July 18, 2018

#19 - JT Kelley

1 hour 8 minutes

JT Kelley (@eatingbootytakingnames) is a comedian who grew up in fundamentalist Christian schooling.

This was an intriguing podcast! I first met my friend JT while working at Juiceland in Austin. My original intention of our dialogue was to chat about comedy. Instead, JT discusses what it was like to have grown up in fundamentalist Christian schooling and how that's affected him. I could have dove much deeper into some of the heated topics brought up in this conversation like socialism, communism, and fundamentalist Christianity, but chose instead to keep things light and friendly.

I was previously ignorant that such schooling programs like Abeka Books and Bob Jones University existed and I'm curious to learn more about them. I'm ignorant on the subject, but it sounds strange to me that there are educational programs in the United States that aren't encouraging kids to think for themselves, are incentivizing them to protest complex issues, and perhaps even supporting leveraging them toward some sort of political/religious/financial agenda. If you know more about any of this, I’d love to hear from you.

All that being said, JT is one of the funniest comedians I’ve ever seen perform (not an understatement) and the conversation was kept pleasant. So, without further adieu, please welcome to the podcast my hilarious friend, Mr. JT Kelley!

Love,

David

*PS - Although much of the discussion revolves around comedy and JT’s Christian upbringing, I wanted to include one quick fact check about incarceration rates: JT briefly mentioned that 20% of the total US population is incarcerated. The research I found states otherwise, that about 2.3M people in the US are incarcerated as of 2018, which is an incarceration rate of less than 1%. That being said, he could have been referring to the US prison population as a percent of the world’s prison population (~20%).

*https://www.prisonpolicy.org/reports/pie2018.html

Show Notes: