94. The Tuttle Twins Fight for Liberty – Connor Boyack

You are listening to the Wealth Without Bay street podcast, a Canadian guide to building dependable wealth. Join your hosts Richard Canfield and Jason Lowe as they unlock the secrets to creating financial peace of mind in an uncertain world. Discover the strategies and mindsets to a financial future that you can bank on. We are excited to be back here, joined today by Connor Boyak, who is the founder of the and president of the Libertas Institute, an award winning free think tank. Now Connor has been named one of Utah's most politically influential people by the Salt Lake City Tribune and his leadership has led to dozens of significant legislative victories spanning all kinds of areas including privacy, government transparency, transparency, property rights, education, personal freedom, and so much more. One of the reasons we're really excited to talk to Connor is because he is the public speaker and an author of over 30 books and some of those books that are my favorites and I absolutely so blessed to be speaking with him. Today is about the Tuttle Twins books incredible series teaching the principles of liberty and financial awareness, Austrian economics at various ages for children to understand these principles in very, very cool storybook form. So we're very excited to have you with us, Connor. Thanks for joining us today on Wealth Without Bay street and welcome to the show.

Appreciate you having me on. Always excited to talk about these topics because you look at the world around us and seems like everything's upside down. So the more we can get the word out, the better.

Well, that's what our viewers and listeners say to us. They say, you know, they, they understand that there's, they feel that there's something just fundamentally wrong. They can't quite put their finger on it. And for us, you know, educational resources, tools like what you've created with Tuttle Twins are just outstanding. And we're going to include a link in the show notes. We would encourage our viewers and listeners to visit the tuttletwins.com website. And I want to begin, Connor, because you and I had connected at Joel Polish's Genius Network session and the talk that you gave was absolutely amazing. We're going to touch on a few points of that 10 minute talk that you delivered. But I want to begin with what inspired you, what inspired you to write 30 books? Most people go an entire lifetime without writing any books, let alone 30. So what, what was that inspiration for you? Maybe take our listeners through that.

I, I am someone who feels like most of the books I've read in the past were unhelpful and didn't, weren't written in a way that would help Me learn. So I. From a young. Not young age, but like, certainly college age. And soon after that, I wanted to learn how to write persuasively and in a way that would engage people's minds and simplify ideas. I really hated school. I didn't enjoy it. I hated textbooks. I thought the format was awful. It was always just dry. I remember my Econ 101 class freshman year of college, and it's all the supply and demand curves and aggregate, whatever, and shift the slope here. And I'm like, I hate economics. Like, this is the most boring, dry, ridiculous thing in the world. And I think I got like a C minus and never took another econ class after that. You know, required introduction. And. And then like, after college, I realized through, like, foundation for Economic Education and other organizations out there that have been teaching economics, but in a way that, you know, actually makes sense and. And is, you know, interesting, I realized that there's a lot of opportunity out there for other ideas and efforts to simplify and better communicate these complex ideas. And so certainly that manifests itself in the Tuttle twins doing it, simplifying it even more for kids. But even with my other, like, non Tuttle twins books, I just find a deep passion in helping people connect with ideas that matter to them and help their lives. And so, you know, a lot of people have hobbies. My hobby is to just write every spare moment. I'm trying to create more content because it's almost like this, you know, the drug addict who gets the hit, and so then they go through a little bit of withdrawal and they crave getting that fix again. And for me, like, I see the impact of my writing and I hear from readers, especially for the title trans all the time. And so that. That, like, dopamine drip for me, like, I know what this is doing for other people. I'm like, okay, I want that more. I want to reach even more people. And so I am addicted to writing. And then there are worse things to be addicted to, I suppose.

I really love the graphic approach that you take, too, especially because we all learn and absorb information in different ways. And the drawings that you use to help deliver those teaching moments to are incredibly powerful. That takes me to. I want to go to the Genius network talk that you delivered. It was so good. There was a story that you shared that I would love for you to share with our listeners and viewers as well.

Yeah, this was so. So the illustrator illustrations you mentioned, that's my partner, Elijah Stanfield. And what's amazing about that, you Know, he, he understands these ideas deeply. So when I write something, he thinks of his own ways to kind of visually present those ideas in a way that are going to engage kids, frankly their parents as well. And so it's a good relationship where he's, he's not. If I just hire a random illustrator and say, you know, design this, like I'm, I'm not a visual creative kind of person in that way. And so he's able to bring that to the table and then you put the words and the visualizations together and that's where the magic happens. So he and I both started doing this whole project because we're dads and we want our kids to learn these ideas and there's nothing else out there like this come to find out, you know, tons of other families out there share that, you know, that desire to teach their kids these concepts, the perspective that they're not finding anyone else out there helping them. So then they find the telechant. So we've now had years since 2014 of just families being like, thank you and where have these been all my life? And praise, praise, praise, praise. And you know, I mean you don't want to let your head get too big, but it is kind of fun to be doing something that like people love and whatever. So I have like a Google alert, right, where I can monitor, you know, when people post about it. And every few days I'm checking in to see what's new. And this was last fall I hit the little Google alert link to kind of see what was new and there was this article at the top that had just been published like an hour previously. And as from this website I'd never heard of before, but come to find out it was a magazine written by socialists for socialists called Current affairs and that they were doing a multi page review of our book series. And I mean, maybe review is the right word. It was really an attack. It was a total takedown of, you know, everything we stand for and that we're doing. And how dare they teach these ideas to kids. And it's horrible propaganda. And they end with this like barb, it was like an eight page long thing. Their magazine, they created their own illustrations to mock our illustrations and spent a lot of time and effort to really do this like negative attack review. And what I shared in the talk that you're referencing, as you recall, is that I feel like most people in my situation, like here's my baby being attacked by someone else. And I feel like most people would be like sad or Angry or depressed, like, oh my gosh, like this is published on the Internet and people aren't going to like me. And you know, what if more people read this and, you know, whatever, I was smiling the entire time that I read this article. Like, really, really big smile. And, and because I had recently learned the power of monetizing your haters, we had a couple months prior decide or come up with this idea with our marketing team to go out to Amazon and find all the 1 star reviews of our books and turn it into a little video where we would kind of poke fun at all the people who are leaving us one star reviews, you know, so someone might say, like, you know, this is not, you know, material for kids at all. This is, you know, like, let kids go play with Legos and whatever instead, right? And so then we'd have a response in the video to the one star review and that example, like, yeah, how dare we teach kids entrepreneurship and you know, give them an idea to build a lemonade stand or whatever. And so it was kind of our little, like, playful poking at these people. So we'd done that. And that video did really well. But it put me in this mindset of like. And I had read from, there's a great email marketer by the name of Ben Settle and he has, I think, a whole book. In fact, I don't have it, but I've, I've read from him in the past about monetizing your haters. So then here lands this article from the socialist magazine. And so that's in my head of like, oh my gosh, like, this is a perfect marketing opportunity. So, so we created a coupon code called Current affairs, which was the name of their magazine. And we had a big, you know, steep, steep discount on our Tuttle twins books for this coupon code. And we start sharing their, their article. Not a screenshot of it, not a little synopsis. Like, I sent the link to like half a million people on our email list. We blasted social media all over it and we're like, go read the article and if this bothers you, take action and go get the books. And we sold 10,000 books in a single day. And so much so that current affairs started getting annoyed. They, because we're tagging them all the time, like, hey, go read this current affairs article. Right? And so they got so annoyed that they created a coupon to get a discount off of their magazine. And the coupon name was Tuttle Twins. And so they started posting back on social media, like, get a discount off like, totally.

They had no earthly idea what they were doing.

No. Right. Because they're the attacker, not the victim. So they got no sympathy. Plus, they're socialists and they don't know how to sell things. And so I don't think that they really succeeded anyways. But. But that, to me, it was fun. And people, it really, like, here's. Here's the interesting thing for all the business people listening out there. Like, what I really learned from this is, yes, that you can monetize your haters. But the name of my. My genius talk was turn your enemies into evangelists. Like, we forced these. These critics to help evangelize our books. And we. What was very interesting about that is that we all have a ton of fence sitters. People who have been subscribed to our email list, listen to our podcast, read our articles, peruse our website, whatever, but they haven't taken action. They're there kind of just waiting and watching. Maybe there's gonna be a big discount and then I'll take action. Or maybe they'll finally say something that'll push me over the edge. But there's so many people who are passively consuming our content, and that's totally understandable, but they're fence sitters, so you need to kind of give them scarcity, urgency, whatever, like, push them into action. What was very interesting about this marketing effort that we did is that it took a ton. Like, we got so many messages from people being like, oh, man, I've been following you on social media. Like, I decided to stick it to the socialists and get your Tuttle twins book. And it was this offering of identity, right? Of like, hey, we're planting this flag. We stand for freedom. The enemy is at the gate attacking us. If you don't want them to succeed, come unite with us and show your support by getting our books. And so it gave people a tangible action that translated their identity to something that they could do. I stand for freedom. I'm going to go get those books right now. And so that was a very illuminating thing for me to realize. There's so many broader marketing ideas that you can extract from that about how with critics, competitors, or even concepts. Like, I shared in the talk, as you'll recall, that, like, you know, maybe you're in an industry that isn't controversial like mine, right? But it's like, hey, our enemy, like, I think I give the example of Mucinex, right? Like, their enemy is the common cold. And so they can center their marketing around how everyone hates the cold. And, oh, man, if you're a guy, then you get the man cold, right? And if you don't like having a cold, then you got to get. And so you use that tribalistic, like human psychology, natural response to say, if you don't stand for that, then stand with us. And so even if you're, you don't have critics or whatever, like, there's so many marketing lessons that I think you can extract from an example like this. But for us, it's, it's a very real given that we got these haters out there and love it. Like, whether they love it or not, we're turning them to ambassadors of our brand to help sell even more books. So it's been a lot of fun. What a brilliant, brilliant approach.

And it just brings back how amazed I was with that talk. Because, you know, when you think about one of the things that we share is that, you know, hey, we've traveled a number of places and we never ever see a statue of a critic.

And so for you to be able to turn your enemy into an evangelist and the approach that you took and you're doing good work. I mean, what you've written, the material is excellent. Children need to be reading those books. And I believe Rich, we were first introduced, it was via James Nethery. And this was at.

Before we hit record. Connor and I were talking about that before.

Oh, there you go. Yeah. And so it was at an annual Infinite Banking think tank conference. And James said, hey, we're going to go ahead and hand out copies of these books to everybody. And I brought them home to my kids. And I know Rich has done the same. And so we love what you're doing and the way that you turned something that a lot of entrepreneurs, a lot of businesses may have cowered from, that may have said, oh, gosh, we can't take a stance because we don't want to be perceived as standoffish or defensive. And you didn't approach it that way at all. You united people that were already, like you said they were part of your community, but you just openly shared that and said, hey, go read this thing and take advantage of this coupon code. And I know you also showed some pics and things of what you did on Facebook and how you were posting pictures with these comments, these one star comments, and you actually framed something up for your headquarters as well.

Is that right? Yeah, we, I bought so this magazine. It wasn't just an online magazine. They. It's a physical thing. So I. A copy of the printed version. So that we could cut out the pages and I actually had to buy two copies because it's double sided. So we had to, you know, buy one for each side and, and we got it mounted really nice. It's hanging on my wall over here in the office and as just a constant reminder of, of. Of this principle. Right. And I mean, like, we all know that, like, if you've never like, upset anyone or created any enemies, you're not making waves, you're not doing anything of subs. Naturally, if you're trying to change the world, there are going to be people who disagree with you. And if you don't have people out there who like, totally disagree with what you're doing, you're not really trying to do that much, I feel like. So to me, this is kind of a token reminder of that. And another related thing you may recall from the meeting, the Genius network meeting, I was introduced for the first time to Patrick. I wasn't familiar with him before, even though he lives apparently here in my same state, but I went and got his book, which is titled you stand is your brand. And it was very insightful. To the point that you were just discussing Jason, because as you point out, many business owners would like, shrink or cow or whatever. Like, oh, I don't want to be. I want to be controversial. I don't want to alienate part of my customer base or whatever. But what's very interesting with this idea that your stand is your brand is that by being milquetoast, you may not be attracting. You may attract more support if you take a stand for something and recognize that you're going to have people who disagree with you than if you just try and be like, you know, milk, toast, and appeal to everyone. The theme of the meeting we attended was connection. And I talked about in my talk how connection implies disconnection. Right, right. Or unity implies disunity. It's not like we're all going to ever agree on everything all the time or whatever. It's like, here's our core group and we're being united or we're connecting with this core group. But it means that you have to exclude people so as to define what that unity and connection looks like. And so I very much believe that humans are tribalistic by nature and we can bemoan that fact, or we can lean into it and recognize that we can build a business around that, centered around that idea and take a stand for what we believe in or what we're trying to change or who our customer is not, and say These are our ideal customers. And if you match this, you're going to want to work with us and unite with our team. And so I recognize that there's many businesses out there for which this would be a little bit tougher to do. I mean, if you're Delta Airlines, right, Like, I don't know, make fun of the people who write Amtrak, maybe that's your, you know, you're like, I don't know what, what it is. Right. But you don't. This doesn't mean you have to be political. It doesn't mean you have to wade into like freedom versus socialism. Like, that's just my industry. But, but, but I do feel like, you know, you have to give your tribe and you have to identify for your tribe who the enemy is or what the enemy is. Again, it could be the common cold. But if you don't do that, you're not taking advantage of this very powerful psychological impact on your marketing that can really help boost your business.

Oh, just so amazing.

And it's fascinating too, because this is all centered around the core of the things that you do with the Libertas Institute, and it overlaps obviously directly from, with your focus on promotion of liberty and freedom. And then that's the underlying underpinning components of the books that you write. But yet the whole marketing component of it is just really you bringing your entrepreneurial spirit to that which you're already doing. So there's a lot of really wonderful components happening to what you're sharing with us, Connor, and bringing it back to the Tuttle twins again, tuttletwins.com, incredible resources there with all these incredible books. This has developed now from. Started with one book and then it went to another and another and another. And so I'd like to hear a little bit maybe to share with our viewers, what was the first book that you guys went with? Why did you choose that one? And then how, how did the progression take place as you decided to go?

Yeah.

What's the next level of interest that we want to be able to teach to children of this age?

It's so interesting, right? Like in any endeavor of human life, one opportunity begets another. And there's this concept from, I think it stems from evolutionary biology, which is where the term was coined. But the idea of the adjacent possible. Think of a coral reef where there's just the high concentration of biological divers, these little critters, and they're mimicking one another and in beating and trying to out evolve or, you know, whatever the other One. And so you have this just profound diversity of really amazing biological difference and spectrum of crazy, you know, features and characteristics. So it's this idea that when you're clustered together and when you're around other people or ideas, Matt Ridley calls this, like ideas having sex with one another, right? Like there's this concept of when the cell phone was invented, then we have apps. And now that we have apps, we have, you know, Uber. And now that we have Uber, blind people can, you know, be far more mobile than they ever were. And like every little thing begets another with the tunnel wins. We didn't start with any grand vision. It. We did not foresee what it would become. Elijah and I just like, hey, it'd be fun to do a kid's book, you know, and okay, do a kid's book. And what should we, you know, do it. And we had this idea of taking like a classic, important book and making like a kid version, quote unquote, of the book. And we thought like, we could just do one book and that's it because not a lot of people buy it. So if this is like our one time shot, what book should we do for both of us? The most. One of the most, if not the most influential books or essays was the Law by Frederick Bastiat, which talks about, you know, rights, justice, proper role of government, freedom and so forth in 1850 by a French economist. Many of your listeners, I'm sure, familiar with him. So we did that book and we put it out there. Funny little story. I went to Freedom Fest in Las Vegas. We had a booth there to sell this first book. We only had one book. We had a banner, we had all this stuff. And I had set up the online E commerce, right, so that people could buy online, but no one knew about Tuttle twins. It was a brand new thing. There was no whatever. So maybe every hour or two I'd get a little order notification on my phone. I'm sitting behind the booth at Freedom Fest. I'm telling all these people walking by about the book. Elijah was there with me and we're trying to evangelize this new idea. And I get this notification on my phone and I look at it and 50, 50, who's ordering 50 books? Ron Paul and his wife ordering a copy of the book for all of their grandkids. Because Ron Paul's been a big influence on my life in terms of, you know, my introduction to freedom and so forth. And so that to me, like, things come full circle, there's my market signal that we're on to something. So we sold enough where and I were like, okay, let's do another one, you know, and then do another one. So that adjacent possible where then we doing these books, and people kept buying them enough where we could justify continuing, but it wasn't still this massive thing. But then a few years ago, it's like, okay, now that we're doing kids books, the adjacent possible is all these kids get older. So what are we gonna do? That we have books for teenagers now, Then the parents are like, well, what about our youngest? And now we have books for toddlers. And then now we have a monthly magazine, and we have a podcast, and we have curriculum, and we just launched a cartoon. So every. Every little thing that we've done sparks this idea or we get ideas from our community about, like, hey, you should, you know, do this, or what about that? And so it's been fun for us to just kind of incrementally go along where I'd say about two or three years ago, that's when we started to think of this as like an initiative and started strategic planning. And, like, where are we going with thing? Because it was starting to pick up a little momentum. Certainly as we were looking into doing a cartoon series, we raised like 5 million bucks for that from like 8 or 9,000 investors. And so for me, here's a very quick data point. So our five or six years, 2014 to 2019, we sold about 750,000 books total, inclusive of all those years. And all of our books. 750,000.

Which, I mean, yeah, we're self published. Like, we're building a new thing. Like, to me, it was. I was. I was blown a bit away by what we were able to accomplish. Especially, like, we do this through our nonprofit. It's not my primary day job. It's just this fun little side project that was starting to grow. So 750,000 in 2020 alone. We sold 1.3 million books just in that year, which was almost double the entire. Wow. Five, six years combined. And I think this year we might hit 1.5 million. We're on track to hopefully hit that. And so things are just, you know, so. I mean, Covid has been horrible in many ways, but one of the silver linings, as we all know, is, like, homeschooling has increased. Parents are way more aware of, like, the problems of the education system and more willing to take action and try and figure out the right thing for their kids, rather than just defaulting to, oh, the, you know, the traditional school system or whatever is going to be great. So it's been good to us. And by that I mean it's been helpful that we can get the word out to far more families to help them educate their kids about these ideas.

What do you, what do you think? You know, is what's it going to take? You know, what's it going to take to really achieve, to really tip the scales? You know, there's just such a growing wave of, for lack of better description, I would just say lunatics out there. And I.

And I say that regardless of again, respecting difference of opinion, respecting difference of perspective, respecting difference of ideas to solve problems. But what do you fundamentally believe it's going to take to tip the scale?

So imagine you live next door to Bob and Bob spreads his lawn furniture and trash and everything on his front lawn. Bob has so much trash and waste and stuff that starts to spill over onto your front lawn. Except the problem is that you don't quite know where your front lawn ends and his begins. There's no fence and you're unclear where the property boundary even is. You thought at one point it was kind of there, but you don't really know. Well, because you don't know what that boundary is. You can't protect it, you can't defend it, you can't articulate it. You can't hold Bob accountable because Bob can just continue to encroach further and further on what you think is your property, but you don't know for sure. I think that's kind of analogous to the situation that we're in. What do we need to do? Fight back? What do we need to do to protect our rights? Well, I think the school system. I'm going to put my tinfoil hat on for just a minute. I think that it is with intention that the school systems of Western society in past decades have done what John Taylor Gatto, a 30 year public school teacher in New York once called and he wrote a book about this, dumbing us down. I think that when you study totalitarian societies and dystopian literature is full of this for a reason. Those in power want to have an intellectually malleable populace that doesn't understand their rights, doesn't understand right versus wrong. Morality has to be subjective. Speak your truth, not the truth. Speak your truth and I'll speak mine. And all these things combine to allow those in power to maintain and augment their power. Again, there's ample historical examples, but I think we're living this reality today where the grade A graduates of our school systems are woefully ignorant about lessons from history. We're all familiar with that quote. Those who don't learn from the past are doomed to repeat it. Problem is that kids today are not taught to learn from no one. No one is taught to learn from the past. At best, they are taught to learn about the past. Almost as if we walk the rising generation through a museum of history, Canadian, American, western society, whatever we want to call it. And we say, oh, look, these are things that happened long ago. And look at the funny things they used to wear and the utensils they used. And here's this art piece that this person. Okay, let's go to the cafeteria, kids. Time to move on with their day. And there's no exposure to ideas and motivations and psychology and influences that are highly relevant to our life. Granted, we're in a different circumstance. I concede that readily. But we can learn from the past. The tension between power and the people, the influences that motivate in America, for example, the founding fathers to throw off the shackles of the world's biggest superpower at the time. Why did they do that? It wasn't just about, oh, taxation without representation.

That was over a 3 cent tax, right?

It was much, much bigger. And so if we don't understand those ideas, we can't relate them to our day and thereby avoid repeating some of the mistakes of the past. I think today our biggest challenge is the rising popularity of socialism and even outright Marxism. And it's trendy and it's hip and people are wearing their Che Guevara shirts and everything without realizing anything. Oh, this is democratic socialism. This isn't like anything before. And so because the rising generation who become voters are ignorant of what socialism even is or what it has looked like in the past, they are far more likely to adopt these viewpoints because they're too dumb to know any different. And I don't mean that in a pejorative sense. I mean that in a factual sense. Right? So I have many hopes. I run a think tank. We try and change laws. We're pretty good at it. But at best, these are band aids. Because unless people, unless voters, unless the public understands their rights, they're going to continue to be violated. And more importantly, the people are going to go along with that. They're going to beg, as they have with COVID for lockdowns and control and control my neighbor because I'm scared and whatever it takes to keep me safe. Sure, dictatorial government. Take whatever powers you want to say I can't go to church or sing in a choir or whatever.

I'm an optimist at heart, but I'm a realist enough to recognize that if we want a brighter future, we have to have an educated public. I'll end with this answer. I'm really passionate about American history and the lessons from history that can and should be applied today. But what's very interesting is that John Adams has this quote where he says that the real revolution happened in the 15 years preceding the first shot being fired at Lexington and Concord, which is what triggered the shot heard around the world that triggered the American Revolution. He says the 15 years prior to that shot being fired was the real revolution. And what he goes on to explain and what he was referring to is the fact that John Locke's writings in England, written under a pseudonym because it was treasonous to be saying all these things at first. John Locke's writings were so influential and spread like wildfire throughout the American colonies that people started having this big mind shift. And they saw themselves no longer as British subjects, but as individuals, free and independent individuals, sovereign individuals. And it was that intellectual journey that they went on that allowed them to say, well, wait a minute, what are we going to do about this now? Now that we have a new understanding, we have to affect political change to reflect and protect that new understanding of our identity. We are never going to win. We are never going to change things if the, if the public is ignorant of the lessons from history, because we will be doomed to repeat it. And so, honestly, that, more than anything, is what motivates me in the morning to get up and get at it with the Tuttle twin stuff. We're working on history curriculum and all kinds of other stuff, because I feel like the state of the world is such that we need, like, it's great for the Tuttle twins to be out there. We need like 400 more things like the Tunnel twins, all trying to, like, help teach these ideas to the rising generation, because the obstacles we face are enormous. The incentives are all messed up in the education system. And, and, and there are, you know, strong forces that want to keep us dumbed down and intellectually ignorant about these lessons. And so I, you know, I kind of feel like David versus Goliath in a sense, and we're out there just trying to do our part. But, but that, to me, is the answer about how we can do it. It starts with dinner table conversations, as trite as that sounds in the aggregate. That is what is going to matter the most. The Character formation, the critical thinking of the young child, the exposure to true history, the willingness to be skeptical of power. These things are not going to be encouraged by the government, by the media that carries the government's water, by the schools that are run by the government. Like you can't expect the government to extol the virtues of freedom and highlight the problems with government. Like they're not going to do that. So it's up to us. And if parents don't take action with the Tuttle twins or whatever else they're doing, delegating to this institution the most formative years of intellectual development of their children, which inevitably leads to more generations of, you know, ignorant voters and we repeat the cycle over and over again. So to me it's all education policy reform, which I do day to day, is at best a band aid to be engaged in these political battles. It starts at home, it starts with children, it is a long term investment. But I think it's one that is critical to be made wholeheartedly.

Agree so much. Our mentor Nelson Nash said, and you know who wrote becoming your own banker, he, he was so adamant that you can't solve problems from top down. You have to, it has to be a bottom up solution. And so here you're referencing the work that you, you do on the policy side on a day to day basis. But the real work is actually in the title Twins. It's in the grassroots method by which you're bringing families together, you're bringing conversation to the dinner table about things. What you're really doing is this idea of learning from history. Well, you're channeling that by simplifying and reallocating how past works have been written in a new format. So they're digestible in a modern age. With modernizing these things like the law, like I pencil by Leonard E. Reed, which coincidentally you gave a good analogy earlier as you're talking about the app and the iPhone. And we have this and it leads to this, and it leads to this. The adjacent possible conversation is a way to describe how I pencil comes together. The story of the making of a pencil and all the world global resources that have to come together for that single thing to be created and the harmony, the harmonic chaos that has to happen in an entrepreneurial format to bring things into life and into existence. And then we have the Atlas Shrugged version that you have and like all these great books and works which are bringing, you know, some, some level of his history into the, into the modern age, then turning it into a digestible format For. For kids of various ages, I think, you know, really, you know, maybe speak to that a little bit about the ages, but you really can hit kids in a number of ways. Now, coincidentally, I bought my books before I even had kids, so in preparation and preparation for when they're old enough to be.

Investment for the future.

Absolutely.

Yeah.

And you know what we share often as well, Connor? Is that so Children. And you know, this, you know, children have a much higher degree of neuroplasticity than adults do. And so the referencing the back backward bicycle video, for example, where, you know, that's why it's so advantageous for kids to learn a new language at such an early age. So describing, you know, the way that you do in these books, children pick up on this. They pick up on this much faster than adults do.

And we have to share a quick example of that, really quick, because you're exactly right. I got an email from this dad who was at the grocery store, and he's walking down the potato chip aisle with his son and turns to his son, but he's not there. Looks back, and the son's standing in front of the potato chips. Walks back over to his son. He's like, son, what are you. What are you doing? And he turns to his dad and he says, dad, I now get why there's so many kinds of potato chips. It's spontaneous order, just like we read in the Tuttle Twins book. And the dad writes to me, he's like, I don't know of a single adult who knows what spontaneous order is. And here my kid knows more than most adults do. And that, to me is honestly one of the most surprising things. Working on the Tuttle Twins is, yes, as we said the outset, I like simplifying these ideas. And so we're trying to drill them down for kids, but these are still challenging, you know, complex ideas. This isn't like hop on pop, you know, and like silly whatever stories of just, you know, that kids, you know, are easy for them to read. This is like real world stuff, stuff most adults don't understand. And I've been blown away at the degree to which kids can understand these ideas. And I feel like it's not only the neuroplasticity and the, The. The ability to understand new ideas and embrace them. I feel like it's also this idea of.

We talk to kids at or beneath their age too often. Kids want to be big kids, big kids want to be adults. And so if we, if we give them the right material that challenges them and Motivates them to kind of level up, if you will, intellectually. Like, I've been blown away at the degree to which many of them rise to the occasion. Wow.

And what we're talking about, again, for our viewers and listeners, if you just ease on over to tuttletwins.com again, that's tuttletwins.com and be sure to get your hands on these incredible resources, get them in the hands of your children, have conversation, talk of the material is just outstanding. And I just, again, I go back to, you know, turning your enemies into your evangelists. Such an incredible, incredible talk at the Genius Network. And it's been such a pleasure, Connor, to be with you. And we would like to, you know, request some additional information about your think tank. I think that that is something that we'd certainly be interested in, you know, learning more about and how we can begin to communicate, you know, here in Canada and start to get messaging out. Because, you know, we talk about in our circles and with colleagues in our industry, everybody talks about how children should be educated to a much higher degree in terms of financial literacy.

What we're talking about here is much different than that. And equally, if not far more important to be sharing with children. And so we'd love to. Haven't expanded and explore that with you a little bit further, if you're open to that.

Yeah, no, it's. It's. I'll say briefly on that point. Like, I started Libertas Institute out of a desire to affect change. You know, I love education, but I don't want to just be Johnny Appleseed out, you know, planting intellectual seeds in the countryside, hoping that 30 years from now they'll sprout into something like, I want change now. I'm a very impatient person. I want to change the world like today. And so I started Libertas to say, like, I want to build an organization that can go get laws changed and affect policy reform. There are groups like mine across America. There's also groups like mine throughout Canada. So I'm looking up right now, looks like there's 11 of them. There's a website or there's an organization called Atlas Network. And Atlas Network is kind of an international association of free market, pro freedom think tanks and organizations trying to affect change. And so you can go to atlasnetwork.org and you can look up in their network and their directory, you know, who's in Canada. There's like the Canada Taxpayers Federation or something, and there's the Frazier Society or Fraser Institute, and you know, so there's a number of these groups I'm reading right now that there's 11, and I don't know them all, but there are groups out there. And what's been amazing to me is, as I do a lot of these interviews, especially in the United States, I share where they can find a separate location, all the United States. And people are like, I had no idea this group was in my backyard. Like, now I go to their events and I, you know, I'm like, supporting them and talking to them about ideas I have and whatever. And I started my group in particular because there was a group here in my state, but I felt like they weren't effective and weren't working on things I thought needed to be worked on. And so that to me was like, no, there's a void in the marketplace. I'm just going to go start myself. And that's not for everyone. I'm not saying, like, go start a think tank if no one's doing what you're doing. It's a lot of work, and it's my path. That doesn't mean necessarily that it's anyone else's out there, but there are good people out there who are trying to affect change first, identify who they are, what they're working on. You may find that, oh, no one's working on my issue. Should I do something about it? But chances are these groups either can help or can point you in the right direction. Sometimes what happens is people will come to us and say, hey, I've got this really important issue. And I'll say, I'm with you. We just don't work on that issue. But I know who cares about it because I'm in these circles. So let me connect you to, you know, this elected official or to this little grassroots group or something like that. And so we can be a connector to those people because we're in the world of, like, knowing who all is working on what. And so these organizations can help as well to, you know, in Canada, there's. There's a dozen, you know, 11. So that's a good place to start to try and find who's trying to work on this stuff and whether, you know, be of interest to go connect up with them and support what they're doing.

Thank you so much for that resource and in the spirit of connection. So we're. We're just honored to connect you to our viewers, to our listeners. Such a pleasure to have you on the show today. And, Rich, do you want to take us home?

Yeah, absolutely. Connor, this was great. Love your, your, your fresh ideas and thinking and really a lot of them are ideas that are from long ago being reactivated and re energized with the energy you bring to the table. And now, you know, in the series of books that I have from Tidal Twins, you know, there's not a lot of imagery of superheroes necessarily. And you may not think of yourself as a superhero. You don't always wear a cape to the office. I don't imagine. Maybe on, on, you know, Fridays, the.

Odd time it's Halloween, you know, a couple days after he's like, as a.

Matter of fact, I am wearing.

Let me turn around.

But we, we always like to ask and, and just, you know, invite you to share with our viewers. Who would you most like to be a hero?

That's an interesting question. I'm actually going to flip it. You're familiar, I'm sure most of your listeners are, with the idea of the hero's journey. This idea that there's kind of a formula in all of the epic tales that is almost like consistent between all these stories. Right? There's a, there's, you know, Frodo Baggins and he's called to this adventure, but he's nervous. Should he go, you know, and then there's a guide there to point the way and he has to overcome this challenge, but then there's defeat and then he has to. And so whether it's the Matrix or Aladdin or, I don't know, other stories aren't coming to mind right now. But all the big epic tales throughout history often follow these stories. So people have written all kinds of stuff about the hero's journey. There's a very interesting business book that I would, for any of the business folks out there called, oh, I've got it right over here. Building a Story Brand. This is written by Donald Miller. And what he talks about in his book Building a Story Brand, he's got a Story Brand podcast too, is he takes the hero's journey and he applies it to business. And if I were to boil everything down, which is difficult because I underlined a lot of stuff in that book, we actually even went re architected our whole website for Tuttle Twins after I read that book. If I were to distill everything he says down to one thing, it is that we should be the guide. The problem is everyone is a hero in their own journey and their own story, and what they need is a guide to point them the way. When I started doing Tuttle Twins, it was a Very, very hero centric thing, which I think this question kind of points to, right? It's like, I'll be the hero and help you and I'm going to benefit your life. But what he, what Donald Miller talks about in his book is that you're actually competing against other people because they are the hero in their lives. And if you're setting yourself up as a hero, there's kind of an ego competition or something like that. Whereas if you reframe what you do as I will be the guide. I know the way. Right, Let me, let me point like I'm, I'm. Oh, man, I'm going to a Harry Potter Halloween thing tonight and I'm a Muggle. My wife and kids know all the Harry Potter stuff. They do Harry Potter, Trivial Pursuit, like every night. What's the guy? Gandalf, right? Gandalf, yeah. Is that right? Gandalf? Yeah. That's Frodo.

That's Frodo.

That's Frodo. What's the guy's name in Harry Potter?

It's a wizard dude.

Yeah, the old wizard dude. There we go. Dumbledore. There's so many listeners out there like rolling their eyes right now.

They're like, these guys don't know what this.

Yeah. Okay, so Dumbledore, right? Like, like dumb like Harry Potter again. Like, here's this little kid, like, same as Frodo, same as Neo, same as all these stories. And so Gandalf is the guide and he can be there to point the way to Harry Potter and help when needed and illuminate the path, right? And so instead when I position myself as the guide and I say, hey, parents, right? I know what you're going through and I know that you're struggling, but hey, I figured things out. I'm a little bit down the path from you, right? And I have a plan because the Guide has to have a plan. So here's how we're going to throw the ring in Mount Doom or here's how we're going to defeat whatever the Harry Potter bad guy's name is with the bald head and thee who shall not be named, right? And you know, here's how we're going to just. In the Matrix, right? Here's how we're going to defeat the machines. Like, so the Guide has the plan. And so when I present to parents and say, I have a plan. And here it is, the Teletrons books. You're going to get the books. You're going to get the activity workbooks. You're Going to sit down with your kids. At the end of the books, we have these questions. You're going to talk about them, your kids are going to understand, you're going to understand. Then suddenly that hero on their journey feels emboldened to say, ah, I can take the next few steps with confidence because I have a guide in my life now to help show the way. So reframing your question as I have and kind of a long winded way, I have really tried to set myself up and kind of pull back the ego, pull back the, like, yay, look at what I'm doing, which we all naturally have, and say, how can I serve other people as their guide? How can I position myself and market myself and kind of build a community around me, serving them as the guide and pointing the way? So if that is the question, that really comes down to, like every family in the world, like I, we translate our books into 15 languages. We just start putting out a cartoon, which is at Tuttletwins TV, which is free to watch. So we got two episodes out. Now we're doing a whole season of 12 episodes like I'm on a, on a mission and our team to change the world and reach every kid, especially the ones that are growing up in communist houses that need this message the most. And so it's what motivates me. And clearly we got a lot of work to do. So I really appreciate, like you were saying, Jason, sharing the connection here with your platform and allowing me to talk to your listeners because it's something I'm very passionate about.

Well, we certainly thank you and we hope that you can serve as their guide. And the first step for folks to take is, again, just ease on over to tuttletwins.com again, that's tuttletwins.com and get your hands on these resources and begin your journey. And so, Connor, it was such a pleasure and I look forward to seeing you at Genius. Are you attending the annual event?

I'm not going to the annual event. I have a conflict, unfortunately. But I'll be at future meetings for sure.

Looking forward to seeing you there. And if there's anything that we can do for you, please call upon us anytime. But gentlemen, make the rest of your week great. And for our viewers who are on the YouTubes, if you just take a look at the recommended playlist that has magically appeared on your screen, please continue your journey of learning. That's why we put these resources together to be of service to you and to help you in your journey. And guys, this was absolutely outstanding. Thank you again, Connor, so much to you and to your teammates for all that you do. We appreciate you very much.

You're welcome. And thank you.

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