Speaker 1: Welcome to odd Lots. It's Monday, November three. I'm Tracy
Speaker 1: Allaway and I'm Joe. Joe. I've got a question for you.
Speaker 1: What were you doing to make money in the summer
Speaker 1: of nine was the best summer because I think I
Speaker 1: made about two thousand dollars from just a summer job
Speaker 1: that I had. But then I put that all into
Speaker 1: stocks because it was the Internet bubble, and I basically
Speaker 1: paid for two years of college thanks to essentially what
Speaker 1: I did that summer, So that's amazing. It was. It
Speaker 1: was a good time. Well, I was making money to
Speaker 1: a little differently. I was still in middle school. I
Speaker 1: was going to garage sales and selling old toys and
Speaker 1: one of the things I sold was a tie dyed
Speaker 1: beanie baby lizard. I sold it for two hundred dollars
Speaker 1: to a forty year old man, and at the time,
Speaker 1: me as an eleven year old, I thought this was
Speaker 1: amazing money and I was rolling in it. That is
Speaker 1: amazing money object for any age selling a stuffed animal
Speaker 1: for two dollars, right, So why are we talking about
Speaker 1: this today? We're going to delve into what can drive
Speaker 1: seemingly rational people to spend hundreds sometimes thousands of dollars
Speaker 1: on stuffed animals. We're going to talk about the beanie
Speaker 1: baby bubble, and we're going to talk about something more
Speaker 1: than that. We're going to talk about bubbles in general,
Speaker 1: the Internet bubble, and the psychology behind speculative mania. So
Speaker 1: here with us today is Zach Bissonett. He's the author
Speaker 1: of The Great Beanie Baby Bubble, Mass Delusion, and the
Speaker 1: Dark Side of Cute. It's a book that came out
Speaker 1: earlier this year and I just happened to finish it
Speaker 1: this morning. Zach, thanks for joining us. So why did
Speaker 1: you write a book about beanie babies animals? I like you.
Speaker 1: I I was in middle school when the beanie baby
Speaker 1: craze hit, and I was kind of a nerd, and
Speaker 1: I was into like old books and antiques and that
Speaker 1: kind of thing. And every weekend I would go to
Speaker 1: this flea market on Cape Cob with my mother, and
Speaker 1: we had never heard of beanie babies. And then all
Speaker 1: of a sudden, out of nowhere, that flea market was
Speaker 1: like beanie baby dealers, and they were wearing like Fannie
Speaker 1: packs and visors and talking just really really excitedly about
Speaker 1: how much they were going up in value and how
Speaker 1: this one they just paid five dollars for was now
Speaker 1: worth forty and they're not going to sell it this
Speaker 1: week because next week it'll be worth fifty. And that
Speaker 1: was like that for about two years, and then all
Speaker 1: of a sudden it was gone and no one ever
Speaker 1: talked about it again. I just I just want to say, uh,
Speaker 1: during those same years that my mother was dating a
Speaker 1: guy who was an antique dealer, and so I also
Speaker 1: went to a lot of flea markets in New England
Speaker 1: and I actually saw all the exact same thing where
Speaker 1: suddenly there were these flea markets where that used to
Speaker 1: be people bringing out their old stuff from their barns
Speaker 1: and then it's just people of stuff down and used
Speaker 1: to be traditionalist antique dealers hated it. Yeah, there was
Speaker 1: there was one guy I talked to who who he
Speaker 1: was so proud of this. He was a traditionalist antique
Speaker 1: dealer who had just railed against beanie babies. He would
Speaker 1: go on CNN. I would say, I'm not in kidding.
Speaker 1: CNN would have these like debates between this guy who
Speaker 1: they called the beanie Meanie and the beanie baby experts
Speaker 1: who were making millions of dollars selling one of them
Speaker 1: sold a million copies a month of a beanie baby
Speaker 1: magazine that she was publishing, and they would have these
Speaker 1: debates in this and this. A group of antique dealers
Speaker 1: in Indiana gave him a crucified skunk beanie baby with
Speaker 1: a certificate thanking him for being a traditionalist who stood
Speaker 1: up for traditional antiques. So this is the amazing thing.
Speaker 1: Walk us through how the beanie baby bubble came into
Speaker 1: existence and how we at one day actually got to
Speaker 1: the point where people were debating the value of stuffed
Speaker 1: animals on CNN. So it starts out with this this
Speaker 1: very sort of eccentric toymaker named Tie Warner, who dropped
Speaker 1: out of Kalamazoo College, tried to become an actor, failed
Speaker 1: at that, then became a toy salesman, was wildly successful
Speaker 1: with that, but then he got fired from that and
Speaker 1: decided to start his own stuffed animal company. And he
Speaker 1: started to create these beanie babies initially because he thought
Speaker 1: at a five dollar price point they would be irresistible
Speaker 1: and that it would help him the sort of a
Speaker 1: foot in the door with large accounts, and that he
Speaker 1: would then be able to kind of upsell bigger stores
Speaker 1: on selling his larger stuffed animal line, and it didn't
Speaker 1: work at all. I remember talking to talking to to
Speaker 1: the sales reps for Tye who remember just there was
Speaker 1: no interest in these beaning babies. People worried they were cheap,
Speaker 1: they thought they looked cheap. They worried people would buy
Speaker 1: the beanie babies instead of a more expensive product. He
Speaker 1: was just not getting any interest in them. But Ty Warner,
Speaker 1: the guy created them, really really believed in this product.
Speaker 1: And he combined that belief with an extremely sort of eccentric,
Speaker 1: obsessive approach to the product and the people who had
Speaker 1: who had worked with him, which at the beginning was
Speaker 1: just his girlfriend. But but she remembered when I when
Speaker 1: I talked with her, he would keep her up until
Speaker 1: like four in the morning debating one color of the
Speaker 1: ribbon on a bear should be. And then she'd think
Speaker 1: they would finally be done debating the color, and he
Speaker 1: would say, well what if it was tied this way
Speaker 1: instead of the other way, And then they would have
Speaker 1: to go back through the iterations of different colors again
Speaker 1: for hours. So he had this really really obsessive approach
Speaker 1: to the product. This is how the retirement came into
Speaker 1: being right precisely. So sometimes he would come out with
Speaker 1: a product and then a few months after he chipped
Speaker 1: a few thousand of them, he would like wake up
Speaker 1: in the middle of the night basically and decide that
Speaker 1: it should be a different color. So like one of
Speaker 1: his first beanie babies, not not one of the very first,
Speaker 1: but one of the one of the first was Peanut
Speaker 1: the Elephant, who was originally a royal blue color. And
Speaker 1: then after a few months of that, I think he
Speaker 1: chipped I think, like I can't remember the fourteen hundred
Speaker 1: or so of the of this beanie baby, and he
Speaker 1: decided it shouldn't be royal blue, it should be baby blue.
Speaker 1: And so the fact that they would get retired and
Speaker 1: never made again, there were never more than that, that's
Speaker 1: how they became collectible that people would see is going
Speaker 1: up in value entirely accidentally. So because this is happening
Speaker 1: before anyone cares about these his annual sales are like
Speaker 1: four million dollars a year at this point, mostly not
Speaker 1: from beanie babies. No one cares about beanie babies. Then
Speaker 1: all of a sudden, this small group of people suburban
Speaker 1: Chicago who lived on one cul de Sac started collecting
Speaker 1: beanie babies. They saw them in stores because they were
Speaker 1: near where Ty was headquartered, so that he had a
Speaker 1: big presence in stores there. And they decided they liked
Speaker 1: these beanie babies and that they wanted to assemble complete
Speaker 1: collections for their kids. And they became very obsessive. These
Speaker 1: were soccer mons. They came very very obsessive with trying
Speaker 1: to assemble complete collections, and so they would call stores
Speaker 1: and other towns to ask them what beanie babies they had,
Speaker 1: and then they remembered this. They would realize that there
Speaker 1: would be like these weird variations and these were the
Speaker 1: ones that he had retired, just changed the design because
Speaker 1: he took a few thousand and then changed entirely accidentally.
Speaker 1: And they started paying each other more for these kind
Speaker 1: of beanie babies. Started this small market for them just
Speaker 1: in this town. As this started to happen, as this
Speaker 1: kind of starts in this small town, this woman Peggy
Speaker 1: Gallagher and her sister Dr. Paula Brinko had this idea,
Speaker 1: you know, we're just calling stores like in the Chicago
Speaker 1: area where this all started, but we call stores in
Speaker 1: like other states will be able to find beanie babies
Speaker 1: that are really rare that no one else has, so
Speaker 1: they go to start going local chambers of commerce and
Speaker 1: getting lists of all of the gift shops. The woman
Speaker 1: who's a doctor at the same time that she's doing this,
Speaker 1: she's doing this study on women who were like diabetic
Speaker 1: or something where she had to call hospitals to talk
Speaker 1: to their researchers, and after she called the researcher, she
Speaker 1: would ask to be transferred to the gift shop to
Speaker 1: ask about beanie babies so she could try to order
Speaker 1: the rare one. But this is the part of the
Speaker 1: story that I love because we eventually go from this
Speaker 1: like small group of soccer mom collectors who professionalize themselves
Speaker 1: as beanie baby dealers and beanie baby market experts. I mean,
Speaker 1: one of them had a Beanie World magazine. She was
Speaker 1: a self described Chicago suburban soccer mom. She had a
Speaker 1: magazine with the circulation of more than one million million
Speaker 1: a month and more ads per copy than Glamour. These
Speaker 1: were like thick magazines full of ads. So people start
Speaker 1: seeing the priceless for these beanies, and they all figure
Speaker 1: prices are going to go up forever. These are good
Speaker 1: investments right, and the stores that are hearing all of
Speaker 1: a sudden out of nowhere start getting calls from these
Speaker 1: out of state collectors are like, oh my gosh, beanie
Speaker 1: babies are really hot. It starts out as like two
Speaker 1: people did the did the magazine that published the prices?
Speaker 1: Because I remember I used to collect baseball cards when
Speaker 1: as a kid, and there was the Beckett magazine, and
Speaker 1: there was like a crucial avenue by which the baseball
Speaker 1: card bubble, which also burst, everyone checked the prices each month.
Speaker 1: So did the magazine for beanie babies serve a similar
Speaker 1: purpose hugely, so that there's a reflexivity. I think two
Speaker 1: price guides where they impact prices as much as they
Speaker 1: report on them. And the first price let's which trebo
Speaker 1: this lady Peggy Gallagher, which she started to circulate. She
Speaker 1: put an ad in like a magazine for other collectors,
Speaker 1: saying he sent her self addressed stamped envelope, she would
Speaker 1: send you this checklist, and she was like, well, what
Speaker 1: should I do? Her prices? She just made them up. Basically,
Speaker 1: she told me this that she said this one's rare,
Speaker 1: so that one should be worth twenty dollars. These were
Speaker 1: not really based on anything, and then she kind of
Speaker 1: sat back and watched on like the A O. L
Speaker 1: message boards, is these priceless she was making up kind
Speaker 1: of became the the price and so talk about that
Speaker 1: how the internet and those are the early days of
Speaker 1: the Internet helped stoke that bubble, so that this is
Speaker 1: a bean babies were ten percent of ebays sales. In
Speaker 1: the early days of ebays. eBay disclosed in the risk
Speaker 1: factors to its sec FI lanes, a dependence on the
Speaker 1: contain crazy yes, and so people were getting computers and
Speaker 1: beanie babies more than anything. Really gave people a reason
Speaker 1: to go on eBay and to do online trading and
Speaker 1: actually just e commerce in general, not just there was
Speaker 1: also trader and message wards. In the early days of
Speaker 1: e commerce, there were a lot of stories that it
Speaker 1: was not growing as quickly as people thought it would.
Speaker 1: People weren't comfortable with it. Stuff was too expensive to
Speaker 1: ship with beanie babies something that had a kind of
Speaker 1: weird you weren't sure exactly what they were worth. They
Speaker 1: were easy to ship, and they were really hard to
Speaker 1: find locally. It brought people onto econ ummers in a
Speaker 1: way that other more mundane products like pets dot Com,
Speaker 1: we're not able to. So even though it's a completely
Speaker 1: pointless bubble of ultimately worthless stuffed animals, it actually did help.
Speaker 1: It had a beneficial effect on the development of these
Speaker 1: Internet markets. Meg Whitman has said in interviews that that
Speaker 1: eBay and I think Pierre Omyard said the same thing,
Speaker 1: that eBay may not have gotten off the ground without
Speaker 1: beanie babies. So, Joe, I know, you remember what the
Speaker 1: late nineties were like. When we look back on Beatie babies,
Speaker 1: it seems amazing that people spent all this money on them.
Speaker 1: All this time. We had one, at least one instance
Speaker 1: of a guy committing murder because of a soured Beatie
Speaker 1: baby deal. Do you remember how nuts it was? Are
Speaker 1: you talking about beanie babies? Are just the late nineties
Speaker 1: and gems? I mean, I would say they're linked, right,
Speaker 1: They're absolutely the people who when they think back and
Speaker 1: they talk about the nineties bubble, it's often referred to
Speaker 1: as a tech bubble or the Internet bubble or the
Speaker 1: dot com bubble. It completely misses the point. Yes, I
Speaker 1: was so much, It was so much bigger. It was
Speaker 1: such a big It was a sense of optimism about
Speaker 1: everything all at the same time, and so there's so
Speaker 1: many wonderful stories about people completely losing their mind. My
Speaker 1: single favorite story of the late nineties bubble was when
Speaker 1: a car dealership in Nevada. It was called Uniprime Capital Acceptance,
Speaker 1: And I remember this very vividly because I was on
Speaker 1: the message boards at the time. It was a penny
Speaker 1: stock maybe you traded trading, I was. They put out
Speaker 1: a press release that said they had a cure for AIDS.
Speaker 1: A car dealership in Nevada. The like was someone we've
Speaker 1: worked with or if we licensed this thing from a scientist.
Speaker 1: They just straight up we have a cure for AIDS.
Speaker 1: And you know, even in the craziest times, like that's
Speaker 1: kind of a skeptical belief, but enough people believed that
Speaker 1: that the stocks surged, it doubled, and then it doubled
Speaker 1: again because just on the possibility that maybe a car
Speaker 1: dealership in Nevada had found a cure for aid the
Speaker 1: people were so optimis stick of everything that it seemed
Speaker 1: not unbelievable. There was a people talk about the internet
Speaker 1: stocks anything that was that breathed on the Internet, people
Speaker 1: are going crazy for One of my favorite facts is
Speaker 1: the fact that k Tell, the company that makes really
Speaker 1: cheesy compilation CDs of like seventies DISCOMs, they sold their
Speaker 1: CDs online, Big whoop. The stock grew tenfold at one point,
Speaker 1: and then over the span of a few months, people
Speaker 1: were losing their minds. The other fact that I love
Speaker 1: is the fact that the segue that you know didn't
Speaker 1: really take off, but people still go tours around. People
Speaker 1: really thought the entire cities were going to be redesigned
Speaker 1: because of how the segue I got people around. So
Speaker 1: basically it was a time of just incredible optimism about everything. So, Zach,
Speaker 1: I'm curious. In your book you quote a lot from
Speaker 1: existing you know, economic and financial literature. You quote people
Speaker 1: like Robert Schiller on the optimism that precedes bubbles when
Speaker 1: it comes to beanie babies. If you could kind of
Speaker 1: pinpoint one thing that flipped it into speculative mania, what
Speaker 1: would it be. It's people seeing prices rise. That that
Speaker 1: is what drives what drives speculative bubbles is that as
Speaker 1: soon as there's you know, this insignificant phenomenon of someone
Speaker 1: who's trying to complete a set for their kid, as
Speaker 1: soon as they pay a hundred dollars for a beanie
Speaker 1: baby that someone paid five dollars for. That's what sets
Speaker 1: in motion, or at least can set in motion certainly
Speaker 1: this kind of chain, because that becomes a story and
Speaker 1: beanie babies, and I think all bubbles are spread by
Speaker 1: by narrative, by people saying I bought this beanie baby
Speaker 1: for five dollars and sold it for a hundred. Anyone
Speaker 1: who did that told a thousand people about it because
Speaker 1: it was so weird. So how big did it get in?
Speaker 1: Is there an estimate of what the total outstanding value
Speaker 1: of beanie babies was at the TIS annual sales peaked
Speaker 1: it around one point five billion dollars um. And that
Speaker 1: was just wholesale. Other people who there must be but
Speaker 1: have a bunch and held it all the way down
Speaker 1: and now just they live in a house filled with it.
Speaker 1: There is a retired soap opera star in Arizona. I think,
Speaker 1: remember what's come so long as I talked to him. Um,
Speaker 1: there's a retired soap opera star who lost his kids
Speaker 1: six figure college funds on them and has like thirty
Speaker 1: thousand of them still in his home. That's Graham. We
Speaker 1: talked about how these sort of bubbles began, at least
Speaker 1: in the case of beanie babies, how did it end?
Speaker 1: Because it did start to fizzle out in and within
Speaker 1: a couple of years the secondary market value of thousands
Speaker 1: millions of stuffed animals was gone. This was one of
Speaker 1: the funniest things about the reporting on this, and I
Speaker 1: think there's a lot of very similar stuff with the
Speaker 1: reporting on the housing bubble and the Internet stock bubble,
Speaker 1: is that I would kind of pose this question to
Speaker 1: the collectors anti executives about kind of how this thing
Speaker 1: had ended, and they all had these really specific explanations
Speaker 1: for it, these kind of linear cause and effect things.
Speaker 1: You know that there was one saying, oh, you know,
Speaker 1: the counterfeits really invaded the market and people were paying
Speaker 1: you know, six hundred dollars and if it hadn't for
Speaker 1: pieces they're trying to be fake, and if it hadn't
Speaker 1: been for all the fraud this, you know, it wouldn't
Speaker 1: have ended that way. A lot of people felt, you know,
Speaker 1: Ty got greedy and made too many, too many styles
Speaker 1: and overproduce them, and I'm like, okay, you know, maybe
Speaker 1: kind of, but you know, if he hadn't done that,
Speaker 1: then being would they still be temper cent and based
Speaker 1: sales and we'd all be rich. I Mean, these things
Speaker 1: end because they're stupid, right, Like that's ultimately they're they're unsustainable,
Speaker 1: and eventually there is something that nixed them and causes
Speaker 1: that kind of that kind of cascade of confidence that
Speaker 1: started it to just crescendo down and and that's what happened. Um,
Speaker 1: there's this thing. At the end of nine. Everything is
Speaker 1: still basically going well. Secondary market sales still good, top
Speaker 1: pieces still valuable, some overproduction on some of the newer pieces,
Speaker 1: those are stacking up a little bit, but basically still
Speaker 1: a strong market. No one's saying this thing's ending. Collectors
Speaker 1: still confident, magazine still selling. Tie announces at the end
Speaker 1: of that on that on January one, all of the
Speaker 1: beanie Babies will be retired and that they won't be
Speaker 1: made anymore. Theoretically, prices should have gone through the roof
Speaker 1: at that point for a minute. Yeah, they did for
Speaker 1: a minute, and people were very excited, and people are like,
Speaker 1: what's going on. This is going to do a different
Speaker 1: product and uh. And then he announced that he would
Speaker 1: do a vote to raise money for AIDS on whether
Speaker 1: people wanted to Beanie Babies to continue, and you would
Speaker 1: log in and online and don't and donate that there
Speaker 1: was some other stuff going on in his life. But
Speaker 1: where you could donate a dollar forty nine, I think
Speaker 1: it was to vote on whether Beanie Babies should be continued. First,
Speaker 1: I'll raise the question of who would spend a dollar
Speaker 1: fifty to vote to end Beanie Babies here that kind
Speaker 1: of like. But so he does this and almost no
Speaker 1: one voted, ended up just having to donate all the
Speaker 1: money himself because he hadn't gotten so many votes as
Speaker 1: he claimed he had, and announced that Beanie Babies would
Speaker 1: be continued and that all the new releases there will
Speaker 1: be all these new millennium collection coming out, and no
Speaker 1: one cared, and the whole thing just every month after that,
Speaker 1: the sales collapsed and people started to That caused your
Speaker 1: out crisis of confidence about the right and then what
Speaker 1: causes and then what happened was so these retire Beanie Babies.
Speaker 1: I remember talking to one of the first collectors who
Speaker 1: was underway back from speaking in a Beanie Baby convention
Speaker 1: as a paid expert, you know, like a keynote speaker
Speaker 1: on beanie babies, and she was at the O'Hare airport
Speaker 1: and she saw a stack of beanie babies. There were
Speaker 1: still five dollars in the store. But we're retired, and
Speaker 1: this was like mind blow. I mean, people thought it
Speaker 1: was a law of physics that a retired beanie baby
Speaker 1: was worth more than five dollars and that that was
Speaker 1: just true. And uh, I mean, you know, kind of
Speaker 1: like you know, hoving prices don't go down. None of
Speaker 1: the models included that. None of their models include the
Speaker 1: idea that a retired beanie baby could conceivably still just
Speaker 1: be worth the retail price. Um. One of my favorite
Speaker 1: saying on Wall Street is that something becomes a bubble.
Speaker 1: Once the bubble bursts, anything else is a great trade, right,
Speaker 1: he just made tons of money. When you look around
Speaker 1: the world, it seems like we are continuously seeing warnings
Speaker 1: about bubbles again in tech, lots of other areas and
Speaker 1: financial markets. Having studied, uh, the science of stuffed animals,
Speaker 1: do you have any wisdom for how we can spot
Speaker 1: bubbles before they burst and before they burst? I think
Speaker 1: the thing, just behaviorally is that when wood is driving,
Speaker 1: it is entirely stories about how much money people have
Speaker 1: been making on it. That's something to be really concerned about.
Speaker 1: And I think any time you have a kind of
Speaker 1: surge of interest in new entrants into a field based
Speaker 1: on sort of past successes of other ones, there was
Speaker 1: a ton of that with the Internet bubble. You had
Speaker 1: legitimate companies go public first and then the next one
Speaker 1: you know, this is going to be the next that,
Speaker 1: and that was a piece of crap. So I think, well,
Speaker 1: to me, you know, to bring your point to the
Speaker 1: current era. You know, we've been hearing about a possible
Speaker 1: tech bubble for the last ten years. I mean, when
Speaker 1: Facebook was valued at a billion dollars, people said tech bubble,
Speaker 1: and now it's worth hundreds of times that. But I
Speaker 1: did see an ad on Instagram this week that was
Speaker 1: promising how to make your billion dollar app, like a
Speaker 1: service that would teach people how to make an app
Speaker 1: that would be worth a billion dollars, And that reminds
Speaker 1: me of like telling stories just about the money. It
Speaker 1: was like, is the next level of the euphoria. I
Speaker 1: always love those like JP Morgan Shoeshine Bobbie stories about bubble.
Speaker 1: So I think, I mean, I remember when I was
Speaker 1: in high school, my bus driver and this was dangerous
Speaker 1: because he was driving a bus full of kids, and
Speaker 1: he had to cell phones and he was flipping houses
Speaker 1: while he was driving, talking to his like real estate
Speaker 1: ass and his manager, and I just so I always
Speaker 1: look for things like that. I remember when that year
Speaker 1: at a summer job, we'd go to the pizza place
Speaker 1: and they would allo so while it was just a
Speaker 1: little pizza shop, and they would also have a rival
Speaker 1: financial network to Bloomberg on TV all the time. That
Speaker 1: was what the pizza guys were watching was CNBC rival network. Well,
Speaker 1: said Joe, you actually managed to make some money from
Speaker 1: internet stocks. How did you time it? Because it seems
Speaker 1: like the timing is key here. Lots of people did
Speaker 1: get rich off beanie babies, and lots of people got
Speaker 1: really poor. It was really it was the best luck
Speaker 1: I've ever had. I was trading through UM the basically
Speaker 1: Christmas break of two thousand and then I had to study.
Speaker 1: I studied abroad in Switzerland in the spring of two
Speaker 1: thousand and Before I left, I sold all my stocks
Speaker 1: because like, I'm not gonna be able to trade while
Speaker 1: I'm studying abroad. That it didn't seem plausible. And then
Speaker 1: the bubble birth while I was studying abroad, so out
Speaker 1: of pure luck with no insight, you need to craft
Speaker 1: that into a narrative about your own foresight. No, it
Speaker 1: was just the opposite. That's just pure luck. That just
Speaker 1: happened to sell like a couple of months before the peak,
Speaker 1: so that that worked out well. All right, So you
Speaker 1: made thousands off internet stocks and I made two bucks
Speaker 1: from a single beanie baby, but you got to cuddle it,
Speaker 1: so that's I'm not sure. Um, all right, Zach. It
Speaker 1: was lovely having you on the show. Thank you so much.
Speaker 1: This was fun. That's great, Thank you, all right, Joe.
Speaker 1: We just had a really interesting, entertaining conversation. What did
Speaker 1: you learn? I actually think my favorite single fact was
Speaker 1: that point about the magazine and the relationship between seeing
Speaker 1: prices written down and seeing prices move and then the
Speaker 1: effect that has on actual prices. I think that's a
Speaker 1: fascinating point, right. I just love the idea that this
Speaker 1: group of soccer moms in Chicago became market and tycoons,
Speaker 1: and I hadn't thought about that before, this idea of
Speaker 1: their being there needing to be a complete set of them, um,
Speaker 1: and so it sort of creates this inherent scarcity to
Speaker 1: them that drives up demand. That was an aspect of
Speaker 1: the beanie baby boom that I had not realized before.
Speaker 1: Artificial scarcity is a hot topic in economics right now.
Speaker 1: Maybe that's something for another podcast. This is Tracy Alloway.
Speaker 1: You can find me at Tracy Alloway on Twitter, and
Speaker 1: I'm Joe Wisenthal. Find me at The Stalwart on Twitter.
Speaker 1: And if you want to follow Zack, he's on Twitter
Speaker 1: too at Zach Pissinet. And thank you for listening to
Speaker 1: odd Locks. Tune Indective