This is Jeff Deist and you're listening to the Human Action Podcast. Ladies and gentlemen, welcome back to week two of our foray through Human Action here on the Human Action Podcast. Now for some of you who had the opportunity to listen last week with Dr. Sean Rittenauer, we sort of went through some background on the book itself, when it was written, how it was written, how it came to be written, Mises' motivations, and we also tried to get some of you interested in getting this book into your personal collection, whether via audio book or Kindle or in physical form. And again, we will provide the links to where you can purchase this book either in hardcover or very inexpensive softcover on our website and use the code HA-POD, that's short for Human Action Podcast, and you'll get a $5 discount on either. And frankly, I think even the hardcover is only $20 before the $5, the softcover is very, very inexpensive. And this is a book, I think if you make it through, if you get through these podcasts and develop an interest in it, it's one of those books that you want to own in physical form. It's not something that you just want to have on your Kindle because it really is one of those seminal rare books that could change your life. So that said, as discussed last week, we are going to start this week with part one of the book, which is entitled Human Action 1, and that comprises the first 142 pages, the first seven chapters. And we thought that there would be no better guest for this portion of the book than our great friend, Dr. David Gordon, who is in Los Angeles. And David, I was talking to Sean last week about how this is considered, I guess, the philosophical part of the book, part one, where some people, especially math-brained econ types, perhaps lose a little patience with Mises. Oh, yes, Jeff. Well, I think in the, for most economists, especially they study the neoclassical mainstream economics, there's very little time spent on issues of method on what the nature of economic method is. They just start giving them all the equations and models right away. So they're not used to this philosophical discussion. I'm very glad Mises put this in because this is my specialty, and this keeps me in business if it weren't for this section. I probably wouldn't have a job, so I'm very glad he has this.  In history, well, my PhD is in history, but all my publication or practically all my publications were in philosophy because it's much easier, you just have to come up with arguments instead of doing a lot of research. So it was, I'm very glad Mises, I think one thing very important, you'll come out when you read human action, is that unlike most economists or most academics today who are very narrowly specialized in their own discipline, Mises had an extremely broad culture. He was familiar with all the main areas of thought, and he could, he would assume that people would get all his references and know what he was talking about, and he had to sometimes decide, he would get the side discussions on where he'd give his opinions on all sorts of philosophical issues. So I think if you're studying economics, say in your regular university course, you won't be used to this, but once you get used to it, once you see that the ideas aren't really that hard to understand, they're really commonsensical ideas. Then once you get the main points, you can just keep going over and over the text and you'll always come up with new stuff, but you'll be able to understand the basics pretty much right away. And of course, for purposes of our discussion, we are using the Scholars Edition, which was published by the Mises Institute in 1998, but originally published by Mises in 1949, and that includes an introduction written by him that same year, a publication, David. And I noticed a couple of things you alluded to earlier. First of all, he points out that economics is the youngest of the social sciences, by which I think really for well into the 20th century, it was scarcely considered a standalone discipline, as Sean Rittenauer and I discussed last week. Also, I noticed in the introduction, he gets in a little dig, I believe, against the economic trends of his time in that profession where he says, in the introduction where he says, one must study the laws of human action and social cooperation as the physicist studies the laws of nature. And of course, we're seeing today, for example, in the MMT movement, there are lots of people who just flat out don't think there are laws of economics. Well, I guess that was the people who don't think there are laws of economics at all. That goes back to one of his primary targets with the German historical school. And they, just like the people you mentioned now, they didn't like the notion of laws of economics, because if there are laws of economics, then they limit the power of the state to do what it wants. For example, there's one influential movement now the MMT, I think Modern Monetary Theory, MMT, and they essentially say that the government doesn't have to worry about having enough money to embark on projects. Say the government says, well, we'd like to, say, give everybody a college education, but then opponents say, but this will cost a tremendous amount of money. So they say, oh, we don't have to worry about that. All we have to do is print the money because the government doesn't have to worry that it's going to go bankrupt if it prints too much money unlike private people. Say if I see all sorts of things I want to buy, I can't just keep going into debt and buying them because eventually all the credit cards will max out my credit cards and they'll come after me. So they say, well, this doesn't happen to the government. So if you hold that sort of view, then you won't like the idea that there are laws of economics that would say you can't do that and you'll suffer certain consequences if you try that. So Mises was very opposed to that. Now, when he said you mentioned before, when he said the laws of, I wanted to connect two things. He said a little about laws. Some people say economics should be studied like laws of physics. He also quoted him saying economics is the youngest of the sciences. What he meant there was that economics has a different sort of law from the other sciences. The other sciences he thought were spinoffs from philosophy originally and they just became independent ways of investigating nature. But economics is a distinct discipline because unlike the other physical sciences, it doesn't study things from the outside, but it can study human action, action from the inside. We all act, so we know what action is and we can study that. And he thought that wasn't what was done in the other sciences, so that's why it's the youngest of all the sciences. So he gets into chapter one titled Acting Man with a bit of psychology and it struck to me that the psychologist and behavioral economists ought to actually take an interest in what he has to say here. So he opens really the book conceptually and as an aside, as Dr. Rittenauer and I mentioned last week, one of the beautiful things about this book is you see sort of his finest and fullest and exposition of various concepts, whether that's his money in banking or socialism or the origins of money or method or praxeology, all of these things have sort of culminated for him career-wise at this point by 1949. So if you only read human action and none of his earlier works, let's say socialism or the theory of money and credit, you would get the best sense of what he thought later in life and later in his career here. So when he opens with a chapter called Acting Man, you get the sense, David, that he has really thought this out and perfected it. So he talks about the idea that human action arises because we feel some sort of uneasiness and we sense that we could somehow improve our conditions around us and so we take some sort of purposeful action to alleviate it. Now, does all of this belong in an economics treatise or is this apparently not so simple as we think? Well, yeah. Well, the reason he puts that in is that he takes us to be action to be the basic concept of economics and he's going to try to deduce the body of economic theory from the concept of action plus a few subsidiary postulates. So this for him is not just some philosophical side path but this is the basis of the whole discipline and we can see this, for example, in say when we're studying theory of value, utility, he isn't as in classical economics just taking kind of utility scales as somehow given to people. You just start with certain scales and then you have them all out there and then you do various kinds of mathematical calculations on them but he tries to show how it's always action. We're always, in our situation, things are not perfect. There's always something we can try to improve our situation. We can try to make things better. If say things aren't going so well for us, we still have the question, how can things be made less bad than they might otherwise be? So we're always faced with choice and then from that we can rank the various alternatives we have and we would then choose the one that best enable us to relieve our uneasiness which would rank highest among our preferences. So I think it's a much better way of doing things than the standard way. He doesn't just jump into utility theory. He shows the whole basis of utility theory in action and how this is just a basic part of the human condition. One of the most essential parts of human beings is that human beings act. Well, so he quickly takes pains to disabuse us of this rational actor idea that still plagues economics today that human action isn't necessarily rational in the ordinary sense in which we use the word. But what he means here is that it's volitional. Human action is volition. It has a purpose to it. It doesn't necessarily mean that we are these rigid sort of rational economic automatons walking around acting in our best interest. It just means that we're acting out of volition. Yes, that's right. I mean, many people will contrast various kinds. They'll say, well, we could think of some people are very carefully calculating what to do where they're thinking things over very in a very painstaking way. Yeah, like Sherlock Holmes. Yeah. Yeah. And others are just impulsive. They just do whatever seems spur of the moment. What matters is just that you have some goal, some purpose. You think that there's a means of way you can achieve that purpose. So he gives cases such as people might take to be irrational in ordinary conversation. I mean, supposing, say, somebody just has an impulse. Mises was very interested in psychoanalysis. He knew Freud personally. Suppose somebody has some impulse that can be explained by psychoanalysis. He just feels like going out and killing somebody. So this counts as action as long as he has the goal, which is to kill the person. He has some means in mind to do it. So it doesn't matter what is the psychological origin of the goal that it doesn't have to be traced to some kind of reasoning process that how the person has arrived at the goal. We just know the person has a goal. He thinks there's a certain way he can achieve that goal. So that's an action and it doesn't have to be the means that he can be wrong about what will enable him to achieve the action. He could just have all sorts of some pretty crazy belief. Imagine somebody who thought if he bangs his head against the wall, 10 times that'll result in his winning the lottery. We would say, oh, that's crazy. He thinks that, but that still counts as action. He has the goal. His goal is to win the lottery. He thinks banging his head enabled him to do that. So that's an action. Well, he makes a couple of pretty sweeping pronouncements in this chapter. One is that causality is really our only suitable method for studying the world around us. I'm not sure that mystics, for example, would accept that. And he also basically says that praxeology is universal. So discuss these two and how he arrives at these. Oh, well, when he says causality, what he has in mind there is when we want to do something, we have to think there's a way that will enable us to do that. We have a goal. We think this will enable us to do this. So we have some sort of view that doing such and such will enable me to get that. So that's what he means by causality. We think something will produce something else. So I don't think he's not really assuming any particular analysis of causality just says, this is really how we get things. So the other one was... The idea that praxeology is universal. Well, he says that obviously most people haven't studied praxeology, so formal science, but the category of action and choice are ones that all people use. Everyone acts and has goals and means to achieve these. And then when they're acting in this way, when they're trying to act, they're carrying out, they're putting into effect the principles of praxeology that when he's going on later and showing how the law of diminishing utility is derived, that this is something that people do in their action. Unless they've studied economics, they won't know it under that name, but they'll be applying it in their own life. So it's universal in the sense that we all apply it in our daily life. We all use praxeology. It's just like the character in Moliere's play who said that he had been speaking prose all his life and didn't realize that people are using praxeology in their life, whether they think of it in that way or not. Well, I think it's an example of why you need to read this book, ladies and gentlemen, why you need to recommend it to others, because it really does give you a different kind of framework for looking not only at economics but at the broader branch of praxeology. And this leads us, David, into chapter two, which from my perspective is the densest and most difficult part of this section of the book anyway. It's all about epistemology. It is entitled The Epistemological Problems of the Sciences of Human Action. And this, of course, is where he really takes us into the differences between praxeology and history and social sciences versus the natural sciences and makes an important distinction about our priori knowledge, which of course applies to disciplines like logic, like math, like praxeology, but not to natural sciences. So, David, kind of tell us, what's our big takeaway? What's the core of chapter two here about epistemology? Well, one thing, Jeff, I say, you know, this is the best chat. This is the most fun chapter, actually, not the most difficult. This is the one that keeps me in business. This is my best one. Well, what he does there first in contrast history with the sciences. So, say, we have history. This is a particular event, like, say, you're on the phone talking to me or I'm talking to you, and we have all sorts of events. So, we can try to have not only list all the events, kind of have a chronology, say, this happened in this year, this happened in this year. We can try to have explanations of those events, say, why did those events happen? So, we have explanations of particular events. Then, on the other side, we have the sciences, which are trying to come up with general laws, not only say why did specific events happen, but why aren't there generally repeated patterns that we find. In physics, why is it that two masses will attract each other with certain gravitational force? So, we have attempt to find general laws. Then, within the sciences, we have a division between sciences that are concerned with general laws for particular events, trying to explain particular things that happened in nature, repeated things that happened in nature, and they're purely, what we call purely a priori disciplines. These give us things we can figure out just by thinking about them, such as mathematics, logic. They don't require, or they don't reference to particular events at all. And, Mises thinks that we can develop economics as an a priori discipline of this kind, just by thinking about action, what's involved in the concept of action. We can work out a priori structure that has to be supplemented by some subsidiary postulates, but once you put those in, everything is, again, figured out a priori. So, it's really a contrast between studying history, studying particular events. Economics is studying action, which is not concerned with particular actions, but just general truths about all actions. Mises argues that this can be studied just by thinking about action. So, that's what he means by a priori, from before. But when he means human action, or uses that term, he's talking about something different than natural phenomena. Human action is a different category. Yes, that's right, because, say, we're looking at non-human actions.  So, the golf ball is not thinking, saying, well, I've got to go this way, or maybe it will be nice to play a trick on this player and get this. I'll go into the sand trap. The ball is just following certain laws of physics, and if we're interested in studying those laws, we could only observe this from the outside, because the ball is going a certain way. We can't get into the golf ball's mind. It doesn't have one. But human beings aren't like that. We not only are making physical motions when we do something, but we have purposes, and we have means that we think will help us attain those purposes. We know this because we're acting ourselves, so we can study actions in different ways from the physical side. Now, I'll mention here, because I think it's a point of historical interest. This went against Aristotle and some of his followers in this way that Aristotle thought that, although it's true say that the physical bodies don't have minds, the concept of purpose still applies to nature. We can talk about things doing things in nature, doing things for a purpose. They're asked, or say, the way an acorn is growing into an oak, because that's what its nature is, where the nature would be guiding it to grow into an oak. So, Mises didn't like that idea at all. He thought, oh, no, this is all wrong, but action just applies to human beings. The nature we can't talk about, we shouldn't talk about nature as the purposes apart from human action. This is one point in the center where he differed from Martin Rothbard, because Rothbard was more Aristotelian, he thought, but he wouldn't have rejected this notion of purpose in nature. But Mises does, he's explaining the physical science completely different from human action that the only purposes in nature are human purposes. So, David, as he gets into this chapter, of course, he brings up what he calls the principle of methodological singularism, which is a different way of saying individual methodology, I suppose. And so everything you've been saying up to this point, we have to understand in terms of Mises is talking about looking at individual action, not collective or group action or aggregates, as we often see in econ. And he actually has a statement on page 45 of the book for people who are reading along against universalism. And it's something that's actually repeated not only at a few different points throughout this book, but in different writings throughout his varied career, this Mises in case against universalism. So talk about what he means here by the principle of methodological singularism. Yes, well, what he means there is that both you want to study action in the way I've been talking about, you want to know what is the nature of action. So what we do is we study, we just take any action you want. So you evacuate all the particular features of that action. What is the general structure that applies to this action as well, any other action? And in doing that, you're considering you're an individual, you're not a collective, it's only individuals and so what you'd be doing, this is methodological individual, talking, getting this a priori structure of action.  This will enable you to understand all actions because you're not concerned with particular actions. You're concerned with general structure that applies to all actions. That's why in studying the general feature of an action, you'll be getting the structure that applies universally to all actions. Well, what I think about this chapter and I think about epistemology, two things come to mind. First of all, as you mentioned earlier, economics doesn't normally start with this stuff at all. It goes straight into graphs and charts and models and numbers. So it ignores epistemology, so to speak. And number two, David, is if Mises is right here or largely correct, doesn't that rest modern whatever we want to call neoclassical economics on a very shaky framework because modern economics is generally not in agreement with Mises here? Oh, yes, that's right. The way they do things, they'll just construct arbitrary models and then they try to test these and say, how does this apply? Is this confirmed in reality? Our model says such and such should happen. Then we say, does this happen? So Mises says, oh, no, that's wrong. What you would get there is you could come up with, you would come up with such and such as happened at particular times. Say we know that prices have risen or fallen in particular for particular goods at various times, but that won't get you any general laws. That'll just get you particular items that have happened on individual occasions, but you won't be able to get any general laws the way you get general laws in economics is to proceed in the way he does in human action by elaborating a whole structure of what's involved in the concept of what's involved in action. He didn't think there was a different way of getting laws. He didn't think you could just come up with empirical laws of economics. They would try to do in the neoclassical economics. They would say, well, we've got our model. Now we're testing it out so we can come up with laws. For example, French economist Thomas Piketty has said, well, there's a law that he claims based on certain statistical data that he hasn't. Well, he can show that the percentage of income going to capital will rise as capital is developed. According to Mises, you couldn't have that kind of law that you could say such and such has happened about the percentage of income going to capital. You wouldn't be able to get a general law from that. The only general laws in economics are praxeological ones. And thus individualistic in approach. I suppose you say something like Germany invaded Russia on June 22, 1941. So it isn't that there's a country of Germany act. There's no sort of collective entity. Hitler, the German leader, gave certain orders as a result. Brothers, people did the result was the evasion. But it isn't that the collective act is somehow some entity apart from the individual. Right. And this is also the chapter where he introduces the concept in the German word of vert free, meaning value free. That all of this, everything we're talking about in the epistemological arena here is observational. It's not normative. It's not based on any overarching values or something that this is purely scientific in that sense of the word, value free. Oh yes, this is one of the most important notions in Mises' whole way of looking at economics, is that in economics we're studying the values people have, the subjective values that we're trying to explain by the terms of the values people have, their preferences. But in doing that, we're making scientific assertions about people's values. We're not imposing our own values or going on our own, based on our own values. It isn't safe. We know that Mises like the free market. So he's going to say, well, I like the free market. So I'm going to come up with a science that supports the free market. A Marxist economist could say, I don't like the free market. So I want to help the proletariat. I'm going to come up with a science that will help them based on my values. Now the view that many people have that Mises is irrational, is a revolt against reason, is that people don't think there are objective science in this way. They say all that we have is particular value systems and people will be trying to support. This is particularly true in economics. Some people say, well, you can always find economists on one side of an issue or another side, depending on what the values they have. Mises said, no, no, this is right. It is certainly the case that the conclusions he comes up with on the basis of his analysis will support the free market, but that doesn't rest on his value judgment. That's just a scientific result. So suppose we say, for example, minimum wage laws cause unemployment. That's a strictly scientific statement. So if you then say, well, I don't want unemployment. So I think it's a mistake to have minimum wage laws. That would be a value judgment, but it's based on the strictly scientific statement that isn't a value judgment. Minimum wage laws cause unemployment. And chapter three is, in fact, entitled economics and the revolt against reason. And this is where, as you just now alluded to, he gets into this concept of polylogism. So what is polylogism? And why does Mises devote a chapter, albeit a rather brief chapter, to polylogism? Well, as I mentioned, talking about the basic concept that he's giving in the whole book in particular in these first seven chapters is that we have an a priori science of human action. This is the basis of economics. So this isn't going to be that big a claim if it turns out that there are different groups that have different ways of reasoning. Suppose somebody said, well, you know, you say there's an a priori structure of human reason that's universal, but in fact, that's not right. There are different classes. Workers, proletarians have a different logic from capitalists. There are different racial groups that have different logic. People have different ways of reasoning depending on what historical era they're living in.  So he naturally argues against that, and he says, no, no, if you people really reason in the same way these concepts are universal, that he's talking about, of course, people have very different beliefs about things that's better in all sorts of ways, but the structure of action is still the same. Universally say we look at their societies very different from our own. We'll still find people are acting people have goals and their have means to attain these goals. And he's very critical of theories that were popular around the time he was running in their still. There's no people who hold these today that say human beings really don't act on the basis of reason in the sense of having goals and trying to achieve them. Some people say human beings just act on instinct. They just kind of, I shouldn't say act on them because they don't really act. They just have feelings that inevitably draw them to behave in certain ways or instincts that make them do things. So Mises says no, that's wrong. One view that was influential when he was writing is that there's a primitive mentality that's completely different from the way people reason today. Of course, those uses come out of fashion.  Be canceled. Right. But what strikes me though about this chapter is the modern analogy to this idea like we'll speak your truth from your lived experiences. It sounds an awfully lot like the polylogism that Mises is fighting that we all have our own logic our own forms of reason. And of course Marxist in his day and still today want to attack logic and reason as mechanisms for truth finding because as we started the show with if there really are let's say objective laws to economics and that's bad for status and Marxist and people with grandiose plans to do things legislatively by fiat which might in fact violate those laws. So I was struck rereading this chapter the other night and it's short, this idea of your truth. There's no such thing in Mises's mind. And I think he would argue today that polylogism is a very dangerous mentality. It makes us think that we all have our own separate logic based on let's say our racial characteristics or our gender or whatever it might be and not a recipe for harmony in society. Oh yes, I think one of the things you find it's a phrase that I find really upsetting people say something like this is true for me. And what they mean by that is that they hold such a view that they take such a view to be true but that doesn't mean something is true for individuals in the sense that there are different realities that particular individuals have. Don't say that at your local Objectivist meeting. I'd say that much. You're going to get slapped. I want to talk about chapter four, the category of action. This is another relatively short chapter but really, really interesting. I really enjoy these cerebral short chapters.  He just brings this stuff to life and makes you think it's actually fun and invigorating to reread some of this stuff. So he starts once again, David, with this idea of felt uneasiness, that this is the impulse we want to change our circumstances. But that economics is about men. It's about people and action. It's not about things and stuff and money. Oh, yes. I mean, if you take money, if you just take it as a physical thing, say pieces of metal or piece of paper, bank certain marks on the computer, this is money only because of the way people take it, the way people are acting on the basis of giving meaning to these physical entities. So we're always concerned in economics with action how people, explaining things through people, subjective values and their use of means to attain those the ends according to their value scales and physical entities aren't significant economics apart from how they enter into action. And he's introducing the subject of the value in terms of ordinal preferences that we can't calculate values per se, but we can only understand an individual subjective or ordinal preferences. Oh, yes. This is, again, one of the key ideas in human action. He said, when we're facing alternatives, what we're doing is we rank the alternatives available to us just as we're considering over the time. Both I have a choice between I can eat an apple now or an orange. So I rank one over the other. It isn't that there are units of value that I can calculate in. There aren't numerical units. It's all that we're doing in action is ranking alternatives one over the other. When we talk about trying to relieve felt uneasiness, there aren't units of uneasiness that we can figure out. The orange will satisfy five units of uneasiness. The apple only three, so I'll take the orange. It's just that we rank one over the other. And I think it's important to remember that in this introductory part of the book, we are strictly looking at the individual. We're not looking at so-called catalactics, which is exchange between one or more individuals, market exchanges. We're just talking about what's behind praxeology. And so in this chapter four of the book, Mises introduces this really I think fascinating idea of action as an exchange. In other words, when humans act to alleviate this uneasiness because they imagine perhaps a better state of affairs for themselves, they're trading sort of one state of affairs for hopefully a more satisfactory one in that we can actually view this, we can view human action as a form of exchange even at the individual level. Oh, yeah, as you say, it's a very interesting idea. You said that, say, if you have your state of uneasiness, so you're in the state at a time, this is your condition, and if your action is successful, then you're better off than you were before. So you've, one state of affairs has been traded for another so you could take, I think an unusual way of looking at things, he's taking the existing state of affairs, the one that's traded for the one that's realized as kind of the cost and the result is what's been produced.  So there's what he calls a psychic profit you gained on the deal. So it's just like in it, say if you have an exchange with two people, you can say, I'm giving you one good in return for you're giving me something else so you have an exchange there and we can both profit. You can take exchange in this extended way of exchanging for an individual, one, your existing state, or some other state which results from your action. And of course, all of this implicates our next subject in chapter 5, which is time. And as Mises tells us, you know, praxeology requires an understanding of the temporal character of what human beings do. So David, tell us a little bit about time now. We don't get into interest necessarily in this in chapter 5, but we get into the idea of time in human action. For example, action implies a future that you're not going to be dead, for example. I'm planning on doing things tomorrow on Friday and my actions depend on me not being dead. So that's one thing. And the other thing is that I think this chapter starts to allow the reader to figure out that we have to economize time and we all understand this, I think, inherently by virtue of our mortality, but to understand it more concretely in terms of praxeology and then how that fits into economics would be to say, David, for example, that a person might prefer their dream house at age 40 over age 90. And there's a reason for that. So what is chapter 5 all about? Well, I think what he has in mind there is say we have, we were talking about earlier in action, we have a goal and we have where the means to achieve this goal. So the goal says we don't have it now, otherwise there would be no need to action. We already have a goal. The goal is something in the future. Say I want such and such. So the goal is in the future and then we have how do we achieve the goal? That would imply the process of achieving the goal. But David, let me interrupt you briefly. When you say we're talking about the future, that could mean something just as short as the next 30 seconds I'm going to walk to the fridge and get a Diet Coke. It doesn't have to mean a lofty or far away future. Oh, yes, that's right. When Mises talks about future, what he has primarily in mind is there's a temporal structure to action. The goal is out ahead and I want to get that action. In the future in that structure where you have the past of the action, the past is the time before the action the period in which the action takes place and then the realization of the action, that's the time as the individual is experiencing that. And Mises distinguishes that from time in a kind of physical sense, say, as we would study it in physics where it's just motion of some sort of going on, just in some kind of physical process, the time is individual to the after. So the individual, two actions of an individual are never synchronous, so to speak. They succeed one another. They happen one after the other.  He has to economize it. Oh, yes, I mean, we can't achieve all our goals in an unlimited way. We have, say, we have a period of 24 hours in a day. So we have to decide how, if we use the time to achieve one goal, then there'll be less of it to achieve other goals. Just as we have different goals that we want. So if I concentrate on one goal, I can't concentrate on other goals. At the same time, we have to realize also we have the time available to us is limited so we can only try to achieve a certain number of our goals. Time is scarce and has to be considered something to be economized on. I have to consider that if I use time in our, for one thing, that'll give me less time to achieve something else. And of course, what time gives us in life or the ticking amount of time we have left is uncertainty. That's chapter six. We don't know what the future holds and we don't know how the world and the physical world and other people around us will necessarily respond to different things. So chapter six, I think dovetails with chapter five, time and uncertainty are related and interrelated. So uncertainty, including death means that we have to consider probability. And that's really what this chapter delves into. It's interesting to note, David, of course, that his brother Richard was a very famous mathematician at Harvard who dealt in statistics and probability actually wrote in that field a famous text on this very topic. So I'm sure Mises, at least by osmosis, learned some stats and probability from his brother. What he says about probability theory in this chapter is very much in line with his brother's theory. But he modified the theory. Somebody didn't really change, but he expressed it in a non-mathematical form in some ways. He made it. Thank God for that. He made it simpler. And what the key thought here is that, as you know, in probability theory and mathematical theory of probability, they have various theorems. Say, if you toss a fair coin in the air 100 times, what are chances that you'll get 25 heads and 75 tails? So you can work out the answer to that mathematically. So what Mises can follow, his brother said, is that that sort of mathematical probability, which he calls class probability, applies only to classes of events where you just know, say, as an example I gave with the coin, you know the mathematical theory that will give me answers to that. But if you don't have repeated theories of the same event, then he thinks mathematical theory of probability doesn't apply at all. He talks about case probability. Case probability is non-mathematical. Well, as I say, what is the probability that Joe Biden will be the Democratic nominee for president? So there is a unique event. I couldn't say, according to Mises, well, the odds are one in 10 that Joe Biden will be the nominee or eight in 10. Because that, according to Mises, wouldn't have any meaning. Mathematical probability only applies to the general classes. So could I object to that? I said, well, don't people say that all the time? People, you can look on various websites and you'll see estimates of what are the chances Biden will win the nomination. But here Mises says we're not really using mathematical probability, even though we say we're giving certain figures. We're just giving subjective estimates. We have strong belief in something that we're trying to just express a certain belief. But the theory of probability doesn't apply. So this least important distinction between risk and uncertainty. Risk means cases where we can figure out what the probabilities are mathematically. And uncertainty is where we can't do this. We could just say something might happen, but we can't give mathematical estimates. And Mises takes uncertainty to be a pervasive feature of action. So let me just build on this a little bit. The first category, class probability. We could say, take a class, let's say Americans. The average life expectancy of an American is 72 years. Now, of course, we understand that that's skewed by people who might die at infancy. It's skewed by people who live to be 112. But nonetheless, we could come up with a number for the class. Now, that won't tell us how, you know, if we say it is 72, that's the average. Now, that doesn't mean that that newborn baby today is guaranteed living 72 years. We all understand that this is a probability for a class of people we've chosen like Americans. Okay, fine. Now, the second category, when you say, well, Biden be the next president. Well, there's not a class here. So it's the normal rules of risk and uncertainty or risk calculation don't apply. I'm thinking here of Nassim Nicholas Talib, who writes on this, the author of the Black Swan. So some people think that the horrible stock market and housing crash of 2008 was a Black Swan event. In other words, an event that was not necessarily foreseeable or predictable because there were so many potential factors in its cause. So help me understand where does a Black Swan event fit into this? What does Mises tell us? That's a very interesting question. I mean, Mises, I think, would view the matter somewhat differently from Talib. The way Talib takes it is he accepts the notion that probability theory applies to individual events. So he's differing from Mises. But what he says is that probability theories in German people use probability theory don't take sufficient account of events that are outliers. So say you have in, you draw kind of a Gaussian curve and you say, here's the chances this is going to have, according to probability theory, the chances are going to be 80% within this range. Maybe there's a 2% chance it could be something on the outside. So Talib says, well, it's a mistake. People using probability theory just dismiss these outlying events with Mises who say you can't use probability theory at all in this kind of case. So it's a bit, Mises is a bit rather more radical. Mises would say it's not, say when people didn't forecast the collapse of the stock market in 2008. It isn't that they forgot to put in this outlier in probability. It's that you can't apply probability theory to such a new event at all. Okay. Okay. So does that mean praxeological knowledge helps us understand at the individual level or to predict the outcome of some sort of act? But it can never help us predict quantitative matters. Yeah. Yeah, that's right. According to Mises, there are no quantitative laws in economics because there are no, in his constant action that enable us to have such laws. I could say, you have laws that you always choose your most highly valued action. But there aren't laws that will say you value your most highly valued action to say 1.5 times as much as your second most highly valued action. There aren't quantitative constants. So wrap this up for us. Chapter seven, the final chapter of part one of this book is entitled Action Within the World. And this chapter is all about utility. It's all about this praxeological notion of utility, which we might also call subjective use value of something. Marginal utility factors into this chapter. What's the key takeaway from chapter seven? This is very much along the lines of what we've been talking about earlier at that. When you're acting, you're trying to achieve your most highly valued goal. So you say, well, what will enable me to achieve that? Supposing, say you have a number of units of a particular good, say you have 10 cows. Of course, I had 10 cows. I couldn't know what to do with them. I'd be completely cowed by that. But only I have 10 cows. David, your neighborhood in Los Angeles is not particularly rural. No, it would be another failure there if I put in cows. Supposing I say, well, I would devote my first, the first cow to such a huge that would be my say I want to get milk for my family. So that's the highest value used. So then if I have another unit, I would put it to a less highly valued use because I use the first one would go to the most high value. So as I have more and more units of the good, they would go to less and less valued uses. So that's what's called the marginal utility utility of the last unit would diminish. So David, obviously this is all an exposition of what is already I guess this 70 or 80 year old concept now by now when he writes this book of marginal utility. So he gets into the idea here of utility is something that can't be measured. So action is choices between alternatives, but action does not measure utility. So talk about this idea that we that we can't calculate values. Yes, well, what he has in mind there is that when we say why we talk about diminishing utility means that this is not a psychological matter in this way that some people think. Well, they think marginal utility diminishes because imagine this case, suppose you haven't some you're eating ice cream cone. You have an ice cream cone. You'll feel good about that. But if you keep eating ice cream cones, eventually you'll get sick. So they think this is a psychological matter. You just have it eventually you'll get satiated. You'll have all the ice cream you want. So as you eat more and more psychological satisfaction, you will keep going lower and lower. And Jesus says, no, no, this isn't what's involved. What's involved is just purely ordinal choices. You're ranking one use higher than the other. It's not a psychological matter at all. That's why you can't be measured because you're just ranking one use over the other. Now, the other point I want to mention, which I think is very interesting, where Jesus introducing says this is a subsidiary assumption of possibility that the labor has this utility or leisure is a good. So what he means there is that we could conceive a world in which say you labor to achieve things you want and then you keep applying maybe your first hour will be devoted to what you value highest and you'll get lower and lower values. You keep laboring. But we can conceive a world is as long as your labor is giving you something you want, you'll keep going as long as this is physically possible. So he says this is not a world we're actually living in. Most people will want to stop laboring. They'll want leisure. So as the value of what you're using your labor before it goes down, the value of leisure goes up. But he says this doesn't have to be the case. Now, I find you know, in the years I've been teaching this, there are a lot of people who don't like this idea. One argument that's sometimes given again, it is not. I think it's an instrument. It's good to see what's wrong with it. People say, well, look, we don't need to have this extra assumption that labor has this utility because we know that since the utility of labor will diminish because labor will be used for less and less valuable goods. So it follows from that that leisure is going up as labor is diminishing. But can you see this is all wrong because it's assuming what is at issue that leisure is good to everybody. And what Mises says, no, it could be that some people don't take leisure as a good. So then even though labor would be going down as it's applied to more and more uses, it wouldn't be the value of leisure is going up because people don't take, those people don't take leisure to be a good at all. So if you argued in the way I was suggesting, you'd be begging the question. So that's why Mises said this has to be introduced as a separate assumption because it's one that could be considerably denied. So rather than thinking of labor as a good, we think of labor as a means, let's say rather than an end. So if we go to work, it's because we prefer that paycheck to the leisure we might get from foregoing the paycheck by staying home all day, right? Right. So that's different. That's not a good per se. No. No, that's right. We're applying it. The uses that we're getting from our labor would be going down more and more. And if we take leisure to be a good, then as we apply more and more units of labor than the value of leisure would rise and we, so you'd have to offer more money or more desirable goods to get the person to work more. Right. So we economize labor just as we economize other material factors. Yes. Yes, that would always be the case even if we didn't take leisure to be a good. We would still economize labor in that we would use labor to achieve our most valued goals. Yeah. And next time you have surgery, you don't want your surgeon to have been up 72 hours straight, for example, just to earn a little bit of the extra surgical fees or something. So I want to conclude towards the end of this chapter with, I thought this just amazing little point that Mises makes, which is that production is not what we think of as an active creation. We think someone like Steve Jobs and the talented people around him came up with this idea of an iPhone and it was going to be this really cool tactile thing that we hold in our hands and it was going to browse and do email and work as a phone and a camera and store apps and do these cool things and no one had really thought of this, so they had sort of created it out of whole cloth. Whereas Mises says, well, production is just transforming existing elements, arranging them, combining them in new ways. So this is one of man's methods, but you're rearranging, you're not creating. So what does this mean? How should we think of production? What Mises meant there was, I mean, supposing, say, someone came up with the idea of an iPhone and he didn't do anything, that wouldn't be production. In production, you have to take physical materials and based on your idea, you would transform the physical materials into the iPhone. Production is a process taking place in the world. It's your making things and we have just limited resources. It's just certain physical quantities of various things that we have to combine to make something. So ideas aren't scarce because an idea can be used by people over and over, but the physical process is something that involves scarcity, that we have to combine these means of production into a product. When you say it reminds me of Hans Zenhold, he was to say on the other side, when a bomb drops on a building, it doesn't destroy anything, it just rearranges things. So this is the inverse of what Mises means to think when production is your arranging thing. So Zenhold could say, well, bombing is rearranging. Well, that's very Krugman-like. We could just rearrange things and then we could all get rich re-rearranging them. David, that wraps up part one. The first 142 pages of this incredible book. I hope some of you have taken the time to embark on this course of reading it with us either for the first time or perhaps the second or third time. I hope some of you have bought it at Mises.org at our bookstore and again use the code HAPOD for Human Action Podcast to get a discount there. If you need to catch up, the first 142 pages are not that tough. You can get through them in a few sittings, I think. And next week, we're going to get into part two of the book, which is actually a bit short. That's only three chapters, about 60 or 70-odd pages. Part two is called Action Within the Framework of Society. Our guest for that is going to be Dr. Bob Murphy. It's going to give you an opportunity, as we discussed, to have experts and economists like David Gordon, Bob Murphy, and Sean Rittenauer and Pair Bailand and many others to help you get through this book, to help make sense of it, and most importantly, to help you enjoy it because you're going to be a far better person as a result of having read this book and it's going to broaden you. It's going to feel good like doing something difficult like going to the gym and it's going to make you more knowledgeable about economics than 99% of the population walking around out there. So all that said, Dr. David Gordon, thank you so much. I really enjoyed speaking with you today. Oh, thanks, Jeff. It was great being on the program. Thanks a lot. Thank you.


from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE. Cover EMC World 2016, brought to you by EMC. Now, here are your hosts, John Furrier and Dave Vellante. Okay, welcome back everyone. We are here live at EMC World 2016. This is theCUBE, it's looking at Engels flagship program. We go out to the events and extract the signal from noise. I'm John Furrier, my co-host Dave Vellante, our next guest is CJ Desai, who's the president of EMC E-T-D Emerging Technologies Division, one of the main pillars of the future of EMC. Now Dell Technologies, I can all come in together. CJ, great to have you back again this year. Great chat last year and before, thanks for coming on. Of course, happy to be here, it was great. So last year, we had an interview, we really kind of nailed it last year.  Last year, we talked about the emergence. We didn't really talk cloud-native, but you had the playground to essentially invent the future for EMC. And it was not just like this fantasy land, it was actually stuff you had to get done really fast. And you executed. So a lot of announcements, certainly so much product discussions, deep dives, great stuff. Give us the update. What are the exciting highlights this year you announced this morning on Keynote that you want to highlight to the folks? So John, one thing we said today in last 100 days, we refreshed all of our product lines to a major version. So just to give you a quick synopsis of that is we launched Scale.io 2.0, right? This is our software-defined block storage. We also finally made DSST available because when we bought the company, it was in a pre-alpha stage. Amazing technology, I talked about it last year, that here is what's coming soon and we finally shipped the product. So we are pretty pleased about it. Isilon 8.0 from Edge to Core to Cloud. Again, major release. Isilon added 1,500 customers in 2015. It is on an amazing growth trajectory. And last but not the least, ECS, Elastic Cloud Storage, is that object storage is doing very well and we shipped 2.x origin of ECS as well. And then the last thing which Chad announced, which was Neutrino, this is a cloud-native platform that allows you to run multi-services that is VMware, Photon, OpenStack, and few others. So, very busy times. And then of course, Nitro. Nitro is a huge announcement, but we haven't shipped that, it's in work, so. That was a secret project that we heard about. That's a secret project. So I talk about the dynamic because I want to highlight the importance of what that all means, really a great accomplishment we just laid out because when you talk about merging, we thought last year like, okay, we got to invent the future and the theme this year is modernizing. And that really is demand. How do I get started today versus some science project or incubating stuff over here?  What was the focus? What were the internal conversations this year? How did you get that done and where did you pick your priorities and what order? Yeah, so, great questions, lots of questions. I would say, when we look at these products, so I have Isilon on its eighth revision. So that's great. Data Lakes 1.0 2014, now Data Lakes 2.0, we announced Project Nitro. Isilon is on a great trajectory, scale out NAS, we are capturing market share from you know who and we love it. I mean, we always when it scale out and when it say archive type of workload, EDA, media entertainment, I would say we are the only real game in town. When people try to say, we also do scale out and there's some big complicated stuff that comes with those kind of things, it doesn't work. So, Isilon, just from a priority on your question, we just want to execute on Isilon. It is a great product, we shipped 8.0, we allow it to tier it to cloud from Isilon UI. Awesome, right? So, that's some significant functionality. That takes Isilon into the cloud era to get interconnected there. And then, you know, the things then scale out, architecture is always very hard to do when we have so many nodes and clusters, non-disruptive upgrades, rolling back to the previous version, we did BST 10 upgrade, I mean lots of features and having one FS in edge locations where people can use Isilon on a VM, on a commodity server, it just expands our time significantly. But Isilon, you kind of had two white spaces, I'll call them, one was you had the global namespace inside of a data center, you talked about that today, extending that, which is not trivial. You'd be interested offline to understand how you did that. And then the other, of course, was cloud. But we've seen some slides from David, well, first of all, for years, Joe Tucci's been talking about the waves. And today, or yesterday in the analyst session, David Goulden showed some slides, some S-curves, right? Business school, you jump an S-curve. You're the new S-curve, right? And you've got Isilon, DSSD, Viper, ECS, ScaleIO, and now VXRAC, right? We provide the software for VXRAC. But that's the portfolio, right? Isilon is obviously the crown jewel of that, driving most of the revenue. So we're seeing real time jumping the S-curve to your business. That's sort of how you're organized, right? Yeah, and Dave, you know this well, when EMC acquired Isilon five years ago, it was $200-some-billion business. 2015 was billion and a half. I mean, it's just phenomenal growth, double-digit growth, and we are doing very, very well. So on priority, make sure that we can keep the momentum with Isilon on elastic cloud storage, where you have economics much more favorable to public cloud. So, you know, I talked to yesterday an EDA company. They love ECS. They want to, I don't want to use the wrong term. They want to put all the stuff in that has become cold data in ECS. They're like, we are not going to go to public cloud, too complicated, lots of security concerns, and the industry, they cannot do it as much. So ECS was second, and these are not in order. Scale IO, you know, the product was, originally was 1.0, now we are 2.0. What Scale IO is becoming, I use the financial services example, a large, large global financial services is now running Scale IO in production. And my goal with these products is, get real use cases, define real use cases so customers understand, hey, okay, I got it software defined storage and commodity. What did I do with it? Which specific applications I run on it? Is it resilient? Does it have data services? Does it do non-districtive upgrade? Is it secure? What if a disk fails? Can I call EMC? Whatever. So, making sure that these products have right use cases, are deployed, and have happy customers, and then that it continues to. I'm intrigued by the organizational model, if I may, this sort of S-curve, you've got all the sort of steep growth stuff, and you don't break out the size of your business, I don't believe, you just gave us some metrics, but it's meaningful. Yes, this is not emerging as an emerging division with $10 million in revenue. Right, right, it's billions. And so my question is, as it becomes even, more than just meaningful, it becomes substantial part of the company's revenue, what happens? Do you continue to cultivate that, and maybe you can't say, but do you hand it over to Guy, or? First of all, I don't like handing over anything. Ah, I know, there's a good healthy competition going on there. We asked Jeremy, which keynote he liked better? He said he liked today better. Sorry, Guy. So, you know, I would say, that used to be the original model, now we are very on bimodal IT, or however you're going to look at it, and David had the blue side and the green side, and I'm focused on the green side, so we're not into, hey, when ECS matures, let's throw it with primary storage, it doesn't make any sense, right? Keep driving. So, yeah, I am doing unstructured data storage, so which is ECS and Isilon. I'm doing data analytics, which is Isilon and DSSD, and software defined storage, which is scale IO and ECS. So you have like three, you know, the Venn diagram looks like that, SDS, you have data and analytics with Isilon and DSSD, and then of course software defined storage. And you got the native cloud, which is different than the enterprise hybrid cloud, so essentially you could just say, you get the developers, basically. You have more of the DevOps piece, cloud natives. And we have EMC code, I don't know, David and John, if you have seen, those sessions are going fully subscribed. We didn't think so. So last year we had only one session and it was standing room only. This year we did multiple sessions, and it's still standing room only, because this is, how do I have persistent storage for containers? A lot of people have that question, hey, I'm trying out containers, don't know what that means. Microservices. Yeah, microservices. And tell me, CJ, can scale IO support containers? What if it's ECS? So every single code, which is in part of my team, all those sessions are going fully sold out. We released Viper Controller 3.0. We opened sources last time we talked about. Again, the same thing. Very well attended sessions. The message I'm inferring from this event, particularly as it relates to cloud, modernize your existing apps. We'll help you do that. But for the cloud native stuff, you don't have to go anywhere. We can help you with that as well. Business processes, vendor relationships, ecosystem, we have you covered. Because if you say you're doing it yourself, we have all the parts. You can give you all the parts, go party and we'll help you go through that journey. If you want to say you want to turn key appliance, we can do that too. So what Chad covered, Neutrino, if you have an open stack and you said, I just want to make it simple. I want open stack to go and keep running very, very fast. We'll take care of all the behind the scenes stuff. If you say, no, I want to take open stack with scale IO storage for my unstructured ECS storage. We can do that too. Well EMC is acquiring a new persona in the ecosystem through your group. That's the developers, right? It's a developer cloud environment because it's got the dev, as you mentioned, containers. All this stuff around orchestration, automation. This is huge and it's relevant. That's a great validation on the code side. Congratulations. Really highlights the relevance and validation to your group. And John, you know our history where we came from. So like the Verizon guy said today, he said, EMC has software defined. What does that even mean? Is it real? And they tried it out and they looked at public cloud options. They looked at our products and they're now in production. So this is pretty big deal. It's Verizon. It's not like some company that's small or something, it's Verizon. And the other guy on the stage today, I think it was Siemens gentlemen, IOT. And Jeremy interrupted and said, hey, is this real? And so you're seeing a tailwind with IOT, particularly in object, right? Because in object what you have is so many files and if you try to put it on a file construct or even a block construct or something depending on how you, it's very expensive. So at a web scale when you have, once you go north of 50 petabytes, object is the only answer, right? And that's what we are finding out where ECS is. When customers says we continue to grow four petabytes a month or whatever the terms are for IOT, that's when we find that there's- And you guys have the capacity optimized measure, but also you have tooling on top. Herd search, when you get over that scale, there's a lot of issues that need to be resolved. Metadata search, then of course they want encryption, if it's healthcare and all that. So I got a question, but I know Dave wants to jump in because he can give me a- I just want to clarify something on IOT. Is Isilon have a play there with a data lake or is it really, you're seeing the momentum with ECS? It depends on again the size of the IOT implementation. If you have many, many sensors, see the thing with IOT is if you want globally distributed data centers with a single global namespace, ECS is the answer, right? Because it can scale, it can replicate across the van, because that's what objects do. So you don't get the kind of performance that Isilon will give you, but that's what object is. We had a question from the crowd yesterday. I wanted to bring it up. I stated it for you because I knew it would be great for you. DSSD is the latest flash darling, period. How is it doing? And is right scale flash, rack scale flash, a recognized category at this time? That's a good one. All right, I have a feeling you came up with that question, but that's okay. It is, actually I wrote it down. But it came from somebody else. So first of all, it's a new category and new category always people scratch their head first. What does a rack scale flash means and this and that? I want to answer your question. For high performance databases and analytics, we are absolutely seeing the demand, right? And the question customers ask me is 10 million IOPS, dude, what am I going to do with 10 million IOPS, right? So when you really, really have that workload where your IOPS are critical, when you say that latency matters to me for end of the quarter or fraud detection or genomic sequencing, that I want to be able to publish results, that's where it matters. So that's where we are seeing the momentum. We shipped the product in March, it's May. Of course, we got few orders already and customers have purchased it after POC and we have a lot more coming. So we are seeing it's expanding, but I will say high performance databases, genomic sequencing, fraud analytics, real-time analytics. Well, this brings up the whole STS, or defined storage consumption challenge for you, which is there's now a variety of ways to consume the tech. So talk about that dynamic. How has it impacted the product development? How does it impact your view of as you put the portfolio together? It is a tough one. I would be lying to you if I say, hey, I can do it in my sleep. No, what we find is, first of all, STS or software defined X, we find that that initiative usually comes top down. CIO or head of infrastructure will say, 20% of the infrastructure should be on software defined X, networking, compute, storage, whatever. And we find that when they do that, then we get all this request, hey, do you have hyperconverge? What is your STS story? Do you do blog? Do you do file? Do you do object? We don't, you don't go and tell somebody, here is what STS can do for you. That's a tougher sale. It does happen sometimes, but a lot of times in customer environment, we see it coming from top down. Is that driven by replatforming initiatives or re-architecting? It's like, yeah, we have new generation of application. I'll give you a classic example, MongoDB as a service or this new with microservices. We don't want monolithic application infrastructure. We want to do something new. Why would I buy an expensive hardware product from us or somebody else? I want to go start small and grow big. So that's where software defined comes in. Something like DSST on the other end of the spectrum, very fine-tuned hardware with the software, shared storage and customer says, hey, if I buy this product, I can see my ROI clearly because I'll have real-time, my fraud detection on a credit card fraud used to take four hours, now it takes two minutes. And I'm going to reduce false positives, dramatically, yeah. So that's time STS does not come up because it's a whole different way. Well CJ, thanks for taking the time out of your busy schedule. I know you had a great keynote this morning. We watched, it was fantastic, great fun, but also you got the great messaging out. I'll give you the final word for the second. Nitro, we didn't talk about nitro. Yeah, let's talk about nitro. We got one minute left. Yes, Icelon, all flesh, no compromises on one FS data services. It's going to be awesome. Really, and what's the ship date on that? 2017. And what's it mean for customers? Because share the meaning of it. Why is it so important? Performance and capacity. So you get a lot of performance and capacity. And like I talked about media and entertainment, John Landau did a phenomenal job today. Or you look at EDA space or healthcare space. This is something they've been asking us for a long, long time. Icelon was always pigeonholed into, this is an archival scale out here. And we want to take it up a notch. I'll give you the last word. Share it with the folks who are watching who may have missed the keynote, or just want to hear from you. What is the message that you were delivering on stage today? What's the core message that they should walk away with from your keynote and your results and product announcements today? EMC is serious about software and software-defined storage. We are serious about open source, as you have seen with Icelon, SDK, Viper Controller and all of that. And we are extremely serious about next-generation flash. So as you modernize your infrastructure, whether it's Icelon, whether it's DSST with flash, we are there for you. All right, CJ, you're the president of the Emerging Technology Division, doing some great things. Here at EMC World 2016, I'm John Furrier with Dave Vellante, you're watching theCUBE. Looking back at the history of Dell, personal computers,


2nd Cavalry Regiment soldiers rolled from Rosebanks and left Covid's Air Base Poland. The Polish Air Base was the midpoint resupply for the convoy to the Baltics for exercise Saber Strike and a crucial one as the base served as the regiment's ammo transfer and holding point where two CR soldiers secured a simulated full combat load of ammunition. Major Jed Hudson, the support operations officer for the 2nd Cavalry Regiment talks about why the regiment is training to secure ammunition in route to the exercise instead of distributing at Rosebaraks. The regiment needs to be able to move on its own and sustain itself. We're testing our ability to link up with the ammunition in route, which gets us out the doors quickly as possible. If we had to wait for the ammunition to arrive at Rosebaraks, do our outload there. We're delaying our required deployment timeline. Instead, we can start driving. The ammunition can be transported either via air or ground as well, simultaneously link up with us along our route. So this is the first time we've tested all those things at one time. The ammunition, the timeline, and the ability to hold it all as we move forward to our forward deployed position. After securing the ammunition, 2CR continued the tactical road march north. They were headed to an uncontested wet gap crossing where soldiers from the Regimental Engineer Squadron worked with the German Bundeswehr and the British Army ensuring the safe passage of 2CR vehicles over a riverway. The vehicles were ferried across the river. The uncontested wet gap event was a rehearsal in preparation for future training operations. On Private First Class, James Crowley, reporting from Poland.


What's the word y'all the LA Lakers are a lot worse than I could have ever expected going into the season I was a guy that looked at what they did last year that Western Conference finals run. Yes, they got swept, but it was a good It was a good sweep depending on who you ask And I saw that in the second half of the year they had one of the best defenses in basketball They were gonna have continuity. I enjoyed their offseason I'm like, yeah, there's no world where the Lakers aren't cementing himself as contenders again And here we are 30 games to the NBA season then boys don't look like attendance There's sub 500 after losing to the Miami Heat last night and this was not a video I was gonna make but this morning Shamsha Rania put together an athletic article talking about Lakers There's currently a growing disconnect between Darvinham and the Lakers locker room stemming from disjointedness disjointedness around Rotations and adjustments the Lakers three in a row loss and nine of their last 12 sub 500 But they got an NC's internment banner dammit. You can't look past that or maybe you can so this is not a video I was gonna make but now with this losing a locker room when LeBron James just superstar has been a Disaster for pretty much every single coach that has gone through this and the LeBron James era in LA It's been Luke Walton. It's been Frank Vogel It's been Darvinham and there is a theoretical situation with Darvinham is out so we might have four different coaches in the LeBron James Ellie Lakers era It's kind of crazy. Now, ultimately, they did win the championship in the bubble that was at 2020 Right is that 2020 in the year 2020? They got the Larry O'Brien trophy under Frank Vogel So it's like at the end of the day your goal is to get betters in LA and you were able to do that once And the LeBron James era but if I would have told you that LeBron James will still look like a super duper star Anthony Davis will be regularly Looking like a top 10 player in basketball and Austin Reeves will have a good year You would have told me Kenny that team is gonna be amazing and yet there there's some 500 Like AD has put together one of his best stretches as a Laker right now and they can't win basketball games The last two games his brother has had a five by four last night against the Miami He was three steals away from a five-by-five. We ain't seen a five-by-five since Nurkage did it in 1942 it was it's been a long time and they weren't even really competitive in that game now Of course the NBA is ups and downs runs and everything, but the Miami Heat was Held on to that lead very firmly and they didn't win what a game before that and I have to admit I did not watch this game So I couldn't tell you the ends and out of this specific game But they lost by 20 points to the Pelicans and do not look now Kenny Beach's favorite Western Conference team this season the Pelicans are looking amazing But they lost by 20 to the Pelicans in a game where Anthony Davis had 20 10 3 5 LeBron James had 32 I'm I'm sorry 34 and they lost by 20 or the game before that look at this box score now again I do understand that this was the loss when LeBron James Tobe was on the line or maybe it wasn't on the line Or maybe it was on the line, but they said it was on the line, but maybe it was not a lot Look at this look at this box score. You lost this game. Bron gave you 26 AD gave you 33 17 8 4 and 2 And you lost those are games where you have your two top 10 ish players in basketball when they're playing like top 10 Players in basketball those are games you need to win and obviously they have not shut out to the Sun for Interrupting my video. Oh, I just always doing it at this time of day now Shams is article is behind a paywall So I can't read it to you, but the most Concerning part about all of this and this is just one singular quote Darvin Ham's decision to bench D'Angelo Russell and start LeBron James Torian Prince Cam Reddus Jared Vendor by Anthony Davis in the lineup without a secondary ball handler beginning December 23rd And OKC was considered a head scratcher by multiple parties internally And if you listen to the the Kenny beats and podcast was just dropped an episode about an hour ago Go take it out. I also said this that this formula of Bron Prince Reddus Vanderbilt Anthony Davis doesn't give you enough variety. It makes you so easy to guard You already got Cam Reddus on the team is a shout out to Cam Reddus He's researched his NBA career, but it's not a team and the NBA is looking at Cam Reddus is a guy that need to hold On to they allow Cam Reddus to shoot as many shots as possible because everything considered He's still shooting 29% from three to you starting him and he's been he's been good defensively for them all season long Obviously again, you look at those splits is not great But defensively he's been on top of his game and then you add Jared Vanderbilt to the lineup We just watched him in the entire playoffs where every team they went against basically said we're not guarding you So you're telling me we're gonna start two players that don't get the respect of the opposing teams Well, that just makes it more difficult for Bron and Anthony Davis to do what they have to do And guess what? Bron and Anthony Davis still haven't able to do what they have to do but the rest of the pieces That's your starting right up right now It's disgusting. Torian Prince is one of my favorite signs of the off season so far I mean, I didn't I didn't mean so far. He was one of my favorite signs of the off season and look at his numbers He's doing his part of it. If I have an open shot, I'm hitting it at a 39 clip That's a duh, but any team that's regularly playing slash starting two Non-scores two non shooters is just going to be an unsuccessful team No matter what the rest of the team looks like they have one of the greatest of all time and Anthony Davis And two non shooters have practically had them implode and last night LeBron James They didn't talk to the media after a loss It's not looking good for somebody Because little GM is going to put on that cap and the trade will be made or somebody's going to get fired I just I don't want to make it seem like Darwin Ham is the only problem because he's not but he's Objectively a problem. Remember when Darwin Ham said he won't Austin Reeves. It just played 28 minutes per game.  He's almost 40 This is the young legs that you just paid let that brother Let him ball because other than the first seven ish games of the season nine is games of the season where he's struggled Austin Reeves been pretty good. And yes, I know the comment section are gonna say Um, uh, Kenny, they're dealing with a lot of injuries and objectively that is true. Yesterday. There was no D'Angelo Ross So there was no Rihachi Mura. Gabe Vincent is still inactive The majority of teams across the association God damn the majority of teams across the association are also going through Injury stuff and you haven't had the ultimate injury stuff Some teams have had their star players miss significant time. Anthony Davis and LeBron have been Very very healthy to start this season Not going wood. God forbid anything happens to them a rolled ankle where they gotta miss three to four games I don't know what happens to this Lakers team But but the thing that made them Really good. One of the best teams in the league post trade that line last season was defensively. They were Head and shoulders above the entire competition And if you have an a defense of that caliber that elite level defense having an average to slightly below average offense It's it's okay at least to win regular season games And in their case it got them all the way to the western conference finals We're seeing another team do that in real time The minnesota timbals are not a good offensive team right now But they're the best offensive team at basketball So they win a bunch of games and so far this season the lakers have the 21st offense in the 11th defense Just not a recipe and and talking about what I was mentioning the number one defense in the league minnesota timbals They have the 18th ranked defense So they're slightly below average offensive team But the defense is so great it keeps them in games and they happen to be one of the better clutch teams in basketball Might be the best clutch team at basketball according to the numbers The lakers don't have that luxury of being in the top three defensively while having a bad offense But if you you fire darvin ham, I don't know who's the patchwork Guy that can come in Coach boonhozer has gone through a lot Um in the last couple months or so.  I don't know if he's looking to coach again Mike dantoni has been on the market for a million gazillion years I don't even know if like I don't know is there's somebody already on the culture staff I have no idea and it's again. This just felt like a team that the continuity was going to carry And here I am thinking about what who can the lakers add to the locker room? What do they need? And I got a guy here in Chicago that's on the trade market that might be connected to the lakers We'll see if that trade actually happens But they they are going to be a team that's going to have to buy they just have to he's labran's 39 and not getting any better He's not obviously getting much worse either But you need to capitalize every single lebron james season Especially if anthony davis is playing at this caliber two Again sub 500 for this amount of talent for the top two guys is kind of unheard of


surprised, exhausted, confused, frustrated, comfortable, proud, uncomfortable, bothered, embarrassed, awkward.


Halo, thank you for keeping us company, this is Y254 discussion mandate kicks off right now, we are talking about Kenya's preparedness in disaster management and we are focusing on coronavirus that has been said somewhere we have allegations that it could be in Kenya but authorities say it is not here. Also we have the locust invasion where we had even a reshuffing the government hoping the CSP Tumunya will bring a change but still things are not happening so as a nation are we ready for any disaster that comes in. I'm speaking to Judy Wamaita, she's a policy and governance person and Anita Nkirote governance consultant so I have the best people to speak about Kenya's preparedness in regards to crisis and calamities. Good evening ladies, I must admit this is the first time I'm having ladies in my show as in without a gentleman other than myself. So it's an honor to have you here. Now I will begin right with what we've had in the last week, we had some memes trending and this was because a plane was seen landing GKIA and actually the person who took that video somehow was suspended. But now let's not focus on the employability thing but the fact that that plane came, Kenyans we are good in tweeting. We are good in creating scenarios, you're good in making things trend and people are saying Kenya is playing with coronavirus and there were scenarios, there were analogies of how we are playing with corona. But anyway, the truth of the matter, are we ready for coronavirus because we are told this mask hours are expensive, do we even have those masks in our country and those people are out there. I'll begin with you Anita. According to me, I know like the public opinion does not think we are prepared for the coronavirus as I've also seen on Twitter and social media. But to be honest if you look at the statement by the government spokes, we are actually doing something about it by canal retired Oguna. And for example, the matters you're raising as it regards to this disaster preparedness in this country, we should note that this is not an isolated, it's not a Kenyan issue. All these are international matters, coronavirus is an international matter, we've seen it in Italy, you've just read New York has gotten one hit. So this is an international affairs, even the WHO is looking into it and finding ways in which it can handle it. When it comes to also matters of, you mentioned coronavirus, even the desert locust, I know we'll be talking about that. All these are, we are not dealing it in isolation. We've even formed a multi-agency tax force to look into the coronavirus. Kenya actually has 5,000 mask, protective mask. Even if you go to JKI right now and you see some maybe Uber drivers because when we get guests, foreign guests they are using the protective gears. As for us to hold the flights, I know it's not the most popular opinion but we cannot just hold flights because these are matters of foreign affairs. And I know you saw in the dailies when the four CSAs were put on the forefront. Because what it means is most nations, when you look at international relations affairs, anything we do to China, they will also retaliate. And you need to look at more than just health affairs, you need to look at, we are indebted to China, you need to look, yes we are heavily indebted to Kenya. And you know whoever pays your bills, sometimes you must throw the line. So I don't know if Judy has a similar opinion or otherwise. So Judy, this is a scenario, there is coronavirus and like she has alluded, it's not an isolated case. We are part of, and considering we have Kenyans who are still stuck there. And I remember when Retired Serozoguno was saying, we would rather have them there because they are not infected yet. But when they come out we risk them, one of them might. And now coming back to Kenya, if one of them gets the virus, that would mean we have a case here. So do you think Kenya is prepared for this? Actually with all these deaths, we can't compare ourselves with the US, they have money. Do we have such? I don't think we are prepared. They have 11 beds, 11 isolation beds to handle coronavirus cases. Well, with the current Kenyan population I don't think 11 beds is sufficient enough, I don't think we are prepared. But even then, I also don't think the situation is as bad as we want, as Kenyans are trying to make it look online. Because basically we have other epidemics that cameo, sorry to say so. But in terms of preparedness, we may not be at the level where China is or where the US is, but we are not immune. Which means even if we shut down flights, remember like the case in Nigeria was from an Italian. So we are shutting down flights from China. But then again we are not considering that a lot of people who come to Nairobi come through Bali. Or a lot of people that come to Nairobi are from Amsterdam.  It should be us looking at how best do we collaborate with the other countries. We have a task force. How best do we work with what is known. How best do we move forward. Even then how do we put systems in place that put us at a better prepared level. How do we work with what we have, with the knowledge we have to actually get us moving. Because we cannot shut down our country. Ultimately if you walk in town and most of the shops are suffering from this. You want to buy stuff but they are telling you we don't have stock because we are not getting stock. So everybody is sort of afraid and it's becoming an effect. It's becoming a round effect on the economy. So we cannot shut ourselves out to the world. But we need to be better prepared than we are. Alright now Anita you just mentioned of foreign affairs and the ties that we have. There was another meme that was going round. We know we owe you. Please don't still come to us. We know we owe you. But also there is this fact. They were saying we stop discriminating the Asian guys. Them that are here. Do you think as a nation we have lacked manas that we've gotten to a point of now. We can have.  So how should we be carrying ourselves as we speak? I believe I even watched an interview in one of the TV shows whereby someone who's been here for more than five years since high school are Chinese and they also saw an incident whereby a South Korean was technically Malindi. He was being considered because you know some people look at the biological maybe small eyes. This characteristic so some people think South Koreans are Chinese. And he was actually put aside, tests were done and he was almost being quarantined. However after a few hours he was able to get out. I think as a Kenya we are one of the most welcoming nations. It's why our tourism has always been like skyrocketing when you go to the lakes of Diani one of the best beaches. We are actually a tourist hub and even I can give examples of expatriates. We have foreign diplomats who have come to do different things. The likes of Lei, former GM and these are the likes of former RIP Bob Collimo. The likes of foreigners who have actually made a home out of this country. And because of our relations with Chinese it's expected that even more Kenyans. There are a lot of Kenyans. That's why we had over 100 students in Wuhan. And we expect even though they are in quarantine and maybe they cannot come back home because as Oguna said transporting them or removing someone from Kasarani or Ruizambo and taking them to JKI may expose them to coronavirus. So I believe where they are they are getting food. I know the government of Kenya has intervened by giving them. At first they were given 1 million. Now I've seen they've been given 10 million. But I believe still the Chinese government is taking care of them providing food in these areas that have been quarantined. So I believe the Chinese who should be here should also because I believe there is a due process. They were checked in Kenyata National Hospital and WHO, WHO itself has recommended self quarantine for 14 days. And they actually are doing that because they also they have a feeling of phobia when they are interacting with Kenyans. So obviously them themselves have quarantined. And you can even map out you are seeing people from the areas of Mombasa Road at the river Tsukimo, they are saying these people are our neighbors. And in fact the day the 216 passengers from the China South Airlines landed people were saying I know exactly where they are. So they are even in one place. It's not like they are distributed. So for me I believe that is good enough. We are not a country that has had a history of xenophobia like our counterparts in South Africa or a country of racism or any form of discrimination. Even the Chinese themselves when they are inviting the foreigners the Chinese who have been outside Kenya they are also being quarantined. They are also wearing masks even in birthday parties. I know you saw that video in a birthday party. So for me I believe they are taking the necessary precautions and they are not going around. They themselves are quarantining themselves. Otherwise CBD you would be seeing everyone in CBD. Actually in Nairobi we are so populated and I don't know what would happen if such a case would happen here. But now I want us not to move to the other interesting issue. We had CS Kiyonjuri being hosted from the Cabinet because he was unable to handle some of the staff from Maze and now the locusts that had just invaded Kenya. But now Peter Munya was coming in and when he came in a lot of people said now we have someone and I remember having a discussion here and one of the panelists was telling me Munya will not do anything because he has been industrialization and we can't count a good number of youths who have been employed. But now he is coming to agriculture. What difference will he make? And I remember another joke that came in he said these locusts are now turning yellow so they are dying. Which is not true. So is CS Munya doing enough from where you sit Kiyonjuri? The good CS is trying in my opinion. But then again he ought to try harder. He ought to come with I think scientifically and statistically backed strategies to actually combat the locusts because as it says we are a country whose food security is threatened and he needs to treat the issue with the seriousness it deserves because basically if we look at where we are we are almost going into the long range and it doesn't sound like there is an actual strategy to actually combat the locusts. I think in my opinion it was a very careless statement for the CS to say the locusts are old. I expected he would actually utilize professionals within the field entomologist. I mean in Kenya we have all this. He would sit down with them and understand and come up with a very good way of resolving the issue. But you see you can't play politics with people's livelihoods. You can't play politics with the food security of our country. And for CS Munya he actually needs to sit down. I don't know whether it needs to be Isipe entomologist. He needs to understand the life cycle of the locusts and also understand what's the best intervention point. Do we do the intervention when the locusts are still like eggs or when they are names or at what point? Otherwise unless we do that it's going to be an issue. It's going to be hectic. It's going to be bad. I need to be speaking of the big four agenda and food security is one of them. And as we speak of the northern part of the country they are already crying. The locusts came and now they are in western... I'm sure some of the people are enjoying this but also they are not oblivious of what would happen later because the locusts are here and I don't know whether the rains will affect them. I don't know how to catalyze their maturity or their livelihood. Was it a misura hit? For me the comments by CS Munya were totally out of line because it's very good. Like Judea said you look at your predecessor. These are the same statements that brought us to question the competencies of CS Kyunjuri and asking does this guy know what he's doing. But when you look at CS Munya you can actually see he has a trade record. For your panelist I wish you please go and ask him what he means by creation of jobs and the ministry of industrialization. Whether he has the statistics because really what is the measurement of a good CS in terms of trade and industrialization. Remember it's under CS Munya that we've had the AFCTA agreement whereby we want to bring all the African countries under one arm when he was under. So he has a very stellar career especially in EAC, East Africa Affairs and also trade. So I believe he has the Midas touch. The only problem he has is sometimes these reckless statements can bring you trouble and make you question your competency. So as Judea said we actually have Isipa. We have the likes of Kefis. We have all these very good agricultural institutions even that focus especially on research. So I believe that the ones who should make a statement or write something to him so that he avoids putting himself in very awkward situations. Now that you people agree on one thing he has made a reckless statement and you have mentioned of this organization that are out here. Does it mean they have not approached him or they talk? Do they meet these people? Do they meet? I would believe they meet because once you form a multi agency task force that's what it's supposed to do because any multi agency task force has representation from different quarters. So I believe the challenge is we might agree even before the station aired you might have said you cannot mention ABCD but you might be on air and you all of a sudden start mentioning things you know that I'm not supposed to mention. So I believe it's a matter of being exposed to air and sometimes you usually lose the plot. So the spring is not working. It should work with the organization that are in place but now we had some affirmers saying this thing should be declared a crisis already but we haven't seen that. We haven't seen that and I don't know what to be the next move and apparently we are out of time so I'm getting your quick comments as your recommendations as we wind up Judy. One thing we acknowledge is CS Munya inherited a lot of incompetence around the way the locust issues was handled. So when he came in we expected a lot out of him I don't know we expected maybe magic like Dudu will come and poof locusts are gone but it doesn't work like that. So basically he just needs to sit with the technocrats, with the people who understand and also considering the fact that this is not a Kenyan thing the locusts are not just in Kenya they tell all the way in Yemen so what are the peers doing? Again I believe Isipa will be very helpful above Isipa we have research institutions we have universities with the various specialists in entomology so he needs to understand where does he need to target best from then what's the most effective and efficient way because we've seen counties spring well one he also needs to work with the county governments because ultimately for easier implementation of his strategies he needs to work very closely with the affected counties but he needs to acknowledge that he has to work with the help of specialists and get politics out of handling the whole issue just sit back handle it and get it done then we can do politics later Alright, just a follow up on you because you kinda say he's the good man in office we have an issue I want us to digress kido gotu on your part he has to deal with the misproblem with the people down there is this something he will be able to handle because many people say they are cartels the truth is they are cartels and he's the best man for that Well, I believe when the president gave him the job he knew he was the best man Alright, Anita, your recommendations For me I'll begin with the maize scandal the maize issues I don't think he'll still be able to handle that because there are a lot of loose ends and it's not from now it seems to a 7 the scandals with the national series and produce board like all the bodies in the agricultural sector actually needs like a complete institutional reform otherwise even first of all we have the threat of locust then number 2 maize especially from the likes of rift valley and the likes kina mzeki bor are seriously complaining that when they take maize to NCPB NCP national series and produce board they say that their stock are full then when you go and check the maize that will come out to the market has a flow toxin I mean it is it's not gonna be a walk in the park so I will not be optimistic about that not to mention their cartels want to import maize from Mexico and who knows where so they are always creating that inhibiting environment then we even have issues of pest control yet we have a pest and controls board that should limit how much pesticides we use on our crops and it's not happening meaning some of this maize is not fit for human consumption so for me it's a whole chain munya should sit down with all these agencies because they are there and they are actually competent as Judy has alluded to they are just not being consulted or being utilized as for the matter of desert locust I already mentioned again it's an international matter and they are coming from Yemen they are travelling down no one has yet the experts have not told us the impact of the rain that we started experiencing this much as you said on how it will affect because if in Aleman I am not an expert I'm a political person I don't know if the beginning of the word desert locust now that it's raining if it really implies that now that it's raining that issue is gone so we will wait for Kana loguna to give us a statement on Thursday and we shall know the way forward and the coronavirus we say we're good for me I say we are right on track alright so Kenyans the governance here are saying we might be saved but also take care of yourself now coming up next is Waimashariki they have been my guest Anita and Kira their governance consultant and Judy thank you so much for coming it's the first time I'm hoping to be seeing you more here thank you so much for coming keep it Y254 TV like I've said Waimashariki is coming up next with DJ TSKN and we will be seeing you again very soon my name is Edira Vahila you have yourself a very good night and a prosperous week ahead


Remdesivir initially was intravenously administrated to treat the Ebola disease however right now it has been administered to treat COVID-19 in some countries. However it is necessary to find the exact effect of Remdesivir in patients with COVID-19. Remdesivir solution is administered with a cyclodextrin carrier that filters solely by the glomeruli, thereby patients with abnormal renal function cannot eliminate it quickly, therefore, Remdesivir can lead to renal failure where liver dysfunction during therapeutic process of COVID-19. Assessment of renal function in patients with COVID-19 who have acute kidney injury, aka eye, or in-stage renal disease is fundamental. This article was authored by Mohamed Rahimi, Elam Jahantabi, Bezod Latfi, and others.


It's important for the U.S. to be involved in NATO exercises and working with our allies across the Atlantic, because as the old Afghan proverb says, if you want to go fast, go alone, if you want to go far, go together, we're going to go much further if we work together as allies than if any one of us were to work individually, and so our ironclad relationship with NATO and all of our NATO allies is really important to the United States. Exercise said fast defender then, so we're part of that broader NATO exercise here off Portugal. We form the central carrier strike element to it. We've got 32 aircraft in the entire strike group. Here on board HMS Queen Elizabeth, I've got a total of 28, that's 18 F-35B lightnings, 10 from the United States Marine Corps and 8 from the UK.