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Lois Houston and Nikita Abraham continue their deep dive into Oracle Database 23ai backup and recovery strategies with Senior Principal Database & MySQL Instructor Bill Millar.   Picking up from Part 1, they explore critical concepts such as instance recovery, checkpoint processes, and the role of redo log files. Bill shares insights into complete and incomplete recovery, flashback technologies, and lots more.   Oracle MyLearn: https://mylearn.oracle.com/ou/course/oracle-database-23ai-backup-and-recovery/141127/   Oracle University Learning Community: https://education.oracle.com/ou-community   LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/showcase/oracle-university/   Twitter: https://twitter.com/Oracle_Edu   Special thanks to Arijit Ghosh, David Wright, Radhika Banka, and the OU Studio Team for helping us create this episode.   --------------------------------------------------------   Episode Transcript:   00:00 Welcome to the Oracle University Podcast, the first stop on your cloud journey. During this series of informative podcasts, we'll bring you foundational training on the most popular Oracle technologies. Let's get started! 
00:26 Nikita: Welcome back to the Oracle University Podcast! I'm Nikita Abraham, Team Lead of Editorial Services with Oracle University, and with me is Lois Houston, Director of Innovation Programs. Lois: Hi everyone! Last week, we had a fantastic chat with Bill Millar, our Senior Principal Database & MySQL Instructor. We dug into the basics of backup and recovery. We touched on everything from a DBA's role in preventing data loss to handling different types of failures, and even some common mistakes that tend to pop up when managing a database. Nikita: Yeah, if you missed that episode, definitely go back and check it out. It's packed with useful info, especially if you're in charge of keeping databases safe. 01:10 Lois: Today, we're picking up where we left off. We're going to ask Bill about instance recovery and recovery strategies. Bill, can you kick things off by explaining what instance recovery is? Bill: You can understand instant recovery by becoming familiar with the checkpoint process, the redo log files, and the role of the log writer with the redo log files. Automatically instance or crash recovery. What is it doing? What are the phases of instance recovery? How we possibly can tune that instance recovery. We can use the mean time to recovery advisor that can help us determine how we might tune the instance recovery. 01:51 Nikita: OK, so let's go through some of these concepts and procedures you mentioned. What is the checkpoint process responsible for exactly? Bill: The checkpoint process itself, it's responsible for updating the data file headers with checkpoint information. When a checkpoint is taken, it is going to write into the controlfiles. It tells the DB writer to write. DB writer writes to the data files, and the checkpoint is also annotated in the data files. So updating controlfiles with that checkpoint information also, controlfiles and database files. It signals that DB writer at full check points again, hey, it's time to write. So that way, it has the latest data written to the data files. The controlfile and datafiles, those are in sync with that. 02:40 Lois: Bill, what about the log writer process and the redo log files? Bill: With the log writer process and the redo log files, the redo log files record the changes to the database himself. It should be multiplexed. 02:53 Nikita: What do you mean by that? Bill: More than one redo log group. Now, the redo log groups, it is recommended that they should be multiplexed. Each group member should be on a different disk or in a different disk group if you're using ASM. 03:10 Nikita: And why is that, Bill? Bill: Because if I lose one, if I lose one redo log group, one member, I can continue to operate with just the one. If I only have one redo log group member and the system comes around and tries to write to it, then my system is going to come to a halt. So the log writer is going to write to those redo logs whenever somebody does a commit. When that redo log buffer is 1/3 full or every three seconds and before DB writer writes. So those are the four mechanism that tells log writer to write from that log buffer to the redo log files. And it'll also write, when we do a shut down, all the buffers will be flushed. And so that way, everything will be in sync when the system is shut down. 04:01 Lois: What are the different modes of operation for a database, Bill? And how do these modes impact the recovery capabilities of the database? Bill: So we have two different modes we can operate in. One is called NOARCHIVELOG mode. It is the default. ARCHIVELOG mode, highly encouraged. But not every environment has to be in ARCHIVELOG mode. 04:21 Nikita: So with ARCHIVELOG mode… Bill: Closed database. You have to close it, recover to the last backup. That's as far as I can go. Actually, I could, depending on what happens, I might be able to apply some redo. Suitable for training and test environments or for data warehouses, we don't have a lot of frequent changes. It's mainly bulk loading data at night and querying during the day. So it might be appropriate for that. Because ARCHIVELOG mode, it is a little overhead. Yes. So with that database, it goes down while it's open. The system, when it comes up, it can recover to the last committed transaction. And this is usually the mode we want to operate in for production environments. So we have that data in the buffer cache. We have that redo being buffered. We have the undo tablespace, keeping track of what the data was before a change. The redo keeps track of what was the change. And if we're in ARCHIVELOG mode, as we switch from one redo log to another, we will generate what's referred to as archived log files, and that's what allows us to do a complete recovery. 05:33 Lois: What happens in the case of automatic instance recovery? Bill: For an automatic instance recovery or crash recovery, our system went down unexpectedly. Because it did not do a clean shutdown, the buffers were not flushed. Everything was not synchronized. So the datafile, controlfile, everything is out of sync. 05:53 Nikita: So, how do the files get synchronized then? Bill: It uses the redo log groups to synchronize the files. It's going to roll forward. It rolls forward the changes that were made. So due to different distinct operations. Roll forward applies committed and uncommitted data. And the redo does not keep track of what was committed and uncommitted. It'll keep track of, hey, I had this transaction, hey, here's a commit for that transaction. But hey, I have a transaction. That was never uncommitted. That's the job of the undo. But rolls forward all those changes. And then anything that did not actually receive a commit, it will roll back the uncommitted data, return to the original state. And that is the job of the undo tablespace. 06:37 Lois: Bill, is it possible to tune instance recovery for better performance? Bill: You can try to tune this instance recovery. Tuning it is touchy. Be careful because you can cause more harm than what you think you might be doing good. The instance recovery, what we're doing, we're trying to-- the transactions between checkpoints. When was the last checkpoint? Because the items between the checkpoints, that's what has to be reapplied. So the last checkpoint to the last redo log, what is that time frame there between those? Well, what we're going to do, we're going to try to control that. We're going to try to control the difference between the checkpoint and the end of the redo log. There is a mean-time recovery advisor. You specify the desired times in seconds or minutes that how often you want that checkpoint to occur. There is a parameter, FAST_START_MTTR parameter that you can set. The default value is zero saying, hey, I'm going to let the system take care of it. And the maximum you can set it is to one hour. 07:46 Nikita: And why 1 hour?
 Bill: The reason being, if I set that to one hour and I have a lot of activity, how long is it going to take? How many transactions can happen within that hour? Yeah, I'm not doing a checkpoint as often, so I'm eliminating that workload. But if it has to recover, how long is it going to take? If I set it too small, the system says, hey, right now, it's going to take me 19 seconds based off statistics. If I said, OK, I want it in five seconds. So what does that mean? Every five seconds, I'm saying do a checkpoint. So what is it doing? OK, time to do a checkpoint. OK, time to go ahead and OK, DB writer write. OK, log writer write. OK, let me update the datafiles and the controlfiles. So you're just thrashing your system. So be careful if you decide to try to manually tune it. And when you go out and look at this mean time to recover, and even if you do it through the command line, you'll see that, that value is most likely going to change throughout the day, depending on the workload that you have. 08:46 Lois: How does the process of restoring and recovering data typically work? Bill: So when we restore, we're restoring our datafiles. All the datafiles, tablespace, controlfiles, archived redo log, server parameter file. Then when we recover, it involves depending on the backup that we use and other factors in there, it is going to apply the redo. So automatically done by RMAN. So I tell it, this is what I want to do. Hey, I want to restore a database. OK, RMAN says, all right, what backup are you going to use? What is it I need to restore? And then we tell it to recover. OK, I know what I need to use to recover. So RMAN can do the work for you. So when we restore and recover due to a manual process and there's different methods that we can use, and depending on the failure, we'll drive what type of restore and recovery we might perform. 09:40 Are you looking for practical use cases to help you plan and apply configurations that solve real-world challenges? With the new Applied Learning courses for Cloud Applications, you'll be able to practically apply the concepts learned in our implementation courses and work through case studies featuring key decisions and configurations encountered during a typical Oracle Cloud Applications implementation. Applied learning scenarios are currently available in General Ledger, Payables, Receivables, Accounting Hub, Global Human Resources, Talent Management, Inventory, and Procurement, with many more to come! Visit mylearn.oracle.com to get started. 10:22 Nikita: Welcome back! Can you talk about the different types of recovery scopes, Bill? How do they compare? Bill: Recovery can have two kinds of scope. All right. One is the complete recovery. We are getting the database back to the current time of the crash with no loss of data. We're going to again bring everything back to the present. Incomplete or point-in-time recovery. We're going to take a database or maybe a tablespace or even a table back to a point-in-time in the past. So from the time that we select to take it to recover, everything that was done after that is null and void, is gone missing. That's why it's called incomplete recovery, because it's not complete. 11:09 Lois: What are the steps that take place during complete recovery? Bill: We restore the datafiles. Changes are applied. We're applying the redo. The datafiles contained committed and uncommitted transactions. The undo is applied. Anything that did not receive an actual commit will take back to the original value. And we have our datafiles recovered. 11:33 Nikita: And what about point-in-time recovery? Bill: Point-in-time recovery, very similar. We're going to restore the datafiles from as far back as necessary. Changes are applied. So the data files are going to contain the committed and uncommitted up to that point-in-time. Database is open, that redo, that undo, anything that did not actually receive a commit. The undo is applied. The point-in-time recovered is complete. We're not applying all the redo, all the changes, only up to the time that we specify. 12:08 Lois: Are there any features that can make point-in-time recovery quicker? Bill: We also have the ability to use flashback database. It is an optional feature. And it can be a quick way to do that point-in-time recovery. It is an alternative to that database point-in-time recovery we just looked at. Faster. No restore is required. It's going to rewind the database. It does require some configuration in the environment. We do have to set up in order to use flashback database. 12:41 Nikita: I want to talk about Oracle's data protection solutions, particularly when it comes to backup and recovery or disaster recovery. Bill: So for physical data protection-- backup and recovery objective. Yep, that works for both physical and logical. My recovery time, hours to days. Possibly minutes to hours for the logical. And Oracle solution, we have the Recovery Manager that's out of the box, RMAN. Oracle Secure Backup, that is Oracle's media management library system backing up to tape. The logical protection, yes, flashback technologies can help me take care of that very easily. For disaster recovery, physical data protection, recovery time objective, seconds to minutes. We're not going to accomplish that with RMAN. You're going to want to use our Data Guard with the Active Data Guard feature to be able to switch over to a standby database within seconds of a failure. 13:41 Lois: Why would someone choose to use flashback technologies for recovery, Bill? Bill: With the flashback technologies, we can use it for viewing data as past dates. What did it look like? We can wind the database back and forth in time. Assist users in an error analysis and recovery, because we have different technologies. This flashback query, version query, transaction query, those allow me to view what was the value of a row at a time. I can even see what were the changes to a row over a period of time? I can also view the query that caused that change. For error recovery, I can back out a transaction. I can take a table back to a non-current time. I can also flashback a table that was dropped. And I can also take an entire database by using flashback. So the different recovery options I might have with the flashback technology. 14:44 Lois: Thank you so much, Bill. These last two episodes have been so insightful, right Niki? Nikita: I couldn't agree more, Lois! If you want to know more about backup and recovery configuration and other concepts, visit mylearn.oracle.com and search for the Oracle Database 23ai: Backup and Recovery course. Our upcoming episode is a very special one, where we'll be discussing Oracle AI in Fusion Cloud Human Capital Management. So, watch out for that! Until next week, this is Nikita Abraham… Lois: And Lois Houston, signing off!
 15:16 That's all for this episode of the Oracle University Podcast. If you enjoyed listening, please click Subscribe to get all the latest episodes. We'd also love it if you would take a moment to rate and review us on your podcast app. See you again on the next episode of the Oracle University Podcast.

In this two-part special, Lois Houston and Nikita Abraham delve into the critical topic of backup and recovery in Oracle Database 23ai.   Together with Bill Millar, Senior Principal Database & MySQL Instructor, they discuss the role of database administrators, strategies for protecting data, and dealing with various types of data failure.   Oracle MyLearn: https://mylearn.oracle.com/ou/course/oracle-database-23ai-backup-and-recovery/141127/   Oracle University Learning Community: https://education.oracle.com/ou-community   LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/showcase/oracle-university/   Twitter: https://twitter.com/Oracle_Edu   Special thanks to Arijit Ghosh, David Wright, Radhika Banka, and the OU Studio Team for helping us create this episode.   --------------------------------------------------------- Episode Transcript: 00:00 Welcome to the Oracle University Podcast, the first stop on your cloud journey. During this series of informative podcasts, we'll bring you foundational training on the most popular Oracle technologies. Let's get started! 00:26 Nikita: Welcome to the Oracle University Podcast! I'm Nikita Abraham, Team Lead of Editorial Services with Oracle University, and with me is Lois Houston, Director of Innovation Programs. Lois: Hi there! For the last two weeks, we've been having really exciting discussions on Oracle AI Vector Search. We covered the fundamentals, benefits, the vector workflow, and lots more. Today, we're going to talk about backup and recovery in Oracle Database 23ai with Bill Millar. If you've been listening this season, you'll know that Bill is a Senior Principal Database & MySQL Instructor with Oracle University. Nikita: In this two-part special, we'll dive into some of the things you need to know about backup and recovery, especially if you're a database and backup admin. So, if you're the person in charge of keeping data safe and handling disaster recovery, this is definitely worth your time. 01:20 Lois: That's right, Niki. Hi Bill, thanks for joining us again. What's the role of a Database Administrator, or DBA, when it comes to backup and recovery? Bill: The DBA is typically responsible for ensuring the database is open and available when needed and at times you need to work with system administrators and other people within your organization to achieve that. But we want to try to protect the database from failure wherever possible. We want to increase the mean time between failures. Hopefully, we don't have failures, and we have to increase that time. But it might mean that we need to ensure we have redundant hardware and that in place, again, maybe out of the realm of the DBA, but people within your organization can help with that. We want to protect those critical components by using the redundancy. And we want to decrease the mean time to recover. Failures happen, but how fast can we get access back to that data after that failure. The faster we can do it, the happier customers are. Minimize the loss of data. It's never good to lose data, especially in a critical environment, but maybe in test and development, maybe not so bad.  02:39 Nikita: How do we ensure a separation of duties for backup and recovery processes? Bill: For a separation of duties, we do have a user called SYSBACKUP. It has the privileges that's required to perform backup and recoveries, the privilege to connect and execute the commands in what we refer to as RMAN, our Recovery Manager. As I said, it has permissions for backup and recovery because you do need to shut down the database, start up the database, those type of things. We're able to connect to that closed database to try to troubleshoot it, to get it to the open state again. It does not include any privileges to access data. The SYSBACKUP user is created when we install the database, when we create the database. We can use it explicitly for privileged user connection. It allows us to connect to the database. So RMAN connects as SYSBACKUP. 03:37 Lois: Bill, what should people keep in mind when figuring out what's considered critical data? Bill: You want to try to identify your critical data. Some data might be highly required to access and make sure we don't lose don't lose data, but then you might have some environments. OK, I don't need to have them up and running as fast. If we lose a little data, it may not hurt, but we want to identify the difference in the different data that we have on different environments. So we want to also prioritize that critical data, which data do we need access to first because how much will the company lose per hour of downtime because we can't do business. We want to make sure the access data protection requirements. Not everybody has access to everything. And there are different types of disaster that can happen that are going to be totally out of your control. There's the physical disaster, a hurricane or tornado, outages, power outages, component failures, failures within the building itself, corruption of data because of some of these failures. And then, the most dreaded one, the one that happens most often, usually those human errors, the logical errors, where the data is just bad, we are able to access and everything. It's just that something has changed that shouldn't have been changed. We want to make sure we access our recovery requirements.  05:04 Lois: So, what are they? What are those requirements? Bill: We want to base that requirement based on how critical is that data, how soon do we need to have access to that? What is our recovery point objective? Do we have a tolerance for any type of data loss? How frequently should we backups? How often they should be taken? What type of backups will be another thing we'll want to figure out? Is point-in-time recovery required? Are we able to or do we ever need to go back to a previous point in time to do something? It's not always just recovery for a database failure. We might need to do a recovery point in time to a different system so we can investigate something. What is my recovery time objective? Again, what is the tolerance for the downtime? How long can I be down? The downtime, the biggest part of when a system goes down is trying to identify what is the problem, then next is what is going to be my plan to recover, and then perform in the recovery. We might have a tiered required time objective based off of critical data, and then depending on the failure. Is that failure at the entire database? Is it just a tablespace? Is it just a table? Is it just a row? That also determines how long it takes to recover and what type of recovery we might try to perform. What is my backup retention policy? Do I have a requirement to where I have to have my backups off site? And it doesn't mean like back in the old days of mainframe computers, you'd back up to tape and you'd take those tapes off site. You might still do that today. Or, am I backing up to a cloud environment? So what do I need to have for that? What about long-term backups? We work with our day-to-day backups, but there's those backups that require for longer, archives like end of year backups. Some places require to keep their end of year backup for like 10 years. How are we going to handle that? So these are some of the things that we have to think about when we start talking about backup and recovery. 07:23 Did you know that the Oracle University Learning Community regularly holds live events hosted by Oracle expert instructors. Find out how to prepare for your certification exams. Learn about the latest technology advances and features. Ask questions in real time and learn from an Oracle subject matter expert. From Ask Me Anything about certification to Ask the Instructor coaching sessions, you'll be able to achieve your learning goals for 2024 in no time. Join a live event today and witness firsthand the transformative power of the Oracle University Learning Community. Visit mylearn.oracle.com to get started. 08:04 Nikita: Welcome back! Bill, I want to talk about the different failures that can occur in an Oracle database. How would you categorize them? Bill: There are different category of failure. This is not an all-inclusive list by any means. It's just something that possibly can happen. So they can usually be divided into different categories like statement failure. All right. When doing a select and insert, update, delete, the statement itself fails. A user process fails. Single database session fails for some reason. Network failure, connectivity is lost. The user error, probably one of the most common ones we have to deal with. A user successfully completes an operation, but that operation was erroneous. They dropped the wrong table, updated the wrong row. Then there's the instance failure. The database itself shuts down unexpectedly. And then media failure, usually a hard failure of our disk. Something of memory, something failed and caused an error. 09:12 Lois: Ok. I want to dive a little deeper into each of these categories that you mentioned. Let's start with statement failures. What are typical problems that one might face? Bill: Attempts to enter invalid data into a table. They're trying to put a numeric field in a date field, and usually just working with the user is going to correct that. Is that the DBA responsible? Yes, no, maybe. They attempt to form operations with insufficient privileges. Attempts to allocate space that fails, well, that depends on are they going-- do they have unlimited storage or do they have a limit? Logic errors in the application. Well, that's where we're going to have to work with those developers to try to correct those type of errors. 09:59 Nikita: What about user process failures? Bill: User performs an abnormal disconnect, doesn't close out properly. It can cause something to hang up or even possibly erroneous data to be updated. A user session is abnormally terminated. Well, usually, we don't have to try to resolve those user type errors, but something we might need to look into. A user experiences a program error that terminates the session. Again, usually it's the application developers, but it's something as a DBA, we might want to keep an eye on. Is it the same person? Is it from the same location? Is it the same module within that application? Maybe there's some things we can help to identify what the possible problem can be. 10:43 Nikita: Bill, tell us about common issues that can lead to network failures. What can we do to mitigate these problems and ensure network resilience? Bill: The listener fails. Well, we can connect a backup listener and configure how it can connect time failover can work. A network interface card fails. Well, again, we're not the hardware people, but can we work with our network, our server team, whatever, to possibly have redundant network cards? The network connection fails itself. Can we configure a backup network connection? 11:18 Lois: And what about user errors? How can we recover from those types of scenarios? Bill: The user inadvertently deletes or modifies data. Well, we have some things we'll look at as far as like rollback a transaction along with the dependent transactions. Rewind that table back to where it should have been. You're also can use LogMiner. You can look at our redo logs to try to figure out where that bad transaction was. User drops a table inadvertently. Well, we can recover the table from the recycle bin if we have the recycle bin on or we may need to recover from a backup. 11:56 Nikita: What are common causes of instance failures, Bill? Bill: The dreaded power outage. Well, hopefully, we have some type of up system to keep us running, even if it's not for continuous operation. Maybe if it's just to allow us to gracefully take a system down. The dreaded hardware failure. If you have a way to predict a hardware failure, you can make a lot of money. Always happens at the most inopportune times. But then again, do we have redundant hardware? Do we have something in place to help allow us to continue to operate in case of a hardware failure? Failure of one of the critical background processes. Why did it fail? We can go out. We can look at our alert log, we have trace files. And then we have, you have the Enterprise Manager Cloud Control. We can do the same thing as looking at the alert log and trace files. But the Enterprise Manager Cloud Control gives us a GUI interface to allow us to do that. 12:53 Lois: Before we let you go, Bill, can you tell us about media and data failures? Bill: Failure of a disk drive, failure of a disk controller, deletion or corruption of a file needed for database operation, well, this is the dreaded media failure. So we're going to restore from a backup. If we need to move, we can move a data file to a different location. We can notify, hey, here's that new location. And then recover by applying any of the incremental backups, any of the redo to get it back to where it should be. And then we have the data failures. We can't access the component, missing data files at OS level. And maybe our system administrators deleted something thinking it wasn't needed, or maybe even a developer on a development type system. Don't have the right permissions. Tablespace is offline. Well, why is it offline? Did somebody took the wrong tablespace offline? We have physical corruptions, block checksum failures. It's inconsistent between the header and footer. Invalid block header field values, like all of them are zeroed out. Then we have the logical corruptions, inconsistent dictionary, corrupt row piece, the inconsistencies, a control file not synchronized with the data files, usually because we recovered something and didn't do it the right way. I/O failures, maybe we just exceeded the number of open files that we're allowed to have. Maybe it's just a network or an I/O error itself. And these are different types of failures that you might experience. Again, it's not an all-inclusive list. It's just a few examples. 14:41 Nikita: I know you said it's not an all-inclusive list and you were just giving us a few examples, but that seemed quite thorough! Thank you so much, Bill, for walking us through all of that today! Lois: Yeah, I totally agree! Thanks Bill! For more on what we discussed today, visit mylearn.oracle.com. Search for the Oracle Database 23ai: Backup and Recovery course. Next week, we'll get into instance recovery and recovery strategies. Until then, this is Lois Houston… Nikita: And Nikita Abraham, signing off! 15:15 That's all for this episode of the Oracle University Podcast. If you enjoyed listening, please click Subscribe to get all the latest episodes. We'd also love it if you would take a moment to rate and review us on your podcast app. See you again on the next episode of the Oracle University Podcast.

Hosts Lois Houston and Nikita Abraham are joined by Senior Principal Database & MySQL Instructor Bill Millar who explains Oracle's newest caching solution called True Cache. Available in Oracle Database 23ai, True Cache is an automatically managed, in-memory, read-only cache that improves application performance dramatically. Bill provides an overview of its features and highlights the benefits of using True Cache.   Oracle MyLearn: https://mylearn.oracle.com/ou/course/oracle-database-23ai-new-features-for-administrators/140830/   Oracle University Learning Community: https://education.oracle.com/ou-community   LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/showcase/oracle-university/   X: https://twitter.com/Oracle_Edu   Special thanks to Arijit Ghosh, David Wright, and the OU Studio Team for helping us create this episode.   --------------------------------------------------------   Episode Transcript:   00:00 Welcome to the Oracle University Podcast, the first stop on your cloud journey. During this series of informative podcasts, we'll bring you foundational training on the most popular Oracle technologies. Let's get started! 00:26 Lois: Hello and welcome to the Oracle University Podcast. I'm Lois Houston, Director of Innovation Programs with Oracle University, and with me is Nikita Abraham, Principal Technical Editor. Nikita: Hi everyone! Last week, we had quite a power-packed episode. We discussed the 23ai new feature for Automatic SQL Plan Management. We also looked at the 23ai automatic feature that enhances SecureFiles LOB Write Performance as well as the update to Wide Columns. 00:59 Lois: Yeah, and in today's episode, we will look at True Cache, another 23ai new feature. To tell us all about it, we have Bill Millar back with us. Bill is a Senior Principal Database & MySQL Instructor with Oracle University. We'll ask Bill to give us an overview of True Cache, talk about its configuration and deployment, and discuss how to apply True Cache to our applications.  Nikita: To kick things off, Bill, can you give us a high-level overview of what True Cache is? How does it differ from other caching solutions like Redis or Memcached? 01:35 Bill: True Cache is an in-memory cache. It is read-only. True Cache is deployed in front of a primary database, and it is automatically managed. It keeps the most frequently accessed data in the cache, and it keeps the cache consistent with the primary database. They call it diskless, but it's not. It does require some space for SP file, redo logs, control files, and such. But it's very similar to Active Data Guard.  The queries can be offloaded to the True Cache for faster query response. And the data in the query cache is consistent. Unlike other mid-tier caches like Redis or Memcached, a query to the True Cache returns only committed data, and the data is always consistent. It's secure. Why? Because we implement our Oracle database security policies and you can control access to the cache.  02:33 Lois: So, why should we use True Cache?  Bill: Improve application performance without having to rewrite any applications. That can save considerable amount of time, effort, and expense. Reduces the application response time. So the closer the True Cache is to the application, the faster the response. Now, you do need a large amount of memory. We're talking memory here. It's an in-memory storage area, and depending on how you configure it, you can have it shared, you can have it divided. We mentioned it's automatically maintained. So there's no application changes required, and it is transparent to the application. Again, simplifies that development and maintenance.  03:15 Nikita: How does it impact application performance, and what kind of scenarios would benefit the most from implementing True Cache? Bill: So at a high-level view, True Cache or primary database, the application configuration serves as other things that are going to decide where is it going to query the data from, from the True Cache or from the primary database.  The True Cache satisfies that query. And that's where the data will be fetched from. If not, then from the primary database. On start up, True Cache is empty. So it starts reading large chunks of data to populate the True Cache. So after a block is cached, then again, it can be automatically updated, apply the redo to it-- very similar to the Oracle Active Data Guard. In the data returned, it is always going to be consistent.  04:04 Lois: Is it going to be current data? Bill: Maybe, maybe not. If it's been updated in the primary, if they redo apply hasn't occurred yet, then it's not the most consistent. But as far as the query cache is concerned, it is the most current because we only display consistent. You can have multiple True Caches. You can save the same database application service to the True Cache as you can partition it.  04:28 Nikita: I'm curious about the memory requirements, Bill. How crucial is memory for True Cache's performance? Bill: You need to have significant amount of memory. Memory, memory, memory. So True Cache is completely memory, memory. So I want to have all my data possible in there. The more memory you have, the less likely something is going to age out. And of course, just like with the standard caching, you can also pin objects to stay in the True Cache.  Yeah, like I said, there are some requirements for storage, even though it's called diskless because of, again, redo log files, configuration files like the control files, SP file. And again it is read only.  05:11 Lois: Can you explain the differences between using physical and logical connections with True Cache? How does this impact the way applications interact with the database? Bill: So with using the True Cache, we have two physical connections, and we can have one to the primary database and one to the True Cache. Each connection has a database application service associated with it, and it's going to choose which connection to use based whether it's going to go to the True Cache or to the primary database.  The second way is the application maintains one logical connection that uses the application service for the primary database. It's the JDBC thin driver, starting with Oracle Database 23 is available. It's going to maintain the physical connections to the primary database and the True Cache itself. Now, the logical connection, the one logical and one physical, is for Java applications only.  Applications that work with JSON, we extend the HTTP entity tag support for that. So a database GET request to the True Cache is going to compute the ETag, insert it into the return document.  06:27 Nikita: But what happens if there's a mismatch when the modified document is put back into the primary database?  Bill: Well, then the database is going to verify. OK, what happens with that?  It's going to verify the document row still matches that ETag for that. If with that put command, let's say, I have new data here, the row is going to match that ETag that was automatically updated. If there's no match, another user has changed the data and the PUT request is rejected. So the PUT request can be retired using the new data.  07:05 Are you planning to become an Oracle Certified Professional this year? Whether you're a seasoned IT pro or just starting your career, getting certified can give you a significant boost. And don't worry, we've got your back! Join us at one of our cert prep live events in the Oracle University Learning Community. You'll get insider tips from seasoned experts and learn from other professionals' experiences. Plus, once you've earned your certification, you'll become part of our exclusive forum for Oracle-certified users. So, what are you waiting for? Head over to mylearn.oracle.com and create an account to jump-start your journey towards certification today! 07:48 Nikita: Welcome back! Now, how do you configure True Cache, Bill? Bill: You can configure True Cache one of two ways. You can either use the Database Configuration Assistant, which actually makes it a little simpler to configure it, and you can also manually create it.  You have some environment options. One is a uniform configuration where you can deploy identical True Cache that use the same database application service. Another way is partition configuration. The data is going to be divided across multiple True Caches, which, each cache is a different subset of the data. You can also deploy True Cache in a RAC environment. As one might expect, there are some additional configuration steps for a RAC environment.  You want to make sure you verify your configuration, that the database application services are working as expected after you configure it. And then, optionally, you can enable DML redirection. What that will do, it writes data to the primary database, and that data is automatically updated in the cache. It's very similar how to the Oracle Active Data Guard works. Because the DML redirection uses more resources, it's not recommended for update-intensive applications.  There is a parameter, a ADG_REDIRECT_DML initialization parameter, that you will set to True in order to do that.  09:18 Lois: Bill, what are the specific challenges or considerations that administrators should be aware of during the configuration process?  Bill: You do need to make sure your network is configured for True Cache in the primary database. So optionally, you can create a remote listener for high availability. But you create your True Cache. You go ahead, and make sure that you have your primary database. You want the network configuration for both of those. And then you create the True Cache. Once the True Cache is created, you're going to create the application services associated with the database. And then, you're going to start the database application services on the True Cache.  When it comes to naming the application service names, each primary database application is going to be associated with a corresponding True Cache application service. To help simplify things a little bit, in the naming convention, you'll notice in our examples-- for example, if we have SALES as the primary database service, then we have the True Cache, we have SALES_TC, standing for True Cache, so it's easily identified.  You don't have to do that, but it's kind of recommended to do that, some way that you're going to identify it. So we're going to start our True Cache services. And you only start the True Cache services on the True Cache instances. Because it's the database services on the database that you need to make sure are started. And they are read-only.  10:46 Lois: Are there some best practices for maximum availability architecture? Bill: Uniform configuration seems to be a popular one. Why? Because I am going to have the both True Caches can be shared. That way, hopefully, I'm getting full usage out of both. And maybe if I have one service going to one, it might be minimally used. Whereas, the other one might be over. Hey, I could use more memory over here.  We'll also recommend use the JDBC 23ai UCP, Universal Connection Pool, for the application. So that can lessen the impact. If one True Cache becomes unavailable, as far as, OK, I need to reroute over here-- benefit of uniform configuration also. Prepopulate the cache. You want to go ahead and run the critical workload for that. If you have a planned outage, and you need to shut down the True Cache, you want to make sure you stop the database application service on that True Cache.  And then, how are you going to design your True Cache? Are you going to partition it? Are you going to have uniform? Which partition option are you going to use? So you can try to design that to help minimize the number of fetches it has to do from the primary database. And the more you can keep in the True Cache, the better the performance is going to be.  12:09 Nikita: What do I need to keep in mind when it comes to managing True Cache? Bill: One thing you might need to do for managing the True Cache is to monitor the True Cache. There's a couple different ways that we can do it. One, you can use the V$ view, the V$TRUE_CACHE view. And, of course, you can always use the Automatic Workload Repository.  12:30 Lois: Bill, we already spoke about this a bit, but can you tell us more about using True Cache in an application? Bill: There's two ways of using True Cache, as we've seen, physical and logical. Physical, it's going to maintain two connections, front one to the primary database and one to the True Cache. The application can decide which connection to use, based off of what it is trying to do.  If it's just reading, long as it's for a service that's configured with True Cache, it can read the True Cache. If it's going to write something, it's going to update, insert, whatever the case might be, it's for the primary database. And you can use any existing client driver as long as you're using the physical connection method. Any programming language will also work.  With the one logical connection method, it uses the application service for the primary database. You're going to use the JDBC Thin driver, starting with 23ai. You can use it and it maintains the connection to the primary database and True Cache. This model only works with Java applications, though. It maintains the physical connections.  We're going to enable the driver connection. And then, we're going to set the read only. We're going to set it to read only, true. Read only, false, whatever the case might be. And the read only mode is false for a connection by default. False is the default. Java applications only.  14:14 Nikita: What are some best practices for load balancing in a uniform configuration? Bill: You have multiple--multiple True Caches. They're going to service the same database application. They're going to cache the same data. It's the listener that's going to distribute the load balances. So the listener will automatically distribute and load each session to each cache. It will do it randomly and it will do it based off a load. Where can it configure? Where can it send for the best performance.  To route the request to the best performing True Cache, you want to make sure that you are using the same listener. So that remote listener parameter should point to the same listener, which is also the primary database listener. Single instance primary database local listener or scan listener, whichever one you're using, points to the primary. For the application for the JDBC URL, should point to the primary database.  You'll remember that Thin driver is going to create that logical connection, and it's going to create the physical connection to the primary database into each True Cache. To simplify things and possibly avoid connection issues, you might consider using the LISTENER_NETWORK, so the initialization parameter instead of specifying the remote and local listener separately. Because with the local--with the listener networks, all listeners within the same network name will cross register.  15:44 Lois: Before we wrap up, are there any complementary features that you would recommend using alongside True Cache to further enhance performance or simplify management? Bill: There are features that can complement True Cache-- the server-side result set cache.  So you can create--you can go ahead and create the result set that's part of the library cache set aside, a portion of that. You're going to go in, you're going to configure what objects will use that. You can still use that even with True Cache.  There's also the KEEP Buffer Pool that can be used. It's a separate pool that you set aside as part of the buffer cache. And you want to make sure you size it so the object that you want to keep in memory in the buffer cache that you size it appropriately. But again, some configuration, you configure the key pool, plus also you go in and alter the objects to use it.  And then lastly, there's the database smart flash cache. So again, if your data doesn't fit into memory, you can expand the capacity of by adding flash devices. When you configure the flash cache, if you are using transparent data encryption data, the local flash devices is not supported. So if it's TD encrypted on the primary database, it's going to stay in the buffer cache of the primary database.  17:11 Nikita: Ok! I think we can close the episode with that. Thank you, once again, for joining us, Bill.  Lois: Yes thanks! We're learning so much from you. To learn more about what we discussed today, including the various configuration options that are available, visit mylearn.oracle.com and search for the Oracle Database 23ai New Features for Administrators course. Join us next week for a discussion on some more Oracle Database 23ai new features. Until then, this is Lois Houston… Nikita: And Nikita Abraham signing off! 17:46 That's all for this episode of the Oracle University Podcast. If you enjoyed listening, please click Subscribe to get all the latest episodes. We'd also love it if you would take a moment to rate and review us on your podcast app. See you again on the next episode of the Oracle University Podcast.

Join Lois Houston and Nikita Abraham, along with Senior Principal Database & Security Instructor Ron Soltani, as they discuss how the new Automatic SQL Plan Management feature in Oracle Database 23ai improves performance consistency and simplifies management. Then, Senior Principal Database & MySQL Instructor Bill Millar shares insights into two new features: one that enhances SecureFiles LOB Write Performance, improving read and write speeds, and another that increases the column limit in a table to 4,096, making it easier to handle complex data.   Oracle MyLearn: https://mylearn.oracle.com/ou/course/oracle-database-23ai-new-features-for-administrators/137192/207062   Oracle University Learning Community: https://education.oracle.com/ou-community   LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/showcase/oracle-university/   X: https://twitter.com/Oracle_Edu   Special thanks to Arijit Ghosh, David Wright, and the OU Studio Team for helping us create this episode.   --------------------------------------------------------   Episode Transcript:   00:00 Welcome to the Oracle University Podcast, the first stop on your cloud journey. During this series of informative podcasts, we'll bring you foundational training on the most popular Oracle technologies. Let's get started! 00:26 Nikita: Welcome to the Oracle University Podcast! I'm Nikita Abraham, Principal Technical Editor with Oracle University, and joining me is Lois Houston, Director of Innovation Programs. Lois: Hi there! Last week, we looked at the Oracle Database 23ai enhancements that have been made to Hybrid Columnar Compression and Fast Ingest. In today's episode, we'll talk about the 23ai new feature for Automatic SQL Plan Management with Ron Soltani, a Senior Principal Database & Security Instructor with Oracle University.  01:01 Nikita: And later on, we'll be joined by Bill Millar, another Senior Principal Database & MySQL Instructor, who will tell us about the 23ai automatic feature that enhances SecureFiles LOB Write Performance. We'll also get him to talk about the Wide Columns update. So, let's get started. Hi Ron! What have been the common challenges with SQL plans and database performance? Ron: One of the problems that we have always had, if you remember, was when data changes, database setting configuration, parameter changes, SQL that were operating very well could now behave badly using the SQL plan that were associated to them. And remember, the same SQL plan generally Oracle likes to continuously reuse.  So the SQL plans were put in the baseline in the past, and we could have those SQL plan baseline, which are a set of approved plans to be used for a SQL from the SQL history stored in AWR, then could be used for the optimizer to choose from. However, which plan to choose and which one would be the best one to use, this is what the problem has been in managing the SQL plan baselines, and a lot of the operation would have been done manually.  02:22 Lois: And what have we done to overcome this?  Ron: So now this new system will going to perform all of those operations automatically for us. Now it can search the Automatic Workload Repository. It can find SQL plans for a particular SQL statement, then look for any alternative plans that may available in alternate sources like SQL tuning sets. And then validate those plans and see if those plans are going to be good and to be used as SQL plan baseline for executing SQL statement by the optimizer. 03:00 Nikita: So we now have the Automatic SQL Plan Management Evolve Advisor to help manage operations automatically, right? Can you tell us a little more about it? How does it ensure optimal performance? Ron: This is an automatic advisor that is created that can go look for different plans and validate the plans by examining them, making sure that they are not causing any regression compared to the previous operation, and then evolve that plan into a good baseline.  This simplifies management of the baseline repository for a SQL statement. So as data changes, as parameters changes, optimizer could come up with different type of plans that are set within this baseline that has been validated to be good baseline for each situational operation. So this way you reduce a lot of hard parsing operations.  04:00 Lois: And how does the SQL Evolve Advisor work, Ron? Ron: First, it will check the AWR to find what are the top SQLs that has been found. Then it will look to see if these top SQLs who did not perform well with the plan that they have, that's why they're top SQL, have other alternative plans that are stored in the SQL plan history, in AWR, or available in any other sources.  Then if it finds any additional plans, it will go ahead and add all of those plans into the plan history. So in the plan history, now you have accumulation of all the plans available in AWR and anything that has been brought from other sources. Then it will test every one of those plans and validate that by use of the plan, the SQL statement will not deprivate and get slower. The performance is either similar or actually better. So normally, there is a percentage that the SQL should improve. So we will then validate these baselines.  And finally, once the baselines or those plans have been validated, they will be accepted, and then they will be added as SQL plan baselines. They will remain in the statement history, in the AWR, and will be available for optimizer for the future use.  05:28 Nikita: What are the benefits of this? Ron: Number one is Autonomous Database. As you know, they want to automate all management, including management of the SQL execution due to changes that are happening for the application, for the data, or the database and its environment.  It totally eliminates any manual intervention for management of the statement, and it can transparently repair any statement that had been affected by a major change.  06:00 Lois: What sort of problems does this feature solve for us? Ron: Of course, this is a performance consistency. We want to make sure that every statement performed to its best performance and any specific changes that may impact those SQL statements would be taken into an account, and a better plan, if available, would then be available for use.  It also improves the application performance level, therefore database service level will get much improvement. And the SQL execution plans will be automatically managed behind the scene by expanding these baselines, by managing all of these baseline history and all of that that is managed by this automatic SQL plan management environment automatically.  06:50 Nikita: And when do we use this?  Ron: If there is a change in a database environment, like you add SGA, the change into the shared pool, change in the size of the buffer cache or any type of storage effects. So all of those can actually affect the SQL execution.  Now all of those changes, including data changes, can cause a SQL plan to not behave very well or behave as well as it was doing before. Therefore, if particular plans do not perform as well as they did before, that affects the performance of the application. This also affects the performance of the database and the instance.  07:35 Lois: So, how do we use this environment?  Ron: Well, best news that I have for you in that is that there is nothing manual needs to be done. All we need to do is, number one, make sure that we enable foreground automatic SQL plan management that we done through the package for the DBMS SPM for SQL plan management.  You will use the package with the configure option, and you enable the auto SPM evolve task, and you set it to auto. Once this is done, now the SQL evolve plan management and advisor are enabled, and they will then monitor your statements, review all of the top SQLs as they are found with all of the ADDM operation, and then do their work in looking for better plans and being able to maintain the SQL plan baselines we talked about.  Now for you to be able to view, monitor, and see how these operations are going, if it is enabled, you can take a look at the DBA SQL plan baseline's view. There are many, many columns in that particular baseline, and there are also columns that has been added that tell you where is the plan generated from, if a plan is approved, and any other user interaction with the plan or settings can then be verified using that DBA SQL plan baseline view.  09:13 Are you looking for practical use cases to help you plan and apply configurations that solve real-world challenges? With the new Applied Learning courses for Cloud Applications, you'll be able to practically apply the concepts learned in our implementation courses and work through case studies featuring key decisions and configurations encountered during a typical Oracle Cloud Applications implementation. Applied learning scenarios are currently available for General Ledger, Payables, Receivables, Accounting Hub, Global Human Resources, Talent Management, Inventory, and Procurement, with many more to come! Visit mylearn.oracle.com to get started. 09:54 Nikita: Welcome back! Let's bring Bill into the conversation. Hi  Bill! Can you tell us about the 23ai automatic feature that enhances SecureFiles LOB Write Performance?  Bill: The key here is that it is automatic and transparent. There's no parameters set. Nothing to configure in table, no hints, and nothing that you have to do with these improvements. It is tightly integrated with SecureFiles LOB infrastructure.  So now, multiple LOBs can be handled in a single transaction and can be buffered simultaneously. This will help with mixed workloads, switching between the LOBs that are writing in a single transaction. The PGA will adaptively resize based off the size for these large writes for the LOBs if you're using the No Cache option. Remember, no cache is going to bypass the buffer cache and does direct reads and writes from the PGA.  JSON type will be transformed into the OSON Oracle data type. It is an optimized native binary storage format for JSON data.  11:15 Lois: Ok. So, going forward, there will be better read and write performance for LOBs. Bill: Multiple LOBs in a single transaction can be buffered simultaneously, improving mixed workloads. We just talked about the PGA. Automatically, the buffer is automatically resized.  And the improved JSON support. The reason it will recognize, hey, this is a JSON data type. But traditionally, JSON data types were small.  So they were small to medium size. So the range from 32k to 32 meg was considered small to medium whereas LOBs were designed for data types larger than 100 meg. So by recognizing this a JSON data type, it can take advantage of the LOB architecture.  Other enhancements will also include the acceleration of compressed LOBs, the pen and compression caching, and improves the poor performance of your reads and writes to compressed LOBs. It's faster than previously.  12:24 Nikita: Bill, what do you think about the recent increase in the column limit? Previously, the limit was 1000 columns per table, which sometimes posed issues when migrating from other systems that allowed more than 1,000 columns, right?  Bill: Maybe because of workload requirements, the whole machine learning, the internet of things workloads, IOTs can have hundreds of thousands of attributes, dimensional attribute columns for that. And even our very own blockchain tables reserves up to 40 hidden virtual columns, so that takes away from the total amount.  Virtual columns count towards the column limits and some applications as they drop columns, what it does, it just converts them to unused, and it still applies towards the limit the number of columns that you can have to that limit. There were workarounds. However, they were most likely not the best way to do it, like column switching, table splitting for that. But big data really use cases, really saw where files have or required more than 1,000 columns.  13:42 Lois: So, now that we can have 4,096 columns in a table, I'm sure it's made handling complex data a lot easier.  Bill: So by increasing this, since other systems do support higher column limits, it can-- the increase can make migration from other systems easier and possibly even a little bit more attractive while it can make applications a little bit simpler because the 1,000 column limit was not always optimal for analytics. Where 1,000 might have been plenty for OLTP type environments, but not for the analytics, especially when it comes to machine learning and those internet of things that we talked about, where the previous workarounds, like splitting the tables, really caused more performance issue than anything else.  So we want to avoid those suboptimal workarounds. And the nice thing is there's no change to the SQL. So once you have that-- well, if we were doing SQL, if we had tables that were split and we're trying to do things that is actually going to help improve that SQL, now, we don't have multiple objects that we're dealing with.  14:57 Nikita: How do we actually go about increasing the column limit to 4,096? Bill: You do have to have the compatibility set to 23c. Why? Because it's a new feature. There is a new initialization parameter called Max columns, and you do set that. There's two different ways, two different values. We can set it to standard or we can set it to extended.  It is dynamic. When it's set to standard, it's only 1,000. When we set it to extended, it's going to allow the 4,096. It is modifiable at the PDB level. However, it will inherit what's at the root level, if it's not explicitly set at a PDB. It can't alter it in a session for that. And multiple instances of the RAC environment must use the same value.  Now one thing, notice that it cannot be set to standard if I created a table that had more than 1,000 columns. One thing that might get you, when you drop a table that has more 1,000 columns and you try to set it back to standard, it might tell you, hey, you have tables that have more than 1,000 columns. Don't forget your recycle bin unless you did a drop table purge.  16:09 Lois: Are there any performance considerations to keep in mind, Bill? Bill: There's really no DML or query performance degradation for the tables. However, it might require, as you would expect, the increase in memory when we have the new column limits. It might require additional shared pool, additional SGA with the additional columns, more buffer cache as we're bringing blocks in.  So that's shared pool along with the PGA. And also we can add in buffer cache in there, because that increased column count is going to be increase in the total PGA memory usage. And those are kind of expected for that. But the big advantage is it gives us the ability to eliminate some of these suboptimal workarounds that we had in the past.  17:02 Nikita: Ok! We covered a lot today so thank you Bill and Ron.  Lois: To learn more about what we discussed today, visit mylearn.oracle.com and search for the Oracle Database 23ai New Features for Administrators course. Join us next week for a discussion on some more Oracle Database 23ai new features. Until then, this is Lois Houston… Nikita: And Nikita Abraham signing off! 17:27 That's all for this episode of the Oracle University Podcast. If you enjoyed listening, please click Subscribe to get all the latest episodes. We'd also love it if you would take a moment to rate and review us on your podcast app. See you again on the next episode of the Oracle University Podcast.

In this episode, hosts Lois Houston and Nikita Abraham speak with Senior Principal Database & MySQL Instructor Bill Millar about the enhanced performance of Hybrid Columnar Compression, the different compression levels, and how to achieve the best compression for your tables. Then, they delve into Fast Ingest, what's new in Oracle Database 23ai, and the benefits of these improvements.   Oracle MyLearn: https://mylearn.oracle.com/ou/course/oracle-database-23ai-new-features-for-administrators/137192/207062   Oracle University Learning Community: https://education.oracle.com/ou-community   LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/showcase/oracle-university/   X: https://twitter.com/Oracle_Edu   Special thanks to Arijit Ghosh, David Wright, and the OU Studio Team for helping us create this episode.   --------------------------------------------------------   Episode Transcript:   00:00 Welcome to the Oracle University Podcast, the first stop on your cloud journey. During this series of informative podcasts, we'll bring you foundational training on the most popular Oracle technologies. Let's get started! 00:26 Lois: Hello and welcome to the Oracle University Podcast. I'm Lois Houston, Director of Innovation Programs with Oracle University, and with me is Nikita Abraham, Principal Technical Editor. Nikita: Hi everyone! In our last episode, we spoke about the 23ai improvements in time and data handling and data storage with Senior Principal Instructor Serge Moiseev. Today, we're going to discuss the enhancements that have been made to the performance of Hybrid Columnar Compression. We'll look at how Hybrid Columnar Compression was prior to 23ai, learn about the changes that have been made, talk about how to use this compression in 23ai, and look at some performance factors. After that, we'll move on to Fast Ingest, the improvements in 23ai, and how it is managed. 01:15 Lois: Yeah, this is a packed episode and to take us through all this, we have Bill Millar back on the podcast. Bill is a Senior Principal Database & MySQL Instructor with Oracle University. Hi Bill! Thanks for joining us. So, let's start with how Hybrid Columnar Compression was prior to 23ai. What can you tell us about it? Bill: We support all kinds of platforms from the Database Enterprise Edition on up to the high engineered systems for that and even the Exadata Cloud at the Customer. We have four different levels of compression. One is considered the warehouse compression where we do a COLUMN STORE COMPRESS FOR QUERY LOW and COLUMN STORE COMPRESS FOR QUERY HIGH. The COLUMN STORE COMPRESS FOR QUERY HIGH is the default, unless another compression level is specified. With the archive compression, we have the COLUMN STORE COMPRESSED FOR ARCHIVE LOW and also COLUMN STORE COMPRESS FOR ARCHIVE HIGH. With the Hybrid Columnar Compression warehouse and archive, the array inserts are compressed immediately. But, however, some conditions have to be met. It has to be a locally-- to use these, it has to be a locally managed tablespace, the automatic segment space management. And compatibility level, at least 12 too or higher when these values have been introduced. There are different compressors that are used for the compression hidden from the customer. It just depends on what is selected as to what is going to be the compression that's going to be used for--  notice that with the COLUMN STORE FOR QUERY HIGH and for ARCHIVE LOW, the zlib compression method is used, whereas if you select the ARCHIVE HIGH, the Bzip2. And in 19C, we added the Zstandard. And it's available for the MEMORY COMPRESS FOR CAPACITY HIGH.  03:30 Nikita: So, what's happened in 23ai? Bill: When in 23c, to take advantage of the changes in compression, the compatibility level has to be set at least to 23.0.0 or higher. When a table is created or altered with the hybrid column compression, the Zstandard will automatically be selected. So it doesn't matter which one of the four you select, that will be the one that is selected. It is internally set transparent to the user. There is no new SQL format that has to be used in order for the Zstandard compression to be applied. And the Database Compatibility Mode has to be at least at 23.0.0 or higher. Only then can the format of the Hybrid Column Compression storage use that Zstandard compression. If we already have compressed data blocks in existing tables, they're going to remain in their original format.  04:31 Lois: And are the objects regenerated? Bill: If the objects are-- they might be regenerated if they were deleted in another operation. If you want to completely take advantage of the new compression, all you have to do is alter table move. And that's going to go ahead and trigger the recompression of that, whereas any newly created tables that are created will use the Zstandard by default. 05:00 Nikita: What are the performance factors we need to think about, Bill? Bill: There are some performance factors that we do need to consider, the ratio, the amount of space reduction in storage that we're going to achieve, the time spent compressing the data, the CPU cost to compress that data, and also, is there any decompression rate, time spent decompressing the data when we're doing queries on it? 05:24 Lois: And not all tables are equal, are they? Bill: Not all tables are equal. Some might get better performance by different compression level than others for that. So how we can basically have to test our results, there is a compression advisor that's available, that you can use to give you a recommendation on what compression to use. But only through testing can we really see the availability, the benefits of using that compression for an application. So best compression, just as in previous versions, the higher the compression levels, the more CPU it's going to use. The higher the compression level, the more space savings that we're going to achieve for that as we are doing those direct path inserts. So there's always that cost. 06:20 Did you know that the Oracle University Learning Community regularly holds live events hosted by Oracle expert instructors. Find out how to prepare for your certification exams. Learn about the latest technology advances and features. Ask questions in real time and learn from an Oracle subject matter expert. From Ask Me Anything about certification to Ask the Instructor coaching sessions, you'll be able to achieve your learning goals for 2024 in no time. Join a live event today and witness firsthand the transformative power of the Oracle University Learning Community. Visit mylearn.oracle.com to get started.  07:01 Nikita: Welcome back! Let's now move on to the enhancements that have been made to fast ingest. We'll begin with an overview of fast ingest, how to use it, and the improvements and benefits. And then we'll look at some features for managing fast ingest. Bill, why don't you start by defining fast ingest for us?  Bill: Traditionally the fast ingest, also referred to as deferred inserts, is faster than processing a single row at a time. It can support high-volume transactions like from the Internet of Things applications, where you have hundreds of thousands of items coming in trying to write to the database. They are faster, because the inserts don't use the traditional buffer cache. They use a pool that will size out of the large pool. And then they're later written to disk using the SMCO, the space management coordinator. Instead of using the buffer cache, they're going to write into an area of the large pool. The space management coordinator, it has these helper threads, however many-- that's just a number for that-- that will buffer. And as buffer is filled based off size of that algorithm, it will then write those deferred inserts into the database itself. 08:24 Lois: So, do deferred inserts support constraints? Bill: Deferred writes do support constraints in index just as for regular inserts. However, performance benchmarks that have been done recommend that you disable constraints, if you're going to use the fast ingest. 08:41 Lois: Can you tell us a bit about the streaming and ingest mechanism?  Bill: We declare a table with the memoptimize for write. We can do that in the create table statement, or we can alter the table for that. The data is written to the large pool, unlike traditionally writing items to the buffer cache. It's going to write to the ingest buffer, the large pool. And it's going to be drained. It's going to be written from that area by using those background processes to write to the actual database itself. So the very high throughput, since drainers issues deferred writes in large batches. So we're not having to wait especially for the buffer cache. OK, I need space. OK, I need to write. I need to free up blocks. Very ideal for these streaming inserts, sensor readings, alarms, door locks. Those type of things. 09:33 Nikita: How does performance improve with this? Bill: With the benchmarks we have done, we have found that the performance can be up to 75% faster by going ahead and doing the fast ingest versus traditional inserts. The 23 million inserts per second on a single X6-2 server with the benchmarks that we have. 09:58 Nikita: Are there any considerations to keep in mind? Bill: With the fast ingest, some things to consider for that. The written data, you might need to validate to make sure it's there. So you might have input files that are writing to that that are loading it. You might want to hang on to those, before that data destroyed. Have some kind of mechanism to validate, yes, it was written. There is a possible loss of data. Why? Because unlike the buffer cache that has the recovery mechanism with the redo and the undo, there is none with that large pool. So that's why if the system crashes, and the buffers haven't been flushed yet, then it's possible loss of data. There's no queries from the large pool meaning that if I want to query the information that the fast ingest is loading into the table, it doesn't go and see what's sitting in the buffer in the large pool like it does with the buffer cache. Index and constraints are checked but only at flush time. And the memoptimize pool size is a fixed amount of space that we're going to allocate-- of memory that we're going to allocate to use for the memoptimize write. We can enable a table for the fast ingest, enable with the memoptimize for write. We can create a table and do it. We can also alter a table. We already have a table existing. All we have to do is alter it. And we want to use that, the fast ingest, for these tables. 11:21 Lois: Do we have options for the writing operation, Bill? Bill: You do have options for the writing operation. We have the parameters, the memoptimize write where we can turn that on. We can also use it in a hint. It is set at the root level, it. Is not modifiable at the PDB level. It's set at the root level, It is a static parameter. We can also do things in our session. We want to verify, OK, is the memoptimize write on? We can verify a table is enabled. So with the fast ingest, the data inserts, you can also use a hint. You can also set this at a session level.  If you decide there's something that you don't want to use the memoptimize write for, then you can disable it for a table.  12:11 Nikita: Bill, what are some of the benefits of the enhancements made in 23ai? Bill: With some of the enhancements-- so now, some table attributes are now supported-- we can now have common default values for a column. We can use transparent data encryption. We can also use the fast inserts, any inline LOBs, along with virtual columns. We've also added partitioning support. We can do subpartitioning and we can also do interval partitioning, along with auto list. So we've added some items that previously prevented us from doing the fast inserts. It does provide additional flexibility, especially with the enhancements and the restrictions that we have removed. It allows to use that fast insert, especially in a data warehouse-type environment. It can also use-- in the Cloud, it can use encrypted tablespaces, because remember, in the Cloud, we always encrypt, by default, users' data. So now, it also gives us the ability to use it in that Cloud environment because of that change. We have faster background flushing for the loads.  13:36 Lois: And how is it faster now?  Bill: Because we bypassed the traditional buffer cache. Faster ingest for those direct ingest. So again, bypassing the traditional inserts and using the buffer cache gives the ability to bulk load into large pool, then flush to the database so that way, we have access to that data for possible faster analytics of those internet of things, especially when it comes to the temperature of the temperature sensors. We need to know when a temperature of something is out of bounds very quickly. Or maybe it's sensors for security. We need to know when there's a problem with the security. 14:20 Nikita: How difficult is it to manage this? Bill: Management is fairly simple. We have the MEMOPTIMIZE_WRITE_AREA_SIZE parameter that we're going to say-- it is dynamic. It does not require a restart. However, all instances in a RAC environment must have the same value. So we have the write area. What are we going to set? And then the MEMOPTIMIZE_WRITE, by default, it uses a hint. Or we can go ahead and we can just set that to all. It is allocated from the large pool. You manually set it. And we can see how much is actually being allocated to the pool. We can go out and look at our alert log for that information.  There's also a view. The MEMOPTIMIZE_WRITE_AREA has some columns. What is the total memory allocated for the large pool? How much is currently used by the fast ingest? How much free space? As you're using it, you might want to go out and do a little checking, or do you have enough space? Are you not allocating enough space? Or have you allocated too much?  It'll also show the total number of writes, and also, the number-- the writers is currently the users that are using it.  And the container ID, what is the container within that container database? What's the pluggable or pluggables that's using the fast ingest? There is a subprogram, the DBMS_MEMOPTIMIZE that we have access to that we possibly can use. So there are some procedures. Here, we can return the rows of the low and high water mark of the sequence numbers. And the key here is across all the sessions. We can see the high water mark, sequence number of the rows written to the large pool for the current session. And we can also flush all the ingest data from the large pool to disk for the current session. 16:26 Lois: What if I want to flush them all for all sessions?  Bill: Well, that's where we have the WRITE_FLUSH procedure. So it's going to flush the fast ingest data of the Memoptimize Rowstore from the large pool for all the sessions. As a DBA, that's one that you most likely will want to be using, especially if it's going to be before I do a shutdown or something along that line. 16:49 Nikita: Ok! On that note, I think we can end this episode. Thank you so much for taking us through all that, Bill. Lois: Yes, thanks Bill. If you want to learn more about what we discussed today, visit mylearn.oracle.com and search for Oracle Database 23ai New Features for Administrators. Join us next week for a discussion on some more Oracle Database 23ai new features. Until then, this is Lois Houston… Nikita: And Nikita Abraham signing off! 17:21 That's all for this episode of the Oracle University Podcast. If you enjoyed listening, please click Subscribe to get all the latest episodes. We'd also love it if you would take a moment to rate and review us on your podcast app. See you again on the next episode of the Oracle University Podcast.

I have been lucky enough to speak to some of the most amazing people who have built the core of security on the Internet, and a person near the top of my list is … Torben P. Pedersen.  The Pedersen Commitment So how do we create a world where we can store our secrets in a trusted and then reveal them when required? Let's say I predict the outcome of an election, but I don't want to reveal my prediction until after the election. Well, I could store a commitment to my prediction, and then at some time in the future I could reveal it to you, and you can check against the commitment I have made. Anyone who views my commitment should not be able to see what my prediction is. This is known as Pedersen Commitment, and where we produce our commitment and then show the message that matches the commitment. In its core form, we can implement a Pedersen Commitment in discrete logs [here]. But blockchain, IoT, Tor, and many other application areas, now use elliptic curve methods, so let's see if we can make a commitment with them. The classic paper is here: So before the interview with Torben, here's an outline of the Pedersen Commitment: Interview Bill: Okay, so tell me a bit about yourself, and what got you into cryptography? Torben: Well, I was studying computer science at university in Aarhus, and I just thought it was an interesting subject that was somewhere between computer science and mathematics. Bill: And so you invented a method that we now know as the Pedersen Commitment. What motivated you to do that? And how does it work? And how do you think it will be used in the future? Torben: Well, the reason I worked with this, was that I was working with verifiable secret sharing. There was, at the time, a method for doing non-interactive verifiable secret sharing based on a commitment which was unconditionally binding and computationally hiding. At the time, there was also inefficient commitments, that had the property of being unconditionally hiding, and I thought it would be nice to have a verifiable secret share where you don't have to rely on any computational assumptions, in order to be sure that your secret is not revealed when you do a secret share. Torben: Then there was a paper which created an authentication scheme very similar to Schnorr. But it's used a similar idea for a useful commitment. And that was kind of the combination of those two (the existing non-interactive verifiable secret sharing and the ideas form this authentication scheme), which motivated me to do verifiable secret sharing. And the commitment scheme was, of course, an important part of that because it had unconditioned hiding property, and it had the mathematical structure that was needed for the secret sharing. Bill: And it has scaled into an elliptic curve world. But with elliptic curves and discrete logs now under threat, how would you see it moving forward into a possible post-quantum crypto world? Torben: The good thing about the commitment scheme is that it is unconditional hiding. Of course, you can be sure that your private information is not leaked, even in case a quantum computer is constructed. But of course, the protocols that are using this one have to see what effect does it have if one, for example using a quantum computer, can change ones mind about a commitment. So you need to see how that would affect those protocols. Bill: So an example use of the commitment could be of a secret say someone voting in an election. So you would see when the commitment was made, and then when the vote was cast. Then the person could reveal what their votes actually was. Now it's been extended into zero-knowledge methods to prove that you have enough cryptocurrency to pay someone without revealing the transactions. How does that world evolve where you only see an anonymized ledger, and which can scare some people, but for others that is a citizen-focused world? How do you see your commitment evolving into privacy-preserving ledgers? Torben: I go back to what we're doing at Concordium where we have a blockchain which gives a high assurance about the privacy of the users acting on the blockchain. At the same time, using zero-knowledge proof, we set it up in such a way that designated authorities — if they under certain circumstances, for example, are given a court order — they will be able to see to link an account on the blockchain for that particular person. So, actually the zero-knowledge proofs and the commitment schemes — and all that — is used to guarantee the privacy of the users acting on the blockchain, and there are also regulatory requirements, that it must be possible to identify people who misbehave on the blockchain. Bill: Yeah, that's a difficult thing, and it's probably where the secret is stored. So, if the secret is stored in the citizen's wallet, then only they can reveal that. And if the secret needs to be stored, for money laundering by an agency could hold it. Torben: Actually we do not have to store the secret of the user. But there are other keys which allow us to link the account with a particular user. That is something which only designated parties can do. So we have one party which is the identity provider with issues and identity to a user and other parties called anonymity reworkers. And those parties will have to work together in order to link an account to a user. We use zero-knowledge proofs when creating the account to assure that account is created in such a way that it is possible for you to trace back the account to the user. Bill: And in terms of zero-knowledge proofs, there is a sliding scale from highly complex methods that you would use for Monero and anonymized cryptocurrencies, to the simpler ones to Fiat Shamir implementation. And they are probably unproven in terms of their impact on performance and for security. Where is the sweet spot? What methods do you think are the best for that? Torben: I think we need to see improvements in zero-knowledge proofs in order to have really efficient blockchains and non-interactive zero-knowledge proofs on a blockchain. So I definitely think we need some work on that. There are some acceptable non-interactive zero-knowledge proofs for the moment. We are using Bulletproofs for the moment together with Shamir shares on it, in order to make it non-interactive. But I think there are some technologies like zkSnarks and zkStarks, but I think there's room for improvement. Bill: And what do you think the key challenges within cryptography just now What do we need to be working on in the next three to five years? Torben: Yeah, so the biggest challenge, as you already mentioned, and that's what happens if we have a quantum computer that can break the assumptions that a lot of the constructions are based on today. Whether we have a quantum computer, I don't know, but we need to be prepared. We have some post-quantum algorithms, which I think also are quite complex, and it would be nice to have something that was more efficient and better to use. I think there's also room for work on that aspect. Bill: And obviously, to create some toolkits that move away from an Ethernet world and where the Internet was really built on the seven-layer model — and it's flawed. We perhaps need to rebuild on a toolkit of math, so that we actually have a solid foundation. I know that Hyperledger is starting to build these tools for developers. When we do see that rebuilding happening, and where are the toolkits going to come from? Torben: Toolkits could come from blockchain companies such as Concordium, for example. It could also come from the community with sponsored projects. If we can build up an infrastructure that allows people to use blockchains in the ledger, without trusting one particular party, so that they can create a trust, which is probably lacking on the Internet today. It's very difficult, as with the current Internet it is very difficult to know if you can trust someone or not. I hope blockchain technology can help create an infrastructure for that. There's a long way to go. We need good public permissionless blockchains for that, so you don't have to rely on a particular party for this. Obviously, that is sufficient, but there's quite some way to go. Bill: How do you change the approach of governments and industries that have been around for hundreds of years. So if you look at the legal industry, they still typically only accept wet signatures. They might have a GIF of a signature and add it to a PDF, but that's as far as it goes. So how are we going to really transform governments and, and existing industries to really accept that digital signatures are the way to do these things? Torben: Yeah, I think it's a bit dangerous, you know, accepting these GIFs of signatures and digital signatures which are not really cryptographically secure. I'm not a big fan of that. I'd like to see us moving to digital signatures, which are the way that we originally envisaged in the cryptographic world, and where the party who signs the signature is in control of the key which created the digital signature. I hope you'll see a movement towards that level of security. Bill: And could you tell me a little bit about the Concordium Foundation and what's objectives on what it hopes to achieve? Torben: So our vision is to create a public permissionless blockchain that can help to create trust across industries. We want to enable entities such as businesses and private persons, to interact or act privately on the blockchain. At the same time, it's very important for us not to create an infrastructure, which allows criminals to misuse it, and for some money laundering problems. Thus we want to create an environment where it's possible to identify people who misbehave or break the rules. And that is why we have this identity layer as part of our blockchain. Bill: And what got you into blockchain? Torben: I think the technology is very interesting. There's a lot of things you said based on a lot of pretty old cryptography. There's also new developments, for example, the zero-knowledge proofs. So there's new and new developments or developments. So very interesting. I mean, it's not necessarily what I was interested in, but when I did research many years ago. That's probably what I wanted to work with. I have been working with cryptography — mostly in mostly for the financial sector for 25 years. And that's also very interesting. There are challenges and it's also nice to get back to the sort of basis that I worked with many years ago. Bill: You took a route into the industry but obviously you could have gone into academia and you could become a professor and have an academic research team. Torben: I think it was because I wanted to work with practical aspects of using cryptography. I've been in research for some years and I thought I needed to try something else. And I was very keen to see how it would be used in practice and be part of that. So that's why I made that step. Bill: What does our digital world look like that's made up of tokens, cryptographic tokens, consensus systems and digital identities. And you think that that world will come anytime soon that we can trade assets, we can have digital assets that can be traded. Torben: Well, it depends on what you mean by soon. I think we will have some way to go. I think the use of blockchains for trading tokens, for handling tokens, and for registering tokens, is an obvious thing, but we also need to bring value to businesses or projects. To have something that people can feel it and control. We need to make sure that information is protected the right way, even though it is registered on a public blockchain, for example.

Many businesses equate "manager" with "leader," excluding potential leaders from across the organization. In this episode, Bill Bellows and host Andrew Stotz talk about leadership in Deming organizations - with a great story about senior "leaders" making a huge error in judgment at a conference of auditors. TRANSCRIPT 0:00:02.0 Andrew Stotz: My name is Andrew Stotz and I'll be your host as we continue our journey into the teachings of Dr. W Edwards Deming. Today, I'm continuing my discussion with Bill Bellows, who has spent 30 years helping people apply Dr. Deming's ideas to become aware of how their thinking is holding them back from their biggest opportunities. The topic for today, episode number 14, is Beyond Management by Extremes. Bill, take it away.   0:00:29.7 Bill: Number 14 already, Andrew.   0:00:32.0 AS: Incredible.   0:00:32.6 Bill: It's a good thing we skipped number 13. That's an unlucky number. [laughter]   0:00:37.0 AS: Not in Thailand. It's a lucky number.   [laughter]   0:00:40.6 Bill: No, we didn't skip number 13. This is 14.   0:00:42.1 AS: Yes, we didn't.   0:00:43.5 Bill: Alright, so I just enjoy going back and listening to all of our podcasts, once, twice, three times. And then I talk with friends who are listening to them. And so I'd like to start off with some opening comments and then we'll get into tonight's feature, today's feature.   0:01:00.9 AS: So let's just, to refresh people's memory, episode 13, which we just previously did, was Integration Excellence, part two.   0:01:09.2 Bill: Yes. And that's what we called it. [laughter] So... [laughter] So last week I...   When we thought about getting together, but I had the wrong time, and it worked out well in my schedule. Last week, Andrew, I did three presentations. A two-hour lecture for Cal State Northridge, which is part of a master's degree program, where I do a class in quality management. That was Tuesday night. Wednesday morning I did a one-hour presentation with one hour of conversation afterwards with the Chartered Quality Institute, which is kind of like the American Society for Quality in the UK, and this... So this was several hundred people from the UK and also the Caribbean chapter from Trinidad Tobago, Jamaica. And so there's a bunch there. And then on Thursday morning I did a three hour session for a group in Rotterdam, which was really early for me and late afternoon for them.   0:02:25.4 Bill: And in all three, I covered similar material for all three groups, which included the trip report that we've done on the ME Versus WE, how did you do on the exam? How did we do? And so it was really neat to present that to the three. And in each case, when I threw out the question, "how did you do on the exam?" And then explained as I did one of our earlier podcasts that if you've got a long list of inputs, which includes - the woman I was talking to and, 'cause I said to her, the question is how did you draw on the exam? What are the inputs? And she said, the inputs are, my energy, my enthusiasm, my commitment that she got stuck. And I said, have other students helped you? And she said, yes, other students have helped you. I said, that's another input.   0:03:17.3 Bill: I said, given that input, how many can you see? And she said, oh my gosh. She said, my professor, my parents, my brother. And then all of a sudden there was this long list of inputs that she couldn't see. And so I explained that to the people and then say, "if you've got that long list of inputs and the original question is, how did you do on the exam? Does that long list of inputs change the question or are you okay with that question?" And what I look for is, and what we've talked about is, does the whole idea, how did we do on the exam jump out at you? No, it doesn't jump out. So, in each case, I said, here's the situation, might you reframe the question? And in all three situations, most of them that I asked said, there's essentially nothing wrong with the question. And if they did restate the question, they kept the "you," "do you think you could have done better?" Do you think... And that's what's so cool is that they just hold onto the you. Well, and for one of the groups it came a... It was kind of like what I was saying was semantics.   0:04:32.6 Bill: And I said this is not semantics. I said, there's a big difference between somebody, you know referring to our kids as my son and my daughter and our son and our daughter. And this, "my," is singular ownership, "our" is joint ownership. And so what I was trying to explain is that, saying “How did you do versus how did we do?” is the difference between being an observer of your learning if you were the student, Andrew and a participant. Those are not... Those are enormous differences. It's not, just, it's not just a simple change in pronouns. And so when I... And when I got to next, I was at a meeting years ago, I was at the annual, you ready Andrew? I was at Boeing's Annual Auditor's Conference.   0:05:40.5 AS: Sounds exciting.   0:05:41.4 Bill: 1999. So I got invited to be a speaker, Andrew at Boeing's Annual All Auditors Conference. Right? So I'm thinking going into this, that these are a bunch of people that don't feel valued. Because it's not like I get a phone call and I say, hold on, hold on. Hey Andrew, I got good news. And you say, you're a coworker, what's the good news? Annual... Andrew, we're gonna be audited next week!   [laughter]   0:06:10.2 Bill: You're like, "Holy cow. Hold on, lemme go tell everybody." So I thought going into this meeting is, these are a bunch of people that don't feel valued. I'm an auditor at least that was, so that was my theory going into this, so it's a Monday afternoon gathering with a dinner and then all day the next, all day for a couple days. So the opening speaker, speaker on Monday night was the senior executive of a big Boeing division, it might have been Boeing defense let's say. And my theory was first of all, you got a bunch of people that don't feel valued and I came away from the three days thinking there's a whole lot going on in audit whether it's financial audit, data integrity audit, quality audit, these are necessary roles. And so I came out of it with great respect for that whole organization otherwise would think right, but I'm thinking this executive is going to come in, going to do the Friday, Monday night presentation and I'm thinking it's like they drew straws and they say well okay I'll go, I'll go up there and talk with them.   0:07:22.8 Bill: Within minutes of him speaking I'm thinking this guy's excited to be here. So I'm thinking he's going to kind of phone it in, now I'm watching this I'm thinking he is, he is really engaged with the audience. He's talking about, the future role of the audit organization being partners and all this and he's talking, I mean he's giving them an enormous bear hug and I'm thinking this is not what I thought and again and so... I'm still thinking he's either a really good actor or he really wants to be here. Then my theory was and I thought, holy cow, now I get it. How many people in the room Andrew would it take to leave the room with their nose out of joint and shut down the F18 program by noon tomorrow? How many people would it take?   0:08:21.3 AS: Not many, one.   0:08:22.9 Bill: Right, so then I'm thinking these, he needs these people to love him, because if he disrespects them, it's a bad day. So I went from thinking why would you want to be here if you were here, then I'm thinking, oh no. Now I'm thinking this is brilliant so then I look at the program and I'm thinking which other executives have figured out how valuable this is and I see the next day at lunch is Boeing Commercials I'm thinking they figured it out but the organization I was within was Boeing Space and they weren't on the program so I contacted a friend that was connected high up in Boeing Space, I said we've got to be in this program, right? So the program ending, it ended nice and I'm thinking wow, wow. So then just prior to lunch the next day is the number two guy for Boeing Commercial. Not the number one. The Monday night guy was the number one. The number one guy for Boeing Commercial at the time was Alan Mulally, it wasn't Alan Mulally, it was his number two person.   0:09:33.7 Bill: So he's up on stage, he's up on stage, he's up on stage. And he's talking to the audience and in parallel Jim Albaugh who at the time was CEO of Boeing Commercial, no Boeing Space and none of Jim's people were there, Jim wasn't there. Jim a couple weeks prior he had asked me to get with his speech writer at a presentation he was doing and he wanted some words in there about investment thinking and all the things we've been talking about in this. He said get with him and put some of that stuff in there put there some of that stuff in there. I said okay. So as I'm listening to the number two guy speak there's a lot of "we" and "you" but who's the we? And who's the you? So I'm making notes to myself to tell Jim don't say "you." Say "we" and make the "we" inclusive, 'cause the guy on stage is, the you and the we and the you and the we, and I said no no stay away from "you" focus on we but make sure they understand that "we" is all of us, right?   0:10:35.1 Bill: So this is what's going through my head and I'm writing it all down, writing it all down and then this guy says and I'll paraphrase. I wish I had the exact words and the paraphrase is pretty close to what he said as judged by what the audience heard, right? So when I heard the comment and I'm thinking to myself, you said what? Then I look around the room and I thought he did. Here's what he said again the paraphrase is: he made reference to those within Boeing that do the real work, and he said it in a way that was present company excluded right? Right, so I hear him say 'cause I'm getting, I'm making literally I'm making notes to myself and then I hear that comment and I'm like, did you just say what I thought you said? And I look around the room with 300 people and I'm thinking, Oh my gosh, you did and I'm seeing I am seeing people irate, you see the body language, right?   0:11:44.3 Bill: And I thought wow, how could you say that? So then the lunch speaker was Harry Stonecipher, the chief operating officer. And he was up, walking around the stage. I don't think he knew anything about what happened prior so he's up there talking, okay. After Harry we're getting back to the program and the guy running the entire event is now up on stage and he's very deliberately he's got a, he's got a piece of paper rolled up, he's walking around on stage, "yeah Scott misspoke no doubt about it. He misspoke, I hear you." I hear you, you are ready Andrew? You are ready, you are ready?   0:12:36.8 AS: Give it to me.   0:12:37.4 Bill: And then he says then he says "But let's be honest we don't make the airplanes." And I thought, really? And as soon as he said that, I had this vision of 250,000 employees, which was about the employment at the time. And so as soon as he said that, I just imagined being at the Everett facility, which is huge, where all the twin-aisle plants are made. And I had this vision of 250,000 people in the building. And the CEO Phil Condit says on the microphone, "Okay, I'd like all of you who make the airplanes to move to the west end of the building."   0:13:26.4 AS: And everybody else.   0:13:27.4 Bill: And it's what you get, is all the flight line mechanics move all the way over there. And then you show up and somebody looks at you and they don't see any grease on your hand, and they say, "ahhh you don't make the airplanes." And you say, "you see that tool in your hand? Who do you think ordered it?" And so this "we" and the "you" stuff, how did "you" do? How did "we" do? It was just, it was...   0:14:00.3 AS: He wasn't deliberately setting up the auditors to be pissed and then to be really, really tough on the rest of the organization. I'm teasing with that.   0:14:12.7 Bill: It was, it is just, I shared that with you and our audience as how uniting language can be and how divisive language can be. And so how did we do, how did you do, and what, with just, this is what I find fascinating is - these words bring people together. What I love, I love watching politicians or State Department people speak and 'cause what dawned on me is they are very deliberate on, I mean they to great lengths to not be divisive.   0:14:57.1 Bill: That's their job. And so they introduce people in alphabetical order, countries in alphabetical order. But they, and I thought, what a neat way of not inferring that the first one I list is the most important one and I just thought there's a just an art of diplomacy. And that's what, to me, that's what diplomacy is, is that the art of uniting, not dividing.   0:15:25.7 Bill: Alright. So now I wanna get into, in the three different groups last week we were doing the trip report and we got down to the hallway conversations and the ME Organization versus a WE Organization. And then a question I asked him was, who are the managers in a ME Organization and what do they do? And you got, those are the ones that set the KPIs. Mark the KPIs, beat you up, sit in their office. Okay. Who are the managers in the ME Organization? What do they do? Who are the managers in a WE Organization? And what do they do?   0:16:01.8 Bill: They are mentors. They're out there on the shop floor, they're working with people. People work for managers in a ME Organization. They work with managers in a WE Organization. So I get that and I think "Okay, pretty good. Pretty good. Pretty good." And then I follow with "Who are the leaders in a ME Organization and what do they do?"   0:16:26.4 Bill: And what's really cool is you get the same answers as the managers. And that's when I started noticing in a ME Organization, we'll refer to the senior leadership team, the senior management team, and we're talking about the same group of people. And I said, what we've just said is that manager and leader are the same. And then I say to people, so what is that message in a ME Organization? The message is, if you're not a manager, Andrew, then you're not a leader. Which means what? Which means you have permission to wait for direction.   0:17:12.5 Bill: Boeing had a leadership center in St. Louis. It was called the Boeing BLC, the Boeing Leadership Center. Yeah, Boeing Leadership Center. And in order to go there, you had to be a manager. You either had to be a first level manager, you would take frontline leadership, a middle manager, which I was, which is leading from the middle or an executive. But the model... So then I think part of the confusion is in a ME Organization, on the one hand we say, our managers are our leaders. If you're not a manager, wait for the direction, wait to be told.   0:17:49.7 Bill: But then we said, we want our managers to be leaders. But that's the ME Organization. In a WE Organization, in a Deming organization, I think of leadership is the ability to bring forth a new order of things, a new order of designing hardware, a new order of designing software, a new order of marketing, we're talking earlier and the ability to create a new order of things and the ability to create a path for others to follow.   0:18:20.6 Bill: And so then in a WE Organization, it's like show and tell. When we were in elementary school, you go in and say, I have discovered this. And I thought, in a WE Organization, everyone has the ability to be a leader on something within their realm. And why would you, why would you make leadership incl...exclusive, which is the ME Organization. And when I tell companies that I consult for I said, when you make leadership exclusive in a ME Organization, to me, that's a kiss of death 'cause you're telling a few people, you're in charge and you're telling everyone else, you're inferring that everyone else, you wait for direction, again.   0:19:09.0 Bill: And I'm not proposing, everyone's all over the place doing it. No. There's got, this is not chaos. And if I have an idea on something and it's not my assigned responsibility, then I know to reach out to you because you're the marketing guy and I just throw the marketing idea to you and then you do with it what you want. But I look at leadership in a WE Organization as being inclusive. And then we get into this idea of, driving...driving change.   0:19:38.0 AS: Let me just ask you about that. Would this really be down to the core principle of Appreciation of a System? That somebody who appreciates a system knows that there's all kinds of components to that system?   0:19:55.5 Bill: Yes, yes.   0:19:55.6 AS: And that you can't say, oh, well this system really is only the people that are working on the production line, when in fact we know that there's all kinds of people working in that system. If I think about my coffee business as an example, we have a hundred employees and not all of them are working on production. And some are moving paperwork and making phone calls and others are out in the field. So an appreciation of a system brings you to the "we" rather than....   0:20:23.0 Bill: Yes.   0:20:23.5 AS: And a person who gets up and says about me, or, tries to identify that there's a certain number of people that are really driving the performance of this company are, they just have no appreciation for a system.   0:20:39.1 Bill: They have a narrow, a narrow view, a narrow view. So what you just said triggered another thought. But, um, the thing I wanted to add to this, in a ME Organization, it's about driving change. And we've talked about this in prior podcast. I go to, you put a gun to your head and I say, I want this KPI by Friday, Andrew. And you're like, yes, sir. And then I said to people in the past is, if driving change is the mantra of a ME Organization, like you're driving cattle driving, driving, and which is not an endearing concept. It is, it is, this is the where we're going. And I say to people, so what would you call it if driving is the ME construct, what is, what's the language of a WE Organization? And people will be wondering "ah," I say "lead, lead, lead." And if we like where you're going, we will follow. That's you creating the path that we will follow.   0:20:40.0 Bill: So I just wanna throw that out. But the other thing you mentioned about the metrics and the design of the organization and the thinking that, these are the critical people. At lunch with an old friend today, and I was sharing with her I taught a course at Northwestern's Business School, Kellogg Business School in the late '90s. And Kellogg then, and today is the number one or number two business school in the country. And I had a friend who was a student there in..., they liked what I was saying. So they hired me to teach a five week course for four years. And I presented, these ideas to them and it was pretty cool. I was, what was exciting is one of them told me that, what I was sharing with them about Deming, you are ready Andrew? contradicted what they were learning in their other classes.   0:22:46.2 AS: Huh. Funny that.   0:22:48.7 Bill: Yep. And so I did that for four years. There were three classes in quality. One was the use of control of charts, mine was called Quality Management, or TQM or something like that. And so there were roughly 80 students in the program, and they had to take two of the three, five week courses. So I got two out three students in the program. Then after four years, they waived the requirement. And so nobody signed up. And so I, um, after, right after 9/11 was when this happened, they invited me back because the person I was working with really liked what the course was about. But they wanted to, make it optional for people to attend. And he said, why don't you come out and talk with them and, that'll inspire them to sign up for the following year. I said, okay, fine. So I went out and he says there'll be 80 people there. I said, why are you so confident? He said, well, we've made it mandatory for everyone to show up. I thought, well that's, I said, that's one way to get people in the room. I said, do me a favor. I said, let them know I'm coming out and I'll have breakfast, I'll have lunch with whoever would like to meet with me beforehand.   0:22:50.7 Bill: So a dozen of them show up. And one of them says to me he says, you're gonna have a, he says something like, it's only fair to say we had a presenter like you last week. And to be honest, it's gonna be a really hard act for you to follow. So I'm thinking, "well, tell me more." "Well, we had a presenter last week who works for a company that makes pacemakers," I'm thinking, okay, "he had a video and showing people before and after their pacemaker one of the fellow students fainted. It was emotional." And I'm thinking, I'm talking about rocket engines. I don't even have a video. It's not gonna be emotional. I let the guy talk. And at one point he says "they keep track." He said "they keep track of who makes each pacemaker." I said "what do you mean?" He says, "they have a list of the people."   0:23:42.9 Bill: Every pacemaker is associated with a team of people who made the pacemaker. And part of what they saw on the video is people who have received a pacemaker now and then go to that company and they meet the people on their team, Andrew, who made their pacemaker. How do you like that concept? Right? Does that, when you graduate from this MBA program, Andrew, isn't that a neat idea that you can take away and use with you? Right? Right? Isn't that a takeaway? Right? So I'm hearing this [laughter] so I said, "let me see if I got this straight. So you're saying they keep track of who makes each pacemaker?" "Yeah, they do." And that's because, when people come well, people come to visit and they keep track. So let's say I said to the student, "let's say I'm the guy who orders the plastic that goes into the pacemaker. Would I be on the list?" you know what he says, Andrew?   0:26:01.9 Bill: No, you didn't make it.   0:26:04.0 Bill: He says, "no," let me try this. I'm the one who wrote the check, Andrew, that paid for the plastic. Would I be on the list? What he says Andrew? "No, you wouldn't be on the list."   0:26:20.2 Bill: So, I said, "well, why not?" And he says, "you have to draw the line someplace." So, I had with me, post 9/11, ready? I had with me a United We Stand two-foot by three-foot poster, which were all over Los Angeles and likely all over the rest of the world, at least the States. So, I held up the poster, and I said, "Have you seen this before?" He said, "Oh, yeah, United We Stand. I'm all about that." I said, "No, you're not." [laughter] I said, "You think you can draw the line and know who contributes and who doesn't, right?"   0:27:02.8 Bill: And you can suddenly see him kind of back up. I said, "Well, let's be honest." I said, "If teamwork doesn't matter, then draw the line any way you want. It doesn't really matter. But if teamwork does matter, be very careful where you draw that line." And to me, in a WE Organization, "we" is, who is the "we"? It's a big list of people. It's the employees, it's the suppliers, it's the customers. And so anyway, it's just that, so what's neat is, go ahead, Andrew.   0:27:41.6 AS: While you were speaking, I was able to go online and find the website of North, what was it? North?   0:27:49.5 Bill: Northwestern.   0:27:50.3 AS: Western, yes. And I was able to actually find the course that you're talking about that was the one that the students said that what you're teaching is contradicting.  The name of that course, I just found it, here it is, "How to apply KPIs to drive in fear and division in your company." No, no, I just made that up. [laughter] "How to apply KPIs to drive in fear and division in your company?"   0:28:16.7 Bill: All right. And so, and we're gonna get to that. So, so as, so I look at management, there's management as a position, but I look at management as an activity of how we allocate resources. And so, are the resources mine or are they ours? And are we proactive or reactive? And then we talked in the past about purposeful resource management, reflective resource, reflexive resource, resource management, which is being highly reactive. Another thing that came to mind. Well, actually, let me jump to the loss function. We looked at last time because I was going through and listening to it. And I thought, let me, let me clarify.   0:29:00.7 Bill: And so when Dr. Taguchi would draw his, his parabolic loss function, a parabola is a curve that goes higher and higher as you get farther and further away from the center. It's like a bell and it just gets steeper and steeper and steeper. And his loss function would be an upward facing bell. And, and then, and he would draw it sitting on the, on the horizontal axis. The idea of being, when you're at the ideal, the loss is zero. And that's, if you're getting exposure to this for the first time, that's okay. But in fact, let me even throw in here a quote from Dr. Deming. Do I have it right here?   0:30:00.4 Bill: Oh, gosh. Anyway, Dr. Deming made reference to, he said, the Taguchi loss function is a better description of the world. And he talks about how loss continuously gets higher and higher and higher. The point I wanted to make is, what I tell people is, once you get used to that concept that loss gets higher and higher, and what matters is how steep that curve is. And so if that curve is very flat, then no matter where you are within the requirements, nobody really notices. And in that situation, you could have a lot of variation 'cause it doesn't show up. It's not reflected in terms of how...   0:30:40.2 AS: And maybe just to help the listener to visualize this, imagine a V.   0:30:44.6 Bill: Yes.   0:30:45.1 AS: And imagine a U. And a V has a very tiny point that is at zero loss. And it very quickly rises to both sides where loss is getting higher and higher. Whereas a very, kinda, let's say, a deep U could have a tiny little loss that's happening for a distance away from the minimum loss point, and then eventually turn up.   0:31:14.4 Bill: Well, but even, even Andrew, and I like the idea of the V. We could also be talking about a V where the sides, instead of being steep, are very flat. So it's a very wide V, and it never goes high because there's situations where, where the impact on integration is very minimal no matter what. All right. So anyway, um, the point I wanted to make is, I would say to our listeners and viewers, loss, the consequences of being off target, are the difference between what happens downstream at integration. And what I love, I went back and listened to the podcast, the one, you talked about your partner in the coffee business.   0:32:12.2 Bill: The point of integration is when they drink the cup of coffee. And that's integration. I mean, the point when they're, when we're eating a food, that's integration. So the piece of coffee is out there, whatever it is. But when the customer's using it, drinking it, that's integration, Andrew. And a...   0:32:32.2 Bill: And so... What I look at is what the loss, loss is the difference between what you see happening at integration and what you think is possible. So if we're at the Ford factory banging things together with rubber mallets day after day after day and you're the new hire and I show you how to do this, as soon as you begin to believe this is how we do things, then loss is zero. Because that's what we think is the norm. But if you have the ability to rise above that and say, I don't think it needs to be that difference, when you look at it and say, I don't think it needs to be the difference between what you think is possible and what it could... Difference between what is and what you think could be that's loss. And what I also say to people is it takes a special eye that you have to see that. It's like your coffee business, somebody's tasting that coffee and you're thinking this is pretty good. Then they say, "well, try this", whoa.   0:33:40.1 Bill: So it takes a special eye to see loss. But then it takes a whole lot of other people to make that happen. So whether that's people in engineering, manufacturing. So a WE Organization is where someone has the ability to see that opportunity, but it's dependent upon all the others to make it happen. So now let's talk about Beyond Management by Extremes. And these are... Has a lot to do with KPIs and also say in one of our last, wasn't the last one, it was a couple before that you had made clear your firm belief that KPIs need to be thrown away in the morning trash. And I remember on the call listening to you and I'm hearing you, we ought to get rid of them, we ought to get rid of them, we ought to get rid of them.   0:34:38.5 Bill: And I'm thinking they aren't bad, it's how they're used. And so I wasn't sure I was in agreement with you on that call. But when I went back and listened to it and that's what what I, what I told the friend is, I said, if you listen to what Andrew says, I don't say anything at the end. And the reason I didn't say anything is I wasn't sure I agreed. But when I went back and listened to it most recently, I said, yes! yes! yes! 'Cause what you said is: if they can be used without an incentive system. And I thought, yes, yes, yes, yes. And so we are in agreement on KPIs, [laughter] they are... But what we have...   0:35:25.2 AS: Which, which my, which my point is, number one, that as long as you don't attach some kind of incentive or compensation system, then, you're not that, you've eliminated a lot of risk that they're causing damage. The second part is a lot of times what I'm looking at is individual KPIs. And what I'm trying to say is that even if you don't add in compensation, it's, it's, it's a fool's errand to try to set up, three KPIs for a thousand people, three thousand KPIs individually and think that now we've got that set. Our organization is going to really rock now.   0:36:06.0 Bill: Well, then what you get is the KPIs are always round numbers. We want to decrease by 5%, increase by... And you're thinking, so how much science getting to these numbers anyway? And you're thinking, but early on in your career, you look at this, you think, well, somebody's thought about this and you realize, no. And so what management by extremes is about is KPIs that are extreme. And so I my PhD advisor in graduate school, I was studying heat transfer and fluid mechanics and and before each of us graduated, went to work in corporations, he'd pull us aside and he'd say, he'd say, "Bill, he said you're gonna be in a situation one day where your boss is gonna come by and is gonna give you.... He's going to give you an assignment, that gives you, he's gone give, that gives you five minutes to figure it out."   0:37:05.7 Bill: And he says, "so, if he or she comes he comes to you, she comes to you and they give you five minutes to figure out, he said there's only three possible answers and I'll tell you what they are and you got to figure out which of them it is and so it'll take you a minute to figure out which one it is. And then the rest of the time you're going to explain it." I remember saying to him, I says, so, "Okay, so what are the three possible answers?" And he says "zero, one and infinity", 'cause it turns out in the world of heat transfer and fluid mechanics, those three numbers show up pretty often as ideal solutions for different cases. And so what he's saying is when your boss comes to you and says, boom, then you have to say, which case is that? 'Cause if that's this case, it's zero.   0:37:51.0 Bill: This case, it's one. This case is infinity. So I thought, okay. Well, in Dr. Taguchi's work, he talks about quality characteristics. So we're running experiments to improve something and a quality characteristic could be as large as possible, infinity being the ideal, the strength of the material. We want to make it stronger and stronger and stronger. But it's referred to as larger is best, meaning infinity is the ideal, smaller is best I'm trying to reduce leakage. I'm trying to make something smoother and smoother.   0:38:25.9 Bill: That's smaller is best. Zero is the goal. And the other one is to get your first who is nominal as best, where a finite number is the answer. And so what I had in mind with this management by extremes, inspired by my Ph.D. advisor, inspired by Deming, Dr. Taguchi, is that, if the KPI is driving to zero or driving to infinity, we want the inventory Andrew to go to zero. We want sales to go to infinity. I said, if you're thinking about things systemically, I don't think zero or infinity is what we're going to do. And so I throw that out as not all the time, but I think quite often if the KPI, if you're working on something where you're heading to zero, heading to infinity, to me, that's a clue that you're looking at something in isolation. And I would say to people.   0:39:25.2 Bill: Let's say you're, you call me in Andrew and you say, "Bill, we need your help getting the cost down of this project." And I say, "well, what'd you have in mind?" You say, "Bill, we'd we'd love to get 10% out of this cost. Boy, 10%." I said, "Andrew, I can double that." "No way. No way" And I say, "Andrew, on a good day, I could do more than that." And then what I say is that the more you get excited by how much we could lower that cost, eventually I'm going to say, "Andrew, gotcha." And you say, "what do you mean?" "Gotcha. Andrew, you're looking at cost in isolation." What's the clue? You'd love it to go to zero. Or... And that's what we end up doing is we want to drive variation to zero. That's the Six Sigma people. Well, first of all, cloning does not produce identical.   0:40:30.6 Bill: Photocopies don't create identical. Dr. Deming would say that of course there's variation. There'll always be variation. And then there are people, and and I cringe. But Dr. Deming was once asked. He was interviewed by somebody I believe with the BBC back in the '80s. And the interview ends with "So Dr. Deming, if we can condense your philosophy down to two, down to two words, what would it be? Or down to a few words, what would it be?" And he said, "reduce variation" or something like that. And I said, "no, it should be manage variation. We should have what the situation needs." And so I'm going to absolute agreement with you. On how can we have KPIs without goals which make make things even more isolated. And then we talk about by what method are we going to achieve those goals? But I think if we're talking about driving variation to zero, then you're looking at things in isolation. If you are driving waste to zero.   0:41:20.8 Bill: then you're looking at things in isolation. If you're talking about, the non value added efforts driving to zero. I'd say value shows up elsewhere. I had somebody within Boeing once say to me "Bill, you know, being on target, you know being on that ideal value, I've had people tell me that once you achieve the minimum size of a hole, going further doesn't add value." And I'd say "If all you're doing is looking at the hole, I can understand that. But if you're focusing on what goes in the hole, that's different." And the other thing I throw out is I was doing some training years ago. There was a guy in the room that I, I mentioned the term "value engineering" 'cause I remember when I got excited by Taguchi's work and Deming's work, somebody said, "The last big training, big thing was value engineering." "What do you mean?" And they pulled out their "That was the wave of the sixties was value engineering." So I asked this guy in class. I said, so, he mentioned he worked at GE back in the '60s and value engineering was really big. So I said, well, "So tell me about that. What was behind that?" He says, “We were taught to look at a contract and all the deliverables. And our job in the value engineering department was to figure out how to, how to meet each deliverable minimally because anything more than that doesn't add value." And I thought, you can't make that up!   0:42:53.0 Bill: Let's look at all the requirements and how do we go to? What's the absolute minimum we have to deliver on the term paper, on the project.   0:43:06.5 AS: How could we kill this through a thousand cuts?   0:43:10.8 Bill: So that's KPIs. Driving to zero driving to infinity. But, but we're in agreement that if you, in a Deming organization where we're not driven by incentives then KPIs are measures of how we are doing. And why isn't that enough to be able to say, how are things? How are things? We can talk about how might we improve this? But then we're going to look at: Is that a local improvement that makes it worse elsewhere? Are we driving costs to zero and screwing this up? So that's what, that's what I wanted to throw out on this management by extremes zero and infinity, and getting beyond that.   0:43:47.6 AS: Well, I think that's a great point to end it went through so many different things, but I think one of the biggest takeaways that I get from this is the idea of appreciation of a system. When you have a true appreciation of a system and understand that there's many parts and, you know, adding value in that system basically comes from more than just being on a production line, for sure and creating value in an organization comes from not only working on improving a particular area but the integration of the many different functions. And if you don't understand that, then you end up in not a Deming organization, not a WE Organization, but more of a ME Organization. That's kind of what I would take away. Is there anything you would add to that?   0:44:51.9 Bill: Well, what, what reminds me of what you're just saying is I was doing a class years ago for a second shift group in facilities people, painters, electricians, managers, and one of them says, he says "so Bill, everyone's important in an organization." I said, "absolutely. Absolutely everyone's important."   0:45:13.2 Bill: Then he says, "everyone's equally important" right? And as soon as he said that, I thought to myself, "I remember you from a year ago." So he says, "So so everyone's important." "Yeah, everyone's important!" "Everyone's equally important." So as soon as he said that, within a fraction of a second, my response was, "No, if you wanna get paid what a quarterback gets paid, you better, you better train to be a quarterback." So what Dr. Deming is not, he's not saying everyone's paid the same. We're paid based on market rates for quarterbacks, for linemen, for software people. And the, and the better we work together, ideally the better we manage resources, the better the profit, we get in the profit sharing, but we're not equal. Our contributions are not equal. The contributions cannot be compared. They are, they're all part of the sauce, but we don't get into who contributed more." Right, and I think that'... We're all contributors.   0:46:28.3 AS: The more you learn about Dr. Deming's teaching, you just realize that there's an appreciation of a system, but there's also an appreciation of people.   0:46:40.1 Bill: There we go.   0:46:43.2 AS: That's really where, as I have said before, when my friend was working with me on my book, Transforming Your Business with Dr. Deming's 14 Points, after many many weeks of working together, he's like, "I figured it out. Dr. Deming is a humanist. He cares about people." It's pretty true. So appreciate the people around you, appreciate the contribution that everybody makes. Nobody makes equal contributions. And even great people who are making amazing contributions could have down months or years where there's things going on in their family or other issues. They're not contributing what they did in the past.   0:47:17.1 AS: That's a variable that we just can't control. But ultimately, appreciation of the system is what I said in my summary. And now I'm gonna add in appreciation of the people.   0:47:30.6 AS: Bill, on behalf of everyone at The Deming Institute, I wanna thank you again for this discussion. Again, entertaining, exciting, interesting. For listeners, remember to go to deming.org to continue your journey. And if you wanna keep in touch with Bill, just find him on LinkedIn. This is your host, Andrew Stotz. And I'll leave you with one of my favorite quotes from Dr. Deming. "People are entitled to joy in work".  

Growing sales is a priority for every healthy business. And sales is also an area that's starting to benefit from fractional leadership. Today's guest, Bill Poole, is President and Client Success Director at Convergo, a firm which helps entrepreneurs sell more services to the right businesses through systematization and fractional leadership.On this episode of The Clarity Advisors Show, Bill and host Ken Trupke discuss how sales shouldn't be a barrier that prevents businesses from reaching their full potential.Timestamps(00:59): Bill's sales background(02:57): The importance of having a system in place(03:34): History of Convergo(05:46): Convergo's services and customers(08:04): Convergo's process(09:54): Getting a company's visionary on board(15:09): Secrets of successful teams(18:54): The importance of getting alignment up front(21:32): Using metrics and scorecards(25:11): Bill's recommended reading(26:34): Convergo's target client Episode Quotes  “When sales is a barrier, it's not always the same challenge. It may be about alignment at the top or it could be about the sales systems that are in place.” (Bill)“A lot of times (improvement) starts with aligning the leaders around ideal clients and the desired journey the ideal client has with the business.” (Bill)“One person can only sell so much and that's a barrier to growth. So, with entrepreneurs and visionaries who sincerely want to grow, we help them understand that they're really the barrier.” (Bill)“Change management is the key, and it requires alignment, communication, training, and stickiness.” (Bill)“The barrier to sales a lot of times isn't really a sales problem. It's that sales and operations are disconnected.” (Bill)“You can't take the right actions until you're tracking the right metrics.” (Bill)“Once you're tracking the right metrics, you look at three things:  the systems, the message, and the people.”“If sales is a barrier and you don't know why – or maybe you think you do know why but you want to confirm it – we'd love to have a discussion with you.” (Bill)Episode Resources 5 Steps To Scale Sales and Grow Revenue: Convergo's eBook listing ways to overcome the challenges of limited time, experience, and resources and build a solid and scalable sales and marketing function.Convergo One-Pager: Overview of the company's services and engagement process.Scorecard Checklist: A checklist that will help you self-assess your own scorecard and develop action items to make immediate improvements.  Recommended ReadingThe Referral Engine: Teaching Your Business to Market Itself by John JantschConnect with Bill PooleEmail: bpoole@convergo.coconverge.coBill Poole on LinkedIn

I am joined by best-selling author, digital transformation leader, successful CIO, and founder of StarCIO, Isaac Sacolick. Recognized as a top 100 social CIO, blogger and industry speaker, Isaac has over 20 years of experience delivering innovative solutions, leading IT teams, and transforming underperforming businesses.  On this episode, we discuss his new book, “Digital Trailblazer: Essential Lessons to Jumpstart Transformation and Accelerate Your Technology Leadership,” his journey to becoming a digital transformation leader/CIO, how the audience can employ their skills as a digital leader, and more.  Here are some of the top takeaways you will receive from this episode:  The impact of generative AI from both an opportunity and a risk perspective  Navigating your role as a transformational CIO  Isaac's transformational journey  How to use data and analytics to a strategic advantage  Developing and refining your ‘vision'  The clash between CIOs, sales leaders, and marketing leaders  Driving transformation and aligning with your organization's offense   As a CIO and Business IT Leader here are More wins you will get by listening: (4:32) Isaac: “So that was neural networks back in the ‘90s. We had no algorithms, there's no tensor flow, there was no cloud, it was all very slow. But we were trying to solve some interesting things around computer vision, around predictions, a little bit of natural language processing.”  (5:19) Isaac: “Three years ago we went from growth to resolving a pandemic set of issues, to supply chain issues, to hybrid working issues. We did this huge pivot in 2020 that I talk about in chapter 10 of the book. I think we're on the cusp of another major inflection with AI. What's the impact of generative AI from both an opportunity and a risk perspective?”  (6:06) Bill: “What are the ways that you can have private AI within your organization versus public AI?”  (6:49) Isaac: “We need to look at the horizons and the frequency. Whatever that frequency was before, double it because things are just happening too fast.”  (7:20) Isaac: “Marketing departments are going to really be the first group hit with a whole set of point solutions that can help them generate graphics, videos, and content.”  (9:11) Bill: “It seems to me that ChatGPT and Microsoft's investment is sort of the first interface that is real practical for human beings to use.”  (9:39) Isaac: “We're going to have to see how that plays out, especially with Copilot. I think that's going to change how people work. It'll be interesting to see where the big four are going to start making their AI explainable or are we going to put regulations in place around that. Are companies going to firewall off this capability because they're afraid of IP being leaked out to it?”  (11:04) Isaac: “If you don't say anything to your employees, they're going to see a green light there. They're not going to know where to stop in terms of what they should and shouldn't do because you haven't provided guidelines.”  (14:47) Isaac: “I was a bit of a go getter in my young days. I joined a startup that was a hosting provider for applications provider for newspapers. And I tell people, that's where I really learned transformation. We were looking at an industry that went through massive disruption. I got to see that front row in seat with my board.”  (19:16) Isaac: “10 years of being CIO in companies that were trying to figure out how to use data and analytics to a strategic advance and involve their products considerably from what they were doing before.”  (21:15) Isaac: “I used to say CIOs knew more about the boxes that hosted the data than the data itself. I think a lot has changed in the last 10-15 years. CIOs learned to build up their strengths and build up their vocabulary and understand the analytics space a little better.”  (22:18) Isaac: “The reality is that whatever we come in from our backgrounds when we become CIOs, we come in from a single or maybe two lanes of understanding. I think the biggest challenge for CIOs is expanding their own capabilities by hiring lieutenants who are highly versatile, who are two-way learners so that they can educate but also continuously learn.”  (23:24) Isaac: “Digital Trailblazer is a book of stories so that when you're facing an issue, an opportunity for the first time, you've never had a blow up moment, a shock and awe moment. You've never stood in front of the board before. You've never had to convince an executive group to go and do an investment in an area they necessarily don't want to do.”  (24:16) Bill: “Which percentage of the folks that are in there agree with you are going to be on your side? Which are the ones who are going to take shots at you? And then which percentage of that audience doesn't really care? And then who is going to take ownership?”  (25:59) Isaac: “People like the idea of products until you really have that conversation around product management. It isn't about taking everybody's wishlist and coming up with a shiny object that checks all the boxes. It's about trade-offs.”  (27:20) Isaac: “When you see alternatives, when you see new experiences coming in play and business models to the incumbent, that's what disruption is right? You throw in new technology and that's the accelerant.”  (28:42) Isaac: “The track that CIOs have had, we've come in from the operating world right? And now we're trying to influence strategy. We're trying to influence experience, both customer and employee experience.”  (29:26) Isaac: “How do you figure out how a salesperson is being incentive? How am I going to help you in your journey and what parts of your journey am I going to have to go and combat the status quo?”  (30:39) Isaac: “The best salespeople come in and say, “Okay I understand what your problem is. Let me connect you with people who have had similar problems. Let me show you what the outcome of a solution looks like if we implement the solution.” Best salespeople aren't selling, they're developing relationships and they're explaining the value.”  (34:56) Isaac: “Any single solution area, any single technology has a bunch of labels underneath it to get sorted through; lots of choices, compliance factors, multiple vendors, etc.”  (35:33) Isaac: “The level by which we're connecting the dots is no longer a three-tier application living on a couple servers right? We're getting into how business is operating.”  (38:33) Bill: “You need a vision for your career and for the role and the position and speed of which we're changing.”  (39:19) Isaac: “This isn't an area where there's a predefined playbook right? You're always going to be looking at how your organization's operating and saying, “I got to do things differently.” The world is changing in some fundamental way.”  (41:13) Bill: “Why do CIOs have so many problems with sales leaders and marketing leaders?”  (41:24) Isaac: “I don't know if it's a problem or have they struggled to develop relationships with them, is a little bit more work for them to understand their world. I think it again, goes back to our roots. We reported to CFOs, we were asked for ROI. And now we're flipping the equation and saying, ‘Look I can't transform the organization just by finding cost.'”  (43:59) Isaac: “What are your assumptions built into your growth model? What are you trying to sell? What are the unknowns for you to be able to hit those numbers. What are your risks and pain points?”  (45:52) Isaac: “If you're a CIO driving transformation, you've got to align yourself with the offense. And part of the reason is, I know I can get help on the defensive side.”  (47:27) Isaac: “I hear it from CEOs and I hear it from boards. When are we going to be done with this? They say it in a fatigued way, they're all just tired of the effort of doing two jobs. You have to run today's business, transform with what you're executing today and then think about the next horizon.”    Resources  Connect with Isaac Sacolick on LinkedIn  StarCIO  Digital Trailblazer: Essential Lessons to Jumpstart Transformation and Accelerate Your Technology Leadership  Driving Digital: The Leader's Guide to Business Transformation Through Technology  Subscribe to Driving Digital Newsletter  Coffee with Digital Trailblazers   

Welcome back to my podcast. On today's episode, I am joined by “Pro Troublemaker,” professional business coach, and president of Stefanie Krievins & Co., Stefanie Krievins. Since earning her trained coaching certification through Erickson's International in 2014, Stefanie has built a company and team of “troublemakers” that provide tools for others to help them define their organization's vision, work with trust and accountability, and communicate clearly to advocate for their own ideas.  Here are some of the top transformational wins you will receive as an IT leader:  How to Navigate Multiple Generations within the Workforce  The Power of Seven Messages, Seven Channels, Seven Times  Using the DISC Behavioral Method to Better Understand Your Team  How to Build Self Awareness  How to Run a Better and Effective Meeting  How to Start Small and Build Stronger Leadership Skills  Tune in and hear how you can transform your skills as a leader and create actions that leave an impact. As a CIO and Business IT Leader here are some wins you will get by listening: (1:05) Stefanie: “We get to work with ambitious, fast growing scaling companies when they have messy, middle, growing pains." (2:10) Bill: “What is happening that there's an opportunity for you and your organization to work for people to solve their particular problems?” (3:13) Stefanie: “I'm seeing a lot of leaders trying to use a consensus model of decision-making, which can be the fastest way to get nothing done.” (3:50) Stefanie: “For folks who want to run a high-performance team, hard times call for bold decisions.” (5:01) Stefanie: “We need to, as leaders, broaden our skillset when it comes to who makes the decision, how do they make it, who's involved so that our organization can continue to grow.”  (5:42) Bill: “What's the genesis of consensus decision making?”  (10:18) Stefanie: “There are new ways for you to be more transparent in your company in a way that makes sense for your business.”  (10:47) Stefanie: “One of my goals is to help people understand those nuances that create friction every single day. Seven messages, seven channels, seven times.”  (14:17) Stefanie: “Repetition is the magic of making your messages stick.”  (14:28) Bill: “Is that sort of the empowerment you're trying to establish if you don't have the view of the CEO in mind but rather an individual leader within their company?”  (15:46) Bill: “If you're coming in from a technical orientation versus an analytical, do you find that people have different things you have to coach them up on?”  (16:17) Stefanie: “We are big fans of the DISC behavioral assessment.”  (20:40) Bill: “You're essentially using this model to make sure that we know where we all are from our own style.”  (21:46) Stefanie: “Just recognizing that you need other people to help you make decisions.”  (22:18) Stefanie: “You need a high performing team that knows how to leverage all styles so they can make the best decisions possible.”  (23:14) Bill: “It is one thing to make a fast decision, but it is another thing to make a fast implementation.”  (25:09) Bill: “Is there a recommended meeting style or cadence that gives a framework for people?”  (27:39) Bill: “How do you coach a team or an individual on how to hold people accountable?”  (28:36) Stefanie: “We have to remember that the accountability is the other person's responsibility.”  (32:08) Stefanie: “You have to define what kind of meeting it is so people understand how to best participate.”  (37:54) Stefanie: “Spend the first 20% of every single workday being completely unavailable to anybody else to do your deepest, most important work.”  (38:38) Stefanie: “Start with the work where you add the most value.” Resources: Stefanie Krievins' LinkedIn  Stefanie Krievins & Co.  Stefanie's Podcast: Hot Mess Hotline  

Got an idea for a podcast? Call us at 702-PODCASP and leave us a voicemail.If you like We Don't Have a Podcast Yet go check out www.whitehouse.boats for exclusive content and weekly bonus episodes!SHOW NOTES:The Book Cover Awards - The Thiccness QuotientAndrew Estes's Pantry of the Paranormal - what if I told you that Englishman's bones are terrible for making bread?Powdered Hands, Chalky Balls - hurry up other people wanna knife fightBreaking News - don't mess with The Green Gable GangWorking Death - Gordon!Phoebe's Like Tyson - she's getting the face tattooGood Save It All - you think that's curds you're eating now?The Bill You - “for services rendered”

In today's episode of the “Inside the Plan with the 401(k) Brothers”, host Bill Bush and Andy Bush, advisors at Horizon Financial Group take a look at changes in company retirement plan contribution limits for the coming year 2023 and will compare them with year 2022.   Episode Highlights 51: It is that time of year, that not only is fall or autumn, but it's the time of year that the IRS looks at contribution limits for the upcoming year and announces changes, if any. 48: Deferral limit for 2023 is going to be $22,500, an increase of $2000. If you are a participant in a 401K plan or 403B plan, your annual elective deferral limit for 2022 was $20,500. 44: As per Andy you don't have to wait until you hit 50 in 2023. Anytime you could become 50 and you can put the extra $7500 in all the way through and plan for it throughout the year. 52: There is a legislation being discussed right now that, authorities will likely even boost the catch-up contribution amounts even further, says Bill. 19: There is an overall plan limit of the dollars that can go in per individual per and in 2022 it was 61,000 for any individual. If you had the catch up, you could have done 67,500. 08: When you think about on the employer side of things in SIMPLE IRA, a non- elective employer deferral is 2% no matter what the employee is contributing, or doing or there's a match and it can be up to 3%. 10: They have changed the definition of highly compensated employee just a little bit based on the dollar amount and that HCE is always looking at the prior year. For HCE it was 135,000 in 2022 and that's moved up to 150,000 in 2023. 34: As per Andy, the traditional and Roth IRA's have contribution limits. In 2022, those are $6000 but next year they move up to 6500 but the catch-up provision stays the same at $1000. 20: There are ranges that are involved in traditional IRA contributions to be deductible depending on how you file your taxes and how much you make. 38: The income phases out range for taxpayers making contributions to a Roth IRA has been increased and it's going between $138,000 to $153,000 for singles, says Bill. 24: If you are married filing jointly and your modified adjusted income is above the $228,000 you cannot contribute to a Roth IRA in 2023. 08: When you cross over the 50-year mark, you really start to realize that I'm closer to retirement and I need to get my affairs in order because life is happening so quickly and the opportunities are becoming fewer and fewer, says Andy 43: All plans,allow you to change your contribution rates at the first of the year. But a lot of plans have other different points where they'll allow you to make changes. 44 Be intentional about saving rates because saving rates matter. You have the opportunity coming and opportunity is increasing for 2023.       Three Key Points If you are in SIMPLE IRA plan, your elective deferral which you are allowed to make in your plan in 2022 is $14,000, but because of the step up in most everything else ,and the adjustments for inflation for 2023 the elective deferral limit has moved up to $15,500. If the spouse making the IRA contribution and is covered by a workplace retirement, that phase is now increased from $116,000 to $136,000 because after $136k, it's not deductible. It doesn't matter what your income level is to make a contribution to a Traditional IRA but it does matter what your income level is if you have a workplace retirement plan to get tax deductibility for a Traditional IRA.     Tweetable Quotes “It's interesting that inflation happens because you would almost link deferral increases to wage inflation.” – Andy “There is definitely more capacity to put away dollars for retirement if you're in a company plan for 2023.” – Bill “You pay your social security tax on earnings up to 147,000 in 2022, but next year in 2023 you will pay social security tax on up to $160,200.” - Bill “There are also ways you can save for retirement outside of employer sponsored plans and that is IRA's and Roth IRA.” – Bill “If you're single filing single and you make more than $153k on your modified adjusted gross income, then you're not allowed to contribute to a Roth IRA.” - Bill   Resources Mentioned https://www.horizonfg.com/ Podcast Editing

Bill Boaz was KATU's number two sports guy in the late 70's and early 80's. If you saw him on the air, you'd never forget his big booming sports voice. Interesting Boaz notes: Talk about “good old days,” Bill went to the great Jimmy Jones for career advice; Ted Koppel told Bill “You're an idiot;” and Bill once committee felonious entry at the U.S./Canadian border to get his story on the air. Bill left sports journalism for the finance world, and in this interview he'll give you free advice on how to retire comfortably and early—and enjoy the Arizona sunshine, as Bill does these days.

I had the opportunity to sit down with celebrity cosmetic dentist, Dr. Bill Dorfman. We chatted about how he came up in the world from childhood to creating one of the most famous dentist practices in Studio City, CA. On top of the practice he created, he also started Discus Dental with a dear friend of his, which was a global leader in professional tooth whitening products with brands such as Zoom®!, BriteSmile®, and NiteWhite® and they eventually sold the company to Royal Philips Electronics for millions. Dr. Bill has appeared on Larry King Live, Oprah, The Doctors and was the only dentist to appear on ABC's Extreme Makeover. Now with his extremely successful career, he has turned some of his focus towards philanthropy and the LEAP Foundation for high school and college students. You're going to see this side of Dr. Bill and his passion towards entrepreneurship, success, giving back and his foundation. As always, thanks so much for listening to the podcast and I would so appreciate a rating of 5 starts and a review. It would really mean the world to me. Much love, Joe Dr. Bill Dorfman Celebrity Cosmetic Dentist, Partner of Discus Dental, Inventor of Zoom! and Founder of the LEAP Foundation Author of: Billion Dollar Smile: A Complete Guide to Your Extreme Smile Makeover Website: https://www.billdorfmandds.com/ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/drbilldorfman/ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/DrBillDorfman LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/drbilldorfman/ YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/user/DrBillDorfman Podcast Music By: Andy Galore, Album: "Out and About", Song: "Chicken & Scotch" 2014 Andy's Links: http://andygalore.com/ https://www.facebook.com/andygalorebass If you enjoy the podcast, would you please consider leaving a short review on Apple Podcasts/iTunes? It takes less than 60 seconds, and it really makes a difference in helping to convince hard-to-get guests. For show notes and past guests, please visit: https://joecostelloglobal.libsyn.com Subscribe, Rate & Review: I would love if you could subscribe to the podcast and leave an honest rating & review. This will encourage other people to listen and allow us to grow as a community. The bigger we get as a community, the bigger the impact we can have on the world. Sign up for Joe's email newsletter at: https://joecostelloglobal.com/#signup For transcripts of episodes, go to: https://joecostelloglobal.lybsyn.com Follow Joe: https://linktr.ee/joecostello Transcript Joe: Ok, my guest today is Dr. Bill Dorfman. Dr. Bill, welcome.   Dr. Bill: Thank you. How are you?   Joe: Great. So it's a pleasure to have you here with a lot of the guests that I have on, I really like to give the audience an idea of who you are and not just jump in to where we are today. So if can you give us some background of your time line, how you decided to get into dentistry where you grew up, just kind of bring us up to today is is slow, slower, as fast as you want to.   Dr. Bill: Sure, I am a native of California, I grew up in Granada Hills as a little kid, I happen to have an accident where I knocked out my baby teeth. We had a great family dentist. And at some point I just thought this would be a cool thing to do and help people the way he helped me. And so at the age of about three, I said, I'm going to be a dentist. And it just never wavered. I was a weird kid. I mean, how many kids want to be a dentist? Right. But I've always been weird and I've always kind of marched to the beat of a different drum. I never felt like I fit into any, like, group or peg. I just kind of always did my own thing. I was like the Switzerland of a kid. I was friends with everybody, but not really part of anything, you know, like I swam. But I wasn't always with the swimmers and I played football, but I wasn't with the football players and student government. But, like, I just was kind of a free spirited kid that didn't really I didn't really, like, do what most normal kids do. I don't know. It was funny. I had this conversation with my parents recently and I said, you know.   Dr. Bill: How was I as a kid, like was I easy to raise, hard to raise, and they're like, you are perfect like you. And, you know, and I honestly don't ever remember I never argued with my parents. I never got into trouble. I was a weird kid. I just I always just kind of did what I was supposed to do. I guess it was in my mind, like the path of least resistance. I didn't smoke. I didn't drink. I didn't do drugs. Like I mean, I always kind of just did what I was supposed to do and I was happy go lucky guy. And, you know, I went to school and it's funny because I was always voted most likely to succeed in kindergarten, in grade school and junior high and high. And I was like, why do people always say that? I don't know. It was just a weird thing, even in dental school and. You know, we grew up really poor. I mean, I was one of five kids, I started working when I was five years old. I had a job. I worked in in the in the yard for neighbors. I would go pick weeds. And then when I was old enough to push a lawnmower, I would pull weeds and do the lawn mower.   Dr. Bill: And then when I got a little bit older, I got a job working at Ralph's, which is a grocery store. And then I worked as a janitor. My mother was a nursery school teacher. And so I would go to school and I would work as a janitor and clean the schools. And, you know, my parents, I would say we were rich, rich, rich in love, poor monetary things. And maybe that was good, you know? I mean, I literally supported myself. I mean, outside of buying food, all my clothes, everything I wanted, I just I bought you know, it's funny because I have three daughters and I almost feel like when they got into college, I got into college, too, because I was so active in helping them write their entrance stuff and did it. But my parents had no idea. You know, one day I got a letter, I'm like, Hey, Mom, Dad, I'm going to UCLA. They're like, Oh, that's great, sweetie. Then they'll clue, you know? I mean, it was just that's just how it was. I was the independent kid. I just did my own thing. I remember. Graduating UCLA, I got a call from the dean's office and I was awarded the outstanding senior award, which is kind of a big deal, right?   Joe: Yeah.   Dr. Bill: So I call my folks and my mom, dad, I get on the phone, they're both on the phone. I'm like, you won't believe this. I said, well, I just got a call from the dean's office and I'm going to be the outstanding senior at UCLA graduating class. My mother says, What's not to believe? A lot. They picked me, there's ten thousand students,   Joe: Right.   Dr. Bill: She goes, darling, do you really think there's somebody better?   Joe: That's awesome.   Dr. Bill: I'm like, Mom, you're like totally missing. My parents had no idea. And it was actually kind of funny, you know, and, you know, so, you know, I kind of went through and I graduate UCLA. I finished that, you know, going to UCLA. And then I got in a dental school. My first choice is dental, which was a great school. It was a three year program. And as I was entering my senior year, I realized, you know, I've never seen the world or anything. Actually, I had never even really been on an airplane. And it's like I need to open up this practice and be tethered to a specific area. Like I didn't want to do that. So I did some research and I found a program in Switzerland that was the only clinic literally in the world that wasn't a third world country where an American dentist could work legally. Problem is, there were four hundred applicants and only one position, and I was bound and determined to get that. So I had every professor in my dental school write me a letter of recommendation. And they were amazing letters, you know. I know. I wrote them all I   Joe: That's   Dr. Bill: Mean,   Joe: Right.   Dr. Bill: Basically, I would say, can you write me a letter and they do I know I have to   Joe: Yeah.   Dr. Bill: Write another letter and then say I'll write it if your personal lives. So I did that and I soon realized that was getting me nowhere. So then I started calling the director of the clinic back in nineteen eighty three. This was not easy. We didn't have cell phones. You know, I, you know, I couldn't make long distance phone calls from my dental school, you know, what am I getting like keep putting quarters like a lot of your millennialist. Don't you know that you actually used to have to put money in a pay   Joe: Exactly,   Dr. Bill: Phone. Right.   Joe: I was there.   Dr. Bill: Right. So there is and you can use a credit card and none of this. So I would have to time it at home. And and even then, it wasn't easy. A lot of times you couldn't get through. It didn't work at the bank. I start calling him and calling him and I tell kids and we'll talk about my leave program a little later on, there will be life defining moments in your life. Sometimes you plan on, sometimes you don't. Sometimes they just happen. And this was one that I really didn't plan, but it was so fortuitous that it happened. And I'm on the phone with the director. His name was Mr. Schreyer. And I said as I realized I was getting nowhere with these phone calls. Can I take you to lunch? Because I had heard somewhere that, like, you should take people to lunch   Joe: Yeah.   Dr. Bill: And the crazy thing is and he said it, he goes, But you're in San Francisco and I'm in Switzerland, I'm like, no problem, I'll fly there. Which is even crazier because I was broke like I had no money. I couldn't even afford, like the 30 cents to go on the bus every day of school. That's how broke I was. I would walk like two miles. And so he said yes. And I figured out a way to borrow money. And I went to Switzerland   Joe: Wait, but don't   Dr. Bill: And   Joe: Go past   Dr. Bill: I.   Joe: This point. Wait, I want to know what you told your parents when you said I'm going to Switzerland to take the head of the department at the dental school. Out to lunch. I want to know what your parents said to that.   Dr. Bill: They thought it was a great idea.   Joe: That's incredible.   Dr. Bill: Good luck. You know,   Joe: That's   Dr. Bill: I mean,   Joe: Awesome.   Dr. Bill: They had no clue. So anyhow, I did it. There was a girl that I had been friends with my whole life that, you know, I had kind of hoped that I would marry one day. That never happened. But we're still best friends. But I took her with me and I figured if I got stuck on words, she was very talkative and she could help me out. But the two of us took him to lunch and he hired me.   Joe: That's   Dr. Bill: And   Joe: Incredible.   Dr. Bill: It literally changed my life. I mean, I got an opportunity to live in Europe. For two years, I learned how to ski trip about salesmanship of the scandal to I'm completely fluent in French. I   Joe: Wow.   Dr. Bill: And I was really not gifted in languages in school. I mean, and I still I have a godson in Switzerland. I mean and I still have very close friends there. So it was a great, great, great experience for me. And it really gave me an opportunity to see the world. I came back to L.A. I really became enamored with cosmetic dentistry as opposed to just general dentistry. And so I did something that we also teach Italy. It's called Kopi Genius. I realized that the last thing Beverly Hills needed was another cosmetic dentist. So I found the five most successful cosmetic dentists and I called all of them and I said, Can I come in Chattanooga? Shadowing wasn't even a thing back then like they were what do what   Joe: Yeah.   Dr. Bill: I'm like now coming to watch you. And I did. And, you know, there weren't a lot of students at the time doing this, but they all five of them said the same thing to me. You're really different. I think what they were saying in a nice way is you're weird, but they're really different, you know, because students would come in and watch me do dentistry. And that's not what I did. What I did was I went in, I wanted to see how they brought the patients in the intake forms, what they said to the patients, how they brought them back to the treatment rooms, how they presented the treatment, and then how they performed the treatment, and then how they took the patient out of the room, how they collected money. I wanted to get paid and I didn't know how to collect money from people working in dental school. They teach you how to drill teeth. And in the clinic in Switzerland, I didn't have to deal with money. I just did the work. So I wanted to learn how a business ran and all that. And I sat there like a sponge in these offices. And my goal was to make an office better than theirs, to take the best of the best from all of these these guys and make a better dental office.   Dr. Bill: And within two years I did it. You know, I had the busiest and probably still have the busiest dental office in all of Beverly Hills because I copy Genius and that's what I did on Instagram and Instagram became popular. I didn't just do it. I hired a whole team. I'm only going to in the world with a million followers on Instagram. You know, I didn't just do it. One of the things I teach, at least when you go go big and that's what I do, if I'm going to do something, I commit and I do it. So, you know, I started this dental practice soon after that, I started a company called Discus Dental where I invented Zoom. And we grew that company from zero to one point three dollars billion in sales. And I did it by hiring a great team. My best friend, Robert Heyman, was my business partner and he was a genius. And his father was Fred Hammond, who created Beverly Hills Giorgio Cosmetics, two seven, three of all Fred.   Joe: Well.   Dr. Bill: So Robert grew up in that industry. So he knew marketing and manufacturing and advertising. I knew dentistry and advertising. And together we built the largest tooth whitening company in the world. Zoom became Q to became the number one to fly new product in the world. And then we sold that company to Phillips back in 2010. And since then, I've been the featured dentist on ABC's Extreme Makeover, CBS of Doctors New York Times, best selling author, 20 Lifetime Achievement Award. Three Children, two ex-wives. This Thrill Ride.   Joe: Incredible. So I have to ask you, and this is for the entrepreneurs in the audience, because the question that would come to my mind is you're fresh back in the states from Switzerland and you decide that you're going to plant roots and probably one of the most expensive real estate areas in the world. How do you start up a dental office in the heart of Beverly Hills?   Dr. Bill: So I basically didn't put all my eggs in one basket, I grew up in Granada Hills, the difference between Granada Hills and Beverly Hills is astronomical. The only commonality is the word Ilze. Right. But I didn't know where I would usually drive more. I had the advantage holes of all the people I grew up with living there and coming to me. But I loved the allure of Beverly Hills. So I worked as an associate in two different dental offices. So it didn't cost me anything. I was a hired gun. I would go in and work and bring in patients. And I soon realized that I loved cosmetic dentistry. I love the mentality of people in a business area like centricity and, you know, and not so much kind of like family dentistry. And so I pretty much closed down the office and Granada Hills worked in in Century City. And the plan was I was working with an older fellow to buy him out. Well, as soon as we started getting closer and closer to the buyout date, I think my enthusiasm became infectious. And he decided he didn't want to quit anymore.   Joe: Oh.   Dr. Bill: And he was very sweet. And he said, you know, Bill, he said, you can do this by yourself. He said, you don't need to buy my practice. I'm going to stay here, open up your own practice. You have enough pay. I had more patients than he did   Joe: Oh,   Dr. Bill: After   Joe: Wow.   Dr. Bill: Just two years. And so I did. It was really fortuitous that the dentist right next door to us moved out of the building. And so there was a completely furnished dental suite. I didn't have to do any build out at all. All of the plumbing, the gas, the soft, everything was there. So I was really lucky. I moved into that suite is on the 11th floor, my building, and the only thing I needed was all the dental equipment, the chairs and the   Joe: Mm   Dr. Bill: Lights   Joe: Hmm.   Dr. Bill: And this and then another stroke of luck. There was a dentist in our building who was four or five flights above me who passed away. And there was a fully furnished dental office up there of all this equipment. And the building didn't know what to do with it. And it was a mess. It was a mess. So I went up there and and I had it evaluated and assessed. I was going to try and take out a loan or something. And the appraisal came in at close to seventy five thousand dollars for all that. I had three thousand dollars in the bank at the time. I mean, that's it. And so I, I went and I spoke to the owner of our building and I said, listen, I've been up on in that suite and it's it's a mess. I mean, and it was it was really disgusting and dirty. And I said, I will empty the suite. I will take all of the equipment, I will clean everything up and get it ready for you to read. And I'll give you three thousand dollars cash. And he said, fine.   Joe: Wow, that's   Dr. Bill: And   Joe: Chris.   Dr. Bill: I still I still have a lot of those instruments, and I this is 40 years I've been practicing. I have all the surgical like four extractions and I have all that stuff still in my office with that doctor's name engraved in it. But that was how I really opened up my office. I had no budget. I had no ad budget. Like, I couldn't advertise, but I realized something. And as an entrepreneur, I would say you need to sit back, look at your situation and really think outside the box. And this is what I did. I thought, OK, I'm in Century City. There is a five block radius of buildings around my office with 20000 thousand people coming to work every day. Right.   Joe: Hmm.   Dr. Bill: We know on average that 50 percent of those people don't have a regular dentist. OK, so that's you know, what was I'm sorry. It was fifty thousand people in that area. So that's twenty five thousand people don't have a regular dentist that work for me. Of those, twenty five thousand eighty percent of them work in companies with dental insurance so they don't even have to pay anything. They just need to come in and because I'm so close, they can walk over, they wouldn't have to drive. So what I did is I hired five kids from Beverly Hills High School, which is right next door to my dental office. And I made up these flyers for I think I paid three hundred bucks and I had them put a flyer in every single office in Century City. Now, this was way before 9/11, so there was no restrictions   Joe: Right.   Dr. Bill: You could go. And so basically by doing that, the flyer gave people a great first time offering to my office. If they had dental insurance, it was free. And I got something like 80 patients the very first month. And if we continue to do that and so we were basically getting patients in two ways, internal and external. Internal was taking the patients that came in, giving them the greatest dental experience we could and asking them to refer friends and then externally going out and putting out more and more and more flyers and bringing in patients. The next month I got something like one hundred new patients. And honestly, since then I have probably had no less than 90 new patients a month my entire career. And there were I mean, and the average dentist gets like 20. But I have never not been busy even during the pandemic. We've been busy. I'm busier now than I've been in years because I always say I invented Zoom when people think I the video conference, what it was. But people are sitting on Zoom looking at their smile,   Joe: Yeah.   Dr. Bill: Going, I'm not really happy with that. I'm doing more cosmetic dentistry right now than I've ever done in my life. It's it's a   Joe: That's   Dr. Bill: Boom.   Joe: Crazy. And when you said when you started your practice you were going to concentrate on cosmetic surgery, so were all of these new patients coming in just for cosmetic stuff, not for cleanings, or were you doing   Dr. Bill: Well,   Joe: That also?   Dr. Bill: First of all, it wasn't cosmetic surgery, it was cosmetic dentistry,   Joe: Ok.   Dr. Bill: But as a cosmetic dentist, yeah, we do regular dentistry too and do   Joe: At.   Dr. Bill: Fillings and crowns and cleanings and everything else that you need to do to maintain your oral care. But the focus of my of my practice, the thing that really differentiates me from most dentists is the fact that I do, you know, cosmetic dentistry. And I have a very high profile clientele for that.   Joe: Yep, so that's my next question, you get right into it perfectly. How did you get   Dr. Bill: Ok.   Joe: Like with any entrepreneur? Obviously, if you provide a really great service, you're going to get talked about right. And automatically you're going to get known. And like for my business, I have an entertainment booking agency here in Scottsdale and Phoenix. Somebody writes to me, calls me. They have an answer. Within an hour or so, I'm known for my response time. And then the product I deliver is a very high product with you. How did you get that first step into a clientele that you now have?   Dr. Bill: So there's a few things. First of all, you said something, you said you automatically get no wrong. You don't automatically   Joe: No,   Dr. Bill: Get   Joe: You   Dr. Bill: No.   Joe: Do it yourself, you write.   Dr. Bill: You know, it takes work,   Joe: Yeah.   Dr. Bill: You know, I was really fortunate early on in my career, there's a woman that I went to high school with as very close. But if you came in and needed a lot of dental work and said, hey, do you want to barter what I got, even though the barter was   Joe: Yeah.   Dr. Bill: I was so naive when it came to business. And then I said, well, what do you do? She goes, I'm a publicist. I'm like, I don't need one of those. She goes, Yeah, you do. I'm like, I don't even know what one was. So I don't leap of faith. I thought, OK, fine, we'll barter and we'll do it. She was genius. I mean, she got me in magazines, journals. She got me listed as the best dentist in L.A. in L.A. magazine, which was huge that, you know, she she was friends with the editor. She got the whole editorial staff to come in and be my patient. They loved their experience. And so they ranted and raved about my practice. And those things started building up my practice. And, you know, I can get more into the whole PR thing, but that was really a big mindshift for me. I never thought as a dentist I would have like a publicist. I mean, and the crazy thing is today I'm probably the best known dentist in the world. Go figure.   Joe: Yeah.   Dr. Bill: Right. But a lot of things happen. And, you know, I always tell kids when they come to leak, if there's only two concepts that you walk away from from this whole program, these are the two that I think are most important. Number one, don't wait for opportunities in life. Make them, you know, I mean, if I meet another millennial who's sitting there waiting for the universe to do something, I want to scream and pull my hair out. Like the universe doesn't care about you at all. You need to care about you. And number two, when you get an opportunity in life, don't take it. M. it. There's a big difference   Joe: Yeah.   Dr. Bill: When ABC put me on Extreme Makeover dentistry, great TV, not so good. You know, if I watch the first two episodes of that show, I literally stunk like they should have fired me. But at least I was smart enough to know how bad I was. So instead of waiting to get fired, I was proactive. I took acting classes, hosting classes, teleprompter in class. I hired the woman who worked with all the kids on American Idol to sit down with me and teach me how to do what we're doing right now. To interview, to talk. I mean, this was not natural for me. It wasn't at all. But, you know, if you practice and you practice and you practice, you get better at things. And there's a big misconception. We always think practice makes what?   Joe: Perfect.   Dr. Bill: Ron.   Joe: Right.   Dr. Bill: Practice makes permanent.   Joe: Yeah.   Dr. Bill: So with your practicing in, you're not getting the results you want, don't keep doing that, get a mentor, get a coach, hire somebody and learn how to do it right, because you need to practice it the right way. Right. To make it perfect. And   Joe: So.   Dr. Bill: So there was a lot of learning for me. But, you know, at the end of the day, it paid off.   Joe: Then would your grandmother say you look thin? Is that what she said? She looks.   Dr. Bill: The first time I was on TV, I said, Grandpa, this is a woman who never said anything bad to anybody. I said, Gramps, did you see me on TV? She goes, Of course I did. I said, What do you think? She says? You look very   Joe: If   Dr. Bill: Skinny.   Joe: It's.   Dr. Bill: I'm like, But what do you think about what I did? She goes, I'm telling you, you were skinny.   Joe: I want to talk a lot about Lee, because even though you said, like, the universe doesn't care, I I also believe and I'm a big Dave Meltzer fan and he's sort of my mentor at this point that we get in our own way. And so there is abundance out there. And if we get out of the way and we just know what we want and we ask for it and we act accordingly, things come. So this connection with you means a lot to me because of Lee. Before we get to that, do you want to talk a little bit about your own podcast? Just because the lead part of it for me is huge and I really want to concentrate on that until our time runs out, so.   Dr. Bill: Well, I mean, the know the way that my podcast ties in the league is, Leape is a motivational leadership program for high school and college students that we do every summer. And it's always been at UCLA Live. Obviously, last year it was virtual. This year, I think we'll have probably one hundred students live and maybe ten thousand virtual.   Joe: Oh,   Dr. Bill: But   Joe: My gosh.   Dr. Bill: It's been amazing. And if any of your listeners have kids or no kids, fifteen to twenty five will be July 18th to the twenty fourth. They could get more information at w w w dot leap foundation dot com. We've had amazing speakers Paula Abdul, Mark Wahlberg, Anthony Hopkins, Kathy Bates, Michael Strahan, Usher, Apollo Ohno, Jason Alexander. I mean, I could go on and on and on. And these people come, they speak to these kids and they they give them their pearls. They give them their words of wisdom to help these kids become successful. And it's it's an amazing program. And, you know, I was always fearful that people would look at is like one and done like we have them for a week. But by putting out content continuously, we're able to stay in touch with the kids and we have the students stay in touch with each other. And so because I've been able to interview all these amazing people, I started this podcast. It's called Meet the Mentor. And every week I. I interview another person. A big part of Leape is mentorship. The program culminates on Friday with a mentor workshop where I bring in doctors and lawyers and firefighters and writers and actors and actresses, you name it, and the kids get an opportunity to sit and talk to these people one on one and ask them about their careers. And it's so valuable. And it's it's literally the highlight of the week for these students. So I continue that throughout the year by doing this. Meet the Mentor podcast. How is it done? Crazy. I mean, we're number one in Yemen. We're number two in Iceland, number three in Finland. And I think I'm ninety fourth in the category of forty seven thousand of these podcast in the US. And it's it's it's been phenomenal. And the purpose is twofold. One, to keep students engaged and keep, you know, exposing them to different mentors and to to expose parents and friends and family to lead. And hopefully they'll send their kids to the program.   Joe: So how did this come about? What was the light bulb that went off for you to say? This really speaks to me. I mean, I can imagine you are with all the things that you've done, your super busy, and then then all of a sudden have this light bulb go off and say, this is how this is. I want to give back and this is how I want to do it.   Dr. Bill: You know, I've always been very philanthropic and it's funny because I had this common theme in my life where every time I've committed to do something purely for philanthropy, it's ended up becoming incredibly successful for me on a monetary basis with literally no hidden agenda. And I can give you an example after example after example. The first one being discussed, you know, I was working at at the sports club L.A., which is now an equinox. And a woman came up to me named Cynthia Hearn, who I didn't know and said, would you like to help raise money for children's cancer research? Well, I wasn't wealthy by any stretch of the imagination, but how can you say no to that? Right.   Joe: Absolutely.   Dr. Bill: So I said, sure. You know, she said, you are a dentist. I said, yes. And she goes, and you're single, right? I'm like, Yeah, but this is weird. She goes, Well, we're doing a bachelor auction and   Joe: Oh,   Dr. Bill: We need 10 bachelors that we can auction off to a thousand women for this charity,   Joe: Oh.   Dr. Bill: To be honest with you. That was stupid and humiliating. But out of that, I met Robert Hamit Robert Heyman with the other bats are standing in line beside me. By the way, Robert was over last night. We had dinner. We became instant. Best friends were brothers.   Joe: A   Dr. Bill: And   Joe: Simple.   Dr. Bill: Robert and I started discus dental and we literally brewed that company zero to one point three billion dollars. And along the way we've raised over forty five million dollars for children's charities. I mean, a lot of really cool things. But I was exposed to lead through another program that was very much like it was a precursor to lead. And that program was a program for students where they brought mentors in and they asked me to come as a mentor. And unfortunately, the founder of that program passed away. And when you did, I thought, you know, I can make this a nonprofit and keep it going so that that's how I actually got introduced to Lee.   Joe: Wow, that's really interesting. So when did this start? By the way?   Dr. Bill: So LEEP has been going this summer would have been our 13th, so the fourth theme fleet will come up this summer, but I've been doing the program prior to leave for probably 10 to 15 years before I started.   Joe: That's incredible. And when they go out to you said it's on the UCLA campus and where are they staying in dorms, if they.   Dr. Bill: Right, so students come from all over the world. We get kids from Australia, from New Zealand, from Europe and Asia and Africa, you name it, it's like a mini UN. It's really fun. And we get about five hundred kids. They all live in the dorms and we put on, you know, I think the best program of its type in the world. And a lot of the success of the program is the community. I mean, I get amazing speakers and they don't charge us. I mean, you couldn't afford to pay, you know, Anthony Hopkins, Mark Wahlberg. I think we'll get Katy Perry this year. I mean, I we couldn't pay, but when I when I talk to him about the program and they see how much passion we put into this, they say, I'll do it, doc, I'll do it. And now with Zoom, it makes everything so much easier because they don't even have to show up prior to the pandemic. If I had told kids. Oh yeah. Mark Wahlberg told Zoom in maybe like and   Joe: Yeah.   Dr. Bill: Now it's like it doesn't it's like live or Zoom. They're happy to see him.   Joe: That's incredible. It's just really the reason this speaks to me is because I feel like in the world that we're in and I'm I just turned fifty nine in February. So next year is a big year for me. And I think about all the time and I don't want to say it was wasted or regret or anything, but I think about that we end up trying to repair ourselves as adults on things that might not have happened. You had your life a little different. You knew exactly what you wanted to do. You followed your path that you're wired differently, your DNA, and you were able to just literally do all of these things. And I'm sure you've had your struggles. So I'm not I'm not painting this picture of, you know, none of that. But it would be so nice to get to these young minds early and explain that the world literally is your oyster. And you need to follow your. And sometimes I don't know. Right. So you say follow your heart. Sometimes they're confused about it. But I love the fact that you're getting to these young minds earlier and you're helping them to understand things sooner. And that's why this program speaks to me so much. I think it's incredible.   Dr. Bill: Well, I'll tell you what I have found empirically to be one of the most important factors in all of this. When I sit back and I say, you know, what am I most thankful for, you know, from my parents now, they never bought me a car. They never gave me money. But you know what? They did give me confidence. And confidence is currency, if you are a parent, the greatest, greatest gift that you can give your kids is confidence. And the very first thing we do, at least when a kid walks in that door and I open the program, I say to them, hey, when you woke up this morning, whether you think you did this or not, you put a number on your forehead once the lowest 10, Zayat said. How many of you did not put a 10 on your head? They raised their hand. I said, Who picked the number? You did have to take a test. No, did have to do anything. No, I said wipe it off and put a 10 on that. I said, from now on, I want you to walk like a ten top like a 10, act like a ten. But most importantly, surround yourself with other kids who are tense because you're trying to be a 10 and everybody around you use it to guess what, you become a two. So we give the kids these pop soccer   Joe: It's also.   Dr. Bill: Support on their phone ten. And you might hear something super crazy. Joe, we sold discus dental on ten, ten,   Joe: Oh,   Dr. Bill: Ten   Joe: Well.   Dr. Bill: At 10 a.m. to Philipps.   Joe: That's crazy.   Dr. Bill: I think about October 10th, 2010, at nine a.m., the merger documents came on like this is you can't write this stuff. I'm waiting till exactly ten o'clock so that when I go to sleep in 2011, I could tell the kids what a perfect ten day looks like. And we I signed that paper and, you know. It was an emotional moment for me. I always knew as against. I'd be comfortable, I had no idea. That I had the ability. To make the kind of money I made when we sold my company, that was like funny money to me, I didn't even think something like that could happen. I didn't grow up that way, you know? And, you know, and I thank my lucky stars every day for for meeting Robert Haymond, for participating in that charity auction, for, I mean, all the things that led up to that. Because I wouldn't I mean, you should see where I'm sitting right now. I'm I'm on the 30th floor of this beautiful condominium in in Century City. I wake up every morning the happiest guy I know. And so, so grateful for everything. It's it's really it's really been amazing.   Joe: Well, you know what? Good for you. Well deserved. I can just tell by I do a little bit of research up front for these. I want them to be somewhat spontaneous. But I when I went and looked at what I felt, I wanted to figure out more about who you are. I can tell I can tell from just how you look at the kids that are part of the program. I watched one of your talks to them, and I can tell it really it's super important to you and and your generous and loving and giving back. And it just it's very, very cool. And I appreciate you.   Dr. Bill: Well, I think my my my mantra is. Learn so you can earn and then return. And I feel if you can really accomplish those three things, you'll have a lot of happiness and and self satisfaction in life. So that's really what I focus on.   Joe: I agree. Well, I literally could talk with you forever. This is amazing. I'm honored that you came on my podcast. What is the best way for someone to get my guests in touch with you in regards to what do you prefer? And also, the lead program has   Dr. Bill: Yeah,   Joe: The best.   Dr. Bill: I mean, believe it or not, I'm the only person I know with probably a million followers who actually answered all of their demands. So Instagram, I don't do tick tock or even Facebook, but if you really want to reach me, it's super easy. It's Dr. Bill Dorfman, D.R Bilel Dorfmann on Instagram. I promise. I answer one hundred percent of my DBMS. If if you're interested in the program, please go to Sleep Foundation dot com. You can sign your kids up right now. And yeah, I think that's.   Joe: Well, thank you so much, I appreciate it. I look forward to to seeing more about what happens with LEEP, and I definitely want to stay in contact with you. And I wish you all the best.   Dr. Bill: Well, thank you.

Bill: Well Sean, I'm going to Boston with you. You know The Guy Who Manages The Red Sox, the Red Sox's manager, gave me a job as coach for as long as you're on the team. Sean: Look Bill, if you're the coach, you must know all the players. Bill: I certainly do. Sean: Well you know I've never met the guys. So you'll have to tell me their names, and then I'll know who's playing on the team. Bill: Oh, I'll tell you their names, but you know it seems to me they give these ball players now-a-days very peculiar names. Sean: You mean funny names? Bill: Strange names, pet names...like Dizzy Dean... Sean: His brother Daffy. Bill: Daffy Dean... Sean: And their French cousin. Bill: French? Sean: Goofé. Bill: Goofé Dean. Well, let's see, we have on the bags, Who's on first, What's on second, I Don't Know is on third... Sean: That's what I want to find out. Bill: I say Who's on first, What's on second, I Don't Know's on third. Sean: Are you the manager? Bill: Yes. Sean: You gonna be the coach too? Bill: Yes. Sean: And you don't know the fellows' names? Bill: Well I should. Sean: Well then who's on first? Bill: Yes. Sean: I mean the fellow's name. Bill: Who. Sean: The guy on first. Bill: Who. Sean: The first baseman. Bill: Who. Sean: The guy playing... Bill: Who is on first! Sean: I'm asking YOU who's on first. Bill: That's the man's name. Sean: That's who's name? Bill: Yes. Sean: Well go ahead and tell me. Bill: That's it. Sean: That's who? Bill: Yes. PAUSE Sean: Look, you gotta first baseman? Bill: Certainly. Sean: Who's playing first? Bill: That's right. Sean: When you pay off the first baseman every month, who gets the money? Bill: Every dollar of it. Sean: All I'm trying to find out is the fellow's name on first base. Bill: Who. Sean: The guy that gets... Bill: That's it. Sean: Who gets the money... Bill: He does, every dollar. Sometimes his wife comes down and collects it. Sean: Who's wife? Bill: Yes. PAUSE Bill: What's wrong with that? Sean: Look, all I wanna know is when you sign up the first baseman, how does he sign his name? Bill: Who. Sean: The guy. Bill: Who. Sean: How does he sign... Bill: That's how he signs it. Sean: Who? Bill: Yes. PAUSE Sean: All I'm trying to find out is what's the guy's name on first base. Bill: No. What is on second base. Sean: I'm not asking you who's on second. Bill: Who's on first. Sean: One base at a time! Bill: Well, don't change the players around. Sean: I'm not changing nobody! Bill: Take it easy, buddy. Sean: I'm only asking you, who's the guy on first base? Bill: That's right. Sean: Ok. Bill: All right. PAUSE Sean: What's the guy's name on first base? Bill: No. What is on second. Sean: I'm not asking you who's on second. Bill: Who's on first. Sean: I don't know. Bill: He's on third, we're not talking about him. Sean: Now how did I get on third base? Bill: Why you mentioned his name. Sean: If I mentioned the third baseman's name, who did I say is playing third? Bill: No. Who's playing first. Sean: What's on first? Bill: What's on second. Sean: I don't know. Bill: He's on third. Sean: There I go, back on third again! PAUSE Sean: Would you just stay on third base and don't go off it. Bill: All right, what do you want to know? Sean: Now who's playing third base? Bill: Why do you insist on putting Who on third base? Sean: What am I putting on third. Bill: No. What is on second. Sean: You don't want who on second? Bill: Who is on first. Sean: I don't know. Bill & Sean Together:Third base! PAUSE Sean: Look, you gotta outfield? Bill: Sure. Sean: The left fielder's name? Bill: Why. Sean: I just thought I'd ask you. Bill: Well, I just thought I'd tell ya. Sean: Then tell me who's playing left field. Bill: Who's playing first. Sean: I'm not... stay out of the infield! I want to know what's the guy's name in left field? Bill: No, What is on second. Sean: I'm not asking you who's on second. Bill: Who's on first! Sean: I don't know. Bill & Sean Together: Third base! PAUSE Sean: The left fielder's name? Bill: Why. Sean: Because! Bill: Oh, he's centerfield. PAUSE Sean: Look, You gotta pitcher on this team? Bill: Sure. Sean: The pitcher's name? Bill: Tomorrow. Sean: You don't want to tell me today? Bill: I'm telling you now. Sean: Then go ahead. Bill: Tomorrow! Sean: What time? Bill: What time what? Sean: What time tomorrow are you gonna tell me who's pitching? Bill: Now listen. Who is not pitching. Sean: I'll break your arm, you say who's on first! I want to know what's the pitcher's name? Bill: What's on second. Sean: I don't know. Bill & Sean Together: Third base! PAUSE Sean: Gotta a catcher? Bill: Certainly. Sean: The catcher's name? Bill: Today. Sean: Today, and tomorrow's pitching. Bill: Now you've got it. Sean: All we got is a couple of days on the team. PAUSE Sean: You know I'm a catcher too. Bill: So they tell me. Sean: I get behind the plate to do some fancy catching, Tomorrow's pitching on my team and a heavy hitter gets up. Now the heavy hitter bunts the ball. When he bunts the ball, me, being a good catcher, I'm gonna throw the guy out at first base. So I pick up the ball and throw it to who? Bill: Now that's the first thing you've said right. Sean: I don't even know what I'm talking about! PAUSE Bill: That's all you have to do. Sean: Is to throw the ball to first base. Bill: Yes! Sean: Now who's got it? Bill: Naturally. PAUSE Sean: Look, if I throw the ball to first base, somebody's gotta get it. Now who has it? Bill: Naturally. Sean: Who? Bill: Naturally. Sean: Naturally? Bill: Naturally. Sean: So I pick up the ball and I throw it to Naturally. Bill: No you don't, you throw the ball to Who. Sean: Naturally. Bill: That's different. Sean: That's what I said. Bill: You're not saying it... Sean: I throw the ball to Naturally. Bill: You throw it to Who. Sean: Naturally. Bill: That's it. Sean: That's what I said! Bill: You ask me. Sean: I throw the ball to who? Bill: Naturally. Sean: Now you ask me. Bill: You throw the ball to Who? Sean: Naturally. Bill: That's it. Sean: Same as you! Same as YOU! I throw the ball to who. Whoever it is drops the ball and the guy runs to second. Who picks up the ball and throws it to What. What throws it to I Don't Know. I Don't Know throws it back to Tomorrow, Triple play. Another guy gets up and hits a long fly ball to Because. Why? I don't know! He's on third and I don't give a darn! Bill: What? Sean: I said I don't give a darn! Bill: Oh, that's our shortstop.

NFL Free Agency for the 2020 off season has begun! Things have already been absolutely crazy for the Tennessee Titans and various other NFL teams. In this podcast I say goodbye to Marcus Mariota and several other Titans, cover the futures of Ryan Tannehill, Derrick Henry, and others, and contemplate the landing spot for Tom Brady. I also kinda go off about the Texans... what the heck, Bill?You can WATCH the video version of this here:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kT5dv1m6YzY

A Visit With Bill Bright During His Last Days (Part 1) - Bill BrightA Visit With Bill Bright During His Last Days (Part 2) - Bill BrightA Visit With Bill Bright During His Last Days (Part 3) - Bill BrightFamilyLife Today® Radio TranscriptReferences to conferences, resources, or other special promotions may be obsolete. Lessons LearnedDay 1 of 3 Guest:                    Bill Bright From the series:   Reflections of Life:  A Personal Visit With Bill Bright  Bob:                Throughout his life and his ministry, Dr. Bill Bright has had a single focus – The Great Commission – that Christ would send us into all the world to preach the Gospel to all men.  Here is Dr. Bill Bright. Bill:                  The average Christian does not realize that his loved ones, neighbors, and friends, are going to hell.  Now you say – would a loving God send people to hell?  No – God has put a cross at the entrance of hell, and the only way anybody can go to hell is to reject God's love and God's forgiveness. Bob:                This is FamilyLife Today for Wednesday, February 19th.  Our host is the Executive Director of FamilyLife, Dennis Rainey, and I'm Bob Lepine.  Today we talk with the man who has made The Great Commission his life's objective, Dr. Bill Bright.                         And welcome to FamilyLife Today, thanks for joining us on the Wednesday edition.  It was not long ago that you and I had the opportunity to sit down and have a conversation with a Christian leader and, frankly, two years ago if you had said we would have had that opportunity in the fall of 2002, I would have said it won't happen, because the Christian leader, in this particular case, Dr. Bill Bright – well, everyone thought that he would not live much longer. Dennis:          Right, and there were a number of us who wrote Bill letters, tributes; we made phone calls.  I still remember a great conversation I had with him that I thought would be my last, and he asked me to speak at an event, and I thought, "You rascal, you've done it again.  You've gotten one more thing out of me.  You're not even going to be here then," but Bill Bright is a great man.  His life is not over.  He is showing us how to finish strong, all the way to the end. He only has about 40 percent of his lung capacity due to the disease that he has, but he's writing books, he's doing interviews, he's taking a limited number of speaking engagements and, Bob, I came to you a few months ago, and I said, "It's time we went to Orlando and sat in Bill Bright's living room and talked with him again.  He's now lived for a couple of years longer than either you or I thought he would.  Let's go find out what he's learned." Bob:                And that conversation that we had in his living room in Orlando was just a relaxed conversation where we peppered him on a variety of subjects, but it was so refreshing. Dennis:          Yeah, and it was really a sweet time.  For those who don't know who Bill Bright is, and there are some who perhaps don't – Bill is the founder and past president of Campus Crusade for Christ.  He is the author of the "Four Spiritual Laws", which has – I suppose there are billions of "Four Spiritual Laws" that have been reproduced around the world – people sharing their faith.  Bill has been used mightily by God to touch the world, to touch nations, but he also was used mightily in my own life and yours, too, Bob, and I think by the time our listeners listen to this interview, along with the next couple of days, Bill Bright will touch you deeply as well.  Let's listen to Dr. Bill Bright. Bob:                You've talked about being on your way to the grave.  You know, there are some who are surprised that we're even having this conversation today, because there was a time just a few years ago I remember hearing you and Brant Gustafson together talking about being ready for heaven and, of course, Brant is there, you're here.  How have you processed all of that over the last several years? Bill:                  Well, just before Easter a year ago, I came home from California to die.  I said to Vonette that I was choking and fainting and all the first signs of what they told me what happened at Mayo's and the Jewish Institute in Denver and my local doctor –"What you have is horrible."  He tried to get my attention, and when I received word I was dying, I said, "Praise the Lord," because, you know, you can't lose with a believer.  It's win-win.  If you die, you go to heaven; if you stay here, you keep on serving Him.  So I had begun to praise the Lord.  He thought I'd lost my sanity, and he said – then he really began to rebuke me – he said, "You have a horrible disease.  You're going to die the most horrible kind of death" – he's a heart specialist and been my doctor for 30 years – and he felt he could tell me that.  Most doctors wouldn't.  And he said, "It's worse than cancer, it's worse than heart trouble, you're just going to choke to death."                         And so I was choking, and I came home to die.  So when I got off the plane, a couple – Jack and Pearl Galpin [sp] had befriended this Russian doctor, and they insisted that she come and examine me.  Now, here's a Ph.D, a research scientist, seven years in charge at Chernobyl, and she had no place to live except the home of the Galpins, who befriended her.  So she came to live in our home, treated me three times a day, and by the end of the 30 days, I began to have new life, and I'm awed at how good I feel. Dennis:          You know, there's a story I want to just tell real quickly, because I want our listeners to know this – there's a real sense in which God used a Russian doctor in your life to keep you alive, and that really can be, I think, tied back to something you did years ago with your retirement savings.  You actually – you and Vonette – actually gave away your retirement to start an outreach in Moscow when the Iron Curtain dropped.  You gave away your retirement, and now here, at the end of your life, what does God use to bless you back, but a Russian whose country had benefited from your sacrificial act of giving, and I think, you know, that's the kind of thing that God in heaven, I think, must have a big grin about.                         He goes, "Bill Bright, you are a termite," you know, "Dennis Rainey, you are, too, but I'm going to show you what I want to do." Bill:                  Oh, He's awesome. Dennis:          I'm going to use somebody from that country to bless you. Bill:                  You know, it's interesting – Vonette and I were led by the Lord to give my retirement pension to build a New Life Training Center at Moscow State University, and one day I'm sitting in the tent 15 years later, recuperating and enjoying the Lord as we're chatting together, and it is as though the Lord said to me in a way that – no question about it – "I sent Dr. Ivanova to help you because you made the widow's mite investment in Moscow State University."                          Now, I began to sob.  I was overcome, because, frankly, there was no question what he was saying to me – that he was pleased by that.  I didn't do it for credit, I didn't make a big issue of it, and I wouldn't have brought it up if you hadn't, but you cannot outgive God, and though, as a movement, we had spent tens of millions of dollars sending Jesus films and Bibles and holding teacher convocations all over Russia and the other republics, but the Lord didn't seem to refer to that.  He referred to what I did first, and that was awesome. Dennis:          You undoubtedly have envisioned where you're going. Bill:                  Oh, heaven is awesome.   Dennis:          To your best extent – obviously, you've never been there – but you've read about it, you know the One Who resides there, you've been walking with the One Who resides there – share what you expect? Bill:                  Eyes not seen, ears not heard what God has prepared for those who love Him.  Heaven is going to be indescribably beautiful – it's not going to be, it is – and I remember as a lad, my precious, saintly mother would often say, "I can hardly wait to go to heaven."  Now, she loved her husband, my father.  She loved seven children.  She was the pillar of the community.  If anybody needed any help, they would always come to my mother.  She was truly a saint.  But I didn't understand what she was saying until I became a believer and now I look forward, with her, with great anticipation, to heaven.  Everything we experience here on earth – all the most elegant and opulent kinds of experiences – cannot compare with what awaits those who believe.                           Here's my logic – the God who spoke – and astronomers say at least 100 billion, 200 billion galaxies were flowing into space, and He holds it all together with the word of His command.  The same God became a man – the God-man, Jesus of Nazareth, died on the cross for our sins, was raised from the dead, and now lives within us, and He said, "I'm going to go to prepare a place for you, and then I'll come back and get you."                         Now, this God who created all this unbelievably beautiful, wonderful universe, you know is going to do a special creative job in preparing heaven.  Heaven is going to be the golden, golden gem of the universe, and whatever our minds can conceive of will fall infinitely short of what heaven is like. Bob:                Were you disappointed when you started getting better? Bill:                  Well, I must tell you, I was excited about going to heaven.  You know, when you heard the interview with Brant Gustafson and myself, we were on a race.  We both were looking forward to going, and we weren't sure – we were saying, "I'll beat you there." Dennis:          Yeah, well, he beat you, didn't he? Bill:                  Yeah, he did – and dear, dear Brant – he was a marvelous, wonderful friend … Dennis:          … yeah, I love him, too. Bill:                  A beloved brother – but here I am doing, in a sense, the most creative thing I've ever done.  In the last 18 months I've put almost 100 hours of the best of my 100 books and booklets on blue screen technology – video – where I can use it for interactive training of millions of people through the years long after I'm with the Lord, and Andrew Murray has been dead 150 years, is still influencing millions of Christians.  Oswald Chambers has been dead over 100 years, is still influencing even the President of the United States.  So here we are, I'm building up a library of books and videos, and I've been able to do that more since I learned I'm dying than any other period in my life.  And then God led a man by the name of James Davis and me to start, as a part of the Crusade ministry, Global Pastures Network, where our goal is to help start 5 million house churches in the next 10 years, and we're working with all major denominations.  We're working with scores of para-church groups, and it's not just a Campus Crusade for Christ project, though it's directed by Crusade under the leadership of Dr. Steve Douglas, but it's a partnership where the leaders of Southern Baptists, Assemblies of God, Presbyterians, and Methodists and many other groups – over 70 denominations and scores of para-church groups are involved. So when I look back over what's happened in the last 18 months, I would have to say I'm glad the Lord let me stay here, and I don't want to stay one second longer than He wants me here. Dennis:          You haven't retired? Bill:                  (laughs) No – I've re-fired. Dennis:          You have re-fired.  What are your dreams if the Lord gives you another 18 months? Bill:                  Well, I would just want to see everything I'm now doing increased, expanded, developed.  But there's one very important thing that is really on my heart in addition to the others, and that is to call America back to the Bible and back to the God of the Bible.  I mentioned that Brad, our son, has written this book, "God is the Issue."  I've written a book on the attributes of God, " God Discovers Character," and "The Year of the Bible.  So we're working on a strategy to take those three – "God is the Issue," "The Year of the Bible," and "God Discovers Character," and do an evangelistic thrust in every community of America, and I can't think of any better way to announce it than your radio program, because, you see, if we get back to the God of the Bible, revival comes.                          And, you know I've fasted and prayed 40 days each year for the last nine years for revival for America, the world, and The Great Commission to be fulfilled.  So I am believing that God is going to raise up the kind of leaders that are necessary in every community of America to make this happen.   Dennis:          Bill, you described heaven as a place you long to go for.  Your face lit up.  I want you to do something you may have never been asked to do – how would you describe hell? Bill:                  Oh, oh, oh – I've just written a book, "Heaven or Hell:  The Ultimate Choice," and hell is an awesome, horrible, indescribably cruel, terrible place, and the average Christian does not realize that his loved ones, neighbors, and friends, are going to hell, and because he doesn't realize there is a hell that is so horrible there are no human words to describe it – this agony for all eternity.  Now you say "Would a loving God send people to hell?"  No.  God has put a cross at the entrance of hell, and the only way anybody can go to hell is to reject God's love and God's forgiveness.  Christ died for all people – Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists, everybody – and He's not willing that any should perish.                         Peter writes, "God has delayed His return in order that more people might have a chance to receive Christ."  So God is not being unfair, but He is a just God, He's a holy God, a righteous God, and if we insist on violating His laws and disobeying Him, we are choosing to follow the kingdom of darkness – Satan – and I'm sobered by this.  Hell is a terrible place.  Heaven is an incredibly beautiful place, and as we read in Colossians 1:13 and 14, God has liberated us out of the darkness and gloom of Satan's kingdom and brought us into the kingdom of His dear Son Who bought our freedom with His blood and forgave us all our sins.                         To everyone who is listening to me, take serious what I'm saying and what Dennis and Bob are saying – there are only two kingdoms in this world – Christ's kingdom and Satan's kingdom – and you and your loved ones are a member of either one of those, and you can't be a member of them both, and if you are playing footsies with the ways of the world and being enamored with the things of the world, you are being deceived by the enemy of your soul.  God prepared hell for Satan and his angels, not for you and me.  But if we insist on following Satan, we will go to hell where he is.  I just want to stand on the street corners and say, "Stop, stop, listen to me, you're on your way to heaven or hell, and there aren't any alternatives.  You're a member of one of two kingdoms – there aren't any other kingdoms," and we need to proclaim that. Dennis:          And to that person, Bill, right now, who is listening, who is going, "I don't want to go there.  I don't want to go to a place of spiritual torment, of emotional grief and of judgment.  I want out of that kingdom.  I want to make sure I'm in God's kingdom – a place of peace, a place of beauty, a place of knowing God, seeing Him, and experiencing His love face-to-face."  What should that person do right now? Bill:                  I'd like to ask everyone who has that desire to pray with me.  I'd like to lead them in prayer. Dennis:          That's good. Bill:                  Just, phrase-by-phrase, you quote after me.  Now, Jesus promised us – before we pray – "If you hear My voice and open the door, I'll come in."  If He is speaking to you through this program or any other program, don't you hesitate for a moment.  You may never have another opportunity like this, because God's grace does not always continue.  There's a time when He says, "I will withdraw My blessing from you."  Now, I ask you, if you really want Jesus in your heart, pray this prayer with me, phrase-by-phrase.  Pray it aloud if you're in a position where you can do so – if not, silently – "Lord Jesus, I know You're the Son of God, I know You died on the cross for my sins.  Come into my life, forgive my sins, change my life, make me the kind of person You want me to be." God bless you.  Don't miss out on His plan for you.  He loves you.  He died for you.  He reaches out to embrace you.  Now don't turn Him away.  Follow Him to your last breath, and He will never fail you.  God bless you. Bob:                That, of course, is Dr. Bill Bright, who has shared those sentiments over the last 50 years over and over and over again – calling men and women to faith in Christ and then to service to their Master throughout their lifetime. Dennis:          That's right, and I have to turn to the audience right now and say to that woman who is listening, that man – if you do not know where you will spend eternity after hearing an 81-year-old man who is nearing the end of his life, give you an eternal perspective that there are two kingdoms – the kingdom of God and the kingdom of darkness, of the devil, wouldn't you like to be sure you are headed toward the kingdom of God? It's a gift.  It's a gift that comes from God by His grace if we will yet receive it by faith in Him and His Word and basically Jesus Christ died on the cross for our sins.  We must receive Him.  We must trust Him.  We must ask Him to be our Savior, our Master, our Lord, and I would just challenge you, right now – if you've not made that discovery, if you do not know the Creator of the Universe and are not walking with Him, there is no better time than right now. Put aside excuses, lay aside that obstacle, that burden, that person in the church that has kept you from receiving Christ and come right now.  Just come to Him and kneel and ask Him – Lord Jesus be merciful to me, a sinner.  Come into my life, forgive my sins, be my Master, my Lord, and begin to make me who You created me to be.  Pray that prayer right now in faith, and I just want to remind you, it's not the words of your mouth, but it is the attitude of your heart of coming to God that I believe establishes a relationship with the Almighty God. Bob:                If you want to know about that relationship with God and want to know what it means to be in a right relationship with God, call us and ask about a book we'd like to send you called "Right With God."  It's a book that will explain to you how a man is made right with God and what it means to be a follower of Christ.  Ask for a copy of that book.  We'll send it at no cost to anyone who prayed along with Dennis, anyone who wants to give his life to Christ today.  Call 1-800-FLTODAY and ask about the book, "Right With God."                         Let me also mention that we have our entire visit with Dr. Bill Bright available on audiocassette or CD.  If you'd like to hear the entire conversation with Dr. Bright – we've had to edit it here for broadcast purposes – but you can hear the unedited dialog on cassette or on CD, and in our conversation with Dr. Bright, we had the opportunity to ask him about the books that he has written, and he said that his favorite of all of those books was a book called, "God: Discover His Character," a book about the attributes of our great God, and we have that book available as well.  If you would like to deepen your understanding and your knowledge of who God is, and I'll tell you, all of us can benefit from that exercise, get a copy of Dr. Bright's book.  Again, it's called "God:  Discover His Character," and you can ask for a copy when you call 1-800-FLTODAY or you can request a copy online at FamilyLife.com.                         We always enjoy hearing from our listeners, Dennis.  We just recently heard from a number of our Legacy Partners, many of them writing to request prayer on a variety of subjects, and we do pray for you when you contact us and let us know what your needs are, and we appreciate those of you who are able to help with our financial needs as a ministry, either as a Legacy Partner or as a FamilyLife Champion.  If you would like to make a contribution to FamilyLife or if you'd like to contact us so that we can be praying for you, you can write to FamilyLife at Box 8220, Little Rock, Arkansas.  The zip code is 72221.  Once again, write to FamilyLife Today at Box 8220, Little Rock, Arkansas.  The zip code is 72221.  You can also donate online at FamilyLife.com or you can call to make a donation at 1-800-F-as-in-family, L-as-in-life, and then the word TODAY.                         Well, tomorrow we're going to continue to hear excerpts from our recent dialogue with Dr. Bill Bright, the past president and founder of Campus Crusade for Christ.  I hope you can be back with us for that.                         I want to thank our engineer today, Robbie Neal, and our entire broadcast production team.  On behalf of our host, Dennis Rainey, I'm Bob Lepine.  We'll see you back tomorrow for another edition of FamilyLife Today.                          FamilyLife Today is a production of FamilyLife of Little Rock, Arkansas, a ministry of Campus Crusade for Christ.   We are so happy to provide these transcripts for you.  However, there is a cost to transcribe, create, and produce them for our website.  If you've benefited from the broadcast transcripts, would you consider donating today to help defray the costs? Copyright © FamilyLife.  All rights reserved. www.FamilyLife.com 

A Visit With Bill Bright During His Last Days (Part 1) - Bill BrightA Visit With Bill Bright During His Last Days (Part 2) - Bill BrightA Visit With Bill Bright During His Last Days (Part 3) - Bill BrightFamilyLife Today® Radio TranscriptReferences to conferences, resources, or other special promotions may be obsolete. Final ExhortationsDay 3 of 3 Guest:                    Bill Bright From the series:   Reflections of Life:  A Personal Visit With Bill Bright   Bob:                Dr. Bill Bright has a message for Christians today, and it's a simple, basic message. Bill:                  I would say to all believers – love God with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength.  Seek first His kingdom, obey His commandments, trust His promises, and spend the rest of your life getting to know Him so you can love Him and trust Him and obey Him without any hesitancy. Bob:                This is FamilyLife Today for Friday, February 21st.  Our host is the Executive Director of FamilyLife, Dennis Rainey, and I'm Bob Lepine.  Today a conversation with a man whose life is centered in The Great Commission and The Great Commandment.                         And welcome to FamilyLife Today, thanks for joining us on the Friday edition.  For the last couple of days we've been listening back to an interview that was conducted recently with the past president and founder of Campus Crusade for Christ, Dr. Bill Bright.  I don't know if you've ever wondered this – but have you ever asked yourself what would have happened to Bill Bright if he'd never been converted, if he'd never come to faith in Christ?  What do you think his life would have been, what would it have looked like? Dennis:          Well, he described himself a couple of days ago on FamilyLife Today as a happy pagan.  He was very successful in the candy business and had created a line of candies called "Bright's Confectionary Candies," I guess. Bob:                "Bright's Delights," wasn't it? Dennis:          Bright's Delights, that's right, that's right.  So maybe some major chocolate lines wouldn't be here because Bill Bright would be ruling in the candy world.  But he didn't do that, Bob.  He yielded and surrendered his life and signed over a title deed of his life, along with his wife Vonette, and for more than 50 years they not only have been married but also have been in surrendered service to Christ and have been used mightily by God. Bob:                I think one of the things that has stuck in my mind, as I've had the opportunity to meet and interact with Dr. Bright, has been his remarkable focus.  Most of us get distracted by all kinds of lesser things, but I don't think I've ever seen him in any environment at any time when he's been distracted by anything other than the Gospel.  It's always about life with Christ.  It's always about evangelism and discipleship and walking with Christ and getting to know the Savior.  I don't know if he's paid attention to anything mundane in the last 50 years. Dennis:          I think some of our listeners would probably be shocked at how little television, how few movies he's ever seen in his life.  I doubt if he reads much of the newspaper, but he saturates his mind and his heart and his life with the scriptures, and I've heard him say on a number of occasions, "I evaluate every day of my life as to how it will contribute to The Great Commission.                          Now, if you think about it, it makes sense that if Jesus Christ said "I have the greatest commission that has ever been given, that I want to give to you," wouldn't it be wise for us to evaluate our lives and how they are contributing to fulfilling what Jesus called the greatest commission – to go to the world and proclaim the Gospel. Bob:                Well, let me take our listeners with us to Bill Bright's living room at his condominium in Orlando, Florida, where we had the opportunity to enjoy a casual conversation about some deeply profound subjects.  Here's Dr. Bill Bright: Dennis:          By all measures of this world, you have lived, not a storybook life, but certainly a successful life.  You undoubtedly have a definition of what a successful life looks like.  Would you mind sharing that? Bill:                  Successful Christian life, and that's summum bonum – that's more important than any other – is the crucified life.  Paul writes in Galatians 2:20 – "I am crucified with Christ.  Nevertheless I live, yet not I, but Christ lives in me, and the life which I now live in the flesh, I live with the faith of the son of God who loved me and gave Himself for me."  So the success of the Christian life belongs to those who know the reality of being crucified with Christ. Dennis:          Putting to death the flesh. Bill:                  Putting death to flesh – and out of that relationship, where Christ is all – He is Lord, He is Master, He is Savior, He is King – comes joy and rejoicing and full of glory.  So that's success – being dead to self and alive to Christ. Dennis:          As a man, as a husband, and as a father – do you have any regrets? Bill:                  I shared one with you – my failure to witness to Coach Red Sanders. Dennis:          The coach at UCLA back in the early 1950s? Bill:                  Yes.  That was an experience I've lived with all these years, because I disobeyed God. Dennis:          Any others? Bill:                  I, obviously, am far from a perfect husband or father or anything, but I don't have any regrets.  I look back on a life that's been rich and full, even the defeats, even the times of heartache and sorrow, God has used for His glory.  It's like Joseph said of his imprisonment and his problems as a result of being sold into slavery by his brothers – "What you intended for evil, God used for good."  And I've found that even in my mistakes, if my spirit is right, my heart is pure, my motives are pure, God turns my mistakes to blessings. Dennis:          Looking back over your life, you've done a lot of courageous things.  Obviously, God at work in you, but what would you say, looking back over 81 years, was the most courageous act you've ever performed? Bill:                  Well, there are many thoughts that come to mind – surrendering everything, where we signed a contract to be slaves of Jesus, putting everything in His hands – all that we owned or ever would own – that was simply an act of obedience, so I don't think it was that courageous, because I was doing what He told me to do.                           Moving to UCLA to start the ministry – I was the only one on staff, thought I was teaching school, and she joined me the second year.  I think, for example, when God led us to start Expo 72.  We'd never done anything like this and a good percentage of the staff leaders objected and some resigned.  Another time, when 13 men marched into my office, men who were like my sons whom I love to this day, every one of them, and God never allowed me to resent them, but they came into my office and demanded I resign.  They were taking over the movement.  To this day, when I have met them on different occasions, I give them a big hug and mean it.  I say, "I love you," and mean it.  That was something that God used to be a blessing.  Incidentally, six of those men left.  They were going to take the whole movement, and 750 people joined the staff that summer, and it was like God pruned so He could give fruit. Dennis:          Bill, you've been close to death because of your lung disease.  Have you ever been afraid to die? Bill:                  No. Dennis:          There's never been the fear of dying? Bill:                  As a matter of fact, God has graciously given me the joy of dying.  You know, face it, you can't lose when you go to be with the Lord.  But Vonette and I were on this airplane out of New York flying to Washington one evening some years ago, and it rained all afternoon.  The flight was delayed and delayed and delayed and finally the pilots apparently just took it in their hands and said, "We're going to fly."  So within minutes after we got in the air, we were in the middle of a firestorm.  I mean, a ball of fire and a tornado type wind, and the plane was like a leaf in the wind – it was awesome.  The wings were just going up and down like a bird, and we knew we couldn't possibly survive. So Vonette and I sat there in the plane, held hands, and prayed and said goodbye and thanked the Lord that we would soon be with Him, and it was very somber and yet – I can't say it was joyful because, frankly, it was frightening.  The plane was just about to come apart, from our perspective.  And we flew and flew and flew and just kept flying and Washington isn't that far away.  By this time, it was night, and finally we landed in a little out-of-the-way airport and discovered that the lightning had struck a hole in the fuselage.  I'd never heard of that before.  It knocked out all the navigational instruments and the pilot was flying blind. When we got off the plane, he was as white as a sheet, and he said, "In all my millions of miles, I've never had an experience like this."  Well, I didn't know it, how serious it was – oh, I knew it was serious – but when I got to Washington, D.C., the next morning we rode the bus from that place to the airport, and I got to the desk, and the girl said, "Oh, you were on that plane that was struck by lightning, and the plane has a big hole in it."  I didn't know that, of course.  I'd never heard of that happening. So then I was in Ghana – I had a summer experience where, in those days, most national airlines were not safe.  The flight was delayed again and again and again.  Finally, after some hours, we took off.  In the meantime, I'd gone around witnessing different people – nobody seemed to be interested, and so just as we were off the pad, just barely, there was this big explosion.  So I thought a tire blew out, but we came to a screeching halt and got off, and the motor had blown up, and had we been in the air, we'd be dead. Dennis:          Unbelievable. Bill:                  So I've had a few of these … Bob:                … but it's not the fear of death – we're never sure how we're going to get there, whether it's going to be a bumpy ride, whether we're going to wind up with a disease that takes us, but all of us are headed to the same place. Bill:                  Death is universal, we're all going to die.  That's the reason it's so important to know where we're going while we're still alive. Dennis:          Bill, someday the news will go out around the world, because it will be an international news event of your home-going, and when that happens, we want to honor Christ for what He did in your life, and I'm most certain that will happen through your memorial service and all that occurs after your home-going.  But I'm wondering what you would want the world to know – your final exhortation – because we're going to play a tape of a broadcast like this with you that Bob and I have done and have some of your words on it.  What would be your final exhortation to the world? Bill:                  I would say to all believers – love God with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength.  Seek first His kingdom, obey His commandments, trust His promises, and spend the rest of your life getting to know Him so you can love Him and trust Him and obey Him without any hesitancy.  Vonette and I have talked about this and concluded:  My own desire was to die as I've tried to live – Galatians 2:20 – Bill Bright is crucified with Christ.  And I asked her if she would bury me in an unmarked grave as a testimony of Galatians 2:20, because dead people are dead. She didn't think it was a good idea.  So we agreed that we would have on our tombstone – "Bill and Vonette Bright, slaves of Jesus" – Philippians 2:7, Jesus was a slave.  God the Creator came to earth disguised as a slave.  And Paul speaks of himself, Romans 1:1 – "slave" and Peter and others – so we'd have appropriate references – but Bill and Vonette Bright, slaves of Jesus, because, as you know, we signed the contract in the spring of 1951 – literally wrote out a contract and signed it to be His slaves, and it's the most liberating thing that's ever happened to us.  I want that to be a testimony of the greatest privilege anyone can have – to be a slave of Jesus. Dennis:          Well, I want you to know, over a year and a half ago when the news came that it looked like you were going to be coming back to Florida, where we are here for this interview, to spend your final days and to die, I spent several hours writing you a letter of – just expressing my profound appreciation for being an employee for 33 years of Campus Crusade.  I'm coming up on my 33rd year.  Bill, it's a miracle you didn't fire me. Bill:                  You're too young. Dennis:          But I really – I appreciate you, your life, and I wanted you to know that face-to-face.  I wrote you the letter and expressed that in that letter, God used my dad in my life and some key pastors to disciple me, and I count you right up there at the top with them of men who have had a profound impact on my life. Bill:                  I'm not worthy to hear that, but I was so moved when you expressed your love in that way in the letter.  I treasure that. Dennis:          Well, I know you received quite a few of them, because I would run into guys who had said they had been to visit you, and I thought, "He's not going to have time to die.  He's got too many people lined up to express appreciation," but I love you. Bill:                  Well, you are very special to me, Dennis.  I have shared with many people through the years what an inspiration and challenge you are to me – what a blessing you are, and I'm just honored to be on this program, and I believe, in spite of the way God's already used you, the best is before you, and I predict that in your lifetime your influence will be as great as anything I've been privileged to experience worldwide. Dennis:          You are very kind. Bob:                Well, this has been a treat.  Over the last three days we've been listening to an interview that was recorded just a few months ago with Dr. Bill Bright, the founder and past president of Campus Crusade for Christ, and, boy, there at the end, it was a tender moment. Dennis:          It was and, frankly, I didn't think I was going to have the opportunity to say that face-to-face, Bob.  I had written some very tender words to him privately and had sent them to him because I thought, frankly, he was dying, but it was not something that I intended to do there at the end of our interview, but looking back on hearing those words again, it was a sweet moment, and I don't want our listeners to go away just yet, because at the end I was sitting there, and I was looking at you, Bob, and I really love and appreciate you, and I was thinking, "You know, if I was Bob, I would really like to hear Bill Bright pray for me."  And so I asked him to do that at the end, and he prayed for not only Bob but for me as well … Bob:                … he prayed for both of us … Dennis:          … and I want our listeners to hear that prayer. Bob:                Before we play that, let me let you know that we have copies of Dr. Bright's book on the character of God, the attributes of God.  It's called "God:  Discover His Character."  You can call 1-800-FLTODAY to request a copy or you can go online at FamilyLife.com.  Either way, we can have the book sent to you.  This is something you can use in your quiet time, you can use it for a group Bible study, you can use it for family devotions.  If you're home schooling, you can use it for your Bible curriculum with your children.  This is fundamental to how we live as Christians.  So let me encourage you to get a copy of this book, make sure it's in your library.  Again, it's called "God:  Discover His Character," by Dr. Bill Bright, and you can call 1-800-FLTODAY to request a copy or order online at FamilyLife.com.                         When you do contact us, if you'd like to get a copy of the complete interview with Dr. Bright – we've only been able to feature portions of it here on FamilyLife Today – but we have the entire discussion available on CD or on cassette, and you can request that resource online at FamilyLife.com or when you call 1-800-FLTODAY. As we played back that conversation, Dennis, I was thinking about the letter that you are going to be sending out to our Legacy Partners here in the next few weeks, where you talk about the fact that we have lost our respect for authority and our fear of God.  When we do know God, we develop a reverence and awe for who He is, and I appreciated your comments in that letter.  It's part of our regular communication with those folks who so support this ministry on a monthly basis.  Not only do they hear from you, but we often hear from them.  In fact, we had a Legacy Partner in New York state who wrote recently and said, "Pray for guidance on what would be God's perfect plan for us, whether we ought to add a fourth child to our family.  We just finished our most recent Homebuilders study, and our spiritual growth has skyrocketed.  Thank you for your prayers.  We are praying for you."  What a delight to hear from folks who not only support this ministry with their financial gifts but those of you who pray for us as well.  We have just added a whole bunch of new Legacy Partners to this ministry, and thanks to those of you who have joined with us in this effort. If you'd like to find out more about becoming a Legacy Partner, or if you'd like to request prayer, you can write to us at FamilyLife Today at Box 8220, Little Rock, Arkansas.  The zip code is 72221.  Once again, it's FamilyLife Today at Box 8220, Little Rock, Arkansas.  The zip code is 72221, or you can make a donation online at FamilyLife.com, and you can also phone in your donation at 1-800-F-as-in-family, L-as-in-life, and then the word TODAY. Well, I hope our listeners have had the chance to listen over the last three days.  If not, I hope you'll get either the cassettes or the CDs of our conversation with Dr. Bill Bright.  That dialog went on for nearly two hours, and at the end of that time, Dennis, you asked Dr. Bright to pray for us, and we wanted our listeners to hear that prayer.  Here is Dr. Bill Bright. Bill:                  Father, Father, Holy Father, we bow in reverence before Your majesty.  We are in awe of Your greatness.  When we think of who You are, we realize how little we are, how small in comparison, and yet even when we were yet in our sins, You died for us.  You love us.  You delight in us, and I thank You that in your sovereignty You chose Dennis and Bob to do what they're doing, and You've anointed them and given them favor and great blessing, and I ask, Holy Father, You'll keep them pure, keep their motives pure, their hearts pure, their attitudes, their desires, that they will be men of God after Your heart.  There will be no sin in their lives that will hinder Your working in and through them.  That is they speak day after day to millions of people, and that number, O gracious God, I pray will increase by the millions.  They will be channels of Your love, Your forgiveness, Your grace, to the multitudes of earth.  I pray for the day when their ministry will literally encircle the globe, where millions upon millions, day after day, will be drawn closer to You, will love You and trust You and obey You because of their influence.  Lord Jesus, bless their families – their families and their children's children's children yet unborn, that they may always love You, serve You, trust You, obey You, and that the legacy of these men will go on and on until You return.  Blessed Holy Father, thank You once again for these men whom You have chosen, whom You have anointed, whom You have empowered and may all glory, honor, worship, and praise go to You.  We pray it in the name of the One whose name is above everything, the Lord Jesus Christ.  Amen. Bob:                FamilyLife Today is a production of FamilyLife of Little Rock, Arkansas, a ministry of Campus Crusade for Christ.   We are so happy to provide these transcripts for you.  However, there is a cost to transcribe, create, and produce them for our website.  If you've benefited from the broadcast transcripts, would you consider donating today to help defray the costs? Copyright © FamilyLife.  All rights reserved. www.FamilyLife.com  

What's the best - and quickest - way for a B2B business to gain marketing traction and turn contacts into customers? This week on The Inbound Success Podcast, boomtime CEO Bill Bice talks about his approach to word of mouth marketing. A serial entrepreneur, board advisor and one-time venture capitalist, Bill has seen what works across a wide range of companies, and now his company boomtime is helping B2B businesses grow by leveraging content and LinkedIn to generate buzz. Check out this episode to get the details of Bill's process and learn how you can use it to improve your own inbound marketing results. Highlights from my conversation with Bill include: Bill says that the three main objectives of word of mouth marketing are to build our audience, follow up on all of the prospects that you're generating, and stay top of mind with that audience. The easiest way to generate new business is through referrals, and the key to getting referrals is to give your audience something to talk about. Bill says most companies make the mistake of talking all about themselves on social media, when in reality they should be focused on educating their audiences. The two most common mistakes that companies make when it comes to marketing are to not make it a top priority and not be consistent with it. Three keys to successful marketing are building a response mobile website, having a robust email marketing program, and making a lot of connections on LinkedIn. In a crowded content landscape, one of the best ways to stand out and attract qualified leads is to build an audience and then invest in educating them through your content. Boomtime helps companies use this same process by outsourcing content creation for them to 300+ subject matter experts. They also help manage their clients' LinkedIn strategies. Bill says that with a well optimized profile, he'll get between a 35 and 50% acceptance rate on connection requests, sending 40 to 50 connection requests a day, and 6 to 8% of those people will start a conversation either from the connection request or he will often send a followup message with whatever the best performing piece of content is. Resources from this episode: Visit the boomtime website Connect with (or follow) Bill on LinkedIn Check out Bill's B2B Marketing podcast Listen to the podcast to learn how word of mouth marketing can help you increase the ROI of your marketing strategy. Transcript Kathleen Booth (Host): Welcome back to the Inbound Success Podcast. I'm your host Kathleen Booth and this week my guest is Bill Bice, who is the CEO of Boomtime. Welcome to the podcast, Bill. Bill Bice (Guest): Kathleen it's great to be with you. Thanks. Bill and Kathleen recording this episode. Kathleen: Yeah, thanks for joining me. I love your story because you scratched your own itch and solved a problem that you were having and I always find that those are some of the most interesting conversations. So I'm really excited to dig into it. Can we start by having you tell my audience a little bit about your story, who you are, what you're doing now with Boomtime, and what led you down that path? Meet Bill Bice Bill: So I feel like I was born an entrepreneur. I started my first company when I was 18, a software company, and of course I had no idea what I was doing, but over enough time, got a great team, and built a great company, and out of that we had enough success in selling that company that I got to be part of an early stage VC fund. And so I have founded and invested and been on the board of a whole host of companies. I actually sat down and counted them up so I could say it's 27 companies, and there is a not shocking correlation in those companies, which are the ones where we've had the most success are where we really focused on going to market and nailed that. And so you do all this really hard work to create an amazing product or service, and yet how good you are at marketing is going to determine what kind of reward you get for doing that. And I just got really frustrated in trying to get great marketing for my own companies, and so I decided to tackle that problem. Kathleen: I love it. And I think probably most of the people who listen to this podcast would agree that great marketing is important for growing your company. So that's awesome. So can you talk a little bit about specifically what Boomtime does? Bill: Yeah, so we've really focused in on B2B, we have a history in doing some work in B2C, but most of my experience has been in B2B. And the thing that I really like about B2B is that we've been able to take sort of the core framework or playbook and apply it to really any sort of highly complex, valuable transaction. So it doesn't really work for things that are volume-based. But if you're selling something high value, then the approach, I mean, I'm really a programmer at heart, so to me it was all about the data. And one of the things that I have found really challenging about marketing is unlike every other discipline in our businesses, here we have one that just refuses to accept scale and efficiency. It's just a core problem with marketing. And we do it everywhere else in our business, and it really has to happen in marketing also. And so I just tackled that from the standpoint of following the data in a very iterative process and learning what works. We don't really have to, although experimentation is key, we don't have to you, you've got bigger competitors who have spent millions of dollars figuring out how to do exactly what you need to do. You've just got to figure out what's the smaller version of that for my business that's going to work for me. And so that's what we've been doing in the B2B world. It's very much a B2B content marketing inbound approach that is what's really compatible with most of the sort of small, that two to $20 million a year business that really does a great job of taking care of their customers, but would like to grow. Or maybe has been growing in that sort of plateaued and didn't really quite understand what was making that work before, and what was making it work was word of mouth. And so we now live in this great era where we can actually really amplify the effect of word of mouth because we're all connected digitally. And so that's the thing that we have focused on. Word of mouth marketing Kathleen: So let's take it to another level of detail. I love that you said that the challenge that you're trying to solve is making companies go-to-market strategies repeatable, scalable, more efficient and really focusing that around the power of word of mouth. What does that look like in practice? If somebody is using boomtime for example, and this isn't necessarily a commercial for the product, but obviously you were trying to solve a problem that you saw through the product. So I'm curious to know, in detail, what does that really look like? Bill: Well, so the three things we want to accomplish is we want to build our audience, we want to follow up on all of, we would be much better at capturing and following up on all of the prospects that we're generating. And then we want to stay top of mind with that audience. And if you do those things really well and you do it with this focus on, let's take the thing that's already working, word of mouth, and let's just leverage digital tools to accomplish the same thing. So we think of it as social currency, like we're going to create a lot more referrals. So let's assume that referrals are really valuable to your business. And the vast majority of business owners I sit down with and I say, well, one of my favorite questions is, where'd your last couple of new clients come from? And the answer, 99% of the time is, "Oh, it was a referral from so-and-so." Because that's what really works. And if you focus on giving your audience social currency, giving them a reason to talk about you, there's a really wonderful thing happens, which is you get more referrals. And the way you do that is just flip your content, flip your marketing on its head. So most marketing for most companies, 100% of what they do should be 10%, because it's all about them. It's the number one mistake in marketing is talking about yourself. Nobody cares. I mean, honestly, your clients just don't care about the new person you hired, the new client that you won. That should be 10% of your marketing. If you put 90% of your effort into sharing your expertise, then suddenly your marketing becomes this really valuable way to communicate with your audience and you give them reasons to talk about you. Word of mouth marketing in practice Kathleen: So can you give me an example of a campaign, for example, that either you've done or that one of your customers has done using the system that you have in place, just so that we can maybe have a mental model through which to understand how it all works? Bill: Yeah, I'm going to use ourselves as the example, because we had the classic problem that a lot of, we don't really consider ourselves a traditional agency, but you see agencies do this all the time, which is you're really good at marketing and yet you don't apply it to yourself. Kathleen: Our first child. Bill: Yes. The thing that's really helped us grow is when we, we actually changed our internal processes to be able to treat ourselves as a client and give one of our marketing strategists credit for us as if we were paying ourselves as a client. Because only by doing that did we actually put the priority in our own marketing. We're literally having the same problem that every business has, which is marketing's always the fourth or fifth thing that you think about, and everybody gets stuck in this same cycle of you focus on marketing when things are kind of slow and then they pick back up. And yet the second biggest mistake in marketing is inconsistency. And it's just clear in the data that being consistent in your marketing is the number one thing you can do to make it pay off. Whatever you're going to do, do it consistently. Pick a longterm strategy you can really commit to and be serious about it. And so when we started doing the same thing for ourselves, which is literally just laying out everything we've learned and following the data, I mean, it's amazing what happens when you bring several hundred like clients together, put them on one platform, be able to aggregate that data and see what's happening. It's so difficult, even if you can have the best marketing director in the world, you only have the data in your one company to work with. Being able to multiply that across several hundred companies, it's incredible what you learn. So we've just taken that and started sharing what we've learned. I'm very passionate about small businesses. It's where innovation comes from, it's what drives our economy. I would love for every small business owner to be doing exactly these things. And our version of this is to share our expertise and what we've learned and layout exactly what you want to do in your marketing. It's the best way to promote what we do, just to share. I mean you can literally take this and go do it yourself. You will be better off if you do that. And that's my number one goal with every one of our clients is we want their prospects to be better off because sat down and got exposed to that company. Whether they ever choose to use their product or service or not, because that's what's going to create word of mouth. Kathleen: So you guys used it for yourselves and what did that look like? Talk me through your campaign that you did. Bill: So it's very content oriented. So in B2B, one of the things that I love about it, it's actually pretty simple. Because if you do three things well your marketing is going to work. If you build a responsive mobile website that really pays attention to the customer journey, if you do really good email marketing and you build an audience on LinkedIn, and if in particular, if you stitch those together and understand the customer journey across those three channels, you will really understand what's working, what's creating engagement and you will be able to get new prospects and pull them down the funnel. And so when we started doing that for ourselves and putting out regular content that was just sharing what we know how to do, it created a different perspective in our audience about who we are and what we do. And it started bringing to us prospects that are much better educated, that were ready for much deeper conversations when we got started. It's one of the core problems in marketing today, which is our prospects have access to so much information, and there's so much that they can learn. You've really got to decide do you want to be an order taker or do you want to be part of that educational process? And the only way you can really create new sales opportunities is to start at the very top of the funnel and be part of that educational process. So that was the change that happened for us when we really started talking about here's what works, here's what we've learned, and just laying that out and doing that consistency thing. When we started doing that really, just week in and week out, every single week. It takes a while. That's the problem with it. I don't believe there are any miracles or short term fixes in marketing, but if you commit to it and then the results start to come in over time and it really changes the trajectory of your company. How content fuels word of mouth Kathleen: Now, how does the content that you're creating feed into word of mouth? Bill: Well, that content is that social currency. It's giving people really concrete things that they can do. So let's take LinkedIn, for example. Like no matter how much effort you're putting into LinkedIn, you should be putting more. If you just look at the engagement data and the growth over the last two years, it's incredible what's happening on LinkedIn, and they really made the switch to getting people to really put time in depth into LinkedIn. And I look at LinkedIn as the ideal networking event, right? I get to meet exactly who I want. I don't have to eat high calorie food at the same time, and you need to approach it like a networking event, which is you're really there to build your network and be helpful, to that note. And if you take that approach and you say, "Okay, I've got an audience now that I'm going to build on LinkedIn, I'm going to run an aggressive connection campaign to get connected to every great prospect for me that's in the market." And then you say, "Okay, now I'm going to share the thing that I know, that I'm an expert at because I've got perspective across..." You might be the CEO or CIO, whoever your decision maker is in your prospective company, you're running your one company. But I work with hundreds or thousands of companies like you, which means I can bring perspective to you that's really valuable to you. And if you're willing to share that, to give away whatever you consider the most valuable thing that you have, give that away as your marketing. That will dramatically change how prospects see you and it will create sales opportunities that didn't exist before. And so executing it on that on LinkedIn is the primary way that we grow. This is very meta, because that's how we grow and the way we do it is to describe exactly how you should do it. Kathleen: Got it. So it's an education play through LinkedIn, then? Bill: If you're in B2B, it's really the best way to grow your company. You'd have to be in a really strange niche for the prospects you want to not be sitting out there on LinkedIn today. Now there are quite a few other software platforms that help B2B and other types of companies with content marketing, with inbound marketing, companies like HubSpot, you've got SharpSpring, there's a ton of them out there. How does the solution that you've built fit within that ecosystem? Well, sort of the short answer is HubSpot with help. So we're not selling a piece of software. What we're doing is selling the end result, the service. So the big surprise with HubSpot, and HubSpot's a great platform, there are a ton of really good marketing automation systems out there, and if you're going to do this internally, you absolutely should implement one of them. The problem, the surprise, after you start paying for that subscription is then the two people you have to hire to get any value out of HubSpot. And a lot of companies, what they really want is just the end result of that as opposed to having to go through all of that process. And one of the things I've seen over and over again, so if you're going to do that internally, one of my strongest recommendations is everybody tries to create the content internally and unless you really put tremendous focus and resources behind that, it almost never works. You really need to go. So the way we've done it is we've built a network of 300 subject matter experts. We don't do any writing internally. There's always somebody out there who already knows your audience really well. Go find that person who you don't have to teach them your market, they've been writing for it, they have been working with the industry pubs or the events in that area, and you can, half hour brainstorming session, you can come up with six months of editorial. What you need is a great stream of regular content that doesn't require you sit in front of a blank screen and have to come up with it yourself. So you can implement all of this yourself, you just, you need to put in the marketing automation system. You need to find the resources that know how to do that. And then you've got to follow the data to really understand what's creating engagement and keep testing every piece of it so you get better with every turn of the cycle. Kathleen: So if somebody is using Boomtime, do they also need to have these other platforms or is Boomtime really a replacement for these things? Bill: So if we're doing that as a service for somebody that you don't really need a marketing automation system. It's great if you have a CRM. One of our biggest challenges is that nobody really uses their CRM the way that they should. And so our approach is to integrate with the CRM and put the end results in the CRM system. One of the challenges with that building your audience part is that your sales team always has many more opportunities that they're working on than what ends up in the CRM. CRMs are really designed for sales managers. And if you put somebody in the CRM, you're going to get questioned about it. So what most sales people do is they only put people who are fairly deep into the funnel into the CRM, which means we're not building our audience and we're not following up with all of the prospects that we have. So one of the tricks that we do is go mine the email boxes of everybody who's customer facing in your company and feed that into your CRM so we're getting that central database. Because particularly if you're in B2B, your sales people are talking to those early prospects via email. So there is a record of it and we can go capture it and we can make their job easier by filling that information in for them. And it's amazing what happens if you just follow up on all those prospects that are already in your firm. It's great low hanging fruit, you just got to go get it. Kathleen: So do you typically work with smaller companies? Because it sounds like really this is a solution for companies that don't have a large marketing team, for example, that really need the external help and that don't have a super sophisticated tech stack already in place. It sounds like it's a good way for a company that recognizes that they need to be able to make their marketing more scalable to really get started with that. Is that accurate? Bill: Yes. So you sort of have two groups. It's the kind of $2 to $5 million year company where we're really doing it for them. And then once you get to the point where you have a marketing director, often we're just working under their direction doing this one piece that I recommend you get automated and process around it no matter how big you are, which is just this regular flow of really great content. The ideas come from in the company, come from the executive team, but we get the content creation outsourced because it's so expensive to do it internally. And if you do this well, that of course is the hard part. Doing it well is difficult. But if you do, then having this regular flow of great content come in, no matter how big your company is, just feed your whole marketing operation in a really wonderful way. So unless you're to the point where you can have a full time staff of writers doing that for you, and even then I would argue it's going to be really cost effective to supplement that with outside resources. So we'll often work with a larger company where that's the piece that we do, because we've gotten really good at it, and there's just, there's a ton of value for you getting that piece essentially automated. From the marketing director standpoint, you just have this great flow of content that shows up and gets distributed and you get data behind it. So I recommend making that happen no matter how big you are. Kathleen: So it's very interesting, because there's a lot of debate around this topic of should you insource or outsource content creation and you are definitely falling on the outsource side. It's interesting, I am building a team right now at my company and I've chosen to totally insource it. So I've hired a writer. For me- Bill: You know what you're doing. Kathleen: Well, let's just say for me it's also that we're in a very technically complex industry and I feel like I need somebody who can, it's a big learning curve and I want somebody who's full time in it, really learning it. Have you found success in addressing that through outsource content? Bill: Yeah, but you have to avoid the copywriter problem, which is the somebody who was working, really good writer, but was working on a car dealership last week and he's going to figure out your very niche enterprise SaaS solution this week. And so the way to do that, we do a lot of work in professional services, law firms. So if you're going to work in a law firm where the partner, the practice head for that area of law is very particular about that content. The only way you can do that is to go find a JD who's practiced in that area before. But the law firms never going to create it internally because they could be billing $600 an hour instead of writing the blog article you want them to create, but you can go find somebody who's been in that practice area, didn't enjoy the practice of law, understands the area really well. Get the ideas from the practice head in that 30 minute brainstorming session, give them five bullet points about the things that they need to cover. They can go do the research, and then all we have to do is get the voice right, which frankly is really difficult. We've ended up dividing that into two levels. The expertise to get the content and then an editor who's really good at capturing the voice. Kathleen: Yeah. I will say that when I've seen outsource content creation work, the only way I've seen it work is when you have a writer who's interviewing your subject matter expert. Anytime I see companies say, Oh, here's a topic, go run with it, I just see crappy, crappy results. because honestly whenever you're outsourcing and you're just giving somebody a topic, I feel like with that person is doing is they're Googling that topic. And so by definition you're not going to have anything new to add in your content, because it's coming from aggregations of other sources. Whereas if you interview a subject matter expert, you can get something original. But that does take a very strong writer and a very strong editor to really be able to do that well and in a way that is unique. Bill: Absolutely. And if you just wanted a content farm, I mean 90% of the efforts should be on creating great content. And so by definition, you're not going to get there if you're cutting the corners there. If we don't have great content, all the tactics that we talk about aren't going to matter one bit. We have to start with really capturing the unique expertise that you have and finding interesting ways to communicate that. Kathleen: So if somebody is listening and they're thinking, I want to improve my marketing results, I'm a B2B company, what are some really concrete things you think that they could do right now to get started? Getting started with word of mouth marketing Bill: Well, what everybody always wants is more leads, and the easiest solution is to go spend money on ads to generate those leads. And yet one of the reasons it's so difficult for that smaller company to ever get an ROI on that is that without the marketing foundation in place, that's never going to pay off. So don't take the easy route. You got to focus on those core pieces first and build that funnel and actually be capturing and following up on all your prospects. And then the easiest way to expand your audience is to focus on LinkedIn. If you take the same approach and you're very helpful and you're sharing expertise, then you can run a LinkedIn connection campaign where you're adding 1,120 new connections a month, every single month, growing this audience of exactly the right prospects that you're now sharing really valuable insight with and that will do a wonderful thing for you. It will create sales opportunities you didn't have before. It'll be the right sales opportunities with people who are much further down the process and are really ready to have a serious conversation with you. So what we see in the data is with a well optimized profile, we'll get between a 35 and 45%, sometimes in the low 50% acceptance rate on on the connection requests, sending 40 to 50 connection requests a day, and six to 8% of those people will start a conversation either from the connection request or we will often send a followup message with whatever our best performing inside driven piece of content is. None of this can be salesy at all, we all get those kinds of connection requests. Kathleen: I was going to say, are you doing an InMail? What are you doing there? Bill: It's not InMail. It's really building the network of people you should be connected to, because you have expertise that's directly relevant to them. And it's sharing that, it's not selling them. I mean, I see that all the time of we get something back from a client who just wants to dive right into the sales pitch. And that would be the same thing as walking into a cocktail party, meeting somebody for the first time, and then starting to give them a sales pitch. Until they ask for it, that doesn't work. You've got to build the relationship first. But if you take that approach, this is the easiest, most concrete thing you can do in B2B to get more sales opportunities. But ironically, the way you do that is stop selling. What kinds of results can you expect? Kathleen: So what kinds of results have your clients gotten from doing this? Bill: So that those are kind of aggregate numbers across the hundreds of of connection campaigns that we're running in just sort of any kind of high value B2B, a lot of professional services, a lot of high end products. And so the thing that we really look at is how many new opportunities are we creating and so, oh, a really good campaign, so my connection campaign, I'm running at about a 54% acceptance rate on connections, which is great. One of the things you often have to do is optimize your profile specifically for that audience that you're going to go after. If you're going after multiple niches, do one at a time, because you'll get a much higher connection. And then we're getting our primary source of new clients is off of the connection campaigns that we run for myself and our chief revenue officer. So this works much better for the executive team in your company, particularly for smaller companies. It's really not about your company profile at all. That's just not where we're going to get the activity. And even in a larger company, the more you can get the executive team and people higher up in the company to participate, the better the results that you're going to get. People want to connect with other people on LinkedIn and it just, it works so much better. And so that six to eight percent of new conversations, when you think about that coming from a thousand new connections a month, this is really the new form and you can run this yourself. You can take an hour a day and do a golden hour of prospecting around LinkedIn connections and you will get much more value out of that than making cold calls for that same time period. But if you're a salesperson who's responsible for doing that for your company, you will get better results if you can get the VP of sales or CEO to do that and let you run it for them. Kathleen: So you have about a 54% connection acceptance rate. And you mentioned that those turned into clients. What is your conversion rate from the people who accept your connection to your leads and then to your customers and how are you measuring that? How are you, how are you tracking? Bill: So there's a plus and minus to LinkedIn, which is the data's really easy to follow, but for personal profiles, the only way you can get it is logging in and looking at it, and it disappears after three months, which is kind of annoying, but it's really easy to see what's working to create engagement. And the LinkedIn algorithm is really simple. Likes and comments are essentially equal value and then you can just chart it and see how many likes and comments you get versus the percentage of your network that gets exposed to that feed. It's just a direct relationship. So I call it going everyday viral. Like our goal isn't to come up with the one piece of content that just explodes. It's to have regular content that does well over and over again in this really specific audience is exactly the people that you want to talk to. And that gives you two bites at the apple. When you make the initial connection request and sometimes you just happen to be reaching out to somebody right when they need your expertise and so you get lucky. But now, because they belong to your network, if you follow that up with a regular flow of insightful content, then you get to talk to them forever so you get a second forever bite at the apple, and both of those are really effective. You get sales opportunities that come right out of the gate and then it just comes with that regular followup. As long as you're good at getting exposure to this audience that you've created. And so many people do work on LinkedIn where they only focus on the first part, building the network, and they don't really focus on the regular updates to that network that really leveraged having created it. And if you do both, you'll get a much better pay off from that effort. Kathleen: How quickly should somebody expect to see results from something like this? Bill: You're going to get early positive indications. So you'll get some wins that show you you're in the right direction. We typically see it within the first 30 to 60 days. But the real payoff comes when you've been doing this for six months, 12 months, 18 months. We really put a focus internally ourselves on LinkedIn starting two years ago and we're seeing a much more significant pay off today than we did in the first six months. Because you really get a reputation for providing valuable information. then one of the great things you can do, somewhere about 5,000 connections, you should switch your LinkedIn button from being connect to follow, because you'll get enough organic traffic now that people will just start following you because of the content that you're sharing. And they won't even show up as asking for connection requests. They're just following you, you're not following them. And that's really when you sort of hit the point of getting a real payback on what you're doing. Kathleen: And you do that in your LinkedIn settings? Bill: I do. Yeah. And you need a big enough following where it makes sense that people would come and start just following you because because of what you're doing and you need to be doing those content updates very regularly. But I get about, right now, about 40% of the additions to my network come from people just following me as opposed to the connection requests that we're sending out. Kathleen: Got it. Very cool. Well that's an interesting tip I haven't heard somebody mention before, so there's a new one for you. Switch your button from connect to follow. Kathleen's two questions Kathleen: Before we get too close to out of time, quick questions for you that I always ask all my guests. The first one is, we've talked a lot about inbound marketing here and content marketing. I'm curious, who do you think, company or individual, is there somebody that you think is doing particularly well right now? Bill: What I want to do is, is turn that into a suggestion for, because there's somebody in your market that is doing that really well. And what I always find very valuable, anytime I'm starting to work with in a new area, is I want to go find whoever is the, I'm not looking for the biggest player, I'm looking for sort of the mid size company that is big enough to have weight behind what they're doing, they're really good at it and they're showing innovation. So I want to flip that around just a little bit and say there's somebody doing, I mean, I've always been able to find one in every single market we've gone into. So even in legal, this enormously conservative market, there's always, we start working with an intellectual property law firm. We found a firm that is doing an excellent job of content marketing in that area and I find it so much faster to learn from somebody who's already doing a really good job of that then to figure it all out ourselves. And somebody is doing that in your market, so spend the time to go do that. And every single market we work in, we have found somebody who's really great at it, who's already doing it, that we've learned a ton from. Kathleen: Anyone in particular who stands out, anyone who somebody wants to go online and see someone who's really best in class that they should look at? Bill: So the IP example, Fish and Richardson does a really good example of, that's one of these really niche-y examples. That's a deep technical area that's tough to do well. And so seeing somebody do it well, it's really the best answer to the question you asked before, which is how do you pull that off? Kathleen: Okay, great. And digital marketing obviously changes so quickly. How do you personally stay up to date on everything that's going on in that world? Bill: So I've become a huge fan of podcasts, now. I'm finally following in your footsteps and doing a podcast. So I've learned from your podcasts, there's about 20 different marketing related podcasts that I listened to. I really like, particularly in the sort of email marketing and LinkedIn side, I like Growth Hackers, because there's always somebody who's already run a test that's doing the thing that you're thinking about doing. So I'm just a big, so unlike when I was 18 and I thought I knew it all and it took me a really long time to figure anything out, I think it makes so much more sense to take advantage of this unique attribute we have of being able to find somebody who already is doing what we're doing, put ourselves in their place and learn from them. Like our ability to get where we want to go so much faster, because of that is amazing. So let's learn from everybody who's already done it before and Growth Hackers is just full of people who are doing exactly that. And I love, a lot of it's very data-driven, which obviously I'm big on, and just great way to learn. How to connect with Bill Kathleen: Bill, if somebody wants to reach out and learn from you or has a question and wants to get in touch, what's the best way for them to do that? Bill: So I'm a CEO of boomtime.com. I love talking about marketing. Happy to have you reach out if you want to. If you want to see the thing that I'm talking about, I'm easy to find on LinkedIn. Go look up my profile. You'll see exactly what we are talking about and of course we're at boomtime.com. You know what to do next... Kathleen: Great. All right, well if you are listening and you learn something new or liked what you heard, please stop what you're doing, take a minute, and go to Apple podcasts and leave a five star review for the podcast. It makes a huge difference. That's how people find us and I would greatly appreciate it. And if you know somebody else who's doing kick ass inbound marketing work, tweet me @workmommywork, because I would love to make them my next interview. Thank you so much, Bill. Bill: It's been a lot of fun. Thanks. Kathleen: Thanks.

It's raining, its pouring, technology is fucking up royally!!!! Pardon our lateness, but we had a bit of a mishap in recording this week, so we are a little, ahem, late, in posting this weeks episode. But it's okay, because you know we were really just very drunk and fucked everything all up. You can thank Claire's, "Hyped Up" version of the Barn's Tequila Sangria for this one. Sorry, not sorry, as the kids say these days. In this week episode, the gals review their best and worst of the week with 'Rose and Thorn" (Shocker they had a lot of roses). News is shared and ABV crew members can look forward to learning about California's challenge to the NCAA's policy on student athletes earning money (By the the way, is it NC Double A or, NC2A or, both? Weigh in please) as well as, Felicity Huffman's sentencing. Advice comes to us this week by way of a disillusioned millennial wanting to know if dream jobs exist. And let us tell you, as soon as this podcast is sponsored you are lookin’ at two hookers with their dream job! Saving the worst for last this week, Bill Maher is this weeks hater. Bring back fat shaming Bill? You are an ignorant piece of privileged garbage. ”Hyped Up” Tequila Sangria Bottle of red wineBlood Orange San PellegrinoLots o’ tequila Sparkling waterLots of iceYou can read this weeks news articles here:https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.wsj.com/amp/articles/california-takes-aim-at-ncaa-pay-ban-11568244553And here:https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.cnn.com/cnn/2019/09/14/us/felicity-huffman-prison-dublin/index.htmlDid you enjoy the shows intro song? Thomas Castillo and his band Creamline, created ABV’s spectacular music. If you want to hear more from Creamline, you can find them on instagram @creamline916. In need of some advice? Want to ask us something weird or embarrassing and have us answer it live? Looking to slide into our DM’s?Find us at: Anythingbutvanillapodcast@gmail.comInsta and Twitter: @abvpodcast

https://youtu.be/kijTzZn2g_Y The other day Bill Holiday sat down with the two newest fee only financial advisors at AIO Financial to ask some questions and learn a little more about them. Here's what they talked about. Bill: In this episode, we're going to introduce you to two of our new advisors – Kataya Plett and Val Mendoza. Kataya, what got you into this field, and what do you like about it? Kataya: What got me into it was I started as a portfolio manager – I looked at the funds that people should have in their portfolios and made sure they were in the right balance and diversification. I really enjoyed learning about all of that and keeping up with trends in the market. But I also wanted to be able to help people with more of their finances. To get the full financial picture and actually be working directly with the client. So that's what moved me towards becoming a financial planner.Bill: That's a good point, just making investment decisions in isolation doesn't let you give as much support as you could if you're helping with their complete picture to meet their financial goals. Kataya: Yes, people don't always realize that investments are just a part of it and that there are a lot of things that financial planners can help with. When you're looking at the whole picture, you're able to help people much more. Bill: Val, same question. What got you into financial planning and what do you enjoy about it? Val: I started out helping with paperwork and contacting clients. I didn't know much about finances and investing when I started but as I learned a lot while working at AIO and thought it was very interesting. You helped me out a lot with learning more and encouraging me to work towards becoming an advisor. I like how much the work varies from client to client and all the different people I get to meet doing this. It feels like every day is something different and I'm always learning something new. Bill: That is a great point about our education system. I don't think investing is emphasized or even touched on at most high schools. And it's really important. While we're in school we focus on someday having a career, but don't learn what to do with the money we earn. Val: Yes, I agree. Even at university, it wasn't something that was generally taught. You had to seek out classes on it. No one is really helping you with this, so you have to seek out the information yourself. Bill: So how are you adjusting to working virtually? Kataya: The interesting thing with AIO is that we have clients everywhere. So, we've always had to do some form of virtual meetings and will continue to do so in the future. But as for me personally, it's been nice in some ways – I like that we can do the meetings from anywhere and at any time which makes it very flexible. But it has been an adjustment to not be working out of the office as much. It can be nice to have that separation of work and home plus you miss out on a lot of the normal office interactions when you're working remotely. But overall, the flexibility we have with working more virtually has been a real benefit and something I think we'll continue to utilize as much as we can. Val: Yes, I agree completely. I think it's great that we can be flexible and meet with people wherever they are. But I would say that sometimes technology has caused some difficulties. It doesn't always work well, or sometimes just random issues come up. So that would be the biggest adjustment I've had to make, is learning to deal with technology when it decides to be difficult. Bill: You're right, and sometimes it's the clients who are struggling with the technology. Luckily, we have a pretty simple meeting system now. But when technology doesn't want to work that's always a struggle. I also miss the office environment. You don't get the same opportunities to just have a chat with coworkers or even have a quick brainstorming session.

Today, we have Bill Daly from Tennesee, to talk about how he started his online career. He is a Physical Therapist and is now working from home as a Utilization Reviewer. In this podcast with Bill Daly: 01:56 - Who is Bill? 03:05 - What does Bill do? 03:57 - How did Bill find out about this online career? 04:40 - What does Bill do as a Utilization Reviewer? 07:53 - What is the next level care Bill is talking about? 16:03 - Why is documentation really important? 18:00 - What are the benefits of working from home? 22:06 - Tips on getting a different career from Bill You can reach Bill Daly on the Alternative Careers Facebook Page Watch out for our Utilization Reviewer Webinar as we will interview him for 4 weeks and teach us how to start a career as a Utilization Reviewer. Get a 40% discount or $200 off at medbridgeeducation.com/tntherapyoutsource. Use the promo code DRMIKE or ALTERNATIVE. Check out our course here for Mastermind and Mentoring for Therapists. https://drmikechua.com/welcome-to-mmt-mastermind-and-mentoring-for-therapists/

Interview Transcript Hugh Ballou: Hey there, it's Hugh Ballou. We're back. This is a bonus session of The Nonprofit Exchange. We are recording a series of interviews about partnerships and collaborations. Recording some thought leaders in the place where SynerVision is located in Lynchburg, Virginia. It's central western Virginia, about halfway up in the commonwealth on the side almost in West Virginia. Bill Varner: Almost. Hugh: Almost. And my guest today is a new friend. I have only been here a year, and we met shortly after. People kept saying, “You need to meet Bill Varner.” Give us a little background, Bill, on who you are. You came from corporate America to run a nonprofit. Bill: I did. The last 30 years, I have spent in health services and hospital administration. The last 17 of those were with Centra as their vice president for strategic planning, marketing, business development, communications, and PR. All of that has been in new business development, evaluating communities and determining what their needs are and putting plans and processes in place to meet those needs. One thing that's interesting about the health system environment is while there is often one single plan for the organization, there are numerous subcomponents to the organization, too. You might have a focus on cardiovascular services, a focus on women's and children's services. There can be strategic plans at each of those levels as well, but they all have to work together toward one single ambition. I have the responsibility for that. I did that for the last 17 years at Centra, headquartered in Lynchburg, and covered all the geographies that organization covers. About a year and a half ago, the opportunity presented itself to run United Way. They were looking for a different skill mix for their incoming executive director, no longer just someone who was comfortable with raising funds, but someone who could say this is an organization that needs to adapt to the future and the current state. What type of skills and experience do we want in the role? Bottom line, they were looking for somebody with more of a strategic planning/vision-setting, tracking incomes type of person. That not only fit very well in my wheelhouse, but I was also very interested in doing something that actually put me a little bit closer to the people that benefited from the work we do. Centra is a great organization, but I am obviously not a physician or nurse or clinician. More and more in my life, I found that I really wanted to be closer to those who were having an impact in the community and to see who we serve. United Way is an ideal fit for me. Hugh: In my world of empowering organizations and leaders, the centrality of it is starting with your vision, mission, and strategy. Being a musical conductor, we have to have the chart in front of us so we know what we have to do. It's a really important foundation for any organization. Coming from corporate America into this philanthropic work for a for-purpose organization—we like to call them that because nonprofit is such a crazy word. When you and I first met, give me an idea. Let's talk about how many other organizations you support. Bill: We support 26 agencies, 38 programs in those agencies. We actually fund those programs. Several of our agencies have more than one program. 26 organizations, 38 programs. Hugh: What makes your work different than Community Foundation? Bill: Community Foundation and we overlap in some respects. Much of what the Greater Lynchburg Community Foundation does focuses on social needs and community needs. They have a broader focus in that they may have benefactors that have funded foundations within their structure who have a very dedicated focus outside social services. We are strictly focused on social services. But we recognize that because we have a shared purpose in the community, we talk. That's a monthly get-together we have. We have included the Centra Foundation. There may be others we want to include in that. We are all to some degree doing the same thing. Let's at least make sure we're coordinated. If we are asking agencies and other nonprofits to collaborate and coordinate, we need to hold ourselves to the same standard. So let's get together and talk. Not sure exactly what is going to come from it. We don't have a hard deadline as to when we will have certain deliverables, but we are starting to see that there will be opportunities for us to communicate and make sure we are all rowing in the same direction around certain needs in the community. I may be getting off your question a little bit, but that's why we recognized early on we needed a single direction. I started to talk about this idea of why don't we do a single community needs assessment? In the past, each nonprofit we support in various times in their planning cycle would do a needs assessment. They each didn't necessarily coordinate with one another. I thought if we could do one needs assessment for the community, not only would we save the time and effort of having everybody do it separately, but we could all participate in that one process, get input into it, and see the same results. We would then ideally be all rowing in the same direction. Here are the three or four biggest issues in the community. Let's make sure we exert most of our time, resources, and effort on those areas. We have the data and feedback to support those are priority areas. We are doing much more than if somebody comes and asks for a grant, we fund them. We're really looking strategically at if this is addressing a community need. Bill at the Community Foundation and I are trying to stay very coordinated in that effort. Hugh: At the heart of collaborations and partnerships, there is defining the need and defining the vision and your philosophy of how you will proceed. How has the work of part of the conversation has been with the city, with the arts center, and with a group called Unity in the Community who are purposefully pulling people together and having projects they can work on together. The theatre is opening up, and there is a whole program centered around the arts. Unity in the Community is centered around religious and service programs. You sit around that table. Thinking about partnerships and/or collaborations, they are slightly different, you can collaborate without being in a partnership, how has your work specifically and your work through United Way created a catalyst or been a facilitator of those things? Bill: Let me answer that by going one step back. I think it's important to understand a place like Lynchburg in central Virginia. One thing I have noticed here, and I have been here 17 years, and I have been in positions myself where we needed help for health issues or other things. This is a community that steps up. This community does not sit around. You just gave an example of your request for people to participate in a choir, and 100 people are there. You don't know if they're all singers, but there is a lot of interest. This is a community when it sees a need, it does not hesitate to rally a group together and try to address that need. Now there is good and bad with that. The good is that you have people who are there who are ready to go, symbolically speaking, they are not thinking all the same. What you also get is multiple efforts that may be duplicated with an existing effort or somehow are running counter to an existing effort. But at the very least, you have multiple organizations who have not yet communicated with one another, who may not even know the other exists. Now you have two different organizational structures. You may have two actual nonprofits who are registered, who have to create a board and have an executive director. They each go into their own direction and suddenly you have fragmentation. I will say a lot of what makes this a unique and wonderful community to live, that good heart that is willing to step up and engage, the unintended consequence of that is there is often too many people who have not yet coordinated. We are replete with organizations who are fragmented and could benefit from coordinating. We have identified that as an issue in our strategic plan. We feel like we have a role in being a catalyst to bring those organizations together. One, because we work with multiple organizations, we may be the first place to see that you are doing the same thing as this organization is doing. Why don't we get you together and talk? Our funding could go a lot further if we could support a consolidated and coordinated effort than it would if we were trying to support two separate organizations. By those way, those two organizations, and in some cases it is six, seven, eight organizations who overlap, are each out in the community asking for funding. My experience with donors is by the third time a person comes and asks for money for the same need, they suddenly realize this isn't coordinated. I won't give my money to this. I think there is a benefit that can come to those who do coordinate in that the ability to “sell themselves” to a donor and to sell their potential impact to a donor is greatly heightened. We are in a unique spot to see maybe for the first time where there are points of fragmentation. It's not always just a duplication or a fragmentation. There are some cases where the work of one organization could feed the work of another organization. Two places should be working together because they are taking care of people at different points in their life. Make sure they are doing a hand-off from one organization to the next. We feel like because we are in that unique spot that sees a lot of this, and we are in the position to be able to fund, and we track outcomes, that is an important role for us. Not just as a fundraiser to give money to those organizations, but to help those organizations operate more efficiently between one another. We are also doing some things to help them operate more efficiently within each organization. Hugh: That's promising. Bill: We are in the very early stages of that. I don't want to oversell accomplishments on that. We are starting to recognize where those overlaps are and are trying to bring groups together and see some of the challenges in that. It's tough for groups, at the end of the day, if you are going to coordinate and collaborate, what you are also going to do is compromise. It means that if I am going to coordinate with another organization, I have to go in with the spirit of compromise, and I have to go in it saying there is a purpose we are coming together for that supersedes my personal self-interest in this. It may in fact require me to give something away for the greater good of the community. I think as long as we are willing to do that and take self-interest and self-preservation out of the equation, I think we will do good things. As long as self-interest, self-preservation, egos, turfism stay in the discussion, it will be hard to move the needle. But I think the purpose of focusing on the community is a much more noble cause than the purpose of focusing on organization and organizational growth. We just need to be all prepared and recognize we will have to compromise. Hugh: I remember reading a story about one of the larger foundations in southern California in the LA area telling their organizations they funded. They pulled them all together and said, “We are not going to fund you anymore unless you work on collaborative efforts. We're leaving the room. You come back to us with a collaboration, and then we will revisit the conversation.” There was a funder stepping up and setting a boundary. We are not duplicating funding anymore. Part of what came to my mind as you were describing that situation was that we create an unintended consequence of leadership: a competitive situation. We have a need, so we will service that need. There is too much of when we didn't adequately do our research about what was available. In business, we look at our competition. What is our unique value proposition? Is it being served? A lot of people come to me when they want to start a nonprofit. I say why don't you work under another one as a project? Do it for a year, and see if there is really a need for this. Then you don't have to go through all that paperwork. Bill: That's music to my ears. That's exactly what we are asking organizations to do. Before you start a nonprofit, pump the brakes. Let's take a look and see if there is somebody else out there not necessarily doing the same thing, but addressing the same need. If there is, talk to them first. It's much more exciting to get your own organization started and create your own logo and website. That stuff is sexy and exciting, and people get caught up in that. You need to let that go. If my real purpose is to serve the community, not just create an organization, let me find out if there is a moving train I can hop onto now, somebody else who is already doing this. In fact, we had an example of that this last year. An organization came to us and wanted to start a new nonprofit. We think you are more appropriately aligned with an existing organization. Long story short, they are now a program under that organization. At least for now, that makes the most sense for them. Now they don't have to go find a separate board. They have not created costly infrastructure. They will share the overheads of the other organization. If anything, that helps spread that organization's overhead out, so that's a win-win. We'll say we have stopped short. We do recognize that as a funder, we have some leverage to say we will withhold some funding until you collaborate. We have stopped short of saying we will not fund you. In our view, that is punishing the wrong person. We're not punishing the organization; we are punishing the people who benefit from that organization. I'm not going to tell for example if there are two backpack programs in the community that provide food to kids on Friday and they are not collaborating, I am not going to say I am cutting your funding until you collaborate because I am not hurting those organizations, I am taking food out of the mouths of the kids on Friday. While it feels like an important knob to turn, to me, it's being a little reckless with money as a motivator. It's not targeted enough to actually motivate the right people. It just hurts the community. But we have said our funding is going to put strong preference on those organizations that collaborate. Hugh: That's true of a lot of private foundations that do fund nonprofit projects. They look favorably at collaborations and partnerships. Going into ways- I want to talk about two things. Going into these joint venture things, what are the deficits? People don't think about writing agreements for certain things. I want to talk about that. And then what are the resources that you and your organization bring to foster those conversations? Bill: It's interesting. I will talk a little bit out of both sides of my mouth. One, I will say I think those organizations who come together to collaborate should not set too high of an expectation early on. I think it's okay to say, “Let's get in a room and talk and see where things go.” If we put a lofty expectation in there meeting one, we may scare each other off, and we may not really know what we're trying to do yet. Don't set super high expectations right out of the gate. Don't be too rigid with saying we have to have an outcome by December. However, at some point, you have to switch the conversation from the stream of consciousness rambling, which some of these can be, which can be ultimately beneficial. At some point, you have to get people on a map. We have talked now for a few meetings; what are some of the things we think we share? Hugh: It's kind of like dating, isn't it? I didn't ask my wife to marry me on the first date. Did some relationship- Bill: That might have been a little presumptuous. Hugh: A little. Bill: It's very much like that. Once you know a little bit more about each other, you can say is there something more here? Is there a common purpose that we share? Is there a common goal that we should work on? If so, let's articulate that as clearly as possible. Maybe that's just one goal. If so, we make part of our work to focus on that goal, and let's keep having this open conversation about other areas you might benefit from or other people you want to bring to the table. But I think ultimately, if work is to get done and accomplishments are to be made and we are going to have positive, sustainable impact on the community, you have to get a plan together. You have to have the basic rudiments that a lot of people think are NBA 101, so people don't do them. They think they have to hold this in their head. You have to have a vision statement that is meaningful, clear, concise, and not have vague language, not be marketing fluff. You need to have a meaningful vision statement. Then you have to talk about the strategy that will get you there. That strategy has to be goals, objectives, tactics, 90-day plans, 30-day plans, who is accountable for it, when is it going to be done, and how do we measure whether or not it was done. If you have that line of sight between that vision and what you need to have done Monday morning, that is a recipe for doing good things. I do think those early collaborative efforts need to be loose on the front end, but gradually get more focused as topics bubble out of those areas. I am in several of those meetings right now. A couple of them, we are in those early stages where we are just talking. We leave the room. The type A in you leaves the room says, “We did a lot of talking, but I don't know what we accomplished.” The more patient side of you should say, “We have done a lot of talking, but we have not talked before. That's good. That's progress. No real hard outcome just yet, but we will get there. Maybe the next meeting or the meeting after that, we will plant a stake in the ground and say that we all want to do this. We all focus on food, clothing, and shelter. Let's pin that up on the wall and say what can we do differently together to do this?” That can be scary to organizations because that does ultimately mean you are going to somebody in the room, probably everybody in the room will have to compromise a bit. You just need to know that going in. If you are going in saying, “I am not doing anything that is going to take something away from me or that causes me to lose influence or control over a certain area of my life,” if you go in there with that attitude, you might as well not be in the room. You have to go in saying, “This is not about me. This is about the community.” If there are points along the road here where I may be doing something that affects something we are measuring at United Way, maybe I need to let it go. If it's better for the community, if what I lose is more than made up for by what the community gains, I should let it go. I will give you a good example. We run a backpack program right now. We fund several backpack programs, but we run a couple different schools out of the United Way. We get revenue for that. That revenue is included in our total pledges that we report at the end of the year. Ultimately, all those backpack programs need to coordinate and consolidate a little bit better. That probably will mean our backpack program could move to a more centralized program somewhere that might be able to do it more efficiently and effectively than us. If I move that backpack program out, that is probably the right thing to do to get it in a more efficient program. But I have also taken X thousands of dollars worth of revenue that had been associated with that program outside of my organization. Somebody looking at our dollars might say you just went from $100 to $75. You're losing ground. Not really. I know where that program went. I know it's doing better where it is now. It made more sense for it to be operated there. If I am collecting $25 less than I used to collect, that's okay. That's not a failure. In fact, that's evidence we collaborated on something. If my only interest is in growing our revenue, I would never do that. That's why you have to let that interest go. There is room for all of us. At some point, organizations may need to consolidate and think about shared purposes. Right now, we are in the earlier coordination and cooperation stage. Hugh: One of the things I am clearly hearing is that you're a catalyst for people to think differently. Bill: We are trying to be, and trying to facilitate conversations like that. and help them see that we are doing this, too. We are not some expert coming in and saying that we want you to do this and it's going to be hard on you and easy for us. We are holding ourselves to that same standard. We can be the voice of experience and say, “Here is what we had to learn about ourselves and our behavior in order to do this effectively.” We want to share our experience with you and see if you could see there is a different way to think about things that might be more advantageous for the community. Hugh: You're the champion of fostering new thinking, but you're also bringing some skills, history, tools, and leadership to this. You re bringing business expertise into tax-exempt business models, which a lot of nonprofits don't think of themselves that way. We have to generate revenue. Otherwise, we will go under. The unintended consequences are people want to go too fast, so you are encouraging people to take a deep breath. Bill: Before starting a new organization out of the ground. Hugh: Or even two organizations- we spoke of one before we went live, which we won't talk about here. We have two coming together who have had some history who had not talked about the philosophies and processes and values moving forward. They got to get to work. There is a self-imposed urgency sometimes. Are we in the long haul compromising our work by going too fast? Bill: Absolutely. Hugh: There is something we could do now. Part of what United Way brings to the table in the community, you are not only working in Lynchburg, Virginia, but you are working in central Virginia. Bill: Amherst, Bedford, Campbell, and Lynchburg. Hugh: That's pretty much the footprint of the greater area. Bill: That is, yep. Hugh: With the impact having more than just funding the programs. You're a funding agency; however, you're fostering this creative thinking about how to work together and how to go to the top a step at a time. Bill: We're doing that not only around collaborative efforts, but we are also trying to establish a program that we are casually referring to now as beyond funding. Many people know us as a organization that does work to improve the community through fundraising that supports nonprofits. In the course of visiting all these nonprofits over the past year and getting familiar with how they operate, it's become clear to me, and I'm sure you feel the same way, that they don't have the marketing department and a finance department and a social media department and an HR department. In many cases, they have an executive director who might be a volunteer, certainly I daresay most are overworked and underpaid. They are in it because their heart is in it and they want to do the right thing. Our money we give them each year is important. They have ample needs beyond that. We survey our membership at the end of last year and asked, “Other than the money, what else could we be helping you with?” About 20 things that we thought they might answer to give them some prompts. We left it open-ended, too. We heard a lot of things. Most said we need help with grant writing, marketing, social media. Many said we need help with board development and board selection or coaching or performance reviews or my building. Our organization can help with some of those things directly. We have someone who writes grants. My background is strategic planning and business development, communications. Aside from our having to fulfill every one of those needs, what we want to do is serve as a broker between those organizations who have their needs and people in the community who can help you address those needs. Right now, one of our agencies who we had a meeting with last week, they need help with their finances. We connected them with somebody from a local employer who says they think they can help them out. We're in the middle. We brokered the relationship. We will stay in touch with it and see if this organization can improve its financial situation. There are several who want grant writing help; we can probably provide that directly for them. We are trying to break the mold of us just being an annual check-writer. You all need help in various areas. Don't be shy asking for help. Tell us, and we will work to get through it. Hugh: That's great. That's a great model. People who are listening and reading the article are looking for ideas. How do we up our game? This will live on in its form as a podcast. As we do a wrap here, parts of this article are some of the other entities in the city, in the arts community and the church community. How do you interface with any of those in your work? Do you? Bill: In some cases, we are taking a sit back and wait and see posture. In many cases, we are directly at the table. Some of these efforts have just gotten started. We have United Way, Centra Foundation, Greater Lynchburg Community Foundation, and that is one group. We have another group that Nat Marshall has pulled together that is us, Salvation Army, Goodwill, Interfaith Outreach, and a couple others. We are in those very early stages of just talking. Poverty to Progress has its combined effort with Bridges out of Poverty. We are in some of the sub-committees of that. We are not sure exactly what our bigger role in that could be, but we probably need to spend some time with the leaders in that effort, Treney and Hugh, to understand what is a better place for us to plug in. Is there some place we can be more effective in that? Given that is one of our big focus areas—we focus on health, education, income, and basic human needs—under income, poverty is one of the biggest issues that we could possibly talk about addressing. We have things that we're doing right now that are not yet looped into the Poverty to Progress initiative. We have more to do to build lines of communication there. Again, that is another one we are sitting back and waiting to see where is the best place for us to plug in. It's broken down into eight or nine groups now. We think we need to try to figure out how to take these lofty conversations and turn those into actionable plans. That is where that effort is now and we may have a role there. Hugh: It's a shame there's only one door. You have covered a lot of turf. Bill: You're the only person who has said that. Hugh: I'm getting tired thinking about it. There are a lot of sub-conversations in there. As we close this out, what thoughts would you share with other leaders who want to move into a partnership or collaborative relationship with their community? What thoughts would you have for them to go forward with? Bill: I'll take a step back on that question, too. One thing I learned early on when I got into this role, and a certain experience in my life from my past made this role very compelling to me, made me be in a position to help people. As I have met executive directors in all the organizations that we support and other organizations, they tend to have a story. They have some reason they are in that type of work. Nobody gets into nonprofit work because of the glory, fame, and riches; you get into it because you care about it. That to me makes this an incredibly exciting sector to work in. The people that you work with are invigorated because they genuinely care. When you get caught up in operating an organization, you can turn down the light on that part of your brain and your heart and get obsessed with what you have to do today. My thought is when you go into a collaborative effort, remember what brought you there. What brought you there is you wanted to help people, not that you wanted to build an organization. If you can keep the light shining on that, the collaboration falls naturally behind. You have to be willing to let some personal interest go so that the benefit accrues to the community, not necessarily to you or your organization. Hugh: Bill Varner, visionary leader for United Way in central Virginia. Thank you for sharing your wisdom today. Bill: Thank you for your time. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Adam Zickerman and Mike Rogers interview author, weight lifter, and personal trainer Bill DeSimone.  Bill penned the book Congruent Exercise: How To Make Weight Training Easier On Your Joints  Bill is well known for his approach to weight lifting which, focuses on correct biomechanics to build strength without undue collateral damage to connective tissue and the rest of the body.So, whether you are an aspiring trainer, serious weight lifter, or even an Inform Fitness client who invests just 20-30 minutes a week at one of their seven locations this episode is chock full of valuable information regarding safety in your high-intensity strength training.  A paramount platform of which the Power of Ten resides at all InForm Fitness locations across the country.To find an Inform Fitness location nearest you visit www.InformFitness.comIf you'd like to ask Adam, Mike or Sheila a question or have a comment regarding the Power of 10. Send us an email or record a voice memo on your phone and send it to podcast@informfitness.com. Join Inform Nation and call the show with a comment or question.  The number is 888-983-5020, Ext. 3. To purchase Adam Zickerman's book, Power of 10: The Once-a-Week Slow Motion Fitness Revolution click this link to visit Amazon:http://bit.ly/ThePowerofTenTo purchase Bill DeSimone's book Congruent Exercise: How To Make Weight Training Easier On Your Joints click this link to visit Amazon:http://bit.ly/CongruentExerciseIf you would like to produce a podcast of your own just like The Inform Fitness Podcast, please email Tim Edwards at tim@InBoundPodcasting.comBelow is the transcription for Episode 20 - Author Bill DeSimone - Congruent Exercise20 Author Bill DeSimone - Congruent ExerciseAdam: So there's not a day that goes by that I don't think by the way that I don't think of something Bill has said to me when I'm training people. Bill is basically my reference guide, he's my Grey's Anatomy. When I try an exercise with somebody, I often find myself asking myself, what would Bill do and I take it from there. Without further ado, this is Bill, and we're going to talk about all good stuff. Joint friendly exercises, what Bill calls it now, you started out with congruent exercises, technical manual for joint friendly exercise, and now you're rephrasing it.Bill: Well actually the first thing I did was [Inaudible: 00:00:43] exercise, but the thing is I didn't write [Inaudible: 00:00:45] exercise with the idea that anybody other than me was going to read it. I was just getting my own ideas down, taking my own notes, and just to flesh it out and tie it up in a nice package, I actually wrote it and had it bound it up and sent it off to Greg Anderson and McGuff and a couple others, and it hit a wave of interest.Adam: A wave, they were probably blown away.Bill: Yeah well, a lot of those guys went out of their way to call me to say boy, a lot of what I suspected, you explained here. But when I read it now, it's pretty technical, it's a challenge.Mike: There's a lot of, I think, common sense with an experienced trainer when you think about levers in general, and I think what you did in that manual was make it very succinct and very clear. I think it's something that maybe we didn't have the full story on, but I think we had some — if you have some experience and you care about safety as a trainer, I think you are kind of looking at it and you saw it observationally, and then I think when we read this we were like ah, finally, this has crystalized what I think some of us were thinking.Adam: Exactly. You know what I just realized, let's explain, first and foremost. You wrote something called Moment Arm Exercise, so the name itself shows you have technical — that it probably is inside, right? So moment arm is a very technical term, a very specific term in physics, but now you're calling it joint friendly exercise, and you called it also congruent exercise at one point. All synonymous with each other, so please explain, what is joint friendly exercise or fitness?Bill: It's based more on anatomy and biomechanics than sports performance. So unlike a lot of the fitness fads that the attitude and the verbiage comes out of say football practice or a competitive sport, what I'm doing is I'm filtering all my exercise instruction through the anatomy and biomechanics books, to try to avoid the vulnerable — putting your joints in vulnerable positions, and that's so complicated which is why I struggled with so much to make it clearer. So I started with moment arm exercise, and then I wrote Congruent Exercise, which is a little broader but obviously the title still requires some explanation. And then — how it happened, as for my personal training in the studio, I would use all this stuff but I wouldn't explain it because I was only dealing with clients, I wasn't dealing with peers. Since it's a private studio and not a big gym, I don't have to explain the difference between what I'm doing and what somebody else is doing, but in effect, I've been doing this every day for fifteen years.Adam: I have to say, when you say that, that you didn't explain it to clients, I actually use this information as a selling point. I actually explain to my clients why we're doing it this way, as opposed to the conventional way, because this is joint friendly. I don't get too technical necessarily, but I let them know that there is a difference of why we're doing it this way, versus the conventional way. So they understand that we are actually a cut above everybody else in how we apply exercise, so they feel very secure in the fact that they're doing what they're supposed to be doing, but I digress.Bill: Generally what I do is any signage I have, a business card, website, Facebook presence, all lays out joint friendly and defines it and kind of explains itself. I would say most of the clients I have aren't coming from being heavily engaged in another form of fitness. They're people who start and drop out programs or they join a health club in January and drop out. It's not like I'm getting somebody who is really intensely into Crossfit, or intensely into Zumba or bodybuilding, and now they're banged up and need to do something different. The joint friendly phrasing is what connects me with people that need that, I just find that they don't need the technical explanation as to why we're not over stretching the joint capsule in the shoulder. Why we're not getting that extra range of motion on the bench press, because again, they haven't seen anybody doing otherwise, so I don't have to explain why I'm doing it this way.Adam: Yeah but they might have had experience doing it themselves. Let's take an overhead press for example, having your arms externally rotating and abducted, versus having them in front of you. There's an easy explanation to a client why we won't do one versus the other.Bill: But I have to say I do not get people who do not even know what a behind the neck press is. Now in Manhattan is a little bit different, more denser.Adam: So for this conversation, let's assume some people know, or understand in a way what the conventional is, but we can kind of get into it. What is conventional and what's not conventional. So it's joint friendly, how is it joint friendly, what are you actually doing to make it joint friendly?Bill: Well the short answer is that I use a lot less range of motion than we've got accustomed to, when we used to use an extreme range of motion. If bodybuilders in the 60s were doing pumping motions, and then you wanted to expand that range of motion, for good reason, and then that gets bastardized and we take more of a range of motion and turn it into an extreme range of motion — just because going from partial motions to a normal range of motion was good, doesn't make a normal range of motion to an extreme range of motion better. And in fact —Adam: What's wrong with extreme range of motion?Bill: Well because —Adam: Don't say that you want to improve flexibility.Bill: Well the HIIT guys who would say that you're going to improve flexibility by using —Adam: HIIT guys means the high intensity training sect of our business.Bill: So the line about, you're going to use the extreme range of motion with a weight training exercise to increase flexibility. First of all, either flexibility is important or it's not, and that's one of those things where HIIT has a little bit of an inconsistency, and they'll argue that it's not important, but then they'll say that you can get it with the weights. That's number one. Number two, a lot of the joint positions that machines and free weight exercises put us in, or can put us in, are very vulnerable to the joints, and if you go to an anatomy and biomechanics textbook, that is painfully obvious what those vulnerable positions are. Just because we walk into a gym or a studio and call it exercise instead of manual labor or instead of — instead of calling it submission wrestling and putting our joints or opponents' joints in an externally rotated abduct and extended position, we call it a pec fly, it's still the same shoulder. It's still a vulnerable position whether it's a pec fly stretching you back there, or a jiujitsu guy putting you in a paintbrush, but I don't know, for most of the pop fitness books though, if anybody else is really looking at this. Maybe not in pop fitness, maybe Tom Pervis —Adam: What's pop fitness?Bill: If you walk into a bookstore and look in the fitness section for instance, any of those types. No offense, but celebrity books, glossy celebrity fitness books, but I don't know that anybody — and the feedback that I've gotten from experienced guys like [Inaudible: 00:08:26] or the guys we know personally, is — even McGuff said yeah, I never associated the joint stuff with the exercise stuff.Adam: Let's talk about these vulnerabilities that you're talking about and extreme ranges of motion. So we have to understand a little bit about muscle anatomy to understand what we mean by the dangers of these extreme ranges of motion. So muscles are weaker in certain positions and they're stronger in other positions. Maybe talk about that, because that's where you start getting into why we do what we do, like understanding that muscles don't generate the same amount of force through a range of motion. They have different torque potentials.Mike: And is there a very clear and concise way of communicating that to a lay person too, like we have practice at it, but in here, we're over the radio or over the podcast, so it's like describing pictures with words.Bill: The easiest way to show it to a client who may not understand what muscle torque is, is to have them lock out in an exercise. Take a safe exercise, the barbell curl, where clearly if you allow your elbows to come forward and be vertically under the weight, at the top of the repetition, clearly all of a sudden the effort's gone. There's no resistance, but if you let your elbows drop back to rib height, if you pin your elbows to the sides through the whole curl, now all of a sudden your effort feels even. Instead of feeling like — instead of having effort and then a lockout, or having a sticky point and then a lockout, now it just feels like effort.Adam: Or a chest press where your elbows are straight and the weights are sitting on those elbows, you're not really working too hard there either.Bill: Same thing. If you have a lockout — what's easy to demonstrate is when the resistance torque that the machine or exercise provides doesn't match your muscle torque. So if your muscle torque pattern changes in the course of a movement, if you feel a lockout or a sticking point, then it's not a line. If all you feel is effort, now it matches pretty evenly. Now here's the thing, all that really means, and part of what I got away for a moment on — all that really means is that that set is going to be very efficient. Like for instance, the whole length of the reputation you're working. It's not like you work and lockout and rest, all that means is that it's going to be a very efficient set. You can't change a muscle torque curve, so if you were just to do some kind of weird angled exercise, you wouldn't get stronger in that angle. All you would do is use a relatively lower weight. Nobody does like a scott bench curl, nobody curls more than a standing curl. You can't change the muscle torque curve, you might change the angle, which means the amount of weight that your hand has change, to accommodate the different torque at that joint angle, but you're not changing where you're strongest. If you could, you would never know you had a bad [Inaudible: 00:11:36], because if the pattern — if the muscle torque pattern could change with a good [Inaudible: 00:11:44], it would also change with a bad [Inaudible: 00:11:47], and then you would never know. Take a dumbbell side raise, everybody on the planet knows it's hardest when your arms are horizontal. Your muscle torque curve can never change to accommodate what the resistance is asking. Now if you go from a machine side raise, which has more even — like where those two curves match, that set feels harder because you don't have to break. You do a set of side raises with dumbbells to failure, if it feels — if it's a difficulty level of ten, of force out of ten, and then you go to a machine side raise and go to failure, it's like a ten, because you didn't have that break built into the actual rep. So the moment arms, knowing how to match the resistance required by the exercise and the muscle torque expressed by your limbs, that makes for a more efficient exercise. In terms of safety, it's all about knowing what the vulnerable positions of the joints are and cutting the exercise short, so that you're not loading the joint into an impingement, or into like an overstretched position.Mike: How different are these…. like thinking about limitation and range of motion on them, we mentioned that before and I think it's kind of adjacent to what you're talking about is — we also want to help people understand that if they're on their own exercising or there are other trainers who want to help their clients, and for our trainers to help our clients… troubleshooting, we know generally how the joints work, where the strength curves exist, but how to discern where those limitations are. Like you said before, that one of the things you do is you limit range of motion and get much more stimulus and muscle.Bill: I'm saying limit range of motion because that might be the verbiage that we understand and maybe listeners would understand, but it's really a lot more complicated than just saying, use this range of motion. So for instance, in a lower back exercise, say a stiff leg or dead lift, which, when I used to misinterpret that by using a full range of motion, I'd be standing on a bench with a barbell, and the barbell would be at shoe level. My knees would be locked, my lower back would be rounded, my shoulders would be up my ears as I'm trying to get the bar off the ground, and so yes, I was using a full range of motion.Adam: That's for sure.Mike: That can be painted for that description.Bill: It's also pretty much a disaster on your lower back waiting to happen, at least on your lower back.Adam: I've got to go to a chiropractor just listening to that.Bill: Exactly, but you still see it all the time. You see it all the time on people using kettle bells, you see that exact posture. The kettle bell is between their legs, their knees are locked, their lower back is rounded, and now they're doing a speed lift. At least I was doing them slow, they're doing speed dead lifts, so if I was going to do an exercise like that, it wouldn't be an extreme range of motion, I'd be looking to use a correct range of motion. So for instance, I wouldn't lock the knees, and I would only lower the person's torso so that they could keep the curve in the lower back. Which might require a rep or two to see where that is, but once you see where that is, that's what I would limit them to.Mike: Do you do it at first with no weight with the client?Bill: That'd be one way of lining it up.Mike: Just sort of seeing what they can just do, make sure they understand the position and stuff.Bill: So for instance, the chest press machine I have in the studio is a Nitro —Adam: [Inaudible: 00:15:37] Nitro.Bill: And it doesn't — the seat doesn't adjust enough for my preference, so the person's elbows come too far back. So for instance, to get the first rep off the ground, the person's elbows have to come way behind the plane of their back, which —Adam: So you've come to weigh stack themBill: Weigh stack, right.Mike: It's like our pull over, you know how we had to pull it over at one point?Bill: So what I'll do is I'll help the person out of the first repetition, help them out of the bottom, and then I'll have my hand to the clipboard where I want their elbow to stop. So as soon as they touch my hand with their elbow, they start to go the other way.Adam: So they're not stretching their pecs too far.Bill: Well more specifically, they're not rotating their shoulder capsule. So that's another thing we tend to do, we tend to think of everything in terms of the big, superficial muscles — right, those are the ones that don't get hurt, it's the joints that [do]. That was one thing of all the stuff I read, whether it was CSCS or Darton's stuff or Jones' stuff, there was always a little murkiness between what was the joint and what was the muscle. That stuff was always written from the point of view of the muscle.Adam: What's a joint capsule, for those that don't know what a joint capsule is. A shoulder capsule.Bill: It's part of the structure of what holds your shoulder together, and so if the old [Inaudible: 00:17:06] machines, 1980 vintage, that bragged about getting such an extreme range of motion, some of them… it really took your shoulder to the limit of where it could go to start the exercise, and we were encouraged to go that far.Adam: And what would happen?Bill: Eventually it just adds to the wear and tear that you were going to have in your shoulder anyway. And that's if people stayed with it, I think a lot of people ended up dropping out.Mike: Often times exacerbating what was going on.Bill: You rarely see, it's occasional that we have that sort of catastrophic event in the gym, it's occasional —Mike: Almost never happens.Bill: A lot of the grief that I take for my material is well, that never happens, people do this exercise all the time, people never explode their spine. Well a) that's not true, they do, just not in that persons' awareness, and b) but the real problem is unnecessarily adding to life's wear and tear on your joints. So it's not just what we do in the gym that counts, if somebody plays tennis or somebody has a desk job or manual labor job — let's say a plumber or some other manual labor guy has to go over his head with his arms a lot, that wear and tear on his shoulder counts, and just because they walk into your gym, and you ask them about their health history, do you have any orthopedic problems and they say no, yes. I'm on the verge of an orthopedic problem that I don't know about, and I've worn this joint out because of work, but no I have no orthopedic problems at the moment. So my thing is, the exercise I'm prescribing isn't going to make that worse.Adam: Well you don't want to make it worse, and that's why you're limiting range of motion, that's why you're matching the strength curve of the muscle with the resistance curve of the tool you're using, whether it's free weight or machine or the cam.Bill: Yeah, we're supposed to be doing this for the benefits of exercise. I do not — I truly do not understand crippling yourself over the magical benefit of exercise. I mean there's no — in 2014, there was a lot of negative publicity with Crossfit, with some of the really catastrophic injuries coming about. There's no magic benefits just because you risk your life, you either benefit from exercise or you don't, but you don't get extra magic benefit because you pushed something to the brink of cracking your spine or tearing your shoulder apart.Adam: Well they talk about them being functional or natural movements, that they do encourage these full ranges of motion because that's what you do in life.Bill: Where? Mike: Well I mean like in sports for example, you're extending your body into a range of motion — and also there are things in life, like for example, like I was saying to Adam, for example, sometimes you have to lift something that's heavy and you have to reach over a boundary in front of you to do so.Bill: Like… putting in the trunk of a car, for example.Mike: Things like that, or even —Adam: So shouldn't you exercise that way if that's what you're doing in every day life?Mike: If your daily life does involve occasional extreme ranges of motion, which that's the reason why your joints of kind of wearing and tearing anyway, is there something you can do to assist in training that without hurting it? Or exacerbating it?Bill: You know it's interesting, 25 years ago, there was a movement in physical therapy and they would have back schools, and they would — it was sort of like an occupational oriented thing, where they would teach you how to lift, and at the time, I thought that was so frivolous. I just thought, get stronger, but lifting it right in the first place is really the first step to not getting injured. Mike: Don't life that into the trunk unless —Bill: Well unless you have to, right? For instance, practicing bad movements doesn't make you invulnerable to the bad movements, you're just wearing out your free passes. Now sport is a different animal, yes you're going to be — again, I don't think anyone is doing this, but there's enough wear and tear just in your sport, whether it's football, martial arts, running, why add more wear and tear from your workout that's there to support the sport. The original [Inaudible: 00:21:52] marketing pitch was look how efficient we made weight training, you can spend more time practicing. You don't have to spend four hours a day in the gym, you can spend a half hour twice a week or three times a week in the gym, and get back to practicing.Adam: I remember Greg [Inaudible: 22:06] said to a basketball coach that if his team is in his gym more than 20 minutes or so a week, that he's turning them into weight lifters and not basketball players.Bill: Well there you go. Now —Mike: The thing is the training and the performance goals in getting people stronger, faster, all that kind of stuff, is like unbelievable now a days, but I've never seen more injuries in sports in my entire life than right now.Bill: It's unbelievably bogus though is what it is. You see a lot of pec tears in NFL training rooms. Adam: So why aren't they learning? Why is it so hard to get across then?Bill: Well for starters, you're going to churn out — first of all you're dealing with twenty year olds. Adam: So what, what are you saying about twenty year olds?Bill: I was a lot more invincible at twenty than I am at sixty.Mike: Physically and psychologically.Bill: The other thing for instance. Let's say you've got a college level, this is not my experience, I'm repeating this, but if you have a weight room that's empty, or, and you're the strength and conditioning coach, because you're intensely working people out, briefly, every day. Versus the time they're idle, they're off doing their own thing. Or, every day the administrators and the coaches see people running hoops and doing drills, running parachutes and every day there is an activity going. What looks better? What is more job security for that strength and conditioning coach? Adam: Wait a second. What is Jim the strength training coach doing? He's working one day a week and what's he doing the rest of the week?Mike: And what's the team doing the rest of the week?Bill: But again, don't forget, if you're talking about twenty something year old athletes, who knows what that's going to bring on later.Adam: You are seeing more injuries though.Bill: Right. A couple of years ago, ESPN had a story on a guy. He had gotten injured doing a barbell step up, so a barbell step up, you put a barbell on your back, you step onto a bench, bring the other foot up. Step back off the bench, four repetitions. Classic sports conditioning exercise, in this guys case either he stepped back and twisted his ankle and fell with the bar on his back, or when he went to turn to put the bar back on the rack, when he turned, it spun on him and he damaged his back that way. Either way, he put his ability to walk at risk, so the ESPN story was, oh look how great that is he's back to playing. Yes, but he put his ability to walk at risk, to do an exercise that is really not significantly — it's more dangerous than other ways of working your legs, but it's not better.Adam: The coaches here, the physical trainers, they don't have evidence that doing step ups is any more effective in the performance of their sport, or even just pure strength gains. Then lets say doing a safe version of a leg press or even squats for that matter.Bill: And even if you wanted to go for a more endurance thing, running stadium steps was a classic exercise, but stadium steps are what, three or four inches, they made them very flat. Even that's safer because there's no bar on your back. So on the barbell step up, which I think is still currently in the NSCA textbooks, the bar is on your back. If the bench is too high, you have to bend over in order to get your center of gravity over the bench, otherwise you can't get off the floor. So now you're bent over with one foot in front of you, so now you don't even have two feet under you like in a barbell squat to be more stable. You have your feet in line, with the weight extending sideways, and now you do your twenty repetitions or whatever and you're on top of the bench, and your legs are burning and you're breathing heavy, and now you've got to get off. How do you get off that bench when your legs are gassed, you're going to break and lock your knee, and the floor is going to come up — nobody steps forward, they all step backwards where you can't see. Mike: Even after doing an exercise, let's say you did it okay or whatever and whether it was congruent or not congruent, sometimes, if it's a free weight type of thing, just getting the weight back on the floor or on the rack. After you've gone to muscle failure or close to muscle failure —Adam: So are these things common now, like still in the NFL they're doing these types of training techniques? Bill: I don't really know what's happening in the NFL or the college level, because frankly I stopped my NSCA membership because I couldn't use any material with my population anyway. So I don't really know what they are — I do know that that was a classic one, and as recently as 2014 — in fact one other athlete actually did lose his ability to walk getting injured in that exercise. Adam: It's cost benefit, like how much more benefit are you getting —Bill: It's cost. My point is that the benefit is — it's either or.Mike: That's the thing, people don't know it though, they think the benefit is there. That's the problem.Bill: They think that for double the risk, you're going to get quadruple the benefit. What, what benefit? What magic benefit comes out of putting your ability to walk at risk?Mike: One of my clients has a daughter who was recruited to row at Lehigh which is a really good school for that, and she, in the training program, she was recruited to go. She was a great student but she was recruited to row, and in the training program, she hurt her back in the weight room in the fall, and never, ever was with the team. This was a very, very good program — Bill: Very good program, so it's rowing, so a) it's rough on your lower back period, and b) I'm completely guessing here, but at one time they used to have their athletes doing [Inaudible: 00:28:22] and other things —Adam: Explain what a clean is —Bill: Barbells on the floor and you either pull it straight up and squat under the bar, which would be like an olympic clean, or you're a little more upright and you just sort of drag the bar up to your collarbones, and get your elbows underneath it. Either way it's hard on the back, but at one time, rowing conditioning featured a lot of exercises like that to get their back stronger, that they're already wearing out in the boat. They didn't ask me, but if I was coaching them, I would not train their lower backs in the off season. I would let the rowing take care of that, I would train everything around their back, and give their back a break, but they didn't ask.Adam: I don't know why they didn't ask you, didn't they know that you're a congruent exerciser?Bill: You've got to go to a receptive audience.Mike: I think because there are things we do in our lives that are outside, occasionally outside our range of motion or outside — that are just incongruent or not joint friendly, whether it's in sports or not. The thing is, I'm wondering are there exercises that go like — say for example you have to go — your sport asks for range of motion from one to ten, and you need to be prepared to do that, if you want to do that, the person desires to do that. Are there exercises where you go — can you be more prepared for that movement if you are doing it with a load or just a body weight load, whatever, up to say level four. Are there situations where it's okay to do that, where you're going a slight increase into that range where it's not comprising joint safety, and it's getting you a little bit more prepared to handle something that is going on.Adam: So for example, for a golf swing, when you do a golf swing, you're targeting the back probably more than you should in a safe range of motion in an exercise. I would never [Inaudible: 00:30:32] somebody's back in the exercise room to the level that you have to [Inaudible: 00:30:34] your back to play golf. So I guess what Mike is asking is is there an exercise that would be safe to [Inaudible: 00:30:41] the back, almost as much as you would have to in golf.Bill: I would say no. I would say, and golf is a good example. Now if you notice, nobody has their feet planted and tries to swing with their upper body.Mike: A lot of people do, that's how you hurt yourself.Bill: But any sport, tennis, throwing a baseball, throwing a punch. Get your hips into it, it's like standard coaching cliche, get your hips into it. What that does is it keeps you from twisting your back too much. In golf, even Tiger who was in shape for quite a while couldn't help but over twist and then he's out for quite a while with back problems.Mike: Yeah, his story is really interesting and complicated. He did get into kind of navy seal training and also you should see the ESPN article on that which really — after I read that I thought that was the big thing with his problems. Going with what you just said about putting your hips into it, I'm a golfer, I try to play golf, and I did the TPI certification. Are you familiar with that? I thought it was really wonderful, I thought I learned a lot. I wasn't like the gospel according to the world of biomechanics, but I felt like it was a big step in the right direction with helping with sports performance and understanding strength and mobility. One of the bases of, the foundation of it, they — the computer analysis over the body and the best golfers, the ones that do it very very efficiently, powerfully and consistently, and they showed what they called a [Inaudible: 00:32:38] sequence, and it's actually very similar, as you said, in all sports. Tennis, golf, throwing a punch, there's a sequence where they see that the people who do it really, really well, and in a panfry way, it goes hip first, then torso, then arm, then club. In a very measured sequence, despite a lot of people who have different looking golf swings, like Jim [Inaudible: 00:32:52], Tiger Woods, John Daley, completely different body types, completely different golf swings, but they all have the — if you look at them on the screen in slow motion with all the sensors all over their body, their [Inaudible: 00:33:04] sequence is identical. It leads to a very powerful and consistent and efficient swing, but if you say like if you have limitations in you mobility between your hips and your lumbar spine, or your lumbar spine and your torso, and it's all kind of going together. It throws timing off, and if you don't have those types of things, very slowly, or quickly, you're going to get to an injury, quicker than another person would get to an injury. The thing is, at the same time, you don't want to stop someone who really wants to be a good golfer. We have to give the information and this is a — people have to learn the biomechanics and the basic swing mechanics of a golf swing, and then there's a fitness element to it all. Are you strong enough, do you have the range of motion, is there a proper mobility between the segments of your body in order to do this without hurting yourself over time, and if there isn't, golf professionals and fitness professionals are struggling. How do I teach you how to do this, even though it's probably going to lead you to an injury down the line anyway. It's a puzzle but the final question is, what — I'm trying to safely help people who have goals with sports performance and without hurting them.Bill: First of all, any time you go from exercise in air quotes to sports, with sports, there's almost an assumption of risk. The person playing golf assumes they're going to hurt a rotator cuff or a back, or they at least know it's a possibility. It's just part of the game. Football player knows they could have a knee injury, maybe now they know they could have a concussion, but they just accept it by accepting it on the court or the turf. They walk into our studio, I don't think that expectation — they may expect it also, but I don't think it really belongs there. I don't think you're doing something to prepare for the risky thing. The thing you're doing to prepare for the risky thing shouldn't also be risky, and besides, let them get hurt on that guy's time, not on your time. I'm being a little facetious there, I don't buy the macho bullshit attitude that in order to challenge myself physically, I have to do something so reckless I could get hurt. That's just simply not necessary. If somebody says I want to be an Olympic weightlifter, I want to be a power lifter, just like if they want to be a mixed martial artist, well then you're accepting the fact that that activity is your priority. Not your joint health, not your safety. That activity is your priority, and again, nobody in professional sports is asking me, but I would so make the exercise as safe as possible. As safe as possible at first, then as vigorous as possible, and then let them take that conditioning and apply it to their sport.Adam: If a sport requires that scapulary traction at a certain time in a swing or whatever they're asking for, I don't really think that there's a way in the exercise room of working on just that. Scapular traction, and even if you can, it doesn't mean it's going to translate to the biomechanics and the neuro conditioning and the motor skill conditioning to put it all together. Bill: You can't think that much —Adam: I'm just thinking once and for all, if strong hips are what's important for this sport, a strong neck is what's important for this. If being able to rotate the spine is important and you need your rotation muscles for the spine, work your spine rotationally but in a very safe range of motion. Tax those muscles, let them recover and get strong so when you do go play your sport, lets say a golf swing, it's watching the videos and perfecting your biomechanics, but there's nothing I think you can do in the gym that is going to help you really coordinate all those skills, because you're trying to isolate the hip abductor or a shoulder retractor. Mike: Well I was going to say, I think isolating the muscles in the gym is fine, because it allows you to control what happens, you don't have too many moving parts, and this is kind of leading up to the conversational on functional training.Adam: Which is good even if you can do that. You might notice there's a weakness —Mike: Yeah but if you're going to punch, you don't think okay flex the shoulder, extend at the — Adam: There are a lot of boxers that didn't make it because they were called arm punchers. Bill: So at some point you can't train it. You need to realize gee that guy has good hip movement, let me direct him to this sport.Adam: So I think what Mike's asking is is there some kind of exercise you can do to turn an arm puncher, let's use this as an example, turn an arm puncher into a hip puncher? If you can maybe do something —Bill: I think it's practice though. Mike: I think there's a practice part of it. Going back to the golf swing, one of the things that they were making a big deal out of is, and it goes back to what we mentioned before, sitting at a desk and what's going on with our bodies. Our backs, our hips, our hamstrings. As a result of the amount of time that most of us in our lives have, and we're trainers, we're up on our feet all day, but a lot of people are in a seated position all the time. Adam: Hunched over, going forward.Mike: Their lower back is —Bill: Hamstrings are shortened, yeah.Mike: What is going on in the body if your body is — if you're under those conditions, eight to ten hours a day, five days a week. Not to mention every time you sit down in your car, on the train, have a meal, if you're in a fetal position. My point is, they made a big thing at TPI about how we spend 18-20 hours a day in hip flexion, and what's going on. How does that affect your gluten if you're in hip flexion 20 hours a day. They were discussing the term called reciprocal inhibition, which is — you know what I mean by that?Bill: The muscle that's contracting, the opposite muscle has to relax.Mike: Exactly, so if the hip is flexed, so as the antagonist muscle of the glue which is being shut off, and therefore —Bill: Then when you go to hip henge, your glutes aren't strong enough to do the hip henge so you're going to get into a bad thing.Mike: Exactly, and the thing as I said before —Adam: What are they recommending you do though?Mike: Well the thing is they're saying do several different exercises to activate the gluten specifically and —Adam: How is that different than just doing a leg press that will activate them?Mike: Adam, that's a good question and the thing is it comes back to some of the testimonials. When you deal with clients, often times if you put them on a leg press, they'll say I'm not feeling it in my glutes, I'm only feeling it in my quads, and other people will say, I'm feeling it a lot in my glutes and my hamstrings, and a little bit in my quads.Adam: But if they don't feel it in their glutes, it doesn't mean that their glutes aren't activated, for sure.Mike: Bill, what do you think about that?Bill: I think feel is very overrated in our line of work. I can get you to feel something but it's not — you can do a concentration curl, tricep kickback, or donkey kicks with a cuff, and you'll feel something because you're not — you're making the muscle about to cramp, but that's not necessarily a positive. As far as activating the glutes go, if they don't feel it on the leg press, I would go to the abductor machine. Mike: I mean okay, whether it's feel it's overrated, that's the thing that as a trainer, I really want the client to actually really make the connection with the muscle part.Bill: Well yeah, you have to steer it though. For instance, if you put somebody on the abductor machine and they feel the sides of their glutes burn, in that case, the feel matches what you're trying to do. If you have somebody doing these glute bridging exercises where their shoulders are on a chair and their hips are on the ground, knees are bent, and they're kind of just driving their hips up. You feel that but it's irrelevant, you're feeling it because you're trying to get the glutes to contract at the end of where — away from their strongest point. You're not taxing the glutes, you're getting a feeling, but it's not really challenging the strength of the glutes. So I think what happens with a lot of the approaches like you're describing, where they have half a dozen exercises to wake up the glutes, or engage them or whatever the phrase is.Mike: Activate, yeah.Bill:  There's kind of a continuity there, so it should be more of a progression rather than all of these exercises are valid. If you've got a hip abductor machine, the progression is there already.Mike: The thing is, it's also a big emphasis, it's going back to TPI and golf and stuff, is the mobility factor. So I think that's the — the strength is there often times, but there's a mobility issue every once in a while, and I think that is — if something is, like for example if you're very, very tight and if your glutes are supposed to go first, so says TPI through their [Inaudible: 00:42:57] sequence, but because you're so tight that it's going together, and therefore it's causing a whole mess of other things which might make your club hit the ground first, and then tension in the arms, tension in the back, and all sorts of things. I'm thinking maybe there are other points, maybe the mobility thing has to be addressed in relation to a golf swing, more so than are the glutes actually working or not.Bill: Well the answer is it all could be. So getting back to a broader point, the way we train people takes half an hour, twice a week maybe. That leaves plenty of time for this person to do mobility work or flexibility work, if they have a specific activity that they think they need the work in.Mike: Or golf practice.Bill:  Well that's what I'm saying, even if it's golf and even if — if you're training for strength once or twice a week, that leaves a lot of time that you can do some of these mobility things, if the person needs them. That type of program, NASM has a very elaborate personal trainer program, but they tend to equally weight every possible — some people work at a desk and they're not — their posture is fine. Maybe they just intuitively stretch during the day, so I think a lot of those programs try to give you a recipe for every possible eventuality, and then there's a continuum within that recipe. First we're going to do one leg bridges, then we're going to do two leg bridges, now we're going to do two leg bridges on a ball, now we're going to do leg bridges with an extra weight, now we're going to do two leg bridges with an elastic band. Some of those things are just progressions, there's no magic to any one of those exercises, but I think that's on a case by case basis. If the person says I'm having trouble doing the swing the way the instructor is teaching me, then you can pick it apart, but the answer is not necessarily weight training.Mike: The limitation could be weakness but it could be a mobility thing, it could be a whole bunch of things, it could be just that their mechanics are off.Bill: And it could just be that it's a bad sport for them. The other thing with postural issues, is if you get them when a person's young, you might be able to correct them. You get a person 60, 70, it may have settled into the actual joints. The joints have may have changed shape.Adam: We've got people with kyphosis all the time. We're going to not reverse that kyphosis. You have these women, I find it a lot with tall women. They grow up taller than everyone else in their class and they're shy so they end up being kyphotic because they're shy to stand up tall. You can prevent further degeneration and further kyphosis.Bill: Maybe at 20 or 25, if you catch that, maybe they can train out of it, but if you get it when it's already locked in, all you can do is not do more damage.Adam: So a lot of people feel and argue that machines are great if you want to just do really high intensity, get really deep and go to failure, but if you want to really learn how to use your body in  space, then free weights and body weight movements need to be incorporated, and both are important. Going to failure with machines in a safe manner, that might be cammed properly, but that in and of itself is not enough. That a lot of people for full fitness or conditioning if you will, you need to use free weights or body weight movements —Mike: Some people even think that machines are bad and only body weights should be done.Adam: Do you have an opinion about if one is better than the other, or they both serve different purposes and they're both important, or if you just use either one of them correctly, you're good.Bill: Let's talk about the idea that free weights are more functional than machines. I personally think it's what you do with your body that makes it functional or not, and by functional, that's —Adam: Let's talk about that, let's talk about functional training.Bill:  I'm half mocking that phrase.Adam: So before you even go into the question I just asked, maybe we can talk about this idea, because people are throwing around the expression functional training nowadays. So Crossfit is apparently functional training, so what exactly was functional training and what has it become?Bill: I don't know what they're talking about, because frankly if I've got to move a tire from point A to point B, I'm rolling it, I'm not flipping it. Adam: That would be more functional, wouldn't it.Bill: If I have to lift something, if I have a child or a bag of groceries that I have to lift, I'm not going to lift a kettle bell or dumbbell awkwardly to prepare for that awkward lift. In other words, I would rather train my muscles safely and then if I have to do something awkward, hopefully I'm strong enough to get through it, to withstand it. My thought was, when I started in 1982 or so, 84, 83, somewhere in the early 80s I started to train, most of us at the time were very influenced by the muscle magazines. So it was either muscle magazines, or the [Inaudible: 00:48:24] one set to failure type training, but the people that we were training in the early 80s, especially in Manhattan, they weren't body builders and they weren't necessarily athletes. So to train business people and celebrities and actors etc, like you would train an athlete seemed like a bad idea. Plus how many times did I hear, oh I don't want to get big, or I'm not going out for the Olympics. Okay fine, but then getting to what Mike said before, if someone has a hunched over shoulder or whatever, now you're tailoring the training to what the person is in front of you, to what is relevant to their life. 20 inch arms didn't fascinate them, why are you training them to get 20 inch arms? Maybe a trimmer waist was more their priority, so to my eye, functional training and personal training, back in the 80s, was synonymous. Somewhere since the 80s, functional training turned into this anti machine approach and functional training for sport was [Inaudible: 00:49:32] by a guy named Mike Boyle. His main point in there is, and I'm paraphrasing so if I get it wrong, don't blame him, but his point was as an athlete, you don't necessarily need to bench heavy or squat heavy or deadlift heavy, although it might be helpful, but you do need the muscles that hold your joints together to be in better shape. So all of his exercises were designed around rotator cuff, around the muscles around the spine, the muscles around the hips, the muscles around the ankles. So in his eye it was functional for sport, he was training people, doing exercises, so they would hold their posture together so that that wouldn't cause a problem on the field. That material was pretty good, went a little overboard I think in some ways, but generally it was pretty good, but then it kind of got bastardized as it got caught into the commercial fitness industry, and it just became an excuse for sequencing like a lunge with a curl with a row with a pushup, to another lunge, to a squat. It just became sort of a random collection of movements, justified as being functional, functional for what? At least Boyle was functional for sport, his point was to cut injuries down in sport. Where is the function in stringing together, again, a curl, to a press, to a pushup, to a squat, back to the curl, like one rep of each, those are more like stunts or feats of strength than they are, to me, exercise, Adam: So when you're talking about the muscles around the spine or the rotator cuffs, they're commonly known as stabilizer muscles, and when we talk about free weights versus machines, a lot of times we'll say something like, well if you want to work your stabilizer muscles, you need to use free weights, because that's how you work the stabilizer muscles. What would you say to that?Bill: I would say that if they're stabilizing while they're using the free weights, then they're using the stabilizer muscles, right?Adam: And if they're stabilizing while using a machine?Bill:  They're using their stabilizer muscles.Adam: Could you work out those stabilizer muscles of the shoulder on a machine chest press, the same way you can use strength in stabilizer muscles of the shoulder on a free weight bench press?Bill:  Yes, it's what your body is doing that counts, not the tool. So if someone is on a free weight…Mike: Is it the same though, is it doing it the same way? So you can do it both ways, but is it the same?Bill: If you want to — skill is very specific, so if you want to barbell bench press, you have to barbell bench press.Adam: Is there an advantage to your stabilizer muscles to do it with a free weight bench press, as opposed to a machine?Bill: I don't see it, other than to help the ability to free weight bench press, but if that's not why the person is training, if the person is just training for the health benefits of exercise to use it broadly, I don't think it matters — if you're on a machine chest press and you're keeping your shoulder blades down and back, and you're not buckling your elbows, you're voluntarily controlling the range of the motion. I don't see how that stabilization is different than if you're on a barbell bench press, and you have to do it the same way. Adam: You're balancing, because both arms have to work independently in a way.Bill:  To me that just makes it risky, that doesn't add a benefit.Mike: What about in contrast to lets say, a pushup. A bodyweight pushup, obviously there's a lot more going on because you're holding into a plank position which incorporates so many more muscles of your entire body, but like Adam and I were talking the other day about the feeling — if you're not used to doing pushups regularly, which Adam is all about machines and stuff like that, I do a little bit of everything, but slow protocol. It's different, one of our clients is unbelievably strong on all of the machines, we're talking like top 10% in weight on everything. Hip abduction, leg press, chest press, pull downs, everything, and this guy could barely do 8 limited range of motion squats with his body weight, and he struggles with slow pushups, like doing 5 or 6 pushups. 5 seconds down, 5 seconds up, to 90 degrees at the elbow, he's not even going past — my point is that he's working exponentially harder despite that he's only dealing with his body weight, then he is on the machines, in all categories.Bill:  So here's the thing though. Unless that's a thing with them, that I have to be able to do 100 pushups or whatever, what's the difference?Mike: The difference is —Adam: The question is why though. Why could he lift 400, 500 pounds on Medex chest press, he could hardly do a few pushups, and should he be doing pushups now because have we discovered some kind of weakness? That he needs to work on pushups?Bill: Yes, but it's not in his pecs and his shoulders.Mike: I'm going to agree, exactly.Bill:  The weakness is probably in his trunk, I don't know what the guy is built like. The weakness is in his trunk because in a pushup, you're suspending yourself between your toes and your arms.Adam: So somebody should probably be doing ab work and lower back extensions?Bill: No he should be doing pushups. He should be practicing pushups, but practicing them in a way that's right. Not doing the pushup and hyper extending his back, doing a pushup with his butt in the air. Do a perfect pushup and then if your form breaks, stop, recover. Do another perfect pushup, because we're getting back into things that are very, very specific. So for instance, if you tell me that he was strong on every machine, and he comes back every week and he's constantly pulling things in his back, then I would say yes, you have to address it.Mike: This is my observations that are more or less about — I think it's something to do with his coordination, and he's not comfortable in his own body. For example, his hips turn out significantly, like he can't put his feet parallel on the leg press for example. So if I ever have him do a limited range of motion lunge, his feet go into very awkward positions. I can tell he struggles with balance, he's an aspiring golfer as well. His coordination is — his swing is really, I hope he never listens to this, it's horrible. Adam: We're not giving his name out.Bill: Here's the thing now. You as a trainer have to decide, am I going to reconfigure what he's doing, at the risk of making him feel very incompetent and get him very discouraged, or do I just want to, instead of doing a machine chest press, say we'll work on pushups. Do you just want to introduce some of these new things that he's not good at, dribble it out to him a little bit at a time so it gives him like a new challenge for him, or is that going to demoralize him?Mike: He's not demoralized at all, that is not even on the table. I understand what you're saying, I think there are other people who would look at it that way. I think he looks at it as a new challenge, I think he knows — like we've discussed this very, very openly. He definitely — it feels like he doesn't have control over his body in a way. Despite his strength, I feel that — my instincts as a trainer, I want to see this guy be able to feel like he's strong doing something that is a little bit more — incorporates his body more in space than just being on a machine. If I'm measuring his strength based on what he can do by pressing forward or pulling back or squatting down, he's passed the test with As and great form. He does all the other exercises with pretty good form, but he's struggling with them. He has to work a lot harder in order to do it, and to be it's an interesting thing to see someone who lifts very heavy weights on the chest press and can barely do 4 slow pushups.Bill: Let's look at the pushups from a different angle. Take someone who could do pushups, who can do pushups adequately, strictly and all. Have another adult sit on their butt, all of a sudden those perfect pushups, even though probably raw strength could bench press an extra person, say, you can't do it, because someone who is thicker in the hips, has more weight around the hips, represented by the person sitting on their back, their dimensions are such that their hips are always going to be weighing them down. So that person's core — like a person with broader hips, in order to do a pushup, their core has to be much stronger than somebody with very narrow hips, because they have less weight in the middle of their body. So some of these things are a function of proportion.Adam: You can't train for it, in other words you can't improve it.Mike: Women in general have their center of gravity in their hips, and that's why pushups are very, very hard.Adam: I have an extremely strong individual, a perfect example of what you're talking about right now. I know people that are extremely, extremely strong, but some of these very, very strong individuals can do a lot of weight on a pullover machine, they can do a lot of weight on a pulldown machine, but as soon as you put them on the chin-up bar, they can't do it. Does that mean they're not strong, does that mean that they can't do chin-ups, that they should be working on chin-ups because we discovered a weakness? No, there's people for example who might have shitty tendon insertions, like you said about body weight and center of gravity, if they have really thick lower body. I notice that people who have really big, thick lower bodies, really strong people — or if they have really long arms, the leverage is different. So it begs the question, lets start doing chin-ups, yeah but you'll never proportionally get better at chin-ups, given your proportions, given your tendon insertions, given your length of your arms. So maybe Mike, this person is just not built to do push-ups and you're essentially just giving him another chest and body exercise that is not necessarily going to improve or help anything, because it's a proportional thing, it's a leverage thing. It's not a strength thing, especially if you're telling me he's so strong and everything else.Bill: The only way you'll know is to try.Mike: Well that's the thing, and that's what I've been doing. We just started it, maybe in the last month, and frankly both of us are excited by it. He's been here for a few years, and he is also I think starving to do something a little new. I think that's a piece of the puzzle as well, because even if you're coming once a week and you get results, it gets a little stale, and that's why I've tried to make an effort of making all the exercises we're doing congruent. Joint friendly, very limited range of motion, and the thing is, he's embracing the challenge, and he's feeling it too. I know the deal with soreness and stuff like that, new stimulus.Bill: In that case, the feeling counts, right? It doesn't always mean something good, it doesn't always mean something bad.Mike: Right, it is a little bit of a marketing thing. Adam: It's a motivator. It's nothing to be ashamed of for motivation. If pushups is motivating this guy, then do pushups, they're a great exercise regardless.Bill: Getting back to your general question about whether free weights lends itself to stabilizing the core better or not, if that's what the person is doing on the exercise, then it is. If the person is doing the pushup and is very tight, yes, he's exercising his core. If the person is doing the pushup and it's sloppy, one shoulder is rising up, one elbow to the side, it doesn't matter that it's a pushup —Adam: He's still not doing it right and he's still not working his core.Bill: Right, so it's really how the person is using their body that determines whether they're training their core appropriately, not the source of the resistance.Adam: I'm sorry, I've done compound rows with free weights in all kinds of ways over the years, and now I'm doing compound row with a retrofitted Medex machine, with a CAM that really represents pretty good CAM design and I challenge anyone to think that they're not working everything they need to work on that machine, because you've still got to keep your shoulders down. You've still got to keep your chest up, you still have to not hunch over your shoulders when you're lowering a weight. I mean there's a lot of things you've got to do right on a compound machine, just like if you're using free weights. I don't personally, I've never noticed that much of a benefit, and how do you measure that benefit anyway? How would you be able to prove that free weights is helping in one way that a machine is not, how do you actually prove something like that? I hear it all the time, you need to do it because you need to be able to —Mike: There's one measuring thing actually, but Bill —Bill: I was going to say, a lot of claims of exercise, a lot of the chain of thought goes like this. You make the claim, the result, and there's this big black box in the middle that — there's no  explanation of why doing this leads to this. Mike: If you made the claim and the result turns out, then yes it's correlated and therefore —Bill: I was going to say getting to Crossfit and bootcamp type things, and even following along with a DVD program, whatever brand name you choose. The problem I have with that from a joint friendly perspective is you have too many moving parts for you to be managing your posture and taking care of your joints. Especially if you're trying to keep up with the kettle bell class. I imagine it's possible that you can do certain kettle bell exercises to protect your lower back and protect your shoulders. It's possible, but what the user has to decide is how likely is it? So I know for me personally, I can be as meticulous as I want with a kettle bell or with a barbell deadlift, and at some point, I'm going to hurt myself. Not from being over ambitious, not from sloppy form, something is going to go wrong. Somebody else might look at those two exercises and say no, I'm very confident I can get this. You pay your money, you take your chance.Mike: As a measuring tool, sometimes you never know if one is better or worse but sometimes — every once in a while, even when we have clients come into our gym and you have been doing everything very carefully with them, very, very modest weight, and sometimes people say, you know Mike, I've never had any knee problems and my knees are bothering me a little bit. I think it's the leg press that's been doing it, ever since we started doing that, I'm feeling like a little bit of a tweak in my knee, I'm feeling it when I go up stairs. Something like that, and then one of the first things I'll do is like when did it start, interview them, try to draw some lines or some hypotheses as to what's going on. Obviously there might be some wear and tear in their life, almost definitely was, and maybe something about their alignment on the leg press is not right. Maybe they're right, maybe they're completely wrong, but one of the things I'll do first is say okay, we still want to work your legs. We still want to work your quads, your hamstrings, your glutes, let's try doing some limited range of motions squats against the wall or with the TRX or something like that, and then like hey, how are your knees feeling over the past couple weeks? Actually you know, much much better, ever since we stopped doing the leg press.Bill: Sometimes some movements just don't agree with some joints.Adam: There's a [Inaudible: 01:05:32] tricep machine that I used to use, and it was like kind of like —Bill: The one up here? Yeah.Adam: You karate chop right, and your elbows are stabilized on the pad, you karate chop down. It was an old, [Inaudible: 01:05:45] machine, and I got these sharp pains on my elbows. Nobody else that I trained on that machine ever had that sharp pain in their elbows, but it bothered the hell out of my elbows. So I would do other tricep extensions and they weren't ever a problem, so does that make that a bad exercise? For me it did.Bill: For you it did, but if you notice, certain machine designs have disappeared. There's a reason why those machine designs disappeared, so there's a reason why, I think in the Nitro line, I know what machine you're talking about. They used to call it multi tricep, right, okay, and your upper arms were held basically parallel, and you had to kind of karate chop down.Adam: It wasn't accounting for the carrying angle.Bill: I'll get to that. So your elbows were slightly above your shoulders, and you had to move your elbows into a parallel. Later designs, they moved it out here. They gave them independent axises, that's not an accident. A certain amount of ligament binding happens, and then —Adam: So my ligaments just were not coping with that very well.Bill: That's right. So for instance, exactly what joint angle your ligaments bind at is individual, but if you're going in this direction, there is a point where the shoulder ligaments bind and you have to do this. Well that machine forced us in the bound position, so when movement has to happen, it can't happen at the shoulder because you're pinned in the seat. It was happening in your elbow. It might not be the same with everybody, but that is how the model works.Adam: So getting back to your client on the leg press, like for instance — you can play with different positions too.Mike: Well the thing is, I'm trying to decipher some of — trying to find where the issues may be. A lot of times I think that the client probably just — maybe there's some alignment issues, IT bands are tight or something like that, or maybe there's a weak — there can be a lot of different little things, but the machines are perfect and symmetrical, but you aren't. You're trying to put your body that's not through a pattern, a movement pattern that has to be fixed in this plane, when your body kind of wants to go a little to the right, a little to the left, or something like that. It just wants to do that even though you're still extending and flexing. In my mind and

He is RALPH ROMAGUERA. After learning Photography in the Navy, now 47 years in business, after visiting numerous countries, after a year of Presidency of the PPA, after decades of learning from icons (and a few decades of teaching others) . . . Ralph has seen more than a few trends in the Photography. What trends does he love? What trend is a love/hate relationship? When Ralph's career is over, and we look back on his influence, what legacy does he want to leave? HINT: It's only 5 words. Today's episode of The PhotoTellers again features Ralph. If you heard his previous conversation here, you'll recognize the distinct Louisiana accent. You'll also remember the distinctly laid-back, insightful glimpse into the industry. "If you learn something new everyday, think how smart you'll be at 100." -Momma Romaguera You'll also hear Ralph discuss the niche that has made him a comfortable income. It's a niche that he's proud to serve, and he's noticed other Photographers recently catching on to an old trend. The clip below is an excerpt that I especially enjoyed. __________ BILL: You mention you're school photographer--when you say that I see your chest puff out a little bit--you say that with real pride. There are some who I would assume look down their nose and think: "School photography: that's not 'highbrow,' 'that's not important.'" How do you respond to that? Have you experienced that kind of attitude among other Photographers? RALPH: Yes! And it's really kind of funny, speaking of changes. There was a day where people would snub their nose, you know. But I've photographed Presidents, I've photographed personalities--but I also like to eat. And I like nice things." ___________ Before our conversation ends, Ralph talks about his involvement with Operation Smile. Had you been there in person, you'd have seen his eyes mist over as he talked about the love he and his beautiful bride, Cindy, have poured into Operation Smile via PPA Charities. If I told you that "240 dollars could LITERALLY save the life of a child," you'd think me exaggerating. But it's true! If you'd like to see some of the work that Ralph Romaguera is creating, find it by CLICKING HERE. And you twice hear Ralph mention the iconic Frank Cricchio. He's oft-been called "the Master's Master." I'm honored to say that Frank was a guest on the show last year! FIND IT HERE.

Welcome to our 50th episode!Dr Laura Ciel inspires transformation not only through her rigorous background and training in clinical and medical psychology, but also through her open heart, clarity, honesty and intense passion for anyone to have the opportunity to live life FULL OUT. Bill Poett is first and foremost a Warrior Heart. He believes that love is the most powerful force on earth and service the highest calling. He is a nationally acclaimed transformational guide, author, corporate facilitator and radio personality. Dr. Laura and Bill joined forces to co-create the world's first fully integrated personal and professional development training programs at Life Advance International. At Life Advance International, they specialize in improving your personal and team performance allowing you to maximize the results you experience in your professional and personal life by applying the concepts, principles and universal laws that the world's happiest, healthiest and most successful people use to get and stay that way! Guiding Principle, Quote or Mantra Bill - They teach a model called the True North Compass for both personal and professional partnerships.  It’s a 6 step process to reconnect to the core of who they are and the vision that they share. Laura - Have a clear vision of where you are going with your health, romantic relationship, professional life etc. If you don’t have a shared vision you can work as hard as you want and you’re not going to get there. When You Tripped Up Laura - Dr. Laura got married young the first time and was married for 20 years.  Looking back, she was operating from the belief that it was more important for her to have her marriage look a certain way than it was to honor who she was at the core. When she walked away from her marriage, everyone thought she was crazy to leave it. From the outside it looked perfect, but had she stayed there she would have been dying daily in one way or another. Bill - In his previous marriage, he and his wife had gone through some real struggles at the beginning of their time together. And he believed that having survived those challenges, they were bomb proof. Then his wife left without any interest in doing much counseling to see if they could reconcile he was shattered. Now with Laura he wakes up everyday knowing it doesn’t matter how well he loved her yesterday. What matters is his capacity to love her today and be very present in their relationship. Proudest moment in partnership Bill - They recently worked with a high performing team who was in profound distress.  The transformation and flow and lack of friction in the team that they witnessed at their executive meeting after working with them for just a few weeks felt so good.  It confirmed that they are doing what they are born to do. Laura - She and Bill have a large family. And they hold a very clear vision of what they hope and want and intend for their family. When they have struggles with the kids, she can look at Bill’s eyes and even if he doesn’t say anything she knows he is holding that vision. She never had a partner she could really count on personally or professionally in this way.  Knowing she can lean on Bill and he will hold their vision even at times when it is tough for her is Laura’s proudest moment in partnership. Bill gives us a great description of what it means to “have your partner’s back.” What is the best partnership / relationship advice you have ever received? Laura - It starts with you. Look around at whatever partnership you are in and if something does not feel right, look to you first and make the shift in you. Talk to your partner about your shared vision. Where are you going? What is the point of this? Bill - You are inherently worthy. And your capacity, on an energetic level, to own...

Bill: So what are these fires going to do to the price of oil as a factor? James Cordier, from OptionSellers.com, he thinks the wildfires there are giving oil a short-term string, and the headlines will be no match for the over-supply. In fact, you think we could see $35 again by the end of the year, don’t you? James: Bill, we certainly do. We’ve certainly had a seasonal rally. Last time we spoke to you we were back in January and we were talking about a seasonal rally starting in February, rallying into March and April. We’ve had that. The fundamentals have not changed that much from last winter when we were sitting around $30. There’s a lot being made about the smaller production in the United States. Of course, we’re losing some barrels out of Canada right now. But as we get past driving season, we’re going to have, once again, a glut of oil. We’re losing places to fill storage tanks around the world. Believe it or not, we’re starting to import oil here again, and I think this fall we’re going to have a big supply problem on our hands, once again. Kelly: Before we get to that, James, to your point about what’s happening in Canada, BP Canada has just declared a force majeure event following the Alberta Wildfires. That means a reduction in available Western Canadian select crude among other grades, and that’s according to Reuters, which sites two trading sources familiar with the matter. So, BP is saying delivery of oil would be affected during the month of May. So, focusing on the direct impact of this, James, what do you anticipate it would be? James: You know, today crude oil is trading $2 under its previous high over the last week or so. We hit $47-$47.50 recently. We’re down $2 below that in the summer months. If, in fact, we thought this was going to be a long-term fundamental change, we would be trading up near those highs that we were last week. So, the fact that we’re down $2 from that level tells us that the seasonal rally, and the play that a lot of investors took part in back in winter, is just about running its course. In a hockey game here in Tampa, we’re probably in the 3rd period right now of this market rally. Bill: You know, for me, I wonder why we’re not at $35 a barrel now. I get the whole concept of the seasonal rally and all that, but we’re in unusual times, if not unique times, right now with the glut of oil that we’ve seen with the tremendous overproduction that has gone on around the world. We still have tankers, I’m told, out in the ocean waiting to find some place to drop off their oil. You were even making the point that fundamentals maybe aren’t supporting this seasonal rally and we’ll have this glut down the road. There’s a dichotomy there. What’s going on here? James: The market rally is practically every February through May, whether we have the largest supplies in history, like we do right now, or not. If, in fact, the fundamentals bode well for the market, it then rallies into June or July, it extends the seasonal rally. Bill, you nailed it. The supplies worldwide are enormous. The United States has supplies near 100-year highs. Iranian and Iraqi barrels are going to start coming on to the market September, October, November, and we’re going to have a glut of oil again. No one knows how low we’re going to be. We’d expect we’ll be in the low 30’s in the 4th quarter of this year. Seasonal rallies are really interesting how in fact they do take place. They did it again this year. We would be shorting oil over the next 30 days with both hands. Kelly: Alright, James, thanks for joining us. James: My Pleasure.

Who did you talk to? Robert: I talked to someone interesting yesterday. Bill: Who did you talk to? Robert: I can't remember his name, but I was sitting on the train... Bill: Yeah... Robert: ...and this young man started talking to me. Bill: What did he say? Robert: He said that he was from Thailand and he was studying here in Japan. Bill: You mean he was a university student. Robert: No, he was a high school student. He had a uniform on. Bill: I see, so what did you talk about? Robert: Well, he said that he enjoyed living in Japan, but he did not have much chance to speak in English. Bill: How was his English? Robert: Pretty good. So, he asked me if we could chat while sitting on the train. Bill: That's interesting. It's not everyday that you meet a Thai student in Japan. Robert: That's right. Let's practice... I saw someone interesting last week. Who did you see? I went somewhere fun last month. Where did you go? I ate something strange. I don't feel so good. When did you eat it? I read an interesting book. What did you read? I have to go to England next week. Why do you have to go there? www.eltpodcast.com

First, you'll hear this a basic conversation at a normal speed, then at a slower speed. Next, you'll hear some practice drills. Finally, you'll hear the conversation again at a normal speed. Robert: Hi Bill. What's happening? Bill: Not much. How about you, Robert? Robert: Well, actually, I want to go to the art museum this afternoon, but I don't know where it is. Do you know where it is? Bill: Which one? There are a few art museums in Fukuoka. Robert: I want to see the Napoleon exhibit. Have you heard about it? Bill: Ah, sure. That's the Fukuoka Municipal Art Museum. It's in Ohori Park. Robert: So, how do I get there? Bill: That's easy. Just take the subway to the Ohori Park station. Walk through the park, and it's there. You can't miss it! Robert: Do you mean that I have to walk to the other side of the park to get to the musem? Bill: Yes, that's right. It doesn't take long. About ten minutes or so. Robert: OK, I think I understand. Thanks. Bill: You're welcome. Let's Practice: A: I want to buy a suit, but I don't know where to shop. Do you know a good shop? B: Yes, I like to buy suits at Fukuyama. You should go there. A: I want to bake a cake, but I don't know how. Can you help me? B: Sorry, I don't know how. You should buy a cook book. A: I want to see a dentist, but I don't know who to see. Do you know a good dentist? B: Yes, my dentist is good. I'll give you his number. Find more at www.eltpodcast.com