The Learning Out Loud Podcast

Is the Book of Job a Supreme Court opinion? In Episode 32 of Learning Out Loud, Part 2 of the Law in the Bible series, Dustin William and Whitestone return to the book many call the oldest in the Bible and read it as a court record. Dustin first lays out the anatomy of a United States Supreme Court opinion, from the caption and syllabus to the writ of certiorari, the dicta and the disposition. The...

Who held title to the land after the European powers finished trading it? In Episode 31 of Learning Out Loud, Dustin William and Whitestone continue reading Joseph Story's Commentaries on the Constitution into the record, picking up at Section 24, where Story is still quoting Chief Justice Marshall in Johnson v. McIntosh. They follow the land through the cabinets of Versailles and London, the Trea...

What if a science-fiction movie were really a lesson in trust law? In Episode 30 of Learning Out Loud, Dustin William and Whitestone break down the Wachowskis' Jupiter Ascending scene by scene, reading it through the lens of title, estate and equity. Whitestone opens with the Gnostic roots of Abraxas, drawn from a 1913 Funk & Wagnalls dictionary and Manly P. Hall's Secret Teachings of All Ages...

Who really holds title to America? In Episode 29 of Learning Out Loud, Dustin William and Whitestone begin a new series: reading Joseph Story's Commentaries on the Constitution of the United States into the record, section by section, with commentary as they go. Starting with Story's plan of the work and Book 1, Chapter 1, on the origin of the title to the territory of the colonies, they follow th...

What does it actually mean to be redeemed? In Episode 28 of Learning Out Loud, Part 5 of our Biblical Redemption series, Dustin and Whitestone move from single stories of rescue to redemption as a song an entire nation was taught to sing. We start in Psalms 103, 107, and 130, where one question hangs over everything: "If thou, LORD, shouldest mark iniquities, O Lord, who shall stand?" From there w...

What happens when a deed looks like an outright sale—but the parties intended it only as security for a debt? In Episode 27 of Learning Out Loud, Dustin William and Whitestone unpack Villa v. Rodriguez, 79 U.S. 323, and the enduring equitable principle that “once a mortgage, always a mortgage.” Follow a 20,000-acre California rancho through drought, family debt, a deed absolute on its face, compet...

What if the Book of Job is more than a story of suffering—what if it presents a legal case pointing directly toward redemption? In Episode 26 of Learning Out Loud, Dustin William and Whitestone examine Job’s demand for a witness, a surety, and ultimately a living goel—a Redeemer who will stand upon the earth and secure his vindication. Through Job 19:25–27, ancient redemption law, and the language...

Once a mortgage, always a mortgage. In Episode 25 of Learning Out Loud, we examine the Equity of Redemption—the doctrine that treats a mortgage as security for a debt rather than an absolute forfeiture of property. Through Morris v. Executors of Nixon and Pomeroy’s Equity Jurisprudence, we explore redemption rights, foreclosure, contribution, exoneration, and the enduring maxim that equity abhors...

The Book of Ruth is more than a love story—it is a legal and spiritual account of redemption. Ruth chooses loyalty. Boaz chooses to redeem. At the city gate, land, inheritance, covenant, and lineage converge in a transaction that reaches forward toward David—and ultimately Christ. In Episode 24, Dustin William and Whitestone examine the kinsman-redeemer, Ruth’s place within Boaz’s estate, and the...

What if everything you thought you knew about a mortgage was only one side of the coin? In Episode 23 of Learning Out Loud, Dustin William and co-host Whitestone dismantle the popular myth of the mortgage as a three-inch stack of papers you “sign your life away” to, and rebuild it from the ground up as what it truly is in equity — a relationship, not a life sentence. Walking through Pomeroy’s Equi...

In this second installment of the Biblical Redemption series, host Dustin William and co-host Whitestone trace the golden thread of redemption from the blood-marked doorposts of the Passover all the way to the bronze serpent lifted in the wilderness. Opening in the book of Exodus, they walk through Israel's deliverance from bondage—the lamb without blemish, the blood struck on the doorframe, and t...

Episode 21 of Learning Out Loud takes a deep dive into the very heart of equity jurisprudence — the Equity of Redemption — through the towering work of John Norton Pomeroy. Host Dustin William and co-host Whitestone trace Pomeroy's life, apprenticeship-forged education, and his masterwork on equity, the treatise that reframed equity not as a historical curiosity or a footnote to the common law, bu...

In this episode of Learning Out Loud, host Dustin William and co-host Whitestone begin an epic journey through the Bible's stories of redemption—starting exactly where it all begins: the Book of Genesis. Together they unpack the four foundational narratives that set the pattern for all of Scripture: the Fall and God's first promise of redemption in the Garden, Noah and the cleansing waters of the...

Step into the gaslit press rooms of 1830s New York, where one ambitious newspaperman rewrote the rules of American media—and the American mind. In Episode 19 of Learning Out Loud, host Dustin William and co-host Whitestone open the first chapter of the Orphan Trains series with the man who lit the fuse: James Gordon Bennett, founder of the New York Herald. Follow the ink from the birth of the penn...

EP 18 — The Fruits of Yale ​ What if the Ivy League wasn't founded on scholarship, but on charters, monopolies, and merchant power? In this episode of Learning Out Loud, Dustin William and Whitestone follow the money from the docks of Elizabethan England to the shores of New Haven — tracing how Queen Elizabeth's chartered trading companies handed a handful of merchant families the power to make th...

What if "Stockholm Syndrome" was never a diagnosis — but a script? In August 1973, a man in a cowboy disguise and a fake American accent walked into a Stockholm bank, fired into the ceiling, and declared "the party has just begun." Six days later, the hostages sided with their captors — and a Swedish psychiatrist named the phenomenon on live TV without ever interviewing a single one of them. In Ep...

From the Lombard invasion of Italy to the rise of papal territorial power, Episode 16 opens the first chapter of our Holy Roman Germanic Empire series by tracing the pressure points that reshaped Europe between 568 and 757 AD. We follow the Lombards, the weakening Byzantine hold on Rome, the papacy’s search for military protection, the Patrimony of Saint Peter, the Donation of Sutri, and the Donat...

EP 15 is live. We trace the life and legal legacy of Justice Joseph Story—then step into the Book of Job and read it the way most people never do: as a structured courtroom proceeding. Job isn’t just a poem of suffering. It’s a forensic dispute—claims, testimony, cross-examination, and finally a verdict from the whirlwind. If you care about law, history, and how language shapes judgment, this epis...

Before Yale became a name synonymous with presidents, power, secret societies, and institutional prestige, it began as a Puritan project rooted in New Haven’s Bible-governed colony, strategic family lines, colonial commerce, and a web of ministers, merchants, rectors, and symbols that still echo through America’s ruling institutions. In Episode 14 of Learning Out Loud, we begin The Fruits of Yale...

They took rhetoric out of your education on purpose. For 2,500 years — from the courts of Syracuse to the halls of Rome — a trained class of men have used the precise science of persuasion to move populations, win property disputes, build empires, and pass laws. They knew the five canons. They knew Aristotle. They knew Cicero. They knew exactly how to open a speech, arrange a body of proof, deploy...

Logic isn’t “just arguing”—it’s the ancient toolset that lets you separate true from false, spot deception, and think in clean, testable forms. In EP 12 of Learning Out Loud, Dustin William and Whitestone walk through the Trivium’s second pillar (Logic), trace it back to logos (the Word), and show how real reasoning works—from propositions and syllogisms to the way lawyers (and sophists) use langu...

Episode 11 kicks off our new Trivium series by going back to the beginning: Grammar—not as “rules,” but as the foundation of how words latch onto reality. If you’ve ever felt like modern life is built on shifting definitions, this episode is your toolkit: naming things correctly (Aristotle’s categories), learning how symbols shape thought, and why etymology isn’t trivia—it’s a way to recover meani...

Equity isn’t “made‑up discretion”—it’s the ancient correction of rigid law where universality fails, rooted in what is just ex aequo et bono. In Foundations EP 10, we trace equity’s lineage from Aristotle’s definition through Roman and English Chancery, the Curia Regis, and the rise of the Chancellor—showing how a system built on principle (Not caprice) became the engine for trusts, remedies, and...

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Episode 8 is live—and it’s one of the most practical conversations we’ve had yet. We crack open a rare 1918 volume, Law, Banking, and Business, and use it as a window into how contracts, notes, deeds, affidavits, agency, and trusts were explained in plain language—then connect those foundations to the living principles of equity: intention, conscience, and diligence. If you’ve ever felt like moder...