Pod Insights SNAFU with Ed Helms Tulip Mania: The World's First Financial Bubble (with Bowen Yang) About this episode Bowen Yang is an unwitting student of Dutch Economics. This week, Bowen joins Ed on a journey to 17th century Netherlands, where they help burst one of history's first ever economic bubbles, known today as Tulip-Mania. You thought NFT's were crazy, but did you know one Tulip bulb in 1637 could purchase an entire HOUSE? Find out what wilted this mad tulip fever, and don't forget to subscribe to the SNAFU YouTube channel: www.youtube.com/@SNAFUPod
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Transcript 8,926 words · 13 speakers
0:01 Speaker 00 But I'm worried that like right off camera, there's like towering stuff like everything that you've bought off of infomercials and like la boo boos and that that that one false move and it's going to collapse and we're gonna have to like call an ambulance to get you out.
0:17 Speaker 01 This is my audition for hoarders and this is, that's my gifting closet. Everyone has some structural thing where it's just a bunch of crap and you're like, I'm gonna give, I'm gonna like a hand this off to like the next person who comes to my house and like, I feel like should leave with something.
0:34 Speaker 00 Amen. I wish, I wish I had a gifting closet. If I take one thing from this, it's that I need a gifting closet.
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2:23 Speaker 00 Welcome to Snafu, your favorite podcast about history's greatest screw ups, or more precisely, what those spectacular face plants reveal about us, the idiotic humans who just keep making them. I'm your host, Ed Helms, and my guest today is a prolific actor, comedian, writer, and podcast host. You may know him as Fanny in the sensation that is Wicked.
2:48 Speaker 01 You may not.
2:49 Speaker 00 Or you may not, or perhaps you know him as the co-host of one of the most popular podcasts that has ever existed, Los Culturistas. Or maybe you've seen him as the adorable Mu Dang on SNL, among many other beloved characters. Welcome to Snafu, Bowen Yang.
3:07 Speaker 01 Hi, Ed. I'm sorry that I had to, I immediately cut in because I feel like I'm one of the few characters in the Wicked films who is not ever named. Like my, like, it's not the Bechdel test, there must be another like film sort of rubric where it's like, well, if the character's not named, it's like, if it's like an under five, it's like, there's an existential sort of like lane that that kind of role exists in.
3:34 Speaker 00 But you had a name in the credits.
3:36 Speaker 01 I did.
3:37 Speaker 00 But you're not actually named in the dialogue of the movie. Is that what you're saying?
3:40 Speaker 01 Because there's like an ongoing, yeah, because there's an ongoing debate as to how the name is even pronounced.
3:45 Speaker 00 Oh.
3:47 Speaker 01 We shot it in the UK and it was, it was just Fanny, there means pussy and it just, it just kind of became a whole, people were just giggling, tordling, I'm sorry, it's the UK, they were tordling on set. This is a character that is, that is suffused with like unseriousness in every way, which is great. Like I, as, as, as two comedians, I think we understand this.
4:12 Speaker 00 I saw and loved the movie Wicked. I didn't know your character's name and had to look it up.
4:17 Speaker 01 There you go. So you is, so when you say, you know, you may know him as Fanny, I had to tordle myself. Have you guys talked about the etymology of the word Snafu? I've always been curious. Do you know anything about where this word, yeah, like?
4:31 Speaker 00 Oh, absolutely. Yeah.
4:32 Speaker 01 Okay.
4:33 Speaker 00 Oh, it's a great word. So it's, in fact, it's not a word at all. It's an acronym. It's, it stands for Situation Normal All Fucked Up. It's a military acronym.
4:42 Speaker 01 Wow.
4:43 Speaker 00 And it basically just means when like, everything is. Everything's going wrong, which is, you know, a lot of times in a, in war and the soldiers in, in World War II, uh, just started using snafu. And then it's, it's close relative sibling, I might even say, is foo bar.
5:02 Speaker 01 Foo bar. I'm, I know foo bar.
5:04 Speaker 00 Yeah.
5:04 Speaker 01 But snafu really is, really kind of like folds into like, I don't know, the English language quite well. Foo bar, it's, foo, foo bar is, is unwieldy and it feels shoehorned in if you try to use it in a sentence, or it feels very like early aughts.
5:17 Speaker 00 Snafu is like worked into the lexicon. We just say like, ah, what a terrible snafu. And we get it. We all know what that is.
5:23 Speaker 01 Are you a video game person?
5:25 Speaker 00 I'm not. I kind of wish I was, but I don't.
5:27 Speaker 01 No, it's okay. There's um, there's a video game called Chance of Sinar, but it's so stylized and super cool and really simple and chic. It's just you like going up a tower, not unlike the Tower of Babel, uh, where you are just translating different languages that are like made up and fictional to this universe, but you are kind of just like joining together these different languages with different syntaxes and different structures and it all kind of, I think as a history buff, you would like this. As someone who understands fundamentally that, um, language limits our relational capacity for whatever, anything
6:03 Speaker 00 Yes.
6:03 Speaker 01 between human beings. It is, I think this is the right game for you.
6:07 Speaker 00 This is so interesting because as you're describing it, I'm thinking like, this sounds so cool and interesting and amazing. And also not at all what I think of as gaming.
6:18 Speaker 01 Right. Exactly.
6:19 Speaker 00 And you're so right, by the way, because how often have you befriended someone for whom English is a second language or tried to befriend someone where you can kind of speak their language and felt like you're not getting your full self across?
6:35 Speaker 01 All the time. Basically all of my family, except my parents and my sister are in China and anytime we're together, especially recently, they're just like, wait, you're like, people think you're funny in America? I'm like, well, not everybody. But I was like, but they're like, but what do you mean? Cause I'm not this, I'm not like the gregarious. Person that I am in Mandarin because they're like, wait, what? And so all the time, but also there are, there are, but then there's, there's so many cases where there's a language barrier and then yet you still sort of get the essential
7:06 Speaker 00 Yes, of course, of course. Of course. It's so funny to me that your family is like, wait, you're funny? What?
7:16 Speaker 01 It's, you know, it's
7:17 Speaker 00 We've all been through some version of that.
7:20 Speaker 01 Yeah, yeah, yeah.
7:21 Speaker 00 Hey, let's dive into the snaff. Are you ready?
7:25 Speaker 01 I'm so ready.
7:26 Speaker 00 All right. We have a doozy today. Um, this one is kind of fun and interesting. Um, we're going to play with bubbles today. Um, but we're not talking about soapy bubbles like you make at a kid's birthday party. We're talking about economic bubbles and it's more interesting than it sounds.
7:45 Speaker 01 Well, did, did the bubbles trickle down? No, I'm kidding. Keep going. They never do.
7:51 Speaker 00 Just for listeners who may not be aware, an economic bubble is when a product's price gets way overinflated because everyone's convinced it's like the next big thing and they keep buying and selling it to make a quick buck. And then pop, the bubble inevitably bursts because some people start to catch on that the crazy price is propped up, not by the product's inherent value, but just like fully by vibes and FOMO.
8:16 Speaker 01 You picked the worst person possible to discuss this with, but I'm with you. I'm so with you.
8:22 Speaker 00 But why?
8:23 Speaker 01 Couldn't tell you a thing about just bubbles, bubbles popping.
8:27 Speaker 00 Matters.
8:28 Speaker 01 Financial, anything. I couldn't even come up with the word financial.
8:31 Speaker 00 I'm the same way.
8:33 Speaker 01 No, really?
8:34 Speaker 00 I'm in the same, but fully. This is why you're even more perfect than I hoped because like you will bring a very genuine, uh, sort of open and curious mind to this because I also, there's parts of the math of this story that I'm like, I'm not even going to bother with that because it's so confusing to me.
8:51 Speaker 01 Okay.
8:52 Speaker 00 What's fascinating about this one in particular is what the bubble was. We're going back to the 17th century when the Dutch went mad, like completely batshit crazy for tulips. Yes, the flower, uh, which you can buy at your local grocery store. At one point, cost the same as a house, a single flower. So the story today is, uh, what historians call tulip mania.
9:22 Speaker 01 Yes.
9:23 Speaker 00 It's a real thing. Now, are you ready for this?
9:25 Speaker 01 I am, but it never, it never went away in Holland, in the Netherlands. It's these Flandersians still love their tulips, but keep going. I'm so invested.
9:40 Speaker 00 Before we dive into 17th century Dutch society, let's detour for a quick tulip origin story. Tulips are native to Central Asia, so we're talking like modern day Kazakhstan and the surrounding regions, where they have been cultivated since the 11th century. The name comes from the Turkish tulbent, meaning turban, a nod to their upward blooming turban-like petals.
10:05 Speaker 01 Oh, wow.
10:06 Speaker 00 Tulips weren't just beautiful either. They carried a lot of serious cultural weight in their native lands. In fact, they were the official symbol of the Ottoman Empire under Suleiman the Magnificent, who ruled from 1520 to 1566. In the 1550s, European ambassadors in Constantinople took notice of the flower, and this is when tulips spread to European markets. By the 1590s, they had reached the Netherlands, and now this is right when the Dutch Republic was entering its golden age, a time of crazy booming trade and artistic brilliance. Have you ever been to the Netherlands?
10:47 Speaker 01 I've been to the Netherlands. I've somehow ended up in Amsterdam like several times within like a couple of years. I don't, I can't say that I know it like the back of my hand. I appreciate the culture of the place a great deal. And I have a theory already about why tulips kind of blew up, but I'll let you keep going.
11:10 Speaker 00 Is it because everyone does mushrooms in Amsterdam?
11:12 Speaker 01 No, I think it's because they're easy to draw, like a child could draw.
11:17 Speaker 00 Oh, interesting.
11:18 Speaker 01 What like a cartoon flower is essentially.
11:21 Speaker 00 So simple and gorgeous. We're broadening out a little bit now just into some more Dutch culture context. It's the golden age for Dutch culture, and you're probably asking
11:32 Speaker 00 Well, how did that come about? And I'm glad you asked, Bowen. A lot of it traces back to the Dutch East India Company, which in 1602 basically invented the multinational corporation, partnered with the government. It was meant to safeguard trade in the Indian Ocean. If by safeguard, you mean like making deals, fighting battles, and committing massive international atrocities on a massive scale, and generally acting like an entire country version of a high school bully. It was such a massive operation that in today's dollars, it would be like trillions. The value of this company was like in the trillions, which is hard to wrap your head around.
12:13 Speaker 01 Which is like, there's only one trillion dollar company, right? Right now?
12:16 Speaker 00 Is it Apple?
12:17 Speaker 01 I think it's just Apple. And wait, so what year did Vermeer paint all of his stuff? I feel like that's, to me, that's the, that's the golden Dutch age in my book.
12:27 Speaker 00 We're in the same zone.
12:28 Speaker 01 We are? Okay, then great.
12:29 Speaker 00 Yeah.
12:30 Speaker 01 Let's see, Girl with the Pearl Earring, I feel like, you know what? All of, all of the Netherlands was like, we are cooking, let's, let's go crazy.
12:38 Speaker 00 Vermeer is part of that artistic boom that's, that's happening at the same time as this like massive financial and cultural boom. It's like Maslow's hierarchy of needs, like as the country becomes increasingly wealthy, things like art and even sciences, they really flourish because there's just, people have more time and more,
12:59 Speaker 01 Right.
12:59 Speaker 00 more interest in, in luxury. So all of this activity, the supercharged economy, contributed to the rise of a new urban business class comprised of merchants and traders who came to dominate high society while the old rural nobility was getting pushed aside. The wealth gap was still significant. It didn't disappear, but regular workers were definitely doing a lot better. And not quite like buy a yacht vibes, but definitely like maybe splurge on some fancy cheese, say, for example. So enter into this cultural moment, the tulip, exotic, imported, and just different enough to make your neighbor low-key jealous.
13:45 Speaker 00 Bowen, do you have a taste for finer things?
13:49 Speaker 01 I think the finer things are wasted on me, but I try to, I try to orient myself towards those things, just, just short of like being like really like obnoxious and cloying about it.
14:02 Speaker 00 What's like a really, I mean, you know, it's funny, I don't really splurge on, I splurge on experiences. That's where I spend, tend to spend my, like, things for my family to do that are like exciting or cool.
14:15 Speaker 01 Whatever happens here, I'm, I hope no lives get lost, but I think like what happens here has a great ending and it was all worthwhile because tulips are beautiful and it's an aesthetic thing. But it's like the modern day thing where if like, you know, NFTs or like little dumb pictures of cartoon gorillas in like baseball caps somehow were, was in like every single garden and park and forest of America. You know what I mean? Like things that like once seemed so, so valuable that investors poured a lot of money into, if they stick around, I don't know, if the bubble bursts, like the best thing that can happen is if they stick around and they are at least a lovely thing for people to look at.
14:55 Speaker 00 Yeah. When a bubble bursts, like the, the thing doesn't disappear. In my Snafu book, there, I did a chapter on the Beanie Baby bubble.
15:04 Speaker 01 Yes.
15:05 Speaker 00 Which was a very sort of famous version of this. The bubble burst and people lost a ton of money. It was very heartbreaking, but Beanie Babies are still around. They're still cute. You can still buy them.
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18:15 Speaker 00 So the Dutch tulip craze begins with a botanist named Charles de Lecluse. At the University of Liden in the 1590s, he cultivated meticulous tulip gardens and in 1601, published The History of Rare Plants, in which he obsessed over what are called broken tulips. Now, these were the, uh, these were like the real show-off tulips. Instead of a single color, they had, oh, they had like these wild flame-like streaks in them. I think we have a photo here of a-
18:49 Speaker 01 I think I'm familiar. Oh, yeah, yep, yep, yep, yep. They are gorgeous.
18:52 Speaker 00 Yeah, this is, uh, this is what is called a viceroy bulb. Um, well, actually, I don't think this is the bulb. This is the-
19:03 Speaker 01 This is the whole-
19:04 Speaker 00 This is the whole thing. This is a sprouted flower. The bulb is what it grows from underground.
19:12 Speaker 01 I'm, again, the wrong person to ask.
19:16 Speaker 00 I feel very confident. I feel very confident about this.
19:18 Speaker 01 I have confidence in you, yeah.
19:20 Speaker 00 Thank you. Legend has it, Lecluse refused to sell his bulbs, which only made them more desirable. That's when thieves broke into his garden and stole offshoot bulbs called offsets. It was these stolen bulbs that then allegedly kick-started the tulip craze. It gets better. While visiting a Viennese aristocrat, Lecluse supposedly spotted a vase of lovely multicolored tulips, the kind he knew existed only in his own garden. And when he pressed this aristocrat, she denied everything and claimed she had no idea where they came from, which was like bold as hell and just complete horseshit.
20:02 Speaker 01 Right.
20:03 Speaker 00 And just audacious.
20:05 Speaker 01 I would never have the guts. I just don't have it in me. I'm just so-
20:13 Speaker 01 Non-confrontational.
20:14 Speaker 00 Wait, to steal something to begin with, or to like ostentatiously display something that you stole?
20:20 Speaker 01 No, just to do the Leclerc thing of calling someone out.
20:23 Speaker 00 Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.
20:24 Speaker 01 I'm telling the world, you can come and steal me for all I am worth, and I will not do a thing about it.
20:31 Speaker 00 Just to avoid the awkwardness.
20:34 Speaker 00 I am there.
20:35 Speaker 01 I just don't want to get into it.
20:37 Speaker 00 Yeah, it's like, uh, because like if I call you out, then there'll be this whole back and forth and like you might get mad.
20:43 Speaker 01 No.
20:43 Speaker 00 But you'll, it's like, you'll probably feel ashamed and then that'll transform into rage and then we're just in this like terribly weird place.
20:51 Speaker 01 Exactly. And, and, and can't we all just be friends even after you've stolen from me? That's all I want.
20:58 Speaker 00 So before long, tulips graduated from nice little garden accent to full-on status symbol. So actual value no longer mattered. This was simply about prestige, spectacle, and the, of course, deeply human tradition of obsessively comparing yourself to your neighbors. It's now 1634. I don't do that, by the way. I don't know if you do.
21:20 Speaker 01 Comparing yourself to neighbors specifically, your, your neighbors specifically.
21:23 Speaker 00 I mean, neighbors in the sense of like.
21:25 Speaker 01 Of course, of course. I'm being liberal about it.
21:27 Speaker 00 Yeah, like whatever neighbor might mean.
21:30 Speaker 01 Right.
21:30 Speaker 00 It's so funny. We operate in a career that is very disconcerting because I'm, I'm taking a detour for a second. Our, the, the world in which we move in this show business world, it's obviously very status driven. But it's also like, there are so many metrics that are so literal as to like, that other people can try to like, assess your value and rank you. And sometimes it's, you know, it used to be things like, what's your most recent box office opening number? Or now IMDb has, literally has a star meter.
22:07 Speaker 01 Bleak, bleak, bleak.
22:08 Speaker 00 That ranks the, the, whatever the star-ness of someone is. But I've always found that so bizarre and, and like, uh, mind-fucky about the business that we're in. Nice little sidebar. We're gonna cut all that.
22:26 Speaker 00 No, those are the best moments. So it's now 1634 and things are heating up. Speculators pile in, prices go nuts, and suddenly everybody wants the aforementioned broken bulbs. These, of course, were prized because they could produce even more rare, flashier offspring, the offset bulbs we mentioned before. So owning one was like owning a racehorse. Like if it's a winner, that's great, but if it breeds more winners, congrats, you're basically running like a 17th century tulip startup. What's interesting is that we learned later through science that the reason these flamey,
23:09 Speaker 00 these tulips had this kind of like fiery appearance with multiple colors was because of a virus and their offset bulbs are increasingly weak and eventually they get to the point where they can't even flower. So they, it's, it's just a sort of delicious irony that they have diminishing returns over time.
23:28 Speaker 01 It's what happens with inbreeding.
23:30 Speaker 00 He's exactly right. The Habsburg chin or nose.
23:36 Speaker 01 It's the nose, it's just the whole face, I think.
23:38 Speaker 00 It's the whole thing, the whole package. The whole Habsburg package. Are there any fads that you've just like fully fallen into or for?
23:47 Speaker 01 Well, now I feel like, okay, I feel like in this day, if a fad pops off, there are about a million people behind the scenes or forces, algorithmic or economic or whatever that are like ensuring its sustainability or success or whatever, like well into infinity, I think, right? Like Labubus popped off last summer and now I feel like every single person across like up and down the sort of like Pop Mart chain or whatever is like, there are teams of people being like, this is our strategy for how to make sure these are ubiquitous forever. We're coming up the movie, we're coming out with the clothes and we're coming, it's like there's, fads are.
24:32 Speaker 01 Fads are, um, people try to like freeze them in amber. There are ways and means to freeze them in amber now, I think. So anyway, that's not answering your question. To answer your question, of course, I-
24:43 Speaker 00 You fell for La Boo Boo's.
24:44 Speaker 01 I fell for La Boo Boo's.
24:46 Speaker 00 Right off camera.
24:47 Speaker 01 Thousand La Boo Boo's. Yes, there's at least, there are two in my kitchen of all places. Terrible place to keep them. Why? They're furry, they're gonna catch something. Crumbs, you know, uh-
25:00 Speaker 00 On fire?
25:01 Speaker 01 On fire. They are dangerously, true story, close to stove.
25:05 Speaker 00 That is a synthetic fur. I don't know what, it's probably ignites easily.
25:10 Speaker 01 No, mine are human hair.
25:12 Speaker 00 Yeah.
25:13 Speaker 01 Um, I, no, my, every fad, I'm playing this Pokemon game right now that is like all over the internet. I'm looking at Lisa Frank stickers right now. I would call those a fad. There's a great documentary about how-
25:25 Speaker 00 What is that?
25:25 Speaker 01 Miss Lisa Frank. You don't know Lisa Frank?
25:28 Speaker 00 Wait, do I? What is that?
25:29 Speaker 01 These are, these were big in like the 90s and aughts. These were on every single like space saver binder backpack in the late 90s, early aughts. Anyway-
25:39 Speaker 00 Wow, and you have a fresh pack, like right there on your desk. I'm scared, Bowen, I'm worried that, that like right off camera, there's like towering stuff, like everything that you've bought off of infomercials and like La Boo Boo's and that, that, that one false move and it's gonna collapse and we're gonna have to like call an ambulance to get you out.
26:00 Speaker 01 This is my audition for hoarders and this is, that's my gifting closet. Everyone has some structural thing where it's just a bunch of crap and you're like, I'm gonna give, I'm gonna like hand this off to like the next person who comes to my house and like I feel like should leave with something.
26:17 Speaker 00 Amen. I wish, I wish I had a gifting closet. If I take one thing from this, it's that I need a gifting closet. Cause there are a lot of times you're walking out the door, you're like, ah, fuck, I need a bottle of wine.
26:28 Speaker 01 Yeah.
26:33 Speaker 00 So, how much were these tulips actually selling for? I don't know if you passed Econ 101 in college, I did not, but I think it's important that we establish some basic facts about the Dutch economy during the golden age before we get into the hard data of tulip mania. So, a quick shout out to author and historian Mike Dash, who wrote a fascinating book about the tulip craze called Tulipomania. He actually starts off the book with a bit of a financial primer on Dutch currency from the era. I'm not going to get too deep into the weeds here on Dutch currency of the 1700s.
27:08 Speaker 01 Yeah, yeah, yeah.
27:09 Speaker 00 But suffice to say, until the early 19th century, the basic unit of currency there was called a gilder. Now, as for what that's worth today, it's kind of fuzzy. It's hard to compare value of things from so far back, but some estimates say one gilder might be equal to about $10. Others go much bigger, suggesting that one gilder could be worth as much as $60. Anyway you slice it, flowers were selling for too much money. So, now that we have that little bit of context, these numbers I'm about to spew at you might actually make some sense. So, tulip prices, they didn't just rise, they rocketed. According to the Amsterdam Tulip Museum, which is, that's not a bit, that's a real place. And you're going next time you go to Amsterdam.
27:54 Speaker 01 I'm going.
27:55 Speaker 00 I've never been. I've never been to Amsterdam. I cannot believe it. I have been all over the world and I've never been to Amsterdam.
28:00 Speaker 01 It's a comedy town. Like, there's a big Chicago there. It's, oh, it's wonderful. You'd love it.
28:06 Speaker 00 I know. I'm so excited to go. And it's, at this point in my life, it's going to be a family trip and I'm, I'm fine with that.
28:13 Speaker 01 It's a perfect family trip. It's great for everybody.
28:15 Speaker 00 According to the Amsterdam Tulip Museum, a single bulb sold one day for 46 gilders, then changed hands a month later for 515 gilders. Another bulb rose from 95 to 900 gilders in a similar period of time. Now, you're like, gilders, what, okay, what, what? All you have to know is that in both cases, we're talking about a roughly 1,000% increase in price. Some records indicate that the priciest sale was for 10,000 gilders in 1636-ish, 1637, which translates to well over $600,000 today.
28:55 Speaker 01 One bulb, not even the, not even the, the, the sprouted flower.
28:58 Speaker 00 For a sing- single tulip bulb. Now, this is at a time when that kind of money could buy you an entire house.
29:06 Speaker 01 Of course.
29:06 Speaker 00 You brought up Vermeer earlier. Here's a fun comparison for you. Rembrandt painted his masterpiece, The Night Watch, for about 1,600 guilders. Meaning, you could have traded one tulip bulb for three Rembrandts.
29:23 Speaker 01 Seems fair.
29:24 Speaker 00 Yeah, I mean.
29:25 Speaker 01 Seems fair to me. Um, that's crazy.
29:27 Speaker 00 It's, it's.
29:28 Speaker 01 That's nuts.
29:28 Speaker 00 How do you think people justified this to themselves? Like, I don't know if you, like, we talked a little bit about sort of falling for fads here and there, but, but like when, when you're in a real bubble like this, and, and there are modern examples like crypto and so forth. I think what's fascinating about this kind of situation is that, like, if you buy a tulip bulb in the, in, in the Netherlands, in the 1600s, and then suddenly it's worth like 10 times what you bought it for, you don't think you're in a bubble. You just think you're in, you just think you're in this like financially advantageous situation.
30:05 Speaker 01 Of course.
30:05 Speaker 00 And that, I think, is what is like such a trap. And why bubbles just keep happening over and over again is because they're almost impossible to perceive when you're in them.
30:15 Speaker 01 When you're in them, it feels like it is always the exception, probably. There's a great book called Status and Culture by this guy named W. David Marks. And he says that what dictates culture, and especially like pre-internet, was markers of status, right? And so like in an economy where you're describing like in the Netherlands, like even like the quote-unquote lower classes like had spending power, like it just drives up the price of something as like what seems as trivial as like a flower or as like fragile, not even trivial, but just like fragile, like this, a bulb like could sprout, it could not, like you're real, it's kind of a gamble, like,
30:55 Speaker 01 but basically like you can buy that, your, people are buying this up because it is, as you were saying earlier, a status marker where they are trying to then like, it's, it's like buying like, I don't know, whatever, I see, I'm so, I'm so out of touch now, like whatever the cool, like. Pant is, or whatever, or you know, or, or let's just say Rolex. It's just like, that is a marker of status. I need to emulate this kind of, I don't know, status mobility. And therefore I need to buy this thing and then show to my neighbors that I have it.
31:29 Speaker 00 Yeah, absolutely.
31:30 Speaker 01 But that's it, that, that, that, that explain, I mean, it sounds, yeah, I mean, we're talking about it now, like hundreds of years later, being like, isn't that so crazy? But, but you're right. It's like, when you're in the bubble, it is imperceptible because you, you, you think it is always, you always think that you are the unicorn. It's the self-selection bias where you're like, this, it's different this time. Yeah.
31:47 Speaker 00 And that it's gonna, just gonna stay this way. The market's gonna stay the way that it is. Okay, so this is one of my favorite examples of the absurdity of these deals that were going down. So according to historian Mike Dash, one of the highest exchanges for one tulip speculator came in a magnificently lopsided load. For one viceroy bulb, like the one that we saw earlier, the seller received the following. Two loads of wheat, two loads of rye, four fat oxen. And yes, it was specified that the oxen had to be fat.
32:24 Speaker 00 Eight fat pigs, 12 fat sheep, two hogsheads of wine, four barrels of beer, two barrels of butter, a thousand pounds of cheese, a complete bed, a suit of clothes, and a silver beaker.
32:41 Speaker 01 Yeah. This is so Oregon Trail, like.
32:43 Speaker 00 Yeah, right.
32:44 Speaker 01 Yeah, you had to barter with all your stuff to like, get like, I don't know, bread and food or medicine. But like, for, for one, what was it? The viceroy bulb? It's pretty though.
32:55 Speaker 00 Yeah, it is a pretty flower, that's for sure.
32:57 Speaker 01 Flower. It's lopsided because it's, because that was, that was the value of the, of the one bulb? Like, is that?
33:04 Speaker 00 That is an actual contract, was the exchange of those items for one viceroy bulb.
33:09 Speaker 01 Holy moly.
33:10 Speaker 00 And what I, what I love about that list is that, you know, back in the day, like, there was so much bartering of goods, livestock and things. Like, none of that is very surprising. It's, it sort of sounds like a pretty conventional deal of the, in the 1600s. Like you said, Oregon Trail vibes. But, but where it gets weird for me is when suddenly like, they're adding in a bed and then a full suit of clothes. And I'm just like, whoever's selling this bulb really needs a fresh start in their
33:40 Speaker 01 Really needs a
33:42 Speaker 00 Like that's what they're, that's, they're getting, they're getting a ton of butter and a bunch of, and like, cheese, and then all these, this livestock, like, this is enough to build a life. You get a bed, a suit of clothes.
33:55 Speaker 01 Or they were taking in, or the person with the bulb was taking in like a street urgent and they were like, oh, we'll need an extra bed and fresh clothes for this person we're taking into our lives.
34:05 Speaker 00 And a thousand pounds of cheese.
34:07 Speaker 01 And a thousand pounds of cheese. Well, that's just for personal use. That's just for them to sort of cut through.
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37:16 Speaker 00 All right, so in 1841, Scottish author Charles McKay wrote a book called Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds, which featured a number of stories about the tulip mania. And full disclosure, some of these stories are thought to be apocryphal. But in one of the tales, there's a great story of a seaman who was visiting The house of a wealthy merchant, the merchant offered him a breakfast of fine red herring. And the seaman then spotted what he assumed was an onion lying nearby and thought, oh, perfect. This will really elevate the fancy fish situation. So he picked it up and crumbled it over his yummy fishy meal. And he enjoyed it thoroughly, presumably feeling quite pleased with his culinary instincts.
38:00 Speaker 00 Unfortunately, it was not an onion, as you have probably guessed. It was a tulip bulb, but not just any tulip bulb. It was a Semper Augustus bulb, one of the most prized and expensive varieties in existence. So the seaman had just enjoyed his breakfast with a $1 million flower. Yeah.
38:20 Speaker 01 That's on the guy for leaving the bulb out in the open. I agree. Victim blaming, but that's, that's just what it reeks.
38:27 Speaker 00 You're right. If it's a million dollar bulb, like you put it, some put it on a shelf somewhere or something.
38:34 Speaker 01 Right. Before you're like, oh, let me get the red herring for you. It just makes sure like your personal effects were like tucked away and like put that in the safe. What are you doing? Leaving the bulb out?
38:47 Speaker 00 Come on, hide the bulb. Wouldn't it be funny to just eat a million dollars?
38:52 Speaker 01 Totally. But like, what, what, what, just pure cash, like in, like what, like in?
38:58 Speaker 00 Yeah, like what if you were at somebody's house and they, and they just had like a million dollars sitting out? Like, since these things were status symbols, like maybe this, maybe the merchant was like, you know, like leaving it out as a sort of like a flex. But if you were at somebody's house and they just left out a big stack of a million dollars and you were just like, hmm, I don't know.
39:15 Speaker 01 Looks good.
39:15 Speaker 00 I'll eat it. I'll just pour some maple syrup on that and just start eating it. All right. So now, interesting to note, a lot of these deals went down in local Dutch taverns of all places, which turned them into basically little tulip brokerages. Drinks flowed, prices climbed, and the rights to a single tulip bulb could change hands 10 times in a day, which is impressive considering no one actually saw the bulbs in most cases. So this is a huge twist. A lot of the time they. They weren't trading actual bulbs. The tulips themselves were still sitting peacefully in the ground, often in Harlem, which is a town west of Amsterdam, which has really ideal conditions for rearing tulips,
40:00 Speaker 00 apparently. So what people were buying and selling were essentially IOUs or future contracts for a flower that hadn't even bloomed yet. So you'd spend a small fortune on something you couldn't see, you couldn't touch, you couldn't even verify, other than just like, you know, that this is someone that you knew in your town and that they would be accountable, all in the hope that when it finally bloomed, it would be this absolutely fabulous thing, which just seems kind of batshit. This is sort of like the origin of futures trading, which is a whole other thing I don't quite understand.
40:36 Speaker 01 Me neither. That's why I always say flowers upfront. I always go into my deals saying, flowers, cash, whatever it has, I'm not, I can't, I can't be like speculative about any of this. I can't be too careful.
40:53 Speaker 00 Every time you go, I've seen you in a flower shop and you were not fucking around. It is, you're just like, no, now, I am not, this is not a down payment. This is, I want to, I want to be walking out of here with flowers. And they're like, Bowen, that's how it works. We give you the flowers right now. And you're like, no, I insist on, and they're like, yeah, that's what we're doing. We're going to give it to you. Don't worry.
41:16 Speaker 01 Exactly. Thank you. Are you, are you a flowers guy, Ed?
41:19 Speaker 00 I'm sort of like a fan of botany in general, but I don't, I'm not a big gardener.
41:25 Speaker 01 I can't ID them. I can't, I can't look at a flyer and be like, oh, that's a, you know, redunculus or whatever, you know. But people, people are really, people are really like, that best gift anyone's ever gotten me, speaking of gifts, earlier, local flower shop, like weekly subscription drop off thing. And this was, this happened like three years ago, and I still, I love these flowers so much of this florist in Brooklyn outline florals that I still pay every week to get a, like a weekly flower bouquet that is like so like delicately curated. It's not like this big, like huge bouquet in a vase. It's like a little arrangement that like is just at my door every Saturday and it's like the highlight of my week. And I just.
42:09 Speaker 01 This is why like I now, because like as you're telling the story, I'm like, I get it. Tulips are tulips are beautiful. I wouldn't pay eight fat pigs for it, but I, I would pay, I would pay some money. They're still pretty expensive.
42:22 Speaker 00 I love this, Bowen. This is such a beauty. What you're describing sounds so lovely. Such a just a such a nice way to sort of treat yourself to beauty in the world, like on a regular basis and to be reminded of beauty and to be reminded they like it's, it's like a sensory. It's not just visual beauty. They smell beautiful and it's someone has put care into this presentation for you and it's in your space now. And that's has such a lovely, lovely thing. A bouquet subscription.
43:00 Speaker 01 But like a lot of like the big box, like forests, like we'll do it.
43:04 Speaker 00 This is local, even better.
43:05 Speaker 01 This is local. Yes, yes, yes. I'm not the first person to say this, but like their nature's little fireworks and you can look at them for longer. It's, it's great.
43:12 Speaker 00 Yeah, I love that. So in this case, they weren't actually trading flowers a lot of the time. They were just trading these sort of promissory notes, which does get crazy. They, they were very cynical transactions, just about sort of making money was all it was about. It wasn't even about the beauty of, of tulips at a certain point. Eustace Lipsias was a, a Dutch philosopher. He said, quote, "What should I call this but a kind of merry madness? They do vaingloriously hunt after strange herbs and flowers, which, having gotten, they preserve and cherish more carefully than any mother doth her child."
43:55 Speaker 01 Oh, vainglorious. What a, what an underused word. Let's bring that back.
44:00 Speaker 00 I know, you're right. It's sort of two words mashed together and it means something else.
44:05 Speaker 01 Perfect.
44:06 Speaker 00 A frustrated botanist at Leiden University by the name of Evrod Forstius stated that if he saw a wild tulip, he would quote, "Attack it furiously with his stick." I think at this point, people are starting to resent tulips because they're creating such merry madness all around.
44:24 Speaker 01 At least it's merry.
44:25 Speaker 00 What is like a merry madness in this moment? Would you say like Swifties or like a merry? Like, like to me, a merry madness is like benign. Like it's not, you know, you, you might, in this case, the tulip bubble, like people lost money, but it wasn't like, you know, everybody died.
44:43 Speaker 01 I think a merry madness now is like a heated rivalry situation where it's like, oh, how lovely, like, it's nice because people love it. It's like, appeals to all sectors somehow. Somehow it's like a four quadrant thing where like heterosexual men are watching this going, wow, this is really touching. And then, and then women of all persuasions are like, this is the most emotion and arousal I felt in my whole life. So I, I think it really, um, it runs the gamut on merriment, I should say. And therefore it is a kind of, and people, but people are a little bit frenzied about it in a way that is a little like confounded and confusing and scary and mad. And so I think that is probably the closest current example that I have.
45:26 Speaker 00 So like all bubbles, this one finally popped in February of 1637. And this is where myth and fact can't exactly agree on, on what went down. Some say too many speculators tried to sell at once, clogging the market and evaporating demand. Others point to a plague outbreak dampening people's enthusiasm for luxury flower gambling. Which, you know, fair, if there's, if, you know, there's a pandemic, you're not, you're not going to be into the, the nice things for a minute. And then there's a theory, I love this one, that a few buyers actually went out to Harlem.
46:07 Speaker 00 This, this town where a lot of the, the tulips were cultivated and they saw fields of tulips and they had this devastating realization like, oh shit, there's a lot of these and they just grow.
46:25 Speaker 00 This is not, this is probably not a thing we can, we can, uh, we can't count on scarcity-driven pricing for very long here.
46:33 Speaker 01 Wow.
46:35 Speaker 00 So, but whatever the actual cause, it's reported that bulbs were suddenly trading at 1% of the value from even just six months prior. Allegedly, the Dutch government tried to intervene, offering 10% of the value on bulb contracts to help stabilize the market, but that wasn't even enough to save it. Whatever the exact trigger, tulip mania was officially squashed. And I imagine a lot of people felt quite foolish when they woke up from their tulip fever dream.
47:03 Speaker 01 Right.
47:05 Speaker 00 Yeah.
47:05 Speaker 01 What was the full span of tulip mania? 16, it started in what year and then ended 1642, you said, or 32?
47:14 Speaker 00 So, that's a good question. The, I think the interest in tulips and sort of the rise of tulips as a cultural phenomenon took place through the, the early, like, you know, like Clues, who we mentioned earlier, was in the 1590s. So it was sort of starting to become a fad through the early 1600s. And then, uh, we're hitting peak tulip mania in the mid 1630s.
47:41 Speaker 01 Got it. I think, I kind of, I'm willing to believe this Harlem story where they saw the fields of tulips because, because it's just an example of like, supply and demand going like the complete opposite direction so quickly that of course the value drops immediately, right? Where it's like, there's so much of these fucking flowers and also nobody wants them anymore, so, and, and that just kind of kills it immediately. Like that, that kind of screeches it to a halt, yeah.
48:11 Speaker 00 It's also a kind of, I like that story too, because it's, it's just so funny how, you know, in some sense, a bubble like this, a financial bubble, is a denial of reality. You know, it's a denial, it's a denial of, of like, it's, it's just ascribing a crazy amount of value on, onto something and the reveal- That there's like sprawling fields of them. It's such a delicious visual to be like, no, you fucking idiots. It's just a plant. It's a plant. I love that.
48:49 Speaker 00 Yeah, this is that's that is the story of tulip mania, Bowen Yang. I'm so glad I was able to share this with you and reflect on it with you. Do you have any other like crazy insights or takeaways from from this?
49:02 Speaker 01 You were so thorough, as you always are. I have to just think I panicked and when you started talking about economic bubbles, I was like, wow, this is so, this is so wrong for me. I'm, I'm, I'm going to be such a let down. And I think this was, this ended up being a wonderful, insightful conversation. So this just, thank you for, thank you for stewarding that.
49:23 Speaker 00 Amen. And thanks for just for bringing your curiosity to it. I have to say, I love these stories. I love history. I love just the rabbit hole of these specific incidents throughout history. But what I really love about this podcast is just the curiosity and the little sort of side turns and eddy swirls that we get into with wonderful guests like you. And, and so many of the ideas and bits and whatever that that bubble up and reflections. I think we touched on some very meaningful kind of human behavioral ideas throughout this episode as well, and I really appreciate that.
50:01 Speaker 01 Ed Helms, you gentleman and scholar, I think you would really like this book. I think you would really like Status and Culture by W. David Marx. It's like, it's, it's very like, these, these are the terms. This is what happens. It's very like cut and dry. But as you're reading, as you're reading everything, you're like, whoa. Like, this is kind of how things are set up, like, kind of without exception, like, all throughout. I don't know, not human history, but just, just in terms of like, how things are sort of like positioned as like status objects and how that informs like the wider culture of like the arts and sports and like all of these different things.
50:37 Speaker 00 Bowen Yang, thank you so much for being on Snafu. This was a goddamn delight.
50:42 Speaker 01 Thank you for having me on.
50:43 Speaker 00 Oh, amen. Yes, indeed. Of course.
50:47 Speaker 00 Snafu is a production of iHeart Podcasts and Snafu Media, a partnership between Film Nation Entertainment and Pacific Electric Picture Company. Post-production and creative support from Good Egg Audio. Our executive producers are me, Ed Helms, Mike Falbo, Glenn Basner, Andy Kim, and Dylan Fagan. This episode was produced by Alyssa Martino and Tori Smith. Our managing producer is Carl Nellis. Our video editor is Jared Smith. Technical direction and engineering from Nick Dooley. Additional story editing from Carl Nellis. Our creative executive is Brett Harris. Logo and branding by Matt Gosson and The Collected Works. Legal review from Dan Welsh, Megan Halson, and Caroline Johnson.
51:31 Speaker 00 Special thanks to Isaac Dunham, Adam Horn, Lane Klein, and everyone at iHeart Podcasts, but especially Will Pearson, Carrie Lieberman, and Nikki Ator. While I have you, don't forget to pick up a copy of my book, Snafu: The Definitive Guide to History's Greatest Screw-Ups. It's available now from any book retailer. Just go to snafu-book.com. Thanks for listening and see you next week.
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