Boom! What's up, everyone? Welcome to Simulation. I'm your host, Alan Saakyan. We are still on site. We are now in Brooklyn, in New York. We are very excited to be talking about all things world views. We're going to be talking about math. We're talking about philosophy. We've got a lot to cover in this episode. I'm really excited to be talking to Adam Kato. Hello. Hey, how's it going? Thanks for coming out of the show. Thanks for having me. I'm really excited for this. We've had some powerful conversation in the last little bit of time. Shout out to Alex K. Chen for introducing us. So, Adam's background. Adam's currently at Stony Brook. He's double majoring in math and philosophy. He is also an undergraduate researcher there. He's a TA. He's also doing a second thesis on worldview formalisms. So, we've been talking a lot about this. There is this really gorgeous way of thinking about the way that one's mind absorbs stimuli over time and gains a perspective of a worldview. This is very different for someone that was born 10,000 years ago versus someone that was born 200 years ago or someone that was born today. They've absorbed different stimuli. They've made a different worldview then. So now, we're even trying to go as far as to literally say that, no, your brain will never disappear.  Yeah, exactly. So what? That's crazy. It's a very futuristic, almost like far out there kind of thing. But yeah, this is, I think, one of the directions in which we're heading. Yeah, so tell us about your obsessions with this idea of worldviews. Right, so I think in some sense I've always been obsessed with the concept of a worldview. Just like, you know, not so much like people watching, but like just observing like, oh, why do people act the way they do? Why do they believe the things that they do? Children do this all the time, of course. That's how they, it's a big part of how they learn about the world. Adults do it as well. Everyone does this all the time, whether or not they notice it or not. And worldviews are very interesting, I don't know, structures, I guess. Not only are they interesting in themselves, like how they can be represented or like reasoned about, like even like how we come to update our worldviews or like, yeah, the information that we intake and how we like use that information to update our worldviews. Yeah, really interesting stuff. So I should probably, I guess, talk a little bit about like how that happens or like a historical perspective. Yeah, definitely. So right, so the question I guess is like, what is a worldview anyway? Now, you ask anyone, they'll give you a different answer. I personally have been particularly influenced by like, as a, you know, philosophy major, a student of philosophy, I guess. Like, I have been particularly influenced by the like philosophical developmental like process, which like, you know, generates worldviews. Like just looking throughout the history of philosophy, you know, we can kind of depict these like philosophical systems that these philosophers have built throughout time as like their own sorts of worldviews.  Like, and you look throughout the modern period, Spinoza, Descartes, Hume, etc. They've all basically been developing worldviews or like explicit accounts of worldviews. Everyone has a worldview that they work off of, you know. So that kind of brings us to the question like, what exactly is a worldview? Now, there's a philosopher at the Free University of Brussels who I think has written probably the best account, the best like even like compressed account of what a worldview is, like a normative account of a worldview. So Clement Vidal at Free University of Brussels wrote this 2012 paper called Metaphilosophical Criteria for Worldview Comparison, where he lists basically a procedure for like how we go about like updating our worldviews and like our philosophical systems and like criteria that go into, you know, like what makes a worldview good or bad or that sort of thing. So this is a very like systematic like philosophical account of what a worldview is. And this is I think a good normative account, but it also doesn't exactly like address the nuances of like people's worldviews and like determining how exactly, you know, the mechanisms that people use to update their worldviews is on like information that they encounter, people that they encounter, artifacts that they encounter. That's a big one, which I guess will probably take up to a geometry. So it's interesting. There's this trajectory of stimuli that you absorb through your life that makes this worldview, but then there's also the way you said that you update your worldview. Right. Yeah, that's interesting. The more open-minded you are to maybe saying that, hey, I'm taking a new information. I'm going to update my worldview versus staying close-minded. Yeah, things like this. One of the real kickers here is that we, you know, I guess you could say that some people are more open-minded than others about like explicitly updating the worldviews or like updating just their beliefs in general about like, you know, like, or listening to people and arguments and trying to like critically think about the arguments and like, you know, maybe, oh, you know, my position in this argument is not, you know, the best. And there are of course people who are more close-minded to that. But what's interesting is that we all take in this like, this information kind of subconsciously or like, lately where, you know, we don't even realize that our worldviews are being updated.  Like there's certain like, like behavioral phenomena that, you know, you can, that people use to like, get you to update your beliefs in some way. So like, that's an interesting side-notice that like, yeah, you could be explicit about saying, oh, I'm going to say, well, maybe my political beliefs or whatever are, you know, I want to see if they're actually most accurate for, you know, my, what I want or like if I'm being as ethical as possible and exploring like different ethical theories or considerations or virtues or whatever. So you could be explicit about that, but also there are people who can like subtly like, permeate your worldview saying like, oh, maybe you should like, like egging you on or something like that, which is really interesting. So, so back to what I was saying about the paper that was written outlining like a normative account of what a worldview is. These are very philosophical in nature and sort of like, I wouldn't say like totally detached from like, like human subjectivity or like, human like behavior or cognition because they are like the three like, clusters I guess of like criteria for worldviews are the objective, subjective and intersubjective accounts which are like basically like, whether or not it's scientific, whether or not it agrees with your like personal motivations and experiences and whether or not it fits with like an overarching like social narrative or like, like a, yeah, like a paradigm sort of thing. Now, yeah, like, it's interesting to see how these like, these normative accounts of worldviews that people write or like philosophical accounts, they're not all that there is. There's a lot of latency that people don't see with their worldviews and like, that's something that I'm trying to capture as well with like my work on worldview studies, worldview formalisms. Not just like the like explicit, like super formal philosophical ways of like developing like philosophical systems but also capturing like the very minute sort of like, day to day like little things here and there. Yeah, oh yeah, and we'll get to some of that. I mean, yeah, even the way that you carry yourself every day has a tremendous wake in a butterfly effect across the world, smiling as you walk, cascades and impacts people, the way that you engage with other artifacts around you which we'll get to in a bit. You leave a worldview imprint in your own, in your own mind as well as you popularize things for other people to add to their worldview depending on what you're disseminating yourself. You started talking about, you know, objective, subjective and then inter-subjective. So, objective seems to be the one that society can agree upon things like the molecular compositional water or gravity or things like that. Yeah, sort of like independent of like personal or social experiences. Yeah, yeah. So like that's the, so there are in total like nine criteria that go into this or that have been outlined at least in this one paper. So the, and they're split into like three categories. So three categories of three different criteria, three different like sorts of criteria. So in the objective sense, you have like objective consistency which is like, oh, does it fit with like sort of like almost attached experience or like investigative experience of like, not even experience, but like objective fact, so to speak. Is it like internally consistent? Is it consistent with like scientific discoveries or like body of scientific knowledge that we have agreed upon that we've derived, like not derived but come to using the scientific method and you have, yeah, that's mostly what the objective, the two of the three criteria for like objective criteria. The third one is scope.  Now, but also there's the subjective accounts of worldview. So like, so scientism, for instance, so we can come up with like three, let's come up with like three different examples. So we have a scientism worldview which is like addressing explicitly like the objective criteria for worldviews. But we also have the subjective accounts, right? So this is where I think like religious worldviews are really popular and where they are most effective. And then intersubjective worldviews are, again, sort of, I guess religious worldviews also like address these and other sorts of like secular, even secular worldviews like secular ethical theories. For instance, like, if you look at effective altruism. So the intersubjective criteria are like, does it fit with like a social narrative? Is it like, is there like a social utility for it, right? Like, does it improve social harmony, social well-being, that sort of thing? So this is where I guess something like effective altruism is like a really interesting like movement and an interesting case for like intersubjective criteria for worldviews because it really does like address this sort of like social harmony, social like well-being sort of thing. Yeah, okay. So now we're starting to do a little breakdown of how we can look at worldviews through objective, subjective, intersubjective. There's also a way of understanding things with the dissemination of memes that I think is really important. Yes. So it's almost as though the more that we take in memes getting disseminated, especially through the information technology infrastructures like the internet now, it's so important for them to be as close in my opinion to objectively true as possible because we can get lost in what is not true and that can deter us away from a cohesive civilization at a time of exponential technology where it's most pressing to have cohesion and truth. So, yeah, memetics are really important here. Yeah, absolutely. So, memetics are, yeah, they're very important in like worldview studies because that's basically how, you know, your worldviews are updated, right? So worldview updating is like, in my opinion, like probably the biggest or not, it's hard to determine what exactly is the most important like part of this field because of course like being able to represent it effectively. And worldview updating would happen from the time you're born. Oh, yeah.   Yeah. Well, this is also why, like, it's a good example for like describing why like local like pocket, like political pockets stay the same or mostly the same, you know, are more resistant to change, right? Because, you know, just take, like, imagine you're born in a very, like let's say liberal town, right? All your friends are liberal, your family's liberal.    And, but now let's say you grow up in a totally conservative town and people are, you know, doing the same sort of thing, right? It's more likely that you as a person will adopt these conservative beliefs, right?  Now, updating, right? I would say now we can really tunnel down into like a silo and not really taking other information sources. Yeah. Those are our blind spots that we get and like to update our world view with those new patches of information is so important to have a well-rounded. Yeah. And that's, that's a good reason or yeah, that's why the internet is so important as well because now you're not, your information network is not just limited to the people that you talk to and like, like large news networks or local news networks, right? You can go anywhere and see what anyone's writing. Like this is, you know, you know, communication, like mass communication is like at our fingertips now and that's really important for world view updating as well because you're exposed to so much, so much content that you otherwise wouldn't have been like maybe like 25 years ago or something. That's right, that's right. And especially like within the past decade of social media. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, with the click of a button you can now update millions of people without needing to even go through a network yourself, like an incumbent newspaper or television network even and prior to that, the most you could have is your social circle. Your community could maybe know after a couple of days of some accomplishment. That's it, yeah.  But now you can grow up in the same environment but have people across the country, across the world. Maybe we're doing too much world view updating. As in, yeah, there's, it says though we're not world view updating with the high level of efficacy towards truth. We're now just looking through too much noise. Social signaling, sort of thing. Social signaling and noise in general. It's not necessarily that because there's so much more information that that means that there's so much more signal that there's so much more world view updating towards truth. That there may even be world view updating towards fake news and deep fakes and everything we got going on now in the near future. Do you find that to be a little bit concerning as you go through like world view updating in the positive lens towards truth and towards an objective societal push towards cohesion. But then there's also this like false world view updating. Right. So the issue with that is that the, I don't know if I'd call it exactly false world view updating but the sort of the sort of like quick jumping towards like updating, right? That can be an issue because it's so, you can do it so instantly without, you don't have to like take the time to like think critically on it. Think critically. Look at more sources. Yeah. Yeah. It's very like immediate. Yeah. And you can, so you, I just like to objectively rank that as, as worse because if you're not critically thinking and you're not looking at all those additional sources, you can just be manipulated by one item of a video or an article or whatever. Oh yeah. Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah. So that's a big issue. Yeah. Continue, continue. Right. Yeah. Like fake news is a big issue. And I think it's, all these reasons are why it's so important to have like a systematic account of like your own world view and how it changes and like being able to even like visualize like how, like the information that you encounter and like being able to like pair that with like how your behavior changes or like, like how your like communicative style changes, all these things, like there's so much like behavioral data that and like communicative communicative data that you can like, you know, pair I guess, like that is interesting. available. You just have to be clever. So, so the idea is that it's fascinating if we gain enough of a, of a metacognitive perspective on our own lives to say, to look in a mirror at ourselves and the stimuli we've taken in order to be who we are, to have the world view that we do and then the, and then we have to really honestly look at ourselves because then we can realize that maybe I'm not critically thinking enough, maybe I'm not looking at extra information patches that I should be in order to update more of my world view a little bit more holistically. And that's why, so, yeah, people also have to be incentivized to do this. They could be internally incentivized to do it just by like being truth seeking, for instance, they could be incentivized by like externally just like, either by like social pressures, like peer pressures or like school pressures or something like that. Like let's say they have a project where they have to do this and they have to get a grade on it, that sort of thing. Now, yeah, there are some like, there's some issues. They're like with like incentive alignment because a lot of times people wouldn't be so like incentivized to like think critically and like really reflect on whether or not they're doing it correctly. And this is where, so I didn't touch on all nine of those points. Totally. Yeah. It would take like, it would take hours for each of them. I know. But like, this is why, I think it was like the fifth point that was outlined or something, which is like personal utility. This is why that's so important for world views is because if you want to actually do something like praxeologically or like to actually like take action in like making the world a better place. Yeah. And like getting people to be like more like reflective and like, that's a bit, like you have to get them to do it. You have to make it, you have to give some sort of like utility or like some, so basically it's just some reason why people should want to do this sort of thing. So people already have like peer pressures or like truth seeking pressures or like their own internal pressures or external pressures to do this sort of thing. But it's not super commonplace. Yeah. We have to really incentivize this to help us progress faster. Yeah. And that's why this sort of like comprehensive world view study is important. Yeah. Because like if you're just focusing on like the objective parts, right, sure like I agree that's very, very important to do. Like it's like modeling the world as it is. Right. You have to determine exactly how to get people to want to do this sort of thing. Right. There's like because you know we are socially embedded. There's a lot of like stuff flying around in the social sphere that are drawing people away from like being That's right. Distractions are rampant right now. Yeah. If you want to actualize your fullest potential into the world, you have to become really good at looking at yourself in the mirror and it's calling yourself out for when you're too much in an echo chamber. Your world views not being updated what properly enough. Now Adam, I think this is important to address and we talked about this when we were chatting earlier. The idea of a potentially a best world view. The idea that they're that I know this is tough for a philosopher. This is really, it's tough. But at the same time this is really important for early childhood education is that if we say that okay, a child's born into the world, there should be just some fundamentals that we embed into the neurology of a child at a young age into their mind.  The heart beats 100,000 times a day.  And maximize your time here. Find what you care about and bring value to the world. I think that if we have some sort of a bare fundamental truth that we can build worldviews upon like we've been doing like, okay, we learned agriculture. We're here. We learned some scientific method principles. We're here now that if we keep building on that and if more people gravitate towards that and potentially away from the echo chambers where there's potentially people coming in with propaganda to try and lure their eyeballs and attention into things that are fake news that are actual that are actual false for the greed and pockets of other people. So what do you think about potentially an ideal truth seeking world view? It's definitely a hot topic amongst pretty much anyone. So, yeah, that's a tall drink of water. It depends. So like, some people would view it, various people would view it in different ways. So you'd say you'd have like postmodernists, right?  Everything is subjective, that sort of thing. Which is, yeah, like, that's one like view of it. Then you have other, you know, other philosophers or academics or anyone really who say, oh no, there's like some objective truth out there. Some objective truth in, or like, maybe like even localized objective truths like within like aesthetics or like ontology, metaphysics, epistemology, so on and so forth. Like, is there such a thing as objective beauty? Is there such a thing as like objective like structure of reality? Like, that we can maybe like formalize mathematically in some way. Is, you know, there is some objective like nature to like mathematics also. Anything like that. Right? So, it very well could be the case that these are, there are objective truths in these like localized senses. And, you know, it's very difficult question. But, you know, maybe there could be like objective beauty versus maybe not like objective like nature of mathematics. Is mathematics cognitive? Is it like platonistic in like the abstract detached sense of mathematics? Like, there's a lot of different like, sub questions that this question is begging, I think. So, whether or not there is one explicit like one, one true world view, it's also a very open-ended question. I think if we frame it in the sense of like, is there one world view that under some like, some normative account of world views is the best world view? That is a different question. I think that has an answer. Oh, okay, cool. Let's, let's answer that question. Right. So, you could say, well, you know, we want our world view to be as scientifically valid as possible. We want our world view to be as, you know, emotionally, you know, drawing in as possible, that sort of thing. And so, you could say, well, maybe we have some like optimization function or something where we want to optimize like some certain metric, which is already problematic. But maybe there's like something that we want to optimize for, some interplay between the different criteria that go into world views or philosophical systems or anything like that. Right. Okay. Optimize flourishing. What is flourishing? Okay. So, Aristotle will tell you something differently that he's going to classical. Yeah. Raising the baseline of living for all beings. Okay. Yeah. And then, now you break that down. There's a lot of metathical concerns here. Like, oh, which normative theory do we pick? Is there like some static normative theory that we pick? Or are we constantly in this dialectical process of updating our ethical principles? We are. That's right. And so, what is really left to argue about? If we're, yeah, seriously, what is left to worry about? If humanity engages in a continuous dialogue about updating our world view over time and continuously updating what we believe is the best logical structure, the function for raising a child's mind into the world, what is there to argue about after that? Anything that's localized within the dialogue. And also, that just gets sorted out. Sure. But then that just gets sorted out. Of the dialogue itself. Sure. Okay. How does it take place? There's like rhetoric, argumentation, logic, all this sort of stuff that you have to reflect on the like dialectical process or the dialogical process. Yeah.  Like, for what purposes are we having this dialogue? You know, some people will say, oh, well, to get at, you know, to maximize human flourishing or human well-being or like human balance or something like, in, according to whatever like, theory they subscribe to. So, like, Aristotle will tell you something different than like, ineffective altruists or like, someone who subscribes valence realism versus like, virtue ethics or something like that. Right. So, I feel like, I feel like we can get, we talk about this a little bit lost in just, the incessant drive to be like, oh, well this is just such a little bit different than this is. And, because if we get so lost in that, then we don't, we just, we gotta drive towards some unity code, that drives us towards that flourishing and then constantly have dialogue about how to update that unity code. Well, yeah, this is why I think, worldviews are such a good, like all-encompassing tool for this. Is that, you know, we can do like, we have certain values, right? We can subscribe to different value systems or theories of value, right? So, one of them could be like, utilitarianism, where we say we value, like the greatest good for the greatest number of people, and if you're really like, into it, you can say, oh, we can give you some like metrics and some like ontological restrictions saying like, oh, yeah, like, this is how exactly we measure well-being. So, we should calculate what we ought to do in order to like, maximize that sort of well-being on those metrics. Other people will say, oh, you should just subscribe to these virtues. So, let's throw the utilitarian framework completely out of the window and say, oh, subscribe to this system of virtues, and another virtue, as this would say something similar, but like, give it a different system of virtues, and then you have contractualists and deontologists and so on and so forth, right? We'll tell you something completely different. And so, we can actually like, systematically track this, using, not only systematically track, like, our ethical considerations, but like, how they relate to our ontological considerations and our like, you know, systems of action and political beliefs and so on and so forth.  And you said, you said something that I think I forgot, like you said, like, why should we care about like the, like, what is there left to argue, I think. And I think you said something after that. Maybe, maybe not so much, like, there will always be things left to argue. Oh, but we're going like too far into one like pocket or one corner. I think you said something about that. Yeah. And we get to, and we're getting potentially too caught up in, irrelevant things. And yeah, and there's got to be some sort of a, of a, of a basic level of, like, we all agree that we came from the cosmos. We all agree your heart beats 100,000 times a day. We all agree that you're going to get about 25,000 days to live and that the stimuli that you put in your mind are really important for where you end up going in the world, the formulation of your world view. So I think if we can agree on these fundamentals that we're all children of evolution of the cosmos and we're all one tribe as the planet and we write these things into our code and then we write into the code that we're going to maximize resource flows to raise that baseline. And we got to figure out how to maximize the flows and how to raise the baseline. This is through dialogue we get there. But that, that, those are the things left to talk about. But I mean, how many people, how many people, how do we update the minds of the people that disagree that we came from the cosmos? How about do we update the minds of the people that say, my heart does not beat 100,000 times a day? You know? Yeah. Yeah. That's, that's a very big issue as well. It's a big, even like political issue. But, I think I have a question for you. Yeah. My question is, for you, where, how do you update your world view? So, it's a good question. So, I update my world view basically by having, I don't exactly have a static world view that I keep at all times and then say, oh, here's how I, like, based on this new information, here's, like, how I can look into it and this, like, formal system sort of thing. I don't, I don't exactly have that, like, explicitly mapped out. But, I do have this sort of, like, rough picture of, like, oh, here's a normative account of what a world view is and here's how, like, I can represent my beliefs and like, personal history and so on and so forth with this, like, world view tool basically like a, almost like a modeling tool. So, like, the different parts interact, right? You know, whether I have certain ontological beliefs or like epistemological beliefs or whatever I consider to be, like, first philosophy or like most, like, philosophical area that takes most precedence, that sort of thing and like, what reasoning tools I use, so on and so forth. So I have, like, a rough model of that and I say, okay, well, based on this new information that I run into and where are the weak points in my beliefs and should I alter those or just like, think more critically on them because maybe they're right, that sort of thing. So that's, so argumentation is a good way to update your beliefs and I also use, so, also like the, the online nationalist community uses the term updating to mean something sort of different in some sense, like, but I just, I don't mean it in the strict, like, Bayesian sort of context, in like, the context of like, formal like, belief revision. It's more like a rough picture, but anyway, like, yeah, like, that's basically what I do. It's argumentation.  Um, We may have ramped our population up too fast, in the last hundred years, and with that population being ramped up so fast has made it harder for us to update our world views more effectively towards that basic unity of truth that we needed, because now we have so many world views that are so all over the place, so far away from truth, in so many different ways, and those are 10 year, 30 year, 50 years into their lives, the formulation of those minds, that now it's becoming more and more difficult as the population's increasing, but the ability to create media that can update people's world views is something that we care a lot about, and that if we can properly do that and get people to awaken and drool to how gorgeous it is that we are all from Earth and that there have been a hundred billion people that lived and died before us to build all of the infrastructure that we have today that then maybe there will be a deeper sense of awe and connection to each other even though our population has skyrocketed so much. You spend a lot of time I can tell and in lands of philosophy that are really deep that I haven't scratched the surface of and that a lot of people haven't scratched the surface of and that going that deep can be both a tremendous advantage because you can more granularly break things down but it can also potentially be a disadvantage when we are trying and the same things true about anyone at the edge of their field that understands the granularity of everything in their field but then the lateral thinking your lateral thinking is still really good at them but there is a lot of lateral thinking that needs to still be developed to gain that multidisciplinary holistic understanding of things and making things simple the Occam's razor approach to just going and making it the most simple way to disseminate to people that can then get them most easily actualized I want us to talk about artifacts this is extremely important you made me really realize that every time that we say the word water we say the word bowl or cup or car or whatever we are further baking this artifact into our mind every time we make a purchase that's a digital log of something that we've bought and then that if we can open up these data silos of the things that we buy and the words that we use and we can really understand how people have gained a world view they have and how to best help people update their world views that goes back to what you were saying about lateral thinking and multidisciplinary interdisciplinary thinking is that we have all these people working in different areas on different silos and there's not as much connectivity between them as maybe there should be maybe philosophers would do philosophy differently if they knew more about biology and neuroscience physics there's only so much that you can specialize in or know too much about but yeah opening up these silos and connecting these silos is very important for getting more holistic there's no other way to get a more holistic picture than by just doing it connecting learning about all these different areas and trying to connect them and build new sorts of disciplines we see this all the time in pure math as well where mathematicians synthesize different areas of mathematics to create new branches you said something earlier that I found interesting there were a lot of things that you said that were interesting so I kind of forgot it but I think it had to do with I associated with the term global connectivity so I think you were saying our population has been increasing so much over the past 100 years and not only that but we're becoming more globally connected thanks to the internet you can talk to anyone around the world people like Dunbar's number is probably increasing in some sense because you can use different people very quickly and have periodic reminders that sort of thing so of course that's only under one definition of what it means to communicate with someone or sufficiently I guess but we're becoming so much more globally connected and we're being exposed to different world views that we've never seen before different political theories or social hierarchies and that sort of thing than we've ever been exposed to before and so this is why systematically understanding people who are not like ourselves who did not grow up in the same conditions why that's so important and how we can figure out how to more effectively come to or be socially harmonious and not only that but this is also where I know social justice gets a bad rap but this is where some sort of social justice comes into play where there are people across the world we are fortunate enough to live in first world country with all these running water and so on and so forth social justice about raising the baseline of living for all beings across the world and eradicating the violences that occur in greed and corruption and racism and sexism and bigotry of any sort I think we also get very caught up in our own basically we've had such a lot of us have had such good educational opportunities that sort of thing where we sort of like there is a quote from this book Philosophical Dialectics an essay on Metaphilosophy by Nicholas fresher where he taught I don't remember the exact quote verbatim but it was like systemic interconnectedness of philosophical disciplines philosophy we can really get we can hop on our hobby horses and just go in one direction without considering the rest what's important sometimes it seems like we're even doing this with I hesitate to say first world philosophy but it seems like we often discount people in underdeveloped countries which is why effective altruism is a good starting point I think there needs to be more infrastructural development or something that's a completely different topic of discussion I want to hear how you want to help us understand how we engage with artifacts and how those update our world views so we should first just explicate what exactly an artifact is artifacts are just any technological gadgets basically any item that has been human made a table could be an artifact or a computer could be an artifact the internet in some sense could be considered an artifact it's describing the ontology of the internet you can do it in several different ways the internet is an artifact it's a man made construct that we interact with we interact with different parts of the internet of course it's shaped our lives so much not just our belief systems based on what we've interacted with on the internet but even just our neurology or the way we our cognition there's general trends going more towards instant gratification that sort of thing thanks to twitter and video games and so on and so forth yeah so you said how can we use artifact understand our engagement with artifacts and how that updates our world views yeah it's hard to systematically track that because we don't have enough obtaining the behavioral data is also very difficult but I think also with the internet of things it would be easier to track just what you interact with not even how you interact with it when we open up the data flows it becomes easier to do this to see what we're interacting with and become decentralized and then gain better insights I feel like I also sort of gave a mischaracterization of the internet of things it's not exactly like it's hard to describe exactly but one example I could give is WeChat Pay we have all these different so WeChat Pay is Venmo for China basically but it's ubiquitous you can use it to purchase pretty much anything in big cities in China and so if you can you have a catalog of all these different things that you're selling and you can say here's a transaction that I made I purchased this thing or spent money to do whatever that would be one way of determining here's what I interact with in terms of the artifactual world now with people it's sort of similar it's very difficult to do this data science there's going back the reason why we're trying to do this is to determine how our worldviews change based on what we interact with so of course they change based on how we interact with different things around us and different people around us and different ideas that are around us so you could call them meme plexus collections of memes that form that tend to form together and how we interact with those higher order complexes of ideas so this is a very fruitful research area there's so many artifacts because everything is an artifact it becomes really difficult to identify which artifacts we should actually log first as part of making up our world view and then better understand how we're updating our lives with those artifacts it seems as though there's so much data in the silos of the facebook's and amazon google's and apples of the world even our banking data just to be able to decentralize those and be able to scrape them to find where what artifacts we're engaging with how often we're taking uber or lift rides how often we are purchasing food versus purchasing groceries and what groceries we are purchasing with farmers we're supporting this goes again it's the cybernetics view of things it's just all super interconnected the whole causality thing is interesting too you could say oh there were these trends in my life where let's say I did purchase more of this type of food or this food at this type of place let's say like a fast food place and you know what caused that there could be extra stressors travel or something like that you could totally start finding relationships and starting to this is a big research area that sandy pentland's lab the social physics lab at the MIT media lab is working on this sort of thing I'm not sure exactly how much they use causality really things but there would be an interesting thing to look at alright how about we go into the benefits of semantic publishing oh yeah so this is a bit different from semantic publishing is just like we should first I guess look at the history of by semantic publishing I mean like scientific publishing like publishing scientific results in like a semantic like let's say like markup language some like like formal ontology or something that is machine readable like natively machine readable as opposed to like having to like do all this like text mining on like corporate of text now semantic publishing is sort of like I wouldn't say like not disrupting like publishing industry but along those like lines where for the past several hundred years I think like 300 years or something we've had this like journal sort of publishing or like a paper based publishing so you write up a paper and then you disseminate it you like submit it to a journal and then you know if it's good it gets accepted and it gets disseminated to all the people who want to read the journal that sort of thing and we've seen like a more like open source type of thing with like the archive and like plus one all those like open access journals now that's really really good especially for like opening those like data silos to like people who otherwise would not be able to form the journals but they're still also in this format that is not machine readable right or it's like hard to like get actual like content like scientific content from those papers right so to get actually like semantic like meaning that's very difficult now what semantic polishing does is it says okay you can still like submit these papers but you can also define like these semantic networks of like you know like high level scientific information or just information about the study that you've done or you know whatever research you've done so this was developed at the Free University of Amsterdam by Tobias Kuhn so he has this like so they're called nano publications so there's a series of like different sorts of semantic publications so there's micro I think I think it's like micro publications is what it's called is another like form so it's still like these like a paper based sort of publication but it's like a very short paper with like also with like semantic data so the more machine readable our scientific papers are the more we can make connections between them and better understand how to update our world view faster more effectively not even so much that but just like like deriving like new like avenues for like scientific exploration and like also determining like this person uploaded or like uploaded this network of data there's like prominence there as well you see an array of data being published and then you realize well what about this area or that area or intertwining these two and so then those are the those are the black and or those are the gray areas that we haven't explored yet and so then we're prompted go invest into the investigate into those areas and even like like for visualization purposes it's really good to totally yeah okay how are you going to take your your undergraduate research how are you going to take the the thesis of of these world views how are you going to take this and disseminate it as an entrepreneur an artist as a professor how are you going to get this out to more people yeah um so that's the classic like academic issues like oh I'm working on this stuff that's really cool but like oftentimes very few people care about it it like especially like um if you're let's say even in like pure math um like highly specialized fields of pure math like I heard one person say like yeah I dropped out of my hd after my like fifth or sixth year because after working on it for like all these years because I realized um I wasn't passionate about it or like as passionate as I used to be and like uh you know only four people could understand it outside of myself much less care um so that's the classic like academic issue um and same with philosophy like uh outside of like typically like pretty narrow so you want to be translational to hopefully billions of people yeah that's a big issue but like um so the way I the way I yeah the way I'm trying to do this I I'm very much like um impact focus first um I would not do it I would not um do this work if I didn't think it would it could actually have like um positive social impact um there are of course issues with this sort of thing as well but not just uh I don't want to just uh like do like meta philosophy or like like work on formalizing the worldviews that sort of thing I want I'm doing that for the particular reason that I can you know actually create um like applications uh for people to like their own worldviews uh track how their like worldviews are updating um and that sort of thing and how would you with other people how would you make those applications for people to better update their worldviews and debate with others um so this goes back into like uh determining what exactly is a worldview so there are certain like representation issues that you have to um consider like how do I actually model things um and how do I get people how do I incentivize people to actually like uh write in their own worldviews right so one way of doing of starting to do this is saying like oh you can just like uh get it from like polls that people answer right like oh like do you prefer like this political candidate or that political candidate or do you prefer this um like uh in in this situation would you prefer to you know um in this like ethical minded situation like the trolley problem for instance would you prefer to do this or that uh and you could say oh well you know different answers um that you give on these like uh survey questions can determine uh certain certain things about your worldview um and maybe like let's say uh you're given this like this uh you know uh like a political compass or something like that we say oh maybe like maybe that's not an accurate description uh let me like investigate this for that sort of thing um there are that's that's only one trajectory there's a whole bunch of different trajectories that are possible for this sort of thing so you're just going to keep exploring yeah and like do like another um another thing to consider is like you can also use it to uh help philosophers do better philosophy or like um more like interconnected philosophy um where you know they say okay here's here's like a philosophical system that I'm working with that I'm working in right or like uh some like some uh some some theories and some some fields that I subscribe to and advocate for um and maybe there's some people who oppose this so I'm going to argue with them and we can come to like either a compromise or like whatever that sort of thing um now the data silos seem to be a really hot place to go to because if you can scrape that data and incentivize people to work together across the silos then you can really gain a good psychometric footprint on what someone's world view is and you can also like um say like you can suggest like communities for people to join based on like certain um like you know then you can pass them that as the next step yeah and there are also a lot of ethical concerns here um there's like privacy concerns and like well if it's all encrypted and decentralized uh anonymized then maybe it's a little bit easier to do but also um you do want to be uh little like little nudged out of an echo chamber and you know you can get that if someone's making a recommendation for you based on um your purchase history and your chat history and stuff like that um I want to ask you a couple quick questions that we typically ask on the way out and of course we've only scratched the surface on world view understandings uh and and updating and period this is a very interesting subfield and we'll hopefully be able to dive into this uh in more depth over time yeah the the typical question is I think it was good though it was a good first uh conversational start to things first question what's a core driving principle of yours uh oh man um it depends on the day I guess um but I'd say most of the time it's uh social harmony the reason why I'm doing this is like it's a communications project pretty much I wouldn't even characterize it as like a philosophy project it's a communications project um for people to uh more effectively like collaborate with each other and cooperate with each other and just understand each other um so that also can get us close to the truth right yeah um if you know we're not so caught up in like these like bickering and that sort of thing um so yeah probably uh I'd say social harmony it's a very like complicated answer that I wouldn't have enough time to go into here because the way I got to that um to this you know um this like uh conclusion I guess or this like core driving principle um is like very strange and like convoluted and um like the a better explication of social harmony in the way that I see it is like also like a bit like convoluted um but yeah basically just getting like increasing like I guess like global connectivity and like yeah yeah that's a good answer social harmony um the communication infrastructure and design that that we have today will directly produce the world we live in tomorrow so um it's a good good answer what about next question if you could rebuild civilization from scratch how would you design it oh yeah so I got a similar question at uh like an icebreaker thing um or an icebreaker session at a conference that I went to about like six seven months ago um I had I didn't really have a good answer then uh I'm still not sure if I have a good answer but um if I could design civilization from scratch um like human civilization uh is there like a starting point that I'm going towards or hmm um how do I design it I don't know exactly how I would design it but I would probably just uh get people to be more cooperative or like like I don't know that's that's a very loaded question um but yeah um I don't know if I'm supposed to be there's so many different like factors here like am I supposed to be designing like um like the biology of humans or like uh like communicative structures or something like it very much pick um yeah um so like if I were to like let's say like program my own like world um where you know we don't have like um the several billion or however like 14.7 billion years of of cosmic like evolution um and then like you know biological evolution so on and so forth um yeah that's that's a really cool question um I would there's like population concerns as well um yeah I definitely change um how receptive people are to like uh you know people who's I guess worldviews oppose their own and just pretty much make people more open to like uh new information new experiences that sort of thing um there's my like um like comprehensive answer would take much more time to explain but yeah that's this is good um it's it's thought experiment wise I'm glad that you're uh you also ran in a bunch of different ways which is very important um next question do you think we're in a simulation? um I definitely did at one point um in fact that was the grounding for my entire worldview for several months um and that's a long story as well but um I when you were in that worldview tell us about what it was like um so I I sort of like latched on so I had these like ontological um beliefs I guess or like uh on like arguments I wouldn't say ontological arguments because that typically has a connotation or like a reference to like um certain like philosophical arguments throughout history like by Aquinas and um Gordel and like other people um but uh these like arguments basically like they were started um based on Zeno's paradoxes of motion um and so I got to thinking like oh maybe uh space time is discreet because I think I can better refute the arguments against like uh continuous space time than I can against discreet space time and like I have all these like computational tools that I've been exposed to that sort of thing and like oh yeah like okay um and of course like growing up with the internet and like computers I was probably more biased towards that view as well um and then like things such as like the simulation argument um like Boston's simulation argument um and stuff that max time mark has written those sorts of things uh definitely uh like push me further towards that um and so I the you said I uh am on my second undergrad thesis my first undergrad thesis was actually on it was motivated by um this simulation aspect where it was actually giving like like uh computational formalisms for um um like like uh you know the base like ontological structure of the world um and how we can um basically abstract from certain um like computational models um to you know give a natural like account of uh that's like this simulatory sort of yeah yeah yeah because when you do go back and compute what happens with this this code in this universe and you fast forward 13.8 billion years you see us here having this conversation alright last question what do you think is the most beautiful thing in the world oh yeah okay um I don't know if it's like I think math honestly that that's that's my honest answer is math like there's um it's so nicely compressed and uh like I've I think the strongest like emotional reactions that I've had to things in my life was actually to like um mathematical results that I've seen I love it so probably like I don't think there's like I don't subscribe to objective um beauty but in from me personally in my own subjective yeah experience I love it I love that um most generally like in most cases yeah yeah this has been such a good episode across world views across understanding how best update them across understanding how to best parse all of the information finding signal updating our world views through that helping understand how to best guide children through their stimuli and their world views and there's a lot to unpack left but I like I like the I like the path towards it towards a civilizational truth and building on top of that and having dialogue to build on that towards social harmony towards social harmony yeah thanks for coming on the show thanks for having me this is great yeah it's been such a super pleasure thanks everyone for tuning in we greatly appreciate it we would love to hear from you let us know your thoughts in the comments below on the topics we were talking about do join us in the conversation also do check out Adam's links below in the bio check out his links and join us join simulation we need your help to continue sustaining the project growing it coming to more great places like New York to interview diverse leaders so do join us and go and build the future everyone manifest your destiny into the world we got 25,000 days each let's build the future we love you very much and we'll see you soon peace that's it cool awesome good job


What is up? Hey, welcome to the new SecureAgementureHeadquarters studio. Ten screens, first time in it. It's not even done yet. Just got carpeted yesterday. Lights are being hung. Dylan's got a big old smile on today, man, because we are in the new studio. Let me know what you think in comments, whether you're watching on Facebook, whether you're watching on YouTube. Let me know what you think in comments below. Man, is this amazing or is this amazing? It keeps growing. You guys keep hooking us up with amazing stuff to talk about. We keep helping you. We're dropping about a dozen videos a week. I was on the insurance guys podcast earlier today, and that's something we talked about was, hey, give back. Help people. Over 92% of interest agents fail. In our new studio, we're proud of it. It's only going to get better. We're going to constantly be improving it to all freaking ten screens. Amazing. Dylan, is that good? Anything else you want me to touch on for the studio? Bailey built a super tower, a $6,000 super tower. It hooks up all ten HDMI's to run this joint. It's nuts. It's amazing. Give us some love in the comments below if you like it, if you hate it, if you love it. I don't know how you would hate it, but if you would, I'd love to know. So that's the studio. I also want to mention, you guys will see, I'm wearing my lanyard tag for 8% Nation in Dallas at the Statler. Just got these in today. Are you going to be sitting general? Are you going to have a general pass and be sitting general? Or is it the Statler in Dallas end of July? You want to hang on for the content today, too. So stay tuned. VIP, a VIP pass end of July, July 26, 27. That's the Statler. We're going to be talking about how to make you more money and create long-term wealth in the insurance industry. VIP seats are like $2.88 right now till tomorrow. And then Premiere, unbelievable. The Premiere's going to be insane. You're going to get to meet the speakers. You're actually going to get to go on stage, go in the speaker catwalk and hang out in the speaker green room and get a quick picture with each and every speaker. Unbelievable. Front row. These Premiere seats are insane. We've only got 70 of these total. And we've already had several fly-off the shelves. The front row is almost filled up from the Premiere. So make sure you check these things out. All right. Also, my boy, Michael Irvin. Just released earlier. I can freaking, I'm excited, man. Michael Irvin, the passion, the enthusiasm, the work ethic. He's going to teach you how to be unbelievable. And I'm excited to have him part of your station. I'm a huge Dallas Cowboys fan, so I'm pretty jacked to get up there and hang out with Michael, introduce him, get to hang out on stage. You guys get to go meet him in the green room. Unbelievable. We're excited about that. He's going to be amazing. We're jazzed. We got more speakers to come, though. More speakers to come. Unreal. I'm excited. I'm super excited about Michael Irvin. Welcome to 8% Club. Let's jump in. All right. So today, I want to talk about the ability that you have to earn a six-figure renewal income with Medicare. Everybody has the ability and option to sell Medicare. What's neat, though, is our Medicare, the reason that this topic came up is I had an agent call in, an agent talked to me today and said, hey, he said, your Medicare leads are unbelievable. He said, he said, you guys may not believe it. Who cares? He said that when he buys our Medicare leads, he calls them, he then sets an appointment, and then when he sits with them, he's closing 100%. And it's not his first order either. He's getting our leads, he's calling them, and he's sending appointments, and he's closing 100% of the ones that he sits with. That's pretty crazy. Our Medicare leads are firing me up because I didn't even realize how good they were, but I'm starting to get feedback on the fact that those things are legit. If you never tried our Medicare leads, they can help you create a six-figure renewal income because when you own Medicare, when you sell Medicare, you get paid a commission as long as they keep the policy on the books. And so I'm a big life guy. I don't even like Medicare as much, but our Medicare leads are ridiculous, and they can help you because you talk about making a couple hundred dollars a year per person, right? So you need, and Dylan helped me if my math sucks, you need 500 clients to make a six-figure renewal income from Medicare, four to 500 clients a year to have and to earn a six-figure renewal income selling Medicare. They're easier to get in front of. They're easier to close, and they're perfect for fact-finding. So you'll end up finding opportunities because you fact-find when you're sitting there with someone interested in Medicare, and our Medicare leads are perfect for that. We don't even, we do almost 50,000, you heard it right, we do almost 50,000 leads a month now. I mean, we are doing so many leads that most vendors would get put out of business or wouldn't be able to keep up. That's how many freaking Medicare, that's how many leads we do in general. We got a question now. Question, are you mic'd up? Yeah, I am. Nice. So Chia on Facebook just wants to know if we're talking about Medicare Advantage leads or MedSup? Yeah, so General Medicare. General Medicare so that you can sell them, supplement, advantage, whatever you want to do. I prefer a General Medicare lead so that you can do whatever you want. Great question, 50,000. We are getting so close to generating 50,000 leads a month. We may end up being one of the biggest vendors in the country. Actually, I believe right now that we are the biggest digital lead generation vendor in the country and you can talk to the owner on his cell phone. Like, where else can you find that? I was on a podcast earlier and they say, hey, there's a lot of lead vendors. Yes, I'm not here to say that we have the best leads in the world because I can't prove it, right? I would probably be lying, maybe I wouldn't be. But what I can do is I can say that I like to build a relationship with people that we work with and our Medicare leads are ridiculous. We're on 8% club to help you be an 8% or our Medicare leads help agents that want to get in front of people stay in the 8% and make six figures. Relationship is huge. I want to build a relationship with you. I was talking to a lady Belinda earlier that had a little bit of a discrepancy with our leads, right? I think it was like a misspelled email address, something small that was like, it wasn't a perfect situation. I called her from my cell phone, resolved it. She is extremely happy, buying more leads. She loves us, right? Because of the relationship that I try to build with each one of our customers. And then whether you're selling Medicare, whether you're working leads, whether you own a lead company, whether you own a training company, it doesn't matter whether you're in business at all. Service. Service is how you're going to separate yourself anytime and our service. We talk about it every deal and true or false. We talk about it every single morning meeting. True. Service is what is all about. Anyone can help people. Anyone can sell stuff. But they don't all try to build a relationship and they don't all try to have amazing customer service. So when I talk about Medicare leads and creating a six-figure renewal income, because you say, okay, let's work it backwards. You guys love when I break down numbers. $100,000. And let's just say divided by, I don't know, let's just say an average, let's say an average sell is $300, right?  Let's just divide it by there. You're literally looking at about 333 clients to create a renewal income. And our Medicare leads can help you get there quite fast. You say, well, Cody, how many Medicare leads would I need to buy? You would probably need to buy about, I would say you'll probably need to buy about 1,633, so that you can close 20%. You can set 40%, you can sit with 20% to 30%, and close 20%. You say, okay, well, how many do I need to buy? Shoot, let's do, I mean, most people don't sell that many. Most people are selling like 100 a year, which I think if you want to think bigger and do more, you can do that, okay? So, oh, that's about 30 leads a week. I'm glad you asked. Cody, okay, how many leads do I need to buy per week to end up hitting that within one year? That's all. So you say, hey, I want to make $100,000. Per year for the rest of my life. All right. Then you need to buy 30 of our Medicare leads. So what I would do is, right now, I would call into our office, 833-40Agent,<PHONE_NUMBER>, and I would tell them, hey, I want to buy 30 Medicare leads for as little as I can pay right now. And then they're going to give you a price and you're going to say, yeah, here's my credit card information, here's the area I want, here's where I want them delivered, and I want them to start this date, right, today, Monday, whatever. And then about 50 weeks from now, if you're brand new, you're going to be making a six-figure renewal income all because you started buying 30 Medicare leads a week. You say, well, Cody, the most vendors and most people I work with, you can't just buy 30 leads a week and actually have success and then a year later be making six figures consistently. Here you can, and that doesn't even include you fact-finding. When you include fact-finding, and you talk about final expense, life insurance, mortgage protection, annuities, before long, this is immediately turned into, a couple hundred grand, a quarter of a million dollars, $300,000 a year, because you're buying those, you're fact-finding, and then you're selling the products that I like to sell, life insurance, annuities, and you end up earning, can they see this over here doing? Yeah. About a quarter of a million dollars per year all because you did two things. You did this and you did this. You bought 30 Medicare leads a week and you fact-fined it.  I'm not. But if you want to earn a six-figure renewal income and just sell Medicare and focus on that, then buy our Medicare leads, buy 30 of them a week and fact-find. Because I just heard from an agent recently, well, and Tommy Mack wants to buy final expense leads for cheap. Dude, you should do that right here. He just shot me a text during the show. But if you want to sell Medicare, I just heard from an agent locally that our Medicare leads, when he sits with them, he closes 100 percent. And let's just say that he sits with 20 percent and he buys 30. Say he sits with 20 percent, that's six. That doesn't even include that there's some husband and wife policies involved. You're writing five, six apps a week pretty easily. That didn't include a spouse. That didn't include a double-sell. That didn't include a couple, all because you took the steps. And I'm talking the first step is this. Buy some Medicare leads. The second step is when you get there, fact-find. Dillon, any comments or questions you want to touch on at all today? In the brand-new freaking studio, talking about Michael Irvin. Tate on YouTube, he was just wondering, is this a good time to buy Medicare leads or is there a better time of the year? I know agents that are writing a dozen apps a week right now and it's not even in open enrollment. Now it's in the secondary enrollment period, disenrollment, all that. So yeah, there's never a better time than now. I know agents that'll write 40, 50 Medicare apps a month using these leads outside of annual open enrollment. And during AEP, they'll write 100 apps a week. 100 apps a month or whatever. And now they'll write, they'll still write 40 to 50 because they'll buy 30 Medicare leads, they'll sell, they'll sit with 20% and they'll write, some of them will be couples. And so they'll end up writing 6, 8, 10, 12 apps a week. So yes, Tate, 100% there's never a better time than now. And if you want it, like it's there for the taking. And we have a service to where if you don't have success and you're unhappy, I'll even freaking talk to you and we'll remedy whatever it is that's the problem. Like where else can you do that? I love that. Thank you, Tate. Anything else? Not at the moment. All right. Dude, I have some fun with you guys. We talked about six figures and making money and hanging out in Dallas with Michael freaking Irvin. That's what I call the 8% club. That's what I call the 8% club. Right now, VIP is $1,250. It's $200 right now. And you get lunch both days. You get to sit close. You get to go to the party and hang out with the speakers and sponsors and power players. That's not even the right one. And you get to sit in the VIP lounge and hang out for two days. All right. I want to hang out with you guys at this thing and I want to talk about making money. And six figures and rolling in the dough and having success. And the fact that there are more millionaires in the insurance and financial services industry than in the other industry in the world and how unfortunately 92% of insurance agents fail. And you want to be a part of the 8% and 8% club and rolling the dough, you're in the right place. You're watching the right show. You're hanging out with the right people. You got the right video man behind the camera, Dylan.  At the end of the day, it's all about helping you create success and long-term wealth. And that's what we call our conference, the insurance wealth conference. Because it's not a sales conference. It's a wealth generating event. If generating wealth is important to you, then this thing is right up your alley. And like Tommy Mack just said, it's silly cheap. Alright, anything else Dylan? Dude, it's been a good show man. Do you have to have a health license for this? Yes, C. Yes, and C you do. You need a health license to sell health insurance. Even Medicare, which is still health insurance for seniors. It's a good question though. Was that some of your Spanish lessons coming out? That's some of my Spanish lessons coming out bro. I'm going to Spanish lessons for those that speak Spanish and are Spanish leads, you will not find a better Spanish lead. Like it is impossible. Then where you can get them right now. Look up Spanish final expense leads on YouTube and tell me if we're not the first 12, 15, 20 videos that show up. And then preach to me on who has the best Spanish leads. Yeah, I'm doing Spanish speaking lessons with Steve every Tuesday morning here in Springfield and we just have our first one. And I know Paquito just a little bit. It's a fun show, 8% club. I want you guys to be successful. I want to help you be successful, which is why we're rolling out some new coaching programs that are almost done at Kodiaskins.com which is focused on helping new insurance agents succeed. We're coming out with a weekly training class to help new and struggling insurance agents. Kind of like taking you to school man. In the insurance wealth university, if you haven't heard about it, our insurance wealth university with 145 plus insurance training videos can take any agent from average to six figures which is just what we're talking about today. I love you guys. I love hanging out with you. I love helping you earn some paper and I want to hang out with you at this thing in Dallas at the Statler with the Michael Irvin and myself and anybody else that wants to be up on stage. Thanks for watching. I can't say that but almost anybody. Thanks for being a part of 8% Club. Thanks for watching today. Thanks for subscribing. If you have any questions you'll need to address, make sure you put them in comments. We'll be back on Monday. We've got some sick videos dropping this weekend too so make sure you check those out. If you haven't subscribed, please subscribe on YouTube. We've got the biggest insurance agent training YouTube channel on the planet and it's only going to get bigger. I've got to get 10,000 so I can start using YouTube stories and start talking to you guys all day every day. Thanks for being a part of the 8% Club. We'll see you Monday for insurance agent training. Have a great weekend.


If you're looking to scale, this video is for you. Big time players, drain big time shots. I'm gonna talk to you today about the best tip that you need in order for you to scale your income and be a high producer in your company. Let's go. All right, guys, I got the best tip for you to scale your business today. Listen up, listen up.  So what I wanna tell you about was what that was. It was a confidence, it was an internal belief. So write this down, flip the switch, okay? Below that, I want you to write down your confidence.  And let me explain something to you. When you're a middle of the pack producer, you're doing pretty good. You're probably making more money than you ever have. Maybe you're getting a little comfortable and you need to wake up. Hey guys, what's going on? It's Andy, a lot of you leave comments telling me that you need help. Do me a favor, I'm gonna tell you the best way to get a hold of me. Shoot me a text message right now,<PHONE_NUMBER>,<PHONE_NUMBER>, I'll help you with whatever you need.  Let's get back to the video. But let me explain something also that's happening when you're a middle of the pack producer and you're wondering why you're not scaling and getting the dreams that you want. It's because you're not chasing the pressure, man. You know what high income producers do? When there's a deal, say in the dealership and somebody can't close it and the sales managers let them leave and nobody's taking a turn on that customer, you know what a top producer would do? He'd go grab the deal, he'd run towards pressure. You know what it would be like?  Are you attacking those fires, man? Or are you scared? You have low limiting self-talk.  So I want you to wake up and I want you to understand this.   Your self talks at an all-time level. Everything's going your way and that's what a high producer does. So number one, when I see a deal that say somebody's not closing or something's going wrong with the deal, what I do is I go up and grab that deal. I remember the first time that I went up and grabbed a deal when somebody was leaving and I had to bet on myself. I had to bet on myself. I had to say, Evan, this is your time. This is your time to shine or your time to fail. But at least I was taking the shot. A lot of people won't take the shot so they never freaking grow, man.  And that's what it's like when you become a closer. So I want you to understand this. Listen, what I did when I grabbed that first deal and I went out and closed it and I had to bet on myself, it was like, dude, everybody was watching me. I was like, hey, let me get a chance at that deal, man, the customer's leaving, right? At that point, you're either worried about what other people think or you're only worried about that sole customer and operating out of that mindset that they came to buy, they will buy as long as I do my job. You have to be delusional about that, man. And as a closer, we only have a couple of seconds to walk in with our training, our charisma, our fun. But if you never try this, you're only gonna stay in the middle of the pack producer.  But if you're not putting the pressure on yourself, it's never going to happen. So write this down, pressure on purpose, man. Start looking for it, it's everywhere. It's in your dealerships, it's in your stores, it's in your companies. You know the feeling, you know when the pressure is when you could actually take the shot, but you're not willing to. I'm here to challenge you today that if you took some of those shots, all of a sudden, man, what will you be doing? You'll be walking with confidence, you'll be talking with confidence. Shoot, D on Sanders used to say like, I even smell like confidence, right? What is it? It's the high producer activity. It's chasing the pressure. And by the way, you can't care what people think. So what happened with me is I closed that deal, man. I came running back to my tower and I was like, I got it, man, I got it. Everybody started looking at me. I was kind of like, oh my goodness, right? And then all of a sudden something switched inside of me. I started taking more of those shots and the shots started to grow. I remember one time when my brother, Ian, you guys might know him, he had the last deal of the month and it was for the dealership's biggest bonus. And listen, this was everybody's bonuses on the line. This was the managers, this was my brothers. And what I had to do, I had to go in behind my boy Ian. I had to close them. I was the guy that was the fire, the fire truck showed up.  I got you, bro. You know? That's taken the shot, man. So listen, if you're not taking the shots, I want you to write this down. Today I'm gonna take my shot. Today I'm gonna bet on myself, okay? If you stay in this zone, you're gonna have low-limiting self-talk. You're always gonna be insecure about your skills. And by the way, most of the people that are middle-of-the-pack producers they're not obsessed with this. If this video is resonating with you, go ahead and share it with somebody. Go ahead and share it with your sales team and go tell them, hey, let's start taking the shots. When we see the opportunity to grow, that's where we need to live, okay? So listen, man, all I wanna tell you is this.  You're gonna start to learn. And that is where the money's made. Becoming the person that she knows inside of you. But a lot of the times when we're in the middle of the pack, we're obsessing about the life we want. We're thinking about it all day long, but we're not taking any action. You know you. Why would you bet on other people before you'd bet on yourself? Why would you sit there and have all of this weird fear about what other people are gonna do and say about you? No, man, you're great. You were born to be great. But it's time to start showing the world. Don't be the best kept secret anymore. Come to the top of the board. Join the top producers that are taking shots and that's really is the only difference. Your confidence. Your decisiveness. Grab that deal. The second you know the pressure's there, do it. Don't care what people think.  No punk stuff around here.  Hey guys, that's what I'm gonna tell you. You're the true one percenters you made it till the end of the video. Do me a favor, share it with the friend that wants to go to another level. Make sure you like the video, comment below so I know who you are. Set your notifications and then subscribe to the channel. We got daily sales training videos dropping. I'll see you soon.


Welcome to this edition of NASA Images. I'm Lynn Bonderant. During this show, we're focusing on results of spacecraft examination of Comet Halley and the seventh planet from the Sun, Uranus. Let's begin with some images from Uranus acquired in early 1986. The place is the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. Well, just about two minutes ago, Voyager 2 passed through its closest approach to Uranus. Next speaker is Dr. Bradford Smith, the imaging team leader. Just for the moment, let me show you a lower resolution image that we have. So what you're seeing here is where it is very red, you're seeing a lot of haze, and where it's blue, it's relatively free of haze. And the first thing you notice is that as you look toward the limb, of course, you're gonna be looking through more atmosphere and seeing more haze. And so we see this brightish, what we call limb brightening around the limb of the planet, indicating looking into the atmosphere and seeing quite a bit of the particulates of haze that are in the atmosphere. I thought it might be a good time now to give a summary of what we've learned so far. It's gonna be a very brief summary, and I'm certainly not gonna be able to go into many details, but at least just to review where we stand and what we've done. Over the last several hours, we have been seeing the playback of recorded photographs taken primarily of the satellites, the major satellites, the five satellites of Uranus at the time that we passed by those most closely. I think that I wanna run through some of those. I think we'll start out with this one of aerial. This is a part of a mosaic of one of the brightest of the satellites, and the whole mosaic consisted of this in the upper left, and then one picture down the lower left, and some of the more interesting things are such views as this, a rather large bright area which is probably associated with a crater, another crater here, bright area. And then moving on with another view of aerial, the upper right, and some of these canyons through here down around this area, much of the unusual terrain and quite strange. Another view, the lower right and this feature right here appears that some of these valleys are sunken. There's been internal activity on these moons and a lot of it and it's surprising. Move on then to, over on, this is not, does anyone here as close as the one we just saw? And Miranda, this is a somewhat distant shot of Miranda. We will get much closer, an unusual feature we saw there was called this chevron formation, but we'll get a better picture of that as we get in closer to Miranda. Because indeed we did get close. This is the one where we saw things down to a kilometer resolution and structure here in Miranda which is quite amazing. The black dropout across the middle here we believe is somewhere in the transmission in there since this is played back from a tape recorder, another playback will recover the information from that section. Here, a curious flow of material down in this direction, that's what it appears to be, but of course it waits for further analysis to see what it is, but something's been going on in Miranda, it's a very small moon, 500 kilometers across and to have this much activity in such a moon is quite different than what we saw, for example, in the moons of Saturn. Another part of it, the mosaics, still another part, again, very curious markings on the surface and right in the middle, the chevron we saw at a great distance is now this object here. What is it? Well, further analysis may tell, we hope. And then backing off with a wide-angle lens to get the complete picture. And then looking back toward Uranus, and let's now talk a little bit about all the other things we've seen besides photographing the satellites. We have discovered one more small satellite, making 10 in all that have been discovered by the Voyager and its approach and near miss or close approach to the planet Uranus. We've also discovered another ring, so that makes a total of 10 small moons discovered and 10 rings, one discovered by Voyager, the other we're known previously. This is a ring picture taken on the approach to Uranus and you can see the major, I think this is the Epsilon ring, there's a bright one and then some others inside of it. We also tried another one when we got behind the planet with the sun shining through the rings toward the Voyager spacecraft to take a picture of that. We expected to see a very bright glimmer because of the very small particles in the ring, which in this backlighting arrangement would tend to glow just as when you see dust motes in the sunlight shining through a window toward you, you can see lots more dust than you can if you actually look from the point of view of the sun. Small particles tend to scatter life directly forward, keep it going. Surprisingly enough, we saw very little from that viewpoint, which is a bit of a mystery.  We've measured the magnetic field now. We were almost two Uranus before we discovered that there was indeed a magnetic field. If it hadn't had no magnetic field, that would have been a real problem. But there is, it's about 15% weaker than the Earth's on the surface. The curious thing about it is this. Uranus has its axis pointed pretty much, its pole, south pole by committee decision, pointed toward the sun. So if the sun's over there, that's where this pole is spinning around like this on that axis. The magnetic field, however, is on a pole at an angle, 55 degrees. So as Uranus spins around on its spin axis, the magnetic field is spinning around like this, which is making, is going to make some very curious effects on the total field. We have displayed now on the screen a picture of titanium. There'll be two of these, very much the same. One is sort of an insurance for the other. This one is in and the second one should be coming in any minute. In the meantime, we've also had the best two pictures of Umbriel, which is here, very almost featureless. And by the way, these are the two pictures that came in there are very similar to each other, taken very close together. I think the thing which surprised most of us was not that Miranda necessarily had all these tectonic structures on the surface, but that there was such a variety, that it was really a very complex distribution. And I think the other thing that surprised me was the extreme relief, which seems to be present on the surface. It's not a very subtle property at all. One sees very sharp scarps, ridges. One sees a grooved terrain. One sees terrain similar to that, which we saw on Enceladus, which is somewhat twisted. It's just a remarkably complex surface. And are those cliffs up at the top? Those are very high cliffs, which are quite remarkable. They terminate a very rugged, hilly terrain, which may well be a place where there is basically lateral thrusting. And down at the lower portion of the planet, we call it a planet, it looks like one of those. That's right. So this moon, Uranus, we see again some of the same curious lines that are going through. That's right, that's right. Fractures, the surface has been heavily fractured by some sort of processing. There may well be some layering on it in the lower right-hand portion of this image where one sees these alternating dark and lighter streaks, that's right. Perhaps that's layering of material. It's really a remarkably complex surface for an object that's barely 300 miles in diameter. The rings of Uranus have provided some thrills and surprises for several of Voyager scientists, those who specialize in studying planetary rings. One of those is Dr. Jeff Cuzzy from NASA's Ames Research Center, and he's with me now. And just let's talk about these strange rings, and I'm gonna ask if somebody can to put up on one of our video ports 70, this picture we want. Jeff, the rings have been, well, we knew about that they were there before. Before Voyager got there. But we've discovered quite a bit more about them, and particularly about the detailed structures that we've been there. What can you say about them? Well, you know, the main rings of Uranus, Oliver, were known from stellar occultations. Several of us who think about rings tend to associate small objects, debris, if you like, of leftover from the formation of the moons and the planet that are associated with rings. When you have all this debris around with the impacting meteoroids that are always there, you always expect to have dust. Now, this dust is very short lived because it drags into the planet, it gets destroyed by the magnetic field, spider ray, one thing another. So the location of the dust is a very important tracer of where the material is. And so we were very eagerly anticipating the existence of the structure of the dust. Now, because of the magnetic field and probably because of the perturbing effect of the magnetic field on the charged particles that are small, most of the dust seems to have been removed from the Uranus system. And so- This is a picture we got at that point. Yeah, that is an absolutely spectacular picture and it shows basically that most of the region of the known rings is more or less replete with dust. The Voyager Uranus encounter has shed new light on this unique planet. Some of the preliminary findings include 10 new moons were discovered, one new ring was found. Two shepherding moons are located near the Epsilon ring. The rings are slightly varying in composition and color and are complex in structure. The five known moons are an ice rock mixture with evidence of ancient geological activity. Aerial was volcanic in the past. Miranda is considered the strangest body in the solar system by many JPL team members. It has scarps, cliffs, and layering. The atmosphere of Uranus is 15% helium and the rest is hydrogen, ammonia, and methane. The planet may have a rocky core of the size of Earth. Uranus is covered with an ocean of mostly water, methane, and ammonia. Our next report comes to us from the NASA Ames Research Center near San Francisco. The report was released in 1987 and summarizes some of the findings of the Pioneer Venus spacecraft which earlier examined Comet Halley as it looped around the sun. As long as man has been conscious of the sky, comets have been objects of special fascination. Our ancestors thought they were omens of ill fortune. Today, we see them much differently. Dr. Jeffrey Cousy is a NASA scientist who specializes in comets. Today we know comets are not magical apparitions, but mountain-sized dirty snow walls of ice and rocky dust. They're living fossils left over from the early days of the formation of the solar system. But there may have been some truth to the old superstition. A large comet hitting Earth may have been the cause of the death of the dinosaurs and other comets may have caused earlier episodes of mass extinction. Even today, Earth is not entirely safe from comets. In 1908 in a remote area in Russia, 200 square miles of forest were blown down by an explosion with the force of a 12-megaton bomb. It was probably caused by a large comet exploding in the atmosphere. Experts estimate that a comet strikes Earth about once every million years. There are a number of reasons for studying comets. Well, the more we learn about the material comets are made of and the way that material is put together, the better idea we'll have of the situation under which the planets of the solar system are formed. It is extremely difficult to reconstruct our planet's origins by studying the material it is composed of today. Even the oldest rocks on Earth have been changed and modified repeatedly by geological processes such as melting and solidification, wind and water erosion. In the 1970s, NASA studied a number of different missions to Halley's comet, one of the brightest and best known of the thousand or so comets that passed periodically by Earth. But budgetary constraints kept such a mission from getting off the ground. Nevertheless, the 1986 return of Halley's comet proved to be a scientific spectacular. Almost all the world's telescopes were riveted on the comet. In addition, the Soviet Union, Japan and the European Space Agency launched spacecraft to rendezvous with a famous visitor. Meanwhile at NASA's Ames Research Center in Mountain View, California, US scientists found an innovative way to participate. Richard Fimmel, NASA's pioneer project manager. In 1981, we started looking into how we could use an existing spacecraft to make measurements of Halley's comet as it came by. This spacecraft is the Pioneer Venus Orbiter which was already in orbit around the planet Venus. It was inserted in orbit in December of 1978. The surface of Venus is completely obscured by a heavy cloud cover, so we really knew very little about the surface of the planet. The Pioneer Venus mission consisted of a pair of spacecraft, the orbiter, and a multi probe, which carried four instrumented probes which were released before the spacecraft reached Venus and they plunged to the surface of Venus making their measurements with the instruments on board as the probes were descending to the planet's surface. Together, the orbiter and the multi probes provided information about the atmosphere of Venus why it is so seringly hot and dense. Also, another instrument on board the spacecraft took thousands of images of the cloud cover of the planet Venus, helping to explain the atmospheric circulation about the planet and unraveling many of the mysteries that Venus has held. Fortunately, the cosmos arranged it so that we had a ringside seat as Halley's comet came by in its path closest to the sun, which is the time when the comet is its most active.   It is composed of roughly 40% water ice, 10% frozen gases, and 50% dust and rock. When a comet's looping orbit carries it close to the sun, the intense sunlight begins to boil dust and gas from its surface.  At the University of Colorado Boulder, Dr. Ian Stewart, chief scientist of the Pioneer Halley's mission, determined that he could make unique and valuable measurements of the comet using one of the orbiter's instruments. In 1983, when we looked into the possibility of observing Halley from Pioneer Venus, we realized that it would come within shouting distance, celastically speaking, and that we could make really valuable measurements of the hydrogen coma. When Dr. Stewart explained his conclusions to us, we were immediately enthusiastic. We knew, of course, that it would mean a lot of extra work, but we also knew that it would provide the United States with a unique Halley mission capable of making continuous measurements through the entire perihelion when the comet was at its most active. Relative to using the ultraviolet spectrometer instrument to look at comet Halley, that was not originally planned as part of the Pioneer Venus orbiter experiments as they were laid out. Earl Montoya, pioneer program manager for NASA. We had very innovative, bright people say, what if we rotated the spacecraft so it would look out at comet Halley? Well, it turned out that the mission could be accomplished the gathering of these measurements using the ultraviolet spectrometer device at no additional cost. The operation seems to be going very, very smoothly at this point. The spacecraft instrument that Dr. Stewart used is called an ultraviolet spectrometer. Like a prism, a spectrometer divides light into different colors or wavelengths. By measuring the brightness of the light at each color, scientists can tell a great deal about its source. Dr. Stewart's ultraviolet spectrometer is fixed to the rotating orbiter. So the spacecraft had to be reoriented in order to observe the comet. Now, normally the spacecraft in orbit around Venus is orbiting with the high gain antenna pointed towards the south ecliptic pole, or we would look at it as upside down as the spacecraft is spinning. In order to observe Halley's comet, which is coming by Venus up and above, we had to carefully rotate the spacecraft 135 degrees so that the ultraviolet spectrometer would be looking up and have the comet in its field of view as it rotated once every 12 seconds. In the process of doing this, a number of things had to be paid attention to. We had to keep the solar panels properly oriented so they were receiving sunlight and to provide the power for the spacecraft. We had to make sure that our star tracker had a bright star in the field of view so that we would be able to maneuver and check the orientation of the spacecraft. And we also had constraints on the position because the high gain antenna can only move a limited amount in elevation and that has to stay pointed at Earth as it is despawned. Halley's orbit takes it from the outer reaches of the solar system, about the orbit of Uranus, to within 55 million miles of the Sun. Well, because Halley's comet is most active when it's close to the Sun, it is most important to observe it at that time. As Halley's comet made its closest approach to Venus and we were in the midst of our critical imaging sequence to get an image of the comet's coma, nature threw a number of obstacles in our way, threatening to disrupt the entire data stream force. First, we had a giant solar flare which interfered with radio communications between the spacecraft and Earth. That was followed then by rain in the Mojave Desert and snowstorm in Madrid and both of these also attenuated the radio signal causing more errors in the data. Well, in spite of all these problems, we were able to get all of the data that we needed. The centerpiece of our observations of the comet was this false color image of the hydrogen coma. The scale is immense. The image that you see is 12 million by eight million miles and briefly, during its passage past the Sun, Halley was the largest object in the solar system. The image uses color to represent brightness. The blues and reds are the darker levels of light and the yellows and greens are the brightest parts of the comet. Well, analyzing the image and other data allowed us to estimate the rate at which water was subliming away, evaporating away from the ices of the nucleus. Our measurements turned out to be unreasonable accord with European and Soviet measurements and they indicate that the comet is losing one or two hundredths of a percent of its total mass each time it passes the Sun. Before this last visit, many scientists had assumed Halley's was a relatively fresh comet so the extent of the erosion and the amount of dark crust on the nucleus came as a surprise. Pioneer Venus observations showed large daily variations as much as 25% in the rate at which water was boiling off the comet. The best explanation for this is that only portions of the comet's surface had freshly exposed ices that could act as sources of water vapor. The evaporation rate varied depending on how much of this fresh material was exposed to sunlight as the nucleus rotated. The orbiter's observations fit nicely with those of the European spacecraft Jotto which passed about 300 miles from the nucleus. Its cameras revealed a cold black object three to four times larger than the size estimated for a fresh comet. The nucleus also appeared highly irregular, almost potato shaped, suggesting it was once much larger and has eroded away over a long time. Pictures from Jotto also showed gas jets spewing from the nucleus and the orbiter measured their velocities as high as 1,100 miles an hour. While the gas escapes, most of the dust that boils off the nucleus remains in the comet's feeble gravitational grip. As the comet moves back out away from the sun, the dust rains back onto the comet's surface. Scientists have begun to realize that this dust plays a central role in the life cycle of a comet. When the layer of dust becomes about three inches thick, it'll act as an insulating blanket and insulate the ice from the heat of the sun. And once that happens, the ice no longer evaporates so the comet loses all its cometary features like tails and dust tails and ion tails. And then it looks a lot like an asteroid. Scientists estimate that comets make only a thousand or so passes around the sun before they're reduced to inactive objects like asteroids. With even a partial dust crust, a comet is slower to warm up and develop a tail. Once heated, however, the dust blanket retains the warmth and the comet keeps its tail longer. That's why Halley's was brighter in April when it was leaving the sun than in December when it was approaching. The orbiter's observations show that the nucleus remains surprisingly inactive until a few weeks before the comet's closest approach to the sun. But it stayed 30% more active on the outbound leg of its journey. It is surprising that the activity turns on so suddenly. The comet gets to within a certain distance to the sun and then it starts to pop like popcorn. The pioneer Venus orbiter made a number of other important observations. For instance, it measured the concentrations of hydrogen, oxygen, carbon, and hydroxyl ions given off by Halley's nucleus. Combined with the observations made by other spacecraft, this information is helping scientists calculate the comet's composition. While it has given scientists a much better picture of what Halley's is like, the new data is also raising questions that can only be answered by future comet missions. One such mission is CRAF, the comet rendezvous and asteroid flyby. It involves shooting a probe into the heart of a comet nucleus to get the first direct measurements of what it is made of. Scientists will study the new information on Halley's for decades. As a result, our knowledge about the origin of the solar system, about its primordial mountain-sized building blocks and how they join together to form the Earth and other planets, will continue to grow. In this fashion, humanity will gain the understanding of its ultimate environment, the cosmos. That's all we have for this edition of NASA Images. But before we go, let me remind you that you're cordially invited to see the displays at the Visitor Center here at the NASA Lewis Research Center. We're located near the Hopkins International Airport in Cleveland. Admission is free. Until next time, this is Lynn Bonderant saying goodbye.