MTA Leadership Remarks - Carl Youngblood

We're on to our last talk. Uh Carl Young Bloodood is the current president and one of the co-founders of the Mormon Transmist Association. He regularly engages in thought work surrounding future technological advances and has published essays on topics such as artificial intelligence, digital identity, blockchain technology, and quantum archaeology. Carl has made a career in software engineering and has worked at and co-founded several successful startups. He received a BA in Portuguese from Brigham Young University and an MS in computer science from the University of Washington. Thanks, Steve. >> So, Chris talked about re-enchanting the world, and the title of my talk is breaking the enchantment, creative work in a time of signs and wonders. But I intend, as is the honored tradition of the MTA, to harmonize these two views and show you why they are very compatible with each other. The conference essay this year invites us to gather, quote, not in triumph, but in solemn wonder, and there is much to be solemn about. As I'm preparing this talk, the United States has, and this may have changed since I last heard, has entered a ceasefire from launching air strikes in Iran. This conflict has disrupted the global trade and cost lives on all sides. Our domestic politics are more fractured than at any point in my lifetime. And just this week, Anthropic published a detailed what they call the system card for its most capable model to date, Claude Mythos, which has this name that almost seems um Prometheian in its uh connotations, right? revealing that the system had independently discovered thousands of zeroday vulnerabilities in major operating systems and in some cases broken out of its own sandbox to access the internet. Anthropic took the unprecedented step of releasing it only to a handful of critical infrastructure partners before even publishing the safety report. And that's the first time that this has occurred uh for any kind of like major AI lab. These are signs and wonders in the most literal sense. 20 years ago when this association was founded, such things were speculation. Now they are Tuesday's news cycle. The miraculous and the menacing have arrived together exactly as the scriptures warned and exactly as we anticipated. So what do we do with that? I want to suggest something that may feel counterintuitive. We should be less alarmed than we are. Not because the dangers aren't real, they are, but because the mood of alarm itself has become one of the greatest dangers we face and one of the least examined. The Book of Mormon offers a deceptively simple observation. Everyone receiveth wages of him whom he listeth to obey. We tend to read this as a statement about moral choices, serving God or serving the devil. But consider it as a description of attention. The media that we consume, the narratives we seek out, the feeds we scroll, these are forms of obedience. We submit to them and they pay us in kind. Seek out outrage and you will be paid in cortisol. Seek out doom and you'll be paid in despair. And as social sharing becomes faster and more pervasive, these viral moods grow more acute. Outrage is manufactured and weaponized, often funded by powerful interests who benefit from our paralysis. Clifford Gears, the great anthropologist, defined religion as quote, "A system of symbols which acts to establish powerful, pervasive, and longlasting moods and motivations in people by formulating conceptions of a general order of existence and clothing these conceptions with such an aura of re of factuality that the moods and motivations seem uniquely realistic." That last phrase is what I want to hone in on. Uniquely realistic. The enchantment works precisely because it doesn't feel like an enchantment. It just feels like we're seeing things clearly. The despair feels earned. The anxiety feels proportionate. The doom feels like realism. So, um, CS Lewis captured this dynamic perfectly in the silver chair. There's this witch queen of the underworld, and she doesn't argue the heroes into submission. She enchants them with warmth, with drowsiness, with a sweet reasonleness that slowly dissolves their memory of everything above. There is no sun, she tells them. There is no Narnia. There are no lions, and it almost works. The enchantment is near complete when Puddle Glum, the marsh wiggle, stamps his foot into the fire and through the pain speaks one of the great declarations of defiance in all of literature. Suppose we have only dreamed or made up all those things, trees and grass and sun and moon and stars and Alan himself. Suppose we have, then all I can say is that in that case, the madeup things seem a good deal more important than the real ones. We're just babies making up a game if you're right. But four babies playing a game can make a play world which licks your real world hollow. Puddle Glum doesn't win the argument on the witch's terms. He changes the terms entirely. He declares that even in a higher world, even if the higher world is a fiction, it is a fiction worth living by and certainly worth more than the dismal realism on offer. This scene is supposed to be puddle glum like stamping on a fire is the best I could get mid Journey to to do. Um, I think this is profoundly relevant to our moment. The enchantment of our age is not optimism, but despair. a sophisticated, well-informed despair that feels like wisdom. And breaking it requires not better arguments, but a different posture altogether. A friend recently told me he was worried that his son was possessed. The boy spent all his time consuming dark manga and had sunk into a deep depression. I suggested to him that whether we call it demonic possession or a mood almost doesn't matter. They are functionally equivalent. The ancients spoke of the quote spirit of the age or what we sometimes call the zeitgeist and they understood that such spirits are real forces whether whatever their onlogical status might be. So the question is how to break this spell. I came across a a wonderful kind of analysis that examines Gandalf's method for liberating King Theodin from Worm Tong's influence as a kind of practical exorcism. Right? So the steps are striking. First, you remove the poisonous influence. You have to silence worm tongue. Right? Second, get the patient outside under open sky. Third, have him stand at his full height. No more slouching, which is what the bewitchers want. Fourth, put a sword in his hand. Get him doing the things that remind him of his purpose. And fifth, reconcile him with his loved ones. What I love about this is how physical and active it is. Gandalf doesn't sit the down for a therapy session about his feelings. He gets him standing, moving, armed, and reconnected. The cure for enchantment is not analysis. It is action. And this brings me to a seemingly unlikely source of wisdom, the Amish. This is supposed to be kind of like an Amish village that combines the traditional with the futuristic, right? Um, so a 2014 business week investigation into Amish f Amish financial life revealed a fascinating paradox. On the one hand, the Amish are remarkably susceptible to affinity fraud. The same kind of scheme that ins snared victims of Bernie Maid off. They trusted their trustbased culture, reliance on handshakes over contracts and aversion to government intervention make them easy marks. The article documents millions of dollars lost to a Florida real estate scheme, a pigeon farming Ponzi scheme, and a worm farming empire run by a convicted sex offender. And yet, the Amish are on the whole more prosperous than their secular neighbors. The phrase Amish millionaire is no longer an oxymoron. More than half of Amish households now earn their primary income outside of agriculture in thriving businesses that reflect genuine entrepreneurial creativity. How can a community so vulnerable to fraud nonetheless outperform? The answer, I think, lies in what they don't spend their time doing. They are not doomcrolling. They're not marinating in political outrage. They are not performing moral superiority on social media. They are building things, furniture, businesses, communities. They deliberate carefully about which technologies to adopt, not rejecting them wholesale, but asking whether each one serves their families and their faith. This, I think, is an important distinction that a lot of folks have um misunderstood in the Amish. And we've probably occasionally joked about, you know, an Amish lifestyle in a sort of dismissive way, but actually their main distinction in how they use technology is just that they deliberate communally about how to use technology, but they don't reject technology wholesale. They just talk about it a lot and make sure that it's going to serve what they think collectively are the goals of their their community and culture. So um their creative productivity overwhelms their occasional losses to con artists. The Book of Mormon draws a similar contrast. Alma describes those outside the church indulging in sorceries, in idolatry or idleness, and in babblings and in envyings and strife while those within it and of course this changed at different times, right? The church wasn't always really industrious, but at least at this moment it was. And um while the the people in the church were prospering through industry and focus and this pattern is ancient and consistent, the people who build things outperform the people who merely react to things. So I want to be clear. I'm not arguing that we should ignore injustice or suffering. I am arguing that our perception of these things is often badly distorted and that the distortion itself becomes an obstacle to the creative work that actually helps those situations. So consider a decade ago serious people were alarmed about the digital divide, the gap between those with and without smartphone access in particular. The concern was real, but within a few years, smartphone penetration exceeded 80% globally, driven not by activist campaigns, but by the relentless economics of cheap manufacturing. Paul Krugman, hardly a free market cheerleader, observed that hundreds of millions of people have been lifted from abject poverty as the indirect and unintended result of the actions of soulless multinationals. Not an edifying spectacle, but an undeniable one, nonetheless. The nonpartisan American Enterprise Institute recently published research showing that the American middle class is indeed shrinking, but because families are moving upward into the upper middle class, which has tripled since 1979, while the poor and near poor have declined from 30% to 19% of the population, at least in this country, the real story is the opposite of the narrative. Once again, not denying that there are problems, but just that sometimes the results are a little out counterintuitive to what we are assuming. CS Lewis warned that of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. The politics of grievance when born of genuine compassion can become its own kind of enchantment, one that exhausts the compassionate and infantilizes those it claims to serve. Many of us felt this acutely during the peak of performative activism in recent years. The energy spent on moral display might have built something lasting. I want you guys to consider um the first verse of the hymn, Come ye saints. No toil nor labor fear, but with joy when your way. Though hard to you this journey may appear, grace shall be as your day. And then the line that cuts to the heart of it. It is better far for us to strive our useless cares from us to drive. And that's what I'm thinking about. The pioneers weren't just enduring hardship. They were grateful for it because the striving itself was the cure. The toil and labor drove out the useless cares. When you're building a hand cart, burying a wheel hub in river mud, hauling your family across a continent, you do not have the luxury of petty moralizing. You do not have time to cultivate outrage about distant abstractions. The work burns it off. And what the hymn tells us counterintuitively, even shockingly, is that this is a source of joy, not merely endurance. The hardship is the mercy. It frees us from the anxious consumptive habits of mind that come from having too much time and too little purpose. I believe the corrective our community needs and perhaps the world needs is exactly this. Less time in consumption, more time in creation. Less scrolling, more building, less commentary, more craft. The useless cares of our age are not driven out by better arguments or more information. They are driven out by work, meaningful, creative, demanding work that leaves no room for them. And this brings me to what we as an association are actually doing and what I'm asking each of you to pour your energy to. Over the past several months, we've been conducting serious marketing research, focus groups, audience analysis, content strategy to understand who our community really is, who's drawn to our mission, and what resonates with them. The findings have been clarifying and I think exciting. We've identified distinct audiences from deeply engaged enthusiasts who already share at least some of our vision to seekers on the periphery who are hungry for exactly the kind of framework we offer but haven't found us yet. And the guiding principle that emerged from this work is resonance over persuasion. So we're not trying to argue people into our worldview. We're trying to create work so compelling that it attracts those who are already searching. This is the puddle glum move. This is the Amish move. We're not fighting the witch on her terms. We're building Narnia. And so I want to show you some of what that Narnia includes. Uh now we've got um before I jump into some demonstrations, um we've got several podcasts that we'll be working on. And um we're also building something we're calling project Lazarus that will be pre preserving the memory and legacy of loved ones through genealogy, genomics, and cryionics. We're developing something we're calling the advent clock, which is a datadriven dashboard tracking humanity's proximity to superhumanity. Um so we're you know looking for actual uh funds and uh research to gather actual statist statistical data about all the different industries and various aspects of world um stats and health that would help us understand uh how how well we're we're getting there. And if you caught the um illusion, there was and still is this thing that's kind of dying with the scientists who created it, but it's called the doomsday clock. Um and uh is sort of like trying to scare humanity into like fixing things, right? And um yeah, and and so uh we're just taking kind of the opposite approach of like saying what we could be instead of what we're like careening towards. Um and then we're also creating something called the Mormon Civ mod, which is introducing millions of gamers to um themes of industry, community, and futurism through the Civilization franchise. So, um, and, um, actually, uh, actually I didn't quue it up, so I'm not going to like I'm not going to waste your time looking at, but I have I have a three-dimensional model of Brigham Y. Young walking around already. And um, and and the idea there is that uh, we're going to actually create a civilization patterned after the characteristics of Mormonism. You know, like we're probably going to give them their settler score for those who played the game. like they're going to have a little bit faster rate of production of settlers, you know, probably like easier faster production of missionaries, I would assume, you know, um stuff like that. Anyway, it's really nerdy, but it's a fun project. Um uh so let's see. Um the next thing, >> yeah, there we go. Got to add a few text to the tech tree. Um all right, so um these aren't side projects. These are acts of creative defiance. Each one a refusal to be paralyzed by by the anxieties of the moment. And each one a concrete demonstration that the best responses to signs and wonders is to build something worthy of them. So we've also completely rebuilt our web presence that I'm going to show you in a sec. But none of this works without you. Every single one of these projects needs hands. Technical, creative, organizational, theological. And the question I want to leave you with is not how afraid we should be, but what are you going to build? What is the sword Gandalf would put in your hand? What is the craft the Amish would have you master? What is the world that Puddle Glum would have you live for? The best answer answers to signs and wonders to both the miracles and the menace of this extraordinary moment is not fear. It is not hand ringing. It is the patient, stubborn, faithful work of building something worthy of the future that is already arriving. And so I'm going to show you that work now. Um, and if you have anything that you in particular feel drawn toward in those things that I talked about or anything else, like we the the retreat isn't over yet, so come corner me and let's talk about it. All right. Okay. So, I have been as the as you know from the charades game that you just played, like I've been huddled over the computer for quite for quite some time and and and that's not actually how I do it, but that's how I was told that I do it. Um, and I must also acknowledge the patience of Cammy, who has, you know, persisted with my long computer sessions as well. She's been kind enough to keep me company while I code. Um, so let's see. I'm going to pull this over so that you all can see this as well. Let me see if I can mirror my display so that um, so um, we've been working with an amazing uh, artist and designer who has helped us with a lot of these visualizations. And you'll notice that we now have um a I'm just going to change the proportion here a little bit so you can see a little better the full extent of this. Um we now have a second theme to our um our website and we the two are called western and alpine. So we have this great one that was done earlier. It's a little drier, more of a Utah feel to it. We've got um now this alpine landscape and these scenes now actually are 24-hour scenes. So if you uh visit this at different times of the day, you will be uh able to witness something uh a little different just to kind of add some interest and visual appeal. And um there's even this little Easter egg that if you pass an hour parameter, you can see what it would look like at a given time of day. So, this is like 2:00 a.m., I guess. Um, we could do 20. This is like dusk, you know. Um, I like this one. This is pretty cool. It's about 900 p.m. Um, and um, one thing that in the process of doing this, one of the things I wanted to achieve that is not currently possible with our website is that I wanted to make it so that non-technical stakeholders and helpers could log in and work on things and update them. And so I have for a while been using a content management system to do that. And McKay and I have been working together on this quite a bit. And um it was helpful uh it it helped us to move forward and understand how to structure a a complex site like this. Um but over time we started uh experiencing these delays that were just incurred because of the complexity of what we had come up with. We had this separate backend that where someone would log into to update all the content and adjust it. And there were a lot of like exposed um exposed gears and knobs and stuff that even for even despite it being like technically something that a non-technical person could use, it was kind of complicated. And um and on top of that, when we wanted to test something as developers and make sure it was working, we had to like deploy a backend and a front end and a third system that was using in that was used to log people in. And just getting that whole system up and running and functional could sometimes take like five minutes or more. And as we started working more and more with AI agents to build this system, we started experiencing these delays where just getting it to launch and getting it to a point where the agent could start adding and building stuff was taking quite a while. And if you are building features with agents, as we've learned over the past few months, as this field has been kind of revolutionized by it, um you're often wanting to just launch like several agents at the same time, do something quick, and then close it down and then do something else. And so each if each one of those operations takes several minutes, that started to really slow us down. And I never would have thought of doing this before, but I was like, what if we just coded our own content management system? What if we just built it from scratch, right? and um like a month later now and we have a full content management system that's all kind of tailored to our needs and a lot of those uh janky like exposed gears and stuff are no longer there. So it was it ended up being quite a bit more um easy to use as well. And that's kind of what I'm going to show you. So, anyone who wants to contribute and and um help us out with this can now um get access and become an admin or a content um curator and start to contribute here. Uh so for someone who's logged in with the right privileges, they can then they can see lots of stats about um you know what's in the system. Uh we I would also add that with this new system, we've now um consolidated all of the content that existed on any of our prior websites or on some of those um just oneoff curations that somebody like Lincoln did where he collected lots of quotes and just kind of threw them into some place or somebody wrote something somewhere on some blog. Um, a lot of that stuff we've just had all over the place kind of in random places. And we've always wanted a better way to present it to the public and share it. And part of the reason why consolidating is so important is that we want this to start to be a source of dissemination for lots of information that we as a as a an association feel that we've curated and want to share. Um, we think of these as like the gems of the restoration. And a part of our mission is to like remind our co-paritioners of these like really important um just beautiful principles that even though they're just right there for us to read um they sometimes don't get sufficient airtime in Sunday school let us say. So um so we've collected all this information and um so everyone who's who we've ever had a quote from or has ever spoken at one of our conferences um they now have an entry here and um we can essentially like have a a biography of this person, some tags associated with the work that they did, some important things to know about them And we even have this system where we can share this content online in a way that um uh could just looks really attractive and is makes it nicer for for us to put on social media somewhere. So as you can see like we have this this share option. So, if you were to post the link to this author on Facebook or on Twitter or somewhere else, um you would you'd have this kind of great visualization of the website background with their um their portrait done in a kind of cool um uh like pen and ink. Um it's called a headcut style. And you have this like choice of three different um sort of themes to use when you share. Um, and uh, I should also point out, this is something I sometimes describe, like some people may have wondered um, as I was designing the theme, what I was trying to go for in this theme, and I'm really proud of it and kind of like like to to share this. So, um, the background and the little subtle animations and stuff are there not to distract the reader, but just to kind of like paint a picture of some brilliant future that humanity might have um to give us this like awe inspiring glimpse of of uh our capacities. And um then as I was doing this, I was like, okay, well, I've got this beautiful background. So, I don't want to cover it all up with text. Like, I don't want to make it so that all this effort that was spent on making the background look nice is like mostly hidden by the foreground. So, what I did instead was um I created a kind of uh blurred backdrop against which all the text would appear. And I also didn't want the foreground illustrations to um to kind of like cover things up either. So you'll notice that these illustrations actually have a transparent background to them. So um what that means is like as that little air taxi is going through Lorenzo Snow's head um you can see it behind his head, right? Um and uh and what it's kind of a fun story in and of itself here. Um how we got there. Um so this style actually is um comes from the Wall Street Journal. And uh it's called a head cut style. And um part of why we adopted this style was that it allows uh it allows us to then strip out all the white pixels and make them transparent and um still make a very discernable and um interesting illustration uh but also like not olude the background. And another kind of interesting side bonus I feel of this particular style is it's kind of vintage looking. It's sort of got a a retro uh vibe to it. And what I think it does, this might be more subtle than most of the visitors are thinking, but like I'm thinking through the the grand vision of this, is that it really can provoke a sense of deep time in the visitor. Because what we're doing is we're like creating an anacronism of the vintage, you know, portraits juxtaposed with this beautiful, colorful, playful background that's kind of futuristic. And so you're like inspired, in my opinion, to kind of like snap out of your day-to-day concerns and get into more of a sense of the grand arc of history and where we've been and where we're headed. So, there is like a a there is a rhyme or a reason to this rhyme, whatever you call it. Um, and if someone likes one of these quotes, they can they can basically uh click on it and share it. Um, uh, we'll there's there's more features still being being built. But in the process of doing this, we also expanded and made our um, primmers. These are are sort of introductory texts a little bit more um easy easy to understand and uh and added added some information there. Um we also recently have added um so we've got yeah I think this is worth highlighting here as well. Um, our prior kind of mission tagline said um something along the lines of the Mormon Transhumanist Association um promotes abundant flourishing through the compassionate use of science and technology, which is nice, but it doesn't necessarily convey some sort of specific uh target audience, nor does it convey a a more of a concrete notion of like what um what is being built and why and um more uh more specific and actionable I think and so with this new tagline what I'm trying to do uh is that I'm trying to highlight that we're working to we're targeting a specific uh demographic which is the rising generation obviously we um welcome everyone but we would like to especially inspire a new generation of pioneers. And the part of why I use that imagery of the pioneer, it's also the title of our podcast is that um this is one of our great legacies as Latter Day Saints. Like we often still refer to the pioneers. We have pioneer day. We are regularly talking about them in our curriculum and um ju justly proud of their achievements. But at times it can turn into if it's not if we're not careful this like um sort of polishing the sephilers of the dead uh prophets instead of focusing on where the current frontiers are and what the current challenges of our generation are and characterizing the activities of today that people today who are blazing new trails are engaged in. And so that's what I wanted to do. And I wanted to also make it clear, more clear than our last tagline, how important faith and um uh our sort of religious zeal is to this whole enterprise. So um being able to bring to these frontiers the full vibrance of their faith is kind of what we're trying to inspire people to do. And um so that that's some of what that what motivated that u wording. We have a frequently asked questions section that I encourage you guys to take a look at. By the way, all of this is about to go live. I would say we're we're awfully close, definitely by the end of the month, but uh probably sooner than that. Um but it's already online. You can just go to next.transfigurism.org. So just substitute the current www for next and you're there. Um, the only reason I haven't like flipped the switch on the old one is that there might have been a few little functionalities that people are still using that until we're fully launched. I I wanted to leave there, but that's about to change. Um, and I want to show uh I think at least one more little glimpse of uh some of the features. I I would would also add that we have um our chapters, our regions, and our um meetups now all on this. And Steve, I think, and McKay will both be grateful that we now have um text and WhatsApp notifications for all upcoming events, and we can automate those reminders and stuff like that. So, there's no need for uh Steve to Natalie be texting all of his friends like he did. So, well, thank you, Steve. wherever you are. Um uh and uh let me let me show you I think one of these things that I was kind of in the middle of before before I close here. Um if I go to just the author's page one more time. Let's suppose that we have a quote from some um important person who has something to say about transhumanism. Right? So, I'm going to put in Yuvall Harrari. Isn't that how you spell his name? I'm just trying to remember. >> H A R. >> H A R A R I. Right. All right. So, I haven't done this before. So, we're going to see together if the system works well or not. All right. But, um I have littered the UI with what I call sparkle buttons. And that's these little sparkle icons, right? And these are the buttons that trigger some kind of AI um assistance, right? So, for the source portrait, I'm just going to click this and we're going to see like um it's going to go out to the web and look for potential images um of Yuval Herrari if it's working correctly. H that didn't work. Um, yeah, for some reason. Anyway, uh, sorry about that. Let's just do this the way it would have happened, but if we go to, um, I just showed this to somebody yesterday and it was working fine. So, I don't know exactly what went on there, but it would essentially pick an image and you'd be able to say, "Oh, that's the one I want." Right? So, I'm just going to pretend like, well, actually, that's probably not the best one for him. What's a good one? Um, this this looks fine, I guess. So, we'll we'll go save image as you all just so I can read it later. Um, but imagine that it popped up an actual thing that you could select, right? And we'll go here and put that in. select it and then we'll save that change so far. And we're going to click on generated portrait. So this um sparkle button here will actually go and it will generate that um style that we've been using on the rest of our website. So, it goes out, it makes use of some of the latest uh nano banana image models that are really like good at capturing people's likenesses. Um, and while that's going on, we will also have it, it's going to send a prompt to Claude to kind of compile some information about this person based on the criteria we are most interested in as Mormon transhumanists and generate a bio for um for this individual. Um, so we'll give that a second. And it also can suggest for us some Yeah. So, okay. So, we have the generated portrait. We have the um and this is a little bit simplified because of the monitor that I'm on right now, but we have what I think will be quite a good bio, especially one that ties in their transhumanist themes. Um as well as some of their religious motivations, if any, that they have. Um, and then we have tags that we've already identified of particular uh topics that are of interest to the association um that apply to this person's biography and anything else that we find about them. And then some other things that would make this useful for a search engine that's looking things up um or to someone that wants to share this on social media. And uh that essentially, as you can see, makes the job of the content curator a lot easier. Now, we we still want them to review this content and make sure it looks good and it it um characterizes our values accurately, but it it really enables us to accomplish a lot more with the resources that we have. Um, and you can also see that, you know, when you share this on social media, you now get this like beautiful uh social sharing uh preview that will go out to Facebook or wherever you want to share it. And what we're also planning on doing here is having a daily um collection of noteworthy quotations, noteworthy um concepts to share. And um essentially the curator will look at that and pick from among the best and share those as inspiring quotes that we could that could be shared with our friends or whoever. Um and I'll I want to show you one other thing there that I think is kind of fun. Um so if I go to Yeah, this is fine. Let's do this one. Um, so when you're sharing a quote, it's actually especially good at um fitting everything into the space that's allotted depending on the length of the text. So, it's using some really um advanced typography placement tools to kind of um pick a font size that makes it so that it can be easily read when you share it, but it the whole thing fits there. Um and it, you know, puts it on the same kind of background and stuff. And so anyhow, um, as we use and collect and curate a lot of these quotes, we also have a huge library of ebooks that we've collected of things that we that are especially relevant to our interests. And if there are any other books you would like to add to that collection, let us know and we can do that. But we have agents that are essentially processing these works and sifting out noteworthy quotations as well that we might want to add to our collection. So, we're doing everything we can to sort of automate that process of collection and dissemination of inspiring ideas. Um, I want to show one final thing. I know it's been everyone's kind of tired, but um I'm gonna show you um I think this would be better for me to show you what's on my current machine because I'm not sure this final image is up live yet. So, I'm going to show you the new MTA store, right? Um, some of you heard yesterday when I was saying that um, there are a lot of content producers online that make like at least half of their revenue not from YouTube, even though they have millions of subscribers on YouTube, but from selling merch that people want to collect of their um, of of the the materials that they're creating and sharing. And um we have this really fun new campaign that is I'm calling it the MTA propaganda uh campaign. And um so you can see one of these first pieces up here and in the broken frame over there. Um, and once again, like when I said we are trying to inspire a new generation of pioneers to explore today's frontiers, I'm being quite literal about that, like in the sense that um I'm using uh our pioneer iconography in in these messages. Um, and we have, you know, a a um Mormon colony or a Mormon uh starship landing on of settlers landing on a new world. Notice I didn't call it an alien world. I call it a new world, right? Um, and that like ties into some of the the phrasing that we read in our own uh lit liturgy and stuff. And we have uh another one that is um that invites us to come to Zion in a an O'Neal cylinder or space habitat. I think I'm going to call this holy habitat or something like that. Um in thy holy habitations did my spirit once reside. We're taking that just a little bit more literally. Um no, but uh holy space habitat, right? Um, and there's some fun other um things that we have in mind that are still um being worked on, but if I show you some of those very last ones, I think this will be fun to see. Um, so these are the sketches um that were done before the final, right? Um, so this is like a an icy outpost on like one of the moons of Jupiter and the slogan is support the perpetual exploration fund. Um, this one is a generational starship heading towards a beautiful glowing planet. And the headline is collab beckons. Um, maybe there's a few other cool lines we could come up with. This one is your tithing built this station. >> Um, this one you just saw, come to Zion. There's another alternative tagline that is join Desireette Colony. Um, this one is join the relief society terraform core. Um, and there are actual women there in the foreground. I just wanted to call your attention to that. Um, they're like, >> well, anyhow, you know what I mean. Uh, I imagine that they're like growing new biomes that will enable like delicious recipes. >> Um, this was we don't know exactly what this um this is supposed to be like a a city library. Like the whole city is a library. And if you can come up with any cool slogans for that that would be like uh also Mormon uh let me know. I'm I'm sure there are >> single apartments. >> Keep working on it. I'm not sure. I'm not sure it's there yet, but okay. Um, this one is like an Atlantis kind of thing. So, this would be another yet another vintage tourism uh invitation, but I'm not sure what uh what to call it yet. And uh this is like something about how we're living in the skies. Um, and this is an underwater um village. So, these are some of the uh the propaganda posters that are still coming out. Um, and I'm sure I could go on and on and on, but you guys are done and everybody's tired. And I want to thank the organizers for putting on such a fun um event, actually giving people time to hang out with each other. giving people time to hang out with each other and like catch up was really really nice. So, thanks again and please um be creative. Think about ways that you can join in and help because we need it so much. Thank you.