488: Connor Boyack—Spontaneous Order

Summary

The Way I Heard It with Mike Rowe

Episode 488: Connor Boyack—Spontaneous Order
Release Date: June 9, 2026

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Main Theme

This episode features a deep-dive conversation with Connor Boyack, web designer turned author, think-tank founder, and creator of the Tuttle Twins books and animated series. Mike Rowe and co-host Chuck interview Connor about his journey from web development to building a publishing and educational empire rooted in making big economic, political, and philosophical ideas accessible (and exciting!) to children and families. The conversation centers around "spontaneous order"—the idea that much of progress and meaningful change arises organically—and spans topics including education reform, critical thinking, grassroots impact, and the mission of the Tuttle Twins.

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Key Discussion Points and Insights

1. The Birth and Evolution of Tuttle Twins

• Connor’s Background: Started as a web designer, found modern web work unfulfilling.
  • “At the end of the day, I was building websites for stuff I couldn't care less.” – Connor Boyack [13:00]
• Think Tank Genesis: Founded Libertas Institute in Utah to influence policy, impact hearts and minds, and create real legislative change.
  • “So I said, how do I quit my job, start a nonprofit, and actually just go advance ideas... how do we change hearts [and] minds but actually enact that into policy?” – Connor [13:07]
• Origin of Tuttle Twins: Wanted to teach his young kids about complicated topics—property rights, economics, and law—but found no suitable resources. Connor and his collaborator, illustrator Elijah Stanfield, created illustrated children’s books inspired by classic works (Hazlitt’s Economics in One Lesson, Bastiat’s The Law).
  • “If this only ends up being one book, what is the one book that we want to adapt to a children's version? ... So we did The Law by Bastiat.” – Connor [54:32]

2. Storytelling Over Data & The Power of Narrative

• Making Complexity Accessible: Connor emphasizes that storytelling—not charts and graphs—is what makes challenging economic or political concepts stick for both kids and adults.
  • “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 that data's bad... But there was no storytelling.” – Connor [22:17]
• Gamifying Ideas for Families: The Tuttle Twins “deviously” use children’s media to reach and educate both parents and their kids, fostering a family vocabulary around ideas like spontaneous order, market forces, and critical thinking.
  • “People think Tuttle Twins are children's books... But it's this devious way of getting to the adults by leveraging their kids.” – Connor [26:36]
  • “Over half of the parents who get our Tuttle Twins books... are learning new things for the first time.” – Connor [26:36]

3. Spontaneous Order & The Pathways of Change

• Unplanned Impact: Spontaneous order is not just an economic concept—it’s the story of Connor’s work. What started as a single book turned into a best-selling series and hit animated show through organic, grassroots demand.
  • “We’re calling the episode 'Spontaneous Order,' which is another economic phenomenon that... describes the lives of some of the most interesting people I know. And Connor is among them.” – Mike Rowe [03:17]

4. Challenges in Publishing & Going Direct

• Breaking the Mold: Children’s publishers said Tuttle Twins was too advanced; adult publishers refused to take on kids’ titles. Connor self-published, forming Libertas Press and building a direct relationship with readers.
  • “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 7 million of these books.” – Mike Rowe [02:25]

5. Impact—Anecdotes & Data

• How Connor Knows He's Making a Difference:
  • Pre- and post-surveys show measurable learning.
  • Memorable stories from parents and kids: children embracing reading, discussing spontaneous order at the grocery store, challenging mainstream economic narratives with insights gleaned from Tuttle Twins books.
  • “The top questions I get asked the most is like, what's the formula? ...How have you taken these academic, economic, antiquated, maybe ideas and brought them into a level that kids... actually want to read?” – Connor [29:30]
  • “I think what we've stumbled onto with Tuttle Twins is this idea that kids want to be challenged.” – Connor [30:46]

6. The Family Table as the Culture Engine

• Root Cause for Societal Change:
  • “I don't think we're going to save America at the Capitol... in the courtroom... or in the classroom. If America is to be saved, it's at the family dinner table.” – Connor [37:50]
  • Mike echoes this, lamenting the "death of conversation" and celebrating resources that foster curiosity and rich dialog among families [39:26].

7. Critical Thinking, Consent, and Challenging Dogma

• Education as Empowerment:
  • Tuttle Twins provides resources (including on logical fallacies and even “true conspiracies”) that empower both kids and parents to sharpen their reasoning and question narratives—from public school to national politics.
  • “I've never been able to answer [how we hit this formula]. Consistently, the feedback we get...is them sharing stories of how their kids have just lit up with interest on these...fundamental human flourishing ideas.” – Connor [29:10]
  • On consent: “What would the world look like if you had to give explicit consent for everything? And...we would move away from a geography based governance model...” – Connor [85:45]

8. Building Generalists, Not Just Specialists—Praxis & Alternatives to College

• Praxis Program:
  • Libertas acquired Praxis, a college alternative bootcamp that trains young people in business skills and guarantees job placement—offering a clearer, less indebted pathway than college for many students.
  • "Praxis is a college alternative boot camp...Our goal is to plug young adults into entry level jobs without needing a college degree. ...We guarantee for Praxis participants a job offer. Otherwise we fully refund their money." – Connor [98:38]
  • Mike and Connor agree on being “pro-choice” about education and the value of generalists—people with broad, interdisciplinary skillsets, not just career specialists.
    • “Farmers were generalists... Now it feels like through all kinds of different specialities, we've become suspicious of generalists...” – Mike [105:49]

9. Real-World Examples & Societal Trends

• Fourth Turning & Historical Cycles:
  • The episode covers cyclical theories in history (Strauss & Howe’s “Fourth Turning”), the current family/culture/politics alignment, and concern about America’s trajectory at its 250th anniversary.
  • “If politics is downstream of culture, culture is downstream of the family.” – Connor [44:10]
  • “How can we Reach, teach and engage families so that they become informed and activated to have this spontaneous order in their communities?” – Connor [67:35]

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On finding purpose after leaving web design:
  • “I wanted to just...put my life energy toward something useful and useful.” – Connor Boyack [13:00]
• On storytelling vs. dry data:
  • “I hated [economics] in school...but then I found it was more psychology than it is facts and figures and graphs.” – Connor [22:20]
• On influencing both kids and adults:
  • “But consistently, the feedback we get...parents sharing stories of how their kids have just lit up with interest on these core ideas, fundamental human flourishing ideas that no kid before had even been talked to about...” – Connor [29:10]
• On the family dinner table:
  • “If America is to be saved, it's at the family dinner table.” – Connor [37:50]
• On the “unintended consequence” of Spontaneous Order:
  • “There’s no real playbook for the Old Bay potato chip. It came into existence because of a lot of other disparate things happening contemporaneously.” – Mike Rowe [66:17]
• On being a generalist:
  • “Farmers were generalists...Now it feels like through all kinds of specialities, we've become suspicious of generalists...” – Mike Rowe [105:49]
• On college and alternatives:
  • “I'm not anti college. ...I'm pro choice in that sense where I just want young people to understand what their options are.” – Connor [103:30]

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Timestamps for Significant Segments

• Origin of the Tuttle Twins / Spontaneous Order – [10:20] – [16:00]
• Impact on Families & Learning Formula – [26:35] – [31:10]
• The Family Dinner Table as Culture Engine – [37:43] – [39:26]
• On Critical Thinking and Challenging Narratives – [84:42] – [91:45]
• Explanation of Consent & Political Philosophy – [84:42] – [87:42]
• From Books to Animated Series on Angel – [62:21] – [65:23]
• Praxis & Generalists vs. Specialists – [98:27] – [104:22]
• The Fourth Turning & Historical Cycles – [70:08] – [73:36]

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Memorable Anecdotes

• Fan Club Request: A 10-year-old asks Connor to start a fan club—and volunteer as its president [28:12].
• Kids Outlearning Economists: A 9-year-old girl corrects a radio economist’s misunderstanding of inflation, referencing the Federal Reserve and “the creature from Jekyll Island” [33:12].
• Grocery Store Epiphany: A young boy recognizes “spontaneous order” in the potato chip aisle thanks to the Miraculous Pencil story [35:40].
• Turning Criticism into Sales: When criticized by a socialist magazine or CNN, Connor uses their names as discount codes—turning hit pieces into record book sales [53:01].
• Name Origin: “Tuttle Twins” was picked for its alliteration, open .com domain, and lack of notoriety—surviving elimination after checking for, among other things, “Playboy twins” [94:23].

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Attitude and Tone

• Upbeat, anecdote-rich, and approachable, blending dry humor (from Mike and Chuck) with Connor’s earnest (but not self-serious) mission-driven energy.
• The conversation balances practical, real-world examples with philosophical speculation and policy insights—never preachy or polemical.

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Further Resources

• Find Tuttle Twins, Praxis, and more: libertas.org
• Praxis Bootcamp: discoverpraxis.com
• Mike Rowe’s Facebook post about generalists: (Referenced in discussion)
• Tuttle Twins animated series: (Available via Angel platform)

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Summary

Episode 488 of The Way I Heard It with Mike Rowe features Connor Boyack, visionary author and activist behind Tuttle Twins. The two explore how spontaneity, family, and authentic curiosity—not top-down dictates or test-driven classrooms—are key to building informed, critically-thinking citizens. Through storytelling that empowers both kids and parents, and by pioneering educational alternatives like Praxis, Connor’s work models “spontaneous order” in action. The episode is both a celebration of organic impact and a roadmap for revitalizing family, culture, and civic engagement—one dinner table and one curious kid at a time.

Transcript

[Mike Rowe]

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.

[Chuck]

Sure.

[Mike Rowe]

Would you like to hear me sing a few bars from a cartoon that I was in once?

[Chuck]

I was hoping you'd ask.

[Mike Rowe]

Yes, here it is. Well, perhaps you've been told from the cradle oh, yeah that you're a failure unless you're college bound but the road to success has many, many lanes and not all go to a colle

[Conor Boyak]

yeah,

[Mike Rowe]

it's kind of catchy.

[Chuck]

Yeah, it is.

[Mike Rowe]

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 gonna call it a cartoon. Even though it's animated.

[Chuck]

It's an animated series, Mike.

[Mike Rowe]

Yeah, but I think it might be more than that, Charles. It may be more than that. Connor Boyak 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 a vis a path that you simply couldn't chart in any kind of map.

[Chuck]

Yeah. What was he doing beforehand?

[Mike Rowe]

He was a web designer.

[Chuck]

Yeah, he was a web designer who wound up becoming an author of books and the creator of an animated series that teaches kids all about economics and

[Mike Rowe]

politics and social anthropology and physics and really like.

[Chuck]

And persuasiveness.

[Mike Rowe]

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? Ezekiel Zebadiah. Ezra, why would you do that to me? Elijah.

[Chuck]

Elijah, that's right. Elijah's last name.

[Mike Rowe]

Let me find his last name. 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 7 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.

[Chuck]

I gotta tell you that 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, but it's like, I just know that 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.

[Mike Rowe]

Well, we're talking about like the seminal books on economics. We're talking about Hayek, we're talking about Henry Hazlett, 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. And Conor 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 Libertis 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.

[Chuck]

And you did a great job and he even said so. By the way, his partner is Elijah Stanfield and he illustrates the books.

[Mike Rowe]

I think I made that point even though I did get his name somewhat.

[Chuck]

You got Elijah, you came up with Elijah, which is better than me, so.

[Mike Rowe]

Well, I went with Ezekiel Elijah. I knew it was a prophet. Okay. And I knew it started with a vowel.

[Conor Boyak]

Yeah.

[Mike Rowe]

Beyond that, you know now everything I knew before I sat down with Connor Boyak. 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, 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. PureTalk knows that, so do their customers, which is why they're raising $250,000 for America's Warrior Partnership by the end of July. This is a truly essential foundation that stands on the front line of preventing veteran suicide. And they do it by covering the basics. Housing, access to VA benefits, transportation, counseling. All the tangible things that give vets a hand up when they need one. And here's how you can help. When you switch your cell phone service to PureTalk this month, you'll have an opportunity to round up to support America's Warrior Partnership. And I hope you will. Because when you do, PureTalk will match your donation till they hit $250,000. That's what I mean when I say PureTalk is an American wireless company that actually stands for something while offering you unlimited talk, unlimited text, and unlimited high speed data for just $34.99 a month. That's a fraction of what the big guys charge. Go to puretalk.com roe and make the switch to PureTalk today. Great way to celebrate America 250. I switched last year. I love it. I bet you will too. PureTalk.com Roe Pure Talk.

[Conor Boyak]

We good.

[Chuck]

He didn't say that with a lot of confidence.

[Mike Rowe]

We are ellipses. Ellipse. And then it could. I can live with the ellipses, but not the question mark. That's still my favorite VO 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. Like they were all like listening. And you know, we want 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, no, not that Boyak. What's the etymology there?

[Conor Boyak]

That is Scottish coming through England. Yeah, it was Boyk. And then they came across the pond and it became Boyac. And so I went back, I tried to figure out, did the Boyeks have a tartan, you know, the clan.

[Mike Rowe]

Yeah.

[Conor Boyak]

And they don't. No. I just know Stuart won the kind of royal steward. And so we went back to Scotland, did some family history. Gosh, like almost 20 years ago.

[Mike Rowe]

Well, it's a great name regardless, man. Conor Boyak. It's a fun name to say.

[Conor Boyak]

It's an uncommon name.

[Mike Rowe]

Yeah.

[Conor Boyak]

And for years I was the only one, but now I found on Facebook Some like 14 year old kid named Conor Boyak.

[Mike Rowe]

I'll tell you what's annoying, what I just found out on Facebook. National Review wrote this article, headline is, where have all the Trade Jobs Gone? And the guy starts writing. Guy Denton is his name. He's a good writer. And he gets about halfway through and I'm like, okay, this surely this is the part where I'm going to be invoked.

[Conor Boyak]

Yeah, okay.

[Mike Rowe]

Yeah, you got to quote Mike Rowe. You're doing an article called where have all the Trade Jobs Gone?

[Conor Boyak]

Yeah.

[Mike Rowe]

Mark Rowe appears and he's heavily quoted and he says things I've been saying for years. And at first I'm like, I can't believe he got my name wrong, guys. But they didn't. There's really a Mark Rowe.

[Conor Boyak]

And they went out and interviewed him.

[Mike Rowe]

And they interviewed him. He had a lot of good stuff to say. Yes.

[Conor Boyak]

And what does he do? What's his background or what's he involved in?

[Mike Rowe]

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.

[Conor Boyak]

So anyway, is this like a Dirty Jobs multiverse where you've got like alter ego Rose out there all.

[Mike Rowe]

Well, this is actually a good place to start because there is, you know, thanks, by the way, for reaching out.

[Conor Boyak]

Yeah, of course.

[Mike Rowe]

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 that 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.

[Conor Boyak]

Right.

[Mike Rowe]

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.

[Conor Boyak]

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. So he was the creative guy and I was the ideas guy, communicator. And so I had started a think tank in the meantime. Libertis Institute.

[Mike Rowe]

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 gonna go ahead and start a think tank.

[Conor Boyak]

Tank. Start a think tank. No big deal.

[Mike Rowe]

I mean, I think everybody sort of understands what it is, but it's a weird word. I mean, think and tank grouped up together. I don't know whether it's hyphenating. 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

[Conor Boyak]

old water or assault somebody.

[Mike Rowe]

Like septic is a great procedure for tank.

[Conor Boyak]

That's why you're clicking with it.

[Mike Rowe]

So, yeah. So you just crossed out septic and wrote in think, like, let's do that.

[Conor Boyak]

That looks better on the resume at least.

[Mike Rowe]

Why? Why a think tank? What problem were you solving for?

[Conor Boyak]

So I had moved from San Diego to Utah and I was developing 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 useful. Right. And how, rather than just how old

[Mike Rowe]

were you at this point?

[Conor Boyak]

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, 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. 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 gifted communicator and I'd been writing books and blogs, 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 policymakers or somebody to actually affect change rather than just preach into the wind and hope somebody listens.

[Mike Rowe]

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 there's more discernment. People are desperate for it. That and 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?

[Conor Boyak]

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, oh, hey, Marilee is my mom's name. So they started talking and my 8th grade teacher asked, inquired after me, how's Connor done Now when your 8th 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's 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. 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.

[Mike Rowe]

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. Is a redux. They've invited me to come back on. Yeah. And they were like, well, what. 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 beautiful. Super cool.

[Conor Boyak]

Move me to tears.

[Mike Rowe]

How do you know you're good at something?

[Conor Boyak]

Because I was laughing a lot when

[Mike Rowe]

you make Connor Boyak 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 Take away.

[Conor Boyak]

Yeah.

[Mike Rowe]

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. But at the same time, the past does not equal the future, 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 her pearls when she sees the truth.

[Conor Boyak]

I speak to a lot of youth groups, and the. 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 gonna 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

[Mike Rowe]

insecurities a little better maybe than a 12 year old can.

[Conor Boyak]

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 Conor Boyak. Not an economist, not a lawyer. 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, you know, built around me. But in the early years it was, I would 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.

[Mike Rowe]

What were the books you had written prior to the Tuttle twins that surprised your former English teacher? This is an ad for ZipRecruiter. 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 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 these people? The answer, of course, involves a little help from my good friends at ZipRecruiter. They have proven themselves a million times over by helping countless employers and get through the hiring process faster and more effectively than ever before. And now they have a brand new feature that instantly shows you the most interested qualified candidates first. That's still a numbers game. But with ZipRecruiter, the human being, the person you're looking for, is probably at the top of that enormous stack of resumes, not the bottom. So why not do what so many other business owners have already done and post a job for free, [e-mail] row and make the numbers work in your favor. You got nothing to lose except the time you've been wasting. Go to ziprecruiter.com row post a job for free ziprecruiter.com ro the smartest way

[Conor Boyak]

to hire I had written a couple Tuttle Twins books by that point. I had written a book called Skip College. Um, 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.

[Mike Rowe]

Big topics. Kind of a wonky approach. Data driven. I'm guessing you're like, you're not telling stories at this point.

[Conor Boyak]

Heavily on storytelling, including my own.

[Mike Rowe]

Oh really?

[Conor Boyak]

So 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 that data's bad. Data is very important. But there was no storytelling.

[Mike Rowe]

There's not the tip of the spear.

[Conor Boyak]

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, like, put me to sleep. But I love economics. Economics is really just the study of human behavior and it's understanding trade offs 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 through which we can understand why people make the choices they do. What are the trade offs? What's the scarcity? What motivates them to do it? And so when that flip switched, I realized, 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.

[Mike Rowe]

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 Hazlett's book?

[Conor Boyak]

Yeah.

[Mike Rowe]

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.

[Conor Boyak]

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 passersby on the street. Hey, this will help you if you have a business or for your family economy, or this will help you understand some really important stuff. I'll throw it to you. What percentage of random passersby do you think would number one, even accept that offer and number two, go home and read it?

[Mike Rowe]

0.0.

[Conor Boyak]

You're a little more cynical than I. But I. 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 tuttletwins 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 Hazlett talks about, but in this fun story that kids can understand, and we introduce the seven or eight basic terms that Henry Hazlett 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? 12, 10, 8. Okay, great. Hey, do you think it's important for them to understand how the world works and how economies work? I think it's 90% plus parents that want their kids to not miss out. They want their kids to understand. Okay, great. Hey, would you like a kids 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. I don't need 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 Hazlett'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.

[Mike Rowe]

Great.

[Conor Boyak]

Read this book together in the evening. And now the family has a shared language around ideas that Henry Hazlett was writing about decades ago.

[Mike Rowe]

Animal Farm wasn't about pigs and horses, right?

[Conor Boyak]

Yep. Right? Yeah.

[Mike Rowe]

I didn't fully appreciate the depth of it, though. I mean, when I go back and look at the early episodes of Tuttle Twins, which obviously are a reflection of the early books. I mean, 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. Right. Otherwise you're just making a cartoon. Otherwise. Well, I mean to bring it back to me, but Dirty Jobs is just one long smelly odyssey through an endless series of connected sewers.

[Conor Boyak]

Sure.

[Mike Rowe]

It can't just be that. I mean, it could, but it wasn't.

[Conor Boyak]

Yeah.

[Mike Rowe]

You know, so it just comes back again to what's 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?

[Conor Boyak]

Yes to everything. I mean, we survey it. 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. 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. Boyak? And, oh, yeah, hi. And kind of interrupts us, but it was a, you know, happy interruption. It's like, I'm your biggest fan. I'm like, oh, great. I'm thinking my donors 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? 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, like, I'm gonna slip you a $5.

[Mike Rowe]

I'm guessing you probably did. This is a classic shill.

[Conor Boyak]

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. 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 Tuttleton's 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, 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 onto with Tuttle Twins is this idea that kids want to be challenged.

[Mike Rowe]

They'll jump.

[Conor Boyak]

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 kids book 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.

[Mike Rowe]

Wow.

[Conor Boyak]

I'm gonna keep reading.

[Mike Rowe]

Well, that's a bar. No, I think part of it has to do with. 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 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. Minimum wage doesn't really work. There's going to be an unintended consequence 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. The answer is probably not unless it does well.

[Conor Boyak]

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.

[Mike Rowe]

So they're in the car, they're children's favorite.

[Conor Boyak]

Exactly.

[Mike Rowe]

Right.

[Conor Boyak]

Bedtime story.

[Mike Rowe]

Tell me the story about the Federal Reserve.

[Conor Boyak]

Exactly. And yet it works. That's what it'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, you know, 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

[Mike Rowe]

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[Conor Boyak]

and you know, imagine the dad, you're right. You know, and. And he laughs because he had read the book with his daughter, so he knew what she was talking about. You know, click, turns 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 Reid's 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 to her, he's back at the potato chips. She walks back to him like, what are you staring at the chips for? He's like, mom, I get it. Spontaneous order. Mom's like, what are you talking. What? I think he's like 10 or 11 or something, right? And in the book, we explain 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, you know, 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. Like, 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 on the 250th anniversary of America and all this. Right.

[Mike Rowe]

I believe you mean the semi quinticentennial.

[Chuck]

I think that was quincentennial.

[Mike Rowe]

Semi quincentennial.

[Conor Boyak]

Yes, yes, please 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 meeting. 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'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 relevance and application of these ideas in the home? So that's kind of the mission of Tuttle Twins. And 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.

[Mike Rowe]

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 surfacey 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. My whole deal, just distill the whole thing down to one thing. My job comes down to two words. Satisfy curiosity. Satisfy it.

[Conor Boyak]

Right.

[Mike Rowe]

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 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.

[Conor Boyak]

I'm missing out.

[Mike Rowe]

Okay, 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 Connections, 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 Forrest 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, like, matters and makes time fly, you win.

[Conor Boyak]

Well, I tell my team, it's like because, you know, 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. 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 have they learned 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.

[Mike Rowe]

You got to wait to see if Conor Boyak, who barely got through English, is going to start writing books. You got to wait.

[Conor Boyak]

I'll keep my 8th grade teacher apprised of those efforts.

[Mike Rowe]

What was her name? You remember?

[Conor Boyak]

I don't remember. She has the memory, not me.

[Mike Rowe]

Well, look, you are old enough to remember the Weeping Indian on the side of the road, right?

[Conor Boyak]

No.

[Mike Rowe]

Keep America beautiful.

[Conor Boyak]

Oh, yes. Okay. Yeah, okay.

[Mike Rowe]

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, right? It's like, okay, somebody applies for a scholarship, they're gonna go study a trade. Who knows what's gonna 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. Cause 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 or 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, you know, and that is a hard thing to take to your Donors?

[Conor Boyak]

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 engaged 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. Anyone would 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. You know, like, well, okay, like, sure, we're preaching to 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. 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, okay? 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 at 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 in a. 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.

[Mike Rowe]

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 music, but you haven't heard this before. That's interesting. You know, 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 Dreyfuss 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'll never, 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. I know for a fact that some of you listening right now Picked up an Aura digital picture frame for Mother's Day because I advertised it on this podcast and I told you that I got one for my mom and. And how much she loves it. So don't be shocked if I suggest that an Aura digital picture frame is also the perfect gift for dad on Father's Day. Because it is. Even if you already got one for your mom. That's the situation with my folks. They have two of them. Everybody I know who gets one of these things winds up picking up an extra one because they like them all over the house. Why? Because they're like portals into the past that allow you to send and receive and ultimately enjoy a limitless number of photos of the people and the friends and the family and the places that you love. I could spend the next 30 seconds checking off the many unique features that have led tens of thousands of people to leave a five star review, but I'm not going to go through all that. If you want to see for yourself why everybody from Oprah to the geeks over at Wirecutter recommend Aura Digital picture frames above all the other ones, just go to their website and poke around. It's obvious. Bottom line, there's no better way to share the pictures you love with the friends and family that you love or celebrate dear old dad than with a gift that keeps his favorite memories alive forever. Save $35 off their bestselling Carver matte frame. That's the one I gave my dad by using Code Mike at [e-mail] promo code mike terms and conditions [e-mail] a u.

[Conor Boyak]

Mike I 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, but they're so commonsensical and so adaptable and accessible to a kid that even though I come from that perspective, the books have a far broader audience. Our, 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 a magazine called Current Affairs, Current Event, 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 capitalistly, you know, producing a magazine for sale to others. But we can set that aside. So I took an image of their hit piece, 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 a hundred thousand 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 they were? We were creating some like 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 what, 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.

[Mike Rowe]

Well, all of them are classic, what we would call classically liberal.

[Conor Boyak]

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 Conor Boyak writes and we're going to believe it all because he's a trustworthy whatever. And I'm like, 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. I welcome families who don't share my political or economic background, who still get the books. And you'll see online people 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.

[Mike Rowe]

How did you deal with the broken windows theory in Food Truck Fiasco? Or did you.

[Conor Boyak]

The Broken Window. So Hazlitt actually borrowed that from Frederick Bastiat, 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 Bastiat 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?

[Mike Rowe]

Just explain real quick the Broken Window Fallacy. So people aren't.

[Conor Boyak]

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. So the broken window fallacy stems from an idea that Bastiat 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. Glazier to come and fix the window. And that helps him pay for his bills. And. 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 existing stuff is part of the same theory.

[Mike Rowe]

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 blocks, street by street, broken window by broken window. So it's a. I don't know if it's the same theory or if it's something adjacent.

[Conor Boyak]

Yeah, I don't think Bastiat wrote about that directly, but it probably fits in there. And I came to the broken window fallacy and the economic side of Bastiat a little bit later. What I first latched 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 Bostat 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 if you know publishing, 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 I 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.

[Mike Rowe]

What's that called?

[Conor Boyak]

Libertas Press.

[Mike Rowe]

That's the press, yeah.

[Conor Boyak]

So that.

[Mike Rowe]

So did Libertas exist then, the think tank?

[Conor Boyak]

Yes, only a few years prior.

[Mike Rowe]

Got it.

[Conor Boyak]

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 local city over eminent domain. They were trying to take some farmer's land for something stupid.

[Mike Rowe]

Stupid.

[Conor Boyak]

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 6 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 with us and I found myself.

[Mike Rowe]

Like your own business kid.

[Conor Boyak]

Exactly. I was like, I want to tell my boy what I do. I don't want to be, oh, I 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. I'm 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.

[Mike Rowe]

Sidebar. Sorry. But yeah, I. I think the question I want to ask you is, what do you admire and what had you seen previously? Because I. 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, right? 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?

[Conor Boyak]

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 6 year old about eminent domain or pick your topic. So over the span of six years, we did a book and a second and a third. And I think by the time 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.

[Mike Rowe]

It's two weeks, man.

[Conor Boyak]

So many parents are like, what has happened to my government? What happened to 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. And so 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, but 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 freedom 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.

[Mike Rowe]

How does this series evolve? How does the book become the show? And why Angel?

[Conor Boyak]

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 running in 2012. So they did a super PAC and I was a little connected to that. We did a bitcoin documentary together in 2013. We did a Kickstarter and we, 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 funn because they couldn't use cash, credit, nothing. Anyway, so we did, we did that. We were doing some projects together.

[Mike Rowe]

Was this like the poop poop poo pourri days?

[Conor Boyak]

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 Libertas.

[Mike Rowe]

He sat right there.

[Conor Boyak]

And so. 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 done the Chosen, 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 like top two or three shows consistently on their platform.

[Mike Rowe]

And, and I believe my episode, I don't want to bring it too back to me too. Please, please do what I do.

[Conor Boyak]

We gotta mention it.

[Mike Rowe]

Did it do okay?

[Conor Boyak]

It did. Excellent. Not, I mean you, but also the issue.

[Mike Rowe]

Yeah.

[Conor Boyak]

Because that issue right now is red hot.

[Mike Rowe]

Our audience, we're talking about college.

[Conor Boyak]

Yes.

[Mike Rowe]

Work and skill.

[Conor Boyak]

Not all knowledge comes from college.

[Mike Rowe]

Correct.

[Conor Boyak]

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.

[Mike Rowe]

Yeah, yeah. The reverse commute. 100% the unintended consequence. Your whole deal is like the Old Bay potato chip. Like, think about it.

[Conor Boyak]

How do you want me to bring that back?

[Chuck]

Well, yeah, because we're from Baltimore and Old Bay is a great spice.

[Mike Rowe]

What's the economic underlying principle when the kid looks at the potato chips? Spontaneous.

[Conor Boyak]

Spontaneous order.

[Mike Rowe]

Okay. Spontaneous order.

[Conor Boyak]

Yeah.

[Mike Rowe]

Right. So there's no real playbook for the Old Bay 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 7 million of the things, but to do it, you had to create your own platform.

[Conor Boyak]

Yeah.

[Mike Rowe]

For the Harmon brothers to do what they 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.

[Conor Boyak]

Right, right.

[Mike Rowe]

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 libertas, too, like the idea, which I assume that's Statue of Liberty stuff.

[Conor Boyak]

Yeah, that's the Roman Goddess of Liberty. That's her name.

[Mike Rowe]

Dead language.

[Conor Boyak]

Dead language. You say libertas, I say libertas. But it's all for me. It comes down to how do we actually save the country? How do. Like you look right now, America's celebrating its 250th anniversary, but I believe you

[Mike Rowe]

mean the semi quincentennial.

[Conor Boyak]

Did he get it right that day? Yeah, he did. He nailed it.

[Mike Rowe]

But he did.

[Conor Boyak]

Every great empire. Every great. 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 Libertas Network, which is our. It's our kind of non profit shell over all. We have Tuttle 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 figure leading this movement of freedom minded people. And his answer was, I don't know. I don't know what your path is. 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 you 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 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.

[Mike Rowe]

I don't know, but maybe just take a beat on that. The Fourth Turning.

[Conor Boyak]

What are their names? Neil Strauss. 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 as the. We think of it in that quote that goes. You would know this. The hard men create great times. Great times. Great weak men. Weak men create hard times. 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. 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.

[Mike Rowe]

You figure we're in the crisis now, you know, as opposed to the unraveling.

[Conor Boyak]

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.

[Mike Rowe]

Do you think there's any validity to the idea that, you know, every generation always and forever has thought they were at the pinnacle of knowledge?

[Conor Boyak]

Right.

[Mike Rowe]

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.

[Conor Boyak]

And we have to. This is the most important election of our lifetime.

[Mike Rowe]

It's got to be because I'm voting in it and because I walk the earth. Yep. But I mean, if that's. If that. If that kind of recency bias can affect our own analyses, you know, I

[Conor Boyak]

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 the. 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 sucking. But then we're gonna have to rebuild, and who are those people gonna be, and what ideas are they gonna be building based off of? And are we gonna 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 Appleseed is, you know, slinging that are gonna grow. But that's kind of like what wakes me up in the morning, gets me excited, is I don't know what's gonna happen in the Middle east and I don't know what's gonna happen with the dollar. And 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 positioned to come out of that.

[Mike Rowe]

Look, I think it's the irony and the dichotomies are rich. You know, I think Paul's right. I don't. 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 can. 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. And I don't know, I look at that unraveling, I look at the crisis. What in the world were they thinking at the end of the Civil War or maybe the beginning of it? And is it just limited to your civilization or your society, your culture? Were 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 then 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. But I think today, maybe because we're just hyper connected in ways, like we look at the federal like we look at the. Like we boil the ocean.

[Conor Boyak]

Yeah.

[Mike Rowe]

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 meeting 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.

[Conor Boyak]

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 TARP bailout. So this is during the, you know, Tea Party and all of that is going on? Yep. 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 center. And so many of my friends go to D.C. right. We're gonna champion the Constitution and we're gonna reform the federal government, all that stuff. And not just people connected to Mike, but I had many other contacts who were all riding the Tea Party wave, wanting to go into D.C. and, and reform things. Meanwhile, the following year, I started Libertas Institute, our think tank focused only on state level policy.

[Mike Rowe]

Yeah.

[Conor Boyak]

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, state level and often local. Our local issues are mostly housing and property rights, really.

[Mike Rowe]

Domain kind of thing.

[Conor Boyak]

Yep. So that's kind of more where we focus, but predominantly 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 PACs 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 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.

[Mike Rowe]

But it's such a classic bottom up, very bottom up approach, you know, 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.

[Conor Boyak]

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, demoted, motivated. Who am I? I'm 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 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 there. Oh, I wish I remembered a buddy of mine, Paul Allen's building, I think it's called Citizen, 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 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 change the world, 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.

[Mike Rowe]

I know this is out of your lane a bit, at least you know, when you think about the Tuttle twins and storytelling, that. That's your buddy's thing.

[Conor Boyak]

CitizenPortal. AI. Yeah. So you can go look up your. There's LA County.

[Mike Rowe]

I love it.

[Conor Boyak]

Monitor what they're doing.

[Mike Rowe]

It's funny. I've consciously avoided, you know, blatant political conversations most of my life, but living in California now, it. It, I. 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 that led to that. And it's like, what can people do truly, on a local level? You're at the ultimate local level. You're at the dining room table, you're at the kitchen table. It doesn't get more local than that.

[Conor Boyak]

That.

[Mike Rowe]

But I guess one click up is really where Libertis thrives most.

[Conor Boyak]

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 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, 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, you know, impacts that on, hey, you care more about business. Let me talk to you about it from that angle. And so what I found over the years is that there's a way, no matter what angle you're coming from, to still have. 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, is 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 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.

[Mike Rowe]

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 LA 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.

[Conor Boyak]

Oh boy. I'm gonna give you a very abbreviated version. Cause this is such an interesting topic to me. You asked earlier what books I had written that the 8th 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 the government, if a just government requires the consent of the governed, 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 LA 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.

[Mike Rowe]

Consent through geography, Effectively, yes.

[Conor Boyak]

And so you're born into it, right? And maybe for economic reasons you can't move, you can't get a job, you don't have 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, you know, welfare programs and da da, da or 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 bill 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, it would just be fascinating.

[Mike Rowe]

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 yeah, broadly, yes.

[Conor Boyak]

I mean the breakdown that 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.

[Mike Rowe]

So you want to be able to

[Conor Boyak]

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.

[Mike Rowe]

What about transportation? Why should I pay for that bridge I never drive up?

[Conor Boyak]

Especially the TSA right now. I mean, they're not functional at all.

[Mike Rowe]

Right, right. But I mean, that's a. I'm not saying it's a non starter. I'm just saying it's a tough sell, 100%.

[Conor Boyak]

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 realized that what 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 tell you families. We have a book, Mike. We haven't. We've been talking about the Kids. The Kids series. We have series for teenagers. We have a toddler series. One of our 13 books is called the Tuttle Twins Guide to True Conspiracies. It's great. That is the typical reaction of people who learn about everybody. 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.

[Mike Rowe]

This is like, they are, by the way.

[Conor Boyak]

Okay, so are the tadpoles. I'll pass that on to Alex. You know what? What have been actual Documented evidences, examples of conspiracy. And the whole reason we did the book, by the way, it was a very cathartic book to write. That was.

[Mike Rowe]

You mean, like what's gone from tinfoil hat, you're out of your mind to true?

[Conor Boyak]

Yeah.

[Mike Rowe]

Yeah.

[Conor Boyak]

Yep. And just takes a few decades and, you know, more and more.

[Chuck]

It's early, you know, it's only six months.

[Conor Boyak]

Yeah, exactly.

[Mike Rowe]

That's fast, man.

[Conor Boyak]

Declassifying a few documents. And lo and behold, so. 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, they were told this instead. And so that is provocative stuff. So, like, 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 Fallacies. 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.

[Mike Rowe]

Right, right. Like, they start losing arguments.

[Conor Boyak]

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 have loved. So I'm writing for young Connor. Like, what. How would I have enjoyed learning? Through storytelling and provocative ideas. Ideas.

[Mike Rowe]

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 government's. I get the government I deserve. I get the TV I deserve, you know, and if I don't like it, I can change the 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

[Conor Boyak]

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 were doing seasteading experiments years ago, or in Honduras and elsewhere, like charter cities, where they'd go to the government, say, hey, can you carve out 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 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. Maybe I voted for Trump, but now he's doing all this stupid stuff and maybe I need to revoke my consent. How do I do that?

[Mike Rowe]

You gotta wait for the next election, I guess.

[Conor Boyak]

Yeah.

[Mike Rowe]

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.

[Conor Boyak]

Right. You know, you would never tell a battered wife that because you said yes three years ago. You have to stick.

[Mike Rowe]

That's right. Yeah, that's right. Wow, Tuttle. Where'd the name come from?

[Conor Boyak]

Oh, this is a. So I knew I wanted a boy and a girl because I wanted, you know, back then we just had boys and girls, so I wanted both boys and girls.

[Chuck]

We're getting there again.

[Mike Rowe]

It was a simpler time.

[Conor Boyak]

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'd 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. With T that are one or two syllables, and I start checking domain names. Is the dot com available? Is there anyone famous with this name? I pulled it Down. I had like a top 10 list. One of them. I, I don't remember, I don't advise in going to look this up, but one of them were like Playboy twins or something like cross that one off. And so Tuttle twins was a process of elimination where the dot com was available. There were, you know, there was no one with the famous. With that name. And it was easy to pronounce for kids.

[Mike Rowe]

So you've never seen American choppers? Obviously not.

[Conor Boyak]

Oh no.

[Mike Rowe]

18 seasons, Discovery Channel. It was the Tuttles who built it. 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 Tuttles started doing the same thing.

[Conor Boyak]

Oh cool.

[Mike Rowe]

And it became. I only know this because I can narrate it. Yeah, but whatever.

[Conor Boyak]

Small potatoes. Okay, I'll go back and watch it. No, no, nothing I'm going to say now because I watched, you know, micro early on and Tuttle was 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 Tuttletons 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. And he's like, you know, maybe someday we can help fund Libertas with book sales from. And I literally laughed at him like a, like a uneasy, dismissive laugh. Like haha, 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 and spontaneous order. Turns out other people wanted the same and well, maybe save America along the way.

[Chuck]

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.

[Mike Rowe]

That's it.

[Chuck]

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.

[Mike Rowe]

Yeah, right.

[Conor Boyak]

The.

[Chuck]

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 to bigger problems.

[Mike Rowe]

Right, which is why you must take. 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 Mideast 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. 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. 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 gotta let you go soon, but I gotta ask you, within Libertas, is it Praxis?

[Conor Boyak]

Mm, yeah. Our college alternative.

[Mike Rowe]

Yeah. Please explain what that is, because that surely sounds like the thing that we'd be in most violent agreement on.

[Conor Boyak]

I think we would. Praxis is a college alternative boot camp. It's a six to eight month boot camp you pay 7,500 bucks 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 Praxis 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.

[Mike Rowe]

Oh.

[Conor Boyak]

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, you know, driving doordash.

[Mike Rowe]

About that same percentage of kids with college debt that don't have a college degree at all.

[Conor Boyak]

100 they don't finish.

[Mike Rowe]

Yep.

[Conor Boyak]

And so college not 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 you a 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, that is kind of the, 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 and the company? And how do you, how do you look out for that? How do you pay attention to it? How do you formulate those ideas? How can you use AI to 10x your 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 non profit umbrella. And part of the motivation was here I've been doing Tuttle 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. What, 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 Tuttle twins reader and they can come into practice. And the beauty of it is like, some of these young people still end up going to college, but they go there with far greater intentionality and success.

[Mike Rowe]

Sure.

[Conor Boyak]

Oh, I'm going to do this now in two, two and a half years. I'm going to do this approach to save money.

[Mike Rowe]

How Many have gone through.

[Conor Boyak]

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? Like, these are big life.

[Mike Rowe]

It's consequential for sure.

[Conor Boyak]

Very consequential. So it takes a little while for them to decide. But. But we did that relaunch that Chuck was showing 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.

[Mike Rowe]

I love it, man. Do you know what Alex Garp is doing over at Palantir?

[Conor Boyak]

Yes.

[Mike Rowe]

Kind of their fellowships and it's a meritocracy fellowship.

[Conor Boyak]

Love it.

[Mike Rowe]

So it's taking kids straight out of high school and giving them, interestingly, like a Western civ, liberal arts background within Palantir while he's sending them out on these big consequential engineering projects.

[Conor Boyak]

So cool.

[Mike Rowe]

They're finishing up in a couple of years. They're guaranteed they're gonna make hundreds of thousands of dollars, no debt. And they might even be able to talk about the Stoics or Aristotle or Adams. Right. Because I'm constantly trapped in this binary thing where it's like, oh, Mike's anti college. No, I'm not.

[Chuck]

Not.

[Mike Rowe]

I'm kind of anti debt. But to be pro trade, but not pro four year degree, it's just a bad choice.

[Conor Boyak]

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 was. 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 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 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 they're like, boom, you're hired.

[Mike Rowe]

When did you Write Skip College?

[Conor Boyak]

2017, I want to say, Find that Chuck, would you?

[Mike Rowe]

How many did you sell? Was it a hit?

[Conor Boyak]

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 Gatto at all? John Taylor gatto 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 a kind of a renegade teacher, one of those that would, like, buck the system and do whatever he wanted for the kids in his classroom. So he's kind of a big name in 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

[Mike Rowe]

being 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, building generalists. 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?

[Conor Boyak]

I don't think so.

[Mike Rowe]

He was talking about Mark Wayne Mullen, who was just appointed head of.

[Conor Boyak]

Oh, he was criticizing him. This was your post. I read your post. Yes. And he was being critical that he used to be in a.

[Mike Rowe]

A plumber.

[Conor Boyak]

That's right.

[Mike Rowe]

So now we have a plumber.

[Conor Boyak]

Yep.

[Mike Rowe]

In charge of protecting us from terrorism. 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. You didn't know. I didn't know with dirty jobs. You probably didn't know with Tuttle twins. But you got off the plane, you're like, that thing's been liked 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. I don't 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. And then he decides because he's got the means and the interest, he goes to dc, he gets elected in Congress.

[Conor Boyak]

Yeah.

[Mike Rowe]

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 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 libertis and everything else. Help us save the plumbers too. Help us save this.

[Conor Boyak]

Let's do it.

[Mike Rowe]

This idea that, you know, I mean, what was Adams before he was Adams?

[Conor Boyak]

What was Jefferson or Benjamin Franklin or.

[Mike Rowe]

He was a hat maker.

[Conor Boyak]

Right.

[Mike Rowe]

Farmers. They all had a trade. Yeah, they were all generalists.

[Conor Boyak]

We ought to aspire to be the same.

[Mike Rowe]

We're gonna do another episode of the Tuttle twins, me and you. Somewhere down there.

[Conor Boyak]

I'd love to.

[Mike Rowe]

All right. Anything else? People should know. Where should they go if they want to help you save the world?

[Conor Boyak]

What's the easiest way libertis.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 libertas.org or I'[e-mail].

[Mike Rowe]

how many likes did I get on that post, Chuck? No, I'm curious.

[Chuck]

I'm just trying to bring it up. It's like making me. I can't log into Facebook.

[Mike Rowe]

Well, just tell me you can't get on Facebook.

[Chuck]

Yeah, hold on one second.

[Mike Rowe]

Call Mark Zuckerberg.

[Chuck]

Hold on. No, no, I got it.

[Mike Rowe]

Now, look, I'm not going to make you guys listen to this.

[Chuck]

How many likes? 135,000.

[Mike Rowe]

135,000. People are basically making an argument for a generalist. Yeah, that's what that is.

[Chuck]

18,000 comments.

[Mike Rowe]

Unbelievable.

[Chuck]

19,000 shares.

[Conor Boyak]

Hit a nerve.

[Mike Rowe]

Yeah, you did, huh? All right. What a pleasure to meet you. Thank you for reaching out.

[Conor Boyak]

Likewise. Great chatting with you.

[Mike Rowe]

You too. Adios. That's a Connor Boyak. 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.

[Conor Boyak]

Before you go,

[Mike Rowe]

Could you please subscribe?

[Chuck]

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[Conor Boyak]

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