Good afternoon, everyone. I'm Himmel, co-founder of CTO at Canopus, a startup based in Australia, so long way coming here. And I'm going to be talking about building an application visibility analytics platform for telcos. Hello everybody, my name is Thomas Graf, CTO and co-founder of Isovalent. I live on the other side of the world in Switzerland, where there is great skiing. Isovalent is the creator of Silio that recently graduated as a CNCF project. We provide Kubernetes networking, and I will be talking about application and network observability specifically for Kubernetes. Great. Before we start, can I ask how many people here are from the telco network operator side? Awesome, a lot. Cool. Let's get started. Let me start with a few customer stories. So there is a tier one telco I've been working with in Asia, and they have a problem with WhatsApp experience. The WhatsApp is not working very well, the customer experience is pretty bad, and customers are complaining, but they don't know actually why, why is that happening. It's very easy to change operators in Asia in a matter of few minutes, and the customers are churning, and they are not able to figure out why, resulting in loss of revenue. Now, there is another tier one operator who is complaining about they have a lot of traditional tools to measure all the network KPI's, be it latencies and throughputs and so on, radiometrics, but they got nothing to measure actual application experience, and when they're making some network changes, they don't know how it's affecting YouTube experience, how my YouTube has been working before and after, and we're helping with that. Now, there's another operator, tier one in Australia and one in North America who's wanting to understand what are the streaming behavior on the network, which applications are trending, Netflix, Prime, or local content, how many gamers do I have on my network, how much are they gaming, so I can craft streaming bundles with the plan, or I can launch low latency gaming for my gamers. By the way, now excessive gaming is recognized as a gaming disorder by WHO recently. Now, there's another operator we've been working with who is trying to, a mobile operator, who is trying to monetize their data with the ad tech platform, with the ad exchanges that are being run, or also trying to build partnerships with enterprises with financial institutions to do something like telco credit scoring or even fraud detection. So all this is happening to solve one problem in the telco industry, and that is diminished returns on massive financial investments on infrastructure, and 5G is a classic example. So let's talk about data. What do we need? A mobile operator needs to understand what applications are flowing on the network, what the end user experience is, and how is it changing when users are moving from one cell to another, while they're moving from one region to another one, and when I talk about application experience, I actually need to know the end user experience. I'm talking about resolution of a video. I'm talking about glitches in a shooting game, talking about conferencing dropouts or stutters in the audio while you're on a call. Not just the network metrics, but we also need to know the underlying network metrics and the radio metrics to be able to perform root cause analysis to be able to see what the anomalies are happening and why all this problem is happening. A fixed line operator needs to know what are the devices in the houses? Are the IOT devices behaving properly? Are they exhibiting anomalous behavior or launching an attack? Are my gamers playing on consoles? Do they have VR headsets? Or are they playing on PCs? And also building subscriber behavior personas, so they can work with the attic, combining that with a real-time activity. When I'm at the airport looking for a hotel's website, that's the right time to send me an SMS, selling me a roaming plan or send me an ad to buy discounted hotels. So all this is coming under applications, devices, subscriber behavior and network metrics and collecting all this data at terabit scale and in real-time is bloody hard. And why is it so hard? Terabit speeds, too many packets. We've been told repeatedly by the operators that deploying traditional DPI appliances consume racks and racks of space in the order of hundreds of servers, which is almost just unaffordable to track data plane traffic at that scale. The second problem is traffic encryption. Not just the payload is fully encrypted today, but the headers are increasingly getting encrypted as well with DNS over HTTPS and DNS 1.3. We solved this problem by looking at the behavior profile of the application, what the time series profile looks like, almost by developing like an ECG or a heartbeat of a network flow. So we are able to build machine learning models to identify an application and also their experience. And the third problem is this all needs to fit in all these different architectures. We are talking about distributed fixed line network, we're talking about cable network, virtualized CMTS networks, 5G NSA and SA. And there are restrictions on what could be deployed, what could not be deployed for monitoring these networks. So let's talk about how we took the journey over five years in solving these problems, focusing on the scale and the architecture one. How many of you have heard of programmable switches or P4 or Tafino in this audience? That's awesome. So the way we started to solve this problem is by looking at, okay, all right, the computer is very expensive. And we don't want to be relying on specialized hardware. So we took the white box way. And what we deployed, we used Tafino on a programmable switch. So defining a match action paradigm. What you can do is write a P4 program in a language called P4. And being able to use any field in a packet, match on it and define a particular action that needs to be taken for a packet or a flow. For example, I could, and this all happens once it's compiled, it runs at line rate at 6.4 terabits per second without any issues at all. So we are able to see actions like, okay, if you get this packet or a flow which you don't know what to do about, just send it to the computer where all our application or business app logic, which is classifying traffic, measuring experience, machine learning models, working needs to look at that packet. Or we can say stream time series telemetry, the behavior profile of that flow, rather than sending all the packets up so that our models can work on just the profile of the flow on the telemetry. Or you can say, I need to know application specific telemetry. Now this flow is a Netflix flow. I don't need all the packets of a 3-hour movie. I just need to know enough so I can continue to classify the resolution of this video. By just doing this, and while this application is talking to the switch 10,000 times a second, and that's very hard to be able to talk to a function switch from outside at that frequency, we were able to reduce, suppress 80% of the traffic and only had to process 20% of the packets in CPU, which gave us five times more scale if the solution is completely deployed on the CPU. So that's how we were able to build a terabit scale platform for analyzing traffic flows by deploying this machine learning models and keeping the telemetry collection on the P4 programmable switch. But there are a few issues here. The first one is P4 is very constrained in what you can write in it. It doesn't even have a for loop and there are also very limited arithmetic expressions that you can use. There's limited flow table capacity so you can't like suppress all the traffic. But the other problem is specialized hardware. We are dependent on a supply chain of a chip coming from Intel. And all this specialized hardware can also not be deployed in cloud native architectures in the 5G SEO world where you can't really deploy a switch and tap the fiber network. To solve these challenges, we started looking at being how we go towards the cloud native approach. And that's when we started next. But nevertheless, using this approach, we were able to build just in three rack units and just two servers, a deep analytics platform which works at 400 gigabits per second line rate and is deployed in many production networks. As you can see a figure on the left-hand side, there's a massive gap in how much packet processing you can achieve in programmable switches compared to the CPUs. So there's always a need to find the right balance. So the next we looked at how we can use an emerging technology EBPF to build a cloud native solution using similar principles as we employed here. And I'll let Thomas introduce why EBPF is the next star here. Excellent. Thank you. It's been very fortunate to have been involved in the creation of EBPF back in 2014. Before EBPF, the answer to software processing, for example, observability was typically something like DPDK and simply punt the problem into user space. And that was fine until containers came around, until cloud native started to happen. Because user space processing is really incompatible if containers consume kernel OS or system calls directly. And EBPF was an answer to this, that we gain almost generic virtual machine to do packet processing, with bounded for loops, with practically unlimited expression capabilities, ability to run in the kernel, in XTP flavor, even accessing the DMA of the NIC, while remaining completely generic. And that was very powerful to clouds where we could not actually make assumptions on the underlying infrastructure or hardware. That's why EBPF has become defining technology to provide networking and observability in the cloud native space. Great. Thanks, Thomas. Before coming to the EBPF while we were building the programmable switchway, we also tried a lot of different methods, which were for the packet processing, working in the CPU alongside with the P4 switch. We worked with DPDK for a very long time. While these applications were running all in the user space, we could take the fast path from the NIC cards and process all the packets in the user space using DPDK, NSRIOE technologies. The problem with that, we were massively dependent on a third-party library. We were dependent on also choosing our NIC cards, which worked with DPDK. And in some of the deployments where we were deploying as virtualized functions, there were host operating systems. On top of that were hypervisors. And then there was another operating system. There was a stack of operating system, which basically troubled in getting that performance you can never get. You can still get around it, but it's a lot of work. Plus you have to write very complicated code to be able to interface with an existing library. We also worked with another, which is a pretty cool library actually by Intel as well called CNDP, Cloud Native Data Plane. They took a different path. Either you can process all the packets in the user space, or you can do it in the kernel space itself, or create a fast path in the kernel space. And CNDP took the route of using XTP to get fast path access to the packets in the kernel space itself. But the similar problems, we had to rely on an external library and interface with it to write the packets. Now, EBP solves all their problems for us. So what we did is employ similar principles. What you see on the right here is XTP packet processing. What happens here, as soon as we get packets from the interface, using XTP, we make it available as soon as possible to the CPU before it gets to any of the kernels. When it gets available to the CPU, we run an EBPF program on it, which we write in a language similar C-like language, which means we have way much more flexibility in what could be written in terms of logic. So we were able to extract very fine-grained 100 millisecond telemetry and complicated telemetry, which we had to all do in our app containers before, while we were working with the switch. And we were able to share all that information with the app containers through the shared state called the flow maps, which provides access from kernel space as well as from the user space to be able to access that state. Now, think of it similar to what we were doing before. These instructions come coming from the user space side and telling what needs to be done to the packet processing. Now that's happening in EBPF and user space application is just reading what it needs to know. It's reading the flow attributes that are needed by the machine learning models, not entire packets. In the events when we still need to send packets once in a while, we can still do that using packet buffers to be able to send those packets using a ring buffer, shared ring buffer states to the app containers, but there are a fair bit of limitations there. That part doesn't really scale. We're still trying to figure out what's the best way to scale it. But we shouldn't rely on that anyway. There shouldn't be too much packets going on to the app containers. And this resulted in four key benefits for us. It gave us bigger and flexible flow states in the flow maps. There's no limitation that we had in before. We were able to put millions of entries there and share all that state. We didn't have to compromise too much on packet processing speeds either. And this fits beautifully into the cloud-native architecture. If a customer at a telco has Kubernetes-controlled architecture, they can run Knoopa's full system workloads on their existing infrastructure. So we call it run it anywhere without any hardware dependency. There were a few, quite a few, challenges moving to this model for us as well. We had to do a lot of work on the application for balancing and reducing the number of packets to the app, which means a more complicated logic, a lot of business logic had to be implemented in the kernel space using EVPF as well. But it's great because when it runs, it's guaranteed to run. And ultimately, we were able to hit scales of 80 to 90 gigabits per second per 24 cores and around close to 200 gig on a single server, still giving us pretty massive scale to deploy traffic analytics. All right, I'll then let Thomas talk about Cilium. Yes, great. Thank you very much. So we've already seen impressive use of EVPF for observability where observabilities gained from a middle box perspective, something box that you can deploy in the network somewhere. What I'm covering next here is observability specifically gained through use of Cilium and Hubble. Hubble is Cilium's observability layer, which is giving observability in any Kubernetes cluster. Cilium is EVPF based networking, service mesh, low balancing, firewalling or policy, and is actually adopted by the majority of Kubernetes platforms today, but it's GKE, Anthos, EKS, anywhere, AKS, they're all using Cilium underneath in some way of actually providing the Kubernetes networking part. In today's presentation, I want to specifically focus on the observability portion even though Cilium of course can provide a wide variety of use cases including SRV6, service chaining, micro segmentation, providing overlays, BGP and so on. We see network observability really having evolved from the old middle box stage that I'm all talked about in the very beginning to now two new stages. The initial one being using EVPF for packet processing and protocol parsing directly in the stack that will be the traditional observability. That's very much what Hubble is doing. We're using EVPF to do protocol parsing, HTTP, TCP, UDP, SDP, GDP, whatever it is. And we've now introduced a new way of actually gaining network observability using Tetragon and for those of you who have never heard about Tetragon and for those of you who have heard about it, you may be actually confused because Tetragon is actually runtime security. So how does runtime security play in here? Tetragon allows us to look at network data and protocol data at the socket level, so independent of any network packets themselves. And this gives us the flexibility and the ability to actually gain network telemetry without even parsing network packets. If the server of the TCPIP stack of Linux already does so. So we can, as we'll see later on, extract latency numbers. We can extract and parse HTTP data without actually adding the delay to the network processing itself. That's what we really see as and what I call out here as EBPF plus application-based network observability. And that really gives this compelling observability platform where we can have Hubble, which does inline packet processing and protocol parsing and Tetragon that can do passive telemetry by instrumenting the TCPIP stack or the networking stack of Linux itself, which all of container platforms are using today. And then underneath both data streams get essentially fed into our regular Prometheus and Grafana dashboards or visualization stack that you can run yourself. As the underlying technology, EBPF is used in both projects. So let's look at a couple of examples here. We'll start out pretty basic layer three, layer four, network protocol statistics, whether it's like DNS dashboards, whether it's TCPIP statistics, whether it is network policy drops and so on. You can visualize this over time, what type of float up have you ever seen, what sort of percentages TCP versus STDP and so on. And we can take a next step. We're going to go actually a lot further and start parsing HTTP and GRPC to understand what HTTP calls have been made all the way actually to extracting open telemetry data where instead of just seeing flow logs of actual HTTP calls or GRPC calls you can see span data which gives you a detailed tracing ability on how long particular microservices took to respond. We can go then forward and actually start looking at the distributed view of this all, how are microservices talking to each other, like Jane or hop by hop, what latency is introducing each step, HTTP level, TCP level and actually visualize that and correlate that way. For example HTTP response error rates, how many of my microservices are returning errors? How does that correlate to CPU usage on that note and so on. You can see all the examples here based on Grafana dashboards. And last but not least, we can then go really, really deep and actually look at advanced telemetry, figure out smooth and round trim times for example, like for individual connections, we can detect TCP0 window events, we can detect when an application is no longer receiving data for let's say 100 milliseconds and actually alert on that in real time in eBPF. So this rule on whether to alert is built directly into eBPF and can answer and enforce such rules with incredibly low overhead. That combined, so we saw a combination of both the protocol parsing aspect of Hubble, as well as the passive telemetry collection of Tetragon. The combination of the two is really powerful as end users of these dashboards or this observability data, you don't actually know which part is providing or fueling this observability it seamlessly integrated into the system. If you want to learn more about eBPF in particular, there is a fascinating eBPF documentary premiering this Wednesday at KubeCon where you can see and learn about the creation story of eBPF all the way back to 2014, how Netflix and Google and Facebook all sort of using it, how Isolvalent got founded as part of it and so on. And we have many interactive sessions and demos this week. You can find us in the expo hall. There's a Sillium OSS experience center where you can actually try out the dashboards that I've just shown you in interactive labs. And with that, I think we have a bit of time for questions. Thank you very much. Great, thank you. Also want to say I'm quite happy to do a real-time demo after the talk. Whoever is interested, just find me and we'll walk you through the real system demo. You mentioned that in this case with the eBPF, we can substitute the service mesh or what will be the evolution for that kind of things in order to reduce the complexity about the implementation for the service mesh. Yeah, so as part of Sillium, Sillium offers a service mesh that is using a combination of eBPF and Envoy. It's a side car free service mesh and it will use an eBPF-based set-up path whenever possible. For example, MTLS, multi-cluster routing, topology routing, all of that can be done using eBPF only and then for things like HB authorization, we're using an Envoy proxy but never a side car which leads to better performance that's part of the Sillium service mesh offering. It's on, it's on. What about security with the eBPF when applications are accessing something that's running essentially in the kernel? That's a very good question. That was the primary concern before eBPF got merged and we fought very hard for multiple years to convince everybody that we could merge eBPF into the Linux kernel. Today, eBPF is used to inspect every single packet going into a Facebook data center. eBPF is a very well documented security model that describes how the verification of eBPF itself works, ensuring that eBPF programs are safe to run, that they always run to completion, as well as the capability system that controls who gets to install eBPF programs. So eBPF is not open for everybody. You need to have particular system privileges called CAP eBPF to actually install eBPF programs. Any other questions? From your perspective and considering that today we are leveraging service mesh tools exactly like Istio, what is your perspective in terms of the pace to leveraging the different tools that today we have and then for the telco, of course, and then to replace to this tool. So I don't know for me is a kind of complexity. Yeah. And I think it is the way to the telco have to understand the way to evolve the pace. So I don't know from your perspective. Yeah, it's a great question. I think service mesh initially was very much adopted by application driven platforms where application teams had very high demands on what a service mesh would have to do, retries, circuit breaking and so on. Open telemetry. Telcos are typically coming to us and saying I want a bit of service mesh but it's usually a lot more networking focused with very clear performance indications and demands. My advice would be if you look at service mesh ask yourself first what do I want from a service mesh? What do I actually need? Is it just MTLS? Is it just encryption and I don't care whether it's MTLS? Is it layer seven observability? Is it multi cluster routing? Is it resilience for applications? And based on that a lot of customers will find that even Sillium alone will already be sufficient for that and they will be happy with that. And there are some certain use case and that's what we added in Sillium service mesh that was not available yet. The mutual authentication was one of them. Sillium service mesh itself I'd say is ready. The one feature that is not instable yet is mutual authentication which we released this summer that we will expect to mark stable in April next year. Also just to add to that from an application data analytics perspective that we were talking about you don't actually have to replace anything because that works out of line that's working on a copy of the traffic away from the inline network. So that could run as a completely different service altogether. Thank you.


Here are five science-backed tips to get you started. Become a timekeeper. Establish a consistent sleep schedule, even on weekends. This helps regulate your body's natural sleep wake cycle. Skip the nightcap. Alcohol might seem like a sleep aid, but it disrupts deep sleep, leaving you feeling drained in the morning. Fuel wisely. Avoid caffeine after midday and heavy meals before bed. Opt for light, healthy dinners to promote digestion and restful sleep. Create a sleep sanctuary. Make your bedroom a haven for sleep. Minimize noise and light. Keep it cool. Around 60, 60 to 7 degree Fahrenheit and banish electronics. Retrain your brain. Reserve your bed for sleep and intimacy. Avoid working, watching TV, or using your phone in bed. This helps your brain associate the bed with slumber. If you can't fall asleep after 20, 30 minutes, get out of bed. Do something relaxing until you feel sleepy, then return to bed. Lying awake in frustration creates negative associations with sleep.


A crucial few days lie ahead with respect to the Iran nuclear deal. Diplomats from Russia, China, UK, Germany and France have been going back and forth between Iran and the US, which is not a part of the formal talks in Vienna. Iran's foreign ministry said on Sunday that 97-98% of a draft agreement was ready, but three key issues remained that the West had not agreed with. Russian delegate Mikhail Ilyanov told reporters on Monday, �We are very close, but additional efforts need to be taken in the days to come.� Three key elements are still being discussed according to observers. Iran's demand for the lifting of sanctions remains a key point of the contention. After former US President Donald Trump unilaterally withdrew the US from the deal in 2018, it proceeded to impose over 1600 sweeping unilateral sanctions on Iran, targeting key sectors including banking and oil. These measures have triggered high levels of inflation, exacerbated poverty, and caused critical shortages of necessities, including medicines. Iran has demanded that the US revoke the 2019 foreign terrorist organization designation against the elite Islamic Revolutionary Guard cops. IRGC has an extended reach in Iran's economy and armed forces, and intelligence services and its commanders hold high-ranking positions in President Raisi's government. Iran has also demanded that the US provide stronger guarantees that it will not exit the deal again. The Biden administration maintains that constitutionally it cannot provide such a guarantee on behalf of a future president, as the agreement in question is not a treaty to be ratified by the Senate. A third issue is Iran's insistence that the International Atomic Energy Agency close its case regarding Tehran's nuclear work. The agency had claimed last year that Iran had not fully explained traces of uranium at undeclared sites. According to reports, this demand has been opposed by the US and the E3, which is UK, Germany, and France. On the 1st of March, Iran's official news agency IRNA reported that the possibility of reaching a deal was equal to the possibility of a failure. However, it added, a potential deal, if reached, would be composed of three annexes. These would include 1. Annex on removal of sanctions 2. Annex on nuclear measures 3. Annex on re-implementation plans IRNA also said that the US will not be able to join the JCPOA before verification is done. The potential deal will also include an individual and collective commitment to prevent any abuse of the snapback mechanism. The provision automatically reimposes UN sanctions if Iran breaches the deal. All sides have reiterated that nothing is agreed until everything is agreed. The crisis in Ukraine has also complicated matters further as diplomatic ties between Russia and the western countries have hit rock bottom. Russia, along with China, was a vital player in the talks helping bridge differences.


But what I want to do today, I have a rather difficult task. I want to try to show that the praxeology by that actually means the science of human action, but it's sometimes loosely used to mean the method that's employed by Mises and Rothbard and other Austrian economists in their work is quite easy to understand once you take note of a few basic distinctions. Many people say when they read the first or try to read the first 140 pages of human action, find it extremely difficult going. They say, oh, I want to go on to something else. This is too hard. But what I want to attempt to do in my rather boring fashion is to show that this is actually fairly easy to understand. So I want to start by making a distinction between concepts and judgments. A concept is an idea that we have of something. Anything that I'm thinking about, the object of my thought, for example, I'm thinking about this lecture, I'm thinking about particular people in the audience. Anything that I'm thinking about is a concept. Notice that a concept doesn't have to be about an idea. The concept is an idea, but it doesn't have to be about another idea. I could say I have a concept of this audience, but that would be different from saying I have a concept of the idea of the audience. So very important, because people will see a bit later how this can lead to mistakes, that to realize that when we're talking about concepts, such as the crucial concept, the concept of human action, we're not talking about ideas in our minds. The concept is an idea in our mind, but it's not about something in our mind. We'll see why this is important later on. Now, judgment is an assertion or denial of something about a concept. For example, I suppose I say this audience is larger. This audience is making me nervous, because there are so many people here. That would be a judgment. I would be saying something about a concept. According to one view of judgments, judgment is a concept that is two concepts, unified, that are brought together by is or is not. That's called the two names theory of judgment. That was very popular among some medieval thinkers. There's some modern logicians, such as Fraga, the great 19th, early 20th century logician, said no, no, that's all wrong. You shouldn't say that a judgment is just linking two concepts together by is or is not, that the predication is completely different from that. But we don't have to go into that now. The important thing just is to realize that judgment is saying something about a concept. And a proposition is expressing a judgment in words. So a proposition, judgment, or sentence, I'll sometimes use one rather than the other. But I won't be really making a big distinction between, but it's just important to realize that the judgment is saying something about a concept. Now, one of the concepts that we have is the concept of action is the use of means to achieve an end. And by action, we usually generally mean some kind of physical movement. It doesn't have to be a physical movement, for example. Suppose I say, all those who agree with me, please signify by remaining seated. Well, nobody stood up, so you've all agreed with me. So that's an action. But most actions aren't like that. They involve some kind of physical movement. So once we have a notion of action of using means to achieve an end, we can think about it and ask what's involved in the concept. This is, say, we can ask what, this came up in the previous lecture, what is involved in action? We're choosing, we have a scale of preferences in which talking to me doesn't rank very high, apparently. So we have to ask what is involved in the notion of how does choice figure into action? And we answer that just by thinking about the concept of action. We have knowledge of this concept. We have this concept, and we can figure out what's involved in it. So this is a deduction. We're deducing what's involved in the concept, but it's an informal kind of deduction. It's not, say, if you've taken mathematical logic, it's not something where we're setting out some kind of formal system and then coming up with proofs for propositions about the system, where we derive them through some kind of rules. At every step, we have to know what we're, understand what we're doing. We can't just carry out rules as we do in mathematics and figure things out just by mechanical application of rules. This has sometimes led to people misunderstanding praxeology. For example, one of the reviewers of Human Action was writing an American economic review and said, if Mises is supposed to be trying to come up with a deductive science of economics, why doesn't he just put all these propositions in the form of mathematical logic then we could see whether the deductions really follow. But as Murray Rothbard pointed out in a reply to this critic, that isn't the kind of deduction that's involved in praxeology. Here, we have to understand every step. Now, we can have the concept of action, which is use and means to achieve an end. But how do we know that there are actions? Mises has a very interesting answer to this, which I think is a quite profound one, philosophically interesting one. He says, we wouldn't be able to make sense of our experience without the concept of action. Suppose we didn't have a concept of action. Well, then we could say someone could see various physical motions. We could see people moving around or we would see just say as we watch, physical objects might move. We wouldn't understand what they were doing unless we had the concept of action. So if we don't have this concept, we just wouldn't be able to know what people are doing. And Mises calls action. Now, this is one of the key terms that always leads to trouble. He calls this an a priori concept. What he means by this is it's a necessary condition for understanding this part of experience. He's saying, unless we have the concept of action, we wouldn't be able to understand what people are doing. We would say if you saw people, say you go into this, imagine someone going into a store and someone is paying for a book by handing over money to the cashier. If you didn't have a concept of action, you wouldn't understand at all what's going on. You would just see someone, you would see various physical motions taking place. Someone would be handing someone else a certain object, but you would have no idea what was going on. It would just be imagine say you were looking at, you were a physicist looking at certain physical particles. You would just be able to describe the motion of these particles, but you wouldn't understand the transaction. You wouldn't understand the sale in any other sense than seeing that physical motions were taking place. So you have to have this concept of action in order to understand what's going on. So when Mises says that an a priori concept is needed to understand something, this is a logical requirement, according to him, is to say one more time, we wouldn't be able to grasp what's going on unless we had the concept. Now this isn't, this is a point a lot of people get wrong. This isn't a point about whether concepts are biologically innate. You remember there was a Descartes thought that we're born with certain concepts and the British empiricists such as John Locke denied this. They thought that we don't have concepts, all concepts are required from experience and this kind of dispute is still going on today. There are various people who claim we have innate structures in our mind. The linguist Noam Chomsky thinks this, the psychologist in philosophy, Jerry Fodor, other people deny it, but this isn't what Mises is talking about. What he's saying is regardless of how we got the concept, we have to have this in order to understand experience. One reason it's very important to distinguish this view that this is a logical requirement from saying a concept is innate is suppose we said that a concept is innate, suppose we said that people just have this innate structure in the mind or brain or something that they have to see various behavior under the concept of action. Then we could ask, how do we know there really are actions just because we were born with certain concepts, maybe they don't correspond to reality at all, just the fact that a concept is innate really doesn't give us good reason to think that it gives us access to reality. But Mises point is differently saying, look, we're able to understand certain aspects of experience and we couldn't do that unless we had the concept of action. So it's a priori in this sense, not in the sense that it's innate. Now, here's, remember at the beginning of the lecture, I distinguish between concepts, it was an idea of something and a judgment, which is a assertion or denial of something about a concept. So it's very important to, we have to distinguish between a priori concepts and a priori judgment. Remember, the a priori concept is one that we have to have in order to make sense of certain aspects of experience and Mises thinks action is an a priori concept. But an a priori judgment is something else. An a priori judgment is one that can be known to be true just by thinking about it. If I think about the a priori judgment, I can grasp right away that it's true. And it isn't, because I can see the grasp but it's true right away, it isn't open, it can't be overthrown by future experience. Once I've got it and I see it's true, that's it. For example, suppose I, let's take the judgment, Aristotle couldn't have been a piece of tissue paper. That we can think about, we can understand that's true. We don't have to go out and test it and try to find out, well, are there people who thought Aristotle was a piece of tissue paper? What's the evidence for that? We don't have to do that, we just understand that the proposition is true. And one thing, one reason I picked that is that examples, it shows another point about a priori judgment, that an a priori judgment doesn't have to consist of a priori concepts, although it can. For example, the one I gave at Aristotle couldn't have been a piece of tissue paper. Well, neither Aristotle nor a piece of tissue paper is an a priori concept. Neither of them is something that we have to have in order to make sense of experience. Aristotle, we learned about Aristotle and tissue paper just by looking at the real world and their empirical concept, they're not a priori concepts, but nevertheless, we can have an a priori judgment about them. We now come to another point in distinction. The great German philosopher, Emmanuel Kant, who I ran referred to as the machine gunner of the mind, distinguish two kinds of judgments. This is different distinction from this one. This is not the same as a priori judgment. He said, there's analytic judgments. In an analytic judgment, the predicate is contained in the subject. And what did he mean by that? Well, let's take the statement, all bachelors are male. Well, the definition of a bachelor is an unmarried male above a certain age. So if you say all bachelors are male, well, male is part of the definition of bachelor. So Kant would call that an analytic proposition because the predicate is contained in the subject. And so you can see analytic judgments are a priori because we can know they're true just by thinking about them. We don't have to ask, are all bachelors male? We don't have to do a survey say, oh, I found a bachelor who turned out not to be male. We just grasp just from the definition that it's true. And on Kant's usage, if a judgment isn't analytic, it's synthetic. So all judgments are analytic or synthetic just because he's defined a synthetic judgment as one that isn't analytic. Okay, now the logical posivists who were a group of philosophers in the, flourished in Vienna, early 20th century, had a different account of analytic and synthetic judgments. And it's very important to get how their view was different from Kant's because it was their view that was used to criticize the Austrians, but we'll see their view is much more open to doubt than Kant's was. On Kant's view, every proposition is analytic or synthetic because he set up the definitions that way. Analytic one is where the predicate is contained in the subject, and the synthetic one is anything that isn't analytic. So you see it's guaranteed, if you have a judgment, it's going to be either analytic or synthetic. But the logical posivist account is different. They said that all meaningful propositions are either analytic or empirical. And analytic proposition is, as they took it, it's quite similar to the way Kant did. They said it's analytic proposition, what they call tautologies. And a tautology is either a definition, part of a definition or a law of logic. And they took definitions to be conventional, meaning that people just got together and agreed on what the definition of something was. Suppose we say the four bachelor is an unmarried male. Well, that doesn't really tell you anything about the world, that's just saying people agree to use the word bachelor to mean that. Actually, that isn't that great a definition. I mean, we say bachelor is an unmarried male above a certain age. Well, what we say, call the pope a bachelor, probably not even though he's an unmarried male above a certain age. So it's very difficult to come up with precise definitions of terms. This is, I think, a problem with the logical posivist and with other people. Sometimes people will tell you, oh, well, what you have to do in arguments is define your terms. This is the key, people don't define their terms properly and this leads to trouble. Now, it's certainly right that people sometimes argue it cross purposes because they're using words in different ways, but actually very few words have precise definitions. So it's very, that advice define your terms really isn't, usually isn't worth very much because most terms don't have exact definitions so the advice doesn't help you very much. But to return to the posivist, they said analytic propositions which are topologies and the other meaningful kind of propositions besides the analytic ones are empirical propositions that can be either true or false and we have to find out by experience whether the proposition is true or false. For example, suppose I said Donald Trump will win the presidential election, that's an empirical proposition, we'll find out in November whether that's true but it isn't something I could just think about and see whether it grasped but it's either true or false. I would just have to find out by examining the world. So in the way the posivist had it, we have these topologies, these propositions that are meaningful but really don't tell you anything about the world and then we have empirical propositions that can be either true or false and we have to find out which it is by looking at the world. Now, the problem for the posivist is, which shows it doesn't apply to Kant, is remember on Kant's account all propositions are either, judgments are either analytic or synthetic while it's guaranteed that that's true because he's defined synthetic as not analytic so it follows logically that all propositions or judgments are either analytic or synthetic just because of the way he's defined synthetic but in the posivist view, we have all propositions or meaningful propositions are either analytic or empirical. Well, it's not guaranteed that those are the only two kind of propositions. How do we know that there are meaningful propositions that are neither, that there aren't meaningful propositions that are neither analytic nor empirical. It's not guaranteed just by the way the posivist set up this dichotomy between the analytic and empirical that all meaningful proposition fall under one of the two categories. So if you accepted what they say, they ruled out the way Mises proceeds in human action, they just ruled this out just by fiat. They're saying we don't even have to consider this because Mises claims their propositions that we can get knowledge about the world, about action just by thinking about it, but we don't have to test out what we come up with. Our propositions aren't, the economics aren't just empirical hypotheses that we have to test out. We know them just by thinking about them. So the posivists have ruled this out. They say, look, unless you say that all the propositions of economics or tautologies, in which case they're not telling us anything about the world, they're just conventions, they're just saying how Mises and others propose to define certain terms, unless they're tautology, and the propositions to be meaningful have to be just hypotheses about the world, but so what Mises says is just ruled out from the start, but we can see that the way the posivists have set this up is arbitrary because they've just said that these are the only two kinds of meaningful propositions, analytic and empirical, but they haven't given us any argument that there aren't meaningful propositions that are neither analytic nor empirical. Now, just to go over again, because I know this is a complicated subject, at least I find it complicated, an a priori judgment doesn't have to be about what's in your mind. It's, say, to give that example I gave before, Aristotle could not have been a piece of tissue paper. That isn't a proposition about something in my mind, that's a proposition about Aristotle, and the propositions of economics, when we're talking about action, we're talking about actions in the world, not ideas that people have or just what's in their minds, and the other point I think is very important is that the a priori judgment is true. Remember, it's a judgment that we can know to be true just by thinking about it. Well, if we can know it to be true by thinking about it, then it's true. So some people, they're not wrong to do this, but they're just using a priori in a different way, just use a priori to mean something that you come up with without evidence and then test out. So they would take a priori judgment just to be a hypothesis. Sometimes followers of the Austrian philosopher, Karl Popper, will talk about the conjectural a priori. Well, you can see this is not what we mean by a priori here because if something is a priori, then it isn't a conjecture, it's true. If it's not true, it's not a priori. Another point to bear in mind is a priori doesn't mean the same as deduced or logically deduced, although we can get a priori propositions by deducing them from other a priori propositions. Suppose I say, as we do in praxeology supposedly say, action involves the use of means to achieve ends and we can deduce a notion of a person's preference scale and then deduce various propositions about that. So here we're starting with a priori truth and then deducing other propositions from it, but just the fact, it wouldn't be enough to get an a priori truth that we have some logical deductions from a set of axioms. Sometimes in standard economics, the economists will set up models and then they'll have deductions from them, but they aren't a priori truths unless the axioms are a priori true. Just having a deductive system isn't sufficient to get you to a priori truth. This is sometimes a very common confusion. Sometimes people will object to praxeology. For example, David Friedman, who is a Chicago-style economist and libertarian is objected to a priori reasoning in economics and he gives this example. He says, well, in geometry, we have there's Euclidean geometry and there are non-Euclidean geometries and both Euclidean and non-Euclidean geometries are consistent set of truths derived from different axioms. So he says, look, well, if you wanna know which is true, you can't decide that just by looking at the set of deductions, you have to examine the world and see which one of the geometries actually applies to the world. Now, what's wrong with this objection is if we have to examine the world to find out whether either Euclidean or non-Euclidean geometry applies to the world, then neither Euclidean nor any of the non-Euclidean geometries is a priori true. What he's done there is confuse the deductions from an axiom with a priori true. So that objection doesn't work. And besides, he was unsound on Murray Rothbard and many other issues. That was supposed to be a joke. You have to laugh. Now, I now want to get to what I think is an interesting misunderstanding about what Mises was doing in his, when he spoke about a priori science of economics. And I find every near, I think practically, I think every year that I've been here and I've been around here for about 30 years, there are people who will always raise this point. They'll say, suppose Mises is right about his deductions, there is what he says about action. How does he know that this, what he's deduced applies to anything other than his own thoughts? How does he even know that there are any other people? How do it, maybe all he's come up with is a set of a priori truths about his own thinking. What is essential to grasp, and I think this is, is that Mises, although he had a very strong interest in philosophy, and he certainly was read much more philosophy than most economists, he wasn't, he was an economist, not a philosopher. He wasn't trying to solve the problem of skepticism or the problem of other minds. Say we have, those who've taken philosophy classes will be familiar with a kind of issue like this. Supposing, I think I'm now giving a lecture, but supposing I wasn't supposing, I was just a brain and a vat, and scientists were applying electrodes to my brain in some very unusual way, so I would have the experience that I'm now giving a lecture. Could I know that that's false? Well, that isn't a problem Mises was trying to solve. He isn't starting just with his own thoughts and saying, how do I know anything else? Economics is one of the sciences, and in the sciences, we take existence of the world for granted. Say physicists wouldn't say, well, we're looking at, we have various measurements that we're taking of the physical particles, but how do we know there really are such things as physical particles, or how do we know there really is a physical world at all? That isn't a question addressed in the sciences. Similarly, supposing say someone said, I think Austrian business cycle shows it's likely that the present US economy is not going to be able to sustain full employment for very long. We're going to get into recession. It wouldn't be a good objection to say to someone who said that, oh, but look, you haven't even shown there's such a thing as an economy at all. How do we know there is a physical world? This wouldn't be part of economics. So this, we see, this kind of common sense here where we just accept the existence of the world isn't something that Mises is rejecting. He's not talking about his own thoughts or just about his own thoughts. He's talking about the actual world, and he's not trying to solve the philosophical problems of skepticism. Now, I now want to turn just to a couple other points that I think are important understanding praxeology. Mises makes the rather striking claim that all action is rational. This sounds, when you first hear it a bit doubtful, and don't we know many irrational people such as I would certainly qualify by most accounts of rationality. But Mises has in mind a very weak sense, by weak, I mean, undemanding sense of rational. All that's required is that the actor believes that the means he selects will enable him to achieve his end. For example, we could imagine, say someone who has an enemy and say makes a little wax doll of the enemy and sticks pins in the wax doll, and he's hoping to harm the enemy. So we could say, well, that person doesn't have very good ideas on how to harm people. His ideas aren't very well supported, but what he would be doing would still be rational in Mises sense because as long as the person believed that that would help him attain his ends counts as rational. So because Mises has this weak view of rationality, isn't demanding in what he requires of rationality, he isn't vulnerable to difficulties about rationality that have been raised by behavioral economists. The behavioral economists, the famous ones, Tversky and Kahneman, they were actually psychologists who were winning, Kahneman received Nobel Prize in economics and there are others like Richard Thaler, Cass Sunstein. They've raised criticism, they say, well, people act in irrational ways and they say, economics assumes rational action, but people don't always act rationally. So they have in mind something like people make various kinds of logical mistakes or informal errors in reasoning. But I'll give you one example. Supposing that somebody would be willing, wants to buy a lamp and he would be willing to go 20 minutes to a store that offered the lamp $10 cheaper than another store. So he'd make a car trip of 20 minutes to save $10. Now let's suppose the person is thinking of buying a car and he wouldn't travel 20 minutes because another dealer offered the car $10 cheaper. So some of the behavioral economists will say, well, that's irrational because if it's worth it to you to go 20 minutes to save $10, then you should act the same way in both of these transactions. It doesn't make any difference what percent of the sale price $10 is $10 is $10, why should that matter? Well, that may be right according to certain views of rationality, but that isn't what Mises has in mind. He has just much weaker notion of rationality where it just involves use of means to achieve. And so as long as the actor thinks that's going to help him achieve his end, it counts as a rational action. Now in the time remaining, I wanna mention a couple sources of opposition to economics. People don't accept the way Mises and Rothbard practice economics. They don't like praxeological reason reading, but if they do like it, they think it's wrong. And one source of opposition to economics, and this was one that the positivist held, was that the way we attain knowledge is by following the methods of the physical sciences. Logical positivists were primarily interested in getting rid of what they considered bad metaphysics. They said they're various philosophers who claim that they understand the world just by thinking about it. Hegel might be one example. I said, well, this is all wrong. The only way we can acquire knowledge is through the methods of the physical sciences. So they said praxeology is supposed to be deductive science of action. It isn't following the methods of the physical sciences, so therefore it's unscientific and should be rejected. And Mises, I think, had very effective responses. You can see this in his book, Ultimate Foundation of Economic Sciences. He said, this isn't a good way of proceeding. You shouldn't insist that the subjects, if you say what scientific, you shouldn't insist that you have some kind of preconceived idea of what scientific method is, and then say only this method is scientific. You have to look at what the actual sciences are. And if you do that, you'll see that economics counts as one of the sciences. And he thought the positivists should have taken account of economics. So it's rather interesting. Here, the positivists, logical positivists were criticizing him for being too a priori. They say he's not coming up with testable propositions, but he's reversed the criticism. He said, look, these positivists have an a priori idea of what science is, but they should really look at the sciences. They should be more empirical and look at what the actual sciences are. And they find that economics is one of them. Now, another source of opposition, not only to praxeology, but to economics in general, was the Prussian or German historical school. And what they said was that economics can't arrive at general laws, or at least not until collecting a very large number of facts and they never thought that they had collected enough facts to try to come up with laws. And the members of the Prussian historical school supported state intervention in the economy. And this was one of the motives for their opposition to economics. They said, well, if our economic laws, then these laws might show the measures we favor like tariffs and minimum wage laws wouldn't achieve their purpose. They wouldn't be successful. So the solution to that is to get rid of economic law. So they said, instead of saying, well, the economic laws as our measures won't work, they said, let's get rid of economic laws. That's, so they said, so that was one reason they opposed economic. And there's even more extreme version of the view of the historical school, which is called, means is called polylogism. And this is the view that all knowledge, not just economics, is relative to race or class. For example, Marxists think that knowledge is relative to economic class. So they would talk about proletarian history or proletarian physics as opposed to bourgeois physics and so on. And similarly, the Nazis thought that knowledge is relative to race. So that Nazis would condemn Einstein's theory of relativity as Jewish physics. So they said, knowledge is relative to race. And according to Mises, the motive for polylogism is similar to what he thought was the motive of Prussian historical school. That it's opposition to the conclusion of economics because what he pointed out was, although the theory of polylogism is supposed to be opposed to claiming that all knowledge, not just economics, is relative to class or race, in fact, the people who profess these views don't really put much emphasis on anything other than economics. So he viewed polylogism as another more extreme version of the way to attack economics by saying that there aren't general economic laws. Well, I think we're out of time now, so thanks very much.


guys my name is Brittany and welcome back to my YouTube channel. You guys in today's video I'm going to share how we are going to be doing Black History Month in our home school this February right now so I'm so excited you guys to share with you everything that we're gonna be doing all of the books all of the resources all of everything so you guys go ahead and stay tuned for today's video. So if any of you guys are new here to my channel again my name is Brittany I am a homeschooling mom to three girls ages 10 3 and 2 and I'm in my second year of homeschooling. You guys I'm really excited about Black History Month. We had so much fun in our first year of homeschooling for Black History Month. I really kept it simple but this year you guys I'm gonna amp it up just a little teeny bit. I actually have a plan for our Black History Month. Last year we really just did a lot of reading. We watched a lot of documentaries. We really had a lot of fun but I guess I just want to add a little bit more icing on the cake this year and I hope you guys can get inspired by some of these books that I'm gonna show you what we're gonna be doing and you can implement some of these things in your homeschool. So I have a list right here on my phone because you guys I seriously have serious mom brain like it's really really bad. Ever since I had my last daughter I really am having a hard time like remembering a lot of things. I'm trying to work on it as best as I can so I have some notes in my phone if I look down just don't worry that's why I'm looking down so yeah. So you guys the first thing I want to go ahead and say for Black History Month if you guys are hesitant you don't know where to start with Black History Month you can really just keep it as simple as just celebrating Black voices reading a lot of picture books going to your local library you can keep it as simple as that and that's really what I did last February to really be honest with you guys I really focused on Black history throughout our homeschool so it's not really a big thing for Black History Month just because we do it throughout the year that's really something that's important for me to allow my daughter to see Black voices just throughout everything whether we're studying science or history or wherever we are studying I always have like some type of Black voice so she's able to see it so yeah so Black History Month it's special because we do put a little bit bigger emphasis but it's really all throughout our homeschool so this month you guys I want my daughter to learn lift every voice and sing last year I started to allow her to learn it she didn't learn the whole thing I think she only learned the first stanza of lift every voice and sing however I want her to learn just the whole song lift every voice and sing so we're gonna be working on that and I'm really excited so right after we do our Bible time we will be singing lift every voice and sing I really don't know if my three and my two year old are really going to you know learn any of it they might just like hum the tune a little bit but for my oldest daughter Brielle yes I do want her to learn it and I really think that it's gonna be fun it's gonna allow us to have a little bit of extra music within our homeschool the second thing that I wrote down here on my list is that the focus for our Black History Month is going to be famous African Americans in science and in medicine after this month we are actually going to be doing our human body unit study in our God's design for life and I really think that it's gonna be a good Kickstarter before we get into our human body unit to focus on all of the African American influences in medicine and in science and I definitely think my daughter is going to enjoy that so some of the resources in the books that I have for us to do that is we are going to be using our and I know you guys see these all around YouTube but they are just really amazing but we're going to be using the little legends exceptional men in black history and then we're also going to be using the little leaders bow women in black history so I actually use these were only my these were my only two resources that I used last year as far as Black History Month and they were amazing they were great it was a really good kicking off point for our Black History Month so I'm really excited to use these however like I said before I'm going to be only pulling out and focusing on the famous African Americans that are in medicine and in science and I really think my daughter is going to enjoy it she love these books and I really think that they're gonna enjoy me putting them back out on our bookshelf now for my two little ones I have the little book right here which is called dream big little ones which is kind of like the same as these other ones however it's like in a board book form and it's so cute I love reading these ones to my toddlers and they're gonna be very excited to for me to pull them back out I did have the one that had the the men on it however I gave it to my nephew because I really feel like he's gonna enjoy it my brother actually told me he enjoys when he reads that one to him so yes so I only have the one for the women I need to go back and buy the one about the men as well just because I want my girls to see it influence within black women and men in in American history so yeah now as far as our read aloud for the month of February we're actually going to be reading roll of thunder here my cry and I'm so excited to read this book with my daughter and I know we're going to have some really really juicy conversations while we're reading this and I'm really really excited about it now as you guys know as far as our real outs I do allow my daughter to pick the read alouds for every other month however I picked it this month and I hope she enjoys this I really want to get her into historical fiction and I really feel like this is gonna be a good jumping point for us as far as American history we have not yet dived into American history for her fifth great year we will go deeper into American history however I think this is gonna be a good start and I really cannot wait to hear what she thinks her opinions and I really can't wait to dive in deep into this roll of thunder here my cry hopefully she loves it so yeah this is gonna be our read aloud for this month now some other books and other things I want to share with you guys is I have also the ABCs of black of black history and this is a new one that I'm adding to our library I also have the timeline from black history leaders legends and legacies and this one you guys was a recommendation from Tori from the Oglesville Han that was where I originally seen this one from I have a lot of these DK encyclopedia books however I'm so excited to add this one to our collection you guys the pictures in here it's beautiful it goes from the beginning to the end or not really to the end but it goes from the beginning of black history it starts in ancient times and it goes all the way as far as it can into present time so I really am going to enjoy using this book as a resource we have already pulled out this book because it's been an amazing resource for us as far as our geography study we've been doing this year which has been the amazing Africa the amazing Africa pack from the heritage mom block it's been amazing and this actually has been a great tool that I've been pulling in when we have been doing our geography study so I'm so excited about this book the pictures are beautiful and yeah it's just great so as long with us learning about or our focus on famous African Americans in medicine and science I also want to incorporate African Americans in our poetry tea time so our poet this year has been Maya Angelou so when we do our poetry tea time for this month of February we are going to be reading about Maya Angelou again and that's going to be like our arts for African American history so I'm really really excited my daughter has already read like almost half of these poems so we're gonna have to go back from it to the beginning and read some more of Maya Angelou's poems but I definitely I want to infuse this into our poetry tea time and I think it's gonna be amazing so yes I have this book right here and it's called poetry for young people by Maya Angelou so this is something we actually already started at the beginning of our school year for poetry tea time so I just feel like it's just gonna be a little bit extra special for this month another book I have that we haven't dived into and the only reason why is that I don't have a CD a CD player and I need to go to my mom's house and borrow hers which is hip hop speaks to children a celebration of poetry with beat and I'm really excited to use this book when we do our poetry tea times on Fridays this month we're gonna be doing poetry tea time every Friday hopefully I can stick with it I actually been doing pretty good with poetry tea time in our home school but I want to make this month's poetry tea time really really special so I need to grab her CD player so we can actually listen to the poems and follow along with it so I'm really excited to use this as far as like our art type of African-American history now as far as someone else we're gonna be studying for like the arts and for Fridays when it's gonna be our poetry tea time it's going to be Misty Copeland I have this really beautiful book called Firebird this is one of her picture books that she has made and it's amazing so we're gonna be doing this as far as our poetry tea time like arts and poetry I also have this book right here which is called American girl a girl named Misty and this actually just goes on the history about her life and everything like that I actually already read this one with Brielle when she was a lot younger however I think it's gonna be fun to kind of do like arts poetry study on Fridays just to kind of break it up I really want to give her like a good variation in this month of February now something else that I do have and I want to share with you guys which is a free resource from what is it called from puzzle huddle they actually have free African-American or black history coloring sheets so if you want your kids to just have like coloring sheets they have a whole bunch of them I just printed off a few because my daughter she loves coloring and even though not all these people are people in science and medicine I still think she's going to enjoy coloring I also have of course I have these which is the world of colors I have the markers and the crayons this is a perfect opportunity for us to pull these out from our homeschool supply closet I normally have them out but now we can use them even more and that is really just an additional resource that I have my daughter she loves coloring while I'm reading to her so I think that that's gonna be a good way to still infuse that influence in this month now another thing that I'm going to be doing is of course I do have to still challenge my daughter academically she is in the fourth grade she's an upper elementary and I am going to incorporate some writing and we're gonna be using this template right here so she can start writing some short bibliographies of these African-American people that she's going to be learning about and I definitely think she is going to enjoy it I actually have we actually used the same template last year she did an awesome job writing her paragraphs and I really helped I really feel like it actually helped her form her paragraphs and her more structured paragraphs by writing and doing these bibliographies last year and I'm really excited for her to do them again this year however I may go through her writing with a little bit more of a fine-tive comb I'm really going to challenge her as far as that we are going to have fun however this is going to be our main history for this month so I do want to still incorporate that academic standard that I have for my daughter too as well so you guys this is everything that we are going to be doing for Black History Month I really hope you can kind of take away how simple it is to incorporate black history in your homeschool this month so you guys thank you so much for watching today's video I hope you really feel an inspire and I cannot wait to see everybody in my next one bye


Thank you for being here we have an exciting announcement that we're gonna make in just a couple moments but I wanted to take a minute to introduce some of the folks who are here we of course have Mayor Murrow Weinberger pleased to have the mayor with us we have here Commissioner Scott Moody chair of our Electric Commission we have City Councilor Hannah King board eight we have Commissioner John Bayling from the Department of Environmental Conservation with the state of Vermont and joined by Lee Martin and Deidre Ritzer we have the BED team we're pleased to be joined by so many colleagues here for what is going to be an exciting announcement and I think we're gonna wait just a second here and then we're gonna go ahead and get started but we'll we'll want to be giving some room because here comes the subject of the announcement so obviously we're here today because behind us here is the first all-electric line crew bucket truck in the state of Vermont and about to go into service right here in Burlington thanks to a partnership between the city and Burlington Electric the state of Vermont and with support from the BED team in the community we're really excited to roll out this truck behind us I'm gonna give just a little information contextually about it and then we're gonna hear from some of our other speakers I wanted to note that a couple of years ago our line crew actually came to me and said hey we want to replace our tools that are fossil fuel powered on our bucket trucks with electric versions we're talking about pole saws chain saws and I couldn't have been more excited to hear that because we have our net zero energy goal here in Burlington at Burlington Electric we're trying to electrify everything that we can and to know that our team that's out there working in the community to keep the grid working to keep the lights on is thinking about this as well and having innovative ideas was really gratifying so we've made that investment we've been in replacing our our saws and chainsaws buckets pole saws with electric versions and now we have the opportunity to replace one of our diesel trucks with an electric truck and what that's going to mean is we have a vehicle here that is a 210 kilowatt hour battery for propulsion it's going to get this vehicle around 115 miles of range we think about the community and what the bucket truck is doing it's typically out in the community driving you know a number of miles but not not typically a hundred in a day much less than that when it's idling there's no more idling it's going to be a hundred percent electric so we're saving all kinds of fuel in terms of that it has a 36k wh battery that is power sorry a 36k w charger that's going to charge that 210 kilowatt hour battery it's going to take around you know six hours seven hours so we'll be charging it up overnight during off-peak times it also has for the bucket and the other systems a separate battery that is charging using a level two charger like you would use for your electric vehicle at home and so all the systems here are electric they're all going to be charged off of BED's a hundred percent renewable electricity which we're excited about and the other thing that's kind of unique here is we think about large vehicle electrification we've been electrifying lawn mowers commercial mowers in the city we've been electrifying sedans and even SUVs this is a big vehicle this is a vehicle that weighs a lot that's that's you know really doing a lot of heavy-duty work in the community and if we can electrify this there's all sorts of other opportunities that we're hopefully going to be able to pursue but we have to demonstrate the technology and that's what the exciting thing here is we're going to be able to put this truck to work very soon folks are going to see it around the community unique in its wrap it's got a net zero energy logo on the hood it's wrapped in the the white and green a little different than the traditional orange and we're going to be able to report out to other utilities to the community to the state how's it doing how's it working what improvements can we make as we move from what is cutting edge first-generation technology to second and third and fourth generation as we go so we're really excited we're grateful for y'all to be here today i'm going to turn it over to the mayor for some remarks thanks good afternoon everyone thank you all for joining us being part of this exciting announcement we're excited to have partners from the the state and city council here as well this is as hopefully everyone in the room knows really brunt has been moving aggressively to move forward and electrify everything and reduce our carbon emissions as quickly as possible this is a goal we have for the city the city team city vehicles and buildings is a goal we have for the whole community the we try to do this across the board as Darren described but it's not something just a bd i think it's important for for everyone know citywide when we have a vehicle or other piece of equipment that is coming to it the end of its useful life we are reviewing and whenever possible making a decision to electrify it we've done that not just here in bd but also in the police department the fire department the traffic team and more the parks department has lawmakers that are electric and has been using them for years string tremors chainsaws we even have an electric sweet street sweeper for the airport and i'm pretty sure we have an electric zamboni is right um and uh however there has been a um limit to what we have been able to electrify up until now when it comes to our heavy duty vehicles and heavy duty trucks and we are very excited to today be announcing what is easily the most awesome technology in our electric fleet vermont's first all electric bucket truck the um this would not have been possible without the integral funding support that we received from the state of vermont um and uh it's also not we're not even possible without the support of the birth electric commission we're here from scott moody in a moment which has for many years been a strong backer of this um uh this electrification strategy and our hope in with announcement like today is that when people see that it is possible to electrify something even as large as one of the city's largest pieces of equipment it really makes all burlington residents business owners think uh that we are we're in a new we're in a new era here we're in a new time when it is possible to electrify and power with burlington's 100% renewable electricity just about any piece of equipment and uh we hope to be a partner to burlington residents and businesses in doing that um thousands and thousands of time in the future as we as we move forward with this aggressive effort to combat climate change through electrifying everything so uh thank you again everyone for being here and with that i'll hand it back to you thank you mayor appreciate it we're going to hear next from the commissioner and i want to just reiterate our thanks to the state for the grant funding that made this possible and the partnership to the administration we couldn't have done it without them and so commissioner thank you very much thank you and good afternoon glad to be here one thing i want to know when my son was 10 i don't think you would have gotten him out of this truck so i hope you i hope you bring it to some elementary schools and that's a great great looking piece of machinery um one of the things i want to touch on obviously this is great for climate change i really applaud the city's efforts in in this regard the electrification of vehicles is huge for vermont you know the majority of vermont's greenhouse gas emissions comes from transportation so this is where we're going to get it done there's another piece of this that i don't think is as prevalent which has to do with with uh other pollutants that are caused by diesel so the reason we had the money to to give uh to burlington electric in this case it came from a settlement with the volkswagen corporation some of you may remember this in in 2015 they admitted that they had tinkered with the software in about a half a million vehicles to have a defeat emissions controls so think about if they had put that kind of effort into actually reducing emissions where we'd be but they put it into cheating but it did result in a massive settlement with a number of states the state of vermont's portion of that settlement came to 18.7 million dollars we administered that to something called the emergency mediation trust that they get there right environmental mitigation trust sorry um and my colleagues here dear to ritzer and lee martin are largely responsible for distributing those funds and we've used it for a bunch of different projects i was with them last fall at the first trash truck in vermont that's all electric uh we had a major uh school bus project and a bunch of those buses were here in chitenden county so we're making this move we're making this transition towards electrification of all vehicles but particularly these heavy-duty vehicles and that's very important so the emissions control defeat devices what it what it amounted to was they were selling cars that were emitting nitrogen oxides which we call nox 40 times the state level right by cheating and defeating the systems they're putting 40 times the amount of nox into the atmosphere that they should be nox is a highly reactive chemical it has direct health effects it triggers asthma worsens asthma it also has an interactive effect with things called pm-2-5 which is small particulate matter and with ozo and what this the impact of that especially in cities like burlington is an increase in childhood asthma it's a major impact on the elderly and on disadvantaged populations all across the country so it's it's very important that we start replacing the traditional diesel vehicles with these electric vehicles so i'm really happy to be here today i'm glad you're doing this keep up the good work and thank you thank you very much commissioner um next we're going to hear from city councilor hannah king and we appreciate as well the city council's support for this project so city councilor king thank you sorry i have to do the open the phone thing um what an exciting day the transition from fossil fuels to electric energy is a crucial part of addressing climate change the summer we've experienced catastrophic and historic flooding smoke from wildfires and closed beaches climate change is here and we need everyone to be working towards a more sustainable energy future this all electric bucket trucks that's an example that transcends city limits and signifies more than a technological advancement it's a statement of intent today is yet and yet again another example of brollington's ability to be a leader on our climate and not zero goals thank you to the state of vermont the entire brollington electric team and the mayor for making today possible and last but not least in our speaker lineup uh is our line worker kieron canavan who is going to be driving this truck around the community uh and who i i should mention does a really great uh job with something we call powertown which is a little safety exhibit that we have where school groups can come in and learn about all the ways to keep safe and i'm excited that in the next iteration of that that the students who come in and and see the truck bay here and see powertown i might be able to see this truck as well so kieron take it away thank you um i'm really excited about this addition to our fleet um i still can't get over how quiet and smooth it is driving around it's kind of a surreal experience for such a large vehicle um but i'm really uh um happy and proud to be one of the individuals demonstrating this technology in brollington and i think it's going to be a great uh teaching tool when we're out interacting with the public thank you thanks kieron so i think with that uh we'd be glad to take any questions folks have so having to charge a first six hours could be a little difficult but if you in the future do you and azure have separate tasks and you know one will possibly be charging when you get yeah so i think for for storm coverage in brollington i think we're going to be good with this truck and with the remainder of our fleet one thing that i've been thinking about is you know we do mutual aid where we send a truck outside of brollington to help with storm and you know recovery uh sometimes we do that in vermont some occasionally we do it outside of vermont right now i don't think we would send this vehicle on a mutual aid trip particularly outside of vermont my hope is in the future range is improved charging infrastructure is more uh available and that there are options where we could have a vehicle like this that would be able to go on mutual aid so this vehicle is primarily going to be servicing the city and it's a great vehicle to do that but my hope is is the technology advances will have that capability as well to think about sending an all electric bucket truck on a mutual aid trip what about down the line a truck that can then put some energy back into the grid as it's driving around is it capable or are we going to wait it's a great question um you know we're not contemplating that initially with this vehicle but you think about you know i said 210 kilowatt hour battery that's uh that's a significant battery that's that's roughly double what a typical EV would have for propulsion so if there were opportunities in the future to install the type of charging infrastructure you would need where it's it's bi-directional uh you couldn't vision a scenario where a truck like this might be able to contribute to peak demand needs you know for does that with the f-150 lightning you have to buy a special charger there's other oems that are looking at that technology as well so that could be exciting and not just for this vehicle we think about you know we have electric transit buses in burlington and we hope to have more of those as we get more large vehicle electrification you could start to think about those batteries as being two-way batteries that are available to the grid in certain circumstances as well so definitely on deck for for future consideration. I don't know commissioner we um so i i think i should mention too as part of this grant we have a conventional vehicle that we decommission and take out of service um you know we try to run a reasonable investment schedule for our bucket trucks and for our fleet as a whole um i think we'll want to get a little bit of experience with this one before we you know purchase a replacement vehicle again we'll probably hopefully a year or two of experience under our belts and we're going to want to monitor the technology because i think just like we've seen with EVs where you know we have a Nissan Leaf out here that we bought for BED back in 2013 that has less than 100 miles of range and we have a Chevy Bolt that we bought in 2017 that has like 250 miles of range so i think you know by being an early adopter we're driving the market and that's important but i'm hopeful that we'll be able to look at this next time and the range is going to be you know bigger the efficiency will be even stronger so we're excited we when we replace a vehicle as the mayor said every single time we're going to be looking for electric technology so we're going to be looking at that with the bucket trucks with our own fleet with the lawnmowers with everything at BED and really i think within the city too yeah so i don't have a specific timeline for the next bucket truck but hopefully within the next couple of years we'll be able to add another one state funding would be helpful too but i don't want to speak for the state and federal funding might be available as well so what did the the brillington electric commission think about this was there anything controversial about this project too expensive or reliability was the commission behind you 100 percent or i don't know if i want to maybe put our commission chair on the spot here if he's willing no not at all i mean i think i would reiterate what the rest of the speakers have said in that i mean this is just a marvel of technology and we're behind it 100 percent and looking forward to it with the key around it here as a teaching tool and hopefully as an inspiration to the people of the city of brillington as we as we electrify the fleet all the way around the city hopefully you know this thing this behemoth here serves as as an inspiration where we're 100 behind it and very proud of it today thank you thanks god i should mention too that this vehicle with the state support cost birlington electric less than what a traditional diesel vehicle would have cost so not even counting on the operating savings from electricity as a transportation fuel being you know cheaper in many cases than conventional gasoline the capital investment here was less than what we would have had to put forward so this was strongly supported i think by the commission and council all the way through if i remember correctly and michael correct me if not i believe it was 722,000 roughly is that that includes the transportation you get here 721 change 722 with the transportation cost right i think you're gonna be looking at you know more roughly like half of that cost or maybe a little less than half depending on you know which vehicle you're getting so there there was a premium here the grant funding helped offset the premium hopefully as the technology evolves the premium will be less as well any other questions we can answer if not i think mike am i correct that we're going to do a little bucket demonstration right it's going to take it outside and take it up all right thanks everybody and we'll look forward to seeing that happen right suiting up over here so