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Hi, this is Rebecca Buchanan, host of New Books Network, New Books in Popular Culture, and today I am here with Ross Benish, who is the author of 1999, the year Low Culture Conquered America and Kickstarted Our Bizarre Times. Ross, thanks for being here with me today. It's good to be on the show. Could you start out by talking a little bit about how this book came to be, why you chose to write about the year 1999, besides the fact that it is the...
title of a song by one of the greatest artists of our time. Well, I just started noticing more stuff in our culture and society that would reflect the trashy entertainment that I loved as a kid. So, you know, you would see things happen in the White House that would resemble Jerry Springer segments. I'd see these cryptocurrencies kind of take off and have a boom and bust cycle that reminded me of Beanie Babies.
scapegoating of all sorts of digital media reminded me of what video games went through as a kid. And so I had enough of these moments, especially all the pro wrestling theatrics showing up in politics in the last five to six years. that I decided to look at the pop culture that I grew up with as a kid, that I loved as a kid, focusing on the trashier side of things and in what ways. those things are still with us. So, you know, I could see...
It's very obvious pro-wrestling is like in the White House when President Trump is doing the Undertaker's podcast on the week of the election. But to go beyond that, in what ways are we still... Dealing with the pop culture that was so derided 25 years ago in the year that he first ran. So that's what drove me to dive into all these topics.
So before we get into sort of the different chapters, the different topics you touch on, Can you talk a little bit maybe about 1999 and we can talk about it more as we talk about specific chapters but really like What was going on then? Like I know throughout one of the things you mentioned is the films that are coming out at that time, some politically what was going on.
So just can we can you situate us into 1999 before we jump into talking about talk shows? So in 1999, youth entertainment was super popular and there's always a youth contingent. Like in the late 90s, there were more. teens than there had been during the baby boom and they were spending more money on entertainment than ever before so like
Teen People, the Teen Choice Awards, those launched in 1999. Backstreet Boys had the number one album. In movies, you had like American Pie, She's All That, Never Been Kissed. Probably over a dozen movies aimed at teens. So there was a lot of money spent by large media corporations. on hitting the youth market. And then a lot of the stuff that I focus on and a lot of the stuff that's perceived as trashy for its times or is perceived as low culture is stuff that's geared towards kids.
Beanie Babies video games and pro wrestling. Now... Politically, we were about to have the most contentious election in modern history at that point. 1999 was the start of the 2000 election. That's when Bush and Gore... you know, started campaigning for the election that would be determined by the Supreme Court ultimately the next year. So...
The 90s are often looked at as this time of peace and prosperity because we didn't have the major wars that we soon had thereafter. The dot-com bubble hadn't started even though its seeds had been planted. 9-11 hadn't happened. But you are on the verge of some contentious issues for sure in this country, even if they didn't appear within the year 1999. So you start out with jerry springer with talk shows and what was going on and so
Can you just talk a little bit about that? Because I think it also, like you said, like the talk shows, you also do the wrestling. But those talk shows really set the stage for... What is going on now, you know, and you connect it to what's going on now in politics and also sort of the sort of the political public sphere that. mimics much of what went on in shows like Jerry Springer. So can you talk a little bit about that? Yeah, sure.
Senator Fetterman recently apologized for comparing Congress to the Jerry Springer show because he said Congress is actually worse. He apologized. to the producers of the Jerry Springer show. So that's where we've come. But in the 90s, Springer... He started out his talk show with being serious. He'd interview Oliver North. He'd talk about...
Team homelessness, poverty, things that matter to him. He was like a crusading, progressive politician when he was mayor of Cincinnati and he later ran for governor of Ohio. But his show got terrible ratings. He was told to juice it up, go after young people, be a little crazier, and they went off the charts crazy. People liked that. Jerry Springer became the most watched daytime show. It even beat Oprah briefly. It just became a huge phenomenon. He had a major motion picture about his show.
called ringmaster and a book of the same title they had all this merchandise they had the one they had the um too hot for tv vhs that you could get that sold millions of copies um springer really push the talk show format into a more sensationalistic um thing where you weren't you know talking about issues you were having people react to like This case, it wasn't an engineered situation like you would see with reality TV, but it kind of was because you'd have people with their real lives.
That was there, but the producers in the back would get them so ready to fight, and they would create the conditions for them to just come out and attack. the person on the other end of the stage in a way that they probably wouldn't have. naturally confronting each other about these things in their own apartment or at a restaurant or somewhere that isn't a television studio.
And so people love the fights. They love the nudity. They love just how bizarre it was. I mean, in addition to all the sexual stuff that's on Jerry Springer, they had episodes about like adults who... Want to wear diapers and, you know, pretend to be babies. Like, there's just, you know...
If there's any bizarre thing you find on the internet now, there was a Jerry Springer episode about that bizarre thing. There was over 4,000 episodes, so they covered all sorts of territory. But what Springer showed is that like... You just need to capture people's attention. That matters so much. At the time of the show's popularity, at the peak of it, it's like 97 to 2000 would be like the peak of the Jerry Springer show. I think 98 is actually when the ratings...
hit the highest point that they ever hit. Um, Springer thought about running for office again, and basically he was blackballed by the Democratic Party because he's perceived as a joke. who was a lawyer at the time who, um, represented a guest who was murdered on the Jenny Joe represented a guest who was on the Jenny Jones show who was later murdered after that segment appeared. And he was like a show biz type guy.
He got Democratic governor nominee for Michigan, but he ultimately lost the general. And those guys, though, Springer and Figer had this brash personality, like kind of like Trump does. But they. couldn't separate their show from their political candidates. But what Trump realized is you just turned the show into the candidacy. And of course, Trump first announced his run in 1999, the year that all this stuff happened. And what you see in...
With him is, you know, the reality TV, you know, coming to fruition in the Oval Office. And reality TV is really just the evolution of talk shows. If you watch the way that the Real Housewives of any of those cities talk to each other and attack each other, they're doing Jerry Springer. And so are the Kardashians. And so are a lot of social media influencers now. So like the talk show format is somewhat dead now. Like Drew Barrymore and...
I don't even know who else is on in the middle of the day right now. I don't know if Maury's still going. They don't have like the cultural significance that... Ricky Lake and Jerry Springer had back in the day. They don't have the ratings. But the thing that they pioneer with that shock and sensation of capturing people's attention, that led to reality TV. And reality TV is like now in Congress and in the White House.
Right. It could be because you want that's one of the things that you talk about in in the chapter, but throughout, too, is like the impact of some of these on what is happening politically. Right. So we have reality television. stars who run for public office. We'll talk about wrestling later, but I grew up in Minnesota. So we have a governor who had a governor who was like part of a mix of all of this. And so.
Can you talk a little bit about that big influence? Because one of the things you also talk about is Oprah. bringing in some of these people like Dr. Oz and Dr. Phil, who have been very damaging to a large public, all of which is happening on... sort of this sort of reality tv space so can you talk a little bit more maybe about um that and those connections to what was going on during the late 90s so um
Steve Wilkos, he was Jerry Springer's security guard who got his own talk show. He's had a talk show for like 20 years now. He's his own celebrity. He made a comment once that like what people think they're too good for other people are watching. So like, you know, you can look down on the Jerry Springer was called moral rot.
And, you know, all these other things. TV Guide said it was the worst show of all time. You know, they did a lot of ethically questionable things to produce those episodes as covered in a recent. Netflix documentary. But the fact of the matter is millions of people loved it. I loved it. I watched it with my parents.
You know, like on the face of it, the Trump candidacy, you can seem asinine, some of the things that he's done. But, God, he won the popular vote, and he won two presidential elections. You know, we're a country that loves its carnies. really. And, you know, that doesn't have to just be limited to TV now. You know, now it's the entertainment and politics are so connected that there's hardly any divide. That's why there's been a bunch of reality stars who have...
ran for office from state houses to Congress, everything in between. And now about Oprah. You can make the case. She's someone whose people take seriously. She's done a lot of good with charity, and she seems like a very empathetic person. She's won three speech battles in court. sued for um by by um cattle producers because she had an episode about bad cow disease and um they came after the oprah winfrey show for exposing that and she won so like you know
Kudos to her for sticking up for free speech. But you could make the case that she's been more damaging to America than the Jerry Springer show was because people took her seriously and she produced such ridiculous concepts. Um, Oprah had the worst actors of the satanic panic on her show and just presented them as credible and never questioned them. I mean, one of the, um, Lauren Stratford who was on Oprah show saying that she was, um,
forced to conceive all these children and they had to murder their babies as part of a satanic snuff film, turned out to be a complete hoax. And then she turned out she was also claiming to be a Holocaust survivor, despite... not even living really during that time period and definitely not, you know, living in Europe as a Jew, as she was claiming. So just, you know, talk shows in general, but including Oprah Winfrey, she's not excluding.
excluded, would just have mentally ill and damaged people on their show and not give you any indication otherwise. Just present that what they're saying is true. So Dr. Oz comes on and... Over half his claims aren't backed by medical evidence. Dr. Phil is a national celebrity, thanks to Oprah. And, you know, he's pushing fraudulent weight loss supplements.
And, you know, she doesn't have the... style of show certainly is jerry springer jerry springer's producer said if you want to save the whales call oprah if you're sleeping with the whales call us so it's a different style of show but uh She's capitalized on our lunacy just as much as Jerry, Ricky or Maury have. She just has a better PR team supporting her image. Which is kind of what we see in politics, right?
Yeah. Oh, for sure. So you move from this Jerry Springer is sort of what's going on in talk shows to... The Beanie Babies and Pokemon, which is sometimes some people would be like Beanie Babies and Pokemon. How do they go together? And in someone who's in a house where my oldest, who is 19, still loves Pokemon. I really enjoyed that chapter and thinking about the capitalistic impact of Pokemon. But can we talk about Beanie Babies and Pokemon and the craziness? that bee babies ensued.
Yeah, so you could say there's a tenuous link between the two. And the way I put it is Pokemon like just embodies capitalism and Beanie Babies embodies the madness of like a boom and bust. Because Pokemon, they are innovative and they produce... new products all the time. They find new generations of fans. There's games modeled after sleep and brushing your teeth now for Pokemon. Pokemon Go was a huge hit. They embody capitalism so perfectly. If you look at the catchphrase, gotta catch them all.
You know, you're not a Pokemon master if you don't get 151 of them. And then, you know, then they keep expanding and having new iterations. And there were like in 1999 Newsweek and Time both had cover stories about. Pokemon and the madness that it was creating with kids trading their Pokemon cards at recess and having fights. that it was going to drive all this antisocial behavior. But they just did what Beanie Babies did, but they did it better and a little bit more responsibly.
Beanie Babies, those started out as $5 stuffed animals and they morphed into financial speculation instruments that people were spending their life savings. Thousands of dollars because they would believe that a beanie baby with Princess Diana's name on it was rare. And then they would collect these and pay for the kids' college education. That was the belief. But B babies are mass produced. They weren't actually rare. There's just a perception of rarity. So you saw how.
With Beanie Babies, how perception mattered more than reality for a long time. The market for Beanie Babies just kept going up and up, even though there's no reason it should have. They provided... no value and they weren't actually rare. People kind of came to their senses. It plummeted. And everyone who spent all that money just lost it all. Like, there's just really sad stories of people losing tens of thousands of dollars. In some cases, hundreds of thousands.
And Beanie Baby Madness got so intense that... There were a lot of crimes. There were thefts. There was a murder in West Virginia. The weirdest one is that there was a divorcing couple and the judge... made them take turns picking Beanie Babies because they divided their assets and they couldn't.
uh they couldn't agree between themselves who would get the beanie baby collection because they thought it was so valuable so they lined them all up in the courtroom and they took turns picking them one by one like the same way you you know if your kid's at recess and you're You're picking a basketball team and you're taking turns picking. So it was just absolutely crazy. how big that fad got and then it just blew up and like the dot-com bubble um it lost all its value and
Like, then you didn't hear about Beanie Babies hardly at all anymore. They still exist now. But no one's buying them for more than they sell at the store. They just exist as children's toys, and they have a much, much smaller footprint now than they did in the 90s. Yeah. And that chapter made me think of like all the different things that we now have that are so these those those kind of.
collectibles that aren't really collectibles, right? Like the Squishmallows, I think, or, you know, like that, or even Funko Pops, like these things that like... They exist. You know, anybody can get them anywhere, but they're still like we have to keep them pristine in a box. We can't take them out because if they do, they're going to lose the monetary value that is absolutely going to exist.
20 years or whatever it might be there's always some guy who like sells a rare vintage pristine like star wars or star trek toy 40 years later and makes tons of money and that inspires everybody i know everyone else to just hoard junk My brother-in-law is... had all this Star Wars stuff when he was young, right? So we're in our 50s, right? So he was growing.
collected at all and he just lets his kids play with it and people will be like how can you let your kid play with that vintage millennium falcon and he's like they're toys i played with them in the 70s they should be playing with them right like but that's the thing they're just toys But it's so hard for us to realize and grasp that.
Yeah, it totally is. There's always a new iteration of that, but Beanie Babies is about as crazy as it got. I mean, Pet Rocks are probably sillier, but I don't think they had the level of investment that Beanie Babies got. And now I make the case that like a lot of these, like, you know, look at a crypto meme coin. Just a pump and dump scheme. But people believe in it. Oh, yeah. They get scammed. It's yeah. Yeah. And you mentioned that sort of different sort of iterations of that.
I want to hop around chapter wise because the Pokemon also reminds me of the video game chapter, right? Like, and I say this as someone who plays video games and really enjoys the Pokemon video game. um and we'll finish a game but also then want to go back because i have not caught all the pokemon in the game right so like i'm like okay i finished the game but there's pokemon i still haven't found should i you know so every once in a while i'll be like oh let me keep looking to
keep my pokemon collection going so let's talk about um video it's it's funny your book The hard copy of your book showed up yesterday and I'd opened it and it was sitting there and my daughter who's 14 comes in and it's like, that's that girl from Graham GTA. on the cover. So I'm like, yes, yes, it is. So can we talk about video games? What was going on? What still is going on with video games?
and violence, and yeah, let's stop gaming. Yeah, sure. And it makes sense to transition from Pokemon to video games because in 1999... Most of the best-selling video games were Pokemon games. Pokemon video games have been hugely successful, but especially in the 90s with all those Game Boy titles. But what I have in the chapter of video games is that... They are part of an evolving moral panic where youth entertainment of that day is blamed for society's problems.
So in 1999, after the Columbine shooting... There was a lot of mass media that was blamed for the shooting, like Marilyn Manson and The Basketball Diaries. That's a movie. But video games... took the hardest blame by far and the video game that took the most blame was doom it's a first person shooter um about um we're shooting these demons from hell basically and um The killers play the game Doom, so therefore Doom is responsible, not a million other things that could contribute to this problem.
There were a lot of press reports blaming Doom, but there was also a lot of academic research linking violence of video games to trying to link it to real-world violence. The best they come up with is more proxy measures of aggression. But what I argue is that with video games, In the 90s, they were more so children's entertainment than they are now, but their audience was aging. People just didn't perceive it at the time because now the average gamer is 35 years old. That's the median age.
of gamers um in the early 90s it was like in their early 20s but you saw more mature games being aimed at um older people because the market was expanding to include um older people because At that point, you had kids who had grown up with games. They were now becoming adults themselves, and they wanted material that reflected their interests and their tastes. But what games went through was not unique at all to video games.
There were congressional hearings about comic books in the 50s causing juvenile delinquency and, of course, rock and roll and jazz and radio. I mean, you could go way back to the first novels. being printed. So anytime there's a new technology that contributes to a new form of entertainment and especially if that entertainment is
popular among young people, it will bear the blame for society's problems. Video games still get blamed whenever mass shootings happen, but not to the degree that they did for If you go from 1999 to 2009, that 10-year period, it was like every time there was one of these tragedies. they would float out whatever video game the killer may or may not have played and try to pinpoint them on that.
And the only reason I think they do that accusation is not as common now is because there are new entertainment formats. since video games that we could freak out about, like, you know, banning TikTok. Yes, lots of banning of TikTok. And I appreciate that you draw like as someone who studies youth culture and talks about youth culture. I really appreciated how you were like this. We see this pattern, right? It's just this is one example, because I do remember.
And I was teaching high school at that time. So, you know, everything that was going on when Columbine came out and all the video games are bad. Video games are going to cause people or young people to be. ultra violent and you really sort of. push at that argument um in thoughtful ways right like my kids are always like well then I should be able to play
you know, um, FIFA and be the best soccer player ever. If I play enough FIFA, if I, right. Like, cause it's true because it's like, why is violence the only thing that video gets, and you said it kind of push at those arguments. I appreciate that. And those connections to we continue to see these things, right? Youth culture is always this site of fear for adults that forget that they were youth ones. Yeah, it's just the cycle that we don't learn from the previous blow-up.
We realized heavy metal wasn't actually causing all these kids to kill themselves. didn't stop and think, should we do that to the next form of media? No, they just did to video games what they did to heavy metal in the 80s. Heavy metal dungeons and dragons. That always gets dragged out too. We always return to it.
So you also we have to talk about professional wrestling, right? Like, so professional wrestling becomes something you look at. And like you mentioned very early on that we see professional wrestling kind of playing out. in our politics or how professional wrestling works. But can you talk a little bit about... professional wrestling and why 1999 and what was going on and yes I will try not to call it the WWF because
I grew up, you know, I was watching in the 80s. But yeah, can you talk about professional wrestling a bit? Yeah, and I had trouble with that too, not calling it WWF. But I just stick with WWE for consistency, even though that's what I called it my whole life. So in the 90s, Pro wrestling was more popular than it ever had been in American history and more popular than it has been since. So 1999 is...
when WWE became a publicly traded company, and you still had stiff competition from WCW at the time. So you had two huge... companies producing 10 hours of television every week that was watched by about 30 million Americans. And wrestlers, they were all on TV shows. They were on covers of magazines. They would be the grand marshal at parades. It was just so... Huge. Dennis Rodman, at the peak of his basketball fame, participated in a pay-per-view with Hulk Hogan. It was just insane how...
popular wrestling was at the time. And it still is popular, but not like it was then. And I just see a lot of wrestling concepts. In our society now, but especially in our politics. So it's not even just Donald Trump. That's very obviously a connection. He's a WWE Hall of Famer. So, of course. Um, you gotta mention him, but even if you watched, um, CNN or Fox News.
The way they set up a discussion is a lot like you would set up a wrestling match. Like you have your clear heel, you have your heel, which is your bad guy, and you have your baby face, which is your good guy. You know who you're supposed to root for. Point of some of those debates they have on there isn't to actually have a debate. It's just to kill the other side. So you bring like a guy who's portrayed as like a misinformed liberal and he just gets destroyed on Fox or some like...
Republicans, you know, congressman comes on on CNN and Jake. Trapper is just going to destroy them and be ruthless to them. It's like a squash match in wrestling where Goldberg would destroy his opponent within a minute because you want to show the whole point of those segments is to show the superiority of your side. And you just, you see so much of that. Even with the way if you use like if you use Travis Kelsey, for instance, the way that he is portrayed now because he dates.
taylor swift and promotes bud light um he's portrayed as this like villain type character in conservative circles even though i'm dating the world's most famous pop star and Taking money from the biggest beer brand in the NFL is something that every football player used to aspire to for generations. This isn't like weird.
anti-social behavior he's actually doing what uh would be considered like an american dream of oh you're making millions of dollars doing beer ads and you're dating a really famous musician wow and um Now he's portrayed as this... It's the concept of kayfabe where you almost have to suspend your disbelief to let that storyline advance. So when I see... Travis Kelsey go from being portrayed as like a great NFL tight end to like he's some sort of nefarious.
culture warrior just because of uh a few things he does in his personal life i see that as like um pro wrestling storytelling where that's a fun story that you could buy into but like It doesn't actually make any sense. You know, like Ultimate Warrior isn't from parts unknown. So it's clearly in our White House. Trump, you know, did The Undertaker's podcast. the week before the election. He's in the Pro Wrestling Hall of Fame. Linda McMahon is going to be Secretary of Education. She's
She was the CEO of WWE in 1999 when they became publicly traded. So pro wrestling is with us. in many ways. I think if you look at society right now and the concept of kayfabe of, and that's a pro wrestling term where you, where you.
you um believe something even though you know something isn't true you'll believe it anyway so like presenting something as genuine when it isn't because it's just more fun to to buy into that concept um that's all around us um you know like canada is not going to become our 51st state but If you think about it as like a pro wrestling storyline, it's kind of fun. And I just think that's where we're at. Oh, yeah, that's one of my favorite Canada. Oh, yeah.
Do we understand Canada's a country with lots of territories and states? Yeah, I have to tell you, and I've probably said this before on this podcast, but I live in a small Midwest town. And we have folks who came in and bought an old church. And once a month, we have pro wrestling here, right? It is kind of the greatest, right? That's pretty awesome. They jump from the rafters of the church, right? It's like these local...
And it's like, you know, guys and women driving in from sort of all over. But it's like so. It is, it is true, right? Like this is like some, this is the great, it's super, I love it. It's great entertainment, right? And we keep returning to it. Oh, it's super entertaining. I don't know how you could watch pro wrestling and not be entertained.
the stunts these people do to uh entertain you is is crazy they're risking a lot really to to do some of these moves oh oh yes yes no i i am very this is very entertaining um You go from like, so you see, you know, you like Jerry's talk shows. We've got talk shows. We've got video games. We've got, you know, pro wrestling. And then we have the insane clown posse. So.
So, I mean, we have to talk about Insane Clown Posse, and then we have to talk about porn because I love your connection to media and porn, or the internet and porn. But why, why, why Insane Clown Posse? I mean, you explain why, but right. It seems very, it does. It's like one of these things is not like the other, but it is so.
Well, so in St. Clown Posse, just to keep with the theme of the book, they were They were definitely mocked, and they were voted as the worst band of all time by Blender Magazine, and their albums were voted as the worst albums of the year by USA Today. But I make the case that Insane Clown Posse, a lot like Christ, has outlived its critics. You know, Blender Magazine was like the Pharisees and the Sadducees. It does not exist anymore. But ICP definitely exists.
And they get their fans to buy into their outsider status in a very intense way. So ICP peaked in 99. That was when the Amazing Jekyll Brothers came out. It was a top five Billboard album. They ended up having two platinum records by the end of that year. They haven't had any since. They were wrestling in WCW at the time. They played Woodstock. They're a niche group. I've gone to two ICP shows. They're not going to sell out Madison Square Garden. They're going to have like...
Maybe a thousand people at like a bar with a huge beer garden. You know, that's the type of tour they do. They don't appeal to everyone. They're an acquired taste. But those who they do appeal to, it's just such an intense bond. And there have been other examples like this, like the deadhead. But ICP has like a...
They're almost used as like a religious replacement for some fans who, you know, are looking for community and meaning elsewhere in their lives. They find it in the communal gathering of the Juggalos. What they've been so successful at is just this us versus the world. concept like their their songs um their lawsuit with the fbi they're often you know it's like juggalos that's their fans
pitted against the world. And I think they do that so effectively that they've had a very successful career despite probably appealing to 1% of the population. But what I see them do, I just often... see preachers do. I grew up in the Catholic Church, but more commonly in recent years than in the 90s, I see a lot of pastors having this, like... Us versus them. Society is out to get us. This is a hostile, secular world out there. We're fighting the good cause.
The way ICP talks about the rest of the world coming after Juggalos is just like kind of a variation of that. And they're not proselytizing any specific agenda. or cause um but they the way violent jay who's uh one of the members of the duo along with shaggy too dope The way he puts it is if it wasn't so cold on the outside, it wouldn't be so warm on the inside. And I think there's a lot of brilliance to that concept of marketing.
You go from, you know, you look at the Christy P and the Juggalos and sort of what's going on there. And then you also look at the... porn industry and how they have really set up the internet and like i was reading i'm like this is so true and it's super fast So can you talk about that and that sort of connection to 1999 and also thinking about like and throughout this like.
The deregulation that was going on in government. But I also appreciate the pornography and free speech. Right. The importance of those things. So, yeah, I'm asking like 15 questions at once. Yeah, sure, I'll try to walk you through it. Well, so in the 90s, all of the, not all of the, but most of the attempts to censor the internet or to regulate the internet were aimed at porn because, like, that's the...
you know, material that the least amount of people are going to object to the government regulating. And there were a series of attempts which were all struck down in court. And they happened basically between like 96 and the early 2000s. But a lot of the core activity peaked in 99. So a lot of the like...
free speech protections we have online are due to porn victories. Now, as part of the Telecommunications Act in 1996, Section 230 was actually part of a bill that got caught up into one of these anti-porn laws, and that's the law that gives... platforms the um ability to allow people they act as distributors rather than as like publishers that's why facebook can let you comment without being sued and your isp can you know let you do all sorts of internet browsing without being held liable um
porn debates that happened in Congress in the 90s. On the tech side, basically, starting in the early 90s, you had these pioneers like Danny's Hard Drive that they would come up with. cookies and ways of tracking his like browsing and online payments video streaming, a lot of technologies that we use now for all sorts of purposes originated in porn because porn was like a risky, more of a risky venture at the time. So there was more incentive to, you know. give over your credit card information.
to them and like to you know buy groceries because you just go to the store to do that if you're trying to privatize a taboo There's a lot of, how should I phrase this? Port is something that people weren't looking to do in public. That's why they're paying a premium to do it privately. That's led to the...
innovation of a lot of digital technologies. So, you know, from bandwidth expansion to all these other little technologies, as I mentioned, you could make a case that it's helped shape the internet a ton and even YouTube and Snapchat. in erotic content, Instagram to a degree. So it's a huge backbone of the internet. It's also, you know, these things that we're most ashamed of have also helped him shrine some right.
to protect our speech. And there were just the series of little court victories that happened throughout the 90s. that are being brought up today in a big way now with the age verification stuff. And there will be other measures to... regulate porn because if you're going to regulate anything on the internet you're going to start out porn free speech battles Happen in the gutter basically
So you write this book about 1999. So I've got two questions for you. Two last questions. So that's this first one. Like, what do you want people to get out of this? Like, what do you want people? to to sort of understand or yeah like tied to low culture but tied to sort of what was going on at that time what's your sort of yeah take big takeaway if you have one yeah so um The trashiest entertainment influences us in many unexpected ways.
You know, when we were growing up, we spent a lot of time dissecting and analyzing more highbrow novels. And, you know, if you find symbolism in literature, that's great, not taken away from that. But we shouldn't dismiss. the throw you know it's called throwaway entertainment that millions of people are spending lots of hours per day watching so so that pop culture affects us.
Maybe not us psychologically, but it affects our society. When you have something that's that consumed by that many people, it's going to leave an imprint on our society. So you can't just like discard the Jerry Springer show and act like it didn't matter because... as voted TV Guide's worst show of all time. I think the Jerry Springer show matters more than a lot of prestige television shows. And then the other thing I would point out is...
I'm actually a fan of most of these things that are in the book. I don't want to come off like... Everything that came out from these shows is terrible. People got a lot of enjoyment out of collecting Beanie Babies, watching Springer, listening to the Insane Clown Posse. So there are positive aspects of low culture. I would say the community and sense of belonging that juggalos get from one another is one example of that.
So the book comes out in April. So my final question is anything you want, like whether you're working on a new project with anything with this book, what is it? Promote yourself. How's that? That's the easiest way to... Yeah, sure thing. Well, you can find me at rossbenish.com. I'm also on LinkedIn and Twitter. If you get this book...
from the University Press of Kansas' website rather than from Amazon, you could get a 30% discount with the code 241999. If you don't use them, use Bookshop or someone else. But I don't have a huge project after this book other than taking care of little ones. That's my next thing for probably the next few years. And then maybe I'll think of something when I have more time and sleep and energy.
Yes, which is always, yes, always the case. Well, Ross, thank you so much for talking with me on New Books and Popular Culture. Again, Ross Benesh is the author of 1999, The Year Low Culture Conquered America and Kickstarted Our Bizarre Times.