Okay. Good afternoon. Welcome to this joint presentation with Hewlett Packard Enterprise and Winterware. Just by way of background, we're going to talk about a specific component of Healian Carrier Grid, which is based on OpenStack with Carrier Grid features and uses some technologies from Winterware as well. Okay. My name is Madhu Kashyap. I work for Hewlett Packard Enterprise and the NFV business unit. I'm responsible for all of the open-source strategy and direction including OpenStack, Open Daylight and OPNFV. With me is Glenn Seiler from Windriver. Good afternoon. Okay. Glenn, you want to take it away? I'll kick it off. How about I take it off? All right. Good afternoon, everyone. It's my pleasure to talk to you this morning about some interesting performance benchmarks that Windriver and Hewlett Packard Enterprise have run together with Spirant and we want to map how these benchmarks map to solving industry business problems if I can just solve how to move this pointer here. All right. What we want to do first of all is look at just very quickly some of the software components. As Madhu had mentioned, we're going to be talking about Healian carrier grade, HPE Healian carrier grade. Some of the technologies in the Healian carrier grade were designed by Windriver and we have a partner relationship between Windriver and HPE. We want to identify some of the performance bottlenecks that we see common bottlenecks in the industry and provide some details on how we've done these characterization test cases, and then, of course, present the results. The focus is going to be around data plane performance, the V-switch, the packet processing engine, and it's going to pinpoint areas that we have compared to standard open-source components. You'll see some pretty dramatic, we think some pretty dramatic performance improvements. But a couple of things I want to emphasize. First of all, this is done by a third-party testing lab. We used Spirant to actually do the testing, run the tests, provide the packet throughput engine, and we also used an independent analyst, Tully, to actually verify the results, and we'll have a published report on this later coming out in the next week or two. Like I said, one of the things I want to do, rather than just talking about benchmarks and performance and my dog's faster than your dog or my server's faster than yours, I want to tie it back to why performance actually solves a business problem. So there's a lot of reasons why service providers, equipment manufacturers, are looking to NFV to solve certain problems. I like to characterize it into three categories. First of all, is increasing top-line revenue, getting new revenues, and that's gaining market share by providing new services very quickly. So that's top-line revenue. Then there's really lowering costs, whether you're lowering CAPEX or whether you're lowering OPEX. That can be done through a number of ways. Obviously, one of the main principles of NFV is using Cots-based hardware or what I like to call industry-standard high-volume hardware, but also using common de facto open-source components. That's lowering costs. Where increasing revenue and lowering costs meet in the middle is agility. That agility and the ability to roll out services quickly is really I think the intersection and one of the main benefits of NFV that service providers are looking to benefit from. But what we're going to talk about, I want to be very clear, what we're going to talk about here is really number three, cost optimizations. We're going to talk about how you lower OPEX by increasing VM density by having very, very fast packet throughput. So I want to tie it from just running benchmarks all the way back up to what's the real business problem, why this even matters. So first of all, just a little bit about the architecture. So you understand the tests that we've been running. This is the HP Helion carrier grade architecture. What we're really going to be focusing on is the middle node there, which is the compute node. That's the data plane node. So that's running standard Linux and a very high-performance KVM using some of the real-time patches that are available in the community. And then the Wind River accelerated V-switch, which uses Intel DPDK. Some of the other things that we've done is we've added an accelerated virtual port, which is essentially a kernel loadable module that sits in the guest OS of the virtual machine and provides very, very fast packet throughput between the V-switch running in user space and the application up in the virtual machine. And they talk directly, the accelerated virtual port essentially emulates an Intel Niantic type of Ethernet port and as I said provides very, very fast throughput. So we're going to be focusing really on the performance of the compute node with data traffic going in and up to the virtual machine. The overall system itself, as you can see, uses OpenStack for the control plane as our framework for the control plane. The V-switch has a neutron plug-in that talks back to OpenStack and can perform various functions, live migration and things of that nature. But what we're really going to focus on here is the performance from the physical devices up through the V-switch and into the virtual machine. So just a little bit more about service provider OPEX and CAPEX. This chart that I'm showing here is from CIMI. If you're not familiar with that, some of you might be familiar with an industry pundit analyst named Tom Noll. He provides almost a daily blog on NFV and Telcom and he created this chart which is actually a little bit unnerving if you think about it, because it essentially shows that, you know, towards the end of this year, next year, the cost, the revenue, if you will, per bit, will start to exceed the cost per bit, sorry, will become more than the revenue per bit, which essentially means that CSPs and telcos are losing money. Now, obviously, we can't let that happen. That's one of the reasons why NFV is so important today, NFV and SDN. We know why it's happening because of the exploding growth in video, but what's really critical to this is there's only two ways to fix that, by the way, right? Increase the revenue per bit or decrease the costs per bit. It's only two ways to really solve it. So critical to solving that problem is increasing capacity and lowering the costs per subscriber. And that's really what we're doing by showing and driving this increased V-switch performance is we're actually gonna show how that lowers the cost per subscriber. So let's take a look at kind of what we're doing. This is diagram that I showed from the previous slide, kind of focuses in on the V-switch architecture. You can see the virtual machine traffic going from the VM to the V-switch and then from the V-switch out to the network. So this is the V-switch that's used in the Helian carrier grade product. And what we've seen is orders of magnitude. So depending, of course, on the use case, depending on whether or not they're using the accelerated virtual port, the kernel loadable module that I mentioned, we've seen anywhere from 10 to 40 times better performance than just sort of the standard OVS that's in the open source community today. So what we're gonna be showing is the increased switching performance equals greater VM density. And the reason that's important is because the payload, the service that you're running is running in a virtual machine and you want more cores available to run that service, fewer cores running the V-switch. Nobody's making money by selling V-switches, right? People are making money by running services on top of the servers with as many cores and consolidating as much as possible. So the more cores that are available for the VMs or the services to run, the more subscribers then you can get per server. That's gonna result in significantly lower OPEX. And it results in lower CAPEX as well, but really over the long term, the lower OPEX of supporting and maintaining and managing fewer servers will significantly result in more savings than just the CAPEX. So let's look at a specific use case. This is a real use case that we've tested and it's a virtualized media gateway. So obviously it's running a lot of data, right? Very high data content. And the bandwidth required for an instance of this particular application is about three and a half gigabits per core. The system configuration that we tested was a standard two socket Xeon server, 14 cores per processor per socket, so 28 cores total. And our testing, what we were able to do with just standard open source or standard V-switch was really the most efficient implementation required about 23 cores to get that much bandwidth through the system. That really only left one core or one core, one VM, to run the payload. So you're essentially running one instance of the payload per server. That's not very efficient. Now on the other hand, when we used the AVS or Accelerated Virtual Switch, we were able to run that same amount of traffic in 10 cores rather than in 23 cores. That left 17 cores for running the actual payload, which is where you're gonna drive subscriber data. So that results in about a 17 to one difference in capacity that's significantly greater VM density, and which results in significantly reduced OPEX, more subscribers per server. So that's really why running and testing and validating these benchmarks in this packet performance is so critical. I'll talk just a little bit about the tests, then I'll hand it over to Madhu to actually run through the actual tests. As I've said, performance is really the key enabler to be able to deploy really large scale NFV deployments. And the way that you can measure that and get a sense for how a system is gonna operate in these large scale deployments is by running the benchmarks. But it's very important to be able to run industry standard accepted benchmarks. So one of the things we'll show you is that the benchmarks we're running here are defined by the Etsy organization. They have been run and validated by independent third party, and we're working both WinRiver and HPE with organizations such as Etsy and OPNFV to further define these tests and make them available so that anyone can run the same tests. And that way, as suppliers and as service providers start to look for solutions, there'll be a common industry standard way to benchmark and identify performance. So hopefully that gave you some ideas of why this is important, how it ties back to ultimately lowering OPEX for the service providers. I'm gonna hand it over to Madu now and he's gonna actually run through the tests and the results. Thank you, Glenn. All right, so let's get to the guts of some of this presentation and the results and the tests that we run. So just to give you an overview, like Glenn mentioned, we based the tests on the Etsy test specs. This particular test was run only for layer two switches, the V-switch, and we used different frame sizes for the different tests. And this is hard off the press. This was literally done last week. We did phase one of the tests, which are the benchmarking tests that I'll walk you through. Unfortunately, the phase two, which was the availability resiliency tests, had to be postponed because of the floods in our Houston lab and messed up the testing there. But we did run the phase one of the tests, which is the results that you'll see here. Okay, not able to... Okay, so these are the four tests that we ran. So the first one is a actual packet forwarding test, the benchmark test. The next one is a consistency test where you run multiple runs of the same test, 10 trial runs to see if you get the same consistent performance from the network and from the V-switch. The third one is the latency distribution. Again, we measure min, max, and average latency of the packets going through the network. And finally is the scale testing for the number of flows on the V-switch. So we test for different scale numbers. And that is the fourth and final one. So let's get into each of the tests. Before that, just a quick note on the hardware that was used for the test. So we use both the Proline DL360 Gen9, which is the Rackmount server. And we tested also on the Blade server, BL460 generation nine. It's dual CPUs, eight cores per socket. And the network card, which is HP branded, is the Intel Neantech NIC. Okay, so this is the first test here, the forwarding, packet forwarding benchmark test. So we used three topologies. First one is from left to right, physical to physical. Basically, the idea is to just run the accelerated V-switch on a bare metal server and run the packets through the V-switch and back out again. And so this simulates where you might have services running on bare metal and the accelerated V-switch running there, and this is running DPDK, the V-switch, and the packets actually go into user space and back out again. The second test is a single VM test. So again, packet going through the guest VM and back out again. And finally, you can think of the last test sort of as a service function chaining test where you have two VMs and packets traversing both the VMs and out again. And we use the aspirant generator, packet generator test here to generate the traffic. All right, so on the last test, VM to VM, this was where you have basically three networks here, one going into the first VM and then VM to VM and then back out again. So we are talking about six ports, so the ingress egress ports of the accelerated V-switch going into the VM and then back out from the second VM. So in all, we are seeing about 39 gigabits per second traffic going through the system with absolutely no data loss that we can tell from the test that we ran. This is running nearly at line speed, 99% of line speed, line rate. So let me walk you through some of the numbers as well here. So these are the tests for the different frame sizes. What you see on the X-axis is the frame sizes. On the Y-axis is the line rate percentage. So as you see from smaller frame sizes to the largest, for all of the three different topologies, whether it's physical to physical, single VM, VM to VM. So for the smallest frame sizes, you have quite a bit of overhead and so for encapsulating, decapsulating and all of the overhead there, you will see the line rate for virtual machine to virtual machine running at about 18% of line rate and going up to just physical. Bare metal, just the V-switch install about roughly in the upper, lower 60%, right? And as you go across the X-axis and as the frame sizes increase, increasingly you'll see that past 256 bytes there for single VM and VM to VM. Sorry, physical and single VM, you start hitting the line rate percentage. So it's running at 100% line rate for the larger frame sizes. Okay, so this is test number two. Again, let me explain. This is running the consistency tests where we run 10 trials to make sure that we get consistent performance of the packets running through these different topologies. So again, let me explain the chart to you a little bit. So for the 64 byte frame size, which is running, the, is showing you roughly about, I don't know, 30, again, this is percentage of line rate on the Y-axis. So it's consistently, the dot on the 64 byte says that there is zero variance after running 10 trials and it consistently runs at about 30% of line rate. For the other 128 byte and the 256 byte, you see the line that goes across the diamond there. So that shows you the variance. Okay, and in the next chart, I'll show you the variance there. So, but it consistently, for the 128 byte, consistently running at 55% of line rate and for 256 byte frame sizes, about 97, 98%. With a slight variation on the consistency test. So if I take you into this next chart, so here you will see, for example, on the 256 byte, you will see some of the runs don't hit the 100%. And you can see that that is the variation that I'm talking about, which you saw on the previous slide with the bar there. So that was the variation that showed up in our test for the different runs for all of the packet sizes, frame sizes. So again, this is showing you consistency after running 10 trials, showing you the line rate percentage for the different frame sizes. This is single VM, the test that we did, the consistency test is for the single VM topology. This is test number three. Again, this shows you the latency test. So what you see again on the X axis is the frame sizes. And what you see on the Y axis is the microseconds, latency in microseconds. And so again, running these tests for different frame sizes, you see chart for minimum latency, which is roughly in the 15 microseconds, which is the minimum average, roughly about 20 to 18, somewhere in that range. And then maximum latency on some of the runs were in the 220, 240 microseconds. So this shows you the latency distribution when you run these tests for a few trial runs. So the next chart will show you the breakdown as well. So we broke this down into different buckets, so less than 50 microseconds, 50 to 75, 75 to 100. And so you can see the percentage completely decreases as the latency buckets go to your right. So there is latency, less than 50 microseconds, you can see for the 64-byte frame size, for example, 99.42 times percent times, it's consistent with line rate or with the latency, but there's a 0.18 percent, which is in the bucket, 150 to 200 microseconds. You can see there's some latency which shows you the max latency that was seen through some of these tests. So again, these buckets show you where the latency, which how many microseconds latency we found running these tests multiple times. Okay, this is the fourth and final test that we ran. Again, for Layer 2, we switched performance based on the RFC 2554. This is a standard test run by most L2 switches for scale, including performance benchmarking flow tests. And this shows where we ran 20 flows through the switch, 2000 and then 20,000 flows. And you can see, again, that is the line rate percentage. So no matter when it scales from 20 flows to 20,000 flows, you still get line rate performance on the V-switch. So this was the test run last week. Like I said, we will continue to add additional tests to what we saw previously and we will output an official report based on these tests as well. Okay, with that, I think, just wanna summarize, I don't know, Glenn, you wanna say a few words? So like I mentioned, it was run by a third party, Tali Group and Spiron actually conducted the test. We will have the test results soon. And some of the next phases of the tests are based on resiliency. So whether a VM goes down or a host goes down, how quickly can we do live migration, the rapid detection of failure. So those are some of the tests that we'll be running next week. And those results also we will share with the community. Unfortunately, as Madhu mentioned, we had a little Mother Nature intervened in our best laid plans to be able to present the resiliency tests, but it'll be available on the HPE website as well as the Wind River website to be able to get the full disclosure document. We're working to put this together now. In the meantime, we encourage you to come visit the HPE booth, take a look at the demo, multiple demos, and you'll be able to see some of the performance and how the Helian Carrier Grade product is working. If you have any questions, please use the mic so we can record it. Go ahead. Hi. Thank you for the presentation. Pretty much every hardware render, Dell, HP is presenting their test results. Whenever I go as a solution architect for designing and putting a bill of material together, what I do go look at the spec.org to see the independent people verifying the hardware by means of CPU, VCPU, ratios and so on, the virtualization side effects. And then I'm stuck at there because after that there's no more KPIs to look at it. When I look at your presentation, yes, you're using Wind River DPDK enabled OVS, most likely or not, using Melanox, Nix to offload the traffic to those guys with SRIOV, which improves the performance, yes. But when I look at what HP or Dell does in the sense of adding value to this hardware, I see pretty much nothing. So one of the things that we're, so yeah, we are producing the hardware, but one of the things we're looking at, I mean, looking to do with the Helian carrier grade is to take advantage of that hardware. So how we can do CPU pinning and process pinning, thread pinning, to take advantage of that hardware. So that is some things in the work. So where the software can take advantage of some of the hardware capabilities. I'm glad you mentioned about the CPU pinning and thread pinning because we have been testing stuff as well. When you look at the CPU pinning, the NUMO architecture and so on, the limiting factor is the layer tree cache versus the QPI bridge between the sockets. Is it gonna really affect the NFV, VMs or not? Or shall we just skip totally the pinning? So it's gonna be much easier for VM to recover or migrate to another host. If you have any test results regarding this using CPU pinning, thread pinning, NUMO architecture, that would be awesome, thank you. Okay, thank you for the input by the way. That's interesting and of course, one of the things that we're trying to do is be able to demonstrate an industry standard benchmark which not all hardware is created equal as you've mentioned. So you wanna be able to provide something that can be run on a wider range of hardware. We didn't use Mellanox, we used Intel Niantics and going straight up to the V-switch, there was no SRIO-V involved. Happy to disclose more details on that, absolutely. The question over there? Yeah, you've mentioned a couple of times about industry standard benchmarking but the only results I saw were your results and you claimed orders of magnitude improvement but you didn't demonstrate that to us. You showed us your results which are great, I'm not just claiming that but what were the results of straight open switch? Okay, so great question and you're right, that wasn't part of this actual benchmark. So what we did in a previous test in that comparison that I showed you where I showed 17 cores running versus the one core, that was a separate, that was a different test that we ran, it was running a commercial version of open V-switch, we weren't using the latest, greatest bleeding edge because we wanted to show our Wind River commercial product versus other commercial products. So in that model, I wanna say that it was running about three to four megabyte speed per, was it three to four million megabytes per second, something like that, compared to our V-switch which was running about 20 megabytes per second. Significant, it was about 10X altogether. So I guess that's my concern is you throw up your results but you don't throw up what you compared against and you say it's a 17 to one, so would I expect at a 256-byte packet that I'm running at 5% of line rate? Is that what you're claiming? We were actually running at about 60%, we were running at about 60% of line rate. Oh no, I'm sorry, that was with 64-bit packets. That was with 64. At 256, you're running 100%. Yeah, we were running 100%. You're saying that at OBS, they're gonna run at 5% of line rate? Is that the claim? Ish? Ish. Yeah, so again, what we were showing was just ours. We didn't want to show another competitor's product in this particular session, so we were just showing what ours are measuring. What you may claim is against the competitor's product. That's what I don't understand is you're gonna make a claim, which is cool. We're making a claim of what our product performs at. But you said I have orders of magnitude better. So you've made a claim against your competitors which is fine, which is fine. And that's what, you know, sort of about, but at least show that to us so we can understand whatever it looks like. No, that's good feedback, I appreciate that. Any other questions? This is great by the way, I appreciate it. I think I have one that might be a follow-on to that. Okay. In regard to packet forwarding performance, it looks like you ran tests at the various interesting packet sizes, 64, 128, 256. Did you run a test with typical traffic and understand what the average packet size was so that we can understand what performance would be in a nominal case of actually using the infrastructure rather than a controlled test? Okay. This was a more controlled sort of, you know, with the spiron just sending out, you know, so it was not a typical test where you're just running arbitraries, you know, packets or traffic through the V-switch, but that is one of the tests that we will conduct. Have you tried that at all? Just to see what, you know, just in a normal- I am not aware of it, but I will find out. I'm not sure. That's really interesting, right? Because although it might perform 100% of a line rate at 656 packets, if your average packet size is smaller than that, you're gonna drop packets and you have no idea which packets you dropped. Right. And then that's a bad deal, right? Right, right. Okay. Okay. Any other questions? Definitely appreciate all of you spending some time here to come listen about the HPE solution. And again, I encourage you to go down and see the demonstration at the HPE booth. And please do look in the next week or two for a much more detailed published report of these benchmarks and also some of the resiliency and availability benchmarks. And hopefully it'll help clarify some of the questions that some of you may have had as well. Thank you very much. Thank you.


Hello, I'm Jamie Lowe, it's proud principal of Oak Park School. I'd like to spend a few moments introducing you to Oak Park School and all the wonderful things that our campus has to offer. Oak Park is a district-centered school that provides educational services to over 300 students with disabilities. Our staff consists of highly educated and trained teachers, specialists, paraprofessionals and administrators who continuously set high expectations for our students so that each may strive to reach his or her individual potential. Well, Oak Park is the best school. I like it. I remember when I was in Haiti, I used to go to school, but I stopped going to school because of my leg and because of my spine injury. So that's the reason why I could have walked. So that's why I decided not to go to school and I spent so many days staying home in Haiti. And then ever since the earthquake came in, we had no place to go, nowhere. I had to live with my uncle until we finally got something, then that's when we finally came to America and that's when they were going to put me to a school because they didn't want me to stay home. That's when I came to Oak Park and then they signed me up on Oak Park and then that's when I first came here and I remember since I came to Oak Park. I liked it a lot. Oak Park has six instructional teams with each team supporting student needs according to exceptionality, strengths, and medical and behavioral needs. Our teams include DAT, Transition K-8, Transition 9-12, Spectrum, Action and Post-Grads. Some of our students utilize assistive technology to access curriculum and communication. We utilize general education curriculum as well as curriculum design specifically for students with special needs. All curriculum is rigorous and relevant and is differentiated to meet the needs of each individual student. Our master schedule includes course offerings and core subject areas as well as electives in music, art, physical education, and technology. All teams participate in community-based instruction in which teaching occurs off-campus while using community venues as extensions of the regular classroom. Our Post-Grad team prepares students for adult living by teaching necessary life skills such as budgeting and banking, meal preparation, housekeeping, accessing community services, and utilizing public transportation. They provide career experiences by working and volunteering with retail companies. Oak Park provides unique therapies for our students that are directly accessible on campus. Services include hippotherapy, physical therapy, occupational therapy, speech and language, vision and heart of hearing services. Our swimming pool was designed with our students' needs in mind and is used regularly for water therapy. Hippotherapy utilizes equestrian trainers who work with our students on improving physical strength and balance. My name is Linda Fries, F-R-E-A-S-E. I am an occupational therapist and a hippotherapy clinical specialist. Instride therapy has been in Sarasota County for over 20 years. I joined them 20 years ago because I started getting involved with hippotherapy and I saw the changes that it made in the kids and I was hooked so I quit my job and went back to school and I moved here because of the hippotherapy program. Hippotherapy offers to our students with posture and movement disabilities a platform where they can experience the kind of three-dimensional movement that we all take for granted. Those children who participate in the hippotherapy program have posture and movement disorders that prevent them from being able to walk. Some of them are not able to sit up. I have seen children sit for the first time, hold their heads level for the first time, talk for the first time after the polio epidemic because they had a lot of people who had polio. They didn't have a lot of therapy facilities and there was a woman who had been afflicted by polio whose doctor said she would never walk again and she won a silver medal in the Olympics. I'm sorry, I can't tell that story without crying. I always tear up. The gold medal winning rider had to carry her to the podium. She still couldn't walk and like she says it's a pretty big deal to win a silver medal. Each student at Oak Park School participates in vocational programming that prepares them for employment opportunities after transitioning from our post-grad program. The WeWork Lab is designed for students to learn pre-vocational skills that will lead to employment. The horticulture and practical arts programs provide hands-on experiences on campus that provide restoration and beautification to the school and its ground. Hi, I'm Sarah Conway. I'm a job coach here at Oak Park and I've been here for about I think this is my 10th year. I always wanted to work with this population ever since I was a little girl. I just always felt like they needed to feel like everybody else. What we do here in job coach land in that part of the school is we have a work lab to help the students transition whether they're going to be staying home after they exit Oak Park, whether they're going to a group home or whether they're going to independent living. We try to help teach them skills that they're going to need to be successful. The work lab has a lot of boxes to teach fine motor skills. We have tools, we have puzzles, we have restaurant wrapping hamburgers. We have a big variety of task boxes so that the students can all practice on whatever skill they need, whatever they can do and whatever they can make better. This Pelican Cottage that we're in now it's just a a portable that we thought why not make a studio apartment for these students so that they can practice independent living. So we made a a portable and everything was donated to us for this very nicely by Pelican Cottage. So it's a really good place for the classes to come in whenever they want with their teachers and their in their peros and practice independent living. It's been very successful and it's it's open every day just like a regular classroom nobody runs it we just set it up and it sort of runs itself. It's uh uh been very successful here to help the students transition. Oak Park is fortunate to have many dedicated and supportive business partners who continuously support our campus with monetary and in kind donations. Our interactive and stimulating playground was constructed through a generous contribution from the Knights of Columbus. We even have professional sports teams as business partners. The Tampa Bay Lightning is committed to hosting street hockey camps for our students to expose them to the sport and perhaps more importantly the value of being part of a team. I'm the PTSO president of Oak Park School and have been for five years now. Well our PTSO stands for Parent Teacher Student Organization so we encompass the entire school where we of course are a very unique demographic as we have students from pre-k all the way up to age 22 and all have an IEP which would indicate that they have some type of special needs and teaching to accommodate them at Oak Park. And as you've already witnessed while you've toured our campus and taken videos of all of our specials programs from our gym to our pool to our hippo therapists to our physical therapists our occupational therapists our speech therapists our library our media center our vocational arts our practical arts and our actual art room and music. So we involve the community by inviting them to different events.


in three games before you're by managing the practice week, maybe as crucial now as any other time in here? Well, I think just trying to be as creative as possible with as many guys that need it. But also, we've got guys that are coming back, off of whether that's designated for return or Deontay and Adrian and guys that we've got to get some work in. But then there's so many other guys that are working their way through things and battling through just the wear and tear of the regular season. So I think that's the biggest thing is trying to be creative, trying to find ways to improve, but also ways to take care of guys and then also get some other guys some work. With that challenge, working on the run game with all these new guys, Peterson, Deontay, that make it part of the additional challenge, trying to get them enough work to get them up to speed with the offense? Yeah, I think so. I mean, it's just that time of year. So we'll see what it looks like this week. And so I can't really tell you what that's going to look like, what practice is going to look like today. Just haven't gotten back and taken inventory. So hopefully we can improve in that area and get those guys some looks and practice. Was the running back rotation last night more by design or sort of just flying by the seat of your pants and how the game was going? I think a little bit just by how the game was going. And we'll see where that goes this week. I thought they all did some things well. And there's some things that they'll have to look at and improve. And obviously, we'll have to be able to block better for everybody. And that's all part of it. How did you think Jay-On held up through the full game back? Yeah, I mean, I think OK. We'll see. I'm sure he'll be sore. But like you said, his first game back, I thought it was OK. I think that it could continue to improve. And it was a good place to go get him back. 19-9 on the sack so far, Mike. Are you guys the case study this year for how a good pass rush can completely revolutionize defense from what it has been? Well, I don't know. Unless we're halfway through, we're not going to have any mid-season reports or anything. We're just trying to find ways to affect the quarterback each week, figure out what your coverage we're in and how to execute it. And I think that those guys do a good job of working together when we call games. It can always be better. And then at the end of the day, you've got to beat somebody. Just on this a little bit last night. But you said when that rush is working productively, as it has been, does that allow you to be a little bit more aggressive at times in the secondary? Well, I think that that's always when the coverage dictates it. When you're in a vision and break defense, yes. I think when there was maybe one, I can remember I'm sure there were more. But where the quarterback pumped it and guys went, and then he came back and hit, maybe it was cup over the middle, to me that is on the pass rush. I mean, that's what we're asking David or whoever to do is that if he looks and that front hand comes off, we're going to have to go and trigger. And he was able to progress back through. So to me, that is on the pass rush. So I think if there's the coverages that would allow us to do that, hopefully. But when you need to be in the back part of the field, you need to be taking care of that job, too. Easy to see guys in the pass rush winning their one-on-one battles. But is there something that you guys, the chain is doing particularly well to get those guys in positions to succeed, whether that's through stunts, alignment, things like that? Well, it's all part of it. I mean, I think that there are sometimes we're game in and, again, we're unfavorable down in distances, second and long. And you're saying, hey, we're going to rush. And if they hand it off, then we're going to have to live with whatever happens. And that sometimes shows up. But it's them understanding that what we want to do versus empty hang, or what we want to do versus this look. So it's always a process. It's always going to be, here's the plan. Here we're going to implement it. We're going to try to teach it to you. And then they're the ones that have to be able to execute it quickly and understand which call or which game they want to get to. Chris Jackson has been kind of pressed into duty. Nice game last week, good game. Yesterday, what is standing out to you just above? And he's battling. And I appreciate Chris. I thought he has done a nice job for us. Can continue to improve in the slot. But he's done some nice things outside. I thought his ability to come up and tackle was really good. And just a guy that has had a good off-season for us, and hopefully can continue to bring some stability. He's got some versatility to play inside and outside as well. How far did that even plan slot for most of the time this year than all of a sudden to go outside and play almost all the time? Well, he's gotten some work. He's gotten plenty of work outside. And it's got good speed down the field. And I think his technique's improved and stuff. You were aggressive. I already go for a touchdown on fourth and one. Instead of kicking, is that based on maybe feel how the game's going? Based on maybe, hey, I've had a play. And when you convert like that, how big would you be? Yeah, I think you just try to make sure that you're being mindful of the situation, the play, scoring opportunities, and just didn't know how many scoring opportunities we were going to get by the way that that was going. Really wanted to capitalize on the field position, love the play. And that's why we decided to do what we did. And the touchdown, a pretty good example of how effective Ryan can be as a runner. You're not like you're running zone reads with him all the time or anything. Nobody here has any problem, especially me with Ryan, with the football in his hand. He's proven that. The ability to scramble and extend plays or to get down field and run or to get his yards on a sneak or any kind of movement play. Jeff, and the way they work off of each other and the production they've had the last few weeks, is that come pretty close to what you were envisioning in the off season when you brought them in? Their growth together?  I just think that they are great people. They're great teammates, talented players. And they, I think, are finding ways to work together. And Danico has really taken a coaching and done a lot of things that maybe we might have corrected them on three weeks ago that are showing up and really making those plays. I mean, whether it's matching the quarterback's throwing hand, like Taran mentioned last night, there were times in the beginning of the year that that wasn't happened, or he may have put two hands up or whatever it may have been. And now you're seeing some of those techniques that it's just a correction. And he's really bought into it. You talk about the improvement further with the entire team. You've spoken a lot about how much you enjoy coaching them and how hard they compete. Is it especially gratifying to see the level of growth from week one against Arizona to what you put on the field last night as an entire team? Yeah. I mean, I think that that's why we stay here a lot of hours and try to figure out ways to help our players individually and then collectively as a team. You could look at Kevin Byard's ball production. I mean, we have tried to study that. And there's other guys are doing it. Kevin is just really doing it really well as far as stabbing through the pocket and not swatting and all these techniques that we see the difference between making a play and not making a play. And again, it's the player that goes out and does it. It's just that as coaches, you're trying to find ways to help them improve. And when you do that, there's a sense of buy-in from the player that, man, this stuff is working. And it really does help me, which then in turn helps their career and then it helps the team. As good as he's been, has Jeffrey Simmons sort of raised the standard for what's expected of him now going forward with that performance? Oh, Jeff will always raise the standard of expectations.  I mean, he's just, love seeing him every morning. We would miss him if we came to work and he wasn't here one day.  Kevin, Bayard had mentioned how he may not have been supposed to be in that passing lane on that interception to pick six. Is that something like, are you giving these guys more autonomy to do that? I would say that, you know, his responsibility is to have ability to make a play and then not hurt the defense. And it clearly didn't, you know what I mean? It was like, if he felt like he knew where the ball was going, he'd go make a play on the football. And that's never going to be an issue. If we start doing things outside the framework of what we're doing and it starts to hurt the team or the defense or the offense or whatever phase, then we have to correct things. We have to have a conversation. But we want guys to make as many plays as they can to help the team in any way. So I think that was a great example of it. Is that more of the case this year, where they're open to do that than last year? Well, I don't know. You know what I mean? I know that they play with a lot of confidence. And if they give up a play, you know, there's not a whole lot of panic. You know, we've gotten just a lot more red zone stops when teams have gotten down there. I think that's really just been the biggest thing. Obviously to Bayard's turnovers, but in coverage, it seems like he's with or without the interceptions. Pretty impressive in that regard as well. Is that accurate? I mean, usually, you know, we're using him in a number of different ways. So I would say most of the things that we're asking him to do, he's doing well. And again, he's a leader on this football team. And value his stability and his production. So whether that's man coverage on a tight end or playing down around the line of scrimmage or playing in different positions, that's something that I think he's really grown at and improved at. As far as the way Adrian ran, how do you think you did? And I guess with more reps, more practice time, you expect that to just keep improving? I hope so. I mean, I think that new system, new terminology, new blockers in front of them had some good, strong runs and probably a couple of cuts in there that he'd like to have back. And I'm sure that there's a couple of blocks that we'd like to have back that need to be better.  That helped us win. Jeremy did that, catching the ball, screens, good runs. Deontay had a couple of good runs. And then obviously Adrian was able to help us get in the end zone. Inquire with the league as to why there was no... I was on a plane. I didn't inquire with the league. I asked you guys to tweet at him. If you didn't, that's your fault. I'm not calling the league. I'm not going to get into this. Is it seem odd that there was no official announcement that... The correction? Correct. Correct. I don't know. I mean, maybe it's happened before. It's never happened personally to me before. So I don't have anything to go by. I don't know what the protocol is when they change something. Do they... Oh yeah, we changed it. OK. Well, let somebody else know so that... I mean, I don't want to be the guy. I'm just trying to follow the rules and say, hey, that's what it is. But no, you'd have to ask what the protocol is when they change a penalty to something else. It opens a broad door for officials in theory. I guess. You know what I mean? We changed it. OK. What did you change it to? But they do a great job. They communicated with me about the one penalty. You know, they came back and corrected it, said that I could take half the distance and put it on the 12 and a half. And so I appreciate that instead of, you know, moving the kickoff to the 50. And so, you know, we understand the job that they have. I want to be part of the solution. I know how fast the game is. I know how fast it is by standing behind those guys at practice, by being out there on the field and having been out there, it moves at a fast pace. And some calls are tough and they all have a job and they're part of the game. And so we know that they're just like, I make mistakes, the players make mistakes and the officials are going to make mistakes. And we're going to have to live with it and understand that it's a part of our game just as coaching and playing is. One week at a time, but when you do have the best record in the conference, is there any temptation to look ahead and start talking about, and we can get a buy, we can play at home, that sort of thing? No, no. So we're just turning the page and getting ready for the Saints. As you mentioned, you flew back this morning, we hope to get everything done. We have some plane ride. What did you make the schedule look like in the last 16... Yeah, we watched the game last night, guys watched the tape and, you know, no issues, you know, with our players. I'm sure they went out, had dinner, did whatever they wanted it to do to celebrate, got everybody on the bus, got to the airport. That was a great process, great trip, great operation from our football ops department. Flew back, landed. We're able to, you know, our video department had laptops for everybody with the Saints stuff on there. And this is a lot of work. And I'm conscious of that and how much work went into being able to give us the Rams game and then being able to give us the Saints stuff and having that all loaded up onto laptops for us to watch on the way home. So, you know, I appreciate Anthony and everybody in his department as well. How do you first, Mike, with your guys, being 7 and 2 and on top this late in the season? It's uncharted territory for you guys. I just wonder, as a coach, what's your approach with them? Probably the same as it was last week and the week before. Like, here's... We've got to fix this. This needs to be better. Here's the message. These are the keys. This is a 12 in shells and go coach them. You know, I don't really know any other way to do it. I just didn't know if they're, you know, in that position there's a different feeling as far as being the hunted rather than the hunter. I'm sure it'll be the same each week. I really do. Right. Nothing's... It's not going to change where I'm going to go back in here. We're going to figure out what the message is going to be for the week. Figure out what the keys are. Meet with Shane and Todd and... Auk. Talk about the injury report. See who may be available. That's kind of what we're going to do. The feeling has been practiced and played mostly on a rate this year, but with his background at left tackle, was he or could he be consideration at left tackle? Yeah, I mean he could be, but just understand him, you know, where the majority of his work has been and is common, you know. So, and he continues to improve and it's cool to see him, you know, push the pile and get Adrian into the end zone last night. I know he was excited about that, you know, playing that role of the jumbo tight end. So, we'll just keep working with all of them. Particularly, good job jumping in last night, especially given who he was lined up across from the start. Sure.


Our fourth inductee is Cara Hill. Cara was a four-year member of the women's basketball program, wrapping up her career as the all-time leading scorer and rebounder, and she still ranked second in both categories. She was a three-time all-NIAC selection. Leadership and knowledge of the game. She was a freshman. I'm not going to make a freshman a captain. But her leadership on the court and off the court with the other players, getting them together, practicing in the gym, her and Alicia came in, and they just did so much. I'll never forget she was a great team player. There were times she had shots and wouldn't take them. She wanted to pass them up, and she did pass them up to the point where I got a little upset because I want to score, I want to win. But she looked beyond that, and she saw the importance of her getting the other players involved. And when she got them involved, we became a better team. Sometimes you don't have a good game, and they'll be down on themselves, but Cara was always the one to go over and give them an encouraging word. And always there for people, even if it's situations where they may have personal issues or whatever, but they could always talk to Cara, and she was always there for them. Yes, and then not only lead by example, she would lead on the court when we're playing games, she would get in the huddle and give suggestions and be a coach player on the field, on the court. That's what she was. And then we only had the gym over there at Greenspring, and so that was, we didn't have but a lot of spaces. So we had to pick and choose when we could go in and use them, because we had physical education classes then. And so she would get the other girls, and they'd go in and they'd come in my office, coach we needed basketball, and I'd say, there they are in my office, get them.  They worked on their game. Oh yeah, absolutely. She's not going to ask anybody to do something that she wouldn't be willing to do. And, you know, she was captain for three years.  And I think that work ethic and the training and that discipline, I think they went to, first time in history, Stevenson, they went to the conference semifinals. And that was the first time in women's basketball for the university, which I'm sure contributed to the fact that we're here talking about her today. So yeah, no, she's always been, you know, tough on herself. She's always been tough on herself. From the class of 2007, it is my honor to welcome Kara Hill into the Dick Watts Athletics Hall of Fame. I'm so honored to be inducted into the Dick Watts Stevenson University Athletics Hall of Fame. I never would have imagined when I started at Villa Julie College in the fall of 2003 that I would be standing here today. I must say that Coach Rammer was instrumental in bringing me to Villa Julie. He was both persistent and consistent in his recruiting efforts. And I often could easily spot him in a gym at Oxon Hill. I was always amazed that he was willing to drive to Prince George's County from Baltimore on a weeknight just to see me play. My first season as a Mustang was truly a shock to my system. My high school made it to the state championship my senior year. So when we did win a single game, my freshman year, I knew we had a lot of work to do. I was not discouraged, but determined not to go another season like the previous. Coach Rammer assured me hope was on the way, and boy was he right. My co-inductee, Tonya, joined the team along with several other recruits, which was the start of our turnaround. My senior year, we finished with a record of 19 and 10. To go from zero wins in a season to 19 wins is a testament to our hard work. The athletic department became my family away from home. The men's basketball team and women's basketball team often traveled together and became a support system for each other. I even had a bonus coach and coach Adam, who would offer advice on my game. This truly was a unique and special group. I cannot fail to mention the support of many faculty members that supported the teams at Countless Games. Special shout out to Chip Rouse. I must admit, I was a little jealous when I came back to the sports facilities here and saw how marvelous they were. But I was incredibly proud at how much the university has grown. I want to thank my amazing parents for their unconditional love and support through my basketball career and life. Even when I was discouraged, which happened often, I knew I could count on them to be a positive and uplifting voice in my ear. My success here would not have been possible without them. I also would like to thank the rest of my family that came out to support me tonight. I'm so thankful for my experience at Stevenson University and have met lifelong friends along the way. I will forever cherish the memories I have here. Thank you.


Hey, if you're sitting there watching thinking I want to be better. I want to make more money. I want to improve I want to be a great salesperson. I want to have big dreams. I want to think bigger. I want to do big stuff in the world I want to sell a ton of insurance I want to help a lot of people then you will want to watch the rest of this video about five books that Every insurance agent should read.  Okay now if you don't want to read That's okay. You can listen to these all through audio book Okay, now, but I'm gonna give you specifically the five books that I Have enjoyed reading or listening to over the last ten years or so, okay? Because I'm big on like personal development self-improvement always getting better strap me better and you guys know that all right? So and I'm gonna list these really probably I'm not gonna put them in any certain order But you will want to remain for the fifth book and it's gonna tie into something We're doing in a couple months. Okay, so I'll make sure you state to the very end the fifth one is a phenomenal book Okay, that's all I got to say all right the first one that I want it that I want to talk about is the art of closing the cell The art of closing the cell by Who is it Brian? Tracy, okay by Brian Tracy this book I listen to every Single day in my car right you could turn on the radio. You can listen to music right you cannot get better You can be a part of 90% you cannot be a part of the 8% or right whatever okay, but when I was new I wanted to win so bad that I would do whatever it took whenever it took So I engrossed myself in this book some of the sales training that still teach right when I go around and do Events and train and and fly to offices and train teams and companies Some of the stuff that I use and that I and that I train on I got from this book the no-callback close boom That's where I got it. Okay, so the articles and sell our Brian Tracy Phenomenal book. It's a great. It's a great listen Brian Tracy is a tad monotone He doesn't have as much energy. I was out as I would like even though he talks about energy sometimes Okay, when I do an audio book, you're gonna feel the freaking energy. I'm actually Maybe I'll finish one one day. Okay, the article is in the cell great book The key to this one. It's got a ton of phenomenal information and I have listened to it multiple times I used to I used to ship it out on audio book to agents Phenomenal book love that. Okay Articles and so our Brian Tracy second one second one. Okay, second one is the 10x rule By Grant Cardone and you say well Cody what why this one? Why this one the biggest reason for me is most people Most insurance agents struggle not only do they struggle with closing Dude, give me the money right now, but they also struggle with enough activity They start they struggle with thinking big enough doing enough dreaming right putting forth the effort of the action most of us are Inherently lazy, it's human nature right to not want to push when you don't feel like it and the 10x rule Will challenge you right? I have a way of challenging insurance agents and I want to get to where You need to be in you need to be putting yourself in uncomfortable situations and get challenged all the time Frequently as much as you possibly can and that's important If you're not challenged and you feel lethargic and lazy and like you're not doing enough right now They need to think about it right you need to check yourself before you wreck yourself because I'm telling you you need to Feel challenged you need to feel motivated you need to feel Excited about what you're doing. Okay, so that's the second one third one third one is I may not write the whole thing out because it's very long, but it's how I raised Myself from failure to success in selling. Okay. I'll raise myself from Maybe I could just write it. I'll just be quick from failure to success in in selling Okay, this one is by I Believe almost positive. It's by Frank bedger By Frank bedger. Okay, really good book. It's got some it's got some you know, what I like about this is the stories Okay, they always say facts tell story sell I like the stories that are in this book about how he's actually going out and selling insurance Okay, this is one of my favorite books. I read this book years ago It's got some good stories It ties in to what you're trying to do how you're looking to accomplish it and when you read a book Okay, when you read a book, you're not looking for 800 different things that you can apply to your business when you read a book When you go to an event When you listen to a book when you go to a mastermind when you buy a university when you do these different things Okay, when you have a coach whatever But you don't have a coach gosh darn it you need one you looking for one Nugget, okay, that's the thing most people don't get you're looking for one Nugget that you can apply to your business right now that can impact the bottom line immediately They can jack you the freak up and that you can implement today, right at 8% nation in in in July You will get a nugget if you want to receive a nugget a lot of people are very negative They don't want to learn.  I'm not good at this the less likely I'm going to be good at it Okay, so when you're thinking about that start to think about okay having a different mindset and Choosing to grab one nugget. You just need one idea To really propel you to the next place in your business and in your life Okay, the fourth book fourth book this one's good this one. I read I listened to I Read it actually on a plane headed to Vegas for I think it was for 10x wasn't it Dylan when we were going out to 10x growth Kind of thing I was reading this Maybe I don't know There's no plan B For Your a game There's no plan B There's no plan B for your a game I can't think of the author's name off the top of my head, but I'm shocked I can't because I refer referred it in success society Dylan will probably grab it for me There's no plan B for your a game. What's unique about this is it challenges you to think bigger Challenge you to think bigger and to really go for it Bo Easton, that's right. Bo Easton. That's exactly right. Yep. Yep. Yep. Bo Easton, okay, Bo Easton And in that book he talks about how he trains people Any and how they train their mind to write down every day that they're gonna be the best in the world at this Right now I write down that I'm the number one insurance sales trainer on the planet Okay, I need to I need to think bigger I guess but I'm writing down that I will be the number one I will go down as the number one insurance sales trainer ever Okay, and by doing that. I'm training my mind to wake up and to go after that He's seen he's with stories in this book He's seen how professional athletes can go from nothing to being the best in the world at their sport He's seen it with soccer players gymnast football players to where they But they made a decision at some point as a kid and they started writing it down every single day I want to be the best in the world at this I'll be the best in the world at this I'll be the best in the world at this And it challenge you to think a little differently most of us have a problem with thinking way too small I want to challenge you to think a little bigger to open up your mind. You'll get an idea from this I freaking guarantee it. Okay, so that's a phenomenal book the last one I told you the last one. Okay, the last one is good Phenomenal sales book you need to be great at sales to really pull this thing off and it's called the way of the wolf the way of the way of the wolf by JB Jordan Belfort, okay, it's by Jordan Belfort He was the Wolf of Wall Street. Okay in the movie Leo Nardeta Caprio played him Jordan Belfort is speaking at a percent nation 2020 in Dallas at the Statler Okay, go to aprecination.com to grab your seat He will be speaking there that book really trains agents to be able to overcome objections To be able to get pulled off of the straight line as he calls it and then back to the straight line by by literally Just being in control and pivoting back to the script, which what's a lot of companies train But that book really diagnosis that straight line cell system that he talks so much about okay, and for me I don't do exactly Brian what Brian Tracy does 100% I don't do exactly what Granker don't does 100% I don't do exactly what Frank Becker does 100% I don't do exactly what Bowie's and does 100% I don't do it You know Jordan Belfort does exactly 100% But what I do is I pull from different people to make my own right? We're building a brand new CA cells system for teams. Okay, it's actually done now and When we were building this we wanted it to be everything that I it embodies me And then I've pulled from different people into one cell system that is meant to help you Succeed okay, so if you have any questions about the cell system about some different books about hiring a coach about the event Or just about scaling or maybe you want a quick strategy call with me email me cody at codyaskins.com I want to help you okay, so I want this to challenge you five books every insurance agent should read Every single one of these I'll have Dylan put a link in the description where you can go buy these you think about a book It's like 10 or 20 bucks right who cares about the money It's that you want to succeed as bad as you want to breathe as my buddy Eric Thomas says alright Okay, so think about what you can do to get better every single day have a huge goal write it down commit go all in Let's do this. Okay, so thanks for watching Go read get better Every single day hey if you love this video then you're gonna love some cells training All right the next video how to overcome objections with my 3a's the steps the systems It's right there click on that video and I'll see you there. I don't know that I can qualify my mom in bad health I understand. Hey, thank you so much for sharing that this program is actually meant for people that are not in great health Okay, so


All right, you'll tweak it and it starts now. OK. During the past two centuries, social theorists have contributed to what has come to be called the secularization thesis. This thesis identifies three main trends. First of all, progress in science and technology tends to promote a disenchanted view of the world, where an ever-increasing number of events can be causally explained without turning to theology or metaphysics. Second, as governing structures adapt to scientific advances, churches and other religious organizations tend to lose their control over law, politics, public welfare, education, and science. And instead, they restrict themselves just to their pastoral functions of providing for the individual's spiritual well-being. And so religion becomes largely a private matter. The third thing is that increased prosperity brought on by industrialization and the rise of the welfare state tends to reduce the need for reliance on a higher power to cope with life's inherent risks. In my abstract, I claim that this hypothesis was showing signs of age. By this, I don't mean to imply that these trends have ceased altogether, but that there are significant discrepancies between the trends as described and what is actually happening. Sociologists and philosopher Jurgen Habermas explains that among the expert community of sociologists, the secularization thesis has been a subject of controversy for more than two decades, and that there is even talk of the end of secularization theory. He points out that while the data globally still provides surprisingly robust support for secularization, the weakness of the theory is due rather to rash inferences that betray an imprecise use of the concepts of secularization and modernization. He goes on to describe these discrepancies in more detail, and he calls this revised thesis post-secularization or post-secularism. He points out that the European model of secularization has actually been the exception rather than the rule. As a counter example, though religion is changing in the United States, it's still home to many vibrant religious communities, and its proportion of religiously committed and active citizens remains high. Despite its religiosity, America nevertheless is the spearhead of modernization. It used to be seen as an unusual holdout against the secularization trend, but wider perspectives on other cultures and world religion now see this as more of a norm. So although churches have lost control over their government functions, they continue to exert a powerful soft influence by encouraging their congregants to be politically active and by clear messaging on issues that are of importance to them. And from a global perspective, religion, especially fundamentalism is actually increasing in the world. So while post-secular theorists have a lot more to say, for the purposes of my presentation today, I'd just like to highlight two important conclusions that I draw from post-sexualization. First, religion has been misunderstood, and perhaps most importantly, religion is not going away anytime soon, so we'd better try to understand it. So let's see if we can try to understand it a little better today. What exactly is religion? It has been notoriously difficult to define. We could easily spend hours on this topic and still not get to the bottom of it. But in general, I take the position that religion has been characterized too narrowly. We think of religion as the church on the corner, as Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism, or Judaism, but we forget that religion existed long before the popular denominations of today. In his crowning work, Religion in Human Evolution, sociologist Robert Bella describes religion as a system of symbols that, when enacted by human beings, establishes powerful, pervasive, and long-lasting moods and motivations that make sense in terms of an idea of a general order of existence. You may notice that this description applies to a broad range of human activities, some of which may not traditionally be associated with religion. So hold that thought because I'm gonna get back to it later. Far from a peripheral aspect of human life, Bella draws on a wide array of biological, archeological, and anthropological research to show that religion was not just an important phase of our evolutionary development, but is actually one of the conserved core processes that contributes to our ongoing survival and is part of our very nature. He traces its emergence in our evolutionary predecessors and describes some of the necessary components that preceded it. So I had a ton of slides about some of his research and I had to just cut them all out because we just don't have enough time today. You can make them available afterwards online? Yeah, I guess I could do that, that'd be great. Bella stresses that human culture develops incrementally. While it may advance to new phases, it always retains elements of the previous ones. He identifies three phases of cultural development, mimetic in which primitive humans communicate primarily by mimicking and gesture, mythic in which the development of language has enabled narrative, and theoretic in which old narratives are questioned and reorganized, old rituals and myths are replaced with new ones, et cetera. But today I'd especially like to focus on myth or narrative. Myth literally means story, especially in the context of religion, stories about transcendent human experiences. Contrary to the popular understanding of the word, myths are not untrue. They may even be based on historical events. In fact, they often are, but their strength is not derived from their historicity. It comes from there being powerful motivational narratives that will still be relevant long after the historical incidents that led to their emergence. Even myths that are obviously fables still contain overarching moral truths that help to order a people's worldview, at least for a time. And we can definitely see myths fading in and out and on the ascendant and waning as well. Myths are symbols that point us beyond our present everyday concerns to an overarching purpose. They bring meaning to our lives and as human beings we crave meaning. We want meaning so badly that we create it where it wasn't before. In fact, created meanings that are most compelling are the ones that tend to endure the longest. Which brings me to the last point that I'd like to make today. As we noted earlier, despite undergoing rapid change, religion today is alive and well and even shows up in some unexpected places. In fact, in many instances, the secular narrative has taken on religious functions. Religion blogger Nathaniel Givens shares a few examples. One prominent and off-sided example of this is the secular religion of environmentalism. The degree to which the green movement recapitulates all the high notes of Christianity is so brazen that it is ripe for parody. We all existed in a state of natural bliss and union with nature until the serpent of modern technology entered and we partook of the forbidden fruit of industrialization, thus causing us to be expelled from Eden and subjected to a barrage of artificial cancer-inducing chemicals. Now all our children have autism from vaccines as the world labors under the weight of collective guilt. We are held sinners in the hands of an angry nature over the fire of catastrophe, of catastrophic global warming, where repentance, carbon offsets cannot purchase our freedom, but is due nonetheless. It's basically Christianity without Christ. He hastens to add, please note that none of this discussion calls into question the science of anthropic global climate change. And I'm merely pointing out that that issue has social weight not because of the science, but because of the narrative. We are disaffected as Louis C.K. puts it, everything is amazing, no one is happy. Something is missing and we need a narrative to plug the whole. Environmentalism fits the profile, whether or not it is factually true as beside the point. This has been noted before, but what has been missed is that this is not just a new veneer for Christianity. It's an example of the extent to which religion, properly defined, is deeply and completely compatible with scientific rhetoric. I should also add, in case it's not obvious already, that Givens is not trying to vindicate Christianity here. He's merely making a sociological observation. He goes on. Another stark example of this was evidence following the tragic Sandy Hook massacre. In the old days, we would have turned to religion to assuage our grief and pain and give us some explanation, but in the 21st century newspapers made sure to cover extensively the fact that the killer's DNA would be studied. Scientifically, this is meaningless. It's as relevant as reading entrails or casting bones. And that's precisely the point. Science is increasingly being cast to fill the role that religion once filled. Mary Midgley identifies two frequent pitfalls that many scientists fall into when discussing some of the potential implications of their discoveries. Cosmic optimism and cosmic pessimism. Robert Bella shares examples of both in his book, which I mentioned earlier. As an example of cosmic optimism, we have Eric Chesson's book, Cosmic Evolution. Intelligent life is an animated conduit through which the universe comes to know itself. Perhaps now is the time to widen the quest for understanding still further, to expand the intellectual effort beyond conventional science, to engage the larger, non-scientific communities of philosophers, theologians, and others who often resonate with the cosmic evolutionary theme, even if not in name, all in an ambitious attempt to construct a millennial worldview of who we are whence we came and how we fit into the cosmic scheme of things as wise ethical human beings. Humankind is entering an age of synthesis such as occurs only once in several generations. Perhaps only once every few centuries. The years ahead will surely be exciting, productive, perhaps even deeply significant, largely because the scenario of cosmic evolution provides an opportunity to inquire systematically and synergistically into the nature of our existence, to mount a concerted effort to a modern universe history that people of all cultures can readily understand and adopt. As we begin the new millennium, such a coherent story of our very being, a powerful and true myth can act as an effective intellectual vehicle to invite all cultures to become participants, not just spectators in the building of a whole new legacy. So Bella responds to this. Chason is in fact calling for a new church to go with his new religion. I have no problem with Chason's endeavor. Indeed, I have a lot of sympathy with it, but I would be happier if he had taken responsibility for what he is doing rather than implying that all this is still science even if, quote, beyond conventional science, beyond conventional science, unquote. And he falls into one of the pitfalls of all religions when he speaks of the story he tells as a powerful and true myth, with the implication that other myths are not true, for truth is one of the marks that gives his religion its distinction. This leads perilously close to the implication that all the other religions are false. Then what happens to the vast majority of humanity that doesn't understand much less believe his myth? Chason would have avoided this error had he been clear about this, myth is not science. Myth can be true, but it is a different kind of truth from the truth of science and must be judged by different criteria. And the myth he tells, though it draws on science, is not science and so cannot claim scientific truth. I would argue that the myths told by the ancient Israelite prophets, by Socrates, Plato and Aristotle, by Confucius and Mencius and by the Buddha, just to stay within the purview of this book are all true myths. He could have added other religions as well. They overlap with each other and with Chason's myth, but even in their conflicts, which are sometimes serious, they are all worthy of belief and I find it possible to believe in all of them in rather deep but not exclusive ways. He then shares an example of cosmic pessimism. It is perfectly true that science attacks values, not directly, but it subverts them. If he accepts this message in its full significance, man must at last wake out of his millenary dream and discover his total solitude, his fundamental isolation. He must realize that like a gypsy, he lives on the boundary of an alien world, a world that is deaf to his music and as indifferent to his hopes as it is to his sufferings or his crimes. So Bella points out that actually that theory is a little bit outdated since morality itself has evolutionary origins. But he still says, although a distinguished scientist and one of the founders of molecular biology, Monod in the above passage has entered the world of metaphysical speculation and perhaps not surprisingly finds there the thought of a leading French existentialist. As Mijili says of him, he has created a drama in which Sartrean man appears as the lonely hero challenging an alien and meaningless universe. Just wanna share a few more examples. Cosmos is also within us. We're made of star stuff. We are away of a cosmos to know itself. Recognize that the very molecules that make up your body, the atoms that construct the molecules are traced to the crucibles that were once the centers of high mass stars that exploded their chemically enriched guts into the galaxy. Enriching pristine gas clouds with the chemistry of life. So that we're all connected to each other biologically to the earth chemically and to the rest of the universe atomically. That's kind of cool. That makes me smile. And I actually feel quite large at the end of that. It's not that we are better than the universe. We're part of the universe. We're in the universe and the universe is in us. Don't get me wrong. I love these guys. I love these guys. In fact, I love watching these shows. Cosmos is one of my favorite shows, okay? So don't get me wrong. Bella ends his critique of these excesses on ecumenical tone. He says, as I now move to trying to tell the modern scientific metanarrative in highly condensed form, let me just reaffirm my conviction that there is undoubted truth in all the reactions, including the rather different ones from these scientists, but also those from many other scientists and non-scientists to this extraordinary and disturbing metanarrative. I also believe that in spite of our differences, we do not need to fall into culture wars in which we denounce and anathematize those with whom we disagree. This is a big universe. There is room for all of us. At this point, I'd just like to paraphrase some of Nietzsche's remark, which I find apt, although they were originally addressed to philosophers, not scientists, he said. That which causes scientists to be regarded half distrustingly and half mockingly is not the oft-repeated discovery how innocent they are, how often and easily they make mistakes and lose their way, in short how childish and childlike they are, but that there is not enough honest dealing with them, whereas they all raise a loud and virtuous outcry when the problem of truthfulness is even hinted at in the remotest manner. They all pose as though their real opinions had been discovered and attained through the self-evolving of a cold, pure, divinely indifferent dialectic, in contrast to all sorts of mystics who, fairer and foolisher, talk of inspiration, whereas, in fact, a prejudiced proposition, idea, or suggestion, which is generally their heart's desire, abstracted and refined, is defended by them with arguments sought out after the event. They are all advocates who do not wish to be regarded as such, generally astute defenders also of their prejudices, which they dub truths and very far from having the conscience, which bravely admits this to itself, very far from having the good taste of the courage, which goes so far as to let this be understood, perhaps to warn, friend or foe, or in cheerful confidence and self-ridicule. Of course, this is an exaggeration, but the phenomenon occurs frequently enough to be a useful observation. The main point, be more aware of and open about your biases. Don't be sloppy about where science ends and religion begins. Call a spade a spade. Back to Bella's definition of religion. Religion is a system of symbols that, when enacted by human beings, establishes powerful, pervasive, and long-lasting moods and motivations. And I'd just like to buttress this with the words of William James. He says, the capacity of the strenuous mood lies so deep down among our natural human possibilities that even if there were no metaphysical or traditional grounds for believing in a God, men would postulate one simply as a pretext for living hard and getting out of the game of existence its keenest possibilities of zest. Every sort of energy and endurance of courage and capacity for handling life's evils is set free in those who have religious faith. For this reason, the strenuous type of character will on the battlefield of human history always out wear the easy going type and religion will drive ear religion to the wall. The definition of religion that I find most useful is whatever symbols, rituals, and narratives are capable of provoking a strenuous mood in a community that inspires it to work towards a desired future. It is a technology like any other but it comes from so far back in our evolutionary past that we're not used to thinking of it that way. It can be used for good or evil. Let's make sure we use it for good. Let's also try to be more aware of when we cross over into religious territory and do so in the right context and consciously and set it by mistake. That's all I have time for. I had one more slide but we'll skip it. Thank you guys. Thank you.