Liberty For Lil' Ones: The Connor Boyack Interview
Kyle and Ethan talk to Connor Boyack! Connor Boyack is president and founder of the Libertas Institute. He is best known for writing the Tuttle Twins series of books, which focus on introducing kids to the ideas of liberty and the free market. Kyle and Ethan talk about weed-smoking Mormons, how many wives a man can have in an anarchist utopia, and pouring libertarian fertilizer on the saplings rather than trying to save the old, diseased statist trees. Topics Discussed What are the Tuttle Twins series of books about What is Libertarianism all about and what on earth is the deal with the Libertarian Party Does a libertarian Mormon smoke weed? Indoctrinating children with foreign ideas like "liberty" and introducing them to books by dead white guys Isn't it a bad idea to teach children about liberty since as parents we want to tell them what to do? How many wives would each man be allowed to have in a libertarian utopia? The polygamy case, where children were taken from their parents, that Connor worked on The ten questions! To watch or listen to the full length podcast, become a paid subscriber at https://babylonbee.com/plans
I just have to say that I object strenuously to your use of the word hilarious.
Hard-hitting questions.
What do you think about feminism?
Do you like it?
Taking you to the cutting edge of truth.
Yeah, well, Last Jedi is one of the worst movies ever made, and it was very clear that Brian Johnson doesn't like Star Wars.
Kyle pulls no punches.
I'm going to ask how you're able to sleep at night.
Ethan brings bone-shattering common sense from the top rope.
If I may, how double dare you?
This is the Babylon Bee Interview Show.
Welcome to the Babylon Bee Interview Show.
I'm Kyle Mann.
This is my co-host, Ethan Nicole.
This is going well.
And today we're talking to...
Talking faster than usual.
Today, well, I just had my third cup of coffee.
And today we're talking to Connor Boyak.
Not used to it.
Welcome, Connor.
Hello.
Connor.
Connor.
It's Connor.
Yeah.
How are you guys?
It's me.
Does the man need any more introduction?
Yeah, that's it.
It's Connor, everybody.
Let's jump in.
Connor is the man responsible for the stacks of books surrounding Kyle.
I can barely see him.
The throne of books.
So, yeah.
Yeah, it's the Tuttle Twins series.
Tuttle Twins.
I've mentioned these on the podcast before.
They're kind of a fan.
They explain concepts like free market and liberty, libertarian issues, pot farms, pot farms, how to set up your own meth lab, legalizing prostitution, all of that stuff, but not really.
The essentials.
All the essentials to create a libertarian utopia.
So it just brainwashes our kids into libertarianism.
Like that, who's that guy in that one country?
He has armies of children and then he's trying to kill everybody with children.
Is it like that?
Is this a real thing?
What's his name?
I'm blanking out on it.
He was really popular for a while.
Yeah, something like that.
This is like a two ome and children did a whole Coney, Coney.
Omi, Coney.
That's it.
Are you like the Coney of Libertarianism?
Definitely not.
Or the Fagan.
Are you like Fagan?
That's a little more classic.
Sorry.
This episode is going really well.
All right.
I'll let you guys talk.
Go ahead.
Anyway, so Connor's also the president and founder of Livertas.
Libertas.
In Spanish for Flaming Mountain Lion.
I believe.
Yeah.
I'm pretty sure that's the flaming spirit of the mountain lion.
That's right.
So, yeah.
That's pretty much all there is to know about Connor.
So, okay.
Welcome.
All right.
Well, good, Connor.
We'll talk to you later.
Thanks for coming.
All right.
So why are you, why the Total Twins books?
Like, what are you thinking?
What's the deal with that?
What have I done?
So, yeah, good question.
So I'm a dad, and I want to teach my kids about the ideas that I believe in.
And it's pretty simple.
I went on Amazon one day looking for books, trying to figure out what I could use when my kids were young to help them understand the ideas that Kyle was just talking about, the ideas of a free society, and couldn't find anything.
I spent about a week or two kind of bummed that, you know, oh, there ought to be something, right?
I mean, even for like sex ed, you know, there's like the birds and the bees, and you can go get a book that will age appropriately help your kid transition or whatever.
Yeah.
That's not a prostitution level conversation.
Yeah.
This is just the introductory birds and bees, right?
And so, you know, there's stuff like that on Amazon.
So I thought there's got to be something for these kinds of ideas.
There wasn't.
And so a couple weeks later.
I'm really curious what the libertarian birds and bees book would look like.
There probably is one by now.
I'll have to go look.
Sorry, I continue.
Self-ownership of your body.
You have control.
Yeah.
So, yeah, like for us, it's, you know, a lot of parents believe these ideas.
They want to talk to their kids about them.
They want to impart to their, you know, offspring the ideas, the principles that they cherish, but.
They often lack the language to do so, right?
Some of these are kind of wonky ideas.
And how do you explain eminent domain to an eight-year-old?
And, you know, how do you talk about sound money to a six-year-old?
So the books are kind of offering the parents to give them a little bit of a crutch to have those conversations and have a really interesting dialogue with their kids.
I personally, I think only government schools should be able to indoctrinate our kids.
I mean, they're kind of the experts on this whole thing.
And so I think you're really infringing on their territory.
They've done a great job at it.
And how do you do that?
I was just reading a poll yesterday from, I can't remember the foundation's name, but they work in history a lot.
And they did one of these things where they go out, survey like 40,000 Americans about basic civic ideas and the literacy rate in terms of like people having a working knowledge of just basic civic historical stuff about America was like 20 percentile, something like that.
And so I'm a product of public school.
You know, I had an okay time, even though I cheated, you know, half the time because it was all about getting a grade.
It wasn't about like inquiry and learning and what I was interested in.
And so as a kid, I cheated a lot.
So you shouldn't even be here right now.
Precisely.
I have no credentials, you know, no fancy acronyms after my name.
I'm a failure.
I should just go home.
And yet, you know, when my middle school teacher found out that I've written 21 books recently, like, you know, might explosion because like in English class, I did horribly, right?
You know, so you would think that I would turn out a failure.
But I've actually, you know, we homeschool our kids and we want them to overcome a lot of those problems in the public school.
Not only do they not teach these ideas, but they often teach harmful ideas.
Like there's a pastor, I remember seeing him, a quote of his a few years ago, and he said, as Christians, can we really expect any, he said, can we really expect to send our children to Caesar's schools and not have them turn out as Romans?
And so I feel like that way with Liberty as well.
It's like, can you expect to send your kids to government schools and have them learn anything about the harms of government and big government and central planning and socialism when these are government schools?
They're often going to water down the bad stuff or omit it completely and just say, oh, things are great and government can do amazing things.
And, you know, looking at the democratic socialists being pumped out of these public schools, I think we see exhibit A of what I perceive to be the problem.
Interesting.
Quite so.
So you were like, I'm making some kids' books.
Did you already have kids' books?
Had you ever thought you'd make kids' books before that day?
No, I had written a few nonfiction kind of adult books.
Erotic erotica.
Yeah, the prostitution.
You kind of keep going.
Yeah, legalizing a prostitution.
No, it's one of those things where if you look at the first letter of each page, there's a special code books where you get the message reading between the lines.
No, this was a, it was a test for us.
And we didn't know if there was a market.
We didn't know if anyone would be interested in this at all.
So Elijah, who's the illustrator, extremely talented illustrator and buddy of mine, for us, it was just a labor of love.
We're like, we have no idea that this will sell.
We don't know if anyone will be interested.
So if we only do one book, what should it be?
And for both of us, it was The Law by Bastiat.
So the shtick with our series is every one of our books is based on and incorporates ideas from an original book, a very important book or essay.
And so The Law by Bastiat, written in 1850 by a French economist, extremely popular essay.
You can find it for free online.
Just search the law, Bastiat.
And so we took his essay, turned it into our own version, The Tuttle Twins Learn About the Law.
And that became our first book.
And the response was amazing.
And so that was kind of the market signal to us.
Like, oh, okay, there's something here.
We've sold now almost a million books.
We've got 14 total books.
We translate them into a dozen languages.
We've got an economic curriculum, a card game.
We're in talks to do a cartoon series.
Things are just kind of not unraveling.
That sounds bad.
They're rolling.
They're, you know, the snowball is moving down the mountain pretty quickly.
They're raveling.
They're raveling.
They are raveling.
They're madly raveling.
Yeah.
So remember when we had Dr. Bob Murphy on and we kept asking them how to compare everything to lemonade stands.
Like make everything a lemonade stand analogy because he's like what all these are.
So these are lemonade stands.
So Ethan, I would like to prescribe to you the Tuttle Twins version of the law.
Now, do you work in any like robots or aliens or anything or do you just keep it pretty straightforward?
Oh, wow.
No, not pretty pretty straightforward, pretty simple.
We don't do time travel and anything crazy.
I see there's a pirate or something there.
Yeah, there is a pirate.
The government is portrayed as a pirate trying to steal property from people.
You got to throw in the taxationist theft somewhere.
That book that Kyle has, The Fate of the Future has robots in it.
Yeah, there's robots.
Yeah.
Giant robots.
So short.
Oh, there's cookies right there.
Spoiler alert.
That's the ending.
We do activity workbooks as well that we give out for free when people buy them on our website and they have recipes in there so they can make the stuff that's in the book and keep thinking about the ideas.
We try and incorporate food into every book.
So what you're saying is there's a market for libertarian books that are full of giant robots and aliens and battles.
Surprisingly, a large market, in fact.
I'm down.
I draw, Kyle, and we both write.
So let's do it.
You may have created competitors right here.
I love it.
I'm a free market here.
I don't know.
That's dangerous.
That is dangerous.
We got to take them down.
We'll call it the Buttle Twins.
The Buttle Twins.
How about rebuttal twins?
The rebuttal.
The rebuttal twins.
The AOC.
You can appeal to all the lefties and tell them why they're wrong.
Now, what have you found the responses of kids that read this?
I have a story where my son was reading, I think it was the one with the giant monster that's like the Federal Reserve.
And my son's in the backseat of our car and he goes, I think he was five or six.
And he goes, dad, this book is about a monster that steals all our money, just like the government.
I don't know if he quite grasped what it was about, but I was like, oh, yeah, that's the basic idea.
So what have you found the responses?
Mission accomplished.
Yeah, mission accomplished.
Child brainwashed.
So what have you found that kids, how do they respond to this?
So, you know, I had never, as I tell Ethan, right, in response to this question, I've never done kids' books before.
This was a total experiment.
And what's been actually really bizarre is not only have kids really glommed on, you look at our social media and we get emails every day from parents being like, oh my gosh, like the conversations I'm having with my kid are like next level amazing.
I never learned this.
You know, I never learned this stuff when I was their age.
What was really surprising to me is the number of comments we get from the parents themselves saying, yeah, yeah, my kid's learning and they really enjoy the books.
But holy cow, I'm reading the books with them and I'm learning things that I never have learned before.
And so we have this kind of whole secondary market where, you know, if you were to give a copy of economics in one lesson, right, or the road to serfdom or one of these books to a parent, you know, they're busy, they're tired, they're overworked, they're, you know, they got life.
They're likely not going to read that book and be introduced or exposed to those ideas.
But now in this kind of fun, friendly kid format, when the proposition is, hey, read this with your kids.
Well, every parent wants to read with their kids, especially a fully illustrated, you know, short story.
And so now the barrier to entry is much lower for the parents.
And so we're reaching kids of all kinds of ages, their parents really tapping into not, in fact, just a libertarian.
We polled our audience.
We've got about, I think, 200,000 families reading these books now or so.
And we polled them last year to kind of learn more about all the demographics and stuff.
And there's amazing how many are just, you know, conservative, moderate, kind of politically agnostic.
They don't know what they believe.
At first, we thought, oh, we're preaching to the libertarian choir, but the books have really resonated with a much broader ideological audience, which has been really fun to kind of reach out to more people.
Yeah, I find a lot of people.
We don't talk about prostitution yet, right?
That's why I'm kind of more masses.
Not good.
Yeah, I find that a lot of people that are sympathetic with conservatism, they share a lot of the same core ideas of liberty, or they're a lot more open to them because this idea that, hey, we just want to be left alone, that resonates with a lot of people across the political spectrum.
So you may not just get the people that are way into libertarianism, but you may get people that they know these ideas, but maybe they haven't put them into words or they don't know where they come from, like Bashiad and all this.
Perhaps one of the weird things, though, about writing these books is I've really come to the realization that a lot of these ideas, we as good parents, we teach our kids, don't hurt other people, don't steal their stuff, et cetera, et cetera.
And it's only as we become adults that all these like asterisks get put onto those fundamental teachings, right?
Oh, don't hurt other people.
But if it's through government or if it's, you know, you're wearing a police uniform or if he was really rude or like all these little qualifiers get put on.
And so our books are more just like, hey, look, all those things you're teaching your kids already or all those things we learned as kids, those values hold true.
We've got a whole book on the Tuttle Twins and the Golden Rule, you know, and every parent wants to teach their kid the ethic of reciprocity, the golden rule.
But where we add onto that is the non-aggression principle, which is kind of a fundamental, you know, libertarian maxim, you know, of not aggressing against other people.
Only in, you know, self-defense are you justified in using force, which is really kind of the inverse of the golden rule.
Just as you don't want people to use, you know, aggression or any violence against you, you shouldn't be doing that to them.
So parents really resonate with these ideas, perhaps more less because they're espousing and teaching libertarian ideas, but more that they're really teaching like ethical, civic virtues and economic ideas that are going to help their kids not only understand the world around them, but be a kind of thriving, successful part of that.
And so we tend to focus really on that sweet spot.
We don't message these as libertarian books.
We're really trying to help parents empower their children with these time-tested values that we identify, I identify with a libertarian type of philosophy.
But most parents in our audience really just resonate with because it's good parenting.
It's good intellectual enrichment for their children to learn these time-tested values.
Is it good for children to be anti-authoritarian?
Well, let me tell you a story about my daughter.
Yeah, it's one of those things where I think I've actually had to kind of think about that a bit too, right?
It all boils down to, I think, what is true authority.
And, well, you know, the brainwashing thing is fun for us to throw around, but fundamentally, I'm not trying to brainwash kids.
What we're trying to do is help parents have conversations with their children.
And that's where I think parents can say, well, look, you know, government authority has its place and it should be limited.
And here's where it exceeds its authority.
And natural authority, like, you know, in a family, I think is quite different.
And we would probably defer to parents to kind of make those distinctions and help their kids thread that needle a little bit rather than raise a bunch of, you know, civilly disobedient children who feel like the Tuttle Twins is like a call to action to rise up and throw off the chains of authority.
Just imagine my two-year-old every time I try to change his diaper shouting, Am I being detained?
Don't tease me, Dad.
Yeah, don't tease me.
Yeah, you seem like a hypocrite.
You run your house like a communist, but uh, exactly.
You want all these kids to be libertarians hypocrite.
Yeah, do as I say, not as I do.
Yeah.
So you went to BYU?
I did, yeah.
So are you a Latter-day Saint?
I am.
And you fled California to live in Utah.
Yep, I did.
I miss California, but I also don't miss it at the same time.
Well, we don't allow as many wives.
We assumed maybe that was the qualifier.
We have a certain chunk of listeners who will be like, what?
And then I just tainted.
Oh, because he's the actor Mormon.
I thought you meant they were.
I like that.
There's a certain chunk of Christians.
What?
And you guys.
Calm down.
Calm down.
We can come together on liberty, right?
What are you going to come together on?
There's a ton of stuff.
I get a lot of messages from secular homeschoolers, secular libertarians who are like, do your books have any religion in it?
You know, and oh, yeah, do you sneak it in there?
We're trying to find secret messages in here.
The coded message.
Yeah.
So our first book we just did was based on the law.
And so in that essay, he makes the argument that our rights come from God, kind of the natural creator, you know, type perspective.
And so we incorporate that in our book, this very kind of religiously agnostic, kind of general Christian point or deist point, perhaps.
But none of the other books have any type of religious content.
But it is something we do get inquiries about, not only from, you know, maybe the evangelical Christians who find out my religious background and think maybe this is like a Mormon conspiracy to indoctrinate people, but even from the atheists who don't want any religion for their kids and they don't want to, you know, buy some books for them.
We have a lot of schools who will buy our books and they, it's interesting, they'll buy the combo pack for the parents, but they'll leave a message in the notes and they say, you need to remove the law, that book, from the pack of books, because they can't use their government money to buy any rel anything that promotes any kind of religion at all.
So they make us omit that particular book just because it mentions that our rights come from God.
So your taxpayer dollars hard at work.
And those are California schools.
So there you go.
That's crazy.
And that's just, that's just what Bashi was saying.
I actually did find the Mormon propaganda in here.
Oh, you found it?
Yeah, look.
Look, Holy Bible.
What's right next to that there on the shelf?
Looks like a Book of Mormon to me.
My glasses.
Oh, Fred's books?
I think there's a Book of Mormon on the shelf.
That was Elijah sneaking it in there.
Did you even know that?
Or did you?
I think he realized that.
My books are on there.
What's messed me up from owning an iPad is now when I can't read something in a book, I go like this.
I just try to squeeze it open.
Did you just squeeze it open?
Yeah, I literally did that.
Didn't work.
I can't see.
I can't put on my glasses.
Goes up to the TV and taps the TV like it's like a touch sensor.
Yeah, it's on people's laptops.
Oh, that's not a touch.
Yeah, I look really dumb when I go from my touch laptop to my regular laptop.
And I'm like, the other weird thing is because I draw, I draw on a Cintiq.
I still have the Muscle memory that, like, when I erase with the eraser end, I'll erase and then I'll brush off shavings that aren't there.
Beautiful.
So, how many wives would each man be allowed to have in your libertarian utopia?
Oh, the more the merrier.
It's division of labor.
This is a fundamental free market economic concept, right?
One can do the food, one can do the dishes, one can do the clothing.
You know, it's a decentralized society.
We have this like, you know, I can only handle one.
I'll say that much.
I always wonder about the desire to have more.
That seems like a lot of I was reading the FLDS about, you know, the when you read about like the details of what that life looks like, these guys that have like tons and tons of wives, they have to like rent entire like fleets of buses to go on family vacation.
Because they have like, it's like, it's insane.
So why would you want that?
My full-time stint with Libertas Institute, you know, we say we change hearts, minds, and laws.
Yeah, he's the Italian, the van.
I always think it's yeah.
I just want to go like Pablo Escobar with it.
So we changed, we changed laws.
That's kind of our shtick is, you know, we're up there advocating for reform and more freedom.
And funny enough, one of the laws that we work on this year in Utah, which is truly a uniquely Utah thing, is polygamy has been a felony since like 1935 as a result of the feds kind of clashing against the state early in Utah's statehood.
And as a transplant to Utah, this was very weird for me to kind of deal with a lot of that, you know, legal history with it.
And what's interesting is the FLDS was actually the reason why I got pulled into politics and liberty to begin with.
I was newly married.
I had just graduated from BYU, totally ignorant about this law, a lot of this stuff.
And I saw on the news, there was this raid down in Texas at this ranch they called Yearning for Zion, where a lot of the FLDS had kind of fled to.
And this woman, what happened was this woman called in.
She was a known fraudster and she called in a false tip saying that there was child abuse going on.
Based on that false allegation, the Fed swooped in helicopters, tanks, assault rifles, everything else, and they invaded this compound or this, this, you know, if you watch Waco on Netflix, you know, like imagery of the Warren Jeffs and everything out there, like that was there at the time.
Yeah.
I read a bunch of books.
I got obsessed.
Allegations of child brides and all these horrible things.
And nevertheless, based on this false tip, they removed over 400 children, placed them in foster care, which in Texas at the time and probably still now was riddled with drug abuse and sexual abuse and all these kinds of things in the foster care system.
So you're taking them from loving moms and dads and situations and throwing them into the system.
So I'm watching this in Utah.
I'm totally ignorant of a lot of this stuff.
And I just got ticked and I didn't know what to do.
I started an online petition back in the day when those were kind of new and novel and got a bunch of signatures.
That was the first time I was ever on the news.
And so that issue kind of pulled me into this broader political awakening where we work on dozens and dozens of different kinds of policies now.
But this year we got the felony.
We basically decriminalized polygamy.
And what's weird about it is with the Warren Jeffs of the world, they would never actually prosecute them for polygamy.
They would find the wire fraud and the child bride stuff and other crimes, but they would never actually prosecute.
And so that was the weird thing.
There was a lawsuit, Supreme Court lawsuit called Lawrence versus Texas, right?
Which kind of said sodomy is sodomy laws are unconstitutional.
What happens in the privacy of someone's bedroom, et cetera, et cetera.
And then broadly, that applies to things like polygamy and so forth.
And so you had this law in the books that was felonizing all these people, but wasn't actually being used.
But what it had the effect of is it pushed them down in the shadows where the Warren Jeffs of the world could rise up and kind of abuse them and say, Oh, if you step out of the line, they might take your kids away.
And it really allowed them to perpetuate abuse.
So the idea for us was, let's remove the felony, let these people just be part of society.
They won't be as scared to kind of report abuse and come out.
And so it's a very bizarre issue for me as a transplant to Utah, but a very real thing for like tens of thousands of people who practice that lifestyle, love it or hate it.
But for me, as kind of a civil libertarian, I was seeing that the government was really mucking up a lot of stuff.
And so it's been an interesting thing to work on.
Yeah, it was a crazy mess.
I remember seeing reading about that.
And yeah, they're just scooping up all these kids to random homes.
And yeah, I remember when I read about it being very torn, I was like, yeah, I hate what's happening here, you know, in specific ways, but that is not the right solution.
Just like rip all these children from their families.
Yep.
It was very much kind of an end justifies the means type of argument because they did find evidence of child rides when they went into their evil.
Yeah, take the 12-year-old away from Warren Jeffs, you know, might be a good idea.
But take 400 children away from all their moms.
Maybe not.
Yeah.
And what was even worse was the argument they made in defense of that basically kidnapping.
They said, well, they might be abused in the future.
Okay.
Like that was literally the argument that the feds made to justify taking all those kids.
So kind of a terrifying thing.
They gave them back, right?
It came back around.
Yep.
Okay.
Yep.
All within a year or so because you started.
You don't, you know, maybe you're part of that or not.
But it was an awakening for me to see how oppressive the government can be, you know, in the name of some justified enforcement against some bad dude.
But what about the virus?
My awakening.
Yeah.
And here we are.
Are we seeing that now?
So why don't you just move to Somalia?
I never get that one.
I'm trying to decide how to respond because I've only heard this one 8,000 times.
So one fun thing we do at the Tuttle Twins is every April Fools we put out, you know, because we're always saying, here's the next book, here's the cover of the next book.
Our audience gets excited.
Well, every April Fools, we put out an April Fool's one.
And so a few years ago, we designed a cover.
You can find this if you go dig through our Facebook page photos in the archive.
We did one called The Tuttle Twins Move to Somalia.
And, you know, they've got the attire and there's goats on the street behind them.
And, you know, so we've given it thought.
We're, you know, helping people understand.
That's what it takes.
Well, we wrote a bunch of ideas for Tuttle Twins books down.
And one of the ones we wrote down was The Tuttle Twins Move to Somalia.
So we didn't do our research.
That's embarrassing.
This is as comedians, we often write jokes that someone's already told.
Especially when you're writing quickly before the podcast.
So we were thinking maybe you could do the Tuttle Twins start an opium farm.
Oopsie.
I don't know.
I don't get any of these jokes.
Tuttle Twins and the unlawful detention.
Oh, come on.
You were the one saying that, you know, don't detain me, right?
Yeah.
Just a minute.
I didn't realize where I was going.
I was just thinking that they could get pulled over at a DUI checkpoint and like film the officer and scream, Am I being detained for the whole book?
There you go.
That could be like the Patriot Act.
You know, they're unlawful combatants against their parents or something.
Yeah, but see, you always make it more of like a metaphor.
Like you'll do like a, you know, like we were talking about a robot or a monster or like some.
It's like, so what would create a reserve as the monster?
Yeah.
Yeah.
So the police officer wouldn't be a police officer.
He would be like school principal or yeah, yeah, yeah, cyborg.
I was thinking like zombies.
Zombie.
I was figuring that's what you would go for.
Zombie.
Zombie police.
Zombie cops.
Zombie cops.
That's a good name.
That is a good name.
Zombies.
We'll do that one.
All right.
The Revelation Twins.
The twins and the zombies.
And the zombies.
How about when they spend 14 years in federal prison for tax evasion?
That would be the Erwin Schiff edition, right?
Dan laughed.
Dan laughed.
He got it.
Me your dad on the other end of the room.
Which is horrible, right?
Erwin Schiff, you know, tied to a bed in prison in there for tax evasion.
He died in prison.
Oh, geez.
They chained him to his bed, you know, in his final days.
This is Peter Schiff's dad.
Peter Schiff is a kind of a well-known economist and gold bug, and he's in the news a lot.
This was his dad, who was very prominent years ago, kind of a tax protester.
And yeah.
In fact, one of the things that woke me up big time to kind of these ideas was a documentary that Aaron Rousseau put together in, I think, 2005 called America Freedom to Fascism.
And he talked about here was like the American ideas and so forth.
And then here's how we've declined and moved away from that.
That was the first time I was introduced to Congressman Ron Paul.
He was interviewed in that documentary and Ron Paul ended up, I reread a lot of his stuff and he kind of sent me on a good direction, you know, go read these books and keep learning.
But in that documentary, America Freedom to Fascism, it shows like, here's what happens when you, you know, don't pay your taxes.
And there were a number of tax protesters in there showing the raw power.
I mean, it was very much just like render unto Caesar or else type of epiphany I had.
Like, this is, I don't know, it's serious stuff.
What do you have against Caesar?
Caesar makes a good salad.
It's true.
It has anchovies in it.
About it.
Does it really have anchovies in it?
They use anchovy paste to make salads.
Oh, is that what that is?
Wow.
I'll never be able to eat a Caesar salad when you dream when you find out Dr. Pepper is made of the prunes.
You're like, wait, what?
That kind of ruins it.
Yeah, it does ruin it.
It just takes you out of it.
So what?
Well, he looks flat regarding it.
So we were thinking that you could, we were thinking you could do Tuttle Twins, how to 3D print your own guns.
And they could come with all the you make one for each.
So you have the AR4, the AR5 for five-year-olds, AR6, all the up to the AR-15, 16, 17.
Make bigger ones and bigger.
We could put a link in the book where they could go download the plans and do it themselves.
Yeah, do it yourself.
I'm up.
It's disguised as a Marvel Madness set when you get it.
That's actually.
Oh, no, that's 3D printing.
If people can't afford a 3D printer, you got to have options.
Yeah.
I'm on board.
All right.
So what drove you to become an ideological libertarian in your life?
Was it just indoctrination from being raised by fundamentalist people?
I don't know.
I'll tell my friends.
I like this assuming somebody's entire upbringing just by the fact they said they're more when I just like completely fill in your life story.
Right.
I'm not wearing a prairie dress for anyone who can't see.
Did your wife have that hairdo that they have on the big wave?
They call it a wave.
Thankfully, no.
You get to have all the wives you want.
You get to like dominate women.
Why do you pick that hair to make them all have it?
Well, not you, not you specifically.
Not you, not you.
I'm just saying we're talking together, arm in arm, about those FLDS weirdos.
Those other guys.
Yeah.
Honestly, the most interesting thing for me about working on that issue was recognizing how much of a minority those type of, you know, the FLDS type of people are.
Like most of the polygamists we ended up working with and changing the law are like, you'd have no clue at all.
Oh, they don't look like that.
Yeah.
Like we did a little video a few years ago, one family story, and they shared that like, you know, one of their daughters died and they took them to the hospital, her here in Utah, and the police and the child services were accusing them of like killing her just because, oh, you're polygamous.
So clearly you're criminals and you did something bad.
And for them realizing, like, we're just trying to be a good family.
And now our government is like, you know, persecuting it.
But you'd have no clue.
Like, they look totally normal and it was weird.
So, no, my wife does not have the wave.
And many, many of the polygamist folks seem not to.
They dress very fashionably.
I thought it's the FLDS, right?
They're into that wave.
Yeah, that's the FLDS.
And frankly, with Warren Jeffs being in prison, a lot of them have kind of scattered and they've lost a lot of numbers, I think.
Putting the hair down.
But in certain communities, you can see them at the store and they're still dressed that way.
You think there was like one guy at the top?
He was like the main guy.
Was that Rulan Roylan or something?
Uncle Rollins.
Royland fashion designer guy.
But he was like, he had just had a thing for that hairdo.
Some girl rejected him as a kid that had that hairdo, and now he makes all the women wear that hairdo.
He's just living out this fancy.
You wear pastel colors?
He looked dressed like Susie from eighth grade.
I don't even remember what we were talking about before.
I had asked you how you became an indoctrinated.
Oh, that's right.
My parents said, yeah, your parents being fundamentalists.
Fundamentalist libertarian Mormons.
So my parents are conservative and were growing up.
My mom was on the city council, but we were never very ideological.
For me, it was that documentary really kind of snapped me awake that I mentioned America Freedom Fascism.
I ended up reading, it was actually after I got out of college.
I didn't really learn any of the stuff in history or economics.
I didn't enjoy those classes.
I did poorly in them.
But I graduated college.
And as I say, when I watched that documentary and learned about Ron Paul, he was kind of my red pill and ended up reading a lot of the books that he had recommended, which just kind of dovetailed into reading other books and finding the Mises Institute and just learning a lot through kind of self-education and reading.
And along the way, I was starting to see like we laugh about, you know, don't tase me, bro.
But then you watch the video online where the police officers tasing this guy.
He was just standing there and bit by bit by bit, seeing all these stories over the years as I was learning about the historical examples of tyranny and oppression.
And then seeing, I mean, just, I mean, I don't know when you guys are going to publish this, but just today, right now on the news, it's blowing up that in, where was it?
I can't remember.
Somewhere in America, the cop had his knee down on this black guy's throat for like five minutes.
And the guy is saying, I can't breathe, I can't breathe.
Just like Eric Garner, I think was his name a few years ago.
Similar thing happened and the guy died.
And, you know, the whole reason that led to the altercation, it was they called it fraud in progress.
It was just this, you know, fraud charge and led to this physical altercation where the government is swooping in.
And I just, I guess I have this really high sensitivity to injustice.
I guess that would be the way to put it.
And so where other people kind of ignore or move on or see it and then go about their day, that stuff sticks with me and really just like fire in my belly kind of like, you know, I'm in a position now where I can do something about those things.
I have a platform.
I have the ability to change laws.
I have the network to affect change.
And so as I see those stories, I just get extremely motivated to do something about it and become a resource for other people who feel like they can't so that I can point them in the right direction or help them, you know, make a difference.
And so, you know, the books are a great vehicle and teaching the principles, but then on the legal side of things, we're able to actually try and go out and do something about it.
So it feels good, I guess, to kind of have that outlet to not just see something and be mad and shake your fist, right?
There ought to be something done about that.
There ought to be a law.
There ought to be, you know, accountability.
But I have to, you know, it's not limited, obviously, but I have an outlet to try and do something.
So the Libertarian Party is kind of crazy.
Kind of.
They just did their Zoom conference or whatever.
And there's people like lighting up bongs and stuff on the not helping themselves.
It's kind of like Vermin Supreme with the boot on his head.
And it's kind of crazy.
So it's kind of interesting what you're doing because you're trying to affect change by, I don't know, just changing young minds and putting this product out there that hopefully gets the ideas out there.
When we talked to Ron Paul, he was kind of similar.
He was saying, I just put the ideas out there.
I don't, you know, I don't try to be political or strategic.
So I don't know.
What do you see as kind of the future of libertarianism and the future of liberty?
How are the ideas going to go forward?
Libertarians have traditionally been bad at getting anything done, you know, because they are so ideological that they run around naked at their conventions and smoke crack and stuff.
It's just unite way more around an idea than they do a person.
Yeah, it's not a person.
It's an idea.
And it's good.
And it's idealistic.
It's not like you have to do cat herding, right?
Like get all these independent-minded, strong-willed people to rally behind, you know, someone.
Yeah.
I often think of the analogy of these trees that are mature but decaying.
And we can fertilize them back to good health, but that's going to take a ton of fertilizer to save the orchard, to try and reclaim those trees.
What if instead, with a fraction of that investment of time and resources, we focused on the saplings, trying to make sure that the future trees were healthy and producing well.
And so that's why I think the future of the liberty movement is in the rising generation.
Because if you think about organizations that are out there trying to educate adults, right, take the Mises Institute or Young Americans for Liberty or FEE.
There's a lot of great organizations.
I support them, love them, share all their stuff.
But it's a defensive proposition.
They are out there trying to play defense for these ideas.
And the offense that they're trying to do is very difficult in the sense that the defense on the other side, right, the other team, they've been training and they've got strong muscles.
And it's very hard to kind of work through people who have spent their entire life going through the public school system and believing in democratic socialism and statism and all these kinds of things.
It's very difficult.
It takes a lot of time and money to get an adult to change their worldview.
What if instead we could focus on the rising generation and help them understand the way the world really works and personal accountability and free markets and property rights and all these time-tested, excuse me, time-tested values.
And it'd be much cheaper and it'd be much more effective and much more long-lasting if we really had this like robust foundation in the future of all these people who had a better worldview.
And that's not to say that it's that difficult.
What I mean by that is, as we're seeing in our own audience with Tuttletrends, there's so many parents who want to expose their children to this, who know that when they send their kids to school, that they're learning like horrible ideas and big government and all this kind of stuff.
And they want to kind of inoculate their children against that so that their own kids don't turn out to be democratic socialists.
Because as much as a libertarian or freedom-loving parent wants their kid to believe the things they do, they're spending the majority of their day in their most formative intellectual years being brainwashed and indoctrinated or taught by people who have totally different worldviews and agendas and goals.
So I think that's why an investment in those saplings is so critical because if we really want the strong orchard of freedom in the future, we need these strong, healthy trees.
I think, yeah, we should go out and fertilize the old, mature, diseased, decaying trees.
We need to reclaim them.
Boots on their heads.
But we got to focus on the future.
And that's where I think the libertarian movement has long missed out.
And that's the void we're trying to fill.
Right now with the monopoly, maybe with you guys, some competition with the buttle twins in the future.
We'll see.
I have an idea, which we may use, but you can have this if you want it.
Because you know how in South Park, I think they stopped doing it, but you used to have Kenny, who always died in every episode.
Right.
You should have Kenny the pot smoker, who he just dies a different way every episode.
And so the kids are thinking, yeah, I shouldn't be, even though it's fine, it's just stigmatized now.
So you don't have all these pot smokers ruining the Libertarian Party.
With boots on their heads.
Boots on their heads and running around naked.
What the Libertarian Party suffers.
I've never been a member, but what they suffer most from is awful branding.
I mean, not only do they get these former big government Republicans trying to like Wells, you know, when he got the vice president nomination last time, my mind was just blown.
That guy's not libertarian at all.
So they're being used and abused by these wannabe libertarians, right?
And then the faithful amidst them are often so crazy that is that really the face of the movement that you want to kind of endear people to your cause?
Like Joe Exotic.
Joe Exotic, who's that?
The Tiger King.
Tiger King.
Oh, he ran as libertarian.
I'm behind on my Netflix guys.
I haven't seen it yet.
Sorry.
He ran for governor as a libertarian.
It couldn't be a more bonkers candidate for anything.
Yeah.
Well, maybe, maybe Vermin Supreme, but he knows.
At least he knows the joke.
Yeah, Joe Exotic, I don't think he thought a day about politics except he knew he wanted to be able to shoot whatever he wanted to.
I guess he's in the past tense like he's dead.
He's alive, but he's in prison.
Anyway, spoiler alert.
Uh-oh, now I don't have to watch it.
He just ruined the whole however many hours.
What else?
I had a serious question after that, but I forgot it.
I have a really serious one.
Are Mormons allowed to smoke weed?
Good question.
I would argue yes, but many would argue no.
I'm kind of a different kind of Mormon than your traditional.
So Mormons have what's called a word of wisdom, which is kind of a teaching of health.
It's why they don't smoke tobacco and drink alcohol and stuff like that.
And yeah, well, depends on the level of caffeine, I guess, you know, but I can't tell you how many Diet Coke addicts there are.
It's like the Mormon drug.
Do you guys have in California, like the, here in Utah, there's all these, I don't even know what to call them, like soda shops, swigs, so delicious.
It's literally you go shopping through.
Yeah, well, it's like, it's like you can get Mountain Dew with like flavors added in.
And it's like the crack cookie.
That sounds like from the day of Hank Williams or something.
It's back.
It's so that it's like Starbucks.
It's like the Starbucks of Utah.
You get your cold caffeine hit.
There's a guy in a trench coat in an alley selling like Dr. Pepper to Mormon Amazing.
So it's like Starbucks, but fizzy, like a fizzy.
Like cannabis.
Cannabis, I believe, is this natural plant that God has given us that does amazing things.
I was actually the one in Utah who spearheaded the medical cannabis legalization effort with our team.
It took five years and we just a year and a half ago got it done and medical cannabis is now legal in Utah, which a lot of people thought would never happen because the LDS church fought us and opposed it.
And so that kind of answers your question, right?
In terms of is it allowed?
A lot of people saw it as just an illegal drug and like all illegal drugs should just remain illegal.
From a more libertarian point, obviously I had a different perspective on that.
And even from a theological point, I think that, you know, I mean, even with like mushrooms, right?
Like psilocybin is amazing for people's mental health.
They're doing clinical studies on it right now.
And it's just baffling that the government stands in the way and says, we're going to throw you in a cage if you use this stuff.
It's, it's pretty sad.
Are you high right now?
I am not high.
No.
Yeah.
Sadly.
This would be a lot more fun, I feel, if I was.
Well, I was kind of thinking like you're having fun, man.
I was thinking to like write these books that adapt old libertarian ideas into like giant robots.
There's probably some like mushrooms or there's something involved.
There's going to be one where they're on a giant mushroom trip for the whole thing and they're about legalizing drugs.
You know, since he draws all the people to ask him if, you know.
Yeah, there's probably something involved there.
Well, what was my question?
I had a question.
Did you have a...
It broke my brain.
Do you have any cool stories?
Yeah, you got any cool stories?
I have lots of cool stories.
What's your coolest story?
Give us your best story.
Like you're at a party.
Everybody's drinking.
You broke your leg.
Everybody's drinking sprite.
You don't have to be not title twins or anything.
You're going to party.
Everybody's high on soda.
And you're going to give your best party stories.
Oh, man.
This is one of the things like when I go to a restaurant and there's like 80 things to choose from, I get decision paralysis when all of a sudden your mind goes.
Have you ever crapped your pants?
I have.
You want to hear that story?
Yeah, it's a home story.
So I was in the marching band.
This has got so much better.
Yeah, you fixed my decision paralysis for me.
Here's the story.
So I'm 16 years old in the marching band.
I played a saxophone.
And this is in the mid-90s when you guys remember corduroy was like really popular.
I had my white corduroy shorts on, my vans shoes.
I was kind of a blink 182 punk kind of kid.
And I was in a ska band.
Oh, beautiful.
So this was in California?
San Diego.
Yeah.
That sounds California.
Yeah, that's very California.
I had a Puka Shell necklace.
Oh, of course you know.
Oh, yeah.
Hawaiian shirts.
Oh, man.
Yep.
Yep.
Quicksilver shirt.
So anyways, I'm out at practice one morning and it's BFE way out in the field past the black top, past the, you know, everything we're out on the.
And so we're practicing.
It's like 7.30 in the morning and I've got the gurgles.
And so I get permission to go and I'm walking back and it's quite a distance, right, to get to the first building with the kind of the lockers and the bathrooms.
And I'm about a third of the way there and all of a sudden the gurgles are happening a little faster.
So I start trying to run as fast as I can while clenching my buttocks as hard as I can to prevent any type of, you know, escape.
And I get a knee walk there.
Yeah.
Very awkward.
You should give it a try.
People are getting these mental images right now of how that might work.
Right.
And I make it.
I'm about 20 feet away and I hear these girls coming.
And it was a group of senior gals showing up early for like gymnastics or something.
And so I hide to the side of the building where the view is a bit obstructed.
And I'm waiting for them to pass because I'm about to like crap myself.
Well, they took long enough that I did, in fact, crap myself outside of the bathroom because I couldn't get in.
Oh, the door was locked, by the way.
The first door I tried was locked.
That's why I didn't just dart in.
So I'm standing outside behind this wall.
Girls are about 20 feet away.
My white corduroy shirt shorts are now brown, soaked through.
I have to somehow figure out how to get four buildings over to the nurse's office.
Fortunately, it's before school.
A lot of kids haven't shown up yet.
So I'm running and dripping everywhere, and it's just a horrible, smelly sight.
I get to the front.
She comes out.
She gives me a trash bag to cover myself with and another trash bag to throw my shoes and socks in.
Buses start arriving.
I'm sitting outside on the because she didn't want me in her office because how horrible would that be?
I'm sitting out on the planter with the bricks with a trash bag covering me and one sitting next to me.
My parents aren't answering the phone.
She has to call my emergency contact, which is a neighbor lady down the road, who, as luck would have it, one week prior, just bought a new minivan for her family that is her only vehicle to come pick me up in.
She arrives half an hour later.
Why?
It took so long for her to get garbage bags strategically covering the seat, the four in a brand new van.
And she drove me home and I had to, you know, take care of business.
And I was traumatized for quite a long time after that.
So that's, that's like my, as I think back in high school, that memory services to the top.
Traumatized.
Yeah.
And they should make that.
And then minivans, they should have a, you know, crap-flinging monkey mode or whatever.
Cause like push a button, everything switches to poop, like won't absorb all hard plastic and everything.
Because like when you have a family and your kids are a certain age, everything behind the front, two front seats is a jungle.
It's complete madness back there.
I just don't even look back there.
Because every once in a while I'll go back and I'll look and it's like it's like a crime scene.
Like I want to, I want to I want a CSI because I don't even know.
It's horrifying what's going on.
Like all the cup holders are full of like sludge and crayons are just scrapes.
There's like claw marks.
You don't even know what was happening.
Don't tell child services.
That sounds pretty crazy.
That's just kids.
It's just kids.
That's how kids are.
They claw things.
Like you have that console that has a little stereo of their own right there that they can control.
They have climbed on that thing and stubbed it so many times.
Like there are no knobs.
There is nothing.
It looks like a person.
Like the stereo looks like a person who got their face eaten up by a chimpanzee.
Like it's just unrecognizable.
Which is why the resale value of those minivans.
Yeah.
So that's what I need.
The crap flinging monkey mode, push the button.
And then once they all turn like five-ish, six-ish, maybe you can flip it back around.
Maybe older.
I feel like that's something Tesla could figure out, right?
Elon Musk.
They're always coming up with those like nine kids.
So he should know by now.
He's got that new one named Something Unpronounceable.
AR-15 or something.
Yeah.
Not exactly.
California wouldn't let him name what they wanted to name them, right?
It was such a weird name that the state law said they did actually stop him.
I thought that I read that they read.
I saw articles that said they could, but I don't know if they, did they?
They actually did.
There was a post I read over the weekend saying that the Grimes or whatever her name is came out and said they had to simplify the name because of the law.
They relented.
They don't allow dashes.
It's kind of like file names.
No Greek symbols or something.
Kyle kind of toned out on that one.
Well, I would like to move on to our 10 questions.
The 10 ultimate questions.
These are the 10 questions we ask every guest.
Although we're going to modify them a little bit.
Okay.
This is the LDS version.
Or we're not supposed to say Mormon.
I'm sorry.
Yeah, it's old habits to die hard.
He sounds like, yeah, he sounds like he's a rogue Mormon who don't play by the rules.
Yeah.
Like the pot.
Is that true?
I mean, that's what it seems like to me.
Depends on the rules.
He's like LDS, LSD, whatever.
It's all tomatoes.
Same letters.
All right, Connor.
Well, thanks for coming on.
And everybody can check out all your stuff at Libertas in Vertas.
Yeah, so you go to tuttletwins.com.
That's where they're at.
Coming up next for Babylon Bee subscribers.
That's a good answer.
We'll claim the Aquabats.
I always forget that Mormons are way sneakier than Christians.
Like Christians go out there and they're like, JC in the house.
And then Mormons are just like, let's just make good stuff.
And then we don't have normal people.
Nobody even knows that they're Mormons.
I love Ska, but it is a little depressing going to a Ska concert nowadays.
And everyone's old.
Everybody's old, and everybody's a little more tired.
Nobody's scamping like they used to.
But have you smoked weedism?
Have you?
I wonder if Peter had like the Gadsden flag t-shirt to tread on me.
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