SYSK's 12 Days of Christmas… Toys: Beanie Babies: Reigning Toy Craze Champion

Summary

Stuff You Should Know — Beanie Babies: Reigning Toy Craze Champion

Podcast: Stuff You Should Know
Hosts: Josh Clark and Chuck Bryant
Date: December 12, 2025
Episode: SYSK’s 12 Days of Christmas… Toys

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Episode Overview

This episode dives into the cultural phenomenon, economic bubble, and enduring legacy of Beanie Babies—the plush toys that captivated America (mostly adults!) in the 1990s. Josh and Chuck dissect the origins of Beanie Babies, the shrewd, eccentric business strategies of creator Ty Warner, and the wild speculative mania that ensued, drawing links to broader trends of collectible crazes and economic bubbles. They blend sharp analysis with their trademark humor, highlighting both the stranger-than-fiction stories of the Beanie Baby craze, and what remains of the legacy today.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Setting the Scene: Why Beanie Babies?

• Holiday Toy Episode Custom: The hosts discuss their annual tradition of covering iconic toys in December.
  • “It’s become a, I guess, tradition to do a classic toy.” —Chuck (03:13)
• Choice of Beanie Babies: Not chosen for Christmas, but for their status as arguably the "greatest market bubble of all time."
  • “The Financial Times called it potentially the greatest market bubble of all times.” —Josh (04:13)

2. Beanie Babies: Origin Story and Ty Warner’s Genius

• About Ty Warner (The Inventor):
  • Eccentric, theater-loving, flamboyant, and supremely ambitious.
    • “He would show up to these sales calls in a Rolls Royce wearing a floor length fur coat and a cane and a hat.” —Josh (07:37)
  • Fired for selling his own toys to clients while working for his father's toy company.
• First Toys:
  • Launched with posable plush cats before moving to Beanie Babies (stuffed with PVC pellets, not fiber or styrofoam like cheaper toys).
  • Early innovation: Personalized names, birthdays, and tiny poems on heart-shaped tags.

3. The Anatomy of a Craze

• Strategic Scarcity:
  • Only small, specialty stores could sell Beanie Babies; NO big-box stores.
  • Stores received limited, varied stock, forcing collectors to shop around.
    • “You would have to go around town to multiple stores in your town to get the ones that were available.” —Josh (15:44)
  • Deliberate retirement of select models stoked demand and made varieties more desirable.
    • “...he created real scarcity by deliberately retiring some just out of the blue.” —Josh (21:30)
• Web Savvy & Collectability:
  • One of the earliest major toy brands to embrace ecommerce (started selling online in 1995, same year as Amazon & eBay).
    • “They were one of the first E-commerce sites on the Internet.” —Josh (17:52)
  • Rise of the Internet helped foster trading, price tracking, and a collector community.

4. Beanie Babies Mania and the Bubble

• Adult-Driven Craze:
  • Despite being made for kids, most buyers were adults chasing speculative investment.
    • “It wasn’t kids that fueled this craze. It was almost exclusively adults.” —Josh (05:47)
  • At the peak, an estimated ~62% of Americans owned at least one Beanie Baby (05:21).
• McDonald’s Tie-In:
  • 1997–98 “Teenie Beanies” Happy Meal promotions: Hundreds of millions distributed, causing mayhem at franchises.
    • “...McDonald’s saw the highest increase in sales in its corporate history.” —Josh (26:11)
• eBay & Secondary Market:
  • At the height (circa 1997), 6% of all eBay listings were Beanie Baby sales (29:06).
  • Some Beanie Babies sold for hundreds—sometimes thousands—if kept in original packaging or were “retired” models.

5. Peak Insanity, Scams, and Fallout

• Ancillary Markets:
  • Books, magazines (e.g., “Mary Beth’s Beanbag World,” which sold 650,000 copies/month), and price guides arose to track the frenzy (31:20).
  • Official and unofficial “Beanie Authenticators” emerged as a cottage industry.
• Extreme Stories:
  • Divorce cases where couples divided Beanie Babies on courthouse floors (33:38).
    • “They brought all these Beanie Babies in on the floor. And the judge said, like choosing a team at recess—you just go one at a time and each pick out a Beanie Baby.” —Chuck (33:38)
  • True crime connections: theft rings, counterfeiting, even a loosely connected murder case (38:08).
  • Bankruptcies: Documentary “Bankrupt by Beanies” about a man who spent $100k on 20,000 Beanie Babies hoping to put his kids through college (35:16).

6. The Bubble Bursts

• End Game:
  • 1999 stunt: Ty Warner announced all Beanie Baby production would end, prompting a mad last-chance buying spree—then “rescinded” after a paid vote, donating proceeds to charity (43:03).
    • “...he basically says Ty Warner killed his, his creation by, by carrying out this stunt.” —Josh (43:03)
• Market Realities:
  • People realized the toys weren’t truly scarce; prices plummeted.
    • “Everybody has these things...these thousands and thousands of dollars worth of Beanie Babies that I have set aside are worthless.” —Josh (46:26)
• Advice About Bubbles (and Bitcoin!):
  • “If you ever see a bubble coming along, that’s not a long-term thing...buy it and then sell it during [the craze]. Don’t hang on to it long-term.” —Josh (46:45)

7. Aftermath & Ty Warner Today

• Warner’s Wealth:
  • Never took his company public, so true wealth unknown; self-reported $700 million profit in 1997 alone (47:35).
  • Diversified into real estate/hotels (owns Four Seasons NYC).
  • Legal trouble: Tax evasion (paid civil/criminal penalties; avoided jail), credited for charitable giving but only fractionally generous compared to his fortune (50:54).
• Continuing the Brand:
  • Beanie Babies still produced in limited form (“Beanie Boos,” licensing deals with Garfield/Disney) but the original mania has never returned.
  • Online resale market riddled with scams, inflated listings, and wishful thinking.
    • “...we’re pretty sure this is either money laundering...or it’s just a straight up scam.” —Josh (53:54)

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• “The Financial Times called it potentially the greatest market bubble of all times.” —Josh (04:13)
• “He would show up to sales calls in a Rolls Royce, floor-length fur coat, cane and hat...so people would say, ‘I want to see what’s in that guy’s briefcase.’” —Josh (07:37)
• “Collect kids to buy all the things.” —Chuck (15:41)
• “They started a website...one of the first E-commerce sites on the Internet, too.” —Josh (17:52)
• “The first weekend of that [McDonald’s] promotion, McDonald’s saw the highest increase in sales in its corporate history.” —Josh (26:11)
• “At its peak, 650,000 copies of the [Beanie Baby price guide] magazine sold for six bucks a pop.” —Josh (31:20)
• “That 1999 divorce in Vegas...the judge said, ‘like choosing a team at recess,’ each of you pick a Beanie Baby that you’re going to keep for yourself.” —Chuck (33:38)
• “If you ever see a bubble coming along, that’s not a long-term thing... Don’t hang on to it long-term.” —Josh (46:45)
• “He himself took out a full-page Wall Street Journal ad saying that he made $700 million in profits in 1997 alone.” —Chuck (47:35)
• “I would have preferred Warren Beatty or Daniel Day Lewis to have played me.” —Ty Warner’s actual wish, as relayed by Chuck (54:24)

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Timestamps for Key Segments

| Timestamp | Segment/Topic | |-----------|--------------| | 03:13 | SYSK's tradition of holiday toy episodes | | 04:13 | Beanie Babies as a “market bubble” | | 06:16 | Ty Warner’s background and sales tactics | | 10:52 | What made Beanie Babies unique | | 12:35 | First launch, price, and “heart” branding | | 14:24 | Limited retail strategy & manufactured scarcity | | 16:11 | The web and the rise of Beanie Baby online communities | | 21:30 | Retirement of models and intentional scarcity | | 25:32 | McDonald’s “Teenie Beanies” mania | | 29:06 | Beanie Babies + eBay secondary market peak | | 31:20 | Price guides & Beanie Baby magazines | | 33:38 | The famous Beanie Baby divorce case | | 35:16 | “Bankrupt by Beanies” — Families betting savings on Beanie Babies | | 38:08 | Crimes and even murder “linked” to Beanie Babies | | 43:03 | Ty Warner’s 1999 “end-of-the-line” stunt | | 46:45 | Lessons about economic bubbles (comparison to cryptocurrency) | | 47:35 | Ty Warner’s profits, self-promotion, and ad in the Wall Street Journal | | 50:54 | Tax evasion charges and philanthropy | | 53:54 | Modern scams and the eBay resale market | | 54:24 | Ty Warner’s ideal casting for his movie counterpart |

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Conclusion

With humor, skepticism, and plenty of pop culture references, Josh and Chuck give a thorough–but always engaging–look at the Beanie Baby phenomenon: from its unlikely beginnings and business machinations to its dizzying speculative peak and ignominious collapse. Whether you lived through the craze or just heard stories, this episode illustrates that what seems like a child’s fad can turn into full-scale economic mania—and reminds listeners to spot the warning signs of the next bubble to come.

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For fans of economic history, toy culture, internet fads, or just great storytelling, this SYSK episode offers plenty to learn (and laugh) about.

Transcript

[Josh Clark]

This is an iHeart podcast.

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[Josh Clark]

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.

[Podcast Intro/Outro Announcer]

Welcome to Stuff youf Should Know, a production of iHeartrad.

[Josh Clark]

Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh, and there's Chuck, and Jerry's here, too, and we're feeling fairly festive. And this is stuff you should know. That's right, the episode before the Christmas episode.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah. Which has become a, I guess, tradition to do a classic toy. When did we start that?

[Josh Clark]

I'd say more custom than tradition.

[Chuck Bryant]

All right.

[Josh Clark]

I'm sorry.

[Chuck Bryant]

Christmas custom.

[Josh Clark]

I'm feeling contrary. It is definitely a tradition.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah, that's because you're about to shut it down for a month. So you don't care. You're burning bridges.

[Josh Clark]

Exactly. I won't see you until, like, 2024.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah, like, Chuck will forget anything that happens today by then.

[Josh Clark]

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 slinky, maybe. No, 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. I can't. I'm drawing a blank right now. So this is, like, high quality podcasting we're doing right now. Yeah.

[Chuck Bryant]

Well, good pick this year.

[Josh Clark]

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.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah.

[Josh Clark]

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. 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.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah, I didn't know anything about this either. Because that was sort of the end of college and then my New York, New Jersey years, and I just. I knew that Beanie Babies were a thing, but I was not participating in the economy in that way at that point.

[Josh Clark]

So you didn't. You didn't own a single one?

[Chuck Bryant]

No, of course not.

[Josh Clark]

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.

[Chuck Bryant]

Think about that. Yeah. That honestly was one of the most shocking stats in this whole thing.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah. That's like 6.3 people out of every 10 people.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah. That's amazing when you're talking about a little kid's toy.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah, well, that was the thing. It wasn't kids that fueled this craze. It was almost exclusively adults. Because the reason the market bubble grew 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.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah. Which was true for a while.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah, it was. It was. We'll get into all that, but let's start from the beginning, shall we?

[Chuck Bryant]

All right. Well, you can't talk Beanie Babies without talking about the gentleman who started it all. I do remember seeing the letters Ty on Beanie Baby packaging. So I wasn't completely head in the sand.

[Josh Clark]

Sure.

[Chuck Bryant]

But I did not know that Tyler 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?

[Josh Clark]

Yeah, from everything I've heard, yeah.

[Chuck Bryant]

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.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah, yeah.

[Chuck Bryant]

Kalamazoo, that means theater, right?

[Josh Clark]

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 world or being in the world with him essentially for the rest of his life.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah, he seemed fairly flamboyant.

[Josh Clark]

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.

[Public Ad Announcer]

Amazing.

[Josh Clark]

Essentially, like Kramer when he accidentally is wearing the Technicolor dreamcoat and ends up with that big jamiroquai. Ha. And a cane. Yeah, that's essentially what Ty Warner showed up to these. 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.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah. Or do you?

[Josh Clark]

Yeah, it depends on the kind of party you're in for.

[Chuck Bryant]

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 is 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.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah. On those sales calls, he would be like, yeah, I've got these great Dakin products. But also, I wanna 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 salesman, essentially.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah. And it wasn't long after that that the Beanie Baby came along.

[Josh Clark]

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 looked. They were fully stuffed, which is a big difference between them and Beanie Babies. And then for every cat, there was a Himalayan version of it. And they were pretty cute little cats. But the thing that he did that I think really kind of helped sell these things because they were like a modest 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.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah. And they were larger. They were about 17 inches larger than Beanie Babies would be. They 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.

[Josh Clark]

Sure.

[Chuck Bryant]

Let's just say the fairly smart thing that he did with Beanie Babies was he stuffed them with beads. Like, what's it called?

[Josh Clark]

PVC pellets.

[Chuck Bryant]

Like a bean bag chair.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah, pretty much.

[Chuck Bryant]

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.

[Josh Clark]

Oh, like the little Styrofoam pellets or the.

[Chuck Bryant]

I don't know what's in those things.

[Josh Clark]

Styrofoam fiber. It's kind of like. Yeah, fibers.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah. I mean, those were the cheapest ones that you would get as like a prize at an amusement park.

[Josh Clark]

Yes, that.

[Chuck Bryant]

Literal Styrofoam balls.

[Josh Clark]

Right. And that was a big. That was a big deal about his Beanie Babies because they were high quality. They were very well made. From the outset, he was all up the bottom of the South Korean manufacturers he had partnered with to make these things. He was really involved in the design and manufacturing process. So these were really high quality dolls. But he made a very conscious decision to sell Beanie Babies at five bucks a pop, which he said that that was the. 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's 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, good quality plush toy.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah, exactly. And 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.

[Josh Clark]

It's like a turducken.

[Chuck Bryant]

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, 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.

[Josh Clark]

Right. Also, I mean, he wasn't the first to do that. This was a good ten years after the Cabbage Patch Kids and their adoption papers and all that stuff. But it's still. It is a good marketing technique for sure. And it did work. But the thing that made Beanie Babies really kind of take off was multifold. Part of it was his marketing scheme. He had a really brilliant idea, which was only certain kinds of stores could carry Beanie Babies. And you actually had to be a licensed Beanie Baby retailer to sell Beanie Babies legally or legitimately. And those stores were like Hallmark stores, locally owned gift stores, hospital gift shops, like small stores. So that right off the bat, canceled any chance of anyone I saw it described it going into like a big box store, like a Walmart or something, and seeing a bargain bin of Beanie Babies just lumped together for 50% off.

[Chuck Bryant]

No way.

[Josh Clark]

The fact 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.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah, super smart. I mean, if you can create a scarcity and the illusion that what you're peddling is like, limited and collectible, then you're gonna do pretty well. And that's what he did, but not only by limiting the amount of stores that could be sold in, but he also limited the number of toys that these stores could even buy. Like that Hallmark store, once they really took off, couldn't be like, hey, we're gonna 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 gotta, you know, like, completing the collection is a classic kid's toy scam for sure.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah.

[Chuck Bryant]

Collect kids to buy all the things.

[Josh Clark]

Exactly. And so you would have to go around town to multiple stores in your town to get the ones that were available. And because they were allowed to only buy limited amounts, frequently, those things were sold out. So the idea that these things were scarce collector's items was manufactured out of the gate by Ty Warner and his marketing skills. I almost said scam, but scheme, I think, is a better way to put it. Yeah.

[Chuck Bryant]

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.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah, I haven't seen it. Did you watch it?

[Chuck Bryant]

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, Zack said, because they started a website, and they were an early website in those years Zach Galifant, or I guess Time Warner, says 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.

[Josh Clark]

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. Because 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.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah. Which is amazing. The movie has a character named Maya who is, again, a thinly veiled version of Lena Trivedi, which I'm curious why they didn't just use their real names.

[Josh Clark]

They touted this as loosely based on Zach Bissonnet'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.

[Chuck Bryant]

Well, which is interesting because he played Ty Warner in the movie. Like, that's the only name that wasn't changed.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah, I don't know why they did it, but they definitely did it.

[Chuck Bryant]

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.

[Josh Clark]

Oh, yeah, he. Like, if you read any, like, corporate write ups, like, like press releases or the very rare interviews he's given, like, it sounds like the whole thing was just him. Just him.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah.

[Josh Clark]

And in part, it was largely him because he owned the company from the outset. Always has. He's never. 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, you know, really was the driving force in this. But he had help that is largely unacknowledged publicly. That. Yeah, it's a good thing that Zach Bissonnet came along and. And also the people who made that, the movie based on Zach Bissonnet's book, to kind of shine a spotlight on the other people, particularly women who helped him.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah, Zach and Zach.

[Josh Clark]

That's right. The two Zachs. On the Zach attack against Ty Warren.

[Chuck Bryant]

That's right. The other thing that he did to sort of, you know, 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 gonna launch a new kind of toy, how many they were making. In 1995, he started retiring models.

[Josh Clark]

That was huge.

[Chuck Bryant]

And then adding other ones. And he would just all of a sudden drop, like, you know, this Marty Moose. What, did I call him something?

[Josh Clark]

The Moose Chocolate Mousse.

[Chuck Bryant]

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.

[Josh Clark]

That's a good idea.

[Chuck Bryant]

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.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah, that was a. 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 these Beanie Baby collectors would go bonkers trying to find the other one. He started to notice that and so he created real scarcity by deliberately retiring some just out of the blue. People would go scramble to find them. And then retailers, most importantly, would start stockpiling everything that he had that they could sell. Say the orange Pinchy.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah. He was also smart enough 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 nearly as popular, but he tried to increase revenues sort of across the company. So he wasn't all in on the Beanie Baby.

[Josh Clark]

Right. I say we take a break and come back and talk about how McDonald's factors into this. What do you think?

[Chuck Bryant]

McWhhat?

[Josh Clark (singing/learning bits)]

Yeah, lately I've been learning some stuff about insomnia or aluminia. How about the one on borderline disorder? Better yet, worth order. Heard that one before, but it was so nice I learned it twice. Everybody listen up. Oh, it's Charles and Joshua. It stops. It stop. Stop. You should know how.

[Public Ad Announcer]

Support for this show comes from Public, the investing platform for those who take it seriously. On Public, you can build a multi asset portfolio of stocks, bonds, options, crypto and now generated assets which allow you to turn any idea into an investable index. With AI, it all starts with your prompt. From renewable energy companies with high free cash flow to semiconductor suppliers growing revenue over 20% year over year. You can literally type any prompt and put the AI to work. It screens thousands of stocks, buys one of a kind index and lets you back test it against the S&P 500. Then you can invest in a few clicks. Generated assets are like ETFs with infinite possibilities, completely customizable and based on your thesis, not someone else's. Go to public.comsysk and earn an uncapped 1% bonus when you transfer your portfolio. That's public.com, paid for by Public Investing Brokerage Services by Open to the Public Investing Inc. Member FINRA and SIPC Advisory services by Public Advisors llc. SEC Registered Advisor. Generated Assets is an interactive analysis tool Output is for informational purposes only and is not an investment recommendation or advice. Complete disclosures available at public.com disclosures tired.

[Apollo Ad Announcer]

Of juggling sales tools or spending hours on prospecting just to book a few meetings and meet Apollo, the go to market platform for finding leads, connecting with buyers, and closing deals all in one place. Apollo gives you access to over 210 million contacts and AI that handles all your busywork, finding leads, drafting emails, and even prioritizing your day. So stop paying for five different sales tools when one does it all. Visit Apollo I.O. and sign up free today.

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[Josh Clark (singing/learning bits)]

Learning stuff is fun with Josh and Chuck.

[Josh Clark]

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.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah, over a couple of years, I think they had two versions in 97 and 98 where there were hundreds of millions of teeny babies. These were even smaller, obviously, because it was, you know, to fit into a Happy Meal.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah. Teeny beanies.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah. What'd I say? Teeny babies.

[Josh Clark]

It works too.

[Chuck Bryant]

I like teeny babies.

[Josh Clark]

I like teeny babies, too.

[Chuck Bryant]

Teeny beanies. And you know, even if your thing is already popular all of a sudden, if hundreds of millions of these things are going out in Happy Meals and you know, the most popular fast food restaurant chain in the world, then it's gonna just skyrocket this thing even further. And that's exactly what it did.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah, the 1998 one, the second one that they did, where you could get teeny 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.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah, that McDonald's record, that even counts. Passing the Great McRib Feast of 92, the previous record holder.

[Josh Clark]

The McRib's back right now. I saw. I've been meaning to go get one.

[Chuck Bryant]

Talk about false scarcity.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah, same thing for sure.

[Chuck Bryant]

I mean, they could put that on their menu at any time, right?

[Josh Clark]

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

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah. And the employee lounge is just stocked with them.

[Josh Clark]

Right. But all this that's going on, Chuck, is underscores a larger cultural thing, and that is that people are buying these Beanie Babies not just because they think they're the cutest thing on two legs, but because it has become largely widely accepted that they are a sound investment. If you want to diversify your portfolio or. Or more often was the case, make your entire portfolio just Beanie Babies.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah. You know, this was. By the. Like you said, the Cabbage Patch Kids had already come and gone. Everyone has already known at this point about the, you know, Star wars collectibles and baseball cards and trading cards. So the idea, I think there are certain people out there, after all those things happened, that are always sort of looking for that next thing as a, you know, sort of alternative investment. If I can, you know, buy 50 Beanie Babies and put them in a box and just sit on them and that'll put my kids through college one day.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah.

[Chuck Bryant]

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.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah. And that nuts. So the secondary market really did grow up, and there really was, like a huge market for Beanie Babies that, say, had been retired. And one that you had bought for $5 and kept in the package, you could sell for hundreds of dollars on ebay legitimately in the, in the mid to late 90s.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah.

[Josh Clark]

So this really was happening. Like, it wasn't like everybody was just hoping beyond hope that their Beanie Babies were going to increase in value. They were increasing value before their very eyes. So people who weren't sucked into it were like, this is the dumbest thing I've ever seen. And if there's ever been an economic bubble, this is it. And yet people were buying these things for, like, long term investing. They were buying them, hanging on to them for 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.

[Chuck Bryant]

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 Sobolowski, she was an IBM systems engineer, and she just made sort of the go to list, like the bible basically, of beauty, Beanie Baby pricing. And made a lot of money off that. And also started putting out a magazine.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah.

[Chuck Bryant]

Like, was it a monthly?

[Josh Clark]

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 list.

[Chuck Bryant]

No, but I knew about it.

[Josh Clark]

Okay. It was basically that. But for, for Beanie Babies, it's called Mary Beth's Beanbag 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.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah.

[Josh Clark]

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, her, she and her, her assistants, like, called dealers, Beanie Baby dealers, to find out what their prices were, what was selling really fast, what you got, what you. They were. Right, right. They were following ebay prices like they were. It was a legitimate. Olivia put it as the gold standard price list for a reason. Yeah, you know, so. And Mary Beth Soboluski is another woman who is often overlooked for the contributions she made to the Beanie Baby Mania. Because in addition to creating the gold standard price list, she was one of the original self described Chicago suburban soccer moms who started trading Beanie Babies in 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's an HBO documentary a couple of 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.

[Chuck Bryant]

So we've had a documentary now, a feature film.

[Josh Clark]

Yes, Broadway. Broadway's next. And then James Michener is coming back to life to write an epic novel about it.

[Chuck Bryant]

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. 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 divorced couple. And they brought all these Beanie Babies in on the floor. And the judge said, 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 gonna keep for yourself. And it's just a very kind of funny looking photo.

[Josh Clark]

It is until you read like, some of the quotes from the woman involved in the divorce case. The wife who was like this. It was really, you know, demoralizing and degrading to have to be forced to do that. She was really upset that the judge made her and her ex husband do that. But really, yes, she was. She was not happy about it at all. But it was like the whole thing was worth five grand, I think they said. But that was five grand at the time. And people were speculating on Beanie Babies. So 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. I don't know.

[Chuck Bryant]

I mean, I guess everyone's entitled to their own opinion. It's her life. But degrading.

[Josh Clark]

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

[Public Ad Announcer]

Okay.

[Chuck Bryant]

I would have felt more silly. Unless he, like, tied them both up and made them do it with their mouth or something. That's degrading.

[Josh Clark]

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.

[Chuck Bryant]

What was the thing you would do where you would pass something with your neck?

[Josh Clark]

That's what I'm talking about.

[Chuck Bryant]

Oh, okay.

[Josh Clark]

They did that, but with the beanie Babies they selected.

[Apollo Ad Announcer]

Okay.

[Chuck Bryant]

What did people used to pass, though?

[Josh Clark]

Like, an orange, I think, is what it was.

[Chuck Bryant]

Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, that's right.

[Josh Clark]

I can't remember what.

[Chuck Bryant]

When you're a kid, I think the whole point of that game was like, ooh, look how close we are.

[Josh Clark]

Exactly.

[Chuck Bryant]

Right.

[Josh Clark]

It was like spin the bottle, but with an orange and necks and chins.

[Chuck Bryant]

No bottle.

[Josh Clark]

Right.

[Chuck Bryant]

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.

[Josh Clark]

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. Isn't 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. The. The shots, like the interviews. It's pretty. It's cute. It's not like, you know, condemnation or anything like that, but it's just. It's. It's worth the eight to 12 minutes that you'll spend watching it, I think.

[Chuck Bryant]

All right, I have to go check.

[Josh Clark]

That out, the dad's like this. This documentary is very degrading. Right, I'm paraphrasing.

[Chuck Bryant]

There were a lot of cases. There were people indicted in court for counterfeiting these things, pos that were never delivered. And distributors kept the money. The craze was so bad, there was actual crime, like people breaking in and stealing Beanie Babies. This one case of a 77 year old guy in Chicago named Ben Perry was charged with stealing close to 1,300 Beanie Babies. There was a PI that found him a TIE Incorporated Private Eye. In fact, they found him moving stuff out of a storage locker, moving these toys in and out. And I'm not sure, like he said, that they weren't stolen, yet he gave them up and donated them to a charity like that. Seems very fishy to me.

[Josh Clark]

He apparently bought them for dirt cheap at a produce market, like a farmer's market. And he swore he didn't know that they were stolen, even though they were in boxes labeled tie. Like they were shipping boxes stolen out of the warehouse. But he got off finally. But it became clear to him that he didn't steal them, but that they were stolen. So he just, you know, donated them.

[Chuck Bryant]

So he didn't get in trouble.

[Josh Clark]

No, but apparently he loved all of the limelight that was cast on him by the press during this, this, the time that he was in court as the Beanie Baby Bandit, he apparently ate it up. So he got something.

[Chuck Bryant]

77, he's like, I'm going out in style.

[Josh Clark]

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 stretch 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. 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.

[Chuck Bryant]

We understand you've been loafing.

[Josh Clark]

Exactly. Is that true?

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah. Is that a crime?

[Josh Clark]

If you got time to lean, you got time to clean, son.

[Chuck Bryant]

Oh, man. Should we take a break on that note?

[Josh Clark]

Yeah, sure.

[Chuck Bryant]

All right, we'll be right back and wrap up the story of the Beanie Baby.

[Josh Clark (singing/learning bits)]

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 stops. It stops. It stops. You now.

[Public Ad Announcer]

Support for this show comes from Public, the investing platform for those who take it seriously. On Public you can build a multi asset portfolio of stocks, bonds, options, crypto and now generated assets which allow you to turn any idea into an investable index with AI. It all starts with your prompt. From renewable energy companies with high free cash flow to semiconductor suppliers growing revenue over 20% year over year, you can literally type any prompt and put the AI to work. It screens thousands of stocks, buys one of a kind index and lets you back test it against the S&P 500. Then you can invest in a few clicks. Generated assets are like ETFs with infinite possibilities, completely customizable and based on your thesis, not someone else's. Go to public.comsysk and earn an uncapped 1% bonus when you transfer your portfolio. That's public.comsysk paid for by Public Investing Brokerage Services by opening to the Public Investing Inc. Member FINRA and SIPC Advisory Services by Public Advisors llc, SEC Registered Advisor. Generated Assets is an interactive analysis tool. Output is for informational purposes only and is not an investment recommendation or advice. Complete disclosures available at public.com disclosures tired.

[Apollo Ad Announcer]

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[Chuck Bryant]

All right, 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. The Internet. The Internet clearly never fell. But the big.com boom was what 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. 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 Thai guy by now, this is just a stunt to get people to buy more of his stuff. But 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.

[Josh Clark]

Right. I didn't read the book, Zach Bissonnet's book, but I read a review of it that they mentioned. The way that he puts it, this was in fact 100% a stunt to kind of juice the beanie, the BB, the beanie baby market again. Yeah, and it did work, but in the short term. And he basically says Ty Warner killed his, his creation by, 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 Glaser Pediatric AIDS Foundation. So that was something. But 91% of people said, yes, we want to keep Beanie Babies going.

[Chuck Bryant]

Of course he did.

[Josh Clark]

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.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah, it seemed like the 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 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 old flash in the Pan. But they were around for a while.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah, 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. 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. 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 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.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah, it's like bitcoin.

[Josh Clark]

I've seen it very closely compared to bitcoin in at least one article.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah. I mean, I know people who are sort of obsessively hours and hours a day trading cryptocurrency and it seems exhausting to me.

[Josh Clark]

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 onto it as a long term investment that are now like, I lost my shirt, you know?

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah.

[Josh Clark]

So it's the same thing with Beanie, but it's the same thing with any economic bubble. You have to know when to get out at just the right time. Or you can sit on the sidelines and be like, you guys are chumps. Right.

[Chuck Bryant]

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.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah, for sure.

[Chuck Bryant]

No one knows exactly what kind of dough he made on these because like you said earlier, he never 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's true, but if it's 700 million just in profits in one year, then that's remarkable.

[Josh Clark]

That would have made TIE Inc. More profitable than Hasbro and Mattel together that year.

[Chuck Bryant]

This is just from everything they sold.

[Josh Clark]

Exactly. Just in profits. Right. That's what taking out that ad in Wall Street Journal is what you call today a flex. Flex. Yeah.

[Chuck Bryant]

But I mean, he is still a legit billionaire. It's sort of gone up and down. According to Forbes, as far as his net worth goes, 2002, supposedly at 6 billion. 2009 down to 3.2, 2023. Forbes says he's worth about 5.7, 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.

[Josh Clark]

Still closed. What's it closed for?

[Chuck Bryant]

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.

[Josh Clark]

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, 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. It wouldn't have to go home and infect their families. Which I thought was pretty cool.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah, I mean, I guess we can talk about that a little bit in a broader sense because Warner is someone who, like, 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, you know, 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.

[Josh Clark]

Right.

[Chuck Bryant]

And just cause he gives a little bit of money and makes a big deal about it, doesn't mean he didn't break the law.

[Josh Clark]

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 hundred thousand dollar 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 a hundred million dollars in it. This guy was a billionaire three times over at his poorest point. There's just no reason to have done that. And he did and he got caught doing it. And so he called it the greatest mistake of his life.

[Chuck Bryant]

Besides.

[Josh Clark]

Besides that pump and dump scheme at the turn of the millennium.

[Chuck Bryant]

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 Boos that came out in 2009.

[Josh Clark]

Those were kind of big.

[Chuck Bryant]

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?

[Josh Clark]

Three?

[Chuck Bryant]

I think 79 years old.

[Josh Clark]

79. I was pretty close. Give or take six years. Yeah.

[Chuck Bryant]

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.

[Josh Clark]

Sure, sure.

[Chuck Bryant]

That kind of thing.

[Josh Clark]

Right, for sure. There's that also that secondary market Chuck is still around and people are trading on that. That myth that some people still have that Beanie Babies are really valuable. And so if you go onto ebay and start searching Beanie Babies, you'll find some for, like, a dollar, some, I think, for less than a dollar. And then you can turn around and find the exact same ones for sale for $25,000 or $60,000 or something like that. And I was reading a, I think, Thai collector.com article where they were basically saying, like, we're pretty sure this is either money laundering that's going on or it's some sort of scam where these people are trying to beef up, like, the. The market value of these things or the secondary market artificially. Or it's just a straight up scam where, like, you. You pay them 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.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah, this is not like a babysitter or something.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah. Even still, I'd be like, what's your angle, babysitter?

[Chuck Bryant]

The one thing that cracked me up, though, was that when the movie came out and he kind of, which was just recently, I think this summer or last summer or whatever, he said, you know, I really wanted. I would have preferred somebody like Warren Beatty or Daniel Tay Lewis to have played me. I'm like, when this was going on, he was in his 40s. Warren Beatty is 89 years old.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah, he's aged these years.

[Chuck Bryant]

Daniel day Lewis is 66. They're not even close in age. He's 26, 23 years younger than Warren Beatty. Like, this guy's all over the place.

[Josh Clark]

Well, his thing with Daniel Day Lewis is that he really did beat somebody to death with a bowling pin once. So he thought Daniel Day Lewis could really bring that to life on screen like he did. And there will be blood.

[Chuck Bryant]

Oh, boy.

[Josh Clark]

You got anything else?

[Chuck Bryant]

I got nothing else.

[Josh Clark]

Have you forgotten all the mean things I've said to you this episode?

[Chuck Bryant]

I don't even know what you're talking about. Great.

[Josh Clark]

Well, since Chuck doesn't know what I'm talking about, everybody, that means that it's time for listener mail.

[Chuck Bryant]

You know, we're gonna forego listener mail this week. It's late in the year, and we would just like to remind everybody we're gonna say our official Christmas greetings on our Christmas episode, but we've got some great live shows coming up next year. We're doing our Pacific Northwest swing and as we do every year in Sea almost every year in Seattle, Portland and San Francisco at Sketchfest. And we went to some bigger theaters this time in Seattle especially. So we would love to see everybody and for you to fill those places up, start 2024 off right? Just go to our website stuffyouchouknow.com 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.

[Josh Clark]

Or if they want to be paid in gift cards, not a real ticket seller.

[Chuck Bryant]

That's right. But we hope to see everybody in.

[Josh Clark]

January, late January, 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 Stuff podcastheartradio.com.

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Hi, I'm Logan Urie, Hinge's lead relationship scientist. We asked 30,000 people about their dating lives. Gen Z daters told us they want deeper conversations, but they're 36% more hesitant than millennials to start them. We call this the Communication Gap app, the space between wanting connection and starting the conversation. But here's the good news. It doesn't have to be this way. Ask one better question or share something honest and watch the connection grow. Find more in Hinge's 2025 Gen Z date Report, now live at Hinge Co.

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[Chuck Bryant]

Guaranteed Human.