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Hello and welcome to another episode of the Odd Lots podcast.
I'm Joe Wisenthal, and I'm Tracy Alloway.
Tracy, where were you in the nineties.
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.
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.
Walked around a lot and don't remember whenever I tell you my time periods and locations.
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 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.
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
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 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. It was up shot.
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 yeah, that's where I'm going with it. That's what it is.
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 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, 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.
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, 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 to the post twenty twenty years that turned out not to be true.
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.
By the end of history.
Yeah, you could. Like.
My takeaway from that back then is like, I get why people got caught up in it.
Anyway, Well, you and I just got caught up in it because we both went on to do international relations.
That's right at university.
That's right.
It's not a useful degree, not.
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.
We're all products of our time.
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,
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 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.
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.
Do people actually want Y two k fashion? Because that worries me a little bit.
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.
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.
I don't know.
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 didn't happen, and they fixed it. Setting aside, why two
K fashion? Why did you write this book?
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 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 the year I had to predict was two thousand and eight.
What did you say? What happened in two thousand and.
Men would crash?
How's it would be these complex financial instruments called CEOs, And now what did you say? What were your expectations?
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 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 be watching our movies on the computer, which you were right about.
You got that right.
Three.
It's pretty good, not terrible.
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.
Remember the DVD bros.
I mean you were.
Yeah, that was like that was a type of guys like has a really good TV?
Oh yeah, no, it was.
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.
Yeah, come over to my house and watch Clerks because I feel like a DVD broth.
And then.
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.
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.
Looking for it, Yeah, I really want to see that now.
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 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.
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 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 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. 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 the previous generations were too stupid to do not want one.
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.
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?
Was that rare?
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?
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 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 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 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?
Oh?
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.
Isn't that sad?
Sort of right, those sort of like suburban.
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.
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.
Well, I think the foremost reason was the dot com bubble.
So everyone was in fact getting rich.
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 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, I.
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.
Yeah, say more about the wait, say more about this.
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.
But they were a big deal.
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 IMACG three's which had just come out. That was a huge Yeah you did any of you?
Ye?
Did either of you have those?
So I remember what year did the colorful Imax come out?
That was that?
So that was ninety eight. They came out the first in ninety eight, and then ninety nine was when they had the full range.
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
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.
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.
They do a lot.
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 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 think about that compared to the cyber truck, which is like scary and sharp and the windows are small.
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?
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 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.
So that's what I used.
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.
To me.
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.
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 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.
Yeah, it's peaceful, it's smooth, it's modern, and we're all just going to get culifish and fuel weight.
But there were other cars that were popular at that time that were not that small.
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, 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.
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.
But in the.
Beginning there was I hadn't really this again, I hadn't really thought.
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.
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.
They won.
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.
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. 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, 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.
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, 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.
Throughout pop culture.
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.
Going back to the idea of nature being like cyclical.
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, 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 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 was not being fully reflected by these big indicators in the late nineties.
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 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 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.
Huh.
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?
I remember that.
I'm going to google that.
Keep talking, So it is it.
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, and just this really just riding around in a hummer.
It was there's a real nihilism to it, almost vulgarity.
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 with the what would become the subprime mortgage crisis.
Yeah, oh that's good. Good. The aesthetic is downstream from the emerging subprime Let's.
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.
That's right.
It was very serious, no chrucker hats. Maybe a chrucker hat. Paris Hilton wearing a trucker hat might have been a little less serious.
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. 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 oh god, yeah, because I have you have a little wave in your hair, and I used too well.
My hair used to be really curly.
Yeah.
I used to relax it with like the actual chemical products that you would get from the drug store.
Yeap, it was bad.
Yeah, I feel like I can smell that. Yeah, like yeah, no, But it's interesting too.
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.
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.
They are built.
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 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.
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 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.
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, whereas I don't think there were that many people necessarily buying like tech IPOs, but I could be wrong.
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 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.
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 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.
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 very fun and exciting and it's this sugar rush, but it's not going to last the way you think it is.
So writing the book and reflecting on your own experiences of this time period, was it cathartic for you?
What did you learn?
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 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 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 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 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.
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
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?
Yeah, I mean on the way up, there was just this idea that well, gee, everyone can just be rich.
Now.
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
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 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 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 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 going to go whatever.
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, and like there.
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.
Like it is now.
Imagine if Elon Musk had gotten the new VW bug and stuff, and how different all.
Of history, all of history would have changed.
I'm still stuck on that possibility.
Clud Shade, Thank you so much for coming on odd lots and congrats and good luck on the book.
Thank you, thanks for having me, Tracy.
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.
Yeah.
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.
No, Like, there wasn't any of that.
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 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.
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, 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, 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.
They should have, Should we re embrace the Y two K aesthetic?
You know what, I don't like it.
You don't like it.
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.
I don't know.
I'm gonna find my my low rise geek.
Actually pretty bad.
Start wearing those into the office.
Actually pretty bad.
It's not that bad. You're crazy, all right? Shall we leave it there?
Let's leave it there.
This has been another episode of the Authoughts podcast. I'm Tracy Alloway. You can follow me at Tracy Alloway.
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
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