Joseph Smith’s plans for a temple could house an NBA basketball court, an Olympic size swimming pool, and still allow important temple rites to be going on.  David Hall, chairman of Hall Labs tells us more about these temples and his amazing ideas to keep people healthy.

David:  Right now we’re trying to make our home, a mansion, our little kingdom. We even put fences around and many times we’ll even put castles and make it look like a castle. Because that’s what we want, to be a king. Well, what our scriptures, especially our scriptures, but even the Bible are trying to tell us as a society is, the community is your mansion. Then, if you also have really nice buildings. I mean, Bill Gates cannot build a mansion as nice New Vista.  He can’t, because you need people. What good is it to have a basketball court in your home if nobody comes? The nice thing about–you’ve got 24 buildings, each with two NBA basketball courts. Can you imagine that?  An 1833 spec, exactly for an NBA basketball court. Basketball wasn’t even invented. Olympic pools, exactly the size of Olympic pools. That’s only five years old for that size.  In 1833! Talk about visionary. But you got 48 basketball courts.

GT:  Or tennis or whatever.

David:  Yes, it’s going 24/7.  It’s just heaven, because people are there. Then, okay, if you want to do endowment ceremony or sealing or something like that, these buildings are perfect for that, more perfect, by far, than any of our temples now. [It has] privacy and everything, the elevator can be private.  The bathrooms can be totally private, no public anything. It anticipated the privacy problems we’re having, way back.

GT:  Well, and I love this because, the original Kirtland Temple, the original Nauvoo Temple, were opened to the public. The mumies were displayed in Kirtland, in the temple. Joseph Smith, Sr. used to give tours for 25 cents or whatever it was. So, I love this idea of reopening our temples.

David:  It’s a community center.

GT:  There’s still private places.

David:  Yeah, like a conference room to have a business meeting. That’s private. So, you rent out from the community, those areas you need for your ceremonies. You bring down from storage, your things, which are different from the Baptists, who used it two hours before. But now it’s for all mankind, not just for a select people.

GT:  You even mentioned the Olympic-sized pools could be then reused for a font.

David:  Yeah, there’s 24 baptismal fonts. You don’t have a hang up. It was an architect’s idea to have it on cattle. That wasn’t part of the vision.

GT:  To have it on cattle, what do you mean?

David:  Well, the baptismal font on a bunch of cattle.

GT:  Oh, yeah. You’re talking about the baptismal font [for the dead in temples.]

David:  I mean, when we centralize one fancy baptismal font, you’re just asking for a bottleneck, right? Come on.

GT:  Well, I know the Salt Lake Temple is going to have two fonts, finally.

David:  Big deal. Every one of these buildings has 24. They’ve got bigger endowment rooms, or smaller. They can be divided. I mean, one of the specs, and you see it in the Kirtland Temple, it has to be able to be divided. So, it could be a full half, quarter, eight or 12.  Decide your session size.

Would you like temples to be open to  the puclic like a community center?

Joseph Smith planned for 100,000 people packed into a small area.  David Hall tells how he would keep people healthy with water purification systems and clean transportation, alongside 24 temples in the city.

GT:  But wow, it was just cool. The idea here is, and this is what I want. I want to bring it all back. Because the technology that you’re using is just cutting edge, at least from my perspective. You’re doing it cheaper than everybody else. The idea here is we’ve got this this plat back in–`the city of Zion,’ the New Vistas…

David:  Yeah, see, Zion has a bad name, because there’s Zionism. There are all kinds of things. So, when you say that, when you use that word, people go in a zillion different directions.  There are some people that think we’re going to march back to Independence to that Zion. That’s nuts. But that’s what some people think. So, you don’t want to use that word. I learned that really quickly years and years and years ago. The reason why I say New Vistas is it’s new. It just happens that one of the prescriptions is that everybody have a clear view. No apartment ever looks at another apartment. They look, they see 600 feet. So, it’s a Vista, and it’s a new concept. Then, if you look at all the problems that you have to solve to make that work, you never run out of problems. There’s always something else to work out.

GT:  So, we’ve got  transportation, but the idea is every community builds their own cars, they make their own food, they recycle their own water, they build their own appliances.

David:  They do their own energy.

GT:  It’s all self-sustaining. I mean, you can’t get any more Mormon than–we’re self- sustaining.

David:  One of the one of the prescriptions, it says it has to supply itself. It’s so casual, since they’re saying, “Well, we get one done and supplied, and do another in like manner, and fill up the world.” Just, you know, just fill up the world.

GT:  Your plan is consecration, self-sustaining, in which everybody’s got a job.

David:  Stewardships.

GT:  They’re taking care of the environment. We’re staying healthy with the healthy toilets and water conservation.  It’s all encompassing. It really is.

David:  Yeah, and that’s the whole idea of the restoration. It’s all encompassing. It’s not just religion. It’s not just ordinances, and we’re afraid of taking on the whole thing. So, we’d rather just be a Sunday school.

Is our church just a Sunday School?

David Hall’s father Tracy was the man who invented synthetic diamonds.  We’ll learn more about David and his father Tracy, founder of Hall Labs, and how David got interested in building Joseph Smith’s visionary city.

GT:  Well, I’d also like to hit a little bit about both you and your dad, because your dad is the one who started the company.

David:  Yeah.

GT:  It’s called Hall Labs. Tell us tell us what your dad started doing, and then how you got into it.

David:  Well, my dad invented how to make diamonds from carbon. That’s a pretty big deal. He left GE where he did it and accepted a job as Director of Research for BYU. They couldn’t pay him squat. They couldn’t.

GT:  Why would he take that job when he’s making diamonds?

David:  Well, it was the company. They allowed him to set up shop separately to make a living, because they couldn’t pay him. He was making back in 1954, $25K at GE, and BYU offered him $7K.

GT:  Oh my goodness.

David:  Yeah, you can imagine the discussions between my mom and my dad. This is not going to work. They had six children at the time. So, the large family, growing family, money just going in and out the door.  There’s no way he could have lived on it. So, they allowed him to have this side gig. He started building presses. He reinvented how to make diamonds in different ways. He invented a new kind of diamond called polycrystalline diamond. He invented a new kind of press called cubic press. That’s what is now worldwide.

GT:  This was for industrial use of diamonds, not just nice little rings.

David:  It was all industrial, but they’re making rings now.  The industry has matured to where a lot of your diamond rings are man-made. It’s big time now.

What do you think of David’s vision of Joseph’s city?