Mike Sertic was never alone. He just thought he was.

When he first encountered the liberty movement, during Ron Paul’s ascendancy in the late 2000s, Mike was curious, intellectually rigorous, and passionate. And as a kid in California, Mike said he “was very interested in political ideas and wanted to know how government worked. But,” he went on, “I also felt like I wasn’t really hearing very many sides or very many perspectives [that didn’t have an agenda].”

That’s where Students For Liberty came in. Mike joined SFL as a student at California State University-Sacramento in 2010. He said, “I’ve come a long way since then in terms of being able to sit down and talk with people … and I think what was most helpful for me was just … knowing that there were other students who felt the same way that I did. Without Students For Liberty,” he continued, “I wouldn’t be here today.” 

“Here” is an influential job and meaningful life — but before he got “here,” he first had to meet hundreds of other libertarian students and activists, through SFL, who taught him about the ideals of liberty and imbued him with a sense of belonging and purpose.

“I was one of those people that was libertarian or libertarian-leaning and I didn’t know it,” Mike said. “And I think just here in the United States, if I had to guess, there’s probably hundreds of thousands, if not millions of people like I was.”

Now as President of the Advocates for Self-Government, Mike leads the effort behind one of the liberty movement’s most powerful tools: the World’s Smallest Political Quiz, which has been taken nearly 30 million times over the past 30 years. With just ten questions — five economic, five personal — it plots political beliefs on a two-axis chart: from libertarian to authoritarian on one side, left to right on the other.

Mike estimates that 90 to 95 percent of people who take the quiz live in the United States, so one of his recent goals has been to expand its reach. At SFL’s LibertyCon International 2025, he spent the better part of three days not just promoting the quiz, but soliciting input from SFL’s global network of leaders to operationalize it for every continent in the world. His lecture, “The Nolan Blueprint: Globalizing the Liberty Movement’s Top Recruiting Tool,” focused on how the quiz can help identify libertarians everywhere.

When people take the quiz and discover they have libertarian leanings, Mike’s team directs them to the best opportunities, often Students For Liberty’s programs and events. “If somebody comes and takes the quiz on our site and they score libertarian,” he said, “and they’re a college student or maybe their high school civics teacher told them to take it, we want to direct them to [the right resources].”

Mike works hard to perfect the quiz. He said, “We’re constantly trying to improve [it] … We have been accused of being [biased], but there’s no benefit for us to label everyone libertarian. We want to focus on the people who truly score libertarian because otherwise it would be a waste of resources.”

But Mike’s work goes beyond quiz questions and scores. It’s about opening minds, identifying new libertarians, and creating pathways for them into the liberty movement. It’s personal, too, because he remembers what it was like to feel politically homeless.

“I’ve had people come up to me and say, ‘It was through the quiz that I discovered I was a libertarian.’ Others have told me that meeting libertarian activists inspired them to join the movement. That’s why this work matters,” he said.

Mike’s passion is clear — not just for the quiz, but for the liberty movement as a whole and its future. “Opening minds is the best part of this job,” he said. “It’s about empowering people to take control of their own lives and governments. That’s what libertarianism is all about, and what I’m all about,” he said. “And I absolutely couldn’t have done that without Students For Liberty; without the friends and mentors that I’ve met along the way.”

Mike Sertic is doing exactly what he set out to do as a student at CSU-Sacramento, all those years ago: identifying and activating libertarians everywhere. And in the process, he has become a quiet but powerful catalyst in the global liberty movement himself, building millions of connections, with 10 carefully crafted questions, one quiz taker at a time.