Transcript

SYSK's 12 Days of Christmas…Toys: Beanie Babies: Reigning Toy Craze Champion | STUFF YOU SHOULD KNOW

From Stuff You Should Know · Episode page · Watch on YouTube

December 14, 2025 · 50 min · 9,172 words · 169 timestamped sections

This is the full, timestamped transcript of "SYSK's 12 Days of Christmas…Toys: Beanie Babies: Reigning Toy Craze Champion | STUFF YOU SHOULD KNOW", an episode of Stuff You Should Know published December 14, 2025 (50 min, about 9,172 words). It mentions 77 people, works and ideas, including Beanie Babies, Ty Warner, the internet, Hallmark, market bubble.

What this episode is about

The discussion centers on Beanie Babies, a phenomenon that outshone Cabbage Patch Kids in popularity and became a cultural icon during the 1990s. Key points include anecdotes demonstrating their immense value, such as a notable courtroom battle over Beanie Baby possessions, and the broader implications of collector culture surrounding these plush toys.

Key takeaways

Beanie Babies: the only toys that made courtroom drama a 'must-watch' event in divorce proceedings.
62% of Americans owned Beanie Babies in the '90s, proving toys don’t have an age limit.
Ty Warner: making Beanie Babies iconic while proving a technicolor wardrobe isn't for the faint-hearted.
The Beanie Bubble burst: Adults took 'kids' toy speculation' to unprecedented heights—and costly lessons.
Forget Cabbage Patch Kid elbows, Beanie Babies made toy frenzy a high-stakes spectacle.

What is discussed, and when

0:00 – 5:00: Beanie Babies, market bubble, Cabbage Patch Kid, Kalamazoo
5:00 – 10:00: Beanie Babies, Adam Kramer, bean bag chair, Himalayan
10:00 – 15:00: Beanie Babies, Ty Warner, Hallmark, the internet
15:00 – 20:00: Beanie Babies, borderline disorder, false scarcity, Hallmark
20:00 – 25:00: Beanie Babies, Teeny Beanies, baseball cards, false scarcity
25:00 – 30:00: Beanie Babies, baseball cards, Beanie Mania, Beckett's monthly
30:00 – 35:00: Beanie Babies, Harry Simmons, Jeffrey White, Bankrupt by Beanies
35:00 – 40:00: Beanie Babies, Ty Warner, Clubby bear, millennium
40:00 – 45:00: Beanie Babies, Children's Hunger Fund, COVID pandemic, Swiss bank account
45:00 – 49:50: Apple Podcasts, Beanie Babies, Beanie Boos, Garfield

Notable quotes from "SYSK's 12 Days of Christmas…Toys: Beanie Babies: Reigning Toy Craze Champion | STUFF YOU SHOULD KNOW"

Hello again, guys. Up next on our playlist is our episode on Beanie Babies. They may have actually upstaged Cabbage Patch Kids because the craze for Beanie Babies stretched way beyond Christmas. There was a divorce case that.
about Beanie Babies · at 0:01
The '9s, were probably well, I'll just say the Financial Times called it potentially the greatest market bubble of all times.
about market bubble · at 2:04
But I did not know that Ty was the guy's name. It was Ty Warner who was born in the mid 1940s in Lraange, Chicago suburb, Lraange, Illinois. and he had a pretty not great childhood it seems like. Is that fair to say?
about Ty Warner · at 4:10
Baby retailer to sell Beanie Babies legally or legitimately. And those stores were like Hallmark stores, locallyowned gift stores, hospital gift shops, like small stores. So…
about Hallmark · at 11:33
Yeah. The other big thing is that this coincided with the rise of the internet.
about the internet · at 13:49
Yeah. Apparently, so he had an employee named Lena Trevetti and she was a coder and this is like 199394 and she convinced Ty Warner to create a Beanie Babies website because they were getting calls and ma and letters and.
about Lena Trevetti · at 14:44
That's right. the other thing that he did to drive this I guess we can call it a false 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.
about false scarcity · at 17:26
How about the one on borderline disorder? Better yet, reporter. Heard that one before, but it was so nice. I learned it twice.
about borderline disorder · at 19:50

Who and what is mentioned in this episode?

People

Ty Warner — Person · 6 mentions · first at 4:13
Lena Trevetti — Person · 2 mentions · first at 14:46
Jeffrey White — Person · 2 mentions · first at 33:46
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.…
Harry Simmons — Person · 2 mentions · first at 33:49
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…
Adam Kramer — Person · 1 mention · first at 5:35
Essentially like Kramer when he accidentally is wearing the Technicolor Dream coat and ends up with that big Jiraquai hat and a cane.
Patricia Roach — Person · 1 mention · first at 14:23
His former business partner 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 they were, an early website in those.
Peggy Gallagher — Person · 1 mention · first at 25:50
This woman Peggy Gallagher, she was a parillegal. 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.
Mary Beth Soalooki — Person · 1 mention · first at 26:07
Another woman named Mary Beth Soalooki. she was a IBM systems engineer, and she just made sort of the go-to list, like the Bible basically of Beanie Baby pricing.
Chris Jr. — Person · 1 mention · first at 31:08
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.
Ben Perry — Person · 1 mention · first at 32:31
Actual crime like people breaking in and stealing Beanie Babies. this one case of a 77y old guy in Chicago named Ben Perry was charged with stealing close to 1300 Beanie…
Chris Robinson Sr. — Person · 1 mention
Harold Nazamian — Person · 1 mention
James Michener — Person · 1 mention
Mama Fly Maya — Person · 1 mention
Princess Di — Person · 1 mention
Zac Bissonnette — Person · 1 mention

Books & papers

The Beanie Baby Phenomenon — Book · 1 mention · first at 25:55
This woman Peggy Gallagher, she was a parillegal. She made 200 grand on a book that she self-published called The Beanie Baby Phenomenon and then started making, I imagine, a…
Beckett's monthly — Book · 1 mention · first at 26:33
Yes. It was based around the price list. Like did you ever collect or read Beckett's monthly for baseball cards?
Mary Beth's Bean Bag World — Book · 1 mention · first at 26:38
Okay. It was basically that but for Beanie Babies. It was called Mary Beth's Bean Bag World. They sold 650,000 copies a month at its peak for six bucks a pop. So that's almost $3 million a run per issue.
The Great Beanie Baby Bubble — Book · 1 mention
Zac Bissonnette's book — Book · 1 mention

Companies & orgs

Hallmark — Company · 3 mentions · first at 11:38
hospital gift shops — Company · 1 mention · first at 11:40
Legally or legitimately. And those stores were like Hallmark stores, locallyowned gift stores, hospital gift shops, like small stores. So that right off the bat canceled any…
produce market — Company · 1 mention · first at 32:59
Them to a charity. Like that seems very fishy to me. He apparently bought them for dirt cheap at a produce market, like a farmers market, and he swore he didn't know that they…
Children's Hunger Fund — Company · 1 mention · first at 44:03
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…
tycollector.com — Company · 1 mention · first at 46:34
For sale for $25,000 or $60,000 or something like that. And I was reading a I think tycollector.com article where they were basically saying like we're pretty sure this is…
Andre Agassi Foundation — Company · 1 mention
Elizabeth Glaser Pediatric AIDS Foundation — Company · 1 mention
Four Seasons Hotel New York — Company · 1 mention
Jamiroquai — Company · 1 mention
Kalamazoo College — Company · 1 mention
The Black Crowes — Company · 1 mention
Ty Inc. — Company · 1 mention

Products & tech

Beanie Babies — Product · 37 mentions · first at 0:03
Teeny Beanies — Product · 2 mentions · first at 21:16
Teeny 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, you.
baseball cards — Product · 2 mentions · first at 23:55
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.
Cabbage Patch Kid — Product · 1 mention · first at 2:34
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.
Peaches — Product · 1 mention · first at 8:03
As that he gave them names. They were indivi they weren't just some stuffed cat. This was Smokey. This was Peaches.
Smokey — Product · 1 mention · first at 8:03
As that he gave them names. They were indivi they weren't just some stuffed cat. This was Smokey. This was Peaches.
bean bag chair — Product · 1 mention · first at 8:40
He stuffed them with beads like a what's it called? PVC. Like a bean bag chair.
Brownie the Bear — Product · 1 mention · first at 10:18
Yeah, exactly. And so this was 1993 for the actual launch of the Beanie Baby which launched with Brownie the Bear.
Pinchers the lobster — Product · 1 mention · first at 10:20
And Pinchers the lobster. And like a cabbage patch kit, it came with a date of birth. He used the name like he, originally did with those fully stuffed cats or kitties. I guess.
Spot the dog — Product · 1 mention · first at 12:59
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…
Squealer the pig — Product · 1 mention · first at 13:01
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…
Chocolate the moose — Product · 1 mention · first at 13:04
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…
Flash the dolphin — Product · 1 mention · first at 13:04
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…
Marty moose — Product · 1 mention · first at 17:52
That was huge. and then adding other ones and he would just all of a sudden drop like you know this Marty moose what I call him something the moose chocolate moose is gone let's say and if there are beanie baby people out.
trading cards — Product · 1 mention · first at 23:55
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.
Clubby bear — Product · 1 mention · first at 38:43
This clubby bear that I had to pay for the privilege of buying to be part of the club. everybody has that.
Beanie Boos — Product · 1 mention · first at 45:19
There was something called Beanie Boos that came out in 2009.
Apple Podcasts — Product · 1 mention · first at 49:35
Stuff you should know is a production of iheartradio. For more podcasts, iMheart radio, visit the iheartradio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
iHeart Radio app — Product · 1 mention
McRib — Product · 1 mention
Princess Di Beanie Baby Bear — Product · 1 mention

Concepts & topics

the internet — Concept · 5 mentions · first at 13:51
market bubble — Concept · 2 mentions · first at 2:13
false scarcity — Concept · 2 mentions · first at 17:32
borderline disorder — Concept · 2 mentions · first at 19:50
millennium — Concept · 2 mentions · first at 37:00
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.
Himalayan — Concept · 1 mention · first at 7:44
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 Beanie Bubble — Concept · 1 mention · first at 14:00
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.
Star Wars collectibles — Concept · 1 mention · first at 23:53
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.
Beanie Mania — Concept · 1 mention · first at 27:56
The secondary market. There's a 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.
Bankrupt by Beanies — Concept · 1 mention · first at 31:15
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…
COVID pandemic — Concept · 1 mention · first at 43:00
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.
tax evasion — Concept · 1 mention · first at 43:38
That because he got in trouble at one point for tax. Well, not tax fraud, but what he call tax evasion. And as part of his sentence, one of which was a couple years probation…
Swiss bank account — Concept · 1 mention · first at 44:37
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.
Garfield — Concept · 1 mention · first at 45:15
Started licensing deals or getting involved with you know licensing other people's stuff like Garfield and some Disney stuff.
There Will Be Blood — Concept · 1 mention · first at 48:03
Thought Daniel Day Lewis could really bring that to life on screen like he did in There Will Be Blood.
eBay (secondary market listings) — Concept · 1 mention
gift card scam — Concept · 1 mention
portfolio diversification — Concept · 1 mention
private investigator — Concept · 1 mention
Technicolor Dreamcoat — Concept · 1 mention

Places & events

Kalamazoo — Place · 1 mention · first at 4:42
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.
LaGrange — Place · 1 mention

Sponsors

sponsor break / ad read (unidentified) — Sponsor · 1 mention

Full transcript with timestamps

0:01 Hello again, guys. Up next on our playlist is our episode on Beanie Babies. They may have actually upstaged Cabbage Patch Kids because the craze for Beanie Babies stretched way beyond Christmas. There was a divorce case that saw the couple having to divide up their Beanie Babies on the floor of the courtroom. We talk about that, don't worry. Anyway, enjoy this episode on Beanie Babies. Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeart Radio. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh and there's Chuck and Jerry's here, too. And we're feeling fairly festive.

0:44 And this is stuff you should know. That's right. The episode before the Christmas episode.

0:52 Yeah. which is uh become a uh I guess tradition to do a classic toy. When did we start that?

0:59 I'd say more custom than tradition. Yeah. All right. I'm sorry. Christmas custom.

1:06 I'm feeling contrary. It is definitely a tradition. Yeah, that's cuz you're about to shut it down for a month, so you don't care. You're burning bridges.

1:14 Exactly. I won't see you until like 2024. Um Yeah. Like Chuckle Chuck will forget anything that happens today by then. I'm trying to think of when our first toy one was. It was a handful of years ago. I don't remember. But it was

1:28 Slinky maybe. No. No. I mean, we've done toy ones, just not around Christmas. I'm trying to think of the first toy

1:35 Christmy one. I I can't I'm drawing a blank right now. So, this is like high quality podcasting we're doing right now.

1:41 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 it turned out to be a good one, too, because it had nothing to do with Christmas. Really?

1:54 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 '9s, um were uh probably well, I'll just say the Financial Times called it um potentially the greatest market bubble of all times.

2:17 Yeah. I mean, that's 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.

2:39 Yeah. Yeah, I didn't know anything about this either because that was sort of uh 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 uh in the economy in that way at that point.

2:56 So, you didn't you didn't own a single one? No, 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 62 or 63% owned at least one Beanie Baby at the height of this this bubble. Think about that.

3:13 Yeah, that that honestly was one of the most shocking stats in this whole thing.

3:16 Yeah, that's like 6.3 people out of every 10 people. Yeah, that's amazing when you're talking about a little kids toy.

3:26 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 um valuable that they had an inherent value greater than the the the face value that you would pay for them at the retail store.

3:46 Yeah. Which was true for a while. Yeah, it was. It was. We'll get into all that. Let's start from the beginning, shall we?

3:55 All right. Uh, well, you can't talk Beanie Babies without talking about the gentleman who started it all. Uh, I do remember seeing the letters Ty.

4:04 Mhm. on Beanie Baby packaging. So, I wasn't completely head in the sand. Sure. Uh, but I did not know that Ty was the guy's name. It was Ty Warner who was born in the mid 1940s in Lraange, uh, Chicago suburb, Lraange, Illinois. and he had a pretty not great childhood it seems like. Is that fair to say?

4:27 Yeah, from from everything I've heard. Yeah. Had a had a mother who suffered from mental illness which was not treated which is even worse. Uh had a didn't have a great relationship with his dad.

4:38 Uh his parents got divorced when he was in his 30s but he went to college at Kalamazoo uh college in Michigan where he learned his love of treading the boards.

4:49 Uh yeah he Yeah. Cal 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 um 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.

5:12 Yeah, he seemed fairly flamboyant. He was flamboyant. There's a really offsighted story about him showing up uh when he became a salesman uh for the toy company that his father worked for. Uh he would show up to these sales calls in a a Rolls-Royce

5:30 wearing a floorlength fur coat and a cane and a hat. Amazing. Essentially like Kramer when he accidentally is wearing the Technicolor Dream coat and ends up with that big Jiraquai hat and a cane.

5:43 Yeah. That's essentially what Tai Warner showed up to these these sales meetings looking like in the early 60s. And apparently it worked because he said that um his premise was if he showed up to a sales meeting looking like that,

5:57 people would say, "I want to see what's in that guy's briefcase." Yeah. Or do you?

6:04 Yeah. It depends on the kind of party you're in for. Uh yeah, he was a really good salesperson apparently. Um he bought 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 uh his at least the way his former boss told it guy named Harold uh Nazamian who was the CEO basically accused him of um moonlighting on the company and using their you know sales list and his personal personal relationships with as a salesperson to sell his own stuff while he was working,

6:44 right? Uh 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 uh DIM products, but also I want to show you these, too." So, he was not only using company contacts, he was using company time, too. It's about as bad a thing you can do as a as a salesman, essentially.

7:02 Yeah. And it wasn't long after that that the Beanie Baby came along. No. Um 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 um when he came back he was inspired to to keep um 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. Um, pretty fluffy. They looked they were fully stuffed, which is a big difference between them and Beanie Babies. And then for every cat, um, there was a Himalayan version of it. Uh, 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 um that he gave them names. They were

8:01 indivi they weren't just some stuffed cat. This was Smokey. This was Peaches. Like these these cats were individuals. They they had an identity and that made them that much more lovable.

8:13 Yeah. And they were larger. They were about 17 in. They uh larger than Beanie Babies would be. Uh they would cost more than Beanie Babies at 20 bucks. And like you said, they were stuffed, but not stuffed with the uh, you know, kind of the genius of the I don't know about genius. That's probably stretching that word.

8:29 Sure. Let's just say the fairly smart thing that he did with Beanie Babies. Uh, was he stuffed them with with beads like a like a what's it called? PVC. Like a bean bag chair.

8:41 Yeah, pretty much. Uh, and didn't over stuff 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 um whatever they stuff those things with. Whatever weird uh chemical um stuffing.

8:58 Oh, like the little styrofoam pellets or the I don't know what's in those things.

9:02 Styrofoam fiber. That's kind of like a Yeah. fibers. Yeah. I mean, those are the those were the cheapest ones that you would get as like a prize at an amusement park.

9:11 Yes. Literal styrofoam uh balls, right? And that was a big that was a big deal about his beanie babies because they were high quality. They were very wellmade. Um 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 highquality dolls. But he made a very conscious decision to sell Beanie Babies at five bucks a pop, which he said that that was the he he 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

10:08 instead it was a good good quality uh plush toy. Yeah, exactly. And so this was 1993 for the actual launch of the Beanie Baby uh which launched with Brownie the Bear.

10:20 Yep. And Pinchers the lobster. And like a cabbage patch kit, it came with a date of birth. He he used the name like he, you know, originally did with those uh fully stuffed cats or kitties. I guess fully stuffed cat sounds gross.

10:35 It's like a turducken. 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. Uh because you got to even if it ended up being a thing that adults tried to collect because uh you know they thought it was valuable, it never would have gotten there if he hadn't have made a toy that kids really love to begin with,

11:02 right? Um 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 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 multiffold. Part of it was his marketing scheme. Um, 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, locallyowned gift stores, um, hospital gift shops, like small stores. So that right off the bat canceled any chance of anyone I saw it described as going into like a big box store like a a Walmart or something and seeing a bargain bin of Beanie Babies just lumped together for 50% off.

12:02 So the fact that that didn't that that possibility didn't exist, someone couldn't see that

12:07 automatically made it um they were just higher status than they otherwise would have been because he he made enough to sell to huge retailers like that. He's he decided deliberately not to do that for that reason.

12:20 Yeah. Super smart. I mean, if you can create a a scarcity and the illusion that uh what you're pedalling is like uh limited and collectible,

12:32 Yeah. then you're going to do pretty well. Uh and that's what he did. But not only by um 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 took off couldn't be like hey we're going to dedicate half our store to these things now because they're selling like hot cakes right

12:52 so he would dole them out in limited numbers to the stores and uh 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

13:07 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.

13:19 For sure. Yeah. Collect all the kids to buy all the things. Exactly. And so you would have to go around town to multiple stores in your town to 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 and his marketing um I almost said scam, but scheme I think is a better way to put it.

13:49 Yeah. The other big thing is that this coincided with the rise of the internet. Um there's a great uh scene in the movie uh there's a movie that's out now uh I think an Apple original called the Beanie Bubble. Yeah, I haven't seen it. Did you watch it?

14:07 No, the reviews aren't kind. Um, I may watch it because I love Zach Gallifanakis,

14:12 who plays Ty Warner and Elizabeth Elizabeth Banks is in the movie as a sort of a um thinly veiled version of his former

14:20 uh business partner and and romantic partner, I think. Patricia Roach. Uh, but in the movie in the trailer I saw today, Zach uh said because you know they started a website and they were, you know, an early website in those years. Yeah,

14:34 Zack Gallifan or I guess Time Warner says uh we broke the internet thing, which I thought was a pretty good line because the internet was so new everyone was like I guess you know this is a thing.

14:44 Yeah. Apparently, so he had an employee named Lena Trevetti and she was a coder and this is like 199394 and she convinced Ty Warner to create a Beanie Babies website because they were getting calls and ma 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 and get excited about Beanie Babies and buy Beanie Babies cuz 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 ecommerce sites on the internet too.

15:30 Yeah. Which is amazing. Uh, 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.

15:41 They they touted this as loosely based on on um uh Zack Besonette's book. Um, and that they that some of it was fictitious, I think, to keep from getting sued. I get the impression that Kai Warner is not shy about suing people. Well, which is interesting because he played Tai Warner in the movie. Like that's the only name that wasn't changed.

16:04 Yeah. I don't I don't know why they did it, but they definitely did it. Well, judging from the trailer, it seems that both the Banks character and the Maya character are uh 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.

16:31 Oh yeah. He like if you read any like um corporate writeups like PE like press releases or the very rare interviews he's given like it sounds like the whole thing was just him. Just him.

16:43 Yeah. And in part it was largely him because he owned the company from the outset. Always has. He's never sh 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 um from the outset. So he definitely you know really was the driving force in this but he had help that is largely unagnowledged publicly that it's a good thing that Zach Besonette came along and and also the people who made that the movie based on Zach Besonette's book to kind of

17:14 shine a spotlight on the other people particularly women who helped him. Yeah, Zach and Zach.

17:22 That's right. the two Zachs on the Zack attack against Taiwan. That's right. Uh the other thing that he did to sort of, you know, drive this um I mean, I guess we can call it a false scarcity is he had he was very secret about the company. Uh 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?

17:45 Um in 1995, 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 uh Marty moose what I call him something the moose

17:56 chocolate moose chocolate moose is gone let's say and and if there are beanie baby people out there like no chocolate moose never left I'm just using that as an example

18:06 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 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 and be like that's too orange. I want it more red. And now all of a sudden I saw Pinchy the the lobster would be a much deeper red. Well, they'd stop producing the orang-ish red one and these Beanie Baby collectors would go bonkers trying to find the other one. He started to notice that and um so he created real scarcity by deliberately retiring some just out of the blue.

18:58 People would go scramble to find them and then retailers most importantly would start stockpiling everything that he had um that that they could sell of say the orange pinchy.

19:09 Yeah. He was also smart enough to um to realize that the Cabbage Patch Kids, like when they 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 he tried to increase revenue sort of across the company, so he wasn't all in on the Beanie Baby,

19:34 right? Um, I say we take a break and come back and talk about how McDonald's factors into this. What do you think?

19:41 Mc What? Yeah. Lately, I've been learning some stuff about insomnia or aluminia. How about the one on borderline disorder? Better yet, reporter. Heard that one before, but it was so nice. I learned it twice. Everybody listen up. Oh, it's Charles. It's stop now. Stop with

20:29 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 um 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.

21:02 Yeah. over a couple of years. I think they had two versions in 97 and 98 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.

21:16 Yeah, teeny beanies. Uh yeah, what' I say? Teeny babies. It works too. I like teeny babies.

21:21 I like teeny babies, too. Teeny beanies. Uh, and you know, even if your thing is already popular, all of a sudden, if hundreds of millions of these things are going out in Happy Meals

21:32 and you know, the most popular, you know, fast food restaurant chain in the world,

21:37 then it's going to just skyrocket this thing even further. And that's exactly what it did.

21:41 Yeah. the the 1998 one, the second one that they did where you could get teeny beanies in a Happy Meal. Uh the first weekend of that promotion, McDonald's saw the 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 for 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.

22:13 McDonald's had to set up rules like individual franchises had their own rules. It was really patchwork where

22:19 um you could say get five happy meals per order and or per visit and you had to have a 2hour 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. Um 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 the Beanie Babies.

22:48 Yeah, that McDonald's record that even counts passing the great McRib feast of 92, the previous record holder.

22:56 The McRib's back right now. I saw I've been meaning to go get one. Talk about false scarcity.

23:01 Yeah, same thing. For sure. I mean I mean they could put that on their menu at any time, right? So

23:06 totally. For sure. You know that the fat cats at McDonald's corporate are eating McRibs every day of the year.

23:11 Yeah. And the employee lounge is just stocked with them, right? But all this that's going on, Chuck, is is uh 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 um largely widely accepted that they are a sound investment um if you want to diversify your portfolio or more often was the case, make your entire portfolio just beanie babies.

23:45 Yeah. uh 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

24:03 that are always sort of looking for that next thing as a you know sort of alternative investment. uh if I can, you know, buy 50 Beanie Babies and put them in a box and just sit on them and that'll put my kids through college one day. Yeah.

24:17 Uh and that's, you know, a lot of people did stuff like that. I think you mentioned eBay had launched uh very soon afterward. They launched in '95 and in 1997, this is the other most staggering stat of uh the show to me. I know

24:32 6% of all of eBay was Beanie Baby sales. Yeah. Isn't that nuts? So, the secondary market really did grow up and there really was like a 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 in the mid to late 90s.

24:58 Yeah. So, it's this really was happening like it it wasn't like the 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 the if there's ever been an economic bubble, this is it. Um, 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.

25:37 Yeah, for sure. Uh, it also created a sort of an ind industry around it. Uh, 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. Uh, this woman Peggy Gallagher, she was a parillegal. 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.

26:07 Uh, another woman named Mary Beth Soalooki. Uh, she was a IBM uh, systems engineer, and she just made sort of the the go-to list, like the the Bible basically of uh, Beanie Baby pricing. and made a lot of money off that and also started putting out a magazine.

26:27 Yeah. Like a was it a monthly? Uh 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.

26:36 No, but I knew about it. Okay. It was basically that but for for Beanie Babies. It was called Mary Beth's Bean Bag World. They sold 650,000 copies a month at its peak

26:46 for six bucks a pop. So that's almost $3 million a run per issue. Yeah. For Beanie Baby'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 um assistants like called dealers, Beanie Baby dealers to find out what their prices were, what was selling really fast.

27:05 What you got? What you got? They were right Right. They were following eBay prices. Like they were It was a legitimate um Olivia put it was the gold standard price list for a reason. Yeah. you know. So, um, and Mary So, Mary Beth Soilooki is, um, another woman who is, uh, 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, um, self-described uh, 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 and they essentially created the secondary market. There's a HBO documentary a couple years ago, I think called Beanie Beanie Mania, that really does a good job of shining a light on on them and their role and contribution to

28:03 the whole thing, too. So, we've had a documentary, now a feature film. Yes. Broadway. Broadway's next and then James Mishner is coming back to life to write an epic novel about it.

28:19 That'd be pretty amazing. Uh speaking of amazing, there are also some amazing stories about uh just how kind of crazy things got uh in in many different ways. Um, one of which is a 1999 divorce case in Las Vegas where this couple was was divorcing and they had a lot of combined assets in the form of Beanie Babies

28:41 that they thought, you know, were worth a lot and they may have been worth a lot of money, their collection.

28:46 Uh, 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.

28:53 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.

29:08 It is. And 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 um 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 it it Yeah, she was she was not happy about it at all. Um 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 that 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.

29:47 I don't know. I mean, I guess everyone's entitled to their own opinion. It's her life. But degrading,

29:52 I I don't think she used the word degrading, but it was it was along those lines. I'm paraphrasing.

29:58 Okay. I would have felt more silly. Unless he like tied them both up and made them do it with their mouth or something,

30:04 right? That's degrading. Yeah. No, the if when they picked a Beanie Baby, they had to pick it up with their chin and hand it to their ex

30:12 to 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.

30:17 Right. that uh what was the thing you would do where you would pass a something with your neck?

30:22 That's what I'm talking about. Oh, okay. They they did that but with the Beanie Babies they selected.

30:27 Okay. What did people used to pass though? What was like a orange I think is what it was.

30:31 Oh, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That's right. I can't remember what when you're a kid. It's I think the whole point of that game was like look how close we are.

30:37 Exactly. Right. It was like um spin the bottle but with an orange and next chance.

30:44 No bottle. Right. Uh there was a guy in California named Chris Robinson senior. I don't think any relation to the the other Chris Robinson.

30:54 And he bought 20,000 Beanie Babies. Uh not $20,000 worth, 20,000 actual Beanie Babies, uh spending a 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."

31:08 And one of his kids, uh 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 cuz he thought it was a good investment.

31:25 Yeah, it's like it's a very short documentary. It's like 8 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. And

31:35 that dumb. Yeah, it was like the dad is definitely like, you know, I it was not a good idea, but um 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 um the shots like the interviews.

31:54 Uh 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 8 to 12 minutes that you'll spend watching it, I think. All right, I'll have to go check that out.

32:06 The dads like this this documentary is very degrading, right? I'm paraphrasing.

32:12 Uh there were a lot of cases uh you know, there were people indicted in court for counterfeiting these things. Um you know, POS that were never delivered and and distributors kept the money. Uh the craze was so bad there was actual crime like people breaking in and stealing Beanie Babies. Uh this one case of a 77y old guy in Chicago named Ben Perry uh was charged with stealing close to 1300 Beanie Babies. Uh there was a PI that found him uh 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 uh to a charity. Like that seems very fishy to me. He apparently bought them for dirt cheap at a produce market, like a farmers market, and he swore he didn't know that they were stolen, even though they were in boxes labeled Tai, like they were shipping boxes stolen out

33:12 of the warehouse. But he got off finally, but it became clear to him that he he didn't steal them, but that they were stolen, so he just, you know, donated them

33:21 so he didn't get in trouble. No, but apparently I he loved all of the limelight that was cast on him by the press during this this um the time that he was in court as the Beanie Baby Bandit. He apparently ate it up. So, he got something

33:35 77. He's like, I'm going out in style. Exactly. Uh 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 um a man named Jeffrey White murdered uh another man, Harry Simmons, in West Virginia. Um 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.

34:15 We understand you've been loafing. Exactly. Is that true? Uh yeah. Is that a crime?

34:23 If you got time to lean, you got time to clean son. Oh, man. Uh should we take a break on that note?

34:29 Yeah, sure. All right, we'll be right back and wrap up the story of the Beanie Baby.

34:35 Lately, I've been learning some stuff about insomnia or aluminia. How about the one on borderline disorder? Better yet, reporter. Heard that one before, but it was so nice. I learned it twice. Everybody listen up. Oh, it's Charles and Joshua. It's stop now. Learning stuff is fun with shark.

35:21 All right. Uh we call this a bubble uh like any sort of collectible or real estate bubble or financial bubble because they eventually burst.

35:30 Uh and the the beanie baby really followed the the I was about to say rise and fall the internet. The internet clearly clearly never fell survived.

35:38 But the big dot boom was what what helped the Beanie Baby along and also helped kill it a little bit. Uh although you know Beanie Babies were bound to um I think they were bound to go away one way or another anytime it's something it's something like this.

35:55 Uh uh 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. Uh some people thought no this is we know that tie guy by now. This just a stunt

36:13 to get people to buy more of his stuff. Uh 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 to complete our collections,

36:24 right?" Um I didn't read the book, Zach Beset's book, but I read a a review of it that they they mentioned the way that he puts it. This was this was in fact 100% a stunt to kind of juice the the beanie the be the beanie baby market again.

36:42 Yeah. and it did work, but in the short term. And he basically says Tai Warner killed his his creation by by carrying out this stunt because um on Christmas Eve, here's where Christmas pops up. As we said at the beginning,

36:58 Christmas Eve 1999, right before the turn of the millennium, or no, I guess that was a year later. Um 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 you had to pay 50 cents to vote, but each 50 cent um vote went to the uh Elizabeth Glazer Glazer Pediatric AIDS Foundation. So, that was something. But 91% of people said, "Yes, we want to keep Beanie Babies going."

37:31 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 um um craziness, but but nothing like it used to be. And very shortly after that, the whole thing started to fizzle out rather quickly.

37:51 Yeah, it seemed like the sort of the last harrah. Uh I don't know if Ty Warner like saw the writing on the wall and wanted one more sort of big sales crunch. Uh, 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. Uh, even though brief, they sold about 800 million in 2000. I mean, that's 7 years later. I think Beanie Babies lasted a lot longer than I would have expected them to. It 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 I saw that they were still going until about 2002. So that's yeah, that's a good long almost a decade of a of a craze of a bubble.

38:37 Um and but but at the end of it all, people started to realize like, oh wait a minute, everybody has these things. This this clubby bear that I I had to pay for the privilege of buying to be part of the club. Um everybody has that. or everyone has the Princess Dye um Beanie Baby Bear, the special limited edition um Beanie Baby they released in honor of Princess Dye after she died. They made it sound like this was like the scarcest Beanie Baby yet. There were there's 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 um are are worthless. Um, and and that was a huge blow to a lot of people. At the same time, I think it was also freeing because you it's you'll just come across stories of people who basically spent all of their free time

39:32 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.

39:46 Yeah. It's like uh Bitcoin. I've seen it. I've seen it very um closely compared to Bitcoin in at least one article.

39:54 Yeah. I mean, I I know people who are sort of obsessively hours and hours a day trading uh cryptocurrency.

40:03 Mhm. 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?

40:35 Yeah. So, it's the same thing with beanie. 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,

40:44 right?" Uh well, who certainly wasn't a chump was uh was Tai because he and I feel like I can just call him Tai because that was so his brand Ty.

40:55 Yeah, for sure. Uh no one knows exactly what kind of dough he made on these because uh like you said earlier, he never, you know, became a uh he never launched an IPO and didn't have to disclose stuff publicly. But he uh is and was a man with with some ego because uh 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. that that would have made Thai Inc. more profitable than Hasbro and Mattel together that year.

41:44 This is just from everything they sold. Exactly. Just in profits, right? That's what um that taking out that ad in Wall Street Journal is what you call today a flex.

41:52 Flex. Yeah. But I mean, he is still a legit billionaire. Um it's sort of gone up and down according to Forbes as far as his net worth goes. uh 2002 supposedly at 6 billion, 2009 down to 3.2. 2023 Forb says he's worth about 5.7. Uh but it's you know he still has that company but he also diversified got into real estate uh notably uh as a hotelier uh and he owns the I think still closed Four Seasons Hotel uh New York.

42:27 Still closed. What's it closed for? Uh it depends on who you ask. I think he claimed it was renovations, but other people said it was a dispute with the the Four Seasons brand,

42:39 but I I think it's supposed to reopen in uh 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 Seasons standards. Yeah,

42:52 I also saw that um that was the first hotel to open to first responders and doctors and nurses um who were working on the front lines of the COVID pandemic so that they they had a place to stay. They wouldn't have to go home and infect their families, which I thought was pretty cool.

43:07 Yeah. I mean, I guess we can talk about that a little bit in a broader sense because um Warner is someone who like has has been notably charitable as far as like uh

43:21 front-facing sort of uh putting stuff out there kind of stuff like the Elizabeth Glazer Pediatric AIDS Foundation

43:29 uh when he donated, you know, the 50 cents for those votes and stuff like that because he got in trouble at one point for um for tax. Well, not tax fraud, but what he call tax evasion. And as part of his uh sentence, uh one of which was a couple years probation, 500 hours of community service, and $100,000 fine on the criminal side. He paid uh over $53 million in civil penalties. Um 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 uh large donations, but prosecutors are like that's a pittance of what this guy's worth,

44:15 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.

44:20 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 a $100,000 fine, 500 hours of community service, and two years probation. Um, and it was for just the dumbest thing. He had a a a Swiss bank account that no one knew about but him. Um, that had like a hundred million dollars in it. This guy was a billionaire three times over at his poorest point. There there's just no reason to have done that. And he did and he got caught doing it. And so he he called it the greatest mistake of his life.

44:58 besides besides that pump and dump scheme at the turn of the millennium. So they kept making stuff uh stuffies in fact um as a company in 2004 they started licensing deals or or getting involved with you know licensing other people's stuff like Garfield and some Disney stuff.

45:19 Uh there was something called Beanie Boos that came out in 2009. Those were kind of big

45:23 that were Yeah, they they did okay. I mean, nothing obviously went like the Beanie Baby, but nothing ever has probably.

45:30 Sure. But he still is out there making money, selling stuff, and he's doesn't seem to be um slowing down. I think how old is he now? 7 what?

45:40 Three, I think. 79 years old. 79. That was pretty close. Give or take six years.

45:46 Yeah. Uh but he's still trying to market um himself and his toy company. I 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, you know?

46:03 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 on to 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 tycollector.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 um market value of these things or the secondary market um artificially or it's just a straightup scam where like you you pay them or they buy from you and say oh I overpaid pay me back in a gift card

47:00 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.

47:15 Yeah. This is not like a babysitter or something. Yeah. Even still, I'd be like, "What's your what's your angle, babysitter?" Uh the one thing that cracked me up though was that uh when the movie came out and he kind of which was just recently I think this summer um or last summer or whatever he uh said you know I really wanted I would have preferred somebody like Warren Batty or Daniel T Lewis to have played me.

47:39 Yeah. I'm like when this was going on he was in his 40s. Warren Batty is 89 years old.

47:45 Yeah. He's aged. Daniel D Lewis is 66. They're not even close in age. Uh he's 26. 23 years younger than Warren Batty. Like this guy's all over the place.

47:54 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 Day Lewis could really bring that to life on screen like he did in There Will Be Blood.

48:05 Oh boy. You got anything else? I got nothing else. Have you forgotten all the mean things I've said to you this episode?

48:13 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. uh you know, we're going to forego listener mail this week. It's late in the year and we would just like to uh remind everybody, we're going to say our official Christmas greetings on our Christmas episode, but

48:31 uh 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 se almost every year in Seattle, Portland, and San Francisco at Sketchfest

48:44 and uh 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 stuffyougenc.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.

49:10 Or if they want to be paid in gift cards, not a real ticket seller. That's right. But we hope to see everybody uh in January, late January.

49:18 Sure. 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 stuffodcast@ iheartradio.com. Stuff you should know is a production of iheartradio. For more podcasts, iMheart radio, visit the iheartradio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

Questions about this episode

What is "SYSK's 12 Days of Christmas…Toys: Beanie Babies: Reigning Toy Craze Champion | STUFF YOU SHOULD KNOW" about?

The discussion centers on Beanie Babies, a phenomenon that outshone Cabbage Patch Kids in popularity and became a cultural icon during the 1990s. Key points include anecdotes demonstrating their immense value, such as a notable courtroom battle over Beanie Baby possessions, and the broader implications of collector culture surrounding these plush toys.

What is mentioned in this Stuff You Should Know episode?

77 people, works and ideas are mentioned, including Beanie Babies, Ty Warner, the internet, Hallmark, market bubble, Lena Trevetti. Each one on this page links to its own page with every episode that mentions it.

How long is "SYSK's 12 Days of Christmas…Toys: Beanie Babies: Reigning Toy Craze Champion | STUFF YOU SHOULD KNOW"?

The episode runs 50 min; the transcript is about 9,172 words in 169 timestamped sections.

More from Stuff You Should Know

About this transcript: the episode's spoken words as captioned on YouTube, split into timestamped sections. Reclip.Me locates every person, work and idea in the text, keeps the time it is first named, and quotes the words around it verbatim. Last updated January 24, 2026.