If you haven't registered for the ASCENT annual meeting yet, it's probably for one of three reasons:

• Too busy
• Nervous about asking for the investment
• You doubt you'll actually implement anything you learn.

This episode takes each of those head-on.

Zed and Paul sit down with Drew Franklin, Ascent's president-elect and chief strategy officer for Albany ENT, along with a candid perspective from Dr. Gavin Setzen, to make the honest case for what a practice administrator really walks away with.

Paul shares the jarring realization from his first meeting, that he didn't have to do the job alone, and how a single decision reshaped his career.

Dr. Setzen speaks directly to the administrator who's afraid to ask for the budget, explaining why the dyad leadership structure of physician and administrator makes this kind of investment essential, and why the ROI shows up in not only in dollars but better decisions.

When every day feels like scrambling from one task to the next, it's easy to shut your door, put your head down, and forget the people the work is actually for. This episode is a reminder that busyness and people aren't a binary choice, and that even when you're busy, you're busy for someone.

In this episode, Zed and Paul sit down with Lieutenant Colonel Bo "Guvna" McGowan, fighter pilot and keynote speaker for the upcoming Ascent Conference, to talk about why people really matter and how that conviction holds up under pressure.

Bo shares the defining moment that made it visceral for him, ejecting from an F-16 over the Okefenokee Swamp in 1991.

From there he offers practical, grounded tools for leaders drowning in the daily grind: starting each day in stillness before your feet hit the floor, pausing to ask "whom am I doing this for," and recognizing that when everything feels urgent, you may have a little mission drift.

If you've been running so hard you've lost the connection to the people around you, this conversation will help you slow down and lead like a champion.

Bo McGowan is delivering the keynote at the upcoming Ascent Conference

AI can feel like a mountain, especially in a highly regulated space like healthcare, and the instinct is either to avoid it entirely or go all in on it. Both, it turns out, are a mistake.

In this episode, Zed and Paul sit down with Sarah Wimberley, an upcoming Ascent Conference speaker, to talk through what it actually means to keep a human in the loop as AI moves into medical practices. Sarah unpacks the hidden compliance traps that catch practices off guard, from AI scribes to the meeting-recording tools that aren't HIPAA compliant straight out of the box, and why building a base layer of AI literacy matters when patients start asking where their data is going.

She digs into the real business case, which is rarely an overnight cost savings and almost always a long game measured in reduced burnout, higher retention, and hours handed back to clinicians. And they land on the lens that should guide every decision: if a technology benefits the business but makes things worse for the patient, it wasn't worth it.

If your practice hasn't touched AI yet, or you're already using it and want to make sure you're doing it right, this one will help you navigate the road ahead before you find yourself wishing you'd done things differently.

Catch Sarah's session at the upcoming Ascent Conference, "From Spider Sense to Systems Sense: Navigating Ethical AI"