 Our first speaker this morning is going to be Brent Alsup. Brent has always been a transhumanist, and I think always should be probably taken in the most literal sense. Without beginning, Brent Alsup has been a transhumanist and has been active in the extropian and transhumanist movements. He's only been active since 1994. He received a bachelor's degree in computer science with a minor in psychology from the University of Utah, and he's currently working as a software engineer. Brent is the founder of Canonizer.com, which he talks about a lot. He is an ardent advocate of Canonizer. He was raised in the LDS church, and he served a mission to Japan. He was married in the Jordan River Temple in 1985 to Malia Fairbanks. They have three adult children, and they currently live in Sandy, Utah. Brent is going to be sharing with us the results of the 2012 member survey of our association members. Okay, yeah, so I basically just have a quick summary, some of the highlights of the survey that I focused on in the interest of time, but all the data is available, so if anyone has more interest in getting more details, you can contact us after about what we've got here. And here's a historical graph showing the number of participants in the survey, and like everything, you can see there's significant increase in its previous years that continued growth, both the number of people in the survey and the number of people in the organization. You can see that growing over the years. And then if we go in, this shows the distribution of where the people are from around the world. It's where obviously focused in the Americas, but no one can deny that we've got some other members from... We welcome Julio from Europe and stuff like that, so we are an international organization. Here, this is the one that I was really interested in, because some of you know I was kind of a... I'm a Mormon, transhumanist atheist, so I'm always interested in tracking consensus theories. Are some theories emerging and coming to the future, and are other theories popular in the past and kind of descending? But if you look at the atheist here, yes, but if you look at just the first three years, erased the last two years, and you might be able to see, growing while theists are decreasing. So if you didn't know the last two years, you might have, but as you can see, it looks like the theists have also increased significantly. Like everything else in the MT, there's just lots of everyone everywhere, so there's some of that. But it's going to be very interesting to me to see that going forward as we increase the size and hopefully we can increase the percentage of participants in further years and get more interesting and maybe see if we can do some filtering and see if we can see some trends, despite the noise of the growth of everyone's growing, to see if we can see it. But anyway, that was just kind of fun for me. And then this one here is showing the membership distribution, so on and that we're not all Mormons. Some of us are other religions and stuff like that. Julio was telling me last night, he said last year when he was at the conference, he had his MTA sticker on. And so it was Mormon transhumanist, and he was here and he walked across the street to the coffee shop to get coffee. And he had this Mormon and he walked in and said, you're Mormon, you can't have coffee. And so it's really cool to see. We're breaking some of the stereotypes that we're not all exactly the same and all Mormon transhumanists aren't from a religion, but yes, I got a kick out of that. And let's see. I went back, okay, cool. And this was another interesting one here that you think of the baby boomers right now, there's a large bubble of population and that's over the 1945 and 1954. We're clearly not baby boomers, but yet there's not a lot of us that are real young either. We seem to be sort of like generation Xers. Most of us are kind of in that range there. And then this is the membership education. So obviously we're very educated. I just have a mere bachelor's degree, so I kind of feel like an idiot here because I don't have a Ph.D. degree like all of you guys. So we're obviously a group of very educated people. And then I wanted to get in and I've got some historical graphs that shows the growth of the MTA, but before I get into that, if it's okay, I'd like to just talk a little bit about why this kind of growth is so significant for me. And when I got back from my mission, I was exploring other belief systems and I started achieving an interest and I specifically focused on atheism and humanism and I was kind of like a kid in a candy shop. Oh, you can believe this kind of stuff and there's going to be other people that you're not all alone and everything. And so I was kind of exciting. And so I joined groups like Atheists of Northern Colorado and Humanists of Utah and stuff like that. But all those groups were like just a handful, four or five people that would kind of meet at someone's house or something like that in there. And I realized that, oh, there's a lot of these humanists and atheists. Where's the humanist church that I can go to? And then how do I join that? One time I sent my PayPal statement. I wanted to join the Atheists of Utah and I sent my PayPal due statement in because I asked them how do I join it. And here's the PayPal address you said it to. And a week later I sent my payment in and it came back to me because there was no one at the other end to receive the payment. So here I was trying to join all these atheists. And then in contrast, let me relate one small snippet and a sea of help. Everyone in the LDS church was providing our family. When our oldest son turned 18, he decided to join the Marines and he head down to San Diego and went down to Camp Pendleton down there. And of course parents, when their oldest son heads out the first time, all of the things that can happen that can ruin a kid's life for the rest of their life, you're just scared to death at that. But of course there's a ward down there that encompasses Camp Pendleton. And like all wards all over the place, they're so well organized. They had set up groups of people that would go to Camp Pendleton every Sunday and they would pick up any Mormons that wanted to go to church today. And they didn't just pick them up. They would take them to their houses after and give them a family dinner. And it's just... Sorry. But just those kind of things that the church does for us. And that's just one small snippet. Sorry. I didn't think I was going to do that. But yeah, just all of the stuff I can't say enough what the church has done for us. And so I was kind of really spoiled. But when I looked at Atheist organization, and the same thing when I discovered Extropian groups, like the Extropian group in 1990, it took me over a year to get on the mailing list there. It was like, you're not one of us. Why should we let you on the list? I mean, that wasn't what they said, but that's just kind of the way it felt. But it was hard to get in and then I tried to volunteer and it took me quite a while. And finally I found out they need a web administrator with them and helped with that. But I was just sitting in my basement administering the web page. It felt like I was the only one working on the stuff only doing not accomplishing anything. So it just didn't, I don't know, it didn't feel like the same as when I went to church and you're a big part of that excitement and everything. And let's see. And oh yeah, then the WTA was founded in the late 1990s. Yeah, before 2000. And it got started. The World Transhumanist Association. And a group of them split off and formed the World Transhumanist Society. And they set up their web page and it's primarily just critical of the World Transhumanist Association. And it's like... And then of course there's the infamous time when a few years ago the World Transhumanist excommunicated the Mormon Transhumanist Association as one of their chapters in their group. And so the Mormons, they put their lives together and they work together and they produce lists of who during the next election they produce lists of who would be supportive of re-affiliating the MTA back with the World Transhumanist Association. And of course the large membership and the work that went into that they were able to elect people in the next election and get those in office. And so after the next election where now and everyone's still working in that and so now we're in affiliate with the World Transhumanist Association again. Humanity plus. Humanity plus, sorry. Their name's now Humanity Plus but that was really exciting to me and I recognize that all of that stuff just doesn't happen. It takes lots of work and so there's lots of all of you that have done all of that that made all that happen and I'm just so thankful for all of that and all of that happens and oh yeah I don't know if any of you heard about that but there was board members that were threatening legal action to other board members if they didn't resign and it was just but anyway there's a funny script or a funny Monty Python script on YouTube that talks about that it's basically World Transhumanist Association versus World Transhumanist Society but in the script it's People's Liberation Front versus the popular Liberation Front and it's a real funny skit but there's some family members here so in the interest of time and it's kind of got some crude language so I'm going to skip over that for this time but to me that's the story of my life life of Brian, life of Brent trying to join the Transhumanist Movement so anyway so let's go on to the next slide so I can show you some of the growth here finally and Lincoln has always pointed out that the growth has been over the last few years and if it's only a group of small group of people like the board of directors that's doing the work to grow the organization anything all you can get is linear growth like we saw but then as you can see at the end of 2011 and 2008 suddenly something happens and the only thing that can explain that if you ask me is other people are stepping in to help out with that and you can see the numbers across the bottom these are percentage growths and you can see the slowest growth that we've ever had is around 25% that's the slowest 25% per annum growth rate and so to me that's just really exciting to see and you can see we're hit about 250 people and I did a little bit of research trying to find out how many members are in the world H Plus, how many members are in the H Plus organization and I found a document by Nisamov that he did in 2008 that talked about how they had 5,000 members back then but I got another number from a recent number from Natasha and she said 250 so I don't know if maybe Natasha's number is paying members versus the other ones non paying I sent out some email trying to get that but I didn't get it in time but the bottom line is with this growth rate even if there is 5,000 or more members we're going to quickly surpass that and with this growth rate we'll soon have more members than the entire world transhumanist association and then when I was thinking of this I started thinking wait a minute what about the Mormons so I went and found this real interesting graph on wikipedia.com where this is the percentage growth rate so think of ours where our minimum growth rate is 25% per year since we started and the LDS maximum growth rate which is right before the internet came out was about 6% that was their maximum growth rate throughout their entire history and so if you take the maximum 6% and compare that with our 25% per year if you project that into the future it takes about 50 years for us to have it as many members so do you think the LDS church should try an excommunicatus or anything like that but anyway this this doesn't happen by itself there's been a lot of work that's gone in to make this happen so I just wanted to take this to thank everyone and it's really exciting to me to see everything come together and it's an exciting group so thanks a lot for all the hard work any questions yeah do you know of any particular events right there in 2012 you start to see a good uptick and I'm guessing that sharp jump must be just after last year's conference because that looks like it's that's a good question I wanted to throw that out does anyone have any ideas out there my idea is that it's simply there's finally the first few years it was just primarily board of directors that it was working on it but after the conference last year it seems like my bet is that other people are starting to spread the word other people are starting to contribute to the work and when you do soon as you get new people coming in and new people contributing that's when you start to see the exponential growth and so that's I think that's a good point and I don't want to toot my own horn on this but exactly the beginning of 2012 is when I began administering the terrace and movement oh interesting and you start to see it uptake I was here last year that was extremely impressed and just as you said getting new people in here board of directors couldn't do that without help from yeah thank you for mentioning that good point any other ideas about Lincoln do you have any thoughts about why do you think it suddenly took this knee jerk any thoughts or anyone yeah I think the conference last year was a big deal we also started some advertising campaigns just about actually a little bit before that Google gives us $10,000 a month in free advertising oh yeah Nathan we did some Facebook advertising we've been on a bunch of popular Mormon podcasts there's been a whole bunch of things that have happened over the last year year and a half that it made interesting but yeah just my final slight here was but if we are united we all things can do so that's my subject for the so thanks a lot