KELLEN HOARD INTERVIEWED BY GREG BENNICK FOR THE NNP

KELLEN HOARD Interviewed for the Newman Numismatic Portal By Greg Bennick minterrors@gmail.com

Instagram: @minterrors

GREG BENNICK: Hi everybody, Greg Bennick here with the

Newman Numismatic Portal. Thanks for joining yet another interview in the series that I'm doing with prominent numismatists and interesting people. And I'm here today with Kellen Hoard.

Kellen and I are co-inhabitors of the Pacific Northwest, and we're both here in the Northwest corner of the United States today. We're going to have a fun conversation. So, Kellen, thanks for hanging out. I appreciate it.

KELLEN HOARD: Good to see you, Greg. I think I'm only “a prominent numismatist” to my mother, but I appreciate you saying that.

GREG BENNICK: You know, that never ends, right? As long as we have our moms with us, that's always true. I put out a book this last week. I had a book come out. And my biggest fan, I don't know how many copies she purchased, is indeed my mother. So that's exciting.

KELLEN HOARD: My mother has been very supportive of numismatics for me generally. I started when I was nine years old, and so I couldn't drive myself anywhere. I really couldn't do much of anything. And so, she, even as a non- numismatist, was supportive and driving me to coin club meetings. My first show, which was the ANA Portland show in 2015, which was great. And she was totally there for me 100%. The day I turned 16, she said, “Go get your driver's license. You're taking yourself to your coin shows now. I was here for you while you weren't able to, but you are more than welcome to go do things all by yourself now.”

KELLEN HOARD INTERVIEWED BY GREG BENNICK FOR THE NNP

GREG BENNICK: Wow. I mean, I like that, though. I like that she was supportive. And I like that she kind of baby birded you out of the nest and said, “Go fly.”

KELLEN HOARD: That's right. Well, actually, the very first time I ever drove a car by myself, she said, “Go get me some candy at the store.” So, I did. I said, “Okay, mom, thanks for letting me get my driver's license.” I think that was kind of the trade-off, is that I would go get her something from the store in exchange for me kind of having that freedom.

GREG BENNICK: That's great. And I'm assuming she still supports your collecting endeavors and or the work that you do.

KELLEN HOARD: As much as a mother does who knows nothing about what I do. Again, totally supportive, but she'll have colleagues or friends say, “What's Kellen doing in coins?” And she can vaguely say that I am continuing to do coins, but perhaps not much more than that. So, it's the perfect amount of support from somebody who doesn't really understand.

GREG BENNICK: | like that. That's actually an interesting question that I should be asking all interviewees. How do you integrate your coin life with your social life and other lives? Right? Because I'm fortunate enough to have a partner who has heard me talk about error coins enough that she's starting to know the difference between a clip planchet and a brockage. Right. But how do you do that? How do you how do you have conversations with other people in the world, who have no idea about the things you do?

KELLEN HOARD: You know, that's a question you shouldn't have asked because it's a long answer, but I’Il try and keep it short. The long and the short of it is” a couple different ways. So, I have a girlfriend here in Seattle, and she has learned so much just through osmosis, just being near me to the point where there was at some point, we were driving the car together and it came up. I was asking her coin trivia questions, and she was very game for answering these questions. And she knew most of them, which was shocking. Like I never explicitly, I don't think, taught her anything, but she just kind of absorbed it.

KELLEN HOARD INTERVIEWED BY GREG BENNICK FOR THE NNP

Sometimes I’Il get a cool new coin. She's excited to see that. I'm happy, I guess. But that's about it for there. But I am a columnist for The Numismatist, and I write it with three other young collectors. So, we replaced Dave Bower's column that he had run, but now we do a young collector's corner. And I’d written a column toward the beginning of college when I was in my freshman year. And I had been concerned because the kind of the classic story of numismatists is that they get interested in it when they're young, when they become teenagers, high school, college students, they kind of drop out their other interests, financial obligations, and so on. They come back to it kind of in their middle age when they kind of that rekindle the interest and they have a little bit more money. And then in their golden years, that's when they really get into it. They write and research and spend big money and really get back into the hobby.

And I was concerned since I started collecting, like, “Oh my God, I'm going to fall into this trap of losing interest.” Fortunately, I never have. And I’ve had opportunities to keep engaging. But it was interesting as I continue my interest going into college, going to Washington, D.C. for college. And I continue to have interest in coins and talk to my peers about them. And college students are fascinated by coins, specifically the stories, the context, the history, the learning opportunities. I mean, they're in a learning environment already.

So, for them to be able to learn in kind of a new non-academia way, or at least the way I was presenting it to them, but more as history in your hands. They found it quite compelling. Which leads into kind of my broader philosophy is that with getting people engaged in the hobby, it's not that they're not interested. They just have no idea about the hobby. There's not some, especially younger people with myriad other opportunities for entertainment engagement. But they found it really quite compelling. And that was hopeful to me. And so, I give a lot of presentations to the public. I speak at a lot of retirement homes about numismatics or schools.

And what I find there is they don't care about grades. They don't care about pricing. That could not be less relevant or interesting to them. But they love the story. They love the context. So, I’ve been building up basically a reference set of coins and tokens and paper money and medals, transcending time and space, in which each piece has some kind of context around its creation that I know the public's like,

KELLEN HOARD INTERVIEWED BY GREG BENNICK FOR THE NNP

“Ah, I didn't even think about that.” And they find it really quite compelling. And then they have an opportunity to actually hold it in their hands as well, as they hear me talk about it.

So, in terms of social engagements with numismatics, to get back to your question is, yeah, socially, what I do is I share stories that I know are going to pique their interest. We never get into the granular details. They don't need to know about, you know, PCGS implementing plus grades. Nobody cares about that, even though I have some stake in that. But they're interested in socially how they can learn through the coins. They find that really quite compelling.

So that's how I’ve really incorporated into my social life to not be the total geek. You know, it's not to kind of bore them with it, but to find opportunity to connect with them over, those coins. One last piece [Il add on this: when I'm at a lot viewing at a Heritage or Stacks Bowers sale at a show. I'll go to lot viewing and I can never afford any of it, but I have a great time looking at it. I always get the most expensive item I can find in the sale and just look at it because why not? That's your opportunity to. But the people who staff the lot viewing... they are not collectors. They're usually temp employees from the local area.

And so, I again, I socialize with them through the coins. So many collectors just look at it themselves. I say, “Do you want to take a look at what I'm looking at?” and I tell them the story behind it. They love it. They're endlessly fascinated by this. They're sitting there all day thinking about it. So, you have an opportunity to then have an inlet with them and ask them, “Well, what are you interested in? What is anything you're interested in?” And this applies not just in lot viewing, but social lives generally. And they might say any number of things. I had a guy say he loves sailing. Phenomenal. Collect coins or tokens with boats on them. There's endless options at every budget level.

I had a woman say that she was really in touch with her religion. Even better. Countless people collect coins related to different religious things. I had a girl at college say, “I just love getting wasted on the weekends.” I said, “Great. Smirnoff has a line of tokens that you can collect.” You know, Smirnoff vodka. You put it on the bump and you spin it around on the bump and the arrow points to who pays for the round of drinks, right? No matter what your interest is, there is something for

KELLEN HOARD INTERVIEWED BY GREG BENNICK FOR THE NNP

you. So that's how you build that social connection as well, is that 1t actually does tie to something. You're basically talking about their interests in a numismatic lens. And they find that...I find really quite exciting.

GREG BENNICK: | love that. John Kraljevich and I were talking the other night about how it's really all about the story. It's about the story behind the coin.

KELLEN HOARD: He captured that story so well.

GREG BENNICK: Yeah, for sure. I find that that's true. You know, you can talk to people about error coins. They're interested in how weird the coin looks, but the process behind it, maybe, but the thing that I collect that people find really fascinating, counterstamps, and the history of a merchant who counter stamped the coin and where they were from and why they stamped the coin. All of a sudden people are really interested in the story and the coin is a symbol of that. So, I love that you found that.

KELLEN HOARD: [ have Brunk's book on counterstamps somewhere on that shelf right there. Yeah, that's a great book.

GREG BENNICK: That's great. That's great. I love it. So, okay. So, what do you collect and how did you get your start in collecting given that myriad of things you could have been interested in that you mentioned a few minutes ago?

KELLEN HOARD: Yeah. So, I’Il start, Pll start with the start. My grandparents used to travel quite a bit. They weren't collectors themselves, but they'd accumulate foreign coins in their travels and they'd always bring them back to me. I would take them and put them in a jar in my room and not really look at them much further. But one day when I was about nine, I said, “I should probably take a look at those.” So, I dumped them out of a jar, and started taking a look at them. They really were quite compelling to me. So, I started out... I put foreign coins in two by twos that I got for Christmas. I did the 50 state quarters as well.

KELLEN HOARD INTERVIEWED BY GREG BENNICK FOR THE NNP

So that was the start. It was U.S. coins and foreign coins as my first two categories. Of course, it's narrowed since then. What am I collecting right now? That is a good question. That's a question I'm asking myself. What am I collecting right now? A couple of different things. One of the ones that has persistently been interesting, but is a sub niche of a sub niche, is sample slabs. For those who aren't familiar this is basically when grading services will give out holders promotionally at shows or to YNs or at luncheons or any number of different occasions. They'll give out these holders and they usually say “sample” on them. Not always though. There's an active debate about what exactly is a sample slab when there are so many different gray areas with so many different kinds of slabs.

But I’ve been collecting those for a long time. It's a neat field because there's constantly new ones being made and not just by a couple of services, but by a bunch of what we call “basement graders,” people who set up shop in their basement to grade everything as 70 for three days and then quit. They also happen to make samples labs. So, I’ve been collecting them. It’s neat because there's constantly new ones being discovered. You have a chance to really find things nobody's seen before, and that's really quite a bit of fun.

GREG BENNICK: And where not many were made. Probably very limited.

KELLEN HOARD: But of course, it's a supply and demand thing, right? I have a sample slab of which one in the world exists and it's worth maybe a couple hundred dollars. A unique coin in the US federal series is going to be millions, right? You definitely see that sense of scale there. I’ve been doing that for a while. I have a great time doing that. I collect numismatic literature. That's one of many shelves. I have been recently collecting exonumia from my hometown of Kirkland, Washington, so I’m having a great time tracking down what even exists in that set as well. Not only that, but taking advantage of, actually, the hunt. The thrill of the hunt.

There was a local bar that issued tokens in the forties. So I went to the bar. I've never been there before. I'm amazed they let me in. I'm underage. But I went to the local bar and tracked down a guy who had been going there for decades and was able to talk to him and track down some of these pieces. So, it's fun. It’s like a treasure hunt to figure out what you can do.

KELLEN HOARD INTERVIEWED BY GREG BENNICK FOR THE NNP

I'm an international affairs student. So, I’ve also been trying to trace, 20th century geopolitics through numismatics. You can see changes to money and all this kind of stuff.

So those are a couple of different things. The big coup for me though, was that I was at a coin shop, maybe about a year ago. My girlfriend happened to be in the car with me. We pulled over and I said, “Could you come in and just hang out with me for a couple of minutes while I look at this?” And she said, “Yes.” Again, wonderful for her to do that. When I went inside to look at the coins, I said, “Why don't you just go look through that junk box of foreign coins and see what catches your eye?”

By the time I finished my business, I asked, “Are you ready to go?” She said, “No, no, no. I'm looking through this box.” She said, “I'm really quite interested.” She pulled out maybe like 25 different coins that she liked and they were about 25 cents apiece. So, I bought them for her. And on the ride home, she was fascinated by them. She loved the designs and she liked Googling to find the story behind those designs. She's quite the traveler. I suggested that we collect one coin from every country as a kind of a fun little set, in line with her traveling. And we're doing that together now. I don't think she realizes she's collecting coins.

We're keeping it that way. It's been great. We're collecting coins together. I just don't think she realizes that we are. That's been quite nice.

The only other thing I collect is things for that reference set I mentioned earlier to share with people something that will catch people's interest.

GREG BENNICK: That's amazing. I love the top secret, backhanded way of getting your partner to collect coins. It’s brilliant.

KELLEN HOARD: Yeah, that's been the approach so far. We've built up quite a set. The real difficulty, honestly, was figuring out which countries to include,

KELLEN HOARD INTERVIEWED BY GREG BENNICK FOR THE NNP

because you can do, you know, UN member states. But does that include countries like Kosovo or Palestine or different ones like this? No. There's endless gray areas. So, we chose which microstates to include and things like that. So, it's been fun in that way as well.

GREG BENNICK: | love this. Good work. That's fantastic. That's a great way of bringing in a new collector. You know, people all the time are trying to figure out how to bring in new collectors and what's the angle. And I guess the angle is get them to collect without realizing they're collecting. That's a new Kellen Hoard technique, a patented copyright.

KELLEN HOARD: Maybe not a sustainable approach, but definitely, one to get them.

GREG BENNICK: | think I might try that. I might try that with, my girlfriend and say, I really like circles. Circles are really interesting. Oh, these things have circles. Let's, let's collect these.

KELLEN HOARD: Well, honestly, not just circles. There's so many shapes. There was, an article in The Numismatist maybe a decade ago about like someone trying to collect every number of signs, as many signs as they could. There you go. You know, interesting geometry. There's great opportunity.

GREG BENNICK: Nice. Very nice. Okay. So, coins are one part of it for you. Tell me about the political side of your reality because there's an intersection too, that we're going to talk about today.

KELLEN HOARD: There's an intersection. One of them, I don't know if it's one you're referencing is how I got started in politics. I was at Summer Seminar, in 2017. I was 13 years old. I was sitting at a small table with some old men who were coin collectors and we were talking coins. One of them turned to me out of the blue and conspiratorially tells me, “Did you know Obama personally owns nuclear weapons?” I was 13 at that time. I was like, “That doesn't sound right, but

KELLEN HOARD INTERVIEWED BY GREG BENNICK FOR THE NNP

I'm not a hundred percent sure.” So I went back to the dorm, I was saying at Google, “Does Obama own nukes?”

And obviously he doesn't own nukes. But in order to fact check that I started reading journals to figure out what was true and what wasn't. The more journals I read, the more hooked I got on it. This was in 2017 when there was a lot of political upheaval going on. I realized that what I was reading about was not only impacting just the world at large, but also me and the people I cared about. What I was reading in these pages in politics had pretty direct, substantive, tangible implications on my life and in my community. And not just at the federal level where a lot of people were looking, but the state level, especially. That's where the day-to-day stuff was happening.

Around that time, I got involved with March for Our Lives, when those walkouts were happening in schools. From there, there was a point at which I put my phone number into some kind of form, truly accidentally. And someone called me and said, “Hey, are you one of Manka Dhingra’s interns?” Manka Dhingra was my State Senator at the time. And I said, “No, but tell me more.” So, I ended up as one of her interns. From there on I got involved on the campaign side of politics.

And then later, as a result of the connections from the campaigns into the policy side, which we can talk about more if you want to, and at the state level.

GREG BENNICK: Yes, absolutely. I would love to hear about all of this. I think all of this is fascinating because I could ask you, “What do you collect?” And you say, “Indian cents.” I say, “Great. Thanks everybody.” And the interview is five seconds long. Or, we can find out more actually about you. I think it'll be great to build connection.

KELLEN HOARD: Okay! Well then sure, we'll go into a brief history of Kellen's political experience. Basically, after the campaign was over, I got hooked up with this group called the Legislative Youth Advisory Council here in Washington State, and they are codified in state law as the official youth advisory body to the state legislature. It’s a two-year term. I was appointed. In my second year I became the Chair of the council. It's 22 young people from around the state who work closely

KELLEN HOARD INTERVIEWED BY GREG BENNICK FOR THE NNP

with the legislature. During my chair year with the state agencies, we really expanded out to work with the Department of Health, and Department of Children, Youth and Families and the schools and everybody else to really provide that perspective, which is so often needed in policy making. When you are making policy without young people engaged, especially policy about young people, you end up with gaps and less effective policy, and less informed policy and less political support for your policy from the community.

So, there's a real opportunity there to get youth engaged that way. I was involved with that for quite a while and that really snowballed into a number of different things. A couple of the main highlights. One was that I got engaged with different campaigns, at different levels and had a great time doing that. The other one was that I was the Student Editor of my newspaper in high school. Especially my senior year, when I was Editor and Co-Editor-in-Chief. Coming back from the pandemic and I said, “Let's go bold on this story. Let's not just do fluff.” The school district did not take kindly to that. The District Communications Director made it be known that we were no longer student journalists who were allowed to speak to our own teachers or any district employees without her permission.

And we found that pretty unconscionable, to say, “Hey, you just can't tell public employees they can't speak to their students.” So, we got lawyers involved. We did a public pressure campaign, private pressure campaign, and got the policy overturned. The employee left the district later and we won a National First Amendment Award. That got me really involved with student free press, which is a whole separate tangent, which we will talk about sometime. But the long and the short of it is that, since the 1980’s, the Supreme Court has ruled that schools can censor student journalists or students for pretty much any reason. They technically had to have a pedagogical reason, but that's super arbitrary.

In effect, principals and school administrators will censor student journalists. Because they're embarrassed about what some of the students are writing, or perhaps, they just don't like it. Well, maybe they're writing about teen pregnancy or maybe they're writing about bad school infrastructure or maybe they're writing about anything, and if the principal doesn't like it? It gets censored. I think that's wrong, both on a moral level because students have the same free speech rights as the rest of us. And also on a practical level, we're trying to raise students to be young citizens, and so, by discouraging them from talking about the issues of the

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KELLEN HOARD INTERVIEWED BY GREG BENNICK FOR THE NNP

day, you are actually hurting your ability to do that. Also on a practical level, as local media dies, as local news outlets shutter constantly, student journalists are filling that void.

One in ten statehouse reporters today are student journalist. They're the ones covering their school boards and local communities. So, if we're censoring them arbitrarily, we're doing even more damage to local news. So, I’ve been involved with this movement called the New Voices Movement to really go state-by-state in state legislatures and pass laws which counteract the Supreme Court ruling and say, “Hey, student journalists have the same free speech rights as the rest of us.” Of course, they can't be libelous or slanderous or break school rules or the law. There are exceptions, of course. They can't evade privacy but they have the same free speech rights.

Then also their teachers can't be reprimanded or fired for just defending those rights, which is often a problem you run into. So, I got really engaged with that. My home state of Washington already has one of the laws, but last year I was looking around. I had a background in lobbying through the youth council and through other non-profits. I've worked extensively with a number of different non- profits. So, I had a background in advocacy. I said, what would be a fun challenge? And I landed on West Virginia, which is about the most different state as you can get from Washington politically.

I called up a state senator there and he and I discussed it. We disagreed on just about everything except for this. I gave him a bill text. He liked the bill. He'd actually sponsored a similar one before and we got it passed in a couple of months. That was really kind of great. I’ve continued that work as well. What I really see with policy is that there's an opportunity at the state and local level, especially as an individual, to have a huge amount of impact. At the federal level, as an individual, you have relatively little power. It's at such a huge scale. At the state and local level, individuals can do so much. It's truly a pretty fascinating amount.

When I was in high school during the pandemic, mental health was a big issue. There was a huge mental health struggle, especially among young people. I heard this from young people I was talking to, especially through the Youth Council. And so, I talked with the state representative here in Washington state and we wrote up

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KELLEN HOARD INTERVIEWED BY GREG BENNICK FOR THE NNP

a bill text that would expand mental health access to a million students around the state. She sponsored the bill and I think like seventy days later, we passed it. It was just me as an individual, right? But by bringing my community together around this, we were able to get it passed. That's not really something you see at the federal level as well. So, then there was that.

And then the more recent kind of political development, even beyond nonprofit work I was doing, I’ve worked with nonprofits like PEN America in college who do freedom of speech work as well. I was working on their academic freedom team to protect classrooms from legislative interference at the university level, working with the Democratic Attorney General's Association to raise money for candidates there. But I was recently appointed to the board of something called Washington Conservation Action. So, it's the board of the leading environmental nonprofit in Washington state.

And how I ended there was a little odd. Basically, one of my main areas I work with, with nonprofits and with elected officials and private sector officials is getting young people engaged, right? And this is a totally nonpartisan thing, but it's in my view, young people really have a different system of thinking to contribute to organizations. So, what I say to nonprofits is, “If you don't have someone under 25 on your board of your nonprofit, you are missing opportunity and you're missing risk by not having that system of thinking represented on your board.” It's not just a different life experience, but actually a different approach to the world, right?

If you're a private sector leader, you don't need necessarily young people on your board, but you should have them, people under 25, throughout your organization, talking to your C-suite leadership regularly. Once, twice a month, you should have someone in marketing and sales and HR, someone under 25 talking to your leadership team and saying, “Here's what we're seeing.” If you're a public leader, like a public official, you should be going to schools once or twice a month and having a dialogue with students, not just talking at them, but having a dialogue. You should have a youth advisory council advising you on your role and your campaign. You should have young interns engaged.

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KELLEN HOARD INTERVIEWED BY GREG BENNICK FOR THE NNP

Having young people allows you access to new opportunities and to new opportunities in line with your mission. And it saves you from systemic risk and demographic blindness. So, I ended up, you know, making that pitch to the environmental nonprofit. I ended up on their board and that's been an insightful way to look at state politics. But also, I’ve continued that work even beyond that, I co-founded the Civically Engaged Youth Council through the Seattle City Club. I don't know if you've encountered them ever. They do civil dialogue work to really try and help to make sure that we're getting young people into positions of authority, getting them a seat at the table.

And that applies to coins too, for that matter, but that's a separate thing as well. But getting young people to sit at the table so that they can help guide this forward and actually make better policy, make better organizations, make better society. So that's a long answer. I hope that was what you're looking for, but that's what I’ve been interested in.

GREG BENNICK: I love it. You and I are kindred spirits and not to throw this interview off the rails by telling you Greg's life story. And I hope that people are still with us. Anyone who's still with us and watching at this point are exactly our people, right? So, there was a law on the books in the city of Seattle called the Teen Dance Ordinance for many years. Which prevented all ages music shows from happening. This is going to be a 30 second version of a three-hour explanation. But my friends and I didn't think that that was fair. We think that art should be able to be accessed by people of all ages.

So, my friends and I petitioned and talked to people and tried to get meetings with city council members and talked to the mayor for many years. And the long story short is that the law was replaced by a law called the All Ages Dance Ordinance, which I wrote with my friend Dave Whitson, submitted to the city, passed through. The current law on the books in the City of Seattle that governs all ages music and allows access to the arts for people of all ages is the law that I wrote with my friend Dave. So, you and I are kindred spirits.

KELLEN HOARD: That's great. I mean, that's the thing, right? You have an ability as an individual or a group of people to, (bring about change). They're literally closer to you, these elected officials. They have a smaller constituency. So,

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KELLEN HOARD INTERVIEWED BY GREG BENNICK FOR THE NNP

you have amplified power and they're often part-timers. Like that's a big part of this as well. This is not the main thing. State legislators, they do this a couple months a year. These aren't professional year-round politicians. These are people who are often enmeshed in their communities to a certain level. They have that somewhat higher level of responsiveness. So, I am so glad to hear that. That is so neat.

GREG BENNICK: Yeah, it's fun. And what I love in listening to you is that this is the embodiment, the perfect example, of one person can make a difference, which often sounds like just such like a trite thing to say. It's so true. Especially in the context of what we're talking about. You really can. If you see something that you don't like, something you do like, you want more of, through your voice, amplifying your voice, you can go out and transform your world. There's no question about it.

KELLEN HOARD: The walls of the political institutions are less high than you think.

GREG BENNICK: That's great. So, with that in mind, let's bring it back to coins. Not because I couldn't talk to you about the rest of this for the next three hours, but I'm convinced that at least one or two people want to hear about the CCAC. So maybe tell us what that is and go into as much detail as you like. Not one thing you've said so far has been not interesting. All of its fascinating and I love it. So yes, the CCAC. Tell us about it and your involvement with it.

KELLEN HOARD: Sure. So, I’ve been a member for the last year and a half-ish. My origin story for ending up on the CCAC: of course I had been somewhat familiar with it. You know, it has an impact on the American hobby especially, in many different ways. So, I’ve been familiar with it, but didn't know much about it. But I saw they were accepting applications in a couple of years ago for members of the general public. And I was pondering whether or not I should apply. And I asked a former member, who shall remain nameless, and he said, “Yeah, you should absolutely apply. But just so you know, you probably won't get it, you know, especially on your first time.”

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KELLEN HOARD INTERVIEWED BY GREG BENNICK FOR THE NNP

Those words are deeply motivating to me. I love hearing things like that. So, I said, okay, I have to apply now. I have to get it the first time. So, I applied, went through the interview process and whatever else, had a great time, and ended up on the committee. I have had the chance to work on some really neat pieces. It's a cool committee for the members especially, for a couple of reasons.

One, you get to work really hands-on with some of the Mint's really talented staff, artists, et cetera. And two, you get to have a hand in designing the coins, or at least recommending designs for the coins. Of course, it's the Treasury Secretary's final call, but you get a chance to have a role in that. Three, you get a chance to learn about things you wouldn't learn about otherwise, in really neat and inspiring ways. You're learning about segments of history that Congress or whoever has decided to feature on coins and medals, that you may not have heard about otherwise. And what's remarkable is that for pretty much most programs, where there's a person or idea featured on the coin, they will have a liaison who comes and talks to the committee, either in person or on Zoom.

It might be someone's family member, the person you're featuring, a member of their family. When we did the Harriet Tubman coins, it was members of the Harriet Tubman House and Underground Railroad Foundation. I know before my time, they had, some members of Jackie Robinson's family. We just recently did a Congressional Gold Medal for the Iran hostages, and we had some of the former hostages come and speak with us. You get really interesting insight into the lives of these people directly from the people who knew them, or at least had known so much about them. So I’ve really enjoyed that as well.

We've had a chance to work on some really neat designs, including now leading up to the semi-quincentennial, the country's 250th anniversary. They're about to do a pretty serious overhaul for one year of the designs. So there's been a lot of conversation about what themes should be represented and what designs best capture those themes. I'll tell you; the community does not always agree. In fact, most of the time, we don't. But to me, that's the fun of the democratic process - figuring out what you can get, because people come from different backgrounds. There's historians, there's artists, there's a numismatist. There's a good group of people there.

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KELLEN HOARD INTERVIEWED BY GREG BENNICK FOR THE NNP

It's always worth applying. I think they have a new application actually open now for a member of the general public. Do it. Especially if you feel you have something to add to the committee because that's what they're looking for. I'll tell you the selection people, they're looking for you to add a perspective. At least this is my take on it. I guess I'm not part of the committee, so don't quote me on this, but they're looking for a perspective that's not represented there. They're looking for a new dynamic voice to add to the conversation, in agreement or disagreement, with a different take.

So, if you feel like you have a different take, think about what that take is and pitch it to them. It's worth applying. You don't get paid any money, but they pay for your airfare and lodging when you're in DC. I'm in school in DC. So, they save a lot of money on me. I think that's why they chose me; because they don't have to pay for my airfare. I think that was, they won't tell me that, but I'm half-sure.

GREG BENNICK: [ have a feeling that merit had something to do with it. I think that merit, knowledge, and ability might've had maybe 1%. I'm not on the selection committee, but I'm convinced!

KELLEN HOARD: You might be able to get the honest truth out of them. For the last couple of years, we've also gone to the ANA show. They pay for that, which is really kind. Before my time, but somewhat regularly, they'd take us out to the mints. A month before I joined, they went up to the Philly mint, and got down on the floor. It's a great way to get involved in the process at a grassroots level and understand what are the processes are that lead to the coins we create and how do we prioritize the themes and designs that we want to see on coins that capture the kind of the breadth of the American experience in the way that US coin designs historically have not.

GREG BENNICK: So, with that in mind, what do you think the priorities of the group are? Is it selecting the person to be honored or is it selecting the historical event that needs to be recognized? Do you see what I'm getting at?

KELLEN HOARD: So, for the most part, the CCAC does not select that. Congress does. The CCAC can make recommendations to Congress about, what

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KELLEN HOARD INTERVIEWED BY GREG BENNICK FOR THE NNP

they would like to see, person or theme or otherwise. But for almost every coin and medal design, it's Congress that says, “We're going to do a commemorative coin of X,” or, “We're going to overhaul circulating coins for these years.”’ And then it goes through the mint process. The mint artists come up with different options and then the CCAC and the commission of fine arts and other stakeholders will provide their recommendations. It is the Treasury Secretary who makes the final call.

I compiled a spreadsheet of - since 2016 - the CFA's recommendations, the CCAC’s, and the final decision. CCAC’s get chosen pretty much every time, but not always. I think there's some respect between the Treasury and the CCAC or at least agreement with it. What happens is they're really looking through designs, the CCAC. They are looking through design portfolios. Maybe there's anywhere from one to 60 different designs. That’s the wideness of the scale. More often it is five to ten different design options. Then they are choosing accordingly based on artistic merit, capturing the theme accurately, and there's any number of different, approaches that individual members can take on why they like something or

not. They often take into account the liaison's preferences and all these kinds of different things as well. The one that Congress doesn't have as much of a hand in, is with the American Liberty gold coin and silver medal series. Because the US mint is able to strike gold coins and silver medals without explicit congressional authority. So that was a program started several years ago to capture modern representations of Liberty and artists kind of had a free hand. Not just the kind of classically trained US mint artists, but also members of their artistic infusion program - so they reached out to tattoo artists, comic book artists, lowbrow, you know, surrealist pop art, like everything that they could. The chief engraver, reached out to everybody and the artistic team worked extensively to get a wide diversity of designs. There were dozens in this last year that we were looking at.

We could have taken any kind of approach: maybe go the neoclassical approach or maybe the more street art aesthetic. We did a little mix of both. So, we'll see what the treasury sector ends up choosing, but that's where we have so much flexibility in the themes that we choose to feature, because it's just a modern interpretation of Liberty that we are seeking to represent.

GREG BENNICK: How long has the CAC? the CCAC been around? Since early, like since mid-aught. So, it was like 2005 or 2006, somewhere around there.

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KELLEN HOARD INTERVIEWED BY GREG BENNICK FOR THE NNP

there was kind of a precursor-ish, but not with the same responsibilities. CCAC is congressionally chartered to basically, to basically do this.

GREG BENNICK: And how many members are there? Is that secret?

KELLEN HOARD: No, there's a website. It is an old website. It's a website where I’ve had people tell me, “I visited the website and I thought it was like a scam pirating website, so I wasn't comfortable putting my information in.” I’ve, asked them to update it, but there's eleven members. There are representatives of the general public, historians, artists, numismatists. There are people appointed by congressional leadership. It's like they get like a congressional appointee, a couple of congressional appointees. So it really is kind of a diversity experience and we just recently got it back up to full capacity. We were down a few for a while.

GREG BENNICK: Amazing. Okay. So, I think we've covered the CCAC pretty well. Is there anything that I missed or anything that we missed that we didn't cover that people don't realize goes into the process of their coins being made? What's the most common thing that people will say? “Oh, I didn't realize that!,” and so on.

KELLEN HOARD: It's not our call. The Treasury Secretary makes the final call. We make recommendations. The other thing I'd say is a lot of numismatists are collectors of U.S. federal coins, and they like the very classical style. They collect Seated Liberty coins. They want modern coins to be similar to those. And so that's been the active debate and discussion among the CCAC for a long time is that as we're pushing for progress on coins, is there a limit to the artistic style or artistic approach you want to take? Do we want to go backwards and emulate that? Or do we want to go forward? What do we want to do? The public has a lot of opinions they share with us about whether we go backwards or forward. But for the most part, I think we're treading the fine line pretty well so far. I'll be able to see what happens. It's a four-year term, so I’ Il be there for a little while. And then once I leave, we'll see what happens.

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KELLEN HOARD INTERVIEWED BY GREG BENNICK FOR THE NNP

GREG BENNICK: What are your favorite designs that you've had a hand in recommending? Are there any designs that have come to fruition and exist now as coins that you’ve loved working on?

KELLEN HOARD: There are. It'd be helpful to show them visually. I don't know if that's possible in this format.

GREG BENNICK: You can. In fact, you could describe them. And what I’II do is edit them in. I'm happy to do that.

KELLEN HOARD: Perfect. And actually, here's what Pll do for you. This won't be helpful. But I have a couple on my phone that stood out to me. I will see if it shows up. I have these photos in my camera roll. So, one of the ones I liked. Yeah, it's not going to show up. But one of the ones I liked was the reverse of the Harriet Tubman silver dollar. Really dynamic design. Look at it there. Really kind of exciting. To me, that is what coins should be for. So, take a look at that one.

The reverse of the Dr. Vera Rubin American Women's quarter, which is coming out next year. Dynamic. That's what a coin should be, that's how we should be featuring people on coins, not just kind of still bust, but really dynamic designs. See that there.

The Althea Gibson American Women's quarter is coming out next year as well. It shows motion in a coin really well. It's just action. So, you'll hopefully enjoy that. So, I recommended the obverse for the American Liberty silver medal for next year. That's one of the street art ones, It's controversial. I showed to people. I get 50 of people who love it, 50% hate it. So let me know what you think of that one.

And then the Stacey Park Milbern American Women's quarter happening next year. First woman, I believe, in a wheelchair on a coin. Dynamic design there.

The Florida Innovation dollar coming out next year. Everyone loves rockets on coins, so that was kind of fun. And then the other one that I was really excited

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KELLEN HOARD INTERVIEWED BY GREG BENNICK FOR THE NNP

about was the reverse of the gold American Liberty coin, which is coming out next year. It's an eagle - we see a lot of eagle standing - flying majestically. This one's doing something different. So, again, my roommate at college saw it over my shoulder and said, “That's the most badass coin design I’ve ever seen in my life.” So, Pll be curious to see your take on it as well.

GREG BENNICK: That's great. I'm excited for this. This is fantastic. So, okay. So, thinking about the badass coin threw me off just for a second because I love it so much. I was just going to ask: being a younger collector, younger researcher, younger writer, how do you feel about the hobby and where it's going in general? I'm not looking for “It's bad. It’s good. I am looking for, what are your feelings about it?

KELLEN HOARD: [ think it's more hopeful than it's been in a long time in that, the constant conversation since I was at the first entry point collecting is, “Where are all the young people? We are screwed.” I don't hear that very much anymore, and about five years ago, I stopped being concerned about it. Because increasingly what you see is that there are a lot of young people involved in numismatics. I mean a lot and not just YNs, but 20-year-olds, 30-year-olds and so on. There's a few reasons why. One is that the internet has really done great things for coins.

The Instagram people. There are countless transactions on Instagram and Facebook every single day totaling in the hundreds of thousands of dollars. There is real business happening online. So, it's harder to see visually, but there's real activity. There's also real activity outside the United States and that's harder for collectors at local shows to see. Collectors in Japan or in Europe. They're not in Hong Kong, they're not seeing that at their local show, so it's you know kind of hard to judge where the young people are there.

But also what we see, is that there's a lot of young vest pocket dealers who are very excited about the hobby, who are very engaged, who are making a lot of money. That is an incentive to draw people into the hobby. There's a lot of money in it to be made, and they're not just dealers. They're collectors. They really enjoy the hobby. I was just at the ANA show. There were a lot of young people on the floor. I mean what you just saw, and that's why I think you hear less of that conversation. A lot of programs have kind of popped up at larger, more institutional, coin

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KELLEN HOARD INTERVIEWED BY GREG BENNICK FOR THE NNP

companies, to harvest the talent. Witter Coin University was one of them that popped up. Stacks Bowers’ Professional Numismatist Program. PNG Next Gen, Heritage has internships, PCGS internships, ANA summer seminar with the YN program there. I mean there are a lot of opportunities for young people popping up, to be basically picked up and brought into these, now billion-dollar, corporations that are happening. It is hard to stop the momentum of that. And I think young people just get sucked in automatically.

I think there are collectors and dealers and all this kind of stuff. So I'm not worried about it. I think there may be some transition with increasing craziness online. And I hope that we are able to preserve the social element of the hobby into that. Social element is key, I think, to preserving it as a hobby and not just as an investment practice. But yeah, I think it's hopeful.

GREG BENNICK: That's great.

KELLEN HOARD: What do you think, Greg? I want to know your take on this. I've been talking too much. What is your take on the hobby here in the next, five to 10 years?

GREG BENNICK: You rule. And you haven't been talking too much. You've been talking the perfect amount. I loved every word of this. I agree with this. Okay. I’ve been collecting since I was 10. And back then, we heard all the time, the story that you told. You know, you get into it, you get out of it, you get into it. And that there's not enough young people. I absolutely agree. That's not true anymore. There's more and more and more young people involved. And there's going to be more and more and more young people. I think a key 1s for us to all stay positive about that. Instead of saying sadly, “Oh, there's not going to be and there's not enough young people. There won't be any young people.” Let's stay positive about it.

Let's stay positive about the fact that there's going to be more people. And then invite more people in and be thinking creatively about ways to bring people in with the storytelling element, the online element, the social element. People ultimately are insecure creatures looking for something to do, and something to latch on to,

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KELLEN HOARD INTERVIEWED BY GREG BENNICK FOR THE NNP

something to feel like they matter in, and something of meaning that they want to be a part of. Let's invite that because it's possible for a young collector, a young person, to get involved in the hobby and find or discover something that hasn't been discovered before or learn something and have a perspective on something that hasn't been written about before.

Sure, there's tons of books - I collect numismatic literature too. There's literally a room over here filled with books. We'll get together sometime and talk literature. The point though is, is that not everything's been written. There's tons of opportunity. You just got done talking about how one person can create opportunity for others in a social or political context. That's certainly true in numismatics. My gosh, we see it all the time in whatever sub-facet we're interested in, whether that's error coins or counterstamps.

I interviewed Bill Groom for this series. Bill Groom is a collector of counterstamps not many people know about. Bill Groom calls counterstamps, “the last great frontier of numismatics” because he sees it as this entirely unwritten-about, undeveloped area of numismatics other than Brunk’s work, Rulau, and his own writing and what not. There's so much potential for it. I think that people are hungry for it - to be part of something meaningful like that. I think there's a lot of potential for more and more young people. I'm excited about it. As I go to shows all around the country, I'm having a great time seeing that. I'm glad to hear that reflected.

KELLEN HOARD: We'll get him into sample slabs too. That's the other frontier there. We'll get him into both.

GREG BENNICK: | agree with that because I remember when I bought David Schwager's book, the original sample slab book, I bought it because I'd never heard of sample slabs. I thought this was the most unusual thing that I'd encountered that summer or whatever it was. I bought it. I read through it. I'm like, “This is fascinating. Are there really collectors of this stuff?” That wasn't me being critical because remember that I collect weird, broken error coins. I was like, “This is fascinating.” We have seen an exponential rise in the number of people collecting sample slabs.

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KELLEN HOARD INTERVIEWED BY GREG BENNICK FOR THE NNP

KELLEN HOARD: That book, which was published first in 2015, then second issue, 2016, is deeply outdated now because there's new ones being made all the time. There's a third edition coming out with a new author and its multiple volumes and it is still incomplete. They had to make a cutoff date because there were just constantly new ones being made. It's kind of a neat thing. I think you're right. People seek community in so many different ways. This is also a tie-together of both politics and coins in that we are a fundamentally social creature and we're going to seek community wherever we can find it. And what we see in America today are fewer and fewer opportunities to build that community. I think to our detriment. We are an isolationist culture in the first place. America is very individually driven. That's the mindset of a lot of people.

And we have nuclear families since the fifties and the sixties. We're very road- centric communities and not a lot of this kind of European model of plazas to bring people together and to have that social life. There's this whole concept of third places beyond your home and your work. Where's a third place where you can gather with your community, like a park? Are we investing in those, especially the ones that don't have paid barrier to entry?

So, what we see in America today, especially post-pandemic and during the pandemic, was this amplification and exacerbation of this individualistic thing where one in seven adult men today in America say they have no close friends. It's a huge number. Church attendance is declining. So, no matter your opinion on religion, that was a place of community for many people. Civil society is struggling. So, clubs and organizations. So where are people seeking community today? Often, I think it's online. And that can be both good and bad, depending on how we direct it. It can be good if, hey, you discover coins online, and suddenly you have this great new hobby, and maybe you end up coming to shows in person or seminars, and you end up finding this new community.

It can also be bad. It can lead to radicalism. It can lead to further feelings of hatred or anger, especially if you find the wrong Facebook group. And there's some dark holes you can go down. So how we as a society are tackling this, is I think relevant. How we as a hobby are tackling this, is I think, quite relevant to us recruiting new collectors and saying, hey, this is not just us collecting metal

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KELLEN HOARD INTERVIEWED BY GREG BENNICK FOR THE NNP

widgets, and not just us collecting metal widgets with a cool story, but it's sharing those stories, having those people together. One of the things I say that I love about this hobby is there's such a range of people, both some of the most intelligent people I’ve ever met, some of the kindest people I’ve ever met, some of the weirdest people I’ve ever met.

You have such a mix of people. And that is really a compelling part of the hobby to me, is that you actually have the opportunity to learn from people who know their area so well, and know other areas so well, and are just engaging people to hear from and learn from. If we as a hobby are able to drag people in from online into these in-person settings, whatever that looks like, I think that's going to be an opportunity for us to do our part in addressing isolation in America.

GREG BENNICK: I love it. Okay, this is immense. This is fantastic. This could probably be the first of a series of these. I love all of this. This might be a good place to just wrap up to give people a 45-minute nice chunk of information about you that they can digest.

KELLEN HOARD: Sure. That'd be great. We'll see what the reaction to this one is and how people end up feeling here. I'm not looking for any emails asking like, “Oh, I'm so alone. Help me?” Ideally. But we'll see. But if that's how you feel, email me and we'll sort something out.

GREG BENNICK: Exactly. If people are feeling alone and they don't have any friends, right, Kellen and Greg. We will be your friends. We'll talk about whatever you want to talk about.

KELLEN HOARD: You can join us next time and we'll have a long, granular discussion of something that only Greg and I care about.

GREG BENNICK: (Laughs) Okay. So, everybody, this has been yet another interview in the series for the Newman Numismatic Portal. I'm Greg Bennick with Kellen Hoard. And if you're interested in this interview, there's been a number of these interviews and there will be a number more. So, if you have ideas for people

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KELLEN HOARD INTERVIEWED BY GREG BENNICK FOR THE NNP

you'd like to have be interviewed, send me a message. That's how Kellen and I got together today. Somebody mentioned, “You should talk to Kellen.” I was like, “Oh yeah! I should talk to Kellen.” So, with that in mind if you have ideas, be in touch anytime. I'd love to hear from you. And Kellen, thanks so much for being here today. I really appreciate it.

KELLEN HOARD: Thanks so much, Greg.

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