488: Connor Boyack—Spontaneous Order

Spontaneous Order might sound like a contradiction, but according to author, entrepreneur, and educator Connor Boyack, some of society's most important innovations emerge without a master plan. Mike sits down with Connor, the bestselling co-creator and co-author of The Tuttle Twins book series that inspired the hit animated show, founder and president of the Libertas Network http://libertas.org/ and a leading advocate for teaching the principles of liberty, entrepreneurship, personal responsibility, and free markets to the next generation. Connor shares the mission that drives his work: helping families understand how free people, voluntary cooperation, and decentralized problem-solving can create remarkable outcomes. Along the way, he and Mike explore the power of ideas, the importance of questioning assumptions, why history still matters, and how a children's book series grew into a cultural phenomenon reaching millions of families. This conversation offers a fascinating look at the relationship between freedom, education, and the unexpected order that can arise when people are left free to innovate.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:03Mike 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.

• 0:09Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 0:10Mike Rowe?

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

• 0:13Speaker 01

  I was hoping you'd ask. Yes.

• 0:16Mike Rowe?

  Here it is.

• 0:32Mike Rowe?

  Right. Yeah, it's kinda catchy.

• 0:34Speaker 01

  Yeah, it is.

• 0:35Mike 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.

• 0:52Speaker 01

  It's an animated series, Mike.

• 0:53Mike Rowe?

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

• 1:21Speaker 01

  Yeah. What was he doing beforehand?

• 1:23Mike Rowe?

  He was a web designer.

• 1:24Speaker 01

  Yeah. He was a web designer who wound up becoming an author of books.

• 1:30Mike Rowe?

  Yeah.

• 1:31Speaker 01

  And the creator of an animated series that teaches kids all about economics and politics and...

• 1:41Mike Rowe?

  Social anthropology.

• 1:43Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:43Mike Rowe?

  And physics, and really like...

• 1:46Speaker 01

  And persuasiveness.

• 1:48Mike 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.

• 2:06Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 2:06Mike Rowe?

  And their parents.

• 2:08Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 2:08Mike Rowe?

  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? Zebediah? Ezra?

• 2:21Speaker 01

  Why would you do that?

• 2:21Mike Rowe?

  Uh, Elijah.

• 2:23Speaker 01

  Elijah, that's right.

• 2:24Mike Rowe?

  Elijah.

• 2:25Speaker 01

  I don't know his last name.

• 2:25Mike Rowe?

  So this, you know, so you got this guy Connor, who's designing websites and whatnot, and his artistic partner, Elijah, and they, they start writing these books, and of course, the publishers don't want them, you know, the kids publishers, it's too high-minded, and the adult publishers don't want to do anything for kids, and, long story short, they sell like seven million of these books. They create a publishing empire. The books turn into, I believe, the number one series over on the Angel platform, where these crazy Tuttle Twins, with the help of these animated devices, robots,

• 3:04Mike Rowe?

  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 a genius 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, and it's fun to meet people who have cracked the code in other ways.

• 3:38Speaker 01

  I gotta tell you that, you know, he's talking about the titles of some of these books in the episode, and, and I'm listening, and I'm going, I want to read that. And I know it's a kid's book.

• 3:49Mike Rowe?

  Yeah.

• 3:49Speaker 01

  But it's like, I just know that he's gonna delve into it as thoughtfully and as eloquently as he did right here.

• 3:57Mike Rowe?

  Yeah.

• 3:57Speaker 01

  Explaining them. He's a really well-spoken guy.

• 3:59Mike Rowe?

  Well, we're talking about, like, the seminal books on economics. We're talking about Hayek. We're talking about Henry Hazlitt. We're talking, like, down the list it goes. So, everything from eminent domain to broken windows theories to...

• 4:14Mike Rowe?

  All these, you know, 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 Connor is among them, because he didn't just come up with a book and then a TV show. Now he has Libertas, which is a think tank.

• 4:57Mike Rowe?

  And other Libertas 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.

• 5:25Speaker 01

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

• 5:34Mike Rowe?

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

• 5:39Speaker 01

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

• 5:41Mike Rowe?

  Well, I went with Ezekiel, Elijah. I knew it was a prophet.

• 5:44Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 5:45Mike Rowe?

  And I knew it started with a vowel.

• 5:47Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 5:48Mike Rowe?

  Beyond that, you know now everything I knew before I sat down with Connor Boyack, but you're about to learn a whole lot more, including a little teaser coming up in the next season of the Tuttle Twins, featuring.

• 6:07Mike Rowe?

  We'll wait for it. Right after this.

• 6:14Mike Rowe?

  So as some of you may have heard, I went to Congress 16 years ago to testify before a House Subcommittee. And then again, a year later, to testify before a Senate Subcommittee about the need to reinvigorate the skilled trades with some kind of national effort that would make a more persuasive case for a lot of good jobs out there that didn't require a four-year degree. Well, 15 years later, I finally heard back from the government, and I am delighted to tell you about a program called BuildFreedom.us. This is the national PR campaign that MicroWorks has been talking about for a decade and a

• 6:57Mike Rowe?

  half now, and it's focused on 300,000 or 400,000 excellent jobs in the defense industrial base. These are the electricians and the plumbers and the steam finners and the pipe fitters and the CNC operators and the shipbuilders and so forth. But in this case, all of those trades are focused on building out our national infrastructure through the defense industrial base. So people who are building our autonomous weapons, our planes, our ships, it's only a matter of national security, and it's a very big deal. And on a personal level, it's really been very gratifying. Build Freedom donated $10 million to MicroWorks. The money's available right now for you if you want to pursue a skill that's in demand

• 7:40Mike Rowe?

  and work in the defense industrial base. I think it's an opportunity of a lifetime. Go to BuildFreedom.us, see what's available, and then apply for a scholarship from MicroWorks. The money's there, burning a hole in my pocket. Go get some. BuildFreedom.us.

• 8:01Mike Rowe?

  We good?

• 8:02Speaker 01

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

• 8:04Mike Rowe?

  We are ellipses, ellipses. And then it's good? 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 gonna 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.

• 8:42Mike Rowe?

  From ABC World News Headquarters, this is World News Tonight with Diane Sawyer? And they're like, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. Not that. Um, Boyack. What's the etymology there?

• 8:59Speaker 02

  That is, uh, Scottish, coming through England.

• 9:03Mike Rowe?

  Yeah.

• 9:04Speaker 02

  It was boyk.

• 9:05Mike Rowe?

  Uh huh.

• 9:06Speaker 02

  And then they came across the pond and it became Boyack. And, uh, so I went back. I tried to figure out, did the boyacs have a tartan? You know, the clan?

• 9:13Mike Rowe?

  Yeah.

• 9:14Speaker 02

  And they don't.

• 9:15Mike Rowe?

  No plaid, no nothing?

• 9:16Speaker 02

  So I just picked the Stuart one, the kind of royal steward. And, uh, so we went back to Scotland, did some family history, gosh, like, almost 20 years ago.

• 9:22Mike Rowe?

  Well, it's a great name regardless, man. Connor Boyack. It's a fun name to say.

• 9:26Speaker 02

  It's an uncommon name.

• 9:27Mike Rowe?

  Yeah.

• 9:28Speaker 02

  And for years, I was the only one, but now I found on Facebook some, like, 14-year-old kid named Connor Boyack.

• 9:33Mike Rowe?

  I'll tell you what's annoying when 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.

• 9:51Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 9:52Mike Rowe?

  Okay, I mean, you gotta quote Mike Rowe, you're doing an article called, "Where Have All The Trade Jobs Gone?"

• 9:54Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 9:56Mike 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 you got my name wrong, guys. But they didn't. There's really a Mark Rowe.

• 10:06Speaker 02

  And they went out and interviewed him.

• 10:07Mike Rowe?

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

• 10:10Speaker 02

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

• 10:14Mike Rowe?

  He sounds like he's me. He's like a doppelganger. He's got like my same basic life and he works for another guy named Jim Rowe. So anyway.

• 10:23Speaker 02

  Is this like a Dirty Jobs multiverse where you've got like alter ego Rose out there all?

• 10:29Mike Rowe?

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

• 10:33Speaker 02

  Yeah, of course.

• 10:34Mike 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.

• 11:06Speaker 02

  Right.

• 11:07Mike 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?

• 11:16Speaker 02

  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.

• 11:58Speaker 02

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

• 12:07Mike Rowe?

  That's worth an ellipses or a pause or something. Couple of guys sitting down, trying to figure out a new creative way to tell stories and you know what? I'm going to go ahead and start a think tank. What I mean, I think everybody sort of understands what it is.

• 12:21Speaker 02

  It's a weird word.

• 12:22Mike Rowe?

  I mean. Think and tank.

• 12:25Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 12:25Mike Rowe?

  Grouped up together.

• 12:26Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 12:27Mike Rowe?

  I don't know whether it's.

• 12:28Speaker 02

  Sounds very pretentious and.

• 12:29Mike Rowe?

  It really does, but there's also something kind of humble about it. Like a tank, right? I mean, it's a tank. It's the place where you might store old water.

• 12:38Speaker 02

  Or assault somebody.

• 12:39Mike Rowe?

  Like septic is a great.

• 12:41Speaker 02

  There you go.

• 12:42Mike Rowe?

  Procedure for.

• 12:42Speaker 02

  That's why you're clicking with it.

• 12:44Mike Rowe?

  So, yeah, so you just crossed out septic and wrote in think.

• 12:47Speaker 02

  Exactly.

• 12:48Mike Rowe?

  Like, let's do that.

• 12:48Speaker 02

  That looks better on the resume at least.

• 12:50Mike Rowe?

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

• 12:53Speaker 02

  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 hired, they think and act this way as well. They're like, I want my life energy to be put towards something useful and impactful.

• 13:18Mike Rowe?

  Right.

• 13:18Speaker 02

  And rather than.

• 13:20Mike Rowe?

  How old were you at this point?

• 13:21Speaker 02

  This was, uh, 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 about. And so I was like, how do I do some good with this? So I was building websites for like political campaigns or friends nonprofits and thinking like, could that be my path to impact? Long story short, I said, you know what? Like, I have a gift of not only this technical background, but I'm also a gift of communicator. And I'd been writing books and blogs, which were back in 2007, eight, nine. So I said, how do I flip it? How can I quit my job, start a nonprofit and actually just go advance ideas?

• 14:06Speaker 02

  Not only through education, preaching to people about these ideas, free market type ideas, but also like actually move the needle and change laws. So how do you change hearts, minds, but then actually enact that into policy? So that's what a think tank typically is, is how do we formulate ideas? How do we persuade other people to accept those ideas? But then what's the strategy to get those ideas turned into practice so that we can go influence, you know, policymakers or somebody that actually affect change rather than just preach into the wind and hope somebody listens?

• 14:39Mike Rowe?

  Nobody wants a lecture. Nobody wants a sermon.

• 14:42Speaker 02

  Right.

• 14:44Mike Rowe?

  I think persuasiveness as an idea is probably more for sale today than it's ever been. Certainly, it's, there's more discernment, people are desperate for it, that 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?

• 15:08Speaker 02

  So I had been writing a blog, as I mentioned, and just people started reading it. And I was a very poor writer and communicator to start with. I chuckled just a moment ago because my weakest subjects in school were English, history, and then into college, economics, hated them. And a few years later down the road, I had written maybe eight or nine books at that point. And my mom was back in San Diego and bumped into my eighth grade English teacher. And my mom had been on the city council, she was kind of, so they, she saw her, oh, hey, Mary Lee, is my mom's name. So they started talking and my eighth grade teacher asked, inquired after me, how's Connor doing? Now, when your eighth grade English teacher, like 20 years later remembers you by name,

• 15:53Speaker 02

  it either means you were a stellar student or quite the opposite, and I'll let you, you know.

• 15:57Mike Rowe?

  Or you just had a great name. Connor Boyack.

• 16:00Speaker 02

  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 on to something, I'm building this audience, but I kind of suck at this, so I need to get really good really fast.

• 16:22Mike 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 Redux. They've invited me to come back on.

• 16:33Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 16:34Mike Rowe?

  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

• 16:42Speaker 02

  Beautiful.

• 16:42Mike Rowe?

  super cool.

• 16:43Speaker 02

  Moved me to tears.

• 16:46Mike Rowe?

  How do you know you're good at something?

• 16:47Speaker 02

  Because I was laughing a lot.

• 16:48Mike Rowe?

  When you make Connor boy act cry. No, they were like, well, what are you, how are you thinking? Like, what sort of lesson? Wrong word, maybe, but what's the morality play?

• 16:58Speaker 02

  The takeaway, yeah.

• 17:00Mike 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 Anna and our, you know, we're condemned to repeat what we don't understand.

• 17:28Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 17:29Mike Rowe?

  But at the same time, the past does not equal the future.

• 17:33Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 17:33Mike Rowe?

  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.

• 17:45Speaker 02

  I speak to a lot of youth groups and the main message that I try to convey is that adults don't know everything you think they do. They're just really good at faking it. You know, young people have such anxiety about their future, especially right now with AI, right? And they think, oh, how am I ever going to be that good or do that good or do that thing, right? So to your point, it's like, how can we help young people see that we adults are just really good at projecting? We're really good at kind of the theater of competence without really having the substance thereof all the time.

• 18:16Mike Rowe?

  Hiding our insecurities a little better, maybe than a 12-year-old can?

• 18:19Speaker 02

  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 figure-outable. 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.

• 18:59Speaker 02

  And then it's little old Connor Boyack, not an economist, not a lawyer, you know, but I've figured it out. And if you 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.

• 19:40Speaker 02

  And now they're the ones that I'm most known for because I've 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.

• 20:05Mike Rowe?

  What were the books you had written prior to the Tuttle Twins? That surprised your former English teacher?

• 20:16Mike Rowe?

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• 21:38Speaker 02

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

• 21:48Speaker 02

  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.

• 22:04Mike Rowe?

  Big topics, kind of a wonky approach, data-driven. I'm guessing you're like, you're not telling stories at this point?

• 22:09Speaker 02

  Heavy on storytelling, including my own.

• 22:11Mike Rowe?

  Oh, really?

• 22:12Speaker 02

  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, that's data's very important, but there was no storytelling.

• 22:27Mike Rowe?

  It's not the tip of the spear.

• 22:29Speaker 02

  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

• 23:13Speaker 02

  Twins, the stories of our, the Tuttle Twins characters, suddenly this stuff becomes really interesting.

• 23:19Mike Rowe?

  But you're also, I mean, when you really got on my radar, it's when I realized you were. 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.

• 23:36Speaker 02

  Right.

• 23:37Mike Rowe?

  And you're sort of distilling, reimagining them, presenting them to a different audience. You know, Haslett's book.

• 23:44Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 23:45Mike Rowe?

  Economics in One Lesson.

• 23:46Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 23:48Mike Rowe?

  That was an eye opener. 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.

• 23:59Speaker 02

  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, you know, 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?

• 24:34Mike Rowe?

  Zero point zero.

• 24:36Speaker 02

  You're a little more cynical than I, but if I were to round down, I would be where you're at. Okay, different example. So as you mentioned, I have a Tuttle Twins book based off of The Economics in One Lesson. We turned it into what we call The Tuttle Twins and the Food Truck Fiasco. So we, we use a food truck setting and they're having to battle the local regulations that protect the restaurants because the restaurant owner is buddies with the mayor. So now you have protectionism where the government is favoring a certain, you know, anyway. So we get into some of these core ideas that Henry Haslett talks about, but in this fun story that kids can understand. And we introduce the seven or eight basic terms that Henry Haslett talks about in his book. So I take the Tuttle Twins book, Food Truck Fiasco.

• 25:21Speaker 02

  And I go out here on the street and I say, sir, do you have kids? Oh, yeah, I have kids. Okay, how old are they? You know, 12, 10, 8. Okay, great. Hey, do you think it's important for them to understand how the world works and how economies work? You know, I think it's 90% plus, you know, parents, they want their kids to not miss out. They want their kids to understand. Okay, great. Like, hey, would you like a 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.

• 26:05Speaker 02

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

• 26:37Mike Rowe?

  Animal Farm wasn't about pigs and horses.

• 26:40Speaker 02

  Right. Yep.

• 26:42Mike Rowe?

  Right? Yeah. I didn't fully appreciate the depth of it, though. I mean, when I go back and look at the early episodes of 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, that makes it even wonkier. And you use the word devious, diabolical. I, I think it's just more about the fact that everybody has an agenda. Everybody's wearing a slip, right? Sometimes your show's 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, that we aren't wearing one.

• 27:27Speaker 02

  Doesn't exist.

• 27:28Mike Rowe?

  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.

• 27:42Speaker 02

  Sure.

• 27:43Mike Rowe?

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

• 27:46Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 27:47Mike 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, your think tank buddies are telling you after they analyze the data?

• 28:06Speaker 02

  Yes to everything. I mean, we survey and we analyze pre and post surveys and our kids learning and and the short answer is yes. So the data can show it. To me, it what gets me is all the anecdotes. It's the tugging at the heartstrings. It's I I was 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 is maybe 10. He walks up and are you Mr. Boyack? 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 donor is like watching all this, lapping it up and shake his hand. Hey, that's great. You know, keep

• 28:49Speaker 02

  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 bill out there.

• 29:01Mike Rowe?

  I'm guessing you probably did the day before. This is a classic shill. I love it.

• 29:05Speaker 02

  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 they leave them there. And maybe a week or two or four goes by, and the parents aren't pushing it, right? They just say, hey, I got these books. Kids aren't interested. But then they pick up their first one. And then they read the second. And pretty soon that day, they've plowed through the entire series of Tuttle Twins books. And the question, one of the top questions I get asked the most is like, what's the formula? How have you

• 29:45Speaker 02

  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

• 30:29Speaker 02

  children's books and curricula and so forth, most material out there meets kids at their level. And I think what we've stumbled on to with Tuttle Twins is this idea that kids want to be challenged.

• 30:39Mike Rowe?

  They'll jump.

• 30:40Speaker 02

  They want to jump. Think of Thanksgiving, right? You've got all the adults and the teenagers at the big table, you've got the kids at the little table, and you're like 11 years old, and you want to be at the big kids' table, you don't want to be with the... And I think that's the dynamic going on, where kids will read this book, and sure, it's illustrated and it's a kid's book, but the ideas in there are so meaty and substantive that they find themselves like, ooh, give me more, I'm smarter than a congressman now, wow, I'm gonna keep reading.

• 31:05Mike Rowe?

  Well, that's a...

• 31:06Speaker 02

  Easy bar in the past, right?

• 31:08Mike Rowe?

  No, I think part of it has to do with, it's a magic trick, in a way. When you think about most kids' programming, and sadly, most adult programming, and most expository messaging is like rooted in cause and effect. We do this, and that leads to this thing. And so, kids are taught early on to anticipate, you know, a logical chronology of things. But the topics you deal with, whether it's philosophy, or work ethic, or kindness, virtues in general, they don't always have a cause and effect. There's often, especially in

• 31:53Mike Rowe?

  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...

• 32:13Mike Rowe?

  Work.

• 32:14Speaker 02

  Right.

• 32:15Mike Rowe?

  Minimum wage doesn't really work. There's going to be an unintended consequence.

• 32:20Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 32:21Mike Rowe?

  Somewhere down the line. To challenge a kid to look for the unanticipated result of a seemingly predictable thing.

• 32:31Mike Rowe?

  That was risky in terms of, is this going to resonate with the key demography, says the network?

• 32:37Speaker 02

  Right.

• 32:37Mike Rowe?

  You know, the answer is probably not, unless it does.

• 32:40Speaker 02

  Well, and for the parents, for them, it's an experiment with their kids because they don't know how their kids are going to process this, if they'll be interested. This is maybe about a year ago, this story, this dad was in the car, his kids are in the back, nine-year-old daughter. And we have a book all about inflation and the creature from Jekyll Island and the central bank and why prices go up. So they're in the car.

• 33:02Mike Rowe?

  That children's favorite.

• 33:03Speaker 02

  Exactly, right?

• 33:04Mike Rowe?

  Yes.

• 33:04Speaker 02

  Bedtime story.

• 33:05Mike Rowe?

  Tell me the story about the Federal Reserve, daddy.

• 33:06Speaker 02

  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.

• 33:52Mike Rowe?

  Couple of weeks ago, on this very podcast, I talked with Brooke Rollins, our Secretary of Agriculture, about the incredibly complicated business of delivering affordable beef to our citizens without disadvantaging American ranchers. We also discussed the very controversial decision to import 300,000 metric tons of ground beef from various foreign countries and the maddening policy that allows meatpackers to label imported meat as a product of the USA. Well, shortly after that conversation, one of my sponsors, Good Ranchers, reported an unusually high level of interest in their product. And this is not surprising. Given a choice, most people would prefer to buy their meat

• 34:36Mike Rowe?

  from American Ranchers. And Good Ranchers is the number one company in America that delivers 100% American meat straight to your door. They partner with over 100 local farmers and ranchers to deliver pasture-raised meat with no antibiotics and no added hormones. They've got 25,000 five-star reviews on TrustPilot. 25,000, including my own. This month, when you visit GoodRanchers.com/row, you'll get a free Angus ground beef bundle with your first order. Again, that's GoodRanchers.com/row for four bonus pounds of ground beef raised right here in these United States. And that's guaranteed.

• 35:18Mike Rowe?

  Support your local ranchers by insisting on American meat delivered at GoodRanchers.com/row. If you could eat a steer, if you could eat a cow, don't take a chance on a foreign ranch. Get Good Ranchers now. Hey, Hal!

• 35:38Speaker 02

  And, you know, imagine the dad, you're driving, 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, a foundation against which to kind of check and, 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 Reed's Eye Pencil? 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?

• 36:23Speaker 02

  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, 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, you know, staring at the chips for? He's like, Mom, I get it. Spontaneous order. Mom's like, what are you, what? I think he's like 10 or 11 or something.

• 36:44Mike Rowe?

  Right.

• 36:44Speaker 02

  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 lightbulb moment for the kid where the mom, again, because the mom had been reading the book with, with the son, they had a cool discussion, building upon this anecdotal little grocery store aha moment.

• 37:28Speaker 02

  Those are the things that matter and, and Mike, I want to drive this point home because we haven't gone here yet. Why does any of this matter to me?

• 37:37Speaker 02

  We're right now in the 250th anniversary of America and all this, right? And

• 37:41Mike Rowe?

  I believe you mean the semi quinte centennial.

• 37:45Speaker 02

  I think that was

• 37:46Speaker 01

  Quincentennial.

• 37:47Mike Rowe?

  Semi quinte centennial, yes, yes.

• 37:49Speaker 02

  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.

• 38:31Speaker 02

  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, whether the books, the cartoon, our other programs?

• 39:12Speaker 02

  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.

• 39:24Mike Rowe?

  I just think about the death of conversation, especially around the dinner table. Especially in a world where, you know, there's a screen.

• 39:33Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 39:33Mike Rowe?

  All this other stuff. And what passes for conversation in so many households tragically? It's 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 Hendrix, 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.

• 40:10Mike Rowe?

  Satisfy, right? Not create it because the world will do that for you. But satisfy it. Give something in the way of a surprising either answer? Or, or maybe it's the way in, Connor. Maybe it's like, you know, pencils and potato chips.

• 40:30Mike Rowe?

  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.

• 40:43Speaker 02

  I'm missing out.

• 40:44Mike Rowe?

  Yeah, you're not really living. But that's kind of it. It just seems like, you know, we worked for a couple of 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.

• 41:28Mike Rowe?

  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.

• 41:38Speaker 02

  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 I get it, and we comply with all that. But so often I say that our work is like Johnny Appleseed in the hillside, just slinging seeds, some will grow, some won't grow. What is the sum total impact? Not within six months of how 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.

• 42:21Speaker 02

  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.

• 42:37Mike Rowe?

  You gotta wait to see if Connor Boyack, who barely got through English, is going to start writing books. You gotta wait.

• 42:42Speaker 02

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

• 42:45Mike Rowe?

  What was her name? You remember?

• 42:46Speaker 02

  I don't remember.

• 42:49Speaker 02

  She has the memory, not me.

• 42:51Mike Rowe?

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

• 42:55Speaker 02

  No.

• 42:56Mike Rowe?

  Keep America Beautiful?

• 42:57Speaker 02

  Oh, yes. Okay, yeah.

• 42:59Mike 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.

• 43:07Speaker 02

  Sure.

• 43:07Mike Rowe?

  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 because it was the Ad Council, it was Coca-Cola, it was some NGOs, it was the government, it was some concerned citizens, all trying to get the country to think differently about littering. And the real data didn't come

• 43:46Mike Rowe?

  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.

• 44:03Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 44:04Mike Rowe?

  You know? And that is a hard thing to take to your donors.

• 44:08Speaker 02

  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.

• 44:52Speaker 02

  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,

• 45:35Speaker 02

  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. And, you know, like, well, okay, like, sure, we're preaching to the choir, but the choir's in the stands singing and their kids aren't in the pews. And how many parents feel like, oh, my gosh, because of social media or whatever, my kids believe something. And not that that's wrong. Kids should have critical thinking to go figure out their own path. But I feel like parents should be empowered to transmit to their own children the ideals that they have. What's

• 46:18Speaker 02

  fascinating about that we've seen over the years is that, take, 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, et cetera. 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.

• 47:03Speaker 02

  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. Cause they didn't really have like a. A language or a vehicle through which to do it. That's what we've tried to solve for is 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.

• 47:31Mike Rowe?

  Here's a different song.

• 47:32Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 47:33Mike Rowe?

  You haven't heard this song before. You know, we're a choir. You know, there's going to be noise and music, but you haven't heard this before. That's interesting. You know? You glossed over something else too, that I think is is worth.

• 47:48Mike Rowe?

  Kicking around the idea that. Your beliefs. Are so weirdly set at fourteen. 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. Of any movie. You know, is Richard Dreyfuss is narrating it and he's looking back at that whole thing. This, 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 twelve. Nobody ever does. It's true.

• 48:33Mike Rowe?

  You know, your relationships, the thing, it, all of that stuff just comes in so hot. And that's why Tuttle Twins. Is.

• 48:44Mike Rowe?

  Something. You're right in there. You're right on that Chinese menu of possibilities, but you're bringing the parents in.

• 48:53Mike Rowe?

  As well.

• 48:55Mike Rowe?

  That must freak people out. You must have detractors. You must have. Security.

• 49:07Mike Rowe?

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• 49:51Mike Rowe?

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• 50:30Speaker 02

  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-

• 51:16Speaker 02

  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, uh, 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 of years, which I love. The first time they did it years ago, uh, you know, their magazine has a very tiny readership and I always find it funny when a socialist is capitalistically, you know, producing a magazine for sale to others, but we can set that aside. So I,

• 51:55Speaker 02

  I, 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. Uh, so to all my detractors, CNN ones did a, a, 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, bring on the haters.

• 52:35Speaker 02

  They help sell books. But I think so much of, 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?

• 52:48Mike Rowe?

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

• 52:51Speaker 02

  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 gonna buy every book that Connor Boyack writes and we're gonna believe it all because he's a trustworthy whatever. And I'm like, whoa, whoa, whoa, hang on, like, thanks, but. Like, I'm trying to empower you to help your kids see what critical thinking is like. And so many of these books are about critical thinking. And if you just start consuming these books and implicitly assuming they're true because of the source, then it's kind of defeating the purpose.

• 53:34Mike Rowe?

  Back to, yeah.

• 53:35Speaker 02

  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.

• 53:58Mike Rowe?

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

• 54:03Speaker 02

  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.

• 54:45Speaker 02

  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?

• 54:54Mike Rowe?

  Just explain real quick the broken window fallacy so people aren't.

• 54:57Speaker 02

  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 it's an economic fallacy because it's net destructive to overall wealth growth.

• 55:41Speaker 02

  When instead of going and producing new windows for new homes, you've got that guy coming and repairing, you know, existing stuff.

• 55:48Mike Rowe?

  Is part of the same theory? The idea that if you don't tend to a window that's broken, then you implicitly encourage more people to break more windows. And the reason city blocks, well, the reason cities deteriorate the way they do is they go block by block, street by street, broken window by broken window. So it's, I don't know if it's the same theory or if it's something.

• 56:13Speaker 02

  I don't know. 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 latch on to is 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 Bastiat. 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, 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, you know, so it started very slow. This is a fun stat that I like sharing.

• 56:53Speaker 02

  We did, over the course of six years, we did about 750,000 books in sales. And, and, you know, if you know publishing, like that's huge.

• 57:05Mike Rowe?

  That's a lot of books.

• 57:06Speaker 02

  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.

• 57:31Mike Rowe?

  What's that called?

• 57:32Speaker 02

  Libertas Press.

• 57:33Mike Rowe?

  That's the press. Okay.

• 57:34Speaker 02

  Yeah, so that.

• 57:34Mike Rowe?

  So did Libertas exist then, the think tank?

• 57:37Speaker 02

  Yes, only a few years prior.

• 57:39Mike Rowe?

  Got it.

• 57:40Speaker 02

  So this, 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 the local city over eminent domain. They were trying to take some farmer's land for something stupid. And I came home that day and like any dad, you know, every day I come home and I say, hey, you know, how was your day? What did you do to the kids? And oh, I played with this toy or I played with this friend. But my almost six year old began to reciprocate the question to me. Dad, what did you do today? How was your day, you know, as a little six year old would ask? And I found myself-

• 58:16Mike Rowe?

  Like your own business kid.

• 58:17Speaker 02

  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 and like kids books about property rights, kids books about economics. There was nothing. This is 2013. And so in conversation with Elijah and he and I had been kicking around similar ideas before. That's when we're like, okay, like there's nothing out there. We want it for our kids. Let's do a book. And that's kind of how all this started.

• 58:47Mike Rowe?

  Sidebar, sorry, but I, I think the question I want to ask you is, what do you admire and what had you seen previously? Cause 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.

• 59:13Speaker 02

  Right.

• 59:14Mike Rowe?

  And I was a kid, you know, and that was talking 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?

• 59:39Speaker 02

  None of that had, I mean, I knew a Schoolhouse Rock. I didn't know about the other ones. My own educational exposure didn't really have any of that in my upbringing. I was born in 81 and again, I wasn't a good student. So maybe some of that was available and it just hadn't really reached me or impacted me. But for me, it was a dad's desire to want to talk to my kid about this stuff and not knowing, how do you talk to a six year old about eminent domain or, you know, pick your topic? So over the the span of six years, you know, we did a book and a second and a third. And I think by the time that six years ended, we had done, I think, seven books, maybe eight. And we had sold about 750,000 books, as I said, inclusive, you know, of those six years.

• 1:00:24Speaker 02

  Then 2020 hits. Everyone's a homeschooler for at least two weeks to flatten the curve. And the government's going crazy.

• 1:00:32Mike Rowe?

  It's long two weeks, man.

• 1:00:33Speaker 02

  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.

• 1:00:55Mike Rowe?

  How many total now?

• 1:00:57Speaker 02

  We're past 7 million, I think, total. And it's like, I never want COVID to happen again or anything like it. It was good for business. There was a silver lining around a very dark cloud. But it was a good jolt because I think we've been in a country where a lot of people have taken a lot of things for granted relative to just basic freedoms and core ideas. And like you say, with conversation, we don't really talk about it. We just, I voted, I got my sticker. That's my civic engagement for the next two years. And so I feel like as horrible as all of that was, there was a good kind of jolt to shake people a little bit and be like, hey, like, things might not be as rosy as you always thought they would be. What we found was a lot of parents in their worry wanted to help their kids kind of make sense of what was going on, what was going on in the world.

• 1:01:43Speaker 02

  And again, that's where Tuttle Twins became kind of a crutch to support those parents.

• 1:01:47Mike Rowe?

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

• 1:01:53Speaker 02

  So I've known the Harmon Brothers for, gosh, fifteen, thirteen 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 newlywed wife Becky, who just got off their honeymoon. For 90 days, they had to use nothing but Bitcoin and the documentary crew would follow them around as they tried to convince the 21-year-old gas station attendant to accept this internet funny money because they couldn't use cash, credit, nothing.

• 1:02:36Mike Rowe?

  Oh, that's great.

• 1:02:36Speaker 02

  So we did, we did that. We were doing some projects together.

• 1:02:39Mike Rowe?

  Was this like the Poop- Poop- Poopery days?

• 1:02:42Speaker 02

  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.

• 1:02:50Mike Rowe?

  He's sat right there.

• 1:02:51Speaker 02

  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, and so they've just been interfacing with a lot of our stuff. And after Tuttle Twins was growing a lot, the 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?

• 1:03:36Speaker 02

  And Elijah and I had been thinking about it for a couple of years, but we couldn't figure out how to do it. We were trying to fundraise some money to get it off the ground and, and what they proved with The Chosen was a funding model that you could solicit from your, from the crowd, not as a fundraising thing, but as actual equity, right? Congress in, 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

• 1:04:19Speaker 02

  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 of seasons. And then from there, we, 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. And

• 1:04:44Mike Rowe?

  And I believe my episode, I don't want to bring it too back to me to

• 1:04:47Speaker 02

  Please, please do. We gotta mention it.

• 1:04:50Mike Rowe?

  Did it do okay?

• 1:04:50Speaker 02

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

• 1:04:55Mike Rowe?

  Yeah.

• 1:04:55Speaker 02

  Cause that issue right now is red hot. Our audience.

• 1:04:58Mike Rowe?

  We're talking about college.

• 1:05:00Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 1:05:01Mike Rowe?

  Work and skill.

• 1:05:02Speaker 02

  Not all knowledge comes from college.

• 1:05:04Mike Rowe?

  Correct.

• 1:05:05Speaker 02

  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.

• 1:05:17Mike Rowe?

  Yeah. Yeah. The reverse commute.

• 1:05:20Speaker 02

  A hundred percent.

• 1:05:21Mike Rowe?

  The unintended consequence. Your whole deal is like the Old Bay potato chip. Like, think about it.

• 1:05:32Speaker 02

  Cause we're from Baltimore and Old Bay is a great spice.

• 1:05:35Mike Rowe?

  What's the economic underlying principle? When the kid looks at the potato chips?

• 1:05:40Speaker 02

  Spontaneous order.

• 1:05:46Mike Rowe?

  Here's a crazy idea. What if there was an academy out there that paid students to learn instead of the other way around? Specifically, men and women who want to work in the skilled trades. And what if this academy not only paid for your training, but also covered all the expenses associated with your training, like travel and food and lodging? And finally, what if this academy guaranteed you a job at the end of the training period? Well, that's exactly what What's happening at America's Workforce Academy by Meta. This is a five-week, highly immersive, pre-apprenticeship program that gets you all the necessary certifications you'll need to start a career in the skilled trades immediately. I'm talking about AI-proof, six-figure jobs,

• 1:06:31Mike Rowe?

  helping to build out the new infrastructure that our economy is depending on. Electricians, plumbers, HVAC techs, welders, fiber optic technicians, these jobs, they are all in demand like never before. And again, every graduate of America's Workforce Academy is guaranteed a job on a Meta website. I first announced this program a few months ago, and I have been watching the response ever since. It's extraordinary. This is a nationwide, unprecedented fast track to a long-term career in a skilled trade. If you, or your spouse, or your kid, or your grandkid are looking for a straight path into a career with no cost at all, check out the opportunities for yourself

• 1:07:16Mike Rowe?

  at meta.com/americasworkforceacademy. That's meta.com/americasworkforceacademy. Okay, spontaneous order. Yeah. 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 seven million of the things, but to do it, you had to create your own platform. Yeah. For the Harmon Brothers to do what they did, right? Everybody's doing a workaround. Everybody's doing an end run.

• 1:07:59Mike Rowe?

  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. Sure. The traditional way. There's no charm in the reverse commute if you haven't spent hours stuck in the commute. Right. Right? But the minute they understand the way everybody else is doing a thing, then they can delight in the curiosity of a workaround. Your whole business is a workaround. It really, I mean, it's amazing. And Libertas too, the like, the idea, which I assume that's Statue of Liberty stuff?

• 1:08:40Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's the Roman goddess of liberty. That's her name.

• 1:08:43Mike Rowe?

  Dead language.

• 1:08:44Speaker 02

  Dead language. You say Libertas, I say Libertas.

• 1:08:48Mike Rowe?

  Libertas.

• 1:08:51Speaker 02

  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 every-

• 1:09:02Mike Rowe?

  I believe you mean the semi-quintcentennial.

• 1:09:04Speaker 02

  Did he get it right that time?

• 1:09:05Speaker 01

  Yeah, he did. He nailed it.

• 1:09:06Mike Rowe?

  He did. I bet he did.

• 1:09:07Speaker 02

  Every great, 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, and so what we're trying to engineer with Libertas Network, which is our, it's our kind of nonprofit shell overall, we have Tuttle Twins and we have other initiatives as well, is, again, if politics is downstream of culture, if culture is downstream of the family, how can we reach, teach, engage families so that they become informed and activated

• 1:09:51Speaker 02

  to have this spontaneous order in their communities? I don't know what they're gonna do. In fact, I have to, I have to share this. After the Ron Paul campaign ended in 2012, it was a very youth-led moment. You got college grads shouting, "End the Fed" and just all kinds of, and I was part of that. I was wrapped up in that. And I distinctly remember at the end of the Ron Paul revolution, as we all called it, people were asking Dr. Paul, like, "What's next? What do we do?" And he was this great, you know, figure leading this movement of, you know, freedom-minded people. And his answer was, "I don't know." Like, "I don't know what your path is." Like, and years later, after Tuttle Twins succeeded and was growing, I had him on our, our podcast and I reminded him of that. Do you remember

• 1:10:34Speaker 02

  when he said, "Oh yeah, I remember when I said that." And he's like, "Connor, let me stress the point here." I never in a million, this is Dr. Paul, I never in a million years would have thought, "Hey, one of you need to go write children's books." Right? "One of you need to go start these youth entrepreneurship markets," or da-da-da, "think tank." And it was a very flattering thing where he's saying, "That's the spontaneous order that you're doing," and then you get a thousand other people doing what they're doing, and we all kind of lift where we stand to say, "If we're all rebuilding social fabric in different ways, that's, I think, how we can make America an anomaly to the trend, this global trend that we've seen." Like, I don't know if that's guaranteed. We can get into the whole fourth turning concept and how these things kind of are cyclical, and it's kind of inevitable. I don't know.

• 1:11:17Mike Rowe?

  Eh, maybe just take a beat on that, the fourth turning.

• 1:11:21Speaker 02

  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, that hard men create great times, great times create 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-

• 1:12:04Mike Rowe?

  There it is.

• 1:12:05Speaker 02

  -throughout history that, yeah, the four, the four different turnings. You get the high, the awakening, the unraveling, and then the crisis.

• 1:12:11Mike Rowe?

  The crisis.

• 1:12:12Speaker 02

  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 of years ago, just to kind of say, "Hey, we're in the fourth turning."

• 1:12:23Mike Rowe?

  You figure we're in the crisis now?

• 1:12:25Speaker 02

  You know-

• 1:12:26Mike Rowe?

  As opposed to the unraveling?

• 1:12:27Speaker 02

  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.

• 1:12:36Mike 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? Right? Which means, I mean, there's probably some corollary, like, we're always at the most pivotal point in all of it, because that's how special we are, and we happen to walk here.

• 1:12:57Speaker 02

  This is the most important election of our lifetime.

• 1:12:59Mike Rowe?

  It's gotta be, because I'm voting in it. And, because I walk the earth.

• 1:13:03Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 1:13:04Mike Rowe?

  But I mean, if that's, if that, if that kind of recency bias can affect our own analyses, you know.

• 1:13:11Speaker 02

  I, I think it totally does, and I'm also reminded of during the French Revolution, another crisis period. John Adams has this great quote, I think it was to Sam Adams, is, I don't think it was to Abigail, but he, 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, 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

• 1:13:54Speaker 02

  the principles of political architecture, what I would call the ideas of human flourishing? So that if we're condemned to repeat history because everyone's forgetting the principles of the past, okay, let's get through that period of suck, but then, we're 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, 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,

• 1:14:36Speaker 02

  but I do know that if I can get millions of kids learning these ideas and they grow up, I feel like we're gonna be that much better positioned to come out of that.

• 1:14:45Mike Rowe?

  Look, I think it's, the irony and the dichotomies are rich, you know, I, 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 you couldn't possibly know. On the other hand, you're also saying any dummy can see what's coming simply by looking back. Cause 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, you know?

• 1:15:27Mike Rowe?

  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 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?

• 1:15:53Mike Rowe?

  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.

• 1:16:01Speaker 02

  Sure.

• 1:16:02Mike Rowe?

  But I think today, maybe because we're just hyper connected in ways like we look at the federal.

• 1:16:09Speaker 02

  Right.

• 1:16:10Mike Rowe?

  Like we look at the like we boil the ocean.

• 1:16:12Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 1:16:13Mike Rowe?

  And and you know, like, 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 a 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.

• 1:16:50Speaker 02

  I am completely with you when part of my transition from moving from web developer to starting a think tank. In the middle of that, it's a funky transition. In the middle of that, I was on the campaign of now Senator Mike Lee. It was his first campaign and there was an incumbent Bob Bennett who had just voted for the. Tart bailout. So this is during the, you know, tea party and all of that is going on. Yep. Uh, 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 DC.

• 1:17:32Speaker 02

  Right? We're gonna champion the constitution and we're, you know, reform the federal government, all that stuff. And not just people connected to Mike, but I, I had many other contacts who were all riding the tea party wave, wanting to go into DC and reform things. Meanwhile, the following year, I started Libertas Institute, our think tank focused only on state level policy.

• 1:17:51Mike Rowe?

  Yeah.

• 1:17:52Speaker 02

  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 passed 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, and now we work in states across the country. So we've expanded, but

• 1:18:22Mike Rowe?

  All local laws?

• 1:18:23Speaker 02

  But all at the state level and often local. Our local issues are mostly housing and property rights related.

• 1:18:30Mike Rowe?

  Domain kind of thing.

• 1:18:31Speaker 02

  Yep. So that's kind of more where we focus, uh, but predominantly at the state level. Cause 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 the federal level and all of the, the PACs and the money and all the pressure. At the, at the local level, you're only making a smaller impact on that little, you know, 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, you know, retired teacher or a, you know, business guy. And so you can still connect with them, persuade them.

• 1:19:04Mike Rowe?

  Yeah.

• 1:19:04Speaker 02

  And again, I'm, I'm a nobody. I'm a 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.

• 1:19:13Mike Rowe?

  But it's such a classic bottom up.

• 1:19:17Speaker 02

  Very bottom up.

• 1:19:17Mike Rowe?

  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.

• 1:19:25Speaker 02

  Sure.

• 1:19:26Mike Rowe?

  101. Um, 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, the biggest, most consequential, sexiest, frothiest, loudest voices. And it's like, that's what you look at, but that's, that's not where the wet work actually happens.

• 1:19:50Speaker 02

  And I wanted to bring it back to that, that point that you earlier made, which you just did, namely, everyone's attention gravitates to kind of the apex of power, the federal level, the area in which they can have the least impact. Therefore, they become disenfranchised, demotivated, who am I, 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've got the good old boy network flourishing at a local level because few people are watching. One thing to push back on that, that I think can change it is AI.

• 1:20:31Speaker 02

  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 citizenportal.ai, if I'm remembering that right. And what he does is taps into video transcripts from city council meetings or state legislature meetings across the country.

• 1:20:48Mike Rowe?

  Yes.

• 1:20:48Speaker 02

  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, you're so spot on, and it is my biggest worry is that so many people are, are well-meaning. They, they desire to change the, 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,

• 1:21:32Speaker 02

  I can't really impact anything federally. I don't even bother trying because the investment would be so high.

• 1:21:36Mike Rowe?

  I know this is out of your lane a bit, at least, you know, when you think about, um, the Tuttle Twins and storytelling, that, that's your buddy's thing there?

• 1:21:44Speaker 02

  Citizenportal.ai, yeah. So you can go look up your, there's LA County.

• 1:21:48Mike Rowe?

  I love it.

• 1:21:50Speaker 02

  Monitor what they're doing.

• 1:21:51Mike Rowe?

  It's funny, I've consciously avoided, you know, blatant political conversations most of my life, but living in California now, it did, I do feel, I can see it, I stood on the roof of this building and watched, watched the Palisades burn and just got so increasingly frustrated with all of the unforced errors.

• 1:22:14Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:22:15Mike Rowe?

  Policy errors, you know, that led to that, and it's like, what, what can people do truly on a local level? Like, you're at the ultimate local level, you're at the dining room table, you're at the kitchen table, that's, it doesn't get more local than that. But I guess one click up is really where libertis thrives most.

• 1:22:38Speaker 02

  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, it's combative, and, and I think that's a fair concern. However, I have long believed, and I continue to believe, that you can build common ground with just about anybody. And so many of our policies, I, 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

• 1:23:19Speaker 02

  a wide spectrum of ideological differences under that big party banner. So we have more Libertarian Republicans, we have super progressive Republicans, so the party label becomes a little less meaningful. But our bills, we really try and find a way of like, hey, you care about criminal justice reform, great, let me help you understand how this policy, you know, impacts that. And hey, you care more about business, let me talk to you about it from that angle. And so what I've found over the years is that There's a way, no matter what angle you're coming from, to still have that conversation. Back to your point, let's have a dialogue. We're going to agree on some stuff. We'll disagree on some stuff. That's fine. But I feel like that's what's been lost as people have been polarized into their opposing camps.

• 1:24:02Speaker 02

  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%.

• 1:24:46Speaker 02

  Let's talk about that and let's work together.

• 1:24:52Mike Rowe?

  I'd like to talk about initiative if I could for just a moment. Here at MicroWorks, we value it a great deal. In fact, it's the most important quality we look for in our work ethic scholarship applicants, but everybody wants it. I'm talking about the quality in a lift driver that inspires him or her to carry your bags to the door without even asking, or the grocery clerk who shows you where an item is on the shelves, or a doctor who personally calls you to explain your test results. If you're hiring, you want to encourage initiative because it's invaluable. And ZipRecruiter has a way to allow a candidate to tell you, in their own words, why they're interested in your job, not just why they're qualified, but why they're interested.

• 1:25:37Mike Rowe?

  This is a way that allows the best candidates to distinguish themselves from the competition and a great way for you to separate the wheat from the chaff, as it were. Right now, you can try it for free at ziprecruiter.com/row. ZipRecruiter is the number one hiring site, in large part because of this new initiative that shows you the most interested, qualified candidates first. So you meet the right people faster. Four out of five employers who post on ZipRecruiter get a quality candidate within one day. Try it for free. ZipRecruiter.com/row. Meet your match on ZipRecruiter.

• 1:26:16Mike Rowe?

  Build it sooner, meet your match at ZipRecruiter. Try it free. How do you think about 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.

• 1:26:40Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:26:41Mike Rowe?

  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.

• 1:27:14Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:27:15Mike Rowe?

  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.

• 1:27:29Speaker 02

  Oh, boy. I'm going to give you a very abbreviated version, because this is such an interesting topic to me. You asked earlier what books I had written that the eighth grade teacher had read. I forgot to mention one is called Lessons From A Lemonade Stand. And I use the lemonade stand as an example to talk about consent in our political system. What does this mean? If 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.

• 1:28:12Speaker 02

  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 gonna do whatever we want.

• 1:28:31Mike Rowe?

  Consent through geography.

• 1:28:33Speaker 02

  Effectively, yes. And so you're born into it, right? And maybe for economic reasons, you can't move. You can't get a job, you 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 cellphone.

• 1:29:18Speaker 02

  You can have a cellphone 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 gonna 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, you know, whatever, right? And what if you could say, well, I'm gonna weigh those alternatives, and I'm gonna sign on the dotted line for this one? And those governments, those competing governance models,

• 1:30:00Speaker 02

  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 cellphone, but like, here's my insurance bill, like this is just what it takes and you know, cost of whatever. And, and so if they would be upfront and compete and costs come down and quality goes up. Like it would, it would just be fascinating.

• 1:30:29Mike 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.

• 1:30:42Speaker 02

  Yeah, broadly, yes. 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, 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.

• 1:31:12Mike Rowe?

  So you would be able to opt out?

• 1:31:14Speaker 02

  Opt out or redirect the dollars. What if I could say, well, I want my kids to go to that private school. So rather than funding the government school, I want my tax dollars to go here. So this is, uh, 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, a role of government.

• 1:31:41Mike Rowe?

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

• 1:31:44Speaker 02

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

• 1:31:48Mike Rowe?

  Right, right. So I mean, that's a, I'm not saying it's a non-starter. I'm just saying it's a tough sell.

• 1:31:54Speaker 02

  A hundred percent, but I bring it up because your question is so important and it's one we don't even talk about. What is consent? The declaration, you know, governments justly operate with the consent of the government. And it's like, we don't even talk about that topic at all. We just buy into this. Matrix like virtual reality of like, well, I guess we've all consented and let's just put up with whatever. So I realize that 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 totally, we have a book, Mike, we haven't, we've been talking about the kids, uh, the kids here. We have a series for teenagers. We have a toddler series. One of our teen books is called The Tuttle Twins Guide to True Conspiracies.

• 1:32:41Mike Rowe?

  It's great.

• 1:32:42Speaker 02

  That is the typical reaction of people who learn about it.

• 1:32:45Mike Rowe?

  That's great.

• 1:32:45Speaker 02

  Every chapter, there's 20 chapters, is a fully documented conspiracy. These aren't conspiracy theories. This isn't, you know, are the frogs gay, Alex Jones kind of stuff. This is like.

• 1:32:56Mike Rowe?

  They are, by the way.

• 1:32:57Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 1:32:57Mike Rowe?

  And so are the tadpoles.

• 1:32:58Speaker 02

  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 that book, by the way, it was a very cathartic book to write. That was a very.

• 1:33:11Mike Rowe?

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

• 1:33:15Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:33:16Mike Rowe?

  Yeah.

• 1:33:16Speaker 02

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

• 1:33:21Speaker 01

  More and more, it's early, you know, it's only six months.

• 1:33:24Speaker 02

  Yeah, exactly.

• 1:33:25Mike Rowe?

  That's fast, man.

• 1:33:26Speaker 02

  Declassifying a few documents and low and behold. So I wrote the book because I've 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, low and behold, you know, 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.

• 1:34:10Speaker 02

  I said, be aware, if you buy this book for your teenage children, right?

• 1:34:15Mike Rowe?

  Right.

• 1:34:15Speaker 02

  Like.

• 1:34:15Mike Rowe?

  You're gonna start losing arguments.

• 1:34:17Speaker 02

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

• 1:34:31Mike 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.

• 1:34:42Speaker 02

  Sure.

• 1:34:42Mike Rowe?

  You know, and they're muscles and the more you use them. The stronger you get.

• 1:34:48Speaker 02

  Let's say, yeah.

• 1:34:48Mike Rowe?

  But back to the consent thing real quick. I would say that in a way, as a country, we have adopted 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 a channel or turn the damn thing off. And if I don't like Newsom, and if I really can't stand these policies anymore, I can go to Texas, or I can go to Florida, or someplace. So we do kind of have it. Now, your point was, well, having the right to do the thing is cold comfort in a world where we're limited by practicalities, economy, money, you know.

• 1:35:33Speaker 02

  Sure. If my dying mother is here, why am I going to leave her out of, you know? And also, I would say in response to that, if every nation operates under this model, where do you, like, that breaks down because, sure, you can pick a lesser bad state, but they still operate with a heavy hand in some ways. So then it's all right, move to a different country, but every country. So this is where you get like Peter Thiel and those guys were doing sea steadying experiments years ago, or in like Honduras and elsewhere, like charter cities, where they'd go to the government and say, hey, can you carve out, you know, a thousand acres? And we're going to have our own governance model that has this more kind of innovative approach. And, and there've been, you know, hits and misses with those, those models. But basically, all occupiable land is governed by nation-states

• 1:36:17Speaker 02

  that operate with the implied consent of the citizens. And so what Jefferson and his associates put in the Declaration is an extremely provocative idea. Jefferson himself furthering that provocation by saying that the tree of liberty should be watered with the blood of tyrants every 20 years. This idea that consent breaks down after a while. Hey, I consented to, you know, maybe I voted for Trump, but now he's doing all this stupid stuff, and maybe I need to revoke my consent. How do I do that?

• 1:36:44Mike Rowe?

  You gotta wait for the next election, I guess.

• 1:36:46Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:36:47Mike 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.

• 1:36:57Speaker 02

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

• 1:37:02Mike Rowe?

  That's right.

• 1:37:03Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:37:03Mike Rowe?

  That's right. Wow. Tuttle, where'd the name come from?

• 1:37:10Speaker 02

  Oh, this is a...

• 1:37:13Speaker 02

  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 to...

• 1:37:21Mike Rowe?

  We're getting there again. It was a simpler time.

• 1:37:23Speaker 02

  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 it to be like one, maybe two syllables. And so, I just start going through all the popular last names with T that are one or two syllables, and I start checking domain names. Is the .com available? Is there anyone famous with this name? And I boiled it down, I had like a top 10 list. One of them, I don't remember, I don't advise in going to look this up, but one of them were like Playboy Twins or something. I'd like cross that one off. And so, Tuttle Twins was a process of elimination where the .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, so...

• 1:38:02Mike Rowe?

  You've never seen American Chopper, obviously.

• 1:38:04Speaker 02

  Apparently not.

• 1:38:05Mike Rowe?

  Oh.

• 1:38:06Speaker 02

  No.

• 1:38:07Mike Rowe?

  Eighteen Seasons, Discovery Channel. It was the Tuttle's who built it. It was the first show that focused on, actually, that's not true. Jesse James in Monster Garage was doing these builds with cars and motorcycles, and the Tuttle's started doing the same thing.

• 1:38:25Speaker 02

  Oh, cool.

• 1:38:25Mike Rowe?

  And it became, I only know this because I narrated it.

• 1:38:29Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:38:30Mike Rowe?

  Whatever.

• 1:38:30Speaker 02

  Small potatoes.

• 1:38:31Mike Rowe?

  Tuttle.

• 1:38:32Speaker 02

  Okay, I'll go back and watch it. No, no, not, I'm gonna say now, it's because I watched, you know, Micro early on, and Tuttle is such an inspirational name. No, it was just kind of a boring process of elimination, and like I said, so much of this has just been organic. It was just like, oh, well, okay, let's do this and see how it goes. I remember distinctly my first board meeting after we published the first Tuttle Twins book, and I gave a copy to each of my board members. And the board chairman, John, we're in the parking lot after, and he's flipping through the book, and he's like, you know, "Maybe someday we can help fund 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's

• 1:39:17Speaker 02

  story. It's just like, I was just trying to solve a need. A dad wanted to teach his kids, and...

• 1:39:21Mike Rowe?

  Spontaneous order.

• 1:39:22Speaker 02

  Turns out, other people wanted the same, and... Well, maybe save America along the way.

• 1:39:27Mike Rowe?

  Yes, Joe.

• 1:39:28Speaker 01

  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."

• 1:39:39Mike Rowe?

  That's it.

• 1:39:40Speaker 01

  "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.

• 1:39:50Mike Rowe?

  Yeah.

• 1:39:50Speaker 01

  Right? The, 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.

• 1:40:11Mike Rowe?

  That leads to big problems.

• 1:40:12Speaker 01

  To bigger problems.

• 1:40:13Speaker 02

  That's right.

• 1:40:14Mike Rowe?

  Which is why you must, 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.

• 1:40:43Speaker 02

  Sure.

• 1:40:44Mike Rowe?

  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.

• 1:40:54Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:40:55Mike Rowe?

  And we're so distracted by All the Trouble in the World. Terrific book, by the way, PJ 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 libertis, is it praxis?

• 1:41:14Speaker 02

  Mm-hmm. Yeah. Our college alternative?

• 1:41:17Mike Rowe?

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

• 1:41:25Speaker 02

  I think we would. It Praxis is a college alternative boot camp. It's a six to eight month boot camp. You pay seventy five hundred 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.

• 1:42:07Speaker 02

  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, four hundred and fifty 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, you know, weeks sifting through applications. We guarantee for Praxis participants, a job offer. Otherwise, we fully refund their money.

• 1:42:42Mike Rowe?

  Oh.

• 1:42:43Speaker 02

  So whereas college offers no such ROI and no such guarantee, you probably know fifty two percent of college grads are underemployed, meaning they're not working in their chosen field, they're at Starbucks or, you know, driving DoorDash.

• 1:42:56Mike Rowe?

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

• 1:43:01Speaker 02

  Hundred percent.

• 1:43:01Mike Rowe?

  They don't finish.

• 1:43:02Speaker 02

  Yep. 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 Praxis, 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 backdrop of all of the curriculum is if you're going to go get a job for this employer, how do you show up on day one and say, I'm here to create value for you in the company? And how do you how do you look out for that? How do you pay attention to it? How do you formulate those ideas?

• 1:43:45Speaker 02

  How can you use AI to ten X 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 nonprofit umbrella. And part of the motivation was here I've been doing TEL-22 for a decade. Those kids get older and the parents are always like, what's next? And what can you do for my kids? 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 TEL-22 reader and they can come into Praxis. And the beauty of it is like, some of these young people still end up going to college,

• 1:44:30Speaker 02

  but they go there with far greater intentionality and success. 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.

• 1:44:40Mike Rowe?

  How many have gone through?

• 1:44:41Speaker 02

  Historically, they had about, I think, six or 700 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 Praxis? Like, these are big life decisions.

• 1:45:06Mike Rowe?

  It's consequential, for sure.

• 1:45:07Speaker 02

  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, and so now the goal in the months and years ahead is to just blow this thing up.

• 1:45:23Mike Rowe?

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

• 1:45:26Speaker 02

  Yes, kind of their fellowships and...

• 1:45:29Mike Rowe?

  It's a meritocracy fellowship.

• 1:45:31Speaker 02

  Love it.

• 1:45:31Mike Rowe?

  So it's taking kids straight out of high school.

• 1:45:34Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:45:35Mike Rowe?

  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.

• 1:45:47Speaker 02

  So cool.

• 1:45:47Mike Rowe?

  They're finishing up in a couple of years. They're guaranteed, they're going to make hundreds of thousands of dollars, no debt.

• 1:45:53Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:45:54Mike Rowe?

  And they might even be able to talk about the Stoics or Aristotle or Adams, right? Because they...

• 1:46:01Mike Rowe?

  I'm constantly trapped in this binary thing where it's like, oh, you know, Mike's anti-college. No, I'm not. I'm kind of anti-debt, but to be pro-trade, but not pro-for-year-degree, it's just a bad choice.

• 1:46:16Speaker 02

  I'm pro-choice in that sense, where I just want young people to understand what their options are. And I feel like, take me for example, I was a web developer. I went to college because I was told that's what you do to get a job. I'm literally sitting in college freelancing. I was kind of finding some clients along the way. I would sit in college at the desk. I'd be coding a website for a client while sitting in class, being instructed by a professor who's like four decades my senior, who his coding skills are kind of rusty and he's having to like try and teach me this stuff. And it, this is my fault. It wasn't until after college that I kind of had the conscious, like, why did I need a degree?

• 1:46:58Speaker 02

  I'm like learning this stuff on my own. I go get my first job out of college. They couldn't care less about my college degree. It was, hey, can you solve this problem?

• 1:47:06Mike Rowe?

  Of course.

• 1:47:07Speaker 02

  And I could solve it and like, boom, you're hired.

• 1:47:08Mike Rowe?

  When did you write Skip College?

• 1:47:10Speaker 02

  2017, I want to say.

• 1:47:12Mike Rowe?

  Find that, Chuck. Would you, how many did you sell? Was it a hit?

• 1:47:15Speaker 02

  Uh, it's, 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. Um, and so, do you know the name John Taylor Gatto at all? He, uh, John Taylor Gatto was a 30-year public school teacher in New York. Uh, 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, uh, my book, Skip College, was the last thing he wrote before he passed away, uh, which was a few years ago. So Skip College: Launch Your Career Without Debt, Distractions, or a Degree.

• 1:47:59Speaker 02

  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.

• 1:48:36Mike Rowe?

  Painted with such a broad brush, you know, in our case, for college, we turned everything else into a cautionary tale or some sort of, you know, vocational consolation prize, which is a dumb. I'll finish up with, you said generalist, Praxis is building 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 gonna 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.

• 1:49:16Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:49:16Mike Rowe?

  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?

• 1:49:35Speaker 02

  I don't think so.

• 1:49:36Mike Rowe?

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

• 1:49:43Speaker 02

  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.

• 1:49:48Mike Rowe?

  A plumber.

• 1:49:48Speaker 02

  That's right.

• 1:49:49Mike Rowe?

  Says now we have a plumber. 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 title 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 multimillion dollar colossus.

• 1:50:34Speaker 02

  Wow.

• 1:50:35Mike Rowe?

  And then he decides, because he's got the means and the interest, he goes to DC. He gets elected in Congress.

• 1:50:42Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:50:43Mike 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 Libertus and everything else, help us save the plumbers to help us save this.

• 1:51:19Speaker 02

  Let's do it.

• 1:51:19Mike Rowe?

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

• 1:51:27Speaker 02

  Benjamin Franklin.

• 1:51:28Mike Rowe?

  He was a hat maker.

• 1:51:29Speaker 02

  Right.

• 1:51:30Mike Rowe?

  Farmers, they all had a trade.

• 1:51:32Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 1:51:33Mike Rowe?

  They were all generalists.

• 1:51:34Speaker 02

  Mm hmm. We ought to aspire to be the same.

• 1:51:38Mike Rowe?

  We're gonna do another episode of the Tuttle Twins, me and you?

• 1:51:41Speaker 02

  Let's do it. I'd love to.

• 1:51:42Mike Rowe?

  All right. Anything else people should know? Where should they go? If they want to help you save the world, what's the easiest?

• 1:51:49Speaker 02

  libertas.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'm at ConnorBoyak.com.

• 1:52:03Mike Rowe?

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

• 1:52:06Speaker 01

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

• 1:52:09Mike Rowe?

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

• 1:52:12Speaker 01

  Yeah. Hold on one second.

• 1:52:14Mike Rowe?

  Call Mark Zuckerberg.

• 1:52:15Speaker 01

  Hold on. No, no, I got it now.

• 1:52:17Mike Rowe?

  Look, I'm not gonna make you guys listen to this.

• 1:52:18Speaker 01

  How many likes? 135,000.

• 1:52:20Mike Rowe?

  135,000 people are basically making an argument for a generalist.

• 1:52:24Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:52:25Mike Rowe?

  That's what that is.

• 1:52:25Speaker 01

  18,000 comments.

• 1:52:27Mike Rowe?

  Unbelievable.

• 1:52:28Speaker 01

  19,000 shares.

• 1:52:29Speaker 02

  That hit a nerve.

• 1:52:30Mike Rowe?

  Yeah, you did.

• 1:52:33Mike Rowe?

  All right. What a pleasure to meet you. Thank you for reaching out.

• 1:52:36Speaker 02

  Likewise. Great chatting with you.

• 1:52:38Mike Rowe?

  You too. Adios. That's a Connor Boyack. Fun to say. If you leave some stars, could you make?

• 1:52:45Speaker 03

  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. Before you go. Could you please subscribe?

• 1:53:17Speaker 04

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