Almost time for the bell, how many options will you sell? Fire up your platform, get ready to enter But first, let's get the mindset centered Let's go, we're here to trade We follow the plan, that's how we get paid Test and trade, have success Find what works for you and forget the rest Stats and probabilities is what we're about Time to dismiss greed and doubt Focus on the process, not the money And the profits will flow like honey Power our lives, let's start the show Come on trade hackers, get ready to go Zero-day options, time to make bank Get locked and loaded, then be ready to play Hey everyone, welcome to Power Hour Live, February 27th S&P, almost exactly where we started the day Just slightly higher, Nasdaq, slightly green Russell up 1%, Dow down about a half percent Gold and silver pretty flat Notes and bonds a little bit red Ten-year yield up half percent Oil up one and a half percent Natty gas up almost four percent Soybeans down a little bit Wheat and corn up Euro and the pound flat Bitcoin up another five percent Fifty-eight thousand VIX at 13.54 I've got a good little day going on here so far Here's my 1DTE, it's currently at about 36 percent My profit targets at 45 percent I've got my re-entries Which I haven't done any re-entries Because my original ones from this morning are still on They're getting ready to hit 90 percent And then I've got What else do I have here? I've got my quiet midday tranches One hit 40 percent, another one hit 40 percent Another one hit 40 percent My NDX looks like it's going to settle for max profit I've got two other quiet midday tranches on They're slightly red so they need a little bit of a down move And then my Wuga I got filled at 410 That's on the 70-75s So that is my 0DTE Oh I did have the one discretionary RIC I did take a loss on I was looking, if it got down to the expected move I would have taken it off and got a little profit But it literally missed it by a couple points And then bounced so I just cut it for a first small loss That was a nice day Steve Good day for the good kids Okay so I did my first Wuga here On the Wuga train Yeah so 50 percent So I got filled at 420 so 210 So I would be closing the whole thing All four like both calls both puts Or just yeah the whole iron condor Okay that's what I thought at 210 Okay perfect Thiago expected move so if you go to the option chain I'm not sure what broker you use but In toss it's this number right here So you've got the percentage Which is the implied volatility of that option cycle And then right next to it in parentheses That plus or minus number that's the expected move For the day Okay so I'm not sure If IB has that on the option chain or not So do you Do you close the whole thing at 50 percent Or just part of it Yeah the whole thing Okay Maro nothing to show the expected move Of the option chains You're pretty happy about that Let's see option strat maybe you would have it I'm trying to think here I'd have to look around on that option strat To see if it's on there Here's my NDX trade right smack dab in the middle Yeah good point Maro I mean that's the That's a quick back of the envelope kind of way Let's just take the price of the at the money straddle The expected move for the day is right around there Yeah I don't know man Obviously option omega doesn't have NDX But just doing the same concept with SPX It just did not test well But I don't quite understand why It just seems like From a mathematical probability standpoint It should have a positive expectancy So for me I have my AM iron condor number one Book 20 percent then stopped So minus 220 lunchtime number one Which same thing 20 percent then stopped Sold some longs ended up being plus 50 bucks And I'm out of 20 percent of lunchtime number two Which was about 10 minutes Before my power hour time so And the Wuga Yeah I know power hour for me today Today's just in the you know Pretty much where we started Premiums are super low so I'm not going to do a Normal power hour besides the Wuga So So Dick K or anybody Going back to that the NDX trade so So here I put the price slices Where the expected move was at the beginning of the day For NDX So You can see that the iron condor I mean it covers Call it 90 percent of the expected move Right yes right 60 Once standard deviation move is like 68 percent call it Whatever I mean you can call it six Let's say this should hit 66 percent of the time right So I mean if you do the math So let's just take it Okay so my max profits 9.50 Max loss is 10.50 So Let's say I do 100 trades And 66 percent of the time It hits 9.50 I know this is not Exact but 9.50 Times 66 equals So that'd be 62,700 34 times At the 100 it loses 1,050 So 1,050 Times 34 Equals Minus 35,700 Right so 62,700 positive 35,700 negative So over you know large and over occurrences Seems like it would play out Now there is the in between So it may not be a max win Or max loss There's going to be times where it expires In between But it's only you know an NDX It's only 10 wide so very little chance it's going to Expire right in between there But some will So just like I said from a Probabilistic Number of occurrences over time It should have a positive expectancy I just I I can't figure out why Back testing I can't Gives any kind of value SPX getting close to highs of day Yeah and I'm just doing it small I mean I'm doing two contracts on NDX No stop You know so there also times it will go way Out of range and then come back and settle in So you don't have to worry about getting stopped out So here's my Wuga So Dick K I've got Two of the quiet Tronches left They need to move down Otherwise They could get themselves in a little trouble here Which would wipe out the four winners Three winners My one two double calendar From earlier today is already up 7% Might take off some of that If I get to 10% by the end of the day My six seven from Friday is up about 5% My five seven from Friday is up about three My three four from Monday Is down about 2% Well I hope I'm not bad luck for the Wuga Because I Remembered I The only one I've ever taken was that Time that moved to the downside Like way out of range almost The one time that we took max loss on it Yeah that's the only time I've traded it This is my second time Basically the one time in 12 months that it took a max loss Is the time you traded it Yup and now mine is Now it's pushing up so it's I hope I'm not bad luck The Dr. Chad Curse I mean mine's already way off Way off center Yeah I'm going to need a little down move For basically everything I got on now God forbid we have two SPX That's two red days in a row It's not allowed but we had two red days This would be three Going back to last Friday Yeah Friday Well It closed lower than when it opened I'm not sure if it closed lower than The previous days closed let's see 50, 87, 50 No, didn't Yeah so Technically this would be two in a row If we closed red So my two re-entries here My one to one is trading at a buck 25 And my 90% profit target 95 cents The other one's trading at 260 And that one's at $1.90 So just a little Lower and those should just close out The trade plans but it's also If you scroll up to the end of yesterday I know somebody posted a screenshot of it I'll see if I can find it real quick Here you go fast 5, 7, 31 Oh looks like you got it There's the back test I don't have it on my trade plan sheet Just because I just kind of do it Just more on a discretionary basis But yeah MRP NDX it'll get Wide so that's one reason I don't use stops or anything on that And I'm okay using NDX For this specific trade Because it Yeah let's see I've got Yeah I've got a My order is at 25 cents to close And it's shown as trading at 30 cents So maybe not quite there yet But sometimes it It won't even hit I took half off of my VXX vertical For about 50% of max Give my rut duck another day If it stays here it pushes higher I'll close it out for beak profit Corn finally got a little bounce Here's a question for you So if the Wuga is sitting pretty centered And you hit your 50% You don't scale out at all huh Now I mean it's purely back test based And so that those parameters are Test the best Yeah that's just what you do That's just what the Wuga does Okay so exit by 352 huh If you haven't hit 50% Where is Wuga? Next day trading futures too Best day in a while Oil 3040 ES A little over 1500 And Dow 505 So I Man I Can't complain but I also Missed a big trade in wheat I was trying to get long wheat And I put the order in Remark it and I forgot It's not open yet, you can't trade it yet You gotta wait till 830 Central and then I was planning on it I had it written on a note Right in front of me to enter at the open So I missed that big up move in wheat That probably would have been another Based on the size I would have done Probably somewhere between 1000 and 2000 So a good day Trading really good day trading all around Gotta trade that weed Naughty dog I worked on my futures Day trading price action course A little bit last night Getting close By the way we're doing a live Trade steward session 30 minutes after the close Today I posted in the trade steward channel For anyone interested I'm basically just going to take a Option omega back test And Build a bot from scratch Just to kind of show you how I do it Kind of point out some of the little things and then And then from there we'll just kind of Open it up to questions or Comments or anything Getting closer to my 90% I still need a little down move Yeah Mukesh for sure I'll be recorded I feel like I need to cut one of my Quiet tronches Loose This thing continues to rip It's going to It's not going to feel good I have my NDX and my bot set at 95% So it's setting it a 25% Limit right now but sometimes That'll fill and sometimes it'll Just expire without even filling We get ES90 we could roll Over Or roll higher I also had some puts loaded up I had an order of 20 That's loaded That were priced to get filled The price got down to The expected move And I was about 30 cents away From those getting filled before it ripped So I ended up just canceling that and that's when I Ended up buying some futures for this Up move So I had a really good day and I missed out On some really nice winners too Now pushing highs Right at highs of day which is the first 5 minute candle So maybe I'll get rejected Wouldn't take much of a down move And get me out of 40% of my Last TLC trade I got on No Just a little pullback My orders At 345 and price is currently At 387 so One DTE Is currently at about 35% I need 45% for that one to Take off It's right around time for Trunch 2 Which I'm not doing but It'll be a 75 straddle for low premiums There we go Out of 40% Out of 40% Very nice Closed out my Closed out both my Trades from this morning My 2 re-entries In my challenge portfolio Now if my 1 DTE Can hit 45% That would be a good little bump For my challenge portfolio So my 1 to 1 Booked about 3900 My 3 to 2 Booked 20 Almost 2500 And then my 1 DTE is Currently up 1700 Not sure if that's going to get to 45% or not So for my challenge portfolio Up about over 8000 so far Right 260 is my next 60% Not a dog Steve's got so many portfolios I need a couple other accounts To be honest It's too crowded sometimes I'm not going 10k to a million It's more like It's more like 150k To 152 million That's what I'm going for Yeah I mean I'm not greedy Let's see what Wuga's doing Something pretty good Another one on I forgot I put this Called a Chad like trade on Because I felt like I needed some more on I hit I got a half at 20% In fact I forgot to reduce the stop Now that I Thinking about it You never forget like you have a trade on That needs to be closed by the end of the day And then realize it's on the next day Do you? That before In fact I just did that I think it was last month I had a I had a diagonal on Which is part of a different It's kind of a Part of a time fly In NDX And on Friday at expiration I forgot to close it So I was left with just the longs on Monday Uh huh And luckily the market went up $26,000 winner No way Uh that's awesome It was an accident But could have been really bad If the market Tanked over the weekend Right I mean I make enough Mistakes that go against me I think I'm entitled to One of my favorite ones My 40% is at 3.95% So A little more down move 30 more cents down No 50 cents down I'll hit 60% Because at 35% 2.5% a day It's awesome My midday tranches These two I have left They definitely need a down move Not real optimistic about the downside here I may just cut those loose No Just don't want to push highs You can just stay where it's at I'll cut one of them loose So my 1, 2 DTE Double calendar I'll see what did I get into that for $8.90 Mmm Don't like this price action Oh, that's really pushing That's right turn around Nothing to see up here Nope Naughty dog, booking profits Wooga could go to $5,100 as long as it comes back Before the close I'd just soon hit 50% before it does that Better on the heart I've had too many in February Too many power hours where I've seen A little green bar just ripping upward See what's going on in stock Land today Jumia that Amazon of Africa has been on fire Almost a double in the last month There she goes New highs of day Zoom up 7% after earnings Green bars, man I guess stopped out of here That must have been my I surely would hate to be 0 for 2 in the Woogas That's funny, Dick K I uh How old is your son?  He's like, well And they've had the account We started the account like right at the bottom During COVID And so of course right out of the gate Their accounts took off He's like, well, I was like, what changed? He's like, well, I'm really good at it And I was like, oh, okay Okay, I just I didn't say anything, I just encouraged him He's already lost interest again He's about to hit it all Figured out. All right, let's pull back here 126 million To the buy side Early indication. Good healthy pullback Yeah, they got in a meta At a really good price too That's their biggest winner Here's one of them They have Apple He likes when we stay in Airbnb So he's got Airbnb He's got C3 AI AMC because he likes to watch movies He actually caught that one He caught that one right before the whole GameStop AMC.  Did it hit the roll over point decay? Would you say 90? Almost, 88.5 Keep coming Cody, I actually made them employees Of One of my entities And so I pay them And then that money that they earned They Contributed to Roth So You know, I added a little bit But that's how I did it 10 cents away from getting out at 60% TLC and be done there We'll go straight in at 235 I need 205 to Close that one at 50% Yup, I need 210 Built on 60% And out Of my lunchtime number 2 The green day It's the first time in a while I haven't done any power hour trades Did the Wooga instead And my NDX still hasn't filled At 25% Yeah, that's kind of what I was thinking too, Dick K It's filled on Five of nine of my One twos for 10% From the one I just put on this morning I'll leave the other ones on until tomorrow morning I'm on theta Have you ever not been able to close The The Wooga? Have you ever had a problem with it? What's that? Have you ever had a problem trying to close You said you're closing a full iron condor If it gets way out of bounds Then You're just gonna watch the longs If they don't have a bid They're down to 5 cents right now 5 and 10 cents Then you'd have to switch over just to the shorts Gotcha 126 million to the buy side still I'm on I need about 7 cents Yeah, Woogoo's getting close Was getting close I'm gonna go ahead and close out my last re-entry here And I think I'm gonna close out my last quiet tranche also Just Not feeling a down move into the close No Need a nickel and the Woogoo's closed Alright My Woogoo's almost there I got filled at 210 Looking for 205 didn't hit it Get back down here Vick's trying to spike up A little over 15 minutes ago I knew this was gonna happen I thought you got hit on the Woogoo Or you got hit on someone else No, but I just I know you guys are Wanting it to pull back I was really hoping it would hit for you guys Still might I like the team player out of you Chad You know I'm out of everything Still 126 million to the buy side Final MOC in 5 minutes Dow came down a little bit After trying to push up there Dow coming down now A little over 4k for me with the Woogoo and TLC trades How many contracts did you do on the Woogoo?  You had definitely a game of inches Is this normal? Is that pretty normal for it? Or no? The Dow came down Whether it's centered or not Right I thought it was coming Market on close number here in about 20 seconds 1.4 billion to the buy side We'll go back to even Crazy just how it gets It gets over there and tests on one side It can be a game of inches Keep coming down buddy Back up to 30-40% Just like that Just like that It'll close out Here in a few seconds 352 Let's scratch that a little profit on the 7 minutes to go Make sure I don't have anything else on here I still got my NDX It's not filled at 25 cents Vix really spiking I still got my 1DTE On that it'll close here shortly It's at 35% so it doesn't look like it'll hit It's 45% but it'll get Closed for profit here in 2 minutes I'm gonna go ahead and close it actually Yeah Vix really coming up I closed my 1DTE For about 35% Nice rookie trader Nice job Meet up 6.3% today Or on the Wuga GX heading up to 50.79 5 minutes to go It shows up 4.4% today Nice job Thanks Fiche I'll check that out Because of the way that Trade Steward had the Vix Versus How we manually look at it Or how Toss looks at it None of those fired for me So I had to manually fire my 1DTE And my re-entry Good thing I Did that because it ended up being a good Good profit 3.5 minutes to go I feel like the S&P is gonna make one more push Yeah there it goes I'll show you guys Something I've been doing here Well end of day Strategy I've been doing So I've been End of day I've been selling a butterfly Right at the money 5 wide If I can get 2 bucks Or better So I got filled at 205 today And then I'm immediately putting in An order for vertical spreads On either side And so Like what I did today Is I sold the 50.75 Put butterfly and then When it pushed up I just got Filled at a buck on the vertical So I've locked in a profit Of 1,050 And then if price comes Back down below 50.75 Before the close I could Book even more here So really if Basically the idea is if you can get In the last 10-15 minutes After you enter your short fly If you can get a move of $5 One strike Most likely you're gonna get filled On that vertical locking a profit Of a lotto to the other side So if the market were to drop here If it were to drop to 70 I'd make a little over 6,000 Which obviously not very likely But I have a little over $1,000 profit locked in 20 seconds to go Looks like around 50-80 Yeah, Suresh, I plan to Just do a little demo of trade Steward and Basically take an option omega And just kind of start from scratch And build a bot And then just kind of go through some of the details around it There is the bell 50-78 .23 I'll be talking more about this I've been just I've been trading it every day for about the last Several weeks trying to Iron out how I want to do it But I'll talk more about it Alright all Let's see tomorrow's live stream Tomorrow is the 28th Wednesday Chat will be streaming live in the morning for the mighty 90 and runners And then we'll be back for power hour And then if you want to Join the trade steward session Here in about 30 minutes The link is in the trade steward channel Alright all, take care, have a good night


Hello friends, welcome to the session I am Alka and today we are going to discuss without actually performing the long division state whether the following rational numbers will have a terminating decimal expansion or a non-terminating repeating decimal expansion. That is 35 upon 50. So we see that q equal to 50 and the factors for 50 are 552 that is 5 to the power 1. This implies that q is in the form of 2 to the power n and 5 to the power m. This implies that the rational number is terminating. Hope you understood the solution and enjoyed the session. Bye bye and take care.


Hi, I'm a full-time software developer and machine learning technical lead as well as a scientific and technical editor. My academic research background is in experimental physics where I develop holographic optical devices and studied complex systems. I've published in peer review journals and conference proceedings in these fields. I also hold a master's degree in computer science with a focus on artificial intelligence and machine learning. In addition to my professional work as a developer, I keep current with the state-of-the-art in AI and data science as an associate editor and writer with KDNuggets.com, the influential news and tutorial site covering these topics. For my scientific and technical editing work, I focus primarily on journal articles covering artificial intelligence, machine learning, and algorithms, as well as a variety of other topics in computer science and physics. I enjoy working with clients from around the world because there is so much awesome science happening today in every hemisphere. Our knowledge of how things work and the discovery of new ideas and techniques continue to increase exponentially. All this great science and technology is worthless unless it is communicated perfectly. So I consider myself as a key collaborator in your scientific work by helping you develop a thorough communication about your research that is clear, complete, and efficient. I've worked with hundreds of editing clients, bringing my expertise in scientific communication to help increase the impact of their research. So I encourage you to partner with a professional editor in all your scientific writing, and I look forward to working with you.


Hey guys, this is Andrea with Food and Mentory Adventures in Food, and I am here today to show you what's inside my pantry and freezer. Today is January 31st, and it is officially the last day of the Pantry and Freezer Challenge, so I thought I'd give you guys an update and show you how things look now. I will link the original pantry and freezer tour in the description box so you guys can see where we started out, but I'll start up here at the very top. Didn't really use a lot of stuff up there. I think Howard may have finished off a couple of boxes of cereal, but other than that, that's the only thing I think that got touched up there. Second shelf, I used a couple of things from the second shelf. We still have a lot of condiments and we still have a basket full of those, like different little seasoning packages, so we've got a ton of those. Did, I did make a dent in the canned goods. I don't think I really touched any of the beans, but I did use quite a bit of the tomato products and also a lot of the cream of soups. Didn't make a lot of headway on this shelf. This is where we keep the canned fruit, so I didn't use a lot of that and I also didn't use a lot of the barbecue sauces, things like that. A lot of that stuff did not get used. On this bottom shelf, I did use some of the pasta and in that basket, there's soups and things like that. There's also some skillet things like Velveeta and I did use a couple of boxes of the skillet mills. So here's the door. Didn't really make much headway on the door at all. I may have used a couple of seasoning packages from the door and really that's about it. So as you can see, still kind of got a ways to go. So let me show you the cabinet. Okay, so here's the cabinet. And as you can see, I did make some headway on the cabinet. There's a lot of empty spaces. There's nothing new in the cabinet, nothing that I added in there at all. So I did make a dent, but as you can see, we still have a lot of food. Have a long ways to go on that. So let me show you the kitchen freezer. Okay, so here is the kitchen freezer. And as you can see, I made some pretty good progress on the kitchen freezer. I've emptied out quite a bit of it and I will say that these egg rolls actually came from my outside freezer, which we'll go to in just a second. So I'm pulling stuff from my outside freezer and bringing it in here, but this stuff is pretty empty.  Sorry, it's from the outside freezer, but if I didn't have this in here, this is what the inside freezer would look like. Here's the door. The door pretty much looks the same. I don't think I touched too much stuff in there. And let me put this down and show you the drawers. The drawers kind of look the same. So here's one drawer. So I've still got a lot of vegetables and things like that. And here's the other drawer, more vegetables, but you know, the shelves pretty empty. So I'm proud of that. So let me take you outside to see that freezer. Okay, so I'm outside in the garage and this freezer will start beeping because I have the door open, but starting right up here, this top shelf made quite a bit of progress. Used a lot of chicken, I feel. The only thing that was added to this shelf were these two packages of bacon. One is here and one is up there that I had in my indoor freezer. So that's up there, but nothing else of course is new. I haven't bought anything. The second shelf, we made quite a bit of progress. We used a lot of Asian skillet mills and we had some mandu and that's one of the bags that you saw in the indoor freezer came from this shelf. I didn't touch any of the pie crust and that roast, as you can see, is still there. This shelf looks really good too. I don't think I've seen it this empty since we bought this freezer, but we still have a lot of meat down there. We still have a hand bone in there. We have more chicken in there. This bottom shelf, we made some progress. We ate a lot of frozen pizza. The pecan pie is still down there. We still have a package of taco shells. Let me show you the door. I don't think I made any cookies, so that shelf looks the same. I think I may have used a package or two of butter. And then we used quite a bit of ground beef. I have three pounds left, so I'll need to go get some more.  And then right here, I think I may have used a little bit, maybe a pound of breakfast sausage, that's it. So in this drawer, I used some smoked sausage, not a lot, but as you can see, we have a lot in there. Still got hot dogs, little smokies, a lot of smoked sausage. Let me show you this final bottom drawer. It's a lot in here, but we still have a lot. A lot of chicken. I honestly did not realize how much chicken we have. I mean, I tend to buy it when the phone's down and then freeze it. So we've still got a lot of chicken in there to use. But anyway, this is the freezer tour. As you can see, we still have a lot of food. So I'm going to continue working on my freezer and pantry. I hope for those of you that participated in the freezer and pantry challenge, I hope it was helpful for you and that you were able to go through some of your stockpile. I really appreciated all the support of those of you doing it right along with me during this time. So I hope you guys enjoyed this video. If you did, please make sure to give us a thumbs up. And if you have not subscribed to our channel, I certainly hope you'll do so. Thanks so much for watching and we'll see you guys next time.


Next question is from it's lean. What are your best tips for gut health? Rule number one maintain good motility. Okay, what that means is you want to have at least one Full bowel movement a day if not, you know two bowel movements a day now I know a lot of people listening don't have a bowel movement every day and in fact even Western medicine Doctors will tell you it's perfectly normal to you know only poop every other day or once every three days But yeah, yes, they will and the reason why they say that's because so many people are like that that they're like Oh, it's perfectly normal. Now. Here's why it's important when you're not getting rid of waste On a regular basis that can cause a situation where bacteria starts to Back up and build in your small intestines and you'll get something called SIBO Which is small intestinal bacterial Overgrowth now, we didn't know much about this not that long ago But today we find that a majority of irritable bowel syndrome issues is due to SIBO so when they test people said irritable bowel syndrome used to be this catch-all phrase where doctors didn't know what the hell is going on So like oh you got stomach problems. We did we know we did an endoscopy We did a colonoscopy. Everything looks healthy. Can't figure out what's going on irritable bowel syndrome Just means you ever it really there's no cure. It's just here's your problem. You have a sensitive gut But now when they go in and they test People with IBS or I be you know IBD or whatever what they find now is that a majority of them have this bacterial Overgrowth in their small intestines and what helps prevent that from happening is good motility So I would say number one Eat in a way that promotes that and if you find foods that reduce that Then maybe stay away from those and by the way if you're prone to diarrhea that doesn't necessarily mean you have good motility This is something else. I learned Oftentimes diarrhea is also a sign of Constipation because the body's getting rid of fluid, but the real waste is kind of sticking and staying stuck there now How do you get good motility? Individually there's gonna be foods that might bother you stay away from those you'll probably know what they are Diversity eat lots of well-cooked vegetables. This is important if you want To improve your motility vegetables can help But cook them well that makes it work even more if you just eat a bunch of raw vegetables or not that much cooked vegetables You might actually find More gas and you know distension and bloat But if you boil them or cook them really well They actually breaks them down enough to where you can eat a large amount and you have better motility I think one of the keys to gut health is is to first figure out What is potentially invading right so that normally if someone has you know irritable bowel syndrome or gut issues or SIBO? It's like there is something there's something that is Affecting that that you're consistently eating and more often than not it's the things that you gravitate towards the most In fact Doug is the intuitive guide still are we still half off on that? Yes, okay? So the intuitive guide this is I mean I recommend everybody does this even if you don't have gut issues, but to eliminate Most of the things that are most commonly You know problems for most people that have gut issues We show you how to kind of eliminate that and then how to also Slowly introduce and then what signs that you're looking for what am I trying to pay and you know I think the first step to having a healthy gut is becoming aware of how your body can express it and understanding that We're all very individualized right so you know I I may have we like let's say Justin and I both Let's just say avocados irritate both of our guts But his he may express it through headaches and I might have my psoriasis flare up, right? So you can't just pair a food or pair an issue with you know Somebody else's symptom that they see you've got to know what all the different things that you could be looking for and then Paying attention to when you introduce these foods into your diet. Are they affecting you in any of these ways, right?   That's actually believe it or not the number one reason why people have motility issues They don't drink enough water. Sometimes it's increasing your water intake We'll have you you know pooping or whatever more often Artificial sweeteners often in my experience cause problems for people if they start to consume lots of sucralose Or aspartame so you might want to you know, stay away from those things as well And then the common offenders that Adam was referring to are gluten dairy soy flour nuts and egg whites those are the and legumes I mean, I know it sounds like a lot, but those are the common offenders with gluten dairy and And nuts and soy being the most out of that category So you can even just cut them out when I say cut them out They have to be completely out completely out of your diet not even have a little bit do that for 30 days and then Introduce one by itself for a week See how you feel if you feel good introduce the next one for it's a tedious process But up until now there's nothing that is come close to being able to identify food and tolerances Quite as effectively


Next, we're going to get to our special guest that we have with us today. Danny Pummel was appointing Acting Undersecretary for Benefits in the Department of Veterans Affairs on October 19, 2015. In his position, he leads more than 20,000 employees through a nationwide network of 56 regional offices, special processing centers, and VBA headquarters. He directs the execution of nearly 90 billion in direct benefits to veterans and their dependents. Mr. Pummel was retired as a colonel from the United States Army after serving 33 years. He served as an adjunct general corps officer and an enlisted field artillery and infantry soldier in a variety of assignments. He has served at every level in the Army from squad through headquarters department of the Army. Commanding two separate battalions, his duties have taken him to Panama, Central America, Korea, Europe, the Balkans, the Middle East, and other various locations throughout the United States. Please give a warm welcome to Mr. Pummel as he will provide you with an update on the current VBA activities. Yeah, 33 years in the Army and I can't work a clicker. You can tell I was a colonel. I'm not a sergeant when I retire. Good morning, everybody. I am honored to be here when Gary and Jim invited me to come speak at the DAV. I initially told them yes. As you know, there's a lot of things going on in the world of VA right now. We had a couple of judges that wanted me to be someplace else this morning. But through a lot of manipulation over the weekend, we were able to work it out so that I could come here instead because I think this is more important. Just so you know, I belong to lots of the veteran service organizations because I think it's the right thing to do. But I'm only a life member of one. Guess which one it is? Yeah. And when I go through this brief, you'll see why I have done that. And it was a long time ago before I even got into this job. And every time I look at the statistics, I realize that I made the right decision when I made my decision.  But I'd love to be in the office to hear you interact. That must be really interesting. What I'm going to do this morning is I'm just going to take you through a briefing and show you the state of where we are in VBA today, what's happening in VBA, what we've done, where we're going with the new secretary, Secretary Bob, as everybody calls him. I've all heard from Sloane Gibson, who came in and spoke yesterday, used to run the USO for the United States. I like working for him, very impressive, very eager, honest guy wants to do the right thing. And it's a pleasure working for him and Bob McDonald. This is the first slide. Basically it's thanking DAV, 270 national service officers, 100 offices, representation to 340,000 veterans. And then when I get through the briefing here, you're going to see that in 14 and 15, you all submitted more claims than any other veteran service organization and the most fully developed claims compared to the other veteran service organizations. And the most electronic compensation claims of any VSO for two years in a row, 10,014 triple to 30,015. And we're already seeing where that number is easily going to double or triple this year. That's huge. It's huge from the perspective of that you're most important, you're helping veterans. You're making sure that veterans get the compensation benefits and services that they've earned in service to this nation. But equally, the important is every claim that you all do, and when I get through the briefing here, and you see the big numbers that DAV is doing for the fully developed claims, those are claims that somebody in the federal government doesn't have to do. So you guys are saving the taxpayers a tremendous amount of money by doing this. And frankly, while the most important thing is taking care of the veterans, we can't discount what it does for the taxpayers. You look at our nation, you look at the deficit and some of the costs we have right now, anything that we can do as citizens or organizations to support the government, to support the agencies that have supported this country, it's the right thing to do. Take a little bit of burden off the back of the taxpayers here. This is just a overall slide that shows the things that we're doing inside of the Veterans Benefits Administration. Going around there, you can see education, compensation, pension, fiduciary. The bottom line is that circle in the center, 22,000 employees. Last year we paid out $96 billion in benefits to veterans, $96 billion. This year we're going to pay out $106 billion in benefits to veterans. This is up from five years ago when we only paid about between $49 and $52 billion a year. So that means that we're paying more money to more veterans, approving more claims than we ever had in the history of the VA. Not only are we paying more in claims, we're doing more education, we're doing more fiduciary, we're doing more home loans. As a matter of fact, we are the number one home loan servicer in the country. And during the recent home loan crisis where people were losing their homes to bankruptcies for closures and short sales, the VA had the best record of anybody in the nation at keeping people in their homes. And we did that by making telephone calls to individual veterans and trying to work with them one on one to help them. We couldn't do it in every case, but we did the best we could to try to keep veterans in their homes. The key to us was a veteran has a place to live. This is the, I talked about coming up from about $50 billion in claims to $90 billion in claims. Along with that, our workload increased. Our workload in the last five years has gone up 132%. That goes back to what I said at the beginning. There's no way that we can continue on this glide path. And we couldn't have got from that 2.74 million issues to the 6.35 million issues without veteran service organizations helping us with the claims. You guys did over 100,000 claims for us last year. And you're probably gonna do more this year. I'll get more into the numbers in a little bit. We expect that number, that glide path to continue to rise. One of the things people forget when they send a nation to war is that right now, the bulk of our claims are pretty much the Vietnam era veteran. Service members and the men and women that served in Vietnam. About 10, 15, 20 years after war, that's when we start getting older. And the little things that happened to us while we were serving, particularly in combat zones, start to become more aggravated and you have a lot more issues. Think of all the young men and women right now that have served Desert Shield, Desert Storm, Iraq, Afghanistan, multiple deployments. And all the issues that they're going to have into the future. They're gonna be our next generation, it doesn't go away. And that still isn't over, they're still over there fighting. They're still over there risking their lives and limb to serve this nation. We gotta make sure that we have the service and benefits in place in the future. And veteran service organizations helping us because that line's gonna keep going up. It's gonna keep going up because it should go up. We should be providing benefits and services to our veterans. Somebody asked me the other day, I was prepping for a hearing up in front of Congress, Chairman Miller and his crew. And they were looking at the numbers and saying, wow, you guys are paying out a lot more compensation.  And I go, no, I'm not concerned at all. I think that veterans today are more educated than they ever have been in the history. Good examples, those commercials we just saw up here, those are huge. Veterans are gonna see those commercials and veterans that haven't taken opportunity of the benefits and services that are available for them, are gonna see those advertisements. They're gonna call up your DAV representatives out there. And then they're gonna be requesting compensation, pension, fiduciary, home loans, education. All the things that they have earned serving this nation. And that's a good thing because that leads to a strong nation because it keeps our recruiting up and retention in our military surfaces. It's all a great big giant circle. Probably the biggest thing people talk about is PTSD. And at the end of that conversation it was, do you think that PTSD is overprescribed that too many people are applying for PTSD? And I say, I personally feel the exact opposite. I feel that PTSD is undersubscribed and not enough people are applying for PTSD. I can tell you right now off the top of my head, without even thinking, the names of ten friends and acquaintances who have PTSD who won't get help for it. And they won't get help for it for a lot of reasons. They're too proud, they have a security clearance, they don't want their family to find out, they're doing other things. They're afraid to impact on their job or their education, things like that. I'm one of those people that believe that if you serve in the military, whether you want to combat or not, it changes you. And if you serve in combat and the things that you go through, even training for combat and stuff like that, it changes you fundamentally inside for the rest of your life. And that everybody needs to get some kind of help, some kind of counseling. Or at least people to talk to. That's where the veteran service organizations come in handy. It's getting groups of men and women together on a regular basis where they can talk about some of these issues. But from the PTSD perspective, I think more people need to apply for PTSD, I think we should screen everybody for PTSD. And I wish there was some kind of test or something that we could give somebody because I think it's a lot worse than anybody really thinks it is. We got to get a handle on it. This is our compensation education voc rehab. And this is just to show that not just our claims have gone up, but everything is going up. That glide path is an actual glide path that shows where we're going. And you can see the arrow is going up, it's not going to level out, it's not going to come down. We got more and more veterans that are more and more educated. They're going to have access to the benefits and services. They know how to use them and they're going to come in and be filing their claims mostly through the veteran service organizations like yours. This is just a list of things that we have done over the past couple years. When I came to the VA in 2010 from the Department of the Army, it was an interesting story. I got called by the Secretary Shinseki's office and the then chief of staff asked me if I was interested in coming over to work for the VA. And I told him, no. And he said, why not?  And he said, so he said, what?  And he goes, it certainly does not. And I go, well, it's here's, and I talked about here's my claim, here's what I went through. Here's my attempts to get through on the telephone and things like that. And he says, well, get over here and talk to me. Well, I got over there. Of course, they don't talk to you. They send you into Secretary Shinseki's office. That it's a whole new approach because he's such a great man and he starts telling you about the things that are going on and the help he needs. Of all places to put me, they put me in compensation and pension service. They made me the deputy under the director of compensation and pension. I couldn't even spell compensation and pension. You guys did my claim for me. I couldn't figure it out. It was too complicated. Well, I got in there and I thought, okay, how bad can this be? Okay, it's 2010, guess what? No automation, paper. How did we get to 2010 in the United States of America and we're doing benefits and compensation and home loans and education, a voc rehab fiduciary for veterans of this country. And we don't have an automated system. It was nuts. They took me to a regional office where they showed me a claim that was higher than I was. It was that tall. It was a six foot, one inch tall claim. I'm six foot tall. Of course, it's hard to pile it that high, but you know. So how do you possibly go through that? How do you possibly get a claim done in any amount of time when you have that much paper? And it wasn't just compensation. It was everything that we did was like that. Well, over the years, we've now automated our education program. We've automated the fiduciary program. We've automated the death benefits. We're in the process of automating the claims process. We're not completely there with VBMS. There's still a lot of things that we have to do to make it better. But most of this has been done in the last two, the last two and a half years through the VBA transformation. I'm proud of what they've done. Some people complain about the amount of money that we spent to get an automated system. I've dealt with a lot of automated systems. I worked for the federal government for almost 43 years now. I have never seen an automated system that we're able to put in place that costs this little amount of money, because I think it was a little amount of money, that was this effective in this short of time. Look at all the other automation systems out there in the federal government that don't work. This one works. I'm waiting for somebody to write a book. I'm hoping that Alice and Hickey, my predecessor, will come back and write a book about the transformation, about how effective this was, and how much did it change the life for veterans. A lot of the things that you see on here that we've done, reducing the backlog 87%, inventory by 60%, improving accuracy, all that 18 month period, that was because of an automation system that we didn't have before, because people were using paper. I can tell you today, and I'm proud to say it, that we are now 100% automated in the claims process. And we're very close to being 100% automated. When you send mail to us, all the mail's going to go to one location. It's going to get scanned. We're not going to lose mail anymore. We'll have everything. We'll be able to associate it with a claim, with a claim number. And that's something that really should have been done in the 70s or 80s in this country. It shouldn't have had to wait till 2010 to happen. But now it's finally happened, and we're finally on the right track. This is a pictorial depiction of the claims process. You can see where we were all the way out there in 2009, 2010. And then you can see we put things on there about the transformation. You see the agent orange, the little circle. That had part to do with this, but not a huge part. The aging of the Vietnam era veterans coming in. This same thing's going to happen for Iraq Afghanistan veterans. It's going to happen with the Desert Shield Desert Storm veterans, because it happened with the Vietnam veterans, happened with the Korea veterans, the World War II veterans. We know this is going to happen in our history. We go to war. We plan for war. We go to Congress. We request a budget to fight the war, to do all the things that need to be for war. But we don't realize that sometime in the future there's going to be a bill to the American people, and that bill is more than just money. The bill is broken bodies, broken minds that are going to happen in the future, because those are one of the repercussions of war. So that hill, if you ran the history of the United States, the wars of the United States, all the way back to the Revolutionary War, you would see that over time after every single war. So how do we get, we're down here to 82,500 claims right now. And in our peak, we are at 611,000 claims. We attacked it pretty well. We got a handle on it. How do we make sure that doesn't happen again? How do we make sure that it stays between 80 and 100,000 down here at the bottom, and that we anticipate the influxes of veterans from the current conflicts that we're doing right now, and make sure we're taking care of it? Well, I'll tell you how we do it. We do it by partnering with the veteran service organizations. We use your expertise. We use your ability to get out there to the grassroots and the communities down to the individual veteran level. We use your ability to help us with fully developed claims, to help us with our appeals process, things like that, so that we can get ahead of this bubble and defeat it before it happens. I am not a big believer that we have to continue to throw money and manpower against this. I think if we work together with the government, the veteran service organizations, local nonprofits, local businesses, and just the American people veterans out there, that together you can make it work instead of relying on just one agency or one group to do it. This shows our transformation goals for quality. I think the most important thing on here is the chart across the bottom. If you see there, it says rolling 12-month averages, it shows you the things that we're measured on. Claims issued, inferred issues, development letters, and if you look at the numbers across the bottom, you see that we're at 98.6%, 99%, 99.8%, 97%, 98.8%. Now, if you look at the bottom, the total, statistically, if you take all of those and you do a quantitative analysis on them, you only come up with 88.8%. So in order to get a higher than a 90%, you literally have to be at 100% in everything. Well, guess what, guys? There's nothing in this world that's 100%. You can't do anything at 100%. So my pledge to you is that we're gonna do the best we can, we're gonna stay on top of our quality, we're gonna continue to push our quality, but I think our quality between 95 and 98%, that should always be our goal. You literally can't get past 98%, it can't be done. We've had outside agencies come in and look at our quality and say, how can we get from 98% to 100%, how do we get there? They say, you can't. It's just, it's not possible in a human process to get to 100%. If you have a manufacturing process, you can do that. You can fine-tone the screws and the edges and the mathematics and stuff, but you can't do that with human beings. When you're dealing with human beings, there's always gonna be a little bit of error in there, and that's okay because it's the right thing to do, but we'll continue to push it. Some of the important things that we have done, the VBMS system, the automated system I was talking about, one of the biggest advantages of the VBMS system is that for the first time ever now, we can look at my level at my office and I can see what mistakes people are making. I can see if a individual in St. Louis is making a mistake, or I can see if the whole St. Louis office is making a mistake, or a team in Florida is making a mistake, or the whole country is making a mistake. We can direct our training now. I can retrain an individual if that individual keeps doing the same thing wrong all the time. I can retrain a team if the team's getting it wrong. I can retrain a regional office, or if it's systematic to all of VBA, we can retrain all of VBA. We have to do this same thing with the appeals process. I have to be able to know inside the appeals process where the issues are, what's happening, so that I can redirect training so that I can prevent some of the appeals from ever getting into the appeals process. So nice thing about automation, it gives you that opportunity to dig back, find out where you're making mistakes, and more importantly to train your people on correcting those mistakes before they happen. Today the average days that a veteran's waiting for a claim is 91 days. That's a 191 day reduction from the 280 days that it was taking in March of 2013. The average days it completes to complete a claim is 128 days, that's a 59 day reduction. We want to get that lower. We want to make a claim available to a veteran as quickly as we possibly can. Fully developed claims gonna help us with that. The benefits delivery on discharge, quick start. There's lots of things that we're working right now to try to speed that up. People ask me, well pretty soon you're gonna have zero claims in your backlog. You're gonna have zero claims over 125 days. No we're not. We're always gonna have claims over 125 days in our backlog. There's lots of reasons where a claim can't get done. Once again, we're dealing with human beings. Somebody adds something to their claim or it's a very complex claim involving radiation or it's a claim where we're having a hard time getting records and we have to go out and get buddy statements and stuff like that. There's always gonna be individual issues and when you're dealing with one and a quarter million veterans a year, even if a small percentage, one tenth of one hundredth of a percent of those veterans have issues with their claims, the numbers are already up to 50, 60, 70,000 claims. I personally believe that we're always gonna have between 80 and 100,000 claims that over 125 days, I'll commit to you that will push really hard to make sure that those claims don't languish out there and that we're doing special care for those veterans but the vast majority of our claims we wanna have done in under about 100 days and that's our goal and if you set your standards high we'll continue to eat away at that and push that down. This is one of the slides that I really like. This is the total rating receipts on the left from DAV and on the right is the fully developed claims received from the DAV. You can see in 2014, y'all did 216,000 rating receipts for us, up 234,000 for 15 and it already looks like it's on track to exceed that by 15 to 20% in 2016. More important is the fully developed claims over there. One of the things that I had talked to Gary when we had a little conversation this morning was these don't just equate to claims. These are individuals. These are human beings. You saw that number, that 611,000 backlog. These are 100,000 veterans out of there that y'all did for us, that you did a fully developed claim. There's 100,000 veterans there that the tax payers didn't have to pay the most expensive part of our claim which is the development phase. Trying to develop the claim. Get the records, get the information, talk to the individual, talk to buddies, get buddies, all the things that you have to do to develop that claim. That's the most time consuming, most expensive. We have a national organization out here helping us do that. That's better for veterans, better for the country, better for VA, that's a pretty neat thing. The other VSOs are doing the same thing for us but they're not at the level that you guys are at right now. You guys are the best and you're the best by a long stretch right now. My favorite subject, appeals. We have a problem in our appeals process. I am sure when Sloan Gibson talked to you yesterday he said in what world would an appeals process that takes as long as we're taking to an appeal to be acceptable for veterans and for this nation? That's not acceptable. It's wrong. It's broken. It's been broken for a long time. We have to fix it. Part of the reason it's broken is we put all of our emphasis on the claims backlog for the last couple of years, okay? I'm not gonna stand up here all the, you that know me know I'm a pretty straightforward guy. We put a tremendous amount of effort on the claims backlog, okay? We didn't let appeals, we didn't let fiduciary education or anything fall by the sideline. You saw that chart before. We brought those all up a little bit but you know what, here's the claims. We brought them up like that and here's everything else we brought them up like that. So how do we fix VBA? How do we get to the system where we don't let the crisis desure destroy everything that we're doing, okay? How do we, how do I attack the appeals process now and not let everything else go by the wayside? I've committed to Sloan Gibson and Bob McDonald that will provide them a campaign plan that says here's how we're gonna attack the appeals, here's how we're gonna work the appeals but we're gonna do it in a way we're not gonna let everything else go to hell for want of a better word. So we're not playing whack-a-mole so that I don't solve the appeals process and three years later I've got something else that is just as big that has popped up there but once again, we can't do this by ourself inside of VBA. It's not possible for us to do this. It's gonna take a huge commitment and a lot of help by the VSOs. The first help that we're asking for is the depth sex Sloan asked all the veteran service organizations and you guys have taken the lead in this once again to do a three-day offsite with VBA and to sit down, go through the appeals process and map it out and figure out is there a better way of doing this? How do we do this better from the veteran perspective and you guys know the veteran perspective better than anybody. How do we change what we're doing so we can do it faster, do it fair, the veterans know what's gonna happen and there's some consistency and an idea of what's gonna happen in the system.  One of the big things we have to change is nobody can understand our documents.  I got something from the VA. It looks like they denied my claim but I don't know what they denied or what's going on. Well, somebody asked me the other day, they said, hey, this veteran's really upset. He got his claim back. We denied his appeal at the drill level and he doesn't understand what we've said on here and I said, oh, it's those legal medical terms. Give it to me, let me take a look at it. They brought it to me. I have no freaking idea what it means. I could not understand it. I called a doctor friend and I said, hey, this claim says that we did this and this and this. What does that mean? Just a second, let me look that up, he says. So that's our doc. That's a VA doc doing this. So I said, okay, something's wrong. I got it that there's a legal process in the United States that's very important. I know words are very, very important. I know that from experience because I say the wrong thing all the time. So I know it's important to have those legal words on there but why can't we put in plain language a sheet on the top of that that says, Sergeant Smith, we denied your claim because you didn't bring us a copy of your last X-ray on your knee from your doctor. If you could get a copy of that X-ray and bring it in or bring it to the DAV and have them bring it in or you come to us and we'll do the X-ray, then we can look at that, we can determine your claim. We don't say that. We use all these big fancy words and we reference Title 38, we reference the Vassar D and the Physician's Desk Reference Librarian and nobody can figure out what the hell we're saying. Our smart guys that do the claim, they know it inside now but they're not the one filing the claim, they're the one doing it. So we have to do that. The status quo in the appeals process is not acceptable. It shouldn't be acceptable for veterans, it's not acceptable for taxpayers. We have to figure out that. The bottom line on this slide is how do we come up with the simplified appeals process that's timely, simple, fair and provides a final answer. One of the things that we're doing because of the, a lot of pressure from the Veterans Service Organizations, particularly the DAV, is in the last couple weeks we've put more people on our appeals process inside of our regional offices. I have taken all of our overtime that was given to the decision review officers to do claims, they're no longer allowed to do that. Now they have to work on appeals in overtime and last week we were able to get an additional $10 million and that entire $10 million went to overtime for DROs to process appeals, okay? You clap now but that's not gonna put a big dent in it. I loved the commercials that you guys sent up here. I wished, and I asked Gary, I said, who did those? And he said, we did them in-house. I mean, we gotta figure out who you're in-house. People are, those are brilliant. That's, you know, you guys did a great job. Did he really? You? I need to get your name after this. Guess who he works for now. No. One of our biggest problems is, how do you appeal to today's veterans? How do you use social media? We're terrible at that. We're still, remember I talked about our paper process and everything? We're horrible at doing that kind of stuff. You guys broke the code. I was engaged, those were, they were just long enough to catch your intention. I mean, I had no idea that there were seven ways you could do an appeal, do a claim. You know, I'm the acting undersecretary for benefits. I didn't know that if you screwed up Invoke Rehab that you could file an appeal or a claim on that. I had no idea. I knew the rest of them, but I didn't know that one. So I learned something in a 30-second thing that I'll probably never forget, from those two little stick guys. You did a really good job, stick guys. Yeah. So how do we do that? We gotta get you guys help. We gotta educate veterans. We gotta tell them, here's how the process works. We gotta get rid of all the legal garbage, all the medical garbage, so they know what they need. We have to have the decision review officers back into the ROs where a veteran could come into the RO office with their VSO representative, sit down with the decision review officer saying, here's what we found, here's what we need, resolve it at that level and resolve it quickly. Somehow we gotta get through. We have about a 400,000 veteran backlog and appeals. I gotta get that knocked out. We gotta get that undone and I think with you guys help, we can get that done and I'm really looking forward to see what we come out of in that three-day process. This is a little bit about our national work queue. The national work queue, we rolled it out last week to eight stations and it's in a pilot right now. My intent is if the pilot works to roll it out to two larger stations later on this week and then they're gonna come back and brief me and if it continues to work well, then we'll roll it out across the nation. What this does is because we're fully automated now, we have automated claims process and we have an automated mail process, we have the ability to do a claim anywhere in the country. Now a lot of people have come to me and said, wait a second, that's not gonna be good because you took Johnny's claim and you didn't now pass so and I'm here in Roanoke, Virginia, how can I help Johnny on the claim? Well, what this does, this gives us the ability to send the claim to the next available person wherever they are in the country to do that claim when they have the capacity to do that claim. It also gives us the ability to find people that are really good, that are experts at certain kind of claims like PTSD or back injuries or knee injuries or TBI and to make sure that they get the claims so that we can raise the quality of the claims so we can do the claims faster. It doesn't take away your ability to do the claim, you will still, as a veteran service officer, still be able to look at any claim anywhere in the country. You'll still be able to go into any RO and review that claim and the DRO in your state will still be doing that claim for the people in your state. Now the first checkpoint in the national work queue is the computer says, is there availability in this state, in this RO, to do the claim? We want it done in that state if at all possible. If we can't do it in that state, then we send the claim to where it can be electronically done the quickest and the fastest. The best example of how this works out in the world is, I was on vacation up in Northern Michigan, vacation in Michigan in the winter, that's an oxymoron, right? And I had to go to CVS Pharmacy to get my prescription because I had forgot them in my bags, caught up in that TSA packing and stuff and I just left them on the counter. And so I went to CVS, CVS was able to type in my stuff and bring up all my prescriptions, all my history, all my information, right there on the computer, they issued me the new prescription and then my pharmacist and my doctor back here saw that I had got an extra in my prescription while I was up in Northern Michigan and then they worked out my prescription when I got back. So our goal is to have every VSO, every VSR, RVSR, anywhere in the country to be able to look at any claim whenever they want. You should be able to pull up on your computer when we get to the final stage on this. Any veteran that you have responsibility for his or her claim, see the claim, see exactly what we're doing, see what the VSR, RVSR is doing, what they've done and what their decisions are and contact them if you want and find out what's going on with that claim. And more importantly, we'll get back to the DRO there. I really think this is going to give us the opportunity to break to the next level so that we'll be able to do claims a little bit fast, a little bit of higher quality. What I'm hoping is that this gives me the ability to remember at the beginning when I was talking about that quality where I could train my people, I want to be able to find out what at the DRO level in the appeals process, what decisions they're making. Because I believe, and this is all anecdotal, I don't have evidence yet, that the same guys are making the same mistakes in the same ROs. If I can figure out what those mistakes are and how to correct them, then I can direct training to them or send a team in and get them to correct it.   My buddies from my DAV chapters wow that big, because they send me most of them. But they come into me and then I give them to the smart people that work for me and they work them for us. And so when the supervisors come back and complain about, why are you allowing veterans to continue to do this? I said, I'll stop doing it when all the veterans are wrong. But so far they haven't been wrong. It's about 50-50. About half of the ones that come to me, we made a mistake.  We didn't look at the right piece of paper. We didn't advise the veteran properly.  Now the nice thing is if they come through a VSO, especially DAV because of you guys' experience and training, and I've been to your training, you do a good job, there's less mistakes and you guys do a better job. And I think it's because you have the opportunity to sit one-on-one with that veteran across the table and you and him or her can have that conversation and work your way through it. We don't have that. We're looking at computers and data and stuff like that and it makes it a little bit tougher. So I think this will give us the opportunity to be able to do claims a little bit better for everybody throughout the country. Improving the veteran's experience. The secretary's number one plank in his platform for improving VA is improving the veteran experience. He says, you guys, I know you're the federal government. I know we're the federal government but you gotta act like a business. The customer is always right and you have to please the customer. The customer is your veteran. If the veteran isn't happy, if the veteran doesn't like what's going on inside of the process, then you're wrong. You have to improve the experience. What he's asked me to do, he said, okay, what do you think the worst part of the veteran experience is? That was easy. I used my experience. I said the compensation and pension exam. It was horrible. I didn't understand it. I didn't know why I was going. The doctor didn't tell me what was happening. I didn't know what he or she was measuring. I didn't know what the results meant. I didn't know how they tied it back to my claim. None of it made any sense. Well, we went out, we did a survey. Guess what? Still like that. Veterans don't understand the compensation and pension process. So we have a whole team right now working. How do we make that more veteran-centric? How do we call the veteran say, hey, we're scheduling you an exam in Roanoke. When are you available for exam? We don't do that right now. What doctor calls you up and says, hey, Captain Smith, you have an exam next Wednesday at nine o'clock. Be there or canceling your claim. Docs don't do that. Somebody from the office calls you up and says, hey, it's time for your exam. What days do you have available? That's the start. Instead of directing, talk to the veteran. They have jobs. They have lives.  So that's the first part. And then what's gonna happen when you get in there? I love those little commercials. Again, I'm gonna steal them all. Yeah. We need to have something like that to our veterans that says, here's a compensation and pension examination. Here's what you can expect. Here's what we're looking for. Here's what we're gonna measure. Here's what you should bring with you. Here's the kind of questions the doctor's gonna ask you. This is not a medical examination.  We're measuring stuff. Okay. And we should, for God's sakes, if we tell somebody to bring their records, their files, we should look at it.  You know, so what to expect when you get there. And then when you get there, we have to educate our docs. Now, something that's happening this year that has never happened before in VA, for the first time in VA, compensation and pension is going to control all the exams. Okay. In the past, we had a huge contract with VHA, with the veterans health. And so their docs and the contract examiners working inside the VHA were doing all the exams. We now are running that contract outside of VBA. So we're setting the perimeters of the contract. We're telling the docs what they have to do, how they have to treat their customers, what their standards are to keep the contract, all those kinds of things. And we're sending inspectors out to make sure they're doing it from a compensation and pension perspective. It's not that they were doing it wrong before, but medical people running compensation and pension is different than compensation and pension people running compensation and pension because there's a specific outcome that we need from those examinations. Then it goes further than that. What's the office like when you get there? Is it clean? Is it comfortable? Did it was the doc respectable for you? Did the doc understand what your military service was? Did they look at all the information? Did we accept private medical evidence? It was supposed to accept private medical evidence. We're supposed to look at it. And then when you leave the follow-on, okay? Here's what's gonna happen now. Here's what's gonna happen with this paperwork. Here's how long you're gonna have to wait. Here's what the follow-up was gonna be and then let the people know what's happening. When I got done with my compensation and pension exam, and oh by the way, I got mine done by the military. I was telling somebody this this morning. I was still on active duty. I got everything done by the military. They did all the tests and everything. And then I went to the VA hospital and they did all the same tests over again. And that was the joint medical examination where they were doing one exam. But I did everything twice. What a waste for taxpayers. I mean, we had a shortage of medical people out there. It's hard for people to get appointments. Free up those doctors. You don't need to check something that's already been checked before. That's already done, guys. We gotta figure that out. And so I left my compensation exam and I went home and I waited and then six months later, still nothing. And I don't need the compensation. I'm retired from the Army. I'm working for the Department of Defense. But I'm curious. I wanna know. And so I keep beating up DAV who's my VSO. What's going on? What's going on? What's going on?  We'll get you when we can. 18 months later, I got another call. That's why I told him the VA sucked when I went to the VA. It was just. And it wasn't because it took so long to do my claim. It was because I didn't know. If somebody would have taken the time to tell me, hey, Danny, here's what's happening. We have a 600,000 claim backlog. We're gonna do the wounded combat vets that are coming back right now first. Then we're gonna do the people that are at risk of homelessness. Then we're gonna do the PTSD guys. Then we're gonna do, if they told me what they were doing, I would have bought it. And I would have been okay with it, but they didn't tell me anything. So the last part of this process is keeping people informed, telling them what's gonna happen, telling them what's happening with the process so at least they know. If people know what's gonna happen, they may not like it, but I think they feel a little bit better about it. Dependency claim processing. We have a nightmare in dependency claims. We have a contractor that's working for us right now that has knocked out a whole lot of dependency claims. We're at the limit of our legal authority on the contract because there's this thing about what's inherently governmental, what's not. I like the contractor because for a very little amount of money, it's incredibly cost effective. They can go through, they can make the calls, they can knock these out. We're trying to get permission to expand that right now to give us more legal authority because I think this is the right thing to do. The other thing that I'm trying to do, I think is the right thing to do is when somebody calls up and says, hey, I just got married, why can't I ask that person, okay, give me the date of the marriage. I need your spouse's name, his or her social security number, and the license number off the license. If you give me that, what do I care? Why don't I just approve it and start paying you for being married? Same thing if you have a kid. When you have a child now, you have to get a social security number. The IRS requires it. Okay, what's the date of birth? Give me the birth certificate number and give me the social security number of the child. We have a cross feed with the IRS. We have a cross feed with social security. We check, make sure it's not a duplicate that you're not scamming. That's pretty easy. And we just pay, and we should do, now I don't have the authority to do this, but we're trying. I believe that most veterans are honest. I believe that 99.99999 are veterans are not gonna be as you. They're gonna tell you the truth. They're gonna do the right thing because people generally do the right thing, especially veterans. They're people of their word. Why don't we just take them at their word, pay them for what we can pay them, and then at the end of the year, do the same thing the IRS does. Do a five or a 10% audit. Audit and go in and see if we made any mistakes. If somebody made a mistake, okay, got it.  You don't have 20 kids, you only have two. There shouldn't have been a zero on there. You know, we're gonna take this money away from you.  If somebody commits fraud, prosecute them. Just like the IRS.  We do that already in the VA. If people commit, it doesn't happen very often. Contrary to popular belief, it doesn't happen very often in the VA. But when a veteran does commit fraud, our investigators go after them or they use the federal investigators, they do whatever's necessary to take care of it. I think we need to get to the process where as a country, as an institution, we trust our veterans. We take them at their word. Dependency is so insignificant and it seems like such an easy thing. We shouldn't have a 200,000 person backlog in there. That's something we could knock out in a couple months and we're trying to work that pretty hard. The last couple of slides that I'm done, this is just the overall budget for the year. We're going through the budget hearings right now. Tomorrow is the Senate hearing. Last week was the Congressional hearing. Your representatives are going through the same hearings. They usually go before us in the budget process. We're all working through this together. The big thing in our budget right now is we're asking for more money for the appeals, more people for the appeals. They gave me 300 people in 15 and 16. I hired them early. I hired them in the middle of 15 so that we could train them up to say they'd be ready to go on 16. I'm gonna do the same thing this year. We have another batch that's coming in 17 and my intent is to hire them early too. Just use hire lag, because with a big organization, there's people coming and going all the time. So when we have vacancies, I'll hire more appeals people and try to get the appeals people out there. Problem with appeals is DROs are pretty specialized people. Not everybody can do that, so you just have to have the right person in there. This is our vision for the future. This is our way ahead. These are all the things we want to do. You can take a look at that later if you want. This is just more read. My eyes are so old, I can't read it and the page is right in front of me, so I don't know how you guys can read it back there, but it's a lot about where we're going for the future. It's a lot more automation, it's a lot more veteran-centric, taking care of the veterans. I love Secretary McDonald's pyramid where he's at the bottom and the veterans are at the top, where he turned the pyramid upside down. So instead of the hierarchical pyramid, we have all the veterans at the bottom and they gotta work their way up through the process to get to him. He turned it upside down. He calls it servant leadership. And we all learn that in the military.  Now we gotta convince VA and other government bureaucracies that will take care of American citizens that that's the kind of leadership we need the government to. This is my last slide. No, you'll be glad to see me out of here. You can see our transformation. 80% down on the backlog. Quality is 98% in all but one category and that's at 97.5. Average days down to 91%. You know, guys, thank you very much. No BS and not pandering to the audience here. That 135,000, those fully developed claims, that's huge. That's a monster. That's an entire month's worth of work out of my entire organization that DAV did for us and they did it fully developed. That means it came to us ready to go, ready to move forward. That means those veterans are in the 91 days. That means they're taken care of and they're ready to move forward and people did the right things for them. Continue to tell people make sure you file online. Don't use paper. We'll be working with the appeals with the veteran service organizations just so you know your guys are taking the lead on that. They always have. The DAV pushes us pretty hard but that's okay. When I first came to VA, one of the things that concerned me was, oh wait a second, now instead of just Congress and the American people, now I got VSOs too. So I got three people I got an answer to instead of two over at DoD. It's gonna be a little bit tougher because I heard the VSOs are really vocal. Well you know what, they are vocal. And we meet on a regular basis. Your VSOs not only vocal, they're very tough on us. They're very hard on us. But you know what, you saw those slides up there. $90 billion a year in benefits and services. Somebody better be hard on us. That's a lot of the national treasure of the United States that's going out to the veterans of this country for their service to this nation. It needs to be done right. It needs to be done fairly. It needs to be done fast. It needs to be done accurately. And for that I appreciate the pressure that I get from the VSOs. Even though it's not fun at the time that I'm getting the pressure. But thanks again. I got a couple minutes for a few questions.


Now, Game Changer is a word that is often overused in the world of YouTube. As you all know, we love a little bit of clickbait to entice you in on a video on what better word than Game Changer. But in the case of the Ping G400 Max which came along about five years ago, I genuinely believe it took forgiveness to a different level and quite legitimately could be called a Game Changer. Felly, o'r fideo dyn ni, rwy'n golygu yw'r cwestiynau bod yna, yw yw'r newydd yng Nghymru, y G430, maes y gweithio'r gweithio. I'r gweithio'r gweithio, ond yna'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio, ond y pwysig yn rhan o'r bwysig, ac mae'n gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio, ond yw yw'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio. Now I mentioned MoI and the number you're about to see on screen is one that I do not understand at all, but what it represents is just how forgiving a driver is and you compare it to the SFT and the LST. Then you see that the figure on the max means that it is the most forgiving out of their lineup, and what it represents is it possibly being the most forgiving driver on the marketplace. And that surely is of great interest to most of you y gallwn gael gulfer ar ddych chi'n gynnwys. Nid gweithio ni'n meddwl i'n cyfwilio'r gweithiau'r llwyr a'r amser nid, a'r hynny'n amser, ond, yn ystafell, rwy'n cael eu pwyllwch yng nghymru o'r gweithio'r gweithio, ac rwy'n cael eu ddweud o'r gweithio'r gweithio. Rwy'n cael ei gwyllwch, fe ddweud o'r gweithio'r gweithio, ac oeddi'n gweithio'r gweithio i'r gweithio'r gweithio. P'n gwybod ni'n gwybod hi'n swyddhau yma, ond weithio'n ddweud o'r hiwn i ymddangos yn ymddangos. Felly ydych yn gweld eich ddweud o'r shelfabeel. P'n gwybod y gwybod yma yw 25, a fydd yw'r gweld iddyn nhw yn eu cyfnodol yn ysgrifedd llyfr yma, ond eich ddweudio'r gwybod yw'r swyddhau o'r swyddhau llym gwybod, ac mae'n gwybod i'n gwybod pethau'r gwybod ymddangos. Mae'n gweld ffuturistig, os ychydig, o gymryd yn fwy o'r cyfeuniaid ynghylch ar gyfer y celfaeth, rydyn ni'n cael ei gael i'r bwrdd, ac rydyn ni'n chyfyddu. Rydyn ni'n cyfeuniaid ym mwy o'r frysgau ar gyfer ymddangos, rydyn ni'n cyfrifio'r rhaid i'r ddefnyddio, ac mae'r dweud yn cael ei ddweud o'r ddweud o'r llwyddiad, o'r unrhyw o'r cyffredinol. ond, ydych chi'n gweithio'n clywed â'r traddwl i'r tyngr o gyllideb sydd yn ei gwneud i gyfnod, a'r cyflogol i'r tyngr o'r cyflogol. Felly, mae'n gwybod i'n ffrindio'r profiol wedi'i'r cyflogol, ond mae'n gweithio'n gweithio'r cyflogol. Oni, mae'n hwyl ymddil o'r cyflogol i'r cyflogol. Ond yna o'r clywed o'r gweithio'r cyflogol yn y rhaed, mae'n gweithio'r gweithio'n gweithio'n gweithio, Dwi'n cael ei wneud, rydyn ni'n rhaid i'r rhaglen i'r holl ddeithas. Mae'r holl yn ymdweithio'r adreu, mae'r cronau ielongau. Ond y maen nhw'n ysgrifennu yw y gallwn ni'n ceisio'n rhaid i'r holl o'r holl o'r hyn o'r holl. Yn ychydig i'r holl yn oed yn ymdweithio'r holl o Caelwau a'r teulu, mae'r holl o'r holl o'r cronau i'r holl o'r holl. I'm not sure why they've done that, and I think that this is the best looking crown in terms of that matte finish, some great score lines again in white, and then there's a void in the middle, which allows you to frame the ball really good at address. And then obviously you've got the sliding weight system in that max that's the heaviest weight, I think it's 25 grams. There's obviously a significant change that you can make in terms of from neutral to a fade and draw bias, and that's a video for another day. Because all I want to know to be honest with you from today's video, I want to know, A, have they managed to achieve a better sound and feel because I hated that of the G425, it was just so hard. And obviously then what I want to know is have they made it as forgiving as its predecessor and perhaps even move that bar on a little bit more because if they have then this is a real game changer. Enough talking, let's hit a golf ball. Okay, so we've got off to a good start, which is always nice. That ball is travelling, and we're going to glance down and see what we've got in terms of first ball out there. I mean, the first thing that I've noticed, and I think perhaps mentioned before I discussed that number, is I've got a 10 and a half degree head here. And we've got a 16 degree launch on the first ball. We've got a 142 ball speed, which is incredible. Two seven spin and a two three nine carry. First ball off the club face, impressive set of data, probably launching just a little bit too high and spinning a little bit too high. If you've been ultra critical and looking to pick fault in this thing, but don't forget, this setup is very much aimed at the mass market. Reg shaft, 10 and a half degree head. It's aimed at trying to launch the ball and be a user friendly setup, I'm going to say. Let's try one more. Absolutely button that thing. It's still, I mean, it's launching a ball incredibly high, as you can see, 16.4 degrees, even higher launch, lower down on the spin at 2 425 and a 2 4 2 carry. That's a real good set of numbers. The interesting thing is, I'm itching to hit another ball because I'm enjoying it. I'm liking what I'm getting. I'm going to talk about the sound and feel very shortly, but this is encouraging. That launch angle is 16 degrees. You know, it's often, if we looked at the kind of like the guidelines in terms of where you want to be, I would say that that probably criticises being too high. But there's nothing more pleasing than seeing you launch a ball into absolute orbit and it's still being carried on going forward because high launch and not too high of a spin number is producing a good number and 242 carry. That's decent, right? One more while for the cameras on, I think, before I go and collect a whole set of numbers. I mean, it's almost like hitting something like a five wood in terms of where it's going to, in terms of up in the air. OK, so slightly lower, 14.8 launch, 2 424 spin, almost identical in spin number, 240 carry. That's an incredible first three shots with a Ping G425. We've got 239, 240, 240, nothing to split them in terms of yardage covered. Spinning at an OK number, I would say, a controllable number, launching perhaps a tad too high. What about that sound and feel? Now, if I was anybody who had a slight amount of animation about their face when things were going well, or bad for that matter, I stay fairly constant. I'd be probably doing a few cartwheels right now. My face would be smiling. I would be doing a bit of a woo-woo or something similar. The basis is Ping have finally, finally achieved something which I never thought possible. They've changed the sound of their drivers. Hallelujah is all I can say because this is so much better on the ear. And that's inside where acoustics are a bit sharp when you're hitting out of here. So it will be a lot better gain out on the fairways. But I cannot tell you how happy I am that Ping have addressed that situation. I tried some fairway wood the other day when, again, there was a noticeable change in acoustics. And thank God they've carried that through into the driver. One of the best things I've been able to report in the whole time that I've been doing YouTube videos. Ping, thank God for that. I applaud you. I can stop whinging about the way your drivers sound so hard of the face. Well done. That is 10 balls hit, I think. What I want to know is just how consistent they were. How forgiving is this G430 driver? And is it, in fact, a game changer from Ping or just another driver? Time for an assessment.  I can report that my feelings were that it performed very, very consistently. And just a quick glance at the numbers. First thing to look at is that ball speed column, 138 to 142. But very, very consistent across 10 shots. You'll also see the launch angle as an average of 16 degrees. And as I said, it continually just launched the ball incredibly high. Whilst you could criticise, like I've already said in the video, maybe a bit too high in my case there today. I think that should be taken as a real positive because that's going to help you load if you're struggling in terms of generating clubhead speed. That's what's happening in terms of launch angle with my swing. And I think it's going to help a lot of golfers and prove to be a really popular element of what this club does. We're setting the neutral position, by the way, in terms of that weighting system throughout. The spin number, in my opinion, again, was really, really impressive. 2444rpm, which is a real good number in my opinion. And coupled with the high launch, I would probably have been expecting that spin number to raise quite significantly above into the sort of three, three and a half thousand revs. And it doesn't do that. It remains, again, very consistent. And I love what they've done there in terms of making it such a, you know, like I said, a consistent number. We don't really want to talk about peak height. The average carried 239, longest ball being 246, shortest ball being 233. Again, I'd take that all day long for me. It's all about consistency in terms of numbers. And that's what they've done incredibly well. I just cannot pick fault. Really impressed just overall with the performance of that G430. I can't tell you how consistent it was. And I think, like I said, that if you were looking at it from an individual perspective, maybe we would look to put the nine degree heading, which would have an immediate impact in terms of launch and change things a little there. Maybe bring that spin number down a tad, but I think all those things are where you're really looking to optimise when you're at the top of your game what potential you can get out of your driver. I'm more interested in what I can get out of my driver when I rock up on a Saturday morning. I've had no warm-up. I just want to put, you know, the first few swings of the day are probably at 70, 75%. And I know I've got a driver that's going to help me get the ball up and out there and find fairways. And I think that's what that setup does irrelevant to what those numbers say. I think it was incredibly impressive. Is it a game changer? I'm not going to go that far. What I'm going to say is that this is going to be a hugely popular driver, as is every time Ping released one of their G drivers out there. And this is no different. I personally think it's the best driver that Ping I've put out there so far. Game changer, maybe a bit too far. Best Ping I've done without a shadow of a doubt in my opinion. Absolutely love it. The question mark is going to be, I would love to try that in a head to head against stealth, perhaps stealth too. And just see who comes out on top. So maybe that's the next video to be done. Right, as ever, thank you for watching. I hope you enjoyed that one. Let me know what your thoughts and feedback are on the Ping G430 driver. And I will see you all very soon.