We could think of no one better to Keynote this conference than Terrell Givens who is one of our most distinguished students of Mormon culture and Perhaps the preeminent Explicator of Mormonism's relationship to the culture of this country and of the world He's published an astonishing number of books in his young career with still More books in the offing. I First came across his work ten years ago Viper on the hearth, which is a study of the place of Mormonism in American culture and thinking I think most Latter-day Saints Know him from his book by the hand of Mormon Which is a book about how the Book of Mormon has been received and understood by the various audiences that have read it and One of the most stimulating and innovating books in our corpus of Mormon studies People of paradox which suggests a new way of looking at Mormon thought as Not a set of principles, but a set of paradoxes which define the tensions of our lives If you wait six months You will be able to buy his study of pre-existence in Western culture. I don't mean Western American culture I mean Western culture From the Greeks right down to the present There are others out and on the way that I won't mention here But this output is truly inspirational in my opinion This the number of books in itself is is Inspiring but what impresses me is the quality of Terrell Givens work. He has a native eloquence and a command of world literature that makes his His speeches and his writings really rhetorical masterpieces On top of that, however, he has an originality of insight That Engages your mind like few of our writers today Dialogic revelation the idea that conversations with God go both ways has become a fixture of Mormon thinking about revelation And it's the same with thinking of our doctrines a series of paradoxes And I think his forthcoming book on the book of Mormon for Oxford University Press You will find studded with fascinating insights about a text that is familiar to Mormons, but he makes unfamiliar and Re-engages us to it The organizers thought that Terrell was the ideal keynote speaker Because he has always sensed the affinities Scientific and entering engineering at speculation and Mormon cosmology. I think you will get some idea of Where he is headed tonight from the title of his address No small and cramped Eternities, so please welcome Terrell Givens Thank you very much for that introduction. Can I have a copy of that for my mother? She she doesn't know what it is. I'm doing in a book Perhaps ironically titled orthodoxy The great Christian Apologist G.K. Chesterton resists the Diminishment of man consequent upon a thoroughly Darwinized universe He writes No philosopher denies that a mystery still attaches to the two great transitions The origin of the universe itself and the origin of the principle of life itself Most philosophers have the enlightenment to add that a third mystery attaches to the origin of man himself in other words a Third bridge was built across a third abyss of the unthinkable when there came into the world what we call reason and what we call will Man is not merely an evolution, but rather a revolution It is the simple truth. He continues that man differs from the brutes in kind and not in degree and the proof of it is here That it sounds like a truism to say that the most primitive man drew a picture of a monkey and It sounds like a joke to say the most intelligent monkey drew a picture of a man Something of division and disproportion has appeared and it is unique Art is the signature of man This creature was truly different from all other creatures because he was a creator as well as a creature. I Want to explore the implications of this last phrase For in defining man as Homo erector rather than Homo sapiens We may find a potent link between what this conference calls Mormon thought and engineering vision When Church father origin wrote one of the earliest treatises on Christian belief in the early third century He noted that some articles of faith were delivered quote with the utmost clear clearness on certain points Which they believed to be necessary to everyone Ever since theology has largely been concerned with articulating and elaborating those foundational tenets of religious faith Such tenets consist of quote the character and attributes of God The doctrines we are to believe and the duties we are to practice according to the 1828 Webster a more recent authority Surveying the historical scope of theology Describes its purview as the whole complex of the divine dispensation From the fall of Adam to the redemption through Christ The limitations of theology of theology are implicit in that very formulation fall through redemption But are made even more explicit in the greatest Christian epic in the West John Milton's paradise lost Milton pushed the boundaries of God's science further than most at least he claimed he did When he determined to soar above the Aeonian Mount To pursue things unattempted yet in prose or rhyme Yet even in his audacious claim to justify the ways of God to men He knew when to recognize the limits of appropriate inquiry God sends the angel Raphael to impart further light and knowledge to Adam But ends by counseling the over curious human with these words Solicit not thy thoughts with matters hid heaven is for thee too high to know what passes there Be lowly wise Think only what concerns thee and thy being dream not of other worlds What creatures there live and what state condition or degree be content with what thus far hath been revealed The questions that Christian theology has by and large resisted the urge to adjudicate our legion What of the time before creation? What was God doing then? Preparing hell for such as would ask such impudent questions Augustine was tempted to respond What of God's other dominions Another mystery it falls not to theology to explain Why is there man at all? For Milton the boldest exponent of theodicy before parley pratt It was to deprive satan of bragging rights and having suborned a third of heaven's angels The scriptures however are silent What of human destiny in the worlds beyond what exactly is man being saved for? Dante thought a state of eternal rapture is contemplation and few have proffered more specifics than that post redemption theology seems an oxymoron So traditional theology in other words confines itself to defining the terms and conditions of a very limited concept of salvation Of a soul of unknown beginnings from an evil of unknown origin To prepare for a future of unknown nature all in accordance with the inscrutable will of a god who is beyond human comprehending What it does elaborate are the articles of faith demanding assent and the sacraments necessary to comply with in the course of human life And the focus is decidedly emphatically on the time frame and the personal transformations that lead Quote from the fall of adam to the redemption through christ Against this conservative christian background the major work of parley p pratt stands in sharp relief No Mormon thinker pratt included would exceed joseph smith's own audacity as a christian iconoclast Speculating on heavenly councils gods that were once human humans that could attain to godhood These and other doctrines blasted asunder the creedal conceptions of god and man alike But it felt a pratt to assemble these ideas for the first time into something like a systematic form In some cases apparently giving public expression to them even before joseph smith Here is perhaps the prime instance of pratt playing paul To joseph's jesus If joseph smith was the instigator of Mormonism's essential beliefs Parley pratt organized them elaborated them and defended them in a manner that gave them the enduring life And the complexion they had in the early church Pratt was in this sense the first theologian of Mormonism Precedents for parley pratt's atypically boundless theologizing were recent The writer thomas dick defended his philosophy of a future state as consistent with If not affirmed by holy writ And took his fellow theologians to task for their reticence in plumbing the nature of heavenly felicity And the employments of the future world Dick lamented the vague and indefinite manner in which such subjects have been hitherto treated And the want of those expansive views of the divine operations Which the professors of christianity should endeavor to attain Like pratt dick was consumed by the spectacle of a scientific juggernaut That was already opening worlds in the early 19th century Both immense and minute To human knowledge and which would leave in its wake any theology To timid to follow Consider the boundless extent of the starry firmament dick-rapsidized The scenes of grandeur it displays the new luminaries Which in the course of ages appear to be gradually augmenting its splendor And the countless myriads of exalted intelligences which doubtless people its expansive regions In regard to the latter He felt ennobled rather than diminished by the titanic scope of creation involved And if the multiplicity of objects in one world overwhelms our powers of conception and computation he wrote How much more the number and variety of beings and operations connected with the economy of millions of worlds At a bare minimum he concluded Men and angels in a future state would continue their intellectual progress in the realms of mathematics and astronomy As a simple precondition for understanding the glory and majesty of the heavens they were to inherit But why stop with those two disciplines? He argued and he goes on to enumerate natural philosophy Anatomy and physiology history and other subjects as some of those branches of science Which will be recognized and studied by the righteous in a future state This was heady doctrine and it came Only a decade or two before pratt's own work in the field of Mormon theology Pratt would reaffirm and expand upon these ideas in at least two regards First he wrote on the basis of what he believed was authoritative revelation rather than simple inference And he wedded his system to a young but flourishing institution Which assured its dissemination and survival The real key to understanding the first great synthetic work of Mormonism Consummated in pratt's science to the key of theology Is to be found in the implications that he draws from one of Mormonism's most radical claims Jesus Christ and the father are in possession of not merely an organized spirit But also a glorious immortal body of flesh and bones Such extreme anthropomorphizing is startling in and of itself But the inference that follows is what shatters the boundaries of traditional theologizing If the father and son have physical tabernacles he reasons Then they are subject to the laws that govern of necessity Even the most refined order of physical existence Because all physical element however embodied quickened or refined Is subject to the same general laws necessary to all existence What this means is that by naturalizing deity The entire universe of god and man heaven and hell Body and spirit the eternal and the mundane is collapsed into one sphere The paradigm to which this stands in opposition is neatly formulated by pratt's contemporary The famous amateur theologian samuel taylor colleridge who stated the matter simply The very ground of all miracle he insisted is the heterogeneity of spirit and matter On that distinction stands the viability of miracles the sacred and god's immunity To the babel tower of scientific materialism and the hubris of philosophical materialism Pratt does not only declare the distinction erased and the sphere is conflated into one But insists that that sphere is governed by laws fully conformable to and accessible by human reason In the aftermath of sir isaac newton's momentous decipherment of the laws of the universe The french scientist pierre simon de laplace famously told napoleon in his philosophical euphoria That he no longer had need of god to make sense of creation Secular science could henceforth exile god from his universe In pratt's theological euphoria God was reinscribed in this universe But as a part of it rather than outside it For this reason it would be more accurate to say that for pratt science encompassed theology Rather than simply coexisted harmoniously with it That is the important sense in which we must understand pratt's title key to the science of theology In an earlier work dating to 1838 Pratt had already signaled his intention to reinterpret all theology within the construct of a kind of scientific materialism Matter and spirit are the two great principles of all existence. He had written Both constitute the eternal and material constituents of the universe But the resulting interaction between the physical and the spiritual the earthly and the divine Could be jarring As the physical universe was directly affected by the fall of man So must christ's atonement be seen as entailing the salvation and durability of the physical world The renovation and regeneration of matter And the restoration of the elements to a state of eternal and unchangeable purity This is more than simply innovation or heterodox speculation This represents perhaps the most significant reconceptualizing of religious cosmology and christian history I'm reminded in this regard of a much circulated essay essay by the iconoclastic theorist to computer science Edgar Deekstra He wrote The usual way in which we plan today for tomorrow is in yesterday's vocabulary We do so because we try to get away with the concepts that we are familiar with And that have acquired their meaning in our past experience It is the most common way of trying to cope with novelty by means of metaphors and analogies We try to link the new to the old the novel to the familiar In the case of a sharp discontinuity however the method breaks down Though we try to glorify it with a name common sense our past experience is no longer relevant One must consider one's own past the experience is collected the habits formed As an unfortunate accident of history and one has to approach the radical novelty with a blank mind Consciously refusing to try to link it with the familiar Because the familiar is hopelessly inadequate Coming to grips with a radical novelty Amounts to creating and learning a new foreign language that cannot be translated into one's mother tongue This applies perfectly to Mormonism with this ironic qualifier Mormonism's most striking discontinuity with Christian theology Is in the radical continuity it establishes between the material and the eternal The transcendent even the supernatural The result is a worldview that is shockingly and yet refreshingly blithe In its indifference to its own oddness When the elements melt with fervent heat said Brigham young The Lord Almighty will send forth his angels who are well instructed in chemistry And they will separate the elements and make new combinations thereof Orson pratt would elaborate this view a few years later The study of science is a study of something eternal if we study astronomy We study the works of God if we study chemistry geology optics or any other branch of science Every new truth we come to the understanding of is eternal It is a part of the great system of universal truth It is truth that exists throughout universal nature And God is the dispenser of all truth scientific religious and political Man and God Building bridges and creating worlds Practicing chemistry and endowing the earth with its celestial glory the mundane and the miraculous are but different degrees On an eternal scale of knowledge acquisition The most audacious Mormon principles followed inescapably from this monastic cosmology And they pertain to man's relationship to the deity One of the most surprising aspects to my mind of Mormon culture Was the ease with which early members most from evangelical backgrounds reared in strict Methodist and Reformed Baptist traditions Segue into a faith that demolished some of Christendom's most sacred precepts An immortal man perfected in his attributes in all the fullness of celestial glory is called a God Wrote Pratt without apology and then without blinking It may then consistently be said that there are in a subordinate sense a plurality of gods This is in 1838 six years before king followed Anglo-Saxon Protestantism had shown since England's toleration act of 1689 A remarkable effort to countenance descent and heterodoxy and Christian faith As long as they fell within a few non-negotiable parameters Notably religious freedom was decreed in the 1689 act for almost all dissenters from orthodoxy Providing they accepted the creedal definition of the trinity And here is Pratt unabashedly professing Mormonism to be in an essential regard polytheistic Certainly a case could be made and has been made that Latter-day Saints are Monotheistic in the only way that matters they worship God the father in the name of Christ The point is Pratt did not stoop to make that claim Because he was not interested in passing muster with the guardians of Christian orthodoxy It would have sounded too apologetic And if there is one thing that Pratt never condescended to it was apologies for Mormon heterodoxy The fullest expression of this idea of course would come in Joseph Smith's famous discourse shortly before his death King Follett presents us with two catastrophes for conventional theology, which may not be a bad thing The first is the humanizing and temporalizing of God I know thoughtful and faithful Mormons who rejoice that King Follett was never canonized for that reason It does have one virtue however as A sermon and perhaps this is one that we will have the boldness some day to plum In that it lends itself to the world's best hope for a naturalistic theology Stripped of all invocations of transcendent entities and transcendent eternities Such a universe should be at least potentially appealing to some of the hardcore materialists Currently working the anti god and anti religion circuit One of Mormonism's greatest strengths surely unexplored and untapped until now Is its potential to offer an alternative to the materialist supernaturalist impasse That stymies productive discourse in this age of increasing polarization and rhetoric that reduces to character proponents of each cosmology I would point out that bridge that positions that bridge this gap have been taken at times By some of the more unconventional of the philosophically minded The Cambridge philosopher John McTaggart, for example Considered himself an atheist insofar as he found nothing intellectually compelling about the god of religions east or west The human soul however, he found too powerful a paradigm to reject In fact, he argues there are better grounds for skepticism about the reality of matter Than to doubt the reality of spirit And incidentally, he found its pre-mortal existence vastly more compelling to believe than its purported immortality, but that's another talk William James also famously proposed a religious paradigm that avoided the materialist supernaturalist alternatives Scientific naturalism is inadequate. He concludes because there are resources in us That naturalism with its literal and legal virtues never wrecks of Possibilities that take our breath away Of another kind of happiness and power And these seem to show a wider world than either physics or philistines can imagine on the other hand he argues The problems with positing a god equivalent to the absolute Are utterly untenable Or make belief in god absolutely untenable Among other problems satisfying as the concept of the absolute is He says it satisfies only intellectual rationality. It does not successfully address what he labels aesthetic or moral rationality At any rate the only solution he finds would be a god who is in some sense finite That is he is in the universe and subject to its laws He believes in accordance with biblical theism, but at variance with creedal christianity That it would be hard to conceive of anything more different from the absolute Than the god of say david or of isiah That god he writes is an essentially finite being in the cosmos not with the cosmos in him But then he says this If it should prove probable that the absolute does not exist It will not follow in the slightest degree That a god like that of david isiah or jesus may not exist Or may not be the most important existence In the universe As a third example, I would point to the avowed atheist philosopher thomas nagel Who found both theism and scientific physicalism with its darwinian evolution wholly inadequate to the task of giving a general account of the human self I am denying he writes That what rationality is can be understood through the theory of natural selection To the question of just what this selfhood is he confesses. I don't have a proper response But the physical story without more cannot explain the mental story Including consciousness and reason But he is loath to invoke the specter of religious belief Yet he concludes after his wrestle with the non god We are simple examples of minds and the existence of mind is certainly a datum for the construction of any world picture At the very least its possibility must be explained and it hardly seems credible that its appearance should be a natural accident Like the fact that there are mammals Positions like these should be of acute interest to mormons It seems to me Because all of them begin with what nagel calls the datum of the human soul In a universe where a transcendent god is not an a priori Reversing the usual sequence the soul is in these cases not the emanation Not the temporal or logical consequence of a creator god It is the starting point for the development of cosmology Precisely as it is in king fallot The second of king fallot's assaults on orthodoxy of course Is its premise that a man may become a god Now this i find the most exciting prospect that mormonism holds out to us It is also of course the most feared theological tenet in the whole history of christendom and even beyond The earliest creation myth of which we have record the mesopotamian atrahasis In this record the man created at the instigation of a divine assembly is made to forget his origin in the heavens Lest he aspire to return to his place among the gods The church father tertulian gave fullest expression to the horror With which guardians of orthodoxy Guardians of god sanctity Face down the possibilities of theosis In these early christian centuries The pre-mortal soul provided by far the most compelling solution to numerous dilemmas associated with human incarnation But in pre-existence lurked one cardinal danger as well The church father tertulian attributed the idea to the pagan philosopher plato and plato he wrote Gave to the soul so large an amount of the divine quality as to put it on a par with god He makes it unborn Which single attribute i might apply as a sufficient attestation of its perfect divinity he then adds that the soul is immortal incorporeal invisible rational and intellectual What more could he attribute to the soul? He asked if he wanted to call it god We however who allow no appendage to god in the sense of equality By this very fact reckon the soul as very far below god We suppose it to be born And thus he foreshadowed the demise of the doctrine of pre-existence Like much else in Mormonism the prospect of theosis or deification Can appeal for vain glorious and ignoble as well as for more pure hearted reasons I would like to think that given the context of enix weeping god And the christ of gethsemane Mormons know that acquiring the divine nature is much more about infinite vulnerability Than about infinite power At the same time I would argue The god of joseph smith and the god of parley p pratt Is a god of power and a god of unprecedented power at that And here is why The heavens are for pratt as they were for the jewish thinker philo of alexandria and church father origin great defender of premortality seething with activity Populous with humans spirits and gods all coming and going ascending and descending like the angels on jacob's ladder The differences among them derive From the varied grades of intelligence and purity and also in the variety of spheres occupied by each In the series of progressive being So wrote parley pratt This is theology that comes fittingly out of the age of thomas mouthis and hagel conformable to darwin's universe of flux and agon and dynamism If by pratt's day the dour face of puritanism had long been in retreat And calvinism fast to becoming a one horse shea The christianity of yesteryear was not receding quickly enough to suit him The gospel pratt taught and embraced was like the age of progress One of unfettered optimism And boundless possibilities He urged upon his contemporary religionists the importance of quote seizing to teach and impress upon the youthful mind The gloomy thoughts of death and the melancholy forebodings of a long slumber in the grave The wayward and buoyant spirits of youth were already too weighed down and oppressed His embrace of human theosis this doctrine of equality as he called it His more general application of the appellation gods all are susceptible to the charge If not of blasphemy Then of a dangerous collapse of sacred distance A risky diminution of the grounds for reverence and awe that constitute reverence before god's transcendent holiness But for pratt The invitation to fellowship with the gods was cause for unalloyed celebration of god's super abundance What a glorious field of intelligence now lies before us yet partially explored What a boundless expanse for contemplation and reflection now opens to our astonished vision What an intellectual banquet spreads itself invitingly to our appetite calling into lively exercise every power and faculty of the mind All the virtuous principles of the human mind may here expand and grow and flourish unchecked by any gloomy fears As for god's motive in giving earthly existence and eternal salvation to man Pratt outlines the meaning and purpose of life in one eloquent paragraph reminiscent of the god that plato described in the tomeas pratt wrote Wisdom inspires the gods to multiply their species and to lay the foundation for all forms of life to increase in number And for each to enjoy himself In the sphere to which he is adapted and in the possession and use of that portion of the elements necessary To his existence and happiness Plato, I will remind you had said this about god and his motives The creator was good And one who is good can never become jealous of anything And so being free of jealousy he wanted everything to become as much like himself as was possible That is why the god of plato created the world and human souls to people it similarly with pratt God creates those conditions most favorable for the endless advance of his progeny through every form of life birth change and resurrection This great work of the father like the universe itself will be endless and eternally progressive Thus in the progress of events unnumbered millions of worlds and systems of worlds will necessarily be called into requisition To be filled by man beast foul tree and all the vast varieties of beans and things that ever budded and blossomed in eden I will end as I began with a quotation from chesterton There is such a thing he wrote As a small and cramped eternity You may see it in many modern religions The cosmology revealed by joseph and explicated by parley pratt Is no small and cramped eternity And the possibilities that it bestows upon the human family The divine potential with which it endows a fallen race Is no blasphemy It is in fact the highest tribute that one could pay to their god Because it presumes the worship of a god as unencumbered by jealousies and insecurities As the capacious god of play-doh Such a conception of god Should invite an equally unencumbered imaginative response Thank you very much We don't have any time for any hard questions, but we have time for easy ones In terms of I mean, I guess how I took it was in terms of countering some of these um pervasive arguments of sort of like the new ideas I was wondering why do you think that's the case, why do we have to take advantage of these ideologically? Well, I think it's because of I'm sorry, the question was why have we yet to take advantage of the Implications for example of a theory like king fallot When they may be so appropriate as a way to respond to many of the criticisms the critiques of the of the new atheist movement And I think that's pretty easy to Analyze I mean we we always have taught the gospel always seem to teach the gospel Assuming that an evangelical audience is listening over our shoulder And you know Richard gave a wonderful paper some years back about the colonization of the Mormon mind in which he talks about how we We always construct our identity identity in reference to and in response to a dominant culture But I think the dominant culture that we tend to be intimidated by is that of evangelical america Um, I think that there may be very good reasons for building bridges with the evangelical community But what I'm suggesting is that we we The pattern has been to downplay differences in order to do that And yet, you know rodney stark and so many other sociologists of religion will tell you look Conventional religions aren't working. They're not succeeding very well. People aren't looking for more of the same They're looking for alternatives and it seems to me that there's a whole community out there who have predicated their hostility toward religion On the notion of the the kinds of creedal gods that underlie those those christian conceptions We don't begin with that kind of a of a creedal god And so it seems that the groundwork is already there for this huge commonality That we share with many of these people. I don't really anticipate that we're going to change the missionary discussions to go out and talk to the Sam Harris's of the world But I do think that as individuals and as scholars and as a church community We ought to think with less nervousness and unease About the bridges that could be built In that in that regard So you really think that a strong what I call a radical anthropomorphic conception of god Is has the potential of being more convincing to individuals Like the Sam Harris's in the pigeons and the documents of the world than Some other possibilities Well, I'm not thinking of them as individuals. I'm thinking of the general orientation they represent And an increasingly secular secularist society the presuppositions increasingly the educated masses are going to be scientific naturalism And what I'm saying is that king fallot is a theology that grows out of scientific naturalism and And and so You know cases you cite those are hardcore. I'm you know, who knows what I don't think they're ever going to cross the bridge But I think there's a whole other audience out there that we haven't spoken to And that we have You know the the the material to get a long ways with if we would just try going down that road Why Well part of it is because the church has sent out such mixed signals about king fallot over the years, right? I mean I was talking about some of these issues with the byu religion department Of course, you know one of the more radical group of free thinkers in the country And you know since someone was very quick to say well, that's not canonized. That's not doctrine And I said well, you know parts of the king fallot discourse were in the joseph smith manual for priestess, right? Um, so but it's those mixed signals. Is it doctrine? Is it not doctrine? Can we quote from it and teach it? Can we not? and But you know the thing I love about joseph smith is that this ambivalence is clear in him from the very very beginning Right article of faith number one god the father jesus christ the holy ghost were just like you don't be threatened Feel comfortable with us article of faith number two We are the only church in the united in the world, right? Denying Entirely the doctrine of original sin So there's this oscillation build the bridge know we're distinct.  I've got no I'm just interested to know what your What would your assessment be of how much of this uh 19th century King fallot kind of pratt smith kind of stuff survives And in what form if it does in bh robert's Especially the truth of the way in the life What's your sense of that My sense is that bh robert saw himself in many ways as continuing and bringing to completion the work of the pratt brothers I think that's what his great magnum opus was I think the opposition that he ran to at the highest levels of the church put the kibosh on that And no one has returned to that kind of an effort in the years since um But I certainly think that he felt they laid the groundwork. He was just going to Kind of bring it up to date Right writing 75 years later and his His inability to get beyond that could be Taken as the The marker of the End of any possibility for canonization It seems to me of that tradition of that earlier tradition. I think you may be right Yeah I heard I shouldn't quote this out of context or without a source, but It's a fun story even if it's of doubtful Providence, but one of the quorum of the 12 was was speaking with a group at BYU recently and he said You know, I wish the quorum of the 12 were certain about church doctrine as typical high priest quorms And so I'd like to think that there's At least a kind of openness that is still there even if there is a resistance to declare one way or the other But I think in some ways that's that's what that's what our job is And I don't mean it's our job to theologize for the church But it's our job to explore and creatively investigate these possibilities without presuming to declare doctrine Yes You know, I'm not going to answer that question just because I'm not conversant enough with The contemporary field of process theology the little that I know Suggest to my mind that that yeah, he would have a great deal of affinity with that movement But there may be somebody here who could address that more confidently than I I'll try to do my homework better next time He has a lot of old science in there Pratt and his book and you read it things like well and things that sound strange just today like pouring fluid spirits into bodies and things like that and so if you ally yourself with New science theory, what kind of danger do you run that you might hurt your theology because science is always changing And so when the new theory comes along and you're strongly allied with what was new You suddenly look possibly strange and and uh Not real Well, I don't think in order to operate under the assumption That I'll give you an example. I'm I'm reading a history of western culture right now about the It's called Aristotle's children. Don't know if any of you are familiar with that So it's an intellectual history of the west that argues that it's christendom that is really responsible for the triumph of reason over faith But one of the points that this author makes Is that is that the entire tradition of medieval philosophy was predicated on the assumption that there had to be one set of Principles and laws that pertained to truth and another set of principles and laws that pertain to revelation And these two never came into contact And I'm not saying that we have to embrace any particular scientific view or paradigm But if our overall impression is that is that these aren't two separate and discrete realms Then what that means is that we are working in a shared enterprise With the scientific and philosophical communities. And that's that's as far as I would push that Here and then and then we'll go to the back You can say a few more words about this notion of the education or the osis I think that you're partially affirming as well as providing an account an account of crap In addition My sense is from your comments It's it's it's more than appreciation That you're describing here And I wondered if you could just talk a little bit about this especially in terms of The question of how far you're willing to go with that Is the way you describe it makes itself there's something really comfortable and exciting and ambitious Something something to be reached for but I wonder do you have in mind the notion of being worship worthy one day? I don't and that's why I I invoked the example of of the weeping god of enic and the christ of gethsemane My mind it would be much more fruitful and productive if we associated godliness with infinite capacity to suffer and to empathize Than than to be empowered now I'm not I'm not an advocate of the king fallot discourse in terms of trying to make a case for The inspiration or truthfulness behind it All I'm trying to suggest is that if we consider it intellectually Rather than theologically or dogmatically And see where those possibilities lead us then they as I said they create the basis it seems to me for a model of understanding god and the divine And human potential That is more amenable to scientific naturalist. That's that's all I'm all I'm saying Opens up a creative space And it's intellectually appealing I mean, you know the the idea of a god who's who we pause it from right as an apriori Who precedes existence itself who is the source of all being? That's right. I mean cons said himself that is right. It's it's impossible to ever get the mind around that kind of a concept And what you have with king fallot right is something that's as natural and evolutionary as any other darwinian example Right, there is this stuff. We know we look around there is matter in the universe Or as john nagel says we can begin with the datum of the human soul. It's here And then you just ask the question given what we know about evolutionary processes What's likely to happen a million billion trillion years from now if you start with that datum? Right, there's nothing intellectually repellent About that theory. There may be something Theologically off-putting, you know to the religious sensibility But that's okay because we're not talking to the evangelicals about this. We're talking to somebody else Richard Would you comment on the premise of this? Which is that in exploring what engineers have done are doing and might do in the future And we can get into a realm Yeah, um, are you saying I didn't address the topic is that what you're saying? I will I will I'll say something that may or may not be an answer to that But it seems to me what I was trying to suggest And this is why you know, I I'm I'm always quoting the god of of playdough of the tomeas And I could just as well quote the god of Aristotle because the the point seems to me to be that that christianity is encumbered By this notion of this tiny little petty insecure god Who loses his temper when he sees that adam and eve are going to become like him? Um, and I think that we haven't entirely escaped the burden of that model And if we once we do then we you know, I don't think god considers it an offense or a blasphemy For us to be exploring the full range of the divine potential with which he endowed us So I don't know if that's a kind of a partial answer But so what that means to my mind is that we don't have to impose these artificial limitations and boundaries over where You know human potential or human creativity can take us Absolutely that's why I love that quotation from Brigham young about you know Well, it's it's angels who are well instructed in chemistry that are going to do the job Which suggests at no point Is our earthly paradigms of knowledge acquisition going to be rendered irrelevant and suddenly You know, we're giving the harry potter wand to do things And so yeah, it suggests to me that that our only problem is that we haven't been ambitious enough In taking seriously what you know, I hear all kinds of defenses made of his you know The glory of god is intelligence. Well, he doesn't mean intelligence in the sense of Oh, yeah, he does You know seek he wasn't out of the best books while best books mean scriptures No, it doesn't they say scripture when they mean scripture talking about best books And and then the other thing is, you know, we've all gone down the rabbit hole, you know, we've all gone down the rabbit hole And and you know once you believe in gold plates You're there As far as the key fault goes I could see how the modest view To hide it helps address things in a way to this conference I guess what troubles me about the king following some of the speculation on how god came to be and exactly what it means for For us to be kind of gods or we're going to have our own little planets and all this sort of thing That idea discussed the typical high priest group meetings and learned that that's really the document Just the just a commercial here. There's questions about process theology and process life speed and Some of the speculation of where you can go The king followed this course of things that are discussed in society for more Philosophy and theology, which is meeting here at the end of next Just just one final comment that I would I would make about joseph smith himself and I've argued this before in these kinds of forums and that is You know joseph smith clearly clearly treasured the opportunity to think out loud And You know on numerous occasions. He expressed irritation With the fact that people always expected his pronouncements to carry the right the stamp of divine approval and authority And I think he was trying to model for us a mode of intellectual inquiry Where as long as we don't make claims That are out of proportion To the certainty or authority that we have Time back over to you All right someone in the back. Yeah, you spoke of infinite vulnerability. Could you expand on them? Well, I'm talking about the episode in in moses chapter seven right where Enok has the theophany and he Beholds the heavens weeping and he asks god how it is that he can weep And god shows him a vision of the pain that he endures and it's a pain that is purely a pain of empathy Right the pain of infinite empathy And when enok Sees that he has this this Well experience whereby he vicariously Experiences that same gift and his bowels yearn wide as eternity. So there again you have that the reinforcement of that image And we know we don't have a very highly developed theory of atonement in the lds faith We have what's the center of our religion and faith, but we haven't really theologized atonement but one right very potent possibility Is that the pain that christ was able to suffer was not a pain that some All right personified justice Meaded out to him But it was his capacity To experience simultaneously the pain and grief and suffering of a virtually infinite human family And so I think that what we see in enok is not just poetic imagery But perhaps an actual key to understanding the nature of the divine and the nature of the suffering that's at the heart of the atonement


I think one of the things we're constantly conscious about is thinking about what this generational upsurge that we're seeing with the millennial generation, and I haven't come up with a better term than millennial. So on our team, or my closest millennial colleague, Chris Sofer, sort of rankles at the topic, at the term. But Chris and colleagues will, why don't you guys come on up while they're making the shift. Maybe at the end of this discussion we'll have a better term for the next generation, the largest generation increasingly online. Chris, I'm going to hand it over to you and let you introduce the next conversation. My colleague, Chris Sofer, folks. All right, hey everybody. My name is Chris Sofer, I work at Knight Foundation. I guess I was asked up here to organize slash moderate this panel on millennials and news. As I told the panelists who are the speakers who are going to be talking to you in a minute. I think it's a lot less interesting to ask about the behavior of a generation because that's just a giant group of people and you can't help but make hopeless generalizations and false assumptions about a whole generation. It is, however, way more interesting to think about the behavior of people and what we can learn from them. So the four people you're going to hear from have done a lot of work with people of the younger persuasion, have a really deep expertise in different facets of that question. How do you work with younger people to do different kinds of things? There are really interesting human centered useful insights from their work and they're going to share those in the format of a brief five minute talks. We're going to hear from four people and then they're going to come up afterward and answer some questions time allowing. So if you have questions, please hold them till the end and we can sort of talk together about some of what they've given us. But you're going to hear from, I'm not going to come up in between, you're going to hear from Tron Ha, formerly a red eye in Chicago now doing a night journalism fellowship at Stanford University. You're going to hear from Jared Keller from policy, sorry, Dot Mike, formerly known as Policy Mike. You're going to hear from Katie Peters of Democracy Works and TurboVote. And you're going to hear from Chris Rudd of Micva Challenge. So without further ado, Tron Ha. Okay, let's do a quick game of word association. Yell out the first word you think of when I say millennials. Yeah. Awesome. Selfie. Christopher. Okay. This label comes with a lot of baggage, right? I've been working with young audiences for most of my career and usually when I mention this in conversation, it usually goes a little something like blah, blah, blah, selfie, blah, blah, blah, Justin Bieber.  And inevitably the phrase, I just don't get why fill in the blank. So what does the future of news and information, whoops, that's a preview. What does the future of news and information look like for this group? Are we destined to see more of this or this? There are plenty of broad generalizations out there about millennials. And as the night fell of this year, what I really tried to understand was why do they do what they do? What drives them? What are their needs? What's important to them? And I did in-depth interviews with more than two dozen millennials to get at these insights. One question I asked was, how do you define news? So this is John, he's 23. He lives in Austin and he defines news as something that is fact-based or is new to me. He sees news as being more than information received from TV, radio, online, newspapers and other traditional channels. News could be something he sees from one of his friends on Instagram. This is Hailey, she's 24 and she lives in New York. She defines news as timely stories and events that have relevance for me. Her main sources of news are Facebook, Instagram and email. She grew up listening to NPR, so she'll sometimes tune into WNYC when she's in the car. She thinks the media covers too much of the same kinds of stories. And for Saman, who's 24 and lives in LA, something has to be both socially and politically relevant to meet his criteria of news. It doesn't become news to me until I know how it affects people, he says. Saman's main source of news is Twitter and he tends to follow people and personalities, not necessarily news organizations. I want to take a look at three prevalent millennial stereotypes as it pertains to news and information and do a lightning round of millennial myth busting. So the first myth slash stereotype is that millennials are lazy. Yes, they do expect news and information to reach them where they are, whether it be on Facebook, Instagram or Twitter for example. But people like John, Hailey and Saman are not lazy or passive consumers. They're actively creating and defining their own content. And coming of age in an era of too much information, they've developed their own systems for filtering the information that's relevant to them. So relevance is the key word here. If it's not relevant, it gets tuned out. Myth number two, they don't have the attention span to read or watch long form. Now what surprised me about a lot of my interviews is just how much long form many of them do consume. Matt, who's 22 and also from Austin, grew up watching 60 Minutes with his parents and he says he enjoys that in depth format. If he hears about a news maker who peaks this interest, he'll search interviews of that person on YouTube and binge watch them. Many of the millennials I interviewed also listened to longer format and PR shows and podcasts. So the takeaway here is they need to be interested in order to consume the long form and they'll seek out what they're interested in on their own time. The third and last myth that I'll talk about today is they won't pay for anything. So while many of them describe themselves as frugal and scrimp on saving things, there are things that they are willing to pay for. Man, for example, buys cheap gas station food but will spend $9.99 a month on Spotify premium. So I think this last insight is really interesting as we think about payment for content. It's not that this group is not willing to pay for anything, it's just that they have a very high bar. What they pay for has to have significant value for them personally or socially. I'll end on that note and look forward to talking more during Q&A. Thank you. That's not me, but that could be. My name is Jared Keller. I'm the director of programming at Mike. We were recently policy Mike until last week. We rebranded to give ourselves a brand new website. That's our new logo. It's much better than our old one. The whole idea was that we wanted a better design sensibility. We wanted to expand our coverage so including policy in the name didn't make much sense. Despite the rebrand and our redesign, our sensibility is still the same. We want to deliver news and analysis to the next generation of news consumer. We want to deliver stories that matter to the next generation. Now, what does that next generation mean? Oh, boy, it's millennials. Yes, it is. So these are all stats from the Pew Research Center about what kind of defines millennial generation. Most of the fundamental research says the same thing. That we're disenfranchised with existing institutions. Social security is a big one since none of us will collect any. That we're politically and socially active. That we have a strong sense of justice. This is all kind of research and every news organization should know this backwards and forwards. However, most news organizations, at least according to our op-ed pages, say that we are terrible, terrible human beings. We are idle trophy kids entitled lazy superficial, unable to commit, unable to really do anything of substance. We don't care about serious news or serious issues. We care about nothing. Unless it's going viral or a friend shared on Facebook, which is hopelessly and aggravatingly reductive. So most media outlets see this. Look at these guys. They're all smiling. They have so many aspirations and ideals. They're not going to work hard to achieve any of them. No. Do we want them to care about what's going on in Egypt? Let's frame it in terms of 27 GIFs from Jurassic Park because that's the only way to get them interested. In fact, you know, I'm blind here. I'm just going to take a quick selfie if you don't mind. Great. Here's what millennials actually look like. Hi. So I don't like hearing any of this stuff because I consume regular news. I care about what's happening in the Middle East. I care about what's happening in Ukraine. I care about what's happening to the healthcare system in the U.S. because it directly affects me.   You know, it's funny. The Pew Research Center has all this information. There's plenty of data about what millennials actually consume. But time after time, a lot of legacy media outlets will run these op-eds about how we are kind of the worst generation ever and that we will accomplish nothing. We want everything handed to us on our plate. And that's not accurate. And that's sort of what we're trying to debunk at Mike. The belief that young people don't care about serious issues. We want to build a business that involves delivering serious news and topics that matter to young people. Now, a lot of that has to do with the way in which we consume. So I have a bunch of charts, which I also stole from Pew, which I'm going to run through. So more and more people are getting their news from social networks. I think we all understand this, that more people are turning to Facebook and Twitter. And I guess Reddit, although I don't know why, for more and more news. We're consuming news in a social context. It's not just us saying at home and consuming in a one-to-one relationship with our newspaper or television, but we're consuming news in a conversation, in an ongoing conversation with our friends, with our colleagues, with our connections. Young Americans consume more and more news online. Golly gee, I wonder why. It's because we all grew up with the Internet. I don't really remember life before the Internet at all, which is terrifying and also accurate. More young people consume news on social media. This number is increasing from hour after hour, day after day, week after week, and so on. This is not just the future of young people, the future of millennials, which is generally used to describe a small, basically an age, but it's more of a sensibility, a way of consuming news. That, yeah, is confined to a certain age, but isn't really about age. My father, who was a correspondent for CBS in the Boston area, gets a lot of his news through Twitter, and he likes to joke that he's a millennial, because he consumes news in the same way that people of my generation do, and it's made him a better reporter. Although, don't tell him I said that. More people consuming news on mobile. This goes directly with the idea of consuming on social. The vast majority of traffic to Facebook and Twitter come from mobile sites, not from a desktop. So those two go hand in hand. Here's what young people are not reading. 73% don't read BuzzFeed, 84% don't read Reddit, 96% don't read Mashable or Gawker. A lot of this has to do with reading from the homepage, so a lot of times people will say, oh, I don't go to these websites, but I actually, I'll click on something that a friend shared. So why should I care? I think a lot of media companies have the idea that in order to deliver information to a younger generation, it has to be framed in the most insipid, idiotic way possible. Like, you know, I'll give you an example. You know, the crisis in Egypt explained through 27 GIFs from Jurassic Park. That is an actual article that was written on a website. I'll let you guess who wrote it. It's the idea that we don't like to eat our vegetables. We only like to eat sugar, and because there's so much sugar on the internet, we'll seek it out anywhere. So we really have to trick people. We have to bring them in and, you know, to read this kind of dreck, and then we'll give them something else. But that's not really the case at all. Our value proposition at Mike has always been that we can deliver news in a way that makes sense to young people. And the idea is that, like I said, we consume news in a social context. So, I mean, who read, did anyone read the presentation of self in Everyday Life by Gothman in college? No, I see one hand back there, too. A couple. Right. So, you know, every action that we take is designed to present a certain portrait of ourselves. Based on the news we consume, you know, the clothes that we wear, the things that we say to people. And social media has basically made that part of our everyday life. It's not a tool that we use. It's an extension of ourselves. So we think to ourselves, how do we get people to consume this news? We have to make it a part of their identity. We have to make people click and share on something because it resonates with their identity, because it's valuable to them as a person who lives their life not offline and then with a little bit online, but who lives their life in two different mediums. So I'm going to run through some examples of hard news stories that we did that actually played really well. Oh, well, here's our traffic growth, too. We found that young people actually care about serious issues, surprisingly. There's not a GIF in any... Well, there are GIFs around here somewhere. But, you know, we have focused primarily on policy, focused on healthcare. We focused on legislation in Congress. We focused on the crises abroad in Egypt, in Ukraine, in Russia. And boy, like, the traffic numbers don't lie. People are actually interested. And this isn't just kind of like a beaten switch, where we have one, you know, super viral story with, like, the 15 cats are having a better day than you, and that generates the 18 million uniques. No, this is all spread pretty evenly over all of our stories. So Obama just did what no other president before him has done. I forget what story this actually was. I think it was about capping CO2 emissions. 137,000 shares, 2.5 million uniques. I'm not really sure that the New York Times could say the same, with all due respect to the Times. One study shows the shocking result when women and minorities emailed their professors talking about gender and race issues on campus. 38,000 shares, 1 million views. Social problems is more of an embarrassment for America than it is for Russia. This is a little media criticism for us. A 7,000 shares, 2 million views. This isn't, like, fluffy stuff. This isn't, like, 23 things that only people who studied radical feminist ecosystems advance or will understand. We're seeing very, very narrow identities for a cheap share. We're focusing on issues that actually matter to young people. Issues of justice, international affairs, politics, culture, society, social and economic justice. And it's working for us somehow. So what this means for media companies. Next generation news consumers care about serious news. Vital and viral, not mutually exclusive. I've always told people that if something is good, they will share it. A good example is who's read Massey Coates' cover story for the Atlantic on the case reparations.  You know, oh god, what's another good example. Ann Marie Slaughter on why women can't have it all. Also a really, really serious issue. It touched off a major debate about gender relations in the U.S. Incredibly, incredibly long. But people still read it and enjoyed it. A lot of my friends were my age. And I don't know why that matters. You know, read and enjoyed it as well. Millennials, they're just like you and me. They're just like, well, they're just like me because I am a millennial. But I think the last thing that I'll say about this is that no young person likes to be identified as a millennial, no one likes to be spoken to as a millennial. It is the most condescending thing you can say to someone. It basically says, I'm going to put you in a box so that I can exploit your culture and sell you stuff. Just call me young people. Or just say people, even. But the next generation of news consumption has everything to do with identity, has everything to do with issues that matter. And the more and more media companies continue to put millennials in a box and say we can only speak to you in terms of funny cat pictures, the more we're going to see the two-tiered system of content that we see online.  And those two things aren't mutually exclusive. You can cover important issues in a way that's accessible and meaningful to young people.  And I think that's it. Okay, thanks. I think I can figure that out. Hey, everybody. I think you might have figured out already that the theme of this panel is none of us wanted to be on this panel. That works out all right in the end anyway. But, oh, I actually, I think I mean it well. It turns out that millennial as Jared's so well teed up is not really I think anybody wants to get called if it's going to look like this.  But, but, hopefully I'll manage to say something worthwhile. I was trying to think about what would mark me as a millennial or as a person of the internet, so to speak. And the first thing I thought of was about my parents, right? You start with who you can contrast yourself to. In about 1989, they bought our family's first encyclopedia Britannica and an IBM 386 in about the same year. I don't think they ever expected the former to obviate, the latter to obviate the need for the former. I, on the other hand, grew up in a way where the Google Wikipedia symbiosis is totally natural to me. I take it for granted that I have an external memory sitting at my fingertips 24-7. My first encyclopedia came with a game. And the fact that it was on a CD-ROM as opposed to the web doesn't really matter much in retrospect. So, I'm up here because I run a website called TurboVote. My co-founder, Seth Flaxman, is in internet terms a little bit younger than me. His first real promise that he got bought into on technology was Amazon's. It is, technology brings you stuff to your door in the mail. And so one day, when we were both graduate students, he came and asked me the question of why hasn't the internet made democracy awesome? And I thought, well, the answer to that question would be that there must be like a database of election rules, election information. It's an information problem. You just collect it and you publish it. That must already exist, right? It didn't. I thought, well, it's the internet. It must be really easy to just collect it and publish it, right? Actually, it still wasn't, but I'm going to maintain that that was a fair assumption, especially for me as sort of a child of Google. Instead, what he meant, though, was that we would collect it, publish it, but also use it to send people stuff in the mail. And it actually took a lot of work to find a publishing house capable of taking all of the different forms and all of the really unique copies of things that every state requires to get registered to vote and to submit an absentee ballot request, but we learned to do it and we send out voter registration forms and absentee ballot requests in the mail with stamped addressed envelopes. I'm pretty proud of it. But the other day, speaking of the promises of the internet that take you by surprise that Mark-Q is old and no longer on the edge of it, a talk went viral in my Twitter feed in which one of the core complaints about big data, in addition to, you know, all of the invasiveness, all of the unforgiveness of it, is, if you know so much about me, why can't you talk to me? Why do you insist on showing me both GEICO car insurance ads and Zipcar ads if you know that at least one of them can't be relevant to my needs? I was a little shocked by that. The idea that you could demand that of internet advertising. But this guy who, technically speaking, is older than me, is, I think, once I started looking around on point. I looked at Matthew Norfleet, who in 2012 was a student body president in Eastern Michigan University. He was implementing TurboVote on campus trying to register his classmates to vote. He looked at all of our guidelines on sending mass emails across an entire campus and institutionalizing it into standard administrative processes and said, that's boring. That's not very personal. And he recruited a set of student leaders, installed our mobile website a shortcut on everyone's home screens and sent them out to stalk down and register their classmates one by one. Hi, I'm Matt. Can I register you to vote? We hired him for the record. Angelica Smith was the student body vice president at Virginia Tech University last year. Again, she looked at all of our guidelines about doing mass broadcasts about the importance of voter engagement and said, huh, I bet I can top that. And she brought together a coalition of student groups and relationships so that every student heard a custom message about the importance of voting from someone relevant to them. And as I started hearing these stories I kept thinking about that talk that had popped through my Twitter feed and I started thinking about what we've been doing. And actually over the course of the last couple years we've been doing that already. Our partners at Towson University took it to something of an extreme frustration, golf cart. I don't know if they actually hunt down and stalk individual students with it or not. I kind of hope they don't. But what I thought of as our growing ability to collect more information and sort more data keep thinking in encyclopedic terms in many ways has meant that we're able to track additional regulations. And as we're trying to explain to people the importance of things like which places you can register to vote turns out we've had to design rules for well how do you know who should know about that? Answer. We track who's sent in their voter registration forms. We know who needs to be told about registering an election day because they didn't get registered in time. We can make that more personal for an individual user and the number of ways in which we talk to individual voters using the platform that is to vote has grown exponentially more complex and as such infinitely more personal over the last two and a half years of our operations. It just took sitting down and talking to those users to realize that that's what we've really been responding to overall this time. And so I set out to build the all knowing all seeing voter engagement machine and it turns out what I've been building is an experience that lets each and every voter be at the center of their own actions casting their own ballots speaking their own voice in the most unique and personal way that they know how and if there's anything that I'm seeing coming out of my own experience serving anyone of what I'd call the next generation the internet that's the promise we're busy trying to fulfill and trying to make come real that I hope we'll all be able to take for granted next. Thanks. Hello. Hello. Hello. Hello. First thing so we have this panel talking about millennials and young people and there's actually a really young person here who would probably be the best to talk about this than any of us sorry I know you guys did great but yeah so everyone now has to follow Andrew Curio he's new to Twitter he's super dope he's from Florida so you guys should all follow him right now seriously and like normally with young people I would say pull out your phones but I see everybody's on laptop so do it on your laptop but yeah he's super cool alright so my name is Chris I work at mikva challenge mikva is a oh wrong way organization excuse me in Chicago so we work with young people to get them involved in the political process the my executive director says that when you want to get young people to be professional ball players you make them practice practice practice and then they get good right but in America for civics or for voting we tell them you can't be involved until hit 18 and then we expect them to be great at it and it just doesn't work that way so our organization focuses on getting them involved a lot younger so then this question about a stronger internet and so the question that came to me was for what why do we need that and so for me it's for the young people I work with to be able to change the world that they live in the world that we all live in but that's that's the goal that we have to change this thing to something better and so when we talk about this question of young folks it's normally by old folks who don't understand young folks so and they don't understand the way they do things and they think the way the young people do things is wrong because it's not the way that they did it back in the day and so this is a bunch of adults at a table and young people have to look and that's not the way it looks anymore so now young people are at the table and they use their computers, they use their phones and they create dope stuff it's crazy I wrote all this stuff down but no I'm not using it and they create all these great products for them, for their peers they're super engaged the young people I work with focus on juvenile justice issues in Chicago and in Cook County and so we policy mic we were using that we use rap genius to annotate juvenile justice policies in Illinois and they were super excited because they got to put their own flavor on boring stuff right and so what we do I guess they term it participatory politics we want to get young people engaged in the political process wherever they are at and that is what they're doing it's not like we invented something for them they did it so you can be civically engaged without necessarily going to the polls you don't necessarily have to vote every four years and if you are great but if that's the only thing you're doing these young folks are engaging every day as he said they're sharing information they're liking things they're engaging with information with editors they're doing all this stuff that before they didn't have an opportunity to so we talk about again these the older folks they want to have it their way but the young people are not doing it so people are getting upset right and so young people are still consuming information they're still probably more than any generation prior to them and now they're able to create information at a level unseen they get a smart phone they get an iPod, they get whatever they want not whatever they want, whatever they have and they make stuff and they're able to share it and they're able to engage each other in a way that we weren't able to do before but so it starts with a question the main way you engage young people is you talk to them you ask them questions and it's not about engaging them where you want to engage them but you learn to engage them where they're at and then they'll go forward so our question was what tools, policies and practices do you need to positively transition from Corrections to Community I know that's long, that was adult created but it basically means what do young people need when they get out of the juvenile justice system in Chicago so one of the answers that my young folks came up with was Expungio and so this is a web app to help young people erase their criminal records we found out that 25,000 young people were arrested in Chicago every year and in 2012 70 young people filed for expungement and were able they were granted expungement but that's a very very small drop in the bucket right so my young people said this is a huge problem and we got to do something about it so this is what we came up against they presented this information to community leaders, to civic leaders and most of these folks are a little bit older I felt like this is going to be a very ageist conversation so I'm sorry about that but they had no clue what they were talking about it didn't make sense to them they knew it was an issue but they didn't understand how an app or a web app or what was a web app like what is that, how is it two things at once and how that could change this problem so we spent most of the fall of 2013 trying to get people interested in this issue they were talking to their friends they were on Facebook steadily tweeting out stuff on Twitter they did all this stuff to try to get people bring awareness to this issue so the internet is actually where we found our solution so a non-profit is very hard none of us know tech stuff like I'm not a tech person at all I appreciate it and I love what you guys do but I don't know how to do it so one day I met Kathy Dang at Hackathon and she tweeted at me about something around juvenile justice issues and I said oh my students came with this idea bam so she was like cool I'd love to work on it so within four months we created the app and we released it in January of this year like very basic but people started paying attention and now they were starting to say oh young people can do stuff they're not just you know especially with Chicago they're just not killers they're not they're not lazy they do care and it was it was an experience so the other thing was a lot of we live in America it's a very racist country it's very segregated and a lot of our young people are very disenfranchised Chicago we don't expect this from young folks especially young black and brown people but through participatory politics through this internet they're able to engage with each other they're able to engage with civic leaders so like my students tweet at people all the time normally not the higher ups because they don't control their own twitter but like the staffers the number twos and so you know they a group of young people who normally don't have access in the political arena now have access so this other thing about like organizing I was listening to an NPR piece a week ago and they were talking about you know this is the 50th anniversary of freedom summer and so you had this whole movement to talk about civil rights and equity and there's this whole process this is an organizing process and these young people are doing that they're just not doing the traditional way so they're still you know they're creating awareness campaigns through likes through shares on facebook it's not the same as going out past not flyers they're not doing that anymore but they're still interested and so I was saying like in the 60s it takes weeks to get 100 some signatures maybe a few thousand but in 3 days 75,000 people sign the petition against Bank of America it's just it's unseen right and now young people are using the internet to mobilize and teach their peers it said 45% of youth get their news from friends or family it's like 49% are using traditional media like newspapers but this is you know this is the way that they're going they don't talk to Andrew and see expert in the room these young folks are way more earth conscious than we are and so the young people I work with hate using paper like they just can't stand it so they'd rather do stuff online because they know what this has in regards for their future right so we released the app in January there was all this buzz juvenile expungement became a hot topic in Chicago and so the mayor had to start acknowledging it so he cosponsored a bill for automatic juvenile expungement in March and they just passed the bill so this is a very quick turnaround of young people engaged in an issue they fought for it they shared it with their peers and now we have policy change that's going to effect thousands and thousands of young people in the future so then why do we want a better internet or how do we ensure that we have a better internet and so I think to do that we have to make sure people from diverse backgrounds are creating what the internet is not just what is shared on it and I think a better internet means a possibility for a better world social media is part of a broader democratizing project that empowers communities and individuals in ways traditional media cannot young people can now organize themselves in society faster than any other generation they learn about more issues and with that knowledge organize powerful civic actions they topple governments in the Middle East without drones they briefly terrorize Wall Street each action they learn and share after each action they learn and share those lessons with the world and we all become smarter the other thing is that young people still need guidance and they crave it they're very talented and they're very witty and they can do so much but they're still young and there's lots to learn and we still have lots to learn on them so to ensure a better internet we have to teach them digital literacy news literacy how to critically analyze what the world is so that they can lay the foundation or push it forward to have a better world and a better internet so that's it we have a couple of minutes for questions so I'm going to invite everybody up Ethan is going to kindly run the microphone we have a bunch of time to ask for concisely worded questions and we'll ask our speakers for concisely worded answers let's go to... oh sorry Ethan sees the question I hear you that you don't like the stereotypes and nobody likes to be stereotyped but you're all ducking but I took in advance to be the point of the what we were trying to divine here which are what are the real trends put aside the stereotypes that conjure something and it's not just the emergence of new technology it's not just television young people in the 60s conjure something and again it's not just color television or space travel young people of the 80s so what are the defining trends that you do see and just a couple of suggestions are defining events the current president's election was that a defining event and the recession a defining event but what are the trends that you actually do see with this generation so how about it let's go down the line if I have to kick off oh boy so I work in civic technology civically we're actually seeing you voter engagement go up so clearly there's a real willingness to engage in political channels again but with a real sense that people want to interact in ways that are relevant and I think there's a sort of a jadedness about channels that don't serve us well and when I talk about the demand of technology and big data and ads this could work better I think with politics there's that same sense of I'm going to get engaged but I want this to work better and there's a real demandingness of the institutions around us and a real sense that they aren't working well and that we don't see the channels necessarily to automatically improve them so there's a real willingness to engage combined with a real fear of being let down so I would say that I think one of the big differences is just how much information is out there today for young people and so if I can make one broad generalization it would be that this group is very very savvy in terms of being able to sift through that information and figure out what it is that they want to engage with I think they're incredibly resourceful in that way and so that's what I meant when I said that they're not passive consumers they know what they want they know how to get it and then they also know how to cross check it with other sources to figure out if they want to figure out whether it's accurate or not and they might not always do that a piece of news might not always be important enough for them to do that but in the times that it is they know how to do that I think there's probably a bigger emphasis on identity formation with this generation and there's been maybe during any other time in American history with the exception of Revolutionary War which is all about identity formation I guess and also the 60s and 70s but there are more tools at our disposal and I've generated these identities in the past your sort of self is defined by your associations I'm a member of this I go to this bowling club or I work in this job or I associate with these people now because the boundaries of association are cut down by the internet and by social media every action is an act by identity formation so even the act of consuming news has become what does this say about me people will share things often people will share things on their Facebook or Twitter pages that they haven't even read because it says something smart about them it says I'm the sort of person who reads Harper's even though I didn't actually read anything in Harper's ever and because of this everything is couched identity so in order to get important issues important topics in the news laws, legislation, Congress wars abroad the question is always how does this affect me and what does this mean for my future as a human being not just as a member of a group as an American or as a young person but for me personally what does this mean for my route to self self-actualization and I think that often gets taken as a sign of narcissism because we talk about go find a job that makes you happy which a lot of people tell their kids when they graduate college and it's totally unrealistic speaking of someone who has had jobs that have made me not happy but you know I mean there's because there are so many more avenues than taking a job or becoming a member of a friars club or something that allow you to construct your identity and associate with different people I think there's more of an emphasis put on it on day-to-day activity I'd say one thing this when you term a group of people the divide is so big so like if you're saying millennials you're talking about like 15 to 20 something that's a very different group of people to say what do they want to do they're not unified in that aspect the other thing is Trump it's about interest and you know it's hard to say what each one is interested in they're all interested in different stuff but that is what they will share that is what they will read that is what they will do stuff that interests them and I would disagree that it's always about identity with that demographic with teenagers it's all about figuring out who they are that is the point in their life when they do that they're trying to figure out who they are and their friends have so much to do with that it's no longer adults it's their peer group so I think one way that we engage young people better particularly with news is that you have more young people writing what we consider news I think a lot of it's going to have to be a change in the definition of what news is and the people who traditionally got to define that can no longer do it and we have to accept that let's go to the next question hi, sorry, Emmy Calabale Stanford D. School I'm wondering to what extent does the terminology and the conversation around millennials need to change I really enjoyed your point on we don't want to be on this panel you know it's sort of like that really brings up I think a fundamental point what do we need to use I saw on Twitter we're young money we're not millennials what are we what other words do we need to use I'll just say real quick that millennials is not really an actual phrase I mean it's a marketing term Teenager was invented in the 50s Teenagers didn't exist before the 1950s which is ludicrous to think about young people if you really have to into the question that it's now being defined generationally rather than the way people consume so I mean the way we talk about it internally at our company is we don't say like millennials we want to get those millennials because none of us identifies millennials even though I put myself up there it's more of a question of what is the next generation of news consumer and that's going to be everyone from someone who's just entering high school to my grandmother who's amazing on Twitter any other quick suggestions I think Chris made a really good point in terms of you know this is a really broad group of people you're talking about you're talking about like 15 plus years that separate the youngest to the oldest and so I would think about more looking at their life stages and even beyond the life stages segmenting them you know based on their interests or psychographic information it's really tricky when you're trying to do like broad strokes generalizations of a group of people who are you know 15 years apart especially in that part of their lives where things are changing so quickly great well I think we're out of time let's get a round of applause for all of our great speakers here thank you also for the questions


Meeting planners, if your next meeting is fast approaching, now is the time to conduct a room audit with your host hotel. And if you're not sure why you should be spending time on this somewhat time-consuming task of comparing lists with your hotel, stick around. I'll hopefully give you a few compelling reasons to show you why room audits are in your best interests. Folks, conducting a room audit can happen at any stage in the planning process. But sometimes doing a room audit is most beneficial when you do it right before your reservation due date or a few days before your conference and certainly right after your conference as well. And even if you have a healthy pickup and you think, why should I be bothered trying to find any extra rooms that may have been placed outside of the block? Here's why doing a room audit would be beneficial even if you have a really, really healthy guest room pickup at your host hotel. Number one, it's going to combat any potential attrition charges. Now again, if you have a healthy pickup, you still are in danger of seeing cancellations up to your event. Delegates do it all the time. They cancel two or three days before a program or they book a room and then decide they're going to stay with family members. So having a room audit ensures that all rooms are captured under the block to combat any potential attrition that you might be facing. Number two, you want to capitalize on your concessions. If you've been granted a one complimentary room night for every 50 consumed, then you definitely want to make sure your numbers are solid so that you can capitalize on all those comp room nights or any room upgrades and amenities that you may have in your contract as well. Number three, accurate history. This is going to help you forecast for future years. So make sure that you get all the rooms that are credited to your association. And finally, credit history. Yes, hotels will call upon your past hotels to get a credit history when deciding to forward you master billing credit for your future event. So again, ensuring all of those rooms and that revenue is to your benefit and to your credit when you're booking your future programs. If you currently conduct room audits on a regular basis and you have any best practices that you would like to share, please share them with your community and comment on this video below. And if you're not sure how to conduct a room audit, please reach out to either Steven or I. We do these room audits all the time for our clients with their host hotels because again, they see the benefit and we see the benefit of doing those room audits on a regular basis. And finally, if you are a hotel sales person, help out your meeting planners with making this process of doing a room audit easy and seamless as possible. This is going to help you guys as well, making sure that the client has an accurate credit history and no one wants to collect on attrition charges. So please help out your meeting planners by assisting them with their room audits when the time comes. And if you haven't done so already, make sure you follow me on LinkedIn to stay on top of all of my Two Minute Tip Tuesday videos. And if you have any questions about conference direct services to our clients around room audits or anything else, drop me a line as well. Hope you enjoyed this week's video. Have a great week. Bye for now.