able to come out due to working and

So a few of my friends and I, we actually went down like the weekend after, and then we did our own little bike tour around Windsor.

Then, you know, there's a lot of different people on the bike club.

They'll just post, hey, I'm going out on, you know, Tuesday at 11.

Who else wants to ride? And that's how a lot of people have been meeting up.

But, you know, stay tuned because we do have events that will be being, we're

Do you know more information about what happened yesterday?

I basically know the same as you.

Does it start where you found yourself homeless in San Francisco or?

Oh yeah, that was no, I was homeless before.

I would say my, my spiritual awakening probably started.

Yeah.

Going back to even like, again, even the quote unquote bad medicine serving a purpose.

So I'd say, um, my spiritual awakening started for sure when I was a heroin addict.

Um, I didn't recognize until a little bit further along that I was really like heroin was my drug of choice because it really kind of quieted all of the spiritual gifts that I had that I didn't recognize as spiritual gifts.

to fight back.

But to get started with this conversation, we really just wanted a chance to... talk about what community means and especially when leaving these groups what it means and how you find community outside of such a tight-knit group and a lot of times you're losing your entire community right amanda do you want to speak a little bit to that of what community what it was like to leave your community and what it was like to try to find one on the outside

Yeah, it was, I feel like leaving the Kingston's and maybe most polygamist groups is the same story where you kind of lose your entire community overnight.

And some people get really shocked by that.

Like not realizing how much their family really is going to cut them off.

I knew that mine was going to do that.

Well, I knew that the majority of the people I knew in the cults were not going to talk to me again once I left.

So I kind of... made my secret goodbyes or you know having those last conversations with the people that I cared about most but it came down to that decision of you know are you going to choose yourself and your freedom or not live slowly bleed out right but it's a hard decision to make um and so coming out you really feel like a fish out of water it's it's almost like you're you're yes you're free and you're out here in the real world but you don't know how to it's like it's like learning a new language so it's really hard to connect with people out here because they're the the life you lived in the cults was so different than the world out here the things we talked about in there were so different than things out here.

Okay.

[laughs]

So what, what Texas Inmate Crafts, um, how it came to be is the founder, uh, is actually a high school friend of mine who has done 22 years on a life sentence.

He's currently incarcerated in the Texas Department of Criminal Justice.

And he had a dream, um, some years ago about being able to help some of the guys on the inside, uh, be able to, uh, keep food in their locker and, and to be able to showcase their talents.

And so one day, he was sitting in his cell and he was watching a podcast about AI, and that's when he realized that his dream could become a reality.

In April of this year, he actually saw that dream come to fruition, and TexasInmateCrafts.com website was launched.

Um, as a matter of fact, today we hit another milestone.

Oh.