Speaker 1: Oh bed of that air, no bed of Hello, and
Speaker 1: welcome to the show. This is the Cult of Conspiracy
Speaker 1: and my name is Jonathan, I'm Jacob and Jacob we're
Speaker 1: going to be talking about something very off the wall today, sir.
Speaker 2: Aren't we We are. We're gonna take a little blast
Speaker 2: of the past here.
Speaker 3: And before I even begin, I do want to apologize
Speaker 3: about my scratchy voice, still recovering from a weekend of
Speaker 3: screaming into Bautry. So just bury with me on the
Speaker 3: scratchy voice and all the things. So while I was
Speaker 3: out and about, going back and forth between Philly and
Speaker 3: d C. And on the drive home, you know, we
Speaker 3: were kind of chit chatting about toys from the past
Speaker 3: and some of the ones that are very remnant of
Speaker 3: our nineties childhood and all these things. Beanie babies came up,
Speaker 3: and you know, there was a whole connection between them
Speaker 3: and the death of Princess Diana. They even had like
Speaker 3: a special run beanie baby in honor of her.
Speaker 2: That was a whole thing. But you know that wasn't
Speaker 2: the craziest thing. You remember the Ferbie.
Speaker 1: Do you know, Jonathan, Oh yeah, dude, Ferbi's were awesome.
Speaker 1: What was it like ninety nine, two thousand, somewhere in there.
Speaker 2: Yeah, well, they originally came out in ninety eight.
Speaker 3: They didn't really take off till ninety nine, and then
Speaker 3: by the early two thousands they were the hottest toy.
Speaker 3: That's what kids were losing their shit over in the
Speaker 3: early or late nineties.
Speaker 2: Early two thousands.
Speaker 4: Always reminded me of a gremlin, those fucking things.
Speaker 2: Yes, yes, agreed. And I didn't know that they were
Speaker 2: so popular that they were even mentioned within President Bill
Speaker 2: Clinton's impeachment hearings.
Speaker 3: Why did they get a nod during that time? It
Speaker 3: doesn't fucking matter. The nineties were a wild wasteland when
Speaker 3: it comes to toys and capitalism and consumerism and all
Speaker 3: the ads in your face at all time. We're actually
Speaker 3: gonna be watching some of the old Ferbie commercials. Now,
Speaker 3: it's gonna take you back. But yeah, just wild things, right.
Speaker 1: But nostalgia with the nineties, dude, it really is. I mean,
Speaker 1: in the nineties anyway, for us.
Speaker 2: It's nostalgia.
Speaker 3: But even if you talk to our parents' generation, who
Speaker 3: were adults raising children in the nineties, they have their
Speaker 3: own form of nostalgia when it comes to the nineties.
Speaker 3: They remember, It's like we were as weird as that sounds.
Speaker 3: We were living in the same era but in different
Speaker 3: vanaged points. But there were certain keynotes that still resonate
Speaker 3: regardless of what generation you found yoursel if you were
Speaker 3: alive during the nineties, which I think is cool. But
Speaker 3: then as we were talking about the Ferby, I realized, yeah,
Speaker 3: I've heard a thing or two about them though, right
Speaker 3: the fact that like some people thought they were sentient,
Speaker 3: some people thought this was the first introduction into AI
Speaker 3: because they were able to respond to you and learn
Speaker 3: from you, and at the time, no toy was able
Speaker 3: to learn based off of sound or anything like that.
Speaker 2: When you first got the toy, you would start to
Speaker 2: hear it speak.
Speaker 3: In like a baby talk for lack of better words,
Speaker 3: little sounds and little things that didn't make sense, like
Speaker 3: a Pokemon. But after so long, it would start answering
Speaker 3: you in English and it would start responding to you
Speaker 3: in English, which means that it could learn. And that
Speaker 3: also means that it had a microphone that were in
Speaker 3: a recording device that was able to listen to you,
Speaker 3: take in what you were saying, and then give you
Speaker 3: something back, which is why the NSA, the Pentagon, the
Speaker 3: Navy Yard, multiple government buildings actually let out a lass
Speaker 3: saying that those devices were not allowed on those grounds. Yeah,
Speaker 3: the Ferby was banned from the Pentagon and the NSA building.
Speaker 4: Were these things made in China?
Speaker 2: No dot, Yeah, kinda kind of, but they were made
Speaker 2: from Hasbro, which is an American toy company.
Speaker 3: But we're gonna get into all of it. We're gonna
Speaker 3: get into all of it, good cult members today on
Speaker 3: the cult conspiracy. We are going to be taking a
Speaker 3: dive into the Ferbies. Where did they come from, how
Speaker 3: did they get so popular, what was all the craze about?
Speaker 3: And then how and why did they end up going
Speaker 3: on the blacklist for multiple government buildings. Was there any
Speaker 3: kernel of truth to it? Was it all a hoax?
Speaker 3: Did the government just not understand what they were talking about?
Speaker 3: Which that kind of lines up to a lot of
Speaker 3: other things too, But also the fact that the Ferbies
Speaker 3: were able to respond to you in your own language
Speaker 3: when they couldn't in the beginning, a lot of things,
Speaker 3: a lot of questions. Today, we're gonna be peeling back
Speaker 3: the layers on that little fur ball, which, for the record,
Speaker 3: is actually why it's called Ferby because it was called
Speaker 3: a fur ball while it was in the working phases
Speaker 3: of its name, and they just condense that down.
Speaker 2: To be Ferby.
Speaker 4: Makes sense.
Speaker 2: An interesting little tidbit. But yeah, we're going to be
Speaker 2: getting into all of it today.
Speaker 3: I got some clips, I got some commercials, I got
Speaker 3: some newscasts, I got some articles.
Speaker 2: We're going to be talking about it all.
Speaker 3: And if you would like to see what we're talking
Speaker 3: about today rather than just hear about it, Jonathan, where
Speaker 3: can they.
Speaker 1: Go Patreon dot com slash Cult of Conspiracy podcast. That
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Speaker 1: video content. We got kicked off of YouTube years ago.
Speaker 1: When we're not playing that fucking pony game anymore. We
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Speaker 4: And saying whatever is on our mind.
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Speaker 4: Okay.
Speaker 1: We want to be able to say vaccine injured. Okay,
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Speaker 1: a night at nine pm Central and the Cult member
Speaker 1: live shows are unhinged to say the very least. But
Speaker 1: to be fair, the most valuable thing that most people
Speaker 1: find the most valuable is that the shows are completely Yeah, dude,
Speaker 1: kick them nasty ads and come boogie with us every
Speaker 1: Tuesday night on the live shows. Let's just get weird.
Speaker 1: You want to be a fly on the wall. You
Speaker 1: want to be able to insert your two cents. Maybe
Speaker 1: you just want to jot it down in the message
Speaker 1: board because you don't want your voice heard. That's totally fine.
Speaker 1: Everybody has a little semblance of camera shyedness.
Speaker 4: I mean it all.
Speaker 1: It started even with us. I mean, I felt very
Speaker 1: weird even saying my name over the mic. I was like, dude,
Speaker 1: saying my name feels weird.
Speaker 4: You ever felt that?
Speaker 3: For the longest time, I hated the sound of my
Speaker 3: own voice on the mic. It took me a while
Speaker 3: to get used to it.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, because we try not to be self centered.
Speaker 1: There's a little bit of a pulling back of that.
Speaker 1: But either way, look, if you enjoy these shows, we
Speaker 1: appreciate all the help that we can get.
Speaker 2: We do this full time, and uh, we appreciate you
Speaker 2: and love you indeed. So now let's start off with
Speaker 2: a little blast in the past. Let's talk some commercials.
Speaker 2: This was on your television back when that was still
Speaker 2: a thing people watched rather than all the apps on
Speaker 2: your rokup or fire sticks.
Speaker 4: Right, so now let's go back we're talking.
Speaker 2: Nineteen ninety eight, and let's watch some of these Ferbie commercials.
Speaker 2: And this actually is a cool video. We're not gonna
Speaker 2: watch the entire thing.
Speaker 3: We're gonna stop somewhere around like eight twenty twelve, something
Speaker 3: like that, because the Ferbies took on some new iterations
Speaker 3: in the twenty teens that, to be honest with you,
Speaker 3: they never really caught the same lightning in a jar
Speaker 3: factor that they did from the late nineties early two thousands.
Speaker 3: I will even give you into the late two thousands,
Speaker 3: but it's nice.
Speaker 1: It just reminds me of Pokemon, Like as soon as
Speaker 1: they started making seventh, eighth, ninth, generation of all these
Speaker 1: new Pokemon.
Speaker 4: I don't know who the fuck they are.
Speaker 1: I know the the original ones and maybe even the
Speaker 1: second generation some of those, But you start, what is
Speaker 1: there like fucking twenty thousand different Pokemon? Now I can't
Speaker 1: keep up with all that shit.
Speaker 2: I can't remember that dog, I just can't. But yes,
Speaker 2: to that point, the nineties were a wild time the
Speaker 2: toy industry.
Speaker 3: Plus the amount of technology that was readily available right now.
Speaker 3: I don't just mean computer systems. I mean the fact
Speaker 3: that the Tamagatchi was a thing. Yeah, right again. And
Speaker 3: that's also that was the inspiration behind the Ferbie. So
Speaker 3: the two creators, and we're gonna learn more about them later,
Speaker 3: they went to a big toy convention. One of them
Speaker 3: was a navy veteran, the other one had a little
Speaker 3: bit of an engineering background. They didn't even really have
Speaker 3: any gumption to become toy manufacturers or creators or any
Speaker 3: of that.
Speaker 2: They they were idea guys, you know, which is cool.
Speaker 3: They go to a toy convention and they saw the Tamagatchi,
Speaker 3: which later the Giga pet, which was the American knockoff version,
Speaker 3: which wasn't as good but was like a third the cost.
Speaker 3: But neither here nor there. They saw the Tamagatchi and
Speaker 3: they thought this was the greatest toy to ever be invented. Ever,
Speaker 3: keep in mind, the beanie Baby was hot at that time.
Speaker 3: So you had the beanie Baby, which was basically just
Speaker 3: like a bean bag plush toy, which is really cute
Speaker 3: and really soft in all the things, which we could
Speaker 3: do a whole episode about the manufactured drawl for that one.
Speaker 3: Come to find out, everybody thought this one beanie Baby
Speaker 3: was so rare. They believed that because it was manufactured,
Speaker 3: like the story of how rare they were or manufactured.
Speaker 3: Although the store you might have might only have one
Speaker 3: of these little teddy bears, the store once stayed over's
Speaker 3: got forty thousand of them. Meanwhile they're telling you that
Speaker 3: this butterfly they've only got one of. Meanwhile the store
Speaker 3: you're in has forty thousand. It was manufactured supplying to man,
Speaker 3: which we'll get to that another time with time Warner
Speaker 3: beside the point. So when it came to these creators,
Speaker 3: they saw the Tamagotchi massively successful, and it's a pet
Speaker 3: that you never have to we have to either constantly
Speaker 3: care for it or it will die. Meanwhile, you have
Speaker 3: the beanie baby that you could pet, but it does it.
Speaker 3: It's not interactive. They were like, wait a minute, what if?
Speaker 3: What if we combined these two things.
Speaker 2: An interactive toy that you have to play with in
Speaker 2: order to make it work, plus soft and lovable that
Speaker 2: you want to snuggle up with. Therefore, the birth of
Speaker 2: the ferbie, it was incredible.
Speaker 4: Let's get weird, dude.
Speaker 1: And I will say, like even like my daughter, you know,
Speaker 1: she's a little too old for it now, but whenever
Speaker 1: she was more youthful, she was like crazy about the
Speaker 1: You ever seen those baby alives?
Speaker 4: Oh yeah, like you.
Speaker 1: Have to change their diapers and feed them and stuff
Speaker 1: like that. I feel like a lot of those kind
Speaker 1: of toys really stem from the Tamagatchi and the furbie
Speaker 1: and you know, taking care and interacting with you know
Speaker 1: what I mean, like with your toy.
Speaker 5: Yeah.
Speaker 3: I think there's a lot to be said for that, honestly,
Speaker 3: And because parents loved it, because it was a pet
Speaker 3: that you didn't have to actually clean up after, or
Speaker 3: actually spend money on to feed, or bring it to
Speaker 3: the vet or any of these things. They were thinking Oh,
Speaker 3: it's gonna teach my kid responsibility. It's gonna do this,
Speaker 3: and there's no skin off my nose. It's a one
Speaker 3: time payment of ten dollars, twenty dollars, thirty, whatever the
Speaker 3: case was, and like, that's all I gotta do, and
Speaker 3: it will keep these kids entertained for hours and maybe
Speaker 3: teach them responsibility.
Speaker 2: Oh, sign me up. The Ferbie was seen as almost that,
Speaker 2: so they saw it as an inherent good thing. But
Speaker 2: the Ferbie, the more you interacted with it, the more
Speaker 2: things it would learn. And for the late nineties that
Speaker 2: was unheard of. There was no toy that was going
Speaker 2: to be learning based off of how much you interacted
Speaker 2: with it. It came with I think it was like twelve
Speaker 2: different language models that it had in it. And it
Speaker 2: started off all speaking this language called Furbish, which was
Speaker 2: kind of the goo goo gaga sounds that it would make,
Speaker 2: and it was whatever. But the more you interacted with it, it
Speaker 2: had a combination of English, Japanese, French, German, Swedish, Italian,
Speaker 2: Mandarin I'm trying to remember.
Speaker 3: It was like a whole lot of languages, and the
Speaker 3: more you talk to it, the more it would pick
Speaker 3: up on whatever language you were speaking to it, and
Speaker 3: it would start responding to you in your language.
Speaker 4: Imagine that was bilingual.
Speaker 1: You know, you got a little a little Portuguese, a
Speaker 1: little English going on in there.
Speaker 3: Oh yeah, oh yeah. So that's the thing. Was it
Speaker 3: actually learning from us? And if that's the case, could
Speaker 3: this be the first reference to a at home AI model?
Speaker 3: And is that possibly the reason why the NSA and
Speaker 3: the Pentagon in the Navy Yard and all these government
Speaker 3: buildings banned it from their property.
Speaker 2: We're gonna talk about it all. So let's go back
Speaker 2: and watch get a nostalgic with us good cult members,
Speaker 2: and remember what the Furby was when it first came out.
Speaker 2: These are commercials from nineteen ninety eight.
Speaker 6: What's Ferby? The first Geeka peg? He teaches to say
Speaker 6: her name, Play games.
Speaker 2: I Love You.
Speaker 7: You, par and Game Mine.
Speaker 3: I should also mention it was very crazy how the
Speaker 3: Ferbies could interact with each other. You remember seeing that
Speaker 3: if you got two Ferbies facing each other, they would
Speaker 3: start speaking Furbish to each other. That little thing on
Speaker 3: their forehead was actually like an infrared layer that would
Speaker 3: pick up on each other and they would start communicating,
Speaker 3: which some would say, yeah, that was just it was
Speaker 3: like a mode that was just the thing to make
Speaker 3: you think, Wow, it's so cool, and that's all it was.
Speaker 3: Some would say that was it giving the information that
Speaker 3: it had acquired from your house to that ferby. That
Speaker 3: Ferby was giving it the information it acquire from your house. Basically,
Speaker 3: think of all the Alexises meeting up and sharing all
Speaker 3: the info about what they learned in your kitchen, like
Speaker 3: almost like bluetooth kind of like but for the principle
Speaker 3: of spying.
Speaker 4: Who knows makes sense.
Speaker 1: Those things are fucking creepy, though, dude, I never wanted
Speaker 1: one of those things.
Speaker 3: Oh dude, I say, I never owned one, but a
Speaker 3: lot of my neighbors did. A lot of my homies did.
Speaker 3: One of my cousins did. And it was so annoying
Speaker 3: because it would just randomly start singing and talking and
Speaker 3: ship in the middle of the night. The only way
Speaker 3: to make it shut up was either a rip the
Speaker 3: batteries out of it or b throw like a beanie
Speaker 3: over the entire thing, or throw a pillow over it.
Speaker 3: Because it could pick up on motion, it could pick
Speaker 3: up on sound, it could pick up on light. So
Speaker 3: the only way to make it really go to sleep
Speaker 3: for good. Was just to take the batteries out. And
Speaker 3: then there's also reports of these things working even after
Speaker 3: the batteries were out of them, so.
Speaker 4: Of course there is. Yeah, it makes sense.
Speaker 3: All right, Let's keep watching these commercials. Some of them
Speaker 3: get wild.
Speaker 1: And can you just imagine waking up in the middle
Speaker 1: of the night and that thing is like crawling towards
Speaker 1: you see.
Speaker 3: So it didn't walk, thankfully, but it would rock back
Speaker 3: and forth and shit, and it would dance his little
Speaker 3: ears of move and all of that.
Speaker 4: But again, the more you play with it, the more
Speaker 4: it does.
Speaker 2: That was the whole big thing.
Speaker 3: The more you talk to it, the more you play
Speaker 3: with it, the more it learns, and the more interactive
Speaker 3: it was.
Speaker 2: It was marketed as not just a toy. It was
Speaker 2: marketed as a friend, as a pet that you didn't
Speaker 2: have to actually feed, that would never die. That all
Speaker 2: it was.
Speaker 3: It was seen as just this marvel of technology meets
Speaker 3: entertainment and meets children's market.
Speaker 2: It was wild times, brother. So that was ninety eight
Speaker 2: when it first came out. Now, let's watch some of
Speaker 2: these commercials from nineteen ninety nine about the.
Speaker 8: Ferby Let's play Ruby says.
Speaker 4: Plays with you each other took on.
Speaker 8: Ferby each sold separately.
Speaker 4: Battery's not included.
Speaker 7: Ak At Coco.
Speaker 4: That very speaks Furbish and.
Speaker 3: English too, so there was a Furbish to English dictionary,
Speaker 3: and you would have to learn what some of these
Speaker 3: phrases were.
Speaker 4: Now.
Speaker 3: For instance, there was one phrase that was do o
Speaker 3: lo ot or something like that, and it was taken
Speaker 3: basically as an amalgamation of Mandarin and Hebrew and Italian
Speaker 3: and all of.
Speaker 2: These things, basically meaning big light up, which is what
Speaker 2: it would say whenever the sun would come up.
Speaker 1: Dude, how about like the Ferbie rate there got the
Speaker 1: little laser or the little monitoring device Rate on his
Speaker 1: third eye. Yep, it's like, well, it's it's literally the
Speaker 1: all seeing eye exactly.
Speaker 2: And then you could look inside of that and see
Speaker 2: the little infrared.
Speaker 3: Some might said it was a camera, some said it
Speaker 3: was a you know, motion detector. Some said it was
Speaker 3: a like a photo photo. I basically could tell if
Speaker 3: the room had the lights turned on or something like that.
Speaker 3: There's sources to say all of these things and so
Speaker 3: much more. But later, as a matter of fact, I
Speaker 3: have a video where these people are breaking apart a
Speaker 3: Ferbi and you get to see the internals to see
Speaker 3: what it actually has on the inside.
Speaker 1: But it's very cool, which is interesting too because even
Speaker 1: whenever its eyes are closed, they can still see, you
Speaker 1: know what I'm saying, Like, there is no putt in
Speaker 1: that thing to sleep.
Speaker 4: That third eyes always all the way open.
Speaker 2: There was no off switch. There was no off switch
Speaker 2: to these ferbies.
Speaker 3: So to your point, yes, just because the eyes are
Speaker 3: closed and it hasn't had any interaction in a couple
Speaker 3: of years, as soon as the lights would come on
Speaker 3: in front of it, it would open its eyes. Ferby,
Speaker 3: you like, do the whole thing. There's actually a report
Speaker 3: which we're gonna get into later. This one chick claims
Speaker 3: that a Ferbie almost killed her boyfriend.
Speaker 2: How did this happen?
Speaker 3: You might ask this one time shot of ferbicide, if
Speaker 3: you will.
Speaker 2: Basically, this Ferbi was.
Speaker 3: Left in a storage shed, mini warehouse, whatever the case was.
Speaker 3: Homeboy goes in and starts getting through some of his
Speaker 3: old boxes stuff, puts it in his car whatever. He's
Speaker 3: on the drive home and the Ferbie behind him starts
Speaker 3: loudly screaming and like making noises, which again he hadn't
Speaker 3: seen this thing in years, well because it was an
Speaker 3: original Ferbi and there's no off switch. If there's enough
Speaker 3: juice in the batteries, as soon as that things seeds
Speaker 3: light or motion, it.
Speaker 2: Will kick back on. And it scared the shit out
Speaker 2: of him so bad he almost ran off the road
Speaker 2: and hit a tree. He didn't. He survived, But yeah,
Speaker 2: that's a case anyway. Wild things. But yeah, the Furbish
Speaker 2: to English dictionary that you had there, there's also websites
Speaker 2: dedicated to this day of Furbish to whatever language translations.
Speaker 2: It's pretty hilarious. Fandoms go hard, you.
Speaker 4: Know, they do, they do.
Speaker 1: Yeah, And the fact that like people still know what
Speaker 1: a Furby is because I think they're still making them, aren't.
Speaker 3: They They are, I should get the caveat. These things
Speaker 3: are weird. It's called the long Ferby. Think of a
Speaker 3: body pillow that's like the size of your thigh that
Speaker 3: has a Ferby face on it. But the rest of
Speaker 3: it is just they keep trying to make it weirder
Speaker 3: and weirder. They also came out with the Ferbi minies,
Speaker 3: the Ferbie Babies Shelby, which is like a little crab
Speaker 3: like Ferby. They kept trying to do more iterations to
Speaker 3: keep it alive. They have never been able to get
Speaker 3: the fandom that they had in the late nineties and
Speaker 3: early two thousands. By about the mid to late two thousands,
Speaker 3: the craze have been over.
Speaker 2: It was done.
Speaker 3: But they still sold like ninety million Furbies within the
Speaker 3: first two years of them existing in America. Keep in mind,
Speaker 3: there's only three hundred and sixty million Americans at this time,
Speaker 3: so pretty much a third of all Americans bought one
Speaker 3: of these bitches.
Speaker 1: I imagine there were collections going on for sure, just
Speaker 1: like the Beanie babies and whatnot.
Speaker 2: Oh yes, oh yes.
Speaker 3: And as a matter of fact, some people got very
Speaker 3: creative with what they did with those Ferbies after the fact.
Speaker 3: One guy even made a organ out of like a
Speaker 3: pipe organ.
Speaker 2: We're gonna watch him play that in a bit.
Speaker 1: But anyway, dude here, I don't know if you heard,
Speaker 1: and this has nothing to do with the Ferby. Did
Speaker 1: you hear that the penny has been discontinued?
Speaker 3: Just talked about that on the Cage and Night. Dude,
Speaker 3: So Philadelphia, where I just was. We even passed by
Speaker 3: the Philadelphia Mint. I didn't We didn't try to go
Speaker 3: inside or anything.
Speaker 2: We were on the road.
Speaker 3: And you know that I'm a penny collector, and like,
Speaker 3: I love this entire thing.
Speaker 2: The pe on a.
Speaker 3: Penny or on any of your coinage means Philadelphia. There's
Speaker 3: three main mints in the United States, Philadelphia, Denver, and
Speaker 3: San Francisco. And now they are doing away with the
Speaker 3: penny because a it costs like ten times the amount
Speaker 3: to make, and b they're just doing away with that
Speaker 3: small unit of currency, which, to be fair, the Euro
Speaker 3: has done that for years and years. There's no such
Speaker 3: thing as a Euro percentage coin. That is, at the
Speaker 3: one everything is to the nickel and the dime. Even
Speaker 3: their taxes are like rounded up or down to the
Speaker 3: nickel or the dime. So now pennies are going by
Speaker 3: the wayside the United States, which on one hand, as
Speaker 3: a collector of pennies, my most valuable is the steel
Speaker 3: penny from San Francisco from nineteen forty three because during
Speaker 3: the World War Two they stopped making pennies with copper.
Speaker 3: They made with steel for one year, but neither here
Speaker 3: nor there. I do love the collection in the history
Speaker 3: behind it, So on one hand, I'm very sad.
Speaker 2: Right. On the other hand, my collection's value is about
Speaker 2: to fuck in skyrocket, So it's a bittersweet.
Speaker 1: And the thing is is that you know you're still
Speaker 1: going to be able to use them, they're just not
Speaker 1: making them anymore. So I think they said that there's
Speaker 1: somewhere around like four hundred and fifty billion pennies out
Speaker 1: in circulation or something like that right now. And to
Speaker 1: be honest, most people just throw away pennies nowadays, you know,
Speaker 1: like because they're so literally valueless. But so the penny,
Speaker 1: it wasn't ten times as much, it was three. It
Speaker 1: cost three point seven cents to make a penny, and
Speaker 1: it came up out it make any damn sense, especially
Speaker 1: with inflation, even the dollar is I would imagine not
Speaker 1: that far away, you know what I'm saying.
Speaker 3: The nickel, look at what the overhead is to make
Speaker 3: a nickel. There was one of them that was like
Speaker 3: ten times the amount. Meanwhile, the dime is like like
Speaker 3: six cents to make a dime. So they're actually making
Speaker 3: money while making money. But the nickel and the penny
Speaker 3: were like, oh it was it was costing too much.
Speaker 4: The nickel costs fourteen cents.
Speaker 2: To make excuse me, Yeah, am here three times the
Speaker 2: amount that's definitely coming up then, yeah, I mean maybe,
Speaker 2: or they'll just start using cheaper materials or remodeling what
Speaker 2: the nickel is because it's a thicker coin, right, so
Speaker 2: if you were to make that smaller in diameter and
Speaker 2: less thick, if you would need less materials it, you know,
Speaker 2: we'll see how you go.
Speaker 1: Just bring back the fifty cent piece, make that a
Speaker 1: more common thing.
Speaker 3: I agree, I agree, but I mean even still, how
Speaker 3: many people are carrying around loose change these days?
Speaker 2: Everything's digital?
Speaker 4: Yeah? A good point.
Speaker 2: Anyway, all right, so back to the Ferby. Let's continue
Speaker 2: may take come.
Speaker 8: Crazy Ferby each sold separately.
Speaker 4: Battery's not included.
Speaker 2: Again, Oh this was cool. This is when they came
Speaker 2: out with their gizmo from uh from Grimlins uh model
Speaker 2: of the Ferbie because a lot of people thought it
Speaker 2: was a Grimlins thing. It was never even intended to
Speaker 2: look like that.
Speaker 3: So then they realized, look, why don't we just lean
Speaker 3: into this and make a run of gizmo Ferbi's And
Speaker 3: this was the commercial to promote that product.
Speaker 2: Check this out?
Speaker 7: What is this?
Speaker 4: So that's my Ferbie talking to.
Speaker 2: Grandpa?
Speaker 8: Thank you?
Speaker 9: He's a wise guy.
Speaker 2: But remember, I know, I know, he's bright light.
Speaker 4: Never feed him after midnight.
Speaker 6: Gizmo, that'll be your best friend.
Speaker 2: Grimlins Interactive gizmo Ferbi sold separately, batteries not included. Interactive gizmo.
Speaker 4: That's actually a cool idea.
Speaker 3: Oh, I think it's a great marketing idea. If nothing else,
Speaker 3: lean into it. They're already saying that it looks like
Speaker 3: a Grimlin, So why not make a little little little
Speaker 3: merger happen and make some more doll hairs out of it.
Speaker 4: I'm down literal doll hairs.
Speaker 2: Yeah right, anyway, let's keep going. Bro, Look at the
Speaker 2: computer monitor on that office desk.
Speaker 4: That thing is massive. The nineties were just wild, dude.
Speaker 1: In those computers were the ship I believe. Isn't that
Speaker 1: the the old Mac? The old Max were made that way?
Speaker 2: Yeah? The Mac and that's an old Yeah. I went
Speaker 2: to Mac back then.
Speaker 4: It was a Macintosh. Yeah yeah, yeah.
Speaker 3: You've ever seen the Zoolander. That's the one where he
Speaker 3: like the files are in the computer. It was this
Speaker 3: ma massive screen he like threw down to break it apart.
Speaker 4: Uh no, actually I've never seen Zoolander.
Speaker 3: Oh fuck, I don't even know what we're doing here. Bro,
Speaker 3: it's a ridiculous movie. But like that's the point. But yeah,
Speaker 3: it's just look at all the colors, the people, what
Speaker 3: they're wearing and ship. The nineties were just they were
Speaker 3: an era.
Speaker 1: It's it's those computers always reminded me of the Game
Speaker 1: Boy color, because you know the Game Boy color. Some
Speaker 1: of them would be like that see through kind of plastic.
Speaker 2: Yeah, dude, yes, indeed, all right, let's keep going.
Speaker 4: Plus stuff the office a quiet slumber party more because
Speaker 4: each one talks to another one. All new Ferbies each
Speaker 4: sold separately. Batteries not included.
Speaker 1: That's that bullshit. Whenever the batteries aren't included, I'm like, dude,
Speaker 1: just throw in.
Speaker 3: Some dollar batn't you can't take the money from the
Speaker 3: battery manufacturers, dude. Dura Cel even had a whole commercial
Speaker 3: with Ferbies next to it talk about how they keep
Speaker 3: going and going makes sense.
Speaker 1: Yeah, probably Energizer too, with the Energizer bunny. That that
Speaker 1: would actually make more sense.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I don't know what that was about. The Dura
Speaker 3: Cell commercial. It was like a cartoon bunny. It wasn't
Speaker 3: the Energizer bunny, but that was also back when they
Speaker 3: had their own ad wars going on.
Speaker 4: But anyway, all right.
Speaker 3: So now we're skipping ahead to two thousand to watch
Speaker 3: some of these Ferby commercials.
Speaker 2: Check this shit out.
Speaker 7: Is it?
Speaker 2: Is it a boy?
Speaker 10: Congratulations baby, Serby baby whoop. They're more talking it good
Speaker 10: farm mark me love, more surprising, I got more unpredictable,
Speaker 10: more amazing.
Speaker 2: Nasty, blind line, long line, next amazing generation is born
Speaker 2: new Ferby babies.
Speaker 9: You never know what they'll say. You still, secondly, that
Speaker 9: is not what gooded.
Speaker 3: So you could see here that the the traverse of time.
Speaker 3: And also some of these commercials were so fucking cheddar
Speaker 3: cheesy it's actually kind of impressive in its own weird way.
Speaker 3: But yeah, yeah, so that was when the Ferby Babies
Speaker 3: came out in the year two thousand.
Speaker 10: Yeah.
Speaker 1: I was looking up because I was like, all right,
Speaker 1: I have an idea about where, like what channel these
Speaker 1: commercials were airing on normally the network, Yeah, normally, you know,
Speaker 1: you would have Disney. Disney only usually played their own shit, right,
Speaker 1: like their own commercials and stuff.
Speaker 3: I remember when they first played it was like a
Speaker 3: Caprice Son commercial that was on Disney, but it was
Speaker 3: like super Disney esque and it said brought to you
Speaker 3: by Caprice at the very end, and they moved on,
Speaker 3: but to your yeah, one hundred percent Disney only on
Speaker 3: the play commercials that promoted.
Speaker 2: Disney shit on the Disney channel. That was it.
Speaker 4: I mean, look, if you can make your money that way,
Speaker 4: then go right ahead, you know. But yeah, I looked
Speaker 4: it up.
Speaker 1: Ferbie commercials originally aired on channels like Nickelodeon and in
Speaker 1: specific regions, they were also shown on local channels such
Speaker 1: as y TV and in Canadia in Canadia in Canada
Speaker 1: and various channels in the UK, Australia and Spain. So
Speaker 1: it says the Ferbie commercials in particular were likely broadcast
Speaker 1: in these regions around two thousand and six.
Speaker 4: There we go, two thousand and six.
Speaker 3: So talking about that, here's some commercials from two thousand
Speaker 3: and five.
Speaker 10: Hey, hey, yeah, shoot me day tell me joke, not heyvy,
Speaker 10: what sun me?
Speaker 8: No miss with new Ferbie.
Speaker 4: No, you never know what's gonna happen. You just gotta.
Speaker 10: Say why I love you.
Speaker 2: Fer me He sold separately. Batteries not included. You can
Speaker 2: find more fun at haf dot com. That's compared first.
Speaker 1: So you can see also they stop being so damn creepy.
Speaker 1: They smaller, They made the eyes a little smaller.
Speaker 3: They made the eyes a little smaller. The mallets weren't
Speaker 3: like beaks. They were a rubber and they kind of
Speaker 3: give a little grin or a little frown either way.
Speaker 3: They had a little bit more expressive faces at this time,
Speaker 3: and they got a little different on the sizes. The
Speaker 3: ears were at a different pitch. They started to kind
Speaker 3: of shift it a bit to better suit the market.
Speaker 3: And again you could clearly see a difference between the
Speaker 3: two thousand and five Furbies and the nineteen ninety eight Ferbies,
Speaker 3: but still owned by the same company, Tiger down here,
Speaker 3: which was bought out by Hasbro.
Speaker 1: Sod Whenever you're watching these, does it like make you
Speaker 1: feel like you're a kid again, and looking at it
Speaker 1: through those that lens.
Speaker 2: You get the nostalgia vibe? You absolutely do. Yes. Indeed,
Speaker 2: let's keep going. Okay, now we're jumping to twenty twelve,
Speaker 2: which is.
Speaker 4: Where introducing Ferby from.
Speaker 3: This is where it starts to get a little wild,
Speaker 3: And this is where I think, really and truly they
Speaker 3: were going out of their way to try to bring
Speaker 3: in as much of that lightning in a bottle as
Speaker 3: they could from the original Ferby twenty twelve, they now
Speaker 3: had an app that you could use to interact with
Speaker 3: your Ferbi. It had digital eyes and the whole thing.
Speaker 3: But again, this is where they really started to taper off.
Speaker 3: I honestly don't even know any human being that bought these.
Speaker 3: I'm sure they sold, I don't know any of them.
Speaker 3: But this is this is pretty much where it falls off.
Speaker 3: Let's check it out.
Speaker 11: It has bro Ferby has a mind of its own,
Speaker 11: and you shape its personality by the way you play.
Speaker 11: There are lots of things that you can do with
Speaker 11: your Ferby. Ferby's reactions are unpredictable, so you'll never know
Speaker 11: how it will behave when you tickle it, pet it,
Speaker 11: oh tilt, tie hold, pull its tail, turn it upside down,
Speaker 11: or shake it. Ferby loves to dance. It recognizes music
Speaker 11: and will begin to dance along and reacts when you
Speaker 11: speak to it.
Speaker 4: Hi Ferby ok te.
Speaker 11: You can feed Ferby either with your finger or with
Speaker 11: the Ferby app, available for free download at the App Store.
Speaker 4: Haha.
Speaker 11: Use the free Ferby app to translate Furbish to English.
Speaker 5: Like you funny.
Speaker 11: To learn more, go online to find the Furbish Dictionary
Speaker 11: at Ferby dot com and remember each of the things
Speaker 11: that you do with Ferby shape its personality me change.
Speaker 1: So you know what's interesting is that that it almost
Speaker 1: sounds like a little minion And I was just living
Speaker 1: up like when the first Despicable of Me came out
Speaker 1: twenty ten, so right before this, I will almost wonder
Speaker 1: if there was a little bit of connection there.
Speaker 3: If nothing else, the people that revitalized the Ferbie or
Speaker 3: at least attempted to, I could see them trying to
Speaker 3: take their notes from the Despicable Me movies, because the
Speaker 3: meanings made that movie what it was. Honestly, without the meanings,
Speaker 3: that movie pretty much sucks. Like take the minions out
Speaker 3: of it, take all their little antics away and want
Speaker 3: to be genius, adopts three girls. Nothing weird or suspicious
Speaker 3: about that, Uh, to try to use them to sell
Speaker 3: cookies to get out a bad guy who stole from him.
Speaker 3: And then in the end he keeps the girls like
Speaker 3: without the minions, that's really fucked.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it actually is, now that you say that, I
Speaker 1: never put that together.
Speaker 3: I don't like to be the one to point these
Speaker 3: things out. But honestly, without the Minions, the Despicable Me
Speaker 3: franchise is pretty much dog shit. But that's why they
Speaker 3: lean more heavily into it and release the Minions movies
Speaker 3: and stuff after. But to your point, you could definitely
Speaker 3: see with the twenty twelve Ferbi how they might have
Speaker 3: taken some notes from the.
Speaker 4: Minions and the success of Despicable.
Speaker 2: Me for sure.
Speaker 4: Influence for sure. Yeah.
Speaker 3: So now let's go into the brief history of the
Speaker 3: Ferbie And as a matter of fact, we got the
Speaker 3: news was reporting on Ferbi's back in this timeframe. There's
Speaker 3: actually two different news clips. One of them is from
Speaker 3: when they first released and the other one is from
Speaker 3: when they got banned from government buildings and some of
Speaker 3: the suspicious behaviors surrounding that. Let's watch this together.
Speaker 12: Christmas shopping came early to Tyson's Corner today. Long lines
Speaker 12: of people waited in line to snap up the latest
Speaker 12: raging toys, the adorable Ferbie.
Speaker 2: Box.
Speaker 12: Five's David Burnett reports the little furbies literally spoke for themselves.
Speaker 13: Ferbies made their Tysons Corner debut at ten am and
Speaker 13: when the doors opened, the lines were already long.
Speaker 2: It'll make a great Christmas present come December when all
Speaker 2: my kid wants one.
Speaker 4: I've got it hidden.
Speaker 2: That's why they came early.
Speaker 4: I've been here two hours.
Speaker 2: Is it worth the wait?
Speaker 4: Not for me, but I think it will be for them.
Speaker 7: I think they're gonna be hard to find. I got
Speaker 7: the grain on the brown eyes.
Speaker 4: How come my little boy has brown eyes?
Speaker 2: And hopefully he'll like this? What's a furbee? Anyway?
Speaker 10: If they talk, they winter after.
Speaker 4: You can play with them.
Speaker 13: The kids can play with them, my niece.
Speaker 2: And my nephew.
Speaker 8: No, she's fibbing.
Speaker 2: She's get it for herself.
Speaker 13: Ferby has a vocabulary of two hundred words, initially speaking
Speaker 13: its own Furbish language, but eventually learning English and playing games.
Speaker 2: This is a four stage development.
Speaker 14: The first stage is you get to know your your Ferby,
Speaker 14: and he gets to know you when you learn how
Speaker 14: to play games. But it won't die.
Speaker 7: It won't die.
Speaker 14: It will not die.
Speaker 2: Whether it has channel five.
Speaker 14: Ye, it just hosted like the batteries on low. Just
Speaker 14: change the batteries. But it didn't have a dog.
Speaker 2: You see again?
Speaker 4: Did you hear that? Which means.
Speaker 2: You've got a cold?
Speaker 5: Not?
Speaker 2: Everyone, though, is buying you didn't buy one.
Speaker 13: No, I wouldn't stand in that line for anything in
Speaker 13: the world, or for a talking doll. Yeah no, But
Speaker 13: even she had to admit that her six year old
Speaker 13: may soon be demanding a Ferbie, which she knows will
Speaker 13: bring her back to the.
Speaker 6: Store and she'll say, how ben running Now.
Speaker 13: Just the kind of nudge toy makers are hoping for.
Speaker 13: From Tyson's corner. David Burnett, Fox.
Speaker 9: Five News, I'm about to say how silly until I
Speaker 9: saw the darn thing.
Speaker 2: Talk when I think of that.
Speaker 12: Yeah, marketing, So how much will it cost to make
Speaker 12: this holiday at Ferby one? Ferby retails at twenty nine
Speaker 12: ninety nine.
Speaker 9: All right, you can get your hands on one.
Speaker 8: That's the thing chill in the air.
Speaker 9: I guess that's why we're talking about holiday gifts already.
Speaker 3: And all right, so now we're going to skip over
Speaker 3: to this article to learn more about this, uh well,
Speaker 3: the controversy surrounding the Ferbs.
Speaker 4: Basically the la boo boos of nineteen ninety eight.
Speaker 2: Uh yeah, that's a way of looking at it. Switching
Speaker 2: tonight over the We're gonna read that one a second. Yeah, Basically,
Speaker 2: they the litle booboos of their day and age.
Speaker 3: But I think the Boo Boos are more closely connected
Speaker 3: to the beanie babies, right, because the Boo Boos aren't
Speaker 3: as interactive in all of these things the furbies.
Speaker 2: You heard what he was saying. It learns from you.
Speaker 3: It starts speaking its own language, but the more you
Speaker 3: play with it, it learns your language, and we'll start
Speaker 3: responding in English.
Speaker 2: Bro.
Speaker 3: In ninety eight and ninety nine, nobody had some shit
Speaker 3: like that on on the shelves for children to play with.
Speaker 4: That was wild, dude.
Speaker 1: Toy makers were the shit in the eighties and nineties,
Speaker 1: you know, And you think about like even the the
Speaker 1: Burger King versus McDonald's Happy Meal toy like war that
Speaker 1: that that they had going on. We used to go
Speaker 1: back and forth and they were just getting bigger and
Speaker 1: bigger and bigger and more awesome, and we were like,
Speaker 1: you know, it brought you to almost become addicted to
Speaker 1: the disgusting, fucking horrible food for your health because maybe
Speaker 1: you wanted to collect and you know, and then the
Speaker 1: whole monopoly thing popped off, and I think they're stood
Speaker 1: on the monopoly thing now. But yeah, it's it's pretty
Speaker 1: interesting these little gimmicks.
Speaker 2: To that point.
Speaker 3: Ferby was at one point released in Happy meals, and
Speaker 3: so you had people that were going for the rare
Speaker 3: collectible ones, which again, who said that they were rare,
Speaker 3: Who said that they were collectible, doesn't matter. They heard
Speaker 3: about it on some internet forum somewhere, right, So you
Speaker 3: had people that were going in and buying twelve Happy
Speaker 3: meals just to get the toy out and basically dumping
Speaker 3: the food on the floor because they didn't even care
Speaker 3: about that.
Speaker 2: McDonald's had a strict policy.
Speaker 3: You cannot buy just the toy, you have to buy
Speaker 3: the entire happy meal. So these people were doing everything
Speaker 3: they could to collect every single Ferbi that McDonald's had offered,
Speaker 3: which we're gonna see a picture of one of those
Speaker 3: McDonald's Ferby's in a minute. They are nowhere near what
Speaker 3: an actual Ferby was, but it didn't matter.
Speaker 4: The collection must be complete kind of thing.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's kind of like just reminds me of Veruka
Speaker 1: and her dad from Wonka, right, yes, like not eating
Speaker 1: the chocolate, just like getting all these workers to try
Speaker 1: and find the golden ticket exactly.
Speaker 2: Actually one hundred percent with you on this, So all right,
Speaker 2: let's read in on the brief of this article that
Speaker 2: into the thick of it.
Speaker 1: The Ferbi, launched in nineteen ninety eight, became a global sensation,
Speaker 1: selling over forty million units in its first three years
Speaker 1: and sparking a collector craze. The toy faced national security
Speaker 1: concerns in ninety nine, with rumors that it could record conversations,
Speaker 1: leading to a temporary ban by the NSA, which was
Speaker 1: later debunked.
Speaker 4: And you maybe it was, Maybe it wasn't.
Speaker 2: We're gonna talk more about it.
Speaker 1: After waning in popularity, the Ferbie was revived by Hasbro
Speaker 1: in various iterations, including the twenty twenty three version, with
Speaker 1: new features like voice activated modes, lights, and customizable personalities.
Speaker 1: So for many Americans, especially millennials, the Ferbie needs little introduction.
Speaker 1: It is considered one of the most popular and maybe
Speaker 1: one of the strangest toys in history and was first
Speaker 1: successful and was the first successful attempt to produce and
Speaker 1: sell a domestically aimed robot. The hybrid owl bat creature
Speaker 1: could talk, sing, dance, and seemingly learn a language from
Speaker 1: its owners.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it was kind of a combination as a con
Speaker 3: set design of a mixture of an owl and a
Speaker 3: chinchilla essentially, and it was again it is a robot
Speaker 3: by definition, and it was the first time that they
Speaker 3: ever successfully sold single use robots to the masses.
Speaker 2: And it was targeted at children specifically. I think that's
Speaker 2: very interesting.
Speaker 1: Dude, an owl with a third eye built into it,
Speaker 1: and just nobody caught on to.
Speaker 3: That, And that third eye is what gave it all
Speaker 3: of the credence. It needed to be aware of its
Speaker 3: surroundings to know if you just walked in the room
Speaker 3: or not.
Speaker 4: Yeah, you're making that owl wise, you know.
Speaker 11: Uh.
Speaker 1: According to Hasbro, Dave Hampton, Richard Levy, and Caleb Chung
Speaker 1: spent around two years creating and designing the first designs
Speaker 1: and prototypes of the toy. Hampton had decided to make
Speaker 1: a ball of fur anthropomorphic, and the name Ferby came
Speaker 1: from his son, who pointed out that the toy did
Speaker 1: in fact look like a ball of fur, with realistic
Speaker 1: ear wiggles, iconic expressive eyes, and even it's own own
Speaker 1: language called Furbish. Ferby was more than just a toy.
Speaker 1: It was a personality meant to make you believe that
Speaker 1: it was alive. Hasbro explained the Furbish language was inspired
Speaker 1: by a combination of language cobbled together by Hampton after
Speaker 1: he picked up bits and pieces of Japanese, Thai, Chinese,
Speaker 1: and Hebrew during his time in the US Navy. Hebrew interesting, Yeah,
Speaker 1: Oddly enough, Hebrew got its own little iteration within the Furbish.
Speaker 4: Can't Sam shocked?
Speaker 1: So when was the Ferby first launched during a time
Speaker 1: of major digital disruption? The nineteen ninety eight Ferby, known
Speaker 1: as the Classic Ferby, was the first generation of Ferby released.
Speaker 1: It continued to be sold for four more years. When
Speaker 1: Ferby was released, it instantly became a phenomenon, with over
Speaker 1: forty million units sold globally in the first three years.
Speaker 1: Parents waited in long hour lines or hour long lines
Speaker 1: to buy the furry friend, and the toy sparked a
Speaker 1: collector craze that drove auction prices above retail prices. Following
Speaker 1: its launch in ninety eight, Ferby has taken the world
Speaker 1: by storm, impacting every corner of the culture zeitgeist, from
Speaker 1: music to television and film, Hasbro said. Over the years,
Speaker 1: we've seen Ferby pop up in various forms, whether it's
Speaker 1: The Simpsons, the Simpsons garage blamed out in uncut gems
Speaker 1: and even in villainous Ferby Crew in the Mitchells Versus
Speaker 1: the Machines, but Ferby became infamous not just for its popularity,
Speaker 1: but also for its mischievous nature. Lacking an off switch,
Speaker 1: the only way to silence it was by removing its batteries,
Speaker 1: meaning children would endure hearing its cries in the middle
Speaker 1: of the night.
Speaker 2: This is very true. This is very true, dude.
Speaker 4: And that's the thing.
Speaker 2: It was so cute, so cuddly. It became overly annoying
Speaker 2: when that bitch wouldn't shut up when you're trying to sleep,
Speaker 2: and like it just picked up on some motion.
Speaker 3: It could have been you turning in your bed. It's
Speaker 3: all of a sudden gonna wake up and start trying
Speaker 3: to sing and shit. Yeah, yeah, anyway, thanks.
Speaker 1: Despite its widespread popularity, the Ferby became a national security
Speaker 1: concern in ninety nine when the US National Security Agency,
Speaker 1: or the NSA, feared that the toy could record sensitive conversations.
Speaker 1: As a result, the Ferby was banned from locations like
Speaker 1: the NSA headquarters in Fort Made, Maryland, and the US
Speaker 1: Navy's Norfolk Naval shipyard in Portsmouth, Portsmouth, Virginia.
Speaker 4: Yeah, yeah, yeah, absolutely.
Speaker 1: The espionage rumors were quickly debunked. But it wasn't until
Speaker 1: Tiger Electronics, the toys manufacturer, took action that the NSA
Speaker 1: lifted the band. It's probably the biggest misconception Ferby has
Speaker 1: seen over time. Christa McKay said, who's the general manager
Speaker 1: and VP of Global brands, Fashion and Preschool at Ferby
Speaker 1: Maker's Hasbro. Damn, that's a long title. In reality, Ferby
Speaker 1: does not have the technology to record what people are saying?
Speaker 3: So then how does it learn to start speaking to
Speaker 3: you in your native language? If it already has the
Speaker 3: capability of doing all these things, how's it no to
Speaker 3: pick up? Oh, this person speaking German to me, so
Speaker 3: I'm going to go from Furbish to German. Meanwhile, in America,
Speaker 3: this one goes from Furbish to English. And it's not
Speaker 3: like this one was, you know, geared more towards America,
Speaker 3: and that's why it got sent there. They basically made
Speaker 3: a one stop shop run of everything. Yeah, the labeling
Speaker 3: might have been in a different language, but that didn't
Speaker 3: mean that the programming was in a different language.
Speaker 4: Yeah, there's clearly some kind of built in memory there. Yeah, see, like.
Speaker 1: There has to be some kind of memory. Now is
Speaker 1: it recording and collecting and sending somewhere?
Speaker 4: Who knows? But at least the memory for sure.
Speaker 1: I mean, if it's picking up, if it knows your
Speaker 1: language and it remembers it, that's memory, you know.
Speaker 3: And it's also crazy that the Ferbi's, even after you
Speaker 3: got it to speak only English, if you would put
Speaker 3: it in front of another Ferby, they would immediately start
Speaker 3: chatting back and forth in Furbish again, which led more
Speaker 3: people to believe that perhaps these toys were actually collecting
Speaker 3: data and information from you in whatever way and for
Speaker 3: whatever purpose, and that then once they would meet face
Speaker 3: to face, it was like they were, like you said earlier,
Speaker 3: like bluetooth sending things to each other.
Speaker 2: Who knows?
Speaker 4: Almost makes who wonder?
Speaker 1: Like what happens if you're sitting in front, like you're
Speaker 1: a little kid, you're eight or nine years old, You're
Speaker 1: watching Nickelodeon one day and you have your Furby sitting
Speaker 1: in your lap, right, and then a Ferbie commercial comes on.
Speaker 1: Is that Ferby going to recognize that other ferby speaking
Speaker 1: Furbish on the TV and how does that you know,
Speaker 1: information kind of you know, settle out.
Speaker 2: I agree, But then even think about it this way.
Speaker 3: Let's say that you're, you know, you're playing with your
Speaker 3: furbiy in the living room, you're doing anything. Your parents
Speaker 3: are watching Fox News or whatever. Meanwhile, you're homeboy at
Speaker 3: school who's got a Ferby. He's sitting in liver, his
Speaker 3: parents are watching CNN. As soon as they get together,
Speaker 3: they're communicating about what kind of political uh feelings.
Speaker 2: This house might have versus this house?
Speaker 3: Could that possibly be a reason for the Ferby's data
Speaker 3: collection here?
Speaker 2: There's all kinds of hypotheticals.
Speaker 1: On this, and then you got like one Ferby that's
Speaker 1: a communist and one Ferby that just wants to wear
Speaker 1: a red hat everywhere, and it's like, what.
Speaker 4: The fuck is going on here?
Speaker 2: Right?
Speaker 1: So it's as the Ferbey returns. The Ferby's popularity began
Speaker 1: to wane in two thousand and one, leading to its
Speaker 1: production halt in two However, since its debut, the toy
Speaker 1: has seen numerous editions and special versions featuring sensors like
Speaker 1: a tickle and tilt sensor, infrared port light sensor, realistic
Speaker 1: eyes and tails or manes In two thousand and five,
Speaker 1: Hasbro acquired Tiger Electronics, gaining ownership of Ferby and its
Speaker 1: other toys, and in twenty twenty three, Hasbro launched the
Speaker 1: latest model, which marked a significant departure from previous versions.
Speaker 1: It says a new generation of kids can discover their
Speaker 1: own curious little creature in kindred spirits. That's sure to
Speaker 1: be their next BFF, they said in twenty twenty three.
Speaker 1: With a history of disrupting pop culture and the toy aisle,
Speaker 1: Ferby remains reminds kids that they can be. That they
Speaker 1: can be hilarious, wacky, perfectly imperfect selves because that is
Speaker 1: what that is what makes them in the world a
Speaker 1: more special. The latest robotic creature features five voice activated modes,
Speaker 1: more than six hundred responses, lights, and ten unique songs.
Speaker 1: Over the past few years, we've done a lot of
Speaker 1: research to understand what kids would want to see in
Speaker 1: a new Ferbi. Through this research, kids told us that
Speaker 1: it was important for Furbi to be their ultimate best friend,
Speaker 1: a furry companion to do all the things that a
Speaker 1: BFF would do, like dance to music, share fortunes, meditate, interesting,
Speaker 1: mimic each other in silly voices and even put on
Speaker 1: a light show. And that's exactly what we created.
Speaker 3: So now let's go back and watch the other newscast
Speaker 3: that one. The first one was again whenever it's first launched,
Speaker 3: and it was wildly successful right out the gate. Now,
Speaker 3: just two years after the release, they had this issue.
Speaker 12: A hottest toy of this past holiday season.
Speaker 9: We're talking about Ferbie. It's a source of concern for
Speaker 9: believe it or not, national security experts. FOCKS five's out
Speaker 9: Fineberg went deep background to get the story.
Speaker 15: Cute, perhaps lovable, maybe, but a spy. The National Security
Speaker 15: Agency recently ememoed employees that furvise were off limits on
Speaker 15: the NSA's Fort Meade, Maryland campus. The country's top intelligence
Speaker 15: group got spooked that top secret wards or sounds might
Speaker 15: be mimicked by this talkative memory chip muppet with a
Speaker 15: two hundred word vocabulary. Oh, government secrecy expert Steve Aftergood.
Speaker 13: Their job is to be on the lookout for possible
Speaker 13: threats to national security, so they're doing their job as
Speaker 13: silly as it seems.
Speaker 15: On this occasion, the NSA issued this release. The NSA
Speaker 15: prohibits use of any non agency owned photographic, video and
Speaker 15: audio recording equipment in agency workspaces. This includes any items
Speaker 15: with built in recording features. Well, we did some sleuthing
Speaker 15: of our own, and we.
Speaker 2: Talked to Ferby's boss.
Speaker 15: Tiger Electronics senior VP for marketing tells Fox five quote,
Speaker 15: Ferby doesn't record, everything's already.
Speaker 4: In there calling.
Speaker 2: Do you see any threat in that?
Speaker 16: It could be a threat to people's bucket book.
Speaker 15: The NSA's former general counsel, Stuart Baker agreed, But.
Speaker 13: I've consulted with a number of experts on this, several
Speaker 13: nine year old girls who tell me they can't make
Speaker 13: him record.
Speaker 15: And on that count, Baker says he may on behalf
Speaker 15: of Ferby file a request for NSA clearance.
Speaker 4: There may be another isn't to ban him.
Speaker 2: However, live it.
Speaker 15: From secret location somewhere I'll find Berg fuck five news.
Speaker 4: Well, I can tell it like al can I tell
Speaker 4: you what?
Speaker 9: Well, No, we're tonight on just how many Furbies have
Speaker 9: infested the NSSA or what the penalty is for having
Speaker 9: a Furbee at Fort Meade.
Speaker 8: It's impting.
Speaker 3: So again, it's interesting to see how the government agency
Speaker 3: at the time from an American made toy, right, Tiger Electronics,
Speaker 3: although yeah, it might sound crazy, had its American headquarters
Speaker 3: and it was later acquired by another American toy company,
Speaker 3: has Bro. Now we know they're using Chinese sweat labor shops,
Speaker 3: we know that, but they.
Speaker 2: Were at least American branded.
Speaker 3: That being said, they couldn't tell how these devices worked,
Speaker 3: what made them tick.
Speaker 2: Were they recording video or audio? What the situation was.
Speaker 3: All we knew was what we heard from the original
Speaker 3: news cast that said that these things were learning, They
Speaker 3: were listening to you. They developed personalities based off of
Speaker 3: how you.
Speaker 2: Interacted with them. The more you spoke to them, the
Speaker 2: more they learned.
Speaker 3: So right off the rip, they're either the company, the
Speaker 3: manufacturers either saying yeah, they're learning or no, they're not
Speaker 3: learning anything. It took one year's time for them to
Speaker 3: go back on that and kind of make up a
Speaker 3: whole other story.
Speaker 1: I find this interesting, you know, and I feel like
Speaker 1: the you know, especially back in those days, what was
Speaker 1: it the uh shit, what was that little recording device
Speaker 1: that Macaulay Culkin had in home alone?
Speaker 2: Oh uh not the walkman.
Speaker 4: I wanted to say walkman, but that's not what it was.
Speaker 2: I used to something man.
Speaker 1: Let me see uh, recording the device by I'm Alone.
Speaker 3: Okay, because because that came in clutch for him on
Speaker 3: more than a few occasions.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, shit, talk boy, that's what it was. Talk boy. Yeah,
Speaker 2: we were saying Walkman. Yeah. Yeah. They were really original
Speaker 2: with these names back then, the talk Boy.
Speaker 4: And I love that fucking thing.
Speaker 1: Whenever I got it for Christmas one year, I was like,
Speaker 1: it was like a new PlayStation. Like that's how awesome
Speaker 1: it was to me whenever I first got it. And
Speaker 1: then you get it and you're like, oh, this actually
Speaker 1: isn't as cool as I thought it was gonna be,
Speaker 1: you know.
Speaker 4: Because it's just a voice recorder. That's all it is,
Speaker 4: you know.
Speaker 1: But that being said, it makes me wonder if and
Speaker 1: I'm sure somebody has done it, because even if you
Speaker 1: think about those those big mouth billy basses that you know,
Speaker 1: the take Me Too, the Roof or like those things,
Speaker 1: you can like work on those to sing and dance
Speaker 1: to new songs and shit like that, right, And so
Speaker 1: it makes me wonder if you can rewire a Ferbie
Speaker 1: to be like a little surveillance animal or record something,
Speaker 1: and and you would just say, oh, it's just a
Speaker 1: Ferbie it's not doing that. Meanwhile, it's recording your entire conversation.
Speaker 1: I'm very glad that you brought it to that level. Again,
Speaker 1: we got a dude who literally built an entire organ
Speaker 1: out of them from just a little bit of some
Speaker 1: rewirre wild and want to say a little bit.
Speaker 3: You're going to see the internals of his piano in it.
Speaker 3: It's insane the amount of work old boy put into it.
Speaker 3: But we're gonna get to that in a bit. But
Speaker 3: uh yeah, you absolutely could take this to make some
Speaker 3: very slight modifications and it could be a spy device.
Speaker 3: But there are those that still to this day believe
Speaker 3: that it was always a spy device, whether we knew
Speaker 3: it or not. But now we're gonna go to the
Speaker 3: CBS article titled the Toy Man, and this is from
Speaker 3: October twenty third of two thousand and two. This is
Speaker 3: talking about Richard Levy, the Hasbro representative that bought that
Speaker 3: later on bought Tiger and made the Ferbi what we
Speaker 3: know today.
Speaker 2: So let's get into it here.
Speaker 3: Richard Levy's house may look like any other on a
Speaker 3: quiet street, but looks can be deceiving lurking inside hidden
Speaker 3: from the outside view are hundreds of creatures waiting to play.
Speaker 3: The toy creatures are Ferby's. You may be wondering why
Speaker 3: a grown man has a wall full of fuzzy toys. Well,
Speaker 3: Levy is the face behind Ferby. He helped develop the
Speaker 3: creature and his friends. More than forty three million were
Speaker 3: sold in fifty two countries. But there's more to Levy's
Speaker 3: career than the Ferby phenomena. Is a direct quote from
Speaker 3: Levy said one day, I'm working on a doll. The
Speaker 3: next day I'm working on a game Family Reunion or
Speaker 3: Root sixty six. The next day I'm working on a
Speaker 3: new type of phaser, said Levy. The inventor tinkered with
Speaker 3: toys for decades and has a special workshot to prove it.
Speaker 3: He calls it his never never Land. The fifty two
Speaker 3: year old has invented, developed, designed, and licensed hundreds of ideas.
Speaker 3: It took the concept, he says. I took the concept
Speaker 3: from popular Dunk and Yo Yo and made it into
Speaker 3: a key chain, said Levy. Toy companies get thousands of
Speaker 3: ideas every year, but most rely on a small crop
Speaker 3: of inventors like Levy. The hot Licks guitar was one
Speaker 3: of his greatest hits. But for every toy that sells,
Speaker 3: there are dozens that don't. Levey has a cabinet filled
Speaker 3: with products that have never gone anywhere. He said, rejection
Speaker 3: doesn't hurt his confidence. To me, it's all about the hunt.
Speaker 3: I love the challenge, said Levy. It's all about the game.
Speaker 3: It's all about the fun of doing it. It's not
Speaker 3: about the money you make or anything else. I have
Speaker 3: a hard time believing that. But neither here nor there.
Speaker 3: Levy had always owned toys. His first was a little truck.
Speaker 3: He will never ever ever retire. He has the passion
Speaker 3: and the love of it in his dreams. Cheryl Levy,
Speaker 3: his wife, said, Dude, I love toy.
Speaker 1: That goot licks guitar. I never seen one of those before, dude.
Speaker 1: It's like it's like garage band. But yeah, in the
Speaker 1: nineteen eighty nine version, Yeah, and you wouldn't plug it
Speaker 1: up to your TV.
Speaker 3: It was basically like a toy guitar that you would
Speaker 3: push a button and then strum it and then boom.
Speaker 2: It sounds like you're just riffing, you know.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 2: Well, I guess it would be more right to say
Speaker 2: guitar hero because Guitar Hero.
Speaker 4: Dude, it missed me on the the people.
Speaker 1: That say Garage Band was better than Guitar Hero, I'm like,
Speaker 1: get the fuck out of here. It was not even close.
Speaker 1: Guitar Hero was the better one. What's your thoughts on that.
Speaker 3: I think that you wouldn't have had Garage Band without
Speaker 3: Guitar Hero.
Speaker 2: Honestly. I do like how Garage Band gave you the
Speaker 2: drum option.
Speaker 3: You had the singer that had to like keep their
Speaker 3: voice in a certain pitch, and it made it fun
Speaker 3: for more than one person, And I get down with that, right,
Speaker 3: But honestly, Guitar Hero was the pinnacle of all of
Speaker 3: it from me or if nothing else, it opened the
Speaker 3: flood gates for sure.
Speaker 4: Oh yeah, dude.
Speaker 1: I remember staying up until like five in the morning
Speaker 1: just trying to beat those levels. Especially Guitar Hero three
Speaker 1: was probably the best one of all time.
Speaker 3: Like, dude, it's hard to even find those those remotes
Speaker 3: for it any more. Guitar Hero remote. Yeah, you can
Speaker 3: go on eBay and you can find them and stuff.
Speaker 3: But every time that I've had a friend of mine
Speaker 3: buy one, it's always like beat to shit.
Speaker 2: The little pedal, the wah wah on it.
Speaker 1: You have to beat the shit out of it though,
Speaker 1: you know, especially on like the hardest modes, and oh yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean if you weren't autistic with it, you weren't
Speaker 1: beating those levels.
Speaker 3: Expert level on beasting the harlet from Avenge Sevenfold or
Speaker 3: expert on one from Metallica, Like you had to like
Speaker 3: spash your whole hand out and you couldn't just like
Speaker 3: lightly tap it at a certain point. Like, yeah, those
Speaker 3: things just got the shit beat out of them, which
Speaker 3: I get, but also yeah, it's very very hard to
Speaker 3: find any of those. They're still workable these days.
Speaker 4: Yeah, I agree.
Speaker 1: I mean, Guitar Hero, those were some of the best
Speaker 1: times ever. That was the song I was thinking of
Speaker 1: Fire and Flames dragon Force.
Speaker 2: Oh my God, which a bit of a misnomer. The
Speaker 2: dude's not even playing it like that, like he's finger
Speaker 2: tapping and which, don't me wrong. I'm not like knocking
Speaker 2: the abilities of the guy who does the song, but
Speaker 2: basically they overlaid like two different guitars on top of
Speaker 2: each other to make Dragon Force what it is through
Speaker 2: the fire and flames. Then they cut to making down
Speaker 2: a video game, and these kids are like there's no
Speaker 2: fucking way this guy is playing this.
Speaker 3: He's a genius. He's the next level mastery of a guitar.
Speaker 3: Then you watch the YouTube videos and you're like, oh, it's.
Speaker 7: Not even like that.
Speaker 4: Yeah, yeah, well they had to make the level harder,
Speaker 4: you know.
Speaker 2: It was.
Speaker 4: That was crazy.
Speaker 3: And also I still get down to that song to
Speaker 3: this day because it's like, that's impressive.
Speaker 4: Yeah it is. Yeah, it is such a banger.
Speaker 3: All right, So moving on, It says the love of
Speaker 3: toys is rubbed off on his family. Cheryl runs the
Speaker 3: financial side of the business, and their daughter Betty briefly
Speaker 3: followed in her father's footsteps. There's no age limit when
Speaker 3: it comes to fun. Even Washington power elite appreciate a
Speaker 3: good time. Levy received a letter from the Secretary of
Speaker 3: Defense Donald Rumsfeld quote I sent him a copy of
Speaker 3: my game.
Speaker 2: Spirit of America recalled Levy, what a great guy.
Speaker 3: He sent me back a wonderful letter with a personal
Speaker 3: check because he couldn't accept the gift, but he wanted
Speaker 3: to keep the game and a special patriotic Ferby landed
Speaker 3: on a former president's desk. The letter reads, thank you
Speaker 3: for my wonderful Ferby now I can finally see what
Speaker 3: all the fuss is about.
Speaker 2: It's a lot of fun. Sincerely, Bill Clinton.
Speaker 4: I'm surprised that old Rumsfeld didn't lose that letter.
Speaker 3: You know, he lost how many trillions of dollars or something,
Speaker 3: but somehow didn't lose that video game.
Speaker 4: Interesting.
Speaker 3: Yeah, but yeah, so and again, whenever Bill Clinton's impeachment
Speaker 3: hearing was going on after he got Dome the Oval
Speaker 3: office from old Monica, apparently the Ferbie on his desk,
Speaker 3: that super patriotic special edition that was sent to him.
Speaker 3: They even brought that up, And I'm curious, was that
Speaker 3: Ferbie recording on the day when Monica hit her knees Listen.
Speaker 3: I don't know this for a fact, but it's very possible.
Speaker 1: Yeah, that'd be an interesting plot twist. Imagine there's actual
Speaker 1: footage of that.
Speaker 2: Oh god, that would be terrifying.
Speaker 3: I in no way, shape or form do I want
Speaker 3: to watch old billiam Clinton getting domed that.
Speaker 2: That sounds nasty.
Speaker 4: On the other hand, I'm not shocked.
Speaker 1: I mean, I know that Bill Clinton was, you know,
Speaker 1: in tight with Jeffrey Epstein, wearing a blue dress and
Speaker 1: red high heels and all that fun jazz, But like,
Speaker 1: you don't blame them for getting with Monica Lewinsky because
Speaker 1: who would ever want to fuck Hillary Clinton?
Speaker 3: He did at least one time. Their daughter, Chelsea is
Speaker 3: a spitting image of both of them.
Speaker 4: It's crazy but satanic spawn.
Speaker 7: Bro.
Speaker 2: Yeah, she's a butt baby.
Speaker 3: That's what that looks like, all grown up, straight out
Speaker 3: the butt. But I mean, even looking back, dude, Monica
Speaker 3: wasn't exactly a well, at least in my opinion, she
Speaker 3: wasn't like a dining piece by any means. But I
Speaker 3: guess anything's better than ol' Killary, I get it.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, it was, especially if Hillary's like coming into
Speaker 1: the bedroom, like all wearing a frazzle drip mask and.
Speaker 4: Shit, You're like, get the fuck out of here, Hillary,
Speaker 4: what are you doing, dude?
Speaker 3: Smelling like fucking blood and death. No, I'm getting all that,
Speaker 3: But I mean at the same time, Bill had a
Speaker 3: lot of blood on his hands too, So at that
Speaker 3: point they just kind of had a satanic blood.
Speaker 2: Packed if you will. I mean they were at Brohemian
Speaker 2: Grove too, you know, they were at well they were
Speaker 2: Hillary was a I.
Speaker 1: Keep on saying Brohemian, but it's both. No, Hillary went
Speaker 1: remember the Satanic Wizard told us that Hillary out there
Speaker 1: and he had to like he was asking Bill if
Speaker 1: he could escort her out because it's an all boys club.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's right, that's right. Damn Bohemian Grove, dude,
Speaker 3: And that's kind of fallen. There's a new one, and
Speaker 3: we do need to do an episode on it. Bohemian
Speaker 3: and Grove used to be like the spot where real
Speaker 3: change would get made and stuff, but now the lid's
Speaker 3: been blown off of it. They yeah, they still have
Speaker 3: their little annual meetings, but it is not like it
Speaker 3: used to be. It's more like the I guess the
Speaker 3: entry level. It used to be like Skull and Bones
Speaker 3: was the entry level to Bohemian. Now Skull and Bones
Speaker 3: is the entry level to the entry level.
Speaker 1: To the real thing, right, right, yeah, they got I'm
Speaker 1: sure there's a bunch of different crazy meetups and some
Speaker 1: you know, off plot sector of the Woods that nobody
Speaker 1: knows exists.
Speaker 2: But anyway, let's gip ahead here a little bit.
Speaker 3: Actually, you know, that's it for this one, just to
Speaker 3: kind of give a background to one of the toy creators, right,
Speaker 3: he just was a toy designer himself. He has no
Speaker 3: background in UH any kind of espionage or anything. But
Speaker 3: he did team up with the other two UH inventors
Speaker 3: and made the ferby what it became so on screen
Speaker 3: right now.
Speaker 2: You see this.
Speaker 3: This is a Ferbie that was released in a McDonald's
Speaker 3: toy from two thousand that looks completely different than the
Speaker 3: furbies you would buy off the shelves. But people were
Speaker 3: losing their collective shit and buying like twenty different Happy
Speaker 3: Meals to make sure that they got all twelve of
Speaker 3: these or six or whatever the run was that was
Speaker 3: released for McDonald's.
Speaker 4: For the collector of it, Oh, it was mind blowing.
Speaker 1: People always flocked to get, you know, to collect all
Speaker 1: of the McDonald's Happy Meals, Like, dude, it was back
Speaker 1: in what was it like back in the eighties, dude,
Speaker 1: they used to give like Star Wars like glass cups,
Speaker 1: memorabilia and like really like actually somewhat valuable shit, you know.
Speaker 1: And then you know, and people saw that that stuff
Speaker 1: was going for a lot of money to turn it
Speaker 1: into a collector's item, And yeah, I mean, I get it.
Speaker 1: It's fun to collect shit, though, you know what I mean,
Speaker 1: Like it is a fun hobby if you're trying to
Speaker 1: collect everything. Like there was a point in my life
Speaker 1: where I was trying to collect all the Pokemon cards
Speaker 1: and then I gave all of mine away for a
Speaker 1: uh I think it was a Tipman five hundred paint
Speaker 1: now with some of.
Speaker 2: Those Pokemon cards and unopened packs are selling for now, dude.
Speaker 1: I had literally so you know those uh, those those
Speaker 1: pages that you would keep and you'd put like, uh,
Speaker 1: you'd put them into your binder, right.
Speaker 2: Yeah, the car collection binders.
Speaker 1: Yeah, you can put nine cards on a page, right.
Speaker 1: I had an entire page of first edition charge Yards
Speaker 1: bro an entire page of them, yeah, And I was
Speaker 1: just like, ah, they're just stupid little cards because you know,
Speaker 1: Yu gi oh was coming out and it was like
Speaker 1: I felt like it was getting watered down and nobody
Speaker 1: was gonna fuck with it anymore. And I traded away
Speaker 1: for a paintball gun.
Speaker 2: I thought I was getting a steal because that paintball
Speaker 2: gun was the shit, right, And now if I'd held
Speaker 2: onto that, I well, I'd probably still be doing what
Speaker 2: I'm doing now anyway, you know, right, yeah, maybe the
Speaker 2: guy who was tipping the pizza guy with bitcoin back
Speaker 2: in the day and now You're just like no that yeah,
Speaker 2: same vibe. Yeah. So all right, now I got the
Speaker 2: Wikipedia page pulled up.
Speaker 3: It's gonna give us a little more in depth on
Speaker 3: the Ferbie in the background to it all.
Speaker 4: Let's dive in, shall we.
Speaker 1: Ferbey is an American electronic robotic toy created by Tiger Electronics,
Speaker 1: a subsidiary of Hasbro. Originally released in October of ninety eight,
Speaker 1: it resembles a sugar glider like creature and went through
Speaker 1: a period of being a must have toy following its
Speaker 1: holiday season launch. More than forty million Ferbies were sold
Speaker 1: during the three years of its original production, with one
Speaker 1: point eight million sold in ninety eight and fourteen million
Speaker 1: sold in ninety nine. Its speaking capabilities were translated in
Speaker 1: fourteen languages. Ferbies were the first successful attempt to produce
Speaker 1: and sell a domestically aimed robot. A newly purchased Ferbe
Speaker 1: or a Ferbe that has been reset, starts out speaking
Speaker 1: entirely Furbish, the unique language that all Ferbies speak, but
Speaker 1: it is programmed to start speaking English words and phrases
Speaker 1: in place of Furbish over time. This process is intended
Speaker 1: to resemble the process of learning English for four years.
Speaker 1: After the toy's end of production, Hasbro introduced an updated
Speaker 1: Ferby in two thousand and five called the Emototronic Ferby.
Speaker 1: This updated Ferby has voice recognition and more complex facial movements,
Speaker 1: and was sold until two thousand and seven. Ferby with
Speaker 1: black and white LCD eyes and a mobile app was
Speaker 1: released for the holiday season in twenty twelve. Another updated
Speaker 1: Ferby with color LCD eyes, known as Ferby Connect, was
Speaker 1: released in twenty sixteen. The last generation was released in
Speaker 1: twenty twenty three. Yes, indeed, now let's go into a
Speaker 1: little bit of this initial creation. I gave some overview
Speaker 1: to it. This will actually do a better job of
Speaker 1: explaining it. Dave Hampton and Caleb Chunk spent nine months
Speaker 1: creating the Ferby, in addition to nine months spent designing
Speaker 1: the toy. After two attempts at licensing the concept, they
Speaker 1: invited fellow toy and game adventured Richard C. Levy to
Speaker 1: join their efforts to sell Ferby. Levy brought Ferby to
Speaker 1: Tiger Electronics, and Tigers Roger Schiffman bought the rights to it.
Speaker 1: Ferby's first public appearance was at the nineteen ninety eight
Speaker 1: American International Toy Fair held in New York City. Product
Speaker 1: officially launched on October second, nineteen ninety eight, Ferbies originally
Speaker 1: retailed for about thirty five US dollars, and upon release
Speaker 1: they sold very well. Catapulting demand during the ninety eight
Speaker 1: Christmas period drove the resale price over one hundred dollars
Speaker 1: and sometimes as high as several hundred dollars. Ferbies were
Speaker 1: sold for over three hundred dollars in newspapers and in auctions.
Speaker 1: Nicknames were given to the different esthetic varieties, and sellers
Speaker 1: assigned rarity values to them. The significant aftermarket demand and
Speaker 1: price for the toy resulted in cases of fraud in
Speaker 1: which customers paid for Ferbies that were never delivered. As
Speaker 1: supplies dwindled and when retail supplies ran out, buyers turned
Speaker 1: to the Internet, where Ferbies could be purchased for two, three,
Speaker 1: or more multiples of their retail price. During one twelve
Speaker 1: month period, a total of twenty seven million Ferbies were sold.
Speaker 3: That is actually insane. In a year, twenty seven million
Speaker 3: were sold. Like that's that's mind blowing numbers as far
Speaker 3: as like business is concerned. And even if those are
Speaker 3: all retail thirty five dollars a pop. Brother, they made off.
Speaker 2: Like fucking bandits off of these little bitches, which I mean,
Speaker 2: that was the idea and I get that, but again,
Speaker 2: they for everybody who's thinking that the whole uh, like
Speaker 2: you're seeing on TikTok and on Instagram and on YouTube
Speaker 2: these unboxing videos and how like the resale and these things,
Speaker 2: and that's such a greedy way to do things, brother,
Speaker 2: let's not get twisted. That's been the way for quite
Speaker 2: some time. As soon as something.
Speaker 3: Is exclusive and you know there's only so many of them,
Speaker 3: you're gonna have people that are gonna make it a
Speaker 3: buyer's market and they're gonna go and buy a bunch
Speaker 3: of them as soon as they drop at the store
Speaker 3: so that they could resell them later and make money.
Speaker 3: That's been the way of human economy for quite some time.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 2: Unfortunately, they uh, they stated at the blackjack table a
Speaker 2: little too long, and you know, I'm sure they lost
Speaker 2: a lot of money by creating a bunch of new
Speaker 2: ones and shutting down because nobody was buying them and everything.
Speaker 4: So yeah, that's just what happened.
Speaker 3: But so now let's talk about this is when it
Speaker 3: was real hot and heavy. As far as the NSA
Speaker 3: getting involved, it was in the first generation of ferbis.
Speaker 3: So now let's get into that first generation learn a
Speaker 3: little bit more about the types and things.
Speaker 1: The main reason for their popularity was because of apparent intelligence,
Speaker 1: as reflected in their ability to develop language skills. Ferbies
Speaker 1: can communicate with one another via an infrared port located
Speaker 1: between their eyes.
Speaker 4: With that third eye all the way open.
Speaker 1: Ferbi starts speaking out entirely or starts speaking for entirely Furbish,
Speaker 1: a language with short words, simple syllables, and various other sounds.
Speaker 1: They are programmed, however, to speak less and less Furbish
Speaker 1: and more and more English as they quote unquote grow
Speaker 1: according to the variant it knew nine languages, English, French, Spanish, German, Italian, Japanese, Swedish, Greek,
Speaker 1: and Portuguese. There was a common misconception that they repeated
Speaker 1: words that were said around them. This belief most likely
Speaker 1: stemmed from the fact that it is possible to have
Speaker 1: the ferby say certain pre programmed words or phrases more
Speaker 1: often by petting it whenever it's said these words. As
Speaker 1: a result of this myth, several intelligence agencies banned them
Speaker 1: from their offices. A simple electronic motor and a system
Speaker 1: of cams and gears close close the verb, the Ferby's
Speaker 1: eyes and mouth raise its ears and lifted off the
Speaker 1: ground in a faux display of mobility. The Originals are
Speaker 1: popular with many hackers as they can be dissected and
Speaker 1: made to do interesting things. In particular, their advanced audio
Speaker 1: capabilities and various sensory interfaces make them popular with circuit
Speaker 1: bending community. Interesting like I thought.
Speaker 2: Yep.
Speaker 1: McDonald's happy meal toy Ferbie Shelby was released in two
Speaker 1: thousand in the UK.
Speaker 4: There are eight.
Speaker 1: There are eight to collect in total, four classic look
Speaker 1: and for clams. These toys can sing to each other
Speaker 1: via a sensor in feet.
Speaker 3: All right, now, with all that being said, here they're
Speaker 3: talking about how when they start they're speaking Furbish and
Speaker 3: it doesn't just go to English. Depending on how you
Speaker 3: spoke to them, it could answer you in any of
Speaker 3: these nine languages, dude.
Speaker 2: So basically Greek being one of them.
Speaker 3: If it got opened by a kid speaking Greek, give
Speaker 3: it a little bit of time and it will start
Speaker 3: answering in Greek.
Speaker 2: If it's not recording, how does it know to do that.
Speaker 4: Yeah, yeah, that's that's bullshit.
Speaker 3: And now there's some that say that this might have
Speaker 3: been the first introduction to a home AI type of
Speaker 3: robot situation, but the creators have stated multiple multiple times
Speaker 3: that there was no AI integrated into the Ferbi. There
Speaker 3: was no microphone into the Ferby.
Speaker 4: There.
Speaker 3: It wasn't actually interacting with you. It doesn't repeat things
Speaker 3: that you say to it, even though there's tons of
Speaker 3: cases of people that are saying that it absolutely would
Speaker 3: start repeating words and phrases that you would say to it,
Speaker 3: Like all right, late nineties, do you remember a phrase saying, oh, bro,
Speaker 3: that's the bomb?
Speaker 4: Oh yeah, everybody said that.
Speaker 3: Okay, there's cases of Ferbi's answering with saying that that's
Speaker 3: not a phrase that was actually programmed into it, So
Speaker 3: where did it pick that up from?
Speaker 2: Now, With that being.
Speaker 3: Said, there was also some cases where it sounded like
Speaker 3: the Ferbies were saying some foul things to customers and whatnot.
Speaker 3: One of them in particular, is where they thought that
Speaker 3: the Ferby was saying fuck me.
Speaker 2: In reality, it was saying hug me.
Speaker 3: But because of the kind of weird speakers to it,
Speaker 3: and it wasn't the crispus of sound. I absolutely could
Speaker 3: understand why that would sound like that, but you could
Speaker 3: go back and look, no, no, it was saying hug me.
Speaker 3: But of course during the Satanic panic that was going on, especially,
Speaker 3: you got these little grimlin looking toys, and now it's
Speaker 3: saying fuck me to my children.
Speaker 2: No, I ain't having that up my house.
Speaker 4: You could see where it would go sideways with that.
Speaker 1: That was the next say tannic toy after like dungeons
Speaker 1: and dragons and shit.
Speaker 2: Exactly exactly.
Speaker 3: So moving on fur babies, in ninety nine, the Ferbie
Speaker 3: Baby's line was introduced. Ferbie Babies are smaller than the original,
Speaker 3: having higher voices and cannot dance, but they switched to
Speaker 3: speaking English more quickly. They also have an extended vocabulary
Speaker 3: and different Easter eggs quote unquote and games quote unquote
Speaker 3: built into them. Ferbie Babies come in twenty four different colors,
Speaker 3: all having white eyelashes and one of six different eye colors.
Speaker 3: Then they later went on too like Ferbie Friends. Novel
Speaker 3: furbies were also released, including interactive Ferbie Style gizmo. We
Speaker 3: watched the commercial for that one from the Grimlins movie.
Speaker 3: A Ferbie Style interactive Yoda based off the Star Wars character,
Speaker 3: a Ferbie style interactive ET from the movie of the
Speaker 3: same name, Everybody Knows Et Phone Home, and which is
Speaker 3: also crazy that movie came out in the eighties, didn't it.
Speaker 4: Yeah, yeah, I was like eighty seven. Let me, I
Speaker 4: don't know.
Speaker 3: Meanwhile, well, these friendly Ferbie types were being released in
Speaker 3: the late nineties, like ninety nine and two thousand, so
Speaker 3: I also find that interesting that ET was able to
Speaker 3: traverse time like this.
Speaker 1: Actually ET came out in eighty two, eighty two, damn.
Speaker 1: So yeah, because I mean, Drew Barrymore was.
Speaker 2: A child exactly, so the Ferby friends, and they were
Speaker 2: making their money off of as granted, Yoda. Star Wars
Speaker 2: introduced Yoda way back in the day. But my point
Speaker 2: is though they were seeing and even Grimlins that was
Speaker 2: an eighties movie, but Ferby was still able to capitalize
Speaker 2: off of that fandom into the late nineties and early
Speaker 2: two thousands, which I also think is pretty incredible. But anyway, yeah,
Speaker 2: so I'm looking up when Gremlins came out in eighty four. Yeah,
Speaker 2: eighty four.
Speaker 3: It's crazy that they were still riding the wave off
Speaker 3: of those fandoms into the late nineties when those came
Speaker 3: out in the early eighties, that's impressive.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean it's pop culture. Pop culture survives beyond,
Speaker 1: you know, just the year that it's released.
Speaker 3: But pop culture is also different these days, right, like
Speaker 3: the whole six seven thing that's not gonna be a
Speaker 3: thing two years from now, but right now it's like
Speaker 3: the shit and even now it's starting to weigh in popularity.
Speaker 1: Yeah, but you think about it like pop culture was.
Speaker 1: If you think about like the whole six seven shit
Speaker 1: or whatever the fuck the kids are saying nowadays, and
Speaker 1: whatever is going to be next, that is stuff that's
Speaker 1: created on TikTok. You know, it's not even something that
Speaker 1: necessarily everybody's going to see. Everybody saw et everybody saw
Speaker 1: Star Wars, everybody saw Gremlin. So it was in like
Speaker 1: the collective conscious you could say, right, agree and and
Speaker 1: so maybe that's why pop culture these things almost represented
Speaker 1: like fucking little archetypes, you know what I'm saying. Like,
Speaker 1: if you thought of a Yoda, you looked at that
Speaker 1: fucking thing, you knew what it was gonna say, you
Speaker 1: knew how it thought, you knew it was like this
Speaker 1: wise little baby wizard looking fucking thing, And yeah, it's
Speaker 1: weird as far as the whole six to seven thing,
Speaker 1: that's just it's stupid pop culture. It's not classic pop culture, agreed.
Speaker 2: But all I was trying to say is that pop.
Speaker 3: Culture goes way quicker these days because of social media.
Speaker 3: In ninety nine and two thousand and two thousand and one,
Speaker 3: there was no social media, right. Think about these movies
Speaker 3: we just talked about et Grimlins, Star Wars. How we
Speaker 3: could even take it to Adam Sandler's movies, The Fucking
Speaker 3: Happy Gilmore, The water Boy. These things stayed in the
Speaker 3: cultural zeitgeist to pop culture for at the very bare
Speaker 3: minimum a decade most of the time even longer than that.
Speaker 3: These days, whatever's like hot two years ago. If I
Speaker 3: was to bring something up, you'd be like, oh, yeah, man,
Speaker 3: I forgot about those, But you ain't forgot about water Boy.
Speaker 4: Right right.
Speaker 1: And here's another example, dude, My daughter started saying, get
Speaker 1: a load of this guy, and I was like, where
Speaker 1: the fuck are you getting this? And I was like,
Speaker 1: I know that that was in movies for sure, right,
Speaker 1: But where was it first talked about? Like where did
Speaker 1: it become sort of like this pop culture that turned
Speaker 1: it into this meme of the Internet. It was fucking
Speaker 1: Wayne's World, really, dude, ninety two Wayne's World. I'm like,
Speaker 1: why are kids now referencing a nineteen ninety two movie
Speaker 1: like that?
Speaker 4: Is just crazy? Makes no sense.
Speaker 2: But to them on the Internet, because of a TikTok
Speaker 2: probably or something on the socials, it is now revitalized
Speaker 2: and retooled and reformat it and now it's cool again.
Speaker 2: It's it's wild how that works. But that's my point.
Speaker 2: Pop culture back in these days it ran longer than
Speaker 2: it does now. It's crazy.
Speaker 1: But anyway, and even now, did you know that, I
Speaker 1: believe it was back in eighty six, eight eighty seven
Speaker 1: something like that. Did you know that the CIA was
Speaker 1: working on this essentially a mind control tool. It was
Speaker 1: called memeic me medic magic.
Speaker 3: Yeah, we talked about that. Memes are a CIA constructed thing.
Speaker 1: Crazy, dude, Like, before people even had the Internet, they
Speaker 1: already had concepted. The idea of Internet memes just goes
Speaker 1: to show how far in the future they're living.
Speaker 2: That's a very good point.
Speaker 3: Meme culture didn't become a thing realistically until the mid
Speaker 3: two thousands, right. Meanwhile, the CI already had that knew
Speaker 3: what to do, knew how to post and do all
Speaker 3: these things.
Speaker 2: In the eighties. Let that one marinate as long as needed, brother,
Speaker 2: crazy dude, Yeah, anyway.
Speaker 1: I mean it's a design for triggers, you know what
Speaker 1: I mean if you really think about it, like you
Speaker 1: see a Peppy the Frog, you're instantly assuming maga or
Speaker 1: something like that, right, And it's like it's crazy, just
Speaker 1: how the they just know what buttons to push in
Speaker 1: the average person's subconscious mind.
Speaker 3: Bro, think about this Bad Luck Brian was already thought
Speaker 3: about before Bad Luck Brian was ever born.
Speaker 4: Yeah, dude, how about Kyle with the Monster.
Speaker 2: Can they already knew that they were going to do
Speaker 2: that before the Monster Enter Drink Drink Company became a thing?
Speaker 4: Yeah? Or what's his name from? Oh shit, what is
Speaker 4: it called? Lord of the Rings?
Speaker 1: One does not simply you know, like that one was
Speaker 1: going around like crazy too, you know.
Speaker 2: And the c I already had that thing planned in
Speaker 2: the eighties. It's wild.
Speaker 4: It is crazy, dude, fucking bot Farms.
Speaker 3: We actually you know what, Yeah, I'm gona writ that
Speaker 3: bitch down. We're gonna do a CIA meme episode here soon.
Speaker 3: That's absolutely going on.
Speaker 4: To the page. Yeah, thats happen, so now moving on.
Speaker 3: They also have sensors that can sense loud sounds, can
Speaker 3: sense being upside down. They say things like shiver me
Speaker 3: timbers and walk the plank when left upside down for
Speaker 3: an extended period of time, and they laugh when they
Speaker 3: are tickled quote unquote. They're Antennas or Tenny's as they
Speaker 3: like to call them. They also purr when they're petted.
Speaker 3: They can be fed by sticking your finger in their mouth. Similarly,
Speaker 3: Shelby's do not have their own name. Unlike the classic furbies,
Speaker 3: Shelby's are also capable of knowing if it's talking to
Speaker 3: a Ferby or another Shelby, saying phrases such as where's Ferby,
Speaker 3: though they cannot differentiate between a Ferby and a Ferby baby,
Speaker 3: they just assume it's a Ferby. In addition to English,
Speaker 3: Shelby's also know some Furbish words and also had their
Speaker 3: own unique language called shelbish It's. They just kind of
Speaker 3: brought it in and kept changing it, taking in it
Speaker 3: as popular as they could.
Speaker 1: As far as that tickle feature, there's another toy that
Speaker 1: is very well known for being tickled and speaking to you.
Speaker 3: You know, the tickle Me Elmo led to actual riots,
Speaker 3: like people got actually injured in mals trying to buy
Speaker 3: the tickle me Elbow.
Speaker 2: Will you remember that?
Speaker 1: Which came out in ninety six, So it pres the uh,
Speaker 1: the Ferby.
Speaker 3: They kept trying to make it more and more of
Speaker 3: a revamp to do what they could. Now continuing on here,
Speaker 3: there's the second generation, the emmotatronic Ferbie Babies, the emotatronic
Speaker 3: Funky Ferbies. Then there was a third generation Ferby party Rockers,
Speaker 3: Ferby Booms Furblings, Ferby Boom Crystals, Ferby Boom Crystal Furblings
Speaker 3: for Baca. In twenty fifteen they made a Chewbacca styled
Speaker 3: Ferbi you know. Then the fourth generation. Now they have
Speaker 3: their fifth generation that is still able to be born today.
Speaker 3: Now as far as the technology is concerned, the original
Speaker 3: Ferbi source code was written in assembly language for the
Speaker 3: six five zero two microprocessor. The first Ferbi model was
Speaker 3: based around that style. Sun Plus SPC eight one a
Speaker 3: micro microme microcontroller excuse me, got my eyes which had
Speaker 3: an eighty KiB of RAM Jesus and one hundred and
Speaker 3: twenty eight bytes of RAM so it had storage and memory,
Speaker 3: which they said doesn't have a memory and it's not
Speaker 3: taking notes, but all right. Its core differed from its
Speaker 3: original sixty five OHO two in the lack of the
Speaker 3: Y index register the TSP five OCO four chip from
Speaker 3: Texas Instruments implementing its linear predictive coding codec. It was
Speaker 3: used for voice synthesis predictive coding CODEC. I find that
Speaker 3: also interesting that it had that, which is interesting.
Speaker 1: It mentioned eighty KiB of ram, so that rom so
Speaker 1: ram is the amount of processing power, right, and the
Speaker 1: ROM would be the memory I think, right, Okay, so, yeah,
Speaker 1: the the memory on it which KiB I never heard
Speaker 1: that one before, but KiB stands for kibbi bytes, which
Speaker 1: is so eighty kibbi bytes is equal to approximately eighty
Speaker 1: one point nine kilobytes or point zero seven to eight
Speaker 1: megabytes or mbs.
Speaker 4: Okay.
Speaker 2: They didn't have a lot of storage.
Speaker 1: The tiniest amount of storage. It's like fucking atari storage.
Speaker 2: Gotcha, gotcha.
Speaker 3: But still it had storage, had some, Yeah, it had some,
Speaker 3: which I think all of that is what led to
Speaker 3: the security concerns.
Speaker 2: So on January thirteenth.
Speaker 3: Of nineteen nine, it was reported the National Security Agency
Speaker 3: the NSSA, the people behind the Patriot Act, which released
Speaker 3: two years after this. I might add to know one
Speaker 3: of the United States banned Ferby's from entering NSA's property
Speaker 3: due to concerns that they may be used to record
Speaker 3: and repeat classified information, advising those that see any NSA
Speaker 3: property to quote contact their staff security officer for guidance.
Speaker 4: Quote.
Speaker 3: It was thought within the NSA that Ferby's had an
Speaker 3: artificial intelligence chip that could quote unquote learn from things.
Speaker 3: The user said, well, it's crazy that they would think
Speaker 3: that whenever they were marketed as a self learning robot
Speaker 3: for children, So okay, you know literally was on the commercial.
Speaker 2: It's crazy.
Speaker 3: The NSA theorized that if employees discussed confidential information around
Speaker 3: the toys, that information could later be repeated at a
Speaker 3: later date. Roger Schiffman, who we talked about earlier, the
Speaker 3: owner of Tigerger Electronics, said that the ferby has absolutely
Speaker 3: no ability to do any recording whatsoever, and that he
Speaker 3: would have gladly told the NSA this if he was
Speaker 3: asked by anyone from the spy agency. Additionally, Dave Hampton
Speaker 3: demonstrated that Ferbiy's microphone could not record any sound at all,
Speaker 3: and it could only hear a single monotonous beep. If
Speaker 3: a loud sound is produced around Ferby, then no words
Speaker 3: or waveforms can be made out at all. The band
Speaker 3: was eventually withdrawn in twenty seventeen. It has been confirmed
Speaker 3: that the Ferby Connect can be connected through a Bluetooth
Speaker 3: and with the special application upload and play any custom
Speaker 3: audio file by anyone and has no password required. But okay,
Speaker 3: two of the three original guys came out and said, dude,
Speaker 3: it has a microphone.
Speaker 2: Yes, yes, it has storage.
Speaker 3: It's not recording, it's not listening, and somehow it's not learning,
Speaker 3: even though they marketed it as a learning thing, which
Speaker 3: that in and of itself is.
Speaker 2: Pretty crazy to me.
Speaker 3: But I could understand the need for security concerns whenever
Speaker 3: there's this new fandangle technology.
Speaker 2: It's just not making no sense. Nobody. It has no
Speaker 2: off switch.
Speaker 3: The only thing that to make it turn off is
Speaker 3: that the batteries run dead or you basically rip the
Speaker 3: guts out of it. We know that it can pick
Speaker 3: up on the photo light sensor right it will tell
Speaker 3: you when the sun rises or when you first turn
Speaker 3: the light on again. There was that one phrase that
Speaker 3: basically when you looked at the Furbish to English translator
Speaker 3: said big light up, which essentially means, oh, the sun's up,
Speaker 3: and it would wake up and start doing it a
Speaker 3: little morning routine of dancing and singing and talking whatever else.
Speaker 2: So I could understand their need for some concern on this,
Speaker 2: But was it baseless?
Speaker 3: Right as all these designers and producers came out and
Speaker 3: said they can't do any of these things, even though
Speaker 3: that's exactly how they.
Speaker 4: Marketed it, what was the real backstore for this?
Speaker 2: Right? There had to be something. There had to be
Speaker 2: a kernel of truth to this.
Speaker 1: It makes me think like it and whatever you think
Speaker 1: about this, if you believe that there can be talking dolls,
Speaker 1: and you know, the these inanimate objects almost brought to life,
Speaker 1: that's kind of where I go with it, Like, is
Speaker 1: it possible that maybe somebody would get a little crazy
Speaker 1: with these things and enchant them or something? You know,
Speaker 1: if that's a thing, you know, if that is a thing,
Speaker 1: I mean, could you enchant an inanimate object to start
Speaker 1: saying words?
Speaker 4: I don't know, maybe that's a step too far.
Speaker 2: But this thing was already geared to talk.
Speaker 3: So all you're doing is basically just making it say
Speaker 3: things that allegedly it was never meant to say. I
Speaker 3: don't see that as a crazy hypothetical.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean, hey, Enchance, it is one of my
Speaker 1: favorite movies. So shout out there, you go, all right?
Speaker 1: This next article is from The Independent. Adorable Cuddly Evil.
Speaker 1: How did the furby take over the world? Let's learn
Speaker 1: about it together, brother. So in nineteen ninety nine, the
Speaker 1: US National Security Agency became aware of impeding or of
Speaker 1: impending security threat, one involving potential espionage and perhaps on
Speaker 1: an international scale. Officials had caught wind of a walking
Speaker 1: talking device that they feared could learn and record any
Speaker 1: secrets uttered within close proct simity to it. The device
Speaker 1: was so fluffy and innocent looking that it could infiltrate
Speaker 1: even the most secure of locations. Terrifyingly, it had already
Speaker 1: invaded homes across America and must have with designs on
Speaker 1: world domination, which is interesting because you know, the Austin
Speaker 1: powers and shit was coming out right around these times. Indeed,
Speaker 1: so they started to ban it from its from its
Speaker 1: first or first from its headquarters in Fort Meade, Maryland,
Speaker 1: as well as from the US Navy's Norfolk Naval Shipyard
Speaker 1: in Portsmouth, Virginia. According to some reports, they even banned
Speaker 1: it from the Pentagon. And this terrifyingly clever device that
Speaker 1: spooked the highest levels of intelligence in the or is
Speaker 1: this the that spooked the highest levels of intelligence in
Speaker 1: the US government none other than the Ferby.
Speaker 2: Indeed, that little furry bastard.
Speaker 1: Christa McKay, Vice President, I'm not going to go across
Speaker 1: that again, laughs off the whole saga, she says. The
Speaker 1: rumor that the toy was capable of espiona was quickly debunked,
Speaker 1: but it was only after a concerted effort by Tiger Electronics,
Speaker 1: the toy's original manufacturers, that the agency lifted the band.
Speaker 1: It is probably the biggest misconception Ferby has seen over time.
Speaker 1: In reality, Ferby does not have the technology to record
Speaker 1: what people are saying. For millennials, the Ferbie needs little introduction.
Speaker 1: For everyone else, well, it's the strangest toy in modern history,
Speaker 1: a hybrid owl, owl, hamster bat creature that can sing, talk, dance,
Speaker 1: and even learn language from its owners. When Ferby was
Speaker 1: first released in ninety eight, it quickly became a phenomenon.
Speaker 1: Children adored its interactivity and parents liked that it was
Speaker 1: basically a pet, but one that didn't produce a mess,
Speaker 1: And it didn't and didn't, if we're being honest, need
Speaker 1: a ton of attention to keep alive.
Speaker 4: If you had a Ferby, you were cool.
Speaker 1: Indeed, further down the line, Ferbie gained notoriety for being
Speaker 1: a bit of a menace. First of all, it had
Speaker 1: no off switch. The only way to deactivate it was
Speaker 1: by taking out its batteries. Even then, some people swear
Speaker 1: that the Ferbie would continue to speak and sing gibberish
Speaker 1: gibberish despite having nothing to power it. London based writer
Speaker 1: and researcher Marianna Michael recalls being a child of eight
Speaker 1: or nine and being spoken and being woken by a
Speaker 1: garbled electronic voice singing a song and repeating, I'm hungry, Chomp, chomp.
Speaker 1: The voice was emanating from the Ferbie that she owned
Speaker 1: at the time, whose batteries were dying. When the toy
Speaker 1: finally ended it's tirade, Michael says she picked it up
Speaker 1: and ran to her parents' room to wake them up
Speaker 1: and tell them of her terror. My parents still take
Speaker 1: the uh the pisto. Yeah, okay, I'm thirty she says,
Speaker 1: joking that she was traumatized by Ferbie. Yeah, I could
Speaker 1: believe Kaylee could Forty, a travel editor based in Washington,
Speaker 1: d C. Says her Ferbie randomly started screaming in the
Speaker 1: middle of the night, causing her whole household to wake
Speaker 1: up and descend into chaos. Her father removed the batteries
Speaker 1: and threw the toy in the back garden, but he
Speaker 1: claims to this day that it wouldn't shut up and
Speaker 1: must have been possessed.
Speaker 4: Dude, see what I'm saying.
Speaker 2: Yeah, either A was possessed or B.
Speaker 3: Is it possible it had a external power source or
Speaker 3: another battery pack that nobody knew about because you're living
Speaker 3: in Washington, DC, and perhaps it was trying to aspire
Speaker 3: listen in who.
Speaker 1: Knows, like old girl with the Roku TV. You know, yeup,
Speaker 1: could have been some crazy shit like that. Maybe it
Speaker 1: is possessed, otherworldly or maybe somebody has a remote to it.
Speaker 4: The world may never know. Indeed, others give weight to
Speaker 4: this theory.
Speaker 1: Ferby has been said to go dormant, sometimes for years,
Speaker 1: before suddenly in quotes waking up at the most unexpected
Speaker 1: of times. Jacqueline dole, A thirty three year old from
Speaker 1: Maine says that she discovered her childhood ferby languishing in
Speaker 1: a storage unit and couldn't bear to throw it away.
Speaker 1: She left it in the back seat of her car
Speaker 1: in peaceful slumber. Then horror occurred when my partner went
Speaker 1: to drive to work at four am. The ferby woke
Speaker 1: up after twenty years and started to talk to him,
Speaker 1: jumped out of his seat.
Speaker 3: Imagine that, bro, Keep in mind, twenty years you haven't
Speaker 3: seen this thing. But apparently because it was this is
Speaker 3: the old school, and there was no off switch, so
Speaker 3: if it laid dormant, the batteries wouldn't continue to just
Speaker 3: leak out juice, they would just kind of chill there.
Speaker 3: So apparently, after twenty years, these double A batteries, it
Speaker 3: required four of them, had enough juice in them to
Speaker 3: make this thing light up and start talking again. As
Speaker 3: soon as it's all motion or any kind of interaction.
Speaker 3: That would scare the fuck out.
Speaker 2: Of me too. I get it.
Speaker 4: I mean it does make sense.
Speaker 1: There's no motion, you know, uh going on for it
Speaker 1: to be able to censor anything, nobody talking or anything.
Speaker 1: If it's in storage and in a dark probably in
Speaker 1: a box. You know, you go into a storage unit.
Speaker 1: Most of the time I've ever gone into a storage unit,
Speaker 1: I'm the only one in there, you know what I mean.
Speaker 1: And so it's yeah, I could see how it could
Speaker 1: be retaining its battery by.
Speaker 4: Not even using it.
Speaker 1: You would think that it would die over the course
Speaker 1: of twenty years though. Don't batteries expire, you would think.
Speaker 1: But I guess this is a really good run of batteries.
Speaker 1: And apparently this Ferby just refused to die. Fucking Energizer
Speaker 1: should have used that as a gimmick, dude, as a
Speaker 1: promotional dude, I.
Speaker 2: Magine that that would be a fucking ad and a
Speaker 2: half right there.
Speaker 4: But anyway, if it was Energizer, who knows?
Speaker 7: Uh?
Speaker 1: So, it says the creators behind Furby never thought their
Speaker 1: amusing little robot would be the stuff of nightmares, but
Speaker 1: they did have an inkling that it would become a hit.
Speaker 1: Dave Hampton, Caleb Chung, and Richard Leevy brought it to
Speaker 1: life after being inspired by another nineties toy craze, the Tamagachi.
Speaker 1: This was a small virtual pet simulation game released by
Speaker 1: Japanese toy maker Bandi. The Grace, the keychains of children
Speaker 1: all over the world. It proved that children of the
Speaker 1: era loved nothing more than a mechanical robot pet. But
Speaker 1: Hampton and Chung were also convinced that they could add
Speaker 1: elements absent from the plastic and decidedly uncuddly Tomagachi, namely
Speaker 1: fur and feelings. Plus, unlike the Tamagachi, which required constant
Speaker 1: care to keep it alive, the Ferby didn't need to
Speaker 1: be fed or cleaned up. This is a very good
Speaker 1: point since Hampton, Chung, and Levy, who was brought onto
Speaker 1: the team after the initial design stage, sold the Ferbiy
Speaker 1: license to at Tiger Electronics, a subsidiary of Hasburro. There
Speaker 1: have been six generations of the chatty companion. More than
Speaker 1: forty million Ferby's were sold in the first three years
Speaker 1: of production. By the mid noughties, its popularity be naughties.
Speaker 2: I don't know, what is that supposed to be? The
Speaker 2: mid the two thousands.
Speaker 4: I guess maybe I don't know.
Speaker 1: Its popularity began to decline sharply as other pet toys
Speaker 1: hit the market and children's attention was pulled elsewhere.
Speaker 3: Indeed, and they tried, like I said, to keep it going,
Speaker 3: but it never had its its same fandom and craze
Speaker 3: like it did when it first released.
Speaker 1: Chung also thought that the toy became a bit two
Speaker 1: end quotes alive, which in turn drove its market away.
Speaker 1: He told director Gregory Green in a twenty fourteen YouTube interview,
Speaker 1: saying Ferby was a big hit because because it on
Speaker 1: purpose was made to let you believe it was alive.
Speaker 1: All electronic toys up to then were squeeze my hand,
Speaker 1: I'll count to ten, a very self centered toy. And
Speaker 1: so it became. It became human in a way that
Speaker 1: other products hadn't been. It became human and present, and
Speaker 1: people thought that it was scaried and scary and weird
Speaker 1: and freaky because it encroaches on being human.
Speaker 4: Which is kind of weird.
Speaker 3: Cut to today, when people are trying to get AI
Speaker 3: to be as human like as possible, and they're designing
Speaker 3: robots to be as human like as possible.
Speaker 2: These people were ahead of their time with this little
Speaker 2: fur ball dog.
Speaker 4: They were.
Speaker 1: Despite the sharp decline and interests since its launch, each
Speaker 1: iteration of Ferby has had more high tech features than
Speaker 1: the last novelty Ferbi's have been released, such as the
Speaker 1: Ferbie style gizmo from the nineteen eighty four horror film Gremlins.
Speaker 1: Others have been given lsed eyes with a wide range
Speaker 1: of motions to make them more expressive. Some iterations have
Speaker 1: been given a simpler on off button, but each generation
Speaker 1: has only had marginal differences in appearance compared to its predecessors.
Speaker 1: That is until now. Hasbro has just launched this latest
Speaker 1: version on Friday. It's first and ten years and it
Speaker 1: looks drastically different. Gone the site are the signature buggy
Speaker 1: eyes that protrude from the Ferby's face, and their place
Speaker 1: are anime style peepers with irises so large that it
Speaker 1: looks like it looks like a cat about to pounce.
Speaker 1: This iteration has also swapped Ferby's classic soft bat like
Speaker 1: ears for transparent, plastic ones with hearts at their center.
Speaker 1: It is shorter and rounder and can and can put
Speaker 1: on its own light show via the heart shaped gem
Speaker 1: on its forehead, Perhaps much to the chagrin of parents elsewhere,
Speaker 1: Hasbro has also gotten rid of the on off button
Speaker 1: again in a nod to its original incarnation.
Speaker 4: Why would you get rid of that?
Speaker 3: As a nod to the original, But even still that
Speaker 3: was one of the only benefits of the second gym.
Speaker 2: That was a fault.
Speaker 4: It wasn't even a good thing.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and it says the glow up makes Ferby almost unrecognized.
Speaker 1: In a word, it has been yassified to the n degree.
Speaker 4: You've yossified yos queen.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 3: So anyway, these are the sparkly looks from the twenty
Speaker 3: twenty three Ferbies and we don't have to.
Speaker 2: Really read more.
Speaker 3: I did just want to read that some of those
Speaker 3: experiences of people that are saying that even after the
Speaker 3: batteries are out, it was still working, which kind of
Speaker 3: leads more credence to the whole you know thing about
Speaker 3: it being a little more sentient than what it originally
Speaker 3: led on.
Speaker 2: This next article is actually from a website called the
Speaker 2: Fubi Toy Shop, which is basically an entire furbie website,
Speaker 2: not for shopping. It's literally just for backstories and it's
Speaker 2: like a blog for ferbies. So let's talk more about
Speaker 2: this here.
Speaker 3: We talked a little bit about the NSA and the
Speaker 3: Pentagon making them illegal on site.
Speaker 2: Back in ninety nine.
Speaker 3: These interactive plate things sparked unexpected controversy. Officials worried their
Speaker 3: abilities to record and repeat phrases might risk sensitive information.
Speaker 3: It's a fascinating twist for a product designed purely for fun.
Speaker 3: This article explores why such fears emerged, how policies shifted,
Speaker 3: and why collectors still adore these electronic pets today. Whether
Speaker 3: you're nostalgic or just curious, there's planning to discover. So again,
Speaker 3: some of the key takeaways here Ferby's face restrictions in
Speaker 3: ninety nine due to its recording capabilities, concerned concerns centered
Speaker 3: around potential data collection risks. The band highlights unique intersections
Speaker 3: between playthings and privacy. Modern collector value these toys for
Speaker 3: their historical significance, and again, there's a little thing the
Speaker 3: end to learn more so the fascinating history of Ferby toys.
Speaker 3: Few play things have left such a lasting impression as
Speaker 3: the Ferby Again. Launched ninety eight by Tiger Electronics. Invented
Speaker 3: by Roger Shift, this interactive toy quickly became a global sensation.
Speaker 3: Its unique blend of technology and charm captured hearts worldwide.
Speaker 3: So we already talked about how it got to Tiger Electronics.
Speaker 3: By two thousand, over forty million Ferbies have been sold,
Speaker 3: making it one of the most successful toys of its time.
Speaker 3: Translated into twenty four languages, it bridged cultural gaps and
Speaker 3: brought joy to millions. One of the most intriguing features
Speaker 3: was its quote unquote learning algorithm. Ferbi's could mimic their
Speaker 3: owner's speech patterns, creating a sense of connection. This audio
Speaker 3: capability made them feel almost alive, bending technology with empathy.
Speaker 3: So we talked about why they capture the hearts worldwide.
Speaker 2: It wasn't just the look.
Speaker 3: It was the fact that they were a pet that
Speaker 3: you didn't have to really maintain or keep up, just
Speaker 3: don't get out. So now, playthings rarely attract attention from
Speaker 3: intelligence agencies, but these did. By ninety nine, just one
Speaker 3: year after their launched, Ferbi's faced restrictions in sensitive government spaces.
Speaker 3: The reason their charming features sparked unexpected security debates.
Speaker 2: Let's talk about the NSA.
Speaker 3: Officials worried about two key capabilities, microphones and adaptive learning
Speaker 3: quote unquote. Though designed to mimic speech, some feared these
Speaker 3: functions could accidentally capture un or classified information. At the
Speaker 3: CIA's Langley offices, ferbies were outright prohibited. So we have
Speaker 3: the NSA building, the CIA building the Pentagon, the Norfolk
Speaker 3: Virginia Naval Yard, which is where they do a lot
Speaker 3: of experimental things for watercraft and weapons. And I've even
Speaker 3: heard reports of the FBI building a couple of news
Speaker 3: agencies based out of DC. There was a lot of
Speaker 3: places in and around these high profile buildings where they
Speaker 3: were just like, no way, you're not bringing that on site.
Speaker 3: So anyway, rumors swirled about whether these toys recorded conversations.
Speaker 3: In reality, their technology was far simpler. Ferbies responded to
Speaker 3: sounds but couldn't store or transmit data. Still, the band
Speaker 3: highlighted growing unease about interactive devices. So the year that
Speaker 3: the band was enacted, ninety nine marked a pivotal moment
Speaker 3: as smart toys entered homes, agencies grapple with potential risks.
Speaker 3: These foreshadowed modern debates around Alexa and Ruma devices. Back then,
Speaker 3: though ferbies were the first two face such scrutiny.
Speaker 2: In ninety nine, restris took.
Speaker 3: Effect in the NSA and CIA facilities, so no evidence
Speaker 3: suggested that ferbies actually compromise security, but they still put
Speaker 3: the ban in place. As of that moment. Why did
Speaker 3: the NSA ban the ferbies? Intelligence agencies rarely raise eyebrows
Speaker 3: over children to play things, Yet ferbi'es did just that.
Speaker 3: The combination of Cold War air caution and emerging interactive
Speaker 3: tech created perfect conditions for concern. Will explore how harmless
Speaker 3: features sparked disproportionate reactions. Post Cold War era paranoia influenced
Speaker 3: how agencies viewed new interactive devices. Ferbies contained basic sensors
Speaker 3: and voice recognition chips, but some staff misinterpreted these as
Speaker 3: recording tools. Their randomized, furbished language pattern heightened suspicion around
Speaker 3: the coded transmissions. So and a declassified memo stated, and
Speaker 3: we heard it from the thing earlier. Unauthorized data transmission
Speaker 3: risks cannot be ruled out with these audio capable devices
Speaker 3: in secure areas to talk about furs, Just so we're clear.
Speaker 3: Though ferbies couldn't store or transmit data, their ability to
Speaker 3: mimic speech created confusion these This mirrored contemporary debates about
Speaker 3: whether talking dolls could violate privacy laws.
Speaker 2: So let's talk about the NSA's reasoning for this.
Speaker 3: The agency's response reflected broader anxieties about smart devices at
Speaker 3: facilities handling classified information. Even theoretical risks demanded action. Three
Speaker 3: key factors drove their decision recording misconceptions, basic microphones were
Speaker 3: mistaken for surveillance tools, behavioral unpredictability, random vocalizations seemed like
Speaker 3: intentional signaling, and three lack of technical transparency. Toy makers
Speaker 3: didn't anticipate security reviews, so it's not like they released
Speaker 3: the blueprints to these three letter agencies as a way
Speaker 3: to tell them to calm down. They literally didn't think
Speaker 3: they had to get clearance or approval when they developed
Speaker 3: this toy that's only going to be marketed to children.
Speaker 3: But next thing they know, they're getting damn near a
Speaker 3: cease and desist from three letter agencies talking about their
Speaker 3: new spy tech. They're like, brother, hold on, hold on,
Speaker 3: we were not even talking about the same thing here,
Speaker 3: but same time today we understand the disconnect, as our
Speaker 3: Ferbie Ban analysis shows. The episode reveals how quickly innovative
Speaker 3: innovation can outpace policy. What seemed like overreaction then now
Speaker 3: appears precedent in our smart era or smart device era.
Speaker 3: So the impact of the Ferbie ban when intelligence agencies
Speaker 3: took action against children's toys, it created ripples across the world.
Speaker 3: In ninety nine, the restrictions transformed Ferbies from playthings into
Speaker 3: cultural artifacts overnight. The unsuspected turn of events shaped perceptions
Speaker 3: for years to come. We already talked about media coverage
Speaker 3: from this headlines exploited when news broke about the restrictions,
Speaker 3: The New York Times reported Toys r US pulls Ferbies
Speaker 3: from Pentagon area stores, capturing public imagination. Suddenly, these electronic
Speaker 3: pecks game symbols of a larger debate about privacy. They
Speaker 3: were having this conversation in ninety nine. Cut to two
Speaker 3: years later.
Speaker 2: When the Patriot Act gets invoked.
Speaker 3: But you know, I guess everybody forgot about the craze
Speaker 3: from the Ferby at that point or something, even though
Speaker 3: they were still being sold. But anyway, so let's see
Speaker 3: how the band shaped Ferby's legacy. The restrictions inadvertently boosted
Speaker 3: the toy's mystique. What began as a holiday gift became
Speaker 3: a talking point about emerging tech today. This episode remains
Speaker 3: one of the most fascinating stories in toy history. Collectors
Speaker 3: now prize early models for their connection to this moment.
Speaker 2: First edition nineteen ninety eight.
Speaker 3: Ferby's Command at least a three hundred dollars or more
Speaker 3: price at auction, the band cemented their status as pop
Speaker 3: culture icons, rather than diminishing their appeal. So again, this
Speaker 3: era foreshadowed modern debates about smart devices insecure spaces. Current
Speaker 3: NSA policies reflect lessons learned from the unusual case. They
Speaker 3: talk about where to go for more on early Ferbie capabilities.
Speaker 3: So they talk about the nineteen ninety eight models and
Speaker 3: what made them so special? So hidden beneath their fuzzy
Speaker 3: exteriors lie surprising capabilities that delight millions. These electronic companions
Speaker 3: packed more personality that meets the eye. Let's explore it
Speaker 3: made them special and why collectors still seek them out today.
Speaker 3: Now that's obviously not an original Ferbie, that's AI image,
Speaker 3: but still so. Some of the unique features. Early models
Speaker 3: responded to touch, light and sound with remarkable sensitivity. Petting
Speaker 3: specific parts triggered hidden easter eggs like secret songs when
Speaker 3: stroked between the ears. Their voice modulation could convey twelve
Speaker 3: distinct emotions through pitch changes. The twenty twelve revival introduced
Speaker 3: Bluetooth connectivity and app integration. This allowed owners to feed
Speaker 3: their Ferbees digitally. Modern versions expanded their ability to learn phrases,
Speaker 3: creating even deeper interactions. So for collectors on this rare
Speaker 3: additions like the McDonald's two thousand Happy Meal versions now
Speaker 3: fetch one hundred and fifty dollars or more if they're unopened.
Speaker 3: The twenty thirteen Ferby Boom remains popular for its colorful
Speaker 3: eggs and growth features. Serious collectors hunt for mint condition
Speaker 3: Tiger Electronics boxes the holy grail of Ferby memorabilia. So
Speaker 3: we already talked about a lot of these things as
Speaker 3: far as the Ferby's, and they're shifting in time and
Speaker 3: their new iterations. But I could understand at least a
Speaker 3: little bit why these three letter agencies who do not
Speaker 3: know how to look at things for the cultural thing
Speaker 3: that they are, the pop culture icons. All they see
Speaker 3: is a device that is self learning, is obviously listening
Speaker 3: to you can possibly even take pictures of your surroundings.
Speaker 3: Why not they could tell when the lights are.
Speaker 2: On or off.
Speaker 3: How do we know there's not a hidden camera inside
Speaker 3: of these things? So they of course took it to
Speaker 3: a level that it was the paranoia realistically, Yeah.
Speaker 2: Yeah, they and I guess rightfully so, because you never know,
Speaker 2: like I don't know if I would be issuing a
Speaker 2: statement I feel like before I made myself look like
Speaker 2: an idiot, I would probably just go buy a Ferbie
Speaker 2: and give it to one of my tech guys and
Speaker 2: be like, hey, can this thing listen to us? I
Speaker 2: don't know why you had to make a whole big
Speaker 2: deal about it, but ultimately, could that have been just
Speaker 2: some kind of ploy because they wanted people to buy Ferbies?
Speaker 2: I don't know if Hasbro would have gotten in with
Speaker 2: those three letter agencies and told them, Hey, Bro, I
Speaker 2: need you to release this memo.
Speaker 3: It's gonna go wild and it's gonna boost sales through
Speaker 3: the roof. That would have been a great marketing ploy.
Speaker 3: I don't know if that's what happened. I can find
Speaker 3: no evidence to suggest that that's what took place. However,
Speaker 3: I could envision a world looking at things in my
Speaker 3: third oulet of the Way Open and Conspiratorily, of course,
Speaker 3: I could envision a world where Hasbro, who is a
Speaker 3: major toy manufacturer, they have tons of money. I could
Speaker 3: see them slipping some money to some top dogs and
Speaker 3: some three letter agencies to let out a memo and
Speaker 3: just kind of let the chips fall where they may.
Speaker 1: On that for sure, Well, how about this sir hasbro
Speaker 1: engages in lobbying and public policy discussions which are overseen
Speaker 1: by its Legal and Communications department. So I mean that's
Speaker 1: a little something at least they're lobbying in the government,
Speaker 1: and maybe they kind of used it as a I
Speaker 1: don't know, like an OJ trial kind of thing, you know,
Speaker 1: like a toy version of it.
Speaker 3: I don't see why not, honestly, I mean to say
Speaker 3: that the American Toy Lobbyist Group, which gonna be honest,
Speaker 3: I didn't know that was a thing. I'm not surprised
Speaker 3: that it's a thing, but just never really thought about
Speaker 3: it before. What's to say that one of these lobbyists,
Speaker 3: while they're over there in DC and they're lobbying with
Speaker 3: these big government agencies.
Speaker 4: Didn't just go knock on the CIA's door.
Speaker 3: Hey, I need you to pass the word to the Pentagon,
Speaker 3: pass the word to the Navy Yard, pass the word
Speaker 3: to the FBI. I'm just gonna let them know that
Speaker 3: these things might be a subject of interest and leave
Speaker 3: a very open ended don't say for sure that it's dangerous,
Speaker 3: just kind of let a NEMO go out saying that
Speaker 3: they're not allowed on site. That will just kind of
Speaker 3: drive more attention to it. Here's a little check for you. Here,
Speaker 3: here's a little money coming into the holiday season. Go
Speaker 3: buy your wife something nice. I could see that absolutely
Speaker 3: being a thing.
Speaker 2: Bro.
Speaker 1: Oh dude, they have a whole open secrets profile on
Speaker 1: lobbying for Hasbro.
Speaker 4: Really holy shit.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it says Hasbro lobbies the US government to advocate
Speaker 1: for policies that benefit their business, focusing on issues like trade,
Speaker 1: consumer safety, and budget appropriations. Their lobbying efforts help influence
Speaker 1: legislation that impacts their operations and industry. My question is,
Speaker 1: do you really have to go to the government for that?
Speaker 1: But check this out, just just for twenty twenty five alone,
Speaker 1: We're not even through this year yet Hasbro has already
Speaker 1: lobbied for three hundred thousand dollars.
Speaker 4: Whoa, that's pretty interesting.
Speaker 2: Here.
Speaker 4: I'm gonna show the screen so you can see it,
Speaker 4: but please do.
Speaker 1: Yeah, if we're following the money, if we're trying to
Speaker 1: figure out what's really going on, you know, may as
Speaker 1: well check it out. But yeah, it just says the
Speaker 1: industry is missile miscellaneous manufacturing and distributing. And you can
Speaker 1: kind of see you know where, like every year, dude,
Speaker 1: every year they're lobbying hundreds of thousands of dollars Hasbro
Speaker 1: is to the US government. Wow, their biggest year was
Speaker 1: twenty seventeen. Yeah, five hundred thousand dollars was the most
Speaker 1: that they lobbied in the fourth quarter was one hundred
Speaker 1: and thirty grand. That was twenty seventeen. Man, I wish
Speaker 1: it went back to like ninety eight. But even two
Speaker 1: thousand and seven it was only one hundred k. But
Speaker 1: even still, like the fact that there's lobbyists for Hasbro.
Speaker 1: Who would have thought.
Speaker 4: That is insane?
Speaker 3: Yeah, I honestly never thought about the Big Toy as
Speaker 3: far as the conspiratorial lobbying conversation goes.
Speaker 2: But I mean, why the fuck not?
Speaker 1: Oh, there's issues with trade. There is two specific issues
Speaker 1: with trade, which you know, which is another reason why
Speaker 1: they lobbied, but also health issues.
Speaker 3: Small choking small pieces that can make kids choke. Seeing
Speaker 3: as how they're made in China, I could see if
Speaker 3: the materials used are possibly dangerous. Okay, fair, especially again
Speaker 3: because so many of the things are made overseas trade.
Speaker 2: I could see that being two issues that they have
Speaker 2: to lobby for clients. Lobbying for health issues twenty twenty five. Yeah,
Speaker 2: so this was two and eighty five clients that were lobbying.
Speaker 2: Is that the amount of people that complained about health
Speaker 2: issues or is that the number of people that lobbied.
Speaker 2: I think that might be the number of people that
Speaker 2: received checks.
Speaker 1: Yeah, number of reports listing issue area. So yeah, almost
Speaker 1: ten thousand reports of health related issues with Hasbro alone.
Speaker 3: So ten almost ten thousand reports of like something's wrong here,
Speaker 3: and almost twenty five hundred payouts.
Speaker 1: Oh, I'm sorry. This is not Hasbro alone, This is everybody's.
Speaker 1: It is the annual number of clients lobbying on health issues.
Speaker 1: So it's not just how it's And if you look
Speaker 1: look at all of them, Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of
Speaker 1: America has the highest number of reports, shocker, and then
Speaker 1: below them Johnson and Johnson unit United Health America's health
Speaker 1: insurance plans.
Speaker 4: Where else I saw.
Speaker 2: Merk, Pfizer, Mark, Pfizer, Blue Cross, Blue Cross, Blue Shield,
Speaker 2: DaVita Pharmaceutical Care Management Association two and forty one records
Speaker 2: of this. And so these are the lobbyists, right like
Speaker 2: the in the lobbyists that are trying to get in
Speaker 2: into the Oh, I want to see what the fucking
Speaker 2: bills were though, bills labeled by Hasbro or lobby by Hasbro,
Speaker 2: And ooh, let's talk about this.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it doesn't really get into the nitty gritty. It
Speaker 1: says figures on this page of calculations by open Data
Speaker 1: or by Open Secrets based on data from the Senate
Speaker 1: Office of Public Records. Data for the most recent year
Speaker 1: was downloaded on October twenty third, But you can't click
Speaker 1: it or anything.
Speaker 4: So yeah, it doesn't say.
Speaker 2: There's nothing to scroll down on.
Speaker 1: No. O, well, shit report images. Dude, I love this
Speaker 1: Open Secrets fucking website.
Speaker 2: SA.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 1: Look, the lobbying firm is called Duberstein Group, So let's
Speaker 1: let's look up who Duberstein If that doesn't sound Jewish.
Speaker 2: Right right right?
Speaker 1: Duberstein stein Stein, Yeah.
Speaker 4: The Duberstein Group.
Speaker 1: Keith Duberstein is transitioned from the White House to lobbyist.
Speaker 1: Isn't that funny how that always works? Always you make
Speaker 1: more money in the private sector.
Speaker 5: Dog.
Speaker 1: Yeah, he was an American lobbyist who served as US
Speaker 1: President Ronald Reagan's White House Chief of Staff from eighty
Speaker 1: eight to eighty nine.
Speaker 4: And now this guy's lobbying for Hasbro. Of course. Duberstein
Speaker 4: was born to a Jewish family in Brooklyn of Jewel.
Speaker 1: Faub, a teacher Aaron Duberstein, who was a fundraiser for
Speaker 1: the Boy Scouts of America.
Speaker 4: All that's not a good look.
Speaker 2: Not at all, man. This guy's just eight up with
Speaker 2: it any.
Speaker 1: But yeah, this is the guy that lobbies for hasbro Yep.
Speaker 1: Duberstein transitioned from the White House to lobbyists. He was
Speaker 1: successful and his insight and advice was sought by leaders
Speaker 1: of both parties. Duberstein founded the Duberstein Group, Incorporated in
Speaker 1: eighty seven. It was a consulting services company providing corporate
Speaker 1: consulting and government relation services. Among its clients are Amazon,
Speaker 1: BP and MLB. Duberstein was hired by Russian authorities via
Speaker 1: Goldman Sachs to lobby against Magnitsky Bill, as known as
Speaker 1: Sergei Magnitsky Rule of Law Accountability Act SO, a bill
Speaker 1: in the US Congress to end quotes impose sanctions on
Speaker 1: persons responsible for the detention, abuse, or death of Sergei
Speaker 1: Magnet and for other gross violations of human rights in
Speaker 1: the Russian Federation. Dude toys, and this is the guy
Speaker 1: that is lobbying for Hasbro Toy Company. Yeah, yeah, so
Speaker 1: we got Wow, we got Commies, we got Jews.
Speaker 4: I mean, it's just crazy up in the ear.
Speaker 2: We got Ferbies. We're all over the place in this bitch.
Speaker 4: And then we want to talk about surveillance. You know
Speaker 4: what I'm saying. It just makes sense.
Speaker 3: Do you see the connections of why certain people still
Speaker 3: to this day believe that the ferbies actually were.
Speaker 4: Being used in this fashion? I mean proofs in the pudding,
Speaker 4: dud dude.
Speaker 1: It even says Duberstein showed discretion and did not discuss
Speaker 1: his work, leading to in quotes an era of mystery
Speaker 1: about him and what he did for his clients.
Speaker 2: The White House chief of staff under Reagan. Yeah, holy shit,
Speaker 2: that's crazy.
Speaker 4: Jesus, this is a weird plot twist. So weird.
Speaker 1: Oh, he was actually on the board of directors for
Speaker 1: bo Conico Phillips.
Speaker 4: What are some other ones that we might know?
Speaker 2: He was a flimming company, Saint Paul Company's Inc.
Speaker 4: Board of directors for Fannie May. Holy shit, this guy's
Speaker 4: all over the place.
Speaker 2: Wow, American Abroad media dude.
Speaker 1: Duberstein was a backslapping Brooklyn native was one of the
Speaker 1: most connected Washington people, a quote unquote permanent Washington fixture.
Speaker 1: He was a regular at Washington parties and network talk shows.
Speaker 1: What the fuck do we find ourselves into?
Speaker 4: Right here?
Speaker 2: And all of this connected to the Ferbie dog my god,
Speaker 2: says Duberstein noted that as a Brooklyn Knight, he always
Speaker 2: enjoyed working with people.
Speaker 1: As a quote unquote cultivator of the press, he was
Speaker 1: generally discreet, refusing to be quoted by name, even for
Speaker 1: articles about himself. Holy shit, man, talk about literally flying
Speaker 1: under the radar. That's crazy, huh.
Speaker 3: I mean, that's crazy as fuck to know that this
Speaker 3: first of all, didn't know there was an American toy
Speaker 3: lobbying conglomerate, didn't know that Hasbro had that, and didn't
Speaker 3: know that this guy was the lobbyist who was paying
Speaker 3: people in DC hundreds of thousands of dollars annually and
Speaker 3: you could track that on Open Secrets to lobby for
Speaker 3: the toy companies.
Speaker 2: That's wild.
Speaker 1: I mean, was was lobbying for the Russians? Dude, You're
Speaker 1: talking about infiltration.
Speaker 4: That's crazy.
Speaker 2: And again all tying back to the Ferbie perhaps they
Speaker 2: were being used in some way, shape or form for
Speaker 2: maybe some sort of intelligence gathering, data collecting, spy network chicanery.
Speaker 2: We don't know.
Speaker 1: There's he very well could have been like some kind
Speaker 1: of Soviet spy at this point for all we know.
Speaker 3: And if he was a Soviet spy and he was
Speaker 3: Reagan's chief of staff, that's not a good look at all,
Speaker 3: because Reagan, it was very much against the comedies.
Speaker 2: That was like his whole shtick.
Speaker 4: Dude, what the fuck man?
Speaker 1: It's like it goes to show that like the surface
Speaker 1: level conspiracies people can laugh at, right, like oh what
Speaker 1: Ferbie's are spying on you?
Speaker 4: And then you're like, wait a second.
Speaker 2: So this connects to that, connects to that, and it
Speaker 2: starts to paint a like a more intricate picture to
Speaker 2: where you're like, Okay, I think I get it.
Speaker 1: Actually, you know, like I understand why there may have
Speaker 1: been concerns.
Speaker 3: And tie this in with your boy Dave Hampton, right,
Speaker 3: one of the original creators, not the third guy that
Speaker 3: they brought in later, one of the original concept designers.
Speaker 3: Him and mister Chung, who American.
Speaker 2: He's American, but yeah, Chung is also very indicative of
Speaker 2: all the conversation we're having here. So the dude went
Speaker 2: off the rails and fell off the grid after his
Speaker 2: instant success with Ferbi. By two thousand and one, Dude
Speaker 2: he was living off grid in Nevada somewhere, and no
Speaker 2: one heard from him since he only came out of
Speaker 2: hiding in twenty fourteen for an interview like one of
Speaker 2: the only ones he ever gave. And when I say hiding,
Speaker 2: I do in fact mean that he and his family
Speaker 2: live off grid by his own emission, specifically so that
Speaker 2: people would stop bothering him about releasing more ferbies.
Speaker 4: I imagine how that could make you crazy?
Speaker 3: Could you imagine being such a successful toy creator that
Speaker 3: you have to take you and your family off grid
Speaker 3: and live out there down by the river to get
Speaker 3: away from the hype, dude, or get it?
Speaker 4: Do it to get away from certain accusations.
Speaker 1: Probably accusations probably a little lobbyist, maybe somebody you know,
Speaker 1: kind of saying, look, we understand that you could have
Speaker 1: possibly been involved in undercover fucking spy surveillance type of shit.
Speaker 1: You know what, instead of just accusing you of it,
Speaker 1: maybe maybe we want you to work for us.
Speaker 2: Now.
Speaker 1: Can you create a new toy, a new ferbie, you know,
Speaker 1: it's all already in the public zeitgeist that these things were,
Speaker 1: you know, mistakenly labeled as surveillance items.
Speaker 4: Maybe we take that and run with it.
Speaker 1: Let's actually create a spy Ferby and maybe it turns
Speaker 1: into like an Alexa Ferbiy or some shit. You can
Speaker 1: imagine people knocking at his door saying that. Or maybe
Speaker 1: it's just I don't know, like people who look back
Speaker 1: upon the the Ferby fondly, I have a.
Speaker 3: Hard time believing that he got so instantly successful and
Speaker 3: made so many millions of dollars almost instantaneously that he decided, yeah,
Speaker 3: this is a bit too much for me.
Speaker 2: I'm gonna go live in the woods somewhere.
Speaker 3: And I can't speak with authority on that one, but
Speaker 3: it sounds really crazy to me that you wouldn't want
Speaker 3: to snowball that success. Maybe take that lightning in a
Speaker 3: bottle and see if you could replicate it or remodel
Speaker 3: it in some way, shape or form. Because again, once
Speaker 3: Hasbro bought the rights from Tiger, he was gone, like
Speaker 3: he's getting a royalties, he's getting percentages off of it,
Speaker 3: for sure, but he had no hand in any of
Speaker 3: the design features. From that point onward.
Speaker 2: So it's also very crazy to me that he not
Speaker 2: just went off and lived a normal life somewhere. He
Speaker 2: went into hiding in the woods. Dog like you're going
Speaker 2: off grid so that nobody can find you because you
Speaker 2: were so successful at a toy one time.
Speaker 3: That doesn't exactly check out to me. It doesn't pass
Speaker 3: the sniff test.
Speaker 1: No, it don't. Yeah, I'm looking at like stock prices
Speaker 1: and shit. But yeah, back in December of ninety nine,
Speaker 1: it had a high of eleven dollars a share, Tom Hasbro, Yeah,
Speaker 1: Hasbro did, and its current price right now is actually
Speaker 1: higher than it ever was. But of course there's reverse
Speaker 1: stock splits that can really pump that up. But I
Speaker 1: think it's current price now is sixty two bucks a share,
Speaker 1: so still pretty damn good.
Speaker 2: Look at what a Coca Cola is at ninety nine.
Speaker 2: Just to give a.
Speaker 3: Comparison, he said, Hasbro was at eleven a share. Yep, Okay,
Speaker 3: all right, now again, Coca Cola is wild, wildly more
Speaker 3: successful than Hasbro, and we understand that, but you got
Speaker 3: to compare something against it, right, Like whenever people are
Speaker 3: like I bought my first house for twenty five thousand dollars, Like, okay,
Speaker 3: but what did a gallon of gas cost?
Speaker 15: You?
Speaker 2: Like, give me something to compared against.
Speaker 1: So the closing price for Coca Cola between nineteen ninety
Speaker 1: and nineteen ninety nine was fourteen twenty seven, so they
Speaker 1: were up there.
Speaker 2: Hasbro was doing very well then.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and the latest price for coke now is sixty seven,
Speaker 1: So like literally what and what?
Speaker 2: Wow?
Speaker 3: That's that's pretty incredible that Hasbro had as good of
Speaker 3: returns as Coke.
Speaker 2: That that's mind blowing.
Speaker 4: Yeah, yeah, it's pretty crazy.
Speaker 1: And especially you think about like how much it probably
Speaker 1: cost them to make this shit overseas, you know, like they're.
Speaker 4: Selling them for twenty nine ninety nine.
Speaker 1: Whenever they first came out, it probably cost them two
Speaker 1: or three bucks to make, you know.
Speaker 4: Oh yeah, and so yeah, I mean I imagine the
Speaker 4: the ROI was quite nice.
Speaker 2: Very true.
Speaker 3: Now let's go into some of the other possible modifications
Speaker 3: on the Ferbies. Like I mentioned this homeboy here his
Speaker 3: YouTube channels. Look, mom, no computer. He actually built an organ.
Speaker 3: I'm not saying pipe organ because there's no pipes. There's
Speaker 3: only Ferbies organ. And he actually got them to make music,
Speaker 3: if nothing else. It's gonna be slightly annoying and slightly entertaining.
Speaker 3: Let's watch this together, good cult members, y'all tell me
Speaker 3: what y'all think. As far as if this guy was able.
Speaker 2: To make this happen with a little bit of some
Speaker 2: time and some wiring and some modifications, what else could
Speaker 2: the Ferbies have been used for?
Speaker 4: If there was a nefarious actor in the mix? Check
Speaker 4: it out? A forgan you will? What a foregan? If
Speaker 4: you will? A foregin? Yes, a foregan new.
Speaker 17: Finally, after trowling through eBay and rummaging fruit cherry shops
Speaker 17: up and down the land, and a heck of a
Speaker 17: lot of soldiering, I present to you the Ferbie organ.
Speaker 17: And here we have forty four free range, homegrown little
Speaker 17: Ferbi dars that have been extensively modified using the fully
Speaker 17: patent void formant Verbi fusion synthesis brain modification surgery procedure,
Speaker 17: along with a beautiful oak finish that wouldn't look out
Speaker 17: of place in your grandma's living room. These furbies are
Speaker 17: able to sing, chat, and play in a dreamlike state.
Speaker 17: Hooked up into the mainframe in the back of the machine.
Speaker 17: They are heavily sedated. I don't even think they know
Speaker 17: they're here. It's kind of like the Matrix, but without
Speaker 17: the bad sunglasses. So without further ado, let's flick the
Speaker 17: collective awakening switch.
Speaker 4: So I've tried to waken up them, I've gone.
Speaker 2: Back to sleep.
Speaker 4: I'm gonna turn that down slightly for that.
Speaker 17: You also have the ability to stop them in their
Speaker 17: tracks by pressing the loop and freeze switch.
Speaker 2: It's weird, isn't it. Feature.
Speaker 17: The Ferbies are able to also generate a four months
Speaker 17: vowel notes, and you're able to change the vowel. It's
Speaker 17: rather hard to notice, but when you hit the notes,
Speaker 17: the Ferbie also speaks. But they're going a bit crazy
Speaker 17: right now. I think they're a bit excited to be
Speaker 17: on camera. So now it's time to play a song.
Speaker 17: I've just got to get out my Ferby composer out
Speaker 17: of its backpack.
Speaker 5: Ah.
Speaker 2: The thing is worth mentioning.
Speaker 3: He just showed some of the furbies that were completely
Speaker 3: dissected that he did for this. We're gonna watch another
Speaker 3: video next that the people actually taking them.
Speaker 2: Apart, which is pretty wild. But yeah, let's let's.
Speaker 3: Continue with this uh musical number. Wild Ship Dude.
Speaker 2: As Aristotle once said, there is no great genius without
Speaker 2: a touch of madness, and that spells that guy right there. Yeah,
Speaker 2: a little bit, a little bit. I had a couple
Speaker 2: more articles pulled up.
Speaker 3: We already talked about when the National Security Agency outright
Speaker 3: band Ferbies. This is a quick little two page thing
Speaker 3: talking about the actual memos that were released. But I
Speaker 3: think we pretty much covered that to the degree. So
Speaker 3: now what is inside of Ferbie? Let's talk about this.
Speaker 3: These two engineer types are actually going to break it
Speaker 3: apart to show the insides. And you know, with all
Speaker 3: the conversation about could they listen, were they recording us?
Speaker 3: Were they interacting and actually learning English and all these things,
Speaker 3: let's learn about it more together.
Speaker 16: Hello there, welcome to Live Lab for another dissection video.
Speaker 16: We've got something a little bit different for you today.
Speaker 8: We're going to be dissecting one of our favorite toys
Speaker 8: in the nineties, Ferbies.
Speaker 16: We're going to start trying to take the skin off,
Speaker 16: the outside skin fur.
Speaker 7: It's a bit of plastic that's so believably real.
Speaker 8: So I'm cutting around the base of the Ferby here.
Speaker 8: I'm just going to slice up his middle now, just
Speaker 8: to see if I can get a look at what's
Speaker 8: going on. We're being held on by his face, so
Speaker 8: I'm thinking his face plate might come off, which'd be interesting.
Speaker 7: What can we see down there?
Speaker 8: So here that looks like where are you tom?
Speaker 15: So?
Speaker 8: That's his sense cool and round on the back. We'll
Speaker 8: get a better look at these once we've got his
Speaker 8: skin properly off. But that's where you can stroke his back.
Speaker 8: The faces is on the way off, you can reveal
Speaker 8: the nightmarish creature within some eyeballs becoming exposed.
Speaker 16: So I've gone for a different approach, just cutting round face.
Speaker 8: It's pretty horrifying, and I'm going to see if I
Speaker 8: can delicately expose his ears. I'd quite like to keep
Speaker 8: the ears intact if I can. We've kind of skinned
Speaker 8: them now, so I think stage two is probably to
Speaker 8: get inside this plastic bit.
Speaker 16: So I think I've done enough screwing or enough pulling
Speaker 16: that we can start to get one of the sides away. Yeah,
Speaker 16: look at that.
Speaker 8: I'm not gonna bother with that last screw.
Speaker 5: Oh.
Speaker 8: I have a theory about these these cogs and gears
Speaker 8: in the back there. If we can force those to move,
Speaker 8: we might actually see some movement in the face of
Speaker 8: the Ferby, which I think would be quite nice. We
Speaker 8: can say we've got a little contact soon. So it's
Speaker 8: just two bits of metal that when they come into
Speaker 8: contact with each other, when you press down make a connection.
Speaker 8: It's just like acting like a switch.
Speaker 7: Found the final screw.
Speaker 16: I want to get this top section with all the
Speaker 16: mechanical workings away from the electrical circuit board, get a
Speaker 16: better look at the brain there.
Speaker 7: It is Ferby brain.
Speaker 8: So we've got lots of resistors and capacitors at these
Speaker 8: ones here, and then these long bits and that bit there.
Speaker 8: Those are kind of some of the cleverer bits. Those
Speaker 8: are the chips, and they're gonna have lots of connections
Speaker 8: in them to kind of do the logic of the circuit.
Speaker 8: So when Ferby's mouth is pressed, move is up and down.
Speaker 8: That's where that is happening.
Speaker 7: Just found a little motor. So either side of that coil.
Speaker 16: Are two magnets. When an alternating current is passed through
Speaker 16: that coil, that's going to make this thing's been round.
Speaker 16: So that's how the Ferbi is translating electrical signals into
Speaker 16: movement of these gears underneath.
Speaker 8: I'm wondering if we feed that some power directly. Oh,
Speaker 8: might we be able to get it to go? Let's
Speaker 8: do it.
Speaker 16: Beth's being slightly blase about connecting batteries to unknown things,
Speaker 16: and that's because he's a fairly low voltage.
Speaker 7: If this was a main's appliance, we would not be
Speaker 7: doing this.
Speaker 8: Oh my god, Yeah, it's alive, brilliant. So we were
Speaker 8: right that one motor is driving all of the gears
Speaker 8: in this little gearbox. All we needed was to find
Speaker 8: the positive and negative and hook it up to a
Speaker 8: bit of a powerful battery that is magnificently creepy. Magnificently creepy.
Speaker 8: The back looks particularly incredible.
Speaker 7: That little black that is for the mouth. That's the
Speaker 7: mouth going in time. This one's doing the ears up
Speaker 7: and down. That little black one there.
Speaker 16: He's doing the eyes open shut, open shut, all off,
Speaker 16: one movement.
Speaker 8: What we want to do now is see what a
Speaker 8: live Ferby looks like without its skin, without its outer casings,
Speaker 8: but still working. We want to see all those gears
Speaker 8: turning while it's alive.
Speaker 7: Talking to you.
Speaker 16: Okay, The inside is really amazing, Like I'd never thought
Speaker 16: about what was going on in there, and now.
Speaker 7: We've seen it. It kind of makes sense.
Speaker 16: The Ferby's got lots of different sensors on the outside,
Speaker 16: and we can see how they're connected to the circuit board.
Speaker 7: When the sensors are pressed.
Speaker 16: Or hear something when the light's covered, send a signal
Speaker 16: to the circuit board.
Speaker 7: Circuit board processes.
Speaker 16: That sends a signal back out to the motives, which
Speaker 16: makes the Ferby movement.
Speaker 8: And it's got a whole range of things just with
Speaker 8: one really simple, a very very clever. So if you've
Speaker 8: got any old toys at home which just sitting up
Speaker 8: in the accid collecting dust, get them downstairs and see
Speaker 8: what's inside them.
Speaker 2: All right.
Speaker 3: So, now, like I said, that's kind of a breakdown
Speaker 3: of the inner workings, the mechanical features and all of
Speaker 3: these things that would be.
Speaker 1: That would be so cool to just go in there
Speaker 1: and you know, mess with some of the words that
Speaker 1: it can say. You know, maybe give it to somebody
Speaker 1: as like a little nostalgic present. They think that they're
Speaker 1: getting a little Ferby. Meanwhile, that thing just walks up
Speaker 1: to you and says.
Speaker 2: Fuck you, Jacob, or drop the base in it and
Speaker 2: be like, oh, have that bitch wake you up in
Speaker 2: the middle of the night, like yo, that would fuck.
Speaker 4: People up, dude.
Speaker 1: I would just have like a little timer that comes
Speaker 1: on at three point thirty in the morning, just like well.
Speaker 3: Like if it's already got the photos cell, it's very
Speaker 3: easy to rig up a timer to where once the
Speaker 3: light's gone, there's like an eight hour timer that starts
Speaker 3: and have that bitch at two in the morning starts
Speaker 3: screaming in one of these tones.
Speaker 4: That's awesome.
Speaker 1: I was thinking I was more Witching Hour, That's why
Speaker 1: I said that. But okay, I mean creepy. Either way,
Speaker 1: it'd be a fun little prank to do on somebody.
Speaker 3: So let's kind of recap on this episode and some
Speaker 3: of the wild things we discussed, and also I actually mentioned
Speaker 3: this one too. There was also some controversy surrounding the Ferbies,
Speaker 3: saying that they were actually using human or animal hair
Speaker 3: as their fur. The Hasbro company had to come out
Speaker 3: and say, no, it's all acrylic, like they dissolved fake fur,
Speaker 3: just like all the other fake fur items you would
Speaker 3: buy from a stuffed animal.
Speaker 4: Which is the cheaper way to go about it anyway.
Speaker 3: Indeed, indeed, now as far as how the machine was
Speaker 3: able to go from speaking Furbish to speaking your language.
Speaker 2: Here's the thing. It was pretty programmed, and it was
Speaker 2: correct that the more you played with it, the more
Speaker 2: it unlocked new things, new easter eggs, if you will, so,
Speaker 2: let me just throw this out.
Speaker 3: You had it to where if you were to like
Speaker 3: say good morning to it or hello, like fifty times,
Speaker 3: it would answer you in Furbish fifty times. On the
Speaker 3: fifty first time it would answer you Hello, and it was.
Speaker 4: Like, no way, it's changing, it's learning.
Speaker 2: It's all this.
Speaker 3: Basically, the program was set to a certain number a
Speaker 3: certain not a timer, but a certain number of times
Speaker 3: when a phrase would be uttered, and then it would
Speaker 3: swap from Furbish to your language and answer you. It
Speaker 3: gave the appearance that it was self learning, but in
Speaker 3: reality it was pre programmed for that. And I'm throwing
Speaker 3: out fifty arbitrarily. I have no idea what number for
Speaker 3: each of these phrases it was. It's still crazy to
Speaker 3: me that it knew if you were speaking English to
Speaker 3: it to start changing from Furbish to English, or from
Speaker 3: Furbish to Greek, or to Portuguese or to Japanese or whatever.
Speaker 3: That is pretty insane in and of itself, which again
Speaker 3: I could understand why to the three letter agencies and
Speaker 3: powers that be of the nineties they would take that
Speaker 3: to be Okay, this thing is artificial intelligence and an
Speaker 3: actual robot, by the company's admission, and they're letting it
Speaker 3: go to all these kids' homes. We're not letting that
Speaker 3: shit in our office. But again, if they just would
Speaker 3: have reached out, they probably would have got a better answer.
Speaker 3: But instead they went in and banned it outright.
Speaker 2: So the Ferbie, the toy that was the craze of
Speaker 2: the world for a good few years there banned by
Speaker 2: multiple three letter agencies, lobbied for by Reagan's former chief
Speaker 2: of staff.
Speaker 3: No, as of this moment, I don't believe that it
Speaker 3: was actually being used as a spy device, but I
Speaker 3: could absolutely understand why so many agencies believe that it was.
Speaker 3: And again, with all those mechanics on the inside, unless
Speaker 3: you knew what you were looking at, how would you
Speaker 3: know if that wasn't being used as a recording device
Speaker 3: or as a memory storage bank, or if there wasn't
Speaker 3: a computer or a camera that was hidden behind the
Speaker 3: eyeballs or behind the little infrared forehead thing. I absolutely
Speaker 3: could understand why there was such a need for concern.
Speaker 3: But to my knowledge, this is the only toy that
Speaker 3: has ever been banned from multiple secure locations in this nation.
Speaker 1: Brother shocking, actually, you know, And it makes you just
Speaker 1: want to look a little bit deeper into a lot
Speaker 1: of the fads and a lot of the toys and
Speaker 1: stuff like that, especially in the day and age where
Speaker 1: microchip might dude, a microchip can be the size of
Speaker 1: a skin follicle now, like they are so damn small.
Speaker 1: They have microbots and all that other shit. I mean,
Speaker 1: it's it wouldn't surprise me, especially in the day and
Speaker 1: age where everybody has Wi Fi, everybody has a cellular
Speaker 1: connection to where it's perfect for GATA collection, And I
Speaker 1: don't know. I mean, of course, nowadays, I don't even
Speaker 1: think you would have to go to those lengths because
Speaker 1: people are just totally fine having Alexas in their house
Speaker 1: and Siri on their phone in their pocket all the
Speaker 1: time anyway, So I don't even know if you'd even
Speaker 1: even need to go to those extents, to be honest
Speaker 1: with you, And so maybe there's just not really a
Speaker 1: need for it. But back then in ninety nine, whenever
Speaker 1: it was a little bit more primitive, at least to us,
Speaker 1: you know, the average folk. I could see why there
Speaker 1: would have been concerns.
Speaker 3: I mean, keep in mind, in ninety nine, the flip
Speaker 3: phone was seen as the fucking pinnacle of the technology
Speaker 3: you'd have.
Speaker 2: In your pocket. People were still using beepers, The Nokia
Speaker 2: brick was still widely being used by a vast majority
Speaker 2: of the public. You had to pull the antenna out
Speaker 2: of your cellular to be able to do like you
Speaker 2: see what I'm saying.
Speaker 1: It was a different era. The next tell phone walkie talkies.
Speaker 1: Those things were like, oh shit.
Speaker 2: Those didn't even come out until like the mid two thousands.
Speaker 4: Dude, was it that No, it was like early two thousands.
Speaker 3: I want to say, the only time I remember seeing
Speaker 3: it was probably around three oh four. And I mean
Speaker 3: maybe by that point they had kind of gone down
Speaker 3: as far as popularity goes. But yeah, the next tell
Speaker 3: cell phone walkie talkies.
Speaker 2: Why wouldn't you just use the cell phone and call
Speaker 2: the guy, well, because you don't want to use your minutes.
Speaker 2: It was It's crazy the amount of things that we
Speaker 2: took at that day and age is like, well, obviously,
Speaker 2: and now we look back like bro, Why what the fuck.
Speaker 4: Dude, I knew it came out a lot earlier. My
Speaker 4: dad used to have one of those.
Speaker 1: It was a work phone, and the next TAEL launched
Speaker 1: it's pushed to talk service marketed as Direct Connect in
Speaker 1: nineteen ninety six.
Speaker 2: No, the walkie talkie cell phone Combo wasn't in ninety six.
Speaker 2: There's no way.
Speaker 4: It says which allowed users.
Speaker 1: This is from how stuff works, but it says which
Speaker 1: allowed users to communicate using a walkie talkie feature on
Speaker 1: their phones. This service became widely popular, however, in the
Speaker 1: late nineties and early two thousands.
Speaker 4: Okay, damn, but it started in ninety six.
Speaker 2: That's fucking crazy.
Speaker 1: Yeah, you'd get the little chirp and somebody's trying to,
Speaker 1: you know, send you a little walkie talkie message.
Speaker 2: God hear that.
Speaker 4: You get the little on your belt, But it was
Speaker 4: your pager. Pagers were the shit back in the day.
Speaker 2: Dude.
Speaker 3: Dude, my dad still had one up until like two
Speaker 3: thousand and two, like and I mean he didn't use
Speaker 3: it past like ninety nine, but he still had it
Speaker 3: and he never like canceled service to it.
Speaker 2: So you just leave it on the dresser.
Speaker 3: We would hear that bitch just buzz his dresser for
Speaker 3: no reason at random times. It was basically like telemarkers
Speaker 3: that were paging him asking him to call them for
Speaker 3: some pole or something.
Speaker 4: It was so stupid it made a kim possible age
Speaker 4: like milk dump bump up.
Speaker 2: Yeah, no doubt dude, Yeah, but yeah, pretty crazy.
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Speaker 2: I know it's a little bit on the pricey side.
Speaker 2: Is that actually gonna pay out in the future?
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Speaker 2: think about the ferbies.
Speaker 4: Are we crazy for looking at it in this way?
Speaker 2: Where the three let our agencies crazy for looking at
Speaker 2: it the way they did? What has bro on some
Speaker 2: shit from day one? They've actually been spying on us
Speaker 2: the whole time. Let us know what you think, and
Speaker 2: the best way to do so would be too Please
Speaker 2: hit the five stars at the Shares of Light subscribes comments,
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Speaker 4: Come check out the.
Speaker 2: K tonight and come join each of us for our
Speaker 2: individual Patreon lives that we host every Wednesday night at
Speaker 2: nine pm Central. Links to those are in the description
Speaker 2: as well. And we thank you for everybody's already gone
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Speaker 1: And with that being said, this was another beautiful episode
Speaker 1: of the Cult of Conspiracy.
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