Live from the Oracle Conference Center in Redwood Shores, California, it's The Cube at the Next Generation Engineered Systems launch event. Brought to you by headline-sponsored, Oracle. Hey, welcome back everyone. We are here live in Silicon Valley. This is The Cube, our flagship program. When we go out to the events and extract the signal from noise, I'm John Furrier with my co-host, Dave Vellante. I'm excited for the next guest we have on, John Fallot, EVP here at Oracle Systems. Longtime son engineer, Larry called you talented. Many times on stage when he was doing his keynotes. Welcome to The Cube. Yeah, thank you guys for having me. Really appreciate it. And there's so much sun DNA in Silicon Valley. I mean, if you look at all the major breakthroughs in terms of technology and system software, you go back, this is back to the Unix Berkeley days and that whole generation really is now spawning back in the cloud. So, you're seeing a resurgence of systems. And it's old school and new school. So, you're heading up this now. You moved it over from 2009, doesn't tend to close the sun acquisition.  What is the deal? I mean, is there fruit coming off the tree five years later? I mean, R&D, they're touting a lot of R&D. Give us the quick, yeah, that's what's going on. Yeah, it's interesting. You know, when Larry bought Sun, the press at the time was sort of confused because here was a big package software company buying a hardware company. What was the idea there? And Larry always had this vision that he could actually put the engineers together and build better products. That was the beginning of the vision, which is kind of interesting. So, you know, from day one, it was go hire some engineers, John. Go build me more aggressive product roadmap. Go tell me what companies we need to buy. And so it was the opposite of the current realization. But the other idea there was getting to the cloud. And again, Larry's been, you know, highly quoted on the cloud, both positively and negatively. But I know internally from working with him, part of his vision was, as Oracle, he could also build better cloud infrastructure, both from customers as well as for our own abilities. But having all of the engineers that build the application and build the Miller and build the database, we could build a better mousetrap. And I got a bunch of stories about some of the things that we talked about in those early days because you're seeing those stories now. Like you see the products now and it takes years to build this stuff, we're now starting to see that. So what's one of the conversations back then? You had a couple outliers like, hey, let's do this convergent infrastructure thing that was kind of outside the box back then. Integrating middleware and bringing more of an OS kind of integration blue layer. So like, what was some of the debates? What would rise up and down the chain in terms of, what were some of the food fights internally around approaches?  Do you go siloed? Do you go integrated stack? Well, you know, we didn't have a lot of food fights inside. We knew what we were building was something different that people weren't used to. And as I like to tell customers, I say, let me start off. I'm not conventional wisdom. Conventional wisdom is to buy stuff from a dozen different vendors and put it together yourself. I'm going to build you bigger, more powerful systems that are more cost effective because they're integrated. Now, before Oracle Bot Sun, they had already been working on Exadata. So Exadata is a vision that actually was started years before the acquisition of Sun. But what Larry discovered in building that, as you guys understand is, it's just a lot harder when the engineering activity consists of contracts, non-disclosure agreements, all of that, as opposed to, okay, everybody gets the room. You mean with other partners? With other partners, right? We're, let's get all the engineers in the room. We can change the software as we need. We can change the hardware. So that Genesis was there. And it was kind of interesting because one of my very first meetings with Larry, Larry wanted to talk about the Spark processor. And he says, John, can we put something into the processor to go help accelerate the database and make the database more effective? And of course I said, sure, of course Larry. And then we went back to the teams and we worked on how could we enhance our silicon design to go make a better product. And those products are going to be announced in 2015. So there's a lot behind all of this which was driven actually by engineering. It was, you know, how do you engineer a better product? And that was the drive behind all of this.  Dave and I both spoke to Andy Jassy and talk about the evolution of Amazon web services which essentially was a bolt on to solve some of their retail and affiliate business. And you know, they had the same debates but what they did decide was to build a platform. That scaled up. Rather than going for the low hanging fruit, say, oh, let's beat a storage device and compete with EMC. That seemed like a no brain and maybe you do that. But you guys took the same approach with Larry and the team. Okay, I get the engineers in the room. That is almost the same thing. You built a platform. Do you elaborate on where that came from and where it is today? Well, I mean, you know, when you say about Oracle, you think about them as a platform company and Sun was as well. It's kind of interesting because when the engineers came together, there was really no cognitive dissonance at all because Sun had been working on Java and Spark and Solaris and a variety of other platforms and there's a certain mindset around that. And then Oracle had been working on WebLogic and the Oracle database and so on. The idea of a platform was very straightforward. You want to preserve people's applications, right? You want them to inherit new properties when they use the products without changing their software. So they have durability over decades, but you want to keep making it better and better and better. And so, you know, I'm intensely focused in hardware intercepting the database in middleware. When I talk to customers, I am intensely focused on those. But why is that? Because your main cost components are how hard is it to run your database? How much storage do you need? How expensive is that storage? And then the applications inherit the properties of those layers. And so I magically make SAP and SAS and many other applications run better. And so that's really an engineering problem, is go after those layers. And since Sun and Oracle were both intensely platform companies, it was a great thing to go put together. And if you go into an Exadata meeting, if you got to secretly go into an Exadata meeting, you'd have a hard time figuring out which men and women are working for me and which men and women are working on the database. Because there's this single conversation about what can we do to go make that work better. And it's very exciting. So the strategy's been very clear. Well, that comes from Larry, right? I mean, he's crisp and thin as thinking. So in some respects, that's maybe the easy part. It takes a long time. Take us through that.  You had to put R&D into it. The fruits of that labor take years and years and years. Take us through that. Yeah, I mean, there's multiple levels of that. I think the roadmap and the strategy, as you said, came together fairly quickly. And Larry loves to have the strategic debates. And we meet every week to talk about hardware strategy and products. He's very intensely focused on this business. But the core tenets of it did not change right from day one.  We've acquired multiple companies in the hardware space, as you know, both storage and networking. And then we basically rebuilt both the strong organic team plus some inorganic components and then have introduced generations of products. You know, here today, why are we here? This is the X5 generation of the complete engineer systems family. Every single year we've been introducing a completely new generation of these products. And so it's a breathtaking pace that we've been setting out to do here to introduce next generation products that include both software innovation and hardware innovation and then are delivered as an integrated engineered whole. And so underneath that has been years of individual technology development, organizational maturity, product maturity. And the systems and storage business has transformed quite dramatically. I mean, when Oracle acquired Sun, Larry used to talk about the cause, we don't want to be in the low end X86. Exactly. We're chasing profits, not revenue. He's very clear about that. Storage is another really hard piece. And Sun, frankly, Sun always in my mind struggle a little bit with storage. What's different now? Is it the intense focus? Is it more R&D? Is it talent? Is it vision? Take us through what's different. Yeah, so I think it's all of the above. And in the storage area, especially with Larry, what's great about Larry is, as Sapphire likes to say, he's the master of the long game. If you want to play in storage, you better be prepared to stay long and invest. And so we've invested heavily in core technologies like ZFS and now FS1 as well as our tape technologies and then consistently executed on incrementing the tape bill of those products for a long period of time. And that, of course, has then resulted in what you have with solid products. And if you look at what Sun, if you want to take an element of history there, it's that consistency of investment and execution that comes in. And you see that in storage. Is Larry patient or impatient? I like to say, yeah. I think Larry is the most impatient, patient person I know. It's kind of interesting because he obviously likes to get things done. But he knows, if you do platforms like database and storage and silicon and so on, you better be prepared to invest for the long term. And he always has been doing that as Oracle. So for me, it's been very exciting, which is this ability to long-term investment technology. I think another comment on storage also is we have the ability to invest to make things like the database run better. And that has a dramatic impact on people's infrastructure. And so we can pick these focus points and then stay with them for years. And you now see that coming out today. In today's announcement, we're going to have this huge message around cost. It's kind of interesting because people don't associate Oracle with being an inexpensive company and we're not, right? But what we've done is we've done a bunch of engineering here to make it much easier to use and much lower cost if you look at what am I trying to do in my data set with these products. And so that was always part of the vision was to take costs dramatically out of the data center. And you don't think about Oracle doing that, but we're going to engineer in a bunch of stuff so you don't have to do it, right? So it's interesting that strategy because essentially you, in some regards, take a hybrid-column compression, OISP, you're essentially locking out your competitors from actually exploiting those types of capabilities. They're unique to Oracle. At the same time, Oracle used to have this rich heritage of partnerships with other hardware companies. Those are sort of fading as you guys go and compete with those guys. At what point do you say, okay, the database in its competitiveness relative to something like SQL Server is needs that ecosystem? Or do you feel like the long-term strategy is to clearly drive that value and differentiation relative to the competition? Yeah, so let me be clear about that. There's this perception that we don't work with the other hardware vendors. Obviously, from a sales standpoint, we compete in a lot of cases, but we work intensively with the other vendors because I don't go into any environment that's an Oracle monoculture. It does not exist, right? I have to go and inter-operate with these and work on a lot of technologies. We've done technology, for example, upcoming for the database in our silicon products which are open to others to use, right? And so we've been briefing customers and allies on there. So we may choose to go after something more intensely like a database compression algorithm because we see a bunch of value on it where other people are building a more generic platform, but we do spend a lot of energy working with other software developers and with other hardware manufacturers even though in a sales standpoint, they make a... Is it unfair to say that you're locking out competitors on some of those capabilities? Is that a misconception on my part? Yeah, that is a misconception. So if you look at the Oracle database, let's look at Exadata. Kind of a classic example, right? What we've done there is we make sure that the database is the database. Your application remains unchanged, right? You can move to P-Series, you can move to X86, you can run the database wherever you would like.  Now, underneath the database, I'm doing a lot of engineering. In the latest X5, I've done a lot of engineering around NVMe storage and others to go accelerate those by being very careful to keep the tools the same. Enterprise manager's the same, data guard's the same, golden gate's the same, rack is the same, so that you're not locked in. And so there's a subtlety in that strategy. If I was locking you in on APIs and programming and making sure you can't move your app, that's a lockout strategy. But very careful not to do that. You're saying choice, that's what you're saying. You're saying choice. So I'm not debating to lock in. I'm talking about the competitive, I call it lockout, right? Maybe it's the old saying, if you want to know what's happening in the company, talk to engineering and sales. Maybe I've been talking to too many sales guys. So they'll position it and say, this is unique to Oracle. I'm sure we'll hear some of that today. Okay, so that's- And we're working hard on investing to have a unique value proposition and we're investing heavily to have value at. That's the idea of pouring all this money into engineering. So EMC can't do hybrid columnar compression, the way you can correct it. But EMC has a wide range of depth around what they have in their data services, how they do other things. They invest in their own technology. That's an open- You're saying there's always a way to get that cat. As long as they work within that Oracle framework, you're saying, and can work with things like ASM, for example. Absolutely, ASM is a very example, right? You can work with that. So back to Amazon, I want to ask you what you think of those guys. Obviously, they're moving into the enterprise. You see them putting a toe in the water. The last conference they had in Las Vegas, the Cube was there, and you heard more enterprise. They had one big government contract with the CIA. I mean, that's a little bit of a telegraph. You know, there's a collision course between Oracle and Amazon. I mean, they're far away right now, but everyone's seeing Amazon as a potential threat. What they're proving is flexibility agile for enterprise. How do you guys view it? Yeah, so first of all, we have agreement with Amazon around a variety of our software too. So there's lots of ways we can play that game, which is we have opportunities to expose our software through Azure as well to customers and do that. So I think the competitive landscape comes down to you're moving from decades ago where you only had packaged software running on siloed, unvirtualized computers, right? The good old days, right? To a situation where we believe pretty much all enterprises are gonna have a hybrid approach. They're gonna have some level of custom written software, other software that they wanna choose to use on premise, whether it's for privacy or legal reasons or that's how they believe they wanna go do it. And they're gonna use some level of infrastructure, services, software and service. Our goal as a company and our investments, as you can see, is to span that spectrum. We have our own software as a service offerings and platform service offerings which are growing rapidly. We can come to you and do it on your prem. We can do traditional siloed computing if you would like to do as a packaged software company. We can merchant hardware and software to other companies that are building cloud services, right? So we have a multi-dimensional strategy there and we're embracing it. So Larry had some negative discussions about cloud many years ago. I can tell you that. But he was actually saying the cloud is, not really, if you parse those discussions, he was just saying, we're not screwed.  I mean, it's the same game, just moving around. So I bring that up.  You're essentially saying that you can tune your stuff for certain workloads. Is there stuff that you're saying, hey, you know, the customers can choose cloud here and certain workloads and Oracle will get better for others. Is there trends that you see patterns around your technology for certain workloads? Well, I mean, we know we run the database better than anyone else and people think about it as just the high mission scale ERP database and obviously we're strong at that. But we're also used for lots of people building strong cloud databases. And that is important because that is an often an underlying element of the application. You might have a pretty light middleware layer, but how's the data access work? And that's where your capability comes from. But I think a lot of cloud today, where it's less interesting to me, a lot of cloud today to me feels like consolidation. I got a certain amount of stuff. I want to go run it cheaper and simpler, right? What I want to build is more exciting than that, right? Is we're going all in memory. We're going 100% DRAM on the storage side, backed by Flash. We're going super high speed interfaces. We've built in in memory database acceleration. We're silicon. You'll see a bunch of exciting announcements. And so the idea here is actually not, okay, I got a pile of stuff. I want to run it cheaper. That's one element. I got a pile of stuff, but also, I'd like to make my business processes more effective. I'd like to have a real time view of my customers. I'd like to always be up to date on my product skews. I'd like to always know what's happening in social media. And those are the problems we're going to have. This database is everywhere now. So if you look at the database model, it's not a monolithic database. What you're basically saying is you're moving it in memory or in core to do all kinds of other database like middleware stuff. Right, or even just to make the existing OLTP and warehouse run wildly more effective. Well, and ISVs have always had to take advantage of hardware. Oracle's historically done that. Microsoft has done that. And now you're able to do that, as you said, at the top much more easily and effectively. The Oracle's cloud strategy is really interesting. John and I have written about this and talked about it a lot, is you got Amazon going for volume. You guys have said we'll compete on price with Amazon and Azure, which would be death to most companies, but it's not to Oracle because you've got the full stack. Exactly. You get margins out of that. So you're happy to play that commodity. For us as software as a service, platform as a service and infrastructure as a service are a blended element of our business, right? So we have the opportunity to deliver all the higher order software as a service models in addition to infrastructure as a service instead of just only being an infrastructure as a service provider. And it's an important part of it because a lot of people want to go run an app somewhere, right? Now we're using a lot of technologies you're seeing here today, right? So our trick is that not only, and it's interesting because as a cloud company we build our own hardware, which means we only play margin at the component level. There's a lot of talk about people building their own computers. Well, we do that too. But the more interesting part is in every one of my products we co-evolve the product with the cloud guys. We've put in management features and put in network security features and we put in a lot of capability to go make it run better. Because again, we want to cost effectively deliver the entire range of capability. Platform as a service, software as a service, no pressure as a service. And there's a lot of software work and hardware work we can do to do that more effectively. And we think that's our natural advantage. What are the technologies and products you're dog-fooding in your internal cloud? Well, it's virtually all of our products, right? So we have many hundreds of engineered systems, Exadata's and others. We have hundreds of petabytes of the ZFS storage appliance. We have thousands of conventional servers. All of the storage and compute resources are 100% Oracle, right? The networking resources are becoming Oracle, right? So we have other vendors that are providing networking hardware to us and we are gradually engineering those out at a fairly rapid pace. So if you go into our cloud data centers you're going to see essentially an all Oracle infrastructure, both servers and storage and engineered systems, it's all of our software stack and we're all in production. And Larry's very clear on that. So we're getting down to the wire, I got a few more questions. One is more of kind of a philosophical question than you've been around the industry and you talk about the good old days. Big rack of stack computing. Old school's now the new rage. I mean, we talk about systems programming is hot. The way you're engineering, quite frankly, it's pretty exciting and people who are in engineering are pretty jazzed about this current engineering cycle. So talk about the gap and how you guys are attracting the young guns. And what are those guys coming out of Berkeley and the computer science programs? Is it, you know, obviously applied physics? Is it the computer science? Talk about that, the younger generation. What kind of people are you attracting? Who are you looking for? And what is that old school?  What's that, what's that model? This is kind of interesting because a few years ago when we started this and Larry's passionate about college hiring and I'm passionate about college hiring. So we had a complete meeting in the mines there. When we first showed up college campuses, hey, Oracle wants to design, is designing silicon, which I come work for us. They're all very puzzled, who's that, right? So then we said, no, no, what's son? We're inside Oracle now. So they say, yeah, I want to join that. But you know, we have a very aggressive program. So I've hired, you know, an order over the past few years, you know, in the United States alone, 900 plus masters and PhDs from MIT stand for Berkeley, only the top schools. And it's been tremendous. And now we just have a flood of people coming in because it's kind of interesting. You want to tackle a hard problem? I'm tackling some hard problems. I'm really saying, what can we change in the operating system? What can we do in the database layer? How can we build the silicon as opposed to, I want to build something generic for everybody. And so we are definitely attracting some really great talent. And that's been one of the most exciting things in our Oracle. And it just took a little while to get started because you didn't associate the name. Well, Larry's an engineering focus. He comes from that mind. So he understands talent, right? I see, you know, his entire background. But now you have to put a roadmap in front of people and get them excited.  Hey, we're working on some tough problems. And that's your challenge. Absolutely, absolutely. But you know, inside the teams, I tell them that it was a pretty simple idea inside Oracle. For our hardware, our plan is not to build the second best hardware in the world and then do a lot of marketing. We have no slides that say that. The plan is to build the best hardware, right? Because, you know, Larry, and you could argue whether we're doing it or not, but there's no arguing about what the plan is. So when I go talk to a top engineer, I say, you want to come here, so here's the plan. We're not going to build the second best hardware. I need you to come here and help me build it. Because the way Larry works is what you see him every day, which is, how do you build the best? And that gets engineers excited. By the way, that's what gets me excited with people on my team excited, which is, you're not trying to, you know, fill in with a marketing program. You're saying, oh, let's build the best. This is not the best. There's no head faking, there's no head faking. Okay? So we're in the cup. Guess what? Right. The trophy's on the table, go get it. You go to market like we are doing today with the next generation. We're going to get some smiles and some frowns and we go back and we change the frowns to smiles. That's, it's a very simple architecture. Yeah. So you guys are five years in. We've got to wrap this up, but I want you to give a summary of what the announcements are here. So that's Larry's master of the long game. He's got a great team. He's, you know, you're awesome. You've been, you know, well-known in the industry. We're going to have some great problems. Engineering lies. That's awesome. So what is this announcement all about today? If this is one leg of the journey in the march to excellence, what is this announcement about? So the biggest part of this announcement is the fifth generation is engineered systems that we want to get across. As we've been very successful at customers understanding, we can tackle a big performance problem. We're really good at the mission critical, you know, computing and so on. The big thing we want to get across in this particular announcement in these products is that we're also the most cost-effective vendor in the industry. And I know that's not how people think about us. That we've done enough engineering here around how do you reduce the cost of the products and how you improve the efficiency of the products. But if you want to run an enterprise application, we are the cheapest guys in the business, right? And we're going to actually use the word cheap. And that's not a word you associate with Oracle, but that's intentional because I know as an engineer, if I do a better job giving you a complete solution and I build in acceleration and management tools and stuff that ultimately you're going to be able to take advantage of these products more cost-effective than you have today. And that's our big message today around the fifth generation product is it's not just for your big ERP, not just for your mission critical, but you can use it for all the stuff that you've got. And you can start thinking about Oracle as a low-cost provider. Well, John, we appreciate it. We went over a little bit and we're getting the hook here. Thanks for coming. We're always great to talk to you. Great to see you. And we remember that we did that podcast many, many moons ago, 2006, back in the glory days. But this is theCUBE. We are here live in Silicon Valley with John Fowler. Really the top dog here at Oracle, engineering in the trenches, Larry Ellison completely on board, meeting weekly. We're looking forward to seeing more continued success. This is theCUBE. We'll be right back after the short break live in Silicon Valley. We'll be right back.


So, you don't understand the Z-modeler brush. Not a problem. Now I always personally wondered why on ArtStation a lot of beautiful professional artwork stuff would be like sculpted in Z-brush and hard surfaced on in 3D Max or Maya or Blender or literally anything except Z-brush. It was really weird to me and I just kind of assumed Z-brush was not capable of poly modeling and just ignored this for a while. But as I got deeper into it, I realized it isn't that it's not capable of poly modeling. It's just the poly modeling tool is so weird, confusing, poorly explained and super unintuitive. It is so obscure and unusual that I'm gonna give it its own entire series because once you get used to it, it's actually extremely powerful. But for now, I'm just gonna explain the fundamentals of what it is.  This is Z-brush's poly modeling power tool. Imagine if someone stuffed all of the Blender modeling abilities into a single brush. That is what this tool is. In Blender, when you tap to edit mode, you can flop between face, edge and point modes. But in Z-brush, all three are active at the same time. And all three will do different things depending on what settings you have. So if you hover your mouse over a point and then right-click, you will see all the point options. But if you hover your mouse over an edge and right-click, you will see completely different options. And if you hover your mouse over a face once again, you will see a completely different set of options to choose from that only exists when working with faces. In addition to having three completely separate layers of commands, depending on what your mouse is hovering over, once you select an option, you will then get more options asking you to specify the target of the option below. And again, this can be different depending on whether you're working with faces, edges or points.   But lucky for you guys, you don't have to spend the next three weeks hating your life because I have spent the last three weeks hating my life for you. So in the next 30 days, I'm about to unload about 90 videos explaining this entire tool once and for all. In order to make sure that no one else on this planet has to waste their time figuring out this ridiculous tool ever again. Real quick, I know I make short tutorials, please understand I usually spend days or weeks researching or practicing the content I present before it ever becomes a tutorial. It's not easy and it takes a lot of time. And YouTube keeps flagging my content and trying to demonetize me for having quote unquote inappropriate content for children.  But the point is, if you think the content on this channel is valuable, please consider joining the support squad. It really would be impossible to keep doing this without them because YouTube definitely thinks I'm evil. If it wasn't for Patreon, this channel would have fallen apart a long time ago. And hey, if you can't support, you don't have any means. Listen, I understand completely. There's two real easy and impactful things that you can do with no cost at all. Those are just let the ads play before each video and give it a thumbs up whenever you can. If you're feeling generous, leave a comment. I love reading them when I can. And if you want to leave a comment, you have nothing to say, just type algo for the algorithm and you will be a hero on this channel. Anyway, thank you so much for watching.  And as always, hope you have a fantastic day and I'll see you around.


Baroness Hale, guests, alumni. On behalf of the many staff and students here tonight, I'd like to offer you all a very warm welcome. Say how honored we are that everyone of you have joined us this evening. Or at least of course Lady Hale, whose judgments and judgment have been so critical in the still fledgling development of the Supreme Court. You join us at an exciting time in our history, as so as stands on the cusp of next year's centenary. Many of you would have seen the building site, upstairs to my right, soon to become the School of Law's new home, as the only academic department in the renovated north wing of Senate House. A location offering both stimulating activities and quiet study that will provide our students with cutting-edge learning facilities in a 21st century law school that retains a long and proud history of innovation and creativity. Whilst, others of you will on the ground floor directly above have seen the occupation, in what was to be the site of this evening's post-lecture reception. As I say, exciting times, in which our staff, including our cleaners, and the students are fully engaged in vigorous debate, to turn the various opportunities that confront us. It's what makes so as such a diverse, stimulating, occasionally maddening, but always compelling place to study and to work. I often tell people, let's be frank, I go on about it all the time, that we have a first School of Global Law, by which I'm stating not only an historical truth, but a future aspiration, as we confront the issues, both opportunities and threats of globalization in a world where parochial lawyers concerned only with their own system of law, do neither their clients nor their profession proud. Whether your practice is in family or corporate, human rights or IP, you cannot serve their needs without a transnational perspective, the awareness of the law beyond your particular border. The SOA School of Law has always punched above its weight, or in the vernacular of the age had impact, which technically is defined under the ref as changing the behavior of a non-academic audience. Be that for example, the scholarship of Lynn Welchman, whose work on the definition of honor crimes has changed the practices of policymakers, NGOs and police forces, not to mention academics in Britain and beyond. Or the extensive studies of Sammy Urbano, who have somewhat to her surprise, been cited extensively in the new count extremes strategy launched by David Cameron on Tuesday, which despite her initial shock, if not horror, provides Sammy with a real opportunity to influence thinking for the good in this particularly febrile and potentially explosive area of policymaking in a forthcoming meeting with ministers charged with developing the policy. But enough of us. The real star of tonight shows Baroness Hale. To be honest, nothing sounds about better than the text conversation we had just an hour ago. Baroness Hale, Paul, where do you want me to arrive? I don't know where the main SOAS building is. Paul, sorry, Brenda, the postcode for your driver is WC8-1-H-O-X-G. Baroness Hale, no driver, I'm coming by tube. After leaving Cambridge with a start first, Brenda joined the University of Manchester as an assistant lecturer, also becoming a member of Grey's Inn and predictably topping the list in the bar final exams. Spending most of her time in academia whilst working part-time as a barrister, she soon rose to become a professor of family law at Manchester before joining the Law Commission as its first woman and youngest commissioner and introducing many important family law reforms, including the transformation of divorce law. After the Law Commission, Brenda joined the judiciary simply rising to the House of Lords before being appointed as deputy president of the Supreme Court some two years ago. Baroness Hale's contribution in the House of Lords and Supreme Court has been marked by groundbreaking leading judgements and brilliant dissents. She has made dull property lawyers such as myself question the assumptions of what sometimes transmutes into the dry calculus of property law in her leading judgements in cases such as Stackendown and Jones and Curnard. Her powerful dissent in Nicholson would have deemed the Suicide Act incompatible with Article 8 and forced Parliament to legislate on the issue of euthanasia. Whilst in Begum, she demonstrated the need to hear multiple voices and addressing issues of choice concerning Muslim women and communities. One could go on and on, but I risk embarrassing her. I know Brenda from my time as a lowly research assistant at the Law Commission where she'd always spend a while every afternoon talking with us at sea, which occurred somewhat ritualistically at 3pm each afternoon. To be honest, we were initially somewhat scared of these encounters where Brenda was always kind and patient, listened to her ill-formed ideas. Admittedly, she was never one to fight shy of showing us where our analysis broke down, but she did so with warmth and humanity, for she is in truth a natural teacher and I know we will all learn much this evening. Ladies and gentlemen, it's my honour to present to you, Baroness Hale. Thank you very much indeed, Paul, both for the invitation and the flattering introduction. I'm afraid I can't resist giving you another bit of that email exchange that we had earlier today. When I said, Paul, I don't know where so-as is, because I've never been here before. That's why I said yes to come. He said, it's in the northeast corner of Russell Square. So I thought, that's a bit odd. I don't think there's anything in the northeast corner of Russell Square that could possibly be so-as. And then a few minutes later, I got another email saying, sorry, my geography's all to pot, northwest corner. So that was a great relief to me and I found you and I'm here and I'm really glad to be here. Thank you. So I thought I'd talk about life in the Supreme Court. Some of you will know everything I'm going to say. I hope a few of you don't. So firstly, what are we? We are the Supreme Court of the United Kingdom, not just England and Wales, but Scotland and Northern Ireland too. This is confusing because the High Court and the Court of Appeal of England and Wales used to call themselves the Supreme Court and they had to change the Supreme Court Act to be the Senior Courts Act in order to accommodate us. Paul rolled them. So that's what we are. Why are we? We are the apex court of the United Kingdom, which used to be the Appellate Committee of the House of Lords. The Law Lords were full members of the House of Lords. We were allowed to take part in the parliamentary business if we wanted to. In 2000, before I joined, the Law Lords reiterated that that's what they were allowed to do, but when deciding whether they would take part in parliamentary business, they'd have two things in mind. One was as cross-benchers, it was not proper for them to take part in matters of strong party political controversy. And the other was they should bear in mind that by taking part in a political debate or debate on a matter of legislation, they might disable themselves from actually sitting on a case connected with it. So most people observed that. Two of my brethren voted against the hunting bill. You will know that the hunting bill took up more parliamentary time in the last but one administration, the Labour administration, than any other piece of legislation. And they voted against it. That meant they couldn't sit on any of the three wonderful cases that we had about the Hunting Act. The Jackson case, which constitutional lawyers will know all about, and one which said that its contents were contrary to human rights, and another which said that its contents were contrary to EU law. So it did seem a rather anomalous position for us to be in. Of course, also, the Lord Chancellor was technically the presiding member of the Law Lords, and he was not only the Speaker of the House of Lords, but he was a senior member of the government. So that didn't seem to be right either. And there was an inappropriate blurring between making laws and interpreting and applying them. And on top of all that, the facilities were not ideal for us. We didn't have enough room, although we had far more than everybody else had, which meant that they didn't have enough room. And so the House of Lords getting bigger and bigger, it's got still bigger since we left. I had my room next door to one of the parliamentarians' rooms. Same size as mine. There was one of me and four of them, just to illustrate that we took up space that they could ill afford. So where are we now? We are ideally situated on Parliament Square. I think it should be called Constitution Square because the four pillars of the Constitution are ranged around the Square. We've got the Houses of Parliament on one side. We've got the most powerful Department of Government, the Treasury, on the other side. We've got the Supreme Court on our side and we've got God and the Queen on the Westminster Abbey side. The only interloper is the Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors. So there we go. We have a lovely old building, which we very much hope that people will come and visit. We get a lot of student groups around. We get a lot of casual visitors in off the Square. They just potter in and think, yeah, what's going on here? Can I go in? Oh, yes, I can go in. I have friendly, welcoming people on a desk and they can potter into the courtroom while we're sitting. And it's lovely. We like it a lot. So there's much better public access, much better facilities for the lawyers and the judges, much better facilities for students, school and other visits, and events like Moots, of which we have quite a lot, and much greater transparency. We are filmed. We were the first court in the country where it was lawful for us to be filmed. All our proceedings have been recorded on film since we began in 2009. We take the cameras for granted, so we behave just as badly as we always did. Then they took to webcasting it live so people could watch our proceedings live at a distance. And now you can even go back into the archive and look at the past hearings.  You can do it. We do give all of our judgments when we hand them down. We do a little piece. We call it the piece to camera, but it's not really a piece to camera. Wednesday mornings, which goes out on YouTube and you can look at all of those for quite a long way back now. When we try and explain in words that make sense to members of the public, so they're very simple for law students and ridiculously simple for proper lawyers. But it is something that we like to do because people can see what our decisions are. And above all, the biggest thing that we've got out of the new building is three courtrooms. That's very significant, I'll come back to it later. So who are we? So far, so good. There are 12 justices. 11 men and me. Most of them went to independent schools and indeed most of them went to boys' boarding schools. I only lived in one because my father was headmaster of one. Most went to Oxford and Cambridge. Most made their careers at the bar, usually smart bar in London or in the case of the Celtic Fringe in Edinburgh or Belfast. I call them the quadrangle to quadrangle to quadrangle boys. Because that's the life they led. All of us, of course, are white British, although we do have our Celtic quota to which I'll return. So I am indifferent in all but two respects. I went to a non-fee-paying state school. I grew up in rural North Yorkshire. My parents were school teachers. No legal tradition in my family. I was the first from my family to, first from my school, let alone my family, to go into the law, the first to go to Cambridge. When I graduated, I didn't go to the bar. I went to teach law at Manchester. That's because I didn't fancy the London Bar or the Magic Surfer Firmers Listers that very kindly offered me their first articles to a woman. But I went to Manchester to teach because they said, please, qualify as a barrister and do some practice part-time. We think that will be good for you and good for the students that academics should know something about practice. That's a bit of a thing in the past, isn't it? But there we go. But of course it was possible then because access to the legal profession was a great deal easier than it is now. I did not have to go and spend £17,000 spending a year at bar school. I could do it by a self-tuition home tuition course. So I got a series of nutshells and model papers and model answers from the College of Law and I studied in my Garrett over the first long vac after I'd been teaching and I passed the bar exams. Well, that shows you how easy the bar exams were. But it did mean that people like me could qualify, which I think was a good thing. So there we are. So in all respects, other than being white and having been to Cambridge, I am different from my colleagues. Now why does it matter that the Supreme Court is such a non-diverse group of people? It is widely believed, especially amongst our higher judiciary, that our higher judiciary is admired the world over. For their intelligence, their industry, their independence, their integrity and their incorruptibility. Well, I think that's all right. They have all of those qualities. So why change? Won't it do more harm than good? Well, I think there are three main reasons why it matters. Legitimacy, equity and difference. Legitimacy is about the confidence of the public and parliament and the government that the judiciary is reflective of the whole population and not just a narrow elite section of it. The law is being applied and developed not by one small elite group but by people who have a wider understanding of society. Equity is about recognizing the abilities of all those able, young women, people from ethnic minorities who've been coming into the law in numbers equal to or greater than the men for decades now. Also people from socially less advantaged groups. And also all those able lawyers who for one reason or another found independent practice at the bar or in a magic circle for the solicitors, not for them but are still just as capable of being judges as the more traditional sort. And then the third reason is difference. Differences about making a difference to the way cases are actually decided especially at the higher levels. And that can be illustrated by the sorts of cases that we do in our court. Come on to that in a minute. So what do we do? We hear appeals in civil and criminal cases from England, Wales and Northern Ireland. We hear appeals in civil cases from Scotland. We don't hear appeals in criminal cases from Scotland because it wasn't in the act of union. And nobody's done anything about it since. And Scottish criminal law is of course so idiosyncratic that nobody else can understand it. I would have thought that would be a good reason for allowing appeals out of Scotland but that's not the way they feel about it. Quite the reverse. We also hear devolution cases from Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, i.e. cases that allege that the devolved parliaments and governments of those three parts of the United Kingdom have not acted within the powers that the UK Parliament has given them. For most of the cases that we do, permission to appeal is required. And in granting permission to appeal, the criterion is, is it a point of law, an arguable point of law of general public importance and a case in which it's appropriate for the Supreme Court to look at it. And the sorts of cases we do are the range of cases, well exemplified by the ones I took away with me to either think about or write about over the summer of 2014. We had, firstly, a Scottish devolution case. Was the act of the Scottish Parliament defining the franchise for the referendum valid law? Because it repeated the ban on any prisoners voting. Which, of course, the European Court of Human Rights had said was wrong, contrary to the European Convention. And the Scottish Parliament is not allowed to legislate contrary to the Convention rights. So that sounds like quite a good point, doesn't it? It could have set aside the whole referendum. We could have said, no, you'll have to think again. Actually, they would have done. I mean, they would have cured it very quickly. However, we decided that the European Convention did not apply to referenda, so it was all right. So that was number one case. Number two case, we had a Welsh devolution case. They had passed a bill requiring employers and their insurers to pay the cost of NHS treatment for asbestos-related diseases for which the employers were responsible. Was that within the powers of the Welsh Assembly? The Welsh Assembly has powers to legislate for funding for the NHS. So was charging employers and their insurers funding for the NHS? How many of you think it was? Oh, sorry lot. How many of you think it wasn't? Come on. Equally sorry lot. No comeback if you get it right or wrong. I asked all these questions in St Andrew's last week. They all answered. Mostly got it wrong. How many think it was? How many think it wasn't? How many have read the case? That's okay then. Well, by a majority of three to two, the Supreme Court held that it wasn't. I was in the two as was the Lord Chief Justice who happens to be Welsh. There we go. It's a very serious jurisdiction that because the law officers can refer to the Supreme Court a bill which has been through the devolved parliament before it gets royal assent for us to rule on whether it is or is not within scope. A really new constitutional function we've never had before. We do have other sorts of constitutional case. We had a case about whether the English courts could interfere with the process by which royal assent is given to legislation passed by a Channel Islands legislature. Could the English courts say that the government should not have advised the Queen to give her royal assent? Well, we said never say never, but not in this particular case. We shouldn't have interfered. Then we have human rights cases, of course. Could the Home Secretary interfere with the free speech rights of members of parliament by denying entry to an Iranian dissident with whom they wanted to hold a meeting in parliament? Not because she was dangerous or would say anything inflammatory, but because it might offend the Iranians who are capable of taking offence and doing nasty things if they do. Now, of course, the British government was perfectly prepared to offend the Iranians for the purpose of freezing the assets of their banks. Because that had to do with UN sanctions and EU sanctions. But they didn't want to add insult to injury by allowing this dissident to come in. That, I think, was one of the most difficult decisions that I have ever had to take because the balance between free speech and national interest was very difficult to draw, very acute, and we had to give a huge amount of respect to the government's expert judgment on that. So as a majority of four to one that held that they were entitled to do that, I was in the fall. We had a huge case, which was a public law case involving human rights, about whether the benefit cap discriminates unlawfully against lone parents who are overwhelmingly women. So is it discriminatory in the enjoyment of the convention right to protection of property, indirectly discriminatory, to impose the benefit cap? It was held by a majority of three to two that the discrimination was justified. The two held that the conflict with the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child meant that it couldn't be justified. I was in the two. I don't think that's any surprise to anybody. We had a tort law case. Can the police be larval in negligence for failing to prevent the death of a young mother at the hands of her former partner, which might have been prevented had they responded appropriately to a 999 call? The majority held no. There were two dissentients, guess who one of them was. Actually, no prizes for guessing who the other one was either because the most dissenting Supreme Court justice is our Irishman. Now, why am I not surprised by that? So we had another tort law case, which, you know, when you do tort law, you'll probably have both of them if you haven't already done it. Is it for the doctor to decide what information to give a patient about the pros and cons of a particular treatment? In particular, should a pregnant woman who is an insulin-dependent diabetic be warned of the risk of something called shoulder dystocia and discuss the pros and cons of vaginal delivery or caesarean section? Now, I think the English had thought that the answer by now was obvious and that yes, she should and yes, there should be a discussion, but in Scotland they didn't. So, fortunately, unanimously we held that there should have been this discussion, she should have been given the choice. Had she been given the choice, she would undoubtedly have chosen a caesarean and had she chosen a caesarean, the baby would not have been born with very severe disabilities as he was. It was great because it gave us the opportunity to set the law straight. We had a property law case Well, I believe that Paul will probably tell you that it was right, but it was one that some of us decided with a heavy heart. What are the rights of a person who sold her home under a so-called equity release scheme on the faith of a promise that she could continue to live there as long as she liked at a very low rent. So her mortgage which she couldn't pay got paid off and she'd actually get a lump sum at some stage and her son would be able to live there too. So in effect she was promised she could go back to what it was like to be a council tenant as she had been before she bought it under the right to buy. But this was of course a fraudulent promise. On the other side the vendor the purchaser had been borrowing money from a finance company to finance the purchase had pretended to the finance company that they hadn't made any such promise to anybody that they could live there. They did of course default on the mortgage so the finance company eventually brought possession proceedings. So you've got two innocent parties one maybe you might think more deserving than the other why aren't finance companies deserving of course they're deserving to make a living just as little old ladies have to have a home. So why does one think that? Nevertheless the law I'm afraid was pretty clear that the promise which the purchaser made could not be enforced against the land as opposed to against the purchaser as a person and enforcing it against the purchaser as a person was going to be pretty difficult because they were all bankrupt and disappeared or now so there we go very sad difficult case contract law case what about the rights of a person who's been sold a payment protection policy have not only against the seller for which there is a compensation scheme but against the finance company which took an enormous the finance company which was lending the money that she wanted to borrow took an enormous premium for the for arranging this policy and then of course added this enormous premium to the money lent nice one totally unnecessary and unsuitable policy so had she got any sort of remedy against the finance company answer yes she did for non-disclosure of this enormous commission that they were getting on this policy which had she known about it she would have realised anybody would have realised it was a very bad bargain indeed so that was more or less what I took away to think about last summer this summer not quite so varied but it did include a family law case the one in which we gave judgement last week about the effect of fraud on a order made in matrimonial financial proceedings and we also of course had some human rights and public law cases we had an international law case about whether the USA could be taken to an employment tribunal when it made civilian employees redundant when it decided to close a military base here well that's an interesting international law problem they could of course have claimed state immunity but they didn't because they thought they'd win in the employment tribunal anyway when it turned out that they weren't going to win in the employment tribunal they took all sorts of arguments out of a hat in order to try and say that they couldn't be made to pay so that one came to us that's a very interesting case and we had a prisoner's rights case was it lawful to keep a prisoner for the better part of 5 years not as punishment for anything wicked he had done in prison but for his own protection because he was such a hateful person that all the other prisoners would pile into him if he was allowed into the mainstream prison at least that was the idea so it was all about the basic the due process rights of prisoners now I've given you that list partly to give you some idea of the enormous variety and fascination of the cases that we have the privilege of trying to decide none of them is easy because they wouldn't be with us if they were easy but you may find it interesting that in that list there is not a single criminal case not a single ordinary criminal law case we do get them from time to time but we don't get very many and of course most people when they first come to study law think the law's all about the criminal law it isn't there's all the stuff I've just been telling you about we do get some criminal cases from the judicial committee of the Privy Council which is still the final court of appeal for the Channel Islands and the Isle of Man the few British overseas territories like Gibraltar and Bermuda and the British Virgin Islands Cayman Islands, Turks and Caicos Islands that sort of set and some independent Commonwealth countries have been on independence felt they were too small to set up their own Supreme Court and so still come to the Privy Council the largest of those is Trinidad and Tobago but we've also got Jamaica and Mauritius and the Bahamas and some others fascinating jurisdiction we see a lot of lovely people quite different we are not the same people we're not the same institution we're the flag of the country from which the appeal comes to make it absolutely plain that we are not the Supreme Court of the United Kingdom when we're sitting on the judicial committee of the Privy Council and we also put down the Privy Council rug just to demonstrate it's not the Supreme Court anyway and next week in fact we are having a Supreme Court case and a Privy Council case being heard together by the Supreme Court Enterprise and participation in criminal enterprises I'm not quite sure whether we should have the rug down or not perhaps we should have it halfway across we'll have to discuss this waiting item so what do we not do unlike Supreme Courts in most of the rest of the world we have no power to strike down acts of Parliament the sovereignty of Parliament that Parliament, the UK Parliament can make or un-make any law there are two qualifications to that the first is the European Communities Act which for as long as it's on the statute book has provided for the supremacy of European Union law within the fields within which it operates so we have a duty to interpret UK legislation so that it conforms to European Union law and if we can't interpret it so that it conforms to European Union law we have to ignore it so that's pretty extreme doesn't often happen but it does from time to time we also have of course the European Convention on Human Rights but that does not allow us to strike down acts of Parliament the most we can do is incompatibility and a declaration of incompatibility leaves it to Parliament to decide what if anything to do about it the amazing thing is that of the I think there are now 20 extent declarations of incompatibility since the Human Rights Act came into force all but one of them that did require some remedial action has been remedied very very good of Government and Parliament what's the one exception prisoners voting quite right it makes the Prime Minister physically sick so there we go but of course it raises an interesting question for us on which the Court has a certain amount of difference of opinion if the matter is one which Strasberg Court would say was within the Marginal Appreciation left to the Member State the United Kingdom what do we do do we say okay it's within the Marginal Appreciation of the Member State so we're not going to do anything about it we'll leave that to Parliament or do we say no Parliament has given us this task of deciding what is and is not in violation of the Convention Rights so we'll decide that it's up to Parliament whether to do anything about it so in the recent case on assisted suicide the Nicholson case five of us said yes we can if it's a proper case to do so we can make a declaration of incompatibility and then Parliament can take it or leave it four of them said no this is very much a matter for Parliament and we are not going to interfere so we have all of those sorts of interesting questions about where we stand in relation to both Government and Parliament on these particular issues but why have a Supreme Court at all if we can't behave like the Supreme Court everywhere else in the world what use are we well we do have a constitutional role as I've explained in respect to the Constitution of the United Kingdom which is an extremely complicated constitution many of the laws in the United Kingdom are UK-wide laws they apply particularly throughout Great Britain both in Scotland, Wales and England some of them apply in Northern Ireland as well so obviously they need to have uniform interpretation throughout the United Kingdom and the other big excuse for us is that we take far fewer cases than the other courts do we have much more time to think about them, to discuss them and consider them fully read around them do a bit of extra research possibly but that's very dangerous so you have to be careful about it the great strength is supposed to be our collective wisdom three minds in the Court of Appeal are better than one in the Trial Court five minds in the Supreme Court are better than three in the Court of Appeal and in important cases we can go up to seven or nine but of course because we have the three courtrooms we now have the space to do that whenever we want to do so probably the most important practical effect of our move from the House of Lords was that we have sat seven or nine in far more cases than we did when we were in the House of Lords how about that? geography matters but of course there is little point in adding to the numbers of minds if they all think alike the whole idea about several minds being better is that out of the attrition of diverse minds comes something stronger and better than the individuals could ever produce by themselves and diverse minds to my mind includes not only diversity of legal philosophies but also diversity of gender ethnicity social and professional background and that's why I think it's so important that the people deciding these hugely interesting and difficult cases should be more diverse than they currently are but we can take comfort in the way in which we are different from some Supreme Courts elsewhere in the world the appointments to our Supreme Court are not made on party political lines I do not know what parties my brethren vote for although I can make a very good guess in some cases there we go that's all I had to say but you can ask me whatever you want I don't promise to answer


How to Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie is the best book I've ever read and I think that everybody has to read this book and I'm about to explain to you why so stay tuned. What's up everybody this is Chris from the Rewired Soul where we talk about the problem but we focus on the solution and as you know I run a mental health channel and a lot of the books I read my intention for reading any of them is to help improve my mental health and then I can pass that along to you. So this book How to Win Friends and Influence People was written decades ago and it is absolutely amazing. It is going to help anybody who struggles with social anxiety, anybody who deals with anger issues, anybody who's looking for just overall happiness, how to make friends and all sorts of things. The best part about this book is that it is absolutely timeless and what I mean by that is is that this book was written so long ago and the references it makes are from last century but they are still applicable today. They even still teach these courses to this day because they are always relevant. Let's talk about why this book was ever written in the first place. So Dale Carnegie he taught a lot of classes on public speaking and other things that just help people be more charismatic if you will and the one thing that he found across the board throughout different studies and statistics and surveys is that the qualities that people wanted the most was how to get along with other people better. Now think about that for a second. Think about the wide range that that covers how to get along with your coworkers, how to get along with your parents, how to get along with your kids, how to get along with your friends, how to make new friends, all sorts of things. In my opinion after reading this book I think that every single high school student in the world should have to read this book. This book has so many practical suggestions that I wish I would have learned growing up just about how to have conversations, what's good and what's bad, pushing away my pride and my ego for a minute. The things that actually work when trying to influence people to meet my wants and needs, how to have a debate without it turning into an argument. These are normal skills that a lot of people just don't know but you can learn them by reading this book. Dale Carnegie pulls in examples from a lot of very influential people from President Abraham Lincoln to the Rockefellers to other people and he discusses why they were good at what they did and he breaks it down in this book and he gives you practical advice on how you can do it too. So this book focuses around nine principles and these principles include principle one, begin with praise and honest appreciation. Principle two, call attention to people's mistakes indirectly. Principle three, talk about your own mistakes before criticizing the other person. Principle four, ask questions instead of giving direct orders. Principle five, let the other person say face. Principle six, praise the slightest improvement and praise every improvement. Principle seven, give the other person a fine reputation to live up to. Principle eight, use encouragement, make the fault seem easy to correct and principle nine, make the other person happy about doing the thing you suggest. So one of my favorite chapters in this book is talking about arguments and how to diffuse these arguments so both people get what they want and one of the best quotes from this book that I can give to you is this one. Welcome the disagreement. Remember the slogan, when two partners always agree, one of them is not necessary. If there's some point you haven't thought about, be thankful if it is brought to your attention. Perhaps this disagreement is your opportunity to be corrected before you make a serious mistake. Now think about that for a second. When two people always agree, one of them is useless. There's another philosophy that'll make a video about where it talks about how the best friends you can have are the ones who disagree with you and it's because you can trust them. You can trust that they're always giving you their honest opinion. If this topic interests you, I'm going to put a link in the info card at the very end to a channel called Charisma on Command. It is an amazing channel and Ben and Charlie do a great job just teaching people skills and a lot of what they talk about pulls from ideas and philosophies from this book. So check out Charisma on Command. But if you would like me to do more videos like this or expand on things in this book, please leave comments down below. If you would like to check out this book, please go to the affiliate link in the description, buy a copy from Amazon or get it on Audible, which I choose to use. I read books or listen to books while I'm driving to work. But by using the affiliate link down below, it helps support this channel so I can make more videos like this and all the other ones I do on this channel. So thanks for sticking around. I hope you check out this book. I hope you enjoyed this video. If you did, give it a thumbs up. And if you're new here, right below this box, hit the little round subscribe button.  So don't forget to subscribe and hit that notification bell. I'll see you next time.


If you're a skinny person who wants to put on muscle mass, especially in your upper body, the number one exercise for massive arms is the deadlift. It seems counterintuitive, but if you think about just a barbell curl, maybe a normal curl, let's say I might be able to do 95 for six reps or something like that. I don't know, six clean ones at least. The force involved there is not that substantial, right? I don't get this hormonal response throughout my entire body because there's no axial loading. It's just I put some weight in my arms, right? And there is a purpose to that. It's okay to fatigue the actual muscle that you want to train and it does help, but you need to prioritize the big bang things, the things that are going to get you a larger growth response from everything. And if you think about the deadlift as our example here, when I try the deadlift, that bar is literally trying to rip your arms off, okay? And if your bicep lets go, then it makes it much more likely that your arms will indeed rip off. So to stabilize your shoulder joint throughout this heavy deadlift that you're doing, you need a little bit of bicep to position your shoulder, right? You need a little bit to control the bar, so it's not just drifting all over the place. You need to glue your hands to the bar, right? You don't want to drop it out of your hands. So that's my little bit of advice. If you are a young lifter and you're trying to put on a lot of muscle mass in your upper body, consider deadlifting.