Videos

James Wigginton argues that Web3 and decentralized technologies can learn crucial lessons from ancestral wisdom, particularly from cooperatives and consensus-building practices. Drawing on David Graeber and David Wengrow’s The Dawn of Everything , he suggests that humans have always experimented with diverse social structures, and today’s DAOs need not reinvent governance from scratch. Wigginton highlights cooperatives—from REI to Blue Diamond Almonds—as proven models for democratic ownership that align naturally with blockchain ideals, while also pointing to Buddhist Sanghas and Quaker meetings as examples of consensus decision-making that produces more stable outcomes than majority-rule voting.

Jon Ogden proposes that religion’s future resembles an API—a plug-and-play system where individuals maintain their cultural and religious context while integrating wisdom from other traditions. Citing the Dalai Lama’s advice to learn from Buddhism while remaining Christian or Jewish, Ogden argues this syncretism is not new—from ancient Egyptian-Greco-Roman religious blending to LDS General Conference speakers quoting C.S. Lewis and Shakespeare. In an increasingly connected world where locality no longer limits exposure to ideas, seeking truth wherever it surfaces becomes both natural and necessary. The challenge lies in maintaining community and particularity while developing a global perspective on wisdom traditions.

Jonathan Jardine, drawing on Clay Christensen’s strategic frameworks, examines how decentralization of church practice—not doctrine—can help build Zion. He traces LDS innovations like seminaries, the Primary, and the welfare program back to emergent strategies that bubbled up from local leaders solving real problems, later adopted and standardized by general authorities. Jardine contrasts this with recent decades’ shift toward deliberate, centrally planned initiatives, arguing that the church needs both approaches and should empower members to exercise their “spiritual muscles” through local innovation.

Joseph West, a psychotherapist specializing in psychedelic integration and assisted therapies, argues that psychedelic medicine offers Latter-day Saints a safe and reliable means of accessing deeply revelatory states of consciousness. Drawing on both neuroscience research and Mormon theology, he explains how substances like psilocybin produce “oceanic boundlessness”—a dissolution of ego boundaries associated with mystical experiences—which he connects to the scriptural concept of revelation as a non-ordinary state enabling creative vision toward atonement. West frames psychedelics as sacred technology that can help Mormons pursue the personal revelation their faith mandates.

Kurtis Lockhart of the Charter Cities Institute presents charter cities as an institutional innovation for the urban age, addressing E. O. Wilson’s observation that humanity possesses “Paleolithic emotions, medieval institutions, and godlike technology.” Using Shenzhen’s transformation from fishing villages to a metropolis of twenty million as a model, he argues that new cities with new rules—combining liberalized commercial law with decentralized governance—can accelerate adaptation to rapid urbanization. Lockhart invokes Florence’s dome as an example of bold, multi-generational planning that faith in human ingenuity can achieve.

Crypto journalist Laura Shin explains how Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (DAOs) function as “little democracies everywhere,” using tokens to coordinate collective ownership, transparent governance, and rapid collective action. Drawing examples from Constitution DAO, Friends with Benefits, and Gitcoin, she illustrates how these blockchain-based communities can empower individuals while serving shared values. Shin acknowledges the challenges—venture capital influence, whale dominance in voting, and governance gaps—but argues that DAOs represent a new model for organizing human cooperation that naturally attracts diverse participants, including a surprising number of women-led groups.

Lincoln Cannon presents the theological and philosophical case for decentralizing power, grounded in Mormon conceptions of God as an embodied person, a community, and a cosmos in which “we live and move and have our being.” Drawing on artificial intelligence philosophy—including the semi-orthogonality hypothesis and game-theoretic insights about resource competition—he argues that approximate equality of power incentivizes cooperation while disparities enable coercion. Cannon contrasts two biblical archetypes: a God who centralizes power (the son of perdition) versus Christ, who shares power and “raises us together in the glory of God.”

Dr. Matthew Memmott presents molten salt reactor technology as the future of distributed, clean energy. He explains how nuclear power—despite its cultural baggage from weapons and accidents—provides unparalleled energy density and reliability, noting that a single uranium pellet equals 1,800 pounds of coal. Memmott champions thorium-based molten salt reactors, a proven 1960s technology that cannot melt down, produces no weapons-grade material, and generates valuable medical isotopes like molybdenum-99. His vision: truck-sized reactors serving 1,000 homes each, enabling truly decentralized power infrastructure to support the distributed systems and blockchain technologies discussed at the conference.

Dr. Neal Davis draws an extended analogy between biological immune systems and the evolving defenses of the internet against predatory actors. He traces the history from the early high-trust ARPANET era through the zero-trust environment of the modern Web, arguing that decentralized technologies—blockchains, DAOs, zero-knowledge proofs, and platforms like Urbit—represent an emergent immune system for human sociality. Davis proposes that cryptographic tools can create “village green” communities of stable, high-trust havens, enabling human flourishing amid the broader adversarial digital landscape.

Sarah Wiley presents Genesis Block, a Utah-based startup building a consumer bank powered by Web3 technology. She explains how the company aims to unlock the benefits of decentralized finance—censorship resistance, transparency, and trustless transactions—while making them accessible through a familiar banking interface. Genesis Block offers high-yield savings accounts powered by DeFi, FDIC-insured deposits, an integrated crypto wallet, and a Visa debit card with crypto rewards, using stablecoins to bridge traditional and decentralized finance. Wiley emphasizes the company’s mission to “do good,” donating 10% of revenue to community-chosen causes and pursuing B Corp certification.