Coming up don’t miss a wonderful interview with Connor Boyack. Connor is the founder and president of the Libertas Institute and renowned author of over 40 books, including the very popular children’s-oriented Tuttle Twins series.
During this 4th of July weekend when many of us are thinking about the ideals and principles that formed this country several hundred years ago, you’ll hear Mike Maharrey and Connor engage in a terrific back-and-forth about the incredible importance of instilling the values of freedom, individual liberty, and sound money in the young people among us.
So don’t miss our exclusive interview with best-selling author — Connor Boyack, coming up after this week’s market update.
So, can gold and silver markets continue to defy the naysayers?
While many are expecting a summer slump following big gains from earlier in the year, precious metals prices are holding above major support levels. And after several weeks of consolidation, gold and silver markets may be on the verge of breaking out of their respective trading ranges to the upside.
Gold has successfully held the $2,300 level multiple times since last April. The monetary metal is rallying again here today and currently checks in at $2,396 an ounce – up 2.5% for the week and appears ready to make another run at $2,400, perhaps in very short order.
Silver, meanwhile, broke back above the $30 level on Wednesday ahead of the July 4th holiday. As of this Friday recording, the poor man’s gold is also seeing continued upward price movement and now trades at $31.57 an ounce and is posting a robust weekly gain of more than $2 or 7.6%.
Turning to the platinum group metals, they are showing signs of life despite being left for dead by some analysts. Platinum re-took the $1,000 level last week and currently trades at $1,043 – up 3.5% since last Friday’s close.
For its part, palladium moved back above $1,000 this week on the heels of a 5.9% advance. Palladium currently fetches $1,066 per ounce as of this Friday morning recording
The platinum group metals have been depressed over the past couple years due largely to concerns over diminishing demand from the automotive industry. But these scarce and extremely dense metals aren’t just useful in catalytic converters. They have a variety of other industrial applications in addition to being made into jewelry and bullion products for investors.
Given platinum’s deep and historically unusual discount to gold, it has become a more viable option for many jewelry buyers who want the adornment of a precious metal. Some also prefer its silvery aesthetic properties.
Recent reports out of the Shanghai Gold Exchange show a surge in platinum deliveries to Chinese buyers. Industrial restocking along with renewed interest from jewelry buyers are helping to feed a rebound in platinum demand.
Global supply for platinum and palladium remains tightly constrained with few sources of mining supply available outside South Africa and Russia. Platinum and palladium along with silver are each projected to record large supply deficits for 2024.
The narrative that platinum and palladium prices are destined to fall due to slipping automotive demand can only prevail for so long. Falling prices encourage more buying and less producing. And when signs of shortfalls start hitting markets, the prevailing narrative can turn on a dime to one that is overwhelmingly bullish for prices.
As we’ve seen, prevailing media narratives about inflation and the economy, about the soundness of the banking system, about the origins of deadly viruses and the effectiveness of vaccines, and about the American presidential race, can all shift suddenly.
For months, the mainstream media had been dismissing reports and video clips of President Joe Biden looking feeble, fatigued, confused, and disoriented. The reports were politically motivated, we were told. The clips were fake, or so we were supposed to believe.
But after Joe Biden’s alarming debate performance left the New York Times editorial board to conclude that he couldn’t beat Donald Trump, the media suddenly turned on Biden. Now the prevailing narrative is that he doesn’t have the capacity to serve as President for another four years and must consider stepping down.
Investors should consider what will happen if the prevailing narratives that currently support the stock market collapse. Or what will happen if the world suddenly stops believing Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen’s assurances that the $35 trillion national debt is at a manageable level.
It’s not about trying to predict when the next financial crisis or bear market will hit. The point is that investors will never be warned in advance to seek safety if they go by prevailing media narratives. They will only be informed about major adverse trend changes after the fact, when it will be too late to avoid getting hurt.
Owning physical precious metals is an indispensable hedge against uncertainty. It can be especially profitable to own them when they are most out of favor by investors and most scorned by the mainstream financial media.
Just over a couple years ago, all the anti-gold commentators came out and said precious metals would fare poorly while the Federal Reserve was raising rates. Well, gold made a record high earlier this year even as the Fed has yet to budge from its supposedly restrictive interest rate policy.
Perhaps at some point the mainstream narrative will shift to admitting we are in a debt crisis that will destroy the U.S. dollar’s prestige and purchasing power. Perhaps CNBC will air stories about how precious metals are functioning as a premier safe haven from the wreckage being afflicted to financial assets.
But until then, precious metals holders can remain content to be contrarians.
Well now, without further delay, let’s get right to our exclusive interview with Connor Boyack.
Mike Maharrey: Greetings. I’m Mike Maharrey. I’m a reporter and analyst here at Money Metals, and today I am here with Connor Boyack. Connor is the author of a ridiculous number of books, I think like 40 plus, including the very popular Tuttle Twin series that’s for kids, and he is also the founder and president of the Libertas Institute, which is a liberty oriented think tank in Utah, and Connor, we’ve known each other for quite a while. We go back to when you were volunteering for TAC, before Libertas, or any of this exciting stuff happened.
Connor Boyack: That’s right. Yeah, no, we go back quite a ways. It’s fun to reminisce, the good old days.
Mike Maharrey: Yeah, right? A lot’s changed over the years, but you have really blossomed, so to speak, from those article writing days, and Utah policy stuff that you did for the 10th Amendment Center. And one of the, just really, to me, most exciting and kind of innovative things is the Tuttle Twins series. And what I’d like for you to do, just to kind of kick things off for people who might not be familiar, can you kind of give an overview of what the Tuttle Twins are all about?
Connor Boyack: So, the Tuttle Twins is a series of children’s books that help families learn how to be free. And prior to what we’ve been doing, there’s been zero resources that speak to families about ideas such as property rights, individual liberty, sound money, entrepreneurship, the golden rule, and more. We take all these political and economic ideas, we wrap them in fun stories. We have books for toddlers, we have books for teenagers. Now we have a cartoon on the Angel Studios platform, so it’s really blossomed.
We started and are most known for our children’s books. As I said, we have toddlers and teen books as well, but the children’s books, the format with those is that each of the books is based on or inspired by a classic work. For example, our first book, the Tuttle Twins Learn About the Law is inspired by Frederick Bastiat’s The Law. And so we basically go to the law, we take the five to seven core ideas and principles, and then we wrap them in a fun story, where the kids are learning them observationally, rather than didactically, or textbook fashion. “Here’s what individual liberty is,” as a definition. That’s boring. We create fun stories where the kids are seeing these ideas play out.
So we’ve got other books like The Creature from Jekyll Island by G. Edward Griffin. We’ve got the Road to Serfdom by Hayek, Economics in One Lesson by Hazlitt, Atlas Shrugged, 12 Rules for Life by Jordan Peterson. So, we take a lot of these books and just try to distill them down to their essence. And what we find too, the thing that… The big aha moment for me was years into this project, when I realized that we weren’t making children’s books, what we were making was family resources, because well over half of the parents who got our books for their kids, mind you, the parents would tell us, “Wow, I’m learning things I never learned in school.” Or, “I didn’t know this stuff before.”
And so what we’ve seen since that time is that parents and kids are learning together. They’re embracing these ideas, they’re talking about them at the dinner table, in the car, and it’s giving them a conversational fluency about how the world works, so that as they go out throughout their lives, they can look at these current events, and issues through a lens of freedom, and understand how to make sense of the world, because they have that solid foundation of core values and principles.
Mike Maharrey: Yeah, I’m really glad you mentioned the fact that it’s really not just for kids. I plowed through Road to Serfdom by Hayek, and I don’t care who you are, that is a dense read, and your average person is never going to pick that book up and read it.
Connor Boyack: No way.
Mike Maharrey: You get about a chapter, and you’re like going, “Ah.” And yet you can pick up the Tuttle Twins story that has those principles wrapped up in it, and you can get the foundational ideas without having to plow through a bunch of stuff that literally nobody’s going to plow through. And was that kind of your idea going in? Or was it really more, “I’m doing this for kids,” and this was kind of a side benefit?
Connor Boyack: Well, so Elijah is the illustrator, and my partner in the Tuttle Twins, and when he and I got started, we actually roomed together at FreedomFest in 2012, I think. And so, that’s when we met Tom Woods, and we were both helping on Ron Paul’s campaign in different capacities, and we had been connected online. And so, we decided to share a room at FreedomFest, because we were both poor, and just getting to know him, and him, me, we’re like, “Hey, we ought to work on something together.”
And so then the conversation continued, and I had started know Libertas, as you pointed out. I used to chair the Utah chapter of the 10th Amendment Center. I was trying to figure out, “What’s my home? Where can I do the most good, and have the most impact?” So, ended up starting my own organization, and we started changing laws and having some big impact. What happened with that was, I’d come home at the end of the day from work, and I’d ask my kids, who at the time were five and three, my son was almost six, and I’d, “How was your day? What did you do?” And, “Oh, I read this book, or I played this game,” or whatever.
But when he was almost six, he would start to reciprocate that question to me. “Dad, where were you today? What did you do?” I found myself wanting to tell him substance of what I did, not just, “Oh, I typed on a computer, and I made phone calls.” I wanted to teach him, “Hey, I was at City Hall fighting eminent domain, because they’re trying to go after this poor farmer.” Right?
Mike Maharrey: Right.
Connor Boyack: And so, I went on Amazon, I’m looking around for books, “What can help me teach my kids about these ideas?” And so, I started talking to Elijah. He had kids kind of similar age, a little older, and we just bounced this idea back and forth. And, so the first book for both of us was really just an experiment. It was like, “We have no idea if this will go anywhere. Maybe we’ll only do one book, and if we only do one book, what should it be?” And for both he and I, was Bastiat’s The Law, because that was so instrumental for both of us. So, we just did it as an experiment. We had no grand vision, we had no plans for the future. It was just, “Hey, let’s give this a go and see what happens.”
And your audience may appreciate the story of when we got our validation, it was 2014, we launched our first book. We launched it at FreedomFest to kind of pay homage to where he and I got connected, and figuring if there’s any audience of people who are going to know about Bastiat’s The Law, and then will want to get it for their kids or grandkids, it’s FreedomFest. So, I’m sitting in a booth, in the back corner, because we got no money, no one knows who I am, who the Tuttle Twins is. And so, I think they comped me, or gave me a discount for a table, and I’m in the just deep, deep, dark recess of the vendor hall. And we had just set up the website a few weeks prior to take online orders. So, every few hours I’d get an email notification, like, “Hey, someone ordered the book.” Well, I’m sitting behind the booth at FreedomFest, no one’s walking by, and I get an email notification on my phone, and someone ordered 50 books. My mind is blown.
Mike Maharrey: Wow, man.
Connor Boyack: “What the heck?” I scroll down a little bit, and it’s Ron and Carol Paul.
Mike Maharrey: Oh, wow.
Connor Boyack: Buying a copy of the book for all the grandkids. And so, that to me was like, “All right, the granddaddy of the Liberty movement has blessed what we’re doing. Let’s keep doing more books.” And since that time, I mean, we sold more than 5 million books. There’s just been so much validation of families saying, “My gosh, I never understood this before. I’m so glad in a world filled with lies that I have a way to teach my children the truth.” It’s just been deeply rewarding since that time. But, to answer your question, no, at the beginning there wasn’t really any grand vision. There wasn’t any strategic plan. It was just an experiment that got a good response. And so, we said, “That’s our market response, so let’s give the market more of what they’re saying they want.” And we’ve continued since.
Mike Maharrey: That’s awesome, man. It is really amazing, isn’t it? You stumbled upon a need, because like you said, nobody’s doing this. And I think people like having children’s and teen oriented material that is within their worldview, as opposed to most of what’s out there today. I’m curious about this, though. I think a lot of people might look at this and say, “Okay, you’ve got something like the Creature From Jekyll Island, right? You’re explaining the Federal Reserve. There’s no way that a six, seven, 8-year-old is going to grasp anything about the Federal Reserve.” As you have kind of watched this evolve, and you’ve seen the response to the material you’ve put out, is that an unfair statement to say that kids can’t grasp this? And I guess what I’m getting at is, what have you seen personally as the nuts and bolts impact that these books have had?
Connor Boyack: Well, I think we underestimate what kids can understand, and what they would be interested to understand. Of course, no one wants to read an econ 101 college textbook when they’re nine, right?
Mike Maharrey: I don’t want to read one now.
Connor Boyack: Exactly. Supply and demand curves will put anyone to sleep. Right?
Mike Maharrey: Right.
Connor Boyack: But, if it’s storytelling, humans love to learn through storytelling. The neuroscience is substantial, in how impactful, and helpful it can be to learn through story. And so, no one had done this before. No one had empowered parents to share stories with their kids about complex ideas. Parents didn’t know how to do it. They didn’t make an attempt. And so, they fall into this trap of thinking, “Oh, when my kids are an adult, when they’re voting age, then I’ll talk to them about all these political things, and all these economic things.”
Well, what was happening was they were basically ceding ground to their ideological enemies, who would have the most formative years of intellectual development for these children to be propagandizing them with ideas, social media, and textbooks, and whatever. And only then, later, would the parents talk to their kids about ideas, or I might argue, organizations in our movement. Most organizations in the so-called Freedom Movement, focus on adults, maybe college students, a tiny few focus on high school age kids, but pretty much everyone waits to bring the ideas of freedom to adults who are already heavily brainwashed if they went through the government indoctrination centers, as most of them do.
So, no one had really done this before. I’ll give you a little anecdote, since you brought up the Creature From Jekyll Island book. So I got this email, this story from a dad. It’s been about a year, and inflation was the hot topic, as it still is today, frankly. It was like the local NPR station he was listening to. He’s in the car, kids are in the back seat, and on the radio they’re talking to an economist from the local community college. They’re asking him, “Why is inflation so high? How’s it going to slow down?” And he says, the economist, he says, “Well, I’ll tell you why inflation’s high. It’s… Have you seen the price of these Taylor Swift concert tickets? They’re astronomical. We have greedy corporations who are charging through the nose, trying to take advantage of people. We just need to get them to not charge so much to cool down the economy, to slow down the spending, and then inflation will go down.”
The nine-year-old daughter, I think she was nine, eight or nine, nine-year-old daughter in the back seat, listening with her dad, chimes in and says, “That’s not true. Inflation is because the Federal Reserve is printing a bunch of money.” And so, the dad… Here’s the magic that a lot of people don’t understand about the Tuttle Twins, because the dad turns off the radio. He chuckles. He knew why she said that, because he had read the book with his kids, so they had the same conversational language. They shared that reading experience together. What most people don’t understand is this is why it’s so important to go directly to families, to get into the home.
When we started, we did a lot of school stuff. We’d do presentations, and assemblies, and we’d give teachers lesson plans. Well, what would typically happen was a teacher, if we were successful, would teach a lesson on the free market, whatever, maybe the I, Pencil story, how pencils are made, and here’s how markets work. And then the kid would go home and mom would say, “Hey, sweetie, how was your day?” “Fine.” “What did you learn?” “I don’t know.” And so there’s a disconnect immediately between parents and kids to be able to talk about, and retain these ideas.
So, our mission, as much as it is to educate children, it’s also to educate the adults, and get them on the same wavelength, so that they’re talking about these things over the course of months and years of those children’s development, so that when those kids become adults, they’ve got a strong foundation in place, because it’s been in the home. I ultimately think we don’t save our country at the Capitol, even though it’s important to engage there. I don’t think we save our country in the courtroom, even though it’s important to litigate, and fight the government.
If we’re going to save our country, I think it’s at the dinner table. I think it’s helping create strong families, rebuilding society, really trying to instill value, and culture, and connection, and community development, and all these things at a local family level. I think that’s how we make a big impact. And so, why I’m on this soapbox I am is, as I said earlier, our movement has failed in this regard. We claim we’re pro-family as a general [inaudible 00:13:39], we love our families, and we’re a very family-friendly movement, so-called, but we don’t talk to families. We don’t serve them. We don’t educate them. And so, that’s what we’re not only trying to do, but then also get the message out to partner organizations and others, like, “Hey, what would it look like to take your idea, or your program, or your course, or whatever, and turn it into a homeschool thing?” Or create a family activity weekly thing, or something, and try to encourage more people to think about that.
Mike Maharrey: Yeah, I hadn’t thought about it in those terms, but that is really a beautiful thing, because what you’re doing, so often, we do send our kids off to, as you put it, government indoctrination camps, and they’re there for the bigger part of the day, and it does create this disconnect between the kids and the parents. And by having this resource, where everybody’s involved, reading to your kid, and you’re engaging them, you are almost creating this foundation of understanding that you can grow off of. Whereas, putting your kids in the government school situation, and I understand a lot of people that they feel like that’s the only choice they have, but this kind of creates a way to minimize, or lessen that wedge, and that’s really cool. I hadn’t thought of that. I’m glad you brought that up.
Connor Boyack: Well, and about half of our audience is homeschoolers. We’re very homeschool friendly, of course, I homeschool my kids, and a lot of homeschoolers use this as curriculum. But the other half of our audience, they’re all government schools, private schools. And for those families, if I were to use… This is my word, not the family’s word, but the way I would characterize it is that for all those families, the Tuttle Twins is a counter agent, because they know that their kids are getting all kinds of woke, weird, silly, wrong stuff.
And so, when the kids are home, it’s like, “Okay, yeah, you learned some nonsense,” or, “Don’t believe everything you hear from a teacher. Let’s read this book together and talk about it.” And so, no matter how families are educating their kids, this is a very adaptable type of curriculum, and educational material. And then we got the cartoon on top of that, where it’s just like, “Hey, here’s a fun Saturday morning cartoon, where it’s funny, it’s silly. There’s lots of jokes and humor, but then we’re still introducing a lot of these ideas to young kids.”
Mike Maharrey: So, here’s something I’m curious about. I make a living writing. I cannot write to kids. I mean, how do you get yourself into the mindset to write for a ten-year-old?
Connor Boyack: Yeah. I’ve written 40… Well, soon to be 47 books.
Mike Maharrey: That’s why I said, “A ridiculous number.”
Connor Boyack: Yeah, my lifetime goal is 100, and that’s probably kind of insane, but about a dozen of them are mass-market, or adult level books, nonfiction, and the rest are all the Tuttle Twins. So a majority of what I’ve written is for children, and it’s harder to write for kids, because when you’re writing for adults, you can just do stream of consciousness, and just like, “Okay, the ideas are… This is how I would talk. This is what I want to say.” And so, gosh, how do I do it? In the early days, I feel like I benefited from this, because I started when my kids were so young, now they’re 15 and 13, so it’s been a decade. And so, as a dad with kids that young, I was communicating to them at a certain level, so that when I started writing, it was a little easy to kind of carry that over into how I would communicate.
And of course, my kids are older now. I don’t communicate to them at that more simple level. But, maybe because I started a decade ago to write this way, I kind of have a knack for it. I don’t read other children’s books to get inspired, or get ideas, or whatever. I think it’s just I started at the right age where, again, I went on Amazon trying to find books for my kids. So, I was trying to think, “How I write something that my child would actually enjoy reading, and learn from?” And part of it too was, especially in the early days, I do this less now, but in the early days, we would do a lot of beta test reading with families.
So, I’d find a dozen families and they would read it. They’d take notes. “This joke didn’t really land. My kids were confused about this.” And so, it was a more iterative process in the early day to kind of figure out where the pitfalls… And so I think some of that learning I’ve incorporated over time as well, because I kind of know, “Hey, if you use a word with five syllables, it’s a no-go.” And what else? I’ll say this. I use this more for my adult books, but I have come to utilize ChatGPT significantly for writing, not the actual writing part, because most of its writing is not great, and not as useful, but as an idea generator.
So, I’ll throw it half of a script for… Or let’s say half of a chapter, and then I’ll say, “Hey, give me a few ideas about where I could take this next.” And maybe there’s five ideas, and four of them suck, but maybe that one other idea gives me, “Oh, hey,” excuse me. “Hey, that gives me an idea of what direction I can go with this.” And then I continue writing. And so having a little study buddy there with you to just prompt you and give you some ideas has also been helpful more recently.
I’ve used it a little bit with Tuttle Twins. In fact, OpenAI has this thing where you can create your own GPT, and you can basically upload files. So, I uploaded the Tuttle Twins books, and created a Tuttle Twins GPT, so that when I’m writing my next book, it has the direct knowledge of how I write, and what I’ve written. And so, I’ve experimented with it. Again, it’s not great. It’s nothing I would want to download, and go print, and shortcut, but I’m always looking for what are those little shortcuts, or tools that I can use that can help me? And that’s been one lately I’ve been having a lot of fun with.
Mike Maharrey: So, what’s your favorite of the Tuttle Twins? Which one do you look at it and think, “Man, I just really nailed this,” as far as communicating these ideas most effectively?
Connor Boyack: That would have to be our history series. Elijah and I have spent a lot of time on this. So, we have, I said books for toddlers, and teens and everything else. We also have this series of American history books. Right now, there’s two, we’re working on a third. They’re each about 250 pages, but they’re not textbooks. The entire thing is a story. It’s a story of stories. And so, we teach kids about American history. Now, these are all based off of, or inspired by Murray Rothbard’s Conceived in Liberty series, where he talks about early American history from a libertarian lens, if you will. And so, his writings have been super useful for us to glean a lot from, and get ideas from. And so, we put a lot of work into that, and are super proud about it, because… You’ve heard this quote. Everyone’s heard this quote, that those who don’t learn from the past are condemned to repeat it. And great, that’s a nice quote. But what do we do about it? Because we keep repeating the mistakes of the past, and so clearly we haven’t learned from it.
And so as I reflect on why that is, well, I don’t need to guess. We actually, when we started this history project, we went out and bought a whole bunch of textbooks that are used in most of the fourth through eighth grade social studies, history type classes across the country. And so, we did an analysis of all these books. And look, if your goal is to win Jeopardy one day by knowing all these little factoids about who wrote what letter to who on which date, from which committee, and what did the clouds look like that day, and what color were the uniforms, then more power to you. These textbooks will cram your mind full of so much superficiality of what was happening.
But all of these textbooks that are used in the schools were completely, like 99% absent of what I’ll call substantive ideas. Why they were doing these things, the tension, the power versus the people, and the ideas, the philosophies. They were like sanitized of these things. And so of course, it’s the equivalent of taking a kid to an American history museum, and you’re like, “Hey, look, there’s the hard tack that they had to eat in Valley Forge.” And, “Look, that’s what a musket is. And here’s a facsimile of a letter that Thomas Jefferson wrote to someone. Okay, kids, time to go to the cafeteria, time for lunch.” Just a very passing, superficial, whatever.
And so, as I reflect on that, I think, look, if we are truly going to learn from the mistakes of the past, we need to tell the stories in the right way so that kids can not only learn what happened, but they can learn the why. They can learn the ideas. And then most importantly of all, relate those ideas to today. This is where I always struggled with history in school. I’m a graduate of what I like to call the public fool system.
Mike Maharrey: Same.
Connor Boyack: I hated history, because I had no idea why I should care in, at the time, 1997 or whatever, about what happened 200 years ago. There was no compelling reason for me to care about that, and so I didn’t. And so in our books, we’ve gone to great lengths to say, “All right, in this chapter, here’s the ideas we covered. Yeah, this stuff happened, but that’s just a vehicle through which we can talk about the underlying idea. So here’s the idea of what was really at stake. Oh, and by the way, did you know that last year in Congress there was a bill on this exact same issue, and here’s what the debate looked like and how that went.”
And suddenly we can start to connect the dots for kids to say, “Oh, maybe those conversations, and debates that took place long ago, with really smart people, have some influence and bearing on what we’re doing today, and we can learn from them.” But, today’s textbooks don’t do any of that. And of course, you and I would probably agree as to why that is, because I think those in power want a dumbed down, historically ignorant populace, which is more easily managed, and governed. And so, to your question, that is what I’m most proud of, because I think learning these principles of history, applying the lessons to today can have the most transformative impact. I give a lot of credit to Murray Rothbard for Conceived in Liberty was a great help to us. And so, that’s at tuttletwins.com/history, those books. We’re super proud of those, and we’re excited to keep working on the next one.
Mike Maharrey: Yeah, that’s outstanding, because you’re absolutely right. It’s names, dates, and places, is what you get in your… And even college history, I mean, I took some advanced college history courses, and most of it was still kind of in that vein. They would touch a little bit superficially on those ideas. But you’re right, I mean… And you end up with these, as our friend Tom Woods likes to say, these cartoon versions of history in school, that the Civil War was caused by slavery. No, that’s absurd, but there’s much more to it. So, I’m really glad that you’re out there doing that, because again, it’s a resource that quite frankly didn’t exist until you guys started doing it.
I had another question about the whole Tuttle Twins experience. I know you’ve gotten a little bit, and I am probably understating that, of pushback from the mainstream about, “Oh, these people are right-wing indoctrinators, and they shouldn’t be feeding this stuff to kids,” and that kind of thing. How do you respond to that kind of criticism, that this is nothing but pure indoctrination?
Connor Boyack: Well, in the early years, I would bristle at that criticism, because I would say, “No. Indoctrination is the stuff when a teacher will close the classroom door with a captive audience inside, and indoctrinate their minds with things that parents were unaware of.” And so, I would say, “Look, we’re selling our books to parents. They’re very aware of what’s in our books, of course, because they’re the ones buying them. So no, it’s not indoctrination. That’s what the other people do.” That’s how I would react in early years.
More recently, I fully embrace the accusation. Absolutely, we are indoctrinating. Because what does that mean? It means to teach the doctrine. And someone is teaching some kind of doctrine to our children at all times. Why wouldn’t we want to compete for the hearts and minds of the rising generation? As I said earlier, if parents just cede ground to their ideological adversaries and assume, oh, I’ll worry about it when they’re 18, it’s not as if no one else is going to try and influence the minds of your children. It’s just that you’re not going to have a competition of ideas for them to evaluate. It’s going to be very lopsided, because you’ve disengaged.
So yes, we indoctrinate. We are teaching fundamental doctrines about a free society, and we are doing it unabashedly. I think similarly with the word propaganda, it has its negative connotation as a pejorative, of course, because of the Nazis and so forth. But, at its core, propaganda is really just the propagation of an idea. And so, similarly, we’re creating propaganda for freedom. We want to propagate these ideas. We want to teach these doctrines to people. So clearly there are negative authoritarian ways to layer on top of these ideas when the government is involved. But, I basically say, “Bring it on. We’re indoctrinating, but so are you. So, as long as you’re willing to admit that just as I am, then let’s have a conversation.” Of course, they’re not willing to admit that.
Mike Maharrey: Right. And may the best indoctrinator win.
Connor Boyack: Exactly.
Mike Maharrey: And I think that’s a thing people sometimes forget in the arena of ideas. The truth tends to win over time. I say this a lot when I’m talking about, you mentioned the whole inflation on narrative that… Or the whole, yeah, narrative on inflation, and you get the, “Oh, it’s greedy corporations,” or it’s Putin, or Taylor Swift. That’s a new one. I hadn’t heard that one before. I’ll have to add that to my list. But economics always wins, in the end. You can make up all of this stuff, and pretend like it’s these different things, but as long as the Fed keeps printing money, we’re going to keep having an inflation, even if they were to solve those problems. So, I think that’s kind of an interesting way to look at it, as well.
Connor Boyack: Yeah.
Mike Maharrey: So, let me just wrap up, and by letting you tell folks where can they find Tuttle Twins stuff?
Connor Boyack: So tuttletwins.com is where we have all of our books. You can find most of them on Amazon, but you’re going to get a better deal at Tuttletwins.com. We also have bundles where we’ve got parent guides, and activity workbooks and all kinds of things to supplement your learning. The cartoon is at tuttletwins.tv, if you want to find that. We just launched season three, so we’ve got two full seasons out. But yeah, all the books are Tuttle Twins, we’re all over social media at Tuttle Twins, and so we’re very easy to find, and I tell folks, “Even if you don’t have kids this age, maybe you got grandkids, you got nieces, nephews, you got the kids in your church group, or in your neighborhood. These make great Christmas gifts and birthday presents.”
Really, we’re out there trying to save the world one family at a time, and I believe strongly that that’s what it’s going to take. And so, people are often, as you know with all of your experience, people are like, “What can I do? I’m just one person, and I don’t know how to get started.” I’m like, “Look, it’s as easy as starting a little book club, and just starting to talk about these ideas with your neighbors, with your friends, and then let it grow from there, as it inevitably does.” These things are organic and develop a life of their own, but you got to get started small.
So hey, get some Tuttle Twins books and put them in little libraries in your neighborhood, in the little pop-up boxes that people have. Donate them to your local library so that kids can check them out. There’s so many ways to spread these ideas, especially using a resource like this that there’s really no competition for, and there’s been a void in the marketplace for resources like these. So, it’s really just an invitation to say, “Let’s reach and teach families our ideas.” And it’s a long-term play. This isn’t like a quick, put a Band-Aid on the gangrenous wound and hope that things will be okay. We do have short-term battles that we need to fight, but this is an invitation to be a long-term investment so that in 10, 20, 30 years, the freedom movement in our whole society is stronger, bigger, freer, and our children and grandchildren can have more freedom than even we’ve had.
Mike Maharrey: Yeah, I think you’re absolutely right in that this is ultimately a battle of ideas, and you have to start with kids young. Like you say, by the time they hit 18, 19, 20, they’ve already started to solidify those views, and it gets much more difficult to break through the indoctrination, and the bad information, and the Keynesian economics, and the, “Oh, inflation is good for you.” They learn all of this stuff, and if you can reach them earlier, they’re going to be just like that little girl in the car that’s going to be able to hear this and say, “Wait a minute, that’s not right.” Because the truth, our ideas are actually relatively simple, and easy to grasp because they’re real ideas. It’s not obfuscation, and quite frankly, BS. And so, I would call the Tuttle Twins books your immunization against government BS. You can use that.
Connor Boyack: I like that. I’ll put that on the tagline.
Mike Maharrey: There you go. Well, you mentioned where folks can find stuff, and hopefully they’ll do that, and I appreciate the work that you’re doing. It’s been amazing for me, kind of having watched from afar from the beginning to see how far this has come, and how it’s really taken fire. And that’s because what you’re doing is important, and you’re doing it well, and that combination of things is going to lead to success. So I congratulate you on that, and look forward to seeing what comes out in the future. Do you have another Tuttle Twin book in the works that you can leak?
Connor Boyack: Oh, yeah. No, we’re about to come out with our next children’s book, all about Cultural Marxism, and so that’ll be a spicy one. The setting is… The book name is the Tuttle Twins and the Marxist Track Meet.
Mike Maharrey: Oh, wow.
Connor Boyack: And so it’s a track meet where the director tries to create equity by giving points to people who don’t have certain privilege. And of course, the whole thing breaks down, and then the twins have to come and point out what the problems are. And so, that’ll be a really fun one. We’re almost ready to launch that in the next couple months. I’m working right now on a… We have a series called Guide Books. In fact, one of my favorite books that we’ve done is in that series, it’s for teenagers. These are non-fiction books for teenagers. And so, we have books like the Tuttle Twins Guide to Logical Fallacies, for example, where every chapter is a different logical fallacy, and we have cartoons, and stories that kind of break down what it is.
My favorite book came out last October, on Friday the 13th. It is the Tuttle Twins Guide to True Conspiracies, and every chapter is a different, true, fully verified conspiracy. We’re talking like MKUltra, or Operation Northwoods, or some of these, some people know there’s a lot of ones in there that were new to me, and most people don’t know. So, that was a fun one.
Right now, I am writing another book in that series, that Guide Book series called The Tuttle Twins Guide to the World’s Worst Ideas. And so, Marxism, as we’ve talked about, or government indoctrination centers, AKA public schools, each chapter will feature a different idea. I will first steelman that idea, “Here’s why people say, ‘This is so great,’ and here’s how it came to be popular,” and then dismantle it, and talk about why it’s the worst idea. So, working on that one. And then, as I said earlier, the third volume of the history book, that’ll take us a little bit of time. There’s a lot that goes into that. But yeah, we got a few in the works, and more to come beyond that.
Mike Maharrey: Awesome. Well, keep up the good work. Thank you for taking a little bit of time out of your day, and spending it with me. I appreciate that. And again, just nothing but kudos to you. I appreciate it.
Connor Boyack: Thank you. It’s great to chat with you again.
Mike Maharrey: All righty.
Having read the Tuttle Twins series with my school age son for years, it sure was great to hear that interview and I hope you enjoyed it as well. Connor is doing some tremendous work in helping to shape young minds in a positive way and I highly encourage you to check out the Tuttle Twins as well as his other works.
Well, that will do it for this week. Be sure to check back next Friday for our next Weekly Market Wrap Podcast. And as always, here’s your friendly reminder to also tune in to the Money Metals Midweek Memo, hosted by Mike Maharrey. To find any of our audio programs just go to MoneyMetals.com/podcasts or find that on whatever podcast platform you prefer.
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