Should we start, Alice, for the invitation to come in? I think it's quite important the whole activity. I think it's great that there are this many people here. I think it's just emblematic of the level of energy and underlying support for being able to do something in terms of creating a cloud environment that has an evolutionary path and an infrastructure and OS to support growth because there's so much excitement about it across the development community across the vendor space and the user environment. There's pent up demand. And so we've been very interested, is kind of an open source steward of freedom of action, freedom to operate, and choice in the community to see that this is nurtured and grows and from our earliest conversations with Alice and in Texas and with Council, with Van, others kind of seeing how this is germinated and kind of hearing the story just retold about the evolution and I think it's a very important time. And it's also important to make sure that as we're doing all the block and tackling as you're developing and evolving this community and this platform that it's one that's sustainable, that the roots are planted deep on and it's able to sustain when it experiences heavy seas. I think the mobile space right now on Linux is an Android and ties in behind it and other platforms essentially is undergoing some experiential turbulence created by success. So it's a good thing. Success begets attention, lots of attention, it's negative. But in the end it ultimately normalizes when you round the situation and patent issues are potentially a source of derailment of progress. And so one of the things I want to talk about is things that could be considered, I gave a little bit of a sense of history of OIN and how its model evolved as one potential model but there are a variety of permutations that could be adopted and there are things to consider but very much it's about creating, understanding the context and creating the right community and leveraging the community because in walking through this I'll talk a little bit about kind of the environment and how the context is one that's not fraught with but there are risks, I think the question was raised by the person who was sitting here in the prior session about risk and what risks were involved in kind of setting up the entity. I think there are far more risks in implementation and the variety of strategies that ultimately be adopted. And so if you think about the context and you look just at the OpenStack OS, you look at some of the technology areas, networking, storage, computing, these are areas that are replete with massive numbers of patents, there are tens of thousands of patents that impact these technology spaces and as a result impact the potential for the advancement since I just spent a lot of time in Britain and this is all over the place, Skyfall's just coming out and it's kind of its own franchise but unlike this environment where of the 20 plus films that have come out of Ian Fleming's books, there you have this one nameless agent of uncertain destiny that deals with the specter of risk, the specter of threat that's out there. Unfortunately, that's not something that we can adopt or emulate in this community. We have a great resource in being able to have thousands of agents, thousands of smart people that we can tap into to create a kind of a parallel universe with what we universe on the legal front and I think that's kind of what you saw in the history that was just described by Eileen and Alice and that's really what we need to continue. It's not an episodic thing, it's a generative process that we must develop. If we think about, as I said, if you move into certain spaces where people have vested interests and are not necessarily supportive of open source models, you create the opportunity for conflict to occur and you create the opportunity for patents to be a source of how that conflict plays out and so certainly we have the example that everyone sees of Microsoft, Apple in particular that are involved in litigation. It's less of a value judgment on what's happening there and just a statement of the fact that, again, success begets attention and lots of it's negative. We can't also forget that there are all kinds of new business models being developed by private equity and hedge funds looking to be able to drive return that are funding players that are listed at the bottom in some or in small measure or in whole to be able to look at value extraction from patents. We have a situation where we have all these patents and we can debate whether software patents should or shouldn't exist, whether they should have a five year life rather than 20 year life and there are all kinds of things that can be done legislatively potentially to change the regulatory environment. That's a long slog. Anybody who participated in the American Vents Act knows that that was kind of a seven year haul with lots of fits and starts, lots of several administrations that it went through finally got something done but when you get legislative relief, if you will, it's usually a compromise because you've got somebody vested interests that are actually competing to have their interests represented in a piece of legislation. What you end up having to have happen then is that the community has to meet whatever legislative reform is halfway. The community has to act as if nothing's gonna happen. We're not gonna have the judiciary or the ITC reform. We're not gonna have new legislation that helps in healing the wound created by the massive patenting and patent approvals that we've had over the last 20 years. So the fact is we've got a situation where we've got lots of patents that probably should have never been granted that are being purchased by companies for the sole and exclusive purpose of asserting and litigating. And we have record numbers, billions of dollars just in the last five years have gone into supporting these kinds of initiatives. And I've just been in touch with insurance companies that are actually involved in providing risk coverage in the event that an operating company wants to sue and it could be counterclaimed against. In this case, they're providing coverage to be able to make it easier for small operating companies to actually sue. So it won't just be the companies that are not practicing entities, it'll actually be, we'll start to see a plethora of growth in this space where small to medium sized companies are actually utilizing it as a strategy. And so that just means that the indirect or incidental threats to this platform and across open source will become more plentiful. The social phenomenon that supports this modality for innovation that OpenStack takes advantage of is very threatening. I think people don't really understand how powerful it is but they know that it's powerful enough for them to be concerned. And so because it creates this opportunity for unrivaled levels of new novelty to be created and innovation to occur, people who have siloed organizations and don't allow for collaborative development are at a disadvantage. They implicitly understand they're at a disadvantage. And so you start to see that threat actually affecting individuals that are operating companies that become direct antagonists or potentially of OpenStack, as well as the indirect antagonists that come primarily from the financial services world or backed by financial services and insurance companies. I think it's important that opportunities for collaboration that we've witnessed to create the entity and to grow the platform to where it is, that that collaboration actually become more acute that it be maintained. And it's not just those parties who are actually gold members or platinum members but it's really all participants. This is something that has to create the kind of community energy that we see outside these doors. And we have to create also a disincentive for aggression by players. And unity will help that because if you don't get picked off, there was actually a very vivid YouTube, I didn't, I spared you by not bringing it, but there was a, I think an impala that was attacked by a lion on YouTube a couple of weeks ago which was a rather vivid reminder to me of exactly how patent aggressors work. They take the animal that strays from the herd and they pounce on it and there is no more opportunity for that animal to have freedom, freedom of choice, freedom to live really and be a vibrant player in an ecosystem. And I think we need to focus on that. So really what we've tried to do and I think what there are direct parallels for OpenStack is that what we've tried to do is recognize that we've got this and wonderfully elegant self-organizing, self-regulating community that is the open source environment and then you've got Linux which is a extremely large and successful commercial project that's become a platform within the open source modality or environment. And you've got that technology collaboration which is vibrant and very dynamic. And then what we're trying to do is create a parallel environment where people are committed to patent non-aggression as deeply as they're committed to collaboration on technology because we recognize that that's the only way for choice to be preserved and for technology development to advance. And so what OIN does, OIN's model is essentially, we have no financial model, we have no business model which I think is very important in the open source world because it's a, as I describe it to people, it's an extremely diverse community and if we actually made money, if we had a revenue model, we'd come under a lot of scrutiny because there's a fair amount of paranoia which is probably appropriate for the early days of growing kind of Linux and growing open source models. And so as a result, what we do is essentially acquire patents with money that's been contributed by a half dozen companies that were extremely forward looking seven or eight years ago when they formed OIN and said, if we don't do something, then we're gonna have the potential for litigation like SCO, which was litigation funded as small companies, litigation against a series of companies in the open source world, the Linux world as it pertained to Unix and Unix patents and that litigation was funded by Microsoft as it turned out and that kind of activity is something that was a wake up call for IBM, Red Hat, Novell, Sony, NEC and Phillips who got together to say, we have to step up and make our commitment because if we don't commit to this right now, we may not have a market in which we can compete and we're all relying on this market. And I think that's the kind of forward looking view that was necessary at the time because of that action, I think it's gonna be a lot easier for whatever policy OpenStack develops for you to be able to rally support because we've got a more contentious environment. What they saw in the early part of the last decade is actually played out in spades where we have more litigation that could have ever been anticipated both from trolls and from operating companies. And as you see, anytime you're in an area which is the province of other companies or is gonna potentially damage their ability to compete as effectively as they may have previously, that's gonna change a lot of perceptions, it's gonna create opportunities for conflagration and patent aggression. And so what we do is acquire patents. Right now we acquire patents that support OpenStack because we acquire virtualization patents. We've looked at kind of the whole notion of the cloud and from our inception as being something that was coming and something that was important. So we go out and buy virtualization patents. We bought a virtualization company two years ago. We just bought the assets of a virtualization company called Labrado about four months ago that was moving in a different direction. We bought their intellectual property assets. We've worked with a company that Red Hat purchased the assets of and we've been continuing to work with some of the inventors to have them continue to invent ahead of where we think the roadmap is for Linux in virtualization and cloud environment. And so we're already looking at the scope of what we buy. It's really across technologies in any place where we think Linux and open source is gonna be potentially impacted. So we're already doing things that are compatible and consistent with supporting the mission here. I think it's just a question of understanding what we do developing your own path that really is customized to be able to fit the ambitions, the desires, goals of the foundation and more importantly of the community that builds around the OpenStack platform. And so we have patents in biometrics, fundamental patents in PHP, e-commerce. Those are just a sample of some of the areas we purchased. We make the patents available on a royalty free basis. Anybody who wants a license can have a license. In fact, it's an open offer. We don't make choices about who can have a license. It could be a company that might be, the Commerce Department might not like a lot or the Justice Department doesn't like. We want inclusivity. We don't wanna make choices about who can have a license and who can have access. The main thing is that what we want is to neutralize the patent threat environment by having people agree in return for this license, this royalty free, fully paid up license. They agree that they will not sue based on Linux and we define what Linux is and it expands over time and we just expanded it twice in the last nine months. And then we also require that they provide a cross license to patents that they own that read on the Linux system definition again as we define it. We take lots of inputs from the community to help in fleshing out what that definition of Linux is. But essentially what we're doing is providing these licenses. We're also patenting and making our patents available through the license. We're doing defensive publications which are statements of prior art that we think the community, if the community, the Linux community for the last 20 years had been or 21 years of its history had actually been producing defensive publications, we'd have far fewer patents because we'd help raise the bar on quality of what is patentable by having this significant repository of these statements of prior art, these publications. Yeah, that's the problem is we've created a wonderful asset group. The problem is it's not searchable with the tools and talents that exist in the patent and trademark office right now. But unfortunately in the doubly world you've got the sanctity of the engineering notebook and you have everything that someone thinks is typically there in the IT world, computer science world, if it's not in code it doesn't exist. So we've got the challenge of being able to create ways whether it's through SPDX or through other programs that are out there to be able to create a codification of future of what we're inventing out into the future so that it can be used for prior art. So we won't run into the situation where we've had precious little invention. You think about the first 15 years of Linux most of the developers were outside of large companies. The last five years most of the developers were inside large companies. So we have more codification processes but before that it was precious little that ever got codified. And not that it had to be codified in the form of patents. We don't have a viewpoint on whether you should patent or whether you should not patent.  And I think companies, the young companies go through this all the time and I think they made a good decision which is to recognize that you have to be prepared for counter offensive measures. So you have to own patents but at the meantime you don't use your patents against anybody to restrict, to provide a negative right. You make your patents readily available to whomever wants access to them. And so it's a good compromise position and one that probably 10 years ago when they first started patenting eight years ago whatever it was filing patents I think there was probably more criticism because there was a lack of awareness of the simplistic elegance of having that kind of strategy. Can be an issue unless you've already licensed OIN which means that those patents are neutralized because they're forever neutralized because the rights that we convey are in perpetuity. So that's an important component of it. And so we've also developed ways of dealing with the past and the present and the future the future I've already described if we get people to file defensive publications we'll pay for them. We have an open offer that if people want to file defensive publications we'll support the drafting, the creation, the codification and the maintenance on sites that are on the Patent and Trademark Office website or database site. And then what we're also doing is we've taken a page out of Peer to Patent and actually the former director of Peer to Patent works for me because the American Vents Act kind of absorbed Peer to Patent into it which is essentially if you have a published application and you think it's, there are a couple right now that are just whoppers that are extremely broad applications that have been put out there by known Linux antagonists that are hoping that they slide through that we are trying to organize utilizing the new opportunities within the American Vents Act to actually have prior art identified so that we can get them either the claims reduced or better yet get the whole patent application rejected. But companies are relentlessly pursuing these strategies of filing very broad patents so they get coverage that allows them to then use it as, use those granted patents when they do issue as a stick to be able to create conforming behavior, discourage innovation and rob people rob companies and vendors and users of choice. And so we're actively involved in identifying prior art on published applications that are concerning and then utilizing whatever methods exist within the American Vents Act to be able to pose a challenge during our synthetic version of an opposition period which we have in the U.S. now which is similar to what existed in Europe for some time. Post issue Peer to Patent is when there are patents that have already been granted. We're starting a program where we're actually looking at filing more reexaminations to get patents reject, to get patents invalidated that have already been granted because there are a lot of time bombs out there that exist in the fabric of the environment. I think these are all things that just again none of these things am I proposing that the OpenStack, the foundation should promote or there are things that can be done that we're doing that we think are important because we try to think of what are all the potential pitfalls of the patent system or of patents that are out there that can slower stall the progress of Linux and open source. And then as I said defense publications we think are important. We license someone about every three days over the last two and a half years. And so there's a groundswell of support. We have over 500 licensees. We own over 400 patents and applications in North American, US patents and applications over 600 global patents and applications. We have 250 defensive publications that we produce. We'd like that to be 2,500. We're promoting that and trying to get people more engaged in that process. And of the companies that are licensees there are over 300,000 patents that they own some percentage of which are part of the cross license that we've expanded the definition as I've said we originally were looking at where Linux was at the time that OAN was formed which is back office transaction processing kind of the server space. We've migrated in a very aggressive way to provide coverage of relevant platforms right now in the mobile space. We'll continue to expand to cover the mobile space. We're also looking at the home. We're looking at virtualization. We're looking at the cloud. We're looking at and we think these are all areas that we should be expand. As Linux expands we want to expand the definition so the coverage and the neutralization in terms of member acceptance of kind of the notion of a patent no fly zone in those areas becomes more prevalent. So some ideas that I had about some of the things that we do, some of the things that you see in other pools, clearly OAN's not the only defensive pool out there. There's RPX, AST. Some people believe that intellectual ventures is a defensive pool as well. For some maybe it is. And so they're all a matter of defensive vehicles that people have signed onto and paid a lot of money into. And really of the mind that the money that's been, many of our members are members of RPX and also of AST and so there's a lot of complementarity. I think whatever is crafted here should be complementary as well. We should look to leverage every dollar that's been spent in forming these other entities and not think that you have to kind of reinvent the wheel. You could adopt a view that there is no formal action that you take. Did you just say look this is not something that we think the foundation has a play in. We recognize it's an issue but each individual company really has to take care of itself. Some companies may have relationships with OAN and maybe that's gonna help them to some extent. Maybe to a great extent. It just depends. So I think that's not an option that lacks viability. It should be considered. Because again, you have to determine and the board has to determine what it really wants in terms of its role and to play back what its members want. And to recognize that there are other entities out there that may be beneficial. There may be an opportunity just to do a patent cross license or a covenant not to sue among members. There could be contributed patents. There could be no contributed patents. It, you know, you could create a pool. Then you have decisions around whether if you contribute patents into a pool and create almost like a standards pool like MPEG LA or something. Determine whether it's a fee-based thing where people have to gain access to it. They have to pay a certain fee. I don't know where your conversations will go internally at the board level and with the community, the ecosystem, but essentially these are the kinds of things that need to be considered. Whether it's member-only access, whether it's open to non-members, how open the choices around assets that are put into a pool. Be a cloud defense patent fund. You could develop a standalone fund, raise capital the way OIN did. Develop a series of regulations or guidelines and policies around how the patents will be used. Could be quite similar to what OIN's doing. Could be different. I think it's really just important to kind of consider all the options, not discount any of them.  And so you don't necessarily have to do that again or you may wanna have control over that because you wanna make sure that there's fine focus on the areas that are critical to open stack. And so, you know, whether it's a discreet pool, whether it's a commingled pool, whether it's a pledge model right now, we're looking at expanding our capability of doing larger deals by evaluating the notion of a pledge model where we would have a series of companies, members and licensees that would potentially pledge a certain amount of money and then this is how a lot of funds actually are done on Wall Street, where you pledge a certain amount of money so you're pre-committed to investments in a certain area, doesn't mean you actually are giving your approval to the fund manager, but there's a pre-commitment so that when you do move forward you're already well advanced and it can be done quite efficiently. There are just a number of ways of doing this and understanding how funds work and understanding how these defensive pools work, bringing that together with again the requirements and the objectives of the members that are really guiding and stewarding open stack I think is critical, but making sure that that conversation is had because it's a very important one to ensure that there is some policy, that it's an explicit policy and that you evidence thought leadership to everyone out there so that they know that this is something that's being thought of, being addressed and what the limits of the ultimate strategy that's adopted are. So I think the consideration should be careful, it should be thoughtful, think about again member goals, remembering that this is not something that should be done in isolation. I can't emphasize enough that every one of these defensive pools, OIN in particular, is ready and supportive of devoting resource, lawyer's time, capital to ensure that you get this right. Because one of the things that comes with the benefits of taking advantage of open collaboration, open source, is that you have all these, the value proposition is very different from an innovation standpoint, but there are obligations and responsibilities on the flip side of that. And we're all in the same boat because we're all participating in this open source paradigm. And as a result, so goes to our view, if you guys don't kind of get this right so that it works for you and that it works to support kind of a rapid advancement of cloud services and cloud solutions, then we're all essentially lesser for it. So we wanna make sure that we can contribute whatever you need to be able to ensure that you can implement a strategy that's gonna work to be able to support OpenStack. And again, don't reinvent the wheel focused on efficiency and efficacy. I think there's a lot of models out there that you can take parts of, you can take all of, you can essentially invest in an entity to be able to have it acquire for you, but essentially just thinking through what you need to do and what your members goals are and what the goals are for the community. And then allowing the rest of this community of players in open source to be able to help. And again, we can't afford to allow, to be negligent in allowing you to not have access to all the institutionalized learnings that we've gone through. And we think it's very important that there are a number of my members that are in the room now that are fully supportive of this notion and are deeply committed to making OpenStack a success and we wanna be part of that. And in so far as patent issues have the potential to slow or stall OpenStack's advance, we think it's critical to have a proactive stance. So thank you very much. Shibata Sun, you know, again, if you look at this, I think this was before you came in Shibata Sun, but no, it's so fun. It's just that so many things that are bound up in the cloud, there are so many patents out there that it's hard to say, I think it's really depends on who's holding the gun. It's not the patents themselves that are bad. Maybe this is, I guess that's all I had to say. The analogy is maybe not great, but so it's really if somebody's an aggressor, an antagonist and they're holding the patents and they haven't committed to decommission those patents as it pertains to OpenStack, then you've got a potential problem. And whether it's a troll that's utilizing them or it's an operating company that's antagonistic because it has its own approach and wants to find those choke points because there are control points in patents. Essentially, it's much like the RF patents that Microsoft is attempting to neutralize right now in terms of this battle that's going on in the mobile side. There are critical spaces that are choke points or control points where if you control that area with patents, then you control the ability of the technology to advance. And so that's what we really have to look for is to try and anticipate and try and, it's really a process of complex adaptation. This is like living systems theory. If you wanna survive, you've gotta anticipate and adapt and you have to adapt and if you adapt, if you've got all these tens of thousands of companies out there, people sensing and advising you, this may be a problem, it's so much better than if you feel you're isolated and alone in this. There's no one company that should feel because there are companies in OpenStack that have dozens of patents and there are companies that have tens of thousands of patents. I think the key is to collectivize so that there isn't the feeling of isolation that one impala can be separated out from the herd and be essentially be turned and lose choice and essentially, because we can't afford to, we're only as strong as the weakest link. The way there are approaches, we're focused on getting really small companies because they're the most vulnerable. They're the ones who can be preyed upon and can be turned away from utilizing, legalizing Linux, utilizing open source. And so we're trying to focus on those companies that are small to medium-sized enterprise, the top 100 distributions. We know what the top five are. It's the others that we're really concerned about because we don't wanna see the energy and the creativity of any ecosystem comes from the edges. We have to make sure that the edges are vital, that there's blood flowing through them and that's why we need to work together. And rather than feel like we're, this group's working on this, this group's working on that, this is something that's too important not to collaborate and collectivize. Yes, focused on is ITC reform without giving you kind of a chapter in verse on the ITC. The ITC is a trade court that's being perverted by trolls and by operating companies seeking to use it to create an uneconomic licensing environment because the only relief that you get in that court, the only remedy that that court has to issue is an injunction. So when faced with the prospect of being shut out of the US market, you will sign a higher than market license. And when you have depocketed companies that are operating companies that are antagonistic to Linux that will file multiple lawsuits in that venue when it costs you eight and a half to $12 million to defend there, that's an environment where we're seeing total cost of ownership rise. This is not a situation we want to see repeated for cloud and for OpenStack, believe me. So what we're doing is investing and we have been over the last 15 months in changing the public interest test so that the entity has the ability to reform itself without legislative reform. There are also measures that we support that are legislative based to be able to raise the standing bar for the ITC. There's a lot that's been written on this. There'll be a lot more written. There are many forms that are going on. It's the next wave of major reform in US patent law. So that's where we feel we can make a difference is denying access to the ITC into that ultimate injunction, injunctive relief when suits should really be tried in the district court where reasonable damages could be. I was just at a forum in Brussels focused on, in some way, in some respect on this issue. I think the, first off the initial statement, in Germany you're not safe from software patents and there were thousands of software patents that have been issued in Europe. You just don't, they don't, even in Britain, we're agonistic, openly antagonistic view, there are lots of software patents. It's just you don't have litigation in the way we do in the US. Well you have it in Germany. So I understand that the unit, yeah. The unitary process, you're exactly right. It will provide essentially a way of subverting what are the general principles of an anti-software patent culture. So that's true, so that's something that needs to be followed. We're, we tend, again, the software patent issue, we have people in Brussels that work for us as well. We kind of stay around the hoop on those issues, but that's, it's mainly the ITC where we felt we could have a surgical response to a problem and have an impact and we are moving that in that direction so that by the end of the year I think there will be some changes in the way that the open source and Linux based products in particular will be considered to be part of the public interest so that they won't issue injunctions against them, which is a major move forward for us. Yes, I think that's TBD. I think, maybe you have to think, what we heard just before is an incredibly accelerated pace to get to the formation and to where the foundation is now. So I think this is something that will follow, but you know, Alice and Eileen can probably answer that question better than I can in conversations. So we know that there's sensitivity and awareness and there has been for really several years. So I think it's not that there's not sensitization, it's just developing a policy is tricky and you really wanna do it right and you wanna take in a lot of inputs that requires a lot of sessions like this and a lot of sessions where individual entities are coming in and providing a view into their model and what works in their model, what doesn't work, what they would change, because nobody gets it exactly right. Every model you have to kind of adapt to fit circumstances because circumstances are always changing, the threat landscape is changing.  So I think it's all been thought of in depth but it hasn't been articulated into a policy yet. And that's again why I'm very anxious to participate and be here. I just came from Europe because I feel this is very important and I've just been excited about what's going on with OpenStack and the foundations formation and whatever, I would be remiss if I didn't put every resource we have to ensure that we are coherent, that our policies are ultimately coherent, whatever is adopted and how intimately we work together that's remains to be seen. Thank you very much for your time.


Hey it's Bridget. I'm heading over. I'm heading over. I like my new chair. Welcome to Above Life channel. The purpose here is to inspire your spirit and to fill you with hope. It's a little weird. I feel kind of far away from you. It's always so strange when I feel like you guys are like looking at my whole body. I don't know why that is. It's just weird. A little weird. So let's get into our session today. We're gonna have a conversation with George Michael in the afterlife. I've actually been thinking about talking to George for a while now and I haven't actually done it. I wanted to talk to him about some a couple of different things and I just wanted to reconnect.  So oh you guys I tweaked my back a little bit but it was worth it. Let's be clear. I traveled and you know those little airplane seats and stuff and I have kind of long legs and stuff and trying to stretch myself out and twist on a flight coming back home. I just I think I did something to it. So anyway I'm getting better. I went to the chiropractor so I'm gonna be better. So I keep looking at what I need to grab something to drink. It's a little too far away here. So I haven't talked to George in a while. It's been a while. I usually talk to him around Christmas time because that's the time he made his transition but I want I just I miss him. I kind of miss him. He feels like a good gosh I really want to cross my legs and I just can't do it. So my chair rocks. Hopefully that doesn't annoy you. George can you come in so that they can feel your energy? That'd be great. It's so weird to call him George. It never fits for me to call him George. It just doesn't. Can you come in my dear? So sweet. Very red. Lots of red a bit. Freddie Mercury like I feel I definitely feel a little bit of a kinship between George Michael and Freddie Mercury. I think it's because of the tribute that you're saying to him. It was really really good. He says thank you. Thank you. Thank you. You are just the kindest compassionate energetic spirit. When I feel you I feel just this beautiful soft tender empathic soul. Can you talk to us a little bit about being an empath and what it means to be compassionate? Literally to feel everything. Quite frankly. Can you talk to us about that? There's so many of us that are just struggling so much with our feelings today and I would love to get some insight from you my dear friend. It's like he wants to kiss me on the cheek and say it's so nice to see you. That's really beautiful and I feel like we need to have mimosas for some reason. I'm not sure with orange juice and champagne. It's afternoon so I don't know what that's about but that's really sweet and the sun just starts coming out as soon as I'm connecting with you of course. So sweet. Talk to us about feeling so much. Help us understand this. It's really I just can feel my heart. Can you guys feel your heart and feel the deep presence of George Michael holding our hearts very tender and compassionately. So the red he says the red is actually with a purpose, Bridget. The red is for a purpose. It's to remind you of the he says the fury. The fury. That's the best match energetically for what because because I feel him you guys. I don't hear him clarionately word for word but I feel his energy of information. That's I'm getting the messages and I I hear parts of his conversation with me. He says the red is part of the fury and and it feels like frustration with being overloaded and stretched and pulled in so many directions and there's so many people want so much from you and he says I know what that feels like George Michael knows what that feels like. You can't be what everyone needs you to be and he says and that is devastating. When you realize that when you finally realize that you can't be everything to all the people that want you and need you to be a certain way he says and you can't you just can't be that because it would require yourself to break yourself up in so many chunks and pieces that you wouldn't really know who you are recognize yourself. He says you can't be all things to all people you can't do that and and still have your sanity you still have your heart. He says the hearts are not meant to be broken apart so much they can be shattered and devastated and he says there's so much healing that occurs in a human existence and in relationship and he says I've always wanted to have love to have a home someone to share my life with he says and the image of that the vision of that could never be it never I never felt that it could actually be mine it's really sad isn't it he says isn't it I didn't realize until many many years later that all the people who loved me my family says my sister my mother all they wanted for me was to really truly be happy to be loved I did a loving relationship and to have a life that was filled with love I never quite thought that that was possible for me there is a sadness about that he says there's a sadness about that just so do you have regrets he says it's a different time it was a different time it wasn't love was clearly defined and now it's much more open and free freedom he says so much freedom and he's saying I would take advantage of that if I could I would would you live so would you live openly gay and maybe be married and he says oh this is really sad this is hitting my heart yeah he says yeah yes to have children to have a family to have someone to grow old with yeah it may have not have been possible for me he says in the times that we were I mean I grew up during those times as well and my father was gay as you well know we've talked about that before and he lived a life where he was married and had three children and wasn't able to fully live expressed and as himself and tragic to me something I said I would never I personally I said that I would never allow myself to live halfway or to live unfulfilled you know whatever that looks like in any stage of our lives because it changes right as we get older it changes you know changes we change we grow we evolve we learn oh gosh hopefully we learn right so love expanded as an empath when we have a lot of relationships where we are bound to others and in expectation and a structure scaffolding that has brought us some security in the past of knowing what to do exactly how to do it so that the other person will appreciate recognize and accept us how do we change within that structure do we have to destroy it does it have to die oh he says oh it's the people that grow and change and evolve the structures mean nothing he says they mean nothing the rules mean nothing they mean nothing look at the image he says look at the image of me as the as a pop star that would be appealing or attractive to hundreds of teenage girls right thousands of teenage girls that's the image right that's the image and it's it's not real and now it wouldn't need to be presented in that way in order to attract the opportunities to grow and change and evolve and create more news meet more music to travel to to have more opportunities to write more songs to have all these shows and entertainment venues and experiences in it and it's not the structure the set of rules it's not the rigid protocols you follow that's who you are inside and the people around you either grow with you or they go it's hard to believe that especially if it's family but it's remind I'm reminded something that my dad and I have yet an exchange before he died and George you know this because we've talked about it a bit that was my way of forgiving my dad and not that he needed my forgiveness but I I look back and I know that it was angry for him choosing to keep a secret and not trust us me with that knowing it would kill him he chose to die instead of being himself who would do that who would choose death over being yourself because you're afraid that who you are disappoints others like that doesn't even I can't even so what so what is it about a fear of rejection or not being loved it's not being worthy what is it I don't understand this I mean he says there's a great deal of fear when it comes to change and when you've built a life that stable or seems stable steady it's difficult for change to come through like a tornado he's like a big storm like a lots of wind it's hard for that you know it's hard for that and instead people hold on to false beliefs about themselves and others and expectations are unrealistic and it might just be that those other people that you're in relationship with have those same kinds of feelings to this is deep George this is deep he says project you wanted to talk about empaths and about being compassionate and the most important thing to understand is to understand you're not going to know all the answers people are not going to behave and respond the way you expect them to so many people have changed over the course of the past few years everything is new and different and because of that there is instability and fear and this need to hang on tighter and tighter and tighter well when you hang on to something so tight you crush it you destroy it okay George you are so sweet and kind and caring and feeling you with this fury like you said the red is like fury it is different it's really different to feel you that way it's like a passion for it's like this understanding of the value of life is to be alive fully alive and realized and not everyone will achieve that in their lifetime and not everyone wants to because they forget they forget that life is about feeling about the senses about the experiences of just the simple the simplest most beautiful things but you need to be able to share that with someone because it makes it so much better he says that's what life is shared experiences George you're so deep today kind of romantic to I gotta say I'm kind of feeling romantic vibes are you guys feeling that with George Michael I'm kind of feeling romantic vibes I got my heart necklace on today my black and white heart necklace kind of a balancing energy of not knowing the answers not knowing the right way the right path the right thing to do next but knowing that the universe is here to support us and knowing that faith is a key ingredient in success and happiness and that is in my life in your life in your life in relationships speaking of life can you talk to me a little bit about the twin flame thing because I'm curious about this because soulmates and twin flames different vibes soulmates after all let's recap okay let's recap gotta stop doing those gymnastics back hand springs are killing me seriously it's not that exciting I literally was sitting on an airplane for a way too long in a weird position you know that is you know that is right so so I'll deal with it so talk to me about so twin so so soulmates are this is gonna be the most awkward video with me repositioning myself every 20 seconds but whatever you guys love me right you can handle it so soulmates because we've had multiple lifetimes I'm just gonna explain this to them okay if I'm wrong or inaccurate if you have something to add please add it soulmates are when you've had multiple lifetimes you've been reincarnated many times therefore you've been a soul in many bodies many types many varieties all that kind of stuff a lot and so say you've done it 30 times which you've probably done it more like 80 let's be clear probably that's a little more the case and so you've done it 30 times 80 times whatever every time likely you have at least one mate right your soul finds a mate and there's a person maybe it's not a lover or a husband or a wife or a mother or sister or a best friend it could be anybody it could be a best friend it could be anybody that just you connect with you jive with you know you've trust no matter what like your ride or die vibe and someone that knows you that loves you no matter what right doesn't have to be romantic can be friendship it can be that kind of thing or sibling etc and yet twin flame is different totally different ballgame the symbol of that is a swan and it's becoming really strong to me where twin flame is this I thought it was once in a lifetime I don't think it's once in a lifetime I think it's a reoccurring connection or meetup between lifetimes not just in a lifetime so it transcends lifetimes therefore because time is layered and not linear you can experience twin flames in multiple capacities in different various ways at different times of points in your life when you need that awareness or recognition so my question to you is twin flame is it someone that is it a person and someone that reincarnates with you and how is it different than soulmates do you know this he says as an empath this is something that can be very off-putting he says it can really throw you full for a loop he says it's the kind of like dizzy love that you only hear about in books you know or you see in a music video you know and how can that even possibly last how can that kind of last and he says it's because there's no time with it there's no the twin flame is no concept of time it's the literally the quite literally the other half of you it's like a winged creature with two wings that can only fly with both of them when one is not there it cannot fly it does not have its fullest capacity and it feels like there's constantly one missing something is constantly missing us so there's a need to seek need to look for that other that other part or peace but it's not to say that you're not full or can't live a life that is full because many people do and experience encounters with multiple different soulmates in their lifetimes and that's quite contented it depends on your path and a purpose and what is needed during this time to unfold but it's more he says the in between the lifetimes is when the unification and the bond is strengthened so that when you come into a life if there is the sense of feeling of missing or something not being right or something being wrong or always kind of off it's because of the lack of the other wing thus the twin flame thus the two as one part of the same bird the same hole that's the best way to describe it so it feels like it's not often it it really he says there's really no determination or calculation based upon how often that happens for someone in a lifetime or how often happens for people he says it's not exclusionary it doesn't it doesn't there's not this like finite amount of twin flame experiences or twin flames he says but is definitely a pathway that is not easy to walk it is difficult the twin flame is the it's almost as though like the twins like you know how you um he showed me like how twins when they're born that they if they feel each other's feelings they feel they have like very similar mannerisms and gestures they don't just look the same but they feel the same and he says it's sort of like that it's like this but it's not by all biological it's this metaphysical universal like this very undeniable cosmic draw it's like this cosmic magnification magnetic kind of cosmic kind of clicking in and he says I can tell you that when twin flames do come together in a lifetime that it is something that is it's unbelievable and it's not easy and it's not it's so powerful that it cannot be handled by many people and so there aren't a lot of that those experiences used you you don't see a lot of that so how do you know so much about this as an empath he says empath empathic heart and you asked you asked about the compassion and the most important thing to know when you're dealing with soulmates or twin flames in particular is that you've got to be fiercely compassionate with yourself and also any other soul that you might come in contact with because they might be misguided or not really understand the the fullness of the concept or the experience of either one of those things and you have to be rather patient or understanding in order to be able to recognize that part at least that portion for yourself says that participation for yourself well what makes it so special and unique is when the two become the one that's what is unusual that's deep so we talked about being an empath we talked about compassion we talked about soulmates we talked about twin flames those are great concepts thank you so much george michael for being here and having conversation with us today i appreciate it very much thank you for watching here on above life channel this has been an interesting channeling video we'll see don't watch it back and see if i look like too much of a dork and i don't want to share it i hope that we've inspired your spirit today and filled you with some hope gave you some interesting things to think about to feel about very empathic very heart-based heart intuitive today and i hope that we've encouraged you to live your life it's your life after all and you get to live it so just live it