Think back to the toy or game that defined your childhood. Answers may vary depending on when you were born.

[Vintage toy commercial montage]

But for Chris Cocks, his game, the one that shaped him, was Dungeons & Dragons.

It's never too late to get into a dungeon and slay a dragon, so maybe by the end of the interview, we'll convince you to come roll some dice and make some silly voices with your friends.

There are plenty of people out there who, like Chris, grew up playing and aged into a hardcore fandom. But unlike them, Chris is having to make tough decisions about the brand he loves and leads. Just a few weeks ago, Hasbro announced layoffs, cutting about 3% of its workforce, as it navigates the starts and stops of the Trump tariffs. It's a lot, but he looks at it this way.

The company was effectively founded in 1860 by Milton Bradley. That was like kind of our earliest predecessor company. So he had to deal with a little thing called the Civil War. So I feel like I'm in at least some historical company because I don't think this is anywhere near the level of historical issues that they had to contend with.

Today, I'm talking to the CEO of one of America's biggest toy and gaming companies about how trade wars and culture wars are influencing the way Hasbro does business. I'm Audie Cornish, and this is The Assignment.

So I have to just begin this with some honesty and I hope you don't mind.

Sure.

I do not understand Dungeons & Dragons. I feel like it's a club that I was not invited to and then later couldn't get into, but I understand this was your gateway drug into this world of play. Well, I heard it was Candyland, but Dungeons & Dragons sounds more intense, so I'm starting there in terms of leadership. Tell me about how you got introduced to the game.

Well, first off, Audie, thanks for having me.

Yeah.

I really appreciate being here.

Thanks for talking with me even as I make that admission.

Yeah, I would describe D&D as the thing that really unleashed my imagination as a kid. When I was like 9 or 10, I'd test pretty well when I would go into classes for school, but I got horrible grades. I never did an assignment. I was kind of all over the place. I think I discovered it at a buddy's house, and I discovered this whole new world that I didn't know existed where there were stories and there were characters and there rules that allowed you to structure your imagination. And it just unlocked something for me. It helped to take like all these discombobulated thoughts and all this kind of raw energy. And you know, I was a pretty creative kid and direct it.

This is a communal game, and it is a storytelling game, which as an audio person, I'm very interested in. And there's something about it that it's like very heavily about community.

Oh, absolutely. I think D&D at the core of it, it's about the friends that gather around the table. And then when you think broader, it' about a passion that people have for a game, a way of socializing, and a set of stories and lore that people fall in love with over the course of a life. And so D& D started when I was a little kid. I'm Gen X. You know, we kind of miss the millennials. I think Pokemon really knocked it out of the park with them.

Yeah.

'But we brought it back up with the Gen X kids, Gen Z. And now there's this multi-polar set of users for D&D who are equally passionate about it. And it's like this passing of the baton or the passing of a torch of gameplay. And we see that for DND, we see it with Magic the Gathering, another big game we have. We see it Monopoly, we see with all of our board games.

I was going to say board games kind of, I feel like had a resurgence during the pandemic. I know I introduced my kids to Candyland. Is that Hasbro?

Oh, for sure. Yeah. Yeah, chances are you'll name a board game and I'll say, yeah, it's Hasbro.

Parcheesy. My husband and I play Boggle, which is way harder than it seems. It just feels like one of the things that strikes me as we enter this conversation, maybe because we're both Gen X, is like adults are the market for games now. Like I feel like when I talk about D&D in a way, I'm talking about other adults and fandoms. And I was actually pretty shocked to learn that like a good amount of Hasbro revenue comes from people over the age of 13.

Yeah, yeah, I think like last count it was over 60% trending to over 65% of our business is over 13. But you know, I would argue that the entire business of play, whether it's video games, mobile games, collectibles, toys, board games, the the market is moving to be an adult oriented market as opposed to a kid oriented market. Kids are still important. You create a first handshake with them, you know starting in like preschool. But increasingly, the median ages of the people who play are aging up, like people aren't putting down their playthings when they become teenagers. They're just kind of doubling down on them.

'And then I heard the term kid-ult, is that a thing or is that a business press thing?

That's a business press thing that's trying to become a thing that I hope doesn't become a thing. I hope we just call it people.

But who are they?

Basically everyone plays.

What does your data tell us about who it is, who we're talking about? Because I just said consumers over the age of 13. That's massive. So who are we really talking about and are they playing, collecting, video gaming? Like what does the kidult like to do?

'I think a kiddult defines a person who values play in their life. And there's a whole bunch of different segmentations about how they value play. They might be kind of more of a casual kind of player and they play board games with their friends. It's a way to socialize and bring people together, connect with their family members. And then it all goes all the way through to people who kind of define an important part of themselves through their fandom. And that might be like a very passionate D&D player. You see it like at Comic-Cons around the world where people dress up as their favorite character, whether it's Iron Man or Thor or a Jedi. And it's kind of everyone in between. And I think the magic of play and the magic the Kid-Alt is that there's so many others of you around you. That wanna connect and wanna rekindle that kind of playful spirit they had in their youth.

I want to talk about the flip side of that because in a way brands ask us to identify with them and then share the joy of that identity with people. But what that means is people bring all of their values and all their issues to the conversation about that brand. And just an example, so the D&D player's handbook removes some like racial traits, introduce some new inclusivity stuff in 2025. And like, there's a backlash, right? And I see people talking about it, people calling it woke overreach. Now for someone like me who's always felt like, why would I play this game? It seems like not for me, based on some of this stuff. I was like, why not? Why such a big deal? So how do you, again, as a player and as someone who just, you're involved in these kinds of shifts. What are you looking at when people respond to things politically? It's woke, it's a problem, they're doing something to us, the fans.

Well, I don't know that it's a satisfactory answer because it's art as much as it is science. So to me, opening up the game to be more representative of people, to reply to legitimate feedback about things that we might've published over the last 50 years of the game where society has changed quite a bit and expectations have changed quite bit, that makes a ton of sense for us to do. Likewise, certain people want to play the game in a certain way because they don't like the way that we've defined something. They have the agency to do that. And in fact, increasingly our online tools allow them to do and pick what they want. And so like I would say the changes that we made to the D&D player's handbook, that's been a net good.

And yet you have someone like Elon Musk out there, you know, wondering if Hasbro is for sale in response to people claiming that it's kind of pushing a woke ideology. And, you know, the reason why I'm dwelling on this is because it feels like in the aftermath of the 2020, you know, racial reckoning and the backlash to that, companies can't escape politics. And I'm wondering, how you are thinking about it, because you haven't been able to escape it either, right?

Yeah, I mean, that's always going to happen once in a while. I mean it's not something that you usually seek out. But again, I just got to go back to first principle, which is we want to open up our games and our brands to the widest assortment of people possible, regardless of where they are in the political spectrum, regardless of where they live in the world, regardless of what their backgrounds are or what they identify as.

We're gonna take a quick break. When we come back, toy prices are rising. I'll talk to Chris about how tariffs could change the state of play for all of us.

So a few months ago, President Trump said, look, maybe the kids are gonna have two dolls instead of 30 dolls. Maybe those two dolls are gonna cost a couple bucks more than they would normally. Should they?

Well, I think we're with the toy association in the U.S. And across the world that toys should be tariff free. Toys aren't a strategic kind of industry. They don't dictate national security, but they're an important industry. They dictate joy and wellbeing for people of all ages, but most notably kids. And it also tends to be a fairly low margin industry. Like if you look at the toy industry in the US, I think there's about 280,000 people that are employed in the industry writ large. But the vast, vast majority of them, like 95% of firms that make toys are basically mom and pop shops. They're like five to 10 people. They're probably working off of an operating margin of, call it 8 to 10%. So it's relatively thin margins. Relatively small operations. And so there isn't a lot of capacity for an industry like that to absorb even a 10 or 20% tariff and 30% on a place like China, where the majority of that industry sources is volume is going to be a challenge.

I think I was reading that toy prices have already jumped like 2%, 2.2% from by May 2025. Has Hasbro had to raise prices or have you had to sit around a boardroom and talk about what raising prices would look like?

I often have to sit around a boardroom, but not necessarily about tariffs. That's just part of the job. We've talked about tariffs a lot. We've had to do a lot of kind of contingency planning on it. We have changed where we source volumes. You know, China is still a big market for us in terms of where we produce. You know, we've moved things around. We've enhanced how much production we've done in the US for like board games in East Long Meadow, Massachusetts. We've increased production in places like Vietnam and Turkey and India. And to date, we haven't raised any prices related to tariffs. You know the industry might've from a fairly modest basis so far. I would expect if prices are going to be raised across the industry, the consumer will probably start to see them in the August through October timeframe, just based off of the production timelines associated with toys, because usually it takes somewhere between three to five months between an order to be placed and a toy to be put on shelf.

The president has said, look, my message to every business in the world is very simple. Come make your product in America and we'll give you among the lowest taxes of any nation on earth. But if you don't make your products in America, you will have to pay a tariff. So what is an example of like making a shift because you see the writing on the wall, because of this administration's push to reorient the business community.

'Well, I think the challenge with near-shoring a large percentage of the toy industry, thinking prior-.

And to translate, when you say nearshoring, you mean the challenge of bringing this manufacturing factories back to the US.

The challenge with bringing back manufacturing for toys back to the US is when you look at toy manufacturing in China or Southeast Asia, it's been an industry that's developed over the last 30 or 40 years and it's got all of kind of the ancillary supply chain and component makers associated with it. It's got a workforce that's been trained over decades. On the finer points of making toys. And because toys tend to be pretty low volume and high turn versus other manufacturing industries, it tends to still be a lot of human touches on a toy, particularly for things like dolls or action figures where you have to do fine paint jobs on the product.

Those aren't like robots and lasers yet?

Yeah, so you can but you know, keep in mind the toy you see on shelf this holiday is probably gone by next holiday. So like the fixed costs of automation are difficult to amortize for a product over time. And that's just a challenge with the industry. So, you know, a typical toy that's manufactured in Asia. Like labor is 30 to 40% of the cost. A typical toy, if you took that same toy with the same process to manufacture it in the US, just given US labor costs, that toy would be 80 to 90% the cost would be labor. And so it would be somewhere in the neighborhood of 50 to 60% more expensive to produce here.

Can you tell me what that means in mom money?

Yeah. So like if you buy an action figure for, or a doll for $10, you know, you would have to charge 15 to $18 just to maintain the same absolute profit dollars for the company, which isn't that high to begin with. So in order to bring things back to the U S you would have to figure out how to automate it in a significant way. And that's not impossible. It's just challenging. And then you would have to bring back all that ancillary supplier infrastructure that exists in Southeast Asia and the U S and that's probably a five to 10 year endeavor.

So you're bringing the production, but you're also bringing all the other thing, all the other elements that are also in those countries.

And that's not unique to toys. That's, yeah, that's why I'm asking a lot of electronics, everything. It's just what happens inside of the toy industry. So, you know, I, I'm not a naysayer that, um, toy production can come back to the U S I just think it will take quite a bit of time and we'll have to think through, we'll to invent some breakthrough means to be able to lower the costs of it. And so, like, you know, what could be some examples of that? Well, Automation is probably the easiest thing to think through. Something we're looking at is 3D printing. And that could be revolutionary, not just for toys, but for a whole host of industries and basically change the way we think about manufacturing. And that's something we're look into and investing. But again, that's at least two to three years before you'd see it on a smaller scale and probably five to 10 years, Assuming. Everything breaks the way you need it to break before it really becomes a mass thing.

So what would you like to see in this economic environment? I mean, we've got people criticizing the Fed. We've got a lot of questions being raised. We've gotta lot of countries reaching out to the White House. There's lots of people with questions here. What are yours?

'Oh, gosh, I really try to stay out of politics. And you know, what a qu-

Well, I said questions, so what would you, when you sit down and you're like, okay, what do we have to be thinking about? What's on your list?

'Well, I sure think we're thinking about, hey, what are the final tariff rates going to be in what countries? You know, that's just a basic planning assumption. I think we are thinking about hey, what's going to the impact of tariffs in terms of the macro? How is it going to affect prices for consumers? How will that affect their share of wallet? How will it affect employment rates in the U.S. And overseas? Um, I also think we're thinking through, you know, just the fundamentals of partnership, you now in a world where the U S is changing its policies and we have partners across the world. And, you, I recognize we're an American company, but we're an American with global interests with a thousand plus partners across the world from manufacturing partners to fellow toy companies, to licensing partners, you how do we maintain? Consistency and help them be able to plan better and rely on us, despite, you know, whatever kind of gyrations might happen geopolitically or macroeconomically. We've been around for a while. We take a long-term view of things. And so our general reaction is be agile, but don't overreact, partner and be constant because you know If you do something negative or you overreact too much and you impact a relationship, that's gonna be there still five years from now when things kind of settle out into either the old normal or a new normal. And we highly value those.

Are there any lessons from your youth of gameplay that you've taken into this job today that you recognize? And I'm not saying that's just like, maybe there's some dungeon master speak that comes out or jokes or is there something you learned from those experiences that you find help you in these moments?

I think probably three things pop to mind immediately. The first is understand the rules and understand both the anticipated consequences of the rule set, as well as the unanticipated consequences. Really kind of game theory your way through a decision and think about it multiple moves ahead, either in the campaign or on the board. I think that's the essence of good strategic thinking. I think the second one Less comes from my gaming background and more from my sports background. My high school football coach was a very colorful fella named Howard Bollinger. And I won't use the explicatives he laced into this one, but he basically would tell us, you're either getting better or you're getting worse because you're never staying the same. And so, you know, that's kind of a truism, which is how are we pushing the ball forward? How are we building resiliency in the organization? How are we building agility across how we work? And then the last thing is, and this is really important for me, remember the industry that you're in and remember what you do. You bring joy to people's lives. And sometimes you're gonna read a tough tweet. Sometimes you're going to hear a policy that breaks the wrong way for you, at least in the short term. But at the end of the day, kind of, you know, remember that. You put in a smile on a kid's face, or you're bringing two fans together and they're playing a game and having good fun. And try to remind everyone of that because I think it helps people get through when you have tough times or a little bit of friction.

Do you think the kid that you were would be shocked at where you're sitting today?

I think he'd be psyched. He'd especially be sight. I don't know. I was about to say, like, behind him, you'd be like, what? With that GI Joe aircraft carrier that his parents refuse to give them. Thanks, mom and dad. And then the Defiant Space Vehicle, the space shuttle behind me. I have a huge GI Joe fan. So

I was too because I watched the cartoon.

Yeah

Hasbro CEO Chris Cox. I wanna thank you so much for listening. We'll be back on Thursday with a new episode.