Hey welcome to part two of my show with Greg McKeon. We are continuing our conversation about his book Effortless. Particularly on this episode we are going to be focusing on how to scale the idea of effortless, how to make business more effortless, how to bring the idea of effortlessness into a more of a corporate world, a corporate experience. Again, a great conversation, a great guy. Thanks for being here. Enjoy. I think that humans primary need, you know, like that it is to be seen and to be heard. Right. And so if people aren't then that tends to come out in uglier ways because it's not just a want. And for reasons that aren't entirely obvious to me and I've spent years and years thinking about it, it's not just shallow thinking to it, but like why it is that it's such a life-changing, healing, powerful thing to be heard. Right. You know, to be seen. In some ways that's still an oddity to me. I mean, I just was reading Carl Rogers book. I mean, he's sort of the father of active listening and he wasn't teaching just the skill of active listening. What he was observing was as a psychotherapist at a time when, you know, Freudian psychotherapy was the norm. He says, because he wasn't trusting that just the theories and concepts he was being taught, he was trusting his own experience with patients in front of him. What do you mean? It was itself powerful and transformational and better than anything that had come before it. But nevertheless, it was quite a quite an aggressive form of taught therapy. And he came along and he's like, what I found is that if I really deeply listened, if I could really let in a very sincere way, be myself, be present, and they could get to talk without fear of being judged and interrupted and so on, that it would naturally spontaneously bring forward something whole and better and stronger and their potential would just come forward and they would start to want to take better action. All of that's just fascinating to me. Like why that is the case? Why is talking openly such an unwinding of all of that, that the knots inside of us that they should naturally find themselves more free to change and to improve and to grow is fascinating. And so if you take that positive perspective and then you say, okay, well, what's happened to people's ability to be heard over the last you know, even the last like year and a half, like just a pandemic period, non-scientific poll that I just did on LinkedIn, but maybe had two or three thousand responses. But I said, do you, how do you feel now? Are you more than before the pandemic? Same or less? And we have probably maybe 43% said less. Okay, so that's the 43%. Let's take that as, you know, that as being about the truth for everybody. There's a big problem, right? Like if you haven't, so and it's not surprising to us, right? People are more isolated now and they, you know, they do feel more separate. And that does have a cost because all those benefits that Rodgers is identifying in psychotherapy, suddenly not being met when the needs aren't being met. Then when you get together with other people, when you are interacting, you want to be heard more than before, because the needs not being met. And so now you can't meet each other's needs in the conversation. You're trying to just be heard first. And so I do think it puts us, I do think it puts us as quite a major inflection point in society because people are trying to be heard in social media. It's not, you don't really get that it's scratched, but you become more and more bombastic in your statements and people become more and more polarized. And so there's tremendous opportunity in this moment that we're in. But it means, among other things, it means that somebody like Trump and it doesn't have to be Trump, but the next Trump, that if they are good at voicing what people are feeling, sort of a sort of societal restate. And I think he was exceptionally talented at that.  And of course he was good at doing that. I mean, you don't get thousands of thousands and tens of thousands of people coming and massively supporting what you're saying. If you can't, it's not because of you being persuasive. That's the wrong way to think of it. It's that you is that a leader that can do that is able to say what people already are feeling and are frustrated by. And it's that collective restate that leaders can do. Now the, yeah, I mean, I'm riffing all over, but the point is, is that you've got this, you've got this need that must be met. If you don't meet needs, they come out later in uglier ways. They can be taken advantage of, they can destroy politicians, they can make others rise to the top is your ability to sense that, to hear it, to understand it. And when you don't do it, you're going to have more revolutionary type experiences. Add to that, you know, recently, these whistleblowers that have come forward from Google or Facebook, that are now speaking, you know, the Netflix social dilemma documentary, you know, that we are now all feel within this attention economy and it's their job to make sure we keep scrolling. And if we're not on our devices, they ain't making money. It's as simple as that. And the negativity travels better. And we are more engaged with it for longer than positivity. All of these things that I worry about for my grandchildren growing up, I have eight grandkids growing up in a very different world to me at 64. And certainly to you too. I mean, I grew up in Yorkshire in a in a real community. I mean, we were the, we were the borough of a cup of sugar from the neighbor. That's how we lived. And it wasn't, it wasn't a government food bank. We were each other's food bank. And every single parent could discipline each other's children. I got clipped around the ear so many times by other mothers. And my mother would thank them for doing it. They're all being jailed now. But that was how we were raised. You know, it takes a village kind of thing. So I felt as I got older, my dad would mainly stand on the bus for women when I was a kid. Me and my three brothers, any woman, not just elderly or a pregnant woman, he would make us carry the shopping bags home from the bus terminus for these women. He would send us out to shovel snow for the elderly and the disabled in winter. So I carried that into my adulthood. And I remember being on a plane a while back, helping a woman put her bag in the overhead locker. And she looked at me and said, do you think I can't do that myself? And I thought, wow, chivalry is dead. That simple, that simple attempt to, to walk in that value in that encounter on that plane became complex and awkward and uncomfortable and potentially confrontational with her attitude. And I thought, wow, what happened to all of that stuff that just makes life, it brings the oil of our relationships and smooths things out. But a simple gesture of kindness was misinterpreted and seemed to be a statement about how weak she perhaps was and so on. I want to look at my grandkids coming up in that one. And I've got eight grandkids, as I said, at least two of them, Greg, are weird. What I mean by weird is they don't fit the mold. And one of them in the, she's 10. The education system is already trying to fix her. And she's not broken.  And she's probably on the spectrum, as they say now. And I worry for her because this one-size-fits-all industrial approach to our kids is killing our kids, as you know, I mentioned earlier. So the effortless idea, yeah, I'm an evangelist for it, since I read the book, and lots of my friends that are reading it now that are loving it, that concept. And I can see it can work between you and I, but it can work at scale too, is what I'm talking about with these guys. Why can't it work at government level and at corporate level? I know it all happens, individuals, and it's the person you need to deal with on the phone today, I get that. So I think it's a book and it's time, I really do. Well, I love what you're saying. And I think part of the key is, I mean, again, so many places we could go with that. But I think about this, that you use the term oil, and that's a metaphor I use in the book for trust, that if you want a high-performing team, you've got to build, it's like the oil in an engine of a car. If the oil goes down for a bit, nothing happens, it's okay. The oil, the trust level can go down for a bit and the engine works fine, but if the oil ever gets too low, that thing will start, every part of the machine, the friction will increase, the heating will increase. In fact, it can completely stop working at some point. And all for once of just keeping up, topping up the oil. And so I do think that when you, I mean, I do think that everyone's experienced this. If you're in a relationship with anyone, where the trust gets low enough, everything is hard. Every, just sending a text might take you 15, 20 minutes, half an hour, ask lots of people's opinion, well, how do I say, and was that the right word? And what does that mean? And that's just one little text, it's so hard, it's so expensive. And then, and then as soon as they get it back to us, you know, it hits us hard and we have to, well, what does that mean? And, and it's like, you know, that's the expensive way to do it. Yes. Contrast that, when you're talking about a scale, but contrast that with Warren Buffett, when he, Berkshire Hathaway buys McLean Industries, right? This is a $23 billion business, but even for Berkshire Hathaway, it's still a major business acquisition. And they're buying it from Walmart.  He had, you know, this was, he said it was a two hour meeting and a handshake. And he said, we knew that, that, that Walmart would have everything as they said they would and they did. And so there was no need for all of that six months and all of that due diligence you'd normally do. It was a handshake. That's, that's effortless. What else can you call it when you contrast six months or millions of dollars to a handshake in two hours? And so, of course, you have to invest in a variety of ways to get to the point where trust is that high. But it's such a bargain. It's such a high, you know, not just ROI, but ROI, right? Return on effort. It's such a high return on effort because as you, as you build the trust, then it works for you again and again and again and again. And you're able to then make decisions so much faster together. And if you're in a high trust relationship, I mean, everything's easy. Yeah, everything. And, and, and that's true for, you know, it's true for one-on-one relationships. It's true with me and my wife. If our trust gets low, everything starts to be hard. If it's high, everything's easy. But I think these are scalable to your, to your general premise. I think it's scalable across society. And, and of course, if the trust gets low enough, I mean, that's when you start having these, these massive discombobulating experiences. I mean, that's what civil war ultimately is. Right. And three years ago, any talk of civil war would have just seemed ridiculous in the United States. Would have just been hyperbole and whatever. But you go through to some of the, the worst moments over the last two or three years and you go, actually now some of the most respected institutes at least are addressing that question. Right. Right.  And I still hope that it is and think that it is. But it's like, if you don't build trust, eventually you sign up for the absence of trust and all these things that functionally work will stop working. And you can't take it for granted unless you keep putting in that, that, that high trust oil. I remember being in Texas a while back doing one of my communication masterclasses and talking about team building. And this CEO in the room asked me about the problem he was having with his kind of core leaders of loyalty. And he asked me, how do you build loyalty in a team? And I said to him, you build loyalty by asking someone, how's your mum? And I think he was so, and then he waited for the real answer as if I was been telling a joke, you know? And I said, no, I'm serious. If you, I was coming back to what you said about seeing people. If you show an interest in the person as a human, and she did tell you about her mum two weeks ago, and that you remembered it two weeks later and asked, how's your mum? And you remembered the mum's name. You won't have a problem with loyalty if that's the culture. And he was seemed so disappointed that it wasn't a more organisational answer, more a more sexy answer than it's that that we're talking about here. It's that world that I want to live in. It's that culture that I want to create in everything I do. How's your mum, trust Bill, done? End of, you know? Yeah, I love the how's your mum question as an answer to that and the tangibility of it. I think about, I think about like, you know, back to back to our airplane discussions over Southwest. I mean, Herb Keller, the founder of Southwest, was, had built the how's your mum into institutional capability, right?  And they would know, and if you partner or someone was dying from something, there would be specific things done for you. And there was, there was a real precision around that and institutional precision around it. And this is why, so then when he says, look, what our business is and we're like, we like love our employees and we love our employees.   But, but I have very rarely seen someone in Southwest do something that just made no sense at the point of interaction. You know, I've seen, I've seen, I've seen over, I just don't, I haven't seen a lot of power hungry moves or controlling kinds of things done. And I think that's a continuation of that, that culture that's been birthed. But then it's not just the Southwest, it's like, in some of the other world class cultures, right? Like, over at Apple, one of my pet peeves about the media's treatment, treatment, the media's way of communicating about Steve Jobs was lazy. And you know, whenever you read the media and you read about something you happen to know about, right? And you know the person they're talking about, you were there or you're part of that thing. And you go, my goodness, that is just like, so not what happened, you know, from a point of view, that's not accurate. And then you suddenly have this awful feeling of, oh my goodness, maybe everything in the media is that much off. And I just don't always know, because it's not an issue I personally am aware of, right? You know, like, so you've got that sort of problem that happened, I believe with Steve Jobs.  But he was so different than the media image of him. Among other things, it was very out of date that they had the version of him that got fired 10 years before he returned to Apple. Well, you have to probably be operating a certain way to get fired, right, from your own companies. So probably there were some things there. But to get rehired, and then to bring around this great transformation, but you think the same person did the first and the second, or do you think he evolved this 10 years? It's a decade. In that decade, he got married, he had a family, he'd been a Pixar, he'd learned a thing or two about the how's your mom. And even before this, and he could definitely, you know, be make some un, un, inhumane choices before that period. But he still wasn't even then as bad as the media image. Because that's how you're able to build the company and have people be loyal. He just he just hadn't got enough control over some of those forces within him. Some of the, but by the time he comes back, I mean, I know stories of people that that he, you know, went and bought himself a laptop and went and handed it to someone because he knew that they didn't have the money to get one and so on or for their teenager. And like, there's all sorts of stories like that behind the scenes. They didn't make it into the headline of Steve Jobs yelling at everyone kind of story. And the people that know him best, in fact, most people that know him best at Apple don't, don't particularly care for Isaacson's biography. And I enjoyed Isaacson's biography myself. But they, a lot of them that know him best don't care for it. And they weren't especially involved in it. Because they thought it reinforced a certain version of him. And they were sensitive to that. Because there's another biography about him that's less well known, it's called Becoming Steve Jobs, which I think captures much better. And they do too, that, you know, the Johnny Ives and Tim Cooks of the world that they prefer this other book, because it tells the evolution. And so, and so I think there's, there's, you know, there's, there's something in that to, to remember that, to sort of to recognize that like to be an essentialist, like to say it that way, to become an essentialist, you have to marry the focus and the elimination of non-essentials with a humanness, with it, with it, in order to create the kind of culture that can do great work.  Is that what you think? Is that what you think how it works, that human dynamics work like that, that you go above and beyond for someone who's just being mean? No one does that. And to do it when you could easily go and leave and be a CEO of almost any other major company, and you stick around for it and do it for years and love your work and so on. It's like, no, this, this media image doesn't, just doesn't do.  And I mean, basically in a sense, Steve was like, maybe I can't say single-handedly, but it's sort of like he eliminated the need for user manuals in technology. It's a non-trivial achievement. You know, no one has a, you know, it gets a 50-page manual to use, to use an iPad. It exists. You can download it and use it, but it doesn't, he was interested in removing all this to make it effortless. Right. In fact, I remember sharing the title of effortless, the book effortless with a friend of mine at Apple, and his response was, made me laugh. His first response was like, well, I mean, I, he said, I really like it. He says, but it feels like maybe it's an oversell. And so immediately sent back to him several advertisements by Apple where literally the word was effortless on the advertisement was just, you know, like the AirPods where they came out, AirPods, effortless, you know, and I'm like, well, I'm not, I'm not the only one that in that, in that space. And he's like, yeah, to shave fair and fair enough, fair enough. And he's fascinating because one of the things that I've been very interested in over the years as a communicator is that to me, the best communicators in the world are the ones that have a very clear, consistent why. And when I began to research, as you have done too, I know from reading your book, into Apple and Amazon and Netflix and Uber and Airbnb, is what you become aware of and why they've had such a meteoric rise in a short space of time is that the, then the why is not the product they're delivering, but a problem that they are solving. And so Apple are not selling devices, they are selling simplicity. And Starbucks aren't selling coffee, they're selling, I think their branding was a third place between home and work. So they're selling a space and free wifi and a social experience while you work. And Uber aren't selling cab rise, they're selling empowerment to us because we fed up with the taxi companies having the control and Airbnb aren't selling accommodation and so on and so on. It's the genius of it. Yes. And I think you mentioned in the book and I was fascinated and I'm going to let you go on a minute, but that these are these massive disruptive businesses were started by outsiders, right? People. Yeah, no, absolutely. I mean, the Airbnb situation, I've done work with Airbnb and with Brian, one of the co-founders and there's lots that we could riff on with that if we had more time. But they originally, their vision for the company originally was a cereal company like breakfast cereal. But that's where they, that's what they were pitching to investors. And I know an investor that turned them down and I was like, oh, did you feel better about turning them down? And she's like, no, it's time it was cereal. It wasn't Airbnb and they create Airbnb, that's literally an air mattress inside of their apartment. And he said, Brian told me, we, the most, the most focused we've ever been was the first 90 days of the company where we call ourselves, as we said, our goal was to be ramen profitable. That is, if we ate ramen noodles three times a day, all three of us together, we could demonstrate we were technically profitable with our idea by the investor conference at the end of that 90 day period. And they could and they did it. And, and, you know, it grew up from there into something that at the time, of course, is just mad. That was such a, even now when you think back, it's like such a weird sounding idea. I'm going to rent out some bed over there in my, you know, rent out my couch. And yet, it's grown into this absolute phenomenon. And, and one of the Chip Connelly, who was one of the early executives in the company, I just interviewed him on the What's Essential podcast. And I loved it. I don't think we've released the episode yet. But, but I love talking to him about the insider inside the baseball of the growth of that company. Yeah, listen, it's not gone out yet. Yeah, I don't think it's gone out. Yeah, I think it's, I think, I don't know why it hasn't actually to be honest, but it'll be scheduled the next few weeks. But, but he, he talked about where he was brought in because he's got all this experience in the hotel industry. And so he comes in as like sort of the, the, the, the wise man of the team. And one of the exercises he takes them to you just love this is he divided everyone in the executive team into, into a pair. So he was with Brian and then everyone else was in twos. And what they had to do is they had to write down in two words. You're like, what business are we in? In two words, right? Okay, so you write down your two words. Then you have to do it again, without sharing it with anyone, you just write it on your next two words. And those two words can't match the first two words. And then again, and then again, you do it five times and no words can repeat themselves. You share it with each other. You talk through and you can select from each other's list one, each that you like the most. And then they brought it back as a team. And this is how they, how they got to, to their belonging theme, you know, that that was their focus was, was what we're really in the business of. It isn't, you know, isn't selling space or an air mattress or a room. It's to help people to belong, anywhere, belong, belong anywhere. I think that's the term belong anywhere. And that's been very powerful centering focus for that company. And I think it's brilliant that they have it. It's a sort of infinite why I just had Simon Sinek on the show too. And he was talking about this, the distinction between having a goal that is temporary and this sort of the infinite why the thing that you're doing, you're always doing whatever other version of your world that you're, you know, whatever product or service you have, you're still doing the same core, you know, the same core vision of why. And, and that's helped with, with, with Airbnb, it helped them. I mean, you remember the pandemic is like bad for all sorts of industries, but it can't have been worse for any industry than the hotel and industry. And so that hit Marriott. I saw the Marriott CEO talk about it. He said, in 9-11, we, you know, the great recession, we lost maybe 15% of our bookings. We have areas that 90% in the pandemic suddenly 90% is lost. I mean, how do you even survive? Airbnb was the same. How they were about to do it IPO. They're going to be the biggest IPO of the year. And suddenly this all happens. They almost go bankrupt. He has to get, you know, one $2 billion of emergency funding to be able to make sure that they can survive this and live it out and go with thousands of employees. It is very intense, challenging period. But because they responded in a certain way, because they knew what they needed to try to create, they ended up running that IPO much, much bigger than it had been at their peak. And, and this was over them one year. It was a really phenomenal inside story. I'm not giving all the details. The old story of, you know, Henry Ford with the Model T Ford, if I'd have asked my customers what they wanted, they'd have said a faster horse. And I think and I think so many organizations politically, corporately, church wise, religious, they are, they are, it's their own version of trying to find a faster horse. And so I feel that we need these disruptors in all these walks of life to come with this zero gravity thinking about what could happen here. That is the effortless thing you're speaking about. Somebody effortlessly sees the problem because they don't have the baggage of not being able to see it because of closeness, familiarity, bombarded with systems and compliance. It's that, you know, the emperor's new clothes, you know, the kings and they all together. It's those people that we need in charge. Yes, I think there's some truth to that.  Thank you so much for having me on here and making this. I could talk to you for longer and longer. This is very interesting. If we'd have been in a coffee shop, we'd have been ordering lunch now. That's right. That's what it is.  It's a nice feeling. You've still been on Yorkshire in the shire, me and you. That's what it is. That is what it is. It's common, it's common heritage and common vision. It's a combination here. Hey, listen, how can people find you, Greg? Oh, I think if people wanted to be involved in this conversation, I would just go to GregMcEwen.com and sign up for the One Minute Wednesday newsletter. Great. I think that's the simplest thing. It's free. It's every weekend. And there's lots of other assets and free assets that come with that, like the podcasts in Europe. You've become part of that community too. So that's what I'd say. That's great. Well, listen, I wish you all the best ongoing with the book and other things that you write. Thanks for writing. I loved it. My friends are loving it. Thanks for doing it. It's a labour of love sometimes, I know, but it's really helping people. Very kind of you. Thank you, Paul. Thanks, my friend. Well, I hope you enjoyed part two of my conversation with Greg McEwen. If you didn't get part one, then you can go and have a listen to that right now. I hope this has inspired you to get a hold of his book, Effortless. And again, thanks for being here and can encourage you. I know I do this every time, but it really helps the ratings of the podcasts. If you would leave a review about your experience here with me on my podcast platform. And if you don't subscribe, hit subscribe. Help me get the word out, share this podcast with others who you feel it may add value to. Cheers. Appreciate you all and I'll see you and speak with you all again on the next podcast. Thanks.


We're here live inside the Cube at the Cloudera headquarters. I'm John Furrier, the founder of SiliconANGLE and SiliconANGLE.tv And it's exciting. We have back in business. We've got the Cube in Cloudera in Palo Alto We have some exciting guests here from Xiotek the president CEO Alan Atkinson and the CTO Steve Secola welcome to the Cube. Thanks John.  I have a lot of success recently Alan tell us update What's going on with with Xiotek right now? Well, it's been quite an 18 months in storage. I got here at Xiotek in October of 2009 so I'm still sort of new And it's been pretty exciting John So what we've seen happen recently is just an amazing amount of market traction a lot of enterprise wins a lot of wins in the cloud space virtualization VDI Really hitting our stride on the blade-based storage. So basically going out with a very modular approach We're not really doing the refrigerators like everybody else You know buy what you need use a hundred percent of it and the real value prop for us is really flat out Then we serve we basically solve the historic trade-off between capacity and performance in storage You can have both and our newest product announcement the hybrid ice really just takes that to the next level Yeah, I mean everyone's talking efficiency emc net app and that's the big kind of punchline Oh efficiency this and that you've had a career and you know and enterprise a big IT startups big companies Yeah, I think Goldman Sachs qualifies is a huge budget when they're not selling Facebook shares internationally But you know they're they're huge and they're known to be huge What's what's changing in the marketplace from your perspective? You've seen it you've seen where the industry has been and where it's going and now you're at the ziotec We are leading the team. What can you share with the audience out there about the market? Well on a macro level a couple things are happening. One is customers have fewer choices than they used to You mentioned it earlier. There's been a huge consolidation in the industry and I'm not sure that's really a good thing for the consumer But it's really good for us So I like sort of being one of the bigger players out there that's not a three-letter acronym I think it gives us a lot closer to our customers and I think they consider us a lot more strongly because of that Also people are starting to spend again So we're seeing a lot more projects being funded than we did a year ago And I think that's just sort of the normal coming out of the recession or whatever you want to call it Closer to where the rubber meets the road I mean the projects that we're seeing get getting a lot of traction are not surprisingly around virtualization VDI in particular people are trying to figure out how can they make the money work on that? How can they get the ROI that they're looking for for desktop virtualization? And we're also seeing a lot in cloud now keep in mind those things are actually related So a lot of cloud implementations are virtualization behind the scene So it's one followed by the other and I expect that trend is going to continue There's obviously the continuing use cases of you know databases and data warehousing and all that and there's Great businesses too, but the stuff that's really got the acceleration behind it I think is virtualization VDI and cloud Virtualization has obviously been around it's and it's now more mainstream at the technical level It's been kind of intoxicating I talked to tech geeks and they're like we can do so much with virtualization You know them the creativity and the solutions that come out of there pretty strong Has that translated up to at the sea level in the business side as as are the business executives going? Hey, this virtualization stuff's real and how is that impacting the the orders and the market traction around that? Yeah, absolutely, but I think it depends on which sector you're going to is to what does that mean? So for some it's just pure cost savings, right? I don't need to build physical infrastructures for DR plans and those sort of things or gee instead of buying a Thousand Dell desktops. I can buy a couple servers and put some wife's terminals out there and build out a VDI solution For others, it's it's a real strategic advantage They can just do a lot more in a virtual environment whether that's reduced management costs solve data center costs green efficiencies etc etc I Think for some it's just purely a cost equation frankly. I don't think there's a lot of strategy to it in some businesses But in others it really has changed the way that they do business I think the days of buying a one-for-one DR solution where you you know buy a box in one side of the river and another Box on the other side of the river. I think those days are gone We're gonna ask you as a CEO of the company. We asked Joe Tucci the CEO VMC net app CEO is storage sexy absolutely Good answer good. I just look at Steve So so let's see talk about let me the CTO So you're in you're in the in the trenches and you got your hands and all the products and you're looking at the roadmaps Efficiency has been a story that everyone's been tossing around I get more efficient here all that and everyone wants to be efficient can't blame that what are the keys inside the covers Of the solution is the efficiency real jewel? I mean is it the disc is it the network is it to compute? In the technology in the product, where is the efficiency come from first? Io tech it's all about the intelligence storage element the ice It's about all those things TCO is a combination of what you paid for and what you have to do to maintain it over It's life and that includes everything performance how much capacity you can use to relate to that performance How often it might fail or not? We are there's efficient if there's efficient, you know ours is the most reliable most performant solution We like to we know that we can do twice the work in half the footprint So clients out there buying tons of pros means storage budgets aren't getting smaller I mean there's more storage hitting hitting the street every day for these customers. Do they just buy more gear? What's this it form factor is it? Drive technology A lot of companies are still in the game where they end up buying way too much storage for what they need because They don't begin enough performance out of the given hard drives or the actual solutions because they actually are much less Efficient at using this the actual storage devices themselves. We on the other hand are very efficient We run just as fast as when we're full as when we're empty Let alone we get two to four times the IO per drive as anyone in the industry and with our new hybrid ice We take that to the next level What's the biggest technical challenge the your clients have out there in terms of the you know dealing with storage storage strategy storage solutions Is it legacy solutions? Is it planning for the future? Is it op-ex? Is it you know products related? I think Alan talked about it. They're really worried about that op-ex. They're worried about the cost more and more They're more interested in the real efficiency. Show me what you can really do. How many machines? Can you really virtualize? Can you handle the boot storms for VDI? How many users can that happen? We've been the most efficient solution with hard drives in the industry and we're following that up with the hybrid ice with the combination of hard drive and solid state What's the biggest enabler for you guys in the product side that's driving a lot of the sales in the business? The ice and is it the is it the attack as well? I mean, it's one of those things where I look at it as Applications are taking on more and more of what I used to be the burden of data management functionality Therefore storage that can be just efficient and provide data protection and Performance when you need it where you need it and availability is Going to be key in the cloud world because if you can provide very efficient available storage It makes the applications upstream be able to do more with less The cloud the cloud private cloud is a big, you know message of this at the emcee event. They launched a low-end Solution they have that mid-range, you know symmetric and they have the high end with green plum iceland and talk about big data What do you guys what how do you guys view big data? I mean a lot of people try to define it a certain way What's your angle on big data? I mean big data for for us is being able to? Deploy a field of storage blades, which is what ice is known as in a very large environment with any presentation whether it's direct access to a to a server or through a block storage controller or file storage controller Letting you know customers deploy whatever they want to do in an infinite way And that is by definition a private cloud or a public cloud I think John if I could add to that I mean what most of the other vendors out there are saying and I think one of the reasons why we're getting traction is because we're One of the only ones who's not saying it is you know who can build a bigger refrigerator, right? So how much can I reinforce my data center floor and bring in these big monolithic arrays if that's what you want to call them And I think that model kind of went out the window years ago So if you think about how you buy servers now, right?  That's how people buy Servers these days Unfortunately, it's not how they buy storage. So typically when they buy storage they they call up their friendly neighborhood pick your three letter acronym And you know you haul in these big array frames and they can't use all that and it's loaded with features And it's one size fits all and if they want to distribute their data So that it really is a cloud where you're talking about multiple data centers or even branch offices or whatever And you want it to just sort of live out there somewhere They've got to buy multiple refrigerators maybe smaller refrigerators, but more of them Whereas we actually have a totally different way of thinking about it How many three-use storage blades do you want to buy exactly what you need the performance is going to be there? The features are going to be there the functionality is going to be there And if you want to buy just one for your data center in Des Moines And you want to buy 50 of them for your data center in Palo Alto That's just fine. They're gonna have the same functionality and you can buy them as you need them You don't you know buy them all as once you need more you just rack it in and in a virtualized environment or in a cloud environment Which are really kind of variations on the same thing That's exactly the way people want to buy it They don't want to have to cut a multi-million dollar PO the next time that they outgrew their latest frame They want to be able to buy another blade and put it in and that's a big value problem It's as simple to manage thousands of ice as it is one We use the same techniques that the cloud does to use management, you know your normal HTTP and you are ice It's that simple all with open APIs. It sounds like the old days and when you know networking just buy more hubs and stack them I was that so the modular approach by as you go approach absolutely right and that's very very appealing in this this environment Right if I add if I'm a company with a VDI solution, and I add another 500 employees I don't necessarily want to have to go buy Another frame because I was already at capacity on my last one It's pretty nice to be able to go buy a single blade for tens of thousands instead of you know millions And to play it blades are known as something that's linear and can grow and you get one exactly we are linear You stack one you get one extra performance you stack to you get two extra performance The same thing goes for reliability and availability all other systems the more drives you put in there The worse your reliability model is and the more a drive service and service costs. That's why we give a five-year warning It's not smoke and mirrors. That's technology enabled savings. I'll tell you about that five-year warning I don't know maybe we'll know that you guys back up the product the five-year warranty, right? I mean that's not pretty we have the numbers to back it up when we you know our failure rate is second to none We don't return do people really express their hazard go come on really five-year warranty the customers. I mean are they surprised They're Very surprised and you usually get the okay So what's the catch right so what you're gonna charge me software maintenance for what $20,000 a year on everyone I buy And what's what's the catch right? And once they get it and they do the they crunch the numbers on the OpEx savings between the fact that they can use a hundred percent of The blade with no degradation The reliability which really translates into the warranty and we beat everybody. I mean we're talking like One out of maybe 20,000 of these things will ever come out of the field even after five years Disruptive on the economics and clients are very much other chair I mean it's very similar some of the successful commodity players on the networking side came out with just straight box fees no licenses And they buy as you grow and they buy thousands of you know spam filters or you know hardware devices you guys do it for storage Yep, you can say that and we're finally making you know the drives that have been known in this industry of getting a bad name It's being basically unreliable. They are a lot so you get the high availability the question would come up from the skeptics would be scale Is there a glass ceiling? Is there a Catch there on the scale side or our largest customer is multi petabytes. I don't know Perhaps there's some exabyte limit that we haven't seen but in theory this thing scales linearly And there's no reason to believe it wouldn't if you look at the architecture There's absolutely no choke point and that's just very very different. So When you have existence proofs as large as we have I'm fairly confident and saying there won't be any Let alone it's we have the telemetry to back it up because we watch every one of these in the field whether they're You know dark sites let us see data, etc Because this is about being able to manage something almost like satellites because they're not coming home Let's talk about competition You guys have a lot of competition out there now that you know as the you know the growing companies that are massively growing get Acquired up by the big boys you guys are competing with again other startups There's a lot of different use cases from low latency database kind of caching solutions all the way up to you know Dealing with the virtual machines over a network is pretty complex. How do you guys fit relative to the competitive landscape out there? And what's the differentiator? so that's a very complicated question, but the answer is we're better so Better cheaper faster more But seriously, I mean let me start with our newest products I think that's the one that I can very clearly delineate in which everybody can kind of just get in the second Which is our hybridized product, right? So this is a product that has a combination of SSDs and conventional disk drives in it and the secret sauce is we've got real-time data tiering that actually moves it literally learns your application and On-the-fly real-time moves the data where it belongs not just moves it up But it moves it down as well This is not like what some other vendors are doing which is sort of a 24 hour batch or 12 hour batch move it around This is real time it learns and adjusts It will be much faster two hours from the time you plug it in then it is the second you plug it in It's pretty cool to watch when you get into that type of product Which you're seeing is you know, we're competing against the guys like fusion iL, right? So these are the folks that really care about performance now our advantages are we are very very fast almost SSD speeds We are very very big so seven point seven usable terabytes in a single in a single blade We are very scalable. We scale linearly just like we always did we have a five-year warranty We enable replication and failover all the things that you get in the storage device. There's no standard device drivers I've got to tell you John that's not a very crowded space. I mean we throw we we we it's not a performance Modular scale we froze multiple deals Against fusion I own the first week we brought that product out and in fact we've only soft launched it So the hard launch is what you're you're seeing over the next couple of weeks That's a very disruptive differentiated product in a preview basis or pre-order basis It is it is it is generally available for order, but there is a waiting list So, you know, basically we've got demands like a hot car. You want the hot car? It's seen on back order Is that pretty much? Yeah pretty pretty much it right which is a good problem for me to have right? You know Steven his team did a phenomenal job Getting that product out there and it's one of many products You're gonna see from us that you're sort of in that same vein Now if you go back to our older product Just the the standardized using using disk drives. It's pretty differentiated too, but The competition is more crowded in the sense that it's it's just technology right now. It's linearly scalable It's got a five-year warranty. It's very highly reliable. It's you can use a hundred percent of it It's got things that nobody else has feature function I think we're on a par with anybody else I could sit here and have a religious discussion with you about why one flavor of what our controllers do is better than Somebody else's but frankly I don't spend a lot of time talking about that because I find that people who know storage look at it and go Yeah, your thin provisioning is a lot like somebody else's and you're a sink wrap is a lot like somebody else's But that's a more crowded space. So once people try us we are great at repeat orders You know people love what we have but we're not the gargantuan Emchp IBM nothing knock those guys, but you know, we have an innovative sales. We have huge sales forces It's huge sales forces and there's a certain profile of a customer Who is going to buy from those because you know what if I buy my server or my network and my professional services my storage In the same guy I get a 15-point discount or you know, whatever else We're much more of a you know best of breed solution where we've got the best storage platform out there And we're very open with the community if you look at what we've done with the BDI coalition If you look at we develop with Cortex these are areas where we're bringing the companies together that have the most innovative solutions out there in a Very very open way our APIs are not proprietary. Everything is restful His growth at the top of the top of the stat too is a lot of them are pretty embryonic actually So there's a lot of development going on there. Yeah, I think the big guys are very very good at iterating on their technologies I think they're very very bad at being disruptive, which is why you see the M&A environment that you currently see among the big tech companies It's also why you see typically R&D percentages of spend at like 2.7 percent, which I'm not kidding I mean those are real numbers You know we spend far more and I think that's really where the innovation right here in Silicon Valley up on 128 Boston it's coming from the smaller companies and we're not small, but We are still very very innovative. I mean we spent a lot of you guys are growing pretty fast But you're not huge like HP. We've been around a long time. My team has been with me for over 30 years We've been doing storage forever and you look at ice ice is an architecture that can take any kind of device And in fact base our current ice with hard drives beats most systems with with SSDs in there as well And you take it to the next level It's just a lot of startups coming out of the woodwork, you know kind of teams first-time entrepreneurs or you know New guys, you know starting out of the garage. You guys have been around the block and Steve Jobs says, you know It's all about a good product To that point, how do you guys have the great product and good success right now? How do you get customers to change you guys are, you know unconventional you got this new form factor you're getting five-year warranty? Scales linearly and it's great value proposition. How do you get clients attention? Is it is it like hey, you know You have to kind of grab them and shake them and say hey You know one at a time John one at one at a time, right? You know you get it in there And once they try it and they love it I'll tell you the current environment has been amazingly helpful for us With a lot of this the guys getting swallowed up and disappearing that creates an opportunity for us It's pretty unique right I mean most of the people that I know of that were buying data domain really didn't want to buy from EMC And the people who were buying 3 par really didn't want to buy firm HP Etc. Etc. Right Being somewhat smaller gives you a much closer customer care factor a much higher touch factor a much more Open way to influence the product development and what's going on and customers like that It's also a sort of serendipity that the whole cloud VDI Virtualization thing is going on and we just fit so neatly Into that because again, I think the whole modular storage Solution is the way people want to go here. So typically if you look at how Storage companies have eventually taken over and dominated. It's almost always a use case So if I remember back to my early days of EMC When I was at Goldman Sachs, I mean the thing that really made it was SRDF. They were the first guys to have truly Synchronous replication that truly worked really gave you a real DR plan That was in the mid 90s and it propelled them to huge success if I look at net app It was NT server consolidation at least on Wall Street That's what really got them noticed and got them into the enterprise if I look at 3 par it was thin provisioning That's that was the thing that people thought about while it's a cost savings model, right for us I think it's you know real-time data tiering and what we're going to be able to apply with a modular based storage in the VDI cloud-based environments and It's always the economics right economics are interesting versus versus building on a zillion individual drives This is you know, not a disk not an array It is a different different partitioning of the problem to enable scale a building block We've been reporting on silicon angle the whole counterculture both on the entrepreneurial level and also in IT You know a lot of people have been talking for years about consumerization of IT and all that But we are taking a different angle on this counterculture mainly around the IT guys Who you know literally if you've been in IT for the past ten years It really hasn't been a pleasant environment a lot of change a lot of cost reductions a lot of the same old business They're now spending more more now. It's more kind of energy in IT And we've been talking about how you know the last time we've seen this kind of change has been the client server Market, you know where oh, hey, we can actually do some stuff differently and scale and provide the value Data cloud and around data and mainly storage at the center of has been a linchpin for this change How are you guys seeing that change in the IT environments from redeployment of resources to Changing of how they're deploying some of their practices and designing networks and storage I mean you guys seeing any of that kind of bottom-up change and is it coming down from the top as well? is Share some observations. Yeah, I'll give you my opinions TV you can answer the question as well I sort of use storage is always the the poor stepchild right so it usually starts with well If you're lucky the app, but sometimes the server But right there and then that's followed by the network at some point and then storage is usually the last thing that happens I don't know if that's good or bad being in storage business But it's kind of the way it goes least you can see where people want to head So when I look at what's going on with virtualization and cloud and all that it's totally changed the way people build the R strategies It's totally changed the way they provision things. It's changed the way they purchase as I said they buy blade servers They fill them up to some degree. They slam in blades when they need them But provisioning would used to be a multi-day rack them up, you know Configure it get the network punchdown is now a 10-minute exercise maybe less depending on how the shop operates Storage though still is basically run in the same way. It always ran They bring in big arrays with big controllers and they plug them into a fiber channel switch or maybe it's ice-cozzy Or maybe it's some other but something like that And they plug it into the server and there's not really any virtualization awareness the server just hits it There's no IO cues or anything like that. I think things are getting a lot smarter And I think it's much it's moving much closer to our way of seeing things And for me, that's very exciting. I mean the idea of storage management in a virtualized environment is far more complicated How do you how do you model performance? How do you know where the issues are? Well in our case it becomes a lot easier because we're a hundred percent predictable You know we're a hundred percent a hundred percent and we're faster to begin with and you can use it all That's a much more attractive model. So I think the storage changes frankly are just beginning I think we're at the tip of the iceberg there I think you've already seen a lot of it in the server world I think BDI is the next really disruptive thing going on in the server world Which is essentially moving the desktop to the server which is going to change the way one of the big implications There's going to be software licensing. I mean, what does that look like when Windows 7 just boom, right? What's that going to do to? Working from home and security issues and you know antivirus and a lot of data center of this whole value proposition now because you Know you can put silo data plans big iron, you know kind of mainframe like mindsets out there But now you got data sitting at the center application integration all these new touch points They're really omnidirectional inside the enterprise. Yeah, so that's causing a sea change of kind of mindset Younger guns are coming out saying hey I don't want to do it the old way well That's the thing if you figure there's so many applications so much software if if storage the actual bottom end of the Storage we're reliable predictable and then Managed as if it was like a software resource you've now met their needs and they can do a lot more with it That's what we do. That's where the market's going in my opinion You know you're gonna see more of that as a kind of a hybrid resource Storage is just part of the right different QoS different QoS's that's what we do We build different QoS's of our ice and the hybrid ice is now the highest level of QoS for any business that you can It's just going to adapt and learn ice has always been a thinking machine by itself It thinks past that now final question for both you guys Alan and this team. What's the next five-year? Vision look like five years from now What's the market going to look like and what's ziotec? place in that world Those may be different what different answers right from what I can see of the big guys It's going to be more the same they're going to continue iterating on their toys And they're going to continue buying folks that innovate that's that's my guess Unless I see somebody have an R&D budget that spikes a lot more than I've seen and a lot more than the Wall Street tends to tolerate That's going to be the plan For ziotec. I mean we have an incredibly aggressive roadmap for 2011 and 2012 I'm spending much more time in the 2011 part than the 2012 part I'm not going to get ahead of ourselves here But you can rest assured that the idea of adaptive learning real-time data tiering Hybrid ice is the first in a series of things that are going to play together They're all going to talk to our restful management interfaces And essentially it's going to provide a modular multi-flavored Very intelligent without me giving too much away way of laying out your data and it's going to be highly highly disruptive You won't see us at ziotec do anything but ice At least not for the foreseeable future and we really are the ice company So we believe in modular bladed storages in a variety of flavors that play nicely together and Give you the solution that you want and that's where we're taking it on top of that I'll add the fact that we're focused everything we've done also allows for and we provide all of the automation tools to integrate with all of the virtualization and VDI and servers and That just makes it that much more simple to scale infinitely and we are the most open company out there. Yes, we are I'm John Furrier. We're here with Alan ackison the CEO of ziotec and Steve Sikola the CTO hot company Their new product It hasn't even been fully available to the public is selling like hotcakes on a waiting list very disruptive innovative model very modular scales Very hot company guys. Thanks for coming into the cube on your visit to Palo Alto. Thanks. Thanks John. Thanks so much. Thank you much


Hello and welcome to the session. In this session, we are going to discuss the following question which says that first for x cross inverse of x plus cross inverse of 2x is equal to pi by 3 cross of a minus b is given by cross of a into cross of b plus sin of a into sin of b and cross inverse of x is equal to sin inverse of square root of 1 minus x square with this key idea let us proceed with the solution we are given that cross inverse of x plus cross inverse of 2x is equal to pi by 3 which can be written as cross inverse of 2x is equal to pi by 3 minus cross inverse of x which implies that 2x is equal to cross of pi by 3 minus cross inverse of x and we know that cross of a minus b is equal to cross of a into cross of b plus sin of a into sin of b therefore 2x is equal to cross of pi by 3 into cross of cross inverse of x plus sin of pi by 3 into sin of cross inverse of x which implies that 2x is equal to cross pi by 3 is 1 by 2 into cross of cross inverse of x is x plus sin pi by 3 which is square root of 3 by 2 into sin of cross inverse of x which is equal to sin of sin inverse of square root of 1 minus x square since cross inverse of x is equal to sin inverse of square root of 1 minus x square which can be written as 2x is equal to x by 2 plus square root of 3 by 2 into square root of 1 minus x square since sin of sin inverse of x is equal to x for all x belonging to the closed interval minus 1 to 1 then we get 2x is equal to x plus square root of 3 into 1 minus x square whole upon 2 that is 4x is equal to x plus square root of 3 into 1 minus x square which implies that 4x minus x that is 3x is equal to square root of 3 into 1 minus x square now on squaring both sides we get 3x square is equal to 3 into 1 minus x square which implies that 9x square is equal to 3 minus 3x square that is 9x square plus 3x square is equal to 3 which is equal to 12x square is equal to 3 that is x square is equal to 3 by 12 that is 1 by 4 we can write x is equal to plus minus 1 by 2 if we put x equal to 1 by 2 in the given equation that is cos inverse of x plus cos inverse of 2x is equal to pi by 3 taking the left hand side we get cos inverse of 1 by 2 plus cos inverse of 2 into 1 by 2 which is equal to cos inverse of 1 by 2 plus cos inverse of 1 that is pi by 3 plus 0 which is equal to pi by 3 and equal to the right hand side of the equation it shows that x equal to 1 by 2 that is 5 the equation now if we put x equal to minus 1 by 2 in the given equation that is cos inverse of x plus cos inverse of 2x is equal to pi by 3 on taking the left hand side we get cos inverse of minus 1 by 2 plus cos inverse of 2 into minus 1 by 2 which can be written as cos inverse of minus 1 by 2 plus cos inverse of minus 1 and we know that cos inverse of minus x is given by pi minus cos inverse of x for all x belonging to the close interval minus 1 to 1 therefore we have cos inverse of minus 1 by 2 is equal to pi minus cos inverse of 1 by 2 plus cos inverse of minus 1 can be written as pi minus cos inverse of 1 which is equal to 2 pi minus pi by 3 minus 0 which is equal to 5 pi by 3 that is not equal to the right hand side of the equation therefore x equal to minus 1 by 2 does not satisfy the equation x equal to 1 by 2 is the required answer please find session hope you enjoyed this session


and welcome to the First Unitarian Society. My name is Kelly Crocker and I'm one of the ministers here. Today I am joined by my colleague, the Reverend Kelly S. Bruce Jackson and the worship team of Linda Warren, Drew Collins, Stephen Gregorius and Daniel Carnes. Today's flowers are in memory of Eva Wright whose memorial service was held here yesterday. The vision of First Unitarian Society is growing souls, connecting with one another and embodying our Unitarian Universalist values in our lives, in our community and in our world. If you're visiting us today, welcome. We're so very glad that you are with us. If you would like more information about First Unitarian Society, please stop by the welcome table that is located in the commons to your right by the elevator. We hope you'll be able to stay and join us for coffee hour immediately following the service which is also right out here in the commons.  The information about First Unitarian Society, all of those slides that were shown at the beginning of the service will be shown again after. So we encourage you to take a moment and watch those and learn more about upcoming programs and activities. And now, I invite you to join me in a moment of silence as we center ourselves and bring ourselves fully into this time, joining together once again in community. But we have been separately and all that we will become together is stretched out before and behind us like stars scattered across a canvas of sky. We stand at the precipice, arms locked together like tandem skydivers working up the courage to jump. Tell me friends, what have we got to lose? Our fear of failure, our mistrust of our own talents? What have we got to lose? A poverty of the spirit, the lie that we are alone. What wonders await us in the space between the first leap and the moment our feet or our wheels, however we move our bodies across this precious earth, touchdown softly on unknown soil? What have we got to lose that we can't replace with some previously unimaginable joy? Blessed are you, spirit of life who has sustained us and livened us and enabled us to reach this moment. Give us courage in our leaping and gratitude in our landing and share with us in the joy of a long and fruitful ministry together. And I invite you now to rise in all the ways we do joining together in our words of affirmation as we light our chalice. We light this chalice in memory of the courage of those who have struggled for freedom, the persistence of those who struggled for justice and the love of those who built beloved communities to carry on the light of hope. We have a new chalice response for October. Let's sing it twice. Choose before I'll let us sing our opening hymn, number 1015, I Know I Can. To hear a story, I have a story for you this morning which is called What the Hair Heard. And it's not this kind of hair, it's that kind of hair, hair, which is just another name for a rabbit, basically, yes. No, like another word for rabbit is a hair. Like another word for rabbit is a bunny. So bunny, rabbit, hair, there you go. That would be very unfortunate for the bunny. I think the bunny needs its hair. If it didn't have to be a bunny, it couldn't be a hair if it didn't have hair. So here's the story. One time there was a hare or a rabbit or a bunny, if you prefer, and it was hanging out by a tree, minding its own business, not doing anything in particular, when a piece of fruit fell down from one of the branches of that tree and landed with a thunk on the ground. Now, it wasn't watching the tree when the piece of fruit fell, it just heard the sound and just hearing the sound, that rabbit leapt to a conclusion. It decided that because it heard this loud thunking sound right behind it, that must mean that the world was falling apart. It's a pretty big leap to make. I'm not encouraging you to make the same assumption if you hear a loud noise in the future. I think you'll see that sort of the point of this story. So anyway, the rabbit was very afraid because it thought that the world was coming to an end. So it started running as fast as it could in the opposite direction, trying to get away from whatever bad thing was happening that made that loud thunking sound. Yes! You think you know this story? Well, then you can tell me at the end if it ends the way that you think that it was going to end, okay? Keep that in mind. The bird said this guy was falling. I think, are you thinking of the bird saying this guy was falling story? Yes, okay. So that's a popular opinion. What do we got? The nut and the hair. Okay, I would like to hear that story from you. Maybe you can tell it to me after the service. Yes! Oh, you've read a book about the spider weaving a web between the sky and the ground? Oh, yeah. There are a lot of good stories about animals and how the world works. And I can see that you're very excited to share something. Yes, chicken little. I think chicken little is the chicken story in question that we're thinking about, right? So in this particular story, instead of a chicken, there's a rabbit. But I think it's the same principle at play because the rabbit went running in one direction and then another rabbit saw that rabbit and said, hey, why are you running so fast? What are you running away from? What do you think that the first rabbit said to that question? The sky is falling. I think we're gonna blend the stories at this point. Okay, so the rabbit said the sky is falling. And of course, of course, the second rabbit was very concerned about that, just like the first rabbit was concerned about that. So along, now they're both running, the first rabbit and the second rabbit, and then some more rabbits joined in, and then some deer, and then some boars, and then some rhinoceros, and then some tigers, and some elephants, and now all these different animals are all running in the same direction and away from that first loud sound, there was a piece of fruit. Did we think it was a plum? So I was told it was a quince, but I think a plum is a perfectly good answer too. So, it happened that a lioness was watching all of this happen. Saw this huge parade of animals running in a very fast speed all in the same direction, all for no apparent reason. And so she raced up in front, lions are pretty fast, so she raced up in front of where the animals were headed to and she, what do you think she did? Roar! Roar! You got it! You got it! Sorry to surprise you. She roared and everybody reacted basically like you did.  We gotta stop what we're doing. And she was like, why? Why are you all running so fast in the same direction? And everybody looked at the elephants and said, the elephants know why we're doing this. The elephants said, no, we don't, we're just following the tigers. The tigers said, we don't know where we're going, we're just following the rhinoceroses. And the rhinos said, no, we were just following the boars, don't put this on us. And then to the deer and then to the rabbits and then all the other rabbits said, it was that one. And so the first rabbit explained, I heard a very loud noise and that's how I know the sky is falling. The lioness said, all right, show me where you heard this noise. So eventually they walked all the way back to where they started. The lioness looked on the ground, looked at the tree, looked at the piece of fruit under the tree and thought, aha, this noise was just a plum falling out of the tree. So the moral of this story that I have for you, you can decide if you have a different moral, okay? But the moral of the story that I have for you is that sometimes an assumption, a wrong assumption, the thing where we guess what's going on and we guess wrong, that can be contagious. Other people can take the same wrong idea and run with it, yes. Okay, so another takeaway here is avoid falling out of trees. I didn't quite follow that one, but it's all right.  Don't jump to conclusions, I love it, I love it. Thank you so much, you've been a great audience. Have fun at class. And I invite you now into this time of giving and receiving where we give freely and generously to this offering which sustains and strengthens our community here, as well as the work of our outreach offering recipient. This week, our recipient is mentoring positives who offers a comprehensive suite of community-based mentoring and social entrepreneurship opportunities designed to bolster leadership, social skills, self-confidence, emotional learning, and well-being for many of Madison's youth. So you'll see there's multiple ways to share your gifts this morning. There are baskets at the doors of this room for those of us here in person. You will also see on the screen that you can donate directly from our website, fussmattison.org, and you'll see the text to give information there as well. We thank you for your generosity and for your faith in this life we create together. I place this question before you because our spiritual theme for this month is courage, and we cannot talk about courage without talking about fear. We sometimes think of courage as fearlessness and of courageous people as people who do not feel fear in the same way that others do. But fear is a natural part of life and a reasonable, rational response to being alive. We are all of us mortal, and everyone and everything we have been given to love upon this beautiful, fragile planet of ours is mortal too. That is reason enough for at least some quantity of fear. The most common sort of fear, at least to talk about, whether or not it's the most common sort to feel, is a hyper-awareness of the simple reality of death. In Act 2, Scene 2 of William Shakespeare's play Julius Caesar, the titular character somewhat famously declares, cowards die many times before their deaths, the valiant never taste of death but once. Of all the wonders that I yet have heard, it seems to me most strange that men should fear, seeing that death, a necessary end, will come when it will come. Julius Caesar, both the historical figure and the fictional imagining of him in the play, was a general and a conqueror.  And being a soldier and a capable one, he took numerous daily precautions against the threat of dying. Donning his armor, drilling his troops, every step taken towards victory on the battlefield was a step towards the possibility of dying, yes, but also a hedge to try to make it least likely under the dangerous circumstances that he had chosen. Through Caesar's voice, Shakespeare declares that it is strange that men should fear death, but a healthy awareness of what makes death more likely or less is an essential quality in those people whose work or whose duty it is to face death on a regular basis. Our spiritual ancestor, Ralph Waldo Emerson, wrote something between a prayer and an incantation against the fear of dying. Dan and Stephen at the soundboard might be able to quote it to you as well as I can because I recite it fairly often during the microphone check before the services.  Here is a man who lived a dramatically more secure life than Caesar's, less fancy but still very comfortable and spectacularly more safe, yearning for freedom from the fear of death. It is a common fear, but it is hardly the only thing to be afraid of. Even Caesar's and Emerson's examples are limited to the fear of one's own dying. When fear for the life of someone we love seems to me just as common, if not more so. To say nothing of all the countless fears of living, living but without a home, living but without a job, living but without someone to love us. The list of abstract possibilities is infinite and exhausting. Now there are several often ignored passages of the Hebrew Bible in which the divine is referred to in unambiguously feminine terms. One of these is found in the 13th chapter of the book of Hosea in which the voice of the God of his understanding says of those who do wrong, I will fall on them like a mother bear, robbed of her cubs, and will tear open the covering of their heart. The courage of a mother protecting her children is primal and visceral, but it is not an erasure of fear. That courage is driven by fear, produced by fear, fear for the well-being of her cubs makes the mother bear courageous beyond all other limits. Two and a half years ago, I had a ritual of my weekly trip outside the house, getting up early, driving to the grocery store, waiting in a line stretched out by social distancing, wearing gloves and a mask, and following all the arrows on the market floor so as not to have to pass directly by any other shoppers. The criticism at the time and since has been that I did all this just as many of you did the same or similar things out of fear. And the common rejoinder is that it was done out of care, out of love for myself, for my family, my community, for strangers I have never met and will never meet, but whom I want to have the best chance to stay healthy and alive. And what I am saying to you now is that in that case and many others, care and fear are not contradictions. They are actually just two perspectives on the same basic feeling. So I have no problem saying that fear is a factor in a necessary program of public health. There is a good and healthy fear to have of making the world less safe and hospitable for ourselves and everyone else. But now what in particular are you afraid of here? I will answer the question first, at least in part. I am afraid of falling short, of failing the people who need me, of not living up to my promises to them or the promises I have made to myself on their behalf. I am afraid of not being the person that the people who need me need me to be. Those people that I am afraid of failing are my children first and foremost, the rest of my family, my closest friends and then you. And nine days out of 10, I am only grateful for that fear because that fear comes from a deep appreciation for the power and importance of the trust placed in me. You see, some of what we call fear is just recognizing how precious something is, the preciousness of a person or a relationship or our own selves. And there is nothing but good in that. It is a healthy thing to care about the ones whom we care about, to honor our obligations, to protect what we love. There can be an excess of this fear as there can be for any sort. As I said, nine days out of 10, the fear of falling short of my promises is only a good thing, but on that 10th day. When I wake in the night towards no positive end, but to worry and fret, no good is added to the world by that. And it can make a soul powerfully tired. Like the little fear of death that makes you careful or prepared or more willing to take the advice of medical professionals seriously, a little fear of failure is the drive to do better as an artist or a parent or a friend.  But I was telling you what I am afraid of. And I have an entirely different fear to confess to you, friends. The fear of being a burden to or a drain on the people who love me. Perhaps you are immune to that particular mental trap.  The fear which drives the impulse to hold back to hide yourself or at least the parts of you that you think are too sad, too hard or just too much. The fear that stops us from asking for help when we need it. And unlike in my previous example, this is a fear that has no good purpose. Nine times out of 10, even 99 times out of 100. It is possible, it's true, to ask too much of other people to take and take and never give back in return. But in my experience, the greater threat for most people is an overabundance of this fear. Not the total absence of it. Anything more than the single drop that marks our care for other people, not just as a means to our own ends, but as ends in themselves. More than this only pushes us towards isolation and alienation. In the Dune series of novels, the science fiction author Frank Herbert includes a recitation that is commonly called the litany against fear. Here's the most common version of it. I must not fear. Fear is the mind killer. Fear is the little death that brings total obliteration. I will face my fear. I will permit it to pass over me and through me and when it has gone past, I will turn the inner eye to see its path where fear has gone. There will be nothing. Only I will remain. The terms of these lines are stark and absolute and you're probably already expecting me to criticize them. The little death that brings total obliteration seems extreme. Better advice for God, emperors and mind witches of an impossibly distant imagined future than for actual people living actual lives. But the advice to turn the inner eye onto our fear, to observe and examine it in order to rob it of its overwhelming power, that feels much more pertinent to life on this planet at this present time. The contemporary Buddhist teacher Pima Chodron tells a parable about how listening to our fears can disarm them almost literally. This is the way that it goes. Once there was a young warrior. Her teacher told her that she had to do battle with fear. She didn't want to do that. It seemed too aggressive. It was scary. It seemed unfriendly. But the teacher said she had to do it and gave her the instructions for the battle. The day arrived. The student warrior stood on one side and fear stood on the other. The warrior was feeling very small and fear was looking big and wrathful. They both had their weapons. The young warrior roused herself and went toward fear, prostrated three times and asked, may I have permission to go into battle with you? Fear said, thank you for showing me so much respect that you asked permission. Then the young warrior said, how can I defeat you? Fear replied, my weapons are that I talk fast and I get very close to your face. And then you get completely unnerved and you do whatever I say. If you don't do what I tell you, I have no power. You can listen to me and you can have respect for me. You can even be convinced by me, but if you don't do what I say, I have no power. In that way, the student warrior learned how to defeat fear. Now here is where we come to what I believe is the formula for courage. Not to have no fear at all, but to have fear of the right sort, about the right things in the right proportions. To learn what can be of use to learn from that fear and to let go of the rest. Not to be ruled by our fears, but to be students of them. Today falls between the Jewish high holy days of Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, which means that in the Jewish tradition, this is one of the days of awe. Some of us here observe this sacred time and some of us do not. One of the many beauties of our theological diversity is that we can learn from each other's practices even if we don't share in them directly. And as it happens, this practice is about a positive engagement with fear. See, during the days of awe, beginning with the Jewish New Year and ending with the day of atonement, a person is called on to reflect on their actions over the year now past. To face the fear of acknowledging having done wrong, the fear of what it would mean to apologize, take responsibility, make amends, and the fear of letting go of grievances and grudges and forgiving others for their own wrongs. The awe at play in the cosmic, in these days of awe is the cosmic awe affirmed throughout and beyond all human religion, the wonder of the soul in dialogue with the universe. How great and how glorious it is to be a part of the vastness of existence and how similarly small and vulnerable we feel when we compare ourselves to the enormity and the power of everything that is. Accepting and learning from these two fears in this season creates the conditions to move forward with courage into the year ahead. Getting right with those around us helps us to feel more at home in the universe and finding our place in the cosmic web gives us strength to seek, accept and extend forgiveness to others. The great Jewish mystic and teacher, Rabbi Nachman of Braslov, but from whom by the way we get the lyrics for our closing hymn today, has a single quotation that he might be best known for. It's translated a number of slightly different ways, but here is my preferred rendering. The whole world is a very narrow bridge. The most important thing is not to be overwhelmed by fear. Notice what it does not say. Not to be without fear, not to ignore fear, to live with it, to learn from it, but not to be overwhelmed by it. So, what are you afraid of? Whatever it may be, my friends, may you not be overwhelmed by that fear and instead find within it the courage that it has to teach you. Each week we gather, bringing with us the joys and the losses of recent days. We share these here knowing we are held in love. We light a candle for Nancy and Pete daily as they mourn the sudden death of Nancy's brother. We send them our love and our care as they remember him. And we light a candle of memory and sorrow and gratitude for the life of Al Sentie who passed away on Thursday evening.  May Sparrow feel our love around her in the days ahead. And we light a candle in solidarity with the people of Ukraine, both in their suffering and in their struggle. Together we yearn for peace, for them and for all people and for an end to all wars of conquest anywhere and everywhere on earth. And if you'll join me now in a moment of prayer with these words from Elizabeth Buke, spirit of life, love which holds us. We gather in reverence and thanks for you. We are grateful for the gift of another breath and for each moment of connection, beauty and truth. Cry with us in our pain for our world. Remind us that we are loved just as we are. Remind us that we are connected with all that is. Remind us that we do not journey alone. Give us what we need for today. Call us back to our promises, commitments and values. Help us love ourselves and each other and to show our love in our actions. Make us instruments of justice, equity and compassion. Free us from all that is destructive. We declare that life and love are stronger than tyranny and fear, that a world of beauty and love is coming and that we must be the ones to shape it together. May we hold all this and all that lives in our hearts in a moment of silence. Blessed be and amen. Will you stand and sing with me? Our closing hymn, number 219. Oh here, my people. May you be brave enough to expose your aching and woundedness and reveal your vulnerability. May you speak your deepest truths knowing that they will change as you do.  May you draw, paint, sculpt and sew, showing the world your vision. May you write letters, poetry, biographies, slogans, graffiti, the great novel laying bare your words to love and hate. May you love even though your heart breaks again and again. And until the end of your days, may your life be filled with possibilities and with courage. Blessed be, go in peace and please be seated for the postlude.


Hello everyone, I am Mrs. Sunita Doh, the topic covered here is complex queries. Complex queries are often hard or impossible to write as a single SQL block or union, intersection or difference of the SQL blocks. What is SQL block? An SQL block consists of a single select from where statement possibly with the group by and having clause. Learning outcome. At the end of the session, students will be able to write the complex queries using the derive relation and the with clause. Two ways of composing multiple SQL blocks to express complex queries are derive relation and the with clause. Consider the derive relation. SQL allows a sub query expression to be used in the from clause. We use such expression then we must give the result relation a name and we can rename the attributes. We do this renaming by using the as clause. Consider the example. Consider the sub query which generates a relation consisting of name of all the branches and their corresponding average account balance. So input to this sub query is the relation account which consists of the attributes account number, branch name and balance. Query is select branch name, average of balance from account grouped by branch name as branch average in parenthesis branch name comma average balance. The sub query force find the average of balance branch wise. The sub query result is name branch average with the attribute branch name and the average balance. In the account relation there are two tuples for the branch name Brinton hence the average of balance is 825 in the resulting table and the remaining tuples are same as that of the original relation. To illustrate the use of a sub query expression in the from clause consider the example. Find the average account balance of those branches where the average account balance is greater than dollar 500. The relation required to write the query is account the query is select branch name comma average balance from select branch name comma average balance from account grouped by branch name as branch average in parenthesis branch name comma average balance where average balance is greater than 500. The relation branch average is the result of the sub query returned within from clause which find the average of balance branch wise. Final result contains only those tuple from the relation branch average where the average account balance is greater than dollar 500. In the relation branch average third, fourth and fifth tuple contains the average balance greater than 500 hence these three tuples are in the final result. Here while writing the query we do not need to use the having clause since the sub query in the from clause compute the average balance and its result is name as branch average and we can use the attribute of branch average directly in the where clause. To illustrate the use of the sub query expression in the from clause consider one more example. Find the maximum across all branches of the total balance at each branch. Relation required is account query is select max of total balance from select branch name comma sum of balance from account grouped by branch name as branch total in parenthesis branch name comma total balance. Here also the having clause does not help us in this task but we can write this query easily by using a sub query in the from clause. The relation branch total is the result of the sub query return in the from clause which find the total balance at each branch. The result of this query is the maximum across all the branches of total balance at each branch. In the relation branch total third tuple contains the maximum balance 1650 for the branch name brinton hence this tuple is in final result. Till now we consider how to write the query using the derived relation. Now pause this video and reflect on this question for a minute or two minute and write your response. Once you return the answer to this question then you can restart playing this video. Question is find the minimum across all the branches of total amount at each branch and the branch name for given relation using derived relation. I hope all of you have completed this activity. So the question is given on this slide query is select minimum total amount comma branch name from select branch name comma sum of amount from loan grouped by branch name as branch total in parenthesis branch name comma total amount. The relation branch total is the result of the sub query return in the from clause which find the total balance at each branch. The result of this query is the minimum across all the branches of the total balance at each branch. In the relation branch total fifth tuple contains the minimum balance 500 for the branch name meanness. Hence this tuple is in the final result. Complex queries are much easier to write and to understand if we structure them by breaking them into the smaller views that we then combine just as we structure the programs by breaking their tasks into the procedures. Now consider the width clause. However, unlike a procedure definition a create view clause create a view definition in the database and the view definition stays in the database until a command drop view view name is executed. The width clause provides a way of defining a temporary view whose definition is available only to the query in which width clause occurs. Example, find all accounts with the maximum balance. Relation required is account query is given on this slide. This query select account with the maximum balance. If there are many account with the same maximum balance all of them are selected. We could have written the above query by using the nested subquery in either the from clause or the where clause. However, using the nested subqueries would have made the query harder to read and understand. The width clause make the query logic clearer. It also permit a view definition to be used in the multiple places within a query. The query return using width clause returns the maximum balance 900 of the account relation. The query select from where clause returns the account number with the maximum balance. Consider one more example of the width clause. Find all branches where the total account deposit is greater than the average of total account deposit at all the branches. Relation required is account. The query is width branch total in parenthesis branch name comma value as select branch name comma sum of balance from account grouped by branch name. Now, second width clause that is width branch total average in parenthesis value as select average of value from branch total and now main query that is select branch name from branch total comma branch total average where the branch total dot value is greater than equals to branch total average dot value. The relation branch total is the result of the first width clause which find the total balance at each branch. The branch total average relation is the result of the second width clause which find the average of the total account deposit at all branches. The resulting relation contains only one tuple corresponding to the branch name Brinton in which the branch total 1650 is greater than the average of total account deposit at all the branches that is 790. Till now we consider how to write the query using width clause. Now, pause this video and reflect on this question for a minute or two minute and write your response. Once you have written the answer to this question then you can start playing this video. The question is find all loans with the minimum amount for given relation using the width clause. I hope all of you have completed this activity. The query is with minimum amount of values as select minimum of amount from loan main query that is select loan number from loan minimum amount where loan dot amount equals to minimum amount dot value. The minimum amount relation is the result of the sub query written using width clause which find the minimum loan amount value. The resulting relation is the result of select from where clause which keeps the loan number L11 and L93 with the minimum amount for the given relation loan. These are the references used for preparing this presentation. Thank you.


This dustbin is the most influential trashcan in the history of photography, and it's going to help you radically alter your approach to color photography, which is going to make your photographs so much more remarkable.  We wouldn't have given it a second glance. To the photographer who we're going to be inspired to today, it was a powerful statement about the use of color and composition in photography. If you google famous color photographers, there are the usual suspects, you know, William Eggleston, Saul Leiter, Alex Webb, but there is a glaring omission from that list, and that is the name of Pete Turner. In my view, one of the most criminally underrated and yet influential color photographers of all time. In a previous video, I talked about being remarkable with your photographs, to producing something that Seth Gordon called a purple cow. There are two fundamental principles to the success of Pete Turner's photography that we are going to learn from and introduce into your own work to help it make it more remarkable. The subjects that Pete Turner photographs are not always the most exotic, although granted, some of his most famous photographs are photographed in exotic locations, but the basic premise behind most of his images is that they can be created pretty much wherever you look, wherever there is the willingness to explore the possibilities of color. Take a look at these photographs and think about what it is about them that holds your attention. Composition within Pete Turner's photography plays such an important role, because even though there are basic shapes and familiar objects and geometric patterns, and they're all presented quite simply, they are giving the color a structure on which it can dance, which it can play.  Turner himself said that, you know, he would be looking and trying to photograph, there would be some sort of color that was really working. And then he would try and tease out the image from that color. And the more that he searched for it, the worse the composition would get. So he would end up with, he wouldn't take the photograph. And the lesson is that it's not enough. It is not enough to just simply photograph lovely and wonderful color and expect that color to carry the image by itself. The photograph of the trash can that we looked at the beginning of this video is a great example of why Pete Turner was so sought after by art directors and people who are making album covers for jazz musicians, because these images stick in our mind. Think about that photograph. That image of the trash can is going to stay with you because it is direct. It is to the point, it is simple. It is masterfully crafted to capture attention, uses the bold primary colors, but also the composition is interesting. The composition is sound. And all those things come together to create a photograph that you are going to remember for, well, basically forever, right? It's going to stay with you long after most of the photographs that you see today have faded from your memory. The second secret crucial element to creating great color photographs, you know, like Pete Turner's and other photographers like Alex Webb, who is, Alex Webb is a fantastic photographer, and I am going to link to a video of his at the end of this because I know that you're going to love it. If you love Pete Turner, well, Alex Webb is going to play your way. But when you look at their photographs, they have such rich, gorgeous colors, and often as a photographer, you think, where, where did they find these things? Where did these colors come from? I was talking to a photographer yesterday on one of the feedback sessions that I do. And we were talking about this, this very secret, if you want to call it that. And that's the use of shadows. This photographer's work was, was bold. There were lots of bright colors in it, but those colors were enhanced by him not being afraid to embrace inky black zone zero shadows in his photography. When you do this, when you introduce darker elements to your images, not only does it create strong graphic elements that the eye latches on to, but it also contrasts with the color in the photographs, the reds and the, you know, the greens and the blues, all of them become so much brighter, they become so much more saturated because of this interplay against darker areas. You've seen this connection for yourself.  And everything in front of that storm cloud has a stronger color to it, has a, has a richness to it. And that's because it's contrasted against the dark sky. Take away those clouds and stuff like that. And you have those kind of, you know, those kind of whitish midday, you know, skies and all that color seems to disappear and become sort of bleached out because of this lack of contrast.  If you want to explore color photography, you need to make your colors saturated, to make them pop and explode off the print. And to do that, you have to let the shadows come in. You have to let the shadows be part of your image. At this point, I think it's appropriate that we make the distinction between simply taking photograph, going into Photoshop or Lightroom and, and cranking up the saturation. And you, because it's not the same, it doesn't give you the same effect. It doesn't give you the same effect as creating the color in camera.  You can use those shadows. When you do all of these things, it makes the image feel, I don't know, once both more organic and more surreal, if you, if you, if you want to call it that, it's relying on dialing up saturation Photoshop, it doesn't give you this same result. So, you know, it's okay to use post-processing techniques to, to create the effects, to, to add on layers of what you've done in camera.  But as the old saying goes, you cannot make a good print from a bad negative. As you learn to see and you use and you appreciate the light and the color and the shadows and all the things that are all around you, it is going to revolutionize all of your photography, even if you just photograph in black and white, you know, photography is about the art of light and understanding it is going to play such a crucial role in you becoming the best photographer that you can be. A photographer whom I absolutely adore the way that he plays with color and shadow and layering and all sorts of stuff in his photography is a guy called Alex Webb, who I mentioned earlier. He is fantastic. If you like Pete Turner, you're absolutely going to adore his photography. I put the video up here. Please do check him out. Thank you ever so much for watching once again and I'll see you again soon.


Now Nigerian lecturers in the Benna Republic have called on the federal government to prevent anyone from being spared after suspending the evaluation and accreditation process for degree certificates from Benna and Togo Republics. Now the group holds the government to expedite investigation and punish those responsible stating that the legitimate students should not be discouraged and that the government has the right to suspend accreditation. The apprehension and the anxiety that the announcement might have caused as a result of the suspension. But we want to assure Nigerians that the federal government has taken these steps not to undermine the effort of genuine students that are studying in Benna or in Togo or by extension other countries that have been involved. No government will do that but it is to ensure that there is credibility in this certification process. So as a body we will not do without commanding the federal government's effort in trying to put things in place. In the meantime we would like to encourage our dear students who are studying in Benna Republic in Togo or who are studying overseas to remain calm. Be rest assured that the action of the government is to ensure quality of the certification process. Hello, hope you enjoyed the news. Please do subscribe to our YouTube channel and don't forget to hit the notification button so you get notified about fresh news updates.