The Way I Heard It with Mike Rowe - 488: Connor Boyack—Spontaneous Order

Episode Date: June 9, 2026

Spontaneous Order might sound like a contradiction, but according to author, entrepreneur, and educator Connor Boyack, some of society's most important innovations emerge without a master plan. Mike sits down with Connor, the bestselling co-creator and co-author of The Tuttle Twins book series that inspired the hit animated show, founder and president of the Libertas Network and a leading advocate for teaching the principles of liberty, entrepreneurship, personal responsibility, and free markets to the next generation. Connor shares the mission that drives his work: helping families understand how free people, voluntary cooperation, and decentralized problem-solving can create remarkable outcomes. Along the way, he and Mike explore the power of ideas, the importance of questioning assumptions, why history still matters, and how a children's book series grew into a cultural phenomenon reaching millions of families. This conversation offers a fascinating look at the relationship between freedom, education, and the unexpected order that can arise when people are left free to innovate. Big thanks to our terrific sponsors PureTalk.com/Rowe Get UNLIMITED hi-speed data for just $34.99 per month! ZipRecruiter.com/Rowe to post a job for FREE. K12.com/Rowe See what's possible for your child with K12's Career and College Prep AuraFrames.com/Mike Use code MIKE to get $35 off their best-selling Carver Mat

What you have here is another episode of the way I heard it. I'm Mike Rowe. And Chuck, quick question before we dive in. Sure. Would you like to hear me sing a few bars from a cartoon that I was in once? I was hoping you'd ask. Yes. Here it is.

Well, perhaps you've been told from the cradle that you're a failure unless you're college bound. But the road to success has many, many lanes and not all go through a college town. Right. Yeah, it's kind of catchy. Yeah, it is. That was from an episode of the Tuttle Twins, which I was honored to appear in a year or so ago. And ever since, and to be honest, even before that, I was a fan of this. I'm not going to call it a cartoon, even though it's animated.

It's an animated series, Mike. Yeah, but I think it might be more than that, Charles. It may be more than that. Connor Boyack is the mad scientist behind this thing. And I don't think he'd take offense to that, although he's not a scientist and he's certainly not mad, but he is a guy who finds himself, I think, in extraordinary circumstances, vis-à-vis a path that you simply couldn't chart in any kind of map. Yeah. What was he doing beforehand? He was a web designer.

Yeah. He was a web designer who wound up becoming an author of books. Yeah. and the creator of an animated series that teaches kids all about economics and politics and social anthropology and physics and really like and persuasiveness yes all of that this guy really is in love with a lot of very important books that have been written over the centuries for adults and he wanted to find a way to make the content of these adult books interesting for kids and their parents so that they could watch, well, or in this case, read a book together. The books are illustrated. The original Tuttle Twins

books are all illustrated by his partner. What's his name? Zechal, Zebediah, Ezra. Why would you do that, too? Elijah. Elijah. Elijah. So this, you know, so you got this guy Connor, who's designing websites and whatnot, and his artistic partner, Elijah, and they start writing these books, and of course the publishers don't want them. You know, the kids' publishers, it's too high-minded, and the adult publishers don't want to do anything for kids. And long story short, they sell like seven million of these books. They create a publishing empire. The books turn into, I believe, the number one series over on the Angel platform, where these crazy tuttle twins with the help of these animated devices, robots, and grandmothers travel through time

to meet great icons in history and learn big lessons that you might otherwise expect to absorb through a lecture in college, except it's accessible to kids. It's an ingenious idea. and I just I just appreciate the way. Anybody who can figure out how to talk to kids and adults at the same time, that's a Rubik's Cube. That was what we tried to do on dirty jobs, and it's fun to meet people who have cracked the code in other ways. I got to tell you that, you know,

he's talking about the titles of some of these books in the episode, and I'm listening and I'm going, I want to read that, and I know it's a kid's book. Yeah. But it's like I just know that he's, He's going to delve into it as thoughtfully and as eloquently as he did right here, explaining them. He's a really well-spoken guy. Well, we're talking about like the seminal books on economics.

We're talking about Hayek. We're talking about Henry Haslett. We're talking about down the list it goes. So everything from an eminent domain to broken windows theories to all these well-established ideas, unintended consequences just resonate through all these episodes. And so I just wanted to sit down and have a thoughtful conversation with him. And what you'll learn, along with some of the obvious stuff, is that these things really do spin out of control. We're calling the episode spontaneous order, which is another economic phenomenon, that turns out, describes the lives of some of the most interesting people I know.

Connor is among them because he didn't just come up with a book and then a TV show. Now he has Libertus, which is a think tank. And under Libertus are other organizations that are doing all kinds of really interesting things, reimagining education and skilled training. And it's just, it's the kind of thing once you get into it, you don't become a casual fan of the Tuttle Twins. You become a devotee. You watch them all, you share them, and you get into it.

And that's why I was so honored to sing a song about work ethic in the last season. And you did a great job. And he even said so. By the way, his partner is Elijah Stanfield, and he illustrates the books. I think I made that point, even though I did get his name somewhat wrong initially. You came up with Elijah, which is better than me. Well, I went with Ezekiel, Elijah. I knew it was a prophet.

Okay. And I knew it started with a vowel. Yeah. Beyond that, you know now everything I knew before I sat down with Connor Boyack, but you're about to learn a whole lot more, including a little teaser coming up in the next season of the Tuttle Twins, featuring, well, wait for it. Right after this. As we prepare to celebrate our semi-quincentennial, it's worth. remembering, I think, that our country would have never made it this far, but for the brave men and women who were and are willing to put their lives on the line to defend it. Pure Talk knows that,

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I love it. I bet you will too. Puretalk.com slash row. We good? He didn't say that with a lot of confidence. We are. Eclipse. Eclipse.

And then... Good? I can live with the ellipses, but not the question mark. That's still my favorite VEO story. ABC hired me to introduce Diane Sawyer on the ABC Nightly News, and they were so nervous about the way, you know,

the read was going to be. They were all, like, listening, and, you know, we went confident, assertive, but not haughty, not braggadocious, just really, just, you know, just put it out there, like she's been the anchor for decades. And I said, guys, I know

exactly what you need. Here we go. Take one. From ABC World News. Headquarters. This is World News Tonight with Diane Sawyer. And they're like, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. Not that. Boyak, what's the etymology there?

That is Scottish coming through England. Yeah. It was Boik. And then they came across the pond and it became Boyack. And so I went back. I tried to figure out, did the Boyaks have a tartan, you know, the clan? Yeah. And they don't.

No plaids, no, nothing. I just picked the Stewart one, the kind of royal steward. And so we went back to Scotland, did some family history, gosh, like almost 20 years ago. Well, it's a great name regardless, man. Connor Boyack. It's a fun name to say. It's an uncommon name. Yeah.

And for years, I was the only one. But now I found on Facebook some like 14-year-old kid named Connor Boyack. I'll tell you what's annoying. what I just found out on Facebook, National Review, wrote this article. Headline is, Where of All the Trade Jobs Gone? And the guy starts writing. Guy Denton is his name. Good writer.

And he gets about halfway thrown. I'm like, okay, surely this is the part where I'm going to be invoked. Yeah. Okay, I mean, you've got to quote Mike Roe. You're doing an article called Where of All the Trade Jobs gone. Mark Roe appears, and he's heavily quoted. And he says things I've been saying for years. And at first time, I'm like, I can't believe you got my name wrong, guys.

But they didn't. There's really a Mark Rowe. And they went out and interviewed him. And they interviewed him. He had a lot of good stuff to say. Yes. And what does he do? What's his background or what's he involved in? He sounds like he's me. He's like a doppelganger. He's got my same basic life. And he works for another guy named Jim Rowe. So anyway. Is this like a dirty jobs multiverse where you've got like alter ego rose out there all? Well, this is actually a good place to start because there is, you know, thanks by the way, for reaching out.

Yeah, of course. I've been wanting to talk to you for as long as I've known you walk the earth because the Tuttle Twins, which I understand really originated between your ears, once upon a time. I want to get the whole story. But what you've done with that show and the way you've taken storytelling to be both entertaining and informative was really similar adjacent, I guess, to what we did with dirty jobs, what we wanted to do. And it started for me anyway with that weird nexus between nobody wants a lecture, nobody wants a sermon.

Right. You have to entertain them. And if you want permission to do anything beyond that, you've got to earn it somehow. You feel like you've earned it? I feel like the audience thinks that we have. Like there's clearly an impact. I think there's still more to be earned. And I'm someone who, maybe with Dirty Jobs, you had this grand vision that you've been architecting.

That wasn't the case with the Tuttle Twins. It was very much this kind of organic evolution of an idea that very slowly grew, and the audience kept telling us more, more, more. And it originated partly between, you know, my ears and that of my friend and partner, Elijah, who became the illustrator. We had recognized early on 2011 and 12 in one another kind of a symbiotic, like, hey, maybe we should do something together. You know, I was starting to write a lot and speak a lot,

and he was in kind of graphic design, motion design, And so he was the creative guy and I was the ideas guy, communicator. And so I had started a think tank in the meantime, Libertus Institute. That's worth an ellipses or a pause or something. A couple of guys sitting down trying to figure out a new creative way to tell stories. And you know what? I'm going to go ahead and start a think tank. I don't know a big deal.

I mean, I think everybody sort of understands what it is. It's a weird word. I mean, think and tank grouped up together. Yeah. I don't know whether it's hyphen. It really does. But there's also something kind of humble about it. Like a tank. I mean, it's a tank. It's the place where you might store old water or assault somebody. Like septic is a great procedure for tank. That's why you're clicking with it. So yeah. So you just crossed out septic and wrote in Think. Exactly. Let's do that. That looks better on the resume at least. Why a Think Tank? What problem were you solving for?

So I had moved from San Diego to Utah. And I was developed. an interest in current events along with history, economics. And I found myself wanting to make an impact. I wanted to just, you know, I think a lot of Gen Z, I see a lot of the Gen Z I hire, they think and act this way as well. They're like, I want my life energy to be put towards something useful and impactful. Right. And how old were you at this point?

This was, gosh, I was 29, 30 years old. And I was coming up. I was a web developer. I just had this like career in IT, but I found it to be kind of soul-sucking. Like I like the technical challenge. I like the people I work with. But at the end of the day,

I was building websites for stuff I couldn't care less about. And so I was like, how do I do some good with this? So I was building websites for like political campaigns or friends nonprofits and thinking like, could that be my path to impact? Long story short, I said, you know what?

Like I have a gift of not only this technical background, but I'm also a gift of communicator. And I've been writing books and blog. which were back in 2007, 8, 9. So I said, how do I flip it? How can I quit my job, start a nonprofit, and actually just go advance ideas, not only through education, preaching to people about these ideas, free market type ideas, but also, like, actually move the needle and change laws?

So how do you change hearts, minds, but then actually enact that into policy? So that's what a think tank typically is, is how do we formulate ideas, how do we persuade other people to accept those ideas, but then what's the strategy to get those ideas turned into practice so that we can go influence, you know, policymakers or somebody to actually affect change rather than just preach into the wind and hope somebody listens? Nobody wants a lecture. Nobody wants a sermon. Right. I think persuasiveness as an idea is probably more for sale today than it's ever been. Certainly it's, there's more discernment. people are desperate for it.

That in authenticity, right? If you can crack that today, I think the needle will move. But I want to go back. You said you were good at these things. How do you know you're good at something? So I had been writing a blog, as I mentioned, and just people started reading it. And I was a very poor writer and communicator to start with. I chuckled just a moment ago because my weakest subjects in school were English, history,

and then into college economics. Hated them. And a few years later down the road, I had written maybe eight or nine books at that point, and my mom was back in San Diego and bumped into my eighth-grade English teacher. And my mom had been on the city council. She was kind of, so they, she saw her,

oh, hey, Merri Lee, is my mom's name. So they started talking, and my eighth-grade teacher inquired after me, how's Connor done? Now, when your eighth-grade English teacher, like 20 years later, remembers you by name, It either means you were a stellar student or quite the opposite, and I'll let you, you know.

Or you just had a great name. That too. Sure. Memorable, no doubt. And so my mom told her, oh, you know, he's written eight or nine books and her mind was, you know, because I struggled with it in school. I didn't like it. So many years later, when I start this blog and people start reading it, I go through this, like, one or two year phase of realizing, oh, my gosh, like, I'm onto something.

I'm building this audience, but I kind of suck at this. So I need to get really good, really fast. I just want to say this out loud because I don't want to forget to bring it up later. But one of the things that I'm talking to your guys about at the Tuttle Twins is a redux. They've invited me to come back on. And they were like, well, what would the subject be? You know, the last time it was straight up work ethic, right? And you guys let me sing that song and everything, which is super cool.

Move me to tears. How do you know you're good at something? Because I was laughing a lot. When you make Conner, boy, I cry. No, and they were like, well, what do you, how are you thinking? Like, what sort of lesson, wrong word maybe, but what's the morality play? The takeaway, yeah. And it's exactly what you just said.

It's this idea. Just because you love something doesn't mean you can't suck at it. And just because you're not good now might have nothing to do with what that turns into later. And it's the thing I want to riff with you on later is, I know history and Santa Ana and our, you know, we're condemned to repeat what we don't understand. Yep. But at the same time, the past does not equal the future. Yeah.

And it's not written in the stars. And, you know, you can be so wrong about who it is you think you are that you make your English teacher gasp and clutch your pearls when she sees the truth. I speak to a lot of youth groups. and the main message that I try to convey is that adults don't know everything you think they do. They're just really good at faking it. You know, young people have such anxiety about their future, especially right now with AI, right? And they think, oh, how am I ever going to be that good or do that good or do that thing, right? So to your point, it's like, how can we help young people see that we adults are just really good at projecting.

We're really good at kind of the theater of competence without really having the substance thereof all the time. hiding our insecurities a little better, maybe than a 12-year-old can. Yeah. So, and I think, at least in my experience, that's kind of an empowering thing for young people to realize that everything is figureoutable. You know, you'll learn how the theater of it works, but like my life, I had a total pivot. I sit in rooms with my think tank hat on. I sit in rooms negotiating on legislation that's going to affect hundreds of thousands,

sometimes millions of people depending on the topic, in substantive ways. And I'll sit at a table and you've got the attorney general. You've got three deputy generals. You know, you've got this attorney. You've got that economist. And oftentimes we're kind of a David and Goliath dynamic a lot of times where you'll have all these people stacked up against you. And then it's little old Connor Boyack, not an economist, not a lawyer, you know. But I've figured it out.

And if you've put in the work and you've tried to learn these topics, you can hold your weight with people who, sure, they have acronyms after their name and they have fancy degrees. I'm a washed up web developer now advancing these substantive laws. Now I have a team built around me. But in the early years, I was sit in a room against all these guys. And I love it. And I didn't have to pay for the privilege of getting a degree. Well, I did get a degree, but not in economics or not in law, which is areas that I'm often involved in.

But as I reflect on my educational experience, those were the subjects I liked least. They were the ones I did poorest in. And now they're the ones that I'm most known for because I figured out a way to communicate these boring, depressing sometimes ideas in ways that kids and their parents can get excited by,

intrigued by, and that to me is such an indictment of the school system that hasn't figured out these super important topics. How do we distill them? How do we transmit them in a way that kids actually want to learn rather than, here's your Scantron sheet, take the test, move on with your life?

What were the books you had written prior to the Tuttle Twins that surprised your former English teacher? Do do do do do do do. This is an ad for Zip recruiter, but before I get to it, let me just say that I like people. I think you could call me a people person. I've interviewed a lot of people. I've worked alongside a lot of people.

I've written stories about a lot of people, but you know what I don't like about people? I don't like hiring them. And the reason is because hiring people is not a people game. It's a numbers game. And I hate that. Hiring the right person for the right job requires the answer. average employer to plow through no less than 250 individual resumes and conduct, God only knows how many interviews, which begs the obvious question, where will you find the time to hire

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And make the numbers work in your favor. You got nothing to lose, except the time you've been... Wasting. Go to ziprecruiter.com slash row. Post a job for free ziprecruiter.com slash row. The smartest way to hire. I had written a couple Tuttle Twins books by that point. I had written a book called Skip College. What else had I done at that point? I had written a book called Passion Driven Education. How do we leverage kids interests and build a curriculum around what they're currently interested in rather than forcing them to adapt to a one-size-fits-all type of thing. So that's a topic I often speak on. Big topics, kind of a wonky approach, data-driven. I'm guessing you're like you're not telling

stories at this point. Heavy on storytelling, including my own. Oh, really? Yeah, some data in there. No, I latched early on to this idea that the reason why I didn't like these topics in school was because they were facts and figures and charts and graphs and data-driven. It's not the data's bad. That is very important. But there was no storytelling. There's not the tip of the spear. There was no narrative around it. It was insanely boring in my econ 101 class in college looking at supply and demand charts and aggregate, blah, blah, blah, blah, like put me to sleep. But I love economics. Economics is really just the study of human behavior. And it's understanding tradeoffs and incentives and why it's more psychology than it is facts and figures and graphs. And when I

saw economics through that lens, I got really interested by it because I realized it's a language to which we can understand why people make the choices they do. What are the tradeoffs? What's the scarcity? What motivates them to do it? And so when that flip switched, I realize, all right, if I can take these topics that I found boring and wrap them in interesting stories, my own stories or like in Tuttle Twins, the stories of our, the Tuttle Twins characters, suddenly this stuff becomes really interesting. But you're also, I mean, when you really got on my radar. It's when I realized you weren't just writing Tuttle Twins episodes out of whole cloth. You're basically taking books that had made a real impact in society. And you're

sort of distilling, reimagining them, presenting them to a different audience. You know, Hazlitt's book. Yeah. Economics in one lesson. That was an eye-opener. And I probably read that 35 years ago. And I'm pretty sure you took the basic chapters of that book and turned it into an episode. Let's run with that for just a moment. It's a great book. Most people who have read it also read it decades ago. People aren't really reading it today. So imagine I take that book, really helpful to understand the basics of economics. And let's say we go out here on the street in Santa Monica, and I go around and I try and offer that book to passers by on the street. Hey, this will help you, you know, if you have a business or for your family economy,

or let's help you understand some really important stuff. I'll throw it to you. What percentage of random passers-by do you think would, number one, even accept that offer and number two, go home and read it? 0.0. You're a little more cynical than I, but if I were to round down, I would be where you're at. Okay, different example. So, as you mentioned, I have a Tuttle Twins book based off of the economics in one lesson.

We turned it into what we call the Tuttle Twins and the Food Truck Fiasco. So we use a food truck setting and they're having to battle the local regulations that protect the restaurants because the restaurant owner is buddies with the mayor. So now you have protectionism where the government is favoring a certain, you know, anyway. So we get into some of these core ideas that Henry Haslett talks about, but in this fun story that kids can understand. And we introduce the seven or eight basic terms that Henry Haslett talks about in his book. So I take the Tuttle Twins book, Food Truck Fiasco. And I go out here on the street and I say, sir, do you have kids? Oh, yeah, I have kids.

Okay, how old are they? You know, 12, 10, 8. Okay, great. Hey, do you think it's important for them to understand how the world works and how economies work? You know, I think it's 90% plus, you know, parents. They want their kids to not miss out. They want their kids to understand. Okay, great.

Like, hey, would you like a kid's book that can help your kids understand this? So what we've done with Tuttle Twins is we've gotten past that barrier that adults throw up. Oh, I'm too busy. that, I'm fine. People think Tuttle Twins are children's books and they are, or the cartoon. They think it's about the kids and it is. But it's this devious way of getting to the adults by leveraging their kids. So it's a family resource. Over half of the parents who get our Tuttle Twins books, we've surveyed this consistently. It's usually around 52, 54% of parents are learning new things for the first time in a Tuttle Twins book. But it's not because we're going to them and saying,

here's Henry Haslett's book written decades ago, give it a read. We're saying, hey, you love your kids. You want your kids to learn this stuff, right? Oh, yeah, of course. I want my kids to have every advantage in life. Great. Read this book together in the evening. And now the family has a shared language around ideas that Henry Haslett was writing

about decades ago. Animal Farm wasn't about pigs and horses. Right. Yep. Right. Yeah, I didn't fully appreciate the depth of it, though. I mean, when I go back and look at the early episodes of Tullough twins, which obviously are a reflection of the early books, I mean, it's, it's Friedman,

it's Mises, it's really some of the greatest economic minds to ever sit down. And that makes it even wonkier. And you use the word devious, diabolical. I think it's just more about the fact that everybody has an agenda. Everybody's wearing a slip, right? Sometimes your shows a little bit. Sometimes it shows a lot. You know, we're in the business of let's not let the slip show, but let's also not pretend that we aren't wearing one. Doesn't exist. Right. Otherwise, you're just making a cartoon.

Otherwise, well, I mean, not to bring it back to me, but Dirty Jobs is just one long, smelly odyssey through an endless series of connected sewers. Sure. It can't just be that. I mean, it could, but it wasn't. Yeah. You know, so it just comes back again to what's all. authentic. What's persuasive? So today, back to my first question, how do you know you're having an impact? Is it because of what the kids are telling you? Is it what the parents are telling you?

Is it what your think tank buddies are telling you after they analyze the data? Yes to everything. I mean, we survey it and we analyze pre and post surveys and our kids learning. And the short answer is yes. So the data can show it. To me, what gets me is all the anecdotes. It's the tugging at the heartstrings. It's a, I, I was at this event a few years ago and I'm standing next to this woman as a donor she's maybe in her 70s and we're chit-chatting and this kid walks up

it was a family conference so there were kids there too and this kid he's maybe 10 he walks up and are you Mr. Boyack? Oh yeah hi and kind of interrupts us but it was a happy interruption I'm your biggest fan I'm like oh great I'm thinking my donor's like

watching all this lapping it up and shake his hand hey that's great you know keep reading And he's like, hey, do you have a fan club? I'm like, I don't have a fan club. He's like, well, if you start one, can I be the president? You know, this kid's just like persisting. I'm like, keep going, kid, you know? I'm going to slip you a $5 bill out there.

I'm guessing you probably did the day before. This is a classic shill. I love it. We get so many stories of kids who, the parents, like, the story we get most commonly from the parents is from a kid who hates reading or doesn't do well in school or doesn't read for leisure, only wants to be on the iPad. or whatever. And the parent gets the Tuttle Twins books because they see an Instagram ad or whatever and they leave them there and maybe a week or two or four goes by and the parents aren't pushing

it, right? They just say, hey, I got these books. Kids aren't interested. But then they pick up their first one. And then they read the second and pretty soon that day they've plowed through the entire series of Tuddle Twins books. And the question, one of the top questions I get asked the most is like, what's the formula? How have you taken these academic, economic, antiquated? And antiquated maybe ideas and brought them into a level that kids not only can understand and will read, but actually want to read. Like, what's your formula? And I've never been able to answer that question. I don't know how I've stumbled on to doing this, but consistently the feedback we get from parents, how we know we have an impact, is them sharing stories of how their kids have just lit up with interest on these like core ideas, fundamental human flourishing ideas that,

no kid before had even been talked to about, let alone would find interesting. And so my theory over the years of doing this is that I think when we're talking to kids, when we're producing children's books and curricula and so forth, most material out there meets kids at their level. And I think what we've stumbled on to with Tuttle Twins is this idea that kids want to be challenged. They'll jump. They want to jump. Think of Thanksgiving, right? You've got all the adults and the teenagers at the big table. You've got the kids at the little table. And you're like 11 years old and you want to be at the big kids table you don't want to be with the and i think that's the dynamic going on where kids will read this book and sure it's illustrated and it's a kid's book

but the ideas in there are so meaty and substantive that they find themselves like oh give me more i'm smarter than a congressman now wow i'm going to keep reading well that's a easy bar but no i think part of it has to do with um it's it's a magic trick in a way when you think about most kids programming and sadly most adult programming and most most expository messaging is like rooted in cause and effect we do this and that leads to this thing and so kids are taught early on to anticipate you know a logical chronology of things but the topics you deal with whether it's philosophy or work ethic or kindness virtues in general, they don't always have a cause and effect.

There's often, especially in economics, there's an unintended consequence to the thing. And for a kid, and I think an adult too, it's delightful in a way to realize that, oh, I did this and I was told it would lead to that, but it doesn't. Rent control doesn't actually work. Right. Minimum wage doesn't really work. There's going to be an unintended consequence. Yeah. Somewhere down the line. To challenge a kid to look for the unanticipated result of a seemingly predictable thing, that was risky in terms of, is this going to resonate with the key demography, says the network? Right. The answer is probably not unless it does. Well, and for the parents, for them, it's an experiment with their kids because they don't know how. their kids are going to process this, if they'll be interested.

This is maybe about a year ago, this story, this dad was in the car. His kids are in the back, nine-year-old daughter, and we have a book all about inflation and the creature from Jekyll Island and the central bank and why prices go up. So they're in the car. That children's favorite. Exactly, right? Bedtime story. Tell me the story about the Federal Reserve.

Exactly. And yet it works. That's our, like, I think that's our top seller, actually. So they're in the car. They're listening to the radio. They're talking about inflation, the latest inflation numbers. They have the economist from the local community college or whatever there to interpret the latest numbers. And they say on there, well, you know, inflation's really hot right now because all these companies are charging high prices.

Look at the Taylor Swift concert and how they've jacked up prices. We just need corporations to stop being as greedy. They need to bring the prices back to dial it back a little bit. And then inflation can cool down. This is what the economist is saying. Nine-year-old daughter in the backseat chimes up. and says, that's not true. Inflation is because the Federal Reserve prints a bunch of new money.

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so he knew what she was talking about, you know, click, turn, off the radio, and they have this reportedly amazing discussion where this girl understood what was happening. She engaged in some critical thinking to challenge a narrative that was being thrown out there, but she had a foundation against which to kind of check and challenge that idea. I had another story of a family walking through the grocery store. We have a book called The Miraculous Pencil. This is based off of Leonard's Reeds. Eye pencil. About how no one knows how to make a pencil because it's the sum total of millions of people working together and all their constituent parts to then end up with a pencil. So that's the miracle of the market,

right? They're in the grocery store and I think it's like a, I think it was a mother and a son. They're walking down the grocery aisle. Mother turns over and looks and the son no longer next her. He's back at the potato chips. She walks back to him like, what are you, you know, staring at the chips for? He's like, mom, I get it. Spontaneous order. Mom's like, what do you What? I think he's like 10 or 11 or something. Right. And in the book, we explained this wonky term, spontaneous order means that there's no czar of pencil production that coordinates these millions of people to ensure we have pencils. That is the spontaneous order of a market system in which we're all making independent decisions and then that can all produce pencils and iPhones and whatever.

And the kid realizes there's ridged potato chips, there's sour cream and onion, there's plain, there's different. brands, there's different sizes. No one's in charge of this, and yet we have all these things. And it had this light bulb moment for the kid where the mom, again, because the mom had been reading the book with the son, they had a cool discussion, building upon this anecdotal little grocery store aha moment. Those are the things that matter. And Mike, I want to drive this point home because we haven't gone here yet. Why does any of this matter to me? we're right now in the 250th anniversary of America and all this, right? I believe you mean the semi-quenty centennial.

I think that was close. Semicentennial. Yes, yes. Say that 10 times fast. And, you know, we're all focused on it. And it's great. And so what does that mean to kind of celebrate America and independence? And there's so many people out there who say, well, we need to engage in the political

process. We need to vote. We need to maybe run for office. We need to attend our city council. me great. There are some people who say we need to engage in the classroom or maybe we need to litigate and sue the government to protect our rights. And I think these are all great. But I don't think we're going to save America at the Capitol. I don't think we're going to save America in the courtroom. I don't think we're going to save America in the classroom. I think if America is to be

saved, it's at the family dinner table. I think that is where we have to rebuild social fabric. I think that is where we model critical thinking for the next generation. I think that think that's where we pass on these ideas of civic virtue and so forth. And so that's what Tuttle Twins and some of our other programs are trying to optimize for. How do we make these ideas relevant at the family dinner table so that parents and kids have a shared language around these ideas so that they can go engage in the community and be a positive sum force? Rather than just reaching the kid or just reaching the parent and there's a disconnect in the home where they're not talking, we're trying to say, how do we build these ideas, the relevant?

relevance and application of these ideas in the home. So that's kind of the mission of Tuttle Twins, whether the books, the cartoon, or other programs, is to say, how can we make this something that mom or dad and kids can read or watch together so that when they're in the car listening to the radio or they're at the grocery store? That's how I know when it's working is when we get those anecdotes. I just think about the death of conversation, especially around a dinner table, especially in a world where, you know, there's a screen, all this other stuff.

and what passes for conversation in so many households, tragically, is just a surfacy, one-dimensional waste of time. To be engaged, to be genuinely curious, and to have something that a parent can use to kick that door open or the kid, you know, to inspire that level of inquisitiveness. My old boss, John Hendricks, I quote him all the time, the guy that started the Discovery Channel.

He's like, my whole deal, just distill the whole thing down to one thing. my job comes down to two words satisfy curiosity satisfied right not create it because the world will do that for you but satisfy it give something in the way of a surprising either answer or maybe it's the way in Connor. Maybe it's like, you know, pencils and potato chips. The banal. It's so accessible. It's right there in front of you. But what if the ridge on that chip leads you to something else? You didn't mention Old Bay, by the way. If you haven't had Old Bay on your potato chips, then you're not really... I'm missing out. Yeah. You're not really living. But that's kind of it. It just seems like, you know, we worked for a couple years on a show here called Six Degrees,

which was kind of a rip off of the great show called Connect. which was hosted by James Burke that changed the way nonfiction TV was done in 1977, where he would find these seemingly impossible connections through what appears to be just serendipitous, forest gumpian happenstance, you know, and then suddenly you realize, oh, that's how the highway system was made, or that's why we got to the moon. But you just have a blank slate, really. It's an empty canvas as a creator. And if you can get a kid interested in a pencil in a way that gets a conversation going around the dinner table that matters and makes time fly, you win.

I tell my team it's like, because we have donors and we were talking before recording how, you know, when you're doing fundraising, a lot of donors want specific metrics and tracking outcomes. And I get it and we comply with all that. but so often I say that our work is like Johnny Appleseed in the Hillside, just slinging seeds. Some will grow. Some won't grow. What is the sum total impact? Not within six months of how do they learn these things, but in three decades, if we have millions of kids learning these ideas at a young age, what type of voting electorate does that become?

What type of leaders do we get? What type of entrepreneurs do we get if we're just planting all these seeds right now? And I can't really measure that and track everything. And we try and we, you know, but that's what gets me excited is, yeah, like there's all the short-term stuff that we're trying to do to teach kids. But I get curious about, well, who does that kid become? But for the fact that we reached him at that young age and planted those ideas. You've got to wait to see if Connor Boyack, who barely got through English, is going to start

writing books. You've got to wait. I'll keep my eighth-grade teacher apprised of those efforts. What was her name? You remember? I don't remember. She has the memory, not me. Well, look, you are old enough to remember the weeping Indian on the side of the road, right?

No. Keep America beautiful? Oh, yes. Okay. Okay. That's what you're doing. I use that example a lot with Microworks because we've been around 18 years and you don't get the satisfaction of putting the ball through the hoop. Sure.

Right? It's like, okay, somebody applies for a scholarship. They're going to go study a trade. Who knows what's going to become of them? You can't even guess unless you're willing to wait around eight, nine years. and circle back, which is what we do. But that weeping Indian was one of a long list of, it's a bunch of iconography that was rolled out in the day

to try and break the country's relationship with littering. And they were desperate to measure because it was the ad council, it was Coca-Cola, it was some NGOs, it was the government, it was some concerned citizens, all trying to get the country to think differently about littering. And the real data didn't come in for like 12, 15 years. But boy, when it did, it was irrefutable. That campaign had a demonstrable effect.

And, you know, it just means the people responsible for it had to take a deep breath early on and maybe go underwater for a while. Yeah. You know, and that is a hard thing to take to your donors. Well, it is. And so often, I think our energy and investment philanthropy is attracted to kind of the political battlefield of the short-term fights of the day. And I'm not saying none of that's important and we shouldn't engage as concerned citizens there. But I think that's where a lot of the energy flows. You probably heard the term politics is downstream of culture. So then you get some people engage more in on the side of the road. Let's have some signage that tries to shift and persuade people to new ideas. So I agree, politics is downstream of culture. What are the cultural

attitudes and expectations and positions that we have? And that affects the downstream political things. I think that's all great. Where we take it one step further is while politics is downstream of culture, I think culture is downstream of the family. And I think that is what many NGOs and organizations and foundations and everybody has been ignoring. They've kind of taken for granted. Like, oh, yeah, we have families, but we'll just deal with what comes after. We'll educate their kids in school. We'll deal with them as adults and voters and we'll just wait to engage. But I feel like that's far too late. There's a University of Michigan study that says that the worldview that someone adopts prior to 14 has a very high likelihood of continuing.

This isn't rocket science. Sure. Sure. Sure. Surmise that, but there's at least their study that validates what I think is common sense. Therefore, that's where we try and engage. Not what I would say propagandistically where we're trying to shield, you know, push the parents aside and go after the kids.

Again, we're trying to engage the parents and the kids together. But we're trying to develop materials that are attractive to and interesting to those young kids so that they can develop and understand those ideas. People in the early years would criticize us for, oh, you're just preaching to the choir because the parents already agree with you. I'm like, well, okay, like, sure, we're preaching the choir, but the choir's in the stand singing and their kids aren't in the pews. And how many parents feel like, oh, my gosh, because of social media or whatever, my kids believe something, and not that that's wrong, kids should have critical thinking to go figure out their own path, but I feel like parents should be empowered

to transmit to their own children the ideals that they have. What's fascinating about that we've seen over the years is that take a, I'll just pick an avatar for a moment. Imagine a conservative Christian mom. That mom feels no problem and feels empowered to share her religious values with her children. You know, there's an illustrated Bible for kids or she'll take them to Sunday school, etc. But that same mom has civic, economic political values and truths that she believes,

what we've tapped into with Tuttle Twins is that same mom feels huge reservations about sharing those ideas with her kids, primarily because she feels incompetent and illiterate, not in a reading sense, but I'm not informed enough about this to know, number one, how any of it works, let alone how would I ever teach my kids? So these parents out there believe in these things,

but have long felt disempowered to share their own beliefs with their kids because they didn't really have like a language or a vehicle through which to do it. That's what we've tried to solve for is I'm not trying to go after kids where their parents disagree and kind of capture the minds of people. I'm trying to empower parents who are already in the choir to say, let's at a minimum help you talk to your own kids about this stuff. Here's a different song. Yeah.

You haven't heard this song before. You know we're a choir. You know there's going to be noise and music, but you haven't heard this before. That's interesting. You glossed over something else, too, that I think is worth kicking around. The idea that your beliefs are so weirdly set at 14 and earlier. Like, we form fast, and then once we have these ideas, we hang on tight.

But it's not just with, well, it's with everything. It's with relationships. I watched Stand by Me. the other night, right? One of the greatest last lines of any movie, you know, is Richard Dreyfus is narrating it, and he's looking back at that whole thing. These four kids, they go on this adventure.

And he looks back and he says, man, I never had friends like you do when you're 12. Nobody ever does. It's true. You know, your relationships, the thing, all of that stuff just comes in so hot. And that's why Tuttle Twins is something. You're right in there.

You're right on that Chinese menu of possibilities, but you're bringing the parents in as well. That must freak people out. You must have detractors. You must have security. D-do-do-do-d-d-d-d-d-d-d-d-d-d-dum. I know for a fact that some of you listening right now, picked up an or a digital picture frame for Mother's Day because I

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Terms and conditions apply at auraframes.com. A-U-R-A-U-R-A-A-R-A-Fraims.com slash Mike. We've had haters, but they're so few and far between. I thought early on we would have more. You know, our books skew more towards the kind of conservative libertarian side with some of the ideas, but a ton of them do not. We have a book called The Tuttle Twins and the Golden Rule.

The whole book is about treating others the way you would like to be treated. Every parent wants that for their kids. We have books about, I mean, like the miraculous pencil, how pencils are made. It's very superficially benign. So even someone like me would approach that from, well, yeah, this is a book teaching kind of Austrian free market type of ideas. is, but they're so common sensical and so adaptable and accessible to a kid that even though I come from that perspective, the books have a far broader audience. Our audience ends up being, you know, I would say more center right, but heavily in the center. And we have, you know,

some people, I would say, on kind of the progressive or left side of things that just kind of stay away. We have a few socialist types who, there's in a magazine called Current Affairs. current affairs. It's a socialist magazine written by and for socialists. And they'll do a hit piece on us every couple years, which I love. The first time they did it years ago, you know,

their magazine has a very tiny readership. And I always find it funny when a socialist is capitalously, you know, producing a magazine for sale to others, but we can set that aside. So I took an image of their hit piece, a little article that they did, and I promoted it to our audience.

And I said, hey, guys, 50% off this weekend. only Tuttleton's books, use the coupon code current affairs, the name of their magazine, spread it on social media through our email list. We sold, what was it? I think it was over 100,000 books that weekend alone. So to all my detractors, CNN ones did a little hit piece about us claiming that we were, what did they say?

We were creating some right-wing indoctrination thing or something for kids. So I once again, I took a screenshot. I said, coupon code, CNN, go get your books. And so I'm like, bring on the haters. They help sell books. But I think so much of it, like I come from a kind of political angle, you know, personally, but so much of this stuff is just what does it mean to flourish as a human? What are the ideas that have built our world?

What are the... Well, all of them are classic, what we would call classically liberal. Yep, exactly. And so that's where I lean, but that's not a term that's well understood by people today. But I think the ideas have a lot of... There's a very wide bridge through which people of different political persuasions can walk across. And so we just try and position these as, again, family resources to help your kids learn. And I even say, like, Mike, the thing that I like least about this is we'll get some families that are

like, I'm going to buy every book that Connor Boyack writes, and we're going to believe it all because he's a trustworthy, whatever. And I'm like, whoa, whoa, hang on. Like, thanks. But, like, I'm trying to empower you to help your kids see what critical thinking is like. And so many of these books are about critical thinking. And if you just start consuming these books and implicitly assuming they're true because of the source, then it's kind of defeating the purpose. So I welcome families who don't share my political or economic background who still get the books. And you'll see online people will be like, ah, we like these nine books and not these four or whatever. And great, that means you're having amazing discussions about, well, the author wrote this,

but here's what we believe. And here's why that's, again, what we're after. We just want families engaging the conversation that you talked about. How do you deal with the broken windows theory in food truck vials? go. Or did you? The broken window. So Haslett actually borrowed that from Frederick Bostiott, a French economist in 1850. So our very first book, let me rewind a moment. So 2013, Elijah, my partner and illustrator and I, as I said, this has all emerged organically. So at the time, we just had an idea to do a book. There was no grand vision. There was no nothing. And we thought that this might just be a

single book that we would do. So Elijah and I had to figure out, all right, if this only ends up being one book, what is the one book that we want to adapt to a children's version? And so Bostia, in 1850, wrote a little essay pamphlet called The Law. And whereas in his later writings, he brings in the broken window fallacy. In this booklet, it's more about the classical liberal ideas. What is law? What are rights? Just explain real quick the broken window fallacy so people aren't. Yeah, I'll share it through a quick story. I'm from San Diego. You often get fires there and maybe 20, 25 years ago. There was a big fire that went through and burned a lot of homes down. And there was an economist from the local university who went on TV to say, well, actually in the aggregate, this is a good thing because

we're going to have to rebuild those homes. And that's going to stimulate the economy because now we're going to pay construction workers and da, da, da, da, da, da. So the broken window fallacy stems from an idea that Bosteat wrote where if you throw a brick at a window, that's actually a positive thing, because now you have to pay the glacier, yeah, glacier, to come and fix the window. And that helps him pay for his bills. And it's an economic fallacy because it's net destructive to overall wealth growth when instead of going and producing new windows for new homes, you've got that guy coming and repairing, you know, existing stuff. Is part of the same theory, the idea that if you don't tend to a window that's broken, then you implicitly encourage more people to

break more windows and the reason city blocks, well, the reason cities deteriorate the way they do is they go block by block, street by street, broken window by broken window. So I don't know if it's the same theory or if it's something to Jason. Yeah, I don't think Bosteat wrote about that directly, but it probably fits in there. And I came to the broken window fallacy and the economic side of Bosteat a little bit later. What I first latch onto was more of his classical liberal political side. And so when Elijah and I said, we're only going to do one book, we both chose the law by Bostap, because for both of us, that was a very kind of eye-opening booklet that we had read in prior years that kind of formed some of our thinking and perspective. So we did that book, and a lot of people liked it, and they started saying, when are you doing another one? We're like, well, okay, I guess we'll do a second.

So it started very slow. This is a fun stat that I like sharing. We did, over the course of six years, we did about 750,000 books in sales. And, you know, if you know publishing, like, that's huge. That's a lot of books. Especially we were self-publishing because early on I went to kind of economic, political book publishers, and I said, hey, I've got this idea. And they said, cool idea.

We don't do kids books. And then I went to the kids' books publishers. And I said, hey, I've got this idea. They said, cool idea. We don't do anything political or economic. So we were kind of sandwiched in the middle where we couldn't really find a publisher and decided to just build our own publishing company effectively. What's that called? Libertis Press.

That's the press. Yeah. So did Libertis exist then, the think tank? Yes. Only a few years prior. Got it. So this whole thing, I don't think I share this. I said that I started the think tank.

My kids were like six and four at the time. And, you know, one day I remember I was fighting a little. local city over eminent domain. They were trying to take some farmers land for something stupid. And I came home that day and like any dad, you know, every day I come home and I say, hey, you know, how's your day? What did you do to the kids? And oh, I played with this toy or I played with this friend. But my almost six year old began to reciprocate the question to me. Dad, what did you do today? How was your day? You know, as a little six year old would ask. And I found myself as, like, I want to tell my boy what I do. I don't want to be, oh, I talk.

typed on computers all day or I made phone, like I wanted to actually share with him what I was doing to go help people with their legal issues. So I literally went on Amazon and like kids' books about property rights, kids' books about economics, there was nothing. This is 2013. And so in conversation with Elijah and he and I had been kicking around similar ideas before that's when we're like, okay, like there's nothing out there. We want it for our kids. Let's do a book. And that's kind of how all this started. Sidebar. Sorry. But yeah. I think the question I want to ask you is what do you admire and what had you seen previously? Because you're really talking about creating a category that didn't exist in the publishing world.

But I can think, I mean, I remember grammar rock. I remember schoolhouse rock. I remember learning how a bill becomes a law because the bill's singing about it on Capitol Hill. And I was a kid, you know, and that was talk about diabolical. I'm just sitting there watching the Bugs Bunny Roadrunner hour or, you know, whatever Saturday morning stuff. And suddenly, you know, I'm learning about adjectives and pronouns and lolly, lolly, lolly, get your adverbs here and so forth.

You know, did that play a role? Like, was that on your own landscape? None of that had, I mean, I knew a schoolhouse rock. I didn't know about the other ones. My own educational exposure didn't really have any of that in my upbringing. I was born in 81. And again, I wasn't a good student. So maybe some of that was available.

And it just hadn't really reached me or impacted me. But for me, it was a dad's desire to want to talk to my kid about this stuff and not knowing how do you talk to a six-year-old about eminent domain or, you know, pick your topic. So over the span of six years, you know, we did a book and a second and a third. And I think by the time that six years ended, we had done, I think seven books, maybe eight. And we had sold about 750,000 books, as I said, inclusive. you know, of those six years, then 2020 hits. Everyone's a homeschooler for at least two weeks to flatten the curve. And the government's going crazy.

It's long two weeks, man. So many parents are like, what has happened in my government? What happened in my freedoms? I can't go to the beach. My kids can't play at the park. There's caution tape around it. What's going on? And we went from, again,

750,000 books that first six years cumulative to in 2020, we sold 1.3 million books in a single year. And then it just continued. How many total now? We're past 7 million, I think, total. And it's like I never want COVID to happen again or anything like it. It was good for business. There was a silver lining around a very dark cloud.

But it was a good jolt because I think we've been in a country where a lot of people have taken a lot of things for granted relative to just basic freedoms and core ideas. And like you say with conversation, We don't really talk about it. We just, I voted. I got my sticker. That's my civic engagement for the next two years.

And so I feel like as horrible as all of that was, there was a good kind of jolt to shake people a little bit and be like, hey, like things might not be as rosy as you always thought they would be. What we found was a lot of parents in their worry wanted to help their kids kind of make sense of what was going on, what was going on in the world. And again, that's where Tuttle Twins became kind of a crutch to support those parents and just giving a fluency. How does the series evolve? How does the book become the show and why Angel?

So I've known the Harmon Brothers for, gosh, 15, 13 years, something like that. They were Ron Paul guys back when Ron Paul was run in 2012. So they did a super pack and I was a little connected to that. We did a Bitcoin documentary together in 2013. We did a Kickstarter and we raised $70,000 to follow our friend Austin and his newly wed wife Becky, who just got off their honeymoon. For 90 days, they had to use nothing but Bitcoin, and the documentary crew would follow them around as they tried to convince the 21-year-old gas station attendant to accept this

internet funny money because they couldn't use cash credit, nothing. Oh, that's great. So we did that. We were doing some projects together. Was this like the poop-po-po-po-per-y days? Yeah, so they had Harmon brothers, which is, yep, that's when they're doing their marketing agency. Jeff Harmon is on my board for Liberta.

He sat right there. And so we've been connected in a lot of ways. And their kids have read Tuttle Twins since the beginning. Their kids have been to our kids' markets. We have this kids market program that we do. And so they've just been interfacing with a lot of our stuff. And after Tuttle Twins was growing a lot, Angel had launched the Chosen series to great success.

And they, I can't speak for them, but from what I understand from their internal conversations, it was, hey, great, we have this vision now of being kind of a content media platform rather than just having a single show or a few shows. We need more content. And all the Harmon brothers had been reading Tuttle Twins books

with their kids. So they approached us and they're like, hey, have you ever thought about doing a kids cartoon? And Elijah and I had been thinking about it for a couple years, but we couldn't figure out how to do it. We were trying to fundraise some money to get off the ground. And what they proved with the chosen was a funding model that you could solicit from the crowd,

not as a fundraising thing, but as actual equity, right? Congress in prior years had just passed what's called a regulation CF, which means you don't have to be an accredited investor. That's the whole unfortunate thing about the investing world, is you have to be a millionaire to make millions, and they lock you out. So the reg CF was a way where some of our middle class families, they're not accredited investors, but could they put in 500 bucks

and get shares of this company producing this cartoon? So we ended up raising, what was it? I think three or four million dollars through this model that Angel had set up. And that funded the first couple seasons. And then from there, I think we're wrapping up, or we're airing right now season four.

But for them, and we're one of their top two or three shows consistently on their platform. And I believe my episode, I don't want to bring it too back to me to Please do. We got to mention it. Did it do okay? It did.

Excellent. Not, I mean, you, but also the issue. Yeah. Because that issue right now is red hot. Our audience. We're talking about college. Yes. Work and skill.

Not all knowledge comes from college. Correct. And that topic right now, especially with AI, but even pre-AI, there's been this product market fit in that kind of teenage young adult demographic of a hunger for alternatives. Yeah. Yeah. The reverse commute. A hundred percent. The unintended consequence. Your whole deal is like the Old Bay potato chip. Like, think about it. Is that a compliment? I knew you're going to bring that back. Well, yeah, because we're from Baltimore and Old Bay is a great spice. What's the economic underlying principle when the kid looks at the potato chips? Spontaneous.

spontaneous order. Okay, spontaneous order. Yeah. Right. So there's no real playbook for the old babe potato chip. It came into existence because of a lot of other disparate things happening contemporaneously. No publisher wanted your book. The kids didn't want it.

The adults didn't want it. Now, you sold seven million of the things. But to do it, you had to create your own platform. Yeah. For the Harmon brothers to do it, did, right? Everybody's doing a workaround. Everybody's doing an end run. And that is another kind of a puzzle that I think kids do appreciate. I mean, first they have to understand the way to do it, the accepted way, the traditional way. There's no charm in the reverse commute if you

haven't spent hours stuck in the commute. Right. Right. But the minute they understand the way everybody else is doing a thing, then they can delight in the curiosity of a workaround. Your whole business is a workaround. I mean, it's amazing. And Libertus, too, like the idea, which I assume that's Statue of Liberty stuff. Yeah, that's the Roman goddess of liberty. That's her name. Dead language.

Dead language. You say Libertus, I say Libertas. Libertas. But it's all, for me, it comes down to how do we actually save the country? How do it, like, you look right now, America's celebrating its 250th anniversary, but every... I believe you mean the semi-quincentennial. Did he get it right that day? Yeah, he did.

He nailed it. I bet he did. Every great empire, every empire, every nation state, every country of any significant size and footprint in the world crumbles right around now. And so how, yeah, we've had to hack and reverse engineer building this thing because no one's been doing it. No one's been talking to families. No one's been reaching and teaching and engaging families. And so what we're trying to engineer with Libertis Network, which is our kind of nonprofit shell over all. We have total twins and we have other initiatives as well is, again, if politics is downstream of culture, culture is downstream of the family, how can we reach, teach and engage families?

so that they become informed and activated to have this spontaneous order in their communities. I don't know what they're going to do. In fact, I have to share this. After the Ron Paul campaign ended in 2012, it was a very youth-led moment. You got college grads shouting end the Fed and just all kinds of. And I was part of that. I was wrapped up in that. And I distinctly remember at the end of the Ron Paul Revolution, as we all called it,

people were asking Dr. Paul, like, what's next? What do we do? And he was this great, you know, figure leading this movement of, you know, freedom-minded people. And his answer was, I don't know. Like, I don't know what your path is. Like, and years later, after Tuttle Twins succeeded and was growing, I had him on our podcast. And I reminded him of that. Do you remember when he said, oh, yeah, I remember when I said that? And he's like, Connor, let me stress the point here. I never in a million, this is Dr. Paul, I never in a million years would have thought, hey, one of you need to go write children's books, right? One of you need to go start these youth entrepreneurship markets or da-da-da-da, think tank.

And it was a very flattering thing where he's saying, that's the spontaneous order that you're doing. And then you get a thousand other people doing what they're doing. And we all kind of lift where we stand to say, if we're all rebuilding social fabric in different ways, that's, I think, how we can make America an anomaly to the trend, this global trend that we've seen. Like, I don't know if that's guaranteed.

We can get into the whole fourth turning concept and how these things kind of are cyclical and it's kind of inevitable. I don't know. Maybe just take a beat on that, the fourth turning. What are their names? Neil Strauss and Howe, a few decades ago, wrote a great book, very insightful,

called The Fourth Turning, where they theorize, based on the data sets that they created, that Western civilization follows an extremely cyclical pattern that goes through four turns. And you can, think of this basically is that we think of it in that quote that goes, you would know this,

that hard men create great times, great times, great weak men, weak men create heart. So that's roughly what they found is this cyclical pattern of history where you have this kind of zeitgeist of euphoria and things are great and then you kind of have the collapse and then you rebuild and you go again. And they found throughout history that, yeah, the four different turnings, you get the high, the awakening, the unraveling and then the crisis. In the crisis. So one of the co-authors passed away a number of years ago, and so the remaining one, I can't remember which,

wrote a updated book just a couple years ago to kind of say, hey, we're in the fourth turning. You figure we're in the crisis now? As opposed to the unraveling? That's what their theory is. I think that's probably right. I think most people looking at our current events would surmise the same.

Do you think there's any validity to the idea that every generation, always and forever has thought they were at the pinnacle of knowledge, right? Which means, I mean, there's probably some corollary. Like, we're always at the most pivotal point in all of it because that's how special we are. Right. This is the most important election of our lifetimes. It's got to be because I'm voting in it.

Because I walk the earth. Yep. But, I mean, if that's, if that kind of recency bias can affect our own analyses, you know, I think it totally does. And I'm also reminded of during the French Revolution, another crisis period. John Adams has this great quote. I think it was to Sam Adams. I don't think it was to Abigail. But he writes being critical of what the French are doing. And he says, look all around. Everyone's tearing everything down. That's the easy part. It's easy to tear down the institutions. What he asks in the letter is, where are the people who understand the principles of political architecture who know how to build. So to your question, Mike, yes, I think we're kind of in the turning and maybe there's some inevitability based on these cyclical patterns. I don't know. What I do know is, I feel like my mission is, can we teach sufficient numbers of people the principles of political architecture, what I would call the ideas of human flourishing, so that if we're condemned to

repeat history because everyone's forgetting the principles of the past, okay, let's get through that period of suck, but then we're going to have to rebuild. And who are those people going to to be and what ideas are they going to be building based off of and are we going to learn some of the mistakes of the past that's kind of the motivating force i can't you know predict the future and who knows what seeds johnny apple seed is you know slinging that are going to grow but but that's kind of like what wakes me up in the morning gets me excited is i don't know what's going to happen in the middle east and i don't know what's going to happen with the dollar and i don't know i don't know I don't know, but I do know that if I can get millions of kids learning these ideas and they grow up,

I feel like we're going to be that much better position to come out of that. Look, I think it's the irony and the dichotomies are rich. You know, I think Paul's right. I don't know. How can you, how much hubris do you need to have to predict a future when you believe that spontaneous order is, in fact, a real thing that rules the day? you couldn't possibly know. On the other hand, you're also saying any dummy can see what's coming simply by looking back because history is a wheel and maybe it doesn't repeat, but it rhymes.

Sure. I don't know. I look at that unraveling. What in the world were they thinking at the end of the Civil War or maybe the beginning of it? You know? And is it just limited to your civilization or your society? your culture, or are you talking bigger? That's the thing I wanted to ask you about before.

I agree politics, upstream culture, or no, the other way, culture's upstream of politics, and the family, of course, is upstream of all of it. But, I mean, do you think politics used to mean something closer to the family? There was a locality to it. That expression is still with us, right? All politics is local. Sure. But I think today, maybe because we're just hyper-connected in ways, like we look at the federal.

Right. Like we look at the, like we boil the ocean. Yeah. And, you know, like, what's more horrifying to you? Footage on C-SPAN of Congress behaving like absolute morons or footage on C-SPAN of, I don't know, like a PTA-me, or like a community council meeting going totally off the rails. For me, I'm more terrified by the petty tyranny that happens in my zip code. And yet I'm completely uninvolved in local politics.

I am completely with you when part of my transition from moving from web developer to starting a think tank in the middle of that, it's a funky transition. In the middle of that, I was on the campaign of now Senator Mike Lee. It was his first campaign. And there was an incumbent Bob Bennett who had just voted for the Tart bailout. So this is during the tea party and all of that is going on. No, well, that's when the vote was Mike Lee was running in 2010. And so 2009 and 10 we're doing this campaign. Mike wins, he defeats the incumbent and 12 other challengers and of course becomes the senator.

And so many of my friends go to D.C. Right? We're going to champion the Constitution and reform the federal government and all that stuff. And not just people connected to Mike, but I had many other contacts who were all writing the Tea Party wave

wanting to go into D.C. and reform things. Meanwhile, the following year, I started Laboritus Institute, our think tank, focused only on state-level policy. Yeah. And while my friends are all going gray at early ages due to the stress and hitting these obstacles

and none of your agenda is able to get past because of one guy who can just shut it all down, I'm in there like changing laws and getting stuff done and like actually helping people and it was gratifying, it's motivating to continue it. And at this point,

we've passed over like 120, 130 laws, you know, and now we work in states across the country, so we've expanded. But all local laws? But all in the state level and often local, our local issues, are mostly housing and property rights related. Domain kind of thing.

Yep. So that's kind of more where we focus. But predominantly at the state level, because at the state level, I feel like that's where you get the biggest bang for your buck. You don't have all the corruption and intrigue that you get at the federal level and all of the packs and the money and all the pressure.

At the local level, you're only making a smaller impact on that little town or city. But at the state level, you get this interesting mix where you can still impact a lot of people, but your average legislator is just a, a retired teacher or a business guy. And so you can still connect with them, persuade them. And again, I'm a nobody.

I'm literally a web developer who starts a think tank. I show up at the Capitol and I just start advocating for the issues that I was pushing and I start changing laws. But it's such a classic bottom up. Very bottom up. Approach. And I only make the point because earlier you said, you know, all we're trying to do is save the world.

Now that's ocean boiling 101. And that's, I think, I don't know if it's idealistic or what the right word is, but a lot of people do want to save the world. And so it tracks that you would find the biggest party, the biggest most consequential, sexiest, frothiest, loudest voices. And it's like, that's what you look at. But that's not where the wet work actually happens. And I wanted to bring it back to that point that you earlier made, which you just did, namely everyone's, attention gravitates to kind of the apex of power, the federal level, the area in which they can have the least impact. Therefore, they become disenfranchised, demotivated, who am I, am one person,

why bother? And that is the source of so much of the political apathy. We've lost local journalists, used to have journalists who would sit in city council meetings, right? So the changing media landscape has had this massive downstream impact of changing local politics, where now you've got the good old boy network flourishing at a local level because few people are watching. One thing to push back on that that I think can change it is AI because now what you can do, I wish I remembered buddy in mind Paul Allen's building. I think it's called citizen portal.aI, if I'm remembering that right. And what he does is taps into video transcripts from city council meetings or state legislature

meetings across the country. And you can say, all right, well, I really care about. Let's just say eminent domain. I want to get an alert every time they're talking about eminent domain. And then you can get the video clip and you can go take action. So I feel like maybe with some automation technology, the average person can be a little more empowered rather than relying on the biased journalists sitting there and being in the watchdog. But you're so spot on and it is my biggest worry is that so many people are well-meaning. They desire to save the world.

They want to help. They're good people. But they've just been routinely disempowered because all of the media is focusing on the sexy battles at the federal level. where you can't really do anything. I can't do anything. I'm a very politically connected and successful person, and yet I can't really impact anything federally. I don't even bother trying

because the investment would be so high. I know this is out of your lane a bit, at least, you know, when you think about the Tuttle Twins and storytelling, that's your buddy's thing there? CitizenPortle.com. Yeah, so you can go look up your, there's L.A. County. I love it.

Monitor what they're doing. It's funny. I've consciously avoided, you know, blatant political conversations most of my life. But living in California now, I do feel I can see it. I stood on the roof of this building and watched the Palisades burn and just got so increasingly frustrated with all of the unforced errors. Policy errors, you know, that led to that.

And it's like, what can people do truly on a local level? Like, you're at the ultimate local. level. You're at the dining room table. You're at the kitchen table. That's, it doesn't get more local than that. But I guess one click up is really where LaBerdis thrives most. And I think a lot of people get scared about politics. Like certainly for someone like you, you've got a big presence. You don't want to alienate your audience. There's obviously a lot of strategic decisions to make. But your average family, I think, is very put off by politics because it's controversial. It's combative. And, And I think that's a fair concern.

However, I have long believed and I continue to believe that you can build common ground with just about anybody. And so many of our policies. I live in Utah, super majority Republican state, right? But most of our bills are bipartisan. And even when you say super majority Republican in states that have a super majority, you get a wide spectrum of ideological differences under that big party banner. So we have more libertarian Republicans.

We have super progressive Republicans. So the party label becomes a little less meaningful. But our bills, we really try and find a way of like, hey, you care about criminal justice reform. Great. Let me help you understand how this policy impacts that. Hey, you care more about business. Let me talk to you about it from that angle. And so what I've found over the years is that there's a way no matter what angle you're coming from to still have that conversation.

Back to your point. Let's have a dialogue. We're going to agree on some stuff. We'll disagree on some stuff. That's fine. But I feel like that's what's been lost. As people have been polarized into their opposing camps, they don't want to operate in good faith and concede to the other side that they have any reasonable points because it's just battle all the time. That's primarily, again, at the federal level.

Some states are like that. But most states, the different political parties, the different legislators, there's a camaraderie, there's a chivalry. There's a whatever you would call it of operating in great. good faith, even though we have our philosophical, political differences. And so I wish more of that could be highlighted to see that we can actually get stuff done and we can enact policy, even if we come from different angles. It's been very, I think, good for my soul to be able to just sit down at a table with someone who comes from a radically different worldview than I, but it's like, hey, we both have this

little Venn diagram overlap of 5%. Let's talk about that and let's work together. How do you think about, well, consent? the idea of being governed really starts with the idea that we're going to collectively give you the power to have the power. Yeah. Right?

I mean, you mentioned Adams earlier. I think wasn't he the one who said that our Constitution is a marvel, but it only works with the people who have a shared, I think he talked about, religious view, you know, with regard to a creator. It only works with people who have universally agreed to some level of consent.

Anyway, if there's a question in there, it just has to do with the fact that the consent in California is different than Florida. And the consent in Orange County is different than L.A. County. And, you know, all of that, as it distills down, it just seems like you might be able to make a case that people have given varying levels of consent and are therefore at each other's throats on that basis. Oh, boy. I'm going to give you a very abbreviated version because this is such an interesting topic to me. You asked earlier what books I had written that the eighth grade teacher had read. I forgot to mention one is called Lessons from a Lemonade Stand. And I use the Lemonade Stand as an example to talk about consent in our political system. What does this mean?

If a just government requires the consent of the government, then how do we manifest that consent? So the very, very short version is our government operates on implicit consent. What that means is, well, you're here in L.A. County. You haven't moved. You could move. Therefore, simply because you're here, I guess you've consented to all of this and we'll just do whatever we want. Or, hey, you participated in the election. You're voting.

Like, sure, you voted against everything that we're doing, but you're still participating. Therefore, you know, so implicit consent is this idea that, well, you don't actually have to explicitly consent. to what we're doing. You're just part of this environment. Therefore, we're just going to do whatever we want. Consent through geography. Effectively, yes. And so you're born into it, right? And maybe for economic reasons, you can't move. You can't get a job, you know, money, whatever, right? But you're born there. You haven't ever actually given your consent. God just put you in that place. And the government would argue, yeah, by geography, we basically assume that you've given consent, otherwise, you know, you would leave.

So what I talk about in that book is a very radical idea. What would the world look like if you had to give explicit consent for everything? And what I think the only outcome of that question is, is we would move away from a geography-based governance model to what's called polycentric law, which would effectively be like your cell phone. You can have a cell phone here in Santa Monica, California, and you can pick your provider,

and you explicitly sign the terms and conditions, here's how much money I'm going to pay you, it's an actual agreement, and you can pick whichever one you want to do. Imagine if you could pick from amongst three to five competing governance platforms, hey, we provide education, garbage collection, fire insurance, and security, but we don't do anything else.

And then government B says, oh, well, we do that, but then we do welfare programs and whatever, right? And what if you could say, well, I'm going to weigh those alternatives and I'm going to sign on the dotted line for this one. And those governments, those competing government models would likely have some treaties between them for like shared services and so forth. That is a radically different world. And yet it's one in which everyone would consent taxes go away because now it's just a membership fee. You don't gripe about your cell phone. But like here's my insurance bill.

This is just what it takes and the cost of whatever. And so if they would be up front and compete and costs come down and quality goes up, like it would just be fascinating. Isn't that charter schools in a nutshell? Like, why shouldn't I have the right to send my kid to whatever school I want? I mean, I know the answer, but somewhere in that answer is the sausage-making thing. Yeah, broadly, yes. I mean, the breakdown, where that breaks down is like I'm a homeschooling dad, right?

I've only ever homeschooled my kids. and I'm paying first through my property taxes for other people's kids to go get educated in the government schools. And then if I have money left over, I can pay for my kids' education. So I would say rather than charter schools, I would say more broadly,

maybe the school choice concept of like, what if I could get my money back? And that money that was going to be used for my kids in a government school, I can unlock that. So you want to be able to opt out? Opt out or redirect the dollars. What if I could say,

well, I want my kids to go that private school. So rather than funding the government school. I want my tax dollars to go here. So this is what's broadly called school choice or education savings accounts, which many states are now passing. So, hey, you could get, you know, eight grand for your kid and put them in a private school and taxpayers. Like, I just don't think government should be involved in the provision of education services at all. I think that's not a role of government. What about transportation? Why should I pay for that bridge? I never drive up there. Especially the TSA right now. I mean, they're not functional at all. Right. Right. But I

I mean, that's a, I'm not saying it's a non-starter. I'm just saying it's a tough sell. 100%. But I bring it up because your question is so important. And it's one we don't even talk about. What is consent? The declaration, you know, governments justly operate with the consent of the government. And it's like we don't even talk about that topic at all.

We just buy into this matrix-like virtual reality of like, well, I guess we've all consented. And let's just put up with whatever. So I realize that everything I just said is so far afield from anything we can even conceive, based on our current thing. But I think it's, especially with the kids that read our books, it's like, let's surface some of those provocative things that can challenge your thinking and totally everyone is. We have a book, Mike.

We've been talking about the kids, the kids series. We have a series for teenagers. We have a toddler series. One of our teen books is called The Tuttle Twins Guide to True Conspiracies. That is the typical reaction of people who learn about it. That's great. Every chapter, there's 20 chapters, is a fully documented conspiracy. These aren't

conspiracy theories. This isn't, you know, are the frogs gay, Alex Jones kind of stuff. This is like... They are, by the way. Okay. So are the tadpoles. I'll pass that on to Alex. You know, what have been actual documented evidences, examples of conspiracy?

And the whole reason we did that book, by the way, it was a very cathartic book to write. That was a very... You mean like, what's gone from tinfoil hat you're out of your mind to... True. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And it just takes a few decades. and, you know, more and more, it's early, you know, it's only six months. Yeah, exactly.

That's fast, man. Declassifying a few documents and lo and behold. So I wrote the book because I thought there can be no better way to help young people engage in critical thinking than to see how often people in the past were being lied to. They were being sold a bill of goods. And then, oh, lo and behold, you know, they were told this instead. And so that is provocative stuff. with the consent idea. I like throwing out

bold ideas to just stimulate thinking. And the kids, especially the teenagers, just eat this stuff up. They love when it's a little saucy and a little, you know, and then suddenly their parents are like, oh my gosh, we have a whole book on logical fallacies. It's called The Tuttle Twins Guide to Logical Thalcies. And when we put it out, I put a disclaimer on it for the parents. I said, be aware, if you buy this book

for your teenage children, right? Right. Right. You're going to start losing arguments. Yes. They will challenge you. And it will be uncomfortable for you. Right? And so, but that to me is how, like, if I was a teenager and I had a book, I would love. So I'm writing for young Connor. Like, how would I have enjoyed learning through storytelling and provocative ideas?

It's a kind of survival guide, you know, in a world where there's a lot of information, a lot of misinformation, a lot of disinformation. These are tools. Sure. You know, and they're muscles. And the more you use them, the stronger you get. Back to the consent thing real quick. I would say that in a way, as a country, we have adapted it or adopted it. I mean, that's the whole state proposition, right?

Like, I give Governor Newsom, I consent. I like to say my governments, I get the government I deserve. I get the TV I deserve. You know, and if I don't like it, I can change a channel or turn the damn thing off. And if I don't like Newsom, and if I really can't stand these policies anymore, I can go to Texas or I can go to Florida or someplace. So we do kind of have it. Now, your point was, well, having the right to do the thing is cold comfort in a world

where we're limited by practicalities, economy, money, you know. Sure. If my dying mother is here, why am I going to leave her out of, you know? And also I would say in response to that, if every nation operates under this model, where do you, like that breaks down because, sure, you can pick a lesser bad state but they still operate with a heavy hand in some ways. So then it's all right, move to a different country. But every country, so this is where you get like Peter Thiel and those guys,

we're doing sea steading experiments years ago or in like Honduras and elsewhere, like charter cities where they go to the government and say, hey, can you carve out, you know, a thousand acres and we're going to have our own governance model that has this more kind of innovative approach. And there have been, you know, hits and misses with those models. But basically all occupiable land is governed by, nation states that operate with the implied consent of the citizens. And so what Jefferson and his associates put in the declaration is an extremely provocative idea, Jefferson himself,

furthering that provocation by saying that the tree of liberty should be watered with the blood of tyrants every 20 years, this idea that consent breaks down after a while. Hey, I consented to, you know, maybe I voted for Trump, but now he's doing all this stupid stuff and maybe I need to revoke by consent. How do I do that? You got to wait for the next election, I guess. Yeah. You know, hey, you're living with him, right? And now he's smacking you around a little bit. But you agreed to live with him and you're in the same house.

So you kind of implied. Right. You would never tell a battered wife that because you said, yes, three years ago, you have to stick it out. That's right. Yeah. That's right. Wow. Tuttle, where'd the name come from?

Oh, this is a... So I knew I wanted a boy and a girl because I wanted to... you know, back then we just had boys and girls. So I wanted both boys and girls. We're getting there again. It was a simpler time. We're coming back. And so I wanted one of each and I said, okay, twins, that makes sense.

And so I wanted alliteration. I thought that would be kind of a fun thing. I wanted to be like one, maybe two syllables. And so I just start going through all the popular last names with T that are one or two syllables. And I start checking domain names. Is the dot com available? Is there anyone famous with his names? I pulled it down.

I had like a top ten list. one of them, I don't remember, I don't advise him going to look this up, but one of them were like Playboy Twins or something. I'd cross that one off. So Tuttle Twins was a process of elimination where the dot com was available. There was no one with the famous with that name.

And it was easy to pronounce for kids. You've never seen American Chopper, obviously. Apparently not. Oh. Wow. 18 seasons Discovery Channel. It was the Tuddles who built. It was the first show that focused on, actually that's not true.

Jesse James and Monster Garage was doing these builds with cars and motorcycles and the Tuddles started doing the same thing. Oh, cool. And it became, I only know this because I can narrated it. Yeah, but whatever. Small potatoes.

Tuttle. Okay, I'll have to go back and watch it. No, no, I'm going to say now, it's because I watched, you know, micro early on. Tuttle is such an inspirational name. No, it was just kind of a boring process of elimination. and like I said, so much of this has just been organic. It was just like, oh, well, okay, let's do this and see how it goes. I remember distinctly my first board meeting after we published the first Tuttleton's book,

and I gave a copy to each of my board members. And the board chairman, John, we're in the parking lot after, and he's flipping through the book. And he's like, you know, maybe someday we can help fund Labertus with book sales from, and I literally laughed at him, like a uneasy dismissive laugh. Like, ha, you know, okay. And I just didn't have that vision. of anything that this would become, which is kind of the consummate entrepreneur story.

It's just like I was just trying to solve a need. A dad wanted to teach his kids. Spontaneous order. Turns out other people wanted the same. And maybe save America along the way. Yes, Joe. I just want to point out that earlier, you mentioned something about John Adams' quote,

and you were absolutely right. It was John Adams, who said, our constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. That's it. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other. And I also wanted to say that when you mentioned, you said there was something else about broken windows. Yeah. Right?

The broken window fallacy is where basically, you know, a broken window, what is it? I forget. It leads to something else. But the broken window theory is what you were thinking. You were saying there was something else with broken windows. Broken window theory is that if the windows are broken and there's graffiti in the neighborhood, these are small problems that indicate to bigger problems. That's right.

Right. Which is why you must tend. That's the point I was hoping to make. I was trying to land the plane in some sort of corollary where, you know, everything is micro or macro. And we're currently enamored of macro. The biggest ideas, whatever, the mid-east, Trump, the headlines, all that stuff. When right in front of us, you know, there's a family around a dinner table who's just having a shitty conversation. And they could be having a great one.

Sure. Now, that's a problem. Graffiti is a problem. Broken windows are problems because they all metastasize. All of that stuff gets worse if you don't do something to make it better. Yeah. And we're so distracted by all the trouble in the world. It's a terrific book, by the way, P.J. O'Rourke, all the trouble in the world.

You would love it. But, look, I know I got to let you go soon, but I got to ask you, within Libertus, is it Praxis? Mm-hmm. Yeah. Our college alternative? Yeah. Please explain what that is because that surely sounds like the thing that we'd be in most violent agreement on.

I think we would. Praxis is a college alternative boot camp. It's a six to eight-month boot camp. You pay $7,500 for whether you're fresh out of high school or you're dropping out of college or you want to take a little break and try this out. And it's more for white-collar. work versus your blue collar stuff. So like sales, marketing, operations, logistics, AI, writing, stuff like that. So that's kind of what the course is built around is all those topics I just

mentioned. Basically, we're trying to help young people very quickly become a well-rounded generalist. And so our goal is to plug young adults into entry-level jobs without needing a college degree. If you think of this from the reverse side, from a company that needs entry-level people on their team, they've got, for every application, 450 people spamming the apply button on LinkedIn or whatever, and you've got your HR person having to sift through all of that. So the value proposition for us with our corporate partners is, hey, you've hired some practice of people in the past, or you see these types of candidates. We'll curate them for you.

We'll plug them right in. You can bypass spending weeks sifting through applications. we guarantee for praxis participants a job offer, otherwise we fully refund their money. Oh. So whereas college offers no such ROI and no such guarantee, you probably know 52% of college grads are underemployed, meaning they're not working in their chosen field. They're at Starbucks or driving DoorDash. About that same percentage of kids with college debt don't have a college degree at all.

100%. They don't finish. Yep. And so college not only. only is not offering that guarantee, they're putting these young people under massive debt and a lot of time in the mean process without any actual metrics of guaranteed success. So our approach is you come into practice, spend a few months with us. If we can't get your job, like some, you know, we might have a dud here and there, but we'll refund your money. At a minimum, you've got a great

education. We're training these kids basically to become value creators. How do you create value in the world? That is kind of the backdrop of all of the curriculum is if you're going to go get a job for this employer, how do you show up on day one and say, I'm here to create value for you in the company? And how do you look out for that? How you pay attention to it? How do you formulate those ideas? How can use AI to 10x year role right from day one? So that's kind of what we're after. Praxis has been a for profit company for about a decade.

We had been partnering with them for a number of years. And then last year we acquired them. So we plugged them under our kind of nonprofit umbrella. And part of the motivation was, here I've been doing total twins for a decade. Those kids get older. And the parents are always like, what's next? And what can you do for my kids? And, you know, we ended up homeschooling or charter school or micro school or whatever.

You know, my kid's 19. What do I do? And what should they do? And so Praxis, we acquired them in part to be able to say, hey, let's just build this little conveyor belt where you get a Telptune's reader and they can come into practice. And the beauty of it is. is like some of these young people still end up going to college, but they go there with far greater intentionality and success.

Sure. I'm going to do this now in two, two and a half years. I'm going to do this approach to save money. How many have gone through? Historically, they had about, I think, six or seven hundred go through the program. My whole goal in acquiring it is to like 100x this thing. It is, I mean, as you know, there's such product market fit with what's going on right now. there's high demand.

It is a harder decision, right? Should I drop out of college and go to a trade school? Should I drop out of college and go to practice? These are big life decisions. It's consequential. For sure. Very consequential. So it takes a little while for them to decide. But we did that relaunch that Chuck was shown the website last fall.

We kind of rebuilt the program after acquisition. And so now the goal in the months and years ahead is to just blow this thing up. I love it, man. Do you know what Alex Garp is doing over at Pound? Yes. Kind of their fellowships and it's a meritocracy fellowship. I love it. So it's taking kids straight out of high school. Yeah. And giving them interestingly like a Western Siv liberal arts background within Palantir while he's sending them out on these big consequential engineering projects. So cool. They're finishing up in a couple of years. They're guaranteed. They're going to

make hundreds of thousands of dollars, no debt. Yeah. And they might even be able to talk about the or Aristotle or Adams, right? Because they, I'm constantly trapped in this binary thing where it's like, oh, you know, Mike's anti-college. No, I'm not. I'm kind of anti-debt, but to be pro-trade, but not pro for your degree, it's just a bad choice. I'm pro-choice in that sense, where I just want young people to understand what their options are. And I feel like, take me, for example, I was a web developer. I went to college. because I was told that's what you do to get a job. I'm literally sitting in college, freelancing.

I was kind of finding some clients along the way. I would sit in college at the desk. I'd be coding a website for a client while sitting in class, being instructed by a professor who's like four decades my senior, who his coding skills are kind of rusty, and he's having to like try and teach me this stuff. And this is my fault. It wasn't until after college that I kind of had the conscious, like,

Why did I need a degree? I'm, like, learning this stuff on my own. I go get my first job out of college. They couldn't care less about my college degree. It was, hey, can you solve this problem? Of course. And I could solve it, and then I, boom, you're hired. When did you write, Skip College?

2017, I want to say. Fine that, Chuck. How many did you sell? Was it a hit? It's been a good hit. That book, unlike all my other books, was a, I edited that book, so I brought on a number of different authors. And so do you know the name John Taylor Godo at all?

John Taylor Goddow was a 30-year public school teacher in New York. He ended up quitting, going on the speaking circuit, criticizing the government schooling model. He was kind of a renegade teacher, one of those that would buck the system and do whatever he wanted for the kids in his classroom. So he's kind of a big name and alternative education and particularly homeschooling circles. His chapter in my book, Skip College, was the last thing he wrote before he passed away, which was a few years ago. So skip college, launch your career without debt, distractions, or a degree. And like you were just saying, Mike, you're not anti-college. Though provocatively titled, kind of get people's attention, we go on to say in the book

that we're not anti-college, we're pro-choice of like, you need to be aware how quickly you can launch a career or a successful life through other pathways other than just the traditional conveyor belt. And so in my case, I just didn't realize until after college that maybe I didn't need to do that. And so not that it's wrong for everybody or I'm anti-college. It's, man, I wish someone was there when I was a college freshman to say, hey, here's five other things to pay attention to and maybe choose between before you just continue going down the conveyor belt. I'll be painted with such a broad brush, you know, in our case for college, we turned everything

else into a cautionary tale or some sort of, you know, vocational consolation prize, which is a dumb. I'll finish up with, you said generalist. Praxis is building generalist. man, that's, I think, so important. I mean, I'm all for specialists, you know, like I just wrote in a post, you know, if I'm going to get my kidney replaced, I'd prefer to have a doctor do it than, you know, just somebody who's kind of curious about medicine.

But farmers were generalists. Oh, yeah. And we were farmers once upon a time. And we knew how to do a lot of different things pretty competently. And now it feels like through all kinds of different specialities, we've become suspicious of generalists to the point where did you see the Jimmy Fallon thing that's swirling around right now? I don't think so. He was talking about Mark Wayne Mullen, who was just appointed head of Homeland Security. This was your post.

I read your post, yes. And he was being critical that he used to be in a... A plumber. That's right. So now we have a plumber in charge of protecting us from terrorists. Well, he's catching all kinds of grief, understandably. Plumbers are upset. So are comedians and terrorists who couldn't make any sense of it.

But find that post jug real quick. I'm curious just to see, I checked when I got on the plane this morning, and you never know with this. I didn't know with dirty jobs. You probably didn't know with Tuttle Twins, but you got off the plane and you're like, that thing's been like 130,000 times. It's been shared 20,000 times. And I think the reason is because this is not an endorsement of Mark Wayne Mullen.

know the guy, but he was a generalist. He was a mixed martial artist. He was a plumber. And then he took over the family plumbing business and built it into a multi-million dollar colossus. Wow. And then he decides because he's got the means and the interest, he goes to D.C. He gets elected in Congress. Yeah. The guy's been in Congress for 12 years, sitting on various committees, and now he's in a truly consequential job. And a big chunk of the country. And a big chunk of the country is so awash in cognitive dissonance, they can't square the fact that a former plumber is now in charge of national security. They just can't, we don't know where to put that. And as you continue saving the world with Tuttle Twins and Praxis and Libertus and everything else,

help us save the plumbers to help us save this idea that, you know, I mean, what was Adams before he was Adams? What was Jefferson? Or Benjamin Franklin. He was a hatmaker. Farmers. They all had a trade. They were all generalists.

We ought to aspire to be the same. We're going to do another episode of the Tuttle Twins, me and you. Let's do it. I'd love to. All right. Anything else people should know? Where should they go? If they want to help you save the world, what's the easiest way to go?

Libertus.org is the website. So that breaks you down into Tuttle Twins, the kids markets, praxis, anything that we've talked about. Probably easiest place is libertist.org or I'm at Connorboyak.com. How many likes did I get on that post, Chuck? No, I'm curious. I'm just trying to bring it up. It's like making me, I can't log into Facebook. Well, just tell me.

You can't get on Facebook. Yeah. Hold on one second. Call Mark Zuckerberg. Hold on. No, no, I got it now. Look, I'm not going to make you guys listen to this. How many likes you?

135,000. 135,000 people. are basically making an argument for a generalist. Yeah. That's what that is. 18,000 comments. Unbelievable. 19,000 shares.

That hit an nerve. Yeah, you did. Huh. All right. What a pleasure to meet you. Thank you for reaching out. Likewise. Great chatting with you.

You too. Adios. That's a Connor Boyack. Fun to say. If you leave some stars, could you make it five? And before you go, could you please subscribe?

If you leave some stars, could you make it? Five and before you go, could you please subscribe? If you leave some stars, could you make it five? And before you go, could you please subscribe?