Everyone’s Kids Are In A Combat Zone

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“Everyone’s kids are in a combat zone,” is a poignant quote from Connor Boyack while we discuss his Tuttle Twins Books and other essential aspects of parenting in these trying times.

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Kody: Hi everyone. I’d like to introduce Connor Boyack. He is an author, creator of the Tuttle Twins and Founder of Libertas Institute, which is an award-winning free market think tank. So, welcome, Connor.

Connor: Thanks for having me.

Kody: So, the Tuttle Twins, you’ve sold over 4 million copies of this, and it’s teaching young readers about economic, political, and civic principles. Do you want to tell us a little bit more about these books and this program?

Connor: The Tuttle Twins books are designed for families to have conversations about ideas that matter, ideas that frankly aren’t being taught in most schools anymore. Things like entrepreneurship, personal responsibility, hard work, free markets, private property rights. These ideas are the backbone of our American country and system of law, and yet are increasingly being ignored in classrooms across the country. So the Tuttle Twins are children’s books for varying ages. We have toddlers to teens to teach about these kind of classical liberal free market, founding father type ideas. We’ve been doing it for seven or eight years, and it’s just exploded, especially with homeschooling just going bonanzas and so many more people doing it now, and with the world kind of going crazy. A lot of families are on the hunt for material that they can use in the home to help their kids learn truth and have a foundation of critical thinking, to push back against all the crazy that’s out there. And so that’s what the Tuttle Twins is. It’s for parents and kids to read together, have discussions, and talk about these ideas and what it means in our world today.

Kody: That’s great. There’s been such a gap in the educational system, both with public schooling and resources for homeschoolers. So I really love that this is something that you’ve put together. You just had a new book come out. Do you want to tell us a little bit about that one?

Connor: Yeah, I have long felt like we do a poor job at teaching American history. I see that as a former public school student who hated learning history and hated memorizing what date, what document was signed, and when these battles happened, and who wrote a letter to who and who said what. It never seemed to matter, never seemed relevant. None of my teachers, none of my textbooks, ever really connected the dots between 250 years ago and today. So a couple years ago, two and a half years ago, our team went and bought a whole bunch of history, like social studies, textbooks that are being used in most of the schools across the country. And what we were trying to do is to validate my theory that things haven’t really changed since young Connor was in the school.

Connor: But these textbooks still follow this same format of teaching history very superficially, just all random factoids and the chronology of all these things happened. And then these, and then, and then these, and then these and, and just rushing through history. So we bought all these books. We read, skimmed through all of them and basically validated the theory. They all do a great job at teaching superficial history. None of them taught what I’ll call substantive history. The ideas, the philosophies, the values, the concepts. We all know this quote that those who don’t learn from the past are condemned to repeat it. The problem is, we don’t do anything about it, nothing, because all of the history books out there just teach kids, they don’t teach kids to learn from the past. They simply teach kids about the past.

Kody: We walk them through this museum and we’re like, “Look at the uniforms they used to wear. Look, that was a musket.” Okay, great, who cares? Time for the cafeteria kids? You know? And we leave the museum. So I don’t think history should be treated that way. I think history is rich with lessons for us. And I think today we’re repeating a lot of the mistakes of the past because kids and adults, former kids now, voters never learned how to learn from history and say, “Hey, how about we stop repeating those mistakes of the past? How about we learn from what happened and then build a better world today?” So the whole purpose of our book, America’s History, is to teach early American history from the perspective of the free, loving founding fathers, but focusing on the ideas.

Connor: Yeah. We talk about what happens, we have to, as a history book, but the emphasis is on the underlying ideas and how those ideas apply to our world. So after every chapter, it’s like, okay, here’s what we talked about. Here’s an example of how it applies to our world. Let’s talk about it. Let’s think this through. And just to start to get kids to flex the muscle of, oh, this is the point of history, this is why we learn about what happens so that we can think about how to better improve things today. This is an approach that is entirely absent from all the textbooks out there, which is mind blowing because, frankly, if I put my tinfoil hat on, I feel like it’s probably intentional that history is not taught this way, because those in power don’t want people to learn from the past. They want to be able to keep making their mistakes and doing their evil deeds. So it’s up to us who want to push back against the crazy people like that, that we’ve got to go out and hunt for history on our own and draw those lessons, because the government school system is not going to help us.

Kody: Well, I really think that the political climate that we’re in right now, especially in the United States, is like a poster child for that statement, that we need to be learning from our past. So I think it’s great that you’re tapping into an opportunity to help not only the children of our next generation, but also even us. I even know for myself that your programs have brought some awareness to some other things that I hadn’t thought of. For example, your most recent Tuttle Twins chapter book, The Tuttle Twins and the 12 Rules Boot Camp, I was reading the little blurb on it that it was teaching not to be a victim and stuff. And I was like, “Wow, I’m going to grab this for my 14 year old son.” He actually loves your books

Kody: I’m like, “Hold on, I was going to read that for class this week.” And he’s like, “Well, I just thought I’d get it ahead of time.” So I have to get this for him because not only will he love it, being in that 14 year old window right now, but even the homeschool kids are just prone for that victim mindset. And not that he is, bu they’re so susceptible to it. So I grabbed the book for him and I wondered where this is based from which actually led me to findi The 12 Rules to Life. I’ve been reading it on the plane the last few days, and really enjoying it. I think you are opening up a, for lack of better word, Pandora’s box, to really help everybody who was a public school student and considers themselves well educated. I went through college and was working on my master’s, which I know you have some other views on college as well.

Kody: I was an ag major, so I feel more like that was a trade school, even though it was at a public school, it’s different. At the ag schools, you’re learning a totally different concept than you are if you’re there as a liberal studies or something.

Connor: For sure.

Kody: Yeah. It’s much more hands-on.

Connor: My concern is, imagine if I bump into Joe Q. Public off street, and I say, “Hey, I’ve got this book that was written in the 1950s by an award-winning economist, free market economist. He won the Nobel Prize back when they used to give it out to free market economists and not the crazy ones today, FA Hayek. He wrote this book called The Road to Serfdom, and it’s a warning about the dangers of socialism and collectivism and the importance of individual freedom. Hey, you should read it.” If I give him the book, what do you think is the likelihood that Joe Q. Public is going to read this decade’s old book with multiple syllable words? There’s no pictures. It’s not written in this modern, dumbed down, simple style of reading.

Connor: I think it’s sub 1%. I mean, probably a fraction of a percent of people who would actually sit down and read that and apply themselves and internalize the message. Okay. Now by contrast, if I run into Joe Q. Public and I say, “Hey, do you think it’s important for your kids to learn about how the economy works or about inflation or about importance of individual freedom?” “Yeah. I want my kids to be well-rounded. I want them to understand these things.” “Great. Here’s a kid’s book, the Tuttle Twins On the Road to Surfdom that encapsulates the core ideas from F.A. Hayek’s original book. But, nonetheless, it is just a fun story. Go with your kids.” The likelihood that that happens skyrockets and, what’s amazing here is that for the adults, their barriers come down. They’re kind of the barrier to entry. Their defenses come down. Whereas before, if I say, “Hey, invest in yourself by reading this book.” “Oh, I’m too busy. Oh, I’ve got all these things. Oh, I don’t read books. I need a YouTube video instead. Is it on TikTok?”

Kody: Well, because everybody’s attention span. . .

Connor: Exactly right. But by contrast, if I redirect it and it’s about their kids. I religiously watch Shark Tank and it’s so funny, whenever there’s a kid’s product or a pet product, Mark Cuban will often cop how those are the two categories where people will spend indiscriminate amounts of money and energy because they want to care for their pets and their kids. But they don’t do it for themselves. People aren’t as willing to invest in themselves, which is actually

Kody: Kind of ironic because that’s one of the 12 rules of life.

Connor: Right. Exactly right. And so by leveraging that, we can actually get the parents to lower their defenses. They’re doing it for their kids. Yet, I can’t tell you how many parents, I mean, probably more than half of the parents who get our books, are learning new things for the first time as a result of these books. So I just think this has been a phenomenal way for us to reach not just the kids, you know, or people who already agree with us, but better educate the adults who, maybe they sympathize with us or they’re kind of like minded, but they can’t really articulate these ideas. They couldn’t defend them in a debate. And now they have the ability and the arguments to start doing that.

Kody: I love that because, for example, in our household, my husband’s a disabled vet and has very strong views on certain topics, but doesn’t always know how to articulate them. His whole education system was learning how to drive a tank. And so he wants to be able to teach our children these concepts, but his way is a little more crass than I would probably want them to be taught most of the time. I think it really gives them talking points together.

Connor: Well now, ultimately, what we’re after is conversation. I’ve spoken to a lot of homeschooling conferences over the years, and one of the big patterns I’ve seen is burnout from moms who feel like they need to be a vast encyclopedia of knowledge. In other words, “Oh, I’ve got to teach biology now. I suck at science. What am I going to do?” “Oh, my writing isn’t that good. I’m an English teacher now.” “Oh, I’m the math teacher. Man, I struggled with math.” You know, over and over. And they feel like they have to be the kind of a fountain of knowledge on all of these topics to adequately teach their kids. I’m just like pulling my hair out. I’m like, “Moms, you’re doing it wrong because your kids need to see you as a student, they need to not see you as the teacher.”

Kody: Teach them lifelong learning.

Connor: Exactly. They need to understand that we as adults don’t know everything. We’re always still learning how much better if your kids come to you and ask you a question,and instead of just giving them the answer and sending them on their way, you say, “Well, I don’t know. Let’s, let’s go research that.” And your daughter watches you Google it or go to Wikipedia or whatever you’re going to do. Look up some YouTube videos. When she starts to realize, “When I have questions, I can go to these sources and find them out rather than let me just go to the authority figure in my life and they’ll give me the answer that I need.” And so I tell every mom, look, you can all Google like experts, all of you can. Right? So don’t worry about being a source of knowledge.

Connor: Instead show your kids where you find this knowledge and then learn alongside them and be open and say, “I don’t remember this. It’s been a long time. Let’s learn the quadratic equation together.” I feel like so many families struggle because they’re trapped in this mindset because they’re largely products of the public school system, this very authoritarian approach. So they bring that bias to what they do in the home. That’s why I don’t even like the term homeschooling, because I don’t want to school in my home. I want home education, lifelong learning. Right? Even the term homeschool, I kind of bristle a lot from time to time. It just reinforces this problematic approach to what true learning is. And so we’re trying to get away from all that with the Tuttle Twins. We don’t have formal curriculum. It’s not all structured. There’s no quizzes. It’s just, “Here’s all this stuff. Let’s have conversation. Let’s spark debate.” Let’s, to your point, go read the original books that ours are based on and learn more deeply about it. That’s the kind of stuff that we’re after.

Kody: Oh, I really love that. I learned as a science major, you don’t have to know the answer to everything. You just have to know where to find it. And that’s something I do with my kids a lot when they have those types of questions. I don’t just say, “Hey, let’s Google it together,” with my 14 year olds. I tell them where to go find it and tell them to come teach me, even if I know the answer. I just want to make them do it. It’s great. So, of course, Tuttle Twins is really what put you on the map, I think, as far as outside of your political arena. But tell me a little bit about Libertas Institute and some of the other books that you’ve written.

Connor: Sure. So 11 years ago, I started a non-profit, Libertas Institute, to fight for freedom. I had volunteered at a few organizations, couldn’t really find any that were my home or that I thought were effective. So I started my own. I had no clue what I was doing, still don’t most days.

Kody: That’s my first rule of parenting. I’m going to mess it up every day. So if you’re willing to work with me as my child, then I think we’ll get along great.

Connor: Yeah, totally. I should say that to my employees, too. We’ve got 78 people on our team now, and we work all over the country. We’ve changed over a hundred laws. Ten of them were the first of their kind in the whole country. So as a think tank, our primary focus is changing laws where we build campaigns and projects to try and influence public opinion or legislators’ opinions and say, “Hey, this is an important bill. Let’s repeal that law.” or “Let’s get this better law passed.” So my day job is fighting for freedom in the trenches. We work primarily in our home state of Utah, with the state legislature, but then now we work across the country. We’ll take the successes that we’ve had, the policy successes, and we’ll go help other states replicate those in their states as well. Everything we do is at a state level. We don’t touch almost anything federal, just because I don’t really think much is going to change there. It’s very difficult to have change, but at the state level, it’s much easier, and that’s where we focus.

Kody: I wish more children could hear that. Sometimes the conversations we have at home, is we want to help make a change, but we don’t know how to start that change. We literally live in a town of like 1500 people in North Idaho. Everybody in our town thinks the same way we do. How do we make that change? Whether it’s us as parents or adults in our community, but I feel like a lot of kids don’t know how to make a positive change either. So, do you have a book on that? How do you rally the troops?

Connor: Yeah, I’ve talked about that on podcasts before. I haven’t written about it, but here’s the nuts and the bolts. First off, like with anything else, kids model behavior. So if they see Mom and Dad just shaking their fist at the TV or at their phone and they’re moving on with their day, we’re teaching our kids that we are passive, sideline observers of what’s going on in the world, versus, go to a town council or city council event and start attending them and seeing what’s going on. Join your local community Facebook group where people are talking about what’s happening at the local level. What I typically recommend to people is ask the mayor or a city councilor, or your state senator or someone to lunch, or better yet, organize a cottage meeting with a dozen people at your home and ask them to come speak for half an hour and answer questions.

Connor: These are politicians, big egos. They love talking to people. And then if you put together a cottage meeting and let them just come blab for a while, suddenly they see you as a connector. They see you as someone that they should pay attention to because for all they know, you may be able to gather a massive group. You’re a kind of community activist, and so they see you differently, and now you can follow up with them. “Hey, good job on voting for that. I really appreciate that.” Or just starting to build a relationship. Everything in the media and politics, it all boils down to relationships. Who knows who. That’s why lobbyists are so impactful, because they spend their entire job just going to golf tournaments for random senators or stalking them on Facebook so that they can tell them, “Oh, hey, I hope your eight year old daughter had a great birthday.”

Connor: Next time they see them, just what are the things where they can build these relationships. And they do that day in, day out. And that’s why over the years, they know all these people really well. So they can get a lot more of what they want, just because they’re friends with these people. The problem for the layperson, you or your kids or others listening is that you;ve got a day job, you’ve got families you are taking care of. You’re not in the trenches full-time. So that’s the first thing. Start to build a little relationship even with one elected official. Take them out to lunch, cottage meeting, something small like that. See where it goes, see where that spills over in other opportunities. The second thing, I’ll encourage all your listeners, go to spn.org. This stands for State Policy Network.

Connor: This is a kind of national group where think tanks like mine are, all members of the state policy network spn.org. And so when you go there, you can click on: directory, you can click on your state, and it will show you the groups in your backyard working at a state level on fighting for freedom. SPN is a right of center organization, so all the groups are kind of conservative, libertarian free market. Tat’s a great way, if you’ve got a listener in, I don’t know, Ohio, boom, click Ohio, and suddenly they see what the groups are. Go follow their social media, join their email list, see if they’re doing any events coming up, reach out to them and say, “Hey, do you ever do any like citizen training?” Or, “How can I volunteer, bring my kids to something?” You know? And so just reach out to the groups that are in your backyard and connect with them. They’re the ones like lobbyists, you know, that’s their job. These organizations are spending all day every day, working in the trenches to fight for freedom. And so the more people that reach out to support them, the better. That’s a good way to get connected with the people who are doing the work in your community and could use more volunteers and supporters.

Kody: That’s great. I know for myself I take my two 14 year olds with me to all the conferences and events that I go to so that they can hear me speak and meet with people. And I’ve seen their networking go through the roof. I mean, I went to a really small conference this last weekend, and all the other vendors were coming up to me telling me to tell my son hi, because they got to meet him at the last conference. I was like, “Wow, that’s really awesome.” And they were telling me these great conversations they had with him in regards to his dairy cow, because that’s all he cares about. I was really proud of him to be able to go out and make those contacts where people were coming up to me and wanting to make sure that he got a hello from them. So that was pretty awesome. Yeah. So I definitely see how having those conversations and exposing your kids to those scenarios is really beneficial and it opens them up to feeling comfortable in those situations as well.

Connor: Yeah, Go attend a rally or a protest or go to a hearing at the state capitol when the legislature is in session. Find the meeting that’s important to you. If you’re an Ag state, there’s an agricultural board and they’re in there debating different things. Go, go go attend stuff, go. You can even do Zoom for a lot of them, but you know, you take your kids along. That’s so smart. The more kids can see us modeling behavior, the more likely they’re going to do it. It’s one thing to sit around and read some Tuttle Twins books and talk about the concepts, right? But beyond that, it’s like, then what, what’s the point of learning all this stuff? It’s like with history, like we talked about earlier, the point of learning history is to improve our lives today, make better decisions. The point of learning about economics and free markets and private property rights and all these things is to act on it. And so the more our kids can see us modeling that, demonstrating that, the better. So that’s just a couple ways to get started. Little cottage meeting, attend some meetings, find the local group in your backyard and that’ll be an easy way to dip your toe in the water.

Kody: Well, I think there’s a huge disconnect between, I don’t know if it started with Covid or if it’s just kind of the electronics era in general, but everybody does everything behind a screen. They aren’t getting connected anymore. And so, yeah, I think that’s great to just get them, even if it’s just a small town council, like getting them out and doing those types of things. When I was a kid that was more common, but I was also really involved in 4-H that pushes kids into these situations, which I still do with my children. But I think breaking that disconnect is going to be a huge key to that.

Connor:Yeah.

Kody: One of the questions that I’ve been really wanting to ask you, because I I see this a lot in the homestead homeschool world, is the fact that we are on the edges of, you’re kind of a pioneer on teaching outside of the socially acceptable norms, and that’s where so many of the homeschoolers and homesteaders just hang their hat. What kind of backlash do you see in marketing to the children? I mean, because, for lack of a better word, I was trying to think of what other synonym I wanted to use. I feel like you use a pretty aggressive marketing, especially what I see online, and I see it as a positive because it needs to be, you need to get people’s attention and be like, “Hey, we need to fix this.” But what kind of backlash have you gotten from that?

Connor: It’s an interesting question because I think, early when we started, we weren’t as aggressive, in the early years. But, as time has gone on, our marketing has gotten a little more, a little bit more bold maybe is the word, in our claims, in our arguments. What’s interesting about that is it’s been at the same level with which the left has gone crazy with all of their children’s stuff. The Nickelodeon and the Peppa Pig, the Blues Clues, the Highlights magazine are all woke now. The anti-racist baby book, the LGBT crap going on.

Kody: I feel like we aren’t even allowed to talk about that. Are we even allowed to say that? That’s bold.

Connor: Depends if you want your podcast canceled or not. I’ll leave that up to you whether you want to talk about it, but that has really grown in the past few years. And so too, has the boldness of what we’re doing, I think, not because of that or not, but I see them as kind of parallel courses. The big reason why we’re so bold in our marketing is honestly because we’re mission driven. And what I mean by that is this. I know having done this for years, the impact that our Tuttle Twins books can have on kids. Parents have shared stories up the wazoo. I get them every day via email and text and everything else. So I know that this works. I know that this is making an impact. I know that families deeply appreciate the light bulb moments and the ahas that their kids are having.

Connor: And then I also know that we’ve reached a tiny fraction of all the kids out there, and that if we really want to save the world, we really want to change things, I need to sell not 4 million books, but a hundred million books. And I need to scale this thing big. So consequently, in a crazy world full of ads and short attention span and TikTok videos and all the rest, because my mission is to reach and teach millions of kids, because I know it will help them, I have to be a little bit bold to their parents and be like, “Look, I know you’re getting 43 ads about all the things your phone heard you talking about the night before in your family room with your kids around and now you’re getting all these ads and I know I’m one of 43 ads, but it’s really important to pay attention to this ad because here’s what’s going on.”

Connor: So we do have to get a little bit in your face because the competition is so high, there’s so much noise in our world. And it sucks in the sense that I don’t want to contribute to that and I don’t want to be part of that. But on the flip side, if it’s social media, if I didn’t have the job I did, I would not be on social media. I would love to quit it, but it’s where everyone is. I have a duty to engage with people where they are, to get their attention and pull them over to something good. And so of necessity, I have to be in on social media.

Kody: You know what, I was just saying today I hate social media marketing and I wish I could just go to conferences every weekend because I’d much rather connect with people on a face-to-face basis than just be throwing ideas out to the electronic world.

Connor: Yeah. It’s a trade off. The trade off on the other side is scale. You’ll never be able to go to enough conferences to reach hundreds of thousands or millions of people with your message. Early on I was content with it. I went to a ton of conferences for Tuttle Twins in the early days, sitting behind a booth. People would walk by and they’d have no idea who we were, what we stood for. So I put in the sweat equity early on to do all that. And then it got to the point where I realized I can take that same amount of money and do some advertising and blow it up five times over what I would at a conference. But then you miss the personal stuff. So it’s kind of a balance, it’s all trade-offs.

Kody: I find talking to people is my muse, it gives me ideas and I find out what people want. But I have a product that as soon as people see my cover as they walk by me in a booth, they flock to me because they want to know what it is right off the bat because it’s really obvious. It says homestead science and it’s got a picture of a hayfield, and so it just draws people in. So they’re coming, “What is this? Tell me more.” So in those type of conference settings, it’s the word of mouth that helps me. But yeah, I could see if I just saw Tuttle Twins, I’d be like, “Oh, a storybook!”

Connor: It’s been interesting when I’ve been at conferences in the past because, again, when I finally connect with someone and they get it and they’re like, “Oh my gosh, where have you been all my life? Why did I not have this a decade ago?” I’ve gotten that enough over the years where I’m like, “Okay, I need to to accelerate this.” And the hard thing with online marketing is, or marketing in general, is people, usually – the number used to be seven – it used to be that you would have to touch someone seven times before they would take action. They’d have to see seven ads or hear about it seven times. I’ve heard, and I don’t know if people have done studies on this or whatever, the number is way higher now.

Kody: I think I heard 11 the last time.

Connor: Yeah. So it’s tough. It’s a game we’ve got to play, spend millions of dollars a year just on marketing the books, just to get them out there and get people off of their….When CNN attacked us a few months ago, it was funny that we shared this article far and wide with our email list and social media. We’re like, “Look guys, we made it. CNN’s attacking us.” They said we were creating this right wing children’s education complex, and so we sold over a hundred thousand books as a direct result of that CNN article.

Kody: Thank you for the exposure I needed. You just proved everything that I’ve been saying.

Connor: 100%. And then I said, “Does anyone know any contacts at MSNBC to encourage them to pile on us as well so we can sell more books?” It was so effective because it got people off of the fence. You know, people are fencing. “Oh, I’ve heard good things about the books. Oh, I’ll get around to it.” Well, we have so many people like this who have heard about us 5, 6, 7, 9 times they haven’t yet purchased. They haven’t yet committed, but then something happens like this CNN article and it just pushes them over the edge. “Oh wow. CNN’s attacking it, then, I’m going to get it.” And then they get it, and then they’re thankful they finally did. It’s just pushing people over the edge. That’s why you told me before the call that you got the Black Friday sale .

Connor: Part of the reason why we run these stupid crazy sales where we’re basically breaking even. I mean, we discount them so much. We are a nonprofit, so as you know, we’re just trying to break even on getting as many books out as we can. And so we do these crazy discounts because we know that they’re so effective for people to take action, get off the fence, get to books, because then the impact happens. They’ve invested a little bit of money, they’ve sacrificed maybe to make the expense, and so they’re more committed to it. They’re going to focus on it, they’re going to use it, and then the impact happens. That’s what we’re after. So sales like that are also a good way just to be like,”Hey guys, here’s your opportunity. Go do it now.” So it’s been fun.

Kody: Yeah. Your ad that stands out to me the most is always, which actually, hold on, I’m going to back up for a second. You stated they’re calling you the right wing extremist. And the funny thing for me is, I feel like in all of this crazy political climate that we’ve had over the last couple of years, I’ve always considered myself conservative. I grew up ranching, I’m a hunter. It just kind of puts me into that window right off the bat. But I always felt like I was more towards the middle. And with all the craziness that’s happened over the last several years, I feel like you have to choose, you have to be one or the other. You can’t be like, “What is our other option?” I’m not a white supremacist and I don’t do whatever those other ones do. I almost feel like what you’re teaching is the third option. That’s a comfortable place where you’re not crazy, but you can still have your conservative values. But anyways, you brought that up and I just wanted to . . . I don’t know if you consider that a compliment or something to roll with, but I just felt like that’s something I wanted to share with you.

Connor: I was just going to add briefly that I feel like that’s intentional on our part. So I’m glad that you acknowledge it because what I’ve found is that left, right, you know, liberal, conservative, whatever, there’s a surprising Venn diagram depending on the issue, but overall, like as Americans or whatever, there’s a lot more overlap than we think there is. We have our fringe issues where we’re never going to agree. We have our polar opposites, no doubt. But with our think tank, I always prefer to focus on bipartisan type bills where I can get Democrats and Republicans and everyone to agree with what I’m trying to do, rather than, “Hey, let’s duke it out and go punish the other side.” And so I think that’s healthier for society. I think it’s more enjoyable, right, for me to spend my time working on positive collaborative things rather than just engaging in this fight. And so that’s something I want to teach kids, too. Here are ideas that are kind of common sense. There’s something that lots of people from different perspectives can agree upon. I’m glad you called that out because that’s something we’ve been trying to angle for.

Connor: I really like that it feels like an education-based political stance versus all these crazy feelings back and forth and finger pointing. So I really appreciate that. But cool. I think one of your ads that really stood out to me is are your children being brainwashed? And you know I see it over and over again and every time I see it, I, yes. My kids probably aren’t so much at this point, although I do allow, now that I have some older teens, I allow them to have cell phones, so they’re on YouTube and that type of stuff, but I’m not monitoring every single thing that they watch because that’s part of giving them their free rein and then teaching. But yeah our children are being brainwashed. That question came up again, like, is he allowed to say that? And I think that’s just, that we see such a different climate and like I said, we live in such a community that everybody agrees with us where we can speak as freely as we like. What’s it like there out in the bigger world?

Connor: Well, what I’ll say might qualify what you just said, that I don’t think because of the digital age that we’re in, that anyone is going to be isolated from the broader kind of media and culture and values being pushed all over social media and the internet and everything else. I was speaking on the radio in some super conservative Texas town a few months ago, and we were talking about the history book, and I was explaining that there’s this problem with these books. “Oh, that’s in the liberal California schools. We here, we have a conservative school board and you know, we’re a conservative town.”

Kody: The teachers might be different, but the content’s the same.

Connor: Well, yeah, the teachers might be different, but typically the schools buy the same exact textbooks that are being pumped out for the California market and the bigger markets. And so you might have a good teacher, but they’re using the same content.

Kody: Yeah.

Connor: Maybe they’ll filter some things out, but often not. So even if your kids or whoever’s kids are growing up in some rural place, or we’ve got a good family, they’re still going to go out there in the world and get exposed to all kinds of other conflicting ideas. And so my message to parents is one of intentionality. What I mean by that is, if your kids are joining the army, you don’t want them being sent to wherever, Middle East or some combat zone without body armor, right? And a gun. And without clearly understanding the rules of engagement, who the enemy is, when they can defend themselves. You want your kids to be prepared and protected and armed and knowledgeable so that they can survive that. So the message that I share is that your kids, everyone’s kids are in a combat zone every day.

Connor: They are on a psychological battlefield. They are the targets of prey for people who see them either for their corporate interests or their political interests as pawns, as raw material, as impressionable taxpayers, as people to be persuaded. And if you don’t know that your kids are basically ground zero for this intellectual battlefield, then you’ve already lost, because you will lose every battle that you don’t know is being fought. It’s like wandering out there in the least, and you have no armor, no gun, no nothing, and then you get shot. What’s the point of going there to begin with? So intentionality, right? It’s that there are evil forces and corrupt people and power mongers and all these people we could talk about for a while. But there’s all these people who are pushing bad ideas and their success requires them to draw in the rising generation.

Connor: It’s why authoritarians throughout history have always gone after the kids. I have a new book coming out next week for parents. Glenn Beck wrote the forward. It’s called Children of the Collective. And it’s all about – it’s on Amazon – it’s all about that all throughout history collectivists have always gone after the kids. Always. Why? It’s because their success requires them to brainwash the rising generation to support the rule state. And so then in the book, I say the same thing is happening today. The land of the free, we’re not exempt from this trend. And so how is it happening today? Then I talk about, in the book, how it’s happening today, what it looks like, and then, more importantly, what can we do about it? But the first thing before you can do anything about it is you’ve got to know this is even happening.

Connor: You’ve got to know that there are people out there trying to come after your kids with these garbage ideas. What does it look like? What are they, who is the enemy? How do we fight them? And how do you equip your kids with the kind of proverbial, you know, intellectual body armor and weaponry? How do you help them understand who the enemy is when, when they need to defend themselves, when they can attack? It is a psychological war right now and there’s so many casualties because so many people don’t even realize what’s going on.

Kody: Oh, I agree 100%. That was actually going to be my next question is how do we arm our kids? But I think I’m just going to go ahead and link your book in the show notes and get it on order myself, because I’m excited. And you know, I think I could sit here and pick your brain forever, but I think I’ll just have to invest in your books and maybe we’ll get a chance to chat again, one day in the future. Looking at the time, I think we should probably wrap it up, but I have a question that I ask all my listeners. My goal with my podcast is to help everybody learn to grow their own food and grow as a person. So I’d like to find out what you think, what your idea of keep growing is.

Connor: I don’t believe that stasis exists. There is no status quo. You’re never staying at the same level. There’s either growth or decay. That’s all there is, so if we’re not growing, if we’re not enriching ourselves, if we’re not striving to be great, or if we’re not, like I said with Joe Q. Public earlier, who won’t invest in himself, but he will invest in, if we’re not investing in ourselves and trying to grow, we’re decaying. Forty years ago, this group of education reformers met, they were called the National Commission on Excellence in Education. They spent 18 months going across the country, reviewing public schools’ curriculum. Teachers are trying to understand how American education was doing. Eighteen months later, they produced this report called A Nation at Risk. This was April, 1983, and in the report they said that America’s educational foundations are being threatened by a rising tide of mediocrity.

Connor: If a foreign government had attempted to impose upon us the very mediocre education performance that now exists today, in 1983, we might well have viewed it as an act of war. As it stands, we have allowed this to happen to ourselves. That was 40 years ago. When I share this, I do a lot of public speaking. I often will share this story. I say, raise of hands, anyone in the audience wants to make the claim that the education system is better than it was 40 years ago. I’ve never had in all my time anyone asking this question, someone bold enough to raise their hand. And that to me is the problem. We have decayed, our education system has been dumbed down. You go look at eighth grade tests from a century ago, and most adults, probably almost all adults, could not pass an eighth grade exam from a century ago. Things have decayed and, and that’s the new normal. That’s acceptable- you can be a straight A student in a dumbed down education system. Doesn’t mean you’re that great. You’re being graded on a curve compared to a lot of mediocrity.

Kody: I tell my kids a lot, don’t celebrate mediocrity

Connor: 100% and our society does. And so to me, keep growing means we gotta recognize that mediocrity is not sufficient. We gotta rise above all of our peers. We’ve got to invest in ourselves. We don’t want to be part of this slow decay that’s happening all around us and that requires diligence. It requires intentionality, it requires uprooting things, and identifying what we need to fix or change. It’s just got to be an eyes wide open process because the antithesis, the opposite, is just going along with society. It’s being swept to and fro with every different public opinion that’s happening. I don’t think that way leads to freedom or peace or prosperity or happiness. So yeah, keep growing to me means, stay away from decay.

Kody: Wonderful. I love it. Where can everybody find you or do you want them to find you?

Connor: If you’re interested in the Tuttle Twins books, those are all at TuttleTwins.com. Up in the menu at the top, it’s got all the different books that we have.

Kody: It’ll be linked in the show notes as well.

Connor: Perfect. So my website is connorboyack.com. That’s just a little one pager all about me. I’ve got a whole lot of books that you can see there at the bottom, like the Children of the Collective, which comes out next week. I’ve got a bunch of other books. My big one for homeschoolers is called, Passion Driven Education, how we can use children’s Interests to build a little curriculum around what they’re passionate about, to inspire them to love learning. So you can find all those books at connorboyack.com. And then while I can point you to Libertas Institute, https://libertas.org/ what I will reiterate is better to go to spn.org, go find the group in your neck of the woods, go reach out to them, connect with them, and I think that’ll be a good first step to start to get involved.

Kody: Wonderful. Thank you so much. And I just can’t wait to see what you come out with next.

Connor: Thank you.

Kody: Well, thank you for joining me today at The Homestead Education, and I hope that I have given you something to think about this week. To help others find me, please comment and leave a review on your favorite podcast player. You can also follow me on Facebook and Instagram at homemade revelation. Do you have questions that you’d like answered or just want to say hi? Please email me at hello@thehomesteadeducation.com. Until next time, keep growing.