing, there's always a few extra runs of
the ladder that you probably should be climbing up. There's

(47:11):
no way of kind of reaching a point where it's like,
what I'm doing is now enough, right, But what I'm
doing is now now makes it a certain bet that
I'm going to make it through armageddon. So you have
this this kind of existential dread as of Jehovah's witness,
and you also have it when you leave. Even for
someone like me who stopped believing in the theology many

(47:35):
years ago. I can remember, around the time of COVID
here in Croatia, we had a series of earthquakes, and
when the first one hit, it was like early in
the morning, and I hadn't quite kind of come around yet,
so I was still kind of booting up, kind of consciously,
and all of a sudden, my entire house is shaking,
and I'm already kind of aware that there's a pandemic,

(47:58):
and just for a few split seconds, it was only
split seconds, but it was enough for me to register it.
My mind was going Armageddon, bingo, okay, earthquakes, check, pestilences check,
you know, and then obviously my conscious brain booted up
fully and I was able to say, don't be silly, Lloyd,
it's just a coincidence. But that is I think what

(48:20):
you're describing, where you just think, finally, finally, Armageddon's caught
up with me. I've been so stupid to write this
all off as being a cult, but actually it turned
out to be right all along. And I think it's
human nature for us to continually second guess ourselves, and
it's actually quite a healthy thing for us to second
guess ourselves. But it's a little bit more sinister with

(48:43):
cults because they program you over many, many years or decades,
so that even after you've left this thinking, not just
the existential dread, but other types of behaviors, they stay
kind of ingrained as part of your personality, and it
can be impossible in some cases to shake all of
these residual effects.

Speaker 1 (49:24):
It sounds absolutely debilitating and exhausting to live your life
inside the organization, always striving to be better but never
quite enough by design, I imagine, very cleverly by design,
but also to then leave the group and feel all
those same things as well as shame, guilt, you know,

(49:45):
all of these things that are instilled from a young age.
After you leave, maybe you know grief because you've been
shunned and you can't speak to your family or friends anymore.
Everybody that you've ever known. Just sounds absolutely like you're
never going to feel well rested for Adn't it does
that like sense to you?

Speaker 2 (50:02):
It does, and you know what, it makes people very angry.
And I think that the anger is justifiable. I think
that we need to have to be able to have
these feelings and recognize that what was done to us
when we were in a cult was profoundly unfair and
it has changed who we are. And this group of

(50:22):
people is, this group of leaders, has meddled in our
lives in the most intimate areas, in some cases, stopping
us from pursuing college or university education, or limiting us
in terms of our sexuality, telling us that we can't
pursue if we're gay, we can't pursue, that we can't

(50:42):
pursue our queerness or whatever, and all of these things,
all of these little time they might seem like imperceptible
little tweaks at the time, but further down the road,
when you're not allowed to explore these very very innocent,
straightforward things about yourself. It all adds, and I think

(51:04):
that anger is a very very justifiable response that people
have when they get out and they realize the extent
to which they were lied to, and also the hypocrisy
of it all, the fact that this group of kind
of parading around as though they are clean and they
are pure and everything that they do is perfect, when

(51:25):
in actual fact you find out that they are covering
up child abuse on an industrial scale. So there's the
hypocrisy element of it as well. But that kind of
brings me back to what we were saying at the beginning,
which is that you kind of need to learn to
control the anger in a way where you're not isolating
the people that you're trying to reach. It's very very

(51:46):
easy to let that anger spill over so that you
end up being confrontational and de risory and mocking and belittling.
But you need to kind of exercise a bit of
restraint and rain yourself in a little bit and you
that anger and that energy as positively and constructively as
you possibly can. That's a real challenge.

Speaker 1 (52:09):
Do you think that this is like gonna be really
interested to ask and find out your answer? But over
the kind of ten years that you were pioneering and
the thirteen and a half years you've been doing this
this work for do you think that you've actually, like,
do you witnessed more people than you were able to

(52:30):
witness if that makes sense?

Speaker 2 (52:32):
Yeah, but by orders of magnitude. Yeah, Well I literally
didn't bring anyone in, you know. But like I said,
I had a Bible study with one lad whose family
were already Jehovah's witnesses, and so he was kind of
a lost cause anyway, you could say. So I don't
lose any sleep over him. But in ten years of
knocking on people's doors, I didn't persuade a single person

(52:54):
to become a Jehovah's witness, Whereas in the thirteen and
a half years I've been doing this, I think I
can comfortably say thousands. I don't think that's an exaggeration.
I'd love to know what the exact figure is, obviously,
but I'm never going to know that. But I think
for me, the satisfaction is not just the thought of
people kind of reading my book or coming on my

(53:15):
channel and waking up. What gives me the most satisfaction
is the thought that someone's life will be better because
of something that I've written or something I've said in
a video, and they'll never know that it was me,
and I'll never know about them. So maybe their mum
or their dad gets out of the group, or that

(53:36):
their grandma or their granddad gets out of the group
because of something I've done. Maybe like thirty forty years
from now, someone's going to be born into a family
that is not a Jehovah's witness family, and they're never
even going to think it's not even going to be
on their radar, you know, Jehovah's Witnesses until maybe later
in their lives they have a conversation with their parents.

(53:58):
But I love the idea of doing something altruistically to
someone who doesn't even know about me. I think that's
the most beautiful thing.

Speaker 1 (54:07):
It's so beautiful. It makes me a bit tary because
you said earlier that will never really grasp how far
reaching the Jehovah's Witnesses really are internationally. But that's the
same with you and your work and all of the
other you know, form of Jehovah's Witnesses that are speaking
out and telling their stories. You know, there's been a

(54:28):
big thing with the Witness Underground film and I think
they did an appearance at the Decoult conference over in
New Zealand. So there's loads of stuff happening at the
moment and you'll never really know the level of impact
that you've had with your work, and I think that's
really exciting.

Speaker 2 (54:44):
It is is I think anything anyone can do, even
if it's just a single tweet or ex post or
you know, whether it's a video or just someone commenting
on someone else's video. You know, maybe they this is
the thing. I mean, we're all different and we all
bring different perspectives to the table, and someone else can
say something in just a few words the way I've

(55:06):
heard it described. I think it was Matt de la
Hunty once who said this. He said, you can hear
a message and you can be like, I'm ignoring that.
That doesn't make sense to me, and then you hear
it again it's like, oh no, sorry, that doesn't make
sense to me. And then you can hear the same
message and it's exactly the same message, but it's just
been said in a slightly different way, and all of
a sudden, the penny drops. It's like huh, you know,

(55:28):
And so Just because I have like a large following
and a large audience doesn't mean the way I describe
things is always going to resonate with everybody. Sometimes all
it takes is is just a few words put in
the exactly the right way, and it's like the butterfly effect.
You just never know what you've done online, or what

(55:48):
you've said to the kid in school, or what you've
said to the Jehovah's witness in the street who stood
by the carts. You might not think that it's had
any effect at all, but it's like butterfly effect. You
just don't know what seed you're sewing when you approach
people who are in this situation in a kind, respectful, tolerant,

(56:11):
accommodating tone, you just don't know what impact that's going
to later go on and have just by simply being
nice and kind of understanding.

Speaker 1 (56:24):
I mean, I could see you a little YouTube plaque
behind you on the wall. There one hundred and fifteen
thousand subscribers on your YouTube channel. That's just one avenue
of many as well that you're using to spread this
awareness and to have people share these stories and for
you to share your stories as well. Do you have

(56:45):
the opportunity to speak with current Jehovah's witnesses, and if
you do, what's your approach there? Is it the same,
you know, kind of making sure you're being open, making
sure that you're being neutral.

Speaker 2 (56:57):
Yes, I have a series on my channel talking with
Jehovah's Witnesses. I haven't done an episode for a while now,
but the basic premise is that I walk up to
some Jehovah's witnesses in the street, normally here in Zagreb,
but I've done it in a few different places, and
I'm miked up, so they don't know I'm miked up,
and I'm being filmed from a distance, and I also,

(57:20):
out of respect for their privacy, I blur their faces
up so all you're hearing is their voices. And I
basically just present myself as someone who has some experience
with Jehovah's witnesses through family, which is true, so I
know a little bit about them, but I'm interested to
hear their fake and hear what they have to say.
And because obviously of my knowledge of the group, I'm

(57:42):
able to kind of steer the conversation a little bit.
And what I'm trying to do is kind of again
sow some seeds, but also for the benefit of my viewers,
show how what Jehovah's witnesses believe actually doesn't make any
logical sense to the point where they can kind of
tie themselves up in knots when they're talking to you.
And what they will also frequently do, which is also

(58:03):
very interesting and kind of what I'm aiming for, is
they will just sometimes flat out lie, you know, and
they will just flat out misrepresent what their beliefs are.
So what happens then is, of course on YouTube, I
put like a caption on the screen, actually this is
what they're what their literature say is so I kind
of fact check them as I'm going along. But the

(58:25):
overall point, when I'm actually in that moment of talking
to a Jehovah's witness is to just constantly be aware
of the fact that I'm essentially talking to myself. You know,
how how would I feel if this were me kind
of twenty years ago? What would I respond to in
terms of what's being said? And if I can kind

(58:46):
of give them a few things that they might go
home and think, Hm, what he said there? Why is
that lingering? Why am I still mulling over what that
guy said. You know, that's just fantastic. So hopefully that's
happened in a few of those conversations. But if nothing else,
I'm helping to educate people that Jehovah's witnesses. They may
not be deliberately setting out to deceive. But the problem

(59:10):
is with cults is that fundamentally they're not true. They
can't obviously all be true, but as it turns out,
they're all false. And the more they kind of try
to explain themselves and the more they try to reason themselves,
the more obvious that becomes, to the point where they
actually end up lying or contradicting something that they say
in their own publications. And I think that's really interesting.

Speaker 1 (59:35):
So upon reflecting on all of this work that you've
put together and this huge archive of material that you've developed,
are you labeled as an apostate? Do you get singled out?
Like is the organization like saying stay away from this guy?
You know, Scientology they like to fair game. I don't
know what other groups are like in that respect. I

(59:58):
don't know if they would be like, let's name him,
because we don't want people to go in search. Look
at his stuff. Let's just like put a blanket statement on,
like there are apostates among us. How does it work?
And has it impacted relationships with any of your family friends,
people you grew up with.

Speaker 2 (01:00:16):
Well, yeah, I am an apostate. That happened quite quickly.
In fact, even when I was just asking questions to
begin with, I sent my friend an email telling him
some of the questions I had, some of the doubts,
and I never got a reply to the email. And
then I found out that he'd gone round to all
of our mutual friends and told them Lloyd's an apostate.
And that was literally just me saying, listen, mate, I

(01:00:37):
need some help. I'm having these doubts. So it's very
very quick. The whole apostate thing happens very very quickly.
To become an actual apostate, you know, you really need
to be speaking out publicly, and that takes that that's
a big step to take. And so once I took
that step, there was a huge blowback in terms of

(01:00:59):
my family shunning me. My dad hasn't spoken to me
since two thousand and thirteen. Yeah, so, and he's met
them once on one occasion since since sir. Jessica was
born in twenty fourteen and Julia was born in twenty nineteen,
and he's met them both once on one occasion, and
that was my initiative. I managed to get him to

(01:01:22):
meet them. Anyway, I'm getting sidetracked a little bit that
what I'm saying is that you do have huge personal
ramifications for speaking out publicly in terms of the organization,
slightly different than with groups like Scientology where they do
fair gaming. I would love it if there were a
page on jw dot org about Lloyd Evans saying don't

(01:01:43):
listen to Lloyd Evans and this is what you should
know about how terrible a person he is. That would
be like my dream come true. But jul their approach
is actually to basically pretend that we don't exist apostase activists,
which is actually kind of a smart move. They have
been doing some kind of behind the scenes shenanigans. I

(01:02:06):
got hit with a legal notice from their legal department
in eighteen complaining about a number of things, most specifically
a video i'd done called Pillowgate, which was actually a
leaked video. I'm not kidding. I'm going to try to
keep a straight face. It was a leaked video, an
initiation video for Bethelites or people who work at their

(01:02:29):
branch offices, telling them not to masturbate using their bed linen.
I'm not making it up. I'm not making it up,
and talking about some of the various problems of a
sexual nature that they've had with people who've joined Bethel.
And so there was a lot of comedy material in

(01:02:50):
there that I could work with, and so I made
a video called pillow Gate, and they basically demanded that
I take it down, and so I replied to their letter, no,
I'm not going to be taking it down, because what
you'll find is that I have used your copyrighted material
in a fair use way, whereby I am showing clearly
what you've said and clearly what I've said. And if

(01:03:12):
you tell me to take it down, what you're essentially
telling me is that I'm not allowed to criticize you.
And I'm sorry. You don't get to tell me to
do that. And I never heard back from them until
I was involved in the Ixer Inquiry, the independent inquiring
to child sexual abuse. They really didn't like the fact
that I'd been invited as a core participant, and they

(01:03:32):
sent a nine page dossia to Ixa claiming that I
was guilty of hate speech, and they came up with
a whole list of examples from my YouTube channel. They'd
clearly had assigned some betheltes to go through my YouTube
channel with a fine tooth comb to try to find
anything that could be incriminating, and each and every example

(01:03:54):
that they came up with over the nine pages was
woods that were taken completely out of contextx. So then
I had great fun producing a hate speech series. I
called it hate Speech, where I literally went through with
a fine tooth comb each and every example and showed
how they were basically lying twixer.

Speaker 1 (01:04:13):
Wow, that is like, there's so many layers to that,
because first of all, anybody that's had to sit there
and watch all of your content, you don't know what
impact that's had on them. Second of all, they're just
giving you clout, they're given you material like helping to
grow your channel without even realizing it. And also they're
giving power to you by contacting you in the first

(01:04:33):
place saying please stop doing what you're doing. You just
go no.

Speaker 2 (01:04:37):
Honestly, it's a badge of honor, it's a badge of
honor to know that there's a dedicated department in Bethel
who were tasked at one point with coming up with
a nine page dossier of you know, just literally sat
there watching my videos in Bethel I did. Really gives
me pleasures to think of that. But all joking aside,
if I'm going to be completely honest, the biggest pushback

(01:04:59):
to my work has not come from Jehovah's Witnesses. It's
actually come from fellow Extrahovah's witnesses because and you know,
I was alluding to this a little bit earlier. When
you get out of a group like Jehovah's Witnesses, you
have a lot of anger, and you especially have a
lot of distrust of people in positions of authority or

(01:05:22):
positions of power and influence. So what some me know,
overwhelmingly the response to my work from fellow Extrahovah's witnesses
has been positive. But every now and then you'll get
an ex Jehovah's witness who really really doesn't like me
because maybe I'm saying something that they disagree with, Like
for example, when I was criticizing Russia for banning Jehovah's

(01:05:45):
Witnesses back in twenty seventeen. They latch onto something that
I've said, or they maybe don't like the tone in
which I've said it, and they just decide that, for
whatever reason, I must be a terrible, terrible person. And unfortunately,
over the years, I've a mass, like a small but
dedicated band of haters who will pounce on my every

(01:06:07):
perceived mishap. And it's actually been quite traumatic to have
to deal with that, you know, because sometimes they can
make entire like video live streams about something that I've
said or something that's happened or something, and there's a
page on a forum somewhere where they write for like
hundreds and hundreds of pages. One of my friends said

(01:06:28):
at one point, I'm pretty sure if you google Adolf Hitler,
you're going to struggle to find a forum thread that's
hundreds and hundreds of pages long about Adolf Hitler, you know,
And yet here they are kind of scrutinizing my life
in a forum thread of that many pages. So it's
actually but I think that that's in a way kind
of a testament to just how harmful cult can be,

(01:06:52):
is that they don't even really need to come out
and attack me. They don't even need to fair gain
me and make websites about me. Hovah's witnesses. That is
all they need to do is just let extra Hovah's
Witnesses cannibalize each other, because that's how messed up you
can be as a result of your experience.

Speaker 1 (01:07:11):
You know, that's so unfortunate. I'm sorry that you experienced
that as well, Lloyd. I know a lot of content
creators will say it comes with the territory. You shouldn't
do this type of work if you don't have like
the stomach or the backbone or whatever kind of misogynistic
exce people want to use for that type of thing.
But you're coming out this work from your own personal

(01:07:32):
traumatic experiences as well, so that adds an extra layer
of kind of convolutedness to the process that you're in.
And also survivor communities. You said earlier that coming out
of a cult is a minefield in learning. You know,
what you should experiment with, what you should keep with you,

(01:07:52):
what teachings you should leave behind. There's a huge kind
of like you know, keep throwaway process people have to
go through, and it takes you know, a lifetime to decide,
you know, or to work through that stuff. But it's
a minefield in survivor communities as well. For this reason,
I've had people say, well, you've had this person on

(01:08:15):
your show, so I can't be associated with you anymore.
They don't give any extra context. I have to kind
of go through Reddit and other forums to try and
piecings together to understand what's just happened. Like that exchange
was so bizarre, And when I first started this work,
the water was so muddy. I had no idea. I
didn't even know about the cult wars, you know with

(01:08:35):
colt apologists, and people would be like, oh, don't listen
to anything. Eileen Barker says. I was like, I don't
even know who this person is. So it's taken like
half a decade for me to get my head around
survivor communities, and they be very, very.

Speaker 2 (01:08:54):
Difficult, very toxic, is how I would put it. I mean,
I've spoken to John did before. He's you know, done
a lot of work in the Latter Day Saints community.
He's been targeted the late Great Mike Wrinda, who died recently.
He was spending some of his final days on Earth

(01:09:18):
debunking of some hatred that was put out against turn
trying to attack him. So it's actually quite tragic. It
is when you think about it, that people who were
purely doing their best to provide a resource that's going
to help people end up getting attacked themselves. It's a
little bit akin to like NHS workers or doctors or
nurses being attacked when they're trying to do some good

(01:09:40):
and it's very sad, But I think it's just important
to focus on the positives. It's just human nature when
you're a content creator to kind of blank out the
hundreds of positive messages and zero in on the one
person who says, I can't believe you would speak to
this person. Haven't you done your research? Or I can't

(01:10:02):
believe that you would say this. Who do you think
you are? And we blank out. It's just psychology. We
blank out all of the goodness and we just zero
in on the one person that has a problem. And
that's just how it is.

Speaker 1 (01:10:13):
Yeah, it is. It reminds me of something my mum
used to say to me. You know, oh you'll you'll
forget one hundred compliments, but you'll remember one critique. You know,
when you're a child and somebody says like, oh, your
hair looks weird today every day, or like, is my
hair weird today? Yeah, so it is, you know, human nature.
But it's still unfortunate and it does make the work harder,

(01:10:36):
and it does come with the territory, which is not
a helpful thing to say to anybody. But at the
same time, I think it's important for us or to
remember that that divide and conquer us versus them. Processes
that are happening in these survivor communities again reinforce the
messages that the cults are teaching people that ex scientology

(01:10:59):
can comunity is so toxic in kind of different pockets
of the online communities that they're probably laughing, say, see,
this is what happens when you leave. You'll get attacked,
people won't agree with you, You'll be more isolated than
you've ever been before. All of the things we warned
you would happen if you left are now going to

(01:11:19):
happen to you. Look at all these people, you know,
even Mike Grinder's cancer diagnosis, they were probably saying, this
is what's happened because he left and said all of
these bad things about us. It's you know, he never
would have had this diagnosis if he stayed and all
of these really horrible, manipulative, really insidious things. So that's
what I always try and say when there's a lot

(01:11:40):
of inviting happening in survivor communities. It's like we are
we are not getting we are not getting closer to
our goal or helping people. We're actually getting further away
and helping the cult get closer to their goal of
dividing us exactly, which is again complicated. But I'm more

(01:12:00):
of your time than I I could just talk to
you all day, Lloyd. You are absolutely fascinating. Short to you,
you have so much like history locked inside your brain.

Speaker 2 (01:12:08):
Honestly, sometimes I wish it wasn't there. It kind of
follows me around like a cloud of wood, the truth. Yeah, yeah,
you weren't there, Man, you weren't there. Yeah No, But honestly,
it's been a real thrill. And might I say I've
done a few interviews over the years, and I think
it's worth kind of just flagging the fact that you're

(01:12:28):
an excellent interviewer. Your questions are fantastic and really kind
of make me think, and so it's it's an absolute
delight to talk to. And I think that the work
that you're doing with Cult Vault is absolutely invaluable. Your
voice is absolutely crucial in this in this sphere and
much needed and it's a real honor to be on

(01:12:49):
the show.

Speaker 1 (01:12:50):
Well, thank you, Lloyd. That's made my day. I don't
know how to respond to that. I'm very British right now.

Speaker 2 (01:12:56):
I stiff up a lip. Yeah, yes, it's.

Speaker 1 (01:13:02):
It's been great to have our conversation. What I find
really insightful when I talk to people that have the
level of knowledge that you have is that sometimes I'll
say things and I'll get corrected, and in those moments,
I have to remind myself that I have so much
to learn and I can't make those changes and I
can't learn those things if people don't correct me. So

(01:13:23):
there's been a couple of exchanges we've had today where
you've said, well, actually it's a bit more like this,
And that's so invaluable to me because I'm just going
to be spouting nonsense the rest of my life unless
people with the knowledge say to me, actually it's a
bit more like this.

Speaker 2 (01:13:36):
So I but this is how we learn. We learn
through conversations, and like I've I've interviewed so many people
on my channel. Like one area, one like massive black
hole in my knowledge that I'm constantly trying to kind
of fix is Bible scholarship. And it always amazes me,
not just Bible scholarship, but also human psychology because obviously,

(01:13:58):
I you know, you go to university in and you
study this stuff for years and years and years. You
don't just read a book and suddenly you know all
of it. And so there's so many times during an
interview where someone's just dropped this, just completely debunked this
assumption that I've had. And it's only through having these
conversations and having the willingness and humility to learn from

(01:14:19):
other people that we advanced our knowledge. And that's why,
that's precisely why it's important that you have this podcast
and that you're having these conversations, because how else are
we going to know than other than by having other
than by talking to each other.

Speaker 1 (01:14:34):
So yeah, yeah, I agree, I agree, and I just
you know, I just have these conversations. Then I get
to edit them and re listen to them, and it's
like learning it all over again. So it's doubly reinforced.
So you've got You've mentioned that you've got a number
of books available. One that is eight hundred pages. I'm

(01:14:58):
guessing that's The Reluctant Apostate.

Speaker 2 (01:15:00):
Yeah, it's a book and it doubles as a doorstop
if you need a doorstop, this is a good book
to buy here. But that, yeah, They're looked into. Postate
Leaving Jehovah's Witnesses comes at a price that's available on Amazon,
and also How to Escape from Jehovah's Witnesses, which is
much much shorter and really kind of tailored more for
people who literally do need to escape from Jehovah's Witnesses.

(01:15:21):
My first book, they were looked Into Postate is written
more for people who don't know anything about it. And
so what I do is I talk about my own
personal story and I intersperse it with the history of
Jehovah's Witnesses, like a forensic analysis of where the movement
came from and how various teachings developed. So it's a
little bit more of a you might say, academic book,

(01:15:44):
if I dare use that word, even though I haven't
been to university or anything.

Speaker 1 (01:15:47):
But yeah, it's kind of like John A. Tack's A
Piece of Blue Sky, which is, you know, like the
historical it's like an a Yes authology series of outside doology.
It's so long, it's like ten books.

Speaker 2 (01:16:01):
In one exactly exactly.

Speaker 1 (01:16:03):
So these are all available online. I'll put links to
both the books in the episode description, and then please
let listeners know again the website that you have, the
YouTube channel that you have, and anything else that might
be helpful for listeners to go and check out.

Speaker 2 (01:16:19):
Absolutely, I will inundate you with links, and I look
forward to your listeners coming up with all sorts of
imaginative ways to stalk me online. So thank you.

Speaker 1 (01:16:29):
Just your YouTube channel is just Lloyd Evans, like gets
to have a YouTube channel that's just their name. That's
so good. Usually mine is just like anything I try
is like that username has taken, So you end up
having something like Rainbow Marmaladers.

Speaker 2 (01:16:45):
Or you didn't. Here's the thing, though, it doesn't happen overnight.
I mean I started making YouTube videos in twenty twelve
and I didn't cross over on to one hundred thousand
subscribers until twenty twenty one. So you know, especially working
in I mean, the way I think of it is,
what we're working in is a niche. It's a niche
of a niche. You know, people kind of think about

(01:17:08):
cults as just this kind of quirky. We're almost working
in the category of conspiracy theory. I've even had people
who run conspiracy theory channels reach out to me and
wanting to talk about Jehovah's witnesses, and I get offended
because it's like, it's not a conspiracy theory. It's real,
you know right.

Speaker 1 (01:17:24):
Now, you know it happened to be.

Speaker 2 (01:17:25):
Actually, that's almost the kind of zub genre that we're
operating in, you know. So again that's why it's not
just about having the conversations, but also kind of sticking
with it. And I think after a while, if you
have something meaningful to say, and you're willing to be
open to new ideas, and you're approaching things from a
fair objective and dare I say journalistic way, which is

(01:17:48):
how you are doing things, it's inevitable that you will
gain traction and your audience will grow. You just have
to be patient.

Speaker 1 (01:17:54):
Yeah, I find it. I mean I find it hard.
I just I'll upload one little video where we and
that's as much as you know, maybe when the kids
are a bit bigger, I'll i'll feel like. And also
the Masters. I did my Masters in like ten months
and I just cannot get back into things. I'm finding
it really hard to I'll like dip my toe and stuff,

(01:18:15):
but I'm finding it hard to fully commit because that
course was so intense and with all the deadlines, and
you know, once you go from working for yourself and
not having really strict deadlines and just being like, oh,
I usually release on Friday, but I'm poorly this week,
so I'll do it on a Saturday. You can't do
that with your university deadlines. You have to have them
in or you fail. So I like, I don't know.

(01:18:38):
It was a bit of.

Speaker 2 (01:18:39):
A welcome to the world of the content creator.

Speaker 1 (01:18:42):
Yeah, yeah, I just don't now I'm struggling to get
back into it. So I will make sure that all
of the links to all of these things go in
the episode description. And I'm so appreciative, Lloyd of all
of your work, everything that you do, and for your
time today come in to chat with me.

Speaker 2 (01:18:57):
Thank you so much, my pleasure, Thank you so much.

Speaker 1 (01:19:00):
Thank you. Enjoy the rest of your day, Lloyd, and
take care okay.

Speaker 2 (01:19:03):
See here. Bye.

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S3 E30 The Reluctant Apostate: In Conversation with Lloyd Evans

NFL Daily with Gregg Rosenthal