Alright, time to get back in the swing of things. What's up guys, my name's Glassfoot. This is Critical Review of It Chapter 2, the sequel to the 2017 It movie. This movie is actually really, really good. It's entertaining, there's a lot of fun stuff, but it has quite a few problems. One of the biggest ones, right off the gate. It's not scary. It is funny, there are a lot of funny moments, but overall the movie is not scary in and of itself. It feels like a comedy with horror elements as opposed to a true horror film. And depending on what you want, that can be a good or bad thing. So I'm putting this out there right now. I've never read the book. I've seen the miniseries from the 90s, but I've never read the book. That's because the book is so thick that I did not feel like taking over that endeavor of reading it. So I don't actually know how the book ends, so I don't know if this movie is super accurate to the book or not, but I can say that the changes that it makes from the original miniseries I liked. And I say there are changes from the original miniseries, I mean how it goes about showing that these characters are getting messed with by Pennywise this time around. There's a point in this movie where they each go to their childhood to different locations to try and find things for the ritual of chude so that they can stop Pennywise. If you're watching it, I'm assuming that you know about that point from the book in the original. So not counting it as a spoiler, but they each go around to try and find their own individual token as they get called in the film to do the ritual and Pennywise messes with each of them in a different way. I'm not getting into it, but the way that he messes with them I actually very much enjoyed. It was really fun to watch how each of them got messed with. The acting was very very good. There were parts that I thought were a little wonky. That's more of just how what is specifically written. When the characters first meet up again there is a bit of weirdness there towards the end of that scene, but overall the actors are very very good. Bill Hader, the guy that plays Richie is probably my favorite. He's very funny.  This movie is both an hour too long and an hour too short as my friend Zane put it. So this movie drags. There are a number of parts that I would have said completely cut out of the film and you wouldn't notice the difference, like at all. It wouldn't have felt like the same film. And then the information that I wanted to have more info on, the ritual, how it was initially performed, stuff like that, you know, isn't actually explained like at all. It's very much a glad story. And the way that they beat him at the end kind of goes against the rules that the movie itself stated were the rules. So don't know how to feel about that personally. Overall this movie is greatly, greatly enjoyable. If you it is a lot of fun. There are parts that are really yeah, but there are parts of me with almost every movie. So I'm not going to really rag on it too much. If you want to watch it, chapter two, I would suggest going to see it is, I mean it's an entertaining film. One last thing before my rating, I want to talk about. Skip to this part of the video if you do not wish to know this information. Forced representation is a problem that I personally have with. Underrepresentation, overrepresentation and forced representation are three problems that I think. Underrepresentation, I think everyone should have equal representation because you know, equality as an egalitarian, I personally believe that. Underrepresentation, but overrepresentation, we try and force the situation, force representation into a situation that doesn't need it a.k.a. making a character gay, but basically only using the gay stereotypes to make the character, not actually writing the character and then just having them be gay is another problem that I have. And then my person and then forced representation also kind of falls into overrepresentation. When you force a subject into, when you force something that doesn't really need to make sense to basically seem inclusive, LaFou from the Beauty and the Beast remake and a line from the Power Rangers movies are two examples of this where LaFou at the very end kind of pulls a guy close and it's gay but could easily not be and then a line from the Power Rangers movie where they ask one of the characters if she had girlfriend problems, but that's not really elaborated on. The problem with forced representation is that you go into this rabbit hole of look I'm so inclusive but you're not actually and I kind of got that sense from this movie. Again never in the book and in the original movie this isn't stated but I would like to know but in this movie it is implied that Richie is gay kind of but not really. So it is something that just confused me but yeah it's something I just want to touch on but none of my score. For me in this movie overall rolled a score of 14. It's very enjoyable entertaining as a very entertaining movie but without really any horror scares poor CGI and just the fact that it felt more like a comedy as opposed to a true horror film lowers the score for me substantially. Still greatly enjoyable if you want to see it I recommend it. A question I would like to pose to all of you what is your favorite horror movie either from when you were a child or now just would like to know tell me in the comments down below if you would like to follow my Twitter and Instagram links are going to also be down below and like comment subscribe if you feel so inclined and as always guys have a great day peace out.


Hi, nice to see you again, welcome to you all. As you know, with the search options list and chart, you can perform simple searches to find out how frequently a word is used. The verb, contribute for instance, can be found more than 26000 times. In the concordance lines though, you can see, that contribute is only shown in its exact form. We do not have any information about the frequency of all the members of the paradigm, that is, third person singular, past tense, participle forms and so on. If we are interested in how frequently a word is used including all its inflectional variants, we can apply the lemma search. To do this, you simply type the query in capital letters. As a result, you receive all members of the paradigm, even those that involve irregular or morphographic variants. Select these two examples, go with its inflectional variants, and carry, which involves the Y to I change in some forms. By the way, with lemma searches, even contracted forms are displayed. And if you want to search for contracted forms only, make sure to insert a space before the contracted form, as shown here. Okay, that's enough for now. Don't forget to practice, try as many as possible lemma searches, and see you again soon.


Good morning, thank you for joining us today. I'm here with Trevor Jones, CEO of Lynx, a company that you may not have heard of, but like big predator cats, it's stalking you. So Trevor, I know that the company specializes in the junction of artificial intelligence and ESG, environmental, social, and governance issues. Tell me how that works. Yeah, absolutely. So we have a lot of functions in our data suite for the Lynx platform that allows junior, mid-tier, and major minors to go out and collect data from all kinds of different places. So we have folks that are entering data in the field, we have sensors, there's satellite images, all kinds of data that we can procure from the wild, so to speak. And we put that all in one database and one centralized, aggregated platform so both folks on the ground and managers in C-suite can see all of the data that pertains, not just ESG but health and safety and all kinds of other aspects, non-geologic aspects at the mine site, too. And then we are using some new artificial intelligence tools that have come on the market recently and these will help our users do things like query large amounts of data. And it's also going to help with our support functions as we support teams around the world like in Indonesia, so we're not getting up in the middle of the night and answering queries about exactly what's going on with the platform. Several new things coming down the pike on the artificial intelligence front, pretty excited about that. Oh, that sounds really useful. So what you're saying basically is it goes beyond just ESG or it makes broader ESG teams, really. Yeah, I think we've all been using and kind of manipulating this ESG acronym for a few years now and really it has to do with a broad-based view of replacing spreadsheets and notebooks. So whether it's ESG data, health and safety data, even security and risk, you know we were talking before, it's just all spread out. It's in a bunch of different places. There's just a need to kind of put it in one place to have that aggregated on the ground picture, a complete picture of what's going on at the mine site. Well, speaking of things being spread out, I know one of the very valid complaints by mining companies is that there's such a plethora of standards that they're expected to comply with in terms of ESG reporting. Is Lynx doing anything to help with this problem? 100% really glad you asked about that. So it's absolutely challenging alphabet soup out there for companies to go understand which standards apply to which parts of their business. The way the Lynx platform helps is just by entering one piece of data, you're going to align that entry to a number of preconfigured standards. So without getting into the actual acronyms, because we could probably take the rest of the interview doing that, you know, if there's a greenhouse gas emission, there's going to be multiple standards that that particular event aligns to. So with a click of a button, the user can just go ahead and check off those checkpoints, those key waypoints that they want to see on the different standards that are out. So essentially it's kind of consolidating based on common points of interest between different standards? Yeah, absolutely. And I think this is really going to save our clients a lot of time and money, frankly, with all due respect to the great consulting work that's going out there. That can get pretty costly if you think about all the different standards and kind of the audit versus performance versus reporting standards too. So rather than have a consultant for each one of those to kind of look through spreadsheets and notebooks to compile that at the end of the year, we're doing it real time, you know, on the ground as that data is uploaded. OK, I just heard a really key word. I just heard real time. So how real time is this? If I'm sitting in the C-suite and I need to know something, how real time is this? Yeah, absolutely. I'll use an example. We have a client that's based out of Oslo and they have an asset in Ethiopia. When those events or those pieces of data are added on the ground in Southwestern Ethiopia, the management team in Oslo can see that pretty much immediately, right? So it's real time or near real time. We want to get rid of these six to eighth month reporting lag times in mining. We can do a lot better, I think, as an industry in just getting that data front of decision makers in a quick, rapid fashion. Absolutely. And it strikes me, particularly as someone who has lived in Africa, that this could also be really useful in being aware of a problem before it becomes a crisis and being able to make plans and launch actions to deal with it. Yeah, I couldn't have said it better, Mel, and you would know, given your experience, I think the real time risk mitigation, right? So surfacing events that are of urgency to decision makers in real time is certainly a big part of the platform. So in addition to being comprehensive with everything that's happening at the site, we also want to make sure things that need to be taken care of. And typically, this could fall under social license or security issues, or it depends, of course, on the geography and jurisdiction. But of course, we want to get those issues the top of the list of the database and notify stakeholders as well. So what it sounds like to me is that what makes links unique is real time capability, allowing for forward planning and responsiveness and associated cost savings. Is that a fair summer? I would say I couldn't have said it better myself. We might have to try to get you over the links to get on the software for a smell. But yeah, absolutely. Let's create efficiencies in the field. Let's surface those risks to decision makers. And let's also get away from spreadsheets and notebooks. We know we love our field notebooks in this industry. And I hear really great, actually, fantastic stories from geologists about how they're using their notebooks. But those notebooks get lost. They're disparate. They're disorganized. We've got to put that in one spot, especially for regulation for compliance. And for finance, too, I know we're sitting here at Investor Intel. There's a lot of efficiency gains to be made by finance to go ahead and see this data in digital format instead of on a notebook. Awesome. Well, best of luck to links going forward. Well, it's always great to talk to you. Glad we got to sit down. Thanks.


From Hollywood, it's time now for Johnny dollar Mr. John dollar. Yes, Western Union. I have a message for you from New York. Oh Please proceed Northern Hotel Clinton Colorado as soon as possible. Yeah building irregularities suspected affecting several insurance companies Will advise regards signed Albert Davies chief investigator United adjustment bureau New York, New York Would you like that mail to you, Mr. Dollar? Oh, no, no, don't bother. Can you take an answer go ahead? To Albert Davies chief investigator United adjustment bureau you have the address Confirming exact time of arrival to follow sign that Johnny dollar Tonight and every weekday night Bob Bailey in the transcribed adventures of the man with the action-packed expense account America's fabulous freelance insurance investigator yours truly Johnny dollar Expense accounts submitted by special investigator Johnny dollar to the United adjustment bureau, New York City, New York The following is an accounting of expenditures during my investigation of the Clinton matter or maybe racket is a better word Expense account first item one hundred and five dollars and sixty-three cents transportation by air Hartford to Denver item two 2850 Denver to Grand Junction a place busy and bustling with uranium hopefuls Third expenditure one hundred dollars deposit and rental on a car Which I used to drive the hundred and five miles through the rugged mountains due north of Grand Junction to Clinton Colorado a Place that the rental agents had described as a sleepy little mountain town When I got there everybody was running in the direction of what was very shortly not going to be the new school building Like everybody else in Clinton, Colorado I spent the next three hours or so helping to try and get the fire into control Then finally I left the scene and located the northern hotel where the clerk was standing by waiting for me Mr. Dollar. Yeah operator 18, New York City has been calling you for the last four hours Mr. Davies, I believe. Oh, yeah, could you put the call in for me? Certainly? I'd be glad to I'll take it up to my room I want to change my clothes certainly Boy take Mr. Dollar's bags up to 310. I shaved and showered change clothes and unpacked From my window. I could see the still glowing embers of the fire red against the winter nights The school building was completely destroyed beyond the snow-covered Rockies rose all about the town of Clinton Which I had yet to see Johnny dollar. Oh good. Thanks Johnny I'll say I've been trying to get to you all day I thought you're gonna let me know the minute you got into town. Well, there was a fire here I'll I had to pitch in and help along with everybody else Well as Osburn contacted you yet about this case Osburn, who's that Julian Osborne?  He said he'd wait around the hotel until you showed up He lives there Johnny He drove into Denver two days ago and told the insurance broker He thought of building the great eastern fidelity covered was in real bad shape now what building well a new school that they just put All it wasn't bad shape were shape now it fell down about four hours ago That was the fire out in for $200,000 Look Johnny contact Julian Osburn and see what he has to say right and call me back when you find out what's what so long Yes, mr. Dollar may I help you? Yeah, do you have a city directory here in Clinton? We aren't that small Right here good after all we have 14,263 people. Okay. Thanks. I know most of them mr. Dollar, what do you want to get in touch with a man named Julian Osburn, but Julian Osburn? Yeah, know him I didn't know him, but it came over the radio a little while ago. They found his body in the fire He burned to death a Four-block walk down the icy streets of the town took me to the sheriff's office and face-to-face with a heavy set Cowley shulking man named dirty Sheriff Paul dirty He smiled professionally and until I got around to inquiring about Julian Osburn.  No, no, I I made the trip here to Clinton to see him especially though I just heard he was killed in the fire. Yes. Yes, too bad about mr. Osborne. I don't quite understand about it though. He was school janitor. Oh what What was your business with him mr. Dollar insurance investigation? Oh Yeah, Osburn reported the possibility of something wrong with the new school. He did To who to our brokers in Denver. That's why they sent me out here. Well Your trip was for nothing then maybe you think if he had anything like that on his mind He'd have come to me wouldn't he yes Did he no no used to pass him on the street never said a word Where's the body morgue? I I wouldn't go over there son. I want to contact some of his family's friends. Yeah, that might be hard to do No family here and no close friends Used to prospect for a living until he got kind of old and he took the job janitoring Lived right there in the basement of the school City will bury him. I see How long had he worked at the school? Six months since the place was built mm-hmm Who hired him? Principal flurry Hawkins flurry Hawkins. Where can I find her lives on Pearson Street? That's one block over and two blocks to your left number 326 326 Pearson them. That's right And son hmm bad night to go calling on it I'd like to see mrs. Hawkins, please. I'm miss Hawkins Well, I'm an insurance investigator. My name is Johnny dollar insurance. Yes Why do you want to talk to me? Well, I'll be frank with you miss Hawkins. I came to Clinton to talk to Julian Osborne.  I know this has been a pretty grueling day for you for everyone in this town miss Hawkins Losing your school and all I wouldn't call on you except. I feel it's important. I Excuse me sure Right now there's just a couple of questions. I'd like you to answer about Julian Osborne so I can get it I can't help you with anything mr. Dollar What you'll have to go now. Well, look now wait a minute if if you don't eat I Don't want to be impolite, but I'm tired very tired Yeah, sure That phone call were you up? Please all right. All right. I'll go miss Hawkins But I think you should know why I came here. I can assure you mr. Dollar whatever the reason I'm Simply not interested I was sent here because Julian Osborne advised the insurance company that he suspected certain building irregularities had gone into the new school Miss Hawkins did mr. Osborne ever mentioned anything like this to you. No Now would you have an idea to whom he might have confided such information here in Clinton? No, I Rather think he was Imagining things you notice nothing irregular yourself No, of course not With that called you just had from Sheriff Dougherty cause you not to notice anything. Is that all I'm dreadfully tired Thanks for your time Almost Hawkins. Yes If Sheriff Dougherty calls again Tell him I'm at the Northern Hotel Northern Hotel Good night, mr. Dollar Expense account item for ten dollars and eighty cents one long distance call to New York. I Got out Davies out of bed and told him the fate of Julian Osborne Davies requested me to stay on and Clinton to see the matter through About 11 o'clock that night. I walked over to the site where the new school had once stood a few Firemen and policemen were still around searching the ashes by the light of lanterns and spotlights One of them told me the cause of the fire had not yet been determined. I Started back to my hotel turning a corner by an alley two men in dark clothes. We're holding a third man in the sheepskin Fourth man was giving him the words Hey You need some help Everybody needs help Let me tell you who I am before you help me. Maybe you won't want to easy. Just take it easy I'm David Baines You're from out of town, aren't you? Yes, I thought so I Architected that school that isn't anymore Well, don't you understand Samaritan Don't you see that group of citizens who are working me over just now have kids The kids could have been in there when the fire broke out I'm afraid I'm afraid they feel I don't design especially good buildings. I Took David Baines over to my hotel room still half unconscious from the beating I Sent the bell boy out for bandages. I had iron and something to take off the chill While I was patching him up. I was thinking how he'd stood there and taken that beating Stood there in sight of half a dozen policemen and firemen and let them do that to him Try a little more Thanks Who are you Johnny dollar insurance investigator? I came here about the school. I see You want to beat me up to Company you're working for will be liable want some more of this Would you say your name is dollar Johnny dollar Mr. Dollar I'm in a curious position. I Designed a school. I planned every feature of it, but I had nothing to do with the building You don't believe me. I wish you'd explained that a Week before they broke ground a very important thing happened to me mr. Dollar. I Went to Europe. I couldn't pass it up. It was a chance to study for another year under some men I'd admired all my life Considerate a scholarship mr. Baines. That's what he said who said the man who paid my way to Europe His name was Roy Vickery So I went to Europe and I studied I came back and my building was all built Now it's burnt down I'm a local boy who's made bad very bad Who's Roy Vickery the contractor who built it? I better talk to him. Yes talk to him by all means You represent a rich and powerful company mr. Dollar But in Clinton you're wasting your time You'll learn no facts no information nothing helpful from anyone here Particularly Roy Vickery You're in a tight-heart mean little Berg mr. Dollar All right, let's have it Why is that building fired on purpose? I just told you you won't find out anything in this town Now here's our star to tell you about tomorrow's intriguing episode of this week's story tomorrow Well, there's a lot of information to be had in a town that won't talk and there are times when the silence screams all over the place Join us won't you yours truly Johnny dollar Yours truly Johnny dollar starring Bob Bailey is transcribed in Hollywood written by John Dawson It is produced and directed by Jack Johnstone Be sure to join us tomorrow night same time and station for the next exciting episode of yours truly Johnny dollar Roy Rowan speaking


In the summer of 1988, I think it was July of 1988, I was about the age of many of you, and I attended my first Mises Institute Conference. At that time, it was called the Advanced Instructional Conference in Austrian Economics. It was quite a bit smaller than this, and it was out in California, Tom Woods mentioned last night that some of the summer conferences were out on the West Coast before they got moved here. And that was actually the second Mises Institute Summer Conference for students, the second edition of what eventually grew and became Mises University. So that was 30 years ago, this summer. And I think there were about maybe 40 or 50 students, and there were only four speakers. They were Roger Garrison, I don't know if Roger's still in here, David Gordon, Hanserman Hoppe, and there was a fourth guy, what was his name? Oh yeah, Rothbard was also one of the speakers. And that was really a transformative experience for me, as I know that coming to Mises U has been for many of you, and I hope will be this week a transformative experience also. So that was really my first exposure to all of these folks and to much of that literature. That was right before I was starting my graduate studies in economics. Now in subsequent years, as I mentioned, the conference expanded and they began bringing in kind of the second and third tier Austrians like Salerno, Block, De Lorenzo, Herbner, et cetera to give the lectures, and then eventually it became this fantastic, much larger event that we have now. But I have been at the summer conference, the Mises University Summer Conference, either as a student or as a speaker, every one of those years from 1988 until the present. So this is my 30th Mises U, can you believe it? No, thank you. After listening to all the lectures and doing all the reading and participating in all these discussions over those 30 years, I still don't think I'm quite ready to take the oral exams. Maybe this year I'll try the written part, but I don't know. What I want to speak to you about this afternoon as we close the first full day, at least the part before dinner, is entrepreneurship. Many of the previous speakers have referred to the role of the entrepreneur in this or that aspect of the market economy. Obviously, entrepreneurship is a central theme in the Austrian tradition, and as we'll see, the entrepreneur plays a critically important role in Mises' system and Rothbard's system and in that of most members of the Austrian school. Now, unlike some of the other topics that we have discussed today, like the division of labor, entrepreneurship is kind of a hot and sexy topic in the world at large, right? Everybody wants to talk about entrepreneurs and entrepreneurship, who's gonna be the next sort of famous breakthrough entrepreneur, that's Serena Williams. You all probably have watched Shark Tank. There are lots of reality shows of this nature, right? I mean, think about it, this is a TV show that lots of people enjoy, which is about business people pitching new products to sort of nasty and highly critical angel investors and venture capitalists. Lots of schools have Shark Tank kind of competitions. In fact, entrepreneurship is one of the hottest subjects in universities, particularly in business schools and other universities as well. The Princeton Review now has an entrepreneurship category when it ranks its top universities. When I first saw the top 25 undergrad entrepreneurship programs, number one, I was pleased that my own university, Baylor University, is ranked in the top 10 of that listing and has been for several years, but mainly I was surprised that there were 25 entrepreneurship programs that they could even rank. But now there's many hundreds of them. Entrepreneurs are kind of celebrities in our culture. What do you wanna be when you grow up? Well, American kids used to say, I wanna be president, not so much anymore. I wanna be a real estate developer and then president is maybe what they say. People wanna be, everybody wants to be the next Steve Jobs. Now not all entrepreneurs are equally popular some shall we say a little bit more controversial. Elon did not have a good week last week whole thing with the submarine and there's a bunch more stuff going on anyway. Now, why am I telling you about entrepreneurship? Why do I think it's important for us from sort of the theoretical perspective and empirical perspective? Well, Mises was really into entrepreneurship too. Now they didn't have Shark Tank back in the early 20th century but if you look at the index for human action, notice how many entries entrepreneurs get in the book. Look how many pages and of course indexes are not perfect and there are many more references to sort of entrepreneurship concepts and ideas than just the listing of the word entrepreneurship. But I mean, you know, epistemological problems of economics, right? Mises is very interested in the philosophy of the social sciences. Epistemology is a critical issue for him but look how many pages epistemology gets. I mean, it's nothing. Equilibrium, of course, if we were looking at a mainstream economics textbook, equilibrium would have many hundreds of entries and entrepreneurs would probably have none whatsoever. But I mean, clearly this is a big deal to Mises. Now what is he talking about? Is he talking about technology startups? Is that what Mises thought was sort of central to economic progress? Is he talking about, you know, Mark Cuban's latest thing or, you know, I mean, certainly those, the sorts of popular notions of entrepreneurship that people are really interested in today, Mises would be interested in them as well. But that's not really what Mises was talking about when he gives the entrepreneur a central role in his analysis of the market economy. Here's a sort of one of Mises' well-known quotes, quote from Human Action. Mises says, it is impossible to eliminate the entrepreneur from the picture of a market economy. The various complementary factors of production cannot come together spontaneously. They need to be combined by the purpose of efforts of men aiming at certain ends and motivated by the urge to improve their state of satisfaction. Now doesn't that sound characteristically Misesian, right? Purposeful human actors aiming to improve their state of satisfaction. In eliminating the entrepreneur, Mises says, one eliminates the driving force of the whole market system. So the entrepreneur is the driving force of the whole market system. Roger Garrison was telling me an Israel Kersner funny story before the lecture. Kersner titled one of his, one of his more recent books is titled The Driving Force of the Market. It's a book about entrepreneurship. He gets that phrase from this line, this passage in Human Action. But what is the driving force of the market, according to Mises? It's the sort of human faculty that accomplishes what? Brings together the factors of production, right? And organizes them in such a way that they can be used to satisfy human wants. This bringing together of complementary factors of production, it doesn't happen automatically, right? It doesn't even happen spontaneously. It happens deliberately and in a calculative fashion through the efforts of particular individuals and actions in the market. That's what entrepreneurship is. So notice a couple of things about this quotation. Entrepreneurship is a very general feature of the market economy, right? It's central to anything that we're talking about in the context of economics. It's not just startup companies. It's not just, you know, high tech companies. It's not just what they call gazelles, right? High growth firms, right? So all kinds of productive human activity, all human action that involves the assembly and combination of complementary resources is within the domain of entrepreneurship studies or the analysis of entrepreneurship according to Mises. So no, that's very different from the sense you get from watching Shark Tank or reading Entrepreneur Magazine or looking at Elon Musk's Twitter feed, okay? So if we're, let's start by talking about factors of production, right? What is involved in the combination of factors of production to allow people to satisfy particular ends? Well, and this is a nice follow-up to Roger Garrison's talk on capital theory, right? So production, the analysis of production in Austrian economics, it really is ultimately about capital or it, central to it is the Austrian notion of capital, which as you know from Roger's talk is in many important ways different from the way capital is treated in mainstream economics and in Marxist economics and other traditions, right? So what is production? I mean, production is really about the transformation of some things into other things, right? You know, if you bake a cake, you have flour and eggs and sugar and water and butter and whatever and you don't wanna just stuff those things into your mouth, right?  So production is about transformation of inputs into outputs. If you wanna think of this in causal realist terms, we're interested in the relationship between means and ends, right? You know, enjoying a delicious piece of cake, that's the end that I seek to obtain when I go into the kitchen, but there's not, you know, a cake isn't just right there in front of me and I can't just will it into existence by snapping my fingers or waving a magic wand, right? I've gotta take the other ingredients and somehow combine them with energy and heat and labor and so forth to make the thing that I want. So we need to distinguish among different types of resources or goods and services, right? They're what the Austrians refer to as original factors of production, which include human labor and sort of nature-given resources, land, minerals, sunlight, wind, right? Things that are themselves not produced but are given by nature and available for us to use. We also have intermediate goods, tools and machines and factories and so forth, vehicles that we produce ourselves but not to consume them directly but to use them to produce other stuff, right? You don't eat a hammer, but you use a hammer to build or you don't live in a hammer but you can use a hammer to build a house that you can live in, okay? Something like that. What's interesting about, you know, what makes this an important topic and in some ways a challenging topic in a modern economy is that, you know, there are lots and lots of different ways to produce things, right? There's lots of ways to bake a cake, right? Different ingredients, there's different types of flour and you can use different ratios of flour to eggs and sugar and so forth. You could make the cakes with, you know, by hand. That's what we typically do, right, in our kitchen but you could make them on a big assembly line using advanced robotics, right? Most of us when we, even if we bake a cake at home we use an electric oven and we might use an electric mixer and we have all kinds of tools. We don't just use our hands and, you know, a stick like some ancestor might have done to try to create bread or something. So there are lots of different ways we can do it. Which inputs do I use? Which ingredients? Which brand of ingredients do I buy at the store? What type of labor do I apply? What should be the ratio of capital to labor and so forth? Now, if you think about making computers or cars or jet engines or skyscrapers there's an almost limitless number of possible combinations of inputs that can be used to produce particular outputs that we desire ourselves or that we think other people would desire and be willing to pay us for. So we've got to think about, we've got to have some means of figuring out the most effective combinations and the most effective individuals to affect those combinations and bring them to the market, right? And so we know, you know, from Roger's talk, right? That Austrians have a unique appreciation of the complexity of production. Production takes time, right? You go from lower-valued combinations to higher-valued combinations and so forth. Did Roger show you the famous Hayekian Triangle? Yeah, so why is this important for production theory? Well, the fact that production takes time means that decision makers, entrepreneurs, have got to, you know, they've got to make some choices now that will affect the stuff that will be available, that will be potentially produced and available to the market later, right? You know, you can't go backwards and forwards in time. So I have to make some commitments now to use particular inputs or to combine them in a particular way without knowing for sure what kind of output I'm gonna get and whether that's the right kind of output. So how do entrepreneurs do this? Well, to be able to engage in a rational process of figuring out how to combine inputs into outputs, we need to use some kind of a system. We need some mode of analysis. And that's where the Austrian notion of imputation comes into the picture. So I'll talk about imputation in just a moment, including concepts like the marginal product of an input and the marginal revenue product of an input, right? So by marginal product, we mean, if I say, you know, what's the marginal product of flour in making cakes? Well, if I use a little bit more flour, another cup of flour, how much more cake do I get, right? The marginal revenue product of an input is the same thing but measured in monetary terms, right? So if giving, you know, adding another cup of flour produces another fourth of a cake and I sell my cakes for 20 bucks a piece, when I add that additional unit of flour, I get how much more revenue Matthew people? Five bucks, yeah, so we're doing, who says Austrians don't do math? So the marginal revenue product of that cup of flour would be five bucks, okay? Again, critical to this process, again, say I'm making these cakes not just to eat myself but to sell, I'm a professional baker, right? In deciding whether or not I wanna buy that extra cup of flour and use that extra cup of flour, I'm thinking, well, how much do I have to pay to get it? And how much more money do I expect it to yield to my enterprise, right? Well, it's gonna, I think it's gonna, I think I can sell these for 20 bucks a pop and I'll get five more bucks from that extra fourth of a cake when I add this cup. But remember, you know, how much it costs me to buy the cup today, that's certain. The cost of that extra flour is known to me now. The revenue I'll have in my pocket, the additional revenue from using that cup of flour, that I only get that tomorrow when I take the cakes to market and, you know, the market price of cake tomorrow is not a given thing to me today. So uncertainty is central to this process as well. So the way the Austrians do imputation, this goes back to, I mean, it's sort of implicit in Karl Manger in his principles in 1871, it really spelled out in more detail by Friedrich Wieser, right? One of Karl Manger's sort of students or disciples and also fleshed out in more detail by Rothbard in man economy and state and many other economists as well. Imputation makes the following claims, right? The discounted marginal revenue product of a unit of an input or a factor is the money revenue attributed or imputed to one service unit of that factor discounted by the social rate of time preference. So let's say it takes a year to bake cakes and bring them to market. These are really elaborate cakes, I guess, the ones you see on Cake Wars. You know, so let's say that when I purchased that, it cost me, sorry, when I purchased one additional unit of flour, say one cup of flour, I can use that to get $5 of additional revenues, but not until a year from now, right? So I've got to discount that by, you know, I've got positive time preference. So, you know, $5 a year from now might only be worth, say, $4.50 in terms of present goods, right? So the most I would be willing to pay for a cup of flour today is how much? $4.50, yeah, because it will generate, I expect it to generate $5 worth of revenue a year from now, okay? So the marginal revenue product of that cup of flour is five bucks, the discounted marginal revenue product is let's say $4.50 or $4.75, depends on what the interest rate or the discount rate is in this particular situation. So as I said, that establishes the entrepreneur's maximum willingness to pay for that unit. I wouldn't pay $6 for a cup of flour if I expect it will generate five bucks of additional revenue a year from now, because then I'm losing money, right? I'm paying more, the cost of that cup of flour is more than what I expect it to gain in revenue. Now, I'd like to get the cup of flour for a dollar or free, I'd like to get it for free, then I could pocket the entire $4.50 in present value terms, you know, but I'd be willing to pay $1, $2, $3, $4. I'd be willing to pay up to $4.50, but not more for the control and the ability to use that factor. So you can imagine that now there's a lot of bakers, right? So if there's competition among entrepreneurs and assume for the moment, everybody knows with certainty that you can sell a cake for 20 bucks and so the additional cake is worth five bucks. Let's say we all know that for sure if we assume away uncertainty, then we would imagine that the market price of that cup of flour is gonna end up being about 450, right? I mean, if cups of flour are being sold on the market for 350, we would imagine that lots of people will realize, oh, I can buy that at 350 and transform it into something that puts another five bucks into my pocket, even with discounting, that's a great arbitrage opportunity, right? So we would expect people to start buying up cups of flour and that will drive up the market price of cups of flour, but we wouldn't expect the market price to be higher than 450 because then the demand for those cups would fall and the price would tend to go down until it equalizes, equilibrates right at around 450. So in the absence of uncertainty and given competitive bidding by entrepreneurs, the price of a factor will tend to equal its discounted marginal revenue product. Now, there's some exceptions to that principle. If you have certain factors have to be combined in certain proportions with other factors or you're baking bread and you need yeast and without yeast, you can't get any bread at all. But in general, when there's some substitution available among factor that's possible between factors, this principle will hold that prices of factors are determined by discounted marginal revenue products. But wait, some of you are saying, he just said some weird equilibrium thing. I thought this was Mises University, this is not Krugman University or Samuelson University or whatever. So yeah, again, I'm saying imagine this sort of equilibrium world, right? You could use the construct in Mises and Rothbard of the evenly rotating economy. So think of a kind of a long run equilibrium state where all factors of production exactly equal their discounted marginal revenue products. What kinds of incomes will be available will exist in that world? Well, anybody who owns a factor, that factor could be flour, it could be land, it could be human labor, right? So any wage earner will get a payment equal to the discounted marginal revenue product of that factor service. People who sort of own and operate firms, they're gonna get some kind of return as well like an opportunity wage, right? Rothbard calls it an implicit wage because they have to have something left over in their pocket to prevent them from selling the firm and going to work for somebody else, selling their labor to someone else. People who own financial capital, right? And sort of make it available to people in the market will earn an interest return, but that's it, right? All of the incomes in that scenario are paid out either as returns to a factor based on DMRP or implicit earnings to owners of enterprise and interest returns to capitalists. Notice what's not, what doesn't exist in that world. No profits and losses. No entrepreneurial profits and losses. Why? Well, think about the following. Suppose we drop this assumption that we live in an evenly rotating economy where everybody knows exactly what's gonna happen tomorrow and all uncertainty is absent. Well, now what we have going on in that world, i.e. in the actual world, right? Is that entrepreneurs are, you know, they're making these bids for units of factors of production without knowing for sure what the future is gonna be like, but based on some kind of beliefs or expectations, right? So they have knowledge and beliefs about the present, right, which includes, you know, technology.  I need some kind of recipe, how does it work? What are the capabilities of different factors? Which resources are available to me? And their expectations or beliefs about the future. What will be the demand for cakes in the future? You know, will the government regulate the cake market? Will there be a lot of, you know, is Elon Musk gonna be making cakes and I have to compete against him and so forth? Okay, so based on those beliefs and expectations, they make their bids in the factor market. And guess what? Some of them are gonna get it wrong, right? Some of them will pay for units of factors amounts that we will later find out are more than what the DMRP was revealed to be, right? What will happen to those entrepreneurs? They'll earn losses, right? Entrepreneurs who are relatively good at this and who correctly anticipate future states of the world, right, will be able to acquire factors of production at prices below what the DMRPs will eventually be revealed to be. So in the real world, you get profit and loss. You get entrepreneurial profit and loss, right? And profit and loss comes from the differential abilities of entrepreneurs to anticipate future conditions. Okay, differences in knowledge, belief, expectations among entrepreneurs is what gives rise to entrepreneurial profit and loss. In fact, Mises puts it this way, right? The term entrepreneur as used by economic theory means acting man exclusively seen from the aspect of the uncertainty inherent in every action. So what is entrepreneurship in kind of the most broad or general sense bearing uncertainty, right? Acting in a world where we really don't know what tomorrow is gonna be like and, you know, taking responsibility for buying and selling resources and combining them and so forth without knowing for sure how things are gonna work out. And notice we're talking about genuine uncertainty. So this is not casino gambling. It's not probabilistic risk. It's you call it nighty and uncertainty or what Mises following his important contributions of his younger brother, Richard Von Mises called case probability as opposed to class probability. Now, you know, so in this sense, sort of all human action is kind of entrepreneurial because we don't know for sure if the returns are gonna be greater or less than what we had to, you know, the expenditures we had to make to get those returns. But, you know, it might be useful, I find it useful to think about entrepreneurship in kind of a narrower commercial sense, right? Which is the act of combining and recombining productive factors in pursuit of money profit. Yeah, I mean, you can say I tried to bake a cake at home and it didn't work out. You see some of you, see those Pinterest fails. You know, my cake was a disaster. Okay, I earned some of a psychological loss. But really we're more interested in the commercial baker, right, who ended up paying more for factors of production than what the baker earned in money revenues. That's the kind of loss we would be concerned about. There's a great quote from the Austrian economist Ludwig Lachmann in his book on capital theory. He says, we are living in a world of unexpected change, i.e. a world of uncertainty. Hence capital combinations or resource combinations will be ever changing, will be dissolved and reformed. In this activity we find the real function of the entrepreneur. So the real function of the entrepreneur is this continual combination and recombination of factors of production under conditions of uncertainty. Now, in order to do this, entrepreneurs need a world of money. They need a world of money prices. And they need, in order to get those, you need markets and private property. So Joseph Lerner will talk about that in his lecture tomorrow on calculation. There's another way you can sort of conceptualize this. I like to use the term judgment, which is a term that is used both by Mises and also by Frank Knight, as a way of understanding this notion of decision-making under conditions of uncertainty. Think of judgment this way. Judgment is decision-making under uncertainty in the absence of a formal model or a formal decision rule. So I don't have a probability distribution in that where I just calculate the expected value. Rather, I rely on what we might call intuition or gut feeling or the Germans have a great word for this, forstain, which is usually translated into English as understanding, but it's really a very, you know, kind of a deep sort of understanding. Let me quote from Mises. The real entrepreneur is a speculator, a man eager to utilize his opinion about the future structure of the market for business operations promising profits. This specific, anticipative understanding of the conditions of the uncertain future defies any rules and systematization. Okay, so there's no equation that the entrepreneur can use to tell them how to act in conditions of uncertainty. And this sense, this judgment, this specific, anticipative understanding can be neither taught nor learned, except in this lecture right now. He says, the entrepreneur sees the past and the present as other people do, but he judges the future in a different way, okay? So notice that, you know, in order to judge in this sense, it's not just sort of an intellectual exercise, right? It's the act of actually taking stuff and combining it into other stuff. And to take possession of this stuff, you have to own it, right? So there's a connection between judgment and ownership or what Mises referred to as the capitalist entrepreneur. And I've got a long discussion of this in a book that I co-published, co-authored in 2012 called Organizing Entrepreneurial Judgment, which has a lot more details about this. And I'll come back to the ownership point in just a moment. So what then do we mean by sort of the entrepreneurial market process? That's a term that you hear often in the Austrian literature. So people like to talk about, this is, we're about this, not equilibrium, but the market process, the market process, et cetera. What do we mean by the market process? In his short essay, Profit and Loss, which I highly recommend on the subject of entrepreneurship, Mises, he says the following, if entrepreneurs fail to produce in the cheapest and best possible way, those commodities which the consumers are asking for most urgently, they suffer losses, right? And are finally eliminated from their entrepreneurial position, other men who know better how to serve the consumers replace them, right? So what Mises has in mind by the market process, it's not some kind of convergence to equilibrium. It's the constant day-to-day competition among entrepreneurs for judging future market conditions, right? So notice that government agencies and nonprofits don't go away, government agencies don't go away when they fail to anticipate future market conditions and get replaced by those who are better able to do so. But also nonprofit firms have a hard time doing this because they don't sell their goods and services on the market. And notice that some economists or mainstream economists, political scientists will say something like, oh, you know what's great about the market is it's like democracy. One company succeeds and iPhones are very successful and flip phones are no longer available on the market very much, right? So it's like the consumers have voted that they like touchscreen, all touchscreen smart devices better than old flip phones that you could drop from 100 meters and they would still work when you pick them up, right? Isn't that great? It's like people are voting for what kind of products they want. Well, I mean, actually a better way, it would be more correct to say, voting in elections is almost as good as the market, right? Because markets are not winner take all. I mean, lots of different preferences can be satisfied on the market. It's not one person, one vote, which is even better, right? You participate in the market to the extent that you care and to the extent that you're willing to put resources on the line and so forth. I just recently noticed a passage in Rothbard's man economy in state that makes the same point about the market process. But I like the way Rothbard phrases it. He says, of course we should not be too hard on the bumbling loser. It's the entrepreneur who failed to anticipate future prices, right? He receives his penalty in the form of losses. These losses drive him from his poor role in production. If he is a consistent loser, wherever he enters the production process, he is driven out of the entrepreneurial role altogether. Anyway, so, characteristically, Rothbardian formulation. So notice a couple of things. There's nothing in Mises formulation as we've described it so far that refers specifically to things like the following. Charisma and creativity and leadership skill. So yeah, I mean, it's true that Steve Jobs had a lot of charisma. Apparently he was also a real jerk, a real blankety blank hole to many of the people around him. But yeah, I mean, lots of successful business people have these kinds of personal characteristics, but that's not part of the definition of being an entrepreneur in Mises sense. That's not necessary to the entrepreneurial role, right? Entrepreneurship in Mises sense is it's not small business management, right? Nor is it starting a new company per se. I mean, managing a small business, owning and operating a small business is entrepreneurial, but that's not the only thing that's entrepreneurial. All kinds of productive activities are entrepreneurial in the sense that we've described. Yes, starting a new company is an entrepreneurial act but operating an existing company is also an entrepreneurial act, shutting down a company is an entrepreneurial act, restructuring a company is an entrepreneurial act and so forth. I got into a little Twitter spat with, actually a good friend of mine, Aya Leipanen is a professor at Cornell. She's an innovation scholar and she was saying that, well, we don't need to be studying entrepreneurship because what we really care about is innovation. And so why do we care about startup companies? If they're innovative, great. If they're not innovative, who cares? So entrepreneurship should really be a subcategory of innovation. And of course, the problem is what she thinks, what she means by entrepreneurship is startups, right? And yeah, I mean, it's true that I would not devote all of my efforts and energies to studying startup. I mean, startups are great. Startups are very important, but entrepreneurship is not exclusively the study of startups. If it were, then I would agree that, yeah, maybe we care about startups only to the extent that they help us to, they perform other functions, right? But entrepreneurship is not, in Mee's sense, it's not the study of startups. It's the study of arranging productive factors under conditions of true uncertainty, okay? Which includes startups and lots and lots of other stuff. I even have a little section in my book, Organizing Entrepreneurial Judgment with Nikolai Foss about what we call the startup bias in the contemporary entrepreneurship literature. So you can look that up if you're interested. But I also wanna refer to some of the other classic scholarly contributions to the entrepreneurship field. In Mee's' understanding, as I interpret it, entrepreneurship, it's not exactly the same thing as innovation, the notion famously associated with Joseph Schumpeter, right? I mean, entrepreneurs do innovate, but even not innovating in the technical sense, continuing to produce old technology or whatever, is also entrepreneurial in the sense that it involves maintaining responsibility for productive assets that are used under conditions of uncertainty. And this notion that I've articulated is also distinct from the idea famously associated with Israel Kershner, that entrepreneurship is about, sort of the alertness to or the discovery of pre-existing profit opportunities, finding those $20 bills on the sidewalk. I understand Kershner doesn't mean this literally, he means it metaphorically, but I think that this formulation can be misleading because, again, it abstracts away from the notion of bearing uncertainty. It acts as if entrepreneurship is just sort of scanning the horizon and you have to be the first to notice something that other people didn't notice. But the point is entrepreneurial profits, they're not there to be noticed because they don't exist today. They only exist tomorrow and they might not even be there tomorrow, after you've taken some action. And finally, entrepreneurship is not really something you can learn in school, as Mises said. Now, that doesn't mean that there's no point in having entrepreneurship courses or entrepreneurship programs in schools, but you cannot teach what Mises calls the specific, anticipative understanding of the uncertain future. You can teach the history of entrepreneurship, you can teach entrepreneurship theory, that's what I'm doing right now. You can study techniques of small business management, you can learn about the venture capital process and so forth, but that's not teaching entrepreneurship per se, that's just sort of learning about entrepreneurship. And goes without saying that this is not something that government can produce or create or somehow stimulate with wise policy or whatever. Now, having said, having sort of, having distinguished between the sort of theoretical notion of entrepreneurship that you get in most of the Austrian tradition from kind of the popular notion, I should point out that Mises does discuss the kind of popular conception of the entrepreneur as well. But he talks in human action about a special category of entrepreneur, a special class of entrepreneur. He says the following, economics also calls entrepreneurs, those who are especially eager to profit from adjusting production to unexpected changes and conditions. Those who have more initiative, more venturesomeness and a quicker eye than the crowd, the pushing and promoting pioneers of economic improvement. So people like Bill Gates or Steve Jobs or pick your favorite, John D. Rockefeller or James Watt or whatever, pick your favorite inventor, entrepreneur industrialist of history. But Mises says, it's confusing to use the word entrepreneur for these people because this is a kind of historically contingent, like a Weberian ideal type, not a precise theoretical category. And Mises says, let's use a different word, let's use the word promoter to describe these people. So we sometimes talk in Austrian circles about promoters or entrepreneur promoters, but the term didn't really take off in the literature at large.   But again, this is not a theoretical construct of this kind of loosely defined, historically contingent one. Let me conclude by talking about one final point about ownership, which is a point that I made before. In my understanding of what it means to act entrepreneurially within the Austrian, in an Austrian sense, one has to own stuff, right, to exercise judgment over the deployment of productive resources. The entrepreneur has to own, right? So we can sit around here, you can come to my office hours in the next session and we can sit around the table and discuss all kinds of cool business ideas or whatever, but then it's 5.15 and we go down to dinner. I would say no actual entrepreneurship took place. We just had a fun conversation or it was like a role playing thing or we played a game or whatever. Entrepreneurship doesn't actually begin until real productive resources are invested, are committed to particular lines of production and the Hayekian Triangle flares out. Okay, that's when entrepreneurship begins. The great line from Frank Knight's book, Risk, Uncertainty, and Profit. He says ownership under uncertainty means an exercise of ultimate responsibility, which in its nature can be neither insured nor capitalized nor salaried. Okay, so you can't insure yourself against entrepreneurial failure because to be an entrepreneur means to take this ultimate responsibility over the use of assets. Now does that mean that entrepreneurs are like, in everybody's face, doing everything, making all the decisions, bossing people around in a typical business firm? Well, of course not. Right, entrepreneurs typically delegate. They delegate a lot. Entrepreneur owners, they delegate lots of day to day decision authority to other people in the firm, employees, and so forth. But remember, they hold the ultimate, they possess the ultimate responsibility, meaning for example, they can hire and fire employees. They can delegate some decision authority, but take it back. They can write the rules of the game within which employees act and do certain things. Right, so the point is non-owner resource providers like workers, suppliers, lenders, and so forth, they're obviously critically important to the production process. You can't operate a large commercial bakery without employees and without people who supply the raw materials and so forth. But those input providers are not exercising judgment in Mises sense because they do not bear the ultimate responsibility for the deployment of productive factors under conditions of uncertainty. So I'm thinking about this because I wrote a paper that I think it hasn't come out yet. Nikolai Foss and I contributed a chapter to a book on stakeholder theory. Some of you have heard about stakeholder approaches which are very popular in business schools nowadays. This is the idea that well, firms should not be run exclusively in the interest of shareholders, but rather in the interest of a broader class of people who have a stake in the enterprise, which includes the employees and the suppliers and maybe people who live in the community and so forth. Maybe all of society are stakeholders in a sense and so firms should be run in the interest of these broader stakeholders. And what we argue in this chapter is that this sort of misunderstands what it means to own resources because the non-owner input providers do not bear this kind of ultimate responsibility. If things go haywire, if the venture goes south, they don't make the decision about how the resources of the firm will be used. A worker can always choose to withhold supplying his or her labor by quitting. A supplier can decide not to supply anymore, but that leaves the assets of the firm in place. The workers and the members of the community and so forth, they don't have control or responsibility for the resources that are possessed and owned by the entrepreneur. So, look, there's kind of think of sort of a market selection process like the one described by Mises and Rothbard, right? So one can choose to be an owner or a non-owner input provider. And given competition among entrepreneurs, competition among employees and input providers and so forth, we would expect a kind of sorting in the market where those who are particularly skilled at exercising the ownership function will end up being owners. And those who are skilled in providing other inputs to the firm will end up being workers and suppliers and so forth, okay? So just final point, which is probably obvious to most people here, attempts by government to sort of simulate entrepreneurship run into a lot of problems, okay? So lots of kinds of government intervention indeed are harmful to entrepreneurs. Business cycle or credit expansion and so forth makes it harder for entrepreneurs to perform economic calculation in figuring out what to do. Government policies that bail out failing firms and provide subsidies to other politically connected firms and so forth. Obviously hinder the market process of selection among entrepreneurs. Government funded training programs and incubators and accelerators and R&D subsidies and so forth. Really basically just like other kinds of government intervention in the market, they direct resources to the wrong places in the wrong directions, right? Rather than letting the market be responsible for resource allocation. So people, I get asked, sometimes a green talks about this kind of stuff. Well, what's the best government policy for entrepreneurs? What should government do to help entrepreneurs? Well, I mean, the answer is not mess it up, right? I mean, get out of the way and don't mess up what entrepreneurs are trying to do. So a society that has stable money and secure property rights and economic freedom, that's the environment within which entrepreneurship can flourish. Thanks very much. Thank you.


Man, what the heck? I can't make any sales. Just want to hit something. Bro, it's all right. You're just in a sales slump. I'm a marketing entrepreneur and I've sold millions of dollars of product. And I'm going to give you 5 tips to get out of your sales slump. Everything's going to be all right. Let's go over these 5 tips to get out of a sales slump and start making money again. Let's get it. Hey, John Crestani here. Marketer and tech entrepreneur. And I've been there. You know, I do sales and marketing for a living. I've been there where you just you just want to freaking hit something because you can't make a sale. You can't get a deal. You're marketing over and over. You're selling over and over.  Don't worry about it because we all go through it. It's a cycle. What it is. A sales slump is this cycle where you just you don't make money and then your confidence goes down and then you get worse and worse and worse and worse and you start doubting everything. Are you in a sales slump right now? Type in I am in the comments if you are. But it's a downward spiral because confidence helps sales and marketing and it just all gets worse. Now, I'm going to be talking about 5 tips to get out of sales and marketing slumps in this video. And these tips are right here. And the first is as always, keep going. Now, I train thousands of students. I teach tens of thousands of people to learn how to do commission only sales and marketing. And the biggest reason that I see people completely fail, completely just lose money and time and opportunity costs and just fail is because they stop. Okay? It's because they stop. And you don't want to stop.  You have to keep going. And ultimately, you're doing this because you love doing this. You got into sales. You got into marketing because you enjoy doing it. You enjoy connecting with people. You enjoy advertising or doing whatever. You enjoy social media. And if you stop, you're letting your emotions get to you.  You already chose a direction. And the most successful entrepreneurs, they've been doing the same thing over and over for years. There was a piece of advice that one of my mentors gave me and it was, the obstacle is the way. Let me say it again. The obstacle is the way. And if you're going through a slump, there are some obstacles. Maybe the markets changed. Maybe there's new regulations.  Or maybe you're putting up marketing posts but you're not really analyzing your numbers. You're not actually looking at things. You're not actually trying to figure out why something's working or not because you're frustrated and you're just sacrificing and creating activity but not and doing analysis, right? All of those things are not good. All of those things are bad ways of dealing with an obstacle. And if you just address and figure out and deal with the obstacle and figure out a way to get over it, you will be a much better salesperson, a much better marketer. The second tip I have for you is measure yourself. Measure yourself always. There's a famous quote from Peter Drucker, the father of modern management which says, you can only manage what you measure. And if you aren't measuring yourself, you're not managing yourself. So, let's go over this real quick. Now, anytime I go through a sales slump and I sell other people's products on the internet through a process called affiliate marketing, I go through slumps as well. My income varies. It goes anywhere from $200,000 a month to $900,000 a month. And you betcha that I get really annoyed when I'm making $500,000 or $900,000 a month in my business. And our sales go down. If I'm used to making money up here at let's say 900k and then I go all the way down to 200k, that hurts. That hurts. This is total revenue. You know, sometimes my business, it'll run in the negative. I'll be losing money. And the previous month, I would have made a quarter of a million dollars profit. So, that hurts. And it really affects my entire mentality. And what I start doing when that happens is I do something that's very easy. I start measuring myself. And what I do is I create a chart, okay? There's a sheet on Google Drive that I use. And I just measure what I do each day. I say time started, okay? I measure the time I start an activity. Let's say start an activity at 910. And then I do the time ended. And I measure everything I do throughout the day. So, I'll put up an activity. Let's say my activity is posting on socials. Doing posting on social media. I will measure my time doing that. And if I lose focus for even a second, let's say I go to get a cup of water. Or let's say I start reading through other people's Facebook posts, right? Or let's say, you know, my dog starts barking. I stop. And I say, okay, I just ended that activity at 915. And then I'll have to do another item. Or I'll say, I'm posting, right? And I'll start it again at 920. And I'll measure how long I work on that activity till maybe 945. But I measure what I do throughout the entire day no matter what. And what I found was that oftentimes much of my day is spent doing non-revenue generating activities. And how I've been able to account for that is I'll put an asterisk next to each item at the end of the day that was useful time for creating sales. And what I found is that when I'm going through slumps, when I begin the slump, I am spending an inordinate amount of time mucking around. Maybe I'm making coffee. Or maybe I spend extra time at lunch. Or maybe I spend time reading through social media or reading the news or doing stuff. Anything besides actually selling. Anything besides actually posting links. Which is what marketing is. It's posting links. Or in sales, it's picking up the phone or knocking on doors, right? The more you measure yourself and my advice here would be create more output. Create more time where you're selling or your marketing.  Now, the third tip I have for getting out of sales slumps is actually education. Learn more. If you are a smarter, more knowledgeable person. If you invest in yourself to become better, you're going to give yourself a better chance of getting out of sales slump. The more you learn, the more you earn. Now, I personally spend 2 to 3 hours every day learning something new. I spend a lot of time learning from people who are much more successful than me because ultimately I'm looking for wealth. And to learn how to make more money, I need to spend time learning from people who are wealthier than me. And I actually am an educator myself. This I'm teaching here but I actually have a training course. A 6-week training course where I teach paid advertising and affiliate marketing. Which is a way that you can create your own marketing business, marketing other companies and get paid hundreds of thousands of dollars. There's really no cap. It's a commission-based position and the power of the internet gives you monster leverage. So, if you want to learn more about how to do marketing and stuff, you can learn from me. But there's many other courses that you can go through from people who are successful in sales and marketing, Tai Lopez, Grant Cardone, Tony Robbins, etc. Where you can learn a lot. I spent a lot of time learning. And the more I learned, the more confident I get. And I've also found that confidence is very highly correlated with being successful. So, enough about that. The fourth tip I have for getting out of sales slumps is oddly enough focusing on your health. Now, I just mentioned to you that confidence is a very important factor of being successful. And I found that getting your health in order, getting in good shape, getting that energy flowing. There's so many benefits of being healthy. Not just looking at yourself and looking in the mirror each day and saying, darn, I look pretty freaking good. But the benefits beyond that includes stuff like you breathe better. Your lungs have more capacity. You get more oxygen to your brain. Literally oxygen. And once you feed your body fats, amount of fats you put in your body, fats are good.  If you focus on your health, you keep your machine oiled, you're going to think better. You're going to have more energy. You're going to be able to attack problems better. You're not going to get that brain fog.  Where you're trying to focus, you're trying to think, you're trying to overcome an obstacle. But your brain just doesn't want to seem to work. It just says there's too many things, there's too many variables, there's too much stuff to hold in it at one time. And you just are kind of like, I just want to watch TV or something else. Let me know. Just type in brain fog in the comments below if that's something that happens to you. Because it used to happen to me all the time. And still happens to me. But fortunately, I've really focused on my health. I got on the keto diet 2 months ago actually. I lost 15 pounds. I used to have a little bit more of a belly here. I've been losing weight. And I also got on a really cool new supplement that's just taken my muscle growth and my build everything to a new level. I'm feeling pretty young. It's awesome. So, definitely focusing on health is a great way to get your confidence up.  Doing sports is a great way of just interaction, of bringing yourself energy, of winning. And getting those small wins. Whether it's on the basketball quarter, the field, the soccer field is a way to enliven yourself and start going after. And actually getting those deals and conveying that you are an authority on whatever subject you're marketing or speaking about. Tip number 5 for getting out of sales slumps is make it easier, okay? Now, a lot of people complicate things. There's every sort of way you can complicate things. I teach tens of thousands of people marketing. And people say, oh, I have to do this before I do that. And then I'll do see. And then I got to put up a web page. And then I got to do this. Screw all of this, okay? If you are having a hard time making sales, boil it down to basics. You don't have to buy inventory and set up a business license and find a technical partner and all this stuff, okay? If you're selling a product, just focus on the easiest thing. And if you're in just regular sales, instead of doing, you know, prospecting, you know, generally commission only salespeople are doing prospecting. They're setting up meetings which we call setting. And then they are closing. Generally doing sales, you're doing 3 things. In marketing, we're doing another number of other things. We're doing targeting and messaging and, you know, marketing. But you can make it easier on yourself. Instead of focusing on prospecting, setting and closing deals, maybe you just remove one part of the pie. And you say, instead of closing deals, you're just going to start setting up conversations for other closers. Take a lower commission for yourself and let the closer get the rest of the commission. So, you can back up and just start doing one part of the process, right? Make it easier for yourself. If you're marketing a very expensive product online, market a cheaper product, right? If you're trying to focus on a niche that, you know, is difficult to market, focus on a niche that is easy to market or easy to sell. If you're trying to sell a really complex, expensive product over the phone, focus on selling a little less complex, a little less expensive product. Just make the situation easier for yourself. So, you can get those small wins and then ultimately focus on getting back into those big wins. Those big deals, whatever that is. I hope you learn something from this. But if you take away anything from this, just keep going. Stay focused. The obstacle is the way. The more you learn, the more you earn.  You need to become a better person. You need to become a better version of yourself. And the more time you spend growing, the better off you'll be. Likely the sales slump is because you didn't focus enough on personal growth.  So, if you're not growing, you're losing. And you have to embrace that the new way of doing business is you can't rest on your laurels anymore. You have to constantly be investing in your own personal growth. If you're looking to learn more about marketing and a little bit about sales, make sure you subscribe to my channel and like this video if you enjoyed what I'm talking about. If you're interested in going deeper and actually getting into a big training course, I have a 6-week training course where I teach really it's mostly prospecting which is you know just paid advertising to get leads to get sales. Okay, that's what I teach in my training course and also how to do affiliate marketing which is what I do for a living. Also if you're looking to join a community and talk with people about these issues, make sure you join my discord channel. We have a chat channel. If you want to chat with people in real time, we also have a subreddit so you can go on reddit and we have a link down to our reddit community and we also have a Facebook group where you can interact with other people on different topics. I want to bring everybody together. I want to make this the number one marketing community in the entire internet and help people succeed and make more money. So, if you know, this is the number one money channel on YouTube. Type in number one money channel on YouTube right down below and look forward to seeing you in future videos. Talk soon.


Good day, fellow investors. Is Warren Buffett waiting for a stock market crash with 122 billion in cash or he's doing something else? In this video, we'll discuss his approach to investing, which is extremely strong and powerful. And there is so much to learn from here, from patience, from diligence, from buying only at the sweet spot, from even selling stocks at high valuations. He's a net seller of stocks now. He has been for the last three quarters. And then we'll discuss his approach to investing and whether you should have the same preparation with your portfolio. Let's start. So Berkshire's cash pile has hit 122 billion. If you understand that 122 billion is 25% of Berkshire's market capitalization. So if you look at the SAP 500 fully invested, Berkshire 75% invested. Plus, Warren Buffett can also always take on cheap debt to make acquisition. So he's buying power, what you can't do on margin or maybe you can, his buying power is in the range of 200 billion, which is 40% of his market cap. That is what Buffett can buy. He's just waiting for the right pitch. And he has been known, has been famous to wait for as long as it takes, because he knows the right pitch will come. Just not yet. And there have been many videos putting pressure on him, pay dividends, do more buybacks. And that is the short-term mindset. That is the short-term mindset that usually doesn't do much good. But Buffett has the long-term mindset and he has destroyed the market thanks to his long-term mindset. Let's see a little bit more about that mindset, why he has so much cash and how did it work out in the past when he was in a similar situation? Buffett describes his cash pile in his last letter to shareholders. So 112 billion a year and now we are at 122 billion. So 20 billion is stashed for external clemities insurance. So 100 billion can be used as an investment. However, he always wants to be a financial fortress. He will miss many opportunities because a lot of stocks go up as we see constantly, but he will never get caught short of cash. And cash is the most powerful hedge when it comes to investing. If you have cash, you can simply deploy it when there are opportunities. For now, to buy complete businesses, Buffett says prices are sky high for businesses possessing decent long-term prospects. His expectation of more stock purchases is not a market call. He doesn't buy stocks because he thinks the market will go up. Charlie and I have no idea, no idea as how stocks will behave next week or next year. I agree with that. I have no idea where stocks will go. I can be ready for everything and take advantage of good fundamental buys or what he says. We have to think about whether a portion of an attractive business is worth more than its market price. Now, here is why and how much cash Warren Buffett has. He made the same comments in his 1998 letter where he said, at year end, we held more than 15 billion in cash equivalents. That was a lot for 20 years ago. His pile increased 10x almost for now, but cash never makes him happy. It's better to have money burning a hole in Berkshire's pocket than resting comfortably in someone else's. When a really major business acquisition appears that would absorb his liquid assets, he will buy it. Currently, however, we see nothing on the horizon. This was 1998. And then if we look at Berkshire's cash pile, the same happened again in 2004-2008. There were a lot of years, four or five years, where his cash pile was about 40 billion. Similar to now, now we are at 120 billion, but he waits for that sweet spot purchase, that perfect pitch. What did he buy in 1999? Well, he deployed his cash to buy mid-American energy. So he bought 2.15 billion in cash and took over the 7 billion in debt. That was a large-scale acquisition for him. In 2009, what did he buy with the cash? He bets big on railroad. He bought Burlington, Northern for 26 billion. How did this end up? Well, let's look at the 2018 annual report and we can see that railroads, 2018, 5.2 billion in profits, utilities and energy, 2.6 billion in profits. So if I sum that up, that's 7.8 billion on the, what, 18-20 billion in profits over the year, that is 35-40% of total Berkshire's operating profits have come from the two acquisitions that he is always waiting for. So 40%, 45% of operating earnings. The message here is simple. Always have cash and be ready to make acquisitions when the market gives you a price that is below the intrinsic value of the business. That's all what Buffett is doing. We cannot know whether there will be a crash or recession, interest rates will go up and down. Nobody knows that. But when there is something trading at below market prices, you buy. We have an advantage. Buffett needs purchases above 10 billion to move the needle. We can buy smaller pieces of companies around the world. So we have advantage when it comes to Buffett. Buffett will continue to simply wait there because that's how he maximizes his investment returns. 40% of operating earnings come from Burlington and mid-American, both 10 and 20 years ago. Imagine what will be the operating earnings 20 years from now from the pile that he will deploy when the opportunity arises. And given the environment, there might be a recession. There might be a cash crunch. There might something be happening to allow Buffett to deploy that money. He says now he's targeting at 8-10% returns. So he can't find that for good businesses. But he is patient and he will wait for as long as it takes as he did over the past 50 years that delivered huge returns. Actually, when we look at what Buffett is doing now, he's actually selling stocks. Over the last three quarters, he has been a net seller of stocks. Berkshire has been a net seller of stocks. This is something we'll discuss in another video about long-term investing. Many think that long-term investing is just buy and forget. Well, no. I'll make a pyramid. You look a lot at a lot of stocks. You buy some stocks and then you focus just on the gems in your portfolio. And then over the long term, you have just a few gems that you hold long term. And that's exactly also what Buffett is doing. But more about that in a video. So please subscribe and click that notification bell to get reminded each time there is a video out so that you don't miss on the crucial videos that might add the most value to your long-term investing returns. The conclusion is simple. Wait for something to be in your sweet spot. Fundamental analysis below intrinsic value to really fit your long-term investing risk and rewards scenario. Then always have cash. Always be ready to buy more. Always be ready to buy when the market gives you an opportunity. And then carefully deploy. Get again, get more cash. Beat through your salary. Beat through dividends. Put more cash in. And then wait for those sweet purchases. So you will beat the market. And that's also the message of this channel. We wait for that sweet spot purchases. We carefully balance our cash flows. And then we take advantage of the high market volatility. And number three, something we'll discuss in another video in the value investing school that we do here on YouTube. Selling is also part of the investing game. Thank you for watching. Looking forward to your comments. And I'll see you in the next video.