100. Mormons in the Metaverse — A Conversation with Carl Youngblood

For this week's episode, we brought on Carl Youngblood for a truly enlightening conversation we’ve been wanting to have for a long time. 

Carl has spent most of his life helping to build and operate technology companies and has done a lot of deep thinking and writing about how technology is shaping our reality and our future—including how it will affect what it means to be human. Digital technology companies, including behemoths like Facebook, are staking their futures on pushing the boundaries of virtual reality and artificial intelligence. Their project is to create a new reality for human beings—what has come to be called the "metaverse."

We brought Carl on to talk about what all this means. What are the implications for our families and institutions? What are the implications for our faith? How might the theology of the Restored Gospel inform how we move into this new reality? 

And what about technologies that may offer the possibility to dramatically extend our lifespans? What does a faith that honors the centrality of God’s creation and that honors death as an essential part of a foreordained plan have to say? 

These are huge and sobering questions, but they’re also exciting to explore. Bill Turnbull, one of the founders of Faith Matters, also joined us for this conversation.

Carl is a co-founder of the Mormon Transhumanist Association, an organization founded to consider the intersection between our faith and the frontiers of technology. The MTA is hosting a conference in Provo this spring, on Saturday, March 19, at which nationally-recognized experts on things like blockchain, crypto and Web 3 will address the implications of these technologies for our society and, by extension, for our faith. Registration info for this conference can be at the end of the episode. Faith Matters has no affiliation with MTA and offers no opinion on their approach, but we acknowledge their efforts in addressing some of the biggest questions of our day.