You're Wrong About - Beanie Babies with Jamie Loftus

Episode Date: December 12, 2022

They’re winsome and soft and so fun to cuddle/ With one of Ty’s Beanie Babies, you could never go wrong/ But they were all born from a toxic puddle/ It really was capitalism all along.This week, Jamie Loftus tells us the story of the greatest toy fad of the 90s, and liberates us from our tiny plastic boxes. Here's where to find Jamie:Jamie's WebsiteSupport us:Bonus Episodes on PatreonDonate on PaypalBuy cute merchWhere else to find us:Sarah's other show, You Are Good [YWA co-founder] Mike's other show, Maintenance PhaseLinks:http://www.jamieloftus.xyz/http://patreon.com/yourewrongabouthttps://www.teepublic.com/stores/youre-wrong-abouthttps://www.paypal.com/paypalme/yourewrongaboutpodhttps://www.podpage.com/you-are-goodhttp://maintenancephase.comSupport the showSupport the show

And he's like, I got this far by not listening to anyone and by believing that all the good ideas I stole from people were actually mine. So don't worry about it. Welcome to You're Wrong About, I'm Sarah Marshall, as always, yesterday, today and tomorrow. This week, I am so happy to tell you that we are learning about beanie babies with Jamie Loftus, two of my favorite entities on this planet. We are getting into the holiday season, actually, we're right in the thick of it, I would say. And I really wanted to get into the sort of child's play, corporate possession, sinister,

fad toy angle of it all, and talk about beanie babies, because I have skin in this game. I was the kind of child whose innocence was corrupted by collectors' guidebooks that told me to save my princess Diana beanie bear in a clear acrylic box, and it haunts me to this day. I am so excited to have Jamie back on the show. I love anything that she does in podcasts. She makes me excited for what's happening in our medium because of her and excited to get to work with her whenever I can.

She was here a lot about this time last year talking with me about the Amityville horror and the Warrens, the inspiration for the hit haunted house horror movie series, The Conjuring. She has a recent podcast series called Ghost Church. She's done a lot of short series that are all amazing, and she is the co-host of Bechdel Cast. If you want to support us and get bonus episodes, we have one out just recently about Fleetwood Mack and the recording of Rumors, and you can do that on Apple Plus subscriptions or Patreon or spend that money on a nice fad toy from your childhood that probably is very

cheap on eBay right now. Let's get into the episode. Don't buy any possessed toys. Don't become possessed by the spirit of capitalism. Happy holidays. Welcome to Your Wrong About, the podcast where we tell you why your beanie elephant didn't appreciate the way you thought it would. And with me is Jamie Loftus.

Hi, Sarah. Hi. How are you? I'm good. I'm very excited to talk about one of one of life's great passions, beanie babies. I want to share with you before I get started the cursed beverage that I will be drinking through this episode that I found at Safeway last night. I don't know if you can read this.

Oh, I haven't seen this one. Mountain Dew Fruit Quake. They did it again. It's a fruit cake flavored Mountain Dew. Oh my God. Have you cracked it yet? No. I have been waiting for this moment.

I think that Fruit Quake flavored Mountain Dew embodies this show in a sense because these are two of the most maligned flavors in America, so let's crack her open. All right. Let's see what she's got. It's good. It's not taste like fruit cake. It tastes like a maraschino cherry. It's got like Shirley Temple energy about it.

Yes. Okay. And so Jamie. Yes. Who are you? What do you do? You can talk about your work and also just about completely random stuff. All of it will be great.

Okay. So I'm a comedian and a podcaster and I've written on TV, but that's not relevant to the discussion. So I've made a bunch of podcasts. I do the Bechtelcast with my friend, Caitlin Durante, which you've been a guest on. It's a feminist movie podcast and I do a bunch of investigative stuff. So I made a show called My Year in Mensa, which is about what it sounds like. I infiltrated Mensa for a year and it went terribly.

And get produced at Amazing Podcast. It's like the Fitzcarraldo of podcasts, like horrible, horrible time, great podcast. You know, the cost versus benefit unclear. So I've also done shows about the legacy of Lolita. That was also not a very fun one. The legacy of Kathy Comics, much more fun. I did a show called Ghost Church this year that was about a community of psychics who live in central Florida.

And I'm writing a book about hot dogs. So a lot of topics flying around. So what is a beanie baby? Okay. So a beanie baby was a really popular, originally American, but it became popular across the world beanbag plush toy that was released in the early 1990s. People liked them because they were a little understuffed. So they were very like, plausible and cute.

They became huge collectors items. So they were just basically these like cute $5 toys, but you couldn't get them at a Walmart. You couldn't get them at any big box store. You could only get them at like small hallmarky kind of gift stores. And so people viewed them as kind of collectors items. They became super, super popular as the 90s went on. And then pretty much 2000 on the dot, this huge popular secondary market crashed. And as far as the general public is concerned, they're never heard from again, although

it's not quite true. There was this kind of myth that spread that they were really valuable and like, oh, you know, if your mom loves you, puts your family into debt and loves you and buys all these beanie babies, she's going to be able to send you to college by reselling them on eBay later. What a wonderful dream. Like of course we believed that it's like, you know, like it's something that normally only adult men get to do when it's available to little kids. Exactly.

So you remember speculating about beanie babies as a kid. Do you ever remember like playing with one? No. I don't think kids played with beanie babies. They like didn't. Yeah. And that's the thing. And I was, you know, also a kid who like, I wasn't allowed to have candy when I was

little. So when candy became available to me, it just tasted too sweet. It was like too much. But the point is that when I was a kid, I would come home with my Halloween candy and I would eat like three pieces of candy and then I would like count the rest of them and arrange them by type and arrange them by color and just sort of like revel in this commodity that I had. So by the time beanie babies came around, I was just like, all right, no fucking around

with these beanie babies. We're going to put the little acrylic tag protectors on the tags. I had the little acrylic boxes for the bears. Mm-hmm. Yeah. The plastic boxes. So much waste associated with beanie babies. Yeah.

So much plastic in addition to the beanies themselves. And so I had this feeling that it would be like really foolish to play with a beanie. And I think actually the first like two beanies I got. I cut the tags off and like treated as toys. And then I was like, what a foolish child I was. Now I'm eight and I would never do such a thing. Mm-hmm. In retrospect, it's like kind of chilling to think about how Scrooge McDuck like my

behavior became around them. Should I get into the story of beanie babies? Yeah. I feel like we've established what they are. They're filled with little plastic beans, I guess. That's why they're called that. Yeah. PVC pellets.

Yeah. I guess they couldn't call them pellet pals. That doesn't have quite a ring to it. No. They're like hacky sacks with features. Yeah. They're little anthropomorphized hacky sacks. They have these iconic little, if you don't remember them, they have these little red

heart shaped tags that say tie. And there's a little poem on the inside of every beanie baby. Of course. The man who starts the business is named Ty, which I think a lot of people don't know that the little heart shaped tag that says tie, that's just the name of the guy who started the company. I remember this being very confusing. And I and a bunch of other kids who I knew believed that it was like a copyright logo.

Right. That it was like there's TM. So there's obviously also TY. Like that was what we worked it out to. So it's just a guy named Ty Warner. This was also confusing because I remember being like, Ty Warner bought AOL, a very relevant thing to my life. But Ty Warner, they must be connected.

I think when you're a kid, you just think that names that sound similar must be related. And I think that people involved in QAnon really continue that trend. But then every so often it's true, like the scars, guards, we're like, wait, Pennywise is related to one of the potential dads for a moment, it's all connected. Okay. So Ty Warner is the guy who becomes a billionaire off of this company is currently still alive, hasn't given an interview since 1996. But to get there, you know, in contrast to billionaires who shall not be named, he made

a kind of intelligent choice, which was that when Beanie Babies became successful, he self mythologized in a couple of interviews and then never said anything again. That is smart. And just sort of counted on being powerful enough that his employees would never really contest this kind of false narrative he introduced. Wouldn't it be great if billionaires today like weren't so obsessed with like saying shit all the time? You know, like now people are like, well, I'm a billionaire, so people have to listen

to me every day. And it's like, what about being a quiet billionaire? I mean, quiet billionaires get the most evil done. Right. They do. They really do. It's kind of has worked out great for Ty, but it's wild that he's quiet because he's such a colorful character. So the Ty version of his childhood is he grew up pretty low income in the Chicago area.

The truth is he grew up in a pretty upper middle class family. He lived in a Frank Lloyd Wright house. He was fine. One of those poor kids who lives in a Frank Lloyd Wright. I mean, I guess it could happen theoretically hard to imagine though. The Frank Lloyd Wright orphanage. No, he like he did have a difficult childhood. His mom struggled a lot with mental illness.

And there was a lot of, I think, emotional and physical violence in the house because of that his father was stepping out on his mom. Like just doing all this things were challenging in the Frank Lloyd Wright house is, I guess, what I'm saying. Yeah. But Ty's father is a toy salesman. Like he's very nepotismed into the toy business. Ty's father works for this company called Dakin, which has a fascinating history

all its own. It like started as a like gun import company. And they eventually get around to selling plush toys exclusively. That's fascinating. This is in like the 1950s and 60s as Ty is growing up. And at the time they were most famous for the Dakin bear, which is like this teddy bear, Ty is said to be, you know, like an awkward teenager, not particularly good at stuff.

But like when he graduates high school, he moves to LA briefly to try and become an actor. It doesn't work out. He moves back to Illinois. Basically, a lot of false starts. And then he's like, all right, fine. I will ask my dad for a job at Dakin toys. Ty was like bad at most things, but he was like a really good salesman. Like Michael Scott.

Exactly. Exactly. Like, you know, kind of a weird guy. Yeah. He also has a difficult relationship with his dad. It's like rumored that he and his dad dated the same women at the same time. So odd. So it just like a very kind of complicated upbringing.

But eventually he gets a job at Dakin and he's really, really, really good at it right away. This man knows how to sell a plush. And this man also knows how to really put off everybody he comes into contact with in spite of that. Everyone who works with Ty doesn't like him. There's a lot of accounts of people just being like, he just was like a really hubris-y guy, like thought he knew better than everybody.

He has this very new money vibe about him where the second he like the check hit, he bought like a pink car and was like wearing a pink floor suit and like high heeled platforms was going to work at a toy company like holding a cane. Wow. So he went like full Willy Wonka, Willy Wonka slash Trisha Paytas. One of the most cursed combinations you could possibly imagine. Really unpredictable host. Yeah.

Eventually, like he does so well there, but always like disagrees with people that he works with. So what he starts to do is like start to build a company on the side. He's like, okay, I'm going to make all the money I can at Dakin and then fuck off and start my own company. So Ty is starting this side business. He's starting his own side hustle in the early 80s with the intention being he's going to start his own company and bail.

Dakin becomes suspicious of this and they have a PI follow him around for months. To build the case against Ty Warner's wonderful because everyone hates him so much at work that they're like, if we built a strong enough case, we could just fire him because he's their number one salesman, but he's despised. Yeah. He kind of has a grue issue in that way. He's a bit of a despicable me, but he has yet to manufacture his minions. So it's rough.

The minions really turn on him and hopefully so. So he loses this job at Dakin and has these kind of lost years. His relationship with his dad is still bad. He's now in his early thirties. These are like Shakespeare's lost years. Yeah. And you know, like Shakespeare, he makes a huge comeback. But he has these like lost years.

He tries to start all these companies that fail according to him. And this is like, you can't really dispute this. And I don't really want it to be disputed because it's funny to me. He says he has this vision of a Dakin bear, a life-sized Dakin bear coming to his window and telling him, Ty, you got to go back into plush. I love this story so much. The gall to tell me that he that a six foot tall stuffed bear came to his house and was like, Ty.

You have to exploit workers. After the spirit of plush past comes to tell him that he must change his ways. And at this point, this is like the early eighties. He's in his like mid to late thirties. He's a bit of a late bloomer that Ty Warner, which I think is a fun aspect of his persona, he decides he wants to start a plush business. He does not have startup money. So what he does is he goes to this woman, Patricia Roach.

She's like a local woman that he's gotten to know. She worked at the local gas station and they just kind of became friends. He was like a loner who didn't get along with a lot of people. Patricia was like in a bad marriage and they just sort of started hanging out and they were friends. So Ty goes to Patty. That's some foreshadowing for all you beanie baby heads out there. But Ty goes to Patty and is like, well, I had this visitation from this big old bear.

And I have to I have to start a company. Do you want to start it with me? And like it's disputed of like, was she a co-founder? Was she the first employee? This becomes a big legal issue later. But basically he's like, oh, start a toy company with me. And she's like, I don't know anything about toys. And he's like, ah, whatever.

I mean, my read of that is like Patty, like she's described in the book as having as quote, looking and acting like Liza Manelli. So she's just like, it seems like Ty is constantly trying to like present charismatic, but like Patty was born with it. She's got a star persona. I wish I had a Liza Manelli impression. I really don't. I can't go on the record with whatever would come out of my mouth.

I know. But the way that they originally bonded was she was taking classes at community college and she would let Ty come to the library with her because Ty was trying to research affordable ways to manufacture plushes using factories in Asia. These were the salad days. These look already he's thinking diabolically. Yeah.

And this is America before NAFTA, right? When it was like, I believe, more thinkable than it would become that you could actually manufacture a product domestically. Right. Ty is an early pusher of outsourcing that work to I think it was mostly Korea where beanie babies were manufactured. Still, the problem is, how do you get the startup money to start beanie babies? Well, here's what you do.

Your dad dies once again. Ty, absolute villain. You know, his dad dies. He doesn't tell his sister for five days. And what? That's so many days. So what he does is, like, by the time Joy gets home and finds out her dad has died, Ty has cleared out the Frank Lloyd Wright house of all the antiques.

So, Patty, later on in his mythology era, he will claim to have inherited fifty thousand dollars. It was closer to two hundred thousand dollars plus whatever he made on those antiques. And this is in, like, nineteen eighty three money. So all of a sudden he has, like, pretty significant runway to start this company with Patty and he does. So he and Patty are the only ones working together for a while. They're making these and I really want one someday.

They make these collectible cats. And Ty is really obsessive about how his toys are designed. And he's also really fixated in this, like, I don't know, I'm like, this is a big metaphor for something. But I have to continue on with my life. But he's really fixated on, like, how, like, eye placement on stuffed animals. He's very fixated on that. And he's like, it needs to feel like it's looking at you.

He would go with Patty in, like, huge velour suits and, like, feather boas and shit like that and would, like, carefully pose his cats. I do love that, like, if you're going to be evil. Do it. Capitalistic in the worst way. Like, yeah, you should at least love the thing that you make and care about it and be particular about it and, like, believe in your product, even if all your means of execution are terrible. Like, it's at least you have something that makes you feel like a human being

or act like one a little bit. He's like a very compelling figure. I like it. I really, really love it. But also he's evil. Like, he would hire, you know, a one day contractor to help run a stall with him at a toy convention and then he would yell at them because he's like, you're sweating on the toys. Get the fuck out of here.

And, like, oh, God, like he was mean. Yeah. He, I mean, has an ego issue. The logo is literally his name in a heart. And there's like a fun story about Russ, Russ Berry of Trolls fame who invented the trolls, the treasure trolls. Yes. Yet yet another toy tycoon that named his company just his first name. Are treasure trolls still around? Like, is this something that a child today would know?

Our kids is Gen Z troll literate. Is this my New York Times op-ed? The trolls have evolved. They're like they make kids movies about them now. Oh, my God, of course. The trolls are huge. They're voiced by Anna Kendrick now. How did that?

At God, the trolls, they got the Kendrick bump, but they look so different. The company kind of coasts along for a couple of years. It's doing pretty well. And he and Patty get into a relationship pretty quickly after the company starts. Because it is so romantic to try and, like, rook your workers together. Yeah. She says for the book, she says it's, quote, two neurotics feeding off of each other's insecurities. They were doing pretty well.

But the Beanie Babies themselves don't come into play until 1993. So they've already been around for seven years before the Beanie Babies come along. And Ty and Patricia's relationship romantically is beyond repair. He is, she alleges in this book, very, very abusive towards her. There's pretty brutal stories about that in that book, as well as she's, like, not paid as if she is, has co-founded this company with Ty, which is a repeated pattern of behavior in 92, which is kind of like one of the final blows to their relationship.

She used to make a percentage of sales, which meant she would have been entitled to something around $200,000. Ty takes her, his girlfriend of five plus years at this point into his office and it's like, great news, I'm going to offer you a salary now. It's $50,000. And you're just not going to want to say that to Liza Minnelli because she's not going to take it well. She's going to dance right over to you and tell you what for.

And so she, but he won't budge on that. And so she's like, you know, on top of his possessiveness and like he would have her stalked and all this stuff, he also was not compensating her even remotely fairly. And so she bails on the relationship but stays with the company. Sure, that'll work out. You know, she starts dating a new guy and they go on a vacation to Cancun and Ty shows up in Cancun.

Yeah, he just, he was bad to her in every conceivable way. So in early 93, Patty says, after the Cancun incident, she's like, I need to leave this company, which also is, you know, sucks for her because she didn't do anything wrong. It just like he became too abusive for her to stay at her job that she was really good at and was already underpaid at. This is another way that women lose money. I feel like we make a big deal about the, you know, for every dollar a man makes

figure, which is important, but like there's so many other ways to express that. And one is just like how much money and how many assets you forfeit because you just have to like leave an unsafe situation. Right. I mean, it's like I've fortunately not to this degree, but it's like I've left jobs because you're like, this guy is never going to get fired. He's unfirable and he's horrible to me. So now I can't work on, you know, insert thing. Now, I can't get my beanie millions when the beanie ship comes in.

It's just over now, by default. Right. Because she was it sounds like very much they were doing equal work as executives, if not a bit in her favor. But anyways, she leaves and starts selling insurance in the early 90s. She will be back tie in 1993, creates the first beanie baby. It's legs. Here he is. Hi, legs. He's a frog. Oh, he's so damn cute.

And we love legs. He's so cute. He's got absolutely no mouth. They debut with 12 beanie babies, legs, the frog, squealer, the pig, brownie, the bear, flash, the dolphin, splash, the whale, Patty, the platypus, chocolate, the moose, spot, the dog and pinchers, the lobster. Now, here's the thing about Patty, the platypus,

it is a direct attack on Patricia Roach. He truly is just a diabolical individual where even after she has left the company, he names Patty, the platypus, a magenta, platypus character after Patty. There's a poem inside that is also a direct assault on her. It's this ran into Patty one day while walking. Believe me, she wouldn't stop talking. Listened and listened to her speak. That would explain her extra large beak.

Evil Ty wrote that one. It's it's so incredible that someone managed to slander their ex, who they were extremely abusive towards via a child's toy. That becomes extremely popular. It's awful. However, the beanie babies are not very popular right away. Really, all you need to know about the beginnings are that Ty's business model is that like we were talking about before, he only sells them in small gift shops.

He wants to kind of create this feeling of like exclusiveness and specialness and scarcity. And so the rules are, if you are selling beanie babies, they have to be displayed because he's very like, it needs to feel like they're looking at you. He has a real thing for being watched by toys. So he only sells to small places. And it doesn't take off for a while. This is where the second undersung beanie babies iconic woman comes into play.

Lena Trivedi, she is number 12. And what that means is she's the 12th Ty employee ever. I think she's a student at DePaul because this is all happening in the Chicago area still. But she's hired when she's 19 as a telemarketer. She's hired at $12 an hour. But the company is so small that she and she's kind of their resident young person. Have you ever been a resident young person at someone's company? It kind of rocks, but it's kind of horrible.

I feel like I've been that not at someone's company, but in the context of teaching sometimes where like I, you know, started teaching in grad school and I got into grad school straight after college. So there were a lot of people who were like actual adults who were in my cohort with me and they were teaching students who were younger than them. And I was teaching students who were essentially my age, right. And in a company, I feel like this would be you're in the middle between like the company and the demographic that you're trying to reach.

Yeah, I had like similar experiences at an improv theater in my early 20s. Lena Trivedi kind of fills that role at Ty in the early years. And she's like really excited when Ty likes her ideas that have nothing to do with telemarketing. So she's she gets really into it. So even though she's technically a telemarketer, she starts throwing out ideas, most of which become very successful and associated with the brand forever, including the poems and the tags integral. That's a Lena Trivedi original.

She proposed that they add them. Ty said, that's an amazing idea. Can you write them for all 80 beanie babies by tomorrow? And she does, she does it. She's a legend. She's our generation's, you know, Browning, Plath, Angelou. She she belongs among the greats. I love those little poems when I was a kid.

And I love knowing that they were like or that many of them were churned out in one night by a very overworked employee, a college student. Yeah, move over Zuckerberg. You goddamn loser. People were doing more important things late night, chugging, probably Mountain Dew fruitcake. You're writing code and she was writing Ode's. Oh, oh, I felt that in my stomach.

That was awesome. So she brings that idea and that's immediately successful. She's also the first person to say, like, hey, we should start a website for the beanie babies. Oh, great. When everybody's like, oh, websites. Exactly. They're like, the internet is a fad.

Lena is like, let's just hire my brother, who's also a college student. We'll make it together. Like we'll show you. And so they make this incredible. I'll send you the link. It's still available on the Wayback machine. But like they make this incredible website that is, of course, all in comic sans. She also creates the website, which becomes very successful and becomes

an amazing tool for Ty Warner to never have to talk to his customer base again. Because what they do, and this is another Lena original idea, she should be, she should be a billionaire. No one should be a billionaire, but like she should. Yeah. Because Ty does not want to make any public appearances. Doesn't even want to speak to his customer base directly. So they create this concept called the info beanie.

The beanie babies talk to the customers. And this is like widely successful on the website. They have the beanie babies keep daily diaries for some reason that are also posted to the website so that you have to keep going back. Like if you were checking a website daily in 1996, it was like you had to kind of put some muscle into it. You had to like log on, which took a good five minutes. Yep.

And then like each page had to load for a while for you to get to like the beanie diary that you wanted to read. And so it's like a good 15 minutes of effort. The Naperville mommies are happy to do it. So the way that beanie babies become popular. They're out for a couple of years. They're moderately successful. The company is doing pretty good.

And in 1995, so a couple of years after it's like basically they blow up in the holiday season between 95 and 96. And once it's 96, there's no looking back baby. The series of moms, some are working moms, some are stay at home moms that discover beanie babies in late 1995. And because it's like the nineties was already kind of a hot time to be a collector in general, these kind of upper middle class women get really into collecting all of the beanie babies.

Because at that time, there were few enough of them that it was like, you know, possible to do. Right. And like, you know, and it's shopping, which can become kind of druggery when you have to do it for your family all the time. But like in this really exciting way that has a lot of like adrenaline and dopamine built in, it's like sport shopping. Right.

And so it's like at this time in 95, the idea that beanie babies could pay for college did not yet exist. It exists because these women started to buy them up and we're trying to build like it was like a rival group of five or six moms that all lived in the same area that started this whole secondary market. Wow. One of them happens to write for People magazine freelance. It gets mentioned in People magazine.

And so it's like, it builds really significantly, really quickly. I don't know. It's like, it wasn't Ty Warner's idea. He later claims it was his idea, but he just was so fixated. On the eyes being very particular that there would often be two or three different versions of the same stuffed animal because Ty was like, ah, the eyes are in the wrong place. You know, like would call up the manufacturer in Korea and be like,

burn them all. I need the eyes closer or further away. Oh, it's a massacre. And so if you had the one with the eyes the wrong way, all of a sudden the moms are like, Hey, that's more valuable. They lit the rest of them on fire. So because he's such a Willy Wonko fucking weirdo, he accidentally kind of creates rare products.

And then like when they run out of products on this beanie baby called lovey the lamb in 95, instead of admitting that he just didn't order enough. He's like, lovey is retired now. So now there's this concept of a beanie baby being retired. You have to buy it right away or it'll disappear. I like that he seems to have like blundered into making his product more valuable through sheer ineptness. But then later he's like, and that was all part of the plan.

Of course. So OK, so now we're in like 96, 97. There's a steady uptick in interest in beanie babies. It starts in the Midwest and slowly kind of expands. But class wise, it stays basically in the middle to upper middle class. No one really has the time or money to be doing this. But this is also around the time where the next woman in Ty's life enters. He meets a woman named Faith McGowan, who was hired.

She's a single mom of two daughters. She's 14 years younger than him. And he hires her to adjust the light fixtures in his McMansion. She comes over to his house hired to install these light fixtures. And he's just like giving her so much grief about it and being like just being horrible because he's horrible. And then at the end is like, do you want to go to a baseball game? I feel that we've really hit it off.

Oh, my God. And she's like, no, thank you. And then he has her car blocked into his driveway until she agrees to go on a date with him. This is weirdly the kind of story that in our culture can be passed off as like the successful start to a loving courtship, which just is very worrying. Exactly. So Faith McGowan, she she passed away, I think close to 10 years ago now, but she had an unpublished memoir that is quoted in this book.

So I just want to give a quick quote about their first date from her unpublished memoir. He talked about his sexually explicit references speaking about Patty, his cosmetic surgeries and his lifestyle. It warned that this man was very different, but I was struck by the drama he created and his personal flair, his unique presence and obvious intelligence started to suck me into his drama, almost as if I was auditioning for a part, unquote. So he is like radically honest, but also is constantly talking shit about Patricia, even though she's no longer in his life.

He stays fixated on her for years. And this is like, I mean, a lot of people clown in him for this. I think that there's far better things to clown on Ty Warner for it. But he did start getting a lot of cosmetic surgery pretty early into becoming wealthy. And, you know, some were better than others. And you can just Google him and form your own opinion. Sort of like Patty, a similar pattern develops with Faith. Faith never works for the company.

I think Ty sort of decides, I'm never going to let a woman work with me in an official capacity again. Yeah, I'm never going to let a woman get close to equity. Right. I mean, he's never been married in spite of the fact that he had decades-long relationships with women. And I do think it's like the financial thing. But for Faith, you know, he's very quick to get people to be stuck with him, but never financially independent, which is like classic abuse or shit to do.

He basically gets her fired from her job because he calls her and he's like, you have to demand a gigantic raise or walk. And like, I won't respect you if you don't do, you know. And so she works at a lighting fixture company. They're not going to give her a $50,000 raise. And so all of a sudden Faith is out of a job and she and her daughters move in to Ty's McMansion, where they stay for years. Great. And now she has to adjust the lighting for free.

Exactly. And she gives Ty a lot of suggestions about specific beanie babies, about the business. There's a wild anecdote about her daughter, who was like nine at the time. Ty was like trying to make a beanie baby that was a ghost, but couldn't figure out the design and he's like beside himself in the McMansion. He's like, I can't make a beanie baby ghost. And then his nine year old sort of stepdaughter is like, what if you did this? And she like draws a prototype that he's like, oh, that would actually work.

And so she designs this beanie baby. Originally he credits her on the tag. Later, he says, remove the credit. It was my idea. He's stealing an idea from a nine year old girl. He's evil. Yeah. Wait. And what beanie baby is this? Is there a ghost beanie baby?

Beanie baby's name is Spook, which, yeah. Yeah. Not a thoughtful beanie baby name or either. No, no, they're all pretty basic and not all of them age particularly well. It's also, yeah, it's like stealing credit from a nine year old is like literally something a villain in a Disney Channel original movie would do. And also it's like, just like negotiate a little deal with her and give her five percent and then start a college fund. And that'll be great.

And you won't, you'll be fine. In 1996, beanie babies are starting to do really well. They're selling well. The secondary market is forming. And Ty decides that he wants Patty involved in the company again. My read of the situation, he just like wants to be in control of these women kind of at all times. And so he's like, OK, let's bring Patty back in.

Maybe it wasn't fair the way she was cut out. Wow. And he proposes that she come back to the company, comes back to Ty, but to run Ty UK. So basically he's like, you're hired again, but I'm shipping you away from me. And she lies him and Ellie's out. And she says, how the hell far away do you want me to go? Or like, whatever. That was good.

But she comes back because it's like she liked working in plush. She just a hated tie. So she's like, all right, I'll move to London. And so she's back in the company. This is such a great story because we all understand the product. It's not like, you know, the Murdoch's or something where you like kind of get the day to day. It's truly just beanbag toys.

It's so now we're getting into like 1998. What is happening in the meantime is like the secondary market has formed. There's now a greater demand for beanie babies. It's in the news of like moms are showing up with their kids to like hallmark stores. They're lining up around the corner. It's like the Harry Potter books, shit like that. Like everyone is so amped on them.

It sort of made its way across the country. There's all of these demands towards Ty of like, you have to license, do some licensing, but he hates licensing. You won't do it. You've got to make a deal with Walmart or sell them to a big store. But he doesn't like big stores, so he won't do it. They want him to make a cartoon. He's like, no, like in a way that I think actually did serve the business

for a long time, like he only wants to sell beanbags and like retire them. And now there's the website. And so there's people logging in to dial up internet multiple times a day to see what the info beanie has to say about new releases or maybe about just hanging out, it depends. Lena Trivedi is like updating the website between classes. She's still in college. Oh my God.

She's still making $12 an hour. Lena, no. Oh no. It gets royally fucked. It makes me so mad. Yeah. Speaking like class wise, this was fairly contained for a long time. It basically sticks in the middle and upper middle class.

But now everyone has heard of Beanie Babies and there's a demand kind of across class lines to have them like everyone wants to have them. And so there's this increasing pressure on Ty Warner to make them available to everybody. In the meantime, we have the the Naperville neighborhood moms are, I mean, at this point, there is talk of like, Beanie Babies are becoming really, really valuable. There's this story about like a specific elephant beanie named Peanut.

Yes, I remember this beanie from my Beanie Book. Kind of like the first virally like valuable Beanie Baby because it came in dark blue, but then they made it light blue. And if you had a dark blue peanut, oh, baby, you're getting a jet ski or whatever. The reason that this information that like, oh, you can if you get enough Beanie Babies, Jamie's mom, like you will be able to retire and send your children to college is because the Naperville moms, like this group of like five or six women, they do become pretty wealthy off of it.

But only because they were the first to it and they all sort of developed these different ways of monetizing it. It also sounds a little bit like Lula Roe based on that, where it's like the way to win at the game is to be one of the first eight people who hears about it and then everyone else is kind of screwed. And you just buy a bunch of shit and then you don't know why. Exactly. And so it's like some of them were making money on actually like reselling

Beanie Babies. There's also Beanie Babies have a huge role in the success of eBay because eBay is launched in 95. And in the early years of eBay, one in 10 sales on eBay were Beanie Babies. Oh my God. They're like what Kanye was to Adidas. Yeah. And, you know, also experience a significant fall from grace and rightfully so.

But yeah, like some of them are selling on eBay. And that's how you sort of get these like juiced up valuation prices where I think the common misunderstanding is like this Beanie Baby is worth $300. When it's like, well, no, someone just listed it for $300. Did anyone buy it? Like I feel like that is often kind of confusing. And this is like mostly women that were developing those price guides that you were talking about and Thai does not make money off of that.

The moms do. And so there sort of develops this upset and litigiousness between Thai and the moms. The ironic part being that the only reason his product is successful is because of them. But now they're making a bunch of money off the side. There's an example of a woman named Marybeth Sobolowski. She started this magazine called Marybeth's Beanie World that at its peak was circulating to the tune of one million copies a month.

Oh my God, it was really big. And so Thai slaps her with a lawsuit. He says, knock it off, Marybeth. He was, I guess, within his rights to do it, but what horrible PR. Yeah. So when Marybeth, like he feels, becomes a little too wealthy off of promoting his products, oh my God, he slaps her with a lawsuit. She has to change the name of the magazine to Marybeth's Beanbag World.

Oh, whatever. That's so. And then I guess makes it sound like it's for Cornhole enthusiasts. And, you know, who benefits really? I wish her the best. The beginning of the end, in my opinion, though your mileage may vary. Is in 1997 at the peak of like beanie baby demand, Thai capitulates and agrees to do the teeny beanie promotion with McDonald's.

Now, this is the first time that beanie babies have kind of been made available to everybody. Now, anyone who can afford a happy meal can have a beanie baby. If you watch like the news broadcast of the first teeny beanie release, it is genuinely terrifying. I'm thankful to have no memory of this happening. Not quite forming memories, but oh my God, I know my mom did it. She was into it.

She was like getting trampled in a McDonald's. Mobs of terrible haircuts, storming the best deal to like either way. OK, so teeny beanies come out. Now the market is absolutely flooded. They are small. They're different from regular beanie babies, which was like done for cost and also to hopefully retain the original value of regular beanies. But now that beanie babies are accessible across class lines,

everybody is like, all right, you know what? I'll start collecting beanie babies as well. If anyone was on the fence, teeny beans made it so that everyone wanted one. Did they exist outside of McDonald's or was it like a limited like we're going to have the teeny beanie happy meals briefly and then they're gone. Like how did that work? So it's it is still the Ty Warner ethos of creating as much scarcity as he can. So it's only McDonald's.

You have to have it at McDonald's. They're only available for a limited time. So if you were a seasoned beanie mom at this point, you're like, OK, so I have to drive to 50 McDonald's. Right. There are like news, local news interviews with kids who are like, I feel sick. OK. My mom just bought 40 happy meals and I feel like there is like news footage from a helicopter of like a McDonald's truck.

I guess accidentally like a couple hundred teeny beanies fell off in the middle of the highway and it's helicopter footage of moms stopping in the middle of the highway and sending their children into five lane traffic to get teeny beanies. It was a big deal. It was a whole thing. You can feel whatever way about it. This is like part of the sort of Karen origin story.

It is it. Absolutely. 1997, the son, child into traffic. Right. Worth it. And also at this point, there's kind of like they're launching new beanie babies so frequently that completionists kind of start to give up because they're like, there's no way I could possibly have every single beanie baby. It was easy to collect when there's 12. Now there's like, you know, at least a hundred, probably a couple hundred.

It's like the Robert Altman movies. You're like, ah, whatever. You're like, I'm sure some of these are good, but it's kind of none of my business. But before that happens, they kind of peak in 98, 99. And that brings us back to the story of one Ty Warner. You know, they've made so much fucking money. He's hired all these people and Christmas Eve, 1998, kind of an iconic day. He in the nicest thing I've ever heard of him doing,

he gives everyone a holiday bonus of their salary again, great, which is like cool of him to do. And also just an example of how much money they were making in 1998. Also, maybe a day can bear wearing a like grim reapers robe, like showed up to him in a dream and told him he'd be dead by next Christmas. If he wasn't more generous, they really screwed him. But meanwhile, in his personal life, you know, Patty and Faith have been pitted against each other in Ty's life

for years now on the same day, the same day of the party, the double your salary party. Yeah. Faith finds out that Ty is cheating on her with Patty. No. At a hotel nearby and Ty lies about it. Patty yells at Faith, punches Ty in the face. Faith, I mean, because Faith, for someone who is very bullied into this relationship, is faithful to him the whole time. And he strung her along for years being like,

you know, we just need to get to this place with the business and then we're going to get married and you will be financially secure. They never get married. That also happened with Scrooge. That's what that whole sad song in the middle of the muck that Christmas Carol is about. This is really a lot of parallels. OK, so Faith does make at least one effort to get a formal title at the company because she's doing so much.

It's unclear exactly what she was doing, but she was certainly like giving constant creative input to Ty, who's always having a meltdown about something creative. Of course. He says all you did was pick colors, you know, fuck off. And so she never gets a formal title. Eventually, I believe it is her who leaves him and he sort of sets her up in a Santa Barbara McMansion and tells her to go away.

But she is really sad and she dies still loving him. It really sucks and it makes me very sad. And Faith is awesome. One thing she says about Ty and her unpublished memoir is nothing is ever enough and nothing is ever good enough because Ty's soul is empty. Oh, wow. And then Patty, you know, while she's more of a brassy broad, she says about Ty, the hardest part of having a relationship

with Ty is realizing that he never cared about you. Oh, God. I feel like that's like the one size fits all like horrible billionaire bio to where like it's just so predictable that you just have to like amass as much as possible, amass power, amass capital and like take all the credit for it. And also, you know, often rely on the unpaid labor of women because that's just like a thing that we do culturally

that actually carries over into this. Yeah. So if they peak in 98, 99 sort of represents this sudden kind of not quite freefall that happens in 2000. But there's all of a sudden doubt. Maybe we're not sending our children to college off of beady babies. They're losing their retail value or like resell value because they always do cost five to six dollars at stores. The price never really increases.

It's the resale values that are constantly fluctuating. So it's like a combination of the market is too flooded. People can't keep up with collecting. And Ty is getting known to be so litigious that like the company doesn't have an amazing reputation because he sues Mary Beth. People don't like that. He sues a company called Holy Bears.

He sues like a Jesus beanie baby rip off. And it's like, do you really think that they're like infringing on your profits at the stage in the game? It looks better to say nothing. Right. They continue to do the teeny beanie promotions annually, which are successful. But like, again, it's like they've peaked.

There's really nowhere to go from here. Sales in 98 are one point four billion. Ty is the only shareholder, so he makes seven hundred million dollars. It's absurd. But by 99, he's sort of trying to find a way to contain the secondary market and isn't successful at it. He tries to like retire a bunch of beanie babies to like spike sales.

It sort of works, but not really. He fucks around with the website kind of considerably to get people to try to, you know, engage more over there with the info beanies. It works, but like not really. And in 1999, he sort of realizes like this may not last forever. I need to start investing in other things. So what he does is he buys the four seasons in New York,

which he owns to this day. What had Ty actually done right by Patricia or by faith. He may not have been able to afford the four seasons. And so it's like that sort of trickle down of like by fucking over various people in his life. He acquired the four seasons and he's currently worth over $3.4 billion because that was a good investment that he couldn't have made if he hadn't thrown so many women off the lifeboat.

Meanwhile, you know, people are kind of jumping ship at Thai Incorporated, right and left. Lena Trivedi leaves because she is still paid $12 an hour. She goes to an executive and says, I want a salary of $120,000, which I think is like good for her. And also she's created so much value for this company. And they basically tell her to fuck off. And so she leaves the company and like has a series of rough years.

She's doing great now. She's an author of children's books. She was in the most recent Beanie Babies documentary. She doesn't seem to hold ill will towards Ty in a way that I find really stunning on her part. I would be so salty forever, but she seems like she's moved on. Yeah. Ninety nine. There's a decline and Ty decides, you know, he makes kind of the final bad

decision of the Beanie Babies craze, which is to drive up sales. He's going to say, Beanie Babies are over forever. Wow. He takes a poll on the Beanie Babies website that says, do you think we should retire Beanie Babies forever? And you have to pay 50 cents to vote. Wow. He makes a bunch of money off of people just being like, we like these.

It's just like such a sensitive ego monster. Maybe he invented being scammy on social media, which, you know, nobody needed to invent that. So yeah. So what he does is he says he's going to retire everything basically. And the scam plan was he's going to retire the brand, which will drive up sales. Then in, you know, early to mid 2000, he'll say, OK, we're bringing them back and he was hoping that this would revitalize the business.

Everyone at the company was like, do not do this. This is the worst idea you've ever had. And you throw pennies at toll booth workers. He's like, I got this far by not listening to anyone and by believing that all the good ideas I stole from people were actually mine. So don't worry about it. So yeah, I think I know what I'm doing. We're going to say that all the Beanie Babies are going to be retired.

And then a couple of weeks later, we're going to say, just kidding. Thanks for the sales. They're back. Consumers do love to be lied to, to their faces in a way they're very aware of. We just love it. So he goes to he and Faith are still together at this time. And he goes to Faith saying, I need to design the final Beanie Baby. And that's where our friend, the end comes.

You just like whipped him into frame in an amazing way. The end is the classic bear. It is pitch black. It's kind of ominous. Yeah. And it's got a little firework on his chest and it says the end. The idea of a little stuffed bear whose name is the end is just very horary to me.

So it is very sinister. I think in an appropriate close to the decade, Ty says that Beanie Babies are ending December 31st, 1999. Allying with the world. Exactly. Just to kind of give, they're like, and also this. But Faith writes the first draft of the poem inside of the end. I think hers is superior.

Are they a fad? Were they a trend? Or were they a way to show love to a friend? Wishes for happiness. Ty continues to send from the beginning to whenever the end. Wow. Ty says, fuck that poem. And he writes this.

He says, all good things come to an end. It's been fun for everyone. Peace and hope are never gone. Love you all and say so long. Faith's was so much better. It was. Ty's has no dimension. This is a man who is not in touch with emotions.

I feel like he just didn't want it to be called a fad canonically. Yeah. Yeah. So we have the end. And also just for your reference, I had to take off my plastic tag holder to read that poem to you. So you're welcome. It just lost serious resale.

You know, that is kind of the story of the fad. He does do, you know, according to plan, he says the beanies are back in early 2000. Everyone's pissed off about it. Like you were saying, they feel lied to. Sales go way, way down and it's bad. The company sort of takes a turn from there. He tries to launch a few new lines, hoping that they'll be as successful. My favorite of which I had some of these.

Are called the beanie kids. Feedback on the beanie kids is they look so scary. So it's like an actual human in beanie form. So that doesn't work. Ty is, you know, sending off his employees to go to these. They're still only sold in these small stores and they start to like take on these like mafia style intimidation tactics that don't work where they're like, you know, the stores are like, oh, we're not.

We don't actually, we just want the beanie babies. We don't actually want the beanie kids. We don't want. And they're sort of like, you're going to want to buy some of these beanie kids. Beanie babies could just go away at any second. Intimidating the manager of the Hallmark store. Either you buy these beanie kids or your brains will be spattered across that contract. How about that?

Right. Ty basically becomes a full time hotelier. Now he and Faith separate at some point. Mary Beth's beanbag world goes under in 01. You know, along with life as we knew it. Yeah. Shrek is released. The target demo moves on to the dealiest catalog. Right.

Like people move on from beanie babies, but the company stays afloat enough. Ty does everything he says he would never do in that beanie babies. The current beanie baby iteration, which are called beanie booze. Now you can get Ty products literally anywhere. If you've seen the like it's like one of those little stuffed animals with the big old eyes, they're very cute, but that's like the beanie babies company. It's what they do now. You can get them literally anywhere, so they're not exclusive anymore.

They also do licensing. You can get Paw Patrol beanie babies. So ultimately he did go down the Dakin Garfield. Patty eventually leaves the company and basically makes Ty agree to never speak to her again. I mean, she suffered a lot of abuse under him and was screwed over financially quite a bit. But I do appreciate that it seems like she ended that on her terms.

It's to get into it in the book. But basically she makes Ty sign something to say like, leave me alone. Love it. And I believe that she is still alive and well. Ty is sued or he has to go to court in 2013 because he's kept over a hundred million dollars in a Swiss bank account. Of course, he's taken to court. But they're like, he could spend as much as five years in prison.

He gets two years of probation based on the charitable donations he made over the years and also the fact that he was humiliated in the press. So he doesn't have to go to jail. It makes no sense. I love how if you're super rich, they're like, well, you experienced embarrassment. So that's penalty enough, really. And it's like, yeah, only rich people suffer ill effects from being charged with a crime. It's like everyone else just has a normal time with that.

It's easier if you have no money. So these days, Ty is he's 78 years old. He still owns the Four Seasons, but I wanted to kind of leave it with Joy Warner, who is his sister. They were never close. Ty was never close with really anyone in his family. But, you know, Joy, in spite of the fact that she lives, I think, in a pretty remote area and like runs a like massage parlor and like has a lot of dogs.

I think she lives on like a ranch. Ty, even though he is a billionaire, has previously refused to help pay for surgeries that she's needed. He's a very mean person. However, because Ty was so withholding and shitty and evil to women throughout his life, his entire life in a little twist of poetic irony. When he dies, his sister Joy will inherit three point four billion dollars. Yes, because that's what happens if you never get married or create heirs, Ty.

Sorry, Ty. And that is the story of Beanie Babies, Sarah Marshall. Oh, my God. Actually, we didn't even talk about the Princess Diana. I know. Did you have one of those? Yes, I had it in an acrylic, clear box, which I now feel sad about thinking about my poor little purple Princess Diana commemorative bear, which from an adult perspective seems rather ghoulish to me to do that.

I agree. But, you know, to never have been played with so sad. They gave the money to whatever the official charitable foundation for Princess Diana was. But even so, I'm like, no, I think that that was fucked up. It's a bit intense. Yeah. Yeah. If you have a perfectly preserved for history, Beanie Baby, somewhere still in a closet, like maybe take it out and play with it and it can fulfill its toy purpose.

That's my dream. And also for people to be adequately compensated for their labor. That's my other one. You might as well play with your Beanie Babies because spoiler alert. That's about all they're fucking good for anybody. Thank you so much for listening to our show. Thank you so much to Miranda Zickler for editing. Thank you to Carolyn Kendrick, my producer, without whom the wheels of this bus

would fly off and I would screech down the highway, making sparks. Thank you so much again to Jamie Laftis, who is so wonderful. Thank you, Jamie, for everything you do. Thank you again for being here with us listening, learning, talking about toys.