January 6, 2025 • 43 mins
If you look at various surveys, Americans feel grim about the state of the economy. But even outside of the economy itself, you see negative readings for faith in various American institutions. Pessimism seems to be in right now, at least on a societal level. But it wasn't always this way. In the 1990s, we were between the Cold War and the War on Terror. The stock market boomed through much of the decade. Optimism was in. So what was that like, and then how did it come to an abrupt end in the early years of the new millennium? On this episode, we speak to Colette Shade, author of the new book Y2K: How the 2000s Became Everything, about this time period in America, what stood out, and what is relevant today.
Related reading: Author of 'Dow 36,000' Book on Lessons Learned Since the 1999 Prediction
Only Bloomberg.com subscribers can get the Odd Lots newsletter in their inbox — now delivered every weekday — plus unlimited access to the site and app. Subscribe at bloomberg.com/subscriptions/oddlots
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:03):
Bloomberg Audio Studios, Podcasts, Radio News.
Speaker 2 (00:20):
Hello and welcome to another episode of the Odd Lots podcast.
Speaker 3 (00:23):
I'm Joe Wisenthal, and I'm Tracy Alloway.
Speaker 2 (00:26):
Tracy, where were you in the nineties.
Speaker 4 (00:29):
Uh, good question. I was in Chicago for a couple
of years, like I want to say, ninety ninety one,
and then from like ninety one to ninety four, ninety
five I was in Japan, and then ninety five to
I guess ninety eight or ninety nine I was in Chicago.
Speaker 2 (00:46):
I have to say, even though we've been doing this
podcast together in nine years, like, there actually is quite
a bit that I don't know about you, And I
feel like there is a lot of as the kids
say these days, Tracy lore that comes out from time
to time or the Tracy No, I just.
Speaker 4 (00:58):
Walked around a lot and don't remember whenever I tell
you my time periods and locations.
Speaker 2 (01:03):
Well, that's also okay, that's okay, that's possible. I also
moved around lot, But I have to say the nineteen nineties.
So this is I'm struggling with this. The nineteen nineties,
particularly the second half of the nineties. I remember it
as a period of a lot of optimism and wealth
and harmony and peace. But the other thing is I
(01:24):
was young and now I'm old, and I'm sort of
trying to reconcile this thing of like, was there was
those Were those really good nostalgia or is it just
personal nostalgia from when I wasn't old.
Speaker 4 (01:35):
I mean the answer is it's probably a mix, right,
But you're right, there was something kind of going on
in the late nineteen nineties. Actually, Joe, you'll enjoy this story.
My after school job when I was in Chicago for
a while was taking care of our next door neighbor's
giant aquarium. And he was an early investor, apparently an
oracle amazing, and he spent all his money on tropical
(01:58):
fish amazing. So for one week it was my job
to go feed the tropical fish, and I would go
every day, and one by one the tropical fish started dying.
Oh by the end of the week there were none left.
And the guy came back and he was like, thanks
for taking care of my fish. And I was so
worried that I was going to get in trouble for
ruining this guy's like multimillion dollar aquarium. But it turns
(02:20):
out he had had it installed like the week before,
and they hadn't got the salt levels and the water
right or something.
Speaker 3 (02:26):
So it wasn't my fault. It was up shot.
Speaker 2 (02:28):
I thought that was going to be like an allegory
for the dream of the dot com bubble and then
it all collapsing with the fish dying.
Speaker 4 (02:34):
But yeah, that's where I'm going with it. That's what
it is.
Speaker 2 (02:37):
So here's my memory of the nineties. You know, there
was just it seemed like there weren't many wars happening.
And of course that feeling ended very quickly not long
after with September eleventh. But the other thing I have
this one summer I got made two thousand dollars from
a summer job and I got into day trading and
I turned it into twenty thousand dollars, which was just
(02:57):
an insane amount of money at the time. And I
had this memory of walking down street somewhere and I
was thinking, Wow, we're rich now. I'm rich now, and
I never thought this should happen. I'm a rich person
and my family is rich because I turned two thousand
dollars into twenty thousand dollars. And so there was that
personal experience in retrospect, twenty thousand dollars not really rich,
(03:21):
but also in retrospect the whole thing wasn't sustainable and durable.
But I do remember this one specific moment feeling life
is really good these days.
Speaker 4 (03:30):
So there's two things I would point out other than
the idea that everyone was getting rich. So number one,
it was the time where we were just discovering new
technology without realizing how terrible it actually could be. Ye,
Like I remember specifically being eleven years old on AOL
chatting on instant messager, probably to adult men, but you know,
(03:51):
we didn't know that back then, and everything was fine.
Everyone was really relaxed about it. And then the other
thing is there seemed to be like this very the
sense that like humanity could triumph over physical constraints, right,
Like everything was going to be online, everything was going
to be software. We didn't really have to worry any
more about the physical world. And you know, fast forward
(04:13):
to the post twenty twenty years that turned out not
to be true.
Speaker 2 (04:16):
You know, not to just keep droning on, but it
was this period between the Cold War in two thousand
and one two and it felt like with the end
of Cold war, Like, okay, the questions of society and
democracy and markets, they've been solid.
Speaker 3 (04:29):
By the end of history.
Speaker 5 (04:30):
Yeah, you could. Like.
Speaker 2 (04:31):
My takeaway from that back then is like, I get
why people got caught up in it.
Speaker 4 (04:35):
Anyway, Well, you and I just got caught up in
it because we both went on to do international relations.
Speaker 3 (04:41):
That's right at university.
Speaker 5 (04:42):
That's right.
Speaker 3 (04:42):
It's not a useful degree, not.
Speaker 2 (04:44):
A useful degree at all. And I don't know why
I did. But only twenty years later in retrospect did
I realize why I went and majored in international relations.
And I was like, oh, yeah, because I didn't know
I was living in a moment of history. In retrospect,
I realized I was living in a moment of hait
story where people thought multilateralism and all that stuff.
Speaker 4 (05:03):
We're all products of our time.
Speaker 2 (05:05):
Yes, and in a way it took me many years
to realize. Anyway, these days, there's multiple major wars going
on in the country. Economic sentiment has been dismal for
a long time. People are less happy than they were,
I believe, despite even accounting for the nostalgia factor. So
let's talk about what it was like when everyone at
(05:25):
least or at least a few of us felt we
were all rich and peaceful and happy in a permanent state.
We have the perfect guest we're going to be speaking with,
Collect Shade. She is the author of the forthcoming book
Why two K, How the two thousands Became Everything? Why
two K is such a perfect stand in because that
was like the one thing we didn't really know what
it was. We thought all the computers were going to
(05:47):
short circuit on January first, two thousand. It's kind of
like an early foreboding symbol in retrospect, Collect that it
wouldn't all last.
Speaker 6 (05:55):
Yeah, it wouldn't all last. And actually, just to note
the reason that I picked the phrase Y two K
for the book's main title is because it's the primary
search term that people use on nostalgia fashion resale website
Oho and also on social media, So I thought that
it would be good for my SEO.
Speaker 4 (06:14):
Do people actually want Y two k fashion? Because that
worries me a little bit.
Speaker 6 (06:19):
Oh, they sure do. I actually just spoke with the
Wall Street Journal a couple of weeks ago about how
to pull off the best Y two K look and
why it's so challenging and why it's so popular right now.
Speaker 2 (06:29):
Oh, I'm I just searched y two K fashion. Oh,
it's bringing back the aesthetics were not that good in
the early two anyway, that's just subjective.
Speaker 5 (06:37):
I don't know.
Speaker 2 (06:38):
The kids might not know these days what to why
two K ment? Which there was this fear that all
the computers would short circuit because when software was first invented,
they didn't have root. Everything was just truncated to have
two digits for the years of ninety eight ninety nine.
People thought that then computers would revert to the year
zero and everything would melt down. But setting aside, that
(06:59):
didn't happen, and they fixed it. Setting aside, why two
K fashion? Why did you write this book?
Speaker 6 (07:05):
Well, that's a really good question. So I wrote this
book because I was sort of going through a tough
time in my life around twenty seventeen, twenty eighteen, twenty nineteen.
It was a few rough years, but things were going
very badly for me. And then in twenty eighteen I
found this time capsule letter in my parents' house in
(07:28):
a box in their basement that I had written for
a millennium time capsule in nineteen ninety nine. Oh yeah,
and it was dated April nineteen ninety nine, and it
was for school because our elementary school made a time capsule.
And I guess what we had been assigned to do
is we'd been assigned a particular year to predict. And
(07:50):
the year I had to predict was two thousand and eight.
Speaker 3 (07:55):
What did you say? What happened in two thousand and.
Speaker 2 (07:57):
Men would crash?
Speaker 4 (07:58):
How's it would be these complex financial instruments called CEOs,
And now what did you say? What were your expectations?
Speaker 1 (08:06):
Well?
Speaker 6 (08:07):
First I said I would be a junior at Stanford University.
That didn't happen. Then I said that we would cure
all cancer. I mean, you know, there have been a
lot of innovations in the past twenty five years, but
I can't say we've cured all of it. And I
also said that we would be watching our we would
(08:28):
be watching our movies on the computer, which you were
right about.
Speaker 2 (08:32):
You got that right.
Speaker 1 (08:33):
Three.
Speaker 3 (08:33):
It's pretty good, not terrible.
Speaker 4 (08:35):
In high school, I decided to start a DVD collection
because I thought I was going to have DVDs forever,
and so, you know, I'm going to get started early
and have this awesome library of videos. And that lasted
for like a couple of years before streaming became a thing,
So you were way ahead of me.
Speaker 2 (08:51):
Remember the DVD bros.
Speaker 5 (08:53):
I mean you were.
Speaker 2 (08:54):
Yeah, that was like that was a type of guys
like has a really good TV?
Speaker 5 (08:58):
Oh yeah, no, it was.
Speaker 6 (08:59):
It was a total data symbol, especially once you got
to like the early to mid two thousands. People would
collect them and it would be like, oh, this person
has forty DVDs wow, or this.
Speaker 2 (09:10):
Yeah, come over to my house and watch Clerks because
I feel like a DVD broth.
Speaker 1 (09:15):
And then.
Speaker 6 (09:17):
Fall asleep and then the DVD intro menu is playing
and then you wake up in the middle of the
night and it's just on a loop. Yeah, and you're confused.
Speaker 2 (09:28):
There was this amazing website. I don't know if either
of you remember it. It was called you Fell Asleep watching
a DVD? Do any of you remember that? And it
would just be this website that just had It was
a picture of a living room and then there was
a TV in there and it was floating that sort
of DVD menu at the end. It was very peaceful website.
I wonder if it still still exists.
Speaker 6 (09:48):
Looking for it, Yeah, I really want to see that now.
Speaker 4 (09:50):
But this actually reminds me, and Joe's made this point before,
which is the sort of late nineteen nineties, maybe early
two thousands, before the bubble burst time period was really
a period of like, in some respects insane optimism about
what humans would be achieving in like the coming years.
And I think even now, obviously there's a lot of
(10:12):
excitement in the stock market about things like AI and
what that's going to be able to do, but even
now it's still tinged with some degree of skepticism, some
degree of worry over what's going to happen to jobs
and things like that, Whereas around like two thousand that
just wasn't there. It was like we were really looking
at this nirvana like future.
Speaker 6 (10:33):
Yeah, And I think that that's a really good term nirvana,
which I can get to a little later. Talking about
the culture of Silicon Valley, there were some really strange
things that I found in my reporting in my research
for this book. So to be clear, I started researching
the book in I mean, I really started around the
(10:54):
time I found that letter, and I was getting very
into these nostalgia accounts on Instagram and watch all these
old movies and listening to old music and all that
sort of thing, and then I signed the contract for
the book in twenty twenty two because I was like, well,
I'm totally obsessed with this thing. I'd like to write
a book about it. And so one of the things
(11:14):
that I found were really odd quotes from really respected figures.
So an example would be there was an MIT economist
in nineteen ninety eight who said, we will never have
another recession again. The economy will keep going up forever.
(11:37):
And then here's the really interesting thing that he said.
He said, we don't want one, we don't need one,
and we have the tools to prevent one. So it's
almost as if the laws.
Speaker 4 (11:48):
Of the previous generations were too stupid to do not
want one.
Speaker 6 (11:53):
Yes, it was quite a lot of hubris, right, if
they had only changed how things worked in their mind differently,
than they could have easily avoided all of those other
depressions and recessions.
Speaker 2 (12:04):
I kind of still think that's the case. I kind
of still think, but sitting as that human nations, and
there is probably some human nature is cyclical, and we
were wrong to think it would be permanent piece and
expansion forever. So here's I guess another way of entering.
I mentioned my epiphany that at some point in like
nineteen nine and nine, I was like, everyone is rich
in life is great?
Speaker 6 (12:25):
Was that rare?
Speaker 2 (12:25):
We're a lot of people in those years having personal
feelings of that. Talk to us about again, not everyone
remembers it. How widespread was this feeling of abundance and
wealth that the general population. Obviously there were exceptions, there
were poor people, obviously, But how widespread was were these
feelings of wealth and so forth?
Speaker 6 (12:43):
I mean, they were extremely widespread. So on a sort
of macro level, you have these big figures like this
MIT economist saying we're never going to have another recession.
Speaker 5 (12:55):
You have a book that.
Speaker 6 (12:56):
Comes out in nineteen ninety nine called Dow thirty six thousand,
which I know that number doesn't sound impressive now, but
at the time, the Dow had just hit ten thousand,
and that was a really big deal. And that was like,
by the way, that was like practically a holiday. One
of the chairmen of the New York Stock Exchange and
(13:18):
Rudy Giuliani, who's at the time the New York City Mayor,
wore special hats that said Dow ten thousand, and they
rang the closing Bell in March March nineteen ninety nine.
But yeah, there's this book called Dow thirty six thousand,
which argued that you could basically expect like three hundred
percent returns on your investments in the next three to
(13:39):
five years. And that is kind of crazy that that
was out there. And if you see movies also like
to move away from kind of the nuts and bolts,
there was this feeling of, oh, everything's really great. Yeah, Oh,
isn't it sad?
Speaker 5 (13:58):
Oh?
Speaker 6 (13:58):
You know American Beauty, which is a movie, you know,
big award winning movie nineteen ninety nine. It's all about how, oh,
we're all so affluent now and there aren't any problems.
Speaker 5 (14:08):
Isn't that sad?
Speaker 3 (14:09):
Sort of right, those sort of like suburban.
Speaker 6 (14:13):
Urbana, which I guess you had before. But there is
a sort of funny thing looking at it now or
watching You've Got Mail or any of these movies from
the late nineties where it's like, what are you people
so upset about you? You own property, you're you know,
your portfolio is doing great, You're gonna be fine.
Speaker 4 (14:34):
So if you had to pinpoint like the foremost reason
behind this sense of optimism about the future, what do
you think it was looking back.
Speaker 6 (14:45):
Well, I think the foremost reason was the dot com bubble.
Speaker 3 (14:49):
So everyone was in fact getting rich.
Speaker 6 (14:51):
Not Well, here's the thing, Okay, So I see culture
as being downstream from big forces, whether they're economic forces
or technology. And you know, it takes a few years.
Now it's faster because we have social media, but it
takes a few years for it to kind of trickle
(15:12):
through the culture for the vibe of the structural things
that are happening to inform fashion, to inform design, music,
things like that. And so even if you weren't personally
invested in the stock market or you weren't involved in
the tech world, I think that the feeling just permeated culture.
(15:38):
So there are a couple of examples. So in the book,
I talk about this inflatable chair I have, which, by
the way, I.
Speaker 4 (15:45):
Had one of those two yes. Yes, yeah, So I'll
just say I've read all of Collette's book, and like
page after page I'm just nodding, going like, yes, this
was my experience as well.
Speaker 2 (15:55):
Yeah, say more about the wait, say more about this.
Speaker 4 (15:58):
Well, mine was blue and you would inflate it and
sit on it, and inevitably it would eventually spring a
leak and you would just sort of be sitting on
it while it slowly like collapsed onto the floor.
Speaker 3 (16:10):
But they were a big deal.
Speaker 6 (16:12):
They were a huge deal. And yeah, mine was silver.
The exact same thing happened, which I write about in
the book. It's kind of like the fish. It's almost
a perfect metaphor for the dot com bubble. But they
were these inflatable chairs that you sat on. Mine was silver,
and I was obsessed with it because I was like,
this is the chair of the future. In the new millennium,
(16:34):
we will all be sitting on silver inflatable furniture. Everything's
going to be silver. Our clothes, our makeup. We're going
to have these big clear blobby IMACG three's which had
just come out. That was a huge Yeah you did
any of you?
Speaker 1 (16:47):
Ye?
Speaker 6 (16:47):
Did either of you have those?
Speaker 2 (16:49):
So I remember what year did the colorful Imax come out?
Speaker 4 (16:53):
That was that?
Speaker 6 (16:54):
So that was ninety eight. They came out the first
in ninety eight, and then ninety nine was when they
had the full range.
Speaker 2 (17:00):
Right, they were so cool on the different Yeah, and
they just looked cool and I just I think in
my imagination at the time, like this is what you
used is if I were, like, if I're in my
mid twenties and I work again Seattle or San Francisco
or New York doing something like being an editor for
a magazine, I would be on one of these cool computers.
Care more about just sort of right exactly, say more
(17:22):
about the cultural downstream of the time. What are other
things that were sort of going on in the late
nineties that are emblematic of this society feeling very happy
and rich.
Speaker 6 (17:32):
Well, yeah, so there's this thing called the now it's
called the Y two K aesthetic. Broadly, there's a really
cool collective of archivists who catalog They're called the Consumer
Aesthetics Research Institute. You should totally check them out, maybe
have them on the show.
Speaker 5 (17:50):
They do a lot.
Speaker 6 (17:51):
Of stuff about just design and marketing trends from the
late twentieth century to the present, and they and others
coin this term the Y two case, which was where
everything was really blobby, so it was really round, There
weren't sharp edges, everything was very transparent, which to me,
when I kind of did a deep read of it,
almost seemed like it was symbolizing like the Internet will
(18:12):
bring about transparency, like political transparency, and things aren't going
to have sharp militaristic edges. They're going to be round
and blobby, right, So just imagine think about the new Beetle,
which was the Volkswagen Yeah, super trendy, why two K
car that came in all these cute colors, like kind
of a Parado green one that I really wanted. And
(18:32):
think about that compared to the cyber truck, which is
like scary and sharp and the windows are small.
Speaker 4 (18:38):
You know, cyber Truck's ugly, so ugly, Sorry but it is. Okay,
So speaking of Y two K one thing that never happened, well,
you actually don't write in your book that much about
the actual Y two K moment right now? Was that
like a conscious choice to avoid that?
Speaker 6 (18:54):
Well, it just didn't figure into my analysis because in
hind site. Okay, So, first of all, I was calling
it Y two K because I wanted to talk about
this era basically between squarely between the dot com bubble
and the two thousand and eight crash and the culture
around it, as well as my own coming of age
(19:16):
which coincided with that, and I wanted to kind of
weave them all together to talk about these to kind
of situate my own memoir and coming of age within
this broader narrative of what was happening economically, politically, technologically,
et cetera. And the term that people like I said,
the term that people I found people using on social
media is y two K.
Speaker 5 (19:35):
So that's what I used.
Speaker 6 (19:37):
And I think the reason I didn't include discussions of
the y two K bug or the Y two K scare,
I think at all was because it just in hindsight,
when I'm analyzing the moment, it doesn't really figure large
into what the true story was.
Speaker 1 (19:53):
To me.
Speaker 2 (19:54):
I was at a New Year's Eve party on December
thirty first, nineteen ninety nine, and a friend of mine,
his dad went into the basement and turned off all
the power of the house, right, So we had for
a second, and I think we knew it was a joke,
but it was a pretty good gag because there were
fears that all the power was going to go out
because all the utilities their software would break, et cetera.
(20:15):
It hadn't occurred to me though. You know the other
thing about that Volkswagen Beetle that came out in the
nineteen nineties, and you know, it's cute and comparing in
contrast to the Cyberg truck aesthetic. But just to dwell
on this because I hadn't clicked it's really not aggressive,
it's small, it's compact. We're really just sort of not
going to take up space. It's sort of a preemptive
(20:36):
surrender or sort of everyone agrees we're just going to
be very tidy and contained. At that time, I hadn't
really thought about that in terms of the core imagery
of what that meant at the time, that that was
aspirational to people.
Speaker 6 (20:49):
Yeah, it's peaceful, it's smooth, it's modern, and we're all
just going to get culifish and fuel weight.
Speaker 4 (20:56):
But there were other cars that were popular at that
time that were not that small.
Speaker 6 (21:00):
That's absolutely true, and that's something that I talk about
in the book as well, and I argue that, well,
this is a whole other this is a whole other
kind of train of thought or suv of thought. But yeah,
SUVs started to get really popular in the early nineties,
(21:22):
and they went up. I mean there the numbers of
SUVs being purchased went up every year throughout it from
the beginning to the end of the nineties. And then
I think I forget what year it's in my book.
I believe it was two thousand, but it's in the book.
So they hummer with the Hummer H two, which was
the opposite of the VW bug esthetic.
Speaker 2 (21:45):
That's really interesting. I remember there was a lot of
sneering at SUVs in the early days. And now most
cars are basically SUV, right, suv of everything.
Speaker 5 (21:53):
But in the.
Speaker 2 (21:53):
Beginning there was I hadn't really this again, I hadn't
really thought.
Speaker 4 (21:58):
You drive down the highway and see someone in like
a crazy hommer an suv and you'd be like, oh,
look at those selfish people polluting the world. And now
it's like, oh, yeah, everyone has that.
Speaker 2 (22:08):
But this idea of like, okay, there were multiple forces emerging.
Once there's the tiny, modest VW beetle people, and then
the rise of the SUV people, and the SUV people won.
Speaker 5 (22:19):
They won.
Speaker 6 (22:20):
Yeah, absolutely, yeah. I mean my dad used to call
those people they not the people. Well, he said, they're stupid.
He was like, they don't know how to read science papers,
because he was an engineer, and I was like, well,
I don't know if that's the issue, but yeah, he
would say, oh, look there's a stupid ugly vehicle. And
actually the essay in the book about SUVs is called
Stupid Ugly Vehicles.
Speaker 4 (22:56):
So, speaking of essays in the book, and you have
one of my all time favorite chapter titles that I've
ever seen, which is Larry Summers Caused My Eating Disorder,
which is absolutely amazing. And the chapter in case you
think that's a joke, it's about basically the explosion in
models in this sort of nineteen nineties early two thousands.
(23:18):
A lot of them came from Eastern Europe, and Larry
Summers sort of indirectly had a hand in the opening
up of Eastern Europe, in the collapse of the Soviet
Union and things like that. I did want to ask
you because we're talking about how great that period was,
but I also remember, and I'm sure you will as well,
given that we're roughly the same age, but there was
like this sort of undertone of misogyny in all of that,
(23:42):
and it like, in many respects, it was not a
great time to be a young girl growing up in
that particular era. Why do you think, like, on the
one hand, there was this unbridled optimism, but that on
the other hand, girls in particular seemed to be under pressure.
Speaker 6 (23:58):
Yeah, I mean, that's a really good question, and I
do want to add that I think things got even
worse after nine to eleven. You had this real reactionary shift,
and to go back to the suv topic, I think
the suv aesthetic really that's when it really really stopped
being as much of a joke and it was like, okay, no,
(24:20):
this is the winning aesthetic. But yeah, like, I think
there also just was a general reactionary cultural turn after
nine to eleven. But even before, as you point out,
there was incredible misogyny.
Speaker 5 (24:34):
Throughout pop culture.
Speaker 6 (24:35):
I mean, I think there are a lot of reasons
for that. I mean, I find Susan Fuluti's argument of
backlash to be convincing, which is basically that there was
widespread resentment about gains that had been made by the
feminist movement through the seventies and the eighties, you know,
and there was just this cultural like, Okay, we're done
with all of this. Let's you know, let's have the movie.
Speaker 4 (24:58):
Going back to the idea of nature being like cyclical.
Speaker 6 (25:01):
Yes, yes, yes, yes, But I also think, you know,
and again I'm a cultural critic here, and I speak
throughout the book as a cultural critic, not as an academic,
but my kind of guess is that a lot of
cultural reaction and culture war stuff, whatever form that takes,
(25:22):
is kind of a proxy for economic anxiety or concerns,
or sometimes technological anxiety or concerns. I think that the
reason that, say, right now, there's so much just insane
culture war stuff is because people are scared. People are
scared of AI, They're scared of you know, inequality, or
(25:43):
they feel like their standard of living has declined. And
the thing is for a lot of Americans and people
in other parts of the world, but I'm you know,
I'm writing about America. A lot of Americans, their living
standard had declined even you know, basically from the late
seventies onwards and then even through the nineties, but that
(26:03):
was not being fully reflected by these big indicators in
the late nineties.
Speaker 2 (26:11):
You know, you mentioned the sort of cultural shifts that
happened after nine to eleven, and I think there's absolutely
the case in many respects. But so there are really
two events. I mean, there was the peak of the
dot com bubble, which was in March two thousand and
it sort of took us a little while afterwards to realize, oh,
this actually has come to an end, because it could
(26:32):
have just been a blip, and you know, things kept
going a little bit this year, and then I guess
eighteen months later with the September eleventh attack, and so
you have the economic bubble punctured and then the world
peace bubble. This idea that after the Cold War, now
we have the issues of geopolitics are solved, and so
(26:52):
really there's sort of the economic story got blown to
bits and then the political story, or the geopolitical story
specifically got blown into bits, and it's sort of a
real double whammy for us.
Speaker 4 (27:02):
Huh.
Speaker 6 (27:03):
Yeah, it wasn't great. And if you look at just
some of the crazy stuff that was happening during that
second half of the Y two K era from two
thousand and one to two thousand and eight, I mean,
it's just really strange stuff. Like I talk about the
mcbling aesthetic. Do you guys know about the mcbling aesthetic?
Speaker 3 (27:20):
I remember that.
Speaker 2 (27:21):
I'm going to google that.
Speaker 5 (27:22):
Keep talking, So it is it.
Speaker 6 (27:25):
This is a term again, like the Y two K aesthetic,
These are terms that are applied now. They weren't used
at the time. But the mcbling aesthetic is think Paris Hilton, Right,
So you think juicy couture track suits with words on
the butt, ug boots, super you know, straight bleached blonde hair,
super dark, fake tan, statement teas, giant Louis Vuitton logo bags,
(27:49):
and just this really just riding around in a hummer.
Speaker 5 (27:52):
It was there's a real nihilism to it, almost vulgarity.
Speaker 6 (27:56):
Vulgarity, right, And I think that again, to go back
to this hunch I have about how culture is downstream
from economic forces. I interpret that as almost a this
is almost Freudian, but it's like a kind of Freudian
kind of subconscious understanding of what's going on in markets
(28:17):
with the what would become the subprime mortgage crisis.
Speaker 2 (28:20):
Yeah, oh that's good. Good. The aesthetic is downstream from
the emerging subprime Let's.
Speaker 4 (28:27):
Talk about that, because all I was going to say
was like, I think there's a tendency nowadays to think
of the mcbling aesthetic as like an ironic statement. But
I remember at the time it was very earnest, like
there was no sense of irony about wearing a juicy
couture tracksuit and like a giant gold chain.
Speaker 3 (28:46):
That's right.
Speaker 4 (28:47):
It was very serious, no chrucker hats. Maybe a chrucker hat.
Paris Hilton wearing a trucker hat might have been a
little less serious.
Speaker 6 (28:54):
Or the statement teased, but there was Yeah, I do
think that there was a seriousness about it. There was
a sense that it was glamour like I had a
couple of juicy pieces that never I never had the tracksuit,
but I had a couple of pieces that I got
at Loman's and which rip. But I just felt so glamorous.
(29:15):
I was like, look at me in my green terry
cloth dress.
Speaker 5 (29:19):
For some reason, I am I am living.
Speaker 6 (29:23):
It's like I could be. It's like I could be
on the OC or on Laguna Beach or something. I
just felt like, this is great. You know, I did
the hair straightener thing. I oh god, yeah, because I
have you have a little wave in your hair, and
I used too well.
Speaker 3 (29:39):
My hair used to be really curly.
Speaker 1 (29:41):
Yeah.
Speaker 4 (29:41):
I used to relax it with like the actual chemical
products that you would get from the drug store.
Speaker 3 (29:46):
Yeap, it was bad.
Speaker 6 (29:47):
Yeah, I feel like I can smell that. Yeah, like yeah, no,
But it's interesting too.
Speaker 2 (29:55):
Is a downstream from the emerging subprime world, because right
it's a very external Aesthetically, they can sort of anti taste.
There's nothing internal, and so the idea of the economy
is like, there's no real economic basis for it, but
there's this sort of presentation of rich in a way
that's unsustainable.
Speaker 6 (30:14):
One hundred percent. And actually I tie that in with
mcmanchins as well. Yeah, because like another person you should
have on is Kate Wagner, who does mcmanchin Hell, oh yeah,
but mcmanonsins are structurally unsound.
Speaker 5 (30:28):
They are built.
Speaker 6 (30:30):
Like I said, my dad's an engineer and he would
drive me around and look at mcmanchons in suburban Virginia
and be like, this is bad. The architecture is terrible.
It's gonna have roof problems in two years. I hate
these things, and so I get it. I get my
critique from him, but also just other stuff I've read
about the actual architectural and structural integrity, and these are
(30:53):
garish because they you know, there's no reason to have
this giant foyer that Kate Wagner calls a lawyer for
where it's like, for some reason, it's like this giant
three story foyer with a giant fake crystal chandelier. There's
just no reason for that from a functional standpoint, and
it's really it's inefficient for heating and cooling.
Speaker 5 (31:16):
Yeah.
Speaker 6 (31:16):
Just these aren't even like fine luxury goods that are
well made but ostentatious. These are like fake luxury goods
that are ugly and tacky and are going to fall apart.
But it doesn't matter, because all that matters is in
that moment, you feel like you're a rich person even
though you're not.
Speaker 4 (31:32):
So what's the through line from the tech bubble to
the subprime bubble, Because on the face of it, they
seem to have some similarities, you know, people getting rich
in an unsustainable way. But on the other hand, there
are some differences where you know, there were a lot
of low income people who bought houses that they couldn't afford,
(31:53):
whereas I don't think there were that many people necessarily
buying like tech IPOs, but I could be wrong.
Speaker 6 (31:59):
No, no, And I think in terms of the differences
between them, that's exactly it. So the dot com bubble
was mostly affecting you know, upper income people, you know,
maybe not the ultra ultra rich. You know, people who
were upper middle class took a hit in their portfolios
or whatever. Or you know, they worked at pets dot
com and they got laid off. But yeah, it didn't
(32:21):
have the same kind of effects throughout the entire economy
because it was kind of contained among more affluent people,
whereas the subprime mortgage crisis affected people lower down, much poorer,
more middle class and poor people, and they, you know,
they weren't just cutting back on luxuries, they were you know,
(32:42):
cutting back on essentials, and that really had downstream effects
on the entire economy at least. That's you know, that's
what I read, and I say in my book.
Speaker 2 (33:06):
I don't want to take too dark of a turn here,
but another incident that I recall there was a mass
shooting at a day trading center in Atlanta in nineteen
ninety nine, and there were a lot of people getting
into day trading, and the day trading centers would have
all of these computers there because probably people didn't have
good internet setups at home. There were these early indications
(33:31):
in the summer of nineteen ninety nine that things were
going to go off the rails, or that despite this
incredible belt that was in the sort of in the
headlines of the newspapers and on financial TV ET cetera,
that there was something that couldn't hold there even before
the formal collapse in March two thousand.
Speaker 6 (33:47):
Yeah, no, I think that that's I actually didn't know
about that shooting, but yeah, I know, I think that
there were there were indicators, and there were also people
here and there who were saying, hey, this is not sustainable.
I mean, even Alan Greenspan he talked about he called
it irrational exuberance right in the market. So there were
people sort of being like, you know, this is all
(34:08):
very fun and exciting and it's this sugar rush, but
it's not going to last the way you think it is.
Speaker 4 (34:15):
So writing the book and reflecting on your own experiences
of this time period, was it cathartic for you?
Speaker 3 (34:22):
What did you learn?
Speaker 1 (34:23):
Oh?
Speaker 6 (34:23):
My god, so cathartic.
Speaker 3 (34:25):
Yeah.
Speaker 6 (34:26):
I mean I felt like I had a lot to
process from that time, and I felt lucky that I
got to incorporate memoir elements into it because these are
personal essays, but they are personal essays that are structured
within a bigger historical story. And I think that when
we learn how our lives that are unique to us
(34:51):
are still within a bigger story of history, and these
forces tech forces, economic forces. I think that can be
really cathartic and can really give us a lot of insight,
like things that we think are our fault. Say, we
might think, oh, it wasn't right to go back to
the Larry Summers caused my eating disorder essay. That was
(35:13):
something I feel like I had to write because it
was like my way of understanding why I was suffering
with this issue for a few years and why it
derailed my life in the way that it did at
the time. And it wasn't just about me or oh,
you know I had this issue. It was that I
(35:34):
was picking up on currents from the bigger culture that
are downstream of economic currents of sort of scarcity and
managing my human capital and all of this, and so
it really was very cathartic or like talking about the
you know, when I talk about the dot com bubble,
the dot com bubble really affected my family in a
(35:56):
way because my uncle was involved in a star up
and it really changed his fortunes. And that was a
very odd experience. And now doing research, I found out
that there were other people who had had similar experiences.
Speaker 2 (36:12):
SayMore, I knew someone in the nineties who happened to
live in San Diego, and he was the first person
who was aware of this company called Qualcom, which was
one of the huge winners at the time because they
were going to make the chips and phones, and everyone
was aware of that. People in his area got made
a ton of money, et cetera, because they knew about
it a little bit before the people on TV knew
(36:32):
about it. What was that experience like to what extent
those people who rowed it up and then wrote it down,
What did it do to them? What was it like
for them on the way up and then afterwards?
Speaker 6 (36:44):
Yeah, I mean on the way up, there was just
this idea that well, gee, everyone can just be rich.
Speaker 4 (36:50):
Now.
Speaker 6 (36:51):
This is to go back to what we were talking
about earlier about how there's just this kind of surreal
thing of like, oh, okay, wait, suddenly I can like
buy a second home, or put my job at forty
or you know, forty five or thirty or whatever, or
I can buy a new, you know, a new luxury
car or a private jet, or go on vacation for
(37:15):
three months all over Europe or something. Right, I mean,
there's this Actually there's a video of Elon Musk in
nineteen ninety nine, and he's getting he had just sold
zip to I think it was when he had just
sold zip to, and so he had sold his first company.
And he's getting a McLaren and this is a CNN video.
And so he bought a McLaren, which I believe at
(37:37):
the time was a one million dollar car, and he
bought himself a McLaren. And there's this video where he
is getting this McLaren. And keep in mind, no one
knows who Elon Musk is at the time. This is
when he this is actually when he got his first
big break, and he's like, oh, this is so surreal,
and he's like this kid, this like little boy who
is like having his dream come true. And that's really
(37:58):
how I think it felt for a lot of people,
because a lot of these people who were not all
mind you, but many of these people who were in
the tech world were coming out of the California Bay
Area counterculture and they were kind of maybe bohemians before
they were able to get into the computer world. Because
back in the seventies, eighties, nineties, you could be It's
(38:18):
not like now where you have to go on a
track early in your life to get into that you
could just be like, you know what, I'm tired of
living in a co op and like scrounging for food.
Speaker 5 (38:27):
I'm going to go whatever.
Speaker 2 (38:29):
This is really important actually, and I hadn't thought about
this before, but right now, if you want to be
at tech, you know, you're probably studying like crazy while
you're in high school to get into the right college
and study you know, electrical engineering or whatever. But back
then it was people who a few years earlier in
their life were like counterculture hippies, yeah, and stuff like that,
(38:49):
and like there.
Speaker 6 (38:50):
Was any some of whom were self taught. Yeah, some
of whom were just self taught, you know, or they
were like, gee, I'm going to go back at the
local community college and cakes and programming class and then
you could just go on in and get a job.
I mean, it helped if you were, you know, a
white man. But yeah, it was really it was more open.
It wasn't like this structured thing.
Speaker 5 (39:09):
Like it is now.
Speaker 4 (39:10):
Imagine if Elon Musk had gotten the new VW bug
and stuff, and how different all.
Speaker 2 (39:17):
Of history, all of history would have changed.
Speaker 4 (39:20):
I'm still stuck on that possibility.
Speaker 2 (39:22):
Clud Shade, Thank you so much for coming on odd
lots and congrats and good luck on the book.
Speaker 5 (39:27):
Thank you, thanks for having me, Tracy.
Speaker 2 (39:42):
I really enjoyed that conversation. First of all, nostalgia, I'll
take you back. But I hadn't really thought about this
sort of connection between I guess just how sharp that
aesthetic turn was between the late nineties and the sort
of the aggressive mcbling culture of the tooth.
Speaker 5 (40:00):
Yeah.
Speaker 4 (40:01):
I think Colett has like put her finger on something,
which is there was that sense of like really unbridled
optimism around that time. It wasn't like, oh, tech is cool,
but maybe there are going to be downsides.
Speaker 2 (40:13):
No, Like, there wasn't any of that.
Speaker 4 (40:15):
It was like, oh, yeah, let's let the kids on
AOL and they can talk to whoever they want, and
we're all going to make money and we're all going
to have like great new jobs in this industry and
we'll live in McMansions, et cetera. And I think, you know,
maybe it was because we hadn't had a big technological
revolution for some time, and so people kind of had
(40:35):
forgotten the downsides.
Speaker 3 (40:36):
But I think there's just.
Speaker 4 (40:38):
No way that you really are ever going to get
that sense of optimism anytime soon, even if we invent
like the coolest new piece of technology. I think everyone
now is just so conditioned to like wait for the drop.
Speaker 2 (40:51):
I think the nineties really were a unique, unrecoverable period.
And you go back and read some of the optimism
the end of history stuff, and you guys like, oh,
that's you know, how could they? But I've tried to
do this experiment baarment in my head a bit, and
it's like, I get it. I get what they saw,
or I get why they thought that to some extent,
(41:14):
certain core problems of human civilization, whether we're talking about
world peace, whether we're talking about economics specifically, kind of
had been solved. Like, I don't blame them much for it.
Obviously a lot of the optimism in retrospect seems silly.
We got nine to eleven, we got the Great Financial Crisis,
we had the Iraq War, the Afghanistan War, multiple wars now,
(41:36):
But I get why in that brief period of time
they sort of didn't see it coming. Should we even
if they should, even if.
Speaker 4 (41:43):
They should have, Should we re embrace the Y two
K aesthetic?
Speaker 2 (41:47):
You know what, I don't like it.
Speaker 3 (41:50):
You don't like it.
Speaker 2 (41:50):
I don't know like there's some you know. Sometimes I'm
walking through the park and I see kids wearing stuff
that I could have worn in high school, and it
filled warms my heart a little bit. I don't really
like it that much.
Speaker 4 (42:01):
I don't know.
Speaker 3 (42:02):
I'm gonna find my my low rise geek.
Speaker 2 (42:04):
Actually pretty bad.
Speaker 3 (42:05):
Start wearing those into the office.
Speaker 2 (42:06):
Actually pretty bad.
Speaker 3 (42:08):
It's not that bad. You're crazy, all right? Shall we
leave it there?
Speaker 2 (42:11):
Let's leave it there.
Speaker 4 (42:12):
This has been another episode of the Authoughts podcast. I'm
Tracy Alloway. You can follow me at Tracy Alloway.
Speaker 2 (42:18):
And I'm Jill Wisenthal. You can follow me at the Stalwart.
Follow our guest Collect Shade at Missshade and check out
her new book Y two K. Follow our producers Kerman
Rodriguez at Kerman armand dash O Bennett at Dashbot and
Kilbrooks at Kilbrooks. Thank you to our producer Moses Ondam.
From our Oddlogs content, go to bloomberg dot com slash
odd Lots. We have transcripts of blog and a newsletter
(42:40):
and you can chat about all of these topics twenty
four to seven in our discord Discord dot gg, slash odd.
Speaker 4 (42:46):
Lots and if you enjoy adlots, if you like it
when we take these nostalgic tours back in time, then
please leave us a positive review on your favorite podcast platform.
And remember, if you are a Bloomberg subscriber, you can
listen to all of our episode sodes absolutely ad free.
All you need to do is connect your Bloomberg account
with Apple Podcasts. In order to do that, just find
(43:07):
the Bloomberg channel on Apple Podcasts and follow the instructions there.
Thanks for listening.
Bloomberg Audio Studios, Podcasts, Radio News.
Speaker 2 (00:20):
Hello and welcome to another episode of the Odd Lots podcast.
Speaker 3 (00:23):
I'm Joe Wisenthal, and I'm Tracy Alloway.
Speaker 2 (00:26):
Tracy, where were you in the nineties.
Speaker 4 (00:29):
Uh, good question. I was in Chicago for a couple
of years, like I want to say, ninety ninety one,
and then from like ninety one to ninety four, ninety
five I was in Japan, and then ninety five to
I guess ninety eight or ninety nine I was in Chicago.
Speaker 2 (00:46):
I have to say, even though we've been doing this
podcast together in nine years, like, there actually is quite
a bit that I don't know about you, And I
feel like there is a lot of as the kids
say these days, Tracy lore that comes out from time
to time or the Tracy No, I just.
Speaker 4 (00:58):
Walked around a lot and don't remember whenever I tell
you my time periods and locations.
Speaker 2 (01:03):
Well, that's also okay, that's okay, that's possible. I also
moved around lot, But I have to say the nineteen nineties.
So this is I'm struggling with this. The nineteen nineties,
particularly the second half of the nineties. I remember it
as a period of a lot of optimism and wealth
and harmony and peace. But the other thing is I
(01:24):
was young and now I'm old, and I'm sort of
trying to reconcile this thing of like, was there was
those Were those really good nostalgia or is it just
personal nostalgia from when I wasn't old.
Speaker 4 (01:35):
I mean the answer is it's probably a mix, right,
But you're right, there was something kind of going on
in the late nineteen nineties. Actually, Joe, you'll enjoy this story.
My after school job when I was in Chicago for
a while was taking care of our next door neighbor's
giant aquarium. And he was an early investor, apparently an
oracle amazing, and he spent all his money on tropical
(01:58):
fish amazing. So for one week it was my job
to go feed the tropical fish, and I would go
every day, and one by one the tropical fish started dying.
Oh by the end of the week there were none left.
And the guy came back and he was like, thanks
for taking care of my fish. And I was so
worried that I was going to get in trouble for
ruining this guy's like multimillion dollar aquarium. But it turns
(02:20):
out he had had it installed like the week before,
and they hadn't got the salt levels and the water
right or something.
Speaker 3 (02:26):
So it wasn't my fault. It was up shot.
Speaker 2 (02:28):
I thought that was going to be like an allegory
for the dream of the dot com bubble and then
it all collapsing with the fish dying.
Speaker 4 (02:34):
But yeah, that's where I'm going with it. That's what
it is.
Speaker 2 (02:37):
So here's my memory of the nineties. You know, there
was just it seemed like there weren't many wars happening.
And of course that feeling ended very quickly not long
after with September eleventh. But the other thing I have
this one summer I got made two thousand dollars from
a summer job and I got into day trading and
I turned it into twenty thousand dollars, which was just
(02:57):
an insane amount of money at the time. And I
had this memory of walking down street somewhere and I
was thinking, Wow, we're rich now. I'm rich now, and
I never thought this should happen. I'm a rich person
and my family is rich because I turned two thousand
dollars into twenty thousand dollars. And so there was that
personal experience in retrospect, twenty thousand dollars not really rich,
(03:21):
but also in retrospect the whole thing wasn't sustainable and durable.
But I do remember this one specific moment feeling life
is really good these days.
Speaker 4 (03:30):
So there's two things I would point out other than
the idea that everyone was getting rich. So number one,
it was the time where we were just discovering new
technology without realizing how terrible it actually could be. Ye,
Like I remember specifically being eleven years old on AOL
chatting on instant messager, probably to adult men, but you know,
(03:51):
we didn't know that back then, and everything was fine.
Everyone was really relaxed about it. And then the other
thing is there seemed to be like this very the
sense that like humanity could triumph over physical constraints, right,
Like everything was going to be online, everything was going
to be software. We didn't really have to worry any
more about the physical world. And you know, fast forward
(04:13):
to the post twenty twenty years that turned out not
to be true.
Speaker 2 (04:16):
You know, not to just keep droning on, but it
was this period between the Cold War in two thousand
and one two and it felt like with the end
of Cold war, Like, okay, the questions of society and
democracy and markets, they've been solid.
Speaker 3 (04:29):
By the end of history.
Speaker 5 (04:30):
Yeah, you could. Like.
Speaker 2 (04:31):
My takeaway from that back then is like, I get
why people got caught up in it.
Speaker 4 (04:35):
Anyway, Well, you and I just got caught up in
it because we both went on to do international relations.
Speaker 3 (04:41):
That's right at university.
Speaker 5 (04:42):
That's right.
Speaker 3 (04:42):
It's not a useful degree, not.
Speaker 2 (04:44):
A useful degree at all. And I don't know why
I did. But only twenty years later in retrospect did
I realize why I went and majored in international relations.
And I was like, oh, yeah, because I didn't know
I was living in a moment of history. In retrospect,
I realized I was living in a moment of hait
story where people thought multilateralism and all that stuff.
Speaker 4 (05:03):
We're all products of our time.
Speaker 2 (05:05):
Yes, and in a way it took me many years
to realize. Anyway, these days, there's multiple major wars going
on in the country. Economic sentiment has been dismal for
a long time. People are less happy than they were,
I believe, despite even accounting for the nostalgia factor. So
let's talk about what it was like when everyone at
(05:25):
least or at least a few of us felt we
were all rich and peaceful and happy in a permanent state.
We have the perfect guest we're going to be speaking with,
Collect Shade. She is the author of the forthcoming book
Why two K, How the two thousands Became Everything? Why
two K is such a perfect stand in because that
was like the one thing we didn't really know what
it was. We thought all the computers were going to
(05:47):
short circuit on January first, two thousand. It's kind of
like an early foreboding symbol in retrospect, Collect that it
wouldn't all last.
Speaker 6 (05:55):
Yeah, it wouldn't all last. And actually, just to note
the reason that I picked the phrase Y two K
for the book's main title is because it's the primary
search term that people use on nostalgia fashion resale website
Oho and also on social media, So I thought that
it would be good for my SEO.
Speaker 4 (06:14):
Do people actually want Y two k fashion? Because that
worries me a little bit.
Speaker 6 (06:19):
Oh, they sure do. I actually just spoke with the
Wall Street Journal a couple of weeks ago about how
to pull off the best Y two K look and
why it's so challenging and why it's so popular right now.
Speaker 2 (06:29):
Oh, I'm I just searched y two K fashion. Oh,
it's bringing back the aesthetics were not that good in
the early two anyway, that's just subjective.
Speaker 5 (06:37):
I don't know.
Speaker 2 (06:38):
The kids might not know these days what to why
two K ment? Which there was this fear that all
the computers would short circuit because when software was first invented,
they didn't have root. Everything was just truncated to have
two digits for the years of ninety eight ninety nine.
People thought that then computers would revert to the year
zero and everything would melt down. But setting aside, that
(06:59):
didn't happen, and they fixed it. Setting aside, why two
K fashion? Why did you write this book?
Speaker 6 (07:05):
Well, that's a really good question. So I wrote this
book because I was sort of going through a tough
time in my life around twenty seventeen, twenty eighteen, twenty nineteen.
It was a few rough years, but things were going
very badly for me. And then in twenty eighteen I
found this time capsule letter in my parents' house in
(07:28):
a box in their basement that I had written for
a millennium time capsule in nineteen ninety nine. Oh yeah,
and it was dated April nineteen ninety nine, and it
was for school because our elementary school made a time capsule.
And I guess what we had been assigned to do
is we'd been assigned a particular year to predict. And
(07:50):
the year I had to predict was two thousand and eight.
Speaker 3 (07:55):
What did you say? What happened in two thousand and.
Speaker 2 (07:57):
Men would crash?
Speaker 4 (07:58):
How's it would be these complex financial instruments called CEOs,
And now what did you say? What were your expectations?
Speaker 1 (08:06):
Well?
Speaker 6 (08:07):
First I said I would be a junior at Stanford University.
That didn't happen. Then I said that we would cure
all cancer. I mean, you know, there have been a
lot of innovations in the past twenty five years, but
I can't say we've cured all of it. And I
also said that we would be watching our we would
(08:28):
be watching our movies on the computer, which you were
right about.
Speaker 2 (08:32):
You got that right.
Speaker 1 (08:33):
Three.
Speaker 3 (08:33):
It's pretty good, not terrible.
Speaker 4 (08:35):
In high school, I decided to start a DVD collection
because I thought I was going to have DVDs forever,
and so, you know, I'm going to get started early
and have this awesome library of videos. And that lasted
for like a couple of years before streaming became a thing,
So you were way ahead of me.
Speaker 2 (08:51):
Remember the DVD bros.
Speaker 5 (08:53):
I mean you were.
Speaker 2 (08:54):
Yeah, that was like that was a type of guys
like has a really good TV?
Speaker 5 (08:58):
Oh yeah, no, it was.
Speaker 6 (08:59):
It was a total data symbol, especially once you got
to like the early to mid two thousands. People would
collect them and it would be like, oh, this person
has forty DVDs wow, or this.
Speaker 2 (09:10):
Yeah, come over to my house and watch Clerks because
I feel like a DVD broth.
Speaker 1 (09:15):
And then.
Speaker 6 (09:17):
Fall asleep and then the DVD intro menu is playing
and then you wake up in the middle of the
night and it's just on a loop. Yeah, and you're confused.
Speaker 2 (09:28):
There was this amazing website. I don't know if either
of you remember it. It was called you Fell Asleep watching
a DVD? Do any of you remember that? And it
would just be this website that just had It was
a picture of a living room and then there was
a TV in there and it was floating that sort
of DVD menu at the end. It was very peaceful website.
I wonder if it still still exists.
Speaker 6 (09:48):
Looking for it, Yeah, I really want to see that now.
Speaker 4 (09:50):
But this actually reminds me, and Joe's made this point before,
which is the sort of late nineteen nineties, maybe early
two thousands, before the bubble burst time period was really
a period of like, in some respects insane optimism about
what humans would be achieving in like the coming years.
And I think even now, obviously there's a lot of
(10:12):
excitement in the stock market about things like AI and
what that's going to be able to do, but even
now it's still tinged with some degree of skepticism, some
degree of worry over what's going to happen to jobs
and things like that, Whereas around like two thousand that
just wasn't there. It was like we were really looking
at this nirvana like future.
Speaker 6 (10:33):
Yeah, And I think that that's a really good term nirvana,
which I can get to a little later. Talking about
the culture of Silicon Valley, there were some really strange
things that I found in my reporting in my research
for this book. So to be clear, I started researching
the book in I mean, I really started around the
(10:54):
time I found that letter, and I was getting very
into these nostalgia accounts on Instagram and watch all these
old movies and listening to old music and all that
sort of thing, and then I signed the contract for
the book in twenty twenty two because I was like, well,
I'm totally obsessed with this thing. I'd like to write
a book about it. And so one of the things
(11:14):
that I found were really odd quotes from really respected figures.
So an example would be there was an MIT economist
in nineteen ninety eight who said, we will never have
another recession again. The economy will keep going up forever.
(11:37):
And then here's the really interesting thing that he said.
He said, we don't want one, we don't need one,
and we have the tools to prevent one. So it's
almost as if the laws.
Speaker 4 (11:48):
Of the previous generations were too stupid to do not
want one.
Speaker 6 (11:53):
Yes, it was quite a lot of hubris, right, if
they had only changed how things worked in their mind differently,
than they could have easily avoided all of those other
depressions and recessions.
Speaker 2 (12:04):
I kind of still think that's the case. I kind
of still think, but sitting as that human nations, and
there is probably some human nature is cyclical, and we
were wrong to think it would be permanent piece and
expansion forever. So here's I guess another way of entering.
I mentioned my epiphany that at some point in like
nineteen nine and nine, I was like, everyone is rich
in life is great?
Speaker 6 (12:25):
Was that rare?
Speaker 2 (12:25):
We're a lot of people in those years having personal
feelings of that. Talk to us about again, not everyone
remembers it. How widespread was this feeling of abundance and
wealth that the general population. Obviously there were exceptions, there
were poor people, obviously, But how widespread was were these
feelings of wealth and so forth?
Speaker 6 (12:43):
I mean, they were extremely widespread. So on a sort
of macro level, you have these big figures like this
MIT economist saying we're never going to have another recession.
Speaker 5 (12:55):
You have a book that.
Speaker 6 (12:56):
Comes out in nineteen ninety nine called Dow thirty six thousand,
which I know that number doesn't sound impressive now, but
at the time, the Dow had just hit ten thousand,
and that was a really big deal. And that was like,
by the way, that was like practically a holiday. One
of the chairmen of the New York Stock Exchange and
(13:18):
Rudy Giuliani, who's at the time the New York City Mayor,
wore special hats that said Dow ten thousand, and they
rang the closing Bell in March March nineteen ninety nine.
But yeah, there's this book called Dow thirty six thousand,
which argued that you could basically expect like three hundred
percent returns on your investments in the next three to
(13:39):
five years. And that is kind of crazy that that
was out there. And if you see movies also like
to move away from kind of the nuts and bolts,
there was this feeling of, oh, everything's really great. Yeah, Oh,
isn't it sad?
Speaker 5 (13:58):
Oh?
Speaker 6 (13:58):
You know American Beauty, which is a movie, you know,
big award winning movie nineteen ninety nine. It's all about how, oh,
we're all so affluent now and there aren't any problems.
Speaker 5 (14:08):
Isn't that sad?
Speaker 3 (14:09):
Sort of right, those sort of like suburban.
Speaker 6 (14:13):
Urbana, which I guess you had before. But there is
a sort of funny thing looking at it now or
watching You've Got Mail or any of these movies from
the late nineties where it's like, what are you people
so upset about you? You own property, you're you know,
your portfolio is doing great, You're gonna be fine.
Speaker 4 (14:34):
So if you had to pinpoint like the foremost reason
behind this sense of optimism about the future, what do
you think it was looking back.
Speaker 6 (14:45):
Well, I think the foremost reason was the dot com bubble.
Speaker 3 (14:49):
So everyone was in fact getting rich.
Speaker 6 (14:51):
Not Well, here's the thing, Okay, So I see culture
as being downstream from big forces, whether they're economic forces
or technology. And you know, it takes a few years.
Now it's faster because we have social media, but it
takes a few years for it to kind of trickle
(15:12):
through the culture for the vibe of the structural things
that are happening to inform fashion, to inform design, music,
things like that. And so even if you weren't personally
invested in the stock market or you weren't involved in
the tech world, I think that the feeling just permeated culture.
(15:38):
So there are a couple of examples. So in the book,
I talk about this inflatable chair I have, which, by
the way, I.
Speaker 4 (15:45):
Had one of those two yes. Yes, yeah, So I'll
just say I've read all of Collette's book, and like
page after page I'm just nodding, going like, yes, this
was my experience as well.
Speaker 2 (15:55):
Yeah, say more about the wait, say more about this.
Speaker 4 (15:58):
Well, mine was blue and you would inflate it and
sit on it, and inevitably it would eventually spring a
leak and you would just sort of be sitting on
it while it slowly like collapsed onto the floor.
Speaker 3 (16:10):
But they were a big deal.
Speaker 6 (16:12):
They were a huge deal. And yeah, mine was silver.
The exact same thing happened, which I write about in
the book. It's kind of like the fish. It's almost
a perfect metaphor for the dot com bubble. But they
were these inflatable chairs that you sat on. Mine was silver,
and I was obsessed with it because I was like,
this is the chair of the future. In the new millennium,
(16:34):
we will all be sitting on silver inflatable furniture. Everything's
going to be silver. Our clothes, our makeup. We're going
to have these big clear blobby IMACG three's which had
just come out. That was a huge Yeah you did
any of you?
Speaker 1 (16:47):
Ye?
Speaker 6 (16:47):
Did either of you have those?
Speaker 2 (16:49):
So I remember what year did the colorful Imax come out?
Speaker 4 (16:53):
That was that?
Speaker 6 (16:54):
So that was ninety eight. They came out the first
in ninety eight, and then ninety nine was when they
had the full range.
Speaker 2 (17:00):
Right, they were so cool on the different Yeah, and
they just looked cool and I just I think in
my imagination at the time, like this is what you
used is if I were, like, if I're in my
mid twenties and I work again Seattle or San Francisco
or New York doing something like being an editor for
a magazine, I would be on one of these cool computers.
Care more about just sort of right exactly, say more
(17:22):
about the cultural downstream of the time. What are other
things that were sort of going on in the late
nineties that are emblematic of this society feeling very happy
and rich.
Speaker 6 (17:32):
Well, yeah, so there's this thing called the now it's
called the Y two K aesthetic. Broadly, there's a really
cool collective of archivists who catalog They're called the Consumer
Aesthetics Research Institute. You should totally check them out, maybe
have them on the show.
Speaker 5 (17:50):
They do a lot.
Speaker 6 (17:51):
Of stuff about just design and marketing trends from the
late twentieth century to the present, and they and others
coin this term the Y two case, which was where
everything was really blobby, so it was really round, There
weren't sharp edges, everything was very transparent, which to me,
when I kind of did a deep read of it,
almost seemed like it was symbolizing like the Internet will
(18:12):
bring about transparency, like political transparency, and things aren't going
to have sharp militaristic edges. They're going to be round
and blobby, right, So just imagine think about the new Beetle,
which was the Volkswagen Yeah, super trendy, why two K
car that came in all these cute colors, like kind
of a Parado green one that I really wanted. And
(18:32):
think about that compared to the cyber truck, which is
like scary and sharp and the windows are small.
Speaker 4 (18:38):
You know, cyber Truck's ugly, so ugly, Sorry but it is. Okay,
So speaking of Y two K one thing that never happened, well,
you actually don't write in your book that much about
the actual Y two K moment right now? Was that
like a conscious choice to avoid that?
Speaker 6 (18:54):
Well, it just didn't figure into my analysis because in
hind site. Okay, So, first of all, I was calling
it Y two K because I wanted to talk about
this era basically between squarely between the dot com bubble
and the two thousand and eight crash and the culture
around it, as well as my own coming of age
(19:16):
which coincided with that, and I wanted to kind of
weave them all together to talk about these to kind
of situate my own memoir and coming of age within
this broader narrative of what was happening economically, politically, technologically,
et cetera. And the term that people like I said,
the term that people I found people using on social
media is y two K.
Speaker 5 (19:35):
So that's what I used.
Speaker 6 (19:37):
And I think the reason I didn't include discussions of
the y two K bug or the Y two K scare,
I think at all was because it just in hindsight,
when I'm analyzing the moment, it doesn't really figure large
into what the true story was.
Speaker 1 (19:53):
To me.
Speaker 2 (19:54):
I was at a New Year's Eve party on December
thirty first, nineteen ninety nine, and a friend of mine,
his dad went into the basement and turned off all
the power of the house, right, So we had for
a second, and I think we knew it was a joke,
but it was a pretty good gag because there were
fears that all the power was going to go out
because all the utilities their software would break, et cetera.
(20:15):
It hadn't occurred to me though. You know the other
thing about that Volkswagen Beetle that came out in the
nineteen nineties, and you know, it's cute and comparing in
contrast to the Cyberg truck aesthetic. But just to dwell
on this because I hadn't clicked it's really not aggressive,
it's small, it's compact. We're really just sort of not
going to take up space. It's sort of a preemptive
(20:36):
surrender or sort of everyone agrees we're just going to
be very tidy and contained. At that time, I hadn't
really thought about that in terms of the core imagery
of what that meant at the time, that that was
aspirational to people.
Speaker 6 (20:49):
Yeah, it's peaceful, it's smooth, it's modern, and we're all
just going to get culifish and fuel weight.
Speaker 4 (20:56):
But there were other cars that were popular at that
time that were not that small.
Speaker 6 (21:00):
That's absolutely true, and that's something that I talk about
in the book as well, and I argue that, well,
this is a whole other this is a whole other
kind of train of thought or suv of thought. But yeah,
SUVs started to get really popular in the early nineties,
(21:22):
and they went up. I mean there the numbers of
SUVs being purchased went up every year throughout it from
the beginning to the end of the nineties. And then
I think I forget what year it's in my book.
I believe it was two thousand, but it's in the book.
So they hummer with the Hummer H two, which was
the opposite of the VW bug esthetic.
Speaker 2 (21:45):
That's really interesting. I remember there was a lot of
sneering at SUVs in the early days. And now most
cars are basically SUV, right, suv of everything.
Speaker 5 (21:53):
But in the.
Speaker 2 (21:53):
Beginning there was I hadn't really this again, I hadn't
really thought.
Speaker 4 (21:58):
You drive down the highway and see someone in like
a crazy hommer an suv and you'd be like, oh,
look at those selfish people polluting the world. And now
it's like, oh, yeah, everyone has that.
Speaker 2 (22:08):
But this idea of like, okay, there were multiple forces emerging.
Once there's the tiny, modest VW beetle people, and then
the rise of the SUV people, and the SUV people won.
Speaker 5 (22:19):
They won.
Speaker 6 (22:20):
Yeah, absolutely, yeah. I mean my dad used to call
those people they not the people. Well, he said, they're stupid.
He was like, they don't know how to read science papers,
because he was an engineer, and I was like, well,
I don't know if that's the issue, but yeah, he
would say, oh, look there's a stupid ugly vehicle. And
actually the essay in the book about SUVs is called
Stupid Ugly Vehicles.
Speaker 4 (22:56):
So, speaking of essays in the book, and you have
one of my all time favorite chapter titles that I've
ever seen, which is Larry Summers Caused My Eating Disorder,
which is absolutely amazing. And the chapter in case you
think that's a joke, it's about basically the explosion in
models in this sort of nineteen nineties early two thousands.
(23:18):
A lot of them came from Eastern Europe, and Larry
Summers sort of indirectly had a hand in the opening
up of Eastern Europe, in the collapse of the Soviet
Union and things like that. I did want to ask
you because we're talking about how great that period was,
but I also remember, and I'm sure you will as well,
given that we're roughly the same age, but there was
like this sort of undertone of misogyny in all of that,
(23:42):
and it like, in many respects, it was not a
great time to be a young girl growing up in
that particular era. Why do you think, like, on the
one hand, there was this unbridled optimism, but that on
the other hand, girls in particular seemed to be under pressure.
Speaker 6 (23:58):
Yeah, I mean, that's a really good question, and I
do want to add that I think things got even
worse after nine to eleven. You had this real reactionary shift,
and to go back to the suv topic, I think
the suv aesthetic really that's when it really really stopped
being as much of a joke and it was like, okay, no,
(24:20):
this is the winning aesthetic. But yeah, like, I think
there also just was a general reactionary cultural turn after
nine to eleven. But even before, as you point out,
there was incredible misogyny.
Speaker 5 (24:34):
Throughout pop culture.
Speaker 6 (24:35):
I mean, I think there are a lot of reasons
for that. I mean, I find Susan Fuluti's argument of
backlash to be convincing, which is basically that there was
widespread resentment about gains that had been made by the
feminist movement through the seventies and the eighties, you know,
and there was just this cultural like, Okay, we're done
with all of this. Let's you know, let's have the movie.
Speaker 4 (24:58):
Going back to the idea of nature being like cyclical.
Speaker 6 (25:01):
Yes, yes, yes, yes, But I also think, you know,
and again I'm a cultural critic here, and I speak
throughout the book as a cultural critic, not as an academic,
but my kind of guess is that a lot of
cultural reaction and culture war stuff, whatever form that takes,
(25:22):
is kind of a proxy for economic anxiety or concerns,
or sometimes technological anxiety or concerns. I think that the
reason that, say, right now, there's so much just insane
culture war stuff is because people are scared. People are
scared of AI, They're scared of you know, inequality, or
(25:43):
they feel like their standard of living has declined. And
the thing is for a lot of Americans and people
in other parts of the world, but I'm you know,
I'm writing about America. A lot of Americans, their living
standard had declined even you know, basically from the late
seventies onwards and then even through the nineties, but that
(26:03):
was not being fully reflected by these big indicators in
the late nineties.
Speaker 2 (26:11):
You know, you mentioned the sort of cultural shifts that
happened after nine to eleven, and I think there's absolutely
the case in many respects. But so there are really
two events. I mean, there was the peak of the
dot com bubble, which was in March two thousand and
it sort of took us a little while afterwards to realize, oh,
this actually has come to an end, because it could
(26:32):
have just been a blip, and you know, things kept
going a little bit this year, and then I guess
eighteen months later with the September eleventh attack, and so
you have the economic bubble punctured and then the world
peace bubble. This idea that after the Cold War, now
we have the issues of geopolitics are solved, and so
(26:52):
really there's sort of the economic story got blown to
bits and then the political story, or the geopolitical story
specifically got blown into bits, and it's sort of a
real double whammy for us.
Speaker 4 (27:02):
Huh.
Speaker 6 (27:03):
Yeah, it wasn't great. And if you look at just
some of the crazy stuff that was happening during that
second half of the Y two K era from two
thousand and one to two thousand and eight, I mean,
it's just really strange stuff. Like I talk about the
mcbling aesthetic. Do you guys know about the mcbling aesthetic?
Speaker 3 (27:20):
I remember that.
Speaker 2 (27:21):
I'm going to google that.
Speaker 5 (27:22):
Keep talking, So it is it.
Speaker 6 (27:25):
This is a term again, like the Y two K aesthetic,
These are terms that are applied now. They weren't used
at the time. But the mcbling aesthetic is think Paris Hilton, Right,
So you think juicy couture track suits with words on
the butt, ug boots, super you know, straight bleached blonde hair,
super dark, fake tan, statement teas, giant Louis Vuitton logo bags,
(27:49):
and just this really just riding around in a hummer.
Speaker 5 (27:52):
It was there's a real nihilism to it, almost vulgarity.
Speaker 6 (27:56):
Vulgarity, right, And I think that again, to go back
to this hunch I have about how culture is downstream
from economic forces. I interpret that as almost a this
is almost Freudian, but it's like a kind of Freudian
kind of subconscious understanding of what's going on in markets
(28:17):
with the what would become the subprime mortgage crisis.
Speaker 2 (28:20):
Yeah, oh that's good. Good. The aesthetic is downstream from
the emerging subprime Let's.
Speaker 4 (28:27):
Talk about that, because all I was going to say
was like, I think there's a tendency nowadays to think
of the mcbling aesthetic as like an ironic statement. But
I remember at the time it was very earnest, like
there was no sense of irony about wearing a juicy
couture tracksuit and like a giant gold chain.
Speaker 3 (28:46):
That's right.
Speaker 4 (28:47):
It was very serious, no chrucker hats. Maybe a chrucker hat.
Paris Hilton wearing a trucker hat might have been a
little less serious.
Speaker 6 (28:54):
Or the statement teased, but there was Yeah, I do
think that there was a seriousness about it. There was
a sense that it was glamour like I had a
couple of juicy pieces that never I never had the tracksuit,
but I had a couple of pieces that I got
at Loman's and which rip. But I just felt so glamorous.
(29:15):
I was like, look at me in my green terry
cloth dress.
Speaker 5 (29:19):
For some reason, I am I am living.
Speaker 6 (29:23):
It's like I could be. It's like I could be
on the OC or on Laguna Beach or something. I
just felt like, this is great. You know, I did
the hair straightener thing. I oh god, yeah, because I
have you have a little wave in your hair, and
I used too well.
Speaker 3 (29:39):
My hair used to be really curly.
Speaker 1 (29:41):
Yeah.
Speaker 4 (29:41):
I used to relax it with like the actual chemical
products that you would get from the drug store.
Speaker 3 (29:46):
Yeap, it was bad.
Speaker 6 (29:47):
Yeah, I feel like I can smell that. Yeah, like yeah, no,
But it's interesting too.
Speaker 2 (29:55):
Is a downstream from the emerging subprime world, because right
it's a very external Aesthetically, they can sort of anti taste.
There's nothing internal, and so the idea of the economy
is like, there's no real economic basis for it, but
there's this sort of presentation of rich in a way
that's unsustainable.
Speaker 6 (30:14):
One hundred percent. And actually I tie that in with
mcmanchins as well. Yeah, because like another person you should
have on is Kate Wagner, who does mcmanchin Hell, oh yeah,
but mcmanonsins are structurally unsound.
Speaker 5 (30:28):
They are built.
Speaker 6 (30:30):
Like I said, my dad's an engineer and he would
drive me around and look at mcmanchons in suburban Virginia
and be like, this is bad. The architecture is terrible.
It's gonna have roof problems in two years. I hate
these things, and so I get it. I get my
critique from him, but also just other stuff I've read
about the actual architectural and structural integrity, and these are
(30:53):
garish because they you know, there's no reason to have
this giant foyer that Kate Wagner calls a lawyer for
where it's like, for some reason, it's like this giant
three story foyer with a giant fake crystal chandelier. There's
just no reason for that from a functional standpoint, and
it's really it's inefficient for heating and cooling.
Speaker 5 (31:16):
Yeah.
Speaker 6 (31:16):
Just these aren't even like fine luxury goods that are
well made but ostentatious. These are like fake luxury goods
that are ugly and tacky and are going to fall apart.
But it doesn't matter, because all that matters is in
that moment, you feel like you're a rich person even
though you're not.
Speaker 4 (31:32):
So what's the through line from the tech bubble to
the subprime bubble, Because on the face of it, they
seem to have some similarities, you know, people getting rich
in an unsustainable way. But on the other hand, there
are some differences where you know, there were a lot
of low income people who bought houses that they couldn't afford,
(31:53):
whereas I don't think there were that many people necessarily
buying like tech IPOs, but I could be wrong.
Speaker 6 (31:59):
No, no, And I think in terms of the differences
between them, that's exactly it. So the dot com bubble
was mostly affecting you know, upper income people, you know,
maybe not the ultra ultra rich. You know, people who
were upper middle class took a hit in their portfolios
or whatever. Or you know, they worked at pets dot
com and they got laid off. But yeah, it didn't
(32:21):
have the same kind of effects throughout the entire economy
because it was kind of contained among more affluent people,
whereas the subprime mortgage crisis affected people lower down, much poorer,
more middle class and poor people, and they, you know,
they weren't just cutting back on luxuries, they were you know,
(32:42):
cutting back on essentials, and that really had downstream effects
on the entire economy at least. That's you know, that's
what I read, and I say in my book.
Speaker 2 (33:06):
I don't want to take too dark of a turn here,
but another incident that I recall there was a mass
shooting at a day trading center in Atlanta in nineteen
ninety nine, and there were a lot of people getting
into day trading, and the day trading centers would have
all of these computers there because probably people didn't have
good internet setups at home. There were these early indications
(33:31):
in the summer of nineteen ninety nine that things were
going to go off the rails, or that despite this
incredible belt that was in the sort of in the
headlines of the newspapers and on financial TV ET cetera,
that there was something that couldn't hold there even before
the formal collapse in March two thousand.
Speaker 6 (33:47):
Yeah, no, I think that that's I actually didn't know
about that shooting, but yeah, I know, I think that
there were there were indicators, and there were also people
here and there who were saying, hey, this is not sustainable.
I mean, even Alan Greenspan he talked about he called
it irrational exuberance right in the market. So there were
people sort of being like, you know, this is all
(34:08):
very fun and exciting and it's this sugar rush, but
it's not going to last the way you think it is.
Speaker 4 (34:15):
So writing the book and reflecting on your own experiences
of this time period, was it cathartic for you?
Speaker 3 (34:22):
What did you learn?
Speaker 1 (34:23):
Oh?
Speaker 6 (34:23):
My god, so cathartic.
Speaker 3 (34:25):
Yeah.
Speaker 6 (34:26):
I mean I felt like I had a lot to
process from that time, and I felt lucky that I
got to incorporate memoir elements into it because these are
personal essays, but they are personal essays that are structured
within a bigger historical story. And I think that when
we learn how our lives that are unique to us
(34:51):
are still within a bigger story of history, and these
forces tech forces, economic forces. I think that can be
really cathartic and can really give us a lot of insight,
like things that we think are our fault. Say, we
might think, oh, it wasn't right to go back to
the Larry Summers caused my eating disorder essay. That was
(35:13):
something I feel like I had to write because it
was like my way of understanding why I was suffering
with this issue for a few years and why it
derailed my life in the way that it did at
the time. And it wasn't just about me or oh,
you know I had this issue. It was that I
(35:34):
was picking up on currents from the bigger culture that
are downstream of economic currents of sort of scarcity and
managing my human capital and all of this, and so
it really was very cathartic or like talking about the
you know, when I talk about the dot com bubble,
the dot com bubble really affected my family in a
(35:56):
way because my uncle was involved in a star up
and it really changed his fortunes. And that was a
very odd experience. And now doing research, I found out
that there were other people who had had similar experiences.
Speaker 2 (36:12):
SayMore, I knew someone in the nineties who happened to
live in San Diego, and he was the first person
who was aware of this company called Qualcom, which was
one of the huge winners at the time because they
were going to make the chips and phones, and everyone
was aware of that. People in his area got made
a ton of money, et cetera, because they knew about
it a little bit before the people on TV knew
(36:32):
about it. What was that experience like to what extent
those people who rowed it up and then wrote it down,
What did it do to them? What was it like
for them on the way up and then afterwards?
Speaker 6 (36:44):
Yeah, I mean on the way up, there was just
this idea that well, gee, everyone can just be rich.
Speaker 4 (36:50):
Now.
Speaker 6 (36:51):
This is to go back to what we were talking
about earlier about how there's just this kind of surreal
thing of like, oh, okay, wait, suddenly I can like
buy a second home, or put my job at forty
or you know, forty five or thirty or whatever, or
I can buy a new, you know, a new luxury
car or a private jet, or go on vacation for
(37:15):
three months all over Europe or something. Right, I mean,
there's this Actually there's a video of Elon Musk in
nineteen ninety nine, and he's getting he had just sold
zip to I think it was when he had just
sold zip to, and so he had sold his first company.
And he's getting a McLaren and this is a CNN video.
And so he bought a McLaren, which I believe at
(37:37):
the time was a one million dollar car, and he
bought himself a McLaren. And there's this video where he
is getting this McLaren. And keep in mind, no one
knows who Elon Musk is at the time. This is
when he this is actually when he got his first
big break, and he's like, oh, this is so surreal,
and he's like this kid, this like little boy who
is like having his dream come true. And that's really
(37:58):
how I think it felt for a lot of people,
because a lot of these people who were not all
mind you, but many of these people who were in
the tech world were coming out of the California Bay
Area counterculture and they were kind of maybe bohemians before
they were able to get into the computer world. Because
back in the seventies, eighties, nineties, you could be It's
(38:18):
not like now where you have to go on a
track early in your life to get into that you
could just be like, you know what, I'm tired of
living in a co op and like scrounging for food.
Speaker 5 (38:27):
I'm going to go whatever.
Speaker 2 (38:29):
This is really important actually, and I hadn't thought about
this before, but right now, if you want to be
at tech, you know, you're probably studying like crazy while
you're in high school to get into the right college
and study you know, electrical engineering or whatever. But back
then it was people who a few years earlier in
their life were like counterculture hippies, yeah, and stuff like that,
(38:49):
and like there.
Speaker 6 (38:50):
Was any some of whom were self taught. Yeah, some
of whom were just self taught, you know, or they
were like, gee, I'm going to go back at the
local community college and cakes and programming class and then
you could just go on in and get a job.
I mean, it helped if you were, you know, a
white man. But yeah, it was really it was more open.
It wasn't like this structured thing.
Speaker 5 (39:09):
Like it is now.
Speaker 4 (39:10):
Imagine if Elon Musk had gotten the new VW bug
and stuff, and how different all.
Speaker 2 (39:17):
Of history, all of history would have changed.
Speaker 4 (39:20):
I'm still stuck on that possibility.
Speaker 2 (39:22):
Clud Shade, Thank you so much for coming on odd
lots and congrats and good luck on the book.
Speaker 5 (39:27):
Thank you, thanks for having me, Tracy.
Speaker 2 (39:42):
I really enjoyed that conversation. First of all, nostalgia, I'll
take you back. But I hadn't really thought about this
sort of connection between I guess just how sharp that
aesthetic turn was between the late nineties and the sort
of the aggressive mcbling culture of the tooth.
Speaker 5 (40:00):
Yeah.
Speaker 4 (40:01):
I think Colett has like put her finger on something,
which is there was that sense of like really unbridled
optimism around that time. It wasn't like, oh, tech is cool,
but maybe there are going to be downsides.
Speaker 2 (40:13):
No, Like, there wasn't any of that.
Speaker 4 (40:15):
It was like, oh, yeah, let's let the kids on
AOL and they can talk to whoever they want, and
we're all going to make money and we're all going
to have like great new jobs in this industry and
we'll live in McMansions, et cetera. And I think, you know,
maybe it was because we hadn't had a big technological
revolution for some time, and so people kind of had
(40:35):
forgotten the downsides.
Speaker 3 (40:36):
But I think there's just.
Speaker 4 (40:38):
No way that you really are ever going to get
that sense of optimism anytime soon, even if we invent
like the coolest new piece of technology. I think everyone
now is just so conditioned to like wait for the drop.
Speaker 2 (40:51):
I think the nineties really were a unique, unrecoverable period.
And you go back and read some of the optimism
the end of history stuff, and you guys like, oh,
that's you know, how could they? But I've tried to
do this experiment baarment in my head a bit, and
it's like, I get it. I get what they saw,
or I get why they thought that to some extent,
(41:14):
certain core problems of human civilization, whether we're talking about
world peace, whether we're talking about economics specifically, kind of
had been solved. Like, I don't blame them much for it.
Obviously a lot of the optimism in retrospect seems silly.
We got nine to eleven, we got the Great Financial Crisis,
we had the Iraq War, the Afghanistan War, multiple wars now,
(41:36):
But I get why in that brief period of time
they sort of didn't see it coming. Should we even
if they should, even if.
Speaker 4 (41:43):
They should have, Should we re embrace the Y two
K aesthetic?
Speaker 2 (41:47):
You know what, I don't like it.
Speaker 3 (41:50):
You don't like it.
Speaker 2 (41:50):
I don't know like there's some you know. Sometimes I'm
walking through the park and I see kids wearing stuff
that I could have worn in high school, and it
filled warms my heart a little bit. I don't really
like it that much.
Speaker 4 (42:01):
I don't know.
Speaker 3 (42:02):
I'm gonna find my my low rise geek.
Speaker 2 (42:04):
Actually pretty bad.
Speaker 3 (42:05):
Start wearing those into the office.
Speaker 2 (42:06):
Actually pretty bad.
Speaker 3 (42:08):
It's not that bad. You're crazy, all right? Shall we
leave it there?
Speaker 2 (42:11):
Let's leave it there.
Speaker 4 (42:12):
This has been another episode of the Authoughts podcast. I'm
Tracy Alloway. You can follow me at Tracy Alloway.
Speaker 2 (42:18):
And I'm Jill Wisenthal. You can follow me at the Stalwart.
Follow our guest Collect Shade at Missshade and check out
her new book Y two K. Follow our producers Kerman
Rodriguez at Kerman armand dash O Bennett at Dashbot and
Kilbrooks at Kilbrooks. Thank you to our producer Moses Ondam.
From our Oddlogs content, go to bloomberg dot com slash
odd Lots. We have transcripts of blog and a newsletter
(42:40):
and you can chat about all of these topics twenty
four to seven in our discord Discord dot gg, slash odd.
Speaker 4 (42:46):
Lots and if you enjoy adlots, if you like it
when we take these nostalgic tours back in time, then
please leave us a positive review on your favorite podcast platform.
And remember, if you are a Bloomberg subscriber, you can
listen to all of our episode sodes absolutely ad free.
All you need to do is connect your Bloomberg account
with Apple Podcasts. In order to do that, just find
(43:07):
the Bloomberg channel on Apple Podcasts and follow the instructions there.
Thanks for listening.
Hosts And Creators
Joe Weisenthal
Tracy Alloway
Popular Podcasts
Crime Junkie
Does hearing about a true crime case always leave you scouring the internet for the truth behind the story? Dive into your next mystery with Crime Junkie. Every Monday, join your host Ashley Flowers as she unravels all the details of infamous and underreported true crime cases with her best friend Brit Prawat. From cold cases to missing persons and heroes in our community who seek justice, Crime Junkie is your destination for theories and stories you won’t hear anywhere else. Whether you're a seasoned true crime enthusiast or new to the genre, you'll find yourself on the edge of your seat awaiting a new episode every Monday. If you can never get enough true crime... Congratulations, you’ve found your people. Follow to join a community of Crime Junkies! Crime Junkie is presented by audiochuck Media Company.
24/7 News: The Latest
The latest news in 4 minutes updated every hour, every day.
Stuff You Should Know
If you've ever wanted to know about champagne, satanism, the Stonewall Uprising, chaos theory, LSD, El Nino, true crime and Rosa Parks, then look no further. Josh and Chuck have you covered.