Hey, good morning everyone. My name is Christian Yushevsky and this is Darren Sorrentino. First before I start, we're going to talk about the OpenStack Unify CLI, which is a little bit legacy name. OpenStack Client is the, to be more current, it's OpenStack Client. Darren Sorrentino is distributing a little cheat sheet that we have with the redhead that describes some of the new OpenStack client commands. We have only a few of them. We have a couple more left on the desk here, but if you guys want them, they're available at the redhead booth. So there's definitely more for you to grab. And I apologize. We didn't bring more. To be honest with you, we didn't expect such an awesome audience here. So thank you for coming. So before I start, I want to ask how many of you fly or flew American Airlines for the last year? Okay, so I'm going to make this quick announcement just like American Airlines does before they departure. So this is your last chance to deplane before the aircraft door is closed. I just want to make sure you're in a good place. Thanks for staying. So OpenStack CLI, so I don't want to disappoint you guys. We are not the OpenStack client developers. So what makes us an expert in this subject? Well, first we both worked with OpenStack, used OpenStack for a really long time. And our current role is OpenStack architects.   And we felt that the OpenStack client, OpenStack by itself is not the easiest project for the new customers to get into. And we felt OpenStack client is definitely a step in the right direction to bring these new guys on board. And that's why we picked this topic to talk to you guys. And it makes our lives much easier too. So I have another question. How many of you guys consider yourself OpenStack operators? So operate OpenStack on a regular basis. Okay, we have a good number of people. So one last follow-up question. For the guys who operate OpenStack, when you try to list all the instances that you have available, how many of you use Nova list instead of OpenStack server list still? Okay, all right. Good. So you guys definitely in the right place. So thanks for joining in. So who is this session designed for? Who did we prepare this for? And I would say mostly the operators, the guys like us who have been working with OpenStack for quite some time are used to, you know, from now on I will call it the legacy CLI. So your typical Nova, Keystone, and Glance commands. And you guys start seeing the error message that I listed here on my screen, that some of these commands will start getting deprecated or starting getting deprecated. And you need to move to this new way of executing CLI. And it's not just that, but folks who are trying to do more to take advantage of some new functionality of the OpenStack client. We're going to talk about those. We're going to talk a little bit about basics and principles. And then the second part of this presentation, Darren, my colleague Darren here, is going to give you a really, really awesome use case of troubleshooting and reverse engineering on how he learned the OpenStack client. All right, so these are a few pointers, principles that I want to go through. What can you expect from the new OpenStack client, some principles? So first, consistency. If you think about, again, as I would refer it as a legacy CLI, it was not always that consistent. For instance, the examples I brought in before, if you wanted to list instances, you would say NovaList. But if you wanted to see the list of images that you have in Glance, you would type Glance ImageList. So from the command perspective, it was not always that consistent. And for the new commerce, especially, that's not a good approach for the CLI. So OpenStack client simplifies that and makes it more consistent. So simplicity is the second biggest principle we have. And I already mentioned some of it. Another aspect of simplicity, we're trying to minimize the output that the OpenStack client commands are showing comparable to the legacy CLIs. Not only that, but the interface or the output and the commands it serves are designed around users more than how the back end of the system is created, which definitely creates a much better user experience. And transparency, so exposed current state of the infrastructure and its interactions. So these are some core principles. I pretty much copy them off the OpenStack guidebooks. All right, so here I'm going to try to do a little bit comparison between legacy CLI and OpenStack clients. I'm going to start with command structure, and then I'm going to try to ask some, or answer some questions that usually folks ask when they switch from one to the other. All right, so command structures, it is pretty similar with, I would say the major differences, the legacy CLI would start with the OpenStack module. You would have to call the OpenStack module first, then follow with some options like tenant name or user name, et cetera, and then command itself. And all of the commands had the user different command options. And most of you are probably familiar with that. And Novaboot is one of the examples. The new OpenStack CLI starts with its consistency, you can see it right away. It always starts with the word OpenStack. There's a whole list of global options after that that you can invoke, starting with the similar as we had before with the OS user name or tenant, et cetera. But there's some more, the new global commands that we're going to talk about a little bit later that they're quite exciting to, and will help you improve your everyday operation. Then command and some command arguments. So right from here, you can see some benefits and principles that are being applied to the OpenStack client. One of them, again, all of the commands will start with OpenStack, which is consistent, but also the user-designed approach. If you think about yourself not knowing about OpenStack anything at all and that's most like a lot of customers that we're working with, and now we're going to ask you to type Novaboot. Would you ever be able to connect this to actually creating the servers on the OpenStack? And for most of our customers or most of my customers that I work with, the answer is no, they don't really make this correlation. So OpenStack server create makes much more better sense and we really appreciate all the work that developers are doing here. All right, so I'm going to compare these two outputs. This is the, again, as I call it, legacy CLI, glance image list. So most of you who used to use OpenStack, you're pretty, or you're still using, you're pretty familiar with that. If we compare it to the OpenStack image list, you will see that most of these commands, we're going to lose that dash. And also the output is shortened significantly. And if you think about this command from the user perspective, from the OpenStack consumer, in most cases, he won't care about the disk format and container format and these additional information. So there's definitely another principle we see here that's being applied. But maybe some of us, including ourselves, maybe we do need all these additional columns. And so how can we get all of these columns back? So OpenStack Client introduced this new flag or new options, dash, dash, long, and it's available in, I think, any command of OpenStack Client. It gives you not only the information you used to see in a legacy CLI, but it extends that to, you know, to even more. And it can be messy, right? There's some of these commands will output much more information that you would expect. But there's a solution for that too. You can use the dash C flag, which stands for column, and only limit your output to the columns that you're interested in seeing. So if you have any scripts that are taking advantage of the old CLI and you just want to take advantage of them in the new one, you can definitely make that happen with these dash C parameters. So now the question is, where are all the commands? Do we have all the commands in an OpenStack Client? And the answer is yes and no. So no, because the OpenStack Client by itself, it only provides the supports for what I call the first-class citizens. So all the projects that are part of most of the installations of the OpenStack. And we certainly agree with this approach. So you see compute identity, image, object storage, block storage, and network. And with network, it's not all the new... Neutron is definitely one of the most growing project out there. And you're not going to be able to see these new commands like tap as a service or something like that right in the core. But no problem. There's also a concept of plug-in. So if you're using Ironic like we do a lot or triple or things like that, there's certainly plugins that will allow you or enable the ability to use OpenStack Client as well. All right, so a little bit about what format options do we have. I'm going to try to breeze through them because I have a little bit more exciting stuff later. So format, the default one is stable. I didn't have to specify that here. But if you just type OpenStack Image List, you will get exactly the same thing. I think everyone is familiar with that. OpenStack Image List with the format CSV for folks who are, you know, maybe want to export this to some sort of spreadsheet format. This is how it's going to look. There's a JSON format for, you know, JavaScript programmers, HTML. There's YAML for folks like us who use, you know, use the YAML type of format quite a bit. And then there's also Shell, which is a little bit more interesting. If you put format Shell against any list of the commands, it will most likely fail. What it does, if you put it against any type of show commands, it translates all the output into this, I would call it close to the bash variable format where you can export it and then use these parameters as a variable. So a little caution if you do that. And you want to just avoid some collisions with your existing environmental variables. You can add the prefix to it, and there's a way to do that as well. All right, so this is the more exciting part for me since I'm the operator, and I want to walk you through some of the things we discovered, some of the shortcuts and things that we use definitely quite a bit when working with OpenStack Client with our customers. So we're going to start with some help, and everyone needs to know how to use help. And it's very similar to the legacy CLI, but I want to show you a little bit difference and a little bit of a few improvements in a space. Then I'm going to go over some OpenStack Complete to show you how quickly enable auto-completion with the OpenStack Client, interactive mode, working with multiple clouds. We heard today at the keynotes that more and more deployments are done in the multiple cloud weights, and we certainly see that on our end, too, with Redhead, when we design the solutions for our customers, they more often try to add more regions to the mix instead of just creating one monolithic deployment. Logging and debugging, this is probably a feature that I use most when I troubleshoot. There's some improvement there, and there's a couple more helpful tips. So let me start with the help. The help parameter or help command works similarly as it used to before. If you just type OpenStack-help, you're going to get a very long listing of everything that OpenStack does in the version you have installed. You can, of course, filter it by the command you're interested in, and here's just one example of filtering it by looking for all the endpoints. And so for the folks that are transitioning and moving to the Keystone version 3, there's also a way to force our OpenStack command to display the commands for Keystone version 3, especially for folks who want to take advantage of some authentication advantages that Keystone version 3 are bringing in. But this is just a quick shortcut on how can you do this here from the command itself. Then there's, of course, the help for the particular command that you want to see. So you start, again, consistency. You start with the OpenStack, you type help or dash-help or dash-h. And then endpoint list is one of the examples, but it's going to be very detailed. It's going to show you everything you need to know to use this command. And I feel like help with OpenStack is very robust, and it's written very well. And it certainly helps our customers to go through all these commands quickly. All right, so this is one of my more favorite features that I kind of found when playing with the OpenStack client. OpenStack complete. If you just type this in your shell, in your OpenStack environment, you're going to get text similar to what you see on my screen here. It's going to be much longer, of course. It's going to have a lot of bash-looking lines. And what it does, actually, it provides you ability to use the autocomplete capability with the OpenStack client. So what you can do now, you can just type OpenStack complete and stream it to your local bash or C. After that, all you have to do is install bash-completion. And as soon as you do that, you can use the OpenStack tab-tab and be able to get some advantage of autocompletion of commands, but maybe also a quick peek of what's available in certain commands itself. So definitely a helpful thing for us. There's also interactive mode. To get into the interactive mode, you just simply type OpenStack, and then you can just start typing the commands without the OpenStack in front of it. So there's an example for the image list. So OpenStack, the interactive mode has an autocompletion enabled by default. So you can use the tab-tab to see all the commands. And then there's also... you can also script using the interactive mode. And I'm giving you a little example here where I execute two commands in a one-swing. So there's another tip or trick that you can use with this new OpenStack client. So this is probably my most favorite feature in the OpenStack client again, using OpenStack client with the multiple clouds. So OpenStack supports using this configuration files, clouds, YAML, and you can put it either in the current directory you're operating from or in a Home Directory config OpenStack or in the Etsy OpenStack. And the first one from the tab list, so the most local file is going to win whatever you have in this file. And there's also another file called Cloud Public YAML. And this file is designed more to store the public cloud information. So I'm going to go through some examples just to show you how cool this speak functionality is. So this is one of the files I created. So what we use mostly with Redhead, we use the triple O to deploy infrastructure for ourselves and for our customers. So the triple O concept for those of you guys who are not familiar, you're deploying OpenStack from the OpenStack. So automatically every single customer we work with have at least two clouds that you need to manage. There's an under cloud and there's an over cloud. So what I did over here, I created this file that specified my credentials for the under cloud. And I also separated my over cloud, so my actually production cloud into the tenant roles. So I have one over cloud for my admin and one over cloud for my tenant one that I used. And this is one way of doing it. You don't have to specify every tenant out there. I find this works a little bit better for me, but you could specify user on a line itself. And there's another example here on the right. It adds, if you have a public cloud that you want to add to the mix, you can do that too as I show on the right in the public cloud section. So now execution, all I have to do is add this one parameter, OS and the name of the cloud that you want to execute it against it. So now if I type server list against the under cloud, it's going to show me my instances running under under cloud. But if I do it with the over cloud, even if it's the same place, I'm going to have output for another cloud. So definitely a big improvement from the usability perspective. And this statement at the bottom, it's in Catalan means amazing. So I first learned this means amazing, but then I learned it can be good amazing or bad amazing. So I think it's more like good amazing. So logging and debugging. If you're an operator, you probably use that quite a bit. There's a dash dash debug and dash dash log file that we typically use. So with the clouds YAML file, you can include the two more parameters, log file and log level. And from there, you no longer have to put the dash dash debug and dash dash log file every time you execute the commands. I think that's quite helpful too. If you're in a stage of troubleshooting, if you have any problems and you just want to get things going quicker, I always forget to add dash dash debug to find all my outputs is usually a problem too. So I think this is another really great improvement. And the last one before I turn it to Darren, it's very simple. I kind of use that too. I just create a little alias for OpenStack, and I make it always directed to the bash. And then instead of typing OpenStack every time, I can just type always an image list, for instance. With that, I want to turn it to Darren who's going to have a more exciting part of the presentation. Thanks. All right. So Chris went over the syntax of the commands here. I'm going to talk a little bit about the framework and what I listed here is deep dive, which is probably more accurately would be reverse engineering. So when they went to go design the OpenStack client, they needed to come up with something that was rigid yet flexible. They wanted something to provide the consistency on the input and the output as seen on Chris's slides. But they also needed something flexible because, as you all know, OpenStack changes over time. The existing projects add additional commands, additional projects come underneath the BigTent infrastructure, and we even move from the integrated platform to the BigTent model. So there's constantly new things going, and they wanted some kind of client that would be adaptable so that you could learn it once, and it would be consistent regardless of what projects you added to it. So these goals here, when they came up with the client, they set us a list of goals that they wanted to accomplish. The consistent naming structure. It was Chris covered all that. Actually, he covered most of all this stuff. The one thing that he mentioned there was about the shell is that the single binary approach, it allows you to start up the shell. It'll authenticate the first time, and then after that you can issue multiple commands against your cloud, and you don't have to authenticate every time you're actually running the commands. So that was one of the key things, as well as they wanted to utilize the Python API libraries. They didn't want to reinvent the wheel or redo things. They wanted to use what we had and what didn't exist code for that. So they leveraged this thing called CLIF, the command line interface formulation framework. The whole design of the CLIF framework is to give you multiple layers. So you have the open stack command, which is your binary. All of the global options go immediately after that, such as the OS cloud that Chris showed in his previously slide, followed by a command. They needed something that was capable of dynamic loading of the code, so that allows them to add additional projects or change existing projects code. So they also utilized the setup tools in Python, which allows them to use an entry points text file, which is what we're going to dig down into in the next couple of slides. So this is my disclaimer slide. I am not a Python programmer. I basically... what you're going to see in the next couple of slides is me trying to adopt the unified CLI, because it's the new greatest thing and everyone says we should use it. And as you can see with Keystone, you start using all these other things. You start getting the deprecated messages and stuff. So the next couple of slides is my approach to actually learning the open stack tool. Hopefully it'll be somewhat exciting and help you also understand it. It's more from the perspective of an end user. And when I was younger, I used to do a lot of reverse engineering of assembly code, a lot of opcode changes from 74 to 75. So that's the kind of perspective I took on learning the open stack client. So the way I really learned it is I actually had a problem with the open stack client. It was broken. So the problem I ran into was with the open stack flavor delete command. So as you can see here, here I am all happy using my open stack unified CLI to list my flavors, create my flavors, list it, there it is. Now I want to get rid of it. And when I went to go get rid of it, now all of a sudden I get this odd message, public endpoint for messaging service not found. Fortunately, with the open stack unified CLI, even though you have that, the old command still works. So when I was on the customer site and ran into this, Nova flavor delete came to my rescue and I put this on the back burner and figured I'd come back later and try to figure out what's going on. So when I finally did come back to this later, I did look up a little bit online and read about Cliff and how that worked. And then I wanted to see, I'm the type of person that needs to see it and see work directly back through how things work. So the first thing I needed to do was figure out where the open stack binary was. So I figured out which one I was using, use yum to determine what package it was in. Then I started looking at the package and I noticed the package was under the site packages of the open stack client. So once I went into that directory, I listed the directory. So just, again, just trying to figure this whole thing out. I started to notice that there's directories here for all of the different aspects, the core projects within open stack. And then from what I read on Cliff, I knew that there was an entry points file somewhere. So this is me basically looking for the entry points file. So then I pulled up the entry points file and looked at it. And the entry points file has a number of sections that all begin with open stack dot and then one of the project names. Underneath that are all of these things, which I guess would be the entry points. So at this point I started to look at this and I wanted to take a simple command that I knew from that open stack and I knew worked. So what I wound up doing was I took the host list command here because the output of the host list command shows your hypervisors. I wanted something simple, again, not knowing Python or anything, just trying to figure out how this thing works. So I looked at the host list command and here's where I executed Nova host list as well as the host list in the open stack using the open stack unified CLI and the output is identical and it actually worked. So I figured I would use this as a basis to try to feel how the code works in regards to the unified CLI. So I went back over here and I was looking at it. The one thing I noticed is that when I did open stack host list, there was a space there. So I started to make the correlation here that host underscore list is the exact same thing. They basically took the space and replaced it with the underscore. So you got the host show, the host list. So I started to see a pattern here, but then I was trying to figure out what this was. But the directory I was in was actually called open stack client and they all had subdirectories in there for the various projects with an open stack. So I started to put two and two together and took a look and sure enough there was a host.python file which matched what was in the entry points file. So that left me with this part here. So which one is actually being the class. We'll take a look at that in a minute. So I took what I knew here on the host list and applied it back to the flavor delete. So here's the flavor delete pointing to the open stack view client flavor, delete flavor. So in this directory, there's three files that are called flavor. The first file is the Python code. The second file is the compiled Python code and the third flavor is the optimized Python code. Google explained that to me. So this is... So when I looked in this file, I took a look at the flavor.py file and this is the class for the delete flavor. Again, I have no idea what this is actually doing because I don't know Python. However, so being reverse engineer trying to get a feel for the code, I can tell that there's two functions defined here. There's this get parser and take action. So I started to think, okay, so if this is broken, maybe I can compare it to something else that actually works. So I went over, this is kind of an eye chart, but perhaps you can see this. The slides were made available after on the open stack.org. So... But I looked over here at the show flavor class and in the show flavor class, again, I see get parser take action and show flavor works. Flavor show works, which it's called flavor show, but the class is show flavor. So the consistency is on the input and output, not necessarily the code, I guess. So I knew this worked, so I compared the two and they both seem to have pretty much the same contents. So I started to think, it's like sometimes you have to take a step back from the problem in order to figure out what's actually going on here. So we know the open stack syntax, where it has open stack, the global commands and the commands. We know our problematic command is my flavor delete. The entry points file, it appears to have a section name that deals directly with the project that... The project that the commands are for has an entry point, which points to a file that has the code and the class that it needs to execute. So then, like I said, the entry point seems to be the command with the space replaced with the underscore. That is an eye chart. So when you've executed open stack help, I looked there to try to get a better idea, but one thing that stood out to me was, so I knew I had in the directory, I had commands for compute, identity, object, block, but what's interesting here is I started to see bare metal. I started to see all these other things in here that weren't pertaining to those specific projects. So that got me thinking. If there's additional commands that you can follow open stack with, there's got to be something else that it's using to get those command lists. So I went back to the site packages directory and I looked for all files that were entry points files and there's 81 of them. So I really didn't feel like I was going to sift through them, so I started thinking, okay, well, what I'll do is I'll just look for the ones that have open stack sections within them, because those will be relevant to what's going on. And sure enough, there's a set of six of them that come back. The open stack client, heat client, ironic inspector, triple O. So that started me thinking. So all of these other entry point files are extending the open stack client by adding additional entry points to it. So in thinking about this though, it's like, well, when we do open stack server list, there's nothing in there that says it's for the compute service. It's just open stack server list. So how does it know that server list, entry point, server underscore list, is part of just for compute? What if the names, the entry points have to be unique across all of them? And what if there was another entry point that was delete flavor? So with thinking that, I said, what if the entry points must be unique? So I looked for flavor delete entry point, and sure enough, it's not only an open stack client as a core, it's also, there's a car client. So I took a look at the open stack client entry point file, and you can see here open stack messaging, and it has all of these entry points here. And what's interesting is that most of them start with Q because it has to do with messaging, except for pool create and flavor delete. They kind of stand out there as odd oddities there. So now I had this theory that maybe the entry points need to be unique. So once you have a theory, you have to test it. What I did was, of course, backed up the text file because I wasn't sure if I was going to break my environment. So then what I did was I changed flavor delete to just exact flavor delete. I didn't know what that would break or what that would do. I just wanted to get that out of the picture when I actually ran my flavor delete. So once I did that, I actually was able to run the flavor delete Barcelona, and sure enough, it worked. So that told me that the entry points would be unique across all projects that are utilizing this. So before we go over what we learned, the other interesting thing that it's kind of ironic because they came up with the OpenStack client in order to simplify the end user's lives. So it's consistent and repeatable and stuff. But in doing that, one of the things using Clif is that now the developers need to be cognizant of the entry points of all these other packages and they need to work together. So in one way, it simplified things for the end users. It's another way it complicated things for the developers now. So they need to basically work together and ensure that no one steps on other people's codes as they develop for the OpenStack Unified CLI. So basically, this is a brief summary of what we went over. OpenStack client comes with the built-in, baked-in commands for the core project set. We covered the overall syntax of using the OpenStack client. Talked about the general syntax of the entry points TXD file and how to basically find what that code is and take a look at it. Talked about that any project can extend the OpenStack client by adding its own entry points into the mix. The end points appear to be just a direct correlation of the arguments you pass to the OpenStack client replacing the space with an underscore and all entry points definitions must be unique. Just a side note, I did go back and rename this a car thing and there is a bugzilla open on that actual bug. So hopefully that will be fixed sometime soon. So that wraps things up for my section. Do we have any questions? Sure. So the core projects, the gaps are, I would say the gaps are very, very small and if they do exist, they exist more as bugs such as this because this is a nova command. For the projects outside of the core set, they fall upon each of the projects to come up with the command sets for them. They're slowly moving away from... I mean, everybody wants to move away from using just the project names to the OpenStack client. But just like any of the projects within OpenStack, it takes time, even though they moved to the Big 10 model, the code still has to mature over time. So just like any other project within OpenStack, it's going to probably take a couple cycles for it to be one widely adopted into the direct equivalent of what you can do with the project commands. Yeah, and just to add to that, I think when I ask initially how many people, even in this room, still use NovaList instead of OpenStack ServerList and a lot of us still raise the hand and I think it's for the old school OpenStack guys, it's imprinted in our head. Just automatically, we still do that. So I think the way for the community and for the users to move forward the OpenStack client is to give them more benefits that will get the buy-in for them to actually move to this new way, right? And I think we're going in the right direction with some of the features we showed up. But if we can add more benefits from the operation perspective to motivate these guys to move on to it, it will be definitely better. So for Keystone, it is there. But for many others and OpenStack documentation, the switch is still not there. So many people, when they go through the dosage, don't zip into your client. That's preventing the migration. Right. Yeah, well documentation historically in OpenStack has always been somewhat, I mean, no one wants to do documentation. So it's not just that. It's not just that. I mean, if you look at some of the documentation stuff, it's not there. It's going through the same pain points that all the other projects go through. So it'll get there. I mean, when we're actively working on helping get that fixed. Good question. Thank you. Any other questions? All right. Well, thank you all for coming. Next slide. I just have a couple other sessions that are supported by Red Hat for today. We have that slide there and that slide, but you guys all have the mobile app, so it's probably better than my slides. Thank you so much. Thank you.


I was rolling back to my truck in a parking lot, and all of a sudden I just hear, Hey! Hey!  You're gonna get robbed. Brian looked rough. I just felt like I needed to stop. And so I slammed on my brakes and I whipped it next to him and I jumped out of the car. And he's just like, hey, I'm David Vibora, a retired NFL player. What happened? This is Buckshot. He was one of the IED Detective Dogs, our unit head. It was April 18th, 2011. I'm walking in the boot prints of the men in front of me and I'm like, all right, Buckshot, we're gonna jump.  And everything goes black from all the smoke and dirt flying in the air and I've had over 30 surgeries. I can't even describe how much that stuff hurt.  And they're like, well, I think you're abusing your meds.  The time when I stopped in that parking lot, he was severely addicted to heroin, had just gotten out of a second detox and he was going to bed every single night with a pistol next to his body. 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In 2011, I suffered a traumatic shoulder injury and it led to a very aggressive pain medication addiction. It started with prescriptions and it quickly manifest itself and it was anything but dealing with pain. It was the first time in my life I had to look myself in the mirror and ask, who's David without football? It just took a year to rehabilitate my mind and my body. So I said, what if we started a gym in Texas? And so we moved here and I launched the performance vault, training for elite athletes. I was having success, man. NFL athletes, Olympic athletes, making good money, finding the groove and then it all changed. Staff Sergeant Travis Mills. He was one of five living veteran quadruple amputees. He was blown up, serving our great country in Afghanistan, stepped on an IED, lost all four limbs. I was way across the room and I just... I saw him walk in and I was just drawn to him and I looked at him and I said, when was the last time you worked out?  I said, Travis, I want to train you. And he said, well, do you have any experience? And the first day we trained, I asked him, I said, what are you most afraid of? He said, well, remember, no arms, no legs, gravity wins, so falling. Then I realized, wait a second, if Travis is in this position that he can't really go to a typical gym, I said, wow, all of these people, veterans, civilians, there's people with physical disabilities, they've sort of been sidelined. They've fallen into the rehabilitation process, but eventually insurance ran out, cash ran out, and where do they go, right? Where do they go to be a part of a collective group that has this community and this ability to push each other? As they graduate this nine-week course and they continue to train as alumni, they recognize that they have this ability to train new people like them.  Something like that would never show up in hospital rehab. There's no tire flips, there's no sledge hammers, there's no sled pulls, none of that stuff. You don't do medicine, ball, slams.  Not just that, they're giving you something to do, a place to be, a little sense of community with everybody. David's program, it's invaluable. What's up, Portland? It's come to that final hour. Look, do me a favor, get up out your seats really quick. Stand up if you can.   One more time, we're breathing in all that staleness, all the stuff that we've been worried about all weekend, and we're going to be right in the present. We're breathing in. Greatness, sit down.  I want to anchor us first with our breath because that oxygen is so critical, right?  That float thing is amazing, is it not? And people that are open to things like this, those are the type of people I want to be around. They challenge status quo, they push back on the way that we've done things in the past to try to revolutionize industries and solve real-world problems in real-time. Today, my speech is entitled Accessing the Supreme Self. What is the Supreme Self? People, I just spoke in lunch a little bit with a group around our table. Those food carts were awesome, by the way. And I said, look, people talk about their peak self, their best self. And to me, the peak is a brilliant view, right? Mountain Hood is a great example of this, right? But nothing grows up at the summit because the environment's not primed for that, the valley, right? The part that we like to avoid, the discomfort that we know grows us is the part that we kind of avoid. And in fact, our brain is wired to create safety survival mechanisms, right? Because back in the day, there's saber-toothed tigers running after us and all that. Now, somebody cuts us off in the freeway. We're like, I've got my whole day now, right? There it goes. And that's the part of the thing that we deal with around a lot of our veterans in post-traumatic stress. Now, regardless of where the stress came, how it came, could have been an IED, could have been that person cutting you off, our brain in our head wants to revert, wants to take a certain path based on prior belief systems and other things that they've adopted for that safety or the identity in self. But in stillness, we begin to wake up something else, right? We can get medical and talk about parasympathetic nervous system and whatnot, but we're waking up the gut, right? Now, my grandma used to call it the spiritual speed dial. She'd talk about the holy ghost bumps. But without really aligning in any specific religion, let's just say this, it's intuitive, is it not? You probably had experienced some time when you knew right here what you were supposed to do or what was happening, but you couldn't really describe it. Any moms, if your mom raised your hand? Yeah, you all know what your kids are doing at all time because of this thing, right? She's like, I know right now what they're doing. But for me, when I was at the peak of my career in football, I had to have tunnel vision to create success, right? And I did that, became a starter to check some of those boxes, but I had silenced this. And there's a beautiful harmony, right? There has to be, because if not, you guys, anybody got one of these in their hands?  These things are crazy, man. They're everywhere now. See kids, they're just... But when I look at this, symmetry is critical, right? That's how it spins on the axis and can continue. So if this looked like Mickey Mouse ears, big on two sides and small on one, it wouldn't spin right, right? It wouldn't maintain the momentum. And life is about momentum. I'm going to get back to that gut. But for me, I consider a Venn diagram. It's a perfect example. The supreme self is where mind, body, and spirit overlap, right? They're all seeing eye in the middle. They're all knowing where it's very much automatic where I don't believe it's about intellect because the battle between the two brains is between intellect and instinct. And when we do something like floating, my own experience, and Ray, Ray, where's your hand? Yeah, Ray, Tomo, what's up, brother? I go into Frisco and he meets me and he sees me and I'm bouncing off the walls all this energy and I just found this out today. He had a bet as I went in, like, that guy's not going to last two minutes. No way, no way. But one of the speakers earlier was talking about discomfort. I'm a little bit of a, I guess, a masochist in this way that I like pain. I feel alive. You know, one of our combat injured veterans at the Foundation, he often says that physical pain reminds you that you're alive, but mental pain will test your will to stay that way. And I think there's a lot of truth in that.  We're really quick to try and do and work and position and angle and get and get and get and then we get and we're like, oh, I gotta get the next thing. Right, because it's like lust, it's good to the touch and it's never enough. Even if it's success, even if it's for good purpose, you might find that vocation that's your why, but you make it your entire identity and then what happens when it gets pulled from underneath you? You know, when I was playing for the Seahawks, my life didn't look like this. Body was big, right? Playing in the NFL had to be focused on that part and the mind was really just specific to how I could engage in success in football. And the spirit was kind of like, I can leave that out or whatever. You know, praise God after the game, pray God that we win the game, that's that. But eventually you heard the drug addiction piece, right? It was the fear inside me, the fear of vulnerability for sure, the fear of staring back at a person in the mirror that had achieved greatness or had earned his way to becoming elite at a craft and I thought that my greatness would outweigh the imbalance of the Venn diagram, but it didn't. So it was January 12th, excuse me, January 15th, 2012, and I laid in a hospital bed. It was day three of seven in drug detox and my body was bearing legit physical war waged against itself, shutting itself down. I didn't know day from night, I couldn't control either end. I had two seizures, lost 34 pounds and in the midst of this, I kind of came to my senses and I woke up and there was a cold-played tuna casserole sitting on the table next to me. I don't know about you guys, but nobody likes tuna casserole much less hospital tuna casserole, right? It's out of a drug detox unit. You can imagine what that would have tasted like warm, much less sitting there, for God knows how long. But I knew if I could feed my body some sustenance, some nourishment that maybe I could find relief. I could calm my torture, the pain that I was in. So when I reached out to grab the food, my hands barely willing to open and I took the plate and I went to take it to the microwave to try to heat it up and that's when the tremor short-circuited and I fell. Powerless. Crash. Plate explodes. Tuna casserole everywhere. Two weeks prior I was playing for the Seattle Seahawks. Now I'm on the floor of a detox unit. Embarrassed, ashamed. Spirit completely crushed. Tears streaming down my face. When the nurses rushed in, they grabbed me and restrained me because they thought I was going to use the broken plate to try to kill myself. So you tell me where you think your power, your source, your identity lives and I'm going to tell you that's the quickest way to wreck the identity, the ego, the self. But floating, the first time I floated, I felt something and it's cliche to say out of body, but I felt something that was so significant that it ignited what you all, what's brought you here today. And maybe it's curiosity. But there's something so unique about your own experience that is your experience and some of the meditation stuff that I do, people are always like, but am I doing it right? Well, just like floating, you're not doing it right, you're not doing it wrong, you're doing it.  So what led me to the floor of detox? Well, it was imbalance, you know? And to me, that imbalance was something that I took great pride in especially, so it made the fall that much more painful. And as I got out of the league, I rehabilitated my mind, my body had a few different shoulder surgeries and foot surgeries, and I was planning on going back to the league. But I took my time to actually wake this up. And as I did, when I got the call to return, something shifted in me. And you're not in the NFL because you're one foot in, one foot out. I mean, you're dealing with monstrosities of men running down the field. And I just knew something shifted and I decided to retire. I actually listened to this. And the crazy thing is when you listen, it strengthens, right? You become more in tune to it. Almost like a sixth sense to begin to understand where your gifts are calling you. And in a way that, yes, is your true north, but also in a way that is authentic to realize that the gift is made to benefit others as well. Call it service, call it the spiritual component of that spinner, the Venn diagram. For me, as I began to look at what my attributes were that made me great at football, I saw that they transferred over to life. And the gift of that detox floor was what ignited compassion. You see, when I stopped for Brian in that parking lot, what did my brain do versus my gut?   You cured the kids in the background. They're screaming. You're hungry. All very justifiable, very rational, right? But I chose to listen to this instead. When I hammered the brakes and jumped out, it was very clear that there was something greater at work in that moment. And to me, it wasn't even about me being the reason. It was about just obedience to the call. And so as I start to unpack what I'm doing in my own life and my own awareness, my own introspection, my personality to try to drive out conclusions working with these athletes that make profound visuals every single day. You got to imagine, these athletes have gulped pain at a degree you and I could never fathom, right? But they no longer suffer. Why is that? Why is that? A perspective shift. And at times when we look objectively at ourselves, what we are facing, whatever that is, we pause in stillness, right? Because we're human beings, not human doers.  It comes in. You're here because you felt it. You're listening because you know. This is a call for you to be qualified, to listen to what that is, and then act. Don't let this interrupt it. Maybe you're in a relationship right now, right? And you, on paper, they got everything that you want. They'd say, I'm a kibble, it's fine, it's nice. But you know in your gut that that's not the person. But you haven't split that off because you don't want to hurt them. But you know what's coming, right? Maybe you see someone, you know, I spoke in a younger group, and it was like high school kids, and I said, you see someone at a party, take that girl who's obviously intoxicated into a room, and you know something's not right, what do you do? Do you act? Because my favorite definition of leader, or leadership, is actually by Napoleon Bonaparte. And I wouldn't recommend quoting Napoleon a whole lot. That's not a real good one. But in this case, he said that a leader is a dealer of hope. Hope. To me, hope is a priceless currency, right? It's like water. You'll die without hope. Like a baby that's born, and if it's not held, it'll die. We're meant to have this interwoven interpersonal connection with other humans and being able to deal hope, hope dealing, all hopped up on hope, right? That's a message that I think we can all learn from the pain that I endured. So how do you repurpose the scar that you were dealt, or maybe that you dealt to yourself? How do you repurpose that to help alleviate some suffering in somebody else? How do you do that? Well, it has to start with what excites you. Because I mentioned compassion earlier, and I wholeheartedly believe this, you can serve without compassion, but you can't offer compassion, not true compassion without service. Let me say it again, you can serve without compassion, but you can't offer true compassion without service. And why is that? Because true compassion interrupts. It stops you. It's not convenient. But you listen to something else, because you know your gifts match someone's needs.  But how are you invested in your personal story?  You cannot give what you do not have. You know, I recently started talking about this, but I was sexually abused as a kid. I was 10 years old. And, you know, when that happened, I felt less than. What I did was, I created external validation and achievement, right? So people wouldn't know what was really going on inside. I created a void that actually didn't exist in myself, but it was from my pain. And the belief system that was created led to me being a shark in the water, and if I stopped swimming, I was going to get eaten, so I had to push and go and go and go. And yes, you can achieve success, but what's your definition of success? Mine is dealing hope. And you're called to. Nobody can do it for you, so I ask you, if not you, then who? Don't marginalize your capabilities as a leader and just put them conveniently out of arms reach, right? Like, oh, somebody else is built for that. Leaders can be first followers. Leaders can be people who just pause and act in compassion. I'm walking into a 7-Eleven one night to buy a Red Bull or something healthy, I'm sure. And with a combat engine marine, a good buddy of mine, and a homeless guy comes running up, and he said, hey, can I get some money? And I'll be completely honest. I sort of blew him off and was going inside. And my buddy reaches into his pocket, he pulls out a $5 bill, and he goes to hand it to the man. But when he hands it to him, he doesn't let go. So the homeless guy grabs it and starts to pull, but then doubles back and looks at my buddy in his eyes. My buddy looks at him and says, you're worth it. Let's go to the bill. Homeless guy turns, starts to walk into 7-Eleven, but circles back and says, hey, man, what did you say to me? My buddy really casually reaches down in his pant leg, lifts up to reveal a prosthetic leg. He lost serving our great nation in Iraq. And he looked at the man and he said, what I did for this country, I did for you. And you're worth it and you're worth that money. Nothing small happened in this moment, because this man turned and walked, not into 7-Eleven, but down the sidewalk and out of sight. I wish I could tell you that I knew the outcome of where that man is today, and somehow that was that turning point effect in his life. And doesn't that feel good? Doesn't our ego want that clarity, that certainty, that definition? But I don't know the answer. I do know, though, that no small thing happened for him and not for me. Because I watched hope being dealt in a way that was so significant. My wife, one of the greatest compliments she's ever given me is that when I pull up to homeless guys, instead of just giving them a couple bucks, and this is post this event, she says, man, you look them in their eyes, you ask them their name and where they're from and what their last job was and what they're interested in and what they're passionate about and literally people behind you will be honking. And this isn't about me, this is being humane to humanity. Because if you treat somebody broken, they act broken.  That's how empowerment works. And community done well is agnostic.  And that's why the gym is a really great conduit for us. Because if you want to use sweat to find out about yourself, I call it sweat psychology. Good pain to push out bad pain. My background is in psychology. The human performance stuff, that's just because I was a white guy in the NFL. Had to know all that stuff to last. But for me, how did I offer a unique perspective toward physical training? Because the physical attributes that we offer these athletes in our nine-week program, that's a no-brainer.  But the mental side is everything. So with this group, we started to weave in meditation, mindfulness. We call it portion recharge. Because yes, we want to turn off the fight or flight and turn on that parasympathetic nervous system. And what we're watching with our athletes is their cup suddenly doesn't run over in a negative way when the littlest things trigger and happen. They can make it through an MRI machine without drugs. They can look to holistic methods. They understand what it is to feel again. Because I don't care if you suffer from post-traumatic stress or not. You're going to suffer, period, if you live between the past and the future. And I don't mean the present. You're bouncing between those two. The present is all you got now. That one's gone now. But we're so quick to let this hold us captive. You know, I floated a couple of weeks ago over at Reyes. And as I'm working through a lot of this stuff with my past and different things, the music that came on while I was in the float, it triggered the piano. And piano reminded me of my sister. And suddenly I was back in our house that we grew up in. And it was 18 years I lived in this house. She was playing the piano. And I could see the dust on the table and the carpet and the ugly popcorn ceilings and the way this smelled and my golden retriever out back. And I was literally moving through my house with such vivid clarity that there's no chance that my conscious mind could have ever resurrected any of this memory or perception. As I moved through in places I used to hide as a kid and this and the way the floor felt. I mean, I had all of these sensory responses. And then I felt my body move to the next door neighbor's house, which is where I was sexually abused. But you know what? I wasn't panicked. There was no emotion. It was a completely objective, aerial view over this experience. And the same thing was true to the exact room where things took place, to the texture of the couch, to the this, to the light, to the... And I got to experience that in a way that had no real connection to what my spirit is. So I realized in this moment what I've sought this whole time has been inside of me. I've been resistant to it as a result of being addicted to my pain and really being addicted to my brain. So, do I love what I'm doing? Yes. Does it call to me? Does it feed my soul? Yes. But if I think that God needs me to do this, I'm wrong. And if I think I'm that important, I'm wrong. What I do realize is that I'm going to be present, and when I hear this call, I go. I go.  I think it was 2009. Now, a witness is really gruesome motorcycle accident. That sweet wood panel convertible that you guys saw? A woody. I bought that for $1,500 on Craigslist. We've been shipping around the country. My wife's so pissed at me right now. Everything breaks down all the time. But it broke down on the side of the road. Surprise, surprise. And the steam's pouring out of the hood and we witnessed the most gruesome and horrific motorcycle accident. A car in the innermost lane ran into this bike. It had a dad and a 14-year-old boy. And the impact that 70 miles an hour caused the father to fling over the handlebars and the bike to lay down and pin the young boy. They were sliding across the pavement, right? Everything slowed down. It was like slow motion, watching this thing unfold. No sound existed. Then a car in the innermost lane ran over to the boy and the bike immediately causing a burst into flames. And in this moment, in this high pressure situation, I reached over to grab my cell phone to dial 911. And as I looked up, I see my girlfriend running out into traffic on I-70, stopping speeding cars. She's wearing only a swimsuit cover-up and flip-flops. Because we were going to a barbecue. She's the one running toward two mango bodies and one still pinned under a burning motorcycle. And this is when Dave Vabor is a modern-day gladiator, right? Starting NFL linebacker. How could I apply Valor on the football field every single day? But then when it came time for a life-and-death decision to serve and to help somebody in that instance, I did nothing. And it shook me. It shook me hard because when I went to my girlfriend, I asked her, I said, why did you not hesitate? She said, look, if that was my dad or my brother, I would expect somebody to do the same. I just trusted my gut. It wasn't even a choice. So then it really shook me up. But I realized two things. The first, I was going to marry this incredible woman. And I did. She's my wife. I've got two little girls now. But beyond that, I realized that I froze. And that was three years before ending up in drug detox, the Seahawks. So if you think about it, I didn't even pause during that moment to do the deep introspection to why I didn't act. Yes, somebody had to dial 911, okay? But how many other drivers already had their hand on their phone to do this very necessary but very uninspiring move? The truth was, it wasn't convenient for David. There was no compassion. And you don't offer something that you don't have. So now what I've done, what I've learned, and what I've rested in is the compassion that I have owed myself. And that float, I'll try not to get choked up by that float and that experience, it's funny, I actually left and I didn't even, it didn't register. I was shaving like two hours later and it started coming up and I was like, I got to write on something, you know, I got to get this out because it was so, so poignant and real. So to me, you guys are solid earth. You are truly the people holding a torch up on a hilltop right now. And look, we can talk about the marketing strategy. We can talk about what it is to understand our market to partner, to create new products. But if it doesn't come from a heart of compassion, if it doesn't come from really the necessity of learning about yourself through this component and then being able to allow others to discover it for themselves and you're positioning that in a way, monetization can happen. We can make money. Things work, they work, right? Nothing real can be threatened, nothing unreal exists. Of course, a miracle. So know that for us today, I want you to leave with this empowered feeling or this challenge for me, either way you want to look at it. I do believe that every single person in here is built for one unique, specific opportunity that they will see the divine in you. And it has nothing to do with why you're qualified by man or by yourself or by the facts or by your schooling or by how much money you have in your wallet. It has everything to do with whether you have something for yourself that you've struggled that you can offer to somebody else. That's dealing hope. So I'd encourage you to tap into this gut instinct, right? They found that these operating systems, right, the central nervous system runs the brain, but the enteric nervous system runs the gut. You can sever the nerve that connects the two and this one will continue to operate. So, yes, there's two brains. Different executive functioning and we need harmony between the two. So I challenge you, please find it what it is that excites you. You can go and do soup at a soup kitchen.  If you are about animals, right, don't continue to pass the buck because tomorrow's not what you have is now. Listen to now, discern now and deal hope. Thank you guys.


All right well good afternoon everyone and thanks for being here at the State Operations Center. Mark Gilarduchim Director of the Governor's Office of Emergency Services and today we wanted to give you a update on the current fire situation across California and the massive coordinated efforts on the way to protect our state. A couple things I want to start off with though. First of all I want to recognize all the the impact that this has had to the community at large and and folks that have been evacuated from their homes our thoughts and and are out with all of you our prayers with you we know it's a tough time and and and we are all working to be able to address this in a timely manner. As well our thoughts and and prayers are with the two Galt police officers that were in a head-on auto accident yesterday they were responding to the Caldor fire as part of the law enforcement mutual aid and both of them are in critical condition and so we're thinking about them today as well. We continue to mobilize every resource to support these fires throughout the state and specifically after extensive review of the damage today. In fact this afternoon Governor Newsom did request a presidential major disaster declaration to the president for individual assistance, public assistance, and hazard mitigation for the counties of Lassen, Nevada, Placer, Plumas, Shasta, Siskew, Tahima, and Trinity. It's just important to note that a presidential major disaster declaration if approved will provide assistance to eligible individuals in the impact of counties for programs and support including housing assistance, food aid, unemployment assistance, counseling, medical services, and legal services. The declaration also would include public assistance which is designed to assist state, tribal, and local governments with ongoing emergency response costs and recovery costs including repairs and replacement of disaster damaged facilities and infrastructure such as roads, schools, bridges, and utilities. And the declaration would also include hazard mitigation which helps the state and local governments reduce the risk and impact from future disasters. The wildfires across the state have already caused extensive damage to residents and infrastructure and we hope that this request will be moved through swiftly and we get information back from the White House as soon as possible. In addition, the governor has already proclaimed states of emergency to provide assistance and support in the following counties, Siskew, Lassen, Plumas, El Dorado, Butte, Tahima, Shasta, Trinity, Nevada, Placer, and Alpine and has secured federal fire management assistance grants for El Dorado, Lassen, Plumas, Siskew, Trinity, Nevada and Placer. These federal fire grants really are designed to enable local, state, and tribal agencies involved with responding to these fires to apply for reimbursement assistance and help mitigate the cost of fighting the fires. My colleagues from Cal Fire and the US Forest Service will provide some more detail specific on the fires in the moment but I wanted to say that you know as of today we have more than 13,000 personnel from state, local, and federal agencies fighting these statewide fires. This includes over 1,000 engines, 257 hand crews, 337 bulldozers, 344 water tenders, 87 helicopters. Much of this through our robust mutual aid system, through the federal system, all the agencies coming together to be able to provide these assets and I particularly want to thank all of our partners in local government, including the state Association of Counties and the League of California Cities and our partners and professional firefighters for their help in pitching in to secure these additional resources. We have also been able to secure out-of-state resources from Utah, Wisconsin, Louisiana, West Virginia, and now Washington. And we're providing resources to support the nearly 43,000 Californians currently under evacuation and more than 500 households in 16 shelters through our California Department of Social Services, our County Office of Emergency Services, the Red Cross, and multiple NGOs and faith-based organizations. Truly a whole of community support response. And although the fires are still burning, the State Operations Center here is working quickly to provide California communities the resources they need to get back in their home as soon and as safe as possible. If you've been evacuated or have lost your home, please first now make an attempt to contact your insurance company and talk to the representative and then also follow Cal OES and or your County Office of Emergency Services for updates on how to apply for assistance. Local assistance centers have been set up and are open in multiple communities and will continue to be open in the coming days. In several counties, we are also already removing household hazardous waste through our Department of Toxic Subjects control in multiple counties due to the fires, which is really the first stage in being able to remove hazardous materials out of these communities and the first stage in getting owners back onto their property. There are also a number of local, state and federal teams that are out doing damage assessments and documenting the extent of those losses so that we can ensure that all that information continues to get into the federal government and amplify the federal aid requests that we've made. And late last week, we announced the governor providing millions of dollars in California Disaster Assistance Act, Public Assistance Advance Funding to Plumas and Alpine counties to help balance the operation on financial impacts the fires have caused to those counties. This advance that's called the California Disaster Assistance Act funding is provided through the governor, provides financial assistance from the state for cost incurred by those local governments because of the disaster event and due to the magnitude of the damage that has sustained in the counties that I had mentioned. In this case, it's Plumas County due to the Dixie Fire and Alpine due to the Tamrat Fire. Let me just close by saying that we all have to do our part to be prepared. It's important that you all have a family plan, prepare with a go bag with some supplies, listen to local and state officials. These fires are still burning in many parts of the state. If you're told to evacuate, don't wait, evacuate. This is very important. Material items can be replaced, but your life cannot. We know that more work lies ahead and I want to just unbelievably thank the dedicated men and women, the public, private, non-governmental organizations, the volunteers, all responders for continuing their service to the people of California. And I also want to thank all of you, the members of the community, who are doing your part in looking out for each other and working with us through this process. It's truly a one team, one fight effort. So I'm going to turn it over to now Cal Fire Director, Chief Tom Porter, who will begin the briefing on the fires and then as we get more information, if you have questions associated with health related or COVID related, we also have representatives from our Health and Human Services Agency here today. So, Chief Porter. Thank you, Director Gillarducci. And again, my name is Tom Porter. I am Director of Cal Fire. And I want to reiterate the heartfelt thank you for all of the support. The Mutual Aid System is alive and well. And we as state and federal fire agencies that are in command of most of these fires, we couldn't do it without the support of our local government partners. And that comes from large jurisdictions as well as small, even just local fire districts. We have people from all corners of the state and out of state as Director Gillarducci mentioned that are adding to this firefight and the siege that we're in. And we couldn't do it without you. Thank you so much. And thank all of you who have authorized sending those resources from your districts. We know it's a difficult thing to do, particularly in the environment we're in, and dealing with the health emergencies that we all are as well. So beyond what's just happening in fires, and I'll get to the fires in a moment. I think it's appropriate at this point to give you kind of a seven day outlook, what we're looking at statewide. And we do this on a daily basis and we look at today, three days, seven days out. For seven days out, we're looking at conditions in the south part of the state that are low to moderate as far as risk for new large damaging fires. That is very good news for us. Very, very good news in the north part of the state. We're looking at moderate conditions again for new large fires. That doesn't change the fact that we have many large damage damaging fires that are ongoing, particularly in the north part of the state, and they're going to continue to grow and get bigger. But it does allow for us to move resources, to surge resources from the south part of the state, and from some of the areas where we're not having as much activity into the fires to protect lives and property and the environment. So that's what we're doing. We're doing that in a very big way. All agencies included working between the different fires and moving resources around there as well. And we're right now tracking the big fires, the river complex and the far north part of the state, the antelope fire, the monument and McFarland fires just north and west of of Redding that have been vexing to some of the small communities in those areas. The Dixie fire, which is now the number two fire in priority for new additional resources and additional efforts that we can put to that fire. It is the second largest fire in California's history, 14th most damaging fire in California's history. The Caldor fire a little bit further south in El Dorado County just outside of Sacramento here is now the number one priority in the nation for fire of fires to get additional and new resources that are coming available. It is that important. It is at the door knocking on the door to the Lake Tahoe Basin. We have all efforts in place to keep it out of the basin. But we do need to also be aware that that is a possibility based on the way the fires have been burning and the concerns that we've been living in all of these other fires and in their growth. Further south, the Walker fire and French fires in Tulare and Kern counties are still out on the landscape. They're still growing. We're putting resources there to try and keep those out of communities in particularly in particular the French fire near Lake Isabella. And all of these fires have their own specific needs, whether it's crews, bulldozers, engines, aircraft of some sort. All of those things are needed in different combinations. And like I said before, we're working to move the resources across the landscape and to the fires that need the particular resources in the most appropriate way and to meet those needs. So with this resource movement, we're also working to make sure that we're resetting and getting our people home and rested so we can sustain this fight. This is a marathon. Right now, we're at about the middle point of our peak season for need for resources and expectation of large and damaging fires. As I said, next seven days, we're looking good in the south. That could change seven days from now. And we could be very much in a different scenario where we're starting to see dry conditions in the south, more need for resources in the south. And so we're making sure that we're resetting those firefighters and making sure that local governments are getting their firefighters back, getting them healthy, ready to go on and continue the fight into the deep fall. These are our days. This is what we do. Every year, we need to be ready for this type of activity. Last year was indicative of what we're seeing this year. We're actually on pace and ahead of head of pace this year from where we were to date last year. Today, we are almost three times the number of acres burned in California over our five year average, almost three times over. A lot of acreage is burning. Fires are burning in ways that nobody has seen before. Yes, I keep saying that you keep hearing that, but it is absolutely true. Mother Nature is in control, and we are doing everything we can to save your lives and property. So director Gillarducci mentioned something that is absolutely critical. You need to be ready to go. Every Californian needs to be ready. You need a go bag. You need your important papers, your medications, those things ready. We haven't seen the ground shake, but you need it just the same in the event of an earthquake. Get that stuff ready. Every single Californian. This is my charge to you. Be ready for the emergency that's coming to your door step at your least the least appropriate time or the least expected time. Be ready. Be ready now. And when it's time to go, just go with that. I'm going to turn over the mic to Tony Skardina, deputy regional forester for the U. S. Forest Service region five. Thanks, Chief Porter. Good afternoon. As others mentioned, obviously our thoughts are with impacted communities. Those who are evacuated, those who've lost their homes and us all working together to help them recover in that process. So just thinking of folks right now across California. I'll try not to repeat things that Chief Porter mentioned, but give you a little bit more of the national picture. We remain currently at preparedness level five. That is the highest level one through five five, meaning lots of large fire activity. We currently have over 100 large fires across the western United States as well as northern Minnesota and northern California. We are also at preparedness level five. That that preparedness level five was triggered on July 14th. That is the third time in 20 years that that has ever occurred if it gives you a sign of the type of fire conditions, the fight type of fire activity across the west that we're seeing. We also have 23,000 firefighters out on the line across the country right now. In addition to the 13,000 firefighters that we have on the ground in California. Right now there are 47 federal incident command teams. They are all either deployed to a fire or on their rest periods. That's happened two years in a row. That's not a usual thing that that is how stretched resources are. That's how much large fire activity we have, and that is not a condition we like to be in either because if there's a new fire start and we need a team to help manage that fire, we struggle with resources in that situation. So again, just the uniqueness and historic nature of these fire conditions are obviously present. The Dixie fire as we mentioned being the number two priority fire in the state right now. Its perimeter is 500 miles around that fire.  And now we're seeing them get much, much larger and much more difficult to damage. Our priorities will remain around life first and protecting people, infrastructure and property, and then resources. Right now we have nine active large fires going on in the state that we are working with our state and local partners on. And as Tom mentioned, we are surging resources not only within the state but other parts of the country to those priority fires to try and catch them with the favorable conditions that we have over the next several days. The other thing that's unique is we've been able to work with our local partners as well to bring nighttime helicopter operations to the Caldor fire. We've been doing that in Southern California since 2013 and now have been able to expand that capability, utilize that nighttime operation is to help us catch them during conditions in the nighttime when things at times are a little bit more favorable and really want to thank our local government partners and others who help bring that capability to bear. Today or last night, we decided to close nine national forests in Northern California. That came shortly after the Caldor fire when the El Dorado decided to close for public safety. We decided to do the same for the forest in Northern California. And the primary reasons for that is when you look at the conditions, the strained resources that we have. We want to keep people out of the way. We can think about events like last year on the Creek fire with over 200 people entrapped. We had more than one scenario like that last year. It's not a decision we take lightly. It has a lot of impact on people that love recreate on national forests, hunters and others. And we understand that, but we also have to one focus on public safety and also firefighter safety when we're having to save people in those situations, which is our responsibility. Collectively, it also detracts from the firefight. And so our goal is to evaluate that over the next two weeks, get through the Labor Day weekend, hopefully reopen on September 6th. And that's going to be based on hopefully resources being freed up. One thing that is helping is one favorable weather to some extent. And we're also seeing parts of the country like the Northern Rockies, Southern Utah getting some moisture. So our hope is during that break period of two weeks, we see more federal teams available, more resources available that we can bring and feel like we're in a better position to manage incidents, manage new starts and keep the public safe. Because right now a new start is problematic in many ways with strained resources that we have. So we'll continue to communicate openly with the public on that about our evaluation and when we may change that decision. And finally, as others mentioned, I have to continue to thank our firefighters on the ground. They've been going at it for more than two months straight and doing very difficult work on a daily basis. The other folks we want to recognize is our support personnel, the people in our dispatch centers, the people that are getting food to the line. They're people that we don't talk about a lot, but they are critical to the firefighting mission and just want to recognize all those people who are truly helping the first responders on the ground. I'll now pass it over to Major General David Baldwin with the Cal Guard. Thanks, Tony. I am Dave Baldwin with the Cal Guard. We currently have 1592 personnel supporting emergency operations throughout the state. This includes 910 soldiers, airmen and sailors from seven states plus the Cal Guard and the Air Force Reserve engaged in wildfire fighting operations and support. We're flying 11 military helicopters that are doing both water bucket operations and medical evacuation support. We have seven Air Force air tankers that are in the Air National Guard and the Air Force Reserve that are flying retarded missions operations. They flew 31 sorties yesterday and there were hammer in the Caldor fire yesterday pretty hard. We expect that number to go up to eight aircraft available, which is all eight of those systems available in the United States will be deployed here in California starting tomorrow. In addition, we continue to have 25 type 1 and type 2 hand crews deployed on fires working in the state and we're preparing to mobilize more soldiers from both the active army and the Cal Guard in order to meet the demands for mainly type 2 hand crews. We have 55 military police members continuing to support the Plumas County Sheriff on the Dixie fire manning nine traffic control points and we're also providing logistic support to Cal Fire in the form of six fuel tankers and we just mobilized a warehouse support team to assist them with moving more commodities up to the fire bases that are working out of the Cal Fire warehouses in Dixon, California. We're posturing to mobilize and make ready additional support from the Cal Guard and we're continuing to work out work with our partners, both in the active component, the Department of Defense and the other states and territories that have a National Guard should the need arise that we have to bring additional capability in. And I'll be followed by Assistant Commissioner Ryan Okashima from the California Highway Patrol. Thank you, General Baldwin. Appreciate it. The first thing I like to do is express our concern as the California Highway Patrol to those who have lost either a business, their homes, been evacuated from their houses. We realize that it's a trying time but very necessary for us to combat these fires and to save save lives in essence. I'd like to express my appreciation to all of our public safety partners that we've been working with at the beginning of these fires and we will continue to do so through the remainder of the fire season as we do every year. The California Highway Patrol has been assisting in many ways, primarily with traffic safety, blocking roads. We've been assisting with evacuations with our other allied agency law enforcement partners. We've also stepped up our patrols throughout the neighborhoods to try and ensure eluding does not occur within the communities that have already been evacuated, which is a big concern for us. And like others have already mentioned before me, please, if you get the word that you need to evacuate, please evacuate. Don't hesitate. Evacuate. Please stay out of the area until you receive the order to repopulate that area. It's very important. Again, as I mentioned, law enforcement is patrolling evacuated areas and it is a crime to enter those areas before you're told to re-enter. So please remain outside that area. And again, as I mentioned previously, we stand ready to provide any assistance necessary to mitigate what's the fires going on through the entire state. So with that, I will turn this over to Dr. Erdogan. He's the director of the California Public Health. Dr. Erdogan. Good afternoon. So we are going through some very difficult times now with the air quality. When you have these fires and the wildfire smoke, that impacts people hundreds of miles away. It impacts the whole state. It impacts regions of the country. So being careful about what we do about air quality is really, really critical. We want people to know that if they're in an area that's being impacted by wildfire smoke is to stay indoors. If you have to be outdoors and you're somebody that has a physical condition, a respiratory condition, a cardiovascular condition, you should decrease your physical activity. And if you have to be outdoors, you should wear an N95 respirator. You want to protect your lungs against those small particles. Wildfire smoke interacts with COVID in two important ways. One is through the biology of the fine particulates that's going to go into the lung, cause inflammation and exacerbate people who have underlying medical conditions. So if they get infected, they're more likely to express that infection because they're more likely to get to become sick. That's first of all. Second, it also impacts behavior in the community because when the air quality is poor outside, what do people do? Well, what I just asked you to do, which is to go indoors and we know the highest risk for transmission of COVID is indoors. So it really gives us this challenge that we have. We want you to be indoors yet. There's more COVID transmitted when you're indoors. And so what can you do is to really pay attention to the situation you're in. If you feel comfortable wearing a mask outside to protect yourself from smoke, please, when you're indoors, wear a mask because it's going to protect you and others. The other thing I want to let everybody know is that in order for us to monitor, no matter where you are in California, you can go online and download the EPA Air Now app. EPA Air Now app downloaded. You put in the zip code and you can check the air quality, the AQI, the air quality index in that area. And it'll give you, it'll tell you what to do next. It's really, it's really important. You should check it every day. I check it every morning. And I check it throughout the day. So I have situational awareness about what's happening. And the trick with PM 2.5 is that oftentimes the air may look fine, but they're so tiny that you may not, you may not know that the air, the air quality is very poor. So please do that. And that, that will go a long way to help you protect yourself, your families and your communities. Thank you. Okay, so you can see from the briefing today that this is an all hands on deck, whole of community response. All these agencies that have briefed you all coming together. And it's a broader, just not beyond these agencies. It's multiple individuals and organizations working and rowing in the same directions. Nothing is linear about these events. So we are continually pivoting to make sure that we have enough resources that we're that we have enough focus. And we're taking care of the the tasks at hand. So with that, happy to open it up for any questions you may have. New or different tactics you guys are using to control the Caldor fire at this moment. So I'm going to throw this back. There aren't a lot of new tactics. I'm just going to say. Tactics are very simple. Put a line around a fire, put the fire out. Use of aircraft slows fire so that we can get boots on the ground and put those fires out. One thing that we've seen this week and and last week when we talked, I did mention that it's been very difficult to get aircraft in the air because of the inversion and how smoky it's been over all of the fires. That has been with us this week as well up until yesterday. And so on the Caldor specifically, we did bring up some night additional beyond what the Forest Service already has available additional night flying capable aircraft from Orange County, L.A. County Ventura in in cooperation with Southern California Edison. Those three aircraft have been here for the last several days. And last night was the first night that they were that we had clear enough air where it was safe enough to fly them. They did fly, they flew late into the evening. And so as far as new resources available, that is that is the only new resource that's been available different in Northern California than what we've used before. And it was used effectively last night. It was helpful in keeping some of the fire in check in and around that west side of the fire where we're concerned about the fire coming back into places like Pollock Pines and others. So we did use that resource last night and are hopeful to continue to build that program into the future. Yes, sir. Also for Chief Porter, did you say the counterfire is the number one priority fire in the nation or in the state? I am going to look to my federal it is in the nation. And remember almost all of the fires we're talking about are federal in unified command with Cal Fire. But but they're they're federal fires. And this is the number one in the nation. It is also in California. You don't mind sort of amplifying your degree of concern about the Tahoe Basin? What I what I'm concerned about related to the Tahoe Basin is what we've seen with fire growth this year in particular, but also last year. So out of the abundance of caution, we are looking at large areas maybe well beyond what we normally normally would look at for identifying areas of opportunity to catch fires. And so I personally don't believe the fire is going to get into the basin proper. But that could I could be born wrong by that. The weather has has outstripped and mother nature has taken over and taken fires like the Dixie to places that I never thought was possible. To Dr Aragon's point a few minutes ago about the impact of wildfire smoke on COVID activity, is the state surging or planning to surge any COVID resources to areas that are seeing dense quantities of smoke, such as testing or other resources? So there's a couple of things happening. One is there is a lot of attention happening where the where the fires are occurring because we're monitoring the community, monitoring the facilities, making sure that all the public health and medical resources are available to take care of patients. And then, of course, we are having a surge of COVID in California. Fortunately, the rates are starting to slow down. So that's great news. And one of the challenges we have is when we have a COVID surge, especially when it impacts the hospital beds and the ICU beds, it impacts care for other persons who may not have COVID, but may be impacted. For example, let's say somebody with heart disease, asthma, COPD, somebody who has is impacted by the fire and then goes to a hospital that may be full of COVID patients. So it's really it is it isn't all community. It is an all community effort. We're going to be in this for a long time. One of the things that we can do as Californians to make sure our hospitals are available is to please get vaccinated. It takes several weeks to get that community immunity community your immunity up, and that'll really help protect the hospital beds so that they're available for everybody, including people who have just smoke related injuries. I may add that evacuation centers, if you're either inside or outside, mass are made available to you. And and you know, there are opportunities for vaccinations at these sites as well as we're working with the counties and our public health department. So but the key thing is that that the mass are provided for you PBE. So please partake in that and utilize that whether you're inside or or outside. Yes, sir. Question for Tony. I think you said last week on that mistaken. 65% of your 10,000 or so firefighters in California, is that number still roughly accurate? Yeah, it's leveled out a little bit. Roughly there's 23,000 deployed nationally, 13,000 of those are in California. So we're still in that 60 percentile come down a little bit. And as I said, we're we're seeing relief in some of those other geographic areas and in that surge of resources, some of it's in route already. Others is being coordinated. So we're still around 60%, 65%. A couple of weeks ago, Secretary Bill Sacks said we're going to get you more boots on the ground in California. And obviously that was that was predicated in many ways on the infrastructure bill passing. What? What is sort of the level of? Stretched fitness. I know that's not very articulate that the that the forest service is average. Just how bad are things? Well, I mean, we continue to look at both needs in terms of fire suppression as well as doing that land management work. And so we know that we have to increase resources to do some of that that work to keep get forest back in healthy conditions so we can get to the point of reducing catastrophic wildfire. And on the suppression side, we have those areas like our crews, like our teams where you've been hearing discussions around firefighter pay and retention. And so I think our goal right now is one, we have to hold on to the quality leadership and personnel we have and we've seen steps being taken to do that because losing our key leadership positions takes years and years to recover from. Then from there, I think it's a larger question with our communities, with our partners about how do we find that balance? How do we get to that key land management work and how much do we want to put in those suppression resources? And I don't think there's a perfect equation to that. And there's a lot of need for people to collaborate and get together and figure those things out. Like I said, last year, I think just within the Forest Service in California, $1.3 billion to suppress fires. If we can invest that in that upfront work and putting conditions and communities back in healthy condition and reduce catastrophic fires, hopefully there's a time where we can start focusing more of energy on that versus suppressing fires. So that's the conversation going on right now. That's the type of work within communities and within government agencies that we have to figure out. Thank you guys. But last week we mentioned that the Caldor fire is happening in what you guys called the Timberbasket. Is that sort of one of the factors why the Caldor fire is kind of to the point where it is right now where it's getting progressively worse? What kind of factors are playing into the reason why it's so bad? Okay, related to my comments about the Timberbasket last week, but the Caldor fire specifically and kind of the timber production and forest that we all know about and presumably love. We're seeing the Caldor fire burning in areas some of which have burned in the last several years or in the last several decades. But other areas that haven't seen fire in the last few decades. And the dryness or the relative dryness of not only what moisture is in the soil, but also what moisture is in the plants and the trees is making fires in the forest burn in ways that we haven't seen. And so what's happening here and on the Caldor, it's not unlike what we saw in the August complex, the North complex, the fire burning from Quincy area all the way down into Oroville or this year the Dixie fire going the opposite direction from the Feather River Canyon all the way up over through the timber region past Lake Almanor. Fires are difficult to control in a timber environment to start with, but when you have an exceptionally dry forest environment, then spot fires become large before you can put them out and it spreads fire through the forest in ways that we rarely see and in the case of this year, last year have never seen before. So just very, very difficult and it's also taking a major toll on that resource that we need, our sustainable resource of forest products that are used for building homes and other goods that we need in our society is being consumed by these fires. So I'll just close by saying it's not about resources because I know there's been a lot of questions about it. It's important to note that the effort here did not start from zero and then we had to get to 100 miles an hour. There's been a tremendous effort over the course of the last couple of years to amplify resources throughout the state, including the governor supporting funding to the Cal Guard to increase National Guard hand crews, which we had not had before to the degree that we do, additional Cal Fire resources and seasonals and hand crews and engines to OES funding for additional engines to put into the mutual aid system. The truth of the matter is these fires, these conditions that we're facing are climate driven, fast moving, super hot, super dry, in a drought and we're dealing is all in a COVID environment. I'll continue to make this challenge, not just the challenge here in California, it's across the Western U.S., talking to my counterparts from other states, they're all facing similar challenges. And so that's why this effort of collaboration and coordination, bringing all the resources to the table, our robust mutual aid systems and fire and law enforcement emergency management, all the tools in the tool basket are brought to bear on this. And so I just want to, again, thank all of the effort of all the different resources that are here and the agencies, we couldn't do it without them. With that, thanks for being here today.


Transformer-based chatbots have been increasingly used in healthcare due to their ability to generate accurate predictions from clinical vignettes. Two models, ChatGPT and Foresight, were compared on the task of predicting relevant diagnoses. Both models showed promising results with ChatGPT outperforming Foresight in terms of accuracy. However, there are several limitations to using these models in clinical settings, including the lack of understanding of the underlying mechanisms behind the model's predictions and the need for manual labeling of data. Despite these limitations, transformer-based chatbots show promise in providing accurate predictions in healthcare applications. This article was authored by Joshua O. Young, Joshua O. Young, Shelko Kraljevik, and others.