Pete Farner on Investable Businesses and Investable Entrepreneurs
Veteran venture capital investor Pete Farner distills experience from four decades of entrepreneurship and investing. Passion, perseverance and intelligence are the three critical attributes he looks for in investable entrepreneurs, an insight drawn from a broad survey that we summarize here.
If we start with an appreciation of the role energy abundance has played in improving the material existence of humankind, we can consider why fossil fuels played this historic role in our energy consumption and what we should keep in mind when looking for alternatives.
Human energy use did not begin with industrialization.
Fire is an obvious source of energy, used from the earliest days of man. Our own bodies, burning calories as we breathe, are an example of energy consumption. Wind and animals were used for transportation. What made fossil fuels revolutionary is their cost-effectiveness.
In his book *Fossil Future*, Alex Epstein simplified the issue of cost-effectiveness into four points:
1. Affordability: How much does energy use cost relative to how much money people have?
2. Reliability: Can it be produced “on demand,” in as large a quantity as needed?
3. Versatility: Can it power many kinds of machines?
Scalability: How many people can it power, and in how many places?
4. By these measures, fossil fuels continue to stand alone.
Let’s take gasoline as an example.
While prices can fluctuate, such as when gas production is impacted by international crises, gasoline remains affordable enough that both the elite and the working class use it every day.
Gasoline is plentiful. In fact, thanks to new surveys made possible by technological advancements, there are more known crude oil reserves in America today than there were in 1977. Gasoline is also reliable in that it will dependably power machinery as long as the engine is functional.
It is versatile that in it can power everything from airplanes to lawn equipment.
And gasoline is scalable in that once sealed in a drum or vessel, it can be shipped anywhere in the world and can sit in storage indefinitely without losing its potency.
Natural gas and coal also have these qualities, which explains why countries like China are increasing their investment in these very fuels even while Western leaders make expensive commitments to move away from them.
In fact, it is the reluctance of North America, Europe, and other economies to do the same that is creating the real fossil fuel crisis: a future of declining reliable energy sources. While global turmoil between Russia and the West has forced European countries to consider the realities of energy scarcity, less developed parts of the world have not yet enjoyed the societal benefits of energy abundance, even in peace. In parts of Africa, for example, energy rationing limits access to life-saving medical equipment. In other areas, unreliable energy sources severely limit industrial capacity.
While America has the natural resources to significantly increase fossil fuel production, energy companies are unwilling to invest in expensive new refineries that will not be profitable for many years. By pushing energy policy away from promoting production and toward other aims—such as alleged environmentalism—North America and Europe are making reliable energy resources more scarce at the expense of their citizens and the rest of the world.
Ironically, those that pay the most lip service to “environmental justice” are promoting policies that directly result in the suffering of the most economically vulnerable in the world.
But do green activists’ preferred alternatives have fossil fuels’ useful qualities? Can humanity rely on them? That is the topic of our next video.
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Want to learn more?
For more animated content, check out Economics for Beginners at https://BeginEconomics.org.
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c-QkpPkTvgY
Consumer sovereignty is a principle of Austrian economics. Here’s how entrepreneurs apply the principle in business, as told by Martin Lünendonk, co-founder of FounderJar.com, as well as Finance Club and Cleverism.com.
Show notes: https://mises.org/library/how-make-customer-your-boss
"How To Make The Customer Your Boss" (PDF): Mises.org/E4E_95_PDF
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=va4v3UnmyiE
Expect more of the same in 2021. The Fed has no real plan. It is just lurching from one crisis to the next, hoping more easy money will buy some time. It's been doing this since 2008, and there's little chance it will stop now.
Be sure to follow Radio Rothbard at Mises.org/RadioRothbard.
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=znYftnjwzJQ
Archived from the live Mises.tv broadcast, this lecture by Roger Garrison was presented at the 2012 Mises University in Auburn, Alabama. Music by Kevin MacLeod.
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xj7Zn-UnTVE
Professor Per Bylund joins Bob to debunk the worries over AI and to question whether the latest version of chatbots should even be called "intelligent."
Per on Robots Taking your Jobs: https://Mises.org/HAP392a
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00:00 Introduction
00:38 Different Types of AI
05:35 How AIs Work
15:18 Actual Machine Intelligence
19:13 Does ChatGPT Pass the Turing Test?
24:32 AI Replacing Human Labor
36:36 The Human Aspect of Labor
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pITnFnoNrAU
Recorded in Lake Jackson, Texas, on December 4, 2021.
Ron Paul's two campaigns for president (2008 and 2012) were watershed moments for liberty-minded people around the world. The "Ron Paul Revolution"—centered around his undiluted message of peace, property, and markets—changed the way millions thought about the American empire and the American financial system. Dr. Paul's focus on central banking and foreign policy caught politicians and pundits off guard, forcing them to scramble for explanations of our Middle East policy and Soviet-style central planning at the Fed. Politics in America has not been the same since the "Giuliani moment" and "End the Fed." The Ron Paul Revolution was both a political and cultural phenomenon.
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Utu-Q9jz0aU
Signaling, grade inflation, federal aid and student debt, free speech, and university bureaucracy.
Download the slides from this lecture at https://Mises.org/MU21_PPT_34.
Recorded at the Mises Institute in Auburn, Alabama, on 29 July 2022.
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QTDMSlaOxU4