Pod Insights EconTalk From Sawdust to Paw Patrol: The Spin Master Story (with Ronnen Harary) About this episode A nylon stocking filled with sawdust that grows grass for hair launched one of the most successful toy companies in the world. Ronnen Harary, co-founder of Spin Master and co-creator of Paw Patrol, talks about his book No Experience Necessary with EconTalk's Russ Roberts. Harary traces his journey from selling grass-growing novelty heads at 23, through Devil Sticks and Air Hogs, to building Bakugan and Paw Patrol into global franchises touching the lives of millions of children. Along the way, he reflects on the artistry of commercial creation and what it means to build something that outlives its founders. The conversation closes on the eternal magic of toys and our childhoods.
Transcript 12,175 words · 2 speakers
0:02 Speaker 00 Welcome to Econ Talk, Conversations for the Curious, part of the Library of Economics and Liberty. I'm your host, Russ Roberts of Shalem College in Jerusalem and Stanford University's Hoover Institution. Go to econTalk.org where you can subscribe, comment on this episode, and find links to other information related to today's conversation. You'll also find our archives with every episode we've done going back to 2006. Our email address is [email protected] . We'd love to hear from you. Today is May 28, 2026, and I want to remind listeners before introducing today's guest that we're doing an Econ Talk Book Club around the Iliad by Homer. Last week's episode was
0:47 Speaker 00 with Ido Chivroni of Shalem College introducing the book, providing some useful context to help you get started. Another episode or episodes, depends when we're in the weeks to come. We're using the Fagels translation, but there are many others to choose from. And now for today's guest, entrepreneur, television and film producer, Ronan Harari. He is a co-founder of the Canadian children's entertainment company, SpinMaster, the co-creator of Paw Patrol, a preschool series that airs in 160 countries. SpinMaster had revenue of $2.3 billion in 2024 and is the fourth-largest toy company in the world, behind Mattel, Hasbro, and Lego. And he's the author of No Experience Necessary: Why Betting on Yourself
1:32 Speaker 00 in Your 20s Is the Best Decision You'll Ever Make, which is our topic for today. Ronan, welcome to Econ Talk.
1:38 Speaker 01 Thanks, Russ. Thanks for having me.
1:40 Speaker 00 Now, this is a very entertaining and thoughtful book. The point of the book is to encourage young people to take a chance, start a business. A lot more to the book than that. It has some moral lessons and life lessons, business lessons. I want to start with risk, because when you encourage people to start a business, well, everyone thinks, well, that's risky. And you say, it's a misunderstood concept. In what way is it misunderstood? And what do you think is the right way to think about it?
2:06 Speaker 01 A lot of people look at the pros and cons of starting something, and you can always game out the downside. It's really, really easy to game out the downside. It's very hard to game out the upside, because you don't know what's going to actually happen. It's actually beyond all our imaginations what's possible. But if you don't start, then you miss out on the screenplay of your life. And it's kind of why I wrote this book is because a lot of people have a lot of pressure from their parents, they have a lot of pressure from society, and they doubt themselves. And so I wrote the book, actually, so people can either make the case to themselves to take a risk in something, whatever it is, in business or, you know, in arts, or to
2:47 Speaker 01 make the case to not do something, and to create a conversation and to reframe their thoughts around what is possible in their life.
2:58 Speaker 00 You make the point, which I think is profound, and certainly a good economist knows this, a bad one might miss it, but we often think about the risk of losing money. You start a business, whatever you put into it's going to be gone, you could have a crushing disappointment, but the main thing people tend to focus on is the money. But you point out, if you don't do something, you may be misusing your time, and in many ways, that's more precious than money. Nothing really goes bad often. You can recover, especially when you're young, from losing some money. Wasting your life is a different matter.
3:33 Speaker 01 Yeah, and I think that we focus a lot on the money, and we don't necessarily focus on what we want to do with our life. And I also think about the whole notion of equity. You know, what you trade off when you don't take the risk to do something for yourself, especially in the realm of starting your own business, is that the time that you're putting into an endeavor and by working for another company, all the upside is going to accrue to someone else. It's not going to accrue to you. So essentially, you're renting your time, right? Versus having that time accrue back to you and looking at your earnings over a long arc.
4:16 Speaker 01 So I encourage people to look at your earnings over a 20-year period or a 30-year period. And obviously, if you start a business, your earnings at the beginning are going to be much less than they will be at the end, but divide it back over 30 years, and I bet you your yearly will be higher than the first 10 years if you rent out your time to someone else. So it's a hard thing, and especially when you're young, it's hard to think that's that far into the future. But I think that the other thing, you know, about risk, I think that...
4:49 Speaker 01 I think a lot about passion and passion delevers risk. So if you're really passionate about something and you don't necessarily have the experience to do it, but you're super passionate and you have an idea, I think the passion will delever the risk. If you're just intellectualizing your way into a business or an opportunity, it's not going to work. But your passion and the fact that you're super young, because you have so much energy. So if you match the energy with the passion and the fact that so many people are rooting for you when you're young and starting a business, like everybody wants to help you.
5:23 Speaker 00 Let's turn to your first product, which is absurd. You know, there's maybe, I don't know, I'm guessing, I didn't look carefully, might be 10 or 15 pages about this product and how it came to life. It's really hard to believe it was a success, I have to say. It was called the Earth Buddy. So first, tell us what it is. It's remarkably unappealing, I have to tell you, when you read about it in the abstract.
5:48 Speaker 01 Well, yeah, we should have had some pictures. It's basically, it's kind of like a 90s version of the 70s Chia Pet. So it's in the size of a softball. It's made out of nylon, on sawdust and grass seed, and it's got a happy face on it. And you put it in water and it grows grass for hair.
6:07 Speaker 00 And that's it?
6:09 Speaker 01 That's it. But it's more than that because it's so magical, because you would never imagine grass growing from this softball, right? And it does it over the course of seven days. And so it's quite, it's quite magical. It's like, it's like a fun house plant.
6:23 Speaker 00 And the design of it, you actually had, and you described this very entertainingly, you had to try some different things. It wasn't a first time out of the box, right?
6:34 Speaker 01 Yeah, well, it's, if we back up, the actual, the idea came from someone in Turkey. No one really knows whoever invented it. And somehow, people in Israel found out about it. And I found out about it from my mother, who was reading the Idiot Akhronok, which is an Israeli, largest Israeli newspaper. And there was a six-page spread about the six different individuals that were manufacturing the product. And in classic Israeli style, they all boasted about how many they were selling. So I basically, I added up all the six and it came to like 300,000 pieces in a country of 10 million. I was like, wow, no one's doing it over here. So.
7:09 Speaker 01 We could sell millions here in North America. So that was my calculus. Um, I, I didn't look at it the way you looked at it and said like it was ugly. I was like, I was just looking at the numbers, actually. And the fact that no one was selling it over here. Um, and so my late grandmother brought us, me and my sisters, uh, three earth buddies for presents. They were called grass heads in Israel. And, um, I took them to my business partner, Anton, who we had a small business at university. And I said to him, what do you think about manufacturing and selling these, uh, in North America? And he thought I was crazy. So it took me two weeks. He was like you, actually. He was like you. And so he, it took him two weeks to decide. And then he's like, okay, let's do it. And then next thing we know, we found ourselves in like Kmart, buying pantyhose.
7:54 Speaker 01 Okay. And, and trying to source sawdust and, and grass seed and trying to figure out like, what's the right grass seed? Cause we didn't have the recipe. We just had, we had to reverse engineer the product.
8:04 Speaker 00 So the part that's the narrative of how this product goes from a, you're 22, 23.
8:14 Speaker 01 Twenty three, twenty three.
8:15 Speaker 00 So you, you make 5,000 and your first attempt is to sell them on street corners. And you sell a few hundred, which you later realized was a miracle, but at the time was depressing. Right?
8:28 Speaker 01 Correct.
8:30 Speaker 00 So you get this break. You mentioned Sam Kotzer before. He buys a bunch, which is great. And you're on, uh, you have some, you tried flower shops, other things, but the, the heart of the story, which is unbelievable, is you have a connection to Kmart. And, you know, I haven't heard the word Kmart in a while. I looked it up. They've fallen on hard times. According to Wikipedia, they have four stores left. Some say they have none. They don't have any real stores. They have like a small fake store. They have some online presence, but they used to be the number one retail in the world. They were the Walmart, uh, before there was Walmart. And so you, um,
9:10 Speaker 00 You're gonna, you want to get to them. And so you have a buddy who knows someone and you eventually get a meeting at Kmart. So I'm going to read a short paragraph about this trip, which there's something deeply romantic and beautiful about it. You say, so first I'm going to set the stage a little bit. It's incredibly exciting. This is a dream come true. You have this funky product, which unlike me, you actually think is a great product. It's this ball of sawdust that grows hair and you have a chance. It's the most important presentation of your life. It could change your life.
9:52 Speaker 00 It turns out it does, but you're 23 and you don't know it, as you point out in the book. And so, quote, "The morning of the pitch, I had to wake up super early at around 4:30 a.m. to make the four and a half hour drive from Toronto to Kmart's corporate headquarters in Troy, Michigan, a suburb of Detroit. Even though I had a 9 a.m. appointment, it didn't occur to me to drive in and stay overnight so I could show up fresh and well rested." These are the things you don't think about, stop to think about when you're 23. Plus, we're trying to save as much money as possible, so we keep putting it into the business. "So I just threw on a white button down shirt and a pair of jeans, loaded a box of 24 Earth Buddies into my mom's red Toyota Celica, climbed behind the wheel and headed out.
10:33 Speaker 00 The crazy thing is I did absolutely nothing to prep for the meeting. I didn't do any prep with Anton, that was your business partner, and there was no PowerPoint." And you show up, end of quote. So you end, you show up at Kmart, you go to this, you've got this incredible opportunity, you get in front of the guy and what happens?
10:54 Speaker 01 Well, first of all, I get, I'm just emotional just listening to you read it back. The absurdity of it all and the amazingness of it all. What happens is I pitch him for 30 minutes, no PowerPoint, no nothing. And after 30, and he's a wonderful man, he sits quiet, doesn't say anything for 30 minutes. And then he says to me, "I'm not the buyer for this product." So what's running through my head is, is he's not telling you the truth. And so I pitched him again for 15 minutes and he listens quietly. And then he says, I'm not the buyer for this product. So then I'm like, okay, I gotta make this work somehow. So I said to him, I still didn't believe him. I said, we'll give it to you on consigned sales, which means that we'll give you the product.
11:39 Speaker 01 And if it sells, you pay us. So there's no risk for him. And he looks at me, he's like, I'm not the buyer for this product. So I'm like, okay, he's really not, I'm giving the product for free and he's not taking it. So he's really not the buyer. So I said to him, well, who is the buyer? You know, I drove four hours from Toronto. Do you mind letting me know? And he was a super gentleman, went back to his office and came back and he gave me the name of the buyer on a piece of paper. And it said Adrian Zacks. I shook his hand and I left and I started walking around Kmart Corporation, looking for this, this person. And the craziest thing is the people that got me the meeting, I didn't even say anything to him. I literally just beelined. I got so excited, I was like, okay, I got the name. So I beelined looking for this lady.
12:23 Speaker 01 And luckily for us, for me, she was sitting at her desk and I pitched her and she said, okay, I'll give you a meeting at 3:30. I went downstairs, told the guys, they were like, let's go for lunch. I said to him, I'm not going anywhere. So they left. I was so paranoid back in the day, I was like, maybe they won't let me back in the building or maybe she'll call earlier and I'll miss the opportunity. So I was like, I'm just gonna stay put. So I just stayed in the lobby and I went up.
12:50 Speaker 00 For five hours, which I love. And she, by the way, she's in the horticulture department because this has grass growing, grass seed and grows vegetation. It's, she's the buyer.
13:04 Speaker 01 Correct, correct. And I go up at 3:30 and boy, did I know that she was the buyer because as I walked back into her office, I didn't notice this the first time, but she had seven other grass head products, earth buddies on the side of her shelf. So I'm like, okay, now I know I'm in the right place. And I had to do this calculus in my head. I'm like, okay, there's a lot of competition. So I dropped my price. I was originally going to come in at $2.60 US. And so I dropped it a dollar to a dollar 65 US and it was costing us about 70 cents US to make it at the time. And I did the pitch for about 15 minutes and then she did the most magical thing.
13:47 Speaker 01 She turned around and she gave me this big fat book, which was the vendor agreement with Kamer, which is to become a vendor, a supplier. And she said, I'm going to order 48,000 pieces from you and if it goes well, I'm going to order half a million pieces for Christmas. And I was completely shocked and then I did the strangest thing ever. Because I didn't believe that it was real. I asked her for her garden gnome. She had a gnome because she was, you know, the buyer of horticulture. So I said, can I have your gnome? Yeah, and then, and then I, I left and drove back to Toronto.
14:25 Speaker 00 Well, you say, she gave me the gnome and it's a strange thing to do. You say in the book, it was to commemorate this out of body experience you just had. And I, I hope listeners can either have some measure of your own success in life where something happens that is so surreal, so much better than you possibly could have imagined. And it's not just that, oh, maybe we're going to make a lot of money. It's so much more than that. It's someone believes in me the way I believe in me. And it's exhilarating. It's an incredible experience of being a human being. And I want to read another quote. I love this quote. You say,
15:10 Speaker 00 "With hindsight, it's clear that Adrian Sacks already knew what she wanted before I showed up to the meeting." She was going to order the product from somebody. And the fact that I took the time to show up in person, help persuade her that we were the people she had to go with. The other big factor, obviously, was price. I came in so low. Looking back now, I probably still would have made the sale, even if I'd cut the price a bit higher. I probably sold it too cheap, giving away maybe 50 to 70 cents per earth buddy. But when I think about her demeanor and her attitude in that meeting, I honestly believe that something else played a decisive role in her decision to give me the business. When I walked into her office, I was barely more than four months past my 23rd birthday. And there I was, telling the biggest retailer in the United States, I could deliver on an order of potentially over a half a million units of a brand new product.
15:55 Speaker 00 And she didn't hesitate to say yes. She didn't even blink. She wanted to give me the deal. And I believe it wasn't in spite of my youth, but because of it. One of the greatest assets you have when you're young is this. Everyone is rooting for you to win. Close quote. And I think that's just such a profound insight that young people struggle to realize or accept. We're on your side. We want you to win. And she saw, like you say, she didn't blink, she didn't haggle. You obviously gave her a very good price, but she just, matter of fact, said, this is the guy. And you'd driven, she probably realized, you'd driven four hours with the box in the trunk.
16:40 Speaker 00 You weren't a big fancy corporate retailer, wholesaler, and she fell in love with you. It's an incredible story.
16:47 Speaker 01 Thank you. Yeah, no, and it proved, what you're saying proved true because she invited me back four years later to speak to underprivileged youth in Detroit. And so that proved the case that she was super passionate about young people. But it's 100% like, everybody is rooting for you all the time. And I also think that it's like, when you're around older people, especially people that are in their middle age, you're also giving them an opportunity to give back.
17:17 Speaker 01 So to get back from their wisdom and their insight and to share and also to feel that youthful energy again. And so I think that people leaning into that is important and to know that you're actually doing a, you know, you're doing, you're giving an opportunity to someone to do some goodness in life. It's like, it's like charity, live charity. It's not even charity, but it's like, it's just live.
17:41 Speaker 00 It's a human connection. It's a beautiful human connection. Right? One of the themes of the book is that business is underrated. That's not the way you write, say it, but this was, she changed her life. She made some money for Kmart. You made some money from it, but it opened a door for you that might not have opened. You might've ended up doing something totally different that we'll get to in a little bit, how transformative it was for you. But that little, there were seven to choose from. Maybe she liked some of the others a little better, but you're in person and you're young and you're probably unbelievably passionate. I wish we had a video of that presentation.
18:20 Speaker 01 I'll tell you, she, not only did she change our lives, but she changed other people's lives.
18:26 Speaker 00 Oh, sure.
18:28 Speaker 01 We, we ended up to produce that quantity. We actually had 200 people in our factory in downtown Toronto working. And two of the people came from a homeless shelter. One, his name was Bob Waklum, and he was running the production. And without him, we would have never been able to produce all of that product. And there was another gentleman, his name was Grenville, and he ran the shipping department. So it made, it made a really big impact on more than just us. It touched a lot of people.
18:57 Speaker 00 So you're selling them, you're selling to them for a buck sixty and they're retailing them for $4.99.
19:06 Speaker 01 Yeah, great margin.
19:07 Speaker 00 And they end up selling one and a half million earth buddies to their customers.
19:15 Speaker 00 Speculate, there's no easy answer to this, but you recognize a couple of times in the book that certain products catch fire and then they die. This caught fire in a way that I would not have predicted, I would not have invested in it on your behalf. But why did it, why do you think it caught fire? And why did it, but once it caught fire, why did it then? You know, we call it a novelty item. It's a thing for a while and then it's not a thing. Talk about that.
19:45 Speaker 01 Well, novelty products are something you want to experience once or twice. And then, once you've experienced it, you want to move on to something else. So it has like a peak magic to it, but the magic only lasts for a certain period of time. And it was just a moment. It was a moment, people had never seen it before. And I also think the velocity sale, we sold so many, everybody got an opportunity to try it. And then they just moved on to something else. And we were very cognizant of that. We intuitively knew it ourselves that it was a novelty product. And so we were like eagerly looking for, what are we going to follow this up with?
20:21 Speaker 00 You know, as you're telling that story, I'm thinking about one of the, I'm not a big buyer of novelty products, but I remember the singing fish, which was a plaque on the wall. Do you remember this?
20:34 Speaker 01 Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes. The deli bass.
20:36 Speaker 00 Yeah. And it would sing, "Don't Worry, Be Happy." And it's utterly delightful the first eight times. After that, it sounds interesting, but it's delightful and you buy it for the delight. If it's not too expensive, you're happy to have it eight times. Now, your second product, which was another fad that caught fire, were devil sticks. You saw some kids in a park, devil sticks. Describe what they are first.
20:59 Speaker 01 Devil sticks are what I would describe as a three-piece juggling set. And you have two sticks you hold in one in each hand, and they have a big stick that's weighted on the edge, on the ends. And it's got nice tassels and you hit it back and forth and because it's weighted, it starts to spin. And as a result of spinning, you can do lots of different tricks with it.
21:21 Speaker 00 So this went crazy also. It's a little bit, this is all for $14.99. You sold another one and a half million of those. The puzzle why anyone would pay for sticks. So there's tassels, the ones you saw in the park were homemade.
21:37 Speaker 01 Correct.
21:38 Speaker 00 So you saw an opportunity here to make something easier that they wouldn't have to go to the trouble of finding the right size and all that.
21:48 Speaker 01 Well, it was a couple of things. One is, I used to actually play with them in high school myself. And I used to go to some Grateful Dead shows and my buddy made some and he sold them at some of the Grateful Dead shows. And so in my mind, it was for people that were in their late teens and twenties.
22:07 Speaker 01 And more for hippies. But what caught my imagination was, why are 10-year-olds playing with this? Why did they like it? And why are they making them in schoolyards or playing with them in schoolyards? And so it was just that notion that gave us the feeling that maybe something was in the ether, there was something in the zeitgeist for kids around this. And we had the factory and it was, let's just give it a try. We have a factory, we can make some prototypes. Go to retail, make some packaging.
22:41 Speaker 01 And it was just a sense that the younger kids were excited about this particular product. And that was the analysis that we made.
22:52 Speaker 00 Do you still sell those?
22:54 Speaker 01 No, we don't sell them today.
22:55 Speaker 00 But you can buy them somewhere.
22:57 Speaker 01 You can buy them somewhere, but again, like with the Earth Buddy, it was a moment in time for kids. Same thing like a yo-yo. Like yo-yos had like, back in the day, they were so big. You can still buy them today, but they're probably a tenth of what they sell when they were really hot and popular. And there's also just like a moment, like where kids, everybody, all the kids are playing with them and they're talking about them. And that's when you tap into the zeitgeist of that particular moment for kids. And you get this crazy amplification effect. Where it's actually, it was just, our product was great. It was good quality, it was good price, it was nicely designed. But what really sold it was the moment more than anything else.
23:40 Speaker 00 And did you, what did you do, if anything, I'm sure you tried to accelerate the fad part, the everybody's talking about a part. You had a, you had a.
23:50 Speaker 01 We leaned, we leaned in, we got, we got vans, we hired college students and they went on tour and they basically went to universities and they were flipping the sticks from like school to school to school. We filmed their first commercial and we did some media advertising with it. We got, we were leaning into what's today is called earned media, so but back in the day it was PR.
24:11 Speaker 00 Yeah.
24:12 Speaker 01 So we're getting on TV, we're getting written up in magazines, newspapers.
24:17 Speaker 01 You know, we didn't have that much money. I was the, I was the model, you know, you can still see my picture on the side of the van today. So we were, we were marketing it like crazy. We were out on the road.
24:28 Speaker 00 And your next product, by the way, what's, what's fun about this story is if you had said to me, how do you become the fourth biggest toy company in the world? This is not how I would have imagined. I'm not sure I would have thought about it. But you were basically just a couple of young, I was gonna say kids, you're in your mid twenties, early twenties. You had some interesting ideas and you're selling them and you're making some money, which is nice. And then you take a big leap. You make these things called airhogs, which is a plane that flies and lands and you can use more than once. And you have, you go from a product of sawdust in a nylon stocking with grass seed, then
25:10 Speaker 00 weighted sticks with some design elements to a airplane, which is, you write about it, we won't go into it, but there's terribly challenging design and manufacturing problems, one of which is, is that when the plane lands, the wings tend to break and it's done. So how did, how did you solve that problem? And was it really solved more or less?
25:34 Speaker 01 It was solved. The first two weeks when product actually shipped, it wasn't solved. It wasn't 100%. So we had to like do some quick modifications. But yeah, no, we solved it through great engineering and design. The wings would pop off on impact. That's how we did it. So you have to put them back on every single time.
25:53 Speaker 00 It's actually a deep lesson. You know, we just talk about this all the time and the eight days after the 2008 financial crisis, that if you want to avoid the pain from, say, a financial crisis, most politicians and some policymakers, their prescription is, don't let it happen again. Whereas Arnold Kling, longtime guest on the program, argued the better strategy is, it's going to happen again. If you keep it from happening, when it does happen, it's going to be even worse. So instead of trying to prevent it from happening, try to reduce the cost of when it happens. So to design a wing that breaks on purpose is a genius idea. Because he can put back on, pops off.
26:35 Speaker 01 Yeah.
26:36 Speaker 00 Yeah, I didn't mean. So that sells 35 million in the first nine months. So you're killing it with that again. You produce different kinds. And you're going along. And then you had a bunch of failures, which is part of life. But then you hit two rather extraordinary home runs. And I have to confess, partly because of my, the nature of my life and my children, I had not heard of these, but I'm sure many of our listeners, you're going to pronounce them, you'll correct my pronunciation, Bakugan and Paw Patrol. Is Bakugan correct?
27:11 Speaker 01 Great pronunciation.
27:12 Speaker 00 So what, for those who don't know what it is, tell us what Bakugan is.
27:18 Speaker 01 Bakugan is, it's a cross between Transformers and Beyblade. And it's basically, it's around marble that you roll onto a card. And in the marble is a magnet and a little spring. And when the marble hits the card, it pops open and transforms. And there's just this magical feedback that you just get and surprise them like it opens up to into this character and we made hundreds of different types of characters. And then you would roll yours onto the card and we would battle and in each character had a points, point number. And then you flip the card open and then there were sigils that matched up to, there
27:58 Speaker 01 are signs that matched up to what was in your Bakugan and we would start to battle. So that was the, the toy and actually it started, it started, it was invented by a 23 year old inventor who had the idea of putting an action figure inside a marble. And so Ben Dermer, at the time, we were looking for, we're always looking for ideas from wherever they came from. That was our philosophy in our company. And we licensed the idea, but we only developed it to certain points. And then we actually took it to Japan and partnered with a company by the name of Sega Toys. And they added this genius of the pop open transformation and the piece of metal that was laminated in a card format. They called it Bakugan.
28:41 Speaker 01 And, and crazy, it was, it was the craziest thing. I went to Japan. Okay. I'd been going to Japan for like five years and we hadn't done very much business there. But they were so good with mechanisms and they're so creative that I just had a hunch that they would be able to help us with this product. And so I pitched it to Tommy, they turned us down. I pitched it to Baku, to Bandai, they turned us down. And Mr. Kokobon, who didn't speak a spit, stitch of English, no English. He said, yes. And then I came back two months later and he added this, this whole incredible innovation to the product. At which point I, I said to him, um, how would you feel about doing a television show?
29:25 Speaker 01 Because the thing in Japan is that they're the, they, they mastered the art form of innovation with animation, with storytelling. And they blended the two together and they have no problems having both of them live in the same world. And so things like Beyblade or Transformers that came before Bakugan, they all have TV shows attached to the toy. So I said to him, how would you feel about doing 52 episode animation? And he said to me,
29:53 Speaker 01 Let's do it. It's gonna cost $12 million. Do you have six?
29:58 Speaker 01 I said, and I said, let me get back to you. So I went home, spoke to my partners, and eventually came back and said, let's, let's give it a try.
30:07 Speaker 01 And that's Bakugan. But I do want to, I do want to state something because, you know, you're going from success to success. And I will say that there is, there is a lot of failures along the way. And the precursor for Bakugan was Beyblade. Because five years before that, I'd gone to Japan. And Beyblade, for, for the listeners, is a spinning top. It's got a ripcord. And it's, it's, it's also a battling toy, but they're battling by, by movement. So two spinning tops in a tray, and they're moving around, and they hit each other. And then when the, the one top gets pushed out of the tray in the arena, then the one that's still in there is the winner. And it was, but back in 2001, five years before Bakugan, I was pitched the idea from
30:52 Speaker 01 Takara Tomy, and I turned it down. And it went on to become a multi-billion dollar franchise, multi-billion dollar toy line.
31:00 Speaker 00 Beyblade.
31:01 Speaker 01 Beyblade that went, went to Hasbro.
31:06 Speaker 00 And you thought, I'm not gonna let that happen again.
31:10 Speaker 01 Well, I was like, when we get our shots, we're gonna try to create our own Beyblade.
31:18 Speaker 01 When the moment arises.
31:19 Speaker 00 So it's exploiting the, and I went online and looked at some videos of, the first one I found, by the way, on YouTube of Bakugan's rolling onto the cards and popping open. It's very beautiful. It had two views, that video. I mean, I, I, by myself, created 50% increase in the, in the views of that, of that video. But the, so you have the visual excitement of that. It's cool. That's a little bit like the talking fish. You know, it's like, the first 20 times is very fun. After the 21st, you want to either, you want to do something else. And what it does is it fights with these other toys. But the next level is what's extraordinary is to create. A narrative universe for children, it's less interesting for adults, but for children,
32:02 Speaker 00 it's endlessly fascinating for them to inhabit that universe of the TV show where these characters are doing other things besides rolling onto a card. So when then you roll it onto the card, you have an emotional resonance that's different than just, oh, that's cool, that's pretty. It's, oh, this is that character who last week on the show did XYZ.
32:24 Speaker 01 Correct. You described it really well. And the characters on the, on the show, when they popped open, transformed, they grow to 100-foot monsters. It's like, right? And, and you had so many different characters, but you did get very vested in certain characters, like Drago was the main character. And, you know, there's a whole bunch of other ones. And, yeah, you had your favorite characters that you fantasized about. And I will, I will, you know, I write about it in the, in the prologue of the book, what really dawned on me, I was in South Africa a few years ago on holiday, and I hired a tennis pro.
33:03 Speaker 01 And we hit, it was a great hour, I loved the kid. He was 22 years old. And he asked me at the end, he said, what, you know, what's, what have you been doing? What's your, been your journey? And I told him about everything, I told him about Bakugan. And the next day, he came back and we hit again, but he brought me his box of 25 Earth Bites, sorry, 25 Bakugan, okay? In mint condition, mint condition. And he was so happy to show me everything. And he was 22, and he still had them from when he was eight years old. And it was the craziest thing for me, because what dawned on me in that time, and it never dawned on me ever before, was that we created Bakugan, but this kid lived it. So the fantasy that
33:45 Speaker 01 you just described before was a lived experience for him for three or four years of his life.
33:51 Speaker 00 Yeah.
33:51 Speaker 01 And it was totally different than my relationship to it. And so it was, it was quite a moment for me.
33:57 Speaker 00 No, it's really beautiful. We're gonna come back and talk about that, because I think, I think it's very difficult.
34:06 Speaker 00 In the pace of life and the speed of of life to remember what else happened beside what happened to you. So there's a beautiful book, I'm forgetting the name, I'll put it in the in the notes to the to the to the show when we when we put this out. But it was about a somebody who developed a, I think, a medical device, and he'd gotten very wealthy from it. And he developed a terminal illness, and he's going to die, as we all are. And his friends put together an evening to honor him. But they invited people who had been
34:49 Speaker 00 helped by this device. And they all stood up and talked from the heart about how grateful they were to this man. And he this sounds absurd, but I think it's a very common human experience. And spend a lot of time thinking about that. He's busy making the product, making sure it worked right, complying with regulations, marketing, whatever it is. And that's your focus, which is normal and for the best. But he didn't spend much time, partly because it's unseen, savoring his denting the world in that way. And I think business,
35:31 Speaker 00 you know, people have a very cold, negative, sometimes negative view of, you know, Wordsworth said, buying and getting and spending, we lay waste our powers. That's the best critique of commercial life. I think it misses what commercial life is really about. It's not about getting and spending. It's about touching people's lives. Now, some products don't do it, some don't do it well, some harm people, and we all understand that. But you created a world for this boy that he wanted to still live in. He kept it's like rereading a book, you know, that you loved as a child. He wants to have that book around. It's an incredible thing. And it's easy to forget. So it's cool that you were able to experience that in a
36:16 Speaker 00 tangible way.
36:18 Speaker 01 Yeah, very much so, very much so.
36:22 Speaker 00 Do you have any Bakugans in your life right now?
36:27 Speaker 01 I do.
36:28 Speaker 00 Do you own any?
36:30 Speaker 01 I have a whole collection in my office.
36:31 Speaker 00 How many, how many are there in that collection?
36:35 Speaker 01 I don't know, maybe 20, 30.
36:37 Speaker 00 How many are the original ones? How many are there altogether?
36:41 Speaker 01 What do you mean altogether? That have been produced in the world?
36:43 Speaker 00 No. Well, you can tell me that too. I'm curious. What is that?
36:47 Speaker 01 In the world, probably like,
36:51 Speaker 01 I don't know, maybe a billion Bakugan?
36:54 Speaker 00 So you have 20 of them, but they're different characters, right?
36:58 Speaker 01 They're different characters.
36:59 Speaker 00 How many different?
37:00 Speaker 01 I have different characters from different years and I have prototypes. I have a whole mishmash.
37:05 Speaker 00 But you don't have the complete set?
37:09 Speaker 01 In our archive, we have the complete set. In my office, I have a mishmash.
37:11 Speaker 00 Okay, all right. So then that's an incredible success. Only sells a few, 100 million or billion. And then your next project that's like this, that has this narrative component, television movie component now,
37:30 Speaker 00 and then the physical device that stimulates the imagination and resonates with the the movie and the TV show is Paw Patrol. So I didn't know what it was. I got online, but tell me what it is.
37:46 Speaker 01 Paw Patrol is a wonderful TV show about five dogs that each have their own archetype that are led by their leader Ryder, who's about a 12-year-old kid who's got his own ATV. And they all live in Adventure Bay. And whenever there's a calamity in Adventure Bay, Ryder picks certain pups to solve the calamity. And so you have Marshall, who's the police dog, and he's got, he's kind of like, he's kind of like Batman in a puppy. And then you have Marshall, he's the fire dog. The Fire Puppy, Sky, and she's got her own incredible helicopter and jet. And Zuma is amazing puppy that goes underwater. You got Rocky, who's recycling pup.
38:31 Speaker 01 And whenever there's calamity in Adventure Bay, they go out and they solve issues. I call them mitzvah pups. They're basically doing good in the world, solving problems and doing it with collaborating in a really wonderful way.
38:43 Speaker 00 So there's some virtue education going on here that makes parents eager to let their kids watch this. It's not edgy or hip and rebellious presumably. Am I getting that right?
38:54 Speaker 01 No, it's it's high paced and exciting for preschoolers because basically what happens is they go up, they go up the tower. Okay, whenever there's calamity, they get called into the tower and they're out playing and then and then Ryder calls them and they run into the to the elevator of the tower. And Marshall always does something funny in every episode. And then they go up the tower and as they go up the tower, they transform into their backpacks. So each puppy has a special backpack that does amazing magical things. And then they all stand in a in a in formation and then on the screen Ryder's describing the mission. And then they pick certain pups and they go down this incredible slide and they pop out and jump into their doghouse that transforms into a vehicle and then they go off into the adventure.
39:38 Speaker 01 So it's imbued with transformation. It's imbued with excitement and speed and action and then collaboration.
39:47 Speaker 00 And
39:48 Speaker 01 And a solve.
39:49 Speaker 00 And what?
39:50 Speaker 01 And a solve at the end.
39:51 Speaker 00 Uh huh, right. So that that's
39:53 Speaker 01 There's, there's, there's, there's actually, there's stakes in every episode.
39:56 Speaker 00 There's resolution and somebody had to imagine all those, those creative things. Who were they? Was it a team? Was it a?
40:09 Speaker 01 It was, it was the most incredible team. So the original concept came was developed by a gentleman by the name of Keith Chapman. And he's an incredible storyteller from the UK. He's the creator of Bob the Builder. And I'd known him for, yeah, no, the English are the best storytellers in the world. They're when it comes to kids animation, they're amazing. And I'd wanted to work with them for like 10 plus years for a long time. And so we had sent out a brief to five different creators around the world, asking them to come to us with some sort of idea that would match up with transformation for preschoolers.
40:47 Speaker 01 And so Keith came back with this whole idea with the archetype that I just explained to you. And so we took that idea and then we found writers and they wrote based on his idea. We found an incredible animation studio and we started developing the characters and look and the feel. We took toy designers and this has never been, this was kind of from our experience from Bakugan, but no one had done it in North America. We took toy designers, which is a very specific art in terms of like the look and the feel and also the play pattern and we mashed them up with the animators and the storytellers. And we had them all sitting in the same room, sharing ideas, drawing over each other's art. Like I'll never forget Eric Cherny, who was a Hot Wheels designer, he was drawing over
41:28 Speaker 01 the animator's designs, vehicle designs, and then, then they would draw over his and they would go back and forth. There was creative friction there, but what we, what we kind of intuitively knew for being in the toy business, we were, Paw Patrol hit in our 19th year. So we'd been doing toys for 19 years. And so we took all our knowledge about what's aspirational for kids and we put it into the story. And then we started working with incredible storytellers who knew how to make characters resonate with you and make, why would you care for the characters? And we mashed it all up together.
42:08 Speaker 01 But, and then it was just people who, who, and then there was incredible director, Jamie Whitney. He produced the most, he was 52 or 53 at the time. He had produced the most incredible children's television shows, probably like five that are like world-class, Emmy award-winning. And he was just the nicest guy and you see his, his niceness is in, in the, the way the characters are brought to life and the writers are so nice. It was, it was probably one of the most amazing projects of people that just came to do their craft as best that they can do their craft. And no one did it, no one was dialing it in, no one thought that Paw Patrol would be what
42:53 Speaker 01 it, what it has become today and how big it's become. It was more about just making it right in the moment.
42:59 Speaker 00 So how did, how did the?
43:04 Speaker 00 How did the physical creatures, the puppies, how did they, how well did they sell? And how well did the movie do? Or how well have they sold? Because it's still going.
43:16 Speaker 01 Yeah, so we're in our 13th year of Paw Patrol. Every year we do 52 episodes. We do specials every year. We're now coming up with our third movie. It's coming out August 14th this year. And, you know, for us, everything was about, we started out, we said, let's try to get to five years of Paw Patrol. We said Paw for five, then we said Paw for 10, and then we said Paw forever. And so we're always bringing new stories and excitement to the show that comes to the kids and then creating new toy lines around it. But we're very focused on just keeping everything fresh and new, but with the same tone and
43:56 Speaker 01 tenor of what the show was all about and never changing the tone and tenor, which is super, super important.
44:04 Speaker 00 So when you have mini-series on Netflix or Amazon Prime, Apple TV, there's, there's two things that are challenging. One is characters, the actors get opportunities that they prefer to this show, or they get tired of it, so they, the characters get killed off sometimes and they move on. The second is, is that the, the shtick of the show gets tired, so they have to come up with new things. And after a while, you realize they're just having fun with you as an, as an audience member, they're not, the narrative doesn't hold together so well. And I'm just going to mention this as an exception. One of my favorite shows is The Americans, which is an incredible show for dialogue and plot.
44:49 Speaker 00 And one of the reasons I love it is that it never, in seasons four or five, thought, no, we can't think of anything new, so let's, let's have Martians come. I mean, there's just a, there's so much money to be made by the next season that they just, they get tired. And also, I assume they also use second, might use second tier writers or directors because, you know, the audience is kind of hooked and then they play it out and eventually it loses the audience and that's the end of it. But.
45:21 Speaker 00 How long, 13 years? So how do you keep it? So your actors never die because they're animated puppies? I mean, they can die, but they don't die because they get a chance to make a movie with so and so. And but your writers, how do they? What do you think? I'm not gonna, I can't judge whether the show is as good as it was 10 years ago or better. But if it's still drawing an audience, obviously, part of it is kids get older and then a new audience comes and they're not tired of the plot twists or, in fact, it becomes sort of a ritual after a while, probably, that sort of things are expected. It's what they want. They don't want it to be too novel.
46:01 Speaker 00 But how do you, how do you keep that, that novelty and creativity working with that, with your team?
46:08 Speaker 01 Well, there's, it's funny that you say, you never want to jump the shark. And, and it's funny that you brought up Martians. Like, like some people think, oh, it'd be cool to go to space. Like Paw Patrol will never go to space because that's just not, that's just too far, too far afield. You have to stay very true to what made the show, the show. And you have to really stay within the confines of what that is. And from a sales perspective, like, you just need to stay within the confines and make sure that the, the writers, the new writers that are coming along
46:51 Speaker 01 are writing within the tradition of the writers that came before them. The pacing stays the same. The comedy stays the same. It's all about the tone and tenor. But within that, you can have fun and you can play. Like, so for example, our movie that's coming out this year, the pups are actually going to a special island where there's dinosaurs and they have their own unique vehicles. And their headquarters is, is a special mobile, something I can't share exactly what it is yet, but you'll see it in the movie. But the same.
47:27 Speaker 01 The same repetition. So for example, the way a show is actually built, never changed, never changes. So it's almost like the way you write a song, the song, the melody hasn't changed, but you can jam around it, but the melody is the same. So the first act, second act, the third act, it's very structured. And so we never changed the structure. And the voices never changed. The kids actually, it's interesting, the kids, they're all, all the voices are done by children. And they age out at like 14 when they hit puberty. So there's been a lot of Marshalls and Chases and Skies and Zumas and stuff like this. But they always hit that perfect pitch of their voice every single time.
48:12 Speaker 00 So it's sort of, it sounds to me like it's Mission Impossible meets The Avengers with puppies. And, and I think Marvel and other similar franchises, Mission Impossible, you know, they struggle with coming up with new things. But when your audience is four years old, it never gets old. Right?
48:40 Speaker 01 Yeah. There's, there's new generation of kids. I think that the brilliance of Keith Chapman was the puppies and making them with incredible capabilities, that anything's possible, and you can resolve everything, and you can do it in a nice way. And I think those are, those are meaningful. And the nice thing is, I think for this generation is they get the benefit of having 13 seasons. So that they, they got like a long arc to choose from.
49:08 Speaker 00 Yeah.
49:10 Speaker 01 But it's fresh, it's, it's, it's fresh, a new generation of kids.
49:13 Speaker 00 It's like Econta. You've got 1,000 episodes plus in the archives. So if you like it, you've got a lot of entertainment ahead of you. Realize something very interesting. I'm always intrigued by how, you know, human creativity is so extraordinary and...
49:29 Speaker 00 It just, when technology comes and changes, it creates new opportunities for that creativity to be unleashed. So, you know, when you think about, when I think about why there aren't any great classical composers, or at least famous classical composers in modern times, I always think, well, John Williams is a great classical composer. So is Hans Zimmer. It's just that in our world, the ability to make great symphonic music for a narrative is what is rewarded, and making a new symphony is not so lucrative. So the talent flows into this new technology of, of, of movies. And in your case, I looked it up, um, according
50:12 Speaker 00 to, I think it was ChatGPT, uh, J.K. Rowling has sold about 600 million copies of, of Harry Potter books, which is an extraordinary achievement. But you've had, you estimate in the book, that about 250 million kids have been touched by Paw Patrol. That's mind-blowing. Um, and it's, it's the same product. It's a story that you've used, and Kate Chapman and others on your team have used to create a world where small children, in this case, smaller, younger than Harry Potter readers, but the children can live in and learn lessons.
50:52 Speaker 00 And, and you, as I think you say, can figure out how to be a grown-up in a safe way. Talk about what that means to have that many kids around the world immersed in a world you and your team brought into being. Uh, and it comes back to this point of, it's hard to remember that's what you've done. You made a lot of money off it. Congrats. There's nothing wrong with that. I salute it. But the reason you made a lot of money is you created something that people really, a world people wanted to live in. And that's the real product, not the money.
51:22 Speaker 01 Yeah. It's, uh, it's similar to what you said before about, um, the doctor. Was he a doctor?
51:29 Speaker 00 Yeah. It was, uh, like, uh, yeah, who'd created a, I think a medical device.
51:34 Speaker 01 It's.
51:37 Speaker 01 It's it's hard thing to actually understand the scope and scale.
51:44 Speaker 00 Yeah.
51:45 Speaker 01 It's really hard to to understand the scope and scale.
51:49 Speaker 01 And savor it like you you mentioned, I do get. I'm very blessed to get lots of opportunities where I meet people and they got kids and they they they hear about Paw Patrol and then they want to share the stories and everybody gets excited. Sometimes they want to take my picture, which is kind of cool.
52:06 Speaker 01 But it's I think the most magical things is actually when I when I see kids. I like I love walking in airports. I have this thing about airports. I learned so much in the airport.
52:17 Speaker 01 And when I see a kid holding a Paw Patrol plush or I see them watching it on an iPad or something like that. That's when it really hits me. That's when it really hits me that that it's that it's that
52:30 Speaker 01 far reaching at the end of the day.
52:31 Speaker 00 Yeah, it's beautiful. I'm going to shift gears a little bit and talk about
52:38 Speaker 00 two aspects of business that you write about. The first is
52:43 Speaker 00 I've never read anybody made this claim before. It's it's it's really intriguing that you're really good at meetings. Now, most people don't think of themselves as good at meetings. Most people dislike meetings. What does that mean to you? What does it mean to to be good at what is a good meeting to you?
53:03 Speaker 01 Well, good meeting is when you are able to bring out the ideas from the other people sitting around the table. And you're able to bring up the the
53:18 Speaker 01 bring up everybody's energy level. And it's an exchange. It's kind of like writing. It's kind of like a symphony and or a jam band and everybody starts jamming together and you're creating music versus creating music, we're we're generating ideas. And then through the ideas, you get the best one pops out and the idea is seen by everybody in the room and everybody gets energy from the idea. And then like they leave the meeting and they're all like energized, like go into action, what just transpired. And and you do that over and over and over and again. And I think that maybe
53:53 Speaker 01 you know, a lot of it comes maybe from my learning disability because I'm not a
54:00 Speaker 01 You know, can't do the PowerPoints. I don't write everything out. So it's more about a synthesis of people coming together. And I used to do the strangest things, okay, in the early days. I used to basically page people on the intercom. So when I start a meeting, so I'll start with two or three people. And then when I get an idea and I want to, and I know that there's someone else that can actually contribute to this idea or to this thought, I want them to come into the room at that moment in time. So I won't wait to book another meeting.
54:30 Speaker 01 I will, in the olden days, I would page them, literally page them on the intercom and have them come to my meeting. Then my business partner, Anton, he cut me off because he thought I was disrupting everybody, which I was.
54:43 Speaker 01 And then later on, I would literally, I would scream to my assistant, sitting outside my office, and I'd ask her to go find the person. And the person would come in. And I'd start with, and I would do this, and sometimes I'd start with two people and we'd end up with like eight or nine people in the meeting. And we're just jamming on the ideas. And so it's like, it's when the inspiration comes, I want to take advantage of it. And I'm always looking to,
55:10 Speaker 01 because I'm like trying to connect the dots, like,
55:13 Speaker 01 who can add to this topic at this moment in time? Right? And I'm very much into the diversity of thought. I think that's the most important thing is diversity of thought. And you know, at Spin Master, you can start in shipping and you can, it's famous, you'll end up being a senior vice president at our company. Because we don't care about anything other than what your thoughts are and what you can bring to the table. And we like mixing it up and, and. Yeah, so that's, that's what I do. And I, and I, I think about myself as like a conductor. And I'm just trying to mash up people's thoughts to get the best idea out. And the one thing I like to say is like, is, and I love, I love bringing the introverts into the room.
55:53 Speaker 01 Because I find that they usually have incredible things to contribute. But they're just, they're not naturally built that way to speak up because they're more introverted. And so I like to just draw it out. And then it's like, wow, that's an incredible insight. Just looking for the insights, just looking for the insights. The other thing I will say is that, and, and this goes against all contemporary norms, is I will not end a meeting on time
56:23 Speaker 01 if the meeting is really good.
56:26 Speaker 01 I just won't, I won't end it.
56:29 Speaker 00 Do you end it early if it's really bad?
56:33 Speaker 01 Uh.
56:35 Speaker 00 Or do you try to save it?
56:38 Speaker 01 I try to save it. I think they're always good. There's always good things that come out. I will tell you, I have a thing that my team, I have standing meetings every single week, and so many times the team calls and says, "Oh, Renan, there's nothing to discuss this week. Why don't we cancel it?" And I never cancel a meeting, ever. I've never canceled a meeting, okay, in my whole career. Okay, because the best things come out of those meetings. There's always things to talk about. It's actually the meetings that you actually have less to talk about with less pressure that the good ideas start to come out.
57:12 Speaker 00 Yeah, it's easy to forget that part of a meeting is a human connection that matters. It's not just the ideas, and spending time with your colleagues has a value in and of itself. You say that business is an art, and I agree. Why do you think so few people see the art in the commercial world?
57:34 Speaker 01 First of all, I'm so happy you're bringing this up.
57:39 Speaker 01 I'm not exactly sure, but for some reason, business has got lots of negative connotations built in. It doesn't have the best reputation, and sometimes people do things that are untoward in the business world, and as a result, and it's also tied to money, and you know, there's lots of connotations around money. It gets conjured up for people.
58:02 Speaker 00 Yep.
58:02 Speaker 01 So, and also how people work with people and how they treat people, there's negative thoughts around that. So I think there's a lot of, there's all those elements, plus many more, that create that narrative for people. But the one thing that dawned on me, and I didn't realize it so much later on, is that if you bring things out into the world that have never been created before, and that could be a service, or that could be a restaurant, or a new recipe, or the way you're serving food, or a new type of gym, or like, they're all experiences. Experiences, or products, or you know, a new way to do a podcast, or a different type of financial service, they're all creative things that
58:46 Speaker 01 are new and different, and you're birthing them, and you're bringing them out into the world. And so what's the difference between that and painting a picture?
58:55 Speaker 01 Right, or writing a song. And the, they're all creative endeavors. The only difference is in businesses, it's more, instead of using paints, it's human beings coming together in a coordinated fashion to create something that's never been done before. And I think that's something extremely artistic.
59:14 Speaker 00 Yeah, in a way, it should be more romantic than painting or songwriting or fiction, but it, I think people who are successful in business who, you know, I spent most of my life as a, sitting in my office by myself. Every once in a while I'd come out and, you know, lecture at 30 to 300 kids, depending on the class. But most of my, I led a very solitary life. And it's only at the end of my career that I've had this opportunity to, to be president of this college, where I have colleagues. I had colleagues before, but we didn't really work together. Very rarely did I write a joint paper, and that's not really the kind of collaboration
59:56 Speaker 00 that happens in a business where you birth something really complex and you overcome obstacles. And, you know, I'm sure some of the best experiences you had, they didn't feel like at the time, but when those wings kept breaking off and then you solved it, it's exhilarating. And it's exhilarating to solve it on your own, but there's something special about solving it with the team because often, if it's done well, everybody contributes and something unique is created from that, that collaboration. For me, I think because people make money off of it, I think people confuse the money side with the motivation. It's true that people like making money, there's nothing wrong with it, but I think
1:00:40 Speaker 00 people assume, like Wordsworth, getting and spending, we lay waste our powers, that, that if you're motivated by the money... Which is absurd. That would be the only thing you cared about is if you didn't care that you made 250 million kids happy, or had given them a meaningful exposure to virtue, or the other thousand things that happened. But as if that's all you cared about was the money, the rest, it was just a vehicle. The quality of the movie was just a way to make the money. No one in business feels that way. I've never met anybody who actually feels that way. I think in popular culture, and in just our zeitgeist, there's an assumption
1:01:25 Speaker 00 that that's the motive. And motive matters a lot to human beings. I can make a good argument, I hope, for why outcomes are more important than motives, but that's not the way most of us feel most of the time. It's an intellectual argument. We have a visceral reaction to somebody who's trying to profit, even if the consequence is something wonderful. So I think the challenge for our culture, which we failed at, is reminding people of the transformative aspects of creative innovation that you're talking about, and how it makes people's lives better. But they focus on the money. And that's a loss.
1:02:07 Speaker 01 Yeah, no, I totally agree with you. I totally agree with you. And also, what people bring into the world, and how it helps people. And actually, there's so many small, medium-sized businesses that really drive, empower the economy. And that's people's lives. That's people's lives and how they live and how they interact.
1:02:38 Speaker 00 So you've done this for roughly three decades, 30 years, a little plus, and you've been phenomenally successful. You took a...
1:02:50 Speaker 00 Nylon with sawdust and grass and eventually, you know, you talk about Adrian Zacks, this woman that came out to change her life. That opened that door to Paw Patrol and everything that came after the Earth Buddy. And, you know, very successful. And you're the chair now, right? Of, is that correct?
1:03:09 Speaker 01 Yep, yep.
1:03:10 Speaker 00 So you're not quite as involved as you once were?
1:03:14 Speaker 01 Yeah, myself and my partner Anton, we stepped down from being co-CEOs about five years ago. So.
1:03:20 Speaker 00 So do you still get excited about toys? That's my closing question.
1:03:25 Speaker 01 Actually, I get more excited about the toys still than the business as a whole.
1:03:32 Speaker 01 The toys themselves, yeah, that never goes away. I'm stuck at seven forever. So it's like, when you see the magic, you know what I really, I tell you what I get the most excited about? I get the most excited about when I see a toy getting created in the company that's super magical, innovative, that I had nothing to do with.
1:03:54 Speaker 00 Yeah.
1:03:55 Speaker 01 Personally.
1:03:55 Speaker 00 That's beautiful.
1:03:56 Speaker 01 That is, that's, and it happened in 2016. We brought this product out called Hatchimals. And so was this, this is a great product. You would like this one, Russ. Okay. It's basically, it's a, it's a, a character in an egg. And when you hold the egg, it picks up on the heat of your hands. And it activates the, it's like a bird inside. It activates the bird and it starts pecking. Okay. To come out of the egg. And he turns 360 degrees in the egg and he pecks. And if you put the, if you put the egg down, he'll stop. And if you don't pick it up for three months, he, he's just like lying dormant. You pick it up again, he'll wake up and he'll start pecking. Eventually, he will crack his way out of the egg. And you pull him out and then you interact with him and he comes to life.
1:04:41 Speaker 01 That product went on to become really successful for our company and I had nothing to do with it. And I was co-CEO of the company back in the day and I was still involved in product. I had nothing to do with that product, zero. And to me, that's one of the greatest achievements. And the greatest achievement is when, when the culture we built in the company is, is being replicated by other people in the company.
1:05:04 Speaker 00 Sure.
1:05:04 Speaker 01 And that's the highest form of success. And if the company, God willing, could live beyond the founders, that's the highest form of success and continue to do what we're doing and tell great stories and great products. But I like to see them. That's like, like a proud grandparent, you know what I mean? Like, I like to see what gets created.
1:05:20 Speaker 00 You remind me, when you say you're, you're still a seven-year-old, it reminds me of another thing, we'll maybe we'll close with this. One of my favorite scenes in a movie is when Anton Ego, the food critic in Ratatouille, tastes the Ratatouille that comes out of the kitchen and he instantly becomes a little boy at his, his rural farmhouse mom's, dad's house and he's, it's nostalgia, is the, the fancy name for it. But it's interesting because if you'd asked me, what were the important toys of my childhood? I'm 71, so
1:06:04 Speaker 00 I grew up in a very different time than you did and certainly very different from a 10 or 12-year-old kid today. But I had a talking Bugs Bunny, which was like an unbelievable present that a family friend gave us. And you pulled a cord and he talked to you. I had, that same family friend bought me this. I'd love to see this. If I saw this, I would get, I'd probably cry like Ratatouille. You know, there's a unbelievable poignancy to encountering your childhood experiences or toys. But this was like a, I don't know how it worked. It was like a box with a light bulb inside and it, it cast shadows of airplanes on the ceiling. It was a very creative product for, you know, 1958.
1:06:50 Speaker 00 But that was the technology. There wasn't much, you know, talking Bugs Bunny was incredible.
1:06:54 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:06:55 Speaker 00 But when you mentioned yo-yos, which were a big part of my childhood and I get a romantic, I can't explain it, obviously. It's just part of the human experience. Just when you said the word yo-yo, I was part of that fad. It was, you know, Duncan and
1:07:11 Speaker 01 Yes, Duncan Yo-Yos, that's right.
1:07:13 Speaker 00 And they were different. It's like, again, it's a primitive form of what you've been doing since you got started. You take a yo-yo and then you change the color and then you make it see-through and then you add a flare to the sides. And then the string is a little different. Then you have people walk around and market it by doing tricks. And do you have a favorite toy from your childhood that you think about? Or maybe you still have it? I don't know. If I said to you, what's your favorite toy growing up? Do you have one?
1:07:41 Speaker 01 Listen, I had the Spider-Man stringer you put on your wrist and then out came the web.
1:07:49 Speaker 00 Yeah.
1:07:50 Speaker 01 Love playing with that. I actually had Green Army Man, believe it or not. So I was like, that was cool. Just placing them and just letting my imagination run wild. So I had a few. I didn't actually grow up with a lot of toys, which is quite ironic.
1:08:02 Speaker 00 Yeah.
1:08:03 Speaker 01 We just not have them in the house very much. But I did grow up in that time where it was, where it's just like your imagination could just run wild. And I think that's the most beautiful thing about toys of actually of any generation. It's just, and the funniest thing is that when you were talking about the pulling the string on the Buzz Bunny, like the same mechanics are still around. Like you still buy plush toys today, right? People still buy plush toys. We think plush toys. It's like, the play patterns are actually eternal. They're just the technologies just change.
1:08:37 Speaker 00 My guest today has been Renan Harari. His book is No Experience Necessary. Renan, thanks for being part of Econ Talk.
1:08:45 Speaker 01 Thanks, Russ. Appreciate it.
1:08:52 Speaker 00 This is Econ Talk, part of the Library of Economics and Liberty. For more Econ Talk, go to EconTalk.org, where you can also comment on today's podcast and find links and readings related to today's conversation. The sound engineer for Econ Talk is Rich Goyette. I'm your host, Russ Roberts. Thanks for listening. Talk to you on Monday.
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