Latest / Man in America Podcast / They’re Coming For Our Kids. Here’s How We STOP Them. (Every Parent & Grandparent MUST Listen)

Transcript

They’re Coming For Our Kids. Here’s How We STOP Them. (Every Parent & Grandparent MUST Listen) · Man in America Podcast

• 0:36
  Speaker 1: Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to Man in America. I'm your host, Seth Holehouse. So by now, it should be obvious to all of us that the communists, globalists, radical leftists, whatever you want to call them, they're after our children. And one of the primary weapons in their war against innocence has been the indoctrination camps known as public schools. Not only are our children being taught that their gender is fluid or that the founding fathers were all racist, but that Marxism and communism are great ideas they should help promote in America.
• 1:08
  As parents and grandparents, we have to fight back against this in every way possible. And today, I'll be interviewing someone on the front line of that fight, Conor Boyick, the author behind the Tuttle Twins book series. But before we get started, make sure you're following me on Telegram and Truth Social at Man in America. You can also catch every episode as a podcast if you just wanna listen. The links to my podcast and social media are all in the description below.
• 1:34
  Or just search for Man in America in your favorite podcast app, and make sure you leave us a five star rating. It really helps us to reach more people. Alright, folks, let's go ahead and jump right into the interview. Alright. So Connor, thank you so much for joining me today.
• 1:48
  It's really an honor. I've seen your books everywhere. And I've always loved meeting fellow bearded Americans that care about freedom. So it's just it's a pleasure to have you on today.
• 1:59
  Speaker 2: There are too few of us.
• 2:01
  Speaker 1: Thanks for having There are. So Conor, how about can you just give us your the backstory of, you know, how you went from, you know, probably what you're seeing happening in America in your life into now what I think is probably one of the most, you know, successful book companies for children, which is really, really important. And we'll talk about what's really happening in our schools. But just go ahead and just give us your story.
• 2:30
  Speaker 2: Yeah, I was a politically ignorant, academically substandard student. You and I are. Graduating K-twelve public school in Southern California. Raised in a generally conservative household, although not super political or or anything. But through a series of events in my life, I ended up Googling a gentleman by the name of Ron Paul.
• 3:02
  And this was 02/2007 during his presidential campaign for the 02/2008 race. And it led me to a whole lot of curiosity and study about free market economics, American history, political science. I just started binging and reading a lot and came to some pretty strong conclusions that a lot of the things happening in our country is were not the way that they ought to be. Spent a few years kind of, you know, oh, someone ought to do something about that type of mode until I realized, you know, hey, you idiot. You know, stop being a summer soldier and get into the fight.
• 3:42
  And so I bounced around for a little while. I I was on Mike campaign, senator here in Utah early when he first ran in 02/2009. I was one of, like, four or five p five or six people on his early campaign when there were a bunch of competitors. We we went through the process, got Mike Lee elected. I felt like, great, got someone who can go support the constitution.
• 4:06
  But increasingly felt like the real problems were in our state and local governments where so few people pay attention. Everyone focuses on the federal level, it's where all of our energy and attention goes, but it's the area that we can impact the least. And I felt like I wanted to focus on where I could actually make a difference. I ended up starting a think tank, a nonprofit in 2011, Libertas Institute. We've now changed over 100 laws.
• 4:33
  We work all over the country with a particular focus in our state of Utah. And then along the way, started writing a lot of books, doing a lot of public speaking, just kind of trying to spread the message. And what grew out of that is these children's books, the Tuttle Twins, as a very successful brand to reach and teach millions of kids. So I've been having a blast making an impact and just loving every day of what I do because I went from being that kind of passive reactive shaking my fist at the TV type of person to someone who's empowered and able to make an impact. I see it.
• 5:13
  It motivates me to do even more, and it just feels so much more productive and energizing to, be in a position to actually affect change. And I'm a nobody. I have I I was a web developer. I have no fancy degrees. I have no economic training.
• 5:28
  I now run a nonprofit with, like, 80 plus people by last count, and I have no idea what I'm doing, but I'm doing it. And, and so that's my story in a nutshell.
• 5:39
  Speaker 1: Well, it's it's a really important story because I think that for a lot of folks who are listening, and they're thinking, oh, well, you know, I can't really do much. And and, you know, you know, me similarly, you know, two or three years ago, I never set out to say, hey, I wanna be YouTube person or have a podcast. It was just it's kind of God threw it in my lap for me. And that's what I went with. But I think it's really, like, almost everyone I talked to, whether it's you or say, like, Tom Rinz, who's the tip of the spear fighting legally for medical freedom, they're just people that reached a point in their life, they're just patriotic Americans.
• 6:12
  Not that we're, you know, we weren't bred to be these super patriots where we grew up, we've got seventeen seventy six tattooed on our arms, and we've got guns on us all the time. We're just people that wanna we we value our freedom. And we're lucky to have someone in our life. You know, I know your grandfather played a critical role role for you that may introduce us these principles of freedom because, you know, we know our teachers weren't the ones that did it, unfortunately, especially at our age. And but there are people that just said, you know, like I've had enough of this, and I need to get in the fight.
• 6:40
  And I'm seeing more and more of that. And that's it's such an important lesson for people is that, you know, Donald Trump is one thing, right? The billionaire that steps into DC. Well, that's none of us. None of us are that.
• 6:52
  Right? And but what we are those are people that can see an opportunity to affect something locally, and that can grow much larger. So now do you have you have a couple kids yourself, right?
• 7:03
  Speaker 2: I do. Yeah.
• 7:05
  Speaker 1: And did did you did part of this beginning? What kind of spurred you on to this? Was it seeing what they're being taught in school? And is that something you said, you know, this is crossing a line?
• 7:16
  Speaker 2: Well, as I said, I graduated what I call the public school system and knew that I did not want to subject my children to that system for a whole host of reasons we could get into if you want, but my wife and I decided to homeschool from day one. So for the past decade, you know, we've been homeschooling our kids. My journey into this came from the fact that dad's out here, you know, running this think tank, trying to kind of change the world. And I would come home when this first started, my my oldest, my son, he was five. And like any good dad, I'd come home and I'd say, tell me what you did today.
• 7:53
  And he'd say, I played with Legos or, you know, whatever. But when he was five, he would start to reciprocate the question. He'd say, dad, what did you do? And I'd be like, well, do I just tell him I just typed on a computer and did phone calls all day? Or how could I act like, actually describe for him that I was fighting eminent domain, you know, at the local city council or pushing back on civil asset forfeiture and people's theft of property or whatever.
• 8:18
  And and so I turned to Amazon. I I literally went searching on Amazon. I figured there's birds and the bees books. There's potty training books. There's books for any awkward or controversial but important subject to talk to kids about.
• 8:32
  Surely, there ought to be some books that would help me talk about freedom type principles with my kids. And there was nothing. I mean, was it was just a ghost town. There was a little bit of, like, constitution stuff for kids, but not about, like, the underlying principles. And so again, shook my fist for a couple weeks.
• 8:50
  Oh, I wish there was something. And got in a conversation with a buddy of mine who's who's now our illustrator. He you know, dad of kids, he bought into the same idea. We talked it through. And we decided, like, let's do a book.
• 9:03
  It'd be fun. You know, little side hustle labor of love. No vision for what it has become today. It was just a fun thing to do that we felt like would have value for our kids. And and so a lot of people bought it and they said, when's your next one coming out?
• 9:18
  Like, okay. We'll do a second one. And it just kinda slowly grew from there until it's really just exploded in the past couple of years. Now we have a cartoon and all kinds of curriculum and things that we're doing. And and so the Tuttle Twins brand has has grown, but it all started from a dad wanting to talk to his kids, not finding anything on the market, and deciding to try and be a little bit entrepreneurial and fill that market void.
• 9:45
  Speaker 1: And it's such a critical void to fill for children because I have a quote here from Lenin who said, give me four years to teach the children, and the seed I have sown will never be uprooted. And the the communists, they know the importance of planting these seeds in children when they're young. And I think that something that I've realized, and my daughter's too, and so she's just at the very beginning of her journey of really learning. And know, she she loves books and everything, and I'm gonna have to place a big order because I just before the the interview found out that you actually have, you know, books for two year olds, which is fantastic. But I think that the with what we're where the issue is right now, society, you know, the communists have had such a strong control over our society for so long, that even with the with the parents that are really protecting their kids, homeschooling them, you almost can't avoid the planting of these communist seeds.
• 10:47
  They get it from everywhere. And so I think it's like the best way to kind of counter that is that we have to be planting our own seeds, right? Planting the seeds of freedom and liberty and justice. Because otherwise, you know, what's what's what future do we have left? And I also know that there's a lot of grandparents that, you know, I talk to that are in, you know, in my audience that they might have liberal children, and they're looking at their grandchildren saying, what can I possibly do?
• 11:17
  And so this becomes a great tool because, know, they may not be in a position where they can start homeschooling their grandkids, right? They just for any number of reasons, especially if they're children, which is common, you know, a lot of grandparents say they're 60 years old,
• 11:33
  Speaker 2: their children
• 11:33
  Speaker 1: are 30, they're the millennials that have a much more liberal, you know, ideology. And so, you know, if if I was a grandparent, I'd be buying these books and sneaking them into the in my kids you know, the the grandkids' bedroom because they need to have this information.
• 11:50
  Speaker 2: Seth, I wanna add an exclamation point to what you just said because I agree with it. And and I think this is a really important point for your audience, for the world to understand. You're talking about this kind of communist intent and what's these trends that have been going on going out for the children. And so I I write a lot of books for, like, adults and nonfiction. So I have one coming out in December on this exact issue.
• 12:13
  It's called Children of the Collective. I've got an advanced copy here. Forward is written by Glenn Beck. And what you were just discussing is the exact premise of the entire book. And that is that historically, the collectivists have always gone after the children.
• 12:28
  They recognize that to maintain and augment their power, they need to basically propagandize the rising generation into their worldview. So not that I always love quoting from Hitler, but oftentimes in the extremes, we can kind of see the the problem and the warning sign. This was from a 1933 speech that Hitler said. He says, when an opponent declares, I will not come over to your side, I calmly say, your child belongs to us already. What are you?
• 12:59
  You will pass on. Your descendants, however, now stand in the new camp. In a short time, they will know nothing else but this community. So what I wanted to do with this book is really try and analyze that trend because it's one thing for us to talk about it historically and say, when has this happened in the past? We all know it's happened in the past.
• 13:22
  We know that Lenin and Hitler and Mao and Fidel Castro and all the rest have done this. It's another thing for us to contemplate what that means for us today and understand that in the so called land of the free, we have this same exact problem. Maybe it's a shade different. Degrees of difference are pronounced. I'll concede that it's not the same, but it is similar And those trends do exist.
• 13:48
  And so in the book, I go through all these quotes from like, you know, MSNBC hosts and presidents and teachers and activists and all these people expressing very collectivist opinions about how these are our children and how that we need to decide and society needs to decide what they're gonna learn and that the parents need to be pushed aside and that it's important for the collective and all this garbage that shows you this is very much something happening today. And I'll end on this point, Seth. After doing that book, I I came to the strong opinion that we are in an ideological battlefield, and most of us don't even know it. And you will lose every battle you're in the middle of that you do not even know is being fought. If you don't realize that this is kind of a larger ploy, a larger agenda, if you don't realize what is actually going on, you will lose every day of the week.
• 14:39
  It's like sending your kid to Afghanistan without a armor and a gun and everything else. Well, he's gonna be a casualty immediately. Why do we send our kids out to these schools and into social media and peer networks and out in the world without them understanding that there are similarly people trying to push on them certain narratives and ideas and agendas that are contrary perhaps to our family dynamic and values. But if we're not intentional about that, if we don't realize that that's happening, we can't counteract it. And too many parents, like you say, you know, with the grandparent dynamic and the parent, so many parents are like, well, wait a minute.
• 15:12
  I believe in freedom. Now my kids are social justice warriors. What happened? I said, well, when's the last time you had a family conversation about what's going on in the world and about economic ideas and political ideas? To which they'll typically say, well, I don't know how to talk to my kids about that.
• 15:25
  That's when I say, hey, go get the Tuttle Children's books and start talking to your kids. But intentionality is the key. If we don't have eyes wide open, if we don't realize that other people are coming after our kids, right, for their own purposes, then we're gonna lose them. And we need to be far more intentional to protect and arm our kids in the middle of that ideological battlefield that they and we all are in.
• 15:46
  Speaker 1: I couldn't agree more. A lot of what what I talk about is is the the bigger picture, the geopolitics, you know, the the CCP, the, you know, Sino Soviet pact, the reality that, yeah, I mean, our our country, you know, we've had an enemy at our doorstep that, you know, for a very long time, actually, not even in our doorstep. They're in our kitchen eating our leftovers, right, or rifling through our underwear drawer. Like, that's how that's how intimate the enemy has become in our society. And it's it's really important to think that, you know, framing is critical.
• 16:20
  You know? Like, so if a parent sees their child, and they're like, wow, this is some weird stuff. And, you know, there's this book that's coming home talking about transgenderism or even more, you know, easier acceptable things like the social justice type stuff about equality, etcetera. They might think, well, it's not that bad. And and, you know, but it's always it's a series of the it's not that bads that have gotten us to where we are right now.
• 16:45
  But then, and this is this is what I think is so critical with this is that there's a lot of parents that they don't really see who the enemy is. And they think, well, it's just a more woke agenda, and these are progressives, and they're just trying to, you know, explore the the development of humankind through pushing in more modern ideas. But they don't realize that that's all rooted in communism. And every bit of research I've done leads me straight back to this guy named Karl Marx, who, you know, wasn't an atheist, actually. He was a Christian that pledged his soul to Satan.
• 17:21
  And he set out on a mission to destroy God. I mean, this is this is the root of what we're up against. And, you know, one of the guests I've had on a few different times is a man named Trevor Loudon. And perhaps you've you've heard of him or seen his videos, but he's someone that his expertise is really understanding communist infiltration. And so, you know, recently, maybe had seen it, Matt Walsh brought the documentary, What is a Woman?
• 17:44
  Which was just incredible. It was asking all the right questions. But there's one question that I think he didn't really ask, which was who's actually behind this entire movement? You know, it's easy to look at the corrupt professors that are, you know, pushing this, and they're they're pushing pedophilia and grooming and all the things that are happening. But in this so I brought I I watched the documentary.
• 18:05
  I said, okay. I need to bring on Trevor after this. So about three or four days later, brought in Trevor Loudon, And he went through because this guy, he brings the receipts, as they say. He went through and said, okay. This gay organization was started by a communist.
• 18:17
  This, you know, pro transgender organization is run by three communists. This was almost everything that's pushing this ideology. And that that's just that. I had on a different guest talking about the BLM movement, the even the entire the Black Lives Matter, obviously, but then also the Planned Parenthood, Margaret Sanger with Eugenics. All of these were also ideas that rooted back into Marxism and Darwinism, which are a it's a very fundamental, I think, a very evil agenda.
• 18:48
  And so I think that if parents can understand that this isn't a this innocence, this isn't like, well, this teacher is more progressive. They're teaching that. But actually behind it, there are these forces, these communist forces that literally want to conquer America. And they've realized that they can't they can't just win in a direct kinetic fight, you know, a long time ago, they set out to do this. So they've had to subvert and infiltrate and slowly grind us down and slowly seize control of our children.
• 19:19
  Until we get to a point like we're today, and you probably know the facts more than I do, but I'd seen a lot of different surveys and polls showing that I think it's upwards of like, close 40 or 50 of the younger generations believe Marxism is a good idea. It's like, how did we go from that? How do we go from, say, you know, our parents or grandparents being so anti communist to now almost half of the younger generations are pro Marxist?
• 19:47
  Speaker 2: And then you see by contrast, people who fled communist countries to come to America for some modicum of freedom being preached at by some 22 year old college kid from Berkeley about the virtues of socialism. And that individual is like, are you you're not it's like, let me tell you what it's like in practice, not this fanciful theory of utopian scheming, but what it inevitably becomes. And they're preached at, they're looked down upon because of their world lived experience that, oh, no, that's different. This is democratic socialism. This is different.
• 20:20
  I fundamentally believe in the quote, we all know but do a piss poor job at doing anything about. And it's this quote, those who don't learn from the past are condemned to repeat it. We all know this. We know it by heart. We've heard it a million times.
• 20:34
  The problem that we as freedom lovers have is that we've not actualized it. We've not done anything about it. And here's why. Or here's how perhaps. Our team a couple years ago, we gathered a whole bunch of the social studies books being used in fourth through seventh or eighth grade, trying to see how are they talking about the colonial era, how are they talking about the revolutionary war, the declaration of independence, constitution, and the bill of rights.
• 21:00
  And so we review all of these books, how kids are being taught about our nation's founding. The books all did a completely amazing job at teaching what I call superficial history. So and so wrote a letter to so and so on this date, this battle happened. They traveled from here to here. The weather pattern was kind of this and then they all ate hardtack in the evening and all these random details that might be impressive to share at a party perhaps, like pop quiz, trivia, look at me, I know all these factoids.
• 21:30
  But that is not learning from history. That is simply learning about history. All of these books, these social studies history books, we're only teaching kids about the past. Literally like the equivalent of taking them to a museum of American history and pointing out like, oh, they wore those uniforms. Look at that cannonball.
• 21:47
  Look at the musket. Okay, kids, let's go to the cafeteria. Cafeteria. It's time to eat lunch. This very passing review of history.
• 21:54
  And so we set out to fix this in July, we published a two forty page American history book called America's History, A Series of Tuttle Twins Stories. So we have this at our website and our whole focus here was not only to teach what happened, because it is important if it's a history, you gotta say here are these events chronologically, But we wanted to solve the problem and focus not on superficial history, but substantive history. Why did these things happen? And more importantly, what are the lessons that we can draw from them to influence positively our own lives today and the future of our country? That's the whole point of history, not just to memorize crap that happened two fifty or however many years ago, but to better our own lives, to learn from and build upon the mistakes of the past, to appreciate the amazing ingenuity and innovation and progress that's happened, and better be humble and grateful for it as we continue to progress and do amazing things.
• 22:52
  That is the point of history. It is completely absent from how it is taught in like 99% of schools, certainly with all of these books that we have, because kids do not walk away from these books having any appreciation for the ideas and values and philosophies at issue in, for example, early America, and therefore are completely ill equipped at extracting those lessons to apply to our world today. So no wonder they support socialism. No wonder they're seduced by the lure of free this and free that from whatever celebrity politician is captivating their attention. They're historically ignorant.
• 23:28
  And to put my tinfoil hat firmly in place where it usually is, I think that outcome is desired and intentional for those in power. Not the nice teacher that we all know down the road who signed up just to help kids, but these people behind the scenes who have very agenda driven motivations, that they prefer a dumbed down electorate because it is easier to manipulate and control an ignorant people than it is an informed populace. And so this is the byproduct of what some people very strongly desire and have engineered. So if we, again, like that definition of insanity, right? It's to keep supposedly the definition is to keep doing the same thing and expect a different result.
• 24:08
  How many of us continue to send our kids to these institutions and have them reading from these textbooks and go through all the same motions and then we bemoan, you know, the the the outcome of, oh, how did they end up so bad? You know? And it's like, well, again, you're you're doing something that we've seen fail over and over again. Maybe it's time to try something different.
• 24:27
  Speaker 1: And I like I like the, you know, kind of your analysis of these social studies books because to me, it's almost like a akin to baking. Right? Where you're teaching someone, it's like, memorize this recipe. You put in a cup of flour, a cup of water, and $10 you know, a tablespoon of salt, and you bake for this mat. It's like, that's what they're teaching the kids.
• 24:44
  They can make one thing, but they're not teaching them, this is how flour works. This is how, you know, this is how to balance out your salt and your water and your egg. They're not teaching the principles of of baking, because what it does is it limits them so they get out of that, they know they know just the surface manifestation of it, because you then can't take that information and say, wow, what if I want to bake a birthday cake? Oh, I can do it this way. Or, you know, so they're really they're trapping people.
• 25:11
  And it's interesting because I think there's there's, well, there's probably multiple stages of this. Two stages I see is one is removing the critical thinking, but the other is actually then putting in the wrong ideas. So instead of learning the critical thinking of even say entrepreneurship, right? You know, when I graduated, I went to your typical high school and went to a liberal arts school and studied design, right, which you can imagine what kind of stuff I was being taught in some liberal arts school. But, you know, when I went into the real world, I was thinking, why did no one teach me sales?
• 25:41
  Why did no one teach me finance? I was thinking, gosh, if someone would have taught me sales and negotiation, it doesn't matter what business you throw me into. If I knew how to sell somebody or actually negotiate a contract, I can succeed in almost anything. But instead, if I look back at high school, they're teaching us the most mundane thing mundane things, and they're teaching how to memorize this. Or, you know, even worse nowadays, they're teaching kids about gender theory, about, you know, social justice, about the, you know, the the false history of our nation, the how the founding fathers were racist slave owners.
• 26:17
  And it's really it's really worrisome. Because I, you know, I'm I'd like to say that I have my finger on the pulse a little bit in terms of the American people fighting to save our You know, most of my my show and my research is really understanding where we're at in the battle for the soul of our nation. And, you know, I think that I see a lot of people really standing up, which is fantastic. I see a lot more people that are going to school boards, and they're getting involved in, you know, the local politics, etcetera. But one thing that's really important in going back to the the seed, you know, analogy from from linen is that if we don't replace that with something else, you know, because I think a lot of parents, they're focused on removing the bad books from the school.
• 27:02
  Right? And that seems to be their focus. But if we don't put something else in its place, those kids are going to find their way onto social media, they're going to have their friends that still have those bad books. And that's a key though, that we have to put something back in its place, because it's really we have to root into these children. Because as much as we're as the adults right now, as much as we're trying to fight for our country, if we don't get our children and our children's children, if they're if we don't get them on the right track, it doesn't matter if we can save America right now.
• 27:35
  Because then in twenty years, it'll be even more right for the takeover.
• 27:40
  Speaker 2: You're not wrong. And among many other people who would agree with you, I would cite John Adams, regularly wrote his wife Abigail, that you can find books that just have all their letters together. On three separate occasions, John Adams commented on this trend, namely the ease with which people will tear something down, but their general inability or incompetence in building things up. In particular, for example, when the French Revolution was happening, he was observing with great worry because the Federalists, his party, were very concerned about the spillover effect into America. And he was very alarmed with how easy it is to kind of destroy a government and tear down these institutions.
• 28:22
  But where are the people, he asked his wife Abigail, who understand the principles of political architecture, who can actually build things, who understand these ideas? I would agree with you that we've seen an awakening. We've seen a lot of engaged parents at the school board meetings and running for office and getting involved. But I wonder in the back of my mind, why is it not a thousand times bigger than it is? Why are there so few people?
• 28:44
  Why don't we have way more YouTube moments of parents calling out some of these people? Why don't we have more? Well, from my observation, so like with our Tuttle Twins books, we've sold over 4,000,000 of them. We've got just gobs of families all over the country who are reading this book. So I'm pretty like you with your audience.
• 29:01
  I'm kinda pretty tapped into how a lot of these parents are feeling and thinking. They're emailing us and talking to us about this. And my perception about why we don't have more, why we don't have more people building and understanding how to build to replace this kind of the institutions and the programs and failed policies we're all trying to pull down is because these parents themselves are typically the product of what I call the public fool system. They received very substandard education. They like me, when I started this with my five year old, not knowing how to explain eminent domain and some of these ideas to my kids, feel incapable.
• 29:39
  We don't understand these ideas well enough ourselves, let alone sufficiently to simplify them and substantively talk about them with our children. And so we don't. And then we trust these institutions that have proven their inability or unwillingness to do so, and the cycle, the vicious cycle repeats itself. So from my vantage point, what we really need is what John Adams recognized so long ago. And that is more people who understand the principles of truth basically, who understand how proper society should be built.
• 30:11
  And these parents, like it's funny, if I were to stop mom or dad on the street and say, Hey, here's a copy of, let's say, The Road to Serfdom by F. A. Hayek. He's a Nobel Prize winning free market economist back when the Nobel Prize was actually given to sane people and not all these crazy people in recent years. So F.
• 30:30
  A. Hayek, very amazing free market economist. He writes this amazing book like sixty, seventy years ago. If I hand that to someone on the street, powerful book, how many people would read it? What percentage?
• 30:42
  I would say sub 1%. It's written decades ago when the words had multiple syllables in them. I know it was a little bit drier English and there's no pictures. So I think very few would read it. But if I ask that mom or dad and I say, Do you think it's important for your kids to understand how the economy works?
• 31:02
  How money works? The importance of individual choice, entrepreneurship, money, and all the rest. Oh yeah, yeah, I want my kids to be well rounded and I want them to. So I say, here's this kid's book. And if you'll read it with your kids, they'll understand these ideas.
• 31:15
  I don't tell them that, oh, hey, parents, by you reading this book to your kids, you've let your defenses down and you are now exposing yourself to the very core ideas that we've extracted from. Like, we have a version called The Tuttle Twins and the Road to Serfdom. And in our book, it's a fictional Serfdom is S U R F. It's a beach town, and eminent domain is involved as it happens, and there's all these things going on that leads to serfdom, SERF, the bondage of collectivism. But I've taken the parents' defenses down, I've given them a shared family moment where they can read a story together.
• 31:51
  We have discussion questions at the end. They can talk about very real world pertinent issues. And suddenly mom and dad are learning a little bit along the way. So we've changed our own perception. Initially, we thought the Tuttle Twins was children's literature, children's materials to help teach the rising generation.
• 32:09
  What we've instead realized is that these are family education resources because mom and dad are often learning for the first time a lot of these ideas and increasing their own confidence level and understanding these kind of political and economic principles so that they can go out to the school board or wherever and go fight for them. So I really think we've kind of had this generational deficiency in a lot of the parents today. Though even though they believe in the principles, it's very superficial. They lack any type of philosophical or academic understanding of these various terms and their implications. And so if we can sprinkle a lot of those seeds and really, like linen, I guess, right?
• 32:45
  Good seeds in our kids. Yeah. And if we can really try and expose them to some of this good information, they'll feel more equipped and informed and energized to go fight alongside us.
• 32:55
  Speaker 1: Which is really incredible. Because if you think about it, like what I mentioned earlier, we have a lot of grandparents that their children, which are say that millennials have grandchildren. And if they were to go to their child and say, Hey, you know, read this book, you know, whether it's Thomas Paine, or read this book about the Constitution, or, you know, recently his earlier writings by John Adams, I'm sure their children are like, you know, why? But it's like, okay, let's sneak it in here. Because if you look at how the left does things and how the the radicals do things, they're they're so crafty.
• 33:25
  It's like, well, let's use their methods against them. Right? The old Saul Alinsky, let's pull up the rules for radical book here and learn a few But it's like, can almost use their methods of intro infiltrating their minds. So it's like, okay, we'll tell you what, we're gonna give these books to the grandchildren and say, hey, you should ask your mom to read this book sometime. Because the grandkids are gonna love it because they're gonna identify with it like, wow, there's something about this is which is different.
• 33:48
  And I feel empowered from it. And they might be saying, mom, will you read me this book on the creature from Jekyll Island? Like, what is what are you talking about? It's like, okay. Sure, honey.
• 33:56
  And that that night, you know, the mother's like, you know, husband, do you know that the Federal Reserve is not owned by the US government? Do you know I mean? It's it's kind of like it's like this stealth propaganda of, like, righteous principles. It's amazing.
• 34:08
  Speaker 2: Well and and and do we feel our ourselves so above our opposition that we're unwilling to do these effective strategic tactics that they've long been doing? I mean, here here's another one for you. Books, very important. It's it's our bread and butter. But I've often felt like we need a cartoon because you look at all the propaganda and all the kids cartoons today.
• 34:28
  We have to go compete in that arena as well. So a couple years ago, we teamed up with the Angel Studios, and they're the creators behind The Chosen, anyone's or not the creators, but they're the distributors and the marketers. The Chosen is just an amazing show that's blown up and been seen by millions. So Angel Studios partnered with us and we've created the Tuttle Twins TV show. We raised almost $5,000,000 from thousands of investors.
• 34:53
  We became the world's top funded kids media project in the entire world. And I think we're tomorrow night about to wrap our first season that was fully funded, 12 episodes, completely free. It's all on YouTube. You search Tuttle Twins, you can find all the episodes. It's in the Angel Studios app.
• 35:14
  But the point of me bringing this up is it's one thing to get a kid excited about reading a book. And for whatever weird reason, kids are really excited about reading our books. Our leading theory is that it makes them feel like older kids. Like every kid wants to be like their older siblings or like their parents. They wanna sit, see the big kids table.
• 35:34
  And so the fact that these are adult ideas, they kind of feel like, oh, this is challenging. It's not these fluffy stories that we have to read at school or whatever. So it's one thing to do that with books where our books admittedly are about, I would say, 75 information and and ideas and 25% story. There's enough story to move things along where we can continue to talk about these ideas, but the main focus is the ideas. With the cartoon, we've completely flipped it.
• 36:01
  So it's 75% just a fun cartoon. It's like kind of The Simpsons if you ever watched that or I'm sure there's other shows where
• 36:08
  Speaker 1: it's like I grew up on The Simpsons. It's silly. One of my problems.
• 36:12
  Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, you and me both. I also grew up on The Simpsons but there was like the kid humor where we could kind of understand all the silly stupid stuff but there were a lot of jokes that were above our heads that our parents would laugh at. You were reaching the entire family. That's what we're doing as well. We've got all the silly humor but we've got a lot of these political and economic things that parents are laughing at.
• 36:31
  So we've created a family viewing experience where it's mostly just entertainment. It's just a fun quality cartoon. We're delivering some of those ideas along the way, but the purpose is if the cartoon can broadly go reach a ton of these people, if grandparents can say, Oh yeah, sure, honey, I'll watch your kids for the day and I'll make them lunch while they go watch the Tulletmans cartoon. They come home and they're talking about it. Oh mom, can we get the books and watch the cartoon again?
• 36:56
  So the idea is we hook way more people in over time with the cartoon because it's just entertaining and fun. And then we slowly lead them down the path of learning more and more until they become very serious in understanding the deeper concepts that we're trying you know, make popular throughout the world.
• 37:14
  Speaker 1: It's really it's incredible what you're doing. Because, you know, so I cover a lot of things, and I cover a lot of the harsh realities of our world, whether it's food shortages, or diesel shortages, or any of the things that are, know, the the pending CCP invasion or anything that's that's, you know, I'm I'm kind of a realist. Like, you know, I'd I'd rather know what's happening and face it head on, then, you know, get distracted with bread and circuses and ignore things until all of a sudden, you there's no more meat at the grocery store, no more gas at the at the gas station. But this is it's such an inspiring conversation to have because this it just gives me hope because this is how we fight. This is know, lot people are like, okay.
• 37:52
  How do we save our nation? Well, there's no one single thing you have to do, but I think it's really it's everything together. We have we have to do is we have to undo everything they've been doing, and we have to rebuild these, you know, these righteous systems. And so when I think about, you know, the Tullow Twins cartoons, it's like, yeah, like, what okay, what's next? How about we replace Disney?
• 38:11
  How about we get rid of, you know, the Pixar, you know, and Disney and all this, and we actually have the people that are teaching the good principles. And, you know, you mentioned that the children, there's some part of them that they they like it because they feel like it makes them like part of the older crowd. And then I agree a % with that. But I also think that there's something that our I think our souls have this ability to detect the truth, and to lead us back to truth, especially if it's put in front of us. And so I'd imagine that there's also some part of them that they, they just feel like these are the right principles, and they're getting that, you know, and I think that it's critical because children are still young enough that they haven't told their conscience no so many times to the point their conscience stops trying to even tell them what's right and wrong.
• 39:00
  And that's the problem with a lot of adults is we've just we've said no so many times to our conscience that the conscience is like, why? Why bother? Right? But I think for kids, though, because I remember how I was at a kid at say, seven years old, or 10 years old, or even 15 years old, I still had a really strong conscience that would say, Seth, that's not actually that's not really good. That's not nice.
• 39:19
  Right? And so I think it's really important because I think kids can still be guided by that in a way that maybe parents can't. And I think that what you're how you're responding to kids just love to read this information. It really to me it, it really validates that idea. That that's exactly what's happening.
• 39:36
  Speaker 2: I say something similar, which is that as adults, we put so many asterisks on these foundational principles that they become definitionally meaningless. It's like, say the golden rule, Do unto others what you would have them doing to you. Oh, except, you know, if they're in a different country or except if someone they're connected to did something bad to you, then you can go nuke them. Except if x y and z and all the politicians arguments and claims and, you know, all the things, right? To the point then like, what's the point of talking about the fact that or claiming that we believe in something when we just encumber it with so many exceptions that you can drive a truck through and never really believe in that principle anymore.
• 40:15
  So I do think the kind of unadulterated principles and ideas are powerful. I really like what you said that kids can kind of click with that a bit more and I wanna think more about that because I suspect that you're right, that they can just identify that these are, we have a podcast for example, called The Way the World Works. It's kind of for mom and the kids in the car. They're little fifteen minute episodes where we're just planting little seeds to get them talking. But fundamentally, we're trying to help the kids and their parents understand a little more about how the world works and not how they're told it works, not how politicians or the media claim what's going on.
• 40:54
  Really peeling back the curtain and talking about some important truthful ideas where, to your point, they can kinda resonate with that and and understand it to be true implicitly. And and I feel like we are in a in in an era when there's so much distrust. It's kind of the adage of like, you know, fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me. Except like we're not learning our lesson.
• 41:18
  You look at the polling figures about the distrust in media or politicians, and then COVID comes around despite, you know, ninety percent or whatever people claiming that they distrust all these authoritarian figures, and they suddenly start acting in compliance with all the authority figures. The if your listeners and viewers don't know, I imagine they already do, Seth, about the Milgram Seth, experiment. I think this to me is one of the most Yeah, it's incredible. But please explain it to a new person who hasn't heard it. It's a damning indictment of humanity itself about how willing we are to subordinate our conscience, add those asterisks, and do what we're told.
• 41:54
  Stanley Milgram was this researcher who observed how the Nazis were using their defense of, I was just following orders, right? And so he concocted an experiment to test to what degree people are willing to follow orders and suppress their own conscience. His very famous experiment, which has been consistently replicated, a lot of these cockamamie experiments have never been replicated, you can't know if they're very valid. His has been consistently proven true. He puts his subject in front of this big machine with a whole bunch of knobs or switches, each of which will progressively increasingly electrocute someone on the other side of the wall.
• 42:29
  The participant is told by this guy in a lab coat with an official looking clipboard that it's very important that you do as you're instructed. And so they start electrocuting progressively. The person on the other side of the wall is like, Ow, ow. They're hearing through the wall but not seeing this person being electrocuted to the point where they stop making noises because they're giving such big shocks. The person is typically like, Well, wait a minute, did I just kill this person?
• 42:55
  Are they okay? Guy in the clipboard. No, it's very important. Percent of people were willing to go to the potentially fatal dose of electrocution. Yeah, lethal.
• 43:05
  They were willing to kill someone just because a guy in a lab coat who had no specific authority, he just looked like an authority figure, but they were willing to do what they were told. Now, of course, the person on the other side of the wall was not actually a person. It was prerecorded audio to simulate it. And it wasn't that person being the subject, it was the person in front of the box, the machine saying, are you willing to potentially kill someone just because you were told to do so? Nearly two thirds of people, they've tested this across age, gender, socioeconomic status, different geographies, and consistently humans are willing to subordinate their conscience based on what they're told to do.
• 43:44
  So yes, there's a lot of distrust in politicians and the media. And I fear that we're gonna have the next COVID, the next emergency, like all the rest before. And despite this cerebral distrust that we have of those institutions, our lizard brain or whatever is gonna kick in again, and we're just gonna trust these authority figures. That is something I think a lot about. How to solve for that.
• 44:07
  How to get people to remember, they fooled you. Shame on them. They fooled you twice, right? Shame on them. Stop believing them.
• 44:13
  Let's be skeptical about this new claim because they don't have the best track record. And that's something I think we as society, if we could solve for that, if we could figure out how to prolong and make permanent that distrust, they would lose a lot of power if we stopped believing them and continued acting the way we want. But it's that condition of humanity that keeps us chained to them, I think, in some respects. And that's something I'm trying to kind of brainstorm. How do we solve for that?
• 44:39
  Speaker 1: I'm glad you mentioned the Milgram experience too, because that is such an important just indicator or example of what can be done to people to betray our inconsistency. Now I'd be really curious to see at a generational level how that experiment is different. Take someone who's 85 years old, for instance, that was taught education sixty five or seventy years ago, how do they respond to that experiment versus someone who's 14 years old? And my guess is that maybe up at say an 85 year old person, maybe only twenty percent of them would actually carry out the experiment. But maybe someone who's say 15 years old, maybe it's ninety five percent.
• 45:20
  And that right there, to me is one of the strongest examples of the social conditioning and the programming that people have been put through. And I think the key though, is just that we have to be able to undo that, especially for the younger generations. I think that there's a lot of parents like you know, like yourself and myself and a lot of the folks that are watching that are saying, you know what, like, I'm not going to go along with this anymore. But we have to figure out how to do that in a much larger scale. Because, you know, I mean, I feel like we're kind of running out of time now, right?
• 45:50
  We don't have another three or four generations to get things back on track.
• 45:55
  Speaker 2: I agree with you. If I were to simplify how I perceive my work, also, I call myself kind of a realist pessimist. It's like, yeah, I'm a conspiracy theorist, but all I really am is a historian. I know how all this stuff has happened before. If you're a student of history, you by nature are a conspiracy theorist about all this stuff going on today.
• 46:19
  So with all of that in my mind and my natural disposition to feel like, man, things are gonna get bad, all these powerful controlling people are trying to do all this stuff. I feel like our ship is about to crash into the Titanic. I feel like we are going to go through a period of struggle and I don't know to what degree and all the things, but I feel like there's a sense of inevitability about that potential impact. So what I see my work today is doing certainly for my family, but for millions of families that we're trying to reach is to get them into the lifeboats. It's to say like, stop paying attention, stop fantasizing about the iceberg, let's get you to safety.
• 46:58
  Let's get you to wake up and realize what's going on, pack your luggage, you need to take action and not just rearrange deck chairs and play the fiddle or whatever. Let's get you onto the lifeboats. And why that's important is the lifeboats are also far more maneuverable than the ship. The ship's course has largely been fixed through a series of long standing actions that have taken us in this direction. The lifeboats can be very nimble and you can move around all these different obstacles.
• 47:27
  And so maybe that means the states, getting the state legislatures to better be able to weather the storm, have rainy day funds, pay down debt, loosen their laws on lockdowns and economic freedom and all the rest so that we can rebuild far more quickly as we go through the storm. It could be The states. It could be local communities, right? Having this interdependency of people working together. It could be remote compounds and prepper relocations, or it could just be neighborhoods where people are meaningfully trying to support one another and get through it together.
• 48:00
  Certainly, Alexis de Tocqueville, gosh, democracy in America. This guy comes to America A Couple Decades after independence and he writes with just such profound awe about what he called mediating institutions. He basically said, and I'm summarizing here, you look throughout Europe, whenever there's a problem, they pass some government program, some monarch just funds it or they do whatever they want. And it's always corrupt and inefficient and it never really works. But in America, he says, every time there's a problem, every time there's someone in need, there is a different association that's created.
• 48:35
  A society is formed. These people organize themselves cohesively into these interdependent networks of community. And it's just phenomenal. That is no longer our America because the state has come in and kind of crushed out the competition. But that to me is the solution.
• 48:51
  Those are the lifeboats. It's finding ways where people are banding together, able to respond more nimbly, to help one another, pull them back up if they get into the water. I see my work largely as red pilling as many people as possible to what's going on so that they can wake up, take action, get into the lifeboats, or at least realize that once that impact happens, grab a lifeboat as quickly as you can. I don't think we can stop the ship from its course, but I do think we can do a lot of good in the meantime for a lot of families who can better prepare for what's to come.
• 49:30
  Speaker 1: Yeah, I couldn't agree more. And I've used Noah's Ark analogy a lot saying, look, know, everyone called him a conspiracy theorist till it started raining. Right? And that's the thing. And I feel like I'm the same in the same way.
• 49:41
  You know, we've got chickens, we've got, you know, stored food, we've we're gardening. And, you know, that's a lot about what I talk about is how to really prepare because I think that whatever comes next, I agree, it's not gonna be pretty. And it's gonna be really difficult. But I say, look, the good people, the people that have the right values, we have to be the ones that can help rebuild. We have to be the ones that are have the lifeboats like and so it's like, hey, look, we already built a lifeboat.
• 50:04
  And I've been telling you about it. So now you know that you can just come hop on the lifeboat. Right? So that's a, it's a critical thing. Think the most, the really critical is helping our children understand, you know, where the ship is headed, where the lifeboat is, understand what the principles are.
• 50:19
  And so actually, want to bring up your, the website to Tuttle Twins because, you know, you know, look, I do very, very, very little affiliate stuff, except things I really believe in. And so, you know, let folks know that, you know, so if you if you go to the URL read with Seth, it takes you to the Titletowns website, which I'll bring up. And so this, obviously, this will support me, but this is it is not about that. I like to be transparent, because it's not some sort of hidden thing. So I want to be completely transparent.
• 50:48
  But this is something that I believe so much in. Because our children, as we talked about, we can't just remove the bad books, we have to give them the good books. And whether you're a parent or a grandparent, it's it's our responsibility. Because if we don't raise the next generation, the state certainly will. If we don't raise our children or our grandchildren, there's 20 or 30 communists that are waiting to fill that role instead of you.
• 51:16
  And so I highly recommend again, website readwithseth.com, you go on here, great website, there's so much you can learn on here. But it has your story, you go into just the story of the books. And I want to actually highlight this really quickly here, this little graphic. This is showing for those of you listening on the audio, this is exactly what it is. It's a it's a mother holding the shield of the Tuttle twins, and she's protecting her children from the arrows of anti family, anti freedom, socialism, Marxism, media line, collectivism.
• 51:49
  This is the role of parents and grandparents that we need to have in our in our country, in our nation, and really around the world. And so anyway, I really want to encourage people we're heading into the Christmas season, whether you're buying for your children or your grandchildren, or if it's your children that have children, your grandparent, you know, get these books into their hands, because we really have to help correct all of these socialist and Marxist lies. Because the reality is, and this is, it's very true, unfortunately, if we can't save our children, we will not be able to save our nation. And for a lot of us, we're working really, really, really hard to save this nation from this communist infiltration and this, you know, these Marxist and globalist ideologies. But if we can't protect our children, we can save our nation today and have it thrown away in twenty years if we can't do that.
• 52:42
  So that URL is readwithseth.com. And it's also a great way of just supporting everything that Conor is doing. Because, you know, you're on the front lines. And so we need we need to it's like, when are you gonna start the Pixar? It's like, okay, we need the total twin animated films.
• 52:58
  We need to be in the movie theaters. We need we need this so much because these have become tools of the communists. And they know this. They've been very open about it, you know, seizing control of Hollywood and the media and education system. So we have to undo that.
• 53:15
  Speaker 2: I I think we do. It is it does boil down again to that word intentionality. Some of these people have been operating very intentionally for their agenda for very long. We've been assuming the best of things. We've been giving people the benefit of the doubt.
• 53:29
  We've been naively assuming that this is the land of the free. Nothing could ever go wrong and no bad things will happen. There's been a lot of naivety and ignorance and apathy on our side. And we've squandered our birthright, I think, in a lot of ways. So if we don't want that, we also have to be intentional.
• 53:45
  I started this as a dad who just saw a problem and wanted to solve that. But I will say that in our early years where this was just a little side hustle, hobby, making some fun books to talk to kids. When 2020 hit for us, it became a mission. It became a strategic project. When we saw the heavy authoritarianism, when we saw these parents just doing what they were told, laying down, surrendering their freedom, trusting these authority figures who had abused our trust so many times before, that's when warning bells started going off for us.
• 54:20
  And we really leaned into creating a ton more content, books for kids of all ages, curriculum, a family game, the cartoon, really trying to accelerate what we're doing because we realized, oh my gosh, this is far worse and it's been far more aggressive than so many people anticipated. Let's try and hustle. So no matter how old your kids are or how they like to learn, if they like books, we got books. If they like hands on stuff, we've got activity workbooks and things. We've got the cartoon, the podcast.
• 54:47
  And so as Seth mentioned, readwithseth.com. You can check out the books. You can start watching the cartoon today. Go to YouTube and just go type Tuttle Twins and you'll find our cartoons and dip your toe in the water. Start talking to you know, ultimately, for me, it's it's not so much about exposing our kids to these ideas.
• 55:04
  The primary benefit we're after is the family discussions. It's really trying to bring parents and kids together around the dinner table because I think that is where America is safe. Not at the Capitol Building, not in the courtroom or anywhere else. It's around the dinner table where you have this intergenerational interaction of teaching and talking about these ideas and then going out in the world and applying them. What we're after is those family discussions.
• 55:29
  And so both with the cartoons and the books, we're steering you towards talking to your kids about this. Don't just give them a book and assume that they're gonna turn out fine. Engage them in conversation. Read the book with them. Sit down together and have that shared experience.
• 55:42
  We provide discussion questions at the end so you can go over them together. You're gonna see far more meaningful conversations. They're gonna go from, Hey, Billy, what did you do today at school? I don't know. They're gonna go from that very distant interaction to all of a sudden these light bulb moments where you're in the car listening to news radio maybe, or you see a TV commercial, your kids are gonna start making connections based on the stories they read in the telephones.
• 56:06
  We get emails about this all day long about this exact light bulb sparked curiosity happening. I want it for every family out there. So, Seth, I would just invite all your listeners and viewers to go to readwithseth.com, pick up your books. We give you free activity workbooks. We're on a mission to reach as many families as we can.
• 56:25
  So just grateful to be on your show to reach a few more.
• 56:29
  Speaker 1: I'm so honored to have you. And so folks, remember, go to over the new tab right now, go to readwithSeth.com and send this video to a friend of yours. Send it to one person. And if they send to one person because this is how we can get the right information in front of our children. So Connor, thank you so very much for making time to be on the show with me today.
• 56:49
  I'm just honored to have you on here and just thank you for the courage that you have fighting for our children, for our nation. And you're making a very important difference. I really, really, I really appreciate that.
• 57:00
  Speaker 2: Thank you, Seth. I'm grateful for that. I feel called to this work, and just very fortunate to be doing what we're doing to offer a solution out there. Together with efforts like yours and mine and many others, we can hopefully get a lot of people in the lifeboats and do a lot of good in the years to come.
• 57:15
  Speaker 1: Absolutely. Alright. Well, take care. Have a wonderful day. Thank you.
• 57:18
  Speaker 2: Thank you.