Lonely Planet: Maureen & Tony Wheeler

In 1972, Maureen and Tony Wheeler bought a beat-up car and drove from London "as far east as we could go." They wound up in Australia, by way of Afghanistan, India and Thailand. Their notes on how to travel on a shoestring became a book, which grew into Lonely Planet — the largest travel guide publisher in the world. PLUS in our postscript "How You Built That," how 15-year-old Michael Mendicino, with help from his mom, took a teenage trend and turned it into a board game called Bottle Flip. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Guy Raz?

  Hey, it's Guy here. Before we start the show, just a quick note to tell you that if you're listening with children nearby, you know, you might want to-

• 0:09Speaker 01

  You might want to crank it up!

• 0:12Guy Raz?

  Uh, what? Mindy, did you just do that?

• 0:15Speaker 01

  Sorry, I didn't realize there was a wall there.

• 0:18Guy Raz?

  What?

• 0:18Speaker 01

  Anyway, I just heard you mention children, and I thought you were ready to tell everyone about our new show.

• 0:23Guy Raz?

  Well, I was gonna wait until, you know what? Never mind. Let's do it.

• 0:29Speaker 01

  Yes!

• 0:29Guy Raz?

  Everyone, meet my friend, Mindy Thomas.

• 0:32Speaker 01

  Hi!

• 0:33Guy Raz?

  So, Mindy hosts this amazing kids' morning show on SiriusXM's Kids Place Live channel. And for the past two years, I've been joining her each Friday to talk about new discoveries and science stories in a kid-friendly way. And so, we decided to, uh-

• 0:49Speaker 01

  To go big time.

• 0:51Guy Raz?

  Yes, you could put it that way. And so, if you are a parent or someone with kids in your life, I'm here to tell you about a brand-new podcast for elementary-school-age kids. It's NPR's first-ever kids' show.

• 1:03Speaker 01

  It's called "Wow in the World."

• 1:05Guy Raz?

  And it's hosted by me and-

• 1:07Speaker 01

  And by me. And every week, we'll take you and the kids in your life through awesome adventures through some of the most wow-worthy events in science, technology, and new discoveries. Plus, we'll introduce you to the people who are changing our world as we know it.

• 1:21Guy Raz?

  So, as many of you know, I am a parent-

• 1:23Speaker 01

  And so am I.

• 1:24Guy Raz?

  And both of us struggle with the challenge of screen time for our kids. So, you know, we decided to come up with our own solution, a podcast for kids and their grownups that inspires wonder and imagination with no screens required, except for the screen you need to subscribe.

• 1:41Speaker 01

  And you can do that right now. "Wow in the World" premieres on Monday, May 15. But you can hear the trailer by subscribing to "Wow in the World" on Apple Podcasts or however you get your podcasts.

• 1:52Guy Raz?

  All right, Mindy, I think I'm gonna have to kick you out now because I have to get back to the show.

• 1:56Speaker 01

  And I gotta fix that wall.

• 1:57Guy Raz?

  I still can't believe you busted through that wall.

• 1:59Speaker 01

  That's the magic of radio, Guy Raz.

• 2:01Guy Raz?

  "Wow in the World," NPR's new podcast for curious kids and their grownups. Subscribe now on iTunes, now called Apple Podcasts, or however you get your podcasts. And now, back to "How I Built This."

• 2:19Speaker 02

  We had grown so fast. We had television going. We had started investing heavily into the digital side of things, a lot of staff. And we were in the middle of that when 9/11 happened. And of course, people stopped traveling and travel guides then just stopped.

• 2:35Guy Raz?

  Did you think that there was a possibility that the whole thing would collapse?

• 2:39Speaker 02

  Yeah, we did have to let people go. We did have to cut back the number of books we did. And I honestly believe that the whole thing could disappear.

• 2:54Guy Raz?

  From NPR, it's How I Built This, a show about innovators, entrepreneurs, idealists, and the stories behind the movements they built. I'm Guy Raz, and on the show today, how Tony and Maureen Wheeler backpacked along the Asia hippie trail in the 70s, jotted down some notes, and turned them into the biggest travel guide company in the world.

• 3:23Guy Raz?

  So much of how a company comes together happens by chance. I mean, think about it. If Sergey Brin and Larry Page never met, would there be Google? If Kate and Andy Spade never worked in the same clothing store in Tucson, Arizona, would Kate Spade bags have happened? Same thing for Airbnb, or Instagram, or Warby Parker. They all happened because of a chance meeting, just a moment in time that could have passed, which is kind of the story of Lonely Planet guidebooks, because it all started on a bench in Regent's Park in London on an October afternoon in 1970. Maureen Wheeler was just looking for a quiet place to sit and read.

• 4:07Speaker 02

  And as I was walking around the park, there was only one bench that had sun on it. And I walked around several times because on the bench, there was also a young man. And I thought, if I sit in that bench, he's probably going to try and pick me up. And I really don't feel like that. So I walked around a few times and I thought, damn it, this is 1970. I can sit wherever I want. So I sat on the sunny bench and turned my back to the young man and started reading my book.

• 4:30Guy Raz?

  And what were you doing, Tony?

• 4:32Speaker 03

  Oh, it's appalling now. I had a car magazine, new edition of it. And I was just reading that. When this young woman came along and sat down, started reading Tolstoy. I mean, what do you do? I said, is this the end place to read on a Thursday afternoon? And she... Did you reply positively?

• 4:54Speaker 02

  No, I turned around and looked at him. And I was about to say, get lost. And then, he's got nice eyes and I liked him. So I said, I don't know. I haven't been here that long.

• 5:04Guy Raz?

  They started chatting. And after a while, Tony asked Maureen if she wanted to go see a movie. So they went.

• 5:10Speaker 02

  And on the way home, he got lost. And we wandered around for quite a while before I realized he was lost. Because Tony just sets off really confidently and keeps going, thinking he's going in the right direction. And the thing is, that's been our entire lives together.

• 5:25Guy Raz?

  Anyway, that first date led to a second and then to a third and then...

• 5:31Speaker 03

  12 months to the day later, we got married.

• 5:34Speaker 02

  And Tony's proposal was very presaic. It was May. We were in May. And he said, I will have known you a year on October the 7th. And he said, we should get married. And I said, you don't get married because you've known each other for a year. And he said, no, but we would save tax.

• 5:54Speaker 03

  Well, look, I was at a business school. That's my only excuse for that, I'm afraid. It wasn't the most romantic.

• 6:01Guy Raz?

  So, once you got married, did you think you would just sort of get jobs in London and start your lives?

• 6:06Speaker 03

  That was pretty much the plan, that I... We met just at the start of my two-year course in London and we got married halfway through that two years. But sometime in that second year together, we decided we were going to take a year off and go traveling and that certainly changed things.

• 6:24Guy Raz?

  How did you guys make that decision? What was the conversation you had?

• 6:28Speaker 03

  I don't know. You know, it was very much a thing to do at that era. I mean, later on, they started calling it the hippie trail. And we just called it the Asia overland trip, that you you left London and you headed east. But this was the era, you know, the music of the time was riding the Marrakech Express and the Beatles were off in India. So there was a lot of sort of cultural significance to it. But we joined what became known as the hippie trail and we headed east.

• 6:57Guy Raz?

  So this is, I guess, around 1972-ish. And what was the plan? The plan was to drive from London to

• 7:04Speaker 03

  To wherever.

• 7:06Guy Raz?

  To wherever?

• 7:07Speaker 03

  Yeah, well, the car, we bought this car and it was so cheap that we thought, well, if it breaks down, we'll get out of it and leave it by the road. And we were going to go as far east as we could go. We had to dispose, either it would break down and we'd sell it, one or the other.

• 7:21Guy Raz?

  So when you guys set out, you were like, you just start driving through Europe and then and then what?

• 7:27Speaker 02

  You just keep driving. You know, you go into, you migrate to the border with Turkey and Iran, then you go right across Iran, then you go right across Turk- Afghanistan, and then you just keep going through Pakistan, and then you go through India, and then you couldn't get across, you had to fly across Burma.

• 7:43Speaker 03

  And then we'd just carry on. The plan was we'd get to Australia and then we would stay in Australia and work for a while and we'd save up enough money and we'd fly back to London. And that was, that was the plan.

• 7:55Speaker 02

  See, we had so little money. We left London with 400 pounds. So that was our money.

• 8:01Guy Raz?

  And you just stayed, like, slept in the van?

• 8:03Speaker 03

  We did at times, but generally we camped most of the time across Asia until we really, actually, even in Afghanistan. In Afghanistan, you know, a lot of the hotels in those days, there'd be in gardens and you could camp in the garden.

• 8:16Guy Raz?

  At that time, how did you even know where to go and what to do and how to?

• 8:24Guy Raz?

  Get the right bus. I mean, how did you figure all that stuff out?

• 8:27Speaker 02

  It's not that hard. I mean, if you walk into a bus station in Afghanistan and you're kind of pointing towards the border, somebody will put you on the right bus, you know. If you're wandering down a street with a bag and you're looking, you know, you look like you're lost, someone will point you towards a hotel, or you'll see something that looks like a hotel, you know.

• 8:47Speaker 03

  You're in a restaurant, you want food.

• 8:49Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's not, it's easy.

• 8:52Guy Raz?

  Well, it's easy today because you just pull out your Lonely Planet. All right, but I'm talking about 1972, right? I mean, there was nothing really.

• 9:01Speaker 02

  Yeah, but you know, you managed. And actually, you know, what was great is that you could travel for weeks without seeing another Westerner. But then suddenly you'd pile in somewhere like Kabul or somewhere, you know, or Herat, and there'd be others. And you'd just spend maybe an afternoon just trading information, you know. When you get here, this place is good, this place isn't. You'd swap information that way. It was just like old fashioned communication.

• 9:26Guy Raz?

  Yeah. And what, like all along, you are keeping a journal, Tony, or both of you guys, or?

• 9:31Speaker 03

  I did keep a diary. I've always been reasonably assiduous about documenting things and keeping records of things.

• 9:38Guy Raz?

  What would you write down?

• 9:39Speaker 03

  Oh, just where we stayed and what it cost and how many miles the car had covered that day. And, you know, now I think about the palaces and the walls and the fortresses, you know, those things are just as important. But in those days, it was very much the information, which of course was a good thing, because that's what we were later on selling.

• 10:00Guy Raz?

  And presumably, you were doing all this with like next to no money, right?

• 10:04Speaker 02

  Yeah. We had to do everything as cheaply as possible. So it was third class rail, and it was hitchhiking. We hitchhiked from Bangkok all the way to Singapore to get down there. And then we went across by boat to Jakarta, and then we went by bus to Bali. And then in Bali, we were really run out of luck. The airline that was supposed to, that we were supposed to have tickets on to take us to Australia, broke down and didn't have any more planes. And so.

• 10:30Speaker 02

  We met this New Zealander who had a little yacht and he was looking for a crew to get down to Australia. So we got on his yacht and crewed to Australia.

• 10:39Guy Raz?

  Was that like scary at all?

• 10:41Speaker 02

  The only time I think I got really, we had a huge storm in the boat. And if I had had more sense, I'd have been terrified, but we were so busy hanging on to the boat. And then the thing, then we got to Australia and I remember standing on the yacht, looking at this coastline that had nothing on it. Nothing at all. We had come in at a place that was miles from anywhere and there was nothing. And I thought, I have no, there's snakes, there's spiders. I don't even know if kangaroos bite you. I have no idea. You know, what are we doing here?

• 11:11Guy Raz?

  What did you think you would do there? Did you think you would hang out there for a while? Did, because neither of you had any connections in Australia, right?

• 11:17Speaker 03

  No, we went to Sydney first of all. I mean, if you're going to go to Australia, Sydney is the golden city that you you all head towards. The, the Yellow Brick Road leads there.

• 11:27Speaker 02

  As we were crossing the Sydney Bridge on our last ride and I said, and it was not long after Christmas, so it was quite closed to holidays. And I said to Tony, how much money have we got left? And he put his hand in his pocket and he said, we've got 27 cents. And I said, well, how much is that in English money?

• 11:44Speaker 03

  Not much is the answer.

• 11:46Guy Raz?

  So what did you do? Like, how did you even?

• 11:49Speaker 03

  Well, I had a camera, so we, we went to the area of Sydney where you'd dispose of those sort of things, sort of a loan shop. And we got $25 from my camera, which I bought back a week later. So we had $25 and in those days you could get a room for a week for $15. So we.

• 12:08Speaker 02

  We got a single room with a single bed. The guy let us both stay there and a communal kitchen and bathroom.

• 12:13Guy Raz?

  Newlyweds, you know, it was romantic.

• 12:15Speaker 02

  At this stage, we were married almost two years.

• 12:18Speaker 03

  No, a year, a year and a bit.

• 12:20Speaker 02

  All right, it felt like two years.

• 12:21Speaker 03

  Well, we'd known each other for two years, yeah.

• 12:23Speaker 02

  And I got a job again. I got a job that afternoon instantly in a, in a little kind of corner shop. But they did sandwiches and things. And at the end of the day, they let me take the sandwiches home that were left. So we ate. And I worked there for a little while until we, and then we both, you know, got good jobs.

• 12:40Speaker 03

  A one-year trip had now become a three-year trip.

• 12:42Guy Raz?

  So what did you, what kind of job did you get, Toni?

• 12:45Speaker 03

  I got a marketing job for a pharmaceutical company.

• 12:48Guy Raz?

  Maureen, you're working a job, another, what was the job you were doing in Sydney?

• 12:52Speaker 02

  I was a P A. in a wine company.

• 12:53Guy Raz?

  So you're working for a wine company. How do you get to a point where you're, you start selling a travel book?

• 13:01Speaker 02

  Well, Toni, Toni has all the great ideas, like, let's travel around the world and let's do guidebooks. I mean, I always say Toni's the architect and I'm the carpenter. So he said, look, we should do a book of.

• 13:13Speaker 03

  Really, this was after we'd, we'd met so many people. Every time we went to some sort of party or met friends at restaurants and so on, always someone would ask us, where did you go? How did you do this? There was a lot of interest in the sort of trip we did. After a while, we thought, hey, we could, instead of just telling them and writing things down and we'll actually, you know, make, put the information down as in the form of a book and sell it.

• 13:38Speaker 02

  And I, I was working in an office, so I was able to get my typewriter and bring it home at night. And I borrowed a guillotine when we were trimming all the books and one of those massive staplers, so we stapled the book together. So in a way, we kind of were able to get enough equipment to do this. We had it printed, but it was, it was a very basic little book. It was a very, it was actually done, it really was done on our kitchen table, because actually we only had a kitchen, kitchen and a bedroom, so.

• 14:05Guy Raz?

  And then you took it to a printer and you ran off a bunch of copies of it?

• 14:08Speaker 03

  We found a little, I mean, we didn't go to a big commercial printer. It was a guy who had this printing in the basement under his apartment. And he, he printed them for us, but we just printed the pages. We actually folded them and put them together. And as Maureen says, stapled them and trimmed the edges of the guillotine.

• 14:26Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 14:27Speaker 03

  So it was really a home-produced book. You know, when, when they were finished and done and we had them in boxes at our apartment, I took a day off work and I, I went straight to the bookshop that had said they'd buy 50 copies of it and said, okay, here I am. Write me the order. And, you know, at the end of the day, I'd sold a surprising number.

• 14:45Guy Raz?

  What did you, what was the price?

• 14:48Speaker 03

  Dollar eighty.

• 14:49Guy Raz?

  Dollar eighty.

• 14:50Speaker 03

  It sold for, it was ninety-six pages, it sold for one dollar eighty.

• 14:53Guy Raz?

  And it covered all the countries you went through?

• 14:55Speaker 03

  All of, all of Asia in ninety-six pages.

• 14:58Speaker 02

  Very brief, but I, I went into, we got our big break, I suppose. I went into one bookshop and she said, and I said, do you want to buy this book? And she said, so what company are you with? And I said, Lonely Planet. She said, I've never heard of them. And I said, no, you wouldn't. And I showed her the book and she said, oh, what's your telephone number in case I want to get more books? Now, we didn't have a telephone, so I had to give her my work number. Anyway, she called me and she said, my flatmate is a journalist and she wants to interview you and your husband on television. So we went on television to talk about our trip and doing this book. And that was our first big publicity thing, wasn't it?

• 15:35Guy Raz?

  Yeah, I was, I was reading through your first guidebook, The Pamphlet, and I mean, it's, I mean, there, there are some pretty different things in there, right? Like, I mean, like, it tells you where you can find marijuana.

• 15:45Speaker 03

  It was not hard to find it, it was all around.

• 15:47Guy Raz?

  Okay, I got you, sorry. Or like where to get a fake ID and stuff like that, right?

• 15:51Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 15:52Speaker 03

  Fake IDs, fake student cards, they were very popular, they probably still are in some places.

• 15:57Guy Raz?

  I mean, I have to assume that you, you know, you guys could not have been like stoned hippies, because you were pretty motivated to write every day and to go places and to catalog your business, right?

• 16:07Speaker 02

  No, we were actually really boring. We didn't do a lot of that stuff at all occasionally, but very rarely. In fact, it was years later, you know, as Lonely Planet became better known, all these people who were using Lonely Planet, you know, and they were really cool people, you know, it was cool people used Lonely Planet. And Tony and I would be at the cafe and all the cool people, but we just didn't look cool, and yet we were the ones who had done these books.

• 16:31Guy Raz?

  You had written the book, yeah.

• 16:32Speaker 02

  So we'd sit there quietly while they're all being incredibly cool around us and think, oh, God, this is, this is interesting, you know?

• 16:39Guy Raz?

  How did you come up with, with, with the name Lonely Planet?

• 16:43Speaker 03

  There is a story behind that. We'd got the book done, you know, we had everything. We had a title for it. It was Across Asia on the Cheap, but we didn't have a title for the publishing house, a name for the publishing house. And we'd been out at a restaurant and drinking too much red wine. And we'd just been to see the rock and roll band on the road film, Mad Dogs and Englishmen. It was Joe Cocker and Leon Russell, travelling around the US in the late 60s. It's a great film. And one of the songs in that movie, in that album, is Joe Cocker singing a song called "Space Captain". And the first line of the song goes, "Once while travelling across the sky, this lonely planet caught my eye."

• 17:28Speaker 03

  And I said to Maureen, I was humming the song, "Hey, that sounds nice. Why don't we call the company Lonely Planet?" To which Maureen said...

• 17:36Speaker 02

  Actually, the first line is "lovely planet" and I wish you would stop singing. And he said, "Well, Lonely Planet's even better." And I said, "How?" And he said, "Well, it just sounds better." So I said, "Yeah, okay." Yeah, it's a great name. And it's a great song for us as well, you know, we're learning to live together on this planet. It was great.

• 17:59Guy Raz?

  So, did the first book, like, make any money?

• 18:02Speaker 02

  Not much.

• 18:03Speaker 03

  No, it was in some way...

• 18:05Speaker 02

  It was more or less covering the cost of the printing.

• 18:06Speaker 03

  Yeah. We didn't lose money on it, but it wasn't a real money-making proposition. But around that time, when we were thinking of, "Okay, this is when we quit and head back to Europe", then we began to think, you know, "That has sold surprisingly well. Maybe we should do another book." And what we thought was, towards the end of the trip from London, we had come down through South East Asia. And of course, at that time, the Vietnam War was still winding down, so South East Asia wasn't seen as a, you know, hotspot for a holiday. It was a place next to a war zone. But we could see that was about to change. And we thought, "Okay, what we'll do is we'll travel around South East Asia, and we'll write the best book anybody has ever seen on South East Asia."

• 18:51Speaker 02

  And we had a Yamaha trail bike. That was our transport.

• 18:55Guy Raz?

  And at this point, Tony, did you think, "This is it. I think this is what we're gonna do."

• 19:00Speaker 03

  No, I still think, you know, we realized we'd sort of, we'd found a sweet spot. We found, we were doing something that people really liked. But, you know, one of the things I've said a lot over the years is it wasn't like your dot com or, you know, social media setup these days. They start on one day and a week later, they're worth a billion dollars. That wasn't us at all. Our business grew very slowly. And I think it was, it was more like the snowball rolling downhill. You've got to keep pushing it at first and then it starts to develop momentum and starts to get larger as it rolls down the hill.

• 19:40Guy Raz?

  When we come back, how Tony and Maureen grew Lonely Planet and then shrank it and then almost lost it. I'm Guy Raz and you're listening to How I Built This from NPR.

• 20:07Guy Raz?

  Hey, welcome back to How I Built This from NPR. I'm Guy Raz. So in 1973, Tony and Maureen were traveling around Southeast Asia once again. And they were doing research for their second Lonely Planet book.

• 20:22Speaker 03

  When it was just about finished and I had a dummy of the book, there was one big bookshop in Singapore. I got an appointment with a buyer for that bookshop. And I said, I thought to myself, you know, he'll definitely, he'll certainly buy 10 copies. And if I'm lucky, he'll buy 20 or 50. He listened to my spiel and then I looked at my dummy of the book. I saw him writing Southeast Asia on a shoestring on the order form and then write some number down. And he spun the order around and pushed it across the desk to me and he bought 1,000 copies.

• 20:53Guy Raz?

  Wow.

• 20:54Speaker 03

  I walked out of that, that office, you know, a foot above the ground and raced back to the hotel and said to Maureen, we've sold 20% of our print run to one bookshop. Fantastic.

• 21:06Guy Raz?

  So after you saw the success of that book, what, I mean, what was your next move?

• 21:11Speaker 02

  And we did another one.

• 21:12Speaker 03

  Another one, another one. People started coming to us with ideas for other books.

• 21:17Guy Raz?

  And Maureen, did you think, I mean, so by the mid 70s, or late 70s even, did you still, did you think that this was going to be your work? I mean, did you, did you both kind of focus full time on this thing now?

• 21:30Speaker 02

  Pretty much, although I was at university. But, you know, I had plenty of time left to work on Lonely Planet and to travel.

• 21:38Speaker 03

  The first year, though, of Lonely Planet in Melbourne, you had a full time job. And, you know, we were living on your, Maureen's salary while I worked on the books.

• 21:46Speaker 02

  I didn't think it was going to be our life. I couldn't see how it could. It was still Tony and I, living in a little rented house with a pile of boxes, boxes everywhere full of books. And when we, you know, we'd, we'd wrap them, we'd address them, we'd put them in the back of the car and take them to the post office. I mean, you don't really see a multinational conglomerate growing out of this. You know, I was still going down to the docks to pick the books up when they came in from the printer and then sending them out again, you know. It still felt very much like a cottage industry, you know.

• 22:19Guy Raz?

  And it wasn't like you went out and raised any money, you were just...

• 22:22Speaker 02

  No, nobody would give us any money.

• 22:24Speaker 03

  Yeah, basically, you know, if you told a bank, you know, what we were doing books on, they'd say, get a life. It wasn't...

• 22:30Speaker 02

  No, we were, we didn't have any money and we weren't making a lot of money. But we were making enough to keep on doing books.

• 22:36Speaker 03

  But we did find other people were coming to us. You know, they'd used our book and they'd say, you know, I really liked your book, Travelling Around South East Asia. I'd been living in South America, you know, I could write a book about this place or that place. So we, we started getting other people coming to us with similar ideas. And really, by the end of the 70s, we had about 20 books.

• 22:55Guy Raz?

  Yeah. Well, what was the turning point? What was the book that, like... All of a sudden where you thought, okay, this is our breakthrough.

• 23:03Speaker 03

  Well, it was very easy to see that when we did a book on India and we researched that in 1980. This was the first time we'd been able to, you know, put a team into a place. So Maureen and I were one team and we had two other writers and we sort of divided the country up, the north, the south, the middle.

• 23:20Speaker 02

  And I found out I was pregnant just about a week before I flew to India for this five-month trek around India.

• 23:26Guy Raz?

  Wow, so you're pregnant, traveling around India. And were you guys just like stuffing pamphlets and brochures and notes in your backpacks?

• 23:34Speaker 03

  Yeah, very much so.

• 23:35Speaker 02

  There wasn't anything else. I mean, we'd also collect every brochure, every timetable, every map. I mean, we'd go with hardly anything in our rucksacks and come back with this massive pile of information.

• 23:47Guy Raz?

  Of stuff, yeah.

• 23:48Speaker 03

  Yeah, much easier these days. We put it on a memory stick.

• 23:51Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 23:52Speaker 03

  And suddenly we had this book that was over 700 pages and it sold for, you know, double figures. It was $12 or $14 or something instead of three or four. And it just sold, we sold 100,000 copies of it.

• 24:06Guy Raz?

  Wow.

• 24:07Speaker 02

  It was the first all-India book of that kind, you know, guide that told you everything. And there wasn't a book like that, but there was all of that huge interest in India at the time, you know. So it just took right off.

• 24:20Speaker 03

  The company doubled its size overnight and we suddenly started taking on more writers and looking at other big projects.

• 24:27Guy Raz?

  And you had a baby at this point?

• 24:29Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 24:31Guy Raz?

  So what did you do? I mean, how did you sort of?

• 24:33Speaker 03

  We took her with us, you know. When she was, how old was Tashi when you went to India, got to India, to Malaysia?

• 24:39Speaker 02

  Southeast Asia. She was eight months.

• 24:41Speaker 03

  Eight months, yeah. So we dragged our eight-month-old daughter around with us.

• 24:46Speaker 02

  I have two children and every school holiday, we'd just go Africa or Asia or wherever and they'd travel with us for that period of time. So every time we got a chance, we'd go and travel as a family. But mainly Tony was doing the writing and the sort of the planning and all of that. And I was doing the carpentry, you know, keeping it together.

• 25:06Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 25:06Speaker 02

  And we'd actually moved out of the house.

• 25:08Speaker 03

  We had a real office.

• 25:09Speaker 02

  We'd moved into a kind of ramshackle office and we had a lot of kind of loose contractors. You know, they'd float in and out and do a bit and float out again and we paid them. By the hour, sort of thing. So it was beginning to take shape in the eighties as a real business.

• 25:24Guy Raz?

  When, at what point did you stop having sleepless nights about whether you were going to be sustainable?

• 25:30Speaker 02

  Well, I don't know. We had, we've had sleepless nights all, every year. I would say, actually, towards late eighties, early nineties, I think, was more when it became obvious that this thing had its own momentum and it was carrying us as much as we were pushing it.

• 25:46Speaker 03

  And I, I've talked to people who were doing the, handling the publishing at LP at that time. And they said it just seemed like we couldn't do anything wrong, that every book we did, you know, sold and, I, I think when we started doing Europe Guides, because we, we were this little publisher at the other end of the world, who'd started off doing Asia. And when we finally did get around to doing Europe, we were big enough by that point that we could really do it well. And I think people in the office really got a kick out of that, that it was such a thrill doing that and sort of, you know, going out and taking on anybody in the world who wanted to try and compete with us.

• 26:21Speaker 02

  I mean, people everywhere you went were using Lonely Planet Guides. I mean, it used to give me a thrill, you know, even in New York, seeing someone come in with a German copy, Chinese copy, or, you know, whatever, just, I used to love that.

• 26:33Guy Raz?

  But, I mean, were there ever any moments where, you know, it wasn't going well?

• 26:39Speaker 02

  Oh, there was a period when things were not looking very good. And that happened around, around 2000 and we had grown so fast. And we reached a point where we were doing so much. We had television going, we had started investing heavily into the digital side of things, a lot of staff, a lot of, you know, we created a whole lot of desktop publishing before it was even a term. And it was eating away all of the money. The books were still selling like crazy, but we were just doing so much. And we were in the middle of that when nine 11 happened. And of course, people stopped traveling and travel guides then just stopped.

• 27:14Guy Raz?

  Did you think that there was a possibility that the whole thing would collapse?

• 27:18Speaker 02

  Yeah, I, I definitely did.

• 27:20Guy Raz?

  Really?

• 27:20Speaker 03

  I didn't.

• 27:21Speaker 02

  Tony, Tony's an incurable optimist. I mean, and that's one of his charms, but it's also one of the most infuriating things because we were definitely looking at a really bad time. We were looking at, we did have to let people go. We did have to cut back on our offices overseas. We did have to cut back the number of books we did. And it was looking, I honestly did believe that it was possible the whole thing could just disappear. Wow.

• 27:45Speaker 03

  I've got to say, in retrospect, I think Maureen's view of it was much more accurate than mine.

• 27:49Speaker 02

  So we really had to pull, start pulling everything together in a very serious way.

• 27:53Speaker 03

  But we did, I mean, we did cut back and make it a much more efficient business. So it did turn around. It took a couple of years, but it did turn around.

• 28:00Guy Raz?

  But I guess it was around, around that time, I guess, the mid 2000s, where you, you wound up selling the company, right?

• 28:06Speaker 02

  Yeah. I think we both felt that it wasn't the same company anymore. It was, it was turning into much more of a digital company, and that has a way of taking over everything. It's not something I'm particularly excited about.

• 28:17Speaker 03

  We, we really felt it was time. It wasn't going to be a dynasty. We weren't going to hand it on to our kids. Our kids had both worked in the company at one stage, but neither of them were going to take it over from us. And, and we just began to feel it was time to move on to something else.

• 28:35Guy Raz?

  And, I mean, did you, did it feel great to sell it? Did it feel sad?

• 28:40Speaker 02

  It was the saddest day of my life.

• 28:42Guy Raz?

  Really?

• 28:43Speaker 02

  One of the saddest days of my life. It was, I remember walking to the BBC with Tony to sign the, the final papers.

• 28:49Guy Raz?

  BBC, who, who bought it, of course.

• 28:52Speaker 02

  Yeah. And I said to Tony, do you have your passport? And he said, no. I said, no. I said, you know, if you had a passport, I'd just go straight up to Heathrow and get out of here.

• 29:02Speaker 03

  We could still escape, yeah.

• 29:04Speaker 02

  I think I drove the sale of Lonely Planet more than Tony did. And I always wondered, you know, if afterwards he would really regret that.

• 29:13Speaker 03

  I haven't.

• 29:14Speaker 02

  I know, he hasn't. But I did worry, and it was a huge amount of grief about it. It took months for me to, I, I still find it very hard to go back to the office. And, you know, I just, it's just hard.

• 29:27Guy Raz?

  I mean, from, from somebody listening to this, like an outsider's perspective, and I know you've probably heard this from people who've said, you've just lived the dream. I mean, you got to travel around the world and create a company. And yeah, you sold it and it's not yours anymore, but it made you rich and look at your life.

• 29:44Speaker 02

  Oh, God. Listen, I think like that every day.

• 29:48Speaker 03

  And we do, every year we do trips together and we do trips with friends. And then every year I, I go places of my own, that's, you know, that I know Maureen would not want to go to.

• 29:59Speaker 02

  Chernobyl.

• 30:00Speaker 03

  Chernobyl.

• 30:02Speaker 03

  I wanted to check the radiation, how it was these days.

• 30:05Speaker 02

  I go to see Ring Cycles and operas.

• 30:07Speaker 03

  And I can go to opera, but there is a limit to my consumption of opera.

• 30:12Guy Raz?

  You know, I am curious, because I interviewed John Mackey, the founder of Whole Foods, for this show, and he was talking about an early relationship he had with the woman that helped him start Whole Foods, and how it really destroyed their relationship. It broke down over it, and he says, you know, business can really bring people together, or it can just tear them apart.

• 30:34Speaker 02

  It can do both.

• 30:35Guy Raz?

  I mean, you guys are approaching 50 years of marriage, and it just sounds like you have an incredible partnership, and, I mean, were there times, were there times when you were building up this company where there was tension and there was, you know, there was crisis, or there would, you know, there was...

• 30:51Speaker 03

  No, there was all of that, all of it and a lot more. You know, we, you know, we've had our fights, we've had our squabbles, it hasn't always been plain sailing.

• 31:01Speaker 02

  And, you know, you cannot, you cannot run a business where you bring personal stuff into the office. I mean, you can't avoid it to some extent, and it was funny, you know, at Lonely Planet, people always knew, first of all, you come and talk to me about an idea, and I'll tell you whether it's worth, Tony has what's called the five-second, you've got a five-second window to engage his attention, you know, it's like the lifespan of a mosquito or something. So they would come to me and say, Maureen, I think this is great, what do you think? And I'd say, I think it's good, and they'd say, shall I tell Tony? And I'll say, yeah, let me talk to him first.

• 31:36Guy Raz?

  How much of your, of your success and what happened with this company and everything, how much do you think is due to luck, and how much because you're just really smart and skilled?

• 31:49Speaker 03

  You definitely need both, and there's that saying about, you know, whenever I'm working really hard, I seem to be luckier. But, you know, we were lucky, we came along when the baby boomers were suddenly deciding they needed to go to more interesting places than their parents did, so there was that element, they were a big market, well, that was important, there were all sorts of things that it was a very lucky time to be there.

• 32:10Speaker 02

  I don't know that skill came into it with Tony and I, there was judgment, I suppose, and... And the fact that we were doing something that we knew everything about.

• 32:22Guy Raz?

  But it's clear that this company could not have become what it became without the both of you. I mean, you both brought different skill sets to this. And amazingly, this chance meeting on a bench in Regent's Park resulted in this incredible company. What were the traits that both of you had, like, that you brought to the company?

• 32:41Speaker 03

  More in sense and meme nonsense.

• 32:46Speaker 02

  Tony, Lonely Planet would never have existed without Tony. He was the dreamer, the vision, but he also very keenly knew how he was going to place Lonely Planet very early on. And he never ran out of that kind of mad enthusiasm, which carries you through so many things. However, he was not good at day-to-day stuff. He never wanted to sit through meetings. He never wanted to sit with bankers. He liked all his staff, but, you know, he didn't want to hear what their problems were, basically.

• 33:21Speaker 03

  I was terrible, I must admit.

• 33:22Speaker 02

  It wasn't terrible. That wasn't terrible. It was just really, he just wanted to know what new book we were going to do, and, you know, how big was it going to be, and where are the maps and pictures. I mean, the books that we did were fabulous books. If you look at our covers and inside, they just got better and better looking, which was good. And a lot of that was Tony. You know, Tony would look at a book and say, you know, this needs this, you know, this is what we need to do with this. So I would say that, I guess I've always said that Lonely Planet could never have existed without Tony, but it probably wouldn't have held together as long without me.

• 33:53Speaker 03

  I'd agree with that.

• 33:56Guy Raz?

  Tony and Maureen Wheeler, founders of Lonely Planet. By the way, at its height, the company was valued at a quarter of a billion dollars. The Wheelers are no longer formally involved with the company. They sold all their shares. But Tony did recently score a gig writing a chapter for a new Lonely Planet book. It's called Epic Drives of the World. And as I speak, Tony is on a three-and-a-half-month drive from Bangkok to London in a classic British MG sports car. And one last question for you. When you travel, like, what is a thing you have to have in your carry-on bag?

• 34:31Speaker 03

  My passport and a credit card.

• 34:33Guy Raz?

  That's boring. Come on.

• 34:35Speaker 02

  Now, for me, it's I've got this wonderful pair of cashmere slippers.

• 34:38Guy Raz?

  Oh, nice.

• 34:39Speaker 02

  They are so cozy and comfortable on. When I get on a plane and I put them on, then I I kind of can relax.

• 34:44Speaker 03

  I've never seen those.

• 34:45Speaker 02

  Yes, you have. You just never noticed.

• 34:55Guy Raz?

  And please don't turn us off just yet. In a moment, we're going to hear from you about the things you guys are building.

• 35:04Guy Raz?

  Hey, thanks so much for sticking around because it's time now for how you built that. And this story, well, let me just say it starts with a plastic bottle, and I have one right here in the studio with me, slightly full of water, about a quarter of the way up. Okay, and that sound, that is the sound of me flipping this bottle a full 360 degrees so that it spins in the air and then lands right side up, which, by the way, is not an easy thing to do, but it is the type of thing that middle school kids can become totally obsessed with. In fact, it became this huge deal last year.

• 35:42Speaker 04

  It was really popular.

• 35:44Guy Raz?

  Which is where Michael Mendicino comes in.

• 35:46Speaker 04

  Like, everyone at school was doing it. My friends would come over to my house just to flip bottles sometimes, and we'd just see how many different cool trick shots we could do, basically, and just do cool stuff with it.

• 35:58Guy Raz?

  So, Michael, he's 15, and he lives with his family in Celebration, Florida. And one night last November, Michael and his mom, Nicole, were at home watching TV.

• 36:08Speaker 04

  We were just sitting around watching Shark Tank, and I was actually bottle flipping. And we just came up with the perfect idea to create a board game and turn bottle flipping into a board game.

• 36:21Speaker 05

  And we looked at each other, and we said, this is one of those just simple aha ideas, just instantly. It wasn't like we had to discuss it, but we just said, let's do this.

• 36:32Guy Raz?

  That, of course, is Nicole, Michael's mom. Anyway, the next day after Michael and his two younger sisters got home from school.

• 36:39Speaker 05

  We actually sat down and all evening, we worked on coming up with A really crude prototype. We just got out the board games that we had in our house and we just started brainstorming.

• 36:52Guy Raz?

  So the game they came up with comes with a bottle, a board with a target on it, and a deck of cards that have a bunch of different bottle flipping challenges on them.

• 37:02Speaker 04

  Like, put your arms in the sleeves of your shirt like a T-Rex and flip the bottle. Keep your eyes open without blinking and try to land five in a row before you blink.

• 37:12Guy Raz?

  The Mendocino's found a manufacturer in North Carolina who agreed to make an initial run of 10,000 board games.

• 37:19Speaker 05

  We actually had the product available to ship on December 21st, so we just barely made it before Christmas.

• 37:26Guy Raz?

  But, of course, they had to still get the word out.

• 37:29Speaker 04

  Yeah, so most of the products that I want to buy, I see people playing them through YouTube. So originally, I started by reaching out to a few people that I watch on YouTube.

• 37:39Guy Raz?

  And Michael asked them, "Hey, can I send you this Bottle Flip game and will you take a look at it?"

• 37:44Speaker 04

  We actually sent them the game and they played it on their channel. And right now, we have over 5 million views all around from all different channels.

• 37:52Guy Raz?

  In their very first week, the Mendocino's sold over 8,000 games. And starting in August, Bottle Flip will be sold in about 100 Target stores. And if you're wondering about the sound of the bottle flipping, Nicole says hearing it over and over can drive a lot of parents crazy.

• 38:13Speaker 05

  So that's definitely been like a hurdle as far as marketing goes.

• 38:17Guy Raz?

  But Michael says he's already started to notice a trend.

• 38:20Speaker 04

  When the parents play it with the kids, they realize how fun it is. And now the parents are kind of addicted.

• 38:26Guy Raz?

  Bottle Flip is still a side hustle for the Mendocino family. Both Nicole and her husband are keeping their day jobs in real estate, but the game has already done $135,000 in sales since they launched it in December. And Nicole says she's already dreaming about the next idea for a board game. Hey, if you want to find out more about Bottle Flip, visit our Facebook page. Just search How I Built This. And of course, if you want to tell us your story, go to build.npr.org. We love hearing from you. And thanks for listening to the show this week. If you want to find out more or listen to previous episodes, you can go to howibuiltthis.npr.org. Please also subscribe to the show at Apple Podcasts

• 39:11Guy Raz?

  or however you get the show. And while you're there, please do give us a review. You can also write to us. That's h i b t at npr.org. And if you want to send us a tweet, it's at How I Built This. Our show is produced this week by Rachel Faulkner, with original music composed by Ramtin Arablouei. Thanks also to Neva Grant, Sanaz Meshkhanpour, Claire Breen, and Jeff Rogers. I'm Guy Raz, and you're listening to How I Built This from NPR.

• 39:42Speaker 06

  Summer movie season gets louder and longer every year. I'm Linda Holmes. For a guide through the blockbusters you know about and the surprise bright spots you might not, Pop Culture Happy Hour has you covered. We'll tell you what we're looking forward to, what we're secretly dreading, and what might just sneak up on all of us. Find Pop Culture Happy Hour on the NPR ONE app or wherever you get podcasts.