Hello, people. If you want to come see us live next year, your very first chance to do it is going to be Seattle, Washington on January twenty fourth at the Paramount Theater, isn't that right?
Yeah? And then the following day, the very next day, we're going all the way down to Portland, Oregon for another show on the twenty fifth at Revolution Hall. And then after that, the very next day we're doing another show, Chuck.
That's right, our annual trip to f Sketch Fest on January twenty sixth. You can get tickets now. Just go to stuff youshould know dot com, click on the tour link, and please please buy from official sellers from the venues. Do not buy scalts tickets.
All right, and everybody, we will see you in January. With bells on jingle bells.
Welcome to Stuff you Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio.
Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh, and there's Chuck and Jerry's here too, and we're feeling fairly festive and this is Stuff you should Know. That's right, the episode before the Christmas episode.
Yeah, which is become a I guess tradition to do a classic toy. When did we start that?
I'd say more custom than tradition. All right, I'm sorry, Christmas, I'm feeling contrary. It is definitely a tradition.
Yeah, that's because you're about to shut it down for a month, so you don't care you're burning bridges exactly.
I won't see you until like twenty twenty four.
Yeah, like chuckle, forget anything that happens today.
By then, I'm trying to think of what our first toy one was. It was a handful of years ago. I don't remember, but it was slinky maybe no, No, I mean we've done toy ones, just not around Christmas. I'm trying to think of the first toy Christmas ey one. I can't. I'm drawing a blank right now. So this is like high quality podcasting doing right now.
Yeah, well, good pick this year.
Yeah thanks. I don't know what made me think of beanie Babies, but I did, and I think it turned out to be a good one too, because it had nothing to do with Christmas. Really, yeah, Christmas pops up at one part. But it's a toy, and it's a really interesting toy because Beanie Babies. For those of you who don't know, if you were born after the nineties were probably well, i'll just say The Financial Times called
it potentially the greatest market bubble of all times. Yeah, I mean that's really saying something, because there's been some market bubbles, but the beanie baby craze of the mid to late nineties probably topped them all. It was just that crazy. I mean, we've talked about some crazy stuff that people have done for toys before, people elbowing one another for a cabbage Patch kid. That's peanuts compared to what people did for beanie babies.
Yeah. I didn't know anything about this either, because that was sort of the end of college and then my New York New Jersey years, and I just I knew that beanie babies were a thing, but I was not participating in the economy in that way at that point.
So you didn't known a single one. Oh, of course not I didn't either, No, I totally didn't. But the thing is is we were in the minority in America, something like sixty two or sixty three percent owned at least one beanie baby at the height of this bubble.
Think about that. That honestly was one of the most shocking stats in this whole thing.
Yeah, that's like six point three people out of every ten people.
Yeah, that's amazing when you're talking about a little kid's toy.
Yeah, well that was the thing. It wasn't kids that fueled this craze. It was almost exclusively adults because the reason the market bubble grew was because there became this idea that beanie babies were valuable, that they had an inherent value greater than the face value that you would pay for them at the retail store.
Yeah, which was true for a while.
Yeah, it was. It was. We'll get into all that, but let's start from the beginning, shall we.
All right, Well, you can't talk beanie babies without talking about the gentleman who started it all. I do remember seeing the letters t Y on beanie baby packaging, so I wasn't completely head in the sand, sure, but I did not know that t Y was the guy's name. It was Ty Warner, who was born in the mid nineteen forties in Lagrange, Chicago suburb Lagrange, Illinois, and he had a pretty not great childhood. It seems like, is that fair to say?
Yeah? From everything I've heard.
Yeah, I had a mother who suffered from mental illness which was not treated, which is even worse, didn't have a great relationship with his dad. His parents got divorced when he was in his thirties, but he went to college at Kalamazoo College in Michigan, where he learned his love of treading the boards.
Yeah, yeah, kalam theater, right exactly. But he did. He got into acting, and it kind of either he was already like a theater kid at heart, or it turned him into a theater kid because he ended up taking that that way of living or that way of looking at the world or being in the world with him essentially for the rest of his life.
Yeah, he seemed fairly flamboyant.
He was flamboyant. There's a really oft sighted story about him showing up when he became a salesman for the toy company that his father worked for. He would show up to these sales calls in a Rolls Royce wearing a floor length fur coat and a cane and a hat. Amazing, essentially like Kramer when he accidentally's wearing the Technicolor dream
coat and ends up with that big Jamir Kui hat Niccain. Yeah, that's essentially what Ty Warner showed up to these sales meetings looking like in the early sixties, and apparently it worked because he said that his premise was if he showed up to a sales meeting looking like that, people would say, I want to see what's in that guy's briefcase?
Yeah, or do.
You Yeah, it depends on the kind of party you're in for.
Yeah, he was a really good salesperson. Apparently he thought a lot of himself though, and in nineteen eighty he worked for this company, I guess what, for like eighteen years, because he got the job in nineteen sixty two, So
that's a nice long run. But at least the way his former boss told it, guy named Harold Nazamian, who was the CEO, basically accused him of moonlighting on the company and using their you know, sales list in his personal personal relationships with people as a salesperson to sell his own stuff while he was working right as a sales manager for this company, and so he got fired.
Yeah, on those sales calls he would be like, yeah, I've got these great dacin products, but also I want to show you these too, So he was not only using company contexts. He was using company time too. It's about as bad a thing you can do as a salesman, essentially.
Yeah, And it wasn't long after that that the beanie baby came along.
No, that was so it was nineteen eighty when he lost the job. He apparently moved to Rome. He went to go visit some friends and ended up living there for a few years. And when he came back, he was inspired to keep going in the toy industry. I guess it kind of got under his skin and he'd seen some toy cats there in Rome, he said, and he was inspired to create not beanie babies at first, but his first plush toys, which was a line of
cats laying down, pretty fluffy. They looked they were fully stuffed, which is a big difference between them and beanie babies. And then for every cat there was a Himalayan version of it. And they were pretty cute little cats. But the thing that he did that I think really kind of helped sell these things because they were like a modest successive scene. It described as that he gave them names they were in They weren't just some stuffed cat.
This was Smoky, this was Peaches. Like these cats were individuals. They had an identity, and that made them that much more lovable.
Yeah, And they were larger, they were about seventeen inches. They larger than beanie babies would be. They would cost more than beanie babies at twenty bucks. And like you said, they were stuffed, but not stuffed with the you know kind of the genius of the I don't know about genius.
That's probably stretching that word. Sure, let's just say the fairly smart thing that he did with beanie babies was he stuffed them with beads like like a what's it called, yeah, pretty much, and didn't overstuff it so you could move them around and pose them and they could, you know, droop over your shoulder and stuff like that, not like a regular sort of fully stuffed whatever. They stuffed those things with whatever weird chemical stuffing.
Oh, like the little styrofoam pellets or the syrofoam fiber that's kind of like a yeah, fibers.
Yeah, I mean those are those are the cheapest ones that you would get as like a prize at an amusement park. Yes, that literal styrofoam balls.
Right, And that was a big that was a big deal about his Beanie Babies because they were high quality. They were very well made from the outset. He was all up the bottom of the South Korean manufacturers he had partnered with to make these things. He was really involved in the design and manufacturing process. So these were
really high quality dolls. But he made a very conscious to decision to sell Beanie Babies at five bucks a pop, which he said that mark that was the kids could typically buy that with their allowance money, because as we'll forget multiple times throughout this episode, these were originally meant
for kids to buy the Beanie Babies were. So that was a really big deal because he came out he was one of the first people to come out with a high quality toy at a price point of something you would get at like the County Fair something as a prize, but instead it was a good quality plush toy.
Yeah, exactly. And so this was nineteen ninety three for the actual launch of the Beanie Baby, which launched with Brownie the bear yep and Pinchers the Lobster, and like a Cabbage Patch kid, it came with a date of birth. He used the name like he you know, originally did with those fully stuffed cats or kiddies. I guess fully stuffed cat sounds gross.
It's like a traduction.
Including the date of birth. And then also another key was this little short poem and their little heart shaped tag turned out to be a bit of marketing genius. It was just just an extra little something to make it different to appeal to a kid, because you gotta even if it ended up being a thing that adults try to collect because you know, they thought it was valuable, it never would have gotten there if he hadn't have made a toay that kids really loved to begin with.
Right Also, I mean he wasn't the first to do that. This was a good ten years after the Cabbage Patch kids and their adoption papers and all that stuff. But it's still it is a good marketing technique for sure, and it did work. But the thing that made beanie babies really kind of take off was multifold. Part of
it was his marketing scheme. He had a really brilliant idea which was only certain kinds of stores could carry beanie babies, and you actually had to be a licensed beanie baby retailer to sell beanie babies legally or legitimately and those stores were like Hallmark stores, locally owned gift stores,
hospital gift shops, like small stores. So that right off the bat canceled any chance of anyone I saw it described it going into like a big box store, like a wal Mart or something and seeing a bargain bin of beanie babies just lumped together for fifty percent off. So the fact that that didn't that possibility didn't exist, someone couldn't see that automatically made it. They were just
higher status than they otherwise would have been. Because he made enough to sell to huge retailers like that, he decided deliberately not to do that for that reason.
Yeah, super smart. I mean, if you can create a scarcity and the illusion that what you're peddling is like limited and collectible, yeah, then you're going to do pretty well. And that's what he did. But not only by limiting the amount of stores that could be sold in, but he also limited the number of toys that these stores could even buy. Like that Hallmark store once they you know, really talk took off, couldn't be like, hey, we're going to dedicate half our store to these things now because
they're selling like hotcakes. So he would dole them out in limited numbers to the stores, and each of those stores only had certain products, like you know, you might have Spot the Dog and Squealer the Pig at one store, or Chocolate the Moose and Flash the Dolphin at another. And that creates a situation then where kids are like, I got a you know, like completing the collection as a classic kid's toy scam.
For sure, Yeah, by all the exactly. And so you would have to go around town to multiple stores in your town to get the ones that were available, and because they were allowed to only buy limited amounts, frequently those things were sold out. So the idea that these things were scarce collector's items was manufactured out of the gate by Ty Warner in his marketing skit. I almost said scam, but scheme, I think is a better way to put.
Yeah. The other big thing is that this coincided with the rise of the Internet. There's a great scene in the movie. There's a movie that's out now, I think an Apple original called The Beanie Bubble.
Yeah, I haven't seen it. Did you watch it now?
The reviews aren't kind. I may watch it because I love Zach Galifanakis, who plays Ty Warner and Elizabeth banks Is in the movie is a sort of a thinly veiled version of his former business partner and and romantic partner,
I think Patricia Roach. But in the movie, in the trailer I saw today, Zach said, because you know, they started a website and there were you know, an early website in those years, Yeah, Zach Galifant or I guess ty Warner says we broke the Internet things about it was a pretty good line because the Internet was so new over him, just like I guess you know there's a thing.
Yeah, apparently. So he had an employee named Lena Trevetti, and she was a coder, and this is like nineteen ninety three ninety four, and she convinced Ty Warner to create a beanie Baby's website because they were getting calls and letters and stuff like that from people saying like
this is my checklist? Is this accurate? Am I missing any And they thought, well, let's just put like a central place where all of the beanie babies can be listed, and it can be a place where everybody who likes beanie babies can come and like learn and get excited about beanie babies and buy beanie babies because starting in nineteen ninety five, they started selling beanie babies on this website, and that was the same year that Amazon and eBay launched,
so they were one of the first e commerce sites on the internet.
Too, Yeah, which is amazing. The movie has a character named Maya, who was again a thinly veiled version of Lena Trevetti, which I'm curious why they didn't just use their real names.
They touted this as loosely based on Zach Bissonette's book and that some of it was fictitious, I think to keep from getting sued. I get the impression that Ky Warner is not shy about suing people well.
Which is interesting because he played Ty Warner in the movie. Like, that's the only name that wasn't changed.
Yeah. I don't know why they did it, but they definitely did it well.
Judging from the trailer, it seems that both the Bank's character and the Maya character are kind of One of the threads of the movies, as it was seemingly in real life, was that there were at least a couple of women in the organization that had a lot to do with their growth in the sort of story is that he never gave them enough credit, and that seems to play out in the movie.
Oh yeah, he like if you read any like corporate write ups, like press releases or the very rare interviews he's given, like it sounds like the whole thing was just him, just him, And in part it was largely him because he owned the company from the outset, always has. He's never sold one share, he didn't take it public. It's been a privately owned company by him one hundred percent as far as I know from the outset. So he definitely, you know, really was the driving force in this,
but he had help that is largely unacknowledged publicly. That it's a good thing that Zach Bisonette came along, and also the people who made that the movie based on Zach Bisonett's book to kind of shine a spotlight on the other people of this, particularly women who helped him. Yeah, Zach and Zach, that's right, the two Zach's on the Zach attack against Ty Warren's.
The other thing that he did to sort of, you know, drive this, I mean, I guess we can call it a fall scarcity, is he had he was very secret about the company. He didn't want people outside the company knowing, like when they were going to launch a new kind of toy, how many they were making. Right in nineteen ninety five, he started retiring models that was huge and then adding other ones. And he would just all of a sudden drop like, you know this Marty Moose, what did I call him something?
The moose, chocolate moose.
Chocolate Moose is gone, let's say. And if they're being baby people out there, like, no, chocolate moose never left. I'm just using that as an example.
That's a good idea.
But they would just announce that on the website and all of a sudden, people are like, oh my god, they've retired the moose, and you know, people are driving around and trying to find them in those stores before they're all gone.
Yeah, that was a deliberate thing to do as well, to create the further scarcity, like legitimate scarcity. But apparently he fell into that backwards or he stumbled into it, because we said that he was really involved in the design. After these things would launch, he would like, see one, be like that's too orange, I want it more red, And all of a sudden, I saw a pinchy the
the lobster would be a much deeper red. Well, they'd stop producing the orangish red one, and these beanie baby collectors would go bonkers trying to find the other one. He started to notice that, and so he created real scarcity by deliberately retiring some just out of the blue. People would go scramble to find them, and then retailers, most importantly, would start stockpiling everything that he had that they could sell, say the orange pinchy.
Yeah. He was also smart enough to realize that the cabbage Patch kids, like when that bubble burst, it just kind of all went away, and so he would do things like, hey, Hallmark, if you want to order these beanie babies, you got to also order some of this other stuff that I'm selling. It's not as nearly as popular, but he tried to increase revenue sort of across the company. So he wasn't all in on the beanie baby, right.
I say we take a break and come back and talk about how McDonald's factors into this. What do you think.
Mcwe lately I've been learning some stop about insomnia or aluminia. How about the one on border like disorder that are under order? That one be warm, but it was so nice, Olearnest, why everybody listen.
Up, stop stop stop Star Josh and shock.
So shot.
Okay, Chuck. So we said, McDonald's factors into this, Like any great American economic bubble story, McDonald's going to play
some role in it whatsoever, somehow, some way. And McDonald is the one that basically said, if you are just kind of out there on the margins and don't really know what's going on in this beanie baby collector world growing under your very nose, this McDonald's happy Meal promotion is going to just blow the doors off of any illusions that beanie babies are not a cultural force to be reckoned with.
Yeah, over a couple of years, I think they had two versions in ninety seven and ninety eight where they there were hundreds of millions of teeny babies. These were even smaller, obviously because it was, you know, to fit into a happy meal.
Yeah, teeny beanies.
Yeah what I say, teeny babies?
It works too.
I like teeny babies.
I like teeny babies.
Too, teeny beanies. And you know, even if your thing is already popular, all of a sudden, if hundreds of millions of these things are going out and happy meals and you know the most popular, you know, fast food restaurant chain in the world, then it's gonna just skyrocket this thing even further. And that's exactly what it did.
Yeah, the nineteen ninety eight one, the second one that they did where you could get teeny beanies in a happy meal. The first weekend of that promotion, McDonald saw the highest increase in sales in its corporate history. It had never sold more in any weekend in the history of McDonald's than it did at the beginning of that second Beanie Babies promotion, and people were ordering as many happy meals as they were allowed to order and telling the McDonald's workers just keep the food, I just want
the beanie babies. McDonald's had to set up rules like individual franchises had their own rules. It was really patchwork where you could say, get five happy meals per order or per visit, and you had to have a two hour waiting period in between visits. So people would like just go for McDonald's and McDonald's and then just go on like a circuit to get as many of the beanie babies as they possibly could. People were tackling like delivery people showing up with the boxes of the new
beanie babies. That was nuts what people did just for the McDonald's version of the beanie babies.
Yeah, that McDonald's record. That even counts passing the Great McRib Feast of ninety two, the previous record holder.
The mcribs back right now, I saw, I've been meaning to go get one.
Talk about false scarcity, Yeah, same thing, for sure. I mean, I mean they could put that on their menu at any time, right, totally for sure.
You know that the fat cats at McDonald's Corporate are eating mcribs every day of the year.
Yeah, and the employee lounge is just stocked with them. Right.
But all this that's going on, Chuck is underscores a larger cultural thing, and that is that people are buying these beanie babies not just because they think they're the cutest thing on two legs, but because it has become largely widely accepted that they are a sound investment if you want to diversify your portfolio, or more often was the case, make your entire portfolio just beanie babies.
Yeah, you know this was by the like you said, the cabbage Patch kids had already come and gone. Everyone has already known at this point about the you know, Star Wars collectibles and baseball cards and trading cards. So the idea, I think there are certain people out there after all those things happened that are always sort of looking for that next thing as a you know, sort
of alternative investment. If I can you know, buy fifty beanie babies and put them in a box and just sit on them and that'll put my kids through college one day. Yeah, and that's you know a lot of people did stuff like that. I think you mentioned eBay had launched very soon afterward. They launched ninety five, and in nineteen ninety seven, this is the other most staggering set of the show to me, six percent of all of eBay was beanie baby sales.
Yeah, and that nuts. So the secondary market really did grow up, and there really was like a huge market for beanie babies that, say had been retired, and one that you had bought for five dollars and kept in the package you could sell for hundreds of dollars on eBay legitimately in the mid to late nineties.
Yeah, so this really.
Was happening, like it wasn't like everybody was just hoping beyond hope that their beanie babies were going to increase in value. They were increasing value before their very eyes. So people who weren't sucked into it were like, this is the dumbest thing I've ever seen, And if there's ever been an economic bubble, this is it. And yet people were buying these things for like long term investing. They were buying them hanging on to them for twenty
years or thirty years from now. The people who were actually trading in the moment are the ones who might have made money off of it. But that's pretty much the only people who.
Did, yeah, for sure. It also created a sort of an in this industry around it. You found some examples of people that made a lot of money just in the ancillary beanie baby market by doing things like writing books about stuff. This woman, Peggy Gallagher, she was a paralegal. She made two hundred grand on a book that she self published called the Beanie Baby Phenomenon, and then started making I imagine a pretty good deal of money as an official, well not official, but as just an experienced
beanie authenticator. Another woman named Mary Beth Sobaluski. She was an IBM systems engineer, and she just made sort of the go to list, like the bible basically of beanie baby pricing and made a lot of money off that and also started putting out a magazine. Yeah, was it a monthly.
Yes, it was based around the price list, Like did you ever collect or read Beckett's monthly for baseball cards. It's just a big.
Price I knew about it.
Okay, it's basically that, but for Beanie Babies it's called Mary Bethyebag World. They sold six hundred and fifty thousand copies a month at its peak for six bucks a pop. So it's almost three million dollars a run per issue for Beanie Babi's price guides. Right, but she really went to town with it. It wasn't It wasn't you know, just based on nothing. They she and her her assistance like called dealers, beanie baby dealers to find out what
their prices were, what was selling really fast? They were right, right, they were following eBay prices like they were. It was a legitimate Olivia Putt. It was the gold standard price
list for a reason. Yeah, you know, so and Mary Mary Beth Sobuleuski is another woman who was often overlooked for the contributions she made to the beanie baby mania, because, in addition to creating the gold standard price list, she was one of the original self described Chicago suburban soccer moms who started trading beanie babies in first place, and apparently their fervor in trading beanie babies in suburban Chicago actually kicked off the national trend of collecting and trading
beanie babies, and they essentially created the secondary market. There's an HBO documentary a couple of years ago, I think, called Beating Mania that really does a good job of shining a light on them and their role and contribution to the whole thing too.
So we've had a documentary now, a feature.
Film, yes, and Broadway Broadways next, and then James Mischer is coming back to life to write an epic novel about it.
That'd be pretty amazing. Speaking of amazing, there are also some amazing stories about just how kind of crazy things got in many different ways, one of which is a nineteen ninety nine divorce case in Las Vegas where this couple was divorcing and they had a lot of combined assets in the of beanie babies that they thought, you know, we're worth a lot, and they may have been worth a lot of money their collection, and they there's a very great picture if you look it up on the internet,
just type in, you know, like Vegas beanie baby divorced couple and they brought all these beanie babies in on the floor and the judge said, like like choosing a team at recess, you just go one at a time and each of you pick out a beanie baby that you're going to keep for yourself. And it's just a very kind of funny looking photo.
It is until you read like some of the quotes from the woman involved in the divorce case, the wife who was like this, it was really you know, demoralizing and degrading to have to be forced to do that. She was really upset that the judge made her and her ex husband do that, but it really, yes, she was she was not happy about it at all. But it was like the whole thing was worth five grand, I think they said, But that was five grand at the time, and people were speculating on beanie babies, so
I think could have been worth a million dollars. That pile of beanie babies, which is why they went to the trouble of selecting them like that one at a time.
I don't know. I mean, I guess everyone's entitled to their own opinion. It's her life. But degrading.
I don't think she used the word degrading, but it was. It was along those lines I'm paraphrasing.
Okay, I would have felt more silly unless you like tied them both up and made them do it with their mouth or something that's degrading. Yeah.
No, when they picked a beanie baby, they had to pick it up with their chin and hand it to their ex to say whether it was okay, if they kept or nothing, and then they had to hand it back all without using their hands.
Right or that? What was the thing you do? Or you would pass something with your neck?
That's what I'm talking about. Oh okay, they did that, but with the beanie babies they selected.
Okay, what did people used to pass that?
Like the orange? I think is what it was?
Oh yeah, yea, yeah, that's right.
I can't remember.
When you're a kid, it's I think the whole point of that game was like, oh, look how close we are exactly right.
It was like Spin the Box, but with an orange and necks and chance.
In no bottle. There was a guy in California named Chris Robinson Senior. I don't think any relation to the other Chris Robinson, and he bought twenty thousand Beanie babies, not twenty thousand dollars worth, twenty thousand actual Beanie babies,
spending one hundred grand or so. And he was one of those guys that was like, this is going to put my five kids through college one day, and one of his kids, Chris Junior of the Black Crows, I guess, made a documentary called Bankrupt by Beanies about, like, I guess how dumb he thought his dad was for spending that much money, like emptying their bank account because he thought it was a good investment.
Yeah, it's like it's a very short documentary. It's like eight to twelve minutes. I can't remember which one, and it's mostly it's just him interviewing his family members about this period in their family's history and dumb. Yeah, it was like the dad is definitely like, you know, it was not a good idea, but he's still holding out hope that you know, at some point sometime down the road. Oh yeah, they still have them, Like they're the background in all of the the the shots, like the interviews.
It's pretty it's cute. It's not like, you know, condemnation or anything like that, but it's just it's it's worth the eight to twelve minutes that you'll spend watching it.
I think, all right, well let's go check that out.
The Dad's like this, this documentary is very degrading, right, I'm paraphrasing.
There were a lot of cases. You know, there were people indicted in court for counterfeiting these things, you know, pos that were never delivered and distributors kept the money. The craze was so bad there was actual crime, like people breaking in and stealing beanie babies. This one case of a seventy seven year old guy in Chicago named Ben Perry was charged with stealing close to thirteen hundred beanie babies. There was a PI that found him, a
Tie incorporated private eye. In fact, they found him moving stuff out of a storage locker, moving these toys in and out and I'm not sure like he said that they weren't stolen yet he gave them up and donated them to a charity like that seems very fishy to me.
He apparently bought them for dirt cheap at a produce market, like a farmer's market, and he swore he didn't know that they were stolen, even though they were in boxes labeled tie like they were shipping boxes stolen out of the warehouse. But he got off finally, but it became clear to him that he didn't steal them, but that they were stolen. So he just you know, donated him
so he didn't get in trouble. No, But apparently he loved all of the limelight that was cast on him by the press during this the time that he was in court as the beanie baby bandit. He apparently ate it up so he got something.
He's like, I'm going out in style exactly.
There was another one is frequently linked to beanie babies, even though it's kind of a stretch if you start to sketch beneath the surface. But a man named Jeffrey White murdered another man, Harry Simmons, in West Virginia, supposedly over a dispute over who owned some beanie babies, although really what happened was Harry Simmons and Jeffrey White used to work together, and I think Jeffrey White was stealing or loafing or something like that, and Harry Simmons got
him fired. So Jeffrey White, who had borrowed beanie babies from him, hadn't given him back, killed Harry Simmons.
We understand you've been loafing exactly?
Is that true?
Yeah?
Is that a crime?
If you got timed? Lean, you got time to clean son?
Oh man. Should we take a break on that note? Yeah? Sure, all right, We'll be right back and wrap up the story of the beanie Baby.
Lately, I've been learning some stock about in say you Minia, how about the one on borderline disorder that or chunder order that one before?
But it was so nice.
I learned this why everybody listen up, shut joy stop stop stop cocks final Josh and shock.
So shot.
All right. We called this a bubble, like any sort of collectible or real estate bubble or financial bubble, because they eventually burst. And the Beanie Baby really followed the the I was about to say, rise and follow the Internet. The Internet clearly clearly never felt but the big dot com boom was what helped the beanie baby along and
also helped kill it a little bit. Although you know, beanie babies were bound to I think they were bound to go away one way or another anytime it's something that's something like this.
Uh huh.
August nineteen ninety nine, the website said, or stop, we're stopping the operation. We're not going to make any more of these at this point three hundred and twenty five different beanie babies. At the end of the year. Some people thought, no, this is we know that tie guy by now, this is just a stunt to get people
to buy more of his stuff. But it, you know, it kind of worked because enthusiast and collectors were like, all right, this is our last chance to go and get what's out there to complete, to complete our collections.
Right. I didn't read the books ech Bisonette's book, but I bread a review of it that they mentioned. The way that he puts it this was this was, in fact, one hundred percent a stunt to kind of juice the beanie the Beaby, the Beanie baby market again. And it did work, but in the short term, and he basically says ty Warner killed his creation by carrying out this
stunt because on Christmas Eve. Here's where Christmas pops up, as we said at the beginning Christmas Eve nineteen ninety nine, right before the turn of the millennium, or no, I guess that was a year later, he said. Ty Ty Warner announced on the website, I changed my mind. I'll leave it up to you guys to vote whether we should keep making Beanie babies or not. And in his credit, you had to pay fifty cents to vote, but each fifty cent vote went to the Elizabeth Klaser Glazer Pediatric
AIDS Foundation, So that was something. But ninety one percent of people said, yes, we want to keep Beanie Babies going. Of course he did, yeah, and the company said, oh, well that's great. We just so happened to have a whole new line of them ready to go. So here you go, everybody, Beanie Babies for all. And it was met with some craziness, but nothing like it used to be. And very shortly after that, the whole thing started to fizzle out rather quickly.
Yeah, it seemed like the sort of the last hurrah. I don't know if Ty Warner saw the riding on the wall and wanted one more sort of big sales crunch. I mean, if that's how we planned it, and then that was pretty smart because that's you know, that's what happened. They had a huge sales jump, even though brief they sold about eight hundred million dollars in two thousand. I mean that's seven years later. I think Beanie Babies lasted a lot longer than I would have expected them to.
It seems to me like it would have been like a two year flash in the pan, but they were around for a while.
Yeah.
I saw that they were still going until about two thousand and two, so that's yeah, that's a good long almost a decade of a craze, of a bubble. But at the end of it all, people started to realize, like, oh wait a minute, everybody has these things. This clubby Bear that I had to pay for the privilege of buying to be part of the club, everybody has that, or everyone has the Princess Die Beanie Baby bear, the special limited edition Beanie Baby they released in honor Princess
Die after she died. They made it sound like this was like the scarcest Beanie Baby yet there were there was like a hundred million of them out there. So people started to realize, like, these things aren't aren't scarce at all. There's a glut of them, and these thousands and thousands of dollars worth of beanie babies that I have set aside are are worthless, and and that was
a huge blow to a lot of people. At the same time, I think it was also freeing, because it's you'll just come across stories of people who basically spent all of their free time tracking down beanie babies. It was an obsession that they couldn't quit, and so they were. They were out a bunch of money and time and wasted years, but they were free finally when the market finally crashed.
Yeah, it's like bitcoin.
I've seen it very closely compared to bitcoin in at least one article.
Yeah. I mean, I know people who are sort of obsessively hours and hours a day trading cryptocurrency, and it's it seems exhausting to me.
And it's the same thing. If you ever see a bubble coming along, that's not a long term thing. If something suddenly just jumps in value and it's shocking and people are writing like crazy articles about it, buy it and then sell it during that. Don't hang on to it long term. Same thing with bitcoin, Like a lot of people made a lot of money by buying bitcoin cheap and then selling it at its peak. It's people who hung on to it as a long term investment
that are now like I lost my shirt, you know. Yeah, So it's the same thing with Beanie. But it's the same thing with any economic bubble. You have to know when to get out of just the right time, or you can sit on the sidelines to be like, you guys are.
Chumps, right, Well, who certainly wasn't a chump was was Tie because he and I feel like I can just call him Tie because that was so his brand and t y. Yeah, for sure, no one knows exactly what kind of dough he made on these because, like you said earlier, he never you know, became a he never launched an ipo and didn't have to disclose stuff publicly.
But he is and was a man with some ego because in nineteen ninety eight there were some questions about, you know, Beanie babies, did they really sell as much? Was it the top toy seller in the world, And he himself took out a full page Wall Street Journal ad saying that he made seven hundred million dollars in profits in nineteen ninety seven alone, which is I don't know if that number is true, but if it's seven hundred million justin profits in one year, then that's remarkable.
That would have made tie ink more profitable. Then hasbro and Mattel together that year? This is just from everything they sold exactly. Yeah, just in profits, right, that's what that taking out that ad in Wall Street Journal is what you'd call today a flex flex.
Yeah, But I mean he is still a legit billionaire. It's sort of gone up and down according to Forbes as far as his net worth goes two thousand and two, supposedly at six billion two thousand and nine down to three point two twenty twenty three. Forbes says he's worth about five point seven. But it's you know, he still has that company, but he also diversified, got into real estate, notably as a hotelier, and he owns the I think still closed Four Seasons hotel, New York.
Still closed. What's it closed for?
It depends on who you ask. I think he claimed it was renovations, but other people said it was a dispute with the Four Seasons brand. But I think it's supposed to reopen and sometime next year.
Yeah. I saw he had a dispute with the Four Seasons brand over upkeep fees, like what he basically needed to spend to keep the thing up to four season standards.
Yeah.
I also saw that that was the first hotel to open to first responders and doctors and nurses who were working on the front lines of the COVID pandemic, so that they had a place to stay they wouldn't have to go home and infect their families, which I thought was pretty cool.
Yeah, I mean, I guess we can talk about that a little bit in a broader sense because Warner is someone who, like has has been notably charitable as far as like front facing sort of putting stuff out there, kind of stuff like the Elizabeth Glazer Pediatric AIDS Foundation when he donated, you know, the fifty cents for those votes and stuff like that. Because he got in trouble at one point for tax well not tax fraud, but
what do you call it? Tax evasion And as part of his sentence, one of which was a couple of years probation, five hundred hours of community service, and one hundred thousand dollars fine. On the criminal side, he paid over fifty three million dollars in civil penalties. But part of the argument was like, hey, you know, as far
as this defense goes, like, this guy's really charitable. He's donated millions of dollars to the Children's Hunger Fund and the Andre Agassy Foundation, and, like I said, a lot of really public facing, like large donations. But prosecutors are like, that's a pittance of what this guy's worth, right, And just because he gives a little bit of money and makes a big deal about it, doesn't mean he didn't break the law.
Yeah. The judge in the case though, was like, yeah, he did, but again, I'm pretty impressed with his charitable work. So he got off easy. He could have gone to prison for four years. Instead he got off with one hundred thousand dollars fine, five hundred hours of community service, and two years probation. And it was for just the dumbest thing. He had a Swiss bank account that no one knew about but him that had like one hundred million dollars in it. This guy was a billionaire three
times over at his poorest point. There's just no reason to have done that. And he did, and he got caught doing it, and so he called it the greatest mistake of his life. Besides besides that pumping dump scheme. At the turn of the millennium.
So they kept making stuff stuff ease in fact as a company. In two thousand and four, they started licensing deals or getting involved with, you know, licensing other people's stuff, like Garfield and some Disney stuff. There was something called Beanie Booze that came out in two thousand and nine. Those were kind of big that were Yeah, they did okay.
I mean, nothing obviously went like the Beanie Baby, but nothing ever has probably sure, but he still is out there making money selling stuff, and he doesn't seem to be slowing down. I think, how is he now seventy three? I think seventy nine years old?
Seventy nine I was pretty close, give or take six years.
But he's still trying to market himself and his toy company. I think it was a little dismissive of the movie. Like everybody who's ever had a movie made about themselves, they always say like, yeah, ten percent of that thing is true. But I think they also secretly kind of liked that they've made a movie about them. Sah, sure that kind of.
Thing, right, for sure. There's that also, that secondary market chuck is still around and people are trading on that, that myth that some people still have that beanie babies are really valuable. And so if you go onto eBay and start searching beanie babies, you'll find some for like a dollar, some I think for less than a dollar, and then you can turn around and find the exact same ones for sale for twenty five thousand dollars or
sixty thousand dollars or something like that. And I was reading a I think tie collector dot com article where they were basically saying, like, we're pretty sure this is either money laundering that's going on, or it's some sort of scam where these people are trying to beef up like the the market value of these things or the secondary market artificially, or it's just a straight up scam where like you you pay them where they buy from you and say, oh, I overpaid, pay me back in
a gift card, which is another thing in addition to selling at the height of a bubble. Never do business with somebody who demands to be paid in gift cards. Something fishy is going on right there. That's my other word of advice around this Christmas time?
Yeah, is it not like a babysitter or something?
Yeah, even still, I'd be like, what's your angle, babysitter.
The one thing that cracked me up, though, was that when the movie came out and he kind of which was just recently I think this summer or last summer or whatever, he said. You know, I really wanted I would have preferred somebody like Warren Batty or Daniel Slewis to have played me.
Yeah.
I'm like, when this this was going on, he was in his forties. Warren Batty is eighty nine years old.
Yeah, he's aged.
Daniel le Lewis is sixty six. They're not even close in age. He's twenty six, twenty three years younger than Warren Batty. Like, this guy's all over the place.
Well, his thing with Daniel day Lewis is that he really did beat somebody to death with a bowling pin once. So he thought Daniel day Lewis could really bring that to life on screen like he did and there will be blood. Oh boy, you got anything else?
I got nothing else?
Have you forgotten all the mean things I've said to you of this episode.
I don't even know what you're talking about.
Great, well, since Chuck doesn't know what I'm talking about everybody, that means that it's time for listener mail.
You know, we're going to forego listener mail this week. It's late in the air, and we would just like to remind everybody we're going to say our official Christmas greetings on our Christmas episode. But we've got some great live shows coming up next year. We're doing our Pacific Northwest Swing and as we do every year in Sea almost every year in Seattle, Portland, and San Francisco at sketch Fest, and we went to some bigger theaters this time in Seattle especially, so we would love to see
everybody and for you to fill those places up. Start twenty twenty four off right, just go to our website stuff youshould Know dot com and click on the tour page and buy tickets from legitimate sources. Please do not go to scalper sites. You might think it's the real site, but if the tickets are more than like forty bucks or something, then it's not a real site.
Or if they want to be paid in gift cards, not a real ticket seller.
That's right. But we hope to see everybody in January late Jane.
Absolutely and in the meantime, everybody. If you want to get in touch with us, you can send us an email, send it off to stuff podcast at iHeartRadio dot com.
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