Caleb Brown: This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Friday, December 2, 2016. I am Caleb Brown. Trying to turn The Road to Surfdom or The Creature from Jekyll Island into popular children’s books would be a daunting task, but it’s a task that Connor Boyack has done his best to undertake. In his new book series, The Tuttle Twins find themselves, with some artistic license, facing the same problems that confound governments and civil society. We spoke this week about how he is trying to bring the freedom philosophy to young people.
Connor Boyack: One of the challenges is really distilling the core ideas down to, in our case, a sixty-page children’s book. You want to hit three to five core ideas that not only children can understand, but quite frankly we are reaching an entirely new adult audience who is not familiar with the original works and who probably would never pick up you know, Economics in One Lesson. But through this very nonthreatening medium, when it’s a shared experience with their child, now we’re reaching an entirely new audience hitting those very fundamental core ideas.
Caleb Brown: Okay so the one that spoke to me most clearly was The Law by Frederic Bastiat. That would seem to be the most simple of the tasks to translate that because The Law, of course, itself is very short.
Connor Boyack: Yeah.
Caleb Brown: And the lessons there are clear as day.
Connor Boyack: Yeah I mean it’s fun too when you can weave in you know, legalized plunder and so we have a pirate in the story. I mean you can have some fun with it and bring this down to a child’s level, but I’ve written five books for adults and now five books for children, and it’s actually more difficult to write a child’s book. You think oh it’s just short, but it’s hard to have something where you strike the right balance where it’s informational, it’s educational, it’s even inspiring in a way, it’s uplifting, but fun for kids to read it over and over again and so getting that balance was hard. That book, The Law, was our first and so we spent a lot of time really trying to refine the story, figure out how do we communicate the basic principles of Bastiat’s essay in a way that’s going to be long-lasting, kids want to read over and over again.
Caleb Brown: Okay, you also more recently you’ve done The Creature from Jekyll Island, which is all about the inflationary effects of giving some central bank the authority to print money, so how did you boil that down?
Connor Boyack: So that one was fun. It’s probably the darker book of our series. And so we took an actual creature, the twins, the Tuttle twins, imagine this creature that can go around and change prices and manipulate the money supply. And so we introduced an actual creature, a monster into the book that is kind of the nemesis and the you know, the bad guy in the story. And so they can kind of pinpoint the bad effects of all this economic manipulation on this creature. And of course they come to understand that the creature is just a nickname and it’s actually a group of bankers and politicians and it’s a bigger issue than that, but the visualization and the story is wrapped around the creature. And so we try and do little cues, little hooks like that so a kid can understand well when you say Federal Reserve most eight-year-olds would have their eyes glaze over, but when you tie it to a scary creature that they’ve seen in the book and they can kind of wrap their mind around, suddenly parents have a hook to talk about these ideas with their children.
Caleb Brown: Alright, some of the other topics you’ve done, The Road to Surfdom.
Connor Boyack: Uh-huh.
Caleb Brown: So how was that translated?
Connor Boyack: That’s our most recent one and we change — we did a little play-on words. So in our case, serfdom is S‑U-R-F-D-O‑M, the name of a beach in the book. Surfdom is a beach and the government has a master transportation plan and they make an actual road to the beach, Surfdom, using eminent domain, of course. And so the twins uncover the unintended consequences of collectivism. They see that oh, because of imminent domain this farmer’s land was stolen. Because he can’t do his dairy farm anymore, the local creamery that has been in town in for a century went out of business, causing all of these people to lose their jobs, and so on and so forth. And so they traced the ripple effect to be able to see, as Hayek warned us, the dangers of collectivism and central planning and so we help the young readers of our series begin to observe those effects. So in Bastiat’s words right, they can become a good economist by tracing not only the immediate visible effects, but also the invisible and prolonged effects as well.
Caleb Brown: Okay, so it’s strikingly similar to Economics in One Lesson, as well.
Connor Boyack: Definitely. And that was the fourth in our series. The title of ours is The Tuttle Twins and the Food Truck Fiasco, similarly trying to convey as Hazlitt does in that book what the effects are of unfair competition, overregulation, and distortion of the economy. So we use the story which is a quite relevant one across the country here in America of food trucks competing against restaurants, unfairly being told that they can’t you know, park and operate within so many feet of a restaurant. Institute for Justice and others have been litigating on this issue most recently and so we introduced that story because it’s a very real one that many of our young readers are familiar with, they’ve been to a food truck, and we can use that as a visual and the real-world example to show what Hazlitt was talking about decades ago.
Caleb Brown: Have you thought about branching out into doing other things that aren’t so strongly tied to some specific classic work?
Connor Boyack: Yeah, and in fact we’re soon going to be launching a YouTube series. I haven’t announced this anywhere else yet, so your listeners get it first. Probably in early January we are going to launch a YouTube series where each video will treat a different current event or historical issue. The books are going to be reserved for being based on original treatises, texts, essays, and so forth. We want to point our readers, after they’ve read our book, to the original works so they learn more and can go deeper in that issue. So we’re going to do ten books in the series. Each one is going to be based on a book or an essay. But we want to branch out. There’s so much more material to cover. And so we’re going to have a video series with some child actors covering all sorts of other issues based with the same kind of framework and philosophy as The Tuttle Twins book series, we’re going to take it to video soon as well.
Caleb Brown: You’ve got these books and as you mentioned before we started recording, you are selling them. You are packing them up and shipping them. I’ve seen pictures…
Connor Boyack: Some late nights.
Caleb Brown:…I’ve seen pictures on Facebook of you doing exactly that. So what is the next step beyond you know, publishing you said ten books, and YouTube series, but what’s after that?
Connor Boyack: Yeah. So it’s been kind of an experimental project. When we started, we didn’t know if the market was there. Elijah, who is the illustrator, is a friend of mine, he’s also a father of young children, we said hey let’s do a book. Let’s see how it goes. The response is overwhelming, we’re turning it into a series, we’re doing a video series. But you know it spread very well through word of mouth, certainly in libertarian circles but beyond in home school circles and elsewhere. But we’ve come to realize that there’s so much more compelling of a need to compete for the minds of young children where they’re not getting this information. So specifically in public, you know, private and charter schools where the parents aren’t familiar with these original works, the teachers certainly aren’t, they’re not presenting this information. If anything, kids are getting the opposite type of information in schools. So early next year we’re going to begin a campaign, a donor-supported campaign, to try and fundraise enough to widely distribute these books directly into schools, giving teachers lessons plans so they can teach some of these economic and political concepts directly to their kids and then the kids get the books to take home and continue reading.
Caleb Brown: How does this translate? I mean for parents who buy these books and maybe are not familiar with the original works, what’s the sort of spillover impact for parents?
Connor Boyack: That was actually accidental. We figured hey, let’s create children’s books. And then about a year into it we started hearing a lot of stories of the parents themselves being engaged in and informed about these ideas. Becoming really intrigued and going and reading the original you know, books that ours are based on. Beginning to you know, become part of the liberty movement. So we almost kind of stumbled onto that secondary audience, but now it’s a big focus of ours, to try and appeal directly to the parents, older siblings as well, marketing to them some information, some courses, some books that kind of build upon our series for an older audience. And so for us really it’s about reaching an entirely new audience. For too long in the liberty movement we’ve waited for people to graduate college you know, or at least high school, to get to them. But by then they’ve got a couple decades of you know, propaganda for lack of a better word, that we have to overcome. We have to de-educate them before we then educate them on these ideas and this philosophy. So we’re trying to say let’s start from a young age, let’s build from there, let’s get them while they’re young, introduce these ideas, and then see what the future holds.
Caleb Brown: How has — we’re recording of course on Cyber Monday — how was Black Friday for you and how have sales been?
Connor Boyack: Yeah, like you say we’ve been packing up the books ourselves so it’s been a lot of work. We’re soon going to have to transition to something else because it was kind of a you know, side project, but it’s becoming a huge thing. Parents are spreading the word like crazy, social media has gone nuts. We’re you know, I think we’ve passed, we’re coming up on 25,000 books sold. And so definitely it’s kind of reaching kind of critical mass where we have to commercialize this a little bit more because it’s reaching a much bigger audience that we need to be able to support. So we’ll get there, it’s been a ton of fun, and the response has been awesome.
Caleb Brown: Connor Boyack is author of The Tuttle Twins book series. Subscribe to this podcast at iTunes, Google Play, and with Cato’s iOS app. And follow us on Twitter, @CatoPodcast.
