Introducing Carl Youngblood and Lincoln Cannon

John Dehlin [00:00:00] Hello, everyone, and welcome to another episode of Mormon Stories Podcast. I'm your host, John Dehlin. It is February 9, 2022, and we have a special Mormon Stories episode for you today. Today we have with us two gentlemen that I've known for quite some time. One is returning to Mormon Stories podcast. We have Carl Youngblood, who's returning to Mormon Stories. Hey, Carl.

Carl Youngblood [00:00:27] Hi, guys, to be here.

John Dehlin [00:00:28] And Lincoln Cannon, who, who I met many years ago but is joining us for the first time. Welcome, Lincoln.

Lincoln Cannon [00:00:34] Thank you. It's a pleasure to be here.

John Dehlin [00:00:35] Yeah, Just to give a tiny bit of an introduction. So probably 2004, 2005, I'm just moved to Utah. I am just trying to get to know people in Utah and Mormons and, and the like. I'm. I'm, you know, connecting with Sunstone and Dan Witherspoon and just trying to get a lay of the land. I. I'm invited to some house with a bunch of young people younger than me. And it was part of a Internet group called swab or Spock with a Beard. It was an acronym for Spock with a Beard. And I meet, you know, these people that are all kind of young, fun people, kind of progressive Mormon types.

John Dehlin [00:01:17] And they've got this group. This is pre Facebook, this is pre, you know, probably pre YouTube. And they're just all forging this really lovely community of really thoughtful young people who like to have intellectual discussions. And over time, like all the Internet forums of the day, they've kind of all passed away or gone away. I don't know what the status of SWAB is, but as SWAB kind of started declining, some of these friends in this group started more and more talking about something called transhumanism, which is what the topic of today's Mormon Stories episode is going to be about.

John Dehlin [00:02:01] But those of you who happen to have caught Carl Youngblood's episode on Mormon Stories a couple years ago, Carl would have given a bit of an introduction to. To transhumanism there. But because. Because I felt like I was really interested in talking to Carl about his Mormonism, about his progressive Mormonism, about how he still believes in Mormonism, you know, in spite of the challenges to its historicity and its truth claims, etc, I think. I think maybe our conversation about transhumanism got a tiny bit derailed in that.

John Dehlin [00:02:38] But also, I've just enjoyed keeping up with Carl and I've always wanted to have Lincoln on. But then if I could also just add one extra layer on Mormon Stories podcast, you know, one of the reasons I wear this Thrive hat. It's not an mlm, it's not a for profit venture. It's literally just this idea that, you know, you can, you can thrive, you can do well.

John Dehlin [00:03:04] Even if you're not a normal Mormon and an average, everyday, orthodox, conservative Mormon, you can still find healing and growth in community, either as a progressive Mormon or, or as an inactive Mormon or even if you've left the church. But the whole idea behind Thrive, in this new Thrive initiative that we have going with Margi, where we're going to be bringing people on to Mormon Stories podcast to tell their stories of how they've thrived sort of outside of Mormon orthodoxy, we'll say this is going to be kind of a pre interview in that spirit. And the reason why we're not just having Margi here to do a regular Thrive story, which is what you're going to be seeing in the future, is because in this case, Lincoln and Carl still are active.

John Dehlin [00:03:48] And I would probably, I'm guessing they would identify as faithful Mormons. So it doesn't quite fit the Thrive story model. But, but, but is that true? Both of you guys attend the church.

Carl Youngblood [00:04:01] Yeah.

John Dehlin [00:04:01] And identify as active, faithful Mormons, Right?

Lincoln Cannon [00:04:03] Yeah, I do.

Carl Youngblood [00:04:04] Yeah. In fact, if I could just take a moment, like, I think our last discussion that we had, which I was really grateful for the opportunity, a number of folks I think, came back to both you and me and said, like, you guys spent so long on this one little part of. I kind of feel like I didn't have the presence of mind in some cases to respond adequately. But I think the biggest thing, the sort of takeaway from that conversation that I was left with is I totally should have done a better job of acknowledging the fact that my Mormonism is not necessarily perhaps the most common. The main point I wanted to make was just that I still see it as legitimate, if that makes sense.

John Dehlin [00:04:47] Totally.

Carl Youngblood [00:04:48] So if you wanted to claim mine was a little more rare or unusual, that's fine. That's. That's fair. That's totally fair. I still see it as authentic, if that makes sense.

John Dehlin [00:04:57] Totally.

Carl Youngblood [00:04:58] Yeah.

John Dehlin [00:04:58] And the truth is there's 6 million versions of Mormonism out there because, yeah, 16 plus million Mormons. So there's 16 plus million versions of Mormonism.

Carl Youngblood [00:05:08] So I've saved you like four hours of that episode by just saying that. So, I mean, if you want, you go and watch it again.

John Dehlin [00:05:14] But. Well, I. And, and by the way, for a long time, the traditional Mormon stories was always having people from across the faith and belief spectrum. Once I got excommunicated, less and less believers were willing to come on the show and in some way that becomes a self fulfilling prophecy where like people will peg you as an anti or an ex Mormon podcast because faithful people won't engage anymore because they're afraid of what might happen if they do engage. So in that spirit, I'm number one grateful that you would come on Mormon Stories podcast as faithful believing members and also that you, you know, would, would be willing to share, you know, what, what do you think and feel?

John Dehlin [00:05:53] Because it's just always been in the spirit of, of Mormon Stories to, to have people like you on. So in that sense, thank you so much for being willing to brave whatever disciplinary action might, you know, potentially you might be at risk for, which is probably none, but.

Lincoln Cannon [00:06:07] Probably none.

Carl Youngblood [00:06:08] But I feel pretty good about it. But yeah, thanks.

Lincoln Cannon [00:06:10] I'm thank, I'm thankful for the opportunity. It's, it's nice of you to invite me.

John Dehlin [00:06:13] My pleasure. So just to kind of finish the thought, I love sharing on Mormon Stories Podcast. Anything that helps people find community, anything that gives people a sense of identity or meaning or purpose, whether they're in or out of the church. If it's not just regular vanilla flavored orthodox Mormonism, it has a place on Mormon Stories. And what I do know for sure is that there are many super bright, thoughtful people that have taken to transhumanism and Mormon transhumanism.

John Dehlin [00:06:43] And you guys have had this conference that you hold every year where people like Rosalind Welch and Richard Bushman and other super smart people have spoken at. I want to say, Adam Miller. Yeah, you know, a lot of the people that we've had on Mormon Stories podcast in the past, a lot of people that our listeners either used to respect or even still respect today have, have been guests to your conference. This isn't kind of necessarily kooky, nerdy, fringe people. These are smart, capable, accomplished professionals and lots of other types of people who have found meaning or value or purpose or community or solace in the philosophy of transhumanism.

John Dehlin [00:07:24] I know transhumanism is a much broader movement than just Mormonism or post Mormonism. I'm also guessing there are post Mormons in your Mormon transhumanism movement. And so what today is all about is introducing transhumanism to you, to you, my listeners and viewers, our listener and viewers, to let you know what it is, why it might be interesting or important or valuable, and to just share it with everyone as an option for people to add Whether they're in or out of the church, regardless of your belief. Perspective. Perspective, it just might be something that could enhance your life and that. That sort of corresponds with the whole thrive initiative.

John Dehlin [00:08:02] And that's why we're having you guys on. And before I just throw it to you guys, I also want to introduce my cherished and valuable side host and partner in righteousness and goodness, Cara Burrell. Kara.

Guest [00:08:17] Hey.

Carl Youngblood [00:08:18] Hey, fellas.

John Dehlin [00:08:18] You made it.

Guest [00:08:19] Yeah, John had a busy morning and I went from. He went from one livestream to popping into this. I walked in, met the guys in the hallway, said, we're doing a podcast right now. Let's get on it.

John Dehlin [00:08:32] Well, Kara, as my listeners and viewers know, you've added so much to. We just passed 50,000 subscribers on YouTube today during our live stream.

Lincoln Cannon [00:08:43] Congratulations.

John Dehlin [00:08:44] And you know, for some, that's nothing. For some, if it's not under, you know, millions, it's irrelevant. In the Mormon world, that's big. There aren't a lot of Mormon themed YouTube channels that have over 50,000 subscribers.

Carl Youngblood [00:08:55] And with your long form content, I'd say that's quite an accomplishment as well, you know.

John Dehlin [00:08:59] Yeah.

Carl Youngblood [00:09:00] Not everyone, you know, listens to the longer YouTube videos, so that's a lot.

Guest [00:09:05] Sending Brad Wilcox a basket of muffins.

John Dehlin [00:09:09] He helped push us over the top.

Carl Youngblood [00:09:11] Oh, yeah.

Guest [00:09:12] The more the church does things, the more we have to report on it. The more we report on it, the more subscribers we get. It's just evidence of the problem that is evident, you know.

John Dehlin [00:09:21] Well, we're all trying to do better, right? That's part of what transhumanism is about, is about progress. So.

Carl Youngblood [00:09:26] Well, in a lot of ways. I also look forward in. In a weird way to challenges that the church faces in various ways because I feel like it maybe helps some of the perspectives that we would like to share get a little more airtime or attention. I also feel like there are things that need to be improved and fixed and stuff. And so anything that brings that to light, that kind of helps truth to come forth, I think is welcome.

Lincoln Cannon [00:09:57] Challenges are always opportunities to improve. They always are. Now whether we do it or not is another thing.

John Dehlin [00:10:03] Bed. Totally. All right, well, Kara, it's great to have you. Thanks for joining us as always. You're a really important part of our success.

Guest [00:10:09] Thanks.

John Dehlin [00:10:10] Thank you.

Guest [00:10:10] Thanks.

John Dehlin [00:10:11] Yeah. Okay. All right, so what I want to do is start with the ending. What is transhumanism? In like a couple minutes. And then we're going to go into a little bit about both of your stories. And then how you came into transhumanism and maybe how you came to kind of create the trans Mormon transhumanism movement. And then we'll just get into just a deep dive. Not a deep dive, but an initial dive into what it is, why it's interesting, why it's important, why it's relevant, why so many cool, smart, thoughtful people in and out of Mormonism care about it. But. But let's maybe start with you. Now, Lincoln, you've been the president of the Mormon Transhumanism Association.

What Is Transhumanism?

Lincoln Cannon [00:10:52] Yeah, for the first 10 years.

John Dehlin [00:10:54] For the first 10 years, yeah. Okay, so maybe we'll start with you, Lincoln.

Lincoln Cannon [00:10:58] Sure.

John Dehlin [00:10:58] If you had to give an introduction to transhumanism in a way that would pique people's interest to make them feel like it could be interesting or relevant to them, how would you describe it? And then. And then Carl will have you add to what Lincoln says.

Carl Youngblood [00:11:12] Sure.

Lincoln Cannon [00:11:13] Yeah. So my definition of transhumanism is the. Is advocacy for the ethical use of technology to enhance human abilities. And I'd emphasize a couple of the words there. One would be advocacy and the other would be ethics. It's not just technology cheerleading, so ethics matters. It's people who recognize both the opportunities and the risks of emerging technology for humanity and for our ongoing evolution. And then advocacy is important because it's not just about people recognizing risks and opportunities, but actually saying, hey, there are these risks and opportunities. Let's go do something about that.

John Dehlin [00:11:51] Okay. So it's kind of like a heavy tech focus of what the risks and potentials of technology can be, and saying, we've all got free time. Let's spend our free time learning about tech and its dangers and uses and how it could enhance humankind.

Lincoln Cannon [00:12:07] Learning is a good start, but we also encourage people, and you know, that includes ourselves, to do more than just learn about these things. How can we actually practice these things in ways that make our bodies and our brains, our communities and our world better than they were historically? What can we actually do? Not just to be talkers, but doers.

John Dehlin [00:12:29] So rituals, Almost.

Lincoln Cannon [00:12:30] Sure.

Carl Youngblood [00:12:31] And I would even add that it's not just a matter of what we're doing with our free time. It also has a lot to do with what we're even doing with our day to day work. I mean, a lot of the people who are just working at a startup or working at any company, more and more, these questions about technology and which direction to take things, how to develop certain plans and ideas, involve serious, you know, cutting edge technologies and the Choices you make about which direction you want to take things in your business could have a lot to do with the outcomes for society and for individuals. I mean, right now we're seeing social media companies, for example, making choices about the ways that we will be interacting with each other that could have huge implications for the whole nature of our existence. Right. Yeah.

Key Technologies in Transhumanist Thought

John Dehlin [00:13:20] You guys, in, in your outline you listed like a bunch of the technologies that, that probably are some of the most common things to talk about amongst transhumanists. But go ahead and just rifle off some of the technologies that you guys would give as examples of technologies that really have the potential to affect the, the health and the well being of humankind and the world.

Carl Youngblood [00:13:45] Well, one I would jump off. That's kind of on people's minds lately.

John Dehlin [00:13:48] We're not going to dive into them yet. Just. Sure, yeah, yeah.

Carl Youngblood [00:13:51] Is virtual reality, right? A lot of folks, Yeah, I mean that's on people's minds because Facebook recently announced. Well, they changed their name to Metta and they announced that kind of this is the place where people are going to be conducting business and maybe even just social activities in the future. That's where they are saying we're all going to be. That seems like a radical shift in the way we currently interact.

John Dehlin [00:14:15] So I don't know, the metaverse, what's one?

Lincoln Cannon [00:14:17] Yeah, you know, biotechnology, genetics, crispr.

John Dehlin [00:14:20] CRISPR technology.

Lincoln Cannon [00:14:21] Nanotechnology and its future for molecular machines potentially. There are cognitive technologies, brain computer interfacing, brain emulation technologies. All of these have huge narratives developed around them in the transhumanist movement, I

Carl Youngblood [00:14:39] would add energy, new forms of energy extraction, like renewable energy. But also one area that's heating up right now in just the next, the last little while is fusion energy. A number of companies have announced they're only a couple years or two or three years away from viable fusion, which up until.

John Dehlin [00:14:59] Sensitive topic in Utah. Right. With cold fusion and that whole debacle.

Carl Youngblood [00:15:04] Yeah. I think only people like our age actually remember that story.

John Dehlin [00:15:08] But you're saying I'm old. What do you say, Carl? What are you saying?

Lincoln Cannon [00:15:10] I'm our age.

John Dehlin [00:15:13] Have you ever heard of cold fusion?

Guest [00:15:14] No.

John Dehlin [00:15:15] No.

Carl Youngblood [00:15:15] Okay, Hans, right? Wasn't it Ponds and Fleshman or something like that?

John Dehlin [00:15:20] It was a big scandal. Some University of Utah.

Carl Youngblood [00:15:23] Was he a professor or something like that?

John Dehlin [00:15:24] Claimed to have figured out how to fuse, how to extract energy from the fusion of molecules, but really hadn't figured it out, but everyone thought that he had. And it was a huge academic scandal in the early 90s. So you're welcome for.

Guest [00:15:38] So never trust scientists again.

John Dehlin [00:15:39] Exactly.

Carl Youngblood [00:15:40] That's our point.

John Dehlin [00:15:41] Don't trust scientists. Okay, keep going.

Carl Youngblood [00:15:43] I think that's the point. I just mentioned that because up until recently, fusion energy, like pragmatic, practical fusion, had always been 20 years away. Everybody kept saying, it's just another 20 years and we'll have this figured out. And they've been saying that for, like, 50 years now. But now there's a few companies that are really saying they're super close. And the amazing thing that that would be is, like, it would actually provide us with practically free energy all across the globe. I mean, just imagine what that would be like, you know?

John Dehlin [00:16:14] Okay.

Lincoln Cannon [00:16:15] Another important thing to recognize about transhumanism is that it's not only about technology either. Some transhumanists like to point out that there's two important ways to approach the word. There's trans dash humanism and transhuman dash ism. Transhuman dash ism would be about the application of technology to the human condition. How do we change our brains and bodies to be better? But there's also the trans dash humanism. And so there's this idea about what is humanism in the first place?

Lincoln Cannon [00:16:48] It's an ancient philosophy and ideology with a rich, rich set of ideas that inform many people in the world. One of the important aspects of transhumanism is the rejection of the notion that humans. Humanity is a done deal, that who we are and what we are has been completed. In transhumanism, there's this recognition that what it is to be human is an ongoing, dynamic process, and that there may come a point in time in the future when we aren't, at least biologically, what we've traditionally understood humans to be.

Lincoln Cannon [00:17:30] And that implies things about more than just our anatomy. That also implies things about our culture and our society and our philosophies and our religions. And so there's much more going on to transhumanism than just interest in technology and science. There's also a very rich social and cultural aspect to the movement.

John Dehlin [00:17:49] I love it. Okay, so now that we've kind of given an introduction to transhumanism, I want each of you to just spend literally just a minute or two kind of doing the bullet points of your. Of your early years. Slash your Mormon story and focus on the parts that you think lead breadcrumbs to transhumanism in terms of, you know, because, you know. And of course, Lincoln, your. Your. Your story, like. Like Carl's, deserves its own deep dive. We're not going to do that today because I really want the focus today to be on transhumanism. But give us just a little bit about your background, your Mormon background and the breadcrumbs that lead us today to your interest in transhumanism.

Carl and Lincoln's Personal Backgrounds

Carl Youngblood [00:18:31] Sure.

John Dehlin [00:18:32] And then Carl, you can refresh us a tiny bit too.

Lincoln Cannon [00:18:35] Yeah. So I was born to parents who were Mormons, members of the church. And my father was a computer programmer. And nice for those who know how old I am, they would know that that was not a popular profession like mainframes or. Yeah, he worked with mainframes, COBOL programming. He was one of the original coders of Word Perf.

John Dehlin [00:18:55] Oh, yeah.

Lincoln Cannon [00:18:57] And he also worked on software for nuclear reactors for the government, for a government contractor. So he was working in the information technology industry long before it became popular to do so. So I grew up in Utah County. Utah. No, no, I was born in Utah because my parents were at BYU originally. We moved to Chicago five years there, moved to Washington State, five years there and then came back to Utah when I was 10.

John Dehlin [00:19:19] Ish.

Guest [00:19:20] Okay.

John Dehlin [00:19:20] Yeah. So dad's a computer programmer. Before it was cool.

Lincoln Cannon [00:19:24] That's right. And so that's what I grew up with.

John Dehlin [00:19:26] Did you have a TRS 80 when it came out?

Lincoln Cannon [00:19:28] Like, do you remember that we had different computers in our home. The coolest computer we had in our home when I was really little was actually kind of just a monitor that was connected to a mainframe in, you know, far away in another part of the city.

John Dehlin [00:19:42] Oh, wow.

Lincoln Cannon [00:19:43] And when it wasn't being used for work related stuff, my dad and I would use it to play text based adventure games.

Carl Youngblood [00:19:49] Wow.

Lincoln Cannon [00:19:50] On a mainframe computer, like MUD kind of stuff. Are you familiar with the. So it doesn't matter. Legend of Zork. It wasn't Legend of Zork. Along those lines.

John Dehlin [00:19:58] Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Lincoln Cannon [00:19:59] So just describe something in text and you tell it what you want to do.

John Dehlin [00:20:03] But did you have the early Apples or the early Commodore? You know any of those? Do you remember those?

Lincoln Cannon [00:20:08] My neighbor had a Commodore that we'd go program. We would copy all of the text out of his magazine, Word for Word into his Commodore and then we would run.

Carl Youngblood [00:20:16] Yeah, we had all those computers too. We had a blast with that.

Lincoln Cannon [00:20:20] Yeah. So that's the environment I grew up in. And my parents were active participants in the church. I was an active participant in the church. And so technology was just part of life, always was. I grew up that way. And so that was a little bit about my father My mother, on the other hand, she was a convert to Mormonism from Catholicism. And her emphasis in her Christianity, even as a Catholic, and she liked it even more about Mormonism was the emphasis on work, on doing something with our faith.

Carl Youngblood [00:20:51] She.

Lincoln Cannon [00:20:52] All the time when I was a kid, she would quote the idea, the scripture of faith without works is dead. It's not enough to just believe something. What are we doing about it? Are we making something of this belief that we have? So I was raised by a very driven mother, very practical mother. My father was very technologically oriented. And so our interpretation of Mormonism was colored by those worldviews. Very practical, very compatible with technology. And in our homes, there was never an incompatibility between science and religion.

John Dehlin [00:21:26] Nice. So evolution wasn't a boogeyman.

Lincoln Cannon [00:21:28] It was never an issue in our home. It was an issue around us that we were. I don't know if people in the church today know how much more difficult it used to be to talk about evolution in the church. There was a time when it was

John Dehlin [00:21:42] hard, it was worse.

Lincoln Cannon [00:21:43] Now, at least for me, it's easy to talk about. I know some people have varying mileage on that, but I talk about it regularly, not every time, but when it comes up in church, I talk about it. And it goes by fine now, but

John Dehlin [00:21:56] when I was a teen, Bruce R. McConkey would have labeled it one of the seven deadly heresies.

Lincoln Cannon [00:22:00] That's right.

John Dehlin [00:22:01] So it was just bad?

Lincoln Cannon [00:22:03] It was bad, yeah. Yeah. But it wasn't in my home. But I observed that around, and that was actually troubling for me as a kid to observe that it was a problem for other people.

John Dehlin [00:22:13] Yeah.

Lincoln Cannon [00:22:13] Because I didn't anymore.

Carl Youngblood [00:22:15] Yeah.

Lincoln Cannon [00:22:15] For other people that, you know, I. These were my friends and, you know, extended family. Why was it bugging them? I saw no problem with evolution being compatible with my religion.

John Dehlin [00:22:24] Yeah.

Lincoln Cannon [00:22:25] And my parents didn't raise me to see any problem with that.

John Dehlin [00:22:28] Yeah.

Lincoln Cannon [00:22:28] And so over time, anyway, just. I don't want to spend all the time talking about my history. I went through a faith crisis eventually. Like lots of.

John Dehlin [00:22:38] Okay, really quick. So you did seminary?

Lincoln Cannon [00:22:40] I did.

John Dehlin [00:22:41] Did you do the mission? Yes, sir. Word Server Mission.

Lincoln Cannon [00:22:44] France, Marseille.

John Dehlin [00:22:45] Okay, fun. And then you. Did you. What'd you do for college?

Lincoln Cannon [00:22:48] I studied philosophy at byu.

John Dehlin [00:22:50] Byu, okay. And then you got married in the temple?

Lincoln Cannon [00:22:53] I did.

John Dehlin [00:22:53] Okay.

Guest [00:22:54] Yeah.

John Dehlin [00:22:54] Okay. So you got all those Mormon checkboxes.

Lincoln Cannon [00:22:56] I checked. Of all the boxes, yes.

John Dehlin [00:22:58] Okay, fine.

Carl Youngblood [00:22:58] And.

Lincoln Cannon [00:22:59] And by and large, these are all experiences that I continue to value deeply today.

John Dehlin [00:23:03] Okay.

Lincoln Cannon [00:23:04] Okay.

John Dehlin [00:23:04] So like around what year was the faith crisis kind of released?

Lincoln Cannon [00:23:07] Well, it started brewing as a teenager.

John Dehlin [00:23:09] Okay.

Lincoln Cannon [00:23:09] And it didn't culminate until my father died of his third cancer when I was a young adult, post marriage. And that's when, you know, very, very predictable challenges to faith hit me. Hit me really hard, like they do to many of us. And I struggled deeply, for example, with the problem of evil and various other things. But that was a big one. You know, how could it be that God is there with all the suffering that I observe and now and experiencing and observing in my father dying of cancer. He had esophageal cancer.

John Dehlin [00:23:40] That's a horrible one.

Lincoln Cannon [00:23:42] It was. It was not pretty. Right. And so watching him go through that, having a good relationship with him, caring about him deeply and not wanting him to suffer that way, and then also seeing the way it affected my family, it was. That was probably one of the harder times of my life. I was also a young parent at the time, had my first child, just barely. I was trying to, you know, start to support my family financially. So everything about life was stressful. But then he dies and I. It broke. It broke my faith.

John Dehlin [00:24:15] What year was this about?

Lincoln Cannon [00:24:17] This would have been in the late 1990s.

Carl Youngblood [00:24:19] Okay.

Lincoln Cannon [00:24:20] Yeah. My father died in 1998.

John Dehlin [00:24:22] Okay.

Lincoln Cannon [00:24:25] Which also corresponds with the. The boom of the original World Wide Web was coming about about that same time. And I. I was. I had worked for dot com companies at the time. When he died, I was working for a dot com startup that eventually failed. Like.

John Dehlin [00:24:42] So you studied philosophy, but you got into tech?

Lincoln Cannon [00:24:44] Because I grew up a programmer because of my father. Yeah. I later got an MBA at BYU as well. But, yeah, nobody would pay me to be a philosopher. They would pay me to program computers. So I spent a couple of decades in corporate environments doing computer programming, software engineering. And so, yeah, I had a faith crisis. I continued to practice, continued to go to church. During my faith crisis, I didn't talk to all that openly about my loss of faith. I wanted to approach it as constructively as I could because I loved the people around me. And it was during that period of time when I was trying to reconstruct my own identity.

John Dehlin [00:25:27] Let me ask you, did you actually hit kind of a consideration of atheism or agnosticism during that time?

Lincoln Cannon [00:25:33] Yeah. I did not openly identify as an atheist. With my close friends, I would joke that I was agnostic towards any extraterrestrial humanoid deities. That was the way I would try to put it, to make it. It sounds a little Funny. Right. So it would relieve the tension and then we could talk about it.

John Dehlin [00:25:48] That's how Leonard D. Moyer Spock would describe his religious points of view. Maybe.

Lincoln Cannon [00:25:53] Yeah. But, yeah, I mean, functionally, I was an atheist at that point in time.

John Dehlin [00:25:58] Okay, so you did hit that.

Lincoln Cannon [00:25:59] I did.

John Dehlin [00:25:59] Should I say rock bottom, Kara? Is that an insult to call that rock bottom?

Guest [00:26:03] I am on top of the world.

Lincoln Cannon [00:26:06] Yeah. And actually, actually wasn't for me, the hardest part about it, the harder. There were harder parts about it in more kind of fundamental ways about just creating value and purpose in life. The question about the existence of God was tangential in some ways to those deeper issues that, like, what are you

Carl Youngblood [00:26:27] going to do with your life?

Lincoln Cannon [00:26:28] Basically, yeah. What was the value of living? What should I make of this? And so, yeah, it was a hard time for me. And I don't want to say that in a sense that I'm asking for any pity. I'm not. Because almost all of us go through a hard time like that at some point.

John Dehlin [00:26:47] Sure.

Lincoln Cannon [00:26:48] And I recognize that. So it's just more of an acknowledgment that, hey, I'm like everybody else. I've gone through this. And so during that period of time is when I encountered. And at first I didn't know it by name, but I encountered transhumanism and that and various other influences.

John Dehlin [00:27:11] Was it like on an AOL chat or like, what do you remember?

Lincoln Cannon [00:27:15] It was not on an A. So this. This was the late 90s. This is pre Google, early 2000s. So Google came about during the period of time. Two of the influences that I encountered separately, and I didn't know at the time that they were actually kind of part of the same movement, were a philosopher called Nick Bostrom. He's a philosopher out of the uk, Oxford University, and a technologist inventor named Ray Kurzweil, inventor of the Kurzweil keyboards.

Lincoln Cannon [00:27:49] I encountered various things that they had written during that period of time, and I didn't know that they were connected ideologically at the time, but I started reading some of their thoughts, and they resonated really deeply with me and in strange ways that we're going to talk about really deeply with my Mormon background as well. There were other influences that also kind of mattered a lot to me during that period of time. I was reading a lot of William James, the philosopher. I was reading a lot of Friedrich Nietzsche, the philosopher.

Lincoln Cannon [00:28:19] And oddly, I was also going back and very carefully reading the New Testament, especially the Epistles of Paul at that time. And Those were all big influences on me during that same period of time when I encountered transhumanism. So that's kind of. That leads up to the point where I bump into transhumanism. That might be a good place to.

Discovering Transhumanism as a Named Philosophy

John Dehlin [00:28:39] Okay, so like, you remember. Do you remember reading the word transhumanism? Where, when do you even remember? Like, like finding out that it was a named philosophy with the community behind it. Do you even remember where and when that happened?

Lincoln Cannon [00:28:55] Yeah. So one of the philosophers I just mentioned, Nick Bostrom, the first paper that I ever read that he wrote was in Philosophical Quarterly. And the title of the paper was Are We Living in a Computer Simulation?

John Dehlin [00:29:10] Really? Back then. Oh, yeah, they were talking about that. I mean, that's an idea that people talk about.

Carl Youngblood [00:29:16] Or the initial.

Lincoln Cannon [00:29:18] Not the first, but yeah, very early.

Carl Youngblood [00:29:20] One of the first to kind of describe and articulate the simulation hypothesis. Right. Wasn't he? Pretty much. It's attributed to him. Right.

Lincoln Cannon [00:29:28] Well, the formalization of it, yes. The argument. And like I said, it was published in Philosophical Quarterly. This is a high quality philosophical journal. So, yes, philosophers have been talking about that idea for a lot longer than popular media has been talking about it.

John Dehlin [00:29:41] Fun.

Lincoln Cannon [00:29:42] Anyway, I encountered, I encountered that and I followed up on his background, and it turned out that he was one of the founders of an organization called the World Transhumanist Association.

John Dehlin [00:29:53] So you've been around. Do you have an idea how long?

Lincoln Cannon [00:29:55] Just since the early 2000s.

John Dehlin [00:29:57] Oh, so it's relatively new.

Lincoln Cannon [00:29:58] Yeah.

John Dehlin [00:29:58] Maybe we'll include a link to that in the show notes.

Lincoln Cannon [00:30:00] They now call themselves Humanity Plus.

John Dehlin [00:30:02] Okay.

Guest [00:30:03] All right.

John Dehlin [00:30:03] Well, Carol will get that in the show notes.

Lincoln Cannon [00:30:05] So when I, I followed up on his background, I found that, and I, I, I, that's, I think when I first encountered the word transhumanism. And, and I started reading more about it, and very soon after, I realized, you know what? I'm a transhumanist. I always have been. I just didn't have a word for it.

John Dehlin [00:30:24] A transhumanist. I mean, that's an identity, right?

Lincoln Cannon [00:30:27] Oh, for sure.

John Dehlin [00:30:29] Yeah, yeah, yeah. And I want to get to, like, how does a Mormon decide they're allowed any other identity than Mormon? But we won't make you answer that at first.

Lincoln Cannon [00:30:38] Oh, yeah, anytime. You let me know you want me

John Dehlin [00:30:40] to come back to that. Okay. Fun. So thank you. So far, Lincoln, that's a great summary of your story. Sorry to make you do it. So.

Lincoln Cannon [00:30:48] No, fine.

John Dehlin [00:30:48] Quickly, Carl. Maybe do the same thing, but just kind of in bullets because people can Reference your story, too.

Carl Youngblood [00:30:55] So I would just say that, you know, like many of us, many who are watching this program, I had to re evaluate certain narratives that I'd grown up with. You know, that. As further knowledge, you were raised Mormon.

John Dehlin [00:31:11] Did seminary.

Carl Youngblood [00:31:12] Yeah, Seminary council, even get all the boxes. I grew up in the church, kind of went through all of those programs, Went on a mission to Brazil later on, met my wife, Cammie, who were still married at the. BYU, and we have four kids, and they're getting older now, you know, in college and stuff like that. But anyway, you look super young, by the way.

John Dehlin [00:31:41] Both of you do.

Carl Youngblood [00:31:44] So. Yeah, maybe it's my last name or something.

Lincoln Cannon [00:31:46] You know, I'm not sure it's a great last name.

Carl Youngblood [00:31:50] So what I would say is, like, in the course of maybe just not too long after getting married, you know, the amount of information on the Internet was just exploding at that time. And so I started being exposed to new ideas, new information about church history that I hadn't been exposed to before.

John Dehlin [00:32:07] Is that part of SWAB or something else?

Carl Youngblood [00:32:09] I think swab, probably. I had been exposed to most of these ideas prior to joining swab, but we definitely carried on a lot of debates. And Lincoln was so persistent in, like, he had such a stamina with these debates. Some people call them the Robot Prophet. I'm not sure he likes that nickname. But the idea that he could, like, you know, in great detail, like, explain his philosophy, and was very patient when other people, you know, might disagree or have issues. But I just got exposed to information that made me realize that some of the cherished kind of narratives that I'd grown up with that seemed to make so much sense were more complicated than I thought.

Carl Youngblood [00:32:55] And I was then faced with the question of, do I discard all of this? Is there any value left here in Mormonism? In Mormonism? And if so, how much value? And if there isn't value in certain things, do I keep doing them? And if I do, how, what kinds of new approaches do I need to figure out? And around the same time, Lincoln and I got connected, and we started meeting on a monthly basis at his house with Lincoln and a few other friends around what year this would have been like 2004, 2003.

John Dehlin [00:33:29] Yeah, that's right. When I maybe met you guys.

Carl Youngblood [00:33:32] Yeah, yeah, yeah. And in the course of doing this, you know, one of the things that I think really resonated with me about transhumanism in particular, and these ideas that we started discovering before we even knew exactly what to call it was this idea that a lot of the changes that are occurring in the dispensation of the fullness of times are really astounding and surprising, even if you're just looking at it from a secular, purely secular perspective. Think of all of the things before these came out.

Faith Crises and Expanding Views of God

Carl Youngblood [00:34:07] No one would have imagined we'd have so much computing power in our pocket and access to so many things. We used to have to print out directions, you know, on how to get someplace. And even before that you had like a map in your car and you had to just like navigate somehow crazy. Somehow the people still figured out how to get to places. But anyway, did you know that, that

John Dehlin [00:34:28] once upon a time. I think we've had this conversation before. To get somewhere you had to buy a huge thick book of maps. And if you were like, and you buy it by city. Yeah. And like, oh, I'm going to Texas. Or you'd have a nationwide map and you thumb to like Texas and then you'd have a map and you atlas

Guest [00:34:48] John, you know you're talking to the daughter of a truck driver who he would take me to AAA before a trip to go pick out maps like it was the frickin candy store. Like it was a treat for me of like we'll get a map up here, maybe we'll like slide up to Wisconsin.

John Dehlin [00:35:02] Are you saying I'm map splaining?

Guest [00:35:03] You're map explaining a truck driver's daughter right now. Been there, done that.

Carl Youngblood [00:35:10] So you had a little bit of an unusual upbringing. But anyway, yeah, like we.

Guest [00:35:14] That's an understatement as well. But I do Remember printing off MapQuest all through high school when I needed to go to Disneyland and MapQuest from Provo to Anaheim and every street in between.

John Dehlin [00:35:25] Yeah, all right.

Carl Youngblood [00:35:27] Yeah. So you know, we were just watching all the, observing all these changes that are occurring in the world and going, what if like some of the more traditional prophecies about the so called last days, like what if they are going to happen but just in a different way than we had thought.

Carl Youngblood [00:35:45] And then we even asked further questions about like wait, what if some of the hoped for winding up scenes that many religious people, including Mormons anticipate. What if they actually depend on our choices here and now? Are they just going to happen inevitably or are they things that will depend on our choices? And then we thought, wait, what if like nothing is going to happen unless we do something right? Like what if like God is waiting on us just as much as we might be waiting on God? Right.

Carl Youngblood [00:36:17] So Some of those kinds of questions really led us in this direction of, like, is our faith just about an afterlife? Just this thing that you just have to sit here and check off all the boxes and then just wait for something good to happen later? Or should it actually be transforming the world that we currently live in? Right. And what's weird about it is both Christianity and Mormonism have veins in both directions where some folks just think that it's all in anticipation of some future time, but really, when you look at the, like, the early seeds of both Christianity and Mormonism, they were about transforming the world we currently inhabit and not waiting until some afterlife.

Lincoln Cannon [00:37:02] Right.

Carl Youngblood [00:37:03] And so this, in some ways, like, reinvigorated a type of faith, even if it was a little different from some of the ways we'd been raised. If that makes sense.

John Dehlin [00:37:12] It does. So there's at least two big branches I'm wanting to go down. One is just a recognition that both of you had a faith crisis, a fundamental core faith crisis probably is a precursor to your interest in transhumanism. True.

Carl Youngblood [00:37:30] Yeah, yeah, yeah.

John Dehlin [00:37:32] And then the second. And then a second branch of that is that in some sense, I guess you could almost say that transhumanism maybe even helped fill in the gaps of and. Or provided new meaning to the parts of your faith that either were changing or that had evaporated. Is that also fair to.

Carl Youngblood [00:37:54] Definitely, yeah.

John Dehlin [00:37:55] So in some sense, it's not. I don't want to call it, like, it's not apologetics in a classic sense, but it's like. It's like an evolution of faith. Let's just say orthodox Mormon faith is kind of a 1.0 version. Add, have a faith crisis, add transhumanism. It's sort of like a resurrection of faith with. With a full. With a philosophy melded in. And that's kind of what. That's one of the reasons why I wanted to have you on. One of the things I like about it, it's. It's just like, yeah, if you're in faith crisis, there are lots of ways you can go. One is to learn about transhumanism, and that might revitalize.

John Dehlin [00:38:30] Because I don't, like. I don't mean to rant on this, but, like, I don't want people to leave the church if it can work for them, if they're enjoying the church, if it's providing meaning, if they don't want to leave and. And. Or if you can't leave for whatever reason, then I. Then. Then we're happy to help People find ways to make it work. And so I guess that's one thing that strikes me, is it transhumanism isn't fair. Mormon. But transhumanism is a way potentially to revitalize your Mormonism into a new version.

Carl Youngblood [00:39:01] A good friend of mine shared a really, like, moving description of her faith crisis. And she described it almost as, in a way, what the original sort of followers of Jesus may have felt like when he died. Because I think for them, it was like a total surprise. They were like, we thought we were going to conquer and come out on top. And now he's dead. Right.

Carl Youngblood [00:39:27] The death of God is kind of a way you could think of a faith crisis. In a way, it's like my whole. Meaning my whole life has been destroyed. Everything that I used to live for is gone. What happens now? And then she said that in a way, this new way of looking at the world, all the certainties she had clung to were no longer valuable, no longer worked for her, but in a different way. She found God again. God had raised from the dead again, but in a form that she hadn't been looking for. And so for her, this was a different thing that she had found.

Carl Youngblood [00:40:04] But it was interesting to use that analogy to talk about a faith crisis, that all the reasons for getting out of bed in the morning had somehow gone away. But then there were some new ones that you found. And I think each person here probably can relate to that in some way or another. Each of us has had to find new motivations and reasons for getting out of bed in the morning. Totally, totally cool.

John Dehlin [00:40:29] Okay. And so I love that. And then it sounds like, tell me if I'm wrong. But we. When we had Randy Bell on recently, we talked about God and Christianity and we talked about kind of, I. This is a term I remember learning a few years ago. The big G God versus the small G God. The big G God is maybe the God that we. It's the God of the lost keys. It's the. It's the God that many of us were raised with in Mormonism, where it's like, oh, little, little white boy. And, you know, Hiram Utah, lost, loses his keys. Praise Heavenly Father helps him find his keys.

John Dehlin [00:41:00] Heavenly Father's like this grand puppet master that's orchestrating everything that happens on the earth. A sparrow doesn't fall without God. Sort of when people die, it's God deciding who's dying and where does the hurricane go and who dies and what. What illnesses are allowed versus not allowed. That's kind of a Certain, let's say big G interventionist kind of God.

John Dehlin [00:41:22] And then, and then we've talked about this idea of a small G God or maybe a deistic God, which is more this idea that God set things up but then for whatever reason has become busy or is preoccupied or has moved on or just doesn't feel like direct intervention is the way, which then introduces this idea that I love which almost sounds a little bit Buddhist esque, which is. No, no, no, live in the present moment.

John Dehlin [00:41:50] Don't focus on the afterlife, don't focus on the past. We have to create our future because there's no God that's going to save us in some sense. Maybe God set things up, maybe there is power out there, but if anything's going to happen, it's going to be us saving ourselves or we're, or we're important partner with God in whatever's going to happen. They literally. And that's why it's a small G God, because it implies that God can't transform us without our, our active reciprocation and participation in that transformation. And that's what I'm hearing is it's actually refreshing. It's a, it's a point of view that I actually value and, and find important.

John Dehlin [00:42:36] Because if we just think God's going to save, that's the most destructive form of Christianity I'm aware of is this idea that we're not responsible stewards of the earth. God's going to save us. Let's just go buy it's escape by tents and ammo and go up to the mountains because God's got to deliver us because otherwise this life sucks and only Jesus can. You know that. We're not getting anywhere with that philosophy. So I, I, you're saying it's escapist?

Lincoln Cannon [00:43:05] Yeah, it's escapism, yeah. What? You know this, this version of theology that you're describing and it's sad and it's destructive.

John Dehlin [00:43:12] Yeah.

Lincoln Cannon [00:43:13] The, the one qualifier I would put on your accounts though is that I wouldn't privilege that account of God with a big G. I prefer to give the big G to the account of God that makes us co creators, that makes us the children of God, that makes us the church of the firstborn, that make, that makes us take on the name of Christ and do the works of Christ to console, to heal, to raise the dead. That's the big G God. And yes, it's much more messy but much more worthy of our reverence and emulation.

John Dehlin [00:43:43] You don't love, you don't love the demotion of. And I wasn't trying to demote. I know you were a philosophical kind of.

Lincoln Cannon [00:43:48] But you just don't want to give the privilege to the others.

John Dehlin [00:43:50] What do you mean?

Lincoln Cannon [00:43:51] I don't want to give the. The poor theology the privilege of getting the capital G for their God. I want to give the capital G to the God that transforms us in reality, that has the real practical consequence in our lives.

John Dehlin [00:44:05] In partnership with. With your participation. Care. Did you want to. Are you thinking.

Guest [00:44:09] Just nodding.

Carl Youngblood [00:44:10] I. It is interesting.

John Dehlin [00:44:12] Kara's like, who are these guys? Why are we interviewing them? And I'm like, trust me, they're smart. They've thought this through a little bit.

Guest [00:44:17] That's rude. I didn't say that. She's John.

John Dehlin [00:44:21] Okay, I'm exaggerating a little bit.

Guest [00:44:24] No, I'm nodding because I think that's beautiful.

John Dehlin [00:44:25] Yeah, it is beautiful. It is beautiful.

Carl Youngblood [00:44:29] And glaring dirty stairs.

Guest [00:44:31] Anyway, John doesn't like that I'm funnier than him. So he tries to dig everyone.

John Dehlin [00:44:34] I don't even get half her jokes because I'm not smart enough. Like.

Guest [00:44:38] So I, like, put up these alley, oops. And he doesn't even slam dunk them. So that's what you guys are here for. Ignore him.

John Dehlin [00:44:43] She talking. She's my token, you know. Why is she making jokes and try to add value? Know your token place. I'm kidding. I'm.

Carl Youngblood [00:44:52] No, but I totally understand what you're saying about the capital G. God. I mean, just. Just like you said, interventionist.

Guest [00:44:58] Right.

Carl Youngblood [00:44:58] The notion that. But these very simple kind of quid pro quo kind of calculations about. Well, I've done this many good things, so I deserve these blessings. Right? Yeah.

John Dehlin [00:45:11] So the prosperity gospel.

Carl Youngblood [00:45:13] Yeah, absolutely.

John Dehlin [00:45:14] You're not necessarily a big fan of that kind of.

Carl Youngblood [00:45:17] No, I mean, I think it's actually a form of idolatry, to be honest. Yeah.

John Dehlin [00:45:20] Yeah. And. And I'm really grateful, Carl. You're here because you and I have had some disagreements or even debates over the years. You've always kind of, like, been friendly, but also willing to kind of disagree. And a lot of times it's gotten acrimonious with other friends or former friends where I've had to ban them or block them or whatever. Somehow we've been able to still have a friendship where. Where we can have that healthy, robust dialogue and exchange, and we're still friends, and I love that. And it sounds like that's part of transhumanisms.

Lincoln Cannon [00:45:53] You should hear us agree with each other. What you should hear us argue with each other.

John Dehlin [00:45:56] Oh, yeah.

Carl Youngblood [00:45:58] I mean, I think we have a. So one thing that I really value in Mormonism that kind of speaks to this is these principles that Joseph Smith shared at the end of his life. One of them, he said, like, one of the grand fundamental principles of Mormonism is friendship, and to unite all people in the bonds of friendship, regardless of what tribe or religion they come from. And I believe that we should cling to our friendships and foster friendships, even across ideological barriers. I think that's really important. And one of the things we try to do at our conferences, for example, is invite critics to come tell us why we're full of it and to critique our philosophy. And we often invite people who don't normally talk to each other very much to kind of engage in a dialogue.

John Dehlin [00:46:50] And I don't want to say that's not Mormon, but it feels unfamiliar to me, given some of my experience.

Carl Youngblood [00:46:57] Well, I mean, I certainly could agree that we don't always see that as often as we should anyway, but that's something we want to do, and I think that happens. Partisanship is so common. Right. It's common on the left and the right and all the different persuasions in between, where people just don't like to hear, don't like to be exposed to alternative viewpoints.

Guest [00:47:20] Right.

Carl Youngblood [00:47:20] Or at least some folks don't. But I almost, like, don't feel comfortable in a partisan environment. Whenever I'm in Sunday school and everyone is. Echo chambers.

John Dehlin [00:47:28] Right? Echo chambers.

Carl Youngblood [00:47:29] What's that? Sorry.

Guest [00:47:30] Echo chambers.

Carl Youngblood [00:47:31] Yeah, yeah.

John Dehlin [00:47:31] Fan of echo chambers.

Carl Youngblood [00:47:32] Yeah. Whenever I'm in, like, Sunday school and everyone's, like, patting themselves on the back for some kind of how awesome we are, I'm always, like, the first one to say, well, but we kind of aren't doing this very well. Or, you know, and then when I'm with someone who's, like, criticizing, you know, the church or other. Other groups of people, I'll be, like, the first to just rise to their defense and say, well, they're still cool in this way, you know? And it's like, I don't know, maybe I'm just a contrarian, but I just can't. I just never feel comfortable when I'm in a cheer. Cheerleading session, you know, so. Yeah.

John Dehlin [00:48:04] And I. I loved it. Just recently on a Facebook thread, you were willing to refer to some Mormons adoration of their leaders as adultery. Like, there aren't. There are. I don't always meet a lot of active, faithful Mormons that are willing to sort of name our leader worship sometimes as an idolatrous. Not to throw shade on the church, but like.

Carl Youngblood [00:48:28] Well, no, I mean, this actually, if it's all right, like, this was one concept that was so empowering for me actually, is like, almost always sort of falling away or changing your views or changing your behavior in some way in regards to church kinds of activities or church expectations.

Carl Youngblood [00:48:52] Almost, in my case, was almost always characterized to me as a kind of sinful thing to do, a kind of thing that was like a step down from what I was doing before. But when I realized that some of these ways of engaging in ultra orthodoxy, whatever you want to call it, were actually a form of idolatry, that actually helped me to characterize my struggle and my search as a search for something better and something more rather than something less and something inferior. Right. That really empowered me in a way, whereas before, I couldn't see any change in activity or change in approach to the church as anything but a step down.

Carl Youngblood [00:49:35] But this really made me go, wait, we've made mist. We're making mistakes, or we're doing this wrong in some cases. And suddenly I could. I could say, no, I'm not seeking to, like, get off easy. I'm actually trying to bump it up a notch, if you will. Does that make sense?

John Dehlin [00:49:52] I love it. I love it. Okay, so let's. The next kind of phase of this conversation that occurs to me is you both have your faith crisis and you both discover humanism. What was it about? So what you could have done is just kind of like, okay, I'll do transhumanism over here, and I'll also be a Mormon, or not. But they could have been very paralleled. Was there something about Mormonism or were there things about Mormonism that were like, whoa, there might be connections here, or where kind of like the peanut butter and jelly sandwich or the Reese's, like, the peanut butter and the chocolate might go good together. What was it about Mormonism that you felt connected enough with transhumanism to make you want to kind of put the peanut butter and the chocolate together?

Why Mormonism and Transhumanism Complement Each Other

Lincoln Cannon [00:50:40] Oh, yeah, for sure. It's definitely that way. Transhumanism and Mormonism are better together. And there's a lot of reasons for that. Some. Some that I'll mention that come to mind offhand include, first of all, that Mormonism is a physicalist cosmology. In Mormonism, in our scriptures, we read that all spirit is matter.

Lincoln Cannon [00:51:06] That already situates Mormon cosmology squarely in the realm of science. At least it should now it doesn't play out that way in all of our heads. But I would suggest for those of us who are doing kind of a.

Lincoln Cannon [00:51:19] A consistent. A coherent Mormon cosmology that has to inform the way we think about the world, and it has to lead us toward a science positive cosmology, which of course, lends itself, which is consistent with transhumanism as well.

Lincoln Cannon [00:51:37] Another important area of overlap was that in Mormonism, Joseph Smith situated us in the dispensation of the fullness of times when knowledge never before revealed would come to earth that would enable us to do things we were never able to do before.

Lincoln Cannon [00:51:53] And we often talk about this in Mormonism, like there's something that's supposed to be special about our day, and the scriptures describe it as a day when eventually we'll live to the age of a tree. It says, and then we will be changed and there will be death no more. And as Paul says in the New Testament, changing the twinkling of an eye from mortality to immortality, Joseph Smith in the Doctrine and Covenants calls this the day of transfiguration.

Lincoln Cannon [00:52:19] So this idea that something is supposed to be happening now, something really important, and that God is providing more revelation than ever before to fuel this change, that parallels quite strikingly the idea that many transhumanists advocate of accelerating technological change. And there is among transhumanists, a lot of utopianism and even functional messianic expectations as a result of technological change. And that's actually really an interesting psychology to explore and has a lot of functional parallels with Mormon millennialism and messianic expectations.

John Dehlin [00:53:01] So technology could save us or deliver us, or technology could help us live in Zion, a technological Zion.

Lincoln Cannon [00:53:07] And there's also apocalyptic risks, right? Evil AI could thwart these good outcomes. We have to pay attention to that. Or maybe from the traditional religious perspective, maybe Satan in the Apocalypse will do great damage to the work, but God ultimately prevails, as the story in the Book of Revelation.

John Dehlin [00:53:26] Does that make. Does that make it necessarily metaphorical? In other words, one interpretation of that is the second coming of Jesus or a God or. Or a second coming or the adversary. If you're all of a sudden kind of using technological explanations to kind of explain those different concepts, someone would say, well, then that necessitates a more metaphorical symbolic theology versus a more literal one with, like, a God with a beard, a white. A white dude with the beard with hands and, you know, feet, or a Jesus that literally comes, stands on the point of Mount Olives and, like, you know, fight Satan and Gog of Magog and all that and then ushers in a millennium. Does it need to be a more mythical, metaphorical, symbolic kind of faith, or can it also be literalistic?

Lincoln Cannon [00:54:24] And I think it's an interesting.

John Dehlin [00:54:26] I guess it could be anything.

Lincoln Cannon [00:54:27] It's an interesting mix of the two. Yeah, I mean, if. If you interpret Christian theology in the simplest way, where I mean that, that's. I mean, the kinds of things that maybe we think when we're children, then yeah, clearly it can't be that simple.

John Dehlin [00:54:45] Like Adam and eve are the first two humans and 7,000 year Earth and all that.

Lincoln Cannon [00:54:50] Yeah, in the very simplest sense. But in another sense, there are ways in which transhumanism and transhumanist expectations for the future inform a more literal interpretation of potential theologies, potential cosmological outcomes. So, for example, whereas a lot of people, a lot of Christians, progressive Christians, settle into a weaker version of theology where it's all merely metaphorical. It's all about our psychological and spiritual struggles, interior to ourselves and maybe the way we relate with people. But they kind of back off from the cataclysmic apocalyptic possibilities that the more literal pre secular interpretations of religion lead to for maybe more fundamentalist inclined people.

Lincoln Cannon [00:55:44] I like to kind of characterize myself as a post secular religion person. I think that there's a lot of weakness in a religion that goes purely metaphorical. It takes away the power and the potency of religion. And in some cases that's good because religion can do bad things. And so sometimes you want religion to become more metaphorical because then they'll stop doing some of the terrorism that gets associated with it, for example. But in other cases, when religion is motivating us to do wonderful things and providing a strenuous mood, to steal a phrase from William James that I mentioned earlier, well, then you don't want to weaken it.

Lincoln Cannon [00:56:20] You don't want it to be only metaphorical. Why don't we want to live in a literal millennial world where people literally don't die from aging? I'd love to live in that world. And there's reason to believe through technological interventions over time we may be able to approach such a world literally. And so is it more figurative or more literal? It's a mix. I think it really depends on what you mean by more figurative or literal. And then you have to explore the details.

John Dehlin [00:56:48] Nice. All right, Carl, I'll ask you the same question. Were there any elements of transhumanism that seem to really jive with your understanding of Mormonism? Separate from the. Absolutely that, Lincoln.

Carl Youngblood [00:57:00] Another really important concept I think is so core to Mormonism is the notion of both a constrained God, not an absolutist God, the capital G God that you described earlier, who could have made the world differently than it is, but decided not to.

Carl Youngblood [00:57:19] But rather Mormonism posits a God who found himself, to quote Joseph Smith, amid spirits and matter and sought to create laws whereby others could progress to be more like him or her. And so Mormonism already has this notion of a God who actually can't do any better than what we've got here, who is, you know, in many ways it resolves a lot of the theodicy challenges, right?

Carl Youngblood [00:57:46] Because God basically is a being like us, only far more advanced than we are. And not only is God like us, but God is our destiny in the sense that our destiny as children of God is to become more like our heavenly parents. Right? So Mormonism, I think, more than any other religion, makes that front and center a part of its theology. And while some people have talked about how that's being maybe slightly downplayed lately, I still think that every time someone sings I am a child of God in church, those concepts are being taught. And I don't picture that hymn going away anytime soon.

Carl Youngblood [00:58:26] So I still think that's getting a lot of airtime in Sunday school, if you will. And so that notion of theosis, the idea of becoming gods, is, I think, stronger in Mormonism than just about any other faith.

Transhumanism, God, and the Problem of Suffering

John Dehlin [00:58:41] All right, I'm, I, it just occurred to me now, I'm guessing a topic that has been of much debate or discussion within the transhuman community, transhumanism community. Because if, if technology is the way that we can become like God or godlike, then it's likely or it would follow that God, him or herself, used that technology to get to where he or she is or are. Why in the freak didn't hear her just share with us all the technological means that helped Mother Father, God get there so that we don't have to reinvent the wheel and relearn all the technological advancements that God God to where they are now? I'm sure you're both smiling. So is that a cliche of like a transhumanistic discussion?

Carl Youngblood [00:59:31] I was just thinking about how this was.

John Dehlin [00:59:33] Actually, hasn't God ever heard of like magazines or peer reviewed science that you share and you build on top of other people's discovery?

Carl Youngblood [00:59:40] Like, so this exact question was asked and answered by Richard Bushman at our conference.

John Dehlin [00:59:46] I love it. And me and Richard, we're homies.

Carl Youngblood [00:59:52] He shared, like, what other Mormon thinkers have said about the topic, and he said that they presented three potential models for how it could go down. Either we're just rediscovering all the same things that God has already done, and it's just really boring for God because God's just sitting there.

John Dehlin [01:00:11] Come on, guys.

Carl Youngblood [01:00:11] Watching.

John Dehlin [01:00:12] Figure it out.

Carl Youngblood [01:00:12] Like, everybody do the exact same thing. But he. And I don't remember what the second one was, but he said the third one was his preferred model. And it was more like that. Every creation, every universe, if you will, every world, whatever you want to call it, kind of had to learn some of the same things, but also had their own little twists on it, you know, like their own unique things that accomplished that. That happened only in that world, if you will. I thought that was kind of a cool way of thinking about it. But at any rate, the question of, like, why so.

Carl Youngblood [01:00:48] So I think some Mormons would respond, well, actually, God is revealing this all the time. And in fact, whenever those eureka moments happen in the sciences and in other disciplines, that they're kind of a form of revelation. Right. And that we can only achieve that revelation incrementally because it's not like you could just sort of like, zap, you know, like, imagine trying to make cavemen, like, give them bicycles or whatever. I don't know. You know, whatever would be like some super. Or put them in the cockpit of an airplane or something. Like, it just wouldn't. Wouldn't work very well. Right.

John Dehlin [01:01:22] So, yeah, you give a caveman a cell phone, they, like, use it as a.

Carl Youngblood [01:01:26] They don't have a cell tower, for one thing.

Lincoln Cannon [01:01:27] That anyway.

Guest [01:01:28] Yeah.

John Dehlin [01:01:29] Yeah.

Lincoln Cannon [01:01:30] I think if we consider the purpose of life to be only feeling okay, to avoid suffering, maybe then nothing about this world makes any sense from a theological perspective. That's a great reason to be an atheist, in my opinion, if it's just to avoid suffering.

Lincoln Cannon [01:01:52] And you're right, transhumanists debate this a lot. And there are a lot of atheist transhumanists because of this, because their reasoning is, we're solving so many problems, and we anticipate to solve a lot more. I mean, transhumanists are pretty optimistic about our potential, even if, of course, we ought to also be caring about the risks along the way. And the best transhumanists do, but we're optimistic about our potential. We tend to really think humans will become immortal.

Lincoln Cannon [01:02:21] Okay, that's pretty optimistic. And if we're going to become immortal, why wouldn't we just give that to our creations. And that's a really challenging question on its face. But then you have to step back and say, okay, well, if we just wanted them to live the kinds of lives that we are already living, the answer to that question is we would give them that immortality just like we expect to have it ourselves.

Guest [01:02:48] And.

Lincoln Cannon [01:02:48] And therefore, there's no good reason to suppose that God already exists based on that reasoning. So if God does exist, take the logic one step further. If God does exist, there must be some other reason why this world exists beyond the evasion of suffering. Because clearly, assuming transhumanists are right, which transhumanists do assume we're right, clearly we're going to be able to avoid the kinds of suffering that we're now enduring in the future.

Lincoln Cannon [01:03:21] So what possible motivations are there? And that opens up an interesting debate. What other possible motivations are there? For me, there's only one that can justify the kind of suffering that we observe and experience in this world, and that's theosis. Because theosis is not just about raw power. Theosis is not. When we talk about.

Lincoln Cannon [01:03:42] And this gets back into the question about how Mormonism complements transhumanism. This is an important part of it. Becoming like God is not just becoming more powerful. It's not becoming like Zeus. In Mormonism, the archetype or the prototype of God is Jesus Christ.

Lincoln Cannon [01:04:01] And what are the virtues that we attribute predominantly to Jesus Christ? Two in particular come to mind. Compassion, love, and creation. Genuine creation. We're not talking about replicative creation. We're talking about the creation of a God and a God who can create more gods.

Lincoln Cannon [01:04:22] And that, in my mind, is the only justification for a super intelligence to create a world that emulates its own evolutionary history, complete with the risks of evolutionary history, because we face serious risks, and serious suffering happens as a consequence of those serious risks.

Lincoln Cannon [01:04:44] So in my mind, the only thing that justifies that is the possibility that traversing these experiences transforms us in more ways than superficially and permits us to achieve virtues that technology, on its own, without experiencing the technology in certain ways, could achieve.

Carl Youngblood [01:05:10] So maybe you should unpack a little bit this notion of emulating its evolutionary history. Because that didn't.

Lincoln Cannon [01:05:17] Yeah, so a little bit hard for if God creates a world like ours, like what we're living in right now, and if God once went through what we're going through, which is a pretty basic claim to Mormon theology, right. God once was as we are, and we can become as God is. If God is doing that, then God is essentially emulating the evolutionary history that led to Godhood. And per Mormon theology, does that over and over and over again. And as I said before, if the only reason we can think of for that is, is that God's goal is to create beings who don't suffer, well, then God has chosen a really crappy strategy for getting there because we keep suffering over and over and over again. So there has to be some other goal.

John Dehlin [01:06:03] Sure.

Lincoln Cannon [01:06:04] And that other goal, in my estimation is the only one that works for me. Everywhere else led me to atheism. The only one that got me out of that perspective was the goal of theosis creating more genuinely compassionate, genuinely creative beings. And I think that genuinely intelligent and powerful. Right, Those also. But on their own, they're insufficient.

John Dehlin [01:06:28] Yeah, right.

Lincoln Cannon [01:06:29] And technology can only ever be a tool to something more important, which would be compassion and creation.

Carl Youngblood [01:06:35] It's probably worth saying that other Mormon transhumanists also take different stances here. Like, we have some who think that God just doesn't exist yet. Right. But God will exist in the future.

John Dehlin [01:06:47] Interesting.

Carl Youngblood [01:06:48] But anyway, you had a question.

Guest [01:06:50] I had a question. You mentioned, like, living forever, immortality. So in your Mormon transhumanist view, how do you view things that are supernatural, like the resurrection of Jesus Christ? Do you believe that that literally happened

John Dehlin [01:07:01] and then water into wine?

Guest [01:07:03] I'm more talking about just like God becoming human and then going back to whatever. I would just love you to explain your ideas around the resurrection and then Mormon theology that Christ will be coming back to reign for a thousand years. How does that intersect with the technology and the ideas of immortality? So that must be a hot topic because that's. Oh for sure that Mormonism loves talking about that.

Lincoln Cannon [01:07:24] Yeah, we talk about this kind of stuff all the time.

John Dehlin [01:07:26] And I'm sure there's no answer because there's no one theology.

Lincoln Cannon [01:07:29] No, we don't have like some official policy on any of this. This is Lincoln and Carl perspectives. Although, you know, our perspectives have a lot of commonalities with other Mormon transhumanists.

John Dehlin [01:07:38] Of course, even if you just share kind of a common or average view is fine.

Lincoln Cannon [01:07:43] Yeah. So let's. You mentioned the resurrection. Many secular transhumanists. Not all, but many secular transhumanists and probably most Mormon transhumanists aspire to resurrection for our dead loved ones and probably for ourselves in the future. A technological resurrection. We're not talking supernatural. So you use the word supernatural when you ask the question.

Resurrection, the Supernatural, and Minimum Viable Theology

Lincoln Cannon [01:08:11] A lot of transhumanists and Mormon transhumanists would reject the idea that any of it's supernatural except in the sense that we just don't understand it yet. We don't have a scientific explanation for it yet, but the anticipation is that we would gain an understanding of it and that God would give us means to achieve these ends. Book of Mormon, of course, teaches that God operates through means.

Lincoln Cannon [01:08:37] And Captain Moroni in the Book of Mormon says that God will not save us unless we use the means that God has already given us. And that theme carries all throughout Joseph Smith's articulation of theology. So Mormon transhumanists embrace that pretty thoroughly. That we aspire to resurrection, we aspire to immortality. We don't look at these as supernatural things. We look at these as things that will come about naturally, but that we have a lot to learn clearly before we can do that. And hey, by the way, Jesus in the New Testament tells his disciples to raise the dead. How seriously are we taking that? Well, transhumanists, Mormon transhumanists take that pretty seriously. Let's figure that out. How do we do that?

John Dehlin [01:09:15] And I'm guessing the pathway that's often considered is you find their DNA somehow, you incubate it, you're able to regrow the person, whole species. Yeah.

Carl Youngblood [01:09:27] I mean, think about it. The idea of growing a body that's like genetically identical to someone is one probably important part of it, but nowhere

John Dehlin [01:09:36] close to all their experiences and their

Carl Youngblood [01:09:39] memories, their connectome, which is sort of the arrangement of all their neurons that we think, at least up till now, based on our understanding of neuroscience, is what makes a person who they are. In many ways, you are not the atoms that make you up. Because 10 years ago you were made up of completely different atoms, but now you're still John, even though you have completely different atoms. Right. So there's this ancient philosophical concept called the Ship of Theseus, which is about this idea of like this boat that. Where every single piece of the boat has been replaced. Is it still the same boat? Right.

Carl Youngblood [01:10:18] And that's the question that the philosophers are debating about. Right. And so I think it's more effective to think of you as a pattern of information. And so when we are resurrecting somebody. Yeah, for Lincoln. Lincoln prefers to think of spirit as that. That pattern of information. And I think it makes sense.

John Dehlin [01:10:38] That sounds impersonal. It sounds slightly impersonal.

Lincoln Cannon [01:10:40] Well, but it's.

Carl Youngblood [01:10:41] You, like, it's the only. You're the John. You're the only pattern of information that's per. That's perfectly John. Nobody else is that Pattern. Right.

Guest [01:10:49] I mean, when I held my daughter in my arms for the first time, I said, you're such a cute. Pattern of information. I gave her a name and a blessing, and I refer to that every night that she goes to bed. Sweet little pattern of information.

Lincoln Cannon [01:10:58] It is nerdy. And I wouldn't use that word in church when I gave a blessing.

John Dehlin [01:11:02] We're not my. We're having fun.

Carl Youngblood [01:11:06] Yeah, no, totally. But. But I think, doesn't that kind of make sense? You know, like this idea that it's not necessarily the atoms, but. But yeah. So resurrecting someone would be a lot harder than just growing their bodies again.

John Dehlin [01:11:19] Yeah.

Carl Youngblood [01:11:20] And so I imagine a future in which, you know, I like to use this analogy of there's this really cool thing that I kind of got into because I'm into music and stuff, where this one company was taking really old scratchy 78 RPM recordings of famous musicians playing their music back in a time when recorded sound had just gotten started and it wasn't very high fidelity. So they had like Rachmaninoff, they had a really famous jazz pianist named Art Tatum, who's just amazing. He's like they said when he came in, God walked in the house because he was so amazing at his work. But they got all these old recordings and they created an algorithm that could infer, based on the physical model of how a piano functions, what notes are being played in what volumes and things like that.

Carl Youngblood [01:12:13] And then they took those recordings and they replayed them on a nine foot grand piano with a high fidelity recording. And it was as if those famous dead musicians were like, alive again, playing in the room. And that is sort of like a really, really small analogy of what I think might happen in the future, where as we gain a stronger understanding of how things work in the world, we start to be able to infer past patterns of information to a greater degree than we can now. So I imagine some far flung future when we might be able to observe the past with a fidelity that we could only barely imagine now.

Carl Youngblood [01:12:53] So, like, we might be able to look back at this moment when we were having an interview in your studio and look at the exact atoms that make you up, make me up, make Cara up, and everybody here. And we could, if we wanted to, then reproduce those atoms at will. I mean, obviously that's a level of sophistication and technology that we could only dream of right now. But I imagine that until we achieve something like that, the resurrection won't be possible. Does that make sense?

Guest [01:13:22] And Just to clarify, I just want to make sure I'm understanding. So when you're talking about like the resurrection of Jesus Christ, what I hear you saying is that we don't understand because he, God would have had to use the same type of technologies that he's used for millennium, that we're going to have to understand and cope with eventually. That, that Jesus Christ just became a reanimated person and we don't have the technology yet to understand the mechanics through which God would have done something like that. But it's a matter of time before we get there.

Carl Youngblood [01:13:50] Some Mormon transhumanists would take that approach of assuming that all of these things in the past really happened exactly as they were told and it. And just that we just don't have the technology yet. And they, I think, would generally agree that they were done in some way that did not violate the laws of the universe, that they actually had to follow some rules as to how those events took place. But there would be others who would maybe say just that those things, those events may not have occurred exactly as the scriptural account claims, and that they may be things that still need to happen in the future.

Carl Youngblood [01:14:28] Right. So for example, that Jesus was. There are various positions on Jesus's messiahship and sort of like, was Jesus merely demonstrating a life that we should all follow and emulate, or was Jesus somehow more unique in some specific way, more divine in some specific way, and actually experienced a physical resurrection? Right. I think there's varying positions on how literally to take some of those claims.

Guest [01:15:02] And you're saying across the Mormon transhumanist community that people assign a certain level of. I don't know whether you want to call it deity or.

Carl Youngblood [01:15:11] The way I like to think of it is I prefer to approach my theology in the form of a minimum viable theology. So what I would like to say is that I at least believe this. But there may be other things that I would be pleasantly surprised if those things are also true. But I want to come up with a theology that works even if those other things that I. That some people think are necessary aren't true. Right. So like, for me, like, I'm totally okay with the idea that Jesus, the story of Jesus may have been riffed on and kind of expanded and exaggerated to the point where Jesus's divinity appears more unique and magical than it actually was.

Carl Youngblood [01:15:57] I'm totally okay if that's true because I still see value in Christianity even if that is. Even if those things have been exaggerated. Right. Whereas there are other folks who Stake their claims in such a way that they're like, if this is not true, I'm out of here. I'm bailing on this. I've had to go through those. The sort of faith challenges necessary to say, is there any value in this message if some of the more superstitious aspects of it that cannot be proven are discarded? Right. And I've sort of come down on the side that Christianity is valuable to me. Even if.

Carl Youngblood [01:16:33] Even if I'm merely following the Christian ideal of, like, what the ideal way of living is. Even if some of the. Even if the resurrection didn't happen as. As some have claimed, I still see valuable value in Christianity. And there are others who are like, if the resurrection didn't happen, we're out of here. You know?

John Dehlin [01:16:52] Yeah. Interesting.

Carl Youngblood [01:16:53] Yeah.

Guest [01:16:53] I love that you said minimum viable product.

Carl Youngblood [01:16:57] Yeah, yeah.

Guest [01:16:57] You should.

Carl Youngblood [01:16:58] Do you want to expand on that viable theology?

Guest [01:16:59] Yeah, minimum. Via. Like that. Yeah, sorry. Minimum viable theology. And I think of. Minimum viable. So product of, like, when you're. You just need the bare bones of something to get you to market, to get you out there, and then you take feedback and then you develop as you go. Do you want to expand on that at all? I think that's totally.

Carl Youngblood [01:17:14] So. I think I need to give credit to a friend of ours, Micah Reading, who actually founded the Christian Transhumanist association after interacting with a number of us regularly. But he's this, like, wait, are you

John Dehlin [01:17:29] saying the Mormon transhumanism movement predates the Christian transhumanism? How cool is that?

Lincoln Cannon [01:17:36] By about eight years.

John Dehlin [01:17:38] That's awesome.

Carl Youngblood [01:17:39] In fact, Micah was like, you know what? I know he blogged about a lot of this stuff, and he was like, okay, fellow Christians, I know you guys might be hating on me for hanging out with the Mormons, but I gotta admit that, like, they're one of the few people. This group of Mormon transhumanists is one of the few who are, like, talking about this really interesting stuff, you know? And so he started coming to our

John Dehlin [01:17:59] Mormons lead the charge again, everybody.

Lincoln Cannon [01:18:01] It's because of unique aspects of Mormon theology that are very unusually compatible with transhumanism.

John Dehlin [01:18:07] I can see that.

Guest [01:18:08] Yeah.

Carl Youngblood [01:18:08] And one thing I really love about this guy is he comes from a preaching tradition where they just practice their sermons, like, regularly, but they never give them the same way twice. So it's like they're extemporaneously preaching, but they're very, very charismatic in the way they do it. It's really quite impressive to hear him speak, but he was the one who coined this phrase of minimum Bible theology. And he was just like saying, okay, if we strip away a lot of these dogmas and other things that have accumulated through the years, is there any value still there? And what is that value? And I think thinking about your beliefs, regardless of what they are in that way is a really powerful way of reconstructing faith after a crisis, if you think about it.

John Dehlin [01:18:55] No, I really get that. And I can honestly, I mean, right now, obviously the Mormon Church inspired in particular the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints or the LDS Church. It's kind of in a, it's at a crossroads. Some would say it's in crisis, but there's a lot of people because of the Internet, because of technology, ironically, just because of modernity and the accessibility of information or the awakening of the general population to certain, you know, human rights issues or social justice kind of issues the Mormon Church is facing, along with a lot of other Christian faiths and just religion in general, you know, potential real decline and, or potential extermination.

John Dehlin [01:19:41] And so I could see at some point in, you know, I think about the white horse prophecy and like the Constitution hanging by a thread. I, I'm sure you guys have envisioned religion hanging by a thread or churches or the LDS Church hanging by a thread. And if, and when it gets to that point, they're going to really be looking for people that have done this exercise of evaluating and, and locating minimum viable theology.

John Dehlin [01:20:07] Because if it's, if it's this all or nothing, black or white, totalistic, it's all true or it's all false, it's all exactly what it ever was claimed to be, or it's the biggest fraud ever perpetrated.

Lincoln Cannon [01:20:19] That's poor reasoning.

John Dehlin [01:20:20] What's that?

Lincoln Cannon [01:20:20] That's poor reasoning. Right?

John Dehlin [01:20:22] Yeah. And, but, but it's, it's. The people would come by it honestly because some of the leaders of the church advocating that,

Carl Youngblood [01:20:31] in fact, that is the kind of. One of the most difficulties I continue to have on a regular basis at church is this notion that if some of these claims are not as we thought they were or different from how we thought they were, that you might as well bail and that you might as well leave.

Carl Youngblood [01:20:50] And that, you know, I think it's a way of doubling down on the existing narrative, but I think it's ultimately ineffective in that like, you kind of paint yourself into a corner more and more and you get to the point where, you know, based on the new information that we have available to us, it's Clear that those, some of those ideas are untenable.

Carl Youngblood [01:21:09] And if you keep insisting on it, all you're going to do is alienate more and more people. Right. And I think of that approach as profoundly un Mormon as well, in the sense that one of those other grand fundamental principles that Joseph articulated right before he died was that a Mormon accepts truth. Accepts truth. So one of the. He said, one of the grand fundamental principles of Mormonism is to receive truth, let it come from whence it may. And if we do not gather all true principles in the world, wherever they may be found, then we're not true Mormons. Right. So we should be, like, eagerly, eagerly, like, asking for our theories to be debunked.

Carl Youngblood [01:21:48] We should be eagerly asking for our assumptions to be questioned. And if we aren't doing those things, according to Joseph, we are not true Mormons. Right. So I see that as a form of unauthentic Mormonism. This idea of doubling down on dogma rather than being, Rather than embracing truth, even if it means you have to revise some of your core beliefs.

Guest [01:22:14] Can I ask a follow up to that? Because it sounds like if you do share these kinds of things with maybe your more typical orthodox Mormons in a Sunday school or something, do you ever get accused of you being, you know, idolaters of technology and people are like, well, we're here to learn and to grow in our relationship with God. You're idolizing something outside of this core Mormon theology. Knock it off.

Lincoln Cannon [01:22:34] Yeah, for sure. If, if that's what we were doing, I would agree with them that that would be.

Guest [01:22:38] Do you get accused of that?

Lincoln Cannon [01:22:39] No, I don't. Because I don't. I'm careful not to present it that way.

Guest [01:22:42] Okay.

Lincoln Cannon [01:22:43] And because. And I also think that would be an inaccurate representation of what I do. The technology is a tool. And the Book of Mormon, all of the scriptures are filled with God giving people tools to accomplish the work of God. But those tools aren't in themselves. The point. The point is our relationships and our potential. The point is our love for each other. The point is the capacity to use our love for each other to create something bigger than ourselves. And if we go to church and we talk about how important technology is, well, that's really not the point of church.

John Dehlin [01:23:19] Yeah.

Lincoln Cannon [01:23:19] The technology is there. We can use it and it can help us along the way. But the point of church is to talk with each other about the welfare of our souls, to reinforce each other in our commitment to take on the name of Christ and to live in accordance with what that discipleship is if I'm doing those things. And then I say, and by the way, here are some tools to help us get there. I never have problems and I shouldn't.

Carl Youngblood [01:23:42] No. I think it's fair to say though that we regularly encounter some members of the church who are like saying, oh, but that's absurd. Like, none of this stuff is going to be going to happen with technology. Like there's no technology involved in the resurrection or whatever. We regularly encounter people who do push back on that. So I don't want to say that like there is no pushback. I do think Lincoln is especially diplomatic about the way he approaches things in church. And I often will not like, I more just like comment in a relevant way in a church setting and don't like try to sit there and throw out crazy ideas all the time, you know.

Guest [01:24:22] But yeah, because this needs a lot of context.

Carl Youngblood [01:24:24] Yeah.

Guest [01:24:24] People who need to be really on the level. You've already had like a four hour discussion with.

Carl Youngblood [01:24:28] Yeah.

Lincoln Cannon [01:24:28] It's unfair to discuss. Go there too quickly.

Guest [01:24:30] Right, right, right.

Carl Youngblood [01:24:31] Yeah. And so I don't get. Typically get a whole lot of pushback in church, but people who sort of like come to our website or know about us and then engage with us. There are sometimes skeptics who are like saying, oh, that's crazy. Like, of course, of course none of that stuff is going to happen with technology. It's totally different.

Lincoln Cannon [01:24:47] Right.

Carl Youngblood [01:24:48] And I would just say that, like, if you look at a lot of Mormon thinkers, they've said that, no, clearly God doesn't violate sort of the laws of the universe. And these things have to happen in some natural way. So yeah. So like it just to be fair with your question, like there, it's not like everyone's like just totally accepting of all these.

Lincoln Cannon [01:25:10] We get criticisms, but the most common response among members of the church to what we do is kind of a cautious interest. That's the most common response by far. And I would say that negative responses, hostile responses are less common than the enthusiastic. I am joining that association now response. We get the enthusiastic response way more often than the hostile response.

John Dehlin [01:25:33] Okay.

Guest [01:25:34] So yeah, and I think, I just want to add, I think you guys explain it really clearly and really beautifully. So anyone who does misunderstand it and wants to like call it something else, that's their loss for like not having an actual genuine curious interest in and what you're doing. So.

John Dehlin [01:25:48] Yeah, so maybe you've already answered this. But you know, there was a time I remember in the 90s I think, or 80s where the church actually, you know, discouraged, quote, study groups. There's probably a lot of concern about like Dialogue and Sunstone and the Mormon History association or whatever and the church just, you know, they're the prophets, they're, they, they interpret the scripture, they're going to tell you what's important. Stay away from study groups or anything that isn't kind of correlated.

John Dehlin [01:26:16] So, so the church is, the Mormon Church historically has had kind of a love hate relationship sometimes with any alternative movement, but especially one that maybe starts to tinker with authority or with ordinances or, or with theology, etc. Has there ever, ever been in any instance any manifestation of church leaders, either locally or at a higher level, finding out about transhumanism and expressing concern and, or even like cautioning people to stay away from it or, or even disciplining someone for believing it or following it, or is it never even been perceived as a potential threat by anyone at any level?

Challenges and Tensions Within the Community

Lincoln Cannon [01:27:01] So I have lots of interesting stories related to this, but let me first say I, I have never encountered nor have I ever heard of anyone encountering any challenge from any church authorities about Mormon transhumanism. Never once.

John Dehlin [01:27:17] Okay.

Lincoln Cannon [01:27:18] And I've been the president and CEO openly, very vocally of the organization for a decade and never once I had a problem. I had a person. Now by the way, you are presidency. Yeah, yeah. I never once had problems with church authority. But among other members there have been what I would classify as a range from humorous to really frustrating experiences.

Lincoln Cannon [01:27:42] An example of something maybe in between the two would be a former member of my ward on one occasion going to my bishop behind my back and saying, did you know that he's a transhumanist and he runs a transhumanist organization?

Lincoln Cannon [01:28:00] And my bishop, what is that? Yeah, bishop was like, what is that? And he said, so my bishop's response to this person in my ward, I found out was, well, I'll ask him about it. So my bishop, really cool guy, asked me about it. We went in, we had a talk, he asked me about transhumanism. I explained it to him and he goes, that's really cool.

Lincoln Cannon [01:28:19] And so very often there are people among just general membership who feel and express, very often is too strong of a word. Occasionally there are people who feel threatened by it and express that in ways that do seek to cause social harm for Mormon transhumanists, but they're more rare than the people who are enthusiastic about it. And by and large, people like all of my bishops have either heard of or already knew that I was a Mormon transhumanist. And they've either thought it's cool or they just don't even care about it.

John Dehlin [01:28:56] Okay.

Carl Youngblood [01:28:57] For me, it's interesting that the gatherings that we have and like, the discussions I have and the explorations I engage in as part of the group are so, so fulfilling for me that I don't feel very much of a need to like, very strongly like advocate for these things in a church setting. I mean, of course I will share relevant comments when I think they come up, but I don't feel the need for like recognition or, or validation from my fellow ward members. So it's like most of them don't know about my involvement, but those who do are like, oh, wow. In fact, this older couple who I really love in my ward came to me other the other day and they're like, hey, we went to your website.

Carl Youngblood [01:29:42] I'm like, what website? And they're like, oh, the Mormon Transhumanist Association. And they're, they're like saying, this is really cool, like, you know, ask, you know, so, so I think some of them who already thought of me as a friend just see it as like a way of putting our faith into practice, you know.

John Dehlin [01:30:02] Okay, these are going to be just a couple of really rapid fire questions.

Carl Youngblood [01:30:08] Sure.

John Dehlin [01:30:08] Do you have a sense for like, how many Mormon transhumanists have ever existed in some way where they've reached out or joined something, or like, is it

Carl Youngblood [01:30:17] hundreds, thousands, like our current membership? I mean, some ways, like we suffer from the same weakness of the LDS Church where it's like anyone who's formally affiliated just sort of generally we keep a track that they've done that, but we don't always have as easy of a notion of like how many of those continue to think of themselves this way. But over a thousand people, roughly like 1100 or so, have affiliated as either basic or voting members.

John Dehlin [01:30:49] Okay.

Carl Youngblood [01:30:49] And voting members are those who can like select and be involved in the election of officers and board members and things like that.

John Dehlin [01:30:57] Is it Nonprofit? It's a 501C.

Carl Youngblood [01:30:58] Yeah, 516. 3 nonprofit. And that would be between 5 and 10% of the overall membership. So like from 50 to 100 individuals are voting members.

John Dehlin [01:31:09] When you guys hold an annual conference and at the end we're going to talk about the conference.

Carl Youngblood [01:31:13] Yeah.

John Dehlin [01:31:13] On average, let's say pre Covid, what was the height of how many people would attend?

Carl Youngblood [01:31:18] I think our best attendance was when Richard Bushman came and that was just over 100 people.

John Dehlin [01:31:22] Okay, fun.

Carl Youngblood [01:31:23] But we're actually expecting 200 people at the event that's taking place in March. It's going to be pretty big and it has a breakout appeal. I think that's a lot broader than some of the other topics we've covered. So we're kind of casting a wider net this time around. It's going to be focused on decentralization, specifically technologies like blockchain and Web3, which is something I've personally been really closely involved in. And Lincoln actually is pretty involved in that space as well. So we're really excited about this. It's a topic that a lot of people are curious about right now as

Lincoln Cannon [01:31:57] well and has theological ramifications.

Carl Youngblood [01:32:00] And we are. We're bringing in actually some.

John Dehlin [01:32:04] Does God use Ethereum? What are the buzzword? The acronym I'm totally botching.

Lincoln Cannon [01:32:12] Does God use the blockchain?

John Dehlin [01:32:13] The blockchain, no, but the nft.

Carl Youngblood [01:32:15] NFT is God.

John Dehlin [01:32:16] I mean, it's got to have an nft.

Lincoln Cannon [01:32:17] Maybe you are an nft.

John Dehlin [01:32:19] Am I an nft? Is that what it is? Is the spirit.

Carl Youngblood [01:32:22] That's quite interesting. John is an nft.

John Dehlin [01:32:25] I am an nft.

Lincoln Cannon [01:32:27] You'll have to come to the conference to find out.

Carl Youngblood [01:32:30] No, but I will say, and sorry for, you know, being a little bit sort of promotional at this moment, but we've had some generous donations that have made it possible to bring in some really top tier people who don't normally come to Utah that I would say are well worth the price of admission. We're not breaking even on the conference.

Lincoln Cannon [01:32:49] We never do.

Carl Youngblood [01:32:50] It's a money sink. But it's part of our core mission, which is to bring these ideas to light and share them with more people. So I would say if you're at all interested in blockchain and crypto or related technologies, it's well worth your while

Lincoln Cannon [01:33:03] wondering what they could possibly have to do with religion.

Carl Youngblood [01:33:06] And while I'm on the topic, why don't I just throw out how they register? Is that okay, View, or do you want to wait till the end or.

John Dehlin [01:33:12] Yeah, well, but we will do this at the end.

Carl Youngblood [01:33:14] Yeah, so just go to mtaconf.org and we did make a special promo code for Mormon stories listeners. So Miss Friend, all caps, one word.

John Dehlin [01:33:27] All right.

Carl Youngblood [01:33:27] Care's getting this down is we'll get you 20% off the conference.

Guest [01:33:30] Okay.

John Dehlin [01:33:31] Fun. There you go.

Carl Youngblood [01:33:32] And the early bird rate ends on February 15, so jump in there if it sounds exciting to you because it won't. It will slightly increase in price.

John Dehlin [01:33:39] But yeah, and I've got a few more questions, so I don't want to lose people.

Guest [01:33:43] My turn.

John Dehlin [01:33:44] No question. Well, okay. You want to volley? Okay, go ahead. I'll come back. I'll come back.

Guest [01:33:49] Okay. So you mentioned the ways that you feel like transhumanism and Mormonism. What's the word? Configure nicely together, complement nicely together. What are some ways that maybe they don't. And I don't know if this is true, but this is the first one that comes to my mind when I think of the future. I think of us moving into more of a, like poly gendered, less gendered, like less divisive about our gender differences is what I view in the future. And Mormonism has a theology that has a lot to do with, you know, gender being eternal from the pre existence. How does transhumanism and Mormonism work out those ideas?

Lincoln Cannon [01:34:27] Sure. Regarding. I'll start with the Mormon aspect of it, just to let people know what context I'm answering. The transhumanist part in Mormonism, in the proclamation to the family talks about gender being eternal. It does not say that gender is unchanging.

Lincoln Cannon [01:34:44] Those are very different things. In fact, the scriptures reject the notion. DNC19 in particular rejects the notion that eternal is unchanging. And it actually goes out of its way to say that God uses that to provoke us. This idea that eternal is unchanging because eternal damnation is not endless. It actually ends, at some point it changes. So eternal is not the same thing as unchanging. And I do totally share the church's perspective that gender is important.

Lincoln Cannon [01:35:17] Now some, many members of the church might think that that means that there's only binary important genders. I think that there's evidence to the contrary that there's not just a binary of genders and that gender is often constructed, but I think that it remains eternally important. That's where I completely agree with what I think is actually the doctrine of the church, even though it gets presented in lots of other ways.

Carl Youngblood [01:35:42] Can I add a little bit on that?

Lincoln Cannon [01:35:43] Sure. And then I'll go into the transhumanism bit.

Carl Youngblood [01:35:45] Yeah. So on that as well. I think that we do have some prior precedents in our history for a notion of family that could be redeemed in a way that is a little bit more accommodating for some of the things we're now learning about gender. And that's in the sense that like, I think we used to think of family as bigger than the nuclear family, which is like this notion of just parents and children in a single household by themselves. I really think that concept is actually fairly modern and not that eternal. And if we look at the history of humanity, it's probably more likely that most humans have been born into a sort of polygamous or dynastic type of larger family grouping.

Lincoln Cannon [01:36:29] Our genes say so.

Carl Youngblood [01:36:31] And so I think that even when you look at the early days of the church, you see this notion of family as being a more multi generational, multi extended kind of a thing, where you might have your odd uncle or aunt that never got married, you might have various people who, because of their life circumstances, just something different was in the cards for them. And I see in early Mormonism more of a communal conception of family.

Carl Youngblood [01:37:00] And even so much so that in the early days, people were being sealed as friends to one another in other ways. And so I think that we even have Brigham Young's son who liked to cross dress and sing opera. And he actually gave concerts, and people paid to go to his concerts. And he was a beloved son of Brigham Young. And even though this eccentric sort of habit of his was different than most of the other people his age, it was like he was doing it and people seemed to be okay with it. Right. So I think in the early days of the church, we have possibly more expansive view of gender even than now in the church.

Carl Youngblood [01:37:42] I'm not saying that there weren't other prejudices that we might have encountered back then, but I do think it's quite interesting to. When you have the perspective of a full context of history, it helps you to be able to inform these debates and discussions in ways that are, I think, more sophisticated than you can if you just have this really myopic view of how we think of things right now.

Guest [01:38:03] Yeah, because, I mean, one of the reasons why I'm not Mormon anymore is because I can't sustain the leadership because I don't think that they're led by God. And so maybe eventually, now or later, we'll have to get into, like, how you view the leadership, how you. Because it sounds like you are, you know, adding this Mormonism with this, this general framework, like you mentioned earlier, like the. What was the wording?

Carl Youngblood [01:38:24] Minimum viable theology.

Guest [01:38:26] Yeah, there we go. And. And then saying this is the framework of Mormonism and then adding some more things and maybe like recontextualizing and redefining the words a little bit. So Lincoln, you just said that the, you know, the proclamation of the family says. He says that gender is eternal, but it sounds like you're kind of changing the definition because that doesn't seem like how the leadership would define that word. They would say you're born either male, female, there's nothing else. That's how I would. John, do you agree that, like, that's how the. That's how the current leadership, if you sustain them, that's how they view it. So what do you do with that kind of. That kind of very much like, dogmatic, myopic view?

Lincoln Cannon [01:39:01] A few things come to mind. The first is that I'm hesitant to say that the leadership all thinks the same thing on any nuanced topic like this.

Guest [01:39:11] Sure.

Lincoln Cannon [01:39:11] Although I'll acknowledge that I probably quite a few think pretty much what you've just described. And so you ask this question about the church, and what do I think of leaders? Well, I love the church and I support the church, and I love the leaders of the church, and I support them.

Lincoln Cannon [01:39:29] I also love and support my wife. But we don't always agree with each other. Sometimes disagreements become hostile, and sometimes for good reasons, relationships end. My relationship with the church is healthy. I do my best to provide constructive criticism when I feel like I should.

Lincoln Cannon [01:39:53] I spend more of my time explaining why I love what I love and reinforcing the good things that I observe. Because if you spend more time criticizing than building up, your relationships deteriorate. That's true with the church and with your spouse and with anybody.

Lincoln Cannon [01:40:12] So for me, what it means to sustain the church doesn't mean to always agree with what it means is the same thing I do with my wife. It means to love and to support and sometimes disagree constructively, but to ensure maybe, as Joseph Smith described in section 121 of the doctrine and Covenants, that you follow up those disagreements with an increase of love so that they know that you're not their enemy.

Lincoln Cannon [01:40:35] And I think that when, most of the time, when people follow that strategy, it tends to perpetuate a healthy relationship. There's exceptions because relationships are messy. They can be messy, at least. So, you know, your mileage might vary, but my mileage with that has been good. I have a good relationship with the church. I respect the leaders of the church. I support them. I want them to succeed. And sometimes we have some disagreements.

Guest [01:41:03] I love that. I really love that. And I'm gonna ask something that I hope is not offensive, because you said that it was.

Lincoln Cannon [01:41:07] You can ask anything you want.

Guest [01:41:08] I know you said earlier that you're an open book. So let's hypothetically say that, you know, you have a Child, you have a friend, you have somebody who's non binary, they don't fit some type of sexual orientation.

Lincoln Cannon [01:41:17] I'll make this not even hypothetical for you. I've had this experience that you're about to ask me about. Go ahead and ask the question though.

Guest [01:41:22] So the way that I'm thinking of it is you, you would define it one day. You would define your sustaining of it in the words that you just put. But from somebody else who might not share that same perspective. They see Lincoln sitting in the pew, raising his hand to sustain the leaders. They see that as just the same as everybody else, every other Mormon, that your number as being somebody, a participant in the Mormon Church, feels like you don't love them. You don't sustain their gender identity or their sexual orientation because while you have a nuanced view of it, you're still counted with the larger membership. And that feels like, you know, it feels like whatever it feels like to

Lincoln Cannon [01:41:57] them, you know, often can hurt them.

Guest [01:41:59] Yeah, exactly.

Lincoln Cannon [01:42:00] Yeah. So this isn't hypothetical.

John Dehlin [01:42:01] Let me ask. Talk this way, just so you talk into the mic.

Lincoln Cannon [01:42:03] Oh, sure.

Guest [01:42:04] I'm asking too many good questions.

John Dehlin [01:42:07] Just look this way. It's just for the camera and for the.

Lincoln Cannon [01:42:09] For sure. Yeah, not a problem. Yeah. So this isn't hypothetical at all for me. I, in my experience in the church, I've lived in neighborhoods, in wards with queer persons that are members of the church and others who are just in the word boundaries, that weren't members of the church. And I've been their friend.

Lincoln Cannon [01:42:30] And I've had to deal with the tensions and the conflicts that have arisen on that subject over and over and over again. Right. I mean, we all can observe this. This is no longer hidden. This is out there in the open as a big challenge.

Lincoln Cannon [01:42:44] And one thing I would say is that I don't think that the general membership of the church is as monolithic as some suppose in their perspectives on this challenging issue. I think there's a lot of nuance and a lot of compassion on this topic, especially today. Maybe less so a few decades ago when I was growing up, but I was also less mature and maybe couldn't see it when I was growing up. I don't know, I just remember it for what it was, but it feels like it's a lot more healthy. It's not healthy enough, but a lot more healthy than it was when I was growing up.

Lincoln Cannon [01:43:17] So, you know, what do I say to them? Well, I do my best to be their friend. And when on the. And I have specific occasions in mind. They have approached me and talked to me about membership in the church.

Lincoln Cannon [01:43:32] I've asked them questions and given them feedback based on how they answer those questions. And on at least one occasion, I have told a queer friend that the church probably wasn't the healthiest place for that person to be, despite the fact that I love the church and I want that person to be a part of the church. Sometimes you have to end relationships, at least temporarily, for your well being. And I think that eternity is big, it's long and it's big.

Lincoln Cannon [01:44:04] And we have taken on ourselves the name of Christ. And part of the work that we've covenanted to do, all of us in the church, is to reconcile, to love each other and to reconcile. And I think that that can and will continue to happen better and better. It won't happen fast enough ever, it never does, but it will happen better. And these people, these friends that have been separated from communion with us in the church, maybe they'll never return, but I trust that there will be times in the future when they could return in a more healthy way than they could today.

Carl Youngblood [01:44:44] I could also just add that I see the process of sustaining as really aspirational. Like when I raise my hand to the square to sustain my leaders, I don't think that that is a statement that they are at all times speaking under inspiration and somehow sort of like dictation machines for God. Right.

Carl Youngblood [01:45:05] I instead think of them as profoundly human. In fact, I think we're all, you know, all those who've been through the temple are the Lord's anointed. And so I think Christ, yes, that means, yeah, we're anointed to become Christ. We are anointed as Christ.

Carl Youngblood [01:45:24] Messiah literally means anointed one. And so I think that a lot of this stuff about sustaining one's leaders as well as the so called evil, speaking of the Lord's anointed is really, these are terms about how we should our orientation towards all saints.

Carl Youngblood [01:45:46] But specifically when I sustain my leaders, I am basically expressing aspiration that they do speak under inspiration, that they do, that they do become prophet seers and revelators. But I don't claim that that always happens, if that makes sense.

Lincoln Cannon [01:46:05] And I'm also agreeing to help them do that.

Carl Youngblood [01:46:07] Yeah, absolutely.

John Dehlin [01:46:08] Makes sense.

Carl Youngblood [01:46:08] Yeah.

Rapid Fire Questions on Mormon Transhumanist Beliefs

John Dehlin [01:46:09] I want to ask you about the compatibility of kind of a transhumanist mindset with, with the Mormon mindset. But before we do, I want to play a game. Okay, sure. So I'm going to ask you to do Something that's impossible, but just don't take it too seriously. Okay, I'm going to ask you each to give your opinion as to the most common point of view for the transhumanists, you know, on various aspects of traditional Mormon doctrine or theology.

Lincoln Cannon [01:46:36] So Mormon transhumanists.

John Dehlin [01:46:37] Yeah, mormonshumanists. And I just want you to give a couple word answer, 2, 3 words

Lincoln Cannon [01:46:43] at the most, people.

John Dehlin [01:46:44] Yeah, well, you're each going to give your opinion, so I'll give you an example. So anthropic, like anthropomorphic God in the sky. I'll do, we'll do Lincoln. And then, and then Carl, like what would be the average, in your opinion, the average Mormon transhumanist view on that?

Lincoln Cannon [01:47:02] Wow. I sure hope that God can manifest morphologically in diverse ways with all of the super intelligence and nanobots going on.

John Dehlin [01:47:11] Okay.

Carl Youngblood [01:47:12] Wow, that was confusing. Lincoln. Sorry.

Lincoln Cannon [01:47:14] That's what came to mind.

John Dehlin [01:47:16] The average Mormon trans humanist view, in your opinion?

Carl Youngblood [01:47:19] I would just say that I think of God and I think many transhumanists think of God as not merely a single being. We already believe that we have heavenly parents and naturally where parents are, there are children as well. And so I think, you know, in the grand scheme of things, God is really a community of exalted beings and that these beings interact with their environment. Therefore they must be, they must have bodies, they must be able to interact with their environment.

Carl Youngblood [01:47:52] Now, as far as whether or not they like have the same exact DNA lineage as we do here on planet Earth, I don't know. I mean, I think most Mormon transhumanists would be somewhat agnostic about how literally to take that. But I think even in our Mormon teachings that's open to various interpretations. Joseph Smith didn't even know about DNA. He didn't give any specifics on it. And I think a lot of this enters into the realm of speculation. Right?

John Dehlin [01:48:27] Yeah.

Lincoln Cannon [01:48:28] Of course there's also a question about what it even means to be anthropomorphic. If you put a light cone or a possibility space cone in front of humanity right now, it still has limits based on who we are today. The shape of our potential is a very human shaped potential. Even if someday biological humanity is no longer a category that rightly applies to us. So in a certain way, sure, we are and always will be anthropos. But in other ways it's likely that evolution will take us beyond what most biologists would say is anthropos today.

John Dehlin [01:49:03] Okay, next one we're going to just a couple really quick Ones. Next one is Jesus. What is Jesus to the average Mormon transhumanist? You go first, Carl. Few. Few words as possible. That's the game.

Carl Youngblood [01:49:17] Jesus is the Messiah, the most prominent example of the example we should follow of the. The role or the person that we should emulate and that we've covenanted to emulate.

John Dehlin [01:49:33] Okay.

Lincoln Cannon [01:49:34] Jesus is the principal example of Christ, which name we've taken on ourselves.

John Dehlin [01:49:38] Okay. All right. Joseph Smith. What is Joseph Smith? To the average Mormon transhumanist, Joseph Smith is a prophet.

Lincoln Cannon [01:49:49] A fallible human who made lots of mistakes along the way, but an inspiring and an inspired prophet.

John Dehlin [01:49:55] Okay.

Carl Youngblood [01:49:56] Yeah. I mean, I. I'm not going to add a whole lot to that, because I generally agree. Yeah.

John Dehlin [01:50:01] I forgot to ask Holy Ghost, what do you think the average Mormon transhumanist would. How. How would they. What would they. How would they characterize the Holy Ghost?

Carl Youngblood [01:50:09] I want to let you go first.

Lincoln Cannon [01:50:11] This one's actually complex. We have a lot of interesting discussions about this. I. I'm going to. Average Mormon transhumanist.

John Dehlin [01:50:19] I know it's a game.

Lincoln Cannon [01:50:20] Oh, man, that's just so hard.

John Dehlin [01:50:22] I'm setting you guys up to all be pummeled. But it's not intentional.

Lincoln Cannon [01:50:25] I'm just gonna say that the Holy Ghost is like. Is analogous to the father and the mother and the son and the daughter in the divine triune, and it symbolizes our premortal origins.

Carl Youngblood [01:50:41] Wow. I was expecting Lincoln to say that the Holy Ghost was a sublime aesthetic

Lincoln Cannon [01:50:47] that I might have said.

Carl Youngblood [01:50:50] We've argued with each other so much that we have these, like, terms that we're. We've heard each other say. But I'm not very dogmatic about what the Holy Ghost is. I prefer to just think of it as a source of inspiration. But it's really hard to say what the average Mormon transhumanist thinks about it because, like, from one person to another, it changes all the time.

Lincoln Cannon [01:51:17] I mean, we'll all agree that the Holy Ghost is part of what Godhood is described as. We all agree on that. Now, going beyond that.

John Dehlin [01:51:23] Okay. Book of Mormon.

Lincoln Cannon [01:51:26] The Book of Mormon a. A work of scripture that is inspirational. And there will be debates among Mormon transhumanists on the extent of its historicity.

Carl Youngblood [01:51:37] Yeah, same.

Lincoln Cannon [01:51:39] Inspirational and inspired. Both. Yeah, we have deep reverence for the Book of Mormon, but there are legitimate questions based on science about its historicity. And we. We discuss those questions.

Carl Youngblood [01:51:49] Yeah. I think that the anachronisms in the Book of Mormon clearly show that not all of it, at least Is his is historical. And I would say that. But I think that like most Mormon transhumanists, I agree that it has just as much right to be called scripture as any other foundational text of any other religion.

John Dehlin [01:52:12] Okay.

Lincoln Cannon [01:52:13] Priesthood authority, but not necessarily power. DNC 121.

Carl Youngblood [01:52:21] Yeah, I prefer to think of priesthood as authority as, you know, for example, like a license. The leaders of the church are the only ones authorized to make policy decisions on behalf of the entire church. And I'm perfectly okay with that. Where I think I sometimes struggle is where or where I might disagree with someone is when they claim that the authority to preside over matters in the church really means that the prophet is like king of the entire earth. I don't really think of it quite the same way. Right. So sometimes people conflate that authority with a different type of power, I guess.

John Dehlin [01:53:00] Okay. The. The current. No, I'll say this. The idea of the LDS Church being the one true church or the one and only true church.

Lincoln Cannon [01:53:12] So the Book of Mormon and the Doctrine and Covenants both present this idea in very abstract terms. Nephi says there's one church, that's the Church of Christ. One church is the Church of Satan. Nothing in between, nothing else. The abstraction to which it's appealing doesn't lend itself, in my opinion. The Scriptures would be incoherent if it was trying to describe particular institutions. So when we say that we're the true church, I interpret that as aspirational. We aspire to be that one true church when the kingdom of God on earth is subsumed into the kingdom of heaven for everyone. Yeah. Joseph Smith said, during the millennium there'll be more than just Mormons. I agree with him.

Carl Youngblood [01:53:48] And. And I would add that therefore other denominations can belong to the Church of Christ as well. And all of those who do the works of Christ, I would say, qualify as members of the Church of Christ. And so I personally feel that the way some members have thought of that, that claim that we're the one true church, meaning this particular denomination is the only true church in the face of the earth. I. I disagree with that interpretation.

John Dehlin [01:54:18] Okay.

Carl Youngblood [01:54:18] I think that's common, but not necessarily all Mormon transhumanists would agree with that.

John Dehlin [01:54:23] Okay. The modern LDS Church prophet or president, what is that to the average Mormon? Who is that?

Lincoln Cannon [01:54:32] The average Mormon or average Mormon Transhumanist.

John Dehlin [01:54:33] To the average Mormon? Transhuman humanists. Yeah.

Lincoln Cannon [01:54:35] Yeah. So President Nelson is the president of the church. I sustain him as its leader. As it's currently organized, I think most so 75% ish of the members of the MTA are also members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints. And I, I think that's pretty typical perspective. Yeah, there's a leader. We sustain him as the leader. Now we also sustain him as a prophet. But we should all be prophets per the scriptures.

John Dehlin [01:54:58] Okay, so prophet. The average kind of sounds like a, maybe a broader understanding of the term prophet than.

Lincoln Cannon [01:55:04] Oh for sure. Mormon transhumanists tend to think of prophet prophethood as something democratic that we should all aspire to be a part of, that we should all be prophets, like Moses says in the Old Testament.

Carl Youngblood [01:55:14] So for example, when when Joseph Smith was asked by a journalist whether or not he was a prophet of God, he said yes, and so is anyone else with the testimony of Jesus. For the testimony of Jesus is the spirit of prophecy. Paul said we should be coveting to prophesy Moses when someone told on these other people in camp and said, hey, those so and so is prophesying over there said would to God that all the Lord's people were prophets and that he would place his spirit upon them.

Carl Youngblood [01:55:39] The Book of Mormon even talks about Abinadi and Samuel as these dudes who came and prophesied that the people needed to repent, but they had no ecclesiastical authority whatsoever. And Jesus even came to them and said, hey, why aren't Samuel's words in here? And they're like, oops, I guess we forgot.

Carl Youngblood [01:55:55] And so I think that the early Mormon conception of prophecy was much more radically egalitarian than many Mormons traditionally think of today. But I think those roots of prophecy are one of our greatest hits and we shouldn't downplay the importance of that.

John Dehlin [01:56:16] What about non Christians? The position or the status of non Christians?

Carl Youngblood [01:56:22] Yeah, so I love to quote DNC 2912, which says that the Lord will speak to all nations of the earth and they shall write it, and the books will be. The world will be judged by the books that are written. I feel that if the Lord really is speaking to all nations of the earth, that has to mean more than just Christian prophets. Right. And we also have some statements from other leaders of the church that indicate that other other people throughout history have received inspiration besides just Christians.

Lincoln Cannon [01:56:52] Yeah, we have members of the MTA who aren't Christian. Not a lot, but we have some and they're welcome.

John Dehlin [01:56:58] Okay, let's do a few quick social issues. So same sex marriage. The average Mormon transhumanist would. Would be. What would their position be about the legalization of Same sex marriage or can you even generalize?

Lincoln Cannon [01:57:15] There are some who have agreed with.

Carl Youngblood [01:57:18] With.

Lincoln Cannon [01:57:19] It's hard to say what the church's position is today, but because it's evolved. But there's some who would agree with what it was historically that it shouldn't be legal. I would say the majority of Mormon transhumanists probably support legal same sex marriage.

Carl Youngblood [01:57:31] Yeah, I agree.

John Dehlin [01:57:35] The church's history on race, whether it's dark skin being a curse based on wickedness for the Native Americans or Lamanites, or the priesthood ban that wasn't lifted until 1978 on black members of the church. Would there be some type of consensus there in your opinions?

Lincoln Cannon [01:57:53] I think most will say it was racism, that we need to repent. We're still working on it.

Carl Youngblood [01:57:57] Yeah, I agree as well. I think most are. Are comfortable criticizing those views as not being of divine origin. Right, okay.

John Dehlin [01:58:09] And the feelings around the. The judiciousness of women being able to hold the priesthood and kind of be equal to men in terms of decision making and those sorts of positions and authority.

Carl Youngblood [01:58:26] I do think that they're amongst those who've like talked and discussed about these concepts. There's somewhat of a difference of opinion on like, how best to manifest more equality in the Church. So for example, some people see value in having some organizations that are only women and only men. Like the idea of, does this mean we get rid of the Relief Society or the priesthood quorums, or is it more of like that we just need to provide them with a more equal status in the leadership decisions? And so the nitty gritty of how it plays out and how it might be manifest a more sort of a greater sense of equality. I think there's various views on how that might look, but I do think that there's a general agreement that some of the ways that we govern the Church today and the ways that we manifest gender roles are not necessarily ideal.

Compatibility of Transhumanism with Institutional Mormonism

John Dehlin [01:59:21] Yeah. What about the. And this is going to lead to kind of one of my biggest questions for you guys today is we kind of start to come to a kind of a pinnacle or a climax of our discussion.

John Dehlin [01:59:39] What about the perception to some that the Church has not been always truthful with its history, always transparent about its history? The Church has not always valued science or intellectual inquiry or even criticism, and that the Church has sort of prohibited criticism, had members vow to never speak, quote, ill of the Lord's anointed, which many interpret is not being critical.

John Dehlin [02:00:09] You know, and this is kind of a longer way of just saying, like I'm gonna just. I'm gonna just kind of divert and then come right back to having you guys answer. Like, what I perceive is that there's an intellectual rigor, there's an openness to honest discussion, to rigorous debate, to deep thinking that I'm. That I am now associating with transhumanism, and that I did before, which is why I had you guys on. But as you. To sit in front of me and you. You model how deeply you've thought about these issues, how much you care, how much language means to you, how robustly you've thought of and even debated to arrive at what I would say are very sophisticated philosophies.

John Dehlin [02:00:52] Some would say, man, that. How can that be compatible with Mormonism? Like Mormonism? Some look at Mormonism as stifling debate, stifling critical thought, stifling open discourse and deep thinking. And I know you guys would probably reject that characterization, but some would just say, man, transhumanism is. Is. Is not compatible with Mormonism because you guys care too much about truth and evidence and rigorous debate. And that's. If Mormonism stands for anything, it's stifling open discussion. It's. It's punishing people for criticizing and. And asking for just blind obedience. Not. That's not fair. But if someone had that, is there a degree to which you or your community would see that, acknowledge it, and then how.

John Dehlin [02:01:40] How would you kind of respond to that criticism or question? I would say Randy would get mad at me at a compound question. I just asked you an impossibly compound question.

Lincoln Cannon [02:01:51] I'm hoping the gist of it.

John Dehlin [02:01:53] Okay, good. I hope you can sense the spirit of my question.

Carl Youngblood [02:01:55] Yeah, yeah, totally.

Lincoln Cannon [02:01:56] Yeah.

Carl Youngblood [02:01:58] I look forward to what Lincoln has to say about this as well. But I guess I would just say that there are different veins in Mormonism. And like I said earlier, I would acknowledge that perhaps some of the views that we share may not be the most predominant ones, but I would absolutely defend that they're legitimate ones. That even from our authentic views of Mormonism, even from the earliest days of the church, there's been a vein amongst church thinkers about an openness to science, a confidence that the views that are being revealed to the prophets are compatible with science, and also a willingness to even discard views or presuppositions that may, in light of later evidence, be contradicted.

Carl Youngblood [02:02:44] And so I think that. That while there are also dogmatic, authoritarian, maybe anti science veins of thought in the church as well in our history, and sometimes it seems like Some have had more, you know, had the upper hand and not others.

Carl Youngblood [02:03:04] I still think that we can clearly establish our approach amongst some of the great thinkers of church history. And in fact, Richard Bushman said he sees us as carrying on the tradition of, like, B.H. roberts and Widtsoe and Talmadge and others. So I definitely think that our views are authentically Mormon. But I totally agree with those who would say that the version of Mormonism they knew or saw or grew up with might be different from this. And what I'm trying to do is just like, really promote what I think are our greatest hits and really try to, in many ways, fight against those who would try to characterize it differently.

Carl Youngblood [02:03:56] Now, I don't mean fight in sort of like a pugilistic way, but more just like resist the notion that that's all that Mormonism ever was or could be.

Lincoln Cannon [02:04:07] Yeah, I guess the first thing I would say is that that experience that you described and you acknowledged while you were describing it, it's not entirely fair, it's not, but it's real. People, really, some people really have lived that perspective on Mormonism, and it makes me profoundly sad, is the first thing I wish it weren't the case. It's not the Mormonism that I've experienced. It's not the Mormonism that I know some many other Mormons have experienced. But nonetheless, that doesn't change the fact that some people have quite a few, apparently.

Carl Youngblood [02:04:42] And wouldn't you say you've experienced, at least to the extent that some other members sometimes approach you and express these kinds of views?

Lincoln Cannon [02:04:48] Yeah. Although, I mean, in my experience, they're the minority, but some people have experienced that. That is what is generally going on. I've never experienced that, but somebody has, and that's their life. And so I guess the first thing I have to do is say, damn, I'm sorry.

Lincoln Cannon [02:05:08] I mean, that's the first thing we have to do is acknowledge that their experience is as real as mine. From there, if they care, I'm happy to talk about why I love Mormonism, why I love the church, because I do genuinely whole soldiers. Now, again, that doesn't mean I always agree with all Mormons or with, you know, I don't always agree with anybody, hardly ever even always agree with myself, but.

Lincoln Cannon [02:05:34] But I love the church. I love our religion. I love what it has done on the whole. And I love even more what I perceive its potential to be. And I want everybody who's willing and able to participate in that with me. That's what I genuinely want. And so, you know, we've exerted a lot of effort, like lots of members of the church do. This is not unique to Mormon transhumanists.

Lincoln Cannon [02:06:00] Lots of Mormons exert effort to trying to share Mormonism. And, you know, lots of Mormon transhumanists do the same thing. We're not exceptions to that. We love what we've got and we want to share it with people. But that doesn't mean we can't honestly recognize that it's. It has messed up in some cases, and in some cases, terribly so.

Lincoln Cannon [02:06:20] And I don't think that denying that that has happened serves any purpose. I think that's counterproductive. I think we need to acknowledge what people have lived and then say, remember, though, that my experience is also real and here's some things I've experienced and love and you might too.

Carl Youngblood [02:06:36] Yeah. In fact, I think that we almost need to promote, as I said, those kinds of interpretations that both are more expansive, that lead forward, lead to a way forward, rather than take the approach of it needs to all burn it all to the ground. There's nothing redeemable here, nothing of value here. I think instead, both those who are opposed to the church or who are frustrated by it, as well as those who love it and who support it should be seeking to magnify the parts of it that are. That we can agree are good. Right. Rather than trying to sort of, you know, just burn it all down, I guess, if that makes sense.

Lincoln Cannon [02:07:18] There's kind of a funny story that comes to my mind that I think epitomizes this tension. In the early 1900s, the quorum of the 12 was divided on the question of pre Adamites. Some thought, in accordance with the scientific evidence of their time, that pre Adamites

John Dehlin [02:07:36] existed, which is just humanoid. Humans are humanoid, human like species or animals or primates living. Predating Adam and Eve.

Lincoln Cannon [02:07:45] Yeah. Predating what? They might have dated Adam. Now, personally, I think that Adam is humanity, and I think that's the best reading of Genesis. That's not me imposing it back on it. I actually think that's the best reading of it. But putting that aside for a second, if Adam was a specific person, the question was, were there pre Adamites? These. You know, and the quorum of the 12 itself was divided on this question. Hugely divided. They debated it. There's records of this that you can get access to in various church libraries. And one of the people on the side of the existence of pre Adamites

Lincoln Cannon [02:08:18] was Talmadge, James Talmadge, the Apostle And I don't know whether he was saying this as tongue in cheek or whether this is a literal true thing that he did, but he says he went to Adam on Diamond and he checked the rocks that Adam used to build an altar, and he found fossils in them. That was his argument in favor of pre Adamites.

Carl Youngblood [02:08:41] Now when you say the rocks, like, was that. Is there some altar that's been attributed to Adam?

John Dehlin [02:08:46] Well, it's like Zelf Joseph's like, oh, that's the altar right there.

Lincoln Cannon [02:08:50] I was actually at Adam on Niam, and just recently I was picking up one of my sons who served a mission in Missouri. And there are some things that are attributed. And of course, attributed is very different than, as we all know, than knowing for sure. But if you ever get a chance, just like almost, it's a little tangential. If you ever get a chance, go to Adam on Diamond and find the Preacher's Rock. There's a rock overlooking a valley, and you can whisper, speaking from the rock, and people a football field away from you down in the valley can hear you.

Carl Youngblood [02:09:22] Oh, cool.

Lincoln Cannon [02:09:23] So I gave the beginning of the King Follett sermon to my family from Preacher's Rock, and it was a lot of fun.

Guest [02:09:28] What's the phenomenon there? Like, how does that work?

Lincoln Cannon [02:09:31] Something about how the valley is shaped? Yeah, it's amazing. It's really cool. So go there. It's really hot in the summer, though.

John Dehlin [02:09:39] Did you have it? Did you have it?

Carl Youngblood [02:09:42] I can't remember what the question was. All right. Yeah.

Critiquing Modern Church Leadership Through a Transhumanist Lens

John Dehlin [02:09:45] Well, a cousin question is like, if transhumanists are about progress, one of the criticisms of especially modern Mormon church leaders is that not only do they not see the future ahead of time, you know, that's what prophets, Sears, revelators, it's all about, like, prophesying about the future, seeing the future, revealing the future. Prophet, seer, revelator. That's kind of like how we're all set up to think of our church leaders, the Quorum of the twelve Apostles, the First Presidency. But a common critique of them is that not only do they not really ever see the future in any real meaningful way, but that. But that they actually have in many instances literally worked for the.

John Dehlin [02:10:33] As stumbling blocks to human progress. Whether it's, you know, fight fighting the era, the Equal Rights Amendment, whether it's opposing the civil rights movement, whether it's fighting LGBTQ rights, whether it's fighting against science and sort of having an anti science mentality that discourages a belief in evolution that. That devalues science. That seeks to demean scientists sometimes and elevate something else. And so I guess, you know, this is a different way of asking a similar question. And again, maybe you may object to that characterization, but could do trans Mormon transhumanists ever find themselves frustrated that these prophets and revelators that they're supposed to sustain as being future minded, are they, is it common for them to ever feel frustrated that these leaders are actually standing in the way of, and retarding genuine human progress instead of, instead of advancing it?

Carl Youngblood [02:11:31] Yeah, I'll respond. And I also want to hear Lincoln, but I, I would say first of all that the notion of a prophetic role is primarily one of like foretelling the future or predicting the future. I think is, is both not the best way of thinking about it as well as not genuinely or authentically the more Mormon way of thinking about it. I mean, while we do have some precedence for people who've claimed that some specific prophecies were like something Joseph saw in advance or whatever, I'd say for the most part, the way of thinking about prophets that resonates with me most that I've heard often taught actually in church is of them as a type of fourth teller, meaning that prophets actually preach what should happen.

Carl Youngblood [02:12:20] And then if the vision that the prophet is, is promoting is compelling enough, then people essentially have the choice of trying to realize that vision or not. And some of the most compelling prophecies about the future are self fulfilling in the sense that a prophet might be so amazing and so compelling and charismatic in the way that they explain what the future is like, that he might actually, he or she might inspire others to actually build that future rather than merely saying what's going to happen. It would be a weak form of prophecy to merely predict it, whereas it's more powerful to actually change the future.

Carl Youngblood [02:13:04] Right. And the most powerful prophets are those who change the future. So I take issue a bit with that characterization of what a prophet is. And then I would also say that once again, there are different veins in Mormonism of those who've been anti science and those who've been pro science. And I personally like to think of the pro science ones, the ones about discovering truth and embracing truth, as being the ones who are authentically Mormon and the ones who are fighting against the truth. And the, and the discoveries of science, I would say are channeling.

Lincoln Cannon [02:13:39] They were having bad days.

Carl Youngblood [02:13:40] Yeah, un Mormon influences.

John Dehlin [02:13:42] But I think, but I think most people, most students of Mormon history would say that the Talmages and the Eyrings and the woodstoves and the B.H. robertses of our past basically died. Joseph Fielding Smith, who was more anti science, outlived them and then incorporated into church curriculum and correlation. Kind of a real anti science mindset that has endured for maybe 40 or 50 years. And so do you acknowledge.

Carl Youngblood [02:14:08] I would definitely say those guys kind of, yeah. Like, in the same way.

John Dehlin [02:14:12] A little bit, at least temporarily.

Carl Youngblood [02:14:13] In the same way. I've said that if you want to say that my version of Mormonism is. Is like less common, I would be willing to acknowledge that. I'd say also I probably that more pro truth, pro science approach is probably slightly less common in certain portions of our history, but I definitely think that it's sort of there and it's not.

Lincoln Cannon [02:14:35] It's also more coherent theologically.

Carl Youngblood [02:14:38] And I would say too, that anyone who characterizes the approach of the current church as being entirely anti science is also incorrect. I think what we see is sort of a mixed bag there where we see several current contemporary statements of leaders of the church in favor of science, and we also see some statements that are kind of like somewhat dismissive of science. Right.

John Dehlin [02:15:05] So when Nelson. When President Nelson says something like, a dog's always been a dog, or you know, when he seems to really.

Carl Youngblood [02:15:11] Well, it's funny because, like, President Nelson, on the one hand, has been both a person who in his own field has advanced science in many ways and who's been the beneficiary of incredible scientific innovations at the same time, outside of his wheelhouse, has made some statements that are like, I would say, somewhat dismissive of science. Right. And so it's so ironic and unfortunate that even in this single individual we have examples on both sides of that argument.

Guest [02:15:44] Right?

John Dehlin [02:15:45] Yeah.

Lincoln Cannon [02:15:45] Although I think that. That I understand and recognize that really bugs some people.

John Dehlin [02:15:52] You guys weren't disappointed?

Lincoln Cannon [02:15:53] No, I'm kind of.

John Dehlin [02:15:56] You were?

Carl Youngblood [02:15:57] Yeah, I'm kind of disappointed, but go ahead.

Lincoln Cannon [02:15:59] I would prefer that he not be dismissive of evolutionary science, because evolutionary science is almost certainly true.

Carl Youngblood [02:16:04] But

Lincoln Cannon [02:16:07] it doesn't disappoint me in any more of a sense as any other influential person in that area, because for me, the role of prophet, which is different from the role of president, and he is in both roles, neither of those roles has the responsibility of teaching me good science. That's just not his job. And for me, I'm totally okay with that.

John Dehlin [02:16:33] You put him in a box. Put him in a box a little bit. It.

Carl Youngblood [02:16:36] I also want to add that, like, elaborate.

Lincoln Cannon [02:16:39] Why is that a box for him? I esteem and revere him as the leader of the church, as the president of the church. And I sustain him as a prophet whose role is to forth tell the type of world that we describe in scripture, the positive side of it. There's also some scary sides in scripture. And, and that I think is his rightful role. And that's what I sustain him in. I don't sustain him in his scientific career.

John Dehlin [02:17:08] No, you're right. And, and I guess I'm channeling the 14 fundamentals of following the prophet. Where was it Benson or I don't even remember who wrote that talk, but it was like the prophet is the authority on every single subject, no matter what, across all.

Lincoln Cannon [02:17:21] And I disagree with disciplines and, but

John Dehlin [02:17:24] I don't think even the church is advancing that point of view anymore.

Lincoln Cannon [02:17:27] I think they've, I've heard some members say stuff like that, but for me, that's an eye roller. Who could possibly live that way? None of us. I can't do that. Why should I expect somebody else to do that?

Carl Youngblood [02:17:37] Yeah. I would just add too, that one thing that's been profoundly important and beneficial for me from an emotional perspective with all this stuff is to actually just dramatically lower my expectations of my fellow humans. So taking a stoic approach to both church and to life in general and expecting to be disappointed by my fellow human beings most of the time has been hugely helpful for me to like, be sane.

John Dehlin [02:18:12] Yeah.

Carl Youngblood [02:18:13] I used to have very, I would say unrealistic expectations of my church leaders.

Lincoln Cannon [02:18:17] And of yourself?

Carl Youngblood [02:18:18] End of myself and of my wife and lots of other people. And when I find that, when I expect to be disappointed, then I'm pleasantly surprised when things turn out better than that. And so who knew this would turn

Lincoln Cannon [02:18:33] into a therapy session?

Carl Youngblood [02:18:35] So that's been part of how I cope with some of these frustrating statements occasionally.

John Dehlin [02:18:39] Right, Nice.

Guest [02:18:41] I have a question. So I think you've accurately explained, I mean, not accurately, I think that you have nicely summarized why your faith in the Mormon church works together with your transhumanist beliefs. My frustration though is still, I want you to kind of address the idea of how can somebody be a Mormon and a transhumanist? Why can't you just have those ideals but not actually participate in the church? What is the actual participation in the church? What you could have your ideas around it. But we talk a lot about systemic abuse in this church. Taking your kids to a place where we know that the church could possibly cover up a sex abuse, something.

Guest [02:19:22] And you, you never know what the church's priorities are. And it's usually not your child. And so I have a children's rights first perspective always. And so how does somebody who wants to say, you know, be stay Mormon? They like the. They like the theology that you just mentioned. They like your transhumanism, but they don't want to actually participate in the church. Do you have people like that in your organization that. That just can't remedy actually attending church because there's just too much systemic problems that they don't want to subject their children to?

Carl Youngblood [02:19:51] Yeah, I mean, not all of our members are active in.

Guest [02:19:55] At church, but they carry the ideas.

Carl Youngblood [02:19:57] Yeah. Several similar ways to find resonating ideas in. In Mormon transhumanism.

John Dehlin [02:20:03] Maybe they define Mormon more broadly than a church member.

Carl Youngblood [02:20:06] Yeah, I would say, like Lincoln said earlier, still the majority of our members are active in church. I guess it. But there is a significant contingent of those who are either less active or some who are even never Mormon or some who used to be Mormon.

Carl Youngblood [02:20:25] And I think I totally, like Lincoln said earlier as well, support someone who, because of their specific family situation, have decided that the pros don't outweigh the cons. Right. And that they need to step away. But I also personally feel like the many opportunities that church service gives me to engage in activities where I'm like, I'm put in touch with other people who maybe think differently from myself, who can help me to develop certain qualities, Christlike qualities that I try to aspire to, that those, those opportunities are good. I recognize, though, that everybody has a different vantage point and a different life situation. And so it's not going to necessarily work for everyone.

Carl Youngblood [02:21:12] But I find that many of the covenants that I've made and sort of the commitments I've made in a church context do continue to help me. And I try to magnify the parts of church that I really. That really resonate with me.

Guest [02:21:26] Okay, cool. That makes sense.

John Dehlin [02:21:29] Yeah.

Lincoln Cannon [02:21:29] Very. Similarly, you know, there are people who have had terrible experiences, whose children, to your point, have had terrible experiences in the church. My perception is that that is the minority. That doesn't make those experiences less serious than they are. They remain very serious.

Lincoln Cannon [02:21:49] I've raised my children in the church. They're now all adults. Well, my youngest will be an adult in like a couple of months. And they've had some challenges along the way, as we all do, but by far it's been a positive experience for them, so far as I can tell.

Lincoln Cannon [02:22:05] And, you know, some of that we tease out as we mature and we look back on our experience and decide what to make of it. So maybe, maybe they'll interpret that differently over time. We'll see that they're their own people. I look back at my childhood in the church. I had some negative experiences, but again, for me it was by far overall a positive thing.

Lincoln Cannon [02:22:25] And so while I don't want to pretend, because it wouldn't be true that there aren't seriously negative experiences that some people have themselves and their children in the church, I think it's equally true to say that some of us have excellent experiences for ourselves and our children.

Lincoln Cannon [02:22:47] And I don't know how to quantify it, but my perception is that it's far more on the positive than the negative. And so I wouldn't hesitate for a moment to advocate to people that they should consider joining the church. I'm a big fan of the church. I think it, on the whole, can improve many people's lives. Are there exceptions, important exceptions to that? Yeah, and I'll acknowledge those. But the missionary spirit is still burning alive and well in me.

Privilege, Inclusion, and Hard Questions

John Dehlin [02:23:14] And this is a tough question, and I'm not trying to hijack you with it, or like, do a gotcha question, but like, what if someone were to say to you, yeah, you had a great experience in the church because you presumably are a white, straight, you know, pioneer, legacy, heterosexual, cisgender, Mormon of man of privilege, and it's privilege alone because the church was made by you, metaphorically, for you, metaphorically. So of course you had a good experience. So. So, you know, can you acknowledge or do you acknowledge that maybe your positive experience is at least in part a function of your privilege?

Lincoln Cannon [02:23:48] Not even maybe. For sure it is.

John Dehlin [02:23:50] Okay, and then the second part of that question is, if somebody were to say to you, yeah, but by, by supporting this institution that many of you might be racist, sexist, homophobic, CIS phobia, gender transphobic, whatever. You're basically aiding and abetting or financially supporting an institution.

Lincoln Cannon [02:24:08] That's true of all institutions.

John Dehlin [02:24:09] You're enabling an institution that's causing a lot of harm to the people that don't have the same privilege you have. You're kind of perpetuating the harm. What do you say to that?

Lincoln Cannon [02:24:18] Yeah, my answer to that is that's true of all institutions, all organizations, all groups. They all have their. They all have their norms, their bigotries, their biases. And what I aspire to is Christian discipleship, which does transcend those things without making any of them unimportant. The body of Christ is not all one big eye. It's got hands and feet and legs and they're all different, they're diverse. This is the metaphor that Paul uses in the Scriptures and I love that. But it's also united. So it's a unity of differences working together for some common purpose, which I trust is the immortality and eternal life of humanity.

Lincoln Cannon [02:24:57] And so, Yeah, there are real challenges in every organization. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints is no exception. Yes, I have benefited from some of those because I am a straight white male. For sure. That has benefited me repeatedly. Is that fair? No, it's not fair. Do I want it to be better for people who have been treated unfairly because of that? Absolutely. And I think that we have made progress there and we still have more progress to make there.

Lincoln Cannon [02:25:27] And I think wallowing in the fact that we've made mistakes and focusing only on that without turning around and saying, and we can and will do better, it would be a mistake. We can and we will do better. And so let's do it.

Carl Youngblood [02:25:42] Yeah. I think that I want to acknowledge that many people like in a situation similar to mine have come to different conclusions. And so I don't at all deny that there are those whose experience and whose calculus of the pros and cons has come to a different conclusion. I do still feel like there's a lot of good out there that the church does, and I continue to want to support and magnify that good. And I also know that there are many people out in the world who, for whom the church and the participation in the church is like a profound step up from what they are currently experiencing. And I just want to try to make that better and try to eliminate those negative aspects that we've talked about. Right. But, but I wouldn't presume to claim that my experience applies to everybody out there.

John Dehlin [02:26:41] Beautiful. All right, well, I, I want to keep talking to you guys, but I'm, for today, I think I'm, I'm, we're going to need to kind of wrap up here, but I hope to have you back. I, I, I really enjoyed today. I really love your perspectives.

Closing Thoughts and the Elevator Pitch

Guest [02:26:55] Yeah. And I want to hear people's comments and things and if we have them back, I'd love to have like a part 2 and integrate more comments of what people's questions were because I'm just popping off the top of my head everything that comes to my mind. So I'm sure the listeners have a lot of stuff that they want to have follow up questions too.

John Dehlin [02:27:08] So I hope we can do that. But I do Want to kind of get you out on this. Let's just say we were going to make a tick tock or an Instagram or a short video on each of you. Kind of explain. What I want to do is end by each of you explaining how Mormon transhumanism has really helped you. In other words, the whole thrive idea is, you know, let's help people heal and grow.

John Dehlin [02:27:31] However, you know, whatever we can do to provide people with opportunities to heal and grow in or out of the church, we just want people to find healing and growth. And so if you were to answer the question of how Mormon transhumanism has materially enhanced your life, I would love to hear each of you just kind of give your elevator pitch so that if somebody is looking for a philosophy, looking for a community, looking to salvage their participation in the church and or faith in the church, looking for a reason to exist, looking for a reason

Guest [02:28:04] to get out of bed. That's what Carl mentioned at the beginning, right?

John Dehlin [02:28:06] Yeah, exactly. Like give give kind of your elevator pitch for how Mormon transhumanism has been an important part of that. And I'll just throw that let meat out there and let you guys fight over who gets a first bite.

Carl Youngblood [02:28:19] Okay, I'll go for it. Mormon transhumanism has helped me to make sense and apply my faith more meaningfully in the here and now and to be inspired to try to change the world that I currently live in, rather than merely expecting or waiting for something better in the afterlife.

John Dehlin [02:28:42] Nice. Again, that's kind of Buddhist. Living in the now. Yeah.

Lincoln Cannon [02:28:48] Mormon transhumanism has infused me with a. With a confidence that we are working on something sublime, that we. That humanity together is working on something sublime, something transformative, that we have potential that equals and surpasses our imagination, and that all of the technologies that we have available to us, including religion, which is a social technology, can contribute to our sublime destiny. Let's call it destiny. Even if it's a destiny we have to work for and has a lot of risks along the way. Mormon transhumanism has made that real and substantial for me.

Carl Youngblood [02:29:35] Not.

Lincoln Cannon [02:29:35] Not just kind of a. A pacifier to help me deal with the challenges of life, but it's actually motivated me and made it. Made it tangible and real for me in my life.

John Dehlin [02:29:47] I love it. Well, there's so much more we could talk about. We really didn't even get into technologies and that sort of thing, but we brushed on them, so that's all beautiful. You guys are smart and inspiring and I. I Want there to be more Mormon transhumanists, honestly. So I have to ask why the freak isn't there Mormon? Or is there a Mormon transhumanism podcast? Because you guys could. Should be bigger. I would like to see, like when I met with Elder Holland, once he met, I met with him and my brother Joel and he literally ended the meeting by saying, I wish there were a hundred thousand Joel and John de Lynn's in this church.

John Dehlin [02:30:24] You know what I mean? And I'm going to say the same thing to you guys. I wish that there were 5 million Mormon transhumanists. Because if. If all Mormons were kind of like seeing things the way you see it, I think that would be good for the Mormon church. I think that would be good for humanity. I think that could improve a lot of people's lives. So why the freak Are you guys better marketers? Why don't you have a podcast and a YouTube channel? Why are there only a few hundred or thousand of you? Come on, guys.

Carl Youngblood [02:30:49] Yeah, you need some help?

John Dehlin [02:30:50] Do you want to hire me to consult you guys?

Carl Youngblood [02:30:52] Like, totally. Yeah. What's your rate?

John Dehlin [02:30:54] There should be at least 50,000 subscribers to a Mormon transhumanism YouTube channel. Come on, dudes.

Carl Youngblood [02:31:01] We actually have been talking about this and sort of. We've been through a couple of leadership changes in the last few years and I'm now the president of the association and working very tirelessly to try to try to move things forward. So we are planning a podcast. Don't know exactly when that's going to start.

John Dehlin [02:31:20] All right.

Carl Youngblood [02:31:20] But one of the big things that I'm working on right now is this upcoming conference right in March, on March 19th. That's going to be awesome. Amazing.

John Dehlin [02:31:29] Is this your first conference?

Carl Youngblood [02:31:30] Well, I have helped to organize many conferences, but the first one is president.

Lincoln Cannon [02:31:34] His primary role, though, back in the day was organizing the conferences. So he's done this many times.

John Dehlin [02:31:38] But the Carl Youngblood administration begins.

Carl Youngblood [02:31:42] Yes, yes, exactly. Yeah.

John Dehlin [02:31:45] A new sheriff's in town, everybody.

Carl Youngblood [02:31:48] So I really do think though that this has some breakout appeal. So I really. One more plug, I think.

John Dehlin [02:31:54] I love it.

Carl Youngblood [02:31:55] It's worth coming out to.

John Dehlin [02:31:56] Cara, what do you think? Do you think. Are you a little. Are you like, at least intrigued or impressed or inspired by their. This brand of Mormonism at all?

Guest [02:32:04] Yeah, obviously I'm putting you on the

John Dehlin [02:32:06] spot because you can say no. I think it's lame, but.

Guest [02:32:08] No, absolutely. I think, to echo what you just said, that if more Mormons thought this way and had more of an Expansive view of Mormon. I'm. I'm the most anti dogma person ever, and it sounds like you guys are too.

Lincoln Cannon [02:32:18] I'm there with you.

Guest [02:32:19] Yeah. So anyone who is against this kind of like, dogmatic view of Mormonism and there's one way or the highway kind of view, it's a huge improvement. And I think you guys are very intelligent and very empathetic. And I love Lincoln, when you started off by talking about ethics and that you're viewing things through an ethical framework first and foremost with your transhumanism, I don't think you can really, like, go a lot of wrong in that. Does that make sense? Like, I think you've. You started with a framework that I really agree with on so many points, on so many ways in so many areas.

Guest [02:32:50] So everything you said today really resonated and is a really beautiful way. I don't. I personally don't. I can't get. I can't come to grips with believing in a higher power. I can't get there. But I see so much beauty and utility in it. And that's what I see in what you guys said today, like a beauty and utility.

Lincoln Cannon [02:33:05] I was there with you too, at one point in my life. That's. Yeah, I feel that.

Carl Youngblood [02:33:10] And we don't have more time. Enough time. But I should mention that Lincoln has developed something he calls the New God argument. It sort of like argues in a probabilistic way for why what the ramifications of not believing in a. In God are. And sort of like that it may mean that humanity is sort of doomed to extinction. So I'll just leave a, like a kind of like a teaser for that.

John Dehlin [02:33:36] It's a foot in the door for part two or part three.

Guest [02:33:39] Yeah, it's just a hanger.

Lincoln Cannon [02:33:40] Popular argument among religious transhumanists for. For faith in God.

Guest [02:33:45] Okay, last question. Can you. Because we're gonna do a Part two. Just. It's gonna happen. Sorry. Three. Whatever.

Lincoln Cannon [02:33:51] Good. Let's do it.

Guest [02:33:52] The first interview that's gonna be in the show Notes with Carl. This is part two, Part three. What would you like to leave the audience with? You already mentioned some websites. Are there books, philosophers articles, other websites that you want the audience to check out if they're interested?

Lincoln Cannon [02:34:08] Yeah. So plug to the MTA website, of course. First of all, so the domain name is transfigurism.org.

John Dehlin [02:34:14] okay, that's confusing.

Lincoln Cannon [02:34:16] Yeah, yeah, there's a story. There's a story behind that too. But you can just Google Mormon transhumanist association It'll pop right up.

Carl Youngblood [02:34:22] Okay.

Lincoln Cannon [02:34:23] I. I have a blog. I've been blogging about technological evolution and post secular religion for 15 years at lincoln.medicanon.net post secular religion.

John Dehlin [02:34:34] We just got. We just got, like, leapfrogged, Kara. Like, we thought secularism was kind of like. I'm kidding. But, like, some think secularism's the culmination and they just posted us. They now have established post secular religion. Did you know that there's a life after your life right now, Kara?

Carl Youngblood [02:34:50] Did you know that?

John Dehlin [02:34:50] Yeah, they envision a life beyond yourself.

Guest [02:34:53] You know, the week that we had. You know, my brain cells are, like, barely hanging on right now. So just to have this discussion and follow it.

John Dehlin [02:34:59] Linkage just was like. I was like you once, Kara, and I've evolved.

Lincoln Cannon [02:35:03] No, I wanted you to hear that. I feel that I know what you're talking about.

Guest [02:35:08] I'm kidding.

John Dehlin [02:35:08] Totally sorry. I just derailed.

Guest [02:35:11] Okay, say the website, your blog one more time.

Lincoln Cannon [02:35:13] Lincoln.metacannon.net or you can just type in Lincoln Cannon. I'm good at search engine optimization. I'll be right at the top. And then, like, if you want to read some cool.

Carl Youngblood [02:35:24] Our YouTube channel is a good.

Lincoln Cannon [02:35:25] Our YouTube channel is excellent, which is also YouTube.com transfigurism or just Mormon transhumanist. YouTube. Really excellent. We have all of our conference speakers going all the way back to 2012 there, including Richard Bushman, Terrell Givens, all the others that we already talked about.

John Dehlin [02:35:42] Miller, Rosalind Welch.

Lincoln Cannon [02:35:44] That's right. We've had great Mormon speakers, and we've had equally great transhumanists. Secular transhumanist speakers. These are people who, many of whom are atheists, who have come to our conferences and presented. We've had them talk with other Mormons, other celebrity Mormons, and have panels together where they chatted back. Interesting stuff.

John Dehlin [02:36:01] If you had celebrity ex Mormons yet. That's the question. I'm just kidding.

Carl Youngblood [02:36:04] Do you want to be on.

John Dehlin [02:36:06] I'd come. Which.

Lincoln Cannon [02:36:07] I don't know that you've got an offer, John. We want everybody. Seriously. We have. We have.

John Dehlin [02:36:13] I don't think you do.

Lincoln Cannon [02:36:14] No, seriously. We invited. We invited a fundamentalist Christian to come offer a criticism of Mormon transhumanism. We have invited secular atheists to come publicly with the. With our.

Carl Youngblood [02:36:26] With our blessing.

Lincoln Cannon [02:36:27] Blessing.

Carl Youngblood [02:36:28] We paid for their.

Lincoln Cannon [02:36:29] We paid for their ticket to fly from the United Kingdom to Utah to deliver a criticism of Mormon transhumanism.

John Dehlin [02:36:34] So maybe Mormon Voldemort will appear.

Lincoln Cannon [02:36:37] There you go.

Carl Youngblood [02:36:37] Is that what you think of yourself as? Do you have horcruxes as well?

John Dehlin [02:36:42] We're just being playful.

Lincoln Cannon [02:36:43] Yeah. So. So yeah, please do come. That would be great. You'll have to talk to him. He's in charge of that these days.

John Dehlin [02:36:49] I don't want to stay in your new tenure. Let's wait until you're. Your tenure is soured a little bit.

MTA Conference, Cryptocurrency, and Final Remarks

Carl Youngblood [02:36:53] But please go to mtaconf.org and like I said, actually, even if you're not, even if you're not, you don't think of yourself as that religious of a person. I think many interesting and important technologies will be being discussed at this conference. So I think you'll find something there that is actually, it's in person.

John Dehlin [02:37:13] Give us the dates and the location.

Carl Youngblood [02:37:15] March 19, Provo City Library.

John Dehlin [02:37:18] Okay.

Carl Youngblood [02:37:19] In the ball.

John Dehlin [02:37:19] Is that where the Fire for Women conference was held?

Guest [02:37:22] It got moved. It was at the Provo Library. But okay.

Carl Youngblood [02:37:25] Yeah, yeah. March 19th, Provo Library.

John Dehlin [02:37:27] Is there a price, a registration fee?

Carl Youngblood [02:37:29] Yeah, it's fairly modest. There's options for those who are students or indigent. Circumstances and Ms. Friend, all caps, all one word is your promo code for 20 off. But like I said, we're not breaking even on the conference. We. It's through donations of our members that that's made possible. But this year it's going to be really exciting. We have some really top tier talent that's coming in to speak.

John Dehlin [02:37:56] So name some of the people or.

Carl Youngblood [02:37:58] Yeah. Laura Shin is like the most prominent podcast host in the blockchain and cryptocurrency space.

John Dehlin [02:38:05] So Aaron may want to come to this.

Carl Youngblood [02:38:07] So she, she's going to come talk. And then we have a Mormon keynote speaker who's also really prominent in the blockchain space and as a public sort of in the public sector. He's advised many White House administrations and is really well known and now is kind of promoting Web3 blockchain technology. Then we have some really interesting stuff around charter cities. People who are looking into new forms of governance. So like special economic zones, international development and all sorts of like ways that decentralization might change the arrangement of countries and things in the future, basically. So pretty cool stuff. All right.

Lincoln Cannon [02:38:51] I'll be speaking on the decentralization of God.

John Dehlin [02:38:53] Nice. Blockchain God.

Carl Youngblood [02:38:56] Yeah, something like that. I'm actually anxious to hear what that's all about.

Guest [02:39:01] Cool guys.

John Dehlin [02:39:02] I love it. All right, well this is so. Oh, really quickly. So Carl, put you on the spot. Bitcoin. Buy or sell or don't. Don't get involved.

Guest [02:39:13] Which one?

John Dehlin [02:39:14] Three answers, one word.

Carl Youngblood [02:39:15] This is financial. This is not financial advice. But I do think that investing in solid corner kind of blue chip, what I call blue chip cryptos as part of your portfolio strategy is, is a wise thing to do.

John Dehlin [02:39:32] So Bitcoin, Buy, sell or don't get involved. We won't hold you on this. No one hold him to this. This is just a game by at least some.

Carl Youngblood [02:39:40] By at least some.

John Dehlin [02:39:41] Buy some Ethereum. Buy, sell.

Lincoln Cannon [02:39:43] Better buy.

Carl Youngblood [02:39:43] Better buy. Better buy than Bitcoin.

John Dehlin [02:39:45] Better buy.

Carl Youngblood [02:39:46] Yeah.

John Dehlin [02:39:46] Okay. And then each of your recommendation for the best, best cryptocurrency to buy right now for the biggest return. Safest but biggest return.

Carl Youngblood [02:39:56] Oh, I have no. I don't feel safe in recommending any individual. Do you?

John Dehlin [02:40:01] You did to me privately.

Carl Youngblood [02:40:03] Did I? What did I say?

John Dehlin [02:40:04] Oh, it's okay. And I'm not.

Carl Youngblood [02:40:06] I actually don't remember. I don't remember what I said. But anyway.

John Dehlin [02:40:08] Solana is it Solana kind of.

Carl Youngblood [02:40:10] I don't. Well, I did mention them as one option but I don't think I would. There's a handful exclusively. Put them out as the biggest.

Lincoln Cannon [02:40:17] One handful of what I would say are nothing in crypto safe and it's super volatile. But the safest biggest returns, blue chips. What are the blue chip, Avalanche, Phantom, Solana, Cardano.

Carl Youngblood [02:40:29] Those aren't blue chips though. Right?

Lincoln Cannon [02:40:31] Whatever.

John Dehlin [02:40:32] That's what you're saying.

Lincoln Cannon [02:40:33] That are like.

Carl Youngblood [02:40:35] I was going to say Bitcoin and Ethereum. I think of blue chips

John Dehlin [02:40:41] like secondary would be what?

Carl Youngblood [02:40:43] Yeah, like some of these next generation ones like Avalanche, Solana. I hate Cardano. I don't really feel Phantom, but Phantom.

Lincoln Cannon [02:40:52] Yeah, Phantom still total value just exploded. Polkadot probably.

John Dehlin [02:40:56] What about Dogecoin?

Lincoln Cannon [02:40:57] Come on guys, I'm not so much into. It's kind of like if you see value there, have fun.

John Dehlin [02:41:03] I lost like 750 bucks on Dogecoin so far.

Carl Youngblood [02:41:06] What did I buy that wasn't so bad.

Lincoln Cannon [02:41:08] Right. But like the technical future, the technical future of blockchain technologies, like the real meaty potential is being manifest in these other ones that we just talked about. There's like not all of them will succeed, but if some of these that we just mentioned succeed, it's. It's paradigm shifting stuff for the world of finance.

Carl Youngblood [02:41:26] Yeah, yeah. I mean I would say beyond that really quick. Just since I'm in this field, what I think these are going to do is enable new forms of governance in both the way corporations are structured, the way organizations like Mormon Stories or Our transhumanist association are structured also in the ways that people organize themselves. New organizations that. That don't even exist yet. New ways of forming bonds between people that are more sort of egalitarian. For example, you could create social media like Facebook or Twitter that did not have a middleman in. No Facebook, no Twitter behind them, but that function in similar ways. Right. So the promise is that communities and individuals will be more empowered to build systems that really add value, rather than trying to extract the value in other ways.

Guest [02:42:22] If I had to summarize this entire podcast. Diversify your portfolio. Money wise and also theology wise.

Lincoln Cannon [02:42:29] I like it.

Guest [02:42:29] That's a kind of diversify your mental portfolio.

Carl Youngblood [02:42:32] That's a great summary.

Guest [02:42:33] Thanks. I'll put that in the description, but I will be writing after this.

John Dehlin [02:42:37] She'll be making a TikTok of herself being wise and sharing that. That.

Carl Youngblood [02:42:41] Yeah, right.

Guest [02:42:42] John, you've cornered me. I'm just all about myself and I have. And I'm just waiting for them to say something so I can sneak in.

John Dehlin [02:42:49] No, no, no. Never.

Guest [02:42:51] I enjoyed this. And you guys were just naming off. My husband's really into trading that stuff all day. It was like you were naming off, like, all of his mistresses that he has to go off to the bedroom to tend to. She's like, at home and at work. We have to talk about this. Anyway, it's true. We do. Everyone, diversify your portfolios.

Carl Youngblood [02:43:07] And I don't want to give the impression that our conference is just for crypto bros. Like, seriously, it's going to be.

Guest [02:43:15] Oh, glad you qualified.

Carl Youngblood [02:43:15] That there's going to be a wide variety of interesting topics. Yeah. So.

Guest [02:43:22] All right, I'm interested.

John Dehlin [02:43:25] Okay. So we'll include a link to the conference in the show notes. The promo code, if you're going to register, is Ms.

Carl Youngblood [02:43:33] Friend.

John Dehlin [02:43:34] Ms. Friend. And check out the Mormon Transhumanist association or whatever it's called. These are great guys. A bunch of cool people. And there's women, too.

Lincoln Cannon [02:43:44] There are not enough, unfortunately. There are demographic challenges in transhumanism like there are in Mormonism, and we have the overlap of those challenges. Unfortunately.

Carl Youngblood [02:43:52] Yes. Our vice president, Connie Packer, is one of those women, and there are several others. Our last two CEOs have been women as well, and I'm just trying to.

John Dehlin [02:44:02] Blair Osler is very well respected. Yeah, she's a. She's a.

Carl Youngblood [02:44:06] That's right. Yeah. Yeah.

John Dehlin [02:44:08] All right. All right. Well, gentlemen, thanks for coming. Come again. I respect you a lot, and I hope to build on this friendship And I want to see Mormon Transhumanism podcast before.

Carl Youngblood [02:44:21] You know, thanks for the inspiration. We really need to do this.

John Dehlin [02:44:25] No, really, you can help a lot of people. I really believe your positions are compelling and you could help a lot of people.

Carl Youngblood [02:44:30] Yeah. Thank you.

John Dehlin [02:44:31] And sometimes Mormon apologetics just looks like any old harebrained excuse to try and get people to stay. You guys seem to have sincere reasons to cling or to grow and to enhance and to cultivate your faith. So it's not just some. It doesn't feel to me, it's just some reaction as a defense to hold on to something you don't want to let go. It feels like there's actually some fertile ground of like, revitalizing your faith and, and, and growing it because of what you've learned from transhumanism. And I like that a lot better than just like, we can't let this go. I don't want to let this go. It's like, hey, there's value here.

Carl Youngblood [02:45:09] Yeah. Thank you. And we want to foster these kind of friendships across different ideological lines. Right. So these kind of discussions that we're having today, even with folks who might find themselves slightly in a different position, are what we thrive on. And we want to. To promote those bridges. Right. So thanks for having us.

John Dehlin [02:45:29] Thanks, gentlemen.

Lincoln Cannon [02:45:30] Thank you, John.

John Dehlin [02:45:31] Thanks, Kara.

Guest [02:45:31] Yeah, thanks, guys.

Lincoln Cannon [02:45:32] Thank you, Kara.

John Dehlin [02:45:34] And thanks to all our listeners who support us. We couldn't do this without you. We're so grateful for all the people that have stepped up to donate to Mormon Stories in the Open Stories foundation, and we couldn't do it. So if you want to join those who are supporting us that make Cara her possible. Gerardo, Jen, Jennifer, just all the amazing work of Mormon Stories in the Open Stories Foundation. If you value this work, if you want to see it continue, please become a monthly donor@mormonstories.org send us your feedback at mormonstories gmail.com subscribe to us on Tick Tock at Mormon Stories podcast, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube.

John Dehlin [02:46:13] We love your follows. We love your subscriptions. We love your positive reviews. Please share this with everyone, comment and give us your feedback. And if you've got other ideas of great topics we can cover. If you want to bring these gentlemen back, maybe some other women or gender non binary trans Mormon transhumanists. If you want to give us your best ideas or talk about other possible show opportunities, you can email us@mormonstoriesgmail.com and give us your feedback. But thanks for the support. Please continue the support and we'll see you guys all again soon on another episode of Mormon Stories podcast. Take care, everybody.

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