Welcome to this episode of the award-winning Best of Left Podcast. This is a sample of our recent bonus episode usually only available to members.

These episodes are comprised of our crew of researchers, Amanda, and myself all getting together

for a roundtable discussion on topics that we find interesting. So here's a few minutes for free so you can

know what all the fuss is about.

And speaking of social, the article argues that social media is like absolutely

helping to drive this trend because probably one of the things that was holding

it back before was, I mean you're just talking about Beanie Babies, it was like,

it was fine for people to collect Beanie Babies in the 90s.

I mean, I guess the word, it was fine, that phrase is doing a lot of work in that statement, but,

you know, many people argued that it was okay for people to collect beanie babies,

usually because, again, just like the baseball cards,

like, no, no, no, this isn't a toy, it's an investment.

These are really valuable.

It's important to have a good collection, et cetera.

The story that sticks out of my mind from that era was the couple that was

divorcing and had to go through like a team captain's scenario where they got to pick alternatingly from their beanie baby

collection so that it would be divided up properly and this was like in court or

you know or like Judge Judy or something like that.

So anyway, it was thought of as okay,

but mostly argued that like, it's not that we're playing with these,

it's that they're valuable and socially important in some way, but social media has sort of like cracked that

egg a bit so that a few people, because there's always going to be a few people

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