Walter Isaacson set out to write about a world-changing genius in Elon Musk and found a man addicted to chaos and conspiracy.

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The book launched a thousand hot takes, so I sat down with Isaacson to try to get past the noise.

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Join me, Evan Ratliff, for On Musk with Walter Isaacson. Listen on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Tune in to the new podcast, Stories from the Village of Nothing Much, like easy listening but for fiction. If you've overdosed on bad news, we invite you into a world where the glimmers of goodness in everyday life are all around you. I'm Katherine Nicolai, and I'm an architect of COSE. Come spend some time where everyone is welcome and the default is kindness. Listen, relax, enjoy. Listen to stories from The Village of Nothing Much on the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Hello, people. If you want to come see us live next year, your very first chance to do it is going to be Seattle, Washington on January 24th at the Paramount Theater, isn't that right?

Yeah. Then the following day, the very next day, we're going all the way down to Portland, Oregon for another show on the 25th at Revolution Hall. Then after that, the very next day, we're doing another show, Chuck.

That's right. Our annual trip to SF Sketchfest on January 26th. You can get tickets now. Just go to stuffyoushouldknow. Com, click on the tour link, and please, buy from official sellers from the venues. Do not buy scalp tickets.

All right, and everybody, we will see you in January with bells on. Jingo Bells.

Welcome to Stuff You Should.

Know, a.

Production of iHeart Radio.

Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh, and there's Chuck and Jerry's here too, and we're feeling fairly festive. This is stuff you should know.

That's.

Right. The episode before the Christmas episode.

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

I'd say more custom than tradition.

All.

Right. I'm sorry. Christmas custom. I'm feeling contrary. It is definitely a tradition.

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

Exactly. I won't see you until 2024.

Chuck will forget anything that happens today by then.

I'm trying to think of what our first toy one was. It was a handful of years ago, I don't remember, but it was- Slinky, maybe? No, I mean, we've done toy ones just not around Christmas. I'm trying to think of the first toy Christmasy one. I can't. I'm drawing a blank right now. This is high-quality podcasting we're doing right now. Yeah.

Well, good pick this year.

Yeah, thanks. I don't know what made me think of beanie babies, but I did. I think it turned out to be a good one too, because it had nothing to do with Christmas, really. 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 really saying something because there's been some market bubbles, but the Beanie Baby craze of the mid to late '90s probably topped them all. It was just that crazy. I mean, we've talked about some crazy stuff that people have done for toys before, people elbowing one another for a Cabbage Patch Kid. That's peanuts compared to what people did for Beanie Babies.

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

You didn't own a single one?

No.

Of course not. I didn't either. No, I totally didn't. But the thing is we were in the minority. In America, something like 62 or 63% owned at least one beanie baby at the height of this bubble.

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

Yeah, that's like 6.3 people out of every 10 people.

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

Yeah, well, that was the thing. It wasn't kids that fueled this craze, it was almost exclusively adults. Because the reason the market bubble grew is because there became this idea that beanie babies were valuable, that they had an inherent value greater than the face value that you would pay for them at the retail store.

Yeah, which was true for a while.

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

All right. Well, you can't talk beanie babies without talking about the gentleman who started it all. I do remember seeing the letters T-Y on Beanie Baby packaging. So I wasn't completely head in the sand. But I did not know that T-Y was the guy's name. It was Ty Warner who was born in the mid-1940s in the Chicago suburb, La Grange, Illinois. He had a pretty not great childhood, it seems like. Is that fair to say?

Yeah, from everything I've heard.

Yeah. He 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.

Yeah, Kalamazoo- That means theater. Right, exactly. But he did. He got into acting. Either he was already a theater kid at 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.

Yeah, he seemed fairly flamboyant.

He was flamboyant. There's a really off-sighted story about him showing up when he became a salesman for the toy company that his father worked for. He would show up to these sales calls in a Rolls-Royce wearing a floor-length fur coat and a cane and a hat. Amazing. Essentially like Kramer, when he accidentally is wearing the Technicolor Dream coat and ends up with that big Jameerahquai hat and a cane.

Yeah.

That's essentially what Ty Warner showed up to these sales meetings looking like in the early '60s. And apparently it worked because he said that his premise was, if he showed up to a sales meeting looking like that, people would say, I want to see what's that guy's briefcase.

Yeah, or do you?

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

Yeah, he was a really good salesperson, apparently. He thought a lot of himself, though. In 1980, he worked for this company, I guess, for 18 years because he got the job in 1962. That's a nice long run, but at least the way his former boss told it, a guy named Harold Nazamian, who was the CEO basically accused him of moonlighting on the company and using their sales list and his personal relationships with people as a salesperson to sell his own stuff while he was working as a sales manager for this company, and so he got fired.

Yeah, on those sales calls, he would be like, Yeah, I've got these great Dacun products, but also I want to show you these, too. So he was not only using company contacts, he was using company time, too. It's about as bad a thing you can do as a salesman, essentially. Yeah.

It wasn't long after that that the beanie baby came along.

No. 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. When he came back, he was inspired to keep going in the toy industry. I guess it got under his skin. He'd seen some toy cats there in Rome, he said. And he was inspired to create not Beanie Babies at first, but his first plush toys, which was a line of cats laying down pretty fluffy. They were fully stuffed, which is a big difference between them and Beanie Babies. And then for every cat, there was a Himalayan version of it. And they were pretty cute little cats. But the thing that he did that I think really helped sell these things because they were a modest success I've seen it described as, he gave them names. They weren't just some stuffed cat. This was smokey. This was peaches. These cats were individuals. They had an identity, and that made them that much more lovable.

Yeah, and they were larger. They were about 17 inches. They're 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 genius of the... I don't know about genius. That's probably stretching that word.

It's true.

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

-a PPC pellets.

Like a bean bag chair.

Yeah, pretty much.

And didn't overstuff it, so you could move them around and pose them, and they could droop over your shoulder and stuff like that. Not like a regular fully stuffed whatever they stuffed those things with, whatever weird chemical stuffed.

Oh, like the little styrofoam pellets or the-.

I don't know.

What's in those things. The styrofoam fiber. It's like fibers.

Yeah, those are the cheapest ones that you would get as a prize at an amusement park. Yes. They had literal styrofoam balls.

Right. 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. 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 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. That was a really big deal because he came out, he was one of the first people to come out with a high-quality toy at a price point of something you would get at the county fair or something as a prize. But instead, it was a good quality plush toy.

Yeah, exactly. This was 1993 for the actual launch of The Beanie Baby, which launched with Brownie the Bear and Pinschers the Lobster. Like a Cabbage Patch Kid, it came with a date of birth. He uses the name like he originally did with those fully stuffed cats or kitties, I guess fully stuffed cats sounds gross.

It's like a traduccan.

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 even if it ended up being a thing that adults tried to collect because they thought it was valuable, it never would have gotten there if he hadn't have made a toy that kids really love to begin with.

Right. Also, I mean, he wasn't the first to do that. This was a good 10 years after the Cabbage Patch Kids and their adoption papers and all that stuff. But still, it is a good marketing technique for sure, and it did work. But the thing that made Beanie Babies really 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. You actually had to be a licensed beanie baby retailer to sell beanie babies legally or legitimately. Those stores were like Hallmark stores, locally-owned gift stores, hospital gift shops, small stores. That right off the bat, canceled any chance of anyone I saw it described it, going into a big box store, like a Walmart or something, and seeing a bargain bin of beanie babies just lumped together for 50 % off. No way. The fact that that possibility didn't exist, someone couldn't see that, automatically made it. They were just higher status than they otherwise would have been. Because he made enough to sell to huge retailers like that. He decided deliberately not to do that for that reason.

Yeah, super smart. I mean, if you can create a scarcity and the illusion that what you're pedaling is like limited and collectible, then you're going to do pretty well. And that's what he did. But not only by limiting the amount of stores that could be sold in, but he also limited the number of toys that these stores could even buy. Like that Hallmark store, once they really took off, couldn't be like, Hey, we're going to dedicate half our store to these things now because they're selling hot cakes. So he would dole them out in limited numbers to the stores. And each of those stores only had certain products like you might have spot the dog and squealer the pig at one store or chocolate the moose and flash the dolphin at another. And that creates a situation then where kids are like, Oh, I got to... Completing the collection is a classic kids' toy scam.

For sure.

Yeah, collect all the- To get kids to buy all the things. -to get.

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

Yeah, the other big thing is that this coincided with the rise of the Internet. There's a great scene in the movie. There's a movie that's out now, I think an Apple original called The Beanie bubble.

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

No, the reviews aren't kind. I may watch it because I love Zach Galifinakis, who plays Ty Warner and Elizabeth Banks is in the movie, is a thinly veiled version of his former business partner and romantic partner, I think, Patricia Roach. But in the trailer I saw today, Zach because they started a website and they were an early website in those years, Zach Gallifin, 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. I'm just like, I guess this is a thing.

Yeah, apparently. He had an employee named Lena Trivetti, and she was a coder. This is 1993, '94. She convinced Ty Warner to create a Beanie Babies website because they were getting calls and letters and stuff like that from people saying, This is my checklist. Is this accurate? Am I missing any? They thought, Well, let's just put a central place where all of the Beanie Babies can be listed. It can be a place where everybody who likes beanie babies can come and learn and get excited about beanie babies and buy beanie babies. Because starting in 1995, they started selling Beanie Babies on this website. That was the same year that Amazon and eBay launched. They were one of the first e-commerce sites on the internet, too.

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

They touted this as loosely based on Zach Bissinette's book, and that some of it was fictitious, I think, to keep from getting sued. I get the impression that Kai Warnerner is not shy about suing people.

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

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

Well, judging from the trailer, it seems that both the Banks character and the Maya character are 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. The story is that he never gave them enough credit, and that seems to play out in the movie.

Oh, yeah. If you read any corporate writeups, press releases, or the very rare interviews he's given, it sounds like the whole thing was just him. Just him. Yeah. In part, it was largely him because he owned the company from the outset. Always has. He's never sold one share. He didn't take it public. It's been a privately owned company by him, 100 % as far as I know, from the outset. So he definitely really was the driving force in this. But he had help that is largely unacknowledged publicly that it's a good thing that Zach Bissinette came along and also the people who made that movie based on Zach Bissinette's book to shine a spotlight on the other people, particularly women who helped him.

Yeah, Zach and Zach.

That's right. The two Zaks on the Zach attack against Ty Warren. That's right.

The other thing that he did to drive this, 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 when they were going to launch a new toy, how many they were making. In 1995, he started retiring models. That was huge. And then adding other ones. And he would just all of a sudden drop this, Marty Moose, what did I call him?

Something the Moose. Chocolate Moose.

Chocolate Moose is gone, let's say. If there are being baby people out there, they're like, No, Chocolate Moose never left. I'm just using that as an example.

That's a good idea. But they would just announce that on the website, and all of a sudden, people are like, Oh, my God, they've retired the Moose. People are driving around and trying to find them in those stores before they're all gone.

Yeah, that was a deliberate thing to do as well to create the further scarcity, 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 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 orangeish-red one, and the Beanie Baby collectors would go bonkers trying to find the other one. He started to notice that. He created real scarcity by deliberately retiring some just out of the blue. People would go scramble to find them. Then retailers, most importantly, would start stockpiling everything that he had that they could sell, say, the Orange pinchy.

Yeah, he was also smart enough to realize that the Cabbage Patch Kids, when that bubble burst, it just all went away. He would do things like, Hey, Hallmark, if you want to order these beanie babies, you got to also order some of this other stuff that I'm selling. It's not nearly as popular. But he tried to increase revenue across the company, so he wasn't all in on the beanie baby. Right.

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

Mcwhat?

Yeah.

Lately, I've been learning some stuff about insomnia or allumia. How about the one on borderline disorder? Better yet, birth order. Heard that one before, but it was so nice. I learned it twice. Everybody listen up. Oh, it's Charles and Joshua. It's tough. It's tough. It's tough. It's tough. It's tough. It's tough. When Walter Isaacson set out to write his biography of Elon Musk, he believed he was taking on a world-changing figure.

That night, he was deciding whether or not to allow Starlink to be enabled to allow a sneak attack on Crimea.

What he got was a subject who also sowed chaos and conspiracy.

I'm thinking it's idiotic to buy Twitter because he doesn't have a fingertips feel for social, emotional networks.

And when I sat down with Isaacson five weeks ago, he told me how he captured it all.

They have cans of spray paint, and they're just putting big X's on machines. And it's almost like kids playing on the playground. Just chews them up left, right and center. And then like, Dr. Jekyl and Mr. Hyde, he doesn't even remember it. Getting the bars doesn't excuse being a total. But I want the reader to see it in action.

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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 out there on the margins and don't really know what's going on in this Beanie Baby collector world growing under your very nose, this McDonald's Happy Meal promotion is going to just blow the doors off of any illusions that Beanie Babies are not a cultural force to be reckoned with.

Yeah, over a couple of years, I think they had two versions in '97 and '98, where there were hundreds of millions of teeny babies. These were even smaller, obviously, because it was to fit into a happy meal. Yeah, teeny beanies. Yeah. What did I say?

Teany babies? It works, too.

I like.

Teeny babies. I like teeny babies, too.

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

Yeah, the 1998 one, the second one that they did where you could get teany beans 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, but 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. People would just go from McDonald's to McDonald's and then just go on a circuit to get as many of the beanie babies as they possibly could. People were tackling 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.

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

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

Talk about false scarcity.

Yeah, same thing, for sure.

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

Totally, for sure. You know that the fat cats at McDonald's Corporate are eating Mcribs every day of the year. Yeah.

The employee lounge is just stuck with them. Right.

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

Yeah, this was by that, like you said, the Cabbage Patch Kids had already come and gone. Everyone has already known at this point about the Star Wars collectibles and baseball cards and trading cards. So the idea, I think there are certain people out there after all those things happen that are always looking for that next thing as an alternative investment. If I can buy 50 beanie babies and put them in a box and just sit on them, then that'll put my kids through college one day. A lot of people did stuff like that. I think you mentioned eBay had launched very soon afterward. They launched in 1995. In 1997, this is the other most staggering stat of the show to me, 6 % of all of eBay was beanie baby sales.

Yeah, isn't that nuts? So the secondary market really did grow up, and there really was a huge market for Beanie Babies that say have been retired, and one that you had bought for five dollars and kept in the package, you could sell for hundreds of dollars on eBay legitimately in the mid to late '90s.

Yeah.

This really was happening. 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. People who weren't sucked into it were like, This is the dumbest thing I've ever seen. If there's ever been an economic bubble, this is it. Yet people were buying these things for 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.

Yeah, for sure. It also created 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 Sobelowski, she was an IBM systems engineer, and she just made the go-to list, like the Bible, basically, of Beanie Baby pricing and made a lot of money off that and also started putting out a magazine. Was it a monthly?

Yes, it was based around the price list. Did you ever collect or read Beckets monthly for baseball cards? It's just a big.

Price list. No, but I knew about it.

Okay, it was basically that. But for Beanie Babies, it was called Mary Beth's Beanbag World. They sold 650,000 copies a month at its peak for six bucks a pop. So it's almost three million dollars a run per issue. Yeah, that's amazing. For Beanie Baby's Price Guides. But she really went to town with it. It wasn't just based on nothing. She and her assistants called dealers, Beanie Baby dealers, to find out what their prices were, what was selling really fast. What you got? Right. They were following eBay prices. It was a legitimate... Olivia put it as the gold standard price list for a reason. Yeah. Mary Beth Sobelowski is another woman who is often overlooked for the contribution she made to the Beanie Baby Mania. Because in addition to creating the gold standard price list, she was one of the original self-described Chicago suburban soccer moms who started trading Beanie Babies in the first place. Apparently, their fervor in trading beanie babies in suburban Chicago actually kicked off the national trend of collecting and trading beanie babies. They essentially created the secondary market. There's an HBO documentary a couple of years ago, I think, called Beating Mania that really does a good job of shining a light on them and their role and contribution to the whole thing, too.

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

Yes. Broadway? Broadway is next. And then James Mission is coming back to life to write an epic novel about it.

That'd be pretty amazing. Speaking of amazing, there are also some amazing stories about just how crazy things got in many different ways. One of which is a 1999 divorce case in Las Vegas, where this couple was divorcing, and they had a lot of combined assets in the form of beanie babies that they thought were worth a lot and they may have been worth a lot of money, their collection. There's a very great picture. If you look it up on the internet, just type in Vegas, beanie baby, divorced couple. 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 going to keep for yourself. It's just a very.

Funny-looking photo. It is. Until you read some of the quotes from the woman involved in the divorce case, the wife, who was like, it was really 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. Really? Yeah, she was. She was not happy about it at all. The whole thing was worth five grand, I think they said, but that was five grand at the time. People were speculating on Beanie Baby. I think it 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 guess everyone's entitled to their own opinion. It's her life, but degrading.

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

I would have felt more silly unless he tied them both up and made them do it with their mouth or something.

That's degrading. 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. Then they had to hand it back all without using their hands.

Right, or that what was the thing you would do where you would pass something with your neck?

That's what I'm talking about.

Oh, okay.

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

Okay. What did.

People use to pass, though? What was that? Like an Orange, I think.

Is what it was. Oh, yeah, that's right. I can't remember what movie. But when you're a kid, I think the whole point of that game was like, Oh, look how close we are.

Exactly.

Right.

It was like, Spin the bottle, but with an Orange and Next and Chance.

No.

Bottle.

There was a guy in California named Chris Robinson senior. I don't think any relation to the other Chris Robinson. 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, I guess, how dumb he thought his dad was for spending that much money, like emptying their bank account because he thought it was a good investment.

Yeah, it's a very short documentary. It's like 8-12 minutes. I can't remember which one. It's just him interviewing his family members about this period in their family's history.

Is that dumb? Yeah.

The dad is definitely like, It was not a good idea, but he's still holding out hope that at some point, sometime down the road, oh, yeah, they still have him. They're the background in all of the shots, the interviews. It's cute. It's not like condemnation or anything like that, but it's worth the 8-12 minutes that you'll spend watching it, I think.

All right, I have to go.

Check that out. The dad's like, This documentary is very degrading. Right. I'm paraphrasing-I'm not phasing.

There were a lot of cases. There were people indicted in court for counterfeiting these things. Pos that were never delivered and distributors kept them 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 Thai-incorporated private eye, in fact. They found him moving stuff out of a storage locker, moving these toys in and out. I'm not sure. He said that they weren't stolen yet he gave them up and donated them to a charity. That seems very fishing to me.

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

So he didn't get in trouble.

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

Something out of it. He's 77. He's like, I'm going out.

In style. Exactly. There was another one. A murder is frequently linked to Beanie Babies, even though that's 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, there was over a dispute over who owned some beanie babies. Although really what happened was Harry Simmons and Jeffrey White used to work together, and I think Jeffrey White was stealing or loafing or something like that, and Harry Simmons got him fired. Jeffrey White, who had borrowed beanie babies from him and hadn't given them back, killed Harry Simmons.

We understand you've been loafing.

Exactly. Is that true?

Yeah, is that a crime?

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

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

Yeah, sure.

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

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All.

Right. We call this a bubble like any collectible or real estate bubble or financial bubble, because they eventually burst. And the Beanie Baby really followed the, I was about to say, rise and fall of the internet. The internet clearly never fell. It survived. But the big dot com boom was what helped the Beanie Baby along and also helped kill it a little bit. Although, beanie babies were bound to... I think they were bound to go away one way or another anytime at something like this. August 1999, the website said, 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, we know that Thai guy by now. This is just a stunt to get people to buy more of his stuff. But it 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.

Right. I didn't read the book, Zach Bissinette'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 juice the beanie baby market again. And it did work, but in the short term. And he basically says, Ty Warner killed his creation by carrying out this stunt. Because on Christmas Eve, here's where Christmas pops up, as we said at the beginning, Christmas Eve 1999, right before the turn of the millennium. 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. In his credit, you had to pay 50 cents to vote, but each 50 cent vote went to the Elizabeth Glasgow-Glaser Pediatric AIDS Foundation. That was something. But 91% of people said, Yes, we want to keep beanie babies going.

Of course, he did.

Yeah. The company said, Oh, well, that's great. We just so happen to have a whole new line of them ready to go. So here you go, everybody. Beanie Babies for All. And it was met with some craziness, but nothing like it used to be. And very shortly after that, the whole thing started to fizzle out rather quickly.

Yeah, it seemed like the last hurrah. I don't know if Ty Warner saw the writing on the wall and wanted one more 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 flash in the pan, but they were around.

For a while. Yeah, I saw that they were still going until about 2002. 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, Wait a minute, everybody has these things. This clubby bear that I had to pay for the privilege of buying to be part of the club, everybody has that. Or everyone has the Princess Die, Beanie Baby Bear, the special limited edition, Beanie Baby they released in honor of Princess Die after she died. They made it sound like this was the scarcest beanie baby yet. There's like 100 million of them out there. People started to realize these things aren't scarce at all. There's a glut of them. These thousands and thousands of dollars worth of Beanie Babies that I have set aside are worthless. 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. They were out a bunch of money and time and wasted years, but they were free finally when the market finally crashed.

Yeah, it's like Bitcoin.

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

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

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 crazy articles about it, buy it and then sell it during that. Don't hang on to it long term. Same thing with Bitcoin. A lot of people made a lot of money by buying Bitcoin cheap and then selling it at its peak. It's people who hung on to it as a long-term investment that are now like, I lost my shirt. Yeah, totally. It's the same thing with Beanie Bay. 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.

Well, who certainly wasn't a chump was Tai because he, and I feel like I can just call him Thai because that was so his brand, the T-Y. Yeah, for sure. No one knows exactly what dough he made on these because, like you said earlier, 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, beanie babies. Did they really sell as much? Was it the top toy seller in the world? And he himself took out a full page Wall Street Journal ad saying that he made $700 million in profits in 1997 alone, which is, I don't know if that number is true, but if it's $700 million just in profits in one year, then that's remarkable.

That would have made Thai Inc more profitable than Hasbro and Mattel together that year. This is.

Just from the.

For everything they sold. Exactly. It's just in profits, right? That's what taking out the ad in Wall Street Journal is what you call today a flex. Flex.

Yeah, but I mean, he is still a legit billionaire. It's 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 he still has that company. But he also diversified, he got into real estate, notably as a hotelier, and he owns the, I think, still closed, Four Seasons Hotel, New York.

Still closed? What's it closed for?

It depends on who you ask. I think he claimed it was renovations, but other people said it was a dispute with the Four Seasons brand. But I think it's supposed to reopen sometime next year.

Yeah, I saw he had a dispute with the Four Seasons brand over upkeep fees, what he basically needed to spend to keep the thing up to Four Seasons standards. I also saw that was the first hotel to open to first responders and doctors and nurses who were working on the front lines of the COVID pandemic so that they had a place to stay. They wouldn't have to go home and infect their families, which I thought was pretty cool.

Yeah, I guess we can talk about that a little bit in a broader sense because Warner is someone who has been notably charitable as far as front-facing, putting stuff out there stuff, like the Elizabeth Glaser Pediatric AIDS Foundation, when he donated the 50 cents for those votes and stuff like that, because he got in trouble at one point for tax, well, not tax fraud, but what he called tax evasion. And as part of his sentence, one of which was a couple of 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, as far as this defense goes, this guy is really charitable. He's donated millions of dollars to the Children's hunger Fund and the Andre Agassie Foundation. Like I said, a lot of really public-facing, large donations, but prosecutors are like, That's a pittance of what this guy is worth. Right. And just because he gives a little bit of money and makes a big deal about it doesn't mean he didn't break the law.

Yeah, the judge in the case, though, was like, Yeah, he did. But again, I'm pretty impressed with his charitable work, so he got off easy. He could have gone to prison for four years. Instead, he got off with a $100,000 fine, 500 hours of community service, and two years probation. It was for just the dumbest thing. He had a Swiss bank account that no one knew about but him that had like $100 million in it. This guy was a billionaire three times over at his poorest point. There's just no reason to have done that. He did, and he got caught doing it. He called it the greatest mistake of his life.

Besides?

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

They kept making stuff, stuff-easy-to-face, in fact. As a company, in 2004, they started licensing deals or getting involved with licensing other people's stuff like Garfield and some Disney stuff. There was something called Beanie Booze that came out in 2009. Those were big. 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 old is he now? Seventy-what?

Three, I think.

Seventy-nine.

Years old. Seventy-nine. That was pretty close. Give or take six years.

But he's still trying to market himself and his toy company. I think it was a little dismissive of the movie. Everybody who's ever had a movie made about themselves, they always say, Yeah, 10% of that thing is true. But I think they also secretly liked that they've made a movie about them, that thing.

Right, for sure. There's also that secondary market, Chuck, is still around and people are trading on that myth that some people still have that beanie babies are really valuable. If you go on to eBay and start searching beanie babies, you'll find some for a dollar, some, I think, for less than a dollar. Then you can turn around and find the exact same ones for sale for $25,000 or $60,000 or something like that. I was reading, I think, tiecollector. Com article where they were basically saying, We're pretty sure this is either money laundering that's going on or it's some scam where these people are trying to beef up the market value of these things or the secondary market artificially, or it's just a straight-up scam where you pay them or they buy from you and say, Oh, I overpaid. Pay me back in a gift card, which is another thing. In addition to selling at the height of a bubble, never do business with somebody who demands to be paid in gift cards. Something fishy is going on right there. That's my other word of advice around this Christmas time.

Yeah, this is not like a babysitter or something.

Even still, I'd be like, What's your angle, babysitter?

The one thing that cracked me up, though, was that when the movie came out, which was just recently, I think this summer or last summer or whatever, he said, I would have preferred somebody like Warren Baydy or Daniel Day Lewis to have played me? Yeah. I'm like, When this was going on, he was in his 40s. Warren Badey is 89 years old.

Yeah, he's.

Aged- Daniel Day Lewis is 66. They're not even close in age. He's 23 years younger than Warren Badey. This guy is all over the place.

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

Oh, boy.

You got anything else?

I got.

Nothing else. Have you forgotten all the mean things I've said to you this episode?

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

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

We're going to forego Listener Mail this week. It's late in the year, and we would just like to remind everybody. We're going to say our official Christmas greetings on our Christmas episode, but we've got some great live shows coming up. Next year, we're doing our Pacific Northwest swing. As we do every year, almost every year in Seattle, Portland, and San Francisco at Sketchfest. We went to some bigger theaters this time in Seattle, especially. We would love to see everybody and for you to fill those places up. Start 2024 off right. Just go to our website, stuffyshino. Com, and click on the tour page and buy tickets from legitimate sources. Please do not go to scalper sites. You might think it's the real site, but if the tickets are more than like 40 bucks or something, then it's not a real site.

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

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

It's late January. For sure. Absolutely. In the meantime, everybody, if you want to get in touch with us, you can send us an email. Send it off to stuffpodcast@iheartradio.

Com.

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Walter Isaacson set out to write about a world-changing genius in Elon Musk and found a man addicted to chaos and conspiracy.

I'm thinking it's idiotic to buy Twitter because he doesn't have a fingertips feel for social, emotional networks.

The book launched a thousand hot takes, so I sat down with Isaacson to try to get past the noise.

I like the fact that people who say, I'm not as tough on Musk as I should be, are always using anecdotes from my book to show why we should be tough on Musk.

Join me, Evan Ratliff, for On Musk with Walter Isaacson. Listen on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Tune in to the new podcast, Stories from the Village of Nothing Much, like easy listening, but for fiction. If you've overdosed on bad news, we invite you into a world where the glimmers of goodness in everyday life are all around you. I'm Katherine Nicolai, and I'm an architect of cozy. Come spend some time where everyone is welcome and the default is kindness. Listen, relax, enjoy. Listen to stories from the Village of Nothing Much on the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Join us for the Can't Miss live music event of the holiday season. Our iHeart Radio Dingle Ball special coming to ABC, December 21st. Starring, Cher, Olivia Rodrigo, Cisa, Niall Horan, Sabrina Carpenter, One Republic, Jellieroll, Big Time Rush, and more. Tune in to the iHeart Radio Dingle Ball special on Thursday, December 21st at 087 Centralon ABC and stream next day on Hulu.