I'm Julie Bishop, the Chancellor of the Australian National University. I'm joining you from Perth, Western Australia, the traditional lands of the Noongar people. Our audience comes from across Australia and we have guests from across the world. We acknowledge and celebrate the first Australians on whose land each of us is today and we pay our respects to the Elders past and present. I'm delighted to welcome you to the big picture series panel discussion of the 2020 Australian National University Crawford Leadership Forum. And I do thank the ANU Public Policy and Societal Impact Hub for posting today's discussion. The big picture series will continue for the month of June. So please register for other discussions. They will be lively, entertaining, informative. The impact of COVID, this global pandemic, has been profound around the world. And it's shaking the very foundations of the university system. Teaching and research has been disrupted. Students across nations and within nations are stranded, unable to attend classes. Revenues have plummeted. But even before COVID-19 became part of our lives, universities were reassessing their model, their place in the world, whether they had relevance for the 21st century. The Industrial Revolution, based on technology, that fourth Industrial Revolution is changing the way we live and work and engage. And so the topic today, the future of universities could not be more timely. Our panel will look at questions like how have universities adapted in these unprecedented times? What model has worked best? What is the future for universities? And how will it look in a decade, two decades to come? Now as today's discussion is being broadcast live, I encourage you to submit questions to our panel throughout the discussion using the Q&A function in your toolbar. Please join me now in welcoming our distinguished speakers. Professor Michael McRobbie, President of Indiana University. Professor Lily Kong, President of Singapore Management University. Our own Professor Brian Schmidt, Vice Chancellor and President of the Australia National University. And distinguished Professor Genevieve Bill, Director of 3A Institute, the Australian National University, who will be chairing this morning's discussion. We are delighted to welcome you all and I'll hand over to Genevieve who will get the conversation started. Thank you Chancellor, we really appreciate that you could be joining us today and we're really grateful that everyone is logged on, dialed in or possibly watching this from some other place and some other time. I too want to begin by acknowledging where I am today on the traditional lands of the Ngunnawal and Nambri people and pay my respects to the elders past and present and to leaders emergent. And I want to acknowledge that this broadcast goes out across Indigenous lands all over Australia and all over the world and pay my respects to elders and traditional owners where this finds you. We're incredibly excited to get to do this. This is the first of a new series we're trying here for the month of June. So we hope this will be the first of many moments where you join us in the rectangle and get to participate. I have to do a little bit of housekeeping first. There's a couple things I need to remind you. I have to go to remind you that this is being recorded and will be broadcast on the ANU channel on YouTube. So the little red button in the top left hand corner that applies to all of us here. Your cameras and mics have been disabled so the way you can participate is through the Q&A box. I know we're going to get a lot of questions. I know some of you sent questions in advance. I have a spreadsheet of 50 of those already and I'm hoping we'll find a way to make sure we can at least answer some of those questions. And I think that's everything. Oh yeah, if you want to ask a question, if you put your name and your city or place that you are from, I will attempt to put that into the question too. So we've had a bit of a chance to talk, Brian, Michael, Lily and I about how we wanted this conversation to unfold. And we hope that it would be more of a discussion and a conversation. And for me at least and I know for Brian, we're both incredibly excited and grateful to have Michael and Lily join us because they bring a different set of perspectives and a different set of experiences. And frankly, are in equally complicated places in the world and I suspect in the middle of equally complicated conversations. So I wanted to start with a little bit of a throwback. I know all of the conversations we're having at the moment feel like they're very much centered on COVID-19 and the world that we find ourselves in. But I wanted to start by reflecting on where you were all at six months ago. Because as the chancellor just said, we've been talking about the future of universities for a little while. And I think thinking about what our visions for our universities and our sector was has been a conversation. I know each one of you is engaged in both in your own institution and in your countries of sort of occupation now. So I'm wondering if we could start with a little bit of six months ago. What were you thinking about the future of both your university and the sector look like? And Michael, I might start with you. So six months ago, almost exactly six months ago, I was I would have been presiding at a graduation ceremony, but what we call a commencement ceremony in the United States, at which we gave an honorary degree to one of our most distinguished alumni. It was former director of national intelligence, Dan Coates. And it was our large winter commencement. And it was thousands of students getting their degrees, 10,000 plus people in the audience and so on.  And it was right in the middle of our bicentennial. Because this is our bicentennial year store, we're 200 years old. And we're right in the middle of the major celebrations and so on. And we had pretty much completed a strategic plan at that point. A whole range of initiatives had been carried out. And we were really focused on what was the next century of the existence of our university going to look like, what were all the major things we were going to be tackling. So it was in the middle of a very joyous, very celebratory time. And within months, of course, we were wrestling day-to-day with the decisions we had to make to basically close down the standard operational part of the university. The kinds of things we were thinking about there were... We think we had played a major role in the economic development of the state for 200 years in a variety of areas, in particular in the health sciences where we're particularly strong. And how were we going to use the strengths that we had and all the change that we have affected over the previous six or seven years to focus on some of the big issues in certainly in the American system of higher education? Making the case for the continuing relevance of large-scale research, maybe now even clearer than it ever was, at least to many people, how we could continue to defend the value of a university degree as opposed to other kinds of qualifications. And in particular, how could we ensure that technology could become even more pervasive throughout the institution? In fact, the reason I'm here, I'm proud alumnus as I am of the Australian National University was initially to be responsible for all the technology of the university before I became president. So I spent 20 years of my life at the university working in that very area and I've seen the sort of impact that it's had on a very large, one of the largest multi-campus universities in the United States. So it would have been the things that many of my colleagues were thinking about. I'm sure those were kind of the things that Brian was thinking about and Lily was thinking about at the same time. And little did we know what was in store for us. Yeah, so I was going to ask you, Lily, six months ago, what were you thinking the future of the university sector would look and feel like? So while Michael was thinking by centennial, we were at the Singapore Management University, we're just entering our 20th year and excited to think about the next decade, the third decade of the university. And just like Michael, we were in the midst of finalising a strategic plan for the next decade. We were excited about a few things. One was greater industry engagement as part of a strategy. Two was how as a university located in the heart of the city, we could contribute to a vibrant innovation and entrepreneurship ecosystem within the city, fortunate to have venture capitalists sort of beginning to coalesce around where we are. WeWorks and other co-working spaces springing up around us and so forth. And how could we as a university in the city be a vibrant part of the city, contributing to it, but also drawing spirit from it? And we were excited about our internationalisation agenda, the possibilities of establishing overseas presence, particularly in Southeast Asia, and pushing very hard for greater integration on campus with interdisciplinarity and so forth. So all these exciting ideas which were beginning to come together around certain strategic priority areas and excited to celebrate our 20th anniversary. And we in fact had our first Patrons Day event of the 20th anniversary year, just as COVID was hitting us. But we managed to get the 500 people through a ceremony and then everything else stopped after that. So, Brian, I know for us here in Australia six months ago was December. So I think we were already in a particular kind of moment, but six months ago when you were contemplating the future of the sector and of the ANU, where was your head at? So, not the 200th anniversary, not the 20th. Next year is our 75th, so sort of the geometric mean of Michael and Lily. And I was thinking of where ANU wanted to be in 2025. I have about five years probably left and my time as Vice Chancellor and trying to figure out, we sort of presented a big vision and how are we going to get there in 2025? That's where I was very much focused. And it really included several things that I thought were important for our sector. One was putting the student back at the center of a university's activities and really committing to Australia to have a place where the education from a student's perspective is as good as any place in the world, uniquely Australian, but as good as anywhere in the world. And so it was going to be the year of the student. And it probably still is the year of the student, just not quite as I expected. But we had already seen the big bushfires in 2019 start. The bushfires that created the smoke that destroyed my vintage, closed campus for many, many days right at the beginning of the year. And so we were also focusing on how research, the fundamental research, we could be really good at it, but also start applying it to the problems. And we saw that very much as a global effort going through and working with colleagues across the world to solve issues around climate change, energy, food security, health, and really trying to ramp up how we work collectively as universities in an international context. You can imagine that's been a little disrupted in some ways, although it turns out via video there's some opportunities to speed that because people's willingness to engage on activities is actually probably easier as just today shows. Can I get you to dwell on that a little bit, Brian? So six months ago, we were thinking about our strategic plan for 2025. We were contemplating a year where students were the locus of our attention. Six months in with World Health Organization declared a pandemic on March 11th. You closed down campus at the end of March. We're contemplating coming back now. Where do you see the kind of conversation for us, both at the ANU and in the sector in Australia in this moment? Well, I mean, I think there's the challenges. We're just sort of in survival mode right now, just trying to figure out our business model, which at the beginning of the year I knew was going to be disrupted over time. And I think what I have seen is it's everything's sped up. All the things I thought might happen over the next decade have happened and are going to happen in the next year. So digitalization is speeding up and we've had to get my professor yet who weren't too keen on digitalization of classes. They're all keen on it now and they've had to deliver it in a couple months. The ability to work remotely and save on greenhouse gases by flying and seeing Michael McRoby in person or Lily in person. Well, those two trips to Indiana and Singapore have been postponed or maybe even canceled. So all of those things we're going to work on have sped up. Some of the things around students obviously just haven't been able to do because they haven't been on campus. But I think the part that I'm worried about is tackling those global issues of climate change, food security and stuff. Those have been disrupted, partially because a lot of them included partners in China, for example, and the ability to work right now in this geopolitical uncertainty. I think things have been disrupted a bit there and I'm not trying to figure out how to get that back on track. It's not easy. So, Michael, I saw that you were nodding there when Brian was talking. Six months after the 200th anniversary kind of speculation and hope, where do you find yourself, your university and your sector in the United States? Oh, well, it's been a massive shock to higher education in the United States as it has, I think, to higher education in most of the rest of the world. I mean, our model, the fundamental model of the university is one of certainly on traditional campuses is a very dense agglomerations of students in person to person, pedagogical settings and social settings. And that is that's one of the great draws for university campuses, well, certainly around the world, certainly here as well. And to go from that to everything being online in a couple of weeks as we as we did. And as I mentioned before, we have 100,000 students across seven campuses around the state of Indiana was a massive undertaking. And I think that the students are to be congratulated certainly here and everywhere else for their forbearance and resilience in dealing with this. And the faculty, too, as Brian said, many people who have been skeptical of online education would not, I would not say they were necessarily completely convinced, but they understand more now the role that it can play as part of a sort of mediated blended education, which we've argued for a long time really is the future of education. I've never been of a lever. In fact, I've been a huge skeptic about the claims for the traditional model of education being replaced by purely online education. I think one thing that this crisis has definitively proved in my view, I think in the view of many of my colleagues over here, is that the model of students doing their four years of study in the parent's basement is just a complete travesty. It's not true at all. There is a desperation for young traditional age students to get back to a college education. Obviously there are the parts that they enjoy, but it is the ability to interact with other students. Sociologists will claim that 50% of what a student learns, they learn from interaction with other students and other aspects of their environment outside the classroom, all of that they've lost. And that's what they want back. And that's what's gonna be so hard for us to do in the present circumstances, but what all of us are trying to, and we're all dealing with the same problem. We're all trying to solve it in similar ways, but that's the problem we're gonna have to solve for us to be able to bring back students in late August when our academic year starts. So Lily, can I ask you where you're thinking is that in this regard? So six months later, I know Singapore's had a very different trajectory with COVID-19 than say the United States. Where is your university and your sector currently? It has, the trajectory in Singapore, you know, the unfortunate thing, and the fortunate thing in one sense is that the community spread is relatively contained, but the unfortunate thing is that the foreign worker dormitories are where the spread has been more severe. And that has opened up questions about inequality. It's opened up questions about what role universities have to play in addressing social disparities and issues to that effect. And so what that's done for us is in terms of thinking about what kinds of research we should be doing as a university that contributes to a more equal and just society, that's one. In educational terms, as with everybody else, we've had to make that pivot very quickly to the use of educational technology. What it has done for me at least, and I am having these conversations with colleagues on campus at this point in time, is to strengthen my own conviction about what we use technology for in education. It's easy to have lots of talking heads on screen and students can listen to whatever material is being spewed out. But we have a fundamental philosophical belief in the student as an individual who has personal learning needs. And so how do we use technology to personalize learning? We also have a fundamental belief in the student as a social being who learns through interaction and through collaboration. And so how do we use technology to deepen that interaction and collaboration rather than to take away from it? And thirdly, we believe that the student is an individual who is part of a larger community and society and who draws benefits from that in myriad ways, but who should also contribute back to that community and society in ways that are meaningful to that community. So we're a firm believer in experiential learning. How do we use technology to enhance that experiential learning so that they can continue to contribute back to the society? So just as an example of that last pillar, we do have community service as a graduation requirement. Lots of students do lots more hours than the graduation requirements demand. But if there is a lockdown, how do students participate in community service? And so the challenge that I've thrown to my colleagues is how do we use technology in the learning of students that enhances the personalization, that enhances the interaction and that enhances the contribution to community rather than to withdraw into self and me and the screen. So no immediate answers, but the conversations are alive on campus. I'm really struck in listening to those answers and in starting to read some of the questions that are coming through in real time, that there's an interesting, it's not tension exactly, but there's these two streams of conversations. There's a conversation about, how do we ensure a quality student experience? And Brian, we have one of our first year students writing Marlo Mears and asking, how does the university ensure that students are gonna have quality access and a quality access to a good education? And I think, Michael, you're reflecting on that too, and so are you, Lily. So there's this sort of interesting tension around, how do we think through quality student experiences and what that will look like in a COVID and post-COVID world with the equal tension piece, which I think all of you are reflecting on too, about what are gonna be the underlying business models that we have here. And Brian, we have a question from Andrew Carey from the age about how it is to, we wanna think at the Australian level about what our business models will look like moving forward in terms of how we think about revenue. But I suspect, because we've also had a question for you, Michael, about the business models for the American university sector, the top of mind for both our students, and I think the broader community is both, how do we ensure a quality education that, as you said, Brian Sanders on the students? And then how do we also think about what the business models might need to be and how they evolve? I'm not sure there's an easy way to answer that question, but that's the question. How do we thread the needle between those two things? We're gonna let them go first? Yes. So, I don't see, I mean, the university sector here is, as you know, very large and complicated, 4,500 different institutions around the country. And for an institution like ours, I don't see, certainly on our major campuses, I don't see the business model changing that much. I mean, we're a large public research university. We get funding for about 20% or so of our budget comes from the state. The state is effectively covering part of the costs of students who live in the state. And then we charge tuition for students out of the state, which both means anywhere else in the United States or anywhere else in the world. That is a multiple on that in state tuition. That's the model. And that, I think, will basically stay, at least from places like us, will stay the same. The one I'm knowing is, if the percentage of online education grows and grows, and I don't see that necessarily as happening, I do see the blended side of it happening, as I said before, then what has to reconsider that distinction between resident and non-resident whether that starts to break down. Now, that's something we obviously are concerned about, and at least it's something we consider and so are the institutions in the United States, big institutions in the United States. It's a bit different for private institutions where they have just one tuition rate, two. And there, this becomes even more pointed for them because there's no state funding to help cover the cost of some large percentage of their student body. So, can you continue to provide a quality education and still charge at the same tuition if the great bulk of it is no longer being done person to person? And that, I think, is probably more of a challenge for private universities than it may actually be for large public universities. We, 85% of students in the American university system are at public universities there. And so that is the area of where real democratization and education takes place. And the public universities have a different market and a focus differently. And their financial model is different to the public's. Yeah, and I think there's a big difference between the US business model, and for example, the Australian one. And indeed, I would say the Singaporeese model is different again. And Lily can talk a bit about that. The reality here in Australia is that our business model has evolved to be very reliant, much more so than the US model is on international students and the fees that they provide. And we have a system more so than either the US or Singapore of cross subsidizing research with student fees, where I think both in Singapore and in the US, student fees sort of cover teaching and the government research and business research covers research and they're quite separate. Even though they coexist here, they're very financially intertwined. And so this has been a big shock for us. And if the international student market changes, and I think there are reasons to believe it will change, it has flow on effects for us. I still think, as Michael said, that the foundational bits of people going to university is gonna remain and the digitalization that we've seen gives us the opportunity of doing a better job of teaching than we used to. So it's actually gonna improve. It's not gonna save us much money, but it means people can learn faster, better. It also provides the opportunity of the democratization of learning. Right now, only 37% of people in Australia go to university. This new ability to scale up digitally means people are gonna be able to get short courses when they need them. And I think it gives the opportunity of actually giving more education to more of Australians. And so I probably not gonna do that at ANU, but other institutions will. So I think that will be another flavor, but I don't really see as long as I keep straight what I'm doing, which is teaching in an intensive on-campus experience and really good research. I don't see that going away. People need to grow up and be part of my campus experience. But I do think there are opportunities to make sure everyone else gets the skills and things that they need. And I think Lily can talk a little bit about Singapore, where Singapore has really said lifelong learning is part of the missions of Singapore. I don't think lifelong learning is on the agenda here in Australia, probably not too much on the US either. But I think that has to be one of the things we can do with the digitalization better than we used to. So thanks for that, Brian. You're absolutely right. There are several pieces to this that affect our business model, but present opportunities in as much as they present challenges. So in Australian universities, as I understand it, the international student flow could have a significant impact on some universities. For us in Singapore, the large proportion of funding for a university actually does come from the government. So unlike a state university in the US, we would get 60% or more from the government, depending on the university. And so to some extent, therefore, there is a cushioned effect from the international student market. Having said that, it is the case that particularly at, for us at SMU, particularly at the taught master's level, the impact of having a smaller flow of international students is non-trivial either. So that's one impact. The second is in terms of going online and the student voices that are saying, well, then you really should be reducing fees as a consequence because we're not getting the same experience. Not that they don't want the same experience as Michael was saying, the students want to have that interaction on campus. They want to live on campus and so forth. But if that's not possible, then you should be cutting our fees. That's the voice of the student. Having said that, we do have a very big push in Singapore for continuing education. And over the last three or four years in particular, the universities have gotten into the act where as private providers had filled that space previously. That space has grown and universities have gotten into the act of providing a lot of what we call in Singapore skills, future training. It's a government scheme with big subsidies that are given to universities to provide those causes. And subsidies are given to the individual Singaporean citizen who can then use that budget to pay the universities or any other provider for the training that they get. And so that going online has actually been quite welcome to the adult working population that is looking to upskill and reskill. And so whereas there are some challenges that are posed from the international student pipeline, the online delivery for undergraduate students who are hankering to come back to campus, this other stream of revenue and opportunities are opening up with continuing education. I'd just like to make a final point about the democratization of learning and agree. And at the same time, disagree with what I've heard so far. There is certainly a democratization in that more students potentially could access the online causes. At the same time, with pivoting very quickly to online for our existing undergraduates, we've become very sensitive to the fact that the digital divide and the socioeconomic disparity among students actually has surfaced much more strongly. Students whose families are living in cramped quarters where it's difficult for them to actually have study spaces where it's difficult for them to have subscription to broadband at a sufficient speed that they can actually do their exams online without disturbance, without disadvantage. Those are the sorts of issues that have come to the fore that we're very conscious about and are putting our minds to thinking about how can we take advantage of the theoretical democratization to ensure that that's actually the case in practice. Thank you, Lily, because I suspect we've seen both sides of that piece of the sort of equality and equity of access, right? It hasn't just been for our students, it's been for our faculty and our staff who have also found themselves engaging in multiple forms of shift and domestic labors that get masked and all of that. I'm always sort of struck by the idea that when we talk about delivering a digital experience to our students, there's someone on the other end of that delivery pathway too. And we certainly know in Australia from work that has been done that the pandemic has had a differential impact in both people's career possibilities as well as for our students based on all sorts of things around gender divisions of labor, expectations about childcare, about what it meant to have all of these things happen simultaneously. So I think it's an incredibly complicated space when we talk about digital engagement and it's something that has been of interest to everyone who has both submitted questions in advance and who is still submitting them now is about both how do we think about the blended strategy? What does it mean to have the possibility of digital engagement as well as maintaining some kind of on-campus presence for all the reasons you said, Michael. And then also how do we think about, and I suspect this is an extension of the question you're all answering too, is how do we think about a business model without also then thinking that certain kinds of categories of education, research and learning seem to be less quote unquote economically viable or valuable? So this would be the kind of question of what's the role of the humanities in all of this? How do we think about the social sciences? I know that at least three of us come from that area. So I think it's probably a question near and dear to our hearts. I had someone ask me about what they thought the value of anthropology would be during the pandemic. And I think there's sort of a piece about how do we imagine a reinvention of the universities that doesn't mean an economic model that feels like economic rationalism. At least that would be my kind of summary of some of these questions. I think it's how do we reinvent the university without losing the pieces that seem possibly less obviously valuable but still deeply important? Michael, I'm gonna start with you on that one. Oh, well, as you know, Genevieve, the traditional model of a university education here certainly at a large research university or a private research university for that matter is the classic liberal arts model, not liberal in the political sense, but which has a different meaning in Australia than it does here, of course. But liberal in the sense that the education provides exposure to both breadth and depth in a variety of different fields. It's the famous model of Cardinal Newman. And that really to this day is still the fundamental model of undergraduate education that certainly the very best American university. So there is a natural willingness to a natural understanding of the important role that the humanities as really the bastions of the history of and the culture and the knowledge, wisdom of the human race play in that. And although debates rage constantly about their relevance, by and large, the best of them certainly survive. I've, in the period I've been president, I've taken a particular interest in supporting the languages. We actually teach more foreign languages than any other university in the United States. We teach in any one year, we teach somewhere between 70 and 80, 70, 80 foreign languages. In fact, it was that strength that first brought us together in the very strong relationship that we have with A&U. And we took the position that with other universities closing down their language programs, there had to be at least one place that would still teach Moosebeck and Urdu and all kinds of other less commonly spoken, actually quite commonly spoken in some of those countries, languages. So we established a new school, one of whose fundamental strengths was language instruction. And we, it was almost a sort of a counterintuitive move. And we have seen a significant increase in the number of students taking combinations of languages with international visits. In fact, it's a school named after two of the great statesmen of the state, Senator Richard Luger, the late Senator Richard Luger and former congressman Lee Hamilton, it's the Hamilton Luger School of Global and International Studies. And that's been enormously successful for us. And I think is a way in which one can take strengths and languages, combine them with international studies and turn that into a sort of magnetic draw card for students as we have, as we've managed to do it. So it is an issue that I don't think is, I don't think there's any glib solution to it. There's ongoing debates. I think sometimes the humanities aren't their best, their best allies, their own best allies in some ways. But I think the fundamental importance of the core of the humanities continues to shine through. I'm gonna pivot a little bit here because we've been getting lots and lots of questions and I wanna make sure that we honor as many of them as we can. A number of those questions really focus on how we think about, not just the model of the university, but how we might do educational delivery. So a number of the questions ask things like we've seen commercial enterprises work out, how to do capabilities and skills training. There are a number of online service providers. We see people working out, how to think about short courses and micro-credentialing. We have people asking, how do we think about any one of those things? So sort of the broad question there I think would be, and it was one that we talked a little bit about before this session, which is that coming out from this six month period, there's clearly a number of things we've all learned, right? Lily, you reflected on both the kind of transformation for your students and about how to think about what it means to have an educational experience when you can and can't be on campus. Michael, you were sort of thinking about what's the virtue of the physical as well as the digital. I'm wondering what each one of you has learned at your university in the last six months that is a useful thing you want to continue to do moving forward. So what are the things you've learned about digital engagement, for instance, that will change the way your university functions moving forward and what sort of, what have you taken from that that you think is interesting and useful? Lily is being very innovative in Singapore as well, but I guess from my perspective, I think there's been two things that have emerged to me very strongly. One, it's how to use digital successfully, and two, how to not use digital in the future. So it's made very clear where digital is enhancing and it's made very clear where digital is a second cousin to the intense in-person experience. And so for me, it is a matter of taking the good and focusing on augmenting our experience. We know students don't like coming to thousand person lectures very often. If you have a really charismatic lecture and it's interesting, they'll do it occasionally, but as a means of actually information transfer as Galileo got up on his pedestal and part of a university, it don't work very well because they all go to digital. They don't show up. So there are other ways of getting that basic information, which are digital, and they go through and do that. But when they do come on campus, the thing our students really miss is that in-person engagement, where you interrogate our ideas. So let's spend our time doing that because Google can outsource me on the big stand and deliver digital stuff, but they can't outsource my world leading professors who can have a one-on-one conversation about exploring ideas and news. So- On your beautiful campus, Brian. On my beautiful campus, in a serene environment that makes people want to contemplate and your beautiful campus as well. And Lily's got a beautiful campus as well. You can make pies. It is not contemplative and beautiful all the time. But make pies are fine until they hit you. So I'm really focused on that. Really going through and getting now people to focus on what works well digitally doing that and then really focusing our energy on the stuff we can do well in-person that I am not gonna be disintermediated or outsourced by a for-profit entity. Universities are not for profit. At least mine isn't. We are public good. And we need to do our job really well and uniquely. So Lily, I see you nodding away there vigorously. You wanna jump out? I was just remembering the mic pies at ANU. But seriously, one thing that we've learned is the importance of the synchronous interaction, even if it's mediated by technology as opposed to the asynchronous. So it's entirely possible for us to put lots of material online and students can access in their own time at their own pace, which is the rhetoric about many of these material that's online. But really, even if it were technology mediated, what the students are looking for and what they really learn from is that interaction with somebody else at the other end of, on the other side of the screen, I might put it that way. And so having said that, we have tried very hard to say to some university partners that say you can still have your student come on an exchange program because our materials online and they can still access our material. And we've politely said, well, thank you, but that's not what we would want for our students. First of all, if they're not able to go to where you are, they're not immersed in another country. They're not immersed in another culture. They're not, and even if it were synchronous, as a Chinese saying goes, you can read a thousand words, but it's not the same as seeing it for yourself just the one time. So, you know, at the end of the day, technology can supplement, can maybe even enable for some and enhance in other situations, but it doesn't replace. So Michael, you're up. Oh, well, I mean, Brian and Lily both put it very, very eloquently. I completely agree with everything they say. I mean, you asked about what have we learned and I'll just repeat what I said earlier. One thing I think we've learned certainly we have definitively as students do not was, as I said before, want to be locked in their parents' basement for four years doing their degree online. They want an on-campus experience. And but the nature of that experience wasn't certainly at our institution pretty heavily technology mediated already. It's going to be more heavily technology mediated, but I think it'll chip away at the parts that as Brian said, the students really aren't, really don't find particularly stimulating the thousand person lecture and stuff like that and move it more in the direction of smaller classes, more interactive classes and flip classes. I mean, all the combination of all that. I think that's the direction that we're all going in. And what this tragic pandemic has done has probably accelerated that. I haven't seen, I mean, the commercial sector has had an impact here. I don't see them as having in any way really undermine the fundamental business model of certainly the undergraduate model of education in this country. I certainly think at the graduate level, it's a different matter. Completely online bachelor's degrees, we have a relatively small number of those online courses. We have thousands. We'll have even more after this, but online master's degrees are another matter. You're dealing with a more mature student, a student who probably has a job or some other employment and wants to do another degree in master's degrees in this country becoming more and more important and wants to do it in a way that's convenient to them at their pace and so do it online. There's no doubt that that is a really important marketplace. And that's probably a place where the commercial sector may be able to have more of an impact than I think they've had at the undergraduate level. So I'm acutely aware that I could keep asking you questions coming off this feed for the rest of the day. And I want to thank everyone who keeps submitting questions because I can't ask as fast as you can type at them. And I'm also aware that we only have about 10 minutes left in this panel. So I wanted to move us to a little bit of kind of forward looking. So if we had the kind of where we were six months ago, where we are today looking forward, I'm wondering for each one of you, and I'm going to start with you, Michael, and then Lily, then Brian, what's the one thing you're going to do differently as a leader coming out of this period and the one thing you're going to do differently as a human being? Because I'm aware sometimes our leadership roles and our human roles are slightly different. So the two things you're going to carry forward, one as a leader and one as a human, after where we've been. And I'm acutely aware for you, Michael, that America is still very much roiled with both COVID-19 and a very complicated conversation about race and politics and policing. So I'm aware you are in the eye of all of that too. So with those things in mind, what are the two things for you that you do differently now moving forward? I may not be quite answering the question of the way you put it, but one of the things that is very much on my mind at the moment grows directly out of the pandemic itself. And I have worked very closely with the deans of our various health sciences schools and our epidemiologists and neurologists and so on as we've sought to map out the parameters of our response here. And one thing that's become abundantly clear is that in some ways we've been very, very lucky that this hasn't happened before. It's happened at a time when the quality of molecular biology worldwide is extraordinarily good. And I just read today, Dr. Tony Fauci, who's been very cautious about the things he said Dr. Fauci said today that he believes that there's a good chance that we are vaccine by the end of this year. Now he's brought that forward because before that it was gonna be well into next year and so on. And that's I think a comment on the power of the whole health sciences enterprise worldwide that has been brought, this massive power that's been brought to bear on this. But you just think of the last 10 years we've had roughly 10, 15 years we've had H1N1, Zika, Ms. SARS and Ebola, which have been contained at all of which you've had a band influence. And I think that this has got to be the definitive wake-up call. And certainly in the United States, a lot of us are talking about the need for some kind of Manhattan project, moonshot in virology that actually provides the country with the capability of being able to react coherently to future pandemics because most virologists will tell you there will be another one and maybe next time it could be a lot worse. So in a university with a very large health sciences, we have the biggest medical school in the United States in a university with a very big health sciences operation. I see it as being vital for us and I'll certainly play my role and try to play my role in it in helping to sort of lead the efforts to build up some kind of national effort in this area to do our part to ensure that if this happens again or when this happens again, we're better prepared to deal with it and address it. As to personally, I'll simply say that since I've been in my study in my house at the moment, I've been here with only a few times out for about 10 weeks. My wife and I had this seizure that during the day we've had lunch together nearly every day. It's been wonderful and we think it is a very good sign for our retirement that we'll be able to have lunch together and enjoy it. That's an excellent learning for both of you. Lily? So I'll keep my responsibility brief for me. It's really recognizing that what the community, the university community needs at this point in time is the leader who is a human being. And that has come through very, very clearly that it has been a rallying point for people to come together. It has been a time when the community has looked for an empathetic listening leader who is authentic and the communication is so very important and the means of communication is so very important and there is probably no such thing as over communication at a time like this, perhaps. And that's the one thing that I've taken away from this that people are waiting to hear from you and want to hear in particular ways in not just in the message, but in the tone of the message. And I think that's something that I've learned very importantly. And I think it's going to be something that is going to recur again and again with whether it's another virus or touch wood, a terrorist attack, people are looking for that human being in a leader. Thank you. Brian, I'm going to give you the last word but I'm going to add one layer of complexity onto it because of course we are mostly broadcasting from our home territory. You know that there are many ANU people on the line asking you questions, wouldn't surprise you. We have a student who wants to know what the future of life in the dormitories would be. So I think in wrapping up the what you've, what you plan to do differently and what you will do differently both as a leader and as a human. I think there's a question in there from Michael Yee about what does it mean to think about being a student on campus and being in the residences and what the future of the ANU that way is. And if you want to take that as your final thought, I would be grateful. All right, so Lily sort of stole a little what I was going to say, which is communication. I did an all staff meeting. We had 1150 people come in on it. It was remarkable. It's highly civilized, people ask questions and you can really go through and have a conversation. And so those used to be sort of a once a year activity for them. So as a leader, we can do those once a month. And you know, my entire life is about trying to be open and transparent and try to people understand at least why I make decisions even though they don't like them. And that is important. The other thing that's really been opened up that I think is important is flexibility. A lot of people are working at home flexibly and are probably more productive and happier and other people are less productive and less happy. But the point is, I did commit earlier this year before COVID-19 to a flexible workplace. And that's one of the things that sped up is people have realized, wow, they can work a day a week at home and maybe get stuff done. And my wife has been working a day a week at home as an economist for our Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, very successful. And she gets stuff done in a way that is different at home. You can actually think and you don't get interrupted all the time. So I'm hoping we can keep that for my entire workforce and including myself. I'm probably for the foreseeable future we'll spend a day at home precisely because it allows me to get things done in a slightly different way. Travel, I'm probably never gonna look at travel again. I mean, I've done a lot of trips, 10, 12, 13 international trips a year. I think I'm gonna do less. I think we can do it this way. And it's just easier on me and it's definitely easier on the planet. So I think that's gonna be a big change. And it doesn't mean I'm not gonna do some trips but the trips are gonna be very specific for reasons I have to be there in person. Not just to fall it off, if you're not there in person, you're irrelevant. And so I think there is a change. And if I look about my highly communal university, it is a place that people are gonna be able to come and my students when they come to the residences in the short term, it's gonna be pretty regimented which is four square meters per person. It's gonna have to have a little bit more, this is the time you get to use the kitchen. When you come walking through campus, you're not gonna get to go in and just sloppily interact with everyone which is I'm looking forward to in the future but right now we can't do it. But what do I see for a year from now? I want people to work flexibly but I want them to come into work because it's a great place to come. I want the students to interact with campus not like what they used to but even more so, more interaction but make the interactions interesting, high quality and unique. So that's what I'm focusing on. Those are glorious hopes for the future. And I wanted to pause here and thank Brian and Lily and Michael and to acknowledge that they have told us stories from places that are probably quite far from where you are logged on and listening to this. And I wanted to thank you for talking to us about where you've been and sharing a little bit about what it's been like in Singapore and in Indiana in the US and a little bit from the ANU. And I wanted to thank all three of you for bringing your incredible expertise to bear here. And I also wanted to acknowledge the extraordinary number of people who asked really smart questions and I'm sorry I couldn't answer or ask all of them for you. My suspicion is if you track down any one of these people's email addresses they will answer them. I'm not gonna give you their email addresses. It's a basically imagine it's a threshold test. What I am gonna close by saying is two things though. This discussion was recorded and it will be available for viewing on ANU TV on YouTube. And we had as the chancellor said at the beginning a number of other sessions like this coming up in the rest of the month. So if you want to be listening to conversations about global public health, Asia in the Pacific region, climate change and how we think about the world order and international relations more broadly. All things I think you heard from our three amazing people here today. Those will be forthcoming in the rest of the month. So you can log in and join us in those conversations. And in the meantime, I wanna thank you all for joining us today and hope that wherever you find yourself you stay safe and also stay engaged.


Hello everyone, I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE, and welcome to this special presentation called Savings in the Cloud. Only pay for what you need with AWS Cost Optimization. We have Rick Oaks here who's the Senior Manager of Cloud Optimization at AWS. 90 year veteran over a decade in the trenches making it happen. Now it's prime time for optimization, certainly as companies grow to next gen and the economy the way it is. People want to squeeze every efficiency out of it and also make sure they're putting their money in the right places for growth. Big discussions around what is repatriation which doesn't really exist as we were talking before we came on camera. But really it's all about being smart and saving some of the clouds. A lot of good ways to do it. Welcome to this special presentation. Thanks John, I really appreciate the opportunity to talk about optimization. It's near and dear to my heart. I've been working on it for a long time as you mentioned. And it's been quite the journey too to see the early days of optimization where it was really just about like, doing very simple things like turning things off nights and weekends and to see the evolution of where we've come has been pretty special to be here. Well, we're psyched to do this series. It's super important. It's one of the top conversations I'm getting across the board, not just cloud, normal cloud native cloud computing but we've seen the AI side. A lot of questions around how to deploy, cost-op cost structures, how do I architect all part of the cloud architecture that's going on that we've been talking about infrastructure as code but it's getting better and better. And then next, we've got an event coming up on July 25th, we'll be in New York City for a panel which should be awesome around an AWS summit talking more about this in person in New York City. And this really kind of brings up the question especially big Vintec in New York. So, they're looking at the cost too. What's that big aha moment?  Why is optimization more important now than ever before? Yeah, I think cloud has really excited a lot of people with the potential and the opportunity for things like designing new capabilities or launching new technology or breaking into new sectors, which is awesome. And oftentimes optimization is like this after effect where now we're looking at our cloud bills, we're realizing the cost associated with trying to invent and create new resource types and solutions. And that's very powerful. But we still have to have responsibility with how we invent. And that's not always easy to do. If it's not thought of in the original invention and creation of software and solutions, that follow-up can be very devastating or detrimental to your backlog. If you even think about like how much time does an average engineering team spend on code cleanup and repository cleanup and some of that stuff versus building new features, it's kind of never fun to sit there and spend a lot of your backlog just cleaning up. And so we have to really change the culture. We have to change the culture of how we build things, how we manage and operate cloud environments and resources. And I think it's exciting because we really have an opportunity to bake into how we build things, a new responsibility, not just for the resources we spend, but for the planet, the impact on the world around us as we figure out how to use resources efficiently. So it's an important, especially with like the economic challenges where organizations are looking to just rationalize the spend they have. It's not just about saving money, it's about is the money I'm spending on my cloud bill driving business value? And then the more we can match up those two ideas that business value comes from spending in the cloud and the value we receive and the solutions we deliver, we have this opportunity to make that ratio really something of a powerful story for cloud use.  We were talking about this all the time at re-invent since 2013 when theCUBE's been there, you know, it's been quoted, it's now the standard, you know, all the undifferentiated heavy lifting or now with AI and some of this automation, it's differentiated heavy lifting. So like the custodial aspect of cleaning up and doing code reviews and fixing things can be monotonous and toil. So the operating model of tuning optimization is very much part of the cloud now, right? And now as cloud goes to on-premises and edge, the cloud-native operating model of cloud is basically a distributed system. And so now you have primary cloud operations as the center point of action. This has become more important because you're always tuning and making sure things are right, not just from a cost perspective, it's an operating model. So it's not, it can't be like a bolt-on.  It's kind of a rock fetch. It moves it from like, okay, move a rock from here to here and you kind of, it can be mundane versus a standard operating model. And you don't, it doesn't need to be either like the idea of extracting value out of cloud by being more elastic with how you treat your resources is very powerful, right? So you don't necessarily need to be in a situation where you're constantly sweeping up and cleaning up your resources. If you're really taking optimization and moving from like, hey, one-time cleanup activities, did I size things correctly? Did I schedule turn offs of my resources nights and weekends? And pivoting more towards like, how can we design systems or even take legacy systems that are still very valuable and apply elasticity concepts to them upfront? So that really turns into how are we taking elasticity as a cultural and architectural practice instead of as a cleanup custodian type activity where we're just kind of going through and, you know, doing the work that nobody wants to do of validating if all these resources are still valuable for us, right? We don't want to do that. As the old expression, it's a feature, not a bug or it should be primary, not just, you know, secondary. And let's get into it, because I think this is important. How, and I think it's not a lot of debate. Optimization is super important. I think people, it's front and center. I think the questions now are, what's the cultural shift to the new model? How do you get started with optimization? Where are we today? How does someone get involved? How do they get their arms around it? So if I'm coming into it for the first time and getting my arms around it, what do I look like if I'm in the middle of it? What's the best productivity path for me? What's the best practices? Take us through optimizations playbooks here. So we can think of optimization in four major methods of saving money in the cloud without hurting performance. The first is sizing things correctly. So we take a look at all of the resources you have in your environment. Look at CPU, memory, disk network, and we validate if we haven't revisited the size of these workloads and maybe months or years. Are there new instance families that have come out? Are there new CPU models that have come out? We can switch to that improve the price to performance ratio of your environments, right? And this, by the way, this applies to legacy as well. You don't have to rewrite your applications to pick new instance sizes. It's just a quick reboot. So this is a really important part of optimization. The next is suspension. So the suspension pillar is really where you have an ability to turn things off nights and weekends, you know, non-production workloads, environments where there's really not anybody in the office or working what have you on those resources. So they're just not needed. We can get away from the five nines culture of non-production and really just hone in on, you know, turning the lights off when you're not through. The next pillar is deleting unused resources. Oftentimes like the first for a for companies as they get into optimization, just going through and auditing and validating the resources they have and just saying, Hey, is this in use? When was the last time this volume was attached to a instance? When was the last time this IP address was used? So on and so forth and just kind of more custodian and then the last one, probably the highest ROI for the effort is purchase optimization and that's savings plans, reservations, purchasing discounts and layering them across your environment in a way that's really reduces your on demand spend for any environments, you know, we're gonna be long lasting and consistent utilization, covering them with discount management is really important. This is another really good starting spot for organizations that are not ready to really tackle engineering specific optimizations and it's more maybe like finance, FinOps type things where central finance organizations can really look at the total spend they have on their bill, optimize that just by committing for one or three years of spend to these resources which allows you to really get a more consistent bill over time and protect the costs to that. Now the real trick, John is when you combine multiple of these pillars together, that's the real trick because when you're sizing and then discounting together, they multiply and I love watching compound interest at work. I don't know about you but that's a fun one for me. Well, this is a, you know, you were talking about Corey Quinn before he came on, the cloud economist. It's an economic equation and then the low hanging fruit, I get that if you know you're using a steady state resource, you have pre-buy, makes total sense, on the integration of the pillars I want to ask you where does the cloud infrastructure costs begin to get complicated and difficult so for someone who wants to go that step what are they looking at? What kind of level of difficulties or a degree of difficulty? Where's the complexity or where do they start? Where should they go first? Can you take us through that next step of integrating in? What are some of the ways you can turn those knobs? That's a great question and depending on the company I'm talking to or the maturity that they're at, the starting stones might be a little bit different because some companies might have very strong engineering practices and the ability to validate idle and waste very quickly. Whereas other organizations have a lot of investment and capability on their finance team and they can buy savings plans or reservations a little faster. And so depending on the maturity and the comfort level of the company they might start with a different pillar. And so there's a couple of really good lower effort, low analysis starting spots, whether that's idle cleanup or savings plans and reservations. The complexity really comes into play when you're thinking about doing multiple at the same time. For example, if you want to buy a bunch of reservations or savings plans for a very specific region or whatever you might run into a situation where in a non-production region you wanna go turn all of those workloads off nights and weekends. And if you say you turn them off, I don't know 16 hours out of 24 hours you're saving two thirds of your total cost per day which is pretty significant. The discount of a savings plan might be a lower discount than the savings you get from turning it off. So you have to sort of pick and choose and look at, well, maybe I apply savings plans to all my production workloads which I know are gonna be online 24 seven but for my non-production I'm actually gonna go with suspension and turning things off nice and weekend. Right, and so mixing and matching these can get more complicated because we have to figure out what's the compatibility between the pillars. But that's also the benefit of, for example, right sizing which takes a lot more engineering effort and investment implementation and automation including but when you get it right and you right size your environments you reclaim a ton of that capacity that was left as over provisioned headroom which is a very common experience and then you apply discounts on top of it you get this benefit of having a total cost reduction of right sizing by 30, 40% and then a total cost reduction from savings plans and reservations of another 30, 40% then you're running a cloud environment really with the cost associated with the end resulting bill that you would prefer to have, right? And now you're really getting the benefit of cloud that you're scaling, you're elastic you're paying only for what you need you're getting these cloud value promises that is the whole point of how cloud was built. It's definitely totally it's in line with the key flywheel for cloud for sure. I have to ask you if you don't mind explaining what right sizing is I know a lot of people get confused refactoring applications that's the term to use replatforming that's been used right sizing is a specific definition around this piece here. When you say right sizing this comes up a lot by the way when people talk about repatriation which is really kind of not happening unless someone really has no interest in cloud at all but that's pretty much like really small percentage of anybody. But if you're in the cloud you're right sizing because you're spanning your footprint, there's more moving parts at least that's my kind of view how do you guys define right sizing for folks watching and what does it mean? That's a great question. So right sizing if we look at like individual instances you have an environment say you have an AWS environment with a lot of EC2 instances. One of the best features in public cloud in general is the ability to change the instance size you have. So say you have 10 instances their web servers you provision them with 16 cores and 32 gigabytes of memory and over time you can look at those instances and say is what's CPU doing? What's memory doing? Am I using all of these instances? Can I get by with smaller instances? Or more modernly, hey this new instance family came out with CPUs that are quite a bit faster. They went from 2.2 gigahertz to 3.3 gigahertz in the latest instance family. Let me go take advantage of that. So right sizing is the ability to turn off that instance pick a new size turn it back on. So you have a reboot of a couple of minutes that instance comes back online and boom it's almost like you just totally renovated your data center and boom you're using the latest generation hardware. Incident upgrade. Over just a few minutes it's a massive upgrade and the prices might be slightly different but when you gain the benefits of the newer generation hardware you gain the 40, 50% performance boost on the newer CPU generation. You don't need to run 16 CPUs you can run eight CPUs and surprisingly enough it's so much faster because the individual core is so much faster that customers process the API call or the website loads faster with less cores. That's why I love DevOps Rick because this is the IT that is now formalized. It's not shadow IT anymore. We talked about that 13 years ago. This is real IT and it's not the old IT. It's the new IT. Right sizing is about upgrading for the app where you need it and you're seeing that right now with a lot of the AI applications. People want to put their workloads on the fastest stuff possible if that's what it needs. So the tuning, the right sizing, they'll go hand in hand, right? Is that the right way to think about it? I think so. So there's modernization. There's scaling and elasticity. There's also the legacy thinking of IT data center provisioning where you would order hardware for a three or five year lifespan, right? So three years for making sure that you're able to replace the components and everything but you always over provision when you order new hardware because you don't want two and a half years into the life cycle of your hardware to run out of capacity. That's sort of devastating. And then you have to order new hardware at a completely new cost. And so you're in a situation where it costs you a few hundred bucks to add some more memory to your hardware that you're gonna order. And so why not? It's a cheap insurance policy but it means you're running very low average utilization.  So you have all of these environments in your data center and then you lift and shift them to cloud and at any given time, most of them are not in use. In a data center, that's okay because it's a sunk cost. It's a capex, right? Now when you move that to cloud and now you're paying by the hour, you all of a sudden have this ability to turn those environments off. You do not need to pay for them when nobody's using them. And now we can use the resources more flexibly but they're still over provision. So we still have this problem because we got used to over provisioning our hardware and our instance sizes on-prem, we copied that behavior forward into the public cloud. We no longer need to do that. We no longer need to have eight extra CPUs for every instance, just in case. If we know that utilization will go higher, we can then just change it to a bigger instance later, no problem. Just pick a maintenance window and go change the instance type. It's great. So we have to shed these on-premise best practices and really embrace the new elasticity concepts of changing the size. It's okay to change instance sizes. If you reboot this instance, it's not going to pop the capacitors on the motherboard like it used to 10, 15 years ago. It's okay, change is good, right? And so we have to break these on-prem mentalities. And I have to say, like, that's my own fault too. I used to provision environments all the time when I worked at Microsoft. I would order dozens or hundreds of instances as servers and get them installed and racked and cabled. And I always overordered because it was safer. Like, I didn't want to get called at two in the morning. They're like, hey, the environment fell over. What are you going to do about it? So, you know, as part of moving to cloud, I'd recognized and saw so many of those instances. Well, that was the right-sizing way to do it. I mean, that's the smart play in a model where you have to right-size over buy to give you that hedge. You want to have that protection and then monitor it to know when to get that next server, right? So, and the game is still the same. It's just an old habit you got to break, right? It's like, okay, it's still the same game, different playing fields. Yeah, and the best way to manage that has just sort of flipped on its head, right? Where you would order hardware because of the long lead times for hard ordering, you would overorder. And now it's just the opposite where you can just flip a switch and all of a sudden you have more capacity. So, you just don't need to overorder anymore. It means we can run the instance size much closer to the actual required capacity you need. That tends to be a pretty significant gap because we overordered a lot. And so, we really had this opportunity to run instance sizes that are more appropriate. That drives average CPU utilization up, right? And that's a nice KPI to use to measure your success here. What's your average CPU across your environments? Is it 4%? Is it 6%? Is it 15 or 20%, right? And it's cool to see companies go through that maturation. That's a great call-out, by the way, putting down those KPIs. That's what people want to look at. What's the scorecard look like? So, that's super valuable. Speaking of that kind of approach, you've got customers, you've got partners on the cloud. So, you got AWS, you guys are the cloud. You got ISVs, you have customers in the marketplace. They're buying and they're provisioning. What do customers do to get this consumed? What do they do to get involved and with partners? I mean, obviously, you've got a multi-vendor environment in the marketplace. It's got traction in terms of how people are procuring, their cloud consumption and contracts. What's the marketplace tie-in? Where's the consumption layer? What do companies do? Yeah, there's so many amazing partners that we have that help organizations use cloud appropriately and optimize size by discounts, all of these sorts of capabilities. You know, we're talking to a few of them on the 25th at the event. We've got a spot by NetApp and we also have AppTO and the cloudability team joining us. So, they've got some pretty awesome products and capabilities to help achieve that. We also have some first-party ones. We have Compute Optimizer, which gives you right-size recommendations. We have recommendations for savings plan purchases and RI purchases, which my team owns. So, we have some first-party solutions. The partner solutions are also incredibly compelling. We love working with our partners. We know that our partners help our customers have a very successful set of practices and environments on AWS to really support their business goals. So, we love working together with our partners. We love working with our customers as well directly. So, it's a very diverse ecosystem. There's a lot of products out there right now. Optimization is really popular. I love seeing it. I love working with all of the partners that come forward and say, hey, we've got great ideas to help customers and we love sitting down and working with them. It's a data problem. I love the data business now. It's so great everywhere.  Can you just explain that real quick differences in some of the interactions and the power dynamics between some of the products? Absolutely. So, CloudWatch is a tremendous sort of default product that you have when you provision EC2 instances and various other resources that provides a lot of utilization data. So, in Compute Optimizer, we use that CloudWatch data. What's really cool is if you turn on the CloudWatch agent and start gathering even deeper metrics on your instances with CloudWatch, like memory utilization, Compute Optimizer by default will pull those memory metrics in and that'll provide even more deep and rich recommendations for right sizing. By default, Compute Optimizer does not provide recommendations to downsize memory because we do not want to hurt your application performance at all. But once you do have memory metrics enabled via CloudWatch or one of our third party providers, APM providers that we built integration with, those recommendations become significantly higher cost savings because the number of instance types that it will evaluate moving to grows pretty tremendously. So, we see a very nice uptake and potential savings when memory data is loaded in and we love working with partners and various other customers to get that memory data, unlock the potential of right sizing more completely and seeing really big numbers delivered back to the customer for them to really spend that money on more strategic investments that they are really driving their Cloud value. I think savings in the Cloud should be more like innovation in the Cloud, it's a continuation of Cloud, it's one of the pillars in the flywheel. You know, you got to kind of keep sweeping the floors and automation is your friend too. You got data coming in at more telemetry, you got right sizing, you got people investing in more of the engine of Cloud and pay for what you need is really the whole principles of Cloud. So, you know, kick the old habits, get into the new and make it operational. Great message, really excellent masterclass, Rick. Thanks for coming on the whole series, saving in the Cloud is phenomenal. Thanks for coming on this special presentation, savings in the Cloud, only pay for what you need with it is cost optimization. We'll be in New York City on July 25th, the eve before it was summit in New York City for more conversations. I'm Jonas Stam, I'm John Furrier, host. Thanks for watching.


Hello, hi everyone and welcome to Lillian's Vegan World, the only show in Hawaii where we talk about the plant based diet and vegan lifestyle. I am coming to you live from downtown Honolulu, but today's my first day out of the studio. I am recording the show from home. I'm sure all of you around the world are probably feeling the isolation blues right now. So this show hopefully will go ahead smoothly and we won't have any internet connection problems. But welcome to the show. I'm really excited today to have a guest from the mainland, someone who I met recently here in Oahu a few weeks ago. I would love to introduce you to my guest today, Woody Bell. Welcome Woody. Hi Lillian, nice to see you. Aloha. Great to see you. Thank you so much for joining us today. Woody, I was so looking forward to meeting you because I had actually heard a lot from your cousin who lives here, who you were visiting on the island just recently. So you are plant based now.  As of one year on March 14th. Congratulations. Thank you. I did see your post on your social media and I do have to congratulate you because it's, I'm sure it was a difficult first year. It normally is for everyone. So tell us a little bit about your journey, how you came into the vegan diet or lifestyle, what started it. Okay, first of all, I'd heard a lot about you from my cousin and Marsha. And they're, because when I, they'd been visiting over here on the mainland and I told them that I was vegan, we'd gone out to a restaurant. They said, what kind of restaurant can you eat at? What can you eat? And then they told me, well, we have this friend Lillian that's a vegan that makes all this wonderful vegan food. So I said, well, it's really simple. I can eat just about anywhere. It's basically vegetables and fruit. I just keep it simple. And so I was approaching my 70th birthday to get back to your question. Last year I was approaching my 70th birthday, which is in May. And I was getting concerned about having type two diabetes. I've been diagnosed with it in 2009 and I had been trying to deal with it with different, eating different ways and stuff like that, trying to avoid sugar. None of that was really working. And I still struggle with sugar. I have a sweet tooth and I'm glad that really dark chocolate for the most part is vegan. Yes. And also very good for you too. Yeah, it is. And so I was looking for ways to deal with my diabetes. The results, the end result of diabetes is you start losing your eyes and they can end up cutting off your feet and things like that. And when you show the pictures, I live a quite active lifestyle and I was not into being de-habilitated at all. So my girlfriend has been a vegan for a long time. Her name is V. You'll see her in the pictures. She went ahead and sent for this book and had it sent to me. And I didn't even know it was coming and it was Dr. Neil Bernard. And it was about reversing diabetes. And I start looking at this book and it's all about plant-based diet and being a vegan. And I didn't think I could do it. I used to love to eat meat and cheese. And I wasn't a real big dairy fan other than cheese and eggs and things like that. And I thought that I had eaten healthy and she was always talking about how simple it is. And so I started looking at that book and reading the book. And I also watched a couple of things on Netflix. One was called What the Health. And awesome documentary. And even though I don't buy everything in it, I was looking for a lot. I think there's a lot of really good information in it. And then I also watched the Game Changers. This was definitely a game changer for a lot of people around the world. I think it just, yes, it really focused on protein, I would say. But it really kind of answered a lot of questions that people have, you know, their concerns about the vegan lifestyle and protein. And again, all of these documentaries awesome to watch when you are looking for more information. Woody, I do want to just if you don't mind interrupt and talk about that book that you read, because this is something I think every person should read. According to the medical news today, Woody, it's estimated that quote unquote, 30 million people in the US are living with diabetes and type two diabetes accounts for between 90 and 95% of all cases. So it's basically they're saying around one third of Americans are affected by this either pre-diabetic or actually diabetic. So if you are getting any of the symptoms that you earlier talked about, you need to really go and seek medical advice. Again, before I continue, I do want to do a quick disclaimer. The content of the show is not intended to be a substitute for professional or medical advice diagnosis or treatment. So always seek the advice of your physician or other qualified health provider with any questions you have about a medical condition, or if you're wanting to really change your diet or start a new diet. That's a lot of people affected by this. It's a lot of people. It really is. And I am one of them. And I wasn't on insulin. And I was and I knew that once I was told that once you're on insulin, there's no reversing that you can't go back. That's what I've been told. And so I'd taken a couple, I've been taking a couple of medications. I'm still on them. I'm waiting for my doctor to give me the okay to get off of them for my next, when my next checkup happens, I think next month. But one thing that did happen was that my A1C's dropped dramatically within one month. With one month. And I was just amazed. I was just amazed. Reading this book and seeing all the stuff on Netflix and everything like that. The common theme is a big problem with diabetes is meat. It's meat consumption. And I had never thought of that. I thought it was sugar. I had a completely different picture of it. It was about bread. It was about sugar. Stuff like that. I love cake, things like that. Carbohydrates, yes. Yeah. And everybody's talking about it's meat. Meat is a big kind of a villain in this. So I said, okay, I've got to do something. I had a little fear in me of the diabetes. You know, I know what happens. And so I was willing to go for it. And actually, I thought I was going to have more problems with it than I did. And I was actually able to stay off the meat. I have not eaten meat since March 14th, 2019. That's amazing. Good on you. Not even a nibble. Yeah, I think you, I think you really, if you are going to really take, take care of your health and really try and take charge of your health by going on a vegan diet, you just have to go cold turkey. And the thing is it's not like giving up drugs or cigarettes.  But when it comes to changing your diet and food that you put into your body, you have to remember that just by giving up meat doesn't mean you're going to starve and not have anything to eat. You're going to learn about some really, you know, delicious ways to eat and your body is just going to appreciate it and show you that what you're doing is right. So good for you. Congratulations again on the one year mark. I'm, I'm, I did quit smoking 33 years ago and that was, was one of the toughest things I ever did. I'm sure because you go, I went cold turkey. I didn't do any vaping. They didn't have it then. I didn't do any gum or patches. I just went cold turkey and it was rough. The big concern that I had and everybody brings up to me constantly is where do you get your protein from? I know that's the big misconception. Yeah. If you don't eat meat, how do you get protein? Yeah. I think, I think there are still people that believe meat is made by animals. Yeah. So maybe you want to again, go watch or see a documentary like what the health or definitely game changer, the game changer does clear up some of those myths and misconceptions about protein. But vegan food, vegetables are very high in protein. And when you, when you get protein from vegetables, you're getting it directly from the source, not through a dead animal's body. That's right. I also liked that almond butter and peanut butter and stuff like that. Seeds, legumes. Yeah. And, and the other thing is I thought it was going to be very difficult. And actually the way I eat is very simple. And the other thing I did not, I didn't know this was going to happen, but I dropped 25 pounds and it happened pretty fast too. And I eat a lot. Okay. I eat a lot. I don't die. Yeah. Here's the other, here's the other game changer with the vegan diet. I know people are going to be surprised when I say this, but you don't have to count calories. Yeah. I don't know. Would any person who is vegan that I personally know who counts calories because you don't have to. In fact, it's not an issue. It's not an issue. The, the doctor that, that we mentioned earlier on Dr. Neil Bernard, who did write the book program for reversing diabetes, the scientifically proven system for reversing diabetes without drugs. Now he belongs to physicians committee that put out YouTube videos on a regular basis. If anyone is interested in more information about a vegan diet or plant based diet, I do recommend you go to YouTube, do Google physicians committee. They have some awesome videos that explain in detail the link between a vegan diet and type two diabetes, whether it be maintaining the condition or living, living with it and reversing it. So they, there is actually a lot of proof and a lot of studies that have been going on that do show type two, type two diabetes can be reversed with the correct diet. And when we talk about the correct diet, we use the word vegan diet, but that doesn't mean eating fries and vegan ice cream and, you know, really bad unhealthy vegan food. It's talking about a low fat, you know, whole foods, vegan diet. So we are going to take a break shortly Woody. And then when we come back, I do want to talk a little bit more about your healthy, active lifestyle, which is absolutely, you know, one of the most important things in leading a healthy, healthy lifestyle along with what you put into your body.  We'll be back right after this break. My show is designed to teach you the simplest and most effective treatment strategies to get you out of pain. And if you or someone, you know is having pain in a certain area of the body with like a free assessment and treatment over media or in person and then come on the show to talk about it. Email us at think tech movement matters at gmail.com Or if you have a topic you would like to know more about, please email us. My goal is to decrease pain all over the world, inspiring people to take better care of their bodies to enjoy life to the fullest. I look forward to hearing from you. Welcome back everyone to Lillian's Vegan World. I'm your host, Lillian Cumick, vegan chef and cooking instructor here in Honolulu. Today I am so happy to have my guest Woody Bell all the way from California. Hey Woody, welcome back. Thank you Lillian. Nice to see you. So great talking to you Woody. I do want to get right back into our conversation. So we've covered the fact that the vegan lifestyle, I should say the plant-based diet is definitely working for you. How about meds that you were taking? Are you finding that you don't need as many meds as before? I just take, I'm still taking two meds. I'm still taking two meds. I will not get off of them until my doctor okays it. I kind of, I work with my doctor. And when I first became vegan, I went and saw her and I didn't bring the book. I'd forgotten to bring it but I told her she knew the book and she knew who the guy was. And she said, pretty much, she said, that's the guy. So she said, yeah, if you can follow that, more power to you. She was behind me all the way on that. Awesome. Yes, he does have, again, so many videos on YouTube. One in particular when I was doing a little bit of homework for this show with you Woody, I did find on YouTube Neil Bernard, the name of the YouTube video is evidence-based eating patterns for type 2 diabetes. I'm actually going to provide the link for this once our show is uploaded onto YouTube later on today. The other video worth looking at is also Neil Bernard. The YouTube channel is called Physicians Committee and it's called Vegan Diets for Diabetes and Weight Loss. Vegan diet, you are going to lose weight on a vegan diet whether you plan to or not. That's just the way it works. That's why a lot of vegans walk around looking younger, healthier, less BMI, body mass index than most meat eaters. That's just a fact. So Woody, let's take a look at some of the photos that you sent in because you just look amazing. You mentioned your, look how gorgeous she is, Vee. You mentioned that she's been a vegan for a long time. Yeah, I don't know how many years. She was a vegetarian for many years and then she went vegan many years ago. Beautiful couple. I love this photo of you guys. This is a frame up. We were attending a wedding and that's my motorcycle. It's a 2014 Indian and a couple that was getting married a motorcyclist and we were all encouraged to ride to the wedding. We did. Awesome. I think that's a beautiful photo. I was actually doing a model shoot for that hat. That's what that was. Really? Yes. And Vee hooked me up with that. There's a company called American Hat Makers here in the Monterey Bay area in Watsonville. And so they were looking for models and they wanted somebody that rode a motorcycle. And so, yeah, they contacted me and I went out and did a model shoot. That's awesome. Great. That actually does look like a poster for something. That's awesome. Who knew Woody you would be modeling at this age? Yeah.  That surprised me. I never thought that would happen. 70 years young, I would say. Yes. And here's what you do, Woody. I'm sorry I didn't mention earlier. You are actually a musician and do play music over there on the mainland. Tell us a little bit about your music career. Well, currently I'm in a band. We just play clubs around the Santa Cruz area where I live. It's called Red Horse, W-R-E-D-H-O-R-S-E. We play dance music, a lot of rock and roll, rockabilly, reggae, some blues. We even do a little country western. We just cover a whole lot. And a picture of me playing an acoustic guitar is I did that. I was doing a solo show with, well, I did it with a couple of other people, but I'm actually doing a solo song right there. And it was for Christmas. And I think I'm singing blue Christmas there. Oh, nice. So you sing as well, Woody? Yes, I do. Awesome. I've been doing it for years. Nice. Yeah. Let's take a look at another one. Here's your motorcycle. Yeah. Guys, you both are so photogenic. Thank you. Thank you. Honestly, I mean that. Like, you and me should be on more posters. You can hook up with some vegan companies that put out vegan products and do something. So those pictures right there is when I met you. That's in Oahu a couple of weeks ago. Yes. This is at the Japanese. Temple. Yes. At the Buddhist temple. Yeah. Yes. And it's beautiful. It's very beautiful there. V's actually 61. And I'm 70. She looks at least 20 years younger. She's amazing. Yes. She is amazing. My cousin Pete, my cousin Pete falling on the left. Let's leave it. Let's leave it on this photo for a minute. So Peter Marta, one of our best friends here on the island. That's how I met you with Pete. Yes. Through them. Yes. They're another couple that just so active and enjoying life. I mean, that's what it's about, isn't it? When we're talking about diet and the vegan diet and, you know, how illnesses can be reversed or prevented.  So this may be woody, the times, the trying times that we're in right now with the coronavirus and everyone being isolated. Maybe this is a really good time for us to rethink or reevaluate our health. But where I'm going with this, what I'm saying is enjoying your life is the main thing. And if you're sick, you won't be able to, so, you know, do what you can to take care of your health so that you can have really awesome times like this. Pete and Marta actually really do take care of themselves. I know Pete's lost a lot of weight recently. Yes. So maybe you and I can, can give them a bit of a nudge and see if they'll, they'll try more plant based on a regular basis. I mean, Marta is so active as well. She looks amazing too. Yes. And, and while I was staying at the, I was staying with them and they accommodated as far as food. They were just wonderful. And Marsha was very concerned. She's, and I had to keep telling her, just keep it simple. The salad is wonderful. Just keep it simple. It's a, let's get back on the screen. We're a month apart in age. I'm actually a month old. Okay. I didn't know that he was so close in age, but yeah, we celebrated Pete's 70th birthday just last year. So yeah, right. Interesting. Might have to do a bit of a Pepsi Coke challenge on that one. But you know, you know what Woody? I think you noticed when you joined us to go and see a concert while you were here at the Blaisdell. I was going to bring water. Yeah.  Did you notice that almost everyone brought vegan food? Yes, I did. I noticed that. And they separated the vegan from the non vegan. And it was over in one car. All the vegan food was in the other car. And most everybody was hanging around the vegan car. Yes. And I, I was like amazed at that. I said, cause you and I were the only vegans there, I believe. Yes. No, there was, I think somebody else. Yeah. No, it was only us two. Yeah. Just us two. Our friends here do that every time we get together. And the food that you brought, you prepared was amazing. It was delicious. Thank you. Thanks Woody. Yeah. I might have a career doing this after all. I think you would. I got to enjoy myself without feeling any guilt and just stuffing my face. So that's part of being a vegan.  You must have noticed this in the last year as you, as you left behind your old eating habits to. I hang around with motorcyclists. I know. So they must be like motorcyclists. They're all meat eaters. I know. But the thing is you don't have to, you don't have to feel, feel threatened by someone who's on a, who's, you know, taking care of their health, eating healthily. In fact, you should be embracing that and trying to, to learn more about it, because you are changing the way you look before people's eyes. Basically, I would love to have seen a photo of you a year before you started this plant-based diet, but I can guarantee people must be looking at you going, something's different, something's changed.  I'm actually a friend of mine recently told me, I look younger. And then of course there is the 25 pound weight loss. And it could even be more, it could be 30. That's incredible. Because I don't really weigh myself. I know. Neither do I. I don't have a scale here. Don't need it. Don't need to count calories. Eat a lot. I did have to buy new clothes. I did have to buy new clothes. A new belt, new pants. Well, see, all, all the viewers watching this, like there's a good excuse. If you want to, if you love shopping as much as I do, you get to lose all this weight and go shopping for a whole new wardrobe. Well, my son, he was the one, he noticed that he goes, you're losing a lot of weight, dad. You need to buy some new pants. Those are looking really bad. He was the one that, you know, got on me about it. He's 41. And he's in pretty good shape too. And so, yeah, I went, you know, you're right. So it was nice to buy a new Levi's, new belt, new shirts. Yes. Yeah. And they were smaller instead of bigger. I know for it. Yeah. It doesn't that feel nice. I mean, think about your, the way your self-esteem can increase when you yourself know you look better. Not only do you feel better, but you look better. It's a win-win situation to me. I look at people who are struggling with struggling on diets. Woody, who are counting every single calorie weighing every single ounce and still not quite getting there to the point where they feel like they're at their right weight and want to, you know, at that perfect weight or that ideal weight that we all kind of have. But you can diet.  That's right. And that's the thing. It's when I do talk to people about, you know, they're struggling trying to diet.  And I try to tell them how simple it is. And they say, well, I need the protein. I need meat. And I cannot, they don't believe me. I know. Of course, I'm not a doctor. I'm not a, I'm not an expert on that. I'm just, you know, I'm a musician and a regular guy. But anyways, I also, it has given me so much more energy on stage playing. Sometimes they play late night gigs and stuff. And I've really, I've really noticed that I have a lot more energy on stage and just a lot more active. And it's easier to stay up. Yeah. And I'm sure Woody, with your riding, you ride your motorcycle a lot. I'm sure that takes quite a lot of energy out of you. So how has that affected your riding? I just got back from a 1200 mile trip. When I came back from Hawaii, I was home one day and took off and went camping with some friends and over the weekend. And it was, I was gone for four days and it was a 1200 mile ride. And I got home and I was just fine. You know, I'm saying, I have, I have absolutely no idea how far that is because the rest of us are on the metric system, Woody. That's right. That's right. We almost changed. I know. Years back, we were talking about it and it never happened. I don't know why we don't. It's simpler. It's way simpler. I know. Woody, we have actually come to the end of the show and it's been such a pleasure talking to you and hearing about your journey one year down so many more awesome, healthy years ahead. And it's been nice to meet you and see Dave again. Thank you. We had a fun time over there and looking forward to seeing you again and I'll take you up on that vegan dinner. Vegan dinner on me next time you're on the island, promise. And to all the viewers out there, thank you so much for watching. Do watch more of Lillian's Vegan World, live from Honolulu. Thank you, Woody. To everyone, please be safe in these trying times. Take care and see you next time. Aloha.