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SPEAKER_10: 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 24th at the Paramount Theatre. Isn't that right?
SPEAKER_09: 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 25th at Revolution Hall. And then after that, the very next day, we're doing another show, Chuck.
SPEAKER_10: That's right, our annual trip to SF Sketchfest on January 26th. You can get tickets now. Just go to StuffYouShouldKnow.com, click on the tour link, and please, please buy from official sellers from the venues. Do not buy scalps tickets.
SPEAKER_09: All right, and everybody, we will see you in January with bells on jingle bells.
SPEAKER_11: Jingle Bells. Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio. Hey, and welcome to the podcast.
SPEAKER_09: 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 has become a, I guess, tradition to do a classic toy.
SPEAKER_10: When did we start that?
SPEAKER_09: I'd say more custom than tradition.
SPEAKER_00: All right.
SPEAKER_09: I'm sorry. It's not Christmas custom. I'm feeling contrary. It is definitely a tradition.
SPEAKER_10:
Yeah, that's because you're about to shut it down for a month, so you don't care. You're burning bridges.
SPEAKER_09: Exactly. I won't see you until like 2024. Yeah, like Chuck will forget anything that happens today by then.
SPEAKER_09:
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, I mean, we've done toy ones. It's not around Christmas. I'm trying to think of the first toy Christmasy one. I can't. I'm drawing a blank right now. So this is like high quality podcasting we're doing right now.
SPEAKER_10:
Yeah. Well, good pick this year.
SPEAKER_09: 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 90s, were probably, well, I'll just say the Financial Times called it potentially the greatest market bubble of all times.
SPEAKER_08: Yeah.
SPEAKER_09: I mean, that's really saying something because there's been some market bubbles, but the Beanie Baby craze of the mid to late 90s 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
SPEAKER_10: and then my New York, New Jersey years. 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 own a single one?
SPEAKER_09: No, of course not. I didn't either. Did you? No, I totally didn't. But the thing is, is we were in the minority. In America, something like 62 or 63% owned at least one Beanie Baby at the height of this bubble. Think about that.
SPEAKER_10:
Yeah, that honestly was one of the most shocking stats in this whole thing.
SPEAKER_09: Yeah, that's like 6.3 people out of every 10 people.
SPEAKER_10: Yeah, that's amazing when you're talking about a little kid's toy.
SPEAKER_09: Yeah, well, that was the thing. It wasn't kids that fueled this craze. It was almost exclusively adults because the reason a market bubble grew is 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.
SPEAKER_09:
Yeah, it was. It was. We'll get into all that. Let's start from the beginning, shall we?
SPEAKER_10: 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. I just want to let you know that T-Y was the guy's name. It was Ty Warner who was born in the mid-1940s in LaGrange, Chicago suburb, LaGrange, Illinois. And he had a pretty not great childhood, it seems like. Is that fair to say?
SPEAKER_09: Yeah, from everything I've heard.
SPEAKER_10: Yeah, 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 30s, but he went to college at Kalamazoo College in Michigan where he learned his love of treading the boards.
SPEAKER_09: Yeah, Kalamazoo. That means 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 way of living or that way of looking at the
SPEAKER_09: world or being in the world with him, essentially for the rest of his life.
SPEAKER_10: Yeah, he seemed fairly flamboyant.
SPEAKER_09: He was flamboyant. There's a really oft-cited 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. And you see like Kramer when he's accidentally wearing the Technicolor dream coat and ends up with that big Jamiroquai hat and a cane.
SPEAKER_09: That's essentially what Ty Warner showed up to these sales meetings looking like in the early 60s. 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.
SPEAKER_10:
Or do you?
SPEAKER_09: Yeah. It depends on the kind of party you're in for.
SPEAKER_10: Yeah. He was a really good salesperson, apparently. He thought a lot of himself, though. And in 1980, he worked for this company, I guess what, for like 18 years because he got the job in 1962. So that's a nice long run. But at least the way his former boss told it, a guy named Harold Nazamian, who was the CEO, basically accused him of moonlighting on the company and using their sales list and his personal relationships with people as a salesperson to sell his own stuff while he was working 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 Deakin products,
SPEAKER_09:
but also I want to show you these, too. So he was not only using company context, he was using company time, too. It's about as bad a thing you can do as a salesman, essentially.
SPEAKER_10: Yeah. And it wasn't long after that that the Beanie Baby came along.
SPEAKER_09: No. That was, so it was 1980 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 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 success I've seen it described as, that he gave them names. They weren't just some stuffed cat. This was Smokey. This was Peaches. Like these cats were individuals. They had an identity, and that made them that much more lovable.
SPEAKER_10: Yeah. And they were larger. They were about 17 inches. They, larger than Beanie Babies would be. Would cost more than Beanie Babies at 20 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 a, what's it called? BBC pellets. Like a bean bag chair.
SPEAKER_09: Yeah, pretty much.
SPEAKER_10: 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?
SPEAKER_09: I don't know what's in those things. Styrofoam fiber? That's kind of like a, yeah, fibers? Yeah, I mean, those are the cheapest ones that you would get as like a prize at an amusement
SPEAKER_10:
park. Yes. They had literal styrofoam balls. Right.
SPEAKER_09:
And 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 decision to sell Beanie Babies at five bucks a pop. Which he said that... It 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 or something as a prize, but instead it was a good quality plush toy.
SPEAKER_10: Yeah, exactly. So this was 1993 for the actual launch of the Beanie Baby, which launched with Brownie the Bear and Pinchers the Lobster. And like a Cabbage Patch Kid, it came with a date of birth. He used the name like he originally did with those fully stuffed cats, or kitties, I guess fully stuffed cats, sounds gross. It's like a turducken.
SPEAKER_10: 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 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 tried to collect because they thought it was valuable, it never would have gotten there if he hadn't have made a toy that kids really loved to begin with.
SPEAKER_09: Right. Also, I mean, he wasn't the first to do that. This was a good 10 years after the Cabbage Patch Kids and their adoption papers and all that stuff. But 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. 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 Walmart or something and seeing a bargain bin of Beanie Babies just lumped together for 50% 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.
SPEAKER_10: Yeah, super smart. I mean, if you can create a scarcity and the illusion that what you're peddling is limited and collectible, then you're going to do pretty well. And that's what he did. 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 really 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, oh, I got to, you know, like completing the collection is a classic kids toy scam.
SPEAKER_09: For sure. Yeah, collect all the things. 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 collectors items was manufactured out of the gate by Ty Warner and his marketing skit. I almost said scam, but scheme, I think is a better way to put it.
SPEAKER_10:
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? No, the reviews aren't kind. I may watch it because I love Zach Galifianakis, who plays Ty Warner and Elizabeth Banks is in the movie as a sort of a thinly veiled version of his former business partner and romantic partner. I think Patricia Roach. But in the movie, in the trailer I saw today, Zach said, because they started a website and they were an early website in those years. Zach Galifianakis, I guess Ty Warner says, we broke the Internet thing. That was a pretty good line because the Internet was so new. Everyone was like, I guess this is a thing.
SPEAKER_09:
Yeah, apparently. So he had an employee named Lena Trivedi and she was a coder and this is like 1993, 94. And she convinced Ty Warner to create a Beanie Babies 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. And starting in 1995, 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.
SPEAKER_10: Yeah, which is amazing. The movie has a character named Maya, who was again, a thinly veiled version of Lena Trivedi, which I'm curious why they didn't just use their real names.
SPEAKER_09: They touted this as loosely based on Zach Bissonnette's book and that some of it was fictitious, I think to keep from getting sued. I get the impression that Ty Warner is not shy about suing people.
SPEAKER_10:
Well, which is interesting because he played Ty Warner in the movie. Like that's the only name that wasn't changed.
SPEAKER_09: Yeah, I don't know why they did it, but they definitely did it.
SPEAKER_10: Well, judging from the trailer, it seems that both the Banks 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 and the sort of story is that he never gave them enough credit and that seems to play out in the movie.
SPEAKER_09: Oh, yeah. If you read any corporate write-ups like press releases or the very rare interviews he's given, 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 100% as far as I know from the outset. So he definitely really was the driving force in this, but he had help that is largely unacknowledged publicly that it's a good thing that Zach Bissonnette came along and also the people who made that movie based on Zach Bissonnette's book to kind of shine a spotlight on the other people, particularly women who helped him.
SPEAKER_10: Yeah, Zach and Zach.
SPEAKER_09: That's right, the two Zachs on the Zach attack against Ty Warren.
SPEAKER_10: The other thing that he did to sort of drive this, I mean, I guess we can call it a false scarcity is 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. In 1995, he started retiring models. That was huge. And then adding other ones and he would just all of a sudden drop like this Marty Moose, what did I call him? Something the Moose. Chocolate Moose is gone, let's say. And if there are Beanie 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.
SPEAKER_09:
Yeah, that was a deliberate thing to do as well to create that 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 and be like, that's too orange. I want it more red. And all of a sudden I saw Pinchy the Lobster would be a much deeper red. Well they'd stop producing the orangish red one and Beanie Baby collectors would go bonkers trying to find the other one. And 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.
SPEAKER_10: 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 nearly as popular, but he tried to increase revenue sort of across the company, so he wasn't all in on the Beanie Baby.
SPEAKER_09: Right. I say we take a break and come back and talk about how McDonald's factors into this. What do you think?
SPEAKER_10: Mc-what? Yeah.
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SPEAKER_03: Better yet, birth order. Heard that one before, but it was so nice I learned it twice.
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Squarespace. Okay, Chuck, so we said McDonald's factors into this. Like any great American economic bubble story, McDonald's is going to play some role in it whatsoever somehow, some way. And McDonald's 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.
SPEAKER_10: Yeah, over a couple of years I think they had two versions in 97 and 98 where there were hundreds of millions of Teenie Babies, these were even smaller obviously because it was to fit into a Happy Meal. Yeah, Teenie Beanies. Yeah, what did I say, Teenie Babies? It works too. I like Teenie Babies. I like Teenie Babies too. Teenie Beanies and even if your thing is already popular, all of a sudden if hundreds of millions of these things are going out in Happy Meals and the most popular fast food restaurant chain in the world, then it's going to just skyrocket this thing even further and that's exactly what it did.
SPEAKER_09:
Yeah, the 1998 one, the second one that they did where you could get Teenie Beanies in a Happy Meal, the first weekend of that promotion, McDonald's 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 from McDonald's to 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. It was nuts what people did just for the McDonald's version of the Beanie Babies.
SPEAKER_10: Yeah, that McDonald's record, that even counts passing the Great McRib Feast of 92, the previous record holder.
SPEAKER_09: The McRib's back right now, I saw. I've been meaning to go get one. Talk about false scarcity.
SPEAKER_10: Yeah, same thing, for sure. They could put that on their menu at any time, right? Totally, for sure.
SPEAKER_09:
You know that the fat cats at McDonald's corporate are eating McRibs every day of the year.
SPEAKER_10: The employee lounge is just stocked with them.
SPEAKER_09: But all this that's going on, Chuck, 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.
SPEAKER_10: Yeah, this was by, like you said, the Cabbage Patch Kids that had already come and gone. Everyone has already known at this point about 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 sort of alternative investment. If I can buy 50 Beanie Babies and put them in a box and just sit on them, that'll put my kids through college one day. 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 in 95. And in 1997, this is the other most staggering set of the show to me, 6% of all of eBay was Beanie Baby sales.
SPEAKER_09: Yeah, isn't 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 $5 and kept in the package, you could sell for hundreds of dollars on eBay legitimately in the mid to late 90s.
SPEAKER_09: 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. 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 20 years or 30 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.
SPEAKER_10: Yeah, for sure. It also created a sort of an 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 200 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 Soboluski, 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. Was it a monthly?
SPEAKER_09: Yes, it was based around the price list. Did you ever collect or read Beckett's Monthly for baseball cards? It's just a big price list? No, but I knew about it. Okay, it was basically that, but for Beanie Babies, it was called Mary Beth's Bean Bag World. It's 650,000 copies a month at its peak for six bucks a pop, so that's almost $3 million a run per issue for Beanie Babies price guides, right? But she really went to town with it. It wasn't just based on nothing. She and her assistants called Beanie Baby dealers to find out what their prices were, what was selling really fast. What you got, what you got. They were following eBay prices. It was a legitimate, Olivia put it, it was the gold standard price list for a reason. Mary Beth Soboluski is another woman who is often overlooked for the contribution 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 the 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 was an HBO documentary a couple years ago, I think called Beanie Mania, that really does a good job of shining a light on them and their role and contribution to the whole thing too.
SPEAKER_10:
So we've had a documentary, now a feature film.
SPEAKER_09: Yes. Broadway? Broadway's next, and then James Michener is coming back to life to write an epic novel about it.
SPEAKER_10:
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 1999 divorce case in Las Vegas where this couple was divorcing, and they had a lot of combined assets in the form of Beanie Babies that they thought were worth a lot, and they may have been worth a lot of money, their collection. And there's a very great picture, if you look it up on the internet, just type in Vegas Beanie Baby Divorce Couple, and they brought all these Beanie Babies in on the floor, and the judge said, 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 some of the quotes from the woman involved in the divorce case, the
SPEAKER_09: wife, who was like, it was really demoralizing and degrading to be forced to do that. She was really upset that the judge made her and her ex-husband do that. But it, 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 the thing 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.
SPEAKER_08: I don't know, I mean, I guess everyone's entitled to their own opinion.
SPEAKER_10: It's her life, but degrading.
SPEAKER_09: I don't think she used the word degrading, but it was along those lines. I'm paraphrasing. Okay.
SPEAKER_10: I would have felt more silly unless he tied them both up and made them do it with their mouth or something. That's degrading.
SPEAKER_09: 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 it or not, and then they had to hand it back all without using their hands. Right, or that, what was the thing you would do where you would pass something with your
SPEAKER_10: neck?
SPEAKER_09: 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, though? Like an orange, I think, is what it was. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, that's right. I can't remember what movie. But when you're a kid, it's, I think the whole point of that game was like, ooh, look how
SPEAKER_10:
close we are.
SPEAKER_09: Exactly.
SPEAKER_10: Right?
SPEAKER_09: It was like spin the bottle, but with an orange and necks and chins.
SPEAKER_10: No bottle. Right. There was a guy in California named Chris Robinson Sr., I don't think any relation to the other Chris Robinson, and he bought 20,000 Beanie Babies, not $20,000 worth, 20,000 actual Beanie Babies, spending 100 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 Jr., 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.
SPEAKER_09: Yeah, it's like, it's a very short documentary. It's like eight to 12 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. Is that 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 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 worth the eight to 12 minutes that you'll spend watching it, I think. All right. Well, I have to go check that out. The dad's like, this documentary is very degrading.
SPEAKER_09: Right.
I'm paraphrasing. There were a lot of cases, you know, there were people indicted in court for counterfeiting
SPEAKER_10: 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. There was one case of a 77-year-old guy in Chicago named Ben Perry was charged with stealing close to 1300 Beanie Babies. There was a PI that found him, a Thai 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.
SPEAKER_09: 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 Thai, 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 them.
SPEAKER_10: So he didn't get in trouble.
SPEAKER_09: No, but apparently, he loved all the limelight that was cast on him by the press during the time that he was in court as the Beanie Baby Bandit. He apparently ate it up. So he got something out of it. He's 77. He's like, I'm going out in style. Exactly. There was another one, a murder is frequently linked to Beanie Babies, even though that's kind of a stretch, if you start to scratch 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 and hadn't given them back, killed Harry Simmons. We understand you've been loafing.
SPEAKER_09: Exactly. Is that true?
SPEAKER_10: Yeah, is that a crime?
SPEAKER_09: If you got time to lean, you got time to clean, son. Oh, man.
SPEAKER_10: Should we take a break on that note?
SPEAKER_09: Yeah, sure.
SPEAKER_10: All right. We'll be right back and wrap up the story of the Beanie Baby.
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SPEAKER_12: All right.
SPEAKER_10: We call 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, I was about to say rise and fall of the internet, the internet clearly never fell. 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 like this. In August 1999, the website said, or stop, we're stopping the operation. We're not going to make any more of these. At this point, 325 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 enthusiasts and collectors were like, all right, this is our last chance to go and get what's out there to complete our collections.
SPEAKER_09: Right. I didn't read the book, Zach Bissonnette's book, but I read a review of it that they mentioned the way that he puts it. This was, this was in fact, 100% a stunt to kind of juice the Beanie, 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, 1999, right before the turn of the millennium, or no, I guess that was a year later. He said, 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, you had to pay 50 cents to vote, but each 50 cent vote went to the Elizabeth Glaser pediatric AIDS foundation. So that was something. But 91% 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 happen 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.
SPEAKER_10: It seemed like this sort of the last hurrah. I don't know if Ty Warner like saw the writing on the wall and wanted one more sort of big sales crunch. I mean, if that's how we planned it, 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 $800 million in 2000. 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.
SPEAKER_09: I saw that they were still going until about 2002. So that's yeah, that's a good long, almost a decade of a craze, of a bubble. And 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 Di Beanie Baby Bear, the special limited edition Beanie Baby they released in honor of Princess Di after she died. They made it sound like this was like the scarcest Beanie Baby yet. There were like 100 million of them out there. So people started to realize like these things 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 worthless. And that was a huge blow to a lot of people. At the same time, I think it was also freeing because 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 out a bunch of money and time and wasted years, but they were free finally when the market finally crashed.
SPEAKER_10: Yeah, it's like Bitcoin.
SPEAKER_09:
I've seen it very closely compared to Bitcoin in at least one article.
SPEAKER_10: Yeah. I mean, I know people who are sort of obsessively hours and hours a day trading cryptocurrency. And it seems exhausting to me.
SPEAKER_09: 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. Yeah, totally. So it's the same thing with any economic bubble. You have to know when to get out at just the right time. Or you can sit on the sidelines and be like, you guys are chumps.
SPEAKER_10:
Right. Well, who certainly wasn't a chump was Ty because he and I feel like I can just call him Ty because that was so his brand, TY. No one knows exactly what kind of dough he made on these because, like you said earlier, he never, you know, became 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 1998, 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 $700 million in profits in 1997 alone, which is I don't know if that number is true, but if it's 700 million just in profits in one year, then that's remarkable.
SPEAKER_09: That would have made Ty Inc more profitable than Hasbro and Mattel together that year. This is just for everything they sold. Exactly. Yeah. Just in profits, right? That's what that taking out that ad in Wall Street Journal is what you call today a flex. Flex. Yeah, but I mean, he is still a legit billionaire.
SPEAKER_10:
It's sort of gone up and down according to Forbes as far as his net worth goes. 2002, supposedly at $6 billion, 2009 down to $3.2 billion, 2023, Forbes says he's worth about $5.7 billion. 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?
SPEAKER_10: 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 sometime next year. Yeah, I saw he had a dispute with the Four Seasons brand over upkeep fees, like what
SPEAKER_09: he basically needed to spend to keep the thing up to Four Seasons standards. 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 and wouldn't have to go home and infect their families, which I thought was pretty cool.
SPEAKER_10: Yeah, I mean, I guess we can talk about that a little bit in a broader sense because Warner is someone who has been notably charitable as far as like front facing, sort of putting stuff out there kind of stuff like the Elizabeth Glaser Pediatric AIDS Foundation when he donated the 50 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 years probation, 500 hours of community service, and $100,000 fine on the criminal side, he paid over $53 million 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 Agassi 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. 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.
SPEAKER_09:
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 $100,000 fine, 500 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 $100 million 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.
SPEAKER_10:
Besides?
SPEAKER_09:
Besides that pump and dump scheme at the turn of the millennium.
SPEAKER_10: So they kept making stuff, stuffies in fact, as a company. In 2004 they started licensing deals or getting involved with licensing other people's stuff like Garfield and some Disney stuff. There was something called Beanie Booze that came out in 2009. 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. 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? 70 what? Three, I think? 79 years old. 79, that was pretty close.
SPEAKER_09:
Give or take six years. Yeah.
SPEAKER_10: 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, 10% of that thing is true. But I think they also secretly kind of like that they've made a movie about them. Sure, sure. That kind of thing. Right, for sure.
SPEAKER_09:
There's that also that secondary market, Chuck, is still around. And people are trading on 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 $25,000 or $60,000 or something like that. And I was reading a, I think, tyecollector.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 market value of these things or the secondary market artificially or it's just a straight up scam where like you pay them or 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, this is not like a babysitter or something.
SPEAKER_09: 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
SPEAKER_10: 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 Beatty or Daniel D. Lewis to have played me. I'm like, when this was going on, he was in his 40s. Warren Beatty is 89 years old. Yeah, he's aged these days. Daniel D. Lewis is 66. They're not even close in age. He's 23 years younger than Warren Beatty. This guy's all over the place.
SPEAKER_09: Well, his thing with Daniel D. Lewis is that he really did beat somebody to death with a bowling pin once, so he thought Daniel D. Lewis could really bring that to life on screen like he did in There Will Be Blood. Oh, boy. You got anything else?
SPEAKER_10: I got nothing else.
SPEAKER_09: Have you forgotten all the mean things I said to you this episode? I don't even know what you're talking about.
SPEAKER_09: Great. If he 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.
SPEAKER_10: It's late in the year, 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, as we do every year in Seattle, Portland, and San Francisco at Sketchfest. 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 2024 off right. Just go to our website, stuffyoushouldknow.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 40 bucks or something, then it's not a real site.
SPEAKER_09:
Or if they want to be paid in gift cards, not a real ticket seller.
SPEAKER_10: That's right. But we hope to see everybody in January, late January.
SPEAKER_09: 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 stuffpodcast.iheartradio.com.
SPEAKER_11: Stuff You Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts on iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
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