#947- The Furby Conspiracy | Banned By The NSA For Being A Spy Device?

Oh bed of that air, no bed of Hello, and welcome to the show. This is the Cult of Conspiracy and my name is Jonathan, I'm Jacob and Jacob we're going to be talking about something very off the wall today, sir.

Aren't we We are. We're gonna take a little blast of the past here.

And before I even begin, I do want to apologize about my scratchy voice, still recovering from a weekend of screaming into Bautry. So just bury with me on the scratchy voice and all the things. So while I was out and about, going back and forth between Philly and d C. And on the drive home, you know, we were kind of chit chatting about toys from the past and some of the ones that are very remnant of

That was a whole thing. But you know that wasn't the craziest thing. You remember the Ferbie.

Do you know, Jonathan, Oh yeah, dude, Ferbi's were awesome. What was it like ninety nine, two thousand, somewhere in there.

Yeah, well, they originally came out in ninety eight.

They didn't really take off till ninety nine, and then by the early two thousands they were the hottest toy. That's what kids were losing their shit over in the early or late nineties.

Early two thousands.

Always reminded me of a gremlin, those fucking things.

Yes, yes, agreed. And I didn't know that they were so popular that they were even mentioned within President Bill Clinton's impeachment hearings.

Why did they get a nod during that time? It doesn't fucking matter. The nineties were a wild wasteland when it comes to toys and capitalism and consumerism and all the ads in your face at all time. We're actually gonna be watching some of the old Ferbie commercials. Now, it's gonna take you back. But yeah, just wild things, right.

But nostalgia with the nineties, dude, it really is. I mean, in the nineties anyway, for us.

It's nostalgia.

But even if you talk to our parents' generation, who were adults raising children in the nineties, they have their own form of nostalgia when it comes to the nineties. They remember, It's like we were as weird as that sounds. We were living in the same era but in different vanaged points. But there were certain keynotes that still resonate regardless of what generation you found yoursel if you were

When you first got the toy, you would start to hear it speak.

In like a baby talk for lack of better words, little sounds and little things that didn't make sense, like a Pokemon. But after so long, it would start answering you in English and it would start responding to you

Were these things made in China?

No dot, Yeah, kinda kind of, but they were made from Hasbro, which is an American toy company.

But we're gonna get into all of it. We're gonna get into all of it, good cult members today on the cult conspiracy. We are going to be taking a dive into the Ferbies. Where did they come from, how did they get so popular, what was all the craze about? And then how and why did they end up going on the blacklist for multiple government buildings. Was there any kernel of truth to it? Was it all a hoax? Did the government just not understand what they were talking about?

To be Ferby.

Makes sense.

An interesting little tidbit. But yeah, we're going to be getting into all of it today.

I got some clips, I got some commercials, I got some newscasts, I got some articles.

We're going to be talking about it all.

And if you would like to see what we're talking about today rather than just hear about it, Jonathan, where can they.

Go Patreon dot com slash Cult of Conspiracy podcast. That link is down the show notes below. If if you want to be able to get the shows days in advance, you want to be able to see all of the video content. We got kicked off of YouTube years ago. When we're not playing that fucking pony game anymore. We are all for a free speech.

And saying whatever is on our mind.

We're not trying to talk about grape and unalived.

Okay.

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I mean it all.

It started even with us. I mean, I felt very weird even saying my name over the mic. I was like, dude, saying my name feels weird.

You ever felt that?

For the longest time, I hated the sound of my own voice on the mic. It took me a while to get used to it.

Yeah, yeah, because we try not to be self centered. There's a little bit of a pulling back of that. But either way, look, if you enjoy these shows, we appreciate all the help that we can get.

We do this full time, and uh, we appreciate you and love you indeed. So now let's start off with a little blast in the past. Let's talk some commercials. This was on your television back when that was still a thing people watched rather than all the apps on your rokup or fire sticks.

Right, so now let's go back we're talking.

Nineteen ninety eight, and let's watch some of these Ferbie commercials. And this actually is a cool video. We're not gonna watch the entire thing.

We're gonna stop somewhere around like eight twenty twelve, something like that, because the Ferbies took on some new iterations in the twenty teens that, to be honest with you, they never really caught the same lightning in a jar factor that they did from the late nineties early two thousands. I will even give you into the late two thousands, but it's nice.

It just reminds me of Pokemon, Like as soon as they started making seventh, eighth, ninth, generation of all these new Pokemon.

I don't know who the fuck they are.

I know the the original ones and maybe even the second generation some of those, But you start, what is there like fucking twenty thousand different Pokemon? Now I can't keep up with all that shit.

I can't remember that dog, I just can't. But yes, to that point, the nineties were a wild time the toy industry.

Plus the amount of technology that was readily available right now. I don't just mean computer systems. I mean the fact that the Tamagatchi was a thing. Yeah, right again. And that's also that was the inspiration behind the Ferbie. So the two creators, and we're gonna learn more about them later, they went to a big toy convention. One of them was a navy veteran, the other one had a little

They they were idea guys, you know, which is cool.

They go to a toy convention and they saw the Tamagatchi, which later the Giga pet, which was the American knockoff version, which wasn't as good but was like a third the cost. But neither here nor there. They saw the Tamagatchi and they thought this was the greatest toy to ever be invented. Ever, keep in mind, the beanie Baby was hot at that time.

An interactive toy that you have to play with in order to make it work, plus soft and lovable that you want to snuggle up with. Therefore, the birth of the ferbie, it was incredible.

Let's get weird, dude.

And I will say, like even like my daughter, you know, she's a little too old for it now, but whenever she was more youthful, she was like crazy about the You ever seen those baby alives?

Oh yeah, like you.

Have to change their diapers and feed them and stuff like that. I feel like a lot of those kind of toys really stem from the Tamagatchi and the furbie and you know, taking care and interacting with you know what I mean, like with your toy.

Yeah.

I think there's a lot to be said for that, honestly, And because parents loved it, because it was a pet that you didn't have to actually clean up after, or actually spend money on to feed, or bring it to the vet or any of these things. They were thinking Oh, it's gonna teach my kid responsibility. It's gonna do this,

Oh, sign me up. The Ferbie was seen as almost that, so they saw it as an inherent good thing. But the Ferbie, the more you interacted with it, the more things it would learn. And for the late nineties that was unheard of. There was no toy that was going to be learning based off of how much you interacted with it. It came with I think it was like twelve

It was like a whole lot of languages, and the more you talk to it, the more it would pick up on whatever language you were speaking to it, and it would start responding to you in your language.

Imagine that was bilingual.

You know, you got a little a little Portuguese, a little English going on in there.

Oh yeah, oh yeah. So that's the thing. Was it actually learning from us? And if that's the case, could this be the first reference to a at home AI model? And is that possibly the reason why the NSA and the Pentagon in the Navy Yard and all these government buildings banned it from their property.

We're gonna talk about it all. So let's go back and watch get a nostalgic with us good cult members, and remember what the Furby was when it first came out. These are commercials from nineteen ninety eight.

What's Ferby? The first Geeka peg? He teaches to say her name, Play games.

I Love You.

You, par and Game Mine.

I should also mention it was very crazy how the Ferbies could interact with each other. You remember seeing that if you got two Ferbies facing each other, they would start speaking Furbish to each other. That little thing on their forehead was actually like an infrared layer that would pick up on each other and they would start communicating, which some would say, yeah, that was just it was like a mode that was just the thing to make you think, Wow, it's so cool, and that's all it was.

Who knows makes sense.

Those things are fucking creepy, though, dude, I never wanted one of those things.

Oh dude, I say, I never owned one, but a lot of my neighbors did. A lot of my homies did. One of my cousins did. And it was so annoying because it would just randomly start singing and talking and ship in the middle of the night. The only way to make it shut up was either a rip the batteries out of it or b throw like a beanie over the entire thing, or throw a pillow over it. Because it could pick up on motion, it could pick

Of course there is. Yeah, it makes sense.

All right, Let's keep watching these commercials. Some of them get wild.

And can you just imagine waking up in the middle of the night and that thing is like crawling towards you see.

So it didn't walk, thankfully, but it would rock back and forth and shit, and it would dance his little ears of move and all of that.

But again, the more you play with it, the more it does.

That was the whole big thing.

The more you talk to it, the more you play with it, the more it learns, and the more interactive it was.

It was marketed as not just a toy. It was marketed as a friend, as a pet that you didn't have to actually feed, that would never die. That all it was.

It was seen as just this marvel of technology meets entertainment and meets children's market.

It was wild times, brother. So that was ninety eight when it first came out. Now, let's watch some of these commercials from nineteen ninety nine about the.

Ferby Let's play Ruby says.

Plays with you each other took on.

Ferby each sold separately.

Battery's not included.

Ak At Coco.

That very speaks Furbish and.

English too, so there was a Furbish to English dictionary, and you would have to learn what some of these phrases were.

Now.

For instance, there was one phrase that was do o lo ot or something like that, and it was taken basically as an amalgamation of Mandarin and Hebrew and Italian and all of.

These things, basically meaning big light up, which is what it would say whenever the sun would come up.

Dude, how about like the Ferbie rate there got the little laser or the little monitoring device Rate on his third eye. Yep, it's like, well, it's it's literally the all seeing eye exactly.

And then you could look inside of that and see the little infrared.

Some might said it was a camera, some said it was a you know, motion detector. Some said it was a like a photo photo. I basically could tell if the room had the lights turned on or something like that. There's sources to say all of these things and so much more. But later, as a matter of fact, I have a video where these people are breaking apart a Ferbi and you get to see the internals to see what it actually has on the inside.

But it's very cool, which is interesting too because even whenever its eyes are closed, they can still see, you know what I'm saying, Like, there is no putt in that thing to sleep.

That third eyes always all the way open.

There was no off switch. There was no off switch to these ferbies.

So to your point, yes, just because the eyes are closed and it hasn't had any interaction in a couple of years, as soon as the lights would come on in front of it, it would open its eyes. Ferby, you like, do the whole thing. There's actually a report which we're gonna get into later. This one chick claims that a Ferbie almost killed her boyfriend.

How did this happen?

You might ask this one time shot of ferbicide, if you will.

Basically, this Ferbi was.

Left in a storage shed, mini warehouse, whatever the case was. Homeboy goes in and starts getting through some of his old boxes stuff, puts it in his car whatever. He's on the drive home and the Ferbie behind him starts loudly screaming and like making noises, which again he hadn't seen this thing in years, well because it was an original Ferbi and there's no off switch. If there's enough juice in the batteries, as soon as that things seeds light or motion, it.

Will kick back on. And it scared the shit out of him so bad he almost ran off the road and hit a tree. He didn't. He survived, But yeah, that's a case anyway. Wild things. But yeah, the Furbish to English dictionary that you had there, there's also websites dedicated to this day of Furbish to whatever language translations. It's pretty hilarious. Fandoms go hard, you.

Know, they do, they do.

Yeah, And the fact that like people still know what a Furby is because I think they're still making them, aren't.

They They are, I should get the caveat. These things are weird. It's called the long Ferby. Think of a body pillow that's like the size of your thigh that has a Ferby face on it. But the rest of it is just they keep trying to make it weirder and weirder. They also came out with the Ferbi minies, the Ferbie Babies Shelby, which is like a little crab like Ferby. They kept trying to do more iterations to

It was done.

But they still sold like ninety million Furbies within the first two years of them existing in America. Keep in mind, there's only three hundred and sixty million Americans at this time, so pretty much a third of all Americans bought one of these bitches.

I imagine there were collections going on for sure, just like the Beanie babies and whatnot.

Oh yes, oh yes.

And as a matter of fact, some people got very creative with what they did with those Ferbies after the fact. One guy even made a organ out of like a pipe organ.

We're gonna watch him play that in a bit.

But anyway, dude here, I don't know if you heard, and this has nothing to do with the Ferby. Did you hear that the penny has been discontinued?

Just talked about that on the Cage and Night. Dude, So Philadelphia, where I just was. We even passed by the Philadelphia Mint. I didn't We didn't try to go inside or anything.

We were on the road.

And you know that I'm a penny collector, and like, I love this entire thing.

The pe on a.

Penny or on any of your coinage means Philadelphia. There's three main mints in the United States, Philadelphia, Denver, and San Francisco. And now they are doing away with the penny because a it costs like ten times the amount to make, and b they're just doing away with that small unit of currency, which, to be fair, the Euro has done that for years and years. There's no such thing as a Euro percentage coin. That is, at the

Right. On the other hand, my collection's value is about to fuck in skyrocket, So it's a bittersweet.

And the thing is is that you know you're still going to be able to use them, they're just not making them anymore. So I think they said that there's somewhere around like four hundred and fifty billion pennies out in circulation or something like that right now. And to be honest, most people just throw away pennies nowadays, you know, like because they're so literally valueless. But so the penny,

The nickel, look at what the overhead is to make a nickel. There was one of them that was like ten times the amount. Meanwhile, the dime is like like six cents to make a dime. So they're actually making money while making money. But the nickel and the penny were like, oh it was it was costing too much.

The nickel costs fourteen cents.

To make excuse me, Yeah, am here three times the amount that's definitely coming up then, yeah, I mean maybe, or they'll just start using cheaper materials or remodeling what the nickel is because it's a thicker coin, right, so if you were to make that smaller in diameter and less thick, if you would need less materials it, you know, we'll see how you go.

Just bring back the fifty cent piece, make that a more common thing.

I agree, I agree, but I mean even still, how many people are carrying around loose change these days?

Everything's digital?

Yeah? A good point.

Anyway, all right, so back to the Ferby. Let's continue may take come.

Crazy Ferby each sold separately.

Battery's not included.

Again, Oh this was cool. This is when they came out with their gizmo from uh from Grimlins uh model of the Ferbie because a lot of people thought it was a Grimlins thing. It was never even intended to look like that.

So then they realized, look, why don't we just lean into this and make a run of gizmo Ferbi's And this was the commercial to promote that product.

Check this out?

What is this?

So that's my Ferbie talking to.

Grandpa?

Thank you?

He's a wise guy.

But remember, I know, I know, he's bright light.

Never feed him after midnight.

Gizmo, that'll be your best friend.

Grimlins Interactive gizmo Ferbi sold separately, batteries not included. Interactive gizmo.

That's actually a cool idea.

Oh, I think it's a great marketing idea. If nothing else, lean into it. They're already saying that it looks like a Grimlin, So why not make a little little little merger happen and make some more doll hairs out of it.

I'm down literal doll hairs.

Yeah right, anyway, let's keep going. Bro, Look at the computer monitor on that office desk.

That thing is massive. The nineties were just wild, dude.

In those computers were the ship I believe. Isn't that the the old Mac? The old Max were made that way?

Yeah? The Mac and that's an old Yeah. I went to Mac back then.

It was a Macintosh. Yeah yeah, yeah.

You've ever seen the Zoolander. That's the one where he like the files are in the computer. It was this ma massive screen he like threw down to break it apart.

Uh no, actually I've never seen Zoolander.

Oh fuck, I don't even know what we're doing here. Bro, it's a ridiculous movie. But like that's the point. But yeah, it's just look at all the colors, the people, what they're wearing and ship. The nineties were just they were an era.

It's it's those computers always reminded me of the Game Boy color, because you know the Game Boy color. Some of them would be like that see through kind of plastic.

Yeah, dude, yes, indeed, all right, let's keep going.

Plus stuff the office a quiet slumber party more because each one talks to another one. All new Ferbies each sold separately. Batteries not included.

That's that bullshit. Whenever the batteries aren't included, I'm like, dude, just throw in.

Some dollar batn't you can't take the money from the battery manufacturers, dude. Dura Cel even had a whole commercial with Ferbies next to it talk about how they keep going and going makes sense.

Yeah, probably Energizer too, with the Energizer bunny. That that would actually make more sense.

Yeah, I don't know what that was about. The Dura Cell commercial. It was like a cartoon bunny. It wasn't the Energizer bunny, but that was also back when they had their own ad wars going on.

But anyway, all right.

So now we're skipping ahead to two thousand to watch some of these Ferby commercials.

Check this shit out.

Is it?

Is it a boy?

Congratulations baby, Serby baby whoop. They're more talking it good farm mark me love, more surprising, I got more unpredictable, more amazing.

Nasty, blind line, long line, next amazing generation is born new Ferby babies.

You never know what they'll say. You still, secondly, that is not what gooded.

So you could see here that the the traverse of time. And also some of these commercials were so fucking cheddar cheesy it's actually kind of impressive in its own weird way. But yeah, yeah, so that was when the Ferby Babies came out in the year two thousand.

Yeah.

I was looking up because I was like, all right, I have an idea about where, like what channel these commercials were airing on normally the network, Yeah, normally, you know, you would have Disney. Disney only usually played their own shit, right, like their own commercials and stuff.

I remember when they first played it was like a Caprice Son commercial that was on Disney, but it was like super Disney esque and it said brought to you by Caprice at the very end, and they moved on, but to your yeah, one hundred percent Disney only on the play commercials that promoted.

Disney shit on the Disney channel. That was it.

I mean, look, if you can make your money that way, then go right ahead, you know. But yeah, I looked it up.

Ferbie commercials originally aired on channels like Nickelodeon and in specific regions, they were also shown on local channels such as y TV and in Canadia in Canadia in Canada and various channels in the UK, Australia and Spain. So it says the Ferbie commercials in particular were likely broadcast in these regions around two thousand and six.

There we go, two thousand and six.

So talking about that, here's some commercials from two thousand and five.

Hey, hey, yeah, shoot me day tell me joke, not heyvy, what sun me?

No miss with new Ferbie.

No, you never know what's gonna happen. You just gotta.

Say why I love you.

Fer me He sold separately. Batteries not included. You can find more fun at haf dot com. That's compared first.

So you can see also they stop being so damn creepy. They smaller, They made the eyes a little smaller.

They made the eyes a little smaller. The mallets weren't like beaks. They were a rubber and they kind of give a little grin or a little frown either way. They had a little bit more expressive faces at this time, and they got a little different on the sizes. The ears were at a different pitch. They started to kind of shift it a bit to better suit the market.

Sod Whenever you're watching these, does it like make you feel like you're a kid again, and looking at it through those that lens.

You get the nostalgia vibe? You absolutely do. Yes. Indeed, let's keep going. Okay, now we're jumping to twenty twelve, which is.

Where introducing Ferby from.

This is where it starts to get a little wild, And this is where I think, really and truly they were going out of their way to try to bring in as much of that lightning in a bottle as they could from the original Ferby twenty twelve, they now had an app that you could use to interact with your Ferbi. It had digital eyes and the whole thing. But again, this is where they really started to taper off. I honestly don't even know any human being that bought these.

It has bro Ferby has a mind of its own, and you shape its personality by the way you play. There are lots of things that you can do with your Ferby. Ferby's reactions are unpredictable, so you'll never know how it will behave when you tickle it, pet it, oh tilt, tie hold, pull its tail, turn it upside down, or shake it. Ferby loves to dance. It recognizes music and will begin to dance along and reacts when you speak to it.

Hi Ferby ok te.

You can feed Ferby either with your finger or with the Ferby app, available for free download at the App Store.

Haha.

Use the free Ferby app to translate Furbish to English.

Like you funny.

To learn more, go online to find the Furbish Dictionary at Ferby dot com and remember each of the things that you do with Ferby shape its personality me change.

So you know what's interesting is that that it almost sounds like a little minion And I was just living up like when the first Despicable of Me came out twenty ten, so right before this, I will almost wonder if there was a little bit of connection there.

If nothing else, the people that revitalized the Ferbie or at least attempted to, I could see them trying to take their notes from the Despicable Me movies, because the meanings made that movie what it was. Honestly, without the meanings, that movie pretty much sucks. Like take the minions out of it, take all their little antics away and want to be genius, adopts three girls. Nothing weird or suspicious about that, Uh, to try to use them to sell cookies to get out a bad guy who stole from him.

Yeah, it actually is, now that you say that, I never put that together.

I don't like to be the one to point these things out. But honestly, without the Minions, the Despicable Me franchise is pretty much dog shit. But that's why they lean more heavily into it and release the Minions movies and stuff after. But to your point, you could definitely see with the twenty twelve Ferbi how they might have taken some notes from the.

Minions and the success of Despicable.

Me for sure.

Influence for sure. Yeah.

So now let's go into the brief history of the Ferbie And as a matter of fact, we got the news was reporting on Ferbi's back in this timeframe. There's actually two different news clips. One of them is from when they first released and the other one is from when they got banned from government buildings and some of the suspicious behaviors surrounding that. Let's watch this together.

Christmas shopping came early to Tyson's Corner today. Long lines of people waited in line to snap up the latest raging toys, the adorable Ferbie.

Box.

Five's David Burnett reports the little furbies literally spoke for themselves.

Ferbies made their Tysons Corner debut at ten am and when the doors opened, the lines were already long.

It'll make a great Christmas present come December when all my kid wants one.

I've got it hidden.

That's why they came early.

I've been here two hours.

Is it worth the wait?

Not for me, but I think it will be for them.

I think they're gonna be hard to find. I got the grain on the brown eyes.

How come my little boy has brown eyes?

And hopefully he'll like this? What's a furbee? Anyway?

If they talk, they winter after.

You can play with them.

The kids can play with them, my niece.

And my nephew.

No, she's fibbing.

She's get it for herself.

Ferby has a vocabulary of two hundred words, initially speaking its own Furbish language, but eventually learning English and playing games.

This is a four stage development.

The first stage is you get to know your your Ferby, and he gets to know you when you learn how to play games. But it won't die.

It won't die.

It will not die.

Whether it has channel five.

Ye, it just hosted like the batteries on low. Just change the batteries. But it didn't have a dog.

You see again?

Did you hear that? Which means.

You've got a cold?

Not?

Everyone, though, is buying you didn't buy one.

No, I wouldn't stand in that line for anything in the world, or for a talking doll. Yeah no, But even she had to admit that her six year old may soon be demanding a Ferbie, which she knows will bring her back to the.

Store and she'll say, how ben running Now.

Just the kind of nudge toy makers are hoping for. From Tyson's corner. David Burnett, Fox.

Five News, I'm about to say how silly until I saw the darn thing.

Talk when I think of that.

Yeah, marketing, So how much will it cost to make this holiday at Ferby one? Ferby retails at twenty nine ninety nine.

All right, you can get your hands on one.

That's the thing chill in the air.

I guess that's why we're talking about holiday gifts already.

And all right, so now we're going to skip over to this article to learn more about this, uh well, the controversy surrounding the Ferbs.

Basically the la boo boos of nineteen ninety eight.

Uh yeah, that's a way of looking at it. Switching tonight over the We're gonna read that one a second. Yeah, Basically, they the litle booboos of their day and age.

But I think the Boo Boos are more closely connected to the beanie babies, right, because the Boo Boos aren't as interactive in all of these things the furbies.

You heard what he was saying. It learns from you.

It starts speaking its own language, but the more you play with it, it learns your language, and we'll start responding in English.

Bro.

In ninety eight and ninety nine, nobody had some shit like that on on the shelves for children to play with.

That was wild, dude.

Toy makers were the shit in the eighties and nineties, you know, And you think about like even the the Burger King versus McDonald's Happy Meal toy like war that

To that point.

Ferby was at one point released in Happy meals, and so you had people that were going for the rare collectible ones, which again, who said that they were rare, Who said that they were collectible, doesn't matter. They heard about it on some internet forum somewhere, right, So you had people that were going in and buying twelve Happy meals just to get the toy out and basically dumping the food on the floor because they didn't even care about that.

McDonald's had a strict policy.

You cannot buy just the toy, you have to buy the entire happy meal. So these people were doing everything they could to collect every single Ferbi that McDonald's had offered, which we're gonna see a picture of one of those McDonald's Ferby's in a minute. They are nowhere near what an actual Ferby was, but it didn't matter.

The collection must be complete kind of thing.

Yeah, it's kind of like just reminds me of Veruka and her dad from Wonka, right, yes, like not eating the chocolate, just like getting all these workers to try and find the golden ticket exactly.

Actually one hundred percent with you on this, So all right, let's read in on the brief of this article that into the thick of it.

The Ferbi, launched in nineteen ninety eight, became a global sensation, selling over forty million units in its first three years and sparking a collector craze. The toy faced national security concerns in ninety nine, with rumors that it could record conversations, leading to a temporary ban by the NSA, which was later debunked.

And you maybe it was, Maybe it wasn't.

We're gonna talk more about it.

After waning in popularity, the Ferbie was revived by Hasbro in various iterations, including the twenty twenty three version, with new features like voice activated modes, lights, and customizable personalities. So for many Americans, especially millennials, the Ferbie needs little introduction. It is considered one of the most popular and maybe one of the strangest toys in history and was first successful and was the first successful attempt to produce and

Yeah, it was kind of a combination as a con set design of a mixture of an owl and a chinchilla essentially, and it was again it is a robot by definition, and it was the first time that they ever successfully sold single use robots to the masses.

And it was targeted at children specifically. I think that's very interesting.

Dude, an owl with a third eye built into it, and just nobody caught on to.

That, And that third eye is what gave it all of the credence. It needed to be aware of its surroundings to know if you just walked in the room or not.

Yeah, you're making that owl wise, you know.

Uh.

According to Hasbro, Dave Hampton, Richard Levy, and Caleb Chung spent around two years creating and designing the first designs and prototypes of the toy. Hampton had decided to make a ball of fur anthropomorphic, and the name Ferby came from his son, who pointed out that the toy did in fact look like a ball of fur, with realistic ear wiggles, iconic expressive eyes, and even it's own own language called Furbish. Ferby was more than just a toy.

Can't Sam shocked?

So when was the Ferby first launched during a time of major digital disruption? The nineteen ninety eight Ferby, known as the Classic Ferby, was the first generation of Ferby released. It continued to be sold for four more years. When Ferby was released, it instantly became a phenomenon, with over forty million units sold globally in the first three years. Parents waited in long hour lines or hour long lines to buy the furry friend, and the toy sparked a

This is very true. This is very true, dude.

And that's the thing.

It was so cute, so cuddly. It became overly annoying when that bitch wouldn't shut up when you're trying to sleep, and like it just picked up on some motion.

It could have been you turning in your bed. It's all of a sudden gonna wake up and start trying to sing and shit. Yeah, yeah, anyway, thanks.

Despite its widespread popularity, the Ferby became a national security concern in ninety nine when the US National Security Agency, or the NSA, feared that the toy could record sensitive conversations. As a result, the Ferby was banned from locations like the NSA headquarters in Fort Made, Maryland, and the US Navy's Norfolk Naval shipyard in Portsmouth, Portsmouth, Virginia.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, absolutely.

The espionage rumors were quickly debunked. But it wasn't until Tiger Electronics, the toys manufacturer, took action that the NSA lifted the band. It's probably the biggest misconception Ferby has seen over time. Christa McKay said, who's the general manager and VP of Global brands, Fashion and Preschool at Ferby Maker's Hasbro. Damn, that's a long title. In reality, Ferby does not have the technology to record what people are saying?

So then how does it learn to start speaking to you in your native language? If it already has the capability of doing all these things, how's it no to pick up? Oh, this person speaking German to me, so I'm going to go from Furbish to German. Meanwhile, in America, this one goes from Furbish to English. And it's not like this one was, you know, geared more towards America, and that's why it got sent there. They basically made

Yeah, there's clearly some kind of built in memory there. Yeah, see, like.

There has to be some kind of memory. Now is it recording and collecting and sending somewhere?

Who knows? But at least the memory for sure.

I mean, if it's picking up, if it knows your language and it remembers it, that's memory, you know.

And it's also crazy that the Ferbi's, even after you got it to speak only English, if you would put it in front of another Ferby, they would immediately start chatting back and forth in Furbish again, which led more people to believe that perhaps these toys were actually collecting data and information from you in whatever way and for whatever purpose, and that then once they would meet face to face, it was like they were, like you said earlier, like bluetooth sending things to each other.

Who knows?

Almost makes who wonder?

Like what happens if you're sitting in front, like you're a little kid, you're eight or nine years old, You're watching Nickelodeon one day and you have your Furby sitting in your lap, right, and then a Ferbie commercial comes on. Is that Ferby going to recognize that other ferby speaking Furbish on the TV and how does that you know, information kind of you know, settle out.

I agree, But then even think about it this way.

Let's say that you're, you know, you're playing with your furbiy in the living room, you're doing anything. Your parents are watching Fox News or whatever. Meanwhile, you're homeboy at school who's got a Ferby. He's sitting in liver, his parents are watching CNN. As soon as they get together, they're communicating about what kind of political uh feelings.

This house might have versus this house?

Could that possibly be a reason for the Ferby's data collection here?

There's all kinds of hypotheticals.

On this, and then you got like one Ferby that's a communist and one Ferby that just wants to wear a red hat everywhere, and it's like, what.

The fuck is going on here?

Right?

So it's as the Ferbey returns. The Ferby's popularity began to wane in two thousand and one, leading to its production halt in two However, since its debut, the toy has seen numerous editions and special versions featuring sensors like a tickle and tilt sensor, infrared port light sensor, realistic eyes and tails or manes In two thousand and five, Hasbro acquired Tiger Electronics, gaining ownership of Ferby and its other toys, and in twenty twenty three, Hasbro launched the

So now let's go back and watch the other newscast that one. The first one was again whenever it's first launched, and it was wildly successful right out the gate. Now, just two years after the release, they had this issue.

A hottest toy of this past holiday season.

We're talking about Ferbie. It's a source of concern for believe it or not, national security experts. FOCKS five's out Fineberg went deep background to get the story.

Cute, perhaps lovable, maybe, but a spy. The National Security Agency recently ememoed employees that furvise were off limits on the NSA's Fort Meade, Maryland campus. The country's top intelligence group got spooked that top secret wards or sounds might be mimicked by this talkative memory chip muppet with a two hundred word vocabulary. Oh, government secrecy expert Steve Aftergood.

Their job is to be on the lookout for possible threats to national security, so they're doing their job as silly as it seems.

On this occasion, the NSA issued this release. The NSA prohibits use of any non agency owned photographic, video and audio recording equipment in agency workspaces. This includes any items with built in recording features. Well, we did some sleuthing of our own, and we.

Talked to Ferby's boss.

Tiger Electronics senior VP for marketing tells Fox five quote, Ferby doesn't record, everything's already.

In there calling.

Do you see any threat in that?

It could be a threat to people's bucket book.

The NSA's former general counsel, Stuart Baker agreed, But.

I've consulted with a number of experts on this, several nine year old girls who tell me they can't make him record.

And on that count, Baker says he may on behalf of Ferby file a request for NSA clearance.

There may be another isn't to ban him.

However, live it.

From secret location somewhere I'll find Berg fuck five news.

Well, I can tell it like al can I tell you what?

Well, No, we're tonight on just how many Furbies have infested the NSSA or what the penalty is for having a Furbee at Fort Meade.

It's impting.

So again, it's interesting to see how the government agency at the time from an American made toy, right, Tiger Electronics, although yeah, it might sound crazy, had its American headquarters and it was later acquired by another American toy company, has Bro. Now we know they're using Chinese sweat labor shops, we know that, but they.

Were at least American branded.

That being said, they couldn't tell how these devices worked, what made them tick.

Were they recording video or audio? What the situation was.

All we knew was what we heard from the original news cast that said that these things were learning, They were listening to you. They developed personalities based off of how you.

Interacted with them. The more you spoke to them, the more they learned.

So right off the rip, they're either the company, the manufacturers either saying yeah, they're learning or no, they're not learning anything. It took one year's time for them to go back on that and kind of make up a whole other story.

I find this interesting, you know, and I feel like the you know, especially back in those days, what was it the uh shit, what was that little recording device that Macaulay Culkin had in home alone?

Oh uh not the walkman.

I wanted to say walkman, but that's not what it was.

I used to something man.

Let me see uh, recording the device by I'm Alone.

Okay, because because that came in clutch for him on more than a few occasions.

Yeah, yeah, shit, talk boy, that's what it was. Talk boy. Yeah, we were saying Walkman. Yeah. Yeah. They were really original with these names back then, the talk Boy.

And I love that fucking thing.

Whenever I got it for Christmas one year, I was like, it was like a new PlayStation. Like that's how awesome it was to me whenever I first got it. And then you get it and you're like, oh, this actually isn't as cool as I thought it was gonna be, you know.

Because it's just a voice recorder. That's all it is, you know.

But that being said, it makes me wonder if and I'm sure somebody has done it, because even if you think about those those big mouth billy basses that you know, the take Me Too, the Roof or like those things, you can like work on those to sing and dance to new songs and shit like that, right, And so it makes me wonder if you can rewire a Ferbie to be like a little surveillance animal or record something, and and you would just say, oh, it's just a

You're going to see the internals of his piano in it. It's insane the amount of work old boy put into it. But we're gonna get to that in a bit. But uh yeah, you absolutely could take this to make some very slight modifications and it could be a spy device. But there are those that still to this day believe that it was always a spy device, whether we knew it or not. But now we're gonna go to the CBS article titled the Toy Man, and this is from

So let's get into it here.

Richard Levy's house may look like any other on a quiet street, but looks can be deceiving lurking inside hidden from the outside view are hundreds of creatures waiting to play. The toy creatures are Ferby's. You may be wondering why a grown man has a wall full of fuzzy toys. Well, Levy is the face behind Ferby. He helped develop the creature and his friends. More than forty three million were sold in fifty two countries. But there's more to Levy's

That goot licks guitar. I never seen one of those before, dude. It's like it's like garage band. But yeah, in the nineteen eighty nine version, Yeah, and you wouldn't plug it up to your TV.

It was basically like a toy guitar that you would push a button and then strum it and then boom.

It sounds like you're just riffing, you know.

Yeah.

Well, I guess it would be more right to say guitar hero because Guitar Hero.

Dude, it missed me on the the people.

That say Garage Band was better than Guitar Hero, I'm like, get the fuck out of here. It was not even close. Guitar Hero was the better one. What's your thoughts on that.

I think that you wouldn't have had Garage Band without Guitar Hero.

Honestly. I do like how Garage Band gave you the drum option.

You had the singer that had to like keep their voice in a certain pitch, and it made it fun for more than one person, And I get down with that, right, But honestly, Guitar Hero was the pinnacle of all of it from me or if nothing else, it opened the flood gates for sure.

Oh yeah, dude.

I remember staying up until like five in the morning just trying to beat those levels. Especially Guitar Hero three was probably the best one of all time.

Like, dude, it's hard to even find those those remotes for it any more. Guitar Hero remote. Yeah, you can go on eBay and you can find them and stuff. But every time that I've had a friend of mine buy one, it's always like beat to shit.

The little pedal, the wah wah on it.

You have to beat the shit out of it though, you know, especially on like the hardest modes, and oh yeah, I mean if you weren't autistic with it, you weren't beating those levels.

Expert level on beasting the harlet from Avenge Sevenfold or expert on one from Metallica, Like you had to like spash your whole hand out and you couldn't just like lightly tap it at a certain point. Like, yeah, those things just got the shit beat out of them, which I get, but also yeah, it's very very hard to find any of those. They're still workable these days.

Yeah, I agree.

I mean, Guitar Hero, those were some of the best times ever. That was the song I was thinking of Fire and Flames dragon Force.

Oh my God, which a bit of a misnomer. The dude's not even playing it like that, like he's finger tapping and which, don't me wrong. I'm not like knocking the abilities of the guy who does the song, but basically they overlaid like two different guitars on top of each other to make Dragon Force what it is through the fire and flames. Then they cut to making down a video game, and these kids are like there's no fucking way this guy is playing this.

He's a genius. He's the next level mastery of a guitar. Then you watch the YouTube videos and you're like, oh, it's.

Not even like that.

Yeah, yeah, well they had to make the level harder, you know.

It was.

That was crazy.

And also I still get down to that song to this day because it's like, that's impressive.

Yeah it is. Yeah, it is such a banger.

All right, So moving on, It says the love of toys is rubbed off on his family. Cheryl runs the financial side of the business, and their daughter Betty briefly followed in her father's footsteps. There's no age limit when it comes to fun. Even Washington power elite appreciate a good time. Levy received a letter from the Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld quote I sent him a copy of my game.

Spirit of America recalled Levy, what a great guy.

He sent me back a wonderful letter with a personal check because he couldn't accept the gift, but he wanted to keep the game and a special patriotic Ferby landed on a former president's desk. The letter reads, thank you for my wonderful Ferby now I can finally see what all the fuss is about.

It's a lot of fun. Sincerely, Bill Clinton.

I'm surprised that old Rumsfeld didn't lose that letter.

You know, he lost how many trillions of dollars or something, but somehow didn't lose that video game.

Interesting.

Yeah, but yeah, so and again, whenever Bill Clinton's impeachment hearing was going on after he got Dome the Oval office from old Monica, apparently the Ferbie on his desk, that super patriotic special edition that was sent to him. They even brought that up, And I'm curious, was that Ferbie recording on the day when Monica hit her knees Listen. I don't know this for a fact, but it's very possible.

Yeah, that'd be an interesting plot twist. Imagine there's actual footage of that.

Oh god, that would be terrifying.

I in no way, shape or form do I want to watch old billiam Clinton getting domed that.

That sounds nasty.

On the other hand, I'm not shocked.

I mean, I know that Bill Clinton was, you know, in tight with Jeffrey Epstein, wearing a blue dress and red high heels and all that fun jazz, But like, you don't blame them for getting with Monica Lewinsky because who would ever want to fuck Hillary Clinton?

He did at least one time. Their daughter, Chelsea is a spitting image of both of them.

It's crazy but satanic spawn.

Bro.

Yeah, she's a butt baby.

That's what that looks like, all grown up, straight out the butt. But I mean, even looking back, dude, Monica wasn't exactly a well, at least in my opinion, she wasn't like a dining piece by any means. But I guess anything's better than ol' Killary, I get it.

Yeah, yeah, it was, especially if Hillary's like coming into the bedroom, like all wearing a frazzle drip mask and.

Shit, You're like, get the fuck out of here, Hillary, what are you doing, dude?

Smelling like fucking blood and death. No, I'm getting all that, But I mean at the same time, Bill had a lot of blood on his hands too, So at that point they just kind of had a satanic blood.

Packed if you will. I mean they were at Brohemian Grove too, you know, they were at well they were Hillary was a I.

Keep on saying Brohemian, but it's both. No, Hillary went remember the Satanic Wizard told us that Hillary out there and he had to like he was asking Bill if he could escort her out because it's an all boys club.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's right, that's right. Damn Bohemian Grove, dude, And that's kind of fallen. There's a new one, and we do need to do an episode on it. Bohemian and Grove used to be like the spot where real change would get made and stuff, but now the lid's been blown off of it. They yeah, they still have their little annual meetings, but it is not like it used to be. It's more like the I guess the entry level. It used to be like Skull and Bones

To the real thing, right, right, yeah, they got I'm sure there's a bunch of different crazy meetups and some you know, off plot sector of the Woods that nobody knows exists.

But anyway, let's gip ahead here a little bit.

Actually, you know, that's it for this one, just to kind of give a background to one of the toy creators, right, he just was a toy designer himself. He has no background in UH any kind of espionage or anything. But he did team up with the other two UH inventors and made the ferby what it became so on screen right now.

You see this.

This is a Ferbie that was released in a McDonald's toy from two thousand that looks completely different than the furbies you would buy off the shelves. But people were losing their collective shit and buying like twenty different Happy Meals to make sure that they got all twelve of these or six or whatever the run was that was released for McDonald's.

For the collector of it, Oh, it was mind blowing.

People always flocked to get, you know, to collect all of the McDonald's Happy Meals, Like, dude, it was back in what was it like back in the eighties, dude, they used to give like Star Wars like glass cups, memorabilia and like really like actually somewhat valuable shit, you know. And then you know, and people saw that that stuff was going for a lot of money to turn it into a collector's item, And yeah, I mean, I get it.

Those Pokemon cards and unopened packs are selling for now, dude.

I had literally so you know those uh, those those pages that you would keep and you'd put like, uh, you'd put them into your binder, right.

Yeah, the car collection binders.

Yeah, you can put nine cards on a page, right. I had an entire page of first edition charge Yards bro an entire page of them, yeah, And I was just like, ah, they're just stupid little cards because you know, Yu gi oh was coming out and it was like I felt like it was getting watered down and nobody was gonna fuck with it anymore. And I traded away for a paintball gun.

I thought I was getting a steal because that paintball gun was the shit, right, And now if I'd held onto that, I well, I'd probably still be doing what I'm doing now anyway, you know, right, yeah, maybe the guy who was tipping the pizza guy with bitcoin back in the day and now You're just like no that yeah, same vibe. Yeah. So all right, now I got the Wikipedia page pulled up.

It's gonna give us a little more in depth on the Ferbie in the background to it all.

Let's dive in, shall we.

Ferbey is an American electronic robotic toy created by Tiger Electronics, a subsidiary of Hasbro. Originally released in October of ninety eight, it resembles a sugar glider like creature and went through a period of being a must have toy following its holiday season launch. More than forty million Ferbies were sold during the three years of its original production, with one point eight million sold in ninety eight and fourteen million

That is actually insane. In a year, twenty seven million were sold. Like that's that's mind blowing numbers as far as like business is concerned. And even if those are all retail thirty five dollars a pop. Brother, they made off.

Like fucking bandits off of these little bitches, which I mean, that was the idea and I get that, but again, they for everybody who's thinking that the whole uh, like you're seeing on TikTok and on Instagram and on YouTube these unboxing videos and how like the resale and these things, and that's such a greedy way to do things, brother, let's not get twisted. That's been the way for quite some time. As soon as something.

Is exclusive and you know there's only so many of them, you're gonna have people that are gonna make it a buyer's market and they're gonna go and buy a bunch of them as soon as they drop at the store so that they could resell them later and make money. That's been the way of human economy for quite some time.

Yeah.

Unfortunately, they uh, they stated at the blackjack table a little too long, and you know, I'm sure they lost a lot of money by creating a bunch of new ones and shutting down because nobody was buying them and everything.

So yeah, that's just what happened.

But so now let's talk about this is when it was real hot and heavy. As far as the NSA getting involved, it was in the first generation of ferbis. So now let's get into that first generation learn a little bit more about the types and things.

The main reason for their popularity was because of apparent intelligence, as reflected in their ability to develop language skills. Ferbies can communicate with one another via an infrared port located between their eyes.

With that third eye all the way open.

Ferbi starts speaking out entirely or starts speaking for entirely Furbish, a language with short words, simple syllables, and various other sounds. They are programmed, however, to speak less and less Furbish and more and more English as they quote unquote grow according to the variant it knew nine languages, English, French, Spanish, German, Italian, Japanese, Swedish, Greek, and Portuguese. There was a common misconception that they repeated

Yep.

McDonald's happy meal toy Ferbie Shelby was released in two thousand in the UK.

There are eight.

There are eight to collect in total, four classic look and for clams. These toys can sing to each other via a sensor in feet.

All right, now, with all that being said, here they're talking about how when they start they're speaking Furbish and it doesn't just go to English. Depending on how you spoke to them, it could answer you in any of these nine languages, dude.

So basically Greek being one of them.

If it got opened by a kid speaking Greek, give it a little bit of time and it will start answering in Greek.

If it's not recording, how does it know to do that.

Yeah, yeah, that's that's bullshit.

And now there's some that say that this might have been the first introduction to a home AI type of robot situation, but the creators have stated multiple multiple times that there was no AI integrated into the Ferbi. There was no microphone into the Ferby.

There.

It wasn't actually interacting with you. It doesn't repeat things that you say to it, even though there's tons of cases of people that are saying that it absolutely would start repeating words and phrases that you would say to it, Like all right, late nineties, do you remember a phrase saying, oh, bro, that's the bomb?

Oh yeah, everybody said that.

Okay, there's cases of Ferbi's answering with saying that that's not a phrase that was actually programmed into it, So where did it pick that up from?

Now, With that being.

Said, there was also some cases where it sounded like the Ferbies were saying some foul things to customers and whatnot. One of them in particular, is where they thought that the Ferby was saying fuck me.

In reality, it was saying hug me.

But because of the kind of weird speakers to it, and it wasn't the crispus of sound. I absolutely could understand why that would sound like that, but you could go back and look, no, no, it was saying hug me. But of course during the Satanic panic that was going on, especially, you got these little grimlin looking toys, and now it's saying fuck me to my children.

No, I ain't having that up my house.

You could see where it would go sideways with that.

That was the next say tannic toy after like dungeons and dragons and shit.

Exactly exactly.

So moving on fur babies, in ninety nine, the Ferbie Baby's line was introduced. Ferbie Babies are smaller than the original, having higher voices and cannot dance, but they switched to speaking English more quickly. They also have an extended vocabulary and different Easter eggs quote unquote and games quote unquote built into them. Ferbie Babies come in twenty four different colors, all having white eyelashes and one of six different eye colors.

Yeah, yeah, I was like eighty seven. Let me, I don't know.

Meanwhile, well, these friendly Ferbie types were being released in the late nineties, like ninety nine and two thousand, so I also find that interesting that ET was able to traverse time like this.

Actually ET came out in eighty two, eighty two, damn. So yeah, because I mean, Drew Barrymore was.

A child exactly, so the Ferby friends, and they were making their money off of as granted, Yoda. Star Wars introduced Yoda way back in the day. But my point is though they were seeing and even Grimlins that was an eighties movie, but Ferby was still able to capitalize off of that fandom into the late nineties and early two thousands, which I also think is pretty incredible. But anyway, yeah, so I'm looking up when Gremlins came out in eighty four. Yeah, eighty four.

It's crazy that they were still riding the wave off of those fandoms into the late nineties when those came out in the early eighties, that's impressive.

Yeah, I mean it's pop culture. Pop culture survives beyond, you know, just the year that it's released.

But pop culture is also different these days, right, like the whole six seven thing that's not gonna be a thing two years from now, but right now it's like the shit and even now it's starting to weigh in popularity.

Yeah, but you think about it like pop culture was. If you think about like the whole six seven shit or whatever the fuck the kids are saying nowadays, and whatever is going to be next, that is stuff that's created on TikTok. You know, it's not even something that necessarily everybody's going to see. Everybody saw et everybody saw

But all I was trying to say is that pop.

Culture goes way quicker these days because of social media. In ninety nine and two thousand and two thousand and one, there was no social media, right. Think about these movies we just talked about et Grimlins, Star Wars. How we could even take it to Adam Sandler's movies, The Fucking Happy Gilmore, The water Boy. These things stayed in the cultural zeitgeist to pop culture for at the very bare minimum a decade most of the time even longer than that.

Right right.

And here's another example, dude, My daughter started saying, get a load of this guy, and I was like, where the fuck are you getting this? And I was like, I know that that was in movies for sure, right, But where was it first talked about? Like where did it become sort of like this pop culture that turned it into this meme of the Internet. It was fucking Wayne's World, really, dude, ninety two Wayne's World. I'm like, why are kids now referencing a nineteen ninety two movie like that?

Is just crazy? Makes no sense.

But to them on the Internet, because of a TikTok probably or something on the socials, it is now revitalized and retooled and reformat it and now it's cool again. It's it's wild how that works. But that's my point. Pop culture back in these days it ran longer than it does now. It's crazy.

But anyway, and even now, did you know that, I believe it was back in eighty six, eight eighty seven something like that. Did you know that the CIA was working on this essentially a mind control tool. It was called memeic me medic magic.

Yeah, we talked about that. Memes are a CIA constructed thing.

Crazy, dude, Like, before people even had the Internet, they already had concepted. The idea of Internet memes just goes to show how far in the future they're living.

That's a very good point.

Meme culture didn't become a thing realistically until the mid two thousands, right. Meanwhile, the CI already had that knew what to do, knew how to post and do all these things.

In the eighties. Let that one marinate as long as needed, brother, crazy dude, Yeah, anyway.

I mean it's a design for triggers, you know what I mean if you really think about it, like you see a Peppy the Frog, you're instantly assuming maga or something like that, right, And it's like it's crazy, just how the they just know what buttons to push in the average person's subconscious mind.

Bro, think about this Bad Luck Brian was already thought about before Bad Luck Brian was ever born.

Yeah, dude, how about Kyle with the Monster.

Can they already knew that they were going to do that before the Monster Enter Drink Drink Company became a thing?

Yeah? Or what's his name from? Oh shit, what is it called? Lord of the Rings?

One does not simply you know, like that one was going around like crazy too, you know.

And the c I already had that thing planned in the eighties. It's wild.

It is crazy, dude, fucking bot Farms.

We actually you know what, Yeah, I'm gona writ that bitch down. We're gonna do a CIA meme episode here soon. That's absolutely going on.

To the page. Yeah, thats happen, so now moving on.

They also have sensors that can sense loud sounds, can sense being upside down. They say things like shiver me timbers and walk the plank when left upside down for an extended period of time, and they laugh when they are tickled quote unquote. They're Antennas or Tenny's as they like to call them. They also purr when they're petted. They can be fed by sticking your finger in their mouth. Similarly,

As far as that tickle feature, there's another toy that is very well known for being tickled and speaking to you.

You know, the tickle Me Elmo led to actual riots, like people got actually injured in mals trying to buy the tickle me Elbow.

Will you remember that?

Which came out in ninety six, So it pres the uh, the Ferby.

They kept trying to make it more and more of a revamp to do what they could. Now continuing on here, there's the second generation, the emmotatronic Ferbie Babies, the emotatronic Funky Ferbies. Then there was a third generation Ferby party Rockers, Ferby Booms Furblings, Ferby Boom Crystals, Ferby Boom Crystal Furblings for Baca. In twenty fifteen they made a Chewbacca styled Ferbi you know. Then the fourth generation. Now they have their fifth generation that is still able to be born today.

It mentioned eighty KiB of ram, so that rom so ram is the amount of processing power, right, and the ROM would be the memory I think, right, Okay, so, yeah, the the memory on it which KiB I never heard that one before, but KiB stands for kibbi bytes, which is so eighty kibbi bytes is equal to approximately eighty one point nine kilobytes or point zero seven to eight megabytes or mbs.

Okay.

They didn't have a lot of storage.

The tiniest amount of storage. It's like fucking atari storage.

Gotcha, gotcha.

But still it had storage, had some, Yeah, it had some, which I think all of that is what led to the security concerns.

So on January thirteenth.

Of nineteen nine, it was reported the National Security Agency the NSSA, the people behind the Patriot Act, which released two years after this. I might add to know one of the United States banned Ferby's from entering NSA's property due to concerns that they may be used to record and repeat classified information, advising those that see any NSA property to quote contact their staff security officer for guidance.

Quote.

It was thought within the NSA that Ferby's had an artificial intelligence chip that could quote unquote learn from things. The user said, well, it's crazy that they would think that whenever they were marketed as a self learning robot for children, So okay, you know literally was on the commercial.

It's crazy.

The NSA theorized that if employees discussed confidential information around the toys, that information could later be repeated at a later date. Roger Schiffman, who we talked about earlier, the owner of Tigerger Electronics, said that the ferby has absolutely no ability to do any recording whatsoever, and that he would have gladly told the NSA this if he was asked by anyone from the spy agency. Additionally, Dave Hampton demonstrated that Ferbiy's microphone could not record any sound at all,

Yes, yes, it has storage.

It's not recording, it's not listening, and somehow it's not learning, even though they marketed it as a learning thing, which that in and of itself is.

Pretty crazy to me.

But I could understand the need for security concerns whenever there's this new fandangle technology.

It's just not making no sense. Nobody. It has no off switch.

The only thing that to make it turn off is that the batteries run dead or you basically rip the guts out of it. We know that it can pick up on the photo light sensor right it will tell you when the sun rises or when you first turn

So I could understand their need for some concern on this, But was it baseless?

Right as all these designers and producers came out and said they can't do any of these things, even though that's exactly how they.

Marketed it, what was the real backstore for this?

Right? There had to be something. There had to be a kernel of truth to this.

It makes me think like it and whatever you think about this, if you believe that there can be talking dolls, and you know, the these inanimate objects almost brought to life, that's kind of where I go with it, Like, is it possible that maybe somebody would get a little crazy with these things and enchant them or something? You know, if that's a thing, you know, if that is a thing, I mean, could you enchant an inanimate object to start saying words?

I don't know, maybe that's a step too far.

But this thing was already geared to talk.

So all you're doing is basically just making it say things that allegedly it was never meant to say. I don't see that as a crazy hypothetical.

Yeah, I mean, hey, Enchance, it is one of my favorite movies. So shout out there, you go, all right? This next article is from The Independent. Adorable Cuddly Evil. How did the furby take over the world? Let's learn about it together, brother. So in nineteen ninety nine, the US National Security Agency became aware of impeding or of impending security threat, one involving potential espionage and perhaps on

Indeed, that little furry bastard.

Christa McKay, Vice President, I'm not going to go across that again, laughs off the whole saga, she says. The rumor that the toy was capable of espiona was quickly debunked, but it was only after a concerted effort by Tiger Electronics, the toy's original manufacturers, that the agency lifted the band. It is probably the biggest misconception Ferby has seen over time. In reality, Ferby does not have the technology to record

If you had a Ferby, you were cool.

Indeed, further down the line, Ferbie gained notoriety for being a bit of a menace. First of all, it had no off switch. The only way to deactivate it was by taking out its batteries. Even then, some people swear that the Ferbie would continue to speak and sing gibberish

Dude, see what I'm saying.

Yeah, either A was possessed or B.

Is it possible it had a external power source or another battery pack that nobody knew about because you're living in Washington, DC, and perhaps it was trying to aspire listen in who.

Knows, like old girl with the Roku TV. You know, yeup, could have been some crazy shit like that. Maybe it is possessed, otherworldly or maybe somebody has a remote to it.

The world may never know. Indeed, others give weight to this theory.

Ferby has been said to go dormant, sometimes for years, before suddenly in quotes waking up at the most unexpected of times. Jacqueline dole, A thirty three year old from Maine says that she discovered her childhood ferby languishing in a storage unit and couldn't bear to throw it away. She left it in the back seat of her car in peaceful slumber. Then horror occurred when my partner went

Imagine that, bro, Keep in mind, twenty years you haven't seen this thing. But apparently because it was this is the old school, and there was no off switch, so if it laid dormant, the batteries wouldn't continue to just leak out juice, they would just kind of chill there. So apparently, after twenty years, these double A batteries, it required four of them, had enough juice in them to make this thing light up and start talking again. As soon as it's all motion or any kind of interaction.

Of me too. I get it.

I mean it does make sense.

There's no motion, you know, uh going on for it to be able to censor anything, nobody talking or anything. If it's in storage and in a dark probably in a box. You know, you go into a storage unit. Most of the time I've ever gone into a storage unit, I'm the only one in there, you know what I mean. And so it's yeah, I could see how it could be retaining its battery by.

Not even using it.

You would think that it would die over the course of twenty years though. Don't batteries expire, you would think. But I guess this is a really good run of batteries. And apparently this Ferby just refused to die. Fucking Energizer should have used that as a gimmick, dude, as a promotional dude, I.

Magine that that would be a fucking ad and a half right there.

But anyway, if it was Energizer, who knows?

Uh?

So, it says the creators behind Furby never thought their amusing little robot would be the stuff of nightmares, but they did have an inkling that it would become a hit. Dave Hampton, Caleb Chung, and Richard Leevy brought it to life after being inspired by another nineties toy craze, the Tamagachi. This was a small virtual pet simulation game released by Japanese toy maker Bandi. The Grace, the keychains of children all over the world. It proved that children of the

I don't know, what is that supposed to be? The mid the two thousands.

I guess maybe I don't know.

Its popularity began to decline sharply as other pet toys hit the market and children's attention was pulled elsewhere.

Indeed, and they tried, like I said, to keep it going, but it never had its its same fandom and craze like it did when it first released.

Chung also thought that the toy became a bit two end quotes alive, which in turn drove its market away. He told director Gregory Green in a twenty fourteen YouTube interview, saying Ferby was a big hit because because it on purpose was made to let you believe it was alive. All electronic toys up to then were squeeze my hand, I'll count to ten, a very self centered toy. And so it became. It became human in a way that

Which is kind of weird.

Cut to today, when people are trying to get AI to be as human like as possible, and they're designing robots to be as human like as possible.

These people were ahead of their time with this little fur ball dog.

They were.

Despite the sharp decline and interests since its launch, each iteration of Ferby has had more high tech features than the last novelty Ferbi's have been released, such as the Ferbie style gizmo from the nineteen eighty four horror film Gremlins. Others have been given lsed eyes with a wide range of motions to make them more expressive. Some iterations have been given a simpler on off button, but each generation has only had marginal differences in appearance compared to its predecessors.

Why would you get rid of that?

As a nod to the original, But even still that was one of the only benefits of the second gym.

That was a fault.

It wasn't even a good thing.

Yeah, and it says the glow up makes Ferby almost unrecognized. In a word, it has been yassified to the n degree.

You've yossified yos queen.

Yeah.

So anyway, these are the sparkly looks from the twenty twenty three Ferbies and we don't have to.

Really read more.

I did just want to read that some of those experiences of people that are saying that even after the batteries are out, it was still working, which kind of leads more credence to the whole you know thing about it being a little more sentient than what it originally led on.

This next article is actually from a website called the Fubi Toy Shop, which is basically an entire furbie website, not for shopping. It's literally just for backstories and it's like a blog for ferbies. So let's talk more about this here.

We talked a little bit about the NSA and the Pentagon making them illegal on site.

Back in ninety nine.

These interactive plate things sparked unexpected controversy. Officials worried their abilities to record and repeat phrases might risk sensitive information. It's a fascinating twist for a product designed purely for fun. This article explores why such fears emerged, how policies shifted, and why collectors still adore these electronic pets today. Whether

It wasn't just the look.

It was the fact that they were a pet that you didn't have to really maintain or keep up, just don't get out. So now, playthings rarely attract attention from intelligence agencies, but these did. By ninety nine, just one year after their launched, Ferbi's faced restrictions in sensitive government spaces. The reason their charming features sparked unexpected security debates.

Let's talk about the NSA.

Officials worried about two key capabilities, microphones and adaptive learning quote unquote. Though designed to mimic speech, some feared these functions could accidentally capture un or classified information. At the CIA's Langley offices, ferbies were outright prohibited. So we have the NSA building, the CIA building the Pentagon, the Norfolk Virginia Naval Yard, which is where they do a lot

In ninety nine, restris took.

Effect in the NSA and CIA facilities, so no evidence suggested that ferbies actually compromise security, but they still put the ban in place. As of that moment. Why did the NSA ban the ferbies? Intelligence agencies rarely raise eyebrows over children to play things, Yet ferbi'es did just that. The combination of Cold War air caution and emerging interactive tech created perfect conditions for concern. Will explore how harmless

So let's talk about the NSA's reasoning for this.

The agency's response reflected broader anxieties about smart devices at facilities handling classified information. Even theoretical risks demanded action. Three key factors drove their decision recording misconceptions, basic microphones were mistaken for surveillance tools, behavioral unpredictability, random vocalizations seemed like

When the Patriot Act gets invoked.

But you know, I guess everybody forgot about the craze from the Ferby at that point or something, even though they were still being sold. But anyway, so let's see how the band shaped Ferby's legacy. The restrictions inadvertently boosted the toy's mystique. What began as a holiday gift became a talking point about emerging tech today. This episode remains one of the most fascinating stories in toy history. Collectors now prize early models for their connection to this moment.

First edition nineteen ninety eight.

Ferby's Command at least a three hundred dollars or more price at auction, the band cemented their status as pop culture icons, rather than diminishing their appeal. So again, this era foreshadowed modern debates about smart devices insecure spaces. Current NSA policies reflect lessons learned from the unusual case. They talk about where to go for more on early Ferbie capabilities. So they talk about the nineteen ninety eight models and what made them so special? So hidden beneath their fuzzy

On or off.

How do we know there's not a hidden camera inside of these things? So they of course took it to a level that it was the paranoia realistically, Yeah.

Yeah, they and I guess rightfully so, because you never know, like I don't know if I would be issuing a statement I feel like before I made myself look like an idiot, I would probably just go buy a Ferbie and give it to one of my tech guys and be like, hey, can this thing listen to us? I don't know why you had to make a whole big deal about it, but ultimately, could that have been just some kind of ploy because they wanted people to buy Ferbies?

It's gonna go wild and it's gonna boost sales through the roof. That would have been a great marketing ploy. I don't know if that's what happened. I can find no evidence to suggest that that's what took place. However, I could envision a world looking at things in my third oulet of the Way Open and Conspiratorily, of course, I could envision a world where Hasbro, who is a

On that for sure, Well, how about this sir hasbro engages in lobbying and public policy discussions which are overseen by its Legal and Communications department. So I mean that's a little something at least they're lobbying in the government, and maybe they kind of used it as a I don't know, like an OJ trial kind of thing, you know, like a toy version of it.

I don't see why not, honestly, I mean to say that the American Toy Lobbyist Group, which gonna be honest, I didn't know that was a thing. I'm not surprised that it's a thing, but just never really thought about it before. What's to say that one of these lobbyists, while they're over there in DC and they're lobbying with these big government agencies.

Didn't just go knock on the CIA's door.

Hey, I need you to pass the word to the Pentagon, pass the word to the Navy Yard, pass the word to the FBI. I'm just gonna let them know that these things might be a subject of interest and leave a very open ended don't say for sure that it's dangerous, just kind of let a NEMO go out saying that they're not allowed on site. That will just kind of drive more attention to it. Here's a little check for you. Here, here's a little money coming into the holiday season. Go

Bro.

Oh dude, they have a whole open secrets profile on lobbying for Hasbro.

Really holy shit.

Yeah, it says Hasbro lobbies the US government to advocate for policies that benefit their business, focusing on issues like trade, consumer safety, and budget appropriations. Their lobbying efforts help influence legislation that impacts their operations and industry. My question is, do you really have to go to the government for that? But check this out, just just for twenty twenty five alone, We're not even through this year yet Hasbro has already lobbied for three hundred thousand dollars.

Whoa, that's pretty interesting.

Here.

I'm gonna show the screen so you can see it, but please do.

Yeah, if we're following the money, if we're trying to figure out what's really going on, you know, may as well check it out. But yeah, it just says the industry is missile miscellaneous manufacturing and distributing. And you can kind of see you know where, like every year, dude, every year they're lobbying hundreds of thousands of dollars Hasbro is to the US government. Wow, their biggest year was

That is insane?

Yeah, I honestly never thought about the Big Toy as far as the conspiratorial lobbying conversation goes.

But I mean, why the fuck not?

Oh, there's issues with trade. There is two specific issues with trade, which you know, which is another reason why they lobbied, but also health issues.

Small choking small pieces that can make kids choke. Seeing as how they're made in China, I could see if the materials used are possibly dangerous. Okay, fair, especially again because so many of the things are made overseas trade.

I could see that being two issues that they have to lobby for clients. Lobbying for health issues twenty twenty five. Yeah, so this was two and eighty five clients that were lobbying. Is that the amount of people that complained about health issues or is that the number of people that lobbied. I think that might be the number of people that received checks.

Yeah, number of reports listing issue area. So yeah, almost ten thousand reports of health related issues with Hasbro alone.

So ten almost ten thousand reports of like something's wrong here, and almost twenty five hundred payouts.

Oh, I'm sorry. This is not Hasbro alone, This is everybody's. It is the annual number of clients lobbying on health issues. So it's not just how it's And if you look look at all of them, Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America has the highest number of reports, shocker, and then below them Johnson and Johnson unit United Health America's health insurance plans.

Where else I saw.

Merk, Pfizer, Mark, Pfizer, Blue Cross, Blue Cross, Blue Shield, DaVita Pharmaceutical Care Management Association two and forty one records of this. And so these are the lobbyists, right like the in the lobbyists that are trying to get in into the Oh, I want to see what the fucking bills were though, bills labeled by Hasbro or lobby by Hasbro, And ooh, let's talk about this.

Yeah, it doesn't really get into the nitty gritty. It says figures on this page of calculations by open Data or by Open Secrets based on data from the Senate Office of Public Records. Data for the most recent year was downloaded on October twenty third, But you can't click it or anything.

So yeah, it doesn't say.

There's nothing to scroll down on.

No. O, well, shit report images. Dude, I love this Open Secrets fucking website.

SA.

Yeah.

Look, the lobbying firm is called Duberstein Group, So let's let's look up who Duberstein If that doesn't sound Jewish.

Right right right?

Duberstein stein Stein, Yeah.

The Duberstein Group.

Keith Duberstein is transitioned from the White House to lobbyist. Isn't that funny how that always works? Always you make more money in the private sector.

Dog.

Yeah, he was an American lobbyist who served as US President Ronald Reagan's White House Chief of Staff from eighty eight to eighty nine.

And now this guy's lobbying for Hasbro. Of course. Duberstein was born to a Jewish family in Brooklyn of Jewel.

Faub, a teacher Aaron Duberstein, who was a fundraiser for the Boy Scouts of America.

All that's not a good look.

Not at all, man. This guy's just eight up with it any.

But yeah, this is the guy that lobbies for hasbro Yep. Duberstein transitioned from the White House to lobbyists. He was successful and his insight and advice was sought by leaders of both parties. Duberstein founded the Duberstein Group, Incorporated in eighty seven. It was a consulting services company providing corporate consulting and government relation services. Among its clients are Amazon,

I mean, it's just crazy up in the ear.

We got Ferbies. We're all over the place in this bitch.

And then we want to talk about surveillance. You know what I'm saying. It just makes sense.

Do you see the connections of why certain people still to this day believe that the ferbies actually were.

Being used in this fashion? I mean proofs in the pudding, dud dude.

It even says Duberstein showed discretion and did not discuss his work, leading to in quotes an era of mystery about him and what he did for his clients.

The White House chief of staff under Reagan. Yeah, holy shit, that's crazy.

Jesus, this is a weird plot twist. So weird.

Oh, he was actually on the board of directors for bo Conico Phillips.

What are some other ones that we might know?

He was a flimming company, Saint Paul Company's Inc.

Board of directors for Fannie May. Holy shit, this guy's all over the place.

Wow, American Abroad media dude.

Duberstein was a backslapping Brooklyn native was one of the most connected Washington people, a quote unquote permanent Washington fixture. He was a regular at Washington parties and network talk shows. What the fuck do we find ourselves into?

Right here?

And all of this connected to the Ferbie dog my god, says Duberstein noted that as a Brooklyn Knight, he always enjoyed working with people.

As a quote unquote cultivator of the press, he was generally discreet, refusing to be quoted by name, even for articles about himself. Holy shit, man, talk about literally flying under the radar. That's crazy, huh.

I mean, that's crazy as fuck to know that this first of all, didn't know there was an American toy lobbying conglomerate, didn't know that Hasbro had that, and didn't know that this guy was the lobbyist who was paying people in DC hundreds of thousands of dollars annually and you could track that on Open Secrets to lobby for the toy companies.

That's wild.

I mean, was was lobbying for the Russians? Dude, You're talking about infiltration.

That's crazy.

And again all tying back to the Ferbie perhaps they were being used in some way, shape or form for maybe some sort of intelligence gathering, data collecting, spy network chicanery. We don't know.

There's he very well could have been like some kind of Soviet spy at this point for all we know.

And if he was a Soviet spy and he was Reagan's chief of staff, that's not a good look at all, because Reagan, it was very much against the comedies.

That was like his whole shtick.

Dude, what the fuck man?

It's like it goes to show that like the surface level conspiracies people can laugh at, right, like oh what Ferbie's are spying on you?

And then you're like, wait a second.

So this connects to that, connects to that, and it starts to paint a like a more intricate picture to where you're like, Okay, I think I get it.

Actually, you know, like I understand why there may have been concerns.

And tie this in with your boy Dave Hampton, right, one of the original creators, not the third guy that they brought in later, one of the original concept designers. Him and mister Chung, who American.

He's American, but yeah, Chung is also very indicative of all the conversation we're having here. So the dude went off the rails and fell off the grid after his instant success with Ferbi. By two thousand and one, Dude he was living off grid in Nevada somewhere, and no one heard from him since he only came out of hiding in twenty fourteen for an interview like one of

I imagine how that could make you crazy?

Could you imagine being such a successful toy creator that you have to take you and your family off grid and live out there down by the river to get away from the hype, dude, or get it?

Do it to get away from certain accusations.

Probably accusations probably a little lobbyist, maybe somebody you know, kind of saying, look, we understand that you could have possibly been involved in undercover fucking spy surveillance type of shit. You know what, instead of just accusing you of it, maybe maybe we want you to work for us.

Now.

Can you create a new toy, a new ferbie, you know, it's all already in the public zeitgeist that these things were, you know, mistakenly labeled as surveillance items.

Maybe we take that and run with it.

Let's actually create a spy Ferby and maybe it turns into like an Alexa Ferbiy or some shit. You can imagine people knocking at his door saying that. Or maybe it's just I don't know, like people who look back upon the the Ferby fondly, I have a.

Hard time believing that he got so instantly successful and made so many millions of dollars almost instantaneously that he decided, yeah, this is a bit too much for me.

I'm gonna go live in the woods somewhere.

And I can't speak with authority on that one, but it sounds really crazy to me that you wouldn't want to snowball that success. Maybe take that lightning in a bottle and see if you could replicate it or remodel it in some way, shape or form. Because again, once Hasbro bought the rights from Tiger, he was gone, like he's getting a royalties, he's getting percentages off of it, for sure, but he had no hand in any of the design features. From that point onward.

So it's also very crazy to me that he not just went off and lived a normal life somewhere. He went into hiding in the woods. Dog like you're going off grid so that nobody can find you because you were so successful at a toy one time.

That doesn't exactly check out to me. It doesn't pass the sniff test.

No, it don't. Yeah, I'm looking at like stock prices and shit. But yeah, back in December of ninety nine, it had a high of eleven dollars a share, Tom Hasbro, Yeah, Hasbro did, and its current price right now is actually higher than it ever was. But of course there's reverse stock splits that can really pump that up. But I think it's current price now is sixty two bucks a share, so still pretty damn good.

Look at what a Coca Cola is at ninety nine. Just to give a.

Comparison, he said, Hasbro was at eleven a share. Yep, Okay, all right, now again, Coca Cola is wild, wildly more successful than Hasbro, and we understand that, but you got to compare something against it, right, Like whenever people are like I bought my first house for twenty five thousand dollars, Like, okay, but what did a gallon of gas cost?

You?

Like, give me something to compared against.

So the closing price for Coca Cola between nineteen ninety and nineteen ninety nine was fourteen twenty seven, so they were up there.

Hasbro was doing very well then.

Yeah, and the latest price for coke now is sixty seven, So like literally what and what?

Wow?

That's that's pretty incredible that Hasbro had as good of returns as Coke.

That that's mind blowing.

Yeah, yeah, it's pretty crazy.

And especially you think about like how much it probably cost them to make this shit overseas, you know, like they're.

Selling them for twenty nine ninety nine.

Whenever they first came out, it probably cost them two or three bucks to make, you know.

Oh yeah, and so yeah, I mean I imagine the the ROI was quite nice.

Very true.

Now let's go into some of the other possible modifications on the Ferbies. Like I mentioned this homeboy here his YouTube channels. Look, mom, no computer. He actually built an organ. I'm not saying pipe organ because there's no pipes. There's only Ferbies organ. And he actually got them to make music, if nothing else. It's gonna be slightly annoying and slightly entertaining. Let's watch this together, good cult members, y'all tell me what y'all think. As far as if this guy was able.

To make this happen with a little bit of some time and some wiring and some modifications, what else could the Ferbies have been used for?

If there was a nefarious actor in the mix? Check it out? A forgan you will? What a foregan? If you will? A foregin? Yes, a foregan new.

Finally, after trowling through eBay and rummaging fruit cherry shops up and down the land, and a heck of a lot of soldiering, I present to you the Ferbie organ. And here we have forty four free range, homegrown little Ferbi dars that have been extensively modified using the fully patent void formant Verbi fusion synthesis brain modification surgery procedure, along with a beautiful oak finish that wouldn't look out

So I've tried to waken up them, I've gone.

Back to sleep.

I'm gonna turn that down slightly for that.

You also have the ability to stop them in their tracks by pressing the loop and freeze switch.

It's weird, isn't it. Feature.

The Ferbies are able to also generate a four months vowel notes, and you're able to change the vowel. It's rather hard to notice, but when you hit the notes, the Ferbie also speaks. But they're going a bit crazy right now. I think they're a bit excited to be on camera. So now it's time to play a song. I've just got to get out my Ferby composer out of its backpack.

Ah.

The thing is worth mentioning.

He just showed some of the furbies that were completely dissected that he did for this. We're gonna watch another video next that the people actually taking them.

Apart, which is pretty wild. But yeah, let's let's.

Continue with this uh musical number. Wild Ship Dude.

As Aristotle once said, there is no great genius without a touch of madness, and that spells that guy right there. Yeah, a little bit, a little bit. I had a couple more articles pulled up.

We already talked about when the National Security Agency outright band Ferbies. This is a quick little two page thing talking about the actual memos that were released. But I think we pretty much covered that to the degree. So now what is inside of Ferbie? Let's talk about this. These two engineer types are actually going to break it apart to show the insides. And you know, with all the conversation about could they listen, were they recording us?

Hello there, welcome to Live Lab for another dissection video. We've got something a little bit different for you today.

We're going to be dissecting one of our favorite toys in the nineties, Ferbies.

We're going to start trying to take the skin off, the outside skin fur.

It's a bit of plastic that's so believably real.

So I'm cutting around the base of the Ferby here. I'm just going to slice up his middle now, just to see if I can get a look at what's going on. We're being held on by his face, so I'm thinking his face plate might come off, which'd be interesting.

What can we see down there?

So here that looks like where are you tom?

So?

That's his sense cool and round on the back. We'll get a better look at these once we've got his skin properly off. But that's where you can stroke his back. The faces is on the way off, you can reveal the nightmarish creature within some eyeballs becoming exposed.

So I've gone for a different approach, just cutting round face.

It's pretty horrifying, and I'm going to see if I can delicately expose his ears. I'd quite like to keep the ears intact if I can. We've kind of skinned them now, so I think stage two is probably to get inside this plastic bit.

So I think I've done enough screwing or enough pulling that we can start to get one of the sides away. Yeah, look at that.

I'm not gonna bother with that last screw.

Oh.

I have a theory about these these cogs and gears in the back there. If we can force those to move, we might actually see some movement in the face of the Ferby, which I think would be quite nice. We can say we've got a little contact soon. So it's just two bits of metal that when they come into contact with each other, when you press down make a connection. It's just like acting like a switch.

Found the final screw.

I want to get this top section with all the mechanical workings away from the electrical circuit board, get a better look at the brain there.

It is Ferby brain.

So we've got lots of resistors and capacitors at these ones here, and then these long bits and that bit there. Those are kind of some of the cleverer bits. Those are the chips, and they're gonna have lots of connections in them to kind of do the logic of the circuit. So when Ferby's mouth is pressed, move is up and down. That's where that is happening.

Just found a little motor. So either side of that coil.

Are two magnets. When an alternating current is passed through that coil, that's going to make this thing's been round. So that's how the Ferbi is translating electrical signals into movement of these gears underneath.

I'm wondering if we feed that some power directly. Oh, might we be able to get it to go? Let's do it.

Beth's being slightly blase about connecting batteries to unknown things, and that's because he's a fairly low voltage.

If this was a main's appliance, we would not be doing this.

Oh my god, Yeah, it's alive, brilliant. So we were right that one motor is driving all of the gears in this little gearbox. All we needed was to find the positive and negative and hook it up to a bit of a powerful battery that is magnificently creepy. Magnificently creepy. The back looks particularly incredible.

That little black that is for the mouth. That's the mouth going in time. This one's doing the ears up and down. That little black one there.

He's doing the eyes open shut, open shut, all off, one movement.

What we want to do now is see what a live Ferby looks like without its skin, without its outer casings, but still working. We want to see all those gears turning while it's alive.

Talking to you.

Okay, The inside is really amazing, Like I'd never thought about what was going on in there, and now.

We've seen it. It kind of makes sense.

The Ferby's got lots of different sensors on the outside, and we can see how they're connected to the circuit board.

When the sensors are pressed.

Or hear something when the light's covered, send a signal to the circuit board.

Circuit board processes.

That sends a signal back out to the motives, which makes the Ferby movement.

And it's got a whole range of things just with one really simple, a very very clever. So if you've got any old toys at home which just sitting up in the accid collecting dust, get them downstairs and see what's inside them.

All right.

So, now, like I said, that's kind of a breakdown of the inner workings, the mechanical features and all of these things that would be.

That would be so cool to just go in there and you know, mess with some of the words that it can say. You know, maybe give it to somebody as like a little nostalgic present. They think that they're getting a little Ferby. Meanwhile, that thing just walks up to you and says.

Fuck you, Jacob, or drop the base in it and be like, oh, have that bitch wake you up in the middle of the night, like yo, that would fuck.

People up, dude.

I would just have like a little timer that comes on at three point thirty in the morning, just like well.

Like if it's already got the photos cell, it's very easy to rig up a timer to where once the light's gone, there's like an eight hour timer that starts and have that bitch at two in the morning starts screaming in one of these tones.

That's awesome.

I was thinking I was more Witching Hour, That's why I said that. But okay, I mean creepy. Either way, it'd be a fun little prank to do on somebody.

So let's kind of recap on this episode and some of the wild things we discussed, and also I actually mentioned this one too. There was also some controversy surrounding the Ferbies, saying that they were actually using human or animal hair as their fur. The Hasbro company had to come out and say, no, it's all acrylic, like they dissolved fake fur, just like all the other fake fur items you would buy from a stuffed animal.

Which is the cheaper way to go about it anyway.

Indeed, indeed, now as far as how the machine was able to go from speaking Furbish to speaking your language.

Here's the thing. It was pretty programmed, and it was correct that the more you played with it, the more it unlocked new things, new easter eggs, if you will, so, let me just throw this out.

You had it to where if you were to like say good morning to it or hello, like fifty times, it would answer you in Furbish fifty times. On the fifty first time it would answer you Hello, and it was.

Like, no way, it's changing, it's learning.

It's all this.

Basically, the program was set to a certain number a certain not a timer, but a certain number of times when a phrase would be uttered, and then it would swap from Furbish to your language and answer you. It gave the appearance that it was self learning, but in reality it was pre programmed for that. And I'm throwing out fifty arbitrarily. I have no idea what number for

So the Ferbie, the toy that was the craze of the world for a good few years there banned by multiple three letter agencies, lobbied for by Reagan's former chief of staff.

No, as of this moment, I don't believe that it was actually being used as a spy device, but I could absolutely understand why so many agencies believe that it was. And again, with all those mechanics on the inside, unless you knew what you were looking at, how would you know if that wasn't being used as a recording device or as a memory storage bank, or if there wasn't a computer or a camera that was hidden behind the

Brother shocking, actually, you know, And it makes you just want to look a little bit deeper into a lot of the fads and a lot of the toys and stuff like that, especially in the day and age where microchip might dude, a microchip can be the size of a skin follicle now, like they are so damn small.

I mean, keep in mind, in ninety nine, the flip phone was seen as the fucking pinnacle of the technology you'd have.

In your pocket. People were still using beepers, The Nokia brick was still widely being used by a vast majority of the public. You had to pull the antenna out of your cellular to be able to do like you see what I'm saying.

It was a different era. The next tell phone walkie talkies. Those things were like, oh shit.

Those didn't even come out until like the mid two thousands.

Dude, was it that No, it was like early two thousands.

I want to say, the only time I remember seeing it was probably around three oh four. And I mean maybe by that point they had kind of gone down as far as popularity goes. But yeah, the next tell cell phone walkie talkies.

Why wouldn't you just use the cell phone and call the guy, well, because you don't want to use your minutes. It was It's crazy the amount of things that we took at that day and age is like, well, obviously, and now we look back like bro, Why what the fuck.

Dude, I knew it came out a lot earlier. My dad used to have one of those.

It was a work phone, and the next TAEL launched it's pushed to talk service marketed as Direct Connect in nineteen ninety six.

No, the walkie talkie cell phone Combo wasn't in ninety six. There's no way.

It says which allowed users.

This is from how stuff works, but it says which allowed users to communicate using a walkie talkie feature on their phones. This service became widely popular, however, in the late nineties and early two thousands.

Okay, damn, but it started in ninety six.

That's fucking crazy.

Yeah, you'd get the little chirp and somebody's trying to, you know, send you a little walkie talkie message.

God hear that.

You get the little on your belt, But it was your pager. Pagers were the shit back in the day.

Dude.

Dude, my dad still had one up until like two thousand and two, like and I mean he didn't use it past like ninety nine, but he still had it and he never like canceled service to it.

So you just leave it on the dresser.

We would hear that bitch just buzz his dresser for no reason at random times. It was basically like telemarkers that were paging him asking him to call them for some pole or something.

It was so stupid it made a kim possible age like milk dump bump up.

Yeah, no doubt dude, Yeah, but yeah, pretty crazy.

This whole Furby phenomenon makes you, makes you wonder well. Look, I do want to say, if you want to be able to support the show, come on and check out our delicious cannabis seltzer.

It's called Good Feels.

That's in the link down below if you want to be able to go and check it out. It does have some CBD, it has a little THC. You ain't gonna wake up with a hangover. You're gonna be smiles all night, relaxed.

It's not like those super high potent milligrams of crazy THCHC that they're putting in weed nowadays that you can't find anything under fucking fifteen percent, which is ludicrous.

It is.

It's like the good old days when you could smoke a joint and just relax. You didn't have fucking crazy anxiety. That's what this cannabis Seltzer from Good Feels is all about It is just about relaxing. It's about unwinding and yang got to stick out like a sore thumb being the person that doesn't want to drink that night, you know. So it's a really good thing to add into your nightly repertoire. You don't need a glass of red wine or white wines that's gonna give you a crazy headache

Absolutely absolutely. Another way to support the show and your own health will be to get you a rife machine in your home and experience real healing through sound frequency technology. Best place to go would go to Real Rife.

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I know it's a little bit on the pricey side. Is that actually gonna pay out in the future?

Is this just gonna be a thing where I'm putting forty bucks in and I might get forty five out. And I promise you they're going to tell you, no, that's not how that works at all.

At least a portion of your retirement portfolio needs to be invested in precious metals. They're going to tell you that. Don't just take my word for it. Best place to get your start b to go to cocsilver dot com once again link in the description below. But another way to support the show and let us know what you think about the ferbies.

Are we crazy for looking at it in this way?

Where the three let our agencies crazy for looking at it the way they did? What has bro on some shit from day one? They've actually been spying on us the whole time. Let us know what you think, and the best way to do so would be too Please hit the five stars at the Shares of Light subscribes comments, we'll post the review shares that their friends of family shares that we're here's the deal. The more activity the algorithms see across all of our listening platforms, the more

Come check out the.

K tonight and come join each of us for our individual Patreon lives that we host every Wednesday night at nine pm Central. Links to those are in the description as well. And we thank you for everybody's already gone and done so.

And with that being said, this was another beautiful episode of the Cult of Conspiracy.

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