Pod Insights Odd Lots What It Felt Like When Everyone Was Hopeful, Happy, and Rich About this episode 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.
Transcript Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
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1:43 Joe Weisenthal? Hello and welcome to another episode of the Odd Lots Podcast. I'm Joe Weisenthal.
1:48 Tracy Alloway? And I'm Tracy Alloway.
1:50 Joe Weisenthal? Tracy, where were you in the 90s?
1:53 Tracy Alloway? Uh, good question. I was in Chicago for a couple of years, like, I want to say 90, 91. And then from like 91 to 94, 95, I was in Japan.
2:05 Tracy Alloway? And then 95 to I guess 98 or 99, I was in Chicago.
2:09 Joe Weisenthal? I have to say, even though we've been doing this podcast together 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.
2:21 Tracy Alloway? No, I just moved around a lot and you don't remember whenever I tell you my, my time periods and locations.
2:27 Joe Weisenthal? Well, that's all.
2:27 Tracy Alloway? That's okay.
2:28 Joe Weisenthal? That's okay. That's possible. I also moved around a lot. But I have to say, the 1990s, so this is, I'm struggling with this. The 1990s, particularly the second half of the 90s, I remember it as a period of a lot of optimism and wealth and harmony and peace. But the other thing is, I was young and now I'm old. And I'm sort of trying to reconcile this thing of like, was there an, was those, were those really good years?
2:54 Tracy Alloway? Is it just nostalgia?
2:55 Joe Weisenthal? Or is it just personal nostalgia from when I wasn't old?
2:58 Tracy Alloway? 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 1990s. 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 in Oracle.
3:19 Joe Weisenthal? Amazing.
3:19 Tracy Alloway? And he spent all his money on tropical fish.
3:22 Joe Weisenthal? Amazing.
3:23 Tracy Alloway? And 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.
3:31 Joe Weisenthal? Oh.
3:31 Tracy Alloway? 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 out, he had had it installed like the week before and they hadn't got the salt levels and the water right, or something. So it wasn't my fault. That was the upshot.
3:51 Joe Weisenthal? 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. But I.
3:58 Tracy Alloway? Yeah, that's, that's where I'm going with it. That's what it is.
4:00 Joe Weisenthal? So here's my memory of the 90s. 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 11th. But the other thing, I have this one summer, I got made $2,000. From a summer job and I got into day trading and I turned it into $20,000, which was just an insane amount of money at the time. And I had this memory of walking down a street somewhere and I was thinking, wow, we're rich now. Like I'm rich now. And I never thought this would happen. I'm a rich person and my family is rich because I turned $2,000 into $20,000. And so there was that personal experience. In retrospect, $20,000, not really rich,
4:44 Joe Weisenthal? 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.
4:53 Tracy Alloway? So there's two things I would point out other than the idea that everyone was getting rich.
4:58 Joe Weisenthal? Yeah.
4:58 Tracy Alloway? So number one, it was the time where we were just discovering new technology without realizing how terrible it actually could be.
5:07 Joe Weisenthal? Yes.
5:07 Tracy Alloway? Like I remember specifically being 11 years old on AOL, chatting on Instant Messenger, probably to adult men, but you know, 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 anymore about the physical world. And you know, fast forward to the post 2020 years, that turned out not to be true.
5:40 Joe Weisenthal? You know, not to just keep droning on, but it was this period between the Cold War and 2001, too. And it felt like with the end of Cold War, like, okay, the questions of society and democracy and markets, they've been solved.
5:52 Tracy Alloway? The end of history. Yeah.
5:53 Joe Weisenthal? Yeah, you could see, like, my takeaway from that back then is like, I get why people got caught up in it. Anyway.
6:00 Tracy Alloway? Well, you and I got caught up in it because we both went on to do international relations.
6:04 Joe Weisenthal? That's right.
6:05 Tracy Alloway? At university.
6:05 Joe Weisenthal? That's right.
6:06 Tracy Alloway? Was not a useful degree.
6:07 Joe Weisenthal? Not a useful degree at all. And I don't know why I did, but only 20 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 history where people thought multilateralism and all that stuff.
6:26 Tracy Alloway? We are all products of our time.
6:28 Joe Weisenthal? 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 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 Colette Shade. She is the author of the forthcoming book, Y2K: How the 2000s Became Everything. Y2K is such a perfect stand-in because that was like the one thing, we didn't really know what it was.
7:09 Joe Weisenthal? We thought all the computers were going to short-circuit on January 1, 2000. It's kind of like an early foreboding symbol in retrospect, Collette, that it wouldn't all last.
7:19 Speaker 05 Yeah, it wouldn't all last. And actually, just to note, the reason that I picked the phrase Y2K for the book's main title is because it's the primary search term that people use on nostalgia fashion resale websites and also on social media. So I thought that it would be good for my SEO.
7:38 Tracy Alloway? Do people actually want Y2K fashion? Because that worries me a little bit.
7:43 Speaker 05 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 Y2K look and why it's so challenging and why it's so popular right now.
7:53 Joe Weisenthal? Oh, I just searched Y2K fashion. Yeah, oh, it's bringing back... The aesthetics were not that good in the early 2000s. Anyway, that's just subjective. I don't know, the kids might not know these days what Y2K meant, which was there was this fear that all the computers would short-circuit because when software was first invented, they didn't have room, everything was just truncated to have two digits for the year, so 98, 99. People thought that then computers would revert to the year zero and everything would melt down. But setting aside, that didn't happen, they fixed it. Setting aside Y2K fashion, why did you write this book?
8:28 Speaker 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 2017, 2018, 2019, as a few rough years. But things were going very badly for me. And then in 2018, I found this time capsule letter in my parents' house in a box in their basement that I had written for a millennium time capsule in 1999.
8:57 Joe Weisenthal? Whoa.
8:58 Speaker 05 Yeah. And it was dated April 1999. 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 the year I had to predict was 2008.
9:17 Tracy Alloway? What did you say would happen in 2008?
9:20 Joe Weisenthal? Lehman would crash.
9:21 Tracy Alloway? You see, there'd be these complex financial instruments called CDOs. And now, what did you say? What were your expectations?
9:29 Speaker 05 Well, 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've been a lot of innovations in the past 25 years, but I can't say we've cured all of it. And I also said that we would be watching our, we would be watching our movies on the computer.
9:54 Joe Weisenthal? Which you were right about. You got that right.
9:56 Speaker 05 Yeah, that's pretty good.
9:57 Joe Weisenthal? Yeah.
9:58 Speaker 05 Not terrible.
9:59 Tracy Alloway? 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.
10:14 Joe Weisenthal? Remember the DVD bros? I mean, you were, yeah, that was like, that was a type of guy who's like, has a really good DVD.
10:21 Speaker 05 Oh, yeah, no, it was, it was a total status symbol, especially once you got to like, the early to mid 2000s, people would collect them and it would be like, oh, this person has 40 DVDs. Wow. Or this.
10:33 Joe Weisenthal? Yeah. Come over to my house and watch Clerks. Because I feel like a DVD bro.
10:38 Speaker 05 And then, and then fall asleep and then the DVD intro menu is just playing. And then you wake up in the middle of the night and it's just on a loop.
10:50 Joe Weisenthal? Yeah.
10:50 Speaker 05 And you're confused.
10:51 Joe Weisenthal? 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?
10:58 Speaker 05 No.
10:58 Joe Weisenthal? 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 a very peaceful website. I wonder if it still, it still exists.
11:11 Speaker 05 That's cool. Yeah, I really want to see that now.
11:14 Tracy Alloway? But this actually reminds me, and Joe's made this point before, which is the sort of late 1990s, maybe early 2000s, 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 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 2000, that, that just wasn't there. It was like, we were really looking at this Nirvana like future.
11:57 Speaker 05 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 time I found that letter and I was getting very into these nostalgia accounts on Instagram and watching 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 2022 because I was like, well, I'm totally obsessed with this thing. I'd like to write a book about it.
12:36 Speaker 05 And so one of the things that I found were really odd quotes from really respected figures. So an example would be there was an MIT economist in
12:50 Speaker 05 1998, who said, "We will never have another recession again. The economy will keep going up forever." 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 of
13:13 Tracy Alloway? Or it's just like, previous generations were too stupid to not want one.
13:17 Speaker 05 Yes, it was quite a lot of hubris, right? If they had only changed how things worked in their mind differently, then they could have easily avoided all of those other depressions and recessions.
13:28 Joe Weisenthal? I kind of still think that's the case. I kind of still think, but human
13:32 Speaker 05 I mean, there is probably some
13:33 Joe Weisenthal? Human nature is cyclical, and we were wrong to think it would be permanent peace and expansion forever. So here's, I guess, another way of entering. I mentioned my epiphany that at some point in like 1999, I was like, "Everyone is rich and life is great." Was that rare? Were a lot of people in those years having personal feelings of that? Talk to us about, and again, not everyone remembers it. How widespread was this feeling of abundance and wealth at the general population? Obviously, there are exceptions. There are poor people, obviously. But how widespread were these feelings of wealth and so forth?
14:07 Speaker 05 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." You have a book that comes out in 1999 called Dow 36,000, which I know that number doesn't sound impressive now, but at the time, the Dow had just hit 10,000, and that was a really big deal. And that was like, by the way, that was like practically a holiday. One of the chairman of the New York Stock Exchange, and Rudy Giuliani, who was at the time the New York City mayor, wore special hats that said Dow 10,000, and they rang the closing bell in March, March 1999.
14:49 Speaker 05 But yeah, there's this book called Dow 36,000, which argued that you could basically expect like 300% returns on your investments in the next three to five years. And that
15:06 Speaker 05 Is kind of crazy that that was out there. And if you see movies also like to move away from kind of
15:13 Joe Weisenthal? Yeah, yeah.
15:14 Speaker 05 The the nuts and bolts. There was this feeling of, oh, everything's really great. Yeah. Oh, isn't it sad? Oh, you know, American Beauty, which is a movie, you know, big award winning movie in 1999. It's all about how, oh, we're all so affluent now and there aren't any problems. Isn't that sad? Sort of.
15:34 Joe Weisenthal? Right.
15:34 Tracy Alloway? Those sort of like suburban on
15:36 Speaker 05 Yeah, suburban on me. Which I guess you had before. But there 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 90s, where it's like, what are you people so upset about? You you you own property, your, you know, your portfolio is doing great, you're gonna be fine.
15:57 Tracy Alloway? 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?
16:08 Speaker 05 Well, I think the foremost reason was the dot com bubble.
16:12 Tracy Alloway? So everyone was, in fact, getting rich?
16:15 Speaker 05 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 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
17:00 Speaker 05 permeated culture. So there are a couple of examples. So in the book, I talk about this inflatable chair I have, which by the way,
17:08 Tracy Alloway? I had one of those too.
17:09 Speaker 05 Yes.
17:10 Tracy Alloway? Yes. So I'll just say, I've read all of Colette's book and like page after page, I'm just nodding, going like, yes, this was my experience as well. Yeah.
17:18 Speaker 05 Yeah.
17:19 Joe Weisenthal? Say more about the, wait, say more about this.
17:21 Tracy Alloway? Uh, well, mine was blue.
17:23 Speaker 05 Okay.
17:23 Tracy Alloway? And you would inflate it and sit on it and event 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. But they were a big deal.
17:35 Speaker 05 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, 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 iMac G3s, which had just come out. That was a huge, yeah. Did you, did any of you?
18:10 Joe Weisenthal? Yeah.
18:11 Speaker 05 Did either of you have those?
18:12 Joe Weisenthal? No, I did not. So I remember, what year did the colorful iMacs come out? That was that?
18:17 Speaker 05 So that was 98.
18:19 Joe Weisenthal? Yeah.
18:19 Speaker 05 They came out the first in 98 and then 99 was when they had the full range.
18:23 Joe Weisenthal? Right. They were so cool and the different, yeah. And they just looked cool.
18:27 Speaker 05 They looked cool.
18:27 Joe Weisenthal? I think in my imagination at the time, like this is what you used as if I were like, if I were in my mid twenties and I work in Seattle or San Francisco or New York, doing something like being an editor for a magazine, I would be on one of these cool looking computers.
18:42 Speaker 05 Karen Bradshaw.
18:43 Joe Weisenthal? More about just sort of, right, exactly. Say more 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?
18:56 Speaker 05 Well, yeah. So there's this thing called the, now it's called the Y2K aesthetic broadly. There's a really cool, Collective of archivists who catalog all, they're called the Consumer Aesthetics Research Institute. You should totally check them out. Maybe have them on the show. They do a lot of stuff about just design and marketing trends from the late 20th century to the present. And they and others coined this term, the Y2K aesthetic, 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 bring about transparency, like political transparency and things aren't
19:40 Speaker 05 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, super trendy Y2K car that came in all these cute colors, like a kind of a Paradote green one that I really wanted. And think about that compared to the Cybertruck, which is like scary and sharp and the windows are small, you know?
20:02 Tracy Alloway? Cybertruck's ugly. Sorry. Sorry. But it is. Okay. So, speaking of Y2K, one thing that never, well, you actually don't write in your book that much about the actual Y2K moment, right? Was that like a conscious choice to avoid that?
20:18 Speaker 05 Well, it just didn't figure into my analysis because in hindsight, okay, so first of all, I was calling it Y2K because I wanted to talk about this era, basically between, squarely between the dot com bubble and the 2008 crash and the culture around it, as well as my own coming of age, 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
20:58 Speaker 05 media is Y2K. So that's what I used. And I think the reason I didn't include discussions of the Y2K bug or the Y2K 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 to me.
21:17 Joe Weisenthal? I was at a New Year's Eve party on December 31st, 1999, and a friend of mine, his dad went into the basement and turned off all the power of the house, right? So we, for a second, 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, etc. It hadn't occurred to me, though. You know, the other thing about that Volkswagen Beetle that came out in the 1990s, and you know, it's cute and comparing and contrast to the Cybertruck 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 surrender or a sort of everyone agrees we're just going to be
22:02 Joe Weisenthal? 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.
22:13 Speaker 05 Yeah, it's peaceful, it's smooth, it's modern, and we're all just going to get along.
22:18 Joe Weisenthal? Fuel efficient.
22:19 Tracy Alloway? Wait, but there were other cars that were popular at that time that were not that small, right?
22:24 Speaker 05 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 90s and they went up, I mean, there, the numbers of SUVs being purchased went up every year throughout that from the beginning to the end of the 90s. And then I think, I forget what year, it's in my book, I believe it was 2000, but it's in the book. So they Hummer came out with the Hummer H2, which was the opposite of the VW Bug aesthetic.
23:08 Joe Weisenthal? This really, I remember, and there was a lot of sneering at SUVs in the early days. And now most cars are basically SUV, SUV of everything. But in the beginning, there was, I hadn't really thought. Again, I hadn't really thought about that.
23:20 Speaker 05 No, in the beginning, you would. You'd drive down the highway and you'd see someone in like a crazy Hummer or 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 them.
23:31 Joe Weisenthal? But this idea of like, okay, there were multiple forces emerging at once. There's the V, the tiny, modest VW Beetle people, and then the rise of the SUV people, and the SUV people won.
23:42 Speaker 05 They won. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. I mean, my dad used to call those people, 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.
24:19 Speaker 00 What's next for virtual assets? I'm Jacob Grease, host of Economy Scale, a series exploring growth in key global sectors. And in this episode, we're diving into the digital forces shaping finance. Sean McHugh from Dubai-based Virtual Assets Regulatory Authority has this to say.
24:35 Speaker 06 We're seeing a lot of insocial players come in, digital asset dedicated hedge funds, high frequency traders and that sort of thing, and folks who service insocial clients.
24:44 Speaker 00 As more capital enters the market, adaptive regulation is likely to become increasingly key. Reece Merrick of Ripple says.
24:52 Speaker 07 A lot of regulators globally would like to keep the industry at arm's length. That's the opposite here. I think also what you'll find is that regulation and frameworks can come out, but some of them are maybe a slight iteration on some 80-year-old policy and not actually in line with what the technology can do and offer. And again, that's very different in Dubai.
25:11 Speaker 00 Listen to the full episode wherever you get your podcasts. This series is brought to you by Bloomberg Media Studios and the Dubai Department of Economy and Tourism.
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26:26 Tracy Alloway? So, uh, speaking of essays in the book and chapters, 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 the sort of 1990s, early 2000s. A lot of them came from Eastern Europe and Larry Summers sort of indirectly had a hand in the opening up of Eastern Europe and 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,
27:07 Tracy Alloway? but there was like this sort of undertone of misogyny in all of that. 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 then on the other hand, girls in particular seem to be under pressure?
27:28 Speaker 05 Yeah, I mean, that's a really good question. And I do want to add that I think things got even worse after nine 11. You had this real reactionary shift and 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, this is the winning aesthetic. But yeah, like, I think there also just was a general reactionary cultural turn after nine 11. But even before, as you point out, there was incredible misogyny throughout pop culture. I mean, I think there are a lot of reasons for that. I mean, I find Susan Faludi's argument of backlash to be convincing,
28:13 Speaker 05 which is basically that there was widespread resentment about gains that had been made by the feminist movement through the 70s and the 80s, 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
28:28 Tracy Alloway? We're going back to the idea of nature being like cyclical, basically.
28:31 Speaker 05 Yes, yes, yes. But I also think, you know, and again, I'm a cultural critic here, and I'm, 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, 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 they feel like their standard of living has declined. And the thing
29:16 Speaker 05 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 70s onward, and then even through the 90s. But that was not
29:35 Speaker 05 Being fully reflected by these big indicators in the late 90s.
29:41 Joe Weisenthal? You know, you mentioned the sort of cultural shifts that happened after nine 11, and I think that's absolutely the case in many respects. But so there were, there were really two events. I mean, there was the peak of the dot com bubble, which was in March 2000. And it sort of took us a little while afterwards to realize, oh, this actually has come to an end because it could have just been a blip and, you know, things kept going a little bit this year. And then, I guess, 18 months later with the September 11th 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 really, there were sort
30:23 Joe Weisenthal? of, the economic story got blown to bits, and then the political story, or the geopolitical story specifically, got blown to bits. And it's sort of a real double whammy for us, huh?
30:33 Speaker 05 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 Y2K era from 2001 to 2008, I mean, it's just really strange stuff. Like I talk about the Mcbling aesthetic. Do you guys know about the Mcbling aesthetic?
30:50 Tracy Alloway? I remember that.
30:51 Joe Weisenthal? I'm gonna Google that. Keep talking.
30:53 Speaker 05 So it is, it, this is a term, again, like the Y2K 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 think Juicy Couture tracksuits with words on the butt, Ugg boots, super, you know, straight bleached blonde hair, super dark fake tan, statement tees, giant Louis Vuitton logo bags, and just this really just riding around in a Hummer. It was, there's a real nihilism to it almost.
31:25 Joe Weisenthal? Yeah, like a vulgarity.
31:26 Speaker 05 Vulgarity, right. And, 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
31:39 Speaker 05 This is almost Freudian, but it's like a kind of Freudian, kind of subconscious understanding of what's going on in markets with the what would become the subprime mortgage crisis.
31:50 Joe Weisenthal? Yeah. Oh, that's good. Good. The McBling aesthetic is downstream from the emerging subprime.
31:57 Tracy Alloway? Let's talk about that. Cause all I was gonna 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.
32:15 Joe Weisenthal? A Von Dutch hat.
32:16 Tracy Alloway? That's right. It was very serious. Well, trucker hats, maybe a trucker hat. Paris Hilton wearing a trucker hat might have been a little less serious, but yeah.
32:24 Speaker 05 Or the statement tease. 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 Lomans and, which, RIP. But I just felt so glamorous. I was like, look at me in my green terry cloth dress for some reason. I am, I am living, 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-
33:05 Tracy Alloway? Oh, I did that.
33:05 Speaker 05 Oh, God. Yeah. Cause I have, you have a little wave in your hair and I do too.
33:09 Tracy Alloway? Well, my hair used to be really curly. In fact, I used to relax it with like, the actual chemical products that you would get from the drugstore.
33:16 Speaker 05 Yep.
33:16 Tracy Alloway? It was bad.
33:17 Speaker 05 Yeah. I feel like I can smell that.
33:20 Tracy Alloway? Yeah.
33:22 Speaker 05 Like, yeah.
33:24 Joe Weisenthal? No, but it's interesting too, as a downstream from the emerging subprime world. Cause right, it's a very- External aesthetic, like it's 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 the sort of presentation of rich in a way that's unsustainable.
33:44 Speaker 05 A hundred percent. And actually, I tie that in with McMansions as well.
33:48 Joe Weisenthal? Yeah.
33:49 Speaker 05 Because like, another person you should have on is Kate Wagner, who does McMansion hell.
33:53 Joe Weisenthal? Oh, yeah.
33:54 Speaker 05 But McMansions are structurally unsound. They are built, like I said, my dad's an engineer and he would drive me around and look at McMansions 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 garish because they, you know, there's no reason to have this giant foyer that Kate Wagner calls a lawyer foyer, where it's like, for some reason, it's like this giant three-story foyer with a giant fake crystal chandelier.
34:39 Speaker 05 There's just no reason for that from a functional standpoint. And it's really, it's inefficient for heating and cooling. Yeah, 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 gonna 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.
35:02 Tracy Alloway? So what's the through line from the tech bubble to the subprime bubble? Cause 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. Whereas I don't think there were that many people necessarily buying like tech IPOs, but I could be wrong.
35:29 Speaker 05 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
35:40 Speaker 05 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.com and they got laid off. But yeah, it didn't 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, 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.
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37:42 Joe Weisenthal? 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 1999. 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 in the summer of 1999 that things were going to go off the rails, or that despite this incredible welt 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 2000.
38:25 Speaker 05 Yeah, no, I think that that's, I actually didn't know about that shooting. But yeah, no, 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 in the market. So there, there were people sort of being like, you know, this is all very fun and exciting and it's this sugar rush, but it's not going to last the way you think it is.
38:53 Tracy Alloway? So writing the book and reflecting on your own experiences of this time period, was it cathartic for you? What did you learn?
39:01 Speaker 05 Oh, my God. So cathartic. Yeah. 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 are still within a bigger story of history and these forces, tech forces, economic forces, I think that that can be really cathartic and can really give us a lot of insight, like things that we think are our fault, say,
39:45 Speaker 05 we might think, oh, it wasn't right. To go back to the Larry Summers caused my eating disorder essay, that was something I feel like. I 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 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.
40:26 Speaker 05 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 way because my uncle was involved in a startup 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.
40:50 Joe Weisenthal? Say more. I knew someone in the 90s who happened to live in San Diego and he was the first person who was aware of this company called Qualcomm, 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. And 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 about it. What was that experience? Like, to what extent, those people who rode the rode 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?
41:21 Speaker 05 Yeah, I mean, on the way up, there was just this idea that, well, gee, everyone can just be rich now. This is, 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 quit my job at 40 or, you know, 45 or 30 or whatever. Or I can buy a new, you know, a new luxury car or a private jet or go on vacation for three months all over Europe or something, right? I mean, there's this, actually, there's a video of Elon Musk in 1999 and he's getting, he had just Sold Zip2, I think it was when he had just sold Zip2.
42:07 Speaker 05 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 the time was a $1 million 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 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.
42:52 Speaker 05 Because back in the 70s, 80s, 90s, you could be, it's 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. I'm gonna go whatever.
43:06 Joe Weisenthal? This is really important, actually. And I hadn't thought about this before. But right now, if you want to be in 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 and stuff like that.
43:27 Speaker 05 And some of whom were basically self-taught. Some of whom were just self-taught, you know? Or they were like, gee, I'm gonna go back at the local community college and take some programming classes. 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 like it is now.
43:48 Tracy Alloway? Imagine if Elon Musk had gotten the new VW bug instead of McLaren. And how different today's aesthetic would be.
43:55 Joe Weisenthal? All of history, all of history would have changed.
43:58 Tracy Alloway? I'm still stuck on that possibility.
44:00 Joe Weisenthal? Khaled Shade, thank you so much for coming on Odd Lots. And congrats and good luck on the book.
44:05 Speaker 05 Thank you. Thanks for having me.
44:19 Joe Weisenthal? Tracy, I really enjoyed that conversation. First of all, nostalgia, thinking back. But I hadn't really thought about the sort of connection between, I guess, just how sharp that aesthetic turn was between the late 90s and the sort of the aggressive McBlain culture of the 2000s.
44:38 Tracy Alloway? Yeah, I think Colette 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.
44:50 Joe Weisenthal? No, there was no.
44:51 Tracy Alloway? Like, there wasn't any of that. It was like, oh, yeah, let, 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 forgotten the downsides. But I think there's just 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.
45:29 Joe Weisenthal? I, I think the 90s really were a unique, unrecoverable period. And you go back and read some of the optimism, the end of history stuff, and you're just like, oh, that's, you know, how could they? But I've tried to do this experiment 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, 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 9/11, we got the great financial crisis, we had the Iraq war, the Afghanistan war,
46:11 Joe Weisenthal? multiple wars now. But I get why in that brief period of time, they sort of didn't see it coming.
46:19 Tracy Alloway? Should we
46:19 Joe Weisenthal? Even if they should, even if they should have.
46:21 Tracy Alloway? Should we re-embrace the Y2K aesthetic?
46:24 Joe Weisenthal? There, you know what? I don't like it.
46:27 Tracy Alloway? You don't like it, Chuck?
46:28 Joe Weisenthal? 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 fills, warms my heart a little bit. I don't really like it that much. I don't know.
46:39 Tracy Alloway? I'm gonna find my, uh, my low-rise jeans.
46:42 Joe Weisenthal? It's actually pretty bad.
46:43 Tracy Alloway? Start wearing those into the office.
46:44 Joe Weisenthal? It's actually pretty bad.
46:45 Tracy Alloway? It's not that bad. You're crazy. All right. Shall we leave it there?
46:49 Joe Weisenthal? Let's leave it there.
46:50 Tracy Alloway? This has been another episode of the Odd Lots Podcast. I'm Tracy Alloway. You can follow me at Tracy Alloway.
46:56 Joe Weisenthal? And I'm Jill Weisenthal. You can follow me at theStalwart. Follow our guest, Collette Shade, at MsShade, and check out her new book, Y2K. Follow our producers, Kermit Rodriguez, at KermitArmond, Dashell Bennett, at Dashbot, and Kale Brooks, at KaleBrooks. Thank you to our producer, Moses Andam. For more Odd Lots content, go to Bloomberg.com/oddlots. We have transcripts, a blog, and a newsletter. And you can chat about all of these topics 24/7 in our Discord, discord.gg/oddlots.
47:24 Tracy Alloway? And if you enjoy Odd Lots, 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 episodes absolutely ad-free. All you need to do is connect your Bloomberg account with Apple Podcasts. In order to do that, just find the Bloomberg channel on Apple Podcasts and follow the instructions there. Thanks for listening.
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