October 14, 2025 • 30 mins
In the 1600s, residents of the Dutch Republic were -- according to the story -- absolutely bonkers for tulips. A market sprang up around the tulip trade, and people began paying in advance for tulip bulbs, negotiating increasingly extravagant financial agreements and, in some cases, even using tulips as currency. This Tulipmania is often presented as the first economic boom and bust... but how accurate is that claim? What really happened? Join Ben and Noel as they separate the fact from fiction.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Fellow Ridiculous historians, we are on the high seas, and
as a result, we are doing a run of classics here. Guys,
remember cryptocurrency back when it was tulips.
Speaker 2 (00:12):
Well that's very meta, man, I'm having to parse that
one out. Yeah, it's still around, but it certainly was
a time where it was the beanie baby of our era.
And now the beanie baby of our era is la
Boo boo. So I don't even know where to start
with all of this stuff.
Speaker 1 (00:26):
Oh my gosh, yeah, yeah, Noel. Back in twenty eighteen,
you and I asked each other what happened with the
Dutch Republic and tulips. It's often used as a textbookcase
in marketing classes the world round. But is this tulip
mania truly an economic boom and bust? We're gonna find out.
(00:50):
Mm hmm yep.
Speaker 2 (00:51):
Let's talk about speculative flowers on Ridiculous History.
Speaker 1 (00:59):
Ridiculous History is a production of iHeartRadio. Originally it was
(01:27):
called the Dull Band because of it's so called resemblance
to a turban, and then it was called the Tulbent
in Turkey, and then it was called the Tulip in France.
And then in the fifteen seventies it was called the
tulbe Today we call it the tulip ben. So you're
telling me it's not because it resembles tulips pairs together. Apparently,
(01:50):
you know, all this is in the eye of the beholder, Noll.
But in this case, the name comes from the resemblance
to a turban. That's right, because it came from the
continent of Asia, right it did. It came from Western Asia,
from Turkey. And the earliest known instance of a tulip
flowering in cultivation they were just growing wild beforehand, is
(02:13):
in fifteen fifty nine a guy named Johann Heinrich Herwart
grew the tulip. I don't know if you're a fan
of flowers or if our super producer, Casey Pegram is
a fan himself.
Speaker 2 (02:28):
Well, Casey Pegrim is a flower in the desert, as
far as I'm concerned.
Speaker 1 (02:33):
A rose in the concrete, Yes, exactly exactly. So what
about you, Noel are you? Would you say you're pro flower?
Speaker 2 (02:39):
Well I am, but I kill them so I am
more of a succulent guy, because they're a little more,
a little more sturdy, shall we say, aka, a little
more resilient, and I don't kill them quite as often,
but I still manage. I still manage.
Speaker 1 (02:55):
Yeah, succulents will be more hearty, for sure. I always
thought one of the toughest flowers grow was the orchid.
I only know one person who has a magic touch
with orchids, and that's my mother. I don't know how
she does it.
Speaker 2 (03:06):
It's cause she's made a magic bend.
Speaker 1 (03:08):
She's made of magic perhaps, and she would be making
a mint allegedly had she gone into the tulip game
at a certain point in time. Because nowadays, it's pretty
easy to buy tulips. You could go to your local nursery,
you can go to your local even a hardware store
will have some tulips for sale often.
Speaker 2 (03:29):
Yeah, Like I think a dozen or so bulbs I
found online for about eighteen dollars or something. And you
know that's for every possible type of variety you could
think of. We're talking about a time where the price
of tulip bulbs just went completely bonkers, absolutely bananas.
Speaker 1 (03:49):
So I propose we tackled today's episode in the following way.
Let's tell the story that's most familiar to everyone, and
then let's after that see how much of this stacks up.
You know what the fact and the fiction actually are.
Speaker 2 (04:04):
That's the only way to do it, ben.
Speaker 1 (04:05):
Yeah, all right. So, in the early seventeenth century, the
Dutch Republic experienced what a lot of people will tell
you was the first example of an economic boom and bust. Right,
we know about this kind of stuff here in the
US today with the housing bubble that burst in two
thousand and eight. We know about this in various other
(04:27):
points in time, but people will tell you that the
Dutch Republic in the early seventeenth century, the sixteen hundreds
experienced the very first recorded economic bust and it was
called toulip Mania to lipmania to Lipmania. So what happens exactly.
Speaker 2 (04:47):
Well, it all revolves around the idea of speculation. Speculation
being predicting what something will be worth in the future
and placing your bets that it will be worth that
or more, and then the bottom out potentially when that
speculative price reaches completely disproportionate heights with the thing itself.
Speaker 1 (05:10):
Does that make sense, Yeah, yeah, and all of a
sudden becomes overvalued or people realize it's overvalued for a
series of reasons that we'll get into yes, yeah, for
a series of reasons that can vary depending on the
specific cases. In the case of tulips, essentially, the way
you'll hear this story pitch is that people in the
(05:31):
Dutch Republic went absolutely bonkers for tulips, began paying exorbitant
rates for them, that it gripped the country and then
eventually that's the sound of a bubble popping. But how
do we get here? What made tulip so popular?
Speaker 2 (05:47):
Let it starts earlier than this fellow, but he's kind
of the main dude that really introduced tulip culture into
the Netherlands. His name was corlus Clusius, and he created
a very very influential guard and at the University of Leiden,
and that was in the late fifteen hundreds. He started
this kind of tradition among horticulturists which became kind of
(06:10):
a gentlemanly pursuit of trading, you know, clippings and seeds
and all kinds of tulip related things bulbs between each
other in the interest of kind of spreading this tradition around.
But it was within a very small set of very
particular types of learned individuals, right. But then it kind
of started getting a little bit out of control, and
(06:32):
instead of just doing trades, these folks who had the
tulip bulbs started charging money for them, and then members
of the merchant class, for example, who wanted to flaunt
their newfound wealth. Because this was kind of a relatively
new class of people that could afford the finer things
in life. In this part of the country, they were
experiencing boom times, they decided they wanted to get in
(06:55):
on this craze because these flowers were very beautiful, and
some of them, particular that had kind of miscolored discolorations
almost they were even more desirable.
Speaker 1 (07:06):
They were like rare POGs or pokemon exactly, and you
have to catch them all. Yes. So this this guy,
Carolus Clusius, got this whole craze going around fifteen ninety three.
And tulips had several strong advantages that made that set
them apart from other flowers of the time. First, and
we need to emphasize this, as you said earlier in
(07:28):
nol they had these intense colors that other plants in
the area just didn't have. Secondly, and perhaps even more importantly,
it turns out that tulips can grow pretty well in
this climate. This area the Dutch Republic doesn't have very
good soil for you know, most of the country. And
it turns out that tulips love what is called poor soil.
(07:51):
So not only can you have these beautiful, striking flowers,
but you can actually grow them in a successful man
in a place where you know, a lot of other
flowers wouldn't grow.
Speaker 2 (08:03):
Here's the thing, though, Ben, and I didn't know this
at all. Tulips take a really long time to grow.
It's true. Yeah, so you can do it with seeds,
but seeds. Tulips grown from seeds take like up to
six or seven years to grow. And then you have
I guess what would be the same as like making
a clone of any other type of plant, but it's
a bulb. I guess it's called an offshoot, I believe, Ben,
(08:26):
and those only take three or four years, maybe even
two years if I'm not mistaken. And that was what
people wanted. And here's the thing that's also interesting about
this whole story is that it kind of introduced some
of the concepts surrounding futures trading, right because you're not
buying a full grown tulip, because you can't uproot a
full grown tulip or it will die. You have to
(08:49):
wait until the summer. When they go dormant, they literally
go back down into these bulbs, and only then can
you dig them up. So people, these merchants, these aristocrats,
these whomever that were just going wild for these tulips
had to buy the promise of a future tulip right.
Speaker 1 (09:07):
They would sign contracts before a notary to buy tulips
at the end of the dormant season, which was from
June to roughly September, that's when you could actually pull
them out of the ground. And because of this, the Dutch,
who had already developed a lot of techniques of modern finance,
(09:27):
created this durable goods futures market for tulip bulbs. And
it went insane pretty quickly, you know, because you're not
buying tulips today, you're buying tulips tomorrow.
Speaker 2 (09:42):
Now glad they pay you tuesday for a hamburger today,
only the other way around.
Speaker 1 (09:47):
And then when you hear that other people in the
market are paying increasingly extravagant prices, then you start to
move with the market as well, whether you are selling,
whether you are buying, whether you are just trading tulip futures.
Speaker 2 (10:02):
Yeah, and let's remember too that these were not native
to the Netherlands, and so they were already relatively scarce
because they take so long to grow. They weren't just overflowing, right.
There was a scarcity and a rare quality to them,
and that is what drives that kind of gotta have
them all mentality. Right, Yeah, if anyone could have them,
(10:23):
no one would care.
Speaker 1 (10:24):
Right exactly, kind of like hammer Pants in the nineteen eighties.
I don't know, I think we're both too young to
really deliver that reference. I just remember him, see hammer
So we said fifteen ninety three, this is when it
starts catching on the early adopters, right, the learned fans
of flowerdom and horticulture start buying up tulips. By sixteen
(10:48):
thirty three. In some transactions, tulip bulbs actually replace currency.
History Mike Dash found documentation of actual properties being sold
for what he said were handfuls of tulip bulbs. And
then more and more people heard the sort of friend
of a friend of a friend's stories about someone who
(11:12):
got into the market, bought and sold tulips, and now
they're set for life. And by that same year, sixteen
thirty three, when this stuff is really escalating, a single
bulb of a tulip variety called Simper Augustus was already
worth five five hundred guilders.
Speaker 2 (11:28):
Yeah, and Simper Augustus is that one with the with
the stripes. It's got kind of red flame like stripes
on it. And this is super interesting. It turns out
that what causes that condition is actually a virus. Yes, yeah,
it's correct. And no one knew how to breed them
to I mean, I've known breeds not the right word
to cultivate them to look like that. So they tried
(11:50):
all kinds of crazy stuff, didn't they then.
Speaker 1 (11:51):
Yeah, they tried. They tried a ton of very strange things.
They would let's see what was one of them. They
buried it in a certain type of mud.
Speaker 2 (12:01):
Yeah, there was a pigeon dung i believe, or pigeon
iguana or whatever you want to call it. Pigeon poop poop.
There you go, that's the right word. That's the science.
That's the science word. They also would even tie like
a red and a white together and then bury them
in the hopes that they would somehow commingle and create
yea tulip b osmosis very much so. My favorite is
they would sprinkle the soil with pigments that they would
(12:24):
hope would somehow seep into the soil, and you know,
there was they didn't know what they were doing, no.
Speaker 1 (12:29):
But they were just trying different things exactly. I think
most people at the time would have made similar attempts.
Those are just a few examples we know of, but
we know that there were many other techniques, most of
which were cartoonish failures. And this just made these failures
just made the specific types of high end tulips even
(12:50):
more appealing. Now we see the market explodeving. You would
think maybe that by sixteen thirty three someone would have
looked around, seen a Simper Augustus bulb and said, I
don't think this is really worth five thousand, five hundred guilders.
(13:10):
But no, the bubble kept growing.
Speaker 2 (13:13):
Yeah, and we actually had situations where these deals were
being made in back rooms of like inns and pubs
and stuff, and it was all pretty organized. They apparently
are these smoke filled rooms where people were getting their
drink on and their smoke on, and they had like
these pieces of wood that they would write they would
(13:35):
essentially bid on these tulip lots, and it was like,
I don't know. I saw this fantastic video series on
YouTube that I was telling you about Ben that I
think you had seen two on a channel called Economics Decoded.
And the guy I don't see his name here, he
doesn't really announce himself for lower third himself, but he
does a fantastic job with illustrations and sound effects, and
(13:55):
I really recommend checking it out. It is a three
part series on tulimania, and he liked it to if
when we had to go and buy a stock, if
we had to literally have a conversation with a bunch
of dudes in a smoky room and arrive at an
agreed upon price, because we take for granted how quickly
information travels these days, and how the price of things
(14:17):
are just set, it's understood by algorithm.
Speaker 1 (14:19):
Or they change it in almost uniform manner.
Speaker 2 (14:21):
Totally uniform, Whereas this was like a series of mini
markets in different parts of the country that were pretty
isolated because you could only get information to another part
as fast as a guy could ride there on a horse,
right exactly. That's that's true. That's that's something that we
can easily forget in the modern age of microsecond transactions
(14:43):
and AI quote unquote helping people trade stocks. So the
way the story goes is that this craze continues. By
sixteen thirty five, you could see records of forty bulbs,
just forty bulbs sold for one hundred thousand guilders or florins,
(15:03):
and by way of comparison at that time, in the
same year, one ton of butter costs around one hundred guilders,
and someone who was a pretty skilled laborer, someone who
practiced a trade of some sort, like a blacksmith or
a ferrier or something, they might earn as much as
one hundred and fifty to three hundred and fifty guilders
(15:25):
a year. So this is a massive amount of money involved.
And I really enjoy the part in the Tulipmania series
on Economics Decoded where he walks us through the strange
occurrence of February sixteen thirty seven. At this point, the
(15:47):
price of a single Simper Augustus bulb that was worth
five thy five hundred gilders in sixteen thirty three is
easily worth ten thousand guilders. The center cannot hold. Things
are going to fall apart. Right, That's not what shinua
Achebe was talking about in his book, but you can
(16:07):
see how this applies. And so according to the story,
the tulip market crashes very very quickly, and people start
to reneg on those contracts that they had signed. So
someone would say, look, you owe me this much money
for these tulips, and they would just refuse to pay. Yeah,
(16:29):
And they got into a real sticky situation where the
sellers had the tulips now at that delivery period where
they'd gotten out of the ground, and there's only a
limited amount of time before they are going to not
be viable anymore, that they have to rebury them. But
nobody's like accepting them. People are like, no, I don't
want them, I'm not going to pay you. And I
think small claims court got involved where they they had
(16:51):
to essentially get the courts to help them come up
with a system of you know, repayment that was agreeable
by both parties and ended up being a small percentage
of three percent of the price promised or where. Because
again these futures and again this wasn't really exactly futures
trading It was sort of like some of the same
(17:12):
style of economics as futures trading, but future trading has
protections built in that this just didn't. And this is
kind of just like the wild West, and so you
wouldn't pay full price and you'd get like a you
would get a deal because you're taking on risk your
tulip might not turn out, and you don't get to
just say, oh, my tulip didn't turn out, I'm not
going to pay for it. That's technically not allowed, even
(17:35):
though that's kind of what these people were doing. But
it wasn't about the tulip not turning out. It was
more about the whole system kind of falling. Yeah, well,
you don't pay full price, you pay a little bit
less because you're soaking up some of that risk for
the grower.
Speaker 3 (17:48):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (17:48):
Yeah, And there's an interesting step here that I want
to make sure we don't miss. Because of the precipitous
rise the price of tulip's, most speculators by sixteen thirty
seven couldn't afford to buy even the cheapest tulips, and
this is what triggered the collapse in demand. And then
(18:09):
when the demand disappeared, the flowers quickly became worth maybe
ten percent of what they had been worth the day
or the week before. And this sounds funny, this sounds
like some sort of Doctor Seus's parable, But the real
time effect and the real life effect of this is
that people encountered financial catastrophe. People's lives were ruined when
(18:32):
the tulip trade collapsed, and as you said, with the
courts getting involved, these vicious fights over debt continued for
years and years and years, and thus the Tulip Boom
and Bust of the Dutch Republic became one of the
most well known financial cautionary tales in the Western world
(18:54):
until about nineteen eighty when people realized that there might
be bored to the story, because it turns out that
the story we just related to you, ridiculous historians is
primarily based on a work of a Scottish journalist named
Charles McKay. In eighteen forty one, he wrote a book
(19:17):
called Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds. He
sourced his story about this tulip Boom and Bust from
a guy named Johann Beckman, who in seventeen ninety seven
wrote a book called A History of inventions, discoveries and origins.
And then Beckmann's story when we trace this back, comes
(19:40):
from three anonymous pamphlets that were published in sixteen thirty seven,
the same year Everything went to pot and they were
hit pieces.
Speaker 2 (19:49):
Bennis slicing the air like a knife with his hand
right now, because he feels very strongly about this, and
I agree for a good reason, hit pieces. Indeed, because
he had an axe to grind. He did not like
the practice of spec at all, and neither did McKay.
And even today, this idea of futures is considered a
moral by many, and it's a lot of it is
(20:10):
felt to be a type of gambling because you're making
bets on things that you don't actually own.
Speaker 1 (20:16):
Right, you know what I mean.
Speaker 2 (20:17):
Right, You're taking this piece of paper it says I
own the idea of this thing what does not yet exist,
and then you're selling it to somebody else for an
inflated price based on this imaginary number that keeps getting
higher and higher and higher. It's sort of like subprime mortgages,
for example, where you keep betting on something and people
(20:38):
don't fully understand you know, what the market is going
to do, and then it does a thing that no
one quite saw coming. And then all of a sudden,
all those bets you made you got to pay them,
but nobody has the money to pay them.
Speaker 1 (20:50):
Yeah, the research was not done, and at least in
the subprime mortgage crisis, there is overwhelming evidence that several
people knew exactly what was happening and just decided to
let it happen.
Speaker 2 (21:02):
Well, because you can make money. That's the thing about bubbles, right,
if you ride it out at the right time, you
ride that wave correctly, you can make a lot of money.
Speaker 1 (21:09):
And we see other examples of this, Beanie babies, that's
an example, POGs. I was talking off air a while
back with Casey about bitcoin. Casey, do you remember Do
you remember bitcoin?
Speaker 3 (21:22):
I do remember bitcoin? Yes?
Speaker 2 (21:24):
Are you?
Speaker 1 (21:25):
Are you involved? Are you a bitcoiner? No?
Speaker 3 (21:27):
No, I got out of bitcoin a long time ago,
So no, I don't have a stake in bitcoin anymore.
Speaker 1 (21:32):
But didn't you get out like a little too early?
Speaker 3 (21:35):
I did? Indeed, Yeah, I bought when it was like
maybe like a dollar or something per bitcoin, and then
at its height it was worth some crazy amount like
maybe close to twenty thousand dollars a bitcoin. But I
sold when it was far less than that. There's like
a lot of people who have parked way too much
money in bitcoin who have lost a lot over the
last several months.
Speaker 2 (21:55):
Yes, it's really interesting. It's a really interesting kind of comparison.
Speaker 1 (21:58):
And they're more bitcoins on the market, right.
Speaker 3 (22:01):
Oh yeah, there's like Ethereum, there's there's a bunch, Yeah.
Speaker 1 (22:04):
There's there's doge coin.
Speaker 3 (22:06):
Yeah yeah, there's there's all these weird like meme coins.
And there's one I was reading about called stable coin,
which is literally just peg to the US dollar. So
it's kind of like, what's even the point, But apparently
the ideas you can kind of I don't know, longer
money with it or something. So you know, oh good
the world of crypto. Yeah, so so.
Speaker 1 (22:25):
We do see an interesting comparison there. We also know
that the tulip story itself, the story of tulip mania,
may have been a case of people playing telephone throughout
history based on essentially works of propaganda that were anti speculative,
(22:50):
anonymously published pamphlets, and this means that this means that
we have more research ahead of us. There are some
wonderful books about tulipmania. There are two that are both
called tulipmania, right, and the authors of these books will
assure you and assure us that the phenomenon was actually exaggerated,
(23:14):
that contrary to what McKay says, it was not a
situation wherein every single person in the nation, from paupers
to royalty, were losing their minds and gouging their eyes
out to buy more tulips.
Speaker 2 (23:27):
Because I learned something in this research is that the
Dutch more or less invented the model for the modern
stock exchange. So it would certainly make sense that this
was something that happened in their neck of the woods.
And they also, you know, were a huge trading empire,
and they established New York City and all of you know,
the Dutch East India Trading Company and all of that.
I mean, it was definitely in their national identity.
Speaker 1 (23:50):
Right. Harlem is originally a town in the Netherlands.
Speaker 2 (23:54):
Harlem is where the infamous collapse of the market supposedly
happened during that auction where nobody bid.
Speaker 1 (24:03):
Yeah, that's Harlem with two eights, that's right.
Speaker 2 (24:06):
And another thing that I want to point out too,
from that video series. We mentioned the guy in that
video series points out something that I think should not
be ignored is that gambling was a huge, another huge
part of their public, their national consciousness. People would make
bets on the craziest things.
Speaker 1 (24:25):
I think.
Speaker 2 (24:25):
He points out one about a guy who bet that
he could ford a river in a tiny wooden barrel
or like a trough or something like that, and I
believe it was Rembrandt, the famous painter, who bet on
whether he'd be alive the next year or not. So,
I mean, it was definitely a thing that was very popular.
So it's almost like, you know, why not, let's bet
(24:47):
on tulips. And also we haven't mentioned the fact that
the plague was a big part of this, and people's
life expectancy was very short. Yeah, it was kind of like, yolo,
let's do this, you know.
Speaker 1 (24:57):
Yeah. And with these important instrumental pieces of context, we
can unpack a little bit of the fact versus fiction
around tulip Mania. We mentioned people did have their lives
ruined financially at the time. That is true, but it
may have been far fewer people than McKay would have
(25:18):
us believe. In fact, some researchers have found fewer than
half a dozen people who experienced financial trouble in that
time period during the tulip boom and bust, and hear
people argue that although prices had risen, money had not
actually changed hands between buyers and sellers, so the profits
(25:39):
were never realized for the sellers unless they had made
other purchases on credit expecting their tulip money to come
in sometime between June and September. So the collapse and prices,
the argument goes, did not actually cause a ton of
people to lose real tangible money, just had a series
of interesting, increasingly desperate conversations.
Speaker 2 (26:01):
Yeah, it's actually really cool that we got to do
this story because I just the other day was asking
my girlfriend's stepdad. He's a big Scotch fan, and I
was something I've always wondered. I asked him, was how
is it sustainable to have these Scotches that you age
for twenty thirty years or whatever and have that be
(26:21):
viable when you need to be selling stuff selling product
right away? And I think I'm explaining this right, But
it was another form of futures where you have a
certain elite that are investing in barrels, investing in particular
lots or whatever, of the good stuff, the really long
aged kind of fancy stuff that they do in smaller
batches in order to finance the quicker turnaround product. And
(26:43):
I just thought that was really interesting that this is
a very similar example to that, Like, how do you
take something that requires years to actually generate a tangible
thing and make that a market where people are actually
going to pay into it? And that's how you do
It's very similar to with whiskey.
Speaker 1 (26:58):
Yeah, wine would be another great comparison. I believe this story,
while it does seem to have a cautionary aspect to it,
and while it does seem to be sort of a
morality tale, we know that it's been exaggerated. It hasn't
been completely made up. This really did happen, And I
(27:18):
would say that this means it still functions as a
crucial lesson in these our modern days. Don't buy tulips
for too much money, you know what I mean? And
don't we have to be we have to be very
cognizant and very self aware of group think and group panics.
Something like this will come along every so often.
Speaker 2 (27:40):
Oh and another interesting little tidbit I picked up along
the way is that what happens when you start increasing
supply over years in a market that relies on scarcity
right to create the actual value of the thing itself,
all of a sudden it ain't so scarce anymore.
Speaker 1 (27:57):
And then people are like, well, well, here's another example
that's tangentially related. And that's a good point in Opek
recently met to reduce production of petroleum, and they did
that not because they're worried about running out of reserves,
but because the price globally of oil fell too low
(28:20):
for their liking. And now, technically speaking, the US is
how you measured out. The US is the world's largest producer.
Speaker 2 (28:28):
Interesting, right, and that's where future is really coming to
play today, is with things like oil, like absolutely necessary
tangible goods. Yeah, yeah, it's supposed to tulips, which are
kind of like frivolous. And if if you heard that
that mighty Python sketch about the loopins.
Speaker 1 (28:44):
Oh yes, I think Gabe reminded me of that one too.
Speaker 2 (28:48):
Maybe we should go out on that because it's such
a fun reminder of how absurd this whole story really is.
Speaker 1 (28:53):
Let's do that. That's a good idea. Thank you so
much for tuning in. Everyone, We hope that you enjoyed
this episode. We want to hear your opinions on other
economic crazes and if you had fun listening, let us
know in lieu of sending us tulips. Why not head
over to our Facebook page Ridiculous Historians, or drop by
(29:14):
Apple podcast and give us a rating. My fine friends,
now false moves.
Speaker 3 (29:21):
Please, I want you to hand over all the loopins.
Speaker 1 (29:24):
You've got loopins?
Speaker 3 (29:26):
Yes, loopins?
Speaker 1 (29:27):
Come on, come on, what do you mean lupins? Don't
try and play for time? I'm not you mean the
flower loopins.
Speaker 3 (29:35):
That's right.
Speaker 1 (29:36):
Oh, we haven't got any loopins. Not, my fine friends,
I happen to know that this is the loop in.
Express your tiny mind.
Speaker 3 (29:46):
Get out of the coach.
Speaker 1 (29:48):
Oh so much of the lupins. Denis mores More galloping
cruits more, Dennis More, Denis More at his horse concord.
He steals from the ridge packets.
Speaker 3 (30:03):
To the board, mister bools.
Speaker 1 (30:08):
I'll be back for more podcasts from iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (30:16):
Visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen
to your favorite shows.
Fellow Ridiculous historians, we are on the high seas, and
as a result, we are doing a run of classics here. Guys,
remember cryptocurrency back when it was tulips.
Speaker 2 (00:12):
Well that's very meta, man, I'm having to parse that
one out. Yeah, it's still around, but it certainly was
a time where it was the beanie baby of our era.
And now the beanie baby of our era is la
Boo boo. So I don't even know where to start
with all of this stuff.
Speaker 1 (00:26):
Oh my gosh, yeah, yeah, Noel. Back in twenty eighteen,
you and I asked each other what happened with the
Dutch Republic and tulips. It's often used as a textbookcase
in marketing classes the world round. But is this tulip
mania truly an economic boom and bust? We're gonna find out.
(00:50):
Mm hmm yep.
Speaker 2 (00:51):
Let's talk about speculative flowers on Ridiculous History.
Speaker 1 (00:59):
Ridiculous History is a production of iHeartRadio. Originally it was
(01:27):
called the Dull Band because of it's so called resemblance
to a turban, and then it was called the Tulbent
in Turkey, and then it was called the Tulip in France.
And then in the fifteen seventies it was called the
tulbe Today we call it the tulip ben. So you're
telling me it's not because it resembles tulips pairs together. Apparently,
(01:50):
you know, all this is in the eye of the beholder, Noll.
But in this case, the name comes from the resemblance
to a turban. That's right, because it came from the
continent of Asia, right it did. It came from Western Asia,
from Turkey. And the earliest known instance of a tulip
flowering in cultivation they were just growing wild beforehand, is
(02:13):
in fifteen fifty nine a guy named Johann Heinrich Herwart
grew the tulip. I don't know if you're a fan
of flowers or if our super producer, Casey Pegram is
a fan himself.
Speaker 2 (02:28):
Well, Casey Pegrim is a flower in the desert, as
far as I'm concerned.
Speaker 1 (02:33):
A rose in the concrete, Yes, exactly exactly. So what
about you, Noel are you? Would you say you're pro flower?
Speaker 2 (02:39):
Well I am, but I kill them so I am
more of a succulent guy, because they're a little more,
a little more sturdy, shall we say, aka, a little
more resilient, and I don't kill them quite as often,
but I still manage. I still manage.
Speaker 1 (02:55):
Yeah, succulents will be more hearty, for sure. I always
thought one of the toughest flowers grow was the orchid.
I only know one person who has a magic touch
with orchids, and that's my mother. I don't know how
she does it.
Speaker 2 (03:06):
It's cause she's made a magic bend.
Speaker 1 (03:08):
She's made of magic perhaps, and she would be making
a mint allegedly had she gone into the tulip game
at a certain point in time. Because nowadays, it's pretty
easy to buy tulips. You could go to your local nursery,
you can go to your local even a hardware store
will have some tulips for sale often.
Speaker 2 (03:29):
Yeah, Like I think a dozen or so bulbs I
found online for about eighteen dollars or something. And you
know that's for every possible type of variety you could
think of. We're talking about a time where the price
of tulip bulbs just went completely bonkers, absolutely bananas.
Speaker 1 (03:49):
So I propose we tackled today's episode in the following way.
Let's tell the story that's most familiar to everyone, and
then let's after that see how much of this stacks up.
You know what the fact and the fiction actually are.
Speaker 2 (04:04):
That's the only way to do it, ben.
Speaker 1 (04:05):
Yeah, all right. So, in the early seventeenth century, the
Dutch Republic experienced what a lot of people will tell
you was the first example of an economic boom and bust. Right,
we know about this kind of stuff here in the
US today with the housing bubble that burst in two
thousand and eight. We know about this in various other
(04:27):
points in time, but people will tell you that the
Dutch Republic in the early seventeenth century, the sixteen hundreds
experienced the very first recorded economic bust and it was
called toulip Mania to lipmania to Lipmania. So what happens exactly.
Speaker 2 (04:47):
Well, it all revolves around the idea of speculation. Speculation
being predicting what something will be worth in the future
and placing your bets that it will be worth that
or more, and then the bottom out potentially when that
speculative price reaches completely disproportionate heights with the thing itself.
Speaker 1 (05:10):
Does that make sense, Yeah, yeah, and all of a
sudden becomes overvalued or people realize it's overvalued for a
series of reasons that we'll get into yes, yeah, for
a series of reasons that can vary depending on the
specific cases. In the case of tulips, essentially, the way
you'll hear this story pitch is that people in the
(05:31):
Dutch Republic went absolutely bonkers for tulips, began paying exorbitant
rates for them, that it gripped the country and then
eventually that's the sound of a bubble popping. But how
do we get here? What made tulip so popular?
Speaker 2 (05:47):
Let it starts earlier than this fellow, but he's kind
of the main dude that really introduced tulip culture into
the Netherlands. His name was corlus Clusius, and he created
a very very influential guard and at the University of Leiden,
and that was in the late fifteen hundreds. He started
this kind of tradition among horticulturists which became kind of
(06:10):
a gentlemanly pursuit of trading, you know, clippings and seeds
and all kinds of tulip related things bulbs between each
other in the interest of kind of spreading this tradition around.
But it was within a very small set of very
particular types of learned individuals, right. But then it kind
of started getting a little bit out of control, and
(06:32):
instead of just doing trades, these folks who had the
tulip bulbs started charging money for them, and then members
of the merchant class, for example, who wanted to flaunt
their newfound wealth. Because this was kind of a relatively
new class of people that could afford the finer things
in life. In this part of the country, they were
experiencing boom times, they decided they wanted to get in
(06:55):
on this craze because these flowers were very beautiful, and
some of them, particular that had kind of miscolored discolorations
almost they were even more desirable.
Speaker 1 (07:06):
They were like rare POGs or pokemon exactly, and you
have to catch them all. Yes. So this this guy,
Carolus Clusius, got this whole craze going around fifteen ninety three.
And tulips had several strong advantages that made that set
them apart from other flowers of the time. First, and
we need to emphasize this, as you said earlier in
(07:28):
nol they had these intense colors that other plants in
the area just didn't have. Secondly, and perhaps even more importantly,
it turns out that tulips can grow pretty well in
this climate. This area the Dutch Republic doesn't have very
good soil for you know, most of the country. And
it turns out that tulips love what is called poor soil.
(07:51):
So not only can you have these beautiful, striking flowers,
but you can actually grow them in a successful man
in a place where you know, a lot of other
flowers wouldn't grow.
Speaker 2 (08:03):
Here's the thing, though, Ben, and I didn't know this
at all. Tulips take a really long time to grow.
It's true. Yeah, so you can do it with seeds,
but seeds. Tulips grown from seeds take like up to
six or seven years to grow. And then you have
I guess what would be the same as like making
a clone of any other type of plant, but it's
a bulb. I guess it's called an offshoot, I believe, Ben,
(08:26):
and those only take three or four years, maybe even
two years if I'm not mistaken. And that was what
people wanted. And here's the thing that's also interesting about
this whole story is that it kind of introduced some
of the concepts surrounding futures trading, right because you're not
buying a full grown tulip, because you can't uproot a
full grown tulip or it will die. You have to
(08:49):
wait until the summer. When they go dormant, they literally
go back down into these bulbs, and only then can
you dig them up. So people, these merchants, these aristocrats,
these whomever that were just going wild for these tulips
had to buy the promise of a future tulip right.
Speaker 1 (09:07):
They would sign contracts before a notary to buy tulips
at the end of the dormant season, which was from
June to roughly September, that's when you could actually pull
them out of the ground. And because of this, the Dutch,
who had already developed a lot of techniques of modern finance,
(09:27):
created this durable goods futures market for tulip bulbs. And
it went insane pretty quickly, you know, because you're not
buying tulips today, you're buying tulips tomorrow.
Speaker 2 (09:42):
Now glad they pay you tuesday for a hamburger today,
only the other way around.
Speaker 1 (09:47):
And then when you hear that other people in the
market are paying increasingly extravagant prices, then you start to
move with the market as well, whether you are selling,
whether you are buying, whether you are just trading tulip futures.
Speaker 2 (10:02):
Yeah, and let's remember too that these were not native
to the Netherlands, and so they were already relatively scarce
because they take so long to grow. They weren't just overflowing, right.
There was a scarcity and a rare quality to them,
and that is what drives that kind of gotta have
them all mentality. Right, Yeah, if anyone could have them,
(10:23):
no one would care.
Speaker 1 (10:24):
Right exactly, kind of like hammer Pants in the nineteen eighties.
I don't know, I think we're both too young to
really deliver that reference. I just remember him, see hammer
So we said fifteen ninety three, this is when it
starts catching on the early adopters, right, the learned fans
of flowerdom and horticulture start buying up tulips. By sixteen
(10:48):
thirty three. In some transactions, tulip bulbs actually replace currency.
History Mike Dash found documentation of actual properties being sold
for what he said were handfuls of tulip bulbs. And
then more and more people heard the sort of friend
of a friend of a friend's stories about someone who
(11:12):
got into the market, bought and sold tulips, and now
they're set for life. And by that same year, sixteen
thirty three, when this stuff is really escalating, a single
bulb of a tulip variety called Simper Augustus was already
worth five five hundred guilders.
Speaker 2 (11:28):
Yeah, and Simper Augustus is that one with the with
the stripes. It's got kind of red flame like stripes
on it. And this is super interesting. It turns out
that what causes that condition is actually a virus. Yes, yeah,
it's correct. And no one knew how to breed them
to I mean, I've known breeds not the right word
to cultivate them to look like that. So they tried
(11:50):
all kinds of crazy stuff, didn't they then.
Speaker 1 (11:51):
Yeah, they tried. They tried a ton of very strange things.
They would let's see what was one of them. They
buried it in a certain type of mud.
Speaker 2 (12:01):
Yeah, there was a pigeon dung i believe, or pigeon
iguana or whatever you want to call it. Pigeon poop poop.
There you go, that's the right word. That's the science.
That's the science word. They also would even tie like
a red and a white together and then bury them
in the hopes that they would somehow commingle and create
yea tulip b osmosis very much so. My favorite is
they would sprinkle the soil with pigments that they would
(12:24):
hope would somehow seep into the soil, and you know,
there was they didn't know what they were doing, no.
Speaker 1 (12:29):
But they were just trying different things exactly. I think
most people at the time would have made similar attempts.
Those are just a few examples we know of, but
we know that there were many other techniques, most of
which were cartoonish failures. And this just made these failures
just made the specific types of high end tulips even
(12:50):
more appealing. Now we see the market explodeving. You would
think maybe that by sixteen thirty three someone would have
looked around, seen a Simper Augustus bulb and said, I
don't think this is really worth five thousand, five hundred guilders.
(13:10):
But no, the bubble kept growing.
Speaker 2 (13:13):
Yeah, and we actually had situations where these deals were
being made in back rooms of like inns and pubs
and stuff, and it was all pretty organized. They apparently
are these smoke filled rooms where people were getting their
drink on and their smoke on, and they had like
these pieces of wood that they would write they would
(13:35):
essentially bid on these tulip lots, and it was like,
I don't know. I saw this fantastic video series on
YouTube that I was telling you about Ben that I
think you had seen two on a channel called Economics Decoded.
And the guy I don't see his name here, he
doesn't really announce himself for lower third himself, but he
does a fantastic job with illustrations and sound effects, and
(13:55):
I really recommend checking it out. It is a three
part series on tulimania, and he liked it to if
when we had to go and buy a stock, if
we had to literally have a conversation with a bunch
of dudes in a smoky room and arrive at an
agreed upon price, because we take for granted how quickly
information travels these days, and how the price of things
(14:17):
are just set, it's understood by algorithm.
Speaker 1 (14:19):
Or they change it in almost uniform manner.
Speaker 2 (14:21):
Totally uniform, Whereas this was like a series of mini
markets in different parts of the country that were pretty
isolated because you could only get information to another part
as fast as a guy could ride there on a horse,
right exactly. That's that's true. That's that's something that we
can easily forget in the modern age of microsecond transactions
(14:43):
and AI quote unquote helping people trade stocks. So the
way the story goes is that this craze continues. By
sixteen thirty five, you could see records of forty bulbs,
just forty bulbs sold for one hundred thousand guilders or florins,
(15:03):
and by way of comparison at that time, in the
same year, one ton of butter costs around one hundred guilders,
and someone who was a pretty skilled laborer, someone who
practiced a trade of some sort, like a blacksmith or
a ferrier or something, they might earn as much as
one hundred and fifty to three hundred and fifty guilders
(15:25):
a year. So this is a massive amount of money involved.
And I really enjoy the part in the Tulipmania series
on Economics Decoded where he walks us through the strange
occurrence of February sixteen thirty seven. At this point, the
(15:47):
price of a single Simper Augustus bulb that was worth
five thy five hundred gilders in sixteen thirty three is
easily worth ten thousand guilders. The center cannot hold. Things
are going to fall apart. Right, That's not what shinua
Achebe was talking about in his book, but you can
(16:07):
see how this applies. And so according to the story,
the tulip market crashes very very quickly, and people start
to reneg on those contracts that they had signed. So
someone would say, look, you owe me this much money
for these tulips, and they would just refuse to pay. Yeah,
(16:29):
And they got into a real sticky situation where the
sellers had the tulips now at that delivery period where
they'd gotten out of the ground, and there's only a
limited amount of time before they are going to not
be viable anymore, that they have to rebury them. But
nobody's like accepting them. People are like, no, I don't
want them, I'm not going to pay you. And I
think small claims court got involved where they they had
(16:51):
to essentially get the courts to help them come up
with a system of you know, repayment that was agreeable
by both parties and ended up being a small percentage
of three percent of the price promised or where. Because
again these futures and again this wasn't really exactly futures
trading It was sort of like some of the same
(17:12):
style of economics as futures trading, but future trading has
protections built in that this just didn't. And this is
kind of just like the wild West, and so you
wouldn't pay full price and you'd get like a you
would get a deal because you're taking on risk your
tulip might not turn out, and you don't get to
just say, oh, my tulip didn't turn out, I'm not
going to pay for it. That's technically not allowed, even
(17:35):
though that's kind of what these people were doing. But
it wasn't about the tulip not turning out. It was
more about the whole system kind of falling. Yeah, well,
you don't pay full price, you pay a little bit
less because you're soaking up some of that risk for
the grower.
Speaker 3 (17:48):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (17:48):
Yeah, And there's an interesting step here that I want
to make sure we don't miss. Because of the precipitous
rise the price of tulip's, most speculators by sixteen thirty
seven couldn't afford to buy even the cheapest tulips, and
this is what triggered the collapse in demand. And then
(18:09):
when the demand disappeared, the flowers quickly became worth maybe
ten percent of what they had been worth the day
or the week before. And this sounds funny, this sounds
like some sort of Doctor Seus's parable, But the real
time effect and the real life effect of this is
that people encountered financial catastrophe. People's lives were ruined when
(18:32):
the tulip trade collapsed, and as you said, with the
courts getting involved, these vicious fights over debt continued for
years and years and years, and thus the Tulip Boom
and Bust of the Dutch Republic became one of the
most well known financial cautionary tales in the Western world
(18:54):
until about nineteen eighty when people realized that there might
be bored to the story, because it turns out that
the story we just related to you, ridiculous historians is
primarily based on a work of a Scottish journalist named
Charles McKay. In eighteen forty one, he wrote a book
(19:17):
called Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds. He
sourced his story about this tulip Boom and Bust from
a guy named Johann Beckman, who in seventeen ninety seven
wrote a book called A History of inventions, discoveries and origins.
And then Beckmann's story when we trace this back, comes
(19:40):
from three anonymous pamphlets that were published in sixteen thirty seven,
the same year Everything went to pot and they were
hit pieces.
Speaker 2 (19:49):
Bennis slicing the air like a knife with his hand
right now, because he feels very strongly about this, and
I agree for a good reason, hit pieces. Indeed, because
he had an axe to grind. He did not like
the practice of spec at all, and neither did McKay.
And even today, this idea of futures is considered a
moral by many, and it's a lot of it is
(20:10):
felt to be a type of gambling because you're making
bets on things that you don't actually own.
Speaker 1 (20:16):
Right, you know what I mean.
Speaker 2 (20:17):
Right, You're taking this piece of paper it says I
own the idea of this thing what does not yet exist,
and then you're selling it to somebody else for an
inflated price based on this imaginary number that keeps getting
higher and higher and higher. It's sort of like subprime mortgages,
for example, where you keep betting on something and people
(20:38):
don't fully understand you know, what the market is going
to do, and then it does a thing that no
one quite saw coming. And then all of a sudden,
all those bets you made you got to pay them,
but nobody has the money to pay them.
Speaker 1 (20:50):
Yeah, the research was not done, and at least in
the subprime mortgage crisis, there is overwhelming evidence that several
people knew exactly what was happening and just decided to
let it happen.
Speaker 2 (21:02):
Well, because you can make money. That's the thing about bubbles, right,
if you ride it out at the right time, you
ride that wave correctly, you can make a lot of money.
Speaker 1 (21:09):
And we see other examples of this, Beanie babies, that's
an example, POGs. I was talking off air a while
back with Casey about bitcoin. Casey, do you remember Do
you remember bitcoin?
Speaker 3 (21:22):
I do remember bitcoin? Yes?
Speaker 2 (21:24):
Are you?
Speaker 1 (21:25):
Are you involved? Are you a bitcoiner? No?
Speaker 3 (21:27):
No, I got out of bitcoin a long time ago,
So no, I don't have a stake in bitcoin anymore.
Speaker 1 (21:32):
But didn't you get out like a little too early?
Speaker 3 (21:35):
I did? Indeed, Yeah, I bought when it was like
maybe like a dollar or something per bitcoin, and then
at its height it was worth some crazy amount like
maybe close to twenty thousand dollars a bitcoin. But I
sold when it was far less than that. There's like
a lot of people who have parked way too much
money in bitcoin who have lost a lot over the
last several months.
Speaker 2 (21:55):
Yes, it's really interesting. It's a really interesting kind of comparison.
Speaker 1 (21:58):
And they're more bitcoins on the market, right.
Speaker 3 (22:01):
Oh yeah, there's like Ethereum, there's there's a bunch, Yeah.
Speaker 1 (22:04):
There's there's doge coin.
Speaker 3 (22:06):
Yeah yeah, there's there's all these weird like meme coins.
And there's one I was reading about called stable coin,
which is literally just peg to the US dollar. So
it's kind of like, what's even the point, But apparently
the ideas you can kind of I don't know, longer
money with it or something. So you know, oh good
the world of crypto. Yeah, so so.
Speaker 1 (22:25):
We do see an interesting comparison there. We also know
that the tulip story itself, the story of tulip mania,
may have been a case of people playing telephone throughout
history based on essentially works of propaganda that were anti speculative,
(22:50):
anonymously published pamphlets, and this means that this means that
we have more research ahead of us. There are some
wonderful books about tulipmania. There are two that are both
called tulipmania, right, and the authors of these books will
assure you and assure us that the phenomenon was actually exaggerated,
(23:14):
that contrary to what McKay says, it was not a
situation wherein every single person in the nation, from paupers
to royalty, were losing their minds and gouging their eyes
out to buy more tulips.
Speaker 2 (23:27):
Because I learned something in this research is that the
Dutch more or less invented the model for the modern
stock exchange. So it would certainly make sense that this
was something that happened in their neck of the woods.
And they also, you know, were a huge trading empire,
and they established New York City and all of you know,
the Dutch East India Trading Company and all of that.
I mean, it was definitely in their national identity.
Speaker 1 (23:50):
Right. Harlem is originally a town in the Netherlands.
Speaker 2 (23:54):
Harlem is where the infamous collapse of the market supposedly
happened during that auction where nobody bid.
Speaker 1 (24:03):
Yeah, that's Harlem with two eights, that's right.
Speaker 2 (24:06):
And another thing that I want to point out too,
from that video series. We mentioned the guy in that
video series points out something that I think should not
be ignored is that gambling was a huge, another huge
part of their public, their national consciousness. People would make
bets on the craziest things.
Speaker 1 (24:25):
I think.
Speaker 2 (24:25):
He points out one about a guy who bet that
he could ford a river in a tiny wooden barrel
or like a trough or something like that, and I
believe it was Rembrandt, the famous painter, who bet on
whether he'd be alive the next year or not. So,
I mean, it was definitely a thing that was very popular.
So it's almost like, you know, why not, let's bet
(24:47):
on tulips. And also we haven't mentioned the fact that
the plague was a big part of this, and people's
life expectancy was very short. Yeah, it was kind of like, yolo,
let's do this, you know.
Speaker 1 (24:57):
Yeah. And with these important instrumental pieces of context, we
can unpack a little bit of the fact versus fiction
around tulip Mania. We mentioned people did have their lives
ruined financially at the time. That is true, but it
may have been far fewer people than McKay would have
(25:18):
us believe. In fact, some researchers have found fewer than
half a dozen people who experienced financial trouble in that
time period during the tulip boom and bust, and hear
people argue that although prices had risen, money had not
actually changed hands between buyers and sellers, so the profits
(25:39):
were never realized for the sellers unless they had made
other purchases on credit expecting their tulip money to come
in sometime between June and September. So the collapse and prices,
the argument goes, did not actually cause a ton of
people to lose real tangible money, just had a series
of interesting, increasingly desperate conversations.
Speaker 2 (26:01):
Yeah, it's actually really cool that we got to do
this story because I just the other day was asking
my girlfriend's stepdad. He's a big Scotch fan, and I
was something I've always wondered. I asked him, was how
is it sustainable to have these Scotches that you age
for twenty thirty years or whatever and have that be
(26:21):
viable when you need to be selling stuff selling product
right away? And I think I'm explaining this right, But
it was another form of futures where you have a
certain elite that are investing in barrels, investing in particular
lots or whatever, of the good stuff, the really long
aged kind of fancy stuff that they do in smaller
batches in order to finance the quicker turnaround product. And
(26:43):
I just thought that was really interesting that this is
a very similar example to that, Like, how do you
take something that requires years to actually generate a tangible
thing and make that a market where people are actually
going to pay into it? And that's how you do
It's very similar to with whiskey.
Speaker 1 (26:58):
Yeah, wine would be another great comparison. I believe this story,
while it does seem to have a cautionary aspect to it,
and while it does seem to be sort of a
morality tale, we know that it's been exaggerated. It hasn't
been completely made up. This really did happen, And I
(27:18):
would say that this means it still functions as a
crucial lesson in these our modern days. Don't buy tulips
for too much money, you know what I mean? And
don't we have to be we have to be very
cognizant and very self aware of group think and group panics.
Something like this will come along every so often.
Speaker 2 (27:40):
Oh and another interesting little tidbit I picked up along
the way is that what happens when you start increasing
supply over years in a market that relies on scarcity
right to create the actual value of the thing itself,
all of a sudden it ain't so scarce anymore.
Speaker 1 (27:57):
And then people are like, well, well, here's another example
that's tangentially related. And that's a good point in Opek
recently met to reduce production of petroleum, and they did
that not because they're worried about running out of reserves,
but because the price globally of oil fell too low
(28:20):
for their liking. And now, technically speaking, the US is
how you measured out. The US is the world's largest producer.
Speaker 2 (28:28):
Interesting, right, and that's where future is really coming to
play today, is with things like oil, like absolutely necessary
tangible goods. Yeah, yeah, it's supposed to tulips, which are
kind of like frivolous. And if if you heard that
that mighty Python sketch about the loopins.
Speaker 1 (28:44):
Oh yes, I think Gabe reminded me of that one too.
Speaker 2 (28:48):
Maybe we should go out on that because it's such
a fun reminder of how absurd this whole story really is.
Speaker 1 (28:53):
Let's do that. That's a good idea. Thank you so
much for tuning in. Everyone, We hope that you enjoyed
this episode. We want to hear your opinions on other
economic crazes and if you had fun listening, let us
know in lieu of sending us tulips. Why not head
over to our Facebook page Ridiculous Historians, or drop by
(29:14):
Apple podcast and give us a rating. My fine friends,
now false moves.
Speaker 3 (29:21):
Please, I want you to hand over all the loopins.
Speaker 1 (29:24):
You've got loopins?
Speaker 3 (29:26):
Yes, loopins?
Speaker 1 (29:27):
Come on, come on, what do you mean lupins? Don't
try and play for time? I'm not you mean the
flower loopins.
Speaker 3 (29:35):
That's right.
Speaker 1 (29:36):
Oh, we haven't got any loopins. Not, my fine friends,
I happen to know that this is the loop in.
Express your tiny mind.
Speaker 3 (29:46):
Get out of the coach.
Speaker 1 (29:48):
Oh so much of the lupins. Denis mores More galloping
cruits more, Dennis More, Denis More at his horse concord.
He steals from the ridge packets.
Speaker 3 (30:03):
To the board, mister bools.
Speaker 1 (30:08):
I'll be back for more podcasts from iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (30:16):
Visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen
to your favorite shows.
Ridiculous History News
Hosts And Creators
Ben Bowlin
Noel Brown
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