Connor Boyack: Liberty, Entrepreneurship & The Tuttle Twins | Powell Perspective Podcast

Imagine raising your kids in a world where liberty is not just a chapter in a textbook, but a story they can live and understand. That vision is exactly what today's guest has made real. Connor Boyak is the founder and president of the Libertas Institute, a think tank that has already influenced over 100 legislative reforms in education, choice, property rights and medical freedom, and government transparency. Consider what it means to take the timeless ideas of economics and civics and make them accessible to millions of families. Connor has done precisely that through the Tuttle Twin series. With more than 6 million books sold and now a successful animated show, his work has turned abstract principles into engaging stories that empower both children and parents to think differently about freedom. If you could wave a magic wand and bring someone who knows how to move culture, shape policy, and inspire the next generation, this would be the person. Conor's not only an author and an educator, he's a strategist and movement builder who understands how to blend story with advocacy to create lasting impact. That is why I'm honored to welcome Conor Boyak as today's guest on Ask dad here at the PAL Perspective. Connor, welcome to the show. Tell me a little bit about how you got started with Tuttle Twins, which is probably one of your best pet projects right now. And it's way beyond a pet project.

Yeah, it's certainly the one I'm most well known for at this point. The Tuttle Twins is an outgrowth of our political work. I started a think tank in 2011 in Utah where I live, and it was a state or is a state based think tank focused just on state level reform. We've since expanded to work across the country, but I was changing all these laws. I was working with legislators. I was, you know, fighting civil asset forfeiture and all kinds of fun stuff. And I found myself wanting to help my kids understand what dad does for work. They were very young at the time, five and three. My five year old was almost six. And you know, I'd come home at the end of the day and I'd tell me how your day was, what did you do? And they'd tell me in very simple terms what cartoons they watched or what toys they played with. But my almost 6 year old started to reciprocate that question. Dad, where were you today? What did you do? And I wanted to give him an answer that was more substant than I typed on a computer or I made phone calls. So I literally went to Amazon. I looked for children's books that would teach about property rights and free markets and things like that to try and simplify and help them Understand this is 2013. There was zilch, just absolutely nothing. So that was kind of the aha, question mark of like, maybe there's an opportunity here. Was talking with a buddy of mine, Elijah, who's the illustrator and my partner now in the Tuttle Twins. He has kids, he's very like minded. So we started kicking around this idea. What about a kids book? There was no grand vision for turning it into what it has since become. It was really just like we wanted this for our kids and it was very much like a personal project, but so many people bought it and demanded more and more and more that we clearly saw the opportunity to fulfill that demand and scale it up.

So not only do you have books, you have a. I, I know it's on YouTube. I don't know, it may be actually on other channels as well. So it's great videos. Tell me about that. How did you get cartoon?

Yeah, the cartoon. The books started selling millions of copies, became a household name across America and we saw the opportunity for doing a Cartoo. So we partnered with Angel Studios. They're the distributor of the cartoon. So you can find some episodes on, on YouTube, but the full episodes for free by the way, are all available on Angel Studios platform. So you can download their app, much like Netflix or whatever. They've got tons of great shows on there and we've got three seasons. We have, I think over 300 million people who've now watched at least one cartoon episode. And so the books are I'll say 75% educational, 25 entertaining. We pack a lot of powerful ideas into the books and, and excuse me, wrap them in a fun enough story where the kids, you know, find it engaging to learn. The cartoon flips it. The Cartoon is like 75% entertaining. It's just a fun, silly cartoon by the way, for kids and adults. We put like Simpsons style adult intellectual humor so that mom and dad can really, you know, get a kick out of watching it. And then maybe 25% of the cartoon is the educational side. So it's really our top of funnel, if you understand, kind of the marketing funnel where we can just have this fun cartoon that's free to watch and families across the world are watching it. And then it's like, hey, do you want to learn more and kind of deepen your understanding? Go get the books. And then we have curriculum and we can lead them down that path to continue learning these ideas.

So did you ever see yourself as A author that you were going to write kids books and then a movie producer, executive producer. I don't know what title you'd call that, but you know, creator. Content creator.

I mean, probably not. And if you ask like my 8th grade English teacher, she'd laugh in your face at the, at the mere prospect of the idea that I could turned into this. I've now written 50 books, about 35 of which are Tuttle twins. And then I have a number of other books for kind of general audience as well. And, and no, like I, I struggled in school with, with English, I struggled with economics, I struggled with history. And when I mean struggle, I disliked it. I hated the memorization and the rote learning and the, you know, being forced to write essays about crap I didn't care about. But later in life, after I graduated college and got off the conveyor belt, I found that I had all this free time to read things that I was curious about and that ended up being kind of libertarian leaning, political economy, history, American history, civics, getting into Austrian economics and so forth. And I kind of, around the time when Ron Paul was first running in like 2007, 8. That's what really spoke of my interest. And, and then I started a blog because I wanted to share with other people what I was learning about. And I quickly realized, wow, I suck at writing. I need to learn how to write well. And so it was this very like organic thing that, that developed alongside my burgeoning interest about 20 years ago in some of these kind of political and economic ideas. And I found that I believe in them so passionately, I want to share them with the world. That really forced me down this path of learning how to communicate well, how to tell stories, how to write. And I've now turned that into a career which has been awesome.

So you don't just have 50 books out there, you have Libertas, which we'll get to in just a minute here. But relative to the kids, the ask dad, you have got to tell me. You know, my granddaughter just had an awesome, awesome. I wouldn't call it a lemonade stand. It was a Beyond Lemonade event center that you could come to and you took that and put it onto steroids. And it's grown across the country. Tell me about what you're doing there.

You'll probably. And your listeners may appreciate the Backstory Briefly. In 2016 there was this weird summer. It happens from time to time. But in 2016 there were all these headlines of little kids lemonade stands getting shut down across the country for not having like a business license or a food handler's permit. Country Time Lemonade even turned this into a stunt the year later where they had a whole, like legal defense fund for kids if they got shut down. So we turned that into policy reform. We went to our legislature in Utah, I went to a buddy of mine in the Senate and I said, I've got this idea. Let's do a law that says if you're a minor doing occasional business, not like a full time, like legit type of operation, but just an occasional Saturday morning, whatever, door to do door thing. Let's say you don't need a business license, you don't need any kind of permit, no sales taxes, no nothing. Let's have a fully actual free market for kids to encourage them before the crushing weight of the state comes upon them. As an 18 year old, let's actually like lower the barrier to entry for these kids. So we got that bill passed. We've since helped about 13 states across the country pass similar laws. But passing that law first in Utah gave rise to this opportunity you're talking about. We call it the Children's Entrepreneur Market. There's the logo. The website is kidsmarkets.com. this is a program, as you say. It's kind of like farmers market events that we operate. But kids run the entire show so mom and dad can help set up the booth. They're required to sit back the rest of the time. Let the kids do everything. They're selling real products for real money. What's fascinating about this now that we've done this for almost a decade, is that when you use the profit motive, kids are willing to learn all kinds of things. If you were to sit these kids down and say, all right, we're going to teach you spreadsheets 101. Let's learn like boring, right? But if they're having to like do this little budget in service of trying to earn money for Pokemon cards or whatever they want to spend money in, suddenly they're interested because it's a means to an end. It's an end that excites them. This is what's broken about our education system is there's no agreement upon the end, right? It's this one size fits all of all the means. You're going to learn this. Just in case you need this 30 years from now. Rather than like, hey kid, what are you interested in? Let's build an educational approach around that interest. Every kid is interested in some spending money and so we can use that to get These kids learning all kinds of stuff, and it's a blast. This year we'll probably have 80 or 90,000 kids across the country going through the program. Next year we want to triple that. So we're rapidly scaling up right now. It's so, so fun. Yeah. KidsMarkets.com is where your listeners can find if there's a market.

Dot com.

Well, in, in our little town, in our neighboring towns, I think you've had three or four this summer across the way, in the neighboring towns that we have between, like Gardnerville and Sparks and, and some others.

What we were talking about, fiat money, which is you have books. I mean, you have. It is amazing. You needed to order. I'm going to tell you, my viewers, you have got to go on Amazon. That's probably the best place. I don't know. That's the easiest place to get. Go to Powell Books. But that also works great for me. Go order these books. And they're amazing. I gave them to my grandchildren and now we've been able to start reading through those. And it causes me to actually go back and look at some of my books that are on my reading list and say, I need to revisit this. But relative to that, we started the show because. And this will date date this show a little bit, but gold just passed 3,500. You and I, you and I were talking about this. This isn't about Gold. It's really about the fiat money program and what's going on at the Fed and what's going on with the instability of the government and such. Talk about that. How would you explain that to a kid?

We see a lot of economic havoc right now, and it's wreaking havoc on even the mental health of the rising generation. You can see across TikTok and other social media apps, young adults coming out of either high school or college massively depressed because they're buried under all this debt. From the start, they were sold this notion of an American dream, thinking, if I just go to college, then I'll get a job. And lo and behold, they're barely even pulling 20 hours at Starbucks trying to just make ends meet. And so the problem is, a lot of these young people have not been made to understand the nature of our economic system and the forces that are working against them, including the erosion of our fiat dollar system, where it's just being inflated and inflated and it's basically theft, this hidden tax on people devaluing their, their money. So we have a book for kids called the Tuttle Twins and the creature from Jekyll island, paying homage to G. Edward Griffin's classic book on the topic, talking about what is the Federal Reserve and what are they doing? What is the nature of money? What types of money have been used in the past, like rice, you know, and shells and all kinds of things. Well, what are the aspects that make money good? If you can go just find shells on the beach, maybe that's not good money because suddenly you're inflating the money supply. Why has gold worked for so well so long? It's not perfect. There is a kind of a steady inflation and, you know, and when gold price goes up, that incentivizes more people to go dig gold out of the ground, which then, you know, brings some equilibrium. Or pretty soon we're going to be mining gold on asteroids and probably crashing the gold market at some point too. But like, what are the aspects of money? And if you know this, I'm hearkening back to my 80s and 90s upbringing thinking of GI Joe, right? Knowing is half the battle, right? If you, if you know, then you've kind of won, at least like come half the way in being victorious. If we can empower these young people with the knowledge about what's happening to our money, what's happening in the economy, then they can make at least better decisions about, oh, maybe I should save in gold, maybe I should save in Bitcoin, or maybe I should figure out other alternatives, buy hard assets. Like what can I do knowing that that's happening and I can't really control that? At least I can make better decisions to protect, you know, me and my family and the wealth that we're trying to, to build. So it's as simple as a fun story. In our book, it's a, literally a creature from Jekyll island, this like octopus looking thing where its tentacles are changing prices and the twins have to figure out what's this hidden, you know, monster that's, you know, secretly changing prices. We have a cartoon episode as well. We call it in the cartoon, the inflation monster. Oh, I have to look for that one. Yeah. It's similarly going around changing prices and they have to figure out why. And in the process they learn about money. But this stuff isn't rocket science. It's just that schools don't really talk to kids about these ideas and let alone government schools, can you really expect a government school to teach the shenanigans that the government is up to and devaluing our money system? Of course not. So it's up to parents. Most parents don't understand it, you know, themselves. And that's why we offer the Tuttle twins as a resource to say, you don't need to understand this stuff yourself. Just read these books with your kids. You're going to have some amazing conversations and learn alongside them.

I love it. Well, so this episode that we're working on is Ask dad, which is fun because my children now are almost all in their 30s, so I have a couple that are just outside of the 30s at this point. But it's interesting because the topics get more and more and more serious. And I was thinking about when you were talking about when you were going to high school and growing up in that scenario. So I grew up reading 1984 and 1984 hadn't happened yet.

Right.

So then I remember when 1984, 1984 is happening right now. I mean, right. We're right in the midst of it. And I'm not talking about overseas, I'm talking about right here at home. So tell me about Libertas. This is about, you know, our 20s and 30 year olds need to be looking at this and being able to understand what liberty really is and what were our founders looking at and how did they come about that? So tell me about Libertas.

So for those who don't know the name, Libertas is the Statue of Liberty, the Roman Goddess of Liberty. And so that's where we drive our name, our institute, Libertas Institute is a policy think tank primarily working in state capitals around the country, trying to reform laws to get regulations and these controls out of the way of entrepreneurs and families and let them just be free and go build their business and serve the market and create social fabric voluntarily rather than the coercive arm of the state. So the Libertas Institute is part of this broader ecosystem called Libertis Network. So this is our kind of non profit holding company under which we have the Policy Institute, we have the Tuttle Twins, we have the Children's Entrepreneur Market, we have other programs like Praxis and others. And so all of these programs work together to serve families, to say, look, if you have little kids, here's some education and some events we can offer you. Oh, you got older kids? Maybe Praxis is an opportunity where we help you get a job without needing a college degree. So if you've got like an 18 to, you know, 23, 24 year old, maybe we can serve you that way. Oh, you're running a business or you're in this particular industry. Let's talk with our think tank, and we can actually help develop policy reforms that are going to help you or your business, you know, be freer. And so what we're trying to build at Libertis Network writ large is this kind of juggernaut of initiatives that no matter the stage that your family's in or the circumstances you're in, we have something to offer you to help you embrace and defend the principles of freedom. You know, so we want to be able to educate you and your kids at all ages. Right. No matter where you're at. And then we want to also empower you with opportunities to get involved. Like, hey, you know, we're working with legislators in your state on this particular issue. Bring your kids up to the Capitol. Here's a civic engagement opportunity. We'll connect you with the legislator. You can show up to committee and testify in favor of the bill. Who does that? Well, you can, right. And so we're trying to create these opportunities for families to not only learn about this stuff, but actualize it. Right? And whether that is like, let's go start a business and just go through the market and do this, or, hey, we're interested in political reform, and we actually want to defend our freedoms and we want to be involved in this lawsuit or in this legislative battle, we're trying to create opportunities for all families of all stripes so that they can be part of this broader effort to try and increase our freedom across America.

I love that. So there's so much to unpack there. I think, you know this. I have a doctorate in law and policy, so I love the policy side. And I teach at a doctoral in a doctoral program about federalism. And federalism is not all that popular of a conversation in today's world. And you've got really two parts to that, which is the separation that we talk about people here, you know, with our. Our executive branch, our legislative branch, and our judicial branch. But that's really at the federal level, right? And what you're talking about. And. And you said it. I love how you say it. And this is the same thing I have with. With my enunciation of words. At times I say libertas. But you actually announce. Enunciate it properly, right?

I don't know about that. When I started the organization, I went to a linguist and I said, how is this pronounced? He said, well, Latin is a dead language. So there's kind of the Germanic English root where you would say libertas. Or there's like the romantic, you know, Italian, libertas, And I'm like, that sounds.

Yeah, Libertas.

I love that.

I love that. So libertas. So in libertas. So now you're really talking about the foundation of why federalism works, which was the separation between the federal government and the states. And so it sounds like much of your think tank work is at the state level because that's where you can actually impact change. Everybody goes votes for the President. That doesn't do anything.

No. And keep in mind who you're talking to, you're talking to a guy who graduated from college with Cs in information technology. I became a web developer for a decade. I have no formal background in economics or politics, no credentials like you or others. I'm just like a washed out web developer that's passionate about freedom and, and I have changed over 100 laws myself.

That's awesome.

I have sat in rooms with toe to toe with all the big power players and all these states. And I love that story because whatever, it makes me look good. I have fun with it. Whatever. The point is, the reason I love sharing the story is that if I can do it, so can anyone else.

Isn't that the way it's supposed to be though?

That's the way it's supposed to be. That way. And as you point out, at the state level is where it can happen if, when we go try and tangle up in D.C. oh my gosh, there's so much money and lobbyists and everything, it's just a nightmare. But you can enact so much reform at the state level. You're exactly right that federalism is where it's at. But I think we have this crisis happening right now. I'll give you a very brief example. I remember about 17, 18 years ago when Real ID was first proposed, there was a national freakout across the country. You remember this? Legislatures were passing resolutions and laws and saying, we're not doing this. There were lawsuits, the feds backed down. And then a decade later goes by and they start attaching all of these grants not to Real ID writ large, but to specific little pieces that they had chunked out of what was proposed as Real id to the point where so many states were eager to get the money. And so, yeah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, five, six, seven years later, you look across the country and over three quarters of the states had become compliant with all the provisions of Real id. Not by swallowing it whole cloth, right? But by just piecemealing it in exchange for the money to the point where everyone's now have to get the little yellow star or whatever on their driver's license and otherwise you can't fly. Right. And so they got the final like 10, 20% over the hurdle by just saying everyone has to do it now. But along the way, everyone became compliant. So to me, this is the problem. The crisis that we face with federalism is that states have been sucking at the taxpayer teat, you know, in D.C. for so long that they're willing to surrender their freedoms, they're willing to no longer stand on principle. So a lot of our effort is trying to get states to man up and say, you are not a subdivision of the federal government. The federal government is a creature that you helped create. You need to restrain it, you need to put the leash on the beast. And if you don't stand up and assert your powers under the 10th amendment, you're just going to be this subdivision of DC, this division of the federal leviathan. And who wants that? That's not going to produce good outcomes. The problem is so many state legislators lack of spine and they're worried about, oh, we're going to lose this funding or oh, we're going to. You know, it's like we need the people who are going to stand up like Madison and Jefferson did in 1798 against the alien and Sedition Acts. Where are the people who are going to be some rabble rousers a little bit? We need more of those.

Yeah, we call those people bad in today's world. When you stand up against, you know, domestic terrorists. Yeah, domestic terrorists. You know, I love the conversation about the, the 10th Amendment and because my simplicity and yes, I do have a doctorate and I got to tell you, I'm very fortunate about that. But I barely graduated high school. I was late to get my undergraduate degree. I was an entrepreneur and a business person and had been, had a fabulous career and opportunities and vocations before I ever went into formal education. So I backed into it. The opposite side.

Yeah.

And it's because I'm incredibly curious. I'm like, oh, I want to go and I want to learn from all sorts of areas. So to be clear on that, it was a foundational learning at a very late.

That's awesome.

So why I say that is, is the, the 10th Amendment is just so amazing because it basically, in the most simplest way says federal government. You get this much power and if we didn't give you that power, everything else belongs to the states and the states and the federal government only get it because the people gave it to them. So power Actually remains in the people. And we're at a state, you know, at different times, where people have totally forgotten the fact that we are the power, not the federal government, but the federal government has the checkbook, the big checkbook. And you probably know this, but it.

Started in the money machine. That's it.

They can print it. Andrew Jackson really was the first time that we had this excess money. And they started using those systems because they couldn't build roads. That wasn't within their power. But they could incentivize states to get gifts in the form of grants and that they don't ever pay back. And now that has grown into this. Just. That's how we have the department of an addiction. We have all of these things.

Yeah.

Because it's an. It's absolutely an addiction. All right, well, that's enough pontificating about those wonderful subjects.

We could go on for hours.

You're out there doing work. I got to do one more. You were introduced to me or I was introduced to you through Lee Brower. I just think he's just like one of the coolest people on the planet. How did you ever meet Lee? You got to tell me this background story.

Oh. So like you, I am in Strategic Coach. Lee was actually my first coach. Randomly got paired with him. I was doing one out in la. So for those who don't know, Strategic Coach is an entrepreneur coaching, kind of group coaching for business owner type of program started by Dan Sullivan. Very successful. He's done, I don't know, tens of thousands of entrepreneurs at this point. So I joined several years ago. Turns out Lee lives here in Utah. He's in Southern Utah, and I'm kind of up the state a little bit. But he was my coach for a few years before I moved up to a new level. And so he was kind of the entry level program, and then I moved up a level. Great guy, Lee. Lee Brower is amazing. He's an awesome human being. And. But yeah, that's our. I forgot that that's our mutual connection that you know Lee as well. Yeah.

So he. He is a wonderful person, great character and amazing leader out there and like yourself, doing some great things. I mentioned that only because he's a good friend and he just had knee surgery, so, you know, kind of got to poke at him a little bit.

But he'll be out hiking before too long.

He already is. He already is. He's kind of slow moving on that, but. Yeah. So what should the. So first of all, the. The cartoons you go to, you can.

Go to tuttletwins TV as a, as a shortcut that'll take you to the Angel Studios website where you can watch them all for free.

So Tuttletwins TV Tuttletwins TV order the books.

The books are@tuttletwins.com where you can get not only the books but we've got some extra little add ons that we throw in little activity workbooks and stuff like that.

I will tell you for my granddaughters, they are, they are loving the books. They loved it as the gift, which is wonderful. And then it just has these conversations that we're having around the dinner table anyway. And now they're engaging in these conversations in a meaningful manner which I just absolutely love. And Libertas or libertas.

It's that one. That one's libertas.org L, I B E R T A S. It's like the word liberty but instead of an as there's a y libertas.org and that'll kind of point you to all of our different programs that you can find. Whether it's the policy stuff or the kids markets. That's kind of our one stop shop for everything that we're up to.

So if you have your child getting stopped by the police because they're selling lemonade, you definitely need to be, please call us.

We will help you. We will blow that story up across the country.

My, I just love that. Well, Connor, thank you so much for joining us. I'd love to get you back at a later date and anything we can do here. I know you've got one more event I think in northern Nevada that's going on before the, before the season's out and then I look forward to getting you back. And we can see some links for next year's programs as well.

That sounds great. Thanks for having me.

Sam.