Version History: Furby

11:15David Pierce:And what he says is, OK, I wonder if we could do the same thing, but better and more three-dimensional and more real. And Caleb said later, the thing he quotes Dave is saying is he says, I just want a little guy that will be my friend, which is like a little bit sad and also deeply fascinating.

11:33Vee Song:The parallels between that sentiment and the guy who created friend, the glowing air tag that I had to wear around my neck and angered people all across New York recently. It's a one-to-one. I just want a little guy to be my friend.

11:47David Pierce:But they end in completely different places.

11:50Vee Song:Completely different places for various reasons.

11:54David Pierce:So they go off to try and make this thing and pretty immediately they patent the idea and they start to figure out what they're going to make. And here, let me really quick just show you a picture of the patent. Actually, I have two images I want to show you of the original patent from Furby. Oh, God. It is, on the one hand, like, the way I would describe this is like steampunk Furby. It's got all these diagrams, right? And there's actually a lot of incredibly complicated stuff going on in Furby. So it's pointing to all the different parts, explaining how they work. And it looks creepy and horrifying.

12:27David Pierce:Because if you just tear the thing all the way down, it is just a little tiny alien robot. But then there's this other picture in the patent filing that is just Furby. Like, it's kind of incredible.

12:40Sean Hollister:What you have just said, I want to invert it completely. I was looking at a cute little steampunk robot bird, and now I am looking at an Eldritch horror. I don't know what you're talking about.

12:52David Pierce:So we're looking at basically like a black and white drawing of something in the Furby family. I think Furby just saw itself and got very excited. Dave in particular has a bunch of ideas about what he wants this thing to be. He doesn't want it to be a cat or a dog because he, A, doesn't want to replace people's pets. A thing he said a bunch was like, there are dogs and cats in shelters and I want you to have one of them, not my robot toy. Which I actually think is really admirable. That is. He's like, I don't want to take the place of an actual thing that you might have. I want to build something different and complementary.

13:23Sean Hollister:But like one year later, Sonny does the eye bow and says, no, you should have a robot dog instead.

13:27David Pierce:Yes. And a thing that Dave also said about this was that trying to do a dog or cat was a mistake because everybody understood what a dog or cat should be like. And so your rough approximation of it would feel really bad because it would feel like you were just giving them a lesser version of an experience they understood, which I think is like kind of the Aibo experience, right? It's like it wanted badly to be a dog, but it wasn't. And it just didn't quite hit the same way, whereas like whatever the hell Furby is, it is different.

13:54Vee Song:The Aibo hit with some people. They were holding funerals at Buddhist temples for the Aibo. For they really? Oh, yes. It was a whole thing. Japanese people got really in touch to their Aibos and had relationships with them. And when Sony discontinued it and they stopped making the stuff, they would hold funerals for their Aibo at Buddhist temples. It was a whole thing for a really long time. Wow. But I think he has a point about, you know, I've tested some of these robots and I have a cat and side by side. I mean, the cat just wins. He's so cute. For sure. Like, he just is a kitty cat. So I think I was, like, really smart of him, and he should have probably talked to Sony about that.

14:35Vee Song:Saved them some trouble. Yeah. Just a little.

14:38David Pierce:They start working, and almost immediately, like, in a manner of a few weeks, they build their first prototype, which they called Furball, which, fun fact, is the origin of the name Furby, a thing that I probably should have known but did not know until prepping for this episode. My question to both of you, is Furball a better name than Furby? Should they have just called it Furball? No.

14:56Sean Hollister:No?

14:56David Pierce:I kind of like Furball.

14:58Sean Hollister:Furball is the thing you say to Chewbacca right before he rips your arms.

15:01Vee Song:Yes. That and also what do cats cough up? Furballs. Yeah. And that's no good.

15:10David Pierce:All right. Fair enough. Fair enough. So they agreed with you and get away from the name Furball pretty quickly. And they move to Furby, which I think is like a little cutesier. There's a lot of cutesy in the development of Furby. They wanted this thing to be cheap. Like when Furby's came out, they were like 40 bucks, which is remarkable for how advanced it was at the time. And so what they had to do was work with pretty cheap components. And they found a way to make basically a pretty cheap, pretty simple motor reversible so that it could actually, the thing could move and operate in multiple directions, which was very hard to do at the time and is still hard to do with cheap parts.

15:47David Pierce:So that was one of their big breakthroughs. But they get this thing sorted in the matter of a couple of months. And then they're like, okay, well, we need somebody to buy this thing from us. They go to the company that made Teddy Ruxpin. But that company, funnily enough, is like into it. But they're like, well, we need some time to really test this and market test it and see if people want this. Maybe we can release it in a year. And Dave Hampton's like, no, no, no. I need money like today. So, no, we're out. They go also to because of Tamagotchi, by the way, they're also like this moment is about to happen.

16:20David Pierce:They were so convinced that Tamagotchi was going to be a hit that they were like this virtual friends thing is going to happen quickly. And we need to be there right at the beginning of it, which good call by them. So they show it to other companies. And then a friend of a friend of theirs, this guy named Richard Levy, introduces them to Tiger Electronics. And Tiger Electronics basically gets the thing fully formed and decides that it's going to do it. Sean, do you know anything about Tiger Electronics? What is this company's deal? Tell me about Tiger.

16:48Sean Hollister:Tiger Electronics, they were the company that was producing all of those very, very cheap but desirable little video game systems you could buy at your toy store. So every movie would have like a tie-in game. You have your Space Jam basketball game, your Toy Story game, all kinds of things like this, just with a couple of buttons for like left, right and like a jump button. I used to have the Paperboy game. And all it would do is there'd be this little like figure on a screen. It would have like two animations, two like other positions that this black like silhouette of a Paperboy could do. And you'd press a button, throw the paper, and you'd see the little, almost like an emoji in terms of how little detail it had, fling this tiny little paper icon across the screen, two frames over to the left.

17:35Sean Hollister:That's the entire game.

17:36Vee Song:That's awesome. Just remembered I had one. It was Beauty and the Beast. And all Belle did was this and this and this. And I did the, oh, my God, I had one. Wow.

17:45Sean Hollister:They also did the Talkboy. If you remember the Home Alone movies. Tiger was the one that did the voice recorder, you know, cassette tape player where Kevin would play his stuff into the voice recorder. It would come out with different voices and scare the criminals away, stuff like that.

18:01David Pierce:Right. So Tiger is a pretty big name in the toy industry at this point. It's not like the toy company in the way that the Mattels of the world are, but it's a pretty big and pretty reputable name. And they basically agree on the spot that they want this thing. So they make this deal with Tiger in 1997. and Tiger says, awesome, we're in, let's do this. We want to show it off at Toy Fair in three months.

18:23Vee Song:That's not a long time.

18:24David Pierce:And we are off to the races. One more tiny bit of interesting drama that I uncovered that I would just like to put in front of you two and see what you think. Caleb and Dave, the two people on the patent for Furby that I showed you, it is not debatable that these were the two people who originated this project. over time seem to, I would say, studiously avoid giving each other credit for things. There's a kind of fascinating passive-aggressive interview strategy that they both adopt. And I just want to read you one passage. So a fun fact about the research for this episode was that I found a lot of Furby history in a 2001 GeoCities chat that Dave Hampton did with a Furby community that is the most, I'll link to it in the show notes, it is the most unhinged interview transcript you've ever seen in your entire life because it's just a group chat of a million Furby fans and then Dave, it's bananas.

19:20David Pierce:I think there are people pretending to be their Furbies and it's a whole thing. But anyway, so this person asks about a product called Snoring Roaring Norbert, which is like if you imagine a Furby, but it's Norbert the dragon from Harry Potter. That's a thing that existed a few years later. And somebody's like, is Snoring Roaring Norbert yours? And Dave says, it is not. This is from the other guy that claims to be the inventor of Furby. And then a minute later, he says, which is interesting. As he started as a co-inventor, yes, there are fathers of Furby too. I read that as like light shade. What do you guys think?

19:56Vee Song:That's clear shade.

19:57David Pierce:Okay.

19:58Vee Song:Other guy who claims to have invented Furby. I mean, he started as a co-inventor. That's, I think that's clear shade.

20:06David Pierce:Okay.

20:07Vee Song:Yeah.

20:07David Pierce:And it's really fascinating that this thing became so big that I think they both ended up wanting most or all of the credit because that became a big thing to have.

20:15Vee Song:What do you think, Coco? Nothing. Coco's over it.

20:19David Pierce:All right. I'm going to leave you with a question, then we're going to take a brief break. What kind of animal is Furby? Don't answer. We're going to take a break. We're going to come right back.

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21:30David Pierce:I think Coco gave up on us.

21:32Vee Song:I mean, it is like 30 years old.

21:34David Pierce:I found a bunch of horror stories in the research of people who were like, my Furby didn't talk for 20 years. And then one day at 4 a.m. No. He woke up.

21:45David Pierce:That's literally the last thing you see before you die. All right. We're back. You've had time. Sean, you go first. What kind of animal is Furby?

21:53Sean Hollister:I'm going to say it's a bird because it has a beak. Okay. That's about it. Okay. There's no other reason beyond the beak, but I'm going with that because that's the first thing I saw when you showed me. It's robot innards.

22:09David Pierce:Okay. I love it. V?

22:11Vee Song:I think it's a chimera akin to a platypus. It's like I think it's a platypus's cousin because while I agree with Sean that it has some bird-like qualities, there's no wings.

22:23David Pierce:It's a terrific point. Okay. So, Sean, you get the point for this one, but only by a hair. there have been many theories about this over the years and I think it kind of no one is wrong but the only two things that I was able to find that the creators have said is that it is mostly an owl which Sean you win on bird I would say the sort of basis of the thing is owl which makes sense the shape a little bit like you can sort of see it and there's some hamster in there somewhere

22:58David Pierce:listen I'm not Don't take this up with them.

23:00Vee Song:Let me look at this. Oh, its face is just so wrong. But, yeah. I mean, it's mostly Gremlin. I didn't even see that movie Gremlin, but.

23:13David Pierce:So, do you want to know a fun fact about that, by the way? Sure. They, at one point, had to subtly change the design to make it look less like Gremlins. If its ears were bigger, it would look even more like a Gremlin.

23:26Vee Song:I think it's better if we just shut Coco's eyes and then close. Okay, I can't close its mouth, but he seems more peaceful with his eyes closed.

23:37David Pierce:That's nice. He's sleeping.

23:38Vee Song:He's sleeping.

23:40David Pierce:Okay, so that is what it is, but it is also very clearly lots of things. There's a lot going on. And again, they didn't want it to feel exactly like any particular creature. But one thing I did think was interesting is that at the beginning as they were building this stuff out and especially as it got more popular, they started to have ideas about lots of other kinds. They wanted to do furbies of the sea, air, and land is the way that Dave put it. There was at one point a fish called Fishby that they worked on and were very excited about but never ended up releasing. They didn't want to make robots.

24:17David Pierce:They wanted to make creatures. That was a distinction Dave made a few times that I thought was really interesting. The one that he said he tried and immediately threw away was a snake. Furby's snake was just immediately thrown out as a bad idea, which I think, Sean, I think we can agree was a pretty solid decision.

24:33Sean Hollister:I mean, I don't think I would want to invite any form of Furby into my house, but snake certainly very, very high on the list of ones that will not.

24:41David Pierce:Furby just wriggling on your table in front of you does not seem like my idea of a good time. They called it danger doodle.

24:48Sean Hollister:It made it appropriately fun.

24:49David Pierce:That's true. So, yeah, so they land on this. Again, like we saw in those patents, this was the look pretty early on. And then they start filling the thing with technology. Fun fact, they wrote it. They wrote the original source code, which you can just find. It's just on the internet. And it's actually surprisingly readable, which is pretty cool. You can see how they're programming the way that it responds to different stimuli to, like, go to sleep. And Dave is the one figuring out how to sort of give this thing personality. And he described it one time I saw it's not yes, no, like a computer, but that it also has maybe.

25:27David Pierce:Furby has maybe, which I thought was a really great way of thinking about it. It's not correct technologically, but it is an interesting way of thinking about how to program one of these things. He spent a lot of time mapping Furby to essentially Maslow's hierarchy of needs, which actually contributes a lot to the personality of the thing, right? When Furby decided it was hungry, which is obviously like down at the bottom of the pyramid, it would just get louder and louder about being hungry because it understood that that is like a base instinct. Nothing else matters if you're hungry. Same with Sleepy.

25:59David Pierce:He built this incredible sort of waiting system between different emotions and different feelings. and then same with all these different inputs. So there's a ton of inputs inside of Furby. I think a big part of what makes it feel alive is this set of sensors. It was sensitive to light so that if you hold it up to a light, it'll actually respond in a certain way. It would respond to sound. It would respond to touch. It would respond to movement. Like there's a little sort of ball inside that lets you know if it's moving from side to side. And basically weighing all of this stuff was the work of building Furby.

26:36David Pierce:Because they really wanted it to not feel programmed, that like, if I do this, it will do this. That was actually the enemy of progress here. They didn't want to sort of give you a set of instructions for how to get different reactions out of Furby. They wanted it to be weird and unpredictable and silly and feel more alive in that sense. His kid also gave him the idea in the course of development that a Furby should know if there's another Furby nearby and that they should actually be able to communicate. This became known as the Furby communication protocol, which I like very much. He always liked to say that he didn't want the Furby to do anything that seemed stupid.

27:15David Pierce:And not stupid in that sense, but stupid in the like, oh, it should be able to do this. Why can't it do it? That's the reason Furby doesn't have hands. It's the reason it doesn't have legs. Because the idea was we don't have the technology to make it so that it can grab something or that it can walk. And the idea of this thing having arms that just do nothing, they thought made it look dumb. They're like, this looks like a thing that is broken and somehow underfeatured. So they just stripped everything out that wasn't relevant, which essentially left you with ears that move to express emotion, eyes that move to express emotion, and a mouth that moves to express communication.

27:49David Pierce:And that's it. And it is just astonishing what you're actually able to do with just those things.

27:53Vee Song:I really think that this guy could go around to various robotics companies like the robot Vax that are adding arms and legs and just talk about like, what if we didn't make robot Vax look stupid? Or like the humanoid robots that we saw at CES where, you know, the one Allison saw that punched itself in the face and then knocked itself out. Like, what if the fundamental law of robotics, forget Asimov, was don't do anything stupid?

28:22David Pierce:One of the things was just like, of course, if a Furby hears another Furby, why would they not be? Like, it would break that immersion and remind you that this thing had flaws and was a toy that wasn't programmed to do certain things.

28:35Vee Song:It's very philosophical. It really is. It's really fascinating. The thoughts of Furby and like what life is and how living things should act, which is, you know, you look at Furby and you wouldn't think such deep thought went into its personality. It's really true.

28:48David Pierce:It's quite deep, actually. Yeah. He called Furby an inference machine, which just jumped out to me after spending, you know, whatever, the last four years reading about AI inference. Like, he just, he was talking about it. It's the same stuff. He also developed, and this wound up being very important, an entirely new language for Furby. Furbish. The language is called Furbish. Furbish is a made-up language, but it has lots of real languages in it. So there's some Thai in there, there's some Japanese, there's a little bit of Hebrew, there's a little bit of Chinese. There's a lot of funny puns that he did on purpose.

29:25David Pierce:Some of the Furbish words sound kind of like swears, which Dave said he didn't do on purpose, but I don't believe him. So the Furby initially had a vocabulary about 200 words. And over the course of your time with it, it would actually start to learn English. So it would start speaking in Furbish. And then this was one of the ways they wanted to feel interactive with you. The more you talked to it, the idea was the more it would start to learn English. This was, of course, not actually an interactive experience that way. But it was meant to feel like it was hearing you and learning from you and talking to you.

29:57David Pierce:Dave said at one point that he actually did build a voice recognition feature for it. so that Furby actually could have understood you talking to it and maybe do something back. But he didn't think anybody was interested. And also they were at such a precious technology barrier that they ended up just not doing it.

30:15Vee Song:At a different time, this could have been like a vastly different Amazon Echo.

30:19David Pierce:A hundred percent.

30:20Vee Song:And infinitely more creepy. Yes. Just, just, ite, Furby by toilet paper. you know it's just like uh-uh is there some other world where that was what Furby was somewhere an

30:37David Pierce:Amazon executive just wrote that down and no don't do it I'm sorry I take it back Toy Fair 2027

30:42Vee Song:this is coming I've made a mistake I've made a huge mistake Sean and I think this was that was

30:48David Pierce:new at the time right like I'm thinking about you know we named a couple of Tickle Me Elmo is like a is a little bit of that sort of a it is a mechanical thing designed to be cute but I don't feel like cute was a thing you would ascribe to many toys of that era i think that there was this

31:05Sean Hollister:fascination by certain people who did think they were super cute like i'm sure furby sold however many millions because people thought it was cute not just because they wanted a robot in their house for sure but but definitely that late 90s period of we're going to make everything talk was huge. And to have this robot come out and say, we're not going to talk with a pre-recorded English speaking voice, but rather we're going to do this language where you have to interpret it. You can map your own feelings, your own ideas of what it might be saying on top of it. That's really fascinating. That is something that seems to be more and more important as we continue you to run up the boundaries of what robots actually can do versus what we hope they can do for us emotionally.

31:51David Pierce:Yeah. You just reminded me of something else that I found that Dave said that I thought was really interesting sort of philosophically about Furby, which is that he never wanted to make a toy that got in the way of a kid's imagination. And actually, to your point, Sean, the thing he didn't like about the toys that would sort of speak back to you or direct you or interact with you in that way was they felt unambiguous in a way that he didn't like. He wanted something that felt open-ended, that you could ascribe your own feelings and meaning to, that you could interact with lots of different ways.

32:20David Pierce:He didn't like things that just were like, you do this and it says this, and then you do this in reaction and it says this. The sort of paint-by-numbers kinds of toys. He wanted something that felt weirder. He was like, this is just much more immersive and interesting and imaginative in that way. And I think he was right.

32:36Sean Hollister:Companies still feel this way. Lego. Lego's bringing out these Lego smart brick toys here in March 2026. And they're going to come out in Star Wars sets and they don't have actual Star Wars voices. You're not going to hear Luke, Leia, Darth, Carrie Fisher and James Earl Jones and Mark Hamill. You're going to hear them talk in some kind of gibberish.

33:01David Pierce:yeah i think all of that is right and and the interesting thing to this is that the reaction to what they were building you would think would be sort of controversial for all the reasons we're talking about right that some people would be ready for it some people wouldn't some people would be like this is so different from what we're used to that didn't happen at all so they they get this thing ready and they take it to toy fair in 1998 and it just absolutely explodes um there's this amazing story. Again, this thing has been under real development for like a few months and is in no way finished.

33:34David Pierce:So they basically show up with one prototype. It actually reminds me of the sort of famous story about the iPhone launch where they had one iPhone that barely worked and it was like a small miracle that it was able to do any of the things that they did during the demo. This is very much like that. And there's this amazing story. Wired did a big feature about it at the time, which is a sign of how big the reaction was to this. But they tell this story basically right before Furby is about to get launched. They're meeting with the president of Hasbro, this guy named Alan Hasenfield, and they just cannot figure out what's going on because Furby is dead.

34:08David Pierce:It's just dead as a doornail on the table. They can't get it to move. They can't get it to talk. They can't program the thing to fix anything. And then they discover that actually the problem is the halogen lights in the room are messing with Furby's circuitry. They're screwing up the electromagnetic field. This is how primitive this thing is. is that the lights in the room are just rendering it dormant. So one of the engineers wraps the Furby's cord in tinfoil, and then that made the demo work. And that was enough. Like, a Furby wrapped in tinfoil got the job done and made Alan Hassenfield, he walked out basically saying, that's one of the coolest things I've ever seen in my life.

34:47David Pierce:And over and over at Toy Fair, people have this experience. Wired runs a huge story. Time Magazine runs a big story. USA Today runs a big story. this thing is essentially already being declared the toy of 1998 never mind that it doesn't exist never mind that they've made precisely one of them this is the next big thing and everybody and by everybody i mean a bunch of adults like it's important to say kids have not seen or played with this thing yet but a bunch of adults have decided that this is the next big thing and sean i did a little bit of research but basically as far as i can tell this is kind of how it always works.

35:26David Pierce:A bunch of grownups decide what kids are going to be playing with 10 or 11 months from now. And that's how the toy industry works. That you're selling to grownups much more than you're selling to kids, at least in the early days.

35:37Sean Hollister:I like to think that some of these grownups are kids at heart and they know what they're talking about. But so often the toys come out and they just aren't that I can't say that for sure. So February 1998, they go to work to finish

35:55David Pierce:this thing. The plan is to release it to manufacturing in July and ship to consumers in October. This is an absurdly fast thing. But the idea is hype is huge. This is happening. We need to get it in front of people. Barely worked, I would say, is how it turned out. They had production delays. They had design delays. It got so bad that at the end of the year, everybody wanted this on shelves for the holiday season of 1998. They had pre-sold tons of them, it was a huge deal. They were making companies come pick up their own inventory from factories in China. And it was so late that these companies had to then fly all the inventory on planes back to the US to sell it because putting on a boat would have taken too long.

36:42David Pierce:So this process becomes hugely expensive and actually, in many cases, raises the price of Furbies for people by a few dollars because you have to offset the cost of like flying 747s around the world to pick up planes full of Furbies. So just imagine we're in like November of 1998 and you look up in the sky and there are just planes full of Furbies flying around. This is what was happening. Tiger and Hasbro wound up making 1.3 million of them in the first year. And even despite that, that's a pretty big number for a new toy. They were impossible to get your hands on. There are all these wild stories out there about the people who were going to crazy lengths to get them.

37:23David Pierce:Actually, can I play you a clip really fast? I would love a clip. This is from the CBC in Canada about what's going on. Nobody has offered me$1 ,000, but I have had offers from$150 to$650. Hundreds of dollars for a toy that feels, sneezes, and yes, it can be taught to speak English. Hello? Hello?

37:55Vee Song:Oh my God. She's just in it for the money. $650. This is giving Beanie Baby, like that whole, I bought it. I mean, I feel like that's very common with toys. I was a Pokemon card grifter as a child because my dad would often go to Japan, come back with Japanese holographic Pokemon cards, and I didn't give a crap. So I was in the lunchroom. selling Pokemon cards at like$10 a pop because I thought that was good for like lunch money or whatever. I was an entrepreneur. So yeah, you know, demand high, supply low, Beanie Baby. It's a strong tradition.

38:33David Pierce:I have two more holiday season 1998 clips that I just want to play you because this turns out to be a rich area. So some of the first people to actually get their hands on this are journalists who are testing it and then talking to people who have seen it, heard about it, seen the ads, but have not actually been able to get their hands on one. Here's one from the BBC. And finally, you're almost certainly going to be seeing a lot of this little guy soon. He's a furby, one of just a couple in the country, but he's predicted to be in huge demand in the run-up to Christmas. Be quiet. Now, he's a kind of furry tamagotchi.

39:07Like a tamagotchi, the electronic pet, he needs loving and care round the clock. But it's thought he could be scarcer than the Teletubbies became last year.

39:15Vee Song:This guy is about to chuck it out the window. Just listening to him talk. It's a bit of English. But you get a dictionary which tells you what he's saying. Now he's saying Lulu at the moment, which means he needs a tickle on the tummy.

39:25David Pierce:I'm sorry. I just want to put this is like national news programming. But then, OK, but then this is my favorite one. This is a CNN reporter who I think maybe hates Furby more than I've ever seen anyone hate anything on television. And I'm playing you the end of a clip that is about the sort of furor in the run up to the holidays. When water was spilled on a gremlin. Thanks a lot. Sorry. It reproduced. But when we tried water on Furby, all he did was burp. In a test of Furby's endurance. They put him in the freezer. We stuck him in the freezer. Now this is content. Aside from being blow dried, we finally placed him on 8th Avenue where bicyclists and motorists tried to avoid him.

40:15Nevertheless, I feel a cringed spirit with this. She goes, oh, when he gets hit by a car. Furby's just tickled not to be roadkill. Ginimo, CNN, New York.

40:30Vee Song:If this CNN reporter happens to see this, please reach out to me. I want to be best friends. I think we have a similar philosophy in testing robots.

40:40David Pierce:So this is my favorite thing about this because everybody has one of two reactions to Furby, which is either you love it to bits or you would like it to die. And there doesn't seem to be any middle ground. Look at it. Everybody who is annoyed by it is so incredibly annoyed by it that they would like to fling it out of a window. So and then there are people a story I saw a bunch was that the first run of Furbies as the first run of any kind of gadget was like a little bit finicky. So some were breaking. There were issues. But a lot of people would report something wrong. They would report back to the company and say something's broken.

41:15David Pierce:And then they would say, oh, OK, send it back. And they would say, no, I don't want to. People got so quickly so attached to their Furbies that even if they were broken, they wouldn't send them back because they immediately just adopted them as a member of their family.

41:29Vee Song:That's the power of cute.

41:31David Pierce:I think the most controversial thing about it at first and maybe forever was that it had no off switch. The only thing you could do is take out its batteries. You couldn't turn it off. You couldn't tell it to be quiet. It was this unpredictable little maniac that just lived in your house. We asked people to send us emails and send us voicemails about how they felt about their Furbies. This one comes from Zach. He says, we got a Furby around 2000. We thought it was interesting at first, but found the marketing about being able to teach it to talk was a complete lie. We also couldn't find the power switch.

41:59David Pierce:So we threw it one story down a staircase repeatedly for an hour or two to try to break the thing to get it shut up, but failed to kill it. Furby.

42:06Vee Song:You could have just taken its batteries out.

42:08David Pierce:Very good. But then year two, the Furby sells 14 million Furbies in the year 1999. Two funny things that happened in 1999. One, the FAA, which governs airlines, warned people not to bring Furbies onto airplanes because they were worried about it disturbing the workings of the plans. This is back when they were like worried about, you know, phones and everything disturbing the interference. So they were telling people, it reminds me of like the Galaxy Note 7 when they're like, please do not bring that thing on the plane. Airlines were telling people to take the batteries out entirely.

42:47Vee Song:Furby is a weapon of mass destruction. Yes, seriously.

42:50David Pierce:The other one, and this one's even better, the NSA, the National Security Agency, banned Furby from a bunch of different locations around the world, believing that Furby might be recording sensitive conversations. There is the sense that there is this living thing in the room with you. And what if it's actually hearing what you're saying? Technically speaking, this thing is incapable of recording audio. There is nothing in it recording. And actually, it's a real statement on how good the thing is at seeming like it's interacting with you, even when it's not, that it is actually able to convince you that it's recording your audio, even though literally, technically, it couldn't.

43:27By the end of 2000, the number is 40 million Furbies.

43:31David Pierce:So this is like a little over two years. They've sold 40 million Furbies. All of a sudden, all of these other Furby-like things come out. There was a thing called Poochie, which means nothing to me.

43:43Vee Song:Simpsons Poochie? No.

43:46David Pierce:The Tamagotchi was also a hit, which is semi-related. It became a pop culture phenomenon. It shows up on talk shows all over the place. Rosie O'Donnell winds up being like a famous fan of the Furbies. She had it on her show a bunch of different times. Here's just one clip. So cool. That's great. We have something for eBay. We have the, first of all, for everybody in the audience and 500 toys for tots, Furby. There you go. Furby. Okay. She shakes the Furby to try to wake it up. I love it. And the Furby people nicely made a one-of-a-kind Furby. They made a Rosie O'Donnell Furby. It's supposed to be me.

44:28What? And the really scary thing is they had the Furby designers come to make sure it was exactly like me. And they actually looked at that and went, perfect, that's Rosie.

44:38Vee Song:Did they put a wig on it?

44:40David Pierce:It's very good. Yeah, I think they put a wig on it. So this thing shows up several times on various Rosie O'Donnell episodes. There's also an episode of Friends where I believe it's in Joey and Chandler's apartment. There's just two Furbies on top of the microwave at one point. They never mention it. There's just two Furbies. It's delightful. But my favorite one is Furby in 1998. Again, like the height of the holiday craze here. Regis and Kathy Lee spent like a week with Furby on their show. and Regis in particular really goes through like an emotional journey. Here's the very beginning of the first day they had it.

45:15How'd you do? Now you just dial the number. This stupid thing is bothering me. This is good.

45:22David Pierce:He picks up the Furby by its hair. He's talking, he's talking, he's talking. Shut up! Okay, so that's day one. So then Furby sticks around and a few days later, Furby continues to talk and Kathy Lee says, okay, maybe we'll auction off the Furby. Somebody in the audience can have it. We can make a lot of money. What about if we do a little auction? I don't think so. How about for Cassidy's place? We raise a thousand bucks here. You'd be writing out a check right now.

45:52Sean Hollister:I've got attached to my little Furby. Reece, you won't even do it for Cassidy's place.

45:57David Pierce:No, come on. It's like two days and Reece just goes from I hate this thing to petting it and not wanting to give it up for charity. That's Furby for you. It's good stuff. So do you guys remember this phenomenon at all? I have to confess, the Furby craze did not really cross my world.

46:17Vee Song:I was the perfect age for it. Yeah. 1998, I was 10.

46:21David Pierce:Okay.

46:21Vee Song:So, you know, it was peak Pokemon, peak Furby. I wanted one. And my dad, in his very strict, stoic Asian dad voice, was just like, no.

46:37absolutely not.

46:39Vee Song:My dad was very anti-Furby and I had a friend who had a Furby and brought it over and the look of disgust on my father's face was just so strong. He's just like, you're not a child anymore. And I was like, but I'm 10. He's like, you're not a child anymore. And so, you know, Furby was something that I was just very like, this is mysterious and I can't have it. So I wanted it.

47:00David Pierce:Was your friend who had one, was it like a big deal that your friend had one?

47:03Vee Song:Oh, she was obnoxious about it. She was just like, I'm in a Furby and I got to tickle me Elmo. And it's just like, OK, yeah, great. I guess your parents love you or whatever. No, my dad, I think my dad had a point because he also saw the tickle me Elmo and he was just like, Americans are ridiculous.

47:23David Pierce:It's not wrong. Sean, what about you? Did did Furby cross your path at this time?

47:28Sean Hollister:I had just become a teenager. And so things like Furby, cute things like that were a little bit beneath me at the time. But this was also after Teletubbies, which everybody my age were making fun of the previous year. And so when another thing like that came along, we're like, oh, God, another thing like this now.

47:49David Pierce:yeah you're like i'm officially too old toys of the year away from me i'm done yeah fair but then it kind of comes back around so the the wildest thing to me about the furby story was in 2001 it already starts to wane this incredibly hot toy that everybody wants it's a big thing um it doesn't die but it ceases to be a phenomenon in 2001 very quickly um there's a lot a lot happens in 2001 in America that is very complicated and changes the way that people feel about a lot of things. And then from there, Furby has just a truly bizarre, fascinating life. It gets redesigned pretty aggressively a few years later.

48:32David Pierce:It gets redesigned pretty aggressively a few years after that. It gets redesigned again pretty aggressively a few years after that. And over and over the thing that happens is it gets more technological, it gets more features, it becomes more customizable, and it becomes less compelling. And this is just the story of it. I think this is where your story gets real weird.

48:52Vee Song:This is where my furby. One of the things that they did

48:54David Pierce:that they were sure was going to work was they got LCD eyes, which in theory should be even more expressive. They can do more stuff, more features. Eventually they did one with an on-off switch, but then they ended up getting rid of that, which I find very funny. But there was just, this was an attempt to keep improving the technology in order to keep improving the toy. And what it actually did was the opposite.

49:13Vee Song:So as I've established, I desperately wanted a Furby while I was a child, and I was very cruelly told no. So in my career, 2016, 10 years ago, I was a reviewer at this point in time at a different publication. And a friend there was like, she did toys and she had a hookup and she got two Furby connects, one in teal and one in pink. I was given the pink one. And she was just like, here, I'm testing and I'm going to write it out. Just tell me how you how you think about it. And I was like, I finally have a Furby. And so I was so happy. He was at my desk. I loved my little guy for about a week. And then the eyes were so creepy and it just talked so much.

50:03Vee Song:And I was just like, oh, my dad was right. Right. And my relationship with this Furby ended in a very tragic way. And that this was the for anyone who was not in media, this was the era of pivot to video. And every all of us in media were forced to do Facebook live streams. And so Christmas comes around and there's a segment with Dollar Shave Club. And someone who was high up at this media company was like, here's the segment for Dollar Shave Club. We're going to shave these Furby on air. Now, here's the thing about the Furby Connects fur. It was very dense and the Dollar Shave Club razors could not actually shave the Furby.

50:47Vee Song:And I was like, oh, my Furby is saved. Thank God. But then I had a very unhinged co-worker just pull out a butterfly knife and skin it on air. And so I was just there like, oh, my God, you've skinned my Furby for Christmas. And the office had this.

51:06David Pierce:I feel like Dollar Shave Club wouldn't have even liked that.

51:09Vee Song:No, it was unhinged. I had to watch this co-worker for shits and giggles skin my baby, which, you know, was an annoying baby. And I just made it sleep all the time. But that was what the hell. And, you know, I was given a skinned naked pink Furby at the end of it. And so I gave it a little photo shoot to make it feel better. And also because I was like, maybe this is an art project about the uncanny valley. And so there is a picture I have of this Furby.

51:38David Pierce:I was sent two of these pictures that I have studiously avoided looking at until now.

51:42Vee Song:Yeah. One of them was just like, oh, my God, look what they did to my boy.

51:45David Pierce:I will say, having looked at these pictures now, no one should ever see the inside of a Furby.

51:49Vee Song:No, no, you shouldn't.

51:51David Pierce:It says such last thing you see before you die energy to it. There were Furby babies that were a medium hit for a while. There was a thing called the Furby party rocker. There was a thing called the Furby boom. One big idea that they had was that actually Furby should play music, which I think is a weird choice, but they got very into this idea. There was a Furby party speaker at one point. There was a whole thing. There was Furby connect, like you mentioned. And at this point they were like, okay, hey, how do we tie this thing in with your phone or your iPad and immerse it in a digital world?

52:22David Pierce:And I think this is just completely anathema to the whole thing that made Furby work. Sean, you're shaking your head. You agree with me. Yes, this is just a completely wrong-headed idea.

52:32Sean Hollister:I think that things like this, super fun when it's motors, moving limbs, and as soon as you get more and more technology in it, if you can't make it a real companion, you're just going to make it creepier and creepier. Yep.

52:46David Pierce:And that is, by and large, the legacy. There are also, I should say, there's a really fascinating hacker angle to this. Again, there is just a computer inside of this thing with computer parts that you can program. In 2000, this guy named Peter Gibbons wins a contest to hack Furby by basically rebuilding its entire circuitry from scratch and putting just a new motherboard into Furby that could do Furby but could do lots of other things. And he talked about at the time how impressed he was that it was just a reasonably powerful computer. And for$65, you could buy his Furby conversion kit. And Hasbro and Tiger were like, they were not thrilled that people were doing this.

53:29David Pierce:But they were also very upfront about the fact that this is your Furby. You bought it. You do what you want with it. If you want to skin your Furby on Facebook video, technically that is your right. So even now, vintage Furbies remain a big thing. You can buy them on eBay. They're everywhere. There are still a lot of collectors out there. As far as I can tell, nothing since then is kind of on the same plane, if that makes sense. that nothing has achieved this same kind of feeling and retro nostalgia excitement. By 2023, just to give you a sense, Hasbro was saying it had sold cumulative 58 million Furbies.

54:06David Pierce:So remember, it sold 40 million in three years. And that indicates, you know, it kept selling a million a year, let's say, maybe a little less, but it has not been the thing in a very long time. But they're still around. People still love them. The fandom community shouts to the Furby subreddit, which is just a wild and remarkable place. And I just want to shout out briefly one quick thing before we get off this particular story, which is Long Furby.

54:39Vee Song:Long Furby.

54:39David Pierce:Please meet Long Furby. this is a phenomenon i cannot explain and i will not attempt to but there is a a large community of people dedicated to making their furbies into very long plush caterpillary things and they are

54:57Vee Song:called long furbies why is it so large is it just the scale of the photo no it's a long furby dude

55:02David Pierce:you said they didn't make the furby snake these are all diy projects this is like long furby is a is a grassroots phenomenon and it, it knows no bounds.

55:14Vee Song:The depth of human creativity and depravity are two sides of the same coin.

55:19David Pierce:That's about right. It's beautiful. Uh, long Furby shouts to you. Um, and that is essentially where we have landed. So I want to, I want to debate the legacy of this thing a little bit, but I think the best way to do that is with the eight version history questions. So let's take a break and then we're going to get to those. We'll be right back.

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56:42David Pierce:All right, we're back. So while we're on the break, our producer Andrew Marino brought in some new batteries because I think we managed to burn through Coco's batteries in like two and a half minutes. And boy, is Coco alive again.

56:58Vee Song:Okay, Coco.

57:00David Pierce:I'm getting the distinct sense that not only is this furbish, it's that like powering down sound where everything talks a little, a little. It's just not quite at full speed.

57:16Vee Song:I mean, this is like 30 years old. I know. I'm impressed this still works.

57:28Vee Song:Okay, that's just wrong.

57:29Sean Hollister:She sacrificed her fingertip to the further.

57:32David Pierce:That's just for all. Coco, you bit V's finger. All right, you're going over here. Feeling herself again. All right. So on every episode of Virgin History, we like to ask the same eight questions to try and get a sense of this thing's true legacy. And it starts with the time matrix. The time matrix, super simple concept. I don't know why people don't understand it. It plots time and idea. Was it the right idea or the wrong idea? Was it the right time or the wrong time? Sean, I want you to go first. Which quadrant do you think Furby belongs in on this graph?

58:08Sean Hollister:Oh, boy. I'm going to say that everything worked out perfectly for Furby, and it should go in the upper right-hand corner because it got to be this huge fad that we all remember and great legacy and may have inspired lots of other gadgets to also scare and

58:24David Pierce:annoy us all the time. Okay, so I will say this was also my instinct too, was to put it up here in Right Idea, Right Time. But there's a version of this, I think about this more and more, where if you take the way that Dave Hampton in particular thought about this thing and the sort of philosophy that he brought to it, but give him two decades more technology, could this thing be remarkably better? or have what is what we've seen over two decades of better technology that actually the technology

58:53Vee Song:is not what makes it better i'm so torn on this i in my personal opinion i think it was the wrong idea at the right time oh interesting that i think it hit at a time like where it was gonna hit that was the time for it to explode it was the time of toys it was the time of like tickle me elmo's Furby. It was the right time for it. This is just the wrong idea forever. That's my take.

59:23David Pierce:Is that because something about it should have been better or just this thing never should have existed and is a blight on humanity?

59:30Vee Song:Correct. Okay.

59:32David Pierce:Understood. I'm going to go with Sean. I think I am compelled by the idea that it was the right time. Alright. Question number two. was this peak anything? I have a few I'd like to offer you. Was this peak horrifying monster in your house?

59:53Vee Song:Yes. Peak creepy cute.

59:57David Pierce:Was it peak creepy cute? I like, I will give you peak creepy cute for sure. Was this peak fake languages?

1:00:04Vee Song:Dothraki is peak. Ooh.

1:00:06Sean Hollister:I'm afraid it's not peak anything because all of this is coming around again. and it's all about to get so much more horrifying

1:00:14David Pierce:and so much cuter. Do you think there's a chance, I'm just going to skip ahead to, you know, number four, will the youth ever make it cool again? Is there a chance we're due for a honest to God Furby or something like it renaissance here?

1:00:27Vee Song:I think something like it, yes. Furby, I don't know. Like I was talking to Andrew before the show and they went to Toy Fair and they did see Furby's there. They saw a K-pop demon hunter Furby. Oh, wow.

1:00:40David Pierce:That's a 2025 Furby.

1:00:42Vee Song:Yeah, 2026 Furby.

1:00:44David Pierce:Sean, what do you think? I mean, I'm genuinely curious your take on this. You reviewed the 2023 version of it, and I would say you were slightly alarmed by how into it your kid was. But do you think – I mean, again, we have this – we have advanced the technology that would theoretically make this possible by orders of magnitude in the last 28 years. Are we due for a Furby renaissance?

1:01:05Sean Hollister:I think it would require toy companies to drastically change their economics somehow, because today your Hasbros, they are still trying to cheap out on every single motor, every single sensor. Their 2023 Furby recognized five and exactly five voice commands, had a whole bunch of pre-recorded lines, but there were no real smarts to it to speak of. I play with$1 ,400 transformer robots, which do the thing I wanted as a kid where it's this car and it will actually transform all by itself into this whole transformer. But they don't have the motion sensors in there to let it actually take a step without any risk of falling over.

1:01:50Sean Hollister:real robots have that toy robots don't so they can change the economics and actually put like genuinely good sensing and ai and things in there and sell it to you for a thousand dollars two thousand dollars great but i don't think the appetite's there in the toy companies to make the forty dollar the hundred dollars saying good yeah i think that's probably right i mean and i

1:02:13David Pierce:was thinking too about the the increasing price of lego like the idea of doing something like this that feels compelling and novel and exciting and is$35 is very hard to imagine, unfortunately. The only other one I had was this peak toy craze.

1:02:32Vee Song:Ooh. I don't know. Maybe it's because it was 30 years ago. Shudder. I felt like Tickle Me Elmo was more insane.

1:02:41David Pierce:That was what I was going to say. I think when people think insane toys, I think people immediately go to Tickle Me Elmo, which is telling. Question number three, if you could time travel back and develop this yourself, knowing everything we know now, could you make Furby more successful? I'm going to posit the answer is actually no. I think this thing hit as big as it possibly could have. And I think anything we know now about like maybe we could have done some marketing that might have hit a little bit better. But in terms of actually making the product, I think they got it so precisely correct on that first go around that it is part of what worked.

1:03:22David Pierce:Like I think if you made a thing that was less annoying, right? If you want something – this is my immediate reaction is, okay, figure out the thing that the 10 % of people hated the most about it. Get rid of it. Problem solved. You've made it more lovable by everybody. I think that kills part of the appeal.

1:03:38Vee Song:I think my only question is, would the addition of an off button have made it better?

1:03:46David Pierce:I don't think so. I think if your parents are not annoyed by your Furby, you're not going to like your Furby as much.

1:03:53Vee Song:It's possible.

1:03:54David Pierce:If a CNN reporter is not trying to get it hit by a car on 8th Avenue, then you haven't built something with enough personality.

1:04:00Vee Song:It is true that not including the off button created all of these pop culture moments of famous people going, shut up, to the Furby and that kind of adding to the charm for the adults, I guess. So, yeah, I would agree. No, I don't think given the constraints of the time. Yeah.

1:04:19Sean Hollister:Sean, what do you think? Anything? With the technology available then and the price point, I can't think of much. The one thing I would say is, wasn't it supposed to be able to learn English words? I don't think it could back then if it's not recording and learning. But imagine, would this phrase have not fizzled out if it could actually properly learn English?

1:04:37David Pierce:Wait, this is a good one because one of the things, we talked about this earlier, Dave Hampton built the voice recognition system and didn't think anybody would want it and ditched it in the product. Maybe we go back and we tell Dave, no, put this in and actually let people teach this thing words. And maybe we're on to something. Like what if Furby, even simple things, what if Furby could learn your name? Maybe that becomes really powerful.

1:05:02Vee Song:Could you imagine how many marriages that would end? Because a voice recognition Furby would be like, Angela, David slept with whatever. And just Furby destroys a marriage.

1:05:14David Pierce:It's just like, who's Nancy? And you're like, Furby, be cool.

1:05:17Vee Song:Who's Nancy? Ute la la ite. And then you basically, yes. Yes, that's what you could. Okay, that's good. Because that would even just amp it up more. You'd have headlines, Furby ruins marriage. Like, that would be something.

1:05:32David Pierce:I think we could make Furby more controversial for sure. Question number five, what feature of this thing should every current version have? And Sean, I want you to answer this first. if you could just lift something out of Furby and put it into the rest of the toy industry or all of the other robots and things you see now, what would it be?

1:05:51Sean Hollister:Turn it upside down and make it plead for its life. I love that.

1:06:00Vee Song:Did it die? Oh, no.

1:06:13David Pierce:It does not like being turned upside down. I hate that. Me scared. There it is. Me scared. I'm sorry. It's okay. It's okay. I love you. Yeah. Coco's cool. All right. That's a great answer. I love that. I think every robot should be able to feel existential fear because you do something. I think that's good. All right. Three more questions. These are the Virgin History Hall of Fame questions. Every product has to pass all three of these tests in order to make it into the Virgin History Hall of Fame. Question number one, did this product do something truly new?

1:06:48Sean Hollister:I'm going to say yes.

1:06:49David Pierce:Yeah? Yeah.

1:06:51Sean Hollister:At the time, the other voice toys, they didn't have that randomness that leads you to think it might be like a real creature. Like the Tamagotchi, nah, it didn't feel like it's in the same ballpark at all. Tidy Rexpin is just playing back a cassette tape. Tickle Me Elmo, pre-recorded sounds. This is a new level. Vee, what do you think?

1:07:17Vee Song:I guess that's a fair assessment. Because I was thinking to myself that a lot of different aspects of Furby were things that we had seen before. Like in all the toys that Sean just mentioned. But I think maybe synthesizing all of them together. And just the surprising deepness of David's philosophy going into that, I think, was pretty unique.

1:07:44David Pierce:I tend to agree. I think the way they went about making it work was new. Even the sort of the whole is greater than the sum of its parts in a new way, which I think Furby deserves a lot of credit for. um question number two i i have a feeling we're all going to disagree and i'm right and it's fine um was furby either remarkably good or remarkably bad it was remarkably furby

1:08:14Vee Song:i don't think it was remarkably good i think it was remarkably clever clever and good i don't think necessarily are synonymous i also don't think it was remarkably bad just because it I don't know.

1:08:29David Pierce:Okay, we actually agree, as it turns out. I feel very strongly that it is neither of these things. And I think this is actually the reason it doesn't get into the Hall of Fame. I think its story, its sort of growth trajectory and the way that it came out and the way that it captured the public imagination, that's all really fascinating but is totally divorced from the actual quality of the product. And kind of what we see is that the actual quality of the product burns super hot and then burns out. Yeah. And so I think in reality, this thing is a fascinating, thrilling, kind of mediocre product.

1:09:02Vee Song:I think the idea of Furby is the most powerful thing about it. It taps into a lot of things that humans want. Connection, interaction, emotion. So like that part of it, like honestly, the personality and the concept of it is very strong. But the execution is very that.

1:09:21Sean Hollister:Sean, what do you think? Back then we would have. I think Dave and Caleb made an amazing canvas for everybody to map their own love, hate, and fear of toys that seem to interact. You know, robots. You can look at this thing and you have an opinion on it. You have a very strong opinion on it. And because everybody can have an opinion on it, and because opinions spread so quickly in the media landscape, they spread so quickly from person to person, it could achieve that level of fame and recognition that we're still talking about today. but as a product like even the 2023 version which is probably a much better product this was a fun one-off review for me and my kids to see whether it could achieve that level of being talked about and being interested again not this is something you need to go out and buy for anybody that's a

1:10:19David Pierce:really good distinction i agree i like that um all right so hall of fame question number three and our last one, did it have a lasting impact? Like, did it capital M matter? And I think, Sean, I want you to answer this question from the toy perspective first. I think I don't have a great sense of what Furby did to the toy industry, but it does seem like if it's gonna make a case for being meaningfully culturally, economically impactful in that sense, it would be in toys, was it? This may be a bit of a cop-out,

1:10:48Sean Hollister:but I wonder if we're not gonna truly know if Furby capital M matters until we see the designer of the next big AI toy say, yes, Furby is the reason I did this. I had a Furby growing up and that's why I made this.

1:11:05David Pierce:That's a good theory. I would like to see that thing. I think part of me feels like the reason I don't want to give this one to Furby is I don't feel like there has been a ton of momentum trajectory from that stuff. Like I did all this research on Dave Hampton and the stuff he was thinking about and the way that he approached this and the way he thought about personality and human interaction. And it's like, boy, I wish more people thought like this now. Yeah. It's like I wish he had started more of a revolution than I think he actually started.

1:11:34Vee Song:I honestly think that – I don't think that revolution is going to come from the consumer space. I think it's going to come in the medical space. I think you are going to find it with dementia patients, elderly patients, because they've already done some clinical studies where they talk to caregivers and doctors. I was doing a lot of research about this recently, where they find that it actually does improve the health of elderly people with dementia and that this level of interaction is enough in those cases and spaces. So I think we'll see this really take off in that space. But if you are a sound mind and body, reasonably, if you can find, I don't know, an AI chatbot to talk to, or at least I hope you touch grass and talk to your fellow humans, you don't really need a social robot in that respect.

1:12:26Vee Song:I think it's one of those cases where sci-fi informs some tech companies into thinking that's the future we want. And maybe there is dubious media literacy as to the future they're warning us away from. But anytime I've tested one of these things, the novelty is there for a little bit. And then I'm just like, OK, you're annoying. Like, go away. I'm going to go play with my cat. Because my cat, not to be a crazy cat lady, it's truly spontaneous. it's truly inconvenient at times to have it, but there is like a real sense of give and take and love. And these robots are programmed and it's very hard for them to spontaneously generate love and connection in a way that feels organic.

1:13:10Because at some point, you know, you can just turn

1:13:12Vee Song:this thing off or like turn it upside down. And maybe you feel empathy because you're like, oh, Coco scared. I'm sorry. But at the same time, as our dear reader once did, you could also just throw it down the stairs multiple times until it dies. So there's no consequences to that.

1:13:28David Pierce:One big upside of this particular foreign factor is it is very easy to throw out of a window. We need more technology that is easy to throw out of a window.

1:13:36Vee Song:It is distinctly like football shaped. If you really think about it, you could do a spiral.

1:13:41David Pierce:Coco's batteries appear to have died again, which means it's time for us to get out of here. Coco's having a tough day. Sean V, thank you both so much for doing this with me. This was tremendously fun. Thank you as always for watching and listening. And as a reminder, the best thing you can do to support all of this is send us new AA batteries so that we can make Cocoa work again. And also subscribe to The Verge, theverge.com slash subscribe. That is what enables all of this to happen. And it means you get ad free podcasts, this one, The Verge Cast, Decoder, all of it. Theverge.com slash subscribe.

1:14:13David Pierce:Thank you as always. See you next time.

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