Dr. Gwynette: Hello and welcome to the Autism News NetWORK. And we are joined today by a very special guest Crazy Aaron of Crazy Aaron’s Thinking Putty. He is a world’s famous laboratory master who has created just toys that are adored around the world. We’re so excited that he’s here. So without further due, I want to say hello to Aaron. Hi Crazy Aaron.

Crazy Aaron: Hey, how you doing everybody? Thanks for having me.

Zephyr Blaze: How did you get started doing what you do?

Crazy Aaron: So about 22 years ago, I finished college and I graduated with a degree in computer science and I started working full time as a software engineer. And that meant sitting at a desk all day, in an office, without too many windows and watching the screen and waiting for things to upload and waiting for code to compile. And I was just bored. I was very fidgety.

And so I had lots of different sort of toys that I had brought to my desk. Look, I forgot one of these little finger puzzles here and other things and the thing that spent most of my time was playing with putty. And it would have stopped there except for all of my co-workers were secretly stealing pieces of my putty to play with their own putty. And that’s what got it into my head that maybe there was something here and I liked making people happy. And so I learned how to make it so that I could sell it to my friends. And it went from there.

Kristina: Why is it that you like with working with individuals with autism?

Crazy Aaron: In some ways, it’s a question. What is it like working with people, right? It’s challenging. It’s fun. It’s rewarding. It’s mind expanding.

It’s all of the things I feel like there’s lots of ways to categorize people and put them into different groups. But the reality is we are all very different and unique. And I say that sometimes individuals… Because we don’t work only with individuals with autism, but all kinds of special needs. Whether they are physical disabilities or other kinds of their intellectual disabilities or autistic individuals. And I think that sometimes working with such a broad range of humanity reinforces not only are we special, but it’s like double true. If you think you’ve figured out how unique and special an individual is probably twice as much. So I think it’s humbling. I think it is a reminder that we all require each other. Teamwork makes the dream work. And that’s sort of our motto.

Kristina: Cool.