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Ep. 49 - Jimmy Barclay‘s Misadventures in Odyssey w/ Actor & Activist David Griffin
228 Plays4 years ago
What Christian kid from the 90’s/00’s hasn’t listened to, or at the very least, known about Adventures in Odyssey? For all you badies who missed it, Adventures in Odyssey is an Evangelical radio drama/comedy created and produced by Focus on the Family. To date, over 900 episodes of Odyssey have aired across the globe, and spin-off products include books, cartoons, computer games, music albums, and of course, TONS of merchandise. At one point, Chic-Fil-A even included Adventures in Odyssey cassette tapes in their kids meals. To say it’s a popular program is… an understatement, to say the least!
Our guest this week is voice actor and activist David Griffin, who voiced a character named Jimmy Barclay, as well as several others. Beginning in his preteen years, David worked with Adventures in Odyssey for over a decade, and appears on 80+ episodes of the show. He absolutely loved voice acting, but his time with Odyssey coincided with his burgeoning struggles with mental health, and subsequent disenchantment with Christianity. Join us as he discusses the good, the bad, and the ugly aspects of being a young person working on a huge faith-based radio program!
Treat yourself to Captain Cecil’s Coffee Roasters by going to www.captaincecilscoffee.com. Enter the promo code “growingupchristian” at checkout for 10% your first order, and free shipping on orders over $50!
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Transcript
Introduction and Character Arcs
00:00:00
Speaker
Now they were starting to think long term about the show and like, hey, we can, you know, have a character here where we can deal with a lot of family dramas, which most of the people that are going to be listening to the show are little kids and families, right? Siblings arguing with each other, you know, respect your mom and dad.
00:00:19
Speaker
How many times can the kids find a, the random kids find a pack of cigarettes and then have to decide what to do? The cigarette episodes were my favorites, you know, which I mean, Jimmy and Donna smoking cigarettes behind the school. Has a brown paper bag under the porch. It is funny magazines where people don't wear clothes. Why does Jimmy have needle jacks in his arm?
00:00:49
Speaker
Oh.
Grown Up Christian Podcast Relaunch
00:01:11
Speaker
Hello and welcome to Grown Up Christian. I'm Casey. And I'm Sam. And we are back, man. We were just talking about it. It's been a couple weeks since we've gotten to do an intro together like normal. I'm giddy, man. Yeah. We're giddy. This is great. I'm always bordering on giddy. You did one with April. And then I don't even remember doing one in between the one you did with April and then the one I did
00:01:40
Speaker
with Aaron. I know we got one in there. I feel like it was short and it feels like it's been four weeks since we even got on the microphone to record. Life's a blur. We're one more month closer to death and we don't even remember it. Yeah. I mean, my memory has been awful, like really awful lately.
Personal Anecdotes and Travel Stories
00:02:01
Speaker
So yesterday was Halloween when we're recording this Monday night. And I was like,
00:02:09
Speaker
trying to figure out what I had done. It was in the afternoon. It was probably around four o'clock. I knew we had done something that morning. I was like, I did something else today. And I couldn't remember. I was like, what did I do? I couldn't remember. I feel like it was something notable. And it was. My wife's cousin had a baby and we went and visited.
00:02:32
Speaker
They're newborn, but it took me like 30 minutes of racking my brain pre-drinking to figure out what the fuck I did that morning. I was like, I don't know. I couldn't recall it. It was, and then I was like, I think I should probably go to the doctor. This feels like it's bordering on like a real problem of short-term memory.
00:02:49
Speaker
Lost? I don't know. I'm sure I'm fine. I think it was just a bad day. I don't think I was hungover, but... You've got that, like, juvenile-onset dementia. Yeah. God, please no. I don't want dementia. I watched some movies about that, and that's just scary. Yeah, it is. So, in the past week and a half, I think I've driven 3,000 miles. That's insane, dude. I'm a road warrior.
00:03:16
Speaker
Yeah, but we went to so we left Kansas went through New Mexico. We went to three national parks and this is a work trip. So there's work in between but we went to.
00:03:30
Speaker
petrified forest in like Northeast Arizona, which was incredible, such a weird place. So many interesting things to see. We went to Saguaro National Park really just for like an afternoon, more or less just to like check it off the list, but beautiful, really cool, interesting, did a bunch of work stuff, drove up into Colorado, which Colorado
00:03:59
Speaker
Colorado. It's like people here say El Dorado. It's like a town close to me. Colorado. Well, so the northeast corner of Arizona, basically between like Flagstaff and this like four corners area. Remember, I'm breaking bad when when what's her face and so we drove by that. But like that entire section of state
00:04:26
Speaker
It's like it's like you're it's not like being on an alien planet. It's like being on three alien planets. It's like you you drive through like, I don't know, it's just so many different, like completely unique looking areas. Really? Yeah, it's something else. I mean, I was I was just like in awe of that place. Yeah, I saw some of the you posted some stuff on social media, like if that kind of desert with a big like those tall little rock that tall a little bit like the
00:04:56
Speaker
It was like a rock mounds or whatever. Yeah. But it's like all flat land. And then there's just like these like rock towers shooting up in the middle of the desert.
00:05:06
Speaker
Yeah, it's like all through there and around that area is like Indian reservations, I think for like the Pima and the Navajo tribes. So that was pretty interesting to see. You mean Americans, Casey. Right. First Nations people. First Nations people. I feel like that's a good way of putting it. Whatever you like to be called, let me know. We will refer to you however you'd like.
00:05:35
Speaker
But yeah, just a wild environment. Went to Mesa Verde National Park, which is like cliff dwellings and stuff like that carved into the side of the mountain by Native Americans. Spent a whole bunch of time in the San Juan National Forest and the Rio Grande National Forest. Fantastic. Great trip. Loved it. Brought home the ultimate souvenir. I am COVID positive.
00:06:03
Speaker
Are you serious? Yeah, I found out today. You got that at work, dude. That was a work present. They gifted that to you. Yeah, it could be. Probably is. Because after that, I really didn't talk to another person other than to like buy some Taco Bell.
00:06:20
Speaker
Yeah. And they've all had COVID already, so it's probably. Right. All right. Any symptoms? I've got like a little goop in the back of my throat, but that's it so far. Yeah. Hey, that's good. That's good.
COVID Experiences and Reflections
00:06:35
Speaker
And you know what that goes to show you? What's that? Is that you just didn't even need the vaccine to begin with, because it's clearly not a big deal.
00:06:42
Speaker
Right. I'm like coming up on my point where I, I think it's been almost six months since I got the vaccine. Yeah. Of course, now I'm out of this truck full of antibodies. Have you had to have any fun? Well, you just found out today, so you haven't had to have any fun conversations with people yet about, I don't, maybe you don't have the privilege of getting to have those conversations. I feel like if I got COVID, I would just end up being stuck in so many conversations I didn't want to be about.
00:07:11
Speaker
Oh, yeah. So it's not a very big deal for you. OK, I know where you're going with this. These are very leading questions. I don't want to be part of this conversation. That's like I would. I mean, not that I'll go two weeks without seeing certain people, but wouldn't be able to wouldn't be able to completely pretend like it didn't. So now you can't go to work and get a quarantine.
00:07:31
Speaker
Yeah, I'm quarantining. I did get like- It's not two weeks anymore. It's like 10 days, five, seven days. What is it? Yeah, it's like 10 from the first symptom, which was like yesterday. Okay. So not too big of a deal, but like, um, I talked to my doctor and he gave me like, I'm on like a cocktail. It's like an antibiotic. Ivermectin. Not Ivermectin. I'm on hydrochloroquine. Okay.
00:07:54
Speaker
And then Z-pack, which I think is like a zinc succubus supplement. Succubent. Succubus. The zinc succubus. Okay. It's a zinc succubus and it's going to suck the COVID out of me. Okay. Nice. He prescribed you a succubus in your sleep to suck the COVID out.
00:08:14
Speaker
Yeah, perfect. Basically, do you remember those little like things that you put in a baby's nose that you the little ball that you squeeze and pull there the boogers out? Yeah, dude. Of course I know those.
Parenting Challenges and Church Memories
00:08:25
Speaker
It's like that, but through your pee hole. Oh, perfect. Oh, you just gave me a good idea. Do those things don't work for sucking boogers out of kids nose. This is a little bit of a pivot, but I I worked in a company that did baby gear for a while.
00:08:44
Speaker
and retail company as a full manager there. And it came out, a company came up with this thing called the nose Frito. I guarantee anyone who had kids listening knows what it is, but it's basically a tube. And at the end of the tube, it goes into a cone to be able to suck the boogers out of a kid's nose. You put the tip of the cone in.
00:09:06
Speaker
But it's got this long plastic straw with a filter in it, and you put the other end in your mouth, and you go, and you suck it. No. Yeah. And it sounds awful. And before, we ended up getting one, and before I got one, I was like, this thing's a fucking joke.
00:09:26
Speaker
What kind of like hippie ass parent shit is this? Get me out of here. And then when kids have that snot nose and you're trying to suck the book, it doesn't work. That thing works perfect. And I was afraid to do it for a while because I'm like, you're going to taste the boogers through the booger air. Like the booger air is going to get through and you're going to just taste boogers on your tongue. Yeah, you don't. The filter works fine. You don't taste bugs. And it sucks so many boogers out of your kid's nose and they don't really freak out like they do with those booger balls.
00:09:55
Speaker
Do you ever try it on yourself? No, no. Can you literally evacuate your own nasal cavities? I feel like that would be worth a try. I don't know. I'm not trying to see if you can suck out your mouth. I don't know if it creates a vacuum if you're inhaling. It's like a reverse trumpet player. Yeah, I don't know. It's worth a shot. You don't really need it as an adult because you know how to blow your nose properly.
00:10:24
Speaker
You know, good try. You ever get food stuck up the back of your throat? Like it goes, you swallow and for some reason it goes up instead of down. Does that ever happen to you? Oh, yeah. Or like you're laughing while you're chewing and you kind of blow it through your sinus cavities or whatever. Yeah, but you can feel it up in the back of your throat and it won't go up or down and it's just stuck there. You could like put it in your nose and blow and maybe would shoot it down your throat. Maybe.
00:10:53
Speaker
I want to try now. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. We should get, I got to get one again. I don't know where mine is. I think we got rid of it after my kids were too old. It's funny. Kids are not good at blowing their nose. I don't know what age kids get good at it, but like.
00:11:09
Speaker
my four year old, he has like, he's been on and off sick for like, it's been like four, five weeks. He just has this like, he's obviously had like, he's been COVID tested. He's in school and it's fine, but it's just, it's lingering, like stuffy nose. So every morning he sneezes and just snot rockets down his mouth and chest. And you're like,
00:11:30
Speaker
into his hands. It's like, come on, dude. It's like stringing, but yeah, it's like stringing. And he grins every time. He's like the biggest grain you've ever seen. Like, Hey, cat Loki has that same sort of thing. He's like perpetually stuffy. He just like, we'll be petting him and all of a sudden he's like,
00:11:57
Speaker
It always makes me think of at our church. Growing up, there was this lady. I can't remember what her name was. But anyway, she was an older lady in her 70s, you know, and she had been going to that church.
00:12:11
Speaker
since she was a kid or something like that. And just the sweetest old lady there was, you know, but she would, she would like ask some of the kids to sit with her sometimes, you know, and so I sat with her a couple times. Like every church service from there forward, I noticed it, but it would be dead silent in the church and she would just do that, like deep, loogie snuff. Ugh.
00:12:41
Speaker
Over time, it didn't matter if they were praying. It didn't matter what it was. And from then on, like it was always like a noise that I heard. But then I knew like, oh, it's Mrs. So and so. That's disgusting. Gail in the snail in it. Gail in the snail. I only actually just I wouldn't have caught that reference except for I feel like you've made it before. But I did. I've recently revisited. It's always sunny. Oh, congratulations. That's such a great show.
00:13:10
Speaker
I'm right about there, like with the gala snail. Spit it out or swallow it, Gail. Okay, so what's been going on in your world? God, I don't know a lot. Oh, so I mentioned the Renaissance fair last week. And there was something that had also I wanted to bring up and we had run out of time.
00:13:34
Speaker
So we stayed in a hotel, as I mentioned. You haven't even listened to the game because you're a bad friend. That is true. The smoke alarm went off, and the fire alarm went off at the hotel we stayed at. So we all had to evacuate in the morning we were leaving. So we just ended up leaving. We were all packed and ready to go, so it was great. But before that,
00:14:00
Speaker
my wife, she's just getting ready, whatever. And I'm sitting in the hotel bed by myself watching. Uh, I was flipping through the channels and I found a televangelist and I decided to like, I guess I'll watch this. Uh, and I was like a little ashamed. Like you just kind of feel like an idiot sitting there watching a televangelist by yourself. As soon as like
00:14:24
Speaker
I hear the bathroom door open. I changed the channel like I'm in high school or in middle school watching something I'm not supposed to. The sex scene in the metrics just came on. But dude, it's just wild. It was on like USA, which is a pretty normal channel, right? Everyone knows US. And why are they playing televangelist shit in the morning? I don't know. Why do cable channels surrender their Sunday morning airwaves to like idiots?
00:14:53
Speaker
Yeah. And then I was wondering if these people are paying them for airtime. I'm not sure. It's like, it's like a company airing an infomercial. I mean, it might get, might get few, like enough people watching it where they're some ad revenue, but I don't think they don't take ad breaks. So these, they must be paying for that airtime. But it's funny because one of the things they get into, and obviously we all know,
00:15:19
Speaker
as a nonprofit, a 501 C three or whatever it is, you are not, you're not allowed to get political, right? You can't endorse a political party. You can't endorse candidates. Uh, and watching this televangelist go off.
00:15:33
Speaker
Their cadence, dude, that televangelist cadence is just a nightmare to listen to. Like, yeah, like you, that's a learned pattern of speech. You don't, no one talks like that in real life. And he's just doing his like, he's going off on how just dark these times are, right? Reading Bible verses about the,
00:15:56
Speaker
the darkness of the coming times, signs of the times, all that kind of shit. And it's like, you know, a lot of these pastors now, a lot of these young ones coming up, these younger pastors, they don't want to take a stand. And they're succumbing to some of these social issues of today. They're not standing firm on the Bible. They're giving way to culture and caving on some of these social issues.
00:16:21
Speaker
And it pans to the audience. And surprisingly, there was some younger people there, like late 20s, early 30s. I was like, why? You're too young to be.
00:16:31
Speaker
still involves it like you should have left by now like that's a weird place for you to be a lot of older people though everyone's just like amen two hands up in the air you know and i'm like that's so interesting because you gotta be careful right if you're actually publicly airing that you would think you'd have to be i mean i i guess like kenneth copeland and all those psychopaths have got away with it for a long time but it's like
00:16:56
Speaker
You can see the way that they won't they don't say anything specifically, but they say everything at the same time. It's so annoying. It's like, oh, you watch that. And you're just I remember, I remember as a kid, that stuff being insinuated and you knew what they meant and you
00:17:13
Speaker
projected certainly but when you just like go back and watch televangelists now it's it's embarrassing like it's uh i don't know man i was just and then jill walks out and i'm like oh i wasn't watching anything i didn't think she realized i was watching it and she mentioned that we were all out to dinner that or out to breakfast that morning and all the people we were with she was like yeah
00:17:37
Speaker
And we were talking about the smoke alarm, the fire alarm going off and Jill was just like, yes. And right before that, same with watching a televangelist on TV. I was like, why'd you tell everybody? No, I wasn't. I would never. I know.
00:17:52
Speaker
Oh my God, it's so embarrassing to watch. Yeah, it is funny how like the the message is the same all the time. Like we were driving through the middle of nowhere and my truck is having like problems with the Bluetooth system.
00:18:08
Speaker
So occasionally it just kicks my phone out and reverts to AM radio. And yeah, same thing. What's that? It's the best kind of radio. Oh yeah. And always a terrible signal. It doesn't matter. You could be next door to the studio and it's like a crackly, awful signal.
00:18:28
Speaker
I know it's terrible. I don't know why there are still AM radio channels. I don't know. I mean, Rush Limbaugh is gone, but as long as we remember the things that he taught us, he'll live on in us forever. Like his Christmas album.
00:18:50
Speaker
In the eventual Disney adaptation of your life story, I want you to have like a Mufasa Simba moment with Rush Limbaugh's ghost. Oh. And I'll be Rafiki. Okay, I'm into it. No, he's whacking you with the snake.
00:19:12
Speaker
Yeah, I don't I don't understand why that message doesn't get it's got to be like there's obviously there's a core group of people that love that stuff and revel in it long term. Yeah, but and give their money to it. Yeah, I was in that community for quite a while. Like I was listening to the radio all the time and I was a big like Glenn Beck fan and stuff like that. And eventually I just got
00:19:40
Speaker
Sick of it because it's the same thing over and over again it like especially when you're talking about politics because there's like a continual emergency happening according to those people. It shifts like one thing ends and immediately like the next thing kicks in. It's like oh, they're expanding abortion rights. Oh, well, that's over now. So they're gonna take the guns away, you know, and That's a perfect one to default when things slow down. You can always bring it back to that
00:20:08
Speaker
Yeah, like you find some minor change in the laws of like some backwater in a state that you don't live in and boom, it's like this is the entry point. Like this is the slippery slope moment where eventually like they're going to legalize abortion up to three years old. If anyone's ever had kids. I'm sure the temptation is there occasionally.
00:20:33
Speaker
I still have, there's still a reset button? I'm just kidding, I love my kids. No one get too alarmed.
00:20:40
Speaker
I think there was like a bit of a shift in that, like a temporary shift after the election. Like after January, I think so many people were just born out with that stuff and like didn't like where people within their group took things. And it seemed like that really kind of died down for a minute because people are just exhausted. But then it always picks up steam again. I just don't, who's got the energy?
00:21:08
Speaker
to continually invest in another potential apocalypse over and over and over again, you know, I know a handful of people who are still as conservative as they'll ever be. And that have said that they stopped watching the news like this, like Fox, they were Fox News people, but they're like, we just stopped because they wouldn't let me I didn't watch CNN or
00:21:29
Speaker
We're a one America news network family now. I know a few people have been like, we just stopped. It's exhausting. And I realized that I feel better when I'm not watching it. It's like, yeah, no kidding. That's what a lot of people have been trying to tell you for a while. You can't live in that constant state of alarm and shock all the time. It's so exhausting for your body. You just feel like you're going to collapse after a while. Well, especially having the last two years of COVID and all that stuff,
00:21:58
Speaker
I've stopped listening to several podcasts.
Media and Relationship Boundaries
00:22:04
Speaker
I've done a bunch of podcast episodes over the past few months. I'll be midway in and they'll start talking about COVID. I don't want to hear about it anymore. I don't want to hear about it. I don't want to hear the latest thing. I just want to think about something else for a minute. I know. It's occupied so much of the airwaves. It is an exhausting thing to
00:22:26
Speaker
have to be a part of. I don't want to really talk to people about it. I know there's that fatigue and then there's a doctor in the city near me that was talking about how their hospitals
00:22:43
Speaker
opening those tents and getting emergency space because more people are being hospitalized for COVID and they don't have the room. And it's like part of that's because people don't want to talk about it, don't want to think about it. Everyone's kind of going back to things being normal for the most part in a lot of ways, but it's like, I don't know, like it
00:23:03
Speaker
If there's one thing that's definitely made its rounds, it's the mental health toll that all this has taken. It's the physical risks, but then there's also the mental health crisis that we have now of people just feeling fucked in the head at this point. It's a lot. I don't know. Especially if you're a younger person, I think we all went through
00:23:27
Speaker
a stage or are going through a stage where it's like your political opinions are a huge part of your personality. And, you know, there's a lot of really important stuff. And we talked about a bunch of that stuff on here. We've had guests on to talk about, you know, the the prison industrial complex and like sexual assault on campus and all that kind of stuff. Like, that's all very important stuff.
00:23:51
Speaker
But if your personality is tied in with this back and forth Fox slash CNN daily emergency level political discourse, you got to get out of that. You've got to find something else to invest in. Yeah, I think so too.
00:24:10
Speaker
I feel like if you're like it's it's easy for a lot of people to be like, well, I have to know about this and more people ought to know about this and stuff. But the the daily grind of like following whatever like headline story is happening right this second, like if you talk about the vast majority of those like big headlines and and, you know, trumped up controversy and stuff like that a month later, they don't matter anymore.
00:24:40
Speaker
Like it's gone. It's over. It really wasn't that big of a deal to begin with. Like it's on to the next thing. I just think, I mean, I, I feel like I regret getting stuck in that cycle for as long as I did because it does not make you happy. It's unfulfilling and you know, the vast majority about it, even especially like conspiracy theory stuff, whether it's true or not is almost inconsequential. Can you as a person do anything about it?
00:25:09
Speaker
Yeah. Or whatever you think you can do, just do that. I mean, people aren't listening to you. I've had plenty of conversations with people who think I'm completely wrong about a lot of things and are maybe even disappointed in me. And I have to live with that. But it's like none of those conversations have ever amounted to... There's a very small group of people in which you can have conversations with
00:25:35
Speaker
where they will listen and you may be impactful or you will probably never know if you're impactful or your conversations with certain people matter because people don't change their mind in an instant and i remember that time in my life like it was probably just like post college i felt like i could go toe to toe with anybody i would pick an argument have that fight argue with my dad about something.
00:25:57
Speaker
And now I'm like, I can't, I get like that anxious pit in my stomach the second anything comes up that could go sour. And I'm like, I don't, I know where this is gonna go. It's gonna end with, it's like, there's certain relationships that are only going to like last or only, you can only have if you don't talk about certain things, right? Because you'll just end up.
00:26:19
Speaker
like hating each other over stuff. And I don't know, like, there are people who think that that's worth the I don't know, maybe you can weigh it out in your own life. And you can think that losing really certain relationships is worth it. Certain ones to maybe being right. And that there may there's probably lines to draw. I don't really know what those are. I think that's what's really difficult about where we're at right now is like, there are so many lines being drawn and figuring out for you which ones are the right ones to
00:26:47
Speaker
and relationships over. I don't know. I lean towards like, there aren't many lines worth ending relationships over. No. But other people don't feel the same way. And I don't know, I guess that's for them to decide on their own personal health and wellbeing.
00:27:09
Speaker
But I think it's tough. It's weird. And it's an awkward time. And I just our world with the political zeitgeist with the your ability to get whatever information you want to back up whatever belief you have. And you can see it everywhere all the time. I don't know. It's like we're at an epistemological crisis at this point. I think I think it's like where you draw the line.
00:27:37
Speaker
on that issue, to where it starts to purposely affect relationships is usually more about a person who won't stop bringing that up with you. I think that's a thing that's really hard and it's not something that I've mastered yet by any means, but I'm trying to consciously establish boundaries.
00:28:01
Speaker
In some of those relationships, you know, and I think it's way better to establish those boundaries, even though it's awkward. And sometimes it's going to, you know, you're going to have screw ups and stuff on both sides of that. Like it's way better to be like, dude, look.
00:28:17
Speaker
We don't agree on this and neither one of us is convincing the other of anything. Like I really, I just don't, I don't want to talk about this when we're together. Okay. Let's just set it aside. We don't need to talk about it. I know where you stand. You know where I stand. There's so many other things that we can focus on and like it's getting to the point where it's hard to be friends with you because I just dread this interaction that we're having right now.
00:28:42
Speaker
I don't want that. I want to be able to enjoy your company. I want you to be able to enjoy mine, you know? And some people are not going to be able to do that. But I think a lot of people, especially, you know, you reached a certain age, I think it's easier to recognize those.
00:28:58
Speaker
The value of those boundaries and like those are the relationships that I think are worth like putting a little more effort into and and keeping those people close rather than just Well, we don't agree so we can't be around each other, you know, right? Yeah, there was a time as recently where a Person I was talking with brought something Up like that. It was just like it was a total conversation derail and it was clearly a hijacking of the conversation to
00:29:28
Speaker
to be mad about whatever they were mad about that I clearly don't agree with. I think they're angry about something that's pretend or make believe a real thing. And it was like, all I said was, why did you just do that? I was like, what? I was like, why did you do that? We were having a conversation about our lives and what's going on with them. And you just stole it to make it about
00:29:55
Speaker
You and whatever you wanted to to be about and I was like, I just this I don't I don't see what the point of that was I don't know why you would do that to this conversation and it was awkward as shit and I kind of like walked off and Then it was like yeah, no, sorry Yeah, you're right. And then we kind of found the conversation again, and it was weird, but it was worth it I'm not great at that. That's like hard to call it out in the moment because it can turn into an argument
00:30:23
Speaker
especially depending on the type of the person that you're having the conversation with, but trying to, especially with kids, dude, with us, with Jill and I having kids that there's certain things I just don't really want my kids being around. Like, you know, there's certain,
00:30:41
Speaker
They're not going to adapt a lot of it now, but there is plenty of stuff that I think could enter into my kid's psyche through being around certain types of beliefs and conversations. And my kids pick up on stuff. They pick up on the stuff that Jill and I talk about. And I'm like,
00:30:59
Speaker
At some point, I feel like I have to have those conversations with people. I specifically do not want you teaching my kids this or that, and usually pertaining to Christianity, certain concepts that some people might think are biblical. That would be very troubling to me if I found out that they were teaching my kids, even if it's just through
00:31:24
Speaker
media or literature like that they think is benign or helpful. Not to get super personal, but I don't really know a way around it. And even my mom had mentioned, oh, I could like, hey, well, this is a good transition into our guest here because we're going long anyway. So my mom mentions bringing out, I should find the art of like old Adventures in Odyssey tapes for the kids. And I didn't say anything at the moment. I was just like, I don't know. That's all I said was like, yeah,
00:31:54
Speaker
I don't know. I don't know that she really heard me or paid any attention. I didn't, I really didn't push it. I was like, I don't know if I want them listening to that. I don't know what kind, I don't remember it enough to know what kind of messages or ideology it's communicating. And that is a weird thing. That's a weird conversation to have is like, I don't care. Whatever my parents want to believe and mate, whatever beliefs I want to maintain when it comes to their Christian faiths.
00:32:22
Speaker
I'm not that worried about it until it starts affecting their relationship to other people. And if that was the case, for the most part, it hasn't affected their relationships with any of their kids. It's not my siblings, not me. So to just be like, I just don't want my kids to listen to that. I don't want them to absorb that messaging. It might sound a little offensive to them, but they're also my kids and I can make those choices.
00:32:46
Speaker
Yeah. Well, it's like when we were growing up, that was one of the few like acceptable, quote unquote acceptable, like forms of media, like of that variety that you could listen to. And you know, that's not the case anymore. There's tons and tons of stuff. You know, you give them an audio book or you can show them a TV show. I'm sure there's kids podcasts.
00:33:11
Speaker
Like yeah, there is we don't need that we don't need this and like I I mean I suppose if you vetted them first, which would be annoying then like I don't want to do that I don't want to go back and listen to Alice worth of adventures and Odyssey tapes despite the fact that I would get to listen to 12 year old 10 year old 9 year old Dave Griffin Yes
00:33:35
Speaker
Let's go ahead and we seamlessly roll into the into the intro. Our guest coming up is Dave Griffin. It's most people who grew up Christian probably know him better as Jimmy Barkley from Adventures in Odyssey. He was one of if not the longest running member, a cast member on on the show. He did about 10 years on it and
00:34:03
Speaker
It was, it was interesting to talk to him about what that was like. Uh, you know, his story, his time on the show, he has a lot of, um, he's had a lot of difficult mental health struggles throughout his life that have put him in difficult situations. Uh, we learned a little bit about how focus on the family through adventures and honestly didn't, um, you know, didn't really believe in residuals or
00:34:33
Speaker
fair payer. It's not anything out of the ordinary. It's nothing that you even probably wouldn't expect in an organization like that. Yeah, exactly. It's a ministry. Therefore, everyone involved has to get paid in pennies and just bragging rights for how many chairs they can stack all at once or how many stacked chairs they can carry all at once.
00:34:53
Speaker
That's as good as any payment telling a bunch of girls in middle school that you, you carried four chairs in each arm. So, uh, I'm going to tell you, I'm the sword drill champion. It's just one step above all of us. And he was Jimmy Barkley. So it was, uh, we covered, I think at the top of the episode, but we, we had tried to do this with him and we had to, we lost audio on it. It was our kind of our first big, uh, podcast kerfuffle and now.
00:35:22
Speaker
We were able to reschedule and rerecord, which was great of him to be able to do that. So I don't know if you have anything to add, Casey, before we go ahead and introduce our guests. We introduced them before we cut to the interview. I'm really terrible at this. Still, we've been doing this for fucking a year, dude, and I'm still just like babbling on and getting my words wrong.
00:35:46
Speaker
The only thing I'd say is if you're not in the Discord, you should jump in on that. It's a lot of fun. There's a lot of great little side conversations and stuff like that that go on as a result of being in there. I do want to give a shout out. This is late, but we have
00:36:07
Speaker
a thread on the Discord called communal self-promotion. I wanted to shout out a new buddy of ours, his band, it's called Bitter Truth. And you can find their first EP on Spotify. Really cool, like Michigan hardcore band, definitely worth checking out. And if you haven't yet, go visit our very first sponsor,
00:36:32
Speaker
Captain Cecil's coffee. It's great stuff. I've tried three or four different varieties now A couple of our friends have have gone in on it and a couple of you guys have bought some and it's it's great coffee It's great cause because it supports local lighthouse You know upkeep and maintenance and things like that and you know, let's face it almost all of you drink coffee and
00:36:56
Speaker
Yeah, you can go to walmart and buy a bag of starbucks and that's there's nothing wrong with that. That's perfectly fine but You know supporting some of these small businesses and stuff Especially one that has a great value system and stuff. It's it's just a great way to You know use your money to support people like you. I think captain sees is a great example of that
00:37:19
Speaker
And hey, if you're going to be buying coffee anyways, why not give Captain Cecil's a try? I think you're going to love it. And they've got some cool merch over there too. So with that being said. I want to shout out the art. The art comes out great. All the labels on the coffee has very appealing to the eye. I got to go ahead and shout that out too.
00:37:40
Speaker
It is pretty cool. Is he going to do like a Halloween city a day after Halloween, 30% off like bloody bags of coffee or something? Yeah. That's spirit of like spirit Halloween. All everything's 40% off all the time until that store disappears for another 11 months.
Humorous Rants and Nostalgia
00:38:00
Speaker
I would rather have COVID than go to spirit Halloween. I hate it. I hate it. I hate it.
00:38:05
Speaker
It's like the worst place ever. Just the most cheap, nasty junk that stinks. All of it. I hate it. You would get COVID if you went there probably trying on one of the masks that 150 other snot-nosed children tried on and didn't buy right before you got there. Yeah, it's a great time to put on that plastic Mike Myers mask and just lick the mouth hole.
00:38:34
Speaker
We need to get out of here, but I'm just going to say this. I remember my parents when you go to like a CVS or some shit where they had those rubber masks, putting it on, they're like, get, get that, take that off right now. And you're like, what's the big deal? It's a Halloween mask. You're supposed. And like now the idea of putting that on, if I saw my kids do it, I would go fucking banana. It's disgusting. My parents were right about that. It smells like the inside of Paul Ryan's gimp suit.
00:39:04
Speaker
And on that note, enjoy our conversation with Dave Griffin. Sam, temperatures dropping. Leaves are changing. I think we're well into the fall season. Yeah, well into it. And the fall season where I live in New England is a premier destination point. It's a lot of people's favorite time of the year here. And it also happens to be my favorite time of the year.
00:39:34
Speaker
and what's better on a crisp fall morning than a great cup of coffee. If you're a coffee enthusiast, you're gonna absolutely love Captain Cecil's coffee roasters. Captain Cecil's is a Massachusetts based artisan roastery born out of a love for the sea and a passion for great coffee. They offer a rotating menu of carefully crafted single source roasts and blends tailored to the season. From the light fruitful notes of empty gold to the nutty banana bread warmth of knobska,
00:40:03
Speaker
There's bound to be a cup of Captain Cecil's that's perfect for you. Empty gold is honestly an incredible coffee. That and another one of my favorites is 19 miles at sea. 19 miles at sea is a little unlike that kind of caramel nutty side and then empty gold.
00:40:20
Speaker
It's a bit on like the fruitier side and I personally just don't like dark roast. I like a light to medium roast coffee and those two are fantastic. The huge hits at my house and we would have friends over and I'd, you know, brew a pot of coffee and everyone raved about it. It's a big hit. I mean, they're just absolutely delicious.
00:40:40
Speaker
Knobsk has definitely been the hit at my house. We absolutely love it. On top of great coffee, Captain Cecil's is committed to caring for the beautiful Northeastern shore that they love so much. 10% of all sales go to organizations like the American Lighthouse Foundation, who ensure the preservation of the historic New England coastline.
00:40:59
Speaker
So if you're ready to welcome that autumn breeze with a warm cup of Captain Cecil's, visit CaptainCecil'sCoffee.com, enter the promo code GrowingUpChristian at checkout to receive 10% off your first order and free shipping on orders over $50. That's CaptainCecil's.com promo code GrowingUpChristian. Hey, everybody. Welcome back. We're here with our guest, Dave Griffin. Some of you might know him a little bit better as
00:41:29
Speaker
Jimmy Barkley and Dave, we thank you. Thanks so much for hanging out with us, man. Thank you. Nice to have you back on and for our listeners. Just to clear the air upfront, we actually had Dave on a little bit ago and we had to take a break in the middle of the recording and
00:41:52
Speaker
We ended up having... There was a horse in my yard. There were horses involved. As I recall, there were horses involved. I'm since learned that the horse is cricket. That's her name and she's a rascal. We recently retailed that story. You mentioned it because you were wearing your Christian nightmare shirt and the old lady would start talking to you about why the heck you were wearing that.
00:42:14
Speaker
We were in the middle of recording this episode with Dave, and then we lost the whole second part of the audio. So we are here with him again. So Dave, we really appreciate you doing it again. I know there's probably some awkwardness in it, rehashing the same things. So I mean, just to back you up for that, it's super dope. Yeah. No, for sure, for sure. And I just want to make sure the horse is secured this time, correct? It's dead. No, the horse died. Oh, the horse was shot.
00:42:43
Speaker
I'm starting to think that the horse has never secured. Okay. I just, I want to understand, you know, kind of what the situation is before we get rolling. Yeah. But yes, thank you for having me in and let's dive in. Yeah. So, okay. Let's go ahead and just start with who this, I mean, let's start at the beginning of the Dave Griffin story. Um, because obviously spending the number of years that you did with adventures and Odyssey, uh, organized, I mean, I program run by one of the most prominent
00:43:13
Speaker
Christian organizations within evangelicalism for sure. Focus on our family. There's obviously a lot going on there. So let's go ahead and let's start with how you grew up, the type of world you grew up in as far as Christianity goes and how you found your way into adventures and odyssey. Sure. So I was born in Florida and I had mentioned that geographically, you know, the first 10 years of my life were spent in Florida and Texas.
00:43:43
Speaker
And I think folks will understand some of the cultural elements of that as a kid of the 80s, growing up in those environments at that particular time. When I was born, I was extremely underweight. I had jaundice. I broke my shoulder bone coming out. And I spent the first week of my life in an incubator. This was a relatively new thing back in the late 70s. And that'll come into play later in the story.
00:44:12
Speaker
But my mother was very religious, my dad less so. Uh, and my dad was just kind of like, all right, you know, do, do what you need to do with the kids. It's good to put them in church. Um, and so I didn't go with you guys. Never, no, never, never didn't, he, I think did not enjoy his experience growing up. Uh, he grew up in an Episcopalian environment. Um, and so for him, church was much more like formal and, uh, like Catholic light, you know,
00:44:41
Speaker
He needed like a Mr. Whitaker type character. Kind of, I think also, but like his family, it wasn't as, it just wasn't this heavy thing. It was, you know, whereas for my mom, you know, it was much more of a profound conversion experience that she had had. I don't know all the details, but I think it had something to do with her being pregnant with me. And then like, you know, me almost dying and whatnot.
00:45:09
Speaker
Um, but so grew up, you know, my whole life going to church multiple times a week. Um, you know, I can remember we would go visit my grandparents, you know, up in their late cottage up in Michigan. And, you know, my mom would put us in vacation Bible school for the week, which would like, infuriate me.
00:45:29
Speaker
Yeah. Vacation Bible School is a wild experience. I'm going to derail real quick. What's the one craft you did in Vacation Bible School that sticks out with you? I think my mom still has it. It was an art project where they took a bunch of matches, lit them on fire, and then smothered the box out so that you had these matches that the heads were burned. And then we did this thing where
00:45:58
Speaker
Uh, made them into a cross. And so the burning effect gave it like a very interesting. Aged colored effect. It was actually very beautiful. Um, it sounds cool, but it was, yeah, it was, uh, you know, uh, let's make a cross out of burnt matches. Interesting. My favorite was where you have like the piece of, uh, ribbon, you know, and you put the little plastic beads on it and you make a lizard.
00:46:24
Speaker
Like the instructions always showed that you had like 15, 30 different options, but nobody ever made anything but a lizard. No, it's, uh, I, but see, I was a kid, I hated vacation bubble school. I never enjoyed going to church. I never, I just did not. I, it was a, it always felt like punishment to me. Like we just did school all week and now we have to like go do more school on the Sundays. Like my weekend, I don't even get a full weekend. Yeah. And then.
00:46:52
Speaker
When I was in the fourth grade, we had had a house fire and my dad was injured. And about a week later, my mom had a really weird allergic reaction and almost died. And so there were these two massive events and I kind of had a breakdown what they would now understand to be like a mental health episode. But back then they didn't, you know, this is like 1986. No one knew what, you know, what's wrong with this nine year old kid.
00:47:22
Speaker
Um, and so we, they transferred me from that school to a private school that my mom was teaching at a private Christian Breein style school. And so I've, and then in my middle order or Texas, this was in Texas. Yeah. And, um, and so I've, I've had experience in the public school sector. I've had experience in the private Christian school sector in my junior high was a private Christian school experience. Uh, so my world growing up in.
00:47:51
Speaker
sort of the evangelical bubble was pretty significant. I was definitely more in the evangelical bubble than in the secular bubble for sure. You know, my mom was very conscientious about like, you know, what kind of television we watched, what movies we went to.
00:48:11
Speaker
It was a pretty strict upbringing, spare the rods, boil the child kind of thing. Was your dad, did he care as much? No, no, he really, you know, there was an interesting tension in my house growing up because I think my dad just didn't really had no interest in any of it and kind of rolled his eyes at all of it. And for my mother, it was this overly
00:48:40
Speaker
emotional thing that drives everything that she does. And I can remember in my earliest years, trying to understand and have arguments with her about like, well, do you love dad more or God more? And the answer was always like, well, I love God more. Well, do you love me more than God? No, I love God more than you. And it's just like this very
00:48:59
Speaker
hard things for like a six year old seven year old kid to wrap their mind around, right? Like, yeah, is that healthy? That's so funny. I haven't, you know, like, do like with even just interpersonal relationships with my mom, it's like, there is this like hierarchy within evangelicals. It's like, you love Oh, yeah.
00:49:17
Speaker
God and then you love your spouse and then your kids. And that was considered okay. And then I, so he'd be like, who do you love dad more than us? And it's like, yeah. But honestly, like push comes to shove. Like you say it cause it's the right thing. But I mean, if you ask me if I love my wife and my kids more, like it's different and equal. And if it's not, you have, oh, that's weird. You're answering that. Well, some of that, you know, the early dissonance that you get as a kid in that environment, um,
00:49:45
Speaker
you know, that this notion that like, dad's going to hell because he doesn't believe what mom believes. Yeah, that's with you. That is gonna mess with you and mess with your your concept of then, then you go into this evangelical, you know, Southern Baptist environment, and everything that they're telling you is spoken as though it's the truth. And you can't question this truth. So
00:50:10
Speaker
when these truths are reinforced in your daily life, sometimes these things can be very confusing. And when you're a child, you don't, you know, you don't know how to discern, you know, what is true versus what isn't you trust the adults in your life and, and when they give you conflicting messages, it's very confusing. Um, and so that was kinda, you know, I would say I grew up in basically your typical, you know, from my age, I'm 44, uh,
00:50:36
Speaker
I was 10 in 1987, so I was a kid of the 80s, a Cold War kid for sure. And all the things that that means of being a Christian at that time in that place and space and in the southern part of our country, which is the Bible Belt for a reason, that part of our nation is very rooted in a lot of
00:51:01
Speaker
these practices. Question for you. You remember growing up in that time period and Colborne, all that kind of stuff. I'm curious as to like, do you remember a person who there was chatter about might be the antichrist? And who was it? Oh, goodness. I mean, well, it depends, you know, that Ronald Reagan was considered the antichrist, then the big name of that era, as I recall,
00:51:32
Speaker
was a character, a woman by the name of Madeleine Murray O'Hara, who is this very famous atheist. I don't think she was ever referred to as an antichrist. Mine was like, they would talk about like, well, Prince Harry's popular, maybe he's the antichrist. It's always something, you know, it's always these weird interpretations. What I will say is that when you ask that question, my immediate reaction is like, which one?
00:51:59
Speaker
Because in that culture, there's like, it's always, oh, Obama's the Antichrist. No, no, no, no, no, wait, it's this person. No, it's this guy over here. It's always some shifting target, right? I remember that Obama stage. He's my personal Lord and Antichrist. So, you know, in the 80s, you know, this was like a hot time for a lot of like, you know, right wing paranoia. It's really where it was all born, was kind of during that time period.
00:52:29
Speaker
And yeah, so I would say I grew up like your typical, typical white privileged American kid. I've grown up in a suburb outside of Houston. I'm going to the churches that everybody in my neighborhood is going to. So this is, it's more than just like a family thing. It's like the entire culture of my neighborhood. You know, when someone new moves in, oh, which church do you go to? Hey, you should come to our church.
00:52:58
Speaker
that, you know, these are really the cultural centers of life in these places. There's a church wars going on. Everyone thought that. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And leave their friends want to come to their youth group. Right. You know, stay away from those dirty Methodists and the Methodists are like, for the love of God, watch out for the Baptists, you know.
00:53:16
Speaker
That'd be a good TV show on A&E or TLC, Church Wars. I'd watch that. We are born to host that show. I think we're living through it right now. So that was kind of, you know, I think for the era, what I experienced was very typical of the time. Sure, yeah. And then when I was 10, we moved out to Southern California. My dad got a job change or a promotion or something. He was in sales.
00:53:46
Speaker
The number one reason families move. Right. Not a different job. Dad's got dad's job. So we we headed out to California and and I was 10 and we could I had just come off of this sort of mental health breakdown. I was very high strung stressed out kid things things that we understand now to be early onset mental illness that just back in the day I was just boy that kids want tight. What's wrong with them?
00:54:16
Speaker
you know, very sensitive kid, sensitive to, you know, if people were mean to me or something, you know, tears were never far from my world. And so when we moved out to California, my mom was trying to figure out something that I could do. I was very sad about this move. Fourth grade, I had all these best friends. I had, you know, I can remember like looking out the back of the van as my friends were like on their bicycles chasing the van down the street.
00:54:45
Speaker
as we're moving away and just the tears just flowing down my cheeks. You know, as you say goodbye to all of your friends for the rest of your life. Because back then, if I wanted to, you know, talk to any of my friends, it was like a 10 minute $10 a minute phone call. Right. Long distance. Long distance phone call. You did that already this month. Yeah, you had to be pen pals. Did you stay pen pals with anyone?
00:55:10
Speaker
I tried for a number of years. And then just over time, by the time we were all teenagers, it petered out. And at that time, that was a really big change coming from Texas to California. So a lot of the cultural changes that start to take over, you realize we would go back and visit a couple of times. And the life that my friends were leading was so different in mind that just a lot of that connection fell apart.
00:55:40
Speaker
So we get to California and my mom had noticed that I had enjoyed doing some school plays. And she found a local Christian, of course, it had to be Christian, Christian Community Theater. It was run by a woman who, you know, her passion is her name is Martine Craig, the Passion of the Christ. Yeah, she her stuff is, you know, arts in service, you know, let's use performing arts as a way to glorify God. And
00:56:09
Speaker
So I got into this, the first play I did was with Johnny Eric Santata. And, uh, then during the rehearsals for that play, I get, she called about a dozen of us up one day and she's like, Hey, you know, go to this place for an audition. And I, so this would have been November, uh, probably October, maybe September of 1987.
00:56:37
Speaker
So I'm in the fourth grade and my parents decided to hold me back a year so that I would de-stress, which just crushed my spirit. Um, I was like a straight A student. I was in gifted classes. Um, but I was so high strung that my parents were trying to like take all this, uh, stress off of me. Interesting. So they thought keeping you back with light and like the school load and you'd be, that would like mitigate stress or something. Okay. Yeah.
00:57:04
Speaker
It fired massively because what it taught me was that if you do a good job.
00:57:09
Speaker
It doesn't help you. A for effort, you know, they tried. Sorry, kid, you have to go back. You know, like you've got A's, but you essentially failed, right? That's the best part about childhood trauma is it was generally because of parents trying. So I'm looking forward to finding out what my kids absolutely hate me for when I'm there. Oh, you are going to wreck them so hard. I say this as a parent. One of the best parts of being a parent is realizing your good intentions are going to cause future therapy bills.
00:57:40
Speaker
At least maybe they're going to be free by the time my kids are that age. So that'd be dope. Only if everybody votes for them. Look that way. Care, please, please. I'm begging you because I need it. So this would have been, yeah, 1987. So I was in the fourth grade again, which destroyed my confidence. And really like that was where the depression stuff like started kicking in. So they say, you know, go to this audition and I don't know what I'm doing.
00:58:09
Speaker
I go to this building in Pomona, California, and this was right as they were moving into their Pomona facilities, this place called Focus on the Family. Never heard of it. No, nothing about it. Um, 10 year old kid. Uh, and they brought me into a room and they had two or three pages of script and you know, a little tape recorder and a couple of microphones and it was a pretty janky setup. And they had me read and did the key skill set that I had.
00:58:37
Speaker
I, you know, if you're trying to make it into voiceover acting is I can read and make it not sound like I'm reading. Um, and so that was one thing, you know, when people ask about, you know, what does it take to be an actor read practice reading read all the time. Uh, I was an avid reader as a kid, you know, in school, when like they would make break up like the text and like, everybody has to read a paragraph and there's the kids that like really struggle with the reading and everybody just has to kind of like sit through it.
00:59:06
Speaker
I was the kid that they would give like the bigger paragraph to because, you know, I could be the workhorse of the class. Oh, that was the worst. When you, when you're reading in school and they're like, you, everyone takes a paragraph and you're looking at who's next and you're counting the paragraph. Oh no, no, I got the big one. Whereas, you know, if you've got like a learning disability and reading is a struggle for you, like, no, please give me the, just give me like two sentences, please.
00:59:33
Speaker
It was the poor kids that really struggled with that. But for me, it was a skill set that I had. And my emotions are very much at the surface of who I am. I don't hide a lot. I mean, I do now more as I've gotten older. But as a kid, I was a very open kid. And so I could read and emote the way that they needed.
01:00:00
Speaker
And so we get a callback, I don't know, this would have been the first week of November. Hey, we'd like you to come in and record. And man, I'm ecstatic. I'm high on a cloud. I'm 10 years old and I'm about to go do a professional recording session. And so I went and the building, what I realized now was the organization had been moving from one building to another.
01:00:25
Speaker
And where I had done the audition was in the new building and the first recording was in the old building. So the old building you walk through and like all the lights are off. And it's 12 o'clock in the afternoon. All the furniture's gone. Like a zombie apocalypse. Yeah, it was totally weird. It was this strange thing. And then you enter into this room and it was the only time I ever recorded in a setup like this. It was like a table with five microphones coming out of it, like a spider's legs or something.
01:00:56
Speaker
And sitting across from me is this guy, his name's Hal, Hal Smith, something. I don't know, he's an old guy. I don't know any of these people. And we recorded the episode, and that was episode number two of Adventures in Odyssey. And I loved it. I didn't even realize I was going to get paid. When I found out I got paid, I was like, wait, this is cool.
01:01:21
Speaker
Did you even realize what you were recording? Did you get a breakdown of what was going on? Or was it just like you sat at this table and they're like, these are your lines? My recollection is that as much as I knew was that I was recording a radio play. That's it. Yeah. So there was not a lot of understanding of any scale of what it was. And I also thought this was just a one-off thing.
01:01:51
Speaker
And then I get a call back like two weeks later and they wanted me to come in and do episodes three and four. And then a month later, another call, you know, episode seven or 11 or whatever. And this just sort of kept happening. And I loved it. No conversation of like, this is what you do now. Like, had you heard the episode as they came out, were you aware of like, what was kind of going on? Well, they would send me a tape.
01:02:18
Speaker
uh, I would get this like bubble wrapped tape in the mail. Um, and that was really about it. And in the early days, like they, the turnaround time on those episodes was pretty fast. They were pretty much recording them, editing them, adding sound effect beds and music beds. And then like, I would say the turnaround time was maybe a month, maybe even less than that two weeks. I don't know. Cause it, I, I got the feeling definitely in the first year that it was almost a,
01:02:48
Speaker
And maybe this is a wrong vibe, but it felt to me like they were surprised at the success of it. Oh, yeah. Yeah. But like, and it just then all of a sudden it was like everybody was running around like their hair was on fire or something like just, you're in this constant state of like, we need to make more content now. And there was not, it was not the era that they have now where it's like, Oh, let's write a bunch of episodes ahead of time. Let's record with a full cast for a week.
01:03:18
Speaker
Um, and then let's spend three months, you know, doing post-production. This was the feeling I got at the time was like, they were doing two episodes at a time, two episodes at a time. And then as you know, things spooled up, uh, after we got the first dozen or two dozen episodes done, I think then they started to settle more into a groove, but they were trying to figure out like.
01:03:39
Speaker
Do they have one writing team? Do they have two writing teams? Like when you don't know if you're going to be like a show is going to be canceled. Yeah. Oh, for sure. Am I wrapped up ending at the end of season three because the viewers. Yeah. There was like no thought really to like long-term story lines or anything like that. It was, you know, even at a young age, I could kind of sense that this was like.
01:04:03
Speaker
You know, like a Christmas gift that had just been unwrapped, like the wrapping paper still on the floor and they're putting the batteries in and oh, wait, it works. Oh, this is more powerful than we thought it is. Um, and so, and, and two, it was like, you know, the character that I'm famous for, I never played for the first year that I was with the show. Uh, I played like, I don't know, half a dozen, seven, eight other characters. So yeah, like each episode was a different character. I'd be Freddie, I'd be Bobby, I'd be Mike, I'd be.
01:04:33
Speaker
Jeremy, I think, was a character I played. So they weren't even building a linear story at that time? Were these just all one-off episodes? Yeah, I think they were just all one-off episodes to kind of gauge, see what audience reaction is to it. But behind the scenes of what those calculations were, I have no idea. I was never privy to any behind-the-scenes information ever. I was just a hired gun to come in and play parts.
01:05:03
Speaker
Um, and then about a year into it, uh, as my recollection goes, I showed up one day and the thing that was very different was in this episode, I had a family and in the prior episodes I had. And they tell me like, all right, this is your new character and this is it. And I, I was a little bummed out cause I liked doing different characters, uh, as somebody who enjoys acting and the idea of only having to do one character seemed really boring. Um,
01:05:31
Speaker
But of course, now, all these years later, you look back and you think, man, I got to play a single character for a decade, which in acting is rare. Yeah, no kidding. And I think they recognize. Did you get bios for the character? Sorry, for the first, when you said the first year, and you did all different characters, and did you get different bios for the characters you were playing? Or did you kind of have to just read them as you read them? No. In fact, one of the unique ways that they record is,
01:05:59
Speaker
Sometimes this can come up to bite you. I would never know what the episode was before I arrived. Never got the script ahead of time. I do have a memory that there was a kid, I think, that struggled with some reading issues, and they were given the scripts ahead of time. But one of the things that happens with actors when you get scripts ahead of time is you content to develop a cadence where you'll
01:06:25
Speaker
You just sort of like you hear the musical rhythm of the line in your head and you can never break that. And so then when you're recording with the full cast, if you have rehearsed your lines prior, it's going to come out rehearsed and not feel organic. And one of the really beautiful ways that they record is as a full cast, typically with voiceover work, you're recording in a booth by yourself. But the thing that they always wanted in this, in this show was
01:06:52
Speaker
the spontaneous interaction between cast members and actors. And I think it gives a much stronger performance. So, but you would have no idea. I would never see a script until I showed up into the studio that morning. They would hand me my 30 pages and a pen and I would go and mark my line. Sometimes I wouldn't even read the script before I would get into the studio just to keep it totally fresh. Like I'm reading the line as though I'm saying these words for the first time.
01:07:21
Speaker
And so somebody is if somebody is like a person that can't react and read and apply like emotion and stuff like that to the line, like in the first couple of tries, they probably don't last very long, I would imagine. Right. Because you start having that production. Well, you will you would be able to pretty much suss that out in the audition.
01:07:45
Speaker
You'll, cause like, and I, years later I had the opportunity to audition or be somebody's audition scene partner when they were auditioning for the show. And you can tell right away whether somebody has that initial skillset or not. I think the odds of getting into the studio, especially in the later years, um, without having that skillset is almost impossible. In the early years, it was more likely because they were struggling finding kids.
01:08:14
Speaker
And so a lot of the kids were like, you know, Oh, Hey, there's a kid that goes to my church that, uh, you know, was really good in the Christmas pageant. You want me to ask her to come in? Sure. They auditioned my brothers. They were dope in those VBS skits. Those were. And so they were really desperate for kids early on. And I'm sure they were asking like all the folks on the family staffers, like, Hey, can your kids come in? And I think, you know, looking at it now.
01:08:44
Speaker
I think that was where they really kind of struck gold with me was that here was this kid, 10 years old, who loves to act. And I did. I absolutely, it was the way some kids pick up a baseball and like their life is set or, you know, you ride a horse for the first time and you know that you're into horses or, uh, or sit on a tractor or a fire truck or whatever. For me, acting was it like once I.
01:09:09
Speaker
Once I knew that I could get on stage and be someone other than myself for an hour, I was set. This is awesome. And so they saw that there was a talent in this kid, and I created this character for me and built a family around this character, if I can be so arrogant as to suggest that, as a way to tell. Now they were starting to think long-term about the show.
01:09:35
Speaker
Hey, we can, you know, have a character here where we can deal with a lot of family dramas, which most of the people that are going to be listening to the show are little kids and families, right? Siblings arguing with each other, you know, respect your mom and dad.
01:09:51
Speaker
How many times can the kids find a, the random kids find a pack of cigarettes and then have to decide what to do? The cigarette episodes were my favorites, you know, Jimmy and Donna smoking cigarettes behind the school. Has a brown paper bag under the porch. It is funny magazines where people don't wear clothes. Why does Jimmy have needle jacks in his arm?
01:10:21
Speaker
Oh. This guy, Dark. Sorry. You took a quick dark turn. No, I love dark. This is great. Jimmy Steele's prescription pad. Yeah, they didn't have vape pens back in the day, man. I wonder what they're tackling in that show now. Is it still going on?
01:10:45
Speaker
Oh yeah. Oh yeah. They're going to be tackling vape pens or edibles. I bet someone grabbed their parents' edibles by this point. I would hope, you know, that sounds like something Eugene would do. Eugene's probably microdosing LSD with all the other tech bros. Um, but, uh, but so yeah, that was, that was basically it was, uh, I was doing this show and I got this character given to me gift wrapped and
01:11:15
Speaker
uniquely, I was the only, I believe still this is true 35 years later. I believe I was the only male actor kid that was ever kept after my voice changed. They kept my voice changed around 12 or 13. And they kept me another seven years. So I recorded with them for 10 years solid. From the age of 10. I think they finally wrote me out when I was 20. Wow.
01:11:43
Speaker
That's pretty wild. I mean, because so they really had to like grow. I don't I'm not incredibly familiar with the, you know, the trajectory of the show. Like we had cassette tapes we would have. Right. Right. They animated that as like a couple of one off like episode like animated episodes. Okay. Yeah. I auditioned for a couple of them.
01:12:06
Speaker
And so like I would catch them, but not enough to like follow any sort of sort of like linear story. So if you're on it that long, do they do other characters age? Do they progress more character? So there's like an inside joke in the show where one of the main characters is this character, Connie, played by the wonderful Katie Lee. Well, Connie is supposed to be a teenager.
01:12:36
Speaker
And because Katie's voice never changes, she always sounds like she's 11. She just has one of those magical voiceover voices that defies her age. Like the woman who played Bart Simpson. Yeah, yeah, yeah, for sure. Nancy Cartwright. So the problem with Connie and Jimmy, and there's episodes where Jimmy has a crush on Connie, but then my voice changed and that was rich.
01:13:06
Speaker
that was written into the show where like I go through puberty. So, you know. Okay. Yeah. So, and then my character aged beyond Connie and that never made sense. And that was probably one of the reasons they wrote me out of the show, other than the fact that I was starting to become a mental health liability to them. Right. And the characters are like,
01:13:34
Speaker
They're starting to pick up on this. And so, uh, so yeah, so they, I think at this point, I think her character is probably maybe graduated high school finally after 35 years. I'm not sure. Uh, but my character clearly, like they decided to use this moment on my voice change to, um, educate kids about growing up. Um, so I got to have the indignity of my puberty, uh, experience broadcast to the entire evangelical world.
01:14:07
Speaker
I kind of wonder if, uh, if Dobson did have a hand in the Connie situation. Like he's like, don't you just wish they could stay teens forever. I'm not going to touch that one. What was the episode like when it was, uh, when, uh, Jimmy learned about masturbation for the first time? You know, haven't recorded it yet, or maybe it got lost in the archives. Not sure.
01:14:34
Speaker
What you need to do is create like a, what you need to do is create like a mock version of Adventures in Odyssey with like, with those kinds of things in it. Like a moral world was to David and Goliath. We need that for Adventures in Odyssey, I think. Yeah, you remember when Macaulay Cokken did that like, dark short film based on Home Alone?
01:15:00
Speaker
Yeah, I never saw it. It was a little rough. He like killed the burglars, if I remember right. We'll shop that after. We'll figure out how to get that made. Let's workshop that idea. Yeah, yeah. We'll take work for now. So yeah, so that's kind of the basic story of how I got into the show and then was on it for quite a long time.
01:15:30
Speaker
Uh, was then unceremoniously written out of it. Um, but it was a great experience and I enjoyed it tremendously. Uh, yeah. What was the experience of, um, yeah, what was the experience of, so you said like, you know, you get written off of it. It sounds okay. So you set it up, uh, at the top of like, you know, you didn't always know when you're going to get called back. And then it sounds like things got more consistent. Did you have more of a consistent schedule? Um, and then when you got kind of written off, how did that like,
01:16:01
Speaker
There was never a consistent schedule. You never knew really if when you went into a studio, if that was the last time you were going to be in or not. And when my voice changed, there was like a, like a year or 18 month long hiatus that they took. I think as there, as the organization moved to, uh, to Colorado. Um, so by the time they came back, we were recording a Burbank.
01:16:26
Speaker
But yeah, I never had a set schedule, never knew when they would call. And that was one of the things that was frustrating was, for me, this was the best part of my life at that time. Parallel to all of this, I was starting to, I was sad all the time. I couldn't figure out why. I was a really troubled kid, not so much with like getting into trouble, but just, you know, my brain was sort of a wreck and I hated school.
01:16:54
Speaker
Never fit in there. I was a great student, but I just never, I didn't like it. I didn't feel like I fit in with my peers at all. And also I had this thing where like I get to go work with adults and not just like work with adults, but like I'm working with people who are literally the best in their industry in the world. You know, every Saturday morning cartoon you're working with like, oh, this is the dude that you seen Winnie the Pooh. Yeah, that's him. Oh, shit.
01:17:22
Speaker
Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. Like Katie Lee. One of my favorite shows growing up was a cartoon on Nickelodeon called Muppet Babies. And my favorite character was Rolf the Dog. Well, Katie Lee, who plays Connie, is Rolf. And like
Voice Acting Industry Insights
01:17:35
Speaker
to find that out when you're 12, you're like, what? What the fuck? This has been like a conversation point on this is important lately. They've been doing like Muppet Babies versus Rugrats.
01:17:52
Speaker
Oh, Muppet Babies All Away. Get out of here with that Rugrats shit. Well, Rugrats is a very different show. Because it was later. Muppet Babies is a bit older than Rugrats. When I was nine years old, my friends and I would watch Muppet Babies, and then we would try to memorize the songs, and then we would fight over who got to be which character afterwards. And this is when I was living in Texas before I ever came out to California.
01:18:19
Speaker
I very clearly remember that show and when I found out Katie was Rolf, my jaw hit the floor. That's cool. I love that. It was like, Hal Smith did Beauty and the Beast. This was right around the time when Little Mermaid came out, when Disney was going back into their second renaissance of animated films. Will Ryan plays the little seahorse and there's Will standing right in front of me.
01:18:49
Speaker
I learned really quickly that these people were great at what they did. And so to go from that- I don't know if they had that many Hollywood insiders or whatever. Oh, that's the secret of that show. It's an interesting thing I've been meditating on about white evangelicalism. They basically pulled all the actors from their favorite 1950s show.
01:19:13
Speaker
And which is a very like common thing in that culture, like they still want television to be like the 1950s, like the good old days, right? When, you know, people of color weren't on television. And, you know, like, so a lot of the actors were drawn from those, those places. And for a reason, too, like these were the best people in the industry that did this. These guys invented live television, they invented
01:19:42
Speaker
a lot of these voiceover techniques and, you know, I'd been doing radio in vaudeville and, uh, you know, I'm 10 years old working with guys who are in their seventies. So, you know, so the family must've like shelled out a lot of money to get this thing off the ground then. Nah, it's cheap. It's super cheap. It's really easy content to make. Uh, but to get these people involved, I mean, you don't think that was 75 bucks because one of the things that drew talent to this,
01:20:10
Speaker
I've asked some of the actors this over the years, especially actors whose lifestyles may have put them at odds or lifestyle is the wrong word. That's an antiquated word. But let's say that certain talent who are living the homosexual lifestyle.
01:20:28
Speaker
Yeah. Um, would have been it. No, I don't know. I'm not, I don't know if that's what this is. For sure. No, you're in the right neighborhood for sure. And that's why I want to be careful about, uh, not perpetuating misconceptions. Um, and, uh, that's more of a note for me. Um, but that, why would they work for an organization that's against who they are as people?
01:20:54
Speaker
And one of the answers I got back was like, well, no one else is making this content, this kind of content. So when you're a voiceover artist, and I mentioned earlier, it's a pretty lonely form of acting. Most of the time you are brought in by yourself into a studio and you're doing work for cartoons or you're doing narration for a commercial, like, you know, all those voices about, you know, describing Pepsi or whatever. And most,
01:21:24
Speaker
Voiceover work tends to be pretty lonely and you don't get an opportunity to actually work with other actors. The way that they were recording with a full cast was unique at the time. And it was something that had surely fallen out of fashion by that point. And so a lot of these actors were hungry for that experience again. And I think, I don't think Hal Smith was getting paid more than I was. It was 75 bucks an episode, but you did it because it's hard to find this kind of work.
01:21:53
Speaker
It's becoming more popular again, but at the time, back in 1987, 1990, this was one of the shows. And in fact, it became a problem because the show wasn't union. And so a lot of people who were involved in the union had to hide their involvement with the show. The most notable of that is Will Ryan, who eventually had to walk off the show and boycott it or, well, go on strike until they became a union show again, which is right. Who is that character? He plays Eugene.
01:22:23
Speaker
Uh, so that was, uh, yeah, that was, he was making an industry strike that they needed to be a union show and they did. Uh, and finally they were, once they wrote me out of the show 10 years later. Um, so, but yeah, it was like, they were able to get great talent because they were willing to pay studio session fees, which are pretty small. I mean, in a 10 years, 80 episodes I did, I would be shocked if I've made more than 10 grand.
01:22:52
Speaker
Uh, which is insane when you think about it, right? Isn't that crazy? Like, um, I think the most I ever got paid for a session pay was like 300 bucks. Um, and so no residuals. No, no, no, I guess I don't know what residuals even mean. I guess if you, if I go to theory, so in theory, a lightweight on cassette tape. Yeah. In theory, residuals would be like, yeah.
01:23:19
Speaker
every time they sell an episode or an episode airs somewhere around the world and the radio stations are getting ad money for that, that your cast and crew who create that content would get, you know, some small payout. And that's one thing that they don't do, which is, I think pretty fucked up of a Christian organization, but it's pretty common in that publishing industry of, you know, of the Christian publishing world to like,
01:23:49
Speaker
Be like, why would we pay your residuals? You're doing God's work, right? Like I stacked a lot of chairs for a zero dollars. So you're lucky you got something. Yeah. At least you got something, man. You know, meanwhile, like every Christian store I go into like around the country, like, Oh, Hey, there's an album. And like on the cover of all of them is this little character with a red baseball cap. I'm like, that's me.
01:24:15
Speaker
You should stop going in Christian stores for one. How many study Bibles do you need, bro? Now, is that industry standard for voice acting at the time? Because I imagine if some of those guys were in Winnie the Pooh and Beauty and the Beast and stuff. No, those unions get residuals. So it was the union was the breaking point.
01:24:41
Speaker
Well, even when this show went union, I still think they're not paying residuals because like they started a streaming service. None of us get any of that. Uh, it's like, of course you don't have to for everything prior to when the negotiation set up or something weird like that. And I don't ever recall signing anything. Like it's something I've looked into actually is like, can I go get 34 years of residuals off of these people? Um, uh, God, I can't believe I just said that out loud.
01:25:09
Speaker
Anyway, I mean, if you're a lot out there, though, yeah, I would like to get a disability. So now. So like, is that part of what happened when they wrote you off the show? I mean, when the when the show went union or they saw the writing on the wall and realized, like, this is where things are going. Did they look at their character list and go, which one of these long term characters can we cut to avoid potentially pay out residuals?
01:25:38
Speaker
That's a good question. I don't think that was a primary motivator. What I think was more likely was, so Hal died. How was an actor by the name of Hal Smith was the original Mr. Whitaker. He died when I was 17. And then they really leaned on my character for a good couple of years there.
01:26:00
Speaker
And then, did you know him well from doing the show? Was that, was his loss something that affected you or is it huge? No, it hugely affected me hugely. Um, he was, he was like my grandfather. Let's see. So a thing to keep in mind about all of this is I became very attached to this crew and this cast. Um, I was closer to them emotionally than I was to my own cousins or aunts or uncles or.
01:26:27
Speaker
You know, I saw Hal Smith more than I saw my own grandparents. Katie Lee is like an aunt to me. You know, Chris Anthony, these people, like I still love them to this day. And when Hal died, I was a wreck. And we're about at the point where we'll start in on this part of the story. Maybe this is a good segue. But I had been diagnosed through a year at that point when he died. And when he died, I just was none.
01:26:57
Speaker
Uh, for a couple diagnosed with mental illness. So I had, so, all right, so we'll jump into this, this part of the story. Um, I had done three episodes called Aloha Oi. And it's one of the few, I think three part episodes they ever did. This was the, for me, it was the pinnacle of my experience on the show. I was working with like a full cast. A lot of the time that we did Barkley family episodes, I didn't get a chance to work with some of the other.
01:27:25
Speaker
characters on the show because they kept a lot of the storylines very insular around this family. And so this was a show where like the Barkley family and this other family, the Rathbones go to Hawaii and hygiene ensue. Um, and it was a fantastic experience in the studio. It was great. It was two full days. I never got to do that. It was usually like an afternoon or morning. Sometimes you get to do a two part episode and get to be in there for the full day. This was like two full days with Walker Edmondston's in there.
01:27:56
Speaker
The cast was amazing and the studio environment was just people were laughing themselves sick. Unbeknownst
Mental Health Struggles and Acting
01:28:05
Speaker
to people, I was suicidally depressed while the whole thing was going on and had been suicidally depressed since I was nine years old and had had these problems arise at the beginning of my story when I talked about how the house caught fire and my mom died.
01:28:23
Speaker
Well, there, you know, looking back on it now, there was what's called early onset. Most people when they go through mental health problems, it occurs usually when you're in college age. The second most popular time is when you're in your like 40s and 50s. As you're going through these like hormonal changes, your brain chemistry changes in life. So post adolescence or, you know, menopausal time. And I had always been having this like,
01:28:52
Speaker
Underline struggle that there weren't really words for it at the time but I was what we would now understand I was severely obsessed and compulsive I was severely depressed and Subject to a lot of anxiety and panic and those kinds of problems But you learn to mask these problems early on and this is probably what also like helped me as an actor is that I was really good at faking that I was fine and
01:29:21
Speaker
It presented problems then when I got sick, because my folks would be like, I don't get it. He seems like this happy, shining kid, you know, this beacon of American Christianity. Look at this blonde child. But I always had like a lot of, you know, really disturbing thoughts that I could never get rid of. I had a lot of
01:29:48
Speaker
Hurtful ways of viewing myself I can remember being called into a principal's office in the third grade because I had drawn a picture of me cutting my head off And you know in 1985 like what the fuck do you do with a kid like this, right? Yeah, those are alarming images for teachers to find Okay, don't draw that picture again
01:30:12
Speaker
Don't do it. Like, no, and not that I got in trouble for it, but like people were worried and didn't know what to do. And, um, so I'd had this mental health break in the fourth grade. Um, and now, you know, it's gosh, what year are we in? So this would have been 93, uh, November 93. So I've been doing this for about six years now. And we have this great experience in the studio. And then I have a suicide attempt afterwards.
01:30:39
Speaker
And I had been, I believe I'd been suicidal before it. Um, and that these episodes were sandwiched in between these two, uh, events. And, um, but so my parents took me to this hospital in Anaheim and it was an adolescent hospital. And I, this had to be days after, maybe even the next day after recording. I don't, my timeframe is a little messed up because of course it was 30 years ago.
01:31:08
Speaker
Um, yeah. Can I, can I ask a couple of questions real quick about, I want to make sure I'm understanding this right. So you said it was six years into doing it. Uh, and it was just after this Aloha oi story on it. Yeah. And, and what, and that was, uh, is this before, um, how, uh, I'm sorry, how, um, had passed away. Yes, because that happened the next year.
01:31:35
Speaker
Okay. At that point, I had been on a lot of psychiatric medication and that was... So Aloha Oi, you end up having a suicide time. This is six years in and you said you spent like 10 years on the show.
01:31:48
Speaker
where, okay. All right, cool. I just want to get the story arc straight and make sure we have the timelines down. Yeah, for sure. And the thing about this show was it was my salvation a lot of the times where I would be down and depressed. Well, Jesus Christ is very sad to hear that. Well, yeah, for sure. And I would get a call like, hey, we need you this next month. And all month long, I would just sit in class just like I couldn't wait, like get me back in that studio. That's where I belong. It's the one place where things make sense.
01:32:18
Speaker
I know how to do that work. I'm good at it. And all this school shit, like, you know, fuck this. So it was something I would sort of emotionally cling to, because it was like a life raft in very, you know, stormy seas, so to speak. And this time, and the thing that acting always was for me, was a great therapeutic escape. Not that I use acting as therapy, but it was a great break from having to be myself.
01:32:48
Speaker
I could step into the skin or the mindset of another character and have freedom. And it was like a mental respite. Um, and all the skill sets of, you know, some of this mental health stuff, like faking my personality, like this plays really well in acting. And so I hit it for a long time, even for myself. Um, and then doing these three episodes, you know, in my troubled sort of frame of thinking, I know it's not, it won't make sense to people.
01:33:17
Speaker
who haven't been suicidally ill, but at the time as a 16 year old kid, I was like, well, it's not, after these episodes, it's not going to get better than this. Like, and I don't know if they're ever going to call me again. And I just figured that was it. I reached the pinnacle of my life. You know, this is the happiest I will ever be is in the studio with these people. And do I get to do this again in six months? Can I, and it was like November, all my suicide attempts happen in November.
01:33:46
Speaker
he said in early October. Oh, Jesus. You're consistent. If no one can say you're not consistent, I appreciate you for that. Right. I'm not feeling well these days as we slide into November. I'll be reaching out at the end of November. Thank you. Yes, you check in with me. We'll do a part two. Just show you a quick email. Yeah. How you doing, Dave? We'll do a part two, right?
01:34:11
Speaker
I, in my sort of illogical state of being, yeah, I tried to check out and, uh, my parents took me to this hospital and, you know, I've replayed this story so many times in my head now. I'm starting to question if it was even true or if I hallucinated it, but my recollection is that I was brought into the hospital about 10 o'clock, 11 o'clock at night. And for anyone who's never been in this kind of hospital, um, it, one of the first things you'll notice is that they lock you in it.
01:34:42
Speaker
Uh, then they take your shoelaces and your belts and they cut all the, you know, draw strings out of your hoodies. It's prison light. It's prison light. It absolutely is. You actually get jail time credit for it because it is a lockdown facility. And I laughed and now I realized like if you were going to serve time after that because of a crime you committed, you would actually get jail time credit for that. So yes, not a joke.
01:35:07
Speaker
Shouldn't have laughed for real. No, one time I was in legal trouble and being in the hospital covered my time. So you go into like a room and everybody, there's like two people to a room. And so I go into this room, the other person's already knocked out. Of course, like probably everybody's drugged out. So they get everyone to go to sleep by 10 o'clock and had no idea what I was getting into. And the first morning,
01:35:37
Speaker
I wake up and I, you know, putting my clothes on and I go to open the door and all the doors, you know, these two hallways, you have like your female hallway and your male hallway, and they kind of converge in this central atrium. And I go to open my door and standing in front of me is the actor who plays Rodney Rathbone, Steve Burns.
01:36:06
Speaker
And he had just been in the studio with me doing these episodes. And I remember looking at him just like, one, like, how are you in here? Like, this doesn't make sense. And he, again, was one of the adults in the show. And he just looked at me just like, you know, this poor kid, what are you doing here? And I think I seem to recall him saying something like if I had known,
01:36:33
Speaker
Cause like we were just both in shock. It was this very bizarre encounter outside of the studio. I guess his day job was he, I think he was a social worker. I guess we only asked if he worked there. Was he at well, I think he was a social worker because after that hospitalization experience, I believe my parents reached out to him cause they knew like the Odyssey connection. And I seem to recall we went to his office once as he was trying to help us figure out like post hospital care, like.
01:37:03
Speaker
finding a therapist or whatever. So I don't know. I may have hallucinated the whole thing. You have my permission to ask Steve Burns. He has my permission to confirm it. Steve and I aren't on speaking terms anymore. Well, neither are we. We already recorded him, and he was a dick. He was a dick to you. That episode will never see the light of day. Aloha, goodbye, Rodney.
01:37:32
Speaker
Uh, so, and, uh, that was kind of my entry. It was like this weird parallel thing where like the show existed as a part of my life and then this mental health journey started. And so post the first hospitalization, my life completely fell apart. I had another attempt about a month later, um, went into my second hospital. This would have been December 93 and then December two. Okay. Yeah. And.
01:38:00
Speaker
Well, one of the things that was happening at this time in psychiatric care is they had these two new drugs, Paxil and Zoloft had just come out and they were part of the same class of drugs that Prozac was. And there were a bunch of other new medications coming out. And I guess the theory at the time was, you know, if you medicate the hell out of these kids, they can't kill themselves. If they're so medicated that they can't move, then they can't really kill themselves. And the
01:38:30
Speaker
upsides and downsides of that is that you, they didn't fully understand like titrating people on and off medications. So you would take a medication, you would have a really bad side effect to it, probably because it's like too big of a dose, but they didn't realize that then. Um, this was definitely like, there was a lot of experimentation, especially on adolescents. Um, and I, let's see, I was hospitalized twice in the fall of 93.
01:38:58
Speaker
Then it became, it was at the point where like I was getting pulled out of school so much that I couldn't go. Then I ended up at like the school for the bad kids, the continuation school. And, you know, now I'm smoking cigarettes. Now I'm much more like, it's hard for me to concentrate because the meds I'm on, I'm being misdiagnosed every six months. And misdiagnosis is a mental health can be pretty severe because the meds they give you can really fuck you up. Yeah, for sure.
01:39:28
Speaker
And so like that story of finding out about how that occurred, I believe when I was 17 and I think I was so medicated that day. I remember I was outside having a cigarette and my mom came up and she's like, Hal died. I'm sorry to tell you this. And I just remember like, like my body needed to cry, but my muscles wouldn't let me. It was just very bizarre. And that, this was like when they thought I was bipolar and I was on lithium.
01:39:58
Speaker
And I gained 60 pounds in water weight, and my saliva glands stopped working for a year, and all my teeth started rotting out. And so in this part of being a kid, you're a teenager, you're in high school, and all of a sudden, now you're a professional patient. So the schooling was becoming so difficult that I stopped caring. How are you going to care about algebra or geometry when you're trying to kill yourself, right?
01:40:28
Speaker
And the meds are becoming more unstable because as you come on and off the meds, they realize now you're more likely to kill yourself or cause self-harm or things like that, things that they didn't understand back in the early mid-90s. And so finally, the determination was made that I just needed to test out of school and graduate. So I graduated my sophomore year and then basically became a professional patient.
01:40:59
Speaker
in between working on this show, you know, that was like the one highlight of my life. And then the rest of the time I was in doctor's appointments, therapist appointments, psychiatrist appointments, on and off medications, getting, you know, self mutilating, punching windows, having my blood drawn so much that like they couldn't find the veins.
01:41:23
Speaker
You know, these years in my life, I don't remember. This is kind of the last three years. It's like, yeah, it's kind of like the last three years of obviously for you. Yeah. So when after I had had this first attempt during that summer after I so I graduated, you know, 16 years old or whatever, graduate high school. And that summer I was super unstable because of these crazy meds and also the symptoms of the mental health problems themselves.
01:41:52
Speaker
I was not a mildly sick person. I, I have a very severe form of the illness. Um, and my dad's like, well, all right, look, you're a crazy 17 year old, so you either need to go back to school, get a job or like, you know, go to college. Right. And so I recorded a voiceover tape with, um, some prominent people, um, Corey Burton directed the tape and.
01:42:22
Speaker
The experience of doing that tape, I think I mentioned this the first time we talked, if I'm wrong, stop me. Did I mention the tape on the first time we talked or? I think maybe so. Yeah. I don't remember how it would happen. So basically the thing that I would say is this is the dichotomy of the world that I was living in at the time. So I had gone in to do this voiceover demo tape and the way that this works is
01:42:49
Speaker
you record about two to three minutes of content. It's a really short tape. And usually you do little 10 to 15 minute segments of variety. So we're trying to show that this is a person that can pitch blue jeans to kids. This is a person that can voiceover something on MTV station. Okay. So it's like to submit for additions and shit like that. And so this, these tapes, the idea of your voiceover reel or, uh,
01:43:18
Speaker
you know, your audition tape is that it's going to provide casting directors a good sampling of, you know, your range. And we went in to record, and this was at the Mark Grouse Studios. Anybody in the voiceover industry, like he is a legend. This guy has had this studio for years. He's recorded with everybody, like literally everybody. And Corey Burton, who probably I consider to be the finest voiceover talent in the world.
01:43:46
Speaker
He does all sorts of stuff for Disney. He's, you know, just Google IMDB Corey Burton. He's in everything. So he used to be an actor on Adventures in Odyssey. And we had an affinity for each other. He was somebody I looked up to a lot for skill sets. And he offered to help, you know, direct this take because my family, my parents were very industry naive. And they never wanted me to really do anything that wasn't like a Christian thing. Yep.
01:44:15
Speaker
But now I'm at the age where like, all right, it's time to take your career to the next level. You're trying to figure out how to make this work for you on your own. And like, I'm pretty sure I'm good at this thing because these guys keep using me. Right. And so I'm sitting there with my mom and there's Corey Burton and there's Mark Grau and Mark brings out this box of, you know, this is you can tell it's 1994. There's no like tablets.
01:44:43
Speaker
So this is like a box just full of paper with like little, you know, quarter pages of lines. And the four of us are just like going through like, all right, what would work for a 17 year old kid with my voice profile, right? You know, I don't have a super deep voice, so I can still get away with some really kind of youngish sounding stuff. So we picked, I don't know, somewhere between like seven to 10 different pieces and assembled them. And Mark was gonna engineer the,
01:45:13
Speaker
this session, and Corey was going to direct me. So this is like the, there's not too many 17 year old kids in the world that would ever have this opportunity. This is pretty unique. And I go in into the booth. And one of the things that I had learned, and I think this is a byproduct of coming out of both the mental health system and the Christian evangelical Southern Baptist system is
01:45:41
Speaker
I learned early on that if you did things right the first time, no one would get mad at you for messing it up. And back in those days, we recorded reel to reel. So if you made a mistake, it was literally costing tape. So I learned at an early age, like you just kind of get it the first try and let the adults mess up. And then, you know, I can just kind of hide and no one will be mad at me. Not that the directors are ever mad, but
01:46:08
Speaker
you know, as an anxious kid who's afraid God is going to send me to hell for making mistakes. You know, I try to not make mistakes. Uh, so I go in and I record this thing and the whole thing took 10 minutes. I took very little direction. There were a couple of notes where I made some changes and we get done, but most of it was like one take and done. And as we get done and I'm putting the notes together, um,
01:46:34
Speaker
you know, this is a soundproof room. So I can see them talking on the other side of the window, but they haven't pushed the com button. And I just see them both like animatedly, like they look mad or like they keep shaking their head. No, and grabbing their heads. And I'm just like, something's wrong. And I go and I walk around into the recording booth and I walk in and what it was was they were mad that they hadn't recorded the entire session. Um,
01:47:02
Speaker
that they kept stopping and starting when we would bring in each new piece of dialogue. And the reason they were upset with that was that if they had recorded the entire thing from the beginning to the end, they would have shown the industry that this is a kid that can be directed and like gets things right on the first try. And basically, what they were mad about was like, what I just did, no one can really do. And
01:47:29
Speaker
here was an opportunity to really show off kind of like a wunderkind, you know, like a little prodigy. And so I say that to like hype myself. That was the first moment that I really realized I had a world-class talent. And within a month, I was in an emergency room with a tube up my nose and several hundred pills in my stomach, having my stomach pumped, spending two weeks in a county facility. So like here I had this great skillset, like that's the high side. That's the good side of my brain.
01:48:00
Speaker
the downside of my brain right there at the same time is just it's like an athlete blowing out their knee or something in college. Like sure right as I was at the cusp of this thing. Um, suddenly I'm now like spiraling further down into the mental health world and cigarette burns and cutting myself and, um, and there is no real support system. I didn't have an agent. I didn't have a manager. Uh, yeah.
01:48:27
Speaker
my parents didn't know what the hell to do. And so I was, it was like this amazing moment where I could see the quality of what I could do. And then it just like got flushed down the toilet. And this was towards it. This is like the tail end of, of your rain. So yeah, I probably only recorded with them maybe three or four more times after that. Okay. Then finally wrote me a, I remember the,
01:48:53
Speaker
I had done a Christmas episode, which was very popular for my character to do these family Christmas episodes year after year after year. And this was the first time I had seen the character named Mr. Whitaker. And I was like, holy shit, they found a new wit and something's changing. So when you, when you asked the question earlier, like, did I get written out of the show for residuals? Here's where we kind of like bring all these threads together. They had finally found a new Mr. Whitaker.
01:49:19
Speaker
I think I was the last that me and Azure who played my sister, we were kind of the last of that first generation of kids to grow up on the show. And we were 20, 19, 20 starting to go off to college. Um, I think that coupled with like my mental health problems, you know, I would get, take so much shit cause like I was smoked cigarettes outside. Uh, cause it's very, we realize now that like people with mental health problems like get addicted to nicotine super easy.
01:49:49
Speaker
Um, so I, you know, I looked like this troubled kid, you know, outside smoking cigarettes, you know, like, and my favorite cigarette smoking story was, uh, one day at the studio, Tim Curry, uh, was recording something in the other, one of the other studios, a book on tape and he would come out and smoke cigarettes and like, I'd be smoking cigarettes. What's that? Pennywise himself. Yes. Yes. Yes. Uh, you know, got to smoke cigarettes with Tim Curry.
01:50:18
Speaker
That's like my one cool Hollywood story. I would take up smoking if I got the. Just I would. I want to take it up again. Like, you know, yeah, we all float down here, TV. Right. And he was was he was his name rooster in any was that when he did the might be in a name all weird. I don't know. I probably fucked the name. No, you're right. But I hate any. So I I I have a pathological hatred of that movie. I'm sure you're right.
01:50:47
Speaker
That was the first thing I saw him in. I can't confirm it but but yeah so that I got written out around that where I think they realized like there were multiple things happening. They had a new Whitaker, they were going union, the kids that they had were aging out and I think that a determination was made like hey let's just
01:51:08
Speaker
bring in a new cast like Saturday Night Live, right? Yeah, it's, you know, and then it's gonna be Yeah, and have bring in new kids and do things like that. For me, it was devastating. Because one, like, this was my primary outlet as an actor at that time. Two, I had a really deep affection for everybody that I was working with. And it's kind of like, at the age of 20, being told like, Oh, you can't come to the family reunions.
01:51:37
Speaker
And when you're in that age and like everything has been pulled away from you at that point. So I had high school pulled away from me. I can remember in fourth grade being one of the few kids on the first day of school, my teacher asking who wants to go to college. And it was like me and three other kids raised our hands. It was expected that I was going to go. And when I got sick, I became like the first member of my family and like four generations to like not go to college. Um,
01:52:08
Speaker
It was a heavy thing. I sat in the stands while all my friends graduated from high school, one of the most miserable experiences in my life. And watching everybody go off and move across the country to the schools that they're going to go to, start their careers, start their lives. And here you are, you're 17, 18, 19, 20. And this door is shut to you. This pathway is shut to you. You can't do this. No college is going to touch a kid that, you know, only has 11 months of a high school transcript.
01:52:37
Speaker
It doesn't matter how smart you are. And so, you know, the one thing that I kind of had rooted in me in some sense of normalcy for whatever my weird life was, was this show. And when that, you know, when I came in and I read the script and was marking my script that day and like, holy shit, you guys are moving my character out of the town of Odyssey. Like, I know what this means. This means this is my last time here. And it was like a death.
01:53:06
Speaker
It was, it, it, it was like everyone, you know, dying, like, wow, I'm not going to see you again. I'm not going to see you again. I'm not going to see you. Um, and so it was a hard thing to grieve that while going through this like really unstable period of, um, of mental health problems. And like, especially when you felt like that was your stability during a lot of the constant, that was what, you know, it was like one place to shine.
01:53:35
Speaker
Oh, for sure. Yeah, yeah, it's everything else sucks. But here, I can, you know, for a few hours a day, I can like, all the world of mental health bullshit does not exist. Here, I'm Jimmy Barkley. And I can do this. And, you know, one of the things that over the years, my mom would say, which I think was an astute observation on her part, was it always surprised her how I was able to like, get the energy together to perform
01:54:04
Speaker
And then I would have these really hard crashes for, you know, depression wise afterwards. So a lot of those episodes that you're listening to me or whoever's interested, you're actually listening to somebody who's suicidally depressed, perform. And this is like, you know, one of the few moments of happiness in an otherwise very, very unhappy person.
01:54:26
Speaker
Yeah. So it's also a weird dynamic, like a mix of like, you know, that be like with that show being what kind of kept you going, what, what motivated you and you being one of the, I mean, the longest running member of like the show. I mean,
01:54:42
Speaker
I was probably the longest running kid, for sure. Yeah. So just to be on it that long and recognize that as something special and also to deal with the feelings of having that come to an end and not knowing what to do next. Yeah, I imagine there's a lot of weird conflict going on, especially when you're struggling with your mental health. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah, for sure. No, it was a mess. And for years afterwards, this feeling of like,
01:55:11
Speaker
You know, to be a mental health patient sucks, first of all, to be a mental health patient in the mid nineties really sucked. And to be a mental health patient in the mid nineties, when you're 16 and 17 years old, it was awful.
Critique of Church and Evangelical Culture
01:55:25
Speaker
And, um, I probably shouldn't be here right now. Like it definitely, there were enough opportunities where like I was on the wrong med and suddenly I would have an attempt, um, just doing stupid shit. Like, um, you know, so it, it,
01:55:41
Speaker
Yeah, it was frustrating that this one like safe place that I loved, you know, there's something about being on a stage or in front of a microphone or a camera. It doesn't matter how chaotic my life is suddenly there, like all the drama disappears and now I can step into this other world and it saves me. Um, and so that was like another thing that, that became problematic. And then throughout all of that is like, now we get into like the part of the church, like
01:56:10
Speaker
and the through line of being a mental health patient in the mid-90s as an adolescent in a Christian evangelical environment. And you were consistently part of this? Were you consistently still like during Adventures in Odyssey part of a church? Were you going on Sundays? Oh yeah. And that was kind of a weird thing too was like I didn't realize that the show was popular because they never
01:56:33
Speaker
They never told me like, I mean, I assume people listen, obviously the show's still going on, but like, I never got fan mail. This was before the internet. There were no chat rooms. So, and nobody at my churches seemed to listen to this. So, or like my private schools that I went to. And so it was like this weird bubble within a bubble where like, you know, and so for years I would hunger trying to find like, oh, who listens to this show? Like somebody out there has to listen to it.
01:57:03
Speaker
Yeah, I'm one of these rare actors that never actually gets to see fans or gets to see their reaction to the show or what it means to them. So it's this weird sort of environment. And then when the mental health stuff started, that was when I stepped away from church because the reception I started getting was pretty frosty. Yeah. And suddenly the love of Christ was not extended to me the way it should have been. Did you feel like, so at that point, how old are you at this point?
01:57:33
Speaker
18. My first attempt was my first attempt was 16. I think I was finally written out of the show when I was 20. But really, I was written out like a year earlier or two. And then when you started feeling like, you know, the church wasn't so much of a welcoming place for you, like where you weren't getting, you know, a lot of no one was really checking in on you seeing how you're doing making you feel like just a general
01:57:58
Speaker
Well, it's not, it's not even just neglect. It's like active gaslighting, like, um, you know, you're trained when you grow up in, in any eventuality or really any religious environment that when you have a problem, where's the first place you turn to that environment, go to your church, talk to your pastor, right? Well, you know, the doctors in 1994 barely understood mental health. The pastor's surely as fuck did not.
01:58:27
Speaker
And so, you know, you would get all this stuff of like, you know, it's a sin problem. Really. You just need to pray this away and kind of like the LGBT community. Um, there's this idea that you can just like pray away mental illness, um, or that it's a byproduct of bad life choices. Now the mental illness will make you make bad life choices. Don't get it twisted. I'm an expert in that.
01:58:56
Speaker
But it's their consideration. I guess I want to make it. Yeah, no, it's really not. And it's I think like the literalism of that community. Like if it's not in the Bible, then it doesn't exist as a concept. Like if they can't explain it away with this and a number of times like good people with good intentions would just destroy me with like, well, here, let's let's read Job together.
01:59:24
Speaker
Like, no, don't. Like, please stop. Here's the story of the time Jesus sent all the demons out of the man into the pigs. Right? Jesus loves you. Have you been to a farm recently? I hear pigs are pretty primed for demons these days. They are. For some reason, they don't like mine. I don't know why. Well, you know, it's worth a shot. I don't want to be like the people from your old church community, but I thought I'd suggest it. It was as...
01:59:52
Speaker
as horrible as regular society was, the church was the worst. And that's the part that, you know, I try and explain to folks is like, it's weird. So, you know, the unspoken part about being on Adventures in Odyssey is that this was a Christian program put out by Focus on the Family as a way to like outreach to children all around the world and, you know, start bringing them into the Focus on the Family publishing empire.
02:00:19
Speaker
Um, certainly meanwhile, like one of their main kids is having a mental health crisis of epic proportions and struggling to stay alive. And the church environment that I'm pimping, um, doesn't really want me around. And my problem is a little inconvenient for their narrative. And, um, and that was when I first started to really consider like, is this environment that I grew up in righteous? Is it real?
02:00:48
Speaker
Is it a hypocritical scenario? Is it what's happening here? Why is, you know, I'm reading the sermon on the Mount and they're not treating me that way. Instead, like I'm being, um, and it's hard to say. It's like there wasn't overt discrimination. Sometimes there was, but usually it was very, very subtle. It's very like, it's not being yelled from the pulpit. It's in the conversations during the coffee break between services.
02:01:16
Speaker
It's people are not talking to you as much. Um, your presence is not really, you can tell when people aren't comfortable running, especially if you're an actor and your skillset is understanding people's body language and behavior, um, became a very toxic environment really fast. And I, I started learning like, maybe this is not what it's cracked up to be. And are we creating a community that is healthy and healing or.
02:01:44
Speaker
Are we creating something that's very darker and much more different? And one of the, while I would wish mental health in a way nobody ever has to go through it, in a way I kind of wish everybody did have to go through it. Because if you went through what I saw and experienced the things with the church environment that I experienced, you would see that what everybody today is wringing their hands about, about like the white evangelical culture, like, Oh my God, how did this happen?
02:02:11
Speaker
This shit was happening 25 years ago, 30 years ago. It is not the healthy thing you think it is. And in a way, this mental health challenge, and while I think it's hell and I wouldn't wish it on people and it destroyed my life, in a way, it was somewhat of a gift because it allowed me to see that the emperor does not wear clothes. And that this loving, caring environment, in fact, is very conditional.
02:02:40
Speaker
There's a lot of people they don't love, or they'll tell you they love you by abusing you to your face as though this is somehow a healthy form of love.
02:02:50
Speaker
It's like love becomes a word for that. Like love is a very, it's a prominent word, but the idea of like, oh, God commands us to love everybody. Well, that doesn't really mean much. It's an abstract concept, right? Yeah. To command love is bizarre. But then weirdly, there's like this disconnect because in those circles and the people that practice that philosophy, what that you don't realize is like,
02:03:15
Speaker
You think that you're being trained to become a Christian to go out there and do great things. Really, what this system produces is two primary behaviors that I observe. One is you become a Christian capitalist. And so one of the ways of expressing your Jesusiosity, it's a new word I just coined,
02:03:37
Speaker
Is to make sure that you buy all the albums and the t-shirts and the study bibles and you know to go get the Yeah, the collections of adventures in odyssey and make sure you have them all Um, you know, we're not giving residuals to anybody but make sure you buy them again and again and again Um, you know the way that like my episodes would keep getting repackaged like multiple times Uh into new collections and whatnot. Um, so it's like this capitalist thing
02:04:07
Speaker
Make sure you buy our books. Make sure this is a new apologetics book that, you know, references the last 10 books. Let's make sure you send your kids to private schools. Let's make sure you pull your kids out of schools because we've got all these books to sell. And one of the things that I can say from the inside of it is that white evangelical Christianity is largely its primary product that it creates is a publishing industry.
02:04:36
Speaker
And that is a multi-billion dollar publishing industry. There's a tremendous amount of money in it, enough money in it. I mean, who's the biggest like Christian publisher Zondervan? Yeah, it's definitely the one that comes to mind. Right. So who's the parent company of Zondervan? Nabisco? Not Nabisco. Close. It's Disney. Close. It's Disney. It's Newsport. You know, the same guys that like run Fox News and
02:05:05
Speaker
this giant publishing empire and so there's tremendous amounts of money to be made and if you teach all of the people in these churches to go and support these things it's why like churches have coffee shops now and starbucks is like hey we're christian coffee bro um so there's that and then the other thing that the white evangelical structure does is it trains you how to vote and what i started experiencing as a mental health patient was that this is not
02:05:34
Speaker
a hospital for broken souls like they say it is. This is a place where people are indoctrinated into a methodology of thinking and behaving so that they can support a capitalist enterprise and that they can support the Republican Party. And Christians who are in it don't think that that's what they're doing. I didn't think that's what I was doing.
02:06:00
Speaker
You know, as through all the years of struggle that I would go through, I would like go to my Bible again and again and again, and none of it made any sense to me other than the Sermon on the Mount. And I would just read through the Sermon on the Mount, and Jesus is like, you will be able to tell by the fruit that is produced, whether these are healthy trees or rotten trees. And as time has gone on, and I think the world is starting to see the fruit that has been produced by the white evangelical culture, it is not healthy.
02:06:31
Speaker
as we see with like this QAnon stuff and the anti-vaxxer and Trumpism and all these like really unhealthy, racist, misogynist, homophobic like elements are no longer being hidden. They're just wide out in the open. And like, and this is what I observed back in the mid 90s when I got sick was like, this is not healthy. This is not a place to go to for any real assistance.
02:06:59
Speaker
So when you started feeling like when you started kind of connecting those dots and it didn't feel like a welcome place, obviously a lot's changed since the 90s. Sure. Your journeys probably take not, I mean, it just in you. I don't even talk culture, maybe maybe not, but a lot's changed in you. Like, did you find
02:07:20
Speaker
yourself. So it sounds like that pushed you out of the church. But now you're still at this point in your life, you know, kind of referencing back to the Summer on the Mount, and the way that you're reflecting on the fruit of what the culture that kind of bore you produces. And maybe they like that fruit. Maybe that fruit tastes really good to them, but maybe not to other people.
02:07:44
Speaker
I don't know that Jesus was talking about how the fruit tastes versus anything else. It is interesting using the fruit analogy because they're all like, I don't know, this fruit seems pretty sick to me. I'm down with it. We're like, no, I don't really like that fruit. Now we're stuck to just- We are going real deep on this fruit analogy. Yeah, I know. Interpreting Jesus through just whatever your personal preferences at that point. But really what it comes down to is what
02:08:12
Speaker
Do I approve of the quality of person that this system creates? That's what I mean by the proof. And that's what the meaning is in the Sermon on the Mount is you're going to be able to tell whether these false teachers are real or not based on what they produce. And when you look at the behavior of the people trapped into this system, the thing that's shocking so many people now is like, wow, I didn't realize they were that racist.
02:08:40
Speaker
Yeah, bro. They really were the whole time. Well, I didn't realize that I just thought the homophobia, it's not homophobia. Yeah, it is. It really, really is. Um, uh, well, we're not misogynistic. We just believe in traditional gender roles. Nah, man. You guys are really misogynistic. I know because I work and the per quality of person I became out of that system was less than healthy.
02:09:05
Speaker
Now, you know, I don't know what role that played in my mental health problems. It's impossible to speculate or, um, but I just, I think like one of the first big eye-openers for me, and I think this one will start to make sense of how like my view of things changed was the way that right wing messaging is built into white evangelical Christianity as a way to very subtly get people to like buy into these ideas. That's going to change and inform how they vote. So.
02:09:35
Speaker
The best example of that that I observed and where my departure really came was I was told all my life that socialized health care is godless communism. And that really, most of these problems are a heart problem. And we need to have charity, that it's the goodness of people and charity that's going to help things. And what you observe in the mental health system is that there is no charity that works. There's nobody there for you.
02:10:04
Speaker
that charity is in fact a very fashionable thing. And it goes off of the whims of whoever's giving and may not have anything to do with what people actually need. Oh, don't give that man money. He's going to use it for alcohol, right? That's charity right there. That's somebody making a moral determination on somebody else's suffering and whether or not money should be applied to that problem. And in the mental health system, I saw like,
02:10:29
Speaker
Man, these young guys who are like 20 and becoming schizophrenic, they need housing, they need healthcare, they will never have a career to be able to make enough money to buy privatized healthcare. And our society goes, that's fine, let them be homeless, let's put them in prisons, who cares? And so I started realizing that this mythology of charity being a proof of how Christian you are, or charity being some example of the goodness of ourselves
02:10:59
Speaker
how loving we are. No, look at all that our church does. Well, that's a really big church and it has a really nice lighting system in it. But I'm noticing all these people living like under tarps. They don't have food. They don't have health care. And as someone who needed health care and had my life destroyed without it, I'm on disability right now so that I have access to health care. So I've been forced to live in the poverty.
02:11:27
Speaker
That Christian charity never showed up in 30 years of waiting. I've never seen it, ever, never, not once. Maybe there's a soup kitchen at this church. Maybe, you know, once Rick Warren's kid committed suicide, now we're finally starting to somewhat talk about these things. But by and large, these narratives that like, government is bad. This whole paranoia in the white evangelical system, you know,
02:11:57
Speaker
I've sat there and seen myself get kicked out of that system. And one of the things that I mentioned to people, the biggest point where my politics changed was when I had to get on disability. And I realized that everything I had been taught about who would be there for me had failed. My church failed me. My family failed me. My neighbors failed me. The privatized industry failed me. Privatized health care failed me.
02:12:24
Speaker
The only entity that has consistently been there for me for the last 25 years has been the government of the United States of America, and every white evangelical is trying their damnedest to tear it down right now because- I have siblings who have been on disability, friends who have been on disability, and that did play a big part in an ideological shift for me too, was like,
02:12:51
Speaker
Because you grow up hearing, oh, the church needs to, it's a church responsibility, not a government one. Then you realize that you don't get that from the church. That could be fine if you just stop calling it a church responsibility and that's fine. Like maybe the church can't sustain that maybe. So, but so I hear you on that. That definitely was a catalyst for some change for me too. And what I understand institutional functions to be. My question for you is,
02:13:23
Speaker
As you started to feel more alienated, as you shifted, which was the catalyst for a change in maybe political ideology, which for a lot of people a change in political ideology is the first step in removing themselves from evangelical bubbles. It was for me. I was still in evangelical bubble when it happened to
Faith, Doubt, and Identity
02:13:47
Speaker
me.
02:13:47
Speaker
uh what did what was that because it varies seem it seemingly varies for a lot of people uh and i i find that it doesn't always get specifically addressed and i figure but i'd like to hit on it before we kind of come to a close is is whether or not that that can
02:14:06
Speaker
completely pushed you out of the faith if it did for a time if you know as you're referencing back to Jesus or on the mountain I can't tell if that resonates with you currently or if that's just something you're holding um if that's a standard that you're holding the church to sure do you have an affiliation with faith or the christian faith what what does that look like for you now uh as you've shifted out of the evangelical great great question great question and one that
02:14:35
Speaker
is so hard for me to answer, but one of my favorite topics. Where am I now? It's something I ask myself this constantly. I think it did not, that realization did not push me out of Christianity. In fact, I clung to it harder and harder for years, because one of the things that occurs in mental health is, especially in adolescence, when you start, all these things start dropping off and you're losing them, you start desperately trying to cling onto them even harder. You know, like you're flailing around in a,
02:15:03
Speaker
deep end of the swimming pool, like please, please help me. So I, the dissonance that I had that, you know, years, man, years of like on my knees, praying with tears, begging for relief that never came. Um, so it, it, it was never, there was never like a clear switch off. Um, I stepped out of the church system in like 94 when I was really sick. And then back in 2003 when
02:15:31
Speaker
A partner got pregnant and I was terrified. I'm mentally ill and I'm broke. And now we're about to have a baby. And, you know, what do I do? So I went, ran back to the church because that's what I'm used to. So there was never really like a clear thing. It was a slow erosion. I think the moment that sort of killed it for me, if there was one, was in 2003, I was in a church when they announced the invasion of Iraq and everyone cheered.
02:16:00
Speaker
And that was the moment. And then he's like, we're one day closer to the coming of the Lord and everybody cheered even harder. And that was when I was like, Oh God, you guys are like cheering war and cheering the end times. Maybe this is not healthy. Um, I don't currently practice any form of it that would be recognizable to people that practice it. I tell people, you know, if they ask, am I Christian? I would say, I don't know. Um, I, I'm not anything else.
02:16:28
Speaker
I know that. I'm not a full blown atheist. I'm not a full blown Hindu or Muslim or any other practicing form of Judaism or anything. It's impossible when you're imprinted that young. I can't shake it. There's no way to get it out of my brain and reset. So all of my
02:16:52
Speaker
all of my concepts of God are absolute Christian concepts. I struggle every day with, like, is it real or not? But it's still that language. That's the first language I knew. I don't know anything else. And so where I finally came to a point of, I guess, resolution is that, you know, because I still have that fear, like, don't reject the spirit, right? You'll go to hell.
02:17:19
Speaker
That's the mental illness talking, Dave. Sorry. No, the mental illness says like, go ahead and go to hell. God doesn't love you. So I think like, I'm always afraid to fully reject it. And so what I cling to really is the sermon on the mountain. I keep going back to that. Like, all right, this is how we were supposed to, this is, this was apparently so important. It was recorded more than once.
02:17:49
Speaker
And there's a clear thing that's being told here where we are given like very clear determinations of what is fake and what is not and what the behavior is that's expected of people. That you are expected to take care of the sick and the poor and the hungry. You are expected to be on the lookout for those false prophets and people who are going to manipulate and abuse you.
02:18:13
Speaker
Like people on CNN, false prophets. Yeah. Fox News, I would say more. But CNN too, sure. But like really the entire publishing industry. That's what I was seeing on the side. Sam's a Ben Shapiro guy. The real fake news. But no, like, you know, I have to wonder sometimes like, did I help provide content for an organization that had a false profit? I don't know the answer to that. I'm worried that it could be. Are the people who were
02:18:44
Speaker
put up on pillars of Christian ideology through the 70s and 80s and 90s and 2000s. Are these people the people we should be following who are opening up colleges that sell lots of books? You know, is this like a healthy environment? And so I think one of the things that occurs in mental illness is you don't know what to trust. It's hard sometimes to even trust yourself. And so I try as best as I can to kind of
02:19:14
Speaker
really distill everything to its simplest, you know, Aristotle form or, you know, just kind of, how can we simplify concepts to their easiest level? And when I look at how Christians behave versus just the Sermon on the Mount, I don't see the same thing. And that's where I tell myself, like, well, okay, I'm going to do this stuff on the Sermon on the Mount. And if I'm not comfortable in this other environment, I'm going to stay away from it.
02:19:43
Speaker
And so I know that's a big convoluted answer. My biggest way to sum it up would be I'm a non-practicing Christian agnostic. Sure. And it's an environment that I think is unhealthy enough that I don't raise my kids in it. Yeah. Yeah, I hear that. As far as trying to figure out how to connect it, there's a meaningful language. I hear what you're saying, man. I think that's cool.
02:20:10
Speaker
sat with it, processed it and kind of come to a comfortable place. Because that's what you do. Like you just sit there and especially if you're a person with obsessive compulsive disorder, I just go over these thoughts sometimes for hours at night, and then multiply that by 20 years. Like, it's definitely it's stuff I put a lot of work into because I had to you have to really question, you know,
02:20:34
Speaker
I tried to kill myself more than once and never saw a light at the end of the tunnel. I do have one weird out of body experience memory, maybe. But really, like, you're trying to resolve like, thou shalt not kill with I don't want to live on this planet anymore. And where is God in that? And where is, you know, where's the Holy Spirit in that? And so the whole thing is just one giant mind fuck. Yeah.
02:21:01
Speaker
And I find most people that came from my background that also have these health problems also similarly struggle with a lot of the same things. Yeah, man, Dave.
02:21:13
Speaker
I don't know if there's anything you want to just kind of close out with before we jump off here. I loved hearing the story again for at least some of it. What I love about doing this, man, is I honestly feel like getting into it. This is the first time I've had to redo a conversation and we had to redo some of it. But I feel like it was fresh still and authentic in that
02:21:35
Speaker
even, you know, I think maybe there was enough time removed from when we originally recorded it where I probably asked the first time and totally just forgot the answers. But, um, so I do think this is great. I feel like it was a real authentic conversation and we weren't just forcing it to be something. So, um, yeah, well, I would just say this isn't, these are important conversations to be having about this stuff right now.
Mental Health Awareness and Conclusion
02:22:02
Speaker
And I think,
02:22:03
Speaker
I've been terrified to talk about this stuff publicly, terrified, absolutely scared to death. Um, you know, I, I reached out to multiple people in the organization that I used to work for, for help over there. And one of them, one of the writers of the show straight up told me, he's like, don't ever tell people that you have mental health problems, especially evangelicals. Like it won't be safe for your family. So I don't like to talk about this. I'm genuinely terrified to talk about it.
02:22:34
Speaker
The reasons for these conversations that are happening in our culture right now are incredibly important. This goes beyond just like Christianity. Right now we're in the middle of, you know, some dangerous shit that's happening politically and it's primarily being driven by this group of people who are frustrated that they're losing the culture wars. And so they're going to take over our government and if they can't, they're going to burn everything down.
02:23:01
Speaker
And I came from that world. I understand the way these people think. And I think these conversations are valuable and it's important. And I feel like, you know, I guess what I'll close with is, you know, two thoughts, one, why I'm doing this and two, just a thought of, you know, where you're at as, you know, whoever might be listening to this. One, the reason I'm doing this is there's a line in a song from Neil Young, uh, when God made me
02:23:29
Speaker
And there's a stands in it and he says, you know, did he give me the gift of voice so that some could silence me? Did he give me the gift of vision, not knowing what I might see? And I've sat with those lines for a long time. Like, I don't want to talk about my mental health problems in public, but I have seen things and understood things about this culture that you can only understand if you go through these problems. Um, and whether I like it or not,
02:23:57
Speaker
It's my duty as a, as a person, as a human, as in the life form on this planet to share those things. If I have the ability to speak on them articulately in a way that people might listen, maybe I've got an audience out there that would be interested in this. Uh, so I feel an obligation and I want to encourage others to speak up. If you've gone through things, this community needs as much support as possible. And then the second thing I would say is it's everybody who's listening.
02:24:24
Speaker
Maybe you're a person that is starting to question whether or not you are in a healthy environment or not. I believe the white evangelical movement is an apocalyptic political cult. And my test to people would be, if you think it's not, just tell people that you're considering voting for a Democrat in your church and see what happens. And start there. Start looking at charity. Start looking at the false promise of it. Start looking at the really good things that our government does.
02:24:54
Speaker
Um, and I hope you don't have to go through something as horrible as I did to recognize the falseness. Um, but test it, try these things out. And, and if, if you have the courage to speak up, please do so because we all need to speak up right now. All hands on deck, man. Um, these are critical times and I think there's a great deception happening in our culture and we have to stand up and put an end to it. Yeah.
02:25:22
Speaker
Definitely. Ben, thanks. I honestly think this will be well received by our listener base. I think that these are the conversations that they're having, the stuff that they're thinking about. So this was just a real pleasure to have you on. Dave, thanks for sharing your story with us. Thank you. I appreciate the opportunity to give the story of how Jimmy Barkley became a Democrat. Yeah.
02:25:45
Speaker
Well, you heard it here, everyone. Jimmy Barkley is going to hell. It sucks. I know. You don't have to tell your parents. You can if you want to. That's okay. These people up in heaven aren't going to be vaccinated. So I'm pretty sure I want to be in hell at this point.
02:26:00
Speaker
All right. Thank you so much for the opportunity. I really appreciate it. Thank you, guys. Absolutely, man. Absolutely, man. If we need to take three or we need to check in again later, let's do it, right? We'll be checking up on you, man. You scared us with this November bullshit talk, so we'll be checking up on you, man. Thanksgiving does suck, though, so I understand. Yeah. All right, everybody. Thank you all. Thanks for listening, and we'll catch you next time.