 Welcome to the FeeCast, your weekly dose of economic thinking from your friends at the Foundation for Economic Education. I am, as always, Richard Lawrence with our fabulous panel, Brittany Hunter, Dan Sanchez, and Mary Ann March. We have a special guest today, TK Coleman, the co-founder and education director at Praxis. And we're really excited to talk with you, TK. You were a keynote speaker last year at FeeCon. You're here talking with folks this year at 2018 FeeCon, which, of course, is where we're live shooting this. TK, what is Praxis? Let's just start out with the basic question. Sure thing. So Praxis is a one-year boot camp and apprenticeship that trains young people on how to launch careers without college. We believe that wealth is a reward for creating value and professional opportunity is a reward for signaling your ability to do so. And we train young people how to do both of those things without relying on the traditional credentials that they've been taught all their lives they must have in order to be a player in the market game. In the real world. It's interesting you should say that work is the only real signal to show that you can actually do something, right? Because up to this point, most people think, I've got to go to school. I've got to get a degree. I've got to get an advanced degree possibly to show that I can actually do the job. But what you're saying is, put people in a working situation and they will demonstrate it. Absolutely. And the notion that you have to go to school to get the credential in order to signal that ability, it's relatively true, meaning that if that's the best thing you have going, you have no alternatives. You don't know how to signal your ability to create value. You don't have any opportunities. Well, then you need that as a baseline, right? But what we provide is the opportunity for young people to get that kind of training and to figure out ways to do it without being on their own. Because for most, most people, there are a lot of people out there who say, college isn't for me. I don't want to go. You know, this is not twisting me. But anybody's arm and trying to get them to do things they don't want to do, right? But there are lots of young people who say, I don't want to go to college. But there's this pressure on me to be the next Steve Jobs or be the next Bill Gates, because that's the message that we give to young people that if you don't go to college, shame on you unless you're a multi-billionaire, right? And so that's a lot of pressure. And what we try to do is create a community, a curriculum, a coaching experience and a work experience where they can let go of that pressure and just focus on the things that matter, like developing useful skills, learning how markets work and building some experience. And we've had a number of those young people actually work at fee through the practice program, which has been awesome. So use the word signal. And there's sort of a signaling theory of education that posits that what people are trying to get with the credential, it's not the experience that they get building up to the credential. It's the signal that the credential is the diploma itself, the piece of paper that they're hoping will signal to employers that they can create value. For our listeners, what are some ways that someone aside from going to college can build an even better signal than a piece of paper? Sure. So first, there are actually two dimensions to that signal. The degree dimension is what you get after the fact. But there's also the social dimension. By going to college, you are also signaling to most adults, at least in our generation, that I'm a responsible person, that I'm a decent person, that I'm not a screw up, that I'm not just living my life willy-nilly. And you can put this to the test. Don't take my word for it. Don't take anything I say by faith. Just go try it. Conduct your own experiments. If you go to people and you say, I'm not going to go to college, they'll ask you an entirely different set of questions than if you say, I'm going to go to college. If you say, I'm going to college, just graduated high school, just got accepted at Kentucky or Kansas, people will say, congratulations, right? On the other hand, if you say, well, I'm not going to go to college, people are going to say, well, what are you going to do? Well, what if that doesn't work out? And then they'll begin to ask you all sorts of philosophical questions that most 35-year-olds can't even answer about their lives and about what happens if they fail and so forth. So that social signal is very important as well. And you get that before the degree of that, like, hey, don't put any pressure on me because I'm doing something for the next four years that accounts for my time. So anyway, you need to address both of those things. You need to give people a social signal that says, all right, I'm not doing college, but I'm also not watching reruns of SpongeBob 24 hours, right? So Praxis does offer that as well. Like you're actually doing something. You're going to be working hard. This isn't just some nebulous community where you come to hang out and be around people that don't go to college. We actually expect you to work. The way we describe it is we're like fitness trainers for your career. The gym is not the kind of place you should feel comfortable hanging out in if you don't want to work out. If you go to a gym and you're holding a beer hanging out with your buddies, someone's going to walk up to you and say, hey, can I help you? Everything OK? You're going to feel real uncomfortable real fast. And you're either going to want to get out of there, or you're going to put the beer down and want to start working out. And we create that same kind of environment. But to answer your question directly about what are some ways people can signal their ability to create value, there are a few different things you can do. One is you build your portfolio. This means that you find real people that you can use your skills to serve and you document that. Having an endorsement from a real person who says, this person did something for me. I paid them for it or I reaped a benefit from it is far more powerful than saying, I'm good at computer science or I'm interested in marketing. It's almost yelp for your career, in a way. It's like an interactive resume, so to speak. Absolutely. It's empirical evidence of goals achieve of results accomplish with a person there to endorse it. I mean, this is how we pick our dentist. This is how we pick our mechanic. This is how we do things in the real world. You know, we say, we don't look at their credentials. We say, hey, Dan, who's your dentist? We say, hey, Brittany, who's your mechanic? And we trust the people that we know. So you build that kind of trust. That's one way that you go about it. Another way is what I call learning out loud, which is the process of studying things is that you're interested in. But instead of waiting until you're a master at that subject to admit to the world you've studied these things, you document the process along the way. And you follow the advice of Richard Saul Werman, who is the founder of TED Talks, which is you market your curiosity, not your expertise. This is one of the most underestimated opportunities in the world. Most people think that in order to build their brand, they have to speak with authority all the time. They have to speak from the mountaintop all the time. But people are interested in people who don't know what they're doing, but who are curious about it, and who are opening the door for you to watch what they look like when they're learning things. This is not only a great way to build a brand with minimal pressure, but it's also one of the most important things that employers can know about you. I often make the distinction between what it is to be a knower and a learner. A knower is someone who is aware of certain facts. A learner is someone who is good at moving themselves from I don't know what I'm doing to I'm going to figure it out. And everybody looks good when they're a knower. Everybody's comfortable and fun to work with when they know what they're doing. They came from somewhere. They came from somewhere, right? But what are you like? What is it like to work with you when you don't know what you're doing? How composed are you? How fun are you to be around? How determined are you? How persistent are you? See, when you tell me that you know something, I don't know what your process was like. Maybe you were lazy the whole time, and you took five years, and you should have took two. And by marketing your curiosity, you're also marketing your trajectory, which in some ways, trajectory is more important than position, like any particular skill level that you have. Absolutely. Like it's much more impressive for me to say, hey guys, I'm T.K. Coleman. I know nothing about the piano, but I'm really interested in learning this thing. So I'm just going to take a stab at it. And every week I'm going to teach myself a new chord. I'm going to start with the scales, and I'm going to play a video, a one hour video that you'll see here on my blog. I'm not really doing this. So don't go there. I was just about to say, I'm going to take you on stage at the funnery and see how this works out. Every week you're going to see a one hour video of me practicing the piano. I'll also do a recap of what I learned, what I struggle with, what I'm going to be working on next week. Follow along. I do this over the course of two, three years. By the time I get pretty decent, people aren't going to be finding out for the first time that I know the piano. No one's going to say to me, oh wow, you know the piano? People will have watched my journey, and they'll not only know that I'm good because of what I can do, but they'll respect me because of how I navigate the process. Contrast that with all the people that you know, all the people that I guarantee you know, who say things like, yeah, I'm interested in writing. I'm interested in making jewelry. And you go, oh, really? Show us. You're interested in that? It's a secret. Why is it a secret? Because people study in private because they've been conditioned by school to hide yourself until you become an expert, then go out there when it's completely safe. And the way it works in the real world is the exact reverse. You learn out loud. You're advocating an amazing amount of vulnerability. I mean, if someone's going to observe your learning process, that is you're opening yourself up to a huge amount of critique. I mean, can people take that? How do they take it well? Yeah, well, so, I mean, talk to somebody that's married, talk to somebody that's achieved anything in life. I mean, are there any good possibilities available to folks who aren't interested in being vulnerable and honest and transparent? You certainly can't run a business that way. You certainly can't run a business by being unwilling to admit that you've made a mistake. You certainly can't run a business. I mean, what if I ran a restaurant and my customer says, I don't like this burger? And I respond it by saying, well, I've been in the restaurant industry for 20 years. You obviously don't know what a good burger is, sir. Like, how long am I gonna be in business, right? I have to be vulnerable and I have to listen to that feedback, even if I think the customer's wrong. I have to take it on the chin and be a good sport about it in a way that allows me to get better. How do you make friends by pretending like you know things all the time? How do you make friends by never admitting that you don't know what the hell you're doing or that you're not afraid of life or that you're not sometimes lonely too? The basis of building friendships is that bridge of empathy where we say, man, that thing you're going through, I totally know what you're talking about. I go through that as well or I've been through that as well. So I would say you have to be vulnerable. That doesn't mean you have to advertise your problems, you know, indiscriminately, but you have to be willing to show yourself to the world when you are not yet perfect because you're never gonna be perfect anyway and that's the only way that you generate trust and respect. It seems that a lot of people think that they can, the source of their personal power is a credentialing institution, that if they just were backed by a credentialing institution, that that would make them capable of creating value for others. Another way that people try to outsource their personal power is to politics. And I know that that's a topic that you are very interested in writing about and we're actually developing an e-book by you along those themes. I wonder if you could talk about that a little bit. Yeah, so I've been giving a lot of talks for the past several years about personal power as an alternative to absolute faith in politics. And this is an issue that's very near and dear to my heart. You know, my life mission is to convince as many people as I can, including myself every day that we have the permission and the power to be the predominant creative forces in our own lives. And this book and all of the talks that preceded it basically have two fundamental drives. The first is a spiritual drive, I'm the son of a pastor. So if I reach you, that's why. But one of the things that my parents taught me is that one, we're made in the image and likeness of God and two, what is impossible with us is possible with God and that the basis for change in society is having faith in your divine potential and making a greater priority of that than anything going on outside of you. And one illustration we see of this is in the Moses story where the Pharaoh, he's the politician. It's the politician who was the one that enslaves people in that story. The politician is the cause of all the trouble. And Moses is the prophet. He's the guy without any political power and what he has is faith and he has courage, okay? And he initially doubts himself because he has a speech impediment. So he doesn't even know if he can be a good spokesperson, but he gives it a try anyway. And he fails a couple of times. He has moments of embarrassment. In fact, the first time he tells Pharaoh, boldly let my people go, Pharaoh not only says no, but he says, because you have insulted me. I mean, I didn't literally say, that's the TK paraphrase, but he basically says, I'm gonna make the work of the slaves even harder. And now the slaves are mad at him and he failed, right? But yeah, but eventually he wins. Eventually he performs the miraculous and helps those people get to the promised land. And the idea there is that it's not the politicians who take us to the promised land, it's the prophets. And the prophets are not psychics. The prophets are not people who can always predict the future, but the prophets of our time are the people who understand that the future lies in the hands of the individual. The future is something that we have to create by taking personal responsibility for the outcomes of society, not by hiding behind politicians, not by giving that over to the state. Where do we get the love for big government from? We get it from nowhere else other than a lack of faith in the individual. The second drive comes from just observing the political climate in which I grew up. I saw the Bush elections, the Bush-Gore elections where there was all the controversy and protests and accusations of voter fraud. I saw the paradox of Obama giving so many people hope and yet so many other people saying we're losing hope. This guy is the anti-Christ and I've seen so many hearts break when Trump won the election. And there are a lot of people who talk about self-help, who talk about personal empowerment, but usually every four years when the wrong guy gets elected and who the wrong person is varies for what group you're a part of, but all of that self-help stuff people talk about, it goes right out of the window. People will happily tell you, whatever you can conceive, you can achieve, well, now we gotta wait to get somebody else in office. That's on pause for the next four years. You let your mood be dictated by other people. And how in the world does that make sense? Then you can't control at all, yeah. I've noticed the same thing with elections. People are standing, they're ready to take action, and then maybe their guy gets elected and they clap their hands and have a seat. And it's all over. Yes, that's right. And the problem is you can't equate your mood with morality, right? So there's nothing wrong with having a bad mood or being upset, disappointed with an election outcome, but you can't let that bad mood reduce you into a state of apathy where you say, well, I guess I can't do anything right now. I guess I have no power. And so when you look at most self-help gurus, there tend to be three responses to politics. One is to throw all the self-help stuff out the window and play the victim card. The second is to say, well, if we can't beat them, join them, let's go into politics ourselves, which is why everyone is pushing Oprah into politics. Even though she's created far more value in the marketplace than she possibly could create in politics, right? She's created a magazine. She owns her own network. She's literally changed so many lives. She's exposed people to so many good books and we're encouraging her to take a step down into politics. The third thing that people do is they either just dismiss it all together. So you'll hear a lot of self-help teachers who just won't talk about it at all and they'll just kind of hope that we don't let that get to us too much. And what I want to do is I want to present the message of self-empowerment in a way that doesn't dismiss politics, doesn't depend on politics and isn't depressed by politics, but that transcends it all together. I want to reverse the order and say, no, politics is not that which gives us permission to be empowered, but power is a pre-political given, right? It is the starting point of the conversation. And if we're gonna ever get to that free society that we want, it's going to start with us. So no, self-help, self-improvement is not some kind of optional subject. It is the basis for everything that we want to achieve in society because it begins with you, begins with me. What you're describing almost perfectly segues to what we talk about at fee all the time as the freedom philosophy, right? So we had a session where we were talking with new staff and new interns last week. We were talking about the freedom philosophy, about integrating it into your own self and working on yourself before expressing your wishes in the outside world. And Leonard Reed, who was Fee's founder, wrote a lot about this. And one of the things he wrote in a book called The Guide to Libertarian Leadership is something called creative potentiality, where different people's individual creative potentiality can actually get together in unknown ways and produce these amazing results that wouldn't have been contemplated by anybody but are valuable to all of us. And so it connects very, very well to what we talk about at fee and inside fee and outside of fee everywhere. I love it. One of the things that Dan and I were talking about is how some people have a hard time seeing the connection. Some people, when they see anything that focuses on personal empowerment, they say, hey man, I thought this was about liberty. Let's get back to the economics, you know? Let's get back to talking about that stuff or let's get back to talking about business as if these things can be separated from the individuals that we are describing when we talk about economics. But I think there are two sides to the freedom coin. And most people only think about the first side. The first side is what it takes to create a society in which individuals can be free. And that's the political side. And I personally think that's the easy side. It's the hardest side to get results, but it's the easiest side to involve our shadows because, well, isn't it always better to just find somebody with power? God forbid it, we think it to be ourselves. But to find somebody with power and get them to do something about it, that's kind of like the default. The other side of the freedom coin is not how to create a society in which individuals can be free, but how to create the kind of individual who can be free in any society. And that means you accept as a starting point that you are born into a world that is not yet free. It's free in some respects, but you will always be part of a society in which some of your freedoms are not honored. Some of your rights are being violated explicitly or implicitly. And if that's the starting point, what are you gonna do about that? Are you going to wait on the system to evolve into something different? Are you going to wait on a politician to do something about it? Or are you going to say, all right, creativity is precisely for a world in which things have to be brought into existence out of apparent nothingness, right? That's why we need creativity. If we lived in a world where everything was perfect and desires could be instantaneously manifested, creativity would be irrelevant. The only reason we need creativity is because we have ideals, we have goals, we have virtues, and we live in a world where there are all sorts of obstacles between us and the realization of that goal. And creativity is about navigating that. And that's what personal development and self-help, that's what that stuff focuses on. That's why it really matters. And you've got to continue learning before you ever know. I love that. Well, thank you so much, TK, for joining us. We were so excited to have you here on the FECAST and looking forward to seeing all your panels here at FECON. We'll see you next time on FECAST.