My experience that much more. Guest thank you. Great to be here. Host i want to dive right in and ask you to read a bit from the process. Host guest turning towards our house on the hillside i see movement of a different type, shadow is pushing for the current, my brothers are a weak testing the weather. I imagine my mother by the stove hovering over pancakes and my father by the backdoor with his steel toed boots and putting his hand into his gloves. The school bus goes past without stopping. I am only seven, but i understand it is this more than any other that makes my family different, we dont go to school. The government cant force us because it doesnt know about us. Four of my parents and children have no birth certificates or medical records because we were born at home and have never seen a doctor or nurse, no School Records because weve never stepped foot in a classroom. At nine i will be issued a delayed certificate of birth but at this moment is according to the state and government, i do not exist. Of course i did exist. I grew up attending for the days of abomination, waiting for the moon. I studied my supplies when the world of men failed my family would continue on the unaffect unaffected. Host that is quite an opening. I want to start there. I want to start in idaho where this takes place. Can you tell me a little bit, tell me what was it like as a 10yearold version of your self . Guest we had a farm that belonged to my grandfather, so it was really beautiful there were weak fields and it wasnt a particularly big mountain but it was beautifully made and formed into a perfect and ive always been told this beautiful story when the snow began to melt there would be an image of the womans body. My dad had a story b the nomadic indians would look for her sign, the sign of spring had ended and winter is over and its time to come back. It is a beautiful place. There was a junkyard with cars into this the kind of exotic playground. There was a lot of beauty in my childhood. I think it took me a long time to realize that there were, but it wasnt normal. To me it seemed normal and now im older and i see the wrong end of the unusual. My dad was supposed to a lot of the institutions most people take for granted, like public education, doctors, hospitals, anything to do with the government. What that meant if i was never able to go to the school, the doctor, and i didnt have a birth certificate until i was 9yearsold. Host its a kind of interplay between this idea likh existence, running around free in this environment that seems very foreign to me as a city kid, and almost a magical place that hurts to talk about this, but theres the other side. There were very much two sides to your childhood experience. Guest absolutely. The mountain was beautiful. Everything that had once id had another. My mother was an herbalist and midwife. We spent all these hours Walking Around the mountains gathering rose heads and beautiful things but it often had another side to it. So, the junkyard was an exotic playground, but they also got hurt quite a bit. There were a lot of injuries, like the time my brother lived a truck on fire and was covered in burns and we made the decision to return home because my father didnt believe in doctors and hospitals. So a situation like that, even with herbalism, which is a wonderful thing my mother was talented at, it can be scary when you are dealing with a real injury when you dont have morphine and things like that. Host can you speak about your fathers philosophy . I attribute it more to your father and your mother, because it seems to be reading the book it came mostly from your father is that fair to say . Guest it was mostly coming from him. Its a complicated thing. Sometimes i think it was a kind of spiritual doctrine he had, and sometimes i think that he was he had these theories that the government, public education, that they had been infiltrated by some kind of ill meaning organization. Sometimes he called it the neo noddy. His reason for opposing these things is because he believed that they were trying to do harm. He really believed it. It was a conviction that he had. Host if you can pinpoint what was he afraid of from the illuminati and that these different sources, what was the fear . Guest i think it depends on which institution you are talking about. I think he was concerned about what he called the medical establishment, but they were not actually doing good. He believed that a lot of the things people take, drugs for example, would damage your body and the effects would last for years and also they would damage you spiritually and you should really use natural healing, herbs. He called them gods pharmacy. The public education, he was worried that there was brainwashing the what kind of lead us away from god and that sort of thing. So, it depends on, hes a complicated person. Host brainwashing seems to be a big part of what he was talking about. And the fear of you being brainwashed into the illuminati coming in, i think a part of it is the fear of i guess someone coming in and changing the path that he had set for his children. Is that part of the fear of this kind of outside perception . Guest he had specific ideas about things, and i think that he was worried we might go to a doctor and we might kind of in some way compromise our health and spirituality. In his mind, the kind of path was narrow and you needed to do these things to have Good Standing with god and in order to be a good person and all these things. So i think that is the fear that you could sucked int have suckee world. This idea of the world being unworldly. I think a lot of people have that idea. I think it is a strong idea and a lot of religions. My father just included doctors. Host you were mormons, but this is not a mormon perspective at all. Guest most, almost all mormons support education. Most send their kids to school oschoolwith a belief in homescht they really believe in it. They definitely believe in doctors and things. Host and i found that interesting in the process coming you wanted to make that point. Guest i did because right now, the political environment is so polarized, and i think people will latch onto any story to confirm their own preconceptions about something. I think that my dad had some irregular ideas. I think that the way his mind worked and im not a medical professional, so i dont know what it was but i felt he had some kind of mental irregulari irregularity. I just, in my mind, the religious extremism i think was a vehicle for that. So i would say whatever was happening in his mind, i think call it religious extremism, dont think it was the other way around. I dont want people to take this story and they all religious people are like this or ill mormons are like this, all these people that are different from us. Its easy when people are different from you to just make them into a caricature. Host let me tell you from reading the book, that is not to take away. This is a foreign land to me, in many ways. And that is not to take away at all, so i think you can rest assured. What is interesting to me, you have no idea of people kind of taking from Popular Culture on the news and applying it to their worldview. There is an example of that you called your first memory that is not a memory and that is the ruby ridge massacre. Can you talk a little bit about the role and how it shaped the fearbased belief that your father kind of established . Guest he did have these ideas about the government, the government specifically around at the time of the ruby ridge incident, our family wasnt so different from the Weaver Family in the way that we lived and a little bit isolated, we didnt go to school and all that. So i think when it happened to them, there was a pur a period y dad was quite worried it could happen to anyone, which is an irrational. I mean if it happened to someone else. I was about five when it happened, and so we kind of went into this period that we were camping a lot and we were preparing. We got bags that if we needed to run and hide in the mountains we were going to have them. I had a journal i have written a few years later when i still had this bad and i documented all of the content. Pages of, you know, a heater for the emergency food and water purifier and mosquito nets in all these things you would need if youre going to live on the mountain. So, for me that event, i dont know how long it lasted for my dad. But it lived in my mind as this very frightening thing that made me feel like the government could come at any moment. He never told us the end of the story. Host can you tell us a little bit of . Guest the weavers were a family that lived in idaho, and they the way that it began as a believe it had to do with a conflict over a rifle that randy weaver and sol had sold apparenn undercover atf agent and he missed a court date i think into the fbi and federal marshals began to secure surveillance and somehow there was a conflict where the dog was shot indian agent was shot and his son and i think was 11. It got out of hand very quickly. It ended up being that he was shot and agents surrounded the cow in and ultimately, his wife, vicki, was chalked while holding the baby. She was killed by a sniper. A sort of her in this story and that is the version that i was told, that my dad told us that looked like have happened if it could happen to them it could happen to us. I remember having dreams we would be crawling around on the floor, it really lived in my mind in this way because he didnt really tell me the end of the story. So when i was 17, i was at the university and i heard the end of the story. And i heard how there had been his massivthis Massive Public od congressional inquiries and newspapers, every major newspaper covered the story, and it became different. When i was a child, it was how in the government they were going to come for us and it was this secret thing. Obviously i realized, i mean, it was a terrible thing that happened, that its how democracy works in a lot of ways and it wasnt something that was kept secret or covered up. It was very much public. There were Massive Public outcry is. Host part of the fear as a 5yearold, the story is terrifying especially in the situation you were in. You very much identified with the family, that you kind of feel they idea that you were not alone, your family wasnt alone and that knowledge would have been comforting to you, do you feel had you known . Guest if i had an understanding of how the institutions edsel responded, but it wasnt like the government wasnt this evil force that obviously that was an incident for the abuse of power and callous disregard for human life. I think that might be what the congressional report on it said. That is a very different idea of the government, that there is a free press and people find out about things. When i went to the university i didnt just learn the story of ruby ridge. I also learned how the constitution works and what is the role of the free press. And of that changes the way the story felt quite a bit. Host i want to go back to kind of three stages in your education assuming thats what you call it educated. Can you talk a little bit of how the education that you learned with your family and you know, it isnt a traditional education, but tell me some of the values that youve learned that most of the people in this country happened. Guest when my oldest brothers were younger i think my mother did a pretty decent job of homeschooling. By the time i came along, she had seven kids, she was a midwife, herbalists, there wasnt a lot of homeschooling going on. So i never took an exam, there was never anything like a lecture or anything like that. That. Homeschool that i received was pretty limited. But there was one thing i valued, just the way that they raised us. They had this philosophy and they would say to us all the time, you can teac teach yoursef anything better than some amounts can teach it to you. It is a principle i agree with and i worry a lot but when we talk about education in this country, and i was in england its become something that is really passive and there should be an individual component. If it is just social, it is a big propaganda. People need to feel actively engaged i think in designing their own curriculum. I do think at some level, i hate the word disempowered, but i do worry that a lot of people seem to take to heart this idea to learn something you have to have a degree and institution in place to teach it to you. I am grateful i wasnt raised like that so i decided to go to college and it felt like something i could do, because okay i need to learn algebra, i will buy a book and i will learned. I kept going. My parents took it too far, i arrived really underprepared and wanted to raise my hand in the class. Ive never heard of it. People thought i was denying it but i had never heard of it before. I wouldnt say that this is an ideal education, but i do think that they had something about people feeling ownership over what they learn because if you think of education i think a few people talk about education as a way to make money and get the job, that it about making a person and people should have the opportunity to participate in the making of their own mind, and i just think that it needs to be more active and people need to be more involved in their own education. Host how did the way that you relate to this obviously in a literal sense. Guest i didnt know how to write narratives. I had a phd because when i got to school i had really committed and ten years later after i stepped foot in a classroom and ten years later i graduated so i know how to do academic writing. But i didnt know how to write the pros but it was that same principle i thought this is a skill i want and what are the ways i can get it. The thing for me that maybe the biggest differencmade thebiggesw york fiction podcast which is amazing. Then they explain to you how they work and it is an amazing curriculum more to the point it was a curriculum that works for me so i could pursue it and i didnt have to spend a lot of time perceiving a curriculum that didnt work for me because i think everybody is different which is why it is always going to be better than what other people would make. Host were there any books that were particularly helpful during the creation of this book . Guest i had never read a short story. I didnt know what the short stories were they found him so helpful. I read a lot of the year of magical thinking and a lot of Toni Morrison because she was a genius and a ton of short stories. You take those that speak to you and there are some amazing writers that i enjoyed but they dont give me ideas of how to write and then some that do and i think that is the beauty of having control over how you learn. Host back to your childhood, what were you reading . Guest i read a lot of religious books. We have others in the house but didnt really read them. I read a lot of 19th century speeches by the kind of founding mormon prophets, so that is a language. Host pretty interesting when you went to school for the first time at 17, you wrote in this kind of stilted archaic style. Guest in a very stilted style because that is what i have been reading. I think a lot of my professors were just very bewildered by why i sounded like a 19th century it took a while to kind of get that voice out great host isnt it amazing it is so much different than a talking voice in that you really have to look at how you didnt speak in that way i am assuming. Is it interesting that is the part guest theguest co. They fa certain selfconsciousness about writing. I noticed this in a lot of writing not just of my own, but people will use words like establishment. Words that you would never use e because i think they feel like they sound more intellectual or something. So i had fact that i just had a bad case of it. Host how long did it take you to get that kind of exercise back . Guest rewrote the whole book the first draft in about a year and first four months everything i wrote was absolutely terrible. So about four months. Host are you being hard on yourself or guest it was really bad. I took it to a writing group once. I didnt really think of myself as a writer. I was literally trying to learn how to write because i wanted to write this one book. It wasnt a part of my identity when they said this is terrible i would say i know, of course it is. I am not a writer. Just tell me how to make it better so that is a wonderful place to learn to write because i ha have no personal feelings about it at all. There was no reason i should know how to do this. Ive literally never written a story like this before but i want to try to learn. Was a great place. Host your journals are a good portion of your life. When did you start coming in to talk about the journals you have. Guest i have a couple when i was eight but i get really serious about it when i was ten, and i was very tasteful about it. I have all of them, two or three stacks. They are all different. Some are about my grandmother and they tend to have a picture on all of them up to the age of 16. Host i know i journal as well and for me i dont think they really understand something until i write it down. What was your reason of doing it, do you have an idea . Guest i think there were a couple of reasons. There was a bit of loneliness. Sometimes i detect, i didnt have a lot of friends commit any friends actually. There was another family that lived in my town but i was never invited to things and it was isolated. I had my siblings. I would write in this journal so i could tell someone all this stuff and i think that is one of the reasons and there was a processing element to it. And i dont know, other than that i dont know why but i latched onto it. Host and you are grateful for them now in writing this book. Guest they were really helpful. Host do you still journal now . Guest i do. Host what is interesting going back to the child, being part of something i didnt recognize was physical pain, threats of physical pain. There was a part where you had an accident in the junkyard. Can you talk about that a little bit . Guest my dad ran a junkyard and i dont know why but for whatever reason, he didnt have that part in his head that would tell him this is a dangerous thing, do not do this thing. But even after someone was hurt he didnt understand how serious it was and he kind of felt everything that happens happens for the best and we are going to be protected. They didnt really believe in safety equipment. We would build these buildings, didnt wear safety hat, just a dangerous place and i dont think that its because he didnt kick about our safety, i think he did care about our safety i just dont think that he understood how dangerous it was even after what happened and there is one example of that after i was probably around 14 i was filling up and it had to be picked up by a forklift and then it had to be taken over and dumped into a semi trailer. So i filled it up and said okay but stump the band and he wanted someone to go into the big trailer and several scrapped after he dumped it at heat thought it would be faster if i wrote up and then he said i wont hold it level with the trailer. Then everything will be great. I got in the van, and as he was turning to rotate around to where the trailer was, a bit of s