Hello and welcome to Money Talks, special extra podcast from Slate Money, where we chat with

brilliant and interesting people. I'm Emily Peck. I'm a writer at Axios and co-host of Slate Money,

and I'm here today with Tarpley Hit, the author of the amazing new book, Barbie Land, the unauthorized history. It's everything that

the Barbie movie wasn't. There is more drama, I'd say, there's backstabbing, there's corporate

espionage, there's crime. This book has everything, Michael Milken is in the book. It's insane.

Tarpley. Welcome. Thank you so much for having me.

I'm so excited. Before we kind of dive in, maybe I'll just ask you why Barbie? Why Barbie? Amazing

question. I've asked myself that a lot of times. But basically it started when I got wind of the

Barbie movie happening.

And I was someone who never really had much of an emotional attachment to Barbie, but I did

have this sort of enduring obsession with dolls and sort of this impulse to make these little

replicas of ourselves and sometimes worship them, sometimes give them to kids.

Usually a bit of both.

A couple years ago, I wrote about these women who make reborn dolls.

They're super expensive, hyper-realistic baby dolls.

They're often used in, like, grief therapy.

And they're so realistic that they demand certain behavioral norms.

So, like, if you leave one in a hot car, someone might call the police.

But the women who make these were kind of wicked and would, you know, do all these things where they brought them out without following the rules and things of that nature.

So I was kind of obsessed with the polarized emotions that these dolls inspired, which was like on the one hand, some of the people who bought them formed real kind of attachments, like the way now people are becoming too obsessed with their AI chatbot girlfriends.

And on the other hand, people who don't have these relationships with them are sort of disgusted.

And when it seemed obvious that Barbie was going to be having a new moment, I was thinking like, well, what captures that polarized reaction more than this one doll,

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