So first up hi everybody for those that don't know me my name is Mike McGrath and I had I joined fedora and I think it was around 2005 I was working for a company. I was working for orbits.com the travel company and so I Think even before that I had been at a study abroad company Which means that we we would send American students to other countries to hang out with other American students I think that was the mission of the of the company but then I I really got serious when I was at at Orbit's and I started volunteering in Fedora infrastructure at the time There were no there were not that many people that were paid full-time to work in Fedora And so I have many many stories from from the early days, but I'll share a quick one which was my hiring and so Sometime around Fedora core three or four The road the Fedora release landed on the same day That the quarterly or that the red-half quarterly financials were due and and so We back then for the young ins out there We we got slash dotted. That was the thing. I don't think people say that anymore but the systems were overwhelmed people couldn't actually download the Couldn't get to the website, but also internally because the Fedora stuff was not completely separated from the internal IT stuff the People could not get their financials The finance team couldn't and so basically the CFO kind of said this can never happen again And at the time Max be back was the the federal product or not. He was the Fedora project lead and And they went to him and said hey, we got to work on this and he said we got to invite Mike McGrath that at the time I was volunteering as the Fedora infrastructure lead most of The team at that point was actually volunteers a lot of the Internal people that a lot of the Red Headers are working on Fedora either got moved on to other things or We're in specific situations like like a release engineer kind of thing and So max I'd invite Mike McGrath the CFOs Assistant could not find my name in the directory and that's because I did not work at Red Head. I was a volunteer and She said you want us to invite a volunteer To talk about how we're gonna close financial You know our quarterly company financials and on infrastructure Needless to say I was not invited But that did the outcome of that meeting was to hire somebody full-time to do this and then they hired me And so I started formally in 2007 I did that for several more years and the team grew and I I'd still look very fondly back at my time on Fedora But also around after that I switched to to I think it was called project the Libra was the first one on it And that basically a founding member of OpenShift And so I went and was the our lead architect for OpenShift and the OpenShift online operations manager And then right around the time OpenShift v3 hit I went back to Linux engineering As an architect and manager and did a few things in now Slowly working my way up through the ranks, I guess I'm the vice president of Linux engineering and so in my current role I oversee all of our Linux Distribution so that includes Fedora it includes rel it includes our Centos's Coro s The silver blue stuff is all kind of you know happening over on the desktop team and in other places and All that stuff is in my org, but I also have a few other things like We've got satellite identity management quite a few things are happening in the Linux space. So it's a great team very Very excited to to work on that team and lots of stories. So if you ever catch me at a dinner, feel free to ask I've got plenty plenty to share So next I just kind of want to talk about just my this is my take on how Mentor shows I think that today you'll probably hear lots of different opinions on on this and experiences And when I look at what a mentor is to me the mentor is always an advisor and a coach Who shares their experiences with someone who is less experienced? It would be very strange for me to be mentored by someone Like and you know someone more junior than me and associate to software engineer for example, maybe it happens but that is not typically how I Think of mentorship and in my time I Working at Red Hat I have been both mentored several times and I have mentored several times In just about every type of scenario that you can imagine And so I'm going to cover kind of all of those today and what my experiences were and hoping to kind of share just some Actual facts that I went out and got about mentorship to convince those of you that have not had a mentor before to to get one So Mentorship is common a lot of people have mentors There are people that I know that have multiple mentors right now And some and many are mentoring multiple people I'm personally mentoring a few people right now And so it's always good to make time as a mentor. I make sure I have enough time for them I can't just take on everybody all the time and so I have to turn some away But now I'm mentoring a few people and those relationships are great So of the Fortune 500 companies 71% of them have actual mentorship programs and so at your company You may want to just check and see if they have a mentorship program. They tended me more limited Time-set kind of Programs so you may just be mentored or mentor someone for six months those have their benefits although some people as we'll see have had mentorship for years or even throughout their lifetime and We'll talk about that as well Fedora's mentorship program as I recall was built to read the you know when I first started getting involved This was built around the account system people would specifically sponsor others and certain while I have not attempted to package anything in Fedora recently the package the package sponsorship setup was a perfect example of technical Mentorship to help show people around Fedora Let them know what's important and how to to work on Packages and all that that was required that is a perfect example of mentorship with a very clear goal in mind for both the mentor and the mentee 97% of people that That have worked with a mentor say they are valuable and so you know What was the last time that you found 97% of people agreed on anything at all? I think it's a very strong argument that that mentorship works and So for those of you there in a series say, oh, I can't really get anything out of it I'm gonna speak to that a little bit, but if you don't think mentorships for you. I will say that is probably Something you need to work through and not something about mentorship itself and of course another big one is men mentees those who have been mentored are Promoted five times more often than those without mentors And so if you're if you're in a situation right now where you're very career-minded and you're looking for growth Get a mentor someone that is more senior than you and that can help you Either you know figure out what's what's not working right now or help you figure out some goals and things To line that up Wanting to be promoted for example trying to get to that next level that is a perfect thing to discuss with your mentor And so just keeping in mind when you And we'll talk a little bit more about this too, but there's lots of different reasons to get into mentorship And it's always important to kind of think about what your reasons are So I've mentioned this earlier. I've been involved in many different types of mentorship in my career The first one I talked about was packaging mentorship. I believe my first Packaging sponsor was Ignacio Many many minutes would have been what 15 years ago something like that It was actually just getting packages contributed and so I had That was kind of my first foray into Fedora was at the packaging level But I also quickly got involved with Fedora infrastructure and that was really where I found my home In the Fedora project. I had a few mentors in the early days. Elliott Lee was one soap with Can go back that farther remember that The late Seth Vidal was was hugely influential to my time in in both Fedora, but also how to get involved with Open source in general I had not really contributed to too many Open source projects at the time the only one that I could even say I was even tiny been involved with was myth TV at the time And I had no code contributions. I think I just used it and occasionally You know participated on the mailing list and so having Seth kind of walked me around And introduced me to open source in general was huge and of course Max Spivak who became my manager at Red Hat when I first started here was also big and just kind of helping me through and learn the ropes When I was working in Red Hat like once I actually formally got started at Red Hat, you know, I met several people and that was great But also around the time that OpenShift was was happening That was such a huge turning point in my life and in my career and so One of the things that had happened was basically I had gone back to college around that time to get a Master's degree in engineering management. So I guess for those of you that are interested I highly recommend the engineering management degree. I actually did not I'm not particularly academic I did I don't think I benefited a ton from my bachelor's degree In computer science, right? Technications management actually just because I was such a tinkerer so much that stuff just wasn't new to me But engineering management was actually a great way for me to kind of learn a few more things Didn't so much have a mentor there As learned about leadership and management and that was kind of where I learned a lot of the mechanics of how I would become a mentor later And shortly after inventing OpenShift that became a huge big thing at least at red hat I was selected to participate in what's called the accelerated leadership development program at red hat or al dp and part of that program gave me access to both a coach and a mentor and that was actually a great experience for me but also Changed the way I look at relationships just in general in the office And so I had a coach The one thing about and you may be wondering what's the difference between a coach and a mentor If they're formally using that title in my case a coach didn't a coach never answered a single one of my questions with anything other than a question They were actually a great sounding board to kind of figure out what I wanted But they really uh, it wasn't I didn't really get to know my coach that well I mean, you know, I got to know them kind of on a personal level But uh for the most part they were just someone to talk to and bounce ideas off of during that time This was like a roughly one year program And so the coach was actually great. It was nice to have somebody to talk to But the mentor in that case was even better And in my case, uh, they were having trouble with finding new mentors inside red hat And so they started to look for people outside red hat I happened to get matched with somebody in the finance industry And this was very interesting. He was a business guy. He was not a technologist in any way And the funniest thing for me was he also happened to be unemployed at the time he He uh, they had matched me with someone who had was in the in the process of changing careers It was taking a couple months off And so I like to joke that I thought the mentorship uh experience with with him went very well Because before uh, he started mentoring me. He did not have a job But after he was done, he did have a job. And so I think that I was a successful mentee for him But the there was a couple things that were really key Which he didn't the thing that was nice about is he didn't know any of the people I read had he didn't know Who I was talking to or why and that caused Him to ask questions that I wouldn't normally get asked and also helped me learn things like You know, he would just ask me questions You know like he if I was having a problem or trying to figure out how to get some process through a red hat Um, he would ask me, you know, just kind of pointedly ask are other people listening to this guy or is everybody ignoring him? Uh, and the reason that's important that was important to figure out because that changes how I would you know How I'd approach a problem. Are we uh, you know one versus the world here trying to do what we think is right Or was this just kind of a was this a long shot thing that we were going to try to do And so it was really it was just really refreshing to be able to talk very plainly and bluntly about things that were going on at work This was the first mentor I had that was very career focused with me So I went from having I would say technical mentors in the past To having one that was more focused on career because that was the specific goal that I had for myself Um in that leadership program and so I'll talk about goals in a minute But uh, you know really understanding what you're looking to get out of your mentor will help you both pick who what kind of mentor you should be looking for But also what you want out of them And of course, uh for for mentoring I I've got three mentees at the moment two from various mentorship programs at red hat And one of them who just reached out directly to me and asked for it and they're at all levels of the company One of them is a a senior director I've got a the rest of them. I think one of them is an associate manager right now And so right now I'm mentoring mostly management manager people on the manager track, but certainly at all levels of their career And it's been very rewarding to to help them through that these are You know, they have Troubles and successes and we talk through them and I find it very rewarding to to mentor now so, um You know Bennett a good mentorship engagement has all of the following traits. So let's just say you're looking to get into a mentorship situation What what what what is a good engagement look like? What should you be looking for? One of them is trust You need to be able to be completely open with each other and even explicitly setting those boundaries at the start of the relationship That you're creating a safe space that shouldn't be discussed outside of that that space um Is good. It means that you can be very frank and playing with your your mentor and Hopefully be free of judgment, you know, certainly You know if you I don't know punched a fellow employee Probably going to get a little bit of judgment out of that But if you're simply lost and not sure what to do like making sure that you have someone safe to go talk to Is important Also making sure you have clearly understood goals This is something that I've realized both as a mentee and a mentor In the case of my packaging sponsorship, I knew exactly what I wanted I wanted to become a packager. I had some specific packages in mind I wanted to learn how to use the packaging guidelines as the tome and so, you know Ignacio helped me on that on that path With uh with my ldp program I was career focused and so I wanted to I was very focused on making sure I made better connections within the company Outside of engineering people. I didn't know that well and also and this was interesting for you remotees for those of you that are working remotely We also decided to just work on my internal brand And I I still feel it's funny to say that your internal brand But it was about making sure that uh making sure that I knew what I was to be known for So that way if I wasn't in a meeting in In boston or raleigh or any other of the major hubs They read it has that people would remember and think of me I'll say we need to go to mike with this instead of trying to handle it on their own And so, you know, these were specific goals that I had But I've also been in mentorship situations where no specific goals happen And we just kind of met and talked about what had been going on that week and maybe some specific problems But without goals, there's no direction on where that relationship should go And those engagements have been less successful. I think you're just less impactful for both the mentor and the mentee Flexibility is also very important You know mentees are on their own journey and they're going to make their own decisions as they should You should never go into a mentorship situation Thinking that you're going to help you're going to teach that person what decisions they should be making Because they're always going to be on a different path than you and so having the flexibility to know what they're doing How you can help them is important But also that flexibility is going to be required in case you happen to be mentoring someone that is completely outside of your scope of expertise which uh, you know, it's uh, I have found Mentoring and menteeing with uh people outside of of my engineering scope Has been very helpful. It's a very different perspective on things and really makes me think And then of course Part of that is something's mutually beneficial for both the mentor and the mentee I think it's obvious that the mentee will will benefit from a mentorship involvement, but The the mentor often does too. This allows me to get at redhead at least I've gotten better insights into different teams That I would normally interact with and I've gotten to learn about other products and even other lines of business that I have no typical interaction with but you know, it's made me smarter and and Give me a better understanding of how red hat works. And so I think that's also great so Just to throw a couple of quotes up here. One of these was from bill gates who was mentored by By the what's his name the oracle? Warren Buffett He said I picked warm warren is somebody that I have learned an immense amount from just hearing his stories of how He dealt with tough situations And how he thought through long how he thought long term How he models the world if you get a chance to spend time with people like that. It's fantastic And also one from Oprah Winfrey Who was mentored by Maya Angelou throughout her life as far as I can tell She was always there for me guiding me through some of the most important years of my life Mentors are important. I don't think anybody makes it in the world without some form of mentorship and so You know, I think these are just people that I think these are both examples of people I think have very long multi-year very long relationships with their mentors I haven't been in a situation like that. But I think if you're able to to find somebody like that It's a it's a great situation to be in And so I've mentioned this a little bit but my experience with mentoring others The the big things are regular contact If you I have found that about every other week works Maybe every week, but if you go to every month or less than that It's just not going to work and it really helps me as a mentor when the mentee is the one driving these things Making sure that they're the ones reaching out to set up meetings. Don't expect your mentor to do the The groundwork there I trust and open this our must and making sure that I know what their goals are Are really the big the big keys to success because those are all the things that help me help them And without that regular contact It's hard for me to know what's going on in their lives and things like that So I just kind of mind my my little tip there And so here's what you should do if you want to be to be a mentor if you want to be a mentee So make sure as as mentee make sure you have a clear goal in mind Your mentor can't help you if you don't know what you want and I know that that can be a very big ask I've certainly gone through several points in my career where I just didn't know what I wanted to do next Those would actually have been fairly poor Situations to get a mentee All right. Sorry to get a mentor But if if you're very clear about well, I want to figure out I I feel lost and I want to find that next thing That could be a goal And so just as long as you're up front about that you could at least talk about it But I've still found those those situations are not so great It's much better to have a clear goal in mind to talk to somebody Also, make sure you find somebody that you respect You can ask them directly or if you don't know them But you know somebody that does one of your peers ask for an introduction Um But don't just blindly reach out to someone and say hey, will you be my mentor and then Not really have anything else in mind. It'd be great to say hey, I love what you did with this project Um, you know, I'm hoping to do something like that in my future Would you my mentor just as long as you have some interactions with them You wouldn't want to reach out to somebody famous or even like in your You know someone way up in your company that you have no interactions with because uh, You know, they just may they may not go the way you think unless there's some some prior connection there And finally is to commit If you find someone willing to mentor you don't waste their time Make sure you're the one setting up the meetings doing the follow-ups do the work If your mentor gives you a book to read or an article to read make sure you read that before your next meeting And you know take take their word seriously and That's these are all things that have worked for me in the past both on both sides of of the mentorship and mentee ship And I'm hoping that they will will help you as well And so with that I'd like to thank you all and if there's any questions I don't know. I think I saw something in the q&a. I saw some things here. Oh, there are there's there's plenty of q&a So I'll just go through and read this Um, I can't see the chat while I'm reading the q&a unless somebody wants to read the q&a to me I don't know if anybody else is in video here with me, but uh I can just get to it. I can do that for you Yeah, go ahead Yeah, so the first question is have you found yourself growing in directions that are orthogonal to your mentorship goals? I That that are that are what to my mentorship goals that are orthogonal Oh, um Sometimes I I think uh, no, I think I'll give you an example I we read here right now managed services are becoming a pretty big thing and i'm on the rail side So we've got a couple of managed services, but we're not like we don't have pagers on our on our hips and so, uh, I think for me It's been valuable to kind of get back into that world. I was you know on call for 15 years or something like that before I switch over to engineering And uh, as I as I meet with them. I found myself Realizing how important it will be to teach my own team how to prepare things to be managed services um, I think that that's been that's been nice, but I guess that's how I'll answer that one Okay, uh another one. What is one pitfall you have seen for mentors and one pitfall for mentees advice on how to overcome or avoid those pitfalls I think there there's been a couple of them Every once in a while if you're in a mentorship program, you will get matched with someone you know And if you have a pre-existing relationship with someone who was used to be a peer Or some of you don't respect in that way that can be awkward. So just be upfront about and say I don't think this one's gonna work. Don't try to make it work. It gets it gets a little weird I think uh, the biggest pitfall I've seen from the mentee side is uh, Is is not having a clear goal in mind And and maybe you know, I haven't seen too many problems or pitfalls on the mentorship side since most of what they're supposed to be doing Is helping but I could imagine an area where your mentor may disagree with your goals And at that point you may just want to find a different mentor just as you would a doctor or somebody else that You know, you're you're going to for advice on something Another question How do you manage the transition from one mentor to another either positive or negative or both? Yeah, it's it's interesting one thing I like about mentorship programs A good mentorship program is they have a distinct beginning and end And so if you both go in knowing that ahead of time, well, we're going to do this for six months or a year or 18 months or whatever Then at the end you you have a boat you start with a kickoff meeting You say hey, this is what we're going to do and you have a closing meeting and you just you know, let them know You you share with them some of the things that you've learned and just you know, have a good Assorted close. I almost always end with you know, feel free to reach out in the future if something comes up You'd like to chat very quickly but yeah at that point you you end you end the relationship and then you you would shut the You delete any future calendar invites things like that and go from there I have one of my mentorship relationships right now Is is open-ended and so we've been meeting for about a year now. There's not going to be a distinct end I enjoy meeting with him and You know, we'll just see see how that goes in the future But at the moment that's one that doesn't have an end And I guess if it becomes a problem, I'll just have to bring it up to and say I don't have time anymore or something And you have to find another mentor. That's just kind of how we do it Yeah, here's one from your experiences. Have you ever found a need to discontinue a mentorship? How do you think this should be handled in context of fedora present? I have in in one and this is kind of goes I'll share a little bit more about the one I was referring to earlier there was somebody that was working with me as a peer in Uh an open shift in the very early days. We're both engineers kind of lead engineers working on something And we basically got blind matched in this mentorship program And so at that point both of our by that point both of our careers had taken a very wide turn Um, I'd gone into management and he uh, and had done well at that and he had been an individual contributor I was just trying to figure out that next thing and while he had very clear goals We had already had a pre-established relationship And so it was just a little awkward to get out of that. We ended up keeping the meetings But mostly just to talk about what was going on in our respective orbs and things It wasn't really a true mentorship relationship. And so we just kind of were upfront about that ahead of time I said, hey, if this is weird, we can just do something else. Just kind of acknowledge it and we moved on Looking at the time, I just I'm just going to ask one more question What would be some books you would recommend such as for mentees? Books for mentees. Well, there's I've got some back here. I think It obviously depends on their goals. I am a big fan of uh, Dale Carnegie's how to win friends and influence people That is one I give to people especially if they have uh, you know, if they're in that If they're in a scenario where they feel people aren't listening to them or you know, they they're So convinced of their convictions that they're right, but they've been unable to convince others That's a good one that I mentioned to people. Otherwise it tends to be more Uh specific to what their goals are like if they some people want to work on delegation Better and so I've got you know different goals for different different books for different to different people But that's one another one. I guess I I've I've given out a lot is good strategy bad strategy The difference and why it matters That has been a good one for people that are kind of mid-career that are looking to interact with people who are more late career I think that's a really good one to To help take that leap and figure out what the language means And and how to actually deal with strategy. So that's another one that I Suggest a lot Thanks a lot and I think it's I need to visit some bookstore tomorrow morning to buy some books And I'll see you around Thank you everybody. I hope this was useful


For a lot of people, myself included, making homemade bread seems like a very daunting task at first. It seems like something that only the most advanced home cooks would even attempt to make, but once you dive into the world of bread and actually learn the process behind it, you start to see that there's actually a repeatable foolproof formula that you can apply to every single bread that you might make. So let's take a look at what's actually happening during the breadmaking process and essentially it can be broken down into six basic steps. Mixing, bulk fermentation, dividing and shaping, final proofing, baking, and cooling. So we'll start off with the mixing phase, which is basically just the phase where you combine all of the ingredients and start to develop gluten in the dough. So often the mixing phase just involves combining a few dry ingredients like flour, salt, sugar, and yeast, with a few wet ingredients which could be water, milk, eggs, butter, or any combination of those. And for certain types of bread, you'll also add some form of pre-fermented dough. So for example, in the case of a sourdough bread, you'd add your sourdough starter or levan. Then before the mixing phase is over, you'll also need to start the gluten development process, which is very important because the gluten is what gives the dough its elasticity and allows those nice bubbles to form throughout the dough to create a light and airy final product. So basically gluten is a stretchy, almost rubbery substance that forms when wheat is combined with water as the gluten in and gliadin proteins within the wheat become hydrated. So when you see the protein content of a flour listed on the package, that's really telling you how much of those gluten in and gliadin proteins are in that flour, and the higher the protein content, the more potential that flour has to develop gluten. So that's why higher protein flours like bread flour result in stronger and chewier doughs. But in order to develop enough gluten, you not only need to hydrate the dough, but in most cases, you'll also need to incorporate some type of gluten development technique as well. So kneading is the most common technique and that can be done either by hand or in a stand mixer, but sometimes other techniques will be used specifically with higher hydration doughs that don't take as well to kneading. So that can include techniques like slap and folds or my favorite just because it's so simple, which is the auto-lease. So the auto-lease is just a short resting period anywhere from about 20 minutes to a couple of hours that you perform after combining the flour with the wet ingredients. Because certain ingredients like salt, butter, and sugar can actually hinder the gluten development of the dough and hinder the activity of the yeast. So the auto-lease basically allows the dough to get a head start before those other ingredients are added. So during the auto-lease, the flour fully absorbs the liquid, which allows the gluten proteins to start forming and the natural enzymes in the dough start to break down that wheat into the simple sugars that the yeast can feed on. Then once the auto-lease is over, you can mix in the rest of the ingredients and proceed to the next phase. And that phase is the bulk fermentation. Otherwise known as the first rise. And this is the phase where the majority of yeast fermentation occurs. So essentially the yeast converts the dough sugars into carbon dioxide and alcohol, which create both leavening and flavor in the dough. So as that carbon dioxide gas is released, it gets trapped within bubbles throughout the dough, allowing those bubbles to expand and inflate. And again, this is why proper gluten development is very important at this point because that gluten is what gives the dough its strength and allows the bubbles to inflate without bursting. So with a lot of lower hydration doughs, you can essentially just leave them to rest during the bulk fermentation and wait for the dough to double in size or whatever your goal is based on the recipe. But with higher hydration doughs like most sourdough bread, you'll typically need to perform several sets of folds throughout the bulk fermentation in order to continue developing gluten and to redistribute the yeast throughout the dough as it ferments. So this bulk fermentation phase is very important when you're making sourdough bread and it's the phase where the most mistakes are made in my opinion. In order to end up with a perfect loaf, you need to be able to recognize when the dough is properly fermented and you may need to make adjustments along the way based on how the dough looks and feels throughout the process. Because sometimes breadmaking can be unpredictable, so the most valuable skill you can develop is an intuition for how your dough should behave at all steps throughout the process, which ultimately just comes with time and practice. And all doughs are different, so there's not necessarily one foolproof way to be sure when it's done fermenting, but when it about doubles in size, it's generally a good rule of thumb. So from there, the next step is to divide and shape the dough. And for less hydrated doughs, you'll generally want to start by punching the dough down just to redistribute the yeast a bit so it can continue to ferment. Then you'll just divide the dough into as many pieces as you need and shape each one into a top ball or whatever other shape you need for the type of bread that you're making. So for example, with leaner doughs like bagels, you can go ahead and just shape it into the bagel shape at this point. But often with higher hydration doughs, you'll first need to shape it into a top ball, then perform a quick 20 to 30 minute resting period, which is known as the bench rest. So this basically just allows the surface of the dough to relax and stretch out a bit so that the dough can be shaped one last time to develop even more tension. And that step is known as the final shaping, which can be done in a variety of ways depending on what type of bread you're actually making. But either way, once it's shaped, you'll just need to place it somewhere to rise one last time for the final proofing phase. So during this period, the goal is really just to allow the dough to finish fermenting so that all the little bubbles that have formed throughout the dough can blow up nice and large with that carbon dioxide that's being produced. And one of the most important things here is that you keep the dough supported on the sides so that it can retain its structure and rise upward rather than outward. So if you're making a rustic high hydration loaf, you'll generally want to proof it in a banneton. If you're making baguettes, you'll want to proof them in a If you're making dinner rolls, you'll want to proof them in a properly sized pan and so on. Now as the dough proofs further and further, it actually gets to a point where the gluten structure starts to degrade, so longer proofing times are not always better. Really, what you're trying to do is let the dough proof enough so that it can become nice and airy without overproofing. So a good way to tell that the dough is done proofing is when it springs back slowly when poked with your finger. So you'll notice that at the beginning of proofing, the dough will spring back quickly because the gluten network is still pretty strong at that point. But as the proofing progresses, it'll spring back slower and slower until it looks about like this. And at that point, it's time to get ready to bake. So with enriched doughs and most other breads that aren't intended to end up with a hard crust, baking is pretty simple because you can essentially just throw them in the oven at about 350 to 400 degrees Fahrenheit, which is about 180 to 205 degrees Celsius until the outside is golden brown and the inside is fully cooked. So in general, the higher the temperature you use, the quicker the outside will cook relative to the inside. So if you're having issues with the inside ending up undercooked, you may want to decrease your oven temperature a bit.  But when it comes to more rustic breads like baguettes or an open crumb sourdough bread, there are a few extra steps you need to take in order to achieve the best possible results while baking. And those steps are scoring and creating steam in your oven. So scoring is just a fancy term for slashing the surface of your dough with a sharp razor, and this basically just creates a path for steam to escape from the loaf as it bakes, so that the loaf doesn't burst in unwanted places. So how deep you need to score depends on the size of your loafs, but for full size boules or batards, you'll generally want to score about a half an inch to one inch deep. And for something like baguettes, you may only want to score about a quarter of an inch deep. But in both cases, I'd recommend scoring at about a 30 to 45 degree angle from the surface of the loaf in order to give the loaf a nice ear, which is that little flap of dough that rises up and gets nice and charred during baking. Then when it comes to the actual baking, you'll need to create steam in your oven for about the first 15 to 20 minutes of baking. So this basically allows the crust of the bread to stay soft for as long as possible so that the loaf can rise freely at the beginning of baking. So professional kitchens often have steam-injected ovens that'll automatically keep the environment moist at the beginning of baking, but for home bakers, we have to come up with a different solution. And there are a lot of methods that people use, like placing bowls of water or ice in the oven, but the easiest method is actually just to bake your bread in a Dutch oven. This way as the bread bakes and releases steam, that steam gets trapped within the Dutch oven and keeps the crust soft. Then after about the first 15 to 20 minutes, you can remove the Dutch oven lid and continue to bake until the crust gets nice and golden brown. So I used to use this Lodge Dutch oven combo cooker, which while it wasn't specifically designed for bread baking, it does work very well because you can just place the dough into the shallow half and then use the deeper half as the lid. But it is a bit one-dimensional because the size is somewhat small so you can really only bake one loaf at a time and you can't really bake bigger loaves or unusual shaped loaves like baguettes. So recently I started using this Challenger bread pan, which was designed specifically for home bread baking, so it forms a better seal to trap in the steam and its size allows you to bake things like demi baguettes, which are basically just smaller baguettes and it can even fit two small loaves at once. So I will be making a full review video on this pan soon, but it's definitely already my new favorite and the results are noticeably better than the results with my Lodge combo cooker. The only downside is that the Challenger pan is more expensive than the combo cooker, but I think for serious bread bakers it's definitely a worthwhile purchase, so I'll leave the link to both pans in the description below for anyone interested in checking them out. So at this point you might think that you're done once you take the loaf out of the oven, but there's actually one more very important step and that is cooling, because steam is still being released from the inside of the bread as it cools, so it's really still finishing cooking at that point. If you cut into it too early, you may end up with a gummy interior, which of course you don't want, so for full-sized loaves you'll want to let them cool for at least one to two hours, and for something smaller like baguettes you'll want to let them cool for at least 20 minutes or so. So now if you want to apply the concepts that I've talked about in this video, I'd recommend that you check out my sourdough baguette recipe in the bottom right corner of the screen, which is one of my personal favorite bread recipes. So thanks for watching and I'll see you all in that next video.


This is the lecture on International Monetary Systems. Oh, sorry, that was the other session. Well, this is actually, the topic is a philosophical one. You know, thinking about philosophy, sometimes I like the story about my friend, Father James Sadowski, gives his introductory classes. He says, the word philosophy comes from the Greek word philosophy, which means philosophy. I've always liked that one. You know, Father Sadowski is very good at somewhat unusual remarks. For example, there's his argument for free will, which is we wouldn't have the concept of free will unless we had it. And then I once gave that comment to Bob Nozick and Nozick said to me, maybe we wouldn't have the concept of bad arguments unless we had them. But what I wanna discuss today is some issues about method in economics. Some of this will be going over material you've heard in other lectures, but I think it's rather difficult stuff and it's always good to get the material from a slightly different angle. Now, Mises made, I think it's a very important claim, he thought that economics has a distinct contribution to make to epistemology. Epistemology is a study of how we know what is the nature of knowledge. And one of the topics in epistemology, and this was one that very much concerned the logical positivists who actually, they prefer to be called logical empiricists, was they were very interested in what's the nature of scientific knowledge in epistemology. We can cover much broader topics in scientific knowledge. We could say what is involved in any kind of knowledge at all. But the positivists were especially concerned with the nature of scientific knowledge. And Mises was, at least to this extent, like them, although certainly the positivists weren't the only epistemologists who were concerned with the nature of scientific knowledge. He was also very concerned with nature of scientific knowledge. And he thought that by neglecting economics, the positivists had made a big mistake. They'd failed to take full account of what was involved in scientific knowledge. They'd left out a branch of science that was very important that if they'd taken that into account, they wouldn't have come to the conclusions that they did. So in particular, he thought that in science, any kind of science aims at coming up with general laws. Say we have physics, of course, we have all sorts of general laws. Some sciences emphasize general laws as much such as biology. But in general, in science, the scientists try to come up with general laws, universal laws. But economics has a distinct way of reaching those laws that's different from the physical sciences. So he thought that the positivists had failed because they didn't take account of this special way that economists arrived at general laws. Now, the question comes up. Well, if economics has this special method of coming up with general laws, why is it that the positivists and other people interested in trying to come up with nature scientific knowledge? Why is it that they failed to come up with this? Certainly they're aware that they're such a discipline of economics. So when they're investigating the nature of science, why don't they ask what are the economists doing? And I should say, when I'm talking about economics here, when Mises was talking about economics, he didn't just mean Austrian economics. He meant it generally accepted price theory. At the time he was writing, he thought there'd been kind of general consensus among economists on price theory. Certainly this wouldn't apply to macroeconomics where you have all sorts of competing schools, but he thought at least the time he was writing, there was a large measure of agreement among economists on the nature of economics. So he said, well, why then did the positivists neglect that? And he thought that there was this kind of a psychological explanation or sociology of knowledge explanation for why economists, why people neglected what economists had to say. He thought that the conclusions of economics are counter to the ideologies of a lot of people, especially of the positivists. Because one of the things we learn from economics is if there are economic laws, these can limit what the economic policy can achieve. Supposing, say, if you, Mises has established that economic calculation under socialism is impossible in a large scale economy. So then if you like socialism, if you wanna put in socialist measure, then you're going to have a problem if economics has shown that this is impossible, or if you favor certain kinds of state intervention in the economy, and economics shows that these measure of intervention won't achieve the goals that you want, then, again, it's going to be very difficult for you to advocate these measures if you take economics seriously. So what Mises thought is that rather than accept the conclusions of economics and say, well, all right, we wanted to be socialist, but we can't now because economics has shown that socialism won't work. He thought that the socialist were suddenly, some socialists were so committed to their views that they would say we're just going to deny the status of economics as a science or ignore it. So he thought that that was one reason that the positivists who were a largely socialistic group were inclined to reject economics or not considering it when they were talking about the nature of science. And the main villain Mises had in writing, there was, sometimes we would have heroes and villains. One of his main villains was Otto Neurot. Well, I'll get to, I'll put him in, now I actually put him in the slides later, but I'll just mention him now. Neurot was a leading positivist. He had been a minister in the Bavarian socialist government in which was established for a short time in 1923, I think, then in 24 and then it was overthrown. So he was a very committed socialist. So Mises thought that a lot of the positivists were motivated by hatred of economics and its conclusions. That was why they ignored economics. Now, I've said that Mises thought that philosophies of science, epistemologists, should take account of the particular nature of economics. He thought that economics had a special way of coming up with laws. Now we can see what that is, say, if we can make a contrast between the physical sciences and economics. Now in the physical sciences, what is generally done is we say there's kind of a relationship between things, between events or things that applies universally. For example, just to take a simple example, we have Boyle's law of gases, which says other things being equal, the pressure and the volume of gas are a constant. If you multiply the pressure and the volume, you'll get a constant. So if that's true, then if the pressure increases on the gas, the volume will decrease. And if the pressure decreases, the volume will increase. Now, the way in which this operates, it's something just purely physical motions. It isn't that either the pressure or volume has some kind of mind and say, imagine the pressure is increased. So it isn't that the volume will be saying to itself, well, the pressure's increased. So I've got to contract to preserve Boyle's law. The volume doesn't have some kind of mind that it's putting Boyle's law into effect. It just, this law is just stating a certain physical relationship. But economic laws are different from this. In economics, people are not only physical bodies who are moving according to laws of physics, but they also act. They have conscious purposes and they act in accord with these purposes. They use means to achieve ends. And this is very different from the physical sciences where we can just observe physical, motions of physical bodies, we can just observe them externally. But as far as we know, they don't have minds, they're not acting. So in economics, we have a different way of coming up with laws from the physical sciences. I should say there are philosophers, there are people who've thought that physical bodies besides human beings or higher animals do have mental aspects. So there's some philosophies that you'll find in which the notion of physical bodies having some kind of mental aspect would make sense, but Mises rejected that idea. Now another thing I should mention where there is a view that Aristotle held and some of his followers, that the notion of purpose or teleology isn't confined to acting beings who can consciously pursue purposes. Aristotle thought there's a purpose in nature even though there's no conscious mind that's carrying out this purpose, but that's a view that you find. Many biologists are very attracted to that view although some aren't, but that's not a view Mises accepted. But whether he's right or wrong about that, he does seem clearly right that there is this special way of understanding human action, namely by talking about ends and purposes and means to achieve them, the category of action that's different from that used in the physical sciences. Now, when we're talking about action, there's nothing mysterious about this. We see action all the time. People are using means to achieve ends. We're all doing things. Say to use example, I want to drink a water so I have a means of getting that. I just take the bottle and drink it. I hope it's water in there. I can't handle anything stronger than if there's anything stronger in there, there's really going to be trouble. So let's hope for the best. So as I say, there's nothing mysterious about this. We do this all the time. We're always acting, we're aware of this. But in order to understand what's going on in an action, we have to use certain concepts, say in order to understand action, we have to have the concept of an end or a means. So these concepts, they're required in order to understand action. So if we're to understand action, we have to have these concepts. And in that sense, we can say, these are a priori concepts, meaning we have to have them before we can understand action if we don't have these concepts then action won't make sense to us. Imagine we didn't have the concept of an end or a means, then we wouldn't be able to understand what people are doing when they're acting. So a lot of people object to the notion of a priori concepts. But as I say, it isn't an unusual view, it's just saying that in order to understand something, we have to have certain concepts. If we don't have these concepts, we won't be able to understand it. Now, it's important, and I gave the example, say we could give an example, if you're learning a foreign language, you have to have certain concepts, you have to have learned certain concepts in order to speak the language. You won't say if you listen to people speaking the foreign language that you don't know, you won't be able to understand anything because you don't have these concepts. So when you talk about concepts being a priori, it's nothing more unusual than just saying you have to have these concepts in order to understand this particular kind of experience. Now, one confusion that a lot of people make when they think about a priori concepts, they'll say, well, then this means these concepts are innate, that people have to be born with them. You remember, you probably learned from history, philosophy, Descartes believed in innate ideas and we find this notion in the 21st century, Noam Chomsky, the famous linguist believes in innate ideas. Jerry Fodor is a proponent of innate ideas, but this is different from a priori concept. A priori just means to understand a particular type of experience, you have to have certain concepts. It isn't saying that the concepts have to be inborn in some way. I suppose maybe if you were talking about concepts without which you couldn't have any experience at all, maybe they would have to be innate, but in general, if you say just for a particular kind of experience, you have to have certain concepts before you can understand that type of experience, that doesn't involve any claim about innate ideas. Now, very important here also to realize, if you say that you can't understand a particular kind of experience without certain concepts, you say, well, you can't understand actions without having the concepts of ends and mean. This is a claim about the logic of action. It's saying that it's not possible to understand action without having these concepts. If you make a claim about some idea being innate, that's just a biological claim. That's just a claim about people's psychology, and it wouldn't be a logical claim. If we say, well, say we know certain things are priori, then if it was just say we had certain ideas or propositions just built into us biologically, we couldn't think otherwise in those, then we really wouldn't have good reason to believe those things. It would just be we'd been built to think that way. So that wouldn't give you good grounds for accepting those views at all. What we want in talking about the a priori is to come up with certain things that are logical conditions or a certain type of experience. So see, that's very different from, say, there's some kind of biological innate ideas. Now, when we apply this notion of a priori ideas to economics, this is the whole discipline that Mises calls praxeology. Now one thing's just a point of terminology should be where praxeology is the science of human action, this kind of discipline that Mises is talking about where we start with the action axiom and then try to elaborate what's involved in action, what deductively follows from it. But sometimes people use the term praxeology to mean the deductive method that is used in this study, but that's not really the way Mises uses the term. So praxeology is the science of action, not the method that you use in carrying out that science. Now, when you're doing this, it's important to avoid, again, another confusion. This is one that a lot of people, I'm gonna spend some time on this because a lot of people make this mistake. When we talk about a priori concepts, that's to say ones that you have to have in order to understand a certain realm of experience, people think, well, a priori concept, so this must mean these have to be mental. So somehow they're talking, if you talk about a priori, what's a priori science, an a priori science, it has to be talking about things that are in somebody's mind. You're really talking about something mental, but this is not the case, you're just saying you have to have certain concepts in order to understand a particular kind of experience, but praxeology isn't about what goes on in people's minds, it's about actions out there in the world, there are real actions going on. It isn't a discipline about how people think, it's about how people act. Now we could, here's where, example of where this confusion comes up. You remember, I'm sure those of you taking history philosophy, remember Descartes raised a famous problem, he said he was asking of all the various beliefs he has, which, if any of those, could he know to be certain that we're immune to doubt and he started doubting all his beliefs, he said, well perceptual beliefs are subject to doubt, he tried to say, is there any belief he had that wasn't subject to doubt, and of course he comes up with a famous one, but he can't doubt his own existence, and from that he tries then to build up other beliefs, he says, well then he proves the existence of God, and from that he gets the sense perception is reliable. So what Descartes is trying to do is to solve a skeptical problem, he's saying, can I, having shown that there's some certain belief and establish other beliefs about the world that are also things that we know, but this isn't Mises project at all, Mises is not doing epistemology in this sense, he's not trying to deal with a problem of skepticism, he's just as all scientists do, not just economists, scientists take for granted, I think rightly so, that the world exists, that other people exist, so Mises in starting with the action axiom is not talking about just something that's going on in his own mind and trying to deduce the existence of the world, this is just not his project, he's not trying to do that. So as I say, he's taking for granted that other people act that he acts, and he's trying to figure out what follows from that, what can we know about the nature of action, given the fact that everyone acts. Now sometimes I've had people ask me, well, how does Mises know that his conclusions apply to anything other than his own actions? Say he's reasoning, he's gotten various conclusions about action, say we know someone always chooses his highest value preference, well how does Mises know that this applies to anything other than his own action? And the answer to that is quite simple, we've already in essence given it, is that Mises is not talking about his own action, he's just talking about action, he's not describing his processes of thought, he's just asking what is involved in the concept of action, in the way we know it applies to others, it isn't referring to him in particular, and we can, the fact that these concepts enable us to make sense of other people acting is how we know it applies to them, it's not, he's not a solipsist, someone who just believes that only he exists, that only the categories of action apply only to him. There was a story about solipsism, that's the belief that only you exist, I remember that Alvin Plante tells, he said once he met someone who's a professor at I think a medical school who was a solipsist and he was talking to some students of this professor and they said, oh yes we're very careful about this professor because when he goes, everybody goes. Now, I now, having given some of the background of what means is meant by our priori concepts and practicality, I now wanna talk about the group that he considered his main methodological enemies in at least in the 1930s. There was also the German historical school, but they were larger from an earlier period that he considered enemies. Now, the positives were a group, here I'm going over some material that Hans Hoppe dealt with in his lectures, but as I say, I think it's always good to hear some of the things again, at least from a slightly different perspective. So the positives were a group centered around Moritz Schlick, who was a professor of philosophy at the University of Vienna, and I think they started around 1928 and they lasted throughout the 30s. They were disrupted when the Nazis invaded Austria in March 1938 and a lot of the members of the group then took positions in other countries. A lot of them came to the United States and as I say, Schlick was the head of the group, but there were other famous people in it, such as Otto Neurad, whom I mentioned earlier. Friedrich Weismann was in it, the Rudolph Karnapp. So this was the group that Mises was largely opposed to. Now, what the Postavists were very much concerned to oppose what they called metaphysics. Now, if you studied history of philosophy, you know there are some philosophers, especially past philosophers, who had the view that just by thinking about things, you could build up a picture of the world that showed the world to be very different from what it appears to be. Say, for example, Leibniz thought that the world consists of certain immaterial atoms, kind of mental atoms that he called monads, and each monad had been programmed with a completely determined way by God who was a supreme monad. So he thought all of this very unusual philosophy could just be established just by thinking about things. We could come up to this conclusion about the nature of the world just by thinking about things. It's very contrary to what you would expect just from studying the physical sciences from common sense observation. He wasn't the only philosopher who thought that. Say, we have Bishop Barkley thought he could show that matter doesn't exist. The world is composed entirely of ideas and acts of thinking. So the positivists were very much opposed to metaphysics. They thought these metaphysical statements weren't based on anything, and they, in their study of theorem knowledge, wanted to say that only knowledge that's based on either sense observation or certain rules of logic counts as real knowledge, is kind of speculative knowledge of metaphysics. Certain metaphysicists had proposed wasn't really acceptable. So what they said, one of their fundamental beliefs was that knowledge is really confined to what we can learn in science, and they'd also accept common sense observations about the world, but really science is the real model of knowledge. So Mises' response to that was, well, if you want to say that, he wasn't going to challenge that. He wasn't going to say, Mises didn't believe in metaphysics either, but he said, as I indicated before, well, you're not to the positivists, you're not taking account of the full nature of science because you're ignoring economics. Economics is a science, but economics precedes in this deductive fashion from these a priori concepts and the way the positivists pictured science was an empirical discipline dealt with generalizations about sensory observations. So economics wouldn't qualify. So what the positivist's response to Mises was that his style of economics doesn't, in fact, qualify as science because it fails the test of the verification principle Now, what was the verification principle? Well, this is a statement about, applies according to them about knowledge about the world and he claimed that we know something about the world. Suppose I say, for example, I know that I'm giving a lecture now, that would be a claim about something going on in the world, so it would have to meet the requirements of the verification principle. Now, there is two really forms of the verification principle, the stronger and the weaker one. The stronger form says that the meaning of an empirical statement is its method of verification. So not only is that saying that every empirical statement has to have some method by which you can verify it, it's saying that the meaning of a statement just is the way you verify it. But this strong form of verification principle doesn't seem very plausible at all. Suppose you say that, reading the historical statement, Caesar crossed the Rubicon River in 49 BC. Well, how would you verify that? Well, you could read various books that had made that claim that you accepted, various historical books, or you could look at various documents that were evidence for the claim that Caesar crossed the Rubicon River in that year. But it seems clear that that wouldn't be what the statement is saying. The statement Caesar crossed the Rubicon in 49 BC doesn't mean if you look in certain books you'll find the statement Caesar crossed the Rubicon in 49 BC. That just isn't what it means. As Bertrand Russell pointed out, in order to know what we would need to do to verify a claim, we have to know what the statement means first. How would you know that the way to verify Caesar crossed the Rubicon in 49 BC would be to look at certain documents unless you already understood what that statement means. So it seems like the strong form of the verification principle just wouldn't work. But then kind of a much, probably a better version would be the weaker form of verification, which would just say any empirical statement has to have certain sensory observations that can confirm it. If I say I'm giving a lecture in this room there have to be ways that could be confirmed. Say people could look and see or listen to me giving a lecture. So you'd be able to confirm that I'm giving a lecture. So at first sight at any rate this principle doesn't sound so bad. Just say if you're making a statement about the world there has to be some observation that can confirm it, that will be evidence for it otherwise it isn't passing this test. But if you say that then it seems that economics can meet the test of that principle because then suppose you say I always choose my highest value preference. Well, economics says that people always choose their highest value preference. Well, then you can just see whenever you choose something are you in fact choosing your highest value preference at the time you're choosing. Can't you verify the statement in that way? So it seems then that economics has passed the test even though it's working in this deductive way it's trying to come up with consequences of action but just deductively it isn't coming up with its conclusions experimentally as they do in the physical sciences but still seems that we can verify them that the positivists didn't accept that either. They said when Mises and the other praxeologists say an actor always chooses highest value preference then all that's being done is that the highest value preference is being defined as the one you actually choose. So according to them there's no empirical claim made it's just that Mises is proposing to define the highest value preference as the action that you choose but this doesn't seem right though does it? It isn't that Mises is defining the highest value preference as the one you choose on the contrary he's just making the claim that we know what a preference is he's saying at the time you're acting if you rank your preferences you're always going to choose the one you rank highest so it seems he's not making a definitional claim as the positivist thought. Now why what the positivists thought the reason they were reluctant completely reluctant to accept what Mises said is they held the view that you couldn't know anything about the world anything about the empirical world just by thinking about it they said you can't know anything just by reasoning a priori and I should at this point I didn't put it in the slides but I should just make a distinction we talked so far about a priori concept certain concepts that you have to have in order to understand a particular kind of experience but we can also this is a bit different we can also talk about a priori propositions a priori proposition is one that you can know to be true just by thinking about it suppose I say 2 plus 2 equals 4 well I can know that to be true just by thinking about it I don't have to keep counting pairs of objects and see if they add up to 4 I just know that to be true just by thinking about it but so what the positivists were saying was that a priori propositions don't give you any knowledge about what's actually going on in the world now just one thing I should say also about a priori propositions is that this is one where the positivists were wrong we shouldn't think that all a priori propositions or these kind of universally the propositions that are must always be true supposing I say let's take the one Descartes I suppose I say I know that I now exist now that's one that unfortunately for me won't always be true I'm not there is going to be a time when I don't exist so that's an a priori proposition it's one I know to be true just by thinking about it but it's not this kind of universal proposition must be true always so you have to be careful to distinguish a priori proposition from a necessary proposition one that always is true couldn't be otherwise so a priori just means you can know it's true just by thinking about it and just one further point while I'm on the subject there are some a priori propositions that if you deny them you'll be involved in what's called a performative contradiction for example suppose I said I don't exist I wouldn't be able to say that unless I did exist so my saying I don't exist presupposes that I do exist but it's important to realize that not all a priori propositions have this feature sometimes I've heard people say well it's a test of a criterion for an a priori proposition that if you're denying it presupposes that the proposition is true and that isn't right supposing I say 2 plus 2 equals 5 my saying that doesn't presuppose that 2 plus 2 equals 4 2 plus 2 equals 5 is a contradiction but my saying that does not presuppose the true a priori statement that 2 plus 2 equals 4 so why did the positivists think that these a priori statements couldn't give you any knowledge about the empirical world but they thought that all a priori truths were really tautologies which really the tautology is really something like a definition or part of a definition or a law of logic so they thought a priori statements are just tautologies they're not really telling you anything new about the world they're just really conventions that are explaining how you propose to use certain terms so I've gone over this already they said in response to Mises that if you say you always choose your most highly valued and all you're doing is saying this is how I'm going to define most highly valued and is the one you choose so if that's right and I don't think it is but if that's right you wouldn't be learning anything about the world in saying you always choose your most highly valued preference you would just be saying that's how you're defining the terms so the basic claim positivists are making is I say is that the a priori judgments are simply tautologies there's an exact famous example that Wittgenstein gives someone asks you what the weather is in a certain place and you say well it's either raining or it's not raining what you've said is perfectly true it's just a law of logic it's either raining or not raining but it doesn't tell you anything about the weather you're not learning anything about the world so what the positivists thought were a priori statements were either tautologies of that kind or simply that would be an example of law of logic or the other kind of tautology would be a definition and it seems clear just by defining terms in a certain way you can't show that something exists if you just say well I'm just going to be using terms in a certain way that doesn't show that anything exists you can't just make something true just by definition so this was the basic way the positivists tried to argue against Mises' praxeology said it's a priori so it's just either it's tautologies it's not telling you anything about the world now what Mises responded to this he had several responses and he said well it seems like even if you accepted what the positivists were saying economics does tell you new information about the world say if you look at the conclusions of praxeology say law of marginal utility it's not at any rate obvious to people that this law is true it's something you have to reason out so aren't you learning something about the world even if it is a tautology in the positive sense you're certainly learning something new even if it doesn't qualify by the positivist standards there's knowledge about the world now it's interesting the positivists themselves admitted this they admitted that people could be surprised by mathematical theorems even though they thought that mathematics consists of tautologies so when they said you're not getting information by just reasoning with a priori statements they would have admitted people can get information in the sense that they learned things they didn't know before but what they deny was that what this information is giving you is knowledge about the world they said what you're just learning is just the implications of using certain terms but Mises had I think a good objection to that view that view said well maybe we're learning something new but it's not something new about the world he said well certainly doesn't mathematics how is it that mathematics is so useful how is it that mathematics applies to the world it's just a set of conventions and how is it doesn't mathematics really about what takes place in the world otherwise why would we be so successful in using mathematics it would seem odd just by defining terms in a certain way and coming up with their implications that this would enable us to do all sorts of things in the world it would seem like there is a big problem for the posthumous view at least as applied to mathematics now I want to raise in the time left a few further problems for the posthumous view one was and I covered this a little before when I was talking about a priori concept of the experience is Mises concept of the a priori is local in the sense that you say we have to have certain concepts that before we can understand action but that's quite compatible with thinking that these concepts are empirical in the sense that they're somehow derived from experience it's just that we have to have these concepts before we can understand this kind of experience so that really there isn't there need not be a conflict between a priori concepts in Mises sense and verification principle now another problem is kind of a famous one for the verification principle this is one that Hans Hoppe covered in his Sunday night lecture is that the principle appears to be self-refuting in that it says that all meaningful statements have to be either analytic analytic statement is just a tautology just a way of saying principle logic or a way of defining terms part of the definition so all meaningful statements are either analytic or empirical but that statement doesn't appear to be either one it doesn't appear to be analytic or it's not empirical either now there are various ways the logical empiricists tried to counter that probably examples were one they said was well if you investigate meaningful statements you'll find that they fall into one of these two categories so they could say that that is an empirical claim it's just you take meaningful statements and you'll find they're either tautologies or empirical claims but the problem with that is if they say that then they're excluding from consideration metaphysical statements how do we know metaphysics is meaningless well we can't say just because metaphysical statements violate the verification principle and then claim it's an empirical claim that the verification principle is true because we rather cook the data we haven't put in the metaphysical statements in the first place so it's rather begging the question then if this is another line the positivist said the statement, the verification principle is analytic because it's a proposal about how a meaningful statement is to be defined then why should people say who like metaphysics who think it's meaningful except that claim it would just seem to be something that would need to be argued for rather than just asserted as a criterion now another problem is that let's just take the principle the way the positivist wanted it so they wanted really that all scientific statements would come out meaningful and metaphysical statements would be excluded but they were never able to state the criterion in such a way that they could get just the statements they want in the ones they didn't want out as it happened any time they kept coming up with more and more elaborate version of the principle there was a great logician at Princeton who was later taught at UCLA I remember seeing him in his later years named Alonzo Church and whatever anyone would come up with a new version of the verification principle he would come up with some new counter example to it and destroy it he would come up with a version of the verification principle that really passed scrutiny Alonzo Church was a very interesting person when he would lecture he was extremely precise when he would write on the blackboard when he would come into the class he would spend about ten minutes erasing the blackboard to make sure there was nothing no specs of chalk that might interfere with any formulas he wanted to put on the board so one way people could upset him was to also would be to say, I think you made a mistake in something you put in he would get very panicky and then look at the thing for quite a few minutes but anyway he was the one who really thought about the verification principle that doesn't show nobody would be able to come up with a version that did what they wanted but no one in fact has done that now another problem is it's not clear what is supposed to be the argument for the view that we can't know anything new about the empirical world just by thinking about it why should we think that all you can do just by thinking about things is just to come up with definitions or conventions why can't we know something about the world just by thinking about it I think at the heart of the positivist view this I'll get to a bit later the positivist view why they thought that is that they said well if you think about something then what you're going to come up with is some kind of necessary truth something that must be the case in any possible circumstance in say say in any possible world but all empirical knowledge is contingent that's to say both I say I'm giving a lecture now that's an empirical statement it could have been otherwise I might not have been giving this lecture I'm sure you all wish I hadn't been giving it but so they thought the positivist thought well any statement gives you knowledge about the world is one that could have been otherwise but they say a priori statements are ones that give you just necessary propositions give an example of statements that are a priori and contingent but I think here we can challenge the positivist why should it be why should we think that all propositions about the tell you knowledge give you knowledge about the world are contingent in this way why can't there be necessary truths about the world that we haven't given any reason to think that now the last thing I'll mention is one of the greatest 20th century philosophers W.B.O. Quine challenged the whole idea of the a priori also rejected distinction between analytic and synthetic propositions what he said was our beliefs confront the world as a whole we shouldn't think say you have a separate beliefs you say well this belief is a priori I get this belief just by thinking about he thought all our beliefs are interconnected in such a way that none of them are ones that could never under any circumstances be given up even laws of logic could conceivably be given up is just some say something say I have a belief set I believe I'm lecturing now but something and then I can come up with observations that will support that but there it isn't a straightforward matter having a belief and then having observations these observations are tied to other beliefs my belief I'm giving a lecture is tied to still other beliefs so what's happening as new sensory data comes in is that I'm adjusting the whole framework some way to cope with the new data so he thought that nothing is immune to this kind of revision even laws of logic but he had to modify that some of his later work he kind of retreated a bit on that and I think it's not really a plausible position to think that the laws of logic at any rate are subject to revision so I have a few minutes left so we can have any questions objections yet so when I when I get into arguments with people into a debate about Karl Hopper's being a circle I know Hopper made the concession that well there might be some role for a pre-are knowledge in formulating hypotheses and ordering our understanding I have an intuition that much surely means something for Meesey's claim that praxeology is a valid kind of science and I wonder oh yeah I just see you have a t-shirt that says I'm not dead yet that's very good well I suppose if you're able to put it on it's true so well you see I think that's right see what Popper didn't think just as you say that you could come up with a priori conjectures we see he had what I think is a kind of an odd view that he encounters more than a conjecture because he thought well supposing you what he would say is supposing I say something well I know that I'm acting so he says well how can you say that's a conjecture don't you seem like you really know that so he says well look there have been cases before where people were quite certain things but they turned out to be wrong about them for example I suppose you have the notion of a class membership it seems certainly to make sense to ask the question it certainly seems to make sense you could have a class of all classes that are not members is not a member of itself but also show that's contradictory so the claim would be any a priori claim you make could be refuted later because maybe you made some mistake about it and as I mentioned in one of my previous lectures I think this is a fallacious view it doesn't follow just from the fact that I've made mistakes that in I think that's really this notion of everything is conjectural is why he just wanted to confine the a priori to this kind of limited role of proposing hypothesis I should say he just came out a few years ago of his correspondence he had an extremely high opinion of Mises he refers to him as a great man he mentions he met with Mises a number of times he said in the 1930s and began he says Mises was very suspicious of him he thought he was in a rationalist and a dangerous person and as usual Mises was right well let me see I think we have time for about one more well I don't think that you could I mean that would just depend on what that would be an empirical claim about the person certainly Mises never claimed to be able to do that well all right thanks very much


I hope you're all trying to stay happy and positive despite what's going on in the world. And that's going to be the main focus of today. What I incorporate into my diet and lifestyle to stay calm, collected, and to be intelligent about everything that's going on right now.  So if you guys haven't gotten the memo, you have vitamin D is important, but when you rub it on specific parts of your body, as if you were out in the sun getting full body exposure, there are hormonal receptors in certain parts of your body that will actually respond. So I've noticed that if I put the vitamin D3 down there and get blood work for testosterone, it will actually change and I will feel a difference in my sex drive. Whereas just rubbing it on my body, you're taking it orally, it's not the same effect. And females can do this too. You can rub it on your breast tissue above your stomach where your ovaries are. Crucial nutrient and it is pretty sunny outside. I woke up pretty late and I have some stuff to do, but even in early April, if it's nice and sunny outside, you can get some UVB rays from about 11 a.m. to 2.30 p.m. So it's definitely worth your time. If you guys aren't doing anything, if it's not too cloudy outside, go lay out in the sun in your underwear in a bathing suit for a couple hours. The natural alternative to taking this supplement, that being said, not everyone can lay outside naked in the sun for a couple hours a day. And this is a main factor a lot of people are missing. You can get every single thing right, but if you're not getting vitamin D3, you're not going to feel energized, you're not going to feel good. And this also ties into nutrient synergy. If you're consuming a lot of vitamin A, if you're consuming a lot of vitamin K2, you're eating all these high fat, soluble vitamin animal foods, but you're not in the sun getting vitamin D, you're going to run into issues long term. One thing I don't mention enough is the main goal of humans, which is to reproduce. So if you don't have a high sex drive, if you don't feel good, you know, if that's not a main component of your lifestyle, you know, something's wrong. I mean, that's all real humans are supposed to do, right? If we were to have one goal. So keep in mind when we're consuming these animal nutrients, you know, by increasing the nutrient density of our diet, by doing all these things in the lifestyle, that's really the end goal, to have the healthiest children possible by creating the healthiest egg and the healthiest sperm possible. So let's go downstairs and have the first meal. So lately I've been doing ground beef with bone broth. So this is a pound of 80, 20 ground beef, and this is some homemade bone broth. What I do is I either take the ground beef out the night before to throw out, or like today I just let it throw out in hot water for an hour, if I forgot to take it out. So while this ground beef is cooking, I'll get my supplements ready. And the three things I take every single day, regardless, are vitamin K2 to replicate fermented foods, very important for vitamin synergy, calcium metabolism.  And this is copper. This is very important because our ancestors would have consumed a lot of wild plant foods that were high in copper. So you want to keep your copper to zinc ratio about one milligram to 10 milligrams. And this is two milligrams per pill. So I basically take one of these with every meal I have, you know, maybe two milligrams per pound of beef. Sometimes I will take iodine, but that's just a bunch of extra, extra of these because, you know, I go through them maybe once every two or three months. So what I like doing is cooking the moisture out of the ground beef. And after I cook the moisture out of the ground beef, we throw this really flavorful bone broth in, then it tastes really, really good. If there's a lot of liquid in the pan and you add the bone broth to it, it's just not as concentrated and flavorful. If you guys haven't seen my bone broth recipe from a few weeks ago, definitely check that out. It's going to blow your mind at how good it is. Yeah, it looks good. I'm going to turn the heat off a couple of tablespoons of broth in here. Now I'll take some salt, maybe a pinch of salt in here. And that's good to go. Just going to let the broth warm up off the heat. So here we have the ground beef with the bone broth and not really too many fat soluble vitamins, mostly B vitamins, protein, caloric energy. And if you think about it from like maybe November through April, we wouldn't have had access to super high vitamin foods. So humans are kind of meant to eat in a cyclical nature. That's why we have babies at certain times of the year naturally. You know, if you look up statistics for like birth, weight, IQ, height, pretty much anything to do with being healthy, babies that are born, you know, in June, in July that were conceived later in the year, that's when they're healthier. That's because the animals on pasture, the food you're eating is higher in nutrition. And then when you have the baby, the sun is out, you're getting vitamin D. So everything makes sense. And if we're able to replicate that in a way through our diet and lifestyle, that's the assumed healthier thing to do.  But again, that depends on the quality of the bone broth. And if you guys look back like a year or two at my old day of beatings, you'll notice I used to eat a lot more fat and that's because that's when I was in bodybuilding.  But now I just eat a lot of protein. As you guys saw last time, about halfway through the meal is when I'll take the supplements. So I'll do one drop of the vitamin K2. And again, if you think you're deficient, you can always go higher. There are studies where they did like 45 milligrams per day, which is, it's very high, but you know, in a state of nutrient deficiencies, it makes sense. And here I have the the beef test these pills. I'm actually going double on them today. I'm going to try twice as much for the next few weeks and see if it makes a difference. I've never swallowed that many pills without water before, and I'm never doing that again. Directly caught on my throat. So that was about a pound of ground beef. And as always, I want to emphasize that you shouldn't be eating to fullness.  Don't stuff yourself. Don't overeat. It's going to stress your body's digestive enzyme. If you really want to increase your calories, what you want to do is switch up the food powder ability. You know, I just ate a pound of ground beef, and I could probably have a couple tablespoons of honey. I could have maybe half a cup of raw cream, a few bites of cheese. By changing up the food type, you're changing up the macronutrient and the micronutrient ratio of what you're eating, and your body's going to crave different things. You know, raw dairy and honey are definitely two things I would lean towards to increasing food powder ability. I used to even put honey on beef fat, and I even made a beef fat ice cream once. Incredibly delicious. Definitely something you guys could try out. You know, since my body can only produce so much pepsin, so much stomach acid, it has a limited amount of protein digestion. But you know, since I didn't eat a lot of fat, since I didn't eat a crazy amount of carbohydrates, there's still other macronutrient metabolism processes in the body that can be utilized.  How much insulin is my pancreas ready to release? How much other enzymes can my body digest in the form of carbohydrates, in the form of fats? And I go over this in my Do Athletes Need Carbohydrates video, where it does make sense to figure out what ratios of macronutrients work for you, what do you perform the best on, and what mixture of high quality foods that are mostly animal based you can comprise most of your diet. So this might be all we're eating today. I'm going to find out. So what I'm going to do now is I'm going to have a couple tablespoons of raw honey. Then I'm going to hydrate a little bit, drink some water, well work out. And depending on how the rest of the day goes, I might have another pound of ground beef, or I might not be able to, I might just leave it at this. And yeah, 95% of the days I'm having two meals, but occasionally, you know, if I eat too much the day before, or if I'm just not as active, I only have one meal. So we had that first meal about one o'clock. I wasn't going to actually eat again today, but it's about 10 PM and I am a little bit hungry. So, you know, we're going to have the other pound of ground beef that I took out. So I do have some bone broth left that we can flavor this with. Just the same thing as before, you know, the rest of my broth, the ground beef, we'll put some salt in there, and then I'll have the copper. I'm not going to have the K2 and the beef testies again. We're just going to do the copper this meal. That's the main difference. You know, those supplements I take in the morning, the D3, all that stuff, I do that once a day. But the copper needs to be taken consistently because you need to balance the zinc. I'm running a little bit low on bone broth, so I'm only really putting like a quarter cup in.  You know, you might even enjoy it a little bit more with more broth in there. Round two, ground beef and bone broth. And honestly guys, the only reason I made this video was to show you guys adding the bone broth to the ground beef because this is so tasty and delicious compared to just eating a plate full of ground beef. And I started doing this just last week. It's really, you know, a step up from choking down ground beef. But as I said earlier, you really need a high quality beef stock or high quality bone broth because it needs to taste good in order to make this taste good. I'm actually still a little hungry, so, you know, maybe I'll have a couple tablespoons of raw honey later as a dessert. I don't know, we'll see, usually, even if I am hungry, it'll go away in like 20, 30 minutes. But, you know, since the goal is to gain weight for the bodybuilding, to give my body as much nutrition as possible, you know, I kind of want to eat a little bit more, especially if I have the stomach capacity for it, you know, when I usually don't. We know nutrition plays a big role in health and happiness and there has never been a time in the world where we needed it so much. So if you can convince, you know, your family to consume more high quality animal foods, if you yourself can consume more high quality animal foods, it's going to put both our physical and mental being in a state where we can deal with all this better. So thank you guys for joining me. We just added a five pound organic ground beef bundle to Frankie's syringe meat if you want to check that out. We might have bone broth in the next week or two.  As I said, check out the recipe I did a couple of weeks ago, or you can even get, you know, an organic beef broth from your local supermarket. If it comes to that, you can go to organ supplements for, you know, some of the various supplements I showed you in this video and the rest of the stuff can be found on Amazon, Frankie's naturals for minimal ingredients and minimally processed hygiene and cosmetic products. I don't show you guys that stuff enough, but, you know, I brush my teeth with it every day. It's the deodorant I wear, hair pomade, lip balm, all that stuff. And you can go to frank dash to pound.com for a free carnivore diet meal plan to get an understanding of all the nutrients you need to keep in balance. Thanks again for joining me guys. Enjoy the rest of your day.