 This is Mises weekends with your host Jeff Deist All right, ladies and gentlemen welcome once again to Mises weekends. I know a lot of you already know our guest Connor Boyack Thanks for having me labor toss in Utah. How are you? Very well? Very excited to be here talking with you, Jeff Hey, you know, there's new total twins book out. That's what we're talking about before we get to that Can we mention that your organization was involved just a couple weeks ago in a medical marijuana initiative in the state of Utah? Please tell us about it. So Libertas has been around for about seven years now. I After I remember Ron Paul on the campaign would always say that, you know People would come up to him and say what should I do and what, you know And he would always say I have no idea like everyone has a different path and this ended up being my path And it's been fun, especially to talk to Dr. Paul recently and he's like Connor I'd never would have told you to go start a think tank and change these laws and stuff So we have a ton of fun. We're what's called the state-based think tank And so where a lot of times we focus on federal issues I feel like we can't have a very good impact a lot of times. It's very difficult to affect change there But at a state and local level, it's actually really easy. So being a very libertarian group We've changed about 30 plus laws in Utah a lot of significant stuff Search and seizure and civil forfeiture and privacy surveillance all sorts of stuff And most recently as you point out, we were behind the effort to legalize medical marijuana or cannabis in conservative Utah that no one thought we'd be able to get it done. So it's a ton of fun and Very heartening to see Conservatives especially come on board and maybe some of the Bible Belt states will be tipping from here to follow the same path Are you finding that just some very average people Mormons are sympathetic to the plight of people with cancer or nausea or pain? Yeah, yeah, I think I think generally speaking people are sympathetic the hard thing is kind of the reefer madness You know the the fear that if we do this teens will start increasing it and DUIs will increase So I think the sympathy is there I think a lot of people know especially with like epilepsy and cancer as you point out that everyone knows somebody Who could benefit the hard part is assuaging those fears especially for people who are inherently fearful And very prone to fear So I think the tricky thing for us was finding how to thread that needle and and have a conversation in our state in a Way that reassured them and helped them overcome those fears and then the sympathy kind of kicked in and we got the vote Yeah Well your side project of course is the tunnel to win series. You've got a brand new book out called Fate of the future. This is what number eight in the total nine number nine. Yeah, yeah now You base each book at least loosely Around an existing book. This one of course is based around Murray Rothbard's Anatomy of the state It's a pretty harsh book for adults when they first read Anatomy of the status if they aren't sort of in tune with our way of thinking Talk about how and why you chose Murray's book So we have a long list of books that You know our readers have been suggesting and so our potential list is pretty long and anatomy of the state has Been on there for a little while that we've gotten Suggestions to do and and we got to remember I remember so much but it's important for your audience to understand that the libertarians are kind of our core faithful few who are familiar with these works and You know I've read the original books and want to pass those ideas on to their children or nieces or nephews However, I'd say easily 80% of our audience at this point are not libertarian They've never heard of Mises or Rothbard. They've never read Bastiat They just heard in a homeschool group that these books teach important values to kids or you know They heard from someone at church that You know, this was great for their kids. Hey, you should check it out So we find ourselves communicating with an entirely new audience who's not familiar with these original works and that makes our This book in particular that much harder, right? Because here we are communicating Rothbard It's one thing to have an intro libertarian debate about, you know Anarcho-capitalism anarchism all that but when you're presenting someone entirely new to these ideas The the basic tenants of the state and voluntarism and so forth It's a tall order and so we had to we try to tread pretty lightly This book ended up being a little bit stronger than past books because we feel the ideas are so compelling But it's it's tough for us to find a way to kind of thread that needle and say well Look we can we can be strong and appeal to the libertarians or we can be a little bit more gentle with these topics and broaden The funnel of people we're talking to and and lead people into our movement. That's the that's the one that we're trying to hit Connors, it's not like you pulled any punches in this book. I mean you're using words like coercion and predatory and violence words that Rothbard uses in anatomy the state and you're presenting them the kids What's what's the age group that the books are aimed at? So Intentionally, we're aiming at kids five to ten what we found over the years that a lot of teens The older siblings will read these books because even though they're a bit juvenile in terms of their presentation with all the colorful illustrations the ideas are engaging and this was never intentional, but it kind of spontaneously came about where easily a third of the parents were finding are kind of What's the word like deviously or Suddenly learning themselves. They don't want to admit that they are like learning from a kid's book But they find this joint learning opportunity where they're learning alongside their children so we position the books with simple stories and Fun, you know stories for the little kids. It's kind of like watching Simpsons or Shrek right where the little kids kind of it's slap happy humor and it's fun But the adults they resonate with it as well. That's the angle that we're trying to achieve Well, I think they're fantastic and we shouldn't kid ourselves a lot of adults aren't familiar with Bastiat Don't know Rothbard Mises don't know Ron Paul necessarily much. So if they they learn of these things through their kids all the better Yeah, exactly when you have kids start asking their parents like why is taxation theft? That really makes the parents start to be like wait a minute. What? What do I need to think about and to be able to converse with my seven-year-old now? Well, I know I've struggled with this a little bit as a parent Is there an argument for allowing kids to keep their illusions for a while a lot of what the Tuttle Twins is about is demystifying the state and state action, but we've got Santa Claus We've got the Easter Bunny should we let kids believe in government for a while when they're little? Let me flip that question a little bit Jeff I really appreciate the question because it's something as a parent. I've thought a lot about as well I Wonder if it's more like helping reaffirm what children are taught ever since they're young Since kids are little we say don't hurt other people don't steal their stuff, you know respect boundaries be kind and In a way, I think our books are Reaffirming not only for those kids, but then the older kids and the adults that yeah Society teaches us all these exceptions to those rules, right? If it's the state It's okay, or if it's big groups of people you don't have to follow those rules if anything I feel like in a way we're reaffirming that those principles that almost universally we teach to our children are Enduring principles. They're not exceptional. They're not time limited age limited So in a way, I think rather than demystifying or talking to kids about these adult things I think we're saying hey kids these principles your parents are teaching you actually apply to the bigger world around you And here's how Well, I'm sure a lot of our listeners or parents or would-be parents someday So let's just talk a little bit about how we've done and my kids are a little older now But when they were younger they would come in with a question about politics or government And here's what I'd say I'd say look I have very strong opinions or feelings about this Here's what I think but as you get older as you develop as you become an adult You may have very different thoughts and opinions and that's okay It won't make me think any different of you or love you any less In other words, I'm trying not to be dogmatic because I don't want my kids to rebel against me by being a statist sure So how do you think about that? You know your presentation with young people in terms of dogmatism? So I this may be an awkward example, but it's the one that comes to mind Imagine a parent of young children wanting to have the birds and the bees conversation with their child They don't want that child learning about the birds and bees on the street, right or on the internet They won't have a sincere conversation in a safe environment and say like look This is what we think is right You're gonna hear a lot of competing ideas as you get older But like this these are our values and this is what we think is proper many parents struggle with that conversation and There are many many popular books that make it very easy to talk to your child about those ideas through a story That you jointly read together kind of introducing a third party into the conversation a little bit That's trusted and sometimes fun and so forth. That's how I feel. We're doing it here We're not propagandizing children so much as we're enabling parents to have Conversations about serious ideas to say look you're gonna learn a lot of competing ideas as you grow up in the world around you We think it's important to transmit these ideas to you and now we have a resource that's gonna help us have those Conversations just yesterday. We got a message from one of our readers who talked about how with his son He felt that our books helped his conversations with his son quote level up in the sense that Around the dinner table they can talk about some really engaging ideas because there's context for the child He can the dad can say hey, do you remember when you read about? the in the Tuttle Twins in the food truck fiasco about protectionism and how the government was trying to stop this business from succeeding Well, guess what our Airbnb is getting shut down by the city because the hotels are trying to come after us And they're using their connections in the city It makes more sense to the child because they have that story to fall back on and the parent can use that reference point Kind of as a foundation as they go on through the years now that we've been doing this for years We've accumulated all sorts of stories where the parents are able to kind of point back to the books as a way to have that Conversation with their children. I think that's the most valuable thing It's just the reference material for parents to be able to contextualize what's happening in the world around them in a way that benefits their children Well, and let's face it even if they're homeschooled in their younger years They're getting bombarded with the fantasy camp version of government is benign. I mean, this is balance needed balance Yeah, yeah for all the accusations of propaganda on our side where are those accusations? Yeah on the pro-state side like I Don't even know if we're balanced because we're like so small compared to the apparatus of propaganda that's conveying the other point of view So if anything, I think we need more of what what the Tuttle Twins is doing We we need competition and we need other people writing books for kids as well Well, I wonder if you have or if many of our listeners have actually looked at kids textbooks in public schools. They're horrible. I Actually, I'm glad you asked that I've been contemplating doing a video with my kids So if you go to our Tuttle Twins Facebook page at the top, you'll see a pinned post with my children Who are kind of our little kid actors for the books and the videos have accumulated millions of views and done really? Well, one of the videos I want to do is featuring some of the material I've actually gone on eBay and I bought some of these books you mentioned Jeff and I have Highlights and sticky notes one in particular I remember was talking all about how wonderful the government is because it solves problems and look at pollution and look at poor people and look at hungry people and the government is so great because it helps people and of Course that explaining is very simply at like a eight eight-year-old level But those messages start to resonate with kids and they stick there And if they're not if there's no competition if we're not in there kind of clarifying or contextualizing that It is propaganda because they're not explaining any alternative point of view But this is revolutionary what you're doing with these books. Do you get attacked for them? You know from time to time not that bad like I remember when our book on Atlas shrug came out But that that's probably the biggest attack we got I remember salon wrote an article attacking us. Oh, no Yeah, it was great for the attention right it helps sell a lot of books It's like whenever there's gun control measures or Democrats win an election that the gun stores sell out because everyone's so Worried it's good for business. So it's been good for business when we get attacked. We don't get attacked a lot I I think some of our books are positioned as kind of apolitical Take for example The eye pencil which we turned into the Tuttle Twins in the miraculous pencil talking all about spontaneous order and social harmony Cooperation that's a book where we've spread tens of thousands of copies of that book into schools directly into classrooms around the country and And there hasn't been really pushback because it's not perceived to be Political even though I mean as you and I might understand politics and economics. It's really kind of human interaction just in different spheres So we try and kind of outwardly position ourselves in a more appealing way and not say hey We're you know libertarian propaganda for kids We we marketed a bit more softly again to kind of broaden that audience a little bit and maybe for that reason We're not getting a ton of Pushback but frankly I would invite more pushback because we'd love to sell a few more copies of the book When I think I lied you have an Atlas shrugged book. You have an eye pencil book by Leonard Reed you have a book based on the law by Bastiat I think you have a Jekyll Island Fed book as well. Correct. We do. Yeah, we have a creature from Jekyll Island We have economics in one lesson. Okay, let's see the road to serfdom We have a dr. Kersener's book a competition and entrepreneurship That was our eighth book that came out a few months ago all about entrepreneurship And then I think we have a foreign policy of freedom by Ron Paul with the collection of his Speeches that was a very meaningful one for me because after the way I got into this movement I'm often I love this question right because we all kind of came in at different times and levels for me It was I was invited to a screening of Aaron Russo's Documentary called America freedom to fascism and I'm sitting in this little library room with people I don't know I just I can't remember how I heard about it and there was this guy that just made a lot of sense You know, who is this guy? And it was Ron Paul. That was my first experience learning about him I purchased this book a foreign policy of freedom, which was the collection of his Congressional speeches pertaining to foreign policy and non-interventionism and as I recall I think I took that like on my honeymoon as my reading material right when I was getting married because so, you know Awakening for me to you know embrace and understand this point of view that just clicked with me And so when we did that as a total twins book all about the non-aggression principle and it was very Fun to honor, you know, Dr. Paul who I credit with bringing me into this movement So we're having a ton of fun. We have many more books obviously that we can do Initially we had kind of planned to do eight to ten books, but at this point I think there's just so much demand for new material We're just going to keep it going well, let me just interject that Daniel McAdams and I edited Ron's speeches which became a foreign policy of freedom and I remember that editing process very Viscerally it was not a fun book dead because it was literally his four speeches as transcribed by the house clerk with the ums and all that In it, so I'm close to that book, you know, I want to ask you there's a big nexus between these books and homeschooling generally Yeah, does ever shock you that we've been able to get away with homeschooling this long that it's not attacked more vigorously. I Actually interviewed for our podcast Society in the state pretty recently a couple who went to Sweden and Talking about their homeschooling fight. They went up to Sweden's highest court In Sweden a few years ago. They changed their country's law to say that You know with with very rare exceptions Nobody can homeschool and they almost never give out those exceptions anymore So this family was talking to me about the plight that they found themselves in people fleeing the country just because they Didn't want their children being fed into this state apparatus literally of a propaganda and Culturization and and it was actually very awakening because your question is very on my mind because of that conversation as a homeschooling father myself To realize how fortunate we are. I'm very critical of how many of our freedoms are being violated Taxes are high wars and everything else. But as a parent I actually would agree with kind of your question the sense that I'm amazed that we get away with this And I'm amazed that the state for all its strength and power Maybe it's that they feel like they're so big that they don't mind a little bit of competition because they know that they're still gonna win and You know, they have all the momentum and money and power and so forth. Maybe there's a little bit of that in play Nonetheless, I'm thankful for it because I know just a few decades ago in America The homeschooling laws were generally awful and it was kind of around the 80s that things improved And I see for my own children a night and day difference of how it would be for them in public school or how it was for me So, yeah, I'm glad we're getting away with it because we have a wonderful time and these books are Huge in the homeschooling committee because I think homeschooling families are always on the hunt for curriculum, right? They're always out there trying to find good material. It's not like there's an off-the-shelf solution for all homeschoolers I think homeschoolers are more independent minded by virtue of that decision that they've made and so all of that kind of clicks together Which works really well in our favor to? Introduce this material to to those types of families And if we're willing to take a long-term view of things homeschooling might be the most radical revolutionary Libertarian activist approach of all I mean it might be better than a million white papers or a million candidates in an election or a million third-party votes Yeah, I totally agree. It's that's how we perceive our project even if we're getting to kids who are in school We position this to those parents of public school kids to say look your kids aren't getting a balanced education Make sure in the home you're supplementing with these types of ideas, but but I agree It's very radical to be spreading anarcho capitalism to six-year-olds I mean you can't really call it anything else other than radical at the end of the day to be Introducing an entirely new generation. I always think about like who's yeah, who's the next Lou Rockwell? Who's the next Ron Paul? Who's the next Jeff dice for for that sake like or Connor boy? Who's out there that if we didn't reach out to them now at a young age? We wouldn't get them for like, you know 50 years before something else happened in their life How amazing is the world gonna be because we're planting all these seeds? Yeah, a lot of them aren't gonna grow But a lot of them are and I get very excited and working on this project Fantasizing in a way about a future in which we have all these people who better understand these ideas will never be a majority I don't think we're gonna have this reawakening of classical liberalism throughout society like the founding era necessarily But I think the critical mass is important of even of a minority and I think projects like this can help But it's interesting if you look at just about all the murderous or dictatorial regimes in human history they've all understood how important it is to get kids away from family influences and Toward thinking in terms of themselves as a cog in something bigger and that bigger thing is the state I agree. I there's a great quote I'm not gonna be able to repeat but the the gist of it is that the the family is the best line of defense between the individual and the state and Again, like I feel that as a dad I worry that a lot of parents like me are not equipped to talk about these ideas when we do little focus groups or try and Study our market a little bit and have these conversations We find that even the adults who've maybe read the law by Boston Let's use that as an example just because it's so popular They feel inadequate in being able to explain that to another adult and then when we say well, how would you talk about to your child? Just blank stares like how do you even distill that down? And so my my goal my quest in all of this project is to facilitate those conversations so that that line of defense between The individual in the state can actually be somewhat adequate, you know be be able to mount some sort of defense but if we I think a lot of parents don't even realize that we're in a battle for the hearts and minds of the rising generation that there are people out there who recognize that this is war quote unquote and For folks like us like how are you going to win a war that you don't even know is being waged? how are you gonna Prevail in a conflict that you don't even understand is happening all around you And so kind of my my sinister goal if I had one with this project is to Spread these ideas to so many families so that they're having these conversations Understanding this material, you know over the weeks and months I don't think it's just you sit down and read it and a light bulb clicks on but maybe something on the news happens four months later and and you know your 11 year old is like Hey, that's just like in this book and those connections are made and and it's gonna help them later in life I think it's immeasurable a lot of the stuff we're doing I think it takes a while to manifest itself, but but where that family should be that line of defense I feel like our movement if you want to call it that we wait for people to become adults, right? Like we like your organization mind Liberatus we're often talking to voters we're talking to adults who can read these big thick books and I I was working on The Tuttle Twins over the years I've come to the realization that we have a profound lack of investment in the rising generation We wait for public schools to propagandize and Plant all these biases that we have to then overcome or we hope that homeschoolers are gonna do okay on their own without equipping them with Resources to kind of help So my wish is that we as kind of a movement so-called Can recognize the importance of investing in the rising generation? I'm not here to say that Tuttle Twins is the or the only project. I think we need more effort And you know, I know Ron Paul's got his Ron Paul curriculum You know, I think the the earlier we can invest some of our resources and attention the better off will be in the future Well, I want to finish with this the first the book is dedicated to Lou Rockwell. Yeah, just tell us why You know Lou Rockwell's website was very helpful for me and learning once I kind of learned about Ron Paul I immediately found LRC and Reading all those essays was very very helpful for me That's how I found out about Rothbard and then of course learning about the Mises Institute And all the work that Lou has done to spread those ideas and so we wanted to honor him As an individual for me personally But also for the movement and doing such an effective job at spreading these ideas so that they they don't fade away into some library but that they're You know a reawakening of sorts and making sure that new generations are learning about Rothbard's work Well, and I don't want to conclude without mentioning the illustrations, which I think is fantastic Elijah Stanfield is sort of your partner in crime and drawing this I think they're every bit as important as the text. Oh Yeah, the stories would be one thing like if all I did were write some little stories, but you know when you have Entire illustrations that can visually convey the ideas that we're doing and talk about these concepts He makes these stories come alive in a way I never never would be able to he he does not get enough credit for these books He does such an amazing job and of all the complaints excuse me not complaints the the The applause that we get in the praise that we get it's it's like 80% easily for how amazing the illustrations are Well before we finish, how can people keep track of what you're doing? What Libertas is up to? So a tuttle twins calm is where you can find out about the books For those who don't have them and want to get we do like a combo pack where you can get the books and the workbooks And then if you want to learn a little bit about our work in Utah We do work with some partner organizations in other states as well Although we are just focused on Utah our website is Libertas Utah org or another handy website because a lot of your listeners are spread out throughout the country There's a group called the state policy network, which is SPN Org and that's where you can find groups like mine, but in the state wherever you're at so different kind of free market Libertarian conservative type groups who are trying to increase freedom in your state SPN org would be a great resource to check out Well Connor, thanks for your time. Congratulations on another book. You can find it ladies gentlemen in our bookstore at mises.org I think you can find them on Amazon as well Yep, and yeah, go buy them on the Mises bookstore We really appreciate what you're doing and we look forward to keeping an eye on you and your organization Thanks as always job. Thanks and ladies gentlemen. Have a great weekend Subscribe to Mises weekends via iTunes you stitcher and SoundCloud or listen on mises.org and YouTube