Coming up on DTNS, forget the politics. We talk about the technological challenge of buying TikTok. Huawei admits they can't make chips anymore, and Amazon's plan to save malls. This is the Daily Tech News for Monday, August 10, 2020 in Los Angeles. I'm Tom Merritt. And from Studio Redwood, I'm Sarah Lane. I'm the show's producer, Roger Chang. Very happy to welcome back Rob DeMillo, CTO at Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, and Venture Partner at Spark Labs Global. Welcome back, Rob. Good to have you back, man. Thank you so much. Nice to be here. We are going to draw upon your CTO experience later on. Thank you for sharing it with us. Oh, no. OK. It's going to be good. We just need you to fix Microsoft. It's going to be fine. If you want the wider conversation on TikTok birds, Mime, Making Hummus, and more, you got to get our expanded show, Good Day Internet. Become a member at patreon.com slash DTNS. Let's start with a few tech things you should know. Amazon announced that it rebranded Twitch Prime to Prime Gaming. The service will keep all the same game benefits, including exclusive in-game content, free games, and a free monthly Twitch subscription. Google Maps now supports CarPlay dashboard. Let's users have turn-by-turn navigation alongside music controls and other CarPlay app widgets. And while they were at it, Google also brought Google Maps back to the Apple Watch. They had removed it back in 2017. NVIDIA teased a August 31st announcement posting the phrase, 21 days, 21 years, on its GeForce Twitter accounts. The original GeForce 256 GPU came out in 1999. So this may be an announcement of the new GPUs based on the Amper architecture that the company unveiled back in May. Hyundai announced the launch of a dedicated battery electric auto brand spinning out its Ionic brand name. Ionic cars will be built on the Electric Global Modular Platform, with the first model being the Ionic 5, a mid-size CUV expected in early 2021. Uber CEO, Dara Khadrusha, he wrote an opinion piece for the New York Times outlining a third way for workers to be classified beyond traditional and contractor distinction. He called for an industry-wide benefits fund to let workers build up benefits across different gig services. TikTok told the ad agencies that it will honor planned ad campaigns and refund any that it can't fulfill as a result of any possible restrictions that happen in the United States. TikTok will also work with major influencers to migrate them to other platforms if necessary. The Russian competition Watchdog FAS ruled that Apple abused its dominant market position in mobile apps by reserving rights to block any third-party apps in the app store, as well as requiring exclusive use of the app store to download apps on iOS. The ruling comes in response to a complaint brought by Kaspersky Labs when its SafeKids parental control app was declined by Apple. Apple said it will appeal the ruling. And the Wall Street Journal reports that Twitter held preliminary talks with TikTok about a US merger. Twitter thinks its small size would be more likely than Microsoft to pass antitrust scrutiny. Now, Twitter might not be able to finance a deal all on its own, but some of ByteDance's existing investors might step in. SoftBank and General Atlantic are possibilities. The most likely might be Sequoia Capital, which owns 10% of ByteDance. Sequoia's global managing partner Doug Leone has contributed to the president's re-election campaign. So he's got some connections there as well. Twitter investor Silver Lake is another possible aider to that bid. All right, let's talk a little more about saving malls. The Wall Street Journal sources say the largest mall owner in the US, Simon Group, has been in talks with Amazon to turn empty department store locations into Amazon distribution hubs. So you'd shut up that old Sears and turn it into a warehouse. The talks date back to before the pandemic, so this has just accelerated the process. Talks have focused on former locations of Sears and JC Penny department stores that have been closed down, though Amazon could also potentially buy locations still in use if maybe a store just doesn't wanna afford that lease anymore. Amazon is also talking to other mall owners, not Simon Group, about possibly putting its Amazon fresh grocery stores in some former JC Penny spaces. Yeah, it sort of sounds like two different scenarios, right? There's okay, big space, not being in use, no other large chain is coming in here anytime soon. What can Amazon do warehouse-wise just so it has more presence in urban areas or areas where they have a lot of customers and so you just fill it up with a bunch of junk and it's just a warehouse. Talk about your one hour delivery, right? Suddenly you're in right now with a bunch more people.   It makes sense for the mall owners, it makes sense. It does feel a little bit like, okay, so we've just evicted the people from this apartment, we're gonna move into it. So there's a little of that to it. But it's gonna do things to the areas around the malls too. It's gonna affect traffic patterns and shipping in and out of those malls and how they're used. So if you are in an urban area or a suburban area and you're living around those malls, what happens? Like how to affect you? I mean, not that there weren't huge traffic problems around malls anyway, right? With people going in and out, but now instead of, you know, a lot of SUVs go into pick up the latest deals, you've got a lot of big trucks, you know? So that is a different traffic problem. Well, yeah, and a place like Sears, you'd say, well, they have to stock stuff too. So they had a solution, but you know, Amazon, the turnover is so different. That really is a different situation. Yeah, it's a different situation because you've got every hour, there's going to be semis going in, semis going out, Amazon delivery trucks going in, UPS trucks going in, you know. It'll be interesting. And I would imagine that the Simon Group and maybe Westfield, Westfield isn't named in this report, but I imagine they might be curious how this turns out, would be into the idea, not only Amazon Fresh Stores, but even if it's just a warehouse, Amazon having return locations or locker locations, you know, things that maybe do still bring in a little bit of foot traffic from people who might still go to the rest of the mall. Yeah, agreed. So yeah, we are going to see a lot more stories like this, not even involving Amazon about, you know, uses for previous retail establishments because there's a lot of holes in the checkerboard right now in the retail space. There are. And malls are, I don't know, they've changed a little bit over the years, but the big stores tend to be the bookends, right? So it's like, okay, if you had a JC Penney in one end and now it's some sort of Amazon branded place that is bringing in foot traffic, how does it change the retail stores that might be in the rest of the mall going forward? Those urban, I'm sorry, the suburban malls that exist right now, the ones that have the Sears and the JC Penneys and where Amazon could potentially take over, feel like they would become different things. And malls would sort of move into urban environments or retract into urban environments where there's high end stores and more logical reason for foot traffic to go in and out, you wanna go to Hugo Boss and you wanna try on a suit, you wanna do that kind of thing. Yeah, yeah, more of the way targets started opening city targets. They would want to think about it, yeah. That's right. A note from analyst Ming-Chi Kuo looks at the potential impact on iPhone sales of the US executive order banning transactions with WeChat. Now, if WeChat were only removed in the US, Kuo predicts iPhone shipments would fall three to 6%. If removed globally, Kuo sees iPhone shipments declining 25 to 30%, with shipments of other Apple products like Macs and iPads and the Apple Watch declining 15 to 25%. And Apple's latest earnings report, Greater China accounted for roughly 15% of Apple's quarterly revenue. So it's something that's very important to the company. Kuo expects Apple suppliers, LG and a tech and genius electronic optical rather also adversely affected. Yeah, we talked about on Friday that WeChat is dominant in everyday life in so many ways in China. And Kuo has put a number on that, how that would impact Apple if a Chinese customer and other places that use WeChat, expats and tourists just looked at it and said, well, I can't buy this phone. It doesn't have WeChat on it. Right. I don't think that it's going to be blocked anywhere outside of the US, right? So the first number I believe, like the predicting the iPhone shipments would fall three to 6% if it's blocked in the US. That makes sense to me. But as you said, China lives in breeze on WeChat. It'd be really difficult to imagine it not being on iPhones that were sold and distributed inside of China. Yeah, and three to 6%, it's not nothing, but that's a lot easier to overcome and maybe try to grow your way past than 25 to 30%, for sure. Apple will be fine. I am not too worried about newly minted billionaire Tim Cook. I think he's going to make his way out of this. But yeah, I am curious if there's even going to be a ban or if there is what, how it manifests and will these executive orders be challenged and all of that. So we've got a ways to go on all of that stuff before we have clarity. But I think this analysis is important nonetheless to say like, all right, we don't know what really is going to happen. But if this happened, this would be our best guess on its impact at least on this. That's right, yeah. Huawei consumer business president Richard Yu notes the direct impact on his business of US trade restrictions saying the company will stop production of its arm-based Kiran chips September 15th. Huawei suppliers use US manufacturing technology and that is restricted for making parts for Huawei. Huawei smartphone production has quote, no chips and no supply according to you. Last year, if you remember the US Department of Commerce placed Huawei on its entity list requiring a license to export anything from the US to the company. And in May, those rules extended to restrict the sale of semiconductors or any other part made outside the US if it uses US designs or intellectual property in the manufacturer. And that meant chip fab TSMC which uses US designs in its plants had to stop taking orders from Huawei May 15th and it had four months to ship its existing orders. So times up on September 15th. Now a few US companies have received licenses to allow some of their products to be sold to Huawei because it's a restriction that says you need a license to sell with to Huawei and some have gotten them. Intel got one for some minor parts. Micron got one, Xilinx got one. Wall Street Journal reporting that Qualcomm is currently lobbying the US Department of Commerce for such a license to sell advanced components related to 5G modems to Huawei. The Qualcomm argument is that an export ban on those components would strengthen overseas competitors like MediaTek and Samsung who are not subject to any of these restrictions because they're not US companies and they're not using US technology to make their stuff.  If you don't give us a license, it's not like Huawei isn't gonna get the 5G parts. They're just gonna get them from companies that aren't in the US. Wouldn't you rather have the money come to the US? That is the problem with all the themes running through the articles that you've discussed today is that these attempts to prevent surveillance by China or prevent commerce coming in from China, it winds up hurting US companies almost as much as it hurts Chinese companies. And in the case of Huawei, you can't just bring up a fab plant out of nowhere. It takes years and years and years, decade, to put one of those things together and get them up and running and functioning. So more power to Qualcomm if they can get through this. Yeah, I mean, I think they have an argument whether the administration will agree with that argument or not, I'm not going to try to venture a prediction, but I think they could. I don't think it's outside the realm of possibility that commerce goes, oh, right. Yeah, no, we're not actually hurting anybody. That doesn't help our leverage, et cetera. It could happen. But Huawei is in a pickle. This is the first time we've seen something from them that wasn't like, yeah, things are slowing down, but we have options. They certainly could get chips from elsewhere within China using Chinese manufacturing processes, but it's not going to be Kirin chips. It's not going to be chips that have been designed specifically for their phones and that's going to have an impact on those phones. Yeah, you can't just take a chip from one manufacturer and plop it in and expect it to work in another environment. And those chips, I mean, the phones, the Huawei phones were all, the reason they can compete in the market so aggressively is they've been leveraging the global supply chain for years and years and years, right? They don't have fair plans. They don't make their own components at that level. They build the phones, they buy the parts, they throw them all in and off they go, right? But if you change any one of those components, it's going to interrupt their distribution. I'm going to float a scenario out here. It's a little bit tin foil hat, but bear with me. I kind of expect Huawei to have a solution to this. I expect the solution will be, well, it's not a Kirin chip, but we have contracted ex-Chinese manufacturer to make these chips for us that we called something else and then there will be accusations that they're in fact mimicking the manufacturing processes of TSMC when they make those chips and that will be another side battle in this whole thing. Maybe. Yeah, I mean, that's a very realistic possibility. It could also be they just cut them off guard as well. Yeah, that's quite possible as well. Well, Bloomberg sources say that Facebook is creating a new group focused on payments called F2 for Facebook Financial. David Marcus, co-creator of Libra, will head the new division, which will include existing products like Facebook Pay, Libra Wallet Novi, What's At Pay, and perhaps others. The aim would be to unify payments across the platforms, including Instagram and Messenger. Facebook Pay can already be linked to a credit card or PayPal account and used to exchange funds on Messenger, WhatsApp, and Instagram. Yeah, if this wasn't Facebook, this story would be a, oh, company has reorganized its reporting structure and its divisions to move all the payments together, but because it's Facebook, it's Facebook starting a bank. Oh no. People have been wringing their hands over for a solid year now once Libra was first announced. I would forgive anybody for being confused as to what is happening with Facebook at this point because there seems to have been so much internal. All right, people aren't really, we've got some pushback on the first announcement. Let's figure out how to draw that back in a way that seems more consumer friendly. Now we've got large bank partners, perhaps dropping out of the plan altogether because it's a little too wishy-washy. I don't know, Rob, what do you think?  So I can't even say crash and burn on impact. So he had a group of people that were very, very intelligent and he spun and pivoted as fast as he could, I think within Facebook. And Facebook has always been concerned about getting money in and out, right? And so if they can do it internally, I think this makes some sense for Facebook, but just to bring back a devil's advocate point here, aren't they becoming a bank? It was really hard for PayPal to move forward in this arena for that very reason. Because they're using credit cards in PayPal, I think they're safe from being deemed a bank at this point, right? There's a lot of confusing factors. First of all, Libra was an entirely separate organization. David Marcus was involved with that, that's gonna confuse people, but this isn't Libra. It's also confused because Novi was the wallet they were gonna use with Libra and that's part of this organization. But really, this is just Facebook very wisely, in my opinion, saying, hey, you know what? We need to diversify our income from just advertising. Payments is a way to do that. Let's tighten this up. David Marcus is a really smart guy who has a lot of experience dealing with the global banking system now. Let's take advantage of that. So that's all true. Where I will meet you on that point is that's now. What they do next will be very interesting because that's where you start to say, well, now they're stepping outside of just using PayPal and credit cards as the backend maybe, right? And as soon as Facebook even looks like their toe is about to cross that line, people are gonna pay attention and crack down on it, for sure. Yeah, and by the way, that path you described, that was PayPal's path. Right, right, exactly. Which I can't say three times in a row, but yeah. So it's- I'm not even gonna try, yeah. So, you know, taking a page from that playbook, that does seem to be the direction that people are headed. So I can understand what people are concerned. There's already enough concerns in the market about Facebook in general and its control over certain sectors of, you know, people's attention spans and social media and delivery of content. And yeah, so now they're stepping into financial issues and I can understand they're gonna be under a lot of scrutiny. Yeah, it's just knowing the difference between concern over what they are doing and concern over what they might do next. That's the only thing I try to shine a light on. Valid concerns. Not sure they can be separated, but okay. Yeah, it's, well, always in motion, the future is. Correct. Folks, if you wanna get all the tech headlines each day in about five minutes, be sure to subscribe to DailyTechHeadlines.com. All right, folks, Microsoft has until September 15th to reach a deal to acquire summer all of TikTok from Bike Dance. You know that, you listen to this show. There is that executive order we talked about Friday that would ban transactions with TikTok if nothing changes by September 20th. That's the ticking clock. Those dates are aggressive just for the business side of the transaction. Just trying to get a merger of this size done challenging is not a sufficient word for that, but they're practically impossible for the technical side. Let's say they do overcome the business challenge and get it done. Bike Dance has been working on a full technical separation of TikTok and its Chinese app Duyan for months now, right? They're not gonna finish it in 45 days. TikTok says user data has never been combined, but Reuters reports that code for the logo and feel is obviously separate, but there's some server code such as telling the app where that data is stored, telling like, oh, you look the US for this stuff, you look at Australia for this stuff, Singapore for that stuff, content recommendation and moderation algorithms, code for managing user profiles, those are all combined on the server end between Duyan and TikTok. Even if Microsoft were to buy all of TikTok, it would still need to review and revise that code and move to a new backend infrastructure, a potentially potent demonstration of its Azure shops, sure, but one that would still likely take at least a year. Another issue is how the recommendation algorithm is maintained. You need training data to have your algorithm healthy and it needs to keep getting data to get better and you will have to segment that if you're buying TikTok away from Bike Dance, especially if Microsoft doesn't buy all of TikTok, just buys the four regions we talked about, Australia, Canada, US and New Zealand. Jim Dubois, former chief information officer at Microsoft told Reuters that hard disks of data would likely need to be transferred between Bike Dance and Microsoft. So a little bit of a sneaker net approach is a potential here. Rob, you've been a CTO at a number of companies and I'm sure you don't envy the folks having to figure this out. What kind of insight can you give us on the gargantuan task here? Having been bought and sold many times with this sort of thing. I see this and I just sort of get sweaty palms. So when Bike Dance created, Julian to begin with, and they knew they were on to expand outside of China, they did segment the system, right? So that if you think of the software path as a big X where there's two different user interfaces, two different data warehouses and then the server, the control mechanisms and the algorithms and the logic and the AI are all in the center and then the content delivery and all that stuff. That's how they've got it set up, which made sense as long as control remained in Beijing. And now that they are scrambling to get the US division over to a US company, which is what it feels like is going on here. Yeah, I agree with everything she said. Like it's the business end of this, it is going to be interesting to see if they can get it in by September 15th. They can, but it's deals of this size and this magnitude with this sort of momentum behind each of these two companies plus the language barrier and everything else is gonna be tough. But the technology side of this, I mean, you're 12, 18, 24 months, right? I mean, even though everything is nicely separated, it's hard to imagine that there are recommendation engines and just for you section and all that is not borrowing information from the metadata from both data sets, right? And there's probably code sitting in that server section that's very key to saying, oh, if this person in the US like this, they might like this stuff over here that folks in China liked doing that, right? So that has to get teased apart. The data sets probably are reliant on some commonality. So that has to get teased apart. So it's not only a huge code separation problem, it still feels like there is like a data schema, data warehouse problem that they need to sit down and deal with. And because this is a acquisition of a subset of BiteDance's product, it's going to slow down any effort that BiteDance had in separating the stuff apart, right? So it'll be pens down, check your code in, we're going to sound for three or four months and do due diligence on everything. So they've got a task ahead of them. Well, and it strikes me too that if you are under the gun to get this done faster, let's say the business deal gets done and let's say the administration says, that's fine, but you only have this amount of time to separate that data out. You need to do it fast. That encourages mistakes, right? Yeah.  And it also could trigger escape clauses. There's no document that's going to get passed and signed between now and September 15th, that does not include a paragraph that says, hey, if we get constrained to this timeframe and we don't hit these milestones, this thing is done. Yeah. All right. What about the idea that in the course of separating this data goes wayward and maybe either appears to have not been in the US after all or somehow gets copied over to the wrong server, right? Oh yeah, that's always a possibility. I'm interested by the, by the way, I think the person that said that they had the sneaker net everything over, I think it was the former CIO. Yeah, former chief information officer, Jim Dubois. Yeah. Right, so he's probably conjecturing as well, although it sounds right because it's going to be like petabytes of data which over the transatlantic cables or trans-specific cables are going to take quite some time. So it would make sense to ship that stuff out but once it's shipped out and then installed in Microsoft Azure data centers and then you start finding issues, like it's going to be hard to correct them. Yeah, I think it's probably tempting for some people to say, well, wait a minute, if there's code shared, isn't that the smoking gun? Isn't that saying that there was in fact data from TikTok on Chinese servers? Is there any way you can make that clear to people to understand why both things can be true? Both things can be true, but that's, it's a revelation that would not be surprised to see either. I mean, I haven't seen the code, so it's hard to tell, but when you bifurcate a data set like that, engineers are engineers, right? And they're going to say, oh, listen, I've got metadata over here in this database that's going to be helpful for my predictions with this database over here. So it's entirely possible that there's code that does tie those two things together. Even if that is not true, to make life easier for the engineers, the data schemas, which is the way data is laid out inside of a hard drive that's in a database, data schemas are probably extremely similar just to make their lives easier. So they don't have to write in, you know, basically in different database languages, different code paths. So that comes into play as well. But it is absolutely too early to say that that conjecture is not correct. And it is possible that the server code and the data code are somehow intimately tied. Yeah, and that's going to come out, right? But it wouldn't have to be. I guess what I'm trying to point out is it's not a smoking gun to say there is some code for TikTok that's executed on a server in Beijing. That's not the same as saying there was user data stored in Beijing. Because it would be the, yeah. That is correct. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So the thing that operates on the data is not the data. And so machines can be running anywhere and the data can be sitting in Des Moines and the data would be separated from anything else that's happening inside of the Chinese firewall. But it certainly could lead some government officials to look at that and think, oh, well, wait a minute, but if that server over there is running it, wouldn't the data also be there, right? So that could be part of this as well. Yeah, yeah, it's going to be an interesting couple of months as we keep reading on this. There's also the interesting tie-in that Microsoft Azure is, what's the word I want? They have a relationship with Tencent, which is also under scrutiny, right? And there are Azure-labeled data centers inside of the Chinese firewall that are really Tencent data centers. And they're separate things. Like if you have an account on Azure outside of China, when you're inside of China, you have to get a separate account to use their version of Azure, but it's running inside of the Tencent data centers. That could come into play as something questionable as well. Interesting. Well, you probably have thoughts on this and if so, a good place to have a conversation about it would be in our Discord, which you can join by linking to a Patreon account at patreon.com slash dtns. Let's finish off with the mailbag. Our friend, Allison Sheridan. Hi, Allison. I miss you. Had some thoughts on our XCloud discussion, XCloud issue really on iOS from Friday. Allison says it seems that Allison has two bad options available to them on the streaming gaming issue given their desire for a policy against streaming because there's no way to control what gets streamed once an app is approved. Option one, which is what they're doing now is forbidding streaming games altogether and living by that policy as well. As Tom mentioned, Apple Arcade can't stream games either, so it's not like they're favoring their own service. Option two, what's been proposed, carving out a special category for a legitimate gaming streaming services. The problem with this, Allison says, it would absolutely favor the giant, themselves monopolistic services like Google Stadia, Microsoft XCloud, Facebook Gaming. Small devs probably can't be considered legitimate if they're trying to just get started. Maybe. I mean, when I said that, I was thinking of Amazon's premium video program, but your point's the same about that, right? If I'm a small video streaming service, can I get in the premium video streaming? I don't know. Apple might say, yes, you can. You just have to meet these qualifications. I would argue with game streaming, it's really hard to be a small dev and get started anyway because that's just such a capital intensive situation, right? It's always been the acceptance part of it. Back in the days when there was the Xbox 360 and the PS3, right? There was an attempt to have independent game developers develop for those machines and some of it carried forward to the PS4 and the Xbox One, you know, and you got wonderful games like Limbo, which was, from what I can tell, was one person, maybe two people that developed Limbo and pushed out. And so it was put on those platforms along with the stuff from Gearbox and name your favorite game developer. And sold relatively well and there were a couple of indie hits that came out of that. Streaming is a different animal in that you have to partner with an application streaming service of some sorts. And so you have to pay for those servers and you have to do all this stuff. So it does increase your cost a little bit, but your flexibility also goes up. This comes back to Apple and gaming just in general, which, you know, not to say anything too terribly controversial here, but they don't really get it that much, right?  In order to play in this pool. Otherwise, it's gonna be really, really hard for people. I mean, I think it would be fair to say we'll have a policy change that says if it's just a game streaming service and as long as we check your app and we only see a game streaming service, then that's fine because the same, like, well, but they'll say it's a game streaming service and it's not, that also goes for the companies that are allowed to stream remote desktops. They say they're doing a full remote desktop, but they could change that, right? And I think it's interesting to note that one of the smaller game streaming services out there, Shadow, is legitimately in the Apple App Store because they said, well, we will give them the whole machine and Apple's like, fine, that's great. Then you can do that as long as you don't have shortcuts that go straight into a game in your app. You have to let them get to the machine and launch it. So there's an example of a smaller company that did get started within Apple's existing rules. So maybe Allison does have a point. I think she does. Hey, shout out to patrons at our master and grandmaster levels. You all have very good points, including Brad, Paul Boyer and Ken Hayes. Also thanks to Rob D'Millo for being with us this fine Monday. Rob, what have you been up to? I have been sitting exactly where you're sitting right now for working longer hours than I've been working for seven months. Yeah. Well, where can people keep up with your work? I can take a look at my About Me page, which I think will get flashed up here at some point and you can find everything that's connected to me there. Excellent. Thank you, Rob. Really, really appreciate the insights, man. It was super helpful. Thanks, everybody. Appreciate it. Always fun to be here.  We got shirts, we got hoodies, we got caps, we got masks. Go check it out, dailytechnewshow.com slash store. I surprised my mom with a little visit over the weekend and she was drinking coffee out of a DTNS mug. Look at the eyes. I know. I was like, how about you? That was very nice of us. Our email address is feedback at dailytechnewshow.com. We're also live Monday through Friday. We'd love to have you join us if you can. 4.30 p.m. Eastern, 20.30 UTC. And you can find out more at dailytechnewshow.com slash live. Back tomorrow with Lamar Wilson, Dr. then. This show is part of the Frog Pants Network. Get more at frogpants.com. The Diamond Club hopes you have enjoyed this program.


Excel 2016 has some wonderful forecasting tools that take all of the labor and time out of developing regression models that manage seasonality and trend. I'll show you how it works. I'm just going to click in my data and go up here to data, forecast sheet, and it brings up a dialog box and it's smarted up to select all the data and model this data for seasonality and trend and give you a forecast with confidence intervals. On your options you can change the start date and stop date for your forecast. You can change the confidence intervals or do away with the confidence intervals and then you can include forecast statistics. The other thing it does it will detect automatically and tell you the seasonality. You know here we've got a 12 month seasonality. I'm sorry yeah 12 month seasonality but if it had a different seasonal period you don't have to figure it out. Excel will figure it out. I'm going to go ahead and click create and it will create that chart for you and give you your Excel statistics which is pretty neat and a whole lot faster than having to do it the way I just showed students to do. So if we can require students to use 2016 and maybe I should just add that as a teaser for the students who don't have 2016. Your thoughts.


Yeah, so yeah, hello everyone. Yeah, welcome again to the dev conference and yeah for the next session We have with us Michael and Joel who'd be speaking out on this topic the declarative Kubernetes cluster with the cluster APIs and yeah, and if you have any of the questions regarding the session going on You can just pop up your questions in the chat box, which is on the right side of the screen So let's start our search Hello, and welcome to our presentation declarative Kubernetes clusters with cluster API My name is Michael McEwen and I'll be joining Joel speed today And we're both engineers that work for Red Hat where we work on cloud infrastructure tooling and one of the projects that we work on is the cluster API project Let's do a little overview of what we'll talk about today So we'll start with a tech review to make sure that everyone's on the same page Then we'll talk about what is the cluster API product? Then I'll hand it over to Joel and he'll talk about why you might want to use cluster API What the internal anatomy of the project looks like and give a small demonstration of how you can use cluster API Then I'll hand it back over to me and I'll talk about how you can get involved with the project. Let's get things started First let's do a little review of Kubernetes and not necessarily from the perspective of a user But from the perspective of someone who wants to understand the topology of Kubernetes and how it's architected So when I think about Kubernetes, I think about it in these kind of three Different boxes. There are the infrastructure providers at the base layer who give the surface upon which will do all of our computing work And then there's the control plane which manages the cluster and the resources that come into it And then lastly we have the workers which actually run the workloads that users load into the cluster Let's dive a little deeper into each one of these components though just to tease apart what they do So the control plane is responsible for making decisions about the cluster itself And the first point of entry is the kube API server And this is a process that takes requests from the user about API updates that need to happen And these are the APIs we know like the resources such as pods and nodes and those type of things And then it enters those into the system so that they can be acted upon XED is the next component behind that which provides a consistent highly available store for all this information Next we have the kube scheduler which handles taking requests for pods and Placing them on to nodes so that everything gets scheduled with the resources it needs Another component is the kube controller manager and this runs some of the core controllers that watch for the base Objects inside of Kubernetes things such as nodes and replication controllers And then lastly we have a cloud controller manager which Coordinates talking from Kubernetes to the underlying infrastructure so that when information such as Machine sizes or network topology need to be learned This can be a place to get those details and all these processes together work in a horizontally scalable manner So that your control plane could be one machine or it could be multiple machines Next we have the workers and the workers are where all the workloads run So the main process here is the kubelet and the kubelet is responsible for ensuring that every pod spec That it is aware of matches with a container on that machine It will not watch containers that don't have pods associated with them And this respect tries to keep the pods in order for kubernetes The next component that's on each worker is the kube proxy And this is a networking component that helps to build the service Mesh that we know inside of kubernetes and helps to make the trend the the communication between pods Work in the way that we know And then finally there's a controller a container runtime This runs the pods and runs the containers and there's several different runtimes that could be added So lastly we have the infrastructure providers This you know whether it's bare metal or virtual machines Networking and storage this the provider gives you all the components that are needed by kubernetes to run Now there's two entries at the bottom here that I kind of put some question marks by There are some providers that give really radical different ways to look at a cluster One of them is called the docker provider and this is used By a tool such as kind kubernetes in docker And then there you can see how a container can be made abstractly to look like a node and so kubernetes could actually Be deployed to a series of containers then on a single machine without needing a large infrastructure And this is great for testing and experimenting Another great really interesting test project is called kubemark And this is a project that allows you to model a kubernetes cluster in memory You mean you can't actually run, you know Heavy workloads here, but you can use it to test the core scheduling and and other mechanics of the kubernetes cluster So I add these only because I think they're really interesting projects and they just show how flexible kubernetes can be So let's start to dive into what is the cluster api project And if we go from the description, uh in the project itself We see that cluster api is a kubernetes sub project focused on providing declarative apis and tooling to simplify provisioning upgrading and operating multiple kubernetes clusters Now that's kind of a mouthful, but let's break it down to see what it really means So declarative apis if you've used kubernetes, you're most likely familiar with it When I approach the kubernetes api, I give it a declaration of what I would like it to match I say this is the pod I would like These are the networks I would like it to use. This is the storage it needs And then kubernetes will either accept that or reject it. Hopefully it will give me back a pod and match what I've declared So cluster api wants to take that methodology and apply it to entire kubernetes clusters So in essence, could I ask my kubernetes cluster for one cluster please and have it return me an entire cluster Now you can see I've labeled these management and workload And these are concepts that come from the kubernetes cluster api project The management cluster houses all the resources that I need to speak about workload clusters so resources such as cluster and machine and machine deployment These are things that I can use as resources in my management cluster to talk about my workload clusters And let's take a look at how that works a little bit broader So here's a situation where I have one management cluster and three workload clusters each deployed on a different cloud And this is one way that I could use the cluster api project To help manage multiple clusters and really have many deployment options for how I want to use them But even more than just creating and destroying clusters I can get a little deeper with my usage of cluster api So here's an example where I'm talking to the management cluster and I want to have it do work in a workload cluster Based on specific actions So perhaps I want to delete a specific machine from the workload cluster Or maybe I want to add more machines to that cluster cluster api can make all these things very easy By giving us tools to address those machines to address those clusters and to address the groupings of machines within those clusters So you can imagine a heterogeneous cluster where some machines are one type And another batch are a different type cluster api gives us a way to manage those machines in a very convenient api But even more than just the basic management of machines cluster api adds a bunch of extra tools that are really cool So there's a control plane management resource that allows you to control kubernetes version that's deployed and the topology of the control plane There's a machine health checking component that allows us to automatically remediate unhealthy machines Cluster api is supported by the kubernetes cluster auto scaler So you can automatically grow and shrink your clusters based on the workloads that are on them There's also a bootstrapping tool and resource which allow you to control How a cluster is created and bootstrapped and how machines are created and bootstrapped into that cluster And then there's also support for spot instance usage And many providers give a something they call spot instances or it might be called something else Depending on the provider But these are instances that can be used at a lower price rate based on availability So when the when the provider has extra machines available They might make them make make them usable at a reduced rate and cluster api can automatically watch for that and use them when possible There are also eight different cloud providers that currently exist in cluster api You saw some of the big names earlier. There are many more. I encourage you to come check them out So with that said i'm going to hand it over to joel and he's going to start to talk about why do we need the cluster api Take it away joel Thanks mike. So now let me know what capi cluster is. Why do we need it? Explain this i'm going to take you for an example of a small software startup that i'm going to call the awesome software company They've got this product team who's built an awesome product That's going to be hosted as a software as a service product on top of kubernetes their customers to use So for that they need a production kubernetes cluster to run the product So that they don't break production when they're making changes They want to make sure that all of their software changes go through a staging process first For this they're going to use a separate staging environment on a separate kubernetes cluster So that they don't break their qe process They're also going to have a separate development cluster where they can make rapid iterative changes Play around explore ideas and not break that qe process As the company grows they realize that of a near the kubernetes cluster Actually isn't all that useful for their product team They're going to need some supporting services and for that they're going to hire a platform team who are going to build those supporting services Things like monitoring and logging ci systems alerting systems these kinds of things Now because the platform team are also going to be developing software They want to have their own development environment so that they don't break their customer the product team And they're also going to want a staging environment too Thus maybe a ci cluster so that they can run builds for the product team As you can see we're starting to get more and more kubernetes clusters in this company and that's just two teams Now imagine that as the software takes off We've got customer coming in who want to run their the product in a different region Say for data protection laws, they need to run it within europe or within china Or perhaps The clusters are getting too big you've got thousands of customers running on a single cluster So behind the scenes the awesome software company have decided they're going to split that cluster in two and migrate some customers Onto a different cluster and mitigate some of that risk As you can see The number of kubernetes clusters here can grow rapidly And soon become very unmanageable So How can capy help with this? Well capy centralizes the management of kubernetes clusters By making a single management cluster we can manage an infinite number Of kubernetes clusters across multiple cloud providers from a single place Just using cube control No more logging into amazon and then gcp and then it's your to check the status of your clusters All our information is centralized Secondly capy automates the provisioning of kubernetes clusters This is something that used to be a very long and manual process with lots of tedious steps Now using capy you can use a few yaml files and then just wait Apply the yaml to your cluster 10 15 minutes later you will have a kubernetes cluster Thirdly automatic remediation As an sre You will often be paged for Small tasks in the middle of the night where something has gone wrong. You've got an alert Because your node has gone down It is very common for software and hardware to have bugs And so there are a number of reasons why a kubernetes node may stop working Capy has something called a machine health check that monitors nodes And when they go unhealthy replaces them automatically Which keeps sre's happy because they're going to get fewer notifications And are less likely to have to wake up at 3 a.m to replace a node Finally while capy can't automatically replace the control plane yet What it can do is automatically upgrade your working machines Say you've realized that you've deployed them as one instance size and actually you've not got enough memory Update the configuration to use a bigger instance type And using a machine deployment capy can automatically replace all of those worker nodes for you Now we know why we need capy. Let's take a closer look at how it actually works Capy is implemented via a number of custom resource definitions on kubernetes Custom resource definitions allow you to extend the kubernetes api and add your own custom types In capy there are four core custom resources Busters which act as a parent for all of the other resources every capy resource must belong to a cluster And machines machine sets and machine deployments which are all very closely related Machines are responsible for creating virtual machines that will join the cluster Machine sets are responsible for creating a number of identical machines Just like a replica set is responsible for creating an identical number of identical pods And a machine deployment, which is responsible for rolling out updates to the machines Should there be any changes to configuration much like a deployment rolls out configuration changes When there are changes for the pods When managing capy you're going to need something called a management cluster This management cluster is going to be where you will create the capy resources such as the cluster of machines And this cluster is a normal kubernetes cluster just like any other. It has its own control plane. It has its own worker nodes When you create a cluster on your capy management cluster This is going to create the shared resources that are required for the workload cluster This is things like a vpc load balancer for the api server dns records And you're also going to need a kubernetes control plane This is going to be responsible for managing the control plane of the workload cluster However, without any Worker nodes, you can't really run any work workload on your cluster But this is where machine deployment, which creates machine set, which creates machines will then create your worker nodes That allow your workload pods to run on your workload cluster If you take a closer look at the management cluster for capy, you'll notice that there are actually four sets of controllers You have your core capy controllers, which are responsible for things like the cluster and machine deployments and machine sets You'll have the provider controllers, which are responsible for the interactions between capy and the cloud provider For instance, creating an easy to virtual machine on aws There's the bootstrap provider, which is responsible for configuring those virtual machines to ensure that they join the cluster And the control plane controller, which is responsible for ensuring that the complex kubernetes control plane of your workload cluster is healthy at all times So let's take a look at those resources in a little bit closer And see how we can create one of these clusters The first resource you'll need is a cluster There's not too much on this Apart from some information about the shared networking and a reference to a pubadm control plane and an aws cluster The aws cluster that we're referring to is what is referred to as an infrastructure cluster This contains the information unique to aws about how to configure the cluster For instance, which region it's going to run When you create your aws cluster a aws infrastructure infrastructure provider cluster controller Will behind the scenes create the vpc The dns records low balances, etc that are required for the cluster Next we have the control plane And this is responsible for configuring how pubadm will start the control plane of that workload cluster For example, it tells us which kubernetes version the control plane is going to be running You'll notice here that this refers to something called an aws machine template This machine template tells the control plane controller how to create the virtual machines that will run the control plane For example, it's aws specific again and tells the aws infrastructure provider machine controller how to create the machine On this example on a t3 large instance with the given instance profile and sshk these four resources define a basic cluster With this you'll have a cluster. It will be functional. You will have a control plane But you won't have any workload nodes as i've suggested earlier So to create those we're going to need a machine deployment Which again references a machine template, but also a bootstrap config Tells us how many replicas we're going to want Or our workload nodes in this case at the moment it says zero it'll also say What version of kubernetes we're going to be running in this case version 1 18 2 The final part that we're going to need is that bootstrap config template This is going to tell kubernetes how to join the node that we bring up to the cluster so With all that in mind let's take those yaml resources and create a cluster a bootstrap my management cluster on a kind cluster that is kubernetes in docker Which is the recommended way to set up your first management cluster We can see if we get the pods that are running on this cluster That we have a number of cappy related pods running So I also have all of that yaml that I've previously shown in a single file here So i'm going to apply that to create the cluster You can see various resources have been created there If now we look at the right hand pane you can see it says that there is a cluster provisioning If we get that cluster take a look at it We can see down here that it's waiting for the control plane which was mentioned earlier And the infrastructure provider to be ready Now this process is probably going to take about 20 or 30 minutes So i'm going to cut here and fast forward So the cluster is now provisioned and we can see we have a single control plane machine started This is a default for cappy whenever you install the cluster It will come up with a single control plane machine and no worker nodes While it is a functional cluster, we probably want to add some worker nodes. So let's do that now We have a machine deployment already applied However, the machine deployment has no replicas But that's fine because we can scale it up really easily So now that that machine deployment is scaled up We see on the right hand side three new machines that are going to be joining the cluster Because we only have one machine running in our control plane at the moment our cluster isn't very fault tolerant If we lose this control plane machine, we've pretty much lost the cluster But let's scale that up as well So now behind the scenes what the control plane controller is going to do is scale up one by one a new control plane machine Join that to the cluster and then scale up the next and join that to the cluster This is done safely so that xcd does not lose quorum at all during this process now If we want to access the cluster, we're going to need to get the cube config I have a small script that is going to let me do that. Let's just run that now This just downloads a secret from the Management cluster and converts it into a cube config file Now what I should be able to do is get the nodes from that cluster using that newly downloaded cube config We can see at the moment only our master is in the cluster and it's actually not ready Let's just make a watch over here for that The reason that the node is not ready is because it doesn't have any networking at the moment The final step for setting up a cluster when using capi is to install the cni driver For this we're going to use calico. This will set up the networking for pod to pod communication within the cluster Once that is done Our master over here should go into the ready status you can see now also One of the worker nodes has just joined the cluster the other two should follow suit The next thing I'm going to demonstrate is machine health checking I've already prepared a machine health check example here machine health check is targeting the conditions of type ready on the nodes if either If the condition is in either the unknown or false status for 30 seconds The machine will be considered unhealthy and the machine will be taken out of service and replaced by a new machine We can also see here. We have a max unhealthy value of 40 percent This means that if more than 40 percent of the nodes targeted by this machine health check are unhealthy Then the machine health check won't replace any nodes. This is to prevent Broken clusters getting further broken by machine health check actions Let's apply that now and if we get that machine health check back We can see it's expecting three machines and currently sees three healthy machines Let's simulate a failure on this To simulate the failure. I need to jump through a bastion host onto the machine and shut down kubelet AWS cluster has an option to set up a bastion host for us, which is done So under this IP so I can use that to jump through to get on to one of the nodes Let's use this note one two two ten more one two two two three seven I'll shut down kubelet on this note and what we should see shortly Is that the health checks will start failing and this node will go into an unready state Let's exit from here And take a look at the machine health check logs You can see now the node has gone unready And what we should see shortly is that one of the machines gets replaced By a new machine that because the machine health check has deleted The broken machine We can see here that a fourth machine has joined the cluster Our not ready node should now go Away as the machine that is running on Will have been deleted See here it's gone scheduling disabled the machine has gone into a deleting phase The machine health check has now replaced that machine. The final thing I would like to demo Is that the machine deployment controller will actually update machines when we make a change If we look at the machine deployment We can see that it references a machine template here If we look at the machine templates We can see that I actually have two for the machine deployment j speed capi one md zero And the same with an x large tag on the end All I have done between this and the previous Is change the instance type from a large with x large instance So we can edit our machine deployment To reference the new machine template, which should then cause a roll out of new machines What we should see now on the right is that we start seeing new machines being provisioned You can see this one has a different ID here compared to the previous ones because it is using a new machine set And you can see that there are now two machine sets For this machine deployment One of which has three replicas and the next has one machine deployment is performing that rolling upgrade for us This concludes the demo Thanks, Joel. That was a great demo and I hope everyone watching got a lot out of it So if you're excited about cluster api like I know Joel and I are Let's talk about how you can get involved with the project The first place that I would say to go is to read the book This book has information about how you can get started with the project It describes each of the components of the project and where you can go for more information I would especially like to highlight the quick start section As that will allow you to start up your own cluster using cluster api And you can do that with or without a cloud provider So if you only have access to docker or to a virtual machine host You could use that to create your own cluster locally and if you have access to something like a Google cloud or vSphere you could use those to spawn clusters as well So after you've played around a little bit You might have some questions and I would say come to the cluster api channel on the kubernetes slack This is a great place. There's always lots of people hanging out there Good discussions happening and if you have a question about the project more likely than not someone is there who can answer it And if if chat isn't quite your thing I would look in the cluster api book because there is a mailing list And you can join there and you'll get the same level of of interaction So if you'd like to get a little closer to the group come attend one of our meetings They're on wednesdays at 1700 utc at this zoom link It's a great place to come introduce yourself meet other members of the community and learn about what's happening with the project And if you have questions or concerns about how to use it. This is also a great place to bring those issues If you'd like to look at some of the past recordings and notes that have taken place Look at the cluster api book because there's a great link that you you can go and look at All the historical information that we've created So if you're really excited and want to go to the next step that I would say come check out the project Maybe propose a change if you've got an idea On github at kubernetes sigs cluster dash api is where you'll find the main project And then sub projects are prefixed with cluster dash api dash So you'll find all the providers and things like the machine health checker and other components Now let's talk about what's coming up in the future for cluster api Cluster api is currently in an alpha api version state, but we are rapidly moving towards a beta api This will hopefully come out perhaps later this year or early next year We're also always working on increasing the testing that takes place around the cluster api components As you can imagine, there are many different providers to test and lots of different scenarios that we like to examine So there's always room to add more testing We're also making some improvements to the cli tooling if you're familiar with kubectl You might be also familiar with cluster cto, which is our controller to allow you to interact directly with the cluster api components There's a little bit of internal refactoring going on to make the alignment of the internal apis more in sync with the kubernetes apis There's also a feature coming up on bootstrap failure detection that we'll be looking into to see how we can provide more early warnings about when a bootstrap fails And there's also a big feature request out for a pluggable load balance This would be a dynamic way to change the load balancers in front of your cluster So I hope you can see there's a lot of interesting work going on and there's lots of room for for more people to come on board and Help us out and maybe bring your own ideas So with that, I'd like to say thank you Here are a couple links that you could use The cluster api book is going to be immensely helpful I would start there and then come check out the cluster api project and examine the code And if you'd like to stay in touch You'll have our I guess twitter and mastodon handles here Please reach out to joel or myself. We'd love to talk more about this Hey everybody Does anyone have any questions about what they've just seen that's an interesting question Uh, how does hive compared to capi? Mike how familiar are you with hive? Nearly as familiar as you are I'm sure Yes, because I'm very familiar with hive As far as I'm aware, they're quite different projects. Um, I'm not an expert on hive at all um My understanding is that hive is kind of for like punching out clusters the same way But Hive You know, you've got the machine pull thing in hive that is like creates multiple machine sets in the child cluster It's it's a similar thing, but hive I think is just the management cluster part Where in capi itself It covers the whole lot. So we actually have some elements of capi within open shift. So Uh machines and machine sets the machine api, which is the team that Mike and I work on Uh, we have those elements of capi already in open shift and hive kind of does the management bit So if you take hive And machine api You kind of have capi If that makes sense Think that hive had as many features for kind of like multi cluster management that capi does But I I could be way off on that. That was just kind of my impression from what I've studied I can't say I've ever played with hive. Uh, I just hear stuff on the river mill about what it does Like I think our main interaction with hive is seeing, um, you know from the open shift side how hive is used I think, you know through terraform to deploy these things, but You know, I I think what I've seen from capi is that they're really trying to target end users who want to do this kind of A centralized control management cluster and then be able to control several different workload clusters from that And I'm I'm not familiar enough with hive to know if that's really kind of a central goal of hive I hope that helps like answer the question a little bit Yeah, I can appreciate why they might sound the same No, like I I've been working on the machine api stuff for like nine months now And I still not really sure what the difference between or not really sure what hive is like We've been working with them recently because they We're going to take over some of the stuff that hive does. I think and bring it into Open shift core Doesn't mean I actually know what it is It's it's a good point to attempt something for us to look into and kind of learn a little more about for sure Yeah, to mike's point a minute ago about who uses capi. There's a lot of people who will use it and I think, um Not sure if i'm allowed to say their name, but vm where they're using it Um to run their their kubernetes hosted offering where you ask them for a cluster and that's they use it under the hood As well. So it's there's definitely potential for I think A lot of people to take this on if they want if they want to sell kubernetes clusters or just manage it in their own company like if I used to work for a startup and we ran 12 or 13 clusters as towards the end and that was That was a lot of work Managing them via something like capi would have made things a lot easier To the point that joel's talking about too, you know, there are some big cloud providers who You know who participate with the cluster api project, but there are also other shops You know the one that comes to mind immediately for me is new relic A new relic they're contributing to the project, but they're a heavy user of the project They use it to manage their Internal infrastructure and it's you know, so I don't even think they're really selling a kubernetes offering per se But they use it for their own development purposes. So there's a lot of different users kind of coming to the table questions, yeah, thanks Awesome. Thank you so much michael and joel. Are there any other questions in the chat? Very quickly Been a long day for the room mods here. Yeah Yeah, all right. Looks like there aren't anymore. Thank you all so much


Hi, it's Fridget. Welcome to Above Live Channel. The purpose here is to inspire your spirit and to fill you with hope. Today, I'm going to be channeling a sort of a colleague, I guess you could say, psychic Debbie Ford. Now when Debbie Ford was alive, I wasn't, I'm gonna say this really publicly, a little bit embarrassed, not really aware of her all that much, and I'm not sure why necessarily. I just haven't studied or followed a lot of other psychics or mediums even early on in my psychic development and career. So I have heard of her since her death and recognized that she's done shadow work. That's kind of the area that she has worked in. That's what I am aware of. So I'd like to talk with Debbie and chat with her about the afterlife as a psychic and as someone who can connect with the energy of beyond herself. It would be interesting to see how, what her perspective is about the afterlife. Hello Debbie. It's nice to meet you. She says hello, Bridget. It's nice to meet you as well. She's very articulate. She's very put together. She is a bit fancy, very professional. She's got short brown hair, very youthful looking. She says, yes, that's, she says, yes, that's the great thing about the afterlife that you can choose. We can choose how we show ourselves in a form that would be recognizable and for you, it's important that I show up very professional and very in a space where you could potentially be inspired and identify. Well, thank you Debbie. Like my cheeks hurt so much from smiling, from her energy. Like she just feels very, like I just want to smile really big. Like she must have had a gorgeous smile, because it's just like really, really smile, really smile. All right. So I know that you died of cancer and that, that was a struggle for you to perhaps come to terms with the fact that your body was dying or that there was illness in the body, especially because you do shadow work or you did shadow work. Do you want to talk about that a little bit? What was shadow work and a little bit, just a little bit about that for everyone. I'm not really sure everybody defines it differently. You know, we all kind of put our own artistic take on things and our own perspectives on things. So Debbie Ford, how do you define shadow work? It's quite simple, really. It's the balance of the light and the dark within all of us as a human being, you encounter the contrast and because of that, there's instantly the introduction of a dark side or an underside, not an evil side, which I think there's often a misperception about that, but there's not the shadow or the darkness doesn't mean evil. It simply means that which is under or below or in the shadow of. It's not about punishment or having to fix something within ourselves or find that one place where we're not right and then once we correct that and adjust things, then everything else is better. It's not that kind of a thing. Shadow work is the willingness to show up and participate to fully engage with the human life experience. And not a lot of people are willing to do that because with the shadow work, there is a need to be at the ultimate levels of vulnerability. And while that may be a term that is in a concept that is more popular nowadays in self-development and the self-development arena, it was not back when I was talking about introducing the concepts of shadow work. And so I think it does mean something different now, but I'm hopeful that this new generation, there's so much more opportunity to understand at a level that the mind is able to understand about what shadow is and how it can help the human experience. And I don't particularly feel that the spirit of things is the light side and the human of things is the dark side or the darkness or the shadow that is referred to in my work from the legacy that I've left on the planet here. But rather, it's much more a way to understand the teachings, the learning of how best we can be better versions or aspects of ourselves. And I think that's really what everyone wants. Everyone wants to, I believe, be a contributor, make a conscious connection to life as a whole in its entirety. And that means that we accept some of the things that happen and occur in the experiences that we witness as part of the whole of our life. And we don't make something bad or good. We simply allow and don't put a judgment or a value statement on it, but rather give ourselves personal permission to go into some of these painful spots within our lives and to uncover or discover some very powerful attributes of ourselves. And because of that, I feel that the work that I began as a human will live on and continue to be supportive in the human context and meaningful, I think, to those who are in human form. And you guys may notice, so I'm sitting out on my back deck, and as soon as I start talking and connecting with her, the sun is like boom out, bright, super bright. Oh my goodness. Wow, okay. All right, so can you talk a little bit about what it is that you, okay, so I keep seeing Wayne Dyer as I'm connecting with you. Were you friends with Wayne Dyer? He says, yes. Dr. Dyer and I, yes. Aside from being colleagues, we were able to meet actually through Oprah. We met and we were on many stages together. So yes, I know Wayne quite well, yes. And here's an incredible, incredible library of work that is still relevant today, and that will continue to be, I think, in service to humanity. So how do you come to terms with, okay, so it's interesting. So here's the thing, Debbie, that I find interesting is that you, you were charged with or passionate about, purposeful about teaching about the shadow of things when, and working in the shadow with our own shadows, which isn't really fun work necessarily. That's not all the yay, rah, rah work. But you were charged with that or passionate about that and your life purpose. But at the same time, you weren't able to, I don't want to say accept the cancer in your body or accept the process of death within your body, but that there was kind of a level of ignorance almost about, and I do use that word intentionally because it's a powerful word. It's a strong word and I mean it very respectfully.  And I'm curious if you feel like that was part of the purpose of the reason why you taught about shadow work because it seems to me like shadow work would be exactly that, accepting the fact that your body has an illness and loving it and working with it through the illness and not just kind of ignoring it. Like I don't understand that like how it seems like such a disconnect but at the same time it seems like an irony, an irony kind of, an irony, yeah. But I think it might be exactly on point that your life purpose was to culminate in this experience of having this cancer and not being able to accept the fact that the cancer is there.  You know, was that a part of the learning for you or the purpose for you or the mission of learning about shadow work? Were you teaching about shadow work because you needed to learn about it yourself and this was the prime classroom for it? I hope I'm making sense. I'm trying to explain it in my human mind and process it in my human mind and be very specific and literal but at the same time also be respectful as a teacher. You're a teacher and many people looked up to you for the work that you did with the shadow and yet at the same time it seems like you died because of or in part of resisting the shadow. Do you know what I mean? Can you talk about this as a beautifully evolved spirit and you look and I'm connecting you with the butterfly and you look like a beautiful monarch butterfly, gorgeous orange of the sacred chakra and beautiful, beautiful loving energy and I appreciate you letting me stumble through my words and trying to connect with you again. I mean to be very much respectful and yet very obvious about this question because this is a big question. It seems like as teachers we are teaching people things that we have to learn for ourselves that are really important to us as spirits to learn and we're constantly just learning it at a deeper and deeper and deeper and bigger and bigger and bigger level. I had a coach once that said to me new level, same devil like that you would get the same lesson in a bigger way to challenge you more the more you grow and expand in advance. So can you talk about that a little bit, Debbie? Please help us to understand from this beautiful, beautiful spiritual teacher perspective that you have. She says first of all, thank you Bridget for your courage and sharing the way you did. It's a valid question and it's one that the mind needs to have an answer to and I understand that completely and yet there is an evolution to the cycle of life, isn't there? Where we do indeed learn more and more and we get more expanded we have more questions the small, the little questions that we seem to to answer or divert ourselves from grow and create opportunities where we have new questions and new things to discover but yet the truth is we are all teachers we are all teachers in some way and we we know that teachers must learn we must learn therefore be students, become students and this is something I know that you believe very much is that teachers are students very, very much, that is a requirement and you are right I agree, I am in alignment with that as truth for me personally yes, I feel as though many of the shadow side of self so much we talk about ego or the idea of the mind and our thoughts the powerful nature of our thoughts and yet I have spoken about fear and how strong fear can be as a motivator and also as a great deterrent and it shows as a protector as a fierce protector and yet it is something that keeps us so small and keeps us from knowing what our true power really is and that includes our healing power and our healing capacity and we are only limited by what we believe and in my experience in my life I was afraid in very human terms I was afraid I was afraid I felt as though if I accepted the cancer if I accepted it that it would be my fate and it was my fate but I wanted to fight as much as I could and the fighting of it isn't about being strong and pushing against it the fighting of it is about taking a stand and a place of acceptance and recognizing that the power of the faith in my body and healing is stronger than the fear of dying from cancer and in my human form I could not reach that point I couldn't get there and I'm sure many others would feel the very same way and it's not expected I should be really clear on this too Bridget it's not expected that we all get here we're not all going to get here so you're not teaching people about spiritual concepts and healing concepts with the expectation that they will apply them at the moment they need to apply them so that they will survive because life isn't just about surviving it is about being successful and happy and embracing all, all that we are given and gratitude and that's probably one of the biggest lessons that I've learned in my in my battle with cancer and it was a battle at the moment that I accepted it I turned to face it and I wasn't truly aware of the incredible power within me to live with it and I lived with it for as long as I could and focused on day to day as my body ached as I felt my body letting go and the deterioration within my cells giving up or surrendering and you know there's this gain that the mind plays with that this idea of surrender and giving up and you hear about this in spiritual context like just let go, let go and be free and that's a very scary thing to tell someone when they're dealing with an illness that in many cases is terminal in many cases will take their life but the place of power is in the duration the quality of the life that they have so accepting the cancer wasn't the same as saying okay my fate is to die from this this is going to kill me it wasn't the same as living with a killer in my body it was a call for a different level of perspective of understanding and of acknowledgement of the power of my body and the power of the presence of the thoughts that I was having and I had to be much more disciplined and aware each moment each day and make choices very consciously about how I would direct my life and that that is the place that I needed to come to in order to truly fulfill the purpose for my life and now I believe it's as you have mentioned and have spoken you know we're not that different you do shadow work as well you just don't call it that necessarily when you refer to clearing or when you refer to healing work and the truth is we're really not that different in those approaches and when push comes to shove and you're asked to really apply the lessons of what you have been learning about to put them into action in a very serious way that is when you are living your life on purpose you are on purpose not because it's hard not because it's easy there's no gauge of that how difficult or how gentle the process is it's not a direct correlation it's not a direct correlation but for me it felt as though you know we're taught to fight and to stand against to do everything we can to eradicate this evil villain from our lives is cancer and it's this intangible thing but so is energy energy is exactly that and spirit is exactly that so Debbie do you feel like you could have saved your own life you feel like you could have had a quote unquote miracle or connected deeper with your own healing power and worked with that and actually turned this around or lived much longer with the cancer I did I lived as long as I could I had wonderful healers wonderful friends and teachers and coaches that supported me and prayed with me and loved me and helped me and you know there was a great deal of time that I spent inside of myself and in bed and in places where I was very low and in depression energy and that is really hard to overcome that is worse than pain energy and the fear energy the fear of dying and the fear of my body not functioning for me the depression energy was worse it was so much worse because it was something that I recognized as shadow and yet I couldn't on my own by myself with all the tools and all the lessons that I've learned over all this time of teaching this overcome it myself what I did learn was that it takes a community and that reaching out and asking for help and sometimes not asking but having those friends that just keep calling no matter what and keep showing up no matter what no matter how annoying they get they keep showing up for you because they know you and they know what you need and they're going to be there for you to remind you to take a stand for what you need which is that self-care that level of ability to shift your thinking to shift for a moment out of that darker place of the depression the heaviness heavier state and just for a moment lighten into an energy of enjoying a cup of tea with a friend or standing up and moving from the bedroom out to the patio simple simple things but these are these are the things that really make a difference in those times and it's such a they're so minute they're so small and this is a wonderful opportunity to explain how to share how those really those true just small things make such a difference and the community of people who loved supported me and helped me and the healers that were I worked with and it worked with me and that prayed with me and I'm very I'm grateful for that that is something that I think everyone should have everyone should have that that people that the buzzword is tried to refer to as a tribe and I think it's really important to have that and that and and I don't believe that everyone does either you know but when I when I left this planet I know that I was loved and I know I loved hard and I was loved deeply and by my family and my friends and that I left a body of work that that I hope that can be gifted to others to help others grow to help them grow as well thank you Debbie wow wow you're very articulate you're very articulate thank you very very very much very much I appreciate it very much alright I should have asked for advice so do you have any advice for any psychics or mediums or healer types that you would give now she says keep doing what you're doing focus on where your heart is where your heart is leading you and don't be afraid to go into the spots that there isn't light where there is unknown where it seems like there aren't other people where other people haven't gone before don't be shy about that investigate all of your opportunities but most importantly follow your bliss just find your joy and really live life to the fullest just because you're a psychic or a teacher medium a spiritual guide it does not mean you are not human it does not negate the human process and the human experience so be sure to remember that and fully commit fully commit alright wow thank you thank you hey you guys this is Bridget at above life channel and we have been chatting with psychic medium Debbie Ford she's a medium is she a medium psychic Debbie Ford in the afterlife if you're a fan of Debbie Ford and you like her work go ahead and put in the comments some of your favorite work of hers if it's a favorite book or a favorite like interview or podcast or that kind of thing please try not to put links because YouTube will catch that as spam just type it out what it is that would be great to share it with others alright so I hope you've enjoyed our conversation today remember the purpose has been to inspire your spirit to fill you with hope because this this right here and right now is your life this is your life so live it just live it thanks for watching