 We're going to be talking today about how creativity and entrepreneurship can change the world. So why don't I start off, Isaac, with asking you what is entrepreneurship? Yeah, that's a good question. It's a very hard word to define, and I never like being forced to define it, because you know I want to be able to use it however I want to. There's two different ways to look at it. The first is the common idea that it's someone who starts a business, and that's certainly a type of entrepreneur. But the way that we're using it tonight and that I like to use it is much broader than that. An entrepreneur is an agent of change. An entrepreneur is a creative problem solver. So these are people, and we're going to talk a little bit about who is an entrepreneur later, but these are people who see things being done in a way that they think can be improved upon. So they're kind of alert to opportunities out there to improve upon existing methods, really combine existing resources in new ways. So it's different from someone repeating a task, a known task, and maybe just doing it the same way or doing it faster, but actually looking at a new way to do that task. So it's cool that entrepreneurs are both disruptive in that they kind of upset the apple cart of the status quo, but they're also coordinating in that they see opportunities to improve efficiency, to create value, and the whole economy follows them if it is successful. So a creative problem solver will probably be a quick definition. Okay. Awesome. So you believe that entrepreneurs are the people who change the world. So why do you think that? Yeah. If you don't know that a better world is possible, it's unlikely that you're going to get a better world. If you can't envision or even desire any improvement upon your current situation, you probably are going to have a hard time getting an improvement. So entrepreneurs are the people who show us a better world, who demonstrate better ways of doing things, who, to quote Michelangelo, criticize by creating and help us see the ways in which the world can be changed by kind of testing the waters and showing new ways of doing things. So think of some policy issues in the world, let's say immigration. Think of immigrants, people who want to make their lives better, improve the lives of their family, maybe someone who lives in a very poor country like Indonesia, and they want to improve their situation, and they literally and figuratively might run up against a wall in trying to get into a country with more opportunity. So in the current mindset, there's a blockage, and it's hard to get these workers where they need to be. An entrepreneur would take a sort of roundabout approach, consider cloud computing and information technology that has developed through entrepreneurial innovation that now allows that person in Indonesia to work for a company in America or in Europe without moving. So they can improve their life and sort of do an end around that status quo institution that's keeping them out. So that's just one example. You can think of the alternative ways of communicating that have made the post office less relevant as other versions of entrepreneurial solutions to problems. Yeah, and for anybody who doesn't know, I'm actually in Ottawa in Canada and Isaac is in South Carolina. So we're sort of getting past one of those geological or geographical, I guess, sorry, challenges right now. And look, I don't have to try to convince the border agents in Canada or you worse yet in the U.S. to stop invading your rights. We can just work around them and send signals through the air that cross borders without being harassed. Exactly. So I think that's great, but there are a lot of people who don't believe that entrepreneurship or creating or technology are really the ways to make the world better. They think that you should get involved, for instance, in politics, maybe write a petition, call your member of Congress, run for Congress. Why do you think that that's not the way to go? Yeah, for a long time, I did think that was the way to go and I set out to change the world and I got involved in politics. There's a famous quote, there's two things you never want to see made, laws and sausages. I'm actually not opposed to seeing sausages made, but the law part was pretty ugly. I kind of learned through that process how inefficient and really corrupt, but I almost hesitate to use the word corrupt, the political process is. The reason I hesitate is because it's not necessarily that there's bad people there, there's some institutional incentives, maybe we can talk about that in a minute, but really working within the status quo, you're kind of playing the game that was created by the status quo. They know how to handle people who attempt to reform from within. I remember being on the Appropriations Committee and having a state rep who was trying to redo the whole thing in a rational way, and all the lobbyists just sort of sighed, okay, we've got somebody who thinks they're going to be a reformer, they knew how to play that game and how to game the system so change wouldn't happen. So the evidence, the best evidence I think for why trying to innovate around the status quo is more effective is if you ask the question, who does the status quo fear? When you really think about it, let's say you want to make a big change to a school system where you live. If the teachers union is the biggest institution standing your way, do they fear your blog where you write about what's wrong with the school system? Do they even fear you running for school board or showing up to school board meetings and voicing your opinion? Not much, because they kind of wrote the rules to that game. That institution is a little bit rigged in their favor. What they really fear and hate are people who opt out of the system altogether in homeschools, or people who are trying to make online K-12 schools, or private schools that compete, they try to shut them down because those alternatives are the biggest threat to them. And there are a couple of movies about that, obviously, right? There's the lottery and Waiting for Superman about the people who try to get around that in the charter schools. And you can see, if you watch those movies, just the type of pushback that people come up against. And I'm sure homeschoolers, if anybody who's listening is a homeschooler, you run into a lot of opposition as well. So if politics doesn't work, why would that be? I like you talked a little bit about that, about how the people who support the status quo are the ones who designed the status quo system. But is there a reason that you can't go into the system and just blow it up and make it work? Yeah, and this is where a good study of economics is really, really helpful in understanding how to be effective in the real world. Public choice theory, in particular, is a branch of economics that uses the analytical tools of economists to study behavior in the political marketplace, if you will. And we find that not only our voters, but politicians as well, are rationally self-interested, just like we are in the marketplace. And there's all kinds of lack of information and knowledge out there because it's very costly to be highly informed of politics as a voter. And the benefits to you of being a really highly informed voter are very low individually. Your vote still doesn't count for much in election. So you have this kind of systemic incentive for political actors to become very good at doling out favors to concentrated interest groups and spreading the costs far and wide because those individual taxpayers might be a few dollars to them, but it might be a million dollar subsidy to an interest group. And so the game of politics is kind of rigged in this way. And it's not about good or bad people, per se. You just have to be good at those things to succeed politically. So the people who are too principled to do that don't tend to be very effective and make it very far. And the people who are really good at doing that tend to make it very far. Hayek says this is why the worst get on top. So ultimately, politicians and members of the political class are followers, not leaders. They're going to do what's safe to them to do based on the incentives they face. And if you boil it down, ultimately those incentives are only constrained by the beliefs of the public. Right. And yeah, I mean, I have a little bit of experience in politics as well. And that was sort of what I found too. You find like a really good guy or girl and you are like, OK, this person, I think that they would really do it for the right reasons. But if they get in there, the right reasons aren't really what get you ahead, right? You've got to compromise. You've got to work within the system, basically. And like you said, the system is set up to support the status quo. OK, so if anybody has any questions, we're going to pause now to take care of them if you want. And while you're typing them out, I'm actually going to ask everyone's opinion on something. After our discussion here, let us know what you think is the most effective way to change the world. You can just click a radio button. They should be up on your screen now. And if you've got any questions, you can definitely type them out. If we don't have any, then we can keep going. So just let us know. Either way, I'll give you guys a couple of minutes to answer it. I don't have any questions yet, so let us know if you've got any, because otherwise I will move on. One of those examples, Janet, when I worked in politics of sort of a good person getting elected and not being able to do good, to kind of illustrate that it's not just a matter of, well, you just need to have more principles. There's a guy who promised sort of limited government to his constituents. And there was a vote that would expand government in some way. I don't remember exactly what. And the bill was going to pass regardless. There was all of one party and a few people from another party voting for it. And he was going to vote against it to stick with his principles. And his party leader said, look, you've got to change your vote, because we've promised the other party that we'd give them five votes. We're going to deliver regardless. If you don't vote for it, this other guy in your party will have to. And in his case, that might cause him to lose his election. In your case, you're going to win your election regardless, so you're safe. And if he loses his election, an even worse person is going to take his place. So you can be selfish and vote your principles. And the bill is going to pass either way, whether or not you do. Or you can compromise, vote for something you don't believe in that expands government, let this other guy stay in office and prevent somebody worse from meeting an office. And you can see how this kind of thing happens day in, day out. And it's just not a very conducive place for really bringing radical change. Yeah, for sure. And yeah, I'm sure there are all kinds of stories like that out there. So I've got most votes in, so I'm going to close the poll. But don't worry, guys, you'll have another chance to let us know what you think in a bit. And I guess we can move forward. Something that we're really excited about at fee and I think is really, really cool are examples that we've talked about a little bit. The way that technology in particular and creativity in general are making the world a freer place kind of in spite of all of the barriers that are in the way. How do you think that ideas are changing to allow this to happen? And so I kind of alluded to that ultimately I think it's the beliefs of society that are the final constraints on what happens in the realm of policy. Well, if you want to change those beliefs, how do you do it? I think there's two ways and they feed each other. You can change people's ideas, kind of their raw ideas, the data they have about the world by educating them, informing them about things, trying to alter what they believe is right and wrong. And you can also change their experiences. You can show them ways in which the world could be better and show them better alternatives to the things that maybe they believe are the best. Okay, yeah. And I mean, that's true of a lot of things, right? Once you see something, it's a lot easier to believe. Do you have a few examples that we could maybe put to the general test? Yeah, so let's talk about some really powerful examples. So, you know, if you believe that it's kind of, oh, my camera slipped out, oh, it slipped back into focus all by itself. You've got to love technology. If you believe that it's okay, what people think, what they believe is going to determine the environment that they live in. So let's just send people a bunch of books that tell them which policies are better. There's something really bizarre. In the Soviet Union, in communist countries, they banned a lot of things that you might be surprised by, right? They didn't just ban books about free market capitalism. They banned Levi's jeans. They banned jazz music. They banned Marvel or cigarettes. And why would they ban those things? Not just books that are telling you that, you know, Marxism is a bad idea or something. It's because people can experience those. And once they do, they don't even necessarily have to be won over intellectually. The most powerful story that I've ever heard to kind of illustrate this, it's actually the Acton Institute has a video called The Call of the Entrepreneur. And the story is done. There's a young man who grew up in communist China. And he worked at the train station. And one day he was moving someone's luggage. And he didn't know anything about the world outside of China. And he thought it was all awful like they told him it was in schools. And the person had come from Hong Kong and they gave him a piece of chocolate. He had no idea what chocolate was. He'd never had it before in his life. He took a bite and he said, the minute I bit into it, I didn't know what this was or where it came from. All I knew was that I needed to do anything to get there. And that's such a powerful example of how literally tasting a new experience. He didn't have to read any books by Milton Friedman. He just tasted that alternative product that innovators in Hong Kong had made or wherever it came from. And he knew that's the kind of world he wanted. So I think those are really powerful kind of examples of how giving people new experiences can alter their belief system in a way that's conducive to change. Yeah, I'm not going to remember what it's called. But there's a movie about the music that was banned in the Soviet Union. And there's a similar story about a guy. I can't remember what he played, maybe piano. And he was allowed to leave to go study somewhere. And he left and he heard the other music and he was like, and that's when I knew that we were creating anything. So it's really interesting the types of creativity that people feel like they need to stifle to keep the status quo. So yeah, I think this is happening a lot more. I don't know if you agree as technology progresses. So do you think that that means that freer people are making decisions now? Or do you think that it's basically the same people? Yeah, it's a good question because there's sort of different types of freedom. I mean, there's kind of effective freedom and technical freedom. So there may be no law changes, but maybe some of those laws aren't enforced as much or your daily life feels more free. So it kind of depends on how we define it. So the people involved in sort of changing societies, are they more freedom friendly in their philosophy? Are they ideological libertarians more than they used to be? Maybe, maybe not. I don't know. But in practice, in everyday life, I think people are very, very freedom oriented because they've sort of gotten used to and taken for granted a lot of these innovations. So take the attempted passage of the, I don't even remember what it's called now, the bill to regulate the internet basically. SOPA? Yes, SOPA, thank you. Okay. The SOPA bill is really interesting. You have all these people who just, it's like, wait a minute, get your hands off my internet, right? And it's a very sort of libertarian position, but it's not all people who are sitting around reading Hayek who are arguing this. And I think you see that increasingly in areas where the government is expanding more clumsily. So take healthcare or education as we mentioned before. You're seeing more and more people just opting out altogether, saying I'm going to go to cash only clinics because I want the innovation. I'm going to pull my kids out of school and unschool them. And these are not people who are doing it for ideological reasons. These are not people who have been won over to the argument that government healthcare is ineffective or immoral or that public school has all these problems. They're just doing it because an alternative was presented and they're seizing that. So I think you're getting more sort of liberty friendly action happening all the time, even if ideology maybe doesn't, if you did a poll of people they may not say that they're more freedom friendly. But they know how to use it and they don't want to give it up once they do. Yeah, I think that's right. Something I always, sometimes you talk to people and they talk about, since you were talking about immigration earlier, passports. If you talk to libertarians in particular, they will get really grumpy about passports. They don't like that you need the government's permission to travel. But I mean, even though we need a passport, the technology and the way that the world has changed and how much more productive we are. At least, I know that I don't want to get into how much richer we are now. That's a whole other event, right? But it didn't used to be that middle class people could go on a plane a couple times a year. It didn't used to be that everybody had a car that they could drive to from Canada, Florida in the winter or from the states up to Canada in the summer to escape the heat. So there are ways that, like you said, effectively we can be really free, even if it seems like there are a lot of problems. It's good to keep that in mind. It's huge, like you said, even a dictator or a despot or a king from 100 years ago, a couple hundred years ago, you could say, well, they could do whatever they want except get from New York to Los Angeles or whatever in a day. They didn't have the freedom to do that. It wasn't possible. We can do those types of things. And in addition to that sort of effective freedom, it also gives us the freedom to kind of fight back and resist. Think about the protests in the Middle East, the Arab Spring, and these things where these technologies enable people who were easily oppressed because they were easily dispersed and not coordinated to start to coordinate together and use that to gain more freedom. Yeah. Yeah, for sure that you're seeing that everywhere. So if creativity works, and I think that it does, why aren't we teaching it more? Why aren't we teaching like I was taught? If you really want to make a difference in the world, you become like civically involved. You do the stuff we talked about earlier. You write a petition. You stand on the street with a sign. There are a lot of things that we're taught to do. Most of the time, we're not taught to go out there and make a better alternative. Why do you think that is? Yeah, I ask that question a lot to myself. And I don't have a settled answer, but I think there's a couple of factors that play a significant part. Obviously, as we mentioned before, status quo institutions fear change, so it's not in their interest to cultivate environments that reward that. I mean, think about the great Apple commercial, the crazy ones. Those are the people that usually don't do very well in traditional education systems or status quo institutions because those institutions are created to continue doing the same thing and to make that stability. I mean, in many cases, take the education system. The way that it's structured was deliberately set up at a time where everyone thought the future of all countries was centrally managed economy is where you're sort of plugged into your job like a widget. And it's still running on that model. It's very one size fits all. It's very compliance is rewarded and deviating from the norm. Being an entrepreneur, maybe teachers call it cheating on a test and you just call it being entrepreneurial. But I think that's part of it. Another part of it though is just this very human thing, this very romantic notion about what the state is, that it's this sort of really nice coordinating thing and we all participate and do our civic duty and it will get better. And that, I think, stems from a fear in realizing that the world is a spontaneous order and that, you know, you can't like introduce a new word to the English language by petitioning some leaders somewhere, right? Like the English language, nobody controls it. So on the one hand, it feels very scary and powerless. On the other hand, it's way more effective than if somebody did control it. But there's this kind of idea that we have to view society as being controlled by one central figure head and that's comforting. And so we're kind of okay thinking in that way and not realizing, hey, if I don't like the way things go, I don't have to petition anybody. I can try to create something new. So I don't know, I think there's a variety of reasons. Yeah, well, maybe it's time to bring back cooperation as a way to do things, right? That's right. Well, I mean, but, you know, then they call you the crazy ones. Hey, I'll take it as a badge of honor. So I've got another poll for the audience and I've got a couple of questions that we can talk about while people are doing this. So we're gonna ask, here are a couple of ways. I said that he is excited about the ways that technology is changing the world. You might not be familiar with all of these, but if you know what a couple of them are and you think they're cool, give them your vote. And while you do, I'll ask Isaac a few of the questions. I'm gonna ask them in the order in which they appeared. So I've got, Thomas asks, for those who attempt to bypass the status quo, how do you prevent government regulation from gathering against you? Yeah, that's a great question. I mean, look, there's a variety of ways to answer this and I don't want to tell you what level of risk you're comfortable with on the far extreme, if government is so bad, ultimately you can, if you have to ignore or try to work around those regulations. I'm thinking of, thinking of communist Poland where literally doing just about anything is illegal or requires government's permission and control. The black market, the underground became essentially bigger than the above ground economy to the extent to where it was simply unenforceable to do anything about it from the government. So I guess at the far extreme, you can try to avoid the law. Now there's a lot of other ways though, I think to work around it and think about solving problems in a more abstract way rather than, okay, I need to deliver these goods to my customers, but there's whatever. There's this border in the way and when I'm trying to deliver goods there, or getting stopped, if you sort of zoom out from that and say, well, what am I actually trying to deliver? They need something to meet a particular need. What if I could, I don't know, send over the internet the blueprints and all the information about how to manufacture these to somebody that's already over the border, right? I mean, this is what 3D printing is in some sense. So where I can basically dematerialize the product and then it will rematerialize over the border, right? Kind of pushing yourself to think is the way that I'm currently imagining the only way to solve the problem? Or is there some way that just bypasses the entire regulatory apparatus that I'm dealing with? May not always be the case, but I think it's a really good exercise to get you pushing yourself. Yeah, well, you have influenced the poll a little bit because 3D printing just took a jump. I've got another question from Cameron. He says, can you talk about what impact entrepreneurs intellectual beliefs can have on their career? And we're gonna talk a little bit about this and Isaac knows what we're gonna talk about, but he asks, are most entrepreneurs intellectual? So I'll let you answer that, kind of knowing where we're going from here. If you think there's anything to say that we won't cover, I'll give you a chance. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. First, I just have to point out, this is why democracy is not a very good way to make decisions. I say one word about 3D printing and suddenly it wins the poll. So yeah, that's a great question. Over the last several years, I've had the pleasure of spending a lot of time with a lot of very successful entrepreneurs, business people. And one thing I was surprised by, because I also have spent a lot of time around academics and very intelligent students, people who really love ideas. And I was surprised by how intellectual most of the entrepreneurs, if not all of them were. How, I mean, they're really philosophers in a lot of ways. And I think a great example of this, I mean, take Steve Jobs. He wasn't someone whose great asset was that he could, whatever, solder little pieces of metal to silicon really well, better than the next guy. He was asking really big fundamental questions, very philosophical questions about the nature of the relationship between human beings and bits of data and the interface between humans and devices and information and each other. And I think that ability to kind of see what's really going on, not only what appears to be going on, to see what needs people are really trying to meet. You see this in marketing all the time, right? People aren't really buying X product. They're seeing it as a means to some greater end. And the person who can understand that is gonna do a better job of meeting those needs. So yeah, I think there's a lot of philosophy involved or abstract thinking in being an entrepreneur. All right. I've actually, I think we've got time. I've got another question, so why don't we do it now because we didn't take any questions the first time. And I think this is a good one. So Debbie asks, a large group of Americans have criminal histories. There is a move towards justice reform to use community control instead of incarceration. Yet many of these people are not only embraced by their communities as stakeholders, but are not embraced by their communities as stakeholders, excuse me. But they do not see themselves that way either. How can we change these mindsets? Whew. That's a huge, that's a huge issue. It is, we can say it a little bit about it. We might not solve a problem. Here you go, solve a huge problem. No, without pretending like I can give a really specific, oh, here's the solution, because if I had one, I would have done it already and been very successful, right? But I think again, if you get to that sort of ideas and experiences, so there's this two-fold approach of help people understand and help educate them that many of these people committed victimless crimes and they're not terrible people or many of them, maybe they stole something and now they're a much different person and that this stigma that we have is way overblown and needs to be rethought, but also alternative experiences. I mean, if, you know, think about, I mean, think about, I don't know, drugs, right? Like, you can tell someone all the medical reasons why they shouldn't be afraid of marijuana. Maybe that will work, maybe it won't. If they've never had an experience with it, it's hard to say, but if, let's say they meet somebody who seems like a really reasonable, normal gal and they find out that she smokes, join every once in a while, right? Like, oh, okay, maybe it's not so scary. I've been exposed to this and I see. So any way that you could envision people with criminal backgrounds getting involved in doing entrepreneurial activity or doing things that are creating value and sort of demonstrating their worth to shed a new light on that, I think would be very, very powerful. All right, awesome. So that kind of leads into my next question because all of this sounds great for people who are, like you said, they're maybe kind of philosophical about the way they look at the world or they're like naturally creative. I know some people just have great ideas all the time and you've got to be really driven to create things. But like we were just talking about, some people don't feel like they are, they've never, they haven't had the experiences or they haven't been encouraged to do that. Do you think, when people say that not everyone is an entrepreneur or entrepreneurship isn't for everyone? Do you think they're right? Do you think that this isn't a path that everyone can take? Yeah, I mean, if we're eliminating it only to starting a business, then no, I mean, it's probably not for everyone. Depends on your sort of risk tolerance. But I think entrepreneurialism, it's not a tight, an entrepreneur is not a specific person. It's not that you're either an entrepreneur or not an entrepreneur. Everyone has entrepreneurial moments and entrepreneurial traits and abilities. Just like we are producers sometimes, we are consumers sometimes. These are sort of types of human behavior. So you were born an entrepreneur. Humans are wired to learn by trial and error by observing the environment around them and adapting it and making interesting combinations that no one's told them before. I mean, if you watch young children, the way that they learn to walk and talk, they're very innovative. The way that they learn to reach the camera equipment that Fee sent me from my desk when they weren't supposed to earlier today. It's pretty innovative. And dump a pile of Legos in front of a kit and see if they ask you for instructions on what to do or if they just start playing around and chewing on them, putting them together, pulling them apart. So I think that's in you. And it kind of gets beaten down and squashed down in these institutions that don't really reward that. They reward the compliance. They reward the obedience. So to what extent you can unleash your entrepreneurship? I don't know. I think there's a lot further that everyone can go in if you never start a business, to see yourself as owning your own sort of entrepreneurial capacity and being an entrepreneur, if you work in another company, as a creative problem solver there or whatever it is. So I think that's really powerful and freeing to see yourself in that way. And I think there is that spark in everybody. Yeah. I think something, you mentioned Steve Jobs. And I think a lot of people kind of think, oh, if I'm gonna be an entrepreneur, how can I be like Steve Jobs? How can I really like change the world? And I think that we don't give enough credit to the little ways that we make our lives and the lives of people around us better. Like if you just come up with a better way of keeping in touch with someone, or you come up with a better way of, I don't know, cooking something for people. Like those are little creations, but they're still creations, right? And I feel like that's the kind of stuff that if we give ourselves more credit for that, then maybe we'll be a little bit more bold. So you talked a little bit about a few different ways that people are entrepreneurial. I was wondering if you could maybe illustrate by sort of telling us different kinds of entrepreneurs beyond what you said, or maybe there isn't too much more to say, but I wanted to give you a chance. Yeah. I mean, I think the variety of entrepreneurs is as diverse as the variety of people. As you mentioned, it's even in the small ways, just looking at the world around you and observing a new way to do something better. It can even be, I mean, I'm running some educational programs in practice and one of the participants just did a very simple thing. Emailed all the other participants and said, hey, we're going through this curriculum and sometimes there's a lot to sort of remember what we've covered and what we haven't. I came up with this spreadsheet and we can all put in there what we've done and what we haven't and that will help coordinate what we talk about with each other and so we can help each other through it. Spreadsheets already existed, the curriculum already existed, all the components existed, but he just combined them in a new way specific to this one application to make everyone's lives better and easier. And of course, I observe this and say, oh, that's interesting, we should maybe build in, right? I didn't think of it. So it's a really cool, I think sort of small example of that kind of entrepreneurial activity that takes place in, you know, I like to, well, actually I'll hold that for a second. Okay. Because I know you're gonna ask me about failure in a minute. I am, that's actually what I'm about to say. So yeah, it's something I- It's almost like we talked about this ahead of time. Don't let them know. Okay, so I am really interested as Isaac knows in articles that I've been reading lately, I don't know if anybody else has been following these, there's a lot of stuff lately about different ways of parenting and whether parents are maybe sometimes being overprotective, how much we can let kids do, and stuff I've been really, really interested in, is learning to fail is the way that they put it. And that's not to say that success is bad and we should teach people not to try to succeed or that it's not important to succeed, but more than it's okay when things don't work out because there's a lesson there. It means that you've tried something. So Isaac, do you think that that's an important lesson for creative people to learn? Absolutely huge, absolutely huge. I mean, if failure will destroy you and be catastrophic, you're gonna have a really hard time kind of innovating and taking action and creating. And I think, as you mentioned, the typical ways that we sort of parent and educate make failure way too scary. I mean, I know there's an article and maybe you're referencing this about young people whatever they're 15 or 20, they've literally never failed anything in their whole life. They've gotten good grades, they've gotten every scholarship they've applied for them because failure was really scary and they didn't wanna let it happen in their environment where it was possible to just do all the right things and you can't fail. So then what happens when they enter the world where they've gotta be adaptive and increasingly in today's economy, there aren't that many jobs where you just obey the rules and get along. You have to be creative and adaptive. The prospect of failing or if you actually do fail, it can ruin people. And that should never be the case. Think about it if you told your kids when they were learning to ride a bike. Okay, we're gonna walk through whatever it is, whether we're gonna give you all these lessons about riding a bike and prepare you and they're gonna go out and ride it, but if you fall down, I'm taking your bike away. I mean, how well do you think kids will learn how to ride? No, they just continue to study. Well, maybe I need to do five more years of bike school because I don't wanna get out there and fall because if I do, I'll lose my bike, everything will fall apart. They'd be in school for 30 years to learn to ride a bike because they'd be so afraid and it's a really bad incentive. I can see this in a microwave with my own children. You know, I give the iPad to my daughter who's two or my daughter who's four and it's amazing how quick they can learn to use it but they're still, they're messing around, they're making mistakes, they're moving all the apps around and accidentally deleting some. And my son who's nine, he drives a nut, he looks over their shoulder and he's like, no girls, you can't do it this way. Let me show you how to do it. And they hate it, they don't want him to show it. They would rather do it and fail. They're totally comfortable with that. He's the first child and we probably kind of over-parented a little bit with him. It's also some personality but he has that mentality that most of us have. Oh, I see you're doing it wrong. Let me correct you and let me make you very scared to explore and to break things. And I think that's really, I think that's really dangerous. I think failure's important. And you know, oh, there we go. Rocky Balboa will show us how important it is sometimes to fail. You can't have an epic story if you don't, you know, fail every once in a while. So it shouldn't be painful and it should be scary and challenging to create to be an entrepreneur. But I tell you what, it's a pain that comes with tremendous reward compared to the pain of just sort of suffering under the status quo. Yeah, and I think it's super interesting that your daughters who are both younger than your son naturally want to learn by making mistakes and he's kind of trying to impose it on them. That's interesting. Well, I think a caveat there or a part of that is probably when he was started using the iPad, he was a little older than them. I had first just gotten it and I was very careful with it. And so I was always looking over, so no, don't do that, don't do that, you'll break it. By this time, I've just given up and I don't care what the kids do with the iPad, it's just theirs. And so I have no fear of that. And I think removing that has given them such a better environment to just explore. And if they break things, they're sad about it and then they want to figure out how to fix it. One thing you didn't mention, so you kind of mentioned how when you try something new, it can be scary to fail, but you didn't talk about the fact that you might not even try something new if you're too afraid to fail. Like I said, I don't know if we're talking about the same article, we'll have to trade links later. But one of the articles I read was a girl in high school, I think she was 15 or 16. And she was taking all math and science courses and this really stuck with me because this is what I did because when I was like two, I decided I was going to be a veterinarian. And then I totally changed my mind when I turned 18. But they said, well, could you be interested in maybe history? Could you be interested in economics? And she's like, well, I don't know, I've never taken the course. And they said, well, why don't you take the courses? She says, well, what if I'm not good at it? I want to go to whatever college and if I can't go to, or if I can't get a three point, whatever, I've never had a four point GPA system. So I don't know what's really good, but a three point, whatever GPA, then I can't go to that school. And the interviewers kind of said, if she can't fail when she's 15 and the consequences are basically like, not really the kinds that you need to worry about. I mean, college is, it's a tough thing. But when you're 15, if you can't make mistakes, when are you going to learn to make mistakes? Yeah. So leading out of that, I wanted to ask you, if you had one piece of advice for young people who want to change the world, what would it be? Be fearless. I mean, don't underestimate what you're capable of doing and be fearless in trying. And like you just said, the cost of failure is really low when you're young, honestly. You can't fail in ways that are super massive and traumatic for the most part when you're young. And that's the time to really explore and do that. Try things that you could fail at, get a couple skin needs, don't be afraid. And I think when you look around the world, I see plenty of what I call shufflers, right? Whether they're bureaucrats, government workers, or just people who kind of follow the rules. They're shuffling around existing resources. And they're often busy bodies or complainers or people who are just sort of, within the status quo, humming on about it or making it carry on. There's enough people like that. We need more creators, create new ideas and alternative experiences criticized by creating. You know, I mean, the only thing ultimately that you can leave behind when this life is over and it's just, it's short. I mean, we don't know. You can leave behind what you've created and how that's impacted the world. You know, your fears and your doubts and your excuses and reasons why you sort of held yourself back, those don't stay around after you. There's no impact there. So don't be afraid. I mean, when I look back on my life, really everything that I would say I might have some regret about, it always shares the same quality. I always listened to the normal thing and sort of the normal advice of normal people about what I should do, more than I should have. I underestimated my own intuition and gut and didn't take as many risks as early on and those are really the only regrets. I never regret that I didn't do the thing that all of the normal advisors told me to do or that I didn't follow the rules enough. I have no regrets in that regard. So be fearless and don't put a limit on what you're capable of doing and whatever sphere that takes place. Yeah, I'm gonna interject and offer a little bit of advice from my personal experience which is similar which is do something really scary on a pretty regular basis. If you're really comfortable, it's time to shake it up a little bit. I kind of like in February made that a late New Year's resolution for myself and I've been having a lot of fun ever since. I'm super afraid. This isn't really a creative thing but I'm super afraid of heights and I went zip lining it a couple weeks ago. Yeah, you'll have more fun. Maybe you won't always create but you won't be as afraid and you'll have a lot more fun. It'll help you be fearless like Isaac suggests. Well, I wanted to throw one more thing on there Janet. Oh yeah, go. There's, it's so much easier to do this now in a lot of ways. One really great, easy way that anyone can sort of test this out, push themselves to be creative. And this was very instrumental for me. Is writing, I mean just start a blog. And the fact that anyone else can see it that you have to sort of ship it so to speak is really scary and intimidating but if you kind of force yourself to create in that way you don't need any capital to start it up, you don't need any specific skills or knowledge but it's scary and it helps you get into the mode of creating and see what you've got inside you that you didn't know and be unafraid because some of the things you write are not gonna be good at all and people might not read them and learning to deal with that is really really powerful and important. Yeah, well and internet commenters can be some scary people so. I'm gonna read the comments. Yeah, so okay so early on I mentioned that Isaac is the founder and CEO of Praxis. I wanna give him a few minutes to talk about that and when he's done that we'll take some questions. So if you've got any questions while you're listening to Isaac, let me know and I'll have one more poll while we hear from those. So go ahead Isaac. Yeah, absolutely so Praxis is kind of the incorporated version of all the ideas that we've been talking about today. You know I sort of after 10 or more years really since my own undergraduate experience of being kind of frustrated with the higher education system and feeling like there was this entrepreneurial opportunity. I saw all these young people saying I've got a degree but I still don't know what I want to do. I don't know if I have the skills. I can't find a job and seeing employers say I've always got a job open but I can't find good qualified workers. I felt like something was amiss and you know I felt like the opportunity was just right with the advent of all this great content coming online with online education and there's so many small businesses everywhere and it's so much easier to start a business now so you have this sort of entrepreneurial surge. So Praxis is an intensive 10 month program where entrepreneur young people 18 to 20 something. We place them with entrepreneurs and they work at those businesses during the 10 month program and learn all aspects of running a business and really contribute and see what it's like to be a creator and they're completing at the same time a really rigorous online curriculum that includes liberal arts because as we mentioned sort of being a philosopher, understanding history economics is important as well as business and digital skills and some hard skills training self-guided projects and it's really about bringing the consumer back as the key decision maker in education. I felt like when I was in college, hey I'm the consumer, I'm the one paying but nobody here seems to care about pleasing me. It's like when you go to the DMV they don't care if you're happy or not because they're gonna get your money either way and that's what I felt like in college. So we really wanna bring it back to you and say what are the things that you need to be successful as an entrepreneurial young people whether you are a young worker whether you start a business or not and we wanna give you those with the experience, the confidence, the skills, the knowledge. So that's what Praxis is all about certainly check it out at discoverpraxis.com you can email us info at discoverpraxis.com anytime, I'd love to talk about it but that's my great adventure in trying to criticize by creating. Yeah and you can also follow Praxis on Facebook. I do and I'm always interested in the latest lessons. It's kind of amazing what they're doing while they're also working which is I think kind of a cool, I always like to work when I was in school because I felt like it gave my brain a little bit of exercise. It could go back and forth between the two moments. So I'm gonna put up our last poll while we take some questions. So I wanna know if you guys since listening to this and kind of thinking about it hopefully, do you think you can create something new and change the world? It's okay to say no if you don't but if you do that's great and while you guys are answering it I will take some of these questions. So Jasmine asks, do you feel that there are enough young innovative entrepreneurs and if not how can that be changed? I know you're trying to do that a little bit but maybe you can say a bit more about it. Yeah, you know again I think there are, probably this generation is more entrepreneurial in many ways than people have been for a long time. I think just some of the realities of the economic situation are part of that that it's really, really the case that you just learn to do a certain thing, go work for one company for 40 years and then retire. You have to kind of be adaptive and be more aware of what your skill sets are. So there's that and I also think that the frequent use of technology and technology that's very individualizable and that you can sort of mold to your own needs are making people a little bit more demanding in terms of what they want. They don't want to just do something where they're told what to do. They wanna be able to kind of mishmash things and build them around themselves and that creates a little bit more entrepreneurship. But I still think largely I go and speak to a lot of students, high school students, college students and that spark is in there and you see them apply it to things that they have been told are like bad things, things that they shouldn't do. Basically anything that's fun is supposed to be like bad for you and you're not thinking about your future and things that are supposed to be good for you like education or torturous and boring. So you see them apply it in, when they're playing Minecraft with their friends or whatever, but then when they come into the official world of education and then work, they kind of forget that and so I really think there's so much work to be done to kind of awaken that, to break down those barriers between what's fun and what's good for you, between education and work, between play and productivity. So I think there's a lot that can be done there and really changing that mindset and making people feel empowered that they do have it within their grasp to alter the world or found in powerful ways. Yeah and I think what you were mentioning earlier, the fact that people get to experience so many new things these days, I think that actually is gonna help because I think we expect the world to be better. Like I think it's actually pretty common that you do something and you're frustrated, like Louis C.K. has the joke, right? When you're mad because your cell phone isn't faster. Cell phones are amazing, right? They're not attached to the wall anymore. I've been reading science fiction and in like all of the science fiction, there's a lot of people like they would still go to a phone booth and use a pay phone and they could fly and they were colonizing Mars. Like nobody even thought of that and yet we get frustrated by it and I think that that's really good. I think it's good that we're disruptive, right? Like we want disruption when we see a problem. And I think that that's gonna kind of foster the type of person who's gonna wanna create because we see the possibility and I actually think it's great that I have no idea what things are gonna be like in even 10 years. So I've also got another question. You can hack anything, you can hack anything now and that's a great mindset. Yeah, exactly. Life hacks, right? Is that the saying and also a website? I guess it's two things. So I've got another question from Thomas about your experience specifically. So he says, when you were starting at Praxis and still today, he's seen you deal with many criticisms even from people who are your friends. So is this something that you've shrugged off or taken in a brace? Like how have you dealt with criticism, I guess, in your experience as an entrepreneur? Yeah, this is one of those things where I think doing a lot of writing and blogging for many years helped me because I learned I used to try to respond to every comment or critique of all my articles because I wanted to please everybody and make everybody happy and eventually I finally realized I don't, and this might sound selfish but I don't mean it that way. I don't write for other people. I write for me. I write because it makes me feel better to say it and to get it out there and there's a moment at which I have to let it out into the world and then walk away from it because maybe I just lack self-control and I'm not zen-like enough but when I go and read the comments or whatever, it just makes me less happy and I think it sort of distracts me from the progress that I'm trying to make. So those lessons were very helpful for me. I mean, when you create anything, if it is at all disruptive or has that potential, it will upset some people and that's fine and that's okay and I know when you're, especially when you're marketing something, you're gonna talk about hey, maybe we should rethink the way we do everything and that scares people and they wanna make sure you're not too crazy. I don't mind being too crazy, but that has been hard. I mean, it can be very hard on a personal level. You have to have thick skins but I also see it as look, this is a good sign and to those who, people try to put you in a binary box if you're disruptive, disrupting things. Okay, so if you're creating practices, that must mean you think college is bad. That's the most absurd conclusion ever. I mean, that's like saying if you create a sedan, you must think that no one should buy a truck. I mean, this is not a one size fits all world. I think college can do great things in certain cases for certain people and I actually think if you really care about college being good and the quality being high, you should welcome the alternatives in the competition. They're more likely to improve the products, if anything. So I've kind of just learned to make my piece with it but it's not always fun, it's the way it goes. Yeah, I think there have been a lot of growing pains as we've moved towards a more personalized world. There are a lot of, music is a good example. You can listen to just really obscure stuff and you can find an audience for it if you're a musician, which is great because it's just allowed so much more creativity. So I don't have any more questions. If anything pops up in the next couple of seconds, I'll definitely take it but I wanted to wrap up. I wanted to thank Isaac so much for being with us today. I hope it's really obvious to you guys why I thought he was a great person to talk to about this and I wanted to draw your attention to an article that we have on the Freeman, which is Fees Magazine but it's also on the website. If you go to the website, we'll report it's there called 50 ways to leave Leviathan and if you're not familiar with the term Leviathan is like a term for big government. So it's kind of life hacks, ways that the world is already becoming freer through technology and I will email that to everybody in a follow-up email from after this event and I'm gonna add to it, Isaac mentioned from the Acton Institute, call of the entrepreneur. I'll see if I can track that down and point you guys towards it as well. We've also extended our registration deadline for our summer seminars. So if you thought that this was awesome and you liked interacting, sign up for a summer seminar. You can do it in person. They're really, really awesome. They can actually change your life meeting the people and hearing the ideas. Oh, I've got a question. So I'm just gonna finish up this last thing and then we can talk about it. So our next event will be with Steve Horwitz who's a professor at St. Lawrence University and if you watch any Learn Liberty videos or participate in many Facebook debates you may know him. And we'll be talking about who decides what you eat. That'll be on Tuesday, April 29th at seven o'clock. But Isaac, I'm just gonna take this last question. Somebody says, oh, this is a tough one. I have lots of profitable ideas. Any comments on how to navigate the legal and accounting issues? Oh my goodness. I've been afraid of launching, only to find out of my own business. And yeah, this is a, it can be really frustrating, I agree. Cause I work as a contractor and it's crazy the stuff you're not allowed to do. So I don't know if you have any advice or maybe this is something that we can point them towards some resources. Yeah, I've got just a sort of a general piece of advice here. I have very, very low patience for paperwork and I haven't done my own taxes since I don't remember, even when I was like 13, 14, I would pay my brother to do them for me because I just have no patience for it. And so when it came to getting praxis going and incorporating, this is where I think building social capital is so crucial. Building a valuable network, not in the sort of, you know, drop business cards from a helicopter sort of way, but continuing to build goodwill with people that you meet, even if you don't know that you'll ever meet them again or anything, so that you kind of have this extensive network. And when you say, I've got this idea, I don't know, LLC, C Corp, S Corp, who do you know that might know someone, that might know someone else? Maybe, you know, they know a lawyer, they know. I recently had this with praxis, we had an international applicant and I was trying to figure out, you know, if there was some way we could do this with immigration. And I just posted generally, let's talk about it really tapping your network. I posted this generally to Facebook. Anyone have any thoughts on visas for international students? And I had like two or three responses and one guy said, oh yeah, we have this lawyer, he's a great friend of ours, she had my email. I emailed the guy, hey, so-and-so, who I'd never met in person, I just knew him from Facebook, recommended you, and he emailed me back right away and answered my question in like 30 seconds. So building those networks I think is really valuable and knowing when, there's times when you might have to gut through it and say, I'm just gonna dig into this ridiculous thing and learn the law myself and figure it out. But anytime you can, if it's something that you hate and you're not good at or that terrifies you, push yourself to see if you can find someone that can do it for you that you can trade favors with, that you can cash in some of that social capital, that's really, really important. So produce as much goodwill as you can because you might need to lean on that sometimes and get some people to help you. Yeah, there's a big difference between forcing yourself to do something you hate and trying something that's scary. So don't force yourself to do something that you hate just because you wanna take more chances. And yeah, I'll just add- That's right. I'll just add that I'm involved in a non-profit charity in Canada and it's hard to do the paperwork. Just don't be afraid to ask for help. I think especially if you're into business, you can be really driven and feel like you can do a lot of stuff on your own, but you don't have to. So hopefully that's helpful. I don't have any more questions. If you think of any more questions, feel free to contact Isaac or myself. Like Isaac said, he'd be happy to take questions. My email is at the bottom, jnielson at fee.org and it's there so that you can email me. So if you have any other questions about upcoming events or anything we talked about today, don't be shy. And I'll just thank Isaac again and thank everybody for sitting in tonight. Thank you guys. Go out there and change the world.