300 - Best of 2025! Teaching Kids Capitalism: How the Tuttle Twins is Changing Hearts, Minds, and Laws with Connor Boyack

0:00From 2014 through 2019, we sold a cumulative total of 750 ,000 copies of books, which for a self-published outfit is actually really, really good. 2020 hit and we sold 1.3 million books in 2020 alone. We've sold a total of over 6 million books now. What was Libertas' budget in 2014 and what is it in 2024? 2014, it was probably about$200 ,000. This year, our budget is roughly$15 million. So we partnered with Angel Studios, spun off a cartoon. That's in its third season now. I think it's got over 250 million views.

0:38So the business we're talking about today is the Tuttle Twins. So I write a series of children's books, which have now also turned into curricula and a whole lot more materials. And these are resources to help kids of all ages and their parents, frankly, learn about ideas like capitalism, entrepreneurship, property rights, personal responsibility. We do it through fun stories, beautiful illustrations, trying to make these ideas accessible to kids. So this is a business unit within a nonprofit. So a little bit different model than a lot of people are used to in the traditional for-profit world, but we treat it kind of independently as its own little business unit, despite being owned by the nonprofit.

1:18So trying to, you know, at a minimum have excess revenue, if not ultimately break even. A lot of folks are trying to get multiples and have an exit at some day or whatever. That's not really our focus. Ours is a very mission-driven initiative. And so we use a lot of entrepreneurial energy within the nonprofit, but ultimately the goal, I'm happy at the end of the day, if we are breaking even in what we do, because that means that a ton of people are reading the books, they're learning about the idea is ultimately that's where we find the most value for us, but it has to be profitable, allowing us to do marketing and reach more people and grow what we're doing.

1:55You know, no mission without a margin. You can't have a mission driven organization if you're not actually able to keep your expenses in line. Can you give people an idea of the Tuttle twins? Let's say how big is that? How many books have you sold? How many, like you have some really cool stuff with Angel Studios. Can you talk about sort of the reach you have? Sure. So we started in 2014. So the time we're recording this, it's our 10th anniversary year. We now have about three dozen books for kids of all ages, all the way from toddlers to teens and everything in between. And then we've sold a total of over 6 million books now.

2:31We translate them into about a dozen languages and more counting. and and yeah you mentioned you know the cartoon so we partnered with angel studios spun off a cartoon that's in its third season now i think it's got over 250 million views across channels we've got you know games and curricula and other content as well really we're just trying to build this almost like content empire and fill this void because this literally started because my partner and elijah we were like you know trying our kids were young and we're like hey we want to teach our kids this stuff. I went on Amazon one day trying to find books like this for my kids.

3:07There was nothing. So it's one of those very traditional stories of like seeing a problem and having the light bulb moment and being like, oh, well, I could do that. So we partnered up, he illustrated, I wrote the book and it's just been growing from there more than any of our wildest imaginations. And now it's a service to millions of kids around the world whose schools and textbooks aren't teaching them these ideas. If anything, they're often teaching quite hostile or different ideas. And so it's a great supplement for families to do it. I think it's great product market fit and it's served us really well.

3:39Okay. So you have the Libertas Institute, which is based in Utah. Is the media arm like a subunit of the nonprofit or is it a separate standalone for-profit entity? It's just an initiative of Libertas Institute. So we are the publisher of the books. We run it as a business unit internally, but on the books, It's just one of our many programs within the nonprofit. So we, we track it ourselves primarily because we want to make sure that as a business unit, we're, you know, it is profitable and not requiring to be subsidized by other fundraising or other revenue generating efforts. But ultimately it's just one of many different initiatives that our organization's involved in.

4:15Is it weird operating this business within a nonprofit? Cause like, I'm just looking 6 million books sold is insane. I don't necessarily know what the profit margins are where we could talk about like generally speaking in the publishing industry what that is. But I'm just curious, like the nonprofit piece, and then having the, I'm not going to even call it for profit, just a very, you know, a very commercial enterprise in selling these books and creating a media arm. How do those two things comport? Well, it's definitely non-traditional, I'll give you that. But it's very doable, and I think advantageous in some cases.

4:49So clearly, my partner and I are not going to have any type of exit where we just go retire to play golf on a, you know, tropical island for the rest of our days. Like that's not what we're after and that's not how we structured it. So there are trade-offs in that sense that we have no ownership stake. There are no shares in a nonprofit. There's no dividends being paid to shareholders or anything like that. But we do get to avoid corporate income taxes, which is really nice. And then we also open up philanthropy as an additional revenue stream. So all along the way, what we've done is what I call a philanthropic kickstart model.

5:22We'll go to donors and we'll say, Hey, we've got this idea for this, you know, this book or this project and we'll get them to fund it. And that will fund its creation and maybe the first print run of books, for example, in a marketing budget. And then from there we sell, we market and sell the book or the project, the asset, whatever it is. And then we can reinvest that sales revenue back into marketing. So we tell donors, it's a kickstart model because you can give just one time, but it's going to be a gift that keeps on giving because you're enabling us to then kind of put it into this machine, the snowball, right?

5:54Going down the hill, getting bigger and bigger. So opening up philanthropy as another revenue stream has been very advantageous for us beyond just being a, you know, taking on investor dollars or bootstrapping it ourselves. So that's been very helpful to grow what we're doing. You really view, I might be putting words in your mouth, but it sounds like you really view this media segment as an accelerant to the mission of the Libertas Institute. Yes, it's very entwined with what we're doing. And it's integral to how we think about social change. So Libertas Institute ultimately is involved in legal reform, trying to change laws, trying to protect our rights in Utah, where we're headquartered, but across the country as well.

6:37And what we realized years ago is that changing laws is really like a pendulum going back and forth. You can go fight, fight, fight, get a law passed, but it might get overturned two years later if the cultural tides shift. So if you want to have a really strong effect on what you're doing, we have to change hearts and minds as well. We need there to be this cultural understanding of these principles and these ideas. And so the books and the other programs that we do that are more family facing and youth oriented for us, yes, are a strategic part of what we're doing overall, trying to, as we say, change hearts, minds and laws to create a freer future.

7:14And it all begins, I think, with education in the home. I don't think we're going to save our country at the Capitol, even though we should engage there and try and fight for better laws. and we do. I also don't think we're going to save our country in the courtroom, even though I think we should litigate and sue the government to hold it accountable. And we do. But I think ultimately, if we're going to save our country, it's not in the Capitol. It's not in the courtroom. It's at the family dinner table. And it's restoring social fabric. It's getting parents and kids learning about these ideas, talking about it, developing critical thinking.

7:46And so that's why for us, it is very mission driven. But as you said, there's no mission without a margin. So we have to treat this like a business. We can't just, look, I could go get Elon Musk to give me a billion dollars and I could just blow all the money and not have a sustainable business model. But we're very entrepreneurial. We like practicing what we preach and what we preach is entrepreneurship. It is capitalism. It is profit. And so we try and incorporate that in what we're doing to get the message out there. You built something really cool. You've got millions of books sold. Obviously, you're reaching hundreds of millions of people with the Tuttle Twins content, you have a cool program across the country that encourages entrepreneurship and for kids to get out with these, I'll call them farmer's markets and get, you know, get a taste of what it's like to operate in a capital efficient market, et cetera.

8:30You could probably make a lot of money by yourself doing something else. Why did you start this? The nonprofit? Yeah, I started the Libertas Institute in 2011. And to be very honest with you at the time, I had a very limited vision. All right. Now's the part of the show where I feel the most uncomfortable, but my therapist says I need to face my fears. So here we are. I've started a newsletter and I want you to subscribe. And what you're going to get every single week are the aggregated conversations from that week that I have on this podcast with an overview of what their business actually looks like.

8:58I'm also going to throw in a review of one or two businesses that are listed for sale. I'll give you my opinion on whether or not the EBITDA multiple is good, or there's customer concentration, or there's red flags or green flags. And then lastly, I'm going to give you one piece of actionable advice every single week on how to buy your first business. So click the link below, subscribe to my newsletter, and let's get back into the show. I was focused just here on Utah, my adopted home state. I wanted to get some laws passed. I had a skillset that was very conducive to that. I had been volunteering in a few different organizations, doing lobbying, doing marketing.

9:30My background's in online marketing and web development. That's what I used to do for a little bit. And so I understood the psychology of persuasion and marketing, but I was very passionate about history and economics and you know, protecting our individual liberty. And so I figured, well, you know, there's no other organization doing quite what I want to do. I'll have to start my own. And I said, okay, well, I'll start a think tank. That'll be the model. But there was no vision for the Tuttle Twins or these children entrepreneur markets or many of the things that we've done. But I found along the way that having a nonprofit for the reasons I mentioned among others have been very, has been very useful tool for me to advance the cause.

10:08I'm not in this to make money. I mean, I'm compensated just fine. And I think I ought to be based on the value that I create. I'm very pro, you know, compensating value creator as well. But I have no, you know, need for any type of particular ego or massive exit. As long as I can take care of my family and build up my own wealth along the way, the mission matters, you know, far more to me. And having a nonprofit structure in which to do that has, you know, facilitated quite well. I could have done a for-profit. Elijah and I could have done that entirely from the beginning. I think we would have had some challenges had we not taking on maybe some investor dollars, which as authors, no one really invests in doing children's books.

10:47Going through the traditional publishing route was a non-starter for reasons we could get into. So it was kind of the path that opened before us and ever since has been a very fruitful avenue to pursue. So there are a lot of, I'm going to call them conservative media types that have kind of cropped up over the last five to 10 years. Ben Shapiro is probably the largest you know he has the daily wire which is incredibly popular because it's filling this niche i think that the mainstream media has kind of neglected for a long time and you got people like no love them or hate them i'm just going to say their names candace owens charlie kirk individuals like that who are also in the space that are creating content and they they realize that media is incredibly powerful because it creates distribution and it is also grown you know their brands when did you realize that like holy crap yes i'm doing the and i'm saying it horribly wrong is it libertas or yeah we i'm a libertarian i don't care how you pronounce it so it's a very yeah you pronounce it however you want we say libertas emphasis on the bear like think of like an italian libertas okay okay okay so liberate i'm i'm terrible anyways so you have you have you do you the non-profit that you created at what point did you realize holy crap we could do something more if we're able to tap into this media piece because we're we're kind of limited with our reach and scope at the moment because it just really depends on the dollars we can bring in but if we build this media piece all of a sudden we have distribution we have an ability to help children like obviously there's a ton of other goals when did that like switch for you in your mind well it definitely did not switch at the beginning.

12:24I distinctly remember that when we published our first Tuttle Twins book, I went to my board meeting and I gave a copy of the book to each of the board members. I was walking out to his car with my board chairman after the meeting. He had the book in his hand and he literally said, and I kid you not, maybe one day we could help fund our work by selling these books. And what was my reaction? My reaction was nervous laughter, dismissive laughter, because I had no vision for it. I thought that was crazy that like, you know, it's a, it's a book number one, but also a kid's book. And the, the, one of the chief problems we ran into thinking of just navigating the publishing industry was I went to some of the, the publishers who do political type books, especially more conservative or, or center right books.

13:10And I pitched the idea for Tuttle Twins and like, well, that's interesting. We just don't do any children's books. And so then I went to the children's books publishers and I said, hey, here's this concept. They're like, okay, interesting concept. We just don't do anything political. Of course, this was a decade ago. Nowadays, plenty of children's book publishers do all kinds of political stuff. But at the time, that wasn't the case. So of necessity, we had to forge our own path. And in the early years, I had very limited vision. This was just a fun hobby. It was a fun little side hustle. So to precisely answer your question, it was COVID.

13:43Here's an interesting stat for you from 2014 through 2019. So that's six years inclusive. During those six years, we sold a cumulative total of 750 ,000 copies of books, which mind you for a self-published outfit is actually really, really good. We were very happy with ourselves, but it was a slow bill. Right. So 750 ,000 total books in those six years, 2020 hit and we sold 1.3 million books in 2020 alone, almost double the entire past six years combined. And so my limited vision and my treatment of this project is just a fun little side project that we were doing radically changed. Once I realized the opportunity, I realized the need.

14:28And then after kind of formulating the thoughts with my team, realized the strategic benefit that comes from integrating this as like a core component of our work. We have this whole model called the Pyramid of Impact, but in short, it's this integral part of what we're doing now for our mission. And it was COVID and the market demand, the response. Well, think of it, right? Everyone was a homeschooler all of a sudden. They don't know what to teach their kids. Many parents are freaked out at the totalitarian response of their local, state, or federal governments. They're worried about the freedoms in our country being eroded, you know, freedom of speech and association and assembly and all of that.

15:06And, and so we were, it was one of those things when preparation meets opportunity, I talked about product market fit. And there was a little bit of that in the early years, but more is just like, Oh, this is a fun little thing. I'll get this for my grandkids. Starting in 2020, that tone shifted amongst our constant customer base. Now it was like, I need these resources to teach my kids truth in a world filled with deceptions. Will you please help me? And it was far more laser focused. It was, And so we brought way more vision and strategy to it. So frankly, it was COVID for me that, that led me to finally realize like, oh, okay, this is more than just a side thing.

15:39I need to turn this into like a critical. Was there a moment in COVID that was like, holy crap, this thing is taking off, right? Like obviously you sell 1.3 million copies in 2020. I'm assuming maybe there was a month or a week or like a conversation with an influencer who promoted your book. Like, I'm just curious, was there a moment of time in time in there where you were like, is this really happening? but this rocket ship is taking off. I think there's two. The first was just the customer response that I think of like coming as, as waves. I was just at Cabo San Lucas with my daughter this weekend.

16:10So I've got beach analogies running through my head and we were standing on the side of the beach and the waves were just kind of gently, you know, lapping at our feet, very soothing, very steady. And, and it was like that in the first few months of COVID where we would have these like waves of customer service, like, like emails and DMS and, and messages from families that would just periodically come in like, okay, three at a time, 10 at a time, 20 at a time. And it was just these parents with just deep gratitude that they found us. It was like, I felt so lost over the past few weeks. I look around at all my neighbors and they're all fearful and don't want to go outside and they're okay with what the government's doing.

16:47And they're going to inject themselves with 4 million, you know, boosters or whatever. And I don't know what happened to the people I thought that were my friends and family or like-minded or whatever. Anyways, messages of gratitude and appreciation that they found us, almost this like anxiety that had been released because I don't know how to talk to my kids about this, but now I found your books and now we've had amazing conversations as a family. So it was like for a period of a few months, these like steady little waves coming over me that changed. And the other thing that was more acute was when we had to double our warehouse capacity.

17:22There was so much demand and we were caught of guard for it. I mean, who predicted or planned for any of this? And we were just at capacity. So we moved into a warehouse, we quickly got up and running. And then like two, three months later, we had to move into another warehouse, double the size. And that for me, just dealing with all the hassle and the headache or whatever, kind of smacked me upside the head. And I was like, hey, you need to take this more seriously. This isn't just like a humdy-dum fun little project. You got to invest more resources and time and energy into this thing because there's a lot of upside, especially right now that we can take advantage of i can't even imagine i can't even imagine going through 2020 and then all of a sudden your your business is just exploding you got to figure out supply chain issues you've got to figure out how to do all the fulfillment finding a new space and you were in california but utah was utah was actually pretty pretty strict so like i i during covid i lived in california in the beginning of covid southern california and moved to Idaho in May of 2020 and we went from like California where if somebody had COVID within a quarter mile everybody was going to die right it's like oh great we might as well you know phone it in we're all dead and then I moved to Idaho where it was like COVID COVID don't exist I don't I'm not getting the Fauci ouchie you know like it's just like two total opposite ends of the spectrum which was right it was cool in a weird way to actually see that stuff but Utah I would say was more in the middle of that, probably closer to California than, than Idaho.

18:50Did you find it difficult operating in Utah to get what you needed done? Like, how did you meet all the demand with the constraints that were placed on you? Yeah, Utah was fine from a business perspective. It was fairly open. I mean, there were those first two or three weeks where everyone around the country was pretty much, you know, shut down. No one knew what was happening, but after that initial period, Utah was fairly open. We didn't really have any constraints in terms of personnel or problems with our warehouse or fulfillment. The biggest problem that we ran into, you mentioned a moment ago, was supply chain.

19:20In particular, the rise of e-commerce, like Amazon and everyone exploded during COVID and has remained high ever since. And something you may not expect from that, because Amazon and other online retailers need massive amounts of cardboard in which to ship all of their stuff, they were bidding every other paper customer in getting pulp because they go to these big auctions, these big warehouses, and they're basically just putting in these massive orders. So getting paper to print our books was difficult. It tripled the amount of time that we had to take to wait for our books to be printed. It massively increased the cost.

19:58Now things have settled down a bit and sped up quite a bit since then. But for like a year and a half or two years, we really struggled on the supply side to even, like we would go out of stock periodically on some of our products because we were just waiting for the books to come in, which kind of sucked because the demand was so high and we were having problems keeping up with it. That was our main pain point was just the supply chain. Did you shift to like, all right, let's create a digital book. All right, let's do audio books. Is that where Angel Studio kind of stepped in and said, hey, let's do a cartoon series.

20:27How did those things evolve? Yeah. Angel slightly predates all of the COVID stuff as we were kind of planning and preparing for it all. So it wasn't born out of that. And the answer is no on the digital side for books, primarily because after we did the first one or two books, we did come up with like the Kindle version and all the things. And the feedback was very strong from our community. The parents were sick of their kids being on devices for everything. And they wanted them to read analog, physical books. And, and which I get, you know, still many kids are getting exposure from plenty of audio books and, and, and digital books, but our community in particular wanted to keep us in the physical space, which I was totally fine with.

21:08And so we've never shipped. Now we have some digital resources. We have activity workbooks and audio books and things like that, of course, that are digital. But the core books, we always kept physical. And for that period of year and a half with the supply chain issues, we just had to deal with it and get through it. But fortunately, we've come out the other end of that and things are largely fine now. But other than that, we didn't really have any huge headaches, thankfully, to deal with during COVID. Did you have any entrepreneurship experience before this? If by experience, you mean various attempts that failed, then yes.

21:39That's experience. You can do it. Of course. Of course. Yeah. So, I mean, here's a fun one. You know, Utah a little bit. So in Utah, there's a company called KSL and they do like, you know, it's a news company, media company, but they have a big classified section. That's very popular. This was like the Parkland. No, it was maybe it was Sandy Hook. There was one of the big shootings like 13, 14 years ago. And in response to that, KSL summarily decided to delist and stop listing all of their guns and ammo and anything firearm related. It was the, you know, in Utah, as in many conservative states, there's no background checks required.

22:17There's no paperwork required. It's private party sale. You can go just buy a gun right now from anybody. And so KSL classifieds were a great way to facilitate those marketplace transactions. Well, they shut it down immediately. They said, we're not doing this anymore, even though they had no connection to the incident, which was in another state. But there was so much online uproar that they just wanted to abandon it. So I messaged my brother. I've got three younger brothers. I messaged one of them who had done some online marketing stuff. I said, hey, what if we set up a website like ASAP to do online marketplace sales for guns in Utah?

22:50And so we start working on that, register the domain name. I get the website set up. Again, I'm a web developer, so he's starting on the business side and the marketing side. And then we find out that a friend of ours has the same idea. So we end up in partnership, four of us total, launching a company that's called the Utah Gun Exchange, which to this day is the premier and basically only place in Utah where you can buy guns from private parties like this. So I sold my interest a few years in, not for much money at all. Frankly, the problem we ran into was we had a hard time scaling up any marketing effort because Google and everyone would not put ads on the website because it had to do with firearms.

23:27So most of our advertising revenue came in the form of like barter, almost like free products, you know, guns and ammo and knives and generators and random things that these advertisers would throw at us, which was fun while it lasted, but there wasn't really any massive upside. So I sold my interest in that. I had, and I'll conclude by saying this, there were probably six or eight other little business ventures and attempts that I had done over the years. My problem was I was always the IT guy. I was the guy that was going to build the website. I was going to build the app. I was doing all of that.

24:01And consistently what I kept running into was we would, you know, back of the napkin, all right, here's the division of labor. You do this, I'll do that. Let's go. And I would go put in all this effort and all this energy. This is of course, pre AI when I didn't have the, you know, any coding assistance to help me. So I'm slaving away coding this stuff. And then they would drop the ball or things would fizzle or it wasn't good product market fit. And so I kept running this problem where I was putting in all this work only for it to flop again and again and again, whereas other guys are just like dipping their toes in the water and like, oh, you know, it's not going to work.

24:32I was slaving away at this. So it kind of burned me out a little while towards really at pursuing any ventures that required me to be the person investing all of the sweat equity up front. but you know in a period of a few years my interests deepen on the the economic and the political side and that's what sent me down the path that i'm on now but i'm grateful for all that early entrepreneurial struggle because it really informs starting up my own non-profit and bringing a lot of that learning to what i'm doing now to try and accelerate rather than starting from from scratch so i have some questions on the business and you know if anything's too close to home, you can say, no, thank you.

25:11But are you required because you're a nonprofit to publicly report your revenues and your expenses and all that stuff? Yes. It is. Okay. So do you report what the Tuttle Twins or the media arm, I shouldn't even say Tuttle Health Twins, the media arm generates for Libertas? In the aggregate, after being combined with all of our other initiatives, as I said, Tuttle Twins is an internal initiative of Libertas Institute. And so it's not reported independently at all to the IRS. What gets reported is across the whole organization. You know, what are expenses for contractors, for employees, for marketing?