Pioneers

We live in an age of peak cringe. People are drowning in cynicism, told daily that civilization is doomed. But something is stirring. A new generation is rediscovering what William James called “the strenuous mood”: the deep human need to struggle for something greater than comfort and safety. In this first episode of Pioneers, host Carl Youngblood, President of the Mormon Transhumanist Association, lays out why the show exists. Drawing on Orwell, William James, Jason Crawford, and Joseph Smith, he argues that the human hunger for meaning and struggle doesn’t go away when we refuse to feed it. It just finds worse food. The question isn’t whether we’ll embrace the strenuous mood, but what we’ll do with it. The frontier never closed. It expanded: beyond Earth into the cosmos, beyond biology into transformation, beyond death into resurrection. Pioneers will sit down with the scientists, engineers, philosophers, and theologians exploring the frontiers of what humanity can become, and ask not just what they’re building, but why.

What would Joseph Smith make of CRISPR? Of ChatGPT? Of the suggestion that the universe might be a simulation? It sounds like a parlor game, until you put the question to the historian who has spent more of his life with Joseph Smith than almost anyone alive. Richard Bushman is 95. He is Professor Emeritus of History at Columbia, a Bancroft Prize winner, and the author of Rough Stone Rolling, the landmark biography of Joseph Smith. For sixty years he has carried the faith into the academy and the academy’s standards of inquiry back into the faith, and he has earned the trust of both. Lincoln Cannon, co-founder of the Mormon Transhumanist Association, sat down with him to play the game in earnest: evolution, the Big Bang, genetic engineering, artificial intelligence, worlds without end. Then something unexpected happened. The historian started asking the questions. About the mystery of mathematics. About quantum observation. About what a scientist does with everything he learned once he gets to heaven. About whether the Association has ever been warned it was going too far. Along the way, Bushman sums up the gospel in a single word, explains why “what works is true,” and gives his answer on whether Joseph Smith would embrace technology as a means of resurrection.