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- [00:01]
A
Hey, it's your friend David Pearce here. Just wanted to let you know that our new season of Version History is launching today and we're dropping the first episode in the Vergecast feed. This is one of my favorite episodes of this whole season, a true delight to make and I think you're going to enjoy it. But before we get into it, I have a big favor to ask. We just split Version History off into its own YouTube channel. And if you've ever launched a new YouTube channel from scratch, it's awful, it's hard out there for a new channel. So please, if you like the show, if you like us, if you just want me to stop begging you to do this, please subscribe to the podcast. It's versionhistorypodcast. We'll link to it in the show notes. Please subscribe. You're gonna get clips. We have huge plans for what we're gonna do with this channel, so please subscribe. Also, frankly, the show is just beautifully shot and we're very proud of the way that it looks. Go check it out. Thank you. And please enjoy Version History. Let me pitch you on a toy. It doesn't do very much. It just kind of makes noises, but it doesn't make noises that you understand and you don't really have any control over them. And it will wake up in the middle of the night and terrify you and everyone you love. It's small, it's furry, and I promise you're gonna love it. From the Verge and Vox Media, this is Version History, a show about the best and worst and most important products in tech history. I'm David Pearce and on this episode we are of course talking about Furby. Avoiding your unfinished home projects because you're not sure where to start. Thumbtack knows homes, so you don't have to. Don't know the difference between matte paint, finish and satin or what that clunking sound from your dryer is. With Thumbtack, you don't have to be a home pro. You just have to hire one. You can hire top rated pros, see price estimates and read reviews all on the app. Download today.
- [02:03]
B
This is not the future we were promised. Like, how about that for a tagline
- [02:07]
A
for the show from the BBC.
- [02:09]
B
This is the interface, the show that explores how tech is rewiring your week and your world.
- [02:16]
C
This isn't about quarterly earnings or about tech reviews.
- [02:19]
B
It's about what technology is actually doing to your work and your politics, your everyday life and all the bizarre ways people are using the Internet. Listen on BBC.com or wherever you get your podcasts.
- [02:35]
A
All right, we're back. It's Furby time. I have three guests to introduce you to today. First, here in the studio with me, the Vergeous V song. Hi, V. Hello. You, I would say, have covered sort of around the Furby space a lot. I think you have spent a lot of time covering, like, interesting trends and fads in Asia and how they've moved to the U.S. you have weird experiences with Furby that I'm not completely sure I'm ready to talk about.
- [02:58]
C
We'll get into it. We'll get into it. But, yeah, I actually used to build robots in high school.
- [03:03]
A
Did you really?
- [03:04]
C
Yes, I did.
- [03:04]
A
I didn't do that.
- [03:05]
C
I was part of a RoboCup junior team, but I wasn't interested in making the robots play soccer. I was interested in making them dance choreography to Singing in the Rain. So this is.
- [03:14]
A
You and Furby should get along very well.
- [03:16]
C
This is my alley. It's like my dark past.
- [03:18]
A
Sean Hollister from the Verge also here joining us over the Internet. Sean, how are you?
- [03:22]
B
Love to be here. I'm doing great.
- [03:24]
A
You have covered a lot of toys for us. One of the reasons I wanted to have you here is because I think a lot of the story of Furby is about basically how toys work in the world and, like, the fads and the rise and fall and the way that we interact with them as people and as adults and as kids. And I think you've seen this from a lot of angles. Do you have weird Furby experience that we need to know about before we get into this?
- [03:46]
B
I reviewed a Furby with my kids in 2023, and my wife kept butting in to say, oh, God, it's that thing that I remember from my youth. Please get it away from me.
- [03:59]
A
I mean, that's the episode. There it is. That's all you need to know. Sean's wife has the story for us. And our third guest is my friend right here. This little Furby. Furby, I would say, is just a tiny little monster. If you're listening to the show and not watching it. This one is white. It has pink ears and a little tuft of hair on top and on the back. This feels like A, kind of the last thing you see before you die, and B, like a really poorly animated chicken. Does that feel right to you?
- [04:30]
C
Yeah. I really think it's important to emphasize the dead eye stare.
- [04:35]
A
Yes. Big eyes, big eyelashes, the just drag
- [04:39]
C
queen eyelashes in, like, the best way possible. And, you know his mouth really does look like a chicken.
- [04:44]
A
We're gonna wake him up, see what happens. Maybe he'll tell us what he is. This Furby takes four AA batteries, which feels kind of aggressive from a power standpoint. So I've screwed open the bottom. I am putting in four AA batteries, and now I'm gonna. I'm frankly, like, slightly terrified about what's about to happen.
- [05:02]
C
I mean, like, okay. Oh, no. Oh, that noise
- [05:10]
A
beat proco. Its name is Coco.
- [05:15]
C
Its name is Coco.
- [05:16]
A
Hi, Coco. Okay.
- [05:21]
C
Oh, absolutely not.
- [05:22]
A
Coco is going to be with us for as much of the show as any of us can possibly tolerate.
- [05:26]
C
You know what's odd is just how much you can hear the mechanical components whirring as it's moving.
- [05:33]
A
100%. Yeah. It, like, really wants you to know it's a robot in a way that is kind of unsettling.
- [05:41]
C
It's singing.
- [05:42]
B
We prompt that. Or is it.
- [05:44]
A
Nope, it's just hanging out. Furby's just here. Let's see if I'm gonna just turn Furby upside down, which is the thing I have heard Furbies do not enjoy. Okay. I have a feeling Coco is not gonna make it much longer. So the reason we picked Furby for this episode is that a. I think in a really interesting way, this is an intersection of a lot of hugely important technology with, like, a completely different way of putting this technology in front of people. And it's also like, this thing is artificial intelligence, right? Like, we are in a moment, it is like. And I want to talk about this. They talked about this thing in the 90s as artificial intelligence, and they understood a certain way that maybe we would come to interact with our friends and our devices and our computers. And, like, in a very real way, Furby represented a vision for the entire future of technology that I think is absolutely fascinating. So the story begins with this guy, Dave Hampton, who's an inventor in California. And he has what I would call the, like, classical tech guy backstory. He's like. Every interview, he's like, oh, I grew up taking apart radios. And it's like, yeah, buddy. So did everybody. You know what I mean? But anyway, he then goes to the Navy to work on planes and radio equipment. He winds up learning a bunch of languages while he's stationed around the world. This becomes very important to the Furby and the language that Furby speaks, which we will come to. He worked on navigation equipment. He opened a Thai restaurant in Thailand. He wound up working for a bunch of early computer companies. Coco's a big Dave Hampton fan, as I'm sure you can hear. And he wound up getting really into the Atari 2600 and at one point wrote a port of the game Q Bert to go to the Atari 2600, which won game of the year, was a whole big deal. This guy is like a sort of renaissance man of engineering and technology. Just really fascinating. He winds up on a think tank at Mattel, which even at the time
- [07:43]
C
is like, Mattel has a think tank.
- [07:45]
A
So it basically served as like an R and D lab. And this was a moment in time where technology was very slowly starting to creep into toys. This is a commercial for Teddy Ruxpin from the Ninet.
- [08:08]
C
Oh, I remember that now.
- [08:11]
A
Hi, my name is Teddy Ruxpin. Can you and I be friends? So this is showing a kid getting on a bus with Teddy Ruxpin. And Teddy Ruxpin, if you've never seen, is basically just an enormous teddy bear with a cassette player in his back. Is it adorable or is the it the creepiest teddy bear you've ever seen in your entire life?
- [08:28]
C
It's creepy.
- [08:29]
B
Okay. I have to admit, thinking back, I actually wanted one of these.
- [08:35]
A
A lot of people did.
- [08:37]
B
Being a little boy, I was like, should I want this? But I wanted it.
- [08:41]
A
Look, Sean, there's no shame in it. Anyway, the first thing Dave Hampton works on is do you remember the CNC device? This is another old, like, sort of interactive, you talk to it kind of toy. But Mattel is like, no, we don't care about the electronic version of this. Moving on. But so he goes out off to found his own company. And the I would say this story is either is either partly company mythology or totally company mythology. But the story he tells is that his son needed jaw surgery and he needed like $100,000 to go pay for this jaw surgery. He has a good reputation in the industry, thinks it's very exciting. And so what he thinks is, maybe I can sell a toy, get some big pre order and just off the royalties, go pay for this surgery. So he's like, I need a windfall of cash and I'm gonna do it by building a toy that a bunch of people want.
- [09:30]
B
And there was good reason to think that he could do that back then because the toy industry kept having these crazes. There was the Cabbage Patch Kids, there was Tickle Me Elmo, there was Teddy Ruxpin. There was always this must have hot
- [09:42]
C
holiday toy, my size Barbie.
- [09:45]
B
So if he could make one and
- [09:46]
A
if you could make the one, and I guess just a feature of the way the toy industry works is they make so many of these purchasing decisions up front that he's like, I don't care if it's not a hit. If I can convince you that it might be, I can get all the money I need out of it before the thing even gets made. So he' this seems to be his game plan. And he and a mechanical engineer named Caleb Chung, whose name is gonna come up in a couple of different contexts here in a little bit. He's an interesting piece of the story too. They go to the New York City toy fair in 1997, and they go to the booth of a company called bandai. And in 1997, do either of you have any idea what Bandai might be showing off at its booth at the New York City Toy Fair?
- [10:25]
B
Power Rangers.
- [10:26]
C
Power Rangers.
- [10:27]
A
Oh, yes, Power Rangers are the reason everybody is going to the Bandai booth. But there is another thing that the company is showing off that is a big hit in Japan that it is thinking about bringing to the United States. It's called Tamagotchi.
- [10:40]
C
Oh, Tamagotchi.
- [10:41]
A
So this is pre Tamagotchi craze. No one in the US knows what Tamagotchi is, but they are, by virtue of being able to bring all these people to their booth to see Power Rangers, they're starting to show them, hey, we have this other thing. It's already a hit abroad. We think it's going to be big here. So Dave and Caleb see Tamagotchi and they immediately understand that it's something. But Dave in particular has this idea of like, okay, Tamagotchi is, you know, it's this little digital pet, but it's on a screen and it's pixels and you interact with it with buttons. And what he says is, okay, I wonder if we could do this same thing, but better and more three dimensional and more real. And Caleb said later, the thing he quotes Dave as saying is he says, I just want a little guy that will be my friend. Which is like a little bit sad and also deeply fascinating.
- [11:31]
C
The parallels between that sentiment and the guy who created Friend, the glowing airtag that I had to wear around my neck and angered people all across New York recently. It's a one to one, I just want a little guy to be my friend.
- [11:45]
A
But they end in completely different places,
- [11:46]
C
completely different places for various reasons.
- [11:52]
A
So they go off to try and make this thing and pretty immediately they patent the idea and they start to figure out what they're going to make. And here, let me really quick, just show you a picture of the patent. I actually have two images I want to show you of the original patent from Furby. Because it is on the one hand, like, the way I would describe this is like steampunk Furby. It's got all these diagrams, right? And there's actually a lot of incredibly complicated stuff going on in Furby. So it's pointing to all the different parts, explaining how they work and. And it looks creepy and horrifying because if you just tear the thing all the way down, it is. It is just a little tiny alien robot. But then there's this other picture in the patent filing that is just Furby. Like, it's kind of incredible what you have just said.
- [12:39]
B
I want to invert it completely. I was looking at a cute little steampunk robot bird and now I am looking at an eldritch horror. I don't know what you're talking about.
- [12:49]
A
So this we're looking at basically like a black and white drawing of something.
- [12:54]
C
Okay, Furby, calm down.
- [12:55]
A
In the Furby family, I think Furby just saw itself and got very excited. Dave in particular has a bunch of ideas about what he wants this thing to be. He doesn't want it to be a cat or a dog because he a doesn't want to replace people's pets. A thing he said a bunch was like, there are dogs and cats in shelters and I want you to have one of them, not my robot toy, which I actually think is really admirable. That is, he's like, I don't want to take the place of an actual thing that you might have. I want to build something different and complementary.
- [13:20]
B
But like, one year later, Sony does the Aibo and says, no, you should have a robot dog instead.
- [13:25]
A
Yes. And a thing that Dave also said about this was that trying to do a dog or cat was a mistake because everybody understood what a dog or cat should be like. And so your rough approximation of it would feel really bad because it would feel like you were just giving them a lesser version of an experience they understood. Which I think is like kind of the Aibo experience, right. Is like it wanted badly to be a dog, but it wasn't and it just didn't quite hit the same way. Whereas like, whatever the hell Furby is, it is different.
- [13:51]
C
The Aibo hit with some people. They were holding funerals at Buddhist tempos temples for the Aibo. Yes. It was a whole thing. Japanese people got really attached to their Aibo's and had relationships with them. And when Sony discontinued It and they stopped making the stuff. They would hold funerals for their aibo at Buddhist temples. It was a whole thing for a really long time. But I think he has a point about, you know, I've tested some of these robots and I have a cat, and side by side, I mean, the cat just wins. He's so cute. Like, he just is a kitty cat. So I think that was, like, really smart of him and he should have probably talked to Sony about that. Saved them some trouble. Yeah, yeah, just a little.
- [14:35]
A
They start working, and almost immediately, like in a manner of a few weeks, they build their first prototype, which they called Furball, which, fun fact is the origin of the name Furby, a thing that I probably should have known, but did not know until prepping for this episode. My question to both of you, is Furball a better name than Furby? Should they have just called it Furball? No, no, I kind of like Furball.
- [14:55]
B
Furball is the thing you say to Chewbacca right before he rips your arm.
- [14:59]
C
Yes, that. And also, what do cats cough up? Fur balls. Yeah, and that's. That's no good.
- [15:07]
A
All right, fair enough, fair enough. So they agreed with you and get away from the name Furball pretty quickly. And they move to Furby, which I think is like a little cutesy. Er, there's a lot of cutesy in the development of Furby. They wanted this thing to be cheap. Like, when Furbies came out, they were like 40 bucks, which is remarkable for how advanced it was at the time. And so what they had to do was work with pretty cheap components. And they found a way to make basically a pretty cheap, pretty simple motor reversible so that it could actually, the thing could move and operate in multiple directions, which was very hard to do at the time and is still hard to do with cheap parts. So that was one of their big breakthroughs. But they get this thing sorted in the matter of a couple of months and then they're like, okay, well, we need somebody to buy this thing from us. They go to the company that made Teddy Ruxpin, but that company, funnily enough, is, like, into it. But they're like, well, we need some time to really test this and market test it and see if people want this. Maybe we can release it in a year. And Dave Hampton's like, no, no, no, I need money, like today. So, no, we're out. They go also to. Because of Tamagotchi, by the way. They're also like, this moment is about to happen. They were so convinced that Tamagotchi was going to be a hit, that they were like, this virtual friends thing is going to happen quickly and we need to be there right at the beginning of it. Which good call by them. So they show it to other companies. And then a friend of a friend of theirs, this guy named Richard Levy, introduces them to Tiger Electronics. And Tiger Electronics basically gets the thing fully formed and decides that it's going to do it. Sean, do you know anything about Tiger Electronics? What is this company's deal? Tell me about Tiger.
- [16:45]
B
Tiger Electronics, they were the company that was producing all of those very, very cheap but desirable little video game systems you could buy at your toy store. So there'd be. Every movie would have, like a tie in game. You'd have your Space Jam basketball game, your Toy Story game, All kinds of things like this, just with a couple of buttons for like left, right, and like a jump button. I used to have the paper boy game. And all it would do is there'd be this little, like, figure on a screen. It would have like two animations, two, like, other positions that this black, like, silhouette of a paper boy I could do. And you'd press a button, throw the paper, and you'd see the little, like, almost. Almost like an emoji in terms of how little detail it had. Fling this tiny little paper icon across the screen two frames over to the left. That's the entire game.
- [17:33]
C
Just remembered I had one. It was Beauty and the Beast. And all Belle did was this and this and this. And I did the. Oh, my God, I had one. Wow.
- [17:42]
B
They also did the Talk Boy, if you remember the Home Alone movies, Tiger was the one that did the voice recorder, you know, cassette tape player where you'. Where Kevin would play his, you know, his. His stuff into the. Into the voice recorder would come out with different voices and scare the criminals away, stuff like that.
- [17:59]
A
Right. So Tiger is. Is a pretty big name in the toy industry at this point. It's not like the toy company in the way that like the Mattels of the world are, but it's a pretty big and pretty reputable name. And they basically agree on the spot that they want this thing. So they make this deal with Tiger in 1997. And Tiger says, awesome, we're in. Let's do this. We want to show it off at toy fair in three months.
- [18:21]
C
That's not a long time.
- [18:22]
A
And we are off to the races. One more tiny bit of interesting drama that I uncovered that I would just like to put in front of you too and see what you think Caleb and Dave, the two people on the patent for Furby that I showed you. It is not debatable that these were the two people who originated this project, over time seem to, I would say, studiously avoid giving each other credit for things. There's a kind of fascinating passive aggressive interview strategy that they both adopt. And I just want to read you one passage. So a fun fact about the research for this episode was that I found a lot of Furby history in a 2001 GeoCities chat that Dave Hampton did with a Furby community. That is the most. I'll link to it in the show notes. It is the most unhinged interview transcript you've ever seen in your entire life. Because it's just a group chat of a million Furby fans. And then Dave. It's bananas. I think there are people pretending to be there for a reason. It's a whole thing. But anyway, so this person asks about a product called Snoring Roaring Norbert, which is like, if you imagine a Furby, but it's Norbert the dragon from Harry Potter. That's a thing that existed a few years later. And somebody's like, is Snoring Roaring Norbert yours? And Dave says, it is not. This is from the other guy that claims to be the inventor of Furby. And then a minute later he says, which is interesting as he started as a co inventor. Yes, there are fathers of Furby too. I read that as, like, light shade. What do you guys think?
- [19:53]
C
That's clear shade.
- [19:54]
A
Okay.
- [19:55]
C
That's the guy who claims to have invented Furby. I mean, he started as a co inventor. That's. I think that's clear shade.
- [20:04]
A
Okay.
- [20:04]
C
Yeah.
- [20:05]
A
And it's really fascinating that this thing became so big that I think they both ended up wanting most or all of the credit because that became a big thing to have.
- [20:12]
C
What do you think, Coco? Nothing.
- [20:15]
A
Coco's over it. All right, I'm gonna leave you with a question, then we're gonna take a brief break. What kind of animal is Furby? Don't answer. We're gonna take a break. We're gonna come right back. Yo, Harvey, Zoey, group selfie. Ooh, nice. New iPhone 17. Drewski, let's do a triangle formation. I'm in front with a center stage, front camera. Everyone fits in the shot. He guided at T Mobile, but switching not anymore. Now you can switch to T mobile in just 15 minutes. Focus, people. Nail your pose and you get a new iPhone 17 on them. No way. Yes way. No way. Yes way. Guys, Switch to T mobile and get iPhone 17 on us. And right now we'll pay off your old phone up to 800 bucks. I'm grabbing my phone and switching to T mobile right now. Get back, Harvey. We're taking a. Let's go again, y'.
- [21:05]
B
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Visit t mobile.com Yo, Harvey, Zoe group selfie. Ooh, nice. New iPhone 17. Drew ski. Let's do a triangle formation. I'm in front with a center stage, front camera. Everyone fits in the shot. T guide AT T mobile. But switching takes forever. Not anymore. Now you can switch to T Mobile Just.
- [21:44]
C
Just 15 minutes.
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- [22:28]
A
Visit t mobile.com I think Coco gave up on us.
- [22:31]
C
I mean, it is like 30 years old.
- [22:34]
A
I found a bunch of, like, horror stories in the research of people who were like, my Furby didn't talk for 20 years and then one day at 4am no, woke up. That's literally the last thing you see before you die. All right, we're back. You've had time. Sean, you go first. What kind of animal is Furby?
- [22:52]
B
I'm going to say it's a bird because it Has a beak.
- [22:58]
A
Okay.
- [22:59]
B
That's about it.
- [23:00]
C
Okay.
- [23:01]
B
That. No other reason beyond the beak. But I'm going with that because that's the first thing I saw when you showed me. It's robot innards.
- [23:08]
A
Okay. I love it.
- [23:10]
C
V. I think it's a chimera akin to a platypus. It's like. I think it's a platypus's cousin. Because while I agree with Sean that it has some bird like qualities, there's no wings.
- [23:22]
A
It's a terrific point. Okay, so, Sean, you get the point for this one, but only by a hair. There have been many theories about this over the years and I think it kind of. No one is wrong. But the only two things that I was able to find that the creators have said is that it is mostly an owl, which, Sean, you win on bird. I would say the sort of basis of the thing is owl, which makes sense. The shape a little bit like you can sort of see it. And there's some hamster in there somewhere. Listen, I'm not. Don't take this up with them.
- [23:59]
C
Let me. Let me look at this. Oh, its face is just so wrong. But yeah, I mean, it's mostly gremlin. I didn't even see that movie. Gremlin, but.
- [24:12]
A
So do you want a fun fact about that, by the way?
- [24:14]
C
Sure.
- [24:14]
A
They at one point had to subtly change the design to make it look less like gremlins. If its ears were bigger, it would look even more like a gremlin.
- [24:26]
C
I think it's better if we just shut Coco's eyes and then close. Okay. I can't close its mouth, but he seems more peaceful with his eyes closed.
- [24:36]
A
That's nice. He's sleeping.
- [24:37]
C
He's sleeping.
- [24:39]
A
Okay, so that is what it is. But it is also very clearly lots of things. There's a lot going on. And again, they didn't want it to feel exactly like any particular creature. But one thing I did think was interesting is that at the beginning, as they were building this stuff out, and especially as it got more popular, they started to have ideas about lots of other kinds. They wanted to do furbies of the sea, air and land is the way that Dave put it. There was at one point a fish called Fishbee that they worked on and were very excited about but never ended up releasing. They didn't want to make robots, they wanted to make creatures. That was a distinction Dave made a few times that I thought was really interesting. The one that he said he tried and immediately threw away was a snake furby Snake was just immediately thrown out as a bad idea, which I think, Sean, I think we can agree was a pretty solid decision.
- [25:33]
B
I mean, I don't think I would want to invite any form of Furby into my house, but Snake certainly very, very high on the list of ones that will not.
- [25:41]
A
Furby just wriggling on your table in front of you does not seem like my idea of a good time.
- [25:46]
B
They called it Dangerdoodle and made it appropriately fun.
- [25:49]
A
That's true. So, yeah. So they land on this again, like we saw in those patents. This was the look pretty early on. And then they start filling the thing with technology. Fun fact. They wrote the original source code, which you can just find it's just on the Internet and it's actually surprisingly readable, which is pretty cool. You can see how they're programming the way that it responds to different stimuli to like, go to sleep. And Dave is the one figuring out how to sort of give this thing personality. And he described it one time I saw it's not. Yes, no, like a computer, but that it also has. Maybe Furby has maybe. Which I thought was a really great way of thinking about it. It's not correct technologically, but it is an interesting way of thinking about how to program one of these things. He spent a lot of time mapping Furby to essentially Maslow's hierarchy of needs, which actually contributes a lot to the personality of the thing. Right. When Furby decided it was hungry, which is obviously like down at the bottom of the pyramid, it would just get louder and louder about being hungry because it understood that that is like a base instinct. Nothing else matters if you're hungry. Same with Sleepy. He built this incredible sort of waiting system between different emotions and different feelings. And then same with all these different inputs. So there's a ton of inputs inside of Furby. I think a big part of what makes it feel alive is this set of sensors. It was sensitive to light, so that if you. If you hold it up to a light, it'll actually respond in a. In a certain way. It would respond to sound, it would respond to touch, it would respond to movement. Like there's a little sort of ball inside that lets you know if it's moving from side to side. And basically weighing all of this stuff was the work of building Furby because they, they really wanted it to not feel programmed. That, like, if I do this, it will do this. That was actually the enemy of progress here. They didn't want to sort of give you a set of instructions for how to get different reactions out of Furby. They wanted it to be weird and unpredictable and silly and feel more alive in that sense. His kid also gave him the idea in the course of development that a Furby should know if there's another Furby nearby and that they should actually be able to communicate. This became known as the Furby communication protocol, which I like very much. He always liked to say that he didn't want the Furby to do anything that seemed stupid and not stupid in that sense, but stupid in the like, oh, it should be able to do this. Why can't it do it? That's the reason Furby doesn't have hands. It's the reason it doesn't have legs. Because the idea was we don't have the technology to make it so that it can grab something or that it can walk. And the idea of this thing having arms that just do nothing they thought made it look dumb. They're like this. This looks like a thing that is broken and somehow under featured. So they just stripped everything out that wasn't relevant. Which essentially left you with ears that move to express emotion, eyes that move to express emotion, and a mouth that moves to express communication. And that's it. And it is just astonishing what you're actually able to do with just those things.
- [28:52]
C
I really think that this guy could go around to various robotics companies like the robot vacs that are adding arms and legs and just talk about, like, what if we didn't make robotvax look stupid? Or like the humanoid robots that we saw at CES where the one Allison saw that punched itself in the face and then knocked itself out. What if the fundamental law of robotics, forget Asimov, was don't do anything stupid.
- [29:21]
A
One of the things was just like, of course, if a Furby hears another Furby, why would they not be like. It would break that immersion and remind you that this thing had flaws and was a toy that wasn't programmed to do certain things.
- [29:34]
C
It was very philosophical. It really is Furby and like, what life is and how living things should act, which is, you know, you look at Furby and you wouldn't think such deep thought went into its personality, but it's quite deep, actually.
- [29:49]
A
Yeah. He called Furby an inference machine, which just jumped out to me after spending whatever the last four years reading about AI inference, like, he just. He was talking about it. It's the same Stu he also developed, and this wound up being very important, an entirely new language for Furby.
- [30:06]
C
Furbish.
- [30:07]
A
The language was called Furbish. Furbish is a made up language but it has lots of real languages in it. So there's some Thai in there, there's some Japanese, there's a little bit of Hebrew, there's a little bit of Chinese, there's a lot of like funny puns that he did on purpose. Some of the Furbish words sound kind of like swears which Dave said he didn't do on purpose, but I don't believe him. So the Furby initially had a vocabulary about 200 words and over the course of your time with it it would actually start to learn English. So it would start speaking in Furbish and then this was one of the ways they wanted to feel interactive with you. The more you talked to it, the idea was the more it would start to learn English. This was of course not actually an interactive experience that way, but it was meant to feel like it was hearing you and learning from you and talking to you. Dave said at one point that he actually did build a voice recognition feature for it so that Furby actually could have understood you talking to it and maybe do something back. But he didn't think anybody was interested. And also they were at such a precious technology barrier that they ended up
- [31:13]
C
just not doing it at a different time. This could have been like a vastly different Amazon Echo and infinitely more creepy. Yes, just, just a itay Furby buy toilet paper. You know, it's just like uh, is there some other world where that was what Furby was?
- [31:36]
A
Somewhere an Amazon executive just wrote that
- [31:38]
C
down and was just no, don't do it. Sorry, I take it back.
- [31:40]
A
Toy Fair 2027 this is coming.
- [31:43]
C
I've made a mistake.
- [31:43]
A
I've made a huge mistake, Sean and I think this was, that was new at the time. Right? Like I'm thinking about, you know, we named a couple of Tickle Me Elmo is like a, is a little bit of that sort of a. It is a mechanical thing designed to be cute. But I don't feel like cute was a thing you would ascribe to many toys of that era.
- [32:03]
B
I think that there was this fascination by certain people who did think they were super cute. Like I'm sure Furby sold however many millions because people thought it was cute. Not just because they wanted a robot in their house for sure, but, but definitely that late 90s period of we're going to make everything talk was, was, was huge. And to have this robot come out and say we're not going to talk with a pre recorded English speaking voice, but rather we're going to do this language where you have to interpret it, you can, you can like map your own feelings, your own ideas of what it might be saying on top of it. That's really fascinating. That is something that seems to be more and more important as we continue to run up the boundaries of what robots actually can do versus what we hope they can do for us emotionally.
- [32:51]
A
Yeah, you just reminded me of something else that I found that Dave said that I thought was really interesting sort of philosophically about Furby, which is that he never wanted to make a toy that got in the way of a kid's imagination. And actually to your point, Sean, the thing he didn't like about the toys that would sort of speak back to you or direct you or interact with you in that way was they felt unambiguous in a way that he didn't like. He wanted something that felt open ended, that you could ascribe your own feelings and meaning to, that you could interact with lots of different ways. He didn't like things that just were like, you do this and it says this and then you do this in reaction and it says this. The sort of paint by numbers kinds of toys. He wanted something that felt weirder and he was like, this is just much more immersive and interesting and imaginative in that way. And I think he was right.
- [33:35]
B
Companies still feel this way. Lego Lego's bringing out these LEGO smart brick toys here in March 2026 and they're going to come out in Star wars sets and they don't have actual Star wars voices. You're not going to hear Luke, Leia, Darth would be Carrie Fisher and James Earl Jones and Mark Hamill. You're going to hear them talk in some kind of gibberish.
- [34:00]
A
Yeah, I think all of that is right. And the interesting thing to this is that the reaction to what they were building, you would think would be sort of controversial for all the reasons we're talking about. Right. That some people would be ready for it, some people wouldn't, Some people would be like, this is so different from what we're used to. That didn't happen at all. So they get this thing ready and they take it to toy fair in 1998 and it just absolutely explodes. There's this amazing story again, this thing has been under real development for like a few months and is in no way finished. So they basically show up with one prototype. It actually reminds me of the sort of famous story about the iPhone launch where they had one iPhone that barely worked and it was like A small miracle that it was able to do any of the things that they did during the demo. This is very much like that. And there's this amazing story. Wired did a big feature about it at the time, which is a sign of how big the reaction was to this. But they tell this story basically right before Furby is about to get launched. They're meeting with the president of Hasbro, this guy named Alan Hassenfeld. And they just cannot figure out what's going on because Furby is dead. It's just dead as a doornail on the table. They can't get it to move. They can't get it to talk. They can't program the thing to fix anything. And then they discover that actually the problem is the halogen lights in the room are messing with Furby's circuitry. They're screwing up the electromagnetic field. This is how primitive this thing is, is that the lights in the room are just rendering it dormant. So one of the engineers wraps the Furby's cord in tinfoil, and then that made the demo work. And that was enough. Like a Furby wrapped in tinfoil got the job done and made Alan Hassan feel that he walked out basically saying, that's one of the coolest things I've ever seen in my life. And over and over at Toy Fair, people have this experience. Wired runs a huge story. Time magazine runs a big story. USA Today runs a big story. This thing is essentially already being declared the toy of 1998. Never mind that it doesn't exist. Never mind that they've made precisely one of them. This is the next big thing. And everybody. And by everybody, I mean a bunch of adults. Like, it's important to say kids have not seen or played with this thing yet, but a bunch of adults have decided that this is the next big thing. And, Sean, I did a little bit of research, but basically, as far as I can tell, this is kind of how it always works. A bunch of grownups decide what kids are going to be playing with 10 or 11 months from now. And that's how the toy industry works, that you're selling to grownups much more than you're selling to kids, at least in the early days.
- [36:36]
B
I like to think that some of these grownups are kids at heart, and they know what they're talking about. But so often the toys come out and they just aren't that. I can't say that for sure.
- [36:49]
A
So February 1998, they go to work to finish this thing. The plan is to release it to manufacturing in July and ship to consumers in October. This is an absurdly fast thing, but the idea is hype is huge. This is happening. We need to get it in front of people. Barely worked, I would say, is how it turned out. They had production delays, they had design delays. It got so bad that at the end of the year, everybody wanted this on shelves. For the holiday season of 1998, they had pre sold tons of them. It was a huge deal. They were making companies come pick up their own inventory from factories in China, and it was so late that these companies had to then fly all the inventory on planes back to the US to sell it because putting it on a boat would have taken too long. So this process becomes hugely expensive and actually in many cases raises the price of furbies for people by a few dollars because you have to offset the cost of, like, flying 747s around the world to pick up planes full of furbies. So just imagine we're in, like, November of 1998, and you look up in the sky and there are just planes full of furbies flying around. This is. This is what was happening. Tiger and Hasbro wound up making 1.3 million of them in the first year. And even despite that, that's a pretty big number for a new toy. They were impossible to get your hands on. There are all these wild stories out there about the people who were going to crazy lengths to get them. Actually, can I play you a clip really fast?
- [38:24]
C
I would love a clip.
- [38:25]
A
This is from the CBC in Canada about what's going on. Nobody has offered me a thousand dollars, but I have had offers from 150 to 650. Hundreds of dollars for a toy that feels, sneezes. And yes, it can be taught to speak English. Hello.
- [38:46]
C
Hello.
- [38:46]
A
Schwajkowski stood in line for hours to nab two furbies at a local toy store. But she isn't playing for keeps. She's just in it for the money.
- [38:54]
C
Oh, my God.
- [38:55]
A
Incredible.
- [38:56]
C
She's just in it for the money.
- [38:58]
A
$650.
- [38:59]
C
This is giving Beady Baby, like, that whole, I bought it. I mean, I feel like that's very common with toys. I was a Pokemon card grifter as a child because my dad would often go to Japan, come back with Japanese holographic Pokemon cards, and I didn't give a crap. So I was in the lunchroom selling Pokemon cards at a like, $10 a pop, because I thought that was good for, like, lunch money or whatever. I was an entrepreneur. So, yeah, you know, demand high, supply low beanie baby. It's a, it's a strong tradition.
- [39:32]
A
I have two more holiday season 1998 clips that I just want to play you because this turns out to be a rich area. So some of the first people to actually get their hands on this are journalists who are testing it and then talking to people who have seen it, heard about it, seen the ads, but have not actually been able to get their hands on one. Here's one from the BBC. And finally, you're almost certainly going to be seeing a lot of this little guy soon. He's a Furby, one of just a couple in the country, but he's predicted to be in huge demand in the run up to Christmas. Be quiet. Now. He's a kind of furry Tamagotchi, like a Tamagotchi, the electronic pet. He needs loving and care round the clock. But it's thought he could be scarcer than the Teletubbies became last year.
- [40:14]
C
This guy is about to chuck it out the window.
- [40:16]
A
Listening to him talk bit of English, but you get a dictionary which tells you what he's saying. Now he's saying lulu at the moment, which means he needs a tickle on the tummy. I'm sorry, I just want to put. This is like national news programming. But then, okay, but then this is my favorite one. Um, this is a CNN reporter who I think is maybe hates Furby more than I've ever seen anyone hate anything on television. And I'm playing you the end of a clip that is about the sort of furor in the run up to the holidays when water was spilled on a gremlin. Great, thanks a lot.
- [40:51]
C
Bye.
- [40:52]
A
It reproduced. But when we tried water on and Furby, all he did was burp. In a test of Furby's endurance, they put him in the freezer. We stuck him in the freezer.
- [41:07]
C
Now this is content from being blow dried.
- [41:09]
A
We finally placed him on 8th Avenue where bicyclists and motorists tried to avoid him.
- [41:14]
C
Nevertheless, I feel a cringed spirit with this. She goes journalist.
- [41:18]
A
When he gets hit by a car, Furby's just tickled not to be roadkill. Ginny Mo, cnn, New York, cnn.
- [41:30]
C
If this CNN reporter happens to see this, please reach out to me. I want to be best friends. I think we have a similar philosophy in testing robots.
- [41:39]
A
So this is, this is my favorite thing about this because everybody has one of two reactions to Furby which is either you love it to bits or you would like it to die. And there doesn't seem to be any middle ground. Look, at it. Everybody who is annoyed by it is so incredibly annoyed by it that they would like to fling it out of a window. And then there are people. A story I saw a bunch was that the first round of Furbies, as the first run of any kind of gadget was, like, a little bit finicky. So some were breaking, there were issues. But a lot of people would report something wrong. They would report back to the company and say, something's broken. And then they would say, oh, okay, send it back. And they would say, no, I don't want to. People got so quickly so attached to their Furbies that even if they were broken, they wouldn't send them back because they immediately just adopted them as a member of their family.
- [42:29]
C
That's the power of cute.
- [42:30]
A
I think the most controversial thing about it at first and maybe forever, was that it had no off switch. The only thing you could do was take out its batteries. You couldn't turn it off. You couldn't tell it to be quiet. It was this unpredictable little maniac that just lived in your house. We asked people to send us emails and send us voicemails about how they felt about their Furbies. This one comes from Zach. Says, we got a Furby around 2000. We thought it was interesting at first, but found the marketing about being able to teach it to talk was a complete lie. We also couldn't find the power switch, so we threw it one story down a staircase repeatedly for an hour or two to try to break the thing to get it shut up, but failed to kill it.
- [43:05]
C
Furby, you could have just taken its batteries out.
- [43:07]
A
Very good. But then, year two, the Furby sells 14 million Furbies in the year 1999. Two funny things that happened in 1999. One, the FAA, which governs airlines, warned people not to bring Furbies onto airplanes because they were worried about it disturbing the workings of the planes. This is back when they were, like, worried about, you know, phones and everything, disturbing the interference. So they were telling people. It reminds me of, like, the Galaxy Note 7 when they're like, please do not bring that thing on the plane. Airlines were telling people to take the batteries out entirely.
- [43:46]
C
Furby is a weapon of mass destruction.
- [43:48]
A
Yes, Seriously. The other one, and this one's even better. The nsa, the National Security Agency, banned Furby from a bunch of different locations around the world, believing that Furby might be recording sensitive conversations. There was this sense that there is this living thing in the room with you, and what if it's actually hearing what you're saying? Technically, Speaking. This thing is incapable of recording audio. There is nothing in it recording. And actually it's like it's a real statement on how good the thing is at seeming like it's interacting with you even when it's not. That it is actually able to convince you that it's recording your audio, even though literally, technically it couldn't. By the end of 2000, the number is 40 million Furbies. So this is like a little over two years. They've sold 40 million Furbies. All of a sudden all of these other Furby like things come out. There was a thing called Poochie, which means nothing to me. No. The Tamagotchi was also a hit, which is semi related. It became a pop culture phenomenon. It shows up on talk shows all over the place. Rosie o' Donnell winds up being like a famous fan of the Furbies. She had it on her show a bunch of different times. Here's just one clip.
- [45:02]
C
So cool. That's great.
- [45:03]
A
We have something for ebay.
- [45:05]
C
We have the first of all for
- [45:07]
A
everybody in the audience and 500 Toys for Tots. Furby. There you go, Furby.
- [45:12]
C
Okay.
- [45:13]
A
She shakes the Furby to try to wake it up. I love it.
- [45:17]
C
And the Furby people nicely made a
- [45:22]
A
one of a kind Furby. They made a brosiotta Furby supposed to be me. What?
- [45:28]
C
And the really scary thing is they
- [45:29]
A
had the Furby designers come to make sure it was exactly like me.
- [45:34]
C
And they actually looked at that and went, perfect.
- [45:37]
B
That's right.
- [45:37]
A
They signed off on that.
- [45:38]
C
Did they put a wig on it?
- [45:39]
A
It's very good. Yeah, I think they put a wig on it. So this thing shows up several times on various Rosie o' DONNELL episodes. There's also an episode of Friends where I believe it's in Joey and Chandler's apartment. There's just two Furbies on top of the microwave at one point. They never mention it. There's just two Furbies. It's delightful. But my favorite one is Furby in 1998 again, at like the height of the holiday craze here. Regis and Kathie Lee spent like a week with Furby on their show. And Regis in particular really goes through like an emotional journey. Here's the very beginning of the first day they had it.
- [46:14]
B
How'd you do it now you just dial the number.
- [46:19]
A
This stupid thing is bothering me. This is gonna picks up the Furby by its hair talking. He's talking. He's talking. Shut up. Okay, so that's day one. So then Furby sticks around and A few days later, Furby continues to talk, and Kathie Lee says, okay, maybe we'll auction off the Furby. Somebody in the audience can have it. We can make a lot of money. What about if we. We do a little auction? I don't think so.
- [46:47]
C
How about for Cassidy's place, we raise a buckle?
- [46:49]
A
I don't think so. You'd be writing out a check right now. I've got a tax to my little Furby reach. You won't even do it for Cassidy's place? No. Come on, A. It's like two days. And Regis goes from I hate this thing to petting it and not wanting to give it up for charity. That's Furby for you. It's good stuff. So do you guys remember this phenomenon at all? I have to confess, the Furby craze did not really cross my world.
- [47:16]
C
I was like, the perfect age for it. 1998. I was 10.
- [47:20]
A
Okay.
- [47:21]
C
So, you know, it was peak Pokemon, peak Furby. I wanted one. And my dad, in his very strict, stoic, Asian dad voice was just like, no, absolutely not. My dad was very anti Furby. And I had a friend who had a Furby and brought it over, and the look of disgust on my father's face was just so strong. He's just like, you're not a child anymore. And I was like, but I'm 10. And he's like, you're not a child child anymore. And so, you know, Furby was something that I was just very like, this is mysterious, and I can't have it. So I wanted.
- [47:58]
A
It was your. Your friend who had one? Was it like a big deal that your friend had one?
- [48:02]
C
Oh, she was obnoxious about it. She was just like, Furby. And I got a Tickle Me Elmo, and it's just like, okay, yeah, great. I guess your parents love you.
- [48:13]
A
Whatever.
- [48:16]
C
No, my dad. I think my dad had a point because he also saw the Tickle Me Elmo, and he was just like, americans are ridicul.
- [48:22]
A
It's not wrong. Sean, what about you? Did. Did Furby cross your path? At this time?
- [48:27]
B
I had just become a teenager, and so things like Furby cute things like that were a little bit beneath me at the time. But this was also after Teletubbies, which everybody my age were making fun of the previous year. And so when another thing like that came along, we're like, oh, God, another thing like this now?
- [48:49]
A
Yeah. You're like, I'm officially too old.
- [48:51]
B
Toys of the year away from me. I'm done.
- [48:52]
A
Yeah, fair. But then it kind of comes back around. So the wildest thing to me about the Furby story was in 2001, it already starts to wane. This incredibly hot toy that everybody wants, it's a big thing. It doesn't die. But it ceases to be a phenomenon in 2001 very quickly. There's a lot, a lot happens in 2001 in America that is very complicated and changes the way that people feel about a lot of things. And then from there, Furby has just a truly bizarre, fascinating life. It gets redesigned pretty aggressively a few years later. It gets redesigned pretty aggressively a few years after that. It gets redesigned again pretty aggressively a few years after that. And over and over, the thing that happens is it gets more technological, it gets more features, it becomes more customizable, and it becomes less compelling. And this is just the story of it. I think you. This is where your story gets real weird. One of the things that they did that they were sure was going to work was they got LCD eyes, which in theory should be even more expressive. They can do more stuff, more features. Eventually they do one with an on off switch. But then they ended up getting rid of that, which I find very funny. But there was just. This was an attempt to keep improving the technology in order to keep improving the toy. And what it actually did was the opposite.
- [50:13]
C
So, as I've established, I desperately wanted a Furby while I was a child. And I was very cruelly told no. So in my career, 2016, 10 years ago, I was a reviewer at this point in time at a different publication, and a friend there was like, she did toys and she had a hookup, and she got two Furby connects, one in teal and one in pink. I was given the pink one and she was just like, here, I'm testing it. I'm going to write it out. Just tell me how you think about it. And I was like, I finally have a Furby. And so I was so happy he was at my desk. I loved my little guy for about a week. And then the eyes were so creepy, and it just talked so much, and I was just like, oh, my dad was right. And my relationship with this Furby ended in a very tragic way in that this was the. For anyone who was not in media, this was the era of pivot to video. And every. All of us in media were forced to do Facebook live streams. And so Christmas comes around and there's a segment with dollar Shave Club. And someone who was high up at this media company was like, here's the segment for Dollar Shave Club. We're gonna shave Vy's Furby on air. Now here's the thing about the Furby connects fur. It was very dense and the Dollar Shave Club razors could not actually shave the Furby. And I was like, oh my Furby is saved. Thank God. But then I had a very unhinged co worker just pull out a butterfly knife and skin it on air. And so I was just there like, oh my God, you've skinned my Furby for Christmas. And the office had this.
- [52:05]
A
I feel like Dollar Shave Club wouldn't have even liked that.
- [52:08]
C
No, it was unhinged. I had to watch this co worker for shits and giggles, skin my baby, which, you know is an annoying baby. And I just made it sleep all the time. But that was what the hell. And you know, I was given a skinned naked pink Furby at the end of it. And so I gave it a little photo shoot to make it feel better. And also because I was like, maybe this is an art project about the uncanny valley. And so there is a picture I have of this Furby.
- [52:37]
A
I was sent two of these pictures that I have studiously avoided looking at until now.
- [52:41]
C
Yeah. One of them was just like, oh my God, look what they did to my boy.
- [52:44]
A
I will say, having looked at these pictures now, no one should ever see the inside of a Furby.
- [52:49]
C
No, no you shouldn't.
- [52:50]
A
It says such. Last thing you see before you die. Energy to it. There were Furby babies that were a medium hit for a while. There was a thing called the Furby party rocker. There was a thing called the Furby Boom. One big idea that they had was that actually Furby should play music, which I think is a weird choice, but they got very into this idea. There was a Furby party speaker at one point. There was a whole thing. There was Furby Connect, like you mentioned. And at this point they were like, okay, how do we tie this thing in with your phone or your iPad and immerse it in a digital world? And I think this is just completely anathema to the whole thing that made Furby work. Sean, you're shaking your head. You agree with me. Yes. This is just a completely wrong headed idea.
- [53:32]
B
I think that things like this super fun when it's motors, moving limbs and as soon as you get more and more technology in it, if you can't make it a real companion, you're just going to make it creepier and creepier.
- [53:45]
A
Yep. And that is by and large the legacy. There are Also, I should say there's a really fascinating hacker angle to this. Again, there is just a computer inside of this thing with computer parts that you can program. In 2000, this guy named Peter Gibbons wins a contest to hack Furby by basically rebuilding its entire circuitry from scratch and putting just a new motherboard into Furby that could do Furby, but could do lots of other things. And he talked about at the time how impressed he was that it was just a reasonably powerful computer and for $65, you could buy his Furby conversion kit. And Hasbro and Tiger were like, they were not thrilled that people were doing this, but they were also very upfront about the fact that this is your Furby. You bought it, you do what you want with it. If you want to skin your Furby on Facebook video, technically that is your right. So even now, vintage Furbies remain a big thing. You can buy them on ebay. They're everywhere. There are still a lot of collectors out there. As far as I can tell, nothing since then is kind of on the same plane, if that makes sense. Nothing has achieved this same kind of feeling and retro nostalgia, excitement. By 2023, just to give you a sense, Hasbro was saying it had sold cumulative 58 million Furbies. So remember, it sold 40 million in three years. And that that indicates, you know, it kept selling a million a year, let's say maybe a little less. But it. It has not been the thing in a very long time. But they're still around. People still love them. The. The fandom community shouts to the Furby subreddit, which is just a wild and remarkable place. And I just want to shout out briefly one quick thing before we get off this particular story, which is Long Furby. Long Furby, please meet Long Furby. This is a phenomenon I cannot explain and I will not attempt to, but there is a large community of people dedicated to making their Furbies into very long, plush, caterpillar y things. And they are called Long Furbies.
- [55:58]
C
Why is it so large? Is it just the scale of the photo?
- [56:00]
A
No, it's a Long Furby.
- [56:01]
B
Dude, you said they didn't make the Furby Snake.
- [56:04]
A
These are all DIY projects. This is like Long Furby is a. Is a grassroots phenomenon and it knows no bounds.
- [56:13]
C
The depth of human creativity and depravity are two sides of the same coin.
- [56:18]
A
That's about right. It's beautiful. Long Furby shouts to you. And that is essentially where we have landed. So I want to debate the legacy of this thing a little bit, but I think the best way to do that is with the eight version history questions. So let's take a break and then we're going to get to those. We'll be right back. This episode is brought to you by Indeed. Stop waiting around for the perfect candidate. Instead, use Indeed sponsored Jobs to find the right people with the right skills fast. It's a simple way to make sure
- [56:52]
C
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- [56:54]
A
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- [57:09]
B
Your little one grew 3 inches overnight. Adorable. Also expensive.
- [57:14]
A
Sell their pint sized pieces on Depop and list them in minutes with no selling fees because somewhere a dad refuses
- [57:21]
B
to pay full price for the clothes
- [57:23]
A
his kids will outgrow tomorrow.
- [57:24]
B
And he's ready to buy your son's entire wardrobe right now. Consider your future growth Bird budget secured. Start selling on Depop, where taste recognizes taste. Payment processing fees and boosting fees still apply.
- [57:37]
A
See website for details. All right, we're back. So while we were on the break, our producer Andrew Marino brought in some new batteries because I think we managed to burn through Coco's batteries in like two and a half minutes. And boy, is Coco alive again. Okay, Coco, I'm getting the distinct sense that not only is this Furbish, it's that like powering down sound where everything talks. It's just not quite its full speed.
- [58:15]
C
I mean, this is like 30 years old.
- [58:17]
A
I know. I'm impressed. This still works.
- [58:26]
C
Okay, that's just wrong.
- [58:27]
B
She sacrificed her fingertip to the further.
- [58:30]
C
That's just wrong.
- [58:31]
A
Coco, you bit Vee's finger. All right, you're going over here feeling herself again. All right, so on every episode of Version History, we like to ask the same eight questions to try and get a sense of of this thing's true legacy. And it starts with the time matrix. The time Matrix. Super simple concept. I don't know why people don't understand it. It plots time and idea. Was it the right idea or the wrong idea? Was it at the right time or the wrong time? Sean, I want you to go first. Which quadrant do you think Furby belongs in on this graph?
- [59:05]
B
Oh, boy. I'm gonna say that everything worked out perfectly for Furby and it should go in the upper right hand corner because it got to be this huge fad that we all remember and great legacy and may have inspired lots of other gadgets to also scare and annoy us all the time.
- [59:23]
A
Okay. So I will say this was also my instinct, too, was to put it up here in right idea, right time. But there's a version of this, I think about this more and more, where if you take the way that Dave Hampton in particular thought about this thing and this sort of philosophy that he brought to it and. But give him two decades more technology, could this thing be remarkably better or have what is what we've seen over two decades of better technology that actually the technology is not what makes it better? I'm so torn on this.
- [59:53]
C
I. In my personal opinion, I think it was the wrong idea at the right time for that. I think it hit at a time like where it was going to hit. That was the time for it to explode. It was the time of toys. It was the time of, like, Tickle Me Elmo. Furby. It was the right time for it. This is just the wrong idea forever. That's my take.
- [60:20]
A
Is that because something about it should have been better or just this thing never should have existed and is a blight on humanity?
- [60:27]
C
Correct.
- [60:29]
A
Okay, understood. I'm gonna go with Sean. That I think I am compelled by the idea that it was the right time. All right, question number two. Was this peak anything? I have. I have a few I'd like to offer you. Was this peak horrifying monster in your house? Yes.
- [60:51]
C
Peak creepy cute.
- [60:55]
A
Was peak creepy cute? I like. I will give you peak creepy cute for sure. Was this peak fake languages Dothraki is peak. Ooh.
- [61:04]
B
I'm afraid it's not peak anything because all of this is coming around again. It's all about to get so much more horrifying and so much cuter.
- [61:13]
A
Do you think there's a chance? I'm just gonna skip ahead to, you know, number four. Will the youth ever make it cool again? Is there a chance we're due for a honest to God, Furby or something like it renaissance here?
- [61:25]
C
I think something like it, yes. Furby. I don't know. Like, I was talking to Andrew before the show and they went to Toy Fair and they did see Furby's there. They saw a K Pop Hunter. Furby.
- [61:37]
A
Oh, wow, that's a. That's a 2025 Furby.
- [61:40]
C
Yeah, 26 Furby.
- [61:41]
A
Sean, what do you think? I mean, I'm. I'm genuinely curious. Your take on this. You. You reviewed the 2023 version of it, and I would say you were slightly alarmed by how into it your kid was. But do you think, I mean, again, we have this. We have Advanced the technology that would theoretically make this possible by orders of magnitude in the last 28 years. Are we due for a Furby renaissance?
- [62:04]
B
I think it would require toy companies to drastically change their economics somehow. Because today your Hasbro's, they are still trying to cheap out on every single motor, every single sensor. Their 2023 Furby, like it recognized five and exactly five voice commands, had a whole bunch of prerecorded lines. But there were no real smarts to it to speak of. I play with $1,400 Transformer robots, which do the thing I it as a kid where it's this car and it will actually transform all by itself into this whole transformer. But they don't have the motion sensors in there to let it actually take a step without any risk of falling over. Real robots have that. Toy robots don't. So if they can change the economics and actually put like genuinely good sensing and AI and things in there and sell it to you for $1,000, $2,000, great. But I don't think the appetite's there in the toy companies to make the $40, the $100 thing good.
- [63:08]
A
Yeah, I think that's probably right. I mean, and I was thinking too, about the increasing price of Lego. Like, the idea of doing something like this that feels compelling and novel and exciting and is $35 is very hard to imagine. Unfortunately, the only other one I had was this peak toy craze.
- [63:29]
C
Ooh, I don't know. Maybe it's because it was 30 years ago. Shudder. I felt like Tickle Me Elmo was more insane.
- [63:39]
A
That was what I was gonna say. I think when. When people think insane toys, I think people immediately go to Tickle Me Elmo, which is. Which is telling. Question number three. If you could time travel back and develop this yourself, knowing everything we know now, could you make Furby more successful? I'm going to posit the answer is actually no. I think this thing hit as big as it possibly could have. And I think anything we know now about, like, maybe we could have done some marketing that might have hit a little bit better. But in terms of actually making the product, I think they got it so precisely correct on that first go round that it is part of what worked. Like, I think if you did, if you made a thing that was less annoying, right. If you want something, this was my immediate reaction is, okay, figure out the thing that the 10% of people hated the most about it. Get rid of it, Problem solved. You've made it more lovable by everybody. I think that kills part of the
- [64:35]
C
appeal, I think my only question is, would the addition of an off button have made it better?
- [64:44]
A
I don't think so. I think if you're. If someone in your. If your parents are not annoyed by your Furby, you're not going to like your Furby as much.
- [64:51]
C
It's possible.
- [64:51]
A
If a CNN reporter is not trying to get it hit by a car on 8th Avenue, then you haven't built something with enough personality.
- [64:57]
C
It is true that not including the off button created all of these pop culture moments of famous people going, shut up to the Furby and that kind of adding to the charm for the adults.
- [65:09]
B
I guess.
- [65:09]
C
So, yeah, I would agree. No, I don't think. Given the constraints of the time. Yeah.
- [65:16]
A
Sean, what do you think? Anything.
- [65:17]
B
With the technology available then and the price point, I can't think of much. The one thing I would say is, wasn't it supposed to be able to learn English words? I don't think you could back then. If it's not recording and learning. But imagine, would this phrase have not fizzled out if it could actually work?
- [65:35]
A
Wait, this is a good one. Because one of the things, we talked about this earlier, Dave Hampton built the voice recognition system and didn't think anybody would want it and ditched it in the product. Maybe we go back and we tell Dave, no, put this in and actually let people teach this thing words. And maybe we're onto something like, what if Furby. Even simple things. What if Furby could learn your name? Maybe that becomes.
- [65:59]
C
Can you imagine how many marriages that would end because a voice recognition Furby would be like, angela, David slept with whatever. And just Furby destroys a marriage that
- [66:12]
A
she's like, who's Nancy? And you're like, furby, be cool. Who's Nancy? Ute la la itay.
- [66:18]
C
And then you basically, yes, yes, that's what you could. Because that would even just amp it up more. You'd have headlines, Furby ruins marriage. Like, that would be something.
- [66:30]
A
I think we could make Furby more controversial for sure. Question number five. What feature of this thing should every current version have? And Sean, I want you to answer this first. If you could just lift something out of Furby and put it into the rest of the toy industry or all of the other robots and things you see now, what would it be?
- [66:49]
B
Turn it upside down and make it plead for its life.
- [66:55]
A
I love that.
- [66:56]
C
Oh, that's so dis. Did it die? Oh, no.
- [67:10]
A
It does not like being turned upside down.
- [67:17]
B
Me scared.
- [67:18]
A
There it is.
- [67:19]
B
Me scared.
- [67:19]
A
I'M sorry. It's okay. It's okay. I love you. Yeah, Coco's cool.
- [67:24]
C
All right.
- [67:24]
A
That's a great answer. I love that. I think every robot should be able to feel existential fear because you do something. I think that's good. All right, three more questions. These are the Version History hall of Fame questions. Every product has to pass all three of these tests in order to make it into the Version History hall of Fame. Question number one. Did this product do something truly new?
- [67:46]
B
I'm going to say yes.
- [67:47]
A
Yeah.
- [67:48]
B
Yeah. At the time, the other voice toys, they didn't have that randomness that leads you to think it might be like a real voice creature like the Tamagotchi. Nah, it didn't feel like it's in the same ballpark at all. Tidy Ruxpin is just playing back a cassette tape. Tickle Me Elmo pre recorded sounds. This is a new level.
- [68:14]
A
Pete, what do you think?
- [68:15]
C
I guess that's a fair assessment because I was saying, I was thinking to myself that a lot of different aspects of Furby were things that we had seen before in all the toys that Sean just mentioned. But I think maybe synthesizing all of them together and just the surprising deepness of David's philosophy going into that, I think was pretty unique.
- [68:41]
A
I tend to agree. I think the way they went about making it work was new. Even sort of the whole is greater than the sum of its parts in a new way, which I think Furby deserves a lot of credit for. Question number two. I have a feeling we're all going to disagree and I'm right and it's fine. Was Furby either remarkably good or remarkably bad?
- [69:08]
C
It was remarkably. Furby. I don't think it was remarkably good. I think it was remarkably clever. Clever and good, I don't think necessarily are synonymous. I also don't think it was remarkably bad just because it. I don't know.
- [69:27]
A
Okay. We actually agree, as it turns out, I feel very strongly that it is neither of these things. And I think this is actually the reason it doesn't get into the hall of Fame. I think its story, its sort of growth trajectory and the way that it came out and the way that it captured the public imagination, that's all really fascinating, but it's totally divorced from the actual quality of the product. And kind of what we see is that the actual quality of the product burns super hot and then burns out.
- [69:51]
C
Yeah.
- [69:52]
A
And so I think in reality this thing is a fascinating, thrilling kind of mediocre product.
- [70:00]
C
I think the idea of Furby is the most powerful thing about it. It taps into a lot of things that humans want. Connection, interaction, emotion. So like that part of it, like honestly, the personality and the concept of it is very strong, but the execution is very that.
- [70:19]
A
Sean, what do you think?
- [70:20]
B
Back then we would have, I think Dave and Caleb made an amazing canvas for everybody to map their own love, hate and fear of toys that seem to interact. You know, robots, you can look at this thing and you can, you have an opinion on it. You have a very strong opinion on it. And because everybody can have an opinion on it and because opinions spread slowly so quickly in the media landscape, they spread so quickly from person to person, it could achieve that level of fame and recognition that we're still talking about today. But as a product, even the 2023 version, which is probably a much better product, this was a fun one off review for me and my kids to see whether it could achieve that level of being talked about and being interested. Again, not. This is something you need to go out and buy for anybody.
- [71:16]
A
That's a really good distinction. I agree. I like that. All right, so hall of Fame question number three and our last one, did it have a lasting impact? Like, did it, did it Capital M matter? And I think, Sean, I want you to answer this question from the toy perspective first. I think I don't have a great sense of what Furby did to the toy industry, but it does seem like if it's going to make a case for being meaningfully, culturally, economically impactful in that sense, it would be in toys. Was it.
- [71:44]
B
This may be a bit of a cop out, but I wonder if we're not going to truly know if Furby Capital M matters until we see the designer of the next big AI toy say, yes, Furby is the reason I did this. I had a Furby growing up and that's why I made this.
- [72:02]
A
That's a good theory. I would like to see that thing. I think part of me feels like the reason I don't want to give this one to Furby is I don't feel like there has been a ton of momentum, trajectory from that stuff. Like, I did all this research on Dave Hampton and the stuff he was thinking about and the way that he approached this and the way he thought about personality and human interaction and it's like, boy, I wish more people thought like this now. It's like I wish he had started more of a revolution than I think he actually.
- [72:31]
C
I honestly think that I don't think that revolution is going to come from the consumer space. I think it's going to come in the medical space. I think you are going to find it with dementia patients, elderly patients, because they've already done some clinical studies where they talk to caregivers and doctors. I was doing a lot of research about this recently, where they find that it actually does improve the health of elderly people with dementia and that this level of interaction is enough in those cases and spaces. So I think we'll see this really take off in that space. But if you are a sound mind and body, reasonably, if you can find, I don't know, an AI and chatbot to talk to, or at least I hope you touch grass and talk to your fellow humans, you don't really need a social robot in that respect. I think it's one of those cases where sci fi informs some tech companies into thinking that's the future we want. And maybe there is dubious media literacy as to the future they're warning us away from. But anytime I've tested one of these things, the novelty is there for a little bit. And then I'm just like, okay, you're annoying. Like, go away. I'm gonna go play with my cat. Because my cat, not to be a crazy cat lady, it's truly spontaneous. It's truly inconvenient at times to have it, but there is like a real sense of give and take and love. And these robots are programmed and it's very hard for them to spontaneously generate love and connection in a way that feels organic, because at some point, you know, you can just turn this thing off or like, turn it upside down and maybe you feel empathy because you're like, oh, Coco's scared. I'm sorry. But at the same time, as our dear reader once did, you could also just throw it down the stairs multiple times until it dies. So there's no consequences to that.
- [74:25]
A
One big upside of this particular foreign factor is it is very easy to throw out of a window. We need more technology that is easy to throw out of a window.
- [74:33]
C
It is distinctly like football shaped if you really think about it. You could do a spiral.
- [74:38]
A
Coco's batteries appear to have died again, which means it's time for us to get out of here. Coco's having a tough day. Sean, V, thank you both so much for doing this with me. This was tremendously fun. Thank you as always for watching and listening. And as a reminder, the best thing you can do to support all of this is send us new AA batteries so that we can make Coco work again. And also subscribe to the Verge theverge.com subscribe that is what enables all of this to happen and it means you get ad free podcasts. This one, the Vergecast decoder, all of it theverge.com subscribe thank you as always. See you next time. Version History is a production of the Verge and the Vox Media Podcast Network. It's produced by Victoria Barrios, River Branson, Eric Gomez, Owen Grove, Brandon Keefer, Travis Larchuk, Andrew Marino and Alex Parkin. Our Editorial director is Kevin McShane. Studio support from Matthew Heffrin and Joe Nes. Our theme music is composed by Brandon McFarland. You can follow the dedicated Version History podcast feed for all of our episodes as soon as they arrive and you can watch full episodes on our new YouTube channel version history Podcast and to support support everything we do and get access to this and all of our other podcasts ad free. Become a paid subscriber to the Verge. Thanks. My dad taught me a lot, including how easy it is to forget to cancel things. So I downloaded Experian, my bff. Big Financial Friend Experian could help me cancel my unused subscriptions and lower my bills, saving me hundreds a year. Get started with the Experian app today. Your big financial friends here to help you save smarter. Results will vary. Not all bills or subscriptions eligible Savings not guaranteed $631 a year average savings with one plus negotiations and OnePlus cancellations paid membership with connected payment account required. See experian.com for details. Experian.